‘You’re quite comfortable up here, aren’t you? I think it’s much nicer than George’s room in the house.’

‘There’s one big advantage, of course,’ he said. ‘George isn’t in this one.’

He wanted her to become angry, or at least to laugh, for the tension she was trying to generate had to be broken quickly. But she merely nodded seriously, as if he had said something true and important.

‘It is nicer without him, isn’t it? And do you live here all the time? I mean, do you use that couch thing for sleeping on?’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Would you mind leaving me with some of my childish secrets and getting on with this good turn you’re going to do me?’ ‘Unless it’s what I think it is’, he almost added, but the vestigial power of his upbringing checked him.

‘Oh, the good turn, yes,’ she said, speaking deliberately. ‘It’s a warning. I wanted to warn you.’

‘What against?’ he asked, impatiently, when she did not go on. He wanted her out of his room. It was small, it was over a garage, it did not belong to him, but he liked it and did not want it contaminated.

‘Against George,’ she said, still in the half-hypnotized voice that dragged across his nerves. ‘He doesn’t like you. In fact he hates you. It seems that you’ve been playing some kind of joke on him, he won’t say what, and he takes these things terribly badly.’

‘I know he does,’ said Charles to fill up another silence.

‘Terribly badly,’ she repeated. ‘He hasn’t told me anything, but I know he wants to injure you. He’d like to get you sacked. And he’ll try to do it, one way or another.’

‘He needn’t worry. After what happened this morning, I’m going anyway. D’you think I could stay here after letting the car get smashed about like that?’

‘But that wasn’t your fault,’ she said slowly and seriously.

‘Well, whose fault was it? The kid’s fault for building himself that lunatic machine and racing it along the drive? Yours and Hutchins’s for coming out of the house at the wrong moment? Mine for not putting my foot down? It’s no good arguing it out. When a thing like that happens, the chauffeur goes. Particularly when the alternative is to expose a couple of things that everybody would rather have hushed up.’

‘Oh, so you’re being noble,’ she said coolly, with a note of something resembling scorn.

‘Noble and obliging. Clearing out five seconds ahead of the boot.’

There was a pause. The discussion seemed to have reached its logical ending. But she did not move.

‘Was there anything else?’ he asked gently, in a parody of chauffeurly deference.