“He had a wool hat on, though it was the middle of summer, and he was hunched over but he had bright blue quick eyes, and he wagged his finger at me to c’mere. I tried to get George to come over with me but he wouldn’t.

“ ‘Would you like to know three things,’ the man asked me, ‘that will let you have the life you really want?’

“ ‘Yes please.’

“ ‘Good! You’re a good boy. Well, the first thing is, you have to set a goal, and you have to make a little change every day towards it—that’s called increments—you make an incremental change and you do it every day. Have you got that?’

“ ‘I think so.’

“ ‘The second thing is, if you had one pound and you doubled it the next day, and you doubled the amount you had every day from then on, how long would it take before you have a million pounds?’

“ ‘I don’t know.’ ”

“Damn right you don’t know,” interrupts Sophie.

“I can’t remember exactly how many days the man said. He mentioned the number twenty-one. But I can’t remember if he meant it would take twenty-one days of doubling to reach a million, or if the twenty-one days were the amount of days things remained slow but after which a stupendous increase exploded the numbers. I’ve never sat down to work it out.”

“I know you haven’t,” Sophie says. “You never work anything out concerning money. Even the miserable lump sum Madame Blanchard shamed the Department of Veterans Affairs into sending you a couple of years ago, what did you do? Hey? Blew it on another useless—”

“It was exactly enough to revisit my birthplace, Westerham—I had to go!”

“Wolfe’s birthplace. Not yours. You don’t know where you were born, that’s—”

“ ‘I tell you this about the pounds,’ the blue man said, ‘in case you’re afraid of money. You should never be frightened of coin. It is the foundation of everything men do. Everyone wants it, and nobody talks about it. It isn’t just people who hide the fact that they want it—countries tell all kinds of stories to pretend they want magic jewels and magic kingdoms and palaces full of genies and spellbinding belly-dancers and even fairies and fish with scales made of silver and gold, but what the countries want is the same as what all the people want, which is money, and you mustn’t be afraid of it or you’ll miss the boat.’ ”

“Exactly!” Sophie cries. “Bring me that fucking blue man now. Where the hell have you left him?”

“Then he said, ‘It’s money that everything else comes from: Love, far-off enchanted lands, and all the things I’ve just mentioned, even God. You know how pretty church windows are, with all their lovely coloured glass?’