“You’re young,” said Beryl, “but you must know who he is. Didn’t you never see The King and I on TV?”

It had been shown the week before. It usually is around Christmas and the New Year. I was still at my parents’, who had a huge color television. The King and I requires color. It wouldn’t have come over very well on old Mrs. Fisherton’s black-and-white set. The strange thing was that a few days later I saw him, “the one that looks like Yul Brynner,” I mean. I identified him from Beryl’s description, there could be no doubt. It was my first day back at GUP and I was walking along the canal at Paddington Basin, my invariable route to avoid the underground, when I saw him on the opposite bank, talking to someone on the roof of a houseboat. I mean that the other person was on the roof of the houseboat. He was on the towpath. It could have been the King of Siam standing there, tall and thin with that same high-cheekboned pale brown Mongolian face, his head shaven. It was a cold morning in January and though he may have been wearing an embroidered satin jacket—I later discovered that he did, in fact, wear clothes like that—he had a huge and very dirty ankle-length sheepskin coat on top. While he talked he was eating and offering the other man squares he broke off a bar of chocolate.

Often, when I look forward to things, I’ve found I’m disappointed, and when I dread something it turns out to be not so bad. That didn’t apply to my return to GUP, which I had really dreaded and which in the event was even worse than I had expected. That term, as part of the psychology course, we had groups scheduled and someone told me that meant group therapy, ten or twelve of us sitting around and telling the rest what went on in our heads. We’d be expected to talk about our childhoods and our relationships with our parents and, worst of all, traumatic events in our lives.