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a whippet, pop-eyed and pale, with an expression of incredulous loathing. W h e n they got going like this, the t w o of them, they forgot everything else, their son, their friend, everything, locked together in a kind of macabre trance. This meant that Charlie and I were often thrown into each other's c o m p a n y . He treated me tentatively, as if
    ! were something that might b l o w up in his face at any m o m e n t . I was very fierce in those days, b r i m m i n g with impatience and scorn. We must have been a peculiar pair, yet we g o t on, at some deep level. Perhaps I seemed to him the son he w o u l d never have, perhaps he seemed to me the father I had never had. (This is another idea put forward by my counsel. I don't k n o w h o w you think of them, Maolseachlainn.) W h a t was I saying? Charlie. He took me to the races one day, when I was a boy. He was all kitted out for the occasion, in tweeds and b r o w n brogues and a little trilby hat tipped at a raffish angle over one eye. He even had a pair of binoculars, though he did not seem to be able to get them properly in focus. He looked the part, except for a certain stifled something in his manner that m a d e it seem all the time as if he were about to break d o w n in helpless giggles at himself and his pretensions. I 35

    was fifteen or sixteen. In the drinks marquee he turned to me blandly and asked what I would have, Irish or Scotch —
    and brought me home in the evening loudly and
    truculently drunk. My father was furious, my mother laughed. Charlie maintained an unruffled silcnce, pretending nothing was amiss, and slipped me a fiver as I was stumbling off to bed.
    Ah Charles, I am sorry, truly I am.
    N o w , as if he too were remembering that other time, he insisted on buying a drink, and pursed his lips disapprovingly when I asked for gin. He was a whiskey man, himself. It was part of his disguise, like the striped suit and the wom-down, handmade shoes, and that wonderful, winged helmet of hair, now silvered all over, which, so my mother liked to say, had destined him for greatness. He had always managed to avoid his destiny, however. I asked him what he was doing these days. Oh, he said, Fm running a gallery. And he glanced about him with an abstracted, wondering smile, as if he were himself surprised at such a notion. I nodded. So that was what had bucked him up, what had given him that self-sufficient air.
    I saw him in some dusty room, a forgotten backwater, with a few murky pictures on the wall, and a frosty spinster for a secretary who bickered with him. over tea money and gave him a tie wrapped in tissue-paper every Christmas. Poor Charlie, forced to take himself seriously at last, with a business to take care of, and painters after him for their money. Here, I said, let me, and peeled a note from my rapidly dwindling wad and slapped it on the bar.
    To be candid, however, I was thinking of asking him for a loan. What prevented me was — well, there will be laughter in court, I know, but the fact is 1 felt it would be in bad taste. It is not that I am squeamish about these matters, in my time I have touched sadder eases than 36

    Charlie for a float, but there was something in the present circumstances that held me back. We m i g h t indeed have been a father and son — not my father, of course, and certainly not this son — meeting by chance in a brothel.
    Constrained, sad, obscurely ashamed, we blustered and bluffed, k n o c k i n g our glasses together and toasting the g o o d old days. B u t it was no use, in a little while wc faltered, and fell g l o o m i l y silent. T h e n suddenly Charlie looked at me, with what was almost a flash of pain, and in a l o w , impassioned voice said, Freddie, what have you d o n e to yourself? At once abashed, he leaned a w a y f r o m me in a panic, desperately grinning, and puffed a covering cloud of s m o k e . First f was furious, and then depressed.
    R e a l l y , I was not in the m o o d for this kind