Busner stands up. For a while he had thought that when he had more leisure he might do something with Maurice’s homolog, which was surely a sexual self-interrogation to rival the broader surveys of Havelock-Ellis and Kinsey. He supposed it might be in one of the orange boxes under the window, or in the attic at Redington Road — wherever it was, it would be together with tea chests full of the rotting correspondence of the parents Busner had never known, their serrated postcards, their now blotched but once creamy notepaper folded into thick envelopes that had been extravagantly franked and stamped. All of it he had foreseen himself unpacking, unsheathing and unfolding, so that the pressed flowers bloomed into dust as he read the missives for the first time since their long-gone recipients set the sheets to one side. It was not — he considers as he raises the candy-striped canvas blind to discover decals of outsized and grinning pizza-eaters being leant against by real people who are grimy in the surprising sunlight that shines on the far side of Fortess Road — the unexamined life that was worthless, but the one un-re-examined by the properly qualified. And at once he resolves to throw all that stuff away. To have it all picked over by the next generation, or in the declension below that, by an amateur genealogist avid for his roots would result in a further demerit, rendering his parents’ lives, Maurice’s, his own, worthless minus one. — And what of Sergeant Culcross? Busner says aloud, speaking to the hip-high fridge, the enamelled BREAD BIN and the electric jug, in a vain attempt to rouse them from their complacent inanimation. What of him? Busner sees the young man lying on the bleak roadside, his legs torn off by the blast, and wonders: did they pick the nuts and bolts out of him before ’coptering him back to base? Was he right now sedated in a hospital bed, waiting to be told. . like Ronald Reagan that he had nothing down below? They might well reassure him all they could, they would probably rub talcum powder on his stumps, sheathe them in silk stockings and the leather sockets of the prostheses. No doubt capable nurses would lift him on either side, then put him on a walking machine — but that’s only another kind of treadmill, because in the end a phantom limb or two would be a blessing compared to this waking, walking nightmare with the half of you that’s been turned on a lathe now turned on another one. . and what might that feel like? In the future, Busner didn’t doubt, microprocessors would be implanted in the brain and attached to sensors inserted between the relevant vertebrae — then this feeling might be examined, but for now it remained an enigma-r-elle est une vraie beauté, m’sieur! The queer little Frenchman has used the slow shoving of the tightly packed crowd to press Audrey against the railings surrounding the green. Right away Stanley suspects him of making free with his hands, so struggles to raise his own while spluttering, I know summuv yer lingo you — you muggins! Not much of a jibe, Audrey thinks — besides, she doesn’t mind the attentions of the Frenchman, whose lavender silk waistcoat and gay straw boater are flowers in the bed of black-and-blue serge which urges in the shadow of the Empire. May I av ze plezzure to —? He frees his hand enough to raise his hat but it’s. .