The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

floor, but I had no idea what had become of him. Of course I was curious, but I suppressed that curiosity. I began to see that he was a dangerous person. And I began to feel that there was danger, too, in the feelings he had almost managed to arouse in me. I wanted nothing further to do with them. The period of my life that I now entered upon was safe, but colourless. I had been genuinely fond of Roger, and found that life without him was flat, lacking in piquancy. A new secretary joined the firm of Walter, Davis & Warren in the autumn. Her name was Barbara. She came from Birmingham, and she was blonde, busty and pretty. I made overtures towards her. She responded encouragingly. We began to see each other out of office hours. We commenced upon a low-key, chaste and uneventful courtship. I took her to the cinema, I took her to the theatre, I took her to the concert hall. One night early in the summer of 1960 I took her to hear Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suite being performed at the Albert Hall, in the hope that its grand romantic climaxes would stir in both of our breasts some corresponding passion for each other. It failed to do so. In the interval, she told me that she would rather I didn’t take her to classical music concerts any more. She said that she preferred Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. She told me this while we were finishing our drinks at the bar – mine a half pint of bitter, hers a Dubonnet and lemon – after which, she went to the ladies’, and I looked across to the other end of the bar and saw Roger staring at me. He was alone, and his face wore a satisfied, knowing smile. He raised his glass to me. I finished my beer and left, without returning the gesture.

The next morning, a note arrived for me at work. It said:There is still time for me to rescue you.The Rising Sun, 9 p.m. tonight.

He was right, of course. I could no longer fight what I knew to be my destiny. I could no longer tell myself lies about my own nature. When I turned my footsteps in the direction of The Rising Sun that night, it was with one fixed intention: to do whatever it was that Roger Anstruther asked of me.

I arrived rather early, at twenty to nine, and ordered a double whisky in order to steady my nerves. I drank it quickly, and ordered another. The second drink lasted for at least half an hour, at the end of which time I looked at my watch, and realized that Roger was late. I ordered a pint of bitter, and took out my notebook, thinking that it would help me to compose myself if I occupied the time in writing. The pub was busy. Another half an hour went by.

It was only then that I began to see the obvious explanation for Roger’s lateness. Could he possibly have been referring to the other Rising Sun? Strange though it may seem, the thought had not occurred to me until this moment. To me, The Rising Sun in Cloth Fair would always be our pub: it was where we’d had our first drink together, and where all our tenderest and most meaningful encounters had subsequently taken place. As for the other one in Carter Lane, I had only been there once – on the evening that Roger had introduced me to Crispin Lambert. It had no special significance or resonance for me at all; but I was aware that Roger had returned there many times, usually to meet Crispin and to confer about their elaborate bets. Had I made a silly, humiliating mistake by assuming that his conversations with me would loom far more impressively in his memory than those sessions with Crispin? Was he sitting there, now, waiting for me, just as I was sitting here, waiting for him?

I delayed another quarter of an hour, and then decided that it was worth taking a chance. I could walk from one pub to the other, if I hurried, and be in with a good chance of finding Roger if he was still there waiting for me. I would cut down West Smithfield, then Giltspur Street, and then straight down past the Old Bailey and into Carter Lane via Blackfriars Lane. It ought to be safe enough. The only danger – and it was a very remote one – was that Roger might have the same thought, leave The Rising Sun at the same time, and come to find me using a different route: up Creed Lane, for instance, then Ave Maria Lane, Warwick Lane, King Edward Street, Little Britain and Bartholomew Close. But this was surely a risk worth taking.

I drained my glass and left the pub, then half-walked, half-ran through the empty streets until the welcoming lights of The Rising Sun were visible in Carter Lane. Short of breath – partly from making such haste, but mainly from anxiety that this crucial evening was dissolving into chaos – I threw open the doors of the pub and rushed inside. There were few people in either the snug or the lounge bar, and Roger, I could see at once, was not among them. A young barman was collecting glasses from the unoccupied tables.

‘Has a young man been in here?’ I demanded. ‘Early twenties – red hair – beard – quite possibly wearing a cape?’

‘Mr Anstruther? Yes, he was here. He left about two minutes ago.’

I let slip a torrent of swear words at this news, much to the barman’s consternation. Then, leaving the pub even more hastily than I’d entered it, I stood for a moment in the street, looking left and right, wondering which way to go. It seemed likely that Roger might have had the same thought as I, and hurried over to the pub I had just left; so, breaking into a sprint now, I retraced my steps up the Old Bailey and Giltspur Street, and was back in The Rising Sun in three or four minutes flat.

‘Are you looking for your friend?’ the barman said, as soon as I appeared. ‘Because he was in here a moment ago, asking after you.’

‘No!’ I shouted, putting my head in my hands, and tearing at my hair. This was too horrific to contemplate. ‘Which way did he go?’

‘Up towards Middle Street, I think,’ said the barman.

But I never found him. I ran outside and spent the next twenty or thirty minutes searching for Roger, calling out his name as I scoured every street within a few hundred yards of Smithfield Market. But he was nowhere to be seen. He was gone.

There was only one last chance. I remembered that there used to be a payphone in the communal hallway of the Notting Hill house where he had his bedsit. I called the number (which I still knew by heart), and waited what seemed like an age for someone to answer, my nervous breath steaming up the windows of the telephone box. But it was no use. It was more than a year since I had last used this number, and when a stranger’s voice finally answered, it was to tell me that Roger no longer lived at this address. After a few seconds’ silence, during which I struggled to regain my power of speech, I thanked the anonymous voice, replaced the receiver slowly, and leaned my forehead against the wall of the telephone box.

So, it was over. Everything was over. Cold, paralysing despair took me in its grasp.

What was I to do now?

I am not sure, in retrospect, how I managed to find myself in the street outside Barbara’s flat in Tooting. Did I get there by bus? Did I take the tube? I cannot remember. That interval of time has been wiped from my memory. It must have been late at night when I arrived, however, for I do remember that I could get no answer from her doorbell, and had to wake her by throwing pebbles at her third-floor window.

She was not especially pleased to see me. She was extremely sleepy. I was extremely drunk. Somehow we managed, none the less, to fall into an embrace. The lovemaking that followed was breathless, fumbled, and quickly finished. Neither of us, I believe, really knew what we were doing, or why we were doing it. They say that ‘You always remember the first time.’ I would have to take issue with that. The whole episode passed, for me, in a kind of haze. What I do remember is lying next to Barbara in bed for the next couple of hours. Neither of us slept, at