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were surprised to see each other.
    “How’s your eye, Evie?”
    “Quite, quite all right. How’s yours?”
    I had forgotten my own injuries. I pressed my hand into the socket of my right eye.
    “Seems all right.”
    “You heard from Bobby?”
    I was so surprised that I did not answer for a moment.
    “No. Why should I?”
    Evie did not reply for a while. She leaned her head back and smiled at me out of the corner of her eye.
    “You’ve got a lot of time to spare haven’t you, Olly?”
    “I’m off school.”
    It was difficult to take my eyes off her, for not only was she exhaling her individual light, she was breathing out the scent of flowers and pretty things with embroidery on them, and girl’s laughter an octave higher than a man’s. Nevertheless I managed to glance sideways, and as I did so the sodium lamps shivered on all the way up the High Street towards the Square, each plucking itself out of the twilight. We were not invisible.
    “Let’s go for a walk.”
    “Where is there?”
    “We could stroll up the hill.”
    “Dad wouldn’t like me to go in the woods. Not after dark.”
    A pair of trousers deeply embedded in mud flashed through my mind, then hung themselves on a bush to dry.
    “But—”
    It was staggering and infuriating. She was defended, bland, secure. The dregs of the western day glinted in one eye, sodium light in the other. I took a step or two, then stood, looking back.
    “Come on, Evie—we can go along by the river.”
    She shook her head so that the bob flew, then settled.
    “Dad says I mustn’t.”
    I knew why, without having to think. That way led through fields to Hotton where the racing stables were. Sergeant Babbacombe probably envisaged stable lads lurking lecherously behind every bush; and he may very well have been right.
    “Well then—We could go the other way along the river, round Pillicock.”
    Evie shut her mouth, and shook her head again, smiling mysteriously.
    “Why not?”
    No answer; just the glint, smile and shake. Each time the bob flew it seemed to release a new cloud of scented suggestion . I thought in bewilderment of what reason she might have for this other geographical prohibition. The most notable thing in that direction was a famous boarding school, keeping itself very much to itself, though only half-a-dozen fields away from us. Perhaps Sergeant Babbacombe had ideas about that too? “Don’t let me catch you playing about with the young college gents, my girl—they’re devils, they are!” But for whatever reason, the countryside was closing in round us. To the south, the erotic woods, west the racing stables, east, the college, and to the north, nothing but the escarpment of the bare downs—and here we were, visible, the pair of us on the crest of the Old Bridge.
    As if this confinement made Evie happy, she began to hum, nodding her head in time.
    “Boop-a-doop, boop-a-doop!”
    The blood surged in my head. I said something, I couldn’t tell what. I needed a club or a flint axe. Evie looked up at me, surprised.
    “Don’t you like them?”
    “Who?”
    “On the wireless. The Savoy Orpheans. I listen to them every night.”
    The surge became a rage from head to foot.
    “I hate them! Hate them! Cheap—trivial—”
    Then we were silent, both of us, while the rage died down in me and settled to a steady trembling. When Evie spoke at last it was very coldly and haughtily.
    “Well. I’m sorry, I’m sure!”
    I was getting nowhere, that was certain. But while I was wondering what to do next, Evie gleamed up at me and smiled.
    “That music you were playing yesterday, Olly, I liked that. You know—on the piano.”
    “Chopin. Study in C minor, opus twenty-five, number twelve.”
    “You can play loud!”
    “Oh I don’t know—”
    I thought for a moment. When I was practising the semiquaver passages of the Appassionata, or the left-hand octaves of the Polonaise in A flat major, if my father had left the door into the dispensary open, he