The door was opened to him by a woman he supposed must be Mrs Engstrand. She looked inquiringly at him, her head a little on one side.

‘I saw your advertisement . . .’ he began.

‘Already? I only put it in half an hour ago. I’ve just got back.’

‘They were putting it in when I saw it.’

‘Well, you mustn’t stand there. Do come in.’ Her voice was both vague and intense, an educated voice which he wouldn’t have expected from the look of her. She wore no make-up on her pale small face that seemed to peep out from, to be engulfed by, a mass of thick brown curly hair. Had she really been out, dressed like that, in denims with frayed hems and a sweater with a hole at one elbow? She looked about thirty, maybe more.

He went in, and she closed the door behind him. ‘I’m afraid the room’s in the basement,’ she said. ‘I’m telling you that now in case you’ve got any sort of thing against basements.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alan. From what he could see of the hall, and, through an open door, of the interior of a room, the house was very beautifully, indeed luxuriously, furnished. There were those things in evidence that make for an archetype of domestic beauty: old carefully polished furniture, precious ornaments, pictures in thin silver frames, a Chinese lacquer screen, chairs covered in wild silk, long and oval mirrors, more spring flowers in shallow bowls. And there was exquisite cleanliness. What would he be offered here for ten pounds a week? A cupboard under the stairs?

Downstairs in the basement was a kind of hall, with white walls and carpeted in red haircord. He waited to be shown the cupboard. She opened a door and he saw instead something like that which he had expected to see at the first house he had visited, before he was disillusioned.

She said, ‘It’s big, at any rate, and it really isn’t very dark. The kitchen’s through there. Tenants have the use of the garden. I’m afraid anyone who took this room would have to share the bathroom with Mr Locksley, but he’s very very nice. He’s got the front room.’

This one was large with French windows. One wall was hung all over with shelves, and the shelves were full of books. The furniture wasn’t of the standard of upstairs, but it was good Victorian furniture, and on the floor was the same haircord as in the passage. It looked new, as if no one had ever walked on it. He looked out of the window at a lawn and daffodils and two little birch trees and a peaked black brick wall, overgrown with ivy.

‘That’s the chapel of a convent. There are lots of convents round here. It’s Cardinal Manning country. The Oblates of St Charles, you know.’

He said, ‘Like in that essay by Lytton Strachey.’

‘Oh, have you read that?’ He turned round and saw that her intense birdlike little face was glowing. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said. ‘I read it once every year. Eminent Victorians is up there on the top shelf. Oh, do you mind the books? They’re nearly all novels, you see, and there isn’t anywhere else for them because my father-in-law can’t bear novels.’

He was bewildered. ‘Why not?’

‘He says that fiction causes most of our troubles because it teaches us to fantasize and lead vicarious lives instead of coming to terms with reality. He’s Ambrose Engstrand, you know.’

Alan didn’t know. He had never heard of Ambrose Engstrand. Did she mean he could have the room? ‘I can give you a bank reference,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’

‘I hate having to ask for one at all,’ she said earnestly. ‘It seems so awfully rude. But Ambrose said I must. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who likes Eminent Victorians is all right. But it’s Ambrose’s house and I do have to do what he says.’

‘My name is Browning,’ Alan said. ‘Paul Browning. Fifteen, Exmoor Gardens, NW2 – that’s my present address. My bank’s the Anglian-Victoria, Paddington Station Branch.’ He hesitated. ‘D’you think I could move in this week?’

‘Move in today if you like.’ She pushed back her thick massy hair with both hands, smiled at his amazement. ‘I didn’t mean I was really going to write to that bank. I shall just let Ambrose think I have. Caesar – that’s Mr Locksley – hasn’t even got a bank. Banks don’t mean anything. I’ve proved that because he always pays his rent on the dot, and I knew he’d be lovely because he knows all Shakespeare’s Sonnets by heart. Can you believe it?’

His head swimming, Alan said he was very grateful and thank you very much, and he’d move in that evening. He went back to Paddington Station and fetched the suitcase and went into a café to have a cup of tea. He was Paul Browning, late of North-west Two (wherever that might be) now of Montcalm Gardens, Notting Hill. It was by this name that he would introduce himself to the black-haired girl tomorrow when he went to the Pembroke Market to tell her what had happened. Tomorrow, though, not today. Quite enough had happened today. He needed peace and quiet to collect his thoughts and make himself a design for living.

11

Joyce Culver’s father offered his house, or the price that house would fetch when sold, for the safe return of his daughter. It was all he had.

Marty and Nigel saw it in the paper.

‘What’s the good of a house or the bread it’ll fetch,’ said Nigel, ‘if you’re inside?’

‘We could make him promise not to tell the fuzz. And then he could sell the place and give us the money.’

‘Yeah? And just why would he do that thing once he’d got her back? Be your age.’

They were talking in low voices on the landing. Joyce was in the lavatory, dropping another note out of the window, this time wrapped round the metal lid of a glass jar. Even in a normal dwelling house, and Marty’s place was far from that, it is difficult to find an object which is at the same time heavy enough to drop, unbreakable and small enough to conceal on one’s person. She couldn’t see where it fell. She didn’t know that under the window was an area containing five dustbins, and that Brent Council refuse collectors had already thrown the pumice stone and the paper round it into the crushing machine at the back of their truck. One of the dustbin lids had blown off, and Joyce’s second note dropped into the bin on top of a parcel of potato peelings deposited there by Bridey on the previous night.

‘When am I going to get out of here?’ said Joyce, emerging.

‘Keep your voice down.’ Nigel was aghast, in spite of the absence of Bridey and the deafness of Mr Green.

‘When am I going to get out of here!’ yelled Joyce at the top of her voice.

Marty clapped his hand over her mouth and manhandled her back into the room. She felt the gun thrust against her ribs, but she was beginning to have her doubts about the gun, she was beginning to get ideas about that.

‘If you do that again,’ said Marty, ‘you can pee in a pot in the kitchen.’

‘Charming,’ said Joyce. ‘I suppose that’s what you’re used to, I suppose that’s what goes on in whatever home you come from. Or pig-sty, as I should call it. Got an Elsan in a hut at the end of your garden, have you? I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

She held up her head and glared at him. Marty was beginning to hate her, for the shot had gone home. She had precisely described the sanitary arrangements in his father’s cottage. It was Thursday, and they had been shut up in here since Monday night. Why shouldn’t they just get out and leave her here? They could tie her up and tie her to the gas stove or something so she couldn’t move. And then when they’d got safe away they could phone the police, make one of those anonymous calls and tell them where she was. He thought that would work. It was Nigel, whispering out there on the landing or when Joyce was washing – she was always washing – who said it wasn’t on. Where could they go, he said, where the call couldn’t be traced from? Once give them this address, anyway, and they’d know who Marty was and very soon who Nigel was. They might just as well go and give themselves up now. Nigel had said he had a plan, though he didn’t say what it was, and Marty thought the plan must be all hot air and Nigel didn’t know what to do any more than he did.