When at last the convulsions had subsided and the patient, with blood on his face, looked up bewildered, the specialist's smile grew even more Buddhistic and bland and he said in a fluting voice, so that other people should hear, 'Well, I must say there's one improvement this week - you're falling so much more gracefully!'

He gave a light little well-bred laugh, which at once raised up in my mind a picture of some woman with enormous bust measurement, swathed in strainingly tight red velvet. He seemed delighted with his own urbane, unsentimental wit, and I felt that at that moment he would have used the words 'heartless elegance' about himself. He seemed really to be living for a moment in his own conception of an eighteenth-century French marquise in her brilliant salon.

I suddenly began to hate the specialist for his clownish show of vanity and facetiousness. I hated him so much that my face began to burn. I felt insulted and outraged; I wanted to have the specialist publicly beaten in front of all the staring patients. I imagined his black pin-striped trousers being taken down, and his squeals of shame and pain ringing through the ward.

Ian, painting alone in one corner, had smiled. He liked Bertha - even her exaggerated uncouthness and her absurd swearing amused him. He would certainly go to her party.

But now, as he sat on the bed in his room, he wondered what exactly fancy undress meant. He supposed it meant fig leaves, loincloths, straw-skirts, saucepan lids, but he wished he had asked some of the other students what they intended to wear. The knowledge would have given him more confidence.

Going over to the chest of drawers, he pulled out his faded mauve bathing 'trunks' and looked at them doubtfully. He remembered buying them with an unexpected postal order sent to him on his fifteenth birthday two years ago. His aunt had not thought mauve a very suitable colour for a boy, but he had liked them even more just because of her disapproval. Now moth holes stared up at him from important places; but these could be hidden....

Charming, heavy, swart Bertha, dressed all in Union Jacks, opened the door herself. A smooth round pillar of stomach divided her bunchy brassiere from her frilly skirt. She screamed, jumped up and down like a pneumatic road drill, then hustled Ian into a bedroom on the ground floor. There he found the clothes of all the other guests strewn about him carelessly. He shivered a little as he pulled on his [costume made from large leaves stitched to the swimming trunks], gowned himself and hung the garland round his neck. He tried not to feel naked and horribly defenceless. He longed for one of those awe-inspiring gorilla bodies. No-one would dare laugh then... Bertha gave him no time for further anxious brooding. She burst into the room and cried, 'Oh, but, Ian, you look sweet. What are you? A sort of little woodland sprite, or what?'

Overcome with confusion, Ian could only mutter savagely, 'I don't know. I'm nothing in particular, although I had thought of trying to come as Bacchus.'

'But you can't look nearly loose enough for that,' shrieked Bertha, taking his hand and pulling him into the living-room....

Ian grew so tired of stubbing his toes on unexpected pieces of furniture [in the party game of 'sardines'], of waiting breathlessly in the dark, that at last he crept up to the French window and let himself into the garden. The night wind blowing on his hot skin made him shiver, but he welcomed it. He went over to the [tethered] cats. They were all lying down, like the lions in Trafalgar Square. The Tom had made one of those amazing smells, fascinating and horrible in their pungency, their power to evoke all scenes of human squalor and misery. Ian squatted on his haunches near the cats and made sucking, cheeping noises in a forlorn effort to please them. Strangely enough the tabby roused herself and ambled up to him. She began to rub herself against his thighs. The feel of her soft fur on his bare flesh was delicious, but somehow vaguely shaming. Like some solemnly planned voluptuousness, it was too soft, too yielding, with no tang in it. Bertha was wrong about this cat, at least - she certainly showed no dislike of strangers. The tabby, trying to climb up on his knees, clutched at his chest when she found herself slipping. Ian gave a little gasp as the claws dug into his flesh. He put up his hand and felt a little trickle of blood. He licked it from his fingers, savouring the saltness on his tongue. Then he gathered up the cat and held it against his body. It was like nursing a huge silky cocoon, a baby wrapped in folds of slime, a purring seed about to burst from its velvet pod. He bent his head, cooing over the cat as if he would send her to sleep. She patted him once with her paw, ran her rough tongue over his skin, then nestled herself more snugly in his arms. The feathery brush of her fur, rising and falling, rising and falling, began to tickle just under his armpit. As a child he remembered his father tickling him there until he was unable to scream any more, until he felt he must go mad or die if the torture did not stop. The sensations came flooding back, turning the gentle tickle into something intolerable. The cat, as though she read his thoughts, turned in his arms and tried to struggle out, but perversely he held her, flattening her against him. In her alarm she gave him a savage little bite so that he loosened his grip; then she leapt away till the leash jerked on her neck, bringing her down, dejectedly. She was like a minute slave, bitter at the thoughts of her bonds. Ian stared down at her for a moment, then he turned abruptly and walked back into the house. He held the bite of his left pectoral muscle, but there was no blood this time. He knew just how it would look; there would be tiny white tooth marks, the skin abraded around the edge, as if he had been paper too much worn by indiarubber.

Orvil, who never could resist exploring derelict places, felt impelled to get through this hole into the garden behind. He also fiercely desired some very solitary place; for the frustration and excitement inside him were becoming almost unbearable.

He climbed up the broken steps and hid himself in the deep overgrown laurels.

When, after some minutes, he pushed through the hole and stood on the tow-path again, a man, who had evidently been waiting, jumped out at him from behind one of the stucco pillars.

'What are you doing on private property?' the man snapped, his eyes behind his glasses seeming to swell, and then to grow smaller, as some people's do when they are lusting. He was a respectable-looking man with hat-band slightly darkened and stained with sweat along the edge.

Orvil was extremely frightened, but at the same time the man's insolence enraged him and gave him quick wits for a very cheap rude answer.

'Is it your place, then?' he asked, politely incredulous, looking up at the grandiose if rather bedraggled gates, trying to put all his contempt into this nasty taunting of the man's poverty.

'Never you mind whose place it is - what are you doing trespassing? For the matter of that, why shouldn't it be my place?' the man added as the full import of Orvil's question sank in. He raised his flapping umbrella. He seemed so beside himself with rage that Orvil jumped back, quite expecting him to strike.

'I saw you! You devil! You filthy little devil! You'll go mad. Your eyes will drop out. And serve you right too. God is not mocked! God is not mocked!'

The man was now advancing on Orvil with his arms raised, in the style of a comic ranting minister or an Old Testament prophet.

Orvil's terror drove all his fierceness to the top. 'Shut up!' he screamed. 'Shut up! How dare you!'

They stood, white, sweaty, breathless, facing each other; then Orvil turned and ran, hating to be near the man with the umbrella for another moment.

He ran madly along the tow-path. The river banks were more populous here; he flashed past a picnic party and some young men outside a tent, who were singing Mozart's Sonata No 16, jazzed up, as they rubbed their dirt-ingrained broad shoulders with grimy towels. The young men made cat-calls and screeching whistles, calling after him in mockery, 'Hullo darling! Coo-er, look at that! What's bitten you?'

Orvil ran on, not bothered for once by these absurdities, because of his anger and fear.

He arrived at the hotel with dust on his sticky face. His hair was dank, and the leather scratched on the toe-caps of his shoes. He tried to stop gasping before he went into the court. It was the hour for late tea. Waiters threaded their way through the crowded room....

Suddenly ... he was overcome with an immense hunger. He passed rapidly through the court to get a book from the little writing-room beyond. He knew that a book in his hand or on his knee would give him confidence, alone in that throng. It would also add to the pleasure of the food.

The writing-room was low, with walls and ceiling decorated in Adam plasterwork of fantastic refinement, The festoons, pendant husks, quivers of arrows, ram's skulls with twisting horns, were all fined down to the most heartless delicacy. Orvil put out his finger and traced the outline of a tendril. The relief was so shallow and thin that it felt like a twirl of wire or thread. The complete whiteness of the room was only broken by the mahogany of the door, which had faded to the brilliant scintillating colour of a cat's eye.

Orvil looked along the shelves in their curved recesses on each side of the fireplace. At last he chose an Edwardian book on physical culture. The cover was decorated with a strong man bending his arms. His biceps had swollen into hard balls, and his belly and stomach were drawn in, so that the basket of the ribs overhung a smooth hollow.

Orvil took the book back with him to the crowded court and found a chair in a corner. His eye followed the glass trolleys axiously. A waiter approached and put down the teapot and hot-water jug of that frosted-looking silver found only in hotels. Orvil poured out a cup of tea and waited impatiently for the cakes. His eyes were already eating them up as the man steered the trolley towards him. The little cakes lay helpless on their plates and seemed to call to him. He took in at a glance the square ones covered with jam, sprinkled with coconut and topped with glistening cherries; the round shortbread ones with portholes to show the bright lemon curd inside; the small tarts of criss-cross lattice-work; the phallic chocolate and coffee eclairs, oozing fat worms of cream; the squares of sponge, enclosed in four hard slabs of chocolate and dressed with wicked green beauty-spots of pistachio nut.

Orvil had one of each sort put on a plate before him. He hardly dared ask for so many, and only achieved it by refusing to look at the waiter. He fixed his gaze on the distance until the waiter left him; then he bowed his head, opened the book, and began to eat.

The chatter and the music surged around him. The waves of sound broke through the deliciousness of the cakes, then receded and were forgotten again. Orvil was not concentrating, but the hyphenated words, 'press-up', 'knees-bend', 'trunk-turn', 'deep-breathing', jumped out from the printed page. His eyes also idly followed the diagrams of a coarse little man who squatted, thrust his legs out, and tucked his chin into his neck until a large vein, like a branching ivy stem, stood out on his forehead.

Although Orvil's eyes still looked down at the page, they gradually came to focus far beyond it. He thought of ruins lost in wooded valleys; kittens with black faces; toast in a Gothic Revival toast-rack like the nave of some miniature cathedral; lovely uncut stones reminiscent of sucked jujubes; a top-heavy georgian coffee-pot shaped like a funeral urn; his mother's minute ring-watch, the face the size of a sequin, with little diamonds winking all round it. He saw it again on her little finger, and remembered how miraculous it had always seemed.

His mind turned from the things it loved to the things it hated. He thought of rude cocktail cabinets which resembled nothing so much as old-fashioned commodes. On lifting the lid of one of these articles, it was still a shock to him to find, instead of a pan, a nest of glasses painted, oh so artfully, with cocks. He thought of the perilous joke of a Faberge cigarette-lighter, in bronze and ormolu, shaped like an anarchist's bomb. It had been given to his father by a Russian refugee. He remembered flicking the little wheel and watching the flame prick up. He thought of the absurd hookah and bottle of rose-water he had once bought for his father's birthday present.

The cakes were all gone now. Gradually Orvil's chin sank down on to his chest. He felt comforted and soothed, and the memory of his unhappy day evaporated. People left the court to go to their rooms to dress. Soon it was nearly empty; but Orvil did not move. He had fallen asleep.

When I did arrive, I found the wooden hut at the back of the farm-house full of small boys. A young master was in charge of them. He came up to speak to me at once, telling me that they had come from a school in the north and that they always went for a jaunt in the summer.

The boys were rushing around, shouting and making such a noise with their feet in the flimsy shed that I could hardly hear what he said.

'We've got to have supper now,' he yelled; and he went off cheerfully to marshal his boys.

He seemed very strict and full of orders, I thought. The boys were not particularly obedient, and I heard him shout exasperatedly, 'That's not playing the game - do it properly - don't play the goat,' many times.

The boys were perfectly sure that he would not get too angry. They banged about with enamel plates and mugs; a group of them hung round him continually, waiting for orders, but doing nothing.

At last he had them all sitting at the trestle table with their bread and butter and cocoa before them. He appealed to their better natures, telling them not to be greedy or to eat nastily. All the time he was working very hard; his dark hair began to hang down limply over his white, damp forehedad, and his mouth was continually open.

The boys shouted all their jokes to him, asked him absurd questions, hung on his arms, and passed him food.

After the meal, when they had banged and rattled all their mugs and plates into the sink and wiped them on their dirty towels, they grouped round him in a spreading mass; the whole floor seemed to be covered with boys. An amazing silence reigned. What was going to happen? Were they going to pray?

The young master sat above them on the trestle table, swinging his feet. Several boys climbed up from the floor and clung around him. He shook them off half-heartedly, then decided to take their arms in his and hold them in subdued positions in this way.

'What's it going to be?' he asked all the boys with verve.

They shouted different names; the master decided on the most popular and called out:

'Very well, we'll have "Chestnut Tree".'

A roar of delight went up followed by as sudden a silence; then the singing and miming began.

The master led with athletic energy. He beat his chest, tapped his head, held out his hands, till the sweat grew in diamonds on his face. The chorus of piping shrill voices affected my curiously. It was such a green, unfeeling, assured sound. It was like listening to a room full of green parrots who knew that they were saying their pieces properly. It was a charming sound, but also very indifferent and cold.

Towards the end of the song I noticed the farmer and his wife [who owned the shed] creeping into the room. They sat down quietly by the window and listened....

I saw the farmer's wife gazing far into the distance; her mouth was set and her plump, rather mottled cheeks held firm. She wore the tragic look of someone who is enjoying an unhappy feeling. Her eyes began to brim and sparkle, then I saw the tears running down her face. She took no notice, but left them there, glistening like shiny snail tracks. Her husband sat stolidly at her side, not looking at her, and the boys were too busy singing. I think I was the only one who saw. 

I got up to go out, feeling angry at the sight of her tears.

Today we took our lunch into the cold morning sun and went out on bicycles. We hurtled down the hill to the 'Volunteers', because Eric wanted a stirrup-cup.
We found the bar parlour full of old men; no other human beings. They were all using the word bloody.

We had gin and Eric drank his with half a pint of stock. We did this three times. I looked at Eric with the sun on him, and saw the tiny red veins on his cheeks and the acid spear-points of yellow and green-brown eyes.

One of the old men started to cry, and another said, 'It's no good crying now, it's too late.' Still the old man went on gently crying and wiping the corners of his eyes; He was a disgusting-shaped old man, and another of them had a dead swivelled eye. They were all disgusting.

The gin went a little to my head. I talked louder.

A very young sailor came in and was given a drink on the house. He wore an amazing expression of gentleness, almost shrinking nervousness and longing to fulfil his own and everybody else's obligations. I could not help staring at this extraordinary modest, blushing, conciliating expression. It was so naked that it was painful. One felt in some way that everyone gave him an awful time. He seemed quite unprotected. I muttereed something to Eric, and a little later, tactfully, he looked round. We said no more till afterwards...

At last we had to go. It was curious, suddenly to see everyone out of doors in the daylight, harsh, and everything cold-looking because one was a little drunk.
I said, 'Don't let's ride our bikes just yet,' because I thought I would fall off. Eric agreed and we wheeled them down the road towards a little wood where I thought we would have lunch.

Eric talked about the expression on the sailor's face. He said exactly what I had thought. 'He's always wanting to please everyone, and everyone gives him a bad time.'
We saw him waiting for the bus. He still wore this same expression.

We walked on, talking loudly and a little drunkenly. Eric said, 'When I take you into a pub, I feel like my father when he took me in for the first time.' And I agreed that I felt like the son who was being shown his way around.

When we got to the opening which led into the wood, we pushed our bicycles up over the brambles and leaves; we came out at the charming clearing that I knew, and we laid my coat on the ground and spread out the lunch. Hard-boiled eggs, toast, coffee, beer for Eric, biscuits, apple tart, blackcurrant puree.

The world was slightly hazy and in a whirl. The weak sun shone. We were warm from the pub and the drink. We lay back against the tree trunk, close together because the wind was cold.

It seems unbearably sad now to think of that picnic, so unsuitable for the time of year, so lost in the wood and in the time and with only two tiny points of humanity to remember it. It strikes me and bites for some reason whenever I think of it. 
We ate happily. I realised that I had been feeling quite drunk when it began to wear off.

Eric knelt up beside me and tried to put his coat right round me, for he saw I was getting cold. 

There we sat and knelt, smoking out pipes. I knew I would remember it afterwards and always. It was too sad to forget. And there was a lovely quality, too, because of the drink and the wood and our hunger for the nice food.

Eric saw how sad I was... [He] lay down on the ground and shut his eyes. We both felt, then, I think, how doomed we were, how doomed everyone was, we saw very clearly the plain tragedy of our lives and of everybody's. A year after a year after a year passes, and then you look back and your sadness pierces you. We were very sad from the drink, and clear-sighted.

I told Eric that he couldn't go to sleep there on the ground, as the sun was disappearing behind clouds and it was getting colder and colder. We got up to go, leaving the egg-shells on the ground. I think of those terribly sad egg-shells lying in the wood now. I feel that I shall go back to visit them. 

We bicycled on across Shipbourne Common where the church bells were ringing; then we climbed up the hill and came back home. We sat by the gas fire and had tea, then we lay down and rested, we were so tired; for the night before we had talked nearly all night.