“I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Straitley,” he said. “But I noticed your plants needed watering.”

“You’ll only get them used to it. Before we know it, they’ll be going on strike, demanding more sunlight and a better grade of compost.”

Winter shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’m already looking after the Chaplain’s orchids.”

“He trusts you with his orchids?” I said. “You must be some kind of a hypnotist. No one touches those orchids. They’re like the children he never had.”

Winter smiled. “I know,” he said. “But those orchids and I are old friends. The Chaplain gave one to my ma when she left St. Oswald’s.” He went on to explain: “Ma was one of the cleaners here. She used to bring me with her, sometimes, when I was a little boy.”

I looked at him more closely. Brown hair; blue eyes. Late thirties, at a guess. A face that could easily pass unseen, and yet he’d looked oddly familiar. Given he lives in White City, I’d thought that maybe I had seen him around. But if he’d come here as a boy, thirty years ago, give or take—

I said: “I do remember you. You’re Gloria’s boy.”

“That’s right,” he said.

Gloria Winter, she must have been. I remember her rather well. In those days, the cleaners were all women, and we called them by their Christian names—not from any sense of superiority, but simply because it gave us the illusion of female companionship.

I told you I remember distant events far more clearly than recent ones: I reached into my pocket for my licorice allsorts, having forgotten that I’d slipped them into my desk drawer; and yet her face came back to me with remarkable clarity. A rather attractive woman, if a little hard-featured, with crow-black hair and those Spanish eyes. And now I think I remember him too, a solemn boy of seven or eight, who would sit and watch from the stairs while his mother walked the polishing machine up and down the parquet floors of the Middle Corridor.

He looked at me now—with amusement, I thought, perhaps remembering Straitley as was, in the days of my empire.

“How is Gloria?” I said.

“Oh, Ma died a long time ago.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said.

He shrugged and emptied the wastebasket into a black bin-liner. “You never think it’ll happen,” he said. “You think they’ll live forever.”

I nodded. He was right, of course. I’d learned the same lesson when I was his age. I remembered my own parents, side by side in the Meadowbank home, like the world’s oldest pair of Babes in the Wood. I said: “Certain people seem to project something of immortality.”

He looked surprised at that. He said: “Yes, that’s right. Exactly right.”