Wilfred Summitt and Mrs Elizabeth Culver appeared on television, but neither put up satisfactory performances. Mrs Culver broke down and cried as soon as the first question was put to her, and Pop, seeing this as an opportunity to air his new dogmas, launched into a manifesto which opened with an appeal for mass public executions. He went on talking for a while after he had been cut off in mid-sentence, not realizing he was no longer on view.

Looking for somewhere to live, Alan left the suitcase in a locker at Paddington Station. At the theatre he had put it under his seat where it annoyed no one because he was sitting in the front row. He had enjoyed Faustus, identifying with its protagonist. He too had sold his soul for the kingdoms of the earth – and, incidentally, for three thousand pounds. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! He had felt a bit like that himself, looking at the sunset while earlier he was walking in Kensington Gardens. Would he also find his Helen to make him immortal with a kiss? At that thought he blushed in the dark theatre, and blushed again, thinking of it, as he walked from Paddington Station down towards the Bayswater Road.

Notting Hill, he had decided, must be his future place of abode, not because he had ever been there or knew anything about it, but because Wilfred Summitt said that wild horses wouldn’t drag him to Notting Hill. He hadn’t been there either, but he talked about it as a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah. There had been race riots there in the fifties and some more a couple of years back, which was enough to make Pop see it as a sinful slum where everyone was smashed out of their minds on hashish, and black people stuck knives in you. Alan went to two agencies in Notting Hill and was given quite a lot of hopeful-looking addresses. He went to three of them before lunch.

It was an unpleasant shock to discover that London landlords call a room ten feet by twelve with a sink and cooker in one corner, a flatlet. He could hardly believe in the serious, let alone honest, intent behind calling two knives and two forks and two spoons from Woolworth’s ‘fully equipped with cutlery’ or an old three-piece suite in stretch nylon covers ‘immaculate furnishings’. Having eaten his lunch in a pub – going into pubs was a lovely new experience – he bought an evening paper and a transistor radio, and read the paper sitting on a seat in Kensington Gardens. It told him that the Anglian-Victoria Bank was offering a reward of twenty thousand pounds for information leading to the arrest of the bank robbers and the safe return of himself and Joyce. A girl came and sat beside him and began feeding pigeons and sparrows with bits of stale cake. She was so much like his fantasy girl, with a long slender neck and fine delicate hands and black hair as smooth and straight as a skein of silk, that he couldn’t keep from staring at her.

The second time she caught his eye, she smiled and said it was a shame the way the pigeons drove the smaller birds away and got all the best bits, but what could you do? They also had to live.

Her voice was strong and rich and assured. He felt shy of her because of her resemblance to the fantasy girl, and because of that too he was aware of an unfamiliar stirring of desire. Was she his Helen? He answered her hesitantly and then, since she had begun it, she had spoken to him first, and anyway he had a good reason for his question, he asked her if she lived nearby.

‘In Pembroke Villas,’ she said. ‘I work in an antique shop, the Pembroke Market.’

He said hastily, not wanting her to get the wrong idea – though would it be the wrong idea? – ‘I asked because I’m looking for a place to live. Just a room.’

She interrupted him before he could explain how disillusioned he had been. ‘It’s got much more difficult in the past couple of years. A good way used to be to buy the evening papers as soon as they come on the streets and phone places straightaway.’

‘I haven’t tried that,’ he said, thinking of how difficult it would be, using pay phones and getting enough change, and more and more nights at the Maharajah, and thinking too how exciting and frightening it would be to live in the same house as she.

‘You sometimes see ads in newsagents’ windows,’ she said. ‘They have them in the window of the place next to the market.’

Was it an invitation? She had got up and was smiling encouragingly at him. For the first time he noticed how beautifully dressed she was, just the way his private black-haired girl had been dressed in those dreams of his. The cover of Vogue, which he had seen in Stantwich paper shops but which Pam couldn’t afford to buy – coffee-coloured suede suit, long silk scarf, stitched leather gloves and nut-brown boots as shiny as glass.

‘May I walk back with you?’ he said.

‘Well, of course.’

It was quite a long way. She talked about the difficulty of getting accommodation and told anecdotes of the experiences of friends of hers, how they had found flats by this means or that, their brushes with landlords and rent tribunals. She herself owned a floor of the house in which she lived. He gathered that her father was well-off and had bought it for her. Her easy manner put him at his ease, and he thought how wonderful it was to talk again, to have found, however briefly, a companion. Must their companionship be brief?

Outside the Pembroke Market she left him.

‘If you’re passing,’ she said, ‘come in and let me know how you’ve got on.’ Her smile was bold and inviting, yet not brazen. He wouldn’t have cared if it had been. He thought, he was sure, she was waiting for him to ask if he could see her before that, if he could see her that evening. But paralysis overcame him. He could be wrong. How was he to know? How did one ever tell? She might simply be being helpful and friendly, and from any overture he made turn on her heel in disgust.

So he just said, ‘Of course I will, you’ve been very kind,’ and watched her walk away, fancying he had seen disappointment in her face.

There were no ads for accommodation in the newsagent’s window, only cards put there by people who wanted rooms or had prams and pianos and kittens for sale, and an unbelievable one from a girl offering massage and ‘very strict’ French lessons. As he was turning away, the back of the case in which the cards were was suddenly opened inwards and a hand appeared. When he looked back, he saw that a new card had been affixed. Doubtfully – because what sort of an inhabitable room could you get for ten pounds a week? – he read it: 22 Montcalm Gardens, Wi 1. He looked up Montcalm Gardens in his London guide, and found that it turned off Ladbroke Grove at what he was already learning to think of as the ‘nice’ end. A boy of about twenty was looking over his shoulder. Alan thought he too must be looking for a room, and if that was so he knew who was going to get there first. The room might be all right, it was bound to be better than the Maharajah. His legs were weary, so he did another first time thing and, copying gestures he had seen successfully performed by others, he hailed and acquired a taxi.

The name on the card had been Engstrand and it had immediately brought to Alan’s mind old man Jacob and Regina in Ibsen’s Ghosts. One branch of the Forsyte family had lived in Ladbroke Grove. Such literary associations were pleasant to think of. He himself was like a character in a book on the threshold of adventure and perhaps of love.

In Montcalm Gardens two long terraces of tall early Victorian houses eyed each other austerely across a straight wide roadway. The street was treeless, though thready branches of planes could be seen at the far end of it. It had an air of dowdy, but not at all shabby, grandeur. There were little balconies on the houses with railings whose supports were like the legs of Chippendale chairs, and each house had, at the top of a flight of steps, a porch composed of pilasters and a narrow flat roof. The first thing he noticed about number 22 was how clean and sparkling its windows were, and that inside the one nearest the porch stood surely a hundred narcissi in a big copper bowl.