Well, it might have been, but I was frankly disappointed. I would have welcomed more tangible proofs of my father’s depravity than just the three of us getting tipsy. A blood stained sheet or a collection of specimen bottles or a folio of sworn affidavits from violated secretaries in the birth certificates offices of Somerset House would have done more to restore my faith in my family connections. I might have had a lot on my mind but I hadn’t forgotten how much I’d enjoyed speaking virulent French and beating up Sharon at Fitzpiers’s party, and I hadn’t forgotten whose virulent French it was that Gertrude Bugler reckoned I’d been enjoying speaking. What larks! she had written on the bottom of her postcard. And what larks if it turned out that my old man and his old man before him had been enjoying themselves likewise. It was difficult for me, as I have already made abundantly plain, to show much forbearance to my forbears; my instincts were all for cursing my precursors. I hated being beholden to anybody. But if I had to make a choice – if it positively had to be the one or the other – then better the Marquis than the mason, any time. Any time.

So why did my mother’s denunciation of my father make me hesitant about going to see him? Why wasn’t I, by my own logic, hot-footing it across the river down to Hardy’s old place on Trinity Road, Tooting, and looking for signs of bruising on Rabika Flatman’s body? Why wasn’t I shaking my father warmly by the hand and asking him if he could try to remember, just once, for me, if there were any virulent Frenchmen in the annals of our family? Why? – because I wasn’t certain I was up to it. Because suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I was a deserving case. It was one thing to be ashamed of one’s genealogy, but what if it turned out that one’s genealogy had reason to be ashamed of one? I wasn’t being unnecessarily self-effacing; at the same time that my father was setting up house with Mrs Flatman and subjecting her, in between re-plastering the walls and ceilings and choosing tiles for the kitchen, to the most extreme forms of degradation that either of them could think up (Oh, Mrs Flatman – up!), I was involved in an incident that enabled me to take a long look at myself as a chip off the old block, as an example of Sadeian manhood – and I wasn’t much impressed by what I saw.

[4]

‘Harder!’

‘Harder?’

‘Harder – ouch – yes, harder!’

‘But I am already doing it harder.’

‘Use your shoe.’

‘My shoe? I couldn’t. It would hurt you.’

‘That’s the whole idea, boy.’