'That's a point, of course. We'd better get on with it, then.'

He heaved the bed away from the wall, while she watched with arms folded, then they both set about the unmaking and remaking. The vacuum-cleaner could now be heard quite close at hand, drowning Welch's recorder. As they worked, Dixon studied the Callaghan girl, despite his determination to notice nothing more about her, and saw with fury that she was prettier than he'd thought. He found himself wanting to make the kind of face or noise he was accustomed to make when entrusted with a fresh ability-testing task by Welch, or seeing Michie in the distance, or thinking about Mrs Welch, or being told by Beesley something Johns had said. He wanted to implode his features, to crush air from his mouth, in a way and to a degree that might be set against the mess of feelings she aroused in him: indignation, grief, resentment, peevishness, spite, and sterile anger, all the allotropes of pain. The girl was doubly guilty, first of looking like that, secondly of appearing in front of him looking like that. Run-of-the-mill queens of love - Italian film-actresses, millionaires' wives, girls on calendars - he could put up with; more than that, he positively liked looking at them. But this sort of thing he'd as soon not look at at all. He remembered seeing in a book once that some man who claimed to have love well weighed up - someone like Plato or Rilke - had said that it was an emotion quite different in kind, not just degree, from ordinary sexual feelings. Was it love, then, that he felt for girls like this one? No emotion he'd experienced or could imagine came anything like so close, to his way of thinking; but apart from the dubious support of Plato or Rilke he had all the research on the subject against him there. Well, what was it if it wasn't love? It didn't seem like desire; when the last corner was tucked in and he joined her on her side of the bed, he was strongly tempted to put his hand out and lay it on one of those full breasts, but this action, if performed, would have appeared as natural to him, as unimportant and unobjectionable, as reaching out to take a large ripe peach from a fruit-dish. No, all this, whatever it was or was called, was something nothing could be done about.

'There, I think that looks very nice,' the girl said. 'You couldn't guess what was underneath it all if you didn't know, could you?'

'No, and thanks very much for the idea and the help.'

'Oh, that's all right. What are you going to do with the table?'

'I've been thinking about that. There's a little junk-room at the end of the passage, full of broken furniture and rotting books and things; they sent me up there yesterday to fetch a music-stand or whatever they call the things. That room's the place for this table, behind an old screen with French courtiers painted on it - you know, floppy hats and banjos. If you'll go and see whether the coast's clear, I'll rush along there with it now.'

'Agreed. I must say that's an inspiration. With the table out of the way nobody'll connect the sheets with smoking. They'll think you tore them with your feet, in a nightmare or something.'

'Some nightmare, to get through two blankets as well.'

She looked at him open-mouthed, then began to laugh. She sat down on the bed but immediately jumped up again as if it were once more on fire. Dixon began laughing too, not because he was much amused but because he felt grateful to her for her laughter. They were still laughing a minute later when she beckoned to him from outside the bathroom door, when he ran out on to the landing with the table, and when Margaret suddenly flung open the door of her bedroom and saw them.

'What do you imagine you're up to, James?' she asked.

VII

'WE'RE just… I'm just… I was just getting rid of this table, as a matter of fact,' Dixon said, looking from one woman to the other.

The Callaghan girl made an extraordinarily loud snorting noise of incompetently-suppressed laughter. Margaret said:

'Just what is all this nonsense?'

'It isn't nonsense, Margaret, I assure you. I've…'

'If anybody minds me saying so,' the girl interrupted him, 'I think we'd better get rid of the table first and explain the whys and wherefores afterwards, don't you?'

'That's right,' Dixon said, put his head down, and ran up the passage. In the junk-room he nudged aside an archery target, making his crazy-peasant face at it - what flaring imbecilities must it have witnessed? - and dumped the table behind the screen. Next, he unrolled a handy length of mouldering silk and spread it over the table-top; then arranged upon the cloth thus provided two fencing foils, a book called The Lesson of Spain, and a Lilliputian chest-of-drawers no doubt containing sea-shells and locks of children's hair; finally propped up against this display a tripod meant for some sort of telescopic or photographic tomfoolery. The effect, when he stepped back to look, was excellent; no observer could doubt that these objects had lived together for years in just this way. He smiled, shutting his eyes for a moment before slopping back into the world of reality.

Margaret was waiting for him at the threshold of her room. One corner of her mouth was drawn in in a way he knew well. The Callaghan girl had gone.

'Well, what was all that about, James?'

He shut the door and began to explain. As he talked, his incendiarism and the counter-measures adopted struck him for the first time as funny. Surely Margaret, especially since she wasn't personally implicated, must find them funny too; they formed the sort of story she liked. He said as much at the end of his account.

Without changing her expression, she dissented. 'I could see you and that girl were finding it all pretty funny, though.'

'Well, why shouldn't we have found it funny?'

'No reason at all; it's nothing to do with me. The whole thing just strikes me as rather silly and childish, that's all.'

He said effortfully: 'Now look, Margaret: I can quite see why it looked like that to you. But don't you see? the whole point is that naturally I didn't mean to burn that bloody sheet and so on. Once I'd done it, though, I'd obviously got to do something about it, hadn't I?'

'You couldn't have gone to Mrs Welch and explained, of course.'

'No, "of course" is right, I couldn't have. I'd have been out of my job in five minutes.' He produced and lit cigarettes for the two of them, trying to remember whether Bertrand's girl had said anything about owning up to Mrs Welch. He didn't think she had, which was odd in a way.

'You'll be out in less time than that if she ever finds that table.'

'She won't find it,' he said irritably, beginning to pace up and down the room.

'What about that sheet? You say it was Christine Callaghan's idea to remake the bed?'

'Well, what about it? And what about the sheet?'

'You seem to have got on a good deal better with her than you did last night.'

'Yes, that's good, isn't it?'

'Incidentally I thought she was abominably rude just now.'

'How do you mean?'

'Barging in and sending you off with that table like that.'

Stung with this reflection on his dignity, Dixon said: 'You've got this "rude" business on the winkle, Margaret. She was absolutely right: one of the Welches might have turned up at any moment. And if anyone barged in, it was you, not her.' He began regretting this speech well before it was over.

She stared at him with her mouth a little open, then whipped abruptly round away from him. 'I'm sorry, I won't barge in again.'

'Now, Margaret, you know I didn't mean it like that; don't be ridiculous. I was only…'

In a high voice, kept steady only by obvious effort, she said: 'Please go.'

Dixon fought hard to drive away the opinion that, both as actress and as script-writer, she was doing rather well, and hated himself for failing. Trying to haul urgency into his tone, he began: 'You mustn't take it like that. It was a bloody stupid thing to say, on my part, I admit. I didn't mean you actually barged in, in that way, of course I didn't. You must see…'