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Miller.’
    ‘Her. Oh, kid, she’s a sow. One of the original pigs. I’ve met some cows in my time, but never such a horse-faced goat as our Doris.’
    ‘I’m supposed to interview her,’ Virginia said, ‘for my newspaper. Which is her room?’
    ‘You born yesterday?’ The man shuffled his cracked patent-leather shoes in a tiny dance step, without moving his shoulders from the wall. ‘You’ve got a hope. You think she wants it splashed on the front page that she’s coming down to appearing in a tenth-rate show like this? She’s only doing it because she’s practically down and out. But she’s keeping it dark. She’s always thinking she’s going to make a big come-back up West. You know what these old-timers are. She doesn’t know she’s finished. They never do. Anyway,’ he added casually, dropping his cigarette and turning his foot on it, ‘she’s gone home.’
    ‘Oh, no!’ Virginia was aghast. ‘I can’t go back to the office and say I haven’t seen her. This was a sort of trial for me. The first big job I’ve been sent on. I can’t mess it up like this.’
    ‘I used to feel like that once,’ the man said. He looked at the end of his cigarette and gave a short laugh. ‘Thought I’d die of shame if I bungled a step. Now I dance like a bull’s foot most of the time, but I don’t care as long as I can hang on to the job. Time was though, when I –’
    Virginia cut him short. Nice as he was, and with a life, no doubt, seamed by tragic disillusionment, she had no time to getnostalgic with him. ‘Do something for me,’ she said. ‘Tell me where that woman lives, and I’ll get her at home. I’ll make her see me. I won’t be beaten by her.’
    The man winked at her. ‘As it happens, I know,’ he said. ‘She’d have me shot for telling you, but if you won’t let on, and since I’ve a daughter myself – here, got a pencil? Ambassador Hotel, Lulgate Square. That’s somewhere in Paddington, I think. Look, kid, she won’t see you. She’s a bitch on wheels. I’m telling you.’
    ‘What do you bet she won’t? Get the
Northgate Gazette
on Saturday and see if I didn’t get my story!’
    *
    Lulgate Square was across the Paddington railway tracks, between the Harrow Road and Edgware Road. The tall Edwardian houses, with stone steps rising over the basement entrance, had been built in the Square’s palmier days, when servants toiled up and down the many stairs, and nursemaids walked prim children in the little railed garden between the houses. Now the paint and plaster had fallen in lumps and not been replaced, and the rows of bells and name-cards by the doorway of each house showed that they were no longer family homes.
    The spear-tipped area railings still remained, but the little garden was fenced with wire, since the railings had long ago been taken away for scrap metal, and had not been renewed after the war. The wire gate was padlocked, but many children and dogs had climbed in over the sagging fence and reduced the grass to a dust-patch and the shrubbery to a few straggled bushes, dying slowly under the layers of soot and sulphur from the railway.
    Two houses at one corner of the square had been shattered by a bomb, and had never been rebuilt. No one had thought it worthwhile to repair war damage which had only hastened the decay already begun long before the Germans made a target of Paddington Station. The bomb-site showed the foundations of old cellars, like bones exposed in an open grave. There were rusted tanks and cisterns in there, broken shoes, and saucepansand rags, and a blackened little bath lying on its side among the caked earth and weeds. On the high, blank wall of the house which stood next to this desolate plot, there showed quite clearly the marks of fireplaces and the steeply zigzagging staircase.
    The house from which the buildings had been torn away was the Ambassador Hotel. The name was painted on the fanlight above the door. There were five bells of different