(And there is Tarzan and Jane and Cheetah and Our Gang and the M.G.M. lion and Tom and Jerry. At half-time the ice-cream boys come with O.K. Peanut, Violet Crumble, Cherry Ripe, Coca-Cola, Eta Peanut, Passionella. Carol blows balloons of American bubblegum. The lights go out; new heroes jump into the screen.)

There had always been three ice-cream boys: various Vincenzos and Lorenzos and Nicolais, who all looked the same (shrewd eyes, oiled-satin hair, rose-bud mouth). One Saturday the most recent Vincenzo was not there — his place was taken by another. The other was beautiful, like a shy brown animal, with cinnamon eyes and nutmeg skin (I love as soon as I look). I stared hard as I bought extra peanut bars and dandies; I thought of him all the time: his face was on the flimsy in typewriting, he was there when I couldn’t play my scales; there, as my fingers crept to the secret place at night.

And so, on long Sunday evenings in summer, when the streets were filled with blue, mixed with my guilt as I heard the church bells, was a strange feeling — a lovely melancholy, that was linked curiously with the ice-cream seller. The garden with its captive plants seemed to echo my longing, the cracks in the pavement smirked and urged me on. In the blue evening, when sprinklers pierced the lawns and mowers whirred and tossed fragrant spears, I walked the streets with Carol.

We walked aimlessly, without plan. Yet always, at a certain random spot — by the Queen of Angels’, by the Daisy Dell, by Hook the bootmaker’s, by Mrs. Newton’s mulberry-tree — our footsteps faltered, as if prearranged. We stopped. And proceeded again, drawn irresistibly — by the blueness and the church bells and a web of cracks — across the Beach Road, up Fisher Terrace, to Gladstone Road.

We walked to the house that was his, and I searched for some trace of him in fly-wire, rubbed red-brick, stained cement. We walked to the lane and stood behind the fowl-houses, the fig-trees, the compost heaps. And one day when we had brought peaches from Carol’s tree, he was there — perched in the fig like Pan. We presented the fruit humbly; he took them as his due. He stared gravely. For a moment my loneliness was assuaged.

The feeling was always worse when the pictures ended and we left the rock-crystal and velvet and the sure glimpse of the ice-cream boy. It was a pale, in-between time, when our heroes dissolved behind gauze and silk and velvet, when houses seemed empty and streetlights were not yet on; when someone far away (it is always far away) plucked with one hand (it is always one hand) at a sad piano; when the roast dinner we feasted on at half past twelve had become the cold meat and pickles we had for tea.