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voices, there was a melee of sorts, a scuffle, and we glimpsed a grinning dishevelled figure in black stockings and a shabby cocktail dress being escorted on tottering stilettoes into the building. Jack liked the look of her at once, this was clear, and for this reason: she dressed like a prostitute. She stood there at the podium, a loud, bosomy woman in a tight dress and pancake makeup, one hand cocked akimbo on her hip and the other flapping the air as she spoke to us with a kind of hoarse nervous bravado, and I remember thinking her opinionated and not very clean, or entirely sober. Her hair was the colour of coal, her lips were scarlet and she had lost a tooth, whose absence lent her a distinctly menacing aspect when she grinned. What was it she talked about? Much of it I have forgotten, but I know she told us how pointless it was to attend art school, which raised a cheer, and then she spoke about
inspiration,
and how travel, drink, the colour black, bodies of water—passion—these were the sorts of things that inspired her. It was our duty, as artists, to find what inspired each one of us. She also told us we should be able to work anywhere. Her own studio, she said, was a disused operating theatre in the basement of an old fever hospital. She also declared that a real artist would sooner let her children
starve
than work at anything but her art, at which Jack jumped up and loudly applauded, provoking laughter throughout the hall. After the lecture she sought us out and attached us to the group she led next door to the pub. Seven weeks later Jack ran away with her to America.
    Seven weeks. In seven weeks he abandoned everything: his family, his home, also what I thought of as the bohemian life we shared in an untidy flat in Kennington, where we threw wild parties—at least they seemed wild to us—and never washed a dish or made a bed or swept a floor. I think Jack did not sleep at all, the night we met Vera. At one point, finding himself seated next to her at the back of the pub, and having said something that caught her attention, and having then sat with lowered eyes and sunken head as she spoke energetically to him, to my horror he took her face in both hands—pronounced some kind of blessing on her—and kissed her on the forehead. Then he screamed.
    She was amused. She promptly seized him by the hair and kissed him back, hard on the lips with her mouth open. Jack was flushed but not with embarrassment, with a sort of brazen excitement, and he looked about him, he caught my eye, glorying in his own audacity. I was standing at the edge of the group, quite sober, and staring at him with palpable dismay. For the rest of the evening the pair of them talked to each other in low tones, occasionally shouting with rude laughter and both drinking a lot. The last I saw of Vera Savage that night she was in the middle of the Charing Cross Road and producing for Jack’s benefit a sweeping bow with copious baroque flourishes of the wrist. He shouted to her that he would see her tomorrow, as hissing I dragged him away.
    The next day at lunchtime we walked into the pub and there she was, by herself, waiting for us. Or rather, waiting for Jack. Why? Beneath a façade of studied eccentricity he was still very much the earnest art student, his limited experience of the world lending him the merest patina of sophistication with which to conceal the depths of ignorance within. But he was ambitious, and he was bold, and he took himself extremely seriously, and perhaps this was what attracted her. A day or two later, when she saw his work, and liked it, apparently, the thing was cemented. I believe she recognized a dim echo of her own style, albeit immature and unformed, and was flattered. As for Jack, he was in love, he had told me so the night before. It had happened in the pub, he said, and although he had never experienced such an emotion before, he was in no doubt at all as to what it meant. He knew the precise moment: at one