Suddenly everything was ‘us’ and ‘we’.

‘We’ve got to do more, Michael. Supply and demand, mate. We’ve got to be ready for it. I need new trunks. I’ve seen them zebra striped ones in Man’s World. I want some of them. Or tiger. Or leopard! How about that? Can you see me in leopard skin?’ He snarled and extended his claws.

‘Down, boy. One thing at a time.’

‘Fuck that. I want it all. I want it now.’ He leaned forward, the steam from the cocoa wreathing his face. ‘I’m hard.’

‘What?’

‘You heard. I’m fucking stiff as a post.’

‘Go on.’

‘Don’t believe me?’ He grabbed my hand under the table. ‘Cop a feel.’

‘Wright, for Christ’s sake! Someone will see.’

‘Great. The sooner we get out of this dump the better. Let’s give ’em something to talk about.’

I got up, cleared the table. Wright followed. He hadn’t been lying. Thank God everyone was concentrating on their food and drink.

‘I haven’t forgotten, you know.’ I was pacing fast across the parade ground, back towards the SSQ. Wright was keeping up with me.

‘What?’

‘You know what. That night.’

‘Oh.’

‘What’s the matter, Mike?’ He grabbed my elbow, stopped me, spun me round to face him.

‘You … you just don’t know what … I mean, all these weeks and now, suddenly …’ I didn’t know what to say. If I started telling the truth, where would it end?

‘I do know,’ he said, quite calm now. ‘And I’m trying to understand.’

‘Right.’

Kelsey came strutting towards us, fatter and angrier than ever. Wright went to meet him. ‘Sarge! What a treat. I was just telling Airman Medway, we don’t see enough of your handsome face these days.’

I made my escape, and fled to the sanctuary of the files.

I wrote back to Stephen, with details of my arrival at Euston.

London is not entirely strange to me. My parents used to take me to art galleries as a child, and I once spent a week with an aunt in St John’s Wood. I’ve visited several times on my own since the age of sixteen. I know the basic geography, and I can manage the Tubes. I’ve read Waugh and Galsworthy and Woolf, so I’m familiar with Mayfair and Bayswater and Bloomsbury, at least in theory. I read the Sunday papers, so I know that Soho is a haunt of vice and that Chelsea is full of queers. But beyond that, I have very little idea of the sort of life that London might offer to a demobbed national serviceman, and it’s time to find out. Which is why I’m on a train headed south, finally using one of my seventy-twos to take a holiday in the bright lights.

As the train pulled out of Crewe Junction, a couple of soldiers, who had been sitting quietly reading newspapers and doing crossroads, got up and walked to the lavatories. Fifteen minutes later, they emerged, transformed. The uniforms had gone, replaced by soft open-necked shirts in lavender and lemon, the boots exchanged for brown suede loafers. Their hair had doubled in volume, and they left a whiff of sandalwood in their wake. One of them turned, looked back at me and whispered to his friend. They both looked, and giggled.