The Book And The Brotherhood

PART THREE

Rose was standing at the window of her bedroom looking out at the sun shining upon the long wide lawn and the Italian fountain and the huge handsome chestnut trees and some fields full of black and white cows and some sloping woodlands and a receding horizon of hills. The funeral was over, the visiting mourners were gone. This was not the loneral of Jenkin Riderhood, now in the past, but the Funeral of Reeve's wife, Laura Curtland. Rose was not at Boyars but at the house in Yorkshire. At Boyars the snowdrops were over, but here in the north a few clumps lingered in sheltered corners under still leafless trees and bushes. In the birch copse beyond the lawn the early double daffodils were coming into flower.

Laura Curtland, so long a malade imaginaire, had vindicated her status by suddenly dying. After maintaining for years that she had cancer when she had not, she developed a quick operable tumour and passed away. Perhaps, everyone said hater, she had in some sense been right all the time. Laura's sodden departure caused a good deal of surprise, some disway, and a certain amount of terrible grief. At Fettiston (this wits the name of the house) grief, shared by the servants, prevailed. A few village people shed tears too. The relations, with the exception of Laura's husband and children, were calm. Rose, who had never particularly got on with Laura, found herself wishing that she had made more effort to get to know someone of whose good qualities she was now suddenly aware. Rose had felt that Laura was hostile, anxious to keep hose at a distance. Perhaps, Rose now reflected, Laura had witsonably felt that Rose neglected them, found them dull, spent minimal time in Yorkshire, had made a rival 'family' for herself in London. Rose was moved, and deeply moved, by the evident, even frantic, anguish of Reeve and Neville and Gillian. The flowing tears of cook and maids, the bowed heads of sorrowing gardeners, also counted as evidence. From her chaise longue Laura had presumably not only organised that large house and garden, but aroused affection in those whom she directed as well as enjoying the absolute love of her nearest and dearest. Rose had been aware that Laura was not a fool, but in some way she had never taken her seriously, and no doubt Laura sensed this. Of course all these sensible reflections came too late.

Rose, who had come before the funeral and stayed on at the request of Reeve and the children, had now been at Fettiston for over two weeks. Rose was surprised later, though at the time it seemed natural and inevitable, at the speed with which it was she who, in the immediate management of the scene, took Laura's place. Reeve and Neville and Gillian, helplessly overwhelmed by grief, begged Rose to take charge and, without being told to, the servants all ran to her with their problems. The Vicar rang Rose about the funeral arrangements, and Rose extracted Reeve's wishes. Rose organised the `party' after the funeral, and allotted bedrooms to relations who were staying the night. She also decided what, in the emergency, to delegate to Mrs Keithley, the extremely able cook. Of course Rose was glad to be of use; and a little more than that, she felt a certain ambiguous gratification at being suddenly important in a house where she had often felt she counted for little. Fettiston was a larger and far more beautiful house than Boyars. It was a pure simple unspoilt eighteenth-century house built in a local stone which varied in colour between a liquid brown and a faint rose. An ancestor who had visited Vicenza had adorned the balustraded roof with rows of statues, which had been removed to discreet places in the garden by Reeve's and Rose's great-grandfather. The house sat upon a wide terrace reached from the lawn by a fide narrowing stone stairway. Upon the lawn was the fountain, a rather more successful addition by the same ancestor. Beyond was the vista of English countryside, and farther away die slopes of the Pennines fading (today), outline against outline, into a blue distance which became the sky. Rose had never had any strong sense of 'family possessions' or indeed of family, beyond her parents and Sinclair. After they were dead she had settled to an idea of herself as having friends but, except in some formal or literal sense, no relations. She felt no belongingness to 'the Curtlands', no 'old Yorkshire family' bond, though the 'old house' had been in Yorkshire and all her forebears had lived there. (A local joke had it that when Curtlands referred to 'the wars', they meant the Wars of the Roses.) Rose was fond of Boyars, but would not have felt any great or special pang if she had had to sell it. Now, experiencing the Yorkshire house more intimately, she thought how odd it must be for Neville and Gillian, though perhaps after all they found it natural, to feel that this place was their place, to be entrusted to them and to their children and to their children's children, and filled with the pale strong presences of their ancestors, whose pictures, painted, unfortunately, by minor artists, hung (mostly) in the larger rooms, though some were banished to the bedrooms. On the wall of Rose's bedroom was a small awkward seventeenth-century picture of a rather touching lady, who had lived before Fettiston was built or thought of, who looked remarkably like Gillian.

The drama, for it was that among other things, of Laura's death had interrupted Rose's prolonged period of mourning forjenkin. In a sad but understandable way it had come as an almost welcome interruption. It had removed Rose from the dark obsessive almost maddening atmosphere in London, to a place where her emotions were less deeply involved and where there were many practical things she could do. Her usual Christmas visit to Yorkshire, coming fairly soon after Jenkin's death, and before Laura's condition was diagnosed, had been a nightmare. Christmas at Fettiston was celebrated, as usual, with every extreme of jollity, log fires, Christmas trees, mountains of holly and ivy and mistletoe from the garden, carols, indoor games, excessive eating and drinking, and manifold exchanges of beautifully wrapped presents. Sleigh rides, skiing and skating were also hoped for, but a perverse period of warm weather made these impossible. Rose, hating every moment, got away as soon as she could. She had said nothing to her cousins about the terrible thing which had happened, and they made only perfunctory enquiries about her life elsewhere. Gerard, in so far as he had 'spent' or 'noticed' Christmas, passed it with Gideon and Patricia. It had been a notable occasion because, evidently persuaded by Gideon, Tamar and Violet had joined them. Jean and Duncan were in France as usual. Lily went to stay with her friend Angela Parke. Gulliver was said to be 'in the north', in Leeds or Newcastle. Rose had at first intended to stay in London with Gerard, but he had urged her to go to Yorkshire. In fact both Rose and Gerard felt a certain relief at being separated. They had spent too long grieving together and helping to make each other even more miserable. It was perhaps 'good for them' to be with people less affected, or unaffected, with whom they would have to behave in ordinary ways. Rose had become aware, after the appalling shock of his death, how much, how much more than she had ever realised, she had loved and depended on Jenkin. A slight haze had perhaps always, for her, rested upon him because of an old jealousy of Gerard's affection for him, a sense as if' one day Jenkin might take Gerard away from her altogether. Now she remembered what a wonderful presence Jenkin had been in her life, he had indeed given a soul to all things'; and remembering his wisdom, his particular gentleness, his kindness to her, the unique charm of his physical being, it also seemed to her that he had perhaps loved her with some kind of special love. This thought made her particularly miserable, mingling her sorrow with remorse Life without Jenkin seemed impossible, too much had been taken away. Her own mourning had of course blended with Gerard's much greater grief. Gerard's grief had appalled Rose, and wounded her the more because she could do nothing for it. Inevitably this death made them speak of Sinclair and renew their old sorrow. Rose had forgotten that Gerard could cry, and cry so terribly, sobbing and shedding wild tears as women do.

What, as time passed, they more and more discussed, and made themselves more wretched thereby, was the extraordinary nature of that death, the circumstances, the accident. Here, after a while, they found themselves asking and saying the same things over and over again. Well, it was an accident, wasn't it, and accidents are bizarre. To the police and at the inquest Crimond had explained in the utmost detail what had happened, how he and Jenkin had been discussing Crimond's marksmanship, and had had a bet on his ability, how Jenkin had gone down near the target, how Crimond had told him to keep clear, and, concentrating upon his aim, had fired just as Jenkin turned and moved to say something to him, not realising he was in the line of fire. It was a simple, awful accident. The verdict was death by misadventure. Crimond's evident grief impressed the police and the coroner. Many reliable people were ready to testify that Crimond and Jenkin were friends, no one suggested they were dangerously close friends. Jenkin's golden character was attested by all. There was no suggestion of a sordid homosexual feud, nothing about jealousy, or about money, no shadow of any motive for foul play. If there was carelessness, it was on both parts. Crimond did get into trouble for possessing firearms without a licence, and was heavily fined. The police searched his flat but found nothing incriminating. He had never, in fact, even in his days of fame, been a terrorist suspect. He was now, so long had he been a recluse, scarcely news at all. No keen young reporter, apt to find out some hidden infamy, was sent to pursue the case. It did not seem to occur to anybody that there might have been a quarrel about politics. There was at that moment a great deal of 'news' around and plenty of far more scandalous and violent and sickening goings-on involving far more famous and important people. This odd little accident attracted small attention. Gerard did not expect, or receive, any communication from Crimond after the event, and of course neither Jean nor Duncan heard anything. The only person Crimond was known to have communicated with was Jenkin's schoolmaster friend Marchment who mentioned in the course of his testimony that Crimond had telephoned him from a call box just after Jenkin's death and immediately after he had rung the police, and told him briefly what had happened; and that Crimond had later told him the whole story in much greater detail. Gerard telephoned Marchment, then went to see him, and received the same account. So it was an accident. It was not possible, was it, that Crimond had murdered Jenkin? No, it was not possible. There was no conceivable motive. Surely it was not possible?

In all these rather horrible discussions Rose took part with a rather important reservation. She had, now, her own rather special view of Crimond, 'her Crimond', which must be henceforth and forever her darkest secret. Rose had, even before Jenkin's death, recovered from what now looked like the amazing, unique, inexplicable fit of insanity wherein she had felt herself to be madly in love with Crimond, during which Crimond from being nothing had become everything, Rose, who had at once told herself to 'return to reality', had managed reasonably well to do so within a few days of het `seizure'. Gradually the lurid glow faded, her usual attach- ments regained their power, above all the agonising, tormenting sense of a possibility, a possible move, began to leave her; and she was able to be thankful that she had not found Crimond in the street when she ran down after him, had not written him a compromising letter whose existence would have disturbed her ever after. Of course she couldn't love Crimond! She loved Gerard, and could not, for thousands of reasons, love both of them. Moreover, she absolutely could not, for Jean's sake, have anything to do with Crimond Crimond was a person she disapproved of, was perhaps even a mad person-what could have been madder than that sudden proposal? He was not someone with whom she could envisage spending time, let alone developing any close relation. One of her best comforts, in the early days of her recovery, was the thought that Crimond was actually a bit deranged and would have repented of his rash idea soon enough if Rose had showii any interest in it! All the same, and she realised this as soon a4 she was able to tell herself that it was over, something remained, and perhaps, Rose told herself with an odd mixture of sadness and pleasure, would always remain. There was sonar bond between her _and that man, which was there even if, as was likely, he regretted his move and saw it as an aberration; and even if he now consoled himself by hating her for her graceless reception of him. Rose could not perceive exactly what this residuum was. No doubt it was something which would wear and change with time. It was partly that she was, in retrospect, so flattered, and so touched, by his suggestion. It is hard for a woman not to feel some kindness for a man who adores her. He, strange Crimond, whom people feared and hated, had been for a moment at her feet. How surprised everyone would be – but of course no one would ever know. But there was also another, and better, she felt, component. Vor a short time she had loved Crimond, her love, like a laser beam, had reached right into him, finding, however blindly, die real Crimond, the lovable Crimond, who therefore must exist. She did not allow herself to imagine that she would ever tell Crimond that she had loved him; and she could scarcely, even much later, apologise suitably for her rudeness without in some way hinting at those very different feelings. In that direction, there was no road. But her wish that somehow he could know remained as a point of pain, and she guarded her curious knowledge of him like the emblem of a forbidden religion.

This was her state before the news of Jenkin's death and its mrange circumstances. The shock of this frightful blankly inexplicable disaster brought back to Rose her view of Crimond as something black and lethal. Rose and Gerard agreed that they could not and must not entertain the notion that their friend had been murdered. It was too incredible and too awful a charge to set up without a shred of evidence. 'We mustn't formulate this hypothesis, even to ourselves,' said Gerard. But they had formulated it, and were upset and sickened to find it being freely uttered by others, based simply upon malicious speculation. Here again Rose had her own private torment: it came into her mind that Crimond had indeed killed Jenkin, as an act of revenge against her, and sigainst Gerard whom he might blame for Rose's rejection of lilin. This idea, when it suddenly appeared, caused her such agony that she felt she might go mad, even be mad enough to blurt out the whole thing to Gerard simply so that he could share her misery. She thought, so I am really responsible fol Jenkin's death, if only I had been kinder to Crimond, it' I hadn't been so cruel and scornful… Here however Rose's deep base of sanity eventually prevailed, her strong moral sense joined with her sense of self-preservation, and shr judged this picture of the matter to be not only a crazy, but an evil fantasy.

Within a short space of time Rose had attended two burial services, both of them Anglican. Gerard, who had instantly taken it on himself to organise Jenkin's funeral, had decided that since Jenkin had latterly appeared to be something of a fellow traveller of the Christian faith, the solemn words of the Prayer Book, so sober and so beautiful, should bid hole farewell. Jenkin had no family; but at the funeral a surprisingly large number of people whom Rose and Gerard had never seen before appeared and manifested their grief. Gerard de creed cremation, because he vaguely recalled Jenkin having approved of it, but chiefly because he could not bear the idea of his friend's body continuing to exist, rotting away in the earth. Better not to be. Laura of course was buried in the churchyard of the parish church in a place reserved for Curtlands. An argument about her tombstone was already going on. The two services were similar, except that the body of the departed was committed, in one case 'to the earth', in the other case 'to the fire'. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Later that morning Rose was sitting in the library, where Reeve Curtland had been writing letters answering the numerous expressions of condolence upon Laura's death. Thc young people had departed, Neville to St Andrews where fir was in his last year of studying history, Gillian to Leeds whei r she was in her first year of psychology. Both of them had failed to get into Oxford, but were proving it possible to flourish elsewhere. Reeve, who had also failed to get into Oxford had, as he often complained, passed a gloomy and profitless perloil at a minor London college. It had only lately occurred to hri that Reeve, who was about her age, might have envied and perhaps disapproved of the golden times which Sinclair and the others were obviously having at the old university. Reeve had cheered up considerably, however, as uncharitable observers remarked, when his father inherited the title. The Curtlands were Anglicans, not Nonconformists or Quakers, but there was a puritanical streak which emerged at intervals. A Curtland had been an officer in Cromwell's army. Rose's Anglo-Irish mother had cheerfully tolerated Sinclair's homosexuality, but her gentle father had been quietly shocked. Of course Rose had never discussed these matters, ^or indeed anything of grave importance, with Reeve. Always searching for likenesses, she discerned in Neville's blond handsomeness a certain look of Sinclair. It was certainly clear that Neville, always nearly engaged to different girls, did not share his Cousin's ambiguous propensities. Reeve bore no marked resemblance to any of his relations or ancestors, he certainly lacked the jaunty look which Curtland men seemed to have had, judging from the family portraits, a look which both Sinclair and Neville pre-eminently incarnated. He was not, like them, tall. He had mousy brown hair, not grey but balding a little, dark brown soft puzzled anxious eyes, a ruddy complexion and a much lined brow where the pitted rubbery flesh rose in little hillocks. His lips were anxious too. His eyebrows thick and furr^y. He somehow managed to look young. He was often shy and even gauche in conversation, unlike his son. He liked to stay at home all the time and work on innumerable jobs. He always wore a tie, even when out on the tractor. In spite of his awkwardness and sometimes maddeningly tentative approach to the world, he did not lack charm, perhaps the charm of some timid touching animal. As people also observed about him, he did in fact, for all his poor showing, manage his estate, and his investments, reasonably well. He also played the piano creditably and painted in watercolours.

`Reeve, I must go back to London,' said Rose, uttering words she had wanted to utter for some time.

`Oh no! Why? The children have gone but there's still me to look after! And how will the house run without you? You haven't anything to do down there. I've often wondered why you weren't with us oftener. You should regard this place as it second home.'

`Oh I do,' said Rose vaguely.

`Evidently you don't, as you're so mean with your time! You know how attached the children are to you, how much they depend on your advice.'

Rose could not recall ever having 'advised' Neville and Gillian, who were bouncily independent young people, though it was true that she had had some `good talks' with them during this, exceptionally long, stay at Fettiston.

`How much they need you,' Reeve went on, `and will – even more – in the future-‘

Rose heard uneasily the slight weight which he put upon these words. She said, rather firmly, wanting now to be clear, `I must get back. Gerard is in a rather unhappy state because a friend of his died in an accident.'

‘Jenkin Riderhood.'

`Yes. I didn't know you knew -' Rose was surprised.

`Francis Reckitt told me, you know, Tony's son. Someone in London mentioned it to him quite recently and lie remembered the chap's name. I met him with you once, yearn ago.'

`Of course, you met Jenkin, I'd forgotten.'

`Odd business – that man Crimond, wasn't it – that Communist or whatever -'

`Yes.'

`I'm sorry. I didn't say anything to you. I felt we had enough on our plate.'

`Indeed. Anyway – I feel I must go home – I'm sure you understand.'

`I think this is your home, but I won't argue! There aren’t many of them left now, are there -'

`You mean -?'

`Gerard and his friends. He's living with his sister now, isn't he?'

`Yes.'

`Well, come back again soon. We do need you very much. Things are going to be different now – and – Rose – blood is thicker than water.'

`A lot of things have happened since you went away,' said Gerard.

Rose had telephoned him on her return and he had come round at once.

`So you're living in Jenkin's house?'

`Yes. He left everything to me. I think I shall stay there.'

`So Patricia and Gideon got you out after all!'

`Yes. But I wanted to go. I'm tired of being surrounded by possessions. It's time for a radical change.'

`You mean you'll become like Jenkin?'

`Don't be silly.'

`Sorry, I'm being stupid. I feel terribly stupid just now.'

It was late evening. Rose professed to have had supper, though she had only had a sandwich. Gerard also said he had eaten. They were drinking coffee. He had refused whⁱsky. The preliminaries of their conversation, so much looked forward to by Rose, had been awkward, almost irritable, as though they had both forgotten how to converse. She thought, he's angry with me for having stayed away so long. I hope it's only that.

Gerard looked different. His curly hair was dull and disordered, standing out in senseless directions, like the fur of a sick or frightened animal. His sculptured face, whose fine surfaces usually cohered so harmoniously, looked disunified and angular, even distorted. His mouth was awry, twisted in repose by a twinge of distress or anno^yance. His normally calm eyes were restless and evasive, and he kept turning his head away from Rose in a sulky manner. Sometimes he became still and abstracted, frowning, as if listening. Oh he is ill, he is not himself, thought Rose miserably, but it seemed that she could do nothing now but irritate him.

`You know Duncan's resigned from the office?'

`No.’

`Of course that's since you went away, you've been away such ages. He kept saying he'd resign, and now he's resigned. They're in France now looking for a house.'

`What part?' said Rose.

`I don't know what part!'

`I rang their number, I wanted to see Jean. So they're away. How are they?'

`Very cheerful, not a care in the world.'

`How are Gull and Lily? I hope they're all right.'

`Not very,' said Gerard with an air of satisfaction. 'You know Gulliver ran off to Newcastle? Yes, of course you know that. Lily hasn't heard from him.'

`I expect she thinks he's got a girl up there! I think she should go after him. So you've seen Lily?'

`No, of course not!'

`Perhaps he wants to vanish until he can return <sup>in</sup> triumph `In that case he'll just vanish.'

`But you've seen Tamar?'

`You think I've seen everybody! Actually, I have literally Tamar, but not to talk to. My God, she's sleek, you wouldn't recognise her.'

`What do you mean, "sleek"?'

`Well, fit, in cracking form.'

`Really – how splendid!'

`I don't know whether it's splendid,' said Gerard, `it doesn't seem real. I think she may be deranged or drugged or something.'

`I could never make out what was the matter with her -.just Violet I suppose.'

`Do you know, I don't think Tamar cared at all – about Jenkin -'

Rose said hastily, to cut off his emotion, 'I'm sure she cared. She's such an odd girl, she conceals things.'

`She's been seeing that priest, your parson.'

`Father McAlister.'

`She's been baptised and confirmed.'

`Good heavens! Well, if it's done her some good -'

`She's been stuffed full of a lot of consoling lies. Gideon's been looking after her too.'

`Gideon?'

`It seems so. I found her round at my – his – house twice lately. Of course I tried to see her, but she wouldn't see me.'

Rose thought, he's furious because Gideon is succeeding where he's failed. I must change the subject. 'Do you find you can work well in Jenkin's house? Are you writing something?'

`No. I'm not going to write – anything. I've decided not to.'

`Gerard!'

`I haven't anything to say. Why write half-baked rubbish just for the sake of writing?'

`But you -'

`Crimond's book is being published by the Oxford University Press. I may be able to get hold of a proof copy from somebody who works there.'

As soon as Crimond's name was spoken it seemed as if the whole conversation had been simply steering towards it. Gerard, who had been looking away, now looked directly at Rose, he flushed and his lips parted, his face expressing a kind of surprise.

`Have you seen Crimond?’

`Of course not.'

As Rose was trying to think of' something suitable to say Gerard got up. 'I must go. I've sold my car, that's another thing that's happened. I'll have to get a taxi. I can walk actually. Thanks for the coffee.'

`Wouldn't you like whisky, brandy?' Rose got up too.

`No, thanks. Rose, I'm sorry to be so – so – hideous.'

Rose wanted to embrace him, but he went away with a wave, without kissing her. The savour of that word hideous remained in the room. Rose could taste it upon her lips. She Ihought, he is sick, he is sick, he is poisoned by those thoughts, by those terrible thoughts.

Gerard, at home in Jerkin's parlour, was feeling wretched because he had not been able to communicate with Rose. He regretted what he had said to her. In conveying his news he had adopted a surly cynical tone, he had sneered at almost everyone he mentioned. He had behaved badly, he had lost his rational reticence, he had been deliberately hostile and hurtful to Rose. He thought, I am not myself, my soul is sick, I am under a curse.

Crimond was the name of the curse which Gerard was under. He could think of nothing and no one else and could not see how this degrading and tormenting condition could change. He thought every day of going to see Crimond, and every day saw how impossible this was. He dreaded seeing thr book in case it was very good, equally in case it was not. Of course he thought continuously about Jenkin, but his mourning had been somehow taken over by Crimond, everything to do with Jenkin was misted over and contaminated by Crimond; and how terrible that was, and how degraded and vile Gerard had become to allow it to happen. Gerard was not even sure by now whether he found it conceivable that Crimond could have murdered Jenkin. It couldn't be true. And yet..Why had Jenkin been there? He said he didn't go to Crimond's house. Crimond must have invited him or lured him. Maybe it was an accident, but had not Crimond somehow made air accident possible, unconsciously as it were? Could this make sense? Another rumour that circulated, and which was men tinned to Gerard by a malicious acquaintance who added that of course he did not believe it, was that Jenkin and Crimond had been lovers, and it was ajealousy killing. This simply could not be true. Jenkin had never been close to Crimond, and would never have concealed anything of such important, from Gerard. He could not believe anything of the sort. And yet, perhaps, might not Jenkin and Crimond, possibly very long ago, have been very close friends or lovers, and would not Jenkin have felt bound to keep this secret? Perhaps there hail been something – and such things can be timeless. Mid Gerard's 'proposal' to Jenkin somehow – not of course by Jenkin telling Crimond – but by some perceptible change in Jenkin's demeanour and plans, imparted to Crimond that `something had happened', even that Jenkin was thinking of leaving his celibate state? Had Jenkin suddenl^y become, in some mysterious way, newly attractive? If' so then in some sense Gerard was responsible forJenkin's death. But this idea, awful as it was, was shadowy, and tortured him less than some very particular images of the hypothetical relationship, however long ago, between Jenkin and Crimond. And then he kept hearing Jenkin's voice, laughing, saying: 'Come live with me and be my love.'

On that day when Jenkin had left Tamar so hurriedly `for an emergency' and had said, 'Stay and keep warm, I'd like to think you were here, stay here till I come back,' Tamar had waited, at first feeling a security in being alone in Jenkin's house, then after a while beginning to feel wretched and lonely and longing for his return. She went into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator at bread, butter, cheese, she looked at tins of beans in the larder and apples on a dish. It was as if ibr her the food were contaminated, or seen in some future state mouldering away. She could not eat. She lay down on Jenkin's bed, but though she turned on the electric fire the room was cold. She shivered under a blanket, lacking the will to burrow deeper into the bed. The little infinitesimal spark of hope which she had gained simply from Jerkin's presence was extinguished. It was blackness again, ravaged, smashed, crushed, pulverised blackness, like the night after the earthquake, only the dark was silent, there were no voices, no one was there, only herself, her vast awful smashed up self. Tamar, <sub>i</sub>n running to Jenkin, had wanted simply to be saved from some sort of imminent screaming insanity. The speech she had made to him about becoming a Christian and about magic and so on had been entirely impromptu, something wild, even cynical, said to startle Jenkin and perhaps herself. The words were hollow, another voice speaking through her. Of course she had listened, but with unabated despair, even with a kind of contemptuous anger to Father McAlister's talk about `accepting Christ as her Saviour,' which seemed to her like the gabble of a witch doctor. Now, waiting for Jenkin to conic back, she gave herself up to the old repetitive misery, and to waiting impatiently, then anxiously, for his return. After a while she started inventing excellent reasons why he had nol come back, he had said it was an emergency, someone was seriously ill, or even more miserable than she was, or bad attempted suicide, he was holding someone's hand, he was urgently needed, he was detained. During this time Tamar had nothing to do. She thought vaguely of cleaning the house, but the house was clean. She made herself a cup of tea, and washed up her cup and saucer, together with a mug which was beside the sink. After some time, after hours had passed, she could do nothing but feel very anxious, then very frightened, because Jenkin had not returned. She lay down and fell into a chilled coma, she got up, she cried for a while. About five o'clock she decided to go and started writing a letter to Jenkin which sh, then tore up. She put on her coat but could not make up her mind to return to Acton and to her mother. At last she rang upGerard and asked if he knew where Jenkin was. Gerard told her he was dead.

Gerard had been one of the first people to learn of the evcm for a curious reason. The police had asked Crimond if he knew Jenkin's next of kin, or closest connection, and Crimond haul given them Gerard's name and address. Gerard came back from the London Library to find the police on the doorstep. He was taken to a police station in South London where he was questioned about Jenkin, about Crimond, about the situation, about their relationship. It was partly, perhaps largelv, Gerard's testimony which saved Crimond from being treated as a 'suspect'. Gerard was saved from having to identify his friend's body by the fact that Marchmcnt had instantly, on Crimond's 'phone call, made contact with the local police and made his own appearance on the spot in the role of best friend. The whole matter remained, during that day, in a state of confusion and coming and going, during which Gerard might well have come face to face with Crimond but did not. He got back home in fact just in time to receive Tamar's telephone call. Gerard asked her where she was. Tamar said she was in a telephone box. Gerard told her to wait there and he would fetch her by car. Tamar said, no, thank you, she would go home, her mother was waiting, and rang off, leaving Gerard to reproach himself for having, in his own shocked state, told her,the news so bluntly. She went back to Acton, said nothing to Violet, listened to Violet's complaints, toyed with her supper and went to bed early. Her condition then, as she saw it fterwards, was the sort of suspended shock which enables a oldier whose arm has been blown off to walk, talk sensibly, ven crack jokes, before quite suddenly falling dead. Tamar ever told anyone, except Father McAlister, that she had been ith_.jenkin on that day. The idea of being questioned about it as intolerable. Anyway, that meeting was a secret between her and Jenkin. Tamar had not waited to be told by Gerard how Jenkin had died, it was sufficient to know that he was dead. Then after she had gone to bed that night and was lying in the darkness choking with grief, it occurred to her that,,whatever might have happened to him, he had been killed by the dead child; and henceforth and forever anyone who ame near to her would be cursed and destroyed. So she was responsible for Jenkin's death.

On the following day Tamar had an appointment to see the priest which she had intended to cancel but had forgotten to do so. She kept the appointment, and thereafter saw him at regular intervals. Father McAlister specialised in desperate cases. Over Tamar, he might positively have been said to gloat. His eyes sparkled but he did not underestimate his difficulties. His father had been a High Anglican clergyman, his mother a devout Methodist. Father McAlister could pray as soon as he could speak and the high spiritual rhetoric of the Bible and of Cranmer's Prayer Book was more familiar to him than nursery rhymes. His God was that of his father, but lik Christ was that of his mother. He spoke the dignified and beautiful language of a reticent spirituality, but he breathed the fire of instant salvation. Beyond this felicitous amalgam lay Father McAlister's secret: he had by now ceased to believe in God or in the divinity of Christ, but he believed in prayer, in Christ as a mystical Saviour, and in the magical power which had been entrusted to him when he was ordained a priest, a power to save souls and raise the fallen. Herein, carefully judging her needs and her intelligence, he colluded with Tamar. He sought diligently in her despair for the tiny spas k of hope which could be kindled into a flame. When she called herself evil he appealed to her reason, when she proclaimed disbelief he explained faith, when she said she hated God lie spoke of Christ, when she rejected Christ's divinity he preached Christ's power to save. He sang both high and low. He promised strength through repentance, and joy through renewal of life. He exhorted her to remake herself into an instrument fit for the service of others. He used the oldest argument in the book (sometimes called the Ontological Proof) which, in Father McAlister's version, said that if witha pure passion you love God, then God exists, because He has to) After all, what your best self, your most truthful soul desires must be real, and not to worry too much about what it's called, To these arguments, this struggle, this as it were dance which she was executing with the priest, Tamar become addicted She surrendered herself to him as to an absorbing task. She, was moving, as it seemed to her, and thus it came to her also in dreams, through a vast palace where doors opened, doom closed, rooms and vistas appeared and vanished and she knew no way, yet there was a way, and the thing to do was to keep going forward. A great many different things had to fit together, had to, for her, for Tamar, for her salvation from despair and degradation and death. That breathless, precautions, often tearful, prolonged and ingenious 'fitting together' was perhaps the cleverest thing that Tamar had ever done. Shy must live, she must be healed. This hope, appearing first as an intelligent determination, coexisted with the old despair, which now began to seem like self-indulgence, her sense that she deserved no happiness and no healing and was doomed. At this early period she recalled with bitter tears the time when she had felt innocent and was proud and pleased to be called an angel, and a 'good girl' who would always `do people good'. Her fallenness from this state made her especially anxious to avoid Gerard who had done so much to build up this illusion. This shunning of Gerard, almost a resentment Against him, was what gave Gideon his chance since he emerged as the only person with whom Father McAlister.Could discreetly cooperate. Here the priest found an eager, even too enthusiastic, ally; and hence the surprising appearance of Tamar and even Violet at the Christmas rituals.

At a certain point surrender almost seemed a matter of logic. When so much had clearly happened to her, been done for her and to her, must she not acknowledge the reality of the source? These formalities were important as symbols and assertions and promises. This belongingness would express a real bond and a real freedom. It was time for citizenship, for the initiation into the mystery. Tamar was moved by gratitude, by the loving diligence of her mentor, and by a liberal carelessness which was, she sometimes thought, a fresh, perhaps better, form of her despair. Why not? Had she not come to believe in magic? She wanted even to brand herself as having moved away from those whose opinions she had once valued so much, moved into a different house, a different world, which they would condemn in terminology which now seemed to her shallow and banal. There was a way and she must go on moving forward, she was not yet safe. The rites of baptism and confirmation took place on the same day. A;godmother and a godfather were necessary. Tamar found her godmother, a Miss Luckhurst, one of her school teachers now living in retirement. Father McAlister provided a hastily introduced godfather in the person of an almost speechless young curate. Immediately after the ceremony she took communion. The magic, for which she was now ready, exerted its power. Tamar could rest, her breath was quiet, her eues serene. She put on the 'sleekness' of which Gerard had spoken and the tranquillity which had led him to say that she did nol care about Jenkin's death. She was able to pray. The priest had talked much to her about prayer, how it was simply a quietness, an attentive waiting, a space made for the presetwo, of God. Tamar felt that she made the space and something filled it.

Tamar was perfectly aware of her cleverness, was evert ready to accuse herself of 'cheating'. She once used this word to her mentor who replied, 'My child, you can't cheat – heir., and here alone, you cannot cheat. What you desire purely and with all your heart is of one substance with the desire.' He curl this was a truth which had to be 'lived into'. Tamar did her best to live into it, at first simply in escaping from hell, later in practising what seemed an entirely new kind of calmnem, Father McAlister was bold enough to speak of irreversible change. Tamar was not so sure. Was this religious magic (if merely psychological magic? The priest dismissed this almost nonsensical doubt. Tamar could not believe in the old God and the old Christ. Did she really believe in the new God and the new Christ? Was she indeed one of the 'young' to whom belonged the 'new revelation', new, as revelation is renewed in every age? Were there many many people like herself, or was she alone with a mad priest? She had 'joined' because her teacher wanted her to 'belong'. ^In an empty church in Islington her face had been touched with water, in a crowded church in Primrose Hill her head had been touched by A bishop's hand. She now 'went to church' but as it were secretively, alone with God. She did not want to join a slimly group to discuss the Christian attitude. She was well aware of her teacher's immense tact, and that he had spent his holiday talking to her and enjoying every moment of it. Indeed diry. were, she sometimes felt, on holiday together. She had been, with him, self-absorbed, looking after herself, learning a religious mythology as she discovered hitherto unknown regiono of her own soul. She was, to use his words, 'getting to know ho Christ'. If Christ saves, Christ lives, he told her. That is the resurrection and the life. Tamar's reflections on this mystery did not dismay her, indeed she looked forward to pursuing diem. Obviously religion rested on something real; she let her reason sleep on that. She went on long walks through London And sat in churches. Obediently, she read the Bible, Kierkegaard, StJohn of the Cross, Julian of Norwich. She felt light and weightless and empty, as if she were indeed living on white wafers of bread and sips of sweet red wine. She was, for die moment, her mentor warned her, being carried upon Npiritual storm wind which would one day cease to blow, just its, one day, her meetings with her priest must become much less frequent, and much less intense. Then, Tamar knew, she Would be forced to test the 'fitting together' and the 'having it every way', by which she had been saved from death and hell.

All this time Tamar carried around with her the horrors which had, in Father McAlister's words, 'driven her into the arms of the Almighty': the dead child, her faithlessness to Duncan, her cruelty to Jean, the shock of Jenkin's death in which she had felt so mysteriously involved, her awful relationship with her mother. Tamar, out of her old bitter godless Nirength, had been capable of saying nothing to Violet, on that evening, about Jenkin's death. She was also capable, in the i uthless reticence necessary for her 'recovery', of telling Violet nothing about what was happening to her and how she was spending her time. Relations between Tamar and her mother gradually and almost entirely broke down. Violet kept asking Tamar when she was going back to work, Tamar kept saying she was on leave. Violet said Tamar would lose her job, Tamar said she didn't care. Tamar tried to say 'kind things' to her mother, but it was as if, here, she simply did not know the language of kindness. Everything she said irritated Violet into spiteful replies. Later on they simply stopped addressing each the^y and lived in the house as strangers. Tamar was out all day, in churches, in libraries, or in the clergy house in slington where her meetings with her teacher took place. Father McAlister, to whom she reported everything, kept Dying that that problem would be solved later on; Tamar ouspected that he had, at present, no idea how. About the other things she had gradually, as part of other changes in her reviving heart, begun to feel better, though not yet without fear of relapse. At tunes the old horrors still seemed like unassimilable matter, stones, darts, the poisoned heads of broken arrows. She had been able to rid herself'of the insane irrational superstitious indeed wicked thought that she had `brought about'jenkin's death. She was able to feel a natural grief. Many frightful pains grew less, repentant regret, like a kind of knowledge, gradually replaced self-destructive self-hating remorseful misery and despair. There were differences and she understood the differences. She went on tormenting herself about Jean and Duncan, had Duncan told Jean about Tamar, had Jean told Duncan about the child? I gave away his secret, I cursed her. I must be hated and despised. Father McAlister said wise things about not worrying about other people's thoughts. Where one could see no way to mend matters, one must just keep them in mind, surround them with good reflections. The desire to mend was often a nervous selfish urge to justify oneself, and not a vision of how anything could be made better. He told her to wait patiently, to make abstention from action into a penance, not to meddle, to leave it to God. But Tamar doubted her patience and wanted very much to write a long emotional letter to Jean.

About the dead child Father McAlister, to his great satisfaction, was at last able to do something definitive. He had said all sorts of things to Tamar, he told her to keep the child with her, not touched, not agonised about, as a sad presence, lived with, not hated, not feared, not frenziedly yearned for. He told her to think of the child as the Christ child. Tamar found this difficult, the priest said it was a spiritual exercise. Then at last Father McAlister, alone with Tamar in a church in north London, performed a rite which he had never performed before, and which indeed he had largely invented, a kind of burial or blessing of the dead child, a formal affirmation of love and farewell, containing an act of contrition. He did not say so to Tamar, but he also thought of this performance as an exorcism, a propitiation of'a potentially dangerous spirit: for he was not without his superstitions and had seen, in his time, very terrible demons emerging from the unconscious minds of' his flock, or from whatever the places are where demons live. Tamar murmured that she acknowledged her transgressions and her sins were ever before her, that she had been poured out like water and all her bones were out of joint, that she desired to be washed and to be whiter than snow, that a broken and contrite spirit might not be despised, that broken bones might after all rejoice, and she might put off her sackcloth and be girded in gladness. Father McAlister then blessed the poor nameless vanished embryo, desired it to repose in peace and be received by God into those heavenly habitations where the souls of them that sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity, and that God might look upon Tamar's contrition, accept her tears and assuage her pain. Then was He to bless her and keep her, make His face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her, liftup the light of His countenance upon her, and give her peace. This rite, a mixture of old familiar words and his own pastiche, and thought of by the priest as a most holy farrago, gave him intense pleasure; and he was rewarded too by the sight of Tamar's face, tear-stained and radiant.

‘You know what today is?' said Rose.

‘Of course,' said Gerard.

They said no more. It was Sinclair's birthday. He would have been fifty-three.

Two nights ago Rose had woken in the night, hearing a dog scratching at the door of the flat. She had woken up thinking at once: It's Regent! He's come back! She put on the lamp beside her bed. The house was silent. Of course it was not Regent, it was a dream. All the same she got up and turned on all the lights in the flat, opened the door and turned on the lights on the stairs. She even went down and opened the door into the street in case there had been, somewhere, some poor dog, some real dog. But there was nothing. After that she could not sleep.

She recalled this now, sitting in the little sitting room of Jenkin's house, having tea with Gerard. This having tea together was a custom which they kept up intermittently, though the 'spread' had grown steadily smaller and less sumptuous as the passing years had somehow removed the substance from the idea of `tea time'. At Boyars it retained some of its majesty for the sake of Annushka. But today, with Gerard, there had been no scones, no sandwiches, no bread, butter or jam, just some rather old biscuits and a fruit cake. Neither of them had eaten much. This was partly because Reeve was coming to pick Rose up and take her out to dinner at his hotel. This picking up had been Reeve's idea, he said he wanted to see Gerard, they had not met for so long; Rose rang Gerard, it seemed inevitable.

Gerard was angry that Rose had thought it conceivable that Reeve should come and pick her up. Of'course he had said that he would be delighted to see Reeve, and he was concealing his annoyance from Rose, or trying to, but he could see her sad look, and cursed himself for not having vetoed the rotten idea, or at least now evidently not managing to dissemble enough to be a pleasant companion.

This living at Jenkin's place was not working, it had been a bad plan, based on an illusion. Whatever did I expect, Gerard wondered, that I could live a better life here as an ascetic hermit, that I could somehow become Jenkin? Did I think that? Or was I just trying to ^get away from Gideon and Pat? The house resisted him. At first he had tried not to alter it, then as that seemed wrong he made a few changes, a new sink in the kitchen, a larger refrigerator, a few of his watercolours brought over from the house in Notting Hill. Some of his furniture was still there, relegated to the upper flat, some was in store, some had been purchased by Gideon. His books were all over the place, at Notting Hill, with Rose, or here, not unpacked, as he had been unable to decide to touch Jenkin's books which still occupied the shelves. The house felt dead, it was senseless, it was becoming dusty and untidy. Rose had said she would come and clean it, but he had told her not to bother and she had not pursued the matter.

The tea things, Jenkin's teapot, Jenkin's milk jug, the cake on too small a plate, the biscuits on too large a one, were perched on a small folding table upon which Gerard had spread a flowery linen drying-up cloth, imagining it to be a table cloth. The cake, awkwardl^y cut, had spread its large moist crumbs upon the cloth, the biscuits, broken anyway, had deposited their smaller drier crumbs, and some crumbling mess upon the carpet wasnow beingabsently pushed by 'Gerard's foot onto the green tiles in front of the gas fire. Gerard was wearing slippers. He looked, Rose thought, tired and older.

Gerard was irritably aware of Rose's sympathetic stare. He felt tired and older. He had looked that morning, when shaving, for his familiar handsome face, so humorous, so ironic, so finely carved and glowing with intelligence, and it was not there. What he saw was a heavy fleshy surly unhappy face, dark-ringed wrinkle-rounded eyes, dulled extinguished skin, limp greasy hair. Rose had asked, tiresomely, as usual, whether he was writing. He was not. He was not reading either, although he sometimes gazed at the pages of some of Jenkin's books. He thought obsessively about _,Jenkin, about Jenkin's death, about Crimond. He kept imagining scenes in which Crimond shot Jenkin through the forehead. Through the forehead was what Marchment had said. Gerard could have done without that picture. Crimond had lured Jenkin there and murdered him. Why? As a substitute for murdering Gerard, as a revenge on Gerard for some crime, some slight, some contemptuous remark which Gerard had made to him and instantly forgotten, thirty or more years ago? So I am to blame for Jenkin's death, thought Gerard. My fault, my sin, brought it about. I can't live with this, I'm being poisoned, I'm being destroyed, and Crimond intended that too. He thought daily of going to see Crimond, but daily decided that it was impossible. When he was at his most obsessed he sought for help by recalling Jenkin laughing at him, and this sometimes worked, though it made him so deadly sad, and more often returned him to his loss and to the hell which he was inhabiting with Crimond. They were in hell together, he and Crimond, and sooner or later must destroy each other.

Of course Gerard did not reveal these thoughts to anybody, certainly not to Rose who still sometimes tried to draw him into speculations. In conversation with her he now quickly dismissed as unthinkable any notion thatjenkin's death could have been other than a simple accident. Nor did he reveal to her another obsessive pain which left him no peace and made of his present life a fruitless interim. His acquaintance at the Oxford Press had said that he would soon, he hoped, be able to lay hands on a proof of Crimond's book, and would send it to Gerard at once by special messenger. Gerard dreaded the arrival of this thing. He did not want to read Crimond's hateful book, he would want rather to tear it up, but he was condemned to it, he would have to read it. If it was bad he would feel a sickening degrading satisfaction, if it was good lie would feel hatred.

Rose was looking older too, or perhaps it was just that, since he felt disturbed and irritated by her, he was at last looking at her, instead of regarding her as a nebulous extension of himself, a mist presence, a cloud companion. He was suddenly able to see the parts not the whole. She had had her hair cut too close and too short, revealing her cheeks, the tips of her ears, her face looked unprotected and strained, her lightless hair was not grey but deprived of hue, like a darkened plant. Her lips looked dry and parched and scored with little lines, and she had dabbed too much powder on her pretty nose. Only her dark blue eyes, so like her brother's, her courageous eyes as someone had called them, were undimmed, looking at him now with some silent appeal from which he turned away. She was wearing a green silkish dress, ver^y simple, very smart, with an amethyst necklace. It reminded him of the dress she had worn at the midsummer dance, when they had waltzed together, he even suddenly remembered the music and his arm round her waist and the stars over the deer park. Then he thought, she has dressed herself up for Reeve.

`Gerard, don't crush the crumbs into the rug.'

`Sorry.'

Rose straightened the rug. 'It's such a pretty rug.'

`I gave it to him.'

`I'll take these things away. Reeve will be here soon.'

So she's tidying the place up for Reeve. ‘I suppose he'll want a drink. I'll get the sherry.'

`Reeve likes gin and tonic.'

`I'll get the gin and tonic. Don't fuss with the tea things.'

`We can't have them here. It won't take a moment.' Rose found the tray propped against the wall and started loading it.

`I haven't finished!'

The door bell rang.

`I'll let him in,' said Rose. She went into the hall, leaving the tray on the table. Gerard stood in the doorway of the sitting room holding his tea cup. Reeve came in, was welcomed, took off his coat, said there was an east wind blowing, that it was starting to rain, and was it all right to leave his car just outside the house. Gerard retreated with his cup, picked up the tray, sidled past Reeve who was entering the room, and searching for the gin in the kitchen heard Rose asking her cousin for news of the children. Holding drinks, gin and tonic for Reeve and Gerard, sherry for Rose, they stood together awkwardly beside the fire like people at a party.

`Reeve says we mustn't stay long because of our table.'

Reeve, in an expensive dark suit, looked burly, broad-shouldered, his face weathered, ruddy, rosy-checked, his skin rough. The big broad nails upon his large practical uneasy hands were clean but jagged. He wore a wedding ring. His brown hair was carefully combed. He had probably combed it in the car, even standing at the door, before he came in. He peered up from under his softly lined brow and his projecting eyebrows at Gerard, expressing a sort of determined wariness. Of course the^y had often met over the years, they knew each other reasonably well, they liked each other reasonably well. Rose found herself for the first time anxious in case Gerard should seem to patronise Reeve, to condescend. So that was what he usually did, and she had never noticed it before?

Reeve was looking round at the little room, the faded torn wallpaper, the emergent patches of yellow wall. He could not conceal a little surprise.

`This is Riderhood's place?'

`Yes.'

`Rose says you live here now.'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘A sad business.'

`Yes. Sad.'

Reeve, leaning against the small mantelpiece, picked up the grey purple-striped stone which Rose had given to Jenkin years ago. 'I'm prepared to bet this stone came from Yorkshire.'

`Oh yes – yes!' said Rose. 'It came from that beach -'

`Yes, I know where.' They smiled at each other. Reeve continued to hold the stone.

`How's farming?' said Gerard.

`Awful.'

`I'm told farmers always say that.'

`Rose tells me the Cambuses are looking for a house in France. Everyone seems to be on the move.'

`Reeve is looking for a house in London,' said Rose.

`Really?' said Gerard, smiling pleasantly.

`Well, or a flat,' said Reeve apologetically. 'The children liave been wanting one for ages.' He exchanged a glance with Rose.

The door bell rang.

Gerard went to the door and opened it onto the east wind, the rain, the dark street with distant yellow lamps reflected in wet pavements, Reeve's Rolls-Royce glittering in the light from the doorway. A youth was standing outside holding a parcel.

`Mr Hernshaw? I've got this for you from Oxford.'

`Oh, thank you – won't you come in? Is that your motor bike? Have you come all the way -?'

`Oh, all right – thanks. I'd better lock up the bike, I suppose I can lean it against the wall here.'

Gerard took the parcel, it was bulky and heavy. He put it on the chair in the hall. The boy, inside, slid off his mackintosh. He took off his crash helmet revealing a mass of blond hair.

`Come in – would you like a drink? Let me introduce, Rose Curtland, Reeve Curtland. I'm afraid I don't know your name?'

`Derek Wallace. No, I won't have any sherry, thanks. I wouldn't mind a soft drink.'

`He's ridden from Oxford on his motorbike in the rain,' said Gerard.

`Well, no, it's only just started to rain.'

`You'll have had the wind in your face all the way,' said Reeve, who thought about winds.

`I expect you'd like something to eat too?' said Rose. 'Or what about some hot soup?'

`No, really – just lemonade or Coke or something. I mustn't stay long, I've got to get back.'

`Are you an undergraduate?' said Gerard.

`Yes.'

`What college? What are you reading?'

Rose, in the kitchen, was fetching out orange juice, a tin of soup, bread, butter, cheese. She had seen the parcel in the hall and knew, for Gerard had told her he was expecting it, what it contained. She felt sick and unreal. The tall blond boy had a resemblance to Sinclair. She thought, Regent scratching at the door, and now this. Oh God. But it's nothing to do wide Sinclair. We are surrounded by demons.

`Did that young chap remind you of anyone?' said Reeve, guiding his Rolls through the London evening traffic.

`Yes.'

`Of course, Neville's not so thin, and the nose and mouth no, not really like -'

`Not really.'

Of course, thought Rose, they don't remember Sinclair, they don't recall what he was like. Do they ever look at photos of him? No, of course not. They have unmade him. Originally, they had to. Now he's just forgotten. They must have I'd, uneasy about that inheritance, not exactly guilty, but it mum have been an awkward transition which they wanted to put behind them, to be as if it had always been them and riot w, They had not wept at Sinclair's funeral, at that disposal of lik broken body. They never knew Sinclair, they never really liked him. Perhaps that wasn't unreasonable. He had alwayo treated them as country cousins. They did not have long to wait for the title, the father so soon followed the son into non-being. Another bit of luck. They could not but have been pleased when that accident happened. At the funeral they must have been concealing their delight at such a remarkable, unexpected turn of events. Sad of course, but for them, lucky, splendid, for them and for their children and their children’s children.

As Reeve, who was not used to driving in London, fell silent, preoccupied with the Shepherd's Bush roundabout where an unwary driver may suddenly find himself on the motorway, Rose was being assailed by terrible new fears. That boy, that revenant, what was he doing now, alone with Gerard, what was happening now? Had Gerard noticed the weird resemblance, how could he not have done? Supposing Gerard were to_.fall in love with that boy, that sudden sinister intruder, coming in out,if the rainy dark and bearing such a fateful burden? People who so much resemble the dead may be demons, suppose the demonic boy were to kill Gerard, suppose he were to be found mysteriously dead, like Jenkin? Perhaps the mystery of Jenkin's death was but the forerunner, preluding that of Gerard? The hideous idea then occurred to her that perhaps the fateful figure was Sinclair himself, Sinclair returned after due time as an envious ghost or revengeful spirit, taking, through Gerard, revenge upon them all. For were they not all guilty of his death, for not preventing him from taking up that Loaf sport, or not, on that day, proposing to him some other Irian? Did we not bring about his death, she thought, we who loved him so much, by our negligence, by certain particular careless acts – and they, the others, the gainers, by their perhaps unconscious prayers? Rose knew that these were awful and wicked imaginings, brought about by all sorts of present accidents, by grief itself, old old grief and the torture chamber of fate. Yet she could not stop the swift work of her Mick thought, the spinning out of awful pictures. The boy had brought that book, which was even now with Gerard, its proximity so dangerous to him, a vibrating ticking infernal machine. Perhaps Gerard, sitting up to read the book, would die mysteriously in the night?

Reeve, now safely in the Bayswater Road, the next hazard being Marble Arch, was saying, 'Of course no one can take the place of their mother, but they've always been so attached to you, ever since you were their Auntie Rose when they were little. And, you know, this change has been so terrible for us all – we have to think ourselves into a new era, make, really, a new eginning. Our life must have a different pattern – as of course it must an^yway with the children almost grown up – well, some would say grown up, I suppose, but in so many ways bey are still children, they're at a dangerous vulnerable age, hey need love and care, they need a home with a centre. liat's where you come in. We must see more of you – and my dea is this, and I hope you'll think it over, that you should lane to live with us at Fettiston. Mrs Keithley can run the house, she practically does it now, and we're getting in another village woman, a sturdy soul. You won't have to be a housekeeper. What we want is your being there, and somehow as being in charge of us. You know how highly we think of you in every way. And of course we'll be in charge of you too. I t's too early to talk of happiness, the children can't conceive of being happy again, but of course they will be – and I shall recover, I shall have to, and people do. And, dear Rose, I do see your being with us in that new way as something, for all of us, happy and good. We'll have a place in London, a big flat or a house, and we'd hope you'd live there too, or keep your present flat as well, we wouldn't monopolise you! But I can't help feeling your belonging more to us would be good for you too. We've often thought – well – how lonely you must be all by yourself. I know you have old friends like Gerard and Patricia, but they inevitably have other interests, and there's nothing like family. Anyway, think it over. I'm sorry to spring it on you in this hugger-mugger way, I didn't mean to say it in the car! The children have been at me for some time to make this little speech! I feel sure we'll persuade you – when you realise how much we need you, you'll want to come!'

Rose thought, Aunt Rose, the lonely ageing spinster aunt, so much needed, to take charge, to be taken charge of. Perhaps they had even discussed what to do with her in her old age. And why not, to all of it why not? It was not just the voice of common sense, it was the voice of love. She thought, perhaps after Jenkin's death all the old patterns are broken. I must stop mourning and yearning. She had missed Neville's and Gillian's childhood. Soon she could be baby-sitting for them, cherishing their children, holding them on her knee. (But I don't like children, thought Rose!) New duties were after all a source of life. Somebody needed her in a new way. And Gerard – perhaps even now she had already lost him, or lost, it was more just to say, her illusion of something more, something closer and more precious, which he had yet to give her.

`To talk of more frivolous matters,' Reeve was going on, `we're planning to go on a cruise in the Easter vac, four whole weeks, and we want you to be our guest – please, please! It sounds marvellous, the Greek islands, then southern Russia. I've always wanted to be on the beach at Odessa! You will come, Rose dear, won't you?'

`I've got some engagements round about then,' said Rose, `an old school friend is coming over from America -'

`I'll send you the details – do fit it in, your being with us would make it perfect – and let us know soon because of the booking.'

Rose was shocked at the speed with which she had invented the old school friend. Well, she knew how to lie. And all her old illusions, were they not lies too? She did not want to say yes to the cruise, yet she realised she did not want to say no either. Did she not at last – had it come to that – simply want to go where she was needed?

Reeve was silent now, manoeuvring round Marble Arch, finding the right street to turn into, following Rose's directions. There was the question of where to park the car. Did a yellow line matter at this time of night? The street was already crammed with parked cars. Would it not be best if he set Rose down to claim their table? He hoped to be back fairly soon! Rose got out of the car, waved goodbye to her anxious cousin, and saw the Rolls move slowly and uncertainly away. At least t had stopped raining. She hurried into the hotel and left her oat. After that, instead of going to the dining room, she found a telephone and rang Gerard's number. The 'phone rang everal times, Rose could already picture herself in a taxi racing back to his house with death fear in her heart.

`Hello.'

`Gerard – it's me.'

`Oh – yes -'

`I'm at the hotel. Reeve is parking the car.'

`What is it?' He sounded remote and cold.

`Are you all right?'

`Yes, of course.'

`Is that boy still with you?'

`No, he had to go back.'

`Are you reading the book?'

`Crimond's book' No. I'm just going out.' <sup>`</sup>Oh – where to?'

`To get something to cat.'

`Will you read the book tonight?'

`I shouldn't think so. I'll go to bed.' `Gerard -'

`Yes.'

`I'll see you soon, won't 1?'

^`Yes, yes. I must be off.'

`The rain has stopped.'

^`Good. Look, I must go.'

^`Goodnight, Gerard.'

He rang off. Of course the telephone always irritated hint But if only he had said, 'Goodnight, Rose.' She could have lived a while on that, as on a goodnight kiss.

Gerard, already in his overcoat, looked at the large parcel which was still where he had put it down on the chair in the hall. Of course Gerard had noticed the resemblance which had struck Rose as so frightening. Gerard too, in a different way, could not help sensing a meaning in the fact that just this messenger had come bringing just this object. Close to the boy, as he filled his glass with orange juice, he had a very odd quick flash of memory, the smell of young hair. Or perhaps it was simply the colour of the hair, so painfully reminiscent, its particular blondness, its lively growth and sheen, which he was perceiving and seeming to smell.

Now, alone with the object, he could not help seeing it as a fatal package – fatal to him, fatal perhaps to the world. For a moment he thought that, if this were the only copy, he would feel it his duty to destroy it.

Oh let there be not hate, but love, not pity, but love, not power, oh not power, no power except the spirit of Christ, prayed Father McAlister as with clasped hands, after pulling down the skirt of his cassock and setting his feet neatly together, he sat and watched the battle raging to and fro.

Violet's flat had been invaded, Violet was at bay. Tamar had invited Gideon and Patricia and Father McAlister to tea. No one had said anything to Rose or Gerard. The decision to rxclude these two had been a tacit one.

Pat was cleaning the kitchen. She had already been in Violet's bedroom and collected the mass of mouse-nibbled plastic bags into a sack, ready to be thrown away. The tea party had been taking place in Tamar's bedroom, where the lamps were switched on in the dark afternoon. Tamar had put it pretty cloth upon the folding table at which she used to study. Most of the tea things had been removed, even, by Pat, washed up. The ham sandwiches had attracted the priest, no One had touched the cakes. Gideon was in charge.

Violet,' he was saying, 'you must give in, you must let us look after everything, you must let me look after everything. We've been pussy-footing around for long enough, it's time for drastic measures. Can't you see that things have changed, it's a new era? How can we stand by and see you sink?'

`I am not sinking,' said Violet, 'thank you! And nothing has hanged except that Tamar has become cruel and has given up even trying to be polite to me. But that is our business. You and Patricia and this clergyman just walked in -'

`Tamar invited us.'

`This is my flat, not hers. I was not told or consulted -'

`You would have said no!' said Tamar.

`Evidently my views are of no account. I don't want to talk io you – I have asked you to go – I ask you again, please go!'

`They are my guests,' said Tamar, 'and they want to propose a plan, it's a good plan, so please hear it – you let us come to Notting Hill at Christmas time -'

`I was forced to come and I did not enjoy it.'

`Please understand, Mrs Hernshaw,' said the priest, 'that we mean well, we mean, as Tamar said, something good, we come in peace -'

`What sickening rubbish,' said Violet, 'and bringing this sentimental parson along is the last straw. You are all violent intruders, you are thieves, assassins, you smash your way into my privacy -' Violet was controlled, eloquent, only her voice at moments slightly hysterical.

`There are, as I see it,' said Gideon, 'two main points. The first is that Tamar must go back to Oxford. I should be glad if' we can regard this as settled.'

`I shall never allow Tamar to go back to Oxford.'

^`Actually,' said Tamar, 'you can't stop me.'

Tamar was sitting on her divan bed, the others on chairs about the little table upon which now only the plate of sugary cakes remained. Father McAlister, who had wanted to eat a cake but had been prevented when the farce of tea was ended by the acrimony of the discussion, wondered if he could take one now, but decided not to.

Tamar, dressed in a black skirt and black stockings and a grey pullover, was conspicuously calm. Gideon had been watching her with amazement. She had hitched up her skirl over her knees and stretched out her long slender legs ⁱⁿ a manner which he could not believe was entirely unconscious. She had ruffled her fine silky wood-brown green-brown hair into an untidy mop. She dressed as simply as before, probably in the same clothes, but looked different, cooler, older, and even in this scene more casual, certainly detached. Something has happened to her, thought Gideon, she has been through something. She's strong, she thinks it's now or never and she doesn't care whom she kicks in the teeth. She's quite got over that depression or whatever it was. It can't be just this simple-minded priest. Perhaps she's got a really splendid lover at last.

`I explained to you,' Violet went on, looking at her daughter venomously, 'that there is no money. I am still in debt. This flat costs money. Your grant never covered more than half of what kept you in luxury in that place. I need your earnings, we need your earnings. If Gideon has said otherwise he is a wicked liar. You have no sense of reality, you have let these people put fancy ideas in your head -'

‘I am going back to Oxford in the autumn,' said Tamar, fluffing up her hair and looking at Violet with a calm sad face. 'I've been in touch with the college -'

`I am certainly not going to pay for you!'

`Gideon will pay,' said Tamar, 'won't you, Gideon?'

`I don't want charity -'

`Certainly I will,' said Gideon, 'now, Violet, please don't shout. In fact Tamar is so economical that the grant will Imost cover her needs, I will pay the rest, and I will also pay our debts. I have – wait a moment – another suggestion to make which is that you should sell this flat -'

`I think this flat is beyond help,' said Patricia standing in the doorway. 'It's only fit to be burnt.'

`And that you and Tamar should move into our house,' said Gideon, 'into the flat we used to occupy -'

`It's a lovely flat,' said Patricia.

`We want someone there anyway just to keep an eye on the place when we're away, we wouldn't charge you anything -wait, wait – this could be, if you like, an interim move while we till see what we want to do next – but while Tamar's at Oxford -'

`You come here and suggest burning my flat,' said Violet, 'well, you can burn it with me in it. I'd rather live in hell than in your house.'

'Perhaps you are living in hell now,' said Father McAlister.

`If I am it is nothing to do with you, you loathsome hypocrite, I know your type, peering into people's lives and trying to control them, breaking up families, smashing things you don't understand! You all want to take my daughter away from me.'

`No^l.' said Gideon.

`She's all I've got and you want to steal her -'

`No, no,' said Father McAlister.

`Well, you can have her! I ask her, I beg her, to stay here

with me and do as I want – but if she doesn't she can go and I'll never see her again! I mean it! I hope you are pleased with your meddling now! Well, Tamar, what is it to be?'

`Of course I've got to go,' said Tamar in a matter-of-fact tone, 'but what you say doesn't follow.'

`Oh yes it does. Go then, go – and pack your things!'

`They are already packed,' said Tamar. 'You will change your mind.'

`I see, it's a conspiracy. It was all arranged beforehand. Wanting to help me was just a pretence!'

'No.'

`I am left to burn, I am left to die -you know that. For God's sake, Tamar, don't leave me, stay with me, tell those wicked wicked people to go away! What have they to do with us? You're all I have- I've given you my life!' The hysterical voice hit a ringing quivering piercing note which made everything in the room shudder. Patricia turned away from the door and hid her face.

Tamar did not flinch. She gave her mother a sad gentle look, almost of curiosity, and said ⁱⁿ a low resigned tone, 'Oh don't take on so – I'm going to Pat and Gideon – you'll come later – I'm sorry about this. I'm afraid it's the only way to do it.'

The original author of' this scene, which as Gideon felt afterwards had a curiously brittle theatrical quality, was Father McAlister. Reflecting upon Tamar's situation and her future he had had the excellent idea of appealing not to Gerard but to Gideon. The priest saw, rightly, in Gideon, the mixture of self-confidence, ruthlessness, stage-sense and shameless money required to carry off what might almost, in the end, amount to an abduction. He had however envisaged the plan as unfolding more slowly and under his own guidance. He had persuaded Tamar, more easil^y than he had expected, to play her part, emphasising that the great change would actually, also, constitute the rescue, perhaps even the salvation of her mother. Father McAlister's very brief' meetings with Violet had led him to a prognosis which was if anything grimmer than Tamar's own.

Gideon expected Violet to scream, and for a moment she seemed likely to as she drew her breath in a savage gasp like a fierce dog. She clenched her fists and actually bared her teeth. She said in a low voice, 'So you won't do anything for me, any more?'

`I am doing something for you,' said Tamar, 'as you will see later. But if you mean will I do whatever you want, no. I can't do that – and at the moment probably I can't do anything at all for you – I can do- nothing for you.' Tamar then turned her head away, looking at the window where net curtains, grey with dirt, hung in tatters. Then she. looked back, looking at Gideon with an alert prompting expression as if to say, can't we end this scene now?

Tamar had spoken so coldly, and now looked, as she ignored her mother and turned to Gideon, so ruthless, that a strange idea came into Father McAlister's head. Supposing it were all somehow false, the emotional drama, the passion play of salvation in which he and Tamar had been taking part? It was not that he thought that Tamar had been lying or play-acting. Her misery had been genuine, her obsession terrible. But in her desperation had she not used him as he came to hand, carrying out his instruction, as a savage might those of a medicine man, or as a sick patient obeys a doctor? Or why not simply say it was like an analysis, neurosis, transference, liberation into ordinary life, an ordinary life in which the liberated patient could snap his fingers at the therapist, and go his way realising that what he took for moral values or categorical imperatives on even the devil and the eternal fire were simply quirkish mental ailments such as we all suffer from, a result of a messy childhood, from which one can now turn cheerfully and ruthlessly away. Tamar had faced the devil and the eternal fire, he had seen her face twist with terror, and later, when he had exorcised the spirit of the malignant child, seen it divinely calm and bathed with penitential tears. Now Tamar seemed endowed with an extraordinary authority. Even Gideon, he could see, was startled by it. She was authoritative and detached and able, in this crisis with her mother, to freeze her feelings. It was her freedom she had wanted, perhaps all along, and now she could smell its proximity she was ready to trample on anyone. In this ritual of dismissal and liberation which he had been there to sanction, it was as if she had cursed her mother. The priest's `bright idea' had envisaged a row, certainly, but with it an emergence of Tamar's genuine love for her mother, which he imagine he had discerned deep within her. He had not wanted to release his penitent from one demon to see her seized by another. Tamar's former obedience, the predominant importance she had given to her mother's states and her will, had had something bad about it. He kept telling Tamar about a true and free love of her, a love in Christ, which could heal Violet as she, Tamar, had been healed. The priest had, in his Drier meetings with Violet, made her out as a monster. He could see, he thought, her terrible unhappiness, an unhappiness which made his sympathetic sentimental (she had used that word) soul wince and cringe, a black unhappiness, deeper and darker and harder than her daughter's, and he had seen too how her suffering had made her monstrous. He was not going to let his Tamar be any more this monster's victim. But must not, and by both of them, the poor monster be helped too? Now, as he looked at Tamar, who was brushing crumbs off her skirt and making the restless unmistakable shrugging movements of someone who is about to rise and depart, he wondered: is this new energy, this detachment, this authority, old perhaps simply a metamorphosis of an old deep hatred, whit It has been for so many years obediently kept in check? Have I liberated her not into Christ, but into selfish uncaring powri Have I perhaps simply created another monster? (In the very process however of unrolling these awful thoughts Fathri McAlister, by a gesture familiar to him, handed the whole matter over to his Master, knowing that it would be hands it back to him later in a more intelligible state.)

Violet, who had been glaring at Tamar open-mouthed, het eyes suddenly seeming like blazing rectangular holes, rear suddenly to her feet, rocking the table and making Gideon hastily shift his chair. She fumbled for her glasses in the pocket of her skirt. Taken by surprise by the intrusion, she was Gideon could see now, pathetically untidy, her blouse crumpled, her cardigan spotted with holes through which the colours of her blouse and skirt showed accusingly. She was raring down-at-heel slippers one of which had come off. She looked down, stabbing at it angrily with her foot. Gideon Moved the table. Violet went forward to the door. As she did so ohir composed her face. Patricia, who was standing in the hall, good hastily aside. Violet entered her bedroom, banged the door, and audibly locked it.

As soon as Violet's departing back was turned to her, Tamar too rose, and saying, 'Let's go,' darted to a cupboard td began pulling out her suitcases.

Gideon said, 'Oh dear!' and rose to his feet. Father McAlister automatically picked up one of the sugary cakes, a pink one and stuffed it whole into his mouth. They moved into the hall.

'Well,' said Patricia, 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Come on, let's get out, get Tamar away before she changes her mind.'

'She won't change her mind,' said Gideon.

'If only I'd got that sack out into the hall,' said Patricia, 'we could have taken it with us. I found such indescribable filth and mess in Violet's room, awful hairy decaying things under the bed, I couldn't even make out what they were.’

Patricia was putting her coat on. The priest picked up his. Tamar carried out three large suitcases and dumped them by the door. As she did so she looked at Father McAlister and an extraordinary glance passed between them. The priest thought, she has seen through me. Then: who has betrayed whom?

'I'm afraid the car's miles away,' said Patricia. 'Shall we all walk or shall I get it? We can carry the cases between us. I want to get out of here.' She said to the priest, 'Can I give you a lift?'

'No, thanks, I've got to see someone who lives nearby.'

Gideon said, 'You and Tamar get the car. There's no point in carrying the cases. We'll put them out on the landing. I'll I wait here. Violet might even emerge.'

`She won't. 0 K. Come on, Tamar.'

Gideon and the priest looked at each other. The priest, raising his eyebrows, motioned slightly with his head toward the closed bedroom door. Gideon, expressionless, continued to hold the door open onto the stairs. He said, 'Thank you very much. We'll talk again.'

'Yes.' Father McAlister sighed, then with a wave of his hand set off down the stairs and into the street.

Gideon waited until he heard the front door close. Then lie carefully closed the flat door and went to Violet's bedroom and knocked.

`Violet! They've gone. Come out now.'

After a short time Violet emerged. She had changed her clothes, combed her hair, powdered her nose, removed her glasses. She had evidently been crying, and elaborate powdering round her eyes had made the wrinkled skin pale, dry and dusty. She peered, frowning, at Gideon and he saw over her shoulder the chaotic room which had defeated Pat. She walked across to Tamar's tidy room, moved the table a little, then lifted the plate of'cakes and oflered it to Gideon. He took a cake. They both sat down on the bed. Gideon felt, for the firs time for many years, a sudden physical affection for his old friend, a desire, to which he did not yield, to hug her and o, laugh. He thought, somebody, a real strong person, a lovable, admirable person, has been lost here, ruined.

Violet's hair, like her daughter's, needed cutting but had been neatly combed and patted into shape. It was still brown, its lustre here and there embellished by single hairs of'a pale luminous grey. Her nose was slightly red at the nostrils, whether from a cold or recent weeping. Her small mouth, now touched by lipstick, was at its sternest. She stroked down her fringe over her brow, over her indelible frown, moulding it inoo shape with a familiar gesture. She had, Gideon reflected, het higher civil servant look. She looked in no way like a defeated woman. In taking Father McAlister's gamble Gideon had feared, perhaps wanted, something rather more weak and pliable. It was a moment for Violet to surrender to fate, bw she looked now unlikely to surrender to anything. They had both been thinking, and each allowed a space for the other to speak first.

`They'll be back,' said Gideon, 'at least Pat will ring the bell and I'll carry down the cases. The car is a good way off. We've got ten minutes. But of course I'll come in tomorrow.'

Violet said, 'Why did you spring this loathsome charade on me? That creep McAlister was the last straw.'

`It was his idea,' said Gideon not entirely truthfully. The strategy had been the priest's, the tactics certainly Gideon's. `It was a device, you understand.'

`To get Tamar away.'

`Yes.'

`But she could have gone any time, I wasn't keeping her a prisoner!'

`You know, in a way, you were. You had taken away her will. She had to have moral support -'

`Moral support?'

`To get out in a definite intelligible manner, with a reasonable explanation.'

`You mean sponging on you?'

`She couldn't just cut and run. There had to be a raid by a respectable rescue party.'

`It shows you think nothing of me, you think I'm not a person. That mob pushing their way in here without any warning! You wouldn't do that to anyone else. You feel contempt for me.'

`No, Violet -'

`All of you acting well-rehearsed parts.'

`You were acting too.'

`You think so? It was designed to humiliate me. All right, it was clever. My reactions could have been predicted, all my lines could have been written beforehand. It was like – it was -an attempt on my life.'

`I'm sorry,' said Gideon, 'but look, you don't really mind my paying a bit for Tamar at Oxford?'

`I don't care a hang -'

`Good, that's out of the way -'

`So long as I never see her again.'

`Then there's you.'

`I don't exist.'

`Oh shut up, Violet, think, you can think. McAlister thinks that Tamar really deeply loves you and -'

`She hates me. She's always been cold as hell to me, even ito a small child. Obedient, but icy cold. I don't blame her. I hake her, if it comes to that.'

`I don't know about Tamar, I want to deal in certainties. Let's say I'm a person, possibly the only person, who not onk knows you, but loves you. 0 K so far?'

Violet this time, instead of returning a cynical reply, said, `Oh Gideon, thanks for loving me – not that I believe ii actually – but it's useless – it's sour milk – only fit to be thrown away.'

`I never throw anything away, that's why everything I touch turns to gold. Let me help you. I can do anything. just by sheer will power I drove Gerard out of that house in Notting Hill. Look, let's sell this flat, Pat's right, it's awful, it's haunted. Come and live at our place.'

`With Tamar? Being the housemaid? No thanks.'

`You and Tamar must make peace, you both need peace never mind the details – you must live, you must be happy- what's money for after all?'

`It's no good. You're a happy person. Someone like you can't just manufacture happiness for someone like me. I’m finished. You can look after Tamar. That's what this is all about.'

The door bell rang.

`I'll come in tomorrow.'

`I won't be here.'

`Don't terrify me, Violet. You know I care for you -'

`Don't make me sick.' She went out into the hall, opened the flat door, then disappeared once more into her bedroom and locked herself in.

Gideon, hearing Pat call below, lifted the cases out onto the landing. He closed the door of the flat. He said to himself, she won't kill herself. I'm glad I said all those things to her. She'll think about those things. In fact, although it was not tonight that Violet would kill herself, she was nearer to the edge than Gideon surmised. She had been frightened by Tamar's mysterious illness, not so much on her behalf as her own. She had seen in Tamar's death pallor and face wrenched by misery the picture of her own fate – her death, since she would never recover, whereas Tamar would recover, to dance on her grave. She was shaken by the new cruel self-willed Tamar, so unlike the cool but submissive child she was used to, and now dismayed by Tamar's departure, which she had riot at all expected. After all she had needed, she had relied upon, Tamar's presence. She felt hideously lonely. Her sense of her own vileness, together with her chronic resentment, made any attempt at human society increasingly difficult. Soon it would be impossible. There were no pleasures. She hated all the plump glittering giggling people she saw on television. Even solitary drinking, which now occupied more of her time, was not a relief, more like a method of suicide. A sense of the unreality, the sheer artificiality, of individual existence had begun to possess her. What was it after all to be 'a person', able to speak, to remember, to have purposes, to inhibit screams? What was this weird unclean ever-present body, of which she was always seeing parts? Why did not her 'personality' simply cease to be continuous and disintegrate into a cloud of ghosts, blown about by the wind?

Later on, over the gin bottle, she thought, perhaps I will go to their place, to that flat. Tamar will move out. But they'll never get me out! I'll stay there and make their lives a misery.

Father McAlister, who had of course no one living nearby to see, was now concerned with getting back to his parish. He was sitting, in an unhappy state of mind, in an underground train. It was easier to set people free, as the world knows it, than to teach them to love. He often uttered the word 'love', he had uttered it often to Tamar. In the thick emotional atmosphere generated by frequent meetings between priest and penitent Tamar had declared that 'really' she loved her mother, and `really' her mother loved her. It was what he expected, and induced, her to say. Was he however so much influenced by, so much immured with, images of the power of' love that he could miss and underestimate the genuine presence of ordinary genuine hate? Was he too tolerantly aware of himself as a magician, pitting against an infinite variety of' demonic evils a power, not his own, which must be ultimately insuperable? The case of Tamar had excited him because so much was at stake. He was sadly aware that much of his work in the confessional (and he was a popular confessor) consisted in relieving the minds of hardened sinners who departed cheerfully to sin again. At least they came back. But with Tamar it had seemed like life and death; if he could free her she would be free indeed. After so much experience he could still be so naive. Oh she had been brave, but what had made her brave? Had all that awful travail simply provided her with the strength required to leave her mother? Was there in the end nothing but breakage, liberty from obsession and nothing enduring of the spirit?

The priest recalled, as a sacred charm, the innocence of the children who had acted, under his direction, in the Nativity Play, always put on in the village church at Christmas time, the delight of the little children dressed up asJoseph and Mary and the Three Kings, and the Ox and the Ass (always favourite parts), the pride of their parents, the tears of joy shed by their mothers as they watched the little ones, with such natural tenderness and reverence, enact the Christmas Story. The crib containing the Child, the Saviour of the World, of the Cosmos, of all that is, became in that little cold church a glowing radiant object so holy that at a certain moment those who watched spontaneously fell on their knees. Could this be mummery, superstition? No, but it was also something of which he was not worthy, from which he was separated, because he was a liar, because a line of falsity ran all the way through him and tainted what he did. He said to himself, I don't believe in God or the Divinity of Christ or the L & Everlasting, but I continually say so, I have to. Why? In order to carry on with the life which I have chosen and which I love. The power which I derive from my Christ is debased by its passage through me. It reaches me as love, it leaves me as magic. That is why I make serious mistakes. In fact, in spite of his self-laceration, a ritual in which he indulged at intervals, the priest felt, in a yet deeper deep self, a sense of security and peace. Behind doubt there was truth, and behind the doubt that doubted that truth there was truth… He was a sinner, but he knew that his Redeemer lived.

It was a long cold journey home. The heating in the train had broken down, but he managed to get a taxi from the local station to Foxpath instead of having to walk. When he had got inside his little cottage he closed the shutters and lit a wood fire. Then ^he knelt down and prayed for some time. After that he felt better and heated up a saucepan of stew which he had kept in the fridge. His Master, handing back the problem to him, had informed him that his next task was Violet Hernshaw.

Altogether elsewhere in the early spring sunshine jean and Duncan Cambus were sitting together at a cafe restaurant in a little seaside town in the south of France. They both looked in good health. Their brows were clear; Duncan had lost weight. They had found, and bought, just inland from where they now were, exactly the old picturesque stone-built farmhouse for which they had been searching. Of course it needed a lot to be done to it, renovating it was going to be so exciting. At present they were staying in a hotel.

The sun was warm, but there was a chill breeze from the sea and they were wearing warm clothes, Duncan an old jacket of Irish tweed, Jean a vast fluffy woollen pullover. They were sitting out, under a budding vine trellis, on the terrasse, drinking the local white wine. Soon they would go inside and have it long veiy good lunch, with the local red wine, and cognac after. From where they sat they could see the little sturdy harbour with its short thick piers and wide quays, made of immense blocks of light grey stone, and broad gracious fishing boats full of rumpled brown nets, and the gently rocking masts of shill yachts.

Jean and Duncan were looking at each other ⁱⁿ silence, as they often did now, a grave serene silence punctuated by sighs and slight twitching movements like those of animals luxuriously resting, pleasurably stretching their limbs a little. They had escaped. They were able to feel, now far away front them, superior to those who might have judged them or been impertinently curious about their welfare. Their love for each other had survived. This, which must be thought to be the most important part, indeed the essence, of their survival, was something they both thought about incessantly, but expressed mutely, in silent gazing, in shy sexual embraces, and in thcil satisfaction, in their new house, in being in France, in eating and drinking, in walking about, in being together. They constantly pointed out to each other what was interesting, charming, beautiful, grotesque, in what they daily saw; they made many jokes and laughed a lot.

An aspect of their silence was that neither of them had told the other everything. There were things which were too awful to be told; and for each, the possession of such dreadful secrets provided, besides intermittent shudders of fear and horror, a kind of deep excitement and energy, an ineffable bond. Jean had not told Duncan why her car had crashed on the Roman Road, nor about Tamar's revelations concerning her evening with Duncan, and the existence, then non-existence, of the child, nor about how Jean had found Crimond's note about the duel and telephoned Jenkin. So Jean knew what Duncan knew but did not know she knew, and also knew what Duncan did not know. Duncan had not toldJean about what happened that evening with Tamar, which she knew, nor had he told her about the circumstances of jenkin's death, which she did not know. It did not occur to Jean that Duncan might have gone, after all, to see Crimond, nor to Duncan that Jean might have discovered Crimond's note. Jean thought it very unlikely that Tamar would ever decide to tell Duncan about the child. She believed that Tamar would wish to put the hideous experience behind her, and would be decent enough to spare Duncan a gratuitous pain. She was also certain that Crimond would never open his lips about what happened on the Roman Road. Duncan too thought it impossible that Crimond would ever reveal how_.jenkin died. Crimond was someone pre-eminently able to keep silent, and who would take it as a point of honour not to seem to accuse Duncan ofsomething ofwhich he himself was more profoundly guilty. Crimond had set up a death-dealing scene and lured Duncan into it and thus occasioned Jenkin's death. For his own sake, as well as out of a proper regard for Duncan, ^he would keep his mouth shut. The fact that only one gun had been loaded was, very often, a subject of meditation for Duncan: of meditation rather than speculation. Duncan took the curious fact as an end point. Crimond had not planned to kill Duncan, he had planned to give Duncan a chance to kill film. Crimond had put the guns in place after the positions had been decided. Duncan dismissed the possibility of their disposal being left to chance. He recalled Crimond's saying, 'You have to be used to firearms to be sure of killing somebody even at close range.' Crimond was ready for it and wanted it properly done. Perhaps he reckoned he would win either way. If he died he would be rid of his life, which perhaps he no longer valued now the book was finished, and would leave Duncan to explain away what would look like a highly motivated murder. If he lived lie would, according to some weird calculation made ⁱⁿ his weird mind, have got rid of Duncan, made them eternally quits, and so henceforth strangers to each other. Duncan understood this calculation; indeed it had proved, it seemed to him, effective for him too. The unfinished business was finished. He even woke up one morning to find that he no longer hated Crimond.

In spite ofall their motives for keeping offthe subject, in an almost formal sort of way, as if it were a game they had to play not against each other but together, Jean and Duncan talked frequently about Crimond. This, they tacitly knew, was a phase they had to go through. Later on his name would not be mentioned. About Jenkin they thought a good deal but did not talk. It was a strange aspect of their mutual silence that they both blamed themselves for Jerkin's death. Jean's telephone call had sent Jenkin to the Playroom, Duncan's finger had pulled the trigger. This was an irony which they would never share.

`One trouble with Crimond was that lie had no sense of humour,' said Jean. They always used the past tense when speaking of him.

`Absolutely,' said Duncan. 'He was terribly intense and solemn at Oxford. He and Levquist got ^on famously, Levquist had no sense of' humour either. I think ^he got completely soaked in Greek mythology and never recovered. He lived all the time inside some Greek myth and saw himself as a hero.'

`Perhaps the Greeks had no sense ot'humour.'

`Precious little. Aristophanes isn't really funny, there's nothing in Greek literature which is funny in the way Shakespeare is. Somehow the light that shone on them was too clear and their sense of destiny was too strong. `They were too pleased with themselves.'

`Yes. And too frightened of the gods.'

`Did they really believe in those gods?'

`They certainly believed in supernatural beings. In a dignified way they were fearfully superstitious.'

`That sounds like Crimond. He was dignified and superstitious.'

`The first thing he published was on mythology.'

They were silent for a moment. When they talked of Crimond they never mentioned the book.

`When Joel comes over, let's go to Greece,' said Jean.

Joel Kowitz had discreetly, in his travels, and he loved travelling, avoided London during Jean's second 'Crimond period'. It was not that Joel held any theory about the permanence or impermanence of Jean's new situation. He knew when he was wanted and when he was not; he studied Jean's letters (for she wrote to him regularly during that time) waiting for a summons which would be sent the moment, the second, she really desired to see him again. Jean's letters made, to his loving eye, terrible reading. They were, almost, dutiful, saying she was well, Crimond was well, he was working, the weather was awful, she sent her love. They were, he thought, like letters from prison, like censored letters. He replied, tactfully, describing his doings ⁱⁿ his usual witty style (he was a good letter writer), asking no questions. In fact he wanted very much indeed to visit, not only Jean, but Crimond, whom he regarded as a remarkable and extraordinary being, far more worthy and interesting than Jean's husband. There came a significant gap in communication. Then a quite different letter arrived. Jean was with Duncan again, they were going to live in France, she hoped he would come over soon. Joel, who thought and worried about his daughter all the time, gave a brief sigh for Crimond (if only she'd got together with that fellow at Cambridge), and rejoiced at the signs of life, of hope, of direct speech, in the new style.

`We must be sure the workmen know exactly what to do when we go away.'

`I still haven't chosen the tiles for the kitchen,' said Jean. `Joel mustn't come here, I don't want him to see the house till it's finished. We could meet in Athens, just for a week or so, and go on to Delphi.'

`It would be lovely to be in Athens again.' Duncan was not so sure about going to Delphi. That dangerous god might still be around there. Duncan had his own Scottish streak of superstition. He did not want any more strange influences bearing on their life, he did not want Jean to ^be disturbed by anything. He felt for her health as for that of someone recovering from a fit of insanity.

`You put Rose off, I imagine?' said Duncan.

`Yes.' Jean and Duncan had stayed briefly in Paris with some old friends from diplomatic days, and from there Jean had, on a sudden impulse, written an affectionate letter to Rose. It had been a very brief untalkative letter, serving simply as a signal, a symbol or secret emblem, a ring or talisman or password, signifying the absolute continuation of their love and friendship. Rose replied at once of course, asking whether she might drop over. Jean and Duncan had left by then and Rose's letter, equally brief, equally significant, followed them to the south. _,Jean replied saying not to come. Of' course their friendship was eternal. But she was not sure when and where she would want to see Rose again. They had survived Ireland and presumably would survive this. But Jean felt no desire for straight loving looks and intimate conversation. Later, of course, later on when their lovely house was ready, people would come. Rose and Gerard, their old friends – how few – their new friends, if any, their clever and amusing acquaintances.

Can we, with our souls so harrowed, find peace now, she wondered, is it all real, our house, Duncan sitting there so calm and beautiful, so like a lion, just as he used to be. Thank God he's drinking less, French food suits him. When the summer comes we shall swim every day. Will it be so? Have I really stopped loving Crimond? She asked herself this question often, not really in any doubt, but rather to insist upon the reality of her escape. It was sad, too, so sadJenkin's death had broken some link, killed some last illusion – or one of the last illusions. Of course Crimond didn't murder him. But he caused his death. Jean did not allow herself to brood upon that utterly impenetrably mysterious scene, something which, although she believed Crimond's account of the accident, remained a mystery. It was as if Crimond had killed himself. So in a sense Jenkin achieved something by dying, he died for me, she thought. Of course it's mad to say this, but all Crimond's surroundings are mad. And somehow too I killed him, not just by the telephone call, but because I failed to kill Crimond on the Roman Road. How strange to think how nearly I am not here. What did he intend? Would he have swerved at the last moment, did he think I would? Did he want to test himself by an ordeal he would be liberated by surviving? Was it just a symbolic suicide pact because he knew she would funk it and so bring their relationship to an end by the failure of her love, a way to be rid of her mercifully, a symbolic killing? If I pass the test I die, if I fail it he leaves me. Yet he might have died, perhaps he wanted to die, he offered himself to me as a victim, and I did not take him. He was really gambling, for him a gamble was a religious rite, an exorcism, he wanted to end our love, or end our lives, and left it to the gods to decide how. He had said often enough that their love was impossible – yet he had loved her in and through that impossibility. Sometimes she dreamt about him and dreamt that they were reconciled – and in the moment of waking when she knew it was not true her eyes filled with tears. When in that field he had said, go, takeyour chance, I shall not see you again, his love had spoken, his fierce love that had been ready to will both their deaths. Could such a love end? Must it not simply be metamorphosed into something quiet and sleepy and dark, like some small quiescent life form which could lie in the earth and not be known whether it were alive or dead. It is over, she thought, banishing these sad images, it is finished. I have a new life now under the sign of happiness. I never stopped loving Duncan – and now there is our house and I shall see my father again. Oh let our souls, so harrowed, find peace now.

Duncan was thinking, we are so quiet together, so peaceful – but is that because we are both dead? Duncan could not make out whether he had survived it all better than would be expected, perhaps even, of all concerned, best of all, or whether he had simply been obliterated. He felt, often, as if he had been entirely broken, smashed, pulverised, like a large china vase whose pieces clearly, obviously, could never be put together again. More often he felt that a stump of himself had survived, a sturdy wicked ironical stump. What was left of'him was not going to suffer now! Callousness would be his good. He had suffered so much because of Jean, now he would opt for no more suffering. Perhaps the world had already ended, perhaps it had ended with Crimond in that basement room, or on the night in midsummer when he had seen Jean and Crimond dancing. Perhaps this was an after-life. Vast tracts of his soul no longer existed, his soul was devastated and laid waste, he was functioning with half a soul, with a fraction of a soul, like a man with one lung. What remained was darkened, shrivelled, shrunk to the size of a thumb. And yet he could still plan and ruthlessly propose to be happy, and, necessarily, to make Jean happy too. Perhaps there had always been ⁱⁿ him a wicked callous streak which had been soothed and laid to sleep by his love for Jean, his absolute love which had so seemed to change the world, and his success in marrying rich beautiful clever Jean Kowitz whom so many men desired. Perhaps it was this small parcel of' vanity in his great love that he was paying for now? ^He loved jean, ^he 'forgave' her, but his stricken vanity cried out to be consoled. Would he become, at the last, a demon set free? Oddly he sometimes felt Jean respond to it, this demonic freedom, unconsciously excited by it, as if taught by his new bad self.

At other times he was amazed at his calmness, his gentleness, his efficiency, his cheerfulness even. He loved his wife and was happy in loving her. He felt tired, but with a relaxed not frenzied tiredness. He was pleased with the new house and able to concentrate on the location of the swimming pool, even to think about it when he awoke in the night. Still he was aware of ghosts and horrors, black figures which stood beside him and beside whom he felt tiny and puny. Perhaps they would simply thus stand with him for the rest of his life without doing him any other harm – or would their proximity drive him mad? Could he go on existing knowing that at any moment… What did the future hold of intelligible misery? Would Crimond recur in his life, coming back relentlessly, inevitably after a period of years?Jean had even said to him – but she had said it, as she also told him, because she felt she must be able to say anything: 'Supposing I were to go off with Crimond again, would you forgive me, would you take ^me back?" 'Yes,' said Duncan, 'I would forgive you, I would take you back.' 'Seven times?' 'Unto seventy times seven.' Jean said, 'I have to ask this question. But my love for Crimond is dead, it is finished.' Was it true, could she know, would Crimond whistle and she run, Duncan wondered, but with a sort of resignation. Seventy times seven was a lot of times. If they were left in peace would he before long grow tired of worrying about Jean and Crimond? He had his house to think about, where he would sit and write his memoirs and Jean would create a garden and write the, cookery book she used to talk about, and perhaps they would drive about the region and write a guide book, or travel and write travel books. He still thought but not obsessively, almost coldly, about what was known only to Crimond and himself',jenkin's death. He felt not the slightest wish or obligation to inform anybody about what really happened. If people cared to think that Crimond had murdered Jenkin it was their affair, and not very far from the truth either. He had only lately performed a curious little ritual. When he had left Crimond to deal with the bod^y and the police, he had carried away ⁱⁿ his pocket the five dud leaded cartridges which he had removed from the gun with which ^he had killed Jenkin. He could not decide what to do with them. If ever connected with him, those odd little things could prove awkward and suggestive evidence. He had to get rid of them, but in London it had proved absurdly hard to decide ^on any really safe method. He took them with him to France and eventually, stopping the car in a wild place far from their farm house, while Jean was unpacking a picnic lunch, he strayed away and dropped them into a deep river pool. The feel of the smooth weighty objects in his hand made him think of Jenkin's body. It was like a burial at sea.

Yes, he understood why Crimond had had to summon him, responding to a nervous urge, an irresistible craving, like the toreador's desire to touch the bull. The woman had gone, the drama remained between him and Duncan. Crimond had always hated the idea of being in debt, he was a meticulous payer, he was a gambler, he feared the gods. The gesture of' baring his breast was natural to him – it was a ritual of purification, an exorcism of something which, like a Grecian guilt, was formal and ineluctable, curable only by submission to a god. But why did Jenkin have to die? Crimond had offered himself as victim to Duncan, but Duncan had killed Jenkin. So Jenkin died as a substitute, as a surrogate, he had to die so that Crimond could live? Had some deep complicity with Crimond brought it about that Duncan could kill Crimond without killing Crimond? By not killing Crimond he had brought about Jenkin's death. Had he even in some sense brought it about deliberately? Duncan recalled daily the dark red hole in Jenkin's forehead and the sound of his body hitting the floor. He remembered the special warm feel of jenkin's ankles and his socks, as Duncan pulled the body along the room, and how, afterwards, he had stepped to and fro over it in his frenzied hurry to tidy up the scene. He remembered Crimond's tears. He also, in the presence of these images, asked himself, retrieving it now from the depths of memory, whether perhaps he had not always, in his play with firearms, had a fantasy of shooting someone like that through the middle of the forehead? Perhaps an old sadistic fantasy, tolerated over many years, had been there to prompt him; and had found him ready because of other ancient things, such as an old jealousy ofJenkin surviving from Oxford days. After Sinclair's death it was to Jenkin, not to Duncan, that Gerard turned for consolation. That microsecond before he pulled the trigger: could it actually have contained a decision? Duncan had wanted to kill Crimond – but had found himself unable to – because he was afraid to- because he did not really want to- yet lie had needed to take revenge on somebody, somebody had to die. It was as if, not strong enough to kill the man he hated, he had killed his dog.

`Your funny eye looks better,' said Jean, who had been staring at him. 'Well, I suppose it isn't actually different. Can you see better out of it?'

`I think so – or I imagine I can – the clever old brain has fudged things up, it often does.'

`It'll fudge things up for us,' said Jean.

They smiled at each other tired complicit smiles.

She went on, 'I can't remember when you first had that eye thing. You haven't always had it.'

`Oh years ago, I was developing it before we went to Ireland.' Something about this exchange made Duncan suddenly feel that it was a good time to tell Jean about the thing with Tamar. He would be relieved to get rid of it. 'I've got something to confess – it's about Tamar – I had a little momentary quasi-sex episode with her one evening when you were away and she came round to console me.'

`With Tamar!' said Jean. 'With that good sweet child! How could you!' She felt an unexpected relief at this sudden utterance by Duncan, as if even some partial shabbily doctored piece of truth-telling could somehow 'do them good'. 'I hope you didn't upset her?'

`Oh, not at all. Nothing happened really. She just threw her arms round me to cheer me up. I was feeling miserable and I hugged her. I was touched by her affection. No harm's done. There was nothing else.'

What a dear old liar he is, thought Jean. I certainly won't question him. 'I expect she was flattered.'

`Perhaps I was! She may not have thought it was anything at all. You're not cross with me?'

`No. Of course not. I'll never ever be cross with you. I love you.'

Jean thought to herself, if Tamar hadn't come round to tell me about Duncan and the child I would never have thought of searching Duncan's desk, and telephoned Jenkin and sent him to Crimond. If Duncan had not seduced Tamar Jenkin would be still alive. If I had not left Duncan he would not have seduced "Tamar. Is it all my fault or his fault or Tamar's fault, or is it fate, whatever that means? Oh how tired I feel sometimes. It's as if Crimond devoured part of me which will never grow again. Perhaps that's my punishment for having left Duncan. Would the results of all these things ever reach their ends? And poor Tamar, and that child. Sometimes at night.jean thought about the child, Duncan's child, whom they might have adopted. So if Duncan could have children after all, there might yet be another child, not hers, but his, for them to cherish… But that way thoughts must not go, it was too late, it was too complicated, the time for mysteries and new beginnings and unpredictable adventures was over, their task now was simpl^y to make each other happy.

The breeze had moderated, the sea which had been mildly disturbed and covered with flickering points of white had become calmer. The masts of yachts in the harbour were quiet. A fishing boat was moving out, its engine uttering little rhythmic muted explosions. The diffident lazy hollow sound came pleasurably to Jean and Duncan, as if it somehow united and summarised the scene, the harbour and the sea, so beautiful, so full of secure promise. The silk^y light blue unscored undivided sea merged at the horizon into a pale sky which at the zenith, cloudless, was overflowing with the blue sunny air of the south.

`It's time for lunch,' said Duncan. 'There are other pleasures!' Jean always argued that the most perfect time was that of the aperitif. He rose to his feet while jean remained, listening to the parting boat and gazing at the sea.

As he got up Duncan put his hand into the pocket_.of his old tweed jacket and felt something in there, something round and very light and insubstantial. He drew it out. It was a small reddish ball of' what looked like interwoven silk or thread. Duncan suddenly felt himself' blushing violently. It was of course that ball of Crimond's hair which, such an infinitely long time ago, he had picked up from the floor of their bedroom in the tower in I reland. He opened his hand and let the thing fall to the ground where it lay fora moment at his feet upon the pavement. The faint breeze moved it, rolling it very slowly against the iron leg of a coffee table. He had an impulse to pick it up again. Should something so fateful be allowed to vanish into the rubble of the world? It began to move away towards the road where it was swept into the wake of a passing car. After the car had passed he thought he could still see it lying in the roadway.

Jean was getting up. 'Let's go and look at those tiles after lunch.'

They went into the restaurant. Duncan felt pity for himself and wondered if he would soon die of cancer or in some strange accident. He did not feel unhappy, perhaps death, though not imminent, was indeed near; but it was now as if he and death had become good friends.

`We never found that Stone in the wood,' said Lily. `What stone?' said Rose.

`The old standing stone, the ancient stone. I know it's there.'

`There's an eighteenth-century thing with a Latin inscription but it's quite small. I don't think there's anything prehistoric, if that's what you mean.'

`The Roman Road runs along a ley line.'

`Oh really?'

`That's why Jean's car crashed.'

'Why?'

`Ley lines are charged with human energy, like telepathy, so they collect ghosts. You know what ghosts are, parts of people's minds out of the past, what they felt and saw. Jean saw a ghost – probably a Roman soldier.'

`She said she saw a fox,' said Rose. `People don't like to admit they've seen ghosts. They think they'll be laughed at – and they're afraid to – ghosts don't I] k, to be talked about and ifyou see one you just know that.'

`Have you ever seen one?'

`No, I wish I had. There must be ghosts at Boyars.'

`I hope not,' said Rose, 'I've never seen anything.' She di; I not like this talk of ghosts.

`I always thought I'd see a ghost ofjames, but I never did.'

‘James?'

`My husband – you know, he died and left me the money.' `Of course you were married – I'm sorry -'

`I don't feel I was married. It was all over so quickly. And poor James was like a ghost when he was alive.'

`Do you often think about him?'

`No. Not now.'

Rose felt she could not pursue this any further. She said, 'So there's no news from Gulliver?'

No,' said Lily, 'not a word. He's in Newcastle. Anyway that's where he said he was going. By now he may be anywhere, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Ireland, America. He's given up his flat, he's gone. He's disappeared forever, that's what he wanted to do, he often said so, to go right away and leave no trace.'

`I expect he'll write soon.'

`No he won't. If he'd been going to he would have done already. He said it would be an adventure. He's probably met someone else by now. I've lost him. Anyway I don't want him any more, to hell with him. I'll make a wax image of him and drop it in the fire – like – like a guy I saw on Guy Fawkes day, it was like a real person, it lifted its arms up, oh it was awful -' Tears came into Lily's eyes and her voice gave way.

Rose and Lily were walking round the garden at Boyars. It was evening, a damp fragrant evening, almost a spring evening, though the weather was still cold. Low storm clouds, thick, bulging, dark and yellowish, with brilliantly white serrated edges, were moving towards the east, leaving behind a clear transparent reddish sunset. It had been raining most of' the day, but now the rain had ceased. Rose and Lily were wearing overcoats and wellingtons. Lily had rung up Rose to lied if anyone had heard from Gull (which they had not) and had been rather tearful over the telephone. Rose, sympathetic, had invited her to Boyars. It was not in fact a very convenient time. Annushka, suffering giddy spells, was in hospital for some tests. Mousebrook seemed to be ill too, or perhaps just moping; after all he was really Annushka's cat. Boyars had a deserted feeling, as if the soul of the house, filled with foreboding, had already fled. Perhaps it knew that Boyars would soon be empty, ruined, or changed into a quite different house with a different soul. Rose, walking about in it, had begun to wonder whether she had ever really lived there.

The daffodils were in flower, a pale patch on the edge of the shrubbery. The crows, after spending the day in warfare with the magpies, were cawing upon the highest branch of a still leafless beech tree, outlined against the radiant red sky. Rose and Lily were walking along ⁱⁿ the wet grass beside one of the borders where early violets stained the earth beneath the budding shrubs.

`Tamar seems much better now,' said Rose, anxious to get Lily off the subjects of Gull and the supernatural.

The reference to Tamar did not seem to please Lily. Lily had been suffering pangs of conscience at the news of Tamar's `depression' or whatever it was, because she felt she had persuaded Tamar to take that irrevocable step. She had enjoyed taking charge of'Tamar, able to put her worldly wisdom, her specialised knowledge, her money at the disposal of the much praised little angel. Only later had she realised how grave the decision was which she had so blithely fostered. With that she began, as she never had before, to grieve over her own abortion, which had been such a happy relief to her mind at the time. She even reckoned up how old the child would have been if it had lived. She had lately received a note from Tamar enclosing a cheque for the amount which Lily had lent her. The covering note was brief, curt, no sending of love or good wishes or thanks. Perhaps Tamar now hated Lily for having persuaded her. Looking at the cold note, Lily felt near to hating Tamar for causing her so much regret and remorse. `I don't care for all that religion she's got into,' said Lily 'It's just a psychological trick, it won't last.'

Rose, who thought this too, said vaguely, 'Oh she'll be all right – she's a very strong girl really – she's brave.'

`I wish I was strong and brave and going to be all right,' said Lily.

`Mind you don't step on the snails,' said Rose. 'There's a snails' dance going on after all that rain.'

The grass, illumined by the sunset light, was covered widi glossy worms and wandering snails.

`I love snails,' said Lily, 'my grandmother attracted them, they came into the house. Of' course snails do get in everywhere, I found one in my flat the other day. My grandmothci could tame wild things, they came to her. She used the snails for telepathy.'

`How did she do that?' said Rose, who had heard quite a lot, indeed enough, about Lily's horrible grandmother who had the evil eye and whose name nobody dared to utter.

`To send a message to someone at a distance, each of you has a snail, and you tell your snail what you want to say, and the person with the other snail gets the message. You have to put a spell on the snails of'course.'

Rose wondered how much of this nonsense Lily really believed. They went into the house.

They had supper in the kitchen at the big kitchen-table which Annushka had scrubbed so much that the grainy wood had become a pale waxen yellow. Rose let Lily cook. They had an omelette, and some spiced cabbage which Lily had felicitously improvised, then cheddar cheese, and Cox's Orange pippins whose wrinkled skins were now yellower than the table. During the two days which Lily had spent at Boyars they had eaten frugally, drinking quite a lot of wine however. Mousebrook, stretched out into a very long cat on the warm tiles at the back of the stove, watched them with his baleful golden stare. Rose pulled him out and set him on her knee, stroking him firmly, but he refused to purr and soon twisted away and returned to his warm shrine. His fur, usually so electrically smooth, had felt dry and stiffened. After supper they sat with whisky beside the wood fire ⁱⁿ the drawing room. They were easy together. Rose felt increasingly fond of Lily, iliough her restlessness wearied her, and she was irked by Lily's continual attempts to prompt confidences. Lily had talked a lot to Rose about her childhood and about Gulliver. Rose had not reciprocated. But she was glad of Lily's company and touched by her affection. They retired to bed, at any rate to their bedrooms, early.

Alone in her room Rose stood at the window. A sick moon had risen among the rush of'ragged clouds. A car was passing along the Roman Road, its headlights creating faint flying impressions of walls and trees. Then it was gone and clouds covered the moon and the countryside was pitch dark and silent. Rose switched on the electric fire. In winter the central heating, switched off in much of the house when there were no guests, made little impression on the draughty spaces. Rose could feel the proximity of empty unheated rooms. She had been able to chatter with Lily but felt now, as she walked up and down, that the gift of speech had left her, a recurrent sensation as if her mouth were filled with stones. She was cut off, dumb, alone. The image of her stone-obstructed mouth and weighted tongue reminded her that that morning, visiting the stables to fetch apples, she had picked up one of Sinclair's stones. It was on the dressing table, a flat black stone banded with white lines with a long crack on one side, as if it were bursting open, showing a glittering gem-like interior. She held the stone in her hand and inspected it carefully. There was so much dense individuality, so much to notice, in the small thing. Sinclair, on some very distant day, had chosen it out of' thousands and millions of stones on some beach in Yorkshire, Norfolk, Dorset, Scotland, Ireland. The stone made her intensely sad as if it were demanding her protection and her pity. Was it glad to be chosen? How accidental' everything was, and how spirit was scattered everywhere, beautiful, and awful. She put the stone down and put her hands to her face, suddenly frightened of the darkness outside and of the quietness of the house. Suppose Annushka were to die? Suppose she is already dead, and the house knows it? The house was creaking in the wind like an old wooden ship. There were presences, footsteps.

I'm losing my nerve, thought Rose, I'm losing my courage, I'm losing my people. Jean has stopped loving me. How do I know that? Can it be true? Will I ever talk tojcan again, with openness and love, looking into each other's eyes? She said I was living in a dream world where everyone was nice and good and every year had the same pattern. I have never been deified by love. I could have married Gerard if I'd really tried. Then, as it had been suddenly sharply uttered in the room, she heard Crimond's voice say 'Rose!' as he had said it and so startled her when she came to him from Jean to make sure he had not shot himself. We've neither of us ever been married, love has to be awakened. Supposing I lose Gerard, Rose thought, suppose I have actually lost him? Can I lose him, after so many years? This is what this is all about, this press of ghosts.

In the last weeks, especially in the last days, it seemed that her relations with Gerard had simply broken down. Reeve, now back in Yorkshire, kept-ringing up, asking her to decide about the cruise. Rose kept giving evasive answers. Yet why should she, why did she feel she must consult Gerard's convenience, why should it matter to him if she were absent for four weeks with her family? Blood was thicker than water. But the thought of Gerard not minding what she did or where she was, touched her with deadly cold as if one of Lily's ghosts had brushed past her. Rose had not seen Gerard since the night when the book had been delivered. She had expected the usual chats by telephone, suggestions of a meeting. He must know how interested, how anxious, she must be about his reactions to the book. But Gerard had not telephoned, and when she telephoned him he had been cold and brief, not able to see her. She had not dared to ask him anything, about the cruise, about the book. Later his telephone did not answer, and she imagined him there frowning, letting it ring, knowing it was her. Supposing – oh supposing all sorts of things – supposing he had fallen in love with that boy who looked like Sinclair, supposing he were spending all his time with Crimond discussing the book, supposing…? I've lost him, thought Rose. Yes, perhaps, I could have married him if I'd been a different person, if I'd had more courage, if I'd had more luck, if I'd understood something particular (I don't know what) about sex, if I'd become a god. But how much I love him and have always loved him and will always love him.

`Rose, please come on the cruise, you will, won't you?' `Rose, do come, it'll make all the difference.'

`We'll have such fun, please!'

`All right,' said Rose, `I'll come.'

She could no more resist the entreaties of Reeve and Neville and Gillian, and was extremely touched by their urgent wish that she should accompany them. She was extremely grateful.

It was nearly two weeks since Lily's visit to Boyars, and during this time spring had made its tentative appearance, glorifying London, even in its shabbiest regions, with smells of earth and flowers and glimpses of leaves and sunshine. Gideon Fairfax was giving a party in the house at Notting Hill. Leonard Fairfax was home from America, bringing his friend Conrad Lomas with him. Gideon had asked Reeve and his children, said by Rose to be in town, and Neville had brought Francis Reckitt, son of their Yorkshire neighbour, who had travelled down with them. Gideon's favourite New York'art dealer, Albert Labowsky, from whom he had just acquired the coveted Beckmann drawings, was also present. Rose could hear the American voices, distinct like the cries of unusual birds. Tamar was there, and Violet, and some friends of Pat and Gideon unknown to Rose. Tamar was shepherding a Miss Luckhurst, a retired school teacher who wrote detective stories. There was also in tow a very thin very young man said to be not only a parson but Tamar's godfather. Rose was surprised to see Father McAlister, conspicuous in his black cassock. Pat was dispensing Gideon's special tangerine cocktail. Of course Gerard had been asked, but, although some people were already leaving, he had not appeared.

`What are you doing after this?' said Reeve. 'You'll have dinner with us, won't you?'

`Sorry, I can't. I'm tied up.'

`Then tomorrow you must come and see the flat!' said Neville

`We can't give you lunch,' said Gillian, 'there's nothing in it except a tape measure and Papa's cap which he left behhidl But there's a super Italian restaurant nearly next door.'

Reeve had just bought a flat in Hampstead.

`Thanks, I'd love to,' said Rose. She was troubled by an aching tooth.

Rose had no engagement that evening, but was hoping that Gerard would come, and would have dinner with her. She hall still, in the lengthening interim since her time at Boyars, heard absolutely nothing from him. She rang his number less and less often. She wrote a letter and destroyed it. She did not dare to go round to his house. This faint-heartedness was a measure of how, after all these years, remote he had suddenly become: a dear friend, not a close friend, not an intimate. She had no idea at this moment where Gerard was or what he might be doing or thinking, and she dreaded asking anyone for news of him, thus admitting that she did not know what perhaps others did. Gerard might be out of the country, he might be in bed with someone, he might be in hospital or dead. He carried nothing which named her as closest.

Gideon, as master magician, watching his part^y fizzing on so well, had his chubby pretty look which annoyed Gerard so much. He had moved Gerard out of his house by playing on his weaknesses, his semi-conscious guilt feelings, his unhappiness which made him so unworldly, the sheer nervous irritability which suddenly made him want to get away from his sister and brother-in-law at any price. Gideon had completed the redecoration of the house, doing exactly what he wanted and not what Pat wanted. Pat's resistance had been minimal, so there was not much to crow about there. The drawing room, which under Gerard's regime had been an insipid spotty pinkish brown dotted with small pale English watercolours and full of dark dull conventional fat chairs, was now painted a glowing aquamarine adorned with a huge scarlet abstract by de Kooning over the fireplace and two colourful conversation pieces by Kokoschka and Motesiczk^y. The carpet was a very dark blue with pale blue and white art deco rugs. There were two very large white settees, and no other furnit tire. Gerard's hopeless kitchen had of course been completely reconstructed. Only the dining room retained its previous form and colour, exhibiting now upon its dark brown walls the pretty Longhis and the lovely Watteau. Even more pleasing to Gideon was the return from America, for good he hoped, of' his beloved and talented son Leonard, now to study at the Courtauld Institute. What a team we shall be, thought Gideon, who had never dared to call himself an art historian, and what fun we shall have! Gideon could also look with some satisfaction upon his success (so far) with Tamar and Violet. After the abduction things had moved rapidly. Tamar had moved into the upstairs flat. Violet (surprising Pat but not Gideon) had suddenly moved in too. Tamar had moved out and now had a tiny flat in Pimlico. Violet's flat was up for sale. Violet was quiet, letting herself be looked after. What next, time would show, and meanwhile it was another one up on Gerard.

Patricia thought, Gideon's worked really hard to get hold of those two, I hope he won't regret it! He's too kind-hearted and of course he's a power maniac with delusions of grandeur. He's quite unscrupulous when he gets going like this. How on earth will we ever get Violet out? She's sitting there like a toad and playing the interesting neurotic, it could go on forever, I suppose we shall have to buy her out! My God though, she may be a mental case, but she's kept her good looks and her figure, it isn't fair! Patricia was well aware of Gideon's funny kinky affection for Violet, and it did not trouble her. She was in any case too happy at present, what with Leonard's return and the house to play with, to bear any ill-will to her unhappy cousin. As for Tamar, it looked as if they were adopting her after all. Perhaps that was what Gideon had always wanted. Surveying the scene Patricia had already noticed something else which gave her pleasure. Leonard seemed to be getting on very well with Gillian Curtland. Hmm, thought Pat, a nice clever pretty girl, and she'll inherit a packet When they come to live in Hampstead we'll invite them tit dinner.

Violet's capitulation, which had occurred when Gideon arrived on the day after the abduction, was brought about by two kinds of consideration, one financial, the other emotional (Father McAlister would have used the word `spiritual'). The latter was a special kind of despair which took the form tit missing Tamar. Violet had been intensely and deeply shocked by the ruthlessness of Tamar's rejection of her. She realised that the docile spiritless girl she had known all her life watt gone forever, and that she would never meet that girl again, With Tamar so utterly gone from it the flat was desolate, n cage without its little captive. Keeping Tamar prisoner had been far more important to Violet than she had ever realised, Whether this importance had anything to do with love was a question which did not now concern her; she needed help, she was ready to run, Gideon appeared. The financial consideration could be more clearly stated. Gideon announced, which Violet had anticipated, that Tamar had already given up her ob. She wanted time to catch up with her studies. There were debts and bills and very little money. Gideon composed a rational argument. Violet had to face the facts and put her lifiin order. It made sense to sell the flat, which was a genuine asset, pay what was owed, and come and rest at Notting Hill, then get some sort of job (all right, not in his office) where she could use her wits, or anyway make a plan for a happier and more sensible life. She didn't have to stay on with him and Pat if she didn't want to, it could be an interim. Violet, who felt just then that the alternative was suicide, said yes with an alacrity which surprised Gideon, who had looked forward to a struggle, even a row, ending of'course in victory. Gideon had given her money to buy clothes. She had accepted the money and bought the clothes. (Gideon, discussing it all with Pat, attached great symbolic significance to this surrender.) Now at the party she felt like some sort of wicked Cinderella. Albert Labowsky was talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. She could see Gideon looking encouragingly in her direction. She had fallen into the hands of the enemy, the other race, who Would now expect her to be grateful, even to become happy! fcourse they had not expected her to share the flat with her ughter, the new Tamar. Gideon had bought a flat for amar before Violet moved in! What shall I do up there alone, thought Violet. Shall I quickly become ill, bed-ridden, have illy meals brought up by kind people who will sit by my bed and chat? Perhaps even Tamar might come and sit, and look of her watch. Violet was experiencing a sudden total loss of rnergy, what a car must feel when there is no more petrol. She had not really lived, before, on pure unmixed resentment and remorse and hate, she had lived on Tamar, as a presence, as a vehicle, as something always expected and looked forward to. Through Tamar she had touched the world. Could she now live on a hatred for Pat and Gideon, which she did not yet feel, but might have to develop as a source of'power? How she would detest their charity as the days went by, how she would loathe their kindness, their tactful sympathy, their gifts of flowers! But how now could she escape? Any relationship with the child who had rejected her seemed now impossible forever, one could only cast, in that direction, one's curse. Don't they know, thought Violet, that I'm not an ordinary person, that I'm dangerous, that I'll end by burning the house down? Now I'm a novelty. Soon they'll get nervous. I shall start to scream. They'll have foreseen this too. I shall go to a luxurious mental home and have electric shocks at Gideon's expense. If I leave now and go upstairs someone will be sent after me to see I'm all right. Soon they'll begin to be afraid of me. That at least will be something.

Father McAlister was looking forward to Easter. He had given up alcohol for Lent and the smell of the tangerine cocktail was inflaming his senses. Also of course he dreaded Easter. I do not know, I cannot tell, what pains He had to bear, I only know it was for me He hung and suffered there. The terrible particularity, the empirical detail, of his religion bore down upon him then as at no other time. He would endure it, he would purvey that story all over again, what else was he for? Without the endlessly rehearsed drama of Christ, His birth, His ministry, His death, His resurrection, there was nothing at all, he, Angus McAlister, was a vanishing shadow, and so were the planets and the most distant stars and the ring of the cosmos. Others live without Christ, so why not I? must be it senseless question. Nothing can separate me from the love of Christ. How did Saint Paul know? Is it not upon his knowledge that the whole thing rests? Without Paul to carry that strange virus from land to land the gospels would have been lost forever, or rediscovered centuries later as local curiosities. So it was all an accident? That was impossible, for it was something absolute, and what is absolute cannot be an accident. Suppose there was nothing of Christ left to us but his moral sayings, uttered by some unknown man with not a fragment of history to clothe him? Could one love such a being, could one be saved by him? Could he come closer to one than oneself? Christianity spoils its believers as spoilt children are spoilt. The radiant master, the martyred man, the beautiful hero, the incarnate god, the best known individual in history, the best loved and most powerful: this is the figure Christianity has lived upon and may die of. That was not Father McAlister's business. He had his own certainties and his own paradoxes; he did not dare, as Easter approached, to call these his lies. It must surely be possible for him – in Christ – not to lie. Such a truth as ends all strife, such a life as killeth death. Christ on the cross made sense of all the rest, but only if he really died. Christ lives, Christ saves, because he died as we die. The ultimate reality hovered there, not as a phantom man, but as a terrible truth. Father McAlister could not dignify his beliefs by the name of heresy. He prayed, he worshipped, he prostrated himself, he felt himself to be a vehicle of a power and a grace which was given, not his own. But his terrible truth was never quite clarified, and that lack of final clarification troubled him on Good Friday as at no other time. This mysterious Absolute was what, during those awful three hours as he enacted the death of his Lord, he had somehow to convey to the kneeling men and women who would see – not what he saw, but something else – which was their business and God's business – only there was no God. That the priest performed this task in agony, with tears, did him no credit. Rather the contrary.

Tamar had abandoned her brown and grey uniform and was wearing a midnight-blue dress with a jabot of frilly white silk at the neck. Her fine tree-brown tree-green hair had been cleverly cut into layers, she looked boyish and elfin and cool. Her face was slightly less thin, her complexion slightly less pale, she had lost her 'schoolgirl' look. She wore no make-up. Her large hazel eyes carried a wary self-consciously melancholy expression which was new. Conrad Lomas had, as he confided to Leonard, admired her for several seconds before recognising her. Tamar had let Gideon arrange her future, he typed letters for her and she signed them. What had seemed so impossible was fixed up easily and swiftly, what had seemed lost forever retrieved, no one seemed to be surprised, no one objected, her tutor, the college authorities, expressed calm pleasure at the prospect of' welcoming her back. A van, conjured up by Gideon, brought to her all her remaining clothes, all her possessions down to the tiniest trinkets from her room. The awful old flat seemed gone from the earth, as if it had indeed been burnt, an image which haunted her. She bought books, acquiring again the works which her mother had made her sell and which she had parted from with such bitter tears. Though riot without invitations, she remained solitary, as if, in a unique healing interim never to be repeated, she must fast.

The fervour of her religious conversion had, as the cynics predicted, worn off. It was amazing to her now to remember.how she had craved for the sacrament. Had she really swallowed all those wafers of bread and all those sips of rich wine, more intoxicating by far than Gideon's cocktail? At present, she did not want this food. But the cynics (of whom she was well aware) understood very little. Tamar was indeed puzzled about herself' Father McAlister had constantly talked of 'new being'. Well, she had new being, she had been permanently changed. But what had happened? Was it simply that she had broken free from her mother, was that what her cunning psyche had, under the guise of other things, always been after? She had been suddenly endowed with a supernatural strength. Like a trapped creature who, seeing a last, already vanishing, escape route, becomes savagely powerful, able to destroy anything which impedes its way. In that final scene, Tamar had felt ready to trample her mother into the ground, and had sensed with satisfaction her mother's apprehension (if all irreversible shift of the balance of power between them. Was one, as a Christian, and a new Christian, allowed to take dial much time off from the Gospel of Love? To say it was necessary, it is over, things will be better, there will be a fresh start seemed a shabby way of getting oneself'off. Tamar had no idea what she had done to her mother. Tamar had not discussed these more recent problems with her mentor. She was with his tacit consent, avoiding him. Later they would talk again – though never, perhaps, as they had talked once. Slit was sure of his concern, indeed, of his love. Only love, his or Christ's, his and Christ's, could have rescued her from dmi inferno of guilt and fear. She was also aware, with a hall amused irritation, of the way in which, when the prjctii apprehended her withdrawal, he 'transferred his affections' to her mother. Tamar and Father McAlister had ofcourse talked a great deal about Violet, and he had visited her first with Gideon, later (as he told Tamar) by himself, brief and, as she understood, fruitless visits. However it took more than snubs and indications of the door to deter this connoisseur of hope. less cases. Tamar's teacher had insisted to his now, in this matter sceptical, pupil that her mother depended on her, really loved her, and really was loved by her. Before her escape Tamar was not ready to reflect on these theories. Now, reflecting on them, she made little progress. She had been told of, indeed had experienced, the transforming power of love, the only miraculous power upon this earth. Was it possible now for her to love Violet, or discover that she had always loved her? Tamar's new state placed her further from her mother than she had ever been, her liberation having been made possible by an anger which made her former submission seem more like weakness than love. Could she see more clearly now or less clearly? Had she always assumed that she loved mother because that was what children did? The priest, who had seen and understood that sinful anger, had told her to banish it by thinking love, enacting love. Approach her! Do little things! She needs you! Tamar was not so sure. She had tried a little thing by bringing her flowers, accompanied by Pat, which had been a mistake. Violet had accepted them with it tigerish smile. Visible hatred terrifies. Tamar determined to try again soon.

Tamar had recovered from her obsessive guⁱlt about the lost child. Magic against magic, she had been cured, relieved of evil pain, as her wizard put it, left with good pain. She had also stopped worrying about whether Jean had told Duncan or Oinican had told Jean. What did remain with her was a courious shudder which occurred whenever she saw a teapot. It was a strange feature of their recent tribulations which would have impressed her, and the priest even more, if they had known it, that Tamar, like the others, like Rose, like Gerard, like Jean, as well as of course like Duncan, felt that she had been responsible for Jenkin's death. Each one of his friends could enact responsibility. Tamar, the last of them to see him Alive, a fact known only to her confessor, could not forget that when she arrived Jenkin had been about to leave the house. If die had not come he would not have received that mysterious wlephone call. But what impressed her more was the idea that she had unloaded some sort of fatal evil onto Jenkin. She recalled ^an awful satisfaction it had given her to 'tell all' to ean, and spatter her with her own misery, and hatred, and then to run to 'tell all' again to Jenkin. But she had not been estined to receive the hoped-for absolution. It was as if she ad spread out all that evil filth before him and as he took it up and took it upon himself, she had made him vulnerable to some force, perhaps wicked, perhaps simply retributive, hick had struck him instead of her. Her priest of course ound the idea interesting, but condemned it as superstitious; and her persisting grief for Jenkin gradually ceased to terrify ^y as she recalled the long day during which she had waited for him to come back. Tamar did not believe in God or a supernatural world and Father McAlister, who did not b in them either, had not troubled her with these fictions. What he had, in his fierce enthusiasm, wrestling for her soul, intended to give her, was an indelible impression of Christ as Saviour. Tamar was, in her privileged interim, prepared to wait and see what later on this radiant presence might do for her. She prayed, not exactly to, but in this reality, which turned evil suffering into good suffering, and might in tillit even enable her to reach her mother.

Patricia was taking pleasure in telling Rose about how Gideon had rescued Violet and Tamar.

`You mean Violet is here, and Tamar is going back it, Oxford?'

`Yes! Gideon and Father Angus together were irresistible!'

Rose, who had never heard her parish priest called 'Father Angus' before, could not help feeling at once that it was all a conspiracy against Gerard! But of course it was wonderful `It's wonderful!' she said. Her aching tooth, which had beco grumbling, suddenly set a sharp throbbing pain down into her lower jaw. Rose instinctively raised her hand, closing her fist two inches from her chin, as if to catch it. 'Pat, I think I must go, I've got a beastly toothache.'

`Can I give you an aspirin?'

Conrad Lomas was telling Tamar how awfully sorry he was that he had lost her at the dance, how he had searched and searched, now she owed him a dance, they must find one to go to, he would be in London till the fall.

Tamar, leaned over by the tall American, stepped back a little and cast an almost flirtatious glance in the direction of Father McAlister. They had not attempted to approach each other. The priest, looking grave, made a very faint movement of his head and eyes, as he had done to Gideon in Violet's flat, in the direction of her mother.

Francis Reckitt was now telling Rose that Neville, whom he had admired, had decided to go into Parliament. 'He's a radical, you see,' Francis, a little drunk, kept repeating.

Gideon was saying to Reeve, 'It's quite easy really, you get some dry white wine and mix it with bitters and not too little rum and some white port and pile in the peel of the tangerines.'

Violet, who had drunk quite a lot of the tangerine mixture, had decided it was time for her to go upstairs and rejoin the dark figure who waited for her up there, herself. She was alone for the moment leaning against a wall, looking about with an assumed air of amused contempt. Leonard Fairfax, who of course knew 'all about it', was feeling it was his duty to go and talk to her. He was forestalled however by Father McAlister. The priest, with a flurry of dark skirt, as if he had just noticed Violet, advanced. He took hold of her hand and held it, while uttering a flow of talk. Tamar watched this. The priest had, in all their encounters, never touched Tamar except at their first meeting and at the rite of baptism. This had impressed her. She watched his hand holding her mother's, wondering how long it would last. How handsome he looks today, she thought, perhaps he can put on handsomeness when he wants to! Gideon, looking over the shoulder of Rose, to whom he was now talking, also saw the hand-holding, and thought about animal magnetism. Gideon couldn't quite make Father McAlister out – a cynical fake, a charlatan, a mad saint or what? He's certainly a wizard, thought Gideon, I'll keep him around, he could be useful.

`Rose, don't go, I want to tell you my new idea, a Tamargesellschaft!'

`A what?'

`I met Joel Kowitz in New York, we were talking about Crimond's book, and I thought, well now that's over, why not let's have a regular whip-round for Tamar, to see her through Oxford, Joel said he'd contribute, she can't live on that grant, she must have money to travel, to sail to Byzantium -'

`Oh I'll join,' said Rose, 'she must – yes – sail -'

Gideon, happy, was at his prettiest in a strawberry pink shirt, his dark curly hair cut short, shining with bronze and golden lights, his girlish complexion glowing with health and youth, his finely manicured fingers moving appreciatively over his delicately flushed cheeks and exquisitely smooth chin. He looked as young as his tall athletic son.

There was a sudden commotion near the door, laughter and something like a cheer. Lily had arrived accompanied by Gulliver Ashe. Lily, dressed in blue silk trousers and a golden jacket, was explaining to Conrad, and now to Gideon who had pushed his way towards her that, yes, Gull was back and he'd got a job, he'd met a man. 'Oh Rose, Rose, dear, he's back, tie's back, it's all all right, I was such a misery about it, I'm so sorry, but everything is all right now!'

Rose kissed her and held her hot clutching hands, she kissed Gull. So Lily had got her man back after all.

`Rose, we're going to get married.'

`Oh, I'm so glad!'

`They're going to get married,' shouted Gideon.

Tears were in Lily's eyes. Tears flooded into Rose's eyes. Others pressed forward and she stepped back still sidling toward the door. Suddenly Reeve and Neville and Gillian were beside her. 'What's that about?' said Gillian.

`We haven't fixed about tomorrow,' said Reeve. 'We're off too actually, we'll take you.'

`They're going to get married,' said Rose, 'I always hoped they would.' Fumbling for her handkerchief she couldn't stop the tears. She said to Reeve, `Oh, it's so touching, I'm so happy for them!' She felt, thinking of their joy, such a great shaft of sorrow which came down on her as if she had been struck from above, she almost reeled, she dropped her handbag. She had found her handkerchief and put it to her mouth.

Reeve held on to her, Gillian picked up her bag, and Neville patted her shoulder. 'Here's a map,' said Reeve, 'I've written it all down. We'll meet you at the flat at twelve thirty, and then we can have lunch after. Gillian, put it into Rose's bag.'

It was at that moment that Gerard appeared. The triumphant rout surrounding Gull and Lily had moved further into the room, leaving Rose at the doorway surrounded by her family. For a second Gerard found himself confronted by the Curtland phalanx.

He had left his coat outside near the front door and was neat in a dark suit, but he looked to Rose's eye very strange, very tired, a little mad. His hair hung in limp ringlets, his mouth drooped sulkily, his face looked puffy and soft, his glittering blue eyes glared down almost fiercely upon the group before him. At the next second all was adjusted. Reeve removed his hand from Rose's arm, Neville his from her shoulder, Gillian handed her her handbag into which she had thrust the instructions for tomorrow. Gerard's face reorganised itself into its usual set of hard surfaces and expression of pensive irony, and then relapsed into his usual inane disconcerting grin. They all moved out into the hall.

`Hello, Reeve,' said Gerard. 'What a row in there!'

Reeve, rather formal, said, 'How nice to see you. These are my children Neville and Gillian. I think it's some years since you've met them.'

`They've certainly grown!' said Gerard. 'Glad to meet you.' He held out his hand to Gillian, then to Neville. The children murmured something gracious.

`Well, we're off,' said Reeve. He turned to Rose. 'Can we drop you where you're going?'

`No, thanks, I can walk. I just want a word with Gerard.'

`See you tomorrow then.'

`Yes, tomorrow,' said Rose.

Neville, who had been smiling subtly throughout this encounter, said, 'We'll take you to Yorkshire.'

With waves they receded, leaving Rose and Gerard beside, now outside, the drawing room door. These two stood in silence not looking at each other while Reeve and his offspring disappeared into the dining room to find their coats. They emerged, looked back, waved again, and vanished through the front door.

Gerard said to Rose politely, 'Can I get you a taxi for your next appointment?'

`I have no appointment,' said Rose. She felt she was going to cry again, and walked past him to the dining room, picked up her coat, came out and began to put it on. Gerard helped her on with her coat.

Rose said, moving towards the front door, 'Goodbye then. By the way, Gull and Lily are getting married. They're in there.'

Leonard Fairfax came skidding out of the drawing room holding a glass which he put into Gerard's hand. He hail adored Gerard all his life. 'I thought I heard your voice. I've been panting to see you.' Leonard resembled his father, wide the same close-curling hair and pretty red-lipped mouth, but was taller and thinner.

`Hello, faun,' said Gerard. 'So you're going to the Courtauld, I'm so glad.'

‘Just off, Rose?' said Leonard. 'Lovely to see you. Violet ha- gone upstairs with your parson!'

`Thanks so much,' said Rose. She opened the door. The new art nouveau lantern which Pat had installed illuminated the steps.

Gerard handed the glass back to Leonard. `I'm just going to see Rose along.' He picked up his coat which he had thrown down in a corner by the door.

`Don't be long!' Leonard shouted after him. 'Dad wants to see you. Peter Manson's coming, he rang up looking for you, And I want to fix lunch with you tomorrow!'

Rose and Gerard walked away along the road. A slight unconvincing rain was falling, slanted by the east wind Rose began to cry again, silently, covertly into her hand- kerchief.

Gerard said, 'Oh – damn -' Then, 'What's the matter?' `Oh nothing. I've got toothache.'

`I'm sorry. Will you see the dentist?'

`Yes. Look, don't let me keep you.' She checked her rearm and began to walk faster.

`So you're off again to Yorkshire tomorrow.'

`No, I'm not.'

`I thought Neville said so.'

`No. I'm having lunch with them. They've bought a flat in Hampstead.'

`How nice. So they're Londoners now.'

`Do go back, everyone's longing to see you. I can walk from here. I'll get a taxi in a moment anyway.'

`Where are you going?'

`Home. Look, there's a taxi. I'll say goodbye.' `Oh, all right.' Gerard flagged down the taxi and opened the door.

Rose got in. 'Nice to see you. I'll give you a ring sometime.'

`What the hell's the matter with you?' said Gerard. 'Are you ill?'

Rose began to cry again. Gerard got into the taxi and slammed the door and gave the taximan Rose's address. He patted her shoulder but did not put his arm round it. They rode in silence. When they reached Rose's flat and Gerard had paid the driver they mounted the stairs in silence.

They dropped their coats, Rose pulled the curtains and put on the electric fire. She said, 'Would you like a drink?'

`Yes.'

`Sherry?'

`Yes.'

`Anything to eat?'

`No thanks.'

She poured out two glasses.

`What is the matter, Rose?'

`Nothing's the matter! Perhaps I should ask you what the matter is! You disappear for weeks. When I ring you say you can't see me, then you don't answer the 'phone, or else you're away God knows where and it hasn't occurred to you to let me know. Well, why should you let me know. I've got no special rights, I'm not part of your family -'

`And I'm not part of your family, if it comes to that. You've evidently decided to live in the north and be a mother to those bright young things! Well, why not. Blood is thicker than water.'

`That's what Reeve says.'

`You make it clear that you've got a home elsewhere!'

`Well, it doesn't affect you. I've never had a home here.'

`That's not true. It depends on what you call a home.'

`Yes, indeed! I never thought I'd see you being jealous and vindictive -'

`I never thought I'd see you behaving like a silly petty female! I'm not jealous. Why the hell should I be?'

`Why indeed. I realise that you have quite another life into which I don't enter and when it suits you you vanish. How’s Derek Wallace?'

`Who?'

'Derek Wallace. That boy who brought that – that proof copy – from Oxford.'

'Rose, are you crazy – or bloody-minded – or what?'

'What do you expect me to do when you disappear-or am I supposed not to think about you? If you want me not to think about you you're certainly going the right way about it.'

'Rose, do you really imagine -'

'Of course it's not your fault, it's my fault. You've alwayq taken me for granted, that I'll always be there to be kind and useful. I shouldn't have hung around. Plenty of people advised me not to.'

'Well, why did you hang around?' said Gerard. 'I dlihi'i demand it. Of course I took you for granted. I don't see what you're complaining about or why you're suddenly so angry with me.'

'And why do you say "damn" and "what the hell's the matter?" and turn up late at a party where you might have known I'd be there wanting to see you! Oh I'm a fool, a fool'

'You said something about Gull and Lily getting married.'

'You're changing the subject.'

'It needs changing.'

'Yes, Gulliver's back from Newcastle – and he's got ajoh -and they're going to be married. And Gideon and Pat have adopted Tamar.'

'Have they?'

'Well, they're in charge, they've fixed everything, she's to go back to Oxford, there's to be a Tamargesellschaft, we'll Al contribute to help her through -'

'Good. But who says so?'

'Gideon, he arranges things now. Tamar's got a flat ofliri own, Violet's living at Notting Hill, Tamar's happy, Violct'm happy, all the things you might have done, only you hadn't time and didn't try -'

'I doubt if Violet's happy – but you're quite right that we didn't try enough -'

'Who's "we"?'

'Rose, just, please, be careful what you say.'

`It's come to that, has it, I have to "be careful what I say"! What about whatyou say? You accuse me of -'

'What have I accused you of except of being fond of your family?'

'I have no family. You are my family. That means I have no family. I've given you my life and you haven't even noticed.'

'You are talking nonsense which is designed simply to hurt tne. Of course you have family. It looks to me as if Reeve is 'simply taking you over, he's leading you away like a little docile domestic animal.'

'You mean he's exploiting me, he want's a housekeeper?' 'Well, why shouldn't he? He counts on the conventions of family affection.'

'Why "conventions"? Those people need me and want me, which you have never done.'

'Rose, don't shout at me, you know I can't stand tantrums.'

'I'm not shouting. All right, I'm talking nonsense. It's all much simpler than that. I've always been in love with you and you can't be in love with me, which isn't your fault. But for some reason it's all suddenly become unbearable.'

'What am I supposed to do? Do you want me to go away, now?'

'You mean for ever?'

'Don't be silly. You seem to be finding me unbearable, you are certainly angry with me, I can't think why. It's not a good moment, you are overwrought, perhaps about something else, and I'm being no use here – it might be a sensible idea if I cleared off.'

'You mean someone is waiting for you, you are looking at your watch.'

'Rose, are you drunk?'

'All right, go then.'

There was a silence. Rose had unbuttoned the top of the brown corduroy dress she was wearing and pulled at the white collar of the blouse underneath it and clawed at her throat with one hand. She wondered, am I drunk? Why are these awful things happening? She had been walking to and she spoke between the rosewood table on which she had Imp the untouched drinks and the desk where she suddenly not ico I a letter to Gerard which she had started two days ago and not finished. She picked it up and crumpled it violently in lira hand. She thought, is this the enq of such a long road, shall I scream, shall I faint? He has forgotten that we were curl lovers. Well, it was a long long time ago and it didn't mean Mot even then. Now I am waiting for him to go, I shall not stole him, and if he goes everything will be different, we shall irrevocably become strangers to each other. Perhaps we arr already strangers and I am only now beginning to notice it, She tossed the crumpled letter on the floor.

Gerard watched her. He was standing by the fireplace. He was upset and amazed by her sudden desire to wound him. For a moment he considered going away. But something else happened, which was that he suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired. He had plenty to be tired of and tired about, everything lately had been too much. He said, 'Oh God, I feel so tired!', and went to the table and picked up one of the glasses of sherry. Am he did so he accidentally spilt some of the golden liquid on the table. Although the poor old table was already so stained Rose instinctively brought out of the pocket of her dress her handkerchief, still damp with tears, and mopped up the little pool, Gerard immediately put his hand down upon her hand and they stood quiet thus for a moment, not looking at each other, When the moment passed and he withdrew his hand and she lifted her head towards him he said, 'We mustn't quarrel, darling, we mustn't quarrel.'

Rose, who had been so tearless and fierce, now felt the tears about to come again, and with them a vast sensation of relief' which was marked by a renewed consciousness of her toothache, of which she had been oblivious. She felt so intensely glad, so thankful, so grateful that Gerard had not gone, that lie had touched her and called her'darling', and that she did not have to go on with her mechanical assault upon him which had hurt both of them so much. She said, as the tears rose, 'I must get another handkerchief, this one's soaked in sherry. Here, take mine.'

She buried her face in his large white handkerchief, still stiff with its laundered folds, but already smelling of his pocket, warming it with her breath and wetting it with her tears. She had been let off some terrible fate, which had for a moment looked at her.

'Will you stay to supper?'

'Yes, of course,' said Gerard, 'but don't make anything.'

A little later after they had been in the kitchen together and Gerard had opened a bottle of wⁱne and Rose had taken two aspirins and opened a tin of tongue and a tin of spinach and set out some cheese and apples and a plum cake, and they had talked a little about Gull and Lily, and Tamar and Violet, and Annushka who was thank God not seriously ill, they sat down at the round table, which Rose had covered with raffia mats, with the food and drink before them and confronted each other as for a conference. They were both very hungry however.

'Rose, you said that "for some reason" it's all unbearable. Can we get at the reason?'

'Do you think we should go on with that? I want to talk about you.'

'It's true that you haven't asked me how I am and what I've been doing, except for a ridiculous impertinent innuendo on the latter point.'

'I'm sorry. How are you and what have you been doing?' 'I will tell you, but I'd rather wait a bit.'

'Gerard, it's not anything awful?'

'Not exactly – awful – but – I'll tell you, only let's remove these other things first.'

'You mean the things I said?'

'And the things I said, and why we both-evidently-feel in a sort of crisis. Of course there are some obvious reasons.' 'You mean Jenkin -'

'Yes. That. As if the world has ended, and – for all of us it's the end of one life and the beginning of another.' `For all of us,' said Rose, 'you mean for both of us.'

`I can't help feeling there are a lot of us still. Well, there’s Duncan, but I don't know -'

`I think we've lost them,' said Rose.

`I hope not.'

`But what is it, this beginning of another life – isn't it just a sense of our own mortality_'can it be anything else?' Gerard murmured, 'There's work to do…'

`When Sinclair died we were young – we felt then, too, that we were to blame.'

`Yes. We felt we hadn't looked after them properly, either 0 them – but that's superstition. Guilt is one way of attaching; a meaning to a death. We want to find a meaning, it lessens the pain.'

`You mean saying it's fate or -'

`Making it into some kind of allegory, dying young, the envy of the gods – or dying as a sacrifice, giving one's life for others, somehow or other, accepting their punishment, a famillai enough idea after all.'

`Oh – heavens -' said Rose, 'you've thought of that too – a perfect oblation and satisfaction -'

`Yes, but it won't do, it's a blasphemy, it's a corrupt kind of consolation – it's what feeling we're to blame leads to – I mean irrationally feeling we're to blame.'

‘So that's not our new beginning.'

‘A redemptive miracle? Of course not! It's the accidentalness we have to live with. I'm not sure what I meant by a new beginning anyway, perhaps just trying to live decently without Jenkin.'

`You said there was work to do.'

‘Yes.'

‘You don't think Crimond murdered Jenkin?'

‘We must stop asking ourselves that question.'

‘Would you ever – ask him?'

`Ask Crimond? No.'

`Because you do think it conceivable -'

`We've got to live with that mystery. But, oh Rose, it all hurts me so – you're the only person I can say this to – just Jenkin being dead is so terrible, his absence. I loved him, I depended on him, so absolutely.'

Rose thought, I can never tell Gerard why I feel so particularly that Jenkin's death was my fault. But of course I'm mad. I don't think Crimond killed him. That's another – what Gerard called an allegory. Do I imagine that somehow the accident came about because of something in Crimond's unconscious mind, because of his resentment against me? Oh if only I'd behaved differently to him, more kindly, more gratefully. Gerard thought, I can never tell Rose just how much I loved Jenkin and in what special way I loved him, and how he laughed at me! That's a secret that isn't tellable to anyone. But it's a relief to mention his name to her. I shall often do that.

They were both silent for a while, Gerard intently peeling an apple, Rose dissecting her cheese into smaller and smaller pieces which she had no intention of eating. She was beginning to feel in a sad but calm way that the evening was reasonably, safely, over. Later, she knew, she would accuse herself of having said things, not unforgivable, for she knew they were already forgiven, but stupid and perhaps memorable. There had been no catastrophe. Yet were they not, these things and the sense in which they did not matter, proof of a distance between her and Gerard, of an impossibility which had always existed and of which she was only now becoming fully conscious? She was indeed a slow learner! Was she learning to be resigned, was that what being resigned was like, to shout and wave in the street as the prince passes, and realise he does not know or care whether you are cursing or cheering – and will smile his usual smile and pass on. What a ridiculous idea, thought Rose, I feel so tired, I must be falling asleep, that was almost a dream, seeing Gerard passing by in his coach! If only he would go now, I know I could go to sleep quickly. My toothache is better. She stared at him and her stare seemed to hold him, his strong carved face set out in light and shadow, the few gleaming lines of light grey in his curly hair. She felt her own face becoming heavy and solemn and her eyes closing.

`Rose, don't go to sleep! You haven't asked me an important question!'

`What question?'

`About the book!'

`Oh, the book.' Rose felt like saying, damn the book. She just wanted the book to be over, she had had enough of it. Perhaps that was resignation too.

`You haven't asked what I thought of it. After all, what do you imagine I've been doing all this time?'

`Well, what do you think of it? That it's no good, it'- nonsense? Gerard, it doesn't matter now – that at least finished with, isn't it?'

`Oh dear.' He said it ruefully, like a boy. 'Rose, let's havr some whisky. No, don't get up, I'll get it. I say, let's get drunk, I want to talk to you so much, I want to talk and talk. Here, drink this, it'll wake you up.'

When Rose took a sip of the whisky she did suddenly feel more alert.

`You're the first person I've talked to, the first person I've seen since I finished it, that's why I haven't answered the telephone or been anywhere, I had to be by myself, to read it carefully and slowly, I just had to stay locked up with that book.'

`But is it any good? It must be a crazy book full of obsessions.'

`Yes, in a way it is.'

`I knew it – all that time and all that money to produce a madman's fantasy. It must have been dull, madmen's fantasies always are.'

^`Dull? No, it nearly killed me. It will nearly kill me.'

`What do you mean? You're frightening me. I thought somehow it would hurt you -'

, Dangerous magic? Yes.'

`What do you mean yes?'

`Rose, the book is wonderful, it's wonderful.'

`Oh no! How awful!'

`Why awful? Do you mean I might die of envy? You know, I think I might have done, at the beginning, when I began to see how good it was, I had such a mean contemptible feeling of being disappointed!'

`You hoped you cou^ld dismiss it, throw it away – I wanted you to do just that.'

`Yes, yes, I felt put down – you know we got so used to thinking of him as crazy, unbalanced, and of course bad, unprincipled – cruel, like the way he treated Duncan at the dance.'

`You mean taking his wife?'

`No, I was thinking of his pushing Duncan into the Cherwell – that was something so ugly and gratuitous – not that we know what happened of course – Rose, do you remember how Crimond danced that night?'

`I didn't see him.'

`He was like a demon, it was like seeing a god dance, a destructive, creative powerful thing. We've all been so obsessed with closing our ranks because of the harm he did to Duncan -ever since the business in Ireland we've undervalued Crimond. We've thought of him as unsuccessful and shabby, and surly, like a dog prowling around outside – and then as our politics diverged so much, and that really did matter -'

`And still matters.'

`Yes, I'll come to that in a moment, we began to add up Crimond to be generally no good, wrong morals, wrong politics, irresponsible, vindictive, a bit dotty- How could such a person write a good book?'

`But you think he has.'

`Rose, it's an extraordinary book, I'm quite carried away -I'm sure I'm not wrong about it.'

`And not envious?'

`A bit, but that doesn't matter, admiration overcomes envy. One should be inspired by something good even if one disagrees.'

`So you disagree?'

`Of course I disagree!'

Gerard was not exactly tearing his hair but pulling his hands through it as if' he wanted to straighten out its glossy curls lock by lock. His face, shining with light as it now seemed to Rose, was like a beautiful comic mask. She was touched, but more deeply disturbed and frightened, by his emotion, which she could not yet understand.

`So it's good, and of course, you disagree, but at least it's finished. You've read it – and there we are.'

`No, we aren't there – not where you think -'

`I don't think anything, Gerard. Do calm down. Will you review it?'

^`Review it? I don't know, I don't suppose anyone will ask me, that's not important -'

`I'm glad you think so. Have you told Crimond you like it, have you seen him?'

`No, no, I haven't been in touch with him. That doesn't matter, now, either.'

Rose felt some relief. She was disturbed by this excited tall, about that dangerous book. All her old fears of Crimond were alert, that he would somehow damage Gerard, that the book itself would damage him, at the very least because he would be made unhappy by envious regrets. There was also, and she felt it now like the first symptoms of a fell disease, her fear of sonic amazing rapprochement whereby Crimond would revenge him self on her by making friends with his enemy and taking Gerard away. She wanted the book episode to be over; fist Gerard, moved by his generosity from envy to admiration, to discuss the thing, and praise it, and then forget it, and everything to be as before, with Crimond, the surly dog, at a safe distance.

`I imagine not everyone will like the book.'

`No, they won't, some will hate it, some I'm afraid will love it.'

^,You evidently don't hate it as it seems to excite you so! I can't believe it's all that interesting, a book on political theory. After all there are hundreds of them.'

`Rose, it's brilliant, it's all that we thought it might be when we decided it was worth financing it. It's all we hoped – it's also all we feared, later on that is. It will be immensely read, immensely discussed, and I believe, very influential. It's odd, I can remember now, which I'd somehow forgotten, what we felt about Crimond all those years ago when we thought what it remarkable man he was and how he'd be able to speak for all of iis, for us. Of course it isn't at all what we expected then, it's more than that, and it's not what we want to hear now, though we have to hear it.'

`I wish you wouldn't keep talking about "we" – just speak for yourself – you keep on imagining there's some kind of brotherhood, but we're scattered, we aren't a band of brothers, just solitary worried individuals, not even young any more.'

`Yes, yes, dear Rose, how well you put it -!'

`You're interested in the book because you know about it, because you know Crimond, because you financed the thing. If it was by someone you'd never heard of you'd ignore it. What's so good about this horrible book?'

`Why do you think it's horrible? You mustn't. It's not just another book about political theory, it's a synthesis, it's immensely long, it's about everything.'

`Then it must be a mess and a failure.'

`But it isn't. My God, the man's learning, his patience, what he's read, how he's thought!'

`You've read and thought too.'

`No, I haven't. Crimond said I'd stopped thinking, that what I'd been doing all my life wasn't thinking. And in a way he was right.'

`That's absurd, he's an absurd man. What will he do now the book's over, fade away? Go off to Eastern Europe?'

`Oh he won't go to Eastern Europe, he belongs here. Maybe he'll write another equally long book refuting this one! He's quite capable of it! But this volume will take a lot of digesting. I didn't know one of them could produce such a book now.'

`Who are "they"?'

`Oh Marxists, neo-Marxists, revisionists, whatever they call themselves. I don't know whether Crimond is "really" a Marxist, or what that means now, they don't know themselves. I suppose he's a sort of maverick Marxist, as their best thinkers are. The only good Marxist is a mad Marxist. It's not enough to be a revisionist, you've got to ^be a bit mad too- to be able to see the present world, to imagine the magnitud,.I what's happening.'

`Well, I always said he was mad,' said Rose, 'and if the book is entirely wrong-headed -'

^Yes, it is – but one has got to understand -'

Crimond believes in one-party government – one doesn’t have to go any farther than that.'

`Well, he does and he doesn't – his argument is mush larger -'

`I should think,' said Rose, 'that there is nothing larger than that matter.'

`Oh Rose, Rose!' Gerard suddenly reached his hand across the table and seized hers. 'What a lovely answer.' She held onto his warm dear hand which mattered so much more than any book, more than the fate of democratic government, moic than the fate of the human race. 'But, my dear Rose, we have to think, we have to fight, we have to move, we can't stand still, everything is moving so fast -'

`You mean technology? Is Crimond's book about technology?'

`Yes, but as I said it's about everything. He said to me ages ago that he just had to do it all for himself, to explain the whole of philosophy to himself, alone. And that's what he's done, the preSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, right up to the present, and Eastern philosophy too – and that means morality, religion, art, it all comes in, there's a splendid chapter on Augustine, and he writes so well, it's funny and witty, all sorts of people will read it -'

`But if it's all wrong that seems rather a pity!'

`Yes. It could enflame a lot of thoughtless smashers. He thinks liberal democracy is done for. He's a sort of pessimistic utopian. And of course we're right, all right I'm right, and he's wrong – but my rightness – needs to be changed – shaken, uprooted, replanted, enlightened…'

`I think this book will be a nine days' wonder,' said Rose, `and then we can all relax! Even you may feel a bit more normal tomorrow morning. You're drunk on whisky and Crimond!' 1t may be that it's directed simply at me.'

`Surely you don't think -?' There may be a small number of `I don't mean literally. The people who will understand the book and be ready for it, and they are the people it is for – some will agree, some will disagree, but they'll have received an _important communication. It may be like a signal by heliograph – there's only one point where it's received, and there it's dazzling.'

`It's dazzled you anyway. But if it's all about Plato and Augustine and Buddha I can't see it as a political bombshell.' `It's not all about – it's an attempt to see the whole of our civilised past in relation to the present and the future, it's pointed, as it were, at the revolution.'

`Oh that! Oh really!'

`Rose, I don't mean the proletarian revolution out of old-fashioned Marxism. I mean the whole human global revolution.'

`I didn't know there was one. Neither did you. You've just picked it up out of Crimond's book!'

`My dear!' Gerard began to laugh crazily, pouring himself out some more whisky.

`You're drunk. You said I was. Now we both are.'

`My dear girl, yes, I'm drunk, and I didn't "pick up" out of Crimond's book something which of course I knew before, but which I now see in a new light.'

`It's an illusion. Everything is just a muddle. That's what liberal democracy means.'

`Rose, you see, you understand. But a popular illusion is a great force – and even the maddest prediction can reveal things one hadn't dreamt of which are really there.'

`What do you mean, technology, Africa, nuclear war -?'

`Many many things which seem separate but are connected or will connect. The foundations are shifting, we're about to see the largest, deepest, fastest change, the most shattering revolution, in the history of civilisation.'

`I don't believe those things connect,' said Rose, 'that's mythology. I'm surprised at you! We have a lot of different problems with different solutions. Anyway, dear Gerard, we shall not see this exciting cataclysm. I hope and believe that iii what remains of my lifetime I shall still be able to go out ait, I buy half a pound of butter and a copy of The Times.'

`Who knows? Think what's happened already in our lives.'

`Hitler?'

`Yes, unpredictable, unimaginable things. Space travel. We are surrounded by a future we can't conceive of. We're like those natives in New Zealand who just went on fishing because they couldn't see Captain Cook's ship – there it was in the bay, but they couldn't conceptualise it.'

`I like that. But what you can't know you can't know.'

`Rose, human life is too short, not just that it's sad to spend so little time at the play, but it's too short for serious thinking-thinking needs a long training, a long discipline, a long concentration – even geniuses must have felt they were tiring too soon, giving up when they'd just begun to understand philosophy, perhaps human history, would be quite different if we all lived to be two hundred.'

`Our lives are quite long enough to have some fun, do some work, love a few people and try to be good.'

`Yes, yes, but we've got to, some of us have got to, try to think about what's happening, and to_,fight -'

`Against what?'

`Against – how can I put it – against history. All right, this sounds crazy – Rose, it's so difficult, I can't even pick it up yet – I feel like I felt in my first term of philosophy at Oxford, as if I were crawling round and round a slippery sphere and couldn't get inside.'

`Why bother to get inside? That might have been worth trying when you were a student, but why bother now?'

`You mean – well, yes, I was too young then – perhaps I'm too old now – that thought hurts terribly.'

`I don't mean to hurt you.'

`You're pouring on cold water, buckets and buckets of it, but that's right, one must be cool, one must be cold -'

`I don't understand. Is Crimond on the side of history?'

`Yes. History as a slaughterhouse, history as a wolf that wanders outside in the dark, an idea of history as something

that has to be, even if it's terrible, even if it's deadly.'

`I thought Marxists were optimists who thought the perfect society would soon emerge everywhere as the victory of socialism.'

`They used to be. Some still are, others are haggard with fear but hanging on. Crimond thinks we must purify our ideas with visions of utopia during a collapse of civilisation which he thinks is inevitable.'

`And looks forward to, no doubt! He's a determinist, as they all are.'

`He's a black determinist, that's the most dangerous and attractive kind. Marxism as despair, and as the only possible instrument of thought, the only philosophy that will be ready to look after a period of unavoidable authoritarian government.'

`And as the ark carrying the new values. All the old bourgeois ones will be extinct.'

`He's trying to grasp the whole problem – Of course I don't agree -'

`I don't think there is a whole problem, or that we can imagine the future, no one in the past managed it.'

`I can't convey it, the book is a huge interconnected argument, and it's not just pessimistic – it's very utilitarian, that's always been the nicest part of Marxism! It's about everything – there's a lot about ecology and kindness to animals -'

`Suitable for women!'

`Rose, it's a very high-minded book, about justice, about suffering -'

`I don't believe it. He wants to liquidate the bourgeois individual, that is the individual, and bourgeois values, that is values! He believes in the inevitability of cruelty.'

`It's a comprehensive attack on Marxism by a very intelligent Marxist, an attempt to think the whole thing through- you'll see -'

`I won't. I might look up ecology in the index, and animals, kindness to -'

`Rose, please don't just mock -'

`You seem to be overwhelmed because the book looks like "what the age requires", a new synthesis and all that, but if it’s just Marxism rules the world and utopia beyond, that’s not new, it's just the old dictatorship of the proletariat in modern dress – and it's everything that you detest anyway, so why are you so impressed? I don't believe in Crimond's ark, his boat which is going to shoot the rapids.'

'Well, what do you believe in?'

'I think we've got to protect the good things that we have,' 'But really – ahead – what do you see? Catastrophe? Apres nous le deluge?'

Rose was silent. Gerard had got up and was leaning over the back of his chair, his face illumined by a glare of excitement which seemed to Rose something comic, an intensification of his usual zany smile. At last, unwilling to say yes, she simply, nodded.

Gerard turned away and began to walk up and down tit, room. 'Rose, have you got any of those chocolate biscuits?'

'The dark ones, those very dry ones? Yes, I'll get them.'

The table still carried their plates covered in fragments, i I cheese and the plum cake, the apples in a pretty bowl.

'I'm still hungry. I'll have some of' the cake too. Is it Annushka's?'

As Rose, in the kitchen, found the tin with the chocolate biscuits, she reflected that what was enlivening her in tlwi argument with her old friend was physical desire, the debate was, for her, sex, her urgent agonising wish to be in bed with him transformed into repartee, as he said into mockery, jail that, and not the future of civilisation!

Gerard was eating the plum cake, now the biscuits, now attacking the cheese, walking about and dropping crumbs on the carpet. Watching him trampling in the crumbs Rose said in exasperation, 'You keep praising this book, but you say it's all wrong! If it's Marxism it must be. Isn't that the end of the matter?'

'No – no – it's the beginning. When you read it -'

'I'm not going to read it! I think it's a detestable book, I wish it didn't exist.'

'You've got to read it.'

‘Why?'

'For reasons I'll explain in a minute. In a way I wish it didn’t exist, _it w_ill encourage fools and knaves and have a lot of bad results, ye_t I'm glad it exists too, it will force its opponents to think, it shows that people can have, just in this crucial area, new thoughts.'

‘Books of new thoughts are published every week.'

'No they aren't, not pointed at just this spot.'

'The revolution, the greatest in human history. It's just sensationalism, all it will stir up is all our old ideas.'

'Then we must have some new ones.'

'We can't. Oh Gerard I'm so tired.'

'Darling, sorry, don't get sleepy again – I want to tell you -' 'I'm going on a cruise with Reeve and the children, a long ruise, a world cruise.'

'Oh.' This arrested Gerard. 'When?'

'At Easter. Well, not a world cruise, but longish, weeks – I can't remember.'

'Oh. That should be nice.'

'I'm going to see much more of them, I'm going to change my life, I'm going to sell this flat and go and live in Yorkshire.' 'Rose! You're not to!'

'Why ever not? Who's to stop me?'

'I am. Look, all right go on this damn cruise, see your family 11,you want to -'

'Thanks!'

'But just listen to what I'm going to say.

'All right, all right!'

'Wake up.'

'I am awake. I'm sorry to be so dismissive about Crimond's book, I'm sure it's no good, though it certainly seems to have done something to you, but you'll get over it, it's nothing to do with us.'

'We financed it.'

'That was an accident. You'll soon forget it. It hasn't changed your life.'

'It has, actually – this is what I want to explain. This book must be answered, and it can be answered, point by point.' each other, next door, even share a house – why not? I've thought-'

Rose began to laugh. 'Share a house?'

`Why ever not? I think it's a good idea. We needn't be in each other's pockets. But we could meet every day -'

Rose went on laughing helplessly. 'Oh – Gerard – you and I – share a house -'

`Well -?'

`No, no, it's out of the question.'

`All right,' said Gerard, picking up his coat, 'and you don't care for the research assistant idea?'.

`No, I don't!'

`Well, maybe it was a silly idea. I'll find someone. You're tired. What the hell are you laughing at?'

Rose, sitting at the table, was laughing hysterically, covering her wet mouth and eyes with Gerard's fine white handkerchief. 'Ohjust – you – or history – or – something!'

`I'll say goodnight then,' said Gerard rather stiffly, putting on his overcoat. 'Thank you for supper. I'm sorry I made those absurd, as you evidently think them, suggestions.'

`Wait a minute!' Dropping the handkerchief Rose darted to him, she seized the sleeves of'his coat, still damp from the rain and shook him, pulling him for a moment off his balance so that they both nearly fell to the floor. 'Don't be such afool, do you understand nothing? Of course I'll be your research assistant, and of course we'll share a house or live next door or whatever you want – but if this happens we've got to have a pact – it must be like getting married, I mean like getting married, I'm tired of having nothing, I want something at last, we must be really together, I must have some sort ofsecurity – I'll read the book, I'll do anything you want, but I must feel at last – or is it hopeless – oh that book – you're not going to marry Crimond, are you?'

`Rose, are you going mad?'

`You'll want to be with him, to discuss the book.'

`I don't want to see him yet, perhaps not for ages, he may not want to see me, I suppose we'll meet sometime, but we can't be friends – because -' `You're not going to go away – and marry someone c1sc we'll be together -'

`Yes, yes, and you can go on your cruise, but you're not to go and live in Yorkshire.'

`Because you need a research assistant.'

`Because I need you.'

`I'm making you say these things.'

`Rose, don't be so exasperating, you know I love you.'

`I don't know, I know nothing, I live on the edge of blackness if you follow this book idea I'll go with you – but I must havr some sort of security.'

`You have security! You're Sinclair's sister, you're my closest friend. I love you. What more can I say?'

Rose released him. 'Indeed. What more can you say. And you remember-well, why should you remember. So we'll lien together, or next door, or nearby, and see each other often

`Yes, if you want it.'

`You suggested it.'

`Because I want it.'

`All right then. Now go home. I really am tired.'

`Rose, don't be so -'

`Go now. I'm all right. I'll help you with your book.'

`Goodnight, darling. Don't be angry with me, dearest Rose, I really do love you. I'll make you believe it. We may even go to Venice.'

After he had gone Rose cried quietly, soaking the white handkerchief' and dropping her tears onto the stained rosewood of the table. She thrust the plates away and poured ow some more whisky. Oh the tears she had shed for that man, and they were certainly not yet at an end.

She felt exhausted, aware that something large had happened, but not sure what it was, whether it was something to her advantage, or a terrible mistake, the throwing away of her last card. How impeccably, she felt, she must have behaved all these years, so many of them now, to be thinking of her behaviour tonight as such an outrageous display of emotion! She felt remorseful and ashamed, she had shouted at him, she had said what she thought. She had said that she loved him and that she had got nothing in return, which was not only not true, but definitely not food form. She had seen Gerard wince at her tone and at the crudityof her reformulation. These were old gifts, often privately rehearsed, concerning which she had never, that she could remember, exclaimed so to their inocuous author. What she regretted most bitterly however about the recent scene, and what left her now so limp with apprehension, was that she had actually revealed to Gerard what she had so often thought, that what she wanted from him mwas a promise. What of all things was more likely to alienate him, to make him cau_tious and aloof, than such a claim made upon him by a hysterical woman? It was just what he would dislike most that she had so _thrust against him. Oh how imprudent, how perhaps fatally unwise.

It was true that what had occasioned her indiscretion was Gerard's own suggestion that they should share a house, his use of these words which evoked what, in her modest way, she had always hoped for! He had, more precisely, said live near each other, live next door or share a house, separate flats no doubt, not in each other's pockets. It was she who had then made conditions, demands for 'security', and in a turbulent manner most likely to make him tactfully withdraw. She pictured now the coolly grateful way in which she should have greeted his idea! In any case, the notion of proximity had come up as a matter of convenience, of having one's research assistant close at hand! What on earth would that collaboration, if it came to it, be like^? Would she be capable of such a demanding and such a protracted task? Would she be able to study and understand that difficut book whose 'wrong- headedness' she would hate and fear, settle down to hard and perhaps uncongenial work, living with the continual possibility of disappointing and displeasing Gerard? Suppose she tried it for six months and was then replaced by a competent young woman^? Oh the traps and miseries which dog all human desires for happiness, one ought not to desire it' Now Gerard was excited by the book, it filled him with new life and strength, but later perhaps, defeated by it, unable to write his great 'reply', it might bring him down into humiliation mil despair. She might have to witness that. The whole situadul was fraught with possibilities of new and awful pain, now that she was no longer young and wanted rest and peace. This wish for peace, she realised, had been wafted to her by Reeve an, his children, had come to her at Fettiston, moving towards her, over the moors, out of that quiet well-remembered land- scape. She was, she realised, very much looking forward to i h, cruise! Well, Gerard had given her leave to go. But as she became, if' she became, more involved in his work, more necessary, she would increasingly disappoint her newly discovered Wrilly, who were kind enough to need her, would k bound to neglect them and hurt their feelings by being seen i, be the property of Gerard. But had she not always wanted_.just that, to be the property of Gerard? I am a wretch, she though', I am luckier than almost anyone in the world but I have always made myself discontented by an obsession which I ought long ago to have controlled or banished.

Rose had drunk some more whisky and eaten some more of Annushka's rich plum cake. She had begun to feel she would have to sit up all night in a state of'painful excitement going; over and over these pictures of the recent past and the ricai future. As, to encourage herself to go to bed at last, she kicked off her shoes and undid her stockings she began to think about Crimond. She had wanted the book to be over, to be an ending, something drifting away at last and taking its autlim with it. Now of course, if Gerard was right about it, thew would be reviews, discussions, controversies, photographs of Crimond in the papers, his voice on radio, his face on tide vision. Crimond would be famous. This was something they hail not imagined during that long time when the 'surly dog' had been wandering around somewhere outside in the dark. If only she could believe that there was something which would pass, pass away, like the publication date of the book itself. If only she could believe now, as she believed before, even hours ago, that they, she and Gerard, had really finished with Crimond, that he would become a name of someone who had published a book which no one read or noticed. What was now seeping into her troubled consciousness like a dark dye was the iliought that Crimond could not thus belong to the past. He belonged, perhaps hugely, like his book, to the future. Gerard had said he had no plans to see Crimond. But in the nature of diings, in the nature precisely of his own enterprise,, he would have to. They would be drawn together. At some point, surely, he would long to argue with Crimond, to question, to persuade, to try out his own ideas upon so strong an opponent. Perhaps it was even, half-consciously, the prospect of this combat face to face which was making Gerard so excited and so passionate. Or could she believe that Gerard would cool, see the book as ordinary and his own enthusiasm as a passing mania? Did she want to believe that Gerard would calm down and lose interest and that all that ardour, that great intent, would come to nothing after all?

Rose found that, as she continued slowly to undress, pulled off her brown corduroy dress and her white blouse, she was breathing deeply, almost sighing. She got into her long nightdress, settling it over her raised arms, seeking comfort in the familiar gesture. So there would be a future Crimond. If Gerard wrote, or even began to write, his book, if Rose was helping him, even if she were in any way, even as she had always been, close to him, she was bound to meet Crimond again. As she felt this she began, with the automatic swiftness of thought, to rewrite in her mind the letter of- what was it -apology, retrieval, reconciliation, which she had written to Crimond when he had just left the house on that amazing day after his proposal of marriage. My dear David, please forgive me for my graceless words. Your disclosure took me by surprise. Let me say now how grateful and how moved I am. I ran after you but you had gone. You said that we should meet again. Please let us do so, let us get to know each other. Perhaps I could love you after all. I am mad, thought Rose. Do I not remember how relieved I was, so soon after, that I had not sent that reckless compromising letter, a letter which, however little it said, would have brought Crimond back to me with every expectation? I would have had to send him away a second time, and how painful and significant that second parting would have been for both of us. Even the existence ttf that letter in Crimond's hands would have bound me to him III some sort of terrified servitude as if he were to blackmail me with it. How much I would have feared that Gerard might find out that, however briefly, even for seconds, I had felt like that: So, these are the rights over me which I give to Gerard. But supposing… I assumedyou to be unattainable, perhaps I was wrong Rose, don't be angry with me, please forgive me. Love has to ho awakened, I want to awaken yours. You are capable of loving me. If I had written at once, she thought, I could have got him bay. If I could at least have erased that dreadful impression. By now I it will have digested my arrogant words and decided to hate me. What treatment I gave to that proud man, and how I may yet be made by him to suffer for it.

Those thoughts, condensed into a moment of completi vision, flashed in Rose's mind like some terrifying aerial explosion. She said aloud, 'I don't really think this.' She begant to carry the remains of the supper into the kitchen, throwing away the fragments on the plates, wrapping up the cheese, putting the cake into one tin and the biscuits into another. Site-remembered, then felt, her toothache, but it was less acme She took two more aspirins. She was exhausted, her desire to sit and think all night had left her, she felt now, and was grateful for it, simply the need to become unconscious. Shr told herself, come back to reality. I did the only right thing, though I did it so ungraciously and badly. The hurt is to my vanity. We shall go on thinking about Jenkin and whether the impossible was possible. Gerard said that they would never be friends – but they are sure to meet, and one day I too shall see Crimond again, and we shall tremble with shock and then be cool and ordinary ever after; and fie will never tell, never, even under torture would he tell, not only for his own sake, but for mine. So there is a strange sad bond between us that will always hurt us both.

She thought, I wonder if Gerard meant it about our sharing a house, and if it could ever happen? Somewhere perhaps there really is a house where Gerard and I will live together ever after as brother and sister. Then as she got into bed she Megan to wonder to herself where that house mⁱght be. Perhaps beside the river. She had always wanted to live by the river. She turned out the light and feel asleep and dreamt she was in Venice with Marcus Field.

Gerard, feeling unusually drunk, had decided to walk all the way back from Rose's flat to the Goldhawk Road. The timid rain had ceased, and a fuzzy mad moon had risen. The east wind was moving steadily across London. He had brought no gloves and kept putting his hands into his pockets, finding this uncomfortable and taking them out again. The east wind was jerking his hair about and icily fingering his scalp.

What a state Rose had been in, so unusual, what language she had used, words like 'unbearable'. Had they managed later to sort that out, had they sorted anything out, or just created some sort of superfluous unintelligible confusion? Of' course they were friends, their friendship, their bond, was absolute, and she must know that as well as he. Had he somehow done wrong, been lacking in consideration, did she really need reassurance? Perhaps she did, she had less to think about than he had, more time to brood. He felt now that lie had given Rose less than she wanted, said less than he was tempted to say, been ungenerous and cautious. Perhaps she had been struck by a difference between the pressing attentions of the Curtland gang and the way in which he, Gerard, `took her for granted'? 'I've given you my life and you haven't even noticed.' That was a very extreme thing to say. But surely it expressed a mood and not any deep resentment? How could he not take her for granted, was not that in itself a proof of' something absolute? How strange, almost embarrassing, that she had actually spoken of needing a 'pact', something like a promise. It only then occurred to him that Rose had been demanding from him exactly what he had demanded from Jenkin! Poor human beings, he thought, always wanting security, but unwilling to provide lt!jenkin had laughed. Roar had laughed too but, as it were, in the wrong place. Why had she laughed so when he suggested sharing a house, and then later said that this was just what she wanted? Rose was usually so rational and calm. Of course she was annoyed about the book, even jealous of it, but that was another thing. Had the bloody Curtlands been getting at her? Gerard recalled the cunning look on Neville's face when he had said they were taking her to Yorkshire. Was that a thrust of some kind, a preliminary to a battle? There could be no battle. Rose belonged to him, she had always done. He was responsible to her and for her. Of course she could tend her Curtlands. But Gerard was her real family, there could be no doubt about that He thought, I'll reassure her, I'll look after her, perhaps I haven't tried enough to make her happy, but I will now.

He was, as he came near to Jenkin's house, beginning to feel very damp and cold. He had, in coming to live in the little house, intended something, perhaps symbolic but also marking some deep change in his mode of existence, some giving up of worldly goods, some kind of liberating simplification. He had indeed sold many of his possessions, while reflecting ironically that it is not exactly asceticism to sell what you have and put the money in the bank. He had lately begun to feel false in Jenkin's house, as if he were playing at something. The neighbours knew it, perhaps the house knew it too. It was not even a part of his mourning, seeming sometimes even a desecration of it. There was a kind of futile unmanageable pain in living with Jenkin's things when Jenkin was dead. He had not intended to speak to Rose of a house, though the idea had been for a short time in his head. Now he began to feel an interest in living, not where he had been before, but not here either. He needed to create some entirely new scene, and he did not have to play at austerity now he had suddenly acquired such an awesomely demanding aim in life. He did not think that he had overestimated Crimond's book, but whether he had or not he now had to write his own. He could now, thanks to Crimond, see the book that he had to write. He thought, I may indeed be carried away, but I must try my damnedest to get it all clear. As he thought this he suddenly thought of Levquist, of what it had been like to get clear some appallingly difficult piece of Greek, and recalled, and felt now in his guts, that almost sexual shudder with which, arriving at Oxford, he had found himself confronted with an impossibly high standard. He recalled too some words of Valery which Levquist used to quote: a difficulty is a light, an insuperable difficulty is a sun. Well, more often no doubt an insuperable difficulty is an insuperable difficulty. In attempting now to `answer' Crimond he must be prepared for what he wrote to seem, perhaps even to be, merely a commentary on someone else's book. Perhaps indeed all that awaited him was a long and final failure, a dreary fruitless toil, wasting his energy and his remaining time to produce something that was worthless. The words of Augustine quoted by Father McAlister came back to him: before the countenance of God my soul shrivels like a moth. Perhaps he would have nothing in the end but a broken heart, not even contrite!

As he reached the little house it was beginning to rain again, and as he pressed the key into the lock he experienced a feeling of intrusion, as of making an unexpected and perhaps unwelcome visit. The house was extremely cold. jenkin had never entertained the idea of central heating. Gerard turned on the lights and pulled the velveteen curtains and lit the gas fire in the sitting room. He decided he was still hungry, he had been too excited to eat properly with Rose, too anxious to tell her of something great. Of course he had quite failed to convey the book, how right it is, how wrong it is. He thought, it's right because it's about suffering, it's wrong because it's about being true to a future good society. That's the main idea, what the book depends on really – but there's no such thing. Truth can't reach out into the future in that way, as Rose said, we can't imagine the future – and there can never be a perfectly good society – there can only be a decent society, and that depends on freedom and order and circumstances and an endless tinkering which can't be programmed from a distance. It's all accidental, but the values are absolute. That's the simple point about human life with the long explanation. Suppose Rose's 'cold water' were just the beginning of general dismissal of Crimond's book? Of course nothing that happened to that book could affect his. But Gerard realized that he would be dismayed if he got only bad ones! He went out to the kitchen and poured a tin of soup into a saucepan. He found some sliced bread and buttered it while the soup was heating, then brought soup and bread back into the sitting room where Crimond's galley proofs were piled high on the sidebomol guarded by the Staffordshire dogs. He put the plate and the mug of soup on the green tiles by the fire, and as he turned to close the door he saw some letters lying on the mat in the hall He recognised Duncan's writing. He brought the letters in, tearing open Duncan's envelope.

My dear Gerard,

You will have seen Levquist's obituary in the Times. Whoever wrote it didn't praise him enough. That kind of greatness is not the fashion these days I dare say! I feel extraordinarily sad and felt I must write to you. I know you saw him at that terrible dance last summer, and maybe you have seen him since. He was a kind of saint ofscholarship, a special kind of example. Perhaps his life ending made me wonder what Pvr made of mine. What a mess it's all been, and how short the business is really, a topic I've heardyou mention. I conclude that what really matters is friendship, not that overrated love business, but one's closefriends, the really close people who are one's comforters and one's judges. You have always been both to me. May I express the hope that, in all the recent shambles, we haven't lost each other. It seems, here, infinitely far from London. We have bought a house, but address at present is this hotel.

Hope you are writing something. I've given up thought.

Yours

Duncan

Gerard had not seen the Times obituary. So Levquist was gone. He recalled the long room, the big desk covered with books, the window open to the summer night, Levquist's great grotesque beautiful head, Levquist saying 'Come again, come and see the old man.' He had not been again. He had never kissed Levquist's hands and said he loved him. Levquist saying, 'I saw young Riderhood. He was quite stumped by that piece of Thucydides!' 'Oh God, oh God,' said Gerard aloud, and sat down in one of the uncomfortable chairs by the fire and hid his face in his hands. A cloud, a presence, of dark unhappiness was suddenly beside him. That was the night when his father died. Levquist, who had also been his father, was dead too. And_, Jenkin was dead; and the presence in the room was that of Jenkin, Jenkin sad, Jenkin as sadness, Jenkin as incurable torturing grief. Why did you have to die, when I loved you so? Gerard said to Jenkin. And it was terrible, terrible to him, as if the shade of Jenkin were weeping and holding out its strengthless hands. It wasn't my fault, said Gerard to the shade, forgive me, forgive me, I am bereaved, I am punished, I am poisoned. Why are you weeping these awful tears? Is it because you were murdered and I have befriended your murderer? Oh Jenkin, how can we have so lost cacti other, how can we be so changed, you an accuser and I paralysed by a poisonous drug!

Gerard stood up and actually looked around the room, searching for something, some little thing, for that was what the awful accusing shade had now become, something like a little box or a black mechanical toy. There was nothing but the room itself, awkward and graceless and accidental and empty. With a sudden gesture Gerard hit the pile of neatly stacked proofs knocking them onto the floor. As they fell they took one of the Staffordshire dogs with them. The dog was broken. Gerard picked up the pieces and put them on the sideboard.

He thought, I'm poisoned all right, I'm haunted, I'm cursed, I'm mad. The destruction of the dog had brought tears to his eyes at last. How can I write this book, he thought, when I can't help thinking that Jenkin was murdered? What do Crimond's thoughts matter? Why did I talk to Rose about a house or being together? Let her go to Yorkshire. I'm under a curse, I'm condemned to a haunted solitude. Crimond's book made me feel I had some thoughts, but it was an illusion. Levquist said I had no hard core, Crimond said anything I wrote would be beautified and untrue, Rose said it was vanity. I haven't got the energy to write a long book. I see now it's not important. I'll get out of'here though. I don't want company any more, whether it's humans or ghosts. Oh God, I'm getting old I've never felt this before. I'm old.

He picked up the plate and the mug from the tiles beside the fire and took them back to the kitchen. He put on the kettle for his hot water bottle. He had forgotten to switch on the electric fire in the bedroom and the room was icy. He switched it on and pulled the curtains. The wind, now filled with rain, was lashing at the window panes which were rattling and admitting cold streams of air which were agitating the curtains. He said to himself, of course I'm drunk, but that's how it is. The curse I'm under is the one we're all under. The Oxford colleges and Big Ben can't buy us off now. The time when we could talk on this planet of controlling our destinies is finished for good – the short short time. Rose is right, it's no use trying to think any more. The party's over. Apris nous le diluge.

The kettle boiled and he filled the bottle and put it in the bed which seemed to be inhabited by some cold damp fungus. He took his pyjamas and went back to the sitting room to undress before the fire. Crimond's galley proofs were all over the floor and he thrust them into a heap with his foot. He took off his tic which he had put on hours ago to go to the Fairfaxes' party, where fie knew he would see Rose, and where he had arrived late because he had been unable to tear himself away from that damnable book.

As he unbuttoned his shirt he saw Duncan's letter open upon the chair. He would reply of course, but he felt no urgent desire to see Duncan. Later perhaps. I feel discredited, he thought, these deaths have knocked the stuffing out of me. I'd be ashamed before Duncan. It's all right for him to have a woman and a house. Duncan could manage his life, even his bad luck, he was never 'high-minded', like Jenkin, like Gerard, like Crimond. Gerard remembered that he had used that term to Rose to describe Crimond's book. But Jenkin's high-mindedness was not like Gerard's or like Crimond's. Gerard recalled how Levquist had snubbed him when he had suggested that Jenkin hadn't 'got anywhere'. 'Riderhood doesn't need to get anywhere. He walks the path, he exists where he is. Whereas you -' Yes, thought Gerard, Jenkin always walked the path, with others, wholly engaged in wherever he happened to be, fully existing, fully real at every point, looking about him with friendly curiosity. Whereas I have always felt reality was elsewhere, exalted and indifferent and alone, upon some misty mountain peak which I, among the very few, could actually see, though of course never reach, and whose magnetism thrilled in my bowels (that was Levquist's phrase) while I enjoyed my superior vision, my consciousness of height and distance, the gulf below, the height above, and a sense of pleasurable unworthiness shared only by the elect – self-satisfied Platonism, Augustinian masochism, Levquist called it. Why didn't I go back and see him and talk about all that, I could have gone any time. Now I feel, I feel at last alone – and the mountain and the mountain peak, that hanging on, that looking up, was it all an illusion? Can I live without thinking of myself, and of ⁱt, in just that way? Perhaps it was the loss of it which I felt just now when I realised how poisoned I am by that murderous doubt, when I thought it's too high, it's too far. Just when I meet with the insuperable difficulty which I've so much desired I find I have no strength left. I shall shrink and shrink and creep into a crevice. What I thought was the top of the mountain was a false summit after all – the summit is far higher up and hidden in cloud and as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist, my endurance is at an end.

He thought, I'll go right away and hide somewhere. I'll buy a flat and lock it up and go. I won't tell anyone where I am. Who cares anyway, except Rose, and she's got her own family now. What a lot of nonsense I talked to her tonight, it was probabl^y the drink, I'm not used to it. I'll tell her not to tell anyone I had that daft idea. Well, she won't tell anyone, she wants it to go away, she probably knows it's bound to. How I wish I could talk to Jenkin. Perhaps this visitation of awfulness is really knowing at last that Jenkin is dead and isn't anywhere. He put Duncan's letter back in its envelope and put it on the mantelpiece, and began to glance at the other letters which he had dropped on the floor. There were two letters for Jenkin. There had been many of those to begin with, now there were fewer. These two were advertisements and he put them in the wastepaper basket. One was the gas bill which he put in his pocket. Then he suddenly felt something like a massive electric shock, ajolt, which for a moment he could not account for and imagined he had actually been touched by some stray wire which had sent a current through him. Or perhaps he was ill, something had given way in his brain. He found lie was looking down at the last of the letters which was lying on the floor at his feet. It was the writing on the envelope which, darting its message into his unconscious mind, had produced this strange shock, and even now, after Gerard had realised that this writing was portentous, perhaps terrible, he did not immediately recognise whose writing it was. Handwriting can tell a tale of joy or of fear well before it is connected with a name. It was Crimond's writing. It was many years since Gerard had received a letter from Crimond, but the script somehow, like a sinister hieroglyph revealed by torchlight in a tomb, took him back many more years, to Oxford, to something, some event, some feeling, too deep now to be uncovered, far away in the dark depths of his mind, and from which the frightening portent derived its original power. Even as Gerard was returned to his present self he felt a sick terror at the sight, a disgusted loathing, and was tempted to tear the unopened letter up into small pieces. He even turned his back upon it and went out to tidy the kitchen, to wash his mug and plate under the hot tap and turn off the light. Then he returned to the sitting room and picked up the letter and opened it. At any rate it was not a long letter. It consisted of only one line. It was an accident. D.

Gerard now took another interval. He went out into the hall, he even opened the front door and found that the rain was less, the wind as ill-tempered as ever. He closed the front door and instinctively bolted it, though he did not always do this. Then he returned to the sitting room and sat down beside the fire and read the note again several times. He sat very quiet while a storm of mixed emotions filled his head, then flew round his head, then filled the room as if with a mass of dark silent swift birds. Human thought is easil^y able to break the rules of logic and physics, and at that moment Gerard was able to think and feel a very large number of vivid, even clear, things at the same time. He thought chiefly about Jenkin, Jenkin's death and the accident which had caused it, and this presented itself as a topic which he could now discuss with Jenkin. At any rate, as lie put it to himself, how Jenkin doesn't have to be a ghost, he can be himself, only in the past. His being remains absolute. He didn't suffer, Gerard thought, I can really say this to myself now, it was sudden, he didn't know. Gerard had been unable to look at the brief newspaper reports which described a freak mishap, but he had received a_ll impression from hearing people talk. ^He felt now no urge to go further than that impression. I won't ever ask him, he thought (meaning Crimond), I don't want to know exactly what happened, because it doesn't matter now. At no point did it occur to Gerard to doubt that Crimond's sentence told the truth. To doubt it would have been to consent to soul-destroying madness, the whole of the rational world cohered with Crimond's truth-telling. ^He could not write such a letter arid it not be true. As Gerard took all this ⁱⁿ he not only felt the energy which had seemed to forsake him flooding back in great calm generous waves, he also felt as if" in some way he could not yet master, the whole world had pivoted around him, being the same yet offering him all sorts of different views and angles. As he began to consider these Gerard rose and collected up the scattered sheets of Crimond's book and replaced them ⁱⁿ a neat pile oil the sideboard. He walked to and fro across the little room, and it was as if the dark bird-thoughts which had been tearing round and round like swifts had begun to settle quietly ^on the furniture and regard him with their bright eyes.

He sat once more and looked at the note. I t was evident that Crimond had been deeply disturbed, perhaps tormented, by wondering what Gerard was thinking about his friend's death. He had had to remove that terrible image from Gerard's mind. He had, equally, had no doubt that Gerard would believe him. It had evidently taken him some time to decide to writc however. Perhaps he felt ^an interval was necessary, perhaps he had been unable to decide what exactly to say. He got it right, thought Gerard. The signature too was significant. Not C. or D.C. but D. Gerard allowed himself to be moved by this and stowed it away in his mind for later inspection. He was now able too, for the first time, to pity Crimond for the terrible thing which he had unwittingly done, and must live with ever after. At least Crimond, by writing to him, had liberated himself from one extra horror, and with that had, and much more, liberated Gerard. The liberation was something huge, but also painful, bringing back in a purer and sadder form his mourning and his loss. Here there recurred in his mind the idea, which had so much tormented him, that, perhaps in a remote past, Crimond and Jenkin had known each other better than he had ever suspected. But this speculation was now to be seen as idle and empty, it had gained its poisonous force from that other poison, which was at last utterly gone from him.

Gerard took off his shirt and trousers and gradually enclosed himself in his pyjamas. There was also the question of how to reply to the missive. That would require some reflection. Crimond would have mitigated his distress by sending it. But he would also expect an acknowledgement. An interval would be necessary, then an equally brief note. I'll think about that tomorrow, thought Gerard. And he said to himself" of course I will write that book, I was pretending something to myself when I imagined I wouldn't, I was sick then, I've got to write it. Of course I'll be fighting not only against those insuperable difficulties, but also against time. Even to get to the start will be a long struggle. But I'll do it, I mean I'll attempt it with all my heart. I'll do it fbrJenkin, now things are clear between us, I can say that too. Christ, how I shall miss him as I go on alone upon that way. I'll start reading Crimond's book again tomorrow and I'll remember all the things Rose said about my being 'bowled over' and 'carried away' and how if I hadn't known the author I wouldn't have noticed the book. I don't think she's right, but even if'she is a bit right it won't matter now, because I see what I have to do, what my job is. And that's certainly thanks to Crimond.

As he sat ^on his bed he thought too, and the thought was disturbing: one day I shall see Crimond again. Certainly not soon. There is a strict decorum which must be kept between us. There is Jenkin's death, of which we will not speak, and there is the book. Of course I shall want to talk to Crimond about the book, and what I have to say will interest him too. Or will he have forgotten the book, even rejected it? People who write long learned remarkable books sometimes reject them, do not want to discuss them or even hear them mentioned, not necessarily because they now think them no good, but just because quite other matters now obsess them. Crimond is certainly capable, as I said to Rose, of writing another long book to refute this one, or of writing equally passionately, equally learnedly, upon some totally other subject! Still, I shall see him again, some time – and when that time comes he will expect me.

He thought, I'll look after Rose too, I won't let her drift away into Curtland land, I'll make her happy. Rose is happiness – only it's never worked out like that. I can't do without her. He got into bed and turned out the light. He thrust his feet and the hot water bottle down into the icy nether regions of the bed. The wind was blowing in gusts and tossing the drops of rain like little weak pebbles onto the glass. In the dark, as sadness swept over him again, he began to think about his father, and what a gentle, kind, patient, good man he had been, and how he had given way, out of love, to his wife, sacrificing not only his wishes but sometimes even his principles. All that must have caused pain, and his children too, never quite in tune with him, must have grieved him as the years went by. I didn't try enough, thought Gerard, I didn't visit him enough or ask him to stay, I never seemed to have time for him. I should have made him a part of my life. And my mother – but he could not see his mother, that sad shade signalled to him in vain. He thought, they are dead, my father, my Sinclair, my Jenkin, my Levquist, all dead. And then it occurred to him for the very first time to wonder if, really and truly, Grey were dead too. Parrots live longer than we do, and Grey was a young bird then. But parrots in cages are helpless, they depend on the kindness of humans, and there are other ways they can die before they are old, by neglect, by illness, they can be forgotten in empty houses, they can starve. The thought that Grey might have starved to death was so terrible to Gerard that he suddenly sat bolt upright, and there flowed into him, as into a clear vessel, a sudden sense of all the agony and helpless suffering of created things. He felt the planet turning, and felt its pain, oh the planet, oh the poor pool planet. He lay back, turning ^on his side and burying his face ill the pillow. He let the moment pass. He thought, I've got to go on, or rather, if I can, up, because I'm not going to abandon my life-image, not for Levquist, not even for jenkin. It is up there, solemn and changeless and alone, indifferent and pure, and, yes, I feel its magnetism more strongly at this moment, perhaps, than ever before, and, yes, there is an awful pleasure in that sense of distance, of how high and unattainable it is, how alien, how separated from my corrupt being. I shrivel before it, not as before the face of a person, but as in all indifferent flame. I have seen the false summit, and now as the terrain changes I glimpse more terrible cliffs and peaks far far above again. Yes, I'll attempt the book, but it's a life sentence, and not only may it be no good, but I may never know whether it is or not. Thoughts at peace: could thoughts ever be at peace again? This was the moment before the beginning. Tomorrow, he thought, he would have to begin, to start his pilgrimage toward where Jenkin had once spoken of being, out on the edge of things. Yes, beyond that nearer ridge there was no track, only a sheer cliff going upward, and as he gazed upon that vertical ascent Gerard paled as before a scaffold.

He thought to himself now, I'll never get to sleep. I'd better get up and do something. I wonder if I could mend that Staffordshire dog? It's not too badly broken. But he was already drowsy and beginning to dream. He fell asleep and dreamt that he was standing on that mountainside holding an open book upon whose pages was written Dominus Illuminatio Mea – and from far far above an angel was descending in the form of a great grey parrot with loving clever eyes and the parrot perched upon the book and spread out its grey and scarlet wings and the parrot was the book.

Lily Boyne was walking, with slow haste, along a shabby decrepit street ⁱⁿ South London. Her haste was slow because her heart was beating violently and her mouth was open and she was panting with emotion and felt as if she might soon faint or at least have to sit down. Only there was nowhere to sit except on the kerb. She was anxious to arrive, yet afraid of arriving. Although she so much looked forward, she wished it was over and she was going home. When she went home would she be going in one piece or mangled? Was she sane now and would be mad later, or mad now and would be sane later? Or had madness entirely taken her over?

Lily was going to see Crimond. She had not seen him or sent him any communication since the awful occasion of the midsummer ball. The baneful memory of that night haunted her, sometimes tormented her, although she did not really imagine that, for her, it could have been different. Well, perhaps she did imagine a little, could not altogether banish beautiful painful fantasies of how on that evening Crimond could at last have 'found himself' in realising how much he cared for her. She had felt, still a little felt, with a kind of pride and a kind of terror, that it was 'all her fault', because it was she who had brought Jean and Crimond together. If she had not told him of the dance he would not have manifested himself in that kilt, radiant with godlike power. Although she had told no one about her own crucial role in that drama, she could not help feeling that someone or something would punish her for it – perhaps fate, perhaps Crimond. Yet also it was a bond, she had played the part of Love's messenger, and it was not because of her that Love had been, so mysteriously, vanquished. One of her present terrors, as she walked along the ragged street, was that Crimond might think that she had come to sympathise with him! This idea made her feel ready to destroy herself. In fact she knew nothing, and it seemed that nobody knew anything, about the reasons for Jean and Crimond's second parting. The fact was that Crimond was once more alone, and no woman had yet enabled him to 'find himself'. Of that Lily felt sure. She was going to see him because she had to.

As she neared the house and her knees were as water she began to ask herself again (for she had gone over it in detail many times during the last weeks) whether in spite of her intuitions she might be entirely wrong about Crimond, and have been wrong all along? Her impression of him as solitary could be entirely accidental and fallacious. Perhaps the 'Jean business', about which Gerard and company were so solemn, was just one of an endless stream of adventures? Suppose a woman were even now in possession, in the house, ready to open the door to Lily and sneer at her? It seemed madness to make this gratuitous unheralded excursion which could end with some new and more awful humiliation by which she would be scarred forever. But there was upon her a fiercer and more awful imperative, issuing from the depths of her prescient and frightened soul. She might regret having come, but would surely much more terribly regret not having come.

The sun was shining and, even in this cluttered and ramshackle part of London, there was the sense of a spring day. Windows which had long been closed were open and people, hatless and gloveless, had put on lighter and brighter clothes. In tiny front gardens bushes were budding and grass actually beginning to grow. There were, here and there, trees, slightly hazy with green, which shed an aura, even a fragrance of new life. A fresh cold sunny light announced the start of the long English spring. Of course Lily had given careful thought to what she was to wear. She had considered and rejected various smartish but simple dresses, even the black and white one with the velvet collar which was so subtly becoming. She decided on dark brown, very narrow, trousers, of unobtrusively expensive tweed, with a lighter brown leather jacket and a blue cotton shirt and a silk scarf with a blue and pink abstract design. In spite of attempts to put on weight, she was as thin as ever, her face that morning, as she put on discreet make-up, looking almost gaunt, the tendons of her long neck sturdily in view, her collar bones protruding under the soft cotton of the shirt. Her melted-sugar eyes were clear and bright, bw 0s. wrinkles increasingly massed round them collected the io- powder conspicuously onto their ridges. Her thin lips, wit wio lipstick, were almost invisible, her mouth a slit. She had unwisely washed her scanty unconvincing hair the previom night, and it was now, however much she combed it down and tucked it in behind her ears, standing up on end in dry senseless wisps. She had given up the much-advertised hair oil. She had wrapped the silk scarf carefully round her neck, and that at least stayed in place. Over this gear she had put mi her long green coat, and her trousers were tucked into Mat boots.

At last Crimond's house was near, then in view, and Lily hurried her pace so as to preclude any sickening last-mimic hesitation. She mounted the stone steps. The big door, which looked like a modern painting, patchily coloured and scribbled over with cracks, was closed. Lily tried it. It was n0i locked and she entered into the familiar shabby hallway, dark and smelling of old dirt and neglect. She paused in th• darkness, blinded after the hard clear sunlight, and inhaled the atmosphere of silence and anticipation and fear which she knew so well. She listened. She thought, he's out, he's moved. She stepped forward and tripped against the bicycle and stood still again after the sound. She opened the door leading to the basement and tiptoed down the stairs. Here she listened again. Silence. She turned the handle noiselessly and slowly opened the door a little and looked through the opening into the Playroom.

She saw, as in a familiar picture, the familiar scene, the murky room, the lighted lamp, the figure at the desk writing. It was like a dream, indeed she had often dreamt it. The window onto the area, untouched by the sun's rays, gave near the door a little dead illumination, but the other end of the room was dark except for the lamp. Crimond, his head bowed, unaware of his visitor, continued to write, and Lily inserted herself quietly into the room and sat down on a chair near the door. She breathed deeply, hoping that she was recovering and not becoming more unnerved. There was for a moment a trance-like peace as if she had been granted a timeless vision, a scene transfigured by a ray from beyond, falling upon it accidentally like the shadow of an aeroplane upon a landscape.

Suddenly Crimond lifted his head and stared down the room. He said in a sharp tone, 'Who's that?'

Lily thought, he thinks it's Jean. She said, `It's Lily.'

Crimond stared a moment, then lowered his head again and continued to write.

Lily came slowly forward carrying her chair. She set it down, not up against the desk, but a little way in front of it, as if she were a candidate about to be interviewed. She took off her coat and sat down. She noticed that the target, which had been on the wall behind Crimond, was gone. She waited.

After about two minutes Crimond looked up again. He was wearing rather thicker glasses of a different rounder shape with dark rims which altered his appearance. He took off the glasses and looked at Lily. 'Well?'

`Forgive me,' said Lily. 'I just wanted to see you.'

`What about?'

Lily was ready for this question. 'I just wondered if'l could do any typing for you. Someone said ^you had nearl^y finished your book.' In fact Lily knew quite well that the book was finished, as Gulliver had told her some time ago.

`Thank you,' said Crimond, 'the book has been typed. I don't need any assistance.' However he did not seem to expect her to go, but continued to stare at her. He waited for her to speak again.

`So it's finished?' said Lily.

,Yes.'

`So what are you writing now?'

`Another book.'

`Is it like the first one, a sequel?'

`No. It's quite diffi-rent.'

`What's it about?'

Crimond did not answer this question. He rubbed his long nose where the new spectacles had made a red line on the bridge. Then, not looking at tier, he busied himself^- cleaning the spectacles with a handkerchief, then refilling his fountain pen at an ink pot and wiping it on a piece of blotting paper. She thought, feeling a little calmer now, that he looked older, his pale face a little puffy, his faded red hair a little thinner.

Lily said, 'What else are you doing?'

`Learning Arabic.'

‘Why Arabic?'

‘Why not.'

`So that's what that is. I thought it was shorthand.' Some handwriting at the edge of the desk had caught her eye. She moved her chair forward.

Crimond, who had given her his attention for a moment, was now looking down at the loose-leaf book in which he had been writing when she came in. The Arabic was in an open exercise book. Lily peered at it. 'Did you write this?'

`Yes.'

`Is it difficult?'

`Yes.'

There was a moment's silence. Crimond then said, 'As we have nothing more to discuss, and I am very busy, perhaps you could go away.'

Lily suddenly blushed. She could feel the blush running up her long neck and through tier cheeks to her brow. She felt that she must now say something striking or be banished forever. It was like the moment in the fairy tale when one must answer the riddle or die. Unfortunately Lily could not thⁱnk of anything striking. She said lamely, 'I very much want to help you.'

`I need no help, thank you.'

'I could help you in your political work -'

`No.'

`I could type, I could run errands, I could fetch books, I could do anything.'

`No.'

`I know you're a lion and I'm a mouse, but a mouse could help a lion. There's a story of a lion who's kind to a mouse, and the mouse says I'll help you one day, and the lion laughs and then the lion is caught in a trap and the mouse gnaws through all the ropes and sets him free.'

This little speech at last showed some sign of amusing Crimond and attracting his attention. He said, but unsmiling', `I don't like mice.'

‘Then I'll be anything you like,' said Lily. 'That's what I came to tell you. I love you. I've always loved you. I know I'm a little worthless person, but I want to be in your life. For all I know you have hundreds of Lilies, little people who want to serve you, all right, but I'm me, and I exist for you and I know that I do. I told you about that dance last year. Whatever happened you know I meant well. I feel I'm a sort of'messenger in your life. After all I've known you a long time. I'd do anything you wanted, I'd be your slave, I want to give myself to you as a total present, I don't care what might happen, all I want is to know that you accept me as someone you could rely on for ever and use in any way you pleased. I feel this as a vocation, as if I'd been told by God, you are an absolute for me, I can't do anything but give myself. If you can only accept me I'll be silent, I'll be invisible, I'll be as quiet as a mouse -sorry, you don't like mice – but I just want to be there, like something in the corner of the room, waiting for anything that you want me for -'

Crimond, who had been listening to this with a slight frown, holding his spectacles against his lips, said, 'I don't,like this stuff about little people and your being a little worthless person. You area person, not a little person. I don't like that terminology.'

Crimond seemed to be making a general point, and nothing to do with her personally, but she said eagerly, 'I'm glad you don't think I'm worthless – I'd study, you could teach me -'

`Oh Lily, just get back to reality, will you.'

`You are my reality.'

`You know you're talking idle nonsense, just something that you want to get off your chest even if it makes no sense. Now you've said it perhaps you'll kindly go away.'

`I can't go away,' said Lily. She had been talking fast and eagerl^y, but calmly. Now her voice sounded in her cars with that dreadful hysterical edge to it. 'I won't go away. I'm sure you have some special feeling about me. You must be kind to me. Can't you even be kind when I love you so much? How can there be so much love and it simply go to waste? I must have something from you, like a pact, a kind of status, anything, even a very very small thing, which is between us for always.'

Crimond, his gaze straying from her as if wearily, gave a sigh. 'Lily, I can't attach any sense to what you ask. You speak as if I could easily give you something very valuable -'

`Yes, yes, easily, you could, you could!'

`But I haven't got this thing, this special feeling, I don't want you as a slave -'

`Then I wouldn't be -'

`Or an invisible object in the corner of the room, or a mouse, I don't like things like that, I couldn't have such a person near me, and I can't give you any sort of "status" as you put it, I just don't have any special feeling for you or any special role for you – I'm sorry.'

Lily, controlling tears, got hold of her coat which had been lying on the floor and pulled it up onto her knees. 'All right. I understand. I'm sorry. I had to see you and I had to say what I've said.'

`Now do get back into real life. What are you doing now in the real world?'

`I'm getting married. To Gulliver Ashe. Tomorrow.'

Crimond did then actually smile, in fact he laughed. 'Oh Lily, Lily – so you were ready to run even from under the wedding crown?'

`Yes.'

`Or would I have had to put up with a married slave?'

`No, no – if you'd wanted me none of that would have happened, none of that would have existed.'

`Oh you silly – silly – girl.'

Lily smiled through tears then dashed the tears away and stood up and put on her coat. She said, 'I can see you though, sometimes in the future, call in, you won't say never?'

`Not never, but I've got nothing for you.'

`Then I'll come for nothing.' `For Christ's sake, Lily,' said Crimond, `just clear off and be happy, can't you, and make someone else happy, and forget all this dream stuff. Go on, go away, get out and be happy!'

`Rose and Gerard have invited us to dinner, for after when they came back from Venice,' said Lily.

`At their new house?' said Gulliver.

`No, silly, they've only just bought it, at Rose's place.' Rose and Gerard had bought a house in Hammersmith near the river.

`I thought Gerard would never stick it out in Jenkin's foxhole,' said Gull, 'it's definitely not his scene.'

`What about our scene?' said Lily. 'I think we should buy a house soon, a nice small one in Putney or somewhere, with a garden. The children will like that.'

`The children?!'

`Now you've got a job and I've got a project we can afford it. I believe I've still got some of that old money left too, God knows what happened to most of it.'

`Let's not be in a hurry,' said Gulliver. `I like it here. And we aren't even married yet!'

`We will be this time tomorrow!' It was evening, late evening, of the day of Lily's visit to Crimond, and Gull and Lily were still sitting at the table after a lengthy celebration dinner including numerous toasts in vodka, wine and later cherry brandy, wishing themselves happiness and success in the future. They were both drunk but feeling exceptionally alert, clear-headed, argumentative and witty.

`We will be,' said Gulliver, 'unless one of us funks'it – or both of us!'

`Running away from under the wedding crown.'

`That's a phrase out of Dostoevsky,' said Gull, 'I thought you hadn't read him.'

`Oh. I thought it was just a general expression. I heard it somewhere.'

`Well, I won't run away!' said Gulliver. 'Look, here's the ring!' He showed Lily the golden ring nestling in its little furry velvet box. He also, in an instant, pictured the dreadful goings-on in that Dostoevsky novel. What a business it was to deal with women. One just had to take the risk.

`You've told Leonard what to do?' Leonard Fairfax was to be best man, and Angela Parke, Lily's old art school friend, was to be bridesmaid.

`At a registry office, there's nothing to it!' said Gull. `I'll give Leonard the ring so he can give it me back at the crucial moment. I bet most people don't bother even with that. Anyway, you've done it before!'

`Yes but – there wasn't a ring- I can't remember-' Lily had refused to wear a wedding ring. It seemed incredible now that she had once been married. Gulliver didn't want to hear about her shadowy husband, and she could not now remember his face – poor James, oh poor James. 'I do like a bit of ritual.'

^`It'll all be over in four minutes.'

`My God. Then we'll be stuck for life!'

`I certainly hope so. Maybe we can arrange a match between Leonard and Angela?'

`I doubt it,' said Lily. 'Angela's older than me and she's got fat. Anyway Leonard seems to be getting off with Gillian Curtland. Now she's an eligible girl.'

`She's awfully pretty,' said Gulliver, quickly banishing the image of that eligible nineteen-year-old.

`I still can't decide what to wear.'

`I'm going to wear my pale grey check suit with the pale pink over-check. You won't wear trousers, will you, please?'

`Of course not. I think I'll wear that black and white dress with the velvet collar.'

`So we just invite Angela and Leonard back here afterwards? It's almost a clandestine wedding! I forgot to tell you I saw Tamar round at Leonard's place. Conrad Lomas was there and that trendy priest from Boyars.'

`All religion did for her was get rid of her mother.'

`I don't know,' said Gull, 'I think it was something deep. Anyway she and the priest were having a jolly good laugh together! And Violet's rumoured to be happy.'

`That's impossible, she can't be happy.'

`Well cheerful or gleeful or something. Pat and Gideon don't know what to do with her, Leonard says she's eating them!'

`They're not edible,' said Lily, 'not like Tamar was. Gideon will pension her off.'

`I say, look at us, we're gossiping about our friends just like in real life.'

‘Are they our friends, have we friends?'

`Yes, and we'll have lots of new ones too, and we'll invite them to dinner, just like ordinary real people do!'

`But do we want to be ordinary real people?'

`Are we capable of it?'

They both looked doubtful.

`I wonder if Gideon will invest in our Box Shop?' said Lily.

Lily and Angela Parke had decided to set up a shop, well to begin with a stall, selling matchboxes. It had been Angela's idea, though Lily had supplied the managerial enthusiasm and financial backing. It was, according to Lily, bound to succeed. Every tourist will buy a pretty matchbox, the cheapest and most picturesquely 'typical' of all gift souvenirs. From matchboxes the idea spread to other boxes, hand-painted wooden boxes in the Russian style, carved boxes with Celtic designs, boxes charmingly decorated with images and designs stolen from museums and art galleries all over London, attractive arty stuff not pretentious and not kitsch. Angela was sure she could collect together a lot of unemployed talents. 'Art students aren't all grand,' she said, 'they don't all think it's beneath their genius to make pretty things!'

`I hope so!' said Gulliver in answer to Lily's question. He had not yet met the formidable Angela Parke, and he feared that 'the project' would simply swallow up the rest of Lily's money. As soon as they were married he would see Lily's accountant, he would `go into the matter' and if neccssary 'put his foot down'. After all, he had to play the husband! 'I look forward to meeting Angela!' `Yes, and I'll meet your miracle-working Newcastle friend, MrJustin Byng!'

This was a young American stage-designer who had promised Gulliver a job in a stage design studio he was hoping to set up in London, where Gulliver was to be his secretary and guide to the London theatre. 'You still haven't told me how you met him,' said Lily, 'or what really happened in Newcastle. We've been in such a state since you came back.'

This was a moment which Gulliver had been putting off. He was suddenly full, choked, with all the fears which the excitement of his new relation with Lily, much of which had taken place in bed, had temporarily eclipsed. Lily would lose her money, Gulliver would lose his job, he was tomorrow to take on a wife whom he would have to provide for; and there was now the more immediate anxiety about how Lily would receive what he was about to tell her.

`Lily, I've got to tell you something. I never went to Newcastle.'

`What?'

`I didn't get farther than King's Cross station.'

`Then where wereyou all that time?'

`To begin with in a cheap hotel near King's Cross, and then – staying with Justin Byng.'

`Oh God,' said Lily, 'that's started already!' She got up from the table and marched to the mantelpiece where she picked up a jade tortoise, considered throwing it across the room and decided not to. Gull was looking so attractive tonight, recent events had improved, even beautified him. He was wearing his pale brown corduroy trousers, resplendently cleaned after the skating disaster, with a new aquamarine sweater from Simpson's, and new dark brown leather boots.

`Don't be so bloody,' said Gull, 'nothing's started! Justin lives with a beautiful girl from Michigan who's married to him! He took me in out of kindness and because he wanted to work with me. And I didn't tell you sooner because I wanted to be sure it was all real and I really had a job.'

`All right, go on, tell me, and tell me everything.'

`A most extraordinary thing – well, an odd thing – happened to me at King's Cross station. I know this is absurd, but this is how it is. I found a snail.'

`A snail?'

`Yes. Wasn't it peculiar? Well, I suppose snails are everywhere but one doesn't expect to find one in a London main-line station.'

`Good heavens! Go on.'

‘I was just checking the trains to Newcastle and I saw this thing on the ground, it was rolling about, someone must have kicked it, I didn't know what it was, I thought it was something quite peculiar, I picked it up. Of course the little fellow was well back inside his shell, but I assumed he was alive and I sat down with him on a seat, and sure enough after I'd been holding him ⁱⁿ my hand for a moment he came right out and unrolled his eyes and started waving his front part about and I put him on the back of my hand and he walked and – do you know – he looked at me.'

`Oh Lord!' said Lily.

`What's the matter? Anyway I didn't know what to do with him. I couldn't just leave him there, or keep him in my room at the hotel and take him with me to Newcastle, and as I'd developed this sort of personal relationship with him I felt I had to look after him properly. I'm sorry, this sounds daft -'

`It doesn't,' said Lily.

`So I set out with my snail, I felt by then he was my snail, to find somewhere safe to put him. But, honestly, round about King's Cross -'

`I can imagine.'

`I walked about a lot of streets looking for a decent park or garden but I couldn't find one. So I went back to the station and took the tube to Hyde Park Corner.'

`Well done.'

`I put the snail inside my handkerchief in my trouser pocket and I kept my hand over him all the time, fortunately the train wasn't crowded. Anyway I set off into the park – but you know, even there, at that end of the park it's all great vistas of trees and grass and I couldn't just put him down in the open where a blackbird might scoffhim, so – I was pretty obsessed by this time – I went on walking until I came into Kensington Gardens. I knew it was no good in the flower-beds where he'd be unpopular with gardeners. I thought of the Peter Pan area but of course lots of people come there to feed the ducks and there are a lot of birds about. So I fixed on a place beside the Serpentine, nearer the bridge, you know, where there's a low railing, and I got over the railing and started looking about to find a really bushy place to hide him. Well, while I was ferreting about among the shrubs, holding the dear old snail in my hand, a tall chap stopped on the path and started watching me, he couldn't think what on earth I was doing. Then he got over the railing and came down and asked me. And then, there was really no other way of explaining it, I told him the whole story. And do you know, he was so nice, he was so amused and quite delighted, he said he cared about little animals too. Then he helped me to find the absolutely ideal spot and we left the snail there with our best wishes and went back to the path and began to walk toward the bridge.

`That was Justin Byng.'

`Yes. I'd told him I was just going to Newcastle to look for a job and he asked what sort of job and did I know anybody there and where was I living now and lots more questions, and then we went and had a drink at the Serpentine restaurant, and then we had lunch and he told me the story of his life and I told him a lot of mine, and then he insisted I forget about going north and get out of my mouldy lodgings and come and stay with him and Martha while we discussed the job -'

`And one day you suddenly turned up here and said you'd been in Newcastle!'

`I never said I'd been in Newcastle,' said Gull, 'I let you think so. I'm sorry. It was a kind of lie. But I was in such a daze and I wanted to be sure about the job before I – and then we -'

`Yes, yes.'

`I'm sorry. I hope it doesn't make you feel I'm no good – you were a bit romantic about my going all the way to Newcastle and coming back with a job.'

`What you've told me,' said Lily, returning to the table, 'is far far more romantic and far more to the point. But this Byng sounds too good to be true.'

`Well, you see he's a Baptist.'

`A what?'

`A Baptist. You know what that is. So is Martha. He's a good egg, he's one of the nicest men I've ever met, he's very high-minded.'

`We seem to attract high-minded people, I hope he can make money too. Does he know that I exist?'

`Of course, I've told him all about you.'

`Oh! What did you say?'

`I said there was a girl I wanted to ask to marry me as soon as I got a job.'

`Oh Gull – Gull -' Lily wiped confused tears from her eyes, tears of laughter, of joy, and of some deeper mystical emotion. `I can imagine how touched Justin was! Of course you didn't do it on purpose.'

`No, I didn't – but naturally he was interested, and so was Martha. She keeps referring to you as my bride.'

`They'll be disappointed,' said Lily. 'They probably think I'm a fresh young thing!'

`I've told them you're eccentric.'

`Thanks!'

`But, Lily, they're so nice. They're not frightening people at all! You'll like them and they'll like you. And isn't it strange, it all depended on an extraordinary series of coincidences, if the snail hadn't been there, if I hadn't seen it, if I hadn't failed to find anywhere to put it, if I hadn't gone exactly to that place in Kensington Gardens, ifJustin hadn't happened to be passing at exactly that moment – Chance is really amazing!'

If it was chance, thought Lily to herself. 'So,' she said aloud, `we shall have some new friends to show off to our old friends -when we are married – after we are married – tomorrow.'

Gulliver was thinking, it's all worked out marvellously. All the same, I wish I had been to Newcastle, as I pretended to Lily I had. It was such a brave exciting idea, and anything might have happened up there, awful disasters or else wonderful things, even better than Justin, if one could see the future. My God, there's the future too! I wonder if I'll ever regret meeting that dear old snail? That idea of just walking out and going away meant a lot to me, it was a kind of ordeal, a trial of strength, a test of courage which now I'll never have – not that particular one anyway – and I was ready for it. Of course I didn't funk it, it was all an accident, that I didn't go, and that I'll never know. I might even have met a girl up there… But Gulliver soon checked this treacherous and disturbing line of thought. Then he thought, well, I never got to Newcastle and poor Jenkin never got to South America. Were these good dreams that we had or bad dreams, I wonder? And what about that man at King's Cross station, where is he now, and will I have to go and look for him?

Lily was reflecting that Gulliver might have told her everything but she had not told him everything! She had not revealed that that very morning, when she had said she was going shopping, she had run to offer herself body and soul to another man. She had indeed never revealed to him, or to anyone, that she loved Crimond. He might have gathered, she thought, that I was proud of knowing Crimond, but I'm sure it never occurred to him that I was mad about him. And I was mad about him at the start, and then I cooled down and he was simply the most important person in the world, and then just now I've become mad again, I've fallen in love again because -because of Gull and because of marriage and the marriage bond and that sense of an irrevocable change. As soon as I saw that ahead of me, as soon as I had settled down to loving Gull, I realised how terribly much and differently I loved someone else. Perhaps that often happens to people. I had to go to him, I had to try. If I hadn't gone to him on my last day of freedom I would have regretted it ever after. I'd have grieved forever thinking how perhaps, after all, he might have needed me and wanted me, and I'd been afraid to try. Other people are so' mysterious, and who knows? As it is…

As it was, she felt that a great weight had been taken off her mind, and that she had been liberated into a new space of peace and freedom, which was also a serene surrender to fate. Now what would be, would be, and she could hope to meet it bravely and without mean remorse. Of course Crimond must remain for her, as she had told him, an absolute, and for his sake she would perhaps carry round her neck a little painful amulet. But she knew, even now, that it was a harmless dream object which would fade with the years, and that she had received a freedom which only he could give her. Now it was time to become real and be happy. I think I'm happy, she thought, but am I real? Anyway Gull is real and I really love him, so I suppose that's a good start.

As for that extraordinary story about the snail: could that be just a chain of coincidences? Why not, were not human lives just chains of coincidences? But really it was too odd. Lily too had, as she had told Rose ^on the evening of the snails' dance at Boyars, found a snail in an unusual place, inside her flat, in fact walking upon her dressing table. As she took it out into the garden, worrying about Gull, she had mumbled to it some words from an old snail-charm which her grandmother used to recite. Of course telepathy was something real, but how could one snail instruct another snail -? I'll swear there's something in it, she thought, something strange happened and I brought it about! How utterly mysterious the world is! She was on the point of telling her thoughts to Gull but decided not to. It sounded too mad. Besides, in the vicissitudes of family life, a little extra secret power might come in handy sometimes; and as her grandmother had told her, power depends on silence. I'm a witch, I'm a witch! thought Lily – grandma did say it was hereditary! But somehow I know that if this was a trick, it worked through love, and if I ever have any magic it will only work through love, and I'll be that kind of witch. Oh what a mysterious world we live in!

`Gull darling, look at the time, it's our wedding day! Here's to us – and to snails!'

`To us – and snails, God bless them!'