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him a towel, which was just a little larger than a drying-up cloth (why not a Turkish towel in a Turkish Bath?), and he wrapped it round his loins. The air was dry, and seemed to smell slightly of sweat and sulphur. At the other end of the long room, brightly lit behind a glass partition, he could see naked men in canvas chairs. “I might as well go through the drill now I’m here,” he thought, and went to join them.
    This was the first of the hot rooms, and it was not unpleasantly hot. Three of the men were fat, and pink, and elderly. Their towels lay on their laps like tiny aprons; their bottoms filled the canvas of the chairs, and seemed about to spill over the edge; each of them was reading the
Daily Telegraph
. The fourth man was younger— perhaps forty-five years old—and in much better physical shape. Unlike the fat old men, he was not at all relaxed, but sat up very straight in his chair, looking covertly and quickly from one to another of them. There was a heart tattooed on the inside of his lower right arm, and in a panel under the heart, the word, “AMY”.
    Julian found a chair. Its seat, he discovered as he sat down, was much hotter than the room. He took an evening paper from the marble-topped table at his side, but decided that he did not feel like reading. As he looked around him, the tattooed man caught his eye, and came over to sit by him.
    “Come here often?” the tattooed man said.
    “No. I’ve never been before.”
    “Oh.” A pause. The tattooed man smoothed the towel on his lap. It came unfastened at the side, but he did not bother to fasten it again. “I come here whenever I’m inLondon. I used to be in the Navy, you know. Lower deck.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. I know them all, you know. I’ve met them all in my time. I’ve had a lot of friends.” He named an admiral, a well-known industrialist, and a Labour M.P. “I often used to go round to
his
place in the old days.”
    “That must have been interesting.”
    “Of course, I’m married and settled down now.” He indicated the tattoo on his arm. “My wife. But I still look in here whenever I come to London. You’d be surprised how often I come. You meet a lot of people.”
    “Yes, I expect you do,” Julian said. He had thought it would be better to have someone to talk to, but it was too much effort. At the cinema, he had not been expected to reply to the actors. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s about time for me to move on. I expect I’ll see you later.”
    “Yeah,” the tattooed man said, “yeah. See you later. I’ll look out for you.”
    Julian walked into the next hot room, and the heat came out and hit him. He tested the seat of a chair, decided that it was much too hot, and went on upstairs to the steam room. Sitting anonymously in a corner on the highest of the tiered benches, breathing steam and feeling the sweat burst out liberally all over him, he tried to think seriously about his situation.
    How had it happened? There are people to whom promiscuity is an itch. You itch and itch, and have to scratch. Over-sexed?—no, it was nothing to do with being over-sexed. Quite the contrary; that was one of the troubles in his relationship with Penny. Not that she wanted it particularly. She knew she
ought
to enjoy coition , because all the books said so, but Penny didn’t really enjoy it. She needed it only to prove to herself that he still desired her, and when they had gone one week,then two, without it, she began to be suspicious, and this made him all the more unwilling and unable, and so the comedy continued.
    I am promiscuous
and
under-sexed, Julian said to himself . What a mess! He was married. He didn’t want a divorce. He even liked being married (Penny would have said he only liked the idea of it), with all its illusions of security, and a home, and being the sort of person he wasn’t but would like to be. Should he, instead of alley-catting about the place, have taken out his promiscuity respectably in an