After our mother's death we were taken over by Aunt Bill, my mother's sister. I suppose her name was Wilhelmina. (I never knew my mother's first name, and later it was impossible to ask. Aunt Bill always referred to her, in an indescribably offensive tone, as 'your ma'.) Aunt Bill lived in the same town, in a caravan. I cannot to this day see a caravan without shuddering. Aunt Bill kept Crystal with her in the caravan, but me she fairly soon (I do not know exactly how soon) despatched to an orphanage. I had, with my first self-consciousness, an awareness of myself as 'bad', a bad boy, one who had to be sent away.

It is impossible for me to 'try to be fair' to Aunt Bill. There are some things which are so difficult that one does not even know how to try to do them. Because of an incident concerning a pet mouse, which I can scarcely bring myself to think of let alone to relate, I detested Aunt Bill forever with a hatred which can still make me tremble. The particular way Aunt Bill had of stepping on insects provided my earliest picture of human wickedness. I am not sure that I have ever bettered it. In any case, Aunt Bill and I were instant enemies, not least because she deliberately separated me from Crystal. Aunt Bill was an uneducated ill-tempered spiteful woman full of malice and resentment. I will not use the word 'sadistic' of her; this suggests a classification and thereby a sort of extenuation. When, many years later, I heard of her death, I intended to go out and celebrate but found myself simply sitting at home shedding tears of joy. Aunt Bill was, of course, a tough egg. ('Brave' carries the wrong implications.) She carried on her war against the world in her own personal way exerting her own personal power, and in this she might even be said to have had some kind of distinction. She was my first conception of a human individual. (Crystal was part of me.) Let what can be said for her. She got rid of me. She might have got rid of Crystal too. Crystal was small enough to be adopted. (I was of course too old for adoption, even apart from my precocious reputation for being thoroughly disturbed and 'bad'.) But she kept Crystal and looked after her; and though she got an allowance for doing so I doubt if she did it for the money. Aunt Bill never worked that I can remember. She and Crystal lived on National Assistance in the caravan.

I shall not talk about the orphanage: again, fairness is probably impossible. It was not that I was beaten (though I was) or starved (though I was always hungry); it was just that nobody loved me. In fact I early took in that I was unlovable. Nobody singled me out, nobody gave me their attention. I have no doubt that some of the people there were good well-intentioned folk who tried to approach me, and that I rejected them. I have a shadowy idea that this may have been so. I can hardly remember the early years at the orphanage. When the light of memory falls I was already as it were old, old and scarred and settled in a posture of anger and resentment, a sense of having been incurably maimed by injustice.

The most profound and maiming piece of injustice was the separation from Crystal. I cannot remember anything about the event of Crystal's birth, but I can recall her in infancy and trying to carry her in my arms. I felt none of the jealousy the earlier child is supposed to experience. I loved Crystal at once in a sort of prophetic way, as if I were God and already knew all about her. Or as if she were God. Or as if I knew that she was my only hope. My younger sister had to be my mother, and I had to be her father. No wonder we both became a little odd. The orphanage was not too far away from the caravan site, and I must have seen quite a lot of Crystal in the earlier time after my mother's death. I have memory pictures of Crystal aged two, three, four, and the sense that we played together. But as I developed more and more into a 'bad' boy I was allowed to see less and less of my sister. It was supposed that I would be 'bad for her'. And by the time I was eleven we were almost completely separated. I saw her on occasional holiday outings and at Christmas. The anguish of these occasions did nothing to lighten my reputation for being 'disturbed'. One Christmas time I arrived at the caravan to find Aunt Bill slapping Crystal's face. I attacked Aunt Bill's legs, which was all I could get at. She kicked me and I spent Christmas Day in hospital.

My reputation for 'badness' was not unmerited. I was a strong child and soon given to violence. I was not bullied by other children. I did the bullying. (These are disagreeable memories. Am I still a monster in the dreams of those I injured then?) I was good at games and excelled at wrestling. These activities gave me my first conception of 'excellence', inextricably mixed up with the idea of defeating someone, preferably by physical force. Many years later a social worker (little knowing that I was myself something of an expert on the matter) told me that criminals who not only rob but quite gratuitously injure their victims as well, do so out of anger. This seems to me very plausible. I was brimming with anger and hatred. I hated, not society, puny sociologists' abstraction, I hated the universe. I wanted to cause it pain in return for the pain it caused me. I hated it on my behalf, on Crystal's, on my mother's. I hated the men who had exploited my mother and ill-treated her and despised her. I had a cosmic furious permanent sense of myself as victimized. It is particularly hard to overcome resentment caused by injustice. And I was so lonely. The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. However I was better off than some. I had Crystal, and I lived in and for the hope of Crystal as men live in and for the hope of God. When we parted from each other, mingling our tears, she used always to say to me, 'Oh be good!' This her having so often heard what a rascal I was. Not that her love wavered. Perhaps she felt that somehow if I became better we would meet more often. But for me Crystal's little cry was and is the apotheosis of that word.

Religion, of a low evangelical variety, was everywhere at the orphanage. I detested that too. Crystal's 'Be good' (which had little or no effect on my conduct) meant more to me than Jesus Christ. Christ was always purveyed to me by people who clearly regarded me not only as a delinquent but as an object of pity. There is an attitude of complacent do-gooding condescension which even decent people cannot conceal and even a small child can recognize. Their religion seemed to me over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening. There was nowhere in it to hide. We roared out 'choruses' about sin and redemption which reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick. I rejected the theology but was defenceless against the guilt which was so fruitlessly beaten into me. The mood was brisk and impatient. Either you were saved by the blood of the Lamb or else you were for it, a black and white matter of breath-taking rewards or whipping. The efficacious Saviour almost figured to me as a sort of agent provocateur. Again and again the trick failed to work, the briskness turned to severity and the jollity ended in tears. In so far as there were mysteries and depths in my life I kept them secret from Christ and his soldiery. I was more moved by animals than I was by Jesus. One of the porters had a dog, and this dog once, as I sat beside him on the ground, touched my arm with his paw. This gentle gesture has stayed with me forever. And I remember stroking a guinea pig at school and feeling such a piercing strange pain, the realization that happiness existed, but was denied to me. I hardly ever visited 'the country'. I pictured it as a paradise where 'the animals' lived.

Those who regarded me as a thoroughly bad lot were in no way unreasonable. One of my earliest memories is of kicking the tulips to pieces in the public park. I progressed to grander acts of destruction. I liked hitting people, I liked breaking things. Once I tried to set fire to the orphanage. I was in a juvenile court before I was twelve. After that I was regularly in trouble with the police. I was sent to a psychiatrist. A Christmas came when I was not allowed to see Crystal. I was just coming to full awareness of myself as an outcast, a person totally and absolutely done for, when I began very gradually to discover a quite novel source of hope, to grow the hope in myself like a growing seed. I was saved by two people, neither of whom could have done it alone. One of course was Crystal. The other was a wonderful schoolmaster. His name was Mr Osmand. I did not discover his first name.

Mr Osmand taught French and very occasionally Latin at the modest unambitious filthy little school which I attended. He had been at the school for many years but I did not become his pupil until I was about fourteen, with my loutish reputation well developed. I had, until then, learnt practically nothing. I could (just) read, but although I had attended classes in history and French and mathematics I had imbibed extremely little of these subjects. The realization that people had simply given up trying to teach me anything enlightened me at last, more than the lectures from magistrates, about how utterly ship-wrecked I was; and increased my anger and my sense of injustice. For with the dawning despair came also the tormenting idea that in spite of everything I was clever, I had a mind though I had never wanted to use it. I could learn things, only now it was too late and nobody would let me. Mr Osmand looked at me quietly. He had grey eyes. He gave me his full attention.

I suspect that many children are saved by saints and geniuses of this kind. Why are such people not made rich by a grateful society? How exactly the miracle happened is another thing which I cannot very clearly recall. Suddenly my mind woke up. Floods of light came in. I began to learn. I began to want to excel in new ways. I learnt French. I started on Latin. Mr Osmand promised me Greek. An ability to write fluent correct Latin prose began to offer me an escape from (perhaps literally) the prison house, began in time to show me vistas headier and more glorious than any I had ever before known how to dream of. In the beginning was the word. Amo, amas, amat was my open sesame, 'Learn these verbs by Friday' the essence of my education; perhaps it is mutatis mutandis the essence of any education. I also learnt, of course, my own language, hitherto something of a foreign tongue. I learnt from Mr Osmand how to write the best language in the world accurately and clearly and, ultimately, with a hard careful elegance. I discovered words and words were my salvation. I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.

Probably Mr Osmand was not a genius at anything except teaching. He encouraged me to read the classics of English literature; but his own preferences were more narrowly patriotic. I buried Sir John Moore at Corunna, I threw my empty revolver down the slope, I shouldered white men's burdens east of Suez, I played up and played the game. My father, from the terrace below, called me down to ride. My head was stored with images of the East, Newbolt's East, Conrad's East, Kipling's East. What I read in these books thrilled me with a deep mysterious significance which brought tears to my eyes. I who had no mother could claim at least a mother land, and these exotic tales were about England too and, after it all, hearts at peace under an English heaven. There was a sense of family. But most haunting of them all to my young mind was the story of Toomai of the elephants. 'Kala Nag, Kala Nag, wait for me.' Perhaps this beautiful picture of the elephant turning round to pick up the child symbolized for me my own escape. The elephant would turn and would carry me away, would carry me to goodness and salvation, to the open space at the centre of things, to the dance.

Mr Osmand was a member of the Church of England, but I think that his religion too was largely patriotic, concerned less with God than with the Queen. (Queen Victoria, of course.) I do not recall that we ever talked about God. But I did imbibe from my wonderful teacher a sort of religion or ideology which certainly influenced my life. Mr Osmand believed in competition. It was necessary to excel. He loved and cherished the examination system. (And rightly. It was my road out of the pit.) Parvenir a tout prix, was my own conception of the matter. We were both very ambitious for me. But Mr Osmand did not simply want me to win prizes. He wanted me, in his own old-fashioned and austere conception of it, to be good. His message to me was the same as Crystal's. Of course he chided my violence, but more profoundly, and through his very teaching, he inculcated in me a respect for accuracy, a respect, to put it more nobly, for truth. 'Never leave a passage until you thoroughly understand every word, every case, every detail of the grammar.' A fluffy vague understanding was not good enough for Mr Osmand. Grammar books were my books of prayer. Looking up words in the dictionary was for me an image of goodness. The endless endless task of learning new words was for me an image of life.

Violence is a kind of magic, the sense that the world will always yield. When I understood grammatical structure I understood something which I respected and which did not yield. The exhilaration of this discovery, though it did not 'cure' me, informed my studies and cast on them a light which was not purely academic. I learnt French and Latin and Greek at school. Mr Osmand taught me German in his spare time. I taught myself Italian. I was not a philological prodigy. I lacked that uncanny gift which some people have for language structure which seems akin to a gift for music or calculation. I never became concerned with the metaphysical aspects of language. (I am not interested in Chomsky. That places me.) And I never thought of myself as a 'writer' or tried to become one. I was just a brilliant plodder with an aptitude for grammar and an adoration for words. Of course I was a favourite and favoured pupil. I suspect that Mr Osmand regarded me at first simply as a professional challenge, after I had been generally 'given up'. Later he certainly came to love me. Mr Osmand was unmarried. His shabby sleeve often caressed my wrist, and he liked to lean his arm against mine as we looked at the same text. Nothing else ever happened. But through the glowing electrical pressure of that arm I learnt another lesson about the world.

I went to Oxford. No child from the school had ever been farther afield than a northern polytechnic. In the milieu in which Crystal and Aunt Bill had their being Oxford was a complete mystery: 'Oxford college', somewhere in the south, like a teacher's training college only somehow 'posh'. I told Crystal about Oxford when I knew scarcely more about it myself. This was to be the escape route. For of course, as I worked away at irregular verbs and gerundives and sequence of tenses I was working not only for myself but for Crystal. I would rescue her and take her with me. And when I had learnt everything, I would teach her. At fourteen I had been a small though muscular imp. At sixteen I was a six-foot adolescent. With Mr Osmand and my new talents and my new ambition I feared no one. I visited Crystal whenever I pleased, I intimidated Aunt Bill, and Crystal and I made plans to become rich and live together.

At Oxford I studied French and Italian. Mr Osmand wanted me to read 'Greats' but I preferred a more linguistic course; the idea of philosophy frightened me and I wanted to be sure of excelling. I was extremely diligent but also played games. Intoxicatingly soon after playing cricket for the first time I was grinding my teeth over missing my blue. I learnt Spanish and modern Greek and started Russian. I got rid of my northern vowels. Crystal, at school, then working in the chocolate factory, came down occasionally to marvel at my new Jerusalem. We went into the country on bicycles. Mr Osmand visited me once during my first year. Somehow the visit depressed us both. He reminded me of too many things. And doubtless he felt that he had lost me. I wrote to him for a while, then stopped writing. I soon gave up returning to the north. I spent my vacations in college or on occasional grant-aided trips to France or Italy. I travelled alone; these journeys were not a success. I was an anxious and incurious tourist and my linguistic abilities never made me feel at home. I scarcely even tried to speak the languages I could read so easily. I was always relieved to be back in England. Oxford changed me, but also taught me how hard to change I was. My ignorance was deeply engrained, the grimy misery of my childhood had entered my mode of being. 'Catching up' was going to be a longer job than I had anticipated when I wrote out my versions for Mr Osmand. I made no real friends. I was touchy and solitary and afraid of making mistakes and well aware that I was a big tough healthy chap devoid of ease and physical charm. I could not get on with girls and scarcely attempted to. I did not mind. Parvenir a tout prix. I was working for me and Crystal. Other things could wait. I won ever prize I went in for: the Hertford, the Heath-Harrison, the Gaisford Greek Prose, the Chancellor's Latin prose. I did not attempt the Ireland (for which Gladstone and Asquith strove in vain). I got one of the top firsts of my year and was almost immediately elected to a fellowship at another college. I made plans for Crystal to come and live with me in Oxford. I gave a party in my college rooms, and Crystal came down, wearing a flowery dress and a floppy white hat. She was seventeen. She said to me with tears in her eyes, 'This is the happiest day of my life!' A year afterwards, as a result of a catastrophe which will be mentioned later in these pages, I resigned my post and left Oxford for ever.

FRIDAY.

IT WAS Friday morning and I was just leaving for the office. Darkness had not yet really given way to day. There might have been some sort of yellow murk outside, but I did not pull back the curtains to look at it. I had swallowed two cups of tea and was my usual hateful early morning self. I emerged from the flat onto the bright electrically lit landing and closed the door behind me. The curious smell was still there. Then I stopped dead.

On the opposite side of the landing, not far from the lift, a girl was standing. I saw at once that she was, wholly or partly, Indian. She had a thin light-brown transparent spiritual face, a long thin fastidious mouth, an aquiline nose: surely the most beautiful race in the world, blending delicate frailty and power into human animal grace. She was not wearing a sari, but an indefinably oriental get-up consisting of a high-necked many-buttoned padded cotton jacket over multi-coloured cotton trousers. She was not tall, but in her gracefulness did not look short. Her black hair in a very long very thick plait was drawn forward over one shoulder. She stood perfectly still, her thin hands hanging down, and her large almost black eyes regarding me intently.

I felt shock, pleasure, surprise, alarm. Then I recalled Christopher's words, completely forgotten since, about a coloured girl looking for me. Fear. For me surely no one could search with an amiable motive. I was about to speak to her when the fact of the silence having lasted, as it seemed, so long made speech impossible. How after all could this girl, such a girl, concern me? There were other flats on the corridor behind her, containing shifting populations of which I took care to know nothing. She was doubtless somebody's girl friend going home. Lucky somebody. I unfixed myself from the door handle and walked to the lift and pressed the button, turning my back upon the apparition. As the lift arrived and the automatic doors opened I heard a soft footstep. The Indian girl entered the lift after me. She stood beside me, staring up at me with an unsmiling expression of dazed puzzled interest. I could see and hear and only not quite feel her breathing. She was wearing a black woollen sweater, visible at neck and sleeves, underneath the jacket. I looked at the reflection of her back in the mirror. The long thick unsilky plait, which she had evidently tossed back over her shoulder as she entered, fell straight to the buttocks where it arched out and ended in a fanlike brush like a lion's tail. The slightly frayed sleeve of the jacket moved and came into contact with the sleeve of my mackintosh. I felt my features stiffen as a current of electricity, generated by the contact, passed on into my flesh. The lift had creaked its way to the ground floor and the doors opened. She stepped out first. I went past her to the street door and out into the street. It was a dark morning, a little rain riding upon the wind, the street lamps still on. I reached the corner resolving not to turn round. The electrical connection still held. I turned round. She was standing upon the steps of the flats and staring after me.

I really did once upon a time run round the park every morning. The goal of keeping perfectly fit was a goal, the gift of a strong and healthy body was a gift. Running was a method of death, of life in death, not the saint's marvel of living in the present, but a desperate man's little version. There was a kind of sleeping or half-sleeping which I sometimes tried to achieve (especially at weekends) when I lay like a floating turtle, just breaking the surface of consciousness, aware and yet not self-aware, not yet tormented by being a particular person. So too with the running. I ran, and was cleansed of myself. I was a heart pumping, a body moving. I had cleaned a piece of the world of the filth of my consciousness. I was not even capable of dreaming. If I could always so have slept and so have waked I would have achieved my own modest beatification. I stopped running not (I think) because of a warning tap from the finger of age, but just out of sinful degenerate laziness of soul: the same laziness and failure of hope which still prevented me from starting to learn Chinese. I would, however, on a good morning when time allowed, walk briskly across the park to Gloucester Road station and proceed to Westminster from there. On bad mornings when I was late I took the Inner Circle from Bayswater. This morning (Friday) was a bad morning.

As I now cram myself into the rush hour train at Bayswater station perhaps I should pause again to describe myself a little more. I have spoken of the cult of my body. I still was very much that body. It had defended me in childhood and I had always identified myself with it as with one of my chief assets. I was (am) just over six feet tall, sturdy, dark, clean-shaven against a fierce beard, with a head of thick greasy crinkly dark hair descending to my collar. A similar mat of thick hair furs my body to the navel. I have hazel eyes not unlike Crystal's, only not so golden and not so big. (Aunt Bill also, I regret to say, had hazel eyes only hers were very small and distinctly greenish.) It is difficult to describe my face. It satisfies no canon of beauty, not even that of a gangster. My wide nose, like Crystal's, turns up a little at the end. If I valued my physique it was certainly not for its charm. Because of my hair I was called 'Nigger' at school and for a time I did in some curious way think of myself as being black. A boy once told me that I had a black penis, and convinced me of it in spite of the visual evidence. Intended to wound, these taunts did not altogether displease me. I liked (though I expected no one else to) my copious fur, my blackness, my secret being as a black animal. Of other uses of my body, in acts of love, I knew nothing, even when I became a student. I knew that I was unattractive and that I radiated a paralysing awkwardness; moreover a ferocious puritanism, doubtless purveyed to me by my Christian mentors, made me feel that sex was unclean.

I relied upon routine, had done so perhaps ever since I realized that grammatical rules were to be my salvation; and since I had despaired of salvation, even more so. Routine, in my case at least, discouraged thought. Your exercise of free choice is a prodigious stirrer up of your reflection. The patterned sameness of the days of the week gave a comforting sense of absolute subjection to history and time, perhaps a comforting sense of mortality. I could not consider suicide because of Crystal, but I wanted to have my death always beside me. My 'days' were a routine, and in the office I conceived of myself as far as possible as a man on an assembly line. Weekends and holidays were hells of freedom. I took my leave for fear of comment and simply hid (if possible slept). I used once to attempt holidays with Crystal, but it was too much. She cried all the time. It was true that, as Freddie Impiatt had said to me, I liked to live in other people's worlds and have none of my own.

None of this entirely describes what I 'lived by'. By what after all does a man live? Art meant little to me, I carried a few odd pieces of literature like lucky charms. Someone once said of me, and it was not entirely unjust, that I read poetry for the grammar. As I have said, I never wanted to be a writer. I loved words, but I was not a word-user, rather a word-watcher, in the way that some people are bird-watchers. I loved languages but I knew by now that I would never speak the languages that I read. I was one for whom the spoken and the written word are themselves different languages. I had no religion and no substitute for it. My 'days' gave me identity, a sort of ecto-skeleton. Beyond my routine chaos began and without routine my life (perhaps any life?) was a phantasmagoria. Religion, and indeed art too, I conceived of as human activities, but not for me. Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. Only I was not inventive. I did not want to play this play or dance this dance, and apart from the activity of playing or dancing there was nothing at all. I early saw that the nature of words and their relationship to reality made metaphysical systems impossible. History was a slaughterhouse, human life was a slaughterhouse. Mortality itself was my philosophical robe. Even the stars are not ageless and our breaths are numbered.

Let us now get on to the office. Very little of my story actually takes place in the office, but as the office was so much a part of my mind it is necessary to describe it. I existed, as I have explained, near to the bottom of the power structure which rose above the clerical and stenographical level. I dealt with 'cases' concerning pay, little individual problems, not always unamusing. (Should this man's 'danger money' affect his pension? Should that man's paid sick-leave be extended in these circumstances? Should another man's pay-rise be backdated in those?) I did not invent rules, I merely applied rules made by others. Sometimes the rules did not quite fit the cases, and there was a tiny occasion for thought. Usually no thought was necessary. I wrote out my view in the form of a 'minute', which I sent to Duncan, who sent it to Mrs Frederickson, who sent it to Freddie Impiatt, who sent it to Clifford Larr, and after that, or even before that, I did not really know or care what happened to it or whether it survived. Arthur Fisch, who devilled for me, wrote no minutes so there was someone to be superior to.

I worked in a room with two other people. This Room and these people have a certain tiny importance because, as so often, the physical world figured the mental world. The two people who shared my room were Mrs Witcher (Edith) and Reggie Farbottom. Arthur worked in a cupboard (almost literally), a little room partitioned off from the corridor, with a corridor window as its only source of light. I regretted that I had not installed Arthur long ago in the Room, but it was too late now, and Arthur liked his cupboard. Mrs Witcher, it was said, had once been a shorthand typist who had risen to power through being someone's Personal Assistant. When I first knew her she was a self-styled 'head' of the Registry, the vast complex where the files were stored. This might have been an important job but in her case it was certainly a standing up job and not a sitting down job; and could one actually say that such a one as Mrs Witcher was 'head' of the Registry? There was in fact another head, a man, who sat down, called Middledale, who really ran the Registry, while Mrs Witcher was just one of the more important of the filing clerks. There was some uncertainty about this even at the time. Later Mrs Witcher received a promotion and a desk, first in the Registry itself, and then in an adjoining room (not Middledale's room, which had by then been converted to another purpose). During a period of office redecoration she moved into my room (the Room) which I then shared with a man called Perry (who afterwards emigrated to Canada). Mrs Witcher came in as a temporary and junior third, but somehow managed to stay, partly because Perry and I were too polite to turn her out, later because it had become a custom. What Mrs Witcher's work was at first supposed to be I never understood, or tried to understand, as I regarded her presence as ephemeral. She had some task concerned with the checking of classifications, doubtless a routine matter of seeing that papers were being filed correctly. Later on however Mrs Witcher set herself up (or was set up by some superior authority) as a sort of watchdog over the classifications themselves, not only checking the files but controlling the divisions and sub-divisions into which they were separated: a task which raised very fundamental questions with which Mrs Witcher was patently not qualified to deal.

That Reggie Farbottom had (as some people said) originally been a messenger was very unlikely. He had probably started life as some sort of trotting boy clerk. How he ceased being a standing man and became a sitting man I do not know. This was perhaps Mrs Witcher's doing: he had long been her creature. The relation between them was mysterious. Mrs Witcher was immemorially divorced. (Of old Witcher nothing was known.) Reggie Farbottom was considerably younger, unmarried, much given to boasting of 'conquests'. He was foul-mouthed into the bargain. Perhaps Mrs Witcher liked that. At any rate Reggie was soon to be found occupying the desk which Mrs Witcher had invented for herself in the Registry, and later, on Perry's departure occupying Mrs Witcher's desk in the Room, while Mrs Witcher occupied that of Perry. My conception of the matter was that Reggie did what Mrs Witcher ought to have been doing (whatever that was), while Mrs Witcher pretended to do a job which she had invented for herself and in reality did nothing. On Perry's departure, as I realized later, I ought instantly to have installed Arthur in Perry's desk. Only Arthur was sentimental about his cupboard, and the true significance of Farbottom only dawned on me when it was too late.

As office rooms go, the Room was not unattractive, though it was lit by the sort of neon lighting which recreates a lurid winter afternoon. It was quite large and had a sort of bay window from which, through a cleft in an inner courtyard, one could see Big Ben, and above him a slice of sky which could be felt to be hanging over the river. In this bay window, on the far side of the room, I sat. My desk, moreover, rested upon a strip of brown carpet which reached from the door to the window and made my side of the room, which also boasted a print of Whitehall in 1780, quite elegant. The desks of Reggie and Mrs Witcher were both nearer to the door, facing the wall in the uncarpeted half of the room. So certain fundamental distinctions were at least preserved.

I always attempted to arrive at the office before nine, This was not required, but there were advantages in being first. I could get quite a lot of work done in the blessed interval before the others arrived. The old joke about civil servants being like the fountains in Trafalgar Square because they played from ten to five had no application as far as I was concerned, or indeed in the department generally, except for a few freaks such as Edith Witcher. There was always far more to do than I had time for, though on the other hand nothing was urgent. This suited me. If I had ever finished I would have felt in danger of going mad. I sometimes had nightmares in which I had no more cases, my in-tray was empty, and as I had no more work to do I was there under false pretences. On this particular day (we are still on Friday morning) a hold-up in the tube made me later than usual. The irritation of this hold-up (jammed breast to breast and back to back in ominous silence) drove from my mind any further speculation concerning the Indian girl. She probably had nothing whatever to do with me. As I entered the building I met Clifford Larr. I was making for the lift, he for the stairs. He worked on the first floor, what one might call the piano nobile. I worked a good deal nearer to the attics. We said good morning. He paused. 'A pleasant gathering last night, was it not?' 'Very pleasant,' I replied. He passed on.

When I reached our corridor I saw at once that the light was on in Arthur's cupboard. I did not stop, though I saw that the door was ajar. Arthur, shy of the Room, perhaps wished to trap me. He was easy to elude however, as I had trained him never to talk to me in the office except about work. I did not want any sort of tete-a-tete with Arthur just now. I went on into the Room. Reggie and Mrs Witcher were both there. They had already set up an 'atmosphere'. This was another reason why I usually came in early.

'Good afternoon, Hilary!'

'Good morning.'

'I said, good afternoon!'

'He was beating it up last night with the Impiatts,' said Reggie.

'It's not Impiatts on Thursday, it's his girl friend.'

'No, it isn't, it's his girl friend tonight.'

'It's his girl friend on Thursday!'

'Hilary - Hilary - listen - isn't it your girl friend tonight?'

'I have no girl friend,' I said, settling down with my back to them and spreading out a case.

'Oh fib, fib, coy, coy!'

'Hilary's a mystery man, aren't you, Hilary?'

'He means it's his lady friend,' said Reggie. ' "Hello, hello, who's your lady friend" -'

'That's no lady, that's my - '

'Do shut up, there's good darlings,' I said.

'Oh good, it's one of Hilary's soft soap days.'

'No flying ink pots today.'

'Hilary, Hilaree, did Freddikins tell you about the panto?'

'Yes. You are to be Smee.'

'Hilary is to be the crocodile, only they haven't told him!'

'Hilary should just play himself, it would bring the house down!'

'I gather Edith is to be Wendy,' I said.

'Oh witty, witty, clever, clever!'

'No call to be sarky, Hilary, making inferred allusions to a lady's age!'

'Jenny Searle in Registry is to be Wendy, one of Reggie's numerous ex's.'

'No wonder they call me Divan the Terrible.'

'Reggie is feeling bronzed and fit after a plunge into the typing pool!'

'They haven't chosen Peter yet.'

'Fischy would make a good Peter, he hasn't reached puberty.'

'Isn't Peter usually played by a girl?' I said.

'Exactly! Fischy for Peter!'

'Shall we go and examine his organs?'

'Edith, you are awful!'

'We mustn't be nasty, after all Hilary and Fisch are sort of - aren't they?'

'That's no lady, that's my Fisch.'

'That's no lady, that's my Burde!' (Screams) 'Hilary is so mysterious.'

'Hilary never tells the truth.'

'Is that Directory enquiries? What number do I ring so as to have my telephone removed?'

'Why do you want your telephone removed, Hilo?'

'The girls won't leave him alone.'

'So as to have my telephone removed - '

'Fisch keeps ringing him and making improper suggestions.'

'Thank you.'

'Hilary, Hilaree , why do you want - ?'

'I want to have my telephone removed - '

'Hilary, why - '

'A post office engineer will call tomorrow?'

Skinker, the messenger, came in with the tea. Reggie Farbottom used to make the tea once, now of course no more. I could not prevent Arthur from making it sometimes, thereby bringing comfort to the Witcher interest. Arthur had no sense of status. Skinker was a gentle elongated creature who had been some sort of hero in a German prison camp and had later, or perhaps then, given himself to Christ. He was a lay preacher in an evangelical mission. He was the only person in the office who called me 'Mr Burde'. The downstairs porters despised me and called me nothing. I was 'Burde' (or sometimes 'Hilary') for ordinary purposes. Skinker's 'Mr' was a tender attention which I appreciated.

Perhaps I ought to describe the appearance of Edith Witcher and Reggie Farbottom; not that they are important, but they were at that time my daily bread. In our daily bondage what can be more preoccupying and ultimately influential than the voices of our fellow captives? How they go on and on: nothing perhaps, in sheer quantity, so fills up the head. I suppose there are situations where idle chatter adds to the good stuff of the world. It may be so in happy families. I knew nothing of that. My daily chatter-ration was a daily sin, and I knew it well. That which religious orders are so right to forbid. I lived in the Room in a kind of moral sludge into which I could not prevent myself from sinking. Given the possibilities of rage, silence, or repartee I usually chose the latter. Edith was a stoutish smartish lady of about fifty with hair dyed brown and cunningly waved to look wind-blown. She had a slightly hooked nose which gave her an air of distinction, and may indeed have been the secret of her success. She had little education and spoke in a loud would-be grand voice. As far as manner went, she might just have been a would-be fashionable head mistress. I suppose there was no harm in her if one could pardon her mind. Reggie sometimes called her Dame Edith. I sometimes called her that myself. I had descended a long way in the Room and was still going down. Reggie spoke in a, possibly put on, slightly Cockney voice. He was slight and fair and quite good-looking in a perky way, with a self-consciously funny expression, as if he were always about to tip his hat on one side and strike up a comic song. He and Mrs Witcher used to make endless jokes about sex. Practically any observation about sex could send them into fits. They giggled at life like a music hall audience who will laugh at anything. About myself of course I misled them steadfastly, offering false incompatible accounts of my past. And Crystal's existence I kept a dark secret from those gross intelligences. The fact that I had a sister would probably have seemed to them irresistibly amusing. At the idea that Arthur loved her they would never have stopped laughing. Another cue for dread.

I was able to continue my daily work perfectly well amid the almost endless stream of Reggie and Edith's 'wit'. My tasks, as I have explained, were not exacting. I got through three cases before lunch. I had never made any attempt to redeem the lunch hour. It remained a period of unmitigated gloom. I ate late so as to have at least the interest of hunger, and took a ham roll and half a pint of beer in a Whitehall pub. Round about three o'clock in the office was the worst time. At four Skinker brought in tea. Today (Friday, now in the afternoon), while Reggie and Mrs Witcher were discussing whether or not Clifford Larr wore a wig, I was writing a minute about a complex back-dated pay award and thinking about Tommy. In fact I had been thinking about Tommy ever since lunch. Friday was Tommy's day.

Tommy, as I should have perhaps explained earlier, was my mistress; though this awkward word scarcely conveys the odd relation in which she stood to me. 'Ex-mistress' would be more accurate in some ways, less truly descriptive in others. Tommy was a major phenomenon in my life. Tommy was, now, a crisis. Her name was of course Thomasina, and her whole name, which had struck me very much when I had first seen it on a theatre programme, was Thomasina Uhlmeister. Indeed I first became interested simply in the name. Uhlmeister was however an interloper who had married Tommy (nee Forbes) when she was eighteen and abandoned her when she was twenty. (Uhlmeister is not part of this story. Only his name got left behind.) Tommy was now thirty-four. She was Scottish. She spoke Scottish, she even contrived somehow to look Scottish. Her father, never visible, was a dispensing chemist in Fife. Tommy, in referring to him, always mentioned that he was a 'gentleman': presumably a Scotticism. Tommy's mother was dead and her elder brother had been killed in the war. Tommy herself was one of those casualties of a stage-struck childhood. (Ex-husband Uhlmeister had been an actor, I bet a rotten one.) She had originally, in a small provincial way, been trained as a dancer, but nothing came of that. She was a failed dancer, failed minor actress, failed deputy stage-manager, failed assistant scene-painter, failed unpaid typist, failed extra and Green Room dogsbody. She had been the sort of young person who would do anything at all for no money so as to go on living in that tawdry magic cave and breathing that stuffy perfumed air and racketing along with all that brittle gaudy caravanserai. Now no longer young, she earned a pittance by teaching 'drama' two days a week at a teachers' training college somewhere near King's Lynn.

Thomasina Uhlmeister was on the programme as assistant stage-manager. I met her at a party after the play. The play was a piece of Soviet Russian nonsense which had been translated into a piece of English nonsense and put on at a tiny Stalinist theatre, and I came into the picture because I had been asked to help with difficult points of the translation. So I appeared at the party garbed in a tiny bit of prestige, and there was long-legged Tommy. She had grey eyes. I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy's were clear and empty like light smoke. Their hue was transparent, as the hue of a clear sky. The purity of the pigment, a washed apotheosis of grey, was most unusual, a colour sample straight from God.

I cannot exactly say that I fell in love with Tommy immediately or indeed that I ever really fell in love with her at all. This was a subject for argument later. I noticed her eyes, her legs. My heart, in so far as, for these purposes, I had one, was in strict seclusion with another lady. And my more recent experiences of 'girls' had been mucky and brief and had persuaded me that I was indeed, as I had been early taught, unlovable. That Crystal loved me must be enough for my life, I often thought. It was not that I was in any way homosexual, though I sometimes attracted men. I liked girls all right, there were reactions. But as soon as I got anywhere near I began to fed nausea and they began to fed fright. It is only in books that a violent nature is attractive. (Not that I often behaved violently, but they could smell it.) I could never develop a language of tenderness. It was a matter of organs, and I wanted to get into bed and get it over with; and as I had not the temperament for this either I disgusted myself. So in practice there was not much of that, and for a while pre-Tommy, none.

Tommy, darling girl, was not only remarkable for her name and her legs and her lucid Cairngorms misty eyes. (Mist is perhaps a better image than smoke. Smoke suggests coils and movement, and although mist too can move it is more blandly uniform in colour; and there was not even the ghost of blue in Tommy's grey.) She was also exceptional in her heroic determination to love me. I suggested in the last paragraph that it was my rude and rugged nature that put women off, but there is more than a hint of self-protective romance in this explanation. Probably it was my face rather than my soul which repelled them. Alas how important this salient surface is, this notice board which the world looks at, and usually does not penetrate beyond. I had a charmless face. Nothing could redeem that nose (except I suppose plastic surgery). This is a singularly depressing fact to have to admit, and I would not have admitted it except out of justice to Tommy and to what I have called her heroism. I shall try to be just in telling the story, however unjust I am in the story told.

I put out a few mechanical lures to Mrs Uhlmeister, not meaning very much by them, and to my great surprise she began to love me and continued to do so. We became lovers. This was quite good. She made me trust her, and this trust set loose a lion of desire. There was a short time when I felt that I was, not cured, that could never be, but somehow soothed, somehow housed. Tenderness and gentleness and a loyal woman in one's bed. Tommy became a part of my life. She visited Crystal, she met Arthur; the Impiatts (until I put a stop to it) occasionally invited her out of curiosity. Then it all began, for me, to blow over, not for any particular reason. Perhaps I was just too puritanical to put up with an extramarital relationship for long. She had proposed marriage. I just laughed. I could not marry anyone because of Crystal.

This too was complicated and had become hideously more complicated since two things had happened, Crystal had passed her thirtieth year, and Arthur Fisch had come to love her. Crystal wanted a child. (So did Tommy. I shall come to that.) When she told me this or when (she never exactly told me) I realized it by means of the kind of telepathy which we used for communication, I was appalled. Of course the idea had been around that Crystal might marry. Why not? At Oxford I had even looked about a little for suitable paragons. But later, when it came to it, although I kept telling her she should marry, she could read my eyes, she could read those thought waves. This did not matter so much when we were still young and life was provisional. The notion that there was, for her, a time limit, filled me with anguish and with a kind of irritated disgust, and produced a quite different kind of problem. And then, so unfortunately, there was Arthur. In act Crystal had hardly ever had any serious beaux and was still a virgin. She was sweet, she was pure-hearted, but she was not in the least pretty. And she had always, all of her life, waited and waited and waited upon me.

'You've got a cold.'

'I haven't.'

'You have. You've got a cold and you're concealing it.'

'What makes you think I've got a cold?'

'It's obvious. Your cheek is hot. Your nose is red. Your lip is inflamed. You keep surreptitiously dabbing with that filthy handkerchief.'

'It isn't filthy!'

'Don't wave it at me. You know the rule about colds. I never see people with colds.'

'You and your stupid rules!'

'You've got a streaming cold. I'm going home.'

'Go then, go!'

Tommy lived in a lost region on the confines of Fulham and Chelsea, with distant hints of Putney, not far from the New King's Road, uncheered by the proximity of any tube station, in a little neat flat in a little neat house in a terrace of little neat houses, each with its tiny ornate portico and its tiny cracking flight of steps and its smelly basement full of dustbin litter. I usually reached her by walking from Parson's Green. I got to her place after seven, sometimes well after seven, as I had something to do before. This was another part of my routine. After leaving the office I would travel either to Sloane Square or to Liverpool Street to have a drink in the station buffet. In the whole extension of the Underground system those two stations are, as far as I've been able to discover, the only ones which have bars actually upon the platform. The concept of the tube station platform bar excited me. In fact the whole Underground region moved me, I felt as if it were in some sense my natural home. These two bars were not just a cosy after-the-office treat, they were the source of a dark excitement, places of profound communication with London, with the sources of life, with the caverns of resignation to grief and to mortality. Drinking there between six and seven in the shifting crowd of rush-hour travellers, one could feel on one's shoulders as a curiously soothing yoke the weariness of toiling London, that blank released tiredness after work which can somehow console even the bored, even the frenzied. The coming and departing rattle of the trains, the drifting movement of the travellers, their arrival, their waiting, their vanishing forever presented a mesmeric and indeed symbolic fresco: so many little moments of decision, so many little finalities, the constant wrenching of texture, the constant destruction of cells which shifts and ages the lives of men and of universes. The uncertainty of the order of the trains. The dangerousness of the platforms. (Trains as lethal weapons.) The resolution of a given moment (but which?) to lay down your glass and mount the next train. (But why? There will be another in two minutes.) Ah qu'ils sont beaux les trains manques! as I especially had cause to know. Then once upon the train that sense of its thrusting life, its intent and purposive turning which conveys itself so subtly to the traveller's body, its leanings and veerings to points of irrevocable change and partings of the ways. The tram of consciousness, the present moment, the little lighted tube moving in the long dark tunnel. The inevitability of it all and yet its endless variety: the awful daylight glimpses, the blessed plunges back into the dark; the stations, each unique, the sinister brightness of Charing Cross, the mysterious gloom of Regent's Park, the dereliction of Mornington Crescent, the futuristic melancholy of Moorgate, the monumental ironwork of Liverpool Street, the twining art nouveau of Gloucester Road, the Barbican sunk in a baroque hole, fit subject for Piranesi. And in summer, like an excursion into the country, the flowering banks of the Westbound District Line. I preferred the dark however. Emergence was like a worm pulled from its hole. I loved the Inner Circle best. Twenty-seven stations for fivepence. Indeed, for fivepence as many stations as you cared to achieve. Sometimes I rode the whole Circle (just under an hour) before deciding whether to have my evening drink at Liverpool Street or at Sloane Square. I was not the only Circle rider. There were others, especially in winter. Homeless people, lonely people, alcoholics, people on drugs, people in despair. We recognized each other. It was a fit place for me, I was indeed an Undergrounder. (I thought of calling this story The Memoirs of an Underground Man or just simply The Inner Circle.) Today, Friday, I had been at Sloane Square. The two stations are dissimilar, indeed in a sense opposites. Sloane Square has a simple bright modest up-to-date air which can cheer in a homely way, whereas Liverpool Street is menacing and metaphysical and vast. The bars differ too, in that at Liverpool Street you can actually stand on the platform with your drink, whereas at Sloane Square you watch the trains through a window. I had had the needful refreshment in the cosy bright retreat, and had arrived chez Tommy at half past seven. Tommy had a bit more sense of style than Crystal and her flat was comfortable and pretty in a muddled sort of way. She had a television set but covered it with a Cashmere shawl when I came. (I detest television. I am told that the average person now spends twelve years of his life watching it. No wonder the planet is done for.) Tommy childishly collected 'pretty things', cheap stuff from Japan and Hong Kong, Victoriana, junk shop sub-antiques, vases, plates, scrolls, fans, figurines, model animals, quaint unclassifiable entities which no one else wanted. Anything cheap and gaudy attracted her. (Hence the passion for the theatre.) The flat was crammed. (It was also speckless, spotless.) Perhaps, as for many unhappy women, simply shopping had become an addiction. She continually bought cheap jewellery, cheap clothes, never a serious garment which looked like anything, just a mish-mash of togs which she put on in random variations. Her hands were always covered in rings. I do not think that she possessed a dress. This evening she was wearing a garish yellow kilt and green tights and a long dark blue sweater with a leather belt and a necklace of black glass beads with a jet locket. She was slim and graceful but not especially good looking apart from her eyes and her legs. Her eyes were long and faintly almondesque, unlike Crystal's which were large and round like a cat's. Her legs were long and shapely. A woman's legs can be perfect: Tommy's were. I never told her so. I had to keep any advantage I could. Her face had lost the freshness of youth and the cheeks were slightly pockmarked. I found this quite attractive, though again I never told her so. Her hair was a mousy brown and hung about her in limp unravelling natural ringlets. She spoke with a mincing precision in a lightweight slightly Scottish voice. She had a fastidious little nose and a fastidious little mouth, features which could express a remarkable amount of sulky stubbornness and become thoroughly repulsive when they did so.

'Well, why aren't you going then? Why are you sitting there drinking when you've had enough to drink already judging by the smell of you? You do plague me, but you don't mean anything by it, do you? We're still us, aren't we, darling? Aren't we?'

'No,' I said. 'I don't think we are.'