TWO

Where’s your best girl?’ Len asked Duncan across the bench, at the candle factory at Shepherd’s Bush. He meant Mrs Alexander, the factory’s owner. ‘She’s late today. Have you had a tiff?’

Duncan smiled and shook his head, as if to say, Don’t be silly.

But Len ignored him. He nudged the woman who sat next to him and said, ‘Duncan and Mrs Alexander have had a row. Mrs Alexander caught Duncan making eyes at another girl!’

‘Duncan’s a real heart-breaker,’ said the woman good-humouredly.

Duncan shook his head again, and got on with his work.

It was a Saturday morning. There were twelve of them at the bench, and they were all making night lights, threading wicks and metal sustainers into little stubs of wax, then putting the stubs in flame-proof cases ready for the packers. In the centre of the bench there ran a belt, which carried the finished lights away to a waiting cart. The belt moved with a trundling sound and a regular squeak—not very noisily but, when combined with the hiss and clatter from the candle-making machines in the other half of the room, just noisily enough so that, if you wanted to speak to your neighbour, you had to raise your voice a little louder than was really comfortable. Duncan found it easier to smile and gesture. Often he’d go for hours without speaking at all.

Len, on the other hand, could not be silent. Getting no fun out of Duncan now, he started to gather up spare bits of wax; Duncan watched him begin to press them all together, moulding and shaping them into what emerged, in another minute, as the figure of a woman. He worked quite cleverly—frowning in concentration, his brow coming down and his lower lip jutting. The figure grew smoother and rounder in his hands. He gave it oversized breasts and hips, and waving hair. He showed it to Duncan first, saying, ‘It’s Mrs Alexander!’ Then he changed his mind. He called down the bench to one of the girls: ‘Winnie! This is you, look!’ He held the figure out and made it walk and wiggle its hips.

Winnie screamed. She was a girl with a deformity of the face, a squashed-in nose and a pinched-up mouth, and a pinched-up nasal voice to match. ‘Look what he’s done!’ she said to her friends. The other girls saw and started laughing.

Len added more wax to the figure, to its breasts and bottom. He made it move more mincingly. ‘Oh, baby! Oh, baby!’ he said, in a silly feminine way. Then, ‘That’s how you go,’ he called to Winnie, ‘when you’re with Mr Champion!’ Mr Champion was the factory foreman, a mild-mannered man whom the girls rather terrorised. ‘That’s how you go. I heard you! And this is what Mr Champion does.’ He held the figure in the crook of his arm and passionately kissed it; finally he put his fingernail to the fork of its legs and pretended to tickle it.

Winnie screamed again. Len went on tickling the little figure, and laughing, until one of the older women told him sharply to stop. His laugh, then, became more of a snigger. He gave Duncan a wink. ‘She wishes it was her, that’s all,’ he said, too low for the woman to catch. He pressed the wax figure back into formlessness and threw it into the scrap-cart.

He was always boasting privately to Duncan about girls. It was all he ever talked about. ‘I could have that Winnie Mason if I wanted to,’ he’d said, more than once. ‘What do you think it would be like, though, kissing her mouth? I think it’d be like kissing a dog’s arse.’ He claimed he often took girls into Holland Park and made love to them there at night. He described it all, with tremendous grimaces and winks. He always talked to Duncan as if he, Len, were the older of the two. He was only sixteen. He had a freckled brown gypsy face, and a pink, plump, satiny mouth. When he smiled, his teeth looked very white and even inside that mouth, against the tan and speckle of his cheek.

Now he sat with his hands behind his head, rocking on the two back legs of his stool. He looked lazily around the Candle Room, going from one thing to another in search of some kind of distraction. After a minute he moved forward as if excited. He called down the bench: ‘Here’s Mrs A, look, coming in. She’s got two blokes with her!’

Still working at the night lights, the women turned their heads to see. They were grateful for any sort of break in the day’s routine. The week before, a pigeon had got into the building and they had gone round the room shrieking, for almost an hour—making the most of the excitement. Now a couple of them actually stood up, to get a better look at the men with Mrs Alexander.

Duncan watched them peer until their curiosity became irresistible. He turned on his stool to look, too. He saw Mrs Alexander heading for the biggest of the candle-making machines, leading a tall, fair-haired man, and one who was shorter and darker. The fair-haired man stood with his back to Duncan, nodding. Every so often he made notes in a little book. The other man had a camera: he wasn’t interested in how the machine worked; he kept moving about, looking for the best shot of it and the man who ran it. He took a picture, and then another. The camera flashed like bombs.

‘Time and Motion,’ said Len authoritatively. ‘I bet they’re Time and—Look out, they’re coming!’

He sat forward again, took up a stub of wax and a length of wick, and started to fit them together with an air of tremendous industry and concentration. The girls all down the bench fell silent, and worked on as nimbly as before. But when they saw the photographer coming, well ahead of Mrs Alexander and the other man, they began to lift their heads, boldly, one by one. The photographer was lighting a cigarette, his camera swinging from his shoulder on its strap.

Winnie called to him, ‘Aren’t you going to take our picture?’

The photographer looked her over. He looked at the girls who sat beside her, one of whom had a burnt face and hands, shiny with scars, another of whom was almost blind. ‘All right,’ he said. He waited for them to draw together and smile, then held up his camera and put his eye to it. But he only pretended to release the shutter. He pressed the button half-way and made a clicking sound with his tongue.

The girls complained. ‘The bulb didn’t flash!’

The photographer said, ‘It flashed all right. It’s a special, invisible one. It’s an X-ray kind. It sees through clothes.’

This was so obviously something he had come up with to flatter plain girls who pestered him to take their picture, Duncan was almost embarrassed. But Winnie herself, and the other girls, all shrieked with laughter. Even the older women laughed. They were still laughing when Mrs Alexander came over with the fair-haired man.

‘Well, ladies,’ she said indulgently, in her well-bred Edwardian voice, ‘what’s all this?’

The girls tittered. ‘Nothing, Mrs Alexander.’ Then the photographer must have winked or made some gesture, because they all burst out laughing again.

Mrs Alexander waited, but could see at last that she wasn’t going to be let in on the joke. She turned her attention, instead, to Duncan. ‘How are you, Duncan?’

Duncan wiped his hands on his apron and got slowly to his feet. He was well known, throughout the factory, as one of Mrs Alexander’s favourites. People would say to one another, in his hearing, ‘Mrs Alexander’s going to leave Duncan all her money! You’d better be nice to Duncan Pearce, he’s going to be your boss one day!’ Sometimes he made the most of it, hamming it up, raising a laugh. But he always felt a sort of pressure when Mrs Alexander singled him out; and he felt that pressure even more today, because she had brought her visitors with her, and was very obviously about to introduce him to them as if he were her ‘star worker’.

She turned her head, looking for the fair-haired man, who was still putting notes in his book about the candle-making machine. She reached, and just touched his arm. ‘May I show you—?’ Along the bench, the girls had stopped tittering and were all looking up, expectant. The man drew nearer and raised his head. ‘Here’s our little night light department,’ Mrs Alexander said to him. ‘Perhaps Duncan could explain the process to you? Duncan, this is—’

The man, however, had stopped in his tracks and was gazing at Duncan as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He started grinning. ‘Pearce!’ he said, before Mrs Alexander could go on. And then, at Duncan’s blank stare: ‘Don’t you know me?’

Duncan looked properly into his face; and recognised him at last. He was a man named Fraser—Robert Fraser. He had once been Duncan’s cell-mate in prison.

Duncan was too stunned, for a moment, even to speak. He’d felt, in an instant, plunged right back into the world of their old hall: the smells of it, the muddled, echoey sounds of it, the grinding misery and fear and boredom…His face grew chill, then very warm. He was aware of everyone watching, and felt caught out—caught out by Fraser on the one hand, and by Mrs Alexander, and Len and the girls, on the other.

Fraser, however, had started laughing. He looked as though he felt the oddness of the situation just as Duncan did; but he seemed able to pass it off as a tremendous joke. ‘We’ve met before!’ he said, to Mrs Alexander. ‘We knew each other—well’—he caught Duncan’s eye—‘years ago.’

Mrs Alexander looked, Duncan thought, almost put out. Fraser didn’t notice. He was still grinning into Duncan’s face. He held out his hand, quite formally; but with his other hand he grabbed hold of Duncan’s shoulder and playfully shook him. ‘You look exactly the same!’ he said.

‘You don’t,’ managed Duncan at last.

For Fraser had grown up. When Duncan had last seen him he’d been twenty-two: lean and white and angular, with a rash of spots on his jaw. Now he must be almost twenty-five—a little older than Duncan himself, in other words, but he was as different from Duncan as it was possible to imagine: broad-shouldered, where Duncan was slender; tanned, and madly healthy-looking and fit. He was dressed in corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt, and a brown tweed jacket with leather patches on the sleeves. He carried a satchel like a hiker’s bag, with the strap across his chest. His fair hair was long—Duncan, of course, had only ever seen him with it cropped—and quite ungreased: every so often, because of the vigour of his gestures, a lock of it would tumble over his brow, and he kept putting up a hand to smooth it back. His hands were as sun-tanned as his face. His nails were cut bluntly, but shone as if polished.

He looked so grown-up and confident, and so at home in his ordinary clothes, that Duncan, on top of everything else, was suddenly shy of him. In his nervousness he almost laughed; and Mrs Alexander, seeing him smile, smiled too.

‘Mr Fraser,’ she said, ‘has come to write about you, Duncan.’

But at that, he must have looked startled. Fraser said quickly, ‘I’m putting together a piece on the factory, that’s all, for one of the picture weeklies. That’s what I’m doing just now; things like that. Mrs Alexander has been kind enough to show me around. I had no idea—’

For the first time, his grin faltered. He seemed to realise at last what he was doing at Duncan’s bench; and what Duncan was. ‘I had no idea,’ he finished, ‘of finding you here. How long have you been here?’

‘Duncan’s been with us for almost three years,’ said Mrs Alexander, when Duncan hesitated.

Fraser nodded, taking that in.

‘He’s one of our ablest workers.—Duncan, since you and Mr Fraser are such old friends, why don’t you show him what your job entails? Mr Fraser, perhaps your man could take a photograph?’

Fraser looked round, rather vaguely, and the photographer stepped forward. He moved about, lifting the camera to his eye again, squaring up the shot as, reluctantly, Duncan picked up one of the little stubs of wax and began explaining to Fraser about the wicks, the metal sustainers, the flame-proof cups. He did it badly. When the flash of the camera went he blinked and, for a second, lost the thread of what he was saying. Meanwhile Fraser nodded and smiled, struggling to hear, and gazing with a fixed, preoccupied interest at every new thing that was pointed out to him; once or twice putting back that lock of ungreased hair from before his brow. ‘I see how it goes,’ he said, and, ‘Yes, I’ve got it. Of course.’

It only took a minute to explain. Duncan put the night light he had made on to the shuffling belt in the middle of the bench, and it was carried off to the cart at the end of it. ‘That’s all it is,’ he said.

Mrs Alexander moved forward. She had been hovering, all this time, and had the slightly disappointed air of a parent who’d seen their child making a mess of its lines in the school play. But, ‘There,’ she said, as if in satisfaction. ‘Quite a simple process. And every one of our little night lights, you see, has to be put together by hand. I suppose you couldn’t guess at how many you’ve assembled in your time here, Duncan?’

‘Not really,’ answered Duncan.

‘No…Still, you’re keeping well, I hope? And how’s’—she’d thought of a way to save the situation—‘how’s the collection?’ She turned to Fraser. ‘I expect you know, Mr Fraser, that Duncan is a great collector of antiques?’

Fraser, looking partly self-conscious and partly amused, admitted that he didn’t know this. ‘Oh!’ said Mrs Alexander with great enthusiasm. ‘Oh, but it’s quite a hobby of his! All the handsome things he turns up! I call him the scourge of the dealers. What’s your latest find, Duncan?’

Duncan saw that there was no way out of it. He told her, in a rather stilted way, about the cream-jug he’d shown Viv at Mr Mundy’s earlier that week.

Mrs Alexander widened her eyes. Apart from the fact that her voice was raised to combat the din and clatter of the factory floor, she might have been at a tea-party.

‘Three and six, you say? I shall have to tell my friend Miss Martin. Antique silver’s her great passion; she’ll be mad with envy. You must bring the little jug in, Duncan, and show me. Will you do that?’

‘Yes,’ said Duncan. ‘If you like.’

‘Yes, do.—And how, by the way, is your uncle? Duncan takes great care, Mr Fraser, of his uncle—’

Duncan heard this and gave a twitch, took a step, almost in panic. Mrs Alexander saw the expression on his face and misinterpreted it. ‘There,’ she laughed, patting his shoulder, ‘I’m embarrassing you. I’ll leave you to your night lights.’ She nodded down the bench. ‘Len, how are you? Everything all right, Winnie? Mabel, you’ve spoken to Mr Greening about your chair? Good girl.’ She touched Fraser’s arm again. ‘Would you care to follow me, now, to the Packing Room, Mr Fraser?’

Fraser said he would, in just a moment. ‘I’d like to make a note of something here first,’ he said. He waited for her to move off, then began to scribble something in his book. He came close to Duncan again as he did it, saying, in an apologetic way, ‘I have to go, Pearce, as you can see. But, look here. Here’s my address.’ He ripped the page out and handed it over. ‘You’ll give me a call? Some time this week? Will you?’

‘If you like,’ said Duncan again.

Fraser grinned at him. ‘Good man. We can talk properly then. I want to know everything you’ve been doing.’ He moved off, as if reluctantly. ‘Everything!’

Duncan lowered his head, to draw out his stool. When he looked up again, Fraser, the photographer, and Mrs Alexander were just going out of the door that took them through to the next building.

The girls started laughing again the moment the door was closed. Winnie called down, in her squashed-up voice: ‘What’s he given you, Duncan? Is it his address? I’ll give you five bob for it!’

‘I’ll give you six!’ said the girl beside her.

She and another girl got up and tried to grab the paper from him. He fought them off, beginning to laugh—relieved that they’d chosen to take the whole thing in this sort of spirit and not another. Len said, about Fraser, ‘See how he browned up to you, Duncan? He’s heard you’re in line for promotion. Where d’you know him from?’

Duncan was still fending off the girls, and didn’t answer. By the time they’d finished teasing him and moved on to something else, the scrap of paper with Fraser’s address on it had got crumpled almost to a ball. He put it into his apron pocket: he put it right at the bottom of the pocket so that it shouldn’t fall out, but for the next hour or so he kept slipping his hand to it, slyly, as if to reassure himself that it was still there. What he really wanted to do was take it out and have a proper look at it; he didn’t want to do that, though, with so many people about. At last he could bear it no longer. When Mr Champion came round, he asked permission to go to the lavatory. He went into one of the stalls, and locked the door; and took the paper from his pocket and smoothed it out.

He felt much more excited doing this than he’d felt when talking to Fraser face to face; he’d been too self-conscious then, but now the fact of Fraser’s having turned up, and having been so friendly—having gone to the trouble of writing down his address, of saying, ‘You’ll give me a call? Will you?’—seemed wonderful. The address was a Fulham one, and not very far away. Duncan looked at it and began to imagine how it would be if he went round there—say, one evening. He pictured himself making the journey. He thought of the particular clothes he’d wear—not the clothes he was wearing now, which smelt of stearine and scent, but a nice pair of trousers he had, and an open-necked shirt, and a smart jacket. He imagined how he’d be with Fraser when Fraser opened his door. ‘Hello, Fraser,’ he’d say, nonchalantly; and Fraser would cry, in amazement and admiration: ‘Pearce! You look like a proper man at last, now you’ve left that wretched factory!’ ‘Oh, the factory,’ Duncan would answer, with a wave of his hand. ‘I only go there as a favour to Mrs Alexander…’

He went on daydreaming like this for five or ten minutes—playing the same scene over and over, of himself arriving at Fraser’s door; unable, quite, to imagine what would happen once Fraser had asked him in. He went on doing it, even though he had no intention, actually, of ever going to Fraser’s house; even while a part of him was saying, Fraser won’t want to see you really. He gave you his address for politeness’ sake. He’s the sort of person who gets madly pleased over little things, for a minute, and then forgets all about them…

He heard the swing of the wash-room door, and Mr Champion’s voice: ‘All right in there, Duncan?’

‘Yes, Mr Champion!’ he called; and pulled the chain.

He looked again at the paper in his hand. He didn’t know what to do with it now. Finally he tore it into little pieces and added them to the swirling water in the lavatory.

 

Must you wriggle so, darling?’ Julia was saying.

Helen moved a shoulder. She said fretfully, ‘It’s these taps. This one’s freezing; the other nearly burns your ear off.’

They were lying together in the bath. They did this every Saturday morning; they took it in turns who had the smooth end, and this week it was Julia’s turn. She was lying with her arms stretched out, her head put back, her eyes closed; she had tied up her hair in a handkerchief but a few strands had fallen and, as the water slopped over them, they moulded themselves to her jaw and throat. Frowning, she tucked them back up behind her ear.

Helen moved again, then found an almost comfortable position and grew still, enjoying at last the lovely creep of the warm water into her armpits, her groin—all the creases and sockets of her flesh. She put her hands flat upon the water’s surface, testing its resistance, feeling its skin. ‘Look at our legs all mixed up,’ she said softly.

She and Julia always spoke quietly when they were taking their bath. They shared the bathroom with the family who lived in the basement of their house; they all had regular bath-times, so there was not much danger of being caught out; but the tiles on the walls seemed to magnify sound, and Julia had the idea that their voices, the splashing, the rub of their limbs in the tub, might be heard in the rooms downstairs.

‘Look how dark your skin is, compared to mine,’ Helen went on. ‘Really, you’re as swarthy as a Greek.’

‘The water makes me seem darker, I suppose,’ answered Julia.

‘It doesn’t make me seem dark,’ said Helen. She prodded the pink and yellowish flesh of her own stomach. ‘It makes me look like pressed meat.’

Julia opened her eyes and gazed briefly at Helen’s thighs. ‘You look like a girl in a painting by Ingres,’ she said comfortably.

She was full of ambiguous compliments like this. ‘You look like a woman in a Soviet mural,’ she had said recently, when Helen had returned from a shopping trip with two bulging string bags; and Helen had pictured muscles, a square jaw, a shadowy lip. Now she thought of odalisques with spreading bottoms. She put a hand to Julia’s leg. The leg was rough with little hairs, interesting to the palm; the shin was slender and pleasant to grip. On the bone of the ankle a single vein stood out, swollen with heat. She studied it, pressed it, and saw it yield; she thought of the blood gushing inside it, and gave a little shudder. She slid her hand from Julia’s ankle to her foot, and began to rub it. Julia smiled. ‘That’s nice.’

Julia’s feet were broad and unhandsome—an Englishwoman’s feet, Helen thought, and the only really unlovely part of Julia’s whole body; and she held them in a special sort of regard, for that reason. She tugged slowly, now, at the toes, then worked her fingers between them; she put her palm against them and gently pressed them back. Julia sighed with pleasure. A strand of her hair had fallen again, and again clung to her throat—dark, flat, and lustrous as a piece of seaweed, or a lock from a mermaid’s head. Why, Helen wondered, were the mermaids’ heads that you saw in books and films always coloured gold? She was sure that a real mermaid would certainly be dark, like Julia. A real mermaid would be strange, alarming—nothing like an actress or a glamour girl at all.

‘I’m glad you’ve got feet, Julia, rather than a tail,’ she said, working with her thumb at the arch of Julia’s foot.

‘Are you, darling? So am I.’

‘Your breasts would look handsome, though, in a brassière made of shells.’ She smiled. She’d remembered a joke. ‘What,’ she asked Julia, ‘did the brassière say to the hat?’

Julia thought about it. ‘I don’t know. What?’

‘“You go on ahead, and I’ll give these two a lift.”’

They laughed—not so much at the joke, as at the silliness of Helen’s having told it. Julia still had her head put back: her laughter, caught in her throat, was bubbling, childish, nice—not at all like her conventional ‘society’ laugh, which always struck Helen as rather brittle. She put a hand across her mouth to stifle the sound. Her stomach quivered as she shook, her navel narrowing.

‘Your navel’s winking at me,’ said Helen, still laughing. ‘It looks awfully saucy. The Saucy Navel: that sounds like a seaside pub, doesn’t it?’ She moved her legs, yawning. She was rather tired, now, of stroking Julia’s foot; she let it fall. ‘Do you love me, Julia?’ she whispered, as she changed her pose.

Julia closed her eyes again. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

They lay for a time, then, not speaking. The water-pipes creaked, cooling down. From some hidden part of the plumbing there came a steady drip-drip. In the basement there were thumps, as the man who lived there walked heavily from room to room; soon they heard him shouting at his wife or his daughter: ‘No, you great daft bitch!’

Julia tutted. ‘That revolting man.’ Then she opened her eyes and, ‘Helen,’ she cried softly, ‘how can you?’ For Helen had tilted her head over the side of the bath and was trying to listen. She waved her hand for Julia to be silent. ‘Work it up your arse!’ they heard the man say: a phrase he liked, and used often. Next came the gnat-like whining that was all that ever reached them of his wife’s replies.

‘Really, Helen,’ said Julia, disapprovingly. Helen moved meekly back into the bath-tub. Sometimes, if the shouting started up and she was alone, she’d go so far as to kneel on the carpet, draw back her hair, put her ear to the floor. ‘You’ll end up like those fucking eunuchs upstairs!’ she had heard the man shout one day, by doing this. She’d never told Julia.

Today he grumbled on for a minute or two, then gave it up. A door was slammed. The things that Helen and Julia had brought down to the bathroom—the scissors and tweezers, the safety-razor in its case—gave a jump.

It was half-past eleven. They planned an idle sort of day, with books and a picnic, in Regent’s Park; they lived quite near it, in one of the streets just to the east of the Edgware Road. Helen lay a little longer, until the water began to cool; then she sat up and washed herself—turning awkwardly around, so that Julia could soap her back and rinse it; and doing the same for Julia herself, when Julia had turned. But when she’d risen and stepped out of the tub Julia sank back down again, stretching out into the extra space and smiling like a cat.

Helen studied her for a second, then bent and kissed her—liking the look and the feel of Julia’s slick, warm, soap-scented mouth.

She put on her dressing-gown and opened the door—listening first, to be sure there was no one in the hall. Then she ran lightly towards the stairs. Their sitting-room was on this floor, beside the bathroom. Their kitchen and bedroom were one floor up.

She had just finished dressing, and was combing her hair at the bedroom mirror, when Julia joined her: Helen watched her through the glass, carelessly dusting herself with talcum powder, then tugging the handkerchief from her head and going naked about the room, picking out knickers, stockings, suspenders, and a bra. Her towel she added to a pile of garments on the cushions that made a little window-seat; almost at once it slid to the floor, taking a sock and a petticoat with it.

The window-seat was one of the things that had attracted them to the house when they’d first viewed it. ‘We’ll be able to sit there together in the long summer evenings,’ they had said. Now Helen looked at the mess of clothes that obscured the sill; she looked at the unmade bed; and then at the cups and mugs, and the piles of read and unread books, which lay on every surface. She said, ‘This room’s impossible. Here we are, two middle-aged women, and we live like sluts. I can’t believe it. When I was young, and used to think about the house I’d have when I was grown up, I always pictured it as terribly neat and tidy—just like my mother’s. I always imagined that neat houses came to one, like—I don’t know.’

‘Like wisdom teeth?’

‘Yes,’ said Helen, ‘just like that.’ She passed her sleeve across the surface of the mirror; it came away grey with dust.

Other people of their age and class, of course, had chars. They couldn’t do that, because of the business of sharing a bed. There was another little room on the floor above this, which got presented to neighbours and visitors as ‘Helen’s room’; it had an old-fashioned divan in it, and a severe Victorian wardrobe where they kept their overcoats and jerseys and wellington boots. But it would be too much fuss, they thought, to have to pretend to a daily woman that Helen slept there every single night; they’d be sure to forget. And weren’t char-ladies, anyway, awfully knowing about that sort of thing? Now that Julia’s books were doing so well they had to be more careful than ever.

Julia came to the mirror. She had put on a creased dark linen dress and run her fingers roughly through her hair; but she could step out of any kind of chaos, Helen thought, and look, as she did now, absurdly well groomed and handsome. She moved closer to the glass, to dash on lipstick. Her mouth was a full, rather crowded one. But she had one of those faces, so regular and even, it was exactly the same in reflection as it was in life. Helen’s face, by contrast, looked rather queer and lopsided when studied in a mirror. You look like a lovely onion, Julia had told her once.

They finished putting on their make-up, then went out to the kitchen to gather food. They found bread, lettuce, apples, a nub of cheese, and two bottles of beer. Helen dug out an old madras square they’d used as a dust-sheet when decorating; they put it all in a canvas bag, then added their books, their purses and keys. Julia ran upstairs to her study for her cigarettes and matches. Helen stood at the kitchen window, looking out into the backyard. She could just see the bad-tempered man, moving and stooping. He kept table-rabbits down there, in a little home-made hutch: he was giving them water or food, or perhaps checking the plumpness of them. It always bothered her, imagining them all crushed together like that. She moved away, and shouldered the bag. The bottles clinked against the keys. ‘Julia,’ she called, ‘are you ready?’

They went down, and out to the street.

Their house was part of an early nineteenth-century terrace, facing a garden. The terrace was white—that London white, more properly a streaked and greyish yellow; the grooves and sockets of its stucco façade had been darkened by fogs, by soot, and—more recently—by brick-dust. The houses all had great front doors and porches—must once, in fact, have been grand residences: home, perhaps, to minor Regency strumpets, girls called Fanny, Sophia, Skittles. Julia and Helen liked to imagine them tripping down the steps in their Empire-line dresses and soft-soled shoes, taking their mounts, going riding in Rotten Row.

In miserable weather the discoloured stucco could look dreary. Today the street was filled with light, and the house fronts seemed bleached as bones against the blue of the sky. London looked all right, Helen thought. The pavements were dusty—but dusty in the way, say, that a cat’s coat is dusty, when it has lain for hours in the sun. Doors were open, sashes raised. The cars were so few that, as Helen and Julia walked, they could make out the cries of individual children, the mutter of radios, the ringing of telephones in empty rooms. And as they drew closer to Baker Street they began to hear music from the Regent’s Park Band, a faint sort of clash and parp-parp-parp—swelling and sinking on impalpable gusts of air, like washing on a line.

Julia caught Helen’s wrist, grew childish, pretending to tug. ‘Come on! Come quick! We’ll miss the parade!’ Her fingers moved against Helen’s palm, then slid away. ‘It makes one feel like that, doesn’t it? What tune is it, d’you think?’

They slowed their steps and listened more carefully. Helen shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine. Something modern and discordant?’

‘Surely not.’

The music rose. ‘Quick!’ said Julia again. They smiled, grown-up; but walked on, faster than before. They went into the park at Clarence Gate, then followed the path beside the boating lake. They approached the bandstand and the music grew louder and less ragged. They walked further, and the tune revealed itself at last.

‘Oh!’ said Helen, and they laughed; for it was only ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’.

They left the path and found a spot they liked the look of, half in sunlight, half in shade. The ground was hard, the grass very yellow. Helen put down the bag and unpacked the cloth; they spread it out and kicked off their shoes, then laid out the food. The beer was still cold from the frigidaire, the bottles sliding deliciously in Helen’s warm hand. But she went back to the bag and, after a moment’s searching, looked up.

‘We forgot a bottle-opener, Julia.’

Julia closed her eyes. ‘Hell. I’m dying for a drink, as well. What can we do?’ She took a bottle and started picking at its lid. ‘Don’t you know some terribly bright way of getting the tops off?’

‘With my teeth, do you mean?’

‘You were in the Brownies, weren’t you?’

‘Well, they rather jibbed, you know, at Pale Ale, in my pack.’

They turned the bottles in their hands.

‘Look, it’s hopeless,’ said Helen at last. She looked around. ‘There are boys over there. Run and ask them if they have a knife or something.’

‘I can’t!’

‘Go on. All boys have knives.’

‘You do it.’

‘I carried the bag. Go on, Julia.’

‘God,’ said Julia. She rose, not graciously, took up the bottles, one in each hand, and began to walk across the grass to a group of lounging youths. She walked stiffly, rather bowed, perhaps only self-conscious, but Helen saw her, for a second, as a stranger might: saw how handsome she was, but also how grown-up, how almost matronly; for you could catch in her something of the angular, wide-hipped, narrow-breasted figure she’d have in earnest in ten years’ time. The youths, by contrast, were practically schoolboys. They put up their hands to their eyes, against the sun, when they saw her coming; they rose lazily from their places, reached into their pockets; one held a bottle against his stomach as he worked with something at the top. Julia stood with folded arms, more self-conscious than ever, smiling unnaturally; when she came back with the opened bottles her face and throat were pink.

‘They only used keys, after all,’ she said. ‘We might have done that.’

‘We’ll know next time.’

‘They told me to “take it easy, missus.”’

‘Never mind,’ said Helen.

They had brought china cups to drink from. The beer foamed madly to the curving porcelain lips. Beneath the froth it was chill, bitter, marvellous. Helen closed her eyes, savouring the heat of the sun on her face; liking the reckless, holidayish feel of drinking beer in so public a place. But she hid the bottles, too, in a fold of the canvas bag.

‘Suppose one of my clients should see me?’

‘Oh, bugger your clients,’ said Julia.

They turned to the food they’d brought, broke the bread, made little slices of the cheese. Julia stretched out with the bunched-up canvas bag behind her head as a pillow. Helen lay flat and closed her eyes. The band had started on another tune. She knew the words to it, and began quietly to sing.

‘There’s something about a soldier! Something about a soldier! Something about a soldier that is fine!—fine!—fine!’

Somewhere a baby was crying from a pram; she heard it stumbling over its breath. A dog was barking, as its owner teased it with a stick. From the boating-lake there came the creak and splash of oars, the larking about of boys and girls; and from the streets at the edges of the park, of course, came the steady snarl of motors. Concentrating, she seemed to hear the scene in all its individual parts: as if each might have been recorded separately, then put with the others to make a slightly artificial whole: A September Afternoon, Regent’s Park.

Then a couple of teenage girls walked past. They had a newspaper, and were talking over one of the cases in it. ‘Mustn’t it be awful to be strangled?’ Helen heard one of them say. ‘Should you rather be strangled, or have an atomic bomb fall on you? They say at least with an atomic bomb it’s quick…’

Their voices faded, drowned out by another gust of music.

‘There’s something about his bearing! Something in what he’s wearing! Something about his buttons all a-shine!—shine!—shine!’

Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it—and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India—God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay. Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to trifles: to the parp of the Regent’s Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn’t you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?

She moved her hand, thinking this—just touched her knuckles to Julia’s thigh, where no one could see.

‘Isn’t this lovely, Julia?’ she said quietly. ‘Why don’t we come here all the time? The summer’s nearly over now, and what have we done with it? We might have come here every evening.’

‘We’ll do that next year,’ answered Julia.

‘We will,’ said Helen. ‘We’ll remember, and do it then. Won’t we? Julia?’

But Julia wasn’t listening now. She had raised her head to talk to Helen, and her attention had been caught by something else. She was looking across the park. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes and, as Helen watched, her gaze grew fixed and she started to smile. She said, ‘I think that’s—Yes, it is. How funny!’ She raised the hand higher, and waved. ‘Ursula!’ she called—so loudly, the word jarred against Helen’s ear. ‘Over here!’

Helen propped herself up and peered in the direction in which Julia was waving. She saw a slim, smart-looking woman making her way across the grass towards them, beginning to laugh.

‘Good Lord,’ the woman said, as she drew closer. ‘Fancy seeing you, Julia!’

Julia had got to her feet and was brushing down her linen dress. She was laughing, too. She said, ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I’ve been lunching with a friend,’ said the woman, ‘up at St John’s Wood. I’m on my way to Broadcasting House. We don’t have time for picnics and so on, at the BBC. What a charming spread you’ve made here, though! Perfectly bucolic!’

She looked at Helen. Her eyes were dark, slightly mischievous.

Julia turned, made introductions. ‘This is Ursula Waring, Helen. Ursula, this is Helen Giniver—’

‘Helen, of course!’ said Ursula. ‘Now, you won’t mind my calling you Helen? I’ve heard such a lot about you. No need to look nervous! It was all of it good.’

She leant to shake Helen’s hand, and Helen half rose, to meet it. She felt at a disadvantage, sitting down while Julia and Ursula were standing up; but she was very conscious, too, of her Saturday-morning appearance—of her blouse, which she’d once unpicked and refashioned in an attempt at ‘make-do and mend’, and her old tweed skirt, rather seated at the back. Ursula, by contrast, looked neat, moneyed, tailored. Her hair was put up in a chic, rather masculine little hat. Her leather gloves were soft and unscuffed, and her low-heeled shoes had flat fringed tongues to them—the kind of shoes you expected to see on a golf-course, or a Scottish highland, somewhere expensively hearty like that. She was not at all as Helen had pictured her from the things that Julia had said about her over the past few weeks. Julia had made her sound older and almost dowdy. Why would Julia have done that?

‘You caught the broadcast last night?’ Ursula was saying.

‘Of course,’ said Julia.

‘Rather good, wasn’t it? Did you think so, Helen? I think we did awfully well. And wasn’t it tremendous, seeing Julia’s face in the middle of the Radio Times!’

‘Oh, it was rotten,’ said Julia, before Helen could answer. ‘That picture’s so frightfully Catholic! I look like I’m about to be bound to a wheel, or have my eyes put out!’

‘Nonsense!’

They laughed together. Then Julia said, ‘Look here, Ursula. Why don’t you join us?’

Ursula shook her head. ‘I know if I sit, I simply shan’t want to get up. I shall be sick with envy, though, thinking about you all day. It’s just too disgustingly clever of you both. But of course, you live so very near. And such a charming house, too!’ She spoke to Helen again. ‘I said to Julia, one would never know such a place existed, so close to the Edgware Road.’

‘You’ve seen it?’ asked Helen in surprise.

‘Oh, just for a moment—’

Julia said, ‘Ursula called round, one day last week. Surely I told you, Helen?’

‘I must have forgotten.’

‘I wanted to take a peek,’ said Ursula, ‘at Julia’s study. It’s always so fascinating, I think, seeing where writers do their work. Though I’m not sure whether I really envy you, Helen. I don’t know how I’d feel, having my friend scribbling away over my head, working out the best way to despatch her next victim—by poison, or the rope!’

She said the word ‘friend’, Helen thought, in a special sort of way—as if to say: We understand one another, of course. As if to say, in fact: We’re all ‘friends’ together. She had taken off her gloves, to bring out a silver cigarette-case from her pocket; and as she opened the case up Helen saw her short manicured nails, and the discreet little signet ring on the smallest finger of her left hand.

She held the cigarettes out. Helen shook her head. Julia, however, moved forward, and she and Ursula spent a moment fussing with a lighter—for a breeze had risen and kept blowing out the flame.

They spoke further about Armchair Detective and the Radio Times; about the BBC and Ursula’s job there. Then, ‘Well, my dears,’ said Ursula, when her cigarette was finished, ‘I must be off. It’s been so nice. You must both come over, some time, to Clapham. You must come for supper—or, better still, I could put together a bit of a party.’ Her gaze grew mischievous again. ‘We could make it an all-girl thing. What do you say?’

‘But of course, we’d love to,’ said Julia, when Helen said nothing.

Ursula beamed. ‘That’s settled, then. I’ll let you know.’ She took Julia’s hand and playfully shook it. ‘I’ve one or two friends who would be thrilled to meet you, Julia. They’re such fans!’ She started putting on her gloves, and turned to Helen again. ‘Goodbye, Helen. It’s been so nice to meet you properly.’

‘Well,’ said Julia, as she sat back down. She was watching Ursula making her quick, smart way across the park in the direction of Portland Place.

‘Yes,’ said Helen, rather thinly.

‘Amusing, isn’t she?’

‘I suppose so. Of course, she’s more your class than mine.’

Julia looked round, laughing. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘She’s a bit hearty, is all I meant…When did you take her to the house?’

‘Just last week. I told you, Helen.’

‘Did you?’

‘You don’t think I did it in secret?’

‘No,’ said Helen quickly. ‘No.’

‘It was only for a minute.’

‘She’s not how I imagined. I thought you told me she was married.’

‘She is married. Her husband’s a barrister. They live apart.’

‘I didn’t know she was—well,’ Helen lowered her voice, ‘like us.’

Julia shrugged. ‘I don’t know what she is, really. A bit of an oddity, I think. Still, that party might be fun.’

Helen looked at her. ‘You wouldn’t want to go, really?’

‘Yes, why not?’

‘I thought you were just being polite. “An all-girl thing.” You know what that means.’ She looked down, her colour rising slightly. ‘Anyone might be there.’

Julia didn’t answer for a moment. When she spoke, she sounded impatient or annoyed. ‘Well, what if they are? It won’t kill us. It might even be fun. Imagine that!’

‘It’ll certainly be fun for Ursula Waring, anyway,’ said Helen, before she could stop herself. ‘Having you there, like some sort of prize pig—’

Julia was watching her. She said coldly, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And then, when Helen wouldn’t answer: ‘It’s not—Oh, no.’ She began to laugh. ‘Not really, Helen? Not because of Ursula?’

Helen moved away. ‘No,’ she said; and she lay back down, with a sharp, graceless movement. She put her arm across her eyes, to keep off the sun and Julia’s gaze. After a moment she felt Julia lie down, too. She must have reached into the bag and brought out her book: Helen heard her leafing through its pages, looking for her place.

But what Helen could see, in the shifting blood-coloured depths of her own eyelids, was Ursula Waring’s mischievous dark gaze. She saw the way that Ursula and Julia had stood together, lighting their cigarettes. She saw again Ursula playfully shaking Julia’s hand. Then she thought back. She remembered how keen Julia had been to get to the park—Come on! Come quick!—her fingers slipping away from Helen’s in her impatience. Was it Ursula she’d wanted to see? Was it? Had they arranged the whole thing?

Her heart beat faster. Ten minutes before she had been lying just like this, enjoying the familiar, secret nearness of Julia’s limbs. She’d wanted to hold on to that moment, make a crystal bead of it. Now the bead felt shattered. For what was Julia to her, after all? She couldn’t lean to her and kiss her. What could she do, to say to the world that Julia was hers? What did she have, to keep Julia faithful? She had only herself: her pressed-meat thighs, her onion face…

These thoughts raged through her like a darkness in her blood, while Julia read on; while the band played a final parp-parp-parp, then put its instruments away; while the sun crept slowly over the sky, and shadows extended themselves across the yellow ground. But at last the miserable panic subsided. The darkness shrank, folded itself up. She said to herself, What an idiot you are! Julia loves you. It’s only this beast in you she hates, this ridiculous monster—

She moved her wrist again, so that it just touched Julia’s thigh. Julia kept still for a moment, then moved her own wrist, to meet it. She put down her book and propped herself up. She took up an apple and a knife. She peeled the apple in one long strip, then cut the fruit into quarters and handed two of them to Helen. They ate together, watching the running about of dogs and children, as they had before.

Then they caught each other’s gaze. Julia said, with a hint of coolness still, ‘All over, now?’

Helen coloured. ‘Yes, Julia.’

Julia smiled. When she’d finished eating the apple she lay back down, and picked up her book again; and Helen watched her as she read. Her eyes were moving from word to word, but apart from that her face was still, closed, blemishless as wax.

 

You look like a film-star,’ said Reggie, as Viv got into his car. He made a show of looking her over. ‘Can I have your autograph?’

‘Just get going, will you?’ she said. She’d been standing in the sun, waiting for him, for half an hour. They moved together and briefly kissed. He let down the handbrake and the car moved off.

She was wearing a light cotton dress and a plum-coloured cardigan, and sunglasses with pale plastic frames; instead of a hat she had a white silk scarf, which she’d tied in a knot beneath her chin. The scarf and the sunglasses looked striking against the dark of her hair and the red of her lipstick. She straightened her skirt, making herself comfortable, then wound down her window and sat with her elbow on the sill, her face in the draught—like a girl in an American picture, just as Reggie had said. Slowing the car for a traffic-light, he put his hand on her thigh and murmured admiringly, ‘Oh, if the boys in Hendon could only see me now!’

But of course, he kept well away from north London. He’d picked her up at Waterloo and, having crossed the river and got to the Strand, he headed east. They had places they liked, an hour from the city: villages in Middlesex and Kent, where there were pubs and tea-rooms; little beaches on the coast. Today they were motoring out towards Chelmsford; they were just going to drive until they found a pretty spot. They had hours together: all afternoon. She’d told her father she was going on a picnic with a girlfriend. She’d stood at one end of the kitchen table the night before, making sandwiches, while he’d sat at the other fixing rubber soles to his shoes.

They wove through the City and Whitechapel; when they started on a wider, smoother road Reggie put the car in a higher gear and moved his hand back to her thigh. He found the line of her suspender, and began to follow it; her dress being thin, she could feel the pressure of his touch—his thumb and palm and moving finger—as vividly as if she’d been naked.

But her mood was wrong, somehow. She said, ‘Don’t,’ and caught his hand.

He gave a groan like a man in torment and pretended to fight against her grip. ‘What a teaser you are! Can I stop the car? It’s that, you know, or run it off the road.’

He didn’t stop the car. He speeded up. The streets grew clearer. Billboards appeared at the side of the road, advertising Players, Please! and Wrigley’s, ‘Jiffy’ Dyes, and Vim. She sat more loosely, watching the peeling back of the city—the blitzed Victorian high streets giving way to red Edwardian villas, the villas giving way to neat little houses like so many bowler-hatted clerks, the little houses becoming bungalows and prefabs. It was like hurtling backwards through time—except that the bungalows and prefabs turned into open green fields, and after that, she thought, if you narrowed your eyes and didn’t look at things like telegraph poles or aeroplanes in the sky, you could have been in any time, or no time at all.

They passed a pub, and Reggie worked his mouth as if thirsty. He’d laid out his jacket on the back seat, but got her to reach into its pocket and bring out a little flask of Scotch. She watched him lifting it to his mouth. His lips were soft and smooth; his chin and throat were freshly shaved, but already dark with dots of stubble. He drank clumsily, concentrating on the road. Once the whisky ran from the corner of his mouth and he had to catch it with the back of his swarthy hand.

‘Look at you,’ she said, half playfully, half crossly. ‘You’re dribbling.’

He said, ‘I’m drooling. It’s from sitting next to you.’

She made a face at the idea. They drove on more or less in silence. He kept to the main road for almost an hour, but then, coming to an unsigned junction, followed the quietest-looking route; and after that they took the lanes that caught their fancy. London, suddenly, became almost unimaginable—the hardness and dryness and dirt of it. The hedges that bordered the lanes were high and moist and, though it was autumn, still filled with colour: sometimes Reggie drew close to the side to let another driver pass, and flowers shook their petals through the window into Viv’s lap. Once a white butterfly came into the car and spread out its papery, powdery wings on the curve of the seat beside her shoulder.

Her mood began to lift. They started to point out little things to each other—old-fashioned churches, quaint-looking cottages. They remembered a day, years before, when they had come into the country and stopped at a cottage and spoken to its owner, and he’d taken them for a married couple and asked them into his parlour and given them glasses of milk. Reggie said now, as he slowed the car before a little house the colour of creamy French cheese, ‘There’s space at the back, look, for pigs and chickens. I can see you, Viv, chucking out the swill. I can see you picking apples in an orchard. You could make me apple pies, and bloody great suet puddings.’

‘You’d get fat,’ she said, smiling, poking his stomach.

He dodged away from her. ‘It wouldn’t matter. You’re supposed to be fat, aren’t you, in the country?’ He kept an eye on the road, but dipped his head to look at the upstairs window. He lowered his voice. ‘I bet there’s the hell of a feather mattress in the room up there.’

‘Is that all you think about?’

‘It is, when you’re around.—Oops.’

He swerved, to avoid the hedge, then put his foot down again.

They began to look about for a place to stop the car and eat their lunch, and took a track that led between fields towards a wood. The track seemed well maintained at first; the further they drove, however, the rougher and narrower it grew. The car bumped about, getting whipped by brambles, and long grass swept and crackled underneath it like rushing water beneath a boat. Viv bounced on the seat, laughing. Reggie frowned, leaning forward, tugging at the steering-wheel. ‘If we meet someone coming the other way, we’re buggered,’ he said. And she knew he was thinking about what would happen if they were to have an accident, smash up the car, get stuck…

But the track dipped and turned and they found themselves, all at once, in a lush green clearing beside a stream, breathtakingly pretty. Reggie put on the brake and turned off the engine; they sat for a moment, amazed and awed by the quiet of the place. Even after they’d opened the doors and begun to climb out they hesitated, feeling like intruders: for all they could hear was the tumbling of the stream, the calling of birds, the shushing of leaves.

‘It sure as hell ain’t Piccadilly,’ said Reggie, getting out at last.

‘It’s lovely,’ said Viv.

They spoke almost in murmurs. They stretched their arms and legs, then walked across the grass to the edge of the stream. When they gazed along the bank they could see, half hidden in the trees, an old stone building with shattered windows and a broken roof.

‘That’s a mill,’ said Reggie, moving towards it, catching hold of Viv’s hand. ‘Can you see the shaft of the wheel? This must have been a proper river once.’

She pulled him back. ‘Someone might be there.’

But no one was there. The house had been abandoned years before. Grass grew through the gaps between its flagstones. Pigeons fluttered in its beams, and its floors were covered with bird droppings and broken slate and glass. Somebody, at some point, had cleared a space and made a fire; there were cans and bottles, and filthy messages on the walls. The cans were rusty, the bottles silvery with age.

‘Tramps,’ said Reggie. ‘Tramps, or deserters. And courting couples.’ They went back to the stream. ‘I bet this is a regular Lovers’ Lane.’

She gave him a pinch. ‘Trust you to find it, then.’

He still had hold of her hand. He lifted her fingers to his lips, looking coy, pretending modesty. ‘What can I say? Some men are gifted like that, that’s all.’

They were talking, now, in normal voices, had lost their sense of awe and caution and begun to feel as though the place was theirs: that it had been waiting, picturesquely, just for them to come and claim it. They followed the stream in the other direction and found a bridge. They stood on the hump of it, smoking cigarettes; Reggie put his arm around her waist and rested his hand on her backside, moving his thumb, making her dress and her petticoat slide against the silk of her knickers.

They threw the ends of their cigarettes into the stream and watched them race. Then Reggie peered more closely at the water.

‘There’s fish in there,’ he said. ‘Big sods, look at that!’ He went down to the side of the stream, took off his wrist-watch and dipped in his hand. ‘I can feel them nibbling!’ He was as excited as a boy. ‘They’re like a bunch of girls, all kissing! They think my hand’s a man-fish. They think their luck’s in!’

‘They think you’re lunch,’ Viv called back. ‘They’ll have one of your fingers if you’re not careful.’

He leered. ‘That’s like a girl, too.’

‘The sort of girls you know, maybe.’

He rose and shook water at her. She laughed and ran away. The water struck the lenses of her sunglasses and when she wiped them, the lenses smeared.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’

They went back to the car for their picnic, leaving the car’s doors open. Reggie got out a tartan rug from the boot and they spread it on the grass. He brought out a bottle of gin and orange, too, and a couple of beakers—one pink, one green. The beakers were meant for children, Viv knew: they were rough against the lip where they’d been bitten and thrown about. But she was used to that sort of thing; there was simply no point minding. The gin and orange had become warm in the car: she swallowed, and felt the glow of it almost at once, loosening her up. She unwrapped the sandwiches. Reggie ate his in great, quick bites, swallowing the bread before he’d chewed it, then biting again; talking with the food still on his tongue.

‘This is that Canadian ham, isn’t it? It’s not too bad after all.’

He’d pulled at his tie, undone the button of his shirt. The sun was on him, making him frown, showing up the creases in his forehead and beside his nose. He was thirty-six, but had recently, Viv thought, begun to look a little older. His face was sallow—that was the Italian blood in him—and his hazel eyes were still very handsome, but he was losing his hair—losing it not neatly, in a round little patch; it was thinning all over, his scalp here and there showing luminously through. His teeth, which were straight and very even, and which Viv remembered as having once been dazzlingly white, were turning yellow. The flesh of his throat was getting loose; there were folds in the skin in front of his ears. He looks like his father, she thought, watching him chew. He’d shown her a picture once. He could be forty, at least.

Then he caught her eye, and gave her a wink; and something of her old, pure affection for him flared up in her heart. When they’d finished their sandwiches he drew her to him and they lay on the rug, he on his back with his arm around her, she with her cheek in the firm, warm hollow between his shoulder and his chest. Now and then she raised herself a little to sip, awkwardly, at her drink; finally she swallowed it all in a gulp and let the empty beaker fall. He rubbed his face against her head, his rough chin plucking at her hair.

She looked into the sky. Her view of it was framed by branches, by the restless tips of trees. The branches were thick with leaves still, but the leaves were ruddy, or golden, or the greenish-yellow of army uniforms. The sky itself was perfectly cloudless: blue as the bluest skies of summer.

‘What bird is that?’ she asked, pointing.

‘That? That’s a vulture.’

She gave him a nudge. ‘What is it, really?’

He shaded his eyes. ‘It’s a kestrel. See how it hovers? It’s waiting to dive. It’s after a mouse.’

‘Poor mouse.’

‘There he goes!’ He lifted his head, the muscles in his chest and throat growing tight beneath her cheek. The bird had swooped, but now rose again with empty claws. He lay back down. ‘He’s lost it.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s only another sort of lunch. He’s entitled to his bit of lunch, isn’t he?’

‘It’s cruel.’

He laughed. ‘I’d no idea you were so tender-hearted.—Look, now he’s trying again.’

They watched the bird for a minute, marvelling together at the buoyancy of it, its graceful swoops and soars. Then Viv took off her sunglasses, to see it more clearly; and Reggie looked, not at the kestrel, but at her.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘It was like talking to a blind girl, before.’

She settled back on the rug and closed her eyes. ‘You’re used to them, of course.’

‘Ha ha.’

He was still for a moment, then reached across her and picked something up. After a second she felt a tickling on her face, and brushed her cheek, thinking a fly had settled on it. But it was him: he had a long blade of grass and was stroking her with the tip of it. She closed her eyes again and let him do it. He followed the lines of her brow and her nose, the curve above her mouth; he worked the grass across her temples.

‘You’ve changed your hair, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘I got it cut, ages ago.—You’re tickling me.’

He moved the blade of grass more firmly. ‘How’s that?’

‘That’s better.’

‘I like it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Your hair.’

‘Do you? It’s all right.’

‘It suits you…Open your eyes, Viv.’

She opened them, briefly, then screwed them up again. ‘The sun’s too bright.’

He raised his hand—held it a foot away from her face, to make a shade. ‘Open them now,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘I want to look into your eyes.’

She laughed. ‘Why?’

‘I just do.’

‘They’re the same as they were the last time you looked into them.’

‘That’s what you think. Women’s eyes are never the same. You’re like cats, the lot of you.’

He tickled her face until she did as he asked and opened her eyes again. But she opened them wide, being silly.

‘Not like that,’ he said. So she looked at him properly. ‘That’s better.’ His expression was soft. ‘You’ve got lovely eyes. You’ve got beautiful eyes. Your eyes were the first thing I noticed about you.’

‘I thought it was my legs you noticed first.’

‘Your legs, too.’

He held her gaze, then threw the blade of grass away and leant and kissed her. He did it slowly, parting her lips with his own, pushing gently into her mouth. He tasted of the ham, still; the ham and the gin and orange. She supposed she must taste of it, too. As the kiss went on, a speck of something—meat, or bread—came between their tongues, and he broke away to pick it from his mouth. But when he came back to her, he kissed her harder; and began to lean more heavily against her. He ran his hand down her body, from her cheek to her hip; then he stroked upwards again and cupped her breast. His hand was hot, and gripped her hard, almost painfully. When he drew it away and began to pluck instead at the buttons at the front of her dress, she stopped his fingers and lifted her head.

‘Someone might come, Reg.’

‘There’s nobody about,’ he said, ‘for miles!’

She looked at his hand, still tugging at the buttons. ‘Don’t. You’ll crease it.’

‘Undo it for me, then.’

‘All right. Wait.’

She looked around, conscious that anyone could be watching, hidden in the shadows of the trees. The sun was bright as a spotlight, the piece of ground they were lying on flat and quite unobscured. The only sounds, however, were those of the stream, the birds, the restless leaves. She unfastened two of the buttons on her dress; then, after a moment, two more. Reggie drew the bodice back, exposing her bra; he put his mouth to the silk of it, feeling for her nipple, drawing at her breast. She moved about under his touch. But the queer thing was, she’d wanted him more, before, in the car in the middle of Stepney; she’d wanted him more while they were standing on that bridge. He kept his mouth fixed hard to her breast, and moved his hand back down her body to her thigh. When he caught hold of her skirt and began to push it up, she stopped his fingers again, and again said, ‘Someone might see.’

He moved away, wiped his mouth. He tugged at the rug. ‘I’ll put this over us.’

‘They could still see.’

‘Jesus, Viv, I’m at that point where a troupe of girl-guides could go past and it wouldn’t put me off! I swear, I’m bursting. I’ve been bursting for you all day.’

She didn’t think he had been. For all his talk, for all his nonsense—here, and in the car—she didn’t think he had been; and she wanted it less than ever now. He pulled up the rug and tucked it around her, then put his arm beneath it and tried to reach between her legs again. But she kept her thighs closed; and when he looked at her she shook her head—let him think what he liked. She said, ‘Let me—’ and moved her own hand to the buttons of his trousers, easing them open one by one, then sliding inside.

He groaned at the feel of her bare fingers. He twitched against her palm. He said, ‘Oh, Viv. Christ, Viv.’

The seams of his underpants were taut against her wrist and made her clumsy; after a moment he reached and brought himself right out, then put his hand loosely around hers. He kept the hand there as she was doing it, and had his eyes shut tight the whole time; in the end she felt he might as well be doing it himself. The tartan rug went up and down over their fists. Two or three times she lifted her head and looked around, still anxious.

And she remembered, as she did it, other times, from years before, when he’d been in the army. They’d had to meet in hotel rooms—grubby rooms, but the grubbiness hadn’t mattered. Being together was what had mattered. Pushing against each other’s bodies, each other’s skin and muscle and breath. That was what bursting for somebody meant. It wasn’t this. It wasn’t jokes about feather beds and Lovers’ Lanes.

At the very last second he closed her hand, to make a sort of trap for the spunk. Then he lay back, flushed and sweating and laughing. She held on to him a little longer before she drew her fingers away. He raised his head, the flesh of his throat bunching up. He was worried for his trousers.

‘Got it all?’

‘I think so.’

‘Careful.’

‘I am being careful.’

‘Good girl.’

He tucked himself away, then fastened up his buttons. She looked around for a handkerchief, something like that; and finally wiped her hand on the grass.

He watched her do it, approvingly. ‘That’s good for the ground,’ he said. He was full of life now. ‘That’ll make a tree grow. That’ll make a tree, and a knickerless girl will one day come and climb it; and she’ll get in the club, by me.’ He held out his arms. ‘Come here and give me a kiss, you beautiful creature!’

The simplicity of him, she thought, was quite amazing. But it had always been his faults and frailties that she’d loved most. She’d wasted her life on his weaknesses—his apologies, his promises…She moved back into his embrace. He lit another cigarette and they lay and smoked it together, gazing up again into the trees. The kestrel had vanished; they didn’t know if it had caught its mouse or gone after another. The blue of the sky seemed to have thinned.

It was September—the end of September—and not summer: presently she gave a shiver, getting cold. He rubbed her arms, but soon they sat up, drank the last of the gin and orange, then stood and brushed down their clothes. He turned the cuffs of his trousers inside out, to shake the grass from them. He borrowed her handkerchief, and wiped her lipstick and powder from his mouth. He walked a little way off, and turned his back, and had a pee.

When he came back she said, ‘Stay here’; and she went herself to a clump of bushes, drew up her skirt, pushed down her knickers, and got into a squat. ‘Watch out for nettles!’ he called after her; but he called it vaguely, he didn’t see where she had gone and couldn’t see her once she’d stooped. She watched him bending at the car’s wing-mirror, combing his hair. She watched him rinsing out the beakers in the stream. Then she looked at her hand. The spunk on her fingers had dried as fine as pretty lace; she rubbed at it, and it became plain white flakes that drifted to the ground and were lost.

 

He had to be home by seven o’clock, and it was already half-past four. They strolled to the little bridge again, and stood looking down into the water. They wandered back to the ruined mill; he picked up a piece of broken glass and cut their initials into the plaster, alongside the dirty messages. RN, VP, and a heart with an arrow.

But when he’d thrown the glass away, he looked at his watch.

‘Better get going, I suppose.’

They went back to the car. She shook out the rug, and he folded it up and put it away, with the beakers, in the boot. Where the rug had been there was a square of flattened grass. It seemed a shame, in so lovely a place: she went over it, kicking the grass back up.

The car had been sitting in the sun all this time. She climbed in, and almost burnt her leg on the hot leather seat. Reggie got in beside her and gave her his handkerchief—spread it out beneath the crook of her knees, to keep her from burning.

When he had done it, he bent forward and kissed her thigh. She touched his head: the dark, oiled curls; the white scalp showing palely through. She looked at the lush green clearing again and said softly, ‘I wish we could stay here.’

He let his head drop until it was resting in her lap. ‘So do I,’ he said. The words were muffled. He twisted round, to meet her gaze. ‘You know—You know I hate it, don’t you? You know, if I could have done it differently—? All of it, I mean.’

She nodded. There was nothing to say that they hadn’t said before. He kept his head in her lap a moment longer, then kissed her thigh again and straightened up. He turned the key, and the engine rumbled into life. It seemed horribly loud, in the silence—just as the silence had seemed weird and wrong to them when they’d first arrived.

He turned the car, drove slowly back up the bumping track, and rejoined the road they’d come out on; they went past the cheese-coloured cottage without slowing down, then picked up the main road to London. The traffic was much heavier now. People were coming back, like them, from afternoons out. The speeding cars were noisy. The sun was in front of them, making them squint: every so often they’d make a turn, or pass through trees, and lose it for a minute; then it would reappear, bigger than before, pink and swollen and low in the sky.

The sun, and the warmth, and perhaps the gin that she had drunk, made Viv feel dozy. She put her head against Reggie’s shoulder and closed her eyes. He rubbed his cheek against her hair again, sometimes turning his head to kiss her. They sang together sleepily, old-fashioned songs—‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’, and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.

Make my bed and light the light,

I’ll arrive late tonight.

Blackbird, bye bye.

When they reached the outskirts of London, she yawned and reluctantly straightened up. She got out her compact and powdered her face, redid her lipstick. The traffic seemed worse than ever, suddenly. Reggie tried a different route, through Poplar and Shadwell, but that was bad, too. Finally they got caught in a jam at Tower Hill. She saw him looking at his watch, and said, ‘Let me out here.’ But he kept saying, ‘Just give it a second.’ He hated to give way to other drivers. ‘If that little twerp in front would just—Christ! It’s blokes like him who—’

The car moved forward. Then they got in another jam on Fleet Street, going into the Strand. He looked for a way to get out of it, but the side-streets were blocked by drivers with the same idea. He beat his fingers on the steering-wheel, saying, ‘Damn, damn.’ He looked at his watch again.

Viv sat tensely, catching his mood, shrinking down a little in her seat in case someone should spot her; but thinking of the place in the woods still, not wanting to give it up yet: the mill, the stream and bridge, the hush of it. It ain’t Piccadilly…Reggie had brushed out the car before they’d started back, getting out all the petals and bits of grass that had been shaken in from the hedges. He’d nudged at the butterfly with his fingers until it had quivered and fluttered away.

She turned her head and looked into the lighted windows of shops, at the boxes of mocked-up chocolates and fruits, at the perfume bottles and liquor bottles—the same kind of coloured water doing, probably, for Nights of Parma and Irish Malt. The car inched forward. They drew near a cinema, the Tivoli. There were people outside it, queuing for tickets, and she gazed rather wistfully across them, at the girls and their boyfriends, the husbands and wives. The cinema had coloured lights on it, and the lights seemed to shine more luridly, more luminously, for shining in the twilight rather than the dark. She saw odd little disconnected details: the glint of an earring, the gleam of a man’s hair, the sparkle of crystal in the paving-stones.

Then Reggie braked and tooted his horn. Someone had sauntered across the road in front of him and moved casually on. He threw up his hands. ‘Don’t mind me, mister, will you? Jesus Christ!’ He followed the sauntering figure with his gaze, looking disgusted; but then his face changed. The figure, in stepping on to the pavement, must have given something away. Reggie started to laugh. ‘My mistake,’ he said, nudging Viv. ‘What do you think of that? It’s not a mister, it’s a miss.’

Viv turned to look—and saw Kay, in a jacket and trousers. She was drawing a cigarette from a case and, with a stylish, idle gesture, tapping it lightly against the silver before raising it to her lips.

‘What the hell’s the matter?’ asked Reggie in amazement.

For Viv had cried out. Her stomach had contracted as if she’d been struck in it. She put up a hand to hide her face and, ducking further down in her seat, said to Reggie with awful urgency: ‘Go on. Drive on!’

He gaped at her. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Just drive on, can’t you? Please!’

‘Drive on? Have you gone barmy?’

The way ahead was still jammed with cars. Viv moved about as if tormented. She looked back, towards Fleet Street. She said desperately, ‘Go that way, can’t you?’

‘Which way?’

‘The way we came.’

‘The way we came? Are you—?’ But now she’d actually grabbed the steering-wheel. ‘Jesus!’ said Reggie, pushing her hand away. ‘All right. All right!’ He looked over his shoulder and began, laboriously, to turn the car. The car behind gave a blast of its horn. The drivers heading for Ludgate Circus gazed at him as if he were a lunatic. He worked the gears, sweating and cursing, and slowly edged the car round.

Viv kept her head down; but looked back once. Kay had joined the line of people outside the cinema: she was holding a lighter to her cigarette, and the flame of it, springing up, through the twilight, lit her fingers and her face. Hush, Vivien, Viv remembered her saying. The memory was stark, after all this time—stark and terrible—the grip of her hand, the closeness of her mouth. Vivien, hush.

‘Thank God for that!’ said Reggie, when they were inching forwards again in the other direction. ‘Talk about not drawing attention to ourselves. What on earth was all that for? Are you all right?’

She didn’t answer. She’d felt the grinding of the gears, the lurching forwards and backwards of the car, in what seemed to be all her muscles and bones. She folded her arms across herself, as if to hold herself together.

‘What is it?’ asked Reggie.

‘I saw someone I knew,’ she said at last; ‘that’s all.’

‘Someone you knew? Who was it?’

‘Just someone.’

‘Just someone. Well, I expect they got a bloody good look at you and me, too. Hell, Viv.’

He went grumbling on. She didn’t listen. He stopped the car at last in some street near Blackfriars Bridge; she said she’d take a bus from there, and he didn’t argue. He pulled up in a quiet-looking spot, and drew her to him so that they could kiss; afterwards he borrowed her handkerchief again and wiped his mouth. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, too, and, ‘What a trip!’ he said—as if the afternoon had been some sort of disaster; as if he’d forgotten, already, the stream and the ruined mill, the initials on the wall. She didn’t care. The feel of his hand on her arm, of his lips against her mouth, was suddenly frightful. She wanted to get home, be on her own, away from him.

As she opened her door he reached for her again. He’d put his hand into a pocket in the dashboard and was bringing something out. It turned out to be two tins of meat: one beef, and one pork.

She was so distracted, she started to take them. She opened her bag to put them away. But then something seemed to give way inside her, and she was suddenly furious. She pushed them back at him. ‘I don’t want them!’ she said. ‘Take them—Give them to your wife!’

The tins fell, and bounced from the seat. ‘Viv!’ said Reggie, astonished, hurt. ‘Don’t be like that! What have I done? What the hell’s the matter? Viv!’

She got out, closed the door, and walked away. He leant across the seat and wound down the window, still calling her name—still saying, in amazement, ‘What’s the matter? What have I done? What—?’ Then his voice began to grow hard—not so much, she thought, with anger, as with simple weariness. ‘What the hell have I done, now?’

She didn’t look back. She turned a corner, and the words faded. After that he must have started the engine again and driven off. She joined a queue at a bus-stop, and waited ten minutes for a bus; and he didn’t come after her.

When she got home, she found the flat full of people. Her sister Pamela had come round, with her husband, Howard, and their three little boys. They’d come to bring Viv’s father some tea. Pamela had warmed it up on the stove, and the narrow kitchen was stuffy and hot. There was washing draped on the laundry rack, hoisted up but dangling almost to the floor; Pamela must have done that, too. The wireless was on full blast. Howard was sitting on the kitchen table. The two eldest boys were charging about, and Viv’s father had the baby in his lap.

‘Nice day?’ asked Pamela. She was drying her hands, working the towel into the creases between her fingers. She looked Viv over. ‘You’ve caught the sun. All right for some.’

Viv went to the sink and peered into her father’s shaving mirror. Her face was pink and white, blotchy. She drew forward her hair. ‘It was hot,’ she said. ‘Hello, Dad.’

‘All right, love? How was your picnic?’

‘It was OK. How’s things, Howard?’

‘All right, Viv. Doing our best, aren’t we? How d’you like this weather? I tell you—’

Howard could never stop talking. The two boys were the same. They had things to show her: noisy little pop-guns; they put in the corks and fired them off. Her father followed the words on everybody’s mouths—nodding, smiling, moving his own lips slightly; for he was awfully deaf. The baby was struggling in his arms, reaching for the pop-guns, wanting to get down. When Viv drew close her father held him out to her, glad to give him up. ‘He wants you, love.’

But she shook her head. ‘He’s too big, that one. He weighs a ton.’

‘Give him here,’ said Pamela. ‘Maurice—Howard, don’t just bloody well sit there!’

The racket was terrible. Viv said she was going to go and take her shoes and stockings off. She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

For a second she just stood, not knowing what to do with herself—thinking that she might start crying, be ill…But she couldn’t start crying with her dad and her sister in the other room. She sat on the bed, then lay down with her hands on her stomach; lying down, however, made her feel worse. She sat up again. She got to her feet. She couldn’t shake off the shock of it, the upset of it.

Hush, Vivien.

She took a step, then tilted her head, hearing a noise above the muffled din of the radio, thinking it might be Pamela or one of the boys, in the hall. But the noise turned out to be nothing. She stood undecided for almost a minute, biting her hand.

Then she went quickly to her wardrobe and drew back its door.

The wardrobe was filled with bits of rubbish. There were some of Duncan’s old school-clothes there, hanging up beside her dresses; there were even two or three ancient frocks of her mother’s, which her father had never wanted to throw away. Above the rail was a shelf, where she kept her sweaters. Behind the sweaters were photograph albums, old autograph books, old diaries, things like that.

She tilted her head, listening again for footsteps in the hall; then she reached into the shadows behind the albums and brought out a little tobacco tin. She brought it out as naturally as if she reached for it every day, when in fact she’d placed it there three years before and hadn’t looked at it since. She’d pressed the lid down very tightly then, and now the joints in her wrists and fingers felt weak. She had to get a coin, and prise away at it with that. And when the lid was loosened she hesitated again—still listening out, anxiously, in case someone should come.

Then she drew the lid off.

Inside the tin was a small parcel of cloth. Inside the parcel of cloth was a ring: a plain gold ring, quite aged, and marked with dents and little scratches. She took it up, held it for a second in the palm of her hand, then slipped it on her finger and covered her eyes.

 

At ten to six, when the men who ran the candle-making machines turned off the pumps, the sudden silence in the factory made your ears ring. It was like coming out of water. The girls at Duncan’s bench took it as a signal to start getting ready to go home: they got out their lipsticks and their compacts and things like that. The older women started rolling cigarettes. Len took a comb from his trouser pocket and ran it through his hair. He wore his hair a bit spivvily, swept back behind his ears. When he put the comb away he caught Duncan’s eye, and leant forward.

‘Have a guess what I’ll be doing tonight,’ he said, with a glance down the bench. He lowered his voice. ‘I’m taking a girl to Wimbledon Common. She’s stacked like this.’ He gestured with his hands, then rolled his eyes and gave a whistle. ‘Oh, mama! She’s seventeen. She’s got a sister, too. The sister’s a looker, but got less up top. What do you think? You doing anything tonight?’

‘Tonight?’ said Duncan.

‘Want to come along? The sister’s a heart-throb, I’m telling you. What kind do you like? I know loads of girls. Big ones, little ones. I could fix you up, like that!’ Len snapped his fingers.

Duncan didn’t know what to say. He tried to picture a crowd of girls. But each one was like the little figure of wax that Len had made earlier, with curves and juts and waving hair, and a rough blank face. He shook his head, beginning to smile.

Len looked disgusted. ‘You’re missing out, I swear to God. This girl’s a stunner. She’s got a bloke, but he’s in the army. She’s used to doing it regular and she’s feeling the pinch. I tell you, if the sister wasn’t so friendly I’d be after her myself—’

He went on like that until the factory whistle sounded; then, ‘Well, it’s your funeral,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘You think of me, that’s all, at ten o’clock tonight!’ He gave Duncan a wink of his brown gypsy eye, then hurried away—lurching a little from side to side, like a stout old lady; for his left leg was short, and fused at the knee.

The girls and the women went off quickly, too. They called goodbye as they went: ‘Ta ta, Duncan!’ ‘So long, love!’ ‘See you Monday, Duncan!’

Duncan nodded. He couldn’t bear the mood of the factory at this time of the day—the forced, wild jollity, the dash for the exit. Saturday nights were worst of all. Some people actually ran, to be first out through the gates. The men who had cycles made a sort of race of it: the yard, for ten or fifteen minutes, was like a sink with its plug pulled. He always found a reason to linger or dawdle. Tonight he got a broom, and swept up the parings of wax and the cuttings of wick from the floor beneath his stool. Then he walked very slowly to the locker-room and got his jacket; he visited the lavatory and combed his hair. When he went outside he’d taken so long, the yard was almost deserted: he stood for a moment on the step, getting used to the feel of space and the change of temperature. The Candle Room was kept cool because of the wax, but the evening was warm. The sun was sinking in the sky, and he had a vague, unhappy sense that time had passed—real time, proper time, not factory time—and he had missed out on it.

He had just put down his head and started to make his way across the yard when he heard his name called: ‘Pearce! Hi, Pearce!’ He looked up—his heart giving a thump inside his chest, because he’d already recognised the voice, but couldn’t believe it. Robert Fraser was there, at the gate. He looked as though he’d just come running up. He was hatless, as Duncan was. His face was pink, and he was smoothing back his hair.

Duncan quickened his pace and went over to him. His heart was still lurching about. He said, ‘What are you doing here? Have you been here all afternoon?’

‘I came back,’ said Fraser breathlessly. ‘I thought I’d missed you! I heard the whistle go when I was still three streets away. You don’t mind? After I’d gone this morning I thought how crazy it was, that you were here and—Well. Do you have an hour? I thought we could go for a drink. I know a pub, right on the river.’

‘A pub?’ said Duncan.

Fraser laughed, seeing his expression. ‘Yes. Why not?’

Duncan hadn’t been to a pub in ages, and the thought of going inside one now, with Fraser—of sitting at a table at Fraser’s side, drinking beer, like a regular chap—was tremendously exciting, but alarming, too. He was thinking, as well, of Mr Mundy, who would be waiting for him at home. He pictured the table set for tea: the knives and forks put neatly out, the salt and pepper, the mustard already mixed in its pot…

Fraser must have seen the look of indecision in his face. He said, as if disappointed, ‘You’ve got other plans. Well, never mind. It was just a chance. Which way are you going? I could walk with you—’

‘No,’ said Duncan quickly. ‘It’s all right. If it’s just for an hour—’

Fraser clapped him on the arm. ‘Good man!’

He led Duncan south, towards Shepherd’s Bush Green: the opposite direction to the one that Duncan would normally have taken. He walked loosely, easily, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders back, and now and then he jerked his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. His hair seemed very fair with the evening sunlight on it; his face was still pink and lightly sweating. When they’d picked their way through the worst of the traffic he got out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck, saying, ‘I need a drink! I need several drinks, in fact. I’ve been out at Ealing since two o’clock, putting together a humorous piece on pig farming. My photographer spent more than an hour trying to coax a whimsical expression out of a sow. I tell you, Pearce, the next time I see a pig it had better be on a plate and have sage and onion coming out of its ears.’

He kept talking as they walked. He told Duncan about some of the other writing jobs he’d recently been sent on: a beautiful-baby competition; a haunted house. Duncan listened just closely enough to be able to nod and laugh when he was meant to. The rest of the time he was looking Fraser over, getting used to the amazing sight of him on a street, in ordinary clothes. But Fraser must have been doing something similar, for after a while he stopped talking and caught Duncan’s eye, looking almost rueful.

‘This is bloody queer, isn’t it? I keep expecting Chase or Garnish to appear and start barking at us. “Keep in!” “Fall back!” “Stand to your doors!” I saw Eric Wainwright last year. You remember him? He saw me, too, I know he did—but cut me dead. He was in Piccadilly, with some awful tart of a girl. I ran into that prig Dennis Watling, too, a couple of months ago, at a political meeting. He was going on about prison at the top of his voice—as if he’d spent twelve years there, instead of twelve months. I think he was sorry to see me turn up. I think he thought I stole his thunder.’

They were passing through Hammersmith now, crossing cheerless residential streets; soon, however, at Fraser’s direction, they made a turn. The feel of the area began to change. The houses were replaced, here and there, by bigger buildings, warehouses and works; the air smelt sourer, dark and vinegary. The dirt surface of the road fell away, exposing cobbles, and the cobbles were slippery, as if with grease. Duncan didn’t know this area at all. Fraser stepped on, in his confident way, and he had to hurry to keep up. He suddenly felt almost nervous. What on earth am I doing here? he thought. He looked at Fraser and saw a stranger. The preposterous idea came to him that Fraser might be mad; that he might have lured Duncan here and be meaning to kill him. He didn’t know why Fraser would want to do such a thing, but his mind ran on with the idea, extravagantly. He pictured his own body, strangled or stabbed. He wondered who might find it. He thought of his father and Viv being visited by policemen; being told that he had been found in this queer place, and never knowing why.

Then all at once they turned again and emerged from shadow, and were at the river. Here was the pub that Fraser had been making for: a wooden, wonderfully quaint-looking building that made Duncan think, at once, of Dickens, of Oliver Twist. He was enchanted with it. He forgot all his anxiety about being stabbed or strangled. He stopped, put his hand on Fraser’s arm, and said, ‘But, it’s lovely!’

‘You think so?’ said Fraser, grinning at him again. ‘I thought you’d like it. The beer’s not bad, either. Come on.’ He led Duncan through the narrow, crooked little doorway.

Inside, the place was not quite so charming as its exterior promised; it had been done up like an ordinary public bar, and there were nonsensical things on the walls, horse-brasses and warming-pans and bellows. It was also, already, at half-past six, rather crowded. Fraser pushed his way to the bar and bought a four-pint jug of beer. He gestured to doors at the back of the room, which opened on a pier, overlooking the river; but the pier was busier, even, than the bar. He and Duncan turned around and made their way back through the crush of people and went out again to the street. There was a set of river-stairs there. Fraser stood at the top and looked over. There was plenty of room, he said, down on the beach. ‘The tide’s right out. It’s perfect. Come on.’

They climbed down the steps, going carefully because of the jug of beer and the glasses. The beach was muddy, but the mud had had the afternoon sun on it and was more or less dry. Fraser found a spot at the base of the wall: he took off his jacket and spread it out, and the two of them sat on it, side by side, their shoulders almost touching. The wall was warm, and tarnished by the Thames: you could see very clearly the line, about six feet up, where the greenish stain of the water gave way to the grey of permanently exposed stone. But the tide, at the moment, was low; the river looked narrow—absurdly narrow, as if you could very easily just nip across, on tiptoe, from this side to the other. Duncan screwed up his eyes, making the view grow blurry; imagining for a moment the water rushing in, swallowing him up. The wall was warm against his back, and he could just feel the nudging of Fraser’s arm against his own, as Fraser undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves.

Fraser poured out beer. ‘Here’s yours,’ he said, lifting his glass. He drained it in three or four gulps, then wiped his mouth. ‘Christ! That’s better, isn’t it?’ He poured out more, and drank again.

Then he put his hand into his pocket and drew out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco. As Duncan watched, he began the business of filling the pipe up—teasing out strands of tobacco with his long brown fingers, then thumbing them firmly into the bowl. He caught Duncan’s eye, and smiled. ‘A bit different to the old days, eh? It’s the first thing I bought when I got out.’ He put the stem of the pipe to his mouth, then struck a match and held the flame of it to the bowl; his throat tightened as he sucked, and his cheeks went in and out, in and out—like the sides, Duncan thought, of a hot-water bottle; or, if you wanted to be more romantic about it, like a Spanish wineskin. He watched the bluish smoke rise up from Fraser’s mouth and be snatched away by breezes.

For a while they just sat, drinking their beer—shading their eyes to look at the sun, which seemed fantastically pink and swollen in the late summer sky. The heat of it brought out the stink of the river and the beach, but it was hard to mind that in a place like this; there was too much glamour to the scene. Duncan thought of sailors, smugglers, lightermen, jolly jack tars…Fraser laughed. ‘Look at those lads,’ he said.

A group of boys had appeared, further along the beach. They had taken off their shirts, their shoes and socks, rolled up their trousers, and were running to the water. They ran in that shrinking, girlish way that even grown-up men must run across pointed stones; and when they reached the river they began to splash and lark about. They were young—much younger than Duncan and Fraser, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Their hands and feet were too big for their bodies, which were all very slender and slight. They looked as though they had too much life in them, that the life was rushing about inside them, giving them awkward angles and tilts.

The people drinking out on the pier at the back of the pub had seen the boys, too, and started to call encouragement. The boys began to splash mud instead of water; one fell right in, and emerged quite black, like a thing of clay—like some sinister sort of mannequin, meant to be paraded about the streets. He waded further out, then plunged head first into the water and came up clean again, shaking the river from his hair.

Fraser laughed and leant forward. He put his hand to his mouth and cheered, like the people on the pier. He seemed as full of life as the boys themselves, his bare lower arms very tanned, his long hair bouncing about his brow.

After a minute he sat back, smiling. He drew on his pipe again, then struck another match and held it to the bowl, cradling the flame. But he looked at Duncan as he did it, from beneath his slightly lowered brows; and as soon as the tobacco was properly relit and the match shaken out, he took the pipe from his lips and said, ‘Wasn’t it odd, my running into you at the factory like that?’

Duncan’s heart sank. He didn’t answer. Fraser went on, ‘I’ve been thinking about it all day. It’s just, not at all the sort of place I’d have expected to find you working.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Duncan, lifting his glass.

‘Of course it isn’t! Doing work like that, amongst people like that? The place is only one step up from a charity, isn’t it? How can you stand it?’

‘Everybody else there stands it. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘You really don’t mind it?’

Duncan thought it over. ‘I don’t like the smells much,’ he said at last. ‘They seep into your clothes. And sometimes you get a headache, from all the noise; or your eyes go funny, because of the belt.’

Fraser frowned. ‘That wasn’t what I meant, exactly,’ he said.

Duncan knew that it wasn’t what he’d meant. But he lifted a shoulder, and went on in the same light tone, ‘It’s easy work. It’s not so different from sewing canvas, actually. And it lets you think of other things. I like that.’

Fraser still looked baffled. ‘You wouldn’t rather do something a little more—well—a little more inspiring?’

That made Duncan snort. ‘It doesn’t matter what I’d rather. Can’t you just imagine the look on the face of the DPA man, if I’d said I’d rather this or I’d rather that? I’m lucky to have any job at all; even a pretend one. It was different for you. If you were like me—if you had my sort of past, I mean—’ He couldn’t be bothered. He began to pick at the surface of the beach: at the stones and bits of broken china, the oyster shells and bones. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said, when he saw Fraser still waiting. ‘It’s boring. Tell me, instead, what you’ve been doing.’

‘I want to know about you, first.’

‘There’s nothing to know. You know it all, already!’ He smiled. ‘I mean it. Tell me where you’ve been. You wrote me a letter, once, from a train.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. Just after you’d got out. Don’t you remember? Of course, they wouldn’t let me keep it; I read it, though, about fifty times. Your handwriting was all over the place, and the paper had a mark on it—you said it was onion-juice.’

‘Onion-juice!’ said Fraser thoughtfully. ‘Yes, now I remember. A woman on the train had an onion, and it was the first any of us had seen in about three years. Someone got out a knife and we cut it up and ate it raw. It was glorious!’ He laughed, and drank more of his beer, his Adam’s apple leaping like a fish in his throat.

The train, he said, must have been the one he’d taken to Scotland; he’d been at a sort of logging-camp up there, with other COs, right until the end of the war. ‘I came down to London after that,’ he said, ‘and got some work with a refugee charity—sorting out people who’d just got over here, finding them houses, getting their children into schools.’ He shook his head, thinking about it. ‘The things I heard would make your hair curl, Pearce. Stories of people who’d lost everything. Russians, Poles, Jews; stories of the camps—I couldn’t believe it. What you’ve read in the papers is nothing, nothing at all…I did it for a year. That was as long as I could stand it. Any more of it, and I think I would have finished up wanting to blow my own brains out!’

He smiled—then realised what he’d said, caught Duncan’s eye, and blushed; and at once started talking again, to cover the blunder up…He’d been at the charity, he said, until the previous autumn; then he’d started to try his hand at journalism, with a view to writing for political magazines. A friend of his had got him the ‘hack job’ he was doing now; he was sticking with it in the hope that something more serious would come along. He’d been involved with a girl, for a month or two, but it hadn’t worked out—he coloured again as he told Duncan that. She’d been one of the other people, he said, at the charity for refugees.

He spoke seriously, fluently, like a commentator on the radio. His well-bred accent was very marked, and once or twice Duncan found himself almost wincing, knowing that the accent must be carrying across the beach, reaching the ears of other drinkers. He began to look at Fraser and, as he had before, to see him as a stranger. He couldn’t imagine the life that Fraser had had, in the logging-camp in Scotland and then in London, with a girl; he could only really picture him, still, as he’d used to see him every day, in the small chill cell at Wormwood Scrubs, with the coarse prison blanket over his shoulders, mopping up his cocoa with his breakfast bread, or standing at the window, his lean white face lit up by moonlight or by coloured flares in the sky.

He gazed down into his glass, then became aware that Fraser had fallen silent and was watching him.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Fraser said, when he looked up. He’d lowered his voice, and seemed self-conscious. ‘You’re wondering how it was for me, working with those refugees, listening to the stories I had to hear—knowing other men had fought while I’d done nothing.’ He threw a stone, so that it bounced across the beach. ‘It made me sick, if you want to know. Sick with myself—not because I’d objected; but because objection hadn’t been enough. Sick because I hadn’t tried harder, hadn’t tried to find other ways—and hadn’t made other people try to find them with me—earlier in the war. Sick, for being healthy. Sick, simply, for being alive.’ He blushed again, and looked away. He said, more quietly than ever, ‘I thought of you, as it happens.’

‘Me!’

‘I remembered—well, things you’d said.’

Duncan gazed down into his glass again. ‘I thought you’d forgotten all about me.’

Fraser moved forward. ‘Don’t be an ass! My time’s been taken up, that’s all. Hasn’t yours been?’

Duncan didn’t answer. Fraser waited, then turned away as if irritated. He drank more of his beer, then went back to fiddling with his pipe, sucking at the stem, making his cheeks like wineskins again.

He’s wishing he’d never asked me here, thought Duncan, prising at a stone. He’s wondering why he did. He’s working out how soon he can get rid of me. He thought again of Mr Mundy, waiting at home, with the tea ready; looking at the clock; perhaps opening the front door to gaze anxiously down the street…

He became aware, once again, that Fraser was watching him. He looked round, and their gazes met. Fraser smiled and said, ‘I’d forgotten how inscrutable you can be, Pearce. I’m used to fellows, I suppose, who do nothing but talk.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Duncan. ‘We can go, if you like.’

‘For God’s sake, I didn’t mean that! I just—Well, won’t you tell me anything about yourself? I’ve been going on like a lunatic, while you’ve hardly said a word. Don’t you—Don’t you trust me?’

‘Trust you!’ said Duncan. ‘It isn’t that. It’s nothing like that. There’s nothing to tell, that’s all.’

‘You’ve tried that once. It won’t wash, Pearce! Come on.’

‘There’s nothing to say!’

‘There must be something. I don’t even know where you live! Where do you live? Up near that factory of yours?’

Duncan moved uncomfortably. ‘Yes.’

‘In a house? In rooms?’

‘Well,’ said Duncan. He moved again; but could see no way out of it…‘In a house,’ he admitted, after a moment, ‘up in White City.’

Fraser stared, just as Duncan had known he would. ‘White City? You’re joking! So close to the Scrubs? I wonder you can stand it! Fulham was near enough for me, I don’t mind telling you. White City…’ He shook his head, unable to believe it. ‘But, why there? Your family—’ He was thinking back. ‘They used to live in—where was it? Streatham?’

‘Oh,’ said Duncan automatically, ‘I don’t live with them.’

‘You don’t? Why not? They’ve looked after you all right, haven’t they? You’ve sisters, haven’t you? One in particular—What was her name? Valerie? Viv!’ He pulled at his hair. ‘God, it’s all coming back. She used to visit. She was good to you. She was better to you than my bloody sister was to me, anyway! Isn’t she good to you, still?’

‘It isn’t her,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s the others. We never got on, even before—Well, you know. When I got out it was worse than ever. My oldest sister’s husband hates my guts. I heard him talking about me once, to one of his friends. He called me—He called me Little Lord Fauntleroy. He calls me Mary Pickford, too.—Don’t laugh!’ But he began to laugh, himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fraser, still smiling. ‘He sounds like a regular charmer.’

‘He’s the sort of person, that’s all, who can’t bear it when people are different to him. They’re all like that. But Viv isn’t. She understands—well, that things aren’t perfect. That people aren’t perfect. She—’ He hesitated.

‘She what?’ asked Fraser.

They were recapturing some of their old closeness. Duncan lowered his voice. ‘Well, she’s seeing some man.’ He glanced around. ‘A married man. It’s been going on for ages. I never knew, when I was inside.’

Fraser looked thoughtful. ‘I see.’

‘Don’t look like that! She isn’t a—Well, she isn’t a tart, or whatever you’re thinking.’

‘I’m sure she isn’t. Still, I’m sorry to hear it, somehow. I remember her; I remember liking the look of her. And these things, you know, hardly ever turn out well, especially for the woman.’

Duncan shrugged. ‘It’s their business, isn’t it? What does “turning out well” mean? Do you mean, being married? If they were married they’d probably hate each other.’

‘Perhaps. But, what’s the man like? What kind of bloke is he? Have you met him?’

Duncan had forgotten this way Fraser had, of catching hold of a subject and niggling away at it, just for the pleasure of thinking it through. He said, more reluctantly, ‘He’s some sort of salesman, that’s all I know. He gets her tins of meat. He gets her loads, all the time. She can’t take them home, my dad would wonder. She gives them to me and Uncle Horace—’

He stopped, in confusion and embarrassment at what he’d just said. Fraser didn’t notice; he latched on to Duncan’s words instead.

‘Your uncle,’ he said. ‘That’s right, Mrs Alexander mentioned him, at the factory. She said what a wonderful nephew you are, or something like that.’ He smiled. ‘So your family isn’t quite so bad as you paint it, after all…Well, I’d like to meet your uncle, Pearce. I’d like to meet Viv, too. I’d certainly like to see where you live. Will you let me come and visit you, some other time? For we—Well, there’s nothing to stop us from being friends again, is there? Now that we’ve hooked up together like this?’

Duncan nodded; but didn’t trust himself to speak. He finished the beer that was in his glass, then turned his head, imagining the look that he knew would appear on Fraser’s face, if he was ever to go home with Duncan and see Mr Mundy there.

He went back to picking at the litter of things on the beach. Soon his eye was drawn by something in particular, and he levered it up. It turned out, as he’d thought, to be the stem and part of the bowl of an old clay pipe. He showed it to Fraser, then started picking the mud from it with a piece of wire. Partly to change the subject he said, as he did it, ‘There might have been a man here, three hundred years ago, smoking tobacco just like you. Isn’t that a funny thought?’

Fraser smiled. ‘Isn’t it?’

Duncan held the pipe up and studied it. ‘I wonder what that man’s name was. Doesn’t it torment you, that we’ll never know? I wonder where he lived and what he was like. He didn’t know, did he, that his pipe would be found by people like us, in 1947?’

‘Perhaps he was lucky not to be able to imagine 1947.’

‘Maybe someone will find your pipe, three hundred years from now.’

‘Not a chance of it!’ said Fraser. ‘I’d lay a thousand pounds to a penny that my little pipe, and everything else, will be burnt to cinders by then.’ He finished his beer, and got to his feet.

‘Where are you going?’ Duncan asked him.

‘To get more beer.’

‘It’s my turn.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I drank most of this jug. I need the lavatory, too.’

‘Shall I come with you?’

‘To the lavatory?’

‘To the bar!’

Fraser laughed. ‘No, stay here. Someone will take our place. I won’t be long.’

He’d started to move off across the beach as he was speaking, beating idly with the empty jug against his thigh. Duncan watched him climb the water-stairs and disappear over the top.

The pub, it was true, was more crowded than before. People had brought their drinks out, as Fraser and Duncan had, to the street and the beach; a few men and women were sitting or perching on the wall above Duncan’s head. He hadn’t realised, before, that they were there. He didn’t like to think that they were looking down at him, or might have been listening to the things he had been saying.

He put the piece of clay pipe in his pocket, then gazed out at the river. The tide was turning, and the surface of the water seemed to tussle with itself, like snakes. The boys who’d been splashing about in the mud had all sat down at the edge of the shore; now they rose and came back up the beach, driven in by the tide. They looked younger than ever. They were grinning, but also shivering, like dogs. They walked more wincingly, too: Duncan imagined the soles of their feet having softened in the water, getting cut by stones and shells. He tried to stop himself looking at them as they climbed the water-stairs; he had a sudden horror of seeing a boy’s white foot with blood on it.

He lowered his head, and started picking at the beach again. He found a comb with broken teeth. He prised up a shard of china from a cup, its dainty handle still attached.

And then—he didn’t know why; it might have been that someone spoke his name, and the words reached his ears through some freak lull in the sounds of voices, laughter, water—he turned his head towards the pier again, and his gaze met that of a bald-headed man who was sitting with a woman at one of its tables. Duncan knew the man at once. He came from Streatham; he lived in a street close to the one in which Duncan had grown up. But now, instead of nodding to Duncan, instead of smiling or lifting his hand, the bald-headed man said something to the woman he was with, something like, ‘Yes, that’s him all right’; and the two of them stared at Duncan, with an extraordinary mixture of malevolence, avidity, and blankness.

Duncan quickly looked away. When he glanced back, and found the man and woman still watching, he changed his pose—turned his head, moved his legs, shifted his weight to his other shoulder. He was still horribly aware of being observed, being discussed, sized up, disliked. Look at him, he imagined the man and woman saying. He thinks he’s all right, he does. He thinks he’s just like you and me. For he tried to picture himself as he must appear to them; and he saw himself, without Fraser beside him, as a kind of oddity or fraud. He turned his head again, more slyly—and yes, there they were, still watching him: they were lifting drinks and cigarettes, looking at him now with the empty yet bullying expressions of people who have settled down for a night at the cinema…He closed his eyes. Someone above him gave a raucous laugh. It seemed to him that the laughter could only be directed at him—that, one by one, the drinkers outside the pub were nudging their neighbours, nodding and smiling, spreading the story that Pearce was here—Duncan Pearce was here, drinking beer on the beach, just as if he had as perfect a right to do it as anybody else!

If only Fraser would come! How long had it been, since he’d gone off with the jug? Duncan wasn’t sure. It seemed like ages. He’d probably got talking to someone, some ordinary man. He was probably flirting with the barmaid. And suppose, for some reason, he never came back? How would Duncan get home? He wasn’t sure he could remember the way. His mind was getting blank or dark—he tried to concentrate, and it was just as though he was blindfolded and putting out his foot, and could feel soft ground, crumbling away…Now he began really to panic. He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands, for he’d once heard a doctor say that looking at your own hands, when you were frightened, could make you feel calmer. But he’d grown too conscious of himself: his hands seemed odd to him, like a stranger’s. His whole body felt queer and wrong: he was aware all at once of his heart, his lungs; it began to seem to him that if he were to draw his attention away from those organs for a single instant, they’d fail. He sat on the beach with his eyes shut tight, sweating and almost panting under the frightful burden of having to breathe, press blood through his veins, keep the muscles in his arms and legs from flying into a spasm.

In what might have been five minutes more—or what might easily have been ten or even twenty—Fraser came back. Duncan heard the sound of the full jug being set down on the stones, then felt the touch of Fraser’s thigh against his own as Fraser sat.

‘It’s crazy in there,’ he was saying. ‘It’s like a scrum. I—What’s the matter?’

Duncan couldn’t answer. He opened his eyes and tried to smile. But even the muscles of his face were against him: he felt his mouth twist, and must have looked ghastly. Fraser said again, more urgently, ‘What is it, Pearce?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Duncan at last.

‘Nothing? You look like absolute hell. Here.’ He passed Duncan his handkerchief. ‘Wipe your face, you’re sweating. Is that better?’

‘Yes, a bit.’

‘You’re trembling like a leaf! What’s it all about?’

Duncan shook his head. He said unsteadily, ‘It’ll sound stupid.’ His tongue was sticking to his mouth.

‘I don’t care about that.’

‘It’s just, there’s a man over there—’

Fraser turned to look. ‘What man? Where?’

‘Don’t let him see you! He’s over there, on the pier. A man from Streatham. A bald-headed man. He’s been looking at me, him and his girl. He—he knows all about me.’

‘What do you mean? That you’ve—been inside?’

Duncan shook his head again. ‘Not just that. About why I was in there. About me and—and Alec—’

He couldn’t go on. Fraser watched him a little longer, then turned and gazed again at the figures on the pier. Duncan wondered what the man would do when he saw Fraser looking. He imagined him making some awful gesture—or simply nodding at Fraser and smiling.

But after a moment, Fraser turned back. He said gently, ‘There’s no one looking, Pearce.’

‘There must be,’ said Duncan. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. No one’s looking at all. See for yourself.’

Duncan hesitated, then put his hand across his eyes and peered between his fingers. And it was true. The man and the woman had disappeared and a quite different couple were sitting at their table. This man had sandy-coloured hair; he was pouring crumbs into his mouth from a bag of crisps. The woman was yawning: patting at her lips with a plump white hand. The rest of the drinkers were talking amongst themselves, or gazing back into the bar, or out at the water—gazing anywhere, in fact, but at Duncan.

Duncan let out his breath, and his shoulders sank. He didn’t know what to think now. For all he knew, he might have imagined the whole thing. He didn’t care. His panic had drained him, emptied him out. He wiped his face again and said shakily, wretchedly, ‘I ought to go home.’

‘In a minute,’ said Fraser. ‘Drink some of this beer, first.’

‘All right. But you’ll—you’ll have to pour it.’

Fraser lifted the jug and filled their glasses. Duncan took a gulp, and then another. He had to hold his glass with two hands, to keep it from spilling. In time, however, he began to feel calmer. He wiped his mouth and glanced at Fraser.

‘I suppose you must think me a bit of a fool.’

‘Don’t talk tripe! Don’t you remember—?’

Duncan spoke over his words. ‘I’m not used, you see, to going about like this, on my own. I’m not like you.’

Fraser shook his head, as if annoyed or exasperated. He looked at Duncan, then looked away. He shifted his pose, drank more of his beer. Finally he said, very awkwardly, ‘I wish, Pearce, that I’d kept in touch with you. I wish I’d written, more than I did. I—I let you down. I see that now, and I’m sorry. I let you down badly. But that year, in the Scrubs: once I’d got out, it seemed—I don’t know—it seemed like a dream.’ He met Duncan’s gaze, his eyelids fluttering. ‘Do you understand me? It seemed like someone else’s life, not mine. It was just as though I’d been plucked right out of time, then dropped back in it, and had to take up where I left off.’

Duncan nodded. He said slowly, ‘It wasn’t like that, for me. When I came out, everything was different. Everything was changed. I’d always known it would be, and it was. People said, “You’ll do all right.” But I knew I never would.’

They sat without speaking, as if both exhausted. Fraser got out his matches and his pipe. And now the flame showed brightly, the day was darkening. He rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs, and Duncan felt him shiver.

They watched the movement of the river. The surface of the water, in just a few minutes, had lost its hectic, restless look. The shore had narrowed further already, the water creeping forwards as if, like a cat’s rough tongue, it was wearing the land away with every stroke and lap. Then a tug went rapidly by, and made waves: they rushed and were sucked back, then rushed again; then wore themselves out and ran more feebly.

Fraser threw a stone. He said, ‘How does Arnold have it? The eternal note of sadness—is it? And the something naked shingles of the world…’ He passed his hand over his face, laughing at himself. ‘Christ, Pearce, the moment I start quoting poetry, we’re done for! Come on.’ He levered himself up. ‘Forget the beer, and let’s go. I’ll walk you home. Right to the door. And you can introduce me to your—Uncle Horace, was it?’

Duncan thought of Mr Mundy, pacing the parlour, coming limping to answer their ring. But he hadn’t the energy, now, for fear or embarrassment or anything like that. He got to his feet, and followed Fraser up the water-stairs; and they started off together, northwards, towards White City, through the steadily darkening streets.