I felt a premonitory twinge of misgiving, but there was nothing to be done about it. Besides, it was, as Mary had said, getting late.

'Well, time you were off to bed now, * Matthew,' I said. 'Thanks for telling us about the pictures. May we keep them down here a bit so that we can look at them again?'

'All right, but please don't lose them,' he agreed. His eye fell on the famine-victim portrait. 'That isn't a bit like you, Daddy. It really isn't,' he assured me. Then he said his good-nights, and ran away upstairs.

We sat and looked at one another.

Mary's eyes slowly brimmed with tears.

'Oh, David. He was such a lovely little boy ...'

Later, when she was calmer, she said:

'I'm afraid for him, David. This — this whatever it is, is getting more real to him. He's beginning to let it take control of him ... I'm afraid for him ...'

I shook my head.

'I'm sure you've got it wrong. It isn't like that, you know. He was pretty emphatic that he is the one who decides when and whether it shall happen at all,' I pointed out.

'Naturally he'd think that,' she said...

I looked in on him on my way to bed. He was asleep, with the light still on. A book he had been reading lay as it had dropped from his hands, face down on his chest. I read the title, then bent a little closer to make sure I had read aright. It was my copy of Lewis Mumford's Living in Cities. * I picked it up, and in doing so woke Matthew.

'I don't wonder you fell asleep. A bit heavy for bedtime reading, isn't it?'

'Pretty boring,' he acknowledged. 'But Chocky thinks it's interesting — the parts of it I can understand for her.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Well ... well, time to go to sleep now. Goodnight, old man.'

'Goodnight, Daddy.'

SEVEN

For our holiday that summer we took a cottage jointly with Alan and Phyl Froome. They had married a couple of years after we did, and had two children, Emma and Paul, much of an age with our own. * It was an arrangement, we thought, which would give the adults opportunities to go off duty for a bit, and have some holiday themselves.

The place was Bontgoch, a village on an estuary in North Wales, where I had enjoyed several holidays in my own childhood. It was an ideal place for boating, and now it even had a painted-up shed with a bar at one end called the Yacht Club.

We did not have a boat, but we still enjoyed the place. The sands are still there for children to dabble around on at low tide and catch shrimps and flat fish. So, too, on both sides of the estuary are the not-too-steep mountains on which one can climb and explore the pockings of old workings that are known to have been gold mines. It was good to be able to go off in the car for the day and leave Phyl and Alan in charge of the children — and quite good, too, to take charge when it was their turn for freedom. Everything was, in fact, a great success — until the Monday of the second week...

On that day it was Mary and I who were free. We drove almost off the map * by very minor roads, left the car, walked along a hillside and picnicked by a stream with the whole Irish Sea spread out below us. In the evening we had a good dinner at a roadside hotel and dawdled back to Bontgoch about ten o'clock. We paused a moment by the gate to admire the serenity of a superb sunset, and then went up the path.

One had only to set foot on the threshold of the cottage to know that something had gone wrong. Mary sensed it at once. She stared at Phyl.

'What is it?' she said. 'What's happened?'

'It's all right, Mary. It's quite all right,' Phyl said. 'They're perfectly safe and sound. Both upstairs in bed now. Nothing to worry about.'

'What happened?' Mary said again.

'They fell in the river. But they're quite all right.'

She and Mary went upstairs. Alan reached for a bottle and poured a couple of whiskies.

'What's been going on?' I said as he held a glass towards me.

'It's quite all right now, as Phyl said,' he assured me. 'Near thing, * though. Shook us to our foundations, I can tell you. Not stopped sweating yet.' He pressed a handkerchief to his brow as if in evidence, said 'Cheers', * and downed half his glass.