Mixed messages, my neighbour continued, as we approached the cove and started to slow down, were a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life: his own brother, the one who had died a few years ago, a dear and generous person, suffered his fatal heart attack while waiting for a friend to come to lunch. He had given the man – who happened, moreover, to be a doctor – the wrong address, for he had just moved into a new apartment and hadn’t yet memorised the full details, and so while his friend was searching for him in a street of a similar name on the other side of town, he was lying on his kitchen floor with his life ebbing away, a life, what’s more, that apparently could easily have been saved had he been reached in time. His older brother, the reclusive Swiss millionaire, had responded to these events by having a complex system of alarms installed in his own apartment, for though he was a man who would never forget his own address he was also entirely friendless and miserly and had never had a lunch guest in his life; and indeed when his own heart attack came – which their family medical history made a likelihood – he simply pressed the nearest emergency button and within minutes was in a helicopter, being whisked to a top cardiac unit in Geneva. Sometimes it was as well, he said – and he was thinking of Theseus’s father here – not to take no for an answer, almost as a point of principle.