‘Yes, thanks. Would you bring me a gin sling, the prawn soup followed by the smoked salmon and then a salad, please?’ ‘And for the main course?’ Gin at the supper table and she not English, Irish or from any of those parts. An American, was it? ‘The beef Wellington,1 I think, and an iced sherbet, and coffee if you still have it. Yes, coffee.’ ‘You’ll be wanting a brandy, then, to top it all off, will you?’ Was she away to the races in the middle of the night? ‘A double, but … but let me have it in this.’ Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a bloody flask and silver, no less, from the Highlands! ‘That I will, m’am. That I will.’ The main dining room at the Shelbourne was all a-glitter. A last bastion of British rule, the hotel had been done over in the late 1880s. Life-size statues of bare-breasted Nubian princesses stood outside the entrance in all weathers, holding the lamp standards: turbaned ebony and gold, wrought iron and gas lamps.
