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suppose he sent back a hostile reply? Suppose he came and were unkind to Bruno? Suppose Bruno felt an irresistible impulse to tell about Janie’s death and Miles cursed him? Miles could curse him. He was a violent intense boy. He could hurt him now, terribly. Perhaps Danby was right. It was better to die in peace.
    Bruno edged over and got his stockinged feet on to the ground. In between each trip his feet seemed to forget about walking altogether. They curled up into balls under the bedclothes and were reluctant to flatten out again into surfaces that could be stood upon. The process of their reeducation was painful. Bruno stood, stooping a little, supporting himself with one hand on the bed. Still holding on to the bed he began to shuffle towards the door. Once he got as far as the bed post he could reach out and get his dressing gown from the door without having to stand unsupported.
    Of course it wasn’t absolutely necessary to put on the dressing gown now that it wasn’t winter any more, but it represented a challenge. It was quite easy, really. The left hand held the bed post while the right lifted down the dressing gown and with the same movement slid itself a little into the right sleeve. The right hand lifted on high, the sleeve runs down the arm. Then the right hand rests flat against the door a little above shoulder height, while the left leaves the bed post and darts into the left-arm hole. If the left is not quick enough the dressing gown falls away toward the floor, hanging from the right shoulder. It then has to be slowly relinquished and left lying. There was no getting anything up off the floor.
    Bruno manages it, twitching the gown forward over his shoulders and drawing it together in front with the left hand. He is breathing deeply with the effort. He slides his right hand down slowly as far as the puckered brass door handle and begins to open the door, sidling slowly round it as he does so. His movement brings him round to face the room and he contemplates it for a moment, seeing his little prison box as an outsider might see it. The yellowish-white counterpane of threadbare Indian cotton is patterned with faded black scrolls which look like copperplate writing on a very old letter. The bed, between its four light brown flat-headed wooden posts, looks coiled up and dirty, a disorderly lair. The sheets all seem to be knotted. It has the desolate incomplete look of an invalid’s bed, momentarily untenanted. The cold sunless evening light from the window shows the small square of thin brown carpet, with the ragged bit tucked under the bed, surrounded by dusty varnished boarding. The wall paper, covered with a dim design of ivy leaves, is pallid and bleached and spotted with tea-coloured stains. The little bedroom was ‘the small spare room’ for years. Bruno occupies it now because of its proximity to the lavatory. On Bruno’s right is a bookcase topped with cracked marble on top of which two detachments of empty champagne bottles frame Janie’s picture. The upper shelves contain paper-back books of great antiquity. The lower shelves house Bruno’s microscope and four wooden frames containing test tubes of spiders in alcohol. On Bruno’s left, behind the door as it opens, is a rickety gate-leg table upon which the great wooden stamp box now rests. At night Danby usually takes it away to his own room, hoping perhaps that Bruno will forget to ask for it again, so that it can then be conveyed to the bank. The full bottles of champagne are under the table. On doctor’s orders Bruno does not drink his champagne chilled. Spider books, which are too big to go into the bookcase, fill much of the rest of the room, piled on the chest of drawers, on the two upright chairs, and on the little bedside table round about the lamp. The sash window shows a segment of wet slate roof, a coffee-coloured sky in slow unseizable tumultuous motion, and one of the trinity of towers of Lots Road power station looking black