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in her gardening clothes with earth on her hands and her hat falling over one ear, Allie in a green linen dress. Her eyes were a sort of mixture of brown and grey, but the dress and the garden setting had made them look almost as green as Ptolemy’s. It was a very bad photograph, but it didn’t go into the discard. None of the photographs were really good. Besides, what did a photograph ever do except set memory and imagination to conjure up a lost image?
    He went on looking at the pictures for a long time. He had an impulse to tear them across. The conjuration of the dead is an unhallowed rite – he would have no part in it. But in the end he put them away in his pocket-book and tore up a number of letters from an uncle who had been his guardian and whom he had most particularly disliked. An irreverent satisfaction in being able to think of him as a scapegoat touched his mood and lightened it.
    He went back to his sorting with a growing wonder as to why on earth one ever cluttered oneself up with all these lendings and leavings. After five years of being foot-loose it seemed to him to be pure insanity.
    It was next day that he discovered he was expected to attend a cocktail party given by Mrs Justice. The Harrisons were not only going to it but had already told her that they were bringing him along, added to which she had rung him up, talked exuberantly about old times, about Sophy and Sophy’s husband and children, with a special mention of the recent twins – about Emmy, and about how nice it would be to see him again. He had always liked Mrs Justice, one of those large rolling women who went her way like a benevolent juggernaut, flattening people with kindness, enthusiasm and good advice. The red-haired Sophy had been a friend of Allie’s – a rollicking creature who always managed to keep one young man ahead of the gossip about her, and was now, he gathered, bringing up a family in the West Indies. Sophy and a tribe of children! It made him feel elderly.
    FIVE
    EVERY RETURNED WANDERER is not greeted with enthusiasm. When you haven’t seen a ne’er-do-well stepbrother for several years you are not always disposed to order in even a portion of a fatted calf. Mr Martin had a rueful expression when Fred Worple walked into his office and shook him by the hand. He was fond of his stepmother – always had been. A good wife to his father and a good mother to himself and Louisa. But as to young Fred, the son of her first husband, well the less said about him the better. Up to every kind of trick at home and always in trouble at school. He was sharp enough, but you couldn’t rely on him. Old Mr Martin took him into the office, but he wasn’t any good there. He was invalided out after six months of his military service and went off into the blue. His mother worried herself sick about him, wanting to know where he was and why he didn’t write, but Mr Martin had always had the feeling that the fewer inquiries you made about Fred the better. And now here he was, quite prosperous-looking, in one of those suits with a fancy cut and a handkerchief and tie which he wouldn’t put up with in one of his clerks. He said, ‘Well, Fred?’ and then, ‘Have you seen your mother?’
    Mr Worple nodded.
    ‘Staying with her. Come on Bert – aren’t you going to say you’re pleased to see me?’
    Mr Martin said, ‘That depends.’
    ‘On what?’
    ‘On whether you’ve come back to worry her.’
    Fred laughed.
    ‘You are pleased, aren’t you! Well, I can tell you one thing, she is. Cried over me and kissed me as if I’d brought her the Crown jewels. And you needn’t worry – I haven’t come back to sponge on her or on you.’
    ‘That is a good thing.’
    Mr Worple altered his tone.
    ‘Now, now, no need to be disagreeable. As a matter of fact I’ve done pretty well – been abroad and made a bit of a pile. Thought I’d like to come back to the old place and see my dear relations. You don’t want to go on knocking about