CHAPTER ONE

Think of a Number

Max Montfalcon lay in bed and tried to remember how many people he had killed. If one understood the question correctly, it seemed very much a question of number.

Beside him, exuding heat and steam, a moistness almost palpable, a damp gust from some peculiar English tropic, he could feel the perspiring presence of Albert, his interrogator. That long ago a fat young man should have stolen one’s daughter and become one’s son-in-law was bad enough. It was pretty bloody rum when one’s son-in-law turned interrogator. Max’s eyes were closed and he liked them that way. He heard the distant church clock strike seven, the chimes carrying a mile or more in the evening air. By such sonic rituals Max had marked out his days and nights at Serenity House since that day in early November 1990, when he had gone ‘inside’. The church clock clear at seven of an evening. The call for ‘lights out’ at nine. The electric milk van at dawn. In summer the boys at the prep school across the road were in the cricket nets. In winter their voices grew shriller. Leaping and darting like midges they batted the hard ball back and forth across the fives courts. Roofless concrete sheds lit by fierce electric lamps. Leather glove meaty as it struck the ball; the scramble for the pepper. Eton Fives on a winter evening. Thank God for England!

One had been exposed to bores before. But Albert took the giddy biscuit.

Even the paucity of possessions in Max’s room irritated Albert. One blue chair and a table in similar hue, almost sky blue. French blue. Continental. Serenity House seemed to have been furnished from second-hand shops and bankrupt hotels. This was Cledwyn Fox’s doing, Albert decided, Welsh tat and French look-alikes, so dismayingly foreign. A broad-shouldered cupboard, oak, five foot tall, bronze facings and a silver lock. Fitted by the locksmith in Highgate Village, Max told him proudly, and ‘guaranteed against all but the most professional burglar’. Where Max kept his bits and pieces. ‘A few mementoes. Pre-war,’ Max had said. ‘My treasures.’

Until recently Albert had taken no notice. Now, he was not sure he wanted to know what Max locked in his cupboard. Upon the bed a cover decorated with a map of Corsica embroidered in gold. Why Corsica, for Christ’s sake? Well, simply because that was the only map available in old Maudie Geratie’s embroidery kit, supplied by her art therapist, a pale girl named Jaci who had been ‘carried away by the Campari’ old Maudie told all and sundry, as if some evil foreign wind, like the föhn or the mistral, or some modest but fatal European malady, had robbed her of her art therapist. Before Jaci had been carried away she had also taught Maudie French-knitting and the red woollen pixie cap hanging behind Max’s bedroom door was another gift. Mixed, mismatched entangled shoes, and shabby slippers, badly bruised, heels trodden flat, lay beside the bed. Sometimes Max would look at the shoes and weep. Not because he had ruined them, walked them into the ground, but because, he told Albert and Lizzie, ‘shoes are hell to get rid of! Always two of them to one of you.’ Upon the bedside table towered Max’s beloved magazines: Monarchy, Majesty, Blue Blood, Homage and, of course, on top of the pile, Max’s favourite, Fealty.

In a reedy, rusty voice, without opening his eyes, Max murmured: ‘Think of a number, any number …’

Whereupon Albert had heaved himself to his feet. ‘I’m not interested in playing silly games with you, Max. You don’t want to talk to me? Fine! Suit yourself. But I’d have thought your family deserves a bit better. Lizzie loves you. And she’s beside herself. She sits around waiting for the heavens to fall. And then there’s Innocenta.’

Albert’s voice was tight. But something else too? – got it – terrified!

Lizzie loved him? Well, perhaps, once. But that was before they made their bargain and Lizzie broke it. The midnight knock on the door. The iron gates closing behind him. Time to pack a single suitcase.

And Innocenta? His darling granddaughter. Yes, she was going to help him. He had an idea that Innocenta was going to help him catch a mouse.

Albert was crashing around the room, preparing to walk out. But Max preferred to listen to young Dr Tonks, the visiting geriatrician, talking to Night Matron down the corridor about a recent leaver.

‘Before we got a rhythm going, she suffered badly, dear old Elsie. I had to time my shots to catch the pain at onset. Mostly I think I got there before it took a real hold. When did you say she left?’

‘Night before last, Dr Tonks. Around three in the morning.’

‘Anyone see her off?’

‘I’d looked in a little earlier. With Imelda. We like to look in if we know guests are leaving. First to know she’d gone was Jack. He’s so quick is young Jack. I have no fears for the small-hour leavers.’

‘Admirable. Last-minute problems?’

‘She was as good as gold.’

‘It gives one hope, Matron. Pain control. From onset. Then swift peaceful departure. That’s my prayer. And lots of good soldiers like Elsie Gooche, with the good sense not to hang about.’

That’s when Albert had walked out of Max’s room. He had walked out the way people walked out of the United Nations. And meetings about Northern Ireland. Got to his feet and stomped out, muttering, ‘I don’t give a bugger. Suit yourself, you stupid old bastard. If you think this is bad, wait till the real questions start!’ And then bang, bang, bang, slam. That was Albert walking out like Arabs and Israelis walked out of peace conferences.

Max had discussed Arab-Israeli walk-outs with Major Bobbno, who said: ‘Didn’t expect you to like Israelis somehow, Monty.’ Major Bobbno would call him Monty. Or sometimes Brigadier. ‘The Israelis know that you get nowhere being nice. Peace talks are about power. Look at Versailles.’

‘Look at Munich.’

‘I do. Munich. I say. Precisely! Nineteen thirty-three. So don’t be weak – nail the bastards’ balls to the wall. Then talk. That’s what the Israelis do. D’you admire the Israelis, Monty?’

‘I admire the Israelis, Major.’

‘Same here.’ Major Bobbno lifted iron-grey eyebrows, two hairy mudguards over rubbery eyes. ‘Between you, me and the gatepost, Monty, it’s Jews who get on my wick.’

‘We might have done better to nail their balls to the wall.’

‘Whose balls? The Jews’?’

‘The Israelis’.’

‘Pardon my ignorance, Monty – but why should we want to nail the Israelis’ balls to the wall?’

‘Not now. In forty-seven,’ said Max. ‘When we had the mandate in Palestine and the Stern Gang bombed our hotels and killed our chaps. That way maybe we would have stopped the long decline. We ran out on the Middle East, Major. After Palestine, came Aden … ’

‘And India. Don’t forget India, Monty. Then Rhodesia.’

Both men suddenly stopped talking as Jack came by. Jack the American helper. The boy with the thick blond hair and the large smile. ‘What you guys saying then? Anybody join?’

‘We’re discussing the usefulness of nailing balls to the wall,’ said Major Bobbno. He waved his plastic hand-reacher at Jack. ‘Now clear off, before I have you shot!’

‘Eigh! But I love you guys!’ said the boy Jack and waltzed off down the corridor shaking his head and muttering delightedly, ‘What are you talking about? Whose balls you’re going to nail to the wall!’

He went on his way, stopping every so often to wave his hands in some kind of American dance, and shake his hips to some internal music and pray out loud in his savage, incomprehensible way, groans and whistles, to whatever American gods he worshipped. A prayer of thanks for bringing him, a poor boy from a trailer home in Florida, to the great good place of Serenity House.

‘Are you sure he grew up in a caravan?’ Major Bobbno asked Max as they watched him go. ‘Mr Fox swears he comes from a decent home. University lad.’

‘How many times has Mr Fox been to America?’ Max demanded.

‘Once a year. To New York.’

‘And you know why?’

‘He takes friend Bruce to that nancy parade. Chaps in frocks.’

‘Exactly. So what does he know about Jack? One day I’ll tell you Jack’s story. You’d be amazed … ’

‘He told you his story, the boy Jack?’ asked the Major.

Max grinned. Shapely yellow teeth above a full lip. ‘The boy’s an illiterate. He couldn’t tell me if he tried. I wouldn’t listen if he did. But I know Jack’s story better than he ever will.’

Time passed. Max’s room was dark. Behind his closed eyelids it was darker still. The signal for lights out sang in Serenity House. A plangent electronic bleeper, not too harsh, no, programmed to mimic the call of the turtle-dove. When Cledwyn Fox, director and sole proprietor of Serenity House, first fitted the device its call was that of a distant ambulance. In the early days of its installation, before Mr Fox muted it, its urgent summons had carried off two occupants of Serenity House. The elderly are susceptible to such alarms and have learnt never to ask for whom the ambulance calls for they know it calls for them.

Though lights out rang at nine, guests were free to choose their own bedtimes. ‘Remember this isn’t my home, it’s yours,’ Cledwyn Fox told each new arrival. But most of the elders heard and obeyed the command. Most of the bedrooms were dark soon after nine o’clock. But not silent. Cries and monologues. Abrupt, tearing coughing attacks – so alarming to those who heard them for the first time, but to the veteran strangely reassuring in their recognisable timbre and regularity, rather like the familiar striking of great, chesty clocks – spilled from the darkened bedrooms. The night staff, the ever-alert carers, would pause on their rounds, and identify the calls, just as hunters in the African dark learn to know the cries of animals that hunt and die by night. Bedtime by consensus, a sense of an ending, said Cledwyn Fox. His dove-grey brochure spoke plainly of its merits: ‘North London’s Premier Eventide Refuge. Four hundred and thirty pounds a week, plus VAT. Trained and kindly staff. Colour televisions in certain rooms.’ A congenial regime.

Regime was a lovely word. Max rolled it around his tongue. In the warm darkness of his room, it tasted of salad oil and iron; assertive yet not unpleasant. Serenity House offered all that might be asked: private medical treatment and physiotherapy. Little Lois Chadwick with the limp dropped in once a week for hairdressing with her portable driers and her little box of ‘curlers and crimpers’. And the chiropodist, Edgar, wearing the tiniest gold ring through his left nostril, with his inflammatory views on the future of Europe. He dropped in on Tuesday with his little box of ‘clicks and sticks’. ‘Eurobugger – and Proud of it!’ said his pink lapel badge.

‘When we go into a united Europe envisaged by the Brussels bureaucrats, we will be taking a fast train straight into the buffers,’ Edgar intoned, stripping the wrapping from a corn plaster and examining the yellow, flaking soles of old Maudie Geratie who suffered terribly with her feet. On Maudie’s bedside table stood a photograph of a lovely girl in a large ivory frame. This, Edgar knew, had been old Maudie, once – old Maudie young. A coquette, a lissome, large-eyed, flighty dancer whose lovers had gasped, strained, and even died for her. Chiefly, a Brazilian baritone named Arnaldo, famed for his interpretation of Mozart, who had perished in the war. Which war? Edgar could not say – probably the Great War for old Maudie was well into her nineties – but after a certain age which war it had been really didn’t matter.

It was one of the few boons of old age – you forgot about your wars. And your dead friends and lovers who seemed so dead then, were now alive and kicking all around you, while the living seemed ghosts from another world.

Edgar sighed as he centred the corn plaster. Old Maudie giggled and glanced around her room. ‘This is a lovely apartment. You don’t often get them this size, in Paris.’

Paris! It gave Edgar a sharp pain. Only Brussels caused him more pain. Bunions, whitlows, in-grown toe-nails, warts, corns – excrescences upon the fair face of humanity – these were the secret names Edgar gave to France, Germany, Italy, Holland. Only Mr Montfalcon understood and sympathised with Edgar’s fierce sense of Englishness. Only Mr Montfalcon deplored the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘Germans, all over again,’ he said, as Edgar treated him for a particularly painful infected toe-nail. ‘Overbearing. Over the top. Only a matter of time and they’ll be over here.’

‘The Channel Tunnel’, said Edgar, manipulating a disinfectant swab with gentle concern, ‘will be a death trap.’

‘Fire?’

‘Rabies! Mark my words. The first rabid dog or cat or bat to make the crossing will have “Made in Germany” stamped on its tongue.’

And Edgar’s left nostril twitched and the little gold ring caught the light like a star. When this happened old Maudie would smile brilliantly, for her eyesight was still amazingly keen although her other functions had failed one by one. ‘Look! The evening star!’ old Maudie chirruped when Edgar’s nose ring flashed light, and she clapped her hands and would have gone on clapping them until the palms were raw had not Matron One arrived to calm her. Matron One, Mrs Trump, also known as Day Matron, was a kindly lady.

Night Matron, an ex-Rhodesian nurse, Mrs S, known to the Manchester Twins as Rudolpha Hess, but to everyone else simply as Matron Two, regulated the evening and nighttime hours – ‘or at least as many hours as are left to us, one and all, for we know not the day nor the hour,’ Matron Two liked to say being religious, and so saying sometimes made Agnes cry copiously. Poor young Agnes (‘I’m just the right side of sixty-seven’), one of those belonging to a group known, not unkindly, with that soft, understanding smile, which is often the only compliment the young and healthy pay the elderly, as the Five Incontinents, leaking as she sometimes did from both ends.

Max thanked his lucky stars that, with rare exceptions, he leaked from one end only. In bed now, he pressed his thighs together, strengthening the pelvic muscles, feeling his incontinence pad fitted snugly into his underpants. It took you back, to things done as a boy, as a baby and surely best forgotten. To have your own body wake you with its liquid, to have the old man that you knew you were not, go and leave his little wet calling card on you, that was awful. Better the pad, even though it was sometimes uncomfortable to sleep on and, if it ever got any worse, then it would have to be the catheter. Yes, he would have the catheter. What did the Arabs say? Bukra il mish, mish: ‘Tomorrow the apricots!’ No apricots for Max Montfalcon – but tomorrow, perhaps, the catheter.

Toileting was one of the major achievements of Serenity House. Guests were toileted regularly. Pads and catheters and commodes on request in the bedrooms and strengthening exercises and attention to diet. As indeed there had to be. For if Agnes leaked from two ends, there were guests who leaked from three. Couldn’t keep a thing down, nor in, nor up. On a bad day the Five Incontinents could ruin an entire carpet. Cledwyn Fox would have carpet on the floor. And Serenity House would do its best to cope.

‘… Drycleaning, personal telephone in some bedrooms – not all rooms. Not bloody likely’ – since, as Mr Fox explained, the apparently pacific Lady Divina had proved herself to have immensely strong wrists and homicidal ambitions for she had one day tried to strangle Edgar the chiropodist as he knelt to deal with a particularly nasty bunion and it had required the combined efforts of both Matron One, Dr Tonks, Mr Fox and the little Filipino nurse-aide, Imelda, to rescue the dainty Euro-hater from Lady Divina’s telephonic garrotte. Afterwards Mr Fox had said: ‘From now on, she uses the pay phone.’ And who could blame him? Edgar wore the welts of his near strangulation clearly visible on his neck for some weeks afterwards as he arrived at Serenity House in his little van with the sticker in the back window which read angrily ‘Fl-EEC-ed!’

The brochure for Serenity House, written in the early eighties, and never revised in the light of more sensitive recommendations by the District Health Authority, was direct and factual. ‘Serenity House. North London’s Premier Eventide Refuge offers complete care for long and short terms in respect of convalescence. Post-operative. Geriatric. Terminal. Holiday …’ Plain, perhaps, but free of ‘superfluous imbroglio,’ declared Cledwyn Fox in tones of some satisfaction, ‘and coming from a Welshman,’ he liked to add to prospective guests, ‘you can’t say fairer’. The small print, mind you, had to be watched pretty carefully. It laid down conditions for the governance of drink and tobacco and placed their dispensation firmly in the hands of the Director and staff. ‘Interest’, the brochure warned, ‘will be charged on late payment of board. Incontinence damage will be charged directly to the incontinent in question.’ Because this ran to replacing top quality carpet – Mr Fox always insisted on good carpet, ‘none of your bloody industrial weave around here,’ – it could be pricey. Then there was the ‘behaviour clause’ modelled, according to Mr Fox again, on ‘similar exclusion clauses found in public schools’; to wit, the right of the Head to boot out any trouble makers, but, naturally, excluding unconscious mental afflictions, whatever they were, or relatively harmless acts of insanity where the person in question really couldn’t help herself. ‘In the evening’ – Mr Fox usually spoke only about ‘the evening’ expecting one to fill in for oneself the obvious conclusion ‘of life’ – ‘in the evening,’ said Mr Fox, ‘acts of insanity are bound to occur, especially when dealing with dementia and’ – here his dark, lively little Welsh face took on a gnomic, almost a pixie-like expression – ‘even due perhaps to the inconsolable anguish of great age. Yes indeed!’

Speaking these words as if delivering them at an eisteddfod, thus did Mr Fox indicate both his sympathy and his spirit of discipline. There had to be rules, hence the catch-all killer clause in the contract: ‘At all times the patient shall not cause a nuisance or annoyance to the staff of the nursing home or other patients therein.’ And finally, there was help with funeral planning. Serenity House had its own scheme to which guests might contribute or they could, if they wished, make use of the scheme run by Age Concern. ‘It is something that families in particular appreciate,’ Mr Fox explained to the relatives of incoming guests. ‘People are able to leave clear instructions as to what they want done. Not to put too fine a point on it, that way there is always the cash to cover the casket.’

*

Who was it who heard Max counting aloud that night, after Albert’s ferocious interrogation? It was Matron Two, moving slowly down the corridor, hearing something outside her range of nocturnal reference, a man counting slowly and firmly in a low voice: ‘… one hundred and eight, one hundred and nine … ’ interrupted now and then by what sounded like choking but turned out to be, she discovered as she listened carefully, not the sounds of asphyxiation – thank heaven! – but only dry, barking sobs.

‘Now then, Mr Montfalcon,’ said Matron Two, as she slipped into his room and sat down beside his bed, ‘it’s just a dream you’re having.’

So silently she moved, did Matron Two, down the corridors, the crêpe soles of her brogues making no sound, the blue night-lights soft on the dark down of her upper lip, that some of the guests supposed that it was Matron Two whom Lady Divina meant when she kept announcing the closeness of the ‘Angel of Death’.

‘Numbers were never taken,’ Max murmured. ‘Never. So many who came into the place, simply left again without being noted.’

‘And where did they leave for, these visitors of yours?’

‘Not mine!’ Max raised himself in bed, turning on a bony elbow, sharp as a school compass. ‘I had nothing whatever to do with the missing numbers. This is hard to understand. I know that. People who weren’t there cannot understand. Ever.’

‘You’re dead right, Mr Montfalcon. That’s what I say about Rhodesia. Not all whites were monsters who ate little black babies. So don’t you fuss. You can tell me, if it makes you feel better – I’ll understand.’

But Max had sunk back on his pillows and said nothing. Matron Two gave him two sleeping pills – her little ‘bombs’ – and a sip of water. A few minutes later he was snoring.

Dear Mr Montfalcon. He was a nice man and not half so demented as he liked to pretend. Probably did it just to get that dreadful family off his back. She did not know who was worse. The obstreperous son-in-law with the round, pink face and the loud voice, or his stuck-up daughter with all the blonde hair, or that ghastly granddaughter who came at night sometimes, dressed up in her robes and painted eyes. Was she a witch, a druid, or the follower of one of those silly gurus who collected Rolls Royces and cheated on their taxes? Poor Mr Montfalcon. The visit from the son-in-law earlier that day had clearly upset him. They could hear the shouting from E-wing.

Max Montfalcon was a fine, sensitive man. Matron Two thought him head and shoulders above most of the intake of 1990, though, as Mr Fox said, times were tight and beggars can’t be choosers and what the hell, so long as their cheques don’t bounce. But really! He didn’t have to nurse them, did he?

All the elders in Serenity House were supposed to retain at least the vestiges of health and reason. Or they should be in geriatric wards somewhere else. Yet there were some who, when the doctors arrived on visits, quite visibly pulled themselves together, stood up straight and nodded, and tried not to dribble. Much as she admired Cledwyn Fox, he connived at the deception. Some guests in the House really weren’t up to it any longer. Some weren’t ‘there’ at all. And amongst some of the very frail and elderly, even when they were ‘there’, like old Maudie, or Beryl the Beard, she knew, somehow, that they wished they weren’t.

And now a man with a loud voice and pink, shining face, hiding under the pseudonym of ‘son-in-law’, came into the House and terrorised one of the better guests. It really was too much. Matron Two did not like Members of Parliament. They were always so damned sure of themselves. Perhaps it came of always having to pretend they knew what they were talking about and having to say it in five minutes flat before the chap in the wig shut them up. Visits from MPs usually spelt trouble: just look what had happened when parties of British MPs began visiting Rhodesia – it had been the beginning of the end.

It had to be said that Max Montfalcon was quite a fellow. ‘Uncontainable!’ Cledwyn Fox said proudly. ‘A free spirit’ – when he had turned up that afternoon on the arm of Sergeant Pearce, after going missing for a full five hours. Whether sitting in his electric wheelchair or moving in his extraordinarily slow but determined way down the corridor, or out of the front door, his height, his kind of tall, stiff stillness made him memorable. The dark blue barathea blazer with its single ivory button was thirty years old if it was a day, but style is style, even in a foreign kind of a way, even if it possessed the stylishness of crinolines and bustles and frockcoats, the sorts of things that hung in faded opulence, in pleats and ruffs and elaborate cross-stitches in museums and theatrical outfitters’ windows. Max often liked to wear a grey silk shirt washed so thin it seemed transparent, and he would knot a dark blood-red tie around the loose creased flesh of his thin neck, a great Windsor knot of tie that was slung like some woollen anchor beneath his bobbing Adam’s apple. Yes, Max Montfalcon was what Cledwyn Fox would once have called ‘a gentleman’, with his fine good grey hair carefully swept back over the ears, and his light blue eyes, even now with a tendency to water, still imposing and rather beautiful. His height and bearing, at eighty-one, made Max Montfalcon a handsome man, with his rather sad little habits – the elderly red tin of rolling tobacco in his inside pocket, shreds of the stuff lodging in the folds of his clothes and often in the folds of his facial skin, the distressing habit of walking with his heels flat, refusing to lace his shoes properly and turning left and right foot sideways as he shuffled along, walking on his feet but not in his shoes. How he kept them on was a mystery. Yet he never lost a shoe, did Max Montfalcon, even when he went on one of his little ‘wanderings’ and had to be brought back from the park or the woods, or the heath where he’d been found like some stray dog or picked up like a lost ball.

Once he was returned to Serenity House by Mrs Marcos, the Cypriot tailor, into whose shop he had strolled one afternoon and discussed, to her intense surprise, the vagaries of the English hyphen, while rolling a cigarette. He declared that, in the matter of the hyphen he, Max Montfalcon, preferred to follow the great Fowler and ‘wallow in uncertainty’. He said ‘vallow’ with a little sharp bark. It was one of those words he never ever pronounced correctly, just as he always insisted on tea and ‘bisquits’ and studied the television programmes in something only he called the ‘bulletim’, choosing to express the first syllable as if it rhymed with ‘dull’. Little Soti Marcos, just eighteen months and safe in her grandmother’s arms, looked into Max’s pale blue eyes, saw his upper dentures fix upon his lower lip as he proceeded to give velocity to his ‘vallow’, and howled her head off.

What Max had actually gone on to say to little Soti, if anybody could remember it, if anybody could understand it, and of course he did not now remember it, was: ‘I hate the use of the hyphen in the term “German-born Jews”. As Fowler pointed out with a similar example of the cumbersome hyphen in the term – “South African-born Indians” – what we should simply say is “Jews born in Germany”.’

Why should this example have sprung to mind? If asked at the time, he would not have been able to say. It really didn’t matter, certainly not as far as Mrs Marcos and her little granddaughter were concerned. On that afternoon, when the sight of Max’s strong yellow false teeth descending on his lower lip had made little Soti Marcos weep like the monsoon, Mrs Marcos had taken him back to Serenity House, wheeling him along like some elderly bicycle on very flat tyres.

But most often it was Sergeant Pearce of the Highgate Police who led him home. The handsome village bobby who stood on the corner of Archway Road watching for the ‘amber gamblers’, the motorists who jumped the yellow on the Archway traffic lights.

There were some ways in which Sergeant Pearce reminded Max of young von F. Something in the height, the blue eyes, the uniform? No, not the uniform. He supposed young von F had worn a uniform, but that would have been after he returned to Germany. Serve him bloody well right. At that time, anyone who returned to Germany ended up in a uniform. What could young von F expect? Seen from the side, Sergeant Pearce’s dark hair curled in his nape in much the way that Cynthia Pargeter had found irresistible! What on earth had happened to Cynthia? He’d not seen her since the day young von F (damned fool!) sailed for home.

‘Got someone here who I think belongs to you,’ Sergeant Pearce would say, on arriving at Serenity House, unfurling his dental flag – his slow crooked smile that had passing housewives blushing like schoolgirls – for the benefit of the goggling nurse. It was the opinion of everyone who knew him that Sergeant Pearce was far too good-looking to be a policeman. And indeed he wasn’t much of a cop. He never caught an amber gambler, or ticketed a car, but he nabbed Max Montfalcon on more than one of his little walks.

Perhaps there was something about Max which positively invited arrest. Who would not have been struck by the slow rocking shuffle of the old man in his blazer and red tie and his ruined shoes, proceeding at an achingly slow pace down the uneven pavements of Highgate? Children clutched their mothers’ hands, wide-eyed at his agonised progress. Busloads of inquisitive Chinese negotiating the hilly heights, in search of the tomb of Karl Marx, stared at the immensely tall thin old man who teetered on the kerb and waved a fist whenever he caught sight of them. ‘Slitty-eyes, slitty-eyes!’ Max would yell, borrowing the insult from Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, one of his great heroes (after Earl Mountbatten – now there was an Englishman for you!). Or he would glare at the pale-faced and rather furtive Russians hiding out in their trade mission on the edge of Highgate West Hill, their closed, alien and somehow abstracted expressions reminding him of beings from a planet well beyond our solar system.

They all saw the old man from time to time, buffeting the air like a bather entering a high, cold sea and making barely any progress. For he moved like a tightrope walker fighting a gale-force wind that hit him face on. It could take him five minutes to cross the road; the length of a single block took anything up to half an hour. Anyone watching him closely would have seen that although he always appeared to be moving, he often only went through the motions of walking, lifting his left leg and then seeming to forget the purpose of the movement, freezing it there while his hands, long white hands, with veins so thin yet clear they might have been drawn in blue ballpoint pen, described frantic little circles by his sides, cyclones of effort.

‘Do you have daughters?’ Max demanded of Sergeant Pearce.

‘No, sir.’

‘Good. Don’t. Daughters are ingrates. Take your money – throw you to the wolves. I made a bargain with my daughter, Lizzie. And my granddaughter, Innocenta. She talked of “granny flats” and “free spirits”. But she’s young and believes in Buddha or Odin or someone. I am not a granny. My suite of rooms in my daughter’s house was not a “flat”. We had a bargain. My money in exchange for a safe haven. Hadn’t been there for two minutes and they shipped me off to the scrap heap.’

‘I think we’re getting nowhere fast, sir,’ Sergeant Pearce said, steering Max in a gentle circle to face the way he had been walking.

‘Story of my life. I wonder what you feel about the hyphen, Sergeant? If we follow Fowler, we can dispense with the hyphen altogether. Fowler illustrates this very clearly using the term “South African-born Indians”. Fowler suggests in its place that we use “Indians born in South Africa”.’

‘Really, sir?’

‘We transpose this. And instead of the ugly hyphenated German-born Jews, we get: “Jews born in Germany”. See what I mean?’

‘Yes, sir. No hyphens.’

‘No Jews either,’ said Max.

‘See what you mean,’ Sergeant Pearce nodded heavily as the justice of this observation was borne home to him, ‘when you put it like that.’

‘Like what?’ demanded the walking windmill at his side, as the policeman and his charge walked slowly home to Serenity House.