There were guffaws and a little more looking around at faces. Again Mr Newman turned to look at the man beside him with the creases in his face, and again he discovered the man looking at him. He felt anger growing in him and faced forward, but the stare of the man’s eyes was like a hot light on his cheeks.

‘The reason I inform you thuswise,’ said the priest whose hands were now upon his hips,’ is that we may expect, as in the past, that these gentlemen will give us due attention in their newspapers and that since their sympathies inevitably interfere with their jobs as reporters we must be prepared for exclamations of dissent upon their part. Should any such outbursts’ take place, I trust you will restrain yourselves and deal with the gentlemen as befits your good sense and qualities of leadership …’

Mr Newman’s mind floundered in anxiety. How were they to deal with them? Supposing this person on his right, the calm man with the jacket in his lap, should suddenly erupt against the speaker? Was he to assist in throwing the man out? Was that what the priest meant by leadership? Or was he simply to abide the man? He did not want to be caught without a prearranged plan of action, for he knew that somewhere in the hall Fred was sitting, and in it too the people who had turned over his garbage can, and he would prefer to be seen doing the right thing vigorously. He wanted to be known as one of these people, as in fact he was, and he had no faith in his reactions in emergencies. The voice of the priest cut through his thoughts.

‘ … close to the end of the most brutal war in all history. Many of us in this very gathering have lost blood brothers and husbands and friends ….’

Newman’s eyes wandered over the heads around him. In an aisle to his right a soldier was sitting bareheaded, a steel brace supporting his neck and chin. His mouth hung slightly open as he listened, and he seemed to be blushing. Mr Newman wondered anxiously whether it was embarrassment or anger at … What did they think about, these soldiers? He wondered if they blamed the Jews for the war. His eye caught another soldier sitting behind the wounded one. He was writing in a pad. Was he for or against? He scanned the audience avidly for more soldiers. Suddenly he realized the hall was crackling with applause. He looked up at the priest quickly, and raised his hands from his lap when the applause stopped. As he lowered his hands the man on the left with creased face glanced at him. The man’s face was without life, without expression, like the face of a sun-bather. Mr Newman lowered his hands and looked ahead.

‘How can we in all honesty …. victimizing …. money …. brethren …’

An icy coolness was rising up the back of Mr Newman’s neck. He raised himself an inch off his chair to relax himself, and noticed an old lady down the row whose shoes came up to her calves, and were laced with white string. She clasped a bundle of newspapers to her bony chest. A stench flowed into Newman’s nostrils, the smell of feet and the aged. He rubbed his neck. It was freezing. Under his chin the skin was hot. On his left a new agitation …. the crease-faced man was grunting. Sitting there with his eyes on the stage, and grunting and pulling at his knee, his eyebrows working up and down as he held a repressed conversation with the priest. Newman edged away and his shoulder touched the blond man on the right who unconsciously pressed him aside with his big hand and folded his jacket again on his lap. Newman saw a heavy gold ring on his hand and stared at it for a moment …