It was while commuting homeward on the 11.03 from Moreton-in-Marsh to London Paddington one foggy Monday forenoon in early September that I received on my mobile phone the call that was to change everything. Since the previous December I had been renting a pretty weekend cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Blockley. The cottage, Waterside by name, sat sandwiched between my landlady’s grand house and a lively though apparently unlived-in little stream that could be depended on, in anything approaching a downpour, to overflow its timid banks. I would journey down to Moreton on Friday afternoons – on, by what was for me a delightful windfall of a coincidence, the 4.50 from Paddington (yes, really) – then make the same trip in reverse three days later. My train, in both directions, was invariably late, but seldom long enough to put me to serious inconvenience.*
So there I was, snugly settled in a first-class compartment, reading, with a view to writing an eventual review for theSpectator, a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of Americanwunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves – its title,The Theory of Colonic Irrigation, should tell you all you need to know about the sort of thing it was. Since I was already aware that this was a book destined to be jettisoned as soon as my review had been delivered, I was in the process of pencilling some cramped, crabbed notes in the margins of its own pages when, at the Oxford stop, a single, rather extraordinary passenger boarded my nearly empty compartment. He stood for a minute in the doorway as though searching for a friendly or just a familiar face, then for a reason known only to himself sat down in the seat directly opposite mine.
As long as we tarried in Oxford, I felt an obscure compulsion to keep both my eyes trained on the text in front of me and even forebore, for the duration, from dabbing at my smarting nose – I was on the mend from a protracted head cold – with the third of four paper napkins which I had filched for that purpose from the buffet-bar where I had earlier bought a cup of muddy coffee. (The first two snot-saturated napkins were stuffed away in the clammy depths of my jacket pocket.) At long last the train started to glide out of the station, a plummy Indian voice on the loudspeaker alerted the latest intake of passengers to the sandwiches, pastries and light refreshments available to them, and even if I don’t recall having had the sensation, one I am especially prone to, of being spied upon by some unseen observer, I could no longer resist peeking at my fellow-traveller over the top of the novel, as thick and doughy as a wholemeal loaf, that I held in my hands.
Iwas being spied upon. The man who had sat down opposite me had, I noted uneasily, a livid complexion, a shock of white hair, an unalluring black patch over his left eye which lent him the corny charisma of the Demon King in a provincial pantomime and an unpatched right eye which was staring straight a
