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together in the past. In forty years' time they would be dead as last year's dog. He said: "You'd better show me."

He walked slowly: happiness drained out of him more quickly and completely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared. As she walked in front of him, her two meagre tails of hair bleaching in the sunlight, it occurred to him for the first time that she was of an age when Mexican girls were ready for their first man. What was to happen? He flinched away from problems which he had never dared to confront. As they passed the window of his bedroom he caught sight of a thin shape lying bunched and bony and alone in a mosquito tent. He remembered with self-pity and nostalgia his happiness on the river, doing a man's job without thinking of other people. If I had never married.... He wailed like a child at the merciless immature back: "We've no business interfering in their politics."

"This isn't politics," she said gently. "I know about politics. Mother and I are doing the Reform Bill." She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the big barn in which they stored bananas before sending them down the river to the port. It was very dark inside after the glare: there was a scuffle in a corner. Captain Fellows picked up an electric torch and shone it on somebody in a torn, dark suit-a small man who blinked and needed a shave.

"Que es usted?" Captain Fellows said.

"I speak English." He clutched a small attaché case to his side, as if he were waiting to catch a train he must on no account miss.

"You've no business here."

"No," the man said, "no."

"It's nothing to do with us," Captain Fellows said. "We are foreigners."

The man said: "Of course. I will go." He stood with his head a little bent like a man in an orderly-room listening to an officer's decision. Captain Fellows relented a little. He said: "You'd better wait till dark. You don't want to be caught."

"No."

"Hungry?"

"A little. It does not matter." He said with a rather repulsive humility: "If you would do me a favour..."

"What?"

"A little brandy."

"I'm breaking the law enough for you as it is," Captain Fellows said. He strode out of the barn, feeling twice the size, leaving the small bowed figure in the darkness among the bananas. Coral locked the door and followed him. "What a religion!" Captain Fellows said. "Begging for brandy. Shameless."

"But you drink it sometimes."

"My dear," Captain Fellows said, "when you are older you'll understand the difference between drinking a little brandy after dinner and-well, needing it."

"Can I take him some beer?"

"You won't take him anything."

"The servants wouldn't be safe."

He was powerless and furious; he said: "You see what a hole you've put us in." He stumped back into the house and into his bedroom, roaming restlessly among the boot-trees. Mrs. Fellows slept uneasily, dreaming of weddings. Once she said aloud: "My train. Be careful of my train."

"What's that?" he said petulantly. "What's that?"

Dark fell like a curtain: one moment the sun was there, the next it had gone. Mrs. Fellows woke to another night. "Did you speak, dear?"

"It was you who spoke," he said. "Something about trains."

"I must have been dreaming."

"It will be a long time before they have trains here," he said, with gloomy satisfaction. He came and sat on the bed, keeping away from the window: out of sight, out of mind. The crickets were beginning to chatter and beyond the mosquito wire fireflies moved like globes. He put his heavy, cheery, needing-to-be-reassured hand on the shape under the sheet and said: "It's not such a bad life, Trixy. Is it now? Not a bad life?" But he could feel her stiffen: the word "life" was taboo: it reminded you of death. She turned her face away from him towards the wall and then hopelessly back again-the phrase "turn to the wall" was taboo too. She lay panic-stricken, while the boundaries of her fear widened and widened to include every relationship and the whole world of