When lunch was over, Terry’s head was spinning from the wine and the stink of the cigars that Percy smoked, which he did even during the meal. They ambled down St James’s Street and dropped into the premises of John Lobb, Boot maker. There Terry was measured for a pair of brogues – he would have preferred something sharper, but when he took delivery of the shoes a couple of weeks later and tried them on, he felt like a lord. He managed to get a look at the bill, and was glad it was on Percy’s account. Percy also bought him a dark-grey titfer at Locks the Hatters, just a few doors up from Lobb’s.

‘A young man in your line of work can’t afford to look the part,’ Percy said, in his plummy, chairman-of-the-board voice, and sniggered. It took Terry a second or two to get the twist of it. Wit, that was.

‘What line of work would that be, exactly, Mr Antrobus?’ Terry enquired, putting on the innocent act.

And Percy only smiled, and tried to pinch young Terry’s neat little backside.

*

Terry still wore the Lobb shoes on occasion, especially when he was missing Percy, although that wasn’t very often. They had aged nicely, the brogues, and fitted more snugly with each wearing. The grey hat had got badly rained on – at the races at Ascot, as it happened, to which top-hatted Percy had taken him, for a special treat – but Terry didn’t mind as he had never got the hang of wearing it. He thought it made him look like a spiv, not the gentleman Percy had meant to turn him into. Poor old Percy.

He’d had to go, Percy did, in the end, eyes wide with surprise and his mouth shaped into that little puckered pink hole. Went down with a bump and a muffled rumble, like a sack of potatoes.

DONOSTIA

Chapter 2

There was a narrow entrance to the bay, so that the water, once inside, fanned out in the shape of an enormous seashell. In fact, the bay was named La Concha, the Spanish word for shell. Because of that bottleneck channel and the long curve of the beach, the waves didn’t run along at a bias, as they did on beaches at home. Instead, there was just one immensely long wave that broke with a single, muffled crash, from the point of the Old Town over to the right, all the way along to the headland far off on the left, where there was a funicular railway that, all day long, inched its laborious way up and down the side of a hill. When Quirke woke at night, with the window open beside the bed, it was as if there were a big, friendly animal asleep and softly breathing out there in the darkness.