“Oh, er, hallo!” I said. And there was a bit of a pause.
I don’t quite know what I had been expecting the old boy to do if, by bad luck, we should ever meet again, but I had a sort of general idea that he would turn fairly purple and start almost immediately to let me have it in the gizzard. It struck me as somewhat rummy, therefore, when he simply smiled weakly. A sort of frozen smile it was. His eyes kind of bulged and he swallowed once or twice.
“Er. …” he said.
I waited for him to continue, but apparently that was all there was.
“Bingo in?” I said, after a rather embarrassing pause.
He shook his head and smiled again. And then, suddenly, just as the flow of conversation had begun to slacken once more, I’m dashed if he didn’t make a sort of lumbering leap back into the flat and bang the door.
I couldn’t understand it. But, as it seemed that the interview, such as it was, was over, I thought I might as well be shifting. I had just started down the stairs when I met young Bingo, charging up three steps at a time.
“Hallo, Bertie!” he said. “Where did you spring from? I thought you were out of town.”
“I’ve just got back. I looked in on you to see how the land lay.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, all that business, you know.”