Pale December sunlight made him sweat as he cycled along Leadenhall Street.
The traffic in the City was heavy. He was aware that it irritated drivers of cars when he was able to steer in the narrow lane between a line of stationary traffic and the pavement, and it pleased him to do it. When cycling, he felt that the driver of every car was a personal enemy.
The mental activity of the previous night had left a feeling of freshness, and he felt no irritation towards the traffic. When a woman stepped off the pavement in front of him, forcing him to brake sharply, he only smiled at her and shook his head in remonstrance; he guessed her to be a foreigner from the fact that she was looking left instead of right.
It was shortly after nine-thirty when he stopped in Aldgate High Street. He leaned the bicycle against the wall outside the Lyons Corner House, and locked the back wheel.
The self-service bar was almost empty. He bought tea and two toasted buns, and sat at a table near the window. A middle-aged woman wearing a pink smock collected dirty cups off the table. He returned her smile, and felt as he did so a sense of anticipation that was like convalescence. The whole cafe with its food smells, the workman opposite reading the Daily Express, the heavy traffic in the street outside, all touched some mechanism of nostalgia in him. It felt like waking from a long sleep. He took the leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and wrote in it: 'Whitechapel, December 1st. I qualify as a modern Faust. Shut up in a room, thinking too much. Enter Austin Mephistopheles, twisting the waxed ends of his moustache… But who is Gretchen?'
He stopped writing, reflecting that Caroline or Gertrude might easily see the notebook. He had been about to elaborate the question. Instead, he wrote: 'Like Mephistopheles, Austin sells me love or life. My side of the bargain is still obscure.'
On the opposite side of the road a barrel organ began to play, tinnily, each note jangling like a rusty can dropped from a height. It aroused in him a memory that was also a sense of smell and colour. For a moment, it eluded him, then returned: the City office, the smell of ledgers, and the French tobacco of the belligerent Scottish clerk who lived at Southend. The last time he had heard it played, Man coeur s'ouvre a ta voix, had been on the Thursday afternoon, five years before, when he had walked out of the office without giving notice, the solicitor's letter carefully folded in his wallet, and had stepped into the traffic and sunlight of Bishopsgate, still dazed by the feeling of relief.
The memory reconstructed itself with a detail of sense and feeling that he found surprising; it revived the hot afternoon smell of dust and motor exhaust, and the damp smell of the entry below the office where he kept his bicycle. For a moment, he considered walking through Houndsditch to look at the office building again, then dismissed the idea, recalling the boredom and self-contempt that had accumulated there over a year.
Almost immediately the sense of reconciliation disappeared. He had remembered the pink cheeks and the wispy blond moustache of the Scottish clerk, and the memory stirred shame and anger. The Scotsman had professed a violent anti-Semitism: he referred to Hampstead and Golder's Green as Abrahamstead and Goldstein's Green. His arguments with Sorme had always finished with mutual declarations of contempt, leaving behind a taste of futility. These arguments, and an abortive affair with the office girl, were all that stood out in Sorme's memory of the year in the office. The girl's name was Marilyn; she was plump, not particularly attractive, and came from Stepney Green. But she was given to wearing semi-transparent dresses, with very little underneath them.
When she bent over the filing cabinet, the outline of her pants showed clearly through the fabric, and the three clerks stared surreptitiously until she straightened up. Finally, he invited her out to the theatre and took her drinking afterwards. Later the same evening, in the Victoria Park, he knew with certainty that he did not want to possess her, that his desire had been an illusion born of boredom and the sexy innuendo of office conversation. She had probably assumed it was chivalry that had made him gently pull down her skirt after she had raised it. He was glad, three days later, to leave the office without seeing her, and contemptuous of himself for being glad.
The recollection left him feeling uncomfortable and ashamed. He finished the toasted buns and went out.
He walked the bicycle along the pavement as far as Middlesex Street, then mounted and rode slowly towards Bishopsgate. He dismissed the memories, and thought deliberately of Caroline and Gertrude; immediately he began to feel better. In Widegate Street he stared with interest at a pregnant woman who pushed a battered pram loaded with washing, and felt the release of some inner tension of smell and colour, a renewal of the excitement. He turned into Spitalfields Market and dismounted; it was impossible to ride among the people who crowded the narrow space between parked lorries and the market building. Almost immediately a man in shirtsleeves swung a net-bag of cabbage off a lorry, missing Sorme's head by a fraction. The man grinned, saying: Watch yer loaf!
Sorme grinned back, halting for a moment to avoid a trolley loaded with potato sacks.
The inner warmth was like being drunk, but without the sense of limitation.
On the corner of Brushfield Street, he stopped to consult the London atlas he carried in his saddlebag. The traffic in Commercial Street was an unbroken stream, filling the air with vibrations and the smell of diesel exhausts.
The pavement of Durward Street was barely two feet wide; the roofs, windowsills and kerbstones formed a perspective of unbroken parallel lines from one end of the road to the other. The street was deserted.
He stopped before number twelve. The brown paint on the front door had been weathered into scales.
He stood there, in front of the window, hoping to hear some movement from inside the house that would relieve his hesitation. Now he was on the point of knocking, he remembered Nunne's comments about Glasp, and the warning of the Hungarian priest.
He tried to think of the words with which he would introduce himself. Finally, he rapped loudly, and waited.
A window opened above his head. He stood back to look, hoping it would be Glasp. It was the window of the house next door. A woman asked him:
Did you want Mrs Greenberg, or the lodger?
A man called Glasp, Sorme said. He felt embarrassed, as if some guilty secret was being exposed to the whole street.
The lodger. He won't be long, the woman said. He usually goes out about this time for breakfast. I don't know which cafe he goes to.
It doesn't matter. I'll call back later.
The window slammed again. He noticed the curtains of the house opposite stir as someone looked out at him. He cycled back along the street, irritated with himself, and with the woman next door for not minding her own business. Her effect had been to make him feel an intruder.
At the end of the street, he dismounted, and leaned the bicycle against the wall, under the No Entry sign. The idea of looking for Glasp in the local cafes did not appeal to him. He looked at his watch, and decided to take a walk round the neighbourhood. It had been a long time since he walked round Whitechapel, thinking of the Jack the Ripper murders. Now, while the mood of receptivity was still on him, the prospect pleased him.
He locked the bicycle, binding the chain twice around the wheel.
Opposite the end of Durward Street was the shell of a theatre, with broken rafters and fire-blackened walls exposed. He stood, staring across at it, experiencing a desire to climb the wooden fence that hid the lower story, to pick his way across the rotten floorboards, and smell the odour of damp and decay that came from heaps of rubble. It was almost a physical craving. It puzzled him. Things were happening inside him that he found difficult to understand. It felt as if his nerves had been disconnected, then reconnected in a different order, generating new appetites and a new sensibility. He turned and walked along Vallance Road, away from the main road. He picked his way carefully across the bomb site, taking care to avoid treading on rusty barrel-hoops. Across the street, an empty school building looked as desolate as the ruined theatre; on its walls, whitewashed letters two feet high stated: Union will get rid of the Reds. At both ends of the inscription was a symbol of a lightning bolt in a circle. He crossed the road past the school, on to another strip of waste ground bordered by empty houses and stumps of broken walls, and paused for a moment to look in the windowless aperture of a disintegrating building. The floor was covered with rubble, old newspapers nibbled by mice, a torn pink brassiere. A narrow stairway, still intact, curved around the opposite wall. As he looked, a mouse ran out from among the newspapers, and disappeared into a hole in the skirting board. Someone had pointed out this house to him before; in 1943, the body of a Finnish sailor had been found on the upper floor by some children playing hide-and-seek; he had been robbed and left to die, battered by a brick swung in a silk stocking.
