That seemed to be true, for Marty didn’t drink any more that evening and on Tuesday he felt almost normal. It was a lovely day to be out in the air. On Nigel’s instructions, he bought a cold roast chicken and some prepared salad in cartons and more bread and cheese and a bottle of really good wine that cost him four pounds. He forgot to get more tea and coffee or to replenish their supply of tins, but that didn’t matter since, by tomorrow, the three of them would be off somewhere, Nigel and Joyce all set for a honeymoon.

The fact was, though, that neither of them seemed very lover-like. Marty wondered what had happened between them on Saturday. Not much, he thought, but presumably enough for Nigel to be sure he was going to make it. Marty observed their behaviour. Joyce sat knitting all day, not being any nicer to Nigel than she had ever been, and Nigel didn’t talk much to her or call her ‘sweetheart’ or ‘love’ which were the endearments he would have used in the circumstances. Maybe it was just that they fancied each other so much that they were keeping themselves under control in his presence. He hoped so, and hoped they wouldn’t expect him to stay out half the night, for his stomach was hurting him again and he felt as if he had a hangover, though he hadn’t touched a drop of scotch for twenty-four hours.

At just after six he went off. It was a fine clear evening, preternaturally warm for the time of year. Or so Marty supposed from the way other people weren’t wearing coats, and from seeing a couple of girls walking along in thin blouses with short sleeves. He didn’t feel warm himself, although he had a sweater and his leather jacket on. He stood shivering at the bus stop, waiting for the number 16 to come and take him down to the West End.

The two in the room in Cricklewood were self-conscious with each other. Nigel put his arm round Joyce and wondered how it would be if she were thirty-seven or thirty-eight and grateful to him for being such a contrast to her dreary old husband. The fantasy helped, and so did some of Marty’s whisky. Joyce said she would have some too, but to put water with it.

They took their glasses into the living room.

‘Did you send my letter?’ said Joyce.

‘Marty took it this morning.’

‘So that’s his name? Marty.’

Nigel could have bitten his tongue out. But did it matter now?

‘You’d better tell me yours, hadn’t you?’

Nigel did so. Joyce thought it a nice name, but she wasn’t going to say so. She had an obscure feeling that some part of herself would be saved inviolate if, even though she slept with Nigel, she continued to speak to him with cold indifference. The whisky warmed and calmed her. She had never tasted it before. Stephen said it was gin that was the woman’s drink, and once or twice she had had a gin and tonic with him in the Childon Arms, but never whisky. Nigel was half-sitting on the gun. It was beside him but not between them. She let Nigel kiss her and managed to kiss him back.

‘We may as well eat,’ Nigel said, and he took the gun with him to the table. The wine would put the finishing touch to a pleasant muzziness that was overcoming his inhibitions. He liked Joyce’s shyness and her ugliness. It meant she wouldn’t know whether he acquitted himself well or badly. She ate silently, returning the pressure of his knee under the table. But, God, she was ugly! The only good thing about her was her hair. Her eyelashes were white – no wonder she’d nagged him to get her mascara – and her skin was pale and coarse and her features doughy. In Marty’s tee-shirt and pullover she looked shapeless.

He started talking to her about the things he had done, how he had been to university and got a first-class honours degree, but had thrown it all up because this society was rotten, rotten to the core, he didn’t want any part of it, no way. So he had gone to live in a commune with other young people with ideals, where they had a vegetarian diet and made their own bread and the girls wove cloth and made pots. It was a free sexuality commune and he had been shared by two girls, a very young one called Samantha and an older one, Sarah.

‘Why did you rob a bank then?’ said Joyce.

Nigel said it had been a gesture of defiance against this rotten society, and they were going to use the money to start a Raj Neesh community in Scotland.

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s my religion. It’s a marvellous Eastern religion with no rules. You can do what you like.’

‘Sounds right up your street,’ said Joyce, but she didn’t say it unpleasantly, and when she got up to put the plates on the draining board beside Marty’s whisky bottles, she let Nigel run his hand down her thigh. Then she sat down closer to him and they drank up the last of the wine. By now it was dark outside, but for the light from the yellow lamps. Nigel drew the curtains, and when Joyce came through from the kitchen he put his arms round her and began kissing her violently and hungrily, pushing her head back and chewing at her face.

She had very little feeling left, just enough to know from the feel of Nigel pressed like iron up against her, that it was going to happen. But she felt no panic or despair, the whisky and the wine had seen to that, and no compulsion to break a window or scream when, for the first time since she had been there, she was left quite alone and free to move. Nigel went out to the lavatory, taking the gun with him. Joyce got on to the mattress and took all her clothes off under the sheet. The third note was still inside her bra. She pushed it into one of the cups and hid the bra on the floor under her pullover. Nigel came back, closing the door on the Yale but not bothering with the other lock. He switched off the light. For a little while he stood there, surprised that the lamps outside lit the room so brightly through the threadbare curtains, as if he hadn’t seen that same thing for many nights. Then he stripped off his clothes and pulled back the blankets and the sheet that covered Joyce.

Her head was slightly turned away, the exposed cheek half-covered by her long fair hair. He stared at her in amazement, for he hadn’t known any real woman could look like that. Her body was without a flaw, the full breasts smooth and rounded like blown glass, her waist a fragile and slender stem, the bones and muscles of her legs and arms veiled in an extravagant silkiness of plump tissue and white skin. The yellow light lay on her like a patina of gilding, shining in a gold blaze on those roundnesses and leaving the shallow hollows sepia brown. She was like one of the nudes in Marty’s magazines, only she was more superb. Nigel had never thought of those as real women, but as contrivances of the pornographer’s skill, assisted by the pose and the cunning camera. He looked down on her with appalled wonder, with a sick shrinking awe, while Joyce lay motionless and splendid, her eyes closed.

At last he said, ‘Joyce,’ and lowered his body on to hers. He too shut his eyes, knowing he should have shut them before or never have pulled back that sheet. He tried to think of Samantha’s mother, stringy and thin and thirty-two, of Sarah in her black stockings. With his right hand he felt for the gun, imagining how it would be if he were raping Alan Groombridge’s wife at gunpoint. But the damage was done. In the last way he would have thought possible, Joyce had taken away his manhood without moving, without speaking. Now she shifted her body under his and opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘I’ll be OK in a minute,’ said Nigel, his teeth clenched. ‘I could use a drink.’

He went out into the kitchen and took a swig out of the whisky bottle. He shut his eyes so that he couldn’t see Joyce and tied himself round her, his arms and legs gripping her.

‘You’re hurting!’

‘I’ll be OK in a minute. Just give me a minute.’