The Malcontents by C.P. Snow

As soon as lunch was over, Stephen made a journey which had become a habit: bus to the park corner, along the route where Mark had driven the night before, a walk into the back streets, Kimberley Road, Ladysmith Road, Mafeking Road, names of the imperial past, forgotten now. It was only a couple of miles from the cathedral, but it might have seemed, if Stephen had been visiting there for the first time, a different town. Not that the streets were squalid: the houses were terraced, built in the early 1900s, red brick, with a yard-long strip (in some of which there was grass gleaming) between the front room and the pavement, and sun-blistered railings in between. The streets weren't so squalid as that in which Neil St John had been born: and the room where he lived was better than anything he had known at home.

It was their usual meeting place. As Stephen entered, he saw it, and didn't see it, with blank accustomed eyes: just as his nose was accustomed to the smell of food in the little passage outside. Neil's landlady lived in the two back rooms and let off what would once have been the main bedroom and the sitting-room. Another student occupied the bedroom, and Neil the ground floor sitting-room. It was there that Stephen was now standing.