“Wales…”

“Stayed on, and became the Cymri. What if we’re all Jews, you see? all scattered like seeds? still flying outward from the primal fist so long ago. Man, I believe that.”

“Of course you do, Gwenhidwy.”

“Aren’t we then? What about you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel Jewish today.”

“I meant flying outward?” He means alone and forever separate: Pointsman knows what he means. So, by surprise, something in him is touched. He feels the Christmas snow now at crevices of his boots, the bitter cold trying to get in. The brown wool flank of Gwenhidwy moves at the edge of his sight, a pocket of color, a holdout against this whitening day. Flying outward. Flying… Gwenhidwy, a million ice-points falling at a slant across his caped immensity, looking so improbable of extinction that now, from where it’s been lying, the same yawing-drunk chattering fear returns, the Curse of the Book, and here is someone he wants, truly, with all his mean heart, to see preserved… though he’s been too shy, or proud, ever to’ve smiled at Gwenhidwy without some kind of speech to explain and cancel out the smile… .

Dogs run barking at their approach. They get the Professional Eye from Pointsman. Gwenhidwy is humming “Aberystwyth.” Out comes the doorkeeper’s daughter Estelle with a shivering kid or two underfoot and a Christmas bottle of something acrid but very warming inside the breast after about the first minute it’s down. Smells of coal smoke, piss, garbage, last night’s bubble-and-squeak, fill the hallways. Gwenhidwy is drinking from the bottle, carrying on a running slap-and-tickle with Estelle and getting in a fast game of where’d-he-go-there-he-is with Arch her youngest around the broad mouton hipline of his mother who keeps trying to smack him but he’s too fast.

Gwenhidwy breathes upon a gas meter which is frozen all through, too tight to accept coins. Terrible weather. He surrounds it, curses it, bending like a screen lover, wings of his cape reaching to enfold—Gwenhidwy, radiating like a sun… .

Out the windows of the sitting-room are a row of bare Army-colored poplars, a canal, a snowy trainyard, and beyond it a long sawtooth pile of scrap coal, still smoldering from a V-bomb yesterday. Ragged smoke is carried askew, curling, broken and back to earth by the falling snow.

“It’s the closest yet,” Gwenhidwy at the kettle, the sour smell of a sulfur match in the air. After a moment, still on watch over the gas ring, “Pointsman, do you want to hear something really paranoid?”

“You too?”

“Have you consulted a map of London lately? All this great meteoric plague of V-weapons, is being dumped out here, you see. Not back on Whitehall, where it’s supposed to be, but on me, and I think it is beast-ly?”

“What a damned unpatriotic thing to say.”

“Oh,” hawking and spitting into the washbowl, “you don’t want to believe it. Why should you? Harley Street lot, my good Jesus Christ.”

It’s an old game with Gwenhidwy, Royal Fellow–baiting. Some unaccustomed wind or thermocline along the sky is bringing them down the deep choral hum of American bombers: Death’s white Gymanfa Ganu. A switching-locomotive creeps silently across the web of tracks below.