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lips until they bled. At the farthest limit of our trek, however, we would come down into a little hollow ringed by rocks, a miniature valley, with meadow-grass and gorsebushes and banks of hawthorn, where all was still and hummingly silent, and where even Freddie grew calm, or as near to calm as he ever got. Here my father, in plus-fours and gaiters and an old fawn pullover and still wearing his dog collar, would stop suddenly, with a hand lifted, hearkening to I do not know what secret signal or vibration of the air, and then strike off from the path and approach this or that bush, with surprising lightness of tread for such a large-made man, and carefully part the leaves and peer in and smile. I remember it, that smile. There was simple delight in it, of course—it made him look as I imagined Freddie would have looked if he had not been a half-wit—but also a sort of grim, sad triumph, as if he had caught out the Creator in some impressive yet essentially shoddy piece of fakery. Then with a finger to his lips he would beckon us forward and lift us up one after the other to see what he had discovered: a finch’s or a blackbird’s nest, sometimes with the bird herself still on it, throbbing tinily and looking up at us in dull fright, as at the side-by-side big faces of God and his son. Not the birds, though, but the eggs, were what fascinated me. Pale blue or speckled white, they lay there in the scooped hollow of the nest, closed, inexplicable, packed with their own fullness. I felt that if I took one in my hand, which my father would never have permitted me to do, it would be too heavy for me to hold, like a piece of matter from a planet far more dense than this one. What was most striking about them was their difference. They were like themselves and nothing else. And in this extreme of selfness they rebuked all that stood round about, the dissolute world of bush and briar and riotous green leaf. They were the ultimate artefact. When I first spotted The Death of Seneca, shining amidst the dross in the back room at Alighieri’s, I thought at once of those Sunday mornings of my childhood, and of my father with infinite delicacy parting the foliage and showing me these fragile and yet somehow indestructible treasures nestling at the heart of the world.
    To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first of all fall in love there. I had always known London; my family, although they hardly ever went there, considered itour capital, not dour Belfast, with its rain-coloured buildings and bellowing shipyard sirens. It was only in that summer I spent in London with Nick, however, that the place came fully alive for me. I say I spent the summer with him but that is wishful exaggeration. He was working—another exaggeration—for his father at Brevoort & Klein, and had moved down from Oxford to a flat above a newsagent’s shop off the Fulham Road. I remember that flat with remarkable clarity. There was a small living room at the front with two peaked mansard windows that made an incongruously ecclesiastical effect; the first time Boy came there he clapped his hands and cried: “Fetch me my surplice, we must have a black mass!” The flat was known as the Eyrie, a word neither Nick nor I was sure how to pronounce, but it suited, for certainly it was eerie—Nick favoured tall candles and Piranesi prints—and airy, too, especially in spring, when the windows were filled with flying sky and the timbers creaked like the spars of a sailing ship. Nick, who was by nature a unique mix of the aesthete and the hearty, let the place run to appalling squalor: I still shudder when I think of the lavatory. At the back was a poky bedroom with a sharply canted ceiling, in which there was wedged skew-ways an enormous brass bed Nick claimed to have won in a poker game in a gambling den behind Paddington Station. It was one of Nick’s stories.
    He did not often sleep at the flat. His girls refused to stay there, because