or so Kins’s informant quipped. The other panellists he wasn’t so sure about. — In the background, display cabinets hulked, their dusty glass obscuring savage clutter: tomahawks and necklaces of cowries, teak masks and bongo-bongo drums fringed with coconut fibre. Closest to Kins sat a lady JP who wore a high-crowned puritanical hat garlanded with a crazy bunch of artificial fruit. Her long powdered chin bathed in its shadow — the glass eyes of the mink tucked up around her bony neck drew the winter day down from the skylight into their cold dead orbs. To concentrate on the chairman’s interminable circumlocutions was an athletic feat: his sentences were so long they curled up and up, then curled still more, arching over in the waxed gloom, until their object was finally united with their subject. . and eaten by it — in its end is its beginning. Moreover, try as he might, Kins couldn’t subdue a strange trompe-l’œil tic: if he looked away for an instant, then back at the lady JP, her head had shrivelled up and been displaced to one of the display cabinets, shelved there beside those of the two remaining tribunal members, a saturnine reservist colonel and a wisp of a parson whose gonflé . . lower lip suggested to Kins acts of unspeakable. . Stiff keyness. He kept his own eyes averted from this horror: the three of them, enraged by being bagged as trophies, so determined to. . enact their own coup. — D’you not think Christ himself would appreciate the justness of this war? It took a while for Kins to realise the lady JP had addressed him, for her tone was surprisingly warm. . Bumbly even . . while her long skinny fingers — fidgeting from dusty beaker to smeared carafe, to the coat of arms which she re-propped — seemed to be acting out an inner conflict. The unbending colonel and the end-of-the-pier parson regarded Kins with expressions indicating they too believed this to be the very crux of the matter, and so: Off I went . . giving chapters — Psalms 29, 32, 34 and 37 — and verses therein — 11, 17, 14 and 37. Quoting: The LORD will give strength unto his people, the LORD will bless his people with peace . . Alternating between the Hebrew prophets — LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us, for thou also hast wrought all our works in us — and the Gospels — Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto to you . . At which juncture Kins swept his eyes over the quorum and tugged the end of an invisible mantiple, as he impressed on his judges the unsaid — but for all that SHOUTED — message: See! See what all these so-called statesmen and their backroom deals have brought down upon our innocent heads! How they cheered Musso and stood by applauding while he poisoned Abyssinia! How they urged on Chamberlain as he beat Beneš to death with his good old um-ber-ella! — The lady JP was looking rather down in the mouth . . still Kins persisted with Romans, Chapter 14, Verses 17 to 19: For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of by men. Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another . . — Not meat and drink . . but tongues and spit, as the fighting continues . . Each seeking the other’s tip so they may. . suck each other, an ouroboros the subject of which eats its own object . . — There’d been a few more questions. It was established that Kins was a regular communicant, and that, while he’d signed the Reverend Dick’s pledge in ’37, he saw this: Very much as a logical adjunct to my faith, not a political statement per se. — Kins could guess at the figure he presented: ruddy-cheeked, his dark hair flattened with water and hair oil, his rather beefy upper body draped in studious and unflashy tweed, its thick material hiding the fine balance and magnificent control he could deploy on court and course. . not battlefield . . The pious and unworldly young man they saw before them, his tie inexpertly knotted. . was me, and if he seemed too clumsy to handle anything with more materiality than a conscience this was. . no contrivance — because Lord knows I want to move my hands but cannot! They hunger after Annette’s breasts and sides, her hips and thighs. — Suddenly they break to stand, eyeing each other warily, breathing heavily and hearing the snuffling in the stalls. Annette, her face monochrome in the moonlight. . throws me a lifeline by asking, Were you awfully afraid? and Kins. . deflating . . going soft . . hauls himself back to the land. Jack Clarke and another trainee remain in custody — Bill Smedley was packed straight off to join the Nancy Elsies. A blanket of shame has covered Collow Abbey Farm, and. . the baseless fabric remains unrent by full and frank discussion. — Two nights before, tiring of their confabs, bored by their limited selection of gramophone records, the trainees and their mentors had set out on a moth hunt. Kins couldn’t remember who’d proposed it — or why they’d all hared heedlessly about the farmhouse and its outbuildings, pulling sheets off beds and gathering together electric torches. Of course we were a bit tiddly — but even so . . Then they marched out together through the recently harvested home field, its stiff hackles scratching their ankles as grasshoppers and mites flew up their trouser legs. It should’ve occurred to someone the row of currant bushes beside the dried-out pond known as Despond was an ill-starred spot — the Graveneys, unsympathisers . . lived a quarter-mile beyond, hunched in their Maginot Line manor house beside the Wragby Road, and armed with one of the few telephones in the district. The torches were implanted in the cracking earth by the bushes’ roots and the sheets were flung on top of them, and the. . great globe was drawn down into these cloudy chambers, over the eerily glowing billows of which inched. . the bamboozled muons and positrons, their antennae twitching, their tattered wings fluttering. They were all there, the CLTA crowd: Brockleby, Cornwallis and Procter — their wives, their older children and their disciples. All fell silent at the eerie sight, and quietly moved to form their own orbit around the pulsing, illuminated bushes — a circle that. . too late! realised it too had been encircled by the. . bloody warmongers! Whose powerful electric lamps. . smashed on! The cosmological model was annihilated, to be replaced by a scrawny boy, his carbuncular neck loose in his battledress, his teeth bared, who stared furiously at Kins over the quivering point of his fixed bayonet. All the Tommies had been racked by nerves — the one confronting Cornwallis actually pricked him. When the enraged ex-docker — temporarily abandoning his own principles — made to give his assailant a clip round the ear, he was immediately surrounded by three more, whose bellicosity was rather compromised by their having to struggle with their rifle bolts. Cornwallis held his hands up, clawed at the air and gave a howl, Kins supplying the line from his archive: He’s remembering the time when he was a wolf and other people and other places never existed. Kins’s Tommy chattered, Wh-What the ’ell ’re you on about, m-mate? And, as with the tribunal, Kins gave him chapter and verse: The Call of the Wild, 1935, starring Clark Gable, Loretta Young and Jack Oakie —. He would’ve continued — since there was laughter on all sides and the tension was draining away — but an officer strode forward at that point and tore the sheets from the bushes.