Alan blushed and hoped it didn’t show in the pub’s murky light. He thought of Rose, her inviting smile, her elegance, the girl of his dreams soon to come true. To turn Una down, he chose what he thought was the correct expression. ‘I don’t find her attractive.’

‘Pity. The fact is, she ought to get away from Ambrose. Of course he’s saved her. He’s probably saved her sanity and her life, but all that dynamic personality – it’s like Trilby and Svengali.’

‘Why does she live in his house?’

‘She was married to this Stewart who’s quite something in the looks line. I’ve seen photos. I tell you, if I wasn’t hetero up to my eyebrows, he’d turn me on. He and Una had a flat in Hampstead but he was always going off with other ladies. Couldn’t resist them, Annie says, and they never left him alone. Una got so she couldn’t stand it any more and they split up. They had this kid, Lucy her name was. She was two. Stewart used to have her at the weekends.’

‘Was?’ Alan interrupted. ‘You mean she’s dead?’

‘Stewart took her to his current lady’s flat for the weekend. Slum, I should say. He and the lady went out for a slow one and while they were out Lucy overturned an oil heater and her nightdress caught fire.’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘Yes. Una was ill for months. The beautiful Stewart took himself off after the coroner had laid into him at the inquest. He shut himself up in a cottage his mother had left him on Dartmoor. And that’s where Ambrose came in. He fetched Una back here and looked after her. He was writing his magnum opus at the time, Neo-Empiricism. That’s what he calls himself, a Neo-Empiricist. But he dropped that for months and gave himself over to helping her. That was three years ago. And ever since then she’s lived here and kept house for him, and before he went off to Java in January he had the basement converted and redecorated and said she was to let it and have the rents for her income. He said it would teach her to assume responsibility and re-face reality.’

‘What happened to Stewart Engstrand?’

‘He turned up after a bit, wanted Una to go back to him. But she wouldn’t, and Ambrose said he’d only be retreating into a mother-dream, whereas what he needed was to work experientially through the reality of his exceptional looks and his sexuality. So he worked through them by taking up with a new lady who’s rich and who carried him off to her house in Trinidad. Another beer? Or would you rather have something shorter and stronger?’

‘My turn,’ said Alan awkwardly, not knowing if this was etiquette when Caesar had invited him out. But it seemed to be, Caesar didn’t demur, and Alan knew that he was learning and making friends and working experientially through the reality of what he had chosen back there in Childon with the money in his hands.

Rose was there in the Pembroke Market on Friday. She had wound her long hair about her head in coils and put on a long black dress with silver ornaments. She looked remote and mysterious and seductive. He had his speech prepared, he had been rehearsing it all the way from Montcalm Gardens.

‘I said I’d come in and tell you how I got on. I found a place from looking in that window, and it’s ideal. But for you I’d never have thought of looking. I’m so grateful. If you’re free tomorrow night, if you’re not busy or anything, I wondered if I could – well, if we could go out somewhere. You’ve been so kind.’

She said with raised eyebrows, ‘You want to take me out because I was kind?’

‘I didn’t just mean that.’ She had embarrassed him, and embarrassment made his voice tremble. But he was inspired to say, afraid of his own boldness, ‘No one would think of you like that, no one who had seen you.’

She smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘that’s better.’ Her eyes devoured him. He turned his own away, but he seemed beyond blushing.

In as casual a manner as he could muster, he said, ‘Dinner perhaps and a theatre? Could I fix something and – and phone you?’

‘I’ll be in the shop all day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Do phone any time.’ It was strange and fascinating the way those simple words seemed to imply and promise so much. It was her voice, he supposed, and her cool poise and the swan-like way she had of moving her head. She gave a light throaty giggle. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

‘Have I?’ He was afraid all the time of committing solecisms. What had he done now?

‘Your name,’ she said.

He told her it was Paul Browning. Some hours had passed before he began to get cold feet, and by then he had booked a table in a restaurant whose phone number he had got from an an advertisement in the evening paper. He stood outside a theatre, screwing up his courage to go in and buy two stalls for himself and Rose.

13

Like Alan Groombridge, Nigel lived in a world of dreams. The only thing he liked about Marty’s magazines were the advertisements which showed young men of his own age and no better-looking, posing with dark glasses on in front of Lotus sports cars, or lounging in penthouses with balloon glasses of brandy in their hands. He saw himself in such a place with Joyce as his slave, waiting on him. He would make her kneel in front of him when she brought him his food, and if it wasn’t to his liking he would kick her. She would know of every crime he committed – by that time he would be the European emperor of crime – but she would keep his secrets fanatically, for she worshipped him and received his blows and his insults with a dog-like devotion. They would live in Monaco, he thought, or perhaps in Rome, and there would be other women in his life, models and film stars to whom he gave the best part of his attention while Joyce stayed at home or was sent, with a flick of his fingers, to her own room. But occasionally, when he could spare the time, he would talk to her of his beginnings, remind her of how she had once defied him in a squalid little room in North London, until, with brilliant foresight, he had stooped to her and bound her to him and made her his for ever. And she would kneel at his feet, thanking him for his condescension, begging for a rare touch, a precious kiss. He would laugh at that, kicking her away. Had she forgotten that once she had talked of betraying him?

Reality was shot through with doubt. His sexual experience had been very limited. At his public school he had had encounters with other boys which had been nasty, brutish and short, though a slight improvement on masturbation. When he left he found he was very attractive to girls, but he wasn’t successful with them. The better-looking they were the more they frightened him. Confronted by youth and beauty, he was paralysed. His father sent him to a psychiatrist – not, of course, because of his failure with the girls which Dr Thaxby knew nothing about. He sent him to find out why his son couldn’t get a degree or a job like other people. The psychiatrist was unable to discover why not, and this wasn’t surprising as he mostly asked Nigel questions about his feelings towards his mother. Nigel said he hated his mother, which wasn’t true but he knew it was the kind of thing psychiatrists like to hear. The psychiatrist never told Nigel any of his findings or diagnosed anything, and Nigel stopped going to him after about five sessions. He had himself come to the conclusion that all he needed to make him a success and everything come right was an older and perhaps rather unattractive woman to show him the way. He found older women easier to be with than girls. They frightened him less because he could despise them and feel they must be grateful to him.

Joyce, however, wasn’t an older woman. He thought she was probably younger than he. But there was no question of her looks scaring him into impotence. With her big round eyes and thick lips and nose like a small pudgy cake, she was ugly and coarse. And he despised her already. Though he affected to be contemptuous of gracious living and cut-glass and silver and well-laid tables and professional people and dinner in the evening and university degrees, his upbringing had left on him an ineradicable mark. He was a snob at heart. Joyce was distasteful to him because she came from the working class. But he wasn’t afraid of her, and as he thought of what he would gain, freedom and escape and her silence, he became less afraid of himself.