He's been wearing one,' said Penelope.
'Yes, but not the sort you play.'
'I saw some men in dresses playing bagpipes at the show,' said Emmeline.
'Kilts, dear.'
'I saw Daddy playing with his pipe in the summerhouse,' said Penelope, 'and he was wearing Mummy's dress too.'
'Well he wasn't playing with it in the same way, Penny,' argued Eva, wondering privately what way Wilt had been playing with it.
'Bagpipes make a horrid noise anyway,' maintained Emmeline.
'And Daddy made a horrid noise when you got into bed...'
'Yes, dear, he was having a bad dream.'
'He called it a wet dream, Mummy. I heard him.'
'Well that's a bad dream too,' said Eva. 'Now then, what did you do at school today?
But the quads were not to be diverted from the absorbing topic of their father's recent misfortune. 'Roger's mummy told him Daddy must have something wrong with his bladder to have a pipe,' said Penelope. 'What's a bladder, Mummy?'
'I know,' shouted Emmeline, 'it's a pig's tummy and that's what they make bagpipes out of because Sally told me.'
'Daddy's not a pig...'
'That's enough of that,' said Eva firmly, 'we won't talk about Daddy any more. Now eat your cod's roe.'
'Roger says cod's roe is baby fishes,' said Penelope. 'I don't like it.'
'Well it's not. Fishes don't have babies. They lay eggs.'
'Do sausages lay eggs, mummy?' asked Josephine.
'Of course they don't, darling. Sausages aren't alive.'
'Roger says his daddy's sausage lays eggs and his mummy wears something...'
'I don't care to hear what Roger says any more,' said Eva torn between curiosity about the Rawstons and revulsion at her offsprings' encyclopedic knowledge. 'It's not nice to talk about such things.'
'Why not, Mummy?'
'Because it isn't,' said Eva unable to think of a suitably progressive argument to silence them. Caught between her own indoctrinated sense of niceness and her opinion that children's innate curiosity should never be thwarted, Eva struggled through lunch wishing that Henry were there to put a stop to their questions with a taciturn growl. But Henry still wasn't there at two o'clock when Mavis phoned to remind her that she had promised to pick her up on the way to the Symposium on Alternative Painting in Thailand.
'I'm sorry but Henry isn't back,' said Eva. 'He went to the doctor's this morning and I expected him home for lunch. I can't leave the children.'
'Patrick's got the car today,' said Mavis, 'his own is in for a service and I was relying on you.'
'Oh well, I'll go and ask Mrs de Frackas to baby-sit for half an hour,' said Eva, 'she's always volunteering to sit and Henry's bound to be back shortly.'
She went next door and presently old Mrs de Frackas was sitting in the summerhouse surrounded by the quads reading them the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi. The widow of Major-General de Frackas, at eighty-two her memories of girlhood days in India were rather better than on topics of more recent occurrence. Eva drove off happily to pick up Mavis.
By the time Wilt had finished his lunch he had picked out two more terrorists from the mug shots as being frequent visitors to the house, and the police station had seen the arrival of several large vans containing a large number of surprisingly agile men in a motley of plain
