A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

CHAPTER V

FRIDAY EVENING

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THE TIDE WAS two hours past the full, and it was getting dark. The cauldron off the point was just going off the boil, slivers of slate-grey pebbly beach showed between the fangs of the Dragon, rimmed with scummy foam. The Dragon’s Hole, which pierced clean through the headland near its narrowest point, and acted as a spectacular blow-hole as the tide streamed in to its highest, was merely breathing spume now in a desultory manner, as though the Dragon was falling asleep. Soon the dripping crown of the arched entrance would heave clear of the water, and the level would sink magically fast, to leave the whole rocky gateway clear. At low tide you could clamber and walk right through it, and emerge in the snaky little haven on the Pentarno side. Certain regions of the complex of caverns inside were always above water, but for three hours before and after high tide both entrances were submerged.

They were all in the hunt by then. Phil had driven in from the farm in the Mini, pale and strained and violently silent, matched herself with the first partner who happened to come in with his periodical, and negative report, and gone off with him to scour the most distant of the Maymouth beaches. Fate dealt her George, for which she was grateful, because that compelled her to behave sensibly and contain her terrors; she couldn’t have borne to be with Tim just then, to double his anguish and her own.

Bunty had come down from the hotel, determined not to be left out, workmanlike in slacks and a windjacket, and was quartering the country fringes of Maymouth with the Vicar, in case Paddy had had a fall or a crash somewhere on his intended way home. There were precipitous lanes he might have chosen to use, to vary the monotony of his journey, and a cyclist can come to grief on even the quietest of roads, given a little carelessness or a too-optimistic local driver who assumes no one uses these by-ways but himself. Everyone who was at all intimate with the boy had been telephoned and asked to keep in touch. What more could they do but just look everywhere, and go on looking?

Tamsin and Dominic had worked their way the length of the harbour, down on the mud, following up the receding tide, and come empty-handed to the remotest rocks under the wall, where ashlar gave way to granite and shale, and the jagged scales of the Dragon leaned over them. The sea still lipped the cliffs here, they could go no farther as yet. They turned inland, hugging the cliff wall, winding in and out of its many razor-edged alcoves, and the crying of the subsiding waves followed them mournfully. They were drenched with spray and very muddy. Dominic had the torch, and sometimes turned to empty its light carefully before her feet in the rough places, and give her a hand. She knew every inch of this shore, but she took the hand, just the same. They were both glad of the touch. This had been going on for such a long time now, and where can you lose a sensible, responsible boy of fifteen, where, at least, that hadn’t already been searched? Except in the sea! They wouldn’t think that, they couldn’t, it was unthinkable. Paddy was strong, shrewd and capable, and knew his native coast. He was alive, he must be alive.

They climbed slowly out of the pebbly fringes of the sea, towards where the first steep path plunged down from the Dragon’s Head. A surging rush of air was all the warning they had. They sprang apart before the hurtling onslaught of something that came bounding down the slope, flashed between them, and was dragged to a noisy stop by a toe horribly scoring the turf. Small, invisible things hopped and rolled under their feet. A voice, anxious, urgent and low, panted: “Tam, is that you?”

Stumbling and slipping on the rolling missiles, Tamsin groped for a tweed sleeve. Dominic turned the torch, and Simon’s face started out of the dark, abrupt in black and white, strained to steel-sharpness, for once utterly bereft of its light, world-weary smile.

“Simon, for God’s sake! What are you trying to do, kill yourself? Fancy riding a bicycle down—”

Tamsin stopped, swallowed, drew breath hard and was silent. The light of the torch passed briefly over the frame of the bicycle, the carrier on the front, the basket spilling small oval fruit. They had no colour by this light, but Tamsin knew them for apricots. She whispered, “Where did you find it?”

“In the gorse, up by the cliff path there. Put down quite carefully, the basket lifted out. Near the edge,” said Simon, low-voiced and ashen-faced. “Not exactly hidden. Laid down out of the way.”

“He did it himself?”

“I think so. I hope so. I’m going to turn it in at once, in case it can tell us anything.”

“Where along the path?” she demanded intently. Her voice had lost its reserve in Simon’s presence, and its sting, too, as his face had lost its assured sophistication. It was as if they had never bumped into each other without masks before, and now that they had, they couldn’t even see each other.

“Farther out. Over the blow-hole, about. Have you been down there?”

“We couldn’t yet, not so far. It’s going out fast now, though, we’ll follow on down.”

“Do, Tam, please. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

“Do you think he could have fallen?” she asked, desperately quietly.

“I don’t know. I won’t think so. I—Oh, Tam!” said Simon suddenly, his voice almost inaudible, and caught at her hand for a moment; and instantly pulled away from her, climbed unsteadily on to the bicycle that was too small for him, and wobbled away recklessly across the bumpy waste of turf to the road and the town. Soiled and dishevelled and faintly ridiculous, and for once wholly, passionately intent upon someone other than himself, without a thought for the preservation of his image or his legend.

Dominic switched off the torch; and after a moment he put an arm delicately but quite confidently about Tamsin, and turned her towards the sea.

They followed the receding tide down the beach yard by yard, ranging along the edge of the water and coasting round into every new complexity of the cliff wall, which ran down here in striated, shaly strata into the litter of flat, blue pebbles and eroded shell. A certain amount of lambent light showed along the breaking foam, and gleamed from the streaming rocks, and their torch, a thin pencil in the dark, probed the corners where even the starlight could not reach.

“That was Simon?” said Tamsin suddenly, all the old obduracy back in her voice.

“Well, that’s what you called him,” said Dominic cautiously.

“Thanks. Just making sure. It’s the first time I ever saw him when he didn’t have an imaginary mirror in front of him. He must be really fond of Paddy.”

“He is,” said Dominic.

“Do I detect a note of reproof in your voice, Mr. Felse?”

He said nothing. What was the good? Only a tiny corner of her mind fretted at the memory of Simon off his guard, and that was to make their one overwhelming anxiety bearable, like pinching yourself to take your mind off a hideous toothache. Any serious thinking she was going to do about it would be done later, in repose, when, please God, they’d have Paddy Rossall safe in bed, and Simon restored to his old image. And then he’d start rubbing her up the wrong way all over again.

“You’ll notice,” she said perversely, her shoes slipping in the weedy crevices of the rock, “he never asks me to marry him when there might be the slightest fear of me saying yes.” She slithered into the edge of an invisible pool, and Dominic caught her by the arm and drew her back on to safe ground.

“All right?”

“Fine! Just a shoe-full of sea. It can’t make me any wetter.” She held on to him for a moment, steadying herself. Her hands were very cold. He saw her face close to him, feathers of wet hair plastered to her cheek, her eyes sombre and wretched. “Dom—we shall find him, shan’t we?”

“Yes,” he said, very firmly. “He’s a sensible kid, I don’t believe he’d let anyone creep up on him, and I don’t believe he’d do anything daft himself.” Which from eighteen to fifteen, when Tamsin came to think of it, was pretty generous, but he sounded as if he really meant it. “He’ll be found intact,” said Dominic strenuously, “and with any luck, we shall be the ones to find him. So hang on, and let’s have a look round the next corner.”

They had looked round a good many by then, with their hearts in their mouths at every turning, but so far there’d been no slight, tumbled body under the cliffs, and nothing washing about in the edge of the retreating waves but casual weed.

“Yes,” she said docilely. And after a moment, very quietly at his shoulder: “You’re a nice boy, Dominic Felse, I like you.”

“Good! I like you, too, I like you a lot. There, you see, nothing!” He couldn’t help reflecting, as soon as it was out, that nothing was a pretty poor return for all their hunting, and a pretty lame reassurance for Paddy’s mother. But it was all they had, and it was better than the wrong thing, at any rate.

The sea sighed away from them, down the more steeply tilted shingle. They stood close under the overhang of the cliff, on a washed and empty shore, and right above their heads must be the necklace of the lofty path that circled the Dragon’s Head, and the scattered hollows of gorse where Simon had found the bicycle. The waters had left the arched entrance of the cave now, it stood tamed and dark above a faint glimmer of salt puddles penned among the boulders.

They halted for only a second, contemplating it together.

“He wouldn’t,” said Tamsin, “would he?”

“Not without a reason, but he may have had a reason, how do we know?”

“But he knows the tides, he wouldn’t let himself get caught.”

“Something may have happened that didn’t leave him any choice. Anyhow, we’re not leaving anything out.”

“Careful, then,” she cautioned, drawing him to the right, to the landward side of the thin channel of water that lay prisoned among the pebbles in the cavern’s mouth. “This side’s the smoothest going. And look out, there are holes.”

Dominic fell into one at that moment, cold salt water gripped him to the knees, and the chilling shock surprised a muted yell out of him. Deep in the blackness beyond the beam of the torch, echo took the shout and volleyed it back to him redoubled.

“Dom!” Tamsin caught at his arm. “Did you hear that?”

Floundering out of the crevices on slippery oblique rock, he supposed that she was as startled by the force and complexity of the echo as he had been, and merely went on scrambling noisily up to safer ground. “Hear it? I started it. It wasn’t that good an imitation—”

“No—listen!” She shook him impatiently, and he froze into obedient silence, straining his ears.

Nothing at first, not a sound; then they were aware of the ceaseless, soft, universal sound of the dripping of sea water from every jutting point of the stone ceiling above them and the contorted walls around, and the soft, busy flowing of a dozen rivulets draining down between the pebbles into the central channel behind them. The place was full of the sounds of water, but empty of the sounds of men.

“But it wasn’t all echo. I’m sure!”

Almost fearfully, Dominic called upward into the invisible spaces of the cave: “Paddy?”

The call came eddying back to him from a dozen projections he could not see, repeated in a dozen hopeful, fearful inflections, ricocheting away into silence. Then a last faint and distant sound, out of turn, out of key, started a weak reverberation away on their right.

“There! Hear that? There is someone!”

But Dominic was already scrambling wildly up the rattling scree of sand and gravel and shell, the pencil of wavering light wincing away from rocks and water-drips before him, clawing his way up towards the drier reaches of the cave. He stretched out a hand to her and dragged her after him. Stumbling, slipping, panting, they climbed inland; and somewhere ahead of them, distant and faint but drawing nearer, unmistakable sounds of someone else’s stumbling, slipping, panting progress came down to meet them.

Into the beam of the torch blundered Paddy Rossall, wiping his dirty face hastily with an even dirtier hand; pallid, wet, and shivering with cold, but alive, intact and alone.

“You don’t mind,” said Phil, turning in at the drive of Treverra Place, “if we call in here? I don’t know that it will do any good, but I just thought, while we’re so near—She might remember something he said, anything that will give us the faintest clue. I know we’ve asked the same questions already, but it’s worth one more try. Oh, George, my poor little boy! I wish I hadn’t said no to him. I wish I’d let him go with Tim and Simon—at least he’d have been safe with them.”

It was the most she had said in all the hours they had hunted together. As long as there’d been more places to search, more possible people to contact, Phil had been a silent, ferocious force of nature sweeping all before her. Only now, when they had almost exhausted the possibilities, was the edge of desperation audible in her voice, and the shadow of breakdown a perceptible cloud over her face.

Miss Rachel was sitting over the fire in her sitting-room, huddled like a broody bird, with her solitary dinner untouched on a little table beside her. She stiffened her old spine and snapped the imperious lights on again in her eyes when Phil stalked in with George at her elbow, but she knew her back was against the wall.

“Aunt Rachel, didn’t he say anything about where he was going? There must have been something. You did see him yourself, didn’t you? Well, what did he say? I know we’re snatching at crumbs. Damn it, crumbs is all we’ve got.”

“Yes, I talked to him, certainly.” Miss Rachel looked smaller than usual, but fiercer. Attack is the best defence. “What passed between Paddy and me can’t possibly have anything to do with any danger to him. But it may—I say may—account for his naughtiness in staying away like this. If you ask me, that’s all it is, and you are just playing into his hands. I was justified in being cross with him. He was exceedingly impertinent and very disobedient, and it was high time someone took steps to bring him to a more chastened frame of mind.”

Quivering and aghast, Phil demanded: “But what—for God’s sake, Aunt Rachel, what did you do to him?”

She couldn’t stall any longer, it would only make it worse when it did come out. And besides, she was lonely and frightened and she wanted Paddy back, impertinent or not, disobedient or not, she just wanted him. So somebody had to find him for her.

“It’s too much to hope that you’ll approve, of course, but I was concerned only for you and Tim, and for the child’s own well-being. I told him what he should have been told as soon as he was old enough to understand—that he has to thank you and Tim for taking him in and giving him a good home and the love of good parents, when his own father wanted to get rid of him. I told him he was adopted, and that he should consider how much he owed to you, and try to behave better to you in future, not take everything for granted as he does. That’s what I told him, and you’ll have reason to thank me for it yet”

Stricken, Phil stood clinging to the back of a chair as to the rocking remnants of her world. “Aunt Rachel! You couldn’t! You couldn’t be so cruel!”

“Cruel, nonsense! It was high time he was told, you’d have had to do it in the end. I don’t believe it’s done him one jot of harm, either, so—”

“No harm!” Groping through the blankness of her misery, Phil arrived at a positive and tonic fury. Her cheeks flushed scarlet, and paled again to a pinched and frightening whiteness. “No harm! You drive that poor boy away with the bottom knocked out of his world, not knowing who or what he is, and you say you’ve done him no harm!”

“It means we’re probably all wrong about his being in danger from our murderer,” pointed out George quickly, with a gentling hand on her arm. “He’s shocked and hurt and wretched, he wants to hide, that’s all understandable. But it means he’s probably staying away of his own will, and when he’s come to terms with it he’ll come home. It isn’t as bad as what we were afraid of.”

“It is, George, it’s almost worse. He’ll be in such a state he might do anything.” She turned frantically upon Miss Rachel, who was backed into her great chair with hackles erect, ready for a fight. “How would you feel, you wicked old woman, if you suddenly found you weren’t who you thought you were, and your parents weren’t your parents, and everything you had was borrowed? Even your identity?” She gripped the edge of the table, and demanded urgently: “Did you tell him who he was? But you couldn’t—we never told you, thank God, so you didn’t know.”

“Oh, yes, my dear Phil, I did know. His father told me himself—right here in the garden, no longer ago than Wednesday afternoon. He told me quite a lot. But I didn’t tell Paddy. I don’t have to tell everything I know.” She drew breath before Phil could ride over her again, and pursued belligerently: “But you’d better. Oh, I know, Simon thinks he can twist me round his finger. Maybe I like it that way. But don’t think I’ve got any illusions about him. I like him very much, but sooner or later he’ll make a bid for what he wants. And if you haven’t noticed that he’s beginning to want Paddy, very much indeed, you’d better wake up, quickly.”

George, whose experience in breaking up fights between women was still somewhat inadequate to such a situation as this, felt profound gratitude to the telephone for ringing just then. It gave him something to do, more constructive than listening to family secrets it would be his duty promptly to forget again, and it distracted the attention of both the embattled females. He picked up the receiver thankfully.

“Treverra Place. This is George Felse. Oh, yes—yes, she’s here. Phil, it’s Tamsin Holt for you.”

Phil clutched the receiver convulsively, afraid to hope. “Tamsin, what is it? Have you—You have! Thank God! He’s all right?”

Her knees gave under her, she was suddenly limp as silk, and George slid a chair under her and eased her into it.

“He’s all right! They’ve found him. In the Dragon’s Hole. The tide caught him inside there. Aunt Rachel, it’s all right! They’ve found him—Tamsin and Dominic. I don’t care now, nothing else matters. I don’t care what you told him, he’s all right. Tam—we’re on our way down, we’ll meet you. Take care of him! Don’t you let him out of your sight again. The little demon! Honestly, I’ll murder him! You’re sure he isn’t hurt? God bless you, Tam! We’re on our way.”

She let the receiver slip nervelessly down into its cradle. She was in tears, and trembling. “George, can you drive a Mini? I—don’t think I’m capable—Oh, George, I want Tim!”

George got her to her feet and out to the car. No one had even a glance to spare for Miss Rachel, braced and defensive in her high-backed chair.

As soon as they were out of the doorway she hopped suddenly out of her sanctuary behind the cold dinner-tray, and danced the length of the room and the library, like an agile girl, until her piled grey hair came down round her shoulders, and she was out of breath. Then, having carefully reassembled her magnificent coiffure and her even more magnificent personal assurance, she rang the bell for Alice, and demanded food.

On their way down through the town they picked up Tim. Phil clung to him in the back seat, pouring out the best and the worst of the news, and swinging breathlessly between rage and joy. Tim held her in his arms and shook with the vehemence of her trembling, and implored her first, and then ordered her, just as ineffectively, to be calm and matter-of-fact, and take the whole thing easily. Hadn’t they agreed from the beginning that with a child not your own you must take nothing for granted, that you had to exercise twice as much care and self-control as natural parents, and earn every morsel of your gift-son’s affection? Restraint, no too greedy love, no too lavish indulgences and no too exacting demands, that was the way. If she let herself go now, she’d push the boy right over the edge, and break something.

“Here they are,” said George at the wheel, and drew the Mini in to the kerb just below the square, the dilapidated trio before them caught and dazzled in its lights. A slim, taut, brittle figure toiled up the hill between two muddy supporters just recognisable as Tamsin and Dominic. He had been drooping badly a moment before, but now he was braced to meet them. The moment was on top of him; he wasn’t ready, but he never would be ready, it might as well happen and get it over. A pale, grime-streaked face stared, all enormous, shocked eyes. Phil lunged for the doorhandle and was half out of the car before it came to a halt.

“Phil, you must be calm—”

“To hell with being calm!” shouted Phil, in a splendid flare of wrathful joy, and hurled herself upon her stray in a flurry of abuse, endearments and reproaches.

Paddy’s parent problem was swept away in the warm, sweet hurricane. After all, he didn’t have to make any decisions about how to behave, he didn’t have to do anything at all. The meeting he had been dreading was taken clean out of his hands. He was plucked from between his henchmen, hugged, shaken, even he seemed to remember afterwards with respect and astonishment, slapped, a thing he couldn’t remember ever having happened to him before in his life. Tim snatched him from Phil to feel him all over, swear at him heartily, strip him of his wet and filthy sweater, and bundle him into a warm, dry sportscoat much too big for him. He could hardly get a word in edgeways, all he managed was: “I’m sorry!” and: “I didn’t mean to!” and: “I couldn’t help it!” at intervals. And he had been shrinking from the thought of moderated voices and careful handling, into which he would inevitably have read all sorts of reservations! There weren’t any moderated voices round here, he couldn’t hear himself think; and the way he was being handled, he was going to start coming to pieces shortly. This sort of thing there was no mistaking. He was loved, all right. She was frantic about him, and Dad wasn’t much better. This, he thought, hustled and scolded and abused and caressed into dazed silence, this is exactly how parents behave.

“Into that car,” ordered Tim, growing grimmer by the minute now that he had satisfied himself that he had his son back with hardly a scratch on him. “You’re going to apologise to Mr. Hewitt for all the trouble you’ve caused everybody, and you’d better make it good.” And when he had him penned into the back seat, with Phil to cushion him comfortably, he had to rummage out the old car rug and tuck him into it like a cocoon, and all to go the two hundred yards to the police station.

The rest of the evening always remained to him a crazy confusion, from which fleeting remarks emerged at times to tickle his memory. The one overwhelming thing about it was that all of it, every bit, was good, better than anything had ever been before, or perhaps ever would be again. To have happiness and know that you have it, and know how wonderful it is to know it, that’s almost too much for any one day.

He was bundled into the warmth and light of the police station, blinking and exhausted, and made his apologies with quite unexpected grace, out of the fullness of his own plenty. He said thank you to everyone who had gathered there from the great boy-hunt, and requested that his thanks be conveyed to all those who were not there to hear for themselves. Hewitt received the offering with considerable complacency, out of pure relief, but maintained a solemn face.

“Don’t you think you’ve heard the last of it, young feller-me-lad. Your next six months’ pocket-money’s going to be needed to pay for police shoe-leather. I’ll be sending you in a bill.” He grinned at Tim over the tow-coloured head that was beginning to be unconscionably heavy. “Take him home, clean him up and put him to bed, Mr. Rossall. I’ll talk to him in the morning, he’s out on his feet now.”

He remembered looking round a whole ring of faces when he said good-night. Mr. Felse was there with his wife, Tamsin was there, and Dominic, and the Vicar, and Uncle Simon. Uncle Simon was looking at him in an odd sort of way, smiling, but without the sparkle, and twice as hard as usual. And he didn’t come with them. Why didn’t he? Oh, yes, of course, he probably had his own car here, so he had to drive it home. But it didn’t look as if that was in his mind, somehow, when he shook his head at Dad, with that odd, rueful smile on his face, and said: “No, I’ll follow you down later, old boy. This is a family special.”

That reminded Paddy of how this extraordinary day had started. There were things he still had to know about himself, but somehow all the urgency was already gone. In the back seat of the car, rolled up again snugly in the rug, with Phil’s arm round him, and Phil’s shoulder comfortable and comforting under his cheek, he drowsed gloriously, too tired to know anything clearly except the one wonderful, all-pervading fact that it was all right. That everything was all right, because his belonging to them was everything.

And whoever he might have belonged to in the beginning, he was certainly theirs now. Heaven help anyone who tried to take him away from them, or them from him!

“I’m glad you know I know,” he said out of his pillows, bathed, fed, warmed and cosseted, and drowning in a delicious, sleepy happiness. “It did come as a bit of a shock at first, that’s why I sheered off from Aunt Rachel’s without telling anybody. I wasn’t trying to frighten anyone, or run away from home, or anything daft, like that. Honestly! I’m not such a clot.”

“I should hope not,” said Tim.

“No, but I was afraid you might think—I just felt shaken up, and not wanting to see anybody, or be talked to. You know! I started for home, and then I couldn’t face it, not until I’d had time to think. I went up on the Head, instead, but it was swarming. People everywhere. I just ditched the bike, and nipped down the cliff path and into the cave, where I knew I could be quiet. Just till I got a bit more used to it, that’s all. But then some kids came in, playing, and I backed up as far as I could, to get out of their way.”

Having, thought Phil, who had not failed to distinguish the tear-marks from the general stains of sea-water and cave-grime, an entirely visible and possibly temporarily uncontrollable distress to hide by then.

“Never mind now, darling, you go to sleep. There’s time for all that to-morrow. You’re home, and that’s all that matters.”

“Yes, but I just wanted you to know I wasn’t sulking, or anything childish like that. It was just by accident I happened to find this passage in the top end of the cave. Only a low sort of hole, you have to crawl through it on hands and knees. I was backed up into this corner, and I shoved my shoulder through it in the dark. It goes a long way. That’s how I lost time, having to be careful because of not having a light. In the end I did call it a day and decide to come back some other time with a torch, but what with not being able to see my watch, and forgetting because I was interested, by the time I crawled back through the hole I’d had it. The water was almost up to the top of the cave mouth, and I didn’t dare dive for it, it was too rough. I had to lie up and wait, there wasn’t anything else to do.” He looked up with the remembered terror suddenly brilliant in his eyes, squarely into Tim’s face. “I was scared green,” he said.

“So would I have been. Even knowing that the top part of the Hole’s above high water, I’d still have been scared.”

“And even there you get a bit battered. And deafened! I couldn’t wait to get out, it seemed for ever. I couldn’t tell what time it was, you see, I just had to follow the water down, and you have to be super-cautious feeling your way in the dark. But I was on my way out as fast as I dared when they came and found me.”

Phil turned the shaded light away from her own face, for fear he should see his ordeal reflected there all too plainly, stroked the fuzz of fair hair back from his forehead, and said: “Yes, well, it’s all over now. You just forget it and go to sleep.”

“Yes—all right, I will. I just wanted you to know how it was. I’m sorry I caused everybody so much trouble.” Half asleep and off his guard, he said with shattering simplicity: “I was just so miserable I didn’t know what to do.”

Tim hooked a large right fist to the angle of his son’s jaw, and rolled the fair head gently on the pillow till a shamefaced grin came through.

“Did you say you weren’t a clot? You could have fooled me! Sure you know now where you live?” The drowsy head nodded; the grin had a curious but happy shyness. “And what time the tide comes in? All right, then, you sleep it off. If you want anything we’ll be around.” He rose, rolled Paddy over in the bed, and smacked the slight hummock of his rump under the clothes. “Good-night, son!”

“Good-night, Dad!”

All the years they’d been saying exactly the same words, and they’d never meant so much before!

Phil kissed the spot where the blonde hair grew to a slight point on the smooth forehead, and was following Tim from the room when a small, self-conscious voice behind her said: “Mummy!”

The tone of it tugged her back to him in a hurry. He hadn’t said it without thought, it had a ceremonial solemnity. She stooped over him, and he pushed away the bedclothes suddenly and reached up his arms for her, burrowing his face thankfully into the hollow of her neck.

“Just making sure,” he said in a muffled whisper. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am, Patrick Rossall, and don’t you dare forget it.”

She gathered up his clothes when she left the room. The flannels would have to go straight to the cleaners. She sat down on the rug beside Tim, and extracted from the pockets, smiling over them with a ridiculous tenderness because they were small projections of Paddy’s personality, one exceedingly grubby handkerchief, sticky with sea-water, a ball pen down to its last inch, the end chewed, two or three foreign stamps, a used bus ticket, one dilapidated toffee, and a few coins, which she stacked carefully on the arm of Tim’s chair.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” said Tim, ears pricked for any sound from upstairs.

“Yes, he’s all right.” Her smile was heavy, maternal and assured. “Don’t worry about Paddy. Tim, I’m glad! I’m glad she told him. It’s a once-only. He knows now.”

“He’s a nice kid,” said Tim. He took up the little pile of coins to play with, because they were Paddy’s. “Look, a brand-new halfpenny.” He looked again, and froze. “It isn’t, though! What is it? Phil, look! It isn’t copper. It looks like gold!”

She dropped the crumpled, dirty flannels, and held out her hand curiously for the coin. It lay demurely in her palm, showing a thick-necked female profile, with a curled lock of hair draped over one plump shoulder.

“Tim, it must be a guinea! Or a half-guinea—-but it’s too big, isn’t it? ANNA DEI GRATIA. And VIGO underneath her portrait. What does that mean? There’s a date on the other side, 1703. REG. MAG. BR. FR. et HIB.” She looked up at Tim over her spread palm, open-mouthed. “Tim, where on earth did our Paddy get a Queen Anne guinea?”