Spare was the first to notice them approaching, and nudged Ironfoot’s higher shoulder.

  ‘’ere, Jack, ’ave a dekko over ’ere! It’s Dennis and a woman ’oo’s too good for ’im. Smashin’ to see yer, young ’un. Jack tells me you done alright the other night, with Spotty and ’is spear carrier in Shoreditch. An’ are we to take it this is your Miss Shilling, ’oo our mate mahogany-bonce Blincoe was considerably impressed by?’

  Before Dennis could reply on her behalf, Grace had stepped forward and stuck out her hand.

  ‘Yeah, I’m Grace Shilling. And you’re Mr Spare. Thanks ever so for signing your surrealist cards for me. I think that you’re a brilliant artist, and tell Mr Blincoe I was dead impressed by him as well. He frit the life out of me, obviously, but he’s a lovely chap, or whatever you want to call him.’

  After shaking hands with an amused and, from the look of it, delighted Austin Spare, Grace turned and did the same with Jack Neave, who seemed just as taken with her.

  ‘And you’re Ironfoot Jack, I’m guessing by the iron foot. Thank you for looking after this big bugger with the business in Shoreditch last Friday. I don’t want to know about it, but thanks all the same. After I’d met your Mr Blincoe, Dennis here was quick to reassure me you weren’t made of iron, but having seen you, I think you most likely are. It’s a great honour meeting both of you.’

  Neave grinned at Dennis from beneath his hat brim, his eyes twinkling like wet lumps of coal.

  ‘Bloody ’ell, Dennis, where did you find this one? I thought that my Jinny was a box o’ fireworks before she evaporated, bless ’er soul, into the elements. But this one ’ere knocks Jinny into a cocked ’at for bleedin’ cheek. You want to watch she don’t ’ave you for breakfast, boy.’

  They were all chuckling now, a still point in the circulating drift of pub goers and patrons. If art exhibitions were as relaxed and convivial as this was, Dennis wondered, then why hadn’t he attended one before? Probably lack of opportunity, he reasoned. He couldn’t recall there being any culture back before the war, and any since still had its hair on fire and its ears ringing. Spare’s show, on the other hand, seemed somehow straightforward and natural, for all of the undoubted strangeness in the images themselves. Despite all his misgivings, Dennis found that he was thoroughly enjoying this. Ironfoot and Spare, apparently, had both taken a shine to Grace and she to them, and although Dennis wasn’t really involved in this amity, he felt inordinately proud and pleased to stand there basking in its warmth. They talked for a few minutes, and then Grace demanded that Dennis accompany her in a circumnavigation of the lounge bar and the pictures that they’d come to see. The artist and the disproportioned hawker both seemed to have other matters that they wanted to discuss, and cheerfully encouraged the young couple on their way, saying they’d see them later.

  Wandering through the subdued rhubarb of the modest crowd, Grace gave Dennis a nudge and nodded to a well-dressed old man with a neatly trimmed moustache and beard, then holding court on the impromptu gallery’s far side. She dropped her pure and vulgar voice to a stage whisper.

  ‘I think that’s old what’s-his-name, the painter who did Lawrence of Arabia and all them. Augustus something, if I’ve got it right. It might be John, something like that. Augustus John.’

  Dennis, predictably, had never heard of the much-vaunted Post-Impressionist, but deftly concealed this behind his genuine astonishment at Grace’s breadth of learning.

  ‘How are you so brainy, Grace? I mean, compared to me. From what you’ve said, you can’t have spent a lot of time in school. I expect you paid more attention than what I did.’

  Guiding him towards a corner where the exhibition seemed to start, she glanced up and afforded him a smugly satisfied quirk of her lips.

  ‘Well, hardly. I was barely there for long enough to pay attention, and I found the Luftwaffe a bit of a distraction, to be honest. Still, at school they taught me how to read and told me what a library was, and, as it turned out, that was all I needed. I mean, it’s not like there’s any subject I know inside out, but I know little bits and bobs about a lot of things. Now, if you can just leave off buttering me up for a few minutes, we can have a proper look at your mate’s pictures.’

  The first one of these that they inspected was a pencil drawing on buff paper, and according to the catalogue that Dennis later spent five shillings on for Grace, was titled Theurgy. The image was remarkably compelling, although neither of them could have said at first precisely what it was or what it represented. At the upper left was an exquisitely presented female head, a handsome woman who directed her expressionless gaze off the portrait’s far side, as though not wishing to be involved with the unusual illustration’s other content, or else unaware of it. The drawing’s right-hand side was occupied by what looked like a single line, that twisted in a coiling and recursive smoulder from the picture’s lower reaches to its upper edge, where it performed a writhing tailspin down again. Along the way it warped itself into a flickering column, at once smoke and fire, that seemed to be a melting totem pole of coalescing faces: ageing and patrician at its summit, diabolically licentious in the middle reaches and a wry daydreamer at its base. The lovely and impassive woman faced these conjoined wraiths, though it appeared she was not looking at them. Underneath this, at the bottom of the frame, was a hand-lettered text in English that was, even so, inscrutable, embedded as it was with cryptic runes in place of punctuation. Nearby, a bird’s wing, feathered with flames, revealed itself to be the artist’s signature, while down below it were three grovelling forms that looked like cartoon pigs fashioned from dough or wax. Dennis was mystified. He didn’t understand it and was disinclined to try, but Grace strong-armed him into it.

  ‘I think that what he’s doing is, he’s trying to cast a spell over that woman. It looks like a picture that she’s sat for, judging by the pose, and from her face I’d say that she was putting up with the experience rather than enjoying it. He knew her, then. She was somebody in his life, and I’d lay odds that all the funny writing and the devil faces are a sort of magic that’s meant to attract her, or to keep her with him, or to win her back. Whichever one it was, I’m not sure that it would have worked. She looks as if, inside, she thinks that she’s a cut above it all.’

  Dennis saw straight away that she was almost certainly correct about the work being intended as some kind of sorcery – it reeked of magic, with its half-real shapes and made-up hieroglyphics – but he privately suspected that her love-charm theory was just Grace misreading everything as being about women because that was Grace’s gender. Slightly cross that she was so much more assured and confident than he was, probably through being that much older, Dennis felt he needed to assert himself and demonstrate that he was, sometimes, almost capable of insight.

  ‘What are all these faces on the right, then? Is it demons that he’s conjuring up to make her fall in love with him? I mean, from where I’m looking at them, they could be just about anything.’

  He found it flattering that Grace appeared to take his comment seriously and give it her consideration before, as he saw it, pointing out why Dennis’s interpretation was completely wrong.

  ‘Hmm. I suppose it could be demons, evil spirits and all that, but if I were to make a guess, I’d say it might be different parts of him, parts of his personality. This one down at the bottom here, perhaps that’s what he thinks of as his basic self, one that finds all the other business funny, half the time. Then, up the top, the one that looks all venerable and solemn, that might be his highest self, the part of him that understands it all but seems fed up about the whole thing. As for the face in the middle, where it’s like a dragon or a bird but with a really lecherous expression, that’s his dirty devil. That’s his cock, in my opinion, and it’s looking at the woman like it wants to eat her.’

  Which shut Dennis up, if only through Grace’s deployment of the word cock and her succinct account of how they look at women gastronomically. This was an observation that struck far too close to home, so rather than say anything, he gave a thoughtful nod and allowed her to bundle him impatiently towards the following exhibit. The boozer-cum-gallery was starting to fill up, with wide lassos of cigarette smoke twirling over the perusing and pontificating herd, the clink of glasses starting to compete with the low murmurs of appreciation. Next on Grace and Dennis’s itinerary was a piece so different from its predecessor that Dennis at first suspected it of being work done by a different artist that had been included by mistake.

  Rendered in charcoal and pastel on textured board that Dennis judged to be around ten by fourteen, it was the head-and-shoulders portrait of a man, the features oddly tilted in a manner that he couldn’t, to begin with, put his finger on. The man’s face radiated so much predatory criminality that the appended title scrawled in at the bottom – Spiv Rex – seemed wholly unnecessary. It was a distinctive look that had become ubiquitous in London since the conflagration, with the fag-end burning down to perilously near the corner of the curling lips; the heavy-lidded eyes slid sideways in covert appraisal of an opportunity or a potential victim. Modelled in soft browns and flesh tones, slightly underlit against the pale blue of what might be a club’s backroom or gents’ urinal wall, long eyebrows in a straight line, directional arrows following the shifty, calculating gaze … belatedly, Dennis realised what it was about the tilting face that had evaded him before: the picture’s point of view was subtly distorted, so that the man’s face was stretched out laterally, as if it were drawn upon the skin of a balloon that had then been inflated. Even now that Dennis had seen through the painterly illusion, he could not say what it was about the image that unnerved him, or of what it had reminded him. He therefore stood back cautiously to view the picture from a distance, even as Grace tottered right up to it for a closer look. Studying both the drawn spiv and the equally absorbing rear view that he had of Grace, he failed to hear the clunk and thud of Jack Neave limping closer until the misshapen figurehead of lost bohemia was right behind him, and his opening remark made Dennis jump.

  ‘Put you in mind of anybody, does it?’

  Neave was grinning, and it took Dennis a second to take in that Ironfoot was referring to Spare’s picture rather than his voyeuristic glimpse of Grace. Frowning in puzzlement at the distended mug of the black marketeer, he couldn’t see what Jack was on about. Something about the face had taken him aback, he would admit, but it hadn’t reminded him of anyone. Or had it? Staring, squinting, tilting his head first to one side then the other, finally the tenuous resemblance hit him, and he turned to Neave with a gone-out expression.

  ‘Is that … does he look a bit like Harry Lud?’

  Jack cackled like a mucous fire that was just getting going.

  ‘Well, no, it’s not ’arry, but I reckon that it’s ’arry what give Awstin the idea, don’t yer think? A villain with ’is mush all spread out sideways, even if this chap ’ere is an understatement o’ the three-foot-wide original. ’e gets a few of his peculiarities from the Great When, does Awstin.’

  Their hushed conversation was at that point interrupted by a sudden peal of laughter from Grace Shilling, who turned from Spiv Rex still giggling, but tried to get herself under control when she saw that Jack Neave had joined them.

  ‘Sorry. I weren’t laughing at the picture. It’s a knockout. I was laughing because I just cottoned on and got the joke. I didn’t know why Mr Spare had drawn this feller with his face stretched out, but then I thought, “Of course! Spiv Rex! This chap’s a wide boy!” I just weren’t expecting, with him being such a brilliant artist, that he might be having a laugh sometimes, too.’

  Ironfoot and Dennis both laughed heartily as well, not having recognised the obvious visual pun themselves. Jack shot a glance up at the younger, taller man, his turtle-skin eye corners crinkling.

  ‘Well, I’m still not givin’ up on my ’ypothesis, but I’d say that this copper-locked enchantress o’ yours was bang on the money. Awstin, ’e likes pullin’ people’s legs, ’avin’ ’em on and that. Sometimes it’s ’ard to get a serious word out of ’im. Ask ’im about ’is life, an’ like as not ’e’ll make up somethin’ for the fun of it. Like ’ow ’is governess seduced ’im when ’e was a boy an’ taught ’im magic in the bargain, or ’ow ’e was trapped under a load o’ corpses back in World War I. I s’pose ’e’s like a lot of us mob when it comes to ’is biography. You take ol’ Monolulu – ’oo’s been in a proper two-an’-eight since goin’ on your expedition with yer, incidentally – ’ow ’e’ll tell yer ’e’s an Abyssinian prince, when ’e wouldn’t know Africa from Pimlico. Nah, all us crowd, we’re all a lot o’ fantasists. Apart from me, o’ course. I’m ’onest as the day is long.’

  Grace snorted, although not without regard.

  ‘Well, that’s not saying very much. Ain’t it about now that the clocks go back?’

  Jack laughed again and intimated that Grace was a cheeky little bleeder, although, once more, not without regard. The three of them moved on together through a beery hall of marvels, wading amongst exhibition goers of such different social backgrounds that it was astonishing to think they shared a city, let alone a lounge bar. Grace and Ironfoot fell into easy dialogue about their differing but not dissimilar experience of post-war London’s lower rungs, while Dennis, not so conversationally adept as either of them, thought about what Neave had said regarding fantasists.

  When Jack had spoken about ‘us mob’ or ‘us crowd’, Dennis assumed he was referring to the infinitely small minority of London’s citizens who were familiar with the Great When, such as Neave himself, Spare, Monolulu and, more lately, Dennis. Was he also a tall-story merchant, then? A fantasist, just like the others? He had never seen himself as such, but now he thought about it, he remembered the procession of defenceless kittens, frightened infants and blind nuns that he’d led from the blazing ruins of Cripplegate when he was nine, as well as the long stints of being Desperate Dan or Harry Lime or Winston Smith that he had served across the years since then. Perhaps he did have an imagination, after all. Perhaps his recently adopted lifelong urge to be a writer could be something more than just another ineffectual tactic to engage Grace’s attention.

  Then, of course, there were the wider implications of what Ironfoot had said. His comments had suggested that an individual’s ability to pass into the different London was dependent on their being prone to make-believe, on having a degree of distance from normal reality. Dennis recalled that up in Arnold Circus, just a week back, Jack had said that category could include nutcases, too – presumably nutcases with imaginations. Perhaps that’s why everyone had been so adamant that the imagination-free Jack Spot could never be admitted to the other place. It underlined, for Dennis, the perturbing fact that having an imagination wasn’t just a means of landing a career that might impress good-looking redheads, but could also be a milestone on the road to mental instability. Uncertain where this left him, he tuned back into the conversation between Grace and Ironfoot, where the latter was currently holding forth on London life and lowlife since the nights of burning sky.

  ‘A thing what weighs on my mind is ’ow everythin’ as was is bein’ done away with, an’ shall soon be vanished altogether, from what I can see. Since I was a young man who still ’ad both ’is legs, I’ve travelled all about the country. Sometimes I’ll be with the gypsy people or else I’ll be with the Needies: with the tinkers, swindlers and theatre people in between engagements. Used to be that we could go from place to place, doin’ a bit o’ this, a bit o’ that, floggin’ our trinkets, tellin’ fortunes or whatever, so that we could scratch a livin’ and thus solve the Problem of Existence. Since the war, increasin’ly, you can’t do that no more. This welfare state what Bevan an’ them ’ave brought in, it’s an amazin’ benefit, an’ very necessary. All the same, it means things ’ave to be more regimented these days, and there’s not the loop’oles that there was for a bo’emian like me to squeeze through. All the characters, the way o’ life, the world I recognised, it’s all goin’ the same way as the dodo.’

  Grace sighed as she agreed.

  ‘I’m too young to remember much of how it was before, but all the older women on the game that I know, they all say that it’s gone downhill since the bombing started. In the blackouts, they’d be in shop doorways shining torches on their tits to drum up custom, but they say it’s not much better with the lights on. These days you get more rough customers, more mad blokes, or that’s what the other girls all tell me. I think that the war blew up a lot of buildings, but it blew up our behaviour as well, I reckon. Even though it’s over, it’ll leave its mark on things for years and years to come.’

  They’d come to rest before another of Spare’s portraits, this one being a bizarrely elongated but immediately recognisable attempt at Bette Davis, or at least how the actress had looked some several years ago. There were two images of Davis, both in a green dress with fiery orange hair which, although beautiful, was not a patch on Grace’s. One of these portrayed the film star with her head tipped back in profile while the other had her meet the viewer’s gaze, but both were stretched more radically than Spare’s depiction of the spiv had been, and this time vertically rather than horizontally. What Dennis was surprised by, though, was Spare’s decision to transform a popular screen idol into proper art, something he didn’t think that he’d seen done before. Grace, meanwhile, had come to her own annoyingly informed conclusions.

  ‘I think I know what it is, this sort of art. It’s something-morphic. Is it anamorphic? It’s, like, where you have to look at it edge-on to see it in the right perspective. It was in this book I read on Holbein, him who painted all the Tudors. It said in there it was a technique he used.’