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who commuted to the smog-producing factories of Bermondsey or Poplar, then returned at night to their modest white enclave; but it was hard to imagine them now in these car-lined streets: that homogeneity was not in nature any more.
    R. Tranter was always known by his first initial only, though very old friends might call him 'Ralph'. Work colleagues and acquaintances called him 'RT'. It had started when he submitted some reviews on spec to a small magazine, Outpost , soon after he had left Oxford. Finding themselves short of material at the last minute, they had printed one, but he had signed it only 'R. Tranter' and they had not been able to reach him by phone to find out what his first name was. When, a month later, a second magazine, Actium , rang to say they were also using an article by him and asked how he would like to be billed, he opted for reasons of continuity and superstition to go with 'R. Tranter'. He had never liked his first name anyway, and it had been the subject of a lifelong confusion as to whether it rhymed with 'Alf' or 'safe'.
    He occupied the first floor of a two-storey building, and, although the house was a sooty brick nonentity, one of a row that varied only in external paint colour and size of TV aerial dish, his rooms were painted a pleasant magnolia and had simple furniture from a Finnish brownsite warehouse. To this clean modern look, the odd mahogany gateleg table or 1950s standard lamp from various second-hand shops had added, he felt, an original note.
    Tranter logged on to the e-mail at his white PC. There was the usual Sunday horoscope from Stargazer. 'Hi, Bruno Banks! A good week awaits you. Venus is in the ascendant, which means you are going to get lucky in love! Professional openings are abundant. Use your fabled charm to make the most of them. Have a good one, Bruno Banks! With best wishes from All the Team at Stargazer.' Tranter envied Bruno his auspicious life. Unfortunately, Bruno was a fictional character Tranter had invented for a novel he'd abandoned two years earlier. As inspiration waned, he had looked to the Internet for help and hoped that signing up to a horoscope as Bruno Banks would give him ideas. It hadn't. Eventually, Tranter e-mailed Stargazer to tell them Bruno had died, been hit by a meteor, had met an unexpected - an unforetold - end, but to no avail: the predictions kept on coming.
    The sitting room was entirely lined with bookshelves that Tranter had made himself, sawing up furlongs of dusty MDF, wearing a face mask from the hardware shop on Green Lanes, then propping lengths of undercoated shelf on the sport and finance sections of spread-out newspapers. His woodwork had won steady praise in his schooldays, more than thirty years before, and, when the shelves had been painted white and fitted to the wall, they were able to support, without sagging, Tranter's 2,000 piece library, ranged in alphabetical order from Achebe, Chinua to Zweig, Stefan. He sometimes regretted all the books he'd sold on to Bellswift, the sullen second-hand dealer in Lamb's Conduit Street, but he knew that it was the half price he got for them that enabled him to continue to live in Europe's most expensive city, albeit in Mafeking Street.
    There was no television in the sitting room, merely a glass-topped coffee table with back numbers of the weekly papers, and a couple of armchairs upholstered in navy blue. One of these was usually occupied by the slothful Septimus, named after a character in The Warden , Tranter's favourite Trollope novel. The cat added a touch of warmth to a room that might otherwise have been intimidating in its single-mindedness: the size of Tranter's library meant there was no space on the walls for pictures or posters. The closest he had come to ornament was a wooden bust of G. K. Chesterton from a shop in Sicilian Avenue, which sat between the end of the Us (Upward, Edward) and the beginning of the Vs (van Vechten, Carl).
    In November, Tranter had invited Patrick