"Yes. Yes, so I heard; poor fellow."
"Now that we have no physical evidence, I suppose we have to rely on the boy's own story. I mean, on checking it. I suppose that can be done."
"Oh, quite easily. It is all quite straightforward, with dates and places. That is what Kevin found so — Yes. Yes. Of course it can be checked. And of course I am sure that it will check. He would not have offered us information which would be proved nonsense."
"So really there is nothing to wait for."
"No, I — No."
Bee braced herself.
"Then how soon can you arrange for me to meet him?"
"Well-I have been thinking about it, and I don't think, you know, that it should be arranged at all."
"What?"
"What I should like to do-with your permission and co-operation-would be to, as it were, walk in on him. Go and see him unannounced. So that you would see him as he is and not as he wants you to see him. If we made an appointment here at the office, he would — "
"Yes, I see. I understand. I agree to that. Can we go now?"
"I don't see why not. I really don't see why not," Mr. Sandal said in that regretful tone that lawyers use when they cannot see any reason why not. "There is, of course, the chance that he may be out. But we can at least go and see. Ah, here is your tea! Will you drink it while Mercer asks Simspon to ask Willett to get us a taxi?"
"You haven't got anything stronger, have you?" Bee asked.
"I'm afraid not; I'm afraid not. I have never succumbed to the transatlantic custom of the bottle in the office. But Willett will get you anything you may — "
"Oh, no, thank you; it's all right. I'll drink the tea. They say the effects are much more lasting, anyway."
Mr. Sandal looked as though he would like to pat her encouragingly on the shoulder, but could not make up his mind to it. He was really a very kind little man, she thought, but just-just not much of a prop.
"Did he explain why he chose the name Farrar?" she asked, when they were seated in the taxi.
"He didn't explain anything," Mr. Sandal said, falling back on his dry tone.
"Did you gather that he was badly off?"
"He did not mention money, but he seemed very well-dressed in a slightly un-English fashion."
"There was no suggestion of a loan?"
"Oh, no. Oh, dear me, no."
"Then he hasn't come back just because he is broke," Bee said, and felt somehow pleased. She sat back and relaxed a little. Perhaps everything was going to be all right.
"I have never quite understood why Pimlico descended so rapidly in the social scale," said Mr. Sandal, breaking the silence as they travelled down the avenues of pretentious porches. "It has fine wide streets, and little through-traffic, and no more smuts than its neighbours. Why should the well-to-do have deserted it and yet stayed in Belgravia? Very puzzling."
"There is a sort of suction about desertion," Bee said, trying to meet him on the small-talk level. "The local Lady Almighty occasions the draught by leaving, and the rest, in descending order of importance, follow in her wake. And the poorer people flood in from either side to fill the vacuum. Is this the place?"
Her dismay took possession of her again as she looked at the dismal front of the house; at the peeling paint and the stained stucco, the variety of drab curtains at the windows, the unswept doorway and the rubbed-out house-number on the horrible pillar.
The front door was open and they walked in.
A different card on each door in the hallway proclaimed the fact that the house was let out in single rooms.
"The address is 59K," Mr. Sandal said. "I take it that K is the number of the room."
"They begin on the ground floor and work upwards," Bee said. "This is B on my side." So they mounted.
"H," said Bee, peering at a first-floor door. "It's up the next flight."
The second floor was also the top one. They stood together on the dark landing listening to the silence. He is out, she thought, he is out, and I shall have to go through all this again.
"Have you a match?" she said.
"I and J," she read, on the two front-room doors.
Then it was the back one.
They stood in the dark for a moment, staring at it. Then Mr. Sandal moved purposively forward and knocked.
"Come in!" said a voice. It was a deep, boy's voice; quite unlike Simon's light sophisticated tones.
Bee, being half a head taller than Mr. Sandal, could see over his shoulder; and her first feeling was one of shock that he should be so much more like Simon than Patrick ever was. Her mind had been filled with images of Patrick: vague, blurred images that she strove to make clear so that she could compare them with the adult reality. Her whole being had been obsessed with Patrick for the last twenty-four hours.
And now here was someone just like Simon.
The boy got up from where he had been sitting on the edge of the bed, and with no haste or embarrassment pulled from off his left hand the sock he had been darning. She couldn't imagine Simon darning a sock.
"Good morning," he said.
"Good morning," said Mr. Sandal. "I hope you don't mind: I've brought you a visitor." He moved aside to let Bee come in. "Do you know who this is?"
Bee's heart hammered on her ribs as she met the boy's light calm gaze and watched him identify her.
"You do your hair differently," he said.
Yes, of course; hairdressing had changed completely in those eight years; of course he would see a difference.
"You recognise her, then?" Mr. Sandal said.
"Yes, of course. It's Aunt Bee."
She waited for him to come forward to greet her, but he made no move to. After a moment's pause he turned to find a seat for her.
"I'm afraid there is only one chair. It is all right if you don't lean back on it," he said, picking up one of those hard chairs with a black curved back and a tan seat with small holes in it. Bee was glad to sit down on it.
"Do you mind the bed?" he said to Mr. Sandal.
"I'll stand, thank you, I'll stand," Mr. Sandal said hastily.
The details of the face were not at all like Simon's, she thought; watching the boy stick the needle carefully in the sock. It was the general impression that was the same; once you really looked at him the startling resemblance vanished, and only the family likeness remained.
"Miss Ashby could not wait for a meeting at my office, so I brought her here," Mr. Sandal said. "You don't seem particularly — " He allowed the sentence to speak for itself.
The boy looked at her in a friendly unsmiling way and said: "I'm not very sure of my welcome."
It was a curiously immobile face. A face like a child's drawing, now she came to think of it. Everything in the right place and with the right proportions, but without animation. Even the mouth had the straight uncompromising line that is a child's version of a mouth.
He moved over to lay the socks on the dressing-table, and she saw that he was lame.
"Have you hurt your leg?" she asked.
"I broke it. Over in the States."
"But should you be walking about on it if it is still tender?"
"Oh, it doesn't hurt," he said. "It's just short."
"Short! You mean, permanently short?"
"It looks like it."
They were sensitive lips, she noticed, for all their thinness; they gave him away when he said that.
"But something can be done about that," she said. "It just means that it was mended badly. I expect you didn't have a very good surgeon."
"I don't remember a surgeon. Perhaps I passed out. They did all the correct things: hung weights on the end of it, and all that."
"But Pat — " she began, and failed to finish his name.
Into the hiatus he said: "You don't have to call me anything until you are sure."