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recovered enough to leave his bed, the house grew tight-walled and airless and he took to walking: slowly, falteringly, through the lanes and crooked streets of the town. He never took the same route home, walked in wide loops rather than retrace his steps. It was away he needed.
    Most walks ended where they had when he was a child, at the ramparts where the entrance to the port narrowed. He clambered down beside the Round Tower, hanging on now at every step like an old man.
    The first time he found himself there he looked for his collection of pebbles. He knew they could not still be there after more than ten years, but when he stooped to look into the hole in the wall and found it empty he felt the tears prickle. It was the injury, he supposed, that made him feel he had lost everything, and that it was too late to find it again.
    The beach was the same, and as always he had it to himself.He sat on the cold stones, rounded by the sea to egg-like smoothness, and watched the sky, the water. Low waves gathered themselves up, glittering in hazy sun, a smooth tight-drawn surface that dropped and broke apart onto the pebbles, spotting them dark, then withdrew with an unhurried slap and rattle. Out towards the Motherbank and the Isle of Wight a band of brilliant white often lay between sea and cloud, luminous against the dark water.
    His life had arrived at a point of suspension, like a fleck of dirt in a glass of water. He hung in a cold bleak space. He had thought to find a future, even found it for a time, beckoning like a tease. Now there was nothing, only this pain in his head and his heart, which had seen into the vile entrails of life and smelled the evil there.
    Air flowed to and fro, water mounted and drew back under the pull of the moon as it had done for as long as there had been air and water, and as it would while air and water ever remained. He sat there, stiffening on the stones, but the pain in his head eased. A kindly trance wrapped itself around him in which time could pass.
    He had retreated into some tight dry place within himself, like a periwinkle marooned above the tideline. It was enough to watch the waves crest and collapse, the distant brilliant band of light contract to a line along the horizon.
    A ball of mist closed in from the sea and dusk crept over the town behind him. He forced himself upright and went throughthe darkening streets back to that narrow parlour and attic bedroom that were his world now.

    Two years after the day on Resolution that he tried not to remember, the war ended. Ended was the word people used, but everyone knew that lost was the one that hung behind it. That ragtag bunch of barefoot rebels had somehow defeated the might of His Majesty King George the Third. It was a humiliation that could never be mentioned. The king’s soldiers and sailors did not know how to take up their lives in the shadow of the word never spoken: defeat .
    When he met Silk near the Hard in Portsmouth Harbour, Rooke saw there had been an alteration in his friend. He could still amuse with some bit of nonsense about the day he left his cap behind in the Royal Oak. But something in him was blighted by what he had seen, and by defeat. And by the half-life of half-pay. The word he used for it was tantalism. There was a bitterness in the way he said it. A man on half-pay did not quite starve, but he did not properly live either.
    To war and a sickly season : now Rooke understood that reckless toast too well. The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.
    Something had shifted in the friendship between Rooke andSilk. They had both watched Private Truby wondering why he could not get up, and that had forged a bond deeper than mere good fellowship.
    There on the Hard, on that day of cold glum cloud, they did not mention that monstrous thing, but wrung each other’s hands so hard it hurt.
    Silk was