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himself once again on his father, Mr Wiley’s new-found fondness entirely evaporated.
    Being himself was bad enough, and indeed Horace had always found looking at his face in the bathroom mirror while shaving an especially dispiriting experience. But then to look up from his plate of porridge at breakfast and see a younger version of himself, a dreadful replica, seated across the table duplicating his own actions and even eating porridge in the same way and with the same sort of reluctance – Vera insisted that porridge was the healthiest food for his heart – did nothing for his state of mind.
    Or, for that matter, for his health. Never good, Horace Wiley’s body now reacted to this mirror imageof his youthful self, awash with burgeoning manhood, or manhood as burgeoning as one would expect from a burgeoning bank manager in Croydon, by plunging paradoxically into premature old age, as if to escape the torment of this unwanted recognition.
    At forty-five, Horace Wiley looked sixty, and a year later had so much the appearance of a man of sixty-five that a visiting manager from the Lowland Bank’s head office went so far as to enquire what he intended to do the next year when he retired. That evening, Mr Wiley returned from the Gibbet & Goose with six double Scotches inside him instead of the usual two.
    ‘Of course I’m drunk,’ he told his wife with some difficulty when she accused him. ‘And you’d be drunk too if you could see yourself like I do.’
    Mrs Wiley had been understandably furious.
    ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that,’ she shouted. ‘You married me for better or for worse and it’s not my fault I am not as beautiful as I once was.’
    ‘True, very true,’ said Horace who found the statement peculiar. He had never found her beautiful so he couldn’t see why she should raise the issue now. Before he could puzzle this out and find a kitchen chair to slump into, she went on.
    ‘You should take a look at yourself,’ she snapped.
    Horace peered at her and tried to focus. There appeared to be two of her.
    ‘I do. All the time,’ he muttered, making for thechair. ‘It’s unbearable. It’s awful. I can’t escape looking at myself. I’m … he’s always there. Always bloody there.’
    It was his wife’s turn to peer. She wasn’t used to dealing with drunks and in any case she had never seen Horace more than mildly in his cups before. To have him come home in this awful condition only to insult her and then, slumped in a kitchen chair, to start talking about himself in the third person suggested more than mere drunkenness. Something more organic, perhaps even dementia, briefly crossed her mind before a whiff, in fact a veritable blast, of Scotch hit her as Horace struggled to his feet with an ashen face.
    ‘There it is again,’ he screamed staring wildly past her at the kitchen door. ‘And now there are two of me. And what are they doing in my pyjamas?’
    Mrs Wiley glanced apprehensively over her shoulder. She had DTs on her mind now. Perhaps Horace had been a secret drinker and the stuff had finally caught up with him, sending him crazy. But it was only Esmond, lurking. Before she could point out this seemingly obvious fact Horace started again.
    ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’ he yelled, the overdose of Scotch evidently combining with vivid memories of a school trip to the Old Vic. ‘One, two: why then, ’tis time to do it. Hell is murky!’
    Grabbing a carving knife, Horace drunkenly advanced on his son, lunged at him and fell flat on his face.
    ‘What’s up with Dad?’ Esmond asked, as Vera knelt by Horace and removed the knife.
    ‘He’s not himself,’ she answered. ‘Or he seems to think someone else is him. Or something. Leave off lurking, Esmond, and help get your father sorted before I ring for an ambulance.’
    Together they dragged Horace up the stairs and put him to bed, by which time Vera had decided not to call the doctor after all. Instead she phoned her