Let the day perish wherein I was born, I came pretty close to saying. I hate coming home to an empty house at the best of times, but when I’m hungry and tired, when I’ve been driving for five hours without a stop, when I have been subjected to gross family indelicacy, and when the house I’ve come home to is in fact a converted cow-shed with deserted fields to its rear and the blank sea in front – well, Why died I not from the Womb?

[3]

I don’t know what time it was when she got home – I’d gone to bed already myself – but I judged from the smell of alcohol that came in with her that it must have been late. Camilla staggering was an awesome sight. It was also dangerous if you happened to be anywhere near anything she might stagger into. The bed, as I knew from experience, was the worst place, because although she couldn’t locate the rest of her furniture she would make for that out of brute instinct. I got out quickly and helped her to fall in. The other disgusting thing about Camilla when she was drunk was that she instantly became sentimental about her family. I have seen her in a heap on the floor, hiccoughing and choking, unable to keep a pen between her fingers, trying to write a letter of reconciliation to her father at four in the morning. Tonight, in the pitch black and not much earlier, she wanted to telephone her brother. ‘We’re so like each other,’ I think she said. But I wouldn’t swear to it. I wasn’t really listening. The words I wanted to hear – ‘Hello, darling, I’ve missed you terribly, let me make you some supper even though I’m thoroughly pissed which I know I have no right to be, and apologize for’ – were not forthcoming, and I wasn’t interested in any others. I didn’t think having my nose pinched and being called a humourless prick was particularly amusing either. And I didn’t want to get into an argument about whether or not that proved I was a humourless prick. So I left her to search for the holes in the dial of the telephone without me, collected the sleeping bag from the bottom of the airing cupboard, and felt my way downstairs – where I was surprised to find a person I had never seen before making himself toast in Camilla’s kitchen.

‘Hi, I’m Tarquin,’ he announced, seemingly quite unperturbed to be discovered. A year or so later he was to become the best known vegetable dye tattooist in the area, thanks largely to the work he did on Harry Vilbert’s under-age girlfriend, Avice; but at this stage in his career he was still travelling from place to place, trying to find himself, and enjoying no reputation to speak of.

I just stared at him.