Eleanor cured Patrick of drinking whisky. When she met him he would start and finish a bottle in an evening. By surreptitiously pouring half of each new bottle down the lavatory and topping it up with water, she weaned him from this dangerous nectar and steered him into a routine where he only drank on Saturdays.
Red Martini, spiced and sickly, was his next peccadillo. He would clasp the bottle by the neck and keep it close to him all evening, challenging anyone who tried to share it.
Patrick rarely invited the children into the Drinking Room. It was like a museum, deep shelves, deep dust, icons and a Chinese pipe. His special things. Patrick loved ritual, and he lit the fire in the Drinking Room at five o’clock on Saturday evenings. Then he went upstairs and had a bath, returning in clean clothes but the same scuffed cowboy boots, like a priest ready for Mass. He stood at the mantelpiece with his first glass of wine, head to one side listening to the opening melody of every Saturday night; the babbling summer notes of Theodorakis’s ‘On the Beach’ issued from the gramophone, heralding another Drinking Evening.
Va Va was eight when she was invited, one afternoon, to help Patrick rearrange his Drinking Room things. Reaching back on a shelf for the broken wing of a plaster cherub, she found a tiny box of books. Eight bruised purple covers in miniature. ‘I shall give you these on your fifteenth birthday,’ said Patrick. Va Va shivered in the shadow of future sophistication. Something in the Drinking Room was hers.