It was a claim which Blanchaille dismissed out of hand. And a short angry conversation was conducted between the two men in whispers which the matron pretended not to hear.

‘Perhaps you were mistaken. It’s the light. There were a lot of people in here. It could not have been Ferreira.’

‘I tell you it was.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What do you mean — how do I know? Of course I know! I know Ferreira. As well as you do. I’m telling you it was him!’

It clearly excited and delighted Kipsel to think he’d spotted his friend. The implications were astonishing! If Ferreira was here then why not others? Why not Father Lynch (only to be expected, surely?), Mickey the Poet, Van Vuuren? Or any of those who had gone before.

The possibility excited Blanchaille too. If Kipsel had been right then they would find their friends here. Now a second realisation occurred to him which he preferred not to contemplate, which he put out of his mind almost as soon as it had made its insidious, chilling entry. For if Ferreira was here it told them something about themselves which Kipsel hadn’t thought of yet. Because the point about Ferreira which really alarmed was not that Ferreira was there — but that Ferreira was dead.

Despite the implication of this he couldn’t stop himself from scrutinising with ever great intensity the faces of his fellow diners.

‘You are perhaps looking for somebody?’ the matron asked.

Blanchaille nodded. ‘A friend. A friend I knew once.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find many of your friends here.’

‘Her name was Miranda, I knew her some years ago. She — she went away. Do you know if she’s here?’

Matron blew jets of steely smoke from her nostrils. ‘Regret I can’t answer. I’m not at liberty to disclose the names of our patients. That’s up to them. Rights of privacy are paramount in our little community. It’s up to people themselves to decide whether they want to be known, or whether they want us to know who they are. And if they do, they tell us their story. In fact it’s very often by telling us their story that we find out who they are and they find out why they’re here.’

Then I heard Kipsel ask Matron a question which went to the heart of the mystery. ‘Where did Kruger hide the gold he brought with him?’

On this subject she was forthcoming. ‘Oh yes, the gold. Do you remember the scenes you so often enacted, where you played the old President in the railway saloon waiting to be taken to the coast and the ship which was to carry him off into exile? Well most conveniently he had with him a number of Bibles. They were big family Bibles. Very heavy. Each capable, I suppose, of holding a few pounds of gold — once the pages had been removed of course.’

Kipsel shook his head incredulously. ‘He would never have done that! Never! Not in the Bibles.’

‘Why not?’

But Kipsel would not bandy words, simply shouted, red in the face, ‘Not in the books!’

She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. You see for him the gold was no longer money, treasure. It was his sacred trust. He wasn’t stealing it. As far as he was concerned he was safeguarding it. And where better to do so than God’s holy book? Nobody would have thought of looking there, nobody would have thought of searching an old man’s Bibles. Of course many realised that the gold had gone. The British knew it had gone. And when he was out at sea, on board the man-of-war, the Gelderland, a curious incident occurred. As they steamed between Cairo and Corsica five British men-of-war were sighted and they gave every impression of being about to attack. Certainly the Dutch captain thought so. He prepared to fight. But at the last moment the British ships turned away. The story is that somebody big in London decided to let it go. Perhaps even Chamberlain himself. They called it off at the last moment. It wasn’t worth an international incident. It would have looked like the worst sort of bullying. “Let the old man have his few dubloons which he’s tucked into his socks,” Chamberlain is supposed to have said.’

‘So he got his millions after all?’ Kipsel asked.

‘Not exactly. The amount has been grossly exaggerated. He collected a few hundred thousand in total when the gold was sold but hardly the fortune of myth and popular imagination. I hate to spoil a good story but the money didn’t amount to that much. Not even with the sums flowing into the house at Clarens from Boer sympathisers and charities from all over the world. But it was enough for him to do what he had to do. Enough for him to buy this place. And remember he was a man of simple faith. He believed that once he had the place, the funds to keep it going would follow. And he was right.’

Blanchaille said softly, ‘Then there never were any Kruger millions.’

She looked at him now, and she laughed, broad and rich. ‘Oh yes, there were Kruger millions all right. Just that they weren’t the sort you think. You see, we are the Kruger millions.’

And then I saw the whole company of diners stand up and quite spontaneously sing several verses of the National Anthem; after which I watched the Happies going around drawing the curtains of the great dining-room with its living fountain and its lost souls and I wished, as the curtains closed one by one, that I too was inside with that strange company of story tellers before I woke from my dream to find myself, as of course I knew I would find myself, alone in Father Lynch’s ruined garden beneath the Tree of Paradise waiting for the earth movers to close in.

Perhaps one last thing should be added. Unknown to Blanchaille and Kipsel, a traveller arrived at the big wrought-iron gates and was met by the gardener. Looksmart Dladla produced his slip of paper ceding him the strip of land for his new colony in Southern Africa. The gardener took his piece of paper and asked as well for Looksmart’s passport, and his pass, and his book of life, documents which contain between them every single item of information about what are often otherwise quite unremarkable existences. Looksmart innocently handed these over, explaining to the gardener that he wished to enter and make a short address to the inhabitants of Bad Kruger. Asking him to wait, and promising him speedy attention, the gardener made a telephone call while Looksmart confidently anticipated admission and ran through the speech he had prepared.

But instead, clattering out of the sky came a police helicopter and Looksmart was arrested. For what was he in the cold light of day but an illegal immigrant, a black man without papers of any sort, a refugee from justice, an African lunatic abroad on Swiss soil, a man suspected of a variety of currency offences, a man who gibbered incomprehensibly of freedom and liberation. The lips of the policemen tightened when they heard this tirade.

I saw Looksmart frog-marched to the helicopter and watched as the machine took off and headed down the mountain. And then I knew that poor Looksmart though he had read Jefferson the philosopher of the American revolution, and Franklin and others, was beyond saving. He had fallen into the extraordinary delusion that given energy, ingenuity, bravery and just a modicum of goodwill, a people of sufficient determination can survive and prosper, even in South Africa. And as I saw him turned away from the gates of Uncle Paul’s great white location in the sky, expelled from the sacred Alp, I realised that it’s a long way down at the best of times and that the pit may wait at the end of the American rainbow, or open beneath the feet in some seeming Swiss paradise just as surely as it does in the city of destruction where I was born.