'Can you tell us where Roselands is?'
'I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've only just come to live here.'
'You don't know a Doctor Baker?'
'Doctor Davidson.
I know Doctor Davidson.'
'No, it's Doctor Baker we want.'
I glanced up at Maxim.
He was looking very tired.
His mouth was set hard.
Behind us crawled Favell, his green car covered in dust.
It was a postman who pointed out the house in the end.
A square house, ivy covered, with no name on the gate, which we had already passed twice.
Mechanically I reached for my bag and dabbed my face with the end of the powder puff.
Maxim drew up outside at the side of the road. He did not take the car into the short drive.
We sat silently for a few minutes.
'Well, here we are,' said Colonel Julyan, 'and it's exactly twelve minutes past five.
We shall catch them in the middle of their tea.
Better wait for a bit.'
Maxim lit a cigarette, and then stretched out his hand to me.
He did not speak.
I heard Colonel Julyan crinkling his map.
'We could have come right across without touching London,' he said, 'saved us forty minutes I dare say.
We made good time the first two hundred miles. It was from Chiswick on we took the time.'
An errand-boy passed us whistling on his bicycle.
A motorcoach stopped at the corner and two women got out.
Somewhere a church clock chimed the quarter.
I could see Favell leaning back in his car behind us and smoking a cigarette.
I seemed to have no feeling in me at all.
I just sat and watched the little things that did not matter.
The two women from the bus walk along the road.
The errand-boy disappears round the corner.
A sparrow hops about in the middle of the road pecking at dirt.
"This fellow Baker can't be much of a gardener,' said Colonel Julyan.
'Look at those shrubs tumbling over his wall.
They ought to have been pruned right back.'
He folded up the map and put it back in his pocket.
'Funny sort of place to choose to retire in,' he said.
'Close to the main road and overlooked by other houses.
Shouldn't care about it myself.
I dare say it was quite pretty once before they started building.
No doubt there is a good golf-course somewhere handy.'
He was silent for a while, then he opened the door and stood out in the road.
'Well, de Winter,' he said, 'what do you think about it?'
'I'm ready,' said Maxim.
We got out of the car.
Favell strolled up to meet us.
'What were you all waiting for, cold feet?' he said.
Nobody answered him.
We walked up the drive to the front door, a strange incongruous little party.
I caught sight of a tennis lawn beyond the house, and I heard the thud of balls.