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By Root 5610 0

of schemes. As for obeying rules, at school she had more than once spat in the eye of authority (she had practised spitting in the garden in Singapore). Rules were made to be broken, in Melanie’s view. Yes, Langfield blood ran in her veins all right; if Walter could have read her school report he would have been in no doubt about that. But perhaps she had mellowed a little, had she not, in the course of the past few months as her body began the upsetting change from that of a child to that of a woman? Well, no, not really, no, she had not mellowed at all. All that had happened was that her preoccupations had begun to change, and Kate’s with them: both girls had become more curious about men. A few months earlier those four eyes observing Matthew would have passed over him without really noticing him, as over a potted plant or a chest of drawers. But now they remained on him attentively as he sat on the steps with his head in his hands.

‘Darling, whatever is the matter with the Human Bean?’

‘Darling, I haven’t the faintest.’

‘Haven’t you, darling? Let’s go and ask him.’

Matthew was quite glad to see the girls, though surprised that Kate, who usually called him ‘Matthew’ should call him ‘My dear darling Human Bean’. When she had introduced him to her dearest friend in the whole world, Melanie, he asked her to explain and she told him how Ehrendorf had called him a ‘wonderful human bean’. ‘Ah, poor Ehrendorf,’ he thought. ‘Where is he now, I wonder?’

While this was being settled Melanie’s eyes had been examining Matthew’s face in a way which was every bit as calculating as one might have expected even of a senior Langfield. And now she had a suggestion which to Kate seemed staggering in its audacity: the Human Bean should take them to the cinema! This was daring: neither girl was allowed to go to the cinema until she had forced her way through a veritable thicket of preconditions: an eternity of good behaviour was demanded, not to mention school reports which were favourable almost to the point of fawning … and, most thorny of all, a preliminary inspection of the film by an adult member of the family.

But if Melanie’s first suggestion was daring, her second was breathtaking in its temerity. For, fixing her bright, unblinking eyes on Matthew’s face like a lizard watching a moth, she added: ‘We want to go and see Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge.’ Kate grew very tense; she held her breath and her heart began to pound. She had difficulty in preventing herself from gasping at this. Waterloo Bridge was a picture for grown-ups. It would never have qualified as suitable in a million years! It spoke (so they had been told by Mrs Langfield’s Irish maid) of intimate and romantic relations between men and women. It was about all that sort of thing (for Kate ‘all that sort of thing’ was a churning vat of dark and still mysterious experience from beneath whose tap-tapping lid there issued an occasional whiff of intoxicating steam). She suddenly began to feel rather sick with excitement and dread. One moment it had been an ordinary, rather boring afternoon, the next she was walking along the edge of a dizzy precipice with the gravel crumbling from under her feet.

Matthew, meanwhile, was looking rather bemused, like someone who has just been roused from a heavy afternoon nap. He looked vaguely at his watch, shook his wrist and looked at it again. But it was working, after all.

‘Go on, be a sport,’ said Melanie. ‘We could go to the four o’clock show and be back for supper,’ she added persuasively.

‘No one would know,’ put in Kate, and received a vicious, warning pinch from Melanie: she would arouse the Bean’s suspicions by making stupid remarks like that.

Matthew was not all that keen, anyway. It was too hot to sit in a picture-house. ‘I really came over to see Joan, you know. There was something I wanted to ask her.’

‘She won’t be back for ages!’

‘Probably not before supper!’

‘Oh, won’t she?’ Matthew looked rather baffled and again consulted his watch. ‘Couldn’t we go another time? Say, the day after tomorrow, for example?’