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said. "I mean-these fellows, you can't trust them." He felt no conviction when he added: "She's just a kid."

"I tell you I had fever," Mrs. Fellows wailed. "I felt so terribly ill."

"You'll be all right. just a touch of the sun. You'll see-now I'm home."

"I had such a headache. I couldn't read or sew. And then this man..."

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it-in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo-death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.

He said: "I suppose I ought to go and see the man."

He sat down on the bed and put his hand upon her arm. They had something in common-a kind of diffidence. He said absent-mindedly: "That dago secretary of the boss has gone."

"Where?"

"West." He could feel her arm go stiff: she strained away from him towards the wall. He had touched the taboo-he shared it, the bond was broken, he couldn't tell why. "Headache, darling?"

"Hadn't you better see the man?"

"Oh, yes, yes. I'll be off." But he didn't stir: it was the child who came to him

She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn't trust and a ghost you could almost puff away: a piece of frightened air. She was very young-about thirteen-and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn't got at her yet: she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms-everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door a fist could break. She said: "I told the policeman you were home."

"Oh, yes, yes," Captain Fellows said. "Got a kiss for your old father?"

She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead-he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about. She said: "I told cook that mother would not be getting up for dinner."

"I think you ought to make the effort, dear," Captain Fellows said.

"Why?" Coral said.

"Oh well..."

Coral said: "I want to talk to you alone." Mrs. Fellows shifted inside her tent-just so she could be certain Coral would arrange the final evacuation. Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was common sense which said: "The dead can't hear" or "She can't know now" or "Tin flowers are more practical."

"I don't understand," Captain Fellows said uneasily, "why your mother shouldn't hear."

"She wouldn't want to go. It would only scare her."

Coral-he was accustomed to it by now-had an answer to everything. She never spoke without deliberation: she was prepared-but sometimes the answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness.... They were based on the only life she could remember-this. The swamp and vultures and no children anywhere, except a few in the village, with bellies swollen by worms, who ate dirt from the bank, inhumanly. A child is said to draw parents together, and certainly he felt an immense unwillingness to entrust himself to this child. Her answers might carry him anywhere. He felt through the net for his wife's hand-secretively: they were adults together. This was the stranger in their house. He said boisterously: "You're frightening us."

"I don't think," the child said, with care, "that you'll be frightened."

He said weakly, pressing his wife's hand: "Well, my dear, our daughter seems to have decided..."

"First you must see the policeman. I want him to go. I don't like him."

"Then he must go, of course," Captain Fellows said, with a hollow unconfident laugh.

"I told him that. I said we couldn't refuse