I moved from a place where I mattered, but in the wrong style, to a place where I didn’t matter at all. Whether this was better I found hard to say at first. But I knew then that people don’t come to an unfamiliar city just to get away from their old homes, but also to escape their old selves.

Everything about London was strange: the hustling crowds that seethed out from the mouths of Tube stations; the double-decker buses that reeled drunkenly around the crammed streets; the truncated way that people spoke, their words chopped in mid-air by some invisible knife that cut ‘a’s down to a sliver, and whittled off their ‘r’s and ‘t’s altogether.

I was rich in nothing but vowel sounds, and even they were a bloody hindrance. Hardly anyone here seemed able to understand me. I could see their faces ruffling with confusion when I spoke, like the sea beneath an angry wind.

Murdie’s cousin, Mr Norman Wharton, owned a tall house in Hackney. This he shared with his wife, Mrs Nellie Wharton. Their two sons had long since gone: one to join the navy, and the other to run an import–export business in Southampton. The Whartons had bought a boxer dog to fill the space in their affections left by their departed children. It was a wheezing, slobbering, bow-legged lump called Rollo, now advanced in years.

Whatever core of independent character Rollo once possessed had long decayed beneath the weight of the Whartons’ indulgence. He slavered by the dinner table, where he lingered in hope of falling bits of meat, growling if his greasy manna was too slow in descending.

In the evenings he staggered in and prostrated himself before the electric fire, sometimes letting loose a rogue fart or a dreaming squeak. Rollo had hated me from the very beginning. The day I arrived, dragging my suitcases through the front door, he stood snarling at the bottom of the stairs, his jowly little mask contorted with rage.

Ever since, he had conducted himself with cussed obedience when the Whartons were there, but the moment he and I were alone in the house his behaviour changed. When he was awake he stationed himself at doors, nipping at my trouser leg when I tried to pass by.

I had, in revenge, invented a game called ‘Baiting Rollo’ which I played on the rare occasions when the Whartons went out and left me to have dinner alone. The kitchen, where the Whartons usually ate, was separated from the hall by a glass-panelled door. Sometimes I was able to make it into the kitchen before Rollo noticed.