I’m outside Meadowhurst, the dull new house that was once an overgrown no man’s land called Braemar, and I’m gazing fixedly at the second tub of geraniums from the left on the hard standing. It must be occupying almost exactly the same piece of space that Stephen occupied as he sat in the lookout for hours at a time in the days that followed the expedition to the Lanes. Keith had stopped coming out to play, and Stephen was too uneasy about what was going on inside the Haywards’ house to knock on his door. So there he sat, on his own. His bottom was resting on the hard dust now hidden beneath the paving stones. His head must have been more or less exactly where those scarlet blossoms are now. I gaze at them, baffled. From the living-room window a boy’s watching me, as absorbed and intent as I am. He’s about the same age as Stephen was then, and he’s trying to work out what’s going on inside the head of this old man who stands gazing with such insane concentration at a tub of his mother’s geraniums.
