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identify.
    The door rattled suddenly and he turned round, feeling obscurely guilty, as if caught out. But it was only the post, half pushed through the letter box and spilling onto the mat. Through the glass door a square of sunlight illuminated the top envelope, as if marking it for his special attention. Probably junk mail, he told himself. Nowadays he rarely ever received anything else. And yet, by a trick of the light, the envelope seemed to glow, giving the single word stencilled across it a new, brilliant significance: ‘ESCAPE’ . As if a door could be opened from the London dawn into another world, where every possibility remained to be played out. He stooped to pick up the bright rectangle, opened it.
    His first thought was that it was indeed junk mail. A cheaply produced brochure entitled HOLIDAY HIDEAWAYS, GREAT ESCAPES , blurry snapshots of farmhouses and gîtes interspersed with blocks of text. ‘This charming cottage only five miles from Avignon … This large converted farmhouse in its own grounds … This sixteenth-century barn in the heart of the Dordogne …’ The pictures were all the same: rustic cottages under Disney-coloured skies, women in headscarves and white
coiffes
, men in berets herding goats onto impossibly green mountainsides. He dropped the brochure onto the table with an odd sense of disappointment, feeling cheated, as if something as yet unknown had passed him by. Then he caught sight of the picture. The brochure had fallen open at the centre page, a double-page spread of a house which lookedcuriously familiar. A large square-built house, with pinkish, faded walls and a red-tiled roof. Beneath it, the words, ‘Château Foudouin, Lot-et-Garonne.’ Above it, in red, like a neon marker, ‘ FOR SALE’ .
    The surprise at seeing it there, so unexpectedly, made his heart lurch. A sign, he told himself. Coming now, at this moment, it had to be. It had to be a sign.
    He looked at the picture for a long time. It was not exactly Joe’s château, he decided after some scrutiny. The lines of the building looked slightly different, the roof more sloping, the windows narrower and set deeper into the stone. And it was not in Bordeaux but in the next county altogether, a few miles from Agen, on a small offshoot of the river Garonne, the Tannes. Still, it was close. Very close. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
    Below stairs the strangers had subsided into eerie, expectant silence. Not a whisper, not a rattle or a hiss escaped them.
    Jay looked at the picture intently. Above it the neon sign flashed relentlessly, enticingly.
    FOR SALE .
    He reached for the bottle and poured himself another glass.

6
Pog Hill, July 1975
    THAT SUMMER MOST OF JAY’S LIFE WENT ON UNDERCOVER, LIKE a secret war. On rainy days he sat in his room and read the
Dandy
or the
Eagle
and listened to the radio with the volume turned right down, pretending he was doing homework, or wrote blisteringly intense short stories with titles like ‘Flesh-Eating Warriors of the Forbidden City’ or ‘The Man who Chased the Lightning’.
    He was never short of money. On Sundays he earned twenty pee washing his grandfather’s green Austin, the same for mowing the lawn. His parents’ brief, infrequent letters were invariably accompanied by a postal order, and he spent this unaccustomed wealth with gleeful, gloating defiance. Comics, bubble gum, cigarettes if he could get them; anything which might have incurred the disapproval of his parents attracted him. He kept his treasures in a biscuit tin by the canal, telling his grandparents he put his money in the bank. Technically this was not a lie. A loose stone by the remains of the old lock, worked carefully free, left a space maybe fifteen inches square, into which the tin could be slotted. A square of turf, cut from the banking with a penknife, concealed the entrance. For the first fortnight of the holiday he went there almost every day,basking on the flat stones of the jetty and smoking,