He had gone to London because he’d fallen in love with a lady ventriloquist on board the ship. If he could have smuggled himself off in her trunks he would have, but she already had a man packed away. A toy man: his name was Willie Shavers. She also had a parrot, a little girl with braids, and a yellow cat. It was the parrot she was famous for: the parrot’s name was Squawkanna, and with Lottie—Lottie was the woman, Lottie Stanley—she’d had a hit song, though that had been ten years before, in the mid-1970s. Famous for a summer. If you heard her name and were English, you’d say, Who? and if you heard the song you’d say, Oh, right. You might wince. It wasn’t a good song. On board the QE2, Lenny had watched Lottie’s act every single night. She was plump in her sequined gowns, and wore her blond hair in an old-fashioned hairdo, with lots of hair spray and a series of paste tiaras. She’d given him her calling card with a flourish, amused by his attention, and now here he was, ringing her bell at the address in Ladbroke Grove, being shown in by the doorman and sent down the hallway to her ground-floor flat.

The hairdo had been a wig, the glamorous face largely makeup, the cheekbones trompe l’oeil. But she was there, like a developing photograph, younger than he’d thought, plusher. She might have been the age of his oldest sister, Eloise, who was thirty-two.

“Huh,” she said, when she saw him. “You don’t belong here.”

“I do,” he said. Then, “I want to learn how to be a ventriloquist.”

She frowned at him. “Good afternoon.” Her voice was different on its own, singsongier.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Could you teach me?”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Don’t tell me how old you are.”

“I’m sixteen,” he said, knowing he didn’t look it. His body hadn’t changed yet, but his soul had: this year he had developed delusions of grandeur and a morbid nature and a willingness to die for love; next year, pubic hair and broad shoulders.

“Christ,” she said. “Come in.”

Her furniture looked serious, antique: she was a grown-up. The sofa was red velvet. He could feel the wood at its heart, as though, if she manipulated it, she could give it a voice and a personality. He thought she was a very good ventriloquist, though he didn’t know much about what that entailed. She regarded her puppets with indifference, as though their energy tired her; he’d stared at her mouth, waiting to see her lips move. Eventually they would, a little, gleamingly, like a thin necklace you weren’t sure a girl was wearing: you looked for it to appear for the pleasure of having it disappear just afterward.

“I’m not too young,” he said.