JO CAREY sat in his study among the debris of an ample half-holiday tea and turned his attention to the personal column of The Times. There had been nineteen issues of The Times since he returned to school for the summer term and he had read eighteen of them, the idea having occurred to him on the second day. It bored him a good deal, but he persevered. Temporarily unencumbered by his parents, who were abroad, he was faced with a major crisis in his life. Were the summer holidays to be spent in some enterprising, possibly adventurous manner of his own choosing, or was he simply going to stay with Aunt Hilda after all?     It was difficult, he found, to begin being enterprising. Exploration and whaling ships did not present themselves, and he regarded offers of one seat in a car going to Spain (expenses shared), and house parties for boys and girls in the Engadine, organised by masters in other schools, without enthusiasm. A great part of his difficulty lay in the fact that he wasn’t sure what he wanted, but he had no doubt at all that he didn’t want those.     Then he found it.     The ancient wicker chair which had been keeping up a gentle creaking accompaniment to his breathing shrieked protestingly as he moved his feet from the table and sat up to read it again.     “Here’s something,” said Jo.     The second occupant of the study, who had reached the tense, pop-eyed stage of his thriller, read on, breathing heavily, and Jo rattled The Times and roared: “Finch! Listen!”     “Shut up,” said Finch automatically, and then, “Dammit—now you’ve put me off. Lost the ruddy thread. What is it?”     “Listen to this,” said Jo, and read the advertisement aloud.       “ ‘Glenvarroch. Scottish family with large house on West Highland sea loch welcome paying guests for summer holidays. Particulars, Box XZ111.’ ”     Mr. Finch was not stirred. “What of it?”     “This might do me.”     “You? Whatever for?”     “My holidays, you fool. I told you—”          “Oh, ah,” said Finch, who was to some extent in his companion’s confidence. “But this is no good. Don’t touch it.”     “You’ve no reason at all to say that,” Jo protested vigorously. “You don’t know anything about it.”     “No,” agreed Finch. “But you wouldn’t like it, Jo. It stinks. Refuge for lost souls if you ask me. Repressed schoolmarms and that sort of thing. Jolly walks and table-tennis in the evenings.”     “Absolute rot.” Far from being discouraged Jo rushed hotly to the defence of the advertisement. “The country alone—and there’ll be climbing and . . .”     “Well—don’t let me stop you. But shut up and let me finish this before the bell.”     Mr. Finch dived into his book again, and Jo with a good deal of banging of drawers collected materials and wrote a letter.     For the next few days he went about with a grim set to his jaw and regarded his friend Finch with a coldness which that unhelpful individual did not notice. Asking for particulars committed him to nothing, he reminded himself several times daily, but he could not help hoping that this was the thing. He had never been to Scotland, but his mother often talked about the glories of the West High­lands, which she had known during the war when his father’s ship was based up there, and even if the Scottish family and their paying guests were lost souls, as Finch predicted, he could get around and see things and climb mountains. Furthermore, there was the point, not a negligible one, that it sounded well. Sufficiently enterprising and sufficiently independent.     On the third day he began to look anxiously for the post, but it was on the fifth day, which was a Sunday, that he was hailed by McKechnie.     Pat McKechnie was of his own age and generation, but as they were in different houses and did not work in the same sets they were hardly acquainted and, apart from fairly regular encounters on the playing fields, they never met.     “Hi, Carey,” said McKechnie, coming alongside as they left chapel, “could I have a word with you some­time?”     He was a vast individual with sandy hair and colourless eyebrows, and his small blue eyes were genial and amused. Jo, almost as tall, was in every other respect a complete contrast, lighter in build, darkish and tidy and academic­ally on a higher level, but he had always liked the look of McKechnie, who was, in fact, generally liked and re­spected as a chap who went his own way without trampling on the feet of others.     “Sure,” he said. “Now?”     “Well,” said Pat, “we can begin now and it may well end forthwith. You answered an advertisement the other day, didn’t you? Glenvarroch? I put it in—or rather my family. Joint effort.”     Jo stared at him.     “Good Lord!” was all he could find to say, and he coloured a little. It was a shock when you answered an anonymous advertisement to find yourself involved not only with a chap you vaguely knew but his whole family as well.     “Quite,” agreed McKechnie, and his grin, which was not a display of teeth but a general amused glow, deepened. “I hope it won’t put you off knowing it’s me, because if you like the sort of thing I think it would be a very good show if you came. But just say, of course,” he added politely, “if you’d rather drop it.”     “No,” said Jo, hesitating, and then, as his embarrass­ment faded, “No. I don’t feel like dropping it. I’d like to hear more about it, of course.”     McKechnie looked pleased.     “Oke,” he said. “Walk this afternoon any good to you?”     “Right. Might have tea at the Wheatsheaf.”     “Well, I don’t usually run to teas at the Wheatsheaf,” said Pat frankly, and Jo laughed, feeling rather cheerful.     “On me,” he said.     In the course of the afternoon Jo was transported in imagination to a new and fascinating country, and instead of the Downs on which they walked he saw a white house on the edge of a sea loch with mountains, rocky and mantled with heather, towering beside it. As McKechnie talked he could almost smell the sea, almost hear the gulls and the curlews, almost feel the heather brushing his feet, and all the old pictures which his mother had given him, and which he had gathered from books and maps, rushed together with the new, and exhilaration set in.     He received a certain amount of casual information about the McKechnie family and that, coloured by his growing liking for Pat, held nothing to discourage him. Dr. McKechnie, it appeared, was a learned man whose mind dwelt chiefly in the Ancient World, while his wife led a colourful life, devoted on the one hand to her family and on the other to a series of unpredictable enterprises. One never quite knew what the current one might be, Jo gathered, but though there had been a good deal of archaeological talk in the Easter holidays it now looked though paying guests would absorb Mrs. McKechnie this summer.     “We’re hard up, you see,” Pat explained cheerfully. “Neil has another year at Oxford and Fiona’s at St. Andrews, and then there’s me, and the good old over­draft’s reached a new high. Loud groans from the bank and gloom and despondency all round. We’ve got this great barrack of a house where we spend the holidays, so we thought we might as well cash in on the tourists. Fiona’s idea,” he went on. “M’brother Neil said nobody would come—not enough plumbing and no amusements—but my mother got quite keen.”     “What does your father think?” asked Jo.     “Oh, he said he couldn’t see the flaw but there must be one because no McKechnie has ever yet made anything pay. But he doesn’t mind what we do, you know. Doesn’t usually notice.”     By the end of the afternoon the first of the Glenvarroch paying guests had been secured, and from time to time as the term went on Jo, in the quadrangle, on the cricket field or in the swimming pool, received bulletins and grew as interested in the enterprise as Pat himself. After a good many offs and ons the bag, as Pat called it, seemed to settle at five; Jo, Mr. and Mrs. Howard J. Coad from U.S.A., Mr. Frank Seward, a lecturer in a northern university who wanted peace in which to write a novel, and Miss A. Price, occupation unknown, from the midlands.     “Not at all bad for a first shot,” was Pat’s verdict. “We might have gripped a few foreigners if we’d been quicker off the mark, but we didn’t think of it in time,” and he added knowledgeably; “Of course these things grow as the word gets round. Satisfied customers telling their pals.”     “Glad I’m coming before they’ve told them,” said Jo, with relief, which he kept to himself, that Finch had been out in his prognostications and the threat of ping-pong in the evenings had dwindled almost to nothing, and Pat agreed that they would have a better time without any more people cluttering the place up.     “The Coads will go off sightseeing,” he said carelessly.   “The writer Charlie’ll write and Miss A. Price can go for nice walks with her sketch book. Very peaceful. The rest of us can just go on as usual.”     Then one day towards the end of term Pat came alongside in the swimming pool and announced: “Two more.”     They made for the side and sat together in the sunshine.       “Just cropped up,” gasped Pat. “Brother and sister. London.”     “You’ve room for them, have you?” asked Jo, without hope.   “Oh Lord, yes. Bags of room. Comic letter—I’ll show you. They sent it on,” and he padded away and returned holding a sheet of pale-blue paper delicately between a wet finger and thumb.     “It smells,” exclaimed Jo, receiving it reluctantly, and then his eye fell on an elaborate silver monogram and he said, “Cor!”     “Very chi-chi,” agreed Pat. “Read it.”     The letter, written in a large, picturesque hand, was quite business-like. Miss June Antony and her brother Mr. Lee Antony, finding themselves unexpectedly free to take a holiday, would be glad to know if accommodation was still available at Glenvarroch and asked for the details promised in the advertisement. But no amount of business efficiency could, in Jo’s view, make up for the monogram and the scent.     “How on earth have they seen the thing now?” he asked crossly. “You didn’t advertise again.”     “Wrapped round the fish, I expect,” said Pat, looking rather pleased and alert. “June Antony. Sounds as if she might be rather a juicy bit, don’t you think?”     Jo regarded the high-quality, deckle-edged sheet in his hand with disfavour.     “Have you ever thought of getting references for these bods you’re collecting?”     “References?” cried Pat. “Whatever for? There’s noth­ing to steal, you know. Nothing whatever to attract the criminal classes.”     “You might get somebody sneaking off without paying, though.”     This was a new idea to Pat, but he thought it far­fetched.     “Rot,” he said. “You can’t ask people for references. It’s rude. Besides,” he added shrewdly, “any wrong ’un would be sure to have them laid on—they always do in books—and we’re not worth cheating, anyway.”     He got to his feet and prepared to dive, and Jo, who suspected ignorantly that people only used scent to disguise the fact that they didn’t wash enough, waved the offensive document at him.     “What’ll I do with this?”     “Oh—give it to . . .” Pat looked round and with a jerk of the head summoned a small, respectful youth. “Hi—just shove this in my pocket, will you? Thanks. Don’t be a clot, Carey. You could see at a glance that the party lacked oomph, begging your pardon. This’ll be it, I hope and trust.”     “Who the hell wants oomph?” demanded Jo morosely, and Pat, poised on the brink, regarded him with disapproval.     “The trouble with you is, you’re timid,” he pronounced.       “Very likely.”     “However,” added Pat reassuringly, “there’s plenty of room and all tastes catered for. I don’t suppose our share of the glamour will amount to much anyway and you can sidestep if you like. I’ll lap up what’s going myself.”     “I hope you’ll be very happy,” said Jo, and watched the vast form plunge, seal-like, into the pool, while a small boy, having obediently placed June Antony’s letter in Pat’s pocket and honourably refrained from unfolding it, hastened to tell his contemporaries that he knew for a fact that McKechnie had a girlfriend and she wrote him letters on pale-blue notepaper with frilly edges that smelt wizard.
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