That evening when Charlie returned he put his head cautiously around the door as if he feared there might be a bucket of water balanced on it. I leered at him, swaying. I had finished the gin, and moved on, reluctantly, to whiskey. I was not drunk, exactly, but in a kind of numbed euphoria, as if I had just come back from a lengthy and exquisitely agonising visit to the dentist. Under the new buzz the old hangover lurked, biding its time. My skin was hot and dry all over, and my eyes felt scorched. Cheers! I cried, with a fatuous laugh, and the ice cubes chuckled in my glass. Charlie was darting sidelong looks at my outfit. Hope you don't mind, I said. Didn't think we'd be the same size. Ah, he said, yes, well, I've shrunk in my old age, you see. And he gave a graveyard laugh. I could see he had been hoping I would be gone when he came home. I followed him out to the hall, where he took off his bookie's titfer and put it with his briefcase on the bog-oak hallstand. He went into the dining-room and poured himself a modest whiskey, adding a go of flattish soda from a screw-top bottle. He took a sip, and stood for a little while as if stalled, with a hand in his pocket, frowning at his feet. My presence was interfering with his evening rituals. He put away the whiskey bottle without offering me a refill. We traipsed back to the kitchen, where Charles donned his apron and rooted about in cupboards and on murky shelves for the makings of a stew. While he worked he talked distractedly over his shoulder, with a cigarette hanging from a corner of his lopsided mouth and one eye screwed shut against the smoke. He was telling me about a sale he had made, or a picture he had bought, or something like that. I think he only spoke for fear of the prospect of silence. Anyway I was not really listening. I watched him glugging the better half of a fifty-pound bottle of Pommerol into the stew. An inch of cigarette ash went into the pot as well, he tried vainly to fish it out with a spoon, clucking in annoyance. You can imagine what it's like for me, he said, actually parting with pictures! I nodded solemnly. In fact, what I was imagining was Charlie in his poky gallery, bowing and scraping and wringing his hands in front of some fur-coated bitch reeking of face-powder and perspiration, whose hubby had given her the money to bag a bauble for her birthday. I was depressed suddenly, and suddenly tired.

He served up the stew, spilling some on the floor. He was not good with implements, they tended to turn treacherous in his hands, to wobble and veer and let things slither off. We carried our plates into the dining-room and sat down at the table under the stuffed owl's virulent, glassy stare. We drank the rest of the Pommerol, and Charles fetched another bottle. He continued to make an elaborate business of avoiding my eye, smiling about him at the floor, the furniture, the fire-irons in the grate, as if the commonplace had suddenly presented itself to his attention with a new and unexpected charm. The lowering sun was shining full upon me through the tall window at my back. The stew tasted of burnt fur. I pushed my plate aside and turned and looked out at the harbour. There was a shimmering flaw in the window-pane. Something made me think of California, something about the light, the little yachts, the gilded evening sea. I was so tired, so tired, I could have given up then and there, could have drifted out into that summer dusk as easily as a breeze, unknown, planless, free. Charlie squashed out a sodden fag-end on the rim of his plate. Did you see that thing about Binkie Behrens in the paper? he said. I poured myself another fill of wine. No, I said, what was that, Charles?

By the by, what would I have done in all this affair without the solace of drink and its deadening effect? I seem to have got over those days in a series of quaking lunges from one brief state of drunken equilibrium to another, like a fugitive fleeing across a zigzag of slimed stepping-stones. Even the colours, gin-blue and claret-red, are they not the very emblems of my case, the court-colours of my testimony? Now that I have sobered up forever I look back not only on that time but on all my life as a sort of tipsy but not particularly happy spree, from which I knew I would have to emerge sooner or later, with a bad headache. This, ah yes, this is hangover time with a vengeance.

The rest of that evening, as I recall it, was a succession of distinct, muffled shocks, like falling downstairs slowly in a dream. That was when I learned that my father had kept a mistress. I was first astonished, then indignant. I had been his alibi, his camouflage! While I sat for hours in the back of the car above the yacht club in Dun Laoghaire on Sunday afternoons, he was off fucking his fancy-woman. Penelope was her name – Penelope, for God's sake! Where did they meet, I wanted to know, was there a secret love-nest where he kept her, a bijou little hideaway with roses round the door and a mirror on the bedroom ceiling? Charlie shrugged. Oh, he said, they used to come here. At first I could not take it in. Here? I cried. Here? But what about -? He shrugged again, and gave a sort of grin. Mammy French, it seems, did not mind. On occasion she even had the lovers join her for tea. She and Penelope exchanged knitting patterns. You see, she knew – Charlie said, but stopped, and a spot of colour appeared in the cracked skin over each cheekbone, and he ran a finger quickly around the inside of his shirt collar. I waited. She knew I was fond of your – of Dolly, he said at last. By now I was fairly reeling. Before I could speak he went on to tell me how Binkie Behrens too had been after my mother, how he would invite her and my father to Whitewater and ply my father with drink so he would not notice Binkie's gamy eye and wandering hands. And then my mother would come and tell Charlie all about it, and they would laugh together. Now he shook his head and sighed. Poor Binkie, he said. I sat aghast, lost in wonderment and trying to hold my wine-glass straight. I felt like a child hearing for the first time of the doings of the gods: they crowded in my buzzing head, these tremendous, archaic, flawed figures with their plots and rivalries and impossible loves. Charlie was so matter-of-fact about it all, half wistful and half amused. He spoke mostly as if I were not there, looking up now and then in mild surprise at my squeaks and snorts of astonishment. And you, I said, what about you and my -? I could not put it into words. He gave me a look at once arch and sly. Here, he said, finish the bottle.

I think he told me something more about my mother, but I don't remember what it was. I do remember phoning her later that night, sitting cross-legged in the dark on the floor in the hall, with tears in my eyes and the telephone squatting in my lap like a frog. She seemed immensely far away, a miniature voice booming at me tinily out of a thrumming void. Freddie, she said, you're drunk. She asked why had I not come back, to collect my bag if for nothing else. I wanted to say to her, Mother, how could I go home, now? We were silent for a moment, then she said Daphne had called her, wondering where I was, what I was doing. Daphne! I had not thought of her for days. Through the doorway at the end of the hall I watched Charlie pottering about in the kitchen, rattling the pots and pans and pretending he was not trying to hear what I was saying. I sighed, and the sigh turned into a thin little moan. Ma, I said, I've got myself into such trouble. There was a noise on the line, or maybe it was in my head, like a great rushing of many wings. What? she said, I can't hear you – what? I laughed, and two big tears ran down the sides of my nose. Nothing, I shouted, nothing, forget it! Then I said, Listen, do you know who Penelope is – was – do you know about her? I was shocked at myself. Why did I say such a thing, why did I want to wound her? She was silent for a moment, and then she laughed. That bitch? she said, of course I knew about her. Charlie had come to the doorway, and stood, with a rag in one hand and a plate in the other, watching me. The light was behind him, I could not see his face. There was another pause. You're too hard on yourself, Freddie, my mother said at last, in that reverberant, faraway voice, you make things too hard on yourself. I did not know what she meant. I still don't. I waited a moment, but she said nothing more, and I could not speak. Those were the last words we would ever exchange. I put down the receiver gently, and got to my feet, not without difficulty. One of my knees was asleep. I limped into the kitchen. Charlie was bent over the sink doing the washing-up, with a cigarette dangling from his lip, sleeves rolled, his waistcoat unbuckled at the back. The sky in the window in front of him was a pale shade of indigo, I thought I had never seen anything so lovely in my life.