“Valert.”

“Jack,” she said. “Jack Valert. Suits you.”

So he was Jack.

He called his parents six nights later, two in the morning on Lottie’s phone, with the knowledge that it would be cheaper at that hour though possibly still astronomically expensive. He’d never made a long-distance phone call in his life. It was the day before he was due to return.

“How are you?” his mother said. “Shattered, I expect.”

“I’m in London.”

There was a pause. He wondered how much each second would cost. He would have to pay Lottie back.

“Why are you in London?” his mother said at last.

“I’m fine. I’ll come back in time for school.”

“Better had,” said his mother. He could hear his father in the background, and his mother said, her hand over the phone lightly, so he could hear, “It’s fine, it’s Lenny, it’s long-distance.”

He’d been Jack for less than a week but Lenny seemed lives ago. Of course his parents wouldn’t be alarmed. His youngest older sister had been twelve when they’d moved to New York, already boarding at Downe House in Berkshire. He had a faint memory of her as a womanish child or childish woman during school breaks. Fiona and Eloise, too, had gone to boarding school, come to the States for the summers and winter hols, and then graduated and gone on to English lives. Months went by when his parents didn’t see the girls. Only Lenny had been raised as an American, sent by his parents to public school—public in the American sense, less impressive, as everything was, in the American sense—as an experiment or a form of surrender. They regarded him as a sort of hanger-on with a pot-metal accent.

“Come when you’re able,” his mother said to him. “Do let us know your plans.”

Lottie gave him her guest room, a narrow space at the back of the flat, with a window at the foot of the bed and a large dresser with a mirror along one wall. “For practice,” she said. “That’s the only way to learn, practice in the mirror. I can’t teach you. I can give you this book, and you can read it, but you’ll have to put in the hours.”

“Am I really too old?”

“No,” she said. “You’re young yet. You might make it.”

“Were you young?”

“I was, yeah. Ten. My brother had an Archie Andrews figure he’d lost interest in. It’s like a language or an instrument. Easier when you yourself believe in all the mysteries of the universe. But not impossible afterward. Here.” From the top dresser drawer she got out a puppet shaped like a hen, brown with a yellow beak and a drooping red comb.

He put it on his hand. It was tight across the knuckles and abrasive around the wrist.