There was, as I had expected, no great difficulty about the flat. We left the car locked up in the middle of the road in front of an opulent-looking block, and climbed to the third storey. Quite why we chose the third I can’t say, except that it seemed a bit more out of the way. The process of selection was simple. We knocked or we rang, and if anyone answered, we passed on. After we had passed on three times we found a door where there was no response. The socket of the rim-lock tore off to one good heft of the shoulder, and we were in.
I had not, myself, been one of those addicted to living in a flat with a rent of some £2,000 a year, but I found that there were decidedly things to be said in favour of it. The interior decorators had been, I guessed, elegant young men with just that ingenious gift for combining taste with advanced topicality which is so expensive. Consciousness of fashion was the mainspring of the place. Here and there were certain unmistakable derniers cris, some of them undoubtedly destined – had the world pursued its expected course – to become the rage of tomorrow: others, I would say, a dead loss from their very inception. The overall effect was all Trade Fair in its neglect of human foibles – a book left a few inches out of place, or with the wrong colour on its jacket would ruin the whole carefully considered balance and tone – so, too, would the person thoughtless enough to wear the wrong clothes when sitting upon the wrong luxurious chair or sofa. I turned to Josella who was staring wide-eyed at it all.
‘Will this little shack serve – or do we go further?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I guess we’ll make out,’ she said. And together we waded through the delicate cream carpet to explore.
It was quite uncalculated, but I could scarcely have hit upon a more satisfactory method of taking her mind off the events of the day. Our tour was punctuated with a series of exclamations in which admiration, envy, delight, contempt, and, one must confess, malice, all played their parts. Josella paused on the threshold of a room rampant with all the most aggressive manifestations of femininity.
‘I’ll sleep here,’ she said.
‘My God!’ I remarked. ‘Well, each to her taste.’
‘Don’t be nasty. I probably won’t have another chance to be decadent. Besides, don’t you know there’s a bit of the dumbest film-star in every girl? So I’ll let it have its final fling.’
‘You shall,’ I said. ‘But I hope they keep something quieter around here. Heaven preserve me from having to sleep in a bed with a mirror set in the ceiling over it.’
‘There’s one above the bath, too,’ she said, looking into an adjoining room.
‘I don’t know whether that would be the zenith or nadir of decadence,’ I said. ‘But anyway, you’ll not be using it. No hot water.’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten that. What a shame!’ she exclaimed, disappointedly.
We completed our inspection of the premises, finding the rest less sensational. Then she went out to deal with the matter of clothes. I made an inspection of the apartment’s resources and limitations, and then set out on an expedition of my own.
As I stepped outside, another door farther down the passage opened. I stopped, and stood still where I was. A young man came out, leading a fair-haired girl by the hand. As she stepped over the threshold he released his grasp.
‘Wait just a minute, darling,’ he said.
He took three or four steps on the silencing carpet. His outstretched hands found the window which ended the passage. His fingers went straight to the catch and opened it. I had a glimpse of a fire-escape outside.
‘What are you doing, Jimmy?’ she asked.
‘Just making sure,’ he said, stepping quickly back to her, and feeling for her hand again. ‘Come along, darling.’
She hung back.
‘Jimmy – I don’t like leaving here. At least we know where we are in our own flat. How are we going to feed? How are we going to live?’
‘In the flat, darling, we shan’t feed at all – and therefore not live long. Come along, sweetheart. Don’t be afraid.’
‘But I am, Jimmy – I am.’
She clung to him, and he put one arm round her.
‘We’ll be all right, darling. Come along.’
‘But Jimmy, that’s the wrong way – ’
‘You’ve got it twisted round, dear. It’s the right way.’
‘Jimmy – I’m so frightened. Let’s go back.’
‘It’s too late, darling.’
By the window he paused. With one hand he felt his position very carefully. Then he put both arms round her, holding her to him.
‘Too wonderful to last, perhaps,’ he said softly. ‘I love you, my sweet. I love you so very, very much.’
She turned her lips up to be kissed.
As he lifted her he turned, and stepped out of the window…
‘You’ve got to grow a hide,’ I told myself. ‘Got to. It’s either that or stay permanently drunk. Things like that must be happening all around. They’ll go on happening. You can’t help it. Suppose you’d given them food to keep them alive for another few days? What after that? You’ve got to learn to take it, and come to terms with it. There’s nothing else but the alcoholic funk-hole. If you don’t fight to live your own life in spite of it, there won’t be any survival…Only those who can make their minds tough enough to stick it are going to get through…
It took me longer than I had expected to collect what I wanted. Something like two hours had passed before I got back. I dropped one or two things from my armful in negotiating the door. Josella’s voice called with a trace of nervousness from that over-feminine room.
‘Only me,’ I reassured her, as I advanced down the passage with the load.
I dumped the things in the kitchen, and went back for those I’d dropped. Outside her door I paused.
‘You can’t come in,’ she said.
‘That wasn’t quite my intended angle,’ I protested. ‘What I want to know is, can you cook?’
‘Boiled egg standard,’ said her muffled voice.
‘I was afraid of that. There’s an awful lot of things we’re going to have to learn,’ I told her.
I went back to the kitchen. I erected the oil-stove I had brought on top of the useless electric cooker, and got busy.
When I’d finished laying the places at the small table in the sitting-room, the effect seemed to me fairly good. I fetched a few candles and candlesticks to complete it, and set them ready. Of Josella there was still no visible sign, though there had been sounds of running water some little time ago. I called her.
‘Just coming,’ she answered.
I wandered across to the window, and looked out. Quite consciously I began saying goodbye to it all. The sun was low. Towers, spires, façades of Portland stone were white or pink against the dimming sky. More fires had broken out here and there. The smoke climbed in big black smudges, sometimes with a lick of flame at the bottom of them. Quite likely, I told myself, I would never in my life again see any of these familiar buildings after tomorrow. There might be a time when one would be able to come back – but not to the same place. Fires and weather would have worked on it: it would be visibly dead and abandoned. But now, at a distance, it could still masquerade as a living city.
My father once told me that before Hitler’s war he used to go around London with his eyes more widely open than ever before, seeing the beauties of buildings that he had never noticed before – and saying goodbye to them. And now I had a similar feeling. But this was something worse. Much more than anyone could have hoped for had survived that war – but this was an enemy they would not survive. It was not wanton smashing and wilful burning that they waited for this time: it was simply the long, slow, inevitable course of decay and collapse.
Standing there, and at that time, my heart still resisted what my head was telling me. Even yet I had the feeling that it was all something too big, too unnatural really to happen. Yet I knew that it was by no means the first time that it had happened. The corpses of other great cities are lying buried in deserts, and obliterated by the jungles of Asia. Some of them fell so long ago that even their names have gone with them. But to those who lived there their dissolution can have seemed no more probable or possible than the necrosis of a great modern city seemed to me…
It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that ‘it can’t happen here’ – that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it was happening here. Unless there should be some miracle I was looking on the beginning of the end of London – and very likely, it seemed, there were other men, not unlike me, who were looking on the beginning of the end of New York, Paris, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Bombay, and all the rest of the cities that were destined to go the way of those others under the jungles.
I was still looking out when a sound of movement came from behind me. I turned, and saw that Josella had come into the room. She was wearing a long, pretty frock of palest blue georgette with a little jacket of white fur. In a pendant on a simple chain a few blue-white diamonds flashed, the stones that gleamed in her ear-clips were smaller but as fine in colour. Her hair and her face might have been fresh from a beauty parlour. She crossed the floor with a flicker of silver slippers and a glimpse of gossamer stockings. As I went on staring without speaking, her mouth lost its little smile.
‘Don’t you like it?’ she asked, with childish half-disappointment.
‘It’s lovely – you’re beautiful,’ I told her. ‘I – well, I just wasn’t expecting anything like this…’
Something more was needed. I knew that it was a display which had little or nothing to do with me. I added:
‘You’re saying goodbye?’
A different look came into her eyes.
‘So you do understand. I hoped you would.’
‘I think I do. I’m glad you’ve done it. It’ll be a lovely thing to remember,’ I said.
I stretched out my hand to her and led her to the window.
‘I was saying goodbye, too – to all this.’
What went on in her mind as we stood there side by side is her secret. In mine there was a kind of kaleidoscope of the life and ways that were now finished – or perhaps it was more like flipping through a huge volume of photographs with one all-comprehensive ‘do-you-remember?’
We looked for a long time, lost in our thoughts. Then she sighed. She glanced down at her dress, fingering the delicate silk.
‘Silly? – Rome burning?’ she said, with a rueful little smile.
‘No – sweet,’ I said. ‘Thank you for doing it. A gesture – and a reminder that with all the faults there was so much beauty. You couldn’t have done – or looked – a lovelier thing.’
Her smile lost its ruefulness.
‘Thank you, Bill.’ She paused. Then she added: ‘Have I said thank you before? I don’t think I have. If you hadn’t helped me when you did – ’
‘But for you,’ I told her, ‘I should probably by now be lying maudlin and sozzled in some bar. I have just as much to thank you for. This is no time to be alone.’ Then, to change the trend, I added: ‘And speaking of drink, there’s an excellent Amontillado here, and some pretty good things to follow. This is a very well-found flat.’
I poured out the sherry, and we raised our glasses.
‘To health, strength – and luck,’ I said.
She nodded. We drank.
‘What,’ Josella asked, as we started on an expensive-tasting paâté, ‘what if the owner of all this suddenly comes back?’
‘In that case we will explain – and he or she should be only too thankful to have someone here to tell him which bottle is which, and so on – but I don’t think that is very likely to happen.’
‘No,’ she agreed, considering. ‘No. I’m afraid that’s not very likely. I wonder – ’ She looked round the room. Her eyes paused at a fluted white pedestal. ‘Did you try the radio – I suppose that thing is a radio, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a television projector, too,’ I told her. ‘But no good. No power.’
‘Of course, I forgot. I suppose we’ll go on forgetting things like that for quite a time.’
‘But I did try one when I was out,’ I said. ‘A battery affair. Nothing doing. All broadcast bands as silent as the grave.’
‘That means it’s like this everywhere?’
‘I’m afraid so. There was something pip-pipping away around forty-two metres. Otherwise nothing. Not even carriers. I wonder who and where he was, poor chap.’
‘It’s – it’s going to be pretty grim, Bill, isn’t it?’
‘It’s – no, I’m not going to have my dinner clouded,’ I said. ‘Pleasure before business – and the future is definitely business. Let’s talk about something interesting like how many love-affairs you have had and why somebody hasn’t married you long before this – or has he? You see how little I know. Life story, please.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was born about three miles from here. My mother was very annoyed about it at the time.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘You see, she had quite made up her mind that I should be an American. But when the car came to take her to the airport it was just too late. Full of impulses, she was – I think I inherited some of them.’
She prattled on. There was not much remarkable about her early life, but I think she enjoyed herself in summarizing it, and forgetting where we were for a while. I enjoyed listening to her babble of the familiar and amusing things that had all vanished from the world outside. We worked lightly through childhood, school-days, and ‘coming out’ – in so far as the term still meant anything.
‘I did nearly get married when I was nineteen,’ she admitted, ‘and aren’t I glad now it didn’t happen. But I didn’t feel like that at the time. I had a frightful row with Daddy who’d broken the whole thing up because he saw right away that Lionel was a spizzard and…’
‘A what?’ I interrupted.
‘A spizzard. A sort of cross between a spiv and a lizard – the lounge kind. So then I cut my family off and went and lived with a girl I knew who had a flat. And my family cut off my allowance, which was a very silly thing to do because it might have had just the opposite effect from what they intended. As it happened, it didn’t, because all the girls I knew who were making out that way seemed to me to have a very wearing sort of time of it. Not much fun, an awful lot of jealousy to put up with – and so much planning. You’d never believe how much planning it needs to keep one or two second strings in good condition – or do I mean two or three spare strings – ?’ She pondered.
‘Never mind,’ I told her. ‘I get the general idea. You just didn’t want the strings at all.’
‘Intuitive, you are. All the same, I couldn’t just sponge on the girl who had the flat. I did have to have some money, so I wrote the book.’
I did not think I’d heard quite aright.
‘You made a book?’ I suggested.
‘I wrote the book.’ She glanced at me, and smiled. ‘I must look awfully dumb – that’s just the way they all used to look at me when I told them I was writing a book. Mind you, it wasn’t a very good book – I mean, not like Aldous or Charles or people of that kind, but it worked.’
I refrained from inquiring which of many possible Charles’s this referred to. I simply asked:
‘You mean it did get published?’
‘Oh, yes. And it really brought in quite a lot of money. The film rights – ’
‘What was this book?’ I asked, curiously.
‘It was called Sex is My Adventure.’
I stared, and then smote my forehead.
‘Josella Playton, of course. I couldn’t think why that name kept on nearly ringing bells. You wrote that thing?’ I added, incredulously.
I couldn’t think why I had not remembered before. Her photograph had been all over the place – not a very good photograph now I could look at the original, and the book had been all over the place, too. Two large circulating libraries had banned it, probably on the title alone. After that, its success had been assured, and the sales went rocketing up into the hundred thousands. Josella chuckled. I was glad to hear it.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘You look just like all my relatives did.’
‘I can’t blame them,’ I told her.
‘Did you read it?’ she asked.
I shook my head. She sighed.
‘People are funny. All you know about it is the title and the publicity, and you’re shocked. And it’s such a harmless little book, really. Mixture of green-sophisticated and pink-romantic, with patches of school-girly-purple. But the title was a good idea.’
‘All depends what you mean by good,’ I suggested. ‘And you put your own name to it, too.’
‘That,’ she agreed, ‘was a mistake. The publishers persuaded me that it would be so much better for publicity. From their point of view they were right. I became quite notorious for a bit – it used to make me giggle inside when I saw people looking speculatively at me in restaurants and places – they seemed to find it so hard to tie up what they saw with what they thought. Lots of people I didn’t care for took to turning up regularly at the flat, so to get rid of them, and because I’d proved that I didn’t have to go home, I went home again.
‘The book rather spoiled things, though. People would be so literal-minded about the title. I seem to have been keeping up a permanent defensive ever since against people I don’t like – and those I wanted to like were either scared or shocked. What’s so annoying is that it wasn’t even a wicked book – it was just silly-shocking, and sensible people ought to have seen that.’
She paused contemplatively. It occurred to me that the sensible people had probably decided that the author of Sex is My Adventure would be silly-shocking, too, but I forbore to suggest it. We all have our youthful follies embarrassing to recall – but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.
‘It sort of twisted everything,’ she complained. ‘I was writing another book to try to balance things up again. But I’m glad I’ll never finish it – it was rather bitter.’
‘With an equally alarming title?’ I asked.
She shook her head: ‘It was to be called Here the Forsaken.’
‘H’m – well, it certainly lacks the snap of the other,’ I said. ‘Quotation?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Mr Congreve: “Here the forsaken Virgin rests from Love.” ’
‘Er – oh,’ I said, and thought that one over for a bit.
‘And now,’ I suggested, ‘I think it’s about time we began to rough out a plan of campaign. Shall I throw around a few observations first?’
We lay back in two superbly comfortable armchairs. On the low table between us stood the coffee apparatus and two glasses. Josella’s was the small one with the Cointreau. The plutocratic-looking balloon with the puddle of unpriceable brandy was mine. Josella blew out a feather of smoke, and took a sip of her drink. Savouring the flavour, she said:
‘I wonder whether we shall ever taste fresh oranges again? Okay, shoot.’
‘Well, it’s no good blinking facts. We had better clear out soon. If not tomorrow, then the day after. You can begin to see already what’s going to happen here. At present there’s still water in the tanks. Soon there won’t be. The whole city will begin to stink like a great sewer. There are already some bodies lying about – every day there will be more.’ I noticed her shudder. I had for the moment, in taking the general view, forgotten the particular application it would have for her. I hurried on: ‘That may mean typhus, or cholera, or God knows what. It’s important to get away before anything of that kind starts.’
She nodded agreement to that.
‘Then the next question seems to be, where do we go? Have you any ideas?’ I asked her.
‘Well – I suppose, roughly, somewhere out of the way. A place with a good water supply we can be sure of, a well, perhaps. And I should think it would be best to be as high up as we reasonably can – some place where there’ll be a nice clean wind.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’d not thought of the clean wind part, but you’re right. A hilltop with a good water supply – that’s not so easy offhand.’ I thought a moment. ‘The Lake District? No, too far. Wales, perhaps? Or maybe Exmoor or Dartmoor – or right down in Cornwall? Around Land’s End we’d have the prevailing south-west wind coming in untainted over the Atlantic. But that, too, was a long way. We should be dependent on towns when it became safe to visit them again.’
‘What about the Sussex Downs?’ Josella suggested. ‘I know a lovely old farmhouse on the north side, looking right across towards Pulborough. It’s not on the top of hills, but it’s well up the side. There’s a wind-pump for water, and I think they make their own electricity. It’s all been converted and modernized.’
‘Desirable residence, in fact. But it’s a bit near populous places. Don’t you think we ought to get further away?’
‘Well, I was wondering. How long is it going to be before it’ll be safe to go into the towns again?’
‘I’ve no real idea,’ I admitted. ‘I’d something like a year in mind – surely that ought to be a safe enough margin?’
‘I see. But if we do go too far away, it isn’t going to be at all easy to get supplies later on.’
‘That is a point, certainly,’ I agreed.
We dropped the matter of our final destination for the moment, and got down to working out details for our removal. In the morning, we decided, we would first of all acquire a lorry – a capacious lorry – and between us we made a list of the essentials we would put into it. If we could finish the stocking up, we would start on our way the next evening, if not – and the list was growing to a length which made this appear much the more likely – we would risk another night in London, and get away the following day.
It was close on midnight when we had finished adding our own secondary wants to the list of musts. The result resembled a department-store catalogue. But if it had done no more than serve to take our minds off ourselves for the evening it would have been worth the trouble.
Josella yawned, and stood up.
‘Sleepy,’ she said. ‘ – And silk sheets waiting on an ecstatic bed.’
She seemed to float across the thick carpet. With her hand on the door-knob she stopped and turned to regard herself solemnly in a long mirror.
‘Some things were fun,’ she said, and kissed her hand to her reflection.
‘Good night, you vain, sweet vision,’ I said.
She turned with a small smile, and then vanished through the door like a mist drifting away.
I poured out a final drop of the superb brandy, warmed it in my hands, and sipped it.
‘Never – never again now will you see a sight like that,’ I told myself. ‘Sic transit…’
And then, before I should become utterly morbid, I took myself to my more modest bed.
I was stretched in comfort on the edge of sleep when there came a
knocking at the door.
‘Bill,’ said Josella’s voice. ‘Come quickly. There’s a light!’
‘What sort of a light?’ I inquired, struggling out of bed.
‘Outside. Come and look.’
She was standing in the passage wrapped in the sort of garment that could have belonged only to the owner of that remarkable bedroom.
‘Good God!’ I said, nervously.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ she told me, irritably. ‘Come and look at that light.’
A light there certainly was. Looking out of her window towards what I judged to be the north-east, I could see a bright beam like that of a searchlight pointed unwaveringly upwards.
‘That must mean there’s somebody else there who can see,’ she said.
‘It must,’ I agreed.
I tried to locate the source of it, but in the surrounding darkness I was unable to decide. No great distance away, I was sure, and seeming to start in mid-air – which probably meant that it was mounted on a high building. I hesitated.
‘Better leave it till tomorrow,’ I decided.
The idea of trying to find our way to it through the dark streets was far from attractive. And it was just possible – highly unlikely, but just possible – that it was a trap. Even a blind man who was clever and desperate enough might be able to wire such a thing up by touch.
I found a nail-file and squatted down with my eye on the level of the window-sill. With the point of the file I drew a careful line in the paint, marking the exact direction of the beam’s source. Then I went back to my room.
I lay awake for an hour or more. Night magnified the quiet of the city, making the sounds which broke it the more desolate. From time to time voices rose from the street, edgy and brittle with hysteria. Once there came a freezing scream which seemed to revel horribly in its release from sanity. Somewhere not far away a sobbing went on endlessly, hopelessly. Twice I heard the sharp reports of single pistol shots…I gave heartfelt thanks to whatever it was that had brought Josella and me together for companionship.
Complete loneliness was the worst state I could imagine just then. Alone one would be nothing. Company meant purpose, and purpose helped to keep the morbid fears at bay.
I tried to shut out the sounds by thinking of all the things I must do the next day, the day after, and the days after that; by guessing what the beam of light might mean, and how it might affect us. But the sobbing in the background went on and on and on, reminding me of the things I had seen that day, and would see tomorrow…
The opening of the door brought me sitting up in sudden alarm. It was Josella, carrying a lighted candle. Her eyes were wide and dark, and she had been crying.
‘I can’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened – horribly frightened. Can you hear them – all those poor people? I can’t stand it…’
She came like a child for comfort. I’m not sure that her need of it was much greater than mine.
She fell asleep before I did, with her head resting on my shoulder.
Still the memories of the day would not leave me in peace. But, in the end, one does sleep. My last recollection was of the sweet, sad voice of the girl who had sung:
So we’ll go no more a-roving…
6
Rendezvous
When I awoke I could hear Josella already moving around in the kitchen. My watch said nearly seven o’clock. By the time I had shaved uncomfortably in cold water and dressed myself, there was a smell of toast and coffee drifting through the apartment. I found her holding a pan over the oilstove. She had an air of self-possession which was hard to associate with the frightened figure of the night before. Her manner was practical, too.
‘Canned milk, I’m afraid. The fridge stopped. Everything else is all right, though,’ she said.
It was difficult for a moment to believe that the expediently dressed form before me had been the ballroom vision of the previous evening. She had chosen a dark-blue ski-ing suit with white-topped socks rolled above sturdy shoes. On a dark leather belt she wore a finely-made hunting knife to replace the mediocre weapon I had found the day before. I have no idea how I expected to find her dressed, nor whether I had given the matter any thought, but the practicality of her choice was by no means the only impression I received as I saw her.
‘Will I do, do you think?’ she said.
‘Eminently,’ I assured her. I looked down at myself. ‘I wish I’d had as much forethought. Gents’ lounge-suiting isn’t quite the rig for the job,’ I added.
‘You could do better,’ she agreed, with a candid glance at my crumpled suit.
‘That light last night,’ she went on, ‘came from the University Tower – at least, I’m pretty sure it did. There’s nothing else noticeable exactly on that line. It seems about the right distance, too.’
I went into her room, and looked along the scratch I had drawn on the sill. It did, as she said, point directly at the tower. And I noticed something more. The tower was flying two flags on the same mast. One might have been left hoisted by chance, but two must be a deliberate signal; the daytime equivalent of the light. We decided over breakfast that we would postpone our planned programme and make investigation of the tower our first job for the day.
We left the flat about half an hour later. As I had hoped, the station waggon by standing out in the middle of the street had escaped the attentions of prowlers, and was intact. Without delaying further, we dropped the suitcases that Josella had acquired into the back among the triffid gear, and started off.
Few people were about. Presumably weariness and the chill in the air had made them aware that night had fallen, and not many had yet emerged from whatever sleeping-places they had found. Those who were to be seen were keeping more to the gutters and less to the walls than they had on the previous day. Most of them were now holding sticks or bits of broken wood with which they tapped their way along the kerb. It made for easier going than by the housefronts with their entrances and projections, and the tapping had decreased the frequency of collisions.
We threaded our way with little difficulty, and after a time turned into Store Street to see the University Tower at the end of it rising straight before us.
‘Steady,’ said Josella, as we turned into the empty road. ‘I think there’s something happening at the gates.’
She was right. As we came nearer we could see a not inconsiderable crowd beyond the end of the street. The previous day had given us a distaste for crowds. I swung right down Gower Street, ran on for fifty yards or so, and stopped.
‘What do you reckon’s going on there? Do we investigate or clear out?’ I asked.
‘I’d say investigate,’ Josella replied promptly.
‘Good. Me too,’ I agreed.
‘I remember this part,’ she added. ‘There’s a garden behind these houses. If we can get in there we ought to be able to see what’s happening without mixing ourselves up in it.’
We left the car, and started peering hopefully into basement areas. In the third we found an open door. A passage straight through the house led into the garden. The place was common to a dozen or so houses, and curiously laid out, being for the most part at the level of the basements, and thus below that of the surrounding streets, but on the far side, that closest to the University Building, it rose to a kind of terrace separated from the road by tall iron gates and a low wall. We could hear the sound of the crowd beyond it as a kind of composite murmur. We crossed the lawn, made our way up a sloped gravel path and found a place behind a screen of bushes whence we could watch.