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was closer to his mother than he had ever been. I belong to them, he thought; only to them. Thinkingit over, his concern over his lost, forgotten first years took the shape of a sort of disloyalty. As he sat by the bed, or in the dreary hospital waiting-room, it became something he was ashamed of. Having felt guilty of funking the challenge of 17 Farrow Street, Simon now felt guilty about even wanting to know the truth about his origins.
    Perhaps that over-developed capacity for guilt was in itself a clue to his past.

CHAPTER 4
    T hough Simon Cutheridge went often enough through Paddington Station in the years that followed, he did not return to the Paddington area, or to the house that he knew had once been his home, until the spring of 1964. This was shortly after the break-up of his marriage.
    The marriage had been one of these modern affairs where the two partners believe they know everything there is to know about the other before they get to the altar or the Registrar’s desk, and find out soon after that they don’t. Simon had met Ruth, his wife, in his last year at Oxford, had lived with her off and on during his Research Studentship at Leeds. Then they had got married, and things had begun almost at once to go wrong. The baby girl that was born did not perform that miracle of cementing the marriage which is so often expected of babies. When she died of pneumonia at ten months the marriage headed rapidly for collapse. The random acrimony and the flare-ups into full-scale rows were now unalleviated by any warmth of reconciliation. ‘You’re just not here half the time,’ Ruth had said, during one of the bitterest of their rows. ‘Perhaps it’s because you don’t know who you are.’ Both of them soon realized it could only end one way. Simon took the Tom Lehrer records and the Beechams, Ruth—the Beatles and the Karajans, and they split up without regrets, and almost without rancour. I was spoilt by the Cutheridges, thought Simon wearily. I’ll never think relationships are easy again.
    In spite of the ease and friendliness of the break, and in spite of the insouciance with which liberated young people at thetime were supposed to regard a marriage break-up, it was a shattering experience for Simon. It somehow seemed a betrayal of all those years of warmth and fortressed domesticity at Yeasdon. His first instinct was to get away from the town, the job he associated with his marriage, and the friends who had watched it empty itself of meaning month by month. He applied for a position on the staff of the London Zoo.
    The governors and officials at the Zoo were cautious, conservative and thorough: new members of their scientific staff were not engaged lightly. Four of the best applicants had their fares paid to London, with two nights at a hotel, so that they could be seen, sized up, and interviewed to the point of grilling. Their suitability (though this was never put into words) had to be established from a social and personal point of view, as well as from a scientific one. On the afternoon of the second day Simon was given a strong hint that the job was his if he wanted it.
    The first thing he did was to ring his mother and father.
    â€˜I’ll be able to get down more now,’ he said.
    â€˜It’s about time something good happened to you,’ said his mother. ‘Perhaps you’re in for a lucky spell now.’
    Simon had thought of the move to London more in the light of a clean break than as the beginning of a run of luck. But his mother—was it the remnant of some peasant superstition?—believed that luck, good and bad, went in cycles, and nothing in Simon’s life so far had contradicted that belief. When he had rung off, he had to decide what to do with his evening.
    He could hardly celebrate in any obvious fashion, even had he a mind to. He was in the same hotel as the three other applicants interviewed, and the broad hint had been given