I did not know, at the time, what was being said above me.
I know it now. I have the whole conversation, word for word, because Steven told me, years later, at a very long dinner, with a great many gestures and a bowl of soup that went cold. He tells it better than I could. He does all the voices.
I will give it to you the way he does.
* * *
"Master," said Steven, "with the greatest respect, I think this is a very bad idea."
He was standing on the pavement above the drain with his hands pressed together in front of him, which is what he does when he is nervous. Steven is twenty-six, with a long neck, thin wrists and the permanently startled look of a heron that has been handed a spreadsheet. He is the personal assistant to the chairman of the Wilson Group of Companies. He has worked for him for four years. In that time, he has been shouted at twice, praised once and asked to carry a live chicken on a plane.
He would die for the man. He just does not enjoy it.
"Why a bad idea?" said the chairman.
"Because we are here in disguise."
"I am aware."
"For the field inspection."
"I am also aware."
"We are supposed to be two ordinary civil servants, visiting County A to check the proposed site for next year's regional development project, Master, and not be recognised. That is the entire plan. We have worn the cheap shirts. We have refused the car. I have not even been permitted to carry a pen with the company logo." Steven's voice cracked. "And now you wish to speak to a street child."
"He returned my wallet."
"People return wallets, sir. It is a common practice among the honest."
"He returned it clean," said Martin Wilson.
Steven blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"He wiped it. With his sleeve. Before handing it to me." The chairman was watching the boy in the drain, who had put his head on his knees. "A boy who is starving, in a gutter, wipes the dust off a stranger's wallet because it seems rude to give it back dirty. Do you know how many people of my acquaintance would do that?"
"Not many."
"None," said Martin. "I have counted."
* * *
Now, I must tell you a little about Martin Wilson, because you will want to know what sort of person he is.
He is fifty-one years old. He is the chairman and chief executive of the Wilson Group, which owns property, shipping, farms, hotels, power stations and about eleven per cent of everything in County V, and a decent portion of the rest of the world. He has been on the cover of magazines. He has met three presidents and refused to have dinner with two of them. He is known in business circles for a calm, level voice, a ferocious memory and a remarkable talent for staying exactly where he is until the other person blinks.
He is also, privately, one of the loneliest men Steven has ever met.
Steven would not say that to anyone. But he had seen it, many times, in small, odd ways. The way the chairman sat at the head of a very long table at dinner, looking at the empty chairs beside him. The way he stopped, in hotel corridors, in front of children's drawings on the wall. The way, whenever he passed a street where a boy and a father were walking together, he turned his head, just slightly, and watched them to the corner.
Martin Wilson does not have a family. At least, he does not have one that speaks to him.
He is a widower. His wife, Eleanor, died eleven years ago, of an illness that came quietly and left quickly. They had no children. His father died long before that. His mother, an old woman, lives behind the walls of the family house in County V and rarely speaks of anything. His only other close relative, a younger brother, vanished from the Wilson house more than a dozen years ago, under circumstances that nobody in the family is permitted to discuss.
Steven knows only that there was a quarrel. That it was very bad. That Martin's mother, the old Madam Wilson, had taken to her room afterwards and not come out for a month. That the brother's name had been struck from the family register, the portrait taken from the hall, and the whole affair put away in a locked drawer like a bad memory.
That was all.
But Steven also knew that every year, on one particular date, the chairman cancelled all his appointments and drove alone to the coast, where he stood on a particular beach and looked out at the sea.
He did not talk about it. Steven did not ask.
* * *
"Master," said Steven, carefully, "may I say something?"
"You always do."
"The boy looks nothing like a Wilson, sir."
There was a silence. It was not a long one. But it was cold.
"I did not say he did."
"No, sir. But I could see you looking at his eyes."
Martin turned his head, slowly, and regarded his assistant. Steven braced himself. He had seen that look before. It was usually followed by a request for a spreadsheet he did not have.
"They are grey," said Martin.
"Many people have grey eyes, Master."
"Not that grey."
"There is more than one shade of grey."
"Steven." The chairman's voice was very quiet. "You are a good man. You are loyal. You are also, from time to time, a coward. And I would like you to consider, for one moment, whether you would prefer to be a careful coward or a useful one."
Steven opened his mouth. He shut it. He thought about the chicken on the plane.
"A useful one, sir," he said.
"Thank you."
"May I at least suggest we keep the conversation brief?"
"We will see."
"And that we do not mention the name?"
"I would not dream of it."
"And that you do not, under any circumstances, offer him money, because the last time you tried to be kind to a stranger, sir, you gave a waiter a car."
"It was an old car."
"It was a Bentley."
"It was very old."
Steven closed his eyes. He prayed briefly to a number of gods. Then he looked down at the boy again, small, dark and crumpled on the edge of the drain, and for the first time that day he felt something odd twist in his chest.
He doesn't look like a street boy.
He did not look like anything Steven could name. He sat very still, in a way that was not defeated but patient, with his knees drawn up and his back straight. He was filthy. He was thin. But his hands lay quietly on his knees, and when he raised his head, there was nothing in his face that Steven could recognise as shame.
He looks like somebody who has decided not to break, thought Steven.
It's unnatural in a child.
* * *
"Very well," said Steven, aloud, with a sigh that came from the bottom of his shoes. "But I am going to say for the record that this is meddling."
"I would call it curiosity."
"They are the same thing, Master, with different hats."
"Then let it be curiosity in a good hat." The chairman stepped to the edge of the pavement. The sun caught the silver in his hair. "Come, Steven. Let us go and be kind to a child."
"I shall be hostile to him," said Steven darkly. "For safety."
"I know you will."
"I'll be very rude."
"I rely on it."
They went down the steps together, the tall man and the thin one, into the shade of the bus stop.
And in the drain, a small boy lifted his head, and looked up at two strangers who had come to change his life, and said, in a voice as polite and flat as a closed door:
"Good afternoon. Are you lost?"
Steven says that was the moment he knew.
He does not say what he knew. He only smiles, when he tells it, and looks at his soup, and changes the subject to the chicken.