She got drunker as well. Each time she returned from the toilet I noted her lipstick had been re-formed. I didn’t want to leave the pub that night, with the corner seats all to ourselves. I knew fine what I was plucking up courage to ask her: how it went on her wedding night. And I was aroused by it too.

  Then a man with a beard appeared. He meandered towards us – the same way a sudden, loosed bead of water on a steamed-up window darts, quick and hapless. Drunk already, he banged his pint down on a table and spilled some, muttering as he sat, directly across. Aoife and I abruptly stopped talking. I was furious at his intrusion; the rear of the pub was empty and yet he’d sat there.

  For something to say, I stated to her, ‘You’ll need to show me those books, then?’

  Aoife turned her face to me. ‘What books?’

  ‘The photography books.’

  ‘What’s that?’ the male voice went.

  I couldn’t believe it. He’d not wasted any time barging in to our company. Aoife and I turned to look at this man.

  ‘What’s that?’ he repeated.

  I looked at him and said in a hostile, warning voice, ‘Pardon?’

  The man’s arm was stretched out and he seemed to be pointing directly at Aoife’s breasts. But then I saw the CND symbol badge that she always had, pinned to the lapel of that corduroy jacket with the flared cuffs.

  Aoife looked at him and she made me angry because she smiled amiably. ‘This?’

  ‘Ya.’

  ‘That’s the sign of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.’

  He leaned forward, rolling a cigarette. He was small, stocky, with a clipped beard, and he was wearing some sort of expensive-looking complex ski jacket, with zips and toggles. He had an accent, German maybe.

  ‘So you think. We. We here in England should have no nukes so fucking Russkis can walk in?’

  I turned my face to Aoife, hidden from him, and I raised my eyes to the ceiling, signalling not to get in an argument.

  ‘I am Czech; Russkis walk in. Same as Hungary. Same as they’ll walk in here you don’t have the bomb. You can store one in my back garden. It’s big enough.’ He shrugged so his jacket rustled and hissed and the bobbles and zip-pulls on it shook. ‘What the fuck. Better than under the Russki fuckin’ commies.’

  Aoife went to speak but I’d had a few beers and I interrupted, ‘The CND symbol isn’t a pro-communist Russia symbol; it’s saying that nuclear weapons are insane and inhuman. Nuclear weapons everywhere.’

  ‘You think, guy, at fucking Agincourt an axe go into the side of a man’s face – you think that’s nice? Always there was these machine for slaughter; since man began.’

  ‘You can’t destroy the world and everything that lives on it with an axe.’

  I could see he was ignoring me now and his eyes had settled firmly on Aoife. He kept looking at her then he dropped his eyes to lick the paper for his rolled cigarette. ‘Your husband talk always for you?’

  I flicked my head at him.

  Aoife didn’t correct him but said, ‘I’m a mother with a child. A nuclear bomb could go off in another country and still kill my baby. It’s disgusting. I don’t want any wars, but most of all not that one.’

  The guy looked at me. ‘You the father?’

  I gave him a final, warning look but the truth is I was charmed to be mistaken for her husband.

  ‘Hey relax, big boy, I just joke with you. I’m Czech.’

  Staring dead at him, I tried to mellow out. ‘I read some of your writers.’

  ‘What you say, writers?’ He chuckled. ‘Fucking writers, what is writers?’

  ‘Klima, Hašek, Hrabal, Kundera. Kafka is Czech.’

  ‘You pronounce names shit. Prague is not just fucking writers and Czech is not just Prague. Writers. They all fuck off out like me. Out Prague, so they can lay some decent women.’ He chuckled.

  ‘Have you been here long?’ Aoife said, her helplessly sweet and childish voice sounding musical.

  ‘What you think, baby? Since sixty-eight, beautiful. Since I been here. Now I’m fucking rich, and I worked hard for it.’ He quickly looked at us, as if daring me to challenge this.

  I clapped my hands together in a slow, cynical applause.

  This wasn’t good enough for him so he had to prove it.

  ‘Yah want me buy you guys a drink, then? Good whisky for both, eh? Expensive?’

  I turned to Aoife in despair but she lifted her shoulders just a fraction in foolish assent.

  ‘What you drinking, darling? I’m just joking with you kids, just joking, what you wanna drink, eh?’

  ‘We’re just drinking beer.’

  ‘I’ll have whisky,’ Aoife said. I pursed my lip and shrugged in agreement.

  ‘Come back to my place and we drink some real champagne. I just live next door.’

  I said, ‘I think we need to be getting back.’

  ‘You don’t wanna come to my house and drink some champagne after?’

  I turned round to Aoife, furious, but she lifted the shoulders an inch again.

  At least he wasn’t lying about the house. Half an hour later we really were just a few doors along from the pub, walking up his garden path. Some kind of metal sculpture was in the front garden with lots of pampas grass.

  ‘This is my place. You’ll see inside. Buy the next-door house and make them together. See? See how there’s no door that side?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘These were two houses now I make them together one house. I’m rich as shit.’

  ‘Yes. You told us.’

  I looked at Aoife and she made a tittering motion to her face. She had a long scarf wrapped round her high neck.

  He bent over and meticulously undid about three locks. Then he opened the front door and we stepped in, onto some dark, carpeted mezzanine area, and he switched on the lights.

  I had to admit, it was impressive. The whole place was like a very large hotel’s lobby area. He’d somehow knocked out the partition walls between the houses, and the floors – Christ knows what was holding it all up. The ground floor was a wide carpeted space with white shelves of books, ornaments and mechanical devices. Above us, a minstrels’ gallery with balustrades on a deep balcony. At the bottom end, a curved, carpeted staircase now swept up on two sides to that first-floor balcony.

  ‘Gosh. You have a wonderful home.’

  ‘Thought you’d like it, baby.’

  He led the way down off the mezzanine and began crossing the huge carpeted floor, moving around the obstacles of chairs and tables.

  ‘You live here alone?’

  ‘All alone, buddy. I had wife and kids but they gone. Thank fuck.’

  Aoife asked, ‘May I use the toilet, please?’

  ‘Sure. I show you where.’

  They went up the right side of the stairs together but he struggled a bit and had to hold on to the banisters. I stood, head tipped slightly back watching for any monkey business, but after pointing Aoife down a corridor to the rear of the house he immediately came back down slowly. He glanced up at me and chuckled. ‘Fuck me, I pissed pissed pissed. Hey, I get some champagne, but we sit.’ He indicated an oasis of chairs.

  On the way there he placed himself before a hi-fi music centre, reached into a large glass jar, absolutely full of loose music cassettes with no plastic covers – maybe a hundred of them – and he lifted one at random into the tape machine, then jammed it on. Music came from all round the bloody place – ironic-sounding waltz music with fiddles and accordions.

  ‘Yah like it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Good. No?’

  He sat in a black leather and chrome swivel chair, clearly an original sixties piece, and I sat opposite, facing him.

  ‘You bring that chair with you from Prague?’

  ‘What?’

  The awful fiddle music was so fucking loud, the old prick couldn’t hear a thing. It was exactly the chair I would have imagined him sitting in, wearing a nasty bathrobe, flicking through back issues of Playboy.

  He leaned forward. I noticed he still had the ski jacket on. I’d got used to the noise it made but now that noise had vanished into the polka music. At least he couldn’t sneak up on Aoife easily.

  ‘I see what goes on.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘She’s wedding ring, you not.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘You guys wanna get out the pub, man, where there too many people. It’s okay with me; I understand affairs. Spend the night here. I got plenty berths on this ship, baby.’

  I leaned in to him a bit and waggled my finger. ‘You’re dead wrong about me and her.’

  He shrugged and chuckled. ‘Oh yeah? I don’t think so. I see her too. Long Tall Sally.’ He leaned back and he said, ‘Don’t be sucker.’

  ‘What?’ It made me furious that he was dead right and that I wasn’t cool.

  ‘Don’t be sucker.’ He leaned forward again and tapped my leg. I half thought I might kick out hard at his crotch and see what way he spun round on the chair.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What you want people say about you when you’re gone? That you was a nice guy? The nicest guy in fucking cemetery.’ He shrugged and looked at me as if this was profound, not ten-cent bar philosophy.

  That Löwenbräu and whisky was quite a mix okay. I was feeling a bit spinny. It suddenly struck me that this man might be an actual emissary from the devil. A demon of the lower orders, Balakan or Massapiel himself, invoked from a scum bath of bloody bones, boiled semen and the slippery pelts of skinned children. I frowned at my involuntary thought.

  ‘You wanna know how I make all my money?’

  ‘You sold your soul to the devil?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You had construction contracts for the Gulag?’

  ‘What? Constructions? I’m in movie business but not the sucker bullshit end. I have movie equipment business. Cameras, cable, generators, support trucks: BBC hire me all time, some movie that come hire me in the seventies, always. I make a lot of fucking money then, man. I fuck a lot of beautiful women. Stupid actress bitches. I own all stuff in warehouse.’

  ‘Plant hire. Good for you.’ I nodded.

  ‘Yeah. Movie plant hire and I got the contacts, man.’ He slapped his own thigh. ‘I got the fucking contacts; you wanna Panaflex thirty-five mil in one hour, I got you it, you, fucking guy!’ He shouted, exhilarated at this state of affairs.

  I nodded patiently as if I had a sore throat and muffler on.

  ‘Hello, baby!’

  I squinted at his shouting and turned suddenly. Aoife was standing at the very top of the stairway; tall, the skinny legs in burgundy tights, but she was carrying her jacket and scarf: the freshened lipstick smile, erect as a sunflower on a windless day, down the stairs she came. I groaned at how much I was in love with her but I also really wanted to fuck her, and when I looked over at my companion he was thinking exactly the same thing. Men of the world unite.

  ‘That’s fun music,’ she called lightly, trotting down the steps. ‘Oops.’

  The Czech was up. I creaked round in my chair and yeah, right enough the old bastard was circling quite smoothly, dancing with Aoife, they turned one two three, one two three. And Eeef knew the steps. I couldn’t dance. I stood up. ‘I’m going to toilet.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Guy. Hey. You dance with lady while I get the champagne.’

  ‘I’m just going up to the toilet.’

  ‘You need to have more fun, buddy. What’s wrong with you? That’s the nice toilet for Lady Hefer up there. That’s your name, baby?’ He’d let go of her and she was standing before him, her cheeks a touch pink from the whisky and dancing.

  ‘Aoife.’

  ‘Eef-herr. That’s her toilet, guy. I show you another less better one for guys.’

  I followed him deeper and deeper to the back of his huge barn. If I’d been carrying a saucepan I might have hit him hard on the back of his fat neck, returned and kissed Aoife on her lipsticked mouth – but I didn’t have the balls. There was a huge kitchen and black windows out into a rear garden, I suppose. He showed me to a small modern bathroom.

  ‘There you go, guy. I take her back the champagne and we have little party.’

  I pissed with trembling hands, quite happy that I squirted some on the black tiled floor, and then I stared at myself in the mirror. I washed my hands and splashed my face with water then dried around my ears, making sure no tell-tale water was left dampening my fringe, taking care I had not soaked my shirt. I took a big breath.

  I walked back towards that ridiculous, macabre vaudeville music. Aoife was standing beside him and the Czech was bent over something: a metallic champagne bucket on a permanent stand, and he was opening the bottle in the shuffling ice. There was a sorrowful pop, killed by the huge acoustics of space. Aoife had her head a bit more forward and a hand up to her lip, nibbling at her thumb. I recognised the stance. Imitating Lou. It meant she was upset. I shouldn’t have left them alone.

  ‘He’s back. He come back when he smell the wine, Hefer,’ the Czech laughed.

  She was looking at me with eyes that seemed to vibrate.

  I said to her, ‘Okay?’

  Still nibbling her thumbnail she nodded quickly and uncertain. ‘Need to pee again,’ she said, looking right at me. And she raised her eyes.

  ‘You pee again, beautiful, but you just did? You like my toilets? You not sniffing the jizz in there?’

  ‘I drank too much beer.’ She strode ahead but she grabbed my hand as she passed and quite spun me around, so I was tugged forward with her on the end of her arm. Hand in hand we went up the curved stairway together.

  ‘Okay, you guys both go to sniff the jizz and give me none. I got good stuff, kids. Better than you. Maybe ya don’t like the music. I sit. I sit and we have a little champagne now. Eh?’

  She kept pulling me up the stairs then at the top, down the corridor we entered a large bathroom together and she shut the door behind us. The bathroom was very luxurious with a huge bath tub.

  ‘He’s a horrible man.’

  ‘I tried to tell you in the pub not to come back here. Did he touch you?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t let a man touch me, but he’s disgusting. What he said. He offered me money to do things.’

  I tried not to smile. I was absolutely delighted the Czech had discredited himself so utterly and so quickly. I could almost have gone downstairs and hugged him. I said to her, ‘Don’t worry about it. Don’t let it upset you. We’ll just go.’

  ‘Okay.’ She glared in my face. I would reach out and I would kiss her. That is what I would do, among all this white stone and mirrors. I smiled. ‘You’re not going to cry, are you?’

  ‘No. No. I’m more angry than anything.’

  ‘Want me to go down there and smash his face in?’

  She looked shocked. ‘No!’

  ‘C’mon, let’s go home.’

  ‘Suppose so,’ she groaned.

  She took my hand to go down the stairs as well. It felt a bit like making an entrance in a musical show, descending the carpeted steps, hand in hand, to the fiddle and accordion. I was ready to confront him but he was sat back in the leather swivel chair, his head to one side, big stomach pushed out. He was fast asleep in his ski jacket.

  Aoife and I both stood before him, still holding hands.

  ‘He’s not dead, is he?’ she whispered in an aggressive hiss, over the music.

  ‘Sadly not. Look at his big belly going. C’mon. Let’s nick the champagne and go.’

  ‘Maybe he’s pretending?’

  ‘Hey. Dickhead? Czech fucker. Your house is a shithole.’

  ‘He’s completely asleep,’ she said, sort of fascinated.

  I leaned forward and I quietly slid the champagne bottle out of the ice bucket. It wasn’t French champagne. It was sparkling wine. Czech wine. Drops of water blotted noisily on the top of my new shoes.

  ‘A cheapskate at heart. It’s sparkling wine.’ I held out the bottle for her examination.

  ‘Thirty pounds to show him a glimpse of my boobs, he said.’ She whispered this looking down on him.

  ‘A definite cheapskate. I’d pay more than that.’

  ‘You’re sweet.’

  Still we stood, looking down on the man, unconscious in his own house. I craned my lips in towards Aoife’s small ear, almost touching the lobe, and whispered, ‘Shall we do something awful?’

  She turned and looked at me, ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Turn on every water tap in the house with the sink plugs in and the overflows blocked with bog paper?’

  She delightedly opened her eyes and her mouth, wide. For the first time, despite her perfection, I noted she had a silver filling on one of her top molars, toward the back. I imagined trying to feel it with the tip of my tongue whilst kissing her.

  Suddenly she said, ‘Let’s nose around.’ She dropped my hand smartly.

  I was surprised. I took a swig from the sparkling wine bottle – it tasted bad – and I followed her back up the stairs.

  She made a circuit round the minstrels’ gallery of the first floor and all the time looking down at him, asleep in the swivel chair.

  There was recessed shelving right round the minstrels’ gallery, then the original windows were above the front door, giving a view out over the street. She walked round the other side. I followed her like some uninspired hanger-on and I said, ‘This dickhead doesn’t have enough books for so many shelves. What a waste. If I owned this pile, I’d fill the shelves with books.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Sure. I could go into every secondhand bookshop in London, and come out with treasures each time.’

  ‘What else would you do? If you were rich?’

  ‘I dunno.’ I looked at her. ‘Have fun and buy you diamonds.’

  She smiled.

  ‘I guess in reality, just lie in bed looking up at the shadows and not actually do a thing. Daydream. Same as now. So it’d be wasted on me. That’s the problem getting rich. You use up your whole life doing it. Just to sit up the front of the aeroplane. What would you do?’

  ‘Make sure Lily got everything she needed.’ She leaned on the balustrade and looked down. ‘Save it for Lily. Go on a holiday.’

  ‘Not Leeds.’