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You always said you didn’t mind what people did but look at you now . . . You’re ashamed because you’re one of them.
    I’m ashamed because I’m not one of them. If I was I wouldn’t mind . . .
    Really?
    I’d be up there still with Terence . . . well, maybe not Terence . . .
    Oh? Who, then? What handsome man do you yearn for?
    Nobody! Nobody! My mother was right, they just want something from you . . .
    He lay until the rain was pooling in his coat, his limbs gradually seizing up with the cold and the wet. Finally he rolled over and slept a little in the short light night, his nose in the short brown and ivory-white stalks of the cropped grass.
    Within hours the day dawned, cool and clear. He scraped himself up, brushing the grass from his coat and trousers, tucking in his shirt, rubbing at his face as if that would make it look better. He didn’t want to go up to Bayswater Road, or to Orme Square. He didn’t want to run into anyone. He didn’t know what to do. He had been out all night – Sir Alfred . . . Mrs Briggs . . . what could he say to them? What are you meant to say?
    He walked the other way, trying to ease his stiff legs, down towards High Street Kensington. Kensington Palace looked beautiful, floating on the morning mist, illuminated as if from within by the early sun, and the statue of Victoria – the Bun Penny – glowed like a pearl. This is how Terence should have painted it , he thought . Damn Terence.
    He stopped in at the Lyons Tea House, and ordered tea. He stared at the thick white cup until the waitress suggested he buy another or move on, would you, because there’s others need the table, and then buying another, and another. I should go to Sir Alfred’s , he thought. Apologise, at least, for staying out, even though I can’t explain. He’ll think the worse of me . . . but then I think the worse of him . . .
    Oh, it’s not his fault.
    I should go home , he thought. But he knew he wasn’t going home. What – talk to Mum about it? Or Dad? This was not a situation a young man took home.
    Where does a young man take this situation? he thought, and he laughed, a sleepless, angry, hungry, lonely, embarrassed, humiliated laugh. He knew perfectly well where this was leading. It was inexorable.
    His seventh cup of tea stood cold in front of him.
    *
    He was still damp through from the park when he went up to the recruiting station. He had calmed down a little, but not much. He was going to do it. He bloody was. With him gone, Nadine could go back to Sir Alfred’s. He’d prove himself a man, in the army. Hard work. Proper work. No nancy stuff – no art. Make Nadine proud. Or knock her out of his system.
    ‘Here I am,’ he said to the recruiting sergeant. ‘You can have me.’ He gave him a big grin. Change. Big and total change.
    You only had to be five foot five now. He was sent in the back to be looked at. He stripped off and flung his shoulders back, coughing in the cold back room while another posh man held his balls. Was he eyeing him up? Stop it, Riley, they’re not all like that. Next behind him was a tough and scrawny Cockney youth who said, apropos the balls situation: ‘They’ve always got you by the bollocks one way or another, ain’t they? The women and the money and the fuckin’ upper classes . . .’
    Riley grinned again. Here we go. That’s more like it.
    He went next door to fill in forms. Name, address (he put Sir Alfred’s); next of kin (Mum and Dad); DoB (26 March 1896), height and weight (5 ft 9 ins, 10 st 11 lbs), eyes hair complexion (grey black pale). Wages – half to Mum and Dad. Regiment: no idea – you tell me. Length of service: one year or duration of war. Duration of war, of course. He didn’t want to spend a whole year in the army.
    *
    Riley had one day before reporting for training. They wanted to get them out there quickly.
    Mum and Dad, Sir Alfred, Nadine.
    He went round to his parents’ that night. He stood in the street by the front door, and