He put his hat under the table.

“There’s plenty to see,” the man said, “if that’s what you want. Museums, art galleries.” Without speaking, he went through a list of names of other attractions, but rejected them all. “Museums,” he said after a long pause, “There’s one at South Kensington, and there’s the British Museum, and there’s one at Whitehall with guns. I’ve seen them all,” he said.

Now every table was occupied. Cold, stiff people with time to kill sat staring at their tea and the clock, inventing replies to questions that would not be asked, justifying their behaviour in the past and the future, drowning every present moment as soon as it began to breathe, lying and wishing, missing all the trains in the terror of their minds, each one alone at the terminus. Time was dying all over the room. And then all the tables except the one next to Samuel’s were unoccupied again. The lonely crowd went out in a funeral procession, leaving ash and tea-leaves and newspapers.

“You must move out of the station sometime, you know,” the man said, returning to a conversation that held no interest for him. “If you want to see around. It’s only fair. It’s not fair to come up in a train and sit in the buffet and then go back and say you’ve seen London, is it?”

“I’m going out now, quite soon.”

“That’s right,” the man said, “give London a chance.”

He is so tired of talking to me that he is nearly losing his temper, Samuel thought.

He looked around him again, at the mourners fidgeting to the counter, at the quick whisky drinkers in a knot by the tea-urn, at the waitresses listlessly busy with cardboard cakes and small change.

“Otherwise, it’s like not getting out of bed, isn’t it?” the man said. “You’ve got to walk round, you know, you’ve got to move some time. Everybody does it,” he said in a sudden, dull passion.

Samuel bought another nip of Bass from a girl like Joan Crawford.

“This is the last one, then I’m going,” he said when he had returned to his table.

“Do you think I care how many more you have? You can stay here all day, why should I mind?” The man was looking at the palms of his hands again as his temper mounted. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Ronald Bishop still stood at the counter.

Mortimer Street has tracked me down, Samuel thought bitterly, even into this lopsided quarrel with a palmist in a station restaurant. There was no escape. But it was not escape he wanted. The Street was a safe hole in a wall behind the wind in another country. He wanted to arrive and be caught. Ronald stood there like a fury with a rolled umbrella. Come in, Mrs. Rosser, in your fawn and beige antimacassar coat, with your tribal hat on your waves, and scream the news of the Street across the table in your whist-drive voice. I could not escape your fury on a birds’ rock, you would be mincing and pinching down to the fishy sea with your beak gaped open like a shopping bag.