A grey-coated doorman lifted his cap and held out his hand, while a bellboy hurried out to fetch Patrick’s bags. One welcome and two tips later Patrick was stalking sweatily through the long corridor which led to the reception. The tables in the Oval Room were occupied by pairs of lunching women, toying with plates of different-coloured lettuces and ignoring glasses of mineral water. Patrick caught sight of himself in a large gilt mirror, and noticed that, as usual, he looked rather overdressed and extremely ill. There was a disturbing contrast between the care with which the clothes had been assembled and the ease with which the face looked as if it might fall apart. His very long black overcoat, dark blue suit, and thin black and silver tie (bought by his father in the early sixties) seemed to be unrelated to the chaotic tangle of brown hair which surrounded his dead-white and shiny face. The face itself was in a spasm of contradiction. The full lips were pinched inward, the eyes reduced to narrow slits, the nose, which was permanently blocked, forced him to breathe through his open mouth and made him look rather imbecilic; and a frown concentrated his forehead into a vertical crease directly above the nose.

After he had registered, Patrick braced himself to clear as quickly as possible the long gauntlet of welcomes and tips that still lay between him and having a drink in his room. Someone took him to the lift, someone took him up in the lift (that long stale suspense, watching the numbers flicker up to thirty-nine), someone showed him how to turn on the television, someone put his suitcase down on the rack, someone pointed out the bathroom light, someone gave him his room key, and, at last, someone brought him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a black bucket of frail ice cubes, and four glasses.

He poured himself a full glass over a few cubes of ice. The smell of the bourbon seemed to him infinitely subtle and poignant, and as he gulped down the first burning mouthful, standing by the window, looking out over Central Park, leafy and hot under a paler wider sky, he wanted to cry. It was so fucking beautiful. He felt his sadness and exhaustion fuse with the dissolving and sentimental embrace of the bourbon. It was a moment of catastrophic charm. How could he ever hope to give up drugs? They filled him with such intense emotion. The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again, life was so subjective.