So I finally – kind of – get it.  You, as a teenage boy, freed a few weeks from your London school to visit family, that August cauldron of a valley village, its fig trees and groves, the huddled noon-white stucco, seeing the old men with their black jackets and hats, or in pristine white of workman’s vests, sucking the drooping cigar, the smoke puffed sideways, sitting backwards, ever backwards, on wicker-seated chairs, leaning hard on the chair-back, ignoring the damp rag of the dog dropped darkly threadbare at their feet, one asleep, the other on guard, watching with nonchalant intensity whatever happens to pass the half-open gate, as if they found themselves the only person at a failing play, an audience of one to a world’s poor production – and you’d raise a hand as you pass, as though you’d authored that play, raise it without conviction, saluting this distant relative you never spoke to, this greyed commander of blistering shade… and, yes, maybe at last, pushing seventy in an August London suburb on a nondescript Sunday, you do almost get it.  That man you might so easily have been if the war hadn’t shattered your parents’ covenant with the land, scattering bloodlines across Europe to reinvent you, not him, him the one now left behind, pushing seventy, can’t walk far, no interest in the neighbouring metropolis, never been to gallery or museum, nothing there but a deeper kind of tedium, unworldly women, unjustified expense; so you sit here, this near-miss you, backward in your chair in self-justifying shade of a fig, a tree ...