PIKLE   KIP FENN   CONTACT

KIP FENN - REFLECTIONS  
by Paul K Lyons

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Chapter Five
Crystal, the Pearly Way and Promotion

'There is no truth around me, not in love, not in charity, not in happiness, nor even in friendship. We are insignificant animals. Ants. We float around thinking we are gods, but we are no more or less than human ants, enslaved to selfishness, hope and money. We wallow in hypocrisy. I am suffocating. I write this book to breathe.'
'No Reason to Live' by Pearl Worthington (aged 15) (2041)

I know for certain I have one great grandchild. Her name is Maria Silva Magalhães. She is dark-skinned, so pretty, with mischievous eyes, high cheek bones, and thick glistening hair set up in a twig. She came yesterday, with her father, Juliano, one of Arturo's children, and her mother Eliane, who is from Recife in North Brazil.

Whereas most people might have trouble sorting out their family connections behind them, thanks to Arturo I have difficulty working out those in front of me, as it were.

Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, I allow Chintz and others to make a special effort to transfer me from my fixed bed into a portable contraption so that I can be wheeled, preferably if the weather holds, into the gardens, or, if not, into the theatre room where some third-rate entertainer tries to raise the dead with comedy, magic or storytelling. The few times I've persevered through such shows it's thanks to Flora's creative and inspired heckling more than the quality of the entertainment.

Yesterday, though, it was a warm bright day, and I was taken out into the rose garden which is my favourite spot in early summer. Left alone for a few minutes, I closed my eyes, which was an odd thing to do: here I am, stuck in bed and in my room 24 hours a day, mostly communicating with a wallscreen or sleeping, and the instant I am brought out into the garden, I close my eyes. Sight can be too powerful a sensation. I sense more without it, the heat of the sun on my cheeks, the light breeze catching the edge of one ear, the fragrance of roses, and the chirruping of greenfinches in the laurel hedge or in the willow tree beyond. It is these sensations, more than any emotions towards Jay, for example, or Guido's children, or Maria, or surviving friends of mine, that cause me to regret the impending end of life. I mean no disrespect to those I love and those that may love me, rather that these sensations are a direct link to the essence of being alive, and thus draw attention somehow to what it must be like to lose that essence.

Since I settled here at Willow Calm Lodge, Jay has acted, with perfect generosity, as a coordinator for my visitors. And, since my death date was decided, he's cautiously contacted more distant friends and family with a view to encouraging them to make at least one visit during these final months.

To my knowledge, I have four grandchildren through Arturo (although I suspect there may be more). I never knew Arturo's first wife Edna, but I did meet their (or his) cloned daughter Alicia once. She disappeared in her late teens. I have, though, met his second wife Fatima and their three children, Ignacio, Juliano and Tina. Juliano is the only one of these three to have married and started a family. Of the whole clan, Tina, the youngest, is my favourite. She must be about 30 by now. When I saw her as a teenager she reminded me strongly of Gabriella (the composite Gabriella, part Amado character, part Gabriella on the bus, and part Conceição, Tina's grandmother). Jay tells me Tina may come to England in the autumn.

I am conscious of the fact that I have not yet even introduced Arturo adequately, so it is fortuitous I don't have much to say about Maria or her parents. Jay, who had sponsored their air fares (with my money), had also advised them that, given my condition, they need not stay long. Conversation was awkward since my Portuguese was poor, and their English was little better. When Jay was speaking, I let my eyes wander to watch Maria race across the lawn chasing after a ball. She tumbled over her own feet. This triggered in me another type of sorrow, not the self-pity I had touched earlier, but a contradictory one born of angst for the future. If Maria's world is going to be similar to the one I have experienced, suffering of some kind at a personal and a public level will never be far away. But then she scrambled to her feet, straightened down her bright pink top in a precocious way, and carried on running to kick and chase the ball. A few minutes later, she ran back to where we were sitting. I asked her to climb gently up on my lap, so Jay could take a camclip of us together.

On leaving, Juliano and Eliane each gave me a kiss on the cheek. Their kisses made me feel as if I were already a corpse propped up in a coffin. Having seen them out, Jay returned to the rose garden and asked if I wanted them to visit again at the end of their week-long package tour around the British Isles. Only if they must, I said.

'I liked them,' Jay volunteered.

'Me, too. I'm glad they came, really I am. I'm very happy to have met Maria, and to know she has seen me in the flesh, or what's left of it.'

'I don't think Ignacio will make it this year. As far as I can tell, he's devoting himself to local politics, in Pernambuco with Grupo Hijo de Jesus, the Son of Jesus group. His emails come with flyers about the movement. Did you know it has 20 million members in Brazil, 35 million in Mexico and nearly as many in the US? I'm only a click away from salvation.'

'Can I ask that you send Juliano one of the camclips, the one with Maria on my lap, and me brushing a hand through her hair. I bet she was grimacing.'

I let my eyelids fall, thinking I might catch the bird song again, or the scent of floribundas; but Jay was in a talkative mood.

'For a straight guy, Pa, you've created a right motley crew of kids, with one exception. Which is ironic.' I like that Jay calls me Pa. It was a tradition in his mother's family. Lizette called her father Pa while he was alive and after his death (she never talked about 'my father', only ever about 'Pa'). Jay went through a stage, in his late teens, when he thought himself too old for the familiar term, but he came back to it.

'Not ironic, if you follow the science of the matter and attribute this, er, "motley" gene to my DNA.' Jay, a good 15 centimetres shorter than I was before old age shrunk me down, but with more handsome facial features, is not my blood kin, no more than I was Tom's. Lizette was already with child when she and I fell in love, and it was partly because of my experience and influence that she agreed to the idea of nurturing Jay with me through a co-op.

'I'm not convinced a motley gene would be enough to explain Crystal's troubled life.' This was Jay prompting me, since he knew I had been planning to write about her and thought I might want to use him as a sounding board.

'No, not at all. A motley gene? I doubt it. Swathes of bad luck, definitely, for she was certainly caught in a cultural swirl; but, most important of all, incompetent, derelict parenting, mine and Harriet's.'

'It's a long time ago now.'

'Over 50 years.' I lowered my eyelids again.

'Are you tired? Do you want to go in?'

'Jay, I wish you'd find someone new. It's not as if you are as young as you were once.'

'What brought this on?' he asked. I kept my eyes closed lightly and began wondering if I could evoke any of the fragrances from the Taunton House garden. 'As it goes, I've heard from Vince. We're meeting next week. He broke his back two months ago doing some mad-fool stunt skiing in Austria, and now he's convalescing. He sounds repentant. You look tired, Pa, shall I take you in?' Jay asked again.

'I'm pleased. I worry about you living alone, being alone.'

'I'm OK Pa.'

'I know you are. But I've been remembering too much about Crystal; that weekend she came to Leiden, in May 43. Without the pill menu, the memory enhancers, I'd never be able to write these Reflections, and sometimes I wish ... I doubt if I should be doing it.'

'The visitors were tiring, you'll feel better later. You don't have to carry on, Pa, you can stop at any time.' Jay can be mildly patronising, but it's too late to fight it or change him. He means so well, and I wouldn't want to hurt his feelings. I let Jay wheel me inside. He stood watching as I was ably transferred back into my bed, and then, when I pretended sleep, he departed quietly. The medication may be helping my memory, but without Jay's support, his love, and his companionship I doubt I would have the resolve and the perseverance to make headway with these Reflections, too many of which are difficult, dark and painful.

***

Crystal dropped out of college when only 17. I had been given no hint of an impending problem, and the first I knew about it was a simple email from Harriet ­ this was in the autumn of 42 ­ telling me that our daughter had left home and was living with a boyfriend called Vidrio, an artist. The two were no better than Scavengers, Harriet said, and there was nothing to be done. I tried calling and messaging Crystal to no avail. When I flew to London a few days later, she refused to answer my requests to meet. By interrogating Harriet, I discovered our daughter had been spending most of her time playing intensive screen games or roaming the streets with graffiti artists. She had shown no interest in qualifications, and, since starting college the previous September, had threatened to leave home. Only the lack of money had prevented her. Then Vidrio came, and led her into the night.

Despite many emails to Harriet and to Crystal over the subsequent months, I learned next to nothing about Crystal's activities, until that is she turned up, unexpectedly, in Leiden a few days before her 18th birthday, in May 43. By then, Diana and I had been living in the Oldwijkgaarten house for nearly five years, and Guido was three and a half. These were busy, productive and mostly happy times. During Guido's early years, Diana had trimmed back her working life, but, when we entered him into pre-school, she re-integrated herself into the theatre world with gusto. I looked after Guido when I could, taking full advantage of the flexi-time laws (and over-working in compensation). When either Diana or I were away, we relied extensively on a caring and generous widow called Elly, who lived nearby and missed her own children. Incidentally, Elly's nephew ran an excellent local cheese and produce store.

Crystal materialised late on a Thursday afternoon. The previous night I had flown back from Washington, and, for various reasons, I was not due into the office until Monday. Diana was at a theatre somewhere, and Guido and I were in the Oldwijkgaarten common area showing our neighbours how to play cricket. I did not recognise the girl walking towards us. Dressed entirely in shades of grey, with a scarf covering her head, and a black material bag on her back, she could have walked out of a late 19th century photograph of gypsies I'd seen once. There was no smile of recognition, nor did she stop for a moment to allow a pause in our playful antics; instead she walked right to me, and, as if we were but acquaintances, put out her hand for me to shake.

'Hi Dad. I'm not too good. Can I stay for a day or two?'

I called Guido over to say hello to his sister, which he did dutifully before rushing off to collect the cricket ball and continue playing. I led Crystal inside, thinking we might drink tea and talk, but she only wanted to bathe and sleep. I called Diana to forewarn her, before going back out to find Guido screaming with laughter, and the cricket bat being used in a tug-of-war.

I have tried consciously over the years to hold on to the memory of that long weekend, for it is the best I have of my only daughter. I had taken Friday off work partly to attend an auction of vintage photographs at Swann's in Amsterdam, so I cajoled Crystal into accompanying me. On the train, she remained mute and self-absorbed, responding to my few questions with single syllable answers. Her ash-coloured headscarf, with its mottled pattern, vaguely resembled a moonscape, and I remember thinking my daughter might as well be on the moon. I distracted myself from anxiety by reading through the glitzy catalogue sent me from New York.

During this harmonious period of my life, and encouraged by Diana, I had assembled a very modest collection of vintage photographs and begun to educate myself on how to store and care for them. I paid three auction companies to send me their paper and digital catalogues regularly. I collected them with commitment, and often copied the larger reproductions into Neil. Only once or twice a year did I actually take part in an auction and make any purchases.

Crystal must have expected to see the old photographs themselves, because, having shown no apparent interest in our journey or its purpose, on arriving at Swann's she suddenly asked what was going on. I explained how the physical auction was taking place in New York, but that roomfuls of prospective buyers in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Milan and São Paulo were participating as if they were there in person. Huge wallscreens on either side of the Amsterdam auction room showed the item on sale from two different angles, and the central screen was fixed on the hammer-man. Bidders could either employ the traditional signal, with a waved hand which the intellicams would pick up, or utilise a keypad by each seat. It was a bit slow for some compared to a one-site auction, but pure entertainment for an enthusiast such as me: all those fabulous photographs, given a provenance, described in loving detail and displayed on the screens. Although prices were below the peak levels of a decade earlier, gasps erupted whenever the hammer went down on an item at over $100,000. I might have bought an E J Constant Puyo nude for around $1,000 but Crystal's presence intimidated me; instead I spent nearly $2,000 on three Japanese portraits, albumen prints by Felice Beato, each one hand-tinted. None were in the best of condition, nevertheless, I felt it was a good price. When they were delivered, a week later, I scanned them into Neil, and Diana used them to create and print out a special card for Crystal, a memento of her visit. I waited in vain for an address to mail it to.

We left the auction house on Prinsen Canal, ate a bagel and drank chocolate, and then strolled along Keizersgracht ­ all in silence. When we reached the stretch of canal in the Asser photograph, I started rambling on about the area and its importance to me, about meeting Diana, falling in love, and our first morning together walking hand-in-hand. And then, suddenly, as if a gag had been removed, Crystal began to chatter and prattle, barely stopping to take breath, much like her mother at times. Initially, she launched an attack on me.

'How can you do that, spend $2,000 in a moment, on a few bits of paper that mean nothing to anyone? Did you see that beggar on the bridge back there? $2,000 for what? Don't you know how hungry people are in Ethiopia, in Bangladesh? How ill people are everywhere, ill in their bodies, and ill in their minds? You could have given that money to the Red Cross, saved lives. It was obscene, watching you and all those others spend millions for nothing, on nothing. It's sick.'

But she wasn't talking directly to me, she kept her eyes sternly down focused towards the ground, while her head kept bobbing backwards and forwards as if trying to punch out, from inside, the obscenities she was talking about. I did not interrupt, I let her rant on about hunger and religious terrorism and injustice and disease and capitalism. After a while, she began to denounce the specific opinions of her mother or well-known politicians or her teachers, and to reveal a passionate support for the more anarchic ideas of her friend Vidrio. When she paused for breath and I asked her, very quietly, to tell me about Vidrio, she did.

Vidrio (Spanish for glass) was not his real name, but a self-appointed pseudonym. According to Crystal their affair lasted many months but had finished abruptly when, one morning, he had decided Berlin, not London, needed his art and talents. His life's work, I learned, was etching graffiti on glass, usually that found in expensive cars and shop windows. Glass etching had become a real urban problem at that time (one symptom of the endemic social terrorism in many cities) largely due to the availability of cheap etching/staining guns. Many countries had lightly outlawed the machines, yet they could be obtained easily enough. Yobbish youth culture (as typified by the Scavengers) tended to view glass etching as the fine art of graffiti skills. Poor Crystal, she saw Vidrio as a cross between Van Gogh and Vi Hoop, combining the artistic talent of the one and the passion for freedom from religious intolerance of the other. Who's to say she was wrong.

Intoxicated by love or poisoned by rejection, Crystal could not stop herself pursuing Vidrio by phone and email. I remember exactly the words she used when, as we walked around Paddington only three months later, I thoughtlessly enquired if she'd heard any more of Vidrio: 'He told me to fuck off. He said I was only his London fuck-chick, and I didn't know shit about art, or cock, or politics. And he'd never have looked at me twice but for my name. That's what he told me.'

We spent the rest of the Friday in Amsterdam (thankfully Dominique was able to cover for me by driving over from Utrecht to collect Guido from school), mostly walking and talking. She told me of Harriet's cycles of depression and boyfriends, depression and boyfriends, and recounted various tales about au pairs she and Bronze had put up with over the years. She had nothing favourable to say about her brother. When I eased the conversation around to her education and whether there might be any possibility of her continuing to study, she clammed up abruptly. Half an hour later, she leaned over an old iron railing and stared wistfully down at a barge decked out with flowers moving slowly along the canal. This led us on to find a tourist boat and to sign up for an hour long tour complete with an English-speaking guide. Afterwards, sitting in the quiet of the Begijnhof early evening, Crystal came round to asking questions about Diana and Guido and me. She expressed genuine astonishment when I gave a much simplified account of the IFSD and my work therein. For a minute or two, she looked at me with something akin to respect in her eyes. I was amazed too. How could my daughter have grown up, be almost an adult, and not know me, or who I was, or what I did? Unfortunately, there was no-one to blame for this but myself.

Diana and I swept aside most of our joint and separate plans for the weekend, so that I could spend as much time as possible with Crystal. On the Saturday, she and I took the train to The Hague, and I showed her round the IFSD building and my office. We stopped by the public relations department, where someone was invariably busy, weekdays and weekends, and I asked to be shown a promotion film for a recently-approved aid programme. I was keen to impress Crystal, not so much with my role, but with the fact that important efforts were always being made to help and support developing countries, even if this was not apparent in the daily media. However, she walked out of the screening before five minutes had passed. I guessed she could not cope (or did not want to cope) with the size of the funding figures or the scale of the works being undertaken, and preferred to allow a youthful prejudice against office buildings, full of nothing but paper, screens and computers, to extinguish any spark of interest in my work and the IFSD. We walked by the town hall, which didn't interest her at all, and stopped for refreshments at Jaspar's. As Crystal had withdrawn into herself again, I thought I might get back on her wavelength if I told the tale of how Rike Thomas had tried to threaten me in this very bar, but she yawned repeatedly and, apropos of nothing at all, interrupted to request we go to a games room. One of the waiters at Jaspar's directed us to Houdijk's, 20 minutes walk away in an area of town I had never visited.

In Houdijk's, a large basement café decorated in black and silver with aluminium furniture and grey terminals (Crystal was perfectly camouflaged), we waited half an hour at the bar for a table and a free terminal. Crystal may have tried to explain her favourite netgame of the moment, Final Oblivion, but her explanations went over my head. When I sat down to watch, though, my stomach churned. The object of Final Oblivion was to commit suicide, and to do so with a mission at one of many levels. The missions included the following: causing as much chaos and destruction against dark forces as possible; assisting an avatar with doubts about the ecstasy waiting beyond; and overcoming personal demons (the Pearl Worthington way). Crystal skillfully avoided other players' crazed suicides and psychological quagmires, and had clearly developed a real expertise at the game. In the corner of the screen, a counter showed that more than half a million people worldwide were playing concurrently. For the sake of our very recent and fragile friendship, I made no comment.

Later that day we returned to Amsterdam so Crystal could inspect Vondel Park, where so many FTM protests had congregated, and where, in recent years thanks to Dutch government initiatives, FTM festivals had become more popular than lawless marches.

Prompted by a further request from Crystal, this time to walk on a dike, Diana arranged for the four of us on Sunday to drive to Hoorn, north of Amsterdam, where a friend showed us around the pretty harbour. We made various stops on the way there and back, not least at Edam, and near Uitdam, where we fought the wind on dike-top foot and cycle paths. Spread across Ijsselmeer, we could see hundreds of modern yachts, windsurfers, parasailers, and the traditional sniks and skutsjes. Despite the apparently idyllic scene, large parts of the surrounding countryside had, in the previous 15 years, twice been devastated by storms and dike breaches. Many lives were lost on both occasions. Successive governments continued to insist that most areas remained safe, and to pour public money into never-ending improvements of the internal and external sea defenses. Nevertheless, large-scale regional evacuations, ordered and spontaneous, had become increasingly common. In the years to come, the sea would reclaim some of the land we could view that day, especially in Flevoland, the largest of the polders which the Dutch had so successfully exploited for more than a century.

I possess a few delightful photos from that day. There are several of Crystal with Guido and/or me, and one, taken by Crystal herself, of Diana, Guido and me. These are the pictures which are most deeply associated with my feelings of love for Crystal, the love that I had never been allowed (by Harriet or myself) to express, and of grief, and of guilt.

On the Monday evening, Crystal's last with us, we went to Dominique's house. Crystal and Dominique had met on the Friday, and Dominique had suggested we all come for supper on Monday. Having forgotten it would be Crystal's birthday, I had agreed. I suspect Crystal spent most of that day gaming, although she did return to Oldwijkgaarten with a few new clothes purchased with the money I'd given her. I left work earlier than usual, returned home first, and then drove the four of us to Utrecht.

Visiting Dominique and Waltar Meijer and their two lively sons, Jurian and Lukas, then aged around nine and eleven, was always a pleasure, their house being full of easy good humour, gentle activity, bright decorations and a multitude of house plants. Crystal did her best to relax and join in. For a while, before dinner, she helped Guido defend himself against the Meijer boys physical teasing (I saw flashes of a carefree childish Crystal), and she responded politely to Waltar's queries about her activities over the weekend. As a climax to the dinner, Dominique brought out a fantastic cake, topped with lavender-flavoured berries and 18 candles. Through a haze of chatter and laughter, Dominique asked Crystal to blow out the candles. Guido stood up on his chair and, so cutely, asked Crystal if he could help blow them out too. She stared at the cake and the candles and at Guido. For a second, no more, all the chatter in the room subsided, as if waiting for Crystal to answer Guido. But the sudden silence must have left her feeling exposed and scared for she shoved her chair back sharply, stood up and raced out of the room. Dominique followed but soon returned saying Crystal wished to be left alone.

We barely spoke on the return journey from Utrecht, nor the next morning. As Crystal and I left the house for the station, Diana, instinctively but thoughtlessly, attempted to give Crystal an embrace and a kiss on the side of the cheek, but she shied away offering only a curt 'thank you'.

At the station, I too got a thank you, a softer one.

'Thanks Dad. It was good, wasn't it? I was afraid of coming. If you hadn't of been outside, you know, I might not ... Guido's nice. He looks like you. And thanks for the money. I'm going now.'

'Take care Crystal. Thanks so much for coming, it was really nice to see you. Come again soon. Come any time, any time at all. If you need the money for the plane or train fare, just yell. And write, please please write.'

'I'll try. Thanks.'

I watched Crystal climb aboard the train with mixed emotions. Among them I recognised anxiety about her future. But also I felt relief at having been allowed to experience a humble shred of paternity towards her. As usual, though, I completely underestimated, or refused to face up to, the depths of Crystal's anguish. I would only see her one more time, and then she would be dead.

***

The days off work and Crystal's visit had already set my tight schedule back considerably. A pile of paperwork awaited me at the office after the Washington trip; and, by the weekend, I would be in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, for my third trip to the IFSD's African offices there.

I need to backtrack for a moment to put my working life in context. During the summer of 40, it had looked as though the world leaders, scheduled to meet in Djakarta that autumn, would not be ready to agree on detailed implementing arrangements for the second global increase in overseas development aid and expansion of the International Fund for Sustainable Development. Thus many of us in the IFSD were expecting a re-run of the Vancouver summit failure. However, a week before the Djakarta summit, anti-West and anti-Christian demonstrations flared up so violently across Java and Sumatra, but especially in the capital, that the meeting was hastily relocated to Oslo (conveniently for us). Parallel demonstrations across the rest of the developing and Muslim world were sufficient to persuade the recalcitrant Western leaders (led by the US and Japan) to relinquish their hardline nationalistic positions. The huge boost in development aid resources actually agreed at Oslo (i.e. the second stage 0.25% increase) allowed the IFSD to expand again, in The Hague and in Abuja, and with new main offices in Islamabad and Manila. Thereafter, we, in the IFSD's future policy division, continued working towards the third and final incremental increase of 0.25% (or, as it became known, the Next Step).

In my role as deputy director, Pravit exploited me as his organiser-in-chief for tidying up loose ends, or for modest liaison responsibilities with other IFSD divisions. And he employed me shamelessly whenever he felt a white face could achieve more than a brown one. 'We must work within the realities of the realities,' he would say confident of my understanding. I did not appreciate these tasks, and in the time leading up to the Djakarta/Oslo summit, in 40, I began to feel I had been sidelined. I watched unit heads, such as Ninel Horeva, press steadily forward and achieve tangible results. I also observed Pravit move from one crisis to another, using his considerable political and diplomatic skills to ease each team's work over apparently insurmountable barriers. By contrast, my own, often bureaucratic, input felt intangible and diffuse. On a few rare occasions, I failed to hold back my grumbles, but Pravit regularly managed to redefine or explain my role and assignments in such a way that I exited from his office refreshed with commitment.

Soon after the Oslo meeting, though, Pravit found himself increasingly involved in the IFSD's main business. This was because the agreement in Oslo had been bought at the expense of major compromises which created new and unexpected working complexities. As a consequence, increasingly during 41 and 42, he called on me, his deputy, to stand in for him as the head of the future policy division. Thereafter, though the demands on his time outside the division gradually diminished, he never attempted to reclaim the full power of his position.

In May 2043, a few days after Crystal's unexpected visit, I travelled to Nigeria. During two previous visits to the country, I had failed, through lazy planning, to catch up socially with Alfred. This time, however, work itself brought us together (as it would several times over the next few years). Alfred had moved sideways and upwards within Ojoru's administration and, by this time, had become a key adviser on certain agriculture and environment issues.

I had not seen Alfred in person for seven or eight years, not since he had finished his doctorate and returned to Nigeria. Yet such is the power of childhood friendship, even only intermittently refreshed, that I could barely keep a smile off my face during the flight in anticipation of meeting him again. And, at the airport, we greeted each other like long lost brothers. I had already agreed by email to put myself in his hands for the remainder of the day, Sunday, so first he drove me to my hotel and from there to a sports park in the city suburbs. Normally, on a Sunday night, he explained, he would be busy training the Capital Warriors for great exploits in the all Nigeria volleyball cup, but, in honour of my visit, the first and second teams had agreed to play a demonstration match.

'I told them it was necessary to show a great English setter how champion Africans play.'

'I don't need reminding how well Africans play, Alfred.'

'Ah, but you should see Sanfry ­ he's one of the best. He's made the Nigeria team already, and he's only 17.'

Unfortunately, Sanfry (short for Sanfrancissisi, apparently) didn't turn up that night, causing Alfred to spend an angry few minutes on the phone. Nevertheless, the Capital Warriors put on a splendid display, and I told them so. Afterwards, Alfred took me to his modest home, a small, newly-built detached concrete bungalow, with a plot of long shaggy dry grass. He introduced me to his beautiful and very young wife, Fayola, and their two year old son Fela, named after the great 20th century Yoruba singer. Steering well clear of our own business which would start on the following day, we talked mostly about international affairs. Although I had seen glimpses of the old Alfred at the sports park, his personality had become more sombre than I remembered, weighed down, it appeared, by Africa's troubles. Some years earlier, a terrible drought had laid waste vast regions across the whole of the southern Sahara. All the affected countries (Sudan, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria's Niger state) were still dealing with the long-term consequences of the resulting famines, plagues and migrations. Alfred was intent on reminding me of past horrors, and present troubles. When I asked about his family and his wife and son, he brushed off such questions and wanted to know whether I approved of NATO (the New Allies Treaty Organisation which had evolved out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) stepping up the terms of its treaty obligations with India. More specifically, he asked what I thought about the phrase 'a major act of aggression' by the Muslim states (which would define any NATO decision to become physically involved in protecting the remnants of Indian Kashmir). He believed that the United Nations should have done more, from the 20s, to tackle the growth of Christian-Muslim tension, and that Europe should have done more to curb US pressure within NATO for it to engage actively in religion-based conflicts. Every move by the US or Europe to bolster Christianity in Asia and in Africa, he opined, strengthened the Islam cause. In one particularly maudlin moment, before he took me back to the hotel, he turned prophet.

'The IFSD is swimming against the tide. It's only a matter of time before there's a real war. Five years or 20, it's inevitable now.'

I had come to Abuja with a briefcase full of tasks, but my main (and undeclared) purpose was to investigate why one stream of negotiations, led by our agriculture team, had stalled. The team leader, a German national (with a very French name), Louise Pavard, had repeatedly come to Pravit and myself complaining that Nigeria on its own and the African Union (representing almost all countries south of the Sahara) had refused to attend low-level negotiating meetings. She claimed the African states were asking for utterly unreasonable commitments on the share of funding to go to African agriculture. Moreover, she said, donors, such as the US and Australia, and recipients, such as the Latin American countries, had threatened to boycott any future discussions if the African states did not moderate their 'illicit demands'. The African position was, apparently, further complicated by a re-emergence of internal conflict between, essentially, the Islam and Christian dominated regions.

All Monday, I sat through a meeting of the committee that liaised between the future policy division and the African Union secretariat. The future policy division's coordinators, based in Abuja, did most of the work. I intervened with explanations or potential solutions here and there, and everything proceeded as normal. Only when we came to the subject of agriculture did the meeting fall apart, mostly because the African Union's own representatives contradicted each other. I sensed, as it was my job to do, that something else was going on. Alfred, as an observer, remained silent throughout the meeting, and left before I could catch him afterwards. The next day, I was due at the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture for a courtesy introduction to a new minister and for discussions with his advisers (including Alfred). However, before I had shaved, my phone rang. Alfred told me that my meetings had been cancelled, and that he would be arriving in one hour to take me on a guided tour.

A guided tour of Abuja University! To get there, we drove through a few respectable neighbourhoods, some dominated by residences and office blocks in the neo-Tropical style. These were generally free of traffic jams. Most of the journey though took us through areas typical of those to be found in many African cities: dense traffic, squalid and not-so squalid street shacks and semi-slums, unrepentant bustle and noise, and patchworks of colour in the midst of much grimness. However, Abuja was not as bad as Lagos, which, despite Ojoru's many advances (and the famous IFSD-funded 'golden' dikes protecting Lagos Island) had failed to lose its 'shitty city' status.

Life of all sorts ­ student traffic, games, teaching circles, snack sellers ­ teemed around the university buildings. Alfred began my tour at the tallest block, for teaching medicine. He showed me the well-stocked library, the lecture rooms, and the well-equipped laboratories, all supported by UN agencies. Then he showed me the artistically-furbished, but very different, Christian and Islam foundations, and explained that they were financed jointly by the federal government and the churches. A few other parts of the university appeared no poorer than a badly-funded European college, but Alfred's purpose was to bring me to the impoverished agricultural science and technology block, a concrete shell of a building with its rooms all empty but for a few broken chairs and tables. We stood outside in the muggy heat, and, finally, Alfred came to the point.

'Education, my friend, education. We need intelligent farmers, people who can read and write and understand money, and who know how to learn to look after their lands in good and bad times. We need farmers who are neither stuck in traditional ways nor taken in by Western salesmen, who can deal with suppliers and government agencies, who can read and research for themselves, who understand the importance of long-term sustainability, who can look ahead and manage their crops and animals with confidence and foresight. It's not that this building doesn't have the facilities of an Oxford college, you know as well as I that much of the teaching is done at home through the net. Yet this building says it all for me. We've had dribs and drabs of help from the UN for agricultural science and education; and there have been projects up and down the continent, but they've petered out, or collapsed in the face of financial and cultural difficulties. Our belief now is that these efforts have always failed because they've never been implemented on a large enough scale. The IFAD and Unesco have never had the muscle. There has been no momentum on this issue. Only the IFSD has the resources and the clout to make a difference. Yet, my friend, as you know better than most, education and training are not considered part of the IFSD framework.' A group of unruly students rushed by. 'We've tried before to get the IFSD mandate extended, but have been blocked at every turn. This time we're determined. Very determined. Now, come, I want you to meet someone. We must be punctual.'

Alfred drove us to the president's Palace. It took about half an hour to get there and another half hour to work our way through security and into an ornately decorated reception room. We waited a further hour which gave me plenty of time to examine the European-style portraits (I could only recognise Ojoru), the exquisite traditional hangings (batik-style), and the beautifully intricate wood carved sculptures and panels (by a famous 20th century artist called Lamidi Olonade Fakeye). Alfred refused to chat, or to confirm for whom we might be waiting. Then, he took a phone call, ushered me to my feet and guided me towards the centre of the room. Ojoru, surrounded by three assistants or bodyguards, entered the room in a gust. He came within a metre of where I was standing. He was slighter than I expected, and more human. I had only ever seen him in the flesh from a distance. I confess that I was slightly awestruck. All I had the presence of mind to notice was that his eye whites shone (like an actor's) and that he was dressed in a trim cream-coloured suit with crimson darts.

'Alfred has talked of you, Kip Fenn. He says you are a man of faith in people, and a man with foresight. I am glad of that. There is much to be done.'

'Yes, sir.' For several seconds Ojoru continued to peer into me. Everyone in the room remained motionless and silent. I debated internally whether to mention that I'd been there, in the European Parliament more than 20 years earlier, when he had delivered his famous mantra, but I felt too intimidated to speak further. It was as much as I could do to hold his gaze. Suddenly, he made a decision and put out his arm towards me. Instinctively, I stepped forward to shake hands with him. He had a very firm warm hold.

'Thank you for coming,' he said. Almost immediately he turned about and, with his entourage in perfect step, exited. Curiously, for a moment I thought not of Ojoru, but of Crystal's cold and formal greeting a few days earlier in the Oldwijkgaarten garden.

Over lunch back at the IFSD building, Alfred loosened up. He explained that if I could find a way of widening the scope of the exploratory negotiations for the Next Step (the third incremental increase in western overseas development aid) to include agricultural training and education, certain unreasonable African demands and differences might disappear. I thanked him profusely for the honour of being introduced to Ojoru, but protested that he was overestimating my position and responsibilities and what could be achieved at my level. Alfred thought not. He promised that a substantial and convincing plan, backed by academic research and intellectual analysis, would be forthcoming if and when it would be given proper acknowledgement and IFSD-backed circulation privileges. He also forecast that, if the idea gained legitimacy, the vast majority of beneficiary countries would gather in its support.

There were other meetings, and other business which I forget now, and a couple of meals out with Alfred (although his wife stayed at home with Fela). One evening, he persuaded me to borrow a pair of shorts and trainers, and knock a volleyball about with friends, including the tall, agile and smiley Sanfry, on an outdoor court near his house. The heat troubled me within minutes, the ball caught my left index finger badly, and then I fell, scraping a knee on the earth. I declared enough was enough and that my volleyball days had ceased long ago. Nevertheless, I did experience a buzz of pleasure seeing Alfred take so much enjoyment from the game.

On the flight home, I considered how I could achieve the mission that, in effect and thanks to Alfred, I had been given by one of the greatest men of the 21st century. It did seem an impossible task, especially since there had been previous failed attempts to enlarge the IFSD's aid framework to encompass education. Moreover, none of us at the IFSD were looking for new battles, and the entire future policy division was working towards an objective ­ the Next Step ­ that many sane and intelligent intellectuals and politicians thought could never be achieved. And, while Western national leaders steered clear of being too publicly negative or defeatist about the chances for the Next Step their opponents, international think-tanks, independent members of many parliaments, media commentators and others had no such qualms. Nevertheless, somewhere over the Mediterranean, an idea did emerge.

The following day I secured a late interview with Pravit who listened to my verbal report with patience. I had intended not to tell him about the encounter with Ojoru (after all nothing had actually been said), but then found I could not properly communicate the importance of the matter without doing so. I proposed that it was all a mistake, brought about because of my friendship with Alfred, and that it needed an older, wiser and more senior head than mine to find a way forward.

'Kip, you become trickier by the day. I do believe you are a tricky one, are you not?' Long pause. When he put such enigmatic questions, I usually found it best to remain silent. On this occasion, though, it was not the right tactic. 'Am I waiting forever then? All right, all right.' He was not in the best of moods, for otherwise he would have allowed us to saunter leisurely for a few minutes through the roles of master and pupil. 'My head is going to hurt tonight. Tell me your plan.'

And so I did. I have no wish to get bogged down in the nitty gritty of my working life, but, briefly, the plan (which partly succeeded inasmuch as any draft plan ever retained its original shape) was this. Firstly, it was necessary to deal with Louis Pavard, the team leader, who had repeatedly rejected all requests to circulate documents relating to agriculture education. She had refused to accept declarations on the subject citing the Next Step's mandate word for word, as if it were the Koran. Pavard was in the pocket of the German government which, most of the time, used its muscle to undermine the EU's generally positive approach to the IFSD. So, Pravit moved, through a German director of the IFSD board, who was not a closet nationalist, to replace Pavard with a younger more malleable and idealistic team leader. Secondly, Pravit and I began to propagate, through our respective contacts within and without the organisation, the idea that we should not be falling back on defensive positions for the Next Step but that, conversely, a new bold idea would help inspire support for it. And education ­ at least in terms of farming practices ­ was that idea. It was no longer feasible, we claimed, to believe real sustainable development of land resources would be possible without earmarking a very significant proportion of aid for teaching farmers (not a few hundred here and there, but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands) how to profit from and, crucially, care for their land better. Thirdly, over the next six months, I travelled extensively to the capital cities of many Western donor countries, mostly those that were positively interested in seeing the Next Step succeed. At meeting after meeting with ministerial advisers (where I could get them), senior civil servants and all kinds of experts, I explained our current difficulties, our need for a new momentum, and the reason why a revision of the existing Next Step mandate was now being proposed. Often it was a thankless and dispiriting task, and, especially in the autumn during the weeks after Crystal's death, I lacked the necessary diplomatic energy (as Pravit would call it) to do the job effectively.

By the end of the year, however, doors began to open more freely, and a growing sympathy for our approach was evident at many of my follow-up meetings. In advance of the April 44 negotiating session in Mexico City, I took a gamble and attempted to coordinate a large group of donors who were prepared to ask for a revision of the mandate. In parallel, Pravit braved the IFSD board. There were all kinds of attempts to derail and block us (not least those stemming from other UN agencies, such as the IFAD and Unesco, involved with agriculture and education respectively). For the first three days of the Mexico meeting, I was apprehensive, believing they might have succeeded: some of the support I had so carefully fostered appeared to be drifting. But, while I had been arguing the case with the donors, Alfred's team had been hard at work too. When it became clear, on the fourth day in Mexico, that there was near unanimous support from the recipient countries for 'the role of education and training in sustainable development of agricultural practices' to be considered for the Next Step, more donors than I expected hesitantly pressed their green buttons. The opposition, suddenly isolated and spotlighted, fell away tamely.

For the next two years, until the second Djakarta summit (not relocated this time, thanks to highly controversial policing methods), 'the role of education and training in sustainable development of agricultural practices' became one of the main motors for the negotiations. It was during this period that Pravit retired suddenly for health reasons, and I was promoted to head of the division (after a period as acting head of division). It is possible that Pravit retired slightly earlier than he might have done so as to allow for my promotion prior to a change of government in Britain. Already in 44 it was evident that Fuller's centre coalition would not last a third term; and Pravit understood that a future Conservative administration might not provide the necessary behind-the-scenes national support for my promotion.

***

Before then, though, my heavy work load led to a series of conflicts with Diana, and the most uncomfortable period so far in our ten year relationship. In the summer of 43, Diana and I had promised (or casually planned depending on the point of view) to visit our Canadian friends, Ike and Augusta Davidson, in Montreal. So, when I declared, several weeks after the Abuja visit, that I would no longer be able to take a full vacation in the summer, Diana responded angrily. Following much discussion and argument about alternative arrangements, we decided that Guido and she would go without me.

As part of the same decision (and somewhat resentfully I judged at the time), she objected to joining me in London for a family-oriented weekend in early September, soon after her return from North America. My mother and her brother were the focus of that weekend. On the Friday, I went to Alan's book launch, and on Saturday Alan and I helped Julie celebrate her 70th birthday with a lunch party. I also spent Sunday afternoon (at the cinema) with Bronze, and delayed my return trip to the Monday morning so as to accede to an unexpected request from Crystal to meet up that evening in Paddington. As I've already disclosed (why is it so difficult to keep the chronology in order?) this was a distressing encounter.

Alan. I have all kinds of regrets about my life. Only stiff people, who live by imprinted route maps or hand-cuff themselves to pre-packaged religious models of being, can get to the end without regrets. Or so I like to believe. One of my regrets is that, over the years, I did not spend more time with my uncle Alan. He invited me to St Petersburg, where he lived for the last 20 years of his life, on numerous occasions, but somehow I never got round to going. He was one of the most intelligent and warmest and kindest of men I ever knew. Officially, he had retired from WWF in the late 30s. Yet he continued to work as intently as ever, not only as an adviser to WWF and others, but on his ambitious book. It took him more than ten years all told, and was finally published in September 43. Floods: past, present, and future (two atlas-sized volumes and a major netsite) gained immediate plaudits from across the world, and soon became a standard reference work. Not only was it full of geographical and scientific explanations, cultural anecdotes and detailed historical notes, but it was replete with glorious photographs and illustrations, albeit often of tragedies. For the next decade, until old age slowed him down, he enjoyed a certain amount of fame, travelling far and wide to give lectures based on the book and the information he had amassed for the netsite.

Alan had arranged for the book launch to take place in the same week as his sister's birthday, not only for his own convenience but because he thought Julie would enjoy a touch of reflected glory. The publishers, Universities Press Inc, in conjunction with WWF, had engaged the International Geographical Society in a marketing deal which included use of the Society's premises for the launch. A maxiscreen displayed a slick slide show, moving occasionally into camclip footage; large-scale photographs from the work and of Alan adorned the walls; and the books themselves had been piled up with architectural skill on publisher glam-stands. Constrained by looking after my mother, I managed nevertheless to talk with Anna Mastepanov (Alan's partner), Jude Singleton (my old boss from the Department of the Environment) who recounted a pleasingly awful anecdote about Rike Thomas, Matt Fortune (an influential left-wing backbencher MP who, as a tireless campaigner for the IFSD cause, I already knew), and a sharp environmental journalist called Bobby Jespersen.

Part Danish and part American, Bobby had made a name for herself in Brussels by careful reporting on green issues for the Wall Street Journal and the London Times. She had written two books, one on European-US environmental policy conflicts, and another which analysed in detail how Europe had won the battle for the initial expansion of the IFSD. I knew she had excellent contacts in the IFSD, as elsewhere, but I personally had never spoken to her before. With a short squat body, far too much make-up, layers of odd clothes, and unkempt long mousy hair, she could have been 40 or 60. She was abrupt, almost rude in the way she interrupted my chatter with Julie; and she had no fluff talk at all. Despite this coarse outer shell, she had a gift for probing intelligent conversation and also for listening purposefully and attentively. While declining to answer a barrage of questions about progress on the Next Step, I did agree to grant her an interview later that autumn. No sooner had she bounded out of earshot in search of further contacts, than my teacherly mother deemed her an 'oddball', which was the best she could do to disguise her dislike of the woman.

I only mention Bobby because some years later she and I developed a useful synergy. Incidentally, she gave Alan's book a superb write-up.

After a couple of zinis and several short speeches, Julie and I took a cab to The Plains in Chelsea. Alan and his Russian partner Anna had invited approximately 30 friends to join them there for a post-launch late lunch. Julie sat next to a charming man she had encountered through Alan many years previously, and who lived in Ireland. (As a consequence of this re-acquaintance, the two of them became correspondents to the end of my mother's life.) Halfway through the meal, Monique, Alan's old girlfriend (who had looked after me so well in Rio de Janeiro all of 20 years earlier) appeared. She had missed the launch party because of a four hour security hold-up on the trains through the Channel Tunnel.

Having spent 12 years in Brazil, I learned, Monique had returned to Paris where her rainforest expertise was much in demand by international groups, including my own organisation, the IFSD. She had helped Alan on his book and was proud to show me, with exaggerated pride, her name listed as a key contributor. At one moment, she turned to watch Alan stand and affectionately embrace two people who were leaving.

'I love that man,' she said.

'Me too.'

My mother's birthday party, at the Dog & Pheasant in Brook, followed on Saturday. Here on my screen is the camclip recorded by Rachel, Julie's friend from Edinburgh, and sent on to me later. It is precious for being the last clip I have of Alan, Julie and me together. His friendly face is rounded by a trimmed white beard. He is laughing and raising a toast to his sister. Julie herself looks gloriously happy, and far from old. Harriet is scowling, and not communicating with anyone. She was invited largely to ensure the attendance of Bronze, so that, as a minimum, one of Julie's grandchildren would be present. And there I am in the camclip, making an effort to communicate with Bronze, whose face is covered in acne. I remember he wouldn't eat, and he complained about having to miss a religious march taking place in central London. I should have been grateful that Harriet and he came at all, at my request, but neither of them wasted much time being pleasant to Julie or me, and so I was relieved when they left early.

Later, I managed to spend an hour alone talking with Alan and Anna about the book, their plans and their life in St Petersburg. Anna spoke English moderately well and with an elegantly light accent. She must have been about 50 then. The two had first met in Kiev on a Ukrainian flood-relief project when she was 25, already with two children and a husband. Only later, after the marriage had disintegrated, and the two children had found high-paying jobs in far-flung corners of the Russian Federation, did she find Alan again. It was Anna who had persuaded him to slow down and settle permanently in St Petersburg. And, presumably, it was she who had provided a platform of domestic stability that allowed him to persevere for so long and complete the work on floods.

At the turn of the century, according to Alan's book, on average 1.5 million people were perishing each year as a result of floods; in the late 20s and early 30s the figure peaked at 3 million a year; and by the early 40s, had fallen back to around 2.2 million. Alan explained, in the book, how the turnaround had come about largely because the flooding cycles had increased to such a frequency that government policies and people themselves began to shy away from the most vulnerable areas. Furthermore, he showed how infrastructure investment, often led by the IFSD, had been instrumental in safeguarding important agricultural regions and many urban areas (there was even a sunset-lit picture of the Dutch-built dikes around Lagos Island).

***

We were not, though, living in happy times. While the cost in human life of flood damage may have been receding, other trends indicated that the golden era of oil and chips was fast coming to an end. Floods apart, man continued to be battered by increasingly unpredictable weather fronts with hurricanes bringing untold damage in a matter of hours, and droughts causing famines and plagues that lasted years. Religious conflict and intolerance were rising and arising day-by-day, and at every level whether in local communities or in the UN organisations. International affairs and diplomacy were often bogged down in efforts to bridge the growing religious divide. Many feared that NATO, its member countries under permanent verbal attack from the International Islam Brotherhood for Peace, was moving inexorably towards a defender of countries dominated by Christian peoples.

By this time, the First Tuesday Movement had already disintegrated into a patchy framework for religious protests, demonstrations and riots. Only the American continents, dominated by Christians faiths, were largely free of this particular affliction. Even there, though, in cities such as San Francisco, Quito, Rio and Buenos Aires young people occasionally demonstrated their anger against US arms being sold to so-called friendly regimes or freedom fighters in North Africa and the Middle East which just happened to proclaim secular or moderate religious objectives. Many ordinary citizens, faced with the growing chaos in the world and a belief that a decade of popular protest had achieved nothing, turned inward seeking spiritual or religious solutions. Cults of all types found new adherents, while traditional religions, in all their variants, swelled their numbers. This served to further exacerbate and polarise religious strife. According to the social historian Gregory 'a worldwide plague of pessimism' emerged, especially among those who could not find solace in imaginary gods.

There was one non-religious cult, the Pearly Way, which brought a most terrible despair to millions of families. Gregory's Suicide in the 21st century, published in the 60s, claimed that suicides worldwide increased from less than one million at the turn of the century (I am selecting these particular stats to allow a comparison with Alan's figures on flood deaths) to around two million in 40. By 43, this figure had grown to three million. It went on multiplying until it peaked in the late 40s at around five and a half million. My daughter was but one single individual in these vast statistics.

But a girl named Pearl Worthington was more than just another statistic. In 2041, her recently-published book, called No Reason to Live, won a major US award for its insight into youthful despair and tragedy. On live television, minutes after receiving the award, and while still on the presentation stage, she pulled a plastic gun from her bag and fired a bullet into the side of her head. Cameras caught each horrifying moment in close-up detail, and the camclip made headlines in all the media, from Beijing to Santiago and from Helsinki to Cape Town. A week later, GlobeOne magazine ran an in-depth feature on suicide, with three words on the cover: 'The Pearly Way'. Pearl's book became an instant bestseller, and was quickly translated into dozens of languages. Across the world, but especially in Japan, Brazil, China, India, the US and the Scandinavian countries, unhappy men and women, young and old, followed Pearl's example, if not with a gun, then with pills or gas or by throwing themselves in front of metro trains or from tops of buildings and cliffs.

Pearl's mother, Xanthe Worthington, however, managed single-handed to turn what might have been a dreadful, but short-lived, fad into an appalling, tragic and permanent feature of our world. Xanthe, having started life as a call girl, amassed a huge fortune by marrying and outliving a series of rich and very rich husbands. Pearl ran away from Xanthe mansion (or wherever) when only 14 and never spoke to her mother again. The book, No Reason to Live, came to be seen as a suicide note, condemning society and the author's mother in roughly equal measure. Following Pearl's death, Xanthe spent several months trying out psychiatric programmes and psychotherapists, but emerged one day, with the appearance of a nun not a queen, to tell the media she had decided to use her fortune in remembrance of Pearl. With a team of amoral and greedy businessmen, software engineers and security personnel, she moved to the renegade Martinez islands in the Caribbean and set up hundreds of netsites in dozens of languages. Some of these glamorised the idea and practice of suicide, providing information on simple and effective ways to kill oneself, and making funds available for regional propaganda. Others offered free downloads for playing simple individual screen games. And yet others provided portals to the addictive netgames Final Oblivion I and II. Both of these were commissioned by Xanthe from a creative young game developer in Korea who later tried, ineffectively, to use his natural copyright (having sold the legal one) to close them down. Xanthe advertised the games widely, allowed the playing software to be distributed freely, and made no charge for involvement in the gaming universe. As the playing numbers increased exponentially, so her team worked round the clock to provide the necessary infrastructure in every continent.

It took Europe nearly three years, until 46, to place an effective ban through Solar (the open Euronet) on the Oblivion games (by classifying them as Unacceptable Content), but efforts to prohibit them in the US and at the UN level failed altogether. Xanthe herself died in 48. It's possible she was poisoned by one of her employees, but the facts were never established. Thereafter, her associates fought among themselves, and the mini-empire quickly fell apart. By then, though, Xanthe's bitter and vindictive objective had succeeded all too well. Even in the Arab world, which suffered least from the cult because of the strictures of Islam, there were increased numbers of suicide bombers, disease-spreaders and fire-raisers, all ready to appease their anger and find glory wherever and whenever they could. In India, China and Southeast Asia there were epidemics of those dying slowly from hunger or quickly from earth burials. Mostly they were protesting against low pay, inhuman working conditions and poverty. In Catholic Latin America and Southern Europe, the suicide statistics were dominated by those eager to get to heaven and experience oblivion. In Northern Europe and the US, we had them all: the oblivion seekers, the nihilist black-hole-and-outers and the Pearl copycats who used suicide to protest, whether against their lovers, their family or society. And, across the Western world of course, there was an explosion in the numbers of those ready and willing to make a quick easy escape from the trials of old age (plastic surgery sags and other cracked-mirror syndromes, pension failures, or body/brain dysfunctions).

Crystal killed herself on Wednesday 23 September 43, only three weeks after she and I had walked through the streets of Paddington. She was found by a friend called Donna at a Scavenger's house in Streatham, South London. She had cut her wrists and was lying in a bath of blood and water. A note, in her handwriting, said only: 'All is annihilation, all is oblivion. I do this entirely on my own, and of my own free will. Crystal.' An autopsy found her stomach full of prescription pain killers and mood calmers. This, and evidence from the distraught Donna, were sufficient to convince the coroner that Crystal had taken her own life. She was cremated in Croydon at the same crematorium as her grandfather, Tom. While the sun had shone for Tom, it only rained for Crystal. Apart from Diana and me, there were a handful of mourners: Harriet and a manfriend, Bronze, Julie and three odd-looking acquaintances of Crystal. We all went our separate ways soon after it was over. I did attempt to exchange a few words with Bronze, to establish how he was coping, and whether he needed anything. He had become a fervent evangelical Christian by then, and believed his sister had done the right thing and gone to a better place, and that, therefore, there was nothing to grieve for.

'R. I. O., rest in oblivion, Crystal,' he said to me without a trace of irony.

My relations with Diana, which had been under strain since the summer, deteriorated during the journey back from London. On receiving the news about Crystal's death, she had been sympathetic, and generously agreed to accompany me to the funeral. On the train journey to London, she had allowed me to grumble, as I had done in the early days of our friendship, about Harriet. But Diana had a selfish streak (greatly tempered, I should add, by being a mother) which I never wished to acknowledge, let alone stand up to. During the return leg, Diana's thin shell of forbearance towards me crumbled. I was probably re-living the weekend Crystal had visited Leiden, or re-dissecting our walk and conversation in Paddington, when Diana snapped. I do not believe it was anything in particular I said, rather that she had waited until a nearby passenger moved so we would not be overheard.

'It's no good going over it again and again. She's dead. She was unhappy, and now she's dead. Bronze is right, she is in oblivion.'

'I don't believe in oblivion, you know that.'

'You left her a long time ago, it's your fault, it's Harriet's fault, it's the world's fault. What is done is done. Let it go.'

'No.' I felt offense. 'She was my daughter. She lived in pain. She died before she was even an adult. Whose fault is that? You want me to deny she existed, stop thinking about her, stop talking about her, forget about her altogether?'

'Yes.' This stark word stunned us both into silence. I felt she meant it literally and turned away towards the window. The request (or was it a command) felt threatening, not in itself, but because it meant I might have to re-evaluate the person who had made it, and from there, possibly, reconsider why I was loving her. It was easier to contemplate the rain battering the glass, and the rivulets streaming from one side to the other. It took Diana a minute or so to continue her meaning, and to try and deflect her apparent callousness. 'Yes. Yes, stop thinking about her for now, stop talking about her. Please, for me. Not to forget her. Remember that you ruined the summer, that you are working too much, that you are always travelling. You want Guido to become like Crystal.' Instantly, she realised she had gone too far again. She apologised verbally, and physically too, by taking hold of my hand. Silently, I made yet another resolution to control my working hours and be more available for Diana and Guido. Yet, as with previous efforts, it was soon forgotten ­ for this was the time I was busy on my mission for Alfred, Ojoru and Africa.

Before leaving the subject of the Pearly Way I should add that I, personally, knew at least five other individuals who committed suicide in the 40s. They were: a Russian IFSD employee who had been caught trying to blackmail his line manager; a Japanese civil servant who negotiated in the IFSD committees on conditions and funding for solar energy and who had been passed over for promotion; an actress acquaintance of Diana who had been screamed at once too often by a director and who had never got over abuse by her parents; the mother of Waltar Meijer who was suffering from multiple sclerosis; and Rob, the brother of Melissa.

Rob had found his way to the house in Lacey's Lane several times in the 30s, evidently seeking the kind of financial handout we had given him once before. On each occasion, according to Harriet's emails, he had stated he was looking for me, so she had given him my address in Leiden and a few euros. He finally caught up with me one weekend that same summer (43) while Diana and Guido were in North America. He arrived with Imogen, a woman ten years his junior who acted like his self-appointed social worker. He had changed beyond recognition from our last meeting, about the time of Bronze's birth in 28. Physically, he looked much tidier than when I'd last seen him, although his unbearded face carried several shaving nicks, and his suit would have fitted a taller, fatter man. Mentally, he reminded me of a dull and doltish teenager, one devoid of character. The nervous and shy Imogen explained that Rob had talked of making this trip for so long that she had finally consented to organise it and accompany him. They stayed for one afternoon only (thankfully), during which we took a short walk around the Leiden sights, and ate ice cream in the touristy Mars Bar (one of Guido's favourite places) on Nieuwe Rijn. Rob struggled to talk at all, so Imogen raised the topic of Melissa for him. Rob's memory of that fateful afternoon had become so distorted or muddled up with other memories, I learned, that Imogen did not even know for sure whether he had had a sister, or how she had died. So, while sitting on a bench by the quieter Oude Rijn, I described, in as much detail as I could remember, the picnic at Sweetwater Pond and what had happened subsequently. Rob's eyes quietly watered as I told them of my final visit to the hospital and hearing of the decision to let Melissa go.

Imogen put her arm around Rob. I was touched by the friendship of these two. But that is all. I had travelled a long way, and, at this busy time in my life, I had no spare emotions. Imogen and Rob were intruding, and I was being polite. At the station, Imogen thanked me profusely once, and then again when I gave her 200 euros. Six months later I received a short letter from her informing me that Rob had died from a deliberate overdose of heroin. She explained that he had not been an addict for more than five years but that a chronic kidney disease had flared up and left him in pain, so he had decided to take the Pearly Way.

My own attitude to suicide has undergone several revisions. When young I believed in a liberal euthanasia policy, such as that evolving in several European countries, and I would not have argued against an individual's choice to relinquish his or her mortal coil (so to Hamlet-speak). Harriet, whose extended family, both present and past, had been scarred by more than one suicide, led me into several prolonged debates on the subject during our time together. She believed that condoning suicide was problematic because of the impact on friends and family, and because individuals rarely remained suicidal for long. I allowed myself to be persuaded. Over time, I suspect, Harriet's views hardened and she became fervently intolerant of liberal views on suicide, which may or may not have affected Crystal's course.

In the weeks and months after Crystal's death, I deflected the pain of the grief and the guilt, as many other parents of suicides did, through anger. The media was full of debate and comment about Xanthe Worthington, her netsites and games, and the various offshoot cults she had fostered. Most governments considered laws and initiatives to try and curb the escalation in suicide attempts (for every successful one there were several failures which put enormous strains on health services, and caused psychological traumas among relations and friends). And, everywhere, the Pearly Way was a topic of intense discussion in families, at dinner parties and at workplaces. My anger switched easily to and fro between Pearl/Xanthe Worthington and the media which did so much to propagate the Pearly Way ideas. For two or three years, I took the view that any legal opening for euthanasia had been wrongly allowed and that any such laws had opened the floodgates, allowing citizens to deny their citizenship, and abdicate their responsibility to families and communities alike. Diana, who did not usually have any firm views on major political or social issues (nor did she much enjoy discussing them), expressed surprise when she heard me pontificate these views. It was only in the late 40s, when Diana and I witnessed the pain and struggles of Dominique and Waltar with regard to Waltar's mother's illness, that my moderate liberal opinion returned.

Even today, 50 years later, thanks in part to the Pearly Way epidemic, I had to go through an endless rigmarole before getting official approval for my own death date.

Horace said once, during a school debate on the phenomenon of suicide terrorists (this may have been an argument I personally originated, but I only remember Horace speaking it), that one of the best arguments against anyone, including a desperate religious fanatic, committing suicide was that life is full of surprises, possibly good ones. If Crystal had held on for a few further weeks she would have been presented with a fully-formed, fully grown half-brother ­ Arturo ­ and who knows what influence he might have had on her.

***

For me, Arturo turning up so soon after Crystal's funeral seemed akin to some god's crass attempt at providing a replacement or compensation; it was as if Crystal's tragedy had entitled me, unknowingly, to a ticket in a lottery of miracles, and I had won a dubious jackpot. The first time I saw Arturo he certainly looked a million dollars, as they say, with his light tan-coloured skin, short wiry bleached hair, a bold handsome face (with mauve lipstick and purple-dyed eyebrows in the re-invented he-fem cat-walk style popular at the time), and an immaculate shiny two-tone jacket and pressed trousers. It transpired that he had gone to Godalming and charmed my address out of Julie (without so much as a call to me to check if it would be all right). He said he was the son of a friend from Brazil and wished to surprise me, which, I suppose, was no deceit. While Arturo lacked other qualities (I could mention integrity, morality, decency) he was not short of charm.

It was a mild but overcast Sunday in October, Diana had taken Guido with her to Theatre Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam to monitor work on the set of a play she was designing, and I had spent the morning at the IFSD office in The Hague. I returned at about 2pm, and was strolling through the communal gardens thinking about what I would eat and drink when I saw a jazzily-dressed young man sitting on one of the benches. His gaze followed me to the front door, and, as I was turning to close it behind me, I saw him approaching. I waited.

'Mr Fenn?'

'Yes.'

'My name is Arthur. Your mother give me this address. I wish to talk to you.' His English was adequate ­ in the present tense.

'And my mother is?'

'Excuse me.'

'My mother? What is her name and where does she live?'

'She live in Godalming. She call herself Julie, naturalmente.' He smiled. He looked harmless, and carried no bag (containing potential weapons), and so, mildly curious, I let him in. I led him through to the lounge area at the back of the house, and offered him tea.'

'Coffee, do you have coffee? I wish to drink coffee.'

'Coffee it is.' I went through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. 'Where are you from Arthur? You sound Spanish or Portuguese from your accent. It sounds familiar.' I spoke loudly so he could hear me in the other room.

'Brazil. I am from Rio.' And when he said the words 'Brazil' and 'Rio' he said them in the way of his own language, which I did then recognise as Brazilian Portuguese. This was a further clue to what the man might be doing in my house, but it only took me as far as thinking he could have some connection with Monique, who I had run into at Alan's lunch six weeks earlier. I took the coffee and biscuits through to the lounge, sat down opposite the man, and poured out a cup for each of us.

'It is pretty here, artistic,' Arturo said.

'My partner, Diana, is very artistic.'

'And that?' He pointed to a poster-size portrait of me temporarily hanging on the door to the kitchen. It was no likeness, except for the long legs and lanky body.

'That's by Guido, our son. He thinks I'm three metres tall.' I kept wanting to say 'so, Arthur what brings you here', but he continued to edge in, asking questions with his broad lipstick grin.

'You have a son. How old?'

'Five in December.'

'Five. Do you know how old I am?'

'No.'

'I am 21 last April. I finish my degree, in biological sciences. I finish it quite young you know, and I get a top mark.'

'Congratulations.'

'Where is Guido today and Diana?'

'In Amsterdam. They're coming back soon. I don't mean to be rude, but why are you here, Arthur, how do you know my mother or me, how did you get my mother's address?'

'You know Brazil.' It wasn't clear whether this was a question or statement.

'Yes, I've visited Brazil, but Arthur why are you here?'

'You have a good time in Brazil?' Now I began to feel impatience, and saw no alternative but to show it.

'Arthur, please answer my question or I will have to ask you to finish your coffee and leave.'

'Naturalmente, Mr Fenn, but please my question, then I answer.' Arturo's smile vanished, and he suddenly become intent.

'Yes, Arthur, yes, I did have a good time in Brazil. I liked Rio very much.' And I waited. Arturo looked around the room. There was an expression on his face, and he carried a look that made no sense, no sense at all, and for a moment, until he spoke, I began to feel wary, under threat.

'Conceição. You remember Conceição?' And still I would not tune in. I have been trying to think how to explain what was happening in my head, and the best I can do is to compare the process to that of trying to find, but only half-heartedly, a radio station on the long-wave receiver, moving through bands of low-level interference, crossing louder bands of hissing and static, and making no serious effort to find the correct wavelength where sound and information could be heard and understood crisply.

Hearing the name Conceição provided a moment of relief, for, at least, the mystery was explained. But then I realised that if this Arthur had come visiting on the strength of his relationship with a woman I'd long forgotten, I had absolutely no interest in him or his business with me.

'Vaguely, very vaguely. I met her briefly. I hope you haven't come all this way to tell me something about Conceição, because, quite frankly, I wouldn't be very interested.'

'Excuse me.'

'I mean ... I'm sorry, I remember the name, but I don't remember her at all. It has been a pleasure to meet you, but I do have things to do. So, if you don't mind.'

'She is my mother.'

'I see.'

'She dead, died, two years ago.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Of AIDS.'

'I am truly sorry.' I was beginning to long for the return of the supercilious mulberry smile.

'I am, was 19. The compensation pay for me to carry on my study. Is more coffee?' I poured him another cup from the coffee pot.

'Please take your time, I'm going to phone Diana.' I went upstairs to call her in case she was close to arriving home. When I returned to the lounge, Arturo was standing by the kitchen door and examining Guido's poster.

'I am born in April 2022, you know. April 2022 is nine months after July 2021. Do you think I look like your mother? I think I have her nose, but your chin.' And back came the smile.

All the hissing, all the crackling, all the interference vanished. In an instant I was digitally tuned in despite my very best efforts to flounder around on long wave: the man was claiming to be my son. A true 'Eastenders' moment, if ever there was one in my life, only there was no emotion within me to guide my words or actions. Instead, with Arturo's comically alien face staring at me, waiting for some acknowledgement, I fixed on doubt as my way forward. I asked him how he knew I was his father, when Conceição must have slept with other men before and after me. He pulled out a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it over to me. It was a certificate declaring that Arturo Fenn Magalhães was born on 10 April 2022. He said that Conceição had told him it was a question of dates and possibilities, and that there was only one possibility. She would not have put my name on the certificate without being certain that I was the father. And why hadn't she contacted me before now, if only for financial support? Because she did not want my help or involvement. She recognised it had been her mistake, and she had no desire to interfere with my life; also I was far away. And why then had Arturo shown up now? Because he wanted to know his father, and to study in England, and to see Europe. His backpack was at the station, and he didn't have much money.

Naturalmente, I told Arturo he should stay for a few days while we find out more about each other. I insisted, and he agreed without question, that we should take a DNA test as soon as possible. (This proved my paternity. It would be dishonest of me to deny that, in the few tense minutes waiting for the result, I did not entertain a hope that the test would prove negative, and that I would be able to cast out the stranger from my life without remorse.) But, from that mild October day in 43, Arturo became a part of my life and stayed one, intermittently, for more than 35 years until his death in 79. Indeed, through his varied offspring, he remains so, as witnessed by the visit of Maria a couple of weeks ago.

Flora, bless her. She has more life than all the staff (except Chintz) put together. Not long after observing me with Maria in the rose garden, for example, she rattled into my room demanding to know who she was. No sooner had I told her, than she launched into a never-ending eulogy about her own seven great grandchildren. Since then she's been hyperactive, visiting too often and staying too long. I confessed to Chintz this evening that I might have to ask Flora to cross me off her touring list. But Chintz hinted that she was not as fit as she appeared, and that too many others inmates had already shut their doors on her. When Chintz asked if I had any good flicks lined up for viewing, I got out the popcorn (metaphorically speaking) and launched Joaquima's The Last Great Puppet Show, a film based on the 48 Barcelona World Puppet Festival.

***

I suppose, from the standpoint of my emotional response to Arturo, I could have shut the door on him, even though he was my genetic son, not with a slam but with firm and persistent pressure. And yet I didn't, I left it open, wide open. Perhaps if he had arrived before Crystal's death and the guilt and pain I felt about that, I would have been less accommodating. Perhaps not.

Superficially, Diana tried to accept Arturo's presence with reasonable humour, and my invitation for him to stay with good grace. But she was not one to hide her feelings for long. On a near daily basis, I sensed her communicating that she resented his existence, his presence, and his ongoing residence, especially given my frequent absences (abroad on IFSD business). My relationship with Diana was already under strain, and Arturo only served to exacerbate the effects of the distance between us. I did not blame her. She was probably being more tolerant than many a partner might be under such circumstances. On the plus side, Arturo proved a reliable and trustworthy guardian for Guido, relieving logistic and time pressures on Diana and me. He played with Guido more empathetically than either Diana or I could manage. He was polite, and charming, thanking us for meals and the loan of our various vehicles. On the downside, he was chronically untidy, regularly asked for money, and used the house as if it were a hotel. I signed him up for English language lessons. I tried to get him a part-time job in the Mars Bar or similar, but the immigration laws had been made watertight, and only a few quasi-legal enterprises, which never survived long, would risk employing those on tourist visas. By the end of November, his presence was proving too great a strain on our small family.

In early December, I sent him on ahead to London, with all the relevant paperwork, to organise a British passport. He stayed in a cheap hotel. I followed a few days later and the two of us went to my mother's house. By then, Arturo and I had altered the past to make it more palatable for Julie: I had had a holiday romance with Conceição, a student, and she had recently died from cancer. I let Arturo improvise in response to more detailed questions. Over the course of a long weekend, and daily train trips into the capital, I introduced Arturo to various people, not least Harriet and Bronze (that meeting was a gaggle of laughs, though I had forewarned them with a letter) and the Turnbulls.

After Dracula Park, Doug and Miriam Turnbull had never invited me on vacation with them again, but they had remained friends. I was accustomed to dining with them whenever I visited London, initially with Bronze or Crystal until they reached their teenage years, and thereafter on my own. The daughters, Susannah and Lucy, had matured into attractive and active young women. Susannah had gone through an anorexic phase while doing her 16 exams, and Lucy had finished her 18s and was studying at a music college. I guessed they might find Arturo interesting and/or amusing, but Miriam, with the insight of a protective mother, saw danger. She kept our visit short, and brushed aside my suggestion of a meal out or a visit to the cinema.

It was Horace, perversely, who resolved the dilemma of what to do with Arturo. I knew my son wanted to study genetic engineering at a British university the following year, and that, until then, he needed to concentrate full-time or nearly full-time on improving his English, but neither he nor I were clear as to where he should do this. We had discussed various alternatives, but I had hoped that one of my friends, such as Doug Turnbull, would offer to help him settle in London. By the Monday, my last day away (I was due to travel somewhere on Tuesday evening from Amsterdam), I was no nearer deciding what should be done with the boy. I'd arranged to meet Horace at the Houses of Parliament, partly because he had contacted me recently wanting my news, and partly because I thought Arturo might like to be taken inside and shown around by an MP. Arturo had dispensed with the lipstick at my request, but he looked no less alluring. Once inside, and in Horace's hands, so to speak, Arturo piled on the youthful charm. In the guest's Tea Tavern, Horace announced, for I had not known this, that he owned a third storey studio in Camden Town, in addition to the Kensington apartment and the Southampton house. It had been inherited from his parents. They had died within a few years of each other and left Horace and his younger brother Tim several properties which they rented out. A year previously Horace had taken the Camden studio back from an unscrupulous agency, and lent it to a struggling artist. That artist had now gone overseas and the flat was free. True or not, it was Horace's story. Arturo could have it for six months at a nominal rent, he said. I tried to intervene, to thank him, and to say we would discuss the matter and get back to him, but Horace was talking to Arturo, and Arturo was responding with enthusiasm. If I, personally, had any doubts about what Arturo was getting himself into, I did not have any that he thought he knew what he was doing. I can't put my own mind about the matter clearer than that.

Arturo returned with me to Leiden to collect his backpack (and a second bag we gave him to carry the new things he had bought). On the way we discussed finance. I offered to pay the rent and the education fees, but he would need to work to cover his living expenses. Apart from the English lessons, I insisted he enroll in a local college and work towards two university entrance exams. If he passed them with a reasonable grade and achieved a university place, I said, I would pay his fees and cover his accommodation expenses for up to four years.

I hoped life at home would improve with Arturo's departure. For several weeks, it felt as though it had. I made a conscious decision to preserve the Christmas holidays for Diana and Guido (and I paid for Arturo to fly home for two weeks, so as not to feel obliged to invite him to stay again). But, no sooner had the year 44 started than I was travelling again, and working all hours in the run-up to the negotiating session in Mexico (which I have already mentioned). There was a brief respite after Mexico, when Diana, Guido and I managed a week-long holiday on the island of Rhodes in May (which was entirely overshadowed by the news of the terrible earthquake in San Francisco), and a holiday with the Rocard family in Italy during the summer. Then, from the moment I became director of the future policy division in October 44 to the final Djakarta summit in December 47, work took me over completely again. There were a few breaks, such as the one to England in June 45 to Brighton and to Horace's party in Southampton, but they were usually short and rushed.

Diana and I did not have many serious rows, but one argument stands out in my memory. In early February 46, I was labouring 12-14 hours a day in preparation for another negotiating session, this time in Cairo. Diana was working towards a big show in Antwerp. We had our diaries and schedules and Guido-caring responsibilities clearly planned out in advance, as was always necessary whenever Diana was in the final stages of a project. I was due to leave for meetings in Geneva on a Tuesday afternoon. Diana would be working in Antwerp that day and evening but would return by 10pm. Elly, our dependable childminder, would collect Guido from school, take him to her house for supper (where he played with a daughter of Elly's neighbour), then bring him to Oldwijkgaarten, put him to bed and wait for Diana. On Monday afternoon, Elly left a message to say she had contracted a chest infection and would be unable to collect Guido the following day. She was excessively apologetic, as if mindful of the trouble her illness might cause. Diana and I began arguing over who should make the calls to find covering arrangements. Under normal circumstances, Diana would do this. She was more social, she was better on the phone, and she had a much clearer idea of who might be able to help. On this occasion, though, she demanded that I do it, and would not relent. Unkindly, I wondered if she already knew that neither Dominique nor Peter from Guido's co-op (who were usually willing to help out if they could) would be available. Peter's wife, Livia, did assist a little by offering to collect Guido on the Wednesday. I phoned two alternative childminders we had used in the past, but neither of them were free. I contacted other friends, and I even walked round to some of our neighbours in Oldwijkgaarten (which was embarrassing since we did not have that kind of relationship with them). When I returned and told Diana, she was furious and blamed me for not having asked the right people, or for not having asked them in the right way. And she insisted I would have to delay my flight to Geneva until the morning. I said that was impossible because I had important meetings. I suggested it would be much easier for her to come back early from Antwerp than it would be for me to postpone my flight. Although I was annoyed by Diana's lack of logic, and unable to fathom out why she was making such a big issue out of it, I wasn't surprised, since we had had similar niggly arguments on many occasions. This one, though, would not end. Our voices got louder, and we swung from Dutch to English and from English to Dutch. Diana accused me of being a workaholic, of not caring for Guido, of not supporting her in her work, of following the same pattern as I had with Crystal. I defended myself by arrogantly trying to take the moral high ground and implying that my work was more important than hers ­ much, much more important. I called her attitude selfish and egotistical. I might be a workaholic, I admitted, but at least I was working for a worthwhile cause not a vain one.

'Nothing will stop me going to Geneva tomorrow, nothing,' I shouted.

'Don't bother coming back,' she screamed. Never before had either of us let loose a thought that implied there could be an end to our relationship. The argument came to a sudden halt when Guido, in his Oink jamas, came bursting in to ask that we stop shouting, and that we kiss and make up. He was crying and demanded a family cuddle. Diana bundled him up in her arms, and took him back to bed. I went to my office to do the work I should have been doing earlier.

A week later, the play ­ Angelika Stockmann's The Children's Land ­ opened to excellent reviews. Stockmann was certainly one of the best German playwrites of the 21st century. This play, which had been a great success in her home country two years earlier and which had been translated into several other languages including Flemish, helped develop that reputation. Classically structured, and Ibsenesque (or, more accurately, Oakleyesque), it tells the story of the battle for a piece of land, situated in a housing estate dominated by immigrants, earmarked for a children's playground. Unrelentingly, Stockmann strips down the characters of the planners, the developers, the officials, the immigrant campaigners, the religious and altruistic do-gooders and so on to reveal the upper, middle and lower orders of hypocrisy. Only the children are left unblemished.

Given the distance of Antwerp from Leiden, Diana suggested I not accompany her to the opening night, but that we make an evening of it, with Peter and Livia, on the Saturday. Diana's set was impressive. She had managed to create a central waste ground space which cried out for the promised playground. In each scene where adults met to argue with, or bully or bribe, each other for using the plot of land in some other way, there was a symbol of adult recreation (such as a cycle exercise machine, a punch ball, or a carpet golf strip) nearby, while across the stage, a child would be kicking the inevitable tin can or throwing stones.

We did not get back to Leiden till one in the morning, but it was a good night out. It might have been better if, when I opened the programme, I had not seen that Karl, Diana's ex, was listed as the play's director. Peter noticed too, and asked after the man who had been his 'barge neighbour' years earlier. Fortunately, he was not in the theatre that night, thanks, I have no doubt, to Diana's planning. I did not want to think about Karl's reappearance in Diana's life, or why she hadn't told me he was directing the play. Nor did I confront her about the omission, the deceit.

The next day, Guido, Tom's spirit and I, along with the rest of the world's population except Diana, sat glued to the screen watching Minty and Wayne Nolan walk on the surface of the planet Mars. (And, nearly two years later we again united with most of the earth's population to wait tensely for the Martian Seven module to return safely into the earth's atmosphere. As is well known, the craft's power had been exhausted in the last desperate navigational adjustments, and the scientists, with all their billion dollar computer facilities, were unable to predict if the module would burn up or land the orphan brothers safely in the Pacific Ocean. The Nolans ­ what heroes!)

***

Life as a team leader and as deputy director had been a doddle compared to that as director. In one obvious sense, the success of the Next Step and the third expansion of the IFSD was in my hands. It depended on the way I handled the people I met and how I dealt with the paperwork on my desk. The responsibility was on my shoulders. But, when all the wheeling and dealing was done and dusted, I personally made a negligible difference to the 47 Djakarta deal, the Djakarta Settlement as it came to be known. The IFSD board, and in particular its director-general, monitored every significant step we took; and, ultimately, the world's nations decided for themselves how far they were prepared to negotiate on every detail. The plain truth is that by 47 the world was teetering on the edge of a global conflict essentially between the Christian West and the International Islam Brotherhood for Peace (IIBP). The IIBP, already under the influence of Imam Al Zahir, had begun talking about the need for the rich to pay Zakat ­ meaning that the West should be contributing a full 2.5% of their GDP in aid to the developing countries not only 1.5-1.7% (which was approximately what the percentage would be for the top rank richest nations once the Next Step negotiations were concluded and implemented).

By this time, all international negotiations, whether in the UN agencies or at the world group summits, were constrained by the need to keep peace. And the only effective way to keep the peace was for the West to bribe the East, the rich to bribe the poor, especially the Muslim poor. Thus, no-one any longer believed the West would renege on its original offer of a third big increase in overseas development aid, it was more a question of how the aid pie would be sliced up, or, in other words, how much the West would give in to the threatening demands of the Islam nations. The US strongly backed Catholic Latin America and was the most hawkish voice in NATO (by then the umbrella for most of the developed world's armed forces). Japan lobbied for its Far East neighbours, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Europe, as usual, was dominated by doves and tended to take a middle ground, but it also insisted on fair play for all countries, which meant providing the most support to the most needy countries, i.e. those in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which had not yet aligned with the IIBP (thanks largely to the continuing effectiveness of the Ojoru-led African Union).

Last night I showed Jay a panorama photo of all the heads of state at the Djakarta summit. I pointed out a few of the historical names he would recognise, not least Terrance Spoon, the GB Conservative prime minister at the time. Ironically, he was wielding one of the widest smiles (viewable on enlargement). I explained that while the Garth Fuller-led coalitions, between 37 and 45, had actively supported the IFSD and pressed for the Next Step, Spoon, who brought the right wing back into power in 45 thanks to coalition support from the newly formed Christian Faith Party, attempted to stone-wall the European policy (like Lyndquist had done in the mid-30s). This was one instrument in his tool box of policies designed to convince a domestic British audience as to the strength of his commitments on fiscal prudence. I caught a 'so what?' expression on Jay's face, whose disinterest in history has been tested by my anecdotes on many occasions.

So what? In the spring of 46, my friend Horace Merriweather, minister for business in Spoon's government, had taken time out from a busy European tour including The Hague to invite me for lunch at my choice of restaurant. This was a low moment for me personally because of the friction with Diana. Moreover, the IFSD had recently been rocked by the uncovering of various fraudulent activities. None of these, I hasten to add were in my division, but the problems inevitably put a spotlight on the organisation's administration and the size of its bureaucracy rather than on its many excellent works. They also provided ammunition for opponents of the Next Step.

I chose the quiet Indonesian restaurant Lake Toba (which, despite several changes of management, served me well for decades). It proved to be an appropriate venue since Horace's prime motive was not social but to quiz me about the current situation on the Next Step and progress towards the Djakarta summit scheduled for the following year. In particular, he endeavoured to extract information on any vulnerable points in the negotiations which the GB might be able exploit to dilute the financial impact of the Next Step on European countries. This is my interpretation, but when ­ in a teasing light-hearted way ­ I accused him of such deviousness, he protested his innocence with inappropriate vigour. As minister for business, the Next Step negotiations were way off Horace's patch, but Spoon must have decided it would be worth trying to exploit Horace's friendship with me.

Jay showed little interest in this explanation. His thoughts had been diverted. What he really wanted to know was how things had worked out between Horace and Arturo. The honest answer is I never knew, not exactly. Once Arturo had installed himself in Camden Town and his regular allowance was in place, I heard from him less than once a month; and I was generally too busy to respond to his emails, or to enquire further as to his well-being. Besides, my own role in the situation did not bear much scrutiny. If the two of them did engage in a mutually beneficial arrangement, then I, who was paying only a nominal rent to Horace (on his insistence), was, in effect, pimping my own son. I did discuss the situation with Diana on several occasions: when Arturo and I returned from London, and later when Horace's name cropped up in the occasional email from Arturo. Her attitude never varied. They are grown men, she said, let them get on with their lives. This I do know. Arturo lived in Horace's flat not only through to the summer of 44, but for the first six months of his time at Imperial College. It was only a few months before the British general election in 45 that he emailed me a new address, in Kentish Town. Thereafter, Horace's name was never mentioned again. I saw Arturo a couple of times year, when I was visiting London, and once when he came to stay a few nights as part of a holiday round the Benelux countries. I believe he had a fling with Lucy Turnbull, although neither of her parents, Miriam and Doug, ever referred to it. I did not volunteer the information (nor that Arturo might have been sleeping with a Member of Parliament at the same time). In 48, Arturo graduated with a good degree in bio-engineering. He returned to Brazil where he joined a large, but highly secretive, organisation called O Futuro, or, in English, The Future.

As I say, I was only ever an administrator. I oiled wheels to help the political trains run a little more smoothly, and I greased the points to help those same trains avoid collisions. If I personally made any more specific contribution over and above this, it was through the Ojoru mission which I'd undertaken as deputy director. Following the decision in Mexico to widen the mandate, our objective, as first proposed to me by Alfred at Abuja University, took on a life of its own and did in fact become a key element in the Djakarta Settlement. Perhaps I am being too modest. The final documents contained scores of drafting subtleties that, over the years, I had prepared and proposed to the chairmen of negotiating sessions. Then again perhaps I'm not, for they also contained text proposed and discussed and negotiated by thousands of other individuals.

In many ways, the Djakarta Settlement (for the third incremental increase in rich-to-poor overseas aid) was a more advanced agreement than its predecessor, the one fixed at Oslo, which had been modelled on old methods and patterns of aid that had been creaking at the seams for decades. Without getting bogged down in detail, one of the many improvements (to my mind) in the Djakarta deal related to how tightly and directly the donors controlled the purse strings. It became far more difficult than hitherto for nations to tie their aid to trade deals or political considerations (other than a set of clearly stated conditions relating to war, terrorism and human rights). Moreover, it allowed for much more wastage and inefficiency to occur before project funds became blocked and Western-trained troubleshooters were aerohovered in. If I am to claim any other slight influence over the agreement, it must be in relation to this latter aspect. During the 40s, there was a growing body of research and analysis, from the least developed African and Asian nations, which demonstrated clearly how inefficiency, bribery, wastage were cultural norms and could not be eradicated over night, or in one generation or two. By continuing to impose impossibly high standards on project implementation, Western donors and their agents (whether companies or non-governmental organisations) had often acted as the final arbiters over what actions, projects, initiatives the recipient countries needed (as opposed to wanted). And, as a broad generalisation, these actions, projects and initiatives tended to fit well with what expertise or equipment the Western nations wanted to sell, and with their domestic politics. I pressed my staff to be aware of the importance, especially to the most undeveloped nations who often had the least effective negotiators, of this issue; and when it came to preparing drafts for negotiating sessions, I paid special attention to the clarity of the language for certain types of amendments!

After the Djakarta Settlement, it took a year for the IFSD to expand once again. A new director-general, appointed in 48, overhauled the entire structure. The future policy division, which had had less than 100 staff, was disbanded. In 49, I was appointed director of the environment division, one of the top seven posts in the organisation, accounting for over 700 staff employees (400 of them in The Hague), and over 1,000 additional contracted personnel around the world. It was responsible for nearly one quarter of all the IFSD's outgoing funds.

***

And so ­ as a finale for this chapter ­ to Barcelona, May 48, where and when Diana, Guido and I spent a most happy two weeks staying in a large apartment with the Rocard family. Didier Rocard and Diana were old friends having studied for a short while at the same theatre school in Berlin. On returning to Paris, Didier began working as an actor, but his inventive imagination and ability to motivate others soon led him on to directing plays, especially large open air spectaculars. And then, for one reason or another (about which I was never clear), he diverted out of mainstream theatre to run a puppet theatre. At about the same time, he married Helene, a childhood sweetheart from their home town of Arles. To many, including Diana, it had seemed a strange match at the time. Outwardly, Helene, an accountant, appeared far too conventional and harnessed to a world of numbers and business, while Didier was an artistic explorer living in a world constrained only by his imagination and ability to self-promote. By the time I met them, which must have been during my first year with Diana, no-one could doubt the success of the partnership. Their differences and different worlds had not led to them drawing apart, making different friends, having different ambitions (as Diana had expected). The reverse was true, their partnership, their love and friendship, or whatever one might call the rare magic they possessed, had guided them into an exciting and successful venture which lasted more than 20 years: the publication of a series of works called Le Monde Fantastique de Marionnettes. Each 'work', which focused on a particular historical or geographical aspect of puppetry, was 'published' as a largish crafted wooden cube containing a collection of objets d'art: a replica puppet, a lavish book, further miniature puppets, photo-posters, and an uncopiable memory story for a screen show full of texts, camstills and camclips on the particular puppet topic. Initially, the works were published in a single limited edition of 500 and sold for 500 euros, but, for later works the limited editions number rose to 1,000, and the price to 1,000 euros, making each one a million euro enterprise. A few years ago, I saw a Rocard original, not in the best condition, sell in auction for 7,000 euros. Didier designed the packages and employed the artists, and Helene managed the projects, organising the finance, printers and manufacturers. For the first two works, she demonstrated an astute instinct for marketing and promotion. By the third one, though, marketing was no longer necessary since demand had begun to exceed supply (opening the way for other companies to make good money producing similar but lesser products). Diana had three Rocard originals on show in our Oldwijkgaarten house, with the main puppets cleverly self-supported above or in front of the attractive cubes. One of them, the first of the series, Diana had been given in lieu of her help in designing the box; and the other two she had purchased at cost price.

But I digress. In the autumn of 47, Didier had invited Diana to work with him on a large well-funded school project within the framework of the annual World Puppet Festival in Barcelona the following spring. He had been offered a fancy apartment in the old quarter, and, after various on-off discussions, it was agreed that we would all go for a full two weeks (though it would mean our children taking one of them off school). I warned Diana that if the Djakarta summit unexpectedly failed to deliver, and a new one was convened for June, say, I might not be able to take time off. Diana suggested, with a naivety I found both endearing and disturbing, that I make sure it did not fail. I obliged.

There were seven of us in the apartment. The Rocard girls, 19 year old Veronique and ten year old Mireille, took the attic bedroom with its one window view across the roofs of old town Barcelona; nine year old Guido made himself comfortable in a tiny box-room; Helene and Didier took the master bedroom, with an excess of mirrors; and Diana and I had the most charming room, L-shaped and decorated with rococo-light wallpaper, a style we thought had faded out in the 30s. Soon after arriving we decided communally to confine eating to the large kitchen, and project work to the dining room, which left the, thankfully spacious, lounge for, well, lounging, entertaining and entertainment. We used a potpourri of English, French and Dutch to communicate, which was no problem for the five of us adults, but Guido and Mireille had to communicate in pokes, tickles, signs, surprisingly proficient mime and schoolgirl English.

Didier, who made several preliminary visits, arrived a week in advance of the rest of us. Until his show was over at the end of the first week, he worked from dawn to midnight. Diana had been supplying ideas and designs by email, and also contributed her time for the first half of the holiday; only thereafter was she able to relax. Indeed, for the initial week we were all involved in the project to one extent or another. To explain briefly, Didier was using a school and upwards of a 100 children to create what I can only describe as a public hide-and-seek game. It involved giant puppets (twice life-size, each with two children inside) and extraordinary drapes and material/paper creations to transform the school buildings and infrastructure. All three of our children made definite choices to take part for the three days of performances, while Helene and I were more than happy to help out with whatever preparations were required of us. It was a blissfully happy time for me, a make-believe world far, far away from the IFSD and all its tensions and responsibilities. Some evenings (more often when Didier's show was over), we fought our way through crowds along the Ramblas, always finding something new to examine in the artisan stalls displaying puppet-related artefacts, toys and books. Then we would stuff ourselves with paella or tortilla, and drink too much wine before allowing (or not) Veronique to bully one or more of us along to a late night (and by extension vaguely adult) plaza show or pop house or sound/light multiscreen extravaganza.

During the second half of the holiday we formed groups varying in size from two to seven to explore Barcelona and to see as many shows as possible. We were guided so expertly by Didier and Diana that we had the good fortune to be present at live performances of four out of the five shows that featured in the famous film The Last Great Puppet Show. (The film was originally going to be marketed as The Greatest Puppet Show on Earth or similar, but Joaquima changed the titled after the organisation, that had fostered and developed the festival for 15 years, became subject to an ugly commercial takeover. The change in management led to many great puppet groups and theatres boycotting the 49 event; and, thereafter, the festival never recovered its status.)

Didier's Les Géantes Invisibles was one of the five shows immortalised by the film (there is a brief interview with Didier, and Diana is also credited), so was the Raluy Puppet Circus, which had captivated Guido when we first saw it in Amsterdam, and a Czech group's light-work puppets performing The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Most spectacular of all was the Ecuadorian firework puppet theatre which drew tens of thousands of people to the beach for two performances only. This latter came out least well on film. Oddly, when watching the movie with Chintz a few nights ago, she enthused over the one show in five I did not see: The Hollywood Stars and Strippers!. The metre-high string puppets were manipulated traditionally by hand from a team of operators hidden in a lowered ceiling, but each puppet contained one or more semi-camouflaged screens which intermittently showed clips of old entertainments (What the butler saw!, Charlie Chaplin, Blue Toons) all coordinated perfectly with the puppet movements and their stories. Hilarious and exhilarating.

It is thanks to the Catalan, Joaquima Ferrer i Germa, the inspired director of The Last Great Puppet Show, that these magnificent shows have been partially preserved for so long. It is also thanks to Joaquima that I met one of my childhood heroes, the Mexican film director Pam (Pedro Antonio de Malancas) who had made the movie Trumpet Boy. I do not recall why he was in Barcelona, perhaps he was giving a keynote speech, or involved with one of the shows, or on holiday like me. Despite the demands of her filming schedule (although, in fact, large chunks of the movie were not actually shot during the two week festival), Joaquima hosted an illustrious party at her Sant Cugat villa some 30 kilometres from the city. She was a large lady, and larger-than-life, one of Catalunya's most famous socialites. When asked by interviewers how she managed to find time for all her many activities ­ film-making, socialising, media appearances, affairs (being 50 and large had not diminished her appetite for young men) ­ she usually answered with some variant of 'by eating instead of sleeping, and screwing instead of dreaming'.

We were all invited to the party because Joaquima had been working with Didier and Diana at the school filming Les Géantes Invisibles, one of the shows that did have to be filmed during the festival. We all squeezed into Didier's hired Siberian and drove out to Joaquima's villa. It proved to be a fabulous place for the children to explore, with its exhibition rooms, wild gardens and dolphin-shaped pool. And there were many interesting people there. I distinctly remember feeling myself colourless, exotically inadequate. Diana was radiant, a partial theatre celebrity in her own right, dressed in a verdant green silk lounge-gown, and usually at the centre of a mini-crowd. I didn't see Didier and Joaquima for hours, so I assumed they had disappeared to talk business; and Helene was a consummate party animal, as comfortable and relaxed with strangers of any type, as she might be in the bath. I sat down on a bench near the pool to watch the children splashing and screaming. With hardly a movement or a noise, an old man sat down by my side. He must have guessed I wasn't Spanish, for he spoke in English, but with a Latin American-type accent.

'You know the Portuguese word saudades?' He didn't wait for an answer. 'These days, I am full of saudades for the time when my children were young. I watch these ones here ­ are they yours? ­ and I am jealous of their fathers. My youngest boy now is 18. Once I was a god to him, and now he knows everything more than me. Everything. I love him, I love them all, but it was best when they were young. Before then, in the past, they made me feel young, now they make me feel old.'

I pointed out Guido and his girlfriends, and asked the man how many children he had.

'Three wives, three sons and two daughters. All of them a great drain on my resources.'

We sat in silence for a few minutes until an American woman, in her 30s, her bare legs and arms pinked by the sun and/or the wine, rushed over to our bench. She had recognised the man next to me, and wanted to add his autograph to several others she had collected that afternoon. Thus, I discovered the man was none other than Pam. When he had shooed the woman away, in a kindly fashion, I let an aura of peacefulness around us, enhanced somehow by the children's play only a few metres away, return before speaking.

'But you know a good deal about youth and being young yourself. I was ten, my son's age, when I saw Trumpet Boy. No film before or since, spoke to me as that one did.'

'A lucky chance. A constellation of fates. A booming film industry, a producer with more money than sense, a genius writer who later killed himself with drink, a computer graphics team that caught a leading edge of technology and then, despite the film, went spectacularly bust, and a headstrong director with too much fame, too much power and a belief he might do some good.'

'A potent brew.'

'It is not that I stopped wanting to improve things, in the way my mother never stopped trying to improve me ... But, how shall I say this? You know, it is as though whatever I do takes me one step further back, never forward. My steps get bigger, more deliberate, more carefully placed; my shoes get more expensive, but I am always moving back, further back, losing sight of what it is I wanted to do, what I wanted to achieve ... what I wanted to achieve.'

At this moment, Guido came rushing over to me shouting, in Dutch, 'Daddy, Daddy, watch me do a back-flip.' We watched him back-belly-flop into the water, and Veronique stand over him saying, in French, 'not like that you silly boy', and Mireille try and push her sister into the water for being so rude to Guido. Pam then turned to me, as if it had suddenly dawned on him that he was talking to someone in particular. He had a dark weathered, leathery face but, I thought, it was furrowed by too much thinking not weariness, too much action not age. He offered me a large hand and introduced himself, thus allowing me to explain who I was, and why I was there. And, on his enquiry, I told him about my position at the IFSD. This had the unexpected effect of prodding him out of the nostalgic backward-looking mood, if I can put it that way, into an active forward-step seeking mode.

I would be lying if I said I could recall the progress of our subsequent conversation. I like to imagine that the basic idea for United Artists International Forum was mine, but when I attempt to recall the logical progression of our conversation, this does not make any sense. It was Pam who, in the autumn of his life, was seeking fresh and worthwhile endeavours, not me; it was Pam who said he had already been thinking of offering his voluntary services to one of the UN agencies if he could dream up a suitable project; and it was Pam who belonged in the film world, bridging the gap between artists and businessmen, and who must have already discussed a hundred such ideas with a hundred colleagues. But it was me who, very simplistically, wondered why there wasn't some way of using the power of film and other art media (theatre, novels, pop music) ­ which for 50 years or more had created pervasive trends and fashions ­ to teach people certain universal basic ideas, about health, disease, safety, environment, energy use or human rights. It was me who questioned why big name directors had not used their blockbuster films to try and counter the Pearly Way epidemic, for example. And it was me who brought up the subject of broadcast soap operas and how they had been effectively employed, in developed countries as elsewhere, to deliver social messages, and who confessed that, even in my 40s, I could recall powerful episodes of 'Eastenders' dealing with immigration and sex issues.

Somewhere along the way of this conversation, which continued as we walked around the garden to fill our glasses and find the tapas table, we came up with the concept of an independent agency, altruistically funded by wealthy artists, that would exist to provide carefully thought-out and structured opinions on how films, music, painting, theatre, literature could advise human behaviour for the good. We quickly arrived at a possible working arrangement for such an agency, whereby contributors would, in effect, hold a share of votes proportional to their contribution (with a maximum and a minimum), and this board would appoint independent thinkers, with a salary and a three or five year commission to consider how specific art forms could potentially deliver important messages of various types. Some organised internal procedure would lead to final opinions, which would then be published and thus be available for artists, producers, directors and writers to take up and use with confidence if they so wished. In addition, the board could be responsible for setting a general agenda for the types of opinions to be drawn up: defining which sectors should be targeted and in what form, and how detailed or general the message should or could be.

We were deep in conversation when Guido came to tell me that the others were waiting to leave. It was the night of the firework puppets on the beach, and everyone was keen not to miss them. I was disappointed to leave since Pam had become excited and was bursting with enthusiasm and ideas. He took one of my hands and cupped it in both his, and promised me our conversation would lead to a step, a real step forward; and that one day he would be at my door asking for funds. For the best part of two years, he worked like a trojan on the idea that had been conceived that afternoon in Joaquima's garden. As a highly respected elder statesmen of the film industry, he was a man who could open doors and help raise millions for charities simply by endorsing certain ventures. Where Pam led, others were sure to follow, so, when he decided to set up his own charity, there was no shortage of backers and sponsors. But Pam wanted to get the structure right. He took his time, and consulted widely, beyond the frontiers of the movie business into other art sectors. He and I engaged in an extended email dialogue, several long camphone conversations and cam-conferences, before he was ready to ask for IFSD money and support, something which would give the organisation, by then already called United Artists International Forum, credibility on a global scale. Even as, or especially as, environment director, I was not able to wave a wand and support projects simply because they were my personal favourites, however insignificant the requested funding. Nevertheless, there was a channel through which mini-scale finance could be donated to ­ for want of a better word ­ speculative ideas targeted on our main policy goals. And, with my advice, Pam had prepared an excellent proposal detailing the kind of environment-related practices (of interest mostly in the developing countries) that could very easily be propagated in certain kinds of movies. We leaked, to trustworthy journalists (lunch with Bobby Jespersen was always a pleasure), elements of the plan that we thought would play well in the press, and then I took the idea to the IFSD board. To my surprise, the board members loved it. I think they imagined themselves already on the invite list to Hollywood and Bollywood premieres. It did mean, though, that for five years United Artists International Forum (UAIF) (as led by its chairman Pedro Antonio de Malancas) was largely tied down to the elaboration of opinions on sustainable development issues. But, since a surprising number of the UAIF opinions were taken up by screenwriters and directors, sometimes on the level of advertising product placements, and sometimes more integrally in the plot, the IFSD's seed funding clearly demonstrated the principle could be made to work. As with most charitable international organisations, the UAIF went very quiet during the war years. Thereafter, it slowly expanded again, in the movie world and other artistic sectors. Today, the UAIF's status is as high as ever, and its opinions generally attract much art-world and media attention.

Finally, I should mention that Joaquima had a minor role to play in Guido's story. Her film captures a short scene in which two adults remove a large white bull-like costume from over the tops of Guido and Mireille who then move to one side. The adults demonstrate how the upper half cleverly concertinas up and down to hide/reveal the giant's head. At the same time, Guido is turning his face towards the camera. Mireille turns too, but to look at Guido; and then all of a sudden she pecks him on the cheek. An embarrassed Guido grimaces and wipes his face with the back of his hand. Years later, Diana used a large camstill of the cheek-pecking moment, and had it framed for a wedding present.

Inspired, I believe, by our love of Guido, who was as problem-free a child as one could wish for, Diana and I occasionally mulled over the idea of extending our family. With money for the best modern monitoring and caring techniques, determination, and a modicum of luck, Diana could surely have given birth in her late 40s. As time went on, we also considered adopting. But it was not to be.

For years we had sunk into a pattern of occasional love-making, depending largely on whether Diana could be bothered, and whether I felt strong enough in myself to let her be bothered. (How strange that sounds, I'm not sure I can explain it any better. With my own sexual needs easily fulfilled in private, I suppose, I became less and less willing to put myself in the position of being even partially responsible for arousing any desire in Diana that I might not be able to satisfy.) On domestic and social levels, the relationship worked well. Most of the time, I never felt any compulsion to discuss my daily working life: the endless difficulties with people, the intricate policy issues, the political emergencies, the bureaucratic nightmares. In the evenings, it was a relief to fall into the lively and cultured atmosphere of our home, where Diana's world governed. On a social level, there was more democracy: I had learned that if I was not too demanding and kept my requests to a minimum, Diana would, without complaint, accompany me to important formal events. Also, with regard to our friends, who were mostly artistic types, there was rarely any tension. I could natter for hours about the future of Flemish theatre or the importance of Tamson Bunting's collages or the beauty of Gustave Le Gray's 19th century photographs. Besides, although they were largely Diana's friends, many of them were not as religious as Diana about their art, and, if they were, they usually had partners eager to talk about anything other than the theatre.

Without the sexual connection, though, there was a void between us. Occasionally, as I say, we reconnected emotionally, and this had led us two or three times to discuss raising a second child together. This happened for the last time in Barcelona towards the end of the two weeks; but, once back in Leiden, the subject was never raised again.

EXTRACTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE

Crystal Fenn to Kip Fenn

June 2043

Thanks, it was good. Made me feel lots better.

I'm with Donna now, and she's cool. Should be OK.

Looking for a job. Say hi to Guido. x

June 2043

Thanks for the emails. You shook hands with Ojoru; my Dad has met Ojoru. That shines.

Saw Mum yesterday. Shouting. Bronze has done exams and gone to Wales with churchy friends for two weeks. I don't think Mum wanted him to go, so I don't know where he got the money from. You?

No Dad, thanks for offer, I don't want handouts. I start work Monday. Screen work (scream work), data-matching. I'm trying, it's going to be OK.

How's Guido, Diana? x

July 2043

Sorry I've not been writing. I wasn't good. It's the bad things. I wrote them down in a list. And then I wrote down the good things. I can't tell you where I am, and my phone's gone. I went to sleep but Donna woke me up, and ... well I'm OK.

July 2043

Thanks Dad, for the letters and money.

But the problem's in my head. One minute it's like I'm in so much pain, and then it's the world in so much pain, and then me again.

I can't stop any of it.

July 2043

Dad, I'm good, it's going to be OK. I've moved on. I'm not with Donna any more, but Kingston. He's rancid. And ace.

I said I would try and write, you see, and I'm being good.

July 2043

No Dad, I can't tell you where I am. It's good. I'm good. Kingston's kind. (NO, he's not a druggy! Rancid means cool.) He understands about the pain. He listens.

September 2043

Sorry Dad, I'm not good. Can't come to Aunt Julie's. Give a hug from me.

September 2043

Dear Dad, are you here tomorrow. I want to tell you something. I should be OK. I'll wait by the flower stand, outside Paddington Station at 6:00.

September 2043

I don't want any more emails like the last one.

It's a good thing. Don't you see. It's action, not inaction. Kingston's gone, but I'm good.

Don't tell Mum any of our conversation. Please.

Arturo Magalhães to Kip Fenn

January 2044

I am so grateful for the journey home. You are kind man, kind father.

I saw the children of the sister of my mother, and many friends.

I stay in Parati for Ano Novo.

And now I am in Horace's flat. It is very cool. I am so lucky.

Muito obrigado.

March 2044

Thank you for your email. I am studying very hard. Imperial College have agreed to my application, but I must pass the English exam. I am doing an extra exam in English: molecular biology.

At nights, I work in a pub. I like it. English drunk people are funny.

Um embraço.

April 2044

Thank you so much for the money and the e-cartoon from Diana. On my birthday night, I went to a club in the End West (foreigner joke) with friends from my English class (I am good student, top of the class), and last night Horace took me to a very fancy restaurant. He is funny, I like him. Very serious and very English and pompous and very silly. He told me when to watch the screen, and I saw him speak in the House of Commons. Important people are the same as everyone. I like it.

Um embraço for my generous father.

May 2044

Today must be a bad day for you (Crystal's birthday), so I just wanted to say hello, and tell you how grateful I am for all your help.

I am doing well in English. Yesterday I went out with Lucy. She is very sexy girl. I like her.

Um embraço, and remember me to Diana and Guido.

June 2044

Thank you for the card of Colossus. I see my brother is growing up fast. I'll come to visit you for a few days in July, if this is OK. And then I'll go with Lucy for two weeks to Scotland and the Isle of Skye. Would it be too bad to ask my father for some extra holiday money?

Did you know I have a relation (a two cousin) in San Francisco. My aunt tells me he is OK, but it is the same as a war was there. He knew a family crushed. The Americans always appear so invulnerable, don't you think, and this reminds us they are human.

Um embraço.

PS: Horace took me to see Peter Grimes at Covent Garden last weekend. Why are you English people so sad?

October 2044

Congratulations on your promotion. You are the right man for the job.

It is very exciting at Imperial College. So many clever people and professors. I am so happy to be here. And it is all thanks to you.

Um embraço, and one for Guido, tell him he's a dude.

PS: It is one year since you are my father.

February 2045

Apologies, I haven't written for a while, I was very happy to go home at Christmas for beach and sun, but I had a lot to catch up with when I got back.

I must tell something that happened, because I know Horace is your friend. He came round a few nights ago without calling. Usually he calls first. And I was with a girlfriend. He got very angry. I can't stay here much longer.

I'm going to find a pad with some friends, and I will apply for a student loan, to help pay. And then I will work all through the summer.

Um embraço.

February 2045

That is very kind. I am grateful. What would I do without you.

April 2045

Thank you very much for the birthday present. You are a very generous man, a generous father. I am getting accustomed to my pad-mates in Islip Street: one more Brazilian studying genetics; a very tall American girl who wants to create and then marry a bio-robot; and a Portuguese girl who loves to cook for us all and studies music theory. I like it here.

Um embraço.

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Paul K. Lyons

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