'I know. But I could do things you would mind, couldn't I? I could stop loving you.'
'No you couldn't.'
'No, of course I couldn't.'
Churchill got out of bed, went over to the washbasin and came back with a small towel which he handed to Catharine. Then he got back into bed again and put his arms round her.
'I'm sorry my breasts aren't bigger for you.'
'That's just one of the things about you that I don't mind. I like them as they are. Anyway, I think they're bigger than they were when I first came across them.'
'What, in a week? They can't be… Perhaps they are a bit. This is their worst time of the month, too.'
He rested his head on the breasts under discussion.
'That's nice, like that. Little James. It's all right to say that, isn't it?'
'Yes. I'm big enough for it to be all right. Tall enough, I mean.'
'You're big James most of the time. It's funny, I've never met anyone who was as gentle as you are, and yet you're more of a man than anyone too. Well, when you think about it perhaps it isn't so-odd, the two things together. I love the way you always make a noise when you're coming into a room where I am, so as not to suddenly be there and frighten me. How did you manage to think of that?'
'It didn't take any thought at all.'
'Oh yes it did, it took a tremendous amount of thought. Or a tremendous kind of thought. Some people it simply wouldn't occur to, not in a thousand years.'
'Well, soon I shan't have to bother about that sort of thing, if you go on not being frightened the way you have the last few days. I'll creep up behind you instead and give a blood-curdling scream and spring at you.'
'You won't really, though. But it's quite true, I very nearly don't get frightened at all now.'
'I wish you'd tell me what happened to you that started you off being frightened. It would make it much easier for me to help you stop being completely.'
'I will tell you, my dearest love, but I don't want to tonight. We're having such a lovely time, and it wouldn't sort of refrighten me to tell you about it, but I think it would depress me a bit. Let's leave it until we're both in the White Hart and I'm serving drinks and giving change in between. That's the best way to do it. You're not to think about it or worry because of it: it's nothing very horrible or unusual, really it isn't.'
He kissed her and said, 'All right, we'll do it like that.'
'I think I'd like to go to sleep now. I'm a bit tired. Mind you wake me up when you go. It was very nasty waking up the other morning and finding you not there.'
'I'll have to be away by a quarter past seven at the latest.'
'I don't care, you're to wake me. Good night, James. I love you.'
'I know. Good night, Catharine.'
She turned on her side and he turned with her. He put one arm round her waist and the hand on her breast; the other arm he had to fold up behind her shoulders. He felt her fall asleep. But for her breathing there was the absolute silence he had noticed on his first visit to the house and found vaguely disquieting. It did not disquiet him now. He thought of the dispatch-rider's death, Fawkes's death, Operation Apollo, and they did not seem terrible. He knew they were and tried to feel that they were, but they remained just facts, dead facts, infinitely distant.
Part Two
The Founding of the League
STRAIGHT after breakfast the next morning Willie Ayscue returned to his hut in the meadow and settled down at his piano. He always had one available, but instead of talcing the same instrument round with him wherever he went, as Leonard would presumably have done, preferred to hire locally. In his present quarters he only had room for an upright, a Bechstein, though, and one with an outstandingly good treble. Better than the average grand, he had decided.
He removed from the lid his walking-out cane, which Evans, his batman, regularly placed there when he tidied up, as if under the impression that his master was in the habit of using it to conduct invisible orchestras from the keyboard. Glancing over at his Alsatian bitch Nancy, who was watching him expectantly from her basket by the door, he raised the lid of the piano and tinkled a few notes at random. The dog made a squeaking noise, got up and came to him with a partly sideways gait, wagging her tail in an unconvinced way.
'It's all right,' he said, stroking her head, 'nothing's going to go wrong. It isn't going to blow up or fall on me. That noise it makes is just it singing because it's happy. It isn't angry or frightened or in pain. It's just a piano, that's all. It can't hurt me. It's nice of you to worry about me but there's no need.'
Nancy gave the equivalent of a shrug and went back to her basket, casting herself down into it with a loud sigh. When he began to play she cowered a little and gave another squeak, but not much of a one.
