Philip took the slice of Dundee cake in his hand and munched it round the room. He felt very old, independent and judicial; he was aware that Baines was talking to him as man to man. He never called him Master Philip as Mrs Baines did, who was servile when she was not authoritative.

Baines had seen the world; he had seen beyond the railings, beyond the tired legs of typists, the Pimlico parade to and from Victoria. He sat there over his ginger pop with the resigned dignity of an exile; Baines didn’t complain; he had chosen his fate; and if his fate was Mrs Baines he had only himself to blame.

But today, because the house was almost empty and Mrs Baines was upstairs and there was nothing to do, he allowed himself a little acidity.

‘I’d go back tomorrow if I had the chance.’

‘Did you ever shoot a nigger?’

‘I never had any call to shoot,’ Baines said. ‘Of course I carried a gun. But you didn’t need to treat them bad. That just made them stupid. Why,’ Baines said, bowing his thin grey hair with embarrassment over the ginger pop, ‘I loved some of those damned niggers. I couldn’t help loving them. There they’d be laughing, holding hands; they liked to touch each other; it made them feel fine to know the other fellow was round. It didn’t mean anything we could understand; two of them would go about all day without losing hold, grown men; but it wasn’t love; it didn’t mean anything we could understand.’

‘Eating between meals,’ Mrs Baines said. ‘What would your mother say, Master Philip?’

She came down the steep stairs to the basement, her hands full of pots of cream and salve, tubes of grease and paste. ‘You oughtn’t to encourage him, Baines,’ she said, sitting down in a wicker armchair and screwing up her small ill-humoured eyes at the Coty lipstick, Pond’s cream, the Leichner rouge and Cyclax powder and Elizabeth Arden astringent.

She threw them one by one into the waste-paper basket. She saved only the cold cream. ‘Telling the boy stories,’ she said. ‘Go along to the nursery, Master Philip, while I get lunch.’

Philip climbed the stairs to the baize door. He heard Mrs Baines’s voice like the voice in a nightmare when the small Price light has guttered in the saucer and the curtains move; it was sharp and shrill and full of malice, louder than people ought to speak, exposed.

‘Sick to death of your ways, Baines, spoiling the boy. Time you did some work about the house,’ but he couldn’t hear what Baines said in reply. He pushed open the baize door, came up like a small earth animal in his grey flannel shorts into a wash of sunlight on a parquet floor, the gleam of mirrors dusted and polished and beautified by Mrs Baines.