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and put it in his pocket and walked away with the vase under one arm and the tiger under the other. Kate had to run to catch him up.
    â€˜Where are you going?’ she called behind him, and felt her brain stabbed with his home-sickness when he replied: ‘Oh, Kate, I’d never get tired of doing that,’ as he walked on hopelessly between the arc-lights. He said: ‘One time, on Bank Holiday . . . I was never at home again on Bank Holiday.’
    â€˜What was the girl’s name?’
    â€˜I’ve forgotten.’
    She put her hand under his arm and the vase slipped and fell and lay in blue ugly fragments at their feet, like a broken bottle to mark the end of a night’s drinking.
    â€˜Never mind,’ he said gently, pulling her closer to his side, ‘there’s still the tiger.’

PART II

1
    T HE bronze doors slid apart, and Krogh was in the circular courtyard, Krogh was surrounded by Krogh’s. The cold clear afternoon sky roofed in the cube of glass and steel. The whole lower floors one room deep were exposed to him; he could see the accountants working on the ground floor, the glass flashing primrose before the electric fires. He noticed at once that the fountain was completed; the green shape worried him as he was not often worried; it accused him of cowardice. He had pandered to a fashion he did not understand; he would have much preferred to set in the fountain a marble goddess, a naked child, a nymph with concealing hands. He paused to examine the stone; no instinct told him whether it was good art or bad art; he did not understand. He was uneasy, but he did not show his uneasiness. His high bald face, like a roll of newspaper, showed at a distance only bold headlines; the smaller type, the little subtleties, obscure fears, were invisible.
    He grew aware of being observed; he was watched through the glass by an accountant over his machine, by a director from his chromium balcony, by a waitress drawing the black leather blinds in the staff restaurant. The day faded quickly above his head, the lights began to go on behind the curved glass walls while he dallied beside the green statuary.
    Krogh mounted the steel steps to the double doors of Krogh’s. When his foot touched the top step, the doors swung open. He bent going in; it was a habit he had never broken; six feet two in height with a flat aggressive back, he had been forced for years to bow in the doorway of his bed-sitting-room, his small flat, his first works. Waiting for the lift he tried to dismiss the statuary from mind.
    The lift was unattended; Krogh liked to be alone. He was enclosed now by a double thickness of glass, the glass wall of the lift, the glass wall of the building; the office, like an untrustworthy man, emphasized its transparency. Moving slowly and silently upwards to the top floor, Krogh could still see the fountain; it receded, grew smaller, flattened out; as the concealed lighting went on all round the court, the brutal shape cast a delicate shadow, like a drawing on porcelain on the circular polished paving. He thought, I am neglecting something, with obscure regret.
    He entered his room and closed the door; the papers he had demanded were stacked neatly on a desk which was curved to follow the shape of the glass wall. He could see the reflection of the log fire in the window; a log shifted and fell and a spray of pale heatless sparks rose up the glass. It was the one room in the building unwarmed by electricity. The gentle beating of the flames was a form of companionship to Krogh in his soundproof room, in his Arctic isolation. Night was dropping into the court below like streamers of ink into a grey luminous liquid. He wondered whether he had been mistaken about the fountain.
    He went over to his desk and put a call through to one of his secretaries. ‘When will Miss Farrant be back?’
    A voice replied from a microphone: ‘We expected her today, sir.’
    He sat down