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He pulled out his watch, snapped it open, leaned forward to study it in the dim light reflected from the road, and shook his head. “You can’t do seventeen miles in thirty-one minutes,” he shouted.

I laughed. “I can. She’ll go up to fifty if I let her out.”

He went fumbling round the back of his seat as the great car pitched and dithered. “Have an apple,” he said, and held one out to me. “What’s she doing now?”

I peered at the square box of the speedometer, but it was too dark to see the flickering needle. “I bet we were doing forty-five along that straight,” I said, crunched my teeth into the apple, and dropped it on my lap to clutch the jerking wheel before we left the road. And as I drove I can remember that the scent of apples rose all around me in the draughty stuffiness beneath the hood.

I don’t know what time it was when we drew up before the new motor garage in Longwall Street, but I remember chucking the sovereign to Jardine for him to catch as we stood upon the pavement waiting for the young manager to come and open up. In that place there was a light in the offices upstairs to all hours of the night. I think he used to design cars up there by night after the work of the garage was over for the day; I remember going up there one night when I was late and drinking coffee with him and listening as he told me of the cars he had in mind to build. Cars for everybody; the cars of a dream. He was very lean and restless; he brushed his hair straight back from his forehead and he worked all night.