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until dinner, so there were no tiresome requests for backgammon.
    At dinner George looked across the bowl of flowers where Ruth’s white hands moved in the candlelight, doling out portions of lemon meringue pie. How much had she changed? Still good-works Ruth with the Christian soul and heathen flesh. A little more skin under the chin … after all she was forty-eight. Really remarkably few wrinkles. Of course her stomach …
    Steven was passing him a plate. George’s ‘thank you’ came mechanically while his mind went back over the past thirteen years.
    Brandy followed coffee and George sank further into his deep-wing chair, his hands folded over his stomach in thosefamiliar surroundings of the drawing-room. The small marble clock on the mantelpiece, the mirror behind it, the flickering fire in the grate, all seemed to shimmer against the more sombre backcloth of mottled wall-paper and darkened portraits. Steven and Robert were talking softly on the sofa. David was unusually reading a book: a book George had given him for Christmas.
    The evening appeared to be fading out in good-humoured mellowness. Ruth, however, decided to watch the evening Carol Service on the television. There was something about the voices of the female members of the choir which seemed to be amusing Steven and his friend. Ruth was looking at them sideways. George winked at them good-naturedly , but mistimed it. Ruth was on her feet; her face flushed, her eyes shimmering.
    ‘Come on, old thing, only a joke,’ said George level-headedly.
    ‘In a religious service?’
    David looked away. Steven’s friend was looking at the carpet. George walked up to her, and held her firmly by the arm.
    ‘Better have a rest.’ He turned and said in a confidential undertone to Robert, ‘Had too much.’
    The three boys heard the clatter of cutlery being hurled down the passage as the choir of St. Margaret’s sang on. George’s voice got fainter as he retreated towards the lavatory . The noise of hammering fists testified to the firmness of the lock. Back in the drawing-room Steven walked slowly towards the television and turned up the sound, ‘Ding dong merrily on high …’.

THREE
    I N spite of his drunkenly inept behaviour several months before, George sober rarely brooded for long over such setbacks , they were all a small price to pay for the comparative luxury he lived in.
    He hadn’t done a day’s work since he left the Army at the end of the war and that was fifteen years ago. Ruth hadn’t been precisely beautiful when he’d met her, but as the rich wife of a peer she had had other attractions for an idle young man in his mid-twenties. George was flattered and incredulous when she fell for him. His war record was good, true, but he’d never previously had any notable sexual success. Several clumsy fumbling affairs which lacked nobility and decorum, two qualities to which he had especially aspired. From cinema usherette to peeress was a step in the right direction.
    His parents had done their middle-class best for him, he’d been sent to a public school, not one of the best, but nevertheless a public school. His career there had been short and uninspiring. He had not been expelled in a blaze of notoriety for stealing or perversion; his housemaster had merely suggested that the academic standards of the school did not seem suited to the steadfastness of his endeavour. It was the usual story: a succession of crammers tutored him for the Army exam but to no avail. He had just failed the first exams in the Estate Agency course, when Hitler dramatically changed the course of his life, and that of several million others, with the invasion of Poland. A few months later George was training to be an officer. His first action was in Egypt and it was there, at Sidi Barrani, that he won his M.C. It had been comparatively easy really. With sixshots, one hand-grenade and five men he had captured five times that many sleeping Italians. Later on he was wounded