“I will if you’ll come and have a swim with me. You promised.” She patted her hair into place.

“Where.”

“In the bath. You get in first, go on. You can’t break your promise.”

George Ring, he whispered, gallop upstairs now and bite your way through the door. She wants me to sit with my overcoat on and my bottle on my finger in the cold, greasy bath, in the half-dark bathroom, under the sneering birds.

“I’ve got a new suit,” he said.

“Take it off, silly. I don’t want you to go in the bath with your clothes on. Look, I’ll put something over the window so you can undress in the dark. Then I’ll undress too. I’ll come in the bath with you. Sam, are you frightened?”

“I don’t know. Couldn’t we take our clothes off and not go in the bath? I mean, if we want to take them off at all. Someone might came in, it’s terribly cold, Polly. Terribly cold.”

“You’re frightened. You’re frightened to lie in the water with me. You won’t be cold for long.”

“But there’s no sense in it. I don’t want to go in the bath. Let’s sit here and you do being glad, Polly.”

He could not move his hand, she had caught the bottle between her legs.

“You don’t want to be frightened. I’m not any older than you are,” she said, and her whispering mouth was close to his ear. “As soon as you get in the bath I’ll jump on top of you in the dark. You can pretend I’m somebody you love if you don’t like me properly. You can call me any name.” She dug her nails into his hand. “Give me your coat, I’ll hang it over the window. Dark as midnight,” she said, as she hung the coat up, and her face in the green light through the curtains was like a girl’s under the sea. Then all the green went out, and he heard her fumbling. I do not want to drown. I do not want to drown in Sewell Street off Circe Street, he whispered under his breath.

“Are you undressing? I can’t hear you. Quick, quick, Sam.” He took off his jacket and pulled his shirt over his head. Take a good look in the dark, Mortimer Street, have a peek at me in London.

“I’m cold,” he said.

“I’ll make you warm, beautifully warm, Sam.” He could not tell where she was, but she was moving in the dark and clinking a glass. “I’m going to give you some brandy. There’s brandy, darling, in the medicine cupboard. I’ll give you a big glass. You must drink it right down.”

Naked, he slipped one leg over the edge of the bath and touched the icy water.

Come and have a look at impotent Samuel Bennet from Mortimer Street off Stanley’s Grove trembling to death in a cold bath in the dark near Paddington Station. I am lost in the metropolis with a rubber duck and a girl I cannot see pouring brandy into a tooth-glass. The birds are going mad in the dark. It’s been such a short day for them, Polly.