‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said. She got up from the table leaving her meringue unfinished, and came towards him, thin, menacing, dusty in the basement room. ‘Master Philip, you do as you’re told.’ She took him by the arm and squeezed it gently; she watched him with a joyless passionate glitter and above her head the feet of the typists trudged back to the Victorian offices after the lunch interval.

‘Why shouldn’t I go for a walk?’ But he weakened; he was scared and ashamed of being scared. This was life; a strange passion he couldn’t understand moving in the basement room. He saw a small pile of broken glass swept into a corner by a waste-paper basket. He looked to Baines for help and only intercepted hate; the sad hopeless hate of something behind bars.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he repeated.

‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘you’ve got to do as you’re told. You mustn’t think just because your father’s away, there’s nobody here to –’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Philip cried, and was startled by Baines’s low interjection:

‘There’s nothing she wouldn’t dare.’

‘I hate you,’ Philip said to Mrs Baines. He pulled away from her and ran to the door, but she was there before him; she was old, but she was quick.

‘Master Philip,’ she said, ‘you’ll say you’re sorry.’ She stood in front of the door quivering with excitement. ‘What would your father do if he heard you say that?’

She put a hand out to seize him, dry and white with constant soda, the nails cut to the quick, but he backed away and put the table between them, and suddenly to his surprise she smiled; she became again as servile as she had been arrogant. ‘Get along with you, Master Philip,’ she said with glee, ‘I see I’m going to have my hands full till your father and mother come back.’

She left the door unguarded and when he passed her she slapped him playfully. ‘I’ve got too much to do today to trouble about you. I haven’t covered half the chairs,’ and suddenly even the upper part of the house became unbearable to him as he thought of Mrs Baines moving about shrouding the sofas, laying out the dust-sheets.

So he wouldn’t go upstairs to get his cap but walked straight out across the shining hall into the street, and again, as he looked this way and that way, it was life he was in the middle of.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2