‘Sausages,’ Baines said. ‘We’re going to celebrate today. A fair bust.’ He celebrated at breakfast, restless, cracking jokes, unaccountably merry and nervous. It was going to be a long long day, he kept on coming back to that: for years he had waited for a long day, he had sweated in the damp Coast heat, changed shirts, gone down with fever, lain between the blankets and sweated, all in the hope of this long day, that cat sniffing round the area, a bit of mist, the mats beaten at 63. He propped the Mail in front of the coffee-pot and read pieces aloud. He said, ‘Cora Down’s been married for the fourth time.’ He was amused, but it wasn’t his idea of a long day. His long day was the Park, watching the riders in the Row, seeing Sir Arthur Stillwater pass beyond the rails (‘He dined with us once in Bo; up from Freetown; he was governor there’), lunch at the Corner House for Philip’s sake (he’d have preferred himself a glass of stout and some oysters at the York bar), the Zoo, the long bus ride home in the last summer light: the leaves in the Green Park were beginning to turn and the motors nuzzled out of Berkeley Street with the low sun gently glowing on their windscreens. Baines envied no one, not Cora Down, or Sir Arthur Stillwater, or Lord Sandale, who came out on to the steps of the Naval and Military and then went back again because he hadn’t got anything to do and might as well look at another paper. ‘I said don’t let me see you touch that black again.’ Baines had led a man’s life; everyone on top of the bus pricked their ears when he told Philip all about it.

‘Would you have shot him?’ Philip asked, and Baines put his head back and tilted his dark respectable manservant’s hat to a better angle as the bus swerved round the Artillery Memorial.

‘I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I’d have shot to kill,’ he boasted, and the bowed figure went by, steel helmet, the heavy cloak, the down-turned rifle and the folded hands.

‘Have you got the revolver?’

‘Of course I’ve got it,’ Baines said. ‘Don’t I need it with all the burglaries there’ve been?’ This was the Baines whom Philip loved: not Baines singing and carefree, but Baines responsible, Baines behind barriers, living this man’s life.

All the buses streamed out from Victoria like a convoy of aeroplanes to bring Baines home with honour. ‘Forty blacks under me,’ and there waiting near the area steps was the proper conventional reward, love at lighting-up time.