Another review after this extract from the opening chapter....

Every evening for six months now, Mark Roche had left the house immediately after dinner to go to the Mallons. He did it furtively, surreptitiously, like an old lady who keeps a secret bottle behind the leather-bound volumes of Dickens in her parlour bookshelves.
He left his mother sitting resentfully at the table and went to put on his hat and coat, watching himself in the huge hall glass as carefully as if he were going to the opera. His father trotted past on his way to the study, brushing cigar-smoke off his black velvet jacket.
"Yes, yes," he said absently. "Do go and enjoy yourself.
Don't worry about us. We'll entertain ourselves."
The study door closed on his dry sheep-like chuckle. There he would spend the rest of the evening, savouring the sins of medieval princes, rolling their names on his tongue like old wine to bring out their full flavour, wagging his head from time to time and sighing for that glorious era of scarlet and gold.
Mark opened the front door and stepped silently out into Fitzwilliam Street. He took the first few yards quickly, for once or twice his mother had followed him to the door and called him back on some pretext which was soon disposed of, but which nevertheless had delayed him for a few agonizing minutes. Now his conscience twitched uneasily, but at twenty the conscience is still delightfully pliable and elastic and it did not trouble him for long.
Mark was fond of his mother, in an impatient way which he could not have explained. Her wedgwood blue and grey drawingroom bored him, like a theatre scene that is too long left unchanged.