‘Why do you do it?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you make a soup or something?’

‘It’s a matter of self-discipline,’ she said.

Atlas and I ate the sandwiches in his office. ‘Dad should have been dead,’ Atlas said. ‘There was no reason at all for him to be alive – scares me everytime I think about it.’ He poured whiskey into the milk Claire had brought him. ‘But he was a funny guy. He thought – he really thought he ought to be able to control things people just plain can’t control. Maybe it worked sometimes just because he thought it so hard. Jesus, he wanted that coat. He wanted it as much as he’d wanted to kill George, and nothing was going to get in his way – absolutely nothing – not even death. So he lived. Just like that.’ But he couldn’t even get to his knees. Beyond him, a hundred yards away, lay a tangled mountain of metal and logs that seethed and stank like Sunday dinner at the workhouse. He tried to get up again and managed this time, but only with the help of the stationmaster who had rushed to his side.

‘Let go of me,’ my grandfather said.

He had the money on him. He could hardly walk, but he made his way along the Lenssen boardwalk and found a men’s tailor. There was no frock coat with pearl buttons, but he found one with a silk lining. For two dollars extra, the tailor added a velvet collar. Jonathan took a room in the town’s one hotel, bathed, dressed, shaved and put on the coat.

This is what revelation is all about.

7

Downstairs, he found College leaning up against the bar, and it was only then that he even remembered his friend’s existence, which the crash had rendered as unlikely as his own. He was so stricken, so shocked, by what he’d forgot and what he’d remembered that he could hardly speak; it was such an extraordinary tactical win for George, alive or dead – this buying of a coat instead of remembering a friend – that it overwhelmed everything else. Jonathan received College’s embrace mechanically, tearing at himself for his own mad priorities, but tearing at himself even more so for letting George prevail on such private territory.

‘Well, you are a cold bastard, bound for hell, aren’t you?’ College said. ‘How’d you get out of that mess?’

‘I jumped.’

‘You didn’t! From the cab? What about Hecox?’ The bar was small, dark, tatty, but it was a family hotel – a place where the occasional man might bring his wife – so it lacked the filth and noise of most such places. Jonathan and College were, in fact, the only customers present. The bartender hovered, listening, fascinated; news of the crash dominated the town.

‘Hecox’s dead.’

‘The Scot, too?’

Jonathan nodded.

‘The others?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why aren’t you dead? God, I’m glad you aren’t. But why aren’t you? You didn’t really jump, did you?’