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element, fled into the car, and said, "We're going to see Mr Taads, Jaap."
    The car tore away. She had nothing to do all day — this too had dawned on him only later — yet did it with the greatest possible speed. In his innocence he still thought that her excitement was perhaps caused by certain mysterious chemical processes somewhere in that white, slightly bloated body, as if a saucepan full of her blood was constantly on the boil on an internal stove. Blotches of different colours appeared and disappeared on the skin of her face and neck, and if she had not regularly heaved one of her big sighs, she would surely have exploded.
    What was a Wintrop? he wondered, for she kept talking about that.
    "All Wintrops are mad, wicked, vain, they lack discipline, they live in confusion, they are constantly getting divorced. They treat their wives like cattle and yet these women remain in love with them, they are on the wrong side in the war or they make money out of it, they are crafty in business, but they gamble their money away or throw it in the air, and they'll sell one another for a few pence. Did you ever know your father?"
    She did not wait for his answer.
    "You were christened, did you know that? My brother was a resistance hero, an exception in this highly principled family. The same cannot be said of your father. He had no idea how to handle money. Women, that was all he knew anything about. Do you still go to church?"
    To this at least he was able to answer.
    "No."
    "Jaap, stop here a moment."
    The white Lincoln shot up on the kerb, narrowly missing a cyclist. She looked straight at him. Blue eyes, like his. Watery but with a steel bottom. With her finger she pointed roughly to where his heart must be.
    "The Wintrops are a Catholic family. A Catholic Brabant family. The only one of your father's brothers who has remained in the church is the one who has all the money. Your father, your Uncle Jos, your Uncle Noud, your Uncle Pierre, your Aunt Claire, they're all either dead or they're on their uppers. You have nothing apart from what you may get from your grandmother one day. They all left the church, chasing after some skirt. You think about that."
    Within a minute they were doing over seventy again.
    The trip, it turned out, took them to the village of Doom. But not only to Doom. If there existed a map of the underworld, of the world of shadows, then Doom lay at its entrance. For this drive to Doom was a drive to his family's past, to bygone names and people, to the Tilburg of the turn of the century, to woolen textiles, to agencies, to manufacturers. Her accent broadened. The Tilburg dialect must be the ugliest in the Netherlands. He listened to her tales and stored them in his mind. Later he would think about them. Later.
    "Your mother was never received by us. You know why?"
    "She told me." So that was what the accent reminded him of: his mother when she was agitated. So in Tilburg the common people and the bourgeoisie spoke alike.
    "Do you still see her?"
    "Never. She doesn't live in Europe."
    Three weeks after marrying the daughter of a French business connection, his father had run off with his mother. Which the family had regarded as worse, the mortal sin or the misalliance, could not be ascertained. They had forgotten his father afterwards, but with the kind of forgetfulness whereby you forget what you have forgotten. The glove you left on a train, of which you never think again. He knew the whole story, but it had never been of any significance. A future girlfriend would say to him one day, "I was never born, I was founded", and he had recognized this. His father had been in the underworld since 1944, and his death had cut Inni out of the family twice over. He knew hardly any of his relations. He did not belong anywhere, and this suited him splendidly. He was alone. He did not know what it was, to have relations.
    "Your grandfather Wintrop and my father were half-brothers. My father is your