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and Nicodemus’s physical ease. She also shares my delight in getting drunk, but as yet it’s taken no toll on her waist or her buttocks. I digress; again. How did I get onto the subject of Marietta’s backside? Oh yes, I was talking about how I traveled as my father’s envoy. It was wonderful. I stood in the shit in a lot of stables over the years, of course, but I also visited some of this planet’s glories: the wilds of Mongolia, the deserts of North Africa, the plains of Andalusia. So please understand
that though I’m now reduced to being a voyeur, this wasn’t always the case. I don’t write as a theorist, pontificating on the state of a world that I only knew from my newspapers and my television screen.
    As I get deeper into the story I’ll no doubt season it with talk of the sights I saw and the people I knew on my journeys. For now, let me just talk of England, the country where I was conceived. My birth mother was a woman by the name of Moira Feeney, and, though she died a short time after my birth, of a sickness I’ve never quite comprehended, I passed the first seven years of my life in her native country, looked after by her sister, Gisela. It was not by any means a cosseted existence; Gisela was enraged when she discovered the father of her sister’s child did not intend to bring us into his charmed circle, and rather than accept the substantial sums he offered her to help raise me, she proudly, and foolishly, refused all subsidy. She also refused to see him. It wasn’t until Gisela also died (she was struck, somewhat suspiciously, by lightning) that my father appeared in my life, and took me with him on his travels. In the next five years we lived in a number of extraordinary houses,
the guests of great men who wanted my father’s advice as a horse breeder (and Lord knows what else besides; I think he was probably shaping the destinies of nations behind the scenes). But for all the glamour of those years—two summers in Granada, a spring in Venice; so much more that I can’t recall—it is my years in Blackheath with Gisela that I still return to most fondly. Gentle seasons these; and my gentle human aunt, and milk and rain and the plum tree at the back of the cottage, from the topmost branches of which I could see the dome of St. Paul’s.
    I have a pristine memory of what it was like to perch in those gnarled branches, where I would linger for hour upon hour, lulled into a happy trance by rhymes and songs. One of those rhymes I remember to this day.
    It seems I am,
    It seems I was,
    It seems I will
    Be born, because
    It seems I am,
    It seems I was,
    It seems I will
    Be born because—
    And so on, round and round.
    Marietta’s right, I do miss England, and I do what I can to keep remembrance of it. English gin, English syntax, English melancholy. But the England I yearn for, the England I dream of when I doze in my chair, no longer exists. It was just a view from a plum tree, and a happy child. Both went into history a long time ago. It is, however, the second reason why I am writing this book. In opening the floodgates of memory, I hope to be carried, at least for a little while, back into the bliss of my childhood.
ii
    I should tell you, just briefly, about what happened the day I told Marietta I’d begun this book, because you’ll understand better what it’s like to live in this house. I had been sitting on my balcony with the birds (there are eleven individuals—cardinals, buntings, soldier-wing blackbirds—who come to feed from my hand and then stay to make music for me), and while I was feeding them I heard her down below having a furious argument with my other half-sister, Zabrina. As far as I could gather Marietta was being her usual imperious self, and Zabrina—who keeps out of everybody’s way most of the time, and when she does encounter one of the family doesn’t say much—was for once