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she didn’t like him?’
    ‘Because she kicked him.’
    ‘A kick or two doesn’t mean anything. It’s a woman’s way. He loved her. You can be sure of that.’
    That meaningless word ‘love’ again. How often my aunt had asked me, ‘Do you love me?’ And of course I had always answered ‘Yes.’ It was the easiest way out of a difficult situation. I couldn’t very well reply, ‘You bore the pants off me.’ She was a good woman in her way, but now I couldn’t help comparing her sandwiches with the meal which the Captain had given me at The Swan. I knew already that I liked the Captain, and that soft word ‘love’ with its mysterious demands would never come between us, I felt sure.
    We walked a little way together from the cinema and at a street corner he paused and asked me as he had once before, ‘You know the way home?’ The word ‘home’ still made me hesitate a little, even though I had begun to use it experimentally myself. It was the word which my aunt had always used and on those brief occasions when I had seen the Devil he would of course use it too, saying ‘Time to go home, boy,’ though all he meant was the train to Richmond and my aunt’s house. I said, ‘Home?’
    ‘To Liza,’ he said, and I had the feeling that somehow I had failed him, but I didn’t know how.
    ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘it’s only three streets away. Aren’t you coming?’
    ‘Better not.’ He put a newspaper into my hands and said , ‘Give her this. Tell her to read page two, but not to worry. Everything’s going to be OK.’
    So I went on to the place they so wanted me to call home, though I was a little disappointed that he was not coming with me.

3
    TO LOVE AND to like – it must have been difficult for me as a child to learn how to distinguish between the two. Even in later years, when sexual desire began to play its part, I would find myself wondering, do I love this girl or do I really only like her because of the pleasure that for the time being we share?
    As I went back home, carrying the newspaper, I was pretty certain that I liked the Captain, but I wasn’t at all certain yet whether I liked Liza. Both of them were mysterious to me, but while I found the mystery of the Captain interesting, the mystery of Liza was like a disappointment; there was a sense of something lacking between us.
    I gave her the newspaper and the message, but she put the newspaper away in a drawer in the kitchen and I knew that she wasn’t going to read it so long as I remained there.
    ‘What’s on page two?’ I asked her boldly.
    ‘What do you mean page two?’
    ‘The newspaper. He said you had to read page two.’
    ‘Oh, it’s only one of his jokes,’ she said and she began to lay the table for our supper.
    That night I couldn’t sleep and when all was quiet I went down on tiptoe to the kitchen. I found the paper still there in the waste-paper basket, and I carried it up to my sofa bed.
    All the same I didn’t at once turn to the page the Captain had named. I was too excited. I felt as though I were on the brink of learning something about the Captain of vital importance. He had admitted to me on our first day together that he didn’t always tell the truth, but in my young eyes a newspaper invariably contained truth, gospel truth. How often in the past I had heard my aunt exclaim about some extraordinary, even inconceivable, event, like the birth of a hippo or a rhinoceros in the London zoo, ‘Of course it’s true. It’s in the papers.’
    I can still see the front page of the
Telegraph
– the Captain was a
Telegraph
man (the
Telegraph
, I can believe now, went with the bowler hat, the walking-stick and the trimmed moustache – it was a stage property to help him create a character). A headline blazed up at me in big type conveying some totally uninteresting news – perhaps the fall of a government – I can’t pretend to remember now. If only it had been murder … but it wasn’t any story worth