“I know, but it was something Laing did. Rather nice, too, I think. Childlike, not to let the money thing run away with you.”

The Rose pulled out a roll of notes. “By the way, what did he say about academics?”

“Well, we were comparing the types of books we read, and Ronnie said he never read books by academics. I asked him why, and he explained that academics spent their whole day either studying a book, or writing a book about the books they were studying. Occasionally they would take a little walk to rest their eyes while they thought about what someone had written or what they were writing. So they rarely experienced life first-hand. And R.D. was a great one for engaging life first-hand. See what I mean?”

As the Rose was about to mount his bike, he noticed a patch of oil beneath it—a characteristic of his Harley-Davidson if it wasn’t ridden regularly. But the spill lit a touch-paper to a memory buried alive in him of coming upon an old woman in a drunken stupor, lying unconscious in a pool of her own urine. He made a mental note to jot down the details when he got to his club.

Since the days of Aleister Crowley, and before, the high ground north of Holland Park—now postcoded W11—had been considered good soil for witches, and in more recent times, when the planet was in transit, the modern-day necromancers of the Sixties gravitated, knowingly or unknowingly, towards the emanations of the vicinity (or so it seemed to the established order).

Aromatherapists, reflexologists, occultists, acupuncturists, astrologists, group therapists and many other ‘ists’ of the ‘inner growth’ movement were available for consultation within the ‘miracle mile’, as it was known in the flower-bedecked community. Patchouli oil and hashish fumes barely disguised by French tobacco thickened the air, and love was free for all the young witches and warlocks who selected their flying fish from the stall opposite the Electric Cinema, and purchased multigrained bread still warm from Ceres, the goddess of tillage and corn, who presided over her children from the north end of Portobello Road.

It wasn’t until the saturnine Seventies were long past, when these apprentices of charm had been driven further afield by rapacious landlords, that Fleur, in search of that culinary centre Books for Cooks, stumbled upon the area and fell for the remnants of its charm. With her second fortune—recently inherited from her deceased husband—burning a hole in her bank account, she purchased the grandest property vacant that weekend: an imposing house on Stanley Crescent which circumambulated the hilltop of West Eleven. Fleur’s sole exercise then as now was swimming, and it was this which finally prompted her to ‘ink the deal’, as the residence had a basement pool.

For a spell, Fleur saw herself as a latter-day hostess of ‘les soirees artistiques’, and launched a series of gatherings, summoning the doyens of alternative society still hanging on in the neighbourhood, most of whom did not appear too interested in Fleur’s ‘evolvement’. They simply consumed the splendid food she provided, and ran.