attendance. Jake noticed that her breasts were either remarkably large or got up to seem so by a professional. He tried to reckon the chances of Curnow's knowing which and felt downcast for a moment, because any chance at all was too much. But almost at once he cheered up again: between the front door and that of the waiting-room there moved a fellow-patient he had seen at least once before under this roof, moved with new and extreme labour, one leg straight and stiff, the other bent and stiff. Teach him, thought Jake. Not me yet, he also thought.
As one who did what doctors said while still rather looking down on them, he decided to walk to Warren Street and catch a 127 bus instead of taking a taxi. That in any case wouldn't have been as easy as winking in this area. No sooner had one black, brown or yellow person, or group of such, been set down on the pavement than Americans, Germans, Spaniards were taken up and vice versa. It was just after four o'clock on a fine afternoon early in April. Jake lengthened his stride and crossed the road in front of a double-parked car, large, black and with CD plates. An unmistakable witch doctor, in equally manifest need of outside help, was doing his best to alight from it.
Portland Place turned out to be easily as full of north-bound vehicles, most of them cars, as might have been expected at this hour on Wednesday in Holy Week, no less so than it would doubtless turn out to be on 23rd December or, this year, more likely 22nd. Despite their intermittent and slow progress, Jake waited for the lights to change before he left the kerb. He had made this a rule ever since a momentously near miss by a motorbike the previous year. The traffic going the other way was much lighter but no faster, thanks to some extensive road works with nobody working on them.
By contrast, though not altogether by contrast, Euston Road resembled a motor-racing track, or a network of such. Jake felt some relief at reaching the northern side undamaged. He waved and smiled cheerily at an old friend he couldn't have named for the moment and the old friend, who had just come out of Thames Television House, waved and smiled cheerily back a couple of seconds before Jake realised he wasn't an old friend but the chap who played the superintendent in that police series. Oh Christ, thought Jake; still, the bugger must get a lot of that.
Half an hour later, having been carried up through Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Hampstead, Jake got off the 127 at the stop outside the Orris Park National Westminster Bank. He was about to start the five-minute walk to his house when his eye fell on the window of Winesteals Ltd and an ill-written notice that nevertheless clearly proclaimed Crazy Cuts: 10p in the ? off everything this week only. He hesitated only a moment. He had brought himself to go and see his doctor, he had responsibly taken a bit of exercise, he had saved something like ?1.20 by not taking a taxi home, and he was fed up with Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry) every night of his life. Into the shop he darted and over to the French corner. Cotes de Nuits Villages 1971 at ?2.05 less presumably 20- 1/2p? Beaune Clos de la Mousse 1972 at..... To hell with it: Chateau Talbot 1967 at ?4.09 less whatever the fuck. On his way to what people probably meant by the check-out he noticed a pile of boxes of liqueur chocolates and hesitated again, longer this time. ?2.17, but that wasn't what was at stake. In the end he took a box.
Ahead of him at the till stood a customer in very dirty whitish overalls smoking a cigar and chatting to the senior of the two shopmen present while the junior cast up what he was buying.
'Is it worth it?' he asked a couple of times. 'This is it. If it isn't, I don't want to know. If it isn't, I'm not interested. If it is, then this is it. I mean, this is it. Right?'
'Right.'
'And it is. It bloody is. Like everything else.' As he talked the overalled man took a roll of ?20 notes from his side pocket and counted some out; Jake thought five but wasn't sure. 'It bloody is. Twelve-year-olds better than eight-year-old and '61's going to be better than '62. I mean, you know, this is it. Ever tried Jack Daniel's Green Label?'
'No.'
'Worth trying.' Change was handed over, not much. 'Ta. Yeah, worth trying. Shows you the Black's worth it. Green's good, though. Well, cheers.'
'Cheers.'
Jake moved along, put his two items down on the stub of counter and set himself to see which buttons on his machine the junior shopman would prod. 3, then one he missed, so he gave up and waited for the receipt slip to be torn off and wordlessly handed to him. He screwed up his eyes. 003.69, 002.17, 006.86. He went on looking while the senior shopman drew in air through his nose.
'Er, the..... You've charged the full price for the chocolates.'
'Right.'
'But your notice says 10p in the pound off everything.'
'Everything bar chocolates and smokes.'
'But it says everything.'
'It means everything bar chocolates and smokes.'
'But....'
'You want them, do you, squire?
'.... Yes.'
'Right.'
After a short pause, during which he took a blow on the kneecap from the corner of a wire basket in the hand of a man in a blue boiler-suit, Jake paid, picked up his goods and left, remembering he should have said Cheers just as the exit door swung shut after him. Out in the street he noticed that away from the sunlight the air was chilly: the spring had begun late and wet. There were still a few dead leaves half beaten into the triangular patch of bare earth bounded by concrete, probably due to become a communal flower-bed any day, at the corner of the High Street and Burgess Avenue. The near end of the latter consisted of two longish brick terraces put up a hundred years before to house the workers at some vanished local industry and these days much in demand among recently married couples, pairs of homosexuals and older persons whose children had left or never existed. Jake had bought no. 47 in 1969; he couldn't have afforded to now.
2—The Farting Ploughboy
The house stood out among its neighbours by not having had anything done to its outside: no stucco, no curious chimneys, no colourful shutters, no trailing ferns in wire baskets, front door and window-frames and drain-pipes not painted cinnabar or orpiment or minimum or light mushroom, and garden neither turned into a tiny thicket nor altogether removed to accommodate a car. Having no car had made it comparatively easy for Jake to prevent that last option but some of the others had taken toll of his powers of resistance. He opened and then shut the gate, which was not of wrought iron or imitation bronze, walked up the
