Zeno had been married for years before he realised the extent to which fear played a role in his wife’s life. The abandon which she expressed sexually was in no way reflected in her daily life; she feared almost everything new. It was some time before she would venture out of the Victoria Road house without her mother or sister with her; and even now she preferred to go shopping with Zen in tow. Zeno found this frustrating socially, but he trod warily around the long toenails of his wife’s phobia, for he had experienced great fears himself, fears that had kept him a virtual prisoner in Britain. Not only did he have a fear of flying, but he also had a severe aversion to heights. This was to change in part some years after his daughter was born when, to his wife’s astonishment, he announced his intention of going to India.

He was gone for a month. His mother-in-law—something of a wag—said the flight out must have been so terrifying that he was too frightened to come back. When he did come home, his fear of heights had not actually subsided (which Prudence was secretly pleased about), but something had changed. And although she thought about it a lot at the beginning, this change gradually became another of those things about her husband that she pushed to one side of her mind. She simply continued loving him in the little ways that she understood: making the dishes of his ever-changing diet tasty, always hanging his shirts on the line in the garden (even though he had provided her with a German tumble-dryer) whenever there was a little sun in the sky.

“Went to see a man about a dog,” was all he offered her by way of explanation after his Eastern odyssey.

The room in the attic that Zeno had allocated himself upon his return from India had been put together haphazardly—something he fully intended to remedy someday, but never got around to. In fact, he grew to like the chaos. No one was invited to the room, and its disorder came to represent a part of himself that he had rarely acknowledged. Over the years, the various effects, souvenirs, and odds and ends that had touched him found their way to the top floor, and a random order had established itself. In a Victorian chest with a brass name-plate he kept the outfits he had worn for his nights on the road, some too fragile to be worn regularly. One old silk shirt which he had not used in a very long time suited his mood. Putting it on, he recalled the day that lilac shirt had caught his eye. He and Kenny Wisdom had been strolling past Hung On You.

Kenny had been his first real friend after fame had swept him up and away; Kenny the teenage cat-burglar, an erstwhile member of Brooklyn’s Aces Wild, and a reformed teenage junkie who became the founder of the Diggers. When Kenny began supplying free food to the poor of San Francisco, he became acknowledged as the Robin Hood of his time. It was the heroin—or ‘Joan of Arc’ as he called it—that did for him in the end. One temptation too many: overdosed on the subway to Brooklyn. A Sunday, when the Methadone Center was closed.