Like a criminal who, having begun to confess, sees no reason for not going on, Dixon was about to admit it, but remembered in time that this would incriminate Christine. (How much, if anything, had Bertrand got out of her?) 'You're quite wrong there, Mrs Welch. I can't imagine why you should think any such thing. Your husband'll tell you I haven't been away once this term.'

'Haven't been away? I don't see how that affects matters.'

'Well, simply that I couldn't have been here and in London at the same time, could I?'

Restraining Bertrand, Mrs Welch said in puzzlement: 'What's that got to do with it?'

'How could I have phoned through from London if I was here all the time? I take it it was a London call?'

Bertrand looked questioningly at his mother. She shook her head and said quietly, hardly moving her mouth: 'No, it was a local call all right. Whoever it was spoke right away. You always get the operator first if it's a London call.'

'I told you you were wrong,' Bertrand said peevishly. 'I told you old David West was behind all this. Damn it, Christine was certain it was him on the phone to her, calling himself Atkinson. It was some pal of his who spoke to us, not…' His eye fell on Dixon and he stopped speaking.

Dixon was savouring his defensive triumph. He'd remember the advantages of pretending misunderstanding in this situation. And it was now clear, too, that Bertrand had got nothing out of Christine. 'Has that cleared things up at all?' he asked the others politely.

Mrs Welch began to go red again. 'I think I'll just go and see how your father's getting on, darling,' she said.' There are one or two things I want him to…' Leaving the sentence in the air, she went out.

Bertrand moved a pace closer. 'We'll forget all about that business,' he said generously. 'Now, I've been wanting us to have a little get-together for quite some time, old boy. Ever since that Ball affair, in fact. Now look here: here's a question for you, and I don't mind telling you I mean to get a straight answer. What precisely was your game the other evening when you induced Christine to skip out of the dance with you? A straight answer, mind.'

This must all have been clearly audible to Christine, who now came down the room with Margaret. Both girls avoided Dixon's eye while they went out, leaving him alone with Bertrand. When the door was shut, Dixon said: 'I can't give any sort of answer, straight or crooked, to a meaningless question. What do you mean, what was my game? I wasn't playing any sort of game.'

'You know what I mean as well as I do. What were you up to?'

'You'd better ask Christine that.'

'We'll leave her out of this, if you don't mind.'

'Why should I mind?' Dixon, in spite of the thought of how Mrs Welch's bill would gobble up his bank-balance, suddenly began to exult. The preliminary manoeuvrings, the cold war between himself and Bertrand, were over at least. This was the whiff of grapeshot.

'Don't be funny, Dixon. Just tell me what was going on, will you? or I shall have to try something a little more forcible.'

'Don't you be funny, either. What do you want to know?'

Bertrand clenched his fist; then, when Dixon took off his glasses and squared his shoulders, unclenched it again. Dixon put his glasses back on. 'I want to know…' Bertrand said, then hesitated.

'What my game was? We've been into that.'

'Shut up. What did you intend doing with Christine, that's what I want to know.'

'I intended doing exactly what I did do. I intended to go away from that place with Christine, to bring her back here in a taxi, and finally to return to my digs in the same taxi. That's what I did do.'

'Well, I'm not having that, do you understand?'

'It's too late not to have it. You've had it already.'

'Now just you get this straight in your head, Dixon. I've had enough of your merry little quips. Christine is my girl and she stays my girl, got mam?'

'If you mean do I follow your line of thought, I do.'

'That's splendid. Well, if I find you playing this sort of trick again, or any sort of bloody clever trick, I'll break your horrible neck for you and get you dismissed from your job as well. Understand?'

'Yes, I understand all right, but you're wrong if you think I'll let you break my neck for me, and if you think they chuck people out of academic jobs for taking their professors' sons' girl-friends home in taxis, then you're even more wrong, if possible.'

Bertrand's reply reassured Dixon that Bertrand hadn't so far found out from his father about Dixon's present standing in the eyes of College authority. The reply was: 'Don't think you can defy me and get away with it, Dixon. People never do.'

'People are beginning to, Welch. You must realize that it's up to Christine whether she sees any more of me. If you feel you must threaten someone, go and threaten her.'

Bertrand suddenly yelled out in a near-falsetto bay: 'I've had about enough of you, you little bastard. I won't stand any more of it, do you hear? To think of a lousy little philistine like you coming and monkeying about in my affairs, it's enough to… Get out and stay out, before you get hurt. Leave my girl alone, you're wasting your time, you're wasting her time, you're wasting my time. What the hell do you mean by buggering about like this? You're big enough and old enough and ugly enough to know better.'

Dixon was saved from replying by the sudden re-entry of Christine and Margaret. The scene broke up: Christine, who seemed to be trying to flash Dixon a message he couldn't read, took Bertrand by the arm and led him, still loudly protesting, out of the room; Margaret silently offered Dixon a cigarette, which he took. Neither spoke while they sat down side by side on a couch, nor for some moments afterwards. Dixon found himself trembling a good deal. He looked at Margaret and an intolerable weight fell upon him.

He knew now what he'd been trying to conceal from himself ever since the previous morning, what the row with Bertrand had made him temporarily disbelieve: he and Christine would not, after all, be able to eat tea together the following afternoon. If he was going to eat that meal with any female apart from Miss Cutler, it would be not Christine, but Margaret. He remembered a character in a modern novel Beesley had lent him who was always feeling pity moving in him like sickness, or some such jargon. The parallel was apt: he felt very ill.

'That was about the dance business, was it?' Margaret asked.

'Yes. He seemed to resent it all rather.'

'I'm not surprised. What was he shouting?'

'He was trying to persuade me to keep off the grass.'

'As far as she's concerned?'

'That's right.'

'Are you going to?'

'Eh?'

'Are you going to keep off the grass?'

'Yes.'

'Why, James?'

'Because of you.'

He'd been expecting a demonstration of some strong feeling or other here, but she only said 'I think that's rather silly of you' in a neutral tone that wasn't ostentatiously neutral, but simply neutral.

'What makes you say that?'

'I thought we got all that settled yesterday. I don't see the point of starting the whole thing over again.'

'It can't be helped. We'd have started it again some time; it might just as well be now.'

'Don't be ridiculous. You'd have much more fun with her than you ever had with me.'

'That's as may be. The point is that I've got to stick to you.' He said this without bitterness, nor did he feel any.

There was a short silence before she replied: 'I don't hold with these renunciations. You're throwing her away for a scruple. That's the action of a fool.'

This time, a minute or more went by before either spoke. Dixon felt that his role in this conversation, as indeed in the whole of his relations with Margaret, had been directed by something outside himself and yet not directly present in her. He felt more than ever before that what he said and did arose not out of any willing on his part, nor even out of boredom, but out of a kind of sense of situation. And where did that sense come from if, as it seemed, he took no share in willing it? With disquiet, he found that words were forming in his mind, words which, because he could think of no others, he'd very soon hear himself uttering. He got up, thinking that he might go to the window and somehow derive alternative speech from what he saw out of it, but before reaching it he turned and said: 'It isn't a matter of scruples; it's a matter of seeing what you've got to do.'