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that afternoon to try the cupboard out?
    “No,” said Hugh violently. “Not this afternoon.”
    “But whyever not.”
    “It’s my room, my cupboard, isn’t it? No, no, no.”
    Penn was silent for a moment. Both Jean and Anna appeared asleep, while Hugh stroked the cat frenetically. After a moment it twisted from his hands and went. Penn changed his tactics, began most uncharacteristically slowly, patiently.
    “But look Hugh, you can’t leave everything lying round your room much longer. Suppose your mother comes up.”
    “She never does.”
    “Just occasionally she does,” added Jean, from where she lay apparently asleep.
    “She’s just as likely to be suspicious if we’re up there all afternoon on a day like this.”
    “She’s never suspicious. She never bothers to be.”
    “She does bother,” Hugh almost shouted, then added in a lower voice, “I don’t want to do it this afternoon, I tell you. I just don’t want to. It is my room, isn’t it?”
    “So you’ve already said,” agreed Penn. But Hugh’s agitation had neatly calmed his. “All right, all right,” he was saying amiably. “Not this afternoon. Tomorrow then. Who cares?”
    It took Hugh a moment to realize he had won his point, and he was left bewildered, mentally unsteady. It was like pushing all your weight against a door which then opened easily, leaving you staggering.

CHAPTER SIX
    Hugh lay on his back, gazing up into the sky, feeling the prickle of grasses under him. They had come to the park for the afternoon, all four of them. The girls did not usually accompany the boys but now whatever they did or did not do seemed related in some way to the cupboard – rather as a shadow belongs inextricably to the solid object from which it falls. Everything seemed necessarily to involve all of them, even when it did not actually involve the cupboard.
    Anna, however, had complained of a headache after a while, somewhat whinily; a migraine she called it.
    “You’re always having headaches,” Penn said brutally, but when Anna had set off for home in search of aspirin he had watched her across the grass till she was out of sight, a thin, small, solitary figure.
    There were willow trees, four of them by an empty stream, one bent almost parallel to the ground. Penn sat astride this as if it was a horse, while Jean, a little pink in the face at having Penn all to herself, leaned against the same tree.
    “Migraine is awful,” Hugh heard her say, from where he lay separate. “One of the mistresses at school has migraines. She has a terrible headache and she can’t see anything; just a little pin point is all she sees.”
    A pin point; a little pin point, Hugh thought. He was looking up into the sky. He felt – for the vast sky was nothing to his eyes, invisible layers of air and atmosphere – as if his vision too had narrowed some little point, which he could not decipher immediately, and after a while with staring up his eyes seemed to be making rings of air, as water looks when a stone falls and ripples spread about; except that these rings moved inward, centripetally. He moved his eyes away, sideways into grass. The stems were magnified, juicy, huge. When he looked up again the speck, the pin point, was nearer – had resolved itself into a hawk, hovering; even from such a height it could, he knew, see things move among these same grass stems. It continued hovering with blurry wings – the moment, held, appeared an hour. Then suddenly it stooped, fell, but jerked itself up before reaching earth, veered off, with slow and easy strokes.
    “A kestrel,” Hugh heard Jean telling Penn. But she only knew because he, Hugh, had pointed kestrels out to her at other times. They had left the willow tree and were desultorily playing cricket, Penn solo in effect, diving, catching, exercising himself. From where Hugh lay, if grass looked like trees Penn looked like a giant.
    Hugh, his face burning, eased himself back till he lay partly screened by