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rather as if Onslow had decided that he was less a mere nuisance than some sort of threat. But there seemed no sense in this. Get yourself involved with bodies in bunkers, Bobby told himself, and in no time you are imagining things.
    So Bobby made proper remarks to his hosts, got into his car, and drove off. But after a couple of bends on Overcombe’s long and ill-kept drive, when he felt that the sound of his engine must have faded away, he drew into the side and came to a halt again. He remembered that what had gone by the grand name of the Art Block in his day had in fact been an old Nissen hut pitched some way from the main building. It seemed improbable that Hartsilver was better or otherwise accommodated now. And nothing would be happening in it at this early hour in the afternoon – one at which the whole school prescriptively took to a disorganized life on its playing fields. But Hartsilver himself would have gone back to his hut, since the place was the only tolerable refuge he had.
    This turned out to be the case. Bobby knocked at the door of the hut, and went in. Hartsilver was alone. He was contemplating a reproduction, pinned up on the wall, of a self portrait in silver-point drawn by Dürer when he was about thirteen. Dürer was thus much of an age with Hartsilver’s present charges at Overcombe. Perhaps Hartsilver was comparing the young Dürer with, say, the young Beadon – something like that. But now Hartsilver, having responded to the knock on his door, was contemplating Bobby precisely as he had been contemplating his reproduction of that marvellously precocious drawing in the Albertina. And at once Bobby remembered that this had been Hartsilver’s habit long ago. He had always contrived to see the little savages of Overcombe not as little savages but simply as endlessly fascinating plastic entities which, but for the calamity which had befallen him, he might equally endlessly have given his life to arresting on a canvas or a square of paper.
    Bobby had forgotten what it was like to be looked at with this particular eye. It was one, he thought, which his mother, so devoted a sculptor, must deliberately refrain from directing upon him. It had a depersonalizing effect, so that he wondered how he was to suggest himself to Hartsilver as being something other than a complex visual phenomenon.
    ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ Bobby said, ‘but I’m–’
    ‘Bobby.’ Hartsilver was smiling gently. ‘Bobby Appleby. You were absolutely no good, you know, so that it’s odd that I should remember you. You might have been a Mohammedan, for all the ability you had to draw so much as a dog or a cat. Like most of the others, really. Yet there was something a little odd about its being that way with you.’ Hartsilver paused in recollection. ‘Isn’t one of your parents–?’
    ‘My father’s a policeman,’ Bobby said – and paused mischievously on this false trail.
    ‘Then it was your mother. But you were no credit to her. Yet there was something there. My dear Bobby – if I may still so address you – can it be that you have become a musician?’
    ‘I’ve become a writer – of a sort.’
    ‘That would be it!’ Hartsilver was delighted. ‘And is that why you have returned to Overcombe? But no! Your first – or even perhaps your second, would it be? – novel is behind you. So you haven’t come back to this desperate place for copy.’
    ‘Well, no – as a matter of fact I haven’t.’
    ‘I’m delighted to hear it. I give you notice that I wish positively not to be put in a novel.’
    ‘You won’t be by me.’ Bobby felt in danger of being possessed by an irrelevant excitement. It was the excitement of finding that he and old Hartsilver had been the same sort of person all the time. And perhaps (despite the gratifying acclaim bestowed by Sunday newspapers upon Robert Appleby, promising author of The Lumber Room ) – perhaps he was himself going to be as thoroughly unsuccessful as this old