Free Dead Romantic by Simon Brett

disembodied. But they also had the desired effect of making him care less, of convincing him that what he was about to do did not matter.
    One more visit to a peep-show restored the desperation of lust. Looking neither to left nor right, he strode along to ‘Mandy’s doorway. Without slowing down, he walked in.
    Inside, it was surprisingly quiet. His footsteps sounded heavily on the uncarpeted stairs, but he did not falter. He only stopped when he was on the landing.
    Here, incongruously, he was reminded of the Garrettway School of Languages. The natural proportions of the landing, like those of Garrettway’s hall, had been destroyed by partition walls. The boarded fire-doors were the same. Only the number of bars and padlock-rings showed this to be a venue of a different sort.
    A printed card, reading ‘Mandy’, was drawing-pinned to one of the doors. Too far committed now to stop, he banged against the dark-grey fireproofing.
    Simultaneous with his knocking, he heard the click of a latch turning. The door, still secured by a chain, opened about six inches, and through the space a wrinkled face under dyed red hair peered.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Mandy?’ he asked, shocked by the thought that this might be what was on offer.
    â€˜The young lady’s busy at the moment,’ said the maid. ‘Could you come back in ten minutes?’
    The door re-closed, and the latch snapped home.
    For a moment he stood on the landing, breathless. Then the clash of reality against his fantasy hit him.
    He ran down the stairs, hailed the first empty cab he saw, and told the driver to take him to Victoria.
    In the train back to Brighton, he sat mesmerised, careless whether anyone penetrated his disguise. He felt soiled, disgusting, as his mind pitilessly kept superimposing the wizened face with its dyed red locks over the pure image of Madeleine.

Chapter 8
    â€˜â€œThe wandering outlaw of his own dark mind”,’ Madeleine quoted, using her fine reading voice for Paul’s benefit. ‘That’s how Childe Harold is described, and it was inevitable, given the kind of reputation the poet had, that Childe Harold should have been identified with Byron.’
    Paul nodded. He sat in his usual posture of tutorial discomfort, a copy of Byron’s Complete Works prudently open on his lap. After the turmoil of the last few days, he felt calmer. He was with Madeleine, and he knew that there could never be any other woman for him. He felt half-drugged, as ever, in her presence.
    â€˜It’s very difficult for us now to imagine the impact of this poem when it first came out. People in 1812 were just not prepared for a character like Childe Harold. He was a new kind of hero, the first anti-hero, if you like. The first two Cantos made Byron famous overnight.’
    â€˜What – just a poem?’
    â€˜Ah, you say just a poem, but you have to remember there wasn’t any television in those days, no radio, no pop records. What Byron offered was all those things rolled into one. Something very new, a bit naughty, a bit shocking, but, above all, profoundly exciting. You can see that, can’t you?’
    Paul let out a grunt which he hoped implied that he could see it, but in fact, though almost everything else was capable of driving him into a frenzy of excitement, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ left him cold. The memories of the books and videos he had seen excited him; at that moment the sight through thin wool of the depression of her brassière strap in Madeleine’s rounded shoulder excited him almost unbearably; but Byron didn’t seem to have the same magic.
    â€˜You have read it, haven’t you?’ asked the owner of the brassière strap. ‘The first two Cantos, anyway?’
    â€˜Oh yes. Most of it. Well, some of it.’
    â€˜Even from just a bit of it you must have seen what an original character Byron had created. Here you have a man who has