Resting

Tired, he was always tired lately … not during the day when the city’s population flowed through the streets, as if a tide had been let loose on parched fields, and H. could be carried like a piece of flotsam on the back of the throng. There he had a purpose, could browse around the bookshops, slip through the labyrinth of streets designated as Soho, idle in the National Gallery, sip a coffee in Patisserie Valerie, a favourite coffee shop in Old Compton Street, scour the antique stalls of Camden Passage, Islington’s sixteenth-century backstreets, visit the YMCA if in the mood, sign on at the Labour Exchange, call a chum and have a breakfast natter in the local greasy spoon or nag the agent. There were a thousand and one other things an unemployed actor in London can do, swept along on the stream of human activities, and at any of these places there might occur a chance meeting with some lonely and eminently desirable woman.