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sometime, ’cause you ought to know.”
    They fetched deck chairs from the cupboard under the stairs and set them up on the lawn. Mr Turner lit a cigarette as they sat down. “There’s bits of shell inside my head going bad on me,” he said. “That’s what they told me at the hospital. They give me about another year, as far as they can judge.”
    She said, “But Jackie, can’t they operate ’n get them out?”
    “They say not.” She had not called him Jackie for some time; it was what his friends all called him, and he warmed towards her. “They say they’re too deep in.”
    She said quietly, “I’m ever so sorry.”
    He laughed. “Not half so sorry as I am!” He thought for a moment, and then said, “I didn’t mean that nasty. But I must say, I got a bit of a shock when he told me.”
    “I should think so, too,” she said.
    He sat in silence in the deck chair, lying back and looking at the stars. Vega burned near the deep-blue zenith, with Altair on his right hand and Arcturus to the left. He did not know the names of any of them, but he found them comforting and permanent. They would be there when he and all others like him had gone on; it was good to sit there and lie back and look at things like that.
    “It’s time we had a bit of a talk about it,” he said presently.“I mean, I dunno how long I can go on working. These giddy fits and that, they won’t get any better now. Six or eight months maybe; then I’ll have to go in a home or something. That means you’ll have to start and think about a job again.”
    “I know that,” she said slowly. “I was thinking the same thing.”
    He said, “I got a little money saved, but not so much. It’s going to take a bit, seeing me finished off. There won’t be much after I’m gone—nothing to make a difference, really.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry about that.”
    “That doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “I can brush up easy, ’n get another job.”
    He nodded. “I reckoned that you could.”
    She turned to him presently. “What about you, Jackie? Will you go on working, long as you can?”
    He said slowly, “I suppose so—I dunno. I got to sort of clean things up—one or two things I got to see about that might take a bit of time. I dunno.”
    She said, “What sort of things?”
    “One thing,” he said. “I got to try and find a nigger.”

CHAPTER THREE
    S HE turned to him in astonishment. “For the Lord’s sake,” she exclaimed, “what do you want with a nigger?”
    It was quiet in the moonlit garden. The scent of roses was around them. In the white light the rows of similar, gabled houses were ethereal, the castles of a dream. The beer still had full hold of Mr Turner, freeing him of repressions and of irritations, making him both simple and lucid.
    “You remember that time I got in prison?” he enquired.
    She said quietly, “I do.”
    It had been one of the disasters in her life, that had made her both cynical and bitter. She had a good deal of excuse. She had married a young, vigorous man in her office back in 1939, when war broke out; they had lived together very little because he joined the Army almost immediately. He became an officer and quickly rose to captain, and she was terribly proud of him. Then he was sent out to North Africa.
    Within three months he was back in England and at death’s door from the wound he got in the aeroplane. When she went down to see him at the hospital in Penzance,she discovered that he was no longer a free man; there was a little matter of three truckloads of Army sugar sold in the black market to be settled first. She knew him for a warm businessman in the office when she married him; she had not known that he was quite so hot as that. He was in hospital for a long time before court-martial; then he got a year’s imprisonment and was discharged from the Army, His Majesty having no further use for his services. He came back to her in February 1945, a perky, irrepressible