“Being his real brother I could feel I live in his shadows, but I never have and I do not now. I live in his glow.”

“My Albert married his Maisie Brown as he said he would. But I think she never took to me, nor I to her for that matter. Perhaps it was a feeling of mutual jealousy.”

“But try as I might, I never got to eat any of her pastries, and do you know, she never even offered me one.”

“One evening, after he’d read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t it ever stop?’ he said. ‘I can mind Father telling that there’d be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What’s the good in reading, if that’s all there is to read about?”

“I should begin at the beginning. I know that. But the trouble is that I don’t know the beginning. I wish I did. I do know my name, Arthur Hobhouse. Arthur Hobhouse had a beginning, that’s for certain. I had a father and a mother too, but God only knows who they were, and maybe even he doesn’t know for sure. I mean, God can’t be looking everywhere all at once, can he? So where the name Arthur Hobhouse comes from and who gave it to me I have no idea. I don’t even know if it’s my real name. I don’t know the date and place of my birth either, only that it was probably in Bermondsey, London, sometime in about 1940.”

“When I think of Tomodachi, I think of your mother. Your mother, she too lose her baby. She lose you. That very sad thing for her. Maybe she come looking, and she not find you. You not there when she come. She think you dead for ever. But she see you in her mind. Now as I speak maybe she see you in her mind. You always there. I know. I have son too. I have Michiya. He always in my head. Like Kimi. They dead for sure, but they in my head. They in my head forever.”

“There's a mouse in here with me. He's sitting there in the light of the lamp, looking up at me. He seems as surprised to see me as I am to see him. There he goes. I can hear him still, scurrying about somewhere under the hayrick. I think he's gone now. I hope he comes back. I miss him already.”