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    â€˜You joined a voluntary pension scheme.’
    â€˜What will that bring me now?’
    â€˜I am afraid nothing.’
    â€˜Nothing?’
    â€˜You become eligible for benefits at the age of sixty-five.’
    â€˜Sixty-five!’
    â€˜You opted for scheme F.4. with smaller premiums.’
    â€˜I see!’
    â€˜Here is your signature.’
    â€˜But I haven’t any money,’ said Austin, ‘I haven’t a penny. I’ve saved nothing.’
    â€˜That is not our affair, Mr Gibson Grey.’
    Was Mr Bransome going to turn nasty? Was Austin going to burst into tears?
    â€˜I mean, I think it’s a bit unfair to sack me suddenly after all these years without warning.’
    â€˜Temporary non-pensionable staff are always subject to this hazard. This was made clear in your terms of appointment. Would you care to see your terms of appointment? They are here on the file.’
    â€˜No, thank you.’
    â€˜We want to make things easy for you, Mr Gibson Grey.’
    â€˜Thank you.’
    â€˜I have here a draft letter of resignation, Miss Waterhouse has just typed it.’
    â€˜You mean my resignation?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I’ll sign it.’
    â€˜Don’t you want to read it?’
    â€˜No, thanks.’
    Austin signed the letter with his left hand. His right hand had been stiff since boyhood.
    â€˜And here is a little mark of our appreciation.’
    â€˜What is it?’
    â€˜A book token. The contributors have listed their names.’
    â€˜So all these people knew I was going and I didn’t?’
    â€˜We wanted it to be a nice surprise.’
    â€˜How charming.’
    â€˜Well, I think that is all, Mr Gibson Grey.’
    â€˜Can I leave at once?’
    â€˜At once? Certainly if —’
    â€˜I don’t think I want to meet my successor.’
    â€˜I would hardly —’
    â€˜And I’ve got my book token.’
    â€˜Then it remains to wish you good luck.’
    â€˜And good luck to you, my dear Mr Bransome.’
    Miss Waterhouse and the Junior watched with ecstasy as Austin cleared out his desk. It was not every day that they witnessed a sacking. Miss Waterhouse lent Austin a carrier bag. The Junior chewed gum, which Austin had forbidden him to do in the office. At the bottom of one of the drawers Austin found a photograph of Betty. He tore it up and dropped it into the waste paper basket.
    I cannot and will not rise upon my humiliations to higher things, thought Austin. He was sitting in the pub. It was raining. He started to eat a pickled onion and bit his tongue. He always bit his tongue in moments of crisis. Perhaps he had an abnormally large tongue? How did the tongue survive anyway, leading its dangerous life inside a semi-circular guillotine? When he came to think about it, it was like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
    It flickers, he thought, it flickers. Behind the visible world, always just upon the threshold of some possible mode of perception, there was another and more terrible reality. He stared till his eyes grew hazy, till they watered not with ordinary tears. Was it like this for others? No. The world of the happy is not the world of the unhappy, as some idiot philosopher had said. Why was he not a successful ordinary man pulling girls’ tights off in the backs of cars? How to overcome anxiety. He once wrote for a book called that. It was all about diaphragmatic breathing. It did no good.
    Looking-glass man, he thought, trying vainly for the millionth time to flex the fingers of his right hand. If only I could turn myself inside out and make the fantasy real, the real fantasy. But the trouble was that there were no good dreams any more, nothing good or holy or truly desirable any more even in dreams, only that awful thing behind the flickering screen. Dorina had been a good dream. There had seemed to be another place where Dorina walked barefoot in the dew with her hair