‘All right, spare me the catchwords—you’ll be calling yourself non-representational and all the rest of it in a minute,’ said Charles with a sneer. He was a window-cleaner and above all this sordid intellectual chatter. ‘And tell me, unless you’ve decided to keep it a secret, what you are doing in these parts.’

‘Well, the fact is,’ said Froulish, twitching and jerking his stubby fingers, ‘Betty found a place for us here, and as far as I’m concerned I don’t care where I go while I’m writing The Novel. It’s quiet enough here.’

‘Betty?’ said Charles, groping amid the miscellaneous memories that were stacked in the back of his mind waiting their turn to be thrown out.

‘Surely you remember Betty. She used to go to Alan’s parties.’

Charles had only been once to a party given by the unsavoury young man referred to, and had on that occasion withdrawn before the amatory stage was reached, but something stirred amid the heaps of débris in his memory, and he had a mental glimpse of the principal ornament of that party—tall and stringy in slacks and flowing hair down to the shoulders.

‘I didn’t know you had,’ he searched vaguely for the word, ‘linked up with her.’

Froulish guffawed, swaying his thick-set body backwards and forwards. ‘Linked up! We were living together all through my third year.’

‘I suppose that helps to account for your going down without taking a degree?’ As the words passed his lips Charles marvelled at himself—how direct, how splendidly coarse and uninhibited he had become. How, in the old days, he would have suffered any fate rather than say anything so crudely personal and challenging, even to one as self-centred and egotistic as Froulish; who, of course, was not embarrassed.

‘Oh, degree!’ he groaned thickly, blinking rapidly through the strands of hair. ‘What’s the use of a thing like that to me! I’m a Novelist. All I need is a table and chair, pen and paper, a woman, food and—’ here he eyed his empty glass—‘drink.’

The old Charles would have jumped up and scurried to the bar at once on a hint as broad as this: the new Charles sat calmly lighting a Woodbine.

‘You can wait till I’ve finished mine. And where is this place where you and Betty live? Is it a house?’