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She’d sometimes said to him, ‘Slow down.’ She’d even said, as if she were steeped in experience herself, ‘Slower is
better.’
    Well, they were steeped in experience now. He had never known anyone better, she was sure of it. Nor had she. It was in the look he gave her now. And in the stare she returned.
    She found it difficult, even as she stared, not to let tears come into her eyes, even as she knew that to allow them, use them, would have been somehow to fail. She must be brave, generous,
merciless in allowing him this last possible gift of herself.
    Would he ever forget her, lying there like that?
    And he
was
in no hurry. The sun from the window lit him. A bar or two of shadow ran across his torso. He finished winding the watch. His eventual car journey must be getting impossibly
fast.
    She didn’t know how he had acquired his sureness. Later, in her memory, she would marvel at it and be almost frightened by his possession of it then. It was the due of his kind? He was
born to it. It came with having no other particular thing to do? Except be sure. But that, surely, would flood you with unsureness. On the other hand, to be a lawyer, merely a lawyer—she even
felt it for him and saw him in a lawyer’s imprisoning dark suit—could only take his sureness away.
    She thought momentarily and madly: Supposing she—Emma, Miss Hobday—had come to get him anyway. Supposing—this was 1924, it was the modern age—she had taken it upon
herself to come here, in her car, to collect him now. To surprise him, drag him from his ‘mugging up’. On such a marvellous day. Wheels on the gravel. Her flowery voice—with a
slight touch of horse—shouting up, as she noticed the opened window, knowing that it was his bedroom.
    ‘Come to get you, Paul! Where are you?’
    What then? She had no doubt that he would have handled it all, somehow, surely. Even wearing just his signet ring. Even standing at the window. ‘Emsie, darling! What a surprise! Give me a
mo to put a shirt on, would you?’
    And how might she, the Nivens’ maid in the Sheringhams’ house, have handled it?
    On the dressing table beside him were all the other little accoutrements of his life, sentimental or purposeful, each one like his own piece of unhidden treasure. Hairbrushes and combs.
Cufflinks and studs in boxes. Photos in silver frames. A preponderance of silver, kept bright by Ethel. Maids had perpetually to dust round, not to mention actually polish such paraphernalia,
making sure nothing was moved from its ordained position. Well, it was easier than a woman’s dressing table.
    If you were brought up with such stuff attached to you, such personal insignia, then perhaps it was easy to be sure. Not to mention the contents of his wardrobe, in the adjacent dressing
room—she had briefly seen it as she was bustled in. All his hanging choices. Not to mention other possessions scattered round the house.
    All that she owned or wore could be put in one plain box. If she had to leave in a hurry, and she always might, she could.
    But it was these little trinkets, this boys’ jewellery that seemed now to claim him, confirm him. Signet ring. Pocket watch. Cufflinks. When he was dressed and before he left he would
gather up the initialled cigarette case and lighter. He would run the hairbrush across his hair, apply the tortoiseshell comb. His two brothers must have taken an assortment of such things, much of
it perhaps newly and morale-boostingly purchased, when they went across to France, never to come back. Ivory-handled shaving brushes, that sort of thing. They, the brothers, were on the dressing
table now, in silver frames. She’d noticed them as soon as she entered the room. That must be Dick and Freddy. Both in officers’ caps. She’d never seen them before. How could she
have?
    She’d looked at them as he’d undone her clothes.
    He padded out of the room to the bathroom. Still only the signet ring. He wasn’t there for long. He had