‘We have the whole evening . . .’ said Patrick. And the whole night, he thought optimistically. The drawing room was a sea of pink lilies, their shining pistils accusing him of lust. He was dangerously obsessed, dangerously obsessed. And his thoughts, like a bobsleigh walled with ice, would not change their course until he had crashed or achieved his end. He wiped his hands sweatily on his trousers, amazed to have found a preoccupation stronger than drugs. ‘Ah, there’s Eddy,’ exclaimed Nancy.

Mr Banks strode into the room in a chequered lumberjack shirt and a pair of baggy trousers. ‘Hello,’ he said with his rapid little blur, ‘I was tho thorry to hear about your fawther. Marianne says that he was a wemarkable man.’

‘You should have heard the remarks,’ said Patrick.

‘Did you have a very difficult relationship with him?’ asked Nancy encouragingly.

‘Yup,’ Patrick replied.

‘When did the twouble stawt?’ asked Eddy, settling down on the faded orange velvet of a bow-legged marquise.

‘Oh, June the ninth, nineteen-o-six, the day he was born.’

‘That early?’ smiled Nancy.

‘Well, we’re not going to resolve the question of whether his problems were congenital or not, at least not before dinner; but even if they weren’t, he didn’t delay in acquiring them. By all accounts, the moment he could speak he dedicated his new skill to hurting people. By the age of ten he was banned from his grandfather’s house because he used to set everyone against each other, cause accidents, force people to do things they didn’t want to.’

‘You make him sound evil in a rather old-fashioned way. The satanic child,’ said Nancy sceptically.

‘It’s a point of view,’ said Patrick. ‘When he was around, people were always falling off rocks, or nearly drowning, or bursting into tears. His life consisted of acquiring more and more victims for his malevolence and then losing them again.’

‘He must have been charming as well,’ said Nancy.

‘He was a kitten,’ said Patrick.

‘But wouldn’t we now say that he was just wery disturbed?’ asked Eddy.

‘So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.’

‘I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.’

‘Cruelty is the opposite of love,’ said Patrick, ‘not just some inarticulate version of it.’

‘Sounds right to me,’ said a husky voice from the doorway.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Patrick, swivelling around in his chair, suddenly self-conscious in Marianne’s presence.

Marianne sailed towards him across the dim drawing room, its floorboards creaking underfoot, and her body tipped forward at a dangerous angle like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.