At about three he woke up. The vodka had given him a raging thirst, so he went into the kitchen and drank a pint of water. After that it would have been natural to go back to bed and sleep till, say, seven, but he felt wide awake and entirely refreshed and tremendously happy. It was years since he had felt happy. Had he ever? When he was a child, yes, and when Jillian was born because she was the child he had wanted, and in a strange way when he was driving off with the money. But he hadn’t felt like this. This feeling was quite new. He wanted to go out and rush up and down Montcalm Gardens, shouting that he was free and happy and had found the meaning of life. A great joy possessed him. Energy seemed to flow through his body and out at his fingertips. He wanted to tell someone who would understand, and he knew it was Una he wanted to tell.

So this was being in love, this was what it was like. He laughed out loud. He turned on the cold tap and ran his hands under it, he splashed cold water over his face. The room was freezing because the heating went off at eleven, but he was hot, glowing with heat and actually sweating. He fell on to the bed and pulled the sheet over him and thought about Una up there asleep somewhere in the house. Or was she awake too, thinking about him? He thought about her for an hour, re-living their conversation and then fantasizing that he and she lived together in a house like this one and were happy all the time, every minute of the day and night. The fantasy drifted off into a dream of that, a long protracted dream that broke and dissolved and began again in new aspects, until it ended in horror. It ended with his hearing Una scream. He had to run up many staircases and through many rooms to find where the screams were coming from and to find her. At last he came upon her and she was dead, burnt to death with charred banknotes lying all around her. But when he took her body in his arms and looked into her face, he saw that it was not Una he held. It was Joyce.

The cold of morning pierced through the thin sheet, and he awoke shivering, his legs numb. All the euphoria of the night was gone. He had no idea of how one went a-courting. It would be as difficult to speak of love to Una as it would have been to Rose, more difficult because he was in love with her – that was unchanged – while for Rose he had felt only the itch of lust. He was alone in the house with Una, he must be, and thinking of it terrified him. Inviting her out to lunch was impossible, making any sort of overtures to her was unthinkable. He was married, and she knew it. He had a notion, gathered more from Pam’s philosophy than from novels, that if you told a woman you loved her and she didn’t love you, she would slap your face. Especially if you were married and she was married. It was apparently, for no reason he could think of, in some circumstances an insult to tell a woman you loved her. He dressed and went out, thinking he would collapse or weep if he were to meet Una in the hall, but he didn’t meet her.

Ex-priest Marries Stripper and Torture ‘Hotly’ Denied said the Sunday papers. They were searching potholes in Derbyshire for the bodies of himself and Joyce. The silver-blue Ford Escort, last observed at Dover, had turned up in Turkey, its passengers blamelessly on their way to an ashram in India. Alan had a cup of coffee and a sandwich which made him feel sick. He noticed, after quite a long while, that it was a nice day. They were back to the kind of weather of the week before he ran away, just like spring, as Joyce had said. The sun on his face was warm and kind. If he went into the park or Kensington Gardens he might meet Rose, so he made for the nearest tube station, which was Notting Hill, and bought a ticket to Hampstead.

Una had lived in Hampstead. He didn’t remember that until he got there. He walked about Hampstead, wondering if she had lived in this street or that, and if she had walked daily where he now was walking. He found the Heath by the simple expedient of following Heath Street until he got to it. All London lay below him, and, standing on the slope beside the Spaniards Road, he looked down on it as Dick Whittington had looked down and, in the sunshine, seen the city paved with gold.

His gold lay down there, but it was nothing to him if it couldn’t give him Una. He turned abruptly and walked in the opposite direction, through the wood that lies between the Spaniards Road and North End. It wasn’t much like Childon Fen. In the woods adjacent to great cities the trees are the same as trees in the deep wild, but at ground level all the plants and most of the grass have been trodden away. A sterile dusty brownness lies underfoot. The air has no moist green sweetness. But on that sunny Sunday morning – it was still morning, he had left so early – the wood seemed to Alan to have a tender bruised beauty, spring renewing it only for further spoliation, and he knew the authors were right when they wrote of what love does, of how it transforms and glorifies and takes the scales from the eye of the beholder.

When he emerged from the wood he had no idea where he was, but he went on walking roughly westward until he came to a large main road. Finchley Road, NW2, he read, and he realized he must be in Paul Browning country. Strange. Paddington was West Two, so he had supposed that North-west Two must be nearby. It was now evident that Paul Browning banked in Paddington not because he lived but because he worked there. Alan took out his London guide, for even though he would never speak to Una again, never be alone with her again, he ought to know the location of his old home.

The street plan showed Exmoor Gardens as part of an estate of houses where the roads had been quaintly constructed in concentric circles, or really, concentric ovals. Each one was named after a range of mountains or hills in the British Isles. It seemed a long way to walk, but Alan didn’t know if there was any other means of getting there, and he felt a strange compulsion to see Paul Browning’s home. In the event, the walk didn’t take so very long.

Most of the houses in Exmoor Gardens were mock-Tudor, but a few were of newer, plainer design, and number 15 was one of these. It was bigger than his own house at Fitton’s Piece, but otherwise it was very much like it, red brick and with picture windows and a chimney for show not use, and a clump of pampas grass in the front garden. He stood and looked at it, marvelling that by chance he should have chosen for his fictional past so near a replica of his actual past.

Paul Browning himself was cleaning his car on the garage drive. The front door was open and a child of about eight was running in and out, holding a small distressed-looking puppy on a lead. There was a seat on the opposite side of the road. It had been placed at the entrance to a footpath which presumably linked one of those ovals to another. Alan sat down on the seat and pretended to read his paper while the child galloped the puppy up and down the steps. Paul Browning gave an irritable exclamation. He threw down his soapy cloth and went up to the door and called into the hall:

‘Alison! Don’t let him do that to the dog.’

There was no answer. Paul Browning caught the boy and admonished him, but quietly and gently, and he picked the puppy up and held it in his arms. A woman came out of the house, blonde, tallish, about thirty-five. Alan couldn’t hear what she said but the tone of her voice was protective. He had the impression from the way she put her arm round the boy and smiled at her husband and patted the little dog, that she was the fierce yet tender protector of them all. He folded his paper and got up and walked away down the footpath.

The little scene had made him miserable. He should have had that but he had never had it, and now it was too late to have it with anyone. He felt ridiculously guilty too for taking this man’s identity and background, a theft which had turned out to be pointless as well as a kind of slander on Paul Browning who would never have left his wife. Alan asked himself if his other theft had been equally pointless.