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withdrawing from The Capital Levy to gaze through the window at the lamps and the plane trees. He went to the sideboard and found a little bit of cheese.
    For some time the mouse resisted the temptation of the cheese. It obviously suspected Mr Surrogate’s intentions. It lay so quiet behind The Capital Levy that Mr Surrogate feared that it had escaped to a hole. He began to feel irritated by a mouse. He withdrew the cheese and toasted it for a moment before the gas fire.
    The smell of the toasted cheese had an immediate effect. The mouse emerged, picked up the cheese, and disappeared behind The Capital Levy . It had a shiny satin rump and an air of great respectability. One expected a bunch of keys to dangle at the waist; but it preferred to eat in private, in the housekeeper’s room. Mr Surrogate did not fetch another piece of cheese; he was no longer compassionate; the tedium of Siberia came terribly home to him when he thought of anyone depending for amusement on a mouse. The clock struck a quarter to seven.
    â€˜Davis, fetch a taxi. I shall be late.’
    Mr Surrogate found his hat and looked back once from the door. The mouse was still in hiding. It had nibbled a corner off The Dictatorship of the Worker , and it had certainly not used the bookshelf only for meals. ‘Davis,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘set a mousetrap by the bookcase.’
    *
    Jules Briton dried his hands on the towel which hung behind the counter and warmed them close to the great copper urn. A French prostitute leant on the counter and talked to him; she had left her beat in Lisle Street to swallow some coffee. Jules answered in good careful uneasy French; so long as his mother was alive he had been allowed to speak nothing but English, for she had borne a grudge against her husband, who had left her with a bankrupt business and disappeared to his native country. Jules had never been to France, but his mother had beaten into him with a hard English rectitude the idea of something shameful, irresponsible, and at night, when, under the influence of drink, she moaned for lost love, beautifully gay. France meant the women in pairs trudging up Wardour Street and down again, the false coins slipped into the cigarette machine, Mass in the dim, badly decorated L’Eglise de Notre Dame, French illustrations, French postcards, French letters. It had the furtiveness of lust, the sombreness of religion, the gaiety of stolen cigarettes.
    The café door opened, and Jules fluttered a hand to Conder advancing through the steam. ‘I’ve got something good for you,’ he said.
    â€˜Come upstairs then,’ Conder said. Conder’s bed-sitting-room was on the first floor. On the wall hung a picture of the royal family taken before the war, the King, the Queen, a crowd of unidentifiable scared children in sailor suits, a princess with frizzy protuberant hair and a large bow. ‘Well,’ Conder said, ‘what is it?’
    â€˜A paper rouble,’ Jules said. He spread it out on the eiderdown.
    â€˜How did you get it?’
    â€˜Found it on the floor when I was sweeping up.’
    â€˜Well, that is good, that really is good,’ Conder said, standing back and gazing at it, passing one hand across his bald head. ‘I never expected to get a rouble. They aren’t allowed to take them out of the country, you know. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if that was worth – well, a couple of shillings. To a collector, of course.’ He fetched a tin box, which had once been used for chocolate biscuits, from the drawer of his table and turned the contents out on the bed beside the rouble note. Whenever he acquired a new coin or a new note he examined the old ones. ‘That’s pretty, that Australian shilling. And those Greek lepta. This Turkish one I got on a bus. I could tell extraordinary stories of what I’ve picked up on buses.’ He handled the coins tenderly, rubbing them with his handkerchief,