Текст книги "What a cave up!"

Автор книги: Джонатан Коу

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

As soon as I realized this, it struck me that the game was intrinsically flawed. It seemed wrong that by a simple process of elimination you could find yourself guilty of a crime, and yet still not know how or where you were supposed to have committed it. Surely there was no precedent for this situation in real life? I wondered what it would actually feel like, to be present at the unravelling of some terrible mystery and then to be suddenly confronted with the falseness of your own, complacent self-image as disinterested observer: to find, all at once, that you were thoroughly and messily bound up in the web of motives and suspicions which you had presumed to untangle with an outsider’s icy detachment. Needless to say, I could not imagine the circumstances in which such a thing might ever happen to me.

As it turned out, in any case, Graham was ahead of us all. On his next move he crossed over to the conservatory via the secret passage and pointed an accusing finger in my direction.

‘I suggest,’ he said, ‘that it was Professor Plum, in the conservatory, with the candlestick.’

He was right; and at this point we conceded defeat. Joan turned the lights on and made us all a mug of cocoa, and the mood would perhaps have been shattered if the storm had not continued outside, gathering in ferocity, if anything, as midnight approached.

∗

This time I didn’t have the excuse of a book to fetch; nor was I feeling hot or uncomfortable. I could probably just have lain there, listening to the rain against the window, the occasional crash of thunder, and sooner or later I would have nodded off to sleep. But only half an hour after I was sure that everyone had gone to bed, I climbed out from beneath the blankets and padded up the stairs in my T-shirt and underpants. The door to Joan’s room, as before, was standing ajar. As before, her curtains were open, letting in a good deal of light from the street lamps. And as before, she was lying on her back, her skin grey and luminescent in the silver lamplight, flickering sometimes into blueness as gashes of lightning streaked across the night sky. Although she was more than half covered, tonight, by the pale duvet, it was still enough to root me to the spot, my beady, impotent eyes consuming her hungrily from the safety of the shadowed doorway.

I stood, and I watched; but soon, strangely enough, it was her face that I found myself watching – the face I had seen every day for the last four days, and not the body which had been magically offered up to me in these precious, illicit glimpses. Perhaps there is something more private, more secret to be found in a sleeping face than there is even in a naked body. At rest, her lips slightly parted, her closed eyelids seeming to suggest an act of intense concentration on some distant, inward object, Joan was shockingly beautiful. It was now impossible, shameful even, that I could ever have thought her plain.

I watched.

And then suddenly her eyes were open; she was looking back at me and smiling.

‘Are you just going to stand there,’ she said, ‘or are you coming in?’

How different my life might have been, how very different, if I had stepped into her room instead of slipping back into the darkness as quickly and as silently as a dream slips from the waking mind.

∗

On Saturday morning I left the house before any of the others were awake, and returned to London. It was the last I saw of Joan for many years. Her parents retired to a village on the South coast, so we never met up again while visiting our families at Christmas. The only news I ever heard was when my mother told me (shortly before we stopped speaking) that she had moved back to Birmingham and married a local businessman.

On Monday morning, I telephoned the Peacock Press and accepted their commission to write a book about the Winshaws.

The same afternoon, I went out and bought my first video recorder.

Thomas

Few people remember anything about the first domestic VCR, launched by Philips as long ago as 1972. The price was high, the recording time was limited to one hour, and it ended up selling mainly to commercial and institutional buyers. Thomas Winshaw bought one, all the same, and had it built into a cupboard behind one of the oak-pannelled walls of his office at Stewards. But he decided not to invest at this stage. Although he was both privately excited by the invention and keenly aware of its commercial possibilities, he sensed that its time had not yet come. Almost, but not quite.

1978 saw the first real flurry of activity. In April JVC introduced its Video Home System, retailing at £750, and only three months later Sony launched the rival Betamax machine. Over the next few years these two systems were to slug it out in the marketplace, with VHS finally proving itself the clear winner. In the autumn of 1978, when Thomas Winshaw announced that the bank would be involving itself heavily in the burgeoning industry, his fellow board members’ initial reaction was one of dismay. They reminded him that Stewards’ flirtation with the film industry in the early 1960s had not been successful, and even invoked the crisis at Morgan Grenfell ten years ago, when a major commitment to film financing had ended in a potential disaster only warded off at the last minute by intervention from the Bank of England. Thomas dismissed these precedents. He was not suggesting anything as risky as investment in film production. He simply proposed taking a modest stake in one of the leading hardware manufacturers; the software market being, as he would be the first to admit, at this stage too new, too unstable and, frankly, too sleazy. As usual, his instincts were right. Over the next five years, imports of video recorders multiplied ten times over, and by 1984 there was a machine in 35.74 per cent of British homes, as opposed to 0.8 per cent in 1979. The bank profited handsomely. Then in 1981 they became advisers and fund managers to a firm which was rapidly building up a strong market share in post-production, distribution and film-to-video transfers. With Stewards’ help, this company went on to merge with an independent video duplication house and within a few years more than three quarters of its income was coming from duplication services. Once again, the bank reaped substantial dividends. Thomas slipped up on one occasion, however: he was an enthusiastic proponent of Philips’s videodisc system, LaserVision, which was put on the market in May 1982 but after more than a year had only collected sales figures of around 8,000. The obvious explanation was that it did not offer a recording facility, and when, a few months later, JVC abruptly cancelled their own disc system, and RCA decided to halt all player production in 1984, it was clear even to the least sophisticated industry analyst that the new technology had failed to catch on. Yet Thomas maintained his commitment to a £10-million disc-pressing plant in Essex, which was running at a huge loss.

Among themselves, his colleagues would puzzle over this curious blind spot. The amount of money involved was negligible, in Stewards’ terms: but it was still the only time in Thomas’s fifteen-odd years of chairmanship that he had persisted in offering uncritical support to a palpably loss-making enterprise. And they never did guess the real reason, which was that he was enraptured with the sharp picture quality and perfect still frames offered by the video disc, which suited his own needs so admirably and took him back to the heady, exhilarating days when he used to hang around the film studios and collect discarded footage of beautiful young actresses in various stages of déshabillé. The freeze frame, for Thomas, was the very raison d’être of video: he was convinced that it would turn Britain into a nation of voyeurs, and sometimes, as he sat spellbound in the dark with the television on, his fly buttons undone and the door to his office securely locked, he would imagine identical scenes being played out in curtained rooms up and down the country, and would feel a strange solidarity with the great mass of ordinary men from whose pitiful lives he normally took such care to insulate himself.

Only once, incidentally, did he forget to lock the office door. It was about seven o’clock in the evening and as luck would have it his secretary, who was also working late, made the mistake of entering without knocking. She was sacked on the spot; but the story still managed to make its way into a few of the City wine bars, and some people maintain that the phrase ‘merchant banker’ was introduced into the currency of rhyming slang at precisely this time.

∗

Thomas loved screens of every description. He loved the lie they sustained: that the world could be given shape by the four sides of a rectangle, and that he, the spectator, was in a position to sit back and watch, untouched and unobserved. In his professional life (not that he had any personal life to speak of) he was at constant pains to screen himself off from the world, which he watched as if it were a silent film from behind the protecting glass of many different screens: the window of a first-class railway carriage, for instance, or of Bob Maxwell’s helicopter (which he was occasionally allowed to borrow), or the smoke-tinted, one-way glass of his private limousine. The computerization of the foreign exchange markets, which alarmed some of the older bankers, seemed to him an entirely logical development. So did the abandonment of the stock exchange floor in 1986. At last, to his delight, there was no longer any need for dealers ever to come into contact with one another, and every transaction was reduced to the flicker of electric pulses on a video screen. He had a camera installed in Stewards’ own foreign trading room, connected to a monitor in his office, and here, staring at a screen which all day showed nothing but row upon row of his traders, themselves staring at screens, he would swell with quasi-sexual sensations of pride and power. It seemed, at such moments, that there was no end to the glassy barriers which he could put up between himself and the people (did they really exist?) whose money formed the basis of each day’s intoxicating speculations. Banking, as he once told a television interviewer, had become the most spiritual of all professions. He would quote his favourite statistic: one thousand billion dollars of trading took place on the world’s financial markets every day. Since every transaction involved a two-way deal, this meant that five hundred billion dollars would be changing hands. Did the interviewer know how much of that money derived from real, tangible trade in goods and services? A fraction: 10 per cent, maybe less. The rest was all commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options: it was no longer even paper money. It could scarcely be said to exist. In that case (countered the interviewer) surely the whole system was nothing but a castle built on sand. Perhaps, agreed Thomas, smiling: but what a glorious castle it was …

Watching his foreign exchange dealers as they stared feverishly at their flickering screens, Thomas came as close as he would ever come to feeling paternal love. They were the sons he had never had. This was during the happiest time of his life, the early to mid 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher had transformed the image of the City and turned the currency speculators into national heroes by describing them as ‘wealth creators’, alchemists who could conjure unimaginable fortunes out of thin air. The fact that these fortunes went straight into their own pockets, or those of their employers, was quietly overlooked. The nation, for a brief, heady period, was in awe of them.

Things were very different when Thomas had first come to work for Stewards: the City was still recovering from the ordeal of the Bank Rate Tribunal which, for two weeks in December 1957, had exposed some of its dealings for the first time to public view. Labour MPs and the popular newspapers had been raising scandalized eyebrows over revelations of multi-million-pound deals being passed through on a nod and a wink in the comfort of gentlemen’s clubs, on Saturday morning golf courses and weekend grouse-shooting parties. Although all of the merchant banks involved had been cleared of the charge of acting upon ‘improperly disclosed’ information about the raising of the Bank Rate, a distinct whiff of scandal lingered in the air, and it remained true that hefty amounts of gilt-edged stock had been unloaded on to the market in the days (and hours) before the Chancellor’s announcement. For Thomas, who had become a director of Stewards in the spring of that year, it had been a bruising initiation: Macmillan may have been proclaiming in Bedford that the economy was strong and the country had ‘never had it so good’, but the foreign speculators thought differently, and embarked upon a fierce campaign of selling sterling short, wiping millions of dollars off the gold reserves and forcing an eventual 2 per cent rise in the Bank Rate (up to 7 per cent, its highest for more than a century).

‘It was what you might call a baptism by fire,’ Thomas had explained to his young cousin Mark, who was employed in a junior capacity at the bank in the summer of 1961. ‘We cleaned up, of course, but to be frank I don’t expect to see another sterling crisis like it during my time at Stewards.’

And yet something similar did take place, on September 16th 1992 (Black Wednesday, as it came to be called), when the currency dealers once again managed to raid the country’s gold reserves to the tune of billions of dollars, and this time force a devaluation of sterling into the bargain. Thomas was right in one respect, however: he never did see it happen. He had lost the use of his eyes by then.

∗

Thomas’s world had always been apprehended entirely through the eyes: this was why (among other things) he never felt any desire to touch or to be touched by women. All great men have their idiosyncracies, and his, unsurprisingly, was a neurotic preoccupation with the quality of his eyesight. A private medicine cabinet in his office contained a vast array of eyewashes, moisturizers, baths and drops, and for thirty years the only fixed item in his timetable was a weekly visit to his ophthalmologist, at nine-thirty every Monday morning. The doctor in question might have found this arrangement trying had not Thomas’s obsession been earning him a ludicrous amount in consultation fees. There wasn’t a single ailment in the textbook which he did not believe to have contracted at some time or another. He fancied that he had arc eye, cat’s eye, pink eye and cystic eye; gas eye, hare eye, hot eye and lazy eye; ox eye, Klieg eye, reduced eye, schematic eye, scotopic eye, aphacic eye, squinting eye and cross eye. Once, after a fact-finding visit to some hop fields, he became convinced that he had hop eye (acute conjunctivitis found in hop-pickers, caused by irritation from the spinal hairs of the hop plant); after a visit to a shipyard, that he had shipyard eye (epidemic keratoconjunctivitis, an infection spread by contaminated fluids in the busy eye casualty stations found at shipyards); and after a visit to Nairobi, that he had Nairobi eye (a severe ocular lesion caused by the secretions of certain vesicating beetles common in Nairobi). On another occasion, when his mother made the mistake of telling him that his grandfather Matthew Winshaw had suffered from a congenital form of glaucoma, he had cancelled all his banking engagements for three days and booked himself a succession of round-the-clock specialist appointments. In turn he was tested for absolute glaucoma, capsular glaucoma, compensated glaucoma, congestive glaucoma, haemorrhagic glaucoma, inflammatory glaucoma, inverse glaucoma, obverse glaucoma, malignant glaucoma, benign glaucoma, open-angle glaucoma, closed-angle glaucoma, postinflammatory glaucoma, preinflammatory glaucoma, infantile glaucoma and myxomatosis. Thomas Winshaw’s eyes were insured (with Stewards’ own insurance company) for a sum variously rumoured to be between £100,000 and £1 million. There was no organ, in other words, which he valued more highly; and that includes the one towards which his right hand could sometimes scarcely stop itself from wandering – most memorably, perhaps, on the day he entertained a surprised but politely speechless Queen and Prince Charles to sherry in his freshly red-carpeted office.

∗

When the Conservative government announced that they were abolishing free eye tests on the NHS in April 1988, Thomas phoned his brother Henry to tell him that they were making a big mistake: there would be a public outcry. Henry told him that he was overreacting. There would be a whimper of protest from the usual quarters, he said, and then it would all quietly die down.

‘And I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘I should have bowed to your political judgment, as always.’

‘Well, it’s quite simple, really.’ Henry leaned forward and threw another log on the fire. It was a cold, dark afternoon in early October 1989, and they were enjoying tea and muffins in one of the Heartland Club’s private rooms. ‘The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what’s hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than … a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at a time.’

Thomas nodded and bit eagerly into his muffin.

‘Unemployment, for instance,’ Henry continued. ‘When was the last time you saw a newspaper headline about unemployment? Nobody gives a hoot any more.’

‘I know: and all this is very reassuring, old boy,’ said Thomas, ‘but what I really want is some concrete guarantee …’

‘Of course you do. Of course.’ Henry frowned and focused his mind upon the matter in hand, which was the case of Farzad Bazoft, a British journalist recently imprisoned in Baghdad on charges of espionage. ‘I understand your point entirely. You and Mark want to protect your investments: I can quite sympathize with that.’

‘Well, it isn’t even just Mark. We’ve got plenty of other clients besides Vanguard who are doing very nicely servicing Saddam and his shopping list. We’re all committed up to our necks, frankly.’

‘You don’t have to remind me.’

‘Yes, but look: this sounds to me like a very delicate situation. This man’s a British subject. Surely this new chap at the Foreign Office – Major, or whatever his name is – is going to come under a bit of pressure to get him released.’

Henry raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. ‘How could he possibly do that?’

‘Well, sanctions, of course.’

‘Really,’ said Henry, laughing out loud, ‘I’m amazed that you think we’d even contemplate such a thing. We’ve got a $700 million surplus with Iraq. Confidentially, there’s going to be another four or five hundred where that came from in a month or two. If you think we’re going to jeopardize all of that …’

He tailed off: the sentence didn’t need finishing.

‘Yes, but what about Mark’s little … line of business?’

This time Henry’s laughter was shorter, more private. ‘Put it this way: how on earth can we impose sanctions on something, when we’re not even selling it in the first place. Mm?’

Thomas smiled. ‘Well, I can see you have a point there.’

‘I know Major hasn’t been in the job for long and we’re all a bit worried that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s playing at. But take it from me – he’s a good boy. He does what he’s told.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘And besides, he might be moving again soon.’

‘What, already?’

‘It looks that way. Margaret and Nigel seem to be heading for a final bust-up. We suspect there’ll be a vacancy at Number Eleven pretty soon.’

Thomas tucked this information away at the back of his mind for future reference. It had considerable implications, which he would need to contemplate and examine at his leisure.

‘Do you think they’ll hang him?’ he asked suddenly.

Henry shrugged. ‘Well, he was a rotten chancellor, it has to be said, but that would be a bit drastic.’

‘No, no, not Lawson. I mean this journo character. Bazoft.’

‘Oh, him. I dare say they will, yes. That’s what happens if you’re silly enough to get caught snooping around Saddam’s arms factories, I suppose.’

‘Making trouble.’

‘Exactly.’ Henry stared into space for a moment. ‘I must say, there are one or two snoopers over here that I wouldn’t mind seeing strung up on Ludgate Hill, if it came to that.’

‘Nosey parkers.’

‘Precisely.’ Briefly a frown crossed his face, comprised half of malevolence and half recollection. ‘I wonder whatever happened to that scruffy little writer that Mad Tabs set on us a few years back?’

‘Him! Good God, that fellow got up my nose. What on earthshe was thinking of …’ He shook his head. ‘Well, anyway: she’s just a poor witless old fool …’

‘You spoke to that chap, then, did you?’

‘Invited him up to the office. Gave him lunch. The works. All I got in return was a lot of impertinent questions.’

‘Such as?’

‘He had a bee in his bonnet about Westland,’ said Thomas. ‘Wanted to know why Stewards had been so keen to support the American bid when there was a European one on the table.’

‘What, and he supposed you were snuggling up to Margaret in the hope of a knighthood or something, did he?’

‘Even more devious than that, I’m afraid. Although, now you come to mention it, I seem to remember there was something promised …’

Henry shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I haven’t forgotten, Thomas, really. I’m seeing her tomorrow. I’ll bring it up again.’

‘Anyway, he’d got this absurd theory that Sikorsky had tied up some huge arms deal with the Saudis, and the only reason we all wanted to climb into bed with them was to get ourselves a slice of the cake.’

‘Preposterous.’

‘Outrageous.’

‘And so what did you say to that?’

‘I sent him packing,’ said Thomas, ‘with a few choice words once directed at myself, on one very memorable occasion, by the late, great and much lamented Sid James.’

‘Oh?’

‘I said – and here I quote from memory – “Do us all a favour, laughing boy: piss off out of it and don’t come back.” ’

And then the room echoed as Thomas attempted his own version of the comedian’s smoky, inimitable laugh.

∗

It had happened in the late spring of 1961. Thomas arrived at Twickenham Studios at about lunchtime and made his way to the restaurant, where he spied three vaguely familiar faces at a corner table. One of them was Dennis Price, still best known for his leading role in Kind Hearts and Coronets twelve years earlier; another was the wizened, eccentric Esma Cannon, who reminded Thomas irresistibly of his mad Aunt Tabitha, still confined to a high-security asylum somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire moors; and the third, unmistakably, was Sid James, one of the stars of the film currently in production – a loose comic remake of an old Boris Karloff feature, The Ghoul, under the new title What a Carve Up!

Thomas fetched himself a tray of corned beef hash and jam pudding, and went over to join them.

‘Mind if I sit here?’ he said.

‘It’s a free country, mate,’ said Sid James, indifferently.

Thomas had been introduced to all three actors a few weeks ago, but he could see that they didn’t recognize him, and their conversation, which had been lively, dried up when he sat beside them.

‘We have met, I believe,’ he said, after taking his first mouthful.

Sid grunted. Dennis Price said, ‘Of course,’ and then asked, ‘Are you working at the moment?’

‘Well, erm – yes,’ said Thomas, surprised.

‘What are you in?’

‘Well, I don’t know how you’d describe it really: I suppose I’m in stocks and shares.’

‘Stocks and Shares, eh?’ said Sid. ‘That’s a new one on me. Something the Boultings are cooking up, is it? Taking the lid off the City: Ian Carmichael as the innocent young bank clerk, Terry-Thomas as his conniving boss. Sounds good. Should be very droll.’

‘Not exactly: I think there might be a small misunder–’

‘Hang about, I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’ Sid had now been studying his face for a few moments. ‘Didn’t you play the vicar in Two-Way Stretch?’

‘No, silly, that was Walter Hudd,’ said Dennis, before Thomas had had the chance to deny it. ‘Surely, though, you were the policeman in Dentist in the Chair?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Esma. ‘That was Stuart Saunders. Darling Stuart. But didn’t I see you in Watch Your Stern?’

‘Come off it – I was in that one,’ said Sid. ‘You think I wouldn’t remember? No, I’ve got it: Follow That Horse. You were one of the spies.’

‘Or was it Inn for Trouble?’

‘Or Life is a Circus?’

‘Or School for Scoundrels?’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ said Thomas, raising his hand. ‘But you’re all quite wide of the mark. I’m no thespian, I’m afraid. When I said I was in stocks and shares, I meant it literally. I work in the City. I’m a banker.’

‘Oh.’

There was a longish silence, broken at last by Esma, who said cheerfully: ‘How fascinating.’

‘What then brings you,’ said Dennis, ‘to these foreign shores? If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘The bank I represent has invested heavily in these studios,’ said Thomas. ‘They like to send me down occasionally, to see how things are coming along. I thought that, if it wouldn’t be too intrusive, I might watch some of the filming this afternoon.’

Dennis and Sid exchanged glances.

‘Well, I hate to say this,’ Sid ventured, ‘but I think you’ve cooked your goose there, mate. You see, it’s a closed set today.’

‘Closed set?’

‘Just Ken and Shirl and the technicians. They’re filming what you might call a rather intimate scene.’

Thomas smiled to himself: his information had been correct.

‘Well, I’m sure that nobody would mind – just for a few minutes …’

But this time, it looked as though he’d finally found himself out of luck. When he strolled over to the set a few minutes later, he learned that the scene to be shot that afternoon involved Kenneth Connor wandering into Shirley Eaton’s bedroom just as she was getting undressed. Onlookers, the assistant director was at pains to make clear, would not be welcome.

Inwardly seething, Thomas withdrew into the shadows beyond the arc lights and contemplated his next move. He could hear the director and the two performers going over their lines, discussing floor-markings and camera angles; and soon after that, there was a call for quiet, a cry of ‘Action!’, and the cameras had presumably started rolling.

It was intolerable. Thomas had caught a glimpse of the beautiful Shirley Eaton in her dressing-gown as he came from the restaurant, and he could not bear the thought of such loveliness now being unveiled away from his greedy gaze. Hard-hearted, cool-headed businessman that he was, so used to presiding impassively over the building and wrecking of huge financial fortunes, it made him want to cry. The situation was desperate. Something had to be done.

As he prowled around the outskirts of the studio floor in semi-darkness, salvation presented itself in the form of a stepladder propped up against the back of some scenery. Cocking his ear against the plasterboard, Thomas could hear the actors’ voices on the other side as they attempted take two of the bedroom scene. He glanced up and noticed two small pinpoints of light drilled into the wood, just where the ladder was resting. Could it possibly be that they would look out on to the set? (As he later discovered, they were cut out of an oil painting, a gruesome family portrait hanging on the bedroom wall, behind which the watchful eyes of the murderer would sometimes make a chilling appearance.) Silently he climbed the ladder and found that the drillholes were exactly positioned to accommodate a pair of human eyes. They might almost have been designed for that purpose. After taking a few seconds to accustom himself to the glare of the lights, Thomas looked down and found that he now had an uninterrupted view of the forbidden bedroom.

It wasn’t immediately clear what was going on, although the scene appeared to revolve around Kenneth, Shirley and a mirror. Kenneth had his back to Shirley while she took most of her clothes off, but he could still see her reflection in the mirror, which was on a hinge and which he was doing his best to keep tilted, for the sake of her modesty. Shirley stood by the side of the bed, facing the portrait through which Thomas’s widened eyes were now staring out, unnoticed. He seemed to have arrived during a lull in the proceedings. Kenneth was in conversation with the director while two young assistants made small adjustments to the angle of the mirror in response to shouted instructions from the cameraman. Finally the director called out, ‘OK, positions, everyone!’, and Kenneth went over to the door to make his entrance. The set went quiet.

Kenneth opened the door, walked in, and looked startled to see Shirley, wearing only her slip and about to put on a nightgown.

He said: ‘I say, what are you doing in my room?’

Shirley said: ‘This isn’t your room. I mean, that isn’t your luggage, is it?’

She clutched the nightgown modestly to her bosom.

Kenneth said: ‘Oh, blimey. No. Wait a minute, that’s not my bed, either. I must have got lost. I’m sorry. I’ll – I’ll push off.’

He started to leave, but paused after only a few steps. He turned and saw that Shirley was still holding on to her nightgown, unsure of his intentions.

Thomas stirred excitedly on the ladder.

Kenneth said: ‘Miss, you don’t happen to know where my bedroom is, do you?’

Shirley shook her head sadly and said: ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

Kenneth said: ‘Oh,’ and paused. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go now.’

Shirley hesitated, a resolve forming within her: ‘No. Hang on.’ She gestured with her hand, urgently. ‘Turn your back a minute.’

Kenneth turned and found himself staring into the mirror, in which he could see his own reflection, and beyond that, Shirley’s. Her back was to him, and she was wriggling out of her slip, pulling it over her head.