Easily and naturally, yet with no more warmth than was warranted by the casual introduction of an unimportant stranger, Bernard Roderick held out a plump hand. Charles extended his own. At the contact he had a vivid sensation of the difference between the two hands. His own had become powerful and square; the skin, roughened by incessant exposure to water and air during his window-cleaning days, had since become a little smoother, but remained hard and thick, with a callous at the base of each finger. His nails were short; Roderick’s were just long enough to protrude a fraction of an inch beyond his finger-ends, so that Charles distinctly felt them in his palm. Irrationally, a slight tremor of physical revulsion went through him. It was not that Roderick’s nails were a little too long, it was not that his general appearance contained in it a slight, indefinable excess of the sleek and the groomed—it was all these together, and something else over and above them, something that Charles could not have indicated even in general terms.

Their eyes met. Charles fought hard to like Mr. Roderick. His muscles, which had relaxed for an instant, drew themselves taut again with the effort of fighting off his revulsion. This man was related to the one being who could bring significance into the random pattern of his life. The effort failed.

‘My niece, Veronica,’ said Mr. Roderick. His eyes flickered away from Charles’s; he was looking at Mr. Blearney.

She put her thin, cool hand in his.

‘Whisky!’ cried Mr. Blearney.

‘Let me get them,’ Charles almost shouted in his anxiety. He wanted it to be his turn to pad across the carpet with a tiny glass, and set it down before her. Mr. Blearney subsided in his chair.

‘Not for us, we haven’t had dinner yet,’ protested Mr. Roderick. ‘If you’re really so kind as to buy a drink for us, I’ll have a dry Martini.’

Who cares what he wants? A gentleman would have asked the girl what she wanted first. Turn towards her, look at her enquiringly. Don’t trust yourself to speak, something’s happened to your throat.

‘Thank you, a pink gin, please.’ They were her first words to him, for on being introduced she had smiled quickly and easily, but in silence. Her voice was clear, not shrill, but light.

As he hurried over to the bar, Charles was struck by a sudden thought: no family resemblance. The sister, or brother, whose daughter she was, must have been very different from Mr. Roderick himself. Or was he a blood relation at all? Did adoption come in at any stage?

The barman was leering at him sympathetically. He realized how he must appear in the man’s eyes; just another crazy love­sick fool.

‘A pink gin, two double whiskies and a dry Martini, and don’t look now but your glass eye’s fallen out,’ he said harshly.