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it turn out that the children of such a lineage were made of such rotten stuff? Cato had gone to the bad, and now Colette, indulged with every possibility of happiness and improvement, was whining about ‘relevance’ and finding her little simple tasks ‘too hard’! What had he done to deserve such children? Ruth had named the girl, he had named the boy. What a sad eclipse of all their bright hopes.
    Cato Forbes, hidden underneath a black umbrella, was walking along Ladbroke Grove with long strides. He passed under the railway bridge and continued for some distance, then turned down a side street. It had been raining all day. Now it was late evening and dark. Cato usually went back after dark. He spent the day wandering about or sitting in library reading-rooms or churches or public houses. He had a decision to make but he could not make it; and the time which passed fruitlessly in this way made the decision more urgent but made the making of it more difficult. Last night he had been sleepless. Tonight he had an appointment.
    Ladbroke Grove is a long and very strange street. At the south end of it there are grand houses, some of the smartest houses in town. At the north end, and especially beyond the railway bridge, the street becomes seedy and poor, there are areas of slum property, a considerable coloured population, a mass of decrepit houses let out in single rooms. A small terrace house in this melancholy labyrinth off the Grove was Cato Forbes’s destination. The house itself had been condemned and some of its neighbours had already been pulled down, so that the street ended in a waste land of strewn rubble where the citizens had already started to deposit their rubbish. The area had, particularly in warm weather, an obscure characteristic smell mingled of dust and spicy cooking and rats and urine and deep black dirt. A Sikh friend once told Cato that it smelt like India.
    The surviving row of houses backed onto a narrow alley, separated from it by a small back yard and a brick wall. Beyond the alley were other houses, also condemned. Cato swung into the alleyway, putting down his umbrella for which there was now no room. His macintosh brushed walls thick with growths of vegetable filth. He fell over a dustbin. The doorways into the yards, which had once had doors, gaped darkly. Some of the houses were still inhabited. Stepping carefully in the mud, he passed through a hole into a cluttered backyard and up to the back door of a house. He quietly and accurately fitted his key into the keyhole, pressed the door open and moved noiselessly inside. He closed the door and locked it after him.
    Before turning on the light he checked with experienced hands that the thick black curtain which covered the window, and which had evidently been hanging there since the blitz, was pulled well across and tucked in at the sides. Then he turned the switch and a feeble naked light bulb, darkened with grease, revealed the kitchen, just as he had left it in the morning twilight, his enamel mug half full of cold tea, a ragged piece of bread, and butter in a paper packet. He took off his macintosh and propped his streaming umbrella in a corner, whence a rivulet proceeded across the floor making pools in the cracked tiles and disturbing a gathering of the semi-transparent beetles who were now shameless inhabitants of the kitchen.
    The dim light showed, immediately outside the door, the steep stairs which Cato now mounted to the room above where he once more checked the window which had been partially boarded up and more recently covered by a blanket hung from two nails. All being well he turned on the light, which here was slightly brighter. He ran down again to switch off the kitchen light, then came up more slowly. The little room was dingy and shabby but not totally comfortless. There was a chest of drawers with the drawers standing open and empty, a divan bed with a dirty flimsy green coverlet drawn up over disorderly