Across the four lanes of the A5 from the supermarket where Sammy Chin Li works his final shift, the Earl Derby. Affixed to newly scrubbed brick, a gently swinging sign bears three stags’ heads, the motif of the Derbyshire earls. Emblem: Argent on a bed azure, three bucks’ heads caboshed or, a crescent for difference. Crest: On a chapeau gules turned up ermine, an eagle, wings expanded or, preying upon an infant proper swaddled of the first. Motto: Sans changer. The clown cracks a wry smile. Without changing. This hostelry that was lately the Golden Egg, before that the Goose and Granite only now adheres once again to the name given it when it opened on the High Road in 1884. The arms belonging to the earl of legend, a fourteenth century adulterer whose wife could provide no heir and who courted one of her ladies-in-waiting, a grateful Jezebel who bore him a son. The babe was dressed in noble robes then left in an eagle’s nest to be serendipitously found, the earl and his barren countess adopting the miracle child and raising him as their own. Henry of Grosmont, first of his line, the champion of St Martin’s Eve; five hundred men at arms and two thousand archers, their firebolts on point, the corpses of three thousand Flemings paying tribute to England’s military hegemony. The earldom bestowed on Grosmont by a grateful Edward III. Earl John who took the coronet from the cold, pestilent head of his uncle in 1361, the third surviving son of the Plantagenet, Edward. Earl John of Ghent and so ‘of Gaunt’, warrior and trusted counsel to the child king, Richard. Earl Henry, the Lancastrian pretender, future king of the realm, crusher of the rebel Glendower. Richard, the final earl from that war torn, plague ridden century, progenitor of one king, two queens and a pair of dukes. And here, on ragged ground where Watling Street races through Kilburn is their legacy, a dining pub with bleached wooden settles, red leather sofas, and tables laid out with broadsheet newspapers. A temple of spirits and victuals inhabiting the dead shell of the pub whose innards it has eaten like a parasite. The clown peers through the window at those who the Earl Derby has drawn in with its promise of craft beers and American themed fare. Angeline Tousson and Mark Cadfield sit in a corner enjoying a glass of chilled Viognier, the bottle sitting next to their table in a bucket of ice. Two childless sybarites, he besotted and she enabling, junior producers at a TV channel where he watches her like his favourite show, studying the profile of her bosom as she passes, intoxicated by a lust that has no release. Lost, lost Mark Cadfield, bewitched by lips that demand kissing, breasts that beg to be freed and legs which belong wrapped around his own, Tousson’s involuntary cries a whimper of ecstasy he will never hear. The clown laughs, his breath condensing on the window. He wipes it away, the movement catching Tousson’s attention. She lifts her big ayes to him and smiles. Tousson who has slept with two men since she and Cadfield last had drinks together a month ago, one of them a busker whose charm waylaid her outside Brondesbury station. Yet to Cadfield, Tousson is Pavlova and Karenina; she is Bovary and Piaf, the man in love with an idea, convincing himself that they are kindred souls when she has never once imagined him naked. He glances again at the fat orbs contained beneath the satin sheen of her loose, short-sleeved top. Soon, he will offer her a gift, a framed photo of the two of them at Winter Wonderland. Tousson will lean across the table to hug but not kiss him, a wave of J’adore by Dior crashing on his face, and while they abandon themselves to a second bottle and order stuffed potato skins with sour cream and chorizo to share, Tousson will tell him about the busker, a throwaway line, a bit part in another story and the words will ricochet around the chamber of Cadfield’s heart like a coin dropped in a copper cauldron, so loud that he will not hear the rest of her sentence; he will want to snatch the gift away and smash it against a wall and run from the pub, from northwest London, from the city, from the good earth, away.