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Although it was now quite impossible to close my mouth completely, he insisted on my closing it sufficiently to prevent the twenty-three pieces falling out on the floor, telling me to come back in two hours.

I looked at my watch: it was just half past ten and a clear sunny morning in May. It was a pity, all the same, I had nowhere to hide.

He had said it was better to keep to the side streets, as of course in such case it was essential to keep my mouth shut both physically and metaphorically or people might ask questions and I should be lost or discovered. Normally I should have gravitated to the nearest pub and, skulking in a dark corner, lowered a few mediums; but, alas, I was debarred now from this as the crockery could not be taken out and I was afraid if left in I might swallow it down along with the dark silky porter.

Closing the heavy door silently behind me I glanced right and then left in the wide sunny street and seeing a loquacious acquaintance, a poet of some standing, slouching towards me, made off at such speed as my trembling legs would carry me to the right, pursued by his peculiarly loud and raucous shouts now mercifully being diminished by distance:

‘Hey! Come here you! What are yez up to at all? Come here, damn ye . . . I want a loan . . . (more distant) . . . a small loan . . . (still further) . . . God’s curse on ye anyhow!’

Luckily an alleyway turned off again right, a place ill-lit by day or after dark, used in the one for stocking shops on the main thoroughfare through trap- and back-doors and in the other for the surreptitious meetings of forbidden lovers. For all lovers were of course forbidden unless they were well enough off to ride to hounds, attend hunt-balls in country houses, breed, own, or train racehorses, contribute handsomely to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, know the right people to drink with in the Shelbourne Rooms, Buttery, Russell, or Dolphin, exhibit themselves regularly in the Right Theatre’s stalls, wear fainnes . . .

Such garbled ruminations, however, were my very first undoing, for instanter I had stepped on vicious air and landed a good three feet below on a piled gross of boxes of artificial finnan-haddy oozing orange dye. The place smelt of dead wood, the said finnan-haddy, and cats. In the process I had skinned my right foreshin, trousers and all, on the sharp metal edge of the turned back thick-glazed trap and a ribbon of cloth hanging forward and down as I trod on its tail now impeded my flight. For I was up in a trice belching back my crocks from mid-gullet, and away on, looking more where I was going and less into my head.

At the end of the alleyway it was right again into the old mews once peopled by horses with their brakes, dog-carts, vis-à-vis, shandrydans, barouches, Victorias, and the odd private coach; now stabling those on the run from society, short of cash, full of money.

I had friends there too and rapidly debated whether to keep close under the wall to the right where most windows were muffed, risking thus a familiar knock-knowledged door being opened in my path all too soon, or stalk upright undisguised directly past the acetylene welders, eggsporters, arty furniture dives, disused billiard rooms, and spent kips on the sunny opposite side.

I chose the former and was instantaneously rewarded by a turquoise door, numbered 26a in white, painted primrose yellow (for I knew it) on the inside, being opened in my face.

Choking back the crockery I stood still, as Moore on his plinth always did and does, and allowed the refugee from war and all else to throw out her toothwater and tampax tube, take a deep sighing breath of polluted spring air and retire. She was one of those people who look better out of her clothes than in the over-rural tweeds she affected in the city, whilst the same was the case for high heels on the bog: but her body was beautiful.

I then shuffled on until I stumbled over a pair of sad-trousered reversed male legs tipped by good shoes, all splayed in my way: my friend the abortionist, lying on his stomach tinkering with his coach-housed car, endeavoring to retrieve with the lasso of his pseudo-stethoscope some bolt or nut which had scooted too far under its oil-sodden carcass for even his hands to lay hold. Before he could get up, cracking his head on the differential case, filling thus his unctuous hair in approximately equal proportions with a mixture of burnt oil and the assorted muds of all twenty-six counties, I was again on my way and slid stealthily into yet another alley, still right, where the delectable bins of a high-classy restaurant were often besieged by the gastronome cats of the neighborhood and where, Lord be praised, I had sometimes supped myself.

I was just about to dispute with a big tabby-tom the rejected remains of a copious fine dish when I remembered the crockery, averted my eyes, tottered on at a teetering trot.

Crouching below the walls of the crockery-monger’s still used mews, its ampelopsis still light green, unsullied by soot, I decided I had had enough of this damned alliteration and put it back in my head for later use.

So I almost strode to the shadow of the clock-arch of the maternity hospital (which struck something), I nodded to my friend the real impecunious doctor, his kind Jewish wife and five kids (an action which almost trisected my tongue) and slipped up the wide road through the hop-scotch players to the fine hawthorn-scented square.

The sun shone kindly on my purple bloated face; sweet bunches of clouds stood still in the pale blue sky; four delicious large drops of pearly water fell off a pendant lilac down my aching neck.

And I thought of Mrs. N.