Samuel rubbed the night out of his eyes and saw the black men dancing with their women, twirling them among the green cane chairs, between the fruit machine and the Russian billiard table. Some of the women were white, and smoked as they danced. They pussed and spied around the room, unaware of their dancing, feeling the arms around them as though around the bodies of different women: their eyes were for the strangers entering, they went through the hot movements of the dance like women in the act of love, looking over men’s shoulders at their own remote and unconniving faces in a looking-glass. The men were all teeth and bottom, flashers and shakers, with little waists and wide shoulders, in double-breasted pinstripe and sleek, licked shoes, all ageless and unwrinkled, waiting for the fleshpot, proud and silent and friendly and hungry—jerking round the smoking cellar under the center of the world to the music of a drum and a piano played by two pale white cross boys whose lips were always moving.

As George Ring weaved Samuel through the dancers to the bar they passed a machine and Samuel put in a penny for a lemon. Out came one and sixpence.

“Who’s going to win the Derby, Sam?” said Mr. Allingham, behind them.

“Isn’t he a lucky poet?” George Ring said.

Mrs. Dacey, in half a minute, had found a partner as tall as herself and was dancing through the smoke like a chapel. He had powdered his face to hide a scar from the corner or his eye to his chin.

“Mrs. Dacey’s dancing with a razorman,” Samuel said.

This was a breath and a scar of the London he had come to catch. Look at the knickerless women enamouring from the cane tables, waiting in the fumes for the country cousins to stagger in, all savings and haywisps, or the rosy-cheeked old men with buttonholes whose wives at home were as lively as bags of sprouts. And the dancing cannibal-mouthed black razor kings shaking their women’s breasts and blood to the stutter of the drums, snakily tailored in the shabby sweat-smelling jungle under the wet pavement. And a crimped boy danced like a girl, and the two girls serving were as harsh as men.

Mr. Allingham bought four white wines. “Go on. He did it on a pintable. You could bring your Auntie here, couldn’t you, Monica?” he said to the girl with the bow tie pouring their drinks.

“Not my Auntie,” Samuel said. Auntie Morgan Pont-Neath-Vaughan in her elastic-sided boots. “She doesn’t drink,” he said.

“Show Monica your bottle. He’s got a bottle on his finger.

Samuel dug his hand deep in his jacket pocket. “She doesn’t want to see an old bottle.” His chest began to tickle as he spoke, and he slipped two fingers of his right hand between the buttons of his shirt on to his bare flesh. “No vest,” he said in surprise, but the girl had turned away.