In the room beneath, Eugene Sinnott, a man of fifty-eight, opened his eyes and at once closed them again, blaspheming quietly. There was sunlight in the bedroom. He felt its presence on his face and on the backs of his hands, which lay outside the sheet that covered him: again, he reflected, he had omitted to draw down the blinds the night before. The warmth made him uneasy, as did the reddish, unsatisfactory darkness he had induced by dropping the lids over his eyes against the glare.

The night before, at four minutes to midnight, he had stood in the centre of the room, thinking of nothing, unbuttoning the jacket of his black suit and then unbuttoning his waistcoat, seizing his braces and drawing them free of his shoulders, stepping from his trousers and then removing his shoes. He had walked to the door to extinguish the light and had entered his bed in his underclothes. One day in 1948 O’Shea had said to him that his three pairs of pyjamas were now beyond repair and he had nodded his head, deciding that it was not necessary to replace them.

Eugene, on this sunny morning, remembered his dreams. He stretched out his left hand and found a packet of Sweet Afton and a box of matches on the table beside his bed. He lit a cigarette and saw himself as he had seen himself while he dreamed: a man with a plump face that was patterned with exploded veins, a man with a cigarette in the centre of his mouth standing in Riordan’s Excelsior Bar, bald-headed except for a ridge of sandy hair at the back of his neck and tufts of it near his ears. He saw a man in clothes that were marked with cigarette burns, who weighed sixteen stone and measured five foot eleven, whose forehead glistened with a skin of perspiration, whose eyes were pale blue. He had been standing at the bar when Morrissey had entered and announced that Eddie Trump was dead.