Lewis felt the sun come through the window onto his head. The carpet against his cheek was a familiar, childhood sort of feeling. He started to move and seemed to fall into the dark and then tilt back into the room and away again. He kept still for a bit and then he felt his teeth with his tongue and they were all there. They felt loose in his head, but his tongue couldn’t feel looseness. It felt as if his skull, and everything that had held it together – the cement he’d never been aware of – had been crushed and had shifted. It hadn’t broken, though. His teeth were there. He opened his eyes. His eyes were there. He could see. At least, he was sure one of his eyes was there; the other felt very hot, and when he blinked it didn’t move. He waited. Then he lifted his hand – which didn’t hurt and felt lovely and free – up to his eye. It was very big, it wasn’t a hole or a gap or something frightening, it was just too big and sticky. It was full of blood. He tried to blink again and his eye opened and was very blurred for a while, but not blind. The blood had come from his eyebrow, which was split wide. He sat up and waited for the floor to straighten out, then got to his knees and his feet and held onto the back of a dining chair to do it. He had a very bad pain down the side of his face, in his cheekbone, like being hit with an iron bar, and when he tried to touch the cheekbone it hurt so much that his vision went black. He held on to the chair and waited. The door opened and the maid came in to clear, and saw him and gave a sort of yell.
‘Sorry,’ he said and she went out.
After a second she came back to shut the door on him and he heard her walking away and then some shouting. He wanted to laugh, but didn’t want to have to move his face to do it. There was a weird moment when he saw his reflection and hadn’t known there was a mirror there, and nearly yelled himself. He looked pretty bad. He needed to spit some blood out, but he didn’t want to do so onto the carpet. Then he remembered it was Dicky’s carpet, so he spat the blood onto it, and then some more. The blood was coming from his lip, but it felt like it was just running into his mouth from the inside of his head, as if his whole head was blood. He wasn’t really hurting now. Except for the cheekbone, which was bright-white pain and very bad, the rest of him felt all right, and different from other fights because his hands weren’t hurting. His hands usually hurt. Jeanie had put his hand in a bowl of iced water when he had been fighting once, but he pictured it being in prison, and that wasn’t right; and he thought of a knife fight he’d seen in prison when a man had his cheek cut open so you could see his teeth through it; and he remembered punching Ed and how hot the woods had been, with the heavy sun coming through the trees and the blazing fields afterwards, and he started to feel sleepy and wanted to lie down in the stubble fields in the sun and rest. Then the church bells stopped pealing. He hadn’t noticed they were still ringing until they stopped, and when they did he remembered everything.
He went out of the house by the garden door. Walking was good, and the air on his face was good too, and he went down the drive and onto the road and towards the village, walking straight, but quite slowly, because of not seeing very well and his head feeling full of blood.
Kit stood next to Tamsin and sang the hymn and listened to Dicky’s big voice singing over them. When the organ stopped, and the ragged voices had trailed away, they all sat down. The vicar started to speak and Kit didn’t listen, but looked down at her hands and things floated into her mind: school assemblies, French verbs, Swiss Alps, lakes, and sleeping and loneliness, and that she felt cold after the hot day outside. And Lewis. Lewis. There was the vicar’s voice and somebody whispering at the back of the church and a little girl giggling, and then the church doors clattered and opened. Everybody turned to look, and Kit turned too, a little late, and saw Lewis. The people all saw him, and at the sight of him in the doorway there was an intake of breath; there were no words, there was shock.
The people nearest him went back. Lewis walked up the aisle of the church and there was nothing for anybody to say. He was looking for Kit, and when he saw her he moved quickly and reached past her father and pulled her towards him. Dicky shrank back and didn’t realise Lewis was grabbing Kit and pulling her out until it was done.
Lewis held Kit around the waist, like a hostage, so that she faced the people. Her back was pressed against him and she saw his face close up before he turned her, but she couldn’t read his expression because of the beating, and he looked terrifying and not like himself. She felt very weak and she looked around the faces staring at her with a sense of unreality. They all had the same expression; her mother, Tamsin, Dicky, all of the people she knew, staring at her, held so hard like that in the church, in front of them and no-one moving or saying anything. She looked at their fear and part of her wanted to say, ‘It’s all right, it’s just Lewis’, but she was shocked too, and couldn’t speak, and she couldn’t breathe very well because he was gripping her. He held her, and then she felt his cheek come down next to her and he pressed his face against her head and whispered in her ear, ‘I’m sorry. Sorry—’
Then immediately it was much worse, because he grasped her top, pulled her blouse out from her waistband and yanked it up to show her body, and she closed her eyes. She went very soft, like an animal that’s frightened so that it can’t move, and she kept her eyes closed and felt her body exposed. She understood he wasn’t trying to hurt her. Still, nobody spoke and she felt Lewis turn her, display her, turn her round so that everybody could see. His body was hot, pressed against her back, and his arm gripped her and his hands felt big on her and she felt the air on her bare skin as he showed her, and then he said, ‘This is not a secret any more.’
Kit felt a wave of sickness and couldn’t have opened her eyes, and he was having to hold her just to keep her upright and his arms felt strong.
‘He does this – he does this to her. He hit Tamsin.’ Then, much quieter, bending down to her again, ‘He mustn’t do it to you any more.’
His voice was sweet and soft and close up to her.
‘Tamsin?’ said Lewis, and Kit opened her eyes and saw her sister looking at Lewis. ‘Tamsin?’ he said again. ‘Didn’t your father do that?’
Tamsin kept staring at Lewis and didn’t speak. Then she looked down to the ground.
Her father’s voice was strong and loud and Lewis pushed down Kit’s top, pressing it around her.
There was movement near them, people were preparing to react – something would happen. Lewis backed away with Kit, and Kit saw her father seem to grow, and he took a step towards her and reached out his hand. Kit ducked shy of the hand as it came towards her.
Lewis kept on holding her, drawing back, and Kit saw that her father’s hand was cut and bruised. Kit saw it. Everybody saw it, and that she shied away from him. Dicky looked quickly round the faces and his look was fearful.
Kit felt Lewis relax his hold on her and a jolt went through her body, like needles, like the blood starting up again and she pulled away from him. He didn’t try to hold on to her and she ran out of the church.
Lewis stood alone. He looked at Dicky and then around – at the faces that all stared back at him – and then back at Dicky.
Then he went after Kit.
Everybody watched Lewis until he was out of the church, and then they turned back to Dicky and there was stillness again. Dicky felt eyes on him, examining him. He tried to make himself look at them; he couldn’t, and Claire and Tamsin stood quietly by, unprotesting.
Lewis got out of the church and the day was bright and still. There was nobody watching any more; just Kit walking away and the graves and the bright light. He went after her, but slowly. As she reached the road she stopped and turned to him. She had her arms around herself and she was crying.
‘How could you? How could you do that to me?’
‘There was nothing else! There was nothing else I could do. I had to protect you.’
‘Protect me!’
‘I have to go away.’
‘What?’
‘My National Service. I got my enlistment notice and it’s that or prison again, and I didn’t know what to do.’
‘I waited for you! I waited two years, I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember. I wanted to be all grown-up for you – and look at you!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re nothing but chaos and disgusting. And God, Lewis, how could you – go to bed with her?’
He felt very quiet. He’d known it would be like this, but it hurt anyway.
‘It wasn’t that simple,’ he said.
‘You’re not who I thought you were.’
There was quiet for a moment.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m no good. And the world’s no good either, but you – you’re something else. Kit. Listen. You’re the only thing I’ve ever seen that’s right. Just the way you see things makes them better – and I thought you’d make me better too, but you can’t. And I thought I could save you. But I can’t. I can’t seem to.’
‘No. I’m fine!’
She held her head up and fought back and he wanted to give her a medal and he said, ‘You’re not fine, Kit. You’re just brave.’
She turned away from him. He looked at her back, and how tough she was trying to look, and at her bare neck.
‘You’re beautiful. And you deserve everything. I wanted to tell you that – and that I love you.’
She didn’t turn around. He waited. He had known she wouldn’t turn around and that he’d lost her, and he felt tired and hurting again now it was over.
‘Well. I’ve done it,’ he said.
The church bells started again and people came out of the church and Kit didn’t wait, but walked away from Lewis and away from the people and back to her house.
Lewis watched her go. No beating would have absolved him.
Afterwards it was all very odd because people came out of the church and there was no scene or shouting or police, and everybody pretended they didn’t see him and carried on as usual. Lewis wasn’t sure where to go or what to do. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was vaguely interested to see if he was going to be arrested for smashing up Dicky’s house – they had been looking for him after all – but nobody spoke to him and there was no Wilson at his side with handcuffs, or anything to show he was even there. He stood in the graveyard as they all went home and he could have been a ghost, for all the notice they took of him. He watched Claire and Tamsin follow Dicky to the car, and thought it had all probably been for nothing. The world had exploded, but Sunday lunch would go ahead as usual.
He saw that his father hadn’t left. He and Alice were waiting by the wall of the church and murmuring to each other and not looking at their friends as they passed them. After a while Gilbert came over and they spoke a few words. There was nothing conclusive; there was no reunion and no statement of loyalty. Gilbert asked him if he was all right and wanted to know if he’d be coming home, and Lewis said he wouldn’t, but he might spend the night, and that he had his enlistment notice through – and then they went. He was left with not a person in sight. He glanced over at his mother’s grave before leaving, but she’d never really been there, and it didn’t mean anything.
He walked down the middle of the road, towards the edge of the village and his father’s house, and the Carmichaels’. It wouldn’t have mattered, except for Kit. He’d thought that if he could shine a light into the dark places of her life, they would disappear, but he had thought wrong. No-one wanted to look.
‘Lewis?’
Lewis turned and saw Dr Straechen. The doctor was standing on the pavement and Lewis thought how he must look, in the middle of the street, blood down his shirt and not even able to walk straight.
‘Why don’t you come with me to the surgery?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘I think you should.’
They walked down the main street to his house, which had the surgery in the front of it, and Lewis could smell lunch cooking and hear Mrs Straechen moving around in the kitchen behind the white-painted door at the back of the hall.
They went into the consulting room. Dr Straechen closed the door.
‘Why don’t you sit down? I’ll clean you up – that cut over your eye looks rather nasty.’
Lewis sat in a metal chair by the curtain that you could pull across to divide the room. He watched the doctor go about collecting cotton wool and other things. He was grey-haired and his suit was a dark pinstripe and worn to softness. He put the things on the small table nearby and pulled up another chair and sat close to Lewis, looking at him.
Lewis felt very tired. The doctor didn’t speak, but watched him, steadily, and Lewis looked around the room. There were framed photographs on the desk of Dr Straechen’s sons and of his wife. There were flowers that needed changing and a hat-stand with the doctor’s hat and coat hanging on it.
‘I delivered you.’
‘What?’ He looked back at the doctor.
‘I delivered you. I’ll always remember your mother, the way she was about it. She wasn’t very frightened, like lots of new mothers; she was extremely brave, and she kept saying she couldn’t wait to meet you. Your father was downstairs, waiting, and he was terribly nervous, of course. It was a good straightforward labour and nothing remarkable, just the sort I like, and your mother, Lewis, your mother was a natural. Now, let’s have a look at you.’
He looked, and he wiped the blood away while he looked, and asked which bits hurt.
‘I imagine you’ve a concussion. You may have fractured your cheekbone. I can stitch the eye up for you. Do you remember that day?’
‘What day?’
‘The day – after the church – when I came to see you at the police station.’
Lewis nodded.
‘It was distressing to see you like that … I’ve got two boys. They’re older than you, of course. Both married now. My elder son’s in Egypt, with the British ambassador there. Younger one’s in the City. When they were younger it didn’t always look as if things might turn out so well. Each of them had a difficult time in one way or another. But things did work out in the end, do you see?’
‘I’ve always thought you were a good boy.’
Lewis sort of laughed.
‘Aren’t you a good boy? I mean, I’ve always liked you.’
Lewis looked down because he was going to cry and he felt stupid about it.
‘You know you should go to hospital with this.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter. Lewis, here—’ He put his hand on Lewis’s head and rubbed his hair and held the back of his neck, looking at him and making Lewis look back. ‘It does matter,’ he said.
He had Lewis lie down on the metal bed that was there, like a hospital bed, with a cotton blanket, and he put four stitches in his eyebrow. He gave him some painkillers and Lewis fell asleep almost straight after, and the doctor went away and had his lunch.
The long dining table at the Carmichaels’ house had been extended to its full length. Silver and china and linen had been laid at sixteen places during the morning, and flowers had been cut from the garden and put in small vases along it. The flowers were August yellow and pollen dropped onto the varnished table.
When the family returned from church there was a nothing, a silence, a regrouping. Claire and Dicky went into the drawing room where there were more yellow flowers, and Tamsin stood in the hall. Kit went upstairs, but stopped in the corridor on the way to her room and sat in a high-backed chair she had never sat in before. She looked up at a painting of a child with a dog. The corridor to her room was to her right and the stairs to her left and she was nowhere, just waiting.
In the hall, Tamsin took off her gloves, slowly. The telephone rang. She picked up the receiver.
‘Guildford 237?’
It was Mary Napper cancelling lunch. Joanna was home unexpectedly. They were sorry. Immediately she put the telephone down, Dora Cargill called to say they were both unwell and wouldn’t be able to come to lunch. The Turnbulls’ butler called, and then David Johnson and then the Pritchards. Everybody was terribly sorry.
The family sat at one end of the table and the lunch was brought in. It took the housekeeper and the maid to carry the side of beef, which had been for sixteen, into the room. They put it in front of Dicky. Dicky picked up the carving knife.
The maid stayed to finish clearing the extra places at the table and, as she finished, looked up and caught Dicky’s eye. She hadn’t meant for him to see her looking at him, but, when he did, she didn’t look away – not until he did.
The housekeeper came back in with vegetables.
‘Just leave them,’ said Claire, ‘we’ll manage’, and she put them near her on the table and they went out and closed the door. The air in the dining room was still and warm.
‘Do you know,’ said Tamsin, ‘I heard on the wireless, it hasn’t rained since the sixteenth of June.’
‘It has been terribly dry, but I had no idea it had been that long,’ said Claire.
‘The garden looks absolutely flat.’
‘We’ve done our best with it.’
‘There’s not enough humidity for a thunderstorm.’
‘No, it’s been very dry, hasn’t it?’
This went on for a while between Claire and Tamsin, with Dicky coming in occasionally and all three exchanging smiles, smiles that weren’t to do with the conversation.
‘It’s still hot enough to swim,’ said Kit. ‘May I go after lunch?’
‘They say the reservoirs are drying up,’ said Dicky, not looking up from his plate. His hands felt very painful, but he was cutting the food up all the same.
‘Well, I hope they’re not going to start that water-rationing nonsense,’ said Claire.
‘Mummy? May I swim?’
‘Do you remember in ’38, when none of us were allowed baths?’
Tamsin laughed. Kit began to feel desperate. Maybe they couldn’t hear her.
‘I said, could I swim after lunch?’
Dicky and Claire and Tamsin all stopped and turned to Kit and looked at her. Then they carried on.
‘Robins spoke to the boy who comes on Tuesdays for the vegetables and he said …’
Kit stood up and they didn’t acknowledge that she had stood up. She looked around at them. She thought she might laugh; she wanted to laugh at them for being like the girls at school, for being so stupidly mean to her, but somehow she couldn’t. She pushed back her chair and left the room.
She went up the stairs and felt a hot feeling in her chest, and the feeling grew and she knew it was all the tears she had been not crying and not feeling, and she felt desperate and that she mustn’t cry them and mustn’t think about her family hating her, or what her father might do if he found her alone, or of Lewis and what he’d done and how hurt he’d been and not having any hope … She wouldn’t think about it and she would be strong, and she would endure it and hide herself and be brave. Brave, but not fine. She got to her room and went inside and closed the door.
She went to the floor by her bed and started to tidy the records that were lying there. She knelt, picking them up, and tried not to think about the world being hard and broken or that she was alone and broken too, and with nobody to help her. There was nobody, and she felt weak and faithless. Her tears were hot and hurt her eyes, and she was angry and clumsy, trying not to feel them and losing her battle.
The door opened. Kit scrambled up from the floor. It was her mother. Claire stood in the doorway, with one hand still on the doorknob, not committing to being there. She looked around the room and her look made the room invaded and shameful.
‘You’ll be going to Sainte-Félicité early,’ she said. ‘And you can remain there for two years. I telephoned them before lunch. You will take the train on Wednesday. We won’t expect you home for the holidays. At the end of your stay there you’ll be almost eighteen. Do you understand?’
Kit looked at her mother and she didn’t fail herself.
‘Perfectly,’ she said, ‘but when I’m gone, don’t you think it will be your turn again, Mother?’
Claire stared at her. Neither one said anything else. Kit clenched her fists and waited for Claire to go and close the door behind her, and then she sat down on the bed.
She was leaving in two days. Not some time in the future, not weeks; two days and not coming back.
She sat on the bed as the feeling came over her and she surrendered. She pressed her face into her pillow and her tears wet the eiderdown that covered it and made dark marks, and she cried and muffled the sound in the pillow. She gave herself up to it and it hurt. It hurt, but the hurt had relief in it because she was getting out. Because of Lewis, she was at last getting out.
Lewis spent his last evening at home outside the house, waiting, while Alice and Gilbert performed their evening in the lit-up drawing room. He stayed outside, where he felt more at home.
He told himself that the next day would come and that he would be away and he’d look back at this and it would be just something that happened to him, like Jeanie, or school – just some thing that happened and not everything, the way it felt now.
It wouldn’t always be so very bad. It wouldn’t always be like a death. His face was still hurting, but he reckoned it was just mending like all the other things that faded away. It hadn’t been the absolution he had needed. He didn’t think anything could be.
He pictured Kit, all her life, from her childhood – all the bits he’d seen – and she was lovely and light and strong, and he wished he could hold that in his mind all the time. He didn’t want to forget her. He had forgotten his mother; at least he hadn’t been able to keep her image in his mind.
He walked over to the woods behind the Carmichael house to collect his case when it was dark, but he didn’t look at the house. At home, he packed and made sure he was ready to go. He looked around the small white bedroom at all the familiar things: the books on the shelves and the chest of drawers and the crack in the ceiling. It was not a living place.
He sat on the bed and let his head go down into his hands. His mind wasn’t raging any more, it wasn’t rushing and fighting to hurt itself, but he was sad, and he missed Kit, and he had failed, and just then his loneliness hurt him very much. He was surprised by how much it hurt; he had thought he was already broken.
The night was long. He didn’t sleep, but waited until the very early morning and then went downstairs to leave.
As he opened the front door, sudden light filled the hall. Gilbert came down the stairs towards the dining room. It was as if they had met by chance in his office or club; he paused and shook Lewis’s hand without looking at him particularly.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and then he picked up the paper from the hall table and went into the dining room.
Lewis left the house and walked towards the road. He heard the door behind him.
‘Lewis!’
Alice came running, barefoot in her nightdress, across the gravel towards him. Her hair was loose. She stopped in front of him and glanced over her shoulder, like a schoolgirl out of bounds, and breathless with not knowing how to say what she needed to. They looked at each other, and her face, with all its need and hope, went straight to him, as it always had. He felt something like love.
‘If you write,’ she said, ‘write to the flat. We’ll be leaving this house.’
‘I won’t write.’
‘No. Goodbye.’
She kissed his cheek, carefully, reaching up, and he put his free arm around her and held her for a moment.
‘All right?’ he said, worrying. She nodded yes. He thought she meant it. She went back into the house and he didn’t wait, or watch her, but carried on, away and out onto the road.
* * *
Kit put on a light blue dress that she had been waiting to grow into and found it fitted. She washed her face and did her teeth in the bathroom and ran her damp hands over her hair and her neck for coolness, and then she went downstairs and had her breakfast in the kitchen. She called her kitten in, and fed her, and annoyed her by lifting her up with her paws dangling to kiss her. She put on her shoes by the kitchen door and went outside. She walked slowly over to the Aldridge house through the woods, and when she got there she cut down through the garden to the front door and knocked. It was Mary who answered the door, and not Alice, and when Alice came neither of them could look at the other. Kit looked at the ground and asked for Lewis and only looked up when Alice said he’d left.
‘Gone?’ she said, ‘he’s gone?’
Lewis watched the other people getting onto the train. It wasn’t the main commuter train to London, but a local one and there weren’t many people. When the train had pulled out he was alone on the platform and he watched the signals changing and saw the stationmaster, after staring at him for a while, go back into the station. It was quiet. There was birdsong and the faint murmur on the line of his distant train. He went to the edge of the platform and trod out his cigarette and kicked it onto the stones by the track. He could hear the engine of the train now, the rhythm of it and the shunting and the metal sound as it came through the valley. Then he saw the steam, a long whitish-grey trail against the clean blue sky, and then he heard a girl’s voice and stared down the platform and saw her, the blue of her dress, coming out of the station where the stationmaster had gone. She called something and he couldn’t hear what it was. He couldn’t believe it was her, but it was her, and she was running towards him. He started towards her too and he could see her clearly now and she was still running, and she was wearing the blue dress that made her look like an imagining of Kit, and not real, until he heard her shout and saw her frown and knew it was her.
‘What?’ he said and she shouted again, but her voice was a girl’s voice and he couldn’t hear her. ‘What?’
‘You are good!’ They both stopped – just for a second – ‘I had to tell you—’
They reached each other then and he got his arms around her and she was holding on to him.
‘You said you were no good, but you are.’
He held on to her and kissed her face and couldn’t believe she was there, but she was, and smelled so clean and beautiful …
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no, it’s all right—’
‘I’ll be better for you, I promise.’
‘No, I love you. I said —’
‘Oh, you’re beautiful.’
He kissed her and held on to her and they kissed for ages, a real kiss with longing to it and heat.
‘Come with me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t leave you here.’
‘No, it’s all right, I’m going away, they’re sending me to Switzerland early. I’ll be gone and they don’t want me back.’
‘I’ll come there, I’ll come and get you.’
They were having to talk over the engine noise now, because the train was pulling in and it was vast and noisy and the whistle blew.
‘Wait! Look here—’ Lewis started through his pockets, looking for a pencil, and the train towered over them and he didn’t have a pencil and he pulled out the enlistment notice, pushing it into her hands.
‘I’ll be here, I don’t know where they’ll send me after—’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘I’m not, don’t be sad.’
‘I’m not sad,’ she said, crying.
The train had stopped, the guard blew the whistle again. It was too hard, to have to get onto the train and to be leaving her. They held on to each other and then he got in with his case and shut the door and bent down from the window to kiss her some more, and they didn’t let go. Everything about her was right, the feel of her, her strength and her softness, and that she was a baby, but so grown-up. It was incredible to him that she knew him and, even knowing him, would hold on to him and kiss him like that, and he felt her hand on his cheek – the one that was all right – and her arm around his neck, and he kissed her some more and there was nothing in the world but that. They forgot about leaving each other, but the train had started, and she started to walk along with it, and it was funny for a moment, but then not. She started to run. He let go of her. They weren’t touching any more. She stopped and looked into him and he looked back, loving the sight of her.
‘Look, Lewis!’ she said and she held her arms out wide. ‘We’re saved!’
The train got faster and she was a distant figure very quickly, but he waited until he couldn’t see her blue dress any more before he stopped leaning out of the window and went back against the wall of the carriage.
There was stillness and quiet; even with the fast train and the noise of it, it was very peaceful. He felt hot. He undid his sleeves and rolled them up, for coolness, not minding about his arm showing.
Kit stood on the empty platform and watched the train disappear. When it was gone she stood a while longer. Her body and her mouth felt the way Lewis had held her and the way he had kissed her and how hard it was and how gentle. She felt a different girl, but the same. She felt cherished. She knew it would hurt later, that he had gone, but now she had nothing but joy. After a while she heard cars arriving and the footsteps of the commuters as they came up to the platform, and Kit didn’t want to see anybody else, and she walked away from them and down from the platform by the small steps and into the long grass. She would walk back across the fields, slowly.
Lewis stood against the wall of the train until the guard came through to take his ticket. He was a tall man, old, and he walked with a limp, as if he had braces on his legs, and he looked at Lewis oddly, and Lewis couldn’t work it out for a while; he was used to people who knew him looking at him like that, but this man was a stranger. Then he realised how he must look, as if he had been in a war, with his face all messed up and his arm cut to pieces and smiling like everything was just right, like everything in the world was laid out for him. He supposed the man didn’t know how you could be damaged like that and be so pleased with it.
He showed the guard his ticket and tried to be polite so that he wouldn’t frighten him and then he went and found a seat. He didn’t think about it, he went straight to a seat facing forwards, so that he could see where he was going.