‘Yes, that too. Certainly that. Disturbing is a good word. You see, I began to recognize voices and to unscramble them and they were all from dead chaps, you see, like my old headmaster and the Principal of my Seminary and people whose books I had read – well, of course I couldn’t recognize their voices but if you hear a chap talking really barbarous Latin with a strong Slav accent and telling you not to wash because it’s a sin of fleshly luxury and then he says his name is Jerome, what can you think?’

‘What indeed?’

‘Quite. But I felt that I had to go on taping and listening and trying to hear and understand and it got worse.’

I slid some more Pastis into his glass, added a little water and helped him aim it at his mouth. He wasn’t drunk, I think he was in some sort of private ecstasy, like a menopausal woman thinking about Cassius Clay.

‘It got worse?’ I prompted.

‘Much worse. Cardinal Manning shouted and shouted at me and seemed to know all about my, er, case; and then someone calling himself Pio Nono kept on saying that he would pray for me but that he couldn’t promise anything and then, worst of all …’ His voice broke.

‘Your mother?’ I asked gently.

‘Oh, no, she’s always very understanding. It was St Francis. At first I hoped it was Francis of Assisi but he soon put me right: it was St Francis Xavier. He was horrid to me. Horrid. You can have no idea what that old bastard can be like.’

His eyes were full of tears. Well, of course, I know what to do with drunken nut-cases. You humour them, listen to them, get them really pissed, then put them to bed, first loosening their collars and removing their boots. My only pre-occupation was how to loosen a Roman collar and how to prevent Eric from moistening my landlord’s rather good Empire sofa.

‘Look,’ he said suddenly and articulating clearly, ‘would you like to hear? Please?’

‘Certainly, certainly; I’ll go and fetch the tape-recorder. Tell you what, let me just freshen up your glass first.’

I fetched my rather good tape-recorder, broke open a new sixty-minute blank tape, fed it deftly into the machine and set it ready for action at 3¾” per second. Eric gazed at the machine in an ambivalent sort of way, as you or I might gaze at the dentist’s drill, which both giveth and taketh away pain. He went on gazing until I sort of shuffled and fidgeted. He looked up at me with a startling, seraphic smile.