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of whispers, even giggles, as people stirred, ready to leave.
    It wasn’t a rational compromise, Arnold Shaw had complained. But then he was expecting too much. I had twice heard an elder statesman of science announce, with the crystalline satisfaction of someone producing a self-evident truth, that sensible men usually reached sensible conclusions. I had seen my brother cock an eyebrow, in recognition of that astonishing remark. I had myself reported it, deadpan, to others – who promptly came to the conclusion that I believed it myself.
    It was not even a rational compromise. I packed up my papers, quite pleased with the morning’s work. Others were talking, glad to have put it behind them. They were used, as people were in a society like ours, highly articulated, but so articulated that most lives touched only by chance, to hearing names, even to meeting persons in the flesh, once, twice, then not again. To most of the Board, the four we had interviewed were strangers, flickering in and out. Myra Bolt, David Llewellyn – they had swum into others’ consciousness that morning, like someone sitting next to one in an aircraft, talking of where he had come from and where he was going to. To people round the table, the names they had heard weren’t likely often to recur. That seemed entirely normal to them, just as it so often seemed to me.

 
     
4:  A Simple Home
     
    YET for me, later that day, one of the names flickered, not out, but in again. I had arranged to spend another night at the Residence, in order to have my ritual drink with George Passant, and was sitting alone in the drawing-room after tea. Vicky had not returned from hospital, and Arnold Shaw had gone to his vice-cancellarial office for another of his compulsive paper clearing spells.
    I was called to the telephone. This was Dick Pateman, a voice said, lighter and more smooth than it sounded face to face: he was anxious to see me. He knew about the result, or rather the non-result? Yes, he had been told: he was anxious to see me. Well, I accepted that, it was all in the job. In any case, I couldn’t stay with him long. Where, I asked? At the Residence? Not much to my surprise, he said no. Would I come to his own home? I asked for the address, and thought I remembered the road, or could find it.
    Getting off the bus at the Park gates, I looked down into the town. There was a dip, and then a rise into the evening haze: lights were coming out, below the blur of roofs. On the left, down the New Walk, I used to go to Martineau’s house. I must have looked down, at that density of lights and roofs, many times in those days: not with a Rastignac passion that I was going to take the town, any more than I had felt it looking down at London roofs (that was too nineteenth-century for us), but with some sort of pang, made up of curiosity and, perhaps, a vague, even sentimental, yearning.
    I had been over-confident about my local knowledge, and it took me some time to identify the road. This was a part of the town which in the last century had been a suburb, but was so no longer; it certainly wasn’t a slum, for those had gone. It was nothing in particular; a criss-cross of tidy streets, two-storeyed houses, part working-class, part the fringe of the lower middle. I asked my way, but no one seemed clear. So far as I could remember, I had never set foot in those particular backstreets: even in one’s native town, one’s routes were marked out, sharp and defined, like the maps of underground railways.
    At last I saw the street sign; on both sides stood terraced houses, the same period, the same red brick, as those my son and I had passed on the way to my father’s room. At the end of the road some West Indians were talking on the pavement. That would have been a novelty years before. So would the sight of cars, at least three, waiting outside houses, including the house I was searching for. The window of the front room gave on the pavement: as in the window of