Hoffentlich werden Sie sich sofort zu Hause finden, Frau Fiesel said.

His mind scrabbled after phrases in exasperation. He felt that without assistance Frau Fiesel’s smile might break. But out of his always inadequate vocabulary, that had collapsed somewhere on the frontier, all he could salvage now were the words Brötchen and ja.

You will soon be at home here, I hope, Frau Fiesel said helpfully. You would like to wash perhaps, and rest a little before we eat. You will find hot water in the basin. It is sometimes red at first, but afterwards you will have no trouble.

Her smile drew back still wider, to console.

Ja, he said, and again: Ja.

Then he was alone.

Across his forehead and his forelock his hat had left a band of sweat. Rooting in the suitcase he unearthed his brush and began, in a surge of voluptuous exhaustion, brushing slowly at his matted hair. His face was undistinguished in the glass, shadowy, apologetic, and smudged by the plains of Germany. It swam up out of a green sea that was half the shimmer of reflected trees and half the blur of physical exhaustion. But none of the radiance of light, the melting of colour in the sea of glass, concealed from the swimmer his own dejection. There are moments when the human mind admits its own shadowiness. And it was one of these.

Leaving behind all sense of geographical ties at Aachen, Elyot Standish found himself floating, placeless, timeless, there was no end to his present or past fluidity, there was no connexion between himself and any of the intervening years. There were even few significant points, forming out of this void. An afternoon standing on the edge of an almost circular bay, fingering a smooth and reddish stone. The bay had dimension, the stone a certain solidity. Then the years flattened out into a general monotony of time, broken by a few twinges of pain, the transitory and intensely personal hells of school.

Well, Elyot, said Mrs Standish, you’ll always have to thank your Uncle Stephen for your education, if it weren’t for your uncle’s allowance, I don’t know what we should do.

At the time it was a rather dubious gift. And Uncle Stephen, well, practising the law and a sense of duty had given him a tinge of unctuousness. Looking down from a considerable height he stirred the money in his trouser pockets, he asked you to lunch and gave you sherry, an impression of Uncle Stephen inevitably became a bluish chin behind a glass of dry Amontillado sherry. You sat on the edge of the chair and made the suitable, the grateful remarks. You felt like the little, frilled trick dog in the circus, sitting on his tail and waiting for the biscuit. On the whole, it was Uncle Stephen who was the ringmaster of the school years.

I don’t want to sound a snob, said Mrs Standish, remembering perhaps the drawing-room in Norfolk, I don’t want to sound a snob, but I’m glad you’re going to a good school.