He was fond of telling me horrible stories about people treating one another dreadfully or about human cruelty to animals. One story was about a group of lads at the seaside who caught crabs and mutilated them by poking them with iron rods, breaking off a leg or a claw, and another was of a rabbit-hunting expedition he was persuaded to go on when he was about twelve years old to a warren not far from Twyford. He thought they were going to look at the rabbits, not to kill the poor things. To his horror the boys he was with lit petrol soaked rags in front of some of the burrows and tried to blow or waft the smoke down into them. This attempt to drive the rabbits out of the safety of their earthworks failed, but they caught one that ran straight towards them when fire from their rags spread through the long grass where it was hiding. He watched as the others surrounded it and battered it to death with lumps of wood.
He passed on to me other grim stories that originated with Andrew or Cheung, probably thinking that they would comfort me. In a curious sort of way they did. However bitter my feelings about Tom, and however sad the evaporation of my imagined wonderful new life at Goodmans Hotel, my misfortunes were not nearly as bad as being set alight or beaten to death with sticks.
The work on Vincent's computer network, arranged when he came to the hotel with Lizetta, also helped divert me from gloom. The project engaged my mind for one day a week with new people and brought some of my old technical expertise back into use. His staff were all 'straight', but none of them was put off when he introduced me by saying that I used to be the computer manager in a big accountancy firm and now ran a gay hotel.
By doing this he saved me from worries about 'coming out'. His staff were used to meeting gay men when they were out on consultancy assignments in the hotel and tourist industry, and were far more interested in asking me questions about my business than they were in talking to me about their own computer system. They were not particularly interested in specifics about Goodmans Hotel, but liked to speculate on the extent of the market for hotel rooms for gay men in London, how many of the guests were business visitors and how many were holiday makers, whether demand was growing, and if there was potential to develop package tours to London for gay visitors from the provinces and abroad.