It was suddenly dark and terribly cold. His lamp threw a faint ring of yellow on the wet road. Shivering, he thought of the warmth and light of the hotel where Robert Tharkles had taken Betty. The wages of sin. He thought of soft carpets, imitation log fires looking warm, efficient central heating being warm. By a sudden unexplained twist he found himself picturing the Oak Lounge at the Grand, and the smooth man padding over to set down the two tiny glasses. Can’t get a short drink under two bob. Money. The network everywhere: no, a web, sticky and cunningly arranged. You were either a spider, sitting comfortably in the middle or waiting with malicious joy in hiding, or you were a fly, struggling amid the clinging threads. He and Froulish were flies, but Froulish did not mind. His contempt for the spider remained genuine and sustaining even while his wings were being pulled off, even while he was being eaten. But the classification did not work. Which was Betty, a spider or a fly? And which, oh which, was the girl in the Oak Lounge? Could a spider have such delicate bones? Could it make a fly feel that nothing else in the world had any meaning?

He remembered reading about spiders. Sometimes the web caught a wasp by mistake. Then the spider had to dismantle the web. The wasp had to be let go, because it was dangerous.

It seemed as if the wasps had the right idea.

Froulish was going through one of his bad spells. When Charles arrived he was on his knees beside the oil stove, tearing sheet after sheet of paper into long strips with a slow, deliberate bitterness. When he had accumulated about fifty strips he set fire to them, one at a time, and burnt them down until the flame almost touched his stubby fingers. The loft was filled with dense acrid smoke.

‘You’re at that game again, are you?’ Charles could not help saying roughly as he passed him to go into his own compartment. ‘How many times have I got to warn you against setting the place on fire?’

‘And how many times,’ retorted the novelist sullenly, ‘have I got to explain that when I come to a standstill, I have to go back and find the obstruction that blocks the flow of inspiration, and that when I find that obstruction, the smoke from its funeral pyre provides the only possible stimulus to enable me to replace the dead matter?’