This Mr Van Schoonbeke comes from an old, wealthy family. He’s a bachelor and lives by himself in a big house in one of our most beautiful streets.

He has plenty of money, as do all his friends. These are for the most part judges, lawyers, merchants or retired businessmen. Every member of this company possesses at least one car, with the exception of Mr Van Schoonbeke himself, my brother and me. But Mr Van Schoonbeke could own a car if he so wished, and no one knows this better than his friends. Indeed, they think it’s rather curious and sometimes speak of him as “that old devil Albert”.

It’s not like that for my brother and me.

Being a doctor, he doesn’t have a valid excuse not to have a car, all the more since he rides a bicycle, which shows that he could do with having one. But for us barbarians a doctor is a saint and on a par with a priest. Owing to his standing as a doctor, my brother is more or less respectable, even without a car. Because it’s not the done thing in Mr Van Schoonbeke’s circles to have friends who have neither money nor titles.

If they enter his house and discover him with someone they don’t know, he presents the newcomer in such a way that everyone’s opinion of him is a hundred per cent more positive than his actual status calls for. He calls a floor manager a director, and a colonel in civilian dress is introduced as a general.

With me, however, it wasn’t that straightforward.

You know I’m a clerk at the General Marine and Shipbuilding Company, which meant he had nothing to cling on to. A clerk has no sacred aura. He faces the world as naked as the day he was born.

He thought for two seconds – that was all – and then introduced me as “Mr Laarmans from the shipyard”.

He finds our English company name too long to remember and also too precise. He knows there isn’t a large company in the city where he doesn’t have a friend who knows one of the directors who could inform him forthwith of my social insignificance. It would never have occurred to him to call me a “clerk”, because that would have been my death warrant. Other than that, I had to fend for myself. He’d given me a coat of mail, but that was all he could do.

“So you’re an engineer?” ventured a man with golden teeth sitting next to me.

“An inspector,” my friend Van Schoonbeke intervened rapidly, knowing that being an engineer implied a particular polytechnic and a diploma. It also required too much technical knowledge in order not to fall at the first hurdle in conversation.

I smiled, implying that there was some secret that might be revealed in the fullness of time.