Who can say what Harry saw? What I can tell you is that he sounded very low. He took failure personally. And he had a shrewd idea that I was not going to consider the eight-year-old Tommy any more of a success than the one of sixteen. But he gave it a half-hearted try. ‘Tommy,’ he asked, ‘what’s your second name?’

‘AAAAAH,’ said Tommy in my voice.

‘As I thought,’ said Harry Vilbert, and he woke me up, needing a break to roll a cigarette himself.

A half an hour later – I’d taken the opportunity to go to the bathroom and plunge my head in cold water – I was back in the chair. It was Harry’s idea to go forward in time, say seventy years, to see if Tommy had attained to the indifference and serenity of old age.

‘Thomas, you are no longer young. It is the twentieth century. There has been a great war over Europe. Many things have changed. There are motor cars now and telephones. Do you recognize any of this, Thomas? Are you there? Do you hear me? Are you alive, Thomas?’

I must confess that I was very taken with Harry’s quick sketch of the march of history, and if I could have called myself my own I would have applauded it. But already someone else was listening with my ears and speaking with my lips. Someone I didn’t much care for, either, and who was at the same time vaguely and unpleasantly familiar. I’m not saying that I had been here, in this guise, once before – I wasn’t having a bar of any of that spook stuff, even while it was happening – but something was dawning on me, some dim sensation of repetition, as if I was half way through a movie which I’d only just realised I’d already seen.

‘Do you hear me, Thomas?’ Harry Vilbert was droning on. ‘Are you there?’

‘Yes, of course I’m here,’ it was time for me to say. ‘There is no need for you to shout.’

‘I’m sorry, Thomas, I wasn’t certain you’d be there.’

‘Where else am I going to be? You’re as bad as Florence.’

‘Who is Florence?’ Harry Vilbert wasn’t going to make the mistake of asking where she was, in case the answer turned out to be: Outside, swinging.

‘Who, indeed! I can tell you she is not the Florence she was meant to be, or might have been but for another of God Almighty’s mighty blunders.’

Poor Harry! He must have felt he had wandered into a minefield. But he went very cautiously. ‘Is she your daughter?’ he asked, giving the Almighty’s blunder a wide berth.

‘Daughter? There have been no daughters for me. Florence is my wife.’

‘Have you been married long, Thomas?’

‘Married? I have been married all my life! When haven’t I been married?’

‘So Florence is your childhood sweetheart?’

‘She? No. The childhood sweethearts have all gone. Long gone. Florence is … was … a girl. Florence came later. She makes for continuity.’