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it.’
    ‘It’s certainly well-paid, as livings go,’ said Mrs. Artside. There isn’t much connection between work and stipend in the church nowadays. Probably never has been. Still, you mustn’t go around quarrelling with the Vicar.’
    She did not say this with any conviction. She was not greatly attached to the Reverend Hallibone. ‘Who did you fight with next?’
    ‘After choir practice,’ said Tim sombrely, ‘I had words with our phoney Major.’
    ‘Oh, dear.’
    ‘He’s such a little snurge.’
    ‘Even if he is a snurge,’ said Liz, ‘and it’s not a term I’m familiar with, that’s surely no reason for quarrelling with him.’
    ‘But he’s so bogus.’
    ‘He’s the best tenor in Brimberley, Bramshott or Alderham.’
    ‘You and your choir. Do you know, I don’t believe he ever was in the Army at all.’
    ‘He must have been, or he couldn’t be called Major. Unless he was in the Salvation Army.’
    ‘If you ask me, he’s made the whole thing up. Do you know, I saw him once, at a tennis party, saluting one of the lady guests – wearing flannel trousers and a blazer, and he gave a natty little salute, and I thought, I bet he’s seen some chap do that on the stage and thought how good it looked, and he’d try it out some time.’
    ‘It still doesn’t prove he wasn’t in the Army.’
    ‘I don’t believe that anyone who had ever been in the Army would salute anyone else whilst he was wearing white flannel trousers and a blazer. Besides, he talks about the K.R.R.C. when he means the 60th – and the Provost Corps – and the Royal Field Artillery.’
    ‘Perhaps he was in the last war.’
    ‘Not old enough.’
    ‘Well, anyhow,’ said Liz. ‘Suppose you’re right. Lots of people call themselves things. I knew a man who called himself Commander and wore a yachting cap, and he’d never been further from the coast than the end of Blackpool Pier.’
    ‘I wouldn’t mind him calling himself a Field Marshal, if he’d keep his hands off Sue.’
    ‘If he’d do what?
    Tim realised that he had told his mother a good deal more than he meant to.
    ‘He offered to walk home with her.’
    ‘He lives in the same road.’
    ‘He’s a nasty little man,’ said Tim. ‘I can tell by the way he looks at her.’
    ‘Is that all you’ve got to go by?’
    ‘It’s enough, isn’t it?’
    ‘Certainly not,’ said Liz. She spoke with surprising firmness. ‘You can’t go round accusing people of that sort of thing without evidence. It’s just not done.’
    ‘All right,’ said Tim, ‘that makes two of you.’
    ‘Two?’
    ‘Sue said much the same sort of thing, only rather more pointedly. I had a stand-up fight with her, too.’
    ‘Lord love us,’ said his mother mildly, ‘Is there anyone you haven’t been scrapping with tonight?’
    Tim ignored this. His heavy body was relaxed in the chair, but his curious green-brown eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling.
    ‘I don’t know what’s come over Sue,’ he said at last. ‘I used to think she was rather keen on me. I don’t mean anything serious. After all, she’s only seventeen. Hardly out of school, really. Do you remember the first time she came round to tea here, when I’d just got back from Palestine. She must have been twelve or thirteen – all legs and tennis rackets. And that’s the way she stayed in my mind ever since – until last month – at the staff college dance. I saw her dancing with some old buffer and thought – she looks rather good.’
    Mrs. Artside, who was suffering from a series of complicated emotions, decided that it was safer to say nothing at all. Chiefly, she was filled with amazement that any man of over thirty could know so little about women. Good heavens, she thought, he’s talking about this thing as though it had never happened before in the history of the world; as though, every day, some gangling schoolgirl with all her defences down didn’t turn into a stickly, prickly bundle of