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living room, where I sat on a couch, my back to the front wall, and he sat in a stuffed chair printed with ugly flowers before the unlit electric fireplace. He told me that I was the fourth of my countrymen who had come to discuss writing about Brian. “People come with letters from publishers, then they go away and one hears nothing more. I don’t know what to make of it. I think they’re pulling my leg,” he said, again turning one eye on me.
    I started to answer him, getting as far as, “Er, ah,” when Brian’s mother came in. I struggled to my feet and said hello. She looked gentler than Mr. Jones. She called him Lewis and he called her Louie, short for Louisa. Her eyes were a normal, pretty blue. Her hair was as yellow as Brian’s, a shade that appeared to age well if given the chance.
    We all sat down, Mrs. Jones in a chair at one end of the room, me at the other end, Mr. Jones in the middle, gazing at the cold fireplace. I tried to explain what I was doing, but the room was capturing all my mind. It contained, besides us and an orange tomcat, typically turgid English furnishings, an old Heathkit record player, an older radio, a black and white television set, a flowering bonsai tree under a glass dome, an American Indian figurine given to each of the Stones in 1964 by the German teen magazine
Bravo,
and on the mantle over the fire-place, a little rubber doll with bright red trousers and a white mane of spun nylon hair, the most vulgar possible caricature of Brian, and yet it seemed a totem to him, the central object in this tiny grotesque room. The orange cat curled in Mrs. Jones’ lap. I asked his name, and she said “Jinx.”
    â€œSuch a shame,” Brian’s father was saying. “Brian could have been a brilliant journalist, he could always play better chess than anyone else at school, so much talent wasted.” He put his back teeth together and grimaced as if a horrible transformation was taking place.
    Mrs. Jones asked, “Did you have a good supper tonight, love?”
    I thought of the supper I had tonight and other suppers missed and other things than suppers missed and some of the things not missed, all because of what I had seen in her son’s eyes. “Fine, thanks,” I said. Then I started asking questions.
    Mr. and Mrs. Jones met in South Wales, where they were living with their parents. Mr. Jones’ parents were schoolteachers. His father sang in opera societies and led the choir at church. Mrs. Jones’ father was for over fifty years a master builder and church organist near Cardiff. Mrs. Jones’ mother was sickly and so didn’t train for anything and was now quite well at eighty-three. Her parents were living, his were dead.
    Mr. Jones studied engineering at Leeds University, then married and started working for Rolls-Royce. In 1939, with the war under way, he was transferred to Cheltenham, where he and Mrs. Jones had lived ever since, he working as an aeronautical engineer, she giving piano lessons.
    Brian was born on the last day of February 1942. The Joneses’ second child, a daughter, died at about the age of two.
    â€œHow did she die?” I asked as gently as possible.
    â€œShe died, and that’s all I’ll say about it,” Mr. Jones said. I tried to explain again why I was asking questions, but Mr. Jones had been hurt too many times by lies and by the truth in print, and he was nowhere near ready to trust a writer. He told me that their youngest child, Barbara, born in 1946, now a physical education teacher, wanted no part of anything to do with Brian, and he asked me to leave her alone. He ground his teeth again. But he couldn’t stop himself from talking and bringing out family photograph albums.
    One photograph showed Brian about five years old, playing with a grey tabby cat.
    â€œOne day when both Brian and the cat were very young, Brian announced that the cat’s name was