The sandy man laid down his fork and blew a kiss to his wife. He was beaming.
‘Oh, fortuitously, you know,’ he said airily. ‘I was mucking about, waiting to be demobbed. Wally was still in Germany, and we hadn’t decided if to team up again. Minnie was broke—no one bought pictures during the war, and she’d lost that whole exhibition when the Polchester went down—and I thought I’d better get cracking. Alan Dell sent me a chap who had been making plastic windscreens for him. The contracts had been cancelled as the war ended, and he had tons of this stuff in sheets on his hands.’
‘So you just looked at him and said, I know, let’s make glübalübali?’
Tonker laughed. ‘It wasn’t unlike that,’ he admitted. ‘We were having a drink at The Howdah and there was a cabaret in the restaurant, which one
