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know what.
    â€˜They had a crisis in the camp. I’ve never told you this, have I?The RSM had an NCO with him who was severely ill from amoebic dysentery and complications. He died the night Joe was in the camp. The RSM sent a detail of four men out at midnight with storm lanterns to bury the body under a railway bridge, where it wouldn’t be discovered. They hadn’t got a padre for any kind of service, because all padres were officers, and an officer would have had them rounded up and shot.
    â€˜Sergeant Sutton said to Joe and the others, while the burial was going on, “Do you want to stay here or go on to Burma?” All the detachment, fresh out from England, were profoundly shocked by what was happening. Of course, the idea of Burma was also not to be taken lightly. So Joe said to Sergeant Sutton, “What do you think, sarge?”
    â€˜And the sergeant said, “I’d sooner be killed in battle than stay in this fucking sink of iniquity another night.” Next morning, they marched back to the Calcutta station – Howrah, I think it was called. They swore to the RSM that they would say nothing about the illegal camp, and of course they kept their word.
    â€˜Joe derived a profound moral from that episode. I’ve always thought of him as very courageous – not heroic, I don’t mean, but courageous – and he probably saw the war itself as somehow cleaner or more honest than the fear which was the reason for the camp’s existence. He saw how easily men could deteriorate.’
    Sheila had moved over to the window and was gazing out at the sunlit street.
    â€˜It makes a good story. Terrifying. It would make a play. Did the RSM threaten them before letting them leave? With a gun, I mean?’
    â€˜I don’t know about that.’
    â€˜I think he’d have to. Burying the body at dead of night is a nice touch, but they could have left the body out for the vultures. Would that be a quicker way of disposing of the body?’
    â€˜Sheila, this really happened.’
    â€˜Yes, I know.’
    When she had gone downstairs to get on with her own work, and he heard her typewriter tapping in the room below his, he thought of how her mind was at work on the story. It would probably surface,with added drama, in a future Kerinth novel. He merely wanted to strengthen the story, not add to it. He wanted it clear and as it had been, over forty years ago. Yet even he, telling it to Sheila, had added something. The bit about the whores coming into the camp seemed all too likely; but that had not been anything Joseph had told him. He remembered now that Joseph had said, in passing, that the deserters got fearfully drunk on palm wine every night, in order to escape from their miserable circumstances. Had he said palm wine? It was difficult to remember.
    Precision was not the only function of memory.
    All the untidy clutter of papers in his room came from Joseph’s flat in Acton. He had to get clear in his own mind his brother’s early years. Then he could make decisions on how to deploy the material.
    He picked up from his desk a photograph he had taken a year before Joseph’s death, showing Joseph and Sheila walking together on Port Meadow. In the background was Joseph’s girl friend – his final girl friend – Lucy Traill.
    Joseph was laughing, his mouth open, his face creased with humour. His tall, spare figure was leaning slightly forward. He liked to walk briskly. His hair, as always too long, was a streaky white and grey.
    It was his wife’s features that Clement mainly studied. Because of the aspect of stillness in Sheila’s nature, she photographed well. Her broad face and well-defined nose and mouth were in evidence as she smiled at whatever the joke was. He thought, ‘No photograph can ever do her justice. Nor for that matter does my memory. I fail to set up a moving picture of her in my mind. That’s why I’m always