In failure, Asquith confronted certain facts he’d managed to ignore during the lifespan of his fraud: the fabricated play was the product of a wound left by his university education, by his inability to become a scholar of classical literature. That he’d now ruined his civil service career and turned his life into the consequence of common and ineludible disappointments of early adulthood—dissatisfaction with his teachers, frustration with his talent, with the outcome of his education—which were all hurts he should have relinquished but couldn’t, well, this made him feel ever more pathetic. He had allowed himself to be disfigured by the experience of failure. In response Ian Asquith, fond of alcohol, began to drink heavily.

By 3 pm the following Friday, there were eleven bottles on Asquith’s table at the Pilkington Arms in Chippendale, three with beer still inside. He reached out and, by mistake, knocked over a glass, which rolled back into his palm. This rolling action interested Asquith and he moved the glass back and forth under his hand, only stopping when it occurred to him how this might appear to the bartender, who didn’t like him. He’d introduced himself, and tried to explain that he’d written a play in trimeter and, well, it was a long story. The sound of his accent somehow kept provoking the bartender into repeating his words, in mockery. Asquith lost track of what he had said, and what was being said to him. The clock above the door was hard to read and many things were quickly becoming difficult to comprehend. Asquith wiped his lips with a handkerchief. He almost never finished a sentence when he was thoroughly drunk: as soon as he himself got the gist of what he was saying, he stopped right there.

‘You are …’ he said.

The bartender walked over. She said: ‘We’ve seen a few fancy drunks in here.’

She poured the remains of his other bottles into a glass and took away the empties. When Asquith had drained the glass he rolled the damn thing along the table and let it fall to the floor, where it did not break. Looked under the table and near the door but it was nowhere, and there was hardly any light inside the pub.

‘I’ve wasted so much time!’ he yelled in the direction of the bar.

People talked about him.

‘I do feel poorly,’ Asquith said.

In the pub toilets, he slid into the nearest stall and the latch clicked across like a mean kiss.