Its cut elegant, its material fine, the suit was handsome, and by some reverse polarity of image, took its unmistakable mould and shape, its distinctive line, from the man for whom it was made. The trouser legs were straight; even though the owner, as a boy, had run a sledge down a snowy hill into the only tree on the slope, to crack both his shins on it. So his brother told me years later.

  The shoulders were massive and wide, much more so than any appearing in the family since, and had the droop of the ageing athlete. A tuck in the fabric marked the upper left arm where the man bore a huge hollow scar. A thumb's breadth of diseased bone had been cut from his humerus, again in his childhood. Therein lay the explanation of why the suit's left sleeve fell short of the right. The cast of a powerful man hung on a fragile frame. The trousers' waist was large and somewhat worn from the bulk that comes of siring four sons - together the four couldn't span his chest - so the game of the explorer tackling the bears should have been called the bear and the explorers.

  There wasn't much more to the suit; only buttons and finely etched lapels that folded over a red, paper package of non-filter cigarettes. These last undoubtedly wasted the heart beating beneath the jacket, eased death in early. A slim pocket for a shiny pen with which to note aeronautic equations and a sharp trouser crease for commercial presentations alike marked the wearer's trade on the cloth. Dust in the cuffs recorded long-haul travels, dinners with his children, threads of his wife's embrace. If one of the sons had grown broad enough to carry the suit, the man's widow would not have given it to charity in later years.