'Free to go now…' he murmured to himself. 'Free to go…'

Resting in the sun, he sat against the wall of the airraid shelter, the yellow shawl wrapped around him. Proctor squatted on the ground a few feet away, preparing to open his bottle of Burgundy. First, he went through a brief but careful ritual, which he performed with all the meat cans and biscuit packs" that Maitland gave him. He scraped the label from the bottle with his knife and tore the fading paper into shreds. After giving the tramp the three-year-old copy of _Life__ which he had found in the trunk of the Jaguar, hoping that the large photographs might turn Proctor's mind to the world beyond the island, Maitland had seen the magazine transformed into a pile of minutely ground confetti.

'You don't like words, do you, Proctor? You're even forgetting how to speak.'

The same was true of Proctor's sight. He was not going blind, Maitland was convinced, but simply preferred to rely on his scarred fingers and his sense of touch within the secure realm of the island's undergrowth.

Maitland turned towards the caisson of the feeder road, with its white concrete surface on which he had written his confused messages.

He snapped his fingers, charged with the sudden conviction that he would soon escape. Lifting the crutch like a schoolmaster, he pointed it at Proctor.

'Proctor, I'm going to teach you to read and write.'