They were very noisy, and they couldn’t pay for their drinks. The man who had been going to pay had left his money in a car, and somebody else had taken the car, or something like that. He had buttered in and paid. He was as tight as they were. He had paid again and again, amidst their laughing and incredulous applause. Then the man somehow got back his car and his money, and they stood him drinks, and they were all bosom pals. She was there with them, of course, but he didn’t think she was so terribly attractive at first. He just noticed that she was frightfully smart, striking, actressy. He didn’t really begin to notice her till closing time. Then, as they stood outside on the pavement with bottles of beer under their arms, it was decided that they should go up to her flat and play shove-halfpenny.

It was not until they were up in her flat that anything happened. The three actors were crowding over the board, garrulous and absorbed in their game: but he was sitting with her on the settee, quietly and reasonably talking. She was telling him about herself, the small part she was playing in the film. Then it happened. At one moment she was just something he was talking to and looking at; at the next she was something of which he was physically sensible by some means other than that of sight or sound: she was sending out a ray, a wave, from herself, which seemed to affect his whole being, to go all through him like a faint vibration. It was as though she were a small amateur wireless station, and he alone was tuned in to her and listening. And the message she was tapping out was, of course, her loveliness. Not that he was tremendously moved by what was happening: he merely appreciated the fact that it was happening, and was slightly excited – excited, perhaps, as much by the novelty of the experience as by anything else. She continued talking, and he answered her clearheadedly, and all the time she was talking and all the time he was answering, he was ‘listening in’…

He knew now that those moments on the settee began it all, that he was head over heels in love with her as soon as he had a moment to be near her and look at her, but he had no idea at the time. The party broke up at about half past one. He chivalrously helped her break it up, because she had said she was short of sleep. It was only casually, almost fortuitously, that he arranged to see her again. ‘Well, don’t we meet again or something?’ he said as they all staggered in the doorway, and she said they certainly would if he frequented the ‘Rockingham’. ‘Well, I’ll be in there at twelve tomorrow. Why don’t you come along?’ – ‘Right,’ she said, ‘that’s a date.’ – ‘Right – twelve o’clock tomorrow,’ she said as he went down the stone stairs, and he didn’t believe either of them was serious.

But when he awoke next morning he remembered his novel listening-in experience of the night before, and trying, not quite successfully, to recapture it in his mind, developed a longing to recapture it in reality. He didn’t expect her to turn up at the ‘Rockingham’, but he decided he must see her again by some means or another. He went to the ‘Rockingham’ at twelve and to his amazement she arrived five minutes later. He at once saw that she was incredibly beautiful, and that he was wildly in love.

He had money, then, of course, and he was spending it. It was just after he had had that mad streak of luck with his Pools, and had made two hundred pounds in a single week. He had that blue suit, too, and those shirts from Jermyn Street. He must have looked prosperous, and behaved prosperously.