No sound in the flat, but Anthony was restless, he went out and took a turn round the Square (if a square can be circled). His footsteps came slow, clogged by his thoughts. Shall I turn back? he asked himself, seeking for some sort of compromise between himself and the Moral Law. Shall I go up to Ramoth Gilead, or shall I forbear? Shall I tell Copperthwaite to return his ill-gotten gains to the Americans, or shall I leave it?

At the opposite side of the Square stood the Roland-Rex (by now he knew its contours only too well), drawn up outside the owner’s door. Sitting at the wheel, indeed asleep at the wheel, was a chauffeur, immaculate in a uniform similar to Copperthwaite’s. He looked like part of the car’s furniture, indeed like part of the car; he was the same colour, his figure might have been an extension, as a reproduction of its lines; his immobility a parallel of its own. Function for function, what difference was there between them?

Anthony completed the circuit.

No car outside his own flat; but he pressed the button; the garage-door swung open, revealing a set of loose boxes, so to speak, in which some of the tenants kept their cars. He remembered the number of his: 5A.

At first he saw nothing except his car, then, sticking out from under its bonnet, a pair of feet and leggings.

‘Copperthwaite!’ he called, hardly expecting an answer.

But after much wriggling, Copperthwaite came into view, so dirty in his overalls, so changed from his glorious appearance of an hour ago, that the transformation was hardly credible.

He struggled to his feet.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I just wondered’, said Anthony, ‘how you were getting on?’

‘Very well, sir,’ said Copperthwaite, composing his face to disguise the slight irritation he felt at being disturbed at his work; “Very well, sir. But I’m afraid the car needs a good deal of attention. It’s been neglected, sir.’

Anthony said nothing.

‘Yes, sir, it’s been neglected, and of course a car doesn’t like being neglected.’

Anthony couldn’t resist saying,

‘Like human beings, I suppose.’

‘Yes, like human beings,’ said Copperthwaite, mopping his brow with a sweaty handkerchief, and without taking, or appearing to take, Anthony’s point. ‘But human beings can fend for themselves.’

He gave the car an over-all look, in which compassion, interest, and adoration—yes, adoration—were blended.

The sudden impulse that makes one ask a question that one would never, in ordinary circumstances and after due consideration, ask, made Anthony say,

‘Why did you leave that excellent job with the American gentleman on the other side of the Square? I thought—in fact you told me yourself—it was your ambition to look after a Roland-Rex.’

‘So it was, sir,’ said Copperthwaite promptly, his eyes switching to Anthony’s battered car. ‘And shall I tell you why—why I didn’t go on there. I mean, because the money was good and the boss gave me all I wanted, including the uniform, which I didn’t want. It was because—’

‘Because of what?’

‘The Roland-Rex was a perfect car, no complaints.’

‘Then why?’

Copperthwaite gave Anthony a look that pitied such lack of understanding.

‘Because there was nothing I could do for it. Nothing ever went wrong with it, it didn’t need me, I couldn’t—I couldn’t mix myself with it—it was a stranger, if you know what I mean. I sat there like a stuffed dummy—the car could have looked after itself, and almost driven itself, without me—’

He stopped, and gave another look at Anthony’s shabby old roadster.

‘Your car isn’t a Roland-Rex, sir, but as long as you are in it you will be driving with me as well as in it.’

Anthony found this remark obscure.

‘Well, of course I shall be driving with you, because I can’t drive myself, but what do you mean by, I shall be driving with you, as well as with it?’

‘Because I am the car, sir.’

Anthony tried to fathom this out.

‘Does the car mean all that to you?’ he asked incredulously.

‘It does, sir. It means a great deal to me, as you do, though not in the same way—begging your pardon, sir.’

Anthony heard the church bells ringing.

‘Good gracious, it’s Sunday!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m all out in my dates—I wasn’t expecting you till Monday.’

‘Yes, but one day doesn’t make much difference, does it?’

‘Of course not.’ Anthony wondered where Copperthwaite had spent Saturday night. ‘But when I was walking round the Square I noticed that your . . . your late employer had another chauffeur.’

Copperthwaite shrugged his shoulders.

‘Oh yes, Mr. Duke doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet, and there are plenty of blokes who will give up their weekends if they see a good job in prospect, and a uniform too.’

The bells sounded louder. Eleven o’clock could not be far away.

‘Well, I must be off’ said Anthony to Copperthwaite’s retreating form, which was edging itself, feet first this time, as if some octopus power, stronger than himself, was sucking him into the tentacles of the car’s dark underneath.

Rapture began to glow on Copperthwaite’s upturned face.

‘If you are going to church, sir,’ he said, wriggling from shoulder to shoulder, ‘say a prayer for me.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Anthony, ‘but what would it be?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, sir, you know more about prayers than I do, just a little prayer for me, and a big prayer for the car.’

‘But isn’t it past praying for?’

‘No, sir, not as long as I’m here,’ and with that Copperthwaite’s tired, dirty, but jubilant face disappeared under the bonnet.

An answer to prayer, perhaps?

PARADISE PADDOCK

Marcus Foster acquired his house, Paradise Paddock, with the maximum of discouragement from his friends. ‘We looked at ninety-eight,’ one of them said. ‘We spent the best part of a year house-hunting, and every single one of them had something hopelessly against it. Either it faced the wrong way, or it had a cellar full of water which would have to be pumped out, or it had no water at all, no electricity and no gas, or it was so far from anywhere that such important things as food could never be delivered, and staff, supposing one could find them, would never consent to stay, and anyhow there were no suitable quarters for them to stay in, and—well, at last, when we were quite desperate, we found Wrightswell, which was so much too big that we had to pull half of it down.’

Marcus was utterly at a loss, for he felt that where his practical or comparatively practical friends, the Larkins, had failed, he was most unlikely to succeed. When he surveyed the length and breadth of England, sometimes with a map, sometimes relying on his imagination, he didn’t know which way to turn.

But turn he must, for the people who had let him their house, for the period of the war, now wanted it back.

Where could he go? He was a bachelor and an orphan, aged fifty, by no means rich but not too badly off. The thought of all England lying before him, studded with houses, each of which had some vital drawback, appalled him. And what of Henry and Muriel, the couple who had served him well for so many years, in spite of Muriel’s chronic melancholia and Henry’s occasional outbursts of temper, where would they go?

Marcus was not without friends, and he decided, with an unconscious foresight, that he had better try to find a house that was near to some of them. In the town of Baswick, in the west country, he had several good friends. Baswick must be his first house-hunting ground.

How to start about it? Marcus found the name of a house-agent in Baswick, and applied to him.

Marcus’s quest had at the same time, vis-à-vis the vast area of England, a limitation which might be a hindrance but also might be a help. He wanted a house by the river, where he could row his boat. Boating was his favourite pastime—boating of a relaxed, unskilful, unprofessional kind, just plodding along a river, in a skiff with a sliding seat, thoughtless, mindless. But something from the movement and from the rustle, heard or unheard, of Nature around him, gave him a peace of mind which he couldn’t give himself.