The House Of Silk

anything else relating to his life before Baker Street. But, of course, that was his nature. He never celebrated his birthday and I only discovered the date when I read it in his obituaries. He once mentioned to me that his ancestors had been country squires and that one of his relations was a quite well-known artist but in general he preferred almost to pretend that his family had never existed, as if a prodigy such as himself had sprung unaided onto the world stage.
    When I first heard that Holmes had a brother, it humanised him – or at least, it did until I met the brother. Mycroft was, in many ways, as peculiar as he: unmarried, unconnected, existing in a small world of his own creation. This was largely defined by the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall where he was to be found every day from a quarter to five until eight o’clock. I believe he had an apartment somewhere close by. The Diogenes Club, as is well known, catered to the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. Nobody ever spoke to each other. In fact, talking was not allowed at all, except in the Stranger’s Room, and even there the conversation hardly flowed. I remember reading in a newspaper that the hall porter had once wished a member good evening and had been promptly dismissed. The dining room had all the warmth and conviviality of a Trappist monastery, although the food was at least superior as the club employed a French chef of some renown. That Mycroft enjoyed his food was evident from his frame, which was quite excessively corpulent. I can still see him wedged into a chair with a brandy on one side and a cigar on the other. It was always disconcerting to meet him, for I would glimpse in him, just for a moment, some of the features of my friend: the light grey eyes, the same sharpness of expression, but they would seem strangely out of place, translated, as it were, to this animated mountain of flesh. Then Mycroft would turn his head and he would be a complete stranger to me, the sort of man who somehow warned you to keep your distance. I did sometimes wonder what the two of them might have been like as boys. Had they ever fought together, read together, kicked a ball between them? It was impossible to imagine, for they had grown up to become the sort of men who would like you to think that they had never been boys at all.
    When Holmes first described Mycroft to me, he had said that he was an auditor, working for a number of government departments. But actually this was only half the truth and I later learned that his brother was much more important and influential. I refer, of course, to the adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans when the blueprints for a top secret submarine were stolen from the Admiralty. It was Mycroft who was charged with getting them back, and that was when Holmes admitted to me that he was a vital figure in government circles, a human repository of arcane facts, the man that every department consulted when something needed to be known. It was Holmes’s opinion that, had he chosen to be a detective he might have been his equal or even, I was astonished to hear him admit, his superior. But Mycroft Holmes suffered from a singular character flaw. He had a streak of indolence so ingrained that it would have rendered him unable to solve any crime, for the simple reason that he would have been unable to interest himself in it. He is still alive, by the way. When I last heard, he had been knighted and was the chancellor of a well-known university, but he has since retired.
    ‘Is he in London?’ I asked.
    ‘He is seldom anywhere else. I will inform him that we intend to visit the club.’
    The Diogenes was one of the smaller clubs on Pall Mall, designed rather like a Venetian palazzo in the Gothic style, with highly ornate, arched windows and small balustrades. This had the effect of making the interior rather gloomy. The front door led to an atrium which rose the full length of the building with a domed window high above but the architect had cluttered the place with too many galleries, columns and staircases and the result was that very little light was able to disseminate its way through. Visitors were permitted only on the ground floor. According to the rules, there were two days of the week when they could accompany a member to the dining room above, but in the seventy years since the club had been founded, this had never yet occurred. Mycroft received us, as always, in the Stranger’s Room, with its oak bookshelves