Page 151 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

the clockfaces they saw; she wanted to organize the ruin away. So the

newlyweds had worked at this project together, though he never allowed
anybody to even suggest that she’d been involved, taking all the blame (and
speculation, and, in some quarters, esteem) onto his own shoulders. In court my
father pleaded that he’d thought he was demonstrating good citizenship by
providing a public service free of charge, but was asked why he’d provided this
public service anonymously and at dead of night . . . why work under those

conditions if you believe that what you’re doing is above reproach? And then all
he could say was, Right, I see. When you put it like that it looks bad.
Another thing the law didn’t like: He’d broken into the clock towers, and left
them open to people seeking shelter, attracting all sorts of new elements into
moneyed neighborhoods and driving established elements out into shabbier
neighborhoods so that it was no longer clear what kind of person you were going

to find in any part of the city.
—

MY FATHER got a three-year prison sentence and came out of it mostly in one
piece due to his being a useful person; a sort of live-in handyman. He gained
experience in tackling a variety of interesting technical mishaps that rarely occur
in small households, and now works alongside my mother at a niche hotel in

Cheshire . . . Hotel Glissando, it’s called, and it’s niche in a way that’ll take a
while to describe. Dad’s Chief Maintenance Officer there. He more or less states
his own salary, as the management team (headed by my mother) hasn’t yet found
anyone else willing and able to handle all the things that suddenly need fixing at
Hotel Glissando.
As Frederick Barrandov Junior, there was an expectation that I’d follow in

Frederick Barrandov Senior’s footsteps, that at some point I’d leave my job as a
nursery school teacher and join Hotel Glissando’s maintenance team.
—

A MONTH or so after I’d turned thirty-three I learned that Mum had assured the
hotel’s reclusive millionaire owner that I’d join the team before the year was out.
She broke this news to me over lunch.

“Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked.
My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery.
Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year
it is and why he was even born . . .”