[Sir John continues]

By the next evening, Erik had come up with a solution: 'You will not snore tonight, because you will not sleep tonight! I will sing you the whole of my masterpiece, Don Juan Triumphant. I have spent twenty years working on it and polishing it to perfection until every note burns, and you shall be the first audience of all five hours of it!'

'Fair enough,' I said. 'Is it funny?'

'Certainly not! It is the expression of the agony in the soul of the composer, refracted through the lens of music to express suffering in every aspect.'

'Then why are people going to want to go and see a five-hour opera about Don Juan that isn't even funny?'

'They aren't supposed to want to see it! They're supposed to have to go and see it!'

'Why?'

'Up until the twentieth century, there was a curious prejudice that "music" should mean a sound that people enjoyed listening to,' observed Erik. 'Gradually, classical musicians, along with artists in other media, taught the educated concert-goer to expect, instead, music that would challenge perceptions of "enjoyment" and of the distinction between "music" and "tuneless cacophony".

'But the trouble was that while this was happening in the classical realm, popular music until the 1980s consisted of tunes that people could dance to. This problem was dealt with by the invention of "dance music" consisting of nothing except a heavy bass beat that feels like being repeatedly punched in the stomach. This way, your successors, instead of drinking sweet wine and singing bawdy ballads, could spend their evenings jerking about in time to the aural equivalent of being hit over the head – which was why it was called "clubbing" – while being blinded by flashing strobe lights, and taking pills to make themselves imagine they were having more fun than any generation before them.

'And yet, while both classical music and dance music required more and more training to enjoy them, opera was being supplanted by something called "musicals" that sent people home humming their tunes. The only way to deal with those is for critics to train audiences to regard every musical as escapist froth – whether it's about urban prostitution, gang warfare in New York, or the problems faced by Jews in Tsarist Russia. They must learn to call every attractive tune "saccharine", and every story that makes you care about the characters "sentimental", until everyone has learnt to despise such things. And when the sweetness is finally sucked out of all music, then the revenge of the musician will be complete!'

'Why do you need revenge?' I asked. 'Can you eat revenge? Or drink it? Does it improve your looks? Or take away the pain of not being loved?'

'I don't want those any more!' retorted Erik. 'Our imperfections were the only thing that made us distinctive, and now we're losing them. Don't you see: if you're not quite as fat as you were, and I'm not quite as ugly or as evil as I was, and Malvolio isn't quite as obnoxious as he was, or Sir Andrew quite as stupid, then we'll no longer be the people we were written to be!'

'Maybe not,' I yawned, 'but we'll probably be so happy that we don't mind.'

'Who wants to be happy?' sneered Erik. 'I'm a genius; geniuses are supposed to be deranged and isolated and misunderstood.' And with that he rolled over and went to sleep.

Erik's moods were so sudden that I wasn't sure I'd ever learn to read them. But then, perhaps I wasn't as shrewd at knowing what went on in other people's minds as I thought. I certainly hadn't understood the way Hal's mind worked, and we'd been best friends for about ten years before the day when, suddenly, we weren't.

I know the plays make it look as though everything turned round within a few months, but that's playwrights for you. But, thinking back, perhaps things had begun to change years earlier, when Hal had come back from a meeting with his father to get us organised for the Battle of Shrewsbury. He'd been still the same Hal, still affectionate and joking and mischievous, but with a new air of authority, rattling off orders for battle before we'd even had breakfast: 'Bardolph, take this letter to my brother the Duke of Lancaster and this one to Lord Westmoreland; come on, Peto, we've got thirty miles to ride this morning; Jack, you're in charge of recruiting 150 foot-soldiers – meet me in the Temple Court 2pm tomorrow and I'll pay you the money to equip them,' and then riding off again, as brisk as a dolphin herding fish.

In France, the Crown Prince is called the Dauphin, and perhaps 'dolphin' is a pretty good description of the kind of prince that Hal had been. It's a beast that can look like a fish and move like a fish without ever forgetting that it isn't a fish, and can dive deep into the water and leap through the air without belonging to either. It's the cleverest and most playful of all beasts, and always seems to be just laughing and playing about, until you realise that it is lethally fast and accurate in pursuit of its prey, and that its smile is full of razor-sharp teeth. But, of course, we can outdo the French; where they only have a Dolphin, we have a Prince of Whales.

It didn't occur to me at the time that Hal was starting to grow up. Perhaps he wished that I'd grow up as well, and become the sort of friend he could trust his life to in battle, rather than just a mate who was a good laugh when we were hanging out in the pub. Maybe he wished I was capable of at least trying to be helpful and responsible in an emergency, instead of just messing around the way we always had.

Well, obviously, I wasn't. But there were still years more of drinking together and playing and having daft conversations, and not much changed between us, except that I became more of a show-off and spent even more money that I didn't actually have, took on Robin as a page, and wrote all my letters headed in the Roman style, beginning with name and titles of sender followed by name and titles of recipient, even if it was just a note to say, 'See you in the Boar's Head this evening.' I began to be jealous of Ned Poins, who was the only other one in our gang who was a particularly close friend of Hal's, because it couldn't be long before Henry IV died and Hal became king, and being the king's closest friend was obviously going to be a good position to be in. And after all, the only reason Hal and Poins got on so well was that they were both obsessed with disguises and playing practical jokes on anyone from me to the trainee barman at the Boar's Head.

I don't know what became of Poins. The last time I saw him was just before I had to ride off to Yorkshire for the Battle of Gaultree Forest, when I was having dinner with Nell Quickly and Doll Tearsheet and Bardolph and Pistol (except that Pistol started a fight with Doll almost at once and I had to chase him away, after which the women were all over me), and just when Doll and I were having a bit of a cuddle and gossiping about Hal and Poins, it turned out that those two were spying on me to find out what I said about them behind their backs. It must have been very disappointing for them to find out that, while I was mildly disparaging about them when they weren't there, I was nothing like as obscene as when I was insulting them to their faces, but they pretended to take offence anyway, and I invented an excuse, and just when things were getting interesting, Peto turned up to tell me that there were army officers knocking on the door of every pub and every brothel in the area, wanting to know why I hadn't reported for duty. In other words, it was exactly like any other evening at the Boar's Head, except that I didn't know it would be the last time that Hal and Poins and I would ever spend an evening talking rubbish together like this. By the time I came back, Hal had become king, and Poins, who was sharper the rest of us and must have guessed the way things were going to go, had disappeared of his own accord without waiting to be banished.

In the two months I'd been with Arthur, I'd stopped thinking about the past, if only because it was a thousand years in the future. But now I was starting to remember it all again, and as I fell asleep, I dreamed about the day when I had gone to the Coronation, taking Bardolph and Pistol and Justice Shallow with me, to congratulate Hal on becoming king. But somehow this time, I dreamed that I was the newly-crowned Henry V:

When I'd decided to spend my time as a prince with all kinds of low-lifes from wayward knights to common ruffians and prostitutes, I hadn't thought there were any serious drawbacks. Yes, I was deliberately ruining my reputation, so that people would be all the more impressed when I reformed later on, and in the meantime, I would have learnt how ordinary people lived. It hadn't occurred to me that I was going to hurt anyone. Now, I'd become king, and the country was poised for a reign of terror. My father had really believed, until a few minutes before his death, that I wanted him to die. Hard-working officials who had had to punish me when I misbehaved were now terrified of reprisals. Even my own brothers were frightened of me.

I had to prove to them all that I really had changed. And unfortunately, the only way I could do that was by rejecting everyone I had been friends with up until now, particularly the group of men standing in front of me now. They weren't the salt of the earth. They were venal, selfish men whom I wouldn't trust to feed my cat for the weekend, but who expected to be given great rank and power because they knew me. But on the other hand, they were men with whom I had heard not only the chimes at midnight but also the police banging on the door at 2am: men who loved and trusted me and, right now, were probably the only people in the world who did, and I was about to betray their trust, as though I was drowning blind kittens.

Then again, were these men really worse than my father the usurper and (probable) murderer, or my brother who invited rebel leaders to peace talks only in order to kill them? When I had finally managed to convince my dying father that I loved him, he had given me his final advice which was: 'Go and start wars in the Middle East so that people don't have time to think about whether you should be in power or not.' My family weren't much better than any other criminal gang, except that we had the power to be nasty on a bigger scale than anyone else.

But all the same, I was now the head of both my family and the kingdom, and had to defend justice, and I couldn't do that if my officials had to keep kow-towing to common criminals to keep them sweet. Why couldn't these people who used to be my friends just take the hint and go away with some remnants of dignity? I was speaking more harshly than I wanted to, blaming them equally for things they couldn't help, for things that weren't even wrong, and for faults I'd never objected to in the past, in the hope that they'd be angry with me and not even want to be friends with me any more, but they still seemed to assume I was only joking. (Why shouldn't they assume that? If you're always giving your dog playful slaps, how's it supposed to know when you're smacking it to punish it?) Why did they stand there until I had to have them arrested just to get rid of them?

My life had been one long series of disguises. I had played at being a degenerate wastrel, played at being a highwayman, and even, once, played at being a waiter. Now I was playing a king, and, unless I went around disguised as an ordinary person sometimes, I was condemned to play the same part for the rest of my life.

That was what I dreamed, anyway. It's just imagination, and I don't know if Henry V really did think and feel all those things at once. But perhaps he did. When I woke up, there were tears on my pillow, and for the first time, I was feeling sorry for Henry V rather than for myself.

'Are you all right?' asked Erik. 'I wasn't even trying to make you have nightmares this time, I promise!'

'No, I'm fine. I was just remembering a man I knew once. He was trying to reform, but coming from a family as messed-up as his, it's going to be a lonely, uphill struggle all the way. Still, I expect he'll manage. Did you manage to sleep?'

'Yes, all night, thanks.'

'I wasn't snoring too much?' I asked.

'I expect so, but I've got used to it. Now, let's get up; it's our turn to make breakfast.' And we went out into the golden morning full of singing birds.