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By Root 1076 0

the carpet, both nice enough in themselves, made Paul feel acutely lonely, the three mirrors of the dressing-table blocking the evening sun. The bulb in the ceiling light glowed in weak competition with it. There was the matching suite, dressing-table, wardrobe, bed with quilted headboard, and then nothing that went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by Mr. Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment. Paul started on a sentence about Peter Rowe coming into the bank, but a superstitious impulse made him cross it out after three or four words. He blocked out the words with his biro till the place shone.

He put the diary away and felt on the top of the wardrobe for the copy of Films and Filming that he’d hidden there. There was a still on the cover from the new film Privilege, starring Jean Shrimpton and Paul Jones. They seemed to be in bed together. Jean Shrimpton’s pale profile hovered over Paul Jones, whose eyes were closed, and his lips, and teeth, slightly parted. At first Paul had thought she must be watching him sleep, too entranced by his pretty face to want to wake him. Then he’d guessed, with a strange prickly rush, that they must be making love, and that the pop-star’s open mouth wasn’t snoring but gasping in surrender. Though actually you couldn’t be sure. There was a suggestion of his naked shoulder and chest, and thus of other things you might get to see if you went to the film. It wouldn’t come here, of course, he’d have to go into Swindon or Oxford on the bus. In the angle between the two faces there was a disconcerting limb, perhaps Jean’s right arm crooked back insect-like as she crouched over him, or maybe Paul Jones’s own left elbow, oddly twisted. He saw for the first time it could be his left wrist, much closer, the hand hidden in Jean’s hair. In the grey and white close-up Paul Jones’s puppyish neck looked fleshy and pitted. Also he had no ear-lobes, a weird thing you couldn’t entirely overlook once you’d noticed it. Paul Bryant wasn’t sure about Paul Jones. His mother had fancied him quite openly once, on Top of the Pops, and you couldn’t very easily share a fantasy with your mother. His own desire, in its way very modest, was simply to kiss Paul Jones.

He sat propped up on the bed to look through the small ads for the third or fourth time. It was like a mild hallucination, or one of those drawings in the paper containing ten hidden objects: it made him shiver to see the concealed invitations. He went systematically through Services, domestic work sought by “refined young men” in “private flats and houses,” or by “masculine” odd-job men, “anything considered.” He wasn’t seeking Services himself, but he was keenly preoccupied by their being offered. There were various masseurs. Someone called Mr. Young, a “manipulative therapist,” could visit between 10:45 and 3 in north-west London only. Paul felt he would be rather intimidated by Mr. Young, even if he managed to be in the area at the specified time. His eye worked through the tiny type of “For Sale and Wanted,” the ads all looking alike, so that you could lose one and find it again with a slightly magical sense of significance. Mainly it was magazines and films. There were hysterical pleas: “Stills, Photos, Articles, Magazines, ANYTHING dealing with Cliff Richard.” An unnamed “studio” offered “physique and glamour movies” for “artists, students and connoisseurs”; someone else sold “50-foot action films,” however long that was. Paul imagined the reel going round on a projector … he didn’t think you could get much action into fifty feet, it would surely be over in no time. Anyway, he didn’t have a projector; and couldn’t see himself getting one on his present salary. Not that there would really be room in here … and then he’d need a screen as well … Quite a few people were fans of something called “tapesponding,” where it seemed you recorded a message and sent it through the post, which might be romantic,