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that you were a middle-class professional person there was a limited number of like people it was possible to meet. Suppose he were to encounter the Ryemarks or even Robin Tatian? No, it was unthinkable.
    A house in Hampstead would mean taking on an astronomical mortgage, but so what? Take what you want, have what you like, he had read somewhere, and drag your income along behind you. He was doing well, anyway, getting more patients each month, would soon have more than he could comfortably cope with.
    The means he used for getting home was the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then the Northern Line to Colindale where he had left his car. Rufus just made it into the train before the rush began. Something happened that always pleased him. His wife opened the front door to him just as he was about to put his key into the lock.
    Marigold’s name suited her. She was tall and generously built and fair, with a high color and a red mouth and white teeth. In other words, she looked a lot like him. If not twins, they might have been taken for brother and sister. Rufus was one of those rare people who admire their own kind of looks better than any other sort and whose partners are chosen because they belong in the same type as themselves. Soon after he met Marigold he had taken her to the opera to see Die Walküre, and afterward had said without forethought, “The Brunhilde was all wrong. She should have looked like you.”
    She had made some preparations for their dinner, but she didn’t object to going out. She never did. It wasn’t yet five-thirty but not too early, in Rufus’s opinion, for a drink. He looked forward to this drink, the first of the day, with a sensuous desire. Any white spirit would do for him, he wasn’t fussy, and he poured himself a stiff vodka, some of that Polish stuff they had brought back from their Black Sea summer holiday. It flooded his head, charged it with recklessness, and brought—he could feel it happening—a warm flush to his face.
    “We’ll go out and drink a lot and get pissed,” he said.
    He gave her his golden ferocious grin. She knew that grin; it meant something had happened, but she wasn’t going to ask what. Let him tell her if he liked. There was a lot of underlying violence in Rufus, and not all that underlying either, a lionlike aggression in times of stress that took the form of a whooping destructive merriment. She didn’t mind that, though sometimes she had a prevision that one day when he was a rheumy old lion and she a worn-out weary lioness she might mind it very much.
    “Go and put on something beautiful,” he said at seven after he had had two overt vodkas, and poured, as was his habit, a single large secret one, and had taken her to bed.
    Marigold disappeared into the bathroom. Rufus, sleek with love and ardent spirits, thought with wonder about how he had actually imagined for all of ten minutes that the house they talked about in the Standard might be Wyvis Hall. It amused him for a moment to speculate about the others, if they, too, had seen the paragraph and whether they had been astonished and afraid. The five of them, he repeated their names silently: Adam, himself, Shiva, Vivien, and—Zosie.
    They would be more discomposed than he. Discomposed, he thought, a word entirely different in meaning (as Adam himself might have pointed out) from its near homophone, decomposed. There was no point in dwelling on that. He and Adam had been at the same school, though he was a bit older. From the day they had all parted, diverging from Ecalpemos out into the world, he had never seen Adam again but he knew all about him, knew for instance that he had become a partner in a company selling computers that called itself Verne-Smith-Duchini. And old man Verne-Smith and his wife he knew, they lived no more than a mile away, but them he avoided out of simple antipathy. What had the Indian’s surname been? He had heard it but not often, it was a strange one and it escaped