There was no half-fit gloom in the dining-room today; the place was starched and shining, silver, glass and linen. There was even a shirt-front where a head waiter hovered. But there was also Mary; calm and comfortable and plump as she had been that morning. He remembered how in need of soothing and reassurance he had been, and could hardly believe that that tortured and exhausted creature could have been himself.

He sat down at the same table, near the screens in front of the service door, and Mary came to take his order and to ask how the fishing on the Turlie was these days.

‘How did you know I was fishing the Turlie?’

‘You were with Mr Rankin when you came in for breakfast, off the train.’

Off the train. He had come off the train after that night of conflict and suffering; that loathsome night. He had come off the train, leaving B Seven dead there with a casual glance and a passing moment of regret. But B Seven had paid back a hundred-fold that moment of easy compassion. B Seven had come with him and in the end had saved him. It was B Seven who had sent him to the Islands, on that mad, cold, blown search for nothing. In that strange absurd limbo he had done all those things that he could never have done elsewhere; he had laughed till the tears ran, he had danced, he had let himself be flung about like a leaf from one empty horizon to the next, he had sung, he had sat still and looked. And he had come back a whole man. He owed B Seven more than he could ever repay.

He thought about Bill Kenrick while he had his luncheon; the young man who had had no roots. Had he been lonely in his unattached life, or just free? And if free, was it a swallow’s freedom, or an eagle’s? A sun-seeking skimming, or a soaring lordliness?

At least he had had a trait that in all climes and ages has been both rare and endearing: he was the man of action who was also by instinct a poet. It was what distinguished him from the light-come crowds of OCAL employees who span their airy patterns across the continents as unthinking as mosquitoes. It was what distinguished him from the milling five-o’clock crowds in a London railway station to whom adventure was half-a-crown each way. If the dead boy in B Seven had been neither a Sidney nor a Grenfell, he had at least been of their kind.

And for that Grant loved him.

‘You know,’ said that voice in him, ‘if you don’t take care you’ll develop a “thing” about Bill Kenrick.’

‘I’ve got it already,’ he said cheerfully; and the voice retired in a defeated silence.

He over-tipped Mary and went away to book two seats on the morning plane to London. He had still more than a week of holiday to come and the Turlie still swarmed with fish, beautiful silver clean-run fighting fish, but he had other business. Since yesterday afternoon he had only one business: Bill Kenrick.

He had qualms about that air journey to London, but not very serious qualms. He could hardly recognise, when he looked back at him, that demon-ridden frightened creature who had stepped down on to Scoone platform from the London mail less than a month ago. All that was left of that deplorable object was a slight fear of being afraid. The terror itself was no longer there.

He bought enough sweets for Patrick to keep him sick for three months on end, and drove back to the hills. He was afraid that the sweets were a little too elegant to please Patrick entirely—a little too ‘jessie-like’ perhaps? — since Pat’s avowed favourites were something in Mrs Mair’s window labelled Ogo-Pogo Eyes. But Laura would no doubt dole out the Scoone ones in driblets anyway.

He halted the car above the river, half-way between Moymore and Scoone, and went down across the moor to look for Tad Cullen. It was still early afternoon and he would not yet have finished his after-luncheon spell on the river.

He had not yet begun it. As Grant came to the edge of the moor and looked down at the river’s immediate hollow, he saw below him in the mid-distance a small group of three persons, idle and relaxed on the bank. Zoë was propped in her favourite position against a rock, and on either side of her, on a level with her crossed feet and gazing at her with an unwavering attention, were her two followers: Pat Rankin and Tad Cullen. Looking at them, amused and indulgent, Grant became aware that Bill Kenrick had done him a final service for which he had not yet had credit. Bill Kenrick had saved him from falling in love with Zoë Kentallen.

A few more hours would have done it. A few more hours in her uninterrupted company, and he would have been involved past recovery. Bill Kenrick had intervened just in time.

It was Pat who saw him first and came to meet him and bring him back to the company as children and dogs do to those of whom they approve. Zoë tilted her head back to watch him come and said: ‘You haven’t missed anything, Alan Grant. No one has had a nibble all day. Would you like to take my rod for a little? Perhaps a change of rhythm will fetch them.’

Grant said that he would like that very much, since his time for fishing was running out.

‘You have still a week to catch everything in the river,’ she said.

Grant wondered how she had known that. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am going back to London tomorrow morning,’ and for the first time saw Zoë react to a stimulus as an adult would. The instant regret on her face was as vivid as that on Pat’s, but unlike Pat she controlled and removed it. She said in her polite gentle voice how sorry she was, but her face no longer showed any emotion. It was her fairy-tale face again; the Hans Andersen illustration.

Before he could consider this phenomenon, Tad Cullen said: ‘Can I come back with you, Mr Grant? To London.’

‘I meant you to. I’ve booked two seats on the morning plane.’

In the end Grant took the rod that Tad Cullen was using—a spare one from Clune—so that they could go down river together and talk. But Zoë made no motion to continue her fishing.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said, unjointing her rod. ‘I think I shall go back to Clune and write some letters.’

Pat stood irresolute, still like a friendly dog between two allegiances, and then said: ‘I’m going back with Zoë.’

He said it, Grant thought, almost as if he were championing her instead of merely accompanying her; as if he had joined an Unfair-To-Zoë movement. But since no one could ever think of being unfair to Zoë, his attitude was surely unnecessary.

From the rock where he sat with Tad Cullen to give him the news he watched the two figures grow small across the moor, and wondered a little at that sudden withdrawal, at the dispirited air that hung about her progress. She looked like a discouraged child, tired and trailing homeward unexpectant. Perhaps the thought of David, her husband, had suddenly drowned her. That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.

‘But that wouldn’t be much to get excited about, would it?’ Tad Cullen was saying.

‘What wouldn’t?’

‘This ancient city you’re talking about. Would anyone get all that excited about it? I mean, about a few ruins. Ruins are two a nickel in the world nowadays.’

‘Not these, they aren’t,’ Grant said, forgetting Zoë. ‘The man who found Wabar would make history.’

‘I thought when you said he had found something important you were going to say munition works in the desert or something like that.’

‘Now that really is something that is two for a nickel!’

‘What?’

‘Secret munition plants. No one who found one of those would be a celebrity.’

Tad’s ears pricked. ‘A celebrity? You mean the man who found this place would be a celebrity?’

‘I’ve already said so.’

‘No. You just said he would make history.’

‘True. Too true,’ Grant said. ‘The terms are not synonymous any more. Yes, he would be a celebrity. Tutankhamen’s tomb would be nothing to it.’