When he leaves, Cecil writes a poem in Daphne's girlish album, entitled "Two Acres" — a reworking, for public consumption, of his lines on the garden and its hammock. But there the novel breaks off; when it restarts, in the 1920s, Cecil is dead. "Two Acres" has become his version of "Grantchester" — a famous evocation of a lost England. One of the keen incidental pleasures of this novel is the accuracy of Hollinghurst's imitation of the verse and letters of this period (and, indeed, the other decades spanned by this novel). Cecil's poetry, with its Georgian plangencies, is pitch-perfect.

The rest of the novel follows the Sawle and Valance families via Cecil's posthumous reputation. In the 1920s, the first, discreetly hagiographical biography of Cecil is written by one of his many Cambridge admirers. There is a vignette of Cecil's family home on the weekend this biographer comes to stay. Corley Court, a "Victorian monstrosity", beloved by Cecil and his mother, is now undergoing a "hygienic" 1920s make-over by Cecil's obscurely vengeful younger brother, Dudley, who has married Daphne. Dudley is dangerously   unhinged, either by his wartime experiences, or perhaps by his mother's excessive and exclusive love and grief for Cecil; and the family skirts around the black hole of his unpredictable rages.

By 1967, Corley Court has become a school — a transformation detailed as lovingly as one of Osbert Lancaster's enchanting drawings in Scene Changes. Even as a school, it has its melancholy mysteries: the music room, with its brown linoleum, has as its sole adornment "above the blocked-off fireplace, [...] an oleograph of Brahms, ‘Presented by his Family in Memory of N.E. Harding 1938-53.' Peter sometimes tried to imagine the family deciding on this particular gift."

Peter Rowe is a young schoolmaster, aware that he is excluded from the secret lives of the boys. He meets and starts an affair with a young bank clerk, Paul Bryant, who has just met the elderly Daphne and her daughter. In Peter and Paul's affair, Peter is dominant; though it is sexual expertise rather than class that counts in 1967.

Houses are altered, sexual mores change, tastes in literature shift, relationships transmute through time. Paul overtakes his sexual mentor in becoming Cecil's biographer, though a tantalisingly inept one. He tip-toes ingratiatingly around the edges of the academic world for which he lacks qualifications, picking up fag-ends of mysterious feuds ("That was all bloody Trevor-Roper's doing!"). He tracks down as many survivors as possible from that weekend of lost intimacies; but his interviewees clam up, or his tape-recorder breaks down. When he interviews George, whose inhibitions are eroded by medication, it is difficult to tell if George's indiscretions are truths told on the threshold of death, or borderline dementia. Sexual revelations, however, are the sine qua non for the modern biography, so Paul publishes anyway. As Hollinghurst suggests, the present belief that all Edwardians were secretly queer (or, if homosexual, secretly straight) is a product of this age.

Even if not all writers, past or present, are necessarily gay, the best of those who are may, like Hollinghurst, be particularly attuned to the outsider's way of seeing: vivid, fresh, edged with danger. This, indeed, is almost a truism. Why Hollinghurst is so good is because he also knows that "the stranger's child" who, in In Memoriam, brings "fresh association" to the landscape, irrevocably overlays and loses the past. Hollinghurst's sense of beauty, past and present, is edged with mystery and loss.