‘Man was not meant to be tugged around the continent like a toy, by a monstrous teakettle on wheels. It isn’t natural.’

Collis had an unnerving experience on Second Avenue one afternoon when he glimpsed a woman who looked just like Hannah. He called the cab driver to stop, and jostled his way through the crowds for two blocks before he saw the woman standing on the corner of Stuyvesant Square, about to cross the street. She was blonde, and there was something about the uptilt of her nose that reminded him of Hannah, but that was all. He walked back to his cab with embarrassment and bottled-up grief. Hannah was dead, he told himself. And even if she weren’t, she wouldn’t be here in New York. Not unless her spirit was trying to make contact with him through another woman. But that was insane. At least he hoped it was.

The most disturbing moment of all, however, was when he saw his mother. He had just spent a vexing lunch hour with A. G. Harriman, of the Harriman Investment Trust. They had eaten an impossibly heavy meal at the Collamore Hotel at Broadway and Spring Street — a bowl of thick pea soup, followed by salted cod in brandy and hot meat pie — and even after cakes and brandy they were still no nearer reaching an agreement on how much Harriman’s should invest in the Sierra Pacific. So they shook hands on the steps outside the hotel, and agreed to meet in two days’ time, and as they did so Collis saw his mother walk obliviously through the hotel lobby on the arm of a strange man.

His first reaction was to step forward and greet her. But then he took hold of A. G. Harriman’s pudgy hand and forcibly pulled him around, like an overweight ballet dancer, so that the banker’s bulk would obstruct his mother’s view.

‘What the devil are you doing?’ demanded Harriman.

Collis touched his finger to his lips and said, ‘Sshh.’

His mother was sweeping along more self-importantly than ever, and even if Collis had walked straight up to her and taken her hand she probably would have needed reminding who he was. Her attention was quite obviously all on herself, and on her flamingo-pink dress with matching cape, which made her look florid and fussy and strangely masculine, like a man dressed up as a woman.

The man beside her was bulky and tall, with shaggy muttonchop whiskers in a vivid shade of Myron Parker’s Hair Dye (‘any colour from brown to jet black’). He wore a grey morning coat and carried himself with great pomposity. As they reached the sidewalk, he raised his cane, and a private brougham drew up beside them, decorated in a particularly offensive maroon livery. Collis kept hold of A. G. Harriman’s hand and watched his mother over the banker’s shoulder as she was assisted into the carriage (smiling and nodding and smiling and nodding in the manner which she had always thought was the height of gentility), and as the bulky man climbed in after her. He was so bulky, in fact, that the carriage displayed a distinct list to starboard as it was driven away.