Julian rode out with Uri for three days, spending one night at a Bedouin encampment, the second in an authentic Sioux tepee in the mountains and the last lying in a sleeping bag out on a hillside under the beckoning stars near Tiberias. And then he stayed on for a few weeks as an unpaid helper. He wasn’t used to western saddles, but he quickly got the hang of them. The clients were mostly tourists. He saddled their horses, helped the riders adjust their stirrup leathers and gave them advice if they asked. He sometimes accompanied them on day rides. He bought a pair of chaps. In this way he explored the land of his ancestors from on top of a horse. Uri Peley never asked what he was doing here on his own; Peley had adopted a minimalist cowboy personality. They mostly talked horses and Julian found these conversations absorbing and calming. There have always been horses in human lives: they have a gentle, innocent quality.

Julian spoke to Kim every day. The children are already losing their British accents. Once she asked him, Are you exploring your roots? And he said, In a way, but even that was not strictly true. In Jerusalem he had visited the holy sites. He was not moved by the overexcited religions themselves, so much as by the inescapable realisation that no one on this earth can cope with their own mortality. For two thousand years Jerusalem has been the world capital of yearning, a yearning for something other. This yearning is an essential quality of being human, and it was that which moved him, although the quest is doomed.

During the parliamentary enquiry and the FSA’s questioning, he had weighed the idea of killing himself. But he had done it theoretically, without any real intent. Also, he remembered that when his mother had killed herself he and Simon were utterly bereft. At first they were told that she had died of an illness in hospital, but other children knew the truth and it soon came out. A blanket of shame covered them, as if they had been responsible. He and Simon had never been able to discuss it. They had felt betrayed and utterly abandoned. In London after the memorial service, at which he read his loopy poem and a whimsical travel piece, Simon told Julian for the first time that their mother’s suicide had produced in him a sense of loneliness which had never left him. He had come to hate their father. And perhaps that is why Julian is travelling and living among strangers, to get over his loneliness and shame.