Hearing Secret Harmonies

5

TO BE TOLD SOMETHING THAT comes as a surprise, then find everyone has known about it for ages, is no uncommon experience. The remarks on the subject of Delavacquerie and Polly Duport, dropped by the actor at the Royal Academy dinner, were a case in point. Mere chance must have been the cause of having heard nothing of this close association. It had been going on for some little time, and there appeared to be no secret about their relationship. Mention of it cropped up again, not long after, in some quite other connexion. All the same, although we continued to meet at comparatively regular intervals, Delavacquerie himself never brought up the matter. When he did so, that was about a year later than this first indication that they even knew each other.

During that year, among many other events in one’s life, two things happened that could have suggested achievement of the mutually desired meeting between Widmerpool and Murtlock. The month of both indications was roughly dated as December, by the arrival of Canon Fenneau’s reminder about books for his bazaar, and the fact that, when Greening and I ran across each other in London, we were doing our Christmas shopping. Neither event positively brought home the Widmerpool/Murtlock alliance at the time. The first of these was the bare announcement in the paper that Widmerpool, having resigned the chancellorship of the university, was to be replaced by some other more or less appropriate figure. After his various public pronouncements there seemed nothing particularly notable in Widmerpool preferring to disembarrass himself of official duties of any sort whatsoever.

Greening’s information was rather another matter. It should have given a clue. We met in the gift department of some big shop. Greening, who had been badly wounded in the Italian campaign, had a limp, but was otherwise going strong. He had been ADC to the General at the Divisional Headquarters on which we had both served in the early part of the war; later rejoined his regiment, and, it had been rumoured, died of wounds. He looked older, of course, but his habit of employing a kind of schoolboy slang that seemed to predate his own generation had not changed. He still blushed easily. He said he was a forestry consultant, married, with three children. We talked in a desultory way of the time when we had soldiered together.

‘Do you remember the DAAG at that HQ?’

‘Widmerpool?’

‘That’s the chap. Major Widmerpool. Rather a shit.’

‘Of course I remember him.’

‘He was always getting my goat, but what I thought was really bloody awful about him was the way he behaved to an old drunk called Bithel, who commanded the Mobile Laundry.’

‘I remember Bithel too.’

‘Bithel had to be shot out, the old boy had to go all right, but Widmerpool boasted in the Mess about his own efficiency in getting rid of Bithel, and how Bithel had broken down, when told he’d got to go. It may have happened, but we didn’t all want to hear about it from Widmerpool.’

‘If it’s any consolation, Widmerpool’s become very odd himself now.’

‘You know that already? I was coming on to that. He’s gone round the bend. Nothing less.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘I was looking at some timber — woodland off my usual beat — and was told an extraordinary story by the johnny I was dealing with. Widmerpool — it must be the same bugger, from what he said — runs a kind of — well, I don’t know what the hell to call it — sort of colony for odds and sods, not far away from the property I was inspecting. Widmerpool’s place has been going for a year or two — a kind of rest-home for layabouts — but lately things have considerably hotted up, my client said. A new lot had arrived who wore even stranger togs, and went in for even gaudier monkey-tricks. This chap talked of Widmerpool as having made himself a sort of Holy Man. Not bad going after starting as a DAAG.’

Greening, unable to paraphrase the narrative of the owner of the woodland, could produce no revelation beyond that. Nevertheless the account of Widmerpool had evidently made a strong impression on him. I don’t think the possibility of the new arrivals being Murtlock’s adherents occurred to me at the time. If that had been at all conveyed, the conclusion would have been that Murtlock had been absorbed into Widmerpool’s larger organization. In short, what Greening spoke of seemed little more than what had been initially outlined some time before by Delavacquerie’s son. Greening began to collect his parcels.

‘Well, I must go on my way rejoicing. Nice to have had a chin-wag. Best for the Festive Season. I’m determined not to eat too much plum pudding this year.’

When, Christmas over, I next saw Delavacquerie, it was well into the New Year. He gave news of Gwinnett being in London again.

‘I thought him rather standoffish when he was over here before. This time he got in touch with me at once. In his own remote way he was very friendly.’

‘Has he returned to that gruesome dump in St Pancras?’

‘I picked him up there the other day, and we lunched at the buffet at King’s Cross Station.’

‘How’s he getting on with Gothic Symbols, etc?’

‘I think it will be rather good. The Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists happen to be a subject of mine too. In fact I was able to assist in a minor way by taking him to a Jacobean play that’s rarely staged. It’s ascribed to Fletcher. The Humorous Lieutenant, not particularly gothic, nor full of mortality, but Gwinnett seemed glad to have an opportunity to see it.’

Without reading the notices very carefully, I had grasped that a play of that name was being given a limited run of a few weeks at a theatre where such productions once in a way found a home. An energetic young director (more influential in that line than Norman Chandler) had been responsible for the revival of this decidedly obscure comedy, interest in it, so Delavacquerie now said, having been to to some extent aroused by himself.

‘I once toyed with the idea of calling my own collected war poems The Humorous Lieutenant, from this play. Then I thought the title would be misunderstood, even ironically.’

‘Why was he humorous?’

‘He wasn’t, in the modern sense, not a jokey subaltern, but moody and melancholy in the Elizabethan meaning of humorous — one of your Robert Burton types. The Lieutenant had reason to be. He was suffering from a go of the pox. Having a dose made him unusually brave, fighting being less of a strain than sitting about in camp feeling like hell. One sees the point. When he was cured all the Lieutenant’s courage left him.’

‘How did you persuade them to put the play on?’

‘I infiltrated the idea through Polly Duport, who is rather a friend of mine. She thought she’d like to play Celia, though a bit old for the part of a young girl.’

This was Delavacquerie’s first mention of Polly Duport. There was some parallel with the way in which Moreland had first produced Matilda, when she had been playing in The Duchess of Malfi. I was quite unable to tell whether this casual method of introducing the name was deliberate, or Delavacquerie supposed I had always known about the association. Clinging to privacy was characteristic of both of them. Apparent secrecy might be partly explained by the shut-in nature of Polly Duport’s life of the Theatre, scarcely at all cutting across Delavacquerie’s two-fold existence, divided between poetry and public relations.

‘I believe you’ve met Polly?’

‘I haven’t seen her for ages. I used to know her parents — who are divorced of course.’

I did not add that, when we were young, I had been in love with Polly Duport’s mother. There seemed no moral obligation to reveal that, in the light of Delavacquerie having kept quiet for so long about her daughter; an example of the limitations, mentioned before, set round about the friendships of later life.

‘You knew both Polly’s parents? It is almost unprecedented to have met the two of them. I myself have never seen either, though Polly spends a lot of time looking after her father, who has been very ill. She’s marvellously good about him. He never sounds very agreeable. Her mother — as you probably know — was married to that South American political figure who was murdered by terrorists the other day.’

‘Poor Colonel Flores? Was he murdered?’

‘Wasn’t he a general? He was machine-gunned from behind an advertisement hoarding, so Polly told me. It wasn’t given much space in the English papers. I didn’t see it reported myself. He was retired by then. It was bad luck.’

I felt sorry about Colonel Flores, a master of charm, even if other qualities may have played a part in his rise to power. Delavacquerie returned to the subject of Gwinnett and the play.

‘He seemed to enjoy it a great deal. I had never seen Gwinnett like that before. He became quite talkative afterwards, when we all had supper together.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘A King falls in love with his son’s girlfriend — that’s Celia, played by Polly — while the son himself is away at the wars. When the son returns, his father says the girl is dead. The King has really hidden Celia, and is trying to seduce her. As he has no success, he decides to administer a love potion. Unfortunately the love potion is drunk by the Humorous Lieutenant. In consequence the Lieutenant falls in love with the King, instead of Celia doing so.’

‘Did the Lieutenant’s exaggerated sense of humour cause him to drink the love philtre?’

‘It was accidental. He had been knocked out in a fight, and someone, thinking a bowl of wine was lying handy, gave him the love philtre as a pick-me-up. The incident is quite funny, but really has nothing to do with the play — like so many things that happen to oneself. As a neurotic figure, the Lieutenant is perhaps not altogether unlike Gwinnett.’

‘Possibly Gwinnett too should drink a love philtre?’

‘Gwinnett is going to risk much stronger treatment than that. Do you remember that Lord Widmerpool, after making that speech at the Magnus Donners, asked Gwinnett to come and see him? Widmerpool has returned to the charge, as to a visit, and Gwinnett is going to go.’

‘That sounds a little grisly.’

‘Precisely why Gwinnett is going to do it He wishes to have the experience. Widmerpool’s situation has recently become more than ever extraordinary. From being, in a comparatively quiet way, an encourager of dissidents and dropouts, the recent addition to his community of Scorpio Murtlock, the young man we talked about some little time ago, has greatly developed its potential. Murtlock provides a charismatic element, and apparently Widmerpool thinks there are immense power possibilities in the cult. He’s got enough money to back it, anyway for the moment.’

‘But surely it’s Murtlock’s cult, not Widmerpool’s.’

‘We shall see. Gwinnett thinks that a struggle for power is taking place. That is one of the things that interests him. Gwinnett’s angle on all this is that the cult, with its rites and hierarchies, is all as near as you can get nowadays to the gothicism of which he is himself writing. He has seen something of the semi-mystic dropout groups of his own country, but feels this one offers a more Jacobean setting, through certain of its special characteristics.’

‘Does Gwinnett approve or disapprove? I expect he doesn’t show his hand?’

‘On the contrary, Gwinnett disapproves. He talked quite a lot about his disapproval. As I understand it, one of the tenets of the cult is that Harmony, Power, Death, are all more or less synonymous — not Desire and Death, like Shakespeare. Gwinnett disapproves of Death being, so to speak, removed from the romantic associations of Love — his own approach, with which his book deals — to be prostituted to the vulgar purposes of Power — pseudo-magical power at that. At the same time he wants to examine the processes as closely as possible.’

‘Some might think it insensitive of Gwinnett, in the circumstances, to visit Widmerpool, even in the interests of seventeenth-century scholarship.’

‘On that question Widmerpool himself has made his own standpoint unambiguously clear by going out of his way to invite Gwinnett to come and see him. You said that Gwinnett, when writing about Trapnel, saw himself as Trapnel. Now Gwinnett, writing about gothic Jacobean plays, sees himself as a character in one of them. I regret to say that I shall not be in England when Gwinnett pays his visit to Widmerpool, and therefore won’t hear how things went — that is, if Gwinnett chooses to tell me.’

‘You’re taking a holiday?’

‘Polly and I may be going to get married. We’ve known each other for a long time now. In the light of the way we both earn a living, neither of us liked the idea of being under the same roof. We might be changing that now. She’s coming to have a look at my Creole relations.’

Delavacquerie raised his eyebrows, as if that were going to be an unpredictable undertaking. I said some of the things you say when a friend of Delavacquerie’s age announces impending marriage. He laughed, and shook his head. All the same, he seemed very pleased with the prospect. So far as I knew anything of Polly Duport, she seemed a nice girl.

‘We shall see, we shall see. That is why we are visiting the Antilles.’

During the next month or so I did not go to London. Over and above the claims of ‘work’ — put forward earlier as taking an increasing stranglehold — attention was required for various local matters; the chief of these — and most tedious — the quarry question.

One of the neighbouring quarries (not that recalling the outlines of Mr Deacon’s picture) was attempting encroachment, as mentioned earlier, in the area of The Devil’s Fingers. The matter at issue had begun with the quarrying firm (using a farmer as ‘front’, at purchase of the land) acquiring about seventy agricultural acres along the line of the ridge on which the archaeological site stood. The firm was seeking permission from the Planning Authority to extend in the direction of the monument. Among other projects, if this were allowed, was creation of a ‘tip’, for quarry waste, above the stream near The Devil’s Fingers; the waters of the brook to be channelled beneath by means of a culvert. If local opposition to workings being allowed so near the remains of the Stone Age sepulchre could be shown to be sufficiently strong, a Government Enquiry was likely to be held, to settle a matter now come to a head, after dragging on for three if not four years.

The quarry-owners were offering undertakings as to ‘landscaping’ and ‘shelter belts’, to demonstrate which an outdoor meeting had been arranged. Men carrying flags would be posted at various spots round about, indicating both the proposed extension of the workings, and related localities of tree-plantation. The assembly point for those concerned, timed at nine o’clock in the morning in order to minimize dislocation of the day’s work, was a gap in the hedge running along a side road, not far from the scene of action. A stile led across the fields to the rising ground on which The Devil’s Fingers stood, within a copse of elder trees.

‘Quite a good turnout of people,’ said Isobel. ‘I’m glad to see Mrs Salter has shown up. She won’t stand any nonsense from anyone.’

The previous night had been hot and muggy, a feeling of electricity in the atmosphere. The day, still loaded with electrical currents, warm, was uncertain in weather, bright and cloudy in patches. Cars were parked against gates, or up narrow grass lanes. All sorts were present, representatives of the quarry, officials from local authorities, members of one or two societies devoted to historical research or nature preservation, a respectable handful of private individuals, who were there only because they took an interest in the neighbourhood. Mrs Salter, noted by Isobel, was in charge of the Nature Trust. A vigorous middle-aged lady in sweater and trousers, whitehaired and weatherbeaten, she carried a specially designed pruning-hook, a badge of office from which she was never parted.

‘Who are the three by the stile?’

‘Quarry directors. Mr Aldredge and Mr Gollop. I don’t know who the midget is.’

The small energetic henchman with Mr Aldredge and Mr Gollop, almost as if he were shouting the odds, began to pour out a flow of technicalities on the subject of landscaping and arboriculture. Mr Aldredge, pinched in feature, with a pious expression, seemed at pains to prove that no mere hatred of the human race as such — so he gave the impression of feeling himself accused — caused him to pursue a policy of wholesale erosion and pollution. He denied those imputations pathetically. Mr Gollop, younger, aggressive, would have none of this need to justify himself or his firm. Instead, he spoke in a harsh rasping voice about the nation’s need for non-skid surfacing on its motorways and arterial roads.

‘I shall not make for Mr Todman immediately,’ said Isobel. ‘I shall choose my moment.’

Mr Todman was from the Planning Authority. Upstanding and hearty, he had not entirely relinquished a military bearing that dated from employment during the war on some aspect of constructing The Mulberry. That had been the vital experience of his life. He had never forgotten it. He had the air of a general, and brought a young aide-de-camp with him. Mr Todman was talking to another key figure in the operation, Mr Tudor, Clerk of the Rural District Council. Mr Tudor’s appearance and demeanour were in complete contrast with Mr Todman’s. Mr Tudor, appropriately enough, possessed a profile that recalled his shared surname with Henry VII, the same thoughtful shrewdness, if necessary, ruthlessness; the latter, should the interests of the RDC be threatened.

‘I can’t remember the name of the suntanned, rather sad figure, who looks like a Twenties film star making a comeback.’

‘Mr Goldney. He’s retired from the Political Service in Africa, now secretary of the archaeological society.’

There were quite a lot of others, too, most of whom I did not know by sight. The thicket of The Devil’s Fingers was not to be seen from the stile. We set off across the first field. It was plough, rather heavy going. Mr Aldredge, the quarryman putting up a policy of appeasement, addressed himself to Mrs Salter, with whom he had probably had passages of arms before.

‘Looks like being a nice Midsummer’s Day. We deserve some decent weather at this time of year. We haven’t seen much so far.’

Mrs Salter shook her head. She was not to be lulled into an optimistic approach to the weather, least of all by an adversary in the cause of conservation.

‘It will turn to rain in the afternoon, if not before. Mark my words. It always does in these parts at this time of year.’

Mr Gollop, the pugnacious quarryman, took the opportunity, a good one, to draw attention to rural imperfections unconnected with his own industry.

‘We quarry people get shot at sometimes for the fumes we’re said to cause. It strikes me that’s nothing to what’s being inflicted on us all at this moment by the factory farms.’

The smell through which we were advancing certainly rivalled anything perpetrated by the Quiggin twins. Mrs Salter, brushing away this side issue, went into action.

‘It’s not so much the fumes you people cause as the dust. The rain doesn’t wash it away. The leaves are covered with a white paste all the year round. After they’ve had a lot of that, the trees die.’

Mr Tudor, a man of finesse, must have thought this conversation too acrimonious in tone for good diplomacy. He had steered the Council through troubled waters before, was determined to do so this time.

‘We do receive occasional complaints about intensive farming odours, Mr Gollop, just like those we get from time to time regarding your own industry. The Council looks on animal by-products as the worst offenders, even if poultry and pig-keepers cannot be held altogether blameless, and some of the silage too can be unpleasing to the nostrils. The air will be fresher, I hope, when we are over the next field. There’s a lovely view, by the way, from the top of the ridge.’

Individual members of the party being concerned with different aspects of what was proposed, the group began to string out in all directions. Isobel, discussing with Mr Goldney the contrasted advantages of stone walls and hedges, a tactical feint, would quickly disengage herself, when opportunity arose, to obtain a good position to command the ear of Mr Todman, the figure likely to be most influential in the outcome of the morning’s doings. Somebody, who had not joined the party at its point of departure by the stile, was now coming across the fields from the west. When he drew level this turned out to be Mr Gauntlett. He would usually appear on any occasion of this kind. Today he was wearing an orchid in his buttonhole.

‘Good morning, Mr Gauntlett.’

‘Morning, Mr Jenkins. Beautiful one too just now, tho’ t’won’t last.’

‘That’s what Mrs Salter says.’

‘Not where the clouds do lie, nor the manner the rooks be flying.’

Mr Gauntlett’s professional rusticity did not entirely cloak his faintly military air, which was in complete contrast with Mr Todman’s soldierliness. Mr Todman suggested modern scientific warfare; Mr Gauntlett, military levies of Shakespearean days, or earlier.

‘How are you keeping, Mr Gauntlett? Haven’t seen you for a long while.’

‘Ah, I can’t grumble. There was a sad thing last week. Old Daisy died. She was a bad old girl, but she’d been with me a long time. I’ll miss her.’

‘I remember you were looking for her — it must have been two years ago or more — when those strange young people came to see us in their caravan.’

Still feeling rather self-conscious about being caught by Mr Gauntlett with the caravan party, I said that with implied apology. Mr Gauntlett brushed anything of the sort aside.

‘Daisy was just where your young friend said. She’d whelped, and there was one pup left alive. It were a good guess on his part.’

‘So he was right?’

‘It were a good guess. A very good guess. He must know the ways o’ dogs. Well, what are we going to be shown this morning, Mr Jenkins?’

‘I wonder. There’s quite a fair lot of people have come to see. It means local interest in preventing what the quarry want to do.’

Mr Gauntlett laughed at some amusing thought of his own in this connexion. When he voiced that thought the meaning was not immediately clear.

‘Ernie Dunch won’t be joining us today.’

‘He won’t?’

There was nothing very surprising about this piece of information. It looked as if Mr Gauntlett had cut across the fields from Dunch’s farm, which was out to the west from where we were walking. Mr Dunch farmed the meadow on which The Devil’s Fingers stood. He was not the farmer who had acted as figurehead in purchase by the quarry of the neighbouring fields, his land running only to the summit of the ridge, but his own attitude to quarry development was looked upon as unreliable by those who preferred some restriction to be set on the spread of quarry workings. Dunch was unlikely to bother much about what infringements might be taking place on territory with scenic or historical claims. Idle curiosity could have brought him to the meeting, nothing more. He would be no great loss. For some reason Mr Gauntlett found the fact immensely droll that Mr Dunch would not be present.

‘Ernie Dunch didn’t feel up to coming,’ he repeated.

‘I don’t expect Mr Dunch cares much, one way or the other, what the quarry does.’

‘Nay, I don’t think ‘tis that. Last Tuesday I heard Ernie saying he’d be out with us all today, to know what was happening nextdoor to him. I said I’d drop in, and we’d go together. I thought I’d see, that way, Ernie did come.’

Mr Gauntlett laughed to himself.

‘That’s natural enough, since the quarry would extend quite close to his own land. I’m glad he feels himself concerned. What’s wrong with Mr Dunch?’

Obviously, from Mr Gauntlett’s manner, that question was meant to be asked. He had a story he wanted to tell. I was not particularly interested myself why Dunch had made his decision to stay away.

‘Ernie’s quite a young fellow.’

‘So I’ve been told. I don’t know him personally.’

‘Two-and-thirty. Three-and-thirty maybe.’

Mr Gauntlett pondered. We plodded on through the heavy furrows. Mr Gauntlett, having presumably settled in his own mind, within a few days, the date of Ernie Dunch’s birth, changed his tone to the rather special one in which he would relate local history and legend.

‘I’ll warrant you’ve heard tell stories of The Fingers, Mr Jenkins?’

‘You’ve told me quite a few yourself, Mr Gauntlett — the Stones going down to the brook to drink. That’s what we want to make sure they’re still able to do. Not be forced to burrow under a lot of quarry waste, before they can quench their thirst. I should think the Stones would revenge themselves on the quarry if anything of the sort is allowed to happen.’

‘Aye, I shouldn’t wonder. I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Smash up the culvert, when the cock crows at midnight.’

‘Ah.’

I hoped for a new legend from Mr Gauntlett. He seemed in the mood. They always came out unexpectedly. That was part of Mr Gauntlett’s technique as a story-teller. He cleared his throat.

‘I’ve heard tales o’ The Fingers since I was a nipper. All the same, it comes like a surprise when young folks believe such things, now they’re glued to the television all day long.’

Mr Gauntlett watched television a good deal himself. At least he seemed always familiar with every programme.

‘I’m pleased to hear young people do still believe in such stories.’

‘Ah, so am I, Mr Jenkins, so am I. That’s true. It’s a surprise all the same.’

I thought perhaps Mr Gauntlett needed a little encouragement.

‘I was asked by a young man — the one who told you where to find Daisy — if the Stones bled when a knife was thrust in them at Hallowe’en, or some such season of the year.

‘I’ve heard tell the elder trees round about The Fingers do bleed, and other strange tales. I can promise you one thing, Mr Jenkins, in Ernie Dunch’s grandfather’s day, old Seth Dunch, a cow calved in the dusk o’ the evening up there one spring. Old Seth Dunch wouldn’t venture into The Fingers thicket after dark, nor send a man up there neither — for no one o’ the men for that matter would ha’ gone — until it were plain daylight the following morning. Grandson’s the same as grandfather, so t’appears.’

‘If Ernie Dunch is afraid of The Fingers, he ought to take more trouble about seeing they’re preserved in decent surroundings.’

Mr Gauntlett laughed again. He did not comment on the conservational aspect. Instead, he returned to young Mr Dunch’s health.

‘Ernie’s not himself today. He’s staying indoors. Going to do his accounts, he says.’

‘Accounts make a bad day for all of us. You’ve just been seeing him, Mr Gauntlett, have you?’

I could not make out what Mr Gauntlett was driving at.

‘Looked in on the farm, as I said I would, on the way up. I thought Ernie ought to come to the meeting, seeing we were going through his own fields, but he wouldn’t stir.’

‘Just wanted to tot up his accounts?’

‘Said he wasn’t going out today.’

‘Has he got flu?’

‘Ernie’s poorly. That’s plain. Never seen a young fellow in such a taking.’

Mr Gauntlett found Ernie Dunch’s reason for not turning up excessively funny, then, pulling himself together, resumed his more usual style of ironical gravity.

‘Seems Ernie went out after dark last night to shoot rabbits from the Land Rover.’

Rabbit-shooting from a Land Rover at night was a recognized sport. The car was driven slowly over the grass, headlights full on, the rabbits, mesmerized by the glare of the lamps, scuttling across the broad shaft of light. The driver would then pull up, take his gun, and pick them off in this field of fire.

‘Did he have an accident? Tractors are always turning over, but I’d have thought a Land Rover ought to be all right for any reasonable sort of field.’

‘No, not an accident, Mr Jenkins. I’ll tell you what Ernie said, just as he said it. He passed through several o’ these fields, till he got just about, I’d judge, where we are now, or a bit further. He was coming up to the start o’ the meadow where The Fingers lie, so Ernie said, in sight o’ the elder copse — and what do you think Ernie saw there, Mr Jenkins?’

‘The Devil himself.’

‘Not far short o’ that, according to Ernie.’

Again Mr Gauntlett found difficulty in keeping back his laughter.

‘What happened?’

‘Ernie hadn’t had no luck with the rabbits so far. There didn’t seem none o’ them about. Then, as soon as he drove into the big meadow, he noticed a nasty light round The Fingers. It seemed to come in flashes like summer lightning.’

‘Nasty?’

‘That’s what Ernie called it.’

‘Probably was summer lightning. We’ve had quite a bit of that. Or his own headlights reflected on something.’

‘He said he was sure it wasn’t the car’s lamps, or the moonlight. Unearthly, he said. It didn’t seem a natural light.’

‘When did he see the Devil?’

‘Four o’ them there were.’

‘Four devils? What form did they take?’

‘Dancing in and out o’ the elder trees, and between the Stones, it looked like, turning shoulder to shoulder t’ords each other, taking hold o’arms, shaking their heads from side to side.’

‘How did he know they were devils?’

‘They had horns.’

‘He probably saw some horned sheep. There are a flock of them round about here.’

‘It was horns like deer. High ones.’

‘How were they dressed?’

‘They weren’t dressed, ‘cording to Ernie.’

‘They were naked?’

‘Ernie swears they were naked as the day they were born — if they were human, and were born.’

‘Men or women?’

‘Ernie couldn’t properly see.’

‘Can’t he tell?’

Mr Gauntlett gave up any attempt to restrain the heartiness of his laughter. When that stopped he agreed that Ernie Dunch’s sophistication might well fall short of being able to distinguish between the sexes.

‘Appearing and disappearing they were, Ernie said, and there might ha’ been more than four, though he didn’t stop long to look. He figured there might ha’ been two male, and two female, at least, but sometimes it seemed more, sometimes less, one of ’em a real awful one, but, such was the state he was in hisself, he was uncertain o’ the numbers. Even in his own home, when he was telling the tale — Mrs Dunch and me nigh him — Ernie began to shake. He said he didn’t go any nearer to The Fingers, once he saw what he saw, just swivelled the Land Rover round as quick as might be, and made for the farm. He said to me ’twas a wonder he didn’t turn the Land Rover the wrong way up on the run back, banging through the tussocks o’ grass and furrows o’ ploughland. His forewheel did catch in one rut, but he managed to right the wheel again. Mrs Dunch says he was more dead than alive, when he got back. She says she never saw him like that before. Ernie swears he don’t know how he did it.’

‘He thought they were supernatural beings?’

‘I don’t know what Ernie thought — that the Devil had come to take him away.’

‘They must have been some jokers.’

‘You tell Ernie Dunch they were jokers, Mr Jenkins.’

‘If they’d been the genuine ghosts of The Fingers there’d only have been two of them.’

‘Ernie may have seen double. He wasn’t at all positive about the numbers. All he was positive about was that he wouldn’t go up there again that night for a thousand pounds.’

‘This happened last night as ever is?’

‘St John’s Eve.’

Mr Gauntlett, always an artist in effects, mentioned the date quite quietly.

‘So it was.’

‘Mrs Dunch reminded Ernie o’ that herself.’

‘What did Mrs Dunch think?’

‘Told Ernie it was the last time she’d let him out after dark with the Land Rover. She said she’d never spent such a night. Every time the young owls hooted, Ernie would give a great jump in the bed.’

‘What do you think yourself, Mr Gauntlett?’

Mr Gauntlett shook his head. He was not going to commit himself, however much prepared to laugh at Ernie Dunch about such a matter.

‘Ernie looked done up. That’s true enough. Not at all hisself.’

‘Would you be prepared to visit The Devil’s Fingers, Mr Gauntlett, say at midnight on Hallowe’en?’

Mr Gauntlett looked sly.

‘Don’t know about Hallowe’en, when it might be chilly, but I wouldn’t say I’d not been on that same down on a summer night as a lad — nor all that far from The Fingers — and never took no harm from it.’

Mr Gauntlett smiled in reminiscence.

‘You must have struck a quiet night, Mr Gauntlett.’

‘Well, it were pretty quiet some o’ the time. Some o’ the time it were very quiet.’

Mr Gauntlett did not enlarge on the memory. It sounded a pleasant enough one. At that moment Mr Tudor appeared beside us. I don’t think Mr Gauntlett had more to say, either about Ernie Dunch’s experiences at The Devil’s Fingers, or his own in the same neighbourhood. He now transferred his attention to Mr Tudor. Mr Tudor either wanted to ask Mr Gauntlett’s advice, as a local sage of some standing, or the two of them had been hatching a plot, before the meeting, which now required to be carried a stage further. They moved off together towards the easterly fork of the ridge. I pushed on alone.

This final field, plough when Isobel and I had visited the place several years before, was now rough pasture. In their individual efforts to obtain an overall picture of what would be the effect on the landscape of the various proposals, the assembled company had become increasingly spread out. Several were studying maps, making notes as they tried to estimate the position of proposed new constructions and plantations represented by the markers with their different coloured flags. Mrs Salter, pruning-hook under one arm, writing in a little book, was furthest in advance. Now, she fell back with the rest to gain perspective. I found myself alone in that part of the field. Over to the east, the direction where Mr Gauntlett and Mr Tudor had disappeared together, lay the workings of the quarry scheduled by its owners for expansion. High chutes, sloping steeply down from small cabins that looked like the turrets of watch towers, rose out of an untidy jumble of corrugated iron sheds and lofty mounds of crushed limestone. The sun, still shining between dark clouds that had blown up, caught the reflection on the windscreens of rows of parked cars and trucks. To the west, over by Ernie Dunch’s farm, still more clouds were drifting up, in confirmation of knowledgeable forecasts that the day would end in rain.

The scene in the fields round about resembled a TEWT — Tactical Exercise Without Troops — such as were held in the army, groups of figures poring over maps, writing in notebooks, gazing out over the countryside. My own guilty feelings, on such occasions, came back to me, those sudden awarenesses at military exercises of the kind that, instead of properly concentrating on tactical features, I was musing on pictorial or historical aspects of the landscape; what the place had seen in the past; how certain painters would deal with its physical features. That was just what was happening now. Instead of trying to comprehend in a practical manner the quarrymen’s proposals, I was concentrating on The Devil’s Fingers themselves.

The elder thicket was flowering, blossom like hoar frost, a faint sprinkling of brownish red, powdered over the green and white ivy-strangled tree-trunks, gnarled and twisted, as in an Arthur Rackham goblin-haunted illustration. In winter, the Stones would have been visible from this point. Now they were hidden by the ragged untidy elders. The trees might well have been cleared away, leaving The Fingers on the skyline. Possibly the quasi-magical repute attributed to elderberries — the mysterious bleedings of which Mr Gauntlett spoke — had something to do with their preservation.

I was mistaken in supposing Mrs Salter the foremost of our party, that none of the others had pressed so far as the elder thicket. That was what I had decided to do myself, a small luxury, before bending the mind to practical problems. Somebody else from the morning’s expedition must have had the same idea; got well ahead at the start, then moved on at high speed across the big field. Now he was slowly returning towards the rest of us. I did not know him by sight. The dark suit probably meant an official. Most of the other representatives of local authorities had moved off to the right and left by now, or withdrawn again some way to the rear. As this figure emerged from the elder trees, advanced down the hill, I felt pretty sure he had not been among those collected earlier at the stile. He must be a stray visitor, a tourist, even professional archaeologist, who had hoped to avoid sightseers by picking a comparatively early hour to visit the monument. Usually there was no one to be seen for miles, except possibly a farmer herding cows or driving a tractor. This man could not have chosen a worse morning for having the place to himself.

He did seem a little taken aback by the crowd of people fanned out across the landscape, the markers on the higher ground, their coloured flags looking like little pockets of resistance in a battle. He paused, contemplated the scene, then continued to walk swiftly, almost painfully, down the slope. There was something dazed, stunned, about his demeanour. The dark suit, bald head, spectacles, looked for some reason fantastically out of place in these surroundings, notwithstanding the fact that others present were bespectacled, bald, dark-suited.

‘Russell?’

‘Hi, Nicholas.’

Gwinnett was far less astonished than myself. In fact he did not seem surprised at all. He was carrying under his arm what looked like a large black notebook, equipment that had at first assimilated him with other note-takers in the fields round about.

‘I was told you live near here, Nicholas.’

‘Fairly near.’

‘What’s going on?’

He managed to establish a situation in which I, rather than he, found it necessary to give an explanation for being on that spot at that moment. I tried to summarize briefly for him the problem of the quarry and The Devil’s Fingers. Gwinnett nodded. He made some technically abstruse comment on quarrying. In spite of outward calmness he was not looking at all well. This was very noticeable at close quarters. Gwinnett’s appearance was ghastly, as if he had drunk too much, been up all night, or — on further inspection — slept on the ground in his clothes. The dark suit was covered in dust and scraps of grass. His shoes, too, were caked with mud. He brought with him even greater disquiet than usual; a general sense of insecurity increased by the skies above becoming all at once increasingly dark.

‘Have you been visiting The Devil’s Fingers?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re staying near here?’

‘Not far.’

‘With friends?’

‘No.’

He named an inn at a small town a few miles distant. It appeared from what he said that he was alone there.

‘I didn’t know you were interested in prehistoric stuff — or has this something to do with your Jacobean dramatists?’

Gwinnett, as was often his habit, did not answer at once. He seemed to be examining his own case, either for a clue as to what had indeed happened to him, or, already knowing that, in an effort to decide how much to reveal.

‘I’ve lost my way. Just now I came up the same path, as well as I could remember it. I don’t know how to get down to the road from here.’

‘You’ve been to The Devil’s Fingers before?’

‘We came up on foot last night. I couldn’t sleep when I got back. I thought I’d drive out here again. Make more notes on the spot. It’s because I’m tired I’ve forgotten the path down, I guess.’

‘You’ve got a car with you?’

‘It’s parked in a gully off the road. Beside some old cars that have been dumped there. I took the steep path up the hill. It stops after a while. That’s why I can’t find the place.’

‘You were here last night?’

‘Some of the night.’

His manner was odd even for Gwinnett. He talked like a man in a dream. It occurred to me that he was recovering from a drug. The suspicion was as likely to be unfounded as earlier ones, in Venice, that he was a homosexual, or a reclaimed drunk.

‘Were you one of the party dancing round The Devil’s Fingers last night?’

Gwinnett laughed aloud at that. He did not often laugh. To do so was the measure of the state he was in. His laughter was the reverse of reassuring.

‘Why? Were they seen? How do you know about that?’

‘They were seen.’

‘I wasn’t one of the dancers. I was there.’

‘What the hell was going on?’

‘The stag-mask dance.’

‘Who was performing?’

‘Scorp Murtlock and his crowd.’

‘Are they at your pub too?’

‘They’re on their own. In a caravan. Those taking part in the rites travelled together. Scorp thought that necessary. I met them near here. We came up to the place together.’

‘Who were the rest of the party?’

‘Ken Widmerpool, two girls — Fiona and Rusty — a boy called Barnabas.’

‘Was Widmerpool in charge?’

‘No, Scorp was in charge. That was what the row was about.’

‘There was a row?’

Gwinnett puckered up his face, as if he was not sure he had spoken correctly. Then he confirmed there had been a row. A bad row, he said. Its details still seemed unclear in his mind.

‘Did Widmerpool dance?’

‘When the rite required that.’

‘Naked?’

‘Some of the time.’

‘Why only some of the time?’

‘Ken was mostly recording.’

‘How do you mean — recording?’

‘Sound and pictures. It was a shame things went wrong. I guess that was bound to happen between those two.’

The flashes of light seen by Ernie Dunch were now explained. Gwinnett seemed to find the operation, in which he had himself been anyway to some extent engaged, less out of the ordinary, less regrettable, than the fact that some untoward incident had marred the proceedings.

‘Russell, what was all this about? Why were you there? Why was Widmerpool there? I can just understand Murtlock and his crew going on in that sort of way — one’s reading about such things every day in the paper — but what on earth were you and Widmerpool playing at?’

Gwinnett’s features took on an expression part obstinate, part bewildered. It was a look he had assumed before, when asked to be more explicit about something he had said or done. No doubt his present state added to this impression of being half stunned, a condition genuinely present; if not the result of a drug, then fatigue allied to enormously heightened nervous tension. Again, seeming to consider how best to justify his own standpoint, he did not answer for a moment or two.

‘Gibson Delavacquerie said you’d seen something of the Widmerpool set-up, the commune, or whatever he runs. He said Murtlock had joined up with it. Murtlock seems to have taken over.’

Delavacquerie’s name appeared for some reason to bring relief to Gwinnett. His manner became a trifle less tense.

‘I like Delavacquerie.’

‘You probably know he’s abroad at the moment.’

‘He told me he was going. I talked to him about seeing Ken Widmerpool again, but I didn’t tell Delavacquerie the whole story. When Ken sent me a letter after the Magnus Donners Prize presentation last year I said I just didn’t have time, which was true. Anyhow I wasn’t that anxious to see him. I thought he’d forget about it this time, though I may have mentioned I was coming over again. I don’t know how he found out I was in London. I hadn’t told anyone here I was coming over. I only was in touch with Gibson after I arrived. Then someone called me up, and said he was speaking for Ken, who had a young friend — and master — whom he wanted me to meet.’

‘Master?’

‘It was Scorp himself telephoning, I guess. I hadn’t met him then. That was how it started. While he was speaking — and I’ve wondered whether Scorp didn’t somehow put the idea in my head — it came to me in a flash that I’d often thought these weirdos linked up with the early seventeenth-century gothicism I was writing about. Here was an opportunity not to throw away. I was right.’

‘It was worth it?’

‘Sure.’

This was much the way Gwinnett had talked of his Trapnel researches.

‘As soon as I went down there, I knew my hunch was right. Ken was altogether different from the man he had been the year before. He was crazy about Scorp, and Scorp’s ideas. It was Scorp’s wish that I should be present at the rites they were planning. A summoning. Scorp thought my being there might even make better vibrations, if I didn’t take part.’

Gwinnett stopped. He passed his hand over a face of light yellowish colour. He looked uncommonly ill.

‘Scorp said these rites can’t be performed with any hope of success, if those taking part are in a normal state of mind and body. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink myself now for thirty-six hours. I didn’t want to miss the chance of a lifetime, to see played out in the flesh all the things I’d been going over and over in my mind for months — like Tourneur’s scene in the charnel house.’

‘What were they trying to do?’

‘The idea was to summon up a dead man called Trelawney.’

‘How far did they get?’

Gwinnett gave a slight shudder. He was detached, yet far from calm, perhaps no more than his normal state, now aggravated by near collapse.

‘They got no further than the fight between Ken and Scorp.’

Gwinnett’s use of these abbreviated first-names gave a certain additional grotesqueness to what was already a sufficiently grotesque narrative.

‘Did they have a scrap during the rite?’

‘In the middle of it.’

‘The horned dance?’

‘No — during the sexual invocations that followed.’

‘What did those consist of?’

‘Scorp said that — among the ones taking part in the rite — they should have been all with all, each with each, within the sacred circle. I was a short way apart. Not in the circle. Scorp thought that best.’

Gwinnett again put up his hand to his head. He looked as if he might faint. Then he seemed to recover himself. Heavy spots of rain were beginning to fall.

‘Did everyone in the circle achieve sexual relations with everyone else?’

‘If they could.’

‘Were they all up to it?’

‘Only Scorp.’

‘He must be a remarkable young man.’

‘It wasn’t for pleasure. This was an invocation. Scorp was the summoner. He said it would have been far more likely to be successful had it been four times four.’

‘Not Widmerpool?’

‘That was the quarrel.’

‘What was?’

‘It had something to do with the union of opposites. I don’t know enough about the rite to say exactly what happened. Ken was gashed with a knife. That was part of the ritual, but it got out of hand. There was some sort of struggle for power. After a while Scorp and the others managed to revive Ken. By then it was too late to complete the rites. Scorp said the ceremony must be abandoned. It wasn’t easy to get Ken back over the fields, and down the hill. As well as doing the recording — it was all wrecked when he fell — he’d been concentrating the will. He’d been giving it all he had. He wasn’t left with much will to get back to the caravan.’

‘And they just let you take notes?’

‘Scorp didn’t mind that. He even urged me to.’

Gwinnett spoke as if that permission surprised him as much as it might surprise anyone else. He took the black notebook from under his arm, and began to turn its pages. They were full of small spidery handwriting.

‘Listen to this. When I first went to Ken Widmerpool’s place, and met Scorp, I was reminded of something I read not long before in one of the plays by Beaumont and Fletcher I’d been studying. I couldn’t remember just what the passage said. When I got back I hunted it up, and wrote the lines down.’

Gwinnett’s hand shook a little while he held the notebook in front of him, but he managed to read out what was written there.

‘Take heed! this is your mother’s scorpion,

That carries stings ev’n in his tears, whose soul

Is a rank poison thorough; touch not at him;

If you do, you’re gone, if you’d twenty lives.

I knew him for a roguish boy

When he would poison dogs, and keep tame toads;

He lay with his mother, and infected her,

And now she begs i’ th’ hospital, with a patch

Of velvet where her nose stood, like the queen of spades,

And all her teeth in her purse. The devil and

This fellow are so near, ’tis not yet known

Which is the ev’ler animal.’

‘Scorpio Murtiock to the life.’

‘He did shed tears during the rite. They poured down his cheeks. That was just before he gashed Ken.’

‘The familiar contemporary slur of our own day gains force of imagery in additionally giving your mother a dose.’

‘The kid in the play was the prototype maybe. Scorp’s in the same league.’

‘The girl called Fiona is a niece of ours.’

Gwinnett seemed taken aback at that. The information must have started him off on a new train of thought.

‘I don’t know how that nice kid got mixed up with that kind of stuff. Rusty’s another matter. She’s just a tramp.’

He brushed some of the mud from his sleeve. He appeared to feel quite strongly on the subject of Fiona, at the same time was unwilling to say more about her. That was like him.

‘I have to get back. I just wanted to make a few notes on the spot. I’ve done that. They’ll be useful. How do I find where I’ve parked, Nicholas?’

‘We’ll go as far as the top of the hill, and have a look round. You’ll probably be able to recognize the country better from there. Why don’t you have a sleep at your pub, then come over to us for lunch?’

‘No, I’ll sleep for an hour or two, if I can, then get back to London. I want to write while it’s all in my mind, but I’ve got to have my books handy too.’

He made a movement with his shoulders, and gave a sort of groan, as if that had been painful. He was not at all well. I was rather relieved that he had refused an invitation to lunch. It would not have been an easy meal to sit through. We walked up the field together in silence. Round about the circle of elder trees the grass had been heavily trodden down. Rain was descending quite hard now. Gwinnett’s story had distracted attention from the weather. The men with flags were beginning to pack up, the inspecting party massing together again, on the way back to their cars; a few hardy individuals, Mrs Salter, for instance, continuing to talk with the quarry representatives, or make notes. Gwinnett and I reached the summit of the rise.

‘Have a look from here.’

The far side sloped down to the waters from which The Fingers drank, when at midnight the cock crew. The Stones would probably need an extra drink after all that had happened during the past twelve hours. I did not mention the legend of their drinking to Gwinnett. It might seem a small matter, after whatever he himself had witnessed up there. We stood side by side on the edge of the hill. Fields and hedges stretched away in front; a few scattered farms; clumps of trees; telegraph poles; a pylon; far distant bluish uplands. The roofs of the small town, where Gwinnett was staying, were just visible in rainy haze. Main roads, hard to pick out in light diminished by heavy cloud, were marked from time to time by the passage of a lorry. Gwinnett stared for some seconds towards the country spread before us, rather than looking immediately below for his recent place of ascent. He pointed.

‘There they are.’

He spoke in his usual low voice, quite dispassionately. A long way off, where two hedges met at a right angle, what might be the shape of a yellow caravan stood in the corner of a field. The sight of it seemed to cheer Gwinnett a little, convince him that he had not dreamt the whole experience. Now he was able to turn his attention to the land below, from which he had first approached The Fingers. While rain continued to fall he established his bearings.

‘That was the path.’

He pointed down to a sharp decline in the ground, not far from where we stood. Away below to the left, in a hollow overgrown with yet more elder, thick in thistles and ragwort, two or three abandoned cars were slowly falling to pieces. They must have been driven in there, and dumped, from a nearby grass lane. Gwinnett’s vehicle, not visible from where we stood, was somewhere beyond these. He raised his hand in farewell. I did the same.

‘See you in London perhaps?’

‘I’ll be having to work hard through the summer and fall.’

The answer seemed to indicate a wish to be left alone. That was understandable after all the things he had by now tolerated from the presence of other people. He edged unsteadily down the incline towards the brook. Rain was pouring so hard that I did not wait to see him negotiate its breadth, shallow and muddy, but too wide to jump with convenience. Probably he waded through. That would not have added much to the general disarray of his clothing. There was a flicker of forked lightning, a clatter of thunder. The whole atmosphere quivered with fluxes of electricity, discernible running through one’s limbs. At the same time the rain itself greatly abated, diminishing to a few drops that continued to fall. The lightning flickered again, this time across the whole sky. I hurried to rejoin the rest of the party, hastening away like an army in full retreat. In the big field I noticed the ruts, where Ernie Dunch had so violently reversed the Land Rover. They were now filled with water. Mr Goldney, of the archaeological society, collar turned up, hands in pockets, appeared. He was half running, but slowed up, supposing I was looking for something.

‘No weather to search for flints. I once picked up a piece of Samian ware not far from here. It’s an interesting little site. Not up to The Whispering Knights, where I was last month. That’s an altogether grander affair. Still, we have to be grateful for what we have in our own neighbourhood.’

‘Why is it called The Whispering Knights? I’ve heard the name, but never been there.’

‘During a battle some knights were standing apart, plotting against their king. A witch passed, and turned them into stone for their treachery.’

‘Perhaps a witch will be waiting at the stile, and do the same to the quarry directors. Then we’ll have a second monument up here.’

Mr Goldney did not reply. He looked rather prim, shocked at so malign a concept, or unwilling to countenance light words on the subject of folklore. Rain had possibly soaked him past the threshold of small-talk. Mr Tudor, in company with Mrs Salter, both very wet, joined us. Mr Tudor showed signs of a tempered optimism so far as to the outcome of the meeting.

‘The Advisory Committee will have to get together again, Mr Goldney. Will Thursday at the same hour suit you? There’s the correspondence with the Alkali Inspector we ought to go through again in relation to new points raised in consequence of today’s meeting.’

‘That’s all right for me, Mr Tudor, and I’d like to bring up haulage problems.’

Mrs Salter sliced at a bramble with her pruning-hook.

‘Even Mr Gollop admits haulage problems. At first he was evasive. I wouldn’t have that’

Isobel, after a final word with Mr Todman, caught us up.

‘Who was the man you were talking to on the ridge?’

‘I’ll tell you about it on the way home.’

‘You looked a very strange couple silhouetted against the skyline.’

‘We were.’

‘A bit sinister.’

‘Your instincts are correct.’

The company scattered to their cars. Mr Gauntlett, an elderly woodland sprite untroubled by rain — if anything, finding refreshment in a downpour — disappeared on foot along a green lane. The rest of us drove away. The meeting had been a success in spite of the weather. Its consequence, assisted by the findings of the Advisory Committee, and the individual activities of Mr Tudor, was that a Government Enquiry was ordered by the Ministry. To have brought that about was a step in the right direction, even if the findings of such an Enquiry must always be unpredictable. That was emphasized by Mr Gauntlett, when I met him some weeks later, out with his gun, and the labrador that had replaced Daisy.

‘Ah. We shall see what we shall see.’

He made no further reference to nocturnal horned dancers round about The Devil’s Fingers. Neither did I, though their image haunted the mind. It was not quite the scene portrayed by Poussin, even if elements of the Seasons’ dance were suggested in a perverted form; not least by Widmerpool, perhaps naked, doing the recording. From what Gwinnett had said, a battle of wills seemed to be in progress. If, having decided that material things were vain, Widmerpool had turned to the harnessing of quite other forces, it looked as if he were losing ground in rivalry with a younger man. Perhaps the contest should be thought of — if Widmerpool were Orlando — as one of Orlando’s frequent struggles with wizards. Or — since the myth was in every respect upsidedown — was Murtlock even Widmerpool’s Astolpho, playing him false?

I did not see Delavacquerie again until the early autumn. I wanted to hear his opinion about Gwinnett’s inclusion in the rites at The Devil’s Fingers. As someone belonging to a younger generation than my own, coming from a different hemisphere, a poet with practical knowledge of the business world, who possessed personal acquaintance with several of the individuals concerned in an episode that took a fairly high place for horror, as well as extravagance, Delavacquerie’s objective comment would be of interest. For one reason or another — I, too, was away for a month or more — we did not meet; nor did I hear anything further of Gwinnett himself, or his associates of that night.

When a meeting with Delavacquerie took place he announced at once that he was feeling depressed. That was not uncommon. It was usually the result of being put out about his own business routine, or simply from lack of time to ‘write’. He did not look well, poor states of health always darkening his complexion. I thought it more than possible that the trip with Polly Duport had not been a success; projected marriage decided against, or shelved. On the principle of not playing out aces at the start of the game, I did not immediately attack the subject of The Devil’s Fingers. Then Delavacquerie himself launched into an altogether unforeseen aspect of the same sequence of circumstances.

‘Look, I’m in rather a mess at the moment. Not a mess so much as a tangle. I’d like to speak about it. Do you mind? That’s more to clear my own head than to ask advice. You may be able to advise too. Can you stand my talking a lot about my own affairs?’

‘Easily.’

‘I’ll start from the beginning. That is always best. My own situation. The fact that I like it over here, but England isn’t my country. I haven’t got a country. I’m rootless. I’m not grumbling about being rootless, especially these days. It even has advantages. At the same time certain problems are raised too.’

‘You’ve spoken of all this on earlier occasions. Did going home bring it back in an acute form?’

Delavacquerie dismissed that notion with a violent gesture.

‘I know I’ve talked of all this before. It’s quite true. Perhaps I am over-obsessed by it. I am just repeating the fact as a foundation to what I am going to say, a reminder to myself that I’m never sure how much I understand people over here. Their reactions often seem to me different from my own, and from those of the people I was brought up with. Quite different. I’ve written poems about all this.’

‘I’ve read them.’

Delavacquerie stopped for a moment. He seemed to be deciding the form in which some complicated statement should be made. He began again.

‘I spoke to you once, I remember, of my son, Etienne.’

‘You said he’d had some sort of thing for our niece, Fiona, which had been broken off, probably on account of that young man, Murtlock. I’m in a position to tell you more about all that — ’

‘Hold it for the moment.’

‘My additions to the story are of a fantastic and outrageous kind.’

‘Never mind. I don’t doubt what you say. I just want to put my own case first. That is best. We’ll come to what you know later — and I’m sure it will help me to hear it, even if I’ve heard some of it already. But I was speaking of Etienne. He has been doing well. He got a scholarship, which has taken him to America. By then he had found a new girl. She’s a nice girl. It seems fairly serious. They keep up a regular correspondence.’

‘How does he like the States?’

‘All right.’

Whether or not Etienne liked the US did not seem to be the point. Delavacquerie paused again. He laughed rather uncomfortably.

‘When Fiona was about the place, with Etienne, I noticed that I was getting interested in the girl myself. It wasn’t more than that. I wasn’t in love. Not in the slightest. Just interested. You will have had sufficient experience of such things to know what I am talking about — appreciate the differentiation I draw.’

‘Of course.’

‘I examined myself carefully in that connexion at the time. I found it possible to issue an absolutely clean bill of health, temperature, pulse, blood pressure, above all heart, all quite normal. I didn’t even particularly want to sleep with her, though I might have tried to do so, had the situation been other than it was. The point I want to make is that the situation was not in the least like that of The Humorous Lieutenant, the King trying to seduce his son’s girlfriend, as soon as the son himself was out of the way.’

‘No love potions lying about.’

‘You never know when you’re not going to drink one by mistake, but in this case I had not done so.’

‘May I ask a question?’

‘Questions might clarify my own position. I welcome them. All I wish to curtail, for the moment, is competing narrative, until I’ve finished my own.’

‘How was this feeling of interest in Fiona related to your other more permanent commitment?’

‘To Polly? But, of course. That is just what I meant. How shall I put it? If, as I said, the case had been other, the possibility of a temporary run around might not have been altogether ruled out. You understand what I mean?’

‘Keeping it quiet from Polly?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Would Fiona herself have been prepared for a temporary run around — I mean had the situation, as you put it, been quite other?’

‘Who can say? You never know till you try. Besides, if things had been different, they would have been totally different. That is something that perhaps only those — like ourselves — engaged in the arrangement of words fully understand. The smallest alteration in a poem, or a novel, can change its whole emphasis, whole meaning. The same is true of any given situation in life too, though few are aware of that. It was because things were as they were, that the amitié was formed. Perhaps that amitié would never have been established had we met somewhere quite fortuitously.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘Then — as I told you — Etienne’s thing with Fiona blew over. She went off with Murtlock, whether immediately, I’m not sure, but she went off. Passed entirely out of Etienne’s life, and, naturally, out of mine too. I was rather glad. For one thing I preferred what existed already to remain altogether undisturbed. It suited me. It suited my work. I forgot about Fiona. Even the interest — interest, as opposed to love — proved to have been of the most transient order.’

I wholly accepted Delavacquerie’s picture. Everything in connexion with it carried conviction — several different varieties of conviction. I could not at all guess where his story was going to lead. Inwardly, I flattered myself that my own narration, when I was allowed to unfold it, would cap anything he could produce.

‘I told you, before I went away, that Gwinnett was going to see Widmerpool. That visit took place.’

‘I know. You haven’t heard my story yet. I’ve seen Gwinnett since he told you that.’

‘I myself have not seen Gwinnett, but keep your story just a moment longer. Gwinnett, in fact, seems to have disappeared, perhaps left London. Murtlock, on the other hand, has been in touch with me.’

‘Did he appear in person, wearing his robes?’

‘He sent a message through Fiona.’

‘I see.’

‘Fiona arrived on my doorstep one evening. She knew the flat from her Etienne days.’

Delavacquerie lived in the Islington part of the world, not far from where Trapnel had occasionally camped out in one form or another. I had never seen Delavacquerie on his own ground.

‘This without warning?’

‘No, she called me up first, saying she had something to tell me. I asked her in for a drink. I had forgotten that none of them drink, owing to the rules of the cult, but she came at drinks time of day.’

I thought — as it turned out quite mistakenly — that I saw how things were shaping.

‘May I interpolate another question?’

‘Permission is given.’

‘You remain still living single in your flat?’

Delavacquerie laughed.

‘You mean did the combined trip to the Antilles have any concrete result? Well, purely administratively, it was decided that Polly and I would remain in our separate establishments, anyway for a short time longer, on account of various not at all interesting pressures in our professional lives. Does that answer the substance of your enquiry?’

‘Yes. That was what I wanted to know. A further query. Had Fiona more or less invented an excuse for coming to see you again?’

Delavacquerie smiled at that idea. It seemed to please him, but he shook his head. On the face of it, the suggestion was reasonable enough. If Delavacquerie had taken what he called an interest in Fiona, when she had frequented the house, she herself was likely to be at least aware of something of the sort in the air, an amitié, to use his own term. She could have decided later, if only as a caprice, that she might experiment with his feelings, see how far things would go. Delavacquerie stuck to his uncompromising denial.

‘No, she was sent by Murtlock all right. I’m satisfied as to that. Murtlock’s motive for wanting to get into communication with me was an odd one. Not a particularly pleasant one.’

‘He is not a particularly pleasant young man.’

‘Nevertheless people are attracted to him.’

‘Certainly.’

‘They come under his influence. They may not even like him when they do so. They may not even be in love with him — naturally they could be in love with him without liking him. My first thought was that Fiona was in love with Murtlock. I’m not sure now that’s correct. On the other hand, she’s certainly under Murtlock’s influence.’

It sounded a little as if Delavacquerie was explaining all this to himself, rather than to me, establishing confidence by an opportunity of speaking his hopes aloud. He had, after all, more or less suggested that as his aim, when he broached all this.

‘Does Murtlock hope to rope you into his cult? Surely not? That would be too much.’

‘It wasn’t me he was after. It was Gwinnett.’

‘They met, I suppose, when Gwinnett went down to see Widmerpool.’

‘That hadn’t happened, when Fiona came to see me.’

‘Murtlock knew about Gwinnett already.’

‘It appears that Gwinnett has won quite a name for himself in occult circles — if that is what they should be called — by having allegedly taken part in an act of great magical significance — in modern times almost making magical history.’

‘You mean — ’

‘By release of sexual energy in literally necromantic circumstances — if we are to accept Gwinnett did that — in short, direct contact with the dead. In performing a negative expression of sex, carried to its logical conclusions, Gwinnett took part in the most inspired rite of Murtlock’s cult.’

‘I knew that, according to Murtlock doctrine, pleasure was excluded. There is no reason to suppose Gwinnett himself believed that.’

‘You are right. Such an attitude seems even to have shocked Gwinnett. At the same time he felt that, as a scholar, he should study this available form of the gothic image of mortality. I do not think Gwinnett exactly expected that the theme would be, so to speak, played back to himself by Murtlock when he paid his visit to Widmerpool. I understand that the reason for Murtlock’s interest in him was never put — the metaphor is appropriate — in cold blood. How much Gwinnett himself guessed, I do not know.’

‘You learnt all this from Fiona?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it time to tell my story yet?’

Delavacquerie laughed. He looked at me rather hard.

‘You knew some of this already — I mean in connexion with Fiona?’

‘As it happens, yes.’

He hesitated, perhaps more tormented than he would admit to himself.

‘Let me say one thing more. What I have been talking about is not quite so simple as the way I’ve told it. There is another side too. You imply that you know for a fact that Fiona was involved — physically involved — in some of these highly distasteful goings-on. Do you know more, Nicholas, than that she has been for quite a long time a member of the cult, therefore they would inevitably come her way?’

‘Yes. I do know more.’

‘Involved without love — even in the many heteroclite forms of that unhappy verb.’

‘Yes.’

‘My first thought — when Fiona came to me with Murtlock’s message that he wanted to know Gwinnett’s whereabouts — was to have nothing to do with the whole business. That was more on grounds of taste than morals. As Emily Brightman is always pointing out, they are so often hopelessly confused by unintelligent people.’

‘Murtlock knew Gwinnett was in England?’

‘He’d already found that out somehow.’

‘He finds out a lot. I’m surprised, having got so far, he hadn’t traced Gwinnett’s whereabouts.’

‘He may, in any case, have preferred a more tortuous approach. I felt it an imposition on the part of this young visionary — whatever his claims as a magician — to force his abracadabras on an American scholar, engaged over here on research of a serious kind, however idiosyncratic Gwinnett’s own sexual tastes may be. Would you agree?’

‘Besides, as you’ve said, so far as we know, Gwinnett pursues these for pleasure, rather than magical advancement.’

‘Exactly. Love and Literature should rank before Sorcery and Power. There was, however, an additional aspect. That was why I was not speaking with absolute truth when I denied that Fiona was in some degree playing her own game, when she came to see me. On the other hand, that possibility did not possess quite the flattering slant you implied.’

‘She told you in so many words why Murtlock wanted to meet Gwinnett?’

‘Certainly. No embarrassments at all about that. More so regarding the ulterior motive for her visit. That emerged while we were talking. The fact was that Fiona was getting tired — more than that, absolutely desperate — about the life she has been living for a long time now.’

‘That’s good news.’

‘Of course.’

Delavacquerie paused again. He did not sound quite so enthusiastic about Fiona cutting adrift from Murtlockism as might have been expected. The chronological sequence of when these things happened — Fiona come to Delavacquerie, Gwinnett gone to visit Murtlock and Widmerpool, the period between — was not very clear to me. I was also uncertain as to Delavacquerie’s present feelings about Fiona. Whatever she had said to him did not appear to have affected her doings at The Devil’s Fingers. I fully believed what Delavacquerie had described as his attitude towards Fiona as his son’s girlfriend; I believed, more or less, that he later put her from his mind; but this new Fiona incarnation remained undefined. It was quite another matter. Also there was Polly Duport in the background. More must be explained. When he spoke again it was in an altogether detached tone.

‘Fiona more or less broke down while we were talking. Even then she was unwilling to say she would give up the whole thing. This was at our first meeting.’

‘There were subsequent ones?’

‘Several. Murtlock wouldn’t accept no for an answer, so far as Gwinnett’s whereabouts were concerned.’

‘You had refused to reveal them?’

‘Yes.’

‘That showed firmness.’

‘Firmness, in any sphere, is ultimately the only thing anyone respects. Murtlock seems to have foreseen a refusal at first. Either that, or he enjoyed linking Fiona and myself in a kind of game.’

‘He would be capable of both.’

‘His instincts told him that he could force Gwinnett’s address out of me, sooner or later, through Fiona herself. Murtlock, as you know by now, is exceedingly cunning in getting what he wants. He was well aware that Fiona felt that he, Scorpio Murtlock, must in some manner release her, personally, from his domination — give her leave to go, before she herself, of her own volition, could escape the net.’

‘All she had to do, in plain fact, was to walk out.’

‘That is just what Fiona could not bring herself to do. Murtlock knew that perfectly. He knew she must have some sort of legal dismissal from his service, one afforded by himself.’

‘An honourable discharge?’

‘Even a dishonourable one, I think — since all abandoning of himself and the cult must be wrong — but it had to come from Murtlock. It was no good arguing with her. That was how she felt. We talked it over exhaustively — and exhaustingly — during various meetings.’

Delavacquerie seemed to have established a more effective relationship with Fiona than any up-to-date achieved by her own family.

‘So what happened?’

‘In the end I revealed Gwinnett’s sleazy hotel. The price of that was that Fiona should be free to leave. Even then Murtlock would not allow her to go immediately. He said she could only go when she had taken part in a ceremony that included the presence of Gwinnett.’

‘So it was through you, in a sense, that Gwinnett went to see Widmerpool. He said it was because he wanted to observe gothic doings done in a gothic way.’

‘That was true too. It was a bit of luck for Murtlock — unless he bewitched Gwinnett too, put the idea into his head. I prefer to think it luck. No doubt he always has luck. Those people do. Once I had told Murtlock where to find Gwinnett, Gwinnett himself decided there was a good reason to fall in with what Murtlock wanted all along the line.’

‘Where’s Fiona now? Has she got away from Murtlock yet?’

Delavacquerie looked for a moment a little discomposed.

‘As a matter of fact Fiona’s living in the flat — not living with me, I mean — but it was somewhere to go. In fact it seemed the only way out. She didn’t want to have to live with her parents — obviously she could, for a time anyway, if she felt like doing that — and, if she set up on her own, there was danger that Murtlock might begin to pester her again. A spell of being absolutely free from Murtlock would give a chance to build up some resistance, as against a disease. There’s no one in Etienne’s room. It was her own suggestion. As you can imagine, she’s rather off sex for the moment.’

‘I see.’

That was untrue. I did not in the least see; so far as seeing might be held to imply some sort of understanding of what was really taking place. A complicated situation appeared merely to be accumulating additional complicated factors. Delavacquerie himself evidently accepted the inadequacy of this acknowledgment in relation to problems involved. He seemed to expect no more.

‘When I say we talked things over, that isn’t exactly true either. Fiona doesn’t talk things over. She’s incapable of doing that. That’s partly her trouble. One of the reasons why it was better for her to be in the flat was that it offered some hope of finding out what she was really thinking.’

He abruptly stopped speaking of Fiona.

‘Now tell me your story.’

To describe what had happened at The Devil’s Fingers, now that Fiona was living under Delavacquerie’s roof, was an altogether different affair from doing so in the manner that the story had first rehearsed itself to my mind. Then, planning its telling, there had been no reason to suppose her more than, at best, a sentimental memory; if — which might be quite mistaken — I had been right in suspecting him a little taken with her, when, in connexion with his son, Delavacquerie had first spoken Fiona’s name. Nevertheless, there was no glossing over the incident at The Devil’s Fingers. It had, in any case, been narrated by Gwinnett with his accustomed reticences, and, after all, Delavacquerie knew from Fiona herself more or less what had been happening. That was only a specific instance, though, for various reasons, an exceptional one. If he felt additional dismay on hearing of that night’s doings, he showed nothing. His chief interest was directed to the fact that Gwinnett had been present in person at the rites. This specific intervention of Gwinnett had been unknown to him. He had also supposed anything of the sort to have been, more or less as a matter of course, enacted at whatever premises Widmerpool provided.

‘How does Fiona occupy herself in London?’

‘Odd jobs.’

‘Has she gone back to her journalism?’

‘Not exactly that. She has been doing bits of research. I myself was able to put some of that in her way. She’s quite efficient.’

‘Her parents always alleged she could work hard if she liked.’

One saw that in a certain sense Fiona had worked hard placating Murtlock. Delavacquerie looked a little embarrassed again.

‘It seems that Fiona revealed some of her plans about leaving the cult to Gwinnett, when he was himself in touch with them. Gwinnett suggested that — if she managed to kick free from Murtlock — Fiona should help him in some of the seventeenth-century donkey-work with the Jacobean dramatists. I hadn’t quite realized — ’

Delavacquerie did not finish the sentence. I suppose he meant he had not grasped the extent to which Gwinnett, too, had been concerned in Fiona’s ritual activities. Evidently she herself had softpedalled the Devil’s Fingers incident, as such. He ended off a little lamely.

‘Living at my place is as convenient as any other for that sort of work.’

I expressed agreement. Delavacquerie thought for a moment.

‘I may add that having Fiona in the flat has inevitably buggered up my other arrangements.’

‘Polly Duport?’

He laughed rather unhappily, but gave no details.

6

WHEN, IN THE EARLY SPRING of the following year, an invitation arrived for the wedding of our nephew, Sebastian Cutts, to a girl called Clare Akworth, I decided at once to attend. Isobel would almost certainly have gone in any case. Considerations touched on earlier — pressures of work, pressures of indolence — could have kept me away. Negative attitudes were counteracted by an unexpected aspect of the ceremony. The reception was to take place at Stourwater. Several factors combined to explain that choice of setting. Not only had the bride been educated at the girls’ school which had occupied the Castle now for more than thirty years, but her grandfather was one of the school’s governing body. The church service was to be held in a village not far away, where Clare Akworth’s mother, a widow, had settled, when her husband died in his late thirties. Mrs Akworth’s cottage had, I believe, been chosen in the first instance with an eye to the daughter’s schooling, for which her father-in-law was thought to have assumed responsibility. Anyway, the Stourwater premises had been made available during a holiday period, offering a prospect that Moreland might have regarded as almost alarmingly nostalgic in possibilities.

That was not all, where conjuring up the past was concerned. In this same field of reminiscences, the bride’s grandfather — no doubt the main influence in putting Stourwater thus on view — also sustained a personal role, even if an infinitely trivial one. In short, I could not pretend freedom from all curiosity as to what Sir Bertram Akworth now looked like. This interest had nothing to do with his being a governor of a well reputed school for girls, nor with the long catalogue of company directorships and committee memberships (ranging from Independent Television to the Diocesan Synod), which followed his name in Who’s Who. On the contrary, Sir Bertram Akworth was memorable in my mind solely on account of the fact that, as a schoolboy, he had sent a note of an amatory nature to a younger boy (my near contemporary, later friend, Peter Templer), been reported by Widmerpool to the authorities for this unlicensed act; in consequence, sacked.

The incident had aroused a certain amount of rather heartless laughter at the time by the incongruity of a suggestion (Stringham’s, I think) that an element of jealousy on Widmerpool’s part was not to be ruled out. Templer’s Akworth (Widmerpool’s Akworth, if you prefer), a boy several years older than myself, was known to me only by sight. I doubt if we ever spoke together. Like Widmerpool himself, unremarkable at work or games, Akworth had a sallow emaciated face, and kept himself to himself on the whole, his most prominent outward characteristic being an unusually raucous voice. These minor traits assumed a sinister significance in my eyes, when, not without horror, I heard of his expulsion. The dispatch of the note, in due course, took on a less diabolical aspect, as sophistication increased, and, during the period when Stringham, Templer, and I used all to mess together, Stringham would sometimes (never in front of Templer) joke about the incident, which shed for me its earlier aura of fiendish depravity.

In later life, as indicated, Akworth (knighted for various public services and benefactions) had atoned for this adolescent lapse by a career of almost sanctified respectability. From where we were sitting, rather far at the back of the church — in a pew with Isobel’s eldest sister, Frederica, and her husband, Dicky Umfraville — Sir Bertram Akworth was out of view. One would be able to take a look at him later, during the reception. It was unexpected that Umfraville had turned up. He was close on eighty now, rather deaf, walking with a stick. On occasions like this, if dragged to them by Frederica, he could be irritable. Today he was in the best of spirits, keeping up a running fire of comment before the service began. I had no idea how he had been induced to attend the wedding. Perhaps he himself had insisted on coming. He reported a hangover. Its origins could have had something to do with his presence.

‘Rare for me these days. One of those hangovers like sheet lightning. Sudden flashes round the head at irregular intervals. Not at all unpleasant.’

The comparison recalled that morning at The Devil’s Fingers, when lightning had raced round the sky. The Government Enquiry had taken place, and, to the satisfaction of those concerned with the preservation of the site, judgment had been against further quarry development in the area of the Stones. Our meeting there was the last time I had seen Gwinnett. He had never got in touch. I left it at that. Delavacquerie spoke of him occasionally, but, for one reason or another — not on account of any shift in relationship — our luncheons together had been less frequent. Fiona was still lodging at his flat when we last met. Without too closely setting limits to what was meant by what Delavacquerie himself called a ‘heteroclite verb’, my impression was that he could be called in love with her. He never spoke of Fiona unless asked, the situation no less enigmatic than his association with Matilda years before.

Matilda Donners had died. She had told Delavacquerie that she was not returning to London after the end of the summer. He had assumed her to mean that she had decided to live in the country or abroad. When questioned as to her plans Matilda had been evasive. Only after her death was it clear that she must have known what was going to happen. That was like Matilda. She had always been mistress of her own life. The organ began playing a voluntary. Frederica attempted to check Umfraville’s chatter, which was becoming louder.

‘Do be quiet, darling. The whole congregation don’t want to hear about your hangovers.’

‘What?’

‘Speak more quietly.’

Umfraville indicated that he could not hear what his wife was talking about, but said no more for the moment. He was not alone in taking part in murmured conversation, the bride’s grandmother, a small jolly woman, also conversing animatedly with relations in the pew behind that in which she sat. Umfraville began again.

‘Who’s the handsome lady next to the one in a funny hat?’

‘The one in the hat, who’s talking a lot, like you, is Lady Akworth. The one you mean is the bride’s mother.’

‘What about her?’

‘She was called Jamieson — one of the innumerable Ardglass ramifications, not a close relation — her husband was in Shell or BP, and caught a tropical disease in Africa that killed him.’

That seemed to satisfy Umfraville for the moment. He closed his eyes, showing signs of nodding off to sleep. Sebastian Cutts, the bridegroom, tall, sandy-haired like his father, also shared Roddy’s now ended political ambitions. He and his brother, Jonathan, resembled their father, too, in delivering a flow of information, and figures, about their respective computers and art sales. Hard work at his computers had not engrossed Sebastian Cutts to the exclusion of what was judged — by his own generation — as a not less than ample succession of love affairs; a backlog of ex-girlfriends Clare Akworth was thought well able to dispose of. An only child, she had been working as typist-secretary in an advertising firm. Her pleasing beauté de singe — the phrase Umfraville’s — was of a type calculated to raise the ghost of Sir Magnus Donners in the Stourwater corridors. Perhaps it had done so, when she was a schoolgirl. Her spell at Stourwater had been later than that of the Quiggin twins (recently much publicized in connexion with Toilet Paper, a newly founded ‘underground’ magazine), both withdrawn from the school before Clare Akworth’s arrival there. Umfraville, coming-to suddenly, showed signs of impatience.

‘Buck up. Get cracking. We can’t sit here all day. Ah, here she is.’

The congregation rose. Clare Akworth, who had an excellent figure, came gracefully up the aisle on the arm of her uncle, Rupert Akworth, one of her father’s several brothers. He was employed in the rival firm of fine arts auctioneers to that of Jonathan Cutts. There were several small children in attendance. I did not know which families they represented. The best-man was Jeremy Warminster, the bridegroom’s first-cousin. Junior Research Fellow in Science at my own former college, Jeremy Warminster was a young man of severe good looks, offhand manner, reputation for brilliance at whatever was his own form of biological studies. A throwback to his great-great-uncle, the so-called Chemist-Earl (specialist in marsh gases, though more renowned in family myth for contributions to the deodorization of sewage), Jeremy had always known exactly what he wanted to do. This firmness of purpose, engrained seriousness, allied to an abrupt way of talking, made him rather a daunting young man. His plan, not yet accomplished, was to turn Thrubworth into an institution for scientific research, while he himself continued to occupy the wing of the house converted into a flat by his uncle and predecessor. Jeremy Warminster’s mother, stepbrother and stepsister (children of the drunken Lagos businessman, Collins, long deceased), had lived at Thrubworth until his coming of age. Then Veronica Tolland moved to London, which she had always preferred. Her Collins offspring were now married, with children of their own; Angus, a journalist, specializing in industrial relations; Iris, wife of an architect, her husband one of the extensive Vowchurch family.

There was no address at the wedding service, but — an unexpected bonus — Sir Bertram Akworth read the Lesson. This gave an excellent opportunity to study his bearing in later life. White hair, a small moustache, had neither much changed the appearance, so far as remembered from the days when Templer had aroused his passions. In failing to acquire a great deal of outward distinction, he resembled Sir Magnus Donners, a man of wider abilities in the same line. Sir Bertram Akworth showed, anyway at long range, no sign of projecting Sir Magnus’s air of being nevertheless a little disturbing. Sir Bertram, still spare, sallow, rather gloomy, looked ordinary enough. Before he began to read he glanced round the church, as if to make sure all was arranged in a manner to be approved. Possibly he himself had decided that his own reading of the Lesson should be alternative to an address. The passage, one often chosen for such occasions, was from Corinthians. As the voice began to rasp through the church, the memory of the schoolboy Akworth (not yet Sir Bertram) came perceptibly back.

‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’

The reference to sounding brass was appropriate, recalling a sole personal memory of the reader, the rebuke administered by our housemaster, his nerves always tried by pupils with strident voices.

‘Don’t shout, Akworth.’ Le Bas had said. ‘It’s a bad habit of yours, especially when answering a question. Try to speak more quietly.’

The habit remained. It seemed to have been no handicap in Sir Bertram’s subsequent career. At one of the closing sentences of the Lesson he hardened the pitch of the utterance. It rang through the nave.

‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.’

Giving a final glance round the congregation, he returned to his seat. The striking image of seeing through a glass darkly again brought thoughts of The Devil’s Fingers. Fiona did not appear to be present in the church. She might well have decided to skip the service, just turn up at the reception. In the light of her newly organized life she was unlikely to forgo altogether her brother’s wedding. So far as I knew she was still living at Delavacquerie’s flat, their relationship no less undefined. Her parents were united in agreeing that, whatever the situation, it was preferable to the previous one. The impression was that Roddy and Susan Cutts, perhaps deliberately, had known little enough about the Murtlock period too. The handout issued by them now was that their daughter had taken a room in an Islington flat that belonged to a man who worked, respectably enough, in Donners-Brebner. Poets not playing much Part in Cutts life, Delavacquerie’s business side was more emphasized than the poetic; potential emotional ties with Fiona not envisaged, more probably ignored. Delavacquerie was after all considerably older than their daughter; though, it had to be admitted, so too had been the handsome married electrician. The Wedding March struck up. For some minutes the congregation was penned in while photographers operated at the church door. Outside, we walked with Veronica Tolland towards the car park.

‘Are your kids here? Angus couldn’t get away either. He had to cover a strike. Iris will be at the reception. Fancy fetching up at Stourwater again. I used to go on visitors’ day when I was a child. The park’s open to the public now. My father’s job was in the local town. I expect I’ve often said that — also I was at school with Matilda Donners, when she was a little girl called Betty Updike. Did you hear she’d died?’

‘Apparently been ill for some time. I didn’t know that. I always liked Matilda.’

‘She made quite a career for herself. I don’t know half the people here. Who’s the good-looking black girl with the young Huntercombes. I know — she’s wife of Jocelyn Fettiplace-Jones. His mother was an Akworth. How glad I am I live in London now.’

Like Ted Jeavons, Veronica had taken on the workings of a world rather different from that of her earlier life, without ever in the least wanting to be part. She had always regarded that world, not without a certain enjoyment, from the outside. Now she felt free of it all, except on occasions such as this one, which she liked to attend. In spite of such inherent sentiments, Veronica had come by now to look more than a little like a conventional dowager on the stage.

‘See you later.’

The immediate vision of Stourwater, in thin vaporous April sunshine, was altogether unchanged. On the higher ground, in the shadows of huge contorted oaks, sheep still grazed. Down in the hollow lay the Castle; keep; turrets; moat; narrow causeway across the water, leading to the main gate with double portcullis. All seemed built out of cardboard. Its realities had in any case belonged more to the days of Sir Magnus Donners, rather than to the later Middle Ages, when the Castle’s history had been obscure. The anachronistic black swans were gone from the greenish waters of the moat. A large noticeboard directed to a car park. Round about the Castle itself playing fields came into view.

‘What games would they be?’

‘Net-ball, hockey, I suppose.’

We parked, then crossed the causeway on foot. The reception was taking place in the Great Hall, now the school’s Assembly Room. Armoured horsemen no longer guarded the door. Forms had been pushed back against the walls, a long table for refreshments set across the far end. In place of Sir Magnus’s Old Masters — several of doubtful authenticity according to Smethyck, and others with a taste for picture attribution — hung reproductions of the better known French Impressionists. We joined the queue, a long one, formed by guests waiting to meet bride and bridegroom. The two families had turned out in force. There must have been a hundred or more guests at least. We took a place far back in the line, working our way up slowly, as Roddy, relic of his parliamentary days, liked to talk for a minute or two to everyone he knew personally. When at last we found ourselves greeting the newly married pair, their closer relations in support, I felt this no moment to remind Sir Bertram Akworth that we had been at school together. There would in any case have been no opportunity. Susan Cutts drew us aside.

‘Come away from them all for a moment. There’s something I must tell you both.’

Leaving her husband to undertake whatever formalities were required, Susan was evidently impatient to reveal some piece of news, good or ill was not clear, which greatly excited her.

‘Have you heard about Fiona?’

‘No, what?’

One was prepared for anything. My first thought was that Fiona had returned to Murtlock and the cult.

‘She’s married.’

I thought I saw how things had at last fallen out.

‘To Gibson Delavacquerie?’

Susan looked puzzled by the question. The name did not seem to convey anything to her, certainly not that of their daughter’s new husband. Susan’s words plainly stated that Fiona possessed a husband.

‘You mean her landlord? No, not him. What could have made you think that, Nick?’

So far from Susan considering Delavacquerie to rate as a potential suitor, she was momentarily put off her stride at the very strangeness of such a proposition. Any emotional undercurrents of the Delavacquerie association must have completely passed by the Cutts parents, unless Susan was doing a superb piece of acting, which was most unlikely.

‘No — it’s an American. I believe you know him, Nick? He’s called Russell Gwinnett.’

Roddy, disengaging himself from the last guest for whom he felt any serious responsibility at the moment, was unable to keep away from all share in imparting such news.

‘Wasn’t there some sort of contretemps years ago about Gwinnett? I believe there was. That fellow Widmerpool was mixed up with it, I have an idea. I used to come across Widmerpool sometimes in the House. Not too bad a fellow, even if he was on the other side. He’s sunk without a trace, if ever a man did. I can’t remember exactly what happened. Gwinnett seems a nice chap. He’s a bit older than Fiona, of course, but I don’t see why that should matter.’

Susan agreed heartily.

‘In his forties. I always liked older men myself. Anyway they’re married, so there it is.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Yesterday, actually.’

‘No warning?’

‘You can imagine what it was like to be told this, with Sebastian’s wedding taking place the following day.’

‘They just turned up man and wife?’

‘Fiona brought Mr Gwinnett — I suppose I should call him Russell now — along to see us the same afternoon. She seems very pleased about it. That’s the great thing. They both do. He doesn’t talk much, but I never mind that with people.’

‘Have they gone off on a honeymoon?’

‘They’re just going to do a short drive round England, then Russell has to go back to America. He’s got a little car he dashes about in all over the country, doing his research. He’s a don at an American university, as you probably know. They’re coming to the reception. Fiona suggested they should do that herself. Wasn’t it sweet of her? They haven’t arrived yet. At least I haven’t seen them.’

Susan, in spite of determined cheerfulness, was showing signs of nervous strain. That was not to be wondered at. I mentioned — less from snobbish reasons than avoidance of cross-questioning about Gwinnett in other directions — that he was collaterally descended from one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Roddy showed interest. At least he was deflected from closer enquiry into the subject of what exactly had happened to connect his new son-in-law with Widmerpool.

‘Is he indeed? I must say I took to Russell at first sight I’d like to have a talk with him about the coming Presidential election, and a lot of other American matters too.’

‘I wish Evangeline were still here,’ said Susan. ‘She might know something about the Gwinnetts. We’ll talk about it all later. I’ll have to go back and do my stuff now. There are some more people arriving… darling, how sweet of you to come … lovely to see you both …’

There was no time to contemplate further Fiona’s marriage to Gwinnett, beyond making the reflection that, if he had done some dubious things in his time, so too had she. Leaving the threshold of the reception, we moved in among the crowd that filled the Great Hall. Most of the guests had chosen to wear conventional wedding garments, some of the younger ones letting themselves go, either with variations on these, or trappings that approximated to fancy dress. The children, of whom there was quite a large collection, scuffled about gaily, the whole assemblage making a lively foreground to the mediaeval setting. Hugo, Norah, and Blanche Tolland had all turned up, Norah grumbling about the superabundance of Alford relations present.

‘Susie was always very thick with the Alford cousins. I hardly knew any of them. They look a seedy lot, large red faces and snub noses.’

‘I find them charming,’ said Hugo. ‘Look here, what’s all this about Fiona marrying an American? The last thing I heard was that she had given up all those odd friends of hers Norah was once so keen on, and was working hard at something or other in Islington.’

Norah was not prepared to be saddled with an admiration for Murtlock.

‘I wasn’t keen on Fiona’s last lot of friends. I’ve been saying for ages she’s hung about much too long doing that sort of thing. If she wants to get married, I’m glad it’s an American. It will give her the chance of a new kind of life, if she goes to live there. Somebody said you knew him, Nick?’

‘Yes, I know him.’

There was no point in trying to explain Gwinnett to Norah. In any case, given the most favourable circumstances, I was not sure I could explain him to anyone, including myself. The attempt was not demanded, because we were joined by Umfraville, carrying his rubber-tipped stick in one hand, a very full glass of champagne in the other. As prelude to an impersonation of some sort, he raised the glass.

‘Here’s to the wings of love,

May they never lose a feather,

Till your little shoes, and my big boots,

Stand outside the door together.’

Hugo held up a hand.

‘We don’t want a scandal, Dicky, after all these years as brothers-in-law.’

Before Umfraville could further elaborate whatever form of comic turn contemplated, his own attention was taken up by a grey-haired lady touching his arm.

‘Hullo, Dicky.’

Umfraville clearly possessed not the least idea who was accosting him. The lady, smartly dressed, though by no means young, might at the same time have been ten years short of Umfraville’s age. She was tall, pale, distinguished in appearance, very sad.

‘I’m Flavia.’

‘Flavia.’

Carefully balancing his stick and champagne, Umfraville embraced her.

‘How horrid of you not to recognize me.’

Umfraville swept that aside.

‘Flavia, this is an altogether unexpected delight. Does your presence at our nephew’s wedding mean that you and I are now related — in consequence of the marriage of these young people? How much I hope that, Flavia.’

The grey-haired lady — Stringham’s sister — laughed a rather tinkly laugh.

‘Dicky, you haven’t changed at all.’

Flavia Wisebite — it was to be assumed she still bore the name of her American second husband, Harrison Wisebite (like Veronica Tolland’s first, alcoholic, long departed) — laughed again tremulously. Her own affiliations with Umfraville dated back to infinitely distant days; Kenya, the Happy Valley, surroundings where, according to Umfraville himself — he had emphasized with a certain complacency his own caddishness in revealing the information — he had been the first to seduce her. That possibility was more credible than Umfraville’s follow-up, that he (rather than the reprehensible Cosmo Flitton, married to Flavia not long after) could be true father of Flavia’s daughter, Pamela. Pamela Flitton, it might be thought, carried all the marks of being Cosmo Flitton’s daughter. Age had done little or nothing to impair Umfraville’s capacities for routine banter, if he happened to be in the right mood. He continued to press the possibility of a remote family tie emerging from the Cutts/Akworth union that would connect Flavia Wisebite with himself.

‘Bride or bridegroom? Come on, Flavia. I want to be able to introduce you as my little cousin.’

‘No good, Dicky. I’m not a blood relation. I’m Clare Akworth’s godmother. Her mother’s a dear friend of mine. We live in cottages almost next door to each other, practically in walking distance of Stourwater.’

Flavia Wisebite began to narrate her past history to Umfraville in her rapid trembling voice; how nervous diseases had prostrated her, she had been in and out of hospital, was now cured. In spite of that assurance she still seemed in a highly nervous state. Umfraville, less tough in certain respects than in his younger days, was beginning to look rather upset himself at all this. No doubt he felt sorry for Flavia, but had reached a time of life when, if he came to a wedding, he hoped not to be harassed by having poured into his ears the troubles of a former mistress. His face became quite drawn as he listened. I should have been willing to escape myself, scarcely knowing her, and feeling in no way responsible. Before withdrawal were possible, Umfraville manoeuvred me into the conversation. Flavia Wisebite at once recalled the sole occasion when we had met in the past.

‘It was when Dicky was first engaged to your sister-in-law, Frederica. You drove over from Aldershot to Frederica’s house during the war. I was there with poor Robert, just before he was killed. I’m a contemporary of Frederica’s, you know. We came out at the same time. I remember you talking about my brother, Charles.’

She began to speak disjointedly of Stringham. She was, I thought, perhaps a little mad now. As one gets older, one gets increasingly used to encountering this development in friends and acquaintances; causing periods of self-examination in a similar connexion. Seeing that Flavia and I had something in common to talk about together, Umfraville slipped away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stumping across the room on his stick to have a further word with the bride. Flavia Wisebite rambled on.

‘Charles was never sent into the world to make old bones, of course I always knew that, but how sad that he should have died as he did, how sad. He was a hero, of course, but what difference does that make, when you’re dead?’

She seemed to require an answer to that question. It was hard to offer one free from sententiousness. I made no attempt to do so.

‘I suppose it makes a difference the way a few people remember you.’

That seemed to satisfy her.

‘Yes, yes. Like Robert.’

‘Yes. Robert too.’

She appeared to have been made quite happy by this justifiable, if unoriginal conclusion. Oddly enough, when at Frederica’s, Flavia Wisebite had spoken almost disparagingly of her brother’s determination, in face of poor health, to join the army. This canonization of Stringham after death had something of her daughter Pamela’s way of remembering dead lovers. Now, in a somewhat similar manner, Flavia began to talk of Umfraville with affection, though she had hardly noticed him at Frederica’s. Then, of course, she had been involved with Robert Tolland. Even so, the enthusiasm with which she went on about Kenya, how amusing Umfraville had been there, how much her father had liked him, was an illustration of the way human relationships fluctuate, without any action taking place; Umfraville, from being entirely disregarded, now occupying a prominent place in Flavia Wisebite’s personal myth. Without warning, she switched to Pamela.

‘Did you ever meet my daughter?’

‘Yes. I knew Pamela.’

I was about to say that I knew Pamela well, then saw that, in Pamela Flitton’s case, that might imply closer affiliations than had ever in fact existed. It was a needless adjustment of phrase. Her mother had certainly long ceased to worry, if she had ever done so, about her daughter’s affairs, with whom she had, or had not, slept. Perhaps, in her own state of health, Flavia had been scarcely aware of all that In any case something else in relation to Pamela was now on her mind.

‘She died too.’

‘Yes.’

‘She married that dreadful man — Widmerpool.’

For the first time it occurred to me as strange, abnormally strange, that Flavia Wisebite had never, so far as I knew, played anything like an active rôle in her capacity as Widmerpool’s mother-in-law. In fact I now saw that, without formulating the idea at all clearly in my mind, I had always supposed Flavia to have died. Whatever the reason — chiefly no doubt the interludes in hospitals and nursing-homes — she seemed to have sidestepped the scandals that had enveloped her daughter’s name; not least Pamela’s unhappy end. If that had been her mother’s deliberate intention, she had been remarkably successful in keeping out of the way.

‘Did you know Widmerpool?’

‘Yes. I know him. I’ve known him for years.’

‘I said did you know him. Nobody could know him now.’

‘How do you mean?’

I did not grasp immediately the implication that Widmerpool had become literally impossible to know.

‘You can’t have heard what’s happened to him. He’s gone out of his mind. He lives with a crowd of dreadful people, most of them quite young, who wear extraordinary clothes, and do the most horrible, horrible things. They are quite near here.’

It was true that Widmerpool’s mother’s cottage had been only a mile or two from Stourwater.

‘I did know he’d become rather odd. I’d forgotten he was in this neighbourhood.’

‘I see them out running quite often.’

In the light of the cult’s habits there was nothing particularly extraordinary in Flavia Wisebite catching sight of them at their exercises from time to time. During the period of working for Sir Magnus Donners, Widmerpool had often spoken of his good fortune in having his mother’s cottage — later enlarged by himself — so close to the Castle.

‘Sometimes they’re in blue garments, sometimes hardly any clothes at all. I’ve been told they do wear absolutely nothing, stark naked, when they go out in the middle of the night in summer. They do all sorts of revolting things. I wonder it’s allowed. But then everything is allowed now.’

Flavia Wisebite grimaced.

‘I try not to look at them, if they come running in off a sideroad. When I see them in the distance I go off up a turning.’

‘Is Widmerpool head of the cult? *

‘How should I know? I thought he was. Didn’t he start it? As soon as Pamela married him, he began his horrible goings-on, though they weren’t quite like what he does nowadays. Why did she do it? How could she? Find the most horrible man on earth, and then marry him? She always had to have her own way. It was quite enough that everyone agreed that Widmerpool was awful, hideous, monstrous. She just wanted to show that she didn’t care in the least what anyone said. She was the same as a child. Absolutely wilful. Nobody could control her.’

No doubt there was much truth in what her mother said. I remembered Pamela Flitton, as a child bridesmaid, being sick in the font at Stringham’s wedding. One of the children had made a good deal of noise at the ceremony just attended, but nothing so drastic as that. Flavia’s daughter had always been in a class by herself from her earliest days. A girl like Fiona was no real competitor.

‘Because Pam didn’t always go for unattractive people. When she was a little girl she fell madly in love with Charles — you know the way children do — at the time he was drinking too much. The amount he drank in those days was terrible. Pam didn’t see him often because of that. Still, Charles was always fond of her, very nice to her, whenever he came to see us, which wasn’t often. Charles left Pam his things, not much, hardly anything by then. Pam never made a will, of course, so Widmerpool must have got whatever there was. The Modigliani drawing. Pam loved that. I wonder what happened to it. I suppose that awful Widmerpool sold it.’

Flavia Wisebite took a small folded pocket handkerchief from her bag. She lightly dabbed her eyes. It was the precise gesture her mother had used, another memory of Stringham’s marriage to Peggy Stepney; Peggy Klein, as she had been for years now. Mrs Foxe’s tears had been more prolonged on that occasion, lasting intermittently throughout the whole service. Flavia’s were quickly over. She returned the handkerchief to the bag. I did not know what to say. Where could one begin? Stringham’s past? Pamela’s past? Flavia’s own past? These were extensive and delicate themes to set out on; Widmerpool’s present, even less approachable. There was no need to say anything at all. Flavia Wisebite, in the manner of persons of her sort, had suddenly recovered herself. She was perfectly all right again. Now she spoke once more in her tremulous social voice.

‘Isn’t Clare Akworth a sweet girl?’

‘I don’t really know her. She looks very attractive.’

‘I’m so proud to be her godmother. He’s a charming young man too. He told me all about his computers. It was far above my head, I’m afraid. I’m sure they’ll be very happy. I never was, but I’m sure they will be. So nice to have met again.’

Smiling goodbye, she disappeared into the crowd. In its own particular way the encounter had been disturbing. I was glad it was over. One of its side effects was a sense of temporary inability to chat with other guests, most of them, unless relations, from their age unknown to me. Flavia Wisebite had diminished exuberance for seeking out members of an older generation, whom one had not seen for some time, hearing their news, listening to their troubles. In that line, Flavia Wisebite herself was enough for one day. She had also in some way infected me with her own sense of disorientation. I required time to recover. The idea suggested itself to slip away from the reception for a few minutes, find release in wandering through the corridors and galleries of the Castle. After all, that was really why I had come here. There was the dining-room, for example, draped with the tapestries of the Seven Deadly Sins, the little library or study, drawings and small oils between bookshelves, where Barnby’s portrait of the waitress from Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant had hung. A side door seemed the most convenient exit from the party. Rupert Akworth, the bride’s uncle, who had given her away, saw me about to leave.

‘The gents? Down the stairs on the left. Rather classy.’

‘Thanks.’

The Stourwater passages had by now acquired the smell common to all schools: furniture polish: disinfectant: fumes of unambitious cooking. I found the little library — now a schoolroom hung with maps — which Sir Magnus had entered with such dramatic effect that he seemed to have been watching for his guests’ arrival through a peephole in the far door (concealed with dummy books), the night we had come over with the Morelands to dinner at the Castle. One of the pictures in this room had been another Barnby, an oil sketch of the model Conchita, described by Moreland as ‘antithesis of the pavement artist’s traditional representation of a loaf of bread, captioned Easy to Draw but Hard to Get.’

After striking one or two false trails, I came at last to the dining-room of the Seven Deadly Sins. Rows of tables indicated that its function remained unchanged, though the Sins no longer exemplified their graphic warning to those who ate there. The fine chimneypiece, decorated with nymphs and satyrs — no doubt installed by Sir Magnus to harmonize with the tapestries — had been allowed to remain as adjunct to school meals. Above this hung a large reproduction of an Annigoni portrait of the Queen. Here, scene of the luncheon where I had first met Jean Templer after her marriage to Duport; later, of the great impersonation of the Sins themselves, recorded in the photographs shown by Matilda, were more pungent memories. I stood for a moment by the door, reconstructing some of these past incidents in the mind. While I was doing so, a man and a girl entered the dining-room from the far end. They were holding hands. Without abandoning this clasp, they advanced up the room. If wedding guests, like quite a few others present at the reception, neither had dressed up much for the occasion.

‘Hullo, Fiona — hullo, Russell.’

Gwinnett offered the hand that was not holding Fiona’s.

‘Hullo, Nicholas.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘You’ve heard.’

‘Yes.’

Gwinnett gave one of his rare smiles. I kissed Fiona, who accepted with good grace this tribute to her marriage. She, too, looked pleased. Her dress still swept the ground — as on the crayfishing afternoon, the last time I had actually set eyes on her — but her breast no longer bore the legend HARMONY. In her disengaged hand she carried a large straw hat trimmed with multicoloured flowers. A considerable cleaning up, positive remodelling, had taken place in Fiona’s general style. No doubt much of that was owed to Delavacquerie. Gwinnett had surmounted the sober suit of the Magnus Donners dinner with a thin strip of bow tie. His head seemed to have been newly shaved.

‘Have you both just arrived?’

‘A side door outside was open. We thought we might look around before meeting the family. Is the Castle thirteenth or early fourteenth-century? I’d say that was the date. The machicolations might be later. What’s its history?’

Gwinnett had shown architectural interests in Venice.

‘Not much history, I think. Sir Magnus Donners, who owned it, had some story about a mediaeval lord of Stourwater, whose daughter drowned herself in the moat for love of a monk.’

Halfway through the sentence I saw that tradition was one preferably to have remained unrepeated in the circumstances. Sir Magnus had narrated the tale to Prince Theodoric the day the Walpole-Wilsons had taken me to luncheon here. I added quickly that the room we were in had once contained some remarkable tapestries depicting the Seven Deadly Sins. That seemed scarcely an improvement as a topic. Fiona may have felt the same, as she enquired about the wedding.

‘How did Sebastian stand up to it?’

‘Very well. Let’s return to them, and drink some champagne.’

Fiona looked questioningly at Gwinnett, as she used to look at Murtlock for a decision; perhaps had so looked at Delavacquerie, before relinquishing him.

‘Do you want to see them all yet?’

‘Whatever you say.’

I supposed they would prefer to remain alone together.

‘I’m going to continue my exploration of the Castle for a short time, then I’ll see you later at the reception.’

Fiona did not seem anxious to face her relations yet.

‘We’ll come with you. You can show us round. I’d like to see a bit more of it. Wouldn’t you, Rus?’

‘I don’t know the place at all well. I was here absolutely years ago, and only went into a few rooms then.’

‘Never mind.’

The three of us set off together.

‘I’m glad I wasn’t at school here.’

Stourwater was one of the educational establishments Fiona had never sampled. The new role of young married woman seemed to come with complete ease to her. There could be no doubt that she liked exceptional types. Gwinnett’s attraction to Fiona was less easy to classify. A faint train of thought was perceptible so far as Pamela Widmerpool was concerned, though Fiona had neither Pamelas looks, nor force of character. The impact of Pamela might even have jolted Gwinnett into an entirely different emotional channel, his former inhibitions cured once and for all. That was not impossible.

‘Sir Magnus Donners once took some of his guests down to the so-called dungeons, but I’m not sure I can find them.’

Gwinnett pricked up his ears.

‘The dungeons? Let’s see them. I’d like to look over the dungeons.’

Fiona agreed.

‘Me, too. Do have a try to find them.’

They did not cease to hold hands, while several rooms and passages were traversed. Structural alterations had taken place in the course of adapting the Castle to the needs of a school. The head of the staircase leading to these lower regions, where the alleged dungeons were on view — knowledgable people said they were merely storerooms — could not be found. Several doors were locked. Then a low door, a postern, brought us out into a small courtyard, a side of the Castle unenclosed by moat. Here school outbuildings had been added. Beyond this open space lay playing fields, a wooden pavilion, some seats. Further off were the trees of the park. Gwinnett surveyed the courtyard.

‘This near building might have been a brewhouse. The brickwork looks Tudor.’

Fiona turned towards the fields.

‘At least I’ll never have to play hockey again.’

‘Did you hate games?’

‘I used to long to die, playing hockey on winter afternoons.’

Gwinnett gave up examining the supposed brewhouse. We moved towards the open.

‘In the ball-courts of the Aztecs a game was played of which scarcely anything is known, except that the captain of the winning side is believed to have been made a human sacrifice.’

Gwinnett said that rather pedantically.

‘The rule would certainly add to the excitement of a cup-tie or test match.’

‘Another feature was that, when a goal was scored — a very rare event — all the clothes and jewellery of the spectators were forfeit to the players.’

‘Less good. An incitement to rowdyism.’

‘I think they both sound excellent rules,’ said Fiona. ‘Nothing I’d have liked better than to execute the captain, and I never watched any games, if I could help it, so they wouldn’t have got my gear.’

Gwinnett would have liked to remain serious, but gave way to her mood. Marriage seemed already to have loosened up both of them. Further discussion of Aztec sport was brought to an end by something happening on the far side of the hockey-field, which distracted attention. Beyond the field a path led through the park. Along this path, some way off, a party of persons was slowly running. They might well have been the Aztec team, doubling up to play a sacrificial contest. There were about a dozen of them approaching, mostly dressed in blue, trotting in a leisurely way, knees high, across the park. Fiona, naturally enough, grasped at once the identity of this straggling body. I don’t know how soon Gwinnett also took that in. Probably at once too. The strange thing was that, before comprehending the meaning of what was taking place, I thought for a second of childhood, of Dr Trelawney and his young disciples.

‘Look! Look!’

Fiona was displaying great excitement. By that time I, too, had understood the scene.

‘It’s them all right.’

Fiona tried to discern something.

‘Is he there?’

She spoke with a certain apprehension. Obviously she meant Murtlock. No one answered her. Gwinnett seemed interested. He watched the runners. Fiona examined them intently too.

‘No — he’s not there. I’m sure he’s not there. But I can see Barnabas.’

There were at least a dozen of them, perhaps more. Not all wore the robes or tunic of the cult, some almost in rags. Both sexes were represented, the average age appeared to be early twenties. The only two older persons were much older. One of them, Widmerpool, was leading the pack. He wore the blue robe. The other elderly man lacked a robe. Dressed in a red sweater and trousers, greybearded, dishevelled, incredibly filthy in appearance even from far-off, this one was by a long way the last of the runners. Fiona was thrilled.

‘He’s not there. Let’s talk to them. Let’s talk to Barnabas.’ ‘OK.’

Gwinnett said that quite warmly, as if he too would enjoy the encounter.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Not at all.’

She turned towards the runners, and shouted.

‘Barnabas! Barnabas!’

At the sound of Fiona’s voice, the pace set by Widmerpool became even more sluggish, some of the party slowing up to the extent of not running at all. These last stood staring in our direction, as if we, rather than they, were the odd figures on the landscape. That may well have seemed so to them. Fiona cried out again.

‘Come and talk to us, Barnabas.’

Widmerpool was the last to stop running. He had to walk back some little way to where the rest had drawn up. He was evidently in charge. If the run were to be interrupted, he might have been supposed the correct individual to be hailed by Fiona. I was not sure what her attitude towards him had been when herself a member of the cult. No doubt he was a figure to be taken very much into account, but, if only from his age, having no such grip as Murtlock on her imagination. It was unlikely she would ever have made our presence known had Murtlock been sighted among the runners. Now, behaving like a girl seeing old schoolfriends again, some of the pleasure coming from their being still at a school from which she had herself escaped, Fiona began to walk across the field to meet them. Gwinnett followed. It was not clear whether he was indifferent to the reunion, wanting only to humour his bride, or still felt curiosity as what this encounter might bring forth. The runners, Henderson foremost among them, strayed across the grass towards us, the elderly man with the tangled beard remaining well to the rear.

‘How are you, Barnabas?’

Henderson looked as if a far more ascetic life had been imposed on him since crayfishing days. His face was pale and thinner. He had removed the moustache, and taken to wire spectacles. The sight of Fiona greatly cheered him. She began to explain what was happening at Stourwater.

‘Sebastian’s wedding reception is going on here this afternoon. Chuck told me he was going to come to it. Chuck knows Clare Akworth.’

I did not grasp the significance of that, nor hear Henderson’s answer. The sight of Widmerpool at close quarters absorbed all my attention. Although I knew he had by now been more or less entangled with the cult for the best part of two years, was accustomed to take part in its esoteric rites, in all respects identified himself with this new mode of life — as The Devil’s Fingers showed — the spectacle of him wearing a blue robe was nevertheless a startling one. Flavia Wisebite had been justified in the account she had given, so far as that went. The image immediately brought to mind was one not thought of for years; the picture, reproduced in colour, that used to hang in the flat Widmerpool shared with his mother in his early London days. It had been called The Omnipresent. Three blue-robed figures respectively knelt, stood with bowed head, gazed heavenward with extended hands, all poised on the brink of a precipice. It was a long time ago. I may have remembered the scene incorrectly. Nevertheless it was these figures Widmerpool conjured up, as he advanced towards me.

‘Nicholas?’

When he spoke, within a second, that impression was altered. What had momentarily given him something never achieved before, a kind of suitability, almost dignity, dwindled to no more than a man gone into the garden wearing a blue dressing-gown. It was largely the clothes that had outraged Flavia Wisebite, but, in the end, it was not this kind of bathrobe that made the strong impression — any more than with Murtlock — it was the man himself. Widmerpool looked ill, desperate, worn out. The extreme debility of his appearance brought one up short. The low neckband of the garment he wore revealed a scar that ran from somewhere below the neck to the upper part of one cheek; possibly the gash inflicted on the night of The Devil’s Fingers ceremony. In this physical state it was surprising that he was able to run at all, even at the slow pace he himself had been setting. No doubt the determination always shown to go through with anything he took up, carry on to the furthest limit of his capacity, was as painfully exercised in the activities to which he had latterly given himself, as in any undertakings of earlier life.

‘Hullo.’

His manner was as changed as his costume. He sounded altogether bemused. He stood there limply, haunted in expression, glancing from time to time at Fiona and Gwinnett, though not speaking to either. So far as could be seen, Fiona was introducing her husband to these former associates; Henderson, the young ones, all crowding round. There was a hum of chatter. The filthy grey-beard hung about in the background. Widmerpool seemed to make an effort to pull himself together.

‘Why are you wearing a tailcoat?’

‘A wedding is taking place. I’m one of the guests.’

‘A wedding’s taking place in Stourwater?’

‘Yes.’

‘But — but the Chief’s dead, isn’t he?’

Sir Magnus Donners, in days when Widmerpool worked for him, had always been referred to by subordinates as the Chief. Widmerpool put the question in an uncertain puzzled voice that seemed to indicate loss of memory more damaging than reasonably to be associated with a man of his age.

‘He died some little while ago — close on twenty years.’

‘Of course he did, of course. Extraordinary that I should have doubted for a moment that the Chief had passed over. A mistaken term escaped me too. I shall do penance for that. At our age transmutations take place all the time. Yes, yes.’

Widmerpool gazed round again. Perhaps more to steady himself than because he had not already recognized Gwinnett, he suddenly held up a hand in Murtlock’s benedictional manner.

‘It is Professor Gwinnett — to use an absurd prefix?’

‘It is, Lord Widmerpool.’

Gwinnett smiled faintly, without the least friendliness. That was hardly surprising in the circumstances.

‘Not Lord, not Lord — Ken, Ken.’

Gwinnett withdrew his smile.

‘You came to see us about a year ago?’

‘Yes.’

Fiona turned from the group with which she had been talking. Perhaps she wanted to impress on Widmerpool her ownership of Gwinnett; anyway now absolute separation from the cult, whatever her taste for still hobnobbing with its members.

‘Russell and I have just got married, Ken.’

‘Married?’

The way Widmerpool spoke the word was hard to define. It might have been horror; it might, on the other hand, have aroused in his mind some infinitely complicated chain of ideas as to what Fiona meant by using such a term. Fiona may also have wished to shock by stating that she had taken so conventional a step. Acceptance of the fact that she gave the word its normal face value seemed to sink into Widmerpool’s head only slowly. Not unnaturally, in the light of what he had just been told about a wedding taking place in the Castle, he mistook the implications.

‘You’ve just been married at Stourwater, Fiona?’

He looked more astounded than ever. Fiona laughed derisively. I think she intended to make fun of him, now that she was free from any possible reprisals. Even Gwinnett smiled at the question.

‘No, it’s my brother’s wedding.’

Taking Gwinnett’s arm, Fiona turned back to her younger acquaintances. Widmerpool reverted to the subject of Sir Magnus Donners. It seemed to trouble him.

‘Extraordinary I should not only have forgotten about Donners, but used that erroneous formula, there being no death, only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation — just as there are no marriages, except mystic marriages. Marriages that transcend the boundaries of awareness, the un-manifest solutions of Harmony, galvanized by meditation and appropriate rites, the source of all Power — rather than the lethal manufacture of tensions as constructed in these very surroundings today.’

Widmerpool’s observations on such matters were suddenly interrupted by a burst of singing. The notes, thin and quavering, possessed something of Flavia Wisebite’s conversational tones, mysteriously transmuted to music, weird, eerie, not at all unpleasant all the same. They came from the other elderly man, the bearded one, who had still moved no nearer to join the rest of the group.

‘Open now the crystal fountain,

Whence the healing stream doth flow:

Let the fire and cloudy pillar

Lead me all my journey through.’

Widmerpool started violently. It was as if someone had touched him with a red-hot iron. Then he recovered himself, was about to go on talking.

‘Who is that singing?’

‘Take no notice. He’s all right, if left alone. He finds Harmony in singing that sort of thing.’

The bearded man stood a little way apart, hands clasped, eyes uplifted. He had hardly more hair on his head than Gwinnett. Something about the singing suggested he had absolutely no teeth. It crossed my mind that the old red high-necked sweater he wore, over torn corduroy trousers, might have been passed on by Widmerpool himself. The beard was matted and grubby, his feet bare and horrible. Entirely self-occupied, he took no notice at all of what was otherwise going on. What he chose to sing altogether distracted my attention from Widmerpool’s discourse on death and marriage. The strains brought back the early days of the war. It was the hymn my Regiment used to sing on the line of march. The chant seemed to disturb Widmerpool, irritate, upset him. His expression became more agonized than ever.

‘Don’t you remember the men singing that on route marches?’

‘Singing what?’

Widmerpool, himself on the staff of the Division of which my Battalion had been one of the units, might not have heard the motif so often as I, but the tune could hardly have passed entirely unnoticed, even by someone so uninterested in human behaviour.

‘Who is he?’

‘One of us.’

Widmerpool had to be pressed for an answer. He was prepared to agree that I might have heard the verse sung before.

‘True, true. He’s a man I apparently ran across in the army. Somebody brought him along to us. He’d been a dropout for years — before people knew about an alternative lifestyle — and was at the end of his tether. We thought he was going to pass over. When he got better, Scorp took a fancy to him. At the time he came to us, I didn’t remember seeing him before. Didn’t recognize him at all. Then one day Bith brought it all up himself.’

‘Bith?’

‘He’s named Bithel. I seem to have known him in the army. Through no fault of my own, it seems I had something to do with his leaving the army. Many people would have been grateful for that. Scorp likes Bith. Thinks he contributes to Harmony. I expect he does. Scorp is usually right about that sort of thing.’

Widmerpool sighed.

‘But I know Bithel too. I knew all about him in those days. He commanded the Mobile Laundry. Don’t you remember?’

Widmerpool looked blank. While he had been speaking these words, his thoughts were evidently far away. He was almost talking to himself. If he had forgotten about the death of Sir Magnus Donners, he could well have forgotten about Bithel; even the fact that he and I had soldiered together. In any case the matter did not interest him so far as Bithel was concerned. He was evidently thinking of himself, overcome now with self-pity.

‘When Scorp found out that I’d had to tell Bith he must leave the army — leave the Mobile Laundry, you say — Scorp made me do penance. What happened had been duty — what I then quite wrongly thought duty to be — and wasn’t at all my fault. I must have been told by those above me that I’d got to tell Bith he had to go. I tried to explain that to Scorp. He said — he’d got the story from Bith, of course — that I acted without Harmony, and must make amends, mystical amends. He was right, of course. Scorp made me… made me …’

Widmerpool’s voice trailed away. He shuddered violently, at the same time swallowing several times. His eyes filled with tears. Whatever Murtlock had made him do as penance for relieving Bithel of his commission was too horrific to be spoken aloud by Widmerpool himself, even though he had brought the matter up, still brooded on it. I was decidedly glad not to be told. One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age. At least this showed that Murtlock had taken over complete command. Even thinking about the retribution visited on him had brought Widmerpool to near collapse. In fact he looked much as he had described Bithel, when — not at all unjustly so far as the actual sentence went — the alternatives of court martial, or acceptance of a report declaring Bithel unsuitable for retention as an officer were put before him. This was the incident to which Greening had referred. It may well have been true — as Greening had said — that Widmerpool had talked in a callous manner later in the Mess about Bithel breaking down. Certainly he had spoken of it to me.

‘Bithel’s one of your community?’

‘For a year or more now.’

Again Widmerpool answered as if his thoughts were elsewhere. Bithel continued to stand apart, smiling and muttering to himself, apparently quite happy. His demeanour was not unlike what it had been in the army after he had drunk a good deal. Fiona left the group with which she had been talking, and came up to Widmerpool.

‘Look, Ken, I want you all to look in on my brother’s wedding party for a minute or two. Barnabas’s old boyfriend, Chuck, is there, and rows of people Barnabas knows. You must come. Just for a moment. Scorp always said that Harmony, in one form, was to be widely known.’

It looked very much as if marriage had caused Fiona to revert, from the gloom of recent years, to the more carefree style of her rampageous schoolgirl stage. Widmerpool made an attempt to avoid the question by taking a general line of disapproval.

‘You went away, Fiona. You left us. You abandoned Harmony.’

The others, uneasy perhaps, but certainly tempted, now began to crowd round. Fiona continued her efforts to persuade Widmerpool, who was plainly uncertain how the suggestion should be correctly handled. It seemed to daze him. Possibly he was not without all curiosity to enter Stourwater again himself. Bithel began to sing once more.

‘From every dark nook they press forward to meet me,

I lift up my eyes to the tall leafy dome.

And others are there looking downward to greet me,

The ashgrove, the ashgrove, alone is my home.’

At this, Fiona abandoned Widmerpool, and made for Bithel. Bithel seemed all at once to recognize her for the first time. He held his arms above his head. Fiona said something to him, then taking his hand, led him towards the rest of the group.

‘Come along all of you. Bith’s coming, if no one else is.’

Widmerpool’s powers of decision were finally put out of action by the inclusion of Bithel in an already apparently insoluble situation. It could well be that one of his responsibilities was to keep an eye on Bithel, probably easy enough out on a run, quite another matter in what was now promised. He made a final effort to impose discipline.

‘Remember, no drink.’

‘All right,’ said Fiona. ‘How do we find our way?’

The last question was addressed to myself. It was a disconcerting one. I was not particularly anxious to take on the responsibility of leading this mob into the wedding reception. If Fiona wanted to present them all to her brother and his bride that was her own affair. She must do it herself. Apart from other considerations, such as uncertainty how they would behave, was the very real possibility that I might not be able to find the way back to the Great Hall by the path we came. Some of them might easily get left behind in the Stourwater corridors. This last probability suggested an alternative route to the reception.

‘The easiest would be to walk round to the front of the Castle. You follow the banks of the moat, then cross the causeway, and straight ahead.’

Fiona looked uncertain for a moment. Gwinnett, either because he saw the tactical advantages of such an approach, or simply speaking his own wish, gave support to this direction.

‘I’d like to do that. We haven’t seen the double-portcullised gateway yet.’

Fiona concurred. Her chief desire seemed to be to transfer her former friends of the cult to the party the quickest possible way. This was no doubt intended as a double-edged tease; on the one hand, aimed at her relations; on the other, at Murtlock. That was how things looked.

‘All right. This way. Come along, Bith.’

They set off; Fiona, Gwinnett, Henderson, Bithel, all in the first wave. Widmerpool lagged behind. He had been taken by surprise, unable to make up his mind, incapable of a plan. If I did not wish to appear at the head of the column, there was no alternative to walking with him. This also solved for the moment the question of Bithel; whether or not to draw his attention to our former acquaintance. We strolled along side by side, Widmerpool now apparently resigned to looking in on the reception. It could be true, as Fiona had hinted, that Murtlock encouraged his people to show themselves, from time to time, in unlikely places. This might not be Widmerpool’s main worry so much as Bithel. Widmerpool’s own words now gave some confirmation to that. He was still speaking more or less to himself.

‘I daresay it’s all right if we don’t stay too long. People can see Harmony in action. Bith, in my opinion, has never achieved much Harmony — still slips away and drinks, when he can lay hands on any money — and I must be sure to keep an eye on him where we’re going. The others are all right. One glass doesn’t matter for Bith — Scorp recognizes that. He says it won’t necessarily make bad vibrations in Bith’s individual validation. He’s a special case. Scorp thinks a lot of Bith. Says he has remarkable mystic powers inherent in him. Still, I mustn’t let him out of my sight. I’m in charge of today’s mystical exercises, and Scorp will hold me responsible. Who are the couple going through these meaningless formulas today?’

Widmerpool asked the last question in a more coherent tone.

‘Fiona’s brother, Sebastian Cutts, and a girl called Clare Akworth.’

Widmerpool winced, much as he had done when Bithel had first begun to sing.

‘Akworth?’

‘Akworth.’

He began to stammer. ‘Like… like…’

He did not finish the question. His face went the dull red colour its skin sometimes took on under stress. I knew, of course, what he meant. At least I thought I knew. As it turned out, I knew less than I supposed. In any case there was no point in pretending ignorance of the essence of the enquiry. The obvious assumption was that, even after half a century, Widmerpool was unwilling to be confronted with Akworth, if there were any danger of such a thing. This was only the second occasion, so far as I could remember, when the Akworth matter had ever cropped up between us. The first had been when we had not long left school, and were both learning French with the Leroy family at La Grenadière.

‘The name is spelt like the boy who was at school with us. In fact the bride is that Akworth’s granddaughter.’

‘Granddaughter of Bertram Akworth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he still — still on this side?’

‘Who?’

‘Bertram Akworth.’

‘If you mean is he still alive, he’s actually at the wedding. He read the Lesson in church.’

‘He’s — at Stourwater?’

‘If you’re coming to the reception you’ll see him.’

Widmerpool stopped abruptly. I had hoped for that. It looked as if he might now decide not to enter the Castle at all. His absence would make one less potentially unwelcome addition to the wedding party; in fact remove what was probably the least assimilable factor. The young people were likely to mix easily enough with their own contemporaries. At worst Bithel would pass out. He could be put in the cloakroom, until time came to take him away. That sort of thing should easily be dealt with on premises as large as Stourwater. Widmerpool was another matter. Not only would his appearance in a blue robe attract — owing to his age — undue attention, but his nervous condition might assume some inconvenient form. With any luck, now he knew Akworth would be present, he would make for home right away. Instead of doing so Widmerpool began to babble disconnectedly.

‘I’ve know Bertram Akworth for years … years … We were on the board of the same bank together — until he and Farebrother got me off it, between them. Farebrother always had it in for me. So did Akworth. It was natural enough.’

It was certainly natural enough in Akworth’s case; even if surprising that Widmerpool recognized the fact. A moment’s thought ought to have made it obvious that Widmerpool and Sir Bertram Akworth were certain to encounter each other in the City. It seemed to have been more than occasional acquaintance, indeed looking as if they had been engaged in a running fight all their lives. This prolonged duel added to the drama of the original story. If I had known about it, I should have been more than ever convinced that this cross-questioning on Widmerpool’s part was aimed at avoiding a meeting with his schoolboy victim and commercial rival. That was a dire misjudgment. On the contrary, Widmerpool was filled with an inspired fervour, carried away with delighted agitation, at the prospect of a face-to-face confrontation.

‘Bertram Akworth will be there? He will actually be present? It can’t be true. This is an opportunity I have been longing for. I behaved to Akworth in a way I now know to be not wrong — so-called right and wrong being illusory concepts — but what must be deplored as transcendentally discordant, mystically in error, in short, contrary to Harmony. In those days I was only a boy — a simple boy at that — who knew nothing of such experiences as cohabiting with the Elements, as a means of training the will. Moreover, I should have encouraged any breaking of the rules, struck a blow for, rather than against, rebellion, aided the subversion of that detestable thing law and order, as commonly understood. In those days — my schoolboy years — I had already dedicated myself to so-called reason, so-called practical affairs. I allowed no — at least very little — unfettered play of those animal forces that free the spirit, though later I began to understand the way, for example, that nakedness removes impediments of all sorts. Besides, if the universe is to be subjected to his will, a man must develop his female nature as well as the male — without lessening his own masculinity — I knew nothing of that… but Akworth … long misunderstood… should make amends … as with Bith… though not… not…’

Again Widmerpool tailed off, unable to bring himself to mention whatever Murtlock had made him act out in relation to the Bithel penance. What he said about Sir Bertram Akworth was most disturbing. A far more threatening situation than before had now suddenly come into being. It was one thing for Fiona, the bridegroom’s sister, to bring into her brother’s wedding party a crowd of young persons, curious specimens perhaps, but, not long before, closely associated with herself. It was quite another to allow the occasion to be one for Widmerpool to give rein to an ambition — apparently become obsessive with him — that he should make some sort of an apology to a lifelong business antagonist, grandfather of the bride, the boy he had caused to be sacked from school half a century earlier. In his present mood Widmerpool was capable of exploring in public, in much the same manner that he had been expatiating on them to me, all the mystical implications of Sir Bertram Akworth’s youthful desires.

‘If the matter of reporting Akworth has never come up in the years you’ve been meeting him, doesn’t it seem wiser to leave things at that now? It might even be preferable not to go to the reception?’

Widmerpool was not listening.

‘Amazing how long it took me to understand the ritual side of sex. Although I never enjoyed sex much myself, I’d always supposed you were meant to enjoy it. Now I know better. I see now that, even when I was young, I was reaching out for the ritual side, to the exclusion of enjoyment. In objecting to Akworth’s conduct, I was displaying an attitude I later took up in my own mind in relation to Donners and his irregular practices. He, too, may have had his own instinctive reactions in the same field. In those days I knew nothing of the Dionysiac necessities. They were revealed to me all but too late. If Donners was aware of such needs earlier than myself, he fell altogether short in combining them with transcendental meditation, or mystical exercises of a physical kind, other than sexual.’

Widmerpool, absorbed with the case of Sir Magnus, shook his head. By this time we were crossing the causeway, about to pass under the portcullised gate, through which Fiona’s vanguard had already disappeared. Either to catch up with the rest of his company, or from impatience to make contact with Sir Bertram Akworth, Widmerpool pressed forward. This urgency on his part impelled his own entry into the Great Hall well ahead of myself, something I was anxious to manoeuvre, but had seen no way of bringing about. Widmerpool was lost in the crowd by the time I came through the doorway. Caroline Lovell — a niece of ours, married to a soldier called Thwaites — was standing just by. She began some sort of conversation before it was possible to estimate the effect of Fiona’s additions to the party. We talked for a minute or two.

‘Is Alan here?’

Caroline said her husband, having just been posted to Northern Ireland, had been unable to come to the wedding. She looked worried, but was prevented from saying more of this by Jonathan Cutts, who joined us, and began to speak of the Sleaford Veronese — as it once had been — a favourite subject of Caroline’s father, Chips Lovell. The Iphigenia had come on the market again, handled by Jonathan’s firm, and achieved a record price. Neither Jonathan Cutts nor Caroline seemed to have noticed the incursion of Fiona’s friends from the cult; confirming the impression that, once within the lofty dimly lit limits of the Great Hall, they had quickly merged with other less than conventionally clad guests. Certainly there was no clearcut isolation of the group. For a second I caught a glimpse of Bithel; a moment later he disappeared. He had been surrounded by a circle of laughing young men. By this time a fair amount of champagne had been drunk. Widmerpool was nowhere to be seen. No doubt he was searching for Sir Bertram Akworth, but Sir Bertram, too, had disappeared for the moment. I asked Caroline where he had gone.

‘There was a hitch about the car to take Sebastian and Clare to the airport. Sir Bertram’s making some new arrangement, somebody said.’

Flavia Wisebite appeared again at my elbow.

‘Have you seen who’s just come in?’

‘Do you mean Fiona Cutts and her former crowd?’

‘Widmerpool.’

She was overcome with indignation, her face dead white.

‘The dreadful man is wandering about the room in his loathsome clothes. What could have made them invite him? Young people will do anything these days. I’m sure it wasn’t Clare’s choice. She’s such a sweet girl. Sebastian seemed a nice young man too. Surely he can’t have asked Widmerpool? Do you think his father — who used to be an MP — had to have Widmerpool for political reasons. That’s a possibility.’

‘Widmerpool and his lot were brought in by Fiona Cutts, Sebastian’s sister.’

‘Fiona brought them? I see. Now I understand. Do you know who Fiona Cutts has just married — who my goddaughter, little Clare, is going to have for a brother-in-law? An American called Gwinnett. I don’t expect you’ve even heard of him. I have. I know a great deal about Mr Gwinnett. It’s all too dreadful to say. Dreadful. Dreadful.’

Gwinnett, in sight on the far side of the room, was talking in a comparatively animated manner to his new in-laws. Behind them, in a corner, Jeremy Warminster had made contact with one of the prettier girls of the cult, whether or not for the first time was hard to judge. The two of them seemed already on easy terms with each other. A husband and wife, introduced as Colonel and Mrs Alford-Green, came up to speak with Flavia Wisebite. Their friendship seemed to date back to very ancient days, when Flavia had still been married to Cosmo Flitton. Colonel Alford-Green was evidently a retired regular soldier. While they were talking Sir Bertram Akworth reappeared. Hailing the Alford-Greens in his loud harsh voice, he greeted Flavia, too, as one already well known to him.

‘How are you, Rosamund, how are you, Gerald? How nice to see old friends like you both, and Flavia here today. The honeymoon car broke down. All is now fixed. I’ve seen to it. No cause for panic.’

‘We thought you read the Lesson very well, Bertram.’

‘You did, Rosamund? Thank you very much. I’m glad you thought I did it all right. You know I rather pride myself on my reading. It’s a beautiful passage. A great favourite of mine. It was the one on the agenda anyway. A bit of luck. I was very glad. If I’d been asked, I’d certainly have chosen it.’

‘When are you coming up to our part of the world again, Bertram?’

‘I hope I shall one of these days. I very much hope I shall. You know how hard it is to get away. Is Reggie still joint-master?’

The question prompted a rather complicated account of some quarrel in which the local hunt had been involved for a long time. I was about to move away, when I became aware that Widmerpool was near by. In fact he was very close. He must have been wandering about in the crowd, looking for Sir Bertram. Now at last he had run him to ground. Sir Bertram had not yet seen him. He was much too engrossed with the foxhunting feuds of the Alford-Greens. Widmerpool began muttering to himself. Suddenly he spoke out.

‘Bertram.’

Use of the christian name somehow surprised me; though obviously, if the two of them had come across each other as often as Widmerpool indicated, they would be on those sort of terms, however great their mutual dislike.

‘Bertram.’

Widmerpool repeated the name. He spoke quite quietly, in an almost beseeching voice. Sir Bertram either did not hear the first appeal, or, more probably, decided that, whoever it was, he wanted to hear the end of the Alford-Greens’ story, which treated of one of those rows between foxhunting people, which have a peculiar intensity of virulence. At the second summons, Sir Bertram turned. Plainly not recognizing an old business adversary under the blue robe Widmerpool wore, he did not seem more than a trifle taken aback at what might quite reasonably have been regarded as an extraordinary spectacle of humanity. His face merely assumed an expression of rather self-consciously wry amusement; the tolerant good humour of a man of the world, who is prepared for anything in the circumstances of the moment in which he finds himself; in this case, unexpected guests invited by his granddaughter to her wedding.

Without making excessive claims for Sir Bertram’s imperturbability, or good humour, one could see that it took more than an excited elderly man, not too clean and wearing a blue robe, socially to discompose him these days. Sir Bertram had not reached the position he had in his own world without achieving a smattering of what was afoot in an essentially disparate one. This particular instance happened to be considerably more than a sharp contrast, to be neutralized by tactful ingenuity, with his own way of life. In short, Sir Bertram Akworth became suddenly aware that he was contemplating Widmerpool. No doubt he had already heard rumours of Widmerpool’s changed ways — probably associated in his mind more with treasonable contacts and equivocal financial dealings — but, a man not given to imaginative reconstructions, Sir Bertram was not altogether prepared for the reality now set before him. Enlightenment caused a series of violent emotions — deep hatred the most definable — to pass swiftly across his sallow cadaverous features; reactions gone in a split second, recovery all but instantaneous.

‘Kenneth, what are you up to?’

Sir Bertram spoke calmly. There was no time for him to say more. Instead of answering an undoubtedly rhetorical question — even if some sort of explanation were required, conventionally speaking, for thus arriving unasked at a party — Widmerpool, in terms of ritual of another kind, went straight to the point; if repentance were to be expressed in physical form. While Sir Bertram Akworth stood, eyebrows slightly raised, a rather fixed expression of humorous enquiry imposed on his features, like that of a reasonably talented amateur actor, Widmerpool, without the slightest warning, knelt before him; then bent forward, lowering his face almost to the parquet.

This description of what Widmerpool did suggests, in fact, something much more immediate, more outwardly astounding, than the act seemed at the time. I should myself have been completely at a loss to know what Widmerpool was at, if he had not expressed only a short time before his intention of making some sort of an apology about what had happened at school. Even so, when Widmerpool went down on all fours in utter self-abasement, I supposed at first that he was searching for something he had dropped on the floor. That was almost certainly the explanation that offered itself to those standing round about who witnessed the scene at close quarters. Of these last no one, so far as I knew, had ever heard of the incident from which the action stemmed. Even had they been familiar with it, the complexity of Widmerpool’s declared attitude towards social revolt, ritual sex, mystical repentance, was likely to be lost on them, as it was lost, collectively and separately, on Sir Bertram Akworth himself.

If quite other events had not at that moment intervened, Widmerpool’s innate perseverance, his unsnubbableness, might at last have made his motives clear to the object of this melodramatic self-condemnation. As things fell out, two happenings diminished the force of the act — in any case for the moment generally misunderstood — to almost nothing, altogether removing possibility of its meaning being driven home. The first of these interpolations, not more than a matter of routine, was the reappearance of bride and bridegroom, who had retired a short time before to put on their going-away clothes. This entry naturally caused a stir among the guests, distracting the attention of those even in the immediate Widmerpool area of the Great Hall. The second occurrence, individual, distressing, even more calculated in its own way to cause concentration on itself, was prefigured by a sort of low gasp from Flavia Wisebite.

‘Oh…Oh…’

She must have moved up quite close to Widmerpool, possibly with the object of making some sort of a contact, in order to express in her own words, personally, the detestation she felt for himself and all his works. If that were the end she had in view, Widmerpool’s own unexpected obeisance to Sir Bertram Akworth had taken her completely by surprise. It seemed later that, when Widmerpool went down on his knees, Flavia Wisebite, brought up short in her advance, had fallen almost on top of his crouching body. This caused considerable localized commotion among guests in that part of the room; by this time beginning to empty in preparation for seeing off the newly married pair. Sir Bertram Akworth and Colonel Alford-Green, who were the nearest to the place of her collapse, with help from several others, managed to get Flavia to one of the forms by the wall. Finally, at the suggestion of Sir Bertram, she was borne away to the school’s sickroom. Perhaps someone lifted Widmerpool from the floor too. When I next looked in that direction he was gone. Isobel came up.

‘Are we going out to see them off? Did somebody faint near where you were standing?’

‘Widmerpool’s mother-in-law.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Flavia Wisebite.’

‘Is she here?’

‘Her son-in-law is a subject she feels strongly about.’

Outside, farewells were taking place round the bridal car. Whatever the mishap, the vehicle had been repaired or replaced. Sir Bertram Akworth came across the causeway. He looked rather flustered. Somebody asked about Flavia Wisebite.

‘Not at all well, I’m afraid.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Being looked after by the school’s skeleton staff. We’ve rung for a doctor.’

Absurdly, the phrase made me think of the opening inscription of Death’s-head Swordsman, conjured up a picture of the dead ministering to the dead, which would have appealed to Gwinnett. He and Fiona, once more hand in hand, moved away now that the car had driven off, crossing the drive to continue their examination of the exterior features of the Castle. Having gone to some trouble to bring her former associates to the wedding reception, Fiona seemed now to have lost interest in them. As usual, bride and bridegroom departed, there was a certain sense of anticlimax. Some of the guests continued to stand about in small groups, chatting to friends and relations; others were going off to look for their cars. The members of the cult were, most of them, standing, rather apart from the wedding guests, in a small forlorn circle, which included Widmerpool. Looking somewhat distraught, he was now at least upright, apparently haranguing his young companions; either explaining the significance of his own prostration before Sir Bertram Akworth, or merely taking the first steps in rounding up the crew, preparatory to setting out on the homeward run.

‘To hell with all that.’

The voice, shrill, unconsenting, sounded like that of Barnabas Henderson. It appeared that he was arguing with Widmerpool. One of the wedding guests, a long-haired beefy young man in a grey tailcoat, was standing beside Henderson. Both these last two were in a state of some excitement. So was Widmerpool. It was at first not possible to hear what was being said, though Widmerpool was evidently speaking in an admonitory manner. The young man in the tailcoat, whose muscles were bursting from its contours, was becoming angry.

‘Barnabas wants to get out. That’s all about it.’

Henderson must have been asserting that intention too. Widmerpool was inaudible. His voice was more measured than theirs, possibly advised that things should be thought over before any such step be taken. Henderson almost shrieked.

‘Not now I’ve found Chuck again. I’m going right away. Chuck will put me up at his place.’

Clearly a wrangle of some magnitude was in progress.

The big young man, who spoke in scathing cockney when addressing Widmerpool, snatched Henderson by the arm, walking him across to the side of the drive where Fiona and Gwinnett stood discussing the Castle. I felt no particular interest in the row. It was no affair of mine. Isobel, with Frederica and Norah, were chatting with Alford cousins. They would be some little time dishing up family news. I strolled towards the moat. As I did so, Widmerpool’s tones sounded desperately.

‘I forbid it.’

Since the days of Sir Magnus, the waterlilies had greatly increased in volume. If not eradicated, they would soon cover the whole surface of the stagnant water. On the far side, placed rather low in the wall near the main gate, was a small window, scarcely more than an arrow-slit, probably sited for observation purposes. A frantic face appeared at this opening for a moment, then was instantly withdrawn. The features could have been Bithel’s. There was not time to make sure; only the upper half visible. It was just as likely I was mistaken, though Bithel was not among those standing round Widmerpool, nor, apparently, elsewhere on the drive. He might have decided to make his own way home. Some of the cult, possibly Bithel among them, were straying about in the neighbourhood of the Castle, because a blue robe was visible at some distance from where I stood. Its wearer was crossing one of the playing-fields. This was likely to be a straggler returning to the main body for the homeward journey.

Watching the approaching figure, I was reminded of a remark made by Moreland ages before. It related to one of those childhood memories we sometimes found in common. This particular recollection had referred to an incident in The Pilgrim’s Progress that had stuck in both our minds. Moreland said that, after his aunt read the book aloud to him as a child, he could never, even after he was grown-up, watch a lone figure draw nearer across a field, without thinking this was Apollyon come to contend with him. From the moment of first hearing that passage read aloud — assisted by a lively portrayal of the fiend in an illustration, realistically depicting his goat’s horns, bat’s wings, lion’s claws, lizard’s legs — the terror of that image, bursting out from an otherwise at moments prosy narrative, had embedded itself for all time in the imagination. I, too, as a child, had been riveted by the vividness of Apollyon’s advance across the quiet meadow. Now, surveying the personage in the blue robe picking his way slowly, almost delicately, over the grass of the hockey-field, I felt for some reason that, if ever the arrival of Apollyon was imminent, the moment was this one. That had nothing to do with the blue robe, such costume, as I have said before, if it made any difference to Murtlock at all, softened the edge of whatever caused his personality to be a disturbing one. Henderson must have seen Murtlock too. His high squeak became a positive shout.

‘Look — he’s coming!’

Fiona seemed a little frightened herself. She appeared to be giving Henderson moral support by what she was saying. For the moment, while doing that, she had relinquished Gwinnett’s hand. Now she took hold of it again. Murtlock continued his slow relentless progress. As this descent upon them of their leader became known among the cult — such of them as were present on the drive — a sense of trepidation was noticeable, not least in the case of Widmerpool. Abandoning the group he appeared to have been exhorting, he crossed the drive to where Henderson was standing with Fiona and Gwinnett. Widmerpool began a muttered conversation, first with Henderson, then with Fiona.

‘So much the better.’

Fiona spoke with what was evidently deliberate loudness. At the same time she turned to glance in the direction of Murtlock. He had somewhat quickened his pace for the last lap, reaching the gravel of the drive. Small pockets of ordinary wedding guests still stood about chatting. Most of these were some distance away from the point where Murtlock would have to decide whether he made for the bulk of his followers, or for the splinter group represented by Widmerpool and Henderson. There was no special reason why the run-of-the-mill guests, having accepted the blue-robed intruders as an integral part of the wedding reception, should suppose Murtlock anything but an offshoot of the original body. Of the two groups — the one huddled together, robed or otherwise; the other, consisting of Widmerpool, Henderson, Fiona, Gwinnett, together with the beefy young man called Chuck — Murtlock made unhesitatingly for the second. He stopped a yard or two away, uttering his greeting gently, the tone not much more than a murmur, well below the pitch of everyday speech. I heard it because I had moved closer. It was possible to ignore squabbles between Widmerpool and Henderson; Murtlock had that about him to fire interest.

‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’

Only Widmerpool answered, even then very feebly.

‘The Visions of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight — and, Scorp, there is —’

Murtlock, disregarding the others, held up a hand towards Widmerpool to command silence. There was a moment’s pause. When Murtlock answered, it was sharply, and in an altogether unliturgical maimer.

‘Why are you here?’

Widmerpool faltered. There was another long pause. Murtlock spoke again.

‘You do not know?’

This time Murtlock’s question was delivered in an almost amused tone. Widmerpool made great effort to utter. He had gone an awful colour, almost mauve.

‘There is an explanation, Scorp. All can be accounted for. We met Fiona. She asked us in. I saw an opportunity to take part in an active rite of penitence, a piece of ritual discipline, painful to myself, of the sort you most recommend. You will approve, Scorp. I’m sure you will approve, when I tell you about it.’

After saying that, Widmerpool began to mumble distractedly. Murtlock turned away from him. Without troubling to give further attention to whatever Widmerpool was attempting to explain, he fixed his eyes on Henderson, who began to tremble violently. Fiona let go of Gwinnett’s hand. She stepped forward.

‘Barnabas is leaving you. He’s staying here with Chuck.’

‘He is?’

‘Aren’t you, Barnabas?’

Henderson, still shaking perceptibly, managed to confirm that.

‘I’m going back with Chuck.’

‘You are, Barnabas?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope you will be happier together than you were before you came to us.’

Murtlock smiled benevolently. He seemed in the best of humours. Only Widmerpool gave the impression of angering him. The defection of Henderson appeared not to worry him in the least. His reply to Fiona, too, had been in the jocular tone he had sometimes used on the crayfishing afternoon; though it was clear that Murtlock had moved a long way, in terms of power, since that period. Perhaps he had learnt something from Widmerpool, while at the same time subduing him.

‘A mystical sister has been lost, and gained. You are not alone in abandoning us, Fiona. Rusty, too, has returned to Soho.’

Fiona did not answer. She looked rather angry. Her general air was a shade more grown-up than formerly. Murtlock turned to Gwinnett.

‘Was not the Unicorn tamed by a Virgin?’

Gwinnett did not answer either. Had he wished to do so, in itself unlikely, there was no time. At that moment Widmerpool seemed to lose all control. He came tottering forward towards Murtlock.

‘Scorp, I’m leaving too. I can’t stand it any longer. You and the others need not be disturbed. I’ll find somewhere else to live. I won’t need much of the money.’

Apparently lacking breath to continue, he stopped, standing there panting. Murtlock’s demeanour underwent a complete change. He dropped altogether the sneering bantering manner he had been using intermittently. Now he was angry again; not merely angry, furious, consumed with cold rage. For a second he did not speak, while Widmerpool ran on about Harmony.

‘No.’

Murtlock cut Widmerpool short. Chuck, not at all interested in the strangeness of this duel of wills, put a protective arm round Henderson. He may have thought his friend in danger of capitulating, now that Murtlock was so enraged. That passion in Murtlock was not without its own horror.

‘Come on, Barnabas. No point in hanging about. Let’s be getting back.’

After Henderson had spoken some sort of farewell to Fiona, he went off with Chuck towards the cars. Murtlock took no notice of this withdrawal. His attention was entirely concentrated on Widmerpool, who, avoiding the eyes Murtlock fixed on him, continued to beg for release.

‘Where could you go?’

Widmerpool made a gesture to signify that was no problem, but seemed unable to think of a spoken reply.

‘No.’

‘Scorp…’

‘No.’

Murtlock repeated the negative in a dead toneless voice. Widmerpool was unable to speak. He stood there stupefied. Murtlock came closer. This conflict — in which Widmerpool, too, was evidently showing a certain amount of passive will power — was brought to an end by the re-entry of an actor forgotten in the course of rapid movement of events. The sound of singing came from the gates of the Castle.

‘When I tread the verge of Jordan,

Bid my anxious fears subside,

Death of Death and hell’s destruction,

Land me safe on Canaan’s side.’

Bithel was staggering across the causeway. His voice, high, quavering, much enhanced in volume by champagne, swelled on the spring air. Some sort of echo of the hymn was briefly taken up by another chant, possibly Umfraville’s — he had served with the Welsh Guards — on the far side of the drive. Murtlock, as remarked earlier, was not in the least lacking in practical grasp. At a glance he took in the implications of this new situation.

‘You allowed Bith to drink?’

‘I —’

‘What have I always said?’

‘It was —’

‘Lead the others back. I will manage Bith myself.’

This time Widmerpool made no demur. He accepted defeat. An unforeseen factor had put him in the wrong. He was beaten for the moment. The rest of the cult still stood in a glum group, no doubt contemplating trouble on return to base. Widmerpool beckoned to them. There was some giving of orders. A minute or two later Widmerpool, once more at the head of the pack, was leading the run home; a trot even slower than that employed when we first sighted them. Bithel had stopped half-way across the causeway. He was leaning over the parapet, staring down at the water-lilies of the moat. The possibility that he might be sick was not to be excluded. That idea may have crossed Murtlock’s practical mind too, because a slight smile flickered across his face, altering its sternness only for a moment, as he strode towards the Castle. Some words were exchanged. Then they moved off together towards the playing-fields. Bithel could walk; if not very straight. Once he fell down. Murtlock waited until Bithel managed to pick himself up again, but made no effort to help. They disappeared from sight. Fiona came over to where I was standing.

‘Will you be seeing Gibson?’

‘I expect so.’

‘I want you to give him a message from me.’

‘Of course.’

‘When Russell and I first knew each other, Rus lent me his copy of Middleton’s Plays. It’s got some of his own notes pencilled in. I can’t find it, and must have left it at Gibson’s flat. Could you get him to send the book on — airmail it — to Russell’s college? Just address it to the English Department. We’re not going to have any time at all when we get back to London.’

‘You’re going straight to America?’

‘The following day.’

‘No other messages for Gibson?’

‘No, just the book.’

By the time I next saw Delavacquerie he was aware that Fiona was married to Gwinnett. I don’t know whether he heard directly from her, or the news just got round. She appeared to have left the flat without warning, taking her belongings with her. He smiled rather grimly when I passed on the request to send the Middleton book to Gwinnett’s college.

‘As a matter of fact I read some of the plays myself in consequence — The Roaring Girle, which Dekker also had a hand in. I enjoyed the thieves’ cant. Listen to this:

A gage of ben rom-bouse

In a bousing ken of Rom-vile,

Is benar than a caster,

Peck, pennam, lay, or popler,

Which we mill in deuse a vile.

O I wud lib all the lightmans,

O I wud lib all the darkmans

By the salomon, under the ruffmans,

By the saloman, in the hartmans,

And scour the queer cramp ring,

And couch till a palliard docked my dell,

So my bousy nab might skew rom-bouse well.

Avast to the pad, let us bing;

Avast to the pad, let us bing.

Not bad, is it?’

‘It all sounds very contemporary. What does it mean?’

‘Roughly, that a quart of good wine in London is better than anything to be stolen in the country, and, as long as wine’s to be drunk, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the stocks, while some heel is stuffing your tart — that’s a palliard docking your dell. Owing to Gwinnett, I came across a good couplet in Tourneur too:

Lust is a spirit, which whosoe’er doth raise,

The next man that encounters boldly, lays.

There seems a foot too many in the first line. They may have elided those relatives in a different way at that period.’

‘How does the thieves’ slang poem come into the Middleton play?’

‘The Roaring Girl sings it herself, with a character called Tearcat. The Roaring Girl dresses like a man, smokes, carries a sword, fights duels. A narcissistic type, rather than specifically lesbian, one would say. At least there are no scenes where she dallies with her own sex.’

Delavacquerie’s good memory, eye for things that were unusual, had certainly been useful to him as a PR-man; for which he also possessed the requisite toughness. What he said next was a side he much less often revealed. It suggested reflections on Fiona.

‘It’s odd how one gets acclimatized to other people’s sexual experiences. At a younger age, they strike one so differently. For instance, during the war I knew a married woman — a captain’s wife — who told me of her first seduction. She was seventeen or eighteen, and on the way to her art-school one morning. Running to catch a bus, she just missed it. Two men, cruising by in a car, laughed at her standing breathless on the pavement. They stopped and offered her a lift. When they dropped her at the art-school door, the one who wasn’t driving asked if she’d dine with him later in the week. She agreed. They went to a road-house outside London. In the course of dinner — establishing his bonafides as homme sérieux — her host remarked that he had lived with one girl for two years. Telling the story to me, she commented that — in those days — she thought love was for ever. Anyway, the chap gave her dinner, they had a good deal to drink — which she wasn’t used to — and, afterwards, went into the garden of the roadhouse where he had her in the shrubbery. When she got home, finding her knickers all over blood, she thought to herself: I’ve been a silly girl. That’s what she told me.’

‘What’s the moral of all that?’

‘There isn’t one, except that the story used to haunt me. I don’t quite know why. It seemed to start so well, and end so badly. Perhaps that’s how well constructed stories ought to terminate.’

‘She never saw the bloke again?’

‘No. I don’t think it really made a ha’p’orth of difference to her. All I say is that for a while the story haunted me.’

‘You were in love with the heroine?’

‘Naturally. In a way that wasn’t the point, which is that, in due course, you find girls are really perfectly well able to look after themselves, most of them. Even allowing for the fact that les chiens sont fidèles, mais pas aux chiennes. To retain the metaphor — bring it up to date — in sexual matters, as in others, the dogs bark, the Caravelle takes off.’

I never knew what Delavacquerie really felt about the Fiona business. Afterwards I wondered whether the heroine of the story he had told was really his dead wife. As Canon Fenneau had observed, we go through life lacking understanding of many things, though I think the Canon inwardly made something of an exception of his own case, where knowledge was concerned. That, at least, was modestly implied in an article I came across later that year, in which he contrasted Chaldean Magic with the worship of Isis and Osiris.

7

BAD WEATHER, OTHER ODD JOBS, mere lack of energy, had all contributed to allowing the unlit bonfire, projected as a few hours’ clearing and burning, to become an untidy pile of miscellaneous debris; laurel (cut down months before), briars, nettles, leaves, unsold rubbish from a jumble sale, on top of it all several quite large branches of oak and copper beech snapped off by the gales. In spite of fog, something calm, peaceful, communicative, about the afternoon suggested the time had come to end this too long survival. A livid sky could mean snow. That dense muffled feeling pervaded the air. The day was not cold for the season, but an autumnal spell of mild weather — short, though notably warm that year — was now over. It had given place to a continuous wind blowing from the west, dropped the night before, after bringing down a lot of leaves and the sizeable boughs. There was a great stillness everywhere, except for a monotonous thud-thud from the quarry; a persistent low rumble, like a faraway train making laborious headway along a rough stretch of track. White vapour, less thick over by Gauntlett’s farm, where a few ghostly trees penetrated its mists, wholly obscured the quarry’s limestone platforms and Assyrian rampart.

For kindling, I shoved twists of newspaper in at the base of the heap. At the moment of ignition, the match flared against capital letters of a headline displayed on the outward surface of one of these scraps of newsprint.

EDWARDIAN SYMBOLIST

SEASCAPE VOTARIES

The enigmatic antithesis topped an article read a week or two before. Even allowing for contemporary changes in art fashions, the critic’s enthusiasm had then seemed surprising. After seeing the pictures, remembering the piece, I vaguely thought of glancing through the notice again, to see if I now felt more agreement with the opinions expressed. By then the newspaper had been thrown away, or disappeared among a heap of others; kept for such uses as lighting fires. A search, likely to be unfruitful, seemed scarcely worth the trouble. Now, inclination to read about what had been said of the exhibition — the two exhibitions — was reanimated. In any case the visit to the gallery had been rather an historic occasion; setting something of a seal on all sorts of past matters.

Lighting another screw of newspaper under the stack, I extracted a handful of crumpled up pages, and straightened them out. On the back of one of these was a paragraph reporting Quentin Shuckerly’s end in New York (battered to death in Greenwich Village), while on a cultural mission of some kind. I tore out Edwardian Symbolist/Seascape Votaries, committing Shuckerly’s obituary lines to their funeral pyre. The paper flared up, dry twigs began to crackle, damp weeds smouldered, smoke rose high into the white mists, merging into grey-blueness. The atmosphere was filled all at once with the heart-searing bonfire smell.

‘… albeit his roots lie in Continental Symbolism, Deacon’s art remains unique in itself. In certain moods he can recall Fernand Khnopff or Max Klinger, the Belgian’s near-photographic technique observable in Deacon’s semi-naturalistic treatment of more than one of his favourite renderings of Greek or Roman legend. In his genre pictures, the academic compliances of the Secession School of Vienna are given strong homosexual bias — even Deacon’s sphinxes and chimaeras possessing solely male attributes — a fearless sexual candour that must have shocked the susceptibilities of his own generation, sadomasochist broodings in paint that grope towards the psychedelic…’

The writer of the critique, a young journalist, with already something of a name in art circles, had been less enthralled by the late Victorian seascapes, also on view at the gallery; though he drew attention to the fact that here too, as with the Deacons, an exciting revival had taken place of a type of painting long out of fashion with yesterday’s art critics. He expressed his welcome of these aesthetic reinstatements; noting the fact that at least a few connoisseurs, undeterred by the narrow tastes of the day, had followed their own preference for straightforward marine subjects, painted in an unaffectedly naturalistic manner. Most of those on view at the gallery had come from a single collection. He praised the ‘virtuosity’ and ‘tightness of finish’ of Gannets Nesting, The Needles: Schooner Aground, Angry Seas off Land’s End, all by different hands.

Although a card had arrived for a Private View at this gallery, a new one, these two exhibitions had run for at least a fortnight before I found opportunity to pay a visit. Returning to the newspaper article — having been to the gallery — I felt less surprise at the critic’s warm responses, not only to the Deacons, but also to the Victorian seascapes. That was probably due, as much as anything else, to a desire to keep in the swim. There was also a sense of satisfaction in reading praise of Mr Deacon (to me he always remained ‘Mr Deacon’), given by a responsible art critic; a young one at that. The last quality would have delighted Mr Deacon himself. He had once remarked that youth was the only valid criterion in any field. He himself never quite achieved a fusion of the physical and intellectual in propagating that view. Certainly the notice marked how far tastes had altered since the period — just after the second war — when I had watched four Deacons knocked down for a few pounds in a shabby saleroom between Euston Road and Camden Town. At the time, I had supposed those to be the last Deacons I should ever set eyes on. In a sense they were; the last of the old dispensation. The pictures on view at the Barnabas Henderson Gallery (the show specifically advertised as the Bosworth Deacon Centenary Exhibition) were not so much a Resurrection as a Second Coming.

If the rehabilitation of Mr Deacon’s art had not in itself provided an overriding inducement to visit the exhibition, the name of the gallery — proving all curiosity was not at an end — would have gone a long way as an alternative inducement to do so. A single-page pamphlet, accompanying the Private View card, outlined the aims of this new picture firm, which had just come into being. They seemed admirable ones. The premises were in the neighbourhood of Berkeley Square. It was rather late in the afternoon when I finally reached the place, a newly painted exterior, the street in process of being rebuilt, the road up, several Georgian houses opposite looking as if they had been recently bombed. In the window of the Barnabas Henderson Gallery itself a poster proclaimed Mr Deacon’s name in typography of a size, and fount, he would have approved, an aureole of favourable press notices pinned round about.

Within, I found myself surrounded by Deacon canvases assembled on an unprecedented scale; more Deacons than might be supposed even to have been painted, far less survived. The Victorian seascapes were segregated in a room beyond, but an arrow pointed to an extension of the Deacon Centenary Exhibition on the upper floor, which I decided to explore first. The red tag of a sale marked a high proportion of the pictures. Two of those so summarily dismissed at the down-at-heel auction-rooms were immediately recognizable from their black-and-gold Art Nouveau frames, Deacon-designed to form part of the picture itself; a technique Mr Deacon rather precariously supported by quoting two lines from Pericles:

In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed:

To make some good, but others to exceed.

In the shabby saleroom this purpose of the frames had been obscured by dirt and tarnished paint, which cleaning and restoration now made clear. Light in pigment, some of the canvases were huge in size, remembered subjects included Hellenic athletes painfully straining in some contest; another (too grimy at the time to be properly appreciated), a boy slave reproved by his toga-enveloped master, whose dignified figure was not without all resemblance to Mr Deacon himself in his palmy days. The show was stylish in presentation. In fact Barnabas Henderson had done a stupendous rescue job from the Valley of Lost Things; Mr Deacon’s Astolpho, or perhaps one of the well disposed swans, fishing up his medallion for the Temple of Fame. Henderson clearly knew his business. To have supposed him the dim figure he had seemed, only a few months earlier in the same year, under the Murtlock regime, was an error of judgment. Since his self-manumission at Stourwater the Private View card was the first I had heard of him; nor was there any further news of Murtlock and Widmerpool.

Even Mr Deacon’s closest friends were accustomed to smile tolerantly, behind his back, about his painting. The few patrons had all faded away by the later stages of his life, when he had exchanged an artist’s career for an antique-dealer’s. All the same, in days when Barnby’s studio was above the antique shop, Barnby had remarked that, little as he approved himself, Sickert had once put in a good word for Mr Deacon’s work. Looking round, more impressed than I should have been prepared to admit, I took heart from Sickert’s judgment; at the same time trying to restore self-confidence as to an earlier scepticism by noting something undoubtedly less than satisfactory in the foreshortening of the slave boy’s loins.

There was still no one about in the first ground floor room of the gallery when I returned there, the attendant’s desk in the corner unoccupied. Through a door at the far end several persons, one of them in a wheel-chair, were to be seen perambulating among the Victorian seascapes. I had not at first noticed that one of the smaller pictures in this first room was Boyhood of Cyrus. Moving across to ascertain how closely, if at all, the palace in its background resembled the configurations of the local quarry, I was intercepted by Barnabas Henderson himself, who came hurrying up a flight of stairs leading from the basement. It was instantaneously apparent that he was a new man; no less renovated than the Deacon pictures on the walls. That was clear in a flash, a transformation not in the least due to adjustments in dress and personal appearance, also to be observed. He had slightly shortened his haircut, reverted to a suit, elegant in cut without being humdrum in style, wore a tie of similar mood. These, however different from a blue robe, were trivial modifications in relation to the general air of rebirth. There was a newly acquired briskness, even firmness of manner, sense of self-confidence amply restored.

‘Oh, hullo, Nicholas. You received our card all right? I was afraid it might have gone astray, as you hadn’t been in.’

‘I couldn’t get to the Private View.’

‘I hope your wife will look in, too, before the Deacon show closes. I always remember how good she was about our turning up once with that awful man. I was quite ashamed at the time. We went crayfishing, do you remember? It was an unusual experience. I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Still, I didn’t enjoy anything much in the circumstances of what my life was then. I hope you like these pictures — and the ones in the next room too, which are by various painters. Bosworth Deacon is one of my own discoveries.’

‘I used to know him.’

‘Know whom?’

‘Edgar Deacon.’

‘Who was Edgar Deacon — a relation of Bosworth Deacon?’

‘He was called Edgar. Bosworth was only his middle name.’

‘No, no. Bosworth is the painter’s name. Are you sure you aren’t confusing your other Deacon man? Bosworth Deacon is a most remarkable artist. In his way unique. I can think of no other painter like him.’

Henderson, possibly with reason, was not in the least interested in whether or not I had known Mr Deacon. Perhaps it was not really a relevant subject; or rather seemed relevant only to myself. It was clear that Mr Deacon — born a hundred years before — seemed in Henderson’s eyes a personage scarcely less remote in time than the kindly slave-master of the artist’s own self-image.

‘I saw you were making for Boyhood of Cyrus, one of Deacon’s best. On the whole I prefer the smaller compositions. He’s more at ease with figure relationships. Several of the critics picked out Cyrus in their notices. I sold it within an hour of the show opening.’

‘The background looks rather like the quarry to be seen from our windows. You may have noticed it on your caravan visit?’

Henderson raised his eyebrows. They could have been plucked. The comparison of Mr Deacon’s picture with the quarry landscape struck no chord. Henderson sold pictures, rather than pondered their extraneous imagery.

‘Surely the palace in the distance represents Persepolis. It’s symbolic.’

‘Well Persepolis isn’t unlike Battersea Power Station in silhouette. An industrial parallel is not excluded out of hand.’

Henderson did not reply. He pursed his lips a little. We were getting nowhere. The subject was better changed. Eleanor Walpole-Wilson had probably sold Cyrus after her parents died. When, in days of frequenting the house, I had once referred to’ their Deacon’, she was all but unaware of its existence, hanging over the barometer in the hall.

‘When I was young I sometimes dined with the people to whom Boyhood of Cyrus used to belong.’

At this information Henderson regarded me with keener interest.

‘You knew Lord Aberavon?’

He was not incredulous; merely mildly surprised. One had to be grateful even for surprise.

‘Not actually. Aberavon died five or six years before I was born. My hostess was his daughter. She owned the picture. Her husband was a diplomat called Walpole-Wilson.’

Henderson was no more prepared to allow that the Walpole-Wilsons had once possessed Boyhood of Cyrus than for Mr Deacon to have been commonly addressed as Edgar.

‘The provenance of Cyrus has always been recognized as the Aberavon Collection. Several Aberavon pictures — by a variety of artists — have been coming on the market lately. They’re usually good sellers. Aberavon was an erratic collector, but not an uninstructed one. Have you looked at By the Will of Diocletian? It hasn’t found a buyer yet. Owing to being rather large for most people’s accommodation these days it is very reasonably priced, if you’re thinking of getting a Deacon yourself.’

‘The younger of the two torturers is not unlike Scorpio Murtlock.’

This time Henderson reacted more favourably to extension of a picture’s imaginative possibilities.

‘Canon Fenneau said the same, when he was in here the other day. He’s someone who knew Scorp when he was quite young. One of the few who can control him.’

‘Where did you come across Fenneau?’

‘Scorp once sent me with a message to him. Chuck and I sometimes go to his church. It was Canon Fenneau who told me that By the Will of Diocletian was painted during Bosworth Deacon’s Roman Catholic period.’

‘Do you ever hear of Murtlock now? Or Widmerpool?’

Henderson, facetiously, made the sign to keep off the Evil Eye.

‘As a matter of fact I do once in a way. Somebody I knew there comes to see me on the quiet if he’s in London. There’s a thing I’m still interested in they’ve got in the house.’

‘Would coming to see you not be allowed?’

‘Of course not.’

Henderson might perhaps have said more on that subject had not Chuck appeared from the inner room. Chuck (perhaps also of seafaring origins) had some of the same burly working-class geniality — now adapted to the uses of the art world — that had once characterized Hugo Tolland’s former partner, Sam.

‘Can you come through for a moment, Barney? Mr Duport wants a word.’

Henderson indicated that he would be along in a moment. Towards Chuck, too, his manner had changed. Himself no longer a victim requiring rescue, Henderson had become something not much short of Mr Deacon’s benign slaveowner. No doubt mutual relationship was carefully worked out in that connexion, Chuck showing no resentment at the readjustment. On the contrary, they seemed on the best of terms.

‘There are some rather interesting people in the further room. The actress, Polly Duport, and her parents. Far the best of the Victorian marine painters show come from the Duport Collection. He’s decided to sell now the going’s good. He’s quite right, I think. I expect you’ve seen Polly Duport in the Strindberg play. Super, I thought. She’s an absolute saint too, the way she looks after her father. Wheels him round all the time in that chair. He’s not at all easy. Can be very bad mannered, in fact. He was a businessman — in oil, I’m told — then had to retire on account of whatever’s wrong with him. He’d always been interested in these Victorian seascapes, picked them up at one time or another for practically nothing. Now they’re quite the thing. He comes in almost every day to see how they’re selling.’

‘I know Polly Duport — and her father.’

‘Do you? But you won’t know her mother, who’s come with them this afternoon. She’s lived most of her life in South America. She must be partly South American, I think. She looks like one of those sad Goya duchesses. She and Robert Duport, the owner of the Collection, have been separated for years, so Polly Duport told me, but have been seeing a good deal of each other lately. He’s never brought her along before. She was married to a South American politician, who was killed by urban guerillas. That’s why she came back to England.’

Henderson’s explanation had taken so long that the people next door, tired of waiting, now moved into the room where we were talking; Duport’s wheeled-chair pushed by his daughter. Her mother followed. Norman Chandler, who was directing the Strindberg production to which Henderson referred, was one of this party. Henderson was right about Jean. The metamorphosis, begun when the late Colonel Flores had been his country’s military attaché in London at the end of the war, was complete.

She was now altogether transformed into a foreign lady of distinction. The phrase ‘sad Goya duchess’ did not at all overstate the case. Chandler gave a dramatic cry of satisfaction at seeing someone with whom he could exchange reminiscences of Mr Deacon.

‘Nick, so you’ve come to see Edgar’s pictures? Who’d ever have thought it? Do you remember when I sold him that statuette called Truth unveiled by Time? Barney and Chuck ought to have that on show here too. I wonder where it is now?’

Duport stirred in the wheel-chair. He looked a rather ghastly sight. All the same he recognized me at once, and let out a hoarse laugh.

‘How the hell do you know he hasn’t come to see my pictures, Norman, not these naked Roman queers? He probably loves the sea.’

He turned in my direction.

‘I can’t remember your name, because I can’t remember anyone’s name these days, including my own most of the time, but we were in Brussels together, looking after different fragments of the Belgian military machine.’

‘We were indeed.’

I told Duport my name. Chandler hastened to make additional introductions.

‘So you and Bob know each other, Nick, and I’m sure you’ve met Polly. This is her mother, Madame Flores —’

Jean smiled graciously. She held out the hand of a former near-dictator’s lady — Carlos Flores cannot have been much short of dictator at the height of his power — a clasp, brief and light, not without a sense of power about it too. There could have been no doubt in the mind of an onlooker — Henderson, say, or Chuck — that Jean and I had met before. That was about the best you could say for past love. In fact Jean’s former husband, whom I had never much liked, was appreciably less distant than she.

‘I’ve gone down the drain since those Brussels days. It all started in the Middle East. Gyppy Tummy, then complications. Never got things properly right. Look at me now. Shunted round in a bathchair. Penny for the guy. That’s how I feel. One of the things I remember about you is that you knew that château-bottled shit Widmerpool.’

Polly Duport patted her father’s head in deprecation of such forcible metaphor. Duport’s appearance certainly bore out an assertion that he was not at all well. There seemed scarcely room in the chair for his long legs, the knees thrust up at an uncomfortable angle. Spectacles much altered his appearance. His daughter looked much younger than her forties. Firmly dedicated — somebody said like a nun — to her profession, she was dressed with great simplicity, as if to emphasize an absolute detachment from anything at all like the popular idea of an actress. This was in contrast with Jean, who had acquired a dramatic luxuriousness of turnout, not at all hers as a girl. Polly had always greatly resembled her mother, but, their styles now so different, perhaps only someone like myself, who had known Jean in her young days, would notice much similarity. Duport was not in the least disposed to abandon the theme of Widmerpool, whom he regarded as having at one moment all but ruined him financially.

‘Polly once saw Widmerpool knocked out by an American film star. I wish I’d been there to shake him by the hand.’

‘He wasn’t really knocked out, Papa. Only his specs broken. And Louis Glober wasn’t a film star, though he looked like one.’

‘It was something to break that bastard’s glasses. I’d have castrated him too, if I’d ever had the chance. Not much to remove, I’d guess.’

Jean made a gesture to silence her former husband.

‘How are you, Nick? You’re looking well. Better than the time you and your wife came to a party we gave, when Carlos was over here. Everybody in London was so utterly tired out at the end of the war. Do you remember our party? How is your wife? I liked her so much.’

‘I was sorry to hear —’

Before Jean could answer, Duport, recognizing the imminence of condolences for the death of Colonel Flores, broke in again.

‘Oh, don’t worry about Carlos. Carlos didn’t do too badly. Had the time of his life, when the going was good, then went out instantaneously. Lucky devil. I envy him like hell. Wish I’d met him. He always sounded the sort of bloke I like.’

Jean accepted that view.

‘I’ve often said you’d both of you have got on very well together.’

Polly Duport, possibly lacking her parents’ toughness in handling such matters, at the same reminded by them of emotional complications suffered by herself, turned the conversation in the direction of these.

‘You know Gibson Delavacquerie, don’t you?’

‘Of course. I haven’t seen him for a month or two. He said he was working very hard.’

‘Gibson and I are getting married.’

‘You are? How splendid. Best possible wishes.’

‘He’s got a new book of poems coming out. That’s why he’s gone into retirement as much as possible.’

She looked very pleased; at the same time a little sad. I wondered whether the poems had anything to do with the sadness. In any case there had been quite a bit of sadness to surmount. She had given this information in an aside, while her parents were laughing, with Chandler and the owners of the gallery, about some incident illustrated in one of the Deacons, to which Chandler was pointing. Now he turned to Polly and myself.

‘Goodness, don’t these bring Edgar back? Do you remember his last birthday party when he fell down stairs at that awful dive, The Brass Monkey?’

‘I wasn’t there. I knew that was the final disaster.’

Duport stared round disapprovingly.

‘I prefer my wind and waves. Smart of me to hang on to them all these years, wasn’t it? That took some doing. Do you remember, Jean, how your brother, Peter, used to grumble about looking after my pictures for me, when I was in low water, and hadn’t anywhere to put them. He hung them in the dining-room of that house he had at Maidenhead. He’d no pictures of his own to speak of — except that terrible Isbister of his old man — so I can’t see what he was grousing at. I might easily have got rid of them, but was spry enough not to sell. They wouldn’t have made a cent.’

Jean laughed.

‘Poor Peter. Why should he keep your junk? You weren’t in low water. You were running round with Bijou Ardglass.’

‘Perhaps I was. One forgets these things. Poor Bijou too.’

‘Do you remember the pictures in the dining-room, Nick? Peter’s Maidenhead house was where we met.’

‘And played planchette.’

‘Yes — we played planchette.*

Duport, becoming suddenly tired, lay back in his chair. He gave a very faint groan. I felt I liked him better than I used. His daughter made a movement to leave.

‘I think we’d better go home now, Papa.’

Duport sat up straight again.

‘So we’ve only got one more to sell?’

Henderson agreed. Jean once more held out her hand. Fashion, decreeing one kissed almost everyone these days, might not unreasonably have brought that about had she kept herself less erect. It was thus avoided without prejudice to good manners.

‘So nice to have met.’

‘Yes, so nice.’

Polly Duport smiled goodbye. I told her how glad I was to hear about herself and Delavacquerie. She smiled again, but did not say anything. Chandler waved. Taking Henderson and Chuck each by an arm, he led them towards the door, evidently imparting an anecdote about Mr Deacon. Duport gave a nod, as he was wheeled away. I strolled round the marine painters. There was — as Jean had said — a vague memory of sea pictures, hung rather askew, on Templer’s dining-room wall. Rather a job lot they had seemed to me that weekend. Even if other things had not been on my mind — that soft laugh of Jean’s — Victorian seascapes would have made no great appeal.

‘It’s the bedroom next to yours. Give it half an hour. Don’t be too long.’

The Needles: Schooner Aground was by no means without all merit. The painter had evidently seen the work of Bonington. I was less keen on Angry Seas off Land’s End. Henderson returned.

‘Polly Duport’s sweet, isn’t she? Don’t you find her mother a little alarming? But then you’d met her before. She must have been very handsome when young. Let me show you that last remaining one of the Duport Collection. You might like to consider it yourself.

He did so. There was no sale. Chuck reappeared.

‘Time to close.’

Henderson looked at his watch.

‘You were telling me you still had some line on the Murtlock/Widmerpool setup. I’d be most interested to hear more of what went on there.’

Chuck interposed.

‘Do you want me to stay?’

Henderson hesitated.

‘No thanks, Chuck. I’ll deal with everything. Just do the usual, and go home. I’ll follow on.’

Henderson seemed divided between wanting to tell his story, and something else that appeared to weigh on his mind. Then he must have decided that telling the story would be sufficiently gratifying to make up for possible indiscretion in other directions.

‘If you’ve got a moment, we could go down to the office.’

I said goodnight to Chuck, by then making preparations to leave. Henderson led the way down a spiral staircase to the basement. The narrow passages below were cluttered with more pictures, framed and unframed. We entered a small room filled with filing cabinets and presses for drawings. Henderson took up his position behind a desk. I chose an armchair of somewhat exotic design, of which there were two. Henderson now seemed to relish the idea of making a fairly elaborate narration. He had perhaps exhausted the extent of persons of his own age prepared to listen.

‘When we all crashed Clare Akworth’s wedding, did you notice an old fellow with us. He had a beard and a red sweater. It was him all the trouble was about at the end, so I heard. Chuck and I had gone off by then.’

‘You mean Bithel?’

‘You know about him? I was told Scorp had almost to carry him home. Bith was a drunk. Somebody sent him along to us when he was just about to freak out. Bith was the only man or woman I’ve ever seen Scorp behave in a decent way to. He pretty well saved Bith’s life. Bith worshipped Scorp in return. When he got better, Bith did odd jobs about the place nobody else wanted to do. That was pretty useful. There was no one who liked household chores. There was another side too. Scorp said an aged man was required for certain rites. Bith didn’t mind that. He didn’t mind what he did.’

Henderson’s face suggested that some of the acts Bithel had been required to perform were less than agreeable, bearing out Widmerpool’s reluctance to detail his own experience in that line.

‘Could he stand being allowed no alcohol?’

‘That’s the point. Bith found that a drag. It was just the knowledge he was being kept alive prevented him from packing it in — plus adoration for Scorp. From time to time Bith would get hold of a little money, and have a drink on the quiet. Scorp winked at that. He’d never have stood it from anyone else, unless for strictly ritual purposes. That was permitted, like getting high on whatever Scorp might sometimes decide to produce. I used to give Bith the price of a drink once in a while, so he’d do things for me. I’d got some money hidden away.’

‘You weren’t allowed money?’

‘Scorp controlled all that. Most of them hadn’t much anyway. I’d hidden some at the top of the house under the eaves. I’d been thinking about getting away for some time, but it wasn’t so easy. Then seeing Chuck gave me the chance. If Chuck hadn’t been working in the same firm as Clare Akworth — he’s one of their drivers, and gives her lifts to the office — I might not be here. I might not even be alive, if she’d not invited Chuck to the wedding, and he hadn’t always wanted to wear a grey tailcoat.’

Henderson looked absolutely serious when he said he might not have been alive. His manner had become even a little disconcerting in its seriousness.

‘It’s Bith who looks in to see me occasionally. Scorp sends him to London sometimes to do odd jobs. Perhaps with a message to Canon Fenneau, if a respectable link is needed. It is sometimes. Fenneau helped once about getting a girl who was having a baby into hospital. Scorp recognizes that Bith will arrive back drunk, but he just makes him do a small penance. There’s a particular thing Widmerpool’s got that I hope one of these days to get out of him. That’s why I keep in touch with Bith. He isn’t very coherent as a rule. That doesn’t much matter. Do you ever hear anything of Fiona? She used to use Bith too.’

‘Her mother got a letter from her the other day. Fiona seems all right. They’re in the Middle West.’

The Cutts parents, ‘good’ as ever, never complained about hearing rarely from their daughter. Probably they took the view that no news was better than bad news.

‘Scorp used to talk a lot about that American Fiona married.’

‘In connexion with Fiona?’

‘No, not at all. Scorp was angry when Fiona went away, but I don’t think he foresaw she would end up with Gwinnett. It was Gwinnett’s own potential powers that attracted Scorp.’

‘Transcendental ones?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about Widmerpool? Did Murtlock think he possessed transcendental powers too?’

The question was put lightly, even ironically. Henderson chose to answer it seriously. Having now abandoned the cult, he was prepared to denounce Murtlock as an individual; he had been too long connected with its system and disciplines utterly to reject their foundations. That was the impression his manner suggested.

‘Ken’s transcendental gifts were not what Scorp valued him for. I doubt if he possessed any. Not like Gwinnett. It was Ken’s will-power. Also, of course, the basic fact of being able to live in and around his house. Ken wanted to be head. I see now he never could have been. At first it seemed touch and go. At least I thought so. I was afraid Ken would take over. He picked up the doctrinal part so quickly. I was terrified.’

‘Why terrified?’

Henderson looked surprise at being asked that.

‘Because I was in love with Scorp. I wanted him at the head.’

‘Is Widmerpool in love with Murtlock too?’

This time Henderson did not give a snap answer. He hesitated. When he spoke it was objectively, almost primly.

‘I don’t know. It was hard for me to judge. I thought everybody was in love with Scorp. I was jealous of them for that. Ken doesn’t actively dislike girls. He’d watch them naked, whenever he could. He may like boys better now he’s used to them.’

‘You mean in sexual rites?’

‘Or on runs.’

‘You went for naked runs?’

‘Not at all often. Very rarely. Sometimes the ritual required it. In spring or autumn we would have to wait for a fairly warm night. Even then it could be dreadful.’

‘Before breakfast?’

‘Breakfast — you don’t suppose we had breakfast? It was usually about half-past four in the morning. Only about once a year.’

‘Murtlock himself?’

‘Of course.’

‘ Widmerpool too?’

‘Why not?’

‘Bithel?’

‘No — not Bith. Bith was let off. He’d make up for it by the other things he had to do.’

‘And Widmerpool took part in the sexual rites?’

‘When he was able.’

‘Didn’t you meet anyone on your naked runs?’

‘Not in the middle of the night. It wasn’t often. Scorp took us along paths through the woods.’

‘Murtlock had Widmerpool completely under control in the end?’

‘Only after the arrival of Bith. That was the turning point. Ken hated Bith. There was no Harmony. No Harmony at all. That made Scorp angry. It made bad vibrations. He was quite right. It did. I won’t tell you some of the things Scorp made them do together. I don’t like to think of it’

Henderson shuddered.

‘Why didn’t Widmerpool leave?’

‘Where would he go? If he went, Scorp remained in possession of the house. There’s no getting him out. Ken’s believed to have bequeathed it to the cult anyway. He could have made it over already.’

‘Was thought of the house what caused Widmerpool to change his mind at Stourwater?’

‘It was Scorp’s will-power. That’s stronger than anything. You’d know, if you’d ever had to face it. He came to Chuck’s flat, and tried to get me back. There was an awful scene. I don’t know how I got through it. I was shaky for a fortnight after. I did somehow — with the help of Chuck.’

Henderson shuddered again.

‘But what was the point of it all. What did — what does — Widmerpool expect to get out of it?’

Once more Henderson seemed surprised. He was prepared to accept that he himself might find the ways of Murtlock harsh, horrible, even murderous. The aim of the cult, if impossible to express in words, was to him an altogether understandable one.

‘Ken was playing for high stakes, if he really became head. It’s hard to explain. Of course I don’t believe now, not in the least. But Scorp, for instance, where’s he going to end? He might go anywhere. That’s what Ken felt. Of course Ken was too old, apart from anything else.’

‘A messiah?’

‘If you like.’

A bell rang at some length from upstairs. It sounded as if someone was following that up by rattling on the front door. Henderson rose,

‘What can that be? It’s just possible … Wait a moment. I’ll go and see.’

When Henderson’s voice sounded again, at the top of the spiral staircase, its note suggested unexpected satisfaction. Henderson himself seemed to be doing all the talking. At least no replies were audible from whomever he had let in. There was a crash, a pause, a great scrambling and stumbling on the stairs, several steps missed; then Bithel, closely piloted from behind by Henderson, arrived — almost fell down — in the office. The immediate conclusion seemed to be that, whatever gratified Henderson, was not the fact of Bithel having arrived sober. On the contrary, Bithel was in a state of extreme intoxication. He was clutching a brown-paper parcel. Henderson spoke formally, as if nothing were more natural than Bithel’s state.

‘Here’s Bith. I thought it might be him, but I never guessed what he’d bring with him. He can’t speak at present. Wait till he’s unwrapped the parcel.’

Henderson made an unsuccessful effort to get hold of this. Bithel clung on. He was, as described, entirely speechless. If Bithel had seemed filthy at Stourwater, out in the open, he looked infinitely filthier enclosed within the narrow confines of the gallery’s office. He smelt horrible. In the army he had admitted to an age in the late thirties, so now was at least seventy, if not more. He appeared a great deal older than that; some dreadful ancient, brought in from tramping the roads day in day out. A decaying push-teen, torn and grimy, covered patched corduroy trousers. This time his feet were in sandals.

‘Sit down, Bith. When did you get to London? Pretty early I’d guess from your state. Let’s have a look at the picture.’

Bithel, deposited in the other exotically designed armchair, evidently wanting desperately to make some statement, was literally unable to speak. What had at first seemed a mere state of drunkenness gave signs of being something more than that. Drink had at least brought no solace, none of the extreme garrulousness that had characterized Bithel’s army toping. He conveyed the air of a man, whatever his innately broken-down state, who had been seriously upset. That might be the form Bithel’s intoxication now took. Henderson was chiefly interested in the brown-paper parcel, trying to get it into his own hands, always failing. Then Bithel got a word out.

‘Scotch.’

‘Haven’t you had enough?’

‘Not… feeling… myself.’

‘No, you’re not your usual self, Bith, on a day off. All right. We’ll see what can be done.’

Henderson, opening a cupboard, brought back to the desk a bottle and glasses.

‘Now unwrap it. How did you manage? It wasn’t theft? You’re sure of that? I’m not going to handle it, if it’s stolen. There must be evidence you were allowed to take it. That’s absolutely definite.’

Bithel made a jerky movement of his shoulders, apparently indicating that nothing at all nefarious had taken place in regard to whatever was under discussion.

‘All right, but why can’t you say more? You’re not usually like this, Bith. You’ve had much too much. What will Scorp do to you? Try and tell me about it.’

Bithel took a deep gulp, finishing off the reasonably generous shot of whisky Henderson had poured for him. He held out the glass for more. Henderson allowed him an individual replenishment. I attempted to explain to Bithel that we had been comrades-in-arms. It was hard to think of an incident that had not reflected some unhappy moment in his own military career; any happy ones almost certainly experienced at times he would have been too drunk to recall.

‘Do you remember our Company Commander, Rowland Gwatkin?’

Bithel’s eyes, damp and bleary, suddenly reacted.

‘ Fol-low, fol-low, we will fol-low Gwatkin —

We will fol-low Gwatkin, everywhere he leads.’

Bithel sang the words gently. Their reference to romping round the Mess on Christmas night, following the Commanding Officer over tables and chairs, sideboards and sofas, must have been entirely lost on Henderson. In any case the Commanding Officer’s name had been Davies. Now Colonel was evidently merged as a single entity with Gwatkin in Bithel’s mind. Becoming more than ever impatient, Henderson once more tried to get hold of the parcel. Bithel demanded a third round before giving it up.

‘Not before I see the picture — know how you got it.’

Bithel made a violent effort to give an explanation.

‘Going to… be burnt.’

‘Scorp wanted to burn it. You rescued it?’

Bithel’s twitching face seemed to indicate that solution as near the mark.

‘Does Ken know?’

This question threw Bithel into a paroxysm of coughing, followed by an awful dry retching. He seemed about to vomit, something not at all out of the question in experience of him. An alternative possibility was apoplexy. When this violent attack was at an end he got out a sentence.

‘Lord Widmerpool’s… dead.’

‘What?’

Both Henderson and I exclaimed simultaneously.

‘Murdered.’

Bithel’s powers of speech made some sort of recovery now. He had contrived to articulate what was on his mind. This was when it became clear that nervous strain, at least as much as drink, was powerfully affecting him. In fact the whisky he had just drunk had undoubtedly pulled him together. At first his words, dramatically gasped out, aroused a picture of gun, knife, poison, length of lead piping.

Then one saw that Bithel was almost certainly speaking with exaggeration. Even so, some ritual — like the gash at The Devil’s Fingers — might have gone too far; for example, misuse of a dangerous drug. Allowing for overstatement, I was not at all sure which was meant. Henderson, with closer knowledge of the circumstances, seemed to regard anything as possible. He had gone white in the face.

‘Was he found dead? Has this just happened? Are the police in on it?’

‘Scorp was responsible. You can’t call it anything but murder. I’m not going back. I’ve left for good. I’m fond of Scorp — fonder than I’ve ever been of any boy — but he’s gone too far. I’m not going back.’

‘But what happened? You don’t really mean murder?’

‘What Scorp made him do.’

‘Say what that was.’

The story came out only by degrees. Even in a slightly improved condition Bithel was not easy to follow. In his — comparatively speaking — less dilapidated days, Bithel’s rambling narratives had been far from lucid. The events he had just been through seemed to have been enough to disturb anyone. They had, at the same time, to some degree galvanized him out of the state of brain-softening he had displayed at Stourwater. He kept on muttering to himself, his voice at times entirely dying away.

‘Lord Widmerpool ought never to have gone. Wasn’t fit. Wasn’t in the least fit. It was murder. Nothing short.’

That the old Bithel — with his respect for the ‘varsity man’ — survived under the tangled beard and foul rags, was shown by dogged adherence to calling Widmerpool by a title he had himself renounced by word and deed; if never by official procedure. After a bout of breathlessness, Bithel now showed signs of falling asleep. Henderson prodded him with a paper-knife.

‘What happened?’

Bithel opened his eyes. Henderson repeated the question.

‘What happened about Ken? *

‘We could all see Lord Widmerpool wasn’t well. He hadn’t been well for weeks. He was bloody ill, in fact. Not himself at all. He could hardly get up from the floor.’

I asked why Widmerpool was on the floor. Henderson explained that the cult did not use beds. Bithel groaned in confirmation of that.

‘When Lord Widmerpool did get up he was all shaky. He wasn’t fit, even though it was a warmish night last night. It was Scorp who insisted.’

‘Was Widmerpool unwilling to go?’

Bithel looked at me as if he did not understand what I was talking about. Even if prepared to accept that we had served in the same regiment, could recognize the same songs or horseplay, he certainly had not the least personal recollection of a common knowledge of Widmerpool.

‘Lord Widmerpool didn’t object. He wanted to be in Harmony. He always wanted that. He took a moment to get properly awake. At first he could hardly stand, when he got up from the floor. All the same, he took his clothes off.’

‘Why did he take his clothes off?’

Henderson explained that was the rite. He seemed to have fallen back into regarding what had gone forward as natural enough in the light of the ritual, a normal piece of ceremonial. Not only did he understand, he seemed a little carried away by the devotional aspects of the story.

‘Scorp must have thought it would get too cold if use was not made of that late mild spell we’ve been having. He was right. The temperature dropped this afternoon. If he’d left it till tonight they’d never have been able to go out.’

‘Do you mean they all went out on a naked run in the early hours of this morning?’

‘Ken never wanted to be outdone in Harmony by Scorp.’

Henderson and Bithel agreed about that, Bithel almost showing animation.

‘Didn’t we all? Didn’t we all? But I’m through. I’m bloody well through. I swear I am. If I go back, it won’t be for long. I swear that. I can’t stand it. I’ll find somewhere else. I swear I will.’

Bithel rocked himself backwards and forwards.

‘What happened on the run?’

‘It was through the woods.’

‘Scorp was leading of course. Did Ken feel ill when he got outside?’

‘Lord Widmerpool seemed recovered at first, they said. There was a warm mist. It was cold enough, they told me, but not as bad as they thought it would be.’

‘So they set off?’

‘Then Lord Widmerpool shouted they weren’t going fast enough.’

Henderson showed amazement at such a thing happening.

‘Why should Ken have done that? It was never a race. The slow pace was to give a sense of Harmony. Scorp always made a point of that.’

‘When Lord Widmerpool shouted, they said Scorp sounded very angry, and said no. They were going fast enough. To increase the speed would disrupt the Harmony. Lord Widmerpool didn’t take any notice of Scorp.’

‘That was unlike Ken.’

Bithel lay back, so far as doing so were possible, in the pop-art armchair. The Scotch had greatly revived him, calmed his immediate fears, enabled him to tell the story with a kind of objectivity.

‘If Lord Widmerpool disagreed with Scorp he’d always say why. They quite often argued. Lord Widmerpool seemed to enjoy a tussle, then giving in, and being given a penance. Never knew such a man for penances.’

Abandoning his narrative, at the thought of Widmerpool’s penances, Bithel sighed.

‘Did Widmerpool increase his own speed?’

‘Not at first, they told me. Then he began complaining again that they weren’t running fast enough. He started to shout “I’m running, I’m running, I’ve got to keep it up.” Everybody thought he was laughing, trying to get himself warm. After shouting out this for a while, he did increase his pace. Some of the others went faster too. Scorp wouldn’t allow that. He ordered Lord Widmerpool to slow down, but of course he couldn’t stop him. He was way on ahead by then. Somebody heard Lord Widmerpool shout “I’m leading, I’m leading now.”‘

‘How did it end?’

‘It was rather a twisty way through the woods. Nobody could see him, especially in the mist. When they came round a corner, out of the trees, he was lying just in the road.’

‘Collapsed?’

‘Dead.’

Bithel held out his glass for yet another refill. Henderson topped it up. There was quite a long silence.

‘How did they carry the body back?’

‘They managed somehow.’

‘It must have been quite a way.’

‘You bet.’

‘What did Scorp say?’

Henderson’s voice shook a little when he asked that. I felt disturbed myself. Bithel seemed glad to leave the more macabre side of the story, for its administrative elements.

‘I was sent to London to ask Canon Fenneau what should be done.’

‘That’s why you came up?’

‘I couldn’t find Canon Fenneau till this afternoon. He wasn’t too keen on being mixed up with it all. In the end he said he’d do what he could to help.’

‘And the drawing?’

‘Scorp said the first thing was for all Lord Widmerpool’s things to be ritually burned. There wasn’t much. You know there was hardly anything, Barnabas, except the picture you told me to try to get hold of, if ever Scorp, in one of his destructive moods, insisted on throwing it out. You said it was between the cupboard and the wall, bring it along, if you’ve half a chance. It looks like a rough scribble to me, but I’m sure it’s the one you said. I hope it’s the right picture, and you’ll make me a nice bakshee for bringing it along. I got it off the fire without Scorp seeing, just as he was going to set everything alight with the ritual torch. I stuffed it away somewhere, and here it is. God, I’m tired. Bloody well done in. I haven’t had any sleep since they got back at five this morning.’

Henderson snatched the parcel, and began to open it. Bithel lay still further back in the pop-art armchair. He closed his eyes. Henderson threw away the brown paper. He held the Modigliani drawing up in front of him. The glass of the frame was cracked in several places; the elongated nude no worse than a little crumpled. It had been executed with a few strokes running diagonally across the paper. The marvellous economy of line would help in making it hard to identify — if anybody bothered — as more than a Modigliani drawing of its own particular period. It was signed. In any case, no one was likely to worry. It had hung in Stringham’s London flat in early days; then passed to Stringham’s niece, Pamela Flitton; on Pamela’s demise, to her husband, Widmerpool. Pictures had never been Widmerpool’s strong point. For some reason he must have clung on to this one. It was odd that he had never sold it. Henderson, even at the period of his renunciation of such vanities as art, must have marked it down, as it lay about somewhere in the commune. Now the agent, even at second-hand, of its preservation, he deserved his prize. Bithel gave a terrible groan in his sleep.

He had begun to slip from the exotically shaped armchair; would soon reach the floor.

‘I shall have to be going.’

‘I’ll come and let you out.’

‘What will you do about Bithel?’

‘I’ll ring up Chuck. He’ll lend a hand. Chuck won’t be too pleased. He doesn’t like Bith. This has happened before. We put him on the late train.’

‘You’ll send him back?’

‘Of course. Where else can he go? He’ll be all right.’

‘Will Fenneau do the clearing up down there?’

‘Everything he can. He’s very good about that sort of thing. He understands. Now I know about it, I’ll get in touch with him too.’

We said goodbye. Henderson was right about the temperature dropping. It was getting dark outside, and much colder. A snowflake fell. At first that seemed a chance descent. Now others followed in a leisurely way. The men taking up the road in front of the gallery were preparing to knock off work. Some of them were gathering round their fire-bucket.

The smell from my bonfire, its smoke perhaps fusing with one of the quarry’s metallic odours drifting down through the silvery fog, now brought back that of the workmen’s bucket of glowing coke, burning outside their shelter. For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind:

‘I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.’

The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long drawn wail of a hooter — the distant pounding of centaurs’ hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas. Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.