He gives a start: If I disappear, perhaps they’ll take revenge on my father. Father must disappear too. No, he’s too old, after all. They won’t bother him.

No time for proper thought. Stig changes his clothes; he has a few in one of the cupboards. He can hear Rascal talking loudly in the next room. Karen’s reply cannot be heard; she has become used to talking quietly. There they are, just beside him, and he is preparing to leave them.

He goes out. His father lives only a few side passages away. Stig hurries in that direction. His father has been a schoolmaster in this house all his long life. Now he sits at home, having handed over responsibility a long time ago. He sits resting, alone with a housekeeper. His wife, Stig’s mother, is dead.

A cracking sound somewhere. And the bewitched arrows are alive and swimming about him. Hidden fingers are pointing at him. But first to Father who is so disappointed in his son.

There he sits, in the familiar chair with the worn paint. He seems even thinner inside his waistcoat. Food is scarce. Look at those hollow cheeks, and those plucked old man’s hands resting on the arm of the chair.

‘Oh, is it you ?’ says the old man. ‘Nothing the matter, I hope?’

I come here so seldom, thinks Stig, that when I do come, he thinks there’s something wrong. But I haven’t had time for anything besides the one preoccupation. Now I’ll catch it.

‘No, nothing’s the matter.’

‘We never see you these days. Why is that? Sometimes I think you may have got mixed up in something.’

‘What should I get mixed up in?’ asks Stig.

A pathetic expression passes across his father’s face.

‘How can you say that? Is it possible that you never run any risks at all?’

Stig is silent.

‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Stig,’ says the old man bitterly. ‘I expected you to take some kind of risk, like so many others.’

Stig watches him. This is my father, he thinks.

‘Well, that’s as may be,’ he says. ‘There are so many considerations you have to keep in mind. Best not to talk about it.’

His father sits listening, grey and pathetic. It is hard to have to let him sit like that, but the orders have to be obeyed blindly. And just as blindly on this particular occasion.

‘Many considerations to keep in mind?’ repeats his father. ‘I suppose so. I simply don’t understand it at all. But supposing things got beyond endurance, wouldn’t you take part in it then, Stig?’

‘Of course!’ says Stig, relieved to be able to say as much. ‘I’m pretty certain I would.’

His father sits looking into the black window-pane.

‘But you ought not to wait as long as that. You ought to join them before then. It’s right to do so then, and is needed most then, but you ought to join them before…. Everything’s so appallingly dark…’ he continues, staring at the blind window-pane where no light may penetrate, either in or out.