Who was he, and where did he come from? He had always been there: he had known him as long as he had known Netta. And yet he knew nothing about him. Above all, what was there between these two, behind the appearance of there being nothing whatever? He believed, on the whole, that the appearance reflected the reality that there was nothing. But he never found them together without wondering.

He now glanced at Netta, to see if something in her appearance might enlighten him. But she gave nothing away as usual. She lay in the armchair holding a glass of beer on one of its sides, and looking into the gas-fire. She was hardly made up at all, and had an appearance of not having quite finished dressing. She was wearing her dark-brown knitted frock – one which contrived to give him, perhaps, more pain than any of her others – and instead of shoes she wore loosely some red slippers he had not seen before. These matched a red scarf she had put round her neck. He realized that the matching of these two – the red slippers with the red scarf – together with her dark brown dress, and dark eyes and hair – furnished the fresh ‘horror’ he had been awaiting. Although she was not made up, although she was untidy and not trying, she agonized him with the unholy beauty of her red scarf matching her red slippers on her dark self.

She looked, in point of fact, something more than untidy: she looked ill. And he had no doubt she was, very. She and Peter would certainly have been drinking heavily all over Christmas, and the hangover would now be at its dreariest. On countless occasions he had seen her like this, staring into her gas-fire at seven o’clock, waiting to go out and get lit up again. That gas-fire – what sinister, bleak misery emanated from its sighing throat and red, glowing asbestos cells! To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court.

On the mat in front of the fire was a quart bottle of Watney’s Ale. The room was in a state of disorder, and had not been dusted. There were ash-trays full of stubs all over the place, some unwashed, finger-smeared tumblers, and a tea-tray with cups full of old wet leaves. Mrs Chope had evidently not been in, and Netta never did anything for herself. The room, which she had taken furnished, contained a table, a sideboard, a radiogram, a large settee and two armchairs. A door led from it into her bedroom. You had to go out into the passage to the bathroom and a small kitchen.

‘Have some Pale Ale,’ said Netta, pointing to the bottle with a kick of her red-slippered foot, ‘you’ll find a glass somewhere.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and fetched a glass from the sideboard and came back to fill it on the mantelpiece.

‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘how’s Hunstanton? Bracing as ever?’

‘Most,’ he said. ‘Well – here’s how.’ And he drank.

‘And did your efforts result in pecuniary advantage,’ asked Peter, ‘as predicted?’

‘Yes. Most successful.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten pounds.’

‘Ah. Good work.’

They knew he had gone to Hunstanton to get money from his aunt – to ‘touch’ her. They had all, and that included himself, made a joke of it. But now, remembering the friendly kindly woman who had given him the money, who had offered him her seaside hospitality and tried to please him and be ‘modern’ by giving him ‘cocktails’, he was ashamed. That quite pleasant and not undignified little week-end was now lost and to be forgotten for ever – converted into a small, cynical joke, to be offered up to the beast Peter and the cruel, dissipated Netta on the altar of a gas-fire in Earl’s Court.

‘You must have been having one of your brighter periods,’ said Netta.

‘Yes. I was quite bright.’

‘Not in one of your famous stooge moods?’ said Peter.

‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘ “stooge” moods?’

He knew, of course, what Peter meant. He meant one of his dumb moods, his ‘dead’ periods. But he had to ask him what he meant out of politeness to respond to the fairly friendly raillery which Netta and Peter had begun.

‘Oh,’ said Peter, ‘just “stooge” moods.’

‘What is a “stooge”, anyway?’ he asked.

‘A dumb person,’ said Netta in her precise, firm voice.