it doesn’t. Why, are you too hot?’
‘It is rather.’
‘I don’t feel the heat.’
‘Could we switch one of the bars off?’
‘Sorry, they don’t. It’s all or nothing. The switch has gone.’
He took a sip of his coffee. He was beginning to sweat.
‘Do you think this milk’s all right?’ he said.
‘Oh, God, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll make you a black one.’
‘Thanks. Do you have a cat?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I just wondered.’
He hated to admit to himself his delicacy over smells, and sweating, and sour milk.
‘It’s funny you should say that. People often ask me that,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you strike them as the sort of person who’d like cats.’
‘I don’t. I hate them.’
The sweat was pouring off him. His skin was prickling all over. How loathsome it all was, parties and sex and purple paintings and sour milk and unmade beds.
Over their coffee Polly amused him with further mimicry, imitating to perfection such well-known characters as her mother, sister, brother and headmistress. He felt too tired to do more than laugh in the right places, and as soon as he could he took his leave.
‘Thanks, Polly. It’s been lovely. See you,’ he said.
As he went down the stairs his pants and vest stuck to his body. He opened the door and breathed a great gulp of air. He was feeling sick. He was a lump in the sore throat of night. He felt messy and miserable. He wanted to play Scrabble and read books and improve his mind and work hard and help British exports and raise a family. His own children, loved and loving.
He picked up a milk bottle and hurled it viciously at the railings. Nothing stirred in the Swiss Cottage night.
It was 2.45 a.m. Perhaps Brenda or Doreen would be there and they could have a cup of coffee, delaying the moment when he’d be alone again, alone in bed. But perhaps they wouldn’t.
Bayswater 27663. Probably she’d be in bed, or still at the party, or with someone. It was absurd to ring her up at 2.45 a.m.
The tone of her telephone was French and encouraging. He whistled to keep up his worldliness.
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo. Robert here.’
‘Who?’
‘Robert. I met you at the party.’
‘Oh, yes. Hullo.’
‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you.’
‘No. I was just having a coffee before going to bed.’
‘It’s just that I’ve sort of found myself in your area and …’ And what?
‘Twenty-three, Leominster Crescent. Top bell.’
He took a taxi. She lived between Bayswater and Notting Hill, also in a nineteenth-century terrace, but this one was cream. She had a glorious Persian carpet – a family heirloom – and a great number of books. She had a record player but no television. She was tall, slim, angular, with rather a large nose and a voice that sounded as if she had a perpetual cold caught at a very good school. When she was old there would be a permanent dewdrop on the end of her nose. She wasn’t his cup of tea, unlike her coffee, which was superb.
She represented good coffee and elegant maturity. She had bags under her eyes, and looked tired, but made no effort to get rid of him. She was 23. He couldn’t kiss her, couldn’t rouse himself to anything like that, and she seemed to understand this. She told him how much she hated parties. She didn’t mention the man she’d been with. They played a desultory but enjoyable game of Scrabble and she gave him a pile of books which she thought he’d enjoy. She asked him why he tried so hard to be amusing. Did he think himself dull? She didn’t think he was dull, except perhaps when he tried to be amusing.
They had further cups of coffee and he began to tell her the story of his life. At last the grey nicotine-stained thumbs of a London dawn began to squeeze the darkness out of the sky. Sonia drew back the curtains and made breakfast, and then he went home to bed.
‘I’m sorry I told you the story of my life,’ he said.
‘Not at all. I enjoyed it,’ she said.
Chapter 3
Early Days
Our story begins in the early hours of a fresh May morning in West London – in Richmond, to be precise – in the front second floor bedroom of number 10, River View West, to be still more precise. At 4.14 a.m. on that day in 1935 there was born to Emma Jane Bellamy, frail young wife of Thomas Robert Cunard Eddison Bellamy, a son. It was a surprisingly normal and easy birth. The boy weighed eight pounds, five ounces, had a hearty pair of lungs, sought more of his mother’s milk than his mother’s frail health permitted him, and was christened Robert Thomas Cunard Eddison Bellamy.
The prosperity of the Bellamy family had been founded in the eighteenth century by one Thomas Robert Bellamy who invented new ways of curing warts and herrings. Bellamy’s Bloater Paste and Bellamy’s Herbal Bunion Remover have a modest reputation even today in some of the more outlandish corners of Eastern England. But the family did not remain for long in these traditional pursuits. They turned their backs on the vulgarities of industry and became farmers and lawyers. Thomas Bellamy was already, at the time of his son’s birth, making a considerable name for himself in the harsh discipline of the bar. On the night of the happy event his attention was in fact divided between the bawling but as yet uninteresting infant and the preparation of what was perhaps to be his greatest case – the prosecution of the notorious Butcher of Wentworth, also known as the Stiletto Niblick Murderer, who lured his innocent victims into a bunker on the dog-leg seventeenth, always a treacherous hole. Thomas Bellamy was a staunch Conservative and a stern though humane disciplinarian. He loved his country, his wife and his only child – in that order.
Emma Bellamy’s flawless beauty revealed little of her physical frailty. Only her intimate friends knew how much suffering her asthma, anaemia, weak heart, gall-stones, ostler’s ankle, Higson’s disease and nervous headaches cost her. After Robert’s birth her husband did not permit her to rise until twelve-thirty or to remain up after nine-thirty. She spent most of the day reclining on a sofa reading books about art and architecture. Young Robert adored her from afar. He respected his father from afar and adored his mother, while his practical wants were taken care of by his nanny.
‘Ah!’ said Dr Schmuck.
The Bellamy household was, as households go, a happy one. The young child, too, seemed happy. Perhaps he had to be rather more quiet than he would
