During the trip, they saw the man again, this time on his unicycle, with two flaming torches in his hands and one sticking from his mouth like a fish from a seal’s. It was near the top of the Royal Mile. The street performer – now dressed in a striped shirt, like an American sports referee’s – spotted them before they even had time to react. ‘My friends from the train!’ he shouted, in front of the large crowd, tourists with their wriggling children, the rubberneckers that always built around a dangerous-looking stunt. ‘Come here and hold the ladder for me, sir!’

‘It’s you!’ said Dad in undisguised delight. ‘What are you waiting for, a barn dance to start? He means you!’

James found himself, in front of all the pairs of eyes, clutching the stepladder as the performer mounted it, torches in his hands and mouth, one of them brushing close enough to James that he could feel the heat on his arms. ‘Let’s hear it for my volunteer!’ yelled the performer, and, taking James’s name, hectored the crowd into chanting it. James! James! James! James! chorused the strangers and, in the middle of it all, he saw his father clapping his hands together vigorously, a huge smile on his face. And he simultaneously saw that Dad was forming a memory he would treasure, and also understood there would not be many more like it, and James had to look down at the cobbled street beneath his feet and think about something else.

That evening as they stood in their favourite spot, near the end of North Bridge, Dad referred for the first time to what was coming.

‘I’d like it if you would scatter me off here, James, old man,’ he said, resting one hand on the low wall and gesturing into the sky with the other.

‘What do you mean?’ asked James, feeling an internal tightening, as if he were small again, and something bad had come into the room at night.

‘Not immediately.’ Alan Chiltern smile-frowned. ‘Not right this minute, I think there’d be a scene if you chucked me off now. But my ashes. You know.’

‘Your …?’

‘After they cremate me. After the funeral.’