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  “Mr. Davidson——”

  Mr. Campbell paused so that Davidson turned towards him again. Mr. Campbell did not immediately meet his eye.

  “—we are the type of human intercourse. We meet here, apparently by chance, a meeting unpredictable and never to be repeated. Therefore I should like to ask you a question with perhaps a brutal answer.”

  Davidson pushed his cap back on his head and frowned. Mr. Campbell looked at the lean-to.

  “Broken, defiled. Returning to the earth, the rafters rotted, the roof fallen in—a wreck. Would you believe that anything ever lived there?”

  Now the frown was bewildered.

  “I simply don’t follow you, I’m afraid.”

  “All those poor people——”

  “The men I——?”

  “The harvest. The sad harvest. You know nothing of my—shall I say—official beliefs, Mr. Davidson; but living for all these days next to that poor derelict—Mr. Davidson. Would you say there was any—surviving? Or is that all? Like the lean-to?”

  “If you’re worried about Martin—whether he suffered or not——”

  They paused for a while. Beyond the drifter the sun sank like a burning ship, went down, left nothing for a reminder but clouds like smoke.

  Mr. Campbell sighed.

  “Aye,” he said, “I meant just that.”

  “Then don’t worry about him. You saw the body. He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots.”

  About the Author

  William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.

  By the Same Author

  Books by

  Sir William Golding

  1911-1993

  Nobel Prize for Literature

  Fiction

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  THE INHERITORS

  PINCHER MARTIN

  FREE FALL

  THE SPIRE

  THE PYRAMID

  THE SCORPION GOD

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  THE PAPER MEN

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  CLOSE QUARTERS

  FIRE DOWN BELOW

  TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  (comprising Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below

  in a revised text; foreword by the author)

  THE DOUBLE TONGUE

  Essays

  THE HOT GATES

  A MOVING TARGRT

  Travel

  AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL

  Plays

  THE BRASS BUTTERFLY

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  adapted for the stage by

  Nigel Williams

  Copyright

  First published in 1956

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © William Golding, 1956

  The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26746–0