Before sleep he removed all his books from the bookcase and laid them in piles on the floor next to his bed. (It was difficult, the next day, to remember why he went through with such an exercise.) From this into unconsciousness and then Asquith woke up, without his painful body registering the rest. He had little recollection of getting home—just flashes of still images—or what happened afterwards, but this information was of little interest to him; that he’d somehow found his way back and into bed was enough. The toilet incident was like a fall from a horse. ‘Everyone should fall from their horse now and then,’ Asquith said to himself in the bath. Every day a little fall. More people, he thought, should go through what I am going through.

When crossing the road on his way to pick up the morning newspapers, he averted his eyes, because to look directly at his best clothes covered with shit in the gutter might have been enough to make him scream. Pollen floated around him like supernatural molecules.

At the newsagent, Asquith bought several suburban papers: he no longer read the Herald, but didn’t intend to give up his habit of reading all news just because he had been exposed as a fraud.

An exhausted Asquith returned to his flat and sat in the front room, next to a five-tier whatnot displaying clapsticks on the top shelf and porcelain frivolities below. Vents laced the ceilings. Fruit flies came through the window. In the tabloid The Truth, which he considered grotty but essential, he came across an article about a three-pound fine imposed on Mr Stratis Simos, ‘owner of a dago eating house’, for not having kept clean a soda fountain. Asquith did not approve of the bigoted language, nor steep fines for restaurant drink fountains when the city’s pubs were in a deplorable state. Sydney would be dead without cafes. The article prompted him to think of a woman he met during the war, Valia Asproyerakas. He was unsure whether Asproyerakas meant ‘white hawk’ or ‘white old man’.

Maybe Valia knew what had happened to the Benny Goodman imposter, he thought. Maybe the fake Benny Goodman had been ruined too. That would only be fair.

5.

The forename ‘Ian’ came from Asquith’s one-armed grandfather, whose portrait hung prominently in the family’s Buckinghamshire house, a property he’d bought in retirement. Grandfather Ian was a vast man with a long, jagged beard that not one descendent replicated; he was a soldier before he became a stockbroker for a London firm, selling consols to Austrians and Frenchmen. Asquith’s own father was involved in consols, and, before the revolution, in the trade of Russian Three Per Cents. Since the year dot Asquith had zero interest in the stock exchange.