By this time the Irishman was coming on like Brendan Behan. He would probably get two extra credits for this from Social Studies – assignment on living down to expectations.

‘How about,’ I asked in the first pause, ‘the number of Irishmen it takes to screw in a nail? Anyone? Eh? Ready? Five! One to hold the nail and four to spin the wall round.’

I thought that was genuinely funny and laughed for a bit.

When I finished, the place had got quieter.

‘How about you and me going outside?’ Uncle Thomais asked. He had done one of those lightning changes from extrovert good nature to black rage.

‘How about . . . How about the way to make an Irishman burn his ear? Do you know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’ He watched me dangerously. ‘Anybody? Anybody know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’

Nobody wanted to play that game.

‘I’ll tell you how to make an Irishman burn his ear . . . Phone him while he’s ironing!’

Somebody laughed. It was good to be a success. I joined him and went on for a while after he’d stopped.

‘Time to go.’

Primo had come for me. When I looked back from the door, the group had dispersed. The Irishman was by himself over at the cabinet of drinks. It looked as if I had altered the mood of his celebration.

In the car, the engine throbbed softly. Lights on the dash threw a dim glow up on Primo’s face. Double rows of headlights flowed at us as we came on to a motorway. The needle climbed and successive silhouettes peeled behind us into the darkness.

‘The Irish joke,’ Brond said conversationally. ‘It’s a shoddy response to the troubles across the water. The flood of jokes about Irish stupidity isn’t really a sign of the fabled British sense of humour.’

In the silence, I thought with the clarity of exhaustion about how often I had heard the word British that day.

‘It’s useful politically to persuade your own public,’ he said, ‘that any people you have to treat firmly are sub-human.’

‘The great British public. Primo and me both,’ I said. ‘Scottish soldiers.’

SIXTEEN

As we followed the path of our lights into darkness, Brond took my stick from where it lay across my knees.

‘Are you afraid,’ I asked remembering the bottle that I had held by his face, ‘I might try to use it as a weapon? It’s too light for that.’

‘So much for curiosity,’he said.

His hands moved and the stick lengthened between them.

‘It’s a piece of craftsmanship,’ he said. ‘You don’t appreciate my gifts. It was cored out on a hollow mandrel lathe using a spoon drill and a hand rest – they bore in about twenty inches from each end to meet – then plug here and hold it with a pinned ferrule; there a double silver fitting on the drawing end; lastly it’s packed with two pieces of split cane to hold . . .’his hands moved apart, ‘twenty-seven inches of tempered German steel.’

It was melodramatic and foolish, a kind of joke, except that nothing Brond did was foolish and if he joked it was in a foreign language about events on another planet. He handed me the stick and I took it, not mine now but his, not a dead thing any longer but like a sleeping servant – or a bad master.

He said, ‘It’s their unexpectedness I treasure.’

I wondered if unexpectedness was his euphemism for treachery.

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘To the capital.’

I had a blurred terrifying image of a house in a quiet town near London – a giant nest of rooms every one empty except for a single chair. In mindless reaction I tried to stretch the stick between my hands. Brond laughed.

‘The Prevention of Crime Act 1953 – it’s against the law to carry a weapon in public without lawful reason or excuse. Did you know that? Anyway, a sword stick really is not a practical weapon in a car.’

I forced my hands to lie still.

‘You gave me the stick in the interrogation room,’ I said, ‘in front of those detectives.’

‘Fortunately,’ Brond said, ‘like yourself, they weren’t sufficiently curious.’

The car slowed as under our lights orange strips on the road rippled. On the roundabout, we passed a sign for the Forth Bridge and took the next exit.

I knew the city now but not why we should be going there.

‘Glasgow has street walkers,’ Brond said as we passed along that long straight entry into the mother of Alba, ‘and an unpalatable collection they are. It has to do, I suppose, with the lack of a substantial middle class. Edinburgh has those, of course, but offers a more genteel service in addition. The advantage, one must suppose, of having the Faculty of Advocates and a plethora of civil servants about the place.’

We came to the Haymarket and went up the hill to the right instead of going forward into Princes Street. After a maze of dark winding streets, we came out on to a broad road and a little later, as I ducked my head searching for some sign I could identify, the car stopped. Primo switched off the engine and I followed Brond out on to the pavement.

Away to our left curved a terrace of substantial houses. In front of us there were stone pillars marking the entrance to a driveway. We seemed to be on a street set above the main road for through the railings behind us the orange lamps shone level with where we stood. Their light followed us into the drive which was longer than it looked from the street, with plenty of space for cars to park discreetly. There was only one at the moment, but I recognised it as a Porsche 911 because the estate owner’s son at home had one; Trailtrow’s son, just turned eighteen, roaring past with a girl beside him, a French girl, an actress, and the calves blockily in flight kicking up their heels.

‘If it is a brothel,’ I said loudly, ‘neighbours in a district like this should object. They should send for the police.’

Primo who was behind me grasped my arm in warning, but Brond looked back seemingly unperturbed.

‘Even discreet brothels,’ he said loudly in a kind of humorous parody of my tone, ‘make a noise from time to time. I expect their neighbours have learned to ignore it.’

A carpet of pebbles gleamed under our feet. Traffic murmured with an effect of distance. We might have been lost deep in the country, coming to knock and ask our way.

The woman who opened the door looked young at first glance, but at a second I thought she was in her fifties at least; and then again there was something not easily defined – she was well dressed, expensively perhaps, nothing immodest – that made me understand Brond had used the exact unvarnished word to describe this place we were about to enter. Maybe that should have made me feel safer, but it didn’t. I didn’t feel happier or safer; just puzzled when she did not admit us at once.

‘Last time was a mistake,’ Brond said, and he leaned forward and spoke to her too softly for me to hear.

‘. . . last time,’ the woman said. ‘. . . last time . . .’

It was eerie to see Brond refused. The illusion of his omnipotence had been imposed upon me. What she was doing filled me with anxiety. I wanted her to stop before something terrible happened. At that moment, however, a car swung into the drive, jerked to a halt in a scatter of pebbles behind the Porsche and ejected a plump bouncy little man whose hair gleamed silver in the light from the open door as he approached.

‘Evening, Maisie.’

He had the air of a familiar guest. As he went to pass us, he glanced at Brond and stopped abruptly.

‘Good God, Maisie!’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re keeping this man on the doorstep. I’ll vouch for—’

‘Mr Smith,’ Brond interrupted him, very easily and as if making a joke. ‘And friends.’