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hope.’
    ‘They must have better things to do.’
    ‘Let’s hope that too.’
    Solly’s hand wavers. It was with his help that Clarence got a place in the Columbia Buildings. And if the Buildings are condemned? Solly will find rooms somehow – he’ll be more Jew or less Jew, as landlords and circumstances require – but what will Clarence do? There are coloured fellows in Notting Hill, and some in Stepney, but they live bachelor lives, and if Solly knows Bernadette she’ll have nothing to do with them.
    Another thing: if what Dora says is true, it’s no time for the Malcolms to be without a roof over their heads. Solly scratches the birthmark on his scalp. ‘It’s too hot today,’ he says.
    ‘Hot! This isn’t hot, this is nice. Jamaica, now, that’s hot. Melt a man down like chocolate.’
    ‘Have it your way. This someone, did she say when?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well,’ Solly says, and moves a knight with some reluctance. Silence rules on the balcony.
    ‘So!’ Solly says, too loudly, as Clarence ponders, ‘Bernadette looks well.’
    ‘Plenty well.’
    ‘Dora says so too. Dora says she glows.’
    ‘Bernie always glows.’
    ‘I am making an implication.’
    ‘I know what you’re making,’ Clarence says. ‘Gossiping like an old woman.’ ?Then, with a kind of shyness, ‘It’s true.’
    Solly claps his shoulder. They shake hands over the board. Downstairs a wireless is talking up the Olympics.
    ‘My sunshine woman,’ Clarence says. Then, ‘ Ha !’ he crows, and the board shakes like an earthquake.
     
    When they’re done Solly goes down and pours himself a drink. He doesn’t like to drink in company. He is excited by others, invigorated by them, and often fearful of them. With others he likes to keep his wits about him. Six days a week, in the Lane, he wears his wits like best clothes. Now there is no one to see him.
    He stands and sips in the sun-thinned gloom and thinks of Clarence Malcolm. He has never known a coloured man before, not to call a friend. He has never needed many friends, but one is a good thing to have – and Dora gets on with Bernadette, so that’s two. Better still.
    Neither he nor Dora has ever moved in wide circles: small ones in Danzig, smaller here. House mice , his father used to call them. If they lived in Whitechapel it might be a different story, but Whitechapel has too many godly Jews for Solly’s taste. Solly has no truck with gods. No, they fit in better here.
    After the war – before he got a proper license in the Lane – Solly traded on the hoof, roundabout Club Row. He knew the other costers, he was on first-name terms with some, but it was never more than that. And then, one day, Clarence arrived. Solly got down there late – Dora had needed him to queue – and there was Clarence, looking to Solly like his own self multiplied: twice as tall, twice as foreign and twice the looks as well, he doesn’t mind admitting it. Clarence Malcolm, fresh from Jamaica, astride a crate in the rain, knees up to his armpits, playing chess with poor Ben Weir, the cascara salesman with the stutter.
    Solly watched him beat Ben hollow. His game was unconventional: Clarence played like a boxer, waiting for the overreach, the lazy guard, the opening. Solly plays a different chess – all guns blazing, is his way – but there were lessons to be learned, he saw, in Clarence’s idling aggression, his velvet-gloved ambushes. A cute game, that was what it was. When Clarence won he grinned and stretched in unconcealed delight, slapped the drops off his fedora, turned to Solly and boomed, You got legs like a Coldstream Guard, standing there all this time! Sit down, man, come, come. Tell the truth, now; are you partial to the sport of kings?
    That chess should have thrown them together, two such different fellows. That they should share, not a love for music, or some other worthwhile thing, but this boyish passion; really, it is ridiculous. It is remarkable.
    Still, it’s hot,