Three: We Leave The Office (continued)

Perhaps it's the sun's heat, perhaps it's because I missed breakfast, but the drink is making me feel a little hazy. Every half-glimpsed face on a passing Routemaster seems to consider me with a disapproving squint. Napier sits beside me on the bench, reading, and chuckling from time to time. He catches me looking at him from beneath a raised eyebrow and feels the need to explain.

"He's fucking her in the street!" he says, in an excitable stage whisper.

Napier is a creature of contradictions, being oddly squeamish about all things corporeal, unless they are under discussion between the covers of a work of erotic literature, though he would reject the description, on the grounds that it is something of a cliché. He does, however, shrink from any kind of physical contact, and will only discuss the merits, or lack thereof, of the opposite sex, in a purely aesthetic or intellectual context. I am obliged to remove to the post room for any frank discussion of earthier matters where Tony and Bob, universally referred to as the post boys, despite their advanced years, are only too happy to share their thoughts. Accordingly, when a particulary fragrant paradigm of young Middle-Eastern womanhood floats past in a long but semi-transparent frock, I am unable to communicate my base thoughts aloud but instead burble them into my lager.

"What was that?" asks Napier, looking up from his book.
"Ayou!" My pager vibrates in a trouser pocket. La Strega has somehow sensed that I have been thinking about another woman. "I've got to make a 'phone call." Napier dismisses me with a Papal wave, as if he hadn't, in fact, been ignoring me completely, and I go inside to find a payphone.