I turned away from the Thunderbird and hailed a taxi. It wasn’t as simple as all that; in the first place, I didn’t want the Thunderbird. I wouldn’t have refused one, just as I wouldn’t have refused a vicuna overcoat; but I had stopped wanting things. I wanted power, power to put through my own ideas; I wanted to be taken seriously, I wanted to be something more than the boss’s son-in-law.

I leaned back for safety and comfort as the notice told me: taxis remained a great pleasure, I didn’t want to undervalue the things which came along with four thousand a year and an ex­pense account. The power would come; Brown couldn’t live for ever. Or with luck he might have a stroke; he was exactly the right build and age and temperament. And I was the father of the Crown Prince. I would have to get to know him better, we’d have to become chums, real chums. Because if we didn’t, one of these days Daddy might be pushed out in the cold. It had hap­pened before in family businesses; my position wasn’t unique.

The pain under my breastbone returned; this time it was so sharp that I bit my hand to stop myself from crying out. The sweat was running into my eyes, but I didn’t dare to wipe it away: the pain held me rigid, my hand in my mouth like a baby. It had gone by the time we reached Kensington High Street; but I still sat stiffly, my right hand to my mouth, my left arm pressed against my side as if to hold back its return. It didn’t return; instead I kept thinking about Harry’s model railway layout. He’d finished it – as much as one ever finished a model railway – last year, just before he’d gone away to boarding-school; it lived on two trestle-tables in the loft. It was a mixed sort of railway, mostly Triang Transcontinental stock, running from Warley to Zurich. It was open country all the way from Warley to Zurich; there were three windmills and two churches in the middle of the fields, but that was the only sign of human life. And on the road which ran parallel to the main line there was a steam lorry, a traction engine, and a steam-roller. There were cattle browsing beside the bright blue river; and, in the shadow of what I took to be Zurich Cathedral, a shepherd and a flock of sheep. But besides them he’d put an elephant and a leopard.

That was on the first night of the Easter holidays when we’d gone to the loft and switched the lights off; as the big silver Diesel came out of the tunnel its headlights had illumined the cathedral and the sheep only. The elephant and the leopard were vague shapes in the background. He dropped the mail at Zurich, a tiny Zurich full of British soldiers, and there the headlight picked up the elephant and the leopard.