The path brought him out at the opposite end to that where he had entered the oval, and his guide showed him that he wasn’t far now from Cricklewood Broadway which seemed to be part of the northern end of the Edgware Road. He walked towards it through a district that rapidly grew shabbier, that seemed as if it must inevitably run down into squalor. Yet this never happened. Expecting squalor, he found himself instead in an area that maintained itself well this side of the slummy and the disreputable. The street was wide, lined with the emporiums of car dealers, with betting shops, supermarkets and shops whose windows displayed saris and lengths of oriental silks. On a blackboard outside a pub called the Rose of Killarney a menu was chalked up, offering steak pie and two veg or ham salad or something called a Leprechaun’s Lunch. This last appeared to be bread, cheese and pickles, but the thought of asking for it in the blackboard’s terms daunted Alan so he ordered the salad and a half of bitter while he waited for it to come.

The girl behind the bar had the pale puffy face and black circles under her eyes of someone reared on potatoes in a Dublin tenement. She drew Alan’s bitter and a pint for an Irishman with an accent as strong as her own, then began serving a double whisky to a thin boy with a pinched face whose carrier bag full of groceries was stuffed between Alan’s stool and his own. Alan didn’t know what made him look down. Perhaps it was that he was still surprised you could go shopping in London on a Sunday, or perhaps he was anxious, in his middle-class respectable way, not to seem to be touching that bag or encroaching upon it. Whatever it was, he looked down, slightly shifting his stool, and saw the boy’s hand go down to take a cigarette packet and a box of matches from inside the bag. It was the right hand. The forefinger had been injured in some kind of accident and the nail was cobbled like the kernel of a walnut.

The shock of what he had seen made Alan’s stomach turn with a fluttering movement. He looked sharply away, started to eat his salad as smoke from the boy’s cigarette drifted across the sliced hardboiled eggs, the vinegary lettuce. Reflected in the glass behind the bar was a smooth gaunt face, tight mouth, biggish nose. The beard could have been shaved off, the hair cut. Alan thought he would know for sure if the boy spoke. He must have spoken already to ask for that whisky, but that was before Alan came in. He watched him pick up the bag, and this time the finger seemed less misshapen. It wasn’t the same. The finger that had come under the metal grille and scooped into the palm the bag of coins he remembered as grotesquely warped and twisted, tipped with a carapace more like a claw or a barnacled shell than a human nail.

It was a kind of relief knowing they weren’t the same so that he wouldn’t have to do anything about it. Do what? He was the last person who could go to the police. The boy left the pub and after a few minutes Alan left too, not following him though, intending never to think of him again. He was suddenly aware that he was tired, he must have walked miles, and he was getting thankfully on to a south-bound bus, when he caught his last glimpse of the boy who was walking down a side street, walking slowly and swinging his carrier as if he had all the time in the world and nothing to go home for.

Alan felt himself in the same situation. For the rest of the day and most of the next he avoided seeing Una. Nearly all the time he kept away from Montcalm Gardens. And he kept away too from north London, from those distant outposts of the Edgware Road when an invented past had bizarrely met an illusion. It was obviously unwise to visit venues, shabby districts and down-at-heel pubs, which suggested crime and criminals to him and where conscience worked on his imagination. He sat in parks, rode on the tops of buses, visited Tussaud’s. But he had to go back or settle for being a vagrant. Should he move on to somewhere else? Should he leave London and go on to some provincial city? For years he had longed for love, and now he had found it he wanted lovelessness back again. He came back to his room on Monday evening and sat on the bed, resolving that in a minute, when he had got enough courage, he would go upstairs and tell her he was leaving, he was going back to his wife, to Alison.

From the other side of the wall, in Caesar Locksley’s room, he heard her voice.

Not what she said, just her voice. And he was consumed with jealousy. Immediately he thought Caesar had been deceiving him and she had been deceiving him, and she was even now in bed with Caesar. He began to walk up and down in a kind of frenzy. They must have heard him in there because someone came to his door and knocked. He wasn’t going to answer. He stood at the window with his eyes shut and his hands clenched. The knock came again and Caesar said:

‘Paul, are you OK in there?’

He had to go then.

‘Annie and I are going to see the Chabrol film at the Gate,’ said Caesar. ‘Una as well.’ He winked at Alan. The wink meant, take her out of herself, get her out of this house. ‘Feel like coming too?’

‘All right,’ said Alan. The relief was tremendous, which was why he had agreed. In the next thirty seconds he realized what he had agreed to, and then he couldn’t think at all because he was confronting her. Nor could he look at her or speak. He heard her say:

‘It is good to see you. I’ve knocked on your door about fifteen times since Saturday night to thank you and say how nice it was.’

‘I was out,’ he muttered. He looked at her then, and something inside him, apparently the whole complex labyrinth of his digestive system and his heart and his lungs, rotated full circle and slumped back into their proper niches.

‘This is Annie,’ said Caesar.

It didn’t help that the girl looked quite a lot like Pam and Jillian. The same neat, regular, very English features and peachy skin and small blue eyes. He heard Caesar say she was a nurse, and he could imagine that from her brisk hearty manner, but she brought Pam back to him, her calms and her storms. He felt trapped and ill.

They walked to the cinema. He and Una walked together, in front of the others.

‘They say’, said Una, ‘that if two couples go out together you can tell their social status by the way they pair off. If they’re working class the two girls walk together, if they’re middle class husband and wife walk together, and if they’re upper class each husband walks with the other one’s wife.’

‘Don’t make me out middle class, Una,’ said Caesar.

‘Ah, but none of us is married to any of the others.’

That made Annie talk about Stewart. She had had a letter from someone who had met him in Port of Spain. Una didn’t seem to mind any of this and talked quite uninhibitedly to Annie about Stewart so that the two girls drifted together in the working class way, a pairing which settled in advance the seating arrangement in the cinema. Alan went in first, then Caesar, then Annie, with Una next to her and as far as possible from Alan. The film was in French and very subtle as well, and he didn’t bother to read the sub-titles. He followed none of it. In a kind of daze he sat, feeling that he lived from moment to moment, that there was no future and no past, only instants precisely clicking through an infinite present.

Afterwards, they all went for a drink in the Sun in Splendour. Caesar wanted Annie to come home with him for the night, but Annie said Montcalm Gardens was much too far from her hospital and she wanted her sleep, anyway. There was a certain amount of badinage, in which Caesar and both girls took part. Alan had never before heard sexual behaviour so freely and frivolously discussed, and he was embarrassed. He tried to imagine himself and Pam talking like this with the Heyshams, but he couldn’t imagine it. And he stopped trying when it became plain that Annie was going, and Caesar taking her home, and that this was happening now.