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taken aback when I had not encouraged his advances. He had assumed that I was a chum. When I asked him why he would think this he had simply shrugged and said that I gave off fairy vibrations.
    ‘Besides,’ he had said, ‘I asked Annie and she said that you were definitely queer.’
    I had assured him I was not, and that I had kept my relationship with Annie deliberately professional in preference to chaotically personal. My failure to sleep with her did not make me queer, although I could see how such an explanation might be a salve to a bruised ego. I’d had no idea that Annie had taken my carefully maintained distance so personally. However I didn’t mind the fact that Adrian was bent. He was reliable and was the only one, apart from me, who could speak the verse. What he did with his body below his vocal chords was entirely his affair.
    Adrian sat down at our table. Annie looked at him and said for the thousandth time, ‘All the best men are queer. How are you, darling?’
    ‘The facilities are adequate,’ he said, ‘and we are very close to a wharf. And where there’s a wharf, after dark there’s a man who wants to be fucked.’
    It was at precisely this moment that Augie Kelly came in. If he heard Adrian’s gross remark he chose to ignore it.
    ‘Last night was a great success,’ he said. ‘If Tibald can get people in here, we can do each other a favour and give the bloody Royal Hotel a run for its money.’
    I could see that he had Tour d’Argent delusions. He was wearing a freshly pressed shirt, and his copper hair had been carefully slicked and parted. Overnight he had decided to play the part of the sophisticated hotelier.
    ‘Your flies are undone,’ I said, and they were. He buttoned them up without blushing and with an unseemly lack of haste. I presume he thought Annie might enjoy watching his fingers fiddle so close to his genitals. He was wasting his time. Annie mostly had good taste in men, and he was definitely not her type.
    Over the ensuing weeks, Augie Kelly found a far more compelling reason for keeping us on at a reduced rate than the success of Tibald’s cooking. He fell in love.
    The first of Tibald’s dinners had indeed been a success. The candles were a brilliant touch. They softened the decayed and drab appointments in the George’s dining room. The single poppy focussed the eye and distracted it from looking up at the mould that had gathered in the corners of the ceiling. That had been Adrian’s idea. There had been a pleasant buzz in the room, helped by Augie’s providing a halfway decent bottle of Madeira. I spoke briefly to Peter Topaz, but the fact that I felt that he had the upper hand meant that I was awkward and dull, or it seemed that way to me. As soon as he saw Annie he made a bee-line for her, and it was perfectly obvious that she hadn’t the least inclination to repel his advances.
    The night of this dinner was the first time I met Polly Drummond. She was there with the soldier boy named Smelt. He had bad skin and a few bristles above his top lip that were trying very hard to approximate a moustache. At one point I saw him place his hand on her knee and move it up to her thigh. She didn’t discourage him, but threw her head back and blew smoke from her cigarette into the air. I assumed they were on intimate terms. At first glance she appeared rather ordinary, almost what the French call jolie-laide — sort of halfway between being pretty and being plain. It depended on how the light fell across her features. She didn’t look more than twenty (I found out later that she was twenty-four), with dark hair cut into a bob. It didn’t really suit her, but I imagine she’d picked the look out of a magazine, and some clumsy Maryborough hairdresser had attempted to make her resemble the picture.
    In the days after the dinner I discovered that Polly Drummond smelled of honey and that her mother was barking mad. I also learnt that her younger brother, Alfred, was