I felt young again. It was all so easy. He was jealous. He wanted what I wanted. He was jealous even of Warley. And ahead of me lay pleasure. Not just the pleasure of having Jean but the plea­sure of taking her from someone else, whom I had dis­liked at first sight. I’d spent the whole day pleasing a glut­tonous sadistic old man for the sake of my bread-and-butter, for the sake of my wife and children. I’d spent the whole day from catching the London train at six in the morning, looking at notes and speci­fications and letters with aching eyes, as an employee, as some­thing less than a man. And now I was free, now I was a man again, now I would join the dancers.

There were thirty of the dancers. They weren’t dancing; some of them weren’t even drinking. It didn’t seem to me as if there were going to be an orgy; everyone there seemed to be very young. Or maybe, I thought, I’d come ten years too late. “I’ll get you a drink,” said Jean “Name it, sweetie.”

“I will name it, and I’ll name him,” Jeff said. “I’ve just remem­bered. It’s Lampton and he wants a large Scotch; that’s what the successful businessman drinks in Warley.” He flattened the first vowel of Warley into a bleat, looking at me to observe the effect. I felt a spurt of anger; automatically I measured him up. He was two inches taller than me but he was painfully thin. It wasn’t an athletic thinness, it was a disjointed, underfed thinness; he seemed somehow brittle. Or as if his bones hadn’t hardened yet; there was more than a touch of childishness about him.

“You’ve guessed right,” I said. “You seem to know Warley quite well.” I offered him a cigarette. It suddenly seemed impor­tant to please him, not because I cared about pleasing him but as an exercise in handling people.

“I lived there once. And I’ve worked for your father-in-law,” he said. “During the war. We never saw eye to eye.”

“Who does?”

“It’s different for you,” he said. “I was just a clerk.”

“We all are,” I said. “Every last one of us at Brown and Co.” At the far end of the room, half-hidden behind a studio couch was a big tape recorder; its profusion of knobs and switches put me in mind of the Flamville computer which, against my advice, Brown had just acquired. Firmly I put the recollection out of my mind.

“He’s the big boss,” Jeff said. “No togetherness for Abe Brown. He’s a throwback, a nineteenth-century throwback.”

Jean came back with the drinks; he took his from her absently and drank half of it at one gulp. She looked at him anxiously. “Are you all right, Jeff?”