‘We didn’t look. We’ve decided that all we can do for the present is lay our ears to the ground and hope for gossip. But we did meet a lovely Centenier who told us all about the local sex-maniacs.’

She listened, saucer-eyed, as I related all I could remember about the neighbourhood satyrs.

‘And in St John’s,’ I ended, ‘there’s a well-respected man who does it with calves: what do you say to that?’

She rolled over on to all fours, her delightful bottom coquettishly raised.

‘Mooo?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Oh, very well.’

4

His speech is a burning fire;

With his lips he travaileth;

In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;

He weaves, and is clothed with derision;

Sows, and he shall not reap;

His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.

Atalanta

‘Jock,’ I said to Jock as I sipped the blessed second cup of the true Earl Grey’s Blend on the morning of Easter Wednesday. (I suppose there is an Easter Wednesday? For my part the only moveable feast which has any charms is the saddle-of-mutton trolley at Simpson’s.)

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘although you are but a rough, untutored fellow I have observed in you certain qualities which I prize. For once I do not refer to your heaven-sent gifts with the teapot and the frying-pan but to another, rarer talent.’

He moved his head slightly, so that his glass eye could give me a non-committal look.

‘I refer, on this occasion, to your innate ability to get into conversations, eternal friendships and fights with chaps in pubs.’

‘Hunh. You gave me a right bad time when I had me last little punch-up, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, well, but that was because you killed the chap, wasn’t it, and I’ve told you and told you not to, and you know what it does to my digestion, and I had to tell fibs to the police about you having been with me all evening watching Molière on the television and they didn’t believe a word of it, did they?’

He gave me his juiciest smile, the one that still frightens even me, the one which exposes a single, long, yellow fang nestling on his liver-hued nether lip.

‘Be that as it may,’ I went on, ‘this gift or knack of yours shall now be usefully employed. Here are ten pounds, the finest that the Bailiwick of Jersey can print. You are to lay them out on beer, cider, rum or whatever pleases your actual rebarbative Jerseyman. Do not buy drinks for any but true-born Jerseymen. They are the ones who will know.’

‘Know what, Mr Charlie?’