If Howard took Beryl back to his lodgings, she’d be disappointed. The place was spartan. His landlady was alarmingly respectable; it stopped her from being fun or even kind. Dry and widowed, she had strong views on what a young man in London should do with his time. She did not think he ought to sit in his room reading books and burning coal unnecessarily; she thought he ought to take long constitutional walks to keep warm. She did not think a real man needed to bathe more than once a week (although he should wear a clean collar every day). She did not think he ought to have another young man visit in the evenings if he was on his own (because that was suspicious), but she certainly did not allow more than two men visiting at once (because that was a party) and never could a woman call (because that was simply wrong). His room was clean, though bare and austere (the landlady did not allow posters and such to be pinned to the walls). In the final analysis it was scrubbed and, crucially, it was cheap. As his aesthetic influence on the room and the number of guests he was permitted was so severely limited, Howard hardly spent any time there and instead hung round coffee shops and bars with other writers.

He did enjoy walking the streets of London, not strictly for the constitutional benefit but to drink it all up, the life, the vibrancy. Adventure. London was the centre of the whole world. Wealth, power, creativity, decency, indecency; it all poured from here, from England, like the Thames itself. He found it inspiring. It was a city of smiles, peace, security, self-satisfaction. He could walk the streets now, left to his own devices, even at this late hour. He was too big to fall into any trouble. He’d take in the nippy air; let it go deep down into his lungs. But Beryl was wearing heels; she’d never keep up. He should put her in a cab.

He liked striding, feeling his long legs cover many feet of pavement in just one step, his arms swinging by his sides. He frequently wanted to break into a run, a strange impulse for a man – most people quashed that urge as they left behind childhood – but Howard often thought he was in a hurry. He wanted to cover as much ground as possible, as quickly as he could, both literally and metaphorically. He ran for miles when he lived in the country, every morning, every night. People used to ask him where he was going and found it hilarious when his only answer was, ‘Nowhere special.’ He didn’t think it was hilarious; he thought it was tragic. A waste. So he ran to London. However, he soon discovered that if you ran in the streets here, you wouldn’t get away with just a few raised eyebrows and mocking comments; a bobby would quickly be feeling your collar. The assumption being that a running man must have stolen something. Still, he could run in the parks until sweat poured into his eyes and made his shirt damp. It was one of the many ways he showed the world that he simply did not accept limits, that he would not be hemmed in or slowed down. That he would explore and conquer if only with his boots and his mind. Space was all.