Look at London flying by me, buses and glowworms, umbrellas and lampposts, cigarettes and eyes under the watery doorways, I am dancing with three strangers down Edgware Road in the rain, cried Samuel to the gliding boy around him. Light and without will as a suit of feathers, he held onto their arms, and the umbrella rode above them like a bird.

Cold and unsmiling, Mrs. Dacey skipped by his side, seeing nothing through her misted glasses.

And George Ring sang as he bounced, with his drenched hair rising and falling in level waves, “Here we go gathering nuts and may, Donald and Mrs. Dacey and George and Sam.”

When they stopped, outside the Antelope, Mr. Allingham leaned against the wall and coughed until he cried. All the time he coughed he never removed his cigarette.

“I haven’t run for forty years,” he said, his shoulders shaking, and his handkerchief like a flag to his mouth. He led them into the Saloon Bar where three young women sat with their shoes off in front of the electric log fire.

“Three whiskies. What’s yours, Sam? Nice drop of Kiwi?”

“He’ll have whisky, too,” Mrs. Dacey said. “See, he’s got his colour back.”

“Kiwi’s bootpolish,” one of the young women whispered, and she bent, giggling, over the grate. Her big toe came out of a hole in her stocking, suddenly, like a cold inquisitive nose, and she giggled again.

This was a bar in London. Dear Peggy, Samuel wrote with his finger on the counter, I am drinking in a bar called the Antelope in Edgware Road with a furniture dealer, the proprietoress of a tea-shop, three young women and George Ring. I have put these facts down clearly because the scent I drank in the bath is still troublesome and people will not keep still. I am quite well but I do not know for how long.

“What’re you doing, Sam? Looks like you’re drawing. I’ve got a proper graveyard in my chest, haven’t I? Cough, cough,” Mr. Allingham said, angrily between each cough.

“It wasn’t that cough that carried him off,” the young woman said. Her whole plump body was giggling.

Everything is very trivial, Samuel wrote. Mr. Allingham is drunk on one whisky. All his face goes pale except his mark.

“Here we are,” Mr. Allingham said, “four lost souls. What a place to put a man in.”

“The Antelope’s charming,” said George Ring. “There’s some real hunting prints in the private bar.” He smiled at Sam and moved his long, blunt fingers rapidly along the counter as though he were playing a piano. “I’m all rhythm. It’s like a kind of current in me.”

“I mean the world. This is only a little tiny bit in it. This is all right, it’s got regular hours; you can draw the curtains, you know what to expect here. But look at the world. You and your currents,” Mr. Allingham said.