The Anti-Death League

A GIRL and an older woman were walking along a metaled pathway. To their left, beyond a strip of grass, was the front of a large high building in grey stone. Reaching its corner, at which there was a pointed turret, brought them a view of a square of grass on which stood a tower-like structure supported by stone pillars. The afternoon sun was shining brightly and the space under the main part of the tower was in deep shadow.

The girl halted. "What's happening?" she asked.

"That's just the old cat," said the other. "He's spotted something under the tower there, I expect."

A small black cat, crouching quite still, faced the shadow. After a moment, a bird with tapering wings flew out, dipped towards the cat, gave two brief twitters and wheeled back to where it had come from. The girl went on watching.

"Oh, you know what that is," said the older woman. "She'll have got a nest under there, the bird, and she's trying to keep the cat away from it. Trying to give him a scare, you see."

As she spoke, three uniformed men came into sight round the corner of the block beyond the tower and walked along the path towards the women. At the same time, a large aircraft, flying low, moved into earshot.

The bird made its circuit exactly as before. "Why doesn't he move?" asked the girl. "Can't he see the bird?"

"Oh, you bet he can. He's not missing anything, that old cat. He's got his eye on her all right. But he's not going to move and give the game away. Now we'll just watch them the once more and then we'll be getting on, shall we?"

The three in uniform came up. One of them, a tall fair-complexioned young man, slowed in his walk and stopped. "Look at this," he.said. "Did you ever see anything like it?"

"Like what?" asked the older of the two with him.

"That tower."

"Just a water-tower they thought they might as well do in the same style. A bit sinister, I agree."

The sound of the aircraft grew in volume sharply. The cat ran off towards a tree growing beside the path. Just when the girl turned and looked at the tall young man it was as if the sun went out for an instant. He flinched and drew in his breath almost with a cry.

"God, did you feel that?"

"I'll say I did. I thought I'd had a stroke or something."

"It was like the passing of the shadow of death," said the third man.

"But what it really was was the passing of the shadow of a passenger aircraft. Look, it'll cross that slope in a second. There."

"Thank Christ for that," said the tall young man. "I really felt like, you know, a fly when the swatter comes down. Gave me quite a turn."

He looked again at the girl, who was not looking at him. The older woman, however, was, and unamiably.

"Come along, Mrs. Casement," she said with an abruptness she had not shown earlier. "We haven't got all night, dear. You're not the only one, you know."

The two groups diverged.

"I never took our James for a student of architecture, did you, Moti?" asked the senior of the three officers, a gaunt man wearing a major's crowns and a clergyman's collar and silk.

"Ah, there you have his well-known subtlety, padre. He was really admiring something far more worth a young man's while than cold stones, am I right, James?"

"Well, yes. I thought she was wonderful, didn't you? Extraordinary eyes. But sort of blank and frightened."

"Probably the shadow of that plane," said the clergyman. "It is scaring if you don't know what it is. It even got me until I remembered. I was quite used to it at one time."

"I should have said she was frightened already. But then who wouldn't be in a bloody place like this?"

The clergyman frowned. "It's got a pretty good reputation. I'm sure they all do what they can."

"By putting up this sort of thing, for instance?"

The pathway had broadened to a circle. In the middle was an ornamental pond, its stonework discolored and scabbed with moss, and in the center of this a plinth on which crouched a stone creature somewhat resembling a lion. Each of its claws became a thin stem ending in a flower shaped like a flattened bell, from which in turn protruded a kind of tongue with three points. The thin tail appeared to have been broken off short and the break filed smooth. From the smiling mouth there curled upwards a triple tongue with a small object, not certainly identifiable, at each point. Every inch of the surface had at one time been enameled with minute designs, but these were largely weathered away.

"A nice welcoming sort of chap to run into on your way in here," said the young man addressed as James. "I dreamt about him the other night."

"Good for you." The clergyman took him by the arm and drew him off towards a flight of stone steps that led up to the entrance of the building. "Is there anything like that in your part of the world, Moti?"

"Not that I know of? I'm thankful to say. We're a pretty morbid lot in our own fashion, but rather more direct. We leave that kind of thing to our yellow brethren. In fact I seem to remember seeing a photo of a gentleman somewhat resembling our friend, though minus the horticulture, standing in a palace at Peking or one of those places. An interesting sidelight."

They reached a paneled vestibule with notices on every hand, some pinned to the woodwork, others on small stands. Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition All This Month in Lecture-Room B, said one. Coach Excursion to St. Jerome's Priory: Names to Office by Friday Please, said another.

"What used to be at the end of his tail, do you think?"

The clergyman glared. "Come off it, James, for heaven's sake. What's the matter with you today? I could give you my theory about that, and back it up, but it wouldn't go too well with my cloth. And what do you care?"

"Oh, the respected cloth."

"Yes, the respected cloth. I know it's a bit threadbare in places, but it's all I've got. Now chin in, shoulders back, arms swung as high as the waist-belt to front and rear and get set to cheer him up. That reminds me-give me that cake."

A small parcel was passed from hand to hand as they walked down the dip of a corridor that rose again out of sight.

"Intimations of infinity," said the officer called Moti, taking in this effect. "Highly therapeutic."

"Oh, look at this," said the clergyman after a moment. "The Army's here. I detect the hand of Captain Leonard. Applied, as you might expect, a little late in the day."

They approached a recessed double door outside which a young NCO was rising to his feet from a folding chair. Before him was a card-table on which lay an open foolscap notebook and a couple of technical manuals.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," he said, coming smartly to attention. "You wish to visit Captain Hunter, I take it?"

"Yes, if the Army Council has no objection. What the devil are you doing here? I mean it's nice to see you, Fawkes, but what are you in aid of?"

The NCO grinned. "Security, Major Ayscue."

"I thought it might be that. Captain Leonard's inspiration?"

"His orders, sir. Everybody who comes and goes has to have his or her full name written down here, plus the time he or she came and went. Very vital information, those times. Captain Leonard was most insistent about them. Oh, and it might interest you to know, sir, that all visitors have got to go down in the book whether it's Captain Hunter they've come to see or not. You never know whether a North Korean mightn't worm himself in with a tape-recorder, you see."

"There wasn't anyone here when I came last week."

"No doubt, Mr. Churchill, but that was last week. And this week we're making a special effort, because Captain Hunter might be coming out in a few days and we're only on the second page of the book. Now let's see"-he began writing-"Fifteen forty-four hours… Major… Ayscue… Captain… Naidu…"

"Is it all right for us to go in now, Fawkes?" asked Ayscue.

"Oh, I think so, sir. Captain Leonard did tell me not to let anyone by until I'd written them down, but I think, I can hold Mr. Churchill's name in my head for a few more seconds. You'll find Captain Hunter very cheerful, by the way. Quite his old self."

"Thank you, Corporal Fawkes," said Naidu. "I take it I shan't be required to furnish a photostat of my commission to the Minister of Defence?"

"No, sir. Captain Leonard didn't say anything about that."

The three officers entered a long airy room with sunlight beating through the windows. More light was reflected from the glossy walls and from the glass of the many pictures hanging on these. Down the middle ran a trestle table that bore dozens of vases of flowers and plants in pots. Thick streamers of greenery curled down from wire baskets attached to the ceiling.

A figure sitting up in bed at the far end of the room raised an arm and the visitors approached. On either side, also in bed, were men reading, men apparently asleep, men lying down but not asleep. One man was looking carefully round the room, as if for the first time, while another man in white trousers and T shirt watched him as carefully from a nearby chair. Yet another man, with irregular patches of grey hair on a grey scalp, got up from a bench by the window and moved away, keeping track of the arrivals out of the corner of his eye.

The man who was putting the Army to so much trouble seemed very much at home. He was lying back against advantageously arranged pillows within reach of various comforts: non-glossy illustrated magazines, paperback novels on the covers of which well-developed girls cringed or sneered, a comparatively hard-back work on how to win at poker, a couple of newspapers folded so as to reveal half-completed crossword puzzles, a tin jug containing a cloudy greyish fluid, packets of French cigarettes and an open box of chocolates. Captain Hunter, a thin pale man of twenty-eight with a thin black mustache, smiled and extended his hand.

"Hullo, boys," he said, and offered cigarettes which Ayscue and Churchill accepted. "I'm afraid I can't give you a light. You're not allowed to have matches and stuff in here because you might start burning the place down. Almost certainly would, in fact. Oh, thank you, James. Is that parcel for me? What's in it?"

"A cake," said Ayscue. "But don't go cutting it now."

"My dear Willie, I couldn't if I wanted to. No knives, like no matches. But the nice nurse comes on at six and he might see his way to lending me one."

"Well, mind he isn't about when you start slicing."

"What…? I suppose there's a file and a rope-ladder in it."

"Not exactly." Naidu spoke with some disapproval. "A different mode of escape."

"You don't mean…"

"Yes," said Churchill. "Three quarter-bottles of White Horse. Corporal Beavis baked the thing up in the Mess kitchen. Sorry we couldn't get any more in."

"Quite enough for a man in my condition. Thank you all most awfully."

"How is your condition, Max?" asked Ayscue.

"Oh, splendid. Dr. Best is very pleased with me. He says he's been able to explain to me just why I got myself into the state I did and so I shouldn't have any more trouble. He's letting me out on proba-tion next Wednesday."

Churchill said diffidently, "What was the explanation he gave you? If you want to talk about it, of course."

"I haven't the remotest notion, dear boy. I'm only telling you what he says he's done. He likes doing all the talking himself. It must come from being supposed to ask so many questions. I just let him get on with it."

"It's bound to be a difficult task, giving it up," said Naidu. "But you can rely on us three to give you all the support and encouragement in the world."

"Whatever is possessing you, Moti? Nobody said anything about giving it up. Any fool can give it up. I'm going to do something much more worthwhile than that-ditching alcoholism and taking up very heavy drinking. Talking of drinking, I'll have to watch that Scotch. Too much at one go and I'll start acting sober, and that'd be suspicious. You see, these pills they give you, when they really get hold of you you start acting pissed all the time. That's how they know when you're taking a turn for the better."

"You're not acting pissed," said Churchill.

"I'd like to think I've always known how to hold my liquor."

"You weren't holding it too well the night we brought you here."

"No gentleman can or should be always a gentleman. Some get more ungentlemanly than others, though. You see that white-haired old buffer down by the door? Last Saturday he was let out on a week's probation. Very early indeed on Tuesday morning they carted him back in, pissed. The ‘they' included a small detachment of police as well as a crying wife. There was no end of a to-do, I can assure you. I haven't heard such language since that last Sergeants' Mess party. At lunchtime today he fell out of bed. What do you think of that? Just try to imagine how he must have attacked the stuff to be still pissed after four and a half days. And he only had two days and a bit to fill his tanks. You know, I can't help finding that rather disturbing? It seems to flout some basic law. Oh, if you can't manage another cake by say Monday, do you think you could send me a book about drinks, cocktail recipes or what-not? There's a lot to be said for pornography in the absence of the real thing. Ask anybody."

"You'd better be careful with those empties," said Ayscue.

"Oh, no problem. I shall just heave them out of the loo window. There's a sort of cairn of broken bottles in the bushes by that corner. I found it on one of my rambles through the extensive grounds when, disinclined to trudge all the way back indoors for the purpose, I was looking for a place to pee. That wasn't all I found, either. In a brief circuit of fifty yards or so I came across no fewer than three very amorous couples, and that was without trying to come across them. Quite the contrary. I was virtually threading my way. I get the impression everybody's at it all the time. It's no more than you'd expect in an environment like this."

Churchill ground out his cigarette. "Not everybody, surely."

"I was speaking figuratively. Not everybody, no. I question whether the catatonics do much in that way, and no doubt the senility wards have a stainless record. Dr. Best took me round them the other afternoon. Nothing personal about it-it's a standard trip, all part of the service. I was expecting him to take the opportunity to deliver a little lecture on the perils of self-abuse, but for once he let things speak for themselves."

When none of the other three said anything, Hunter went on, "I had our old buddy Brian Leonard round here a couple of days ago. He'd really come to keep Fawkes up to the mark, he told me, but having come so far he saw nothing against walking the few extra yards to my bedside. He wasn't entirely happy, he said. He seemed to think that a dipsomaniac in charge of the administration of a secret-weapons training unit represented some kind of danger to security. I did what I could to reassure him. I pointed out that if the worst threat of that sort came from the odd dipsomaniac then he hadn't much to worry about. He agreed with that, and said that anyway he was satisfied I didn't know enough to be a menace."

Naidu had thrown off the slight uneasiness he had been betraying in the previous few minutes. "If that is so," he said accusingly, "how does brother Leonard justify this quite ridiculous fandango with the unfortunate Corporal Fawkes at the door like the recording angel?"

Hunter did his silent laugh. "We went into that. He was very man-to-man about it-I've never felt so close to him before. He was sure I'd agree that one had to go through the motions in matters of this sort. He never knew when his master in Whitehall mightn't want to know what was being done to stop this dipso admin officer's mouth, in the talking sense, that is, and the Fawkes arrangement would cover him. I asked him whether in that case a sentry in radiation battle order mightn't be even more impressive, and he said he could tell I was joking and clapped me on the back and we had a jolly good laugh together. You know, I must introduce Brian to Dr. Best one of these days. They'd get on like a house on fire."

"Did Leonard say anything about this spy idea of his?" asked Naidu.

"Only that he was more convinced than ever that there was one, at least one, somewhere in the unit. In fact he said he now had positive proof-he wouldn't tell me what sort. But he still had very little idea of who the spy might be, except that he'd now more or less ruled out the high-security people, plus me and the Colonel and you, Willie. I put it to him that any proof of a thing like there being a spy in a place ought to throw a good deal of light on who the spy was or else it was a pretty odd sort of proof. He turned all bland and mysterious and said yes, it was."

"Very helpful indeed." Naidu stood with his hands behind his back, evidently pondering. "Did he voice any particular suspicions?"

"Not really. All these Indians and Pakistanis coming into the unit made his job frightfully tricky-I'm just telling you what he told me, Moti. He saw that they had to come, but he wasn't happy about the efficiency of their Governments' screening systems. His master in Whitehall is going to have a word with someone about it."

After more thought, Naidu said, "He seems most curiously ready to discuss the problem, even if he doesn't give much away. I ask myself why this should be. Would it not seem that a prerequisite of catching a spy would be to avoid putting him on his guard by letting it be known that his presence is suspected?"

"I asked him that very question. Apparently what's called the philosophy of phylactology-spy-catching to you-has been transformed. Keeping dead mum until the final pounce is old hat now. You go round saying how near you're getting and wait for somebody along the line to get anxious enough to show a break in their behavior-pattern. The new method works better except with very brave spies and there are figures to prove that only nine per cent or something are that. Anyway, no more about Security. It's a subject for fools and madmen, as my chat with Brian Leonard might well suggest to you. But like everything else it has its compensations. One or two of Fawkes's mates have turned up to see him when they're off duty and they tend to look in on me as well. Somebody called Signalman Pearce, who works on the camp telephone exchange, appeared this very morning and discussed jazz and popular music with me for over half an hour. A most charming lad. Which somehow reminds me to tell you the only really interesting thing Dr. Best had to say about my difficulties. According to him I'm probably a repressed homosexual."

All four men burst into laughter.

"These repressed lesbian tendencies of yours," said Dr. Best, smiling. "If it's all right with you I want to go into them rather more deeply than we had time for last week. Do you agree that we should?"

"Yes," said Catharine. "If you want to."

"It isn't what I want, Mrs. Casement, it's what you want. And I ask you whether you want to because, as I've warned you several times before, whenever we go down at all deep we're virtually certain to find something rather unpleasant waiting for us. Do you follow? Something that must be pretty shocking or it wouldn't be hiding away from us like that."

"Just carry on, doctor. Another shock or two won't make much odds to me."

Dr. Best chuckled and shook his head in a kind of admiration. "You're incorrigible, Mrs. Casement. The very first time you were able to talk to me intelligibly, just after Christmas, you made exactly the same point, and I told you then what I see I must tell you again now, that a mere unpleasant experience, however much it may happen to distress you, does not in itself constitute a shock in the scientific, psychoanalytic sense. Let me tell you a couple of typical stories, both relating to patients that have been through my hands in the past year, which I hope will make the distinction clear to you."

The doctor's manner became even more relaxed than hitherto, if that were possible, and there was a note of affectionate reminiscence in his voice when he continued, "A little girl, ten years of age, is going home from school through a public park. It's a winter evening and dusk is falling, but it isn't dark yet, the park is only a few hundred yards across, and at this time there are usually plenty of people about-but not, unfortunately, on the evening in question. A man springs out on her, drags her into the bushes and rapes her, very thoroughly. After a time she makes her way home and is naturally taken to hospital.

"Today that child is happily watching television and playing her gramophone records just as before. Even her work at school has shown no significant decline in quality. It's true that there are gynecological complications which may affect her ovulatory capacity, but emotionally and mentally she's quite untouched. What happened to her, you see, was an unpleasant experience.

"The picture's very different I'm sorry to say, with the second case. Here we have a young man of twenty-five-which leads me to make an important secondary point. I say ‘a young man of twenty-five' because this is how we customarily refer to persons of that age-group. But in psychoanalytic terms that man is no longer young. This is very far from being a technical quibble, Mrs. Casement. All our experience shows that the psychoanalytically young are far better equipped to resist both unpleasant experiences-as we saw with the little girl-and shocks in comparison with, let's say, the psychoanalytically non-young. Of which group you yourself are a member. (Indeed, at thirty-two you are hardly young in any sense.) I mention this distinction by way of reinforcing my warning to you about the dangers of beginning to go down deep.

"But to resume my story. Our young man, or man, was in the cinema one evening when the man in the next seat made a sexual assault on him. This probably amounted to no more than a hand laid on the knee or thigh. We can virtually rule out the idea of any genital contact, even through clothing. But I suppose we can never be quite sure, because… Because that young man, after a short period of violent mania, is now in a state of deep and perhaps irreversible depressive withdrawal. He, you see, had had a shock, the shock, I have no doubt, of finding that something buried in him was deeply responsive to the assault. The sudden flash of insight into his own unconscious homosexual tendencies was too much for his sanity. Which brings us, Mrs. Casement, to the point we reached five minutes ago."

Catharine had started trying not to listen as soon as she realized the sort of thing that was going to happen to the child in Dr. Best's first story, but she had to go on looking at him, because whenever you looked away from him he stopped talking, waited for you to look at him again and went back to the beginning of his last sentence but one. Going on looking at him made it harder not to listen to him, and it was not until she had heard what happened in the park that she was able to push the meaning out of his voice by hearing it as a flow of little cries and moans separated by puffs and clicks.

To keep this going, she had to push the meaning out of the doctor's face in the same sort of way. At the start, it was more of a face than most people's: a glossy pink bald crown with a patch of thick curly hair above each ear, wide and shining blue eyes, a nose that seemed too big for its nostrils, a band of broken veins across each cheekbone, lips of which only the lower one did any work, a bottom row of narrow black-edged teeth. As she concentrated on it, all this turned into shapes and colors, some parts moving, others not, as important and as unimportant as the whites and pale greens and lines and corners that were the papers on the desk, the dark greens and ovals and pinks of the flowers, the rectangles and dark blues and dark reds along the wall, or best of all the bands of light and shade everywhere. This was the method of dealing with things that she had learned very quickly six months earlier, just after finding out that there was nothing about her life that she liked.

Making it so that either everything she saw and heard was important, or nothing but unimportant things were anywhere, had helped a lot at first. But as soon as she was really good at it, and could keep it up most of the day, she had begun having trouble with sizes and distances. It was about that time that her sister and brother-in-law had got Dr. Best to look after her.

The trouble began again now. What was the doctor's face must be an ordinary size and an ordinary distance away. But, as she looked at it, it suddenly grew and receded at the same time, so that very soon it was, or seemed as if it was, yards across and yards and yards away, like a mountain miles off, a cloud in the sky. Then, with an invisible flick that she always expected but could never time, it was very small and near, the size of a penny at arm's length, a pinhead so close that she would brush it with her eyelash if she blinked.

Hardly frightened at all, Catharine said to herself, meaning it very sincerely, that what she was looking at was Dr. Best's face, attached to the rest of him behind the desk in his office, surrounded by papers and all those flowers and the books, with bars of sunlight from the Venetian blind falling on the walls and floor and furniture. And after only a few seconds everything was back as it should have been. Now she knew she was getting better.

Just then the doctor stopped talking. She felt so cheerful that she smiled at him and asked casually, "What happened to the man? Did they catch him?"

"What man?"

"The man in the park. The one that raped the little girl."

He clicked his tongue, thrusting out his lower lip. "I don't know- that's none of my concern. Really, Mrs. Casement, I do beg you most seriously not to identify yourself with other victim-figures in this way. It's childish, childish in the technical psychoanalytic sense as well as the semantic."

"I was only asking. I wasn't identifying. I wasn't raped."

"No no no, I meant… Let it pass, let it pass. We've wasted quite enough time already. Now. You agree you've been warned that investigating your lesbian tendencies may lead to your suffering a shock?"

"If you like to put that in writing I'll sign it."

"That won't be necessary. Your oral consent is sufficient. Very well. You appreciate that unless you answer my questions fully and to the best of your knowledge and ability honestly there is no point in my putting them to you?"

"Yes, all right."

"Good. Now just running over what you told me last time… You've never taken part in any overt sexual activity with another member of your sex, never so much as embraced passionately with another girl or woman, never made a sexual approach to one or had one made to you by one, never entertained any romantic sentiment towards one. Do you agree?"

"Agree? Of course I agree. It's what I said myself, isn't it?"

"I merely wondered if you'd had any second thoughts on the matter. I'm particularly interested in your friendship with this… Lady Hazell. Would you care to tell me something about that?"

"It's just a friendship, doctor. There are such things, you know. Lucy is a widow and very rich and I met her through my first husband. When I left my second husband she said I could come and stay with her until I got myself sorted out. Only as you know I didn't get myself sorted out. But I must have told you this when I first came here."

"In a rather different way. Do go on."

"Well, that's all there is. She's been very kind to me and she makes me laugh and I'm fond of her."

"What does she think of you?"

"I don't know. I suppose she's sorry for me. I suppose she likes me."

"Is she ever… physically affectionate, does she put her arm round you, hug you and the like? For instance, does she ever dance with you?"

Catharine laughed heartily. "Dance with me? No. She doesn't ever dance with me. She's got quite enough male dancing partners."

"So I confess I rather assumed," said the doctor, hissing slightly. "Oh yes, she came to see me after visiting you last week. Without an appointment, I may say. In fact she didn't even knock at that door. Fortunately I was disengaged. She said I wasn't giving you the right treatment and became abusive on the point."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Best. I didn't know she was going to do that."

He gave a brief snorting laugh, probably to show how trifling had been the effect upon him of Lady Hazell's intrusion. "Yes. She runs a sort of permanent salon for young men, doesn't she, at that grand house of hers? Officers from the camp and such? Parties and the rest of it till all hours?"

"She gives parties, yes."

"A curious environment, it must have been, for a woman undergoing a breakdown. Did you join in the parties when you were there?"

"I just gave people drinks sometimes."

Dr. Best said suddenly, "A very attractive person, I mean physically, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, clearly. But if you mean have I ever wanted to go to bed with her the answer's no."

"Living in that house you must often have seen her naked or semi-naked, in the bathroom and the bedroom and elsewhere. Have you ever experienced sexual excitement at such times?"

"No."

"You haven't been aware of your nipples hardening or any genital phenomena?"

"Christ, certainly not. I told you I get little enough of that with men."

"We'll come to that later. Meanwhile I can't help being struck by the extreme emphasis of your denial, Mrs. Casement. Over-stressed reactions to such inquiries always tend to suggest that the subject is concealing an opposite reaction. So please think carefully. You have never in any way been sexually attracted towards Lady Hazell or any other girl or woman as far as you are aware, is that correct?"

"Yes," said Catharine in a tone heavy with moderation.

At this assurance Dr. Best's cordiality, which had been falling off ever since he ended his pair of anecdotes, vanished altogether. He curled his lower lip over his upper one, then drew it away with a plop. "It's clear that these tendencies of yours are buried more deeply than I suspected. We must try another line of attack."

"May I ask a question?"

He sniffed and shrugged. "If you wish."

"I know I'm very ignorant about all this, but me not ever feeling attracted to girls, mightn't that just mean I wasn't attracted to them? I don't see how-"

The doctor's good will was immediately restored. "As you say, you're ignorant. That's natural enough. But there's nothing mysterious about this. Tell me. What do you think is the reason for your prolonged history of… let's call it failure with men?"

"Well, I suppose some of it's bad luck."

"There's no such thing as luck in this field, I'm afraid. What else?"

"I told you I sometimes feel a bit afraid of them. There was that man early on who pulled the knife on me, you remember."

"Yes, very good, that's certainly relevant, though its real meaning is rather different from the one you appear to attribute to it. You'll agree that threatening somebody with a lethal weapon is a manifestation of aggression? Yes, now what's the most probable exterior cause of aggression, not coming from inside the person who becomes aggressive but from outside?"

"Something you don't like?"

"Very nearly. Something that doesn't like you. Somebody else's aggression. Do you follow?"

Catharine considered. "You mean I didn't like him? But I spent all my time thinking how nice he was. I wanted to-"

"That was what you thought consciously, Mrs. Casement. All this is buried very deep, you know. Just look at your sexual career. Over the last months I've accumulated something like thirty pages of notes on it. And what does it amount to?" The doctor picked up the file in front of him and threw it a few inches farther away on his desk, then, slowly folding his hands, laid them on his crossed legs. "Nothing very hard to interpret. Two broken marriages. Literally dozens of affairs, starting at an unusually-"

"They weren't what you could call affairs, most of them, they didn't last any time at all. I kept wanting them to last when they started, but they kept going wrong and I couldn't make them last."

"Because of your deep… unconscious… aggression… towards… men. Oh, it's a familiar pattern. You betray unconscious hostility, the man unconsciously senses it and begins to react overtly, you retreat, he responds to the primitive flight-situation with more hostility and so on. All of which increases your latent hostility yet further and makes the next failure that much more inevitable. Your course was set a long time ago. Originally, probably, your attitude to your father was what-"

"I loved my father."

"No doubt, no doubt. I'm not a Freudian, so we can safely leave all that on one side. I'm not interested in the semi-mystical origins of mental disease. I'm a doctor, not a theologian." Dr. Best ran his tongue to and fro behind his lower lip. "Anyway, in case you're still unconvinced, let me if I may draw attention to your physical type. Your shape, Mrs. Casement. Would you mind standing up for a moment? Thank you. Oh yes. Oh yes, it's all there. Tall… shoulders tending to be broad… small breasts… rather narrow hips… long legs. Turn round, would you? Quite so. You can sit down now. Quite typical semi-androgynous characteristics. You belong to-"

"I know, that means man-plus-woman, doesn't it? Well, if you think I'm not properly a woman or something you're wrong. All my men, all the men I've ever had anything to do with, were always complaining about the very opposite. I couldn't do a thing without them all saying it was just like a woman. Bloody woman. Pull yourself together and stop acting like a bloody woman. And there was nothing wrong with my shape according to them. Whenever they weren't angry with me they were always going on about my shape, all of them. And my face. If you think I've got a face like a man all I can say is you've seen some pretty queer men."

"Oh, I have, Mrs. Casement, I have." Dr. Best seemed delighted. "Some very queer men indeed. Including a number who were unaware of their condition until I pointed it out to them. Why, only yesterday I was talking to a young fellow under treatment here for alcoholism, an Army officer from the camp. Well educated, highly intelligent, you'd have said quite worldly and sophisticated. And yet when I suggested what was patently obvious, that he was drinking himself to death in order to conceal from himself his unconscious homosexual tendencies, he told me with evident sincerity that the idea had never crossed his mind. He meant his conscious mind, of course. In his case there was the fact that his appearance and demeanor and so on were those of a normal male, which in his uninstructed way he seemed to take as some sort of evidence of his basic heterosexuality. I lost no time in exposing the fallaciousness of that view.

"Yes yes yes," the doctor went on with momentary petulance, perhaps repressing a negative reaction from the depths of his unconscious, "the world is full of male counterparts of yourself, Mrs. Casement. Undoubtedly the men you attract are of this type. The self-hatred engendered by their hidden recognition of this is what leads them to react so aggressively to your own aggressions. It's hardly surprising that the outcome should be unfortunate on both sides. Such men would do well to recognize their homosexual psyche and set about coming to terms with it, as I told our young friend."

Dr. Best gave a bright nod by way of conclusion and reached for a vase of wallflowers, the scent of which he inhaled with a clear nasal whistle.

Catharine said, "You're advising me to start sleeping with women, are you?"

"My dear Mrs. Casement, men in my position never advise anything, any more than we condemn anything. All we try to do is explain. And the explanation I offer you is that all your difficulties spring from an unconscious preference for your own sex. In other words, you are a lesbian."

He put so much into this last sentence that Catharine tried quite hard to respond with appropriate indignation or concern. But perhaps she had taken too much to heart his repeated warnings against giving him the kind of answer she thought would please him. Anyhow, the best she could do was to ask in an interested tone, "Do you really think so?"

The doctor put the flowers down firmly but quietly. More thoroughly than before, he searched his mouth with his tongue. "You seem unaware of the seriousness of your position. You became a patient in a lunatic asylum because you went mad, I've never gone in for sentimental euphemisms about mental hospitals and psychologically disturbed and the rest of it and I'm not going to start on your account. One of the marks of your condition is a fear of insight, understandable enough in view of what that insight would entail. But what I find far less… explicable is your obstinacy. An individual personality defect. You are of your own free will resisting that recognition of the truth, that shock which alone will enable you to undergo what's known as a psychic shift and reveal the true nature of your disorder. Very evidently, nothing I can do here will bring that about. Very well then. We'll see how you get on in a rather less cozy and warm and safe environment. I've feather-bedded you against reality for too long."

He reached for a pad of pink paper and began writing on it, his head swaying like a violinist's.

"What are you going to do with me?"

When he had finished writing, the doctor said, "I'm putting you out on probation, Mrs. Casement. For twenty-eight days in the first instance. You leave this asylum next Wednesday. That will give you time to make arrangements."

He had, at last, succeeded in disconcerting her. Without any effort on her part, a sense of what it was like outside came upon her: railway stations, drinks, shopping, laughter, traffic, telephones, men. Catharine hugged her hands between her knees. "Where shall I live? What am I going to do?"

"Your room at Lady Hazell's establishment is ready for you any time you care to go there. She was most definite on that point. I gather you're not in any financial difficulties. So you should manage perfectly well."

Dr. Best prodded a bell-push on his desk, smiled distantly and went on, "You'll be back where you started from. The results of this little experiment should be interesting. To both of us."

"We'll give it to you in the arm today, Maxie, as a special concession," said the nurse. "Seeing as how there are gentlemen present."

"We'd better be getting along," said Ayscue.

"This is the main event of the afternoon," said Hunter, unbuttoning his pajama jacket. "It would be insensitive of you to go now." He swallowed quickly twice and licked his lips.

Churchill, about to follow Ayscue's lead, noticed this. He fancied too that a couple of paler patches had appeared on Hunter's pale face. "It'll do us good to watch-might make us go a bit steadier with the pink gins tonight. What are you getting?"

"Little multi-vitamin shot," answered the nurse, a muscular man in his thirties with one of the smallest noses Churchill had ever seen. "All our thirsty friends start missing out on their carrots and liver after a bit. This will make our Maxie a healthy boy as well as a good boy."

The nurse had placed a round metal tray at the foot of the bed. He took from it a small glass phial with a narrow neck which he nipped with a pincer-like instrument. Next he carefully filled a syringe with the dark amber-colored liquid in the phial and then picked up an antiseptic pad.

"Is this all he gets?" asked Churchill, meaning only to break the silence as the man worked.

"Oh no, soldier." The nurse began swabbing a patch of skin on the inside of Hunter's upper arm. "There's the little blue sausages that make Maxie go bye-byes, and the weeny round orange jokers that cheer him up when he's feeling sad. Right. Now just relax, will you? Relaxie, Maxie. Good…"

"Incredible taste you get at the back of your throat with these vitamin shots," said Hunter, looking past them at the wall. "I don't think I shall ever be able to drink barley water with the same relish after this. Not that it does much to take the taste away. I think perhaps… a couple of nice solid sandpaper sandwiches might help. But they don't provide those here."

"Good boy, Maxie." The nurse patted Hunter lightly on the top of the head. "You'll be able to see in the dark now. Just what you could do with, eh? You know, you blokes don't want to take your old pal's troubles too seriously. He's just a bit of a boozer, is our Maxie. Nothing compared to some we got here."

He took a cigarette from Hunter's bedside table, lit it with a lighter from a pocket in his white knee-length coat, blew out a shred of tobacco and continued to talk, slowly stroking his forehead with the fingers of the hand that held the cigarette.

"That geezer over there, now. Fellow with my colleague in attendance." Although the nurse did not drop his voice at all, the man who had been carefully examining the room went on doing so without any sign of having heard. "Keen as mustard. In love with the stuff. This conditioned-reflex treatment, now that's no buggy-ride, I can tell you. It's this idea where they start off by giving you a bomb that makes you throw up. Strychnine was what they used to use, but as the years rolled by they got to notice that it had, uh, undesirable side-effects. You know, like death." The nurse gave a long chuckle, bowing deeply once like an actor taking a curtain call. "All that's been ironed out. Anyway, you know the form, I dare say: fill him full of emetine hydrochloride and the rest of it and let the old tachycardia and sweating and vertigo soften him up a bit. Then the technique is to slip him a glass of Scotch or whatever he's hooked on about half a minute before the emetine makes him spew his ring. It's an art, really. If you do it right you get to where just the Scotch'll make him throw up. Our brother got that far and it's only about twenty-five per cent that do. Then the big white chief sends him out on probation-great on timing, the old chief. Comes a fortnight later and our brother's back in. Acute exhaustion and malnutrition. What he'd been doing, he'd been knocking back the Scotch and spewing his bloody guts out and then knocking back the Scotch. And so on. You see what I mean. There's a geezer who really cares about drink. It's what I said, our little Maxie's still in the kindergarten.

"Well, I'll be getting along." The nurse picked up his tray and shook his head philosophically. "Oh, you get some peculiar buggers in here," he added, seemingly by way of introduction to further material.

"Don't let us keep you," said Naidu.

"Not on your life, General. And you'd better not stay around too long either. We don't want our Maxie getting over-excited and tossing and turning all night. He's being tapered off on the sodium amytal, see. Well, so long, my trusty lads. Fix bayonets and charge the old bomb, eh? That's the style."

The man walked smartly away.

Naidu said, "I'd be happy to go straight to whoever's in charge here and lodge a complaint in person. You've only to say the word, Max."

"Oh, Moti, where's your sense of humor? He's really a very nice lad. In his way. He's as gentle as a child. When another child's trying to take its toy railway train off it. No, that's not quite fair."

"Is he the one you call the nice nurse?" asked Churchill. "Because I'd hate to-"

"No, the nice nurse is truly and demonstrably nice. He says I need looking after. He's promised to sit next to me on the coach trip to St. Jerome's Priory on Sunday."

Ayscue grinned. "What are you going to do there?"

"Look at it, I suppose, and then come back. It'll make a break."

A minute later the three visitors had taken their leave and were walking back along the corridor. Churchill was brooding. He said in a strained voice,

"Why does this sort of thing have to happen? A chap like Max in that horrible situation. It isn't right."

"He's being made well," said Naidu. "It's necessary, James. I didn't like that swine of a nurse any better than you did, but you may be sure that if he over-stepped the mark in a big way then the authorities would get to hear of it and take necessary action. You know that. You must be reasonable."

"I'm trying to be. I'm trying to see the reason in it. It isn't the nurse so much. I don't want there to be people like that but I'm not against the idea of it. What I'm against is it being possible for a man like Max being able to damage himself in that way. A man like anybody, come to that."

They emerged into the brilliant sunshine. Naidu said earnestly,

"Man has free will. He has the things of this world before him and it's up to him what he does with them. That we must all recognize. There is such a thing as alcohol and if a man indulges in it to an excess then he has only himself to blame. I trust I'm not sounding censorious towards our good friend when I say that, you understand."

Averting his eyes from the stone figure of the lion-like creature, which they were now passing, Churchill looked at Naidu. The small neat handsome face with its shapely bones and rich brown skin was troubled, but not unhappy. It was as if new reasons for envying him came up every day.

"I see that, Moti," said Churchill. "But why couldn't alcohol just have had good effects, or at least not have had such bad ones as it's had on the fellows in that ward? It could have been, you know, no worse than overeating, making you fat or something if you went on with it. So why did it have to be so bad?"

"My dear James, why is there arsenic, why are there poisonous snakes, why is there cholera and bubonic plague and the other things of that sort? Come along, padre, you're the expert here. You must render me some assistance."

"I'd be worse than useless, I'm afraid," said Ayscue. "I've been into this with James before, more than once. I just make him angry."

Churchill flushed. "Not angry, Willie, merely disturbed to find someone of your intelligence defending the indefensible."

"Don't let's start."

"All right. Sorry."

As they drew level with the water-tower, a door in the adjacent building opened and the two women they had seen earlier came out. Churchill felt a shock, as if the aircraft had again passed between him and the sun. He realized that he had thought of the girl every couple of minutes since his first sight of her. He caught her glance now and held it until they passed. Immediately he was filled with shame at his own foolishness and lack of forethought in not having looked at the girl properly. She was thin and tall and perhaps had a slight stoop and her hair was neither light nor dark. Instead of noticing more he had just stared into her eyes, and after five seconds he could not even remember their color. But he had a feeling he would know her again anywhere.

With no more said they rounded the corner and made for their car, one of the passé jeeps wished on the unit as a result of some turn of Captain Leonard's thought. Yellow lettering on its body said 6 HQ Adm Bn, shorthand for the unit's cover name. Ayscue got into the driver's seat and they moved off.

"It's an exceedingly pleasant situation, you can say that much." Naidu looked out at the grassy slopes, dotted with rhododendrons and azaleas, between which they were riding. "Doesn't the whole place remind you of an English country house of the traditional sort?"

"It used to be just that," said Ayscue. "I was reading their pamphlet. Apparently the fellow who was squire here in Victorian times was a sort of pioneer in mental illness. Set up what amounted to a clinic, one of the first in the world. Then one of his successors handed it over to a trust, and there we are."

"I can see there's been a lot of building since those days, but it still keeps its very charming historical appearance."

Sitting behind them, Churchill heard little of this. He was trying to satisfy himself that there was nothing he could have done about the girl. Even if he had had the resource to give his two friends the slip and follow her back to her ward, he would probably not have been able to find out so much as her name. And her name alone would not have been much use-just a lot better than nothing at all. Why had he not been able to run after her, pretend he thought he knew her or something? Oh well, it was done now, or rather not done.

At the lodge, a thickset man in a blue suit peered at them through a sort of guichet, then waved them past impatiently.

"Rather lax security measures here," said Naidu. "How does that worthy fellow know we aren't three raving maniacs who have overpowered three unsuspecting Army types? He'd get short shrift from our gallant Captain Leonard."

Churchill roused himself; he would think about the girl again later. "Apart from the violent chaps, who never leave the ward, it's all open here, apparently. Max was telling me last week. The problem is keeping chaps who've been chucked out from worming their way back in."

The traffic across their front was heavy. While they waited for a gap, a motorcyclist in Army uniform drew over to the curb near them, stopped his machine and pulled it onto its rest. As he approached, pushing his goggles up, they saw that he was a dispatch-rider of the Royal Corps of Signals. He crossed to Ayscue's side of the jeep, saluted with something of a flourish, and said,

"Excuse me, sir, but you seem to be part of the unit I'm trying to find, Sixth HQ Admin Battalion. Can you tell me where your place is? This is the second time I've been along this bit of road."

"We're going there now, Corporal," said Ayscue. "Perhaps we can deliver your packet for you."

"Not unless one of you gentlemen happens to be…"-the man referred to a typewritten instruction-"Captain P. B. Leonard, 17th Dragoons? I've got to deliver to him personally and get his signature, you see. Thank you all the same, sir. Now if you could just give me an idea…"

Churchill half listened while Ayscue furnished directions. The dispatch-rider's head and shoulders were out of sight from the back seat of the jeep, and his voice was unremarkable. He was quite young: nothing more.

"You'll be there long before we are," Ayscue was saying. "By the way, I thought you fellows were all on four wheels these days."

"We keep up a few of the bikes for special runs like this where there isn't a lot to carry. Better in traffic, too. And this weather, well, it's a treat to be in the saddle. Well, thanks again, sir. I'll probably pass you on my way back."

In a few seconds he was off. Churchill fancied he waved as he went, but was not sure. By the time there was a gap in the stream of vehicles long enough to take the jeep, the dispatch-rider was out of sight ahead of them.

Naidu started a conversation with Ayscue about discipline, inspired, he said, by their brief exchange with Corporal Fawkes an hour earlier. Was that admittedly very pleasant young NCO not perhaps a trifle… free and easy? He, Naidu, ought not to have encouraged this spirit by offering even that very minor jest of his at the expense of Security and, by implication, of a brother officer. Or was he being over-scrupulous, too much the son of a subadar-major father whose views on such matters were probably indistinguishable from those current in Victoria's Indian Army?

As Churchill had expected, Ayscue said more or less that everything was all right really. Saying that everything was all right really, however different it sometimes looked, earned Ayscue his living, of course, but at the moment none of his masters was in earshot. Surely he must forget himself sometimes? Never to do so would verge on the inhuman. Well: he was decent enough in other respects for it to be regrettable that he was a parson.

Churchill soon got tired of regretting this. Although he would not be able to think about the girl properly until after dark and when he was alone, he was encouraged to do so now by the stretch of country they were passing through, sunlit meadows on one side, shade over the road and on the other side, where there was also a stream splashing down among rocks with ash and birch trees on the slopes and drifts of dead leaves seemingly undisturbed since autumn.

It was not that Churchill visualized himself walking among the trees with the girl, nor so much that he would have liked to be doing so. Instead, by a process familiar since childhood but never analyzed, he used the thought of her to focus his attention on the scene, finding much more in it physically than he would otherwise have cared to, and taking its and her joint existence as a signal, almost a guarantee, that the real joyful life existed somewhere. Churchill was not an unhappy person, either by nature or by experience, but since leaving school five years ago he had several times been disconcerted by doubts about whether the joy of which he knew his heart was capable would ever find its occasion or its setting. Only sad or frightening things, like this afternoon's visit to Max Hunter, seemed to have the power that joy ought to have, and the necessity for getting through the ordinary day sometimes felt, late at night, as if it were detuning his heart, screening and muffling its capacities.

He could admit to himself now that it had been a relief to have been prevented by circumstances from pursuing the girl. Her apparent status as inmate of a mental hospital would certainly have raised unusual obstacles to his pursuit of her, but if he had managed to surmount these he would only have found himself committed to some variation on that repetitious and mechanical program which had turned out to be the accepted way of dealing with women: telephone calls, restaurant dinners, car drives, seaside trips and attempted or actual seduction. He had been round this course a dozen times over the last few years and had got quite good at it, usually finishing successfully, always enjoying it after a fashion once he was off the mark, and hardly ever having to cheer himself up by reflecting that women who needed no pursuing were probably not much of a catch. But at times the whole thing would strike him as oddly out of touch with what it was supposed to be about. The proportions seemed wrong. He could only get them right in his thoughts.

"Hullo, what's up here?" said Naidu. "An obstruction of some kind?"

"Looks like it."

Ahead of them was a line of halted traffic. Ayscue drove up to the rear of it and stopped. A minute went by.

"Shall I walk on round the bend and have a look?" said Churchill. He wanted to be in the sun and alone, even if only momentarily.

"I think they're just starting to move now."

After another minute they came to two stationary lorries almost side by side and blocking most of the roadway, an ambulance and a police car parked on the verge, and a small crowd just beginning to be dispersed by policemen. Churchill saw somebody's hand sticking out from under one of the lorries, just behind the front wheel. Two ambulance attendants and a man in plain clothes were kneeling nearby. The hand clenched, then opened again.

"It looks as if you may be needed here, padre," said Naidu.

Ayscue drew into the nearside verge, stopped the jeep, got out and walked across the road. Churchill watched. Then he noticed a motor-bicycle lying on its side on the opposite verge. He had a view of its rear mudguard, across which were painted bands of blue and white, the insigne of the Royal Corps of Signals. He got out and went over.

As he approached, a police constable was saying to an Inspector, "It's a ten-ton crane, sir. Should do the job all right."

"Go and tell ‘em to speed it up. Say it's a matter of minutes." The Inspector turned and saw Churchill. "He wouldn't be one of your lads, sir, would he?"

"No, but I can handle the Army side for you if you want."

"I'd be most grateful if you would, sir."

"We're about a mile down the road." Churchill explained where. "When you get his documents off him, have them delivered to the Adjutant. I'll warn the sentry on the gate. We'll see to it that the proper people are informed. Now there's the question of his dispatches. They'll be on his bike."

The two men walked over to the machine, which had suffered no more than minor damage, and Churchill opened the dispatch-bag strapped to the carrier. There was only one packet inside, the one destined for Leonard. It was a fat foolscap envelope stamped Top Secret.

"I'll deliver this," said Churchill, "but I'd better give you my signature for it." He wrote in the proffered notebook. "What happened here?"

"He hit one truck and went under the other. Sounds like his own fault, but you can't tell at this stage."

They were strolling back towards the two lorries.

"Has he got a chance?"

The Inspector shrugged. "He had a wheel over him and must have got dragged a fair way before the driver could pull up. We can't get him out till the crane arrives. The doc's with him now."

Ayscue was among those watching as the man in plain clothes, seen earlier by Churchill, bent forward with a hypodermic syringe. There was a gap in the passing traffic and a faint moan could be heard from under the lorry. The extended hand went limp.

"Coming, James?" said Ayscue.

Without answering Churchill turned back to the Inspector.

"One more point-if you'll just tell me where you can be got hold of I'll see that's passed on to his unit too."

The Inspector gave the information and thanked him.

Ayscue was waiting a few yards off. The two walked back to the jeep in silence.

"It was that dispatch-rider we talked to just now outside the hospital," Ayscue told Naidu.

"Oh. Is he dead?"

"Not yet. But he soon will be, I gathered."

"Poor fellow," said Naidu. "Only a youngster, too."

Standing on the verge, Churchill took out the packet addressed to Leonard and looked at it.

"Imagine dying delivering this. Whatever it is."

Naidu looked at Ayscue for a moment, then said, "He isn't dying delivering it, James. He was on his way to deliver it when something happened as a result of which he will presumably die."

"Something happened. Why? Why did it have to happen?"

Again Naidu hesitated. "If we must go into it now… It's a question without an answer. And there is no question either. It didn't have to happen. It simply happened."

"Come on, let's get going," said Ayscue.

Churchill said loudly, "Yes, let's do that. Why don't we do that? Chaps getting crushed under lorries, it's happening every day. Hardly worth stopping for. A bit uncomfortable for the chap under the lorry, but he was probably going too fast and this little experi-ence'll see to it that he takes more care in future. And think of all those opportunities for spiritual growth on the part of the chap's girl, and his mates, and the chaps who were driving the lorries that knocked him off. All that fortitude and resignation and what-not that they'd have had to do without otherwise. The Lord giveth and by Christ the Lord taketh away. Oh, it isn't only all right really, it's better than all right, eh, Willie?"

"James." Ayscue faced Churchill across the hood of the jeep, "Please don't talk in that accusing tone. I can't think of anybody who'd try to justify this thing here. Surely you must know I wouldn't. Can't you see that Moti and I feel just as badly about it as you do?"

"I don't know where Moti fits in," said Churchill as before, throwing away the cigarette he had been trying to light, "but as regards you, Willie, no, I can't. I don't think you do feel as badly as I do. If you did, you wouldn't be over here, getting ready to drive off to the Mess and have tea, you're supposed to be a bloody parson, you'd have crawled under that bloody lorry and be doing your best to comfort that poor sod, instead of-"

Ayscue had walked round the front of the jeep and now put his face close to Churchill's.

"How?" he said. "Comfort him how?"

"Don't ask me, that's your department, I only-"

"Stop trying to set up a monopoly in feeling. The first thing I could make out over there was that the doctor was preparing to give the man an injection that would make him unconscious in seconds. He gave him it. There was nothing I could do after that, because he'll probably never recover consciousness, and if he does it's unlikely he'd be able to take in what I said or even what I was."

"But he might."

Naidu got out of the passenger's seat and walked past them up the road away from the accident.

"Exactly," said Ayscue to Churchill, "and that above all is why I'm over here instead of over there. What's he going to think if he wakes up and sees me? Use your imagination, James. How would you feel if you came to yourself in a hospital bed with a man in a dog-collar bending over you and telling you to be of good cheer? You'd know where you were due next all right. Agreed?"

Churchill nodded.

"If I had any reason to suppose that that boy believed in God then I wouldn't have come away. But these days the chances are very much against any such thing. And I couldn't ask him. I just couldn't risk it, James. You see that, don't you?"

Churchill nodded again.

"Come on."

"I'm sorry, Willie," said Churchill as they drove away.

"That's all right. We'd better both apologize to Moti. I'm afraid we may have shocked him a little."

"Because of what?"

"Inappropriate behavior."

They picked up Naidu and a few minutes later turned right towards the camp, first pausing to allow a heavy mobile crane to pass in the opposite direction.

Captain Leonard put on his mess-jacket and stood while Deering, his batman, fastened the buttons, using a thin cloth so as not to spoil the polish on the brass.

The jacket was of an unusual deep ultramarine, the mark of an honor awarded to the 17th Dragoons, Leonard's regiment, as a result of an incident in the Peninsular War when a squadron of them had been able to take an enemy force in the rear by swimming, horses and all, across an arm of the Mediterranean. The regiment was colloquially known as the Sailors in consequence. Nowadays it was a reconnaissance unit equipped with scout cars and light tanks, but had remained, as far as its officers were concerned, an abode of the landowning families. It was for this reason that Leonard's masters in Whitehall had chosen it as his cover, explaining rather offensively that nobody would suspect an officer in the Sailors of being anything but what he seemed. In a different mood, those masters had undone a fair part of this precaution by advising Leonard to divulge strong periodic hints about his real job, on the new-found principle-recently advertised to Hunter-that a security system works best when the opposition know it to be at work and may react significantly to that knowledge. Many of the officers and men in the camp had heard that Leonard was not really a soldier at all but some sort of agent of military counter-intelligence assigned to prevent anyone outside from learning what No. 6 Headquarters Administration Battalion was actually up to.

Although he had never trained or served with the Sailors, had never been near them except to be given dinner and shown round once at their depot, Leonard's attention to his turnout as one of them would have been judged adequate even by the Vice-President of their Mess. He pointed out various imperfections-a protruding thread at the edge of the revers, a fleck of dried metal-polish near a buttonhole-which Deering went some way towards repairing. Then, with the care of a cadet about to go on guard-mounting, Leonard examined himself in the full-length triple-paneled tailor's glass he took wherever his masters sent him.

The man inside the jacket and the close-fitting scarlet trousers with ultramarine stripe was forty years old. He had retreating black hair that was still thick at the sides and back, and a sallow complexion darkened round the mouth by beard showing under the skin. When he spoke, it was with a perpetual air of urgency stemming in part from the guttural sound he regularly substituted for the letter R. He said urgently now,

"Brush."

Deering walked not very slowly round his officer dabbing at his jacket with a clothes-brush, dislodging a few of the fallen hairs and specks of lint but merely changing the position of most.

"Sticky tape's the thing really."

"You should have thought of that before."

"Yes, sir."

With a forgiving smile, Leonard crossed to the rosewood dressing-table that he had not had to bring with him. Such pieces as this and the imposing mahogany tallboy, tall enough almost to touch the beams overhead, harked back to the days when the Mess had functioned as a farmhouse. The place was large enough to accommodate all the unit's officers above the rank of captain, plus a few deemed to qualify for comfort on special grounds: the Adjutant, Hunter, as administration officer, Leonard himself, who had explained that he needed to be at the center of things. Had he not thought to do so he might have found himself bedding down in an outhouse with a couple of subalterns, or even trying to live in one of the box-shaped, pastel-colored huts that had recently been run up in a nearby meadow and rang with portable radios eighteen hours a day.

He now picked up a red leather spectacle-case, quickly removed the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing, substituted a pair of pince-nez, and closed the case with a loud snap, his eyes steadily on Deering throughout. The effect of the change was to replace the semblance of an ambitious schoolmaster with that of a minor Slavic bureaucrat.

"Well, Deering, any news?"

This was the signal for the daily report on gossip and rumor within the camp. Only a short acquaintance with the Army had been needed to teach Leonard the usefulness of batmen as confidants, eavesdroppers and innocent over-hearers. He had seen exceptional intelligence-value of this sort in Deering as soon as the Mess Sergeant recommended him, and that value had proved itself ever since. There was something about the man that he sympathized with more personally, too. Untidy and casual and sometimes faintly impertinent he might be, but his contempt for the politicians supposedly in charge of national security, combined with his respect for those few who (like Leonard) were really doing something about it, was as proper as it was rare, and would have been totally admirable if expressed in a better accent.

Losing no time in displaying his less attractive side, Deering took half a cigarette from his trouser pocket and lit it. He sniffed twice and said,

"The padre's been on the prowl again."

"Are you sure?"

"See how it strikes you. About two A.M. Coates is parked in the forecourt waiting to take the Colonel's guest home when he sees someone creeping across that bit of meadow towards the huts. Whoever it is goes into one of the ones near the far end-Coates can't be sure which one, but that's where Ayscue's hut is. It was him all right, no doubt about it."

"What do you mean, no doubt about it?" Leonard spoke sharply. A conversation about the work of the unit he had had with Ayscue the previous week had convinced him that no suspicion of spying could be attached here, and the idea of having to reopen a closed file was disagreeable to him. "A couple of the Indians have got huts down that end. It might have been one of them, or Churchill, or almost anybody."

"Churchill and the Indians don't keep dogs. Ayscue does. If it had been anyone else but him, that bloody Alsatian bitch of his would have cracked on like it does whenever you go near it. But there wasn't a peep out of the pooch. I asked Coates particularly. That proves it, see. I remember reading a story about that somewhere, you know, the case of the dog that didn't bark."

The power of reasoning shown here impressed Leonard, but it would not do to let Deering see this. "All right, suppose it was Ayscue, where does that get us? He might have all sorts of reasons for slipping out of camp for a few hours."

"Like what? Going on the piss? He shifts a few here in the Mess when he feels like it, and he keeps a bottle in his hut, too, Evans says. Nothing there. Out on the ram? Can you see our respected spiritual counselor engaging in amatory pursuits? He wouldn't touch a woman with yours. No, he's up to something. Why does he live in one of those bloody pencil-boxes when as a major he's entitled to a room here? So's he can keep a fatherly eye on his flock, I suppose?"

"Well, yes-from what I hear he does spend a lot of time talking to the lads."

"Yes, in a very nasty nosey way, too. Always on at them to let him know if there's anything they're afraid of and whether they're happy. Happy! What business is it of his? And these gramophone recitals and chamber concerts and what-not. It's not natural. Never trust a parson and you won't go far wrong. Say one thing and do another. Politicians who haven't been able to make the grade."

For once, Leonard felt he could do without Deering's support. "Is that all you've got?"

"Not quite. That cupboard of his, the one he keeps locked. Evans says he's done everything he can think of to get a look inside and he's got nowhere at all. How do we know he hasn't got a short-wave radio tucked away in there?"

"Nonsense, there'd be no-"

"It could be something like tit pictures, of course, but he'd only need a drawer for those. It'd pay you to have a dekko at that cupboard, I bet you."

Wearily, but silently, Leonard agreed that he could not afford not to. He had recently been shown a training film about techniques of concealment in which great play had been made with double bluffs, dummy strong-boxes being hidden in the rafters or magnetically attached to the underside of bed-springs while the real one sat in view on the table, and so on. Leonard himself had followed this principle by setting a permanent guard on his office and stowing his most secret documents in a suitcase which he kept under his bed. Its unusually complex lock, however, incorporated a fine wire which any attempts at forcing would rupture, thus triggering off an alarm circuit.

A trained spy might well have camouflaged the hiding-place of his tools after the same reasoning. Could Evans be bribed into doping Ayscue's whisky-bottle as preliminary to getting hold of his keys? Non-minimal risk-potential would be the verdict of the manual- which, however, would be sure to offer helpful alternatives. He must consult it, but not now.

"I think I'll be getting down to the ante-room," he said.

"Funny, that dispatch-rider getting chopped just up the road from here. It was an accident, I suppose?"

"No doubt about it. I was at the inquest. Nothing wrong with him the smash wouldn't account for, or his bike, or the road. Why?"

"That packet he was bringing must have been pretty important, to send a special with it like that, and the regular DR run coming in at eight the next morning."

"It duplicated stuff I've had for nearly a fortnight," said Leonard, lying with his usual ease. "You don't know the Ministry."

"Some of the lads were saying the date of Operation Apollo's been brought forward. I don't know where they got that from."

Leonard felt as if a hot sponge had been pressed against the back of his neck. The information mentioned, together with the many detailed changes of plan necessitated, was what the special packet had contained. "I wish they'd tell me these things now and then," he said, exactly as easily as before. "Funny my chief didn't think to mention it when he had me on the scrambler that night."

"I told them it was all rubbish. Thought you ought to know, though. I could probably get their names if you want."

"Don't bother. You get this sort of thing all the time. Well, I must be off. Gloves."

Deering went to the tallboy and produced a pair of white cotton gloves ironed as thin as wafers. He handed them to his master, who made no attempt to put them on. This was sensible of him, for their evolution resembled that of the sleeves of a hussar's dolman, and no hand bigger than an eight-year-old child's could have entered them. Leonard grasped them lightly in his fist.

"Hat."

The scarlet-piped ultramarine forage cap was produced with similar formality, but proved to be designed to go on Leonard's long head, and to fit there well enough. He needed it and the gloves for the thirty-yard indoor walk to the ante-room.

"That's all, Deering, thank you."

"Good night, sir. See you in the morning."

Left alone, Leonard felt almost calm again. It had been a bad moment, but no more. Deering brought him rumors at the rate of a dozen a week, and only time had been needed for one of them to hit the mark by chance. Nobody but himself, he was certain, had seen the contents of that packet.

To restore his morale finally, he turned and gazed at a large oil painting which, like the tailor's glass, he had started to take with him everywhere. Partly illuminated by the late sun, it made a handsome and cheering sight. The plate at the top described the subject as Uniforms of His Majesty's 17th Regiment of Horse, the Duke of Staffordshire's Dragoons ("The Sailors"). The picture showed five men on mounts in varying stages of hysteria. The lower plate identified the riders as Trooper: 1810-Lieutenant: 1850-Trumpeter: Field Service Order: 1901-Corporal of Horse: Service Dress: 1915-Major: Full Dress: 1929.

Leonard's attention fixed, as usual, on the last-named. This was a slim, youngish figure, clean-shaven, gazing-unlike the others-directly at the observer with just discernibly blue eyes. His real-life analogue would have seen action in the last year or two of the first war, might well have commanded a brigade or a division in the second, would by now, if tradition held, be fretting at his uselessness in a south-coast resort or spa. In Leonard's fancy, this predecessor of his in the Sailors was saying to him, I did what I could in my way: I enjoin you to do what you can in yours.

There had been a lot of opposition when Leonard, coming across the picture in the Sailors' regimental museum during his sole visit to them, had set about acquiring it for the duration of his Army or pseudo-Army career. His insistence that it was vital to his cover as a serving officer had finally turned the wheels that secured it for him, but it had been a near thing. If the Commandant of the Sailors had behaved more tactfully at his interview with the relevant Minister, had as much as refrained from calling him a grubby little upstart, the issue might well have gone the other way.

To learn of this would have surprised Leonard. He had guaranteed in writing that, as soon as his job was done, the picture would be returned to its owners, and this, he would have thought, was enough. Now, drawing himself up, he snapped a salute to the blue-eyed major and left the room.

"Ah, here's our spy-catcher. What are you drinking, Brian? Spot of pink gin?"

"Dry sherry, please, sir," said Leonard.

"Of course, should have remembered, never touch the hard stuff, do you? Quite right for a man in your position. Can't have you getting tight and blabbing secrets all round the place. What about you, Willie? More of the same, or are you going to take a leaf out of Brian's book?"

"Not this time," said Ayscue. "I'll have another whisky, if I may."

"Let it be so. Anybody else? Oh, come on."

Colonel White had been selected as Commanding Officer of the unit on several grounds. His standing as a reliable, orthodox professional soldier fitted him for a post where above all, it had been felt, nothing fancy was needed. It had been further felt that he would guard the secrets put in his charge as closely as, by purely military means, they could be guarded, nor would he be concerned to know himself just what these secrets were. Service psychologists had recommended a personality of his outgoing, socially oriented type to preside at a Mess where various tensions could be expected to emerge. And a man in the Ministry who had been with him in North Africa had thought that old Chalky White, whom a German mine had deprived of half his left foot and thereby of most of his chances of promotion, could do with a full colonelcy and its extra pay.

At the moment, the Colonel was displaying his psychological qualifications for his post. Leonard's isolation from most of the other members of the Mess had not escaped him, and he lost no opportunity of throwing conversational bridges across this gap, of inviting the majority to see that even a Security man was a man and his job a job. White now took up the job half of this task.

"Well, Brian," he said, when the Mess waiter had brought the drinks and retired, "how does the great work?"

"Oh, not too-"

"I must say I wouldn't care to be up to what you're up to, would you, Willie?"

"It must be rather like my line of country, only more taxing."

"Not being able to relax for a moment. On duty twenty-four hours a day. Your head the one that rolls if the opposition get on to anything. Tell me, Brian, are you any nearer your man yet?"

"Yes, I think so. One works by elimination, of course. I was able to rule out the S1 people more or less from the start."

Leonard referred to those in Security Grade 1, the six British, four Indian and two Pakistani officers undergoing training for Operation Apollo and their two Instructors, both British. Nobody else in the unit, apart from Leonard himself, was permitted full knowledge of the nature of the Operation. Grade 2, or S2, consisted only of the Briefing Group, two British officers and one Indian-Naidu-whose duties were to provide certain ancillary information. S3 comprised the Colonel, the Adjutant, the Medical Officer, Hunter and Ayscue.

The Colonel laughed, knuckling his mustache. "That brings us pretty near home, Brian. Leaves you with what? Half a dozen people?"

"Eight, as regards officers. I've been working on them pretty hard over the last ten days. They're down to four now."

"Is it," asked the Colonel, "is it in order for me to inquire whether I am one of the possibly guilty four or one of the innocent four?"

"Oh yes, sir. You're clear. So are Hunter and the MO and Captain Naidu."

"Then I'm not clear," said Ayscue.

"Now you're not to take this sort of thing in the wrong way, Willie," said the Colonel; "Brian's simply doing his job. And one of the ways we can help him is by forcing ourselves to put up with things we might think it was wrong to put up with in other circumstances. You're not accusing anybody, are you, Brian?"

Ayscue nodded. "Oh, fair enough. But what interests me isn't so much the fact that tomorrow morning I may find myself arrested for passing secrets to the enemy-though it's an interesting enough fact in its way. Just for the moment I'm looking at it from Brian's point of view and wondering how he manages to stay alive at all without any human relationships. Not many people could stand being driven back inside their own mind the whole time."

"You're diving a bit deep for me there, Willie," said the Colonel.

"No, I see what he means, sir-he's quite right. You start living in a sort of dream world. You get worse at judging evidence, not better. When I started in this game I wondered why they gave us such long leaves. Well, it's only the last half of the time that's really like leave. You spend the first half gradually pushing yourself out of your shell."

The Colonel was not certain what Ayscue's mild stare at Leonard meant. He said briskly, "But of course one couldn't afford to rule out people outside the Mess, or even outside the unit, am I right, Brian? I must admit I've got a bit of a soft spot for the idea of a beautiful spy setting up shop in the village and trying to lure innocent young officers into her web, you know, the old Mata Hari touch. It'd brighten life up like anything."

"That's unlikely, sir," said Leonard carefully. "Possible, but unlikely. The one bit of luck we've had does point pretty well unmistakably to the fellow we're after being somewhere in this camp. He could be-well, one of the sergeants, say, or even a guard, but that's rather unlikely too. I can't see any of the S1 officers giving things away in that sort of direction. And the precautions you've taken, sir, have made it quite impossible for anyone to get at the secret stuff physically. No, I'm going to stick to my four candidates until I'm proved wrong."

"I wish you'd tell us what this bit of luck of yours was," said the Colonel. "Why you think your man's someone inside this unit. How you can be so certain we're up against a spy at all, come to that. Can't do any harm to let it out, can it?"

Leonard made a decision. It would be useful to see whether, or how soon and in what form, this information would come back to him via Deering. "The other week our people made an arrest in London. One of the things they picked up was a message reporting progress on penetrating Operation Apollo-nil, I'm glad to say. Well, there was something about that message, not its actual text, which established that it came from somebody serving in the Forces."

"Kind of paper or something," muttered the Colonel.

"And we learned something else, too. A man who leaves his tracks uncovered in that kind of way isn't a regular spy. He's what we call in the profession a neo-ideologue-an amateur, if you prefer it. That's a two-edged thing from our point of view. On the one hand it makes him more likely to give himself away through inexperience; on the other, he'll have had no previous contacts or history of any kind and there won't be a file on him. In that sense he might be anybody."

What Leonard had been saying was full of interest for the Colonel, but it was time to draw Ayscue back into the conversation. "Well, I'm sure we all hope you find him soon and we can breathe more easily. Are you a literary man, Brian?"

"I don't seem to get much time for reading."

"No, I suppose not. Pity. I'm at it all the time myself. Of course, it's easy for me-I got my little machine in motion within twenty-four hours of arriving here, set up the guards and so forth, and now it's just a question of the odd time-table check. The rest of the time, when I'm not down here making sure you all get enough to eat and drink I'm ploughing through these French existentialist fellows. Bit arid, they strike me, but never mind. Anyway, I was just going to say that Willie here is thinking of starting some sort of magazine. I didn't give you a chance to tell me much about it, did I, Willie? What kind of thing have you in mind? Will you get enough contributions?"

"Well," said Ayscue, rather unwillingly, "there are twenty-three officers and a hundred and sixty-three other ranks inside this fence. Half the lads spend half their time hanging about waiting to go on guard duty in one form or another, and day passes are restricted to ten per cent of them. Quite a few of the others haven't a lot to do-the drivers and DRs, for instance. I've asked around a bit, and my impression is that some of them might be fairly keen. I'll probably have to write a good deal of the thing myself, but then, I'm afraid I haven't much to do here either."

"Sounds a good idea," said Leonard. "Very good idea."

"Oh, then there'd be no objection from the security angle?"

"None at all. Quite the contrary. Excuse me."

Leonard moved away down the room. This looked very much like the farmhouse sitting-room it had been forty years earlier, so much so that a mind inquisitive in other directions than Leonard's might have suspected a conscious attempt to preserve it. From 1946 until three months ago the house had sheltered successive groups of officers on Intelligence courses, and it would have been some of these, or the President of their Mess, who had had the floor relaid without its ancient dips and slopes being corrected, the wide fireplace re-bricked with the asymmetry of its flanking buttresses and low stub walls left as it was. Oak furniture predominated, including a rocking-chair with a vertical see-saw effect that nobody tried twice. Militarism appeared only in the dozen or so framed photographs, imported perhaps in a jeering spirit, showing officer-cadet classes now long since dead or pensioned off, groups of World War I generals and staff with mustaches and plumes, and a victory parade of the same era. The sole recent object was a large television set. Beside it, though not as if he were about to switch it on, stood the figure of the Chief Instructor.

From a distance this man evidently had no neck. Closer approach showed that there was a neck there after all, and a substantial one; its very thickness disguised it by blending it with the head. This was squat and heavy, with greying hair cut very short and a florid but small-featured face. The Chief Instructor was about fifty and getting fat, which his posture did nothing to hide. He was and looked a civilian in uniform. The uniform in this case, and on this occasion, was the Mess dress of the Army Information Corps, a dark-grey jacket and olive-green trousers. The olive-green revers of the jacket were covered with ash from the cigar its wearer was smoking. The Chief Instructor was called Major Venables. Nobody in the unit knew his Christian name.

"Good evening, Leonard," he said in his tight, groaning voice.

"Hullo, Major. I was-"

"Not Major. I have told you before. I am no more a major than you are a captain. Venables is my name."

"Sorry… Do you mind a bit of shop?"

"I welcome it, even your sort of shop. It is considerably more appealing than what passes for conversation among these fusiliers and dragoons. Well?"

Leonard dropped his voice. "The revised schedule."

Venables maintained his. "I told you there would be no difficulty and there has not been. The persons who control our destinies were aware of their ignorance for once and allotted an over-generous period for the completion of training. Terminating the course two weeks sooner than originally planned will entail nothing more than some intensified homework on the part of my pupils. I cannot speak for the so-called Briefing Group. From what I see of them in this social slum I would judge that they would find it difficult to pass on accurately the words of ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen' within any fixed period of time."

Leonard looked nervously about. "Ssshh," he said.

Venables laughed. It was like his voice talking without words. "If a remark of that sort gives you cause for concern, you must find your duties very onerous. You should learn to take things more lightly."

"Yes. I'm glad you feel you can manage all right in the shorter period. You've reported to that effect, of course."

There was a pause. Venables's mouth gathered round his cigar, which was of square cross-section. A cube of ash fell onto his jacket. "Are you not invading my province and exceeding your authority? Provided my contacts with my superiors are secure they are no concern of yours. And if these trinkets they gave us to wear on our clothing mean anything you are debarred from giving me orders. And allow me to say that I very much resent first learning of this change of date through you rather than in due form from my superiors."

"I'm sorry… Venables. I wasn't trying to order you about, honestly. It's just that my people seem to think I ought to know everything all the time. It gets difficult not to pry. As regards me getting the news first, that's just, well, inter-departmental rivalry. Showing how quick off the mark they are."

"Yes. Why inform you by dispatch-rider instead of the equally secure and, as it proved, less unreliable method of scrambler telephone?"

Leonard shrugged. "Well, there was a lot of detail. And I suppose it made somebody feel more important, sending for a DR. You know what they're like."

"I am beginning to."

"There's just one more point."

"Oh dear. Yes?"

"Small but important." Leonard reminded himself whose uniform he was wearing and faced Venables more squarely. "You remember that you were not to divulge the bringing forward of the Operation until midnight tomorrow at the earliest."

"Yes, yes."

"This has now been amended. You are not to divulge it until what is in your opinion the last possible moment, and you are to give in writing forty-eight hours' notice of that moment. And that's an order. You see, you weren't quite accurate just now when you said I wasn't to give you orders. In all Security matters you do as I tell you."

Venables threw his cigar-butt into the fireplace. "Mm. Shall I not be informed of this by my own superiors? The matter of the giving of notice and so on?"

"No doubt. I was told to pass you your instructions as soon as possible."

"Very well. I bow to your authority."

The look Venables gave with this was unfamiliar. Perhaps he was respecting Leonard for having stood up to him, in the way that tyrants, martinets and so on were always supposed to. In Leonard's experience, this sort of respect was never hard to conceal behind a mask of increased tyranny or redoubled martinet-type behavior, but Venables might be different. He was a man full of differences from other people. Leonard tried to imagine him in the act of giving some of the instruction he had been sent here to give, and soon stopped. At this point the Mess Sergeant announced dinner, removing Venables from Leonard's thoughts as well as from his side.

Colonel White led the way across the cobbled hall and into the dining-room. The floor here was of marble, in squares of black and white. This was not an original installation, but one voted in key with the rest of the house when, a dozen years earlier, a program of reconstruction at the county mental hospital had led to various furnishings and fittings there being advertised for sale. The then Mess Secretary had taken a truck over to collect the tiles and had been entertained to tea by Dr. Best's predecessor.

On this distinctive foundation stood a pair of refectory tables, their surfaces polished to a high gloss by generations of batmen and defaulters, and on the bare wood was disposed a great deal of Victorian plate and silver and glass. All this, together with a large selection of wines, Hunter had bought off the previous owners at a price that had made them slightly angry.

As always, the Colonel sat down at the farther table, choosing a random point along the side facing the window. This policy ruled out any traditionally undemocratic nonsense of a regular place or chair for the CO while giving him the outdoor view he enjoyed. The main buildings of the camp were out of sight from here, but he could see the drill square and transport sheds, the clothing store, the concrete bungalow that housed the telephone exchange and the emergency wireless station, a couple of sleeping-huts. It was all quite deserted, apart from four or five men in khaki slowly making their way up the main track. They had the lethargic air of underworked troops drifting along to the canteen and its television room or poker schools. But down at the gate stood the two necessary figures with steel helmets, respirators in the alert position and machine-pistols slung across their shoulders. Then the grandfather clock behind the Colonel struck the hour of eight and within seconds, as he watched, three more men emerged from a nearby hut and marched formally towards the gate: the Sergeant of the Guard and the two relieving sentries. The exchange was carried out with exemplary smartness. The Colonel felt relieved. What really counted was being done.

He picked up the menu. The meal was to open with a choice of avocado pear and eggs Benedict, followed by cold salmon, roast duckling with cherry sauce and fresh peas, and ice-cream pudding with hot chocolate sauce (one of Corporal Beavis's specialities). A Kreuznacher St. Martin 1959 and a Clos de Vougeot 1957 were offered.

The Colonel asked for avocado pear and it was immediately brought. Although of good color, it resisted his spoon in parts. He mentioned the fact to the fattish, mournful-looking young officer sitting on his left. This was his Adjutant, Captain Ross-Donaldson.

"Should have been held back another day or two," said the Colo-nel. "You have to keep these fellows up to the mark all the time. Good thing for us all when Max Hunter gets back from his rest cure. When's that going to be, Alastair, by the way?"

"Excuse me a moment, sir." Ross-Donaldson turned to his other neighbor and repeated the question. "Churchill thinks tomorrow, sir."

"Not a moment too soon. Oh, I was just speaking about Max…"

When the Colonel had shifted his attention to the Medical Officer, who was on his right, Ross-Donaldson went on with what he had been saying to Churchill earlier.

"This whole concept of denial is losing its meaning," he said. "And of course I don't just mean that ground is three-dimensional. In fact, to insist on that has become rather immature, now that delivery can be made along virtually any parabola one chooses. No, the moment one abandons the front philosophy one's logically forced to part with direction except purely locally, and when that's gone, denial's whole raison de se battre is in peril, though no doubt it'll continue to color unfriendly thought, vestigially at any rate. In my mind there's no question but that prenodalization must be the working principle."

"You mean you stay where you are and fight whatever you see," said Churchill.

"Have some hock. Well yes, though that denigrates some of the subtleties. You ought to read the chap's article in the Military Quarterly. It's called, um… ‘Node and Anti-Node: Tomorrow's Denial?' You know. With a question mark."

"Sounds fascinating."

"It's the most adult piece of thinking I've seen for a long time. Since the van Gelder-Hernandez-Funck mobility equations came out in ‘62, probably. Do you feel like a bit of fun this evening?" added Ross-Donaldson in the same tone.

"Yes. What sort of fun?"

"Let's look up Lucy. You know her, don't you? Lady Hazell? Oh, you must meet her. She'd like you. I suppose one might call it a slight Bacchante complex in her case, with possible Jocastan undertones. We'll drive over after dinner."

When the meal ended, Churchill and Ross-Donaldson returned to the ante-room, where they soon put down a cup of coffee and a glass of Cockburn 1945. Taking their leave presented no difficulty, for Colonel White had abjured formal dessert except on the weekly guest night. In the hall, Ross-Donaldson stopped and turned to Churchill.

"I'd better just look in at the Command Post," he said. "Coming?"

They went to the rear of the hall and stood for a moment in front of the door of what had been the morning-room. Then the door slid aside and they entered.

A sergeant and a corporal were facing them at attention. Ross-Donaldson told them to sit down. Immediately beneath the beams of the ceiling were television screens giving views of the main gate and, from various angles, a long low building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and a concrete pathway. As Churchill glanced up at these a soldier with a slung machine-pistol moved slowly and silently across one and out of shot. Elsewhere there was a telephone direct to the civilian exchange, another telephone and a remote-control unit connected by underground cable to the camp exchange and wireless station respectively, and a large red button marked GENERAL ALARM.

"Hullo, Fawkes," said Churchill to the corporal. "I thought you were spending all your time over at the hospital keeping the Viet Cong from getting together with Captain Hunter."

"That packed up yesterday, sir," said Fawkes. "I think Captain Leonard reckoned the Reds would have lost heart by then. I arrived back just in time to get on the roster for this lot. Captain Hunter's coming out tomorrow anyway, I hear."

Although he spoke with his usual cheerfulness, Fawkes did not look well. His face was pale and there was sweat on his upper lip.

"Are you all right, Fawkes?" asked Churchill. "Feeling rough?"

"I have got a bit of a head, but it's nothing really."

"Would you like me to get you anything? I can fix up a relief for you if you want."

"No, I'll be okay, honest. Thanks very much all the same, Mr. Churchill."

A buzzer sounded. The sergeant got up and went and looked through the thick panel of one-way glass in the door.

"It's the bloke with our tea, sir," he said. "Can I go ahead?"

"Certainly," said Ross-Donaldson.

The sergeant pressed a stud and the door slid back. A well-built young man of perhaps twenty came in carrying two pint china mugs. At the sight of the two officers he straightened his back. Without looking ridiculous he managed to hand over the teas in a sort of posture of attention, then turned and saluted Ross-Donaldson.

"Signalman Pearce, sir," said Fawkes.

"Good evening, Pearce," said Ross-Donaldson. "Do please carry on."

Churchill remembered hearing the name from Hunter. He was struck by the healthy look of the young man's complexion and eyes and by the extreme smartness of his turnout. He would have made a good model for a recruiting poster, thought Churchill, had it not been for his air of intelligence.

The sergeant and Ross-Donaldson began discussing an arms inspection due to take place the following morning. Churchill turned towards them. He heard Pearce talking in an undertone.

"These were all I could get. I should take three now and another couple about one A.M. Remember I'll be on the switchboard at ten so you can give me a buzz there if you want anything."

"Thanks, Andy. Don't worry about me."

The internal telephone rang.

"Command Post, Corporal Fawkes speaking. Right. Go ahead in five minutes, at… twenty-one twenty-five hours. Okay. Cheers." Fawkes turned to Ross-Donaldson. "Just the floodlight check, sir."

"Thank you, Fawkes… Well, I'm afraid they're going to have to turn up whether they've been up all night or not, Sergeant. I'm not going to lay it on twice over. Anything else? Oh, who's Duty Officer?"

"Captain Leonard, sir."

As the officer directly responsible to the Colonel for the discipline of the unit, Ross-Donaldson evidently felt that it would be unsafe to react to this name in almost any way at all. He inclined his head about an inch without looking at anybody, said good night and left.

Churchill followed. In the hall again, the two entered their names in the Sign Out book that lay on a handsome gate-leg table. After writing down a local telephone number in the Location column and bracketing it against both names, Ross-Donaldson hesitated.

"I'd better just ring and make sure," he said. "You go on."

Lighting a cigarette, Churchill strolled outside and moved to-wards the officers' car park. This brought him near Hut D4.

D4 was the long single-story building Churchill had been looking at just now on the Command Post television screens. Its contents were the reason for the Colonel's carefully planned system of guards. Overhead lights illuminated it and the pathway round it, where Churchill could see the two sentries pacing. Farther off, two other figures could be made out, members of the patrol that circuited the area at all times. They were passing the foot of the steel scaffolding that supported one of the permanently manned machine-gun posts. The other was in the roof of the farmhouse. The guns were heavy-caliber weapons mounted on tripods. The noise with which they fired their 12.75 mm. alloy-jacketed ammunition (as heard at a recent practice alarm) was immense. Such bullets would penetrate any vehicle which Colonel White considered at all likely to be used in an attempt to enter D4. A mere armored car would be riddled in seconds. In the event of a full-scale tank assault, agreed to be a remote possibility in peacetime, the Colonel was to call on a neighboring RAF base for assistance.

Churchill contemplated D4. The thought of what was inside it hardly weighed upon him. He had felt nothing but a remote excitement when, three weeks earlier, a pair of five-ton lorries escorted by a full platoon of motorized infantry had delivered there a number of large sealed boxes. What he disliked about the building tonight was its reminders of a world which had started to disappear almost as he was starting to walk and talk, but which he knew about from written and other records. Even this, however, was less unwelcome than the kind of future the sight of D4 seemed to promise. It felt to him like a personal rather than simply a general future. The memory of the dispatch-rider's death five days earlier came into his mind as he stood in the darkness waiting for Ross-Donaldson, that and the memory of the girl he had seen earlier on the afternoon in question.

Just then D4 and its environs became in an instant totally bright as the floodlights round it were switched on. Churchill flinched, and could have sworn that the sentries on the path did the same, each seeming to check in his stride. Near the single gateway in the fence they crossed and diverged, then one after the other passed out of sight round the angles of the building. For a quarter of a minute nothing moved. At the end of that time the lights went off and their image shrank and swirled and grew again on Churchill's retinas. The check had been successfully completed.

Ross-Donaldson came up and said, "I suppose in a way one wouldn't have expected it. Second-stage concealment theory in a non-hostility context. Somebody with old Chalky White's history would have been much more likely to keep the beams on all night long so that even a Russian on a moon-run could see D4, let alone any inquisitive strangers in the village. I tried to get her but she was engaged both times."

"Well, at least that means she's in," said Churchill as they got into Ross-Donaldson's jeep.

"Not necessarily. The engaged signal is given whenever the connecting apparatus is engaged, which will be the case if another subscriber is attempting to raise the same number. And Lucy's number is one people are constantly attempting to raise. It's one of the things about her. And her number. Of course, I did get here a couple of weeks before you and the other S1 chaps, so I've had longer to explore and a clearer field at the outset. But even so I am slightly astonished you haven't come across Lucy before, or she you. I thought that most of the Mess had been round at her place at one time or another, except for people like Leonard and Venables of course. And Willie Ayscue. And the Indians and Pakistanis. Yes, I suppose there are quite a few who haven't been, when you come to work it out carefully. Adjutant and Lieutenant Churchill. Recreational."

This last was said to, and taken down in writing by, a corporal who emerged from the guard-hut by the gate. The gate itself, a massive affair of steel and concrete which it would have taken a fair-sized shell to knock off its hinges, was pushed open by one of the sentries, while the other peered vigilantly up the road, as if aware that this would be a good moment for an attack by hostile motorcyclists, should one be in preparation.

They turned right into what was no more than a lane, and then immediately left. Fifty yards farther on they crossed directly over a substantial trunk highway and traveled along a minor road with tall hedgerows on either side. Ross-Donaldson had at once taken up his own words to the guard corporal. "Recreational. I suppose that is the way to describe it. Do you think it'll help Leonard to know that we've been recreating?"

"He has to keep a check, presumably. But I do wonder what he gets out of these guard reports. If you and I were spies going off to meet our contact we'd be unlikely to tell the guard so. And we'd vary the times and everything, so that-"

"An omnifariously randomized schedule indistinguishable from the genuinely random. Quite so. However, I'm sure this is at least as clear to Leonard as it is to us. From all points of view he must start by doing what's expected of him. It's only then that he can surprise people. Are you warm enough?"

The jeep had no side-screens, but the rush of air was no more than cool. It smelled vaguely of earth and vegetation. Except for their headlights it was quite dark. "I'm fine," said Churchill, then went on.

"Why don't the Indians and Pakistanis ever go and see this Lucy woman?"

"Oh, I'm sure they sense that they wouldn't get on together. They and she."

"Doesn't she like non-Europeans?"

"I've no idea. Light me a cigarette, Churchill, would you? No, it's what they'd feel about it. Not what she'd feel about it, if I know her. One of them explained to me the other day that they all have very excellent, very loving wife in Bombay or Karachi. I think it was your friend Moti Naidu."

"It doesn't sound like him."

"I'm sorry, I know I'm not good at imitations. I must stop doing them."

"Why does it matter if they have any sort of wife in Bombay?"

"Well, I don't care personally one way or the other."

"No, I mean why should that stop them going to see Lucy?"

"Having a wife might not stop me, but people like Asians often hold these strict views about marital fidelity."

"Are you trying to tell me that they couldn't go to see this woman without popping into bed with her?"

"It's unlikely. She might jib a bit at taking on old Chatterji."

Churchill felt slightly alarmed. "Christ, what sort of set-up has she got there?"

"It's what you might call a maison à une fille. She practices promiscuous polyandry. You'll see."

"Christ."

"I thought I'd conveyed that. Anyway, everything's very well handled. Only those with exceptionally low embarrassment thresholds would feel any discomfort."

"How good-looking is she?"

"Quite sufficiently. She spends a lot of money on her clothes and jewelry and stuff of that kind. She's the widow of a man who became very rich as a result of making furniture, so rich that they had to give him a knighthood. They hadn't been married very long, and he'd been a knight an even shorter time, when he fell off his yacht in the Adriatic and was drowned. There are no children of the marriage."

"What was she before she was married?"

"I don't know. She's never said and I've never thought to inquire. I don't even know how long she's been polyandrous. One would imagine quite a time, but it's probably the sort of activity in which a high pitch of expertness is soon reached."

Anticipation and nervousness were mixed in Churchill. After thinking for a while he decided that, although he had very little idea of what he was in for and still wondered energetically how many other men might turn out to be looking up Lucy tonight, he would be disappointed rather than relieved if for any reason she proved unavailable. He cheered up a lot at this thought, and became impatient to arrive.

"How far now?" he asked.

"We're just coming up to halfway, which I take to be St. Jerome's Priory. It's behind that peak on the left. You can't actually see it from the road. In fact the site's well concealed from most points along the natural approaches. It lies at the top of what looks like a perfect example of a mesa, though one would expect other such formations to be found in the area, and I haven't identified any. More probably it's the remains of an unusually broad band of vertical strata whose slopes have been subject to a lot of snow action, giving us a kind of eroded hog's back. Anyway, a useful spot for a place full of valuables that isn't allowed to defend itself."

"It's pretty much of a ruin, isn't it?"

"The western end of the chapel and a corner of the refectory are relatively intact, but elsewhere there isn't much that's higher than a couple of feet. Cromwell slighted it so thoroughly that they probably couldn't face the thought of rebuilding. It must have cost the most appalling effort originally, with everything having to be brought up on pack-animals."

After another twenty minutes or so they turned off the road through a stone gateway and drove up between two lines of trees to a substantial house. Churchill realized that their journey from the camp had brought them along the diagonal of a kind of flattened square, with the village and the mental hospital at the other two corners and the Priory somewhere in the middle. There were lights burning in the house, though dimly.

Ross-Donaldson parked the jeep next to two other cars. He got out and straightened his jacket.

"I'm getting fat," he said morosely. "It's all that eating and drinking we do. But what I can't see is why being fat isn't good for you. Surely you'd be much fitter, you'd get much more out of the exercise, give your muscles more work to do, sweat more and so on, if you walked and ran about the place wearing a special boiler-suit padded with thirty pounds or so of sand. But that's an exact equivalent of being thirty pounds overweight. And why doesn't being fat make you thin? The boiler-suit arrangement certainly would."

"There must be a fallacy somewhere," said Churchill as they waited in the extensive portico.

"No doubt. I suppose Lucy hasn't gone off to St. Tropez and left the lights on. It would be in character. Ah, here we are."

The door opened slightly. A man's voice said something brief.

"Good evening," said Ross-Donaldson. "We've come to see Lady Hazell."

"Who are you?"

"A friend of hers. Who are you?"

Further indistinguishable words were said, this time in a grumbling tone, then the door was pulled wide. Following Ross-Donaldson in, Churchill looked about for the man who had opened to them, but he was nowhere to be seen. This would have been more surprising if the hall had been better lit. As it was, the only illumination, wan and pinkish, came from a couple of bulbs on or near the staircase that mounted the far wall. Across this there hung a gigantic figure, a mythological personage or beast portrayed perhaps on a tapestry. Other beings looked down from elsewhere on the walls and stood about the place in three-dimensional form. Directly ahead was a doorway from which a slightly stronger light was shining. Churchill walked through it.

The room he entered was as full of pictures and statuary as the hall had been. This gave so strong an impression of over-crowding that it was some time before he was sure that there were only about four actual people present. Two or three men were calling to one another.

"Get her cage up here."

"I'm not going to lift that thing.".

"Can't you see she's frightened? Leave her alone for a bit."

"Go on, grab her and get it over."

One of the men was standing on a chimneypiece, clinging with one hand to the corner of an ornate picture-frame while he lunged upwards and outwards with the other. A periwigged face stared past his hip.

"Gin and tonic," he said coaxingly. "Gin and tonic, gin and tonic, gin and tonic."

"Gin and tonic," said another, ghostly voice.

"Come here, you fool."

The man made a quick snatching motion and over-balanced, sending the picture swinging to and fro on its nail. He fell noisily but, it soon proved, without hurting himself, across a table, a chair and the corner of a large writing-desk. At the same moment a small dark shape detached itself from the picture-rail, where it had been practically invisible, and made with a beating of wings into the middle of the room. A grey parrot with a bald crown to its head settled neatly on Ross-Donaldson's right shoulder.

"Okay now, keep still and we've got her. Cage over here quick. You're all right, birdie-gin and tonic."

"Gin and tonic."

A half-full glass was proffered and the parrot seemed to drink.

"That's it, you love the stuff, don't you, you old soak?"

"Here we are. Come on, in you get, curse you."

"She can't, she's got her foot caught in this wire or whatever it is on this chap's shoulder."

"Chain mail," said Ross-Donaldson. "Quite customary."

"Customary or not, let's get her perishing foot out. Now…"

"That's no good, somebody'!! have to hold her."

When no one else moved, Churchill clasped the bird with the palms of his hands over its wings. Its heart was beating very quickly. After a moment it struck down at his finger with its beak. He kept his hold, eased the parrot into its cage and sucked at the tear in his finger.

"Let me see that," said Ross-Donaldson.

"Lucky she didn't get her beak round it or she'd have gone through it to the bone. They're very vicious, you know."

Churchill was aware that the company had just increased by one, perhaps two. While Ross-Donaldson peered at the injured finger, a cloud of scent and a rustle of skirts approached from somewhere in the rear. The hand in question was gently grasped by another one, thin, cool and dry, the owner of which Churchill took in as of medium height, dark hair, pale complexion and no particular age. There was elaborately cut clothing and earrings and necklaces, too.

Ross-Donaldson said, "Lucy, may I present a brother-officer of mine, Lieutenant James Churchill of the Blue Howards? Churchill, this is Lady Hazell."

"How do you do, Mr. Churchill." Lady Hazell gave the hand she was holding a couple of shakes and went on holding it. "It's not much use trying to see anything in here," she added truthfully. "Let me take you along to the bathroom."

Still holding his hand, she led him to a far comer of the room and up a narrow staircase with linoleum underfoot and crumbling plaster on the walls. On the next floor, in virtually complete darkness, she drew him across a couple of yards of what felt and sounded like bare boards, then switched on a light so comparatively bright that Churchill blinked.

They stood in what was indeed a bathroom, for it contained a bath, and in addition a washbasin and w.c. But he found it hard to imagine anyone bathing here willingly. A dank-looking rug covered some of the floorboards, its design indistinguishable. Two disused pots of paint stood in a corner beside an equally disused lavatory brush, and along the sill below the uncurtained window were half a dozen jam-pots, most of them empty, one or two holding an inch of pale-brownish liquid. The light-bulb was unshaded.

In the two seconds he spent taking this in, Churchill felt, Lady Hazell had been taking him in. She gave no sign of how he had fared when she said pleasantly, in her faintly hoarse voice,

"I'm afraid things are in rather a mess. We don't use this part of the house a great deal. Now let me have a look. I must apologize for poor Sadie's behavior. She's been over-excited and I'm afraid she rounded on you when you were being the only brave and helpful person there. That's life. But this doesn't look too bad, thank God. Does it hurt very much?"

Churchill had had much more than two seconds to take Lady Hazell in. He found her a good deal better than he had expected, in several respects. To begin with, she was no more than thirty-five, if that; he had assumed that the onset of promiscuous polyandry could not be expected before the later forties. Then, she was slightly above the quite sufficiently attractive level promised by Ross-Donaldson; her complexion turned out to be white and clear rather than pale, with strongly marked black eyebrows and abundant lashes. And although her figure was obscured by the various artifices of her clothes, neither it nor they seemed too bad. Best of all, her manner was quiet to the point of docility. He knew very well that this might easily change later, but he was glad that so far she had not sprung at him with the kind of erotic snarl he had imagined when Ross-Donaldson first started describing her.

"What? Oh. No, it's… fine, thank you."

The blow had been right at the limit of the parrot's reach, and in fact most of the tear in the skin had already stopped bleeding.

"Good. But I think we ought to disinfect it, and bathe it and so on. Now…"

She opened a wall-cupboard, the glass of which was cracked and foxed, revealing a hundred or more unstoppered bottles, uncapped tubes and lidless tins. After a brief search she took out a small bottle of beetroot-colored liquid.

"Mercurochrome. Just the thing. Let's wash the cut out first, though."

Now she turned on one of the taps at the basin. A loud shuddering groan filled the room, dwindled to a whimper and was quiet. Water splashed, trickled, splashed again.

"It'll run hot eventually, you'll find. I expect you'd like me to leave you to yourself, Mr. Churchill. I think there's some plaster in the cupboard. Be sure to help yourself to a drink, won't you?"

Before leaving, she gave him a glance that clearly meant something, though he could not have said what. Perhaps he had already failed some vital test and would never be allowed near her again. He put one of his uninjured fingers under the tap, which was now delivering a steady but cold flow, and considered. Had he been meant to set about pulling her dress off the moment they arrived up here? And if so, would that have been taken just as a required show of keenness, to be noted and taken up later, or would one thing have been allowed to lead to another? And if so, where? In here? Then keenness was hardly the word. Or had Ross-Donaldson been pulling his leg about the whole thing? One could never be sure with him.

And what was that about helping himself to a drink? Were there some dregs of medicinal brandy somewhere in the cupboard? He looked, but soon gave up. The risk of toppling bottles into the basin was too great, and any dregs he might find in this context would be unappealing.

The water from the tap had settled into a state between cool and lukewarm. He washed his finger, working up a little lather from a sliver of household soap, and dried it on his handkerchief. After some thought he poured mercurochrome onto it. There was no special result apart from a bright red stain on the skin. The plaster he decided against. He used the w.c., smoothed his hair back in the mirror, lit a cigarette and slowly groped his way down the stairs.

The room he had left could never look quite empty, but within a few seconds he was sure there were no people in it. He listened. Immediately there was the sound of a car being started and driven away. It was not, as he feared just when it began, the sound of a jeep. He went quietly through the hall to the front door, opened it and looked out. The jeep was standing on its own where it had been left, and a tail-light was receding along the drive. He shut the door and listened again. There was absolute silence. He walked across thick carpets to the foot of the stairs. From here it was quite plain that the figure on the tapestry he had noticed on arrival was human after all, a girl in a long white dress reclining at the edge of a pool or stream. Nothing was to be seen up the stairs.

Back where he had just come from, he heard the parrot stirring in its cage. On his way over to it he noticed a tray with bottles, glasses and an ice-bucket. He understood now about being told to be sure to help himself to a drink. Grinning, he mixed himself a gin and tonic with ice. What little he had gathered of the men here earlier had not appealed to him much. They had certainly been sent packing; even now it could not have been much more than five minutes since Lady Hazell had left him in the bathroom, which meant among other things that he could not have been inside the house more than a quarter of an hour. This seemed to him very surprising. However-how much longer was he going to be on his own, and how was he going to fill in the time?

He resumed his interrupted progress towards the parrot. Watching him, it used claws and beak to move itself ungracefully across the back of its cage. Then it forgot about him and clung there without stirring. After calling it by its name several times without any result, he moved away again and looked idly at some of the pictures. Most were portraits. Several of these, whether true likeness or not, seemed in the half-light to show such an ugly face that it was hard to imagine how they had survived the death of the sitter at latest, unless by the intervention of some close relative. The one above the chimneypiece, rendering a man in middle life whose pop-eyed petulance the artist had perhaps tried, not very hard, to represent as authority, was a case in point. It hung a little askew after being disturbed by the climber there and he straightened it. On the shelf below it he noticed a framed photograph. Although its tones were in over-violent contrast, he could make out enough of the face of the girl in it to be fairly sure it was better-looking than the surrounding average. Faintly and, he felt, untraceably, it reminded him of somebody. He put it down.

Suddenly Churchill felt sure he was going to have to hang about here all night, forgotten or ignored by Ross-Donaldson and Lady Hazell, with nothing whatever to do, nothing to read and in any case-he fiddled vainly with the switches beside the door-no light to read by. He drained his gin and tonic and poured another: much faster drinking than his normal tempo. But that tempo itself had recently been quickening, ever since, in fact, he and the other S1 officers had been fully informed of the nature of Operation Apollo.

He did not want to think about this now. Carrying his fresh drink, he moved towards the hall, then changed his mind and walked to the far corner of the room. Here, next to the staircase, he found a door, then a dining-room with a long table but no chairs, then a kitchen. This had a normal light in it. It was clean and tidy, although thinly stocked with food and means of preparing it. The refrigerator contained nothing but a lot of ice-trays and seven or eight tins of tomato juice. Apart from this, it appeared that Lady Hazell lived on eggs, black coffee and various spices. The racing page of a newspaper was spread on the table. Churchill stood reading this and sipping his drink for a few minutes. Then he heard Ross-Donaldson call his name from the drawing-room.

"You weren't very long," said Churchill when he reached him.

"No," said Ross-Donaldson. Looking just the same as usual, he was gazing at one picture or another. "Where have you been?"

"In the kitchen. You know, hanging about."

"Did you notice any coffee there?"

"As a matter of fact I did. Lots of it."

"I think I could do with a cup. Would you like some?"

"Well yes, but…"

"Oh, sorry, of course. It's the second door on the left along the upstairs passage. And I would be really honestly grateful if you didn't prolong the after-play unduly. Don't feel you have to rush it, but it'll take us an hour to get back to camp and into bed and I've got this arms inspection at nine hundred hours. Have a good time."

It was not until now that Churchill really believed that the expedition was going to have some point as far as he was concerned. Mounting the shadowy staircase he felt pleased and excited, confident that he could take in his stride any unfamiliarities or momentary enigmas presented by what was in store for him.

Lady Hazell was lying in the middle of a very large bed with the covers up to her chin. Under the usual dim glow, it looked as if everything in the room was made of silk or velvet, but before Churchill could check on this impression she spoke to him.

"The thing is," she said, "for you to take all your clothes off now and then come and get into bed. It's much the best way."

He did as he was told. Once in bed he very soon found that she too had nothing on. Her body was delightfully warm, and also well shaped in detail, firm, carefully looked after, healthy: or just young. He remembered faintly that he had expected her to be beyond him in one way or another, responding far too much or not at all, but her movements were those of someone whose mind was effectively on what they were both doing.

It was fine; it was successful; it was over. Lady Hazell stroked the back of his neck and smiled at him. She said,

"Is it James or Jim or Jimmy or something quite different?"

"James."

"I've suddenly come over terribly sleepy, James. It's only about eleven. Not my usual form, I can tell you. Would you think it was awful of me if I sort of threw you out?"

"Not in the least."

He got out of bed.

"The bathroom's through there. You can talk to me from it."

This bathroom was radically unlike the one he had been in earlier. There was a bright red carpet that his toes sank into and wallpaper depicting colonnades and ornamental fountains. The bath was made of a beautiful pale green marble. There were two different kinds of lavatory paper. He said over his shoulder,

"Do you live here on your own?"

"I have been for the last few months. I've been making do with Mrs. Stoker. She lives just down the road. She comes up every morning and does my breakfast and washes up the glasses and tidies round, and then she goes back and does my lunch and Mr. Stoker carries it up here on a tray. He cleans out Sadie's cage and things too. And in the evenings I have a few drinks and don't usually bother. But it'll be different after tomorrow."

"Why, what's happening then?"

"Well, tomorrow my great friend comes back. She's called Cathy. She's been away being ill but she's all right again now. You must come over again and meet her."

Churchill went back into the bedroom and started dressing. Lady Hazell had apparently fallen asleep. He wished that those men had not been in the house when he arrived, and that he had come on his own. At this stage it was clear to him that he would not be making another visit here. If he did, he would probably like it less. Or he might like it more, in which case he would mind about the other men more. Or, possibly, he might find himself eventually minding about them less. That was an unpleasant idea.

He finished dressing and went over to the bed. Lady Hazell lay on her back just as he had left her. He did not want to leave her without saying good night, but was not sure how to wake her. He pressed his hand gently on the pillow beside her head and she opened her eyes at once.

"You'd like her," she said. "She's very sweet. Oh, you're off now, are you?"

"Yes."

"Say good night to Alastair for me. How old are you, James?"

"Twenty-four."

"I suppose I must seem the most fearful old bag to you."

"You don't at all."

He kissed her.

"You see, I suddenly found out that this was the sort of life I liked. I know there must be a reason for it but I wouldn't know what it is, would I? Now you're not to feel you've got to hang about, because you've got a long drive back to camp. But you must come over again soon and meet Cathy."

"Of course. Good night, Lucy."

The village where the officers and men of the unit did their minor shopping and their extra-mural drinking appealed to them chiefly because of its relative closeness to the camp. The local trades, such as they were, had become depressed over the previous decades, and the region had never attracted promoters of industrial development. Consequently, the village had declined in numbers and acquired a drab, dilapidated look which did not invite the better-off people from the nearest town to consider settling there. Recently, however, quite a few such people had got into the habit of driving out on summer evenings to drink at the White Hart, the largest pub in the place and the only one with pretensions to comfort. Among the results of this new trade were a modernized interior with a small grill-room, a furnished garden and a fresh intake of barmaids, these of a type thought to be more attractive to visitors than the village girls who had formerly done the job.

Catharine Casement became a barmaid in the lounge of the White Hart two days after she was let out of the mental hospital. The idea, and the arrangements, had been Lucy Hazell's. Dr. Best had given his qualified approval at his last interview with Catharine.

"I suppose in some ways it's not a bad thing that you should go straight into some sort of work," he had said, rather dispiritedly. "You realize that you'll inevitably be brought into contact with men at this public house?"

"Yes. That's all right with me."

The doctor had shown his lower teeth. "You know my view on your feeling towards men, Mrs. Casement. I don't intend to go into them again now. What I want to impress on you is that in these next weeks you must show boldness and courage. If you find that some situation or person disturbs or frightens you, that's a sign that you must move towards it or them, not retreat. This is necessary if your probation period is to prove truly therapeutic. Remember, you are in search of a shock."

"I'll see what I can do for you."

"It's not for me, Mrs. Casement, it's for you. Well, we'll re-examine your case in four weeks' time. Meanwhile, I advise you not to get in touch with me. The more isolated you feel yourself to be, the better the chances that something will come of our experiment. Something favorable, I hope." At this point he had smiled cordially. "But I shall be keeping myself informed of your progress."

"How?"

"Don't worry, I won't be obtrusive about it. You'll be left to yourself all right. Well, good-bye. For the time being. And good luck. With the experiment."

She had decided to forget all about Dr. Best and his instructions until she had got used to being out of hospital. The first couple of days of this, at any rate, had been unexpectedly easy: completely non-frightening. On the second evening, as arranged, Mr. Stoker had driven Lucy and herself down to the White Hart so that she could be introduced to the landlord and the rest of the staff and have her duties explained to her. The landlord was a red-faced man of fifty called Eames. He wore a short brown beard, grown as a personal contribution to the modernizing of the premises. He had taken the two women into the snug and insisted on giving them champagne. What he said, plus his manner, suggested a thorough but selective briefing by Lucy earlier.

"I'm putting you in my lounge bar to start with, Mrs. Casement, because the trade isn't very heavy there, except sometimes at weekends, and there'll be someone else on then as well to give you a hand. You get a very nice type of people in the lounge. Nice type of men particularly. But I want to impress on you that if by any remote chance anybody does get impertinent or anything, you come to me straight away and I'll deal with him, won't I, Lady Hazell? No, you won't have any trouble. As I say, they're a nice crowd. You get doctors and businessmen and officers from that camp up the road. They'll all be on your side.

"Now as regards the technical aspect, if you could get down here at say nine-thirty, I'll run over that with you before we open, though I gather from Lady Hazell here that you're used to the serving of drinks, so I may not have very much to teach you there. The difficulty you will undoubtedly find is with remembering prices, totaling orders and giving change. What I've done, I've had a full list typed out for you in my office. Here. The drinks and so on are down this side, and over here there's the prices. I'd advise you to just work away at that until you've got it off by heart. Get Lady Hazell to help you. You could reel off an order, Lady Hazell, and Mrs. Casement could work out how much it would come to. The two of you could make a sort of game of it. You know… ‘Two large gins and tonic, please, miss, pint and a half of best bitter, one light ale, pint of ordinary bitter, scrub the light ale, how much, please?'-'Eleven and four, please, sir, and would you like a slice of lemon in the gins?' "

It had not risen to anything like that pitch during lunchtime opening the next day. Trade was small and slow, confined to a few local tradespeople and one or two young couples. Catharine got the tables and her counter cleared as soon as the bar shut at half-past two. Then she was free until a quarter to seven. Eames explained that the girl in the saloon, which communicated, could easily deal with an early evening custom, adding that Catharine was not to overtax herself and that she was to tell him at once if there was anything she thought was not as it should be.

In the afternoon she slept for an hour or so. After that she got up and made a pot of tea and took it into Lucy's bedroom. They went over the price list together a final time. At the end of it Catharine was pretty confident about everything except the bottled beers and stouts.

"I'll never get all those lagers right," she said.

"What does it matter? What's so awful about looking at a list? You can't expect to have it all off by heart the first evening. Anyway, I've just noticed they go in alphabetical order. The Esbjerg's the most expensive, then the Gesundheit and then the Lyre. And the price goes down threepence between the first two and three-hapence between the second and third. Just half as much."

"Good, that is a help."

"I hope this won't turn out to be too much for you, Cathy. I've realized it's getting on for two hours' travel by car every day. But you're a good strong girl, and I thought after being cooped up in that disgusting place all those months you wouldn't mind rushing about a bit. Now we've got to decide what you're to wear. It's Mr. Eames we have to consider really. Strike the happy medium between what he'd think was tarty and what he'd think was dowdy. It won't be quite plain sailing. I tell you what, I think I'd better have another little sleep. I was late last night and as far as I can remember I look like being late again tonight. You go and have a lovely bath and then bring all your best things in here and we'll go through them together."

By six o'clock they had finally settled on a blue sleeveless linen jacket, a pleated skirt, sandals and gold earrings, and Catharine was arrayed in these as she sat and talked to Lucy, who in turn was in the bath. She looked at Lucy's body as its owner soaped it. It seemed to her a prettily molded body with delicate skin, and touching it would not have revolted her, but she could not imagine what it would feel like to want to do so. At this distance Dr. Best's ideas, whose unexpectedness and difficulty she had taken as an extra proof that they were right, struck her as amateurish and affected. He talked as if he had forgotten all about going to bed with people, if he had ever known. But how was he going to keep his eye on her?

"Are you all right, Cathy?"

"Yes, fine. A bit nervous. It's all so public, you see. I know I can look after myself with just one or two of them to deal with at a time, but it's probably not so easy when there's a whole crowd of others there listening and getting ready to laugh. You know what they're like; you've been in pubs."

"Not for some time, actually, until the other day with you. But you're looking at things the wrong way. You should be expecting somebody marvelous to turn up. It's about due for that to happen to you, goodness knows."

"Yes, I suppose it might happen." The difficulty was in deciding whether somebody was really marvelous or would only go on seeming to be until it was too late. Catharine felt she was slightly worse at this now than she had been when fifteen.

"That's the spirit. When you get back you can sneak up to bed if you want, or come into the drawing-room and mingle with the throng. You wouldn't have to mingle too thoroughly, I'll see to that. I can always keep the wrong sort away from you, you remember, even if you can't. Mr. Stoker should have you back here by quarter past eleven, so there'll be some of the evening left if you fancy it. That's him hooting now. Off you go, Cathy. Good luck with the lagers. Enjoy yourself."

Catharine arrived at the White Hart in good time, hung up her coat in the alcove next to Eames's office and went into the saloon. There were half a dozen people drinking there, all of whom turned to stare at her. The barmaid already on duty, a round-faced nineteen-year-old called Anne, raised the leaf of the counter to let her through.

"Nothing very much for you next door, Cath. Couple of peasants on brown ales and four of those soldiers, three of them on large pink gins and the other on angostura and soda. Can't think what he gets out of it, can you? I've been charging him ninepence a go. You'll have it easy for a bit but it'll start filling up after seven. Give me a shout if you want me for anything."

Catharine went through the communicating doorway into the lounge bar and came face to face with a young man in khaki standing on the other side of the counter. Immediately she remembered having seen him on her way to her last interview but one with Dr. Best. She was startled and could tell that he was too. Neither spoke for a moment.

"I've seen you before," he said in a clear voice. "At the…"

"Yes. At the mental hospital. I came out the day before yesterday."

"I knew you straight away."

She could not stop herself saying, "And I knew you straight away."

"I know."

She noticed his finely shaped ears and square hands. "You'd better tell me what you want to drink. We can still talk."

"Yes. Three large pink gins and a dash of angostura bitters with soda. Friend of mine on the wagon. I'm called James Churchill."

"Catharine Casement. Any particular kind of gin?"

"I think the Plymouth. That's a pretty name."

"Half of it's not too bad. Would you like some ice?"

"Yes, please."

"In all of them?"

"Yes, please. How do you mean?"

"The Casement's somebody else's name. But I never see him. But I don't seem to be able to divorce him. He's in London. I live about fifteen miles away."

"You're not usually a barmaid, are you?"

"No, I'm not usually anything very much. This is my first day. That'll be seventeen and three altogether."

While he was taking out his money, the street door opened and four or five men came in. They all gathered at the bar and started looking at her.

"Thank you," said Churchill, not paying yet. "Can I take you home after you finish here?"

The new arrivals grinned and nudged one another.

"Well, I've got a car coming for me."

"What sort of car?"

"Well, it's a sort of taxi really, I suppose."

"You could cancel it, then."

"Yes, I suppose I could."

"Right." He handed over the money. "Thank you."

"Thank you, sir. Two and nine, one pound… Yes, sir?"

"You've got a moment to spare to get me something now, have you, love?" said the man she had addressed, grinning no longer. "Or would you rather carry on chatting?"

"I beg your pardon, sir, I'll get whatever you ask for immediately, of course."

"Oh. Well, uh, two gins and tonic and a pint of best bitter, one light ale, make those large gins…"

After staring at the speaker for some seconds, Churchill withdrew, a drink in each hand. When he came back for the other two drinks he told her he had to leave shortly but would be back later. Until he did leave she kept glancing over to the corner where he sat with his three companions, a pale man with a mustache, a man who looked like an Indian, an older man wearing a clerical collar. They talked animatedly now and then but kept falling silent. She missed their departure.

By closing-time Catharine was tired, but not too tired to be pleased with herself for not once having given wrong change. Through the open doorway she caught sight of Churchill waiting on the pavement. The unspoken questions she had thought she would never again put to herself about anybody formed in her mind. Is it now? Is it you?

When she came out he took her arm and walked her along to a small military car with a canvas roof but open sides.

"This was the best I could do at short notice," he said. "I'll get hold of something more suitable next time. Which way?"

She told him. There were cars backing and turning in the street ahead with a mixture of lights and shadows, and they had reached the last few houses of the village when he said,

"I've thought of you every day since I saw you."

"I've thought of you too." She knew now that she had, though until this evening she had not caught herself doing so.

"You looked frightened that first time. Were you?"

"Yes." She explained about the cat and the bird.

"But why should that have frightened you?"

"It was something I didn't understand but looked as if it was going to turn violent and horrible, and those two things together tend to frighten me."

"What, violent and horrible?"

"Well, more violent-and-horrible and I-don't-understand-it, really."

"Have lots of things like that happened to you?"

"There were quite a few at one stage." Catharine paused. "Just before I went into the asylum. About six months ago."

"Were they to do with Mr. Casement, the frightening things six months ago?"

"Yes. I'll tell you about them another time, but I will tell you."

"I hated you being in that place."

"So did I, but it was necessary, I suppose. Anyway, it must have done me some good, because here I am going about my own business like everybody else, not mad any more."

"You'd probably have got better on your own."

"Maybe. I doubt it, though. I wasn't in a good way at all. I couldn't carry on any more. I used to sit in my chair all the time because I was afraid I couldn't find my way back to it if I got up. It was like having something wrong with your eyes."

She looked at the small farmhouse they were about to pass. It was solid, like a building brick, pegged down immovably into the ground, staying exactly the same real size as they approached it, drew level and left it behind. Since they were moving, the fence that ran alongside the house could not do otherwise than seem to swing towards them and away again. On either side of them now were acres of uncultivated land, rising to low wooded hills that swept round in a semicircle ahead. If she could see them, these would appear small, because they were quite distant. Everything was as it should be, and so the loneliness round about did not matter.

"But it's all right now," she went on. "Which is much more interesting. I used to think that being mad might be rather fun. Inconvenient, of course, and awful, but quite exciting, with visions and things, and thinking the Russians were after you, and doing marvelous paintings. But it isn't at all really, not my sort anyway. Nothing ever happens. And the other people are such bores. Those first… weeks I suppose they were, it was like being on holiday in a lousy hotel with it raining all the time and you can't speak the language and let's say you've lost your glasses and can't read."

"Sounds a bit like the Army. I'm glad you're well now. And I'm very glad you got that job in the pub. If you hadn't, I might easily not have seen you again. You know, lots of times I wanted to go over to the hospital and try to find you."

"How would you have set about it? You didn't know my name or anything."

"That was what decided me against it. All I could have done was to walk round the place on the off-chance of seeing you."

"Just as well you didn't. If you'd stuck at it at all our learned Dr. Best would have clapped you inside."

"Oh yes, of course, you must have known Dr. Best."

"Why, do you?"

"Not personally. I know a bit about him from the chap I was visiting when I saw you. Did you ever run into him there? Name of Hunter, Max Hunter. He wasn't mad, only drying out after too much whisky."

"I may have done, I don't remember."

"Of course, he was only in there a couple of weeks. Hey, I had him with me when I was in the pub earlier."

"Which one was he?"

"Mustache. The one who wasn't with me the day I saw you."

"I don't remember anybody being with you then,"

"That is flattering. I'm afraid I remember somebody being with you."