Three to See the King

the door I saw Mary Petrie standing at the top of the stairs.
    ‘Right,’ she said. ‘From now on all your friends are banned.’
    ‘All of them?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How long for?’
    ‘Always.’
    By this time, of course, I’d resigned myself to sanctions of some kind or other. I accepted the severity of the verdict without argument, knowing it would all blow over in a week or two. It was impossible for Mary Petrie to enforce a lifetime ban on my friends and acquaintances, that was obvious, so I only had to ride out the storm until the day’s events were forgotten. Besides, I thought, it would do no harm to cut down on all the friendly coming and going that had lately been endemic at my house, and which was starting to get out of hand.
    Indeed, here was an opportunity to return to how things were before. With a great show of contrition I carefully cleared all the sand out of the house, closed the door, and settled down for a period of relative quiet. I didn’t venture upstairs that night, but by the following day the two of us were again talking freely. Late in the afternoon Mary Petrie came outside with me to admire the new weathercock, which, she agreed, looked quite nice. I made no remarks about how unnecessary it was, nor did I point out that the wind showed no sign of abating. Instead I played the part to which I had become accustomed, in which a man remains master of his own home, so long as he observes all the rules.
    An uneventful week passed by. Then another. Finally, one morning there was a knock on the door. It was Simon Painter, and he was almost in tears.
    ‘Can you come and help?’ he said. ‘Someone’s taken my house to pieces.’
    8
    He was a forlorn sight, standing there in the doorway holding his overnight bag. He looked tired, as if he’d been travelling for several hours, and there were traces of red sand on his clothing.
    ‘What do you mean, taken to pieces?’ I asked.
    ‘It’s been dismantled bit by bit,’ he replied. ‘And now it’s just a pile of tin. What am I going to do?’
    He was clearly very desperate.
    ‘Sorry, Simon,’ I said. ‘I’d like to help but I’m barred from seeing my friends.’
    ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Mary Petrie, moving me aside. ‘Come in out of the cold, Simon, and we’ll make you some breakfast.’
    ‘Oh, thank you,’ he said. ‘You’re so kind.’
    ‘How would you like it if it happened to you?’ she hissed after he’d gone in.
    ‘Just obeying orders,’ I shrugged.
    She soon had him sitting down at the table with a hot cup of coffee, and once he’d recovered a little he told us what had happened.
    ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard,’ he began, ‘but I’ve been out to stay at Michael Hawkins’s place quite a few times lately.’
    ‘Yes,’ replied Mary Petrie. ‘We’d heard that.’ (I understood from the look she gave me that I wasn’t allowed to pass comment on the subject.)
    ‘Well, I was there until quite late last night,’ he continued. ‘Couldn’t drag myself away until the small hours, but the moon was out - did you see the moon?’
    ‘No, we didn’t.’
    ‘Marvellous, it was, very shiny, so I decided to travel home by moonlight. We do things like that at Michael’s: getting up early, staying up late, it’s all part of daily life out there.’ He paused and took a deep breath. This was followed by a sigh. ‘Anyway, as I drew nearer I expected to see the outline of my house appear ahead of me, but instead there was nothing. It was dawn when I got to where it should have been, and all that remained was this big pile of tin, with the flagpole lying nearby.’
    ‘What about your captive balloon?’ I asked.
    ‘They’ve let it down.’
    He was beginning to look tearful once more, so Mary Petrie put her arm round his shoulder and said, ‘There, there, you’ll soon put it together again.’
    ‘I don’t know how,’ he moaned.
    ‘Well, we’ll help, won’t we?’
    She eyed me firmly, and I realized I was going to have a busy few days ahead.
    ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a nice breakfast, and then we’ll go and see what can be done.’
    To tell the truth, by the time we were ready to leave I was quite looking forward to the project. It would be a fruitful pastime, I thought, reassembling someone’s house, and thereby earning their eternal gratitude. Of course, when Mary Petrie had said we’d help she actually meant me. For her part, she knew nothing about building from tin, and