We strolled across an expanse of stained red carpet to the roulette wheel, jostling a space for ourselves among a crush of dinner jackets and taffeta dresses. Dovidl scattered coloured discs across the numbered board, apparently at random. He paid scant attention to the scudding ball, the spinning wheel, the call of ‘faites vos jeux, messieurs’. I wondered how French, the language of love, had become the vernacular of chance. When the ball came to rest in a groove, the croupier clawed in the losing chips with a silver rake and paid the winners. Dovidl seemed scarcely to notice. He was chatting to a neighbour and his expensive girl and would miss a round now and then in airy bonhomie. I, too, had leisure to observe the ‘membership’ of this disreputable place. They were an odd mix of old-school tie and East End toughs, one lot killing time, the other out for a killing. I had never seen men so sharply dressed, girls so strenuously gorgeous.

The repetitiveness of the procedure, the vacancy of conversation, gave me a pain in the small of the back. There was none of the high tension I had read about in Greene and Hamilton, only a want of something better to do. It puzzled me that someone as nervy and hyperbright as Dovidl could squander his nights at such routines. Boredom gave way to anxiety. ‘What if there’s a police raid?’ I whispered, a tremor in my tone.

‘There won’t be,’ laughed Dovidl. ‘The boys in blue have been taken care of.’ How did he, a schoolboy, know such things?

After an hour or so, he rose, yawned, stretched and strolled off to cash in his chips at the grille beside the door, his pile having redoubled at the roulette wheel. He gave a large chip to the cashier and another to the hat-girl, along with a lingering kiss of the kind I imagined to be French.

‘Fancy another club?’ he said, as our heads surfaced above ground, inhaling the damp night air.

I looked at my watch. It was three o’clock and I was wilting. ‘Never mind,’ said Dovidl, ‘some other time.’

We stopped for coffee and buttered buns at the Old Teapot and got bantering with two footsore whores, in from the rain for a cuppa.

‘Got the time, son?’ sniffed one, Mavis by name.

‘All the time in the world for you, love,’ grinned Dovidl.

‘I’ll give you a good time,’ cackled her friend.

‘Time and a half, I bet,’ flashed my friend. Where had he learned to banter?

He hailed a cab on Piccadilly and ordered it to St John’s Wood. It was the blackest hour of the most vivid night of my sheltered life. Dovidl and I were at one again, but I could not relish the reunion without an attempt at reason.

‘How did you begin gambling, Dovidl?’ I asked quietly.

‘A chap at school took me along,’ he replied evasively.

‘Where did you get the money to play?’