He was glad that she worked in a humble hairdressing place off Tottenham Court Road. That meant she would only earn about thirty-five shillings a week, and he could just afford, if he borrowed judiciously from Harry, to take her out in the way she was used to, or perhaps a little more luxuriously.

Then he thought of Stan and his motorcycle, and felt miserable. He growled at himself. He hated feeling miserable and humble about a girl, and girls hated it too. Harry had told him that. ‘Don’t crawl, my dear chap. Never crawl. They hate it. They try to get you to do it and they hate it when you do. I do it rather too much, I’m afraid. It’s a thing I’ve got to get out of.’

Fortunately for Harry’s masculine pride his girls usually began the crawling before he did, and bored him; then he could abandon them with a light heart.

It was difficult for Francis to remember what he had to ask for at the warehouse. He still felt slightly drunk. The narrow streets roofed with soft, pure blue sky looked beautiful. The tall warehouse, white with millions of grains of talc, chalk, milk powder and cement looked peaceful as a country mill, and there was the voice of water knocking musically near, hidden behind a wall, and freshening the air with its mysterious life.

Francis climbed to the second floor to find Mr Cartwright, who was in charge of the warehouse; and went down a narrow lane between sacks of milk powder piled ten feet high on either side of him. His shoulders were already patched with white and his shoes showed black creases across their dust.

This annoyed him, but he liked the warehouse. When he came to the end of the lane there was half the side of the building knocked away and through it glittered the sparkling freshness of the river, all over flat scales of gold, but blue as a dragonfly, and on it floated five barges piled high with the brightest gold planks, which ran their dazzling ladders of yellow reflection for fifteen feet across the blue water. All the white clouds sailed and ran, the far shore was dim with brown wharves and the green bushy trees of Greenwich and the snaky heads of cranes. One red funnel stood up in the smoke of the distance. The blue and gold and movement ran into the senses like a delicious smell, mixing with the dry faint one of chalk, and that of newly cut wood, the hidden mud and weeds and moving water.

Confused by love and hope, his eyes dazzled with the dance of blue, Francis soberly and with immense precision asked for, and obtained, his specimen of silica.

CHAPTER XVI

He got back to the cottage feeling happier, for he had looked up Rozanne in the telephone book and found that her number was Heythrop 4775 and her shop was at 43 Milton Street, as Toby had said. He had also realized that today was Thursday, which explained why Toby could be away from the shop during working hours; the hairdressers outside the West End close on Thursday afternoons like most suburban shops, and stay open late on Saturdays. Evidently Toby’s shop did not come within the glittering circle known as ‘up West’.