The Heat of the Day (22 page)

look in the drawer." "What's the use of looking in the drawer when they're in the Army?--No, if I've got to have the universe in my head I might as well look it in the eye. There ought to be some advantage in seeing it in proportion, which is all it requires. I should not mind if I did. You can but try; it can do no further harm." "You might stop your heart." "Look, you buzz off back to sleep!" "I haven't been asleep." "What were you talking in your sleep for, then? I was right on the point of attaining when you made me jump." "Ever so sorry." "Oh well, how were _you__ to know?" "All the same, I do wish you wouldn't, Connie." "_Now__ I doubt if I can.... And where are you getting to, I'd like to know--crying out like that after a stray soul?"

Chapter 14

ONE thing _was__ out of the question: telephoning to Robert. There needed to be no question--when, having parted from Louie, Stella was again, alone, in her flat--of eyeing the telephone, wondering whether to or not to. Robert tonight was at Holme Dene. Summoned to a family convocation, he had arranged, he had that morning told her, to dash down there by the seven o'clock train. The occasion was without precedent: what had happened was this--Mrs. Kelway had had an offer for the house. By post had arrived the thunderbolt: one of the many agents upon whose books Holme Dene had reposed for so many years had, without warning, written saying he had a buyer; or, at least, a client ready to reach that point. To say that the proposition unsettled Mrs. Kelway and Ernestine would be an understatement; it threw them into disarray. Simultaneously, they declared that the deciding of anything, either way, was repugnant; and equally, that it would be unsuitable for them to decide anything, with or without repugnance, without Robert. Ernestine's letter to him to this effect had been such a combination of haste and length that he could only reply, as indeed he had, that he had not the pleasure of understanding her. She had refused to telephone on the matter except in a series of groans, warning hisses and hydrophobic laughs, interspersing what sounded to be a code. Muttikins and she, she reiterated, quite saw that of course the war and Robert's conduct of it came first; at the same time, could he not find some teeny-weeny space in which to attend to the affairs of his own family? Muttikins was being wonderful, but it seemed unfair. Thus had they got him there: there he was. Already for an hour they had been at it: now the clock in the lounge stood at 9.15--Ernestine, owing to the seriousness of the occasion, had decided to give the news a miss. The curtains over archways and windows were close drawn; the decorative squints in the inglenook wore what looked like eye-patches of black cotton. The tray carried in with fuss for Robert had been carried out again with just less fuss, Mrs. Kelway and Ernestine having watched him eat. The children, if not asleep, were in bed--a sense of midnight already filled the lounge; the fire, having consumed its last feed for the day, burned low. Screens had been so concentrated as to form an alcove for Mrs. Kelway's chair; in this she knitted with that unflickering velocity which had alarmed Stella. Ernestine, on the opposite side of the hearth, was doing nothing other than thinking hard--as, she explained, she and they all must do, in view of the shortness of Robert's time and the necessity of deciding _something__. Sitting upright on a coffin stool collected by her father at an antique shop, she wore her uniform and a hat. As for Robert, it was useless to suggest he should sit down, though they indomitably continued to do so--up and down the lounge, to and fro across it, Between the original oak pieces and the visiting mahogany furniture, he paced: he paused, stared, stood. When he ever did come to a standstill on the hearthrug, it was with the effect of sighting some resolution, which again each time he abandoned without giving it words. His keeping in movement thus gave the Kelway triangle an unfixed third point: to address Robert involved a perpetual turning of the head--at least on the part of Ernestine; Mrs. Kelway seemed to see no more reason to make this concession than to make any other. The Kelways communicated with one another with difficulty, in the dead language. At intervals, the recurrence of a remark showed that yet another circle around the subject had been completed. "It is _something__, at any rate," Ernestine once again said to Robert, "that you are here. The telephone is never the same. And with letters keeping crossing each other, by the end we might not be clear what we all feel." "Whereas," said Robert, momentarily resting his elbow on the top of the upright piano, "we are now?" "We are becoming clearer than we might have been, I think--wouldn't you say so, Muttikins?" went on Ernestine, hopefully glancing across at the other chair. Upon Mrs. Kelway's having said nothing, Ernestine had to qualify: "If it was not so difficult." "Let us sum up," said Robert. "A., we don't know if we want to sell; B., if we do, how much more than the offer are we to hope to get; and, C., again, if we do sell, where are you and Muttikins to go next?" At these words his mother did bestir herself. "I am afraid," she said, "it is not so simple as all that." "It's no good rushing things, Robert," Ernestine pointed out. "Better take everything one by one. There are always the children. And suppose Amabelle did not like the idea?" "Amabelle," said Mrs. Kelway contemptuously, "cannot get out of India. But there is more in addition." "Muttikins," went on Ernestine, "cannot help feeling that there must be something behind this offer." She glanced across again: Mrs. Kelway indicated that yes, this was what she could not help feeling. "What's _behind__ the offer is someone's wanting to buy the house." "Oh, I daresay, Robert; but it is so sudden. It is not even as if this was a safe area." "Nothing has happened," said Mrs. Kelway in an offended tone. "Oh, indeed no, Muttikins, and why ever should it!" Having sacrificed some seconds to laughing the idea off, Ernestine resumed: "Of course it's nice being a neutral area, not evacuated into, not evacuated out of, therefore quite quiet; but even so... who can be after a house no one has seen?" "Certain no one _has__ seen it?" "No one we do not know has been to the door." "Well, it can be seen from the road, at this time of year, or at any rate from a little way down the drive." "We do not care for people coming down the drive," said Mrs. Kelway. "That," agreed Ernestine, "is exactly what we do not like the idea of. If they want the house, why cannot they come to the door and openly ring the bell? Creeping and spying about when we did not know, calculating the value of everything, planning how soon they could get us out.... This is England, Robert; one expects to have privacy." "I'd imagine, someone is in a hurry--" "But why? That is what seems suspicious." "Well, you know how it is--" "They need not think they are going to be able to rush _us__," said Mrs. Kelway. "_We__ did not ask them to buy the house." "Still, we have left it 'for sale' for years on the agents' books; which, one must face it," said Robert, "comes to the same thing." "They are trying to take advantage of us," said Mrs. Kelway. "But this is our home." "If that's how we do feel, how simple," hastily declared Robert. "We turn 'em down." "But it is too large." "In that case, we beat 'em up." "We have many associations with it," said Ernestine. "In _that__ case, beat 'em up still higher." Mrs. Kelway allowed herself, over her knitting, an infinitesimal frozen pause. "I am afraid," she repeated, "it is not so simple as all that." "Muttikins," said Ernestine, after a feeling silence, "is astonished. And I don't wonder. You talk, Robert, as though everything could be valued in money. You talk as if this was just a business transaction." "Surely that's what you got me down to discuss?" "We have not yet decided whether we wish to transact anything. This has been a shock. We hoped you might understand our point of view. After all, our father bought this house himself, and we all moved into it out of Meadowcrest, because it would be nicer. And so in ways it has been." "It always has," said Mrs. Kelway, "been too large. And with these days it is now too larger. Especially as it seems we have no privacy, the rates are high. Your father made a mistake, but it could not be helped; we have done our best. We had to install a new cistern, which was expensive; and this room and the drawing-room had to be redecorated in 1929. All that should be taken into consideration." "Our father," Robert pointed out to Ernestine, "saw his mistake in a flash, even before there had been time to rub it in--that was done later. It was he who put down the house on the agents' books." "We had at one time," Mrs. Kelway agreed, "become accustomed to the idea of selling it. But that was long ago." "You feel you could be happy, Muttikins, in something smaller?" "It is not a question of happiness," Mrs. Kelway said, "it is a question of the future. That is for you and Ernestine. I have had my life and I hope I have done my best. Your father used to say he had not much to complain of. The cistern and the improvements to the reception rooms and the improvements to the garden, including the pergola and the statues of fairies, which were ordered by Ernestine at the Ideal Home Exhibition and came to more than we expected, as they charged for delivery, will I hope be taken into consideration. The children like them. But you must not expect me to be with you long." "Muttikins," shrieked out Ernestine, "don't say such _dreadful__ things!" Mrs. Kelway raised her small silvered head, which gleamed under the light of a standard lamp, to look across at Ernestine with contempt. "You talk," she said, "as though you expected not to die yourself. We shall all come to that, including the children. I have no objection to taking facts as they come, but what we now have to decide about are changes. And we should be certain of the value of things: it would not do to be taken advantage of. I have the receipts for everything in my room. In addition--" --The telephone rang, from the other side of a curtained arch. Robert, starting violently, turned in its direction: he stopped in his tracks and listened--tense, fair, gaunt, at bay. Ernestine bounded up from the coffin stool, exclaiming with the resigned air of an indispensable person: "That will be the W. V., for me!" She shot through the archway. Robert waited; Mrs. Kelway knitted--evidently Ernestine had been right. He relaxed sharply, glanced across at his mother, lighted a cigarette. He then, as Ernestine's talk protracted itself, walked to the foot of the staircase and looked up. Above-stairs Holme Dene was silent: without a creak it sustained the stresses of its architecture and the un-sureness, manifestly indifferent to it, of its fate. Upstairs, as elsewhere, it had been planned with a sort of playful circumlocution--corridors, archways, recesses, half-landings, ledges, niches and balustrades combined to fuddle any sense of direction and check, so far as possible, progress from room to room. The plan demanded the utmost in the way of expenditure on passage carpets and woodwork paint. What could be puzzling was that now, at night, with the hearing tuned in, so much space should give out so little reverberation. These two upper floors (for another staircase, beyond a swing door, led on up to Robert's and other attics, in an extensive range) were, in fact, not hollow, being flock-packed with matter--repressions, doubts, fears, subterfuges and fibs. Or so he felt. The many twists of the passages had always made it impossible to see down them; some other member of the family, slightly hastening his step as they heard one's own, had always got round the next corner just in time. A pause just inside, to make sure that the coast was clear, had preceded the opening of any door, the emergence of anyone from a room. The unwillingness of the Kelways to embarrass themselves or each other by inadvertent meetings had always been marked. Their private hours, it could be taken, were spent in nerving themselves for inevitable family confrontations such as meal-times, and in working on to their faces the required expression of having nothing to hide. At the same time, the intelligence service had been good: everyone knew where everyone else was and, in time, what everyone else was up to. Failure again to be present, after an interval, always had brought a messenger to the bedroom door or a call from the garden under the window; while to be come on looking out of a window had been to be asked to specify what one was looking _at__. It had not been possible for anybody to leave the house unseen--dashing across a lawn or heading down the drive one held oneself ready to be challenged; a potter through the boundary woods could at any time be black-marked as "hiding"; and as for slipping off to the gate postbox, that was above all deprecated--letters might be written, but must be exposed in the hall before collection for post. Amabelle, who early had heard the call of sex, to the accompaniment of suffusing blushes and a roundedness as nonplussing to her wardrobe as to herself, had been martyred for it: no one could have been merrier on the subject than Ernestine, or more repudiatingly icy than the sisters' mother. (Mrs. Kelway's way of saying "your father" still, years after that guilty creature's death, vibrated with injury; the implication was that he had become a father at her expense.) Robert in adolescence had taken to photography, which secured him an alibi, a dark room whose door he could respectably lock, and a more or less free pass out, for technical requirements, to the nearest town. Chiefly, Holme Dene had been a man-eating house: as such it was one of a monstrous hatch-out over southern England of the 1900's. Conceived to please and appease middle-class ladies, it had been bought by a man whose only hope was this--as a home Holme Dene might seem to be an outmoded model, but it remained a prototype. Lock-shorn, without the bodily prestige of either a soldier or a manual worker, as incapable of knocking anybody about as he was of bellowing, Mr. Kelway had been to be seen seeing out at Holme Dene the last years of an existence which had become derisory. Prestige from his money-making, unspectacular but regular, had been nil; his sex had so lost cast that the very least it could do was to buy tolerance. Only in the odd reflex or revulsion which had caused him, so soon after the move here, to put Holme Dene down as for sale again on the agents' books had Robert's father been in any way out of type. What unformulated anarchical dreams he had entertained one would never know. Unstated indignities suffered by the father remained burned deeply into the son's mind--Mr. Kelway, by his insistence on Robert's constantly looking him in the eye, may have meant to challenge his son to recognise any one of them. His fiction of dominance was, as he would have wished, preserved by his widow and his daughters. Robert's hand reposed where he remembered seeing his father's--on the polished knob terminating the banisters. Nothing but a whiff of carbolic soap from the children's bathroom came down to him: upstairs life, since the war, had up there condensed itself into very few rooms--swastika-arms of passage leading to nothing, stripped of carpet, bulbs gone from the light-sockets, were flanked by doors with their keys turned. Extinct, at this night hour stygian as an abandoned mine-working, those reaches of passage would show in
daylight ghost-pale faded patches no shadow crossed, and, from end to end, an even conquest of dust. These days, the daily servants fled Holme Dene, superstitiously, long before darkness fell: sent to bed, Anne and Peter had the empty top to themselves. It was to be hoped that Ama-belle's children were impermeable. When Ernestine came back from the telephone, Mrs. Kelway said to her: "What is Robert doing?" "What are you doing, Robert?" "Looking upstairs." "Why, anything wrong?" "No." "Oh.--It _has__ been a day!" said his sister, sitting down again as though with little hope of remaining in that attitude long. "There has been first one thing and then another. And I shouldn't wonder if there was more to come." "Ernestine has not been able to take her hat off," said Mrs. Kelway. "Still, it's different now we have something to show," said Ernestine. "One hardly likes to say so, but look at Montgomery! Mrs. Jebb has just told me there was something further on the nine o'clock news. When we miss that something has always happened. But tonight that is not the point.--How far _had__ we got?" "Muttikins had been saying she would not be always here." "Muttikins was being extremely naughty!--No, the thing is: _ought__ we to sell, or not?" "Or, to put it the other way, do we want to?" "These days one cannot always be thinking of what one wants." "I never have thought of what I wanted," said Mrs. Kelway. "Perhaps it might have been better if no one else had." "If everybody were more like Muttikins," observed Ernestine, "the world would be very different from what it is." "Really I doubt that," said Robert suddenly, picking up a paperknife from a table, putting it down again. "Many people are unsuccessful imitations of Muttikins.--No, from the practical point of view, Ernie, I'm afraid it's merely a question of whether to sell now or later on. You can hang on on the assumption prices will go up; but as you so rightly say, that so much depends. This is not a house that many people would want--" His mother said: "Yes, it is merely our home." "Then again, of course," he went on, raising his voice, "there's the question of where you two would go next. You naturally," he said with uncontrollable coldness, "must live somewhere." "We should not at all care to live just _anywhere__, either!" cried Ernestine with a good deal of spirit. "Naturally." "We had both hoped, Robert, that you might think of something, instead of merely agreeing with what we say. If we did not already agree with what we say there would be no point in our saying it, would there?--What so much depends on is, after the war: one doesn't know now what will be nicest then. And by that time Amabelle may be tired of India." "Amabelle," interposed their mother, "will be in no position to say. She has no claims of any kind. Your father dealt with her suitably when she married. If she and her husband expect more they are quite mistaken. I had always quite understood they understood at the time. If they are mistaken they had better stay in India: they went of their own accord. She was anxious to marry and did not stop to think. We have taken the children when it was not convenient; one would not expect the children to understand, but that is the most Amabelle should expect. This house is to be left to you, Ernestine, and Robert, jointly. If you do not care for it, you had better say so." "Oh but of course we care!" wailed Ernestine, hysterically thumping backward her green felt hat, with the W. V. S. lettering, from her forehead. "How can I ever forget this is my home?" "And how can I?" chimed in Robert. "It would not be your home if your husband had not died," said Mrs. Kelway, looking at Ernestine disparagingly. "I never should have forgotten it, in any case," said the widow. "Nobody is asking you to forget it," said her mother, feeling round in her knitting-bag for a fresh ball of wool. "But we see that Robert is saying nothing." "Oh, where _I'm__ concerned," he cried merrily, "_I__ say, sell!" There ensued a resounding pause. "That is what I expected," said Mrs. Kelway. Ernestine spun round on the coffin stool to examine Robert as though for the first time. There escaped from her a quite new demoralised laugh: head on one side, she heard it with some alarm. She then complained: "Well, you need not put it so violently!" Mrs. Kelway said: "Robert does not remember." "There you are quite wrong, Muttikins," said her son. Mrs. Kelway allowed herself one more pause--less a query than a taking of note. "Indeed..." she remarked. Ernestine meanwhile raked a worried look round the lounge, as though something from outside had got into it. "Yes, Robert, indeed." Again he had taken up his stand--this time, it might really be, ominously--on the rug between his sister and mother. He had placed himself where it was impossible not to see him; and Mrs. Kelway, admitting this, glanced his way--as unflinchingly as if he had drawn a gun. She appeared to measure his height, from the feet up. Then: "He talks like a man," she said, contracting her little shoulders. But that was lost: her son had suddenly turned and was looking beyond the screens at the staircase. "Hel-_lo__!" he exclaimed. "Who's here?" "Me, Uncle Robert," said Anne, coming on down. "_Anne__!" expostulated Ernestine. "Oh, Auntie Ernie, _please__!" Clipclopping in slippers across the floor, overcoat over her striped pyjamas, Anne made for Robert, holding up her face to be kissed. "We were not allowed to stay up," she said, "so I came down. Why are you standing up like that?--are you just going?" "Both of you," scolded Ernestine, "ought to be sound asleep!" "Peter is," Anne said in a righteous tone. "Grannie does not care for people creeping about," said Mrs. Kelway. "I know, but--" "--Don't say, 'I know' to Grannie." "Well, I do know, but it's Uncle Robert's fault for coming so late." "He did not come to see you." "I know; but I don't see why I should not see him." "Because Grannie and Auntie Ernie and Uncle Robert are deciding business." "I know, but--" "Anne, if you keep saying 'I know' you will have to go back to bed immediately. As it is, you must go back to bed at once.--Robert, you encourage her!" "No, she encourages me. _Now__ this begins to look like an evening." He bore out the statement by throwing himself into an armchair, scooping up Anne to make her sit on the arm. "All the same, what an un-clever, un-funny little girl you are," he told her, gripping her by the back of her coat-belt, not altogether kindly rocking her to and fro, to the peril of her not certain balance. "Why don't you ever manage to think up anything? Why not be walking in your sleep?" "Because I'm awake," Anne said, struggling round to face him. But so near did that bring her eyes to her uncle's forehead that she recoiled, blinking, as though a pang of the mistrust as to the reality of the moment were passing through her. She loved him with, in her respectable way, the first intensity of her life: so much so that the woman she would become stared askance at him out of her child's features. He was right, she was a dull little girl--without animal poetry, without guile, but formed for devotion: inopportune, staunch, ruddy. But within that little stout breast, as it filled out, there would from time to time heave up some choking wish--now she was offering all she had, beginning and ending with her power to stand on her head. Reddening, looking down at the toe of her uncle's shoe as though yearning to be the one who had polished it, she asked: "Why can't you stay tonight?" "Because I hate early starts.--How are you?" "I'm all right." "Nothing to tell me?" Anne racked her brains. "I was top at mental arithmetic." "You can tell Uncle Robert all about that next time. Now--" "--Oh, Aunt _Ernie__!" "No really, Ernie," said Robert. "Well then, Anne, a moment. Only a moment, mind." "How many moments _are__ there?" said Anne to Robert. "Sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour; but how many _moments__ are there?" "That has to depend on you." "How long, compared to a minute, is a moment?" "_That__ depends," he repeated, searching her face for the face of someone else. "You are awful," Anne said. "--Are we going to sell this house?" "Don't ask silly questions," interposed her aunt. "Uncle Robert's tired, and so should you be." "But I thought you said he'd say." "Never mind what you thought." "What _do__ you think, Anne," said Robert, irresponsibly turning. "Sell out? Hold on?" Anne bit her upper lip with her lower teeth. "Oh, I don't care; I only wondered. What would anywhere else be like? This house _is__ getting too old to be lived in much longer; the handles are coming off the doors. We could try a new one. And what's the object of this being too big when we can't go into any of the other rooms? If we sold this, with the money should we be rich? Or if not, could we be very poor? I and Peter should rather like to be _something__." "Indeed," said Mrs. Kelway. "And pray, why?" Anne let her weight sag against her uncle's shoulder--as usual when he led on, she had gone too far. "Oo, I don't know; I don't mind," she said with an artificial yawn. "Anne, how you rat!" said Robert. "I don't mind," she doggedly said again. Why should she? Here for her it had been a pat little lifetime without moments, an existence amongst tables and chairs, without rapture or mystery, grace or danger. Never a heartbeat: never the light disregarding act, the random word or spontaneous kiss; never laughter other than those registrations of Ernestine's; anger always in a smoulder, never in a flame. Though she did not know it, she had never seen anyone being happy--what better was to be hoped of a new house if they were all to go there? This was demeaning poverty. Pity the children of the poor. Who, however, knew when the trumpet might not sound and the walls of Jericho might not come crashing down? The telephone rang. Robert this time started outright--so much so that Anne, as though he had thrust her from him, grabbed at the air with a little cry. She recovered herself, but she had betrayed him: his mother fixed their chair with her eye. "The telephone is never for anybody but Ernestine," said Mrs. Kelway. "So what is the matter, Robert? Are you expecting anything?" "If you imagine it is for you, Robert," said Ernestine, clamping herself to her seat with great self-control, "do by all means answer: I should be only too glad." "Knocking the child off the chair," went on Mrs. Kelway, further tried by having to raise her voice above the demoniac ringing of the telephone, "though she had no business to be sitting on the arm." "I simply fell off, Grannie." "You should not sit on your uncle when he is nervous.--Need we have all that ringing?" To her temple she raised one little hand. "It seems so loud--might it be better if someone answered it?" "I'll go--oh, let _me__ go!" Stopping only to hitch her slippers up on her heels, Anne bounded in the direction of the arch. "Ernestine, do you prefer Anne to answer the telephone when she ought to be in bed?" "Sorry, sorry, sorry--certainly _not__--Anne!... I was busy wondering who it could possibly be, at this hour." "Something may have happened," said Mrs. Kelway faintly, contracting under the blast of sound like an anemone. "It might be best if Robert could go and see." "Never mind, never mind, Robert," Ernestine rapped out, buttoning her coat as she strode into action past him. "I will. As you know, I invariably do." Her brother, though he had risen, stood with a hesitancy exaggerated by his height: he towered there in a sheer negation of movement, head half-turned to the curtain marking the ringing telephone. Anne, rooted halfway across the lounge, fixed on him, one could not say how intuitively, her eyes. "Wait," interposed Mrs. Kelway, for an instant removing the guard from her temple, the little hand, "there is no point in Ernestine's answering if it _is__ for Robert. Is he expecting anything?" "No one would ring up about nothing as late as _this"__ said Ernestine, distractedly halting. "The question is, Robert, do they know where you are?" "It does seem very late," said Mrs. Kelway. Robert said: "Ten past ten?" "It does not seem very considerate," said Mrs. Kelway, "unless, of course, something has really happened." "If it _was__ for you, Uncle Robert, would you let me answer?" "Why, yes," he said, staring back at his niece, "why not?" "What should I say to them?" "That I've left here--I'm on my way back to London." "Not quite true, strictly," said Ernestine. The ringing stopped of its own accord. Robert sat down again; Ernestine, hand on the curtain of the important arch, laughed wildly. She then said accusingly: "Now we may never know." "No," agreed Mrs. Kelway. "If it should turn out to have been anything important, I shall always blame myself. Though if it was, it seems funny they should not have kept on. Though, of course, they may always begin again.--At any rate, Anne, _you__ must go to bed: I don't know what you are thinking of!" "I wonder what anybody was thinking of," said her mother. "As a rule in this house we are so prompt." "Now, Anne, now Anne, go and run along!" "If I do run along, may Uncle Robert come up and say goodnight to me?" "No. You have had enough excitement for tonight." "It is not merely that," pointed out Mrs. Kelway. "Anne has already been said goodnight to. I am surprised at her." Anne heard nothing: she had flung her arms round Robert as high up as arms could reach. He stooped; she pressed her cheek to his very cold one, feeling meanwhile, through her unimaginative body, echoes of the beating of his heart. "You're always going," she mumbled, "always going away." However uncaring, he was slow in disengaging himself from this last haven--it was she who withdrew her face from his, the better to be able to look at him; at the same time going through uncertainty as to whether it _was__ better to see, or touch. Nothing solved itself: having shaken all her bed-tousled hair back, she shut her eyes. "You're giving me a crick in my back," he said, beginning to pull away. "You must grow taller." "Just once more...." Pulling his head down, she butted her forehead against his: their brain-cases touched--contact of absolute separations she was not to forget. She turned away and clipclopped to the foot of the staircase and up, up into the darkness, not having looked back once. "Anne is getting to be quite a big girl," observed Mrs. Kelway. "It is a pity." "One way and another," said Ernestine, "there seems to be quite a fatality against our deciding anything. How if I got a pencil and paper to jot down points?" "In addition, there will be Robert's train." "Yes, there'll be my train," he agreed, looking at the clock.