‘I can hear you, Venables. Venables, do you know what time it is?’

The man with the moustache, the punctuality man, was shaking the door of the lavatory.

‘Coming now. Coming, coming.’

Venables waited for the sound of feet moving away, but did not hear it. He remembered his father banging on the lavatory door when he was a child and shouting through it, just as the punctuality man had. Venables sighed, wiping the marks of his tears with a piece from the paper roll. Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on doors he locked to demand his egress? His father’s big brooding face, with a moustache eight times as large as the punctuality man’s, flashed into his mind. He could hear his voice: ‘What are you up to, you scut? Come quick now or feel the razor strop.’ And, as Venables remembered, he felt the razor strop whether came out at once or not. He felt it almost every day of his childhood, for sins like picking his nose or standing on the outside edges of his feet or spending too long in the lavatory. His father, who had lately become a Seventh Day Adventist, was now in Wales somewhere.

‘He came here in 1940,’ Mr Bird had written,

and remained during the war years and ever since. Thomas Orpen Venables (49), psychologically unfit to play a part in the hostilities, is a man given over to loneliness and tears. I do now recall the precise manner of his entry here, but I rather imagine he was recommended by a resident who has long since taken leave of the boarding-house and the greater world. He it was who gave me the idea of collecting my solitary spirits together, and for that I have always had a kind thought for him. Venables goes in fear of his life, escaping a Mr and Mrs Flatrup, a couple of no doubt foreign extraction, whose daughter he put in the family way and did not bear the consequences. He suffers, perhaps as a result of his terror, from a stomach ailment. Venables, I believe, is dying.

He could hear the punctuality man washing his hands. He pulled the chain and replaced his blazer.

‘You should see to that before you leave the house in the morning,’ remarked the punctuality man. ‘You’re meant to set an example, old boy.’