I drift, I float, I loop-the-loop — yet, like Pegoud performing the stunt at Brooklands, I feel as at ease as if I were sat on a settle poking a cosy fire. They were all hugely amused by his pash for the aeronauts and their machines — an old yokel coming past stopped and set down his trug simply to laugh with them. Stanley thought that, notwithstanding how the flying men soared up and up, still they remained far below these bluestockings and their foppish gentlemen friends. Willis had lent him a blazer, a boater and cut him a buttonhole with his own strange hands. There had been a fly waiting for them at Carshalton Station — only then, under the withering gaze of a gamekeeper’s boy in a suit of cheap broadcloth, did Stanley appreciate that he passed muster — true, the boy saw him for what he was, yet still I passed muster. The young ladies who gathered round him, screening out the downs with their pretty gowns, asked after his people, and, as naturally as h’s, r’s and t’s rose up from the close-cropped lawn to mesh with his careful elocutions, the lies fell from his lips: They stopped at Dulwich, his father was in the City. The young ladies laughed, and Stanley laughed with them, grasping in that moment the poisonous quicksilver of their prejudices: that for them this was far, far below, down with the aeronauts and still more sublunary creatures — people in trade and the like. Between raised and brick-lined beds of syringas, hydrangeas and hellebore, Turkish rugs and gold-embroidered cushions with tassels had been carefully arranged, while in garden pavilions he recognised as Ince’s the servants were setting out the buffet: big bloody bowls of rhubarb syllabub, meats quivering in aspic, a naked salmon laid out on its cucumber petticoats. He was offered champagne — but knew better than to accept. They gave him sarsaparilla flavoured with cloves instead, so he took pleasure in this and also the small woolly dogs that got under the ladies’ skirts, then were reborn, yelping. He loitered, listening to the hushed amazement with which the outrages in the West Country were being discussed — some of the young ladies expressed a muted sympathy, the martyrdom of Davison was invoked. Had he been honestly himself, Stanley might have had something to add — but he was not, so did not. He hung about, caught up in the crisp curves of the maids’ white caps and the neat pleats of their snowy aprons. — Later, when cunning panther padding he went in search of the conveniences, he found himself on an upper storey, stuck in beeswax and staring into a linen cupboard through a door half ajar at wicker trays of frilled and freshly laundered linen — pure white linen, underclothes threaded with white, white ribbon, petticoats, shifts, chemises, shirts and still flimsier things. Lavender wafted across these small white meadows, and the desire to romp on them, to bury his sunburned face in those sweetly flowery furrows, was. . resisted. He found the WC and drained himself — a horsey splatter, the cistern squealed and clanked and gushed and groaned. Adeline asked him about his situation — Willis had introduced her as Missus Adeline Cameron, empee, and she had laughed, Not yet, Fey! which Stanley knew was short for Feydeau, Willis’s nonsensical nickname. Stanley said smiling: I have none. If he had but known it, it was this clumsily done approximation of charm that drew her in, her neck so long and white stretchingup to him, with its tresses of dark, dark hair either side of a face. . some men might’ve found too strong. Come, she said — not unkindly, although it was clear she meant business — let us be frank with one another. And so he was. She heard him out about his dismissal from Ince’s, and before that the Post Office. — My old man. . he hesitated. . was with the London General. She quizzed him: A doctor? while knowing full well what he meant. Stanley came clean: No, the ’bus company — but ’e’s left there now, leff London inall. My bruvver found ’em a place down in Devon, where me muvver’s lot’re from. Sincerity had chipped away at his imposture — she affected not to notice. They had somehow managed to set a course away from the other guests, and looking back he saw them all grouped on the stone-flagged terraces that sat below the spreading eaves of the new house. The guests — of whom there were not that many — had, by some application of the laws of motion, loosely arranged themselves into two orbits, one around an elderly body in a bath chair, the other intent on a small boy who was showing them the finer points of his model biplane. Willis touched a wing — Stanley turned back to his hostess, then went where she was looking: beyond the sudden falling away of the lawn to a melting chessboard, cows lying enamelled in the centre of a field-square lashed their tails at flies, clouds dappled the flanks of the downs and on top rain drew a discreet hatching between earth and sky. Boots stamped across Stanley’s recently filled grave — he shivered, also, there was some forcemeat and two cold, cooked potatoes in a deal box on the windowsill . . off by now. His rent was far beyond being in arrears and they knew he had nothing left to pawn — they might sell the debt on to the boys . .a second shiver, hair pricking thighs inside these flannel trousers, too hot — yet he was frigid. He dismissed the thought of Arnold Collins and the ways in which he would be beholden if he asked for a little leg-up. There were poppies nodding above the long grass and large dock leaves cast still deeper shadows in the hedges’ shadow, and for Stanley there was a great falling away of the substance from everything — a pair of linnets hung on a bramble that trailed from the hedge, the arms of oaks embraced . .Then how do you sustain yourself? she asked. He mentioned a modest sum due to him for minuting the proceedings of the discussion group — of his sister and how she had obtained this position for him, as she had the last, he said nothing. Merely to say her name, Or-dree, was to evoke all her energy and so confirm his own moody fatigue. Stanley looked down at his shined brogans spreading on the lawn cow pats, and said: Also. . I make things — fabricate them. She put her ebonised eyes on him and saw a well-made young man, who, despite the obvious unravelling of reduced circumstances — she could not bring herself to think poverty — nonetheless appeared clean, with a clear complexion and an expression perfectly manly, without slyness . .Oh, she said, what sort of things? He recovered his other self and said: That would be difficult to explain, it’s easier for me to say what I make them out of — now it’s dowelling and rice paper or butcher’s paper, because these are easy to come by. . When I was with the umbrella-makers there were always damaged frames and plenty of material offcuts — oiled cottons, art silks, that sort of thing — Oh, and fish glue, but that you can always get. . None troubled to come across to them, some cried out as they turned towards her house. The maids and menservants hurried to gather up the cushions and roll up the rugs. Adeline remained scrutinising Stanley. Are they like gazeekas or billikens, Mister De’Ath? she asked, and so he realised that, for all her cleverness and aplomb, there were few years between them, for she too had desired these daft toys. He laughed. — No, much bigger than them — when kids see them they want to play with them. I won’t allow it. My models are delicate and airy things, their struts snap, their coverings tear. . so. . I won’t allow it. . She was hatless, and, as the rain swept over them, his first instinct was to hand her his borrowed boater — before he could do so he became enthralled by the exaltation he saw there, her strong features dissolving in the warm droplets. No words were spoken as the carefully arranged folds of white muslin at her neck greyed into transparency and her clavicle filled