He tried a pub near the hospital, but it was dirty and lonely. A few old men sat staring with red-rimmed eyes into their pints, making the beer look like tears they had dripped into their glasses and were saving for some purpose. He went out, leaving half his drink unfinished, and walked for a long way, keeping to the quiet back streets. Every road, every junction and square, was the same as every other. The low brown houses watched him as he walked past. ‘One of us is your home,’ they muttered to him. ‘You’ll find Rosa in the kitchen and the bed upstairs in the front room, the photographs talking to each other in the cold parlour, the lavatory down the back yard, for ever and ever, Amen.’ Well, what of it? He would be safe and hidden. Nothing ever happened in houses like this, nothing except things people could understand. No problems, no art, no discussions and perplexities, just birth, death, eating, resting, sitting in front of the fire on Sunday after­noons with the News of the World. The factory sirens, instead of birds, would wake him in the morning, he would leave off his collar and tie and grow fat round the middle. As the years padded past, a troop of horse on felt, he would grow closer to his Rosa, making her happy and reflecting her happiness like a tarnished mirror, wrong in only a few spots that didn’t matter.

This looked like a more cheerful pub. He went in and got a drink and carried it to a seat. He had been wrong. It was a gin-palace when you got inside. He must have wandered somewhere near the middle of the town, and the place seemed to cater for a smarter clientèle, very much the kind of people he wanted to avoid from now on. Besides, by not keeping his eyes open he had come in at the wrong door; the public bar might be all right, but this was the Saloon. He looked round him in disgust. It was the sort of place where you met people like Tharkles.

A tart came and sat next to him. ‘Feeling lonely, dear?’ she asked. ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ he replied to drive her away. She had a hideous green coat and skirt on, shrieking at her peroxide hair. Odd how they sometimes seemed to choose the ugliest colours; perhaps it was a trade convention to make them conspicuous, or perhaps that life sapped their aesthetic sense. He had half a mind to ask her what made her choose that colour scheme, but if he did he would never get rid of her; in any case she had gone across the room and transferred her attention to an old gentleman with a white moustache who ought to have been at home, watering his roses.