'James, are you all right?'
'Yes, of course. Why?'
'You looked sort of startled. James, your nice friend Max Hunter is here. He says he'd like to talk to you. He was terrifically emphatic that it was nothing urgent and could perfectly well keep till the morning, but since he was here he just thought he might as well pass the word.'
Churchill got out of bed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers and followed Lucy out. She led him into her bedroom.
'Is she all right?' she asked.
'Yes. I made her take a sleeping-pill.'
'Have you taken one?'
'No, I don't like them. Where can I find Max?'
'I'm afraid I've put him in the library. It's rather nasty in there, but there are two almost possible chairs, and at least you won't have my dentist friend and his friends breathing down your neck. They seem to be very thick on the ground tonight for some reason.'
'Anybody I know, apart from Max?'
'There's your other nice friend, Captain Leonard. Brian, I mean. He won't go. He sort of keeps getting on the end of the queue again. Then I was half expecting Alastair, but it's getting a bit late for him now. Those are the only ones you know, I think. We may as well go down.'
They left the bedroom and moved along the passage.
'In fact,' Lucy went on, 'there are two of them in the drawing-room I don't know myself. They're somebody's friends, I gather. It's funny how the hot weather seems to bring them out.'
As they started descending the stairs, Churchill's eye was caught by the figure of the girl on the tapestry that hung there. There was something unnatural in its posture, a stiffness he had not noticed before. He saw too that parts of its dress were slightly discolored, presumably by damp.
'Oh well, I suppose I'd better get ready for Brian,' said Lucy. 'His turn seems to come round quicker and quicker. You know, I wish he wouldn't go on so. I mean talking. But you can't help liking him, can you?'
'No. Thanks, Lucy. May see you later.'
'Now mind you don't sit up chatting all night.'
Until this evening Churchill had only seen the library by day. Most of it was in semi-darkness now, so that the books filling its walls looked even more unreadable. They had been crammed on the shelves anyhow, some in horizontal piles, others with their spines facing inwards. Among their bindings an antiquated dull red was most prominent. They gave off a strong whiff of other people's boredom. Here and there, mostly on the floor, were busts of varying sizes. Churchill had looked them over one afternoon and had come to the conclusion that, whatever connection with literature any given one of the men represented might or might not have had, all of them were certainly dead.
An intense light, given as it proved by a bare bulb in a brass lamp, came from a shallow alcove in one corner of the room. Here Hunter was sitting by a bulky davenport in an attitude suggesting that he had that moment turned aside from some mighty creative task. Nothing else gave this impression. Apart from the lamp, the objects before him consisted only of a foot-high doll in tattered clothes that had a national or peasant air, a French sailor in molder-ing papier-mache under a glass dome, most of an ormolu clock, and a glass of liquor. He waved Churchill to a dining chair with burst seat-padding like the one on which he sat.
'Make yourself at home if you can,' he said. 'This may help.'
He handed over the glass, which contained a very strong whisky and water. Churchill drank a third of it in one.
'How long have you been sitting here?'
'Not more than twenty minutes. I haven't been idle, however. I've been pushing ahead with my smoking like billy-ho. Two Gauloises one after the other, just like that. Have one.'
'Thank you. I'm sorry I kept you waiting.'
'I expect Lucy did most of that. She's got a heavy backlog to work through tonight. So heavy I had to come out. A discussion on the shortcomings of Britain's youth seemed to be getting under way. Not that it's very nice in here, I must admit. Erudition in the raw.'
'Has Lucy worked through you yet?'
'Oh yes, I'm no problem. But it seemed rather early to be off home, so I thought if you weren't asleep I might get hold of you for a few minutes' chatter.'
Churchill drank again. 'I'm glad you did. Well, what's the news?'
'Nothing out of the way. The Anti-Death League held its inaugural meeting and nobody turned up. At least, quite a few people turned up, but none of them seemed to want to join the League. And the founder, or X, or whatever one's supposed to call him, didn't surface either. What we got was a series of anti-climaxes, good in themselves but not at all encouraging. I felt very let down, I can tell you. Poor old Brian Leonard felt a good deal worse than that. He brought all his phylactological expertise to bear and came up with the conclusion that X isn't the spy he's been after all these weeks, but another chap altogether. I couldn't follow half of it. Still, I do remember him saying he thought X must be half off his rocker and might do anything at any time, which was awfully frightening, he thought. I didn't think so. It cheered me up no end, after the way the meeting flopped. Then it crossed Brian's mind that you might be X.'
Churchill started violently. 'Why me?'
'It was all complicated in the extreme, as I said. He was pretty well convinced, evidently, that X must be one of the S1 people. The way he saw it, X has been sent all dithery by the notion of having to knock off so many chaps in Operation Apollo, and this League business is his method of dithering about it in public, so to speak. A bit
