‘Eh?’

‘Won’t you find it rather a bore having me at home for so long?’

‘I trust I should not betray such an emotion even if I felt it,’ said my father mildly and turned back to his book.

The evening passed. Eventually all over the room clocks of diverse pattern musically chimed eleven. My father closed his book and removed his spectacles. ‘You are very welcome, my dear boy,’ he said. ‘Stay as long as you find it convenient.’ At the door he paused and turned back. ‘Your cousin Melchior worked his passage to Australia before the mast.’ (Snuffle.) ‘What, I wonder, is “before the mast”?’

—

During the sultry week that followed, my relations with my father deteriorated sharply. I saw little of him during the day; he spent hours on end in the library; now and then he emerged and I would hear him calling over the banisters: ‘Hayter, get me a cab.’ Then he would be away, sometimes for half an hour or less, sometimes for a whole day; his errands were never explained. Often I saw trays going up to him at odd hours, laden with meagre nursery snacks – rusks, glasses of milk, bananas, and so forth. If we met in a passage or on the stairs he would look at me vacantly and say ‘Ah-ha,’ or ‘Very warm,’ or ‘Splendid, splendid,’ but in the evening, when he came to the garden-room in his velvet smoking suit, he always greeted me formally.

The dinner table was our battlefield.

On the second evening I took my book with me to the dining-room. His mild and wandering eye fastened on it with sudden attention, and as we passed through the hall he surreptitiously left his own on a side table. When we sat down, he said plaintively: ‘I do think, Charles, you might talk to me. I’ve had a very exhausting day. I was looking forward to a little conversation.’

‘Of course, father. What shall we talk about?’

‘Cheer me up. Take me out of myself,’ petulantly, ‘tell me all about the new plays.’

‘But I haven’t been to any.’

‘You should, you know, you really should. It’s not natural in a young man to spend all his evenings at home.’

‘Well, father, as I told you, I haven’t much money to spare for theatre-going.’

‘My dear boy, you must not let money become your master in this way. Why, at your age, your cousin Melchior was part-owner of a musical piece. It was one of his few happy ventures. You should go to the play as part of your education. If you read the lives of eminent men you will find that quite half of them made their first acquaintance with drama from the gallery. I am told there is no pleasure like it. It is there that you find the real critics and devotees. It is called “sitting with the gods”. The expense is nugatory, and even while you wait for admission in the street you are diverted by “buskers”. We will sit with the gods together one night. How do you find Mrs Abel’s cooking?’