‘Well, I must be getting,’ he said when they had finished. ‘Got to see an early rehearsal. So long, partner! Don’t take any jokes off match-boxes—they might go on strike!’

Laughing uproariously, he went out. Charles stood looking through the window at the wet sky. Neutrality; he had found it at last. The running fight between himself and society had ended in a draw; he was no nearer, fundamentally, to any rapprochement or understanding with it than when he had been a window-cleaner, a crook, or a servant; it had merely decided that he should be paid, and paid handsomely, to capitalize his anomalous position. To his companions in Mr. Frush’s team, this was a job like any other. They did it instead of working in industry or commerce. But to him it was an armistice, obviously leading to a permanent armed truce. There could be no forgiveness, but neither party would, in the foreseeable future, launch an offensive. Tharkles, Scrodd, Hutchins, Lockwood, Burge, Roderick, none of them could either despise or respect him now. All they could do would be to look at him in bewilderment, shake their heads, and envy him his salary. He did not want their envy, but it was less of an embarrassment than either their contempt or their approval.

The telephone buzzed, and the janitor’s voice croaked that a lady wished to see him.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked.

After a short pause the frog in the man’s throat said, ‘Miss Flanders, sir.’

He did not know anyone, male or female, whose name even vaguely sounded like ‘Flanders’.

‘Show her up, please,’ he said. As he replaced the instrument, a slight, quick tremor ran through him, as if the indifferent bakelite had tried to warn him that he had said the wrong thing.

Veronica came in as unconcernedly as if this were the Oak Lounge.

‘I wasn’t quite sure about giving my right name to the man,’ she said, ‘so I just gave him the first name that entered my head. Moll Flanders. I’ve just been reading about her.’

‘I never got to the end of that book,’ he said. ‘Has it got a happy ending?’

‘Not really. It doesn’t end, it just stops. She turns respectable and repents, but you knew that from the beginning.’

He looked away from her, trying not to feel how beautiful and dangerous she had been to him, and could be again.

‘I don’t like it when I know from the start how things will turn out, do you?’ he asked.

She lifted her dark head and looked at him silently. Inside his skull sledge hammers crashed down on metal plates.

‘Do you?’ he repeated urgently.

‘I don’t think I ever have known,’ she said slowly. ‘You always get surprises.’

‘Such as what?’ he asked.