‘You stupid bastard.’ John picked up Marlon’s fallen cigarette packet, brushed the grit off it. ‘D’you have to act like a kid of ten?’

‘Got to get some sort of kick out of this dump,’ Gilly said sulkily. ‘Dead-end hole.’

‘Well, that’s what it is, isn’t it? What d’you expect? A bar? Booze? Bring on the dancing girls?’

Gilly started to laugh again, picked up his muse again. ‘I wouldn’t mind this dancing girl. Don’t reckon they’d miss her, do you? She’d look OK in my place. I could stand her on the table.’

‘What for?’

‘People have statues, don’t they? They’ve got them in the town hall. It’d give my place a bit of class.’

‘Come on,’ said John, ‘let’s stick the lot of them in the chapel. The foreman’ll do his nut if he sees you going off with that. She’s too big to go under your jacket.’

So they piled the statues and the urns in the chapel, and Gilly amused himself by shouting insults and obscenities which the lofty walls echoed back at him, black pigeons, white doves flapping from the crannies in fear.

‘What d’you do in that room of yours, John? Must be a real drag all on your own night after night. Fancy coming over to my bird’s place? She’s got a real dishy friend. We could have ourselves a ball, and I don’t mean wining and dining.’

No, thanks, John said, and softened his refusal by saying he had to study which impressed Gilly. It wasn’t that he was a prude so much as that the idea of association with Gilly’s friends offended some snobbish delicacy in his nature, some fastidiousness. Better the speechless company of James Calhoun Stokes and Angelina Bowyer and the historian, better, in the evenings, the dreams of them and the wonderings about their lost lives. Though, in refusing, he thought it likely that brash insensitive Gilly might not take his no for an answer but turn up one night with his girl and that other girl to rout him out. He feared it a little, but not with Marlon’s obsessional dread of threats from another world.

When at last Gilly did come, it was on a cold moonlit night, and he came alone.

‘I’m going to split,’ said Gilly, ‘I’m getting the hell out. All good things come to an end. You can tell the foreman in the morning, OK? I’m going south. I’ve got a girl in London, worships the ground I tread on, poor cow. She’ll take me in. But that’s between you and I, right?’

‘But why?’

‘He’s found out, her old man, and I reckon he’ll have his heavies out gunning for me. He’s beat her up – bunch of bloody gangsters that lot are. I’ll miss her.’ The tears stood in his eyes, and John stared, amazed, confounded. ‘Poor cow,’ said Gilly, the epithet an endearment, a caress.

‘D’you want me to come to the station with you?’

‘No need for that. I only come in to tell you to tell the foreman. Anyway, I got something to do first, get that statue, that Clio. The train don’t go till eleven, and I want her.’ He turned half away. ‘For a souvenir like, she’s the dead spitting image.’