He should go to the window, bang on it, and shake his fist. But Arthur Simpkins decided not to. No, better just to let him get fed up and go. Probably on drugs or drunk. These kids were all the same, they all had money to burn.

Arthur Simpkins took the bowl and the tea out of the front room and into the small dining room. Here he switched on the overhead light and drew the curtains, shutting out the square of Irish cement garden.

He sat drinking his tea, and rolled a cigarette, being careful not to waste any tobacco. He took off his shoes, but, with his socks still on, he crept back into the front room again, to look.

The white-haired man was still there. He was just sitting, not facing the house even, staring along the street, as if he was waiting for someone by appointment.

Trying to put the wind up. Young bugger.

Arthur Simpkins went back into the dining room, and drank the rest of his tea and finished his cigarette. On the floor the bowl steamed less.

There were no ornaments in the room, as there were none in the front room. Over the fire hung a framed photograph of Arthur Simpkins the warrior, with two of the other men. They were beaming and contented in their battledress. You knew where you were then. Under the photograph hung a medal. He had his pride.

On the dining-room table lay Arthur Simpkins's scrapbooks of the Royal Family, and the little pile of cuttings that he had yet to insert. He had been going to see to those tonight, out he could not settle.

The water in the bowl had got cold,

He would go and boil up the kettle again.

Arthur Simpkins went out, and, creeping once more, passed around the wall of the front room to the window.

Still there.

What should he do? Call the police? It seemed extreme. But then, this was a threat, was it not, implicit. He was a poor old man. He was alone.

Arthur Simpkins sidled to the small bureau where the telephone was kept. Above it hung the other picture in the house, of the Queen trooping the color. It seemed to offer slight protection, and as he raised the receiver, outside the man on the wall turned his head. He looked straight in at the window as if he had heard the receiver being lifted.

Arthur Simpkins's hand shook. And in his ear he heard a tinny silence. There was no dialing tone.

He turned on the phone, working the cradle a couple of times, without hope. You could rely on nothing nowadays. He could be dying, and the phone not working.

Then he looked up, the dead receiver in his shaking hand, and relief washed through him in a scalding wave.

The man was gone from the wall.

No trace of him.