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the way so there was a chancethat, after a last monochrome orgasm, he might pass out by daybreak.
    They got to the door and started up the steps to street level just as a man in a black overcoat was making his way down. Sinner looked up. It was Philip Erskine. Sinner stopped.
    ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?’ he said.
    Erskine blanched and started to stutter something.
    ‘You followed me,’ said Sinner.
    ‘What?’ said Erskine.
    ‘You followed me here. Probably going to kidnap me. Posh cunt.’
    Erskine swallowed. ‘That’s right. I followed you here. I’m sorry.’
    Sinner knew that Will Reynolds wouldn’t like it if he heard that Sinner had punched a bloke out on his steps, so Sinner just cuffed Erskine hard with the back of his hand. Erskine let out a yelp, then turned, hurried back up the steps, and ran off down Endell Street.

3
AUGUST 1934
     
    Erskine was back at school. In the dream, he woke up one morning in the dormitory, threw off his sheets, looked down at his body, and saw with horror that during the night he had somehow transformed from an insect into a man.
    When he woke up a second time, he was sweaty and glue-mouthed and he had an erection. He had only intended a ten-minute afternoon nap but it was already three o’clock. He was in a small hot room in the United Universities Club on Suffolk Street, where he stayed whenever he was in London, on a mattress packed with knuckles and sinews. The club was old-fashioned and full of awful Cambridge hearties and so dusty he couldn’t stop sneezing, but his father had insisted that he join. Very soon, with a bit of diligence, Erskine felt he was certain to acquire lots of fascinating London friends with whom he would be able to dine and lodge as he wished, but so far, at twenty-four years old, the UUC was all he really had.
    After changing his shirt he went downstairs to the L-shaped coffee room with its heavy maroon curtains half-closed to resist the siege of the summer day, and found Morton, Cripling and Nash sitting around cackling about something. He settled himself beside them in an armchair and tried to work out what was funny. No one greeted him, so he pretended to look over a copy of
The Times
. There was to be a plebiscite in Germany tomorrow to confirm the exciting succession of Herr Hitler.
    ‘I think Nash himself enjoys the occasional “night trip to the great open spaces”, don’t you, Nash?’ Morton was saying. ‘Ever the “Bohemian”.’
    Nash raised his hands in mock-confession. ‘I shan’t deny it. “After the day’s routine”, I find it just the thing.’ They all brayed again.
    Erskine saw that they were looking at some sort of chit or card. ‘What’s the joke?’ he asked.
    ‘Oh, hello, Erskine,’ said Morton cheerfully. ‘Cripling found this on the floor at his barber’s.’ Julius Morton had matriculated at Trinity with Erskine, and had once, quite sober, held Erskine down and forced him to gargle port until he threw up into his Ovid, then chuckled about it for days afterwards as if Erskine had been in on the joke all along. Every time Erskine allowed Morton to treat him as a chum the humiliation of that episode, and many others like it, was redoubled, but Erskine didn’t really have any choice – particularly since Morton had recently taken a romantic interest in his sister Evelyn, having met her by disastrous coincidence at one of Lady Molly’s dances. One of Erskine’s many objections to the orthodox eugenic theory of the day was that he knew of no proposed system which would put Morton down for compulsory sterilisation. Or at the very least a flogging.
    Erskine’s only consolation, in fact, was what he knew of Morton’s beloved younger brother. At eight years old the brother had shoved a spade into the wheel of a moving car, which threw him on to his back so hard that he broke his leg and was blinded in one eye by a blow to the temporal lobe of the brain. The leg got better but he soon,