Orvil took the violent pink fruit between his teeth, while his father still held the other end of the wooden toothpick. The wicked taste of scent and alcohol and syrup struck against the roof of his mouth; and in a moment he was eight years old and back again by the library fire in his pyjamas, drinking his hot milk, while his father sipped his cocktail and read to him until the clock chimed twice for half-past seven.

‘How many cherries soaked in gin did I eat before I was ten?’ he wondered.

“Let’s go in to dinner,” said Mr. Pym, standing up after his third gin and French. He made his son precede him on their way into the dining-room. This pleased Orvil.

He stood in some confusion in the middle of the room, looking at all the coloured shields round the walls, waiting for his father to choose a table. By the time he had found the shield of his brother’s college, his father had decided on the table near an old lady who seemed to be eating nothing but boiled eggs. Two shells were already before her on the white table-cloth. She was snapping her nutcracker lips together and saying something vicious to the young waiter who bent over her. Once her hand darted up to her mouth, and Orvil saw that the skin fitted over the bones like a translucent sheet of gelatine. On one of her fingers she wore a half-hoop of very large diamonds; the sort of ring that harmonizes with white suites of bedroom furniture, wreaths of composition roses, inset panels of cane-work, silver shoe-homs and button-hooks, and Reynolds’s angel faces on the oxidized lids of powder-pots.

Orvil watched her through most of the meal, but this did not stop him from also paying attention to his food. First he had tomato soup and ate plenty of Melba toast with it; then he went on to roast duck and orange salad with mashed potato and creamed spinach. Spinach done in this wayalways reminded Orvil of something. He could not help it; although he tried to rid his mind of the image, it sprang up again with each new sight of the dish. Once in a field full of buttercups he had trodden in a cow-pat. He had looked down at his foot which had broken through the hardened outer crust. It lay in a trough lined with darkest richest green. ‘What a wonderful colour!’ he’d thought; ‘it’s just like velvet or jade, or creamed spinach.’

Now, as the waiter put the soft spoonfuls on his plate, the image was with him again. ‘I’m eating cow-pat, I’m eating cow-pat!’ he said to himself as he dug his fork in.

“What would you like afterwards?” his father asked. He was a man who got pleasure from watching other people eat. He himself was only having juicy black mushrooms on toast. The mushrooms, with their flattened damaged gills radiating from a centre, looked like shrunken scalps of coarse Oriental hair.

Orvil read the menu.

“I want pêche Melba,” he said.

“It won’t be a fresh peach,” his father warned him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had pêche Melba with a fresh peach,” Orvil mused; “it’s always been a big yellow tinned peach.”

“I knowr; that’s just the trouble. They never do it properly. They oughtn’t to make it at all if they don’t make it with fresh peaches.” Mr. Pym seemed quite angry; although Orvil knew that nothing on earth would ever persuade his father to eat a pêche Melba himself.

“But in England sometimes the fresh peaches are half a crown or more each,” Orvil said, still defending pêche Melba made with a tinned peach.

His father said nothing in answer but went on drinking whisky-and-soda in delicate gulps.

The pêche Melba arrived with its dripping veil of thick red Escoffier sauce. The two slices had been joined together so that the buttock-like shape of the fruit was again apparent.

‘It’s like a celluloid cupid doll’s behind,’ said Orvil to himself. ‘This cupid doll has burst open and is pouring out lovely snow and great big clots of blood.’

Orvil put some of the metallic-tasting red sauce on his tongue. His father watched him indulgently and carefully until the last bit of peach had disappeared, then they both got up and went back to the basket chairs under the glass roof.

“You pour out,” his father said, when the coffee was brought. This again, like the walking in front into the dining-room, gave Orvil a peculiar pleasure. He felt important.

His father had his coffee black, with three lumps of sugar in the tiny cup; then quietly and gently he fell asleep. Orvil watched the delicate puce veins on his father’s nose and cheeks. They appeared to him as minute purple hands and fingers reaching out to one another. Orvil wondered if his father had been smoking opium again.