“Probably not.”

“-so I wonder if she mightn’t have answered a Personal in the Times. Had you thought of that?”

“No.” I straightened up. “I should have thought of that myself. We would want the issues for the first two weeks in August. I suppose the newspaper offices have them on file, or is there a library that-”

“Courtney,” Julia said.

“Why, of course,” Nigel said. “Courtney Bede.” He turned to me. “There’s an old fellow who keeps every issue of the Times. And all the other papers as well. He’s what you would call a character. Quite daft, actually, but not a bad sort. Do you want to go round there?”

The English have certain words that are better than ours. Daft is one of them. Such American alternatives as flaky don’t quite do the job.

Courtney Bede was daft. He was a short, round man who might have been anywhere from fifty to ninety – it was quite impossible to tell. He performed some backstage function in the theater and lived alone in a basement apartment in Lambeth not far from the Old Vic. There, in four sizable rooms, he existed as a rather orderly version of the Collier brothers.

He saved things. He saved string, and empty bottles, and bits of metal, and theater programs, and keys that didn’t fit anything, and all of the items that most people throw out. His collections, which he showed me with more pride than I thought justified, did not really thrill me as much as he felt they should. But he did have newspapers, all right. Ten years’ worth of all of the London papers, stacked neatly in piles by date.

“And not one of ’em cost me a ha’penny,” he said, poking out his stomach for emphasis. “ London ’s full of fools and spendthrifts, lad. Men and women what’ll pay sixpence for a paper and throw it away after a single reading. I get all me papers every day, and not one of ’em that costs me a ha’penny.”

“And you read all the papers yourself?”