on the seat of his trousers.
Wimpy frowned back at him, pointed at the old woman, and then swept his hand towards the interior of the house.
Suddenly the meaning of his words became crystal clear to Bastable. In fact, it was so obvious—it was so obvious what he ought to do that he understood also why Wimpy had risked addressing him in French, on the assumption that he couldn't fail to take that meaning. It was so absolutely and utterly obvious that it shrivelled him with embarrassment that he had been so slow on the uptake and so quick once again almost to give everything away, to ruin everything, with his slowness.
He bent forward between the handles of the cart and lifted the body of the old woman from its resting place among the bundles and packages.
dummy4
The interior of the house seemed much gloomier than it had been on the first occasion he had entered it, as though the light which penetrated it from outside had lost some quality of brightness which it had possessed only a short time before.
Bastable stood irresolutely by the newel-post, wondering which way to go, where to lay down his burden, yet held back at the same time by the sound of the voices behind him—
Wimpy's voice, so instantly recognizable, yet at the same time so strangely different as that ever-ready tongue curled round those alien French sounds; and the German's voice, slower and deeper, tackling the same sounds less confidently, yet adding a harsh Teutonic abruptness which somehow made each of them even more foreign.
He strained for a minute to try for at least some inkling of what they were saying to each other. But once again he could make no sense of any of it, from the German's carefully-constructed phrases, in which each word was preceded by a momentary hesitation, to Wimpy's fluent replies, in which all the words ran together in one continuous torrent of language.
And yet... and yet—there was no hostility in the German's voice, only a note of polite inquiry. Indeed, if there was an anger, it was in Wimpy's replies . . and Wimpy
impressively and eloquently French—even arrogantly French, with no more concession to his interrogator's understanding of that language than the Tynesider had made to the SS officer back in the operating theatre.
He closed his ears to the voices, and concentrated on his own problem to the exclusion of everything else, and the answer to it came to him immediately. There was only one place to take her, because there was only one place where she would wish to be—even though she wished for nothing now, and knew nothing, and felt nothing.
He blundered forward past the hat-stand, down the passage.
This time the parlour door required no brute force to open, he had swept the floor clean behind it when he had put his shoulder to it the first time.
The old man in the chair hadn't moved, he had only lost his watch-and-chain; and the bowl of artificial fruit hadn't moved, it still sat in the middle of the table amid a litter of fallen plaster from the ceiling.
Still cradling the old woman, he bent forward and caught the edge of the table-cloth and twisted sideways, dragging the bowl and the debris with him; and then dropped that edge and caught another part of the cloth, and dragged it further, and then repeated the action, until the cloth slid from the table, carrying the bowl and the plaster with it. The bowl fell and splintered, out of sight beneath him, and a cloud of plaster-dust arose from its ruin. He stepped forward quickly dummy4
and unloaded the little black-clad corpse on to the bare polished surface, which had been swept clean by the slide of the table-cloth across it; and turned and fled from the room before the dust could settle on her, and on her table, and on her husband, slamming the door fiercely behind him, leaving them alone together.
The slam of the door echoed inside his head for an instant, then was lost in other sounds outside him: the insistent far-distant
He turned his head to look and listen in the same direction, towards the open doorway at the end of the passage. There was no one blocking it now, but the lack of brightness beyond, the pale light outside, suddenly registered the passing of time, of which he had altogether lost track. This endless day was crawling at last out of its long afternoon into its long summer's evening.
But the doorway was not empty—or, it was empty, the rectangle of its opening, but just within it, pasted against the door itself, stood the child.
So Wimpy didn't need the child any more. So now she was plainly alone and terrified again; he could see that by the way the poor little mite had flattened herself against the door, her small fists clenched across her chest. And he knew, from his own experience of being held motionless by the equal forces dummy4
of different terrors, why she couldn't move. Outside, in the garden and on the road, was all the dust and noise of the whole German Army on the march, a thing beyond her understanding . . . but inside . . .
