4

“Just a passing call,” said Mr. Allingham. As though he were sitting indoors at a window, he put out his hand to feel the rain. Shoes slopped past on the pavement above his head. Wet trousers and stockings almost touched the brim of his hat. “Just in and out,” he said. “Where’s George?”

I’ve been bounced, Samuel thought.

“It reminds me of my old man.” Mrs. Dacey’s face was hidden under the umbrella, as though in a private, accompanying thunder cloud. “In and out, in and out. Just one look at him, and out he went like clockwork.”

“Oh, the Gayspot? Can’t go there, old man.” Samuel winked seriously in the dark. “Oh, carrying a cargo. Swinging a bottle around. One look at me, out I went.”

“He used to carry a little book with all the places he couldn’t go to and he went to them every Saturday.”

Fool, fool, fool, Samuel said to himself.

The steps were suddenly lit up as the door opened for George Ring. He came out carefully and tidily, to a rush of music and voices that faded at once with the vanishing of the smoky light, and stood on Mrs. Dacey’s steps, his mane of curls golden against the fanlight, a god or a half-horse emerging from the underworld into the common rain.

“They’re awfully cross,” he said. “Mrs. Cavanagh ripped her skirt and she didn’t have anything on underneath. My dear, it’s like Ancient Rome down there and now she’s wearing a man’s trousers and he’s got legs exactly like a spider’s. All black and hairy. Why are you sitting in the rain?”

“It’s safe,” Mr. Allingham said. “It’s nice and safe in the rain. It’s nice and rational sitting on the steps in the rain. You can’t knock a woman down with a bottle here. See the stars? That’s Arcturus. That’s the Great Bear. That’s Sirius, see, the green one. I won’t show you where Venus is. There’s some people can’t enjoy themselves unless they’re knocking women down and licking them on the floor. They think the evening’s wasted unless they’ve done that. I wish I was home. I wish I was lying in bed by the ceiling. I wish I was lying under the chairs like Rosie.”

“Who started to fight, anyway? Let’s go round the corner to the Cheerioh.”

“That was ethical.”

They climbed up the street, George Ring first, then Mr. Allingham; then Samuel and Mrs. Dacey. She tucked his arm in hers.

“Don’t you worry. You hold onto me. Cold? You’re shivering.”

“It’ll be Cheerioh all right.”

The Cheerioh was a bad blaze, an old hole of lights. In the dark, open a cupboard full of cast-off clothes moving in a wind from nowhere, the smell of mothballs and damp furs, and find a lamp lit, candles burning, a gramophone playing.

“No dancing for you,” Mr. Allingham said. “You need space. You want the Crystal Palace.”