‘I can’t marry Robert!’ he said loudly in his agony. A middle-aged woman and a small boy, standing at a ’bus stop, spun round and stared into his face with insane curiosity as he passed. Charles broke into a gallop. He only wanted to get round the next corner and hide his back from their eyes, but as he ran he knew that he was running away from everything that, up to that moment, had been his life.

It was over. ‘No more Sheila’ and ‘SNUG’ were written across each other on a yellow-lit pane. Half dead, he clutched at a brass door knob and swung himself over the threshold of the bar parlour.

‘Well, all I know,’ said the landlord, ‘is that he was no good when he worked for me.’

He spoke with truculence, as if contesting an unfair judgment. But the red-faced man answered, calmly and with emphasis:

‘He could buy you up to-day. Every brick and blade of grass in the place, if he wanted.’

The landlord was rapidly becoming downright angry. He glared venomously at the glass which Charles passed up to be refilled, and scowled so that his forehead, already unusually low, dis­appeared altogether.

‘I’m not going to say, mark you, that you couldn’t trust him,’ he said with the air of one striving, with unheard-of generosity, to find some redeeming trait in a worthless character. ‘I don’t say as I ever had reason to think that he pinched anything, either money out of the till, or drink out of the stock, or glasses or ash-trays or anything—not like some of ’em. But what I DO know,’ he said menacingly, leaning forward, ‘is that he didn’t know which was his right hand and which was his left. And if he could write his own name it was just about all he could write. Sometimes, when we was busy and I used to have him behind the bar, I used to think he couldn’t read the labels on the bottles. They’d come in and ask for Double Diamond, and they’d be lucky not to get a Guinness.’

Charles, who had been standing patiently at the bar, trying to concentrate on nothing but the three pints already inside him and the fourth he was trying to buy, was suddenly jerked into attention by the word ‘Guinness’. ‘No thanks,’ he said hastily, ‘I’ll just have the same again.’ The landlord, ignoring him, leaned over the bar to sneer at the red-faced man with indescribable malice. He imagined himself to be reasoning calmly.

‘His fingers was all thumbs,’ he said to clinch the argument.

The red-faced man patiently repeated, ‘If he was to come in here and like the look of the place he could afford to buy it.’

The landlord, livid with fury, clutched convulsively at the handle of the beer engine and released a swirling flood of the cloudy liquid into Charles’s glass.