much pored over and frequently declaimed from, his elder son had no apprehension of his feelings at all. . Flush’d is his brow, through every vein, In azure tide the currents strain, And undistinguish’d accents broke, The awful silence ere he spoke. Now considering it with a clarity borne of pitiful resignation, Kins decided that if Sirbert had any feelings at all. . he must keep them in a locked ministerial box. This was Kins’s epiphany: his father might be adept at putting on a show, but he’d probably no greater sympathy. . than a tree or a rock. — Moreover, if his own physical cowardice was a hive burning under his skin, Sirbert — being nerveless — had no comparable feelings, so neither balked at the necessity of dishing out death from a safe remove — as he’d done at the Arsenal during the last war, and was ably doing right now as the Beaver’s PPS — or so much as gave it a thought that he might be hee-hawing . . while others. . roared into the slaughter. The repellent smoothness of Sirbert’s hairless calves when he pulled up his stockings and tied the laces of his golf shoes, the ugly varicosity that wormed purplish behind his knees — these were proof he was incarnate, although, in common with Our Saviour, Sirbert had. . risen without trace. But that was where the resemblance ended. All this time Kins had been mystified: why was it he was unable to deploy the one weapon allowed him — prayer. Now he understood: his God had never been a meek, mild, silky-bearded ephebe, but a clean-shaven Old Testament bully, who took every trick his partner won for his own. . and the Devil take the hindmost. Kins had never imagined himself to be a physical coward before — now he saw there’d been a thick yellow streak running through the persistence with which he’d skived off footer and mitched rugger. There was also the studiousness with which he’d avoided the RSM who’d taught the Lancing boys the noble art. . of sadomasochism, encouraging them to spar with their guards scarcely up so as to invite their opponent’s blows. . in a manly and virile fashion. All became clear: it was not — as he’d assumed, knowing of the pashes older and younger boys shared — the homo overtones of such activities that repulsed him, it wasn’t wily Grecian love . . but. . forthright Roman contact he couldn’t abide. And if this were the case, might what Syd Walker condemned him for also be true? All this pledging, pontificating and piety had really been. . an awful pose. The old Sirbertian religion had, Kins now acknowledged, been no leap of faith, but rather. . finely factored for risk, a matter of Pascalian wagers within still more Pascalian wagers. When Kins and Michael were boys. . Our Father encouraged us to bet on the duration of the sermon. Kins had never doubted Sirbert’s sincere belief in certain aspects of the Christian deity: the ones he believed he shared, each having been made in the other’s image. Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds, From every searching Eye, Why darkness and obscurity, In all thy words and laws . . Thrice I denied him before the cock crowed . . So when Syd Walker finally beckoned him from the cell and with slapstick digs and pricks drove him into an office where an elderly and corpulent man sat wrapped in an unseasonable blue Melton overcoat, Kins was fully prepared. . to recant all and become a fighting heretic, if necessary. It wasn’t. The bull-necked desk sergeant held Kins’s certificate upright between the tips of his fingers. Bugger off now, laddie, he said to Syd Walker. Your OC has been held up a fair while now — you’re ruddy lucky I don’t get him to put you on a two-five-two for. . ah, mislaying this one. — Squeezing past the rooted Kins, Syd Walker gave a final smirk. . for my eyes only . . and brought his martial heel down hard on cowardly toes. After that he was gone, leaving Kins to grimace at the rolltop desk, a calendar advertising Emco Farm Suppliers of Caister, a hat-stand and an open but barred window, through which early-morning sunlight drained into the room. A quart-bottle of Watneys Ale and a glass sat on the blotter beside the sergeant’s zebra-striped cuff. The fat old man sighed heavily, then wheezed: I’ve no time at all for you bloody conchies. If I’d a free hand, that ass Brockleby’s set-up’d be shut down pronto and the lot of you’d be rounded up. After that, if you weren’t disposed to do your bit, well. . He sighed again, still more heavily, and, struggling round on the squeaking swivel chair, poured some ale into the glass and took a gulp. Aaah! Theatrical satisfaction, Kins felt, was of a piece with the man’s spotted bow tie and the antique nippers hanging from a tricolour ribbon pinned to his jacket collar. You’ll have a quick wet? The old man gestured with the bottle, and when the sergeant declined, he finally confirmed: I’d have you shot. Now. . he ran on blind to his casual savagery . . take your lousy bit of paper and bugger off. You. Are. Free. — he gave each of the words sardonic emphasis — To. Go. — In the courtyard behind the police station a cockerel was rooting in some straw and a corporal was slamming the lorry’s tailgate. Captain Smyth leant out from its cab and called to Kins, I say, d’you want a lift back to Holton? Shielding his eyes, Kins called back, No, thanks all the same, I’d as soon stretch my legs. . For the first five miles or so he suffered the torment of this remonstrance: You snivelling idiot, you could’ve at least given him a proper wigging! — By mid-morning he’d come down off the hills and was labouring across the fields, too fagged to do anything but follow furrows that tended in roughly the right direction. He came upon an old woman who was. . a bit touched: a living oddmedodd who stood by the hawthorn hedge screening her tiny tumbledown cottage from the sunken lane. Her outspread apron filled with crumbs, she brought down on her head an unkindness of crows, which limped across the beech-mast to stare one-sidedly at this. . carrion in waiting. She pumped water into an old tin that Kins drained and she refilled several times, then she went to her hen house of curling tar paper and withdrew two speckled eggs that, still warm, she introduced to his hand. — He went on with the eggs in the tin, and an hour or so later waded out through the hip-high waving wheat to a shrub-choked marl pit. Hiding on the shore of this sunken island, he filled the old tin with tea-brown water, put together a tiny pyre of bark bits and very slowly hard-boiled the eggs. Sitting there, the fire still smouldering between his outstretched legs, Kins twisted the first egg, unscrewing the white meat from its ends so it fell to lie steaming on the grass. . an armistice, at last, with Blefuscu. He thought of Bryant & May — very old gentlemen, he assumed, Victorian benefactors with a penchant for fallen women. . and turning them into match girls. He thought of his Solomon at Louth. . some lordly Lieutenant or acceptably Oddfellow . . and, taking the hot naked egg in his hand, slit its perfect translucent skin with a dirty fingernail, marvelling: I’ve never done anything quite so satisfying before — prob’ly never will again. The egg’s atomic core steamed. . with all the pungency of coition, and in its yellow core Kins discovered a blood-red speck of fertilisation. — He’s sat for so long a thrush hops from the hedge and pecks at the puzzlement of shell bits with its pretty beak. Lifting his head from the mess in his hands, Kins sees, Gainsboroughised by foliage, a V-formation of airplanes stammering overhead.