Both his parents were resting in peace, but before his mother had died, Zeno had finally persuaded her to tell him how he came to have his unusual name. As long as he could remember—which was quite a long time—his name had made him feel special. “Jenkins, Zeno,” his form master would holler when calling the register, ensuring all his charges were wide awake. And as he was squeezed between “Isaacs, Molly” and “Jones, Stanley”, it always presented a thrilling start to the day. It was not just unusual in a school filled with Toms, Georges and Alberts, it was unique.

The fact that neither his mother nor his father would divulge the whys and wherefores of their choice of name convinced him that, deep in the annals of the Jenkins or Johnson clan, lay an ancestor—another Zeno—whose name he bore. As a youngster he’d quizzed all four of his grandparents, gazing up into their faces with the sincerest of blue eyes. However, the four elders of little Zeno could not (or would not) recall another Zeno. And in his boy’s mind, this denial gave dark credence to a ‘black sheep’ ancestor: a smuggler, perhaps—a pirate or a horse thief. Yes, probably a horse thief, so disgraced as not to be spoken of.

As Zeno grew, so did his belief in the legend he had created. And in the way that every past is eager to enhance its own tune, so did Zeno boast of this ancestor whose namesake he was. Once set upon the path of exaggeration, however, he found it impossible to retreat; his fancies grew, as did his resolve to unearth the secret.

At primary school, his illustrious relation was ‘Zeno the Transylvanian Horsetrader’, with one leg shorter than the other. Crippled taming a wild horse, he became the wheelwright of his troupe and, because of the great strength of his arms, the fashioner of all the leather tack—which was a lot, as the band was horse-drawn.

The Firemaker was another of his titles: able to raise a fire anywhere, even in the rain. This fiction continued well into secondary school, when necromancy became the fad of the day and ‘Old Blacky’—as he had become—was magically transformed into a great soothsayer.

One afternoon when his grandma met him after school, she was perplexed to find herself surrounded by a gang of children who couldn’t take their eyes off her shawl and gold hoop earrings, unaware that two days earlier she had inherited ‘Old Blacky’s’ powers of secret crystal gazing and the reading of tea-leaves. Zeno was caught unawares but once he found out that she hadn’t actually spoken to any of his classmates, he explained the next day that she spoke only Rom— Romany for ‘the uninformed’.

It was at the height of his fame—he was eighteen, and his record had just entered the Billboard charts with a bullet—that the mystery was finally resolved. Posing, as is often the case, a far greater mystery.

Zeno’s mum, Enid, lived to enjoy her son’s fame, and her fiftieth birthday was celebrated, at Zeno’s instigation, by a luncheon at the Orangery in Holland Park. Enid had a sweet tooth, and on the advice of the wine waiter Zeno ordered for her a split of Château Yquem. His mother, ignorant of its potency, yet approving of its taste, downed the half-bottle as though it were a shandy. The plan was to stroll in the gardens amongst the irises that smelled like prunes, and then put her on a number-nine bus home. She made it as far as the mulberry tree, where she had to sit down. The robust sauterne had loosened her tongue and she confessed the much-speculated-upon secret without so much as a prod.