“You mean my father-in-law is.”

“You too. Because you’re the one he’ll blame.”

“That’s true enough.”

“I’m telling you this for your own good.” He called over the waiter. “It’s odd, but I feel a kind of responsibility for you. You go blindly ahead, butting your head against stone walls. . . .”

“Sometimes through them,” I said.

“You can when you’re younger. Not now, Joe, not now.” He passed me his cigarette-case. The cigarettes were fatter than usual and bore his initials. I reached for my cigarette-lighter then took out instead one of the books of matches I’d taken away from the Savoy. He looked at the matches and grinned. “Snap,” he said. The grin made him look younger; for the first time I was be­ginning to understand why Alice had married him.

“I didn’t want to come here this evening,” I said.

“I can see that. We needn’t go into the reasons, need we? I didn’t want to come myself, actually—” He bit his lip. “We can’t talk here.”

We talked at his house on Pennack Lane. Pennack Lane was a narrow unpaved road off Poplar Avenue; it was for some reason a better address than even Poplar Avenue. George’s house wasn’t the biggest but it was the newest; it was a staunchly traditional chalet bungalow in local stone, an entirely different proposition from the concrete box on Linnet Road in which he’d lived with Alice.

It was the kind of house which Alice would have liked; but his tastes otherwise didn’t seem to have changed. Only the bourbon whisky (“I remember your weakness, Joe”) which I was helping myself to kept me from acute depression; the colours were too light, the furniture too streamlined, the abstracts altogether too abstract. And the house was too neat, too tidy, the home of a neat and tidy man who lived alone.

George did most of the talking, wandering restlessly round the lounge. The bourbon seemed to be soaked up by my tired­ness, leaving my head clear and my tongue articulate; but George, now that he was on home ground, was letting himself go. He didn’t redden or turn pale, but very quickly his face and his voice became dishevelled.

“It was Maureen’s idea,” he said, abruptly leaving the subject of my father-in-law. He brought a framed photograph over from the mantelpiece. The girl in the photograph didn’t look much older than thirty; she had dark hair and a firm mouth. She seemed amused at something, but not in an unkindly way. I handed back the photograph; he took it from me very carefully as if to drop it would be to injure her.

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

“We’re going to be married.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s unofficial. But soon.”