We both tried, and the umbrella suddenly bellied out, the spokes tore through the soaking cover; the wind danced its tatters; it wrangled above us in the wind like a ruined, mathematical bird. We tried to tug it down; an unseen, new spoke sprang through its ragged ribs. Leslie dragged it behind him, along the pavement, as though he had shot it.

A girl called Dulcie, scurrying to the Itch-pit, sniggered hallo, and we stopped her.

“A rather terrible thing has happened,” I said to her. She was so silly that, even when she was fifteen, we had told her to eat soap to make her straw hair crinkle, and Les took a piece from the bathroom, and she did.

“I know,” she said, “you broke your gamp.”

“No, you’re wrong there,” Leslie said. “It isn’t our umbrella at all. It fell off the roof. You feel,” he said. “You can feel it fell off the roof.” She took the umbrella gingerly by its handle.

“There’s someone up there throwing umbrellas down,” I said. “It may be serious.”

She began to titter, and then grew silent and anxious as Leslie said: “You never know. It might be walking-sticks next.”

“Or sewing-machines,” I said.

“You wait here, Dulcie, and we’ll investigate,” Leslie said.

We hurried on down the street, turned a blowing corner, and then ran.

Outside Rabiotti’s café, Leslie said: “It isn’t fair on Dulcie.” We never mentioned it again.

A wet girl brushed by. Without a word, we followed her. She cantered, long-legged, down Inkerman Street and through Paradise Passage, and we were at her heels.

“I wonder what’s the point in following people,” Leslie said, “it’s kind of daft. It never gets you anywhere. All you do is follow them home and then try to look through the window and see what they’re doing and mostly there’s curtains anyway. I bet nobody else does things like that.”

“You never know,” I said. The girl turned into St. Augustus Crescent, which was a wide lamplit mist. “People are always following people. What shall we call her?”

“Hermione Weatherby,” Leslie said. He was never wrong about names. Hermione was fey and stringy, and walked like a long gym-mistress, full of love, through the stinging rain.

“You never know. You never know what you’ll find out. Perhaps she lives in a huge house with all her sisters—”

“How many?”

“Seven. All full of love. And when she gets home they all change into kimonos and lie on divans with music and whisper to each other and all they’re doing is waiting for somebody like us to walk in, lost, and then they’ll all chatter round us like starlings and put us in kimonos too, and we’ll never leave the house until we die. Perhaps it’s so beautiful and soft and noisy-like a warm bath full of birds …”