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that.’
    ‘Yeah. I mean, Bo looks so much like you, but he doesn’t have your genes.’
    ‘Oh. Yes. I guess I never looked at it that way.’
    I’d planned to run through a pile of proofs this morning, but I get out the box of photos instead. There’s one of Monika and Robbert. It was taken at a party at our
house on the Ceintuurbaan. They’re holding up their glasses in a toast. Robbert is grinning at the camera. Monika is smiling her Monika smile: restrained, but with that cynical little
something. (There were people who hated her for that smile, but those people couldn’t see the pain behind it.)
    Could he be the one? Robbert? No, couldn’t be. Couldn’t it be? Bo doesn’t look like him at all. Well, except for the colour of his hair. Where might Robbert be these days? What
would a law-school dropout be doing for a living? Running a consultancy? Doing a little day-trading? Would he still be living in Amsterdam? I haven’t seen him for years. I pick up the phone
book.
Haakman, Humadi, Huisman, Hueber.
    Hubeek, H.J.M., attorney
– impossible.
    Hubeek, R.P.F.
– damn, that’s right. ‘The Reformed Political Federation called for you,’ I used to say to Monika whenever I’d had Robbert on the line.
‘Is Monika there?’ were the only words he ever spoke. He never asked how I was doing, or about Bo, but that seemed only logical to me. He didn’t like me, and the feeling was
mutual. On the few occasions Monika went out with him while we were together, she came back with stories about how narrow-minded he was, what an enormous stick-in-the-mud. He came to our house only
once, for that party. We shook hands. He wasn’t at the funeral. I can’t remember whether he received a funeral announcement.
    Hubeek, R.P.F. I jot down the address and telephone number in the back of my pocket diary. From the looks of things, he’s gone up-market.
    ‘Do you think it could have been somebody at Small World?’ I ask Ellen that evening.
    ‘Of course not.’
    ‘What do you mean, “Of course not?”’
    ‘You tell me what kind of men worked there.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You had Chris Verhoeven. He was a fag. Then you had Chris Winters. He wasn’t Monika’s type at all.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘The kind who wears slip-on trainers and trousers with an elastic waistband. A single family dwelling in Almere with no family.’
    ‘And who else?’
    ‘Who else? Well . . . well, there was Niko.’
    ‘Exactly.’ I remembered Niko. The tour guide. Pale face. Straight, dark hair. Dark eyes. A little tatty. The kind of guy who made other men wonder why so many women fell for him.
Couples who booked a tour with Small World in order to save their relationship were better off not ending up in Niko’s group.
    ‘Niko’s destroyed a lot of marriages,’ Monika said when she introduced me to him at an office party. (The same party where I first met Ellen. ‘This is Ellen,’
Monika said. ‘If I ever leave you for anyone, it’ll be for her.’)
    ‘Impossible,’ Ellen says. ‘I would have noticed. I had a crush on him myself back then, remember?’
    ‘That’s exactly it. It would explain why she didn’t tell you.’
    ‘Armin, Armin, stop it. You’re driving yourself crazy.’
    ‘No I’m not. I’m doing everything I can to stop myself going crazy.’
    I’ve written Niko’s name in the back of my pocket diary, too. Under Robbert’s. Ellen has no idea where Niko lives these days, or what he does. But I’ll
find out: Neerinckx, written with a ckx at the end. There can’t be too many of those in Holland.

10
    T he first words a child learns are, I believe, the most important ones in his life.
    It’s better for a kid to learn ‘monkey’, ‘nut’, ‘kitten’, ‘fire’ and ‘peanut butter sandwich’ than it is ‘Atari’,
‘Nintendo’, ‘Teletubby’ or ‘My First Sony’. Better yet if he learns ‘sparrow’, ‘titmouse’, ‘blackbird’, ‘magpie’,
‘redwing’. Or ‘love’,