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flâneur . Also, we liked loafing around and watching other people doing things and tiring themselves. We went to the alleys off Fleet Street to see gross rolls of newsprint being unloaded. We went to street markets and law courts, hovered outside pubs and bra-shops. We went to St Paul’s with our binoculars, ostensibly to examine the frescoes and mosaics of the dome, but actually to focus on people praying. We searched for prostitutes – the only other constructive loafers there were, we wittily thought – who in those days were still identifiable by a delicate gold chain round the ankle. We would ask each other,
    ‘Do you think she’s plying for trade?’
    We didn’t actually do anything except observe; though Toni was accosted one moist and foggy afternoon by a myopic (or desperate) whore. He answered her businesslike
    ‘How about it then, love?’
    with a confident if piccolo-voiced
    ‘How much will you pay me?’
    and claimed an épat.
    ‘Disqualified.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘You can’t épater la Bohème , It’s ridiculous.’
    ‘Why not? Whores are an integral part of bourgeois life. Remember your Maupassant. It’s like dogs taking after their masters: whores take on the petty values and rigidity of their clients.’
    ‘False analogy – the clients are the dogs, the whores are the mistresses …’
    ‘Doesn’t matter as long as you admit the principle of mutual influence …’
    Then we both realised that neither of us had noticed how the long-gone chippy had reacted. It was no épat if she’d liked the joke.
    This sort of contact, however, was deemed unrewarding. We preferred not to talk to people, as this got in the way of ourobservation of them. If asked specifically what we were looking for, we’d probably have said, ‘Rimbaud’s musique savante de la ville’ . We wanted scenes, things, people, as if filling one of Big Chief I-Spy’s little books – but our book was not yet written, for it was only when we saw what we saw that we knew we were looking for it. Certain things were ideal and unattainable – like walking in spectral gas-light across damp cobblestones and hearing the distant cry of a barrel-organ – but we hunted jumpily for the original, the picturesque, the authentic.
    We hunted emotions. Railway termini gave us weepy farewells and coarse recouplings. That was easy. Churches gave us the vivid deceptions of faith – though we had to be careful in our manner of observation. Harley Street doorsteps gave us, we believed, the rabbit fears of men about to die. And the National Gallery, our most frequent haunt, gave us examples of pure aesthetic pleasure – although, to be honest, they weren’t as frequent, as pure, or as subtle as we’d first hoped. Outrageously often, we thought, the scene was one more appropriate to Waterloo or Victoria: people greeted Monet, or Seurat, or Goya as if they had just stepped off a train – ‘Well, what a nice surprise. I knew you’d be here, of course, but it’s a nice surprise all the same. And my, aren’t you looking just as well as ever? Hardly a day older. No really …’
    Our reason for constantly visiting the Gallery was straightforward. We agreed – indeed, no sane friend of ours would bother to argue – that Art was the most important thing in life, the constant to which one could be unfailingly devoted and which would never cease to reward; more crucially, it was the stuff whose effect on those exposed to it was ameliorative. It made people not just fitter for friendship and more civilised (we saw the circularity of that ), but better – kinder, wiser, nicer, more peaceful, more active, more sensitive. If it didn’t, what good was it? Why not just go and suck cornets instead? Ex hypothesi (as we would have said, or indeed ex vero ), the moment someone perceives a work of art he is in some way improved. It seemed quite reasonable to expect that the process could be observed.
    To be candid, after a few Wednesdays at the Gallery, we