“It’s a Sunday School,” Mr. Allingham said. “Tasted your wine yet, Sam? This horse’s unfit to work. A regular little bun dance. You could bring the vicar’s wife in here.”

Mrs. Cotmore-Richards, four foot one and a squeak in her stockinged trotters.

“A regular little vestry,” Mr. Allingham said. “See that woman dancing? The one who fell in the flour bin. She’s a bank manager’s niece.”

The woman with the dead white face smiled as she passed them in the arms of a padded boy.

“Hullo, Ikey.”

“Hullo, Lola. She’s pretendin’, see. Thinks she’s Starr Faithfull.”

“Is she a prostitute, Mr. Allingham?”

“She’s a manicurist, Sammy. How’s your cuticles? Don’t you believe everything you see, especially after it’s dark. This is all pretending. Look at Casanova there with the old girls. The last time he touched a woman he had a dummy in his mouth.”

Samuel turned around. George Ring whinnied in a corner with several women. Their voices shrilled and rasped through the cross noise of the drums.

“Lucy got a beating the last time I see her,” said a woman with false teeth and a bald fur. “He said he was a chemist.”

“Lucille,” George Ring said, impatiently shaking his curls. “Lucille Harris.”

“With a clothesbrush. He had it in a little bag.”

“There’s a chemist,” said a woman wearing a picture hat.

“He doesn’t mean Lucy Wakefield,” another woman said.

“Lucy Wakefield’s in the Feathers with a man from Crouch End,” said the bank manager’s niece, dancing past. The boy who danced with her was smiling with his eyes closed.

“Perhaps he got a leather belt in his little bag,” said the woman with the fur.

“It’s all the same in a hundred years,” said the woman in the picture hat. She went down to her white wine, widening her legs like an old mule at a pool, and came up gasping. ‘They put hair oil in it.”

This was all wrong. They spoke like the women who wore men’s caps and carried fishfrails full of empties in the Jug and Bottle of the Compasses at home.

“Keeps away the dandruff.”

He did not expect that the nightclub women under the pavement should sing and twang like sirens or lure off his buttons with their dangerous, fringed violet eyes. London is not under the bedclothes where all the company is grand and vile by a flick of the cinema eye, and the warm linen doors are always open. But these women with the shabby faces and the comedians’ tongues, squatting and squabbling over their mother’s ruin, might have lurched in from Llanelly on a football night, on the arms of short men with leeks. The women at the tables, whom he had seen as enamouring shapes when he first came in dazed from the night, were dull as sisters, red-eyed and thick in the head with colds; they would sneeze when you kissed them or hiccup and say Manners in the dark traps of the hotel bedrooms.