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have dearly loved to have taken them to town, to have bought them beers, to have gone whoring with them, to have shared the easy relaxed talk he had overheard between them. But there was something stiff in him, something that would not bend.
    So he waited in his office for the deputation, breaking paperclips and throwing them into the rubbish bin.
4.
    He disapproved of bribes and so gave this one badly. Rather than speeding his interview with the minister it produced the opposite effect. The minister’s secretary, a uniformed sergeant from the 101, was now punishing him for such a tasteless and inelegant performance.
    He had now waited an hour, his agitation becoming more and more pronounced. He crossed his long legs and then uncrossed them. He stared at a yellowed five-year-old copy of
Punch
and could find nothing funny in it. He stared at the bleak anteroom with a practised eye, observing a thousand defects in workmanship and finish, noting a wall that was not quite vertical, automatically relocating a window so that it was lower, wider, and placed on a wall where it might have collected some of the chilly winter sunshine.
    He stood and examined the tasteless paintings on the walls.
    He sat and looked at his fingernails, wondering if it was true thatthe long curved shells indicated a propensity to lung disease as he had once been told.
    As to how he would persuade the minister to make extra funds available to meet the men’s demands, he had no idea. If he had been Mr Meat he would not have bothered with the minister, he would have gone straight to Oongala, played polo with him and spent a night at the billiard table. He would have laughed at the dictator’s jokes and told even cruder ones of his own. But he was not Mr Meat and his grey formal reserve made the dictator uneasy, as if he were being secretly laughed at. Oongala would no longer see him.
    What the men wanted was fair and reasonable. It was quite correct. But the correctness did not help. Everything in him wanted to say: “Give the money, find it, do anything, but let the work proceed.” But that, of course, was not an argument.
    Finally the secretary had had enough of the agitated movements of his prisoner. He phoned through to the minister and told Gerrard he could go in.
    Gerrard smiled at the secretary, thanking him.
    The secretary stared at him, the merest flicker of a smile crossing his stony face.
5.
    The minister sat behind his large desk doing the
Times
crossword. He was, for this country, an unusually short man. He had a sensitive face and particularly nervous hands, which seemed to flutter through a conversation like lost butterflies. On occasions they had discussed Proust and the minister had talked dreamily of days at Oxford and invited the Haflingers to visit socially, an invitation that Gerrard, had he been a trifle more calculating, would have realized was an important one to accept. Yet he managed to neither accept nor decline and had left the minister with the feeling, correct as it happened, that Gerrard found his company unstimulating. The minister was a man of sensitive feelings and weak character, a failing that had kept him alive while stronger men had long since disappeared into jail.
    “Good morning, Gerrard. What would you make of this — Ah! A cross pug leaps across funereal stone? It is eleven letters,” he smiled apologetically, “beginning with S.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Neither do I.” He folded the delicate rice-paper pages of the airmail edition and plugged in a small electric jug which sat on the low filing cabinet beside him. “Coffee?”
    “That would be pleasant, thank you,” Gerrard was trying to be pleasant, to unbend, to relax, to be patient enough to discuss all ten volumes of
Recherche du Temps Perdu
if it was necessary. He sat in the low visitor’s chair and they both waited for the jug to boil.
    “How is Mrs Haflinger?”
    “Gone, I’m afraid.”
    The eyebrows raised and the tongue clucking