sideboard, picked up a slippery fried egg and slid it into his mouth whole. She watched him with folded arms and a blank expression. Chewing violently, he doubled up a piece of bacon and crammed it between his teeth, then signalled he was ready to move. Intimations of nausea circled round his digestive system.
They went in file through the hall and up the stairs. The ocarina-like notes of a recorder playing a meagre air were distantly audible; perhaps Welch had breakfasted in his room. Dixon found, with a pang of relief, that he could open the bathroom door.
The girl looked sternly at him. 'What are we going in here for?'
'My bedroom's on the far side of this.'
'Oh, I see. What a curious arrangement.'
'I imagine old Welch had this part of the house built on. It's better like this than having the bathroom on the far side of a bedroom.'
'I suppose so. My goodness, you certainly have gone to town, haven't you?' She went forward and fingered the sheet and blankets like one shown material in a shop. 'But this doesn't look like a burn; it looks as if it's been cut with something.'
'Yes, I… cut the burnt bits off with a razor-blade. I thought it would look better than just leaving it burnt.'
'Why on earth did you do that?'
'I can't really explain. I just thought it would look better.'
'Mm. And did all this come from one cigarette?'
'That I don't know. Probably.'
'Well, you must have been pretty far gone not to… And the table too. And the rug. You know, I don't know that I ought to be a party to all this.' She grinned, which made her look almost ludicrously healthy, and revealed at the same time that her front teeth were slightly irregular. For some reason this was more disturbing to his equanimity than regularity could possibly have been. He began to think he'd noticed quite enough things about her now, thank you. Then she drew herself up and pressed her lips together, seeming to consider. 'I think the best thing would be to remake the bed with all this mess at the bottom, out of sight. We can put the blanket that's only scorched - this one - on top; it'll probably be almost all right on the side that's underneath now. What about that? It's a pity there isn't an eiderdown.'
'Yes. Sounds all right to me, that. They're bound to find it when they strip the bed, though, aren't they?'
'Yes, but they probably won't connect it with smoking, especially after what you did with your razor-blade. And after all, you wouldn't have put your head right down the bottom of the bed to smoke, would you?'
'That's a point, of course. We'd better get on with it, then.'
He heaved the bed away from the wall, while she watched with arms folded, then they both set about the unmaking and remaking. The vacuum-cleaner could now be heard quite close at hand, drowning Welch's recorder. As they worked, Dixon studied the Callaghan girl, despite his determination to notice nothing more about her, and saw with fury that she was prettier than he'd thought. He found himself wanting to make the kind of face or noise he was accustomed to make when entrusted with a fresh ability-testing task by Welch, or seeing Michie in the distance, or thinking about Mrs Welch, or being told by Beesley something Johns had said. He wanted to implode his features, to crush air from his mouth, in a way and to a degree that might be set against the mess of feelings she aroused in him: indignation, grief, resentment, peevishness, spite, and sterile anger, all the allotropes of pain. The girl was doubly guilty, first of looking like that, secondly of appearing in front of him looking like that. Run-of- the-mill queens of love - Italian film-actresses, millionaires' wives, girls on calendars - he could put up with; more than that, he positively liked looking at them. But this sort of thing he'd as soon not look at at all. He remembered seeing in a book once that some man who claimed to have love well weighed up - someone like Plato or Rilke - had said that it was an emotion quite different in kind, not just degree, from ordinary sexual feelings. Was it love, then, that he felt for girls like this one? No emotion he'd experienced or could imagine came anything like so close, to his way of thinking; but apart from the dubious support of Plato or Rilke he had all the research on the subject against him there. Well, what was it if it wasn't love? It didn't seem like desire; when the last corner was tucked in and he joined her on her side of the bed, he was strongly tempted to put his hand out and lay it on one of those full breasts, but this action, if performed, would have appeared as natural to him, as unimportant and unobjectionable, as reaching out to take a large ripe peach from a fruit-dish. No, all this, whatever it was or was called, was something nothing could be done about.
'There, I think that looks very nice,' the girl said. 'You couldn't guess what was underneath it all if you didn't know, could you?'
'No, and thanks very much for the idea and the help.'
'Oh, that's all right. What are you going to do with the table?'
'I've been thinking about that. There's a little junk-room at the end of the passage, full of broken furniture and rotting books and things; they sent me up there yesterday to fetch a music-stand or whatever they call the things. That room's the place for this table, behind an old screen with French courtiers painted on it - you know, floppy hats and banjos. If you'll go and see whether the coast's clear, I'll rush along there with it now.'
'Agreed. I must say that's an inspiration. With the table out of the way nobody'll connect the sheets with smoking. They'll think you tore them with your feet, in a nightmare or something.'
'Some nightmare, to get through two blankets as well.'
She looked at him open-mouthed, then began to laugh. She sat down on the bed but immediately jumped up again as if it were once more on fire. Dixon began laughing too, not because he was much amused but because he felt grateful to her for her laughter. They were still laughing a minute later when she beckoned to him from outside the bathroom door, when he ran out on to the landing with the table, and when Margaret suddenly flung open the door of her bedroom and saw them.
'What do you imagine you're up to, James?' she asked.
VII
'WE'RE just… I'm just… I was just getting rid of this table, as a matter of fact,' Dixon said, looking from one woman to the other.
The Callaghan girl made an extraordinarily loud snorting noise of incompetently-suppressed laughter. Margaret said:
'Just what is all this nonsense?'
'It isn't nonsense, Margaret, I assure you. I've…'
'If anybody minds me saying so,' the girl interrupted him, 'I think we'd better get rid of the table first and explain the whys and wherefores afterwards, don't you?'
'That's right,' Dixon said, put his head down, and ran up the passage. In the junk-room he nudged aside an archery target, making his crazy-peasant face at it - what flaring imbecilities must it have witnessed? - and dumped the table behind the screen. Next, he unrolled a handy length of mouldering silk and spread it over the table-top; then arranged upon the cloth thus provided two fencing foils, a book called
Margaret was waiting for him at the threshold of her room. One corner of her mouth was drawn in in a way he knew well. The Callaghan girl had gone.
'Well, what was all that about, James?'
He shut the door and began to explain. As he talked, his incendiarism and the counter-measures adopted struck him for the first time as funny. Surely Margaret, especially since she wasn't personally implicated, must find them funny too; they formed the sort of story she liked. He said as much at the end of his account.
Without changing her expression, she dissented. 'I could see you and that girl were finding it all pretty
