'What?'
'The toilet bowl or the connection with the drain. Something's give way.'
'Oh... Not very nice.'
'It's not healthy. That estate agent wants shooting.'
Going in front of him on our way out of the room I paused deliberately, making him bump into me. 'Sorry.'
'S'okay,' he said softly. The smile he gave me, my first for so long, told me that his mood too had lifted. We followed Andrew and the agent back out onto the landing, where we paused at the foot of the narrow twisting staircase leading to the attic. From above came a familiar old piano tune from the twenties or thirties. 'Sounds like they're in. Do we need to bother with the attic rooms?' the agent asked.
'A quick look,' Andrew decided. Tom and I followed, and I could not resist putting my hand on top of his on the stair rail as we went up. He looked back and smiled again. How desperately I hoped his desire for me had rekindled. Halfway up the bare wooden stairs was a tiny bathroom somehow squeezed into an area below part of the roof. At the top was a small square of landing barely big enough for two to stand, with the doors of two bedsits on either side of it. The agent knocked at the one on the left, but the sound reverberated so much that the doors on both sides opened in answer. On the right was a Middle-Eastern looking man of about thirty with a thin line of black moustache, and at the door on the left stood a boy who looked too young to be living on his own.
'I hope I'm not disturbing you, lads, can we just have a quick look, if it's not too inconvenient?'
The boy went back into his room and the music ceased abruptly; Andrew and the agent followed him, while Tom and I accepted a gesture of invitation into the room opposite. Text books with scientific diagrams were strewn around the table and bed, and on a cabinet was a partly disassembled computer. The tenant was unsmiling, resentful of our intrusion, and we glanced quickly around, directing our eyes upwards towards the ceiling as though checking for damp.
'Something wrong with the computer?' I asked.
'I'm studying computers and electronics. Imperial College.' After a pause he added 'Darren has been playing his music very loud, sometimes in the night.'
'Darren?' He must have assumed I was someone to whom he could make a complaint. 'Very late? Did it keep you awake?'