I didn’t ask about the hospital – some sort of surgery, I gathered – but his mention of it put the fear of God into me. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ I said. ‘I think I can be in Washington this very evening, maybe eight, maybe ten o’clock your time. Can you pick me up?’ Within hours, I was aloft over that frozen wasteland. The airlines are superb with wheelchair cases like me, especially when you excite them with the thought of some miraculous new medical treatment. A pity Atlas had none to offer me.

We’d always been close, Atlas and I, despite the separation two continents enforce on two lousy letter writers. When I was small he used to say I was ‘astute’. It was his warmth I liked. He met me at the airport in one of those huge, soft, American cars that drive as though they were negotiating bowls of Jell-o. It was late, dark by the time I got through passport control; on the ride to his house – mile upon mile of the stippled two-stripe that makes up highways at night, red tail-lights on one side, white headlights on the other, a pretty sight – on that ride, we decided to spend a day taping and the next day looking at Hannaville, my grandfather’s town, which was a hundred miles upstate from Atlas’s house.

It seemed a hard schedule for somebody who was pushing eighty, as Atlas was, especially somebody preparing to be carved up in a few days, but what choice was there? Besides, he was still hale, solid, hairy, still big enough and strong enough to lift me in and out of the car all on his own, and still practicing medicine. He’d been various kinds of doctor in his life, usually with a whiff of the shady about it: Medical Director to the Tobacco Research Institute in New York, for example. In his dotage he’d manipulated himself into the post of geriatrician to one of those American old age ghettos, all coarse grass and motel architecture, no dogs, no children, this one run by somebody who had the impudence to call himself Dr Youngblood. On the bedside table in the room where I slept – arrangements for the old serve me very well – lay a magazine called Senior Society: on the cover, a piece of elderly cheesecake showing off pulpy thighs and hoisted bosom in a one-piece suit from years ago.

I’d never met Atlas’s present wife. She was a fiercely efficient woman, not as old as Atlas but not so far from it, either. Atlas introduced us over cornflakes.

‘This is Claire,’ he said to me.

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to greet you last night,’ Claire said, fetching milk from the refrigerator. She had one of those faces that are purely American. Even at whatever ancient age she’d reached (and plainly she’d been around quite a while), there was nothing in the skin, nothing in the eyes, nothing around the mouth to betray a single thought or a single experience; all was as hygienic as an unwrapped roll of toilet paper, no hint whatever that anybody had ever lived there: a safe house rather than a face. ‘I’ve got such a heavy day ahead of me. Did he tell you?’