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out.’
    ‘Now don’t disturb yourself,’ patiently bawled Mr Geddes through the twilight. ‘You stay comfortable, and I’ll wait here until she gets back. I don’t expect she’ll be long, will she?’
    ‘Just popped out. Ran out of bread. It’s only round the corner. Joneses.’
    Silence fell. Mr Geddes wondered if he might venture to sit on the stairs. Better not, perhaps. He sighed.
    ‘Did I hear a male voice?’
    Mr Geddes jumped nearly out of his skin. It was the hoarsest of near-whispers and it seemed to float down from the ceiling. Glancing rather wildly upwards he could make out a glow, of a faintness to match the eerie sound of the question, at the top of the attic stairs.
    ‘It’s Mr Geddes, the Reverend Robert Geddes. I’ve come to see Miss Barnes but she’s out.’ He launched his explanation hopefully into the gloom, upwards.
    ‘Ah …’ breathed the voice, as if satisfied. ‘I’ll come down.’ At the same instant there was a courteous squeak from Miss Barnes’s hidden sister. ‘If you’ll just open the door, sir, and come into the front room, you’d be more comfortable waiting there. You could switch the light on. It is just by the door.’
    ‘Thank you – I will. Thank you.’ The mild nightmare showed signs of dissolving.
    But now slow, slapping footsteps were descending the attic stairs, with an effect of caution, as if the person coming down were feeling their way; old footsteps, conveying weakness, as had the bodiless voice.
    Mr Geddes, not a romantic or imaginative type, had had enough. He was also hungry.
    He opened Miss Barnes’s door with a jerk, fumbled against the wall, and crisply switched on the light. The room’s cosy poverty was revealed and also the further room, with Annie, sitting up muffled in some of the coats, nothing of her visible but her eyes, glaring out of the balaclava. She uttered an unintelligible sound conveying welcome, and Mr Geddes lowered himself thankfully into an armchair.
    He turned his eyes towards the door.
    Another moment and a little old man crept up and stood framed in it as if he were a picture, looking mildly in.
    He wore clothes faded to barely distinguishable shades of dim brown, sage and stone colour, all toned down to one overriding hue; it was as if he were dressed in dead leaves. His long-nosed face suggested the mask of a horse or sheep. Intelligence, of a kind, looked out through milky-brown eyes.
    ‘When I heard you were a priest, I thought – an educated man,’ he observed, ‘and it’s many weeks since I talked with an educated man. There’s,’ the eyes moved to Annie and he interrupted himself to give a little bow and say, ‘Good-evening, Miss Annie,’ then went on in a lowered tone – ‘There’s so many women about, so very many, and none of them you might call educated.’
    His voice sank to a confidential murmur, ‘… one educated man to another,’ he ended.
    All Mr Geddes could find to say was, ‘Good-evening.’
    He judged that the visitor must be nearer ninety than eighty; skin, hair, eyes, teeth, stance, voice all thinly proclaimed great age. He wore bedroom slippers worn almost down to their supporting sock on his little feet, embroidered in orange and flame and ruby but all faded to a near-whiteness.
    ‘My name this month is Lancelot Andrewes,’ he remarked, shuffling into the room, ‘I make a habit of taking a different name every month, sometimes that of a writer, sometimes a thinker, sometimes a prophet or a philosopher.’
    ‘But what’s your own name? The one your mother called you by?’ Mr Geddes asked, wondering, but not about that.
    ‘Ah. My real name. It really is Lancelot. Lancelot Fisher. I expect you have read Malory?’
    ‘Not since I was at Oxford.’
    ‘You were at Oxford. A great privilege. I never went to any University, my father was poor, very poor, poorer than what I am, you may say, because I have chosen to be poor, but he didn’t have no choice. That is the ’ardest way of