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that I had been holding and kissing in the whirling darkness, or did I dream that, why for a while did I have the sense that someone was sitting on me, what in the name of hell was that? And then nothing, nothing again, and nothing.
    And then in the bright glare of morning, opening my eyes to find myself in my bed, with the mosquito curtains all in disarray, and my stomach bare to the world, and my pyjamas strewn, I could just see, on the writing table in the next room, and a long, horrifying piss mark on the polished floor, and all along my arms, my belly, and my feet, the red marks of mosquitoes. And in the centre of the floor, queerly self-possessed, the pyramid of a turd.
    And then probably what woke me, the sound of Tom Quaye coming in to work, and me making a wild lunge towards the blessed turd, for pity’s sake, for pity’s sake to cover it, so my shame would not be made manifest, and yet Tom getting in the door innocently before I could reach it, and opening his arms, the spectacle before him of his naked employer, in mid-leap, and him saying, in kindness and astonishment, searing me to the marrow:
    ‘Major, you shit on the floor?’
       
    I am staring out the window at the searing yard outside. A large fly, as black as a railing, a moment ago staggered and stopped in mid-air, such is the mighty hand of the heat. The weather is a sort of celestial pointsman.
    My head is empty. It is a little moment before thought, I suppose. Before thoughts rush in again. A thousand times I have felt this in my life. It has little to do with true peace, it’s the body recovering from the onslaught of alcohol.
    When you are alone, there is a special quality to this, I find. I was drunk alone, I felt guilt alone, and now I feel this deceitful peace alone, for which nevertheless I am grateful.
    Here is my little library, ranged along my work table, complete with two huge dead moths, and a brick-sized beetle that didn’t have the strength fully to retrieve his wings before he died:
       
Bridges and Structural Design .
    Bengal Lancer , by F. Yeats-Brown.
    Barrack-Room Ballads .
    Foundations of Bridges and Buildings , by Jacoby and Davis.
    Hound of Heaven .

Chapter Five
    ‘The buveur of Sligo’ Mai’s father used to call me, though not in my hearing. Today the phrase came winging back to me.
    Those heavy rooms of Grattan House, weighted down by the accumulated bullion of her father’s life, the sideboard in the dining room for instance, I could see the floorboards cupping under its crouching legs and lion’s paws, and Mrs Kirwan had given each bare foot of everything, chair and table and whatnot, a little embroidered covering. The whole room looked like it might break into movement nonetheless, the sideboard walk forward, the chair make for the door, but they didn’t, everything held its breath, it felt like, and the vast cornucopia of silken scarves that was the bay outside stirred and heaved in the wide windows, shrouded all the same in sun-faded and dusty-looking curtains. Those heavy rooms, and myself entering them for the first time, with Mai just ahead, and the quick little change in her somehow that I detected, almost with an unwanted sixth sense, a distance made between her and me, as if disowning me temporarily in the aura, the principality of her father. Her block heels banging across the dark boards. Her mother, bony as a cat, with her child’s smile, as if no one was looking at her, as if she was in some measure invisible, in a dress so old-fashioned it seemed a mistake had been made in time, and we were walking into the 1880s. My own good shoes with their heel-plates and metal studs to give them wear, beating out a smaller tattoo than Mai’s across the floor, yet too much noise to make me comfortable or easy. And then the room itself, the smell of fried plaice and cabbage, as it turned out, and the two waiting, the diminutive mother, and the utterly present father, with his waistcoat and his stomach, and his