Portobello

CHAPTER SEVEN

The private wing was newly built but that part of the hospital Ella had come from had changed very little from the old workhouse it had once been. Her patient had been in a mixed ward, shared by old men and old women, and hated by both. That at any rate would not have been allowed in Victorian England when this place was built. She went up to the streamlined green glass desk to ask for Joel Roseman, fulminating inwardly against the government (or maybe the Primary Care Trust) and its promises to put an end to this state of affairs, and was told he was in Room Five. She found him not in bed but asleep in an armchair. Ella saw a man in his thirties, dark-haired, rather good-looking, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a blanket over his knees. The room was very warm and the windows were shut.

Ella sat down in the other chair, the one on the opposite side of the bed. He woke, as she knew he would, but instead of taking her for yet another therapist come to manipulate him, he started and then he stared.

Ella got up and held out her hand. 'How do you do? I'm Ella Cotswold, Dr Cotswold, but I'm not here professionally. I've brought you a cheque for the money you lost.'

He blinked and, seeming to shrink away from the brightness of the window, put out his hand and took the envelope. 'That's very kind of you. I thought for a moment you were – well, someone else.'

'How are you?'

'I'm sort of OK,' said Joel Roseman. 'Only it's too bright in here for me. Just a moment.' He reached for the drawer in a bedside cabinet and took out a pair of large black sunglasses. They obscured a good deal of his face. 'I'm supposed to be going home soon.'

'You must be looking forward to that.'

He was silent, opening the envelope, contemplating the cheque. 'This signature, that's the man I spoke to on the phone? Is he a friend of yours?'

Ella nodded. She wished she could say Eugene was her fiancé but she couldn't. Not yet. 'You've someone to look after you when you get home?' she asked in doctor mode.

'My mother will come over sometimes.' He moistened his lips, leant towards her across the bed. The black glasses turned his face into a mask. 'My father doesn't have anything to do with me. We don't speak. Well, he doesn't speak to me.' The voice changed and became a child's, confiding, innocent, naive. 'He pays, though. He pays for everything. They'd call me a remittance man, wouldn't they?'

'Perhaps,' Ella said. 'I don't know.'

'Are you a GP?' When she nodded again he said, 'I haven't got a doctor. I mean, I'm not on a doctor's list. Of course, I've got doctors in here, lots of them. Do you take private patients?'

Ella tried not to let her astonishment show. 'I have two or three friends who come to me privately.'

'When I get out of here could I be your private patient? My pa will pay, there won't be any difficulty about that.'

Nonplussed, she said, 'You don't know me, Mr Roseman. Perhaps you should wait until you get home before you make decisions like that. I'll give you my card and you can phone me if you want to.'

Joel Roseman took a long time reading the card. He took his sunglasses off, put them on again, turning the card over, rereading it. He put it in his jeans pocket, handling it more carefully than he had the cheque. 'I won't tell you what's wrong with me now if you don't mind. That can keep till I'm your patient. You'll think it strange, I know you will, but it's all absolutely true.'

She got up, sure she would never see him again. 'Goodbye. I hope all goes well for you.'

'I'll tell you when next we meet,' he said.

Going into a Tesco Express in Kensington High Street for a pint of semi-skimmed milk, he had come upon a metal rack in front of the counter crammed full of packets of Chocorange and Strawpink. He stood in front of them, contemplating them sadly. It was too late. Tesco of all places, Tesco, which he had always affected to despise! How happy this discovery would have made him a week ago. This meant it wasn't only in this Express but surely in all, in all the main stores too and the Metros including the one in the Portobello Road, a stone's throw away. And such an impersonal place too, five bored-looking mechanical youngsters lined up behind the checkout, indifferent to what customers bought or didn't buy. He took a packet off the shelf, put it into his basket, then put it back again. Quickly he turned away and took his milk up to the checkout.

Once out of the shop, he began to regret not taking the Chocorange with him. Surely he could have taken one packet, made it last two days or three. It was harmless, after all. He wasn't talking about crack cocaine, for God's sake. But he didn't go back to the Tesco Express. He comforted himself with selfcongratulation. It was three days now that he had been without a Chocorange and it had been bearable. There was a lot to be said for not having the things in the house, for he knew that, even if he had put a packet on top of a cupboard he would need a ladder to reach, he would have fetched that ladder and climbed it. Best not to put temptation in his way and this thought brought him a kind of euphoria that lasted for most of the afternoon, enduring even when the man who came in regularly to walk up to the Rothko, eye it, finger its frame but postpone any decision he might make about it, returned for the last time to say he had definitely decided against it.

Dorinda was wrathful. 'These people have the most colossal nerve. And there's absolutely nothing one can do.'

'Nothing at all,' said Eugene. 'It's time we changed the window. We could try some of those minor Pre-Raphaelites. Well, maybe two. The girl walking with her baby in the woods, I think, and the woman waiting for the lifeboat to come back. Oh, and that famille noire vase. Jackie can do it.'

Look at the upside of your self-denial, he told himself. There will be no more pretending you've a sore throat or you've been eating a chocolate. No more removing the thing from your mouth in a tissue when a potential customer comes in. The days of never passing a pharmacy without wondering if they stock the things, those are gone. Secrecy is past. A small voice somewhere inside him said, 'But you like secrecy, it's what you do.'

Now, for instance, as he chose two paintings among the Pre-Raphaelites, taking a long time over whether he preferred the girl and her baby or the wounded soldier and his wife, he told himself that at least he no longer had to fear Jackie's observant eye when she spotted the telltale bulge in his cheek. He carried the painting into the window, moved the Chinese vase a little off-centre and sent her to find a length of yellow damask to drape an easel.

The craving had suddenly become very bad. He took a deep breath, which made Jackie turn to look at him. 'Are you OK, Eugene?'

'I'm fine,' he said.

Leaving her to finish, he went into the little kitchen at the back of the gallery and filled a glass with water from the tap. Water sometimes helped, but not this time. There was nothing to be done but bear it. He walked home, telling himself that he had been shut into a prison but there was a door to his cell that he had opened by exerting willpower. He should be proud of himself. He had said no and walked past those shops. He had put his hands in his pockets, turned his head away and walked past. Perhaps he should tell Ella. He could tell her now he had given up. But wouldn't it be better and wiser to keep his addiction and his conquest of it a secret?

Once in the house, he thought how only a few days before he would have put six packets into the secret drawer in the kitchen, four into the carved drawer in the black oak table and the rest into various pockets in his coats and jackets, keeping one out for dipping into during the course of the evening. No longer. The feeling of deprivation was profound, a sensation of emptiness and that nothing he might do could be of any value. A vast interminable evening stretched ahead of him, unrelieved by a secret helping himself to a Chocorange while Ella was in the kitchen or having a bath.

The doorbell rang.

He wasn't expecting anyone and for a brief moment his thoughts went to the young man without a name who had tried to claim the hundred and fifteen pounds. But why should he come back? Eugene went to the door.

A man in an orange day-glo anorak over dirty jeans stood on the step, his face convulsed with anger. In his left hand he was carrying a lightweight aluminium stepladder. 'I could have the law on you,' he shouted when Eugene opened the door. 'You're lucky I haven't got on to the police already.'

'I have no idea what you're talking about,' Eugene said.

'You didn't borrow my steps from my building site in Pembridge Crescent? Oh, no. You didn't have the bloody nerve to leave them stuck up against your house. You don't know a fucking thing about it, do you?'

'Well, no, I don't. I've never seen that – that ladder before.'

The builder flapped his right hand in a gesture of despair, said, 'Bloody toffee-nosed creep,' and retreated down the steps, carrying his stepladder. When he was out of sight, Eugene went up to the side gate where the steps had apparently been. If they had been there earlier he wasn't much surprised that he hadn't noticed them. He wasn't particularly observant of domestic detail and usually attributed this deficiency, if deficiency it was, to his mind being on higher things. He felt the side gate and noted that it was locked. Was it possible that Carli his cleaner had helped herself to the stepladder and left it there? It seemed unlikely and unwise to ask her. She might take offence and leave, and then where would he be?

He couldn't have a Chocorange, so he decided to calm his disturbed nerves with a drink. It surely proved his addiction wasn't as intense as he had feared. A real addict would need his fix more than any possible substitute. A large gin with a little drop of tonic worked wonders. He reclined on the raspberry-coloured chaise longue, admiring his surroundings. His beautiful furniture, exquisite porcelain and glass, and his carefully chosen extravagantly draped curtains always calmed him and put him in a good mood.

He sighed and thought of Ella who would be along when her evening surgery ended in ten minutes' time. Tonight he would take her somewhere especially nice for dinner but, before that, over another gin for himself and a dry sherry for her – but no, it should be champagne. He went off to the kitchen to put a bottle of Moët on ice. Before that, as the soft late-spring dusk began to close in, he would propose. Her perpetual presence in his house would be the best inhibitor of his dependency he could think of. He had given up, he told himself. It was over and now was the time to make this major change in his life. The sight of her lovely face daily across the breakfast table and nightly at drinks time, would keep him on the straight and narrow… Keep him? There was no question of his lapsing. Not now. He had got over the first day, the second and the third. Those were the first steps that counted.

She arrived a little sooner than he expected, looking almost prettier than he remembered. She should always wear dresses, he thought, dresses of floral silk with that crossover neckline effect, so flattering and sexy on a woman with a large bosom. He hadn't got a ring but they could buy one together tomorrow and no expense should be spared.

'My darling, champagne for us this evening. Will that be nice?'

'Lovely,' said Ella. 'But I have to tell you about Mr Roseman and the cheque first.'

'Oh, no, please, spare me. I'm sure you did it all perfectly. You always do everything perfectly.'

Ella laughed. 'Just as you like. Why the champagne?'

But Eugene had gone outside to fetch it. She wouldn't have told him very much, anyway, she thought. Nothing about that strange stuff Roseman had hinted at. Soon, if he carried out his promise – threat? – of becoming her private patient, she wouldn't be able to reveal anything of what he said to anyone else. Eugene came back with the champagne and two cut-glass flutes on a black japanned tray. The wine was poured, he raised his glass to hers and the flutes touched with a delicate ring.

'Going down on one knee is a bit absurd, Ella, wouldn't you agree?'

Awestricken, she whispered what she had murmured to Joel Roseman, 'I don't know.'

'Still, I'll try it.' Eugene knelt down, surprising himself by the ease with which he did this and with no creaking of joints. 'I want you for my wife more than anything in the world. Will you marry me, Ella? Say you'll marry me.'

She nodded. 'Yes, oh, yes.'

In the middle of the night Eugene got up to fetch himself a glass of water. Ella was fast asleep, a half-smile on her lips, one white arm lying outside the barely whiter quilt. He had drunk rather a lot the evening before but refused to fill his tooth glass from the cold tap in the en suite bathroom. All his life he had been told, first by his mother, then by various women including Ella, that it was unwise to drink from any but the mains tap in the kitchen. Upstairs, water had stood too long in a storage tank where bacteria would abound. So he went downstairs and drank two glassfuls straight down, filled another glass and, at the top of the stairs, used the toilet (which he would never have called a toilet) in the other bathroom so as not to wake Ella with the sound of the flush.

The craving for a Chocorange sweet had started from the moment he woke up but it had been mild at first, controllable. Now, with his thirst quenched, it began to rage. He reminded himself that he had none in the house. There ought to be a version of the nicotine patch for those giving up sugar-free sweets. Some sort of throat pastille? The irony didn't escape him. You began on sugar-free sweets to avoid sugar with its weight-gaining potential and had recourse to sugar to avoid an addictive substitute. Suppose that somewhere in the house there was just one left? He opened the door of the little wall cupboard and found only a lone tin of Fisherman's Friend. That was no good, he couldn't stand the taste of liquorice. Four drawers underneath seemed only to hold the usual accumulation of bathroom rubbish, scattered cotton buds, hairclips and a pot of lip gloss left behind by a one-time girlfriend, used and unused tissues, combs with missing teeth, half-used tubes of hair gel and several toothbrushes, their bristles worn down and clogged with toothpaste. Except the lowest drawer. He opened that one and checked the cry of surprise and joy he would have uttered if Ella hadn't been in the house.

In the bottom drawer lay one Chocorange packet. Don't touch it, he said to himself, leave it. He picked it up but knew before he opened it that it was empty. Downstairs in the coat cupboard in the hall, in the pocket of a coat or jacket, one might remain. It had happened before when he ran out. Despising himself, he went down to look and after grubbing about in pockets had failed, on the floor of the cupboard he found a single dusty Chocorange lying in the far corner behind an umbrella.

But instead of eating it, he saved it up. It would keep till the morning and then he would have it after Ella had left for the medical centre. It would be something to look forward to. He put it into the pocket of his dressing gown and returned upstairs. Worn out by his struggles, he crept quietly back into bed in the pre-dawn dusk and, lying close beside Ella, one arm round her waist, fell asleep at once.

Perhaps it was just as well, he told himself in the morning, that the sweet had disappeared. He could have sworn he had put it in his dressing gown pocket but it must have fallen out or he had forgotten and put it somewhere else. Eating it would have been a terrible mistake, taking him back four days and undoing all the firmness he had achieved and all the conquering of a foolish habit he had done. Better this way. And he did feel he was getting somewhere at last. The temptation was easing, the craving less. It filled him with jubilation.

Later, at the gallery, he announced his engagement to Dorinda and Jackie, kissed them both and promised champagne to come. No, they hadn't yet fixed a date for the wedding but it would very likely be October. He took Ella out to lunch at the Ivy and afterwards, at a jeweller's in Bond Street, spent an awesome (her word) amount of money on an engagement ring with a large and perfect solitaire diamond set in platinum.

Jon Henley, the Guardian columnist, had written a piece about Uncle Gib in his daily diary. One of the Children of Zebulun brought the paper round for him to see. It quoted his Agony Uncle replies in the magazine and had a lot of praise for their out-andout condemnation of pre- and extramarital sex. Uncle Gib was over the moon, though he attributed the comments to God's efforts rather than Henley's, and kept saying how his strict morality had at last been recognised. But Lance wasn't so sure. He couldn't have explained why, but it looked to him as if the diarist was mocking Uncle Gib, sending him up, and didn't really think the way he answered young couples' letters was the right thing to do but was – well, something to laugh at.

But it made Uncle Gib stricter than ever. He gave Lance a lot of pain by referring more and more often to Gemma and to Lance's wickedness in hitting her, which he said would never have happened if the two of them hadn't lived in sin. As if married people never fought. He said he might write to Jon Henley and tell him this was living proof of what immorality led to. And when Lance tried asking him about receivers of stolen goods, just a name or just a street number, just a hint, Uncle Gib said not to be surprised if he came home one night and found the locks had been changed.

The result of all this was that Lance didn't go back to White Hair's place for several days. He went to Gemma's, though. The weather had changed and grown cold, as unseasonably cold as the previous weeks had been unusually hot. She wasn't to be seen on the balcony with her baby and certainly not sitting in one of the cane chairs. The third time he went a man was up there, a young olive-skinned and very good-looking man with a moustache, doing something to the railing with a screwdriver. Just some workman, a council bloke, Lance thought, sent round to do a bit of maintenance. But he went away with an uneasy feeling. A council workman might look the same as a new boyfriend and a new boyfriend might mend a railing. Why not? When he'd lived there he'd often done little jobs for Gemma. Thinking like that brought back his depression and he had to spend money he couldn't afford on a couple of Bacardi Breezers. Next morning, avoiding her flat, he went round to Chepstow Villas.

He arrived outside the house just as White Hair was coming down the steps, briefcase in hand, and had no time to hide himself. But the guy didn't recognise him because he didn't notice him. People like the guy didn't even see people like him except after dark when they thought people like him were going to mug them. He watched White Hair go off up the road towards the bus or the tube or whatever work he did. Then, turning back, he saw the steps had gone but he didn't wonder where they had gone or how they had got there. He wasn't bothered. He had the key to the side gate with him, though he feared that by now the guy would have seen that the gate wasn't bolted. But he hadn't seen. Or if he had, he'd done nothing about it. Lance unlocked the gate and let himself into the garden.

That window, the one on the right-hand side of the french windows, was the focal point of his study. It consisted of sixteen rectangular panes. He could break one of the panes but that would do no good as this was a sash window without a handle and probably fitted with pegs, one on each side, which constituted window locks. Even if the sash were to be raised it would rise no higher than six inches because of the locks. You couldn't get skinnier than him but even he couldn't have squeezed through a six-inch gap. How about the french windows then? There were four of them and he could tell from their handles that all were openable. His mind went back to the only occasion he had been in that room. No bolts on those windows, he remembered, keys in the locks but no bolts. If he had a stick or, preferably, an electric screwdriver, could he push one of those keys through from outside? The key would drop to the ground and then, using something thin and flat, say one of those nail files Gemma used, perhaps he could ease the key under the door and very carefully tease it…

The sound of a door slamming, the front door surely, sent him retreating to the cover of a dense dark-green bush with flat white bracts of flowers. Veiled in leaves, he could see into the room without being seen. The woman he had seen earlier in the week plying the vacuum cleaner had come in and now she dropped the two bags she was carrying with a grunt and collapsed into an armchair. Lance didn't stay to see what happened next. He let himself out of the side gate, locked it after him and put the key into his jeans pocket.

It was crazy, it was only tormenting himself, he knew all that, but still instead of going back the way he had come, he took the small diversion that led him along Talbot Road. No one was on Gemma's balcony. No washing hung there and the chairs had been taken indoors. But as Lance leant against the custard-coloured wall with its red-and-blue hieroglyphics and stared upwards, he fancied he saw a movement behind the glass door. He thought he could make out two heads and though he could see no more than blurred outlines, he was quite sure one of them wasn't the baby's. Once or twice he had heard Uncle Gib use the expression 'a heavy heart' and now, for the first time, he knew what it meant. His heart was heavy. It felt like a stone hanging inside his chest and his muscles and his collarbone weren't strong enough to hold it up. He would have liked to let it sink him, to lie down on the pavement and give himself up to his grief.

But he plodded on his way, hunched inside his hoodie. Why had he punched Gemma? It all came back to that, that was what set it going. He wasn't the sort of bloke to smack a girl around or he thought he wasn't. But that time… She had told him he ought to get a job, any job, it didn't matter much what, so long as he could stop being a Jobseeker. Not all those employers he had interviews with could have rejected him, he must be setting out to make himself unemployable on purpose. As for her, once the baby was at school she'd get work, she'd be along at the Job Centre the first day she'd dropped him off at primary school. As things were, she didn't want Lance under her feet all day and every day. It wasn't as if he'd babysit for her while she went to the gym or had a coffee with one of her girlfriends. All he'd do, she said, was sit about with the telly on like the lazy layabout he was. It was when she said those words that he saw red and punched her.

At first he thought he'd broken her jaw but it wasn't as bad as that. Her eye went dark red and, when she'd sworn at him, she put her hand up to her mouth, then held it out to him to show the bloody tooth he'd knocked out. He was sorry at once, he said he didn't know what came over him and he'd never do it again.

'Too right you won't,' she said. 'You won't get the bloody chance. If you're not out of my house in fifteen fucking minutes I'm getting Dwayne round here to put you out.'

Dwayne was her brother, an amateur heavyweight boxer and rumoured to be a bare-knuckle fighter as well. Lance had got out, though not before Dwayne had roughed him up a bit, and eventually he had ended up with Uncle Gib. But the regrets never ended. The funny thing was he hadn't lost his temper a single time, not once, since then. He'd been a different man.

In the evenings they sat in front of Auntie Ivy's black-and-white television set. Lance found the telly soothing, it didn't much matter to him what was on, though he drew the line – when he was in a position to draw the line – at documentaries. They reminded him of school. The great drawback to watching was Uncle Gib. He chain-smoked. He talked through every programme, especially the sexy ones, and they were mostly sexy or violent or both. Uncle Gib called everything disgusting or ungodly and, puffing away, said it was liable to bring fire from heaven down on Channel Four and he was particularly incensed by what Lance liked best, girls with not many clothes on. The two of them sat on Auntie Ivy's sagging mock-leather sofa, its seat cushions cracked and wrinkled like Uncle Gib's face, while Lance stared in silence and Uncle Gib fidgeted about, sometimes shaking his fist at the screen and shouting, 'Harlot!' or, 'You wait till the Day of Judgement.'

Lance's favourite sitcom had just begun when the letter box rattled. Uncle Gib went off to answer it. It was his house, as he often said, and he wasn't having Lance answering his door. Lance was watching the female lead, a beautiful girl mysteriously wearing a bikini in the living room in the depths of winter, trying to persuade her dad to let her boyfriend stay the night, when Uncle Gib came back with two men, one of whom Lance recognised at once as the guy with the moustache he had seen on Gemma's balcony. The other man had a red face and quite a belly on him, though he was young, no more than twenty-something. 'Ian,' he said. 'Ian Pollitt. This here's Feisal Smith but you can call him Fize.'

Lance got up. 'What d'you want?'

'My mate and me, we've come here to tell you,' said Ian Pollitt, staring at Lance the way a policeman might.

This seemed to be the signal for Uncle Gib to switch off the telly. He turned back to Lance, said, 'I don't know what this is about but don't think I'm going. This is my house and I'm staying to hear what he's got to say.'

'Suit yourself,' said Fize. 'I'm not bothered.' It was the first time he had spoken. He had a funny accent, not like the Indians but not English either.

'Sit down,' said Uncle Gib with the nearest to graciousness he ever got. 'Make yourselves at home.' His cloudy old eyes were glittering with malice. 'Any friends of my nephew's are friends of mine.' He poked two cigarettes out of the packet. 'Want a ciggie?'

Ian Pollitt took no notice. Fize shook his head. From his jeans pocket he fetched something in a small plastic bag. 'You know what this is?'

Lance did. He had seen it before, though in a bloodstained condition. It was Gemma's tooth. Dry-mouthed, he nodded. Uncle Gib looked at the tooth, did a double take and jumped to his feet, throwing up his hands. Fize watched him, apparently with sympathy, and at last he sat down, patting the seat beside him and smiling quite pleasantly.

'It's like this,' he said when Uncle Gib had joined him, looking up at Lance, 'Gemma's a very good-looking girl, as you know. Now she's got a horrendous great gap in her mouth, thanks to you. You'd agree with that, wouldn't you?'

'Don't matter whether he does or not,' said Pollitt.

Again Lance nodded. It was Uncle Gib who spoke. 'He'll agree all right. He knows what he's done.'

'Now Gemma's been to the dentist and he says she needs an implant, that's what he called it, an implant, and that don't come cheap. Now Gemma's a single parent and she don't have that kind of money.'

'What kind of money?' Uncle Gib was relishing this. Lance could see he had difficulty in suppressing his laughter.

It was Pollitt's turn to speak. 'The dentist said he'd do it as economical as what he could but it'll still be a grand. One K, if you get my meaning.'

Lance found his voice with difficulty. 'A thousand pounds?'

'Right. You got it.'

'But I haven't got it,' Lance said. 'Where am I to get a thousand pounds? I'm signing on.'

'You should have thought of that before you smacked a young lady in the mouth.'

'Me and Gemma,' said Fize, 'we're not unreasonable, we'll give you till Saturday.'

Pollitt intervened again. 'Next Saturday, that's May twenty-six. By midnight, mind. That's the deadline.You can bring it round to her place, you know where it is.'

Lance nodded, dry-mouthed.

'Don't think her and Fize haven't seen you stalking her, hanging about outside at all hours.'

'I haven't got no money,' said Lance.

'Get it off this gentleman then,' said Fize politely. 'He's a property owner, isn't he? He's got to be loaded.'

'He knows better than that,' said Uncle Gib. 'What, me lend a thousand quid to a fellow who's only my dear late wife's greatnephew? I should coco.'

But all this talk of money stayed in Uncle Gib's mind. He was a property owner but he wasn't making prudent use of his property. As a religious man dedicated to God's work, he attributed this to his innocence and lack of wordliness. But next day, when Lance was out, he went up to the top of the first flight and untied the rope that cut off access to the second floor. That faculty which, in most people, detects dirt and disorder had been left out of Uncle Gib's make-up. Up in the three rooms on the attic floor he noticed nothing of the cobwebs and the grime, nor did the lack of bathroom facilities or even running water strike him. There was no furniture, of course, and some idea retained from one of the short periods in his middle years when he hadn't been inside told him that the law wouldn't let you evict a tenant from unfurnished accommodation. Still, that was easily solved. Take that good table from Lance's room, a couple of chairs from the dining room and pick up a mattress from somewhere. A bed wasn't needed, a mattress on the floor would do perfectly well.

No need to think twice. Uncle Gib sat down at the table in the kitchen to compose his advertisement. Lately he'd seen quite a bit on the TV about young people not being able to get on to the property ladder and, seeing the prices of those places he studied in estate agents' brochures, he wasn't surprised. He'd be doing a service to humanity, showing love for his neighbour by offering accommodation to rent. So how much to ask? Rented property advertised by some of those agents was fetching four and five hundred pounds a week. Uncle Gib was a realist and, though he had an inflated idea of the value and desirability of his home, he understood three rooms in it weren't in this league.

Using the reverse side of the No Entry card (waste not, want not) he wrote: To let: self-contained furnished flat in fashionable movie-featured Notting Hill. £150 per week. He added the address and phone number. When it was done to his satisfaction he took it down to the newsagent in Powis Terrace and paid – through the nose, in his opinion – to have it put in the window.

Every other shop these days had been turned into an estate agent. He passed five on his way to the Portobello Road except that he didn't pass them but stopped in front of each one, noting to his satisfaction how houses no bigger or better than his own were commanding prices of seven and eight hundred thousand pounds. More than that if, like his own, they were detached. His would soon be in the million league.

In the window of the Earl of Lonsdale he saw a notice offering a trading site to let outside. Such signs weren't uncommon and, every time Uncle Gib saw one, he thought of the stall his father had had here and from which he sold fruit and vegetables and in the winter roasted chestnuts; thought too how maybe he could take that site and keep a stall of his own. But perhaps not, perhaps it was too late. No, he would become a landlord instead and maybe a millionaire, even if a homeless one.

He went into his favourite delicatessen and bought black pudding, salami, a piece of Cheddar, half a dozen large eggs for himself and the same number of small ones for Lance, and a bottle of orange squash. It never did to economise on food.