Domingos loved his food. Food and laughter. Sadness, too, sometimes—melancholy and depression. The walls of Duncan’s Hotel were sometimes shaken by the echoes of his laughter. Sitting among the staid Scotsmen and their wives in the lounge, among retired Empire builders, businessmen and lonely transients, Marcia and he listened to stories. There was the man who told them of his alcoholic brother who died of exposure on a street after being out all night. Or the hall porter told them of his plans to get married. (That was in the month of September. By December he was divorced.) Or Margaret, the cook, would bring in her daughter-in-law, a dark-haired Celtic-looking girl, to talk to Marcia because she was lonely, but the young woman spoke Glaswegian which sounded like Gaelic to her and they both spoke to each other in seemingly different tongues. And the Fat Boy would bring in trays of biscuits and tea.

Domingos would come in, plump himself down among the petrified Scotsmen and middle-aged Scotswomen in sensible stockinged brogues and tweeds with their twin sets of Pitlochry knits, then guffaw and laugh with an untrammelled ebullience as his florid face grew redder and redder. He almost made them leap out of their seats with his laughter. Laughter which had both joy and defiance in it. He wanted to make his presence felt. Anonymity, wherever he lived, would never be for him.

Quite suddenly, quite dramatically, he would stand in the lounge of the flat in Birbeck Square and declare: ‘My mother is a castrating woman. She castrated me.’

‘Castrated you? Are you impotent, then?’

‘Ha! Carmencas would laugh if she heard that,’ he would say.

Yet, his conversations about his family, his mother, his sister, her children, and his girl friend Carmencas, revealed how much he was attached to them. He saved his stipend to make long phone calls to them in Colombia, calls which cost hundreds of pounds. He bought gifts for them. His thoughts were always with them.