“Where was Moses when the light went out, Mrs. Dacey?”

“Like one of those cherubs in the Italian Primitives, only with a bottle on your finger, of course.”

“In the dark. Like this.”

“What did our Polly do to you, the little tart?” Mrs. Dacey said in her tidy, lady’s voice.

Mr. Allingham stood up. “I’m not listening. Don’t you say a word, Sam, even if you could. No explanations. There he was, gassed in the bath, at half-past four in the afternoon. I can stand so much.”

“I want to go out,” Samuel said.

“Out the back?”

“Out.”

Out of the blind, stripping hole in a wall, aviary and menagerie, cold water shop, into the streets without locks. I don’t want to sleep with Polly in a drawer. I don’t want to lie in a cellar with a wet woman, drinking polish. London is happening everyhere, let me out, let me go, Mrs. Dacey is all cold fingers. “Out then, It’s six o’clock. Can you walk, son?”

“I can walk okay, it’s my head.”

Mrs. Dacey, unseen, stroked his hair. Nobody can see, he said silently, but Mrs. Susan Dacey, licensed to sell tobacco, is stroking my hair with her lizards; and he gave a cry.

“I’ve got no sympathy,” said Mr. Allingham. “Are you coming, Sue?”

“Depends where you’re going.”

“Taking the air down the Edgware Road. He’s got to see around, hasn’t he? You don’t come up from the provinces to drink eau de cologne in the bath.”

They all went out, and Mrs. Dacey locked the shop.

It was raining heavily.

“Fun!” George Ring said.

They walked out of Sewell Street into Praed Street arm-in-arm.

“I’m a fool for the rain.” He shook his clinging curls and danced a few steps on the pavement.

“My new brown overcoat’s in the bathroom,” Samuel said, and Mrs. Dacey covered him with her umbrella.

“Go on, you’re not the sort that puts a coat on in the rain, are you? Stop dancing, George.”

But George Ring danced down the pavement in the flying rain and pulled the others with him; unwillingly they broke into a dancing run under the lampposts’ drizzle of light, Mrs. Dacey, black as a deacon, jumping high over the puddles with a rustle and creak, Mr. Allingham, on the outside, stamping and dodging along the gutter, Samuel gliding light and dizzy with his feet hardly touching the ground.

“Look out. People,” cried Mr. Allingham, and dragged them, still dancing, out onto the slippery street. Caught in a circle of headlights and chased by horns, they stamped and scampered onto the pavement again, clinging fast to each other, their faces glistening, cold and wet.

“Where’s the fire, George? Go easy, boy, go easy.” But Mr. Allingham, one foot in the gutter, was hopping along like a rabbit and tugging at George Ring’s arm to make him dance faster. "It’s all Sam’s fault,” he said as he hopped, and his voice was high and loud like a boy’s in the rain.