Downriver

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‘And what,’ Sabella insisted, ‘is the opposite of a dog?’

Her husband, Henry Milditch, continued to ignore her. This was not easy. Sabella had been painting all afternoon, and was now flagrantly drunk. She poked a pint-sized coffee mug into his midriff. The red wine splashed on to his shirt. He wheezed cigar smoke like a leaking radiator.

‘You two are as boring as those old farts on “Test Match Special”. Everything’s finished, burnt out. Nothing is what it used to be. Every book you mention is “a dog”, “a howling dog”, “an absolute dog”. I want to know what else there is in the world.’

Milditch, up to now, had kept his life in separate compartments. But, with the move out of Hackney, everything was coming to pieces. His wife was roaming free in his book room in an old rugby shirt that she filled very adequately, even though she had put it on back to front. And her daughter was doing her best to climb into my lap and interest me in an odd volume of nautical memoirs.

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