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Grant unexpectedly asked.
    “Why he’s Charley Summers, dear,” Mr Grant replied. “You remember him,” he said, with confidence. “He used to come in to see our Rose. Yes, it does feel a long time, eh Charley?” But the young man did not reply.
    “Everything’s initials these days,” the old man said, abruptly changing course. “You can’t even pay the public house a call of an evening any more. Of course you go there just the same, but it’s an anniversary of the Home Guard being stood down that takes you, or the H.R.O.N. having a reunion, and so on, and so forth. I’ll wager it strikes anyone as a bit different to come home to,” he suggested. Charley merely said it did.
    “And how d’you manage with your coupons?” Mr Grant went on, while his wife seemed to recollect herself behind the hand she now held over her eyes, “Do they give you a supply so you can get a stock up?”
    “There you are,” Charley said, thinking about a dressing gown.
    “I suppose it’s what you could term necessary,” Mr Grant commented, “but it’s damnable, boy, in a free country such as we were supposed to be. To think of a man like you, who we should all be grateful for, having to pass through that rigmarole makes you ask yourself what we’re fighting to finish, doesn’t it? I could tell you tales would make you really wonder. Why, down at the B.D.S. offices, there’s a man in charge who, before the outbreak, if I’d gone to him holding a few potato peelings, he’d have eaten them out of my hand right before my face, that same individual is sitting behind a telephone and it’s ivory coloured, who I knew in the old days when he was with Thomsons, a despatch clerk, that’s all he was. Well now, if you should want anything, he’s the man Charley. From a toothbrush right up to a typewriter. And sitting there just to say no. As a matter of fact, with Amy in the state of health she’s in,” and his wife did not flinch, “as things are with her, the doctor gave a prescription for a bit extra of this or that, or whatever it might be, and I had to go down to George Andrews, because that’s the man’s name, to get him to countersign the diet sheet the doctor had made out. You could never imagine the time I had with him.”
    “Is that so?” Charley said.
    “You aren’t John, are you?” Mrs Grant objected, between her fingers. But Mr Grant saw fit to let this pass.
    “Yes, if I was to tell, you’d never believe,” he said to the young man. “This, that, and the other,” he said.
    “Then who are you, then?” Mrs Grant asked quietly.
    “Now, dear, don’t take on so,” Mr Grant said. “You’ve forgotten, you don’t remember, that’s all it is. Yes,” he continued to Charley, “men I wouldn’t have engaged as office boys when I was in charge of the department, lording it over us now, heads I win, tails you lose.”
    “What are you doing here?” Mrs Grant demanded, looking at Charley between her fingers, and cringing.
    “He’s come to take a cup of tea with us, dear,” the husbandsaid. This time he glared. She did not notice because she never took her eyes off Charley.
    “I don’t like it,” she muttered.
    “I’m very sorry,” Charley Summers said to Mr Grant.
    “Just pay no attention,” this man replied. But it was not to be as easy as all that, for Mrs Grant took control by throwing herself back into the sofa to thrust her head into one of its soft corners, from which she began to shriek, muffled by upholstery.
    “Amy, stop that this minute,” Mr Grant said firm. “You’re not a child after all. It’s just the habits she’s been getting,” he explained to Charles. “It’ll pass in a moment, you’ll see.” Upon which Mrs Grant took her nose out of the arm and the back, and screamed, not very loud. Charley saw his chance.
    “I really must be getting on,” he said.
    Mr Grant was remonstrating, “Now Amy,” as though with an awkward child. He had gone to sit beside his wife,