I turned to greet him and bumped into the girl’s older sister, who had followed us from the river. I helped to pick up her bucket and spade that I had knocked onto the grass, but by the time we had exchanged apologies the young man had returned to his car. He locked the canvas hood, avoiding my eyes as he stepped into the driver’s seat. I guessed that he had seen me following the children, too old to be a parent and too young to be a grandfather, and suspected that I might have some illicit interest in them.

I watched him drive away, exhaust roaring as he swerved past the war memorial and the crowded lunch-hour pubs. When he had gone I felt that I had narrowly missed meeting myself.

*   *   *

This sense of an imminent rendezvous somewhere in Shepperton had been growing within me during the six months since Dick Sutherland’s death. I woke each morning, looking forward to the day’s work, buoyed by the warm spring light and by a mysterious elation that had overtaken me. I had expected to be depressed by Dick’s death, an ordeal made all the more harrowing by the uncompleted documentary, but I felt an immense sense of release. The air outside the crematorium was so bright and pungent that I scandalised Cleo Churchill by searching the chimneys for any signs of burnt flesh.

The non-denominational service, with its recorded organ voluntary and mock-solemn trappings, had resembled the rites of a new religion still in its development stages, an effect only stressed by the large contingent of television producers who were present. Behind their heavy shades, forever dreaming of twelve-part series, they perhaps saw Dick as a mana-personality for the age of global TV. We were attending the funeral of someone who, with the shrewdest foresight, had already interred himself within the film archives of the BBC.

I had taken care to grieve for Dick while he was still alive, aware that repeats of his old programmes would soon be returning to our screens. Much as I disliked the documentary film in which we had taken part, I was grateful to Dick for choosing me as his interviewer. By demystifying his own death he had freed me from any fears of my own. For the first time since the birth of my children I felt that I was wholly done with the past and free to construct a new world from the materials of the present and future.