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“I’ll leave you to it.” Alan pounded him on the back, two hard friendly-looking slaps, and walked on.

He found Neal just beyond the avenue of rhododendrons, crouched by a shrubby conifer.

“Wellingtonia gigantea,” called Neal. “From California. Biggest tree in the world.” He sat back on his heels, feeling around its base. He wore no jacket, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows.

“You’d never know it.” Alan sat down on a stone bench and stretched out his legs.

“Wait five hundred years.” Neal grinned, at the tree and at Alan both, exuding satisfaction and marvelment and simple joy. That was Neal. The man had a wellspring of goodness inside him. No awful knowledge weighed him down. No childhood hurt curdled his mind.

Alan stared. “However do you manage?”

“Manage what?” Neal stood, dusting his hands on his trousers. Something in Alan’s face made him ask: “What’s wrong?”

“Fraternal strife.” Alan shrugged. “Insignificant, if we take the long view.” He waved his hand at the Wellingtonia. “What will it matter in five hundred years?”

Neal was at the bench in two strides, eyes narrowed. He distinguished between leaves, between blades of grass. Of course, he noticed that Alan’s fingers had changed color. “Broken?”

Alan curled the fingers experimentally and shrugged. “They’ll be good as new in a week’s time.” He frowned. “Can’t hold a pen to save my life. That’s the worst of it. Yesterday, I had to resort to the bloody typewriter.” He didn’t add that his desire for a certain woman’s company had greatly increased his impatience as he’d stabbed at the keys.

“You can’t compose on a machine,” he said. “Unless you want to write telegrams.”

“I thought you were modern.” Neal sat beside him on the bench. “Mechanization is the future.”

Alan laughed, recognizing the offer. A debate, for distraction. Neal had grown up in a household that specialized in cheerful intellectual argumentation.

“What about your wife?” he asked. “Don’t tell me she types her novels. Surely her sentences flow from a crimson quill.”

Neal tipped back his head, exposing his neck. Alan bit the inside of his cheek to keep from ribbing Neal about its attractively tanned skin and virile dimensions. Lavinia’s first novel featured swooning descriptions of a Neal-like pirate. Alan liked to recite choice passages.

“I might write a novel myself.” He stretched out his legs. “A novel of Mars.”

The idea arrived, wholly formed. A novel of Mars, for Claud. For other children marooned in their beds.

“What else does the future hold?” Neal was looking at him. “Not five hundred years from now, five years from now.”

“For me?” Alan folded his arms. “Beyond my novel of Mars?”

“Yes, and don’t say a novel of Jupiter.”

“But that’s just it. Followed by a novel of Saturn.”

“Evasive as always.” Neal crinkled his brow, resigned.

Miss Finch’s words echoed in Alan’s ears.

I don’t think anyone knows you.

He didn’t let anyone know him, even the people he loved best. It was a kindness.

He sighed and offered a minor confidence. “I’ll open my own art gallery. I have my eye on the building, an old fruit market. Satisfied?”

“Will it satisfy you?” Neal folded his arms, left hand resting on his biceps. He wasn’t a man to wear rings, but since he’d married, Alan had never seen him without his wedding band. The gold winked.

Alan ignored the question. “In five years,” he predicted, “you’ll have three children, and you’ll have planted Wellingtonias for them to climb, and Lavinia will have put them in an adventure story. And when I visit, I’ll incite them to acts of deplorable mischief.”

“Of course you will.” Neal snorted, then laughed. “Be careful I don’t return the favor. I expect by then you’ll have a family of your own.”

“My good man.” Alan started. “Are you cracked? Why in God’s name would you expect that?”