‘And then we can go on again,’ said Mrs Kerr, making room for Sydney. ‘Why is it so much more tiring to sit still in something that doesn’t move?’ Sydney climbed silently in and sat between them. By the time they had been able to pass the wagon, drawn back farther down into a bay of the road, she felt that the evening was already over, that they had been home for a long time, that all this had happened a year ago and only by some delay of the memory still seemed to concern them. As they walked rather slowly up the Hotel steps, weighed down with armfuls of wraps, and the disconcertingly keen lights streamed out on to them, Mrs Kerr with an air of coming awake again remarked that Sydney was tired. ‘If you’re not too tired,’ she said, ‘come in on your way up and say good night to me. We shan’t have you many nights more.’

‘Thank you,’ Sydney said, ‘but don’t wait up for me. I’ll come early if I come at all.’ After dinner she went straight up to her own room, sleep came up over her like a wave as soon as she shut her eyes, a tall dark wave that gathered itself and waited above her a moment, so that she was conscious of it before she was conscious of nothing. Then all night long she was climbing up the endless road again, corner by corner, to an empty town at the top.

24

Kindness

‘YET I DO think it would be nice of you to go with him as far as Genoa,’ Mrs Kerr said to Ronald, three evenings afterwards. At an end of her gentle insistence, she could do no more; she left the appeal in the air to dissolve or solidify, sighed, turned away from her son and took up her letters. The appeal stretched out and closed upon Ronald’s unwillingness, tentacle after shadowy tentacle; he got up and walked round Mrs Kerr’s room, uneasily moving his shoulders, writhing mentally like the Laocöon and feeling himself constricted at every point.

‘Well, I am blowed,’ he said petulantly. ‘I really am blowed!’ But Mrs Kerr was reading a letter.