The Memorial

THE MEMORIAL

THE MEMORIAL

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS MINNEAPOLIS

Copyright 1946 and renewed 1974 by Christopher Isherwood. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

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mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior

written permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square West,

New York, NY 10003.

First University of Minnesota Press edition, 1999

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-1986

The memorial / Christopher Isherwood. — 1st University of Minnesota Press ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8166-3369-X (acid-free paper)

I. Title.

PR6017.S5M4 1999

823'.912 — dc21

98-54201

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO MY FATHER

BOOK ONE 1928

I

"No, not really," Mary was saying. "No, it didn't really help things much."

The doors were ajar. Anne, sticking entertain­ment-tax stamps on to green and orange tickets, listening to her mother's rich lazy ironical voice, frowned.

Mary was describing over the telephone, for the twentieth time, the awful scare they'd had at last week's concert, with the Spanish Quartet. The 'cello and second violin—poor little things, they were almost in tears—had left their parts of the Dohnanyi locked up in a hotel at Victoria, and when Mary had gone round there in a taxi with only a quarter of an hour to spare, while they played the Schubert, she'd had the most terrific job persuading the staff to let her into the rooms. And, of course, it had all been very funny. Very, very funny, thought Anne, frowning. Very funny indeed.

"Ah, well; ah, well. That was just one of the awkward bits."

How Mother, loves all this. And why shouldn't she? Anne's eyes moved round the attractive little room, with stacks of papers everywhere, the Breton armoire, the Steinlen poster on the wall, the bed, the dressing-table, the shelf of yellow paper-bound books, the gay chessboard curtains at the windows. Rather like the inside of a caravan. At night you went to bed on the camouflaged divan surrounded by the day's debris—letters, newspapers, press cuttings, other people's musical instruments, tennis rackets, and usually a little dirty crockery or a few beer glasses which had escaped notice in the wash-up after a picnic meal. And this is my home, Anne thought.

The truth was, she was still feeling a bit peevish at having had to move into the music-room, be­cause of a Central School student whom Mary had invited in to sleep for the next fortnight, until she could get digs. The bed in the music-room had hot pipes running along the wall beside it. One woke up in the morning half-stewed. Why couldn't the wretched girl have known beforehand and made her own arrangements? But nobody ever knew anything beforehand here. Always these last-moment decisions, rushings out to get food, collect people for a party. Always this atmosphere of living in a railway station—just for the sake of living in a railway station. Anne yawned. But I quite see what fun all this is for Mary.

"Yes. We were bidden to a rich supper at the

Gowers'. My dear ... I ain't proud, 'cos Ma says 'tis sinful—but of all the . . . yes, you've said it____"

Not that she didn't work, harder than any office clerk, at her endless letters, which she answered in a great sprawling hand full of spelling mistakes. And the hours she spent at the Gallery, on a hard chair. And then having to sally out in the evenings to studio parties, concerts, shows at clubs, in order to meet, amidst the crush in the artists' room, some person who might, remotely, be "useful." Never tired, always ready to dance, drink, give imitations of Sir Henry Wood or Harriet Cohen, help cook somebody else's dinner, sing:

Late one night, at the theatre,

See him sitting in the stalls,

With one hand upon his programme------

Your Mother's wonderful, they said. Anne had heard it all her life. Your Mother's wonderful. It was quite true.

And feeling this, Anne smiled with real affec­tion at Mary, who appeared in the doorway, smil­ing, her hands full of papers, wearing an apron, a cigarette in her mouth.

"Did we send Mrs. Gidden her membership card?"

"Yes, I think so."

"She's just written to say she hasn't got it."

"Wait a minute, then, I'll look it up . . .yes, we did."

"The bitch!"

With indolent, unhurried movements, Mary added her papers to the pile on the table, selected others, copied an address into the members' book and strolled out.

The truth is, thought Anne, just avoiding stick­ing two stamps on to one ticket, I don't belong here. I'm not one of the Gang.

Yes, she'd felt it often. At charades, only a week or two ago, when they'd done the Ballet scene, and Edward had literally stood on his ear for about fifteen seconds. She'd found herself watching them, as though they were strangers. The curious thing is that Maurice belongs. It isn't merely a question of not being arty.

It wasn't that she was jealous of Mary. Not simply that. Though, of course, I am, slightly. She's awfully good to me. No, much more than good—really decent. Perhaps I should get on better as a lady. Living with Aunt Lily. God forbid.

I shall never be a tenth of what Mother is, thought Anne. And I don't want to be.

"Mrs. Oppenheimer wants two guest-tickets for a daughter and friend," called Mary from the next room.

"Right you are."

"I think the friend must be that plaintive little thing we saw at the Aeolian."

"Very likely," Anne called back, reaching for the tickets and entering them in the book.

If one had to criticise Mary, one could say nothing, absolutely nothing. She was above criticism. But must you always—Anne could some­times have yelled out—must you always be so tolerant? Had Mary ever, during her whole life, had any really absurd, old-fashioned, stupid pre­judice? Had she ever hated anybody? Had she ever really felt anything at all? One could hardly imagine it. Her utmost commendation of anyone: "That's a good number." Her utmost condemna­tion: "Your taste, not mine." She laughed things away—Bolshevism, Christian Science, Lesbians, the General Strike—"Not really very cosy," or, "I couldn't really fancy it meself."

I suppose I ought to go into a convent. A year ago Anne had seriously considered becoming a hospital nurse. She'd made enquiries, even tenta­tively mentioned it to Mary. And it was Mary's indulgent, ever so faintly amused smile that had made her feel: No, never. She couldn't. She could never face the Gang, who, with their little jokes, could turn it all into just one more new sort of game. The questions they'd ask. "Isn't it fright­fully thrilling?" "Isn't it simply terrifying?" "Isn't it tremendous fun?" I suppose I'm just being romantic and schoolgirlish. I used to want to be Joan of Arc. It's all Sex. Good old Sex. I'm being screamingly funny. But I do long, long for someone

who hasn't got this tremendously highly developed sense of humour. She thought at once of Eric. No, Eric wouldn't laugh.

There was the telephone again. Mary in the doorway, smiling: "For you."

Anne got up, felt herself beginning to blush, frowned, walked through into the other room. Should she shut the door? Damn it, no.

And as she picked up the receiver, her voice seemed to go suddenly out of her control. Smooth, false, clear as crystal, she drawled:

"Hullo, Tommy. How goes it?"

The anxious little voice at the other end made her smile faintly to herself.

"Oh, my dear, did you? But how too thrilling___

How too splendid. . . . But that sounds most excit­ing. I'm sure I should love it. ... Wait a minute, my dear, I'll just look and see. I'm not absolutely sure. . . ."

She turned, to catch sight of her flushed cheeks in the mirror. Should she? Would it be amusing? Oh, well, yes. She sighed. Not exactly from bore­dom. Tommy always made her feel—responsible.

Out of bravado, she looked into the other room, where Mary was getting on with the tax-stamps.

"Is there anything special on, this evening?"

"No, I don't think so. I shall probably look in on Georges' little do. I might catch Hauptstein there."

"And you're sure you can manage with the rest of the stuff for tomorrow?"

"Perfectly, thank you, my dear."

Mary smiled. Anne explained, with sudden ex­asperation :

"I'm going out to the theatre. With Tommy Ramsbotham."

"Give him my love."

Their eyes met. Unwittingly, admiringly, Anne grinned at her Mother, thought: You think you're so jolly sly, don't you?

"And do try," said Mary, "to find out some­thing more about the second Mrs. Ram's B."

"I don't expect Tommy knows much."

"Perhaps the whole thing's just another Chapel Bridge fairy story."

"I shouldn't wonder."

"It certainly doesn't sound like our Ram."

And in due course Anne was plunging into a simple but very smart frock, touching her lips with red, powdering, slipping on her new shoes—the complete box of tricks. It was like packing up a parcel of presents for a child. Oh, she felt thirty-five at least—so sophisticated, so chic, so wearily false, so benign, so maternal, so—good God, yes— so tolerant. She peeped at herself in the glass. Whisked downstairs.

She knew the whole programme. It had been

repeated so often. Tommy loved doing things in style. It was no good fussing, or telling him that he was spending all his pocket-money. He did so enjoy it. Am I a fearful cad? she'd often asked her­self, looking round some quite grand restaurant. She decided that she was, and had better get slightly tight. Of course, at the theatre, it would be stalls. She sat beside him, watching a revue, simply trembling in her eagerness to be amused, to show that she was amused. And how he laughed when he saw she was laughing. And if he started laughing first, he looked back, as it were, holding out his hand, imploring her to follow. And then came the interval, when he said very negligently:

"What do you think of it?"

"I think it's absolutely marvellous," she'd say, beaming super-gratitude at him, as though he'd written book and music and was taking all the parts.

"Not too bad, is it?" She could hear his joy, his pride in the revue ring like a telephone bell through his drawl.

And then she'd ask him about the office and whether the work was very hard and how he liked it. And he began to tell her, carefully and seri­ously, suddenly breaking off with:

"You're absolutely certain I'm not boring you?"

Her tone crossed its heart, kissed a dozen testa­ments. She simply couldn't be sufficiently posi­tive:

"My dear, I think it's most frightfully interest­ing."

And then they'd go on to the little place he took such pride in being a member of. His only regret was that it wasn't naughtier. It had never once been raided. And here she was soon beautifully muzzy, giggling up at him as they swayed about the room. Now she didn't care if she was a cad or not. Part of the wall was made of looking-glass. She kept catching sight of herself. Really, she had to admit, those eyes were pretty striking—and how really exquisitely I dance. She sparkled at him. He was flushed with happiness. In the taxi coming home she'd fairly ask for it. He kissed nicely. Life is so terribly complicated, she thought, stroking his hair. I suppose I oughtn't to be doing this. Why the hell not? Oh damn, we're in the King's Road already.

"I say, Anne, you are marvellous."

"Good old Tommy."

When they arrived at the mews she generally had enough sense to insist on his keeping the taxi and going straight back to his digs. Otherwise, he got maudlin. To make up, she kissed him in front of the driver. I am a harlot, she thought.

And next morning, of course, there'd be the usual reaction. It wasn't fair. If he were just an ordinary young idiot—and she'd met plenty. But Tommy was different. He really adored her. What a pleasing thought. She couldn't help grinning as

she pronounced the word mentally to herself. But no, it wasn't fair. It would be almost better if she were just a harpy, luring him on. But I am fond of him, Anne thought. That's what makes it so im­moral. I blow hot and blow cold. If only the poor darling hadn't given himself away so completely. He would put all his cards on the table. He was utterly reckless. He liked to humiliate himself. And that made it so much worse for her. This fatal feeling of security made her tease, patronise him. She behaved vilely. And she knew that he went home and brooded over every word she'd uttered, won­dering: Now what, exactly, did she mean by that? The worst moments were his proposals. That was really the most exquisite misery. She suffered for him—pins and needles, daggers. While he ex­plained his prospects. Gerald didn't care much about the business. And if he, Tommy, worked, it was only a matter of time—"I know it wouldn't be much of a life for you, up there," he said. Some­times she thought him quite shameless, playing on her pity. He was so dreadfully constant. She felt that she'd really been his only love from the cradle —Gatesley was practically that—and would be till the grave. If only he'd flirt with another girl and I got to hear of it, Anne thought, I might be honestly jealous. Yes, I should be. And then we should have got somewhere. But Tommy had no guile. He just lay there and waited to be stepped on.

As the bus turned into Cambridge Circus, Anne saw him faithfully waiting, under the shelter of the Palace Theatre. And suddenly she had a most unpleasant, apprehensive, sinking feeling—worse than she'd ever felt before. It was as if she were going bad. She was neither chic, false, modern nor benign.

Oh hell, she thought—I'm afraid I'm not going to enjoy this evening at all.

II

The little Society to which Major Charlesworth and Mrs. Vernon both belonged met once a week throughout the winter months. Every week it visited some monument or relic of old London—a church, a city hall, an Elizabethan gateway in the corner of a Thames-side goods yard. Its members were chiefly oldish single women, young board-school teachers with pince-nez, an occasional clergyman, scholarly and querulous, asserting him­self at lectures—earnest, curious, simple people, making their rambles into a little cult, mildly perti­nacious, not daunted by the jokes of draymen or the stares of guttersnipes, determined to see everything, but glad of their tea.

Ronald Charlesworth admitted to himself that he felt out of place amongst them. The obvious slight pleasure of the spinster ladies at having a military gentleman in their ranks added to his em­barrassment. But he wasn't going to be put off. As a young man he'd stood a good deal of chaff from his brother officers because of his fondness

for museums, art galleries, old bookshops. Now that he was retired, middle-aged, with the War over, he could indulge his hobbies in comfort. Every week he was to be seen, at the back of the crowd—because, with his height, he could see over them easily—slightly stooping, his beauti­fully shaped jaw somehow recalling that of a warrior in a Japanese print, listening to what was said with a proud, delicate humility, his hands crossed like a martyr's on the crook of his per­fectly rolled umbrella.

Ronald's friendship with Mrs. Vernon had be­gun quite naturally, the first time she had attended one of the Society's meetings, some months ago. The effusive lady who organised the Society's affairs had introduced them. They chatted about the place they had come to visit, their eyes asking the question: But why are you here? Neither looked the part of archaeologist.

In appearance Mrs. Vernon was no more than thirty, and yet a curiously mature air of sadness and quietness surrounded her, so that he knew, after a few moments, that she must be ten or fif­teen years older. She seemed sad, even though she laughed and smiled and talked in a rapid eager way about old pictures and old buildings. Since he had known her, she had been dressed always in black, which accentuated the fairness of her hair and skin and gave her sometimes absolutely the look of a child.

After the Society's meetings came always the question of tea. Sometimes the places they visited would provide it, free or at a shilling a head; some­times they had all to make for the nearest con­fectioner's. At such times, Mrs. Vernon and Ronald naturally drew together, recoiling, without snobbery but by natural instinct, from the rest of the party. They had plenty to talk about. First and foremost, their mutual hobby. Ronald was surprised at her knowledge. It was not great, but it was much greater than he would have ex­pected from a woman. And her feeling for the Past, for the romantic aspect of History, charmed him.

From archaeology, they passed over many topics. He discovered that Mrs. Vernon painted; had painted, rather. She had done nothing, she said, for years. Thus it came about that she asked him to her flat, to tea. The portfolios of water-colour sketches she showed, with many apologies for their faults, made him insist that she ought to have kept it up.

"I haven't cared to," she answered, smiling sadly, "since the War."

And at that moment, though she hadn't made the faintest movement, Ronald noticed on the mantelpiece a silver-framed photograph of a man in uniform. Mrs. Vernon had never spoken to him of her husband. Himself so sensitive, he recoiled immediately, blamed himself for his clumsiness in

paining her with his questions. But she, as though guessing this and wishing to reassure him, had continued:

"My husband was an artist, too. He was far better than I am. I should like to show you some of his work."

How beautifully, he felt later, she had said this.

Though they met often, their friendship grew slowly. But it did grow. Ronald was as shy as a schoolboy. He foresaw or imagined the approach of a snub and drew back long before it reached him. He showed Mrs. Vernon his flat, his small collection of etchings, his few valuable books. They went together to hear lectures at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Lonely himself, having few friends even at his Club, suffering often from the after-effects of en­teric fever, which he had developed during the Boer War, Ronald yet thought of Mrs. Vernon's life as being lonelier still. At times, he pictured her as a sort of nun. She seemed so serene and calm. Once she had told him smilingly that her maid had given notice and been gone a week. She had been living, she said, on fruit. She liked it. She was in no hurry to get another. Ronald had been seriously alarmed. He was sure that she would be utterly careless about food, perhaps forget to

eat altogether. She might make herself really ill. She looked as fragile as air. Yet he dared not say anything, lest he should seem to intrude upon her life. It was only by casual and tentative questions that he later ascertained that another maid had been found. Going to tea with Mrs. Vernon a few days after this, he saw the new maid for himself and was infinitely relieved.

For some time he had no idea that Mrs. Vernon had a son. When she did at length refer to him it was quite casually, and yet Ronald felt at once that behind her assumed indifference there was a tragedy. She spoke about something he had done as a boy, and it was as if she were talking of some­one who had died. Evidently there was some shady business. Perhaps he'd forged a cheque. Probably worse. Was living in disgrace. And it must have broken his mother's heart. Ronald was a mild man, but he felt himself utterly without mercy in his judgment of that young bounder, who'd behaved so vilely to her. The only thing that could be said for him was that he had the decency not to show himself.

She had spoken to Ronald on more than one occasion of an old house in Cheshire where, he gathered, she had stayed for some years since her widowhood. It was the house of her husband's people. She showed him some of her water-colour drawings of it. And now, she said, this house was shut up and empty, in the hands of caretakers. When she spoke of it, her eyes had tears in them.

Oh, it was cruelly unjust, it was fiendish that she should have so many sorrows to bear. She seemed to have lost everything that she'd valued in the world. And yet she could still be so sweet and gentle, without any bitterness. And he, he'd have gladly been flayed alive if that could have lightened all this sorrow for her by one particle. He grieved over her in secret. He dared say nothing, not one kind word even, for fear that she should be troubled or embarrassed by his interest.

Ronald, with his Japanese warrior's jaw, his ill-health, his etchings and books, could hardly re­member that he had ever been attracted deeply by a woman. Except in a purely physical sense, and that was when he was quite a boy; tall, clumsy, ignorant, turned out into a barracks to make his way somehow, being a younger son. He had been a dreamer, then, from shyness. He had protected himself from all that dangerous, half-alluring, half-disgusting side of life by secreting around himself a shell of action, hardship, routine, friendships with brother officers who eventually married and asked him to be their best man. And from this shell of action he had preferred to watch women moving about on the edge of his world, like shapes in water, beautiful, mysterious, with waving tendrils and blossoms. But that was years and years ago.

Now he sat in the Club drinking Sanatogen and

hot milk, thinking with pleasure that tomorrow the Society would meet for its weekly excursion.

They met, that afternoon, in the grounds of the house they had come to visit, an old mansion in the far western suburbs—the country residence of a family which was just about to relinquish it. In a few months the low white building with its Ionic portico, its Queen Anne windows, its long vista of shaven lawns between high elms which did not quite hide a steady stream of cars and buses along the distant road, would be sold, the house pulled down, the land used for building, for allotments, for playing-fields. The boards were already up at the drive gates, and the old caretaker who received them seemed bowed with the sense of impending disaster. The whole spirit of the meeting was tact­ful and hushed. Permission to view had been ob­tained as a special favour. There were three Lelys in the long gallery and a landscape by Cotman. They would be sold at Christie's. Some wonderful Jacobean furniture. The family had been driven into hotels, on to chicken farms, away to the south of France. The caretaker was alone, waiting for the enemy.

As Ronald walked slowly up the drive, the moist gravel shrinking crisply under his feet, the air of the avenue, bare as it was of leaves, clammy—it must always be clammy in that low-lying spot—

he was filled with the oppressive yet faintly pleas­ing reverent sadness which he so often experienced on these occasions. Mrs. Vernon was standing on the steps of the house. She smiled.

"I've been waiting for you," she said.

It was not the first time that this had happened. It was, to him, one of the most charming intimacies of their friendship that she liked to see everything at the same moment as himself, comparing impres­sions and scraps of knowledge with him.

She wore grey today, not black. And this seemed exactly to suit the mood of the sad, cloudy afternoon and the abandoned rooms of the mansion, where chandeliers hung from moulded ceilings, draped in holland bags. Their visit was somehow like a religious ceremony, and their eyes met with the expression of people who regard each other for a moment in church. The caretaker's voice echoed dully down the corridors. Ronald and Mrs.Vernon addressed each other occasionally, in low voices, remarking on a piece of china or the back of a chair.

At length, when they stood looking out over the lawn from a window on the second storey, she said:

"I can't bear to think of all this passing away."

There was real emotion in her voice. It moved Ronald deeply.

"People want to destroy all this," she said. "But what have they got to put in its place?"

The courage of her reactionary romanticism

moved him. He was a reactionary himself, perhaps, but, reading the newspapers, he had felt a con­fused enthusiasm also for housing schemes, playing-fields, London as a garden city. He belonged to both camps. She did not. He honoured her for it. Standing at the window, in the waning afternoon, with her slight figure, her low voice, she seemed to be crying out against that distant stream of scarlet buses and dark closed cars sweeping by the gates. She challenged the future with an extraordinary passion of quiet resentment. There were tears in her eyes.

"They've got nothing," she said.

He mumbled some words of agreement.

Mrs. Vernon seemed pleased at his support. She smiled sadly and yet gaily.

"At any rate, they've got no use for us."

III

Coming down the gas-lit mews with three beer bottles under her arm, Mary experienced, as often before, a pang of love for her home. My dear little house, she thought. It was full of people. The front door stood ajar. Lights shone from all the windows. Odours of fish-pie met her as she set foot on the stairs—which were really only a very steep step-ladder covered with linoleum. Mary had once tripped and slid down them on her seat, shooting right out into the mews and the presence of several astonished chauffeurs, clutching a new loaf.

"You've left the door open, Earle," called Mar­garet's voice from above; "somebody's got in."

They peeped down at her:

"Oh, it's only you, dearie. We were afraid it was more uninvited guests. There's enough of us as it is."

"And to think," said Mary," of your poor old Ma running all the way from the Goat in Boots because you'd left your key behind. I thought the music-room window was bolted."

"So it was, but that didn't deter our Maurice. He climbed the drain-pipe."

Maurice, in shirt-sleeves, waiting for Anne to tie his evening tie, grinned.

"Look here, my Tad, you know I don't like my sanitary system to be used for your gymnastic dis­plays."

They all helped to lay the table, pushing past each other in the narrow doorway, each carrying a single fork or a plate.

"Oh, children," said Mary, "it's very kind of you to help Mother, but, you know, I could get the whole job done in two minutes alone."

"That's all right. Just you sit down and rest, Granny dear. Somebody get Mary her Bible and her cashmere shawl."

"I say, we just must subscribe for one. Wouldn't it be too suitable for the Gallery? She'd be exactly like those dear old pets one sometimes sees in ladies' cloak-rooms."

Earle came out of the kitchen:

"Say, if you don't eat your pie soon, Mary, I guess there'll be nothing left but the fish-bones."

"Oh, Earle," said Margaret, "you mustn't guess so much, my dear, really. It simply is not done. In this country we confine ourselves to the direct statement."

"Oratio Recta," said Maurice.

"Oratio what did you say?"

"Oratio Recta."

"I don't think I like that expression at all."

"Where's Eric," Mary asked, "and Georges?"

"Eric rang up to say he might be late," said Anne. "He's got to go to a committee meeting. He says he'll probably take a sandwich and eat it on the bus."

"And Georges isn't quite comfortable about something in the Hindemith."

Sure enough, Mary could hear the sound of a violin coming up from underneath the stairs. There was a stove near the coal-hole door and Georges liked sitting with one leg on either side of it and practising.

"He's scared stiff," said Maurice.

"He's not half so scared as I am," said Earle.

"I expect you'll forget your Debussy in the middle and have to play 'Mary Lou'."

"Nobody would notice."

"Don't you get being so nasty, my boy," said Mary. "You ain't got no call ter be so bitter at your time of life, and you so 'andsome."

"I think Oldway would notice," said Margaret. "He'd write that Mr. Gardiner's tempo left much to be desired."

"Now, children," said Mary, "we must eat. Maurice, don't be a pig. If you're too proud to have your dinner with us, you can leave ours alone."

Maurice was at his usual trick of sampling the food. He licked his fingers.

"Yes, I'll pass that. But it's not so good as the

one we had when Edward was here. He's easily the best fish-pie maker we've got."

"You might tell Georges we're ready," said Mary to Anne, glancing quickly—she couldn't help it—at Margaret's face.

"Heavens, I must wash," said Margaret. "I'm simply filthy."

Eric sat at the card-table, murmuring:

"Only members sign. Please give up your guest-tickets inside the door."

Rich old ladies in black silk, with veils, assisted by artistic nieces, passed along the passage into the concert-room, complaining of the stairs.

"My dear, are you sure this is the place?" one of them asked, with distaste.

Lady Croker, always rude, said that the passage was too narrow. The headmistress of a large girls' school gushed to Eric:

"We're sure this is going to be a real treat."

An elderly colonel, sent by his wife, came out to complain that members were keeping as many as three seats for friends and putting mackintoshes on them. A small newly joined member couldn't be­lieve that one was allowed to sit wherever one liked. Two or three men lingered by the door, waiting for their chance to ask Eric where the lavatory was. A flustered lady wanted to know:

"Can you tell me, will my membership card and

these three guest-tickets cover the next three con­certs, if I bring a friend who had a half-season ticket last year but couldn't use it?"

Eric had to deal with all these people. Some­times he referred them to Mary, who was standing just inside the door. He could hear her strong re­assuring voice, soothing all these unhappy creatures, promising everything, anything:

"Oh, yes, I'm sure that'll be perfectly all right."

Students came from the Royal College, bringing gaudy cushions, knowing that they were too late for the deck-chairs. Pale cultured Jews, rich amateurs. An Oxford don. The critics, with peev­ish frowns of predisposed boredom, treading on, other people's toes. A few millionaire bohemians, in suits of rough, baggy, expensive tweed. A French teacher of languages. A famous actress. A chem­istry master from a public school. Fragments of talk:

"Yes, the Upper Sixth are doing The Merchant of Venice this term."

"Roy scored in the last seven minutes. At the end, I simply couldn't talk above a whisper." ,

"Oh, but you missed something if you didn't see the private rooms upstairs."

And now they were mostly inside. The chatter had died down. Clapping. Beginning of a Bach partita. Eric pushed open the door and came quietly into the concert-room. Mary made room for him in her corner, at the back. The concert-room was the Gallery. Bright canary-coloured nudes in stockings on striped sofas hung round the walls, alternating with rather scratchy still life, a plate of gritty-looking bananas or a knife, a folded copy of Le Matin, one kid glove. The rigged-up stage was backed by sackcloth curtains. Georges' huge body dwarfed the little violin, like an enor­mous mechanical appliance required to perform a very delicate and minute task. He held it with grotesque tenderness, like a baby, his double chin doubled against it. Earle, when he came on to play the Debussy Preludes, was very nervous. He sat down in a rapid, preoccupied manner and started without waiting for any applause, as though he'd just hurried back from answering the telephone to resume work. What a noise he could make! "I didn't know he had it in him," Mary whispered to Eric, at the end of the second piece. "The only question is: will the platform stand it? We ought to have lashed the piano down with ropes."

Yes, he really is my idea of a saint, Anne thought, her eyes resting on Eric's tall bony figure, there in the corner, by her mother. You could have put him straight into the Bible, just as he was, in his plain, but obviously rather expensive dark suit, with his metal-rimmed glasses and the odd pauses in his speech, relics of his stammer. He wouldn't be out of place. There was something ancient and sombre

about him. And when he looked at you, you felt that he was absolutely honest and fearless and good. He had beautiful eyes.

Perhaps they were all just a little bit afraid of Eric—yes, even Mary. They showed it when they chattered to him and made jokes in their own lan­guage, trying to pretend that he was one of them­selves and nothing to be alarmed at. They knew quite well that he wasn't.

And really, what did any of them know about him, that mattered? What had made him, for in­stance, at the time of the General Strike, throw up his whole Cambridge career just when he was doing so brilliantly and was the coming man, as people said, and take to this work of his ? Of course, it was all perfectly splendid—so splendid that it made one feel a little uncomfortable and chilly to think about it. Eric certainly wasn't interested in politics any more. From something he'd once said, he seemed to lump Communists and Fascists and everybody else together in one heap. And now that he was rich, he was carrying on just the same. He must spend at least half the money from the estate on his various funds and societies and clubs. Wealth only made him slightly more remote from them—though he was very generous, and had taken to presenting Mary with bottles of her favourite brandy. How strange it was to think of him—their own age—being confided in and seriously consulted at committees and organising

relief work and making reports. Fancy herself doing that—or Maurice either, though he was so very much the business man now. And Eric never forced his work on their notice. Indeed, he often apologised for it—as when he came for the evening and had to explain that he'd told somebody they could ring him up there at such and such a time. He was always busy.

I wish, thought Anne, I had the nerve to talk to Eric. A really good talk. I should—yes, it sounded rather absurd, but I should like to ask his advice. She felt she'd take what he said as a kind of oracle. About all sorts of things—well, yes—curse it— about Tommy.

"I'm relying on you, my dear, to make this evening bearable," Lady Klein was saying to Mary as the last of the audience filtered out. Eric, on a step-ladder, was helping Anne unpin the sackcloth curtains from the wall. Already, the men had arrived to fetch away the piano. Mary was tidying up, encouraging one or two enthusi­astic younger members who had volunteered to stack the deck-chairs in the cupboard at the back, counting some money which she had illegally received at the door, for tickets, in envelopes.

"I'll do my best," she promised.

"And bring anyone you can. I must fly off. I'll tell the car to wait."

"More work for the troops," said Mary to Anne and Eric, when she'd gone. "Be little heroes, won't you, and help your old Ma?"

Lady Klein's house had no carpet on the polished stairs. A precaution, somebody said, against drunkards. In the drawing-room there were Ming horses, Chinese embroidery, lacquer, old glass and modernist lamps with petal-like brass shades, possibly designed to represent Mexican desert plants. In the dining-room was a portrait by John, and supper. Bowls of salad. A chicken or two. Fruit. Somebody was playing on the spinet in an alcove. Everybody was standing up. The whole company slowly and uneasily circulated, like granules in amoeba. Eric had the feeling that he must keep turning round and round lest some kind of area of danger should form behind his back.

He talked to Priscilla Gore-Eckersley and Naomi Carson. Looking round, he saw Mary, like a veteran warrior at bay, amusing, single-handed, six or eight people. Georges was hemmed in by admiring women eager to talk French. Sir Charles Klein, a frank, simple man, came forward to congratulate Earle. He had been im­pressed by Earle's hitting in Ce qu'a vu le vent d'Ouest. "By George," he said, "I shouldn't like to pick a quarrel with you, young man." Margaret's laugh squealed out. And there was Maurice, just arrived, with the girl he'd been taking out to dinner. Yet another new one.

The women laughed. Priscilla and Naomi laughed, anxious to be amused, never amused. Do they despise me as much as I despise them, Eric wondered. The proud enemies, smoking, laughing. "It sounds amazingly funny." No, they were not to be despised. They are formidable, Eric thought. Tell me, what is it you want? he would have liked to ask Priscilla Gore-Eckersley, the biologist, who had done so brilliantly in all her examinations, who lectured at the London Uni­versity. She was questioning him about the work in South Wales. He began to explain to her the system of food tickets given by the Guardians. Part of the groceries obtained with the sixteen shillings-worth food ticket, Eric explained, has often to be given to pay the rent. Becoming serious, forgetting the Kleins' party, he described, with brusque gestures, a town where fourteen of the nineteen pits had been closed down and thirteen shops in the main street had had to shut. Even the Chair­man of the Board of Guardians was nearly starving. A man who owned four houses was starving be­cause he could get no rent and because, as a house­holder, Guardians' relief was impossible. Every­body suffers. The children are tubercular. Families of eight share a room. The houses are mostly condemned. People live on bread and pickles.

She nodded seriously, moving her eyelashes. But why are we talking like this ? Eric wanted to yell at her, becoming aware again of her half-naked body, cunningly concealed and revealed by the sex-armour, her Eton crop, her plucked eyebrows, her scent—Good God, why are you so dishonest? Quick, let's go upstairs. There must be a bed somewhere in this damned house. But no, she didn't seem to want a bed. Not with me, at any rate. Then why does she waste my time? He turned from her to Naomi, the less subtle whore, who had asked, smiling:

"Eric, couldn't you possibly get me a job in a Communist Sunday School?"

It was the usual cry. Somebody do something. The party was beginning to stick. Lady Klein looked grim. Charades were suggested, with enthusiasm. But nobody wanted to act.

"Mary as Queen Victoria."

"Mary as Queen Victoria."

"Personally, I've never seen this immortal performance."

"Oh, but, darling, you must. It's classic. Mary, do!"

"Mary, you must!"

"Don't let us go down to our graves unsatisfied."

"But you've all seen it," Mary protested.

"We all want to see it again."

"Very well. But I must have my full London company. Let me see, who's done this before?"

Various performers were present.

Yes, and Margaret was the lady-in-waiting. But what about Lord Tennyson?

"The heavy lead? Oh, that was Edward Blake. Don't you remember how screamingly funny he was in that beard, reading In Memoriam?"

"What a shame he's not here."

"Out of Town, isn't he?"

Well, at last they were all chosen. Lady Klein, beaming gratitude, conducted Mary and Margaret to one of the best bedrooms, loaded them with clothes, old lace, brooches, everything for make­up.

"Just use anything you like."

"Thank you so much. We won't be long."

Mary sat down at the glass and began doing her hair. Margaret was listlessly inspecting the pile of scarves and shawls. Abruptly she exclaimed:

"Why the hell doesn't he write, or something?"

Mary went on steadily brushing. She said soothingly:

"Edward was never a model correspondent."

"Oh, I know. . . . But this time it's different." Margaret's voice was shaking. "Mary, what do you think has happened?"

"My dear, what can possibly have happened?"

"Oh, God knows. Anything. Everything. In the state he's in."

Mary twisted her hair into a bun:

"We're certain to hear tomorrow."

"My God—I can't wait much longer."

Mary rose from the mirror with a sigh. Mar­garet sat huddled on the bed, her shoulders shak­ing with sobs. She was fraying the border of her handkerchief with her teeth.

"If you like, I'll tell them you're feeling a bit rotten. Eaten too much caviare. You stay here. We'll manage somehow without you."

"Thanks awfully, Mary. But I shall be all right in a minute. I am a fool to behave like this."

Mary rummaged in her bag:

"'Ave a drop of Mother's curse?"

Margaret gulped at the flask. Then she came over to the glass, dabbing at her eyes.

"Gosh, don't I look bloody awful?"

"I say, Eric. There's something I want to ask you as a very great favour."

The party was breaking up. Eric had watched Maurice telling his girl to wait for him for a second and come hurrying across the room. He couldn't help smiling a little in anticipation.

"What is it?"

"Well, you see, Eric, it's like this—you know I always get off very unexpectedly—today, for instance, I hadn't an idea until I saw my boss at half-past twelve that I could wangle a night in

Town—as it is, I've got to be back at the Works at nine tomorrow—and, as you know, it's nearly the end of the month and I don't like to keep asking Mary------"

"How much do you want?" said Eric, smiling.

"Well------"

He could see that Maurice was wondering if he still remembered that other little favour, not to mention a ten-shilling note, "just until I get change," the day they'd all gone out together in the car. Eric felt so sorry for Maurice in his em­barrassment that he hastened to say:

"I'm afraid I've only got £2 on me and some silver. Will that be enough?"

Maurice's face cleared with relief:

"Rather. Thanks most awfully, Eric." He grinned and added, with an air of great candour: "I haven't forgotten the—the other, as well, you know."

Never mind that, Eric refrained from answer­ing, lest he should hurt Maurice's feelings.

"And, of course, I'll let you have it first thing tomorrow's post."

"There's no frightful hurry," said Eric.

IV

As the maid brought into the dining-room a silver dish of chestnut cream, Lily was saying with a sigh:

"Yes, the days are really getting longer now."

Eric did not move. His mother did not look at him. She had placed the table-spoon and fork further apart, brushing the tumbler with her silk sleeve, making it faintly ring. A sailor was almost instantaneously drowned. The maid put the dish down on its little mat.

Eric looked at the ceiling. Lily piled up his helping, leaving only a few mouthfuls for herself. She began to eat, with the gestures of one who is never hungry.

Eric looked at the ceiling, at the sky behind the solemn window with its silver-blue silk curtains. He thought: Why need we go through this? Which of us wishes it? His brain was numbed by the warmth of the closed room. Smells of Old Kensington—rotted potpourri and cedar wood burnt on stoves.

He looked at his mother. She smiled. Asked:

"You like this, don't you?"

"Yes. It's my favourite pudding."

Her faint smile did not question the dullness of his answer. She is only, thought Eric, asking: You admit that I've done my part?

Bowing his head, his mind wearily answered hers:

You've done more. You've done everything.

The telephone bell rang. They heard the maid's mincing reply:

"Yes, this is Mrs. Vernon's flat."

"Is that someone for me?" Lily called.

"Yes, m'm. It's Major Charlesworth."

"Does he want me to speak to him?"

"If you could spare a moment, he says."

Lily smiled, rose. She disappeared into the hall. Eric sat listening to his mother's voice. It was quite changed in an instant. Her telephone voice. Gay, almost playful:

"Yes. Yes. Good morning! Yes, I'm going, certainly."

Eric took a nut from the bowl of fruit.

"Yes, I think your best plan would be to take the Underground to Mark Lane and a bus on from there. It puts you down almost at the door."

Back she came into the room. How strange. Eric had the faint, often repeated surprise of seeing that she had after all not turned into a young girl, to match that voice. Yet she did not

seem old. It was difficult to see where her fair hair was mixing with silver. She smiled sadly and brightly:

"It's my little Society, you know."

She smiled. She asked:

"Why don't you come with us next time we meet? I suppose you wouldn't care to?"

"I'm afraid things of that sort aren't much in my line."

Touching the little bell-push concealed beneath the table, she asked:

"Would you like coffee here or in the drawing-room?"

Thinking: I shall be sooner away, he mur­mured :

"In here, if you don't mind."

The coffee things came in. Eric had the tray placed before him. Lily faintly smiled. Ritual survives, he thought. She values that. He placed the spirit-lamp beneath the flask of the percolator.

"You see I've got some new cups?"

"Yes."

"How do you like them?"

He looked at them dully. Cups, he thought. Cups.

"They're very nice."

She seemed pleased.

"I got them at that new shop just opposite the Bank. I don't know whether you noticed it as you came past today?"

"No, I didn't."

Lily sipped her coffee. She said to the maid:

"Just bring in the cigarette-box from the draw­ing-room, please."

It came in. The silver box with the signatures upon it in facsimile of the friends of Father's who'd given it as a wedding present. Inside it was an un­opened cardboard packet of cigarettes.

"Those are the sort you like, aren't they?"

"Yes, thank you. They are."

He broke open the packet, lit a cigarette. He didn't want it. She said:

"Why not take the whole packet?" She smiled sadly. "They'll only get stale."

"Thank you very much."

Obediently, he put them into his pocket. She watched him smoke.

"Have you been back long?"

"Only three or four days."

Why do you ask all this? his mind appealed to hers.

"What part of the country were you in, this time?"

"In South Wales."

Suddenly, she gave a bright, quick, playful smile, like a child asking:

"Tell me the names of the places," then added, as though challenging him laughingly to refuse her: "I like to look them out on the map."

She was extraordinary. She could always astonish

him. He repeated the names dully. She repeated them after him, asking how they were spelt.

"And where shall you go to next?"

"I don't know," he lied.

She smiled. It seemed to him that she under­stood perfectly what he felt, had even taken a gently mocking interest in seeing how far he would allow himself, today, to be questioned.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed. He pre­tended surprise, clumsily, unused to such man­oeuvres :

"I must be in the City in half an hour."

"Must you?" She smiled sadly. They rose. She asked:

"When am I to have the pleasure of another visit?"

He flushed.

"I may be going away again soon. I'll let you know."

"You mustn't come unless you can spare the time. I don't want to keep you from your work."

Again she was sadly mocking. But he would not reply. She asked, as though without object:

"Shall you be seeing the Scrivens before you leave London?"

"I saw them last night. There was a concert."

"Oh, how nice!"

Eric challenged the wistfulness of her tone.

"If ever you cared to come, I'm certain they'd give you a ticket."

"That's very kind of you." She shook her head, smiling. "But I'm afraid it would be wasted on me. I don't understand music."

"Neither do I." His sudden exasperation made Lily smile. "But that needn't prevent your coming if you'd like to."

"I don't think I will, thank you, darling. I very seldom go out in the evenings now."

Yes, actually, he could swear that it had amused her to break through his carefully and painfully prepared armour. His armour of politeness, mild­ness, dullness. She said very sweetly:

"You'll give my love to Mary, won't you, when next you're there? I haven't seen her for ages. Tell her that any time she cares to, I should be de­lighted to have her to tea. But, of course, I know she's very busy." Lily was helping Eric on with his overcoat. "I've nothing very important to do myself"—she suddenly uttered a quiet laugh— "and so I always feel I may be rather apt to forget how hard other people in the world are working."

She came with Eric across the little hall to the door of the flat. Her manner changed.

"I hope your landlady feeds you properly?"

"Of course she does," he forced himself to smile.

"And doesn't put all sorts of ridiculous extras on your bills?"

"No."

"Well, good-bye, darling."

"Good-bye, Mother."

He stooped and kissed her cheek. Had an im­pulse to bolt down the stairs. Rang for the lift.

Out in the street, walking fast, he thought dully: Why do I come here? What makes her wish to see me?

She can trifle with all this, he thought, in a sudden gust of anger. It costs her nothing. She doesn't feel. For her this is only pleasant, sad. It's a sentimental luxury.

No, he thought, that's utterly unjust. I'm a brute. I'm vile to her.

Darling Mother. Can't I help her? Must we go on like this? It seems so miserable and senseless. His mind ranged for solutions, followed the old circle. No, there's nothing.

Nothing, nothing, he thought—seeing a tram, people shopping. Sane women with baskets choos­ing fish, or materials for curtains. Sensibility is an invention of the upper class, he had read, had said. Suppose one explained everything to that police­man. Don't get on with yer Ma, eh? After all, some of it could be translated into that language. But he would expect a black eye to be shown him, or a bruise inflicted by a poker.

It was a lovely afternoon. He had vaguely intended a walk in the Park. But bright, clean Ken­sington, with its nursemaids and old ladies, so prim and cosy and well-to-do—no, Eric was still haunted by the memory of a Welsh village. The strangely compact blocks of cottages, like the key­board of a piano, mounting the hill. The sombre' and motionless headgear of the pits. Men loung­ing in groups at corners. The rain-drenched land­scape. The grey sodden sky. No, he must do some sort of work. He'd go back to his rooms in Aldgate and write a few more pages of his report. Later, he might see how they were getting on with the new room at the Boys' Club. And he'd promised his friend the probation officer to see if he could trace an ex-reformatory boy whom they'd got a job as boots in" a commercial hotel and who'd disappeared. His uncle, who lived somewhere in the neighbour­hood of Hackney Marsh, might know where he was.

V

Edward Blake stood for a moment at the corner under the lamp-post, swaying gently on his toes. Behind him, the Tiergarten lay inky black. Patches of snow gleamed bluish round the feet of the bare trees. In the Sieges Allee the lights shone brilliant and hard as diamonds upon the icy array of statues. It was much colder than the North Pole.

Edward didn't feel the cold. He started forward again, his overcoat flapping loose around him, singing to himself. He was beautifully warm all over, and the thing which kept whizzing round in his head gave him a pleasant sensation of deafness which was in itself a kind of warmth, blunting the edges of the freezing outside world. For quite con­siderable distances he walked almost straight— then suddenly he made an erratic swerve, wander­ing to the brink of the roadway or stumbling up against the steps of a statue. Whenever he did this, he saluted or said: Excuse me.

Edward knew the statues well. Heinrich das Kind was of course his favourite, but Karl IV. was

the one he really liked. Karl and he had something in common. Karl always looked as though he'd seen something particularly fetching on the other side of the road. When Edward reached him, he sat down for a little on the steps. Then he got up and wandered on.

"Well," said Edward, aloud, but not addressing the statues, "here I am, you see." For it had sud­denly struck him—how queer; ten years ago I wasn't allowed to come down this road. Now it's allowed again. And in ten or twenty years' time perhaps it won't be allowed. How bloody queer. In 1919 we were going to have bombed Berlin. Mathe­matically speaking, there's no reason why I shouldn't be dropping a bomb on myself at this very moment.

Somehow or other he got across the Kemper Platz without being run over. He had a curious feeling, as though he weren't allowed to look either to the right or the left, was in blinkers.

He'd been walking for hours and his feet were tired. He'd been right up in Pankow and down through Wedding. He'd stopped at least twenty or thirty times for drinks. Well, he was nearly home now. In the Potsdamer Platz an omnibus bore sud­denly down upon him, seeming to swim out of the darkness, waving its lighted fins. He had to jump for the pavement. Why, I might have been killed, he thought—and this was really extremely comic.

His hotel was in aside street behind the Anhalter

Bahnhof. Edward steadied himself, said Guten Abend to the girl in the office, took his key from the hook. He met nobody on the way up to his room. At this time, early in the evening, the place was very quiet. He flung open the door. It banged against the foot of the bed.

How extraordinarily bright the electric light was. Its reflection flashed from the mirror of the ward­robe and from the mirror over the monumental wash­stand. The room was warm. Too warm. Edward sat down on the bed. The brightness of the light made him dizzy.

He rose and opened his suitcase, which stood on a chair. Yes, they were there all right. The two envelopes lay on top of his folded clothes. He took them out. Miss Margaret Lanwin. Eric Vernon, Esq. He opened Margaret's first. Three pages of it. How beautifully it's written, Edward thought. How bloody lucky I wrote it while I was still sober. Dear Margaret—By the time you get this I hope you'll be thinking a little better of me than you do at present.

Damn these explanations. And they'll read it all out in court. I could post it now, though. No, Edward decided, sitting down on the bed, I can't be bothered. He tore the letter up slowly. But per­haps they'll find the pieces and stick them to­gether. The Germans are said to be a patient race. Better burn them. He went over to the washstand for the soap-dish, dropped the pieces into it and

set fire to them. Then he carefully took the ashes, opened the window and scattered them out. Better clean the soap-dish too. It might be a clue. While he was cleaning the soap-dish, he dropped it. It broke in three pieces. Oh hell, thought Edward. But it'll go on the bill. I suppose somebody'll pay the bill.

He opened the other letter:

"Dear Eric,

At my Bank there is a small black metal box. Will you see that all the papers inside it are destroyed?

I am asking you to do this because you are the only person I can trust.

I am leaving you some cash for your funds. Spend it as you think best. Edward."

Yes, that was all right. He put it back in the suitcase and closed the lid. Should he lock it? No. That would only make extra trouble.

On the dressing-table lay the card of the man he'd been to see yesterday. The psycho-analyst. Somebody had talked about him at a party at Mary's. He was wonderful. The best man in Europe. Had had great success with cases of shell-shock. Edward had thought: Perhaps he could make me sleep.

But, of course, it had been just like all the others. A darkened room. A man in cuffs. Questions about

early childhood. There was a man Edward had been to see years ago, just after the War, who'd elicited with great triumph that once or twice, in 1917, Edward had as good as run away. He'd faked attacks of rheumatism, got several days' sick-leave. "And so, you see," the bright little doctor had explained, "we're at the root of the whole trouble at last. Subconsciously, you've never for­given yourself. Now you must try to look at this reasonably. Think of your splendid War record. Everyone must have periods of relapse. We aren't made of iron. There's no disgrace at all. None at all. Under the circumstances, it was really quite natural." "Under the circumstances," Edward had replied, "I'm willing to bet they wouldn't have got you into one of those bloody machines at the point of the bayonet."

Yesterday, the doctor had been very hopeful. It seemed to him, he said, a perfectly plain case. Yes, thought Edward, and it'll be plainer still to­morrow morning.

And now he opened a drawer. Took out his leather collar-box. Undid the strap. The little auto­matic lay within a coil of collars. It flashed in the light. Edward took it out, weighing it in his hand. It was bloody small. Again he mistrusted it. Surely it couldn't fail? Not if I'm careful. But he wished he had his Service revolver. That would have made a good old mess.

Standing in front of the mirror, opening his lips,

pressing the stunted muzzle against the roof of his mouth, he posed. That was right. No, tilt it back a little. Must be very careful not to point it too far forward. He swayed. The blood was pounding in his ears. I wish I wasn't so drunk. No, better do it lying down. I shall be steadier.

Lurching slightly, he moved towards the bed. As he sat down he became aware of his coat. A pity to mess a good overcoat. He took it off, dropped it across a chair. Now. He sat down again, sank back heavily. Lay staring a moment at the ceiling. Raised the pistol to his mouth.

Should he turn the light out? No. He couldn't get up again. Couldn't move any more. If no­body heard the shot it might go on burning for hours. It didn't matter. They'd put it down on the bill. They'd put everything down on the bill.

He closed his eyes. Immediately the blood-beats in his head quickened to a smooth, rushing, roaring sound. Louder and louder. He had the feeling that he was losing consciousness. Dug the muzzle hard against his palate. Further back. No, it didn't matter. A tremendous roar. Like falling. The first time you jump with a parachute. Yes. Quick. Now. Raising himself upon one elbow, he fired.

A bright surface. Pattern of cubes. The bright edge intersected the dark. A solid oblong shape

bulging towards the top. The wardrobe seen from the floor.

Edward blinked. His eyelids were sticky.

Periods of coma passed like clouds over his brain, lasting a few seconds perhaps, or several minutes. Periods of awareness of the intense brilliancy of the electric light. He blinked. Something moved above him. It was his foot.

He had fallen off the bed and lay with his head and shoulders on the mat.

Sending out cautious messages, he established contact with his right arm, raised it a little, let it fall. His left also responded. He put his hand to his lips, held it up to the light. Blood. Not much.

O Christ, thought Edward, I've mucked it.

He wondered dully how much damage he'd done. So far, he was not aware of pain. Only a dazed sense of nervous outrage, as though something inside him had been snapped off short, leaving a jagged stump. It made him sick and faint.

I've mucked it, Edward repeated to himself.

Consciousness sharpened again, and he collected his forces for a movement. One. Two. Three. He swung his feet off the bed. His heels banged on the floor. That was better. Next, using his elbows, he rolled right over.

His elbow rested on something hard. He picked it up, holding it close before him. It was the auto­matic. The muzzle was caked with blood. Looking at it made him feel extra sick, so he let it fall. Sick.

Yes, he was going to be sick. At once. On all fours, he scrambled across the room to the slop-pail— just in time. It was mostly blood. Ugh! Filthy! He rested, gasping, panting like a dog, his eyes full of tears. A few drops of bright new blood spilt from his lips on to the floor. But more did not follow.

Gripping the corner of the washstand, he crooked one leg under himself, rose.

Immediately the room and the brilliant light made a smooth half-revolution, like an oiled fly­wheel. Edward reeled and fell across the bed.

After this he lay for some time, perhaps a quarter of an hour, staring at the ceiling.

I've mucked it, he thought.

The wish grew inside him to rise, to get out of this place, into the air. Cautiously he sat up, steady­ing his nerves against the giddiness. It swept over him and passed. He rose to his feet. As he shuffled forward, his feet kicked the pistol. It couldn't lie there. Sitting down on the bed, he hooked it towards him with his instep, captured it at last. Bending forward very slowly, he picked it up, closed the safety-catch, put it into his pocket.

Again he rose. Carefully steering his body with his will, he crossed to the mirror. Stared at himself. He wasn't such a sight as he'd expected. There was a smear of blood on his cheek and a stain run­ning down from the corner of his mouth. And his mouth was pulled rather sideways. He looked as if he'd swallowed a dose of some nasty medicine.

Turning, steering himself, he picked up his overcoat from the chair, let it fall. He hadn't the strength to put it on. He was shaking all over. Sweat ran down from his hair. Out. He must get out quick.

He made for the door, twisting the light off as he went.

There was nobody in the passage, though he could hear people moving on the floor above. He didn't care whether he met anybody or not. They shouldn't stop him. He groped along the wall. At the stairs, he nearly pitched head-first down. He had to sit on the steps for a minute to recover.

Fresh blood was beginning to come from his mouth. He fumbled and found a handkerchief, pressed it to his lips. He must hurry.

Nobody in the office. He stumbled against the door. In the street the cold gripped like iron. It cleared his brain. A passer-by glanced curiously at him, but did not stop. A taxi. He waved to it. It drew up. Where to? Edward suddenly realised that he was crumpling in his fist the psycho-analyst's card. What a joke. He gave it to the driver, who read out the address slowly. Edward plunged into the car.

A stab of pain like a hot lancet slid between his eyes. It had started. Edward uttered a groan and lay back, covering his face with his hands. The taxi swung to the right, to the left. He was, suddenly, horribly seasick, tried to put his head out of the

window, failed, and vomited on the floor. The pain struck him again, turning everything black.

They were helping him up some steps, into a house. The taxi-man and someone else. Edward tried to apologise for the mess he'd made. Put it on the bill, he wanted to say. He only coughed. And here was his friend the analyst. He doesn't seem very pleased to see me, Edward thought.

They'd laid him on a couch. People moved about. There were lights and voices. Somebody was telephoning for an ambulance. Immediate opera­tion, and a lot he couldn't follow. Hands sponged his face.

Well, thank God, thought Edward, they'll do me in between them, that's certain.

BOOK TWO 1920

I

Lily, with her feet up on the chintz window-seat, her cheek resting against the oak shutter, thought: How tired I am. How terribly tired.

It was past eleven, already. Kent, on the box of the victoria, drove round and round the sundial like a clock. The August morning was warm and heavy and moist. The elm-tops were steamy. The atmosphere was drowsy with inaudible vibrations of the distant mills.

Lily thought: It will be like this always. Until I die.

From right across the valley, overlooked by the other window of her bedroom, at the back of the house, sounded the thin wild mournful whistle of a train. A pang caught at Lily's throat and her eyes filled with fresh tears. I ought to be glad to think of dying, she thought. This moved her. She uttered a sob, but others did not follow. She wiped her eyes. Almost immediately she had put away her handkerchief, more tears began to trickle down her face.

This year she had taken more and more to cry­ing when alone. It was becoming easy, a habit. She knew this and must stop. Somebody, or several people, had told her to be brave. Be brave, she re­peated to herself. But now that word had no mean­ing. It sounded rather idiotic. Why should I be brave? Lily thought. Who cares whether I'm brave or not? I'm all alone. Nobody understands or cares. She let the tears stand in her eyes, run down her cheeks, spill into her lap. While the War was still on it had been different. She could be brave then. While the War was still on her grief had had some meaning. She was one of thousands. They seemed to be encouraging each other, standing together. There was patriotism and hatred. You saw car­toons in newspapers and posters on walls. Lily re­minded herself that all these mothers and widows, or nearly all of them, were alive today. But they no longer counted. No, we're done with now, she thought. There's another generation already.

And at the thought of this new generation, so eager for new kinds of life and new excitement, with new ideas about dancing and clothes and be­haviour at tea-parties, so certain to sneer or laugh at everything which girls had liked and enjoyed in nineteen hundred—at that thought Lily felt not a pang of sadness but a stab of real misery. She was living on in a new, changed world, unwanted, among enemies. She was old, finished with. She remembered how, in schoolroom days, she and a

friend had giggled at their middle-aged gover­ness.

"You must try to live for your boy," somebody had written. Darling Eric, thought Lily mechani­cally. She always thought of Eric as darling, and her voice, saying the word, was almost audible to her. People didn't understand in the least. How on earth am I to live for Eric, thought Lily, when he's away at school eight months of the year? He was so young, too, when Richard was killed. We could never share this together.

She tried, all the same, to remember fresh scenes of Eric's childhood and boyhood. She saw him running about the garden on a day like this, five years old, in his red jersey and little spectacles. Poor Eric. Poor darling. He was always so plain. He didn't in the least remind one of Richard. Per­haps he was a little like dearest Papa. Lily smiled tenderly to herself and glanced out of the window. But the cockade of Kent's shining black top-hat still moved round and round the sundial. They would all be late. And then she had another memory of Eric, in his preparatory school Norfolk suit, with his new bicycle and another pair of spec­tacles, really hideous ones, made so as hot to mark the bridge of his nose.

Of course darling Eric would be the greatest joy to her always and the greatest comfort. And every year he would be older and more able to be a companion to her. But the word "companion"

stabbed through her again. A person who held your knitting. That's not life, Lily cried out to her­self. That's not life; people being kind to you and talking in gentle voices, trying to think of things which will amuse you. That's not life. She got up, and, walking towards the other window, looked out across the valley at the hills towards Yorkshire and the chimney of the bleaching works by the river and the eye-sore, the new sanatorium for con­sumptive children from the Manchester slums. "That eye-sore," she called it fiercely, to her father-in-law, who, as usual, grunted. But my life is over, Lily thought.

Perhaps from this very room the Vernon girl of the story had seen her lover drown. Two tiny figures in the valley below. She must have had a telescope. No, it was absurd. The tall stalk-like chimney trailed a long wavy smudge of smoke across the sky. Turning away from that view, so terribly nostalgic, Lily faced her bedroom, the re­mains of her life; the silver-framed photograph of Richard, taken just before he sailed for France, the hairbrushes she had had as a wedding-present, the black silk cloak—part of her uniform as a widow, laid out across the foot of her single bed.

A friend of hers, who had lost her son at Arras, had tried hard to persuade her to go to a woman she knew of in Maida Vale. Not stances, just you and she together, and the room wasn't even dark­ened. This woman had worked in a shop. She was

quite uneducated. Her control was a Red Indian. Lily's friend said how weird it was to hear her, when she was in a trance, bellowing in a deep man's voice and shouting with laughter. She was very small and fragile. It seemed that the Red Indian had told Lily's friend that her son was happy and waiting for her to come to him. The poor mother had been so much cheered. It was pathetic. But Lily couldn't believe. No, not in the Red Indian, at any rate. It seemed that there were some things we weren't meant to know. One reads books like the Gospel of the Hereafter and everything seems so certain and beautiful and comforting. And then you try to go one step further, and there is only mockery and blackness.

Yet the temptation was very strong and it was always present. Suppose one went to that woman and did get a message—-just a few words, anything, so long as you could believe it was real. Suppose some woman held your hands and began speaking to you in your husband's voice. In Richard's voice. It would be ghastly, wonderful. One might walk out of that room and never feel unhappy again. Or perhaps, Lily thought, I should go straight home and drink something to send me to sleep. Then we could be together again at once.

Some time ago another friend had impressed Lily very deeply by describing how she had seen her dead husband standing, quite plainly, at the top of the staircase in her own house. Lily's friend

had had no doubt whatever that it was really he, that he had come to console her, to show her that he was still alive in another world.

Lily thought a great deal about this. Finally, she knelt down and prayed that Richard might appear to her. She made this prayer for several nights. During the earlier part of the War, when Richard was still alive, she had prayed regularly for his safety. Nearly everybody prayed then. But since his death she had said a prayer only occasion­ally, or in church. Several days passed. And then one evening, as she was coming up the staircase from the hall to dress for dinner, she saw Richard standing in front of her. It was getting rather dark, and he appeared, strangely distinct, within the archway of the corridor. He was as she had last seen him, on his last leave, a slightly bowed figure in the British Warm and frayed tunic, his mild eyes wrinkled like his father's, but prematurely, with his deeply lined forehead and large fair moustache. There he was. Then he was gone. Lily, who had paused for a moment on the top step of the stair­case, walked dully past the place where she had seen him, and along the corridor, down to her room. For days she couldn't think clearly about what had happened. She attempted different moods, tried to feel that this was a sign, that at last she was calm, she was happy. But she wasn't. Doubts wearied her. She couldn't believe. She felt that what she had seen was a creation of her

own will. She had done something base in wishing to create it. Then she tried to put it all out of her mind. She never prayed to see Richard again.

Yes, I'm terribly tired, thought Lily. I'm absolutely worn out. I must stop worrying so much. I've got nothing to worry about now. This idea was as painful to her as the others. Her eyes blurred again. Is this all my share of life, she thought? Gone? Twelve years of happiness; paid for more than twelve times over in agonies of waiting during those awful months, expecting always the War Office telegram which came at last. Killed in Action. Lily was standing in front of the looking-glass.

Her lips trembled; she was frog-faced, half smiling. Somebody knocked at the door. She sighed deeply. Her face drew down at the mouth and eyes. She looked five years older.

"Come in," she sighed aloud.

She picked up her hat from the dressing-table and put it on, arranging the little veil. The hat made her eyes look extraordinarily lost and tragic. She could still occasionally feel the pathos of the sight of herself in black—a small restrained figure beside which always stood, in her imagination, the charming fresh image of a girl in spreading cream skirts and a large hat with flowers, puffy-sleeved; herself as a young mother. The knocking, discreetly insistent, was repeated. Lily frowned and called sharply: "Come in."

"Master's just gone down to the carriage, Mrs. Richard. He told me to tell you to be sure and hurry, because it's getting late."

Mrs. Beddoes smiled with the privileged irony of an old servant.

Lily said: "I've been ready for the last half-hour," and she too smiled—a smile, as she sud­denly felt—catching a glimpse of it in the mirror— of the most extraordinary pathos and sweetness. She saw the effect of the quick sad smile together with her slightly inflamed eyes on Mrs. Beddoes, who stood aside for her to pass with a certain added quality of respect. Respect for her grief. For the ordeal her feelings were about to undergo. Poor Mrs. Richard.

Lily passed quickly down the gloomy corridor on light footsteps, her cloak about her. A shaft of sun­shine full of teeming motes struck down across the staircase from the small high mullioned window. The staircase creaked even under her weight. The heavy baluster-heads of carved oak fruit were nearly black with age. She paused for a moment, half way down, and stood, as she often did, taking in the silence and age of the house. The huge and faded piece of tapestry clothing the wall above her. The cheese-coloured ovals of faces painted upon wood three hundred years ago. The clock's tick like a man walking in armour. And as Lily stood there, she could feel so wonderfully calm and happy that it was like a kind of hope growing up

inside her. She thought: No. I shall never forget him, never. I shall never forget our life together. I shall never forget how happy we were. Nobody can take that away from me. And after all, Lily thought, I shall be brave. It's quite easy. I shall be able to be brave and smile and be wonderfully sympathetic to every one, simply because nobody knows what my life with Richard has been. How marvellously happy we've been together. As long as nobody knows that and as long as I never forget what my life used to be like, I shall be quite contented. I shall be brave and I shall be safe, because nothing can possibly happen which will touch me again. Lily came down two more steps and now she was standing in the sunshine. She was standing there with her face lit pure gold, like an angel, when Eric came running up the stairs to fetch her. He was pale and breathless. She seemed to dazzle him.

"M-mm," he blurted at her, with his painfully uncouth stammer.

"Darling, you must remember to count before you speak. You're getting worse than ever."

"I'm s-s-sorry."

He stood before her, so uncouth, looking more than his height with his shambling limbs and clothes just slightly too small. Lily hated the bother of buying clothes and Eric never seemed to have any ideas of his own except negatives ones. Most boys of seventeen were so particular. Maurice had

looked quite grown up when last she had seen him in his best. And it isn't as if I couldn't afford it, thought Lily. I really don't know how Mary manages.

"Because I'm perfectly certain, my darling, that you could cure yourself if you'd only fight against it. You mustn't just lose heart. Every­thing can be cured."

As she said this, stretching out her gloved hands to straighten his tie, her face was radiant. It seemed to her that by uttering these words she was con­firming for herself the truth of what she had just been feeling. She looked tenderly into her son's eyes, through the lenses of his powerful spectacles. He had preferred steel ones to the much more becoming sort with horn rims when they bought a new pair last spring. She sometimes wondered whether he didn't take a perverse pride in looking as plain as he could. Smoothing his hair, she asked, smiling:

"Can't you really make it lie down better than that?"

He flushed, and she saw, with a strange sense of irritation, that she had made him feel ashamed of himself.

"I did t-try, Mums."

"Darling." She laughed gently, kissed him. "We mustn't keep Grandad waiting."

They went down, her arm beneath his, into the hall. Outside, in the frame of the porch, the garden

looked brilliant. The carriage was standing at the door, and John Vernon's back, hoisted between Kent and Mrs. Potts, filled the whole space be­tween the box and the seat as he paused in the act of mounting. They might have been handling a very large grey tweed sack, chock full, with its neck tied up in a white woollen muffler and a homburg hat perched on the top. Kent puffed, Mrs. Potts strained, they made a final effort. And the old gentleman, lifted by main force into the victoria, slewed round and sank heavily upon his seat. The springs of the carriage gave visibly on the far side. John Vernon's pink and attractive face, with its silver moustache and slobbery mouth like a baby's, was smiling with pleasure and amuse­ment at his own helplessness and weight, at the trouble he had caused and at having got once more safely into position for the chief adventure of his day, his drive. His soft white freckled hand held a half-smoked cigar dangerously near his opened coat front and his broad waistcoat, covered with those little food-stains which were Mrs. Potts' despair; as fast as petrol could take them out, more were made. Mrs. Potts advanced, anxious about the cigar. She signed to Kent, who, understanding what was wrong, contrived, in tucking the rug round his master's lap, to prop up the hand which field the cigar away from the flap of the overcoat. At once Mrs. Potts was all smiles with relief, and now Mrs. Beddoes, coming out of the house

behind Lily, joined her. Lily got into the carriage, kissing Papa good morning as she did so. She took her place beside him and Eric sat opposite. He was wearing his black school clothes and a bowler. They were all in black except John. Mrs. Beddoes had been sure the master would catch cold if he wore his top-hat. She and Mrs. Potts, grey-haired women in aprons, stood watching their master as the carriage drove out into the park. They came out after it to close the garden gates.

They both admire him tremendously, Lily thought. And with pride she reflected that her father-in-law had a dignity all his own. A dignity so intrinsic, so little dependent on outer appear­ances, that it could be appreciated by these two women who, for the last five years, since his slight stroke, had washed and dressed their master, performing the most menial offices for him, like nursemaids. There he sat, as the victoria bowled along the drive, across the bare stretch of the little park, broken only by clumps of bushes and small ponds, along the avenue of oaks, beeches and ash-trees, with his wide happy smile of contented ownership, looking at nothing, the cigar beginning to singe the fringe of the rug. He smiled as she moved it a little, smiling. She felt his hand to make sure that it wasn't cold. He gave a grunt.

None of the trees grew very high, because the park, although apparently so low-lying and even swampy, was on a higher level than the Cheshire

plain, and the wind blew across it from the sea: perfect hurricanes in winter and even today there was a little breeze. Papa had a story that, in the days when he still went for short walks, he had met an American sea-captain in the park. The sea-captain didn't seem to realise that he was tres­passing. He came there, he said, every day to get the air. It smelt, he said, of ozone. The finest air in the Midlands. Some people have cheek. There was a little ash-tree, planted the year Eric was born; and there, a bit further along, was another, planted on their wedding-day. And deliberately, because it gave her pain to think about it, Lily tried to remember a day even earlier, the day she had first come to the Hall. That was in the spring. And closing her eyes, she managed, for an instant, to see the park and the house as they had looked to her then, so different, yet really just the same as now, except that there were flower-beds round the sundial and the sycamore hadn't been cut down in the corner of the garden. But she didn't want to think of anything but the differences.

That evening Lily had knelt down in her dressing-gown with her elbows on the dressing-table, to get the full light of the candles burning on either side of the mirror. Opening the silk blotting-book, she continued her letter to her aunt:

"The house itself is partly Elizabethan. ..."

She paused, looking at herself in the glass. Her eyes held tiny reflections of the candle-flames. They were brilliant with happiness. Her bright hair flowed over her shoulders, her cheeks were flushed. What a day! Her diary—which she would turn to next—allowed one page for each, and she had a childish fad of filling each one exactly by making her writing either bigger or smaller. This evening it would have to be very small indeed.

"The house itself is partly Elizabethan." Lily gazed into the mirror, into the shadows of the enormous solemn best bedroom, with high-backed cretonne chairs boldly patterned. A fire burning brightly—put in, she felt, more to make her feel cheerful than because the weather needed it—could not dispel those shadows, it only made them more grotesque. There was a woollen-worked fire­screen, so charming and amusing, a real relic of the Early Victorians. And on the mantelpiece there were the most absurd little china lambs, with rough china fleeces, which you could use for striking matches on.

No, Lily couldn't feel that this room was really gloomy. She'd expected—but already she'd for­gotten exactly what she had expected of the Hall. Richard sometimes talked about it as though it were a perfect dungeon. And yet he was really devoted to his home; nobody could be more so. Of course, thought Lily, nothing could have seemed anything but perfect to me—even if it hadn't been; and it is!

". . . but it has been refronted," she wrote, with sudden decision, "and the mullioned windows on the right side of the porch replaced by sash win­dows, about the time of Mr. Vernon's great-great­grandfather."

Richard had been really amazed, and so pleased, when she'd asked his father about that, at dinner. Because, as he pointed out, she must have noticed it actually as they were driving in at the gates. They hadn't walked round outside at all yet.

"Lily notices everything," he had boasted, going on to tell them how she actually went into old churches — not during the service, of course— and took measurements with a tape measure, the length of the nave, breadth of the chancel, and so on, as well as making sketches of carvings and doorway ornaments, and put it all down in a book. "She ought to have been an architect," he went on, laughing, making Lily blush. But Mrs. Vernon had been so charming to her and so much in­terested, asking questions about St. Clement Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand. And then Mr. Vernon told her how some of the windows over­looking the stable-yard had been bricked up at the time of the Window Tax. Then he went on, speak­ing in his slow, rumbling voice, to tell a story about a Cavalier who had visited the house in the weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War to see his lady-love. The Vernons had stood for the Parlia­ment. One night the lady-love's mother had discovered that the young Cavalier was carrying secret despatches; among them, her husband's death-warrant. When the Cavalier left the house next morning he was accompanied by a servant who was to show him the ford in the river. The servant, at his mistress's order, led the young man to a place where the current was strong and the water very deep. The Cavalier was drowned, and the girl, watching the scene from her window, was driven mad. "They say she haunts the wood behind the house. That's the reason it's called the Lady Wood," said Mr. Vernon, with his slow, very charming smile. During dinner he had drunk none of his wine. Now he picked up his glass of Chablis, his glass of port, his whisky and soda, his liqueur, gulping them down straight away, one after the other. At each gulp he blinked and smiled. And this, too, seemed charming and amusing to Lily. He was like a child taking medicine. And he was so kind.

But everybody had been kind. Kent, the coach­man, had seemed to welcome her specially in the way he touched his cockaded hat, as she and Rich­ard got into the carriage at Stockport Station. Stockport, Richard said, was a dirty old hole of a place, but she'd liked it as they rattled over the setts. Of course, it was different from the South; grey, smokier, barer than anything she'd seen in London—but she was determined to find some romance in it. And Mr Vernon had supplied that.

"They always say," he told her, "Stockport is like Rome—it's built on seven hills."

And then there was the long drive through muddy, twisting lanes, past straggling houses, across the high-arched bridge over a canal, grind­ing with the carriage-brake on down a steep little hill. Richard pointed out two or three neighbour­ing "places," standing in fields, among trees. The unfamiliar names thrilled her. He was holding her hand.

Mr. Vernon was standing in the porch as they drove up. He was not quite so tall as Lily remem­bered him—at her aunt's house in Kensington— but perhaps that was because the whole Vernon family were above the normal height. She kissed him, turning to the tall dark girl behind, who she knew, of course, must be Mary, and shook hands with her, conscious all the while of the hall beyond, with its flagstones, and the big porters' chairs by the fireplace and the old portraits against the panel­ling. Yes, Mary had Richard's eyes, they were beautiful, but she wasn't so good-looking. Lily liked her, loved her, instantly. She was shy, rather awkward. She seemed so big, to Lily. Ought she to have kissed Mary? They smiled. Lily had just that impression of those lovely eyes in the plain, rather pale face.

Mrs. Beddoes, the housekeeper, was intro­duced. And Mrs. Beddoes half-curtsied as she said:

"Welcome to the Hall, miss."

That was almost too exquisite for Lily. She nearly took Mrs. Beddoes in her arms. And actu­ally she felt the tears in her eyes. They were all too kind. Mr. Vernon, tall, slow and stooping, with, his fair moustache and mild wrinkled eyes, saying: "I expect you'd like to see your room?" And Mary, moving ahead of her shyly, at the top of the won­derful carved staircase which was sloping sideways with age, opening the door: "I hope this will be all right."

"It's perfectly beautiful."

They paused, smiled enquiringly. Mary smiled quickly, oddly. She had a most attractive voice— rather husky and soft:

"I'm glad," she said. That was all. They were interrupted by the gardener's boy bringing up the luggage. Mrs. Beddoes came in to begin the un­packing. The whole house was in a bustle.

"We've been looking forwards to this for weeks, miss," said Mrs. Beddoes, when she was alone with Lily. "So has Master and the Mistress—you wouldn't believe."

Whatever could she say? She'd wanted then, as later, when she took Mrs. Vernon's hands and kissed her, standing beneath the great glass chandelier in the drawing-room, to cry: Thank you, thank you—thank you for living in this house, for being so perfect. She would have liked to be absolutely schoolgirlish. But since she was grown-

up and couldn't, she put on her nicest dress, the pink and silver, hoping it would please them all. And now, what was she going to say about all that to her aunt: in her diary? She gave it up. To­night she was too tired. But she didn't go to bed at once. She sat staring at herself in the mirror, silly with happiness, the jewel of her engagement ring against her lips.

"It scarcely seems possible that I have been here only a fortnight tomorrow," Lily wrote in her diary later. "Drove up the village with Mamma and Papa in the morning. . . ."

They drove up the village most mornings. First they stopped at the grocer's, then at the butcher's, then at the fishmonger's. The shop­keepers came running out and stood bowing at the brougham window. At the stationer's, where Mr. Vernon got his tobacco and mystery novels, Mrs. Vernon and Lily were left to travel on alone, visit­ing various poor houses in the back streets behind the Wesleyan Chapel. Kent was sent indoors with parcels, and women came out to thank Mrs. Vernon, wiping their hands on their aprons. Lily wished that they would have curtsied, as she'd seen the villagers do in a village in Suffolk where she sometimes went to stay. It was the only thing she criticised about Chapel Bridge—the people seemed so very off-hand. Their bows were little

more than nods. And the crowd of women in shawls and clogs whom one met trooping out of the mill at midday—they didn't even nod, they simply looked at you, not unpleasantly, but rather as if you were something in a museum. They seemed to take everything for granted. Once, this had struck Lily so forcibly that she had exclaimed in generous indignation, as they drove away:

"I'm afraid you're really too good to them, dearest Mamma. Unfortunately, that class can't always appreciate what's done for them."

Mrs. Vernon had extraordinarily delicate, pale Grecian features. Lily often thought that she was one of the most beautiful people she'd ever seen. She half-closed her eyes when she spoke:

"In this part of the world, my dear, one has to supply the appreciation oneself."

She lay, much of the afternoon and evening, on the sofa under the chandelier, in the drawing-room. Lily never heard what complaint she suffered from. She was simply fragile, as flawless china is fragile. Mary did all the housekeeping; Mr. Vernon brought her her books and papers from other rooms; she thanked them exquisitely by her mere gestures. She said:

"You all spoil me. I shall give you reason to regret it."

She lay with half-closed eyes, the white feather boa about her shoulders, wearing long gold ear­rings. And, as Lily looked at her, she sometimes

felt an absolute awe, an adoration. Mrs. Vernon seemed precious and sacred, like an ikon. Lily was secretly preparing an offering to make to her, a book of sketches of the Hall. When they were finished, she would bind them herself. Book­binding was another of her small talents. Richard, of course, had to be shown the book, under strict promises of secrecy, as it progressed. He had seen all her earlier water-colours and sketches. These, he said, were better than anything else she had done. They were marvellous. Lily basked in his praises.

"How could they help being," she asked, "when everything's so perfect here?"

"Before you came, it was the dullest old hole you can imagine."

"You don't deserve to live in this house," she told him, half-shocked, "you can't appreciate it."

"You've made me appreciate it," said Richard.

The weeks passed into summer. Mrs. Vernon had come out of doors to lie in a chaise longue under the copper-beech on the Terrace. Her red sun­shade protected her from the strong light streaming down through the leaves. Lily sat beside her. They talked of Lily's childhood, her dead parents, her aunt—to whom Mrs. Vernon asked always to be remembered in Lily's letters—of the wedding in the autumn. They talked of Richard—"You must promise me to take care of him," Mrs. Vernon had

said, and once: "My dear, how am I to forgive you for taking him away from me?" For Richard's work would be in London and they would live there, after the first year. But Lily answered: "You know, darling Mamma, that, if I could, I'd stay here always." Mrs. Vernon laughed and touched Lily's hand.

Once or twice a week they drove out in the victoria to pay calls. Often there were callers. The Wilmots drove over from Torkington, the Knowles from Mellor, bringing their visitors with them to see the Hall. There would be tea on the Terrace, and afterwards Mrs. Vernon would depute Lily— rather than Mary or Richard—to show them round. "Oh, she's much the best guide," she would say, smiling. "Lily knows the house better than we do ourselves." And so Lily, flushed with pride, would lead off Colonel Somebody or Lady So-and-So, be­ginning at the library and sparing them nothing, trying hard to communicate some part of her own glowing enthusiasm and sincerely vexed when the gentlemen seemed to prefer looking at her to ex­amining the Blue Dash charger on the chest by the window. Once she went as far as exclaiming: "I don't believe you're attending to one word I say." The military man was all confusion: "Oh, I say, you know—dash it, ha ha, is that quite fair? I give you my word of honour. . . ." "You wouldn't have liked it," Lily cut him short with a smile, alarmed at her rudeness, "if I hadn't listened to all those

interesting things you were telling me about the Boers."

On other days—and this amused Lily more than the County people—there were callers from Chapel Bridge itself. The vicar's wife came and the doctor and the manager of the bank. Lily described them all in her letters. She was seldom malicious, and could write quite sincerely that Mr. Hassop was "delightfully vulgar." She loved to see Papa stroll­ing with him in the garden, chatting so amiably, offering him cigars. Mr. Hassop made her feel the prestige of the Hall in the village, among the churchwardens and substantial men. He spoke of Papa always as the Squire, Mamma he treated as a kind of Queen. And really, thought Lily, they'd make a most imposing royal couple.

That summer, in the hot garden, it had been like a world where nothing will ever happen. Mamma under the tree, exclaiming, as visitors were an­nounced: "The Philistines are upon us!" Papa telling how an Italian coachman had jumped off the box and snapped Papa's walking-stick across his knee in a fit of temper: "And, if you'll believe me, he said neither Dog nor Cat—simply got back into his seat and drove as hard as he could go, down to the Villa." Richard's voice from the tennis court, calling the score. A beautiful, happy world, in which next summer would be the same, and the next and the next—the County gossip, the Balls, engagements being announced, girls "coming out,"

talk about the cost of keeping up one's place—the shooting, hunting, livestock—humorous allusions to people who'd made money in cotton—Mrs. Beddoes and the others passing between the tea-table and the cool house, with plates of cress and cucumber sandwiches. The old safe, happy, beautiful world.

Papa made a convulsive movement, as though to commit suicide by flinging himself out of the car­riage. He was only trying to throw away his cigar. Kent climbed down from the box and took it from him, while Eric opened the park gates. Lily had seen Kent light Papa's pipes, taking several pulls first at the pipe himself and wiping the mouthpiece on the sleeve of his coat. Another of his offices was to cut his master's corns in his attic smoking-room with a razor. Now he stubbed out the cigar against the wheel. Lily couldn't be sure whether he had or hadn't slipped it into his pocket.

She looked at her watch, leant forward:

"I think we shall be just in time, after all," she said to Mr. Vernon, being careful to pronounce the words very distinctly.

"What?"

He did not say What, but Whuh—this being an easy example of the grunt-language, unintel­ligible to almost everybody but Kent, Lily, Eric, Mrs. Beddoes and Mrs. Potts—in which he now

spoke, partly through infirmity, partly through laziness.

"I don't think we shall be very late, after all," said Lily.

Mr. Vernon gave his affirmative grunt. He smiled widely. He didn't care whether they were late or not.

And looking at him with tenderness, Lily well understood the admiration of Mrs. Potts and Mrs. Beddoes. She thought of his early travels. He had been all over Europe and to the East Indies and to America. He was never seasick—once, off Nor­way, the captain had challenged him to an endur­ance test—platefuls of cold mutton-fat—and lost. And on another occasion the whole crew had apologised to him next morning for feeling ill. He had proposed to Mamma seven times. He had played village cricket. Had spoken at the opening of Zenana mission bazaars. Had been a J.P. Had met Ford Madox Brown in Manchester and in­vited him over to see the tapestry. To Lily, he re­presented now the whole of the past—for Mamma was dead, Richard dead, her aunt dead—all that she loved and looked back to with regret.

But Papa could never have really understood Richard. She forgave him that. For nobody had understood Richard but herself. That was her pride and her consolation now. He should have been sent to Oxford or Cambridge and become a don, instead of going to Owens College and into

that solicitor's office. Richard had never cared much for being a solicitor. His talents were quite wasted.

Nevertheless, some of the happiest hours of their married life had been spent in museums, libraries, churches. Richard developed tastes which must have been latent all the time. He began to sketch. He became good—better than herself. She was so proud of his work and showed it to everyone who came to the house.

Outside the park gates the village began almost at once, with the hideous new pink brick villas they were building. Most of them were bungalows. The windows were decorated with chessboard panes of stained glass; flowers and fruits. And if you looked inside you were confronted with an awe-inspiring varnished contraption of drawers, brackets, fretwork and looking-glasses, a super-sideboard, covered with photos and fancy china bearing the arms of seaside towns. How do these people live? thought Lily, with a shudder. Where is the romance? They passed the Ram and began to clatter on the setts. She went back to her reflections. The village street opened ahead, two lines of plain dark Mid­land houses, a few small sweetshops, pavement, lamp-posts, no trees, the mill against the sky. Sud­denly, an idea which had been in Lily's head for a long time seemed confirmed. Darling Eric. He must fulfil what Richard would have wished. He must be a don. Everyone told her that he was so

clever. His History master felt sure that he would get an entrance scholarship to Cambridge. Of course. How delightful that would be. How happy it would make Richard. And Lily saw herself walk­ing with her son, arm-in-arm, along the most beauti­ful part of the Backs, where the trees are like ferns. He was wearing a gown and a white silk hood, and the college bells were ringing. Her eyes brightened with tears at the picture. And, because she couldn't describe it to him then and there, she leant forward and asked, smiling:

"How are you getting on with that book you've got to read, darling?"

The book was Pollard's Factors in Modern His­tory. Eric had got it and several others to read dur­ing these holidays. Lily had looked into it a day or two before and had asked Eric to read some aloud to her. It helped his stammering. She couldn't fol­low very much of it—the author seemed always to be alluding to things she hadn't heard of. She began to realise that History meant different things to different people. She'd always thought she knew a good deal herself. There was a time when she could have told you how all the English kings were related and who they married and the names of most of their children. But Lily took a great plea­sure in hearing Eric read the Factors, for it was all History, and how clever Eric must be to under­stand it.

When she addressed him now, he looked up, so

grave and preoccupied, with his ugly hands folded on one knee. It was easy to imagine him medi­tating in a study. He had been startled out of his thoughts.

"Oh, all r-right."

His answer was rather curt, very different from, the way in which he usually spoke to her, but Lily did not notice it. Already she was back again in the past. She had almost forgotten him. They were passing the mill, with its rows of blank windows, high above them. And now they were at the canal and looking down into the lock, the water so black and deep down, and the tall weedy gates letting through no more than a trickle. Lily had come up here to sketch while she was engaged. It made a beautiful water-colour. The bar of the gates, black and white, standing out against the distant hills, and the barge coming down with scarlet hatches, and the slope of the ground spread­ing away from you—the woods just below and the church tower showing. That picture had been one of Richard's favourites. They had had it up in the dining-room of their little house in Earl's Court all the time they were married.

"I should think we'd better sit at the back, to­day," said Lily to Mr. Vernon. "It won't be so far for you to walk; and there's sure to be a crowd."

Mr. Vernon smiled, grunted, nodded.

But immediately it occurred to Lily: I should hate people not to see him. The Squire. Lily felt a

tremendous loyalty to John as the Squire. He represented the Hall. There was a great deal of Socialism in the village, she had heard, since the War. Chapel Bridge had always had a tendency to Socialism. Lily had come to think of certain people as loyal to Papa and others as not loyal. Mr. Askew, who kept the paper-shop, was loyal. Mr. Hardwick, the bank manager, was loyal. Mr. Higham, the grocer, though polite to Papa's money, was not loyal. Lily remembered how good Mamma had always been to the people of Chapel Bridge, and it made her furious to think that these people or their children could repudiate the leadership of the Hall in the village life. But the fact was, the village was no longer a village, but a suburb. Rich men lived there, who went into business every day in quick trains to Manchester. Most of them had made money in the War. Lily could hate these people passionately.

But now they were stopping at the church. A great many people were standing round the door and in the churchyard. They were just going in.

"You let me get out first," she said to John, as she always did. As if she thought he might spring from the carriage and help her to alight.

Eric was out already. And now Mr. Hardwick, wearing a very high collar, was unctuously coming forward to give Mr. Vernon his arm.

"Good morning, sir. Good morning, Mrs. Richard." His tone was discreetly melancholy.

"One might say that this weather was quite ideal. Allow me. Thank you."

He was used to steering Mr. Vernon from the carriage to his seat in the bank office, where he was frequently informed tactfully of an overdraft,; and the extraordinary violence with which John left the victoria did not break his wrist. Kent brushed some cigar ash from his master's coat, quite unaware that he was making the same noises as when he groomed the horse.

John shuffled up the path to the church door on Mr. Hardwick's arm. Lily and Eric followed. Several people raised their hats with discreet re­spect. Lily felt resigned to their sitting at the back now that she saw what a lot of people had come. If they didn't, they would never get out for the dedication at all.

There was Mr. Ramsbotham. Whatever was he doing here? Lily didn't know whether she felt pleased or not that Mr. Ramsbotham had seen them and was edging his way up. No, she was not pleased, she felt—looking at his ruddy, veined face, with its cropped moustache, hairy lobes to the ears and rather bald forehead. He jarred upon her mood, so neatly dressed in dark blue, with a black tie. And, as usual, he was wearing spats.

"Good morning, Mrs. Vernon. Good morning, sir. May I help you find a seat?"

He disregarded Mr. Hardwick completely; but Lily didn't, after all, dislike him. Evidently he

knew how to behave. She had never seen him sobered down like this before. On that day he had shown them over the mill she had been shocked but rather intrigued by his naive vulgarity. "Well, Mrs. Vernon, I'm afraid this is rather an awkward step up. I won't look, I promise." Or his gallantry, asking her to advise him about some samples of coloured string: "We always have to ask the ladies, you know, when it's a question of taste." And then, when he came over to see the Hall, there were his jokes about the "Leather Bottel." And of course he had discovered that embarrassing circular hole in the seat of the porter's chair, under the cushion. All the same, thinking of these things, she couldn't help smiling at him slightly.

In silence, with heavy scraping of footsteps on the stone, the crowd passed into the church, where the organ was booming. Mr. Ramsbotham had taken control of Papa. They moved into the first of the pitch-pine pews. The crowd in front was so thick that there was no glimpse to be had of the Bishop. The service was just going to begin.

Lily looked round for Mary and could not see her. Was it possible that Mary hadn't come? Surely not. But with Mary anything was possible. She was so casual. Lily felt herself turn cold and hard with resentment towards her sister-in-law. She hated Mary for the feeling that was coming over herself, at this moment, in this place, when she wanted to be pure and free from any thoughts

except of Richard. Reminding herself of how she had felt scarcely half an hour ago, of her newly discovered calm and strength, she knelt down and closed her eyes. Her brain muttered words. In her heart she was praying: O God, make me happy. Let me be happy a little longer. But her brain did not know any prayer-words about happiness. It only repeated what it knew, tags about repentance, humility, goodness, mercy. Lily looked up towards God and saw the incredible blue roof of the chancel decorated with golden stars. And now the whole congregation was on its knees, repeating the correct version of the prayer she had imperfectly remem­bered. The mid-Victorian ugliness of the church, so gorgeous and solemn, with its ruby and emerald green and sapphire windows, bathroom marble tablets, scrollwork gas-brackets, check pavement and fancy organ-pipes, soothed Lily's mind. She felt a tenderness towards it, if only because Richard and she had laughed at it so often. She turned her eyes and saw Papa sitting bowed in prayer. He couldn't kneel. Eric's sleeves moved half-way to his elbows when he bent his arms. And why couldn't he tie his tie better? Her straightening had only made it worse. She would be sorry if Mary saw it. And this made her glad in a way that Mary wasn't there. But her heart was pure, now. She suddenly noticed Mr. Ramsbotham's striped cuffs.

They all rose to their feet for the hymn. For all

the saints. The draped flags showed against the altar for a moment down a long lane between the heads. Lily's voice sailed up. Who Thee by faith before the world confess'd. She sang beautifully, her eyes full of tears. Thou wast their Rock. Mr. Vernon's crazy tenor sounded in her ear. Mr. Ramsbotham was just audible. O blest communion! fellowship Divine! She couldn't hear Eric. She tried to see Richard's face before her in the air. The organ dwindled to vox humana for the Golden Evening. People round her were sobbing. Lily was in ecstasy. The last verse roared out in triumph. And it was their triumph—all theirs. They stood to attention while the Vicar read the names of the Fallen.

This part of the service had a strange effect upon Lily. The reading of the names, so crudely re­corded, alphabetically, without any preface or title, seemed ugly and brutal to her. She had been simi­larly struck, though not so strongly, by a call-over she had heard on a Speech Day at Eric's school. It had seemed to her that this was a glimpse of the real man's world, so hard and formal and cold. She had hardly thought of Richard, as one had to think of him, of course, turned forth over there, on the Other Side, with Frank Prewitt, Harold Stanley Peck, George Henry Swindells— all so naked and lost, clinging together, learning the new rules and ways, dazed and unfamiliar.

"Ernest Trapp," read the Vicar.

"Richard John Vernon."

"Timothy Dennis Watts."

His name had sounded quite strange to her. She thought: I don't care—I don't see why it should be different from over here. Why couldn't they have read out the officers' names first? She'd heard that the names on the Memorial were put in the same way. That was really disgraceful, because, in fifty years' time, nobody would know who anybody was.

The organ began to play, and the choir sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as the congregation filed out into the churchyard for the dedication. Mary appeared at the door and touched Lily's elbow. They smiled faintly at each other. Anne was with Mary. And behind them was Edward Blake.

The Memorial Cross had been erected on the spur of land at the back of the church, overlooking the valley. The dark edge of the hill rose behind it, and everybody agreed that the site could not have been better chosen, although it was unfortunately not visible from the road. Kent, who had been wait­ing in the porch, came forward and gruffly whis­pered to Lily that the boy had brought up the wreath from Dobson's. Apparently it was hidden away in one of the sheds at the back of the vestry, where the sexton kept his wheelbarrow and spades. Was it to be brought now, or later?

Lily wondered what other people were doing. They must have made some arrangement. If the

wreath was fetched out now, who would hold it during the dedication? They mustn't stand still either, or they would be left behind by the people on their way down to the Cross. On the impulse, Lily explained to Mr. Ramsbotham. He was un­expectedly helpful. He would go round with Kent and see about it at once; and then he would bring it to them, ready to be laid on the Cross. Lily thanked him with her eyes. Mr. Hardwick, not dashed by his earlier snub, appeared ready to give Papa his arm. People were very kind. Lily, emo­tional after the singing, felt a rush of kindness towards everybody, including Mary and Anne. In order to say something to her sister-in-law, for the pleasure of speaking to her, she asked where Maurice was.

"He couldn't come," said Mary.

Lily said "Oh," and smiled; for no particular reason, except that she wanted to show Mary that she was feeling quite differently towards her to­day. Perhaps they might see more of each other, Lily thought, impulsively. But Mary was so diffi­cult to understand. She smiled too. But her smile was somehow baffling. To Lily she seemed always to be keeping her distance, rather ironically.

And there was Edward Blake. Well, of course, it was to be expected that he'd be there. Richard's great friend. And now Mary's friend. Lily had tried so hard, in the old days, to like him—for every­thing in any way connected with Richard must be

likeable and nice—but she'd failed. Perhaps she'd just been jealous. That was natural. For he'd known Richard years and years longer than she had. Well, I needn't be jealous now, Lily thought. And he looked so tired and ill—no wonder, after the terrible things he'd been through in the War. After his flying accident, when for months, she'd heard, he'd been quite insane. Even now he'd a strange way of looking at you that was sometimes a little frightening. Lily felt glad that she hadn't to entertain him at the Hall. But poor Edward Blake, she told herself, forcing down her dislike of his presence, how terribly he must have suffered. The Bishop and the choir came out of the vestry door and filed in procession amongst the grave­stones towards the Cross. The orderly procession of surplices converged towards the dark straggling body of the congregation, from which detached themselves, forming into line, the ex-Service men, the buglers, the Boy Scout Troop. The order of the service must have been rehearsed, of course, but on the uneven, sloping ground the movements of the different parties were uncertain and tenta­tive. They shuffled into their places, forming three sides of a rough square. It was very hot and still, and various everyday sounds—the crowing of cocks on a farm, the wail of a train in the valley—were disconcertingly prominent. Lily was unpleasantly aware of the nearness of all these people. Of the stuffy smell of their mourning and of their Sunday

boots. Their grief, which had seemed beautiful and triumphant over death while they were inside the church, was now, under green trees, crude and hypocritical and sordid. Rooks flapped above them, scattering tiny twigs which fell from high aloft, spinning, to lodge on women's hats. People sniffed or cleared their throats. Some were coughing.

With an effort she withdrew her attention from these sounds and fixed it upon the Cross. She liked the design, and would have liked it a good deal better if there hadn't been so much ornamentation on the shaft. But it was in very good taste com­pared with the granite atrocities they were putting up in the neighbouring villages. She wondered what Richard would have thought of it.

Now they were all ready for the dedication to to begin. Lily and Mr. Vernon and Mary were standing almost directly in front of the Cross. Mr. Hardwick was on one side of Papa, Lily on the other. Mary was at Lily's elbow. Edward had with­drawn somewhere into the background.

Lily glanced round for Eric, and saw him stand­ing just behind, with Anne. Anne is getting very pretty, Lily thought. Both Mary's children were good-looking—Maurice even more so than his sister. But I wouldn't change my darling Eric for either of them, Lily thought. And, after all, Anne isn't so pretty as she might be. There's something wrong with the way her forehead comes down. And her face is too broad. As for Maurice, I don't know.

There's something about him one doesn't quite like. He reminds one slightly of his father. But I mustn't go on like this, Lily thought. Why can't I be nicer to Mary and her children? Besides, I see them so seldom. How could I possibly judge?

And now the Bishop advanced with his pastoral staff towards the Cross. Lily crowded all these thoughts out of her consciousness, crammed them into a back drawer of her brain. She was humiliated and penitent that they should be with her at such a moment. She closed her eyes, fastening the eye of her brain upon a needle-point of concentration.

Richard, she thought, Richard.

And now the Bishop turned to the Cross, speak­ing the first words of the prayer:

"O Lord our God, whose only beloved Son did suffer for us the death upon the Cross, accept at our hands this symbol of His great Atonement, wherewith we commemorate the sacrifice which our brothers made: and grant that they who shall look upon it may ever be mindful of the price that is paid for their redemption: and may learn to live unto Him who died for them, Our Lord and Saviour."

Richard, she thought, Richard.

The Bishop's voice, so beautiful, so confident, with such precise modulations, rose and fell:

"To the Honour and Glory of God and in memory of our brothers who laid down their lives for us, we dedicate this Cross in the name of the

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

Lily opened her eyes. She saw the Bishop, with his linen sleeves and the medals on his scarf. She saw the tall monument, the work of a good Man­chester firm, tastefully executed and paid for by the large, easily afforded subscriptions of grateful business men. But Richard isn't here, she thought —she knew, with horror: Richard isn't anywhere. He's gone. He's dead.

Giddy on the mouth of a black pit, she faltered, scarcely conscious, swayed forward in an instant's nausea of pure despair, saved herself just con­sciously from the fall.

A moment later she realised that she had caught hold of Mary's hand.

II

Mary was very much startled. She had been won­dering whether she ought to have ordered some more of that New Zealand lamb. There was the week-end to think of. Not that any of them liked it so much as the other. And we really must econom­ise over sugar, Mary decided. Nice-minded people had kept up their war-time habits, had ceased to want now what they couldn't get then. But the War hadn't cured Maurice of liking his three lumps a cup. As for saving, generally, it wasn't in her. She was snobbish about it. The idea of doing things stingily simply revolted her. Cooking in margarine, for instance, which most of their neigh­bours, who were much better off than they were, did as a matter of course. If you hadn't got the stuff—that was a different matter.

She returned to the service with a violent jerk.

"What's the matter?" she whispered to Lily. "Are you all right?"

Lily must have felt faint for a moment, but

she didn't show it now. In fact, she glanced up quite coldly at Mary and said: "Perfectly, thank you."

Mary couldn't help smiling. That was so ex­actly like Lily, to squeeze your hand one minute and snub you the next. But she really is extraordinary, Mary thought. I shall never be able to understand what she's driving at.

How strange it is, Mary reflected, to think of the days when I really hated her—almost as much as I hated Mother. The truth was, I merely wanted a scapegoat, and she was a stranger. It was easier to blame her than Dick. I suppose I was very unfair on her; not that it did her much harm. It wouldn't have kept her awake at nights.

The Bishop turned to address them from the steps of the Cross. He said:

"Today we are gathered together at the foot of this Cross by a common sorrow and with a common purpose."

But no, Mary couldn't believe that she'd ever hated Lily. It was impossible. She still looked so idiotically young. There was scarcely a line in her face, although she couldn't be under thirty-seven. And yet she was frightfully cut up when Dick was killed. That was genuine enough. But it isn't crying that makes you look your age, thought Mary. It's having to buy the dinner every day of the year for eighteen years, wondering what everybody likes and usually guessing wrong, and then to bring it

all home and cook it. Probably Lily had never cooked a meal in her life.

"There are some of us here today," said the Bishop, "who have looked on that scene of terrible desolation, who have seen, as I myself have seen, those shattered villages and streets, those blasted fields and those blackened trees. But to the others, those who have not seen that land, I should like to put this question: What did the War mean to you?"

Mary could answer that straight away. It meant filling in ration-cards, visiting the Hospital, getting up jumble sales for the Red Cross. It had meant coming up from London, because Father, after his stroke, had sent a message through Lily that he wanted her. It had meant leaving the little house in the mews. I'll go back there one day, Mary de­cided, if it's possible. Father, she knew, had wanted her to live at the Hall. And he'd have enjoyed hav­ing the children too. She was sure of that. But she couldn't. She wouldn't. Perhaps that was silly. Time changes everything. When Desmond left her, and Mother sent that message—how she got to hear of it was a mystery—that she could come back if she liked, Mary had torn the letter into little bits and burnt it alive in the stove. But it's no use being hectic. Mother was dead—and Mary was glad to hear of it; and yet it was painful for her to be glad. And when the War had come and she'd heard the last of Desmond and she knew that

Father would never get better, she was in two minds whether to accept. But this compromise had been wiser. She was sure of that, now. Lily and I couldn't have stayed in the same house together, Mary thought, for more than a week. I couldn't ever have lived in Chapel Bridge, and had Father looking in every morning on his way to the Bank. And what had the War meant to Father? Dick being killed, of course. But he had never cared very much for Dick, she sometimes thought. No, the War hadn't been very much to Father, who could still, even when they were shelling Paris, take his drives, which got longer every year, up the Devil's Elbow, away over the moors towards Glossop, the brougham full of cigar smoke and the smell of the rug being scorched by Father's fusees, Kent cursing—back for warmed-up lunch at a quarter-past three. Tea with tea-cakes at half-past four. The evenings upstairs in the attic, reading endless novels by Guy Boothby, William le Queux, Phillips Oppenheim. Sometimes he'd sit for hours holding one of them, upside down, staring at it, breathing heavily. Yet they were soon finished. If you opened them afterwards you would be sure to find a wad of damp tobacco stuck between the pages. Father was what Kent called "a wet smoker." On these novels, on this tobacco, on cigars, on absurd and costly presents to his grand­children—he had once given Eric a mechanical swan which went round and round by clockwork

in a tin basin—on huge tips, grocer's bills, losses through holes in his pockets, he almost incredibly managed to spend about two thousand a year. Thank goodness, thought Mary, I've got that money out of him for Maurice's school, whatever happens.

It was really hard on Father that he didn't see more of Maurice—his favourite grandchild. But it was so unpleasant bringing the children to the Hall. Not that Lily would make the faintest fuss, of course. Sometimes Father came over to lunch in Gatesley, and then Maurice entertained him the whole time, showing him card tricks, explaining how the dining-room clock worked, asking: "Grandad, what would you do if you were alone in a forest at night, and you had no matches, and no food?" balancing a cricket bat on his chin. But Father was getting too shaky for that now. She'd sent the children over to see him by themselves, but they hadn't enjoyed it much. They liked being on their own ground, especially Maurice. She didn't blame him. She'd got into the habit of sel­dom blaming Maurice, and this, no doubt, was bad. Maurice was altogether too charming. Again and again she saw Desmond, in the way he smiled, cut the bread, ran upstairs, described a conversa­tion. It was like the explanation of a trick. She could watch her son and say, yes—it was that which attracted me to his father, and that and that. She could only be taken in once in a lifetime, but

she could appreciate nature's cleverness. She could appreciate Maurice. This morning, for instance, she simply couldn't insist on his coming with them. And she might have known that Lily would notice—and remark on it. Well, let her notice. What had this service got to do with Maurice any­how? No more than with Anne. But Anne took after her mother. She'll make some man a good wife, thought Mary, with resentment against men. I'll try to see that he isn't a Desmond, at any rate.

"I want to suggest to you," said the Bishop, "that this Cross stands for Freedom and for Re­membrance. It stands also for Inspiration. I hope that, in days to come, the boys and girls who pass by this place will be told something of the heroism and self-sacrifice which it commemorates, and of the men who gave their lives in the service of that sacrifice."

There was one thing she would probably never tell either of the children. Desmond had spent his last leave in London. He had written to know if he might see her. They hadn't met for years. He didn't come to the house. He'd arranged a rendez­vous by Cleopatra's Needle. He was forgetting his way about London now, he said. He'd been abroad most of the time. He wasn't changed in the least. They had tea at a Lyons' and walked up and down rather absurdly, like people waiting for a train.

He swore she was the only one he'd ever cared for. Where are the others now? thought Mary. And when this War is over, can we start again? Will you take me back? Yes, he asked that. She felt so much older than he was, old enough to be his mother. His mother, who'd written several times from Cork, very bitterly. She believed that Mary was the seducer, the betrayer of her son. He'd broken her heart. "No, darling," Mary told him—she shook her head, smiling, "I'd never have you back. Not if you paid me." She loved him better than ever at that moment, but differently. Love made her cunning. She would keep what she'd got—no more gambling. He was astonished, deeply injured innocent. He wasn't used to being treated like that by women. They parted quite good friends. And he was killed almost at once. She cried all day, but she wouldn't put on black. She wondered if the others had seen the name on the lists. It was never referred to. But perhaps Lily had gone through long indecisions wondering whether it would be proper for her to write and condole. Mary grinned. Lily was up at the Hall by then. She'd gone to live there almost as soon as the War broke out.

"There is one name, of all the names written here"—the Bishop made a backward, slight, some­how deprecatory gesture—"which I might speci­ally recall to you. It is the name of a boy. Perhaps some of you here will, in a few years, be telling

your sons: That boy was your own age when he died fighting that you might grow up in a safe happy home. Yes, that boy was not yet sixteen when he was killed at Ypres. I hope that his name will never be forgotten in this village."

Mary didn't know it, but thought vaguely that he must be one of the Pratts from School Green. She seemed to remember having heard at the time. Meanwhile she felt someone pushing through the crowd just behind her. It was Ramsbotham— Ram's B, as the children called him—carrying the wreath. He took his station just behind Lily. He was crimson in the face.

It was all extraordinarily comic. But Mary could hardly believe that Lily had ever given him the slightest encouragement. He'd been at the Flower Show and the Sunday School Sports— where she hadn't, after all, turned up—and at the sale of work. It was getting talked about. Higham had remarked to Mary only the other morning: "Mr. Ramsbotham takes a lot of interest in Chapel Bridge affairs."

And of course he went over to the Hall as often as he got a chance, which was about once a month at best, poor man. Why, she wouldn't wonder if he hadn't originally encouraged Gerald and Tommy to come over so often to Gatesley because he wrongly imagined that it was an easy step from that to being invited to the Hall itself. Poor old Ram's B.

And what did Lily think about it all? Did she

know? Surely. But Lily might be capable of know­ing or not knowing anything. And if she were told she would probably be very incredulous, and then a little shocked, and then faintly, rather unkindly interested—as though she'd heard about some curious new disease. Yes, a woman of Lily's sort could be exceedingly cruel.

They all started to sing the first verse of "Abide with Me." Mary began to feel stiff, and realised that she was very bored with this service. Why couldn't they have had something much shorter? She wondered what the account of it would sound like in the local paper. She was quite sure that the hymns would have been "very sympathetically rendered." Would there be a list of the principal "floral tributes"? Poor Ram's B must be hating theirs. It was horribly awkward to carry, to avoid crushing the lilies or letting the moss moult or getting pricked by the wire. She daren't look at his face again.

And really, thought Mary, I suppose it's hateful even to think of laughing here, at this service, for a hundred and three quite decent little men who all got killed stopping Germans flying the two-headed eagle on the Conservative Club. Yes, I do feel that. No, I don't, she revolted. After all, that's only snobbery. All this cult of dead people is only snob­bery. I'm afraid I believe that. So much so, that the attitude which we're all subscribing to at this moment seems to me not only false but, yes,

actually wicked. Living people are better than dead ones. And we've got to get on with life.

The truth is, thought Mary, I want my lunch. And my corns ache dreadfully. And I despise men. Almost from the first, she knew, there'd been other women. Desmond scarcely concealed it after being detected once or twice. As he'd said, he had friends in London. Had she minded? She could scarcely remember. Yes, very much at the begin­ning. But soon she was used to it. She began to realise that she wasn't the only one who'd been treated in the same way. And there were the chil­dren. And the Chelsea people, whom she'd disliked and mistrusted so much at first, and who turned out to be quite decent and very kind. And there was her little house which she'd loved so dearly.

She'd often been sorry for Desmond, too. Lon­don didn't suit him. As an Irishman, he felt him­self a kind of foreigner there. They'd talked of going to live in Paris, but nothing came of it. Ireland was out of the question. He could get no work, and there were his relations. His concerts, when he'd saved up for them—teaching, playing in theatre orchestras, and even once, as he'd fore­told, in a restaurant, wearing a false moustache— weren't much of a success. The critics, he said, had made up their minds to ruin him. He shed tears. She comforted him. He was grateful, but soon went out; to be comforted more efficiently by some­body else.

Had Mother foreseen all that? She must have foreseen it. And how completely she'd been proved right. That was what I could never forgive her, Mary thought.

Nevertheless, she'd hardly been prepared for Desmond's note on top of the gas oven, one even­ing, just as she'd got back from a party. It must have been done quite on the impulse, like their elopement from Gatesley. He'd gone. Left Lon­don—gone abroad, as someone afterwards told her. The woman was an Austrian. They soon separated, Mary's informant said. Later, he'd come back, she heard, to London for a time. They didn't meet. He wrote, talking about divorce. She said that he must please himself. Did he want one? He never answered this—presumably because that particular reason for wanting one had fallen through.

It was a pity he'd felt that he must leave her. He had nothing to blame for it but his own conscience; and yet she had to admit that she'd been happier since. Even on that night, when she'd read his note and gone in to look at the children tucked up in their beds after she'd read it, she'd felt, yes, just for a second, in the middle of the awful shock, a little start of joy. Now I'm free. He'd left her every­thing. Why, he'd even left his old hat. And al­though, at first, life had been a nightmare that she'd have to write home and beg for money from Mother, she'd pulled round. She started the res­taurant, and that had turned itself almost automatically into a gallery and a concert-room as well. And I'll start them all again, thought Mary—ex­cept the restaurant. I'm getting too old and lazy for that. The hymn ended at last.

The Bishop raised his hand, pronounced the benediction.

There was a pause. The buglers stepped for­ward. The Last Post blared out, setting echoes off among the trees. They blew like violent, ill-regu­lated toys—as if jerked by a strong spring. Mary thought of the cuckoo clock they used to have in the nursery when they were children, which always burst out of the door late—a few seconds after the hour. In the silence there was one explosive cough. A train whistled. Rooks cawed. A dog barked. A car went past along the road with a raucous screech. Nothing was silent except the black crowd. They waited for the Bishop to give the silence its end. To Mary's impatience, it seemed that he dawdled, as Richard had sometimes priggishly dawdled over nursery grace, knowing that she wanted to get down from the table. At last he turned. It was over.

They sang "God save our gracious King."

And now Lily took Father's arm and ap­proached the Cross. Ramsbotham followed, awk­wardly carrying the wreath. The Bishop, sur­rounded by the choir, had barely made his retreat from the scene.

It was a coup d'etat, as Mary saw it. She heard

somebody murmur: "Old Mr. Vernon," and another, "t'old Squire." Lily had done the trick. She had produced Father at the service and vin­dicated his honour and the honour of the Hall be­fore the village. She had asserted his claim to be chief mourner. Here he was. Nobody made any protest, although a voice audibly asked: "Who's t'old maan?" Father shuffled up to the step of the Cross. Lily turned to Ram's B, who handed her the wreath. She gave it to Father, and Mary thought he would promptly drop it. But no, he rose to the occasion. He managed to hook his fingers round the wreath for an instant, crushing the lilies, and advance one pace, before he half laid, half dropped it on the Cross before the tablet bear­ing his son's name. Then he stood still for a moment, facing the Cross, perhaps uncertain what to do next. It was understood that he was praying. Father's ponderousness had had its usual effect upon his audience. They were impressed. Mary, with a vaguely protective instinct, had followed the three of them out from the crowd. She was con­scious of Eric and Anne just behind her. She didn't know whether she wanted to sink through the earth or merely to laugh. Then Father turned. She stood aside, anxious not to lead the procession. She took her place on his left, Lily on his right. Eric and Anne had executed a sort of flanking movement. They confronted the crowd, and Father looked up and slowly round from face to face as he lurched

and shuffled forward. Mary felt rather than heard the admiring comments:

"Isn't he wonderful?"

"He must be a great age."

"Ee, look!"

"He can walk without a stick, and all!"

Mr. Hardwick came forward to receive them. The crowd opened to let them pass out to the carriage. Other people moved forward to lay their wreaths on the Cross.

Mary saw that Lily was radiant with triumph.

"The old gentleman was wonderful, wonderful!" Mr. Hardwick was telling her.

Mr. Askew, in a dickey and a sort of Eton collar worn under his coat, came forward and shouted in Mr. Vernon's ear:

"It's grand to see you about again, sir. It's quite like old times."

John grunted and said something like: "Awa ga ga, wa ga."

Mr. Askew beamed with pleasure:

"I was just telling your father that this is quite like the old times."

Ramsbotham had screwed his eyeglass back into his inflamed eye. Perhaps owing to some extra­ordinary scruple of delicacy, he hadn't worn it during the service. And he was so relieved, poor man, that it was all over.

"Can I give you a lift home?" he asked Mary. "I've got the car." ...

"You can, with pleasure. I was just wondering if we'd missed the bus. That is, on condition you stay to lunch. You'll probably meet your family."

I suppose I'm as near as Ram's B can hope to get to the Vernon family today, she thought— calculating whether they'd possibly got enough to eat in the house. Is there a reflected glamour about me? How thrilling. Tomorrow night we'll have to keep going on cheese and salad, unless I send Maurice out to cadge a meal in the village. Which she'd done before now, successfully.

Mr. Vernon made further noises, Lily acting as interpreter:

"Ercurumber yerfther."

"Mr. Vernon says he can remember your father, Mr. Askew."

"Can you really, sir? Can you indeed?"

Lily turned from Mr. Askew to thank Ramsbotham for bringing them the wreath.

It's very interesting, thought Mary, to watch the tricks which a girl cultivates when she first comes out sticking to her when she's nearly middle-aged. Lily still opened her eyes very wide when she talked to men. (But no, thought Mary, that's spiteful.)

"I really don't know what we should have done if you hadn't been on the spot."

Ram's B was absolutely as red as a villa, blurting out about it being:

"A pleasure, Mrs. Vernon, I assure you."

"You must come and see us again soon." Oh, there's no doubt about it, thought Mary, Lily is a little brute. That can't be mere stupidity. Or does she really like him? Good God.

What would Gerald say, and Tommy, to all this —if they knew? Gerald and Tommy, who probably prized their bachelor existence with their father in that tumble-down country house swallowed up in the outskirts of Stockport. There was no garden except a few grimy shrubs round the warehouses of the mill. No place to amuse themselves except the mill reservoir, on which they had a punt. What would they say to a stepmother and the end of their outings to Manchester—for one couldn't see Lily with them at the Midland, where Ram's B put up

his eyeglass at every pair of legs in the room------?

And their whole life—breakfast at lunch-time, Ram's B getting home from doing deals in Edin­burgh or London overnight, having slept on the train, wrapped in newspapers, with a temper like a skinned snake, going out in pyjamas to have a row with a foreman, with a tea-cup full of whisky in his hand? What would she think of Gerald, who ran after every girl in the neighbourhood, though he was barely seventeen? They'd both got round their father to take them away from school. They told him some amazing yarn about their weak hearts. He was quite unable to deal with them. He yelled and cursed, and occasionally, when tight, would throw a bottle at their heads. Once they'd

tied him to a chair—so they said—and left him to cool down. They seemed fond of him. Even Maurice had been slightly shocked at the way they stole money from his desk. They were hanging about the place all day long—except when they came to Gatesley—working in the mill when they felt like it—"learning the processes," according to custom, before becoming partners, but more often being hunted from one floor to another by exas­perated overseers—rigging up machinery of all kinds in their private workshop, amusing them­selves with revolver practice in their bedroom, trying to learn the saxophone or the mandolin, riding their huge motor-bikes all over the town and being summoned for speeding or not having silencers—ten times worse when Maurice was with them; the corrupton was mutual. The first Mrs. Ramsbotham had died years ago. Mary had heard that she was a quiet woman, refined and gentle, the daughter of a clergyman.

And now Mary had to talk to Mrs. Cooper and Miss Townend and Mrs. Higginbottom. They wanted her to help again this year with the Girls' School Outing.

"We thought of taking them by chara to Castleton to see the Caves," said Mrs Cooper.

Mary loathed the Caves. She once bumped her head nearly silly in the Peak Cavern. In the Speed­well Mine Maurice had dropped a new wrist-watch Father had given him into the water. She

said that Castleton would be splendid, and re­flected that she needn't go in. Some of the smaller children were always frightened and had to be stopped with outside.

And then before long there'd be the teachers' picnic and then there'd be the Hockey Club Committee and the Whist Drives beginning, and soon they'd have to think of the Conservative Club dances, and so on to the Winter Sale of Work and the Turkey Fund bazaar, the Bethlehem Tableaux, the operatic show—probably Ruddigore—the School Christmas Tree, the Church Christmas Tree, and the performance of As You Like It. Oh, curse all this, thought Mary. I'd give anything to be back in London. But no, that wasn't quite sincere. The thought of all this activity and organising pleased her. She really looked forward to all of it—except, perhaps, the Whist Drives.

"I'm sure I don't know what we should do without you, Mrs. Scriven," said Miss Townend.

And Mary couldn't help being rather flattered and pleased, as she smiled at the little school-mistressy woman in pince-nez.

After all, she thought—I do get some fun out of my life.

"There aren't many from Gatesley here this morning," said Mrs. Higginbottom.

"There'd have been more if they'd held it on a Sunday," said Mrs. Cooper.

Mary agreed. And suddenly it seemed strange

to her that Mrs. Cooper should be Milly Barlow of Stone Hall Farm. Milly, who'd been the witness of all those surreptitious visits—Mary pedalling over the hills on her bicycle in time to meet Desmond when he returned to Gatesley from his hated bank-clerkship in Manchester. Desmond was the Bar­lows' lodger. And they must, for many weeks, have been half expecting the tremendous and thrilling scandal which finally closed his stay. Does she remember the old days? Mary wondered. Of course, she must remember. Dozens of people in Gatesley must remember. How had she ever dared to come back and live in Gatesley, the scene of all her wickedness? To tell the truth, Mary had hardly given the matter a thought. She liked Gatesley— well, for sentimental reasons, perhaps, and when she decided not to live in Chapel Bridge itself she'd naturally chosen it. She'd had no idea of shocking anybody. If there was gossip, she was too thick-skinned to mind that now. She'd grown a thick skin during her married life. But an outside ob­server, Lily, for instance, couldn't be expected to see all that. It was quite likely that Lily had been very deeply shocked at Mary's callousness. Per­haps that was why she so seldom came to call on them. She didn't want to seem to condone the offence.

Mrs. Higginbottom said that she thought the service was beautiful.

"Oh, it was beautiful," agreed Mrs. Cooper. "I

think they did everything so"—she searched for a word—"so reverently. It was beautiful."

Yes, thought Mary—she must have forgiven me long ago. When was it, I wonder? When did I suddenly become respectable? Was it after the first time I organised the Red Cross Bazaar? Or simply when it got about that I was being received again at the Hall?

"We felt so sorry for poor Mrs. Richard," said Miss Townend.

And at last Mary was touched. The sincere, cinema-goer's romantic sentimentality of this dried-up spinster, moved by the sorrows of the beautiful and blue-blooded. There was beauty in the gloating of Miss Townend over Mrs. Richard.

And she made it better by adding:

"We were so glad old Mr. Vernon was able to get here, today. We were all so very much hoping that he would."

So, after all, Lily's instinct in that wreath busi­ness had been entirely right.

And now Ram's B was helping Father into the carriage, with the aid of Kent and Mr. Hardwick and Mr. Askew. Father was allowing himself to be particularly heavy, out of swank; like a baby being naughty and even sick because there are visitors. People coming out of the churchyard paused to admire the spectacle. There he sat, and they tucked him in with the carriage rug. The people gazed at him with curiosity. Mary considered her father through their eyes. He was among the best of his sort in these parts—where Rolls-Royce cars were often to be found in the garages of quite small villas. Landowners were be­coming obsolete. Father was obsolete. The vehicle he sat in was obsolete. The animal which drew it was nearly obsolete—soon perhaps to become a Zoo exhibit or an outdoor pet. Perhaps he had a certain interest on that account. He would soon not be there. His present claim on their attention was chiefly that, by a sort of accident, he happened to be not yet dead.

Conscious that Mr. Askew and Mr. Hardwick —not to mention Mrs. Cooper, Miss Townend and Mrs. Higginbottom—vaguely expected it, Mary advanced to the carriage, mounted the step with one foot, and, leaning over, kissed John on the top of the head.

He submitted quite pathically, just uttering the usual grunt of acquiescence.

"How are you, Father?" she asked.

But he merely smiled, gave another brief grunt. He wouldn't tell her.

Stepping down from the carriage, she asked Lily, who was standing ready to get in:

"How do you think Father is?"

"Oh, wonderfully well, I think," said Lily.

And it seemed to Mary that she couldn't keep out of her voice just that slightly defiant note—as much as to say: Do you think I don't take care of him?

"He wants you to come over and have lunch with us one day next week," Lily added, heighten­ing this effect.

And at this, Mary really couldn't help smiling. As if Father could possibly have "wanted" her to come over on a special day! That, of course, was Lily's way of interpreting Father's having said: "We never see Mary nowadays." And so Lily would have decided that it should be lunch. And on that morning she'd tell Kent to bring the Master home at one o'clock sharp. Well, and why not? Mary thought. What is there funny in all that? It made her smile, nevertheless.

"Which day would you like me to come?" she asked, and immediately wished she hadn't been so unkind, because Lily flushed and her face changed with vexation like a child that has been tripped up in some slight exaggeration by a pedantic grown­up person.

She answered, quite curtly:

"Oh, naturally, whichever day is best for you."

Poor Lily, thought Mary. Why am I so malicious? She remembered again how Lily had taken her hand in the middle of the service. It seemed that, after all, Lily was all candour and innocence.

Mary's smile became really friendly:

"I'll come on Monday," she said briskly, and kissed Lily, a thing she seldom did, as she got into the carriage. She could see that the public kiss

melted Lily at once. They both looked round for Eric, for Kent was ready on the box. He was dawdling just inside the gate, talking to Anne, and Mary moved towards them, calling: "Come along, children." Anne was in no hurry, but Eric started and flushed when he saw that he was keeping the carriage waiting. He blundered forward, nearly colliding with his aunt. He paused for an instant to try to apologise, and Mary had the impulse to say:

"If you like to blow in this afternoon, we shall all be at home."

He looked at her with his large, rather startled brown eyes:

"Oh, t-thanks awfully, Aunt Mm—"

"If you've got nothing more amusing to do," she added hastily, smiling, to cut short that awful stammer. And she signalled to Ram's B, who was talking to Edward Blake, that they were ready to start.

III

Ramsbotham was telling the not very new story of how, one week-end, the railway company had re­fused the responsibility of storing a consignment of his jute. So on Saturday evening he and Gerald and Tommy and a couple of watchmen had taken a lorry down to the station and brought the jute back, unloading it outside the mill gates and stacking it right across the roadway, so as to hold up the traffic. He'd been summoned, of course. Edward nodded, not listening to a word.

"I suppose everything'll go on much the same." Richard had said that, the last time Edward had seen him alive. He was sitting on the edge of an overturned wheelbarrow, a derelict, minus its wheel. He puffed his pipe. It was a blue, mild day. High above Armentieres an aeroplane caught the sun on its turning wing. There were heavy grum­blings of artillery from the north. Behind them, some men were playing football near the farm with

the hole in the roof—Richard's billet. They sat at the edge of the muddy road, watching an enor­mous procession of lorries slowly bumping forward over the pot-holes.

They had been talking of that unimaginable time, the end of the War. Unimaginable, at least, for Edward. He'd never for a moment, he now felt, expected to come through, to see it. And there was Richard sitting on the wheelbarrow, puffing his pipe, speaking with such calm certainty, as though he meant to live for ever. It had done Ed­ward good. He came away from this last meeting, as from their first, reassured and soothed.

Their last meeting wasn't, after all, unlike their first. Then, also, the future had seemed obscure and uncertain. Then, also, had Edward been op­pressed by a fatalistic sense of helplessness, of being a tiny part of a machine. Not such a big machine. Only a school of four hundred boys. Yet now Edward remembered more clearly than this later afternoon in France that dreary Midland evening. How they'd all crowded together—the "new youths"—mutely wretched, wishing to efface themselves, unhappily trying to avoid the questions, the sarcasms of their seniors. And Edward Blake had trembled, loathing it passion­ately, more than any of the others, loathing and re­senting it. Hating his parents for having sent him to such a place. He'd run away, he told himself, at once. He'd drown himself. Starve himself to death.

He'd never submit, not if they tortured him. He almost hoped they'd try.

From the very first, he'd been defensively on the lookout for marks of injustice and tyranny. He hadn't long to wait. His fag-master gave him three strokes because the sausages weren't properly cooked. How could you be expected to cook sausages if you'd never learnt and if the study fire had to be fed with coal-dust? How could you be expected, after a single week, to remember all the idiotic nicknames of the various masters? And fancy having to clean boots. What an indignity. You might as well be a slave. How did people endure it? Why didn't they rebel?

Why didn't they rebel? he'd asked Vernon; and Vernon had answered vaguely that he didn't know. He supposed that everyone had to put up with it, at first.

Already they were friends, and took, as a matter of course, their Sunday walks together. Over the moist fields to the wood where people smoked or along the banks of the wide muddy river as far as the chain-ferry. Richard Vernon was barely an inch the taller of the two, but Edward thought of him as being exceptionally large for his age. His mild, good-tempered air invested his broad shoulders with an added strength and solidity. The second and third termers, in exercising their prerogative of bullying the new youths, had pre­ferred to leave Vernon alone.

Of Edward, who was wiry and strong as a monkey, they felt no such timidity. They attacked him continually, in the passages, in the changing-room, in the dormitory—and when, fighting with the power of desperation, he managed to keep three or even four of them at bay, they merely doubled their numbers and, getting him helpless at last, applied their clumsy traditional tortures, mocking his tears, which were not of pain but of rage.

Richard Vernon seemed mildly amused by the difficulties which Edward was perpetually creat­ing for himself. He did not altogether believe that they were so necessary or so unavoidable. But his sympathy was entirely practical. He helped Edward with his sausages, his boot-cleaning and his im­positions. As for his own work, he appeared to get through it without effort. From time to time he made mistakes, was punished, justly or unjustly, like all the others. It did not worry him. He forgot a beating as soon as he could comfortably sit down again.

Edward was amazed by his equanimity. Im­patient at and furious with it by turns. But he could never finally condemn it. He gave up trying to quarrel with Richard and surrendered to a deep­ening admiration.

Their friendship survived the passing of terms and the sharpening of the almost comic contrast between them. Edward was going to take life by storm. He admitted no final obstacle, no barriers. He could do anything. He would do everything. He was jealous of the whole world. All that he read, either of heroism or of success, he applied at once to himself. Could I do that? Of course. And, what's more, I will. At school, he appointed de­finite objects for his ambition. He'd get into the cricket eleven. He had. He'd get into the foot­ball team. He hadn't, but that was, partly at any rate, because he'd sprained his ankle. He'd get into the Upper Sixth. He'd only reached the Lower—having decided on the way that work was a waste of time and that all the masters were incompetent fools. Everywhere he saw a chal­lenge. His schoolfellows delighted in baiting him, encouraging him to break bounds, to go to the Green Man for beer, to let loose a guinea-pig in form, to put a chamber-pot on the arch of the school bell. How well they had understood him. He dared not refuse. He dared refuse no adven­ture—horribly frightened as he often was. He would have fought any boy in the school, would have got himself expelled for any offence, rather than admit to being afraid.

He was never popular. His violent, ill-balanced temper kept people at a distance. His jokes, over­strained and malicious, seldom raised a laugh. He was accused of playing games selfishly. When he worked hard in form he was called a sweatpot; when he slacked, the masters wrote scathing reports. The little group of Sixth Form intellectuals might have welcomed him, but he openly spurned them. The rest of the House found him over-subtle. He had started his school career by hating the school; he ended by despising it. And throughout he had no close friend but Richard.

Everybody liked Vernon. As he grew older he was universally known as Uncle Dick. He played cricket adequately, was a useful full-back for the House, did a sufficient amount of work to satisfy, if not to please, his form master. His laziness, of which he now made no secret, was a perpetual joke. Unnecessary exertion he frankly avoided. While Edward never missed an afternoon's exercise when games were not compulsory he played fives or went for runs—Richard preferred his study fire. The Spartan element in the House was inclined to be shocked, but, somehow, Vernon was never severely criticised. He had his own special position and it was respected.

Yet Richard, also, was curiously without inti­mate friends. He was taken too much for granted. People found him uniformly pleasant, but colour­less and unexciting—a trifle dull. He never be­came involved in the little intrigues and antagon­isms of House politics, and so appeared rather aloof. He was often appealed to, at the end of some heated discussion during which he had sat listen­ing in placid silence, with an affectionate, faintly condescending tone: "Well, Uncle—and what do

you think about it?" It was as if they were address­ing an old favourite dog.

To Edward alone did Richard Vernon seem more than merely likeable. To Edward, Richard was a hero and a great man. In Richard's presence he felt genuine humility. Richard's strength and calm made him conscious of his own weakness. He envied his friend as he envied nobody else. Richard had no need to give proofs of his courage, to assert the strength of his will. He was sure of himself—therefore he did not have to fight and boast. He was brave—unnecessary for him to climb the chapel roof or swim the river in his clothes to win a shilling bet.

Never had Edward felt this more strongly than at the Hall, where he had often been invited to spend a week or two of the holidays. The Hall seemed the perfect background for Richard. The ordered quietness of the Vernons' life impressed Edward like a work of art. He was spellbound by the aged silence of the house, the garden and the woods. This, he felt, was the only place where he could have lived for ever, untormented by his restlessness and his ambitions.

And Mary, he had to admit, was all, or nearly all, that Richard's sister should be. It was only a pity that she'd been born a girl.

"But you'll be able to marry her, that's one thing"—had been a standard joke of Richard's, made always in Mary's presence.

Mary didn't seem embarrassed. She'd only laughed and said:

"Perhaps Edward won't have me."

How strange all that joking seemed now. Strange, almost prophetic. Well, it wasn't he who had deserted Mary, at any rate.

Edward hated to remember all that business. It had shaken, as nothing else could have shaken, his faith in Richard. It had come near to destroying it. He would never be able to understand how Richard could have behaved as he had. One could only dismiss it as pure cowardice—Richard's single act of cowardice—and blame Lily for everything.

And yet it was hard to blame Lily. Edward, when he first saw her, had been half dazzled, half amused. She was so absurdly pretty, she didn't seem quite real. And so childishly innocent. He remembered her one day at lunch saying that she'd read all Bernard Shaw's plays. "All of them?" some young man who was there had archly asked, thinking, evidently, that he was on rather daring ground. And, in an awkward silence, Lily had said quite seriously:

"Oh yes, the Unpleasant ones too. I think it's perfectly splendid of him to want to stop all those dreadful things. If I were a man, I should be proud to have written them."

Poor old Richard. He'd looked rather an ass trailing round after her, carrying her easel and paints. Edward hadn't been able, at first, to take

Richard's love seriously. It had seemed an essen­tially comic disease, like mumps. As for the fact that they'd presently get married and settle down and probably have a family—well, they simply couldn't. You can't have a family with a wax doll; not even the kind that opens its eyes very wide and says Papa and Mamma.

But the time passed like a dream; and soon they were preparing for the wedding. Nobody else, it seemed, regarded the affair as either monstrous or absurd. Except, perhaps, Mary. They never openly discussed Lily—they had too much loyalty for that—but sometimes their eyes met question­ingly. They exchanged vague smiles of dismay.

Edward, of course, was best man. He had carried out his duties on the day in a mood of slightly hysterical humour. Richard, his tower of strength, had frankly and comically collapsed. He appealed helplessly for Edward's support, from the top of his hat, which had been brushed the wrong way, to the toes of his shoes, which hadn't been properly cleaned. Edward was duly reassur­ing. No, no, they wouldn't be late, they'd find his gloves, they'd got the ring. For several hours they were all transported into the world of the comic picture post card, they belonged to the genre of hired horses, bad eggs, curates, mothers-in-law and accidents to bathing-machines. And Edward, because he recognised this, had a sense of leader­ship and power over the whole party. His speech

at the wedding breakfast was an enormous success. Funny, but in perfect taste.

And then, almost the next day it now seemed —although, of course, it must really have been months later, came this scarcely believable affair of Mary's. Unbelievable then as now, an accident without meaning, like something read in a news­paper. Of course, she must have been fond of him. But Richard's marriage, Edward could not help feeling, had had something to do with it as well.

A few weeks after the elopement he'd had a letter. She asked him to come and see her. They were alone together, and she'd cried when they met. Edward had never thought of Mary as being given to tears; it was the disappearance of one more familiar landmark in his changed world. For Mary was certainly changed. She seemed very determined and yet very submissive—ready, if necessary, to be defiant.

She wanted, naturally, to see Richard. And so Edward had gone almost direct from the untidy little house in Chelsea to the tidy little house in Earl's Court. From Mary closing the front door in an apron to a smart parlour-maid opening it in a cap. Richard, also, he'd seen alone. Edward had accepted his mission impulsively, sure of success. He expected Richard to be upset, of course; even, perhaps, conventionally shocked—as he himself

had been—even, perhaps, angry. What he hadn't expected was Richard's shamefaced attitude of helplessness. For he didn't condemn. He was only very uncomfortable. He didn't, he said, see how he could visit Mary "behind the Mater's back." He was incredible and absurd—absurd as everything to do with the new Richard, absurd as his cosy little smoking-room with its washy pictures, absurd as his embroidered slippers. "Behind Lily's back, you mean," Edward had been startled by anger into replying.

But Richard, as ever, wouldn't be roused:

"It'd put her in a very difficult position."

Edward asked fiercely how, and was told that he didn't quite understand. "Perhaps later on," Richard mumbled, things would be "easier." This was too much:

"You seem to have forgotten that Mary's your sister."

That was the end of their interview. They parted —Edward furious, Richard pained and clumsily repeating that they "must meet again soon."

Mary had to be told—though Edward glossed over what he could. She was bitterly wounded he could see, but she took it calmly:

"Very well. Dick must do just as he likes. I shan't bother him again."

For a time, Edward had stayed on in London.

He continued to visit Mary and sometimes met Scriven, who lolled about the house when he was at home, fingering a cheap cigar. Scriven was half-guarded, half-insolent—taking it for granted that he'd be disapproved of. His handsome, sulky face drew into a sneer when he spoke. He asked a great many questions about Mr. and Mrs. Vernon, obviously for Edward's benefit—particularly about Mrs. Vernon, to whom he referred as "my esteemed mother-in-law." "If ever I make a penny-piece we shall have your whole family round here within the day," was one of his favourite comments. It was plain how Mary hated all this, but she wouldn't show it. She laughed and went on with her sewing or got up with some casual joke and strolled into the kitchen to prepare food. She was developing, under the stress of her married life, a quite unfamiliar vein of humour, adapted partly from Scriven's sarcasm, partly from Richard's rarely made, dry, mild jokes. She was building up her fortifications. Even when Edward and she were alone together now, she avoided the per­sonal, warded off his tentative approaches and his unspoken sympathy with funny little stories about tradesmen's bills, people they'd met at parties, remarks she'd overheard at the green-grocer's, which baffled and finally rather bored him. He accepted her tactics and was funny, too. He could always, he now discovered, be funny. He wished he'd learnt the knack earlier, at school.

Edward had visited Richard, too. Even after that scene he couldn't stay away altogether. And both Richard and Lily had sent him notes—Lily's bright and semi-formal; Richard's cordial but brief. "You must try and find the time to look us up soon." That was irony indeed. Time—Edward had nothing but Time. He fidgeted about Town, dabbled and dawdled, could settle to nothing. From a seat in the park, from an armchair in his club, he regarded the enormous horizons which opened before his time, his money and his talents. Such horizons appalled him. He ordered a drink. Then another.

And at Earl's Court Lily welcomed him with conscientious brightness. She didn't like him, he knew that. Well, he didn't like her either. She left Richard and Edward alone together, after dinner, with some ceremony. "I know you've always such a lot to talk about." They had absolutely nothing. Richard, who wouldn't admit this, it seemed, even to himself, filled the silence between them with loud, uneasy joviality. When they were all three upstairs, later, in the drawing-room, the eyes of the married pair scarcely left each other for a moment. They appeared almost to forget his presence. Edward generally made an excuse to be out of the house before ten. At this they were genuinely surprised. Richard, indeed, had actually expressed his qualms:

"I'm afraid you find it pretty slow, spending

the evening here?" he had asked, with an anxiety which would have been rather pathetic were it not so irritating, as he stood in the hall, ready to show Edward out.

To escape from those two houses, he had travelled. China. South Africa. Brazil. Twice round the world. Had shot big game, climbed in the Alps, been round the coasts of Europe in a small sailing-boat. At any rate, he could afford to risk his life ex­pensively. And he was happier away from England.

And then the War. And that last afternoon with Richard, sitting talking by the side of a muddy road. Edward was glad to be able to remember that afternoon. He'd taken a good deal of trouble to procure it, wangling things at the aerodrome, getting a fifty-kilometre lift, bribing the tele­phonist to put through a private message to Richard's mess. He hadn't expected anything but a sentimental pleasure from the meeting. And, after all, it had been a success. For Richard, away from Earl's Court and his office, had seemed again the Richard of their schooldays. He was busy knitting. He offered Edward a pair of mittens. And Edward had been wearing them when he crashed. They must have been cut off him at the hospital with his other clothes and thrown away or burnt. It was a pity, because he had nothing, absolutely nothing to remind him of Richard as he used to be, as he was when he died.

Ramsbotham had finished his story about the jute and was beginning another, also not new, about an accident with the transformer. Mary beckoned to them to make haste. Two men, said Ramsbotham, had been killed. Richard had been killed. Richard, who had said that everything would go on much the same. Richard is dead. And this is what remains, said Edward to himself, seeing the doll in her black, the slobbering old man, the gawky boy getting into the carriage. This is what we've got left of Richard.

IV

Eric jumped into the victoria, nearly treading on his mother's foot. Squatting down on the back seat, with his knees sticking out, he felt clumsy and huge—all bones.

His clumsiness was loathsome to him. He put his hands round his knees to make himself more compact in the narrow space. But his hands were as bony as his knee-joints, and always either too hot or too cold.

He looked at his mother, to see that he had not offended her. But Lily's eyes were fixed on the tree-tops, dreamily watching the rooks. He looked at his grandfather, and John smiled at him, widely, out of his bland, collapsed face. They were moving away from the church. The heavy line of Cobden rose above the trees. The white farms were sprinkled on its back like grains of salt. Eric began to think about the boy who had been killed in the War.

"I've asked Mary to come and lunch next Mon­day," said Lily to John. "Will that be all right?"

John smiled at her. Then he nodded, with a little grunt.

Eric had never heard of the boy before. He felt that he would like to find out about him, and wondered whom he should ask. Kent would probably know. Kent knew almost everybody in Chapel Bridge. When they were out driving people often touched their hats or nodded: Good morning, Mr. Kent, who never took any notice of Grandad at all. Mother said that this was simply deliberate Socialistic rudeness. But it couldn't be stopped. It wasn't Kent's fault.

That last spring of the War, in the Easter holidays, Maurice had said laughingly one day: "Suppose we join up, Eric?"

They had been alone together at the time, and though Maurice had laughed, he'd meant what he said, so Eric thought. Maurice had a way of half-jokingly suggesting doing a thing and then, if anyone agreed or dared him to do it, doing it at once—with so much decision that you felt he'd been meaning to, all the time. Only last spring, they'd been up in his bedroom one day and Gerald Ramsbotham had started talking about heights. Gerald said the bedroom was thirty feet from the ground. Maurice said: "No, not nearly that." Gerald said: "Anyhow, I bet you wouldn't like to jump out." "Do you," said Maurice, smiling. "How much?" Gerald said sixpence and Tommy said ninepence. Maurice had climbed out on to

the sill and jumped. He landed in a flower-bed, the only one in the garden, and lay there shouting to them to chuck him down the money. His ankle was twisted a bit, but nothing serious.

Those words of Maurice's had thrown Eric into a fever of doubts and hesitations for the rest of the holidays. Almost every day he was on the point of going to Maurice and saying: "Come along. I'm ready." Every night he lay awake for hours think­ing about it, screwing himself up. At night, in the darkness, he was brave. The adventure seemed possible, almost easy. He saw it before him in the blackness, lived through it in all its stages. They would have been passed, almost certainly. They were tall for their age at fifteen, and at that time, with the German Push going forward, they couldn't afford to be particular whom they took. Eric saw their life together in the training-camp, watched himself and Maurice drilling, being taught how to fight with bayonets, embarking on the troop­ship, cheering from French trains—Are we down­hearted?—arriving in billets, going up along miles of communication trenches to the front line, wait­ing for the zero hour at dawn, in thin rain. He weighed, tasted every experience, every hardship —decided that, with Maurice, he could face them all.

It hadn't been a mere day-dream, either. Again and again he'd all but asked the question. And of course Maurice would have come. The truth

was, he'd been held back by pure fear—nothing else. Yes, I'm a coward all right, Eric thought.

But suppose he had known then of someone else—of his own age—who'd done the same thing. This boy, for instance. That example might just have turned the balance. And so, one night, they'd have run away, caught an early morning train into Manchester, leaving notes in their bedrooms. And, as a matter of fact, the War would have been practi­cally over before they got out to the Front at all. And now they'd be war heroes, old soldiers, as good as grown-up men, respected by everybody. Or their names might be written with his father's on the Cross. Eric preferred to think of that. No, not Maurice's name. His own, only. He had saved Maurice's life. They got him back to the base hospital, fatally wounded. He felt no pain. Maurice came and knelt by his bed. Oh, Eric, why did you do it? I don't deserve it. But Eric smiled and said: I'm glad I did it, Maurice. You mustn't cry like that. You must try to make things easier for my mother. Maurice was standing today beside Aunt Mary and Anne at the Cross. Maurice wore a black band round his arm. They talked of Eric. Maurice said: We shall never forget him. Never. What bloody trash, cried Eric to himself, pouncing suddenly upon the day-dream, kicking it savagely, smashing it to atoms.

Yet his eyes had filled with tears. As the carriage climbed the slope of the road to the canal bank,

he felt all round him the heavy voluptuous sadness of the summer day brooding over the glittering hills. It was in his blood, in his stomach, in his brain; a cloudy, apprehensive sadness. Eric was going through a phase of nostalgia for his child­hood. The present seemed mere chaos, cumbered with the inefficiency of his three-quarters grown body and half-developed intellect. He brooded over the shapes of the hills. He had discovered that they resemble breasts. Eric wrote poetry, mostly sonnets, in a small black book which he usually carried about with him, when at home, for fear his mother should find it. They were all about Nature.

One of his black socks had a hole in it; the roughness of his school trousers itched against the inside of his knee. He thought of school, where life was so difficult for him, so full of worries and anxieties, not to be late for work or games, not to leave his clothes lying about the changing-room, not to do any of the things which made people laugh at him. He got along all right if he gave his mind to it. He wasn't quite a figure of fun. But at the beginning of each new term he felt quite physically sick with worry. He would be glad when it was all over for good.

One day, thought Eric, I suppose I shall go to Cambridge. He knew nothing about Cambridge, but supposed it must be very different from school. Suddenly he had a brilliant idea. If I worked very hard there, I might become a don. He saw himself,

an august, robed figure, lecturing: "And fifthly, gentlemen . . ." The thought pleased him. He grinned.

But I shall never be a don, he reflected, if I can't cure my stammer and learn to be tidier, The thought filled him with despair. But he made a resolution to himself. He would cure the stammer­ing and he would be tidier. It was quite possible. Only he forgot. He was always mooning. At school, his friends helped him to overcome this tendency with occasional hard kicks on the bottom. "Moon­ing again," they reminded him kindly, without malice.

He could cure the stammering if he counted before speaking and always thought out before­hand exactly what he was going to say. And he would take trouble over his appearance and buy some brilliantine for his hair. But at that idea, a curious feeling of shame came over him. He didn't like to think of himself with his hair brushed and his tie carefully tied, wearing smart clothes. Maurice's hair was always as smooth as silk. But I'm ugly, thought Eric, with a certain fierceness. It's idiotic for me to make any sort of effort. I'm hideous.

And at this picture of himself, so ugly, clumsy, so inept at all the things in which he would have liked to excel—tennis, conjuring-tricks, juggling with oranges, doing stunts on a push-bike, ping-pong, card-games, understanding machinery— made only the more conspicuous in his failure by

his stupid "cleverness" at History—at this picture Eric frowned with hatred and felt capable of doing something violent and dangerous, like riding Gerald's Indian all out, and not caring whether he got really seriously hurt.

His mother's eyes met his, and she smiled.

"Don't sit so hunched up, darling. You'll get round-shouldered."

She thinks I'm still a child, Eric thought. Dar­ling Mother, she doesn't understand me in the very least. I suppose she'll always treat me as though I was still nine or ten.

He looked into Lily's eyes, so clear, so liquid. Their beauty filled him, as so often, with vague remorse. Darling Mother, I'm unfair to her. I'm always being unfair to her, and filthily selfish. I'm always forgetting what she must suffer. How awful life must be for her. I'll look after her always and make things as nice for her as I can.

This afternoon, Eric suddenly decided, I won't go over to Aunt Mary's. I'll stay at home. It was perfectly beastly of me even to think of going out today, just after this. I'll read to Mother or go for a walk with her. I'd much rather do that than go to Aunt Mary's, anyway. No, he couldn't pretend that to himself, not quite. I'm going to stay at home, at any rate, he decided. Eric began to form with his lips the word "shall"—shall we go for a walk this afternoon, Mums?

But he remembered that he must count before

speaking; and then, because that seemed too much trouble, he settled it that he would ask her later on, when they were alone.

Father had been killed while Eric was at school. This was his first year as a public school boy, and the telegram, with Mother's letter following it, had seemed merely to add the darkest tinge to an already melancholy life of war rations, fagging, loneliness, discomfort, strangeness.

Eric had respected his father, but had never been more than fond of him. Lily had claimed all his love, since the days when she had come into the nursery in her evening dress with spangles and picked him out of his cot before going out to a dinner-party. "Whose little boy are you? Are you Mummy's little boy? Are you?" Her kisses were rich with scent. And Father was only a figure in the doorway, a white boiled shirt-front surrounded by blackness, who said: "Good-night, old man. Darling, it's twenty past." Father was grave and kind. He took Eric out for walks when they came up to stay with Grandad, and told stories out of books in his careful solicitor's voice. The carriage was passing the lock gates now. Eric could re­member just how the weather vane on the church tower above the trees had looked as Richard had begun to tell him about Sherlock Holmes. "Who was Sherlock Holmes, Daddy?" "Sherlock Holmes was a detective." "What's a detective, Daddy?" "If you'll listen, you'll hear."

Eric was very, very sorry to hear that his father had been killed. The news added poignantly to his sense of desolation in the midst of the great school. It sharpened the misery of hearing the ugly jang­ling morning bell, of washing in cold water, of jostling downstairs to work. It seemed that his father's death was in some way connected with the school. That the school was responsible for it, as it was responsible for the bell, the water and the work. The mornings were cold and raw, like reiter­ated sips of death. The dismal, untidy boot-room, the iron staircase, the bare dormitories, the stuffy little box of a study with the high weak electric light and thick blind which you got six for forget­ting to draw—because of air-raids—and the soaked playing-fields and dusty class-rooms and icy-cold chapel—all seemed the atmosphere and scene of Death. For a week, Eric was almost intolerably unhappy, for a week only just less so, for a week still very miserable. Then he knew that he could bear it. It was no better, but he was stronger.

The days were lengthening. He wrote home three times a week, and his letters became more hopeful. They were full of comforting phrases. He almost sermonised to his mother, and indeed did actually repeat to her phrases from sermons in the school chapel about the War and the Fallen. He told her items of school news. And he felt sure that his consolations must be taking effect, because Lily's letters became shorter, less personal and

more chatty. She in her turn told him news of Chapel Bridge affairs. The weather became beauti­ful. It was the end of the term. Father was dead. No longer, in Eric's mind, stood the stark word "killed." He was dead. Everyone told you that he was happy. Eric believed it. It seemed as though his father had never been alive, but was always, as now, an honourable, benign figure of legend. It made Eric cry sometimes to think of him, but only as music made him cry—a sad waltz. The idea of his father receded, became remote and sad.

He returned to Cheshire for the holidays, pass­ing—as now—on his way up from Chapel Bridge station, the shop of the little Swiss watchmaker, and noticing that the window was smashed and boarded. The watchmaker had been suspected of pro-Ger­man sympathies, and now, so long after the out­break of war, some rowdy munition operatives had made this an excuse for a "bit of fun" and nearly lynched him.

And when Eric had arrived at the Hall, excited with the pleasure of being home again and at the beautiful spring morning, Mrs. Beddoes had met him at the door, in silence, with only a wan smile. He was sent up to his mother in her room, as if to an invalid. He had come in, a little sobered, rather apprehensive, after knocking—utterly unprepared for the awful shock he was to receive. For a moment, he hardly recognised Lily. She was hideous with grief. Her eyes swollen into slits, her mouth heavy

and pouting, her face blotched and sallow. He hung back, scared. The smile shrank from his lips. She gave a kind of hoarse cry. He rushed into her arms. That was agony. He knew then that everything he'd imagined he'd suffered at school was nothing, mere selfishness, triviality. She reopened the wound and tore it ten times wider. And now it would have made no difference to Eric if ten fathers had been killed. It was only for her he felt. Father was dead. But she was alive and suffering like this under his very eyes. He could do absolutely nothing. The words he tried to say were one long stammer. As for what he'd written in those letters, he was wretched with shame at his glibness, his heartlessness. He stood beside her while she sobbed. Sud­denly she'd gasped out: "He loved us so much."

It was like a reproach, not for what he'd failed to feel for his father, but for all he might have been to her. He knelt beside her chair. An hour must have passed. It was time for lunch. He left her bathing her eyes with water from the bedroom jug.

This was the first and last scene of the kind they had had together. He guiltily shunned another. It would have been more than he could bear. When they were together they were gentle and sad, or sadly cheerful. Often Eric knew that she went up­stairs to be alone with her sufferings, and on these occasions he went out by himself and roamed guiltily about the woods, torn between the feeling that he ought to be with her and the feeling that he

couldn't bear to see her in that terrible condition. When he came into her room, sometimes, and found her crying over a diary or some old letters, he either stepped out quietly, or, if detected, pre­tended to notice nothing. Lily, on her side, never made any appeal for his sympathy, beyond show­ing, sometimes indirectly, sometimes frankly, that she wished to be alone.

Eric had been glad to get back to school at the end of that holiday. Even school was preferable to this haunted state, and the routine distracted his thoughts. The next holidays were not so bad. The load seemed eased a little. At times he fancied that she was brighter, but the relapses were more pain­ful by contrast. They had never had a secret from each other before this. Eric had never consciously kept any fact or sensation of importance relating to himself from his mother. But now their whole relationship changed, and was likely to remain changed.

Nothing, it seemed, could re-establish it. Eric began a secret grieving over his mother. He was grieving over her now — over her paleness and sadness as she sat in slim black beside Grandad and the carriage rattled down the village street. Some of the shops were open, others closed, ac­cording as to whether their proprietors had been up at the church. If only I could do something to help her, Eric thought.

But he couldn't. And, what was worse, he was

getting quite shy with her, afraid of blundering— of giving her pain or offence. All through the ser­vice he had glanced anxiously at her to be sure that she could stand it. He was quite prepared for her to faint or collapse. He would far rather have had no memorial service and no memorial and his father forgotten, if she could forget too, and be happier.

And yet, here he was thinking about going to tea at Aunt Mary's. He had another pang of guilt at his selfishness. It was curious that the thought of Aunt Mary often made him feel guilty towards his mother, apparently without any reason.

He was still mooning when the victoria stopped at the park gates, and Kent began to climb down from the box, very stiffly and with loud coughs.

Lily had to remind Eric:

"The gates, darling," tapping him on the knee.

So he jumped out and opened them, as he had done since he was eight years old and loved doing it, after Sunday morning services, just reaching up to the latch, rooting the bolts out of the ground with a great effort, and always glancing apprehen­sively up at the notice: Trespassers will be Prose­cuted. By Order. John Vernon. John Vernon would come slowly into focus again, as it were, as his grandfather—sitting mildly and blandly in the carriage

But some day, thought Eric, he will die. The idea did not greatly impress him. It seemed so remote. He could imagine his mother dying—it had been a nightmare of his for years. He saw her, so beautiful and young, struck down, killed by grief or quick consumption. That seemed sometimes horribly imminent. But Grandad never changed. Eric could barely remember him before his illness. He appeared to be immortal in senility. One would as soon expect a famous ruin, which trippers visit, to tumble down.

But when Grandad does die, mused Eric, pur­suing this unfamiliar train of thought, the Hall will belong to me. That, too, seemed meaningless. Once or twice Lily had alluded in some way to the future, prefacing the remark with "One day, if any­thing were to happen to Grandad ..." This sort of conversation made Eric ill at ease, and he cut it short with:

"Then you and I will live there together, won't we, Mums?"

"If you like, darling." Her smile was sweet. "If you want me to, then."

"Want you to?" He simply didn't understand. "Why on earth shouldn't I?"

"You might be thinking of getting married, you know."

"I shall never marry. I'd rather stay with you."

"Oh, but I should like you to marry. I should like to be a grandmother some day."

"Well, even if I did, it wouldn't make the slightest difference."

She had laughed. This had been one of her rare moments of gaiety; but he, who had been taking her more or less seriously, was faintly hurt.

By this time, Kent had touched his hat with his whip, said: "Thank you. Master Eric"—and Eric was back in the victoria again, having closed the! gates. They were crossing the park, and every feature of that miniature sloping landscape was known to him. There were the woods beyond and the chimneys of the Hall just showing in the hol­low. There were leaf shadows on the rutted drive. What should I do if all this belonged to me? Eric wondered. Perhaps I'd have the drive repaired. Should I change the name on the notice-board from John to Eric Vernon? But no, he didn't want to touch anything. He had grown up with a semi-superstitious fear, perhaps exaggerated from the teaching of his mother, of meddling with the Past. His mind switched back, as it always did, to her.

I'll stay with her always, he said to himself, and the thought made him feel curiously sad, so that tears rilled his eyes.

Taking a sudden decision, he leant forward and asked:

"Shall we g-g------?"

"Take a deep breath and count, darling," said Lily.

Eric took a deep breath and counted up to twenty.

"Shall we g-go out for a walk after lunch, Mums?"

She smiled, so sweetly and sadly,

"If you'd like to, darling," she gave a little sigh, "and Mummy's not too tired."

She looked as fragile as a leaf. Again Eric re­proached himself. She didn't want to, and it would tire her. But she'd probably come, all the same, just to please him. He ought never to have asked her to come. It was more of his lack of considera­tion. Of course, after that long service, she'd need a rest.

A voice spoke inside him:

If she doesn't come, you can go over to Aunt Mary's. He repressed it with an extraordinary sen­sation of guilt. In any case, he told himself, nothing would induce me to go to Aunt Mary's on a day like this. I oughtn't to. Out of respect for Father. Mother wouldn't like it. I ought to be by myself this afternoon and think about Father. It'd be dis­gusting to go to Aunt Mary's. She oughtn't to have asked me. But I expect she forgot, just for the moment. She'd probably think I was an absolute cad if I did go.

Edward Blake will be there, Eric reminded him­self, searching for an idea which would make Aunt Mary's house seem less attractive. Eric hated Edward Blake. He was jealous of the excite­ment his arrival had caused the Scrivens. Maurice was particularly enthusiastic about him, because,

it seemed, he'd done marvels in the War, in the Air Force. He'd got the D.S.O. and the Military Cross. He'd even been once recommended for the V.C. He'd shot down lots of German machines. He was a hero. And although he was really quite middle-aged and was going bald, with white hairs round the temples, he could do some extraordin­ary gymnastic tricks, like turning a somersault over the back of a chair or doing a standing jump across the table. But, quite apart from jealousy, Eric disliked him. Mistrusted him. He seemed to be sneering at everybody, and at Eric in particular, with his large, light-green, blood-shot eyes. Eric couldn't imagine how his father could have been such friends with Edward Blake.

And now they were at the house and there was another pair of gates to open. The figures of Mrs. Potts and Mrs. Beddoes were waiting in the porch, which meant that they were already late for lunch.

Since the beginning of the War, Grandad had had his meals in the room once known as the smoking-room. They only ate in the dining-room on Sundays. The room was too vast for three people, much less two, and, in Eric's mind, it was associated with visitors and enormous meals which went on for hours. Also, it had seemed vaguely patriotic to use the smaller room; as it had seemed patriotic then to do anything, however useless, which made you less comfortable.

But Eric liked the smoking-room. For one

thing, a convention had grown up that in that room you weren't expected to wait for Grandad to finish. It was part of the idea that the whole meal was a sort of picnic. Grandad would always wave to them with his heavy freckled hand not to wait for him while he finished his pudding. He usually had a second helping. Then there would be trouble with his false teeth. They tumbled out on to his plate. Mother always pretended she hadn't noticed. And Mrs. Potts would step forward with a napkin to wipe a large piece of stewed plum off his waistcoat, while Mrs. Beddoes looked up to the ceiling in serio-comic resignation. Grandad seemed to regard all this as a joke. He laughed quite frankly, and never made the least attempt to hide the mess.

Grandad might have saved himself a great deal of trouble if he hadn't come down to tea. Or if he hadn't gone up to his attic between tea and lunch. But this ritual of coming down to tea had perhaps been kept up in memory of Granny, who insisted on it. Eric could remember her saying: "Will you run up and tell your grandfather that we're waiting for him? We can't begin till he's here."

Eric had hated Granny. She was so sarcastic. It was all very well for Mother to tell him that she'd had such an "extraordinary interest in life." That only means that she was fearfully selfish, thought Eric, sternly.

Mother was very silent at lunch today. It

seemed more and more evident how tired she felt. Usually, she talked to Grandad a good deal and with great animation, as though she were a visitor. Eric had always admired this faculty of his mother's for making conversation. To him, it seemed positively wonderful. She was so full of interest in everything Grandad said, laughing eagerly at the jokes in his stories, which Eric hadn't thought so tremendously funny, even at first hearing.

Mrs. Beddoes brought in the pudding, and Eric was reminded of the days when, as a small boy, the lunch had come as a logical termination to the activities of the morning—when he had gone down to the kitchen soon after breakfast and followed the maids upstairs to watch them dust and sweep, teasing them, moving chiefly on all fours, so that he became familiar with the different kinds of mats, carpets and rugs in various parts of the house. At eleven, the maids returned to the kitchen to drink cocoa. Eric had stayed on there to see the lunch being cooked, had weighed out currants and raisins from the tin and had been allowed, sometimes, to grind mince-meat out of the machine. Finally, when lunch was ready and brought in, he would exchange glances with the housemaid, who waited at the sideboard, as much as to say: "Here's our pudding."

Granny had put a stop to all this. She dis­approved of his going round with servants. It was

all very well, but he had no one else to play with except occasional visitors, sons of neighbours, who drove over for tea, and whom he usually dis­liked—even if they didn't happen to dislike him. If only, thought Eric, the Scrivens had been living up here then. '•

Well, lunch was over now. Lily passed out of the room and up the staircase, walking slowly. She seemed deep in her thoughts.

Eric followed her. I won't say anything about a walk, he thought, if Mother doesn't. I won't bother her. She wants to rest, I expect.

She reached the door of her bedroom and, turn­ing, said:

"Is there anything you want, darling? I'm going to lie down for a bit."

He blurted it out before he could stop himself:

"I only w-wanted to know if you w-wanted to go out this afternoon, t-that's all."

She hesitated, smiling:

"Well, darling; just as you like. But I do feel most awfully tired."

"Oh, n-no, of course not, then."

He turned very red. He felt every kind of cheat, deceiver. He was vile. He nearly insisted on her going, out of pure conscience. She kissed him, smiling. He turned from her awkwardly and walked slowly along the corridor, down the front staircase, out of the house.

The hot garden was very still. The stable clock

struck half-past two, with a sound which sug­gested a pebble dropping into deep water. Eric thought: I'm not going.

He walked slowly down the garden path to the door in the wall which opened into the stable-yard. But then, thought Eric, I'm really making a most terrific fuss about nothing. Mother doesn't want me this afternoon. Why shouldn't I go over there? It's ridiculous to think that Father would have minded. And at this decision he felt a sense of ex­quisite relief, although he knew he would have further qualms of conscience later on.

Eric could still remember vividly the time when the Scrivens came to live in Gatesley. Eric had barely heard of their existence before. He knew that he had an aunt and two cousins, but they were seldom referred to, and, of course, he had never seen them. Then one day Mother had said: "You'll soon be seeing your Aunt Mary." She didn't, even then, talk much about their coming. She answered his questions indirectly, but he knew instinctively that she was almost as deeply interested in the prospect of the meeting as he himself was. He knew, intuitively also, that his mother wasn't merely pleased at the idea. She was suspicious and tentatively antagonistic. He gathered that there might be something odd or reprehen­sible about his Aunt Mary, and that judgment would be reserved for the present.