clear my mind. In August the city emptied out a little — but the drive all the way from Friern Barnet through the tail-end of the rush hour was still gruelling — all those mental patients sitting silently howling in their foam-padded cells. He had locked his own a practitioner’s privilege and, pocketing the keys, escorted its discharged inmate down the avenue that leads to the Observatory, while rolling his head around on his neck, loosening his shoulders and swinging his arms — all of which was what passed for exercise, now that his liaisons with Mimi had been abruptly terminated. Mi-mi! Mi-mi! Mi-miiii . .! The siren of an ambulance whipping across the heath behind him is, he realises, what has called this car crash to mind: It wasn’t only her engagement to the squaddy she had wrenched away from, she was cutting herself free from all bodywork . . At the Observatory, Busner stands, letting his eyeballs shoot down the green slope to the Naval College, volley through the Cutty Sark’s rigging, spin through the tightly packed terraces of Millwall and Cubitt Town — swerving around the pegs of three newish multi-storey council blocks — before cannoning away across Mile End, Hackney, Highbury, Finsbury Park and Crouch End back to whence I came . . In the mid-distance the dust of demolition lies in filthy rags on the broken bones of dead houses in Limehouse and Poplar. He wonders if the Observatory is still in use — did star-struck boffins sit beneath its cloven copper dome firing their eyes at the distant past of other worlds? The city, Busner realises, tires him — already he has no patience with its affectations, its attitudinising, which take on such permanent and concrete forms. He sees Mimi blown thistledown, rising up from the embankment beside the Isle of Dogs foot tunnel, her body gently clapping inside the gleaming bell of her transparent plastic umbrella. She is, he thinks, a child of the future, not a miserably authoritarian nanny of the past, her bare legs reaching out . . It is precisely at this moment that he crosses his own prime meridian and understands: My youth is over — and with it any blame that attaches to. . who, the Luftwaffe? Or to them for trusting to the Anderson and not bothering to take the three hundred and twenty-nine steps down into the underground? His youth is over, and, while he may go on turning Ronnie’s whirligogs, repeating the same mistakes while expecting different results, because that’s what people do, he will not compound these errors any further by typing his patients. Henceforth there will be only me and you, never again the fraudulence of either us or them. He’d like to celebrate this by cutting a caper, picking a flower, embracing a child — instead he sinks his hands deeper in his pockets, smells the sticky sap of the limes, and listens as the first heavy drops of rain splatter on their foliage. If I was that dapper chap on the telly, he thinks, I’d’ve brought my umbrella with me. But he is none of these things: dapper, a chap, on the telly — and so arrives jogging back at the Austin, hunched over, his sports coat sodden, his grey flannel trousers greyer. — Standing on the pavement, looking up at the elegant curve of the grand development, with its beautifully four-square brick beads strung along colonnades, Busner notes that for every property that is well maintained there are two more that have tripped up into neglect: jigsaw chunks of stucco have dropped from their entablatures, and behind the elegant pillars are coal sacks and clothes-drying racks, pigeon-manured shrubs have taken root on ledges and in the crooks of walls, television aerials lurch from the chopped-off polyhedrons of their roofs. The address given for Sir Albert De’Ath, KG, KBE, in the 1955 edition of Who’s Who Busner had found in the hospital library — and subsequently confirmed as still being his residence in a current A — D phonebook — is the most rundown of all. No paragon . . what with its curtained and shuttered windows, and its overgrown front garden wherein the weeds have sprung up around a feature that looks to be a crudely fashioned pair of. . Indian clubs? He wonders if he’s made a mistake and the huge old pile is being squatted — the single bell push a nipple, inverted in its plaster aureole calls forth a disorderly chorus of chimes, buzzes, bongs and rings that sounds away into the distant recesses of the house, and, while Busner is puzzling over the nature of someone who could rig up such a fantastical system, presumably he’s deaf — he’s startled by the premature cracking open of the door and the emergence of a sagging and heavily powdered face surrounded by a shockingly luxuriant blue-rinsed perm. . almost an Afro! Doctor Busner? the woman whistles through goofy teeth — and as he confirms this she swings the door right open and ushers him in. I’m Missus Haines, we spoke on the telephone yesterday morning, she says. There’s a hefty Birman cat stalking round and around between her stubby legs, its thick furry tail lashing up her tweed skirt — she pays this no attention. Sir Albert, she continues, is expecting you. Then she does nothing. They stand there facing each other in the hallway, and, as Busner’s eyes adjust to the gloom, he begins to see how very weird it all is: not one or two but seven coat trees all hung about with old mackintoshes, mufflers and even Edwardian duster coats are marching along the hallway towards the back of the house. The slope-shoulders of these headless giants brush against epidermal Anaglypta that’s sloughing off in strips and patches — the hall runner, of good quality, exhibits the same punctuation of time, dashes and commas of wear exposing its underlay. His eyes escape the Birman’s empty, narcissistic ones by rising to take in the hanks of wiring and the thin copper tubing of old gas pipes running along the picture rail, together with a thicker pipe. . a speaking tube? There’s far less dust than Busner would’ve expected — whatever irregular things go on here, hoovering is daily — it’s only that nothing has ever been removed or replaced, simply added to or adapted. From the ceiling hang three different light fitments from three different eras — gas-brackets still crook from the walls, this must’ve been going on since — Nineteen eighteen, Missus Haines says, Mister and Missus De’Ath — as they were then — moved in here in the summer of nineteen eighteen, shortly after they were married. I joined the establishment in nineteen twenty, and one of my first tasks was the vacuum cleaning — they’d a machine already, you see, Sir Albert was always bang up to date with such things. At a loss as to where he should go with this information — a perfect synthesis of telepathy and the mundane — Busner asks: Have you always been employed by Sir Albert? She laughs, Oh, no, bless you — I went off, did all sorts. . married a railway man — we were at Orpington up until the war. . No, Sir Albert always kept in touch, and when Lady De’Ath passed away three years ago, he wrote asking me to come back and housekeep for him. Well, I’d not long lost my Rodney, so I jumped at the idea. . It seems most unlikely to Busner that Missus Haines has been able to jump at much for