There was a tall hedge of holly out at the back to hide the stables. Two gardeners were clipping this hedge. One of them came down off his ladder and gave a holloa. He might have seen a fox. Richard saw Christopher come out of the small iron gate. The other man got off the ladder and stood by his side. The two men holloaed together. A third time they did this and then Christopher joined in, his voice high above theirs. At last Actress came galloping, once more from a distance. The nurse came out of the iron gate to fetch him for his goodbye to his father. Then Actress was there. And as Richard turned back, and the car came out of the back drive to go to the front door, he did not know how he was going to get through his goodbye. What he had just seen was so like all he had known and might never find again, and, as he clutched at her arm above the elbow, he shook at leaving this, the place he got back to her.

“WHEN I was in Africa,” Piper was telling Richard in the four-ale bar, “it didn’t ’alf cause a rumpus, oh dear, quite usual too. You’d see a number of ’em, with their long sticks, kickin’ up the dust on the compound where they lived, till you could make out only their ’eads and shoulders with all they’d raised. In the end they always got ’em back, yus, nearly always, but oh dear what a rumpus,” and he laughed his high, cracked laugh. For Piper had got Richard’s name from the copper Pye called to take Christopher home, this copper living along the same street as Piper these twenty years.

It was the evening of the second day in the substation. Richard was too worn out, too bewildered to deny that his son had been abducted. In peace time, to avoid getting involved with this old man, he would not have hesitated. Lying he would have denied all knowledge of Christopher. But now that it was to be war he thought he would say goodbye to evasions, or pretence. He foolishly admitted he had been the victim.

“When that copper give me the name,” said Piper, “I said to me-self I know someone, let’s see, somewheres, why yes, you old bastard, it’s that young feller training alongside of yer at the station. So then I looks you up and it is you. So there you are then.”

“Yes it was me,” Richard admitted for the third time.

“An’ if it ’adn’t been that your nipper would not tell ’im where you lived ’e never would ’ave called the copper but left ’im as if by accident along your street, I don’t doubt. Fortunate to one way of lookin’, but misfortune some ways, according to ’ow things turn out with him in charge of this substation with you in it.”