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looked up at her.
    I thought—This is what happens when the game stops?
    She said ‘Because don’t.’
    I said ‘And that’s why people are so awful, because they’re never at home in what they like.’
    Sheila was standing like the prow of a ship again: a big girl, shining, with water in her eyes.

IV
    The party for Mr Perhaia, the Asian or African Prime Minister, was to take place at 10 Downing Street, where Uncle Bill and Aunt Mavis and I were to be driven after we had had supper on trays at Cowley Street. Uncle Bill and Aunt Mavis and Mrs Washbourne often had supper on trays: they would try to time their meals at home in order to coincide with current-affairs programmes on television; which they took trouble to watch as if by this they might find out what was going on in the world which to some extent they were supposed to be ordering.
    I had been asked to go to the reception for Mr Perhaia I think because there was little social life at Cowley Street in which I could be included, and Uncle Bill and Aunt Mavis must have felt (they were wrong) that I might mind about this. At this reception there were going to be writers and artists, Uncle Bill had said, because Mr Perhaia had himself once written a book upon cultural anthropology, and was thus supposed to like the company of intellectuals. I do not think Uncle Bill now had much time for books himself: I had once been reading in the drawing-room at Cowley Street and he had come up to me and had taken the book out of my hands and had turned the back towards him to look at the title, and then had handed the book back to me as if he were just giving it clearance through the customs.
    In my family I had for some reason always been supposed to be literary: I think this was because of my way of not speaking very much, and when I did, of its having been such a struggle that it had been worth my while to have tried to think of something witty.
    When Uncle Bill had told me about my coming to Mr Perhaia’s party—he had come across me on the landing when I had been trying to get to the bathroom as usual without beingseen—he had said—All the medusas and flatworms will be there. This was a reference to a conversation I had had with him some time before, when I had said that it seemed to me that writers and artists were like coelenterates, whose mouths are the same as their anuses. Uncle Bill had said—I must remember that for the Royal Academy dinner. I used to get on quite well like this with Uncle Bill. Of course I tried to charm him, as everyone did, because he was Prime Minister.
    When we left the house at Cowley Street for Mr Perhaia’s party there was a chauffeur and a big black car and a detective going from the back door to the front and jumping in almost as the car was moving. A few people on the pavement were waving and shouting at Uncle Bill: I think it was something to do with Mr Perhaia. Mr Perhaia was either popular or unpopular with regard to Central Africa; I was not sure which; he was temporarily a celebrity. I think politicians get pleasure from all sorts of publicity because they are people who have been brought up to need just to be the centre of attention; and detectives and big black cars and people on the pavement cheering or booing are like the toys in the nursery that their mothers either did or did not give to them.
    I sat on the back seat of the car between Aunt Mavis and Uncle Bill. Mrs Washbourne, it had been made clear, was being driven separately. This was a time when efforts were being made to make Uncle Bill and Aunt Mavis seem happily married. The three of us sat straight-backed in a row; like those toys which have spikes up their arses to make them, I suppose, look upright and pleased and respectable.
    In Downing Street there was another small crowd and flashing lights and a thin sort of cheering. Uncle Bill was to get out first; after Uncle Bill there would come Aunt Mavis who would have to