So, I repeated some tales about my early days, about how my parents were already well into their years when I came along, their only child. And how at eighteen, my mother died leaving me the apartment in the Old Powers district and enough in her account to keep me going for a year. And not wishing to waste my time at college, or to get stuck in the nine-to-five routine, I set about making as much money as quickly as I could. And, using my wits and some luck along the way, I made money enough to put my ungrateful kids through a private education – I missed out the word ungrateful – to get a five-bedroomed place in Campion Heights, plus a holiday place out at the coast, and to drive a 1935 Riley Kestrel Saloon at weekends just for the hell of it. Not that everything was appreciated; the Riley for example is a car the kids always refused to get into, said it made them look like they were in Mary Poppins or something.

Anyway, I told the old tales, and they laughed the old laughs.

We had just been served the main courses when I thought I saw him. He was at a two-seat table in a darkened corner, and the corner was illuminated intermittently by passing cars. Then, when a car stopped and caught him full beam, I knew it. It was him. It was Dickie Rooks.

He had aged, as had I, but I was in no doubt; the disordered hair still trying to escape his scalp, same hunch of the shoulders, same air of self-assurance – a self-assurance exemplified by the fact that he was seated alone. I didn’t know many, if any, who would dine alone in a restaurant; I for one could not countenance the thought, it would be too desolating for me. In a room designed for company and conviviality I would feel acutely the accompanied eyeing my solitude, and would interpret every ministration of the waiters as deep pity.

Dickie Rooks. The fact was that I had not had a friend like him since we parted after the game against The Holy Martyrs Orphanage all of those years ago; not a real friend, not like those I had read about and envied: Montaigne and Etienne de La Boetie, Flaubert and Alfred le Poittevin, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Never since had I felt able to tell anyone what strange things might be going on in my head, to think out aloud, with whom I could measure my place in the world and try to make some sense of everything.

I had picked up a few acquaintances since, people to have an early drink with, or to eat lunch with, that sort of thing; casual, with no responsibilities or expectations on either side. And it would all be ok until they said something stupid. And everyone said something stupid eventually, people just cannot help themselves.

One of them got complicated. Maurice Coggan was a fellow I knew through my business. Pretty soon after I got to know him we had to take a trip together, a trip that involved an overnight stay in Geskie, a town some seven-hundred miles to the south of Grover. There was no way around it. If there had been a way round it, I would have taken it. But I needed him and he needed me and we needed to be on the site in Geskie at the same time. I insisted though that we take the train, for which I was happy to buy first-class tickets; the idea of being trapped in a car with someone I barely knew for a fourteen-hundred-mile round trip was too much to bear.

As it turned out though, Maurice Coggan was ok. He didn’t talk as if he had to get words used up by a certain date, and when he did talk he didn’t bore the life out of me, didn’t just come up with one stupid thing after another to fill the silence. He was a churchman, a lay preacher at his local church. Me, I didn’t have a religious bone in my body but that was ok, because Maurice wasn’t a holy-Joe type; true, he didn’t curse and swear like some I’ve come across, but he had a quiet sense of humour and didn’t mind taking a drink when the occasion arose.

But the problem between us started when I met his wife. He invited me and Carmel round for dinner; not something I would usually accede to, but we had met a few times and travelled half the length of the country together without mishap, so I didn’t think it would do any harm; besides, Carmel had been telling me that I ought to be more sociable and get to know some people.

His wife, Glenore, was a small tightly-packed redhead with a slight lisp, and I fell for her before we got to the soup. By that time, I had been with Carmel for fifteen years, been married for twelve of them, and had not strayed far beyond the marital bed. But there was something about Glenore which kicked all rational thought out of the window and replaced it with animal desire.

She too was involved in the church – we said grace before the meal – but like Maurice she wasn’t solemn about it; just the opposite, I had barely come across anybody who laughed as much as she did. Whenever I said anything resembling a witticism, she made me sound like a cross between Lenny Bruce and Chic Murray. So, it wasn’t just her look and lisp and hips that I warmed to, it was how she seemed to regard me, which was different to how I regarded myself and how I thought others might regard me.

When Maurice went out to stack the dishes, Carmel went through to help, leaving me and Glenore sitting opposite each other. ‘Great food,’ I said but she didn’t reply, just smiled and kind of stared at me, as if she was waiting for the answer to a question which she hadn’t yet asked. And before Maurice and Carmel returned, we had agreed to meet the following Friday at the Holiday Inn at Swinhoe Blossoms, a town about twenty or so miles to the east of Grover where we reckoned on nobody recognising us. I didn’t expect her to turn up, but she did. And the first thing she said when she came into the room was, ‘I haven’t sinned like this before. I would just like you to know that.’

‘Glenore, please don’t sin on my account,’ I said. ‘Just go back home to your husband.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I love Maurice, but I need to experience someone else. I need someone else to experience me. Maurice is all I have known, and it is not enough. If I don’t do it now, I never will.’

So, we met at the same place on alternate Friday afternoons until, after three months or so, she came into the room looking more anxious than usual. I asked her what had happened and she told me. ‘The girl,’ she said. ‘She gave me a look.’

‘The girl?’

‘The girl on reception. She looked at me like I was a prostitute. She thinks I am a prostitute. I felt terrible, Joe. It reminded me of what we’re doing.’

She told me that she liked me a lot – neither of us had talked of love, we knew it wasn’t that – but that it had to stop. I didn’t put up any argument.

So, we said our goodbyes and then she confessed her sin; first to her priest, then to her husband. I assumed that her confessions would cause some trouble between me and Carmel, but they didn’t because Carmel never got to know and I didn’t see Glenore again.

Next time – and the last time – I saw Maurice I told him how sorry I was, which was true. Not for having sex with his wife – it is something I still think about now – but sorry for abusing his hospitality and companionship, and for upsetting the apple-cart of his marriage.

‘I forgive you, Joe,’ he said. ‘We are all too human, and I mean all of us. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did and I forgive you both.’

I would rather he had roughed me up, as he could have done; he was bigger than me, and younger and fitter. But no, he made me feel worse by forgiving me. Within a couple of months they had moved from the area.

With Rooks it had been different. We first met when we were seated together in a geometry class on our second day at Taplin High. We were thereafter in daily company for almost the entirety of the next five years. Why? Who knows? Who can say what attracts one to the other. The best that Montaigne could come up with was, Because he was he and I was I. And as far as I know neither Flaubert nor Stan or Ollie came up with anything better to explain his indivisible connection to that other person; that person without whom he himself might seem incomplete.

It was not an attraction of likes; certainly not in terms of our family backgrounds. My father made decent money but worked long hours for it, out at six in the morning, back at eight in the evening, half-day Saturdays. He made enough so that my mother didn’t need to work, so she didn’t. My main early memory is of them sitting in their separate chairs, he reading the newspaper or sleeping, and she watching moronic television programmes. The next memory is his funeral, which happened when I was ten, the year before I started at Taplin High. After that, most nights my mother’s sister sat where my father sat.

Rooks’ family though, they were chalk to my family’s cheese. They always had people coming in and out; all bohemian types like them. They had no sources of income that I could see, but always seemed to have enough to provide them with what they needed; and what they seemed to need was good food and wine, tickets to operas and plays, and frequent trips to the coast where both parents painted execrable seascapes. Execrable or otherwise, they liked to display them on the walls of their apartment, a big old place in the Chaplains area which had apparently been in the Rooks’ family for generations.

There, they had no television. Instead, they either had the radio on or somebody noodled about on the piano, sometimes both at once. Now and again, usually after a glass or two and regardless of the time of day, or whether anybody was listening or not, Ralph Rooks would sing something to his wife’s piano accompaniment, often in German.

Even stranger, certainly stranger in the early days, was that they would often be reading in silence, the mother and father at either side of the fire. They would be so absorbed in what they were reading that they often didn’t notice me and Dickie coming through on our way to the kitchen.

When I first saw them doing that – the singing and the reading and so on – it seemed very odd, as if I had stumbled upon some weird cult. But after a few such occasions they seemed like the most natural things to do, and pretty soon I barely took any notice; in fact, on those evenings when I returned home – and on weekends I rarely did – it was the sight of my mother staring dumbly at the television which began to seem pretty odd.

And I cannot deny that another attraction at Rooks’ place was Monica. She was Dickie’s sister, three years older than us and to me a vision of previously unimagined gorgeousness. It was she who lit the touchpaper of my subsequent lusts and, not having seen her in these past decades, time has not diminished her attraction.

All told, I had five years in the company of Dickie and his family and assumed that it would be a lifelong connection, assumed that I too would become a bona-fide bohemian and never again look at a television. And maybe things would have worked out that way if it had not been for that catch.

The Rooks were cricketers. That is, Ralph Rooks had since early boyhood been a member of The Chaplains Cricket and Tennis Club, the wooden pavilion of which was in sight of their apartment. It was an amateur but serious set-up which had been going for over a hundred years, and in summer the family spent a lot of time there. Although I had no sporting inclination, Ralph and Dickie tried to excite in me some enthusiasm by describing the beauties of the game; it’s shapes and patterns, its arcane rules and observances which did not, as Ralph put it, change whether played at Lords, the Gabba, or at Little Palfry.

Lords? Gabba? Little Palfry? What the hell was he talking about?

It was, he said, as much a meditation as a game, made for long days on new-cut grass and for musings upon the nature of life. It was, in the uncertainty as to how and when it would end, a template for life itself. It was, above all, an arena in which a man’s conduct mattered, a place in which the good man was easily distinguished from the rascal, the rascal in that arena being the rarest and most pitiable of creatures. He told me that, ‘The great Becket, a man of unimpeachable moral fortitude,’ had been a cricket enthusiast and was the only Nobel Prize winner to have appeared in Wisden. ‘Imagine it, Joe. The man who wrote Godot, striding out to the crease.’

What was Wisden? What was Godot? And who was Becket come to that, with his moral fortitude?

Ralph – he was always Ralph, even to his own kids – showed me the Chaplains cap; red and orange panels with a top tassel, the peak embroidered with the motto Actiones Secundum Fidei. I could work the sentence out from my Latin class, but he told me anyway; it meant, We act according to who or what we believe ourselves to be.

At that time, it meant as much to me in Latin as in English.

So I began to spend a lot of time at the club, not only because Dickie hung out there, but also because Monica spent a lot of time there playing tennis. If I were to adopt any sport, it would undoubtedly have been tennis, but not for reasons which might make for a great player.

As for the cricket, I cannot deny that over time I gained an inkling of what Ralph Rook was talking about, kind of; a sense of life being enacted out there inside the boundaries; the white uniforms vivid against the green of nature; there they were, at silly mid-on and gulley, at long off and short third man, waiting for a sweep in their direction, not knowing when it would come, knowing only that it would. Ralph recalled a match in which, during seven hours of play, he touched neither ball nor bat. He said that he loved every moment; the sun, the slow walk from position to position, the tea and sandwiches, the clicks and thuds and the applause from the pavilion.

And the odd thing – another odd thing – about Ralph was that he wasn’t particularly good. As one of the older players, he stood in the slips, but I cannot recall seeing him taking more than three catches in all of the hours that I watched him. And always before he went out to bat, Olivia, his wife, fussed over him like a mother preparing her child for his first day at school; adjusting his cap, tucking his neckerchief into his shirt, cleaning his spectacles. Before each ball he surveyed the field like a general before battle, looking for the gaps and weaknesses in the opposition defences. It would barely have surprised me had he taken out a telescope. And his movement around the crease was more ballet than sport; all Nureyev steps and d’Artagnan swishes. But whether facing pace or spin, bouncer or yorker, his bat rarely found itself in the close vicinity of the ball. On those occasions when, by an accident of geometry and physics, bat and ball collided, he looked mildly shocked, as if he had stained the artistry of his performance with an instance of vulgarity. When that happened, despite the encouragement of his partner, he would make no attempt to run but would simply examine his bat, as if checking for damage.

Ralph played for the second team, Dickie turned out for the junior teams, and Olivia and some of the other women made sandwiches and served teas on match days. At first, I joined their practices but it was soon clear that I didn’t have what it takes. The bat just felt wrong in my hands, too big and too heavy, and despite Dickie’s exhortations – ‘Just follow the line of the ball. Keep your bat straight’ – it all felt too unnatural. I wasn’t much better without the bat; the ball seemed unnecessarily hard to me and I was conscious of having a somewhat effeminate throw. So, without anything being said, I just accepted my role as spectator and matchday assistant.

That is, until the charity match.

Toward the end of each season, they held a match, Chaplains against the Holy Martyr’s Orphanage from over in Greek Fields. The winners were presented with the Gilbert Raglan Trophy, Gilbert Raglan being one of the founders of the Orphanage. The mayor and his wife would come with other bigwigs, and local firms sponsored the thing, and the spectators paid to get in; they bought raffle-tickets and stuff made by the kids from the orphanage – greetings cards, baskets and religious knick-knacks – and all the proceeds, including the takings from the bar, went to the Holy Martyrs. The teams were made up of a Chaplains eleven, minus the first-teamers, against some of the staff and older kids from the orphanage. Chaplains always won.

Although I didn’t say anything, from the off it always seemed a strange affair to me, the moneyed of Chaplains doing their bit for the motherless boys who might soon be washing their cars or cleaning their gutters, or asking for their loose change; boys who had as much chance of becoming members of the Chaplains Cricket and Tennis Club as I had of opening the batting for the first-team.

And they didn’t even play in whites. Every year, it looked like they were wearing whatever they could get their hands on before getting on the bus; stuff that was too baggy or too tight, with loose threads and patched trousers. I wondered every time I saw them, why didn’t they use the proceeds from the previous charity match to at least get the kids turned out decently. Nobody seemed to have thought that they mattered enough for that.

Dickie and I had just finished our final exams when the time for that season’s game came around. This time there was some kind of bug going round the city and Chaplains were a player short. As I was staying at Dickie’s on the Saturday evening and going to the game anyway, Ralph asked if I would step in. Knowing that I possessed no ability, he assured me that, if things went according to plan there would probably be no need for me to bat, and that all I had to do was stand out by the boundary and wait for anything that might come my way, and that probably wouldn’t be much given that the Holy Martyrs were not usually very good. But, charity game or not, I did not feel inclined to make a fool of myself, especially in front of Monica, so I made an excuse about having a bad foot.

‘Not to worry, Joe,’ Ralph said, playing some classical thing on the piano. ‘I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to wear the cap before too long.’

That night as I lay in the guest room – which was pretty much my weekend room by then – Monica came in and sat on the bed. She had been into town with her friends and I could tell that she had been drinking. For one thing, she had never before entered that room while I was in there.

‘Well, if it isn’t diddle Choe Crement,’ she said in a ridiculously childish voice. ‘Wad I hear ’bout your boor didoo footy-woot?’

‘Oh, it’s ok,’ I said, assuming that she was enquiring after my fraudulent foot condition. ‘It’s just a little sore that’s all.’

She sat on the bed and I was grateful to be lying down, because I thought that her close proximity might cause me to faint.

‘Well, if it’s ok, why can’t you play in the match tomorrow?’ she said, sounding serious in her normal voice.

‘Like I say, it’s a bit sore. I’m not so sure I can run on it.’

‘Which one?’

‘Which one what?’ I asked, giving myself time to choose.

‘Which foot?’

I chose left.

‘Well let’s have a look at it shall we.’

She lifted the blanket, and began to rub my left foot with both hands.

‘Is that any better?’ she asked.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Yes, a bit.’

‘Maybe if the improvement continues you might be able to play in tomorrow’s game. You think?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, as I lay with my eyes closed, wishing these moments could be stretched to the end of my time on this earth, and resisting the impulse to touch her.

‘How about if I kissed it, you think that might help?’

Standing naked at the crease would have been a small price to pay for the touch of Monica’s mouth on my skin.

‘Oh god,’ I croaked. ‘I think it might, yes.’

She bent forward and kissed it. And it was not just a peck; her mouth moved slowly around the top of my foot, placing small and exquisitely painful bites here and there. Then she pressed my big toe upward and placed it in her mouth. I made a squeak of ecstasy and, so that my juices might be held in check, forced myself to contemplate one of Olivia’s seascapes.

‘You like that, Joe?’ she said, still kissing. ‘There might be more after tomorrow’s match. If you can play, that is. Can you play?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Shall I go and tell Ralph the good news?’

‘Yes, I suppose.’

‘Good boy. I knew you wouldn’t let us down.’

She kissed the tips of her fingers and placed them on my lips. Then she left, and I lay awake for a long time, feeling her fingers on my mouth, and staring at the small tattoos she had made on my foot.

Next day the temperatures were in the seventies. Amid the chatter and the clattering of boots in the changing-room, Ralph handed me a red and orange cap: Actiones Secundum Fidei. We act according to who or what we believe ourselves to be. Although I knew the words, I still couldn’t be sure what they meant exactly, only that they seemed to point in the direction of something which might matter.

There must have been about two-thousand spectators all told, packing the whole pavilion and sitting on deck chairs all around the boundary. As usual, there was a large and raucous contingent from the Holy Martyrs, brought across the city on buses which were laid on free. Priests and nuns were well represented and two of the priests – a batsman and a left-arm spinner – were in the team.

Ralph won the toss and chose to bat first. I was the eleventh man and it was hoped that Chaplains would have a decent enough score to declare before I was needed. However, it so happened that the spinner priest knew what he was doing and the Chaplains batsmen were having trouble getting to grips with his deliveries which, on the dry wicket, were leaping off the wicket at odd angles. Also, one of the orphan kids – Henry, a skinny six-footer with a crazy run-up who nobody had seen before was sending balls down at about eighty miles an hour and – this was before they started using headguards – looked as if he might cause someone a serious injury.

Ralph went in at sixth and during a forty-minute innings scored eight – two fours off the spinner. After Henry had him caught behind, he was applauded back to the pavilion as if he had scored a century against Australia. By the time the ninth wicket fell, Chaplains had scored only ninety-seven so I was sent in, unnerved by the rapturous applause I received, and by Monica’s voice shouting, ‘Come on, Joe Clement. You can do it.’

As things turned out, I couldn’t do it. I lasted seven balls before the Henry kid one down that I didn’t see but only heard as it smashed into the stumps behind me. The innings ended on one-hundred-and-one.

‘Never mind, Joe,’ Monica said, as I piled sandwiches onto my plate. ‘Let’s see how you do in the field. How’s the foot?’

‘A bit sore,’ I said.

It was a long hot stretch in the field. I had been on the boundary for coming up four hours and had touched the ball about five times, each time to retrieve it when it had gone for a four or a six. I couldn’t deny though that it was getting quite interesting, even exciting some might have said. The crowd were certainly becoming more animated with each ball. Coming into early evening the game had reached a point where the Martyrs needed seven to win but had only one wicket remaining. The gangly kid Henry, who had only gone in at number five, was on forty-nine when, fielding right in front of the pavilion, my moment came.

Dickie, who bowled at a medium pace and had taken three wickets, sent one down and Henry, going for a six, hit it high into the air. It took a moment for me to follow the flight of the red and diminishing dot on its upward trajectory, but as it hung as if suspended and then began its return to earth, I realised that it was coming down in my direction. As I moved to get under it, I heard Monica’s voice above the growing din, ‘It’s yours Joe. Catch, catch, catch.’

The ball seemed to take an age before it collided with my cupped hands. But it didn’t stay there. I had obviously not cupped my hands as I had been shown on numerous occasions, had not made them soft and so the ball bounced out again. Looking back, it must have seemed to the spectators that I was handling molten metal as, falling to my knees, I made several grabs at it as it dropped toward the grass. At last, I managed to hold it as it landed and as I leapt up, I threw the ball back into the air and, as I seen others do, shouted ‘Howzat.’

When I had witnessed such an occurrence before, and I had witnessed many such occurrences, it had been accompanied by congratulations and the slapping of backs. But my effort resulted in a kind of murmur, sounding like a whispered question from the pavilion behind me.

I stood with the ball held aloft, and the distant umpire, assuming from my actions that the ball had not met with the ground and that the catch had been a clean one, raised his index finger to signal the end of the innings, the end of the match, and a win for Chaplains. There was a smattering of applause from the far side fielders, and then another – still sounding like a question – from the spectators behind. Those few half-hearted claps for my catch became a standing ovation as the batsmen made their way up the pavilion steps. I noticed Henry giving me a strange look.

No one spoke to me as we gathered for the presentation in the main room of the pavilion. Dickie was talking to Henry and they were both glancing across at me; Ralph was in deep conversation with the mayor, and Monica and Olivia were busy with the other women in the kitchen. I stood alone with my tea, pretending to study the portraits of previous club captains, which included two Rooks.

Then someone tapped a cup with a spoon and the room became silent. The mayor held the trophy and made his usual speech. He gave thanks to all who had helped make the day possible: all the volunteers, the players, and God for giving us such great weather. He told us that, although the gate receipts had not yet been counted, it was thought that this year’s game had yielded a record amount. Except for me, who was not in the mood, everybody clapped. Then he said, ‘Following discussions with both captains, we have decided this year that, under the circumstances, the Raglan Trophy will be shared between the two teams.’

More applause, more glances in my direction. Because we all knew what the circumstances were. The circumstances were my catch. The circumstances were that the ball had hit the ground before I caught it, and now everybody knew it.

As Ralph and one of the priests had their photos taken, each holding a handle of the trophy, I went into the home dressing-room and put my cap on one of the hooks. Then, I changed and took the tram back to Old Powers where, with the curtains closed to keep the sun out, my mother and her sister were watching Tubby Reddy’s Big Prize Show. I never saw Dickie or any of his family again.

As we were leaving Penceys, I went across to Rooks’ table. The kids having by then done their duty, it was just me and Carmel.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but it’s Dickie, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Dickie Rooks?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, as if being reminded of his own name. ‘How are you?’

He stood and we shook hands. He knew me from somewhere, but where.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Fine also,’ he said. He clutched his brow to indicate concentration. ‘It’s just that…’

‘Joe,’ I said.

‘Joe?’

‘Clement’

‘Clement?’

‘Joe Clement.’

‘Joe Clement. Well, well. So nice to see you again.’

‘Just thought I’d come across to say hello. It’s been such a long time.’

‘Of course, glad you did. How long exactly? Must be what…?’

‘Twenty-eight years by my reckoning.’

‘Oh my, that long? How time sneaks up on us.’

He was trying to work it out, forty-five minus twenty-eight. Maths had not been his strongest subject. I wanted to ask after his family but feared they might all be dead. I couldn’t bear to hear that Monica had died; or worse, was happily married to someone who was not me.

‘We had some good times,’ I said, hoping to remind him.

‘Joe Clement, of course.’

‘You remember.’

‘I remember. The charity match. Of course, the charity match?’

I wanted to ask him, was it that catch that did for me? Was it that catch which marked me as a rascal, to be cast out forever from the civilised world? Would Samuel Becket have disapproved so much? Did anybody care that much about whether a ball hit the ground before I caught it all those years ago? And did it still matter? But I didn’t ask the questions, because I didn’t wish to hear the answers.

‘Anyway, I’d better…’ I pointed to Carmel who was waiting, arms folded by the door.

‘Yes, of course. Well, it’s been very good to see you after all this time. Joe Clement, of course.’

‘You too, Dickie,’ I said, wondering about the of course. ‘You too.’

Out on the street I looked back into the restaurant. He was seated again, concentrating on his spaghetti, twirling it casually onto his fork. It was one of the things I had noticed on one of my early visits, the Rooks were easy with pasta; a fork was all they needed, two or three casual twists and the strands were secured tightly whereas I, like a child, needed the assistance of a spoon. At home, I practiced when my mother wasn’t around, and next time I went across to Chaplains I didn’t need the spoon.

‘Who was that?’ Carmel asked as we slid into the cab.

‘An old friend,’ I said.

‘You have old friends?’

‘Yes, I have old friends. What’s so strange about that? Someone I played cricket with as a matter of fact.’

‘Cricket?’

‘Yes cricket. What’s so funny?’

‘You, all that standing about for nothing, all those silly rules, everybody wearing silly caps. I just can’t imagine it.’

‘Yeah well, there might be a lot about me that you can’t imagine.’

‘Oh my, it’s the man of mystery, is it? Why don’t you wear one of those caps next time we have sex, whenever that might be.’

I loved Carmel but she could be a bitch at times, saying things like that. She must have sensed the downturn in my mood as we undressed.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Forty-five, it’s only a number. Don’t go all midlife on me.’

‘I’m not,’ I said, although the clichés had crossed my mind. I had a few days previously looked around a Harley-Davidson showroom. I had also contemplated the wearing of a fedora but, anticipating Carmel’s laughter, thought better of it.

Montaigne’s essays were lying on the floor by my bed. Ralph Rooks name was written on the inside page. Montaigne had become a long habit; even if only for a few minutes, every night I would open it at random and read something of what he had to say about whatever came into his head. The fact was, I mostly preferred to be in Montaigne’s head than my own. But that night, I didn’t want to hear what he had to say about dogs or combs or the nature of friendship. As far as I was aware, he had nothing to say about cricket.

I lay awake and Carmel slept. I thought about Dickie Rooks. And the red and orange cap, and what it said and what it might mean: Actiones Secundum Fidei. We act according to who or what we believe ourselves to be. Was I any closer to understanding those words now? Was I no better then than I ought to have been? And now?

I brought to mind the names of some of those ragged boys from the Holy Martyrs. As well as Henry, whom I had cheated of glory, there was a Hughie, and a Patrick, and a Moses. Boys almost like me. And I wondered, as I had wondered many times before, what had become of them. I certainly never saw any of them in Penceys. I used to look out for anybody who resembled Henry – at the cathedral steps, or at the West Gate of the park, places where the beggars gathered. And if I had seen him at any of those places I would have given him everything I had on me, and told him why.