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needed nothing more than her body to give her fun. Hal does it to me, often. I think of my father who spoke English hardly at all and the closed firework-box of his Polish growing damp over the years. But Cora’s feelings had been hurt, I imagined, so I persevered.
    ‘Causes?’
    ‘Yup – you know, animals, all that, comets, rhinology . . .’
    ‘She’s a kidney expert?’ I tried to make a joke. I failed.
    ‘No, the nose being, you know, symbolic of the rest of the body. Each bit having its own bit of the body.’ She was still sulking. She was leaving herself as few words as those poor newspapers. I considered momentarily the congruence of circumcision and nose-bobbing and held my tongue. Where in the nose was the heart?
    Where, for that matter, the tongue? ‘It gives you a whole new outlook on noses,’ said Anne, in a doped religiose voice. As she said it, she squinted wildly, and held her hand on Cora’s wrist, and they both laughed. Anne looked as though she had closed a drawer on a cache of rusty knives.
    ‘But the main thing is animals, with Angel. She likes them better than people. She thinks they should be free to run their own lives. She says a hare is better than any rabbi.’
    I took this as a reference to that form of spiritual superiorness which entails promiscuity and sententiousness in equal parts.
    ‘How did you meet?’
    ‘Oh, in the shop. We even do vegetarian dog-food.’
    ‘Is it popular?’ asked Anne. She had many characteristics of the conventional British woman. She loved animals in a straightforward way; this involved feeding her dogs on what dogs eat.
    ‘Not for dogs, but it’s cheap, and a lot of people buy it for themselves. There are people poorer than you know,’ Cora said, rather wildly, not addressing me, not daring to address Anne, truce being too recent. Somehow my money was meritocratic, I supposed.
    ‘I know someone who’s going that way,’ said Anne.
    Whether she referred to vegetarianism or poverty, I doubt if she knew. They were remote, exotic states.
    ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ carried a voice.
    It was Tertius.

Chapter 7
    Tertius was misleading to look at, but when he spoke he left no uncertainty. At the dinner party, he sat between his old friend Anne and his cleaning woman Cora. I had not particularly wanted him to be present when I introduced Hal and Cora, but he had ensured that things fell out thus when we had bumped into him. He had been delivering a frame to Cam’s just opposite Fortnum’s, a very little frame, he had said, but chased silver and what is chaste nowadays?
    Tertius was a pantomime queer. He was too old for camouflage chic; I refer not to the fashion for wearing army drab, but to the fashion for appearing to camouflage among the heterosexuals, which was, I must admit, what I wanted for Hal. A fat man, Tertius had the red hair which announces its ubiquity at neck and cuff and ankle. His bottom had the mass, in its invariable grey flannel trousers, of a tired old circus elephant’s. He had huge shoulders, even for his size, and all his clothes were covered with checks, squares, dogsteeth, tartan, plaid, shadow-paning, windowpane or other designs playing the not many variations on ninety degrees. I had seen rooms shatter into a mosaic of squares once Tertius entered, as though dividing into those grids used by painters of fresco and mural to control their matter. A flower placed in his buttonhole would, you felt, marshal and bevel its petals to squareness. It was nothing so clear as that Tertius the seller of frames saw everything, as it were, through a square or rectangular frame; it was that he was so strong a presence, so colourful and so vivid a sight, that curves lost their importance wherever he was, confronted with his bulk and squareness. He re-emphasised perception, shook it up and squared it up. Perhaps the only thing which might have reasserted curvature in his life, a Fat Lady, was not at all what he wanted.
    I liked him for