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Insider Risk and Personnel Security

This textbook analyses the origins and effects of insider risk, using multiple real-​life case his-
tories to illustrate the principles, and explains how to protect organisations against the risk.
Some of the most problematic risks confronting businesses and organisations of all types stem
from the actions of insiders –​individuals who betray trust by behaving in potentially harmful
ways. Insiders cause material damage to their employers and society, and psychological harm
to the colleagues and friends they betray. Even so, many organisations do not have a systematic
understanding of the nature and origins of insider risk, and relatively few have a coherent and
effective system of protective security measures to defend themselves against that risk. This
book describes the environmental and psychological factors that predispose some individuals to
become harmful insiders, and the most common pathways by which this happens. It considers
how aspects of insider risk have been altered by shifts in society, including our increasing reli-
ance on technology and changes in working patterns. The second half of the book sets out a
practical systems-​based approach to personnel security –​the system of defensive measures
used to protect against insider risk. It draws on the best available knowledge from industry and
academic research, behavioural science, and practitioner experience to explain how to make
personnel security effective at managing the risk while enabling the conduct of business.
This book will be essential reading for students of risk management, security, resilience,
cyber security, behavioural science, HR, leadership, and business studies, and of great interest
to security practitioners.

Paul Martin, CBE, is Professor of Practice at Coventry University’s London-​based Protective

Security Lab, a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and
Security Studies (RUSI), an Honorary Principal Research Fellow at Imperial College London, a
member of the UK Police Science Council, and an independent adviser to various UK govern-
ment entities and private sector organisations. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge
and was a Harkness Fellow at Stanford University. He is a practitioner with more than 30 years
of experience in the UK national security arena.
Insider Risk and Personnel Security
An Introduction

Paul Martin
Cover image: Getty © gremlin
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Paul Martin
The right of Paul Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Martin, Paul, 1958 May 11– author.
Title: Insider risk and personnel security : an introduction / Paul Martin.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023031285 (print) | LCCN 2023031286 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032358536 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032358543 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003329022 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Risk management. | Business enterprises–Security measures.
Classification: LCC HD61 .M377 2024 (print) | LCC HD61 (ebook) |
DDC 658.15/5–dc23/eng/20230818
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023031285
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023031286
ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​35853-​6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​35854-​3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​32902-​2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003329022
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK
Disclaimer

Knowledge and practice in protective security are continually changing, as experience and
research reveal more about the nature of the problems and their potential solutions. Professional
practice should evolve in the light of this growing understanding and reflect changes in the
threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. Leaders and practitioners should rely on their own knowledge,
skills, and experience when applying any of the information, methods, or approaches described
in this book. They should obtain specific professional advice that is tailored to their own par-
ticular circumstances. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the author and the publisher accept
no liability for any damage or loss to persons or property, whether direct or indirect, that might
arise from applying the information, methods, or approaches described herein.
Contents

List of illustrations ix
About the author x
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

PART I
Understanding insider risk 5

1 What is insider risk? 7

2 Why does it matter? 17

3 Who are the insiders? 33

4 Why do they do it? 42

5 Trust, deception, and betrayal 52

PART II
Personnel security 63

6 Personnel security principles 65

7 Pre-​trust measures 76

8 In-​trust measures 89

9 Foundations 105

10 Models and metrics 119

viii Contents
11 Barriers to success 133

Recommended further reading 143

Glossary of terms 144
Index 148
Illustrations

Figures
1.1 The causal chain that generates security risk 9
4.1 The development of insider behaviour 50
6.1 Theory (holistic security) versus practice (separate silos) 71
6.2 A simple threefold model of a personnel security system 74
9.1 A simple three-​step model of security risk management 111

Tables
2.1 Types of insider actions 18
2.2 Types of impact resulting from insider actions 18
3.1 Five key variables for categorising insiders 34
3.2 Types of external threat actors 37
5.1 The components of trustworthiness 53
7.1 Elements of pre-​trust security 86
9.1 Questions for leaders 106
10.1 Components of a threefold model of personnel security 120
10.2 Some metrics of insider risk 127
10.3 Some metrics of personnel security effectiveness 128
10.4 Possible metrics of personnel security performance and costs 128
11.1 Barriers to success 134
11.2 Areas of relative ignorance requiring more research 140
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About the author

Paul Martin, CBE, MA, PhD, FIET, is Professor of Practice at Coventry University’s London-​
based Protective Security Lab, a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute
for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), an Honorary Principal Research Fellow at Imperial
College London, a member of the UK Police Science Council, and an independent adviser to
various UK government entities and private sector organisations. He is a practitioner with more
than 30 years of experience in the UK national security arena. During a career in UK govern-
ment service from 1986 to 2013 he held a variety of senior positions, including heading his
organisation’s personnel security function, heading the Centre for the Protection of National
Infrastructure (CPNI, now NPSA), and leading national security preparations for the London
2012 Olympics. From 2013 to 2016 he was the Director of Security for the UK Parliament, with
responsibility for its physical, cyber, and personnel security.
Paul was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in Natural Sciences
and took a PhD in behavioural biology, and Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral
Harkness Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He subsequently
lectured and researched at the University of Cambridge, and was a Fellow of Wolfson College
Cambridge, before leaving academia to join government service. He is the author or co-​author
of several books about security and behavioural science including: Measuring Behaviour
(Cambridge University Press, 4th edition 2021); The Sickening Mind (HarperCollins, 1997);
Design for a Life (Jonathan Cape, 1999); Counting Sheep (HarperCollins, 2002); Making Happy
People (Fourth Estate, 2005); Sex, Drugs & Chocolate (Fourth Estate, 2008); Play, Playfulness,
Creativity and Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Extreme (Oxford University
Press, 2014); and The Rules of Security (Oxford University Press, 2019).
newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the following people for their generous help and wise advice: Andrew
Glazzard, Bianca Slocombe, Charis Rice, Christina O’Kelly, David McIlhatton, Findlay
Whitelaw, Jordan Giddings, Margaret Wilson, Richard Mackintosh, Sarah Austerberry,
Stacy Snook, and Tara Foulsham. Two figures are reproduced by kind permission of Oxford
University Press.
Introduction

We used to think of security as protecting us from bad things in the world outside. However, the
worst risks can come from within. They stem from people we have trusted, and they require a
different sort of security response. Human behaviour lies at the heart of these risks, making them
the most interesting of all security problems, but also the most neglected.
The most corrosive security risks confronting organisations stem from the actions of insiders –​
individuals who abuse their trusted positions by behaving badly. Insiders inflict material damage
on their employers and cause psychological injury to the colleagues and friends they betray.
They are found in every type and size of organisation, from small tech start-​ups to multinational
corporations and government departments. Almost all the corporate risks faced by organisations
have a human dimension, which means they can be affected or effected by insiders.
Many insiders know their actions are forbidden and harmful. For some, that is the whole
point. Not all insiders, however, set out to cause harm. Organisations also suffer from unwitting
insiders whose actions stem from recklessness, ignorance, complacency, laziness, misjudge-
ment, or indifference. Many cyber security incidents are caused by unwitting insiders who
inadvertently send data to the wrong recipients or click on attachments loaded with malware.
A conventional reaction to security breaches is to blame people for being the ‘weakest link’.
But that misses the point. The real problem is failing to understand the risk and build the right
defences against it. Unwitting insiders cause persistent low-​level harm through poor perform-
ance and small acts of rebellion. However, purposeful insiders with malign intentions have the
potential to cause far greater harm, and they are the primary focus of this book.
The actions of insiders are highly consequential. Insiders steal money, personal data, sen-
sitive information, and intellectual property. They damage reputations, leak secrets, perpetrate
fraud, and sabotage infrastructure. Some have killed colleagues in outbursts of violence; others
have helped criminals, terrorist organisations, or hostile foreign states to do all these things.
Single insider incidents have resulted in financial losses of more than a billion dollars. The
commonest and costliest type of financial crime is insider fraud, with global losses running to
trillions of dollars. More than half of all cyber security incidents are perpetrated by insiders.
The more capable insiders operate in the shadows and remain undetected for years. Some
are never discovered. Their inside knowledge, privileged access, and authority enable them to
cause more harm than the average external threat actor, while making them harder to detect.
Some insiders are self-​motivated, while others are manipulated or coerced by external threat
actors like hostile foreign states or criminals, who can be highly proficient at exploiting human
psychology.
Few organisations have a thorough understanding of insider risk or comprehensive security
measures to protect them against it, creating a permissive environment in which insiders can
thrive. Insider risk is less well understood and less well managed than cyber security risk. Cyber
DOI: 10.4324/9781003329022-1
2 Introduction
security attracts much bigger budgets than personnel security, the Cinderella of protective
security. Organisations spend large sums on cyber security and regularly discuss cyber risks
at board level, while taking a piecemeal approach to insiders. Among those facing the starkest
risks are smaller businesses that depend critically on their unique intellectual property.
People are both the sources and the instruments of the most pernicious forms of security risk.
They will remain so for the foreseeable future –​at least, until technology makes the next big
leap into truly sentient artificial intelligence, at which point all bets are off. Insiders do more
harm because they know more about their victims and have better access than the average threat
actor. Fortunately, there are effective practical remedies to hand. Intelligently designed per-
sonnel security can defend organisations against insider risk.
The purpose of personnel security is to stop bad things from happening by mitigating the
risk from insiders. However, good personnel security brings additional benefits by building
resilience and trust. Organisations that understand and manage their insider risk are better able
to avoid crises and cope with the crises they cannot avoid. The right kind of personnel security
helps to build trust, which is every organisation’s most valuable commodity. No organisation is
safe unless it can trust its people.

The structure of this book

This book is in two parts. Part I explains the problem. Part II describes the solutions.
Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by defining key terms and concepts,
including insider risk and personnel security. Chapter 2 describes the many and varied types
of insider behaviour and the diverse types of harm they cause, exemplified by case histories.
Chapter 3 considers different types of insiders and how they can be categorised according to
variable characteristics such as intentionality, autonomy, and covertness. Chapter 4 explores
how insider behaviour develops through interactions between internal factors, such as person-
ality and experience, and external factors, such as work environment and personal relationships.
Finally, Chapter 5 analyses the nature of trust and its close relationship with insider risk, the
characteristics that make people trustworthy, and how to judge whether a person is telling
the truth.
Part II describes how a well-​designed system of personnel security measures can protect
organisations against insider risk. Chapter 6 sets out the basic design principles for personnel
security. It explains why personnel security should take a systems approach and have a stra-
tegic purpose. Chapter 7 outlines the pre-​trust personnel security measures (also known as
pre-​employment screening) that can be applied before a person is trusted with access to an
organisation’s assets. Chapter 8 describes the in-​trust personnel security measures (also known as
aftercare) that can be applied after a person has been trusted with access. Chapter 9 summarises
the cross-​cutting functions needed to underpin pre-​trust and in-​trust measures, including gov-
ernance, ethics, and risk management. Chapter 10 considers ways of measuring insider risk and
the effectiveness of personnel security. Finally, Chapter 11 looks at the main barriers to success
in understanding and managing insider risk, including cognitive biases and a lack of systems
thinking.

Language
Insider risk is complex enough without further obscuring it behind layers of opaque technical
language. My aim has been to simplify wherever possible and to clarify where simplicity
reaches its limits.
 Introduction 3
The problems discussed in this book are not unique to any one type of institution. The term
‘organisation’ is used throughout as shorthand for institutions and businesses of all types: public
sector, private sector, small businesses, global corporations, universities, thinktanks, charities,
government departments, intelligence agencies, police forces, and so on. The ways in which the
principles and concepts are applied to protect an organisation must be tailored to its particular
circumstances.
The term ‘insider’ refers to a person who brings heightened security risk to their organisa-
tion by exploiting, or intending to exploit, their legitimate access to the organisation’s assets for
unauthorised purposes. To put it another way, an insider is someone who has been trusted, but
who betrays that trust by acting in potentially harmful ways. Thus, most people are not active
insiders and never will be. But the few who are active insiders can cause immense harm.

Case histories

Real-​life case histories are used throughout to illustrate the nature of insider risk and its
underlying principles. The case histories are all in the public domain and the details of
many have been drawn from BBC News, Sky News, The Times, The Guardian, The Wall
Street Times, and other reputable news media. They are based on multiple sources, but
single sources are cited for the sake of brevity.
Part I

Understanding insider risk

1 What is insider risk?

Reader’s Guide: This chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by defining key terms
and concepts, including risk, insider, insider risk, and personnel security.

Before attempting to manage complex risks, it is a good idea to understand them. Security prac­
titioners and leaders can be inclined to leap into action without pausing sufficiently to consider
the nature of the risks they are trying to tackle. They are unlikely to succeed if they do not under-
stand the risks and cannot communicate clearly about them. So, what is insider risk?

Insider risk is the security risk arising from the actions of insiders.

So far, so good. What, then, is meant by ‘insider’ and ‘security risk’?

What is an insider?
There is no universally agreed definition for insider. However, according to one widely cited and
entirely sensible definition:

An insider is a person who exploits, or has the intention to exploit, their legitimate access to
an organisation’s assets for unauthorised purposes.1

Thus, an insider is not just any person with access. To be an insider, they must bring heightened
security risk to their organisation by exploiting, or intending to exploit, their access for purposes
that might cause harm. According to this definition, most people in an organisation’s workforce
are not insiders.2
Viewed through a different lens, an insider is a person who has been trusted with access to
an organisation’s assets, and who betrays that trust by exploiting (or intending to exploit) their
access for unauthorised purposes, thereby potentially causing harm. Hence, an alternative and
equivalent definition is that:

An insider is a person who betrays trust by behaving in potentially harmful ways.

Other definitions are available, but they all say more or less the same thing with more words. By
the same logic, and viewed through the same lens of trust:

Insider risk is the security risk arising from trusting people.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003329022-3
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8 Understanding insider risk
Trust, trustworthiness, deception, and betrayal are core concepts in personnel security. They are
discussed in Chapter 5.
A person need not be a salaried employee to be an insider. Contractors, business partners,
advisers, suppliers, and other third parties who are trusted with access to an organisation’s assets
are all potential insiders. If a high-​security site is guarded by armed police officers, then they are
potential insiders. Similarly, if a business outsources its IT to a supplier, then employees of that
supplier are potential insiders, and so too are people in the supplier’s supply chain, and so on.
Having defined ‘insider’ we should now explain ‘security risk’.

What is security risk?

Security risk is a particular type of risk.

Risk is the amount of harm that is likely to arise if no further mitigating action is taken.

Security risks are risks that arise directly from the potentially harmful actions of threat actors
such as criminals, terrorists, hostile states, and insiders.3

Risk refers to possible future events that might or might not happen. Uncertainty is therefore an
inherent feature of risk.
Security risk is a product of three components:

• Threat: the capabilities and intentions of threat actors such as criminals, terrorists, hostile
states, and insiders.
• Vulnerability: the gaps or weaknesses in the potential victim’s defences that could be
exploited by a threat actor.
• Impact: the harm that would be caused if the risk were to materialise.

The causal chain by which threat, vulnerability, and impact combine to generate a security risk
is illustrated in Figure 1.1.
Insider risk is the distinctive type of security risk arising from the actions of insiders. The
concept of security risk is crucial to understanding insider risk and how to defend against it. So,
let us look more closely at its three core components: threat, vulnerability, and impact.

Threat

A security threat exists when a threat actor, such as a terrorist or an insider, has both the intention
and the capability to cause harm. Both ingredients are necessary. Many people harbour malign
intentions but lack the capability to realise those intentions. For instance, some terrorist groups
would slaughter us all if they could, but thankfully do not have the means. Conversely, some
threat actors, like nation states, possess the capability to cause catastrophic harm, but usually
lack the intention. Threat requires intention and capability.
The concept of threat can also be expressed as the probability (likelihood) that a threat
actor will make a credible attempt to cause harm; for example, by attempting to conduct a
terrorist attack or hack into a digital system. Note the word ‘credible’, denoting the element
of capability.
National threat levels for terrorism, like those used by the UK and US governments to com-
municate with the public, convey threat in this same sense of likelihood of a credible attempt, as
 What is insider risk? 9

Figure 1.1 The causal chain that generates security risk4

Source: After Martin, 2019.

opposed to likelihood of an attack actually occurring. In practice, most terrorist plots are foiled
by the pre-​emptive actions of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and consequently the
number of successful attacks does not reflect the much greater extent to which credible attempts
are being made. This explains why the threat level can remain high despite a prolonged absence
of attacks. (The UK government definitions of threat levels are somewhat confusing because
they refer to the likelihood of ‘an attack’ rather than a credible attempt.)

Vulnerability

Threat by itself does not make a risk. A threat actor will only succeed in causing harm if there
are gaps or weaknesses in the security defences of their target, or potential victim. If the target
is completely protected by impregnable defences, then the threat is likely to be deterred or
thwarted. The stronger the protective security, the lower the vulnerability, and the lower the
likelihood of the threat culminating in harm.
The concept of vulnerability can be expressed as the conditional probability of an attack
succeeding if an attack were to be attempted. It follows that the combination of threat and vul-
nerability gives the likelihood of the risk materialising; for example, the likelihood of an insider
defrauding their employer or stealing data.
The terminology of threat and vulnerability has its equivalents in the parallel language of
crime prevention. A criminal is more likely to succeed in committing a crime if they possess
a combination of motive (intention), means (capability), and opportunity. The combination
of motive and means equates with threat, while opportunity equates with vulnerability. This
is sometimes referred to as the COM-​B model of crime, where Capability, Opportunity, and
Motive combine to produce criminal Behaviour.
10 Understanding insider risk

Impact

We care about security risks, and spend money trying to mitigate them, because of their
consequences, or impact. Thus, the third component of security risk is impact, which means the
amount of harm that would occur if the risk were to materialise.
The impact of any security risk is multidimensional. An incident or attack will have many
different effects, which unfold over different timescales. For example, the most immediate
consequences of a major terrorist attack would be deaths and physical injuries. However, such
an attack would have many other consequences as well. These are likely to include some com-
bination of psychological injuries, damage to infrastructure, disruption to business and services,
financial costs, and social and political effects. As its name suggests, the aim of terrorism is to
terrorise. A major cyber attack would produce a different array of effects, such as the loss of
sensitive data, disruption to business, financial costs, legal costs, loss of stakeholder confidence,
and regulatory consequences. The point is that the impact of security risks, including insider
risk, cannot be reduced to a simple quantitative metric, like the number of deaths or the finan-
cial cost.
Putting all three components of risk together, we see that Risk (R) is a product of Likelihood
(L) and Impact (I), where Likelihood is a product of Threat (T) and Vulnerability (V):

R =​L x I =​T x V x I

As noted before, uncertainty is an inherent feature of risk, which relates to future events that
might not materialise. Measuring the size of a security risk is prone to further uncertainty, given
the intrinsic lack of precision in any estimates of its core components of threat, vulnerability,
and impact.

Comparing risks

Insider risks and other types of risks come in different shapes and sizes, so it is useful to com-
pare them. The simplest way is by plotting the various risks on a matrix according to their like-
lihood and impact. An organisation might have a corporate risk matrix showing its top-​level
risks, such as loss of competitive advantage, reputational damage, critical staff shortages, infra-
structure failure, and so on. Cyber risk usually makes the cut, but insider risk rarely appears.
The organisation’s internal security function (if it has one) may produce its own, more granular,
matrix of security risks, such as fraud, data theft, terrorist attack, and ransomware. Insider risk
should appear there, even if it is absent from the top-​level corporate risk matrix.
Any one type of security risk, such as an insider incident or a terrorist attack, will encompass a
range of credible scenarios that differ in their likelihood and impact. Insider incidents could vary
from a harmless keyboard blunder by an unwitting employee to a catastrophic betrayal by a malign
insider directed by a hostile foreign state. For a risk matrix to make sense, it must compare like
with like. A general convention is to pitch each type of risk at the level of the reasonable worst-​case
scenario (as distinct from the most likely scenario or the absolute worst-​case scenario).

The three ways to reduce security risks

Given that security risk is a product of threat, vulnerability, and impact, there are only three
ways to reduce a security risk: by reducing the threat, reducing the potential victim’s vulner-
ability, or reducing the impact (or some combination of the three).
 What is insider risk? 11
A systematic approach to protective security involves countering each risk at every point
along its causal chain (Figure 1.1) with the aim of reducing both the likelihood of the risk
materialising and the impact if the risk were to materialise. This approach to risk reduction is
embodied in the description of personnel security set out in Part II of this book.
The UK’s national counter-​terrorism strategy takes the same conceptual approach with
its ‘Four Ps’ of Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare.5 The Prevent agenda aims to identify
and counter the underlying causes of terrorism so that individuals no longer aspire to become
terrorists. This corresponds to reducing threat by reducing the intentions of potential threat
actors. Pursue aims to identify and disrupt terrorists before they can conduct attacks. It tackles
the symptoms by undermining the threat actors’ capabilities and intentions. The Protect agenda
seeks to reduce the vulnerability of potential targets. It does this by hardening the targets with
protective security, making an attack plot less likely to succeed. Protect is necessary because
Prevent and Pursue cannot guarantee to stop all attacks. Finally, Prepare is a backstop to deal
with the consequences of attacks through measures such as incident management, business con-
tinuity planning, and disaster recovery. Prepare works mainly by reducing the impact component
of the risk. It is called into play if Prevent, Pursue, and Protect fail to stop a damaging attack.
In a similar vein, a well-​constructed system of personnel security measures should aim to
reduce the intentions and capabilities of potential insiders, reduce the vulnerabilities of their
potential targets, and reduce the impact of their hostile actions.

‘Insider risk’ or ‘insider threat’?

As we have seen, risk and threat are different beasts. Security professionals are careful to avoid
bandying the terms interchangeably, as though they mean the same. Nonetheless, people com-
monly refer to the security risk arising from insiders as ‘insider threat’.
The terminology of ‘insider threat’ is prevalent in the US, reflecting the phraseology of the
Presidential Executive Order on National Insider Threat Policy issued in 2012. This directed US
government departments and agencies to establish ‘insider threat programs’ to protect classified
national security information. Accordingly, the US government-​ funded National Insider
Threat Center (NITC) defines insider threat as: ‘The potential for an individual who has or had
authorized access to an organization’s assets to use their access, either maliciously or uninten-
tionally, to act in a way that could negatively affect the organization’.6 At face value, this defin-
ition appears to describe a risk, not a threat, because it refers to the amount of harm that might
be caused. A more recent variant published by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (CISA) defines insider threat as ‘the potential for an insider to use their authorized
access or understanding of an organization to harm that organization’.7 Again, this could be
interpreted as a risk, not a threat. Others hedge their bets by referring to ‘the insider threat risk’,
which further muddies the waters.
Some commentators are driven to use the language of ‘insider threat risk’ because they start
with an all-​encompassing definition of ‘insider’ as anyone with legitimate access. This makes
everyone in the workforce an ‘insider’ and consequently requires a second label to distinguish
the small minority who abuse their access to cause harm. Hence, people who could properly be
referred to as insiders become ‘insider threats’, and the security risk arising from them becomes
‘insider threat risk’. In this book, we will stick with the simpler formula of ‘insider risk’, and
not just because it is simpler.8
Insider risk is a risk. It has three components, only one of which is threat (the others being
vulnerability and impact). Apart from signalling possible confusion between threat and risk,
calling it ‘insider threat’ detracts from the important vulnerability and impact components, both
12 Understanding insider risk
of which require their own distinct types of mitigation. Moreover, ‘threat’ implies a degree of
intentionality that may not be present in unwitting insiders. ‘Insider threat’ also carries a subtle
connotation of criminals, spies, or terrorists working at the behest of external threat actors,
whereas many insiders are self-​motivated and self-​directed.

Absence of evidence of threat versus evidence of absence of risk

The conflation of risk with threat is sometimes associated with another problem, which is to
confuse the absence of evidence of a threat with evidence of absence of a risk. The faulty
reasoning goes like this: ‘I have seen no evidence (intelligence) of a threat to this organisation
and therefore it does not need more protective security’. The implicit assumption is that an
apparent absence of security threat denotes an absence of security risk. The assumption is wrong
at two levels.
First, an absence of evidence about security threats means just that –​there is no evidence.
Covert threat actors like insiders, spies, and fraudsters try to conceal their true intentions, which
means that reliable information about security threats is hard to obtain. That is why the advanced
capabilities of intelligence agencies are needed to discover what is really going on; and even
then, the picture is always incomplete. An absence of intelligence does not signify an absence
of threat, let alone an absence of risk. The only safe way to conclude that a threat actor poses no
threat would be by acquiring firm evidence to that effect.
The second mistake lies in conflating threat with risk. Even if the threat component of a
security risk is known to be low, the risk would still be substantial if the vulnerability and
impact components are large, in which case protective security would be advisable. Suppose,
for example, that reliable intelligence suggests the terrorist threat to a critical infrastructure site
is low, but the site is vulnerable, and the consequences of an attack would be severe. The risk
would be significant, and the site should be protected. By the same logic, an absence of evidence
of a threat from insiders categorically does not prove that the insider risk is low or that there
is no need to bother with personnel security. It may just show that the organisation is poor at
detecting the risk.

Personnel security and vetting

If insider risk is the problem, then personnel security is the solution.

Personnel security is the system of protective security measures by which an organisation

understands and manages insider risk.

Part II of this book describes how to design a coherent personnel security system (with an
emphasis on the word ‘system’).
Vague terminology can be a pitfall here as well. ‘Vetting’ is a widely used but ambiguous term.
Some practitioners regard ‘vetting’ as synonymous with personnel security, in the broad sense
defined above. For most people, however, ‘vetting’ refers only to pre-​employment screening. As
we shall see, there is much more to personnel security than pre-​employment screening, so these
two connotations of ‘vetting’ are very different. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is
safer to assume that when someone talks about ‘vetting’, they mean only the pre-​employment
part of personnel security.
The ‘insider risk’/​‘insider threat’ and ‘personnel security’/​‘vetting’ confusions are not the
only terminological hazards. Personnel security should not be confused with ‘personal security’
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‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the book comes first with me always. Nothing
else matters.’
She ruminated upon that thought for several seconds. The
bluntness, the ungraciousness of it at once repelled and attracted
her. She could not but admire Edward’s capacity for impersonal
enthusiasm; it made him great; and she found something fascinating
in his indifference to lesser things. Among those lesser things she
was content, for the moment, to include herself. To be his tool, to
help him in his work: such service, she felt, would be its own
sufficient reward.
Noting her silence, ‘That seems to you inhuman?’ he asked.
‘It seems to me superhuman,’ answered Sheila. ‘Perhaps that’s the
secret of fine living: to subordinate all personal things to some great
impersonal passion.’
‘That’s just how I feel,’ he said.
Sheila continued. ‘Unless we’re content to be miserable and useless,
we must have a consuming passion, if it’s only for collecting beetles:
something that doesn’t depend on anybody else.... Persons change,’
she added sadly.
‘You’re thinking of Hypatia,’ he suggested.
‘Hypatia, yes. And someone else. It’s like building your house on
sand, you know, ever to rely on persons.’
‘Still,’ said Edward, ‘if a person’s rational and consistent—and there
are consistent persons.’
‘Yes, and there are clockwork toys. A perfectly consistent person
must be very much like them, I should think.’
‘But surely you agree that man is just that: a mechanical toy in the
hands of Necessity. The illusion of freewill is only disguised
mechanism.’
‘How dreadful!’ Sheila exclaimed. ‘Then Henley’s lines:
 I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul—
are meaningless to you?’
‘The man who thinks that he is master of his fate is the most
enslaved of all persons,’ said Edward. ‘For he is not even master of
the facts.’
‘That’s a quotation from your book, I believe,’ said Sheila. And the
young man blushed.
This was the beginning of a long and animated discussion, the first
of many. In Edward Sheila discovered that reliability which she had
thought could be attributed to no person. His mind was keen and
critical: it worked with a certain deadly precision that was as
impressive and at times almost as terrifying as a piece of gigantic
machinery. He had doubts and hesitancies indeed: the hesitancies of
one aware of the subtleties, the baffling complexity, of problems
which less careful minds deemed simple; but once he had reached a
definite decision, nothing short of overpowering ratiocination, no
consideration of comfort or sentiment, could shake him from it. And
while her sense of poetry revolted against a certain aridness in his
philosophy, the very magnitude and the shattering presumption of
his attempt to rationalize the universe overpowered her imagination
and thrilled her with a sense of great adventure.

In sharp contrast with this austere enthusiasm for Edward Fairfield

and his work, there flickered up in her heart a secret romantic
compassion for the Honourable Richard Bunnard, that fair-haired,
frank-eyed, simple-minded young man, whose nickname, Bunny,
appeared even to the eye of affection so entirely suitable. For his
youth and good nature, for his docility, for the irresponsible levity
that even the Fairfield atmosphere could not entirely inhibit, and still
more for the less definite charm he unconsciously exercised over her,
Sheila conceived a liking that trembled sometimes dangerously on
the verge of tenderness. She was stirred by his voluntary surrender
of his personality into the grasping hands of Hypatia, the high-
priestess of a new oracle, and trembled at the thought of his being
immolated, a blood sacrifice, upon that godless altar. But, most of
all, the memory of his music troubled the deep cool waters of her
mind. She sought in him often, and sometimes for a fleeting instant
found, the transfigured face of the violinist who had once laid his
spell upon her.
She swayed for a while between these two magnetic points:
Edward’s intellectuality and Bunny’s manifest need for being looked
after; but if the one’s self-sufficiency sometimes repelled her the
other’s comparative vacuity of mind no less tried her patience. With
such an alternative, perhaps her womanhood would have urged her
irresistibly towards Bunny, in spite of discouraging precedent, had
not that youth remained unaware of her claim to be anything more
exciting (and that was exciting enough, no doubt) than Hypatia’s
friend.
‘If only he had Edward’s brains as well as his own niceness,’ Sheila
said to herself; and humour compelled her to add, self-scornfully:
‘Well, what if he had? He’d perhaps be even more indifferent to me
than he is now.’ And that would have been hard; for his absorption
in Hypatia was so complete that he could even sing her praises in
little solitary interviews with Sheila contrived for that very purpose.
‘Don’t you think she’s very clever?’ he said one day, incredulous of a
hint of criticism.
‘I know she’s got wonderful brains,’ Sheila assured him. ‘But at
present I believe they’re under a cloud. That sounds horribly
dogmatic, I expect. But I really think Hypatia’s a little bit of a fanatic
nowadays.’
He rebelled against that. ‘She’s an enthusiast, if you like.’
Sheila smiled. ‘Perhaps that’s all. I suppose fanaticism’s only the
name we give to the other person’s enthusiasm.’
‘I must say she often puzzles me,’ admitted Bunny. ‘You know her
very well, don’t you?’
‘Not so well as you do, I expect.’
‘Oh, but you were at school with her,’ he urged.
‘That’s five, six, seven years ago.’
‘Still....’ He ached to believe that Sheila out of the fulness of her
knowledge of Hypatia could help him. ‘Do you think she’s capable of
liking anybody?’
‘Liking?’ The clear inadequacy of the word arrested her.
‘Liking very much, I mean, don’t you see? It’s this way: supposing
you wanted....’ He waited as if for her to help him out. But she
rather pointedly didn’t. ‘She seems so aloof very often, don’t you
think?’
To this mild proposition Sheila assented. ‘A little cold, you think,
perhaps?’ She guided his stumbling feet thus far.
‘Cold, but not,’ he hoped, ‘incapable of—well, affection, as it were.’
Sheila agreed gravely that ‘incapable’ would be too absolute a word.
‘She is very fine-looking.’ He had the air of submitting this idea for
her acceptation.
‘Fine is quite the right epithet,’ Sheila assured this incredible youth.
‘She has always been fearless; you can see that in her face. And she
had a sense of humour once.’ To herself she added: ‘Am I so very
maternal that he must confide in me?’
After a brief transitional hovering, when he was neither quite in
Sheila’s company nor definitely out of it, he went away, no doubt to
treasure all these things in his heart, leaving Sheila in a state that
oscillated between amusement and a half-ashamed regret. And that
night Hypatia, joining her friend in the spacious bedroom that they
shared, displayed unwonted animation. Whether it was Bunny or the
stirring in its sleep of old friendship that loosened her tongue, Sheila
patiently waited to have revealed to her.
Hypatia was in a reminiscential mood. She sat on Sheila’s bed and
talked of Selborne days, of feuds with Miss Fry, of Sheila’s Aunt
Hester, and of what little she knew of Kay. She appeared rather to
dwell on Kay. She called up once-familiar faces from the pit of
oblivion and set them again speaking forgotten parts. And presently,
without preamble, she remarked: ‘There’s more in Bunny than he
allows to appear, don’t you think?’
‘Very likely,’ Sheila said, sleepily. ‘But you know him so much better
than I.’
‘He’s ductile,’ said Hypatia, rather consciously selecting the word.
‘Too much so,’ Sheila ventured. ‘How beautifully he plays the violin.
That night at the Folk Dancing he was wonderful.’
‘Yes. In his way he’s quite a genius. Though of course this musical
glamour is not really healthy. It’s a kind of delusion, a magnetism. In
Real Knowledge it doesn’t exist.’
‘He’s rather marvellous, your friend Bunny,’ Sheila said tritely, chilled
by Hypatia’s eternal prosing.
‘He’s a very nice boy. But under mother’s thumb at present. I shall
change that.’
Sheila shivered. ‘You! How?’
‘He proposed to me to-night.’
Sheila was dumbstruck for a moment. Then, ‘You’re very calm about
it,’ she said. ‘Did you...?’
‘Not yet. But if I do accept him there’ll be a fine tussle with mother.’
‘Doesn’t your mother like him?’
‘Immensely. But mother has an inordinate appetite for affection.
She’s like a spider with a fly. She won’t share him.’
‘How bitterly you speak!’
Hypatia loftily repudiated the suggestion. ‘Not at all. I’m merely
stating a fact. You will see, if you’re here long enough.’
‘Poor Bunny!’ said Sheila.
‘Oh, don’t worry about him. I shan’t let mother gobble him up, you
may be sure.’
‘I’m sure you won’t,’ Sheila replied, biting her lip. ‘You’ll marry him
sooner than that.’
But irony was lost on Hypatia. ‘Mother shan’t have him,’ she
reiterated.

Edward found the presence of another person distracting. The

dictation of his book was soon abandoned, and he pursued his
solitary way. Yet not solitary, for he was not unconscious that his
solitude had been invaded, destroyed; and he was not yet sure
whether he liked or resented the invasion. In spirit another walked
by his side. For Sheila this book, child of his brain, became a living
thing to be thought about with a reverent excitement. She was still
enough of a child to find this making of books miraculous: it was like
that creation of something out of nothing which the church
attributed to God. The best of Edward went into his book, and Sheila
was quick to remember this in his defence when vitality or humour
seemed lacking in him. He worked with clocklike regularity. He wrote
from nine till twelve-thirty. He resumed work, after lunch, at one-
thirty and wrote till, at half-past four, some toast and tea was
brought to him on a tray. For this refreshment he allowed himself
twenty minutes, and for ten minutes he systematically did nothing.
From five till seven was his final daily spell.
Seven o’clock released him from his self-imposed task. At half-past
seven he dined with his family, and having dined was free to
cultivate such social amenities as he did not utterly despise. He
formed the habit of seeking out Sheila; he persuaded her to go for
walks with him: strenuous almost racing walks, conscientious and
concentrated exercise, essential to the maintenance of physical and
therefore mental fitness. She, glad of an antidote for the daily dose
of omniscience forced down her throat by Hypatia, welcomed this
new friendship. She was a willing and intelligent listener; the
quickness of her mind delighted him, and his appreciation evoked an
answering delight in her. The variety and colour of her thinking, a
habit she had of investing with emotion even the dry bones of
argument, provided a foil for Edward’s exact logic. She took
imaginative leaps in metaphysical speculation, while he plodded
laboriously on from point to point, never retracing a step. They
sharpened their wits against each other and felt marvellously
stimulated by the process. And still it was of the book, and of
cognate subjects, that he talked, in an unending torrent of
discourse. He involved himself in sentences so prodigious that Sheila
sometimes got lost in a labyrinth of phrases and subordinate
clauses. More than once she felt rising in her a secret impatience;
she even got to the point of contemplating the discontinuance of an
intercourse that became daily more overpowering. Yet looking back,
as the days passed, upon that vista of intimate, flushed, excited talk,
she could not find heart to cut adrift from him; moreover, he had
made her feel, not without a sense of her presumption, that she had
somehow become necessary to his literary scheme. These
enormously distended monologues of his helped him to clarify his
thought, and her occasional interpolated criticism freshened his
dialectic processes. She felt a certain responsibility for him.
Mrs. Fairfield observed this ripening intimacy with a curious
admixture of benevolence and displeasure. One evening she came
upon her son and Sheila sauntering in the garden together a few
minutes before seven, and smiled at her guest with an inimical glint
in her eye.
‘Sheila dear,’ she said bitter-sweetly, ‘you mustn’t take my son from
his work.’
Sheila, flushing with resentment, could make no reply.
‘Mother,’ said Edward, neither hotly nor coldly, ‘you interrupt the
thread of my argument.’
Mrs. Fairfield flashed a point of jealous fire at Sheila, who turned on
her heel, biting her lips in vexation. She was astounded and
ashamed by this momentary and involuntary revelation of a woman’s
soul.
Edward followed her without an instant’s hesitation.
‘See you at dinner, mother,’ he said casually, over his shoulder.... ‘The
matter is not quite so simple as that,’ he went on, speaking to the
girl at his side. ‘The vitalist hypothesis has implications that lie
deeper than that altogether, and that run, in my opinion, altogether
counter to the ascertained facts of experience. Chemical analysis....’
Sheila let him ramble on, grateful that he took no notice of her
evident embarrassment. She wished he had left her. She wanted to
escape from the intolerable sense of having been delivered an
insulting ultimatum, a warning, by Edward’s detestable mother. Yes,
Edward’s detestable mother: that was how she thought of the
woman in whose mien she had read ‘Hands off my property!’ Her
instinct was to run away from the house and never return; but
slowly, as Edward’s sentences gathered length and momentum, she
came to regard such an action as merely melodramatic.
She cut one of his clauses in half by asking abruptly: ‘What did your
mother mean by that?’
He was pulled up short, and left floundering.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sheila; ‘I’m very rude. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.
I was thinking of what your mother said. What makes her hate me
so?’
‘Hate you! Dear me, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re too sensitive. Mother
is hurt because I give my confidence to you and not to her. Don’t
worry about her. She’ll have to get used to it.’
‘Oh no, she won’t. I am going home to-morrow.’
‘To-morrow?’
‘I had already arranged to, you know,’ Sheila untruthfully assured
him.
‘I hope you will stay longer,’ he said earnestly. ‘If mother has
offended you she shall apologize. I’ll see to it.’
‘Pray do nothing of the kind. And let’s drop the subject.... Won’t you
forgive my inattention and tell me what you were saying?’
They had by now reached a remote part of the garden, a part from
which the house was hidden by a mass of sweet peas clustering over
trelliswork. A rustic seat on the gravel path by the trim croquet-lawn
invited them to rest.
‘By the way,’ he said, when they had sat down. ‘I’ve finished the
magnum opus.’
‘Finished!’ she exclaimed, glowing with excited pleasure. ‘How fine!
Aren’t you tremendously glad?’
‘It’s a relief,’ he admitted. ‘I shall take a week’s rest and then start
the revision.’
She, exulting still in the accomplished work, could spare no thought
for the revision.
‘How jolly to have finished! You didn’t tell me you were near the
end?’
‘Ah, you’d forgotten then.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘I told you a
fortnight ago that I should finish on the thirteenth of this month.’
She was suitably astonished.
‘You mean to say you knew to a day?’
‘I work on a programme, you see,’ he said, relishing her surprised
admiration.
Now that the work was done he seemed to have time for human
weaknesses. This unexpected boyish vanity made Sheila like him
more than she had ever done before.
‘I suppose you’re pleased with yourself now!’ she mocked him gently.
‘Very!’ he confessed. They both laughed.
‘There was another thing that might have told you,’ he said. ‘I came
out of my room before seven o’clock to-night. Have you ever known
that happen before?’
‘You see, my watch had stopped,’ she explained. ‘So that is what
your mother——’
‘Probably.’
‘Why didn’t you explain to her?’ she asked him.
‘I refuse to propitiate her,’ he said. ‘Besides, I wanted you to know
first.’
She was silent.
‘Sheila,’ he said gently, ‘we could do such a lot together!’
She began to rise from her seat, but he placed on her knee a strong
and strangely reassuring hand.
‘It’s a year since your last visit to us, isn’t it?’
Sheila found her voice, a very small voice now, and answered ‘Yes.’
‘Well, a year ago I made up my mind to ask you to marry me. Will
you?’
There was a teeming silence. Sheila’s mind was in a whirl. There
seemed something wanting in the richness of this moment, a
disconcerting gap in the happiness that had come within her reach.
But another feeling conquered. She looked at him with her heart in
her eyes.
‘If I can help you.... Oh, Edward, I do want to help you!’
‘My dear!’ he said. He kissed her cheek in warm brotherly fashion.
‘We shall be very happy together, you and I.’ He took her hand in
his.
For a moment they contemplated this prospective happiness without
speaking. The gong summoned them to dinner.

Sheila accompanied Edward into the house with a numbed feeling in

one corner of her mind. She could not banish a vague half-formed
doubt that had crept into the heart of her new happiness. There was
so much that was fine, so much that was bracing, about her
relationship with Edward, and she told herself that this lurking
discontent was mere perversity. A feeling of comradeliness struggled
with a sense of chill. She was to be his friend, his wife, the partner
of his life’s work; they were intellectually in tune: what more could
she ask of life? What was this secret craving for tenderness, for
romance, but a foolish lapse into the sentimental dreaming of her
school-days? Edward offered her in abundance what that boy-lover
Kay Wilton had been so conspicuously unable to offer: the sympathy
of an alert mind. Sympathy and comradeship—were not these the
fairest flowers of life? The rest were gaudy hothouse plants,
nurtured in an artificial warmth and unable to endure the healthy
rigours of continual daily intimacy.
She tried by such reflections to still the whispering voice within her;
nevertheless she was not herself during dinner, and it was with a
catch of the breath, afterwards, that she heard Edward announce
their betrothal to his parents. Stated coldly, the compact had the
terrifying air of something irrevocable. She controlled with effort an
impulse to flee from the room.
Mrs. Fairfield was exclamatory and encouraging, and Mr. Fairfield
vaguely echoed his wife’s expressions of pleasure. Mrs. Fairfield
opened her plump arms and wrapped them round Sheila as though
taking permanent possession of her.
‘My dear Sheila!’ she exclaimed. ‘A new daughter for me!’
From that capacious and efficient embrace Sheila emerged with a
sense of having been rescued from a yawning gulf. The one thought
in her mind was that she did not wish to be a daughter to Mrs.
Fairfield. She felt that Edward’s mother would as readily take, if she
could, the globe itself into that large embrace, and exult greedily in
her newly-acquired property, like a child with a big ball that it may
bounce to its heart’s content.
‘Now that is nice!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Very pleasant arrangement
indeed! Well, well!’
A diversion was created by the entry of Bunny. He tried to conceal
an air of desperate purpose under the affectation of breeziness.
‘Hullo, by Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘How are you, Mrs. Fairfield? How are
you, sir? How do, Ted? And how are you, Miss Dyrle? Myself, I’m
jolly fine. Thanks for kind inquiries.’
‘That’s a comfort anyhow,’ said Mrs. Fairfield grimly. ‘You seem a
little upset.’
‘Upset! Me!’ cried Bunny. He calmed a little to add: ‘Bit excited
perhaps. Got some news for you, Mrs. Fairfield.’
‘Ha!’ The light of triumph gleamed in Mrs. Fairfield’s eye. ‘You’ve
agreed to be president of the Workers’ Federation after all.’
‘No, not exactly.’
‘You haven’t!’ Mrs. Fairfield became the picture of righteous
indignation. ‘You refuse to do a little thing like that for me, when
your name would be so valuable to us!’
‘It wouldn’t be fair to my father. He’s a bit old-fashioned, I dare say,
but there it is. He can’t help being an earl. He makes rather a point
of my not getting too deep in the movement.’
The Honourable Richard Bunnard stood on one toe and twirled once
round to assure every one that he was perfectly at ease.
‘Please don’t fidget, Bunny, when you’re talking to me, even though
I am only an old woman. Once again I ask you, and for the last
time: will you do the right thing, the public-spirited thing?’
Bunny tried to soothe the exasperated lady.
‘My dear Mrs. Fairfield, I’ve already promised my father.’
The storm burst.
‘Your father! Fiddlesticks your father! Hypatia’s at the bottom of this!’
‘Don’t get excited, mother,’ urged Edward.
‘I will, I will,’ retorted his mother. ‘I’ve a perfect right to get excited.
You young people, you’ve got hearts of stone. All the love we
mothers lavish on you is nothing to you. Do we get any gratitude?
Not a bit! Scorn, yes, plenty of it! Scorn of our grey hairs and our
silly ways and our ignorance. But gratitude—the last thing in the
world.... Some chit of a girl comes....’
Edward shrugged his shoulders in cold disgust.
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mrs. Fairfield. There was an ominous pause. Her
husband rushed towards her.
‘It’s all right, me dear. I’ve got you safe and sound. Sit down and
have a bit of a rest.’
The afflicted lady sighed.
‘She’s going to faint,’ cried Mr. Fairfield. ‘Why didn’t you let her have
her way, you young devils, you!’
‘Of course she’s going to faint,’ said Edward. ‘That is the last scene
of the melodrama.’
Sheila watched the scene with a mixture of indignation and
compassion. The indignation was short-lived: it died suddenly at
sight of Edward’s complete detachment. He seemed utterly devoid of
the filial sentiment that would have made allowances for his mother.
For she was, after all, his mother, Sheila reflected. She had faced
death to bring him into the world. He was flesh of her flesh, bone of
her bone: for him she had spent herself, and he was still the centre
of her life. Had Edward shewn anger, Sheila would have been
wholeheartedly with him, but this cold disdain, this resolute refusal
to be stirred a hair’s breadth either to pity or to wrath seemed to
Sheila’s warmer heart almost inhuman, although it extorted from her
an unwilling admiration.
‘I think I’d better clear out,’ said Bunny, moving towards the door.
‘Sorry to have been the cause of a disturbance.’
But Mrs. Fairfield’s recovery was as abrupt as her collapse had been.
From the arm-chair into which her husband had placed her she
urged the young man to stay.
‘Don’t go, Bunny. I’m better now. It was my son upset me, not you.
Come and tell me your news?’
She spoke in a languid faded tone, the tone of one bearing bravely
an immense burden of wrongs.
‘Well ...’ began Bunny nervously, glancing towards Sheila.
Edward, intercepting the glance, asked: ‘Are we de trop, Bunny?’
Mr. Fairfield intervened. ‘Edward and Miss Dyrle have just come to an
understanding, Bunny.’
‘An understanding?’ asked Bunny.
‘Yes. Bit of sweethearting, you know.’
‘Really!’ cried Bunny, beaming. ‘I congratulate you. Well, that makes
it easier for me. There’ll be a double event.’
‘A what?’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield, all the languor gone from her.
‘You see,’ Bunny explained, ‘I’m engaged to be married.’
‘Well I declare!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Engaged! Why, everybody’s getting
engaged. Time we set about it, mother, eh?’
Edward made a congratulatory noise. Only Mrs. Fairfield was silent,
watching Bunny with feline intentness.
‘Well,’ she said sharply. ‘Who’s the young lady, Bunny?’
Bunny, with his hands in his pockets agitating a bunch of keys, stood
first on one leg and then on the other.
‘That was what I came for,’ he said, blushing, ‘to ask your blessing,
don’t you know. You see, Hypatia....’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Fairfield curtly. ‘What about Hypatia?’
Even the amiable Bunny had not unlimited patience.
‘Hypatia?’ he said. ‘Well, nothing about her. You asked me who was
the young lady. I’ve told you.’
‘Hypatia!’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield.
‘Exactly,’ answered Bunny, and strode out of the room.
‘Herbert!’ cried Mrs. Fairfield to her husband. ‘Go after him. At once.
Hypatia shan’t have him. She shan’t!’
‘You’d better faint again, mother,’ remarked Edward.
‘Oh, Edward, how can you!’ cried Sheila, stung to speech.
She beckoned him to the bay window, as Mrs. Fairfield followed her
husband to the door.
‘Edward,’ Sheila said, ‘are you sure you want me?’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘You know I do.’
Sheila felt that her question needed an apology. ‘It’s only that I hate
to cause a fuss. Your mother does loathe me, I’m sure.’
He took both her hands in his for a moment. ‘Sheila, you’re not
going to forsake me, are you?’
‘Not ... if you really care,’ she answered in a low voice.
Mrs. Fairfield from the passage stepped back into the room.
‘Children!’ she muttered, regarding the lovers with malevolence,
‘children ... no, vipers!’
Her husband returned, followed by Bunny wrapped in his dignity and
by Hypatia armed with invincible placidity.
‘Now understand this,’ began Mrs. Fairfield. ‘We old folk refuse to be
ignored. We just won’t put up with this insulting behaviour. You think
we don’t count, but we’ll see. Bunny, let’s hear no more of this
nonsense about marrying Hypatia. You shall not marry her. You’re a
young snob. And Sheila shan’t marry my Edward either. I won’t be
robbed of my children by young stuck-up creatures who despise me
and my husband because we’re in trade.’
‘What a wicked lie!’ exclaimed Sheila, with flashing eyes. ‘You know
we don’t despise you! Everybody’s parents are in trade ... except
Bunny’s, I suppose.’
‘Herbert!... Edward! Will you stand here and hear this girl call your
mother a wicked liar?’
‘Where do you want me to stand?’ enquired Edward. ‘Besides, I’m
not Sheila’s controller. I’m not even her parent.’
‘You will leave my son alone,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, struggling with her
rising passion. ‘Marry the Honourable Richard, if you want to marry.’
‘But that would still leave Edward and Hypatia unmarried,’ objected
Bunny, lapsing into weak humour. ‘They can’t marry each other, you
know.’
‘And you leave Hypatia alone!’ Hypatia’s mother turned upon Bunny.
‘I’ll make father disinherit them both if they disobey me.’
‘Is that all you have to say, mother?’ asked Hypatia, with the patient
smile of the Christian Scientist.
‘No, it is not....’
‘Well, it’s quite enough,’ Hypatia assured her. ‘Come along, Bunny.
Come and buy the licence.’
Without a word, the young man followed Hypatia out of the room.
The flame of battle was awake now in Sheila’s heart, burning away
all lingering reluctance, all doubts and fears. If there was to be a
feud, there was no doubt upon which side she would fight. Age had
declared war upon Youth, and all the spirit in her woke to the
challenge. Edward, her comrade, was being threatened with
disinheritance. Sheila knew now that she was irrevocably his: a hint
of doubt would have been shameful treason. She forgot the cold
formality of his attitude to his mother: she remembered only his
strength, his glorious unyielding strength.
‘Look here, mother,’ Edward was saying, ‘you’ll have to readjust your
ideas a little.’ He waved aside a hysterical interruption. ‘No, it’s no
use indulging in heroics: your storming only makes me tired. Storm
in a teacup, that’s all. Listen to me.’
Mrs. Fairfield turned her back on him.
‘Yes, listen like that, if you wish. It’s extraordinarily rude, but never
mind. I was saying that you’ve got to readjust your ideas a little.
They’re about a hundred years behind the times. We young people,
as you call us, have as much right to live as you, and as much right
to freedom.’
His mother wheeled round swiftly. ‘Freedom! You’ve had too much
freedom!’
‘Please don’t interrupt,’ said Edward. ‘There’s been quite enough
shouting and stamping. I want you to reason the thing out calmly.
Freedom consists in being left alone, left with room to grow, not in
being penned round with affection and told every minute of the day
that of course we can do as we like if we don’t love mother and
father.’
‘You’re hitting too hard,’ whispered Sheila.
‘You think,’ Edward continued, ‘because you’ve born and bred us and
sacrificed yourself for us that Hypatia and I belong to you.’
‘Oh no, you don’t belong to me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield in fierce sarcasm.
‘I’m only your mother: that’s all.’
‘Precisely,’ said Edward. ‘Our mother, not our owner. We belong to
nobody. We have our separate lives to live, and we intend to live
them in our own way.’
‘You’re mine, mine, mine!’ protested his mother. ‘Don’t you feel any
common gratitude for what I’ve done for you? I gave you life; I fed
you with my body; and now—is this the end?’
‘Those are services that cannot be repaid,’ he answered, without any
trace of emotion. ‘If in return for what you did for me I had to
submit to be your doll for ever, it were better that I had not been
born at all.’
‘Brutal, brutal!’ interjected his father, waking from a spell of
bewilderment.
‘Perhaps,’ conceded Edward, ‘but it’s nature. Nature is brutal. Do you
think that because you gave me life, as you say, that you have the
right to take it away, or smother it, or confine it, at your pleasure?
You shut your eyes to logical inference. See to what absurd
conclusions your wild unreasoning would lead you if you dared
follow it to the end. Time and again civilization has been hindered in
its march....’
For a moment Sheila ceased her loyal silent applause to ask herself:
Why does Edward talk like a parliamentary candidate? But Mrs.
Fairfield quickly distracted her attention from that question.
‘I see,’ she said, ‘I’m nothing to you. I’m only your mother. This bit of
a girl, who’s done nothing for you, whom you’ve known ten minutes,
is more to you than your mother is.’
Edward assented gravely. ‘So much more than I propose to live with
her and not with you. You were a bit of a girl yourself once, mother.
If father had been more devoted to his mother than to you, you
might have been a childless spinster at this moment.’
‘Now then,’ said Mr. Fairfield, briskly asserting himself. ‘We’ve had
about enough of this. Mother’s had her say. And you’ve had yours.
You’ve got the gift of the gab all right. Now just you cut along and
leave your mother alone.’
‘Herbert, he shan’t have a penny of your money!’ Mrs. Fairfield
turned confidently to her husband for ratification of this threat. ‘Tell
him so.’
‘We’ll see. We’ll see. I’m not dead yet,’ said the little man, with
unwonted independence. ‘I hadn’t any pennies myself when I was
his age.’
His wife turned upon him a terrible Et tu Brute look.
‘Never you mind,’ he retorted, with incredible courage. ‘There’s sense
in what the lad says, even though he is a bit of a hard nut. Gets that
from his father perhaps.’
‘His father!’ cried the mother in scorn. ‘They’re their mother’s
children, both of them. Else they’d never dare to treat me like this.’
There was pride as well as anger in the glance she flashed at
Edward as she gathered up her skirts and rustled out of the room.

PART THE THIRD

Sheila Fairfield
1

ALL roads led to Edward Fairfield. His atheism, his sister, Aunt
Hester’s opposition, all conspired to fling Sheila into the polite
dispassionate arms of that rational young graduate from Cambridge.
Kay had offered romance without intellectual comradeship: Edward
offered a kind of business partnership in the propagation of rational
atheology, and this proved an irresistible bait for a spirited girl
hustled by disaster into premature cynicism. Edward concerns us no
further, save that he married her, respected her, and practised upon
her the editorials that appeared week by week in his own paper The
Iconoclast. Everything that he did was in perfect taste and supported
by a perfect reason. When, for example, she declared their marriage
a failure, he provided her with a pair of admirable rooms in his own
well-appointed house, and lived thereafter in contented celibacy. He
was just to the point of inhumanity; but she, a disappointed woman,
was not just. The efficient elegance of her home afflicted her. It
seemed a mere piece of machinery for the daily manufacture of well-
bred happiness. Her two rooms, until she had transformed them,
seemed sleek, complacent: they announced to her, with the patient
smile and in the incisive tones of a secularist lecturer, the supremacy
of Reason. In herself, reason was far from supreme.
A woman with love must bestow it somewhere: Sheila poured it
without stint upon her dream of Kay. Ten years divided them, and
more, before that dream was finally destroyed. Sophie, his wife,
gave birth to a child, and Sheila, impelled by who knows what
medley of motives, visited her. They sat and talked about nothing in
a room pervaded by yellow. A pale-brown flower perpetuated itself
at intervals on the walls; a small occasional table set in the middle of
a dark yellowish carpet was covered by a buff cloth; a gilt-framed
oval mirror surmounted the mantelpiece. There were photographs
on the mantelpiece of Sophie’s father, of Sophie’s child, of Sophie,
and one of Kay standing stiffly with a book in his hand—a cruel
photograph, courageously signed by the photographer. Sheila gave
no second glance to it.
She interrupted a remark of Sophie’s about the chapel Dorcas
Society by saying, ‘Oh I forgot to ask—you don’t mind Bernard being
here, do you?’
‘Bernard?’ Sophie was mystified.
Sheila pointed to the Irish terrier that was frisking round her.
A little ripple of merriment came from Sophie.
‘Do you call the dog Bernard? How funny! I love dogs, but father
doesn’t care for them.... But of course he won’t mind yours,’ she
added hastily.
Sheila tried to puzzle out how Mr. Dewick could even have a chance
of objecting to her dog, but just then a diversion was created by the
entry of a rather plump old-young man in a morning coat rubbing his
hands together and making an indeterminate noise in a vague
endeavour to be hospitable. He wore a little brown moustache and
short side-whiskers near the ears. His hair had receded considerably,
more especially where the parting was, and had left an expanse of
shining brow.
‘Well, well,’ he said, nervously cheerful. ‘How are you after all this
while? I’m sure we’re very pleased.’
Sheila recognized him instantly, although there seemed indeed
nothing of the old Kay left to recognize. Yet this was Kay. This was
he who years ago under the moon had whispered to her, with eyes
full of dreams, his boyish love. Shades of the meeting-house had
closed on that boy for ever.
Almost sick with disappointment, she shook hands with him, and
quickly sought refuge in responding to the terrier’s still frantic
demonstrations.
‘I hope you like my dog,’ she remarked to Kay, shy of using his
name.
‘Yes, yes, fine fellow,’ responded Kay. ‘Come on, good dog, good
dog!’
He patted the dog awkwardly.
‘We call him Bernard,’ explained Sheila, afraid of the smallest hiatus.
‘George Bernard, because he’s Irish and vivacious.’
Kay looked puzzled. ‘But why ... do you call him George Bernard? I
didn’t quite catch....’
‘After Shaw, you know,’ Sheila explained. ‘We suspect Bernard of
having been a distinguished playwright in a previous incarnation.’
‘Oh I see!’ said Kay, his brow clearing.
But it was knitted again the next moment.
‘What was it the Reverend Aitken was saying about Shaw last
Sunday, mother?’
‘I remember something,’ Sophie answered. ‘I think he said he was a
mountaineer, didn’t he?’
‘Mountaineer,’ murmured Kay. ‘I think not. Ah no, mountebank! That
was the word.’
Here Sheila joined the conversation in a mildly argumentative vein,
but Kay sidetracked by waxing indignant over the attempted
introduction of a liturgy into divine service. He had set his face
against that, he assured them: every true nonconformist at the
church meeting had set his face against that, and right feeling had
ultimately triumphed over the incipient popery. It appeared indeed
that the cosmos was being conducted in an entirely proper manner,
except for the wanton behaviour of the east wind. He considered the
east wind very dangerous. He became impressive and told a long
story about a man of his acquaintance who ventured out in an east
wind without his overcoat, caught a chill, developed pneumonia, and
had to take to his bed.
‘Dead in a week!’ finished Kay, dramatically and with relish.
Except for an appreciative murmur from his wife, the story was
received in silence. Sheila with a stunned sensation was telling
herself: ‘I would never have let him get like this.’ But Kay,
misinterpreting the silence, began another story. It concerned
another man who ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat.
This man had a similar series of adventures, his experience differing
from the first man’s only in that he lingered for two days and then
died, leaving a widow and five children. Kay could not remember
whether there were three boys and two girls, or three girls and two
boys. He began naming them on his fingers. There were Horace and
George, Margaret and Vera. That made four. He was sure there was
another one—he remembered the child perfectly as a baby, but he
could not for the life of him recall its sex. He felt sure that its name
began with F.
He became perplexed.
‘Mother, can’t you remember?’ he asked. The question was an
accusation.
‘Remember what, dear?’ inquired Sophie in her gentle way.
‘The name of Tomlinson’s youngest. You remember Tomlinson.’
‘I don’t believe I do,’ said Sophie.
Sheila sat silent, limp under the burden of her disillusionment. She
felt something like fear when Sophie, with a rapturous cry, ‘She’s
awake!’, rose and darted from the room to fetch her little girl. To
hide her nervousness she said, ‘Such an unusual name you gave her,
didn’t you? What made you think of Robina?’
While Kay was losing himself in explanations Sophie came back,
leading her baby daughter by the hand. The mother’s face was
shining.
‘Oh!’ A passionate cry broke from Sheila. In a moment she was on
her knees gazing with adoration at the flaxen-haired, elf-like child.
For from the big dreaming eyes her vanished Kay looked at her; the
wonderful boy dead and buried in a prematurely old man, lived
again in this two-year old girl. Hungrily Sheila kissed the tiny face ...
and once again she felt his arm about her and heard his boyish
whispers.
‘Oh, give her to me!’ she cried, looking up over the child’s head at its
father.
Kay’s face lit up.
‘I’ve got it now. I remember,’ he said triumphantly.
‘What?’ asked Sophie, troubled by Sheila’s emotion, and yet gratified
by it.
‘Why,’ said Kay, ‘the name of Tomlinson’s youngest. It was Freddie. I
told you it began with an F.’
He looked round with modest pride, and was surprised to see Sheila
burst into tears.

So that was the solution of the problem. The beauty of life was only
for the young, the very young. In a child’s heart and nowhere else
the kingdom of heaven was to be found, a frail gossamer thing
vanishing with the years. This was the common lot: by contact with
the world to rub the down of paradise off our souls, to grow drab
and dull in spirit, drab and dull in mind, even before that waning of
physical strength which alone could assuage the bitterness of the
process. In Kay youth had died; in Edward—Edward had never been
young; but in herself youth lived and craved more life. Yes, it lived
still, but now it was stricken and dying.
It flashed upon her then that she too could renew her youth. In a
child she could live again.
But a child had been denied her.
She deemed her life to be already virtually finished. She would age
from this moment: after a brief fever her mind would dim and even
the desire for beauty would sink into oblivion. She tried to hope it
would be soon, but the struggling youth in her cried out against the
hope.

The struggling youth in her cried out, and, years later, the cry was
answered. Beauty became incarnated in the person of Stephen
Redshawe, whose son she later encountered in the house at Maadi.
The past rose in sad loveliness, enveloping her with the fragrance of
pressed flowers; but of all the memories that surged in her, this one
alone broke in pitiless splendour over her consciousness. In that
moment Stephen Redshawe lived again, less as a man and a lover
than as a gleam, an ecstasy, a chord of divine music, a symbol of all
that she had longed for and lost. Other things she could recall
minutely, but Stephen remained a vague splendour. She recalled
how, in her little cottage near Mundesley, she had waited for his
promised coming; how she had looked again and again, in wonder,
to find in her mirror the face he had called lovely. It was a face
ravaged less by her thirty-three years than by discontent. His sisters
and his mother she remembered only as so many bundles of
feminine hostility. They disapproved of her, and no wonder: was she
not a married woman, holiday-making alone, who yet suffered gladly
the admiration of an infatuated boy? They called her adventuress, no
doubt, and she, even in the midst of the adventure, made
allowances for them. She had neither the strength nor the will to
renounce the fairest gift that life offered.
‘May I come in?’ Stephen’s tall figure filled the doorway.
‘You must,’ Sheila answered, with a smile. ‘I’m not going to give you
any tea while you stand there keeping the sunshine out.’
‘This is our last meeting,’ blundered Stephen. ‘I want to tell you....’
Suddenly dreading to hear the words for which she longed, Sheila
fended them away. ‘Eat your pretty cake,’ she admonished him.
After tea they went out into the sandy paddock and talked for an
hour of indifferent things, of trains, of luggage, of books and bad
music ... until a stillness fell, heralding dusk. Evening became
personal and urgent to enfold them: they could hear in the wash of
the water, rhythmically plashing the sand, the rise and fall of her
bosom; they could feel her breath sweeter than apples in the
autumn air. And all the skies that during the past weeks of stolen
companionship they had seen together, all the tides they had
watched moving upon the shore, became fused with that sky, with
that tide; all the hours of their comradeship were gathered up into
that hour. They surrendered themselves to the embracing arms of
silence.
To Sheila it was as if infinity had been spilled into time: the moments
throbbed by, brimming with beauty, until the silence that these two
guarded became a music, a poem, a flower of loveliness. It was a
flower that budded and blossomed till their vision dimmed with the
glory of it, a flower that burst and fell scattering pollen and perfume.
He bent towards her, with cheeks flaming. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he
said, and for a moment could not go on. To Sheila life was become
exquisitely unreal, a work of art. ‘You must know,’ he said brokenly,
‘that I adore you.’
Compassionately she laid her cool hand on his.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a low tone tenderly soothing.
‘Ah!’ His breath fluttered. She gave him her trembling lips.
They kissed, first, like boy and girl, timidly; then like comrades
united after a long parting; again, and a red splendour flamed
through the throbbing world. He lifted her into his arms, and divine
madness seized her. He carried her with strong unfaltering stride into
the house.
And this day, which they had called the end, was really the
beginning. She returned on the morrow to Edward’s house and
confided to her husband that she wished him to divorce her. Edward
listened patiently, like the disinterested friend he was; but his
disinterestedness made her pride wince, and the old hated
surroundings were bleak about her. Yet on that night of her return,
in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she undressed with a new joy. She
stood nude before the wardrobe mirror and gazed with awe upon
the pure rounded loveliness of her own form. She stroked gently her
white velvet skin. Her body, so long disdained, had become sacred
to her again. As she laid her head, that kingdom of heaven, upon
her pillow, and murmured Stephen’s name, Stephen himself, in a
suburb fourteen miles away, posted his weekly letter to the girl—no
adventuress, she—who was to become his wife and the mother of
his only son. For Stephen, too, was back in the old routine, enfolded
and pressed close to the bosom of his family, conscious of his
mother’s eyes watching him with an angry solicitude. Not without a
struggle did he succumb. To Grace, whose pretty simplicity no longer
held him, he hinted dire things; but at the first gesture of suffering
from her he winced, and surrendered. And he wrote to Sheila in his
best literary style. She carried the letter, as she had carried its
predecessors, into the summer-house, that she might commune with
her lover undisturbed.
‘Darling,’ she read, ‘the thought of how I must hurt you is hell to me.’
She caught her breath, looked once upon the sky, and then bent her
eyes again to receive the blow....
With mind benumbed she looked up from the fastidious caligraphy to
find Stephen himself standing, like a whipped dog, before her. For a
moment they strangely stared.
‘Why have you come?’
He broke out into self-pity. ‘Oh, I can’t bear it. Don’t for God’s sake
look like that.... I couldn’t leave you without a word from your lips.’
She tried to harden her heart. ‘Is that all?’
His hands made a helpless gesture. ‘I’m such a despicable coward.
I’ve lived always among dreams. Real life is too hard for me—I’d be
better dead.’
‘Why have you come?’ she asked. ‘Have you anything to add to this?’
She held out his letter. ‘Why not leave it at that?’
‘I had to see you,’ he said. ‘I had to ask your forgiveness. I hoped to
get here before that thing. Oh, how detestable I am!’
He dropped on to the seat beside her and sat, hunched and shaking,
a figure of desolation.
‘Never mind,’ said Sheila firmly. ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk. You’re quite
free now to go back to her. And you’ve done me no harm.’
He stammered in amazement. ‘You can say that! Don’t you see how
contemptible I am! I would like to kill myself!’
He brooded on that thought. Death was the only escape from his
own insufferable egoism. Then he began to perceive that he was
extracting enjoyment even from the savour of his own self-loathing.
He was rolling the bitterness round on his tongue till it had a certain
sweetness for him. He was indulging in an orgy of painful emotions
that was delicious to the very egoism it wounded. He was
discovering hitherto unplumbed depths in his nature and being
fascinated by the stupendous spectacle of his own soul’s suffering.
And he knew that the experience was far too morbidly interesting to
drive him to suicide.
The perception of his self-pity afflicted Sheila with a new and more
sickening pain. Something of this change must have been visible in
her face, for with a manifest effort he became calm, and began
speaking in more normal tones.
‘Perhaps we shall be glad afterwards,’ he said slowly. ‘The scandal
would have killed my mother....’
Sheila winced. ‘Oh, Stephen, are you trying to make me hate you?
Why did you say that?...’
‘Why——’
‘Why do you talk in that unreal way? Why do you pretend ... try at
the last moment to blind me with false pious reasoning!’
‘But what I said about my mother——’
‘—Was false as water. You didn’t mean a word of it. You are too
dreadfully sorry for yourself to care about your mother. You’re
breaking faith, and because it hurts you you’re trying to feel good
about it. God knows I haven’t disputed your decision—nor even
blamed you for it. But now, please go!’
He rose. ‘I am not to come back?’
‘No, no. Go away.’
‘But, Sheila——’
‘Why will you torture me so?’ she cried. ‘It’s your own choice. If only
you’d never come to-night—it would have been so much kinder.’
‘Oh, I can’t bear this!’ He trembled towards her.
She rose, to confront him with lustreless eyes.
‘Are you made of straw? Can you neither take me nor leave me?...
Good-bye.’
‘God, how you hate me now!’ he murmured, as she swept past him.
She paused to say: ‘That should be nothing to you. But it’s not true.
You have done me no harm. I had never known happiness before
you came ... but,’ she added, with his child in her womb, ‘I shall
soon forget, and you will have made no difference. None at all.’
She stumbled out into the hateful sunlight and went, half-running,
towards the house.

In Edward’s house, and with Edward’s bored approval—for he was

busy at the time on a scathing history of the Jesuits—Stephen’s child
was born. And, in the triumph that followed agony, the spirit of
Sheila rose from the dead. Four years later, determined to purge
herself of bitterness, she visited the scene of her love. When she
entered the paddock again, her silent but excited child at her side,
her eyes filled with tears at the sight of the old romantic disorder
that had once so charmed her. ‘These poppies,’ her heart said, ‘are
children of flowers that witnessed our love.’ The paddock was shut in
on three sides by a hedge of briar. In the long rank grass numberless
weeds had rioted unchecked for many years, and the hand of the
picnicker lay heavy on the land. A medley of docks, nettles, thistles,
poppies, empty cigarette packets, paper bags, ginger-beer bottles,
and corks, greeted Sheila’s eyes. ‘What a pickle!’ she said.
‘What a lovely pickle, Sheila,’ the little girl echoed. She began
collecting corks with the solemnity of an elderly spinster gathering a
cautionary nosegay for a drunkard’s grave. This was a simile that
Sheila, gravely nonsensical, suggested to Rosemary, who with
perfect dignity assented. ‘How fortunate that Edward isn’t here to be
shocked by my vulgarity,’ Sheila thought.
Entering the house she found there matter for surprise: a greasy
plate, a crust of bread, and a breakfast cup, caked with tannin,
standing ankle-deep in a saucer half-full of spilt tea. The next
moment Mrs. Boddy arrived, a little red berry of humanity to whom
had been entrusted a duplicate key and the duty of preparing the
place for habitation.
‘Oh, ma’am!’ said Mrs. Boddy. ‘To think that you should have got ’ere
before me, without a bit of tea ready or nothing.’ The sight of those
inglorious festal remains was the culminating assault on her feelings.
‘There! Just look at that.’
Sheila nodded, smiling. ‘Some one’s been here evidently. The
question is, Who?’
‘And how?’ added Mrs. Boddy. ‘’Ow?’ she repeated, by way of
emphasis. ‘And oh,’ she cried, enveloping Rosemary, ‘here’s the dear
little ducky duck. Hasn’t she got a kiss for the wicked old woman
that didn’t get her mother’s tea ready?’
Having released Rosemary, Mrs. Boddy stood brooding. ‘There’s
been a man here. One of those persons of the tramp class.’
After a moment’s contemplation of this hypothetical tramp, ‘It’s not
at all nice,’ she added, and drew away from the polluted table. ‘You
might be murdered in your beds.’
‘Well, if one must be murdered, one could hardly choose a more
comfortable place,’ said Sheila. ‘Let’s try to make a fire to boil the
kettle on, shall we? I’m longing for my tea.’
Mrs. Boddy became the embodiment of bustle. She shot out of the
house in search of dry sticks for the fire.
‘And do you know what I would do if I were you, ma’am?’ she
enquired, reappearing after a brief and successful forage. ‘I’d have
my tea and go straight back to town. Straight back. I wouldn’t stay
another minute.’