And soon enough, I was home.
My parents had not been worried, although they were irritated by the orange rust dust on my clothes, by the rip in my shorts. “Where were you, anyway?” my mother asked.
“I went for a walk,” I said. “I lost track of time.”
And that was where we left it.
It was almost two in the morning. The Polish countess had already gone. Now Nora began, noisily, to collect up the glasses and ashtrays and to wipe down the bar. “This place is haunted,” she said, cheerfully. “Not that it’s ever bothered me. I like a bit of company, darlings. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have opened the club. Now, don’t you have homes to go to?”
We said our good nights to Nora, and she made each of us kiss her on her cheek, and she closed the door of the Diogenes Club behind us. We walked down the narrow steps past the record shop, down into the alley and back into civilization.
The underground had stopped running hours ago, but there were always night buses, and cabs still out there for those who could afford them. （I couldn’t. Not in those days.）
The Diogenes Club itself closed several years later, finished off by Nora’s cancer and, I suppose, by the easy availability of late-night alcohol once the English licensing laws were changed. But I rarely went back after that night.
“Was there ever,” asked Paul-the-actor, as we hit the street, “any news of those three boys? Did you see them again? Or were they reported as missing?”
“Neither,” said the storyteller. “I mean, I never saw them again. And there was no local manhunt for three missing boys. Or if there was, I never heard about it.”
“Is the playhouse still there?” asked Martyn.
“I don’t know,” admitted the storyteller.
“Well,” said Martyn, as we reached the Tottenham Court Road and headed for the night bus stop, “I for one do not believe a word of it.”
There were four of us, not three, out on the street long after closing time. I should have mentioned that before. There was still one of us who had not spoken, the elderly man with the leather elbow patches, who had left the club with the three of us. And now he spoke for the first time.
“I believe it,” he said mildly. His voice was frail, almost apologetic. “I cannot explain it, but I believe it. Jamie died, you know, not long after Father did. It was Douglas who wouldn’t go back, who sold the old place. He wanted them to tear it all down. But they kept the house itself, the Swallows. They weren’t going to knock that down. I imagine that everything else must be gone by now.”
It was a cold night, and the rain still spat occasional drizzle. I shivered, but only because I was cold.
“Those cages you mentioned,” he said. “By the driveway. I haven’t thought of them in fifty years. When we were bad he’d lock us up in them. We must have been bad a great deal, eh? Very naughty, naughty boys.”
He was looking up and down the Tottenham Court Road, as if he were looking for something. Then he said, “Douglas killed himself, of course. Ten years ago. When I was still in the bin. So my memory’s not as good. Not as good as it was. But that was Jamie all right, to the life. He’d never let us forget that he was the oldest. And you know, we weren’t ever allowed in the playhouse. Father didn’t build it for us.” His voice quavered, and for a moment I could imagine this pale old man as a boy again. “Father had his own games.”
And then he waved his arm and called “Taxi!” and a taxi pulled over to the curb. “Brown’s Hotel,” said the man, and he got in. He did not say good night to any of us. He pulled shut the door of the cab.
And in the closing of the cab door I could hear too many other doors closing. Doors in the past, which are gone now, and cannot be reopened.
GOING WODWO
Shedding my shirt, my book, my coat, my life
Leaving them, empty husks and fallen leaves
Going in search of food and for a spring
Of sweet water.
I’ll find a tree as wide as ten fat men
Clear water rilling over its gray roots
Berries I’ll find, and crabapples and nuts,
And call it home.
I’ll tell the wind my name, and no one else.
True madness takes or leaves us in the wood
halfway through all our lives. My skin will be
my face now.
I must be nuts. Sense left with shoes and house,
my guts are cramped. I’ll stumble through the green
back to my roots, and leaves and thorns and buds,
and shiver.
I’ll leave the way of words to walk the wood