'I got cold feet. I should have known better. But it was '

'May I see it?'

'I burnt it.'

He raised his eyebrows, tapping the ash from his cigarette into the ivy behind him, but that odd, elated expression was still on his face. 'What did it say?'

'That you were Jack, you don't think for a moment that I '

'Tell me what it said.'

'Nothing specific. Vague accusations that you'd corrupted him, that you were dissipated, and loose-living, and ' I hesitated. 'Evil. That was the word he used.'

'One of his favourite epithets,' Jack said. 'You heard him a few moments ago.'

'Yes.' I smiled at him, and for a second we were old friends, sharing a joke. But I still didn't feel quite at my ease. I glanced down at my suitcase, wishing I hadn't been such a fool. I said, 'And I came back because '

'Oh, I know why you came back.'

I glanced up at him, taken aback. 'Do you?'

'Of course. It's perfectly obvious.' He ground the stub of his cigarette into the ashtray, rubbing the back of his neck with the other hand.

'Oh, God, no.' I checked an impulse to stand up, like an anxious child. 'It wasn't anything to do with Tyme's End that is, you think I was frightened you'd change your mind, that I came back for that truly, Jack, it wasn't '

'That wasn't what I meant.'

'Then '

He looked at me and smiled. 'Very well. Tell me. If you were so . . . afraid, why did you come back?'

'Because Edie told me she didn't mean to, but she did she told me that . . . She told me why Fraser was blackmailing you.'

He blinked. He didn't move, but his muscles seemed to tense. He stared at me until I felt my cheeks colour and had to look away; then he walked towards me, plucked the cigarette packet out of my lap and strode back to the window. He said, 'Edie has no idea why Fraser was blackmailing me.'

'Well ' I watched him light another cigarette, and felt glad that he had his back to me. 'She didn't say that exactly, only she told me about you, and then I realised '

'She told you ?'

'That ' I had finished my own cigarette, and I wished he hadn't taken the packet back; I desperately wanted something to do with my hands. 'That you're homosexual.' I wasn't sure I'd ever said the word before.

He laughed.

Of all the possible reactions, it was the one I hadn't anticipated. He threw back his head and laughed until the room rang with the sound.

I felt the blush on my face spread downwards, past my collar, across my whole body. I imagined a quick, clean death, and thought how grateful I would be for one.

'Homosexual,' he said, at last, correcting my pronunciation. 'With a short "o". It comes from Greek, Gardner, not Latin.'

'I didn't know,' I said.

'Why should you?' he said. 'I'm sorry for laughing, but you're absolutely priceless. Edie, too. As Anthony would say, you can trust a lesbian to bark up the wrong tree.'

'Then you're not?'

He held my look for just long enough for me to realise what an impertinent question it was. Then he said, 'As it happens no. At least . . . no. To tell you the truth, I'm not terribly interested in that sort of thing.'

I hadn't known it was possible to flush more deeply than I already had, but I did. For a few seconds I felt nothing but embarrassment, like a lobster in a vat of boiling water. I cleared my throat. 'Oh,' I said. 'Jolly good.'

He watched me, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. It would have been more humane of him to avert his eyes, but I supposed I had deserved it.

At long last he said, 'But you came back.'

I clenched my teeth together, caught his eye and looked away quickly.

'How loyal. Like a dog.'

'I'd imagined something so much worse,' I said, stumbling over the words.

His smile broadened, and he threw the cigarette packet back to me. I tried to field it, but my fingers only caught the corner. I bent down and blundered about for it on the floor, glad of the excuse to hide my face.

He waited until I'd got a cigarette out the first one bent and crumbled in my fingers and I had to take another and managed to light it. I drew in the smoke, glad of the bitterness, and felt my cheeks return slowly to their ordinary colour. Then he said, 'Would you like to know why Fraser was blackmailing me?'

I looked up, sharply. 'Only if you want to tell me.'

'Oh, I think I do.'

'Then yes.' But I wasn't sure I was telling the truth. Of course it could be nothing serious that Jack had disposed of Fraser so quickly reassured me of that but all the same . . . I said, suddenly, 'No. No, Jack, it's none of my business. I don't want to know.'

It was as if he hadn't heard. He walked over to the gramophone and wound it thoughtfully, using one foot to leaf through a pile of records that someone had left on the floor. He said, 'Get a drink.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Get a drink. Get one for me too.' He glanced round, then crouched to pick up one of the records, turning it over to see the sleeve. 'Whisky and soda for me. You'd better make yours neat whisky.'

I stood waiting, although I wasn't sure what for, but Jack didn't say anything else. I crossed the hall, went into the kitchen and poured drinks for us both. I did it slowly, wondering at my own obedience. I had left my suitcase beside the sofa in the drawing room, but the warm air blew in through the window, tempting me. I still had the train ticket to Peltenshall in my pocket. I could desert without Jack even noticing, as long as I didn't mind leaving my things behind me.

But Jack had been so kind to me; it would be the basest ingratitude, and cowardly to boot.

I took a deep breath, drinking in the fragrance of the garden, and heard, as if from a long way away, the gentle creaking of the house as it settled in the heat. Yes, it would be cowardly to leave. And if I did, Jack might would, almost certainly disinherit me. That seemed, suddenly, to matter.

I poured more whisky into my glass, until there was a scant quarter-inch of space between the liquid and the rim. Then I took a deep breath, picked up both glasses and went back into the drawing room.

Jack said, 'Sit down.'

I sat down. I put my tumbler on the little table at my left hand. I said, 'Honestly, Jack, there's no need whatever Fraser accused you of, I know you can't have done anything base or vicious.'

'Do you? How do you know that?'

I stared at him. 'Because I know you.'

He said, without ill will, 'Shut up, Gardner. I'm sure that's very touching, but you really know hardly anything about me.'

I picked up my drink carefully, so that the liquid trembled below the rim, but didn't spill and moistened my lips with it. I put the glass down again and sat with my hands folded. There was a breath of warm, sweet air from the window, the smell of summer.

'Now,' Jack said, and leant against the windowsill, watching me, as if it were I, not he, who had something difficult to say. Then, in a dreamy, pleasant tone, like someone at a cocktail party, he began to speak.

'I suppose you know a little of my war service in Arabia; of course you do you read The Owl of the Desert, didn't you? That isn't absolutely . . . exact, but the details hardly matter; it's close enough to the truth to give you a decent idea of what I did. My life had a certain glamour that the trenches lacked. To the English, mud is regrettable, but sand has an inherent romance.' He smiled. 'Be that as it may . . . I worked for a little while in Egypt, and then I was appointed liaison officer between the Arabs and the British. That gave me some considerable freedom and I conducted my own operations, blowing things up, leading ambushes, organising assassinations of civilians.' I gave a start, and he laughed. 'Only a few, Gardner, and they were very efficiently carried out.'

I said, 'Is that what Fraser ?'

'No. There were . . . other things.' There was a silence. 'When one has absolute freedom . . . It's an extraordinary feeling. I could have done anything I wanted. At first there were no other British soldiers with me. And, in any case, I was producing very satisfactory results; it would have been foolish of my superiors to worry much about a few indiscretions here and there.'

I picked up my glass; when I raised it to my mouth the whisky slopped over the rim and ran down my chin. I swallowed and wiped my face with the back of my hand.

'But after a while,' Jack went on, watching me, 'I was sent another British officer, to tag round with us. It was a terrible bore. He was a little self-righteous Welshman there was some story that his brother had been shot by our men at Gallipoli when they heard him speaking Welsh and thought he was a Turk with a voice like a foghorn. To start with, I thought he might rub along with us quite amiably, but he turned out to be rather too naive for our purposes.'

'You mean '

'I mean he had little conception of the necessities of modern warfare.' Jack shrugged. 'And unfortunately he wanted to impose his views on me, and my men. He was determined that we should play at war like gentlemen, as though it were cricket only without enjoying it, naturally.' He lit a cigarette, shook the matchbox thoughtfully and smiled. 'You can keep that lighter of mine, by the way, Gardner. Where was I?'

'Disregarding the Geneva Convention, I think.'

He shot me a glance, but I avoided his eyes. I took another gulp of whisky, feeling it burn as it went down. He said, 'Yes, in effect. We had . . . procedures, with which Jones took issue. He made himself unpleasant.'

There was silence. I said, 'So, what did you do?'

'Nothing, at first.'

I looked at him, in spite of myself. 'Nothing?'

'We ignored him. We were perfectly civil and polite, and we acted as though he weren't there. We carried out our operations with the same enthusiasm as before. I ensured that he knew precisely what was happening. I listened to his outpourings of indignation with great courtesy and told him he was at liberty to report me. He threatened me with court martial. I was extremely patient with him. Then, a few weeks before he was due to return to Cairo, we came to a village a sad, dirty little place and my men found a group of women and children, hiding. I had one of the women brought before him, and gave him the choice between his life and hers. He chose his own. I went through all of them, one by one. At the end he was weeping like a baby, but he still chose himself over them.'

There was a silence.

I heard my voice say, 'You went through ?'

'I shot them,' he said. He exhaled a long plume of smoke, and it hung in the air, grey-blue, until the breeze blew it into nothingness. 'He watched them die in front of him. The first time I wondered if he might sacrifice himself; by the second I knew he'd plead, and blubber, and crawl, and choose his life over theirs, every time. He left that village knowing what sort of man he was. I had no trouble with him after that.' There was a pause. 'By the way, Oliver, do you know you're pouring whisky over your trousers?'

I set my glass down convulsively on the table, cracking the base. I looked at the damp patch on my knee. I heard a kind of sob, and thought I was laughing.

'He should never have survived; for a while I thought he might kill himself, but of course he didn't have the courage. He saw worse things than that later, and joined in; he had nothing to lose, you see. Perhaps he even enjoyed himself eventually. He couldn't report me couldn't do anything in the end, he was a wreck and so I didn't worry. And then he went back to Cairo. After the war he fell apart. He was a dipsomaniac dropped dead a few years ago. But a few weeks before he died, he ran across Fraser in some sordid dive and told him the whole story and Fraser knew me from Cambridge, and knew he was telling the truth . . . It was the damnedest luck.'

'Yes,' I said, in a low voice, 'the damnedest.'

Jack looked at me, his eyes narrowed. He said, 'Are you all right?'

I said, 'Tell me some of the other things you did.'

VI.

It was one of the strangest things I had ever experienced, that Jack should talk and talk and I should listen without quite hearing what he said. A quiet, distant part of myself noted the phenomenon, while I sat blind and frozen, following the words with my mind and thankful that most of them meant nothing. The world intruded on my senses with an uncanny almost absurd clarity: the shiny leather of the sofa, the amber dregs of whisky catching the electric light, the smell of alcohol and roses, every creak and murmur of the floorboards as Jack moved. I heard the sounds his mouth made the damp clicks of his tongue against his teeth, the suck of spit as he opened and closed his mouth and the rustle of his shirt. It was as if I could have mapped the whole world from where I sat, knowing the exact location and movement of each atom, like a god. All the time there were words washing at me and images rising in my head; but somehow I couldn't see how the two were linked, I couldn't understand the process. Jack was a murderer, a torturer. That much I had gathered in the first few seconds. But his voice went on and on, and seemed to fade away, while the sensation of the smooth curve of my glass against my hand seemed to grow until it took up all my consciousness.

It was my name that brought me back to myself: my name, in Jack's voice.

'Oliver. You look like you're going to be sick.'

I said, with an effort, 'I don't think so.'

'Have you had enough?' He said it very gently.

I wanted to stand up, but my legs were numb, as if someone had cut neatly through my spine. I said, 'Please '

'Have a cigarette.' He got one out of the packet, and lit it before he passed it to me. I took it and put it in my mouth, even though it had been in his first. He said, 'You poor, silly twerp.'

I shut my eyes. I was afraid; if the pictures were still there . . . but the darkness was blank, merciful. All I could see was the beetle he had torn apart, like a little green-gold potentate: and that seemed such a small thing, a foolish thing.

There was silence; blessed, blessed silence. It was like the silence after a nightmare, when I'd wake to find the roar of the guns was only in my head, and a few deep breaths would chase the terror away.

'Do you want more whisky?'

I wanted to look at him and laugh, but I couldn't remember how to do it. I couldn't believe I ever had done it. I said, 'No,' and held on to the maimed beetle in my mind's eye, because a beetle was insignificant, bloodless, incapable of crying out.

I should have known, when I saw him do that. I had known; or part of me had. But I had come back to Tyme's End in spite of it.

All of a sudden I was cold. I saw my hands start to shake. My body was trembling so hard that the legs of the sofa were vibrating softly on the floor. My skin was crawling. The air around me was still and chilly; for a moment it was as if Tyme's End had disappeared and I was outside, alone, freezing, surrounded by space. I thought that if I opened my eyes I would see nothing but emptiness, grey emptiness, like one of my nightmares; but it wasn't no-man's-land, it was just . . . nothing.

I opened my eyes. Jack was in front of me. I stared into his face.