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At Sloane Square he jogged down to the station platform with a sense almost of truancy, and had to go in a smoking carriage to follow an Italian couple, the man in white jeans so astonishingly tight that he travelled on two stops beyond Victoria just to look at him. Then he quickly changed platforms and came back, he ran up the escalator and the stairs, but the queue was slow at the booking office and when he reached the platform the blank back end of the train he was meant to be on was jolting over the points and out of view.

There was another train in half an hour, and he could still be in Gipsy Hill with a clear thirty minutes before the auction started. He tucked his ticket in his wallet and wandered looking up at the departures boards, and at the men looking up at them; then stood shifting in the onward rush of arrivals from two trains – fantasies of greetings in faces that held his own for a second as they swept past. It was arrival in London, and Johnny felt its excitement as well as the subtler pleasure of noting, as a Londoner himself, the blind air of routine in most of the travellers’ faces. Some slowed and waited, roaming, half-preoccupied. A space opened up and he saw the movement round the entrance marked Gentlemen, men going in hurriedly and down the stairs, past others coming out with a businesslike look. He thought he might just go himself – in and down. The copper coin in the turnstile was the price of admission, the admission in his case of a guilty thought – overseen by a man in a glass box for whom any interest in the endless traffic in and out had long been exhausted.

Johnny passed a row of blue doors, all engaged, towards the step and the white wall where the pitted copper pipe started hissing and rasping over the tiles. He saw himself in the mirror above the basins, but in his mind he was hardly visible, the mere magnetized observer of the man who dried his hands for ever on the roller towel, the three men spaced along the gutter, workman, businessman, old gent. He leaned forward and peeped past the curtain of his hair as he tried to piss, stopped up by the presence of the others and the gripping sensation of standing on the brink. The businessman was shockingly hard, the workman, thirtyish, with a roll-up kept dry behind his ear, floppy but bigger. Johnny blushed, looked down with a racing heart, the quick ratchet and thud all the time of the turnstile behind them and a man setting down a big suitcase and pushing in between himself and the workman, heavy-built, coat and hat, off the boat train perhaps, and perhaps unaware of the tense patience of the others who waited him out, frowning as if at their own stubborn failure to make even a dribble. And as he waited with them Johnny saw himself drawn into the criminal collusion of the other men, and under cover of the visitor’s last sullen shakes and wheezy buttoning up he stepped down too, as he zipped, and was away through the turnstile and up the stairs with the still-panicked heartbeat of a narrow escape; and a feeling growing, after four or five eventless minutes, while the businessman emerged without seeing him and strode off to the taxi rank, that if he didn’t catch a train he would have to go back in again; and that the going in again, past the attendant who seemed neither to condone nor prevent what was going on, would set a visible seal on his guilt.

But the thought of the workman being down there still, down there all morning perhaps, in thick jeans and boots and a donkey jacket moodily used to reveal and close off what he had on offer, was so thrilling that the air in the great noisy concourse above seemed to pulse with a barely concealed new purpose. A cloud shifted and the sun angled down through the high glass roof. He looked boldly at one or two men who were waiting like him for their trains to be announced; but the boldness was met with irritated puzzlement and Johnny drifted away and looked blankly at the cafe and shops. Just inside the open door of John Menzies Ivan was standing. He was at the counter, in a duffel coat and a knitted green scarf which for a long ten seconds seemed to isolate his sleek pale face against the muddled background in a woolly nimbus. Johnny turned away to absorb the shock, the abrupt opportunity, on top of the others, missed and ebbing. He hardly knew if he wanted to see him. Then he turned round just as Ivan came out of the shop with a magazine, and walked towards him with the unseeing look of someone looking for someone else. Ivan seemed aware of a person smiling before he had his own little shock – ‘Oh, hello!’ and stuck out his hand, which Johnny, disconcerted, took a moment to accept, and shake. It was a fleeting fragment of time, ten seconds again, in which something was irrevocably exposed – though Ivan scooted round to cover it up. ‘Oh, gosh – I’m . . .’ – he grinned at him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you out and about in the middle of the day.’

‘I didn’t, either,’ said Johnny: ‘expect to see you.’

‘What are you doing?’ – and now Ivan tapped him on the arm, almost reproachfully.

‘I’m going to an auction,’ said Johnny, as if it was his own idea.

‘In Brighton?’ said Ivan vaguely.

‘Brighton? – no, Gipsy Hill.’

‘My dear . . .’ said Ivan.

Johnny wasn’t sure of the implication – he looked down at Ivan’s magazine: The Yachtsman. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were . . .’

‘Oh . . . !’ He looked at it too, and laughed distantly. It was odd, but Ivan’s discomfort seemed unrelated to the soreness in Johnny’s own mind about their supposed night out, though it wasn’t Ivan’s fault it had all gone wrong. Ivan rather stalled, he said, ‘Well, fancy meeting you at Victoria.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Johnny, moved again by his presence, his glow in the cold air heightened by the morning’s mood of chance and temptation – his fringe had grown longer and caught in the long lashes of his right eye as he blinked and then shook his head.

‘Freddie says everyone has their terminal. His is Paddington, you know, coming from Devon, and then going to Oxford all the time, of course.’

‘Oh, yes.’ It was the sort of London game he could see Freddie playing.

‘I’m Paddington too, of course, what are you – King’s Cross, I suppose?’

‘I’m Euston.’

‘Oh, Euston – shame,’ said Ivan.

Johnny tutted humorously at this, though he knew what he meant, about the new station. His first London memory, at seven or eight, was of the Euston Arch – just before it was demolished: the six huge gilded letters EUSTON, cut deep in the blackened stone, seemed to dance, more a spell than a name, not like any other word, beneath a deep blue sky. ‘Well, you don’t spend much time in the station, do you.’

‘That depends . . .’ said Ivan, and looked away as if he’d said something else.

‘Anyway, where are you going?’

Ivan stared at him, baffled: ‘Oh, I’m not going anywhere,’ and then laughed, ‘No, I’m waiting to meet my uncle, and he seems’ – he craned round again – ‘to have missed his train.’

‘Oh, I see!’ said Johnny, saddened and obscurely relieved. ‘I thought your uncle was dead.’