There were certainly prettier girls around. It wasn’t like at the Stentorian, from where Will had been sacked a week after finishing the traineeship and where it had been all clever, vicious boys. The Beast had decided to replace its journeyman casuals with ambitious girls who’d been to Cambridge. Will had been told he was lucky to have a job here at all; the Beast needed girls to whisper prompts for when it spoke to women readers. But Rosie should by no means consider herself the only lobster in the tank.

He tried again, differently. ‘Oh, God, look at this. He took pictures of this poor woman and of her daughter, separately, then Photoshopped them together. Isn’t that awful?’

‘It’s gross,’ said Rosie. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

Jeremy spoke up again. ‘Just to save you getting told by Max later, that’ll have to come out.’

‘Why? It’s such a good detail.’

‘It’s too much for a family newspaper.’

Will had thought that ludicrous term must be ironic. ‘But the Beast is constantly printing stories about perverts.’

‘The readers want to know about perverts, they just don’t want to know too much.’

‘So they want to be teased.’

‘Got it in one.’ Jeremy made the sign of the cross as if blessing Will. ‘And I say you are a journalist, my son. I can see you’re destined for a glorious career.’

Will blushed. He felt a thrill of excitement. Was that true? Was there something about him that people could see from the outside? Would people who met him now one day be saying that, even when he was young, you knew he would go on to great things? His being sacked from the Stentorian would be one of those curious factoids like Einstein failing his university entrance exam.

But when he read through the prose he’d reworked, and caught the unmistakeable tone of gloating excitement, the shame of his situation again consumed him. To find himself, after his first from Oxford – he’d never while there imagined he would catch himself thinking like this, but from Oxford, for God’s sake; where had Jeremy or Max got their degrees? Hull? – and after an essay on Browning’s metrics that his tutor had called ‘extraordinarily promising’ – extra-ordinarily – he found himself working in the gutter, for the gutter press. And this was no Wildean ‘in the gutter, but looking at the stars’; he was working for the Beast, and ‘Beast reader’ was a shorthand he himself had previously used for the worst kind of person – vulgar, ignorant and bigoted.