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right to children, not to adults, and therefore they can’t justly be put into the category of ‘Mrs Wakefield’s things’.
    “It’s quite all right,” I hastily assured his mother. “Let him play with it. I’m only sorry we haven’t any real toys for him, but you see my son is fifteen now, and so of course …”
    “Of course,” agreed Sally, not quite listening. “Say ‘Thank you’ to Mrs Wakefield, Barnaby, and play with it quietly. Don’t drop it.”
    “’K you” was just audible from the child’s lips, pitched in any direction except mine, and then, propelled by his new master, the elephant set off on his journey into the unknown.
    “What I really wanted to ask you,” Sally was now saying; “when your husband — when Edwin — first told you about this expedition, what exactly did he say ? Where did he say they were going? What, exactly, were they planning to do ?”
    I’d had plenty of time to ask myself these questions, and I still didn’t know the answers. Perhaps, if I’d listened more attentively when Edwin had first mentioned the possibility of this assignment— but there, how can one know in advance that something is going to go so gravely wrong with a project that one’s memory is going to be raked and scoured for tiny clues — for nuances of tone, for inadvertently dropped syllables? All I knew — and so all that I could tell Sally — was that the expedition concerned the gleaning of information about certain (un-named) hostages — information which might — just might — be conducive to their release. He was going out as an investigative journalist in company with two others — Sally’s husband Richard and one other, a certain Leonard Coburn. Oh, and that he — Edwin — would be travelling on his own from Heathrow to a destination in the Middle East, and would meet up with the others on arrival. That the whole thing would take ‘quite a while’. Also, that he might not be able to write home very often.
    Actually he hadn’t written at all; but then he often didn’t. For Sally it was different. Richard normally wrote to her every day when he was away, often twice, and went to heroic lengths to see that his missives got through, even if he found himself up a mountain or tossing in an open boat on some politically sensitive stretch of ocean.
    “So you see I know I’ll hear from him soon,” she insisted. “He’ll contrive it somehow, I know he will; he always does no matter how difficult the circumstances. I just watch the post every day, I rush out to the postman, and when there isn’t anything — why, in a few hours there’ll be the next post, won’t there?
    “It upsets his mother rather, that I’m like this: she wants me to be despairing, like her. She was dreadfully upset about this cake, you know, this nut cake that’s Richard’s favourite. Tempting providence, she called it, to make a cake for him when we don’t even know if he’s still alive.
    “But we do know, Clare; at least, I mean, I know. I just feel certain he’s all right. Daphne — that’s my mother-in-law, she likes me to call her ‘Daphne’ and not ‘Mother’, but I don’t alwaysremember, she seems a bit old to be called Daphne, if you know what I mean — well, anyway, Daphne seems to think it’s actually wrong of me to feel so optimistic. But how can it be wrong? And anyway, how can one help one’s feelings …?”
    How indeed? Once again, I was filled with envy. How wonderful it must be to have such nice feelings to control instead of grudging, un-loving ones like mine!
    All the same, I couldn’t help sympathising somewhat with this mother-in-law. In a situation so fraught with danger and with dreadful possibilities — dreadful probabilities, indeed, — all this blind, unreasoning optimism must occasionally grate on the nerves terribly.
    Blind optimism. Sometimes, I’ve wondered whether it is really as blind as it seems? I’ve met people like Sally before — people who, in