The geyser began to mutter; I turned on the cold water tap and the light brown water became a bit darker. As I looked at it and at the brown ring round the bath that no scouring would remove, I knew that it would be only a matter of time before the daily bath would become a bath every two days and then weekly. Norah didn’t seem to notice it, just as she didn’t seem to notice the streaky green distempered walls and the scabrous wooden W.C. seat; but I had been in Capua too long. I lowered myself into the tepid brown water, trying not to touch the sides of the bath.

But when I had dried myself and was drinking tea by the gas fire in the living annexe I began to feel more cheerful; if there had been little pleasure in the bath itself there was pleasure in not being in the bathroom. And there was, now that the tea had removed the thickness of daytime sleep from my mouth, a cer­tain satisfaction in doing nothing at half past three in the after­noon.

It was what I needed: the abdication of responsibility, the re­tirement from the arena. Looking back, I saw nothing but strug­gle: struggle to reach Dufton Grammar School, struggle to pass my matriculation, struggle to become a clerk in the Trea­surers at Dufton, struggle to marry Susan and the long struggle, which only since summer I’d known to be so, of marriage itself. The new life would begin soon, the new life that had chosen me: at last I was living in the present. I ran my hand over my chin and took down my electric shaver from the mantelpiece.

A bell rang.

I did not immediately recognize what it was; it had a softer note than the telephone, almost as if it were part of a carillon. For a moment my mind was befogged by vague fears, as if the dream had not ended. This was not a sound I had ever heard in my three weeks in London; no one had ever called at the flat.

I didn’t want to see anybody and I was all too conscious of being unshaven and still in my dressing-gown at four o’clock; I wondered whether to let the doorbell ring, something which, like leaving the telephone off the hook, I’d always wanted to do. But slowly and reluctantly I went to the door.

It was Mrs. Brown, immaculate in a white belted raincoat. I noticed that her black glacé shoes were dry and her umbrella still furled; there was nothing extraordinary about this since she pre­sumably had come by taxi, but I reflected that I knew no other person who was so little affected by the weather. She would look exactly the same if she’d walked twenty miles through a cloud­burst.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“By all means.”