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of
the red bombs, Maurice three of the Belrepose things.’ Speaking neither briskly
nor with emotionalism, he added, ‘Well, I’m sorry he’s gone. He was a decent
old boy, with plenty of sense. I expect you’ll miss him a lot, Maurice’
    This
mild show of commiseration and its accompanying glance, which carried sympathy
of a depersonalized sort, were Jack’s first non-utilitarian responses to what
had happened, nor did he enlarge on them. He said good night in a high
monotone, as somebody like Fred might call it across the bar, and led the way
towards the stairs. After kissing Joyce and glancing in my direction, but not
directly at me, Diana followed, She did not, I was almost touched to see, do
any of this with the air of imparting by her silence a message more eloquent
than any mere words could have conveyed. The same had been true of her earlier
restraint of manner. I felt it was uncharitable of me to wonder how long this
uncharacteristic behaviour of hers would last, but wonder I did. Nothing short
of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.
    ‘Let’s
go to bed straight away,’ said Joyce. ‘You must be absolutely whacked.’
    I was
indeed utterly tired out in body, as if I had been standing all day in the
same position, but had no inclination for sleep, or for lying down in the dark
waiting to go to sleep. ‘One more Scotch,’ I said.
    ‘Not a
giant one, Maurice. And only one.’ She spoke pleadingly. ‘Don’t sit up
drinking. Bring it into the bedroom.’
    I did
as she said, first looking in on Amy, who was lying asleep quite
unemphatically, so to speak, without the parade of concentration or abandonment
I have seen in grown women. Would my father’s departure leave much of a hole in
her world? I could not imagine any of the things she had said she had meant to
say to him: his attitude to her had been one of uncertain geniality, she had
behaved to him with something not far from a child’s version of this, a
brightness that had been absent-minded and self-regarding at the same time, and
they had never, so far as I had noticed, talked together much. But he had been
about the place every day of the year and a half since she had come to live
here after her mother’s death, and I could see that no sort of hole in a small
world could really be a small hole.
    ‘Was
she all right?’ asked Joyce when I carried my whisky into our bedroom, the next
along the passage from Amy’s and no broader from window to door, but with more
length. Standing in this extra space, she popped one of her red sleeping-pills
into her mouth and gulped water.
    ‘Asleep,
anyway. Have you seen the Belreposes?’
    ‘Here.
Three sounds rather a lot, doesn’t it? With you drinking as well, I mean. I
suppose Jack knows all about it.’
    ‘They’re
not barbiturates.’
    I
chased the white tablets down with whisky, watching Joyce as she kicked off her
shoes, pulled her dress over her head and hung it up in the wall-cupboard. The
small moment in which she stepped away and turned to go down the room was
enough for me to take in the fine swell of her breasts under the spotless white
brassière, in unimprovable proportion with the breadth of her shoulders and
back and the spreading fullness of her rib-cage. She had not taken three paces
towards the bed before I had put my glass down on her dressing-table and caught
her round her naked waist.
    She
held me against her with a quick firmness that belonged to somebody comforting
somebody. When, as she very soon did, she found that it was not comfort I was
after, at least not in the ordinary sense, her body stiffened.
    ‘Oh,
Maurice, not now, surely.’
    ‘Especially
now. Straight away. Come on.’
    I had
only once before in my life felt such a totally possessing urge to make love
to a woman, with the mind sliding into involuntary dormancy and the body
starting to set up on its own several stages earlier than usual. That time had
been as I was watching a mistress of mine