the eye? Based on what I knew so far, I had no idea. I decided to wait.
At the opening of Tyler’s Court, on the corner of Wardour Street, was a pub, the Eagle. I bought an evening newspaper from a stand and went into the pub. I was able to find a seat by the window from where I could watch the front door to the Matterhorn and read the paper at the same time. My situation reminded me of the surveillance I had carried out on Sam from the Lamb in Middle Hill. This time I didn’t have one of Wilhelm’s cigars with me (I had two left).
Between six-forty and eight-forty I got through four half-pints of beer and two whiskies. I had read the paper from beginning to end and back again, all eight pages of it. The Eagle, I could see, had its share of characters. A man whose mane of long, lank grayish-silver hair suggested that he had once been a character actor in the West End theater had the voice of a Shakespearean senator, and at one stage he declaimed, in a full baritone boom, not the bard, as you might expect, but what I knew could only be Kipling:
I’ve a head like a concertina, I’ve a tongue like a buttonstick,
I’ve a mouth like an old potato, and I’m more than a little sick,
But I’ve had my fun o’ the Corp’ral’s Guard; I’ve made the cinders fly,
And I’m here in the Clink for a thundering drink and blacking the Corp’ral’s eye.
The clientele heard him out, applauding when he had finished (or stopped) and moved on.
A gypsy woman in a long purple crocheted dress and lace-up shoes sang a song—frail, tender, embarrassing. Everyone let it go. If she had to sing, she had to sing.
I was seeing elements of Soho I had never seen before. Was the West End always like this, or was it a function of the war? Whatever it was, I liked it.
I dipped into the paper a second time, looking up every few seconds, keeping an eye out for Genevieve. With the evening paper gone through twice lightly, so to speak, there was nothing else to do but go through it again. I still couldn’t concentrate, however, as I had to keep looking up every so often. Also, I knew that Sam would be beginning to worry, and that worried me. What I would have given for one of those new telephone things, there in the pub and at home.
Time passed. I had yet another beer, which I strung out till nine-ten—and then I saw Genevieve in the street. She was standing at the top of the stairs to the club, buttoning her coat. There was a man with her, older, darker-haired, thin. They both waved farewell down the steps, to the Negro at the door of the club, then linked arms and moved off.
I followed, at a distance. They turned south, on Wardour Street, then left—east—along Old Compton Street, back the way Genevieve had come, as far as Cambridge Circus, then on down Earlham Street to Seven Dials. From there they entered the other side of Earlham Street and, halfway along it, stepped into a brightly lit shop. Most shops had been closed for hours by now, but not this one, and I recognized it though I had never seen it before. It was a theatrical shop that Eve Palmer had mentioned, a shop that sold props, makeup, costumes, magicians’ bits and pieces, and rented out dance shoes, clowns outfits, military uniforms, and so on. All the things that theatrical productions might need when things went wrong at the last minute. Presumably, Genevieve knew about it in the same way that I did.
The shop was far too small for me to enter it while they were there, so I waited near Seven Dials, where there was a convenient alleyway with no shortage of shadows in which I could hide. It was coming on to rain again and Earlham Street was a quiet place—you would never guess you were bang in the middle of the theater district of a major city with a war on. There were shadows everywhere and the hiss of the rain was louder than anything else.
Genevieve and her companion were in the shop for about ten minutes. I saw them come out, stand for a moment in the pool of illumination thrown by the shop lights as they pulled up their collars and wrapped their scarves around their