It was, as usual in London about that time of the year, endeavouring to snow. There had been a hard frost for days, in fact it was so cold that in any other country it would have snowed long ago. The sky was a constipated mass, yellowed by the fog, suspended over a city awaiting the Deluge. It was eight-thirty in the morning. The streets of Rotting Hill were like Pompeii with Vesuvius in catastrophic eruption, a dull glare, saffronish in colour, providing an unearthly uniformity. The self-centred precipitancy of the bowed pedestrians resembled a procession of fugitives.

    Mark Robins was standing at his bathroom window. His eye followed with displeasure the absurdly ominous figures moving under mass-pressure to be there at nine o’clock, passing on through the hollow twilit streets towards the swarming undergrounds. It was the urgency that jarred, their will-to-live as a machine.

    He could see into the lighted baker’s shop. The lady known in his private mind as “bum-face” arranged yesterday’s and of course the day before yesterday’s pastry in the window. Whenever he saw the old pastries ranged in the window he thought of that air of uprightness and invincible integrity owned by the little master-baker. Why were his loaves the least white, the greyest, of any in Rotting Hill? He held very strong opinions on the subject of the socialist administration: perhaps cause and effect. His bread became as hard as a brick within forty-eight hours. It became like that in the stomach too if you failed to expel it promptly. This baker’s views on the socialist government were as forcible as a pick-pocket’s are regarding the police force, only the baker’s had the added force of moral indignation.

    Then, as Mark idly watched, “Fringe” (in his private mind she was known as that) erect and white in her chemist’s uniform, came out of Willough’s. She moved like clockwork, as steady as the swan on the surface of the lake. Whenever she turned she turned abruptly at right-angles with the precision of a Royal Marine. She had been a she-soldier. Mark approved of “Fringe”, and regretfully noted how she stopped, pivoted to face at right-angles, and entered the baker’s shop (as she did every morning) and selected an ageing pastry. However, she worked in a chemist’s and no doubt kept her bowels open.

    In several windows of the lofty Victorian houses—all Private Hotels—where the diligent refugees of Rotting Hill were already at work on their biographies of Goethe or of Meyerbeer, there was electric light. The silversmith and diamond merchant was (typical of his class! thought Mark) the latest riser of the tradesmen of Rotting Hill. The last snores of the night blew out of his nostrils upon the little fluttery moustache as his head lay on the pillow beside that of Mrs. Silversmith. Both the Silversmiths and Mark had a low opinion of the other’s morale: their flats so situated that nothing that went on in one was exactly a closed book for the other—especially in view of the prohibitive cost of material for curtains and the veils that in happier times shroud our domestic interiors.

    Mark withdrew from the window. He sighed. He did not know why he sighed. But a large white “Ascot heater” stood in a corner of the bathroom which no longer produced hot water. Three months earlier the mechanic of the gas service had called for the routine clean-up. Since then it had been out of action. Mark boiled some water in the kitchen and washed: then he filled the kettle again, and again put it on to boil. After that he went to his guest’s room, knocked at the door, and put his head inside.

    “Charles! Stop dreaming and get up. I have put some water on to boil for you.”

    “Thank you, Mark. Whooah!” Charles yawned.

    “You slept well?”

    “Perfectly.”

    “Good.”

    “Whooah.”

    As he went to his room Mark was smiling. “Whooah!” was so like Charles. Seeing Charles in bed “whooahing” had caused him for some reason to think of Ida Dyat, Charles’s sister. He thought of her, as he always did, in repose. Action was not her element: so, though on horseback her hair was dramatic as a maenad’s, he preferred to think of the stationary cloud of dull gold as she lay back in an armchair reading a book. The indolent red lips he would see for preference at their most indolent, when she had been too lazy to smile and had smiled with her eyes instead—which was less trouble. Her beauty was preraphaelite at its best, brooding or dreaming in some equivalent of the mirror of the Lady of Shalott.

    It was a certain inactivity in Ida’s composition which attracted him most, and it was that, too, that accounted for his romantic attachment remaining in a state of abortive repression, contained within the forms of youthful camaraderie: Mark being one of those men who needed, if not to be hunted by the female, at least to be reminded that women are sexual phenomena. But always a warm wind from the past rushed into his mind when he had, as now, these images

    of her. Then the image suddenly dissolved, his smile faded. For Ida must be a hag of forty-five, he thought. Thinking of Ida as greying and pathetic was so immensely distasteful that he began moving quickly and noisily about. Old Charles stopped young though, he thought. “Whooah.” Mark smiled again.

    But he soon forgot Charles’s sea-lion cry, for he became grimly absorbed in dressing. His bedroom was a far more efficient refrigerator than the “Ascot heater” was a heater. However, the Briton regards chilliness as next to godliness. Mark would have been quite as displeased had the refrigerator failed as he had been at the defection of the “heater”.

    Taking a fresh shirt out of the drawer he identified it—as the one with the smallest buttonholes of any. This abnormality was revealed by all new shirts to some degree. With the shirt in question the buttons refused to go in. Each buttonhole had to be forcibly entered, the one at the top entailing as much sometimes as five minutes strenuous thumbing. Unquestionably this afforded him that grim satisfaction the Briton experiences when senseless obstacles are placed in his way or life bristles with purposeful mischance, all food for his “grit”. But in this case there was another factor: namely the credit and good name of a socialist Britain. Probably it would prove a better advertisement if British manufacturers turned out serviceable shirts—easy to button up and with such conveniences as are prized by self-indulgent foreigners. It was like our taxation. Few foreigners understood that. Taxes such as we can stand up to would cause a revolution anywhere else. Only we have the guts to “take it”. Besides, the obvious explanation of the smallness of these buttonholes aroused Mark’s party-zeal: the motive was profit. It saved labour and time in the factory to make them small. It was a relief to one’s feelings to reflect that the days were numbered of “free enterprise” shirt manufacture.

    Even the best shirts tended to shrink and the buttonholes lost width in the wash quite as much as the sleeves lost length, if only a little. But the button naturally was unaffected. Any slight dilation of the buttonholes attendant upon the constant passage, in and out, of the button, was less than its shrinkage in the wash. It had of course occurred to Mark to purchase a few dozen shirt buttons, smaller than those on the shirt. But although there were many sorts of buttons in the shops, shirt-buttons (oddly enough) were practically unobtainable.

    As he pulled on a sock one of his fingernails caught in the wool. With an almost new pair of nail-scissors he attempted to cut off the chipped nail. But the scissors were already loose and of a metal formerly unknown to cutlery. The nail was bent by them, it was not severed. He fell back on his nail-file. After a little he gave that up, and stuck a band-aid over the nail.

    The quality of all goods supplied by the sundriesmen had inevitably deteriorated. Then he knew about the small piratic factories that turned out the defective steel goods, inundating England with gimcrack merchandise, and felt grateful that their days were numbered in a collectivist society.

    Mark was superstitious. To start the day in slippers appeared to him almost an ill-omen. The shoes on which his choice fell, on this occasion, were his recently-acquired £5 brown pair. Of these he was still rather proud—an emotion the shoes were not fitted to inspire. And Charles had assured him that there was no pair of shoes to be had worth putting on your feet under seven pounds ten.

    With these shoes he invariably attempted, completely without success, to tie a bow. The shoelaces were too short. In England today the statutory length for shoelaces is fourteen inches. It is illegal to supply laces longer than that. Mark was not aware that he had to thank the Government for this idiotic difficulty, and put it down to some dishonest manufacturer selling short weight on the plea of a non-existent “shortage”. As usual, for all his stout finger-work, he got nothing but a solitary loop, one for the left foot, one for the right.

    He rose to his feet, the petty frustrations involved in the act of dressing done with. A tweed jacket hung from a peg. No peasant weaver could ever have been responsible for the vulgarity of the colour. Mark, who had paid twenty pounds for it, eyed it dubiously. It was about the maximum price for a ready-made tweed. All first-quality tweeds, of course, must be reserved for export. But why (the question had once forced its way into Mark’s mind) need what was left for the home-market be so ugly and vulgar?

    Another question: Why should all ready-made jackets, cardigans, jumpers, be made for small and frail men? Mark was tall and muscular, so that question it would have been inhuman to ignore. But it was easily answered, too. Far less material was required for a small man or a child than for someone of Mark’s size. Consequently the manufacturers preferred to think that Englishmen, with a few exceptions, are stunted and emaciated.

    Mark took the jacket off the hanger and a phoney smell of ersatz peat assailed his nostrils. It was with no possessive glow he put on this practically new garment and as he left the bedroom he registered depression. He could not guess why sans amour et sans haine his heart was so full of a low-grade pain.

    There was no sound of Charles, so he went into the kitchen to prepare the breakfast. He took the “Strachey loaf”, as Charles cheaply called it, out of the bread tin. Officially it was one day old, but when he applied the bread-saw it was like sawing brick. He sawed off four slices and grilled them two at a time. The kettle had been refilled and was acquiring a little heat. He threw the remainder of his butter-ration into the repast, added a few pinches of alleged Darjeeling to the pseudo-Ceylon in the teapot: placed on the tray the two dishes of cereal, a teaspoonful of sugar for each. Sugar was always a bad shortage with him. He took down a jar marked “Strawberry Jam”, recognized by housewives as mainly pectin and/or carrot pulp, given appropriate local colour of course and flavour to match. There was neither nourishment nor pleasure to be had from it. Charles appeared, yawning and smiling.

    “Why no Mrs. Bristers?” he enquired.

    “Oh, she does not come when I have ’flu.”

    “Why?”

    “Because—I believe this is the reason—Mrs. Bristers thinks I am putting it on. Swinging the lead.”

    “When you quit malingering she comes back.”

    “Yes. Of course she malingers herself meanwhile. She calls off her malinger as soon as I announce my recovery.”

    “Anything I can do,” Charles said, “in Mrs. Bristers’ absence?”

    He was given the kettle to carry.

    “How do you feel this morning?” The guest put the question.

    Mark hesitated a moment. “Depressed!” he confided. “Unaccountably depressed.”

    They both moved into the living-room, the lightly laden Charles in the van.

    “What a poisonous day,” Charles shouted, and the room was in fact so dark that when a match was struck to light the gas-fire it was like a miniature firework display.

    “A bit of fog,” Mark conceded with didactic firmness.

    Where the weather was concerned Mark was always on the defensive, because people were apt to blame the Government for the weather. Then, he had a feeling that very bad weather (of which there was an awful lot) was, in fact, compromising in a brave new day.

    They sat down facing one another and Mark poured out the tea.

    “Ah, that is a capital idea.” Charles picked up a piece of toast and examined it. “The dreadful bread arrives disguised as good old-fashioned toast.”

    “Let’s see, you like sugar?” Mark looked up, a cube poised above the cup.

    “If you think it won’t spoil the tea!”

    Mark laughed. Even a bureaucrat laughs sometimes on such occasions, as a clergyman would consider it politic to laugh at not too coarse an anecdote. Besides, he was fond of tea. “It is certainly not good tea,” he said in a firm voice. “I have tried to coax some decent tea out of my grocer. But I really believe he had none.”

    “Have you tipped him?”

    “Good gracious no!” Mark protested.

    Charles shook his head, dogmatically flourishing a piece of toast. “I am afraid you cannot expect to get anything if you don’t oil their palms.”

    Mark’s was a damp smile.

    “Do you,” he enquired, “go around oiling everyone’s palm? I know that is done. But it does not strike me as very nice. You may get the lion’s share that way but it is the behaviour of a less noble animal. I will not say a rat.”

    “A pig, you think, eh!” Charles laughed, drinking with relish. “Best to drink this stuff while it is so hot you can’t taste it.”

    Since Mark had worked at the Ministry of Education and since Charles had become a farmer of a rather lurid black-market type, they had started arguing differently. In their discussions in the old days nothing more concrete or subjective, as a rule, was touched on than the present Catholic revival or the currency of the Incas. Also when, in easy-going debate, Charles’s opinion prevailed, Mark did not mind in the least. Today, however, he would defend his position, at times, almost acrimoniously, particularly where the issue was political. This was very unMark like.

    Mark Robins and Charles Dyat had known one another as schoolboys, been at Marlborough, then at Oxford together. Neither had formed any close friendship except this one of theirs. But its rationale was not likemindedness. Charles was what is labelled “a leader-type”. Mark had little taste for responsibility. These two facts alone may have provided the essential ingredients for a friendship.

    Theirs was not quite the comic marriage-of-opposites, instances of which are so common. Leaving aside physical contrast—Charles who was fair, being only of middling height and Mark being a tall black-haired man—Charles looked at life from a certain social eminence (an imaginary one), whereas Mark was uninterested in social distinctions. Where intellectual distinctions are concerned he was rather romantic, from which circumstance Charles had benefited. Charles he considered very brilliant, unquestionably destined for great things. Again, were one to investigate and collate, their roots would reveal a common soil exploited to different ends. Both came from the prosperous professional middle class: but Charles’s father had been a successful and a pretentious country lawyer, who ran at one time a butler and footman, his large house, Tadicombe Priory, standing in half a dozen acres of pseudo-park, a small satellite farm completing the picture: Mark’s father, on the other hand, was a Manchester doctor with a big practice, with neither time nor inclination to emulate his most snooty patients.

    So the conversation had taken the acrimonious turn it nowadays was always liable to do. Mark ate his handful of cereal, inadequately sweetened with the teaspoonful of sugar (although the Jamaicans were starving because nobody wanted their sugar-cane). Charles noisily tested the friability of a blackened and gritty crust, smeared with ersatz jam. Then Charles sat back, and after a minute or two took up again the question of tipping.

    “Of course I go around oiling palms,” he began aggressively. “Your masters don’t need to—they have their farms like Stalin’s commissars and their privileges. But you and I have to exude pourboires or our health would suffer. You can’t live on one ration book without tipping. Tipping is the black market of the poor.”

    Mark no longer hesitated to recognize the political gulf which yawned and gaped between them. Charles smiled his tough gay smile, belonging to his cavalier complex, as he glanced into the yawning chasm. The white hairs in his brushed-off-the-mouth moustache were not numerous enough to make it “gray”, the gold-gray of the temples he kept clipped. In the yellow gloom he sat up, eyes dancing, a gallant little daguerreotype darkened by the fog of time. Mark returned his gaze, with a bit of a waver, across the grim period-piece of sham-tea, sham-jam, “processed” butter, grey bread scorched into toast. He admired, as he had always done, the lawless eye, the witty mouth.

    Charles was too monotonously destructive, however: he had an individualist itch to pick holes, in Mark’s phrase. Where Mark would be apt to respect the most pernicious by-law, Charles would be quite certain to break it. Was he not (in imagination) of the class that made the laws? As part of his synthetic “aristocratic” outfit he despised all laws and the law-abiding. But the great social changes since 1945 of necessity complicated the role of the synthetic “aristocrat”. Charles was towered over by a hostile Zeitgeist. Mark saw quite well this menacing shadow looming over his friend as he argued: for the natural lawgiver had become a potential outlaw.

    “In our young days, Mark,” Charles said softly, “it was you, you know, who were the little Tory, I the little radical. Do you remember?”

    Mark agreed that he had been a dreadful reactionary and that Charles had been most frightfully advanced. “A perfect devil, in fact!” he laughed a little derisively.

    Charles pushed his cup towards the teapot. “May I have some more of that bloody tea? Yes, you were quite shocked at my red tie.”

    “I was!”

    Flushed and animated, Charles had laid aside his imperious technique—he had chosen to soothe and to charm. For the second time that morning Charles forcibly recalled his sister—the submerged sexual asset in this friendship was brought into play. Mark softened at once in response: and it was with eyes still moist that he looked up and cooperated in recalling the pleasurable absurdities of undergraduate youth. “You did really alarm me at one time,” he confessed. “We nearly parted company for ever on the subject of Trotsky, for whom you had a most irrational admiration. Do you, I wonder, retain any vestige of that obsession?”

    “He would be better than this lot!” Charles answered. He emptied his cup. “For what we have received by gracious permission of the Ministry of Food may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

    “Amen,” said Mark. Charles lighted a cigarette, then rather abruptly he announced:

    “No, I am no Tory. I am just a defeatist.”

    Frown lines returned to Mark’s forehead, he bent a questioning eye upon the peccant Charles.

    “You should not be that,” he said.

    “Why not?” Charles asked, with amiable truculence. “We are not going to win the Peace on monkey-nuts and black bread, whether as socialists or Churchillites. I suppose I am, after all, not defeatist. I don’t want England to degenerate into a slum, presided over by a sanctimonious official class. If I despaired as you do and sold out to Beelzebub, then I should complain no more of course—I should say yes to bad tea, to bad bread, to the purchase-tax, to the income tax, to no petrol, to three-and-sixpence for cigarettes, and to a doctrine of servile submission.”

    “If you think it is the way to win the Peace, Charles—to use your ridiculous expression—to find fault…?”

    But Charles broke in impatiently.

    “Of course one must find fault, Mark. You work for them, that is another matter. But why on earth should I swallow their rotten tea, and smoke their extortionately-priced cigarettes (two shillings and tuppence of the three-and-sixpence goes to the Government) and say it is heaven? Besides, mankind cannot dispense with fault finding, or call it by its proper name, criticism. If an inventor were enraptured with every model he produced, even his first rough draught, if he dispensed with the principle of trial and error—if he tested but never discarded—he would not get very far.”

    “Nor would he if he listened to every ignorant suggestion.”

    “The trouble is that all the experts are outside, not inside, the Government and its committees.”

    “Quite untrue, but go on.”

    “These people are not trying, however, that is my main complaint. They have in mind something quite different from a prosperous society. They have in mind an abject society. When you and I yearn for good tea and for white bread, that is ‘reactionary’.”

    “Which is utter nonsense, Charles. There is a world food crisis. I am sorry, but there is.”

    “Do you really believe that? Are you incapable of using your reason, have they deprived you of that, my poor Mark?”

    “No. It is not I who am irrational…”

    Charles gathered himself for an assault upon the citadel of Unreason, and Mark, smiling nervously, manned the walls.

    “I am as sure as that I am sitting in this chair—it seems to me self-evident, that the most irksome of the restrictions and shortages are not economic but ideologic; political. A Government which wanted to create an atmosphere differing from that of a Poor House, which is what we experience, could do so without risk of any kind to its economic stability. Why is there no rationing in Switzerland, a country which imports proportionately just as much food as we do? Why are things more ‘normal’ in France, Italy, Belgium, Holland? The answer is that our rulers do not wish for a return to normality. They desire to maintain abnormality and ‘crisis’. Even in Western Germany there is much more food than here.”

    They had both pushed their chairs back a little from the table, the glow from their cigarettes sometimes lit up their faces in the yellow gloom, which the electric light did not banish.

    “Is it really necessary for me to point out why England appears worse off than neighbouring countries?” Mark asked testily. “It is easy enough to explain, and it is very much to her credit that she does so appear.”

    “Oh, yeees?”

    “Yes. In other west European countries Marshall Aid has reached the top crust only, the idea being that it would somehow, some of it, trickle down to the bottom. A return to normal luxury was in that way rapidly achieved. You mentioned Western Germany. The most dreadful contrasts exist there—of a new Schiebertum in stark contrast with an indescribable poverty. They have just fixed prices so high that only the rich can buy the best food—and then they abandon rationing! So could we easily if we were so inhumane as to adopt that method! In England rationing stopped the well-off from getting all the food. It is a façade of immoral luxury in Paris that makes the French seem ‘better off’ than the English to the tourist. Underneath the gilded crust those countries are worse off. You ought to know better than to believe…”

    “So ought you, so ought you!” Charles yelled delightedly, waving his hands. “Don’t you believe all that stuff about a thin gilded top crust, with famine underneath. In Paris restaurants frequented by taxi-drivers you feed better than at the Savoy. Anywhere in France one can eat far better, far more, and far cheaper, than here in England. And there is no filthy purchase-tax either. You forgot to mention that!”

    “Really old chap…!”

    “Be patient. We English are in the presence of a Great Design. The big idea is to push this people down to a living-plane strictly that of the average manual worker. That is the first phase. When they have us tied up with controls so that we cannot move hand or foot and have drugged us with dogmas, the idea is to push the entire mass down lower yet, to a carefully regulated peonage, paid possibly with scrip, all shops state-owned. Nothing must stick up above the primitive level decreed except the Party. Even such tiny protuberances as us, Mark, with our hankering after good tea (of the old middle-class days) are an offence. The ‘crisis’ atmosphere is of the same kind as the wartime black-out. All are now agreed that the black-out was grossly overdone in England if not totally pointless. It was ‘atmosphere’. This tasteless tea is atmosphere. So is that ghastly bread!”

    Mark had been listening more attentively at last, but his expression became much more severe. He examined his friend—the eloquent moustachioed mouth, the eager ideologic eye, the inflexion of the “county”: he watched as if engaged in making a diagnosis, with a patient who revealed symptoms more and more disquieting. As Charles stopped his host suddenly stood up.

    “Charles, you are hopeless,” Mark told him quietly—in a tone in which a doctor would wind up, “and I fear it is malignant.”

    “Incurable. I am chronically sick of the present Government.”

    “Where on earth did you collect all those batty beliefs? A Great Design! Socialists are sparing you, Charles, the exquisite inconveniences of a bloody revolution.”

    “Fiddlesticks. Like Kerensky they are paving the way for communism.”

    Mark shook his head.

    “You get your politics from the Daily Express.” He stretched. “I am going to get my mail.”

    “Postman doesn’t bring it up any more—pops it in a box downstairs—have to fetch it yourself—serve you right!” Charles chanted, lying back, his face to the ceiling and puffing derisive smoke through his moustache.

    Mark stopped at the door. “Egotist! Why should that poor devil climb fifty flights of flat-stairs every morning and get varicose veins and fallen arches!”

    “He did before!” Charles called after him. “And—he’s varicosed already. His feet are as flat as a pancake!”

    Mark roared back from the stair-head. “You will be a postman yourself in your next incarnation.”

    “Not going to have any more lives,” howled Charles. “This life is quite enough for me!”

    When Mark got back, muttering “excuse me” he tore open a buff envelope, glanced at the contents and hastened to the telephone. He dialled a number and waited. With an irritable sigh he hung up and redialled. After a minute or so he rehung and dialled a single number.

    Charles laughed. “Telephone not working this morning? The Exchange will see what they can do! Dial O.”

    “Will you try and get me Whitehall 6688?… Yes, I have dialled twice. There was absolutely no sound… Thank you.” (A long pause.) “Number engaged? But there are twenty lines at least… Thank you.” (A long pause.) “What?… The number is Whitehall 6688 not Whitechapel 8866… No, it is not 8866… All right.”

    During this pause Charles chattered. “It keeps a lot of people out of mischief playing telephones. An American woman wrote to my paper the other day that it took longer to get through to Brighton than to Buffalo, New York.”

    Mark was speaking at the telephone. “Yes. I am having a blood test at twelve o’clock… No, they think it is all right… I will. I will mail it tonight.”

    Mark looked at his watch, quickly dialled again. Then he exploded.

    “Are you Temple Bar 5032 or not!… Oh, 8976. I see. Sorry.” He rehung and dialled again. A short pause.

    “What is your number?… Not 8976 again!… Oh damn. Sorry.”

    Mark rehung and dialled a single number.

    “The symbolical number Zero!” observed Charles as he went to the door. “You are showing the Dunkirk spirit, stout fellow. You haven’t left your post at the telephone. You have to vacate all numbers except Zero. So you go and live with good old Zero. Why not always dial O? Why have any truck with anything but Zero?”

    Ten minutes later Mark was setting off, a brown paper parcel held against the stomach. Charles joined him.

    “Going to be bled?” said he.

    “If you care to call it that.”

    “Just what you need as a matter of fact, bleeding.”

    “You think so, Charles?”

    “What we all have to put up with, you deny the existence of. You bottle up the curses to which I give vent! You suppress more than I spit out. One of these fine days at that rotten old telephone you will explode, the bad blood you bottle up will tear you apart—bang!”

    Mark laughed. “You have got it all wrong! The telephone staff are…”

    “Wonderful—I know, I know, all ought to have a Victoria Cross and a Nobel Prize. And so ought you—so ought you! Come along and be bled—quick.”

    Outside the flat-door before pulling it shut, Mark stood still and fixed an Ancient Mariner-like eye upon Charles.

    “Let me tell you something, Charlie!”

    “Yes?”

    “All the intelligent people I know—intelligent, Charles, intelligent—are socialists. They have discovered suddenly that they are socialists.”

    “You mean all the smart alecks.”

    “Oh no. For it is stupid, Charles, to be a little black-marketeer. Not very intelligent, Charles!” And Mark poked Charles with a stiff forefinger.

    “And, Mark, my lad!” Charles poked an expressive forefinger into Mark’s midriff. “The winning side, eh! Cowardy cowardy custard!”

    Mark growled with sporting glee and his eyes sparkled as he flattened the tip of his square-headed forefinger upon Charles’s chest. “Not so, Robin Hood! Not so Dick Turpin! You will end with a price on your head!”

    “Ha! And your head”—and Charles flattened his forefinger upon Mark’s cheekbone—“won’t fetch a farthing if it ever comes up in a witches’ auction. This yes-man’s skull one farding! No bids.”

    “I suppose, Charlot, you pat yourself on the back,” and Mark flattened his forefingertip on Charles’s arm. “You outwit the police, yes? Rich Americans get their black-market eggs, illegal rashers, and what not, thanks to good little Charlie! Fine intelligent work, what!”

    “And you, my smart man,” Charles poked him pointedly with his finger, “you have one egg a week and crow as though the millennium were here!”

    And they went shouting down the stairs, jabbing each other mirthfully with their forefingers.

    During the remainder of that day the two friends might be found in various parts of the town, up to 11 p.m. when they returned to Rotting Hill. Their cab took them up Wimpole Street on the way to the Heppel Laboratories. As they ascended one of the two celebrated streets of costly medicine-men Charles reacted characteristically to his surroundings. “The art of medicine,” he said, “will decay in this country. The National Health Act writes finis to fine work in surgery and dentistry, and doctors will sink to the status of druggists—with more responsibility and less pay.” To which Mark replied, “Charles—rubbish! When medicine ceases to be a profitable racket as it is at present it will be far better placed to make real advances. They may even discover a cure for the common cold.”

    The man with the dirty white clinical-coat who let them in said: “I suppose it’s for a blood-draw?” “I imagine so,” said Charles. “My friend is badly in need of a letting.” The man himself looked like a blood-donor in the last stages of pernicious anaemia, but he was a hectically talkative Cockney.

    When Mark’s turn came to go in to be “drawn” he expected to find himself in a laboratory, spectacularly antiseptic, white jars and tubes containing human blood, labelled and ready for diagnosis, lined up on glass shelves. The tools for “the draw” would be much in evidence. But this was a Socialist dream. What actually happened was so much the reverse that Mark supposed a preliminary interview was considered necessary.

    A dingy sitting-room of the Trollope period was where he found himself. No vacuum cleaner ever came near the dusty shelves and decrepit leather arm-chairs. The doctor would have been all the better for a little mechanical suction too. But he was unmistakably a doctor: he invited Mark, with great urbanity and kindness, to take off his jacket and to be seated near him beside an untidy desk: and when they were both smilingly seated close together by the desk he invited Mark to roll up a sleeve. This was it, then!

    The doctor, still smiling, examined Mark’s left and right arms, well stocked with muscles and fat. “I think we will take it from the finger,” he announced with quiet affability—he could not have spoken more softly or smiled with better breeding. “Your hands are very cold,” the doctor remarked sympathetically. And indeed, the room was so cold that Mark’s hands were like ice rather than flesh. The doctor was evidently used to this complication. He led his case to a wash-basin. There the hands were practically boiled, and they both went back to the chairs again. The doctor smiled with exquisite courtesy and kindness. “Warmer now!” he said. “Yes. The hands are,” said Mark. The doctor apologetically took his right hand and gently stroked the middle finger with a piece of wet cotton wool. Then rather unexpectedly he jabbed an instrument deep into the ball of the fingertip.

    The doctor drew out the instrument and proceeded to squeeze the hole he had made quite viciously. He murmured a complaint about the paucity of blood, then jabbed his instrument in again. “Sorry!” he murmured (he was a very perfect gentleman) and started squeezing again and collecting the red trickle.

    “My blood,” said Mark, “refuses to visit so exposed an outpost of my body. It lurks in the well-covered trunk until I get into a warmer room. Then it may come out.”

    The doctor smiled gently and indulgently as he fixed on the band-aid and said “I am so sorry the room is not warmer. When we throw out this Government, Mr. Robins…!” Mark looked at him severely as he put his jacket on and very coldly observed: “It is not the Government that is to blame, sir, as you know quite well! Good day.” As they were being shown out by the hysterical anaemic Cockney with the dirty white coat, Mark enquired, “Is this a National Health Service place?” to which the answer came with a laugh. “No, sir… not by a long shot. We do have National Health Service patients, sir, when the other laboratories are flooded out as I might say with them. Let me see, yes, sir, there was one of them this morning, sir.” Charles burst into a laugh which caused the doorman to jump almost out of his dirty white coat.

    “I,” said Mark sternly, “am that National Health Service patient. I shall immediately report the filthy condition of this place, and the lamentable disregard of sepsis. Why do you not send that coat to the wash? Good morning!”

    Charles remained on the doorstep holding his sides, which a gargantuan laugh threatened to split. He stamped about gasping for breath.

    “You are growing into an idiot!” said Mark.

    “But I would not have missed that for anything. ‘Why don’t you send it to the wash?’ Ha, ha! Sublime! The Welfare State in action. An informer!” And he pointed at his friend a trembling finger. “Snooper!”

    “Shut up.” Mark walked smartly away.

    But Mark had not lost Charles. As he entered the marble halls of the Richelieu near Piccadilly, Charles was at his side—or he was at Charles’s. This most famous establishment has always specialized in poor food. But the grill room lunch was a carefully calculated insult to the British palate, delivered by a staff of deaf but noisy Italians, who flung the plates down on the table, and rushed away, deaf to the protests which at once arose. The “soupe brésilienne” was dirty yellow water, the “foie braisée mode de Mayence” was literally a piece of blackened shoe-leather, the “pommes soufflées Richelieu” had never “blown” and tasted of last month’s fats, and the “baba au rhum” had no rum and was not a baba. The coffee tasted so rancid and bitter that one sip was more than enough.

    “If you put a five shilling ceiling on what may be charged for a meal…” said Charles in answer to Mark’s muttered apology, lighting a cigarette. “A man has to live.”

    “He does not have to live at the expense of the community. This is bad behaviour!”

    “Report ’em!” Charles winked at him.

    Mark eyed the wine list with distaste. “What will you have, Charles?” They had a double “Fine Maison” and Mark spoke of Ida. “I was thinking the other day,” he said, “we haven’t met since…when was it? Being out of England most of the war years in the East damages one’s time-sense, deflates the perspectives or something.”

    “It was 1936 I believe, down at Tadpole’s.”

    “So it was, so it was!”

    “As a matter of fact,” Charles told him, “she is coming down to stay with me and is coming to London tomorrow.”

    “Is she really—you didn’t tell me, Charles…”

    A mixed expression came into Mark’s face, which he struggled to conceal. It was the outcome of inharmonious emotions. In his effort to shut off the true expression he acquired one of sheepish benevolence. “How is old Ida now?” he asked, frowning in sympathetic puzzlement, as if he had asked a pretty difficult question. “I have often meant to get you to tell me how she spends her time. You don’t see much of her, do you, but I haven’t seen her for over ten years. I was awfully sorry to have missed her last year. That was your fault! Has she altered…I mean become a blue-stocking or anything?”

    Charles smiled enigmatically. “Come along with me tomorrow to her club; she would like most awfully to see you, I know.”

    “May I, Charles? An excellent idea, I still have a day or two’s sick leave. It will be most exciting seeing Ida again. Another snort? I’m going to. Waiter!”

    A half-hour later the two friends stood in one of London’s largest stores, the brown paper parcel still held by Mark rather carefully, against his left-hand breast pocket. The thick and sluggish stream of shop-gazing charladies, finding an obstruction, bumped it and rolled around it. For Mark and Charles stood together muttering in the middle of the MEN’S SHIRTS. They examined attentively a batch of shirts of most attractive soft check, conspicuously displayed.

    “Sixty shillings,” said Charles pleasantly, “of which fifty per cent, I expect, is purchase-tax. You bought two. So you paid Cripps sixty shillings when you fell for this pretty checkwork.”

    “Try not to talk like the Daily Express,” Mark observed.

    “Oh, well, you love Cripps so much you probably feel patriotic about it.”

    Mark asked a tall shopman where the manager of the department was to be found.

    “I am the assistant manager,” he was politely informed. “The manager is away.”

    A young man came up to him with a bill which he initialled or something. Mark opened his parcel and revealed a shirt identical in all respects with the attractive pale blue checks displayed on the counter. The assistant manager gazed at the shirt and then looked enquiringly at Mark.

    “Have you had any complaints about these shirts?” Mark asked him.

    “No, sir. None whatever.”