This side of Kitty’s nature was innate, not encouraged. Her mother was one of those women who accept the body more in theory than in practice, you supposed. Knowing Mrs Goose casually, you might have wondered in what abstract frame of mind she received the attentions of her husband. Nobody knew Mrs Goose very well, more than casually, in fact. She was seen in the background of her husband’s shop, where the shop became back parlour, and finally developed into kitchen. Farther than this she seldom ventured, except to walk with her husband on Sundays near the Castle. You supposed that Mrs Goose led more than this rudimentary existence. But no clue ever encouraged you to guess. You sensed perhaps that there was something different, without just putting your finger on what this difference was.

Walking in the Sunday streets, it was the thickset, fiery Mr Goose who drew the public eye. The physical Mr Goose. Because he was one of the small, thick, muscular men who make a first impression that is almost purely physical. His back compelled you by its force. His voice rose from deep inside. But five minute’s conversation with the face made you wonder how the body had withstood so long a contact with the mind. Some people thought Mr Goose was mad, others that he was a monster. Mrs Illingford-Greene, for one, who was told while buying a leash for her dog: To the privileged the poor are muck, to be scraped into heaps to hide their own. And his eyes, my dear, could have burnt me up. Mr Illingford-Greene, when told, turned to a different page in the paper and talked about these radicals, they weren’t even worth the price of shot. But Goose continued in his own convictions, smouldering inside his shop, where the smell of fresh leather and the flash of buckles struck you, like the proprietor’s eye, the moment you walked inside the door.

With his friends, or with his family, sitting in the yard on summer evenings, in the light through limes and a sound of ducks, the eyes of Mr Goose would dwindle to a pale distance at times. Thinking of her father, more often than not, Kitty thought of those distant eyes, very pale, and distant, and absorbed. They were the eyes of a mild man. The abstraction of a man. That was the trouble with Mr Goose. In spite of material evidence, he had almost ceased to exist. Except as a concentration of theory. Whipped into action by a sense of justice, he remained too selfless to exist as a man. His physical existence exhausted itself on rage at a social system and an economic lie.

Professionally, as a harness maker, they respected Mr Goose. In the dark shop below the Castle, there was a good display of harness, as well as the useless things you stocked to attract a Mrs Illingford-Greene. Mr Goose found satisfaction in his work. He liked to work with his hands. Because, he said, it relieved the mind. Working late, by lamplight, his stubbled head like a winter field, the more essential part of him would wander into fresh utopias, till his wife, or, if it were the end of the week, his daughter, would appear in the inner doorway, and say it was long past the time for him to come and eat.