Palm Beach is set on a narrow tongue of land between the Atlantic, to the east, and Lake Worth, to the west. The city itself is set out according to a classic American grid layout, a neat tracing no more than four blocks wide from coast to coast. We tramped south down the County Road, peering dutifully at landmarks like the town hall and the Memorial Park fountain, a water feature fringed by swaying palm trees under a powder-blue sky. Then we turned onto Worth Avenue, four blocks of overpriced shops: Cartier, Saks, Tiffany, Ungaro’s, stocking everything from Armani clothes to antique Russian icons, anything you wanted, nothing with a price tag. One of the shops boasted the world’s largest stock of antique Meissen porcelain. Outside the shops limousine engines idled.

Lou said, “So what do you think? A little different from Manchester?”

“Too bloody expensive.”

“Yeah, but if you were rich enough your head would work differently. You don’t spend to get stuff. You spend as a statement. But it hasn’t always been this way. I started to come here in the early sixties. We had a beach house, farther up the coast.”

“We?”

“Lisa, my wife. Two boys. Already growing up, even then.” He didn’t mention the wife and kids again; I inferred the usual story, the wife had died, the kids rarely visited. “It was a good place for the summer. But back then it was kind of different.” The town had been founded in the nineteenth century as a winter playground for the well heeled. In the twenties had come further development. “It was a winter town. In the summer they used to dismantle the traffic lights! Now, though, it stays open all year. Some say it’s the richest town in the Union.”

“So you’ve done well to end up here,” I said.

“End up. You’re not around old people much, are you?”

“Shit. I—”

“Ah, forget it. Yes, I did okay. Stock options—” His talk drifted back to the Second World War. He had been a draftee. “I was lucky. Spared the fighting. I already had some business experience, helping my father run his machine shop as a kid. So I got staff positions. Logistics. Requisitions. The work was endless.

“The invasion of Italy was the biggest bureaucratic exercise in history. We were heroes of paperwork.” I grinned dutifully. “But it was good experience. I learned a hell of a lot, about people, business, systems. Stuff you learn in the army you can apply anywhere.