He had fallen on his feet. For the first week he was wary, expecting some crippling snag to reveal itself, but once over the initial feeling that this was too good to be true, he had lived in a trance of self-congratulation. Peace: an obscurity as great as any­thing he could have found by marrying Rosa and disguising himself as Stan’s brother-in-law. And coupled with it a sense of idyllic, almost pastoral calm, flowing in upon him from the tranquil beauty of the countryside. The house was a modest brick building, probably a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century farm­house, with a few unobtrusive but thorough-going innovations in the cause of comfort for the inhabitants, but no messing about with the outside. Mr. Braceweight’s moderation again, his refusal to be rushed by his own wealth. Through the window of his room Charles could see how the expensively tended garden (cottage style) broadened into the expensively tended countryside that slumbered around it. For this was not what Charles secretly considered the ‘real’ countryside; it was rural, yes, it produced its crops and milk, yes, and the pubs were full of ruddy broad-shouldered men speaking slowly and loudly in Mummerset, yes, but he had grown up accustomed to the countryside of the middle of England, which earns its own living. Sussex, with its fabulous beauty, its groomed cottages in Hollywood black and white, its glossy cows and immense trees, was to him a stage set, a fake, something supported by the prosperous in search of peace and quiet and food in their week-ends out of town. As he drove slowly through the deep lanes with their nodding green edges, sounding his horn in tiny spotless villages, the blatant self-consciousness of it made him feel as American visitors must feel—glad that a good show has been put on, but somehow wistful at finding the organization so perfect.

Of course, it had taken some luck to produce these ideal conditions for his introduction to the job; he admitted that. For one thing, Mr. Braceweight was taking a holiday after his operation. There was no need to drive him up to London, or to spend long periods at his house there, ready at any time of the day to face the nightmare crawling traffic of the city. It was half-pressure as yet. Then again, the man had had the sense, at some remote period of his life, to choose a wife who was exactly like himself. So entirely without flavour or distinction, for good or ill, was Mrs. Braceweight, that for the first fortnight Charles found himself unable to remember, between one meeting with her and the next, what she looked or sounded like. He carted her like a parcel on her shopping excursions, touched his cap to her in the garden, sat in the car and read his newspaper while she paid calls in the district, and that was all.