Roderick looked down at him. His face was like a pumpkin on which a child has idly made a slit for a mouth, two dark holes for eyes.

‘If you think for a minute, Lumley, can’t you guess?’

A great weariness possessed him, turning his bones to jelly and his muscles to water, dirty water.

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice coming from a long way off. ‘I suppose I can guess.’

‘And do you really mean to say that you didn’t guess all along? That you really thought she was my niece?’

Charles was silent. The knowledge that Veronica was Roderick’s mistress had been there all along, in his bones, in his arms and legs, in the blood in his veins. Now it had risen at last to his brain, bursting through the pathetic little barrier of self-hypno­tism that had kept it down all these months.

‘In every important sense,’ he said, ‘I’ve known that since I first met you both. That stuff about her being your niece wouldn’t have deceived anyone unless they wanted to be deceived.’

‘And you did want to, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said simply, ‘I did want to.’

Roderick moved towards the door. Before reaching it he stopped and turned his pumpkin-face steadily towards Charles.

‘We shan’t meet again. Veronica has told me that she will never communicate with you any more. I may say, in case you’re puzzled, that this little gift of mine,’ he waved his hand to indicate the room and its furnishings, ‘was made at her request. She agreed with me that you must be told about the real nature of the position, and told, what’s more, before you grew strong enough to begin building hopes on what had happened between the two of you, hopes about the time when you came out of here. But she wanted me to see that you were comfortable before breaking the news. She felt you would need that little extra help if you were to stand the shock.’

Charles was silent.

‘Well, have you anything to say before I go?’ Roderick asked, clearing his face of its pumpkinhood and resuming his imitation of himself being bland—only this time there was a touch of parody in the performance, so that it was a slightly malicious portrait. He stood, waiting. Charles just managed to speak.

‘Yes. Get out.’

He went out quietly, shutting the door.

The nurse noticed at six o’clock that his temperature was up. ‘Your temperature’s up,’ she told him.