‘Not exactly frightened.’

‘Well,’ said Roger, smiling, ‘what effect, exactly, did I have on you?’

Laurie shook his head.

‘I couldn’t quite explain. Of course, in my dream you were different.’

‘Nicer or nastier?’

‘Well, not nastier—you couldn’t be.’

Now it was Roger’s turn to feel embarrassed. He stared at Laurie, and all at once Laurie’s face turned scarlet.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean that, you know I didn’t,’ he pleaded. His hands traced circles on the rumpled bedclothes and his head oscillated with them. ‘I said not nastier, because you never are nasty, so you couldn’t be nastier, if you see what I mean.’

‘I think I do,’ his father said, mollified and more relieved than he was prepared to show, ‘although I am nasty sometimes, I admit. But how was I different, in your dream?’

‘That’s just it, you weren’t so nice.’

Roger didn’t like the idea of being thought less nice, even in someone’s dream. But he had to say something—he wouldn’t let Laurie see he had been hurt.

‘What was I like?’ he asked, with assumed jauntiness.

‘Oh, you were like yourself, to look at, I mean—not really like of course, because people never are, in dreams. But I always knew it was you.’

Less and less did Roger relish the idea of his dream personality being made known to him. Would it be cowardly to change the subject?

‘Don’t you ever dream about your mother?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Oh, no, never, nor about Susie or Victor. Only about you.’

There seemed to be no escape. Roger grasped the nettle.

‘When you dream about me,’ he asked, ‘what do I do?’

‘Oh, you don’t do much, nothing to speak of. You’re just there, you see.’

‘I do see,’ said Roger grimly, though he didn’t really. ‘And you don’t like me being there?’

Laurie wriggled; his plump hands left off making circles on the sheet and clasped the front of his pyjama-jacket.

‘No, I’m glad you’re there, because I always feel safer when you are, but——’

‘But what?’ Let’s get to the bottom of it now, thought Roger.

‘Well, you make me think I’ve been doing something wrong.’

Roger’s heart sank. It was too bad. Hadn’t he always, throughout his parenthood, tried to give his children just the opposite impression—make them feel that what they did was right? Not so much with Victor and Susie, perhaps; he did tick them off sometimes, he really had to. But he had never succeeded in making them feel guilty; whereas with Laurie——

‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘Stop fidgeting with your pyjamas or you’ll be pulling off the buttons and then you will have done something wrong.’ Switching himself round still farther on the bed he stretched his arms out towards Laurie and firmly imprisoned the boy’s restless hands in his. ‘Now listen,’ he repeated, propelling Laurie gently to and fro, making the boy feel he was on a rocking-horse, ‘dreams go by contraries, you know.’

‘What does that mean, Daddy?’

‘It means that when you dream something, you dream what is the opposite of the truth. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘So, if you dream about me and I seem nasty, or about the pylon and it seems nasty, it really means——’ he stopped.

‘Yes, go on, Daddy,’ said Laurie, sleepily. He was enjoying the rocking motion—so different from the pylon’s sickening lurches—and didn’t want it to stop. ‘Please go on,’ he begged.

‘It means that we’re both—the pylon and me too, well, rather nice.’

Before Roger had time to see whether this thought was sinking in, there came a thunderous knocking at the door. Releasing Laurie’s hands he pulled his pyjama-jacket round him and called out, ‘Come in!’

There was a stampede into the room, a racket and a hubbub like a mob bursting in, and Susan and Victor, fully clothed, were standing by the bed.

‘Oh, you are lazy,’ Susan cried. ‘You haven’t even begun to dress, either of you, and you haven’t heard the news.’

‘What news?’ Roger asked.

‘Awful news, dreadful news, the worst. Isn’t it, Victor?’

‘It’s simply frightful. It’s the end,’ Victor said. ‘You’ll never guess.’

Their faces beamed with happiness.

‘Well, why are you so cheerful about it then?’ their father asked.

‘Oh, just because it is so horrible,’ said Susan, and their faces glowed afresh. ‘You’ll never guess, and so we’ll tell you.’ She caught Victor’s eye to give him his cue, and at the tops of their voices they chanted in unison:

‘The pylon’s coming back!’

Dead silence followed; even the impression of noise, which had been as strong as or stronger than the noise itself, was banished.

‘You don’t say anything,’ said Susan, disappointed. ‘We hoped you’d be . . . you’d be . . . just as upset as we are, and there you sit in your pyjamas . . . like . . . like . . .’

Her voice died away into the silence which had returned with double force, and seemed to occupy the room even more completely than the uproar had.

Roger’s voice broke it.

‘But you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘They’re not making a new pylon, they’re only breaking up the platform of the old one.’

‘No, no,’ said Susie, dancing to and fro. ‘It’s you who are wrong, Daddy. You aren’t always right, you know. You see we’ve been across and talked to the men themselves, and they say they are building a new pylon taller than the last——’

‘A hundred and thirty-seven feet high,’ put in Victor.

‘Oh, yes, a huge great thing. We were so horrified we couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s true, Mummy, isn’t it?’

She appealed to Anne who, hitherto unnoticed, was standing by the door.

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ Anne said.

‘There, we told you! And now the view will be spoilt again for ever!’

Stung in his masculine pride, shorn of his mantle of infallibility, Roger lost his temper. These wretched children! Ill-mannered brats, why had he spoilt them so? ’ Now you clear out!’ he thundered, adding, ‘I don’t mean you, Anne.’ But his wife had already gone.

Laurie remained, but where? He had slipped down between the bedclothes, out of sight and almost out of mind. Now he came to the surface and let his stricken face be seen.

‘Oh, Daddy!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, Daddy!’ But what he meant by it he could not have told, so violent and discordant were the emotions that surged up in him. Indeed, they seemed to sound inside his head, drowning another noise that punctuated but did not break the silence: the hammerstrokes from which would rise a bigger and better pylon.

‘I’m here, Laurie, I’m here!’ his father said, but remembering the effect his presence had in Laurie’s dreams he doubted whether it would be much consolation now; for was not Laurie always in a dream?

MRS. CARTERET RECEIVES