“What’s up with you, Nick?”

“Up with me?”

“No friends. No girls. Nothing.”

“Not at this time of the morning. Please.”

She sat there dumpily, in an old red dressing gown, her hair uncombed, as old as time.

“You’re not looking for a job. That’s all my fanny.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“I know you are, Kemp.”

I looked up at her. Her face was a disaster. She had long ago let it go to rack and ruin. It was pasty, bloated, with the eyes permanently narrowed against tobacco smoke; somehow like a mask in a Noh play, which in an odd way suited the Cockney resonances that loitered in her voice and the hard anti-sentimentality she affected. But now, in what was for her an extraordinary gesture of affection, she reached across the table and patted my hand. She was, I knew, five years younger than Lily de Seitas; and yet she looked ten years older. She was by ordinary standards foulmouthed; a blatant member of what had been my father’s most hated regiment, one he used to consign far lower even than the Damned Socialists and the Blasted Whitehall Airy Fairies—the Longhaired Brigade. I had a moment’s vision of his standing, his aggressive blue eyes, his bushy colonel’s moustache, in the door of the studio; the unmade divan, the stinking old rusty oilstove, the mess on the table, the garish sexual-fetal abstract oils that littered the walls; a tat of old pottery, old clothes, old newspapers. But in that short gesture of hers, and the look that accompanied it, I knew there was more real humanity than I had ever known in my own home. Yet still that home, those years, governed me; I had to repress the natural response. Our eyes met across a gap I could not bridge; her offer of a rough temporary motherhood, my ffight to what I had to be, the lonely son. She withdrew her hand.

I said, “It’s too complicated.”

“I’ve got all day.”

Her face peered at me through the blue smoke, and suddenly it seemed as blank, as menacing, as an interrogator’s. I liked her, I liked her, yet I felt her curiosity like a net drawn round me. I was like some freakish parasitic species that could establish itself only in one rare kind of situation, by one precarious symbiosis. They had been wrong, at the trial. It was not that I preyed on girls; but the fact that my only access to normal humanity, to social decency, to any openness of heart, lay through girls, preyed on me. It was in that that I was the real victim.

There was only one person I wanted to talk with. Till then I could not move, advance, plan, progress, become a better human being, anything; and till then, I carried my mystery, my secret, around with me like a defense; as my only companion.

“One day, Kemp. Not now.”

She shrugged; gave me a stonily sibylline look, auguring the worst.

The old char who cleaned the stairs once a fortnight bawled through the door. My phone was ringing. I raced up the stairs, lifting the receiver on what seemed the dying ring.

“Hello. Nicholas Urfe.”

“Oh, good morning, Urfe. It’s me. Sandy Mitford.”

“You’re back!”

“What’s left of me, old man. What’s left of me.” He cleared his throat. “Got your note. Wondered if you were free for a spot of lunchington.”

A minute later, a time and place fixed, I was reading once more my letter to Alison. The injured Malvolio stalked through every line.

In another minute there was no letter; but, as with every other relationship in my life, pounded ashes.

Mitford hadn’t changed at all, in fact I could have sworn that he was wearing the same clothes, the same dark blue blazer, dark gray flannels, club tie. They looked a little more worn out, like their wearer; he was far less jaunty than I remembered, though after a few gins he got back some of his old guerrilla cockiness. He had spent the summer “carting bands of Americans” round Spain; no, he’d received no letter from Phraxos from me. They must have destroyed it. There was something they hadn’t wanted him to tell.

Over sandwiches we had a talk about the school. Bourani wasn’t mentioned. He kept on saying that he’d warned me, and I said, yes, he’d warned me. I waited for a chance to broach the only subject that interested me. Eventually, as I’d been hoping, he made the opening himself.

“Ever get over to the waiting room?”

I knew at once that the question was not as casual as he tried to make it sound; that he was both afraid and curious; that in fact we both had the same secret reason for meeting.

“Oh God, now I meant to ask you about that. Do you remember, just as we said goodbye…”

“Yes.” He gave me a tightly cautious look. “Never went to a bay called Moutsa? Rather jolly, over on the south side?”

“Of course. I know it.”

“Ever notice the villa on the cape to the east?”

“Yes. It was always shut up. I was told.”

“Ah. Interesting. Very interesting.” He looked reminiscently across the lounge; left me in suspense. I watched him lift, an infuriating upward arc, his cigarette to his lips; the gentleman connoisseur of fine Virginia; then fume smoke through his nostrils. “Well that was it, old boy. Nothing really.”

“But why beware?”

“Oh it’s nothing. No-thing at all.”

“Then you can tell me.”

“I did, actually.”

“You did!”

“Row with collaborationist. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Same man who has the villa.”

“Oh, but…” I flicked my fingers… “wait a moment. What was his name?”

“Conchis.” He had an amused smile on his face, as if he knew what I was going to say. He touched his moustache; always preening his moustache.

“That’s right. But I thought he did something rather fine during the Resistance.”

“Not on your nelly. Actually he did a deal with the Germans. Personally organized the shooting of eighty villagers. Then got his kraut chums to line him up with them. See. As if he was all brave and innocent.”

“But wasn’t he badly wounded, or something?”

He blew out smoke, despising my innocence. “You don’t survive a German execution, old boy. No, the bugger pulled a very fast one. Acted like a traitor and got treated like a bloody hero. Even forged a phony German report on the incident. One of the neatest little cover-up jobs of the war.”

I looked sharply at him. A dreadful new suspicion crossed my mind. New corridors in the labyrinth.

“But hasn’t anyone… ?”

Mitford made the Greek corruption gesture; thumb and forefinger.

I said, “You still haven’t explained the waiting-room business.”

“His name for the villa. Waiting for death or something. Had it nailed up on a tree in Frog.” His finger traced a line. “Salle d'attente.”

“What happened between you?”

“Nothing, old boy. Absolutely nothing.”

“Come on.” I smiled ingenuously. “Now I know the place.”

I remembered as a very small boy lying on the bough of a willow over a Hampshire stream; I was watching my father casting for a trout. It was his one delicacy, casting a dry fly, posing it on the water as soft as thistledown. I could see the trout he was trying to coax into a rise. And I remembered that moment when the fish floated slowly up and hovered beneath the fly, a moment endlessly prolonged in a heart-stopping excitement; then the sudden swift kick of the tail and the lightning switch of my father’s strike; the ratcheting of the reel.

“It’s nothing, old boy. Really.”

“Oh for God’s sake. What’s it matter?”

“All damned absurd.” The fish took the fly. “Actually I was out walking one day. May or June, I can’t remember. Bit browned off at the school. Went over to Moutsa to swim and well, I came down, you know the place, through the trees and what did I see—not just a couple of girls. But a couple of girls in bikinis. Quick recce. Niftiest beeline I knew how towards them, said something in Greek, and damn me they answered in English. They were English. Gorgeous creatures. Twins.”