He finished his tea alone. He tried one of the buns, but they were too dry and somehow they tasted of death. At last, at three o’clock, he left the house and walked down to the end of the road, to wait for the horse-drawn omnibus to take him over the river into London. Across the street, as he waited, two barefoot street Arabs were trying to shin up the gas-lamp on the corner, watched in awe by another boy in a boater hat and a sailor suit, whose nanny had paused to gossip on the pavement with a postman.

The omnibus arrived late. Because it was a fine summer’s day, Peter sat up on the roof, and smoked a cigarette. There was a traffic jam on Blackfriars Bridge, and the omnibus had to wait there for almost ten minutes, while a cool breeze blew up the Thames from the docks, fragrant with spices and peppers from unloading ships and warehouses. Peter took out another cigarette, but tossed it half-smoked on to the road.

He arrived at a small jeweller’s shop just opposite Holborn Circus a few minutes before five o’clock. The late afternoon was crowded with carriages and cabs and horse-drawn drays, and the noise of horseshoes and iron-bound wheels grinding on the wooden road-blocks was almost deafening. A bell jangled as he stepped into the door, and then there was silence as he closed it behind him.

The shop was very small. There were mahogany-and-glass showcases on all sides, crammed with rings and pendants and silver perfume-holders — lower middle-class jewellery, the kind of jewellery that a jobbing clerk might give to his lady-love at Christmas, or a shopkeeper buy for his wife on their wedding anniversary. There was a smell of dust and silver polish and jeweller’s rouge.

From a door at the back of the shop came a man as lanky as a tailor, with blond hair which flopped over his right eye. ‘My dear fellow!’ he said, as soon as he saw it was Peter. ‘What a complete surprise!’

Peter held out his hand. ‘How are you, Samuel? You’re not getting any plumper.’

‘Not for want of eating, though,’ said Samuel. ‘Business has never been so brisk. Have you come down for anything special, or just for a jaw?’

Samuel Kellogg had been a schoolfriend of Peter’s in Kennington, although when Samuel’s father had died of consumption he had moved to Bloomsbury to live with his Uncle Max, and help in the family jewellery business. Still, the friends had kept in touch from time to time, even when Peter went to Southport, and only last summer they had met for supper in Oxford Street, at Runcorn’s Chop House.

‘My mother passed away,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve been down in Kennington clearing up the house.’

‘My dear chap,’ said Samuel, sympathetically.

‘She was frailer than I thought,’ Peter told him. ‘I suppose she never really was cut out for the British climate. She always used to suffer from colds, and the influenza.’