Harold doesn’t even glance at the paper. Instead he reads into his wool as if it is helping him understand me. “Of course.”

“You understand that I’m actually…in truth, I mean in very essence, I’m James Wolfe?”

“I do. I understand it very well.”

“And not just…a nobody.”

“Of course not.”

“Every schoolboy in Quebec learned all about Wolfe when we were small. But none of the other schoolboys responded the way I did…”

“They were very likely firing chewed paper pellets at each other.”

“For me it was, Get lost, you fuckin’ fag! Ai, moron! Enlève-toi d’icitte!”

“A lot of us well know that scene.”

“I was nobody and nothing. Un bébé lala!”

Harold lays his knitting in his lap and gazes toward the shelved tins of Habitant pea soup and ragoût de boulettes and the Vienna sausages that have not come from Vienna.

The cook in the corner kitchen in his paper hat tosses a fryer-basket full of frites so crisp they rustle throughout the dim shop. From nails hammered down the side of a shelf dangle packaged rubber gloves, bathing caps and fly swatters. One high shelf holds a concentration of things I find incredibly useful and can never seem to get my hands on when the need strikes: WD-40, duct tape, steel wool, glue. I’m tempted to get up and have a closer look, but Harold says, “You became Wolfe as a way of honouring the parts of yourself no one else saw…and…it’s not as if the real Wolfe minded…he was waiting to be found.”

“For a very long time!”

“Found, known, loved. Understood…and from what you’ve told me—from everything I’ve heard you say when you speak from his position—Wolfe longs to stop being such a high-profile figure. He wants to see how it feels to be…well…to be you. Someone unknown. Unheralded. It’s in—what’s the poem you said he carried everywhere?

“Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ ”

“He longed to be a nobody just as you longed to be a somebody. It’s a hilarious piece of justice, really, because in the end…” Harold counts his stitches and lays his incomplete circle on the counter and smooths its bumps.

I finish his thought. “I used to be so envious of him…I used to imagine James Wolfe had more control over war than I did….”

“But your ranks differ no more than markings on that deck of cards over there on the counter: who is the joker and who the king?”

“As Jimmy Blanchard I certainly didn’t have the power to reward men under me with extra pay or a word of praise, because there were no men under me. Hell, I wasn’t even Jimmy Blanchard—I had no way of knowing who I was, and still don’t.”