“But I must tell her of the overpasses, the cement pillars, the lots twinkling with cars. How there is nobody walking, or if anyone does walk he’s in mortal danger of getting stuck at a curb until the end of time waiting for the light to change. I often predicted to my mother that our colonies might become tinged with the vices of England, but if ever I had envisioned Costco…”

“You’re coughing again.”

“My lungs are worn purses Dick Turnip might have slashed to ribbons, finding them entirely useless!”

I smash my snails with a rock to steep overnight among bits of willow in my medicine pan.

“Turpin.”

“What?”

“The eighteenth-century highwayman who robbed your neighbours was Dick Turpin, not Turnip. Nobody’s called Turnip. Did you get the bread?”

Sophie has surprising nuggets of knowledge. But I have forgotten the bread! “Sorry.”

“Baking soda?”

“Colgate.”

“For God’s sake. What about the Dumpsters?”

“Covered in disgusting tomato pulp.” In fact, I did not get around to the Dumpsters.

“And Madame Bee? Did you at least make arrangements to see her?”

“I did nothing about Madame Blanchard.”

“I’m asking about her for your sake, not mine.”

“I got distracted.”

“Don’t blame me if you wait too long. She is not getting younger.”

Sophie hauls up our sleeping bag. It’s not really a bag any more, more a tattered blanket. I found it in front of a pizzeria sign whose salami the sun had bleached green.

“I need you not to be on your phone just now.”

“Yeah-yeah.”

“I’m paying you to listen…”

“You haven’t paid me anything yet.”

“I gave you nearly all the money I earned in Westerham.”

“That was two years ago, and you didn’t earn it—that money was the measly bit left over from the government cheque I helped you—”

“Sophie, I need to talk about today….I was thinking on the bus….”

“Hang on!” She’s lit Facebook-blue. This is far from the kind of listening my mother provided, but it’s all I have.

I can’t always recall what happened in combat at Dettingen or in Culloden or at Quebec or anywhere else. Events have become entangled: all my wars now transpire in a single battlefield during one timeless period—darkness cut with spears of flame in whose light any instant of my soldiering might have played out. Sophie is supposed to help me disentangle the years. That has been our arrangement, from our first September to this one.

“Please?”

“Okay, shoot.”

“On the bus today I remembered flames, fire, all the times I made things burn, or made people burn, or when other people burnt things….”

“Forget about what other people burnt.”

“I never burnt anyone on purpose.”

“Okay.”

“Did I? Not directly…”

“You burnt people indirectly?”

“I see them scream and burn—but—I was not barbaric.”

“Weren’t you?”

“The enemy were the barbaric fiends.”

“Which enemy?”