Saturday came with the free gift of yet another sunny morning hidden in its dreary cardboard cornflake packaging, inner and outer mists all burned away long before Dennis prised his eyelashes apart, blinking with unfamiliarity at the almost forgotten benison of a weekend. Again, Grace was already up and dressed, practically shovelling a plate of egg on toast down Dennis as she made it clear that this was the financial high point of her week, and that he’d have to leave the house when she did. He remembered to retrieve his copy of The Cosy Room that he’d had Gawsworth sign, shoved it into its carrier bag, shrugged on his mac and followed Grace out of her sardine-suitable accommodation. It was all a bit rushed, not at all the lingering farewell that would have been his preference: there on her doorstep, with the yammer of the nearby market ruling out whatever soft exchanges he’d been hoping for, there was a moment where he wondered whether she might kiss him, or if he should kiss her, but at last he stuck his hand out, whereupon she shook it awkwardly and he felt like an idiot.

  Pathetically, at least in his own estimation, he gazed after Grace as she tick-tocked away down Bishopsgate, heading for Cheapside, Ludgate Hill, and ultimately her accustomed pitch in Bride Lane. Eyes like an abandoned dog, he watched as she reduced into the French Impressionistic stipple of weekend pedestrians, her hair with all the colour and potential of an unstruck match. Caught up in the theatrics of thwarted romance, he heaved a self-indulgent sigh and sulked up Shoreditch High Street, making for Gibraltar Walk and his upsetting landlady, a destination that he understood was nearly as unpalatable and as necessary as the place that Grace was making for. Slumping along, his carrier bag dangling, he dragged the ball and chain of his desire to turn and follow her behind him, like a comic-paper convict.

  Making his unwieldy way through shoaling shoppers, shitting dogs and unexploded schoolkids off on Saturday adventures, Dennis thought about the previous five days, realising he still didn’t quite believe they’d happened. Now it was all over – or, with luck, all over except him and Grace – he reckoned he could come to see it as a good thing, that it was concluded in so short a space of time, however hectic and traumatic those five days had been while they were going on. Perhaps their breathless pace would make them easier to wrap up as a brief, uncanny stammer in his life, a spasm of improbable events that he might one day, hopefully, dismiss as dreams or, better yet, forget entirely. He supposed it was a bit like London and the war, with nobody pretending that those seven years hadn’t occurred, but everybody keen to put it all behind them and not look at it again. He even wondered if at some point in the unimaginably distant future, both he and the city might eventually become nostalgic for the terrifying times they’d been through, although, just then passing the rock garden of Great Eastern Street, he knew that the concept was laughable in either instance. He could see how London harboured sentimental feelings for the 1920s, when there wasn’t yet a war, or how he could look fondly on his infancy for the same reason, but nostalgia for the Blitz or severed heads in pot-pourri was clearly never going to be a trend, for London or for Dennis. Some things, surely, were too raw to finish up in souvenir shops, or he hoped they were.

  Crossing Commercial Street and still attempting to find something positive in the deranging horror of the last week, he decided that he must at least have gone through all the strangeness allocated to a single human being in their lifetime, and that from here on, speaking statistically, the rest of his existence should be free of funny or peculiar incidents. He was congratulating himself on this reassuring possibility when something funny happened – not Gog Blincoe funny, but still funny nonetheless. As he turned into Bethnal Green Road, Dennis registered a figure on the far side of the busy street, doggedly striding west, its gait familiar though glimpsed only in instalments through the intervening cars and horse-drawn carts. It was Clive Amery.

  They both spotted each other at the same time and stopped in their tracks. The trainee lawyer’s eyes were momentarily inhabited by blank surprise before his face lit up with a broad grin of recognition and he waved enthusiastically to Dennis, waiting for a break in traffic to dart eagerly across the road towards his younger, shabbier acquaintance.

  ‘Why, Lord Oxydol! The very chap that I was looking for! Do you know, I’ve been wandering the grounds of your dismal estate for a good fifteen minutes, hoping to catch sight of you? I’d just popped up and squinted through the window of that picturesque Dickensian hovel where you work, but, failing to find you there, had given up the ghost. And now, as if from nowhere, here you are! Nature must give you guttersnipes your colouration so that you can blend in with the gutters when you’re sniping.’

  Dennis laughed, while inwardly still reeling with astonishment. Other than their first meeting, when Clive happened to call in at Lowell’s Books & Magazines, he’d never previously known his stylish pal to venture so far from the law courts. Shoreditch, for a city boy like Clive, he thought, must seem like a safari into a dark continent of rationing, with tin advertisements for Oxo bolted up on its end-terrace walls. The young legal apprentice even looked a little worn and windswept after hacking through the urban undergrowth: still dashing, naturally, but with a couple of his blond hairs out of place, and a few minor wrinkles in the same dark suit that he’d been wearing yesterday. He didn’t have his tie on, and the points of his unbuttoned collar were spread like white wings across the black lapels. It wasn’t that he was what anyone would call dishevelled, but, on Clive, anything other than impeccable tended to be more of a cause for comment.

  ‘Clive? What are you doing all the way up here? Aren’t you afraid you’ll pick up commonness or beriberi?’

  Giving Dennis an indulgent smile, Clive wagged one slightly grubby palm dismissively.

  ‘Good Lord, no. If you’re going east of Holborn these days, they give you injections against both those things, hadn’t you heard? No, it was just a Saturday and I had nothing planned, so I thought that I’d take advantage of the weather, and trek all the way up here to see my old mate Knuckleyard. Especially after that business you were talking to me about yesterday. God, Dennis, what a yarn! I promise you, I thought about it all last night, and then this morning I decided that I’d better come and check on you to see how it all went, the episode with Jack Spot and his quaking henchman that you were expecting when I saw you last. Since you appear to have no obvious bullet holes, I take it that things didn’t go too badly?’

  Dennis raised an eyebrow, but then wasn’t sure what he had done it for, so lowered it again.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, everything went fine, and I don’t ever need to think about that stuff again. I mean, it was sort of exciting, I suppose, but I’m not someone who’s cut out for it. Somebody cleverer or tougher, perhaps they could handle it, but me, I’ve had enough.’ Clive nodded, it seemed sympathetically. ‘But I’m chuffed that you came here to make sure I was alright. You said you’d keep an eye on me when I rang up and asked on Wednesday, and you have. You’re a good mate, Clive. Thanks for doing that. Had you got anywhere in mind where we could go? I was just heading back to Ada’s after all this time away, but, obviously, it’s not something that I’m looking forward to, and a chat in a Lyons Corner House with you would at least put it off a little longer. We could probably find somewhere on the high street, if you fancied it. My treat.’ He’d still got most of Grace’s tenner.

  Clive made an apologetic grimace.

  ‘Dennis, if I’m honest, it was just you and your welfare brought me up here. Now I’ve satisfied myself that you’re still with us, there’s most probably a lot of casework that I should be reading up on over this weekend. We’ll have to save our badinage for a further occasion.’

  Despite a fleeting cloud of disappointment, Dennis saw the logic in what Clive said, and was anyway too heartened by his comrade’s gesture of concern to make a fuss about it.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Perhaps we could meet up in Bond’s next week sometime?’

  The fledgling barrister sighed heavily and shook his head.

  ‘No can do, I’m afraid. Something’s come up, and I’m anticipating that I’m going to be exceptionally busy for at least this coming week. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we put our meeting off until the evening of the Monday after next, when I get out of work? And, strictly entre nous, I’m getting rather sick of Bond’s, aren’t you? The way that sweaty idiot manager fawns over both of us is starting to make even me uncomfortable. There’s a nice café up in Farringdon Road, near the bottom. It’s called Franklin’s, and stays open late into the evening. You can’t miss it. Shall we say Monday the thirty-first, at eight?’

  Although it seemed like a long wait, Dennis accepted it resignedly. The two shook hands and clapped each other on the shoulder, while a passing coalman’s horse evacuated its gold-green and fibrous load on to the tarmac not three feet away. Clive sauntered off in the direction of Old Street and Clerkenwell, and Dennis stood and watched him go, still marvelling at the unreality of their exchange. Something about it felt a bit wrong, almost, but this minor itch was wholly overruled by Dennis’s elation that the bond between him and his friend seemed to be deepening, as he’d hoped. For Clive to have come all the way to Shoreditch because he was worried about Dennis felt like a tremendous honour – almost cancelling the doomsday of his forthcoming reunion with Coffin Ada, but not quite. Afflicted by a sinking feeling that itself had sinking feelings, Dennis steeled himself for the encounter with his landlady, now only a few minutes up the road and in his future. He drank in a mighty breath to fortify himself, and only then remembered the proximity of the fresh horse shit.

  He dragged out his climb of a largely conceptual Gibraltar Walk as much as he was able, which was hardly any time at all. On his procrastinating way, he was obscurely cheered to notice that one of the chapters from Sax Rohmer’s Dope – Night-Life of Soho, as it happened – was still holding on for dear life in a gutter of the cancelled street, despite last Thursday’s rain. Dennis considered fishing it out of the drain that it had blocked and giving it a read, just as a further tactic for postponing the inevitable, but then told himself he was a better man than that, and anyway, the pages, save for their bold headings, were too sodden to be legible. With concrete in his shoes and heart, he carried on towards the walk’s top end and its remaining stalagmite of brick and slate, its desolation show home.

  Saturdays were always the best days for trade, and therefore Lowell’s Books & Magazines was resolutely PEN according to its ghostly, hanging door sign. Carrier bag in hand, he pushed his way into the shop with a defeated jingle from its customer-alert bell, where he found that he and Ada Benson, possibly because it was still relatively early, were the only people there.

  Standing beside the till, Ada looked up at him and all the colour would have drained out of her face if there’d been any to begin with. She attempted what a scream would be with very little breath behind it, like the death squawk of a strangled hen, and sagged forward across the counter, clutching at her chest, gasping for breath and with her varicose eyes bulging. She was obviously dying, more than she was normally, but when he lurched across the shop floor to his landlady’s assistance, she threw up one trembling hand to ward him off and screamed again, although with even less force and conviction. Holding herself up with one palm braced against the counter and the other held out in refusal like a traffic bobby’s, her distended eyeballs seemed about to launch themselves towards her underling from her slack, corrugated face.

  ‘Dennis? I thought you were a cough cough cough cough cough cough fucking ghost! How are you cough cough cough cough fucking cough cough still alive? If you’ve still got that book there in your cough cough cough cough carrier bag, then you can cough cough fuck off out of it.’

  Startled and stunned by the extremity of Ada’s almost cardiac reaction, Dennis stuttered as he fumbled in the bag to pull out and brandish aloft Machen’s The Cosy Room.

  ‘No, no, no, I got rid of that. I, I, I took it back to where it came from, like you told me. All I’ve got in here’s that Machen book with “N” in it. I, I, I got the editor to sign it for you.’ Dennis paused and blinked as his internal filing system finally caught up with what his spluttering employer had just said. ‘Hang on – you thought that I was dead?’

  In her ambiguous maybe-tartan slippers, Ada stamped out angrily, without a sound, around the counter to confront him, although whether she was furious with him for having asked a question or for not being dead wasn’t an easy matter to establish. He thought it might be a bit of both.

  ‘Don’t change the fucking cough cough cough cough subject! I had fucking Jack cough Spot in here, looking for you! If you’re cough cough cough telling me that you’ve took back the Hampole book and seen off cough cough cough Jack Spot, and haven’t come out of it inside out or fucking cough cough dead, you must think I’m as fucking cough cough cough cough daft as you are!’

  Dennis, bag in one hand, Machen memorabilia in the other, was beginning to feel somewhat put upon. He was also discovering that after all the Popes of Blades and wooden men and talking cats, his landlady was fractionally less frightening, though only by a petrified and rigid hair. He wasn’t ready yet to stand up for himself with Coffin Ada, but thought that he could perhaps manage a seated posture. His cowed apologia now had undertones of dignity, and even sounded slightly cross.

  ‘Ada, I sorted it all out. I had help doing it, but everything you wanted me to do, I did it. I got Spot to hold off killing me until I’d taken Hampole’s book back to the other place, and then I brought somebody home he couldn’t argue with. He won’t be giving either of us any trouble from now on, and neither will the other London. Plus, I’m now on speaking terms with all the top magicians, if you’re after occult rubbish, and I got your copy of The Cosy Room signed by its editor and publisher. Not blowing my own trumpet, but I think for once I’ve done a pretty decent job. All I want now is to move back in here, and get on with my work, and put this bloody awful week behind me.’

  Ada stared at him without especial malice, as if actually considering what he’d just said. She snatched the Machen volume that he was still waving, flipping through it to the flyleaf with John Gawsworth’s signature and dedication, then looked back at Dennis.

  ‘Dennis, I’ve cough cough cough cough cough sold your bed.’

  He opened and then closed his mouth two or three times in quick succession without making any sound, his feelings evidently inexpressible. Ada seemed irritated by his look of hurt betrayal and the criticism of her character implied therein.

  ‘Don’t cough cough cough cough look at me like that. With you not coming back, keeping the cough cough bed seemed cough cough cough cough fucking morbid. Cough cough cough. Dennis, there comes a time when cough cough people have to let go and move cough cough cough cough on.’

  He stared at her as if no longer sure what he was staring at.

  ‘Ada, you saw me Tuesday. I’ve been gone four days.’

  She carried on, as though he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘Anyway, the chap I sold it to refused to cough cough cough cough take the mattress, so it’s not all cough cough cough cough cough cough doom and gloom. Think yourself lucky that I didn’t cough cough cough cough fucking burn it, because I was cough cough going to.’

  She paused as if in thought, perhaps considering the sheer unlikelihood of what her clueless lackey had accomplished. Unexpectedly her angry granite features softened.

  ‘Well, you’ve spoiled my cough cough morning good and proper now, coming in cough cough cough cough here, and nearly giving me a fucking heart attack. I’ll have to shut the shop until this after cough cough cough cough noon. I don’t want anybody seeing me like this.’

  She shuffled in her plaid or puked-on slippers and her three-week-dead flamingo of a dressing-gown across to the shop door, turning the hanging cardboard sign from PEN to LOSED, looking exactly as she did at every other point in all the years Dennis had known her, with her skin like puckered tripe, and fire-risk hair. She’d left it a bit late, he thought, to not want anybody seeing her like that, much as he both endorsed and understood her wishes. Having closed her business at what must have been around ten in the morning, Ada swivelled to regard her prodigal employee, briefly holding up The Cosy Room with an expression of airily unimpressed disdain.

  ‘Not that it’s any of your cough cough business, but I used to know John Gawsworth. He once served me coffee what had cough cough cough poor old Matty Shiel’s ashes in it, the disgusting cough cough cough cough cough cough fucker. I knew Shiel as well, when he was living up that cough cough tree in Hyde Park. Lovely chap. Ah, well. I’ve shut up for the cough cough morning, so shall we go in the kitchen for a cup of tea and a cough cough cough cough cough fucking chinwag?’

  This disorienting mood reversal offered Dennis no appropriate response except to mutely do as she’d suggested. It was like the grillings that he’d seen in films, where there was usually a threatening copper and a sympathetic one, to break down all a suspect’s psychological defences, except in this instance, both interrogators used the same vinegar-shrivelled lips. He followed Ada through into the kitchen, where she made them both the promised cup of tea and even furthered Dennis’s sense of unbalance by providing a half-finished pack of finger biscuits.

  It was certainly the longest and, in its odd way, the most convivial conversation that the two of them had ever had. It wasn’t that his landlady was any nicer to him, but more that she was suddenly subjecting him to the same level of unpleasantness that she reserved for peers and other grown-ups. Even when he told her about trying to take the Hampole book to Flabby Harrison’s when he was drunk and consequently getting noticed by Jack Spot’s men, the way Ada gave a phlegmy chuckle and called him a cunt felt something like affection. And when Dennis started to describe the chase through Soho that had ensued, she held up a crenellated finger in the most polite of interruptions.