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scowled. “Dreams, right? Things you see when you’re asleep, things you hear? Don’t
write them down
, but remember them. One day Theodora will ask you about them.”
    “Yes, sir. I will, sir.” Andrew was simply postponing the effort of trying to imagine some no doubt frightening-looking woman namedTheodora interrogating him about his dreams at some future date.
    “Good lad. When is your birthday?”
    “January the sixth, sir.”
    “And why the hell shouldn’t it be, eh? Sorry. Good. Your mother has done very well in these seven years. Do as she tells you.” He waved his hand, suddenly looking very tired. “Go and get something to eat now, and then go home to your Cotswolds. And don’t—
worry
, about anything, understand? You’re on our rolls.”
    “Yes, sir. Uh—thank you, sir.”
    Andrew and his mother had been abruptly led out then, and the black-haired man had taken them down to a narrow dark lunchroom or employees’ bar on the seventh floor, and simply left them there, after telling them that their meal would be paid for by the Crown. Andrew managed to get down a ham sandwich and a glass of ginger beer, and he had guessed that he shouldn’t talk about the affairs of this place while he was still in it. Even on the drive home, though, his mother had parried his questions with evasions, and assurances that he’d be told everything one day, and that she didn’t know very much about it all herself; and when he had finally asked which of those men had been his godfather, she had hesitated.
    “The man who led us in,” she’d said finally, “was the one who… well, the wooden-legged chap—you saw that it was an artificial limb, didn’t you, that he stabbed himself in?—he took the…” Then she had sighed, not taking her eyes off the already shadow-streaked road that led toward Oxford and eventually, beyond that, home. “Well, it’s the whole service, really, I suppose.”
    On our rolls.
    Shortly after the visit to London his mother had begun receiving checks from an obscure City bank called Drummond’s. They had not been accompanied by any invoices or memoranda, and she had let her father believe that the money was belated payment from Andrew’s delinquent father, but Andrew had known that it was from “the Crown”—and sometimes when he’d been alone on the windy hill below the Broadway Tower he had tried to imagine what sort of services it might prove to be payment for.
    Remember your dreams.
    In his dreams, especially right at the end of the year and during the first nights of 1930, he sometimes found himself standing alone in a desert by moonlight; and always the whole landscape had been spinning, silently, while he tried to measure the angle of the horizon with some kind of swiveling telescope on a tripod. Once in the dream he had looked up, and been awakened in a jolt of vertigo by the sight of the stars spinning too. For a few minutes after he woke from these dreams he couldn’t think in words, only in moods and images of desert vistas he had never seen; and though he knew—as if it were something exotic!—that he was a human being living in this house, sometimes he wasn’t sure whether he was the old grandfather, or the ex-nun mother, or the little boy who slept in the wooden box.
    He always felt that he should go to Confession after having one of these dreams, though he never did; he was sure that if he could somehow manage to convey to the priest the true nature of these dreams, which he didn’t even know himself, the priest would excommunicate him and call for an exorcist.
    And he had begun to get unsolicited subscriptions to magazines about amateur radio and wireless telegraphy. He tried to read them but wasn’t able to make much sense of all the talk of enameled wire, loose couplers, regenerative receivers, and Brandes phones; he would have canceled the subscriptions if he had not remembered the one-legged old man’s question—
Are you interested in radio, lad?
—and