I ought to say something, before I finish, about the last time I saw him, since I suspect that is the part young Anstey is most anxious for, judging by the way his pencil has been hovering rather than moving these last several minutes.
It was some years after his retirement, out on the Sussex Downs among his bees, a place I visited exactly once in my life and found, to my own considerable surprise, a good deal more restful than any club window I have ever occupied. He wrote to me, out of nowhere, asking whether I would care to come down for a weekend, an invitation so entirely unlike anything I had ever received from him in thirty years of transactions that I very nearly suspected forgery myself, and would have investigated it through my own usual channels if the handwriting had not been so unmistakably his own.
I took the train down on a Friday afternoon, and I remember being struck, coming up the lane from the station, by how small he looked against that much open country, a man I had only ever known as a fixed and faintly intimidating point in the middle of London traffic, now pottering about a garden with a smoker in one hand and a look on his face I had never seen there before, something close to contentment. I would not have believed him capable of it a decade earlier.
"You look older, Pike," he said, by way of greeting. It was so exactly the sort of thing he would say that I laughed aloud on his own front step.
"So do you," I told him, "though you seem to be wearing it a good deal better than I am."
"Bees do not lie about a man the way London does. They only sting you when you deserve it, which I have found to be a more honest arrangement than most of the ones I left behind in the city." He set down the smoker and looked at me properly for the first time since I had arrived. "You have not come down here for gossip, I think."
"No," I admitted. "I am not sure why I came, if I am honest with you, which I have found myself doing considerably more often since my doctor started using words I need a dictionary for."
He did not press me on my health that evening, for which I was grateful, and we walked his rows of hives instead while he explained, with more patience than I had ever known him show for an explanation, the workings of a colony, the queen and her attendants and the long, orderly, faintly ruthless economy of the thing. I remember thinking, though I did not say it aloud, that I had spent thirty years watching a strikingly similar economy operate in every drawing room in London, minus the honey.
We sat on a bench looking out over the Breezy Channel with a cup of coffee the following morning, and he asked me, with what I can only describe as genuine curiosity rather than professional interest, how business was. I told him business was dying along with me, that the young men coming up in the trade now worked for papers with circulations ten times what mine had ever been and consciences, from what I could observe, considerably smaller.
"Do you regret it?" he asked. "The whole of it, I mean. Not any single case. The trade itself."
I thought about it longer than the question probably deserved, watching a fishing boat make its slow way along the coast below us.
"No," I said, in the end. "I regret the sister business, some days. I regret one or two others I haven't troubled you with this evening and don't intend to now. But the trade itself, no. Someone was always going to know these things, Holmes. I would rather it had been me, sitting in my window with my own rules about what I would and would not do with what I knew, than some other man with none at all."
He did not answer directly. That was, I had learned over three decades, very often his way of agreeing with something he did not wish to say aloud. He only reached over and refilled my glass, out there on his own bench with his own bees humming somewhere behind us, and we sat a good while longer without either of us saying anything further. I found it, then and still find it now, a more companionable silence than a great deal of the conversation I made my living from.
I left the following Monday morning, and he walked me down to the station himself rather than sending a boy with the trap. I understood, without either of us saying so, that this was his own way of marking that the visit had mattered to him more than his letter had let on. He shook my hand on the platform, something he had not done since the very first year of our acquaintance, and said only, "Take care of yourself, Pike," in a tone that made the ordinary phrase sound, coming from him, closer to an instruction than a pleasantry. I have thought of that handshake more often, in these last months, than any single case we ever worked together.
The young man tells me I have been dictating for nearly two hours, and that his hand has cramped twice already, and that his editor will want to know what on earth to do with seven thousand words of an old gossip's deathbed reminiscence that names no living person and settles no scores at all, which is not, he informs me with some tact, the sort of column our readers generally expect from this window.