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obedient. He could have been led upstairs to a masochistic brothel for all he cared, although such a thought did not enter his mind. Henry did not have that kind of imagination. There seemed to be a mountain of stairs. A swish of the cardinal's cloak, an attic room, reached only when he was out of breath. One of them was carrying his suitcase, the other his shoes and the leather jacket bought for the journey, both men chattering explanations like soft-voiced starlings.

    '. . . Afraid the only bath is at the back of the kitchen.

    . . we'll leave the lights on . . . Water hot again, soon.'

    '. . . the loo's on the landing. . . your loo, that is . . . Peter, you forgot the bedside light ah, there it is . . .'

    'Towels are here. . . you switch off the electric fire over there.

    We'll make you a proper one tomorrow.'

    The fire defied his own notion of antiquity. Two electric bars glowing like parallel fireflies, creating a patch of warmth extending creating a patch of warmth extending towards the bed but not quite reaching it. And such a bed. Not large, not even a queen size, but high off the ground; if he fell out of that in the night, he could break a leg. Henry's tired eyes noticed the series of bedspreads which were strewn over it, greens and blues with the shimmer of silk, giving the bare room its only opulence. His companions fussed a little more and then retreated. It was as if the whole of the world retreated with them and the silence they left behind was quite complete.

    YOU can't talk now. The words held an echo. When would he ever be able to talk? He had been unable to talk freely for more years than he could remember, or not the kind of talking which was communicating. He never quite knew what to say, except to his father. All these years of saying little, as if he had some kind of impediment that made him incapable of expressing what his brain was telling him to say. A kind of scold's bridle, the curse of the shy man. He liked the easily opened window; he liked the bedspreads, stroked them, and despite the chill of the room, he was suddenly intensely grateful to be in it.

    It occurred to him that he had been churlish to these two bizarre men; that he had failed to express or even to feel gratitude for the fact that they had so obviously responded in double quick time to a call from the flooded hotel, and that he ought to feel grateful also to the man who had made the call enabling his hosts to be so charmingly ready to receive him. And then, as he peeled off his clothes and tried to remember where on the way up the stairs was the bathroom, deciding everything could wait until daylight, everything, including judgement, he realized the man from the hotel would never have phoned, would have forgotten his existence as soon as he was out the door.
    . . Nothing mattered.
    Dressed in his underwear and his now dry socks, shivering, but only a little, he moved to the window. The moon shone on the water in a calm, silver pathway. The sea looked as if it was trying to efface itself, nibbling at the pebbles of the beach with discreet, foamy bites which teased the shore, eating at it with the quiet determination of the dog with her separate bowl of food. The whole of it had a poetic tranquillity, a normality he found reassuring and enough to suppress the conclusion that none of this was normal, or anything like.

    He looked at the door of the room, suddenly and irrationally afraid that he had been locked in. He did not know why he should begin to imagine such a thing and experimenting with the quiet latch showed him he was wrong. An eccentric household was all. Nothing here to worry a stout heart.

    He took off his socks, got into the bed, relishing cool linen sheets and heavyweight blankets.
    He wanted to be pressed into sleep, ironed into unconsciousness, but just as he stretched to feel the parameters of the high bed, his feet touched warm fur, and he screamed. There was an animal in here.

    Henry flung back the covers