‘Are you out of your goddamned mind?’

Marty made noises like a beaten puppy. Sweat was streaming down his face. The blankets were wet with sweat, but he was shivering.

‘I’ll have to,’ he said, his teeth chattering. ‘I’ve got to do something.’ He met Nigel’s cold glittering eyes, and they made him cry out, ‘You wouldn’t let me die, Nige? Nige, I might die. You wouldn’t let me die?’

18

He could hear her talking to Caesar outside the room. She must have gone out to the bathroom. He looked at his watch. Half-past seven. He was embarrassed because Caesar had seen her – dressed in what? The bedspread that he saw was missing? – and he was afraid of Caesar’s censure because all his life every friend or acquaintance or relative had appeared to him in the guise of critical authority. She came back and stepped naked out of wrappings of red candlewick, and into his arms.

‘What did he say to you?’ Alan whispered.

‘“Good luck, my darling,”’ said Una, and she giggled.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You’re the only woman I ever made love to apart from my wife.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Why would I say it, then? It’s nothing to be proud of.’

‘Well, but, Paul, it is quite amazing.’

A horrid thought struck him. ‘And you?’

‘I never made love to any women.’

‘You know I don’t mean that. Men.’

‘Oh, not so many, but more than that.’

And a horrider one. ‘Not Ambrose?’

‘Silly, you are. Ambrose is a celibate. He says that at his age you should have experienced all the sex you need and you must turn your energy to the life of the mind.’

‘“Leave me, O Love, that reachest but to dust.”’

‘Well, I don’t think it does. I really think it reacheth to much nicer things than that. You know, it wasn’t just incredulity that made me say it was quite amazing.’

He considered. He blushed. ‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly. But if it’s true, what you said, don’t you think you need some more practice? Like now?’

That was the best week he had ever known.

He took Una to the theatre and he took her out to dinner. They hired a car. They had to hire it in her name because he was Paul Browning who had left his licence at home in Cricklewood. Driving up into Hertfordshire, they played the lovers’ game of looking at houses and discussing whether this one or that one would best suit them to live in for the rest of their lives. He already knew that he wanted to live with her. The idea of even a brief separation was unthinkable. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her, and the memory that he had told Caesar he didn’t find her attractive was a guilty reproach, though she would never know of it. The word, anyway, was inadequate to describe the effect she had on him. He was glad now that she didn’t wear make-up or dress well, for these things would have been an obscuring of herself. More than anything, he liked to watch the play of emotion in her face, that small intense face that screwed itself into deep lines of dismay or surprise, and relaxed to a child’s smoothness with delight.

‘Paul,’ she said gently, ‘the lights are green. We can go.’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t keep from looking at you. I do look at the road while I’m driving.’

When they got home that night and were in his room – she slept with him every night in his room – she asked him about his wife.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Alison,’ he said. He had to say that because he was Paul Browning.

‘That’s nice. You haven’t told me if you’ve got any children.’

He thought of dead Lucy, who had never been mentioned between them. How many children had Paul Browning? In this case there could be no harm in telling the truth. ‘I’ve got two, a boy and a girl. They’re more or less grown-up. I was married very young.’ Not just to change the subject, but because a greater truth, never before realized, came suddenly to him, ‘I was a very bad father,’ he said. Of course he had been, a bad father, a bad husband, whose energies went, not into giving love, but to indulging in self-pity. ‘They won’t miss me.’

Una looked at him with a wistfulness in which there was much trepidation. ‘You said you wanted to live with me.’

‘So I do! More than anything in the world. I can’t imagine life without you now.’

She nodded. ‘You can’t imagine it but you could live it. Will you tell Alison about me?’

He said lightly, because ‘Alison’ merely conjured for him an unknown blonde woman in Cricklewood, ‘I don’t suppose so. What does it matter?’

‘I think it matters if you’re serious.’

So he took her in his arms and told her his love for her was the most serious thing that had ever happened to him. Alison was nothing, had been nothing for years. He would support her, of course, and do everything that was honourable, but as for seeing her and talking to her, no. He piled lie upon lie and Una believed him and smiled and they were happy.

Or he would have been happy, have enjoyed unalloyed happiness, had it not been for Joyce. The man he had seen in the Rose of Killarney was certainly not the man who had asked him for twenty five-pence pieces for a pound and therefore not one of the men who had raided the bank and kidnapped Joyce. True, they both had mutilated forefingers on their right hands, but those mutilations were quite different, the men were quite different. And yet the sight of that man, or really the sight of that finger, so similiar to the other and so evocative, had reawakened all his conscience about Joyce and all his shame. The bitterness of love unattained had kept that guilt at bay, the happiness of love triumphant had temporarily closed his mind to it, but it was back now, weighing on him by day, prodding him in the night.

‘Is Joyce your daughter’s name?’ Una asked him.

‘No. Why?’

‘You kept calling that name in the night. You called, “Joyce, it’s all right, I’m here.”’

‘I knew a girl called Joyce once.’

‘It was as if you were talking to a frightened child,’ said Una.

He should have done something in the Rose of Killarney, he thought, to make the boy speak. It would have been quite easy. He could have asked him where the buses went or the way to the nearest tube station. And then when he had heard the ordinary north London voice he would have known for sure and wouldn’t be haunted like this. He understood now why he was haunted. The sight of that finger had brought him fear, disbelief, a need to react against it by pretending to himself that the similarity was an illusion – but it had also brought him hope. Hope that somehow this could open a way to redeeming himself, to vindicating himself for what he had done in leaving Joyce to her fate.

On the Friday morning he locked his door and took out the money and counted it. He could hardly believe that he had got through, in this short time, nearly two hundred pounds. Without really appalling him, the discovery brought home to him how small a sum three thousand pounds actually was. Since finding Una, he was no longer content vaguely to envisage one crowded hour of glorious life with disgrace or death at the end of it. He had known her for a week and he wanted a lifetime with her. He would have to get a job, something that didn’t need credentials or qualifications or a National Insurance card. Optimistically, not doubtfully or desperately at all, he thought of taking her away from London and working as a gardener or a decorator or even a window-cleaner.

The doorhandle turned. ‘Paul?’

He thrust the money back into the drawer and went to let Una in.

‘You’d locked your door.’ Her eyes met his in bewildered rejection, and in that look of fear, of distrust, she suddenly seemed to him to represent other women that he had disappointed, that he had failed, Pam and Joyce. Trying to think of an explanation for that locked door, he understood that here was something else which eluded explanation. But she didn’t ask. ‘I’ve had a letter from Ambrose,’ she said. ‘He’s coming home on Saturday week.’