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heart failure.’
    ‘How did you know he was dead?’ asked Wallis.
    ‘Because he died in my arms . . . in the street.’
    She shivered, but persisted. ‘But how did you know? What did he look like . . . ?’
    ‘He was quite tall,’ I said. ‘And he had dark hair.’
    ‘Not him ,’ she said. ‘Death. What did death look like?’
    I noticed her hands. She was brushing one tapering finger against the pulse in her wrist. One should always attempt to understand what is being asked of one , I thought.
    ‘As though a light had gone out,’ I said, and would have told her more if her sister Ida hadn’t shuddered and begged me to talk about something less sinister.
    We all drank a great deal. When I first heard my voice getting louder I was angry at myself, but by then it was too late. Most of us had got used to alcohol fairly early on in life. At Harvard only the swots and the athletes kept themselves pure; members of the smart set were expected to drink themselves under the table.
    Ginsberg grew heated pretty quick. He and George Dodge had begun a discussion on Germany and in no time at all the conversation had somehow switched from the superiority of the German navy to Ginsberg ranting on about there being only two overwhelming impulses, hunger and the sexual instinct. Out of respect for the girls, and timidity, George stopped disagreeing as soon as he saw which way the wind was blowing, but Ginsberg wouldn’t be quieted. ‘Hunger,’ he shouted, chopping at the cheese on his plate, ‘is easily satisfied, but the other . . .’ and here he breathed through his nose like a horse.
    ‘There is another impulse,’ I said. ‘Boredom. Which is never absent when you’re around.’
    ‘That isn’t an impulse,’ he retorted. ‘Merely a feeling.’
    I didn’t like playing the boss-man, but with George, who was always so eager to merge into the crowd, it was unavoidable. And it did shut Ginsberg up.
    Not that the girls turned a hair; judging by the serene manner in which she surveyed the room Wallis hadn’t even been listening. As for Molly Dodge, I doubt she could ever be put out of countenance. Right from a child she’d been sassy, unlike George, who was always a scaredy-cat and remained so. He’d been a weekly boarder at St Mark’s, which wasn’t usual – a delicate constitution was the excuse but we reckoned his father wanted to keep a bully rein on him – and on Friday nights he travelled the half-hour home on the family’s private train. The Dodges lived in Manchester-by-the-Sea, at Apple Trees, a colonial mansion on the North Shore, and sometimes George invited me along for the weekend. He and I weren’t great friends; it was just good to get away from school once in a while, and besides, George was needy and I felt I owed it to him seeing I was fortunate enough never to have been crushed by circumstances. In the fall it was misty along the shore and all through dinner one heard the melancholy wail of fog-horns and every damn time Molly would whisper, ‘Was that a fart, Morgan?’
    Ginsberg kept refilling my glass. I’ll say this for him, blatherskite or not, he wasn’t a sulker, and after all, he’d only voiced what the rest of us felt. Most of our time was spent thinking what we might do with women if only we had the chance. There were houses we could go to, of course, but with girls of our own set there was never the slightest opportunity of trying out even a little of what we’d learnt, which rendered us incapable of behaving naturally in their company. In our best moments, mercifully dominant, we thought of them as sisters or mothers and treated them accordingly; in our worst they were always whores, white and compliant, though we hid such unworthy speculations behind a general attitude of soppy regard. It helped to know that our elders seemed to have got the hang of it, yet often I wondered where love showed up.
    I was aware suddenly that Wallis was watching me, and without detachment.