are you sure you &apos;re quite fit ? it &apos;s terrible weather . he turned round to face his colleague . for some esoteric reason Fairbanks always completed the buttoning of his flies in the main area of the lavatory . good morning , Harold , he said . I &apos;m pretty chipper , thanks , considering . he was a tiny man , of fanatical neatness , his remaining hair snowy , and cropped like a Prussian &apos;s . his white shirt cuffs were actually starched : he protruded from them his surprisingly thick and hairy wrists and began to wash . as a matter of fact a good hard frost seems to clear the old tubes . much better for me than the rain . good , said Colmore . excellent . Fairbanks hummed a few bars in a voice made resonant by the very weakness of his chest . Colmore was ready to leave , but delayed his departure , as one who dare not go to bed early for fear of missing some wholly unanticipated but remotely possible event of absorbing interest . he took up a clothes brush . I &apos;d like a little conference this morning , said Fairbanks . ten-thirty be all right ? he did not wait for a reply . get J.D , will you ? J.D was Davis , the other assistant Secretary . conference was Fairbanks &apos;s word for finding out what was going on . yes , Charles , certainly , Colmore said . it was not the Secretary &apos;s return to health that was disconcerting this morning - the man had to retire at sixty - but his irreproachable fa&amp;ccedil;ade . Westminster and Lincoln - not , of course , absolutely full-fruit standard , but serviceable enough . Colmore had more than once read his entry in who &apos;s who : son of Canon Fairbanks , married to the daughter of a knight , member of the Devonshire . Colmore thought of his own parents , now safely dead : his mother &apos;s wen , his father &apos;s lack of aspirates . with such a background one could never be really safe however brilliant one was . there were a score of things that could betray one &apos;s weakness , things that lay totally outside Fairbanks &apos;s conception . perhaps some outrageous relation would suddenly decide to call on him at his office : his Uncle Howard , say , whose nose had doubtless grown no less purple over the years . or his accent , which had carefully acquired a neutrality as unidentifiable as some composite creature evolved by statisticians , could break down unbeknown to himself , on the pronunciation of a common and tell-tale word . or , more subtly , his whole habit of mind and body , formed in the uncultured , nagging , parsimonious , penurious household of his childhood , might , at a crucial moment of his life , reveal him as utterly unsuitable for further advancement - not necessarily or , indeed , at all , by a word or gesture or family connection , but through the image of himself that had willy-nilly and over an extended period been fixed in the eyes of those who controlled his destiny . Fairbanks reached for a towel , a clean one and not the scarcely crumpled one that Colmore himself had used and had left thriftily on the ledge below the mirror rather than consign to the linen basket . of course , Colmore thought , as he put down the clothes brush and left the lavatory , in one sense , in a very real sense , his own action , which would have saved the two or three coppers on the authority &apos;s laundry bill , would have been the right , the virtuous one . he had simply never properly learnt what came to Fairbanks quite naturally , that the rules of conduct which must be enforced on the inferior mass do not apply to the rulers themselves . it was not long ago that Fairbanks had personally overhauled the system whereby the departments of the authority indented for stationery stores , making the ordering the responsibility of a department &apos;s senior administration officer who , among many other things , was henceforth to issue new pencils only on the surrender of an equivalent number of pencil stubs . when in 1940 he had first entered the service of the authority - though in those remote days it had , of course , been merely the executive committee - he had imagined that even its higher reaches were , like his own level , simply a matter of work , of problems set and overcome , of the advancement of the able and the stagnation of the inefficient . but as he had progressed and the organization itself had grown , he had begun to encounter all the unforeseen forces of birth , influence and intrigue . he had occasionally - even in those days - glimpsed the highest powers and their way of life : the building ( and this was 1941 ) of a massive series of oak lockers for the committee &apos;s hats and coats , following the theft of the Vice-Chairman &apos;s umbrella ; a meeting of the committee itself with virgin blotting paper , freshly-sharpened pencils , cut-glass carafes of water , and its members displaying not their ability ( which no doubt in some cases actually existed ) but the quality of their garments or knowledge of each other&apos;s background , and even in the case of the ex-trade union members a salience , a richness of feature that seemed at once designed for the convenience of the newspaper cartoonist and the product , like the splendour of a jungle animal , of some special advantage of nurture or habitat , so that each moustache or bald head or pair of spectacles was a unique and peculiarly finished specimen of its kind , possessing , indeed , some curious aesthetic quality as though added by a great painter . as he moved up in the hierarchy - or , rather , was buoyed along by the great influx of personnel below him when the authority became the authority and began to expand at an increasing rate with the end of the war - the world of the rulers grew less strange : it occasionally recognized his existence , his promotions became its concern , and he at last saw the possibility of breaking into it . though that was not quite the phrase , for even if he could succeed Sir Charles he would , as an executive , be eternally differentiated from the Governors . Fairbanks managed the Governors beautifully , he knew more than they , he was cleverer than most , discreetly used their Christian names - but remained their servant . they had no office hours , however elastic ; their lives were spent in committee making decisions for others to execute on the basis of data laboriously gathered for them ; they moved from board-room to board-room , encountering a succession of new pencils , clean towels , institutional crystal and silver , protein-rich lunches , immaculate agendas , able slaves . Lord Groves , for example , though doubtless compelled by earlier habits of comparative poverty to fried fish high teas , existed for the greater part of his life in luxury , lolling in the back of an authority Austin or in a complimentary stall , strolling along the promenade at a conference , eating in a free pullman car on his way to open a new authority provincial office . and even Lord Groves , despite his proletarian origins and political complexion , shared the fierce , jealous morality of the rulers . if Colmore was apprehensive of Fairbanks &apos;s view of his conduct , how much more had he to fear from the Governors , who at the breath of a scandal would close their ranks and utterly disown him . in their company he had sometimes had to check an expression of opinion , divining - as a child , ignorant of the moral standards of the adult world , anticipates censure in the premonitory motion of a mouth or eye - that what he was about to say would offend the collective ethos . it would be utter folly , for example , for him to indicate that he lacked religious belief ; though , no doubt , several of the Governors had never for years set foot in a place of worship , together they presented a solidly spiritual front . Colmore remembered , too , how one of their number had once commented to him on what to the speaker was the royal family &apos;s excessive interest in horse racing ; but the institution of royalty could never be called into question , and from the critic himself would certainly come one of the loudest of the murmurs of God bless her after a proposal of the loyal toast . for on this level , the great monoliths of the state which to the population at large presented the simple issue of aye or no , were capable of intimate criticism , albeit they were of unquestioned acceptance - as the friends of a celebrated actress will , without in the least denying her greatness or surpassing beauty , remark on a mole or wrinkle which the general public has never been close enough to see . among the Governors there was often casual talk of royals or Buck House : in the last analysis it was the honours and titles bestowed by the state through the institution of royalty - like the ease of mind which came through the allegiance to an official religion - which these men most valued , for in their position they were ambitious less for money than for the infinite gradations of social and public distinction . how stupid and gross would seem to them Colmore &apos;s abortive romance ! indeed , so it seemed at this moment to him . his desires , his fumbling way of fulfilling them , put him at the same sort of disadvantage as his voice , his school , his family - perhaps the one stemmed in some way from the other . as he reached his room he was seized with a sudden fright about Davis , who had come into the authority the normal way , via the civil service , and whose lack of the ultimate ability lay hidden in a charming orthodoxy . it was not until Colmore had been at his desk for a half-hour that his sense of power and control returned . his mastery of the authority &apos;s vital processes made him look forward with almost painful pleasure to the meeting with Fairbanks and Davis , as a well-prepared candidate to his examination . so that as he made his way to Fairbanks &apos;s room - fileless , paperless , leaving on his desk the daily returns of the authority &apos;s financial position , having transferred the relevant figures effortlessly to his memory - he searched greedily in his mind for some other reason for being happy , and lit on Judith . he marched up to the next floor , looking down at the sharp crease of his trousers along his thighs , sensing the satisfactory hang of his unbuttoned jacket as it moved gently in the disturbed air made by his passage , and thought : I &apos;ll keep her in reserve . the thought was comic even to him - that he should treat her like an item in the authority &apos;s accounts . but how few men of his years had this unobvious relationship , this inexhaustible source of aesthetic enjoyment , this secret and unforeseen extension of their youth , and who of those few would voluntarily surrender to the passionless final phase of their lives . 4 . the telephone rang and Colmore rose immediately . Dorothy said : let Anna take it , darling . she ought to practise her English . Anna was their European girl of the moment , half maid , half student . no , Colmore said , she &apos;s been waiting long enough for lunch as it is . and one of us will have to go in the end . they had just sat down at table after a rather extended session of gin and frenches with Colmore &apos;s three companions of the morning &apos;s golf whom he had brought home to meet up with their wives , already being entertained by Dorothy . a comforting husk of inebriation separated Colmore from reality and it seemed to him that his reaction in anticipating that the call would be from Judith was phenomenally quick and sagacious . they had not been in touch with each other since the unsatisfactory evening that had begun with the intrusion of the callow young man from Gilson &amp; Freeman &apos;s , whose name he could not dredge up through the alcohol , and the thought of speaking to her and even , in this uninhibited moment , arranging to see her soon - tomorrow , tonight - brought an excitement to him that was almost physically erotic . in the few yards from the dining-room he had time not only to review all this in detail but to savour the remains of his last mouthful of p&amp;acirc;t&amp;eacute; and to admire once again the colour and pattern of his new tweed suit that he was wearing for the first time today . 