The house was quiet now, the only sound the distant one of traffic in Ladbroke Grove. This surprised him. Since his landlady had a father-in-law, she must also surely have a husband and very likely, at her age, small children. But Alan felt that he was now alone in the house, though this couldn’t be so as, through the French window, he could see light from upstairs shining on the lawn. The two radiators in his room had come on at six, and it was pleasantly warm, but there didn’t seem to be any hot water or anything to provide it. After looking in vain for some switch or meter, he went upstairs to find Mrs Engstrand.

He knocked on the door of the room from which the light was coming. She opened it herself and there was no one with her. She was still wearing the jeans and the sweater, not the long evening skirt he had somehow expected.

‘I’m terribly sorry. There’s an immersion heater in that cupboard outside your door and you share it with Caesar. I expect he’s switched it off. I must tell him to leave it on all the time now you’ve come. I’ll come down with you and show you.’

He only caught a glimpse of the interior of the room, but that was enough. A dark carpet, straw-coloured satin curtains, silk papered walls, Chinese porcelain, framed photographs of a handsome elderly man and an even handsomer young one.

‘Caesar’s very considerate.’ She showed him the heater and the switch. ‘He’s always trying to save me money but it really isn’t necessary. I pay the bills for this part of the house, you see, so Ambrose won’t ever see them.’

He didn’t understand what she meant and he was too shy to enquire. Shyness stopped him asking her in for a drink, though he had drinks, having stocked up with brandy and vodka and gin on his way there. The bottles looked good on top of the tallboy. Maybe when the husband turned up, young Engstrand, he’d invite the two of them and this Caesar and the black-haired girl. It would give him an excuse for asking her.

That night and again in the morning he listened to his radio. There was nothing about Joyce or himself, for no news is not good news as far as the media are concerned. He bought a paper in which the front page headlines were Pay Claim Fiasco and Wife-swapping Led to Murder. Down in the bottom left-hand corner was a paragraph about Joyce’s father offering his house for the return of his daughter. Alan wondered what the police and the bank would do if Joyce turned up safe and told them she had been alone in the bank when the two men came, that there had been only two men, and only four thousand in the safe and the tills. It was very likely that she would tell them that. He asked himself if, by wondering this, he meant that he didn’t want her to turn up safe. The idea was uncomfortable and disturbing, so he put it out of his head and walked to the back of this rather superior newsagent’s-cum-stationer’s to where there were racks of paperbacks. There was no need to buy any books as his room was like a little library, but he had long ago got into the habit of always looking at the wares in bookshops, and why break such a good habit as that?

It wasn’t really coincidence that among the books on the shelf labelled Philosophy and Popular Science he came upon the name of Ambrose Engstrand. Probably the man’s works were in most bookshops but he had never had occasion to notice them before.

He took down The Glory of the Real and read on the back of its jacket that its author was a philosopher and psychologist. He had degrees that filled up a whole line of type, had held a chair of philosophy at some northern university, and made his home, when he was not travelling, in West London. His other works included Neo-Empiricism and Dream, the Opiate.

Alan read the first page of the introduction. ‘In modern times, though not throughout history, the dream has been all. Think of the contexts in which we use this word. “The girl of my dreams”, “It was like a dream”, “In my wildest dreams”. The real has been discarded by mankind as ugly and untenable, to be shunned and scorned in favour of a shadow land of fantasy.’ A few pages further on he found: ‘How has this come about? The cause is not hard to find. Society was not always sick, not always chasing mirages and creating chimeras. Before the advent of the novel, in roughly 1740, when vicarious living was first presented to man as a way of life, and fiction took the lid from the Pandora’s Box of fantasy, man had come to terms with reality, lived it and loved it.’ Alan put the book back. One pound thirty seemed a lot to pay for it, especially as – he smiled to himself – there were a lot of novels in Montcalm Gardens he hadn’t yet read.

But it was certain that he had sold his soul and run away in order to find what this Engstrand called the real, so he had better begin by going to the Pembroke Market. The black-haired girl wasn’t there, she was taking the day off, and Alan didn’t dare ask the man who spoke to him for the number of her house. But he learned that her name was Rose. Tomorrow he would come back and see Rose and find the courage to ask her out with him on Saturday night. Saturday night was for going out, he thought, not yet understanding that for him now every night was a Saturday.

The rest of the day he spent at the Hayward Gallery, going on a river trip to Greenwich and at a cinema in the West End where he saw a Fassbinder film which, though intellectual and obscure, would have made Wilfred Summitt’s scanty hair stand on end. There was nothing in the evening paper about Joyce, only New Moves in Pay Claim and Sabena Jet Hi-jacked. He had been in his room ten minutes when there came a knock at his door.

A man of about thirty with red hair and the kind of waxen complexion that sometimes goes with this colouring stood outside.

‘Locksley. I thought I’d come and say hallo.’

Alan nearly said his name was Groombridge. He remembered just in time. ‘Paul Browning. Come in.’

The man came in and looked round. ‘Bit of luck for both of us,’ he said, ‘finding this place. By the way, they call me Caesar. Or I should say I call me Caesar. What they called me was Cecil. I had the name part in Julius Caesar at school and I sort of adopted it.’

‘Do you really know all Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart?’

‘Una tell you that, did she?’ Caesar grinned. ‘I’m not clever, I’ve just got a good memory. She’s a lovely lady, Una, but she’s crazy. She told me she let you have this place because you’d read some essay about Cardinal Manning. Feel like coming up the Elgin or KPH or somewhere for a slow one?’

‘A slow one?’ said Alan.

‘Well, it won’t be a quick one, will it? No point in euphemisms. We have to face the real, as Ambrose would say. D’you mind if we take Una?’

Alan said he didn’t mind, but what about her husband coming home? Caesar gave him a sidelong look and said there was no fear of that, thank God. However, he came back to say she couldn’t come because she had to wait in for a phone call from Djakarta, so they went to the Kensington Park Hotel on their own.

‘Did you mean there isn’t a husband?’ said Alan when Caesar had bought them two pints of bitter. It was a strange experience for him who had never been ‘out with the boys’ in his life or even into pubs much except with Pam on holiday. ‘Is she a widow?’

Caesar shook his head. ‘The beautiful Stewart’s alive and kicking somewhere out in the West Indies with his new lady. I got it all from Annie, that’s my girl friend. She used to know this Stewart when he was the heart throb of Hampstead. Una’s about the loneliest person I know. She’s a waif. But what’s to be done? I’d do something about it myself, only I’ve got Annie.’

‘There must be unattached men about,’ said Alan.

‘Not so many. Una’s thirty-two. She’s OK to look at but she’s not amazing, is she? Most guys the right age are married or involved. She doesn’t go out much, she never meets anyone. You wouldn’t care to take an interest, I suppose?’