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unrelatedly, contracted polio. The Mortons’ family doctor, a former military man, was called, but, suspecting the boy of malingering, instructed that he should not be put to bed but instead kept active. As a result, Morton’s brother had lost the use of his right arm and both his legs, all of which had to be kept in heavy irons, and they itched so unbearably that he was driven almost insane: he would sometimes laugh for no particular reason in uncontrollable simian howls like a vaudeville comedian pretending to have gone mad. Nothing but acute paincould stop him, and his healthy leg ended up badly scarred because he used to burn himself deliberately with cigarettes. This episodic tragedy, which had darkened the lives of Morton’s entire family, gave Erskine ceaseless pleasure, like a really good radio serial.
    ‘What is it?’ he said, taking the card from Morton and reading it over.
    Erskine didn’t understand – it seemed to be just an advertisement for a nightclub – but he forced a little laugh anyway, and gave it back. He sat for a few minutes as the three others began to joke about the temperaments of some of their university contemporaries. But as he tried to think of something witty to contribute, he slowly began to realise what they were really discussing, and at last, when Cripling used the expression ‘a bunch of brown hatters’, Erskine was sure. After that, he listened very closely.
    But by then the theme was already almost exhausted, and the others soon started to talk about their plans for the evening. As much as he’d heard about the wonderful freedoms of a young bachelor in London, Erskine had found that one’s movements were even more public in a little club like this than they had been in a Cambridge college, so he already had an imaginary dinner with a cousin prepared as an excuse for going out to the fight tonight. And when the other three got up, leaving the card behind, he realised nervously that the excuse could do double-duty. Shaftesbury Avenue was only a few minutes from the United Universities Club. He could easily slip into this Caravan place on the way back from the fight.
    In Trinity’s Great Hall he had once overheard part of a conversation along similar lines about a pub called the Marquis of Granby. Then, as now, he had carefully committed the exchange to memory, but it had contained no details of scientific usefulness apart from one crucial remark that ‘at a place like that, one can never be over-dressed’. Erskineconsequently concluded that he would have to put on white tie if he was to visit the Caravan, but he could hardly wear that to the boxing match. Luckily, he had already resolved to wear his father’s overcoat on his trip into Spitalfields and keep it on at all times so that he wouldn’t have to come back to Suffolk Street with the ineradicable stench of blood and poverty and herring and Jew on his suit. The tails would not be visible under the overcoat.
    He spent the early evening finishing a book by Lord Alfred Douglas called
Plain English
. Douglas, like Erskine, had been in the scholars’ house at Winchester, and Erskine had spent a term working at a desk on which the small carving of an erect penis was reportedly Douglas’ work. What Erskine had read of Wilde and his panderers he found repellent, but when he discovered that ‘Bosie’ had written a book about racial purity he ordered it from the London Library out of curiosity. As he’d expected, it was a crude work, with nothing to say, for instance, about Pitt-Rivers’ interesting but outlandish theory that, in sexual inversion, the great evolutionary consciousness of the species had found a way of hacking off its own least promising lines of inheritance before they could be propagated. Also, the book apparently lacked any of the coded allusions to immorality that Erskine sometimes found it abstractly amusing to identify in works by authors like Douglas, mentally netting and labelling each innuendo like