When Haisam asked me, on the first morning back at school after the Christmas holidays, why I had a big bandage around my hand, I was tempted to tell him everything – the whole truth – and to ask his advice about helping Marie. But in the end I just told him I’d trapped my hand in the bonnet of the Panhard. He gave me an odd look, as though to say: why are you lying to me, since you know there’s no point? He was playing chess with his father and every now and then they would toss out bizarre terms that still meant absolutely nothing to me: the East Indian Defence, the Nimzo-Indian Defence, the Rubinstein Attack, the Sämisch Variation, the Spielmann Variation, the Sicilian Defence. For the first time, I was beginning to hate the game: it seemed as complicated and nerve-racking as the world itself. School was also beginning to feel like a big chessboard full of traps, which Marie and I would have to struggle across, just as we’d struggled to get through the maze at the fair. For the last few days I’d had a knot in my stomach and it had been getting tighter as the end of the holidays approached. As for Haisam, his father had given him a book of theory for Christmas, all about the “hypermodern revolution in chess”. But I think my anxiety about Marie meant that I no longer admired his freakish intelligence quite so much.

The game finished and we began to munch Turkish delight. Haisam’s father started telling us about Istanbul, the city of his birth, and its attractions: the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus, the Galata Bridge and all that stuff. It wasn’t really the best time to be reminiscing, because all the kids were pouring into school, although that didn’t seem to bother him much. In general I was a bit wary of putting questions to my noble Egyptian’s Turkish father, but on that day I did ask him whether he ever felt like going back to his roots.

“Turkey isn’t Turkey any more… It’s a shadow of its former self. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is! There’s nothing to be done but dream about its glorious history…”

I could see that he was feeling melancholic about his ancestral lands and I too began to daydream, lulled by all those strange names he kept mentioning: Istanbul … Kassim Pasha … the Galata Bridge … the famous Princes’ Islands, where he’d lived as a child and which he was clearly trying to recreate in his lodge, on a smaller scale.

The bell rang and that brought me back down to earth.