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Louise.’ He saw the fist open and close, the damp inefficient powder lying like snow in the ridges of the knuckles. ‘Oh, Ticki, Ticki,’ she said, ‘you won’t leave me ever, will you? I haven’t got any friends—not since the Tom Barlows went away.’ He lifted the moist hand and kissed the palm: he was bound by the pathos of her unattractiveness.
    They walked side by side like a couple of policemen on duty into the lounge where Mrs Halifax was dealing out the library books. It is seldom that anything is quite so bad as one fears: there was no reason to believe that they had been the subject of conversation. ‘Goody, goody,’ Mrs Halifax called to them, ‘the new Clemence Dane’s arrived.’ She was the most inoffensive woman in the station; she had long untidy hair, and one found hairpins inside the library books where she had marked her place. Scobie felt it quite safe to leave his wife in her company, for Mrs Halifax had no malice and no capacity for gossip; her memory was too bad for anything to lodge there for long: she read the same novels over and over again without knowing it.
    Scobie joined a group on the verandah. Fellowes, the sanitary inspector, was talking fiercely to Reith, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary, and a naval officer called Brigstock. ‘After all this is a club,’ he was saying, ‘not a railway refreshment-room.’ Ever since Fellowes had snatched his house, Scobie had done his best to like the man—it was one of the rules by which he set his life, to be a good loser. But sometimes he found it very hard to like Fellowes. The hot evening had not been good to him: the thin damp ginger hair, the small prickly moustache, the goosegog eyes, the scarlet cheeks, and the old Lancing tie. ‘Quite,’ said Brigstock, swaying slightly.
    ‘What’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.
    Reith said, ‘He thinks we are not exclusive enough.’ He spoke with the comfortable irony of a man who had in his time been completely exclusive, who had in fact excluded from his solitary table in the Protectorate everyone but himself. Fellowes said hotly, ‘There are limits,’ fingering for confidence the Lancing tie.
    ‘Tha’s so,’ said Brigstock.
    ‘I knew it would happen,’ Fellowes said, ‘as soon as we made every officer in the place an honorary member. Sooner or later they would begin to bring in undesirables. I’m not a snob, but in a place like this you’ve got to draw lines—for the sake of the women. It’s not like it is at home.’
    ‘But what’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.
    ‘Honorary members,’ Fellowes said, ‘should not be allowed to introduce guests. Only the other day we had a private brought in. The army can be democratic if it likes, but not at our expense. That’s another thing, there’s not enough drink to go round as it is without these fellows.’
    ‘Tha’s a point,’ Brigstock said, swaying more violently.
    ‘I wish I knew what it was all about,’ Scobie said.
    ‘The dentist from the 49th has brought in a civilian called Wilson, and this man Wilson wants to join the club. It puts everybody in a very embarrassing position.’
    ‘What’s wrong with him?’
    ‘He’s one of the U.A.C. clerks. He can join the club in Sharp Town. What does he want to come up here for?’
    ‘That club’s not functioning,’ Reith said.
    ‘Well, that’s their fault, isn’t it?’ Over the sanitary inspector’s shoulder Scobie could see the enormous range of the night. The fireflies signalled to and fro along the edge of the hill and the lamp of a patrol-boat moving on the bay could be distinguished only by its steadiness. ‘Black-out time,’ Reith said. ‘We’d better go in.’
    ‘Which is Wilson?’ Scobie asked him.
    ‘That’s him over there. The poor devil looks lonely. He’s only been out a few days.’
    Wilson stood uncomfortably alone in a wilderness of armchairs, pretending to look at a map on the wall. His pale face shone and trickled like plaster. He had