He moved on, entered one of the concourse bars, and ordered a Budweiser, taking it to a stool by the wooden Indian. It was only his third beer of the day – the first two in the kitchen at home before setting out – and this he still considered an acceptable level of consumption. He knew that there were those among his Californian acquaintances who considered him an alcoholic because it was nothing to him to drink a bottle, a bottle and a half of Napa Valley wine at a sitting, or half a dozen cans during a TV show, but they had not seen a real alcoholic at work, and he had and he knew the difference.

His father, Stephen Valentine, for the last six months of his life, had lived uninhibitedly as a drunkard, no longer troubling to top up his morning tumbler of vodka with an inch of orange juice, or have a spoonful of coffee with his whisky at eleven. He had drunk the stuff raw and with a certain sad bravado, revealing at last the full measure and tyranny of his thirst. And there had been a certain slewed dignity to it that had made things easier, freeing them from that wearying and shaming pretence, the sorry fiction that ‘Daddy’s just a bit tired’. Though, of course, in a sense it was true; he had been tired, fatigued to the point of madness from trying to live a life he considered, with that secret insider view no wife or therapist could ever share, an irreversible failure.

Early on, the brothers had learned how to survive his rages, those evenings when he moved around the house like an electric storm, bawling accusations and hunting down the lost first cause of it all, the wrong turning that had led to his ruin. More difficult than the anger were those moods of gross sentimentality when he would appear in the playroom wanting to be with his boys and join in and do as other dads did. But he stank of the drink, and the brothers had not wanted him there – too loud, too forceful, too grimly jolly. When Alice saw it getting out of hand she would sometimes turn on him – sheer mother instinct, which was a power beyond them all, fierce and pure – and Stephen would shut himself away in the workroom or the old summerhouse, where Larry one afternoon looked in at him, his back, his boneless shoulders, as he sat among the sacking and old apples, tending a bottle, working it, and then, alerted by some shift in the light, turning to the window to see his son and exchange with him a long glance through the cobwebbed glass, a look that had taught Larry – those lessons that pass through the eye like a virus – that it wasn’t the toxicity of alcohol which killed a drunkard, but the unsheddable burden of self-consciousness.