“Where are you, Wilf, where are you? Hold on! Don’t go!”

“I won’t.”

“But you’ve done it so often and then just hung up!”

“Don’t be wet!”

“Where are you then?”

“Let’s just say I’m on a motor road.”

“Yurp or the States?”

“A motor road. Now listen, Rick old friend. I want to see you.”

“Well, surely, surely! God! It is really you?”

“I’m going to meet you in a place we both know.”

“Any place, Wilf! My God!”

“That hotel in the Weisswald.”

Then there was a long, long silence. Even the girl at the till thought I’d finished and looked up. I wondered if I’d spoiled things.

“I’m waiting, Rick.”

“Well, I know, Wilf.”

I decided it was time to sprinkle a little bait.

“I’ve been thinking about the biography, Rick.”

“Oh my God, Wilf, it’s like being—like being saved by the bell. My God! He gave me seven years and—”

“I’ll be there Thursday. Get your Mr Halliday to buy you the ticket right now.

“Hell, the Weisswald isn’t far. I can make it without.”

“How’s it with Mary Lou, Rick?”

There was a pause. My mind’s eye saw his chin sink back. Not a good phoner, our Rick. His voice came over low and defensive.

“They have a beautiful relationship, Wilf.”

“Like us.”

There was a period of white sound. I carried on.

“I’ll be there on Thursday. Don’t turn up till Saturday. I want to live myself in. Acclimate.”

I hung up. I’m not like Rick, I find it easy to be firm on the phone—easier than face to face. It’s as if my faceless voice is a different person I can use the way some people use a solicitor to say their dirty work for them. So on I drove with the tight wire in my chest and on and on. I spent a night, I remember, in that colossal motel wherever it is, then over the mountains and far away to the dear old Weisswald. I didn’t seem to mind the rack railway so much this time, it was odd. I was welcomed to the hotel not by Herr Adolf Kaufmann whose recommendation is included somewhere in this opus but by his nephew, an entirely different Adolf Kaufmann, who having consulted the hotel filing system greeted me as an old friend and gave me the familiar suite with a bottle of Dôle already opened on the table. And they say that values are not what they were! It was odd to find the manager so much younger though. The fat woman had died and the décor of the bar was changed, that was all. It sent me to the bathroom mirror to look at myself and, my God, I saw myself for the first time in years and years. If you don’t change your hairstyle because it’s mostly fallen out and you don’t shave, you’ve no cause to go chasing yourself in a mirror. Yes, time had done some engraving over most of what was visible and I reminded myself to go back to washing regularly. I made a clever deduction from this and had a shower at once. My bag didn’t seem to have any underclothes in it so I sent out for some which arrived promptly.