It was all right for a while, after Terry Tice had moved into Percy Antrobus’s third-floor flat in Fitzroy Square. The place was bigger than he would have expected. It had five or six big airy rooms and a nice view over Fitzroy Square Garden. The grass and the trees gave a greeny-gold cast to the light under the high ceilings, especially in the morning-time. But the place was a rubbish dump, with most of the furniture broken, and filthy carpets and unemptied ashtrays and unmade beds, and smeared glasses put down anywhere and left so long that any drop of wine remaining in the bottom of them crystallised and made them a bitch to wash.

Not that Terry did much in the way of housework. He left that kind of thing to Percy, who was too mean to hire a char. Terry liked to lounge on one of the sway-backed sofas and watch the old geezer at his chores, hoovering the sticky carpets, or up to his elbows in suds at the kitchen sink, with his shirtsleeves rolled and wearing a little frilly apron, a fag stuck in the corner of his mouth and one eye shut against the smoke, listening to comedians like Ted Ray or Arthur Askey on the wireless and phlegmily chuckling.

All the same, the dirt and the squalor had come as a surprise to Terry. He had expected that Percy, with his cravats and his patent-leather shoes and his la-di-da drawl, would live in the grand style, with pictures and books, and silver  cutlery, and little antique gilt chairs, all that kind of thing, like in films. He should have known better, if only from the permanent snowfall of dandruff on the collars of Percy’s Savile Row suits, and the dirt under his fingernails. Also his breath had an awful, greyish reek, as if something had crawled down his gizzard and died there.

They ate out, mostly, at a little Italian place just round the corner from the flat. Terry didn’t much like Italian food, but Gino’s did a nice veal cutlet, and the ice cream really was ice cream, not the usual English muck. Sometimes he sneaked off on his own to the Feathers for a pint of Guinness and a bag of pork scratchings. The tarts that haunted the place would come and sit beside him at the bar and cross their legs and try to chat him up, but he would tell them to get lost. He didn’t mind having it on with a bird now and then, when the fancy took him, but he had no intention of paying for it, ever.