“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.”

Mrs. Dacey still held Samuel by the arm. “You’re safe with me. I’ve taken a fancy,” she said. “Once I take a fancy I never let go.”

“And never trust a woman who can’t get up.” Mr. Allingham pointed to a woman sitting in a chair by the Speedboat pintable. “She’s trying to get up all the time.” The woman made a sudden movement of her shoulders. “No, no, legs first.”

“This used to be the cowshed,” George Ring said, “and there was real straw on the floor.”

Mrs. Dacey never lets go. Samuel saw the fancy shining behind her glasses, and in her hard mousetrap mouth. Her cold hand hooked him. If he struggled and ran she would catch him in a corner and open her umbrella inside his nose.

“And real cows,” Mr. Allingham said.

The men and women drinking and dancing looked like the older brothers and sisters of the drinkers and dancers in the club round the corner, but no one was black. There were deep green faces, dipped in a sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, sealed on the cheeks; red and purple, slate-gray, tide-marked, rat-brown and stickily white-washed, with violet-inked eyes or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink lidded, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axlegreased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, salt-cellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrotheads, yolkheads, blackheads, heads bald as sweetbreads.

“All white people here,” Samuel said.