Tomorrow's ghost

hard luck. Your Majesty. ,'

'That's a pity,' said Frances.

'I agree. Except they would only have given us the beginning of the story, and it's the end of it we really need ...' He watched her. 'That is ... if we're looking for the same thing, Princess.'

'True.' The trading had started. 'You said Sands thought he was going to be a schoolmaster, not a soldier? Did he really mean that?'

Paul half-smiled. 'Takes a bit of effort to see Fighting Jack as Mr Chips, not Colonel Blimp, doesn't it!'

'Did he?'

'I doubt it. I think Rifleman Sands simply thinks that any poor boy who won a scholarship to- the Grammar and liked reading books ought to be a schoolmaster, that's all. Just the old class prejudice against the Red Coat ... plus his own memories of the trenches, I suspect.'

'And what did Butler's father make of it?'

'Well, I think . ..' He broke off. 'I think ... that it's about time you stopped asking questions and answered one or two for a change. Princess. Like, for instance, what this sudden interest in Fighting Jack's academic progress means?'

Frances shrugged. 'I think he's a complex man.'

'Aren't we all?' He gestured towards the shelves of books. 'But he carried on the family tradition - adopted family anyway. They're all military, or military-political. Or political ... Ex libris Butler is the same as Ex libris Chesney.'

'Not upstairs.'

'Upstairs?'

'In his bedroom.'

'Indeed? Books in his bedroom? Well, well!' He was interested in spite of himself.

'What dark secret have you uncovered there, then?'

Frances thought of the hard, narrow bed and the carefully adjusted reading lamp, as well as the well-thumbed books. And also what the children had said.

'No dark secret, Paul. Just Hardy and Dickens and Thackeray ... he's re-reading Henry Esmond at the moment.'

'Re-reading?'

'And Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. And Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

And Hemingway and Stephen Crane. And Jack London's Martin Eden.'

'That would be rather suitable,' murmured Paul. 'But Hemingway - that's a turn-up, I must say!'

'And John DOS Passes ... Thoreau, Mark Twain ... and Faulkner - every bit of Faulkner

...' She trailed off.

'Hmm . ..' There was a frown on his face now. 'Not a simple soldier, you mean? But maybe a man after your own heart, perhaps?'

He had seen her books, Frances remembered, even though he had also confused Robbie's with hers to her discomfort.

And then ... after her own heart?

Well, they both had the same Yoknapatawpha County tales, except that his had been bought new in '55 - J. Butler 1955 - and hers picked up, dog-eared, in the Charing Cross Road fifteen years later.

Heart -

And except his had an underlining in it (and it was his underlining too, in the same coal-black ink of J. Butler 7955), and as he had never underlined anything in any other of his books, so far as she could discover, that passage from Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech had to be strong magic for him:

... the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths ... love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice...

'You favour the psychological approach this time, then? 'Know the man, and you'll know where to find the facts everyone else has missed'?' At least he was deadly serious and not making fun of her.

'Are there any facts everyone else has missed?'

He didn't reply at once; he was still adding the unsuspected literary Butler to his Fighting Jack, and getting no sort of answer.

At length he nodded. 'I think there are, somewhere - yes.'

'Why?'

'Because of us, Frances. You and me.'

'What d'you mean?'

'I mean ... I don't believe they would have detached us without a reason - I don't think it can be just because someone high up hopes to block Butler's promotion. I think that a word has been dropped somewhere that there is something. And if they put the same people on it who checked him out before, they think those people will find the