Scrodd seemed to have fallen into a trance: his eyes were groping in Charles’s direction as if searching for an invisible opponent.

‘So why not give the job regularly to one of your old boys? I could make a journey over here, without any reminding, say at the beginning or end of each term, and make a couple of days’ job of it, and of course my charges would—’

Scrodd was on his feet, and the miracle had happened. He was looking directly at Charles.

‘I am still hoping,’ he articulated distinctly, ‘that this will turn out to be some foolish joke on your part.’

‘—be less than whatever it is you’re having to pay now.’

‘Perhaps a touch of the sun. It has been hot lately.’

‘Look at it this way. Suppose you don’t get anyone in from outside, who is there who can do it decently? No one. Smith’s too fat and rheumatic to get to the top of a ladder, and as for Bert, you must know that he can’t be spared from the coke-shovel­ling—’

‘Lumley! Spare me the trouble of ringing for the janitor and having you taken out of here by force!’

‘—except during the summer, and then he has to act as grounds­man. I could take the whole thing off their hands, and make the windows a credit to the school.’

Scrodd’s hand jerked to the bell, and pressed the button, holding it feverishly down. Charles stood up. He had about one minute, the time it would take Smith to plod back down the corridor, in which to say his last words to Scrodd. It was inconceivable that they should ever meet again. And yet he had not the slightest urge to say anything, either cutting, furious, or conciliatory. The time for summaries was over. He had no breath to spare for his past life and its débris.

Oddly, it was Scrodd who felt the need to elaborate.

‘I can only conclude, Lumley, that you felt some kind of grudge against me that impelled you to come back and waste my time with this foolish joke. Window cleaning! I suppose the implication is that your education has unfitted you for anything worth doing, and you seek to drive the point home by coming here with this foolish talk about having turned artisan. You need not have spoken in parable.’

Charles turned away as Smith opened the door. He felt no wish to comment on Scrodd’s reading of the case. He merely said, over his shoulder, ‘Why not in parable? I spent eight years here being taught to think metaphorically.’

And as Smith held the door for him to go out, he broke suddenly into the drowsy quiet of the corridor with a rendering, as musical as he could make it, of his obsessive fragment:

‘May their seed-time past be yielding

Year by year a richer store!’