Then Richard persuaded Christopher to come with him to the moat, to break ice near where they had had the bonfire not so long ago. But it was no use. The day was too cold. Over and above this he found, with so much time on their hands, that nothing was special. This was no more than just another week-end, now that he had forgotten he was a fireman who had not even had a fire. When he made some excuse to get away the boy did not mind, happy to go back with Actress to the stables.

The stud groom, on his last visit, had let him kill with a spoon nine immature mice they had uncovered beneath a pile of horse blankets.

Each day they had down there, Dy arranged that Richard should be with Christopher in the mornings. He would come into their room first thing, and ask, “What shall we do?” “Why not go out with daddy after breakfast?” “Yes,” he might say, or “All right,” not letting it be seen whether he was bored or pleased, seeming to accept the arrangement because it had been settled.

When, at last, his father took him by the hand soon after eleven and asked where they were to go, it was Christopher, now that it had been agreed that they should be together, who suggested the visit they could make to this or that in the grounds. He did this as though he was the one to do the entertaining, cold, unquestioning, yet perfectly happy, and with no comment. He was still too young for chat. In whatever they got up to he was content to stand by while Richard did the heavy work, not helping while he turned over logs or pulled long sheets of ice from the moat. But Richard could not do anything on his own or Christopher would cry, “Wait till I come, oh wait.”

Roe had been brought up in this house, among these gardens. The lawns, and most of the undergrowth in the wild garden, the trees, the beds of reed around the moat, all these had become a part of his youth. They had not altered in the twenty years he was growing up. It was he who had changed, who dreaded now, with a hemlock loss of will, to evoke how once he shared these scenes with no one, for he had played alone, who had then no inkling of the insecurity the war would put him in, and who found, when confronted by each turning of a path he knew by heart but which he could never call to mind when he closed his eyes, that the presence, the disclosure again of so much that had not changed and shewed no immediate signs of changing, bore him down back to the state he wished to forget, when he was his son’s age and had no more than a son’s responsibility to a father.