He was on the wrong platform, so he walked down the subway and back to number five. There, he found another bench which looked across the divide to the one he’d just left. He wasn’t on it any more, of course: he’d moved, so he couldn’t see himself. As for young Michael, he’d be home by now, unless he’d stopped off at James’s house. Some afternoons they did their homework together, working through the Latin, and the science and all that French vocab he’d forgotten.

He smiled.

The apple-juice carton looked so innocuous. The glass he had brought was opaque. The whisky was warm. And it came from a tiny Scottish town, and he knew that because he had visited the distillery with Amy, to whom he would now be married if he hadn’t written that dreadful letter. What he wanted to remember, though, was his Highlands holiday, and how he’d hoped she’d let him do that particular tour on his own, because he knew she wasn’t interested in whisky. Why had she insisted on coming with him? Hadn’t she realised she was spoiling it?

‘It was nice,’ she said afterwards. ‘Such a con, though. All they want to do is sell you stuff.’

He’d laughed, because he’d bought two bottles and a box of Tomatin liqueur chocolates.

‘Of course they do,’ he said.

Secretly, he’d wondered what she expected. It was the distillery’s business, after all, and it would have been strange if they’d suddenly started giving their whisky away. ‘You’ve taken the trouble to visit us, sir. Have it for free.’

‘Such a con, though, Michael. All they want to do is sell you stuff.’

‘I know.’

‘And it’s not cheap, is it?’

But it was, for all that time and skill.

He had wanted to understand the distilling process, because he had such gaps in his knowledge. He didn’t know what malt was. He didn’t know why spring water mattered, and he hadn’t even known what a bonded warehouse was for, because he’d never thought about it. Thousands of barrels of whisky were simply left to sit for ten years, or fifteen years… it shouldn’t have struck him as odd, but it did. Time made the whisky better, so you paid for its age.

He sipped the liquor and tried to taste the oak. The oak soaked into the spirit, and nobody had come up with a way of faking that process. A woman called Vicky had shown them round, and there was someone else on the tour – a bilingual Scandinavian – who seemed to know his stuff. He had asked technical questions, but Vicky dealt with them all, succinct and utterly in charge – the Scandinavian man had ended up looking rather foolish.

Amy had said, ‘Boring twat,’ under her breath.

Boring twat.