But the moment he took off his jacket, sat at his desk and, with his usual methodicalness, began to move books and papers around, he realised how difficult this task—no, this sacred obligation—was going to be. His stationery drawer refused to open. The ink dried in his pen. In his mind’s eye he saw Strulovitch delightedly refusing his request, perhaps setting the paper it was written on alight, perhaps doing something even worse with it, whereupon his soul withered. “It isn’t proving as easy as I’d hoped it would,” he said to Barnaby, conscious of a little lie in that he had hardly as yet tried moving mountains. Barnaby threw him one of the most beseeching looks in his collection. “My heart is set on it, D’Anton,” he said. Ah, the potency of punctuation. Barnaby knew his friend was powerless to resist him when he finished a sentence something something something comma, D’Anton. The full stop taking an eternity to arrive, the name—D’Anton—lingering it seemed forever in his mouth.
