When I had finished with Joseph, I left him and his sister with Pascal and went into town to do the shopping. I had arranged to meet David at the theatre at lunchtime, and before I did so I intended to organize myself and this town. I was ready to walk for miles to find the right butcher and the right grocer. After an hour’s investigation, when I had fixed myself up with everything except a large tin of oil, I began to panic: it was a strange feeling to notice that I was so out of my depth, that there was nothing and no one in the town to which I could relate myself. With deprivation and a sense of loss I made my way to the nearest Wimpy Bar and ordered a cup of coffee, for the decor in these places is the same, the coffee tastes the same in Hereford as in London, and, who knows, they may have them, too, in Buenos Aires and Beirut. I felt at home there, as I feel in Marks and Spencers; or rather not at home, but unnoticed in the anonymous brightly painted delocalized calm. And there, sure enough, was a small group of actors, who had made their way there with the same birdlike instinct: all those who were not working that morning. In a week or two, in fact, they discovered another coffee bar, nearer to the old narrow streets where we lived, which had some pretension to an arty student life, and they took it over. They simply moved in. They did not drive everyone else out, because some remained to stare, but they must have ruined the place for its local longhaired personalities forever.

When I had had my coffee and found my tin of oil, which I could not get delivered, I set back over the bridge to the theatre. I was near enough, but the tin banged against my knees as I walked. When I arrived at the stage door, there was no sign of David, or of anyone else, so I started to read the notices on the noticeboard, assuming that the company had not yet broken for lunch. I read the cast lists, and who was understudying whom, and notices about not parking cars in the public car park; then I started to arrange all the spare drawing pins in a neat circle. As I was doing this, someone arrived behind me. I did not turn, but became increasingly aware that whoever it was, was not moving. After a minute or so the person said:

“Do you think I might disarrange your nice little pattern and have a couple of pins?” and I turned round and saw that it was Wyndham Farrar with a piece of paper that he wanted to pin up.

“I suppose so,” I said, unpicking two and offering them to him. “They are hardly mine to withhold.”