‘Have some port first.’

‘Yes, have some port if you want it. But don’t come into the drawing-room.’

‘Too bloody drunk,’ said Sebastian nodding heavily. ‘Like olden times. Gentlemen always too drunk join ladies in olden times.’

(‘And yet, you know, it wasn’t,’ said Mr Samgrass, trying to be chatty with me about it afterwards, ‘it wasn’t at all like olden times. I wonder where the difference lies. The lack of good humour? The lack of companionship? You know I think he must have been drinking by himself today. Where did he get the money?’)

‘Sebastian’s gone up,’ said Brideshead when we reached the drawing-room.

‘Yes? Shall I read?’

Julia and Rex played bezique; the tortoise, teased by the pekinese, withdrew into his shell; Lady Marchmain read The Diary of a Nobody aloud until, quite early, she said it was time for bed.

‘Can’t I stay up and play a little longer, mummy? Just three games?’

‘Very well, darling. Come in and see me before you go to bed. I shan’t be asleep.’

It was plain to Mr Samgrass and me that Julia and Rex wanted to be left alone, so we went, too; it was not plain to Brideshead, who settled down to read The Times, which he had not yet seen that day. Then, going to our side of the house, Mr Samgrass said: ‘It wasn’t at all like olden times.’

Next morning I said to Sebastian: ‘Tell me honestly, do you want me to stay on here?’

‘No, Charles, I don’t believe I do.’

‘I’m no help?’

‘No help.’

So I went to make my excuses to his mother.

‘There’s something I must ask you, Charles. Did you give Sebastian money yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Knowing how he was likely to spend it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘I simply don’t understand how anyone can be so callously wicked.’

She paused, but I do not think she expected any answer; there was nothing I could say unless I were to start all over again on that familiar, endless argument.

‘I’m not going to reproach you,’ she said. ‘God knows it’s not for me to reproach anyone. Any failure in my children is my failure. But I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you can have been so nice in so many ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don’t understand how we all liked you so much. Did you hate us all the time? I don’t understand how we deserved it.’

I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I almost expected to hear her say: ‘I have already written to inform your unhappy father.’ But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.