Free Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

not have to be shocked. Train disasters, like Netta, had their own tragic haloes which grew faint and dissipated at a great enough distance.
    ‘ PLAYWRIGHT OF MECHANICAL AGE IS DEAD … FRANCO CLAIMS 18- MILE THRUST IN GREAT CATALAN BATTLE … £4,000 FOR “ PERFECT NURSE ”… TONGUE-TWISTING RADIO BEE ENDED LEVEL … PALACE OUTWIT GRIMALDER SHOT DEFENCE …’ He read until his coffee came, and then he put the paper aside, lit a cigarette and began thinking again.
    His cigarette, as it always did at this time of day, set him on edge. It was now five and twenty to eleven, and he had to make his plans for the day. Phoning Netta was obviously the first requisite for this, but the question was, what time?
    Every day he had this problem to face: every day this morning existence of Netta’s, this earthly paradise she created merely by existing, by being awake and moving about in a flat a quarter of a mile away – a paradise made a thousand times more agonizingly interesting and desirable by the fact that he was permanently excluded from it and had no idea of what went on in it – had at last to be interrupted, violated by his own courage and deed. The marvel was that after a certain time of the morning (eleven o’clock) it was possible to make such an assault. It was not necessarily wise – on certain days she might be furious if he phoned at eleven – but it was possible; it was not expressly forbidden. The problem which always exercised his mind was what time to choose, how long he should, or could, hold off. He sometimes tried to get some information on this subject from herself the night before, but she was seldom informative. She was not an informative girl: he had to find out everything for himself by experiment and disaster. From many such experiments and disasters, however, he had deduced certain scientific rules which were of service to him. He had now some knowledge, through deep thought, inference, and hearsay, of the main complications with which, daily, he summoned up the effrontery to interfere. In the forefront of these complications was her bath. There was the bath which she genuinely took each day shortly after she rose; there were also the spurious baths he had foisted upon him when Mrs Chope was there to answer the phone. The best time to phone her, the time at which she was likely to be in her best mood, was about a quarter of an hour after her genuine bath. Half an hour after, it was too late: she was often already out of the house. The principal thing to do, then, was to guess accurately the time of her rising, which might, to a certain extent, be deduced from the time shewent to bed, and to link up such a guess with the general knowledge he had acquired, over a long period, of the likelihood of the irregular Mrs Chope having arrived at the flat. For the presence of Mrs Chope threw out all other calculations based on the premise that she was not there.
    Today he did not feel that the same caution and foresight were necessary, for he had been definitely invited to phone her. Moreover, it would be advisable to phone early as, if she intended to keep her promise and come out with him in the evening, she would want to have it fixed up, so that she could tell, if she desired to do so, the appropriate falsehoods to Peter or Mickey, or anyone else who phoned and tried to engage her for the evening. To this day he did not know whether Peter or Mickey knew about these occasions when he took her out by herself. Nothing was ever said about such things in front of them: on the other hand nothing had ever passed between Netta and himself consciously to cause this silence. It was only very seldom anyway, only when he had money, that he took her out alone.
    He waited till the clock pointed to eleven o’clock, then he paid his check and went into the station.
    In the line of telephone booths there were a few other people locked and lit up in glass, like waxed fruit, or Crown jewels, or footballers in a slot machine