'Well, do you?'

'I think it's an indelicate question.'

I called 'Christopher!' and went back to the kitchen leaving the front door open. Christopher emerged. Laura said to me, 'I must have a word with Christopher. Freddie wants him to write some music for It is later than you think.'

'It is later than you think. Yes, indeed.'

'Why, hello, Len, how nice! Len and I are old friends!'

'Are you, Laura?'

Christopher and Len and Laura were filling the kitchen with chatter. Jimbo, still in Christopher's room, was arranging the green branches in a vase. Through the still open front door I saw Biscuit standing on the landing wearing a sari.

I went out to her slowly, pulling the door to behind me.

The sari was a plain bluish-purple with a wide golden border. She had been wearing a coat over it but had removed the coat. It was folded up neatly beside her on the floor. Her hair had been put up into an intricately woven glossy ball suspended somehow at the back of her head. This made her look older. And the sari gave her, in an odd way, a look of being in uniform, on duty. With the great erection of the hair the pale brown face looked thinner, the eyes huger, reflecting in their depths the bluish-purple tints of the gorgeous sari.

'Hello, mystery girl.'

'Hello, Hilary.'

'I'm Hilary today, am I? Why did you run away?'

I took her wrist lightly between my fingers. The bony feel of the wrist was already familiar. I moved my hand, caressing the wrist, taking her small hand, still lightly, in a full grasp. Her hand was moist and warm. It moved inside my hand like a snuggling animal.

'It's full up in there,' I said, motioning over my shoulder at the flat.

'I'm sorry. Then will you come with me? Will you come with me to a cafe? I have got something to give you.' The way she said 'to a cafe' sounded curiously foreign and the phrase had a ridiculously improper ring about it.

I looked down at her. Her hand had reminded me of Anne's hand. Or rather, her hand had reminded my hand. My hand did not know that Anne was dead and that twenty years had passed and that I was a murderer. Gunnar must have seen Anne in the hospital before she died. What had happened to her face? Did he hold her in his arms when she was dying?

'Will you come with me, please?'

'No,' I said, 'I'm busy. I've got to write an important letter. I can't play games of will you won't you with mystery girls. Just fuck off and leave me alone, will you? I've got enough trouble without being persecuted by bloody tarts.'

I went back into the flat and slammed the door. Laura and the boys were making some coffee.

I was with Crystal. She was holding my hand. It seemed to be my day for holding hands with women. I now regretted having sent Biscuit away. I would like to have gone to bed with her. Presumably that was what it was all about. It would have distracted my mind. I wondered if she would ever come back again. She had looked very beautiful in her sari. And at least she was a little separate piece of possible future. I was rather short of future at present.

The electricity, much reduced in power, had remained on all day, and was still on, although further cuts were threatened.

I had eaten a little supper and drunk a great deal of the litre bottle of Spanish burgundy. Supper had consisted of steak and kidney pudding, out of a tin, brussels sprouts and mince pies. The white lace tablecloth was on, and I had spilt wine on it again. Crystal washed it snow-white every week.

'Do you still want to see the Christ Child in Regent Street?'

'Oh - dearest - have you sent that letter yet?'

'I haven't written it yet.'

'Must you leave the office?'

'Of course.'

'You needn't see him.'

'He'd be there. And he'd know I was there.' How awful for Gunnar, it occurred to me, to find me infesting the place as a low form of life, a sort of loathsome beetle. 'The least I can do is be gone before he comes, not remind him that I exist.'

Crystal's rather square podgy face was all wrinkled up with anxiety and grief and love. Her frizzy orangy hair was tangled as she had been twisting it between her fingers earlier in the evening. She was wearing her glasses, gazing across the room with her enlarged golden eyes, staring at the row of ebony elephants that marched upon the sideboard and holding my hand in both of hers. Laura had kneaded, Biscuit had nuzzled. Crystal held steady, firm, the way you might hold someone's hand if he were going to be shot.

'I'll soon get another job,' I said. 'And if I can't, you and Arthur can support me! I won't starve.'

'If it would help if I stopped going with Arthur - '

'Oh don't be idiotic, Crystal! If I could only be sure you were happy and looked after I'd - '

'What?'

'Oh not kill myself or anything. Not even emigrate. I might marry Tommy.'

'We'll lose each other,' said Crystal. She released my hand and turned to face me. She took off her glasses and looked at me with her beautiful truthful defenceless myopic eyes.

'Don't say that, darling. You know we can't lose each other. We are one.'

'I feel so frightened. There were funny noises downstairs last night.'

'Oh nonsense.' Crystal had never had these sort of fears before. Or more likely, she had had them but had never troubled me with them.

'Everything's suddenly so frightening. Oh if only it hadn't happened, if only he hadn't come back. I feel the past will destroy us, something terrible will come out of the past and eat us up.'

'Stop it, Crystal. I shall just take a new job, nothing else will happen.'

'I feel you're in danger. I prayed for you last night. I wish I really believed in God.'

'Your prayers will invent God. He'll have to exist just to receive them. I'll take you to Regent Street and we'll see the Christ Child, and we'll have a dinner out, shall we, like we did once. Oh Crystal, I do wish you could be happy. If I thought you could be happy I could simply cease to exist with a sigh of joy.'

'How can I be happy when I know you suffer all the time, all the time, because of that, and now it's come after us like a - like a sort of demon of revenge - '

'None of that, Crystal. Prayer is better. Do you know what dear old Tommy told me in a letter? She said she had forgiven me on behalf of God!'

'You never told Tommy?'

'No. And I never will. Whatever happens. But, Crystal, listen. I haven't said this to you yet. I've told Arthur.'

'Told Arthur - when?'

'Last night.'

'Everything?'

'Yes.'

'Oh dear - ' said Crystal. 'Oh dear - ' The big golden eyes were filling with tears.

I was appalled. 'But Crystal, I thought you'd approve, be pleased - I felt - if you're going to marry him - it was a kind of gesture - and he is so - and I had to tell someone - didn't you want him to know?'

'No. I didn't want him to know. I didn't want anybody to know. I didn't want it to exist as anything that people knew. I want it not to have happened at all. And one of the things about Arthur was that he didn't know - '

'Oh my God!' I said. I felt exasperation. Had I got to play the instrument of Crystal's sensibility forever? She was stupidly vulnerable. 'Brace up, Crystal. All these things did happen. Keeping them secret isn't going to unhappen them. I haven't spoilt Arthur for you. Arthur's got to grow up. You've got to grow up. There are terrible things in the world. Anyway, Arthur ought to know that he's getting a murderer for a brother-in-law!'

'What did he say?'

What did he say? I had not paid much attention to what Arthur said, half the time as I was talking I was unaware that Arthur existed. 'It doesn't matter what he said. He talked some guff about forgiveness. Now, Crystal, stop crying. I don't see why I should have to put up with your bloody tears as well as everything else.'

Crystal mopped her eyes with her hands, then began to fumble under her skirt for the handkerchief which she still kept in her knickers like a little girl. 'I wish we still believed in Jesus Christ and that he could wash away our sins.'

'Washed by the Blood of the Lamb. Remember all that old stuff? Washing in somebody's blood - what repellent images one cheerfully put up with in one's childhood. Over and over like a mighty sea, comes the blood of Jesus rolling over.'

'It's the love of Jesus, not the blood of Jesus.'

'Well, since there's no Jesus it'll have to be your love that saves me, Crystal, so don't stop praying, will you?'

MONDAY.

IT WAS now Monday afternoon (it looks as if nothing ever happens on Sundays, but just wait a while), getting dark, which consisted in a yellowish twilight which had persisted all day thickening into a yellowish darkness. Big Ben's lighted face had not been extinguished since morning. I sat at my desk looking at that friendly countenance and trying to compose my letter of resignation. The thought of searching for another job and doing so rather briskly, since I had no savings, filled me with frightened exhausted dejection. Someone (Reggie?) had purloined my fountain pen, and I was struggling with a steel-nibbed dip-pen which I had got from the stores, and which spluttered the ink merrily about in intervals of scratching holes in the paper.

Sunday had passed somehow. I went to the cinema twice and got drunk in the intervals. I also walked a good deal. There are so many kinds of walking. I walked a special kind of metaphysical sad London walking, which I had walked before, only I performed it now with an almost ritualistic intensity. In Russian there is no general word for 'go'. Going has to be specified as walking or riding, then as habitual or non-habitual walking or riding, then as perfective or imperfective habitual or non-habitual walking or riding, all involving different verbs. The sort of walking which I indulged in on that Sunday deserved a special word to celebrate its conceptual peculiarity.

During the later part of Monday morning one of Arthur's lame ducks who had just come out of prison and had celebrated this by getting drunk, came round to find Arthur and obtain some more money to get drunker. I helped Arthur to get him out of the building. Arthur had not returned, presumably being unable to shake off his bibulous friend, or perhaps being engaged in escorting him to a suitable place of refuge. The porter at the door, having vainly opposed ingress, reported to Freddie Impiatt, who came to see me as if it was my fault, and gave me a sort of dressing down while Reggie Farbottom and Mrs Witcher giggled in the background.

After lunch however a rather more respectful attitude became evident. When I came in Reggie was eagerly imparting something to Mrs Witcher. They fell silent when I arrived, staring at me.

'I say, Hilary, is it true that you and Jopling are old friends?'

'No.'

'There you are, Reggie, I told you it couldn't be true.'

'But you do know him, don't you, I was told you were old friends, that you were at school together.'

'They couldn't have been,' said Edith. 'Hilary's miles younger.'

I sat down in my protected nook, in the yellow beam of old Big Ben. I would miss that.

'Hilaree! Don't you answer when people speak to you any more?'

'I didn't think an answer was required.'

'You do know him though? They were saying in the bar you knew him well.'

'I used to know him very slightly. We haven't met for years.'

'Fancy Hilary knowing Jopling!'

'I didn't know Hilary knew anybody.'

'We'll have to start calling him Mr Burde now.'

'Mr Burde, hey there, Mr Burde - '

And so on and so on.

I made up my mind to go home early. I could not write the letter of resignation and could not do anything else either. The work had already gone dead on me. I decided to adopt a device which I sometimes adopted when depressed, to get onto the Inner Circle and go round and round until opening time and then go to the bar either at Liverpool Street or Sloane Square, according to which was nearer. This system weighted the balance slightly in favour of Liverpool Street if I took the westbound line, and of Sloane Square if I took the eastbound line, since there were fifteen stations between Liverpool Street and Sloane Square on the former route and twelve on the latter route. I attempted to let some immediate chance decide which direction I took. The element of gamble distracted the mind a bit, though not so much as being in bed with Biscuit would have done.

I intended of course to go and see Clifford Larr as usual in the evening. He knew my tantrums and how to ignore them. I did not really believe that my outburst in the park could have ended our friendship. He had already taken a reprisal in the form of his indiscretions on Thursday, and would I hoped be satisfied, though he might still be bloody-minded enough to refuse to see me or simply to be absent. But there was always, with such a man, also the possibility of his suddenly deciding that one had gone too far and that all was over. This possibility began, as the day went on, suddenly to ache on its own, a perceptible special pain among all the others, making thought impossible, prompting flight. Soon after four o'clock I got up and glided quietly out of the room. Reggie and Edith were playing noughts and crosses. Arthur had still not come back.

I went to the cloakroom and put on my overcoat and cap. I could never bring myself to sport a trilby or a bowler; the cap provided some protection even though it signally failed to cover the ears. I could not descend to the Arthur woolly beret level. I set off down the stairs. I always used the lift to come up, the stairs to come down. The lift carried the hazards of social life. It was a concession to old age that I no longer walked up.

The stairs were, in accordance with government standards of economy, very ill lit. I had descended two flights and was descending a third when a stout elderly man turned the corner from the lower landing and began slowly to mount towards me, holding onto the banisters. We passed each other. For a second I saw his face. I reached the next landing and turned the corner. I held onto the wall for a moment, then sat down on the stairs at the top of the next flight.

Arthur was just coming up. 'I say, Hilary, what's the matter? Are you all right? Are you feeling funny?'

I said, 'Go away.'

'Hilary, can I -?'

'Go away!'

In order to escape from Arthur I pulled myself up and went quickly on down the stairs, leaving him staring after me. I went out into the street.

I had had a flash of the blue eyes before he passed, otherwise I might not have recognized him. He was partly bald and had become stout. He had the gait and bearing of an older man, much older than me, older than his own years. He also had, even in that glimpse, the air of a grandee, a public man. Perhaps this had contributed to the effect of age. But what was even more devastating than seeing him was being seen by him. I had intended to be far away when Gunnar Jopling came. Now: he had seen me. But had he recognized me, could he, in those few seconds, have done so? Of course I had not changed as much as he. On the other hand, he could not possibly have been expecting to see me. No, he had not looked at me. He had surely passed by, preoccupied, not seeing.

By this time I had got myself, somehow, in a state of unconsciousness, onto the Inner Circle, direction Paddington. I went over the incident again and again in my mind. It was so dark, we passed so quickly. I was wearing a cap, no, no he could not possibly have known me. But we had passed each other on the stairs, our two bodies had passed within two feet of each other. I could have touched his sleeve. I sat in the train with my face in my hands. A kindly old lady asked me if I was all right, and when I did not reply thrust a pound note into my pocket. I felt a second or two of gratitude.

Hours passed and it was opening time. The Inner Circle roulette determined on Liverpool Street, which I was rather glad of and must unconsciously have voted for by taking the Paddington direction. Liverpool Street has a terrible shoddy doomridden end of the world majesty about it, like some place out of Edgar Allan Poe. I got drunk standing on the platform, watching the trains come and go. At last I got onto a train myself and went to Gloucester Road.

There had been a glimmer from the sitting-room window. The glass panel above the door was lighted up. I let myself in with my key as usual. 'Hello, Clifford.'

'Hello.'

He was in the kitchen, chopping an onion.