And that’s it. All of it so far. My story, all nineteen years long. Took longer to live than to remember. What would you make of it, Archie Charlie? How would it grab you, hey? Put a curl in your unruffled donnish hair? Open a little wider your backward-looking eyes? I wonder. Rummaging about in your attic full of yesterdays: secondhand yesterdays at that. If I told you you’d probably smile politely and push the decanter across the table. ‘Do have another drink. The night is so young …’ You wouldn’t believe it, or pretend you hadn’t heard, or it didn’t happen, like your wife’s little ‘slip’ this afternoon. The silence of discretion, good manners, incomprehension. Breeding. That it? I mean, look at it this way, if Decca had tossed herself off the rocks with her pockets full of boulders they’d have called the Daily Mirror long before the ruddy doctor. Front page, two columns; ‘happy snap’, too. Great ‘space’. Something you wouldn’t understand in a life as serene and still as a summer pond: perhaps you’re scared of pushing in a stick and stirring up the mud. Is that it? I’ll never know anyhow.

Did you love that funny woman I hauled out of the sea today? Did she ever love you? Did you touch? Kiss? Lie together under those pines, in this great echoing house; were you ever young once? I can’t imagine it. Like the Queen going to the lavatory. Mind-blowing. Impossible. I suppose it was passionless love twice a year and then back to your history books; no wonder she went shrimping. Without the net.

One thing is certain though, it would send a well aimed ball right down the alley to the bowling-pins of your l’Aiglon image. Kerplonk! Rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble, ting, tang, tong, tung! Kerrasssh! Exploded! All fall down. I may look a bit like him, I’ll give you that, but that’s where it ends. And I’ll bet he never fell in love with a German tart in a rabbit-skin jacket who couldn’t cook. I know what she’ll say. He said the word aloud to savour the sound.

‘Fantastic!’

Chapter Three