Connie Tiarks stopped to buy oranges in the King’s Road. There was Mrs Lassiter’s orange juice, that became the rumble at bezique, dear me, said Mrs Lassiter, excuse Connie the tum-tum, is that a Queen I see. Connie Tiarks excused. She was all excuse. She was all admiration for the gaudy oranges, for the whole face of the King’s Road. She felt she had paid cheaply for her moment of elation. Sitting on the bus she found she could think without tremor of a face, as if a face had crystallized, and all she had been wanting to say to a face. Her whole life moved forward with the bus, the ease of its pneumatic tyres. Because the box.

Turning into Pimlico Road her mind reached out with a jerk, then more sickly, step by step, to what had been the box. Somewhere in the King’s Road, the fruit shop perhaps, Connie Tiarks had left the box. Her whole life ended in the King’s Road. It popped with the finality of the gas fire in the top bedroom back at Mrs Lassiter’s. The bus was carrying her somewhere, it did not much matter, too firmly, stickily, with the firm pneumatic irony of buses.

Back in the King’s Road the stream lapped very quickly over the personal moment of Connie Tiarks. The beige women staring at prospective joints, the hymnal voice beyond the kerb, the corduroy brigade, many moments in themselves, refused to deal in past time. It is always this way with the gaudy streets, Edgware, Whitechapel, Chelsea, these are perpetually present tense. There is no time for nuance. Pig-coloured, pored like oranges, their voice is a barrel organ, their breath the hot gust from the sixpenny store. Pause in the back streets and the tone is reminiscent, the frozen lace, and the static portico, a gentle wash of past time crumbling step and column. But out in full stream, the vulgar, sucking present, there is no hope for a Connie Tiarks, her effort is a small circle on the mobile surface of the King’s Road. It takes the unprovoked, the all-of-a-piece, the smooth, the rubbery, the unconditionally resilient, it takes a Wally Collins to make the current of the gaudy streets.

Things could bore the pants off Wally Collins, dames, and rent, and broken contracts, but there remained a sense of well-being in the gaudy streets, a kind of mental oxygen absorbed. Just to walk down a pavement under neon, his hat, the brim curled like a leaf, stuck at the back of his head, the elbows cocked, swaying at the hips. Just to walk down the King’s Road on a certain afternoon, away from the unmade bed, the cute, oppressive, all-in-luxury box at Godiva Mansions, this was renewal, just to feel the hustling of the air, it was a kind of blank content.

Wally Collins stopped, sucked his toothpick thoughtfully at oranges, the big, glossy, golden globes that settled easily as an image, he began to fasten his mouth in a pleased smile. It sat there, with the desire to talk. He wanted, he would, to someone. Because he felt good. He would buy, he would buy some oranges.