The Twilight Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

film company he and Hugh had formed. It went bust after one brief documentary and now they subsisted on bits of freelance work. When push came to shove I could cadge a fiver off my parents, and Alan’s occasional meagre little cheques for articles and short stories seemed like a windfall, a free gift, manna from heaven, so we always blew the lot at Fava’s or Chez Victor, after which we’d go on a pub crawl, eventually fall into bed and wake up next morning to start all over again.
    How happy we were! I lived in a bubble of happiness, seeing life through its iridescent glitter. But bubbles are transient, and after the murder everything changed.
    .........
    Hugh had inconveniently moved to digs in South London. One Saturday we set off on the lengthy journey to Lavender Hill, by way of Islington to pick up Colin. We got off the Circle Line at King’s Cross and struggled up the Pentonville Road to the battered terraces of Islington. It was the first time I’d been in a district where everyone looked so poor. Colin was living in a slum! Perhaps he had to, because of the Communist Party. I was shocked. In spite of the war, I’d led a sheltered life: ‘class privilege’ Colin said, irritated by my naïve dismay at the poverty all around.
    At the Angel station it was like going down a coal mine as a gaunt industrial lift jerked us down into the bowels of the earth. At the bottom a flight of steps ended in the horror of a single narrow platform between two live rails. I clung to the balustrade. Alan was impatient: ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of! What is the matter with you!’
    I took a few paces out onto the tightrope, but: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it,’ I cried, ‘I know I’m a coward.’
    A wind whirled hotly out of the tunnel as the train roared towards us with stupendous force.
    Hours later, it seemed, we came out of a different station into another shabby slum. A winding road meandered without purpose into the distance, no end in sight, frozen in the arctic cold. The odd gap where a stray bomb had hit a house gaped, the houses like a row of rotting teeth, grey, discoloured, dreary. Some of the shops, more like hovels, were shut. Some still had boarded-up windows, where the glass had been knocked out by bomb blast.
    At last we turned up a side road and came to the house. Inside, at least it was warm, and Hugh’s bedsitter was quite comfortable. ‘She charges me five shillings for lighting and hot water, and there’s a meter for the gas. Rent’s only fifteen bob a week.’
    The flames of the gas fire made a little popping noise and roasted the front of my legs. The smell of gas – like Benzedrine or menthol, sharp, slightly sweet, intoxicating – tainted the room, yet made it feel even cosier.
    Hugh handed me a toasting fork and some slices of bread while he made tea. I held the slices against the ceramic filigree that caged the flames of the gas fire, and the three of them plotted and planned.
    Before the war they’d been so close, Alan said, thick as thieves. They were the Three Musketeers of documentary film. But now …
    My father said that when you’re young you’re all in an undefined lump with your friends, you’re all unformed like molten toffee, but as you get older you harden out and separate. Peculiarities of character stiffen into incompatibility. It had sounded a bit lonely. I wondered, too, if it also applied to marriage – you might wake up one morning and find the person you’d married had gradually turned into somebody else. I hoped that wouldn’t happen to Alan and me.
    I was beginning to think it was happening to the three of them, though. Colin returned from the war a grimmer person, Alan said. What he’d seen had hardened his political views, but if only he didn’t throw his weight about so pompously: ‘You weren’t there – I was’. He always fell