There was silence for a few seconds.

“Jack, leave it for a few days. We’ve just begun. Wait till we’ve settled in a bit, OK?”

“I’m coming up.”

Pause. “I can’t stop you.”

“Ask her to speak to me,” came out of his mouth like a screech.

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

The line went dead.

He put the receiver down. Mrs Moloney, who was wiping down tables in the foyer, looked at him. Embarrassed he paid her for the call. “I have no luck with phones,” he explained cheerfully.

The minute he entered the bar a cold light came on in his head. Is this what it is like? Will it happen now?

The air was filled with dark threads of hair. He refocused his eyes.

Some local men, the gardener among them, came in and chatted jovially. They did not look in his direction. He wanted to speak to them but didn’t. He could feel the hostility. He ordered a double sherry.

“And put it in a lemonade glass.”

“Right,” said Hugh. “Do you want to speak to anyone at sea?” he asked in a conspiratorial voice. As he twisted the knob on the illegal two-wave radio a jumble of German and Russian voices came in from the Atlantic. “There’s none of us out there in this weather, anyway.”

After a while he drank a brandy. A gin. Which one is it will bring us over the whatever-it-is? The what-do-you-call-it. Keep moving! By then a red wedding carpet had been thrown along the garden path and in through the front door. It led to a table where sherry glasses stood brimful, awaiting the bride and groom. On his way to the toilet Jack asked the lad for one.

“I’m a guest,” Jack said.

“Is that so?”

“That’s right. Just pour it in there,” and Jack proffered the lemonade glass. But the lad gave him none through some misunderstanding that was beyond Jack. In the toilet he placed the lemonade glass on the pink-tiled window ledge and retched violently. I’m not getting any better, he thought.

The gardener came in and combed his hair.

“Vanity is lost on you, squire,” said Jack, recovering himself.

“You don’t look so good yourself, boss.” The gardener skimmed a grey lock across his weatherbeaten skull, shook his member generously and spat into the urinal.

“Why,” Jack asked, “are thoroughbreds put into horseboxes on their own?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, without looking at him.

“It’s for the same reason,” replied Jack, laughing hysterically, “that cardinals wear tall hats.”

The gardener considered Jack and said: “I’d have a long rest if I was you.”

A lot of people have sat like me, thought Jack, throughout the world, their hearts stopped on the half-hour, and soot falling.

He was overflying the place he was in. He filled a glass with vodka, and put it under his chair. He wrote into his notebook. Then he searched round for his glass. When he drank he was surprised to find it was vodka in the glass. He could’ve sworn it would be sherry. Then he was equally surprised to find he was back in the Adams’ house. I should not be here, he thought. This is not home.