“Get chapter and verse, Lem,” he allowed himself to urge.

“Trust me!” said Lemaitre, with almost cocky confidence. “Like me to come along and report, in the morning?”

“Check with me first,” Gideon told him. “I’d like to see you but there may be too many briefings. Call about ten o’clock.”

“Right. Oh, by the way, George — what day was summer last year?”

Gideon put down the receiver, pretending not to hear. He felt a flash of exasperation; that kind of facetious humour was Lemaitre’s speciality and, in the right mood, it could be funny, but Gideon wasn’t in the right mood. He had just been glowing at the thought of London’s loveliness; just been recalling the glorious summers of his boyhood. He smiled wryly to himself. Did one always remember the good and forget the bad, in one’s past?

The question answered itself even as he asked it, bringing to mind in successive flashbacks two schoolday incidents. One, an occasion when he had been caned and humiliated for writing ‘dirty’ words on a wash-room door — and two of the words he had never even heard of! He had been absolutely guilt-free. The boy who had been guilty had let him suffer the punishment; and afterwards, in the playground, he had jeered: “Bloody fool, that’s what you are! If you knew it was me, why the hell didn’t you say so?”

To this day, in such a mood as he was now, the old injustice still had the power to hurt; well, perhaps not really hurt, but certainly it still brought a feeling of heavy-hearted-ness, a sense of dismay at the existence of unrightable wrongs.

The other memory, something quite different, was of the one and only time he had been selected to play for the school First Eleven — and the cricket match had been rained off. He had never forgotten how unutterably miserable he had been. Such things had at least enabled him to share the hurts and disappointments and frustrations of his children, but he could still feel some of that old, aching awareness that he had been robbed of a chance which had never come again.