. He falls sideways. . a dray horse, dead in the shafts . . killed by the drink he dragged . . She draws him into her lap so they lie. . chair-o-planing through the onrush of time and the night — That day, ranging along the banks of the Lincolnshire eau, Williams gave Kins a course in practical botany. A charm the young conchie had never known he possessed gained him the angry deserter’s support for what had become. . a quest: I cannot account for it, Kins confessed, I feel unclean, though — shrink from any contact with our fellow men. . and their machines. I s’pose rationally I know I shan’t be shunned by all. . For now. . I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I’d sooner be dead meat than press their flesh. . Williams was pragmatic: Missus’ll give yer a can or two of Spam, an’ we’ve home-baked bread — but game’ll spoil quick, cheese’ll sweat to buggery in this heat, an’ there’s nowt to spare off the ration. Kins said, I understand, really, Mister Williams — it’s terribly decent of you to bother with me at all. To begin with Kins had floundered about in the woodland spreading out behind their cottage — he was unused to daytime’s pitiless visibility, or to the thickness of its information. When he told Williams the leafy green carpet between the trees put him in mind of a cheap Bible’s typography, the poacher snorted: Wood sorrel? Oh, yes, it’s good news if you’ve an empty belly — it’ll make a serviceable salad stuff, and this — he strained ferny leaves between his fingers — is tansy, if you steep it you can get a potable tea. — On they went, Williams pulling up long sticky tendrils of goose grass and hauling down thorny stalks clustered with. . Haw-Haws. When they reached the woodland’s edge, there was a stiff fringe of bracken, beyond this another eau, and on its far side golfers were breezily teeing off. Williams motioned to him to take cover. Outstretched, pollen tickling his nose, Kins thought first of Belgian nuns being. . ravaged in bunkers, then began to analyse the golfers’ swings. Williams spat, Mister-bloody-Barnes with his private-bloody-army! Only then did Kins see that half the cumbersome eight were gamekeepers in rough tweeds and gaiters, who, instead of drivers, had shotguns cradled in their arms. What a laugh, Williams said unsmilingly, if the Nazzie parachutists were to land here he’d invite ’em up to the big house and serve ’em a fine bloody luncheon. — They retreated back into the covert and Williams coaxed his pupil’s clumsy fingers through the fine work of rigging a snare. Kins said, I’m ’fraid I shall forget how to do it more or less pronto — I doubt I’d have the patience to wait for the birdies anyway, or. . frankly, the gumption necessary to dispatch and prepare them. Williams wasn’t interested in such defeatism — he grasped Kins’s arm, saying: You’ve a choice, man, more ’n I do. They’ll be coming for me any day now and it’s the fucking glass-house for me — how d’you think I’ll stomach that, eh? Least you can do is be free for the both of us. — Missus Williams had a sickly yellowish tint — Kins wondered if she might be jaundiced. Looking at her, listless as she took the baking tin from the range, a smudge of flour on the puffed sleeves of her homemade frock, another stain on its pie-crust collar, he felt her sadness. They saw him off at sunset, standing in the porch, its fretwork coping throwing shining hearts on them. Williams’s arm was around his wife’s resisting hips, his lantern jaw was in her hair, and as Kins walked away he looked back once to see the ivy slowly tearing the tiles from the cottage roof. . and falling in tresses. — He kept doughtily on, the Milky Way sparkling underfoot as he maintained his southerly course, night after night — Kins put it down to Williams’s stiff ening influence. On the fifth, he rose up out of the fenlands and gave Peterborough a wide berth. The following evening he rolled from beneath a hedge and, picking up the Great North Road’s course, he followed it on towards. . the immense and stagnant lagoon. He’d scrumped apples and pinched eggs to boil in his spam tin — a tramp he ran up against on the banks of the Ouse shared tea from a screw of newspaper and half a good white loaf. In return Kins gave him a half-crown — and the tramp tried to embrace him. They’d dozed away that day together, in fitful ignorance of whether a gauleiter was banging his Luger’s butt on the arm of the Speaker’s chair. . until it broke. — A bold white sun with bold white rays rose up. . Brasso . . on the stuccoed gable end of a general provisioner’s Kins sloped by in the unearthly hour before dawn. Laying up for the day, he heard the traction engines’ steady chuffering and the tractors’ rapacious roar — all of it, he thought, components of a production line designed to whirl the grain away in a sulphurous cloud: the soldiers’ bellies needed bread — the guns fired fresh-baked rolls and loaves, the brimstone mills went on grinding out. . lead and steel. Contra the hopes of Feydeau, Cornwallis and Brockleby, the very land itself was being transformed into an extension of the battlefield. He slept uneasily, and in his dreams ears of corn burst into flame, while vaporised ducks left their flying shadows imprinted on the sides of barns. — So at last he came to Epping, where a tricky uphill Par 3 took him to the crest of a hill. Crawling through the rough on his hands and knees, he reached the pockling of a rabbit warren and decided. . entirely arbitrarily . . that this was the end. He made his final calculations: the extraordinarily long course, its holes succeeding one another unflaggingly, had stretched for 218, 470 yards from Holton-cum-Beckering to here, and he had played it with 4, 853 strokes — including 74 penalty ones for lost imaginary balls. These were, he conceded, only approximate figures — he was no cold calculating machine. Spread out on the cooling ground, listening to an owl’s subdued wisdom, Kins speculated: had his strange walk been some form of pilgrimage, and, if so, have I done sufficient penance? Rising, going on he saw that the hill was a vast and. . Sibertian dome, the far side of which was. . crinkled up into ridges by disapproval. Beyond the last clumps of gorse the ground fell away and the city’s still vaster face confronted him, its Stygian complexion pin-pricked here and there by the slitted feline eyes of ’buses and motor-cars padding silently through the blackout. For a long time, as he stared away to the south, Kins could make no sense of what he saw, lit up by bright flashes reflected by the clouds. Had some sort of giant chair-o-plane . . been set up above the East End? It was only when several of the shapes detached from the vortex that he realised: this was no fairground — it was. . the United Airmen! They’d got here first and because they don’t approve of independent sovereign states . . they were. . bonking London to smithereens! — Everyfing tickety-boo, cock? This from a stalwart fellow sealed into manila-coloured overalls, who’d been delivered early to the late-summer morning. The young collie dog that ran out in front of the man, set then rounded Kins up — was perfectly instinctual . . he thinks as he lies in Moira’s arms, admiring the shattered composition of the broken glass scattered about the day-bed. . deceptive as memory. — The dog must’ve smelt him from a long way off: for eight days he’d swopped one dirty shirt for the other, his cricketing pullover was in shreds, only his sports jacket. . holding it in together. The man — who, Kins supposed, was a fitter or printer come off night shift — showed no dismay, only stood below Kins on the hillside, the sun-smitten reservoir