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reflection suggested to him that the Lightfoots had something to do with it. Here were two very old friends, or at least a very old friend and his wife, approaching with a painful obviousness the end of a road. Perhaps they could be regarded as a special case – being both, as they were, more than a little dotty. But in old age who wasn’t liable to turn that way? Perhaps Honeybath himself was, without noticing it, teetering on the verge. Didn’t he ceaselessly talk aloud as he drove through the countryside in the solitude of his car? Didn’t he sometimes make grotesque faces at himself in his shaving-mirror for no reason at all? Didn’t he hunch himself up in bed in an infantile and indeed foetal position when it would really be more comfortable, as well as dignified, to lie stretched out like a statue on a tomb? Nothing of all this seemed directly connected with Edwin and Melissa; yet there was no doubt that the spectacle of life getting out of hand with them was distressing and shaking him very much. And this was so even although he had seen neither of them again. His misadventure on the kerb had prevented his making any speedy return to the flat in Royal Crescent, and in addition to this he felt there might be something intrusive in seeming to elevate into a crisis that business of Melissa’s declaring she was clearing out. Perhaps it was a threat she made every week, and what he had blown in on was no more than a recurrent tiff such as married couples commonly indulge in harmlessly enough.
    The domestic relations of the Lightfoots nagged at him, all the same. He even felt that if – what he didn’t at all intend – he made his retreat into Hanwell Court at once, he might come to feel that he had withdrawn from a fray in which his friends were still honourably engaged: by the ‘fray’ being meant simply carrying on with one’s habitual manner of life even when it turned sticky in one way or another.
    When he did return to Royal Crescent it was in a mid-afternoon, and again unheralded. He went in a cab, since he had provided himself with a rather large bouquet – the sort of thing small girls or boys hand to the Queen – and he had felt this might mildly embarrass him on a bus. He had remembered Melissa’s neglected flowers, and vaguely felt that a good dollop of fresh-cut ones might cheer her up.
    There proved, however, to be no Melissa to hearten – and no Edwin either. There was nothing but a furniture van, and a number of burly men huddling the Lightfoots’ possessions into it. Alarmed and seeking information, Honeybath squeezed past these sweating persons and penetrated to the flat. The directing intelligence of the operation proved to be a man even more burly than the others, and enjoying as a consequence the character of a foreman. He regarded Honeybath with suspicion (quite massively and elaborately, since he had nothing else to do), and professed entire ignorance of anything except the immediate job in hand. It was his business to see the flat cleared of everything that could be removed or wrenched from its place, and then dumped in something he called the depository. One or two of the other men looked at Honeybath rather hopefully. There being no proprietors of the flat in evidence, he represented their only chance of any additional remuneration for their day’s labour. Nothing of the kind came into Honeybath’s head, and he was about to withdraw from this melancholy and disconcerting scene when a fresh arrival a little changed the situation. This was none other than a certain Mrs Plover, whom Honeybath dimly remembered from long ago as a lady occasionally obliging the Lightfoots in a cleaning and polishing way. As things now were, she appeared to enjoy the status of an old retainer, and it looked as if she had accepted the task of a final tidy up when the removal men had done their worst. Honeybath, although he was extremely perturbed by