Waking much later, he retained a steadied sense of bereavement and a steady knowledge as to what must be done. First, the kitchen must be put in order. Then he must straighten his bed; finally, his desk. He went at it calmly, too much fatigued to be conscious of any additional effort. Once only he was impeded by an uncertainty of purpose, and that was when he came to the manuscript on his desk. But after a glance at the bookshelf, he let it be. Those deplorable favourites had taken their chance, and so should this. He took the pistol from the drawer, and checked that it was in order. A minimum of oil and attention will keep such things in condition, though they lie for years unused and unthought-of. The habit of carrying it with him when he travelled had conveyed it to Maidstone, and now it was here. A last thought struck him. He went from room to room opening the windows. The air flowed in, impartial and absolving. Air flows in, soul flies out. But that is for the housebound deathbed; for his part, he had no notion to die anywhere but out of doors. Blood, so unseemly on a carpet, soon assimilates itself to earth.

He went out, and into the patch of ground at the back of the house where the dogs were buried and the horse-radish grew. Frost had already touched the strong-grown serpentine leaves. Their edges were fraying, their green was blotched as if with rust. Rubbing one against another in the slow wind, they made a grating noise, one might almost call it clanking—or would that be a Gongorism? One must be on one’s guard against … He remembered that the obligation to be on one’s guard was now at an end. All he had to 137do was to decide whether to shoot through the eye or the ear. The eye is infallible, yet most people flinch at that who flinch at nothing else, and prefer to blow their brains out through the ear. He would wait for the robin to end its little stanza, and then he would shoot himself through the eye.

The robin flew up. Loveday’s voice, a little out of breath, said, ‘Oh, Mr Bateman, are you after that rat? He’s about here every evening. But you won’t get him now, for I saw him run into the hedge as I came out.’

‘Oh! Did you? Well, so here you are. Did you enjoy yourself at Margate?’

‘Oh, yes, Mr Bateman. I had a very nice time. The sea looked so calm, I quite wanted to go on it.’

Ramsgate was where he had advised her to go, Ramsgate was where she had been. But Loveday knew that this was not a moment in which to be geographical. It was enough that she had come back, found all the windows open and that manuscript blown all over the floor, and Mr Bateman up to no good. Up to no good: she would not allow herself to think more explicitly. To do so would not help him or her. Talking of the blueness of the sea, the whiteness of the cliffs, the devastations of war, the unexpectedness of sitting down on a bench and finding Lucy Petter, whom she had not seen for years, sitting at the other end of it, she stood conversing among the horse-radish, wearing shoes that had become too tight for her and a hat like an apple-turnover.