‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s my French dinner party. We have a club. It’s to spread culture. Sounds silly, I know, provincial and all that, but it isn’t, at least it isn’t necessarily silly, and it’s my turn—’

‘I didn’t know. I’m afraid it’s an awful imposition I’m putting on you.’

‘I’ll manage,’ she said, a trifle sourly. ‘Seven around the table is the problem.’

‘What problem?’ Atlas said.

‘We only have six chairs—’

‘Jesus Christ, Claire. You think a mess like that –’ he indicated me ‘– could make use of a dining-room chair even if we had one?’ Some able-bodied people, Atlas is one, can say things worse even than this without offense – quite the contrary: it’s as though you’re in it together somehow, no longer an outsider.

Claire sniffed. ‘This party is just the thing for you, Nate,’ she said. Atlas is a family name for my uncle. The brass plate outside his house reads DR NATHANIEL CARRICK in elegant Times Roman. Claire doesn’t like the sound of Atlas; she says sibilants at the end of a name are ugly. Myself, I think Nate sounds kind of ugly. Anyhow, she turned all her attention, mischievous now, girlish, in his direction. ‘We’re going to have five wines.’

‘Five? What do you want five for?’

‘It’s French.’

‘What’s French? Having five wines?’

‘It says so in the book. Right here. Reader’s Digest International Cookbook. Five wines.’

‘Jesus, Claire, these stupid bastards don’t know wine from hog piss,’ he said. ‘What the hell are they going to make of five of the fucking things?’

‘Precisely,’ she said.

She urged us off into his study soon after breakfast. We took our coffee with us, settled ourselves and began to record on tape what Atlas could remember about his father.

My father was Atlas’s brother, Jonathan Carrick’s oldest son. When I was small, he told me stories about Jonathan, frightening stories, and I came to fear my grandfather the way other children fear the bogeyman. I could see him, can see him now as I saw him then, clothed (for some unknown, childhood reason) in black – black hat, black coat – bringing with him a cloud of black that engulfed anybody and anything who got close enough, swallowed them up, never to be seen again. It wasn’t his anger that frightened me then; I knew nothing of his anger until Atlas told me about it, nothing of the fire in him, nothing of his resemblance to the steelworks outside Cardiff. I’d always seen him through my father’s eyes, and my father saw him as icy cold – how could two brothers see their own father so differently? – the embodiment of a meaningless and yet implacable justice: whatever sin you sinned was to be rooted out and punished without mercy, whether you sinned knowing or not knowing. I am a born, bred and wholly convinced atheist – an orthodox atheist, you might say – and yet I have, I think, a religious temperament: I fear my sins, all of them, known and unknown. My father called my grandfather ‘the old man’. If a stair creaked in the dark, it was the old man come to get me. If I awoke suddenly in the night, it was the old man come to get me. If there was a rustle at the window . . .