Children ask. They cannot help it. I have learned to say "nine point six" before they finish the question, which moves the conversation along faster and saves all of us the indignity of arithmetic in a butcher's shop.

Nine point six is, I have come to believe, an unusually honest number. Whole numbers are for accountants and generals. The world after May 1940 was not a whole-number sort of world. We came back with fractions of ourselves. I happen to wear mine on the left foot, where I can see it.

My wife, Gerda, finds this metaphysical. She says I should simply say "nine" and be done with it. I tell her that the missing four-tenths matter to me, and to the historical record, and to Bartholomew's posthumous reputation, and she sighs in the way she has sighed since 1936.