Life, in fact, had slowed down to a welcome jog-trot. He had forgotten the taste of peace since those first golden weeks as a window-cleaner, before it had begun to turn sour. Now some­thing of that spirit was returning; his room above the garage, when he climbed to it after his day’s work, had about it a pleasantly nostalgic reminder of the Froulish loft. Not even his fellow-­servants presented a problem, for there were none. There was only a harassed housekeeper who tried to train a succession of more or less mentally deficient girls from the village. All the intelligent ones had gone into the towns, mostly to serve in milk-bars within striking distance of American airfields. Ten years previously and there would have been a full-scale servants’ hall, presided over by a butler looking like an eighteenth-century statesman at Madame Tussaud’s, and a rigid hierarchy, smaller and more vigilant than the one at the hospital, into which he would have had to squeeze himself somehow. Now there was nothing; he did not even know the name of the old man who dug the garden, or the youth who helped him on Saturdays. He was a Crusoe with no need to look for footprints in the sand.

He was polishing the headlamps, one slack afternoon, when a high-pitched buzzing, like that of an angry bee, began to cut through the drowsy August air. Approaching, it turned into a series of deep, choking snorts, then renewed itself into a mad bellowing. Charles straightened up and stared down the drive. It was a curving one, which skirted the kitchen garden so as to leave the flower-garden with its cottage atmosphere unsullied, and he saw through the gaps in the bushes that something was taking it, gravel surface and hairpin bend included, at little short of forty miles an hour. Hastily he backed behind the solid bulk of the Daimler.

The motor-cycle swept into the small courtyard in front of the garage with its front forks whipping up and down as the brakes went on. Gravel spurted like the spray from a fast launch. With wheels locked, the abominable machine clawed its way round in a tight circle. One handlebar scored a deep line in the paintwork of the garage door. It stopped, and there was silence.

Before Charles could collect himself to protest, a young man had heaved the bicycle on to its stand and turned to face him.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Sixty-two minutes from town. From High-gate to be precise.’

He was powerfully built, with black brows and a heavy jowl. His face showed no trace of intelligence or sensibility, but it was not unattractive. His general manner was of untroubled, genial capability; obviously there were quite a number of things he could do well, and as for the things he could not do at all, he had simply never heard of them.