The Rebel Angels

1

February: Unquestionably crisis month in the University, and probably everywhere else in our Canadian winter. Crisis was raging all about me in Mamusia's sitting-room where, for at least an hour, Hollier had been circling his obsession with Urquhart McVarish and the Gryphius MS without ever coming to grips with the realities of the matter. The room seemed darker even than five o'clock in February could explain. I kept my head low and watched, and watched, and feared, and feared.

"Why don't you say what you want, Hollier? Why don't you speak what is in your mind? Do you think you can fool me? You talk and talk, but what you want shouts louder than what you say. Look here – you want to buy a curse from me. That's what you want. No?"

"It is difficult to explain, Madame Laoutaro."

"But not hard to understand. You want these letters, this book, whatever it is. This other fellow has it and he teases you because you can't get it. You hate him. You want him out of your way. You want that book. You want him punished."

"There are considerations of scholarship –"

"You've told me that. You think you can do whatever can be done with this book better than he can. But most of all, you want to be first with whatever that is. No?"

"Very bluntly put, I suppose that's it."

"Why not bluntly? Look: you come and you flatter me and tell me I'm a phuri dai, and you tell me this long story about this enemy who is making your life a hell, and you think I don't know what you want? You talk about me becoming your colleague in a fascinating experiment. You mean you want me to be your cohani, who casts the evil spell. You talk about the Dark World and the – what's the word – Chthonic Powers and all this professor-talk, but what you mean is Magic, isn't it? Because you're in a situation that can't be dealt with in nice, fancy professor terms and you think maybe the black old stuff might serve you. But you're scared to come right out and ask. Am I right?"

"I'm not a fool, Madame. I have spent twenty years circling round and round the sort of thing we are talking about now. I've examined it in the best and most objective way the scholarly world makes possible. But I haven't swallowed it wholesale. My present problem turns my mind to it, of course, and you are right – I do want to invoke some special means of getting what I want, and if that brings harm to my professional rival, I suppose that is inevitable. But don't talk to me of magic in simple terms. I know what it is: that's to say, I know what I think it is. Magic – I hate the word because of what it has come to mean, but anyway – magic in the big sense can only happen where there is very strong feeling. You can't set it going with a sceptical mind – with your fingers crossed, so to speak. You must desire, and you must believe. Have you any idea how hard that is for a man of my time and a man of my training and temperament? At the deepest level of your being you are living in the Middle Ages, and magic comes easily – I won't say logically – to you. But for me it is a subject of a study, a psychological fact but not necessarily an objective fact. A thing some people have always believed but nobody has quite been able to prove. I have never had a chance to experiment with it personally because I have never had what is necessary – the desire and the belief.

"But now, for the first time in my life – for the very first time – I want something desperately. I want that manuscript. I want it enough to go to great lengths to get it. I've wanted things before, things like distinctions in my professional work, but never like this."

"Never wanted a woman?"

"Not as I want that manuscript. Not very much, I suppose, at all. That kind of thing has meant very little to me."

"So the first great passion in your life has its roots in hatred and envy? Think, Hollier."

"You simplify the whole thing in order to belittle me."

"No. To make you face yourself. All right; you have the desire. But you can't quite force yourself to admit you have the belief."

"You don't understand. My whole training is to suspend belief, to examine, to experiment, to try things out, to test them."

"So, just for an experiment, you want a curse on your enemy."

"I never spoke of a curse."

"Not in words. But to my old-style ears, that inform my old-style mind, you don't have to use the old-style word. You can't say it because you want to leave yourself a way out; if it works, so – and if it doesn't work, it was all Gypsy bunk anyway, and the great professor, the modern-style man, is still on top. Look; you want this book. Well, get somebody to steal it. I can put you on to a good, clever thief."

"Yes; I've thought of that. But –"

"Yes – but if you stole it and then wrote about it, your enemy would know you stole it. No?"

"That had occurred to me."

"Ho! Occurred to you! So let's face the facts as you have already faced them inside your heart, and as you won't admit to me, or even admit straight out to yourself: if you are to have this book or whatever it is, and be safe to use it, the fellow who has it now must be dead. Are you prepared to wish somebody dead, professor?"

"Thousands of people wish somebody dead every day."

"Yes, but do they really mean it? Would they do it if they could? So: why not get him murdered? I won't find you a murderer, but Yerko might be able to tell you where to look."

"Madame, I didn't come here to hire thieves and murderers."

"No, you are too clever; too modern. Suppose your murderer gets caught; they are often very clumsy, those fellows. He says, 'The professor hired me,' and you are in trouble. But if you are found out and say, 'I hired an old Gypsy woman to curse him,' the judge laughs and wags his finger at you for a big joker. You are a clever man, Hollier."

"You are treating me like a fool."

"Because I like you. You are too good a man to be acting like this. You're lucky you have come to me. But why did you come?"

"At Christmas you read my fortune in the Tarot, and it has proved true. The obsession and the hatred of which you spoke have become terrible realities."

"Making trouble for you and somebody near to you. Who is that?"

"I had forgotten that. I don't know who it could be."

"I do. My daughter Maria."

"Oh yes; of course. Maria was to work with me on the manuscript, if I can get it."

"That's all about Maria?"

"Well, yes, it is. What else could there be?"

"God, Hollier, you are a fool. I remember your fortune well. Who is the Knave of Coins, the servant with a letter?"

"I don't know. He hasn't appeared yet. But the figure in your prediction that has brought me back to you is the Moon, the changeable woman, who speaks of danger. Who can that be but yourself? So naturally I turn to you for advice."

"Did you look good at that card? The Moon, high in the sky, and she is both the Old Woman, the full moon, and the Virgin, the crescent moon, and neither of them is paying attention to the wolf and the dog who are down on the earth barking at the Moon: and at the bottom of the card, under the earth, do you remember, there is the Cancer, and that is the earth spirit that governs the dark side of all the Moon sees, and the Cancer is many bad things – revenge and hate and self-destruction. Because it devours, you see; that is why the devouring disease bears its name. When I see the Moon card coming up, I always know that something bad could happen because of revenge and devouring hate and that it could ruin the person I am talking to. Now listen to me, Hollier, because I am going to tell you some things you won't like, but I hope I can help you by telling you the truth.

"You have been hinting for more than an hour that as an experiment – just as a joke, just to see what happens – I might try one of those old Gypsy spells on your enemy. What old Gypsy spells? Do you know of any? You talk as if you knew much more about Gypsies than I do. I only know maybe a hundred Gypsies, and most of them are dead – killed by people like you who must always be modern and right. All that spell business is just to concentrate feeling.

"But a curse? That needs the strongest feeling. Suppose I sell you a curse? I don't hate your enemy; he is nothing to me. So to curse him I have to be very well in with – What? – if I am to escape without harm to myself. Because What? is very terrible. What? does not deal in the Sweet Justice of civilized man, but in Balance, which is not nearly so much concerned with man, and may seem terrible and evil to him. You understand me? When Balance decides the time has come to settle the scales awful things happen. Much of what we do not understand is Balance at work. We attract what we are, you know, Hollier; we always get the dog or the fiddle that is right for us, even though we may not like it, and if we are proud Balance may be rough in showing us how weak we are. And the Lord of Balance is What?, and if I call down a curse just for your benefit, believe me. Balance must be satisfied, or I shall be in deep trouble. I do not think I want to stretch my credit with What? to oblige you, Hollier. I do not want to call on What?, who lives down there in the darkness where Cancer dwells, and whose army is all the creatures of the dark, and the spirits of the suicides and all the terrible forces, to get an old book for you. And do you know what frightens me about this talk we are having? It is your frivolity in asking such a thing of me. You don't know what you are doing. You have the shocking frivolity of the modern, educated mind."

Hollier was not taking this well. As Mamusia talked his face grew darker and darker until it was the colour people mean when they say a face is black; it was bloody from within. Now he faced her, and all the reasonable, professorial manner with which he had been talking for the past hour was gone. He looked terrible as I had never seen him before, and his voice was choked with passion.

"I am not frivolous. You cannot understand what I am, because you cannot know anything of intellectual passion –"

"Pride, Hollier, give it its real name."

"Be silent! You have said all you have to say, which is No. Very well then, say no more. You may have it your own way. When I came here I probably did hope that somehow you might consent to use your powers for my sake. I took you for a phuri dai and a friend. Now I know how far your friendship goes, and I have revised my ideas about the extent of your wisdom. I am no worse off than when I came. Good afternoon."

"Wait Hollier, wait! You do not understand what danger you are in! You have not understood what I have been saying! It is the feeling that is the power of the curse. If I say to What? "My friend here feels very deeply about so-and-so; what will you do for him?" I am only your messenger. To be the messenger I must have belief. You don't need me for a curse; you have already cursed your enemy in your heart, and you have reached What? without me. Man, I fear you! I have seen terrible hate before, but never in a man so stupid about himself as you are."

"Now you tell me I can do it without you?"

"Yes, because you have pushed me to it."

"So, listen to me, Madame Laoutaro: you have done one great thing for me this afternoon. I know now that I have both feeling and belief! I believe! Yes – I believe!"

"Oh God, Hollier my friend, I am in great distress for you! Maria, drive the professor home – and be very careful how you drive!"

I did not speak a word as I drove Hollier back to the gate of Spook. I had not spoken a word during his angry hour with Mamusia, though I was terrified by the awful feeling that mounted in that room, like a poison. What was there for me to say? As he got out of my car he slammed the door so hard I feared it might fall off.

2

The next day Hollier seemed calm, and said nothing to me about his row with Mamusia. Indeed, to judge from appearances, it affected him much less than it did me. I was being forced to come to new terms with myself. I had struggled hard for freedom from my Mother's world, which I saw as a world of superstition, but I was being forced to a recognition that it was out of my power to be wholly free. Indeed, I was beginning to think more kindly about superstition than I had done since the time, when I was about twelve, when I first became aware of the ambiguous place it had in the world in which I lived.

Everybody I knew at school was terribly hard on superstition, but I had only to watch them to see that all of them had some irrational prejudice. And where was I to draw the line between the special veneration some of the nuns had for particular saints, and the tricks the girls played to find out if their boy-friends loved them? Why was it all right to bribe St. Anthony of Padua with a candle to find you the spectacles you had mislaid but not all right to bribe The Little Flower to keep Sister St. Dominic from finding out you hadn't done your homework? I despised superstition as loudly as anyone, and practised it in private, as did all my friends. The mind of man is naturally religious, we were taught; it is also naturally superstitious, I discovered.

It was this duality of mind, I suppose, that drew me to Hollier's work of uncovering evidence of past belief and submerged wisdom. Like so many students I was looking for something that gave substance to the life I already possessed, or which it would be more honest to say, possessed me; I was happy and honoured to be his apprentice in this learned grubbing in the middens of supposedly outworn faith. Especially happy because it was recognized by the university as a scientific approach to cultural history.

But what was going on around me was getting uncomfortably near the bone of real superstition, or recognition that what I thought of as superstition might truly have some foundation in the processes of life. Long before Hollier told me he wanted me to take him to Mamusia again, I knew that what she had seen in the Tarot was manifesting itself in his life – and because in his, in mine as well. Growing difficulties and dissatisfaction with the way his work was going; the trouble-maker? – it was plain enough to me that Urquhart McVarish was the source of the disquiet and that Hollier's response was hatred – real hatred and not just the antagonism that is common enough in academic life. In the old expression, he was Cain Raised to get his hands on the Gryphius portfolio; the fact that he knew very little about what was in the letters merely served to persuade him that they were of the uttermost importance. What new light he expected on Rabelais and Paracelsus I could not guess; he dropped hints about Gnosticism, or some sort of crypto-protestantism, or mystical alchemy, about herbal cures, or new insights into the link between soul and body that were counterparts of the knowledge Ozy Froats was so patiently seeking. It seemed that he expected anything and everything if he could only get his hands on the letters that were tucked into the back flap of that leather portfolio. McVarish was thwarting him, and Cain was raised.

This at least had nothing to do with imagination. Urky was behaving in an intentionally irritating way, and betrayed that he knew what was in Hollier's mind. When they met, as they sometimes did at faculty meetings or more rarely on social occasions, he was likely to be affectionate, saying "How's the work going, Clem? Well, I hope? Run across anything in your special line lately? I suppose it's impossible to put your hand on anything really new?"

It was the sort of talk which, when it was said with one of Urky's teasing smiles, was enough to make Hollier uncivil, and afterwards, when he was talking to me, furious and abusive.

He was angry because Darcourt would not accuse Urky to his face, and threaten to put the police on him, which I could see plainly was not something Darcourt could do on wobbly evidence. All Darcourt knew was that Urky seemed to have borrowed a manuscript from Cornish, which could not now be traced, and it takes more than that to spur one academic to set the cops on another. Hollier, by the time he demanded that I take him to Mamusia, had grown thinner and more saturnine; feeding on his obsession. Chawing his own maw, like that Dragon in the Faerie Queene.

When Hollier told Mamusia he did not recognize the Knave of Coins, the unjust servant, I could not believe my ears. Parlabane was worse than ever, and his demands for money, which had been occasional before Christmas, were now weekly and sometimes more than weekly. He said he needed money to pay for the typing of his novel, but I couldn't believe it, for he would take anything from two dollars to fifty, and when he had sponged from Hollier he would come to me and demand further tribute.

When I say "demand" I mean it, because he was not an ordinary borrower; his words were civil enough but behind them I felt a threat, though what the threat might be I never found out – took care not to find out. He begged me with intensity, a suggestion that to refuse him would provoke more than just abuse; he seemed not far from violence. Would he have struck me? Yes, I know he would, and it would have been a terrible blow, for he was a very strong little man, and very angry, and I feared the anger even more than the pain.

So I kept up a modern woman's pretence that I was acting from my own choice, however unwillingly; but not far below that I was simply a woman frightened by masculine strength and ferocity. He bullied money out of me, and I never reached the point of anger where I would rather run the risk of a blow than submit to further bullying.

He didn't bully Hollier. Nobody could have done that. Instead he worked on the loyalty men feel for old friends who are down on their luck, which I suppose has at least one of its roots in guilt. There but for the Grace of God…; that nonsense. He could whine ten dollars out of Hollier and within thirty seconds be in the outer room twisting another ten out of me. It was an astonishing performance.

His novel was to him what the Gryphius MSS were to Hollier. He lugged masses of typescript around in one of those strong plastic bags you get at supermarkets. There must have been at least a thousand pages of that typescript, for the bag was full even when Parlabane at last handed Hollier a wad which was, he said, almost a complete and perfect copy of the book. He hinted, but did not actually say, that a typist somewhere had the final version, and was making copies for publishers, and that what he still had in the bag was a collection of notes, drafts, and unsatisfactory passages.

Parlabane made rather a ceremony of handing over his typescript, but after he had gone, Hollier glanced at it, retreated in dismay, and asked me to read it for him and make a report, and perhaps to offer some criticism that he could pass on as his own. Whether Parlabane ever suspected this deceit I do not know, but I took care that he never found me grappling with his rat's-nest of fiction.

Some typescripts are as hard to read as bad handwriting, and Parlabane's was one of these. It was on that cheap yellow paper that does not stand up to correction in ink and pencil, to frequent crossings-out, and especially to that pawing a book undergoes when it is in the writing process. Parlabane's novel, Be Not Another, was a limp, dog-eared mess, unpleasing to the touch, ringed by glasses and cups, and smelly from too much handling by a man whose whole way of life was smelly.

I read it, though I had to flog myself to the work. It was about a young man who was studying philosophy at a university that was obviously ours, in a college that was obviously Spook. His parents were duds, unfit to have such a son. He had long philosophical pow-wows with his professors and friends, and these gurgled with such words as "teleological" and "epistemological", and there was much extremely fine-honed stuff about scepticism and the whole of life being a can of worms. There was a best friend called Featherstone, who seemed to be Hollier; he was just bright enough to play straight man to the Hero, who of course was Parlabane himself. (He had no name and was referred to throughout as He and Him in italics.) There was a clown friend called Billy Duff, or Plum Duff, who never got any good lines; this was undoubtedly Darcourt. There were sexual scenes with girls who were too stupid to recognize what an intellectual bonanza He was, and they either refused to go to bed with Him, or did and failed to come up to expectation. Light dawned when He went to another university for advanced study and met young man who was like a Greek God – no, he did not deny himself that cliche – and with the G.G. He was fulfilled spiritually and physically.

He denied himself nothing. Everybody wrangled far too much and didn't do nearly enough – even in the sexy parts. They weren't much fun except with the G.G. and those encounters were described so rhapsodically that it was hard to figure out what was happening except in a general way, because they talked so learnedly about it.

I cannot pretend to be a critic of modern fiction; for the moment, Rabelais was in the front of my mind; but anyhow I question whether this thing of Parlabane's was really a modern novel or perhaps a novel at all. It just seemed to be a discouragingly dull muddle, and so I told Hollier.

"It's his life, though not nearly so interesting as what he told me in The Rude Plenty; everything is seen from the inside, so microscopically that there's no sense of narrative; it just belly-flops along, like a beached whale."

"Doesn't it come to anything at all?"

"Oh yes; after much struggle He finds God, who is the sole reality, and instead of scorning the world He learns to pity it."

"Very decent of him. Plenty of caricatures of his contemporaries, I suppose?"

"I wouldn't recognize them."

"Of course; before your time. But I dare say there are some recognizable people who wouldn't be too happy to have their youthful exploits recalled."

"There's scandalous stuff, but it isn't described with much selection or point."

"I thought we would all be in it; he made enemies easily."

"You don't come off too badly, but he's rather hard on Professor Darcourt; he's the butt, who thinks he has found God, but of course it isn't the real eighteen-karat philosopher's God that He finds after his spiritual pilgrimage. Just a peanut God for tiny minds. But the queerest thing is that he hasn't a scrap of humour in it. Parlabane's a lively talker, but he seems to have no comic perception of himself."

"Would you expect it? You, a scholar of Rabelais? What he has is wit, not humour, and wit alone never turns inwards. Wit is something you possess, but humour is something that possesses you. I'm not surprised that Darcourt and I appear in a poorish light. No such bitter judge of old friends as a brilliant failure."

"He certainly seems to be a failure as a novelist – though I don't set up to know."

"You can't make a novelist out of a philosopher. Ever read any of Bertrand Russell's fiction?"

There was never any question of Hollier's reading the book himself. He was too much taken up with his rage against McVarish. It was in February he made me take him to visit Mamusia, and during that miserable hour I kept in the background, terrified by what she was able to corkscrew out of him. It had never entered my mind that he would ask her for a curse. I suppose it is a measure of how stupid I am that I was able to read and write of such things in his company and under his direction, as part of the tissue of past life we were studying, but it never occurred to me that he might seize upon a portion of that bygone life – at least it seemed to me that it belonged to the past – as a way of revenging himself on his adversary. I had never admired Mamusia so much; her severity of calm, good sense made me proud of her. But Hollier was transformed. Whose was the Wild Mind now?

From that day onward he never mentioned the matter to me.

Not so Mamusia. "You were angry about my little plan at Christmas," she said, "but you see how well everything is turning out. Poor Hollier is a madman. He will be in deep trouble. No husband for you, my girl. It was the hand of Fate that directed the cup of coffee to the priest Darcourt. Have you heard anything from him yet?"

3

Had I heard anything from the priest Darcourt? It was easy for Mamusia to talk about Fate as if she were Fate's accomplice and instrument; beyond a doubt she believed in the power of her nasty philtre, made of ground appleseed and my menstrual blood, because its action was as much taken for granted by her as were the principles of scientific method by Ozy Froats. But for me to admit that there could be any direct relationship between what she had done and the attitude towards me that I now detected in Simon Darcourt would mean a rejection of the modern world and either the acceptance of coincidence as a factor in daily life – a notion for which I harboured a thoroughly modern scorn – or else an admission that some things happened that ran on separate but parallel tracks, and occasionally flashed by one another with blazes of confusing light, like trains passing one another in the night. There was a stylish word for this: synchronicity. But I did not want to think about that: I was a pupil of Hollier's and I wanted to examine the things that belonged to Mamusia's world as matter to be studied, but not beliefs to be accepted and lived. So I tried not to pay too much attention to Simon Darcourt, so far as being his pupil and the necessities of common civility allowed.

This would have been easier if I had not been troubled by disloyal thoughts about Hollier. I still loved him, or cherished feeling for him which I called love because there seemed to be no other appropriate name. Now and then, in the talks I had with him about my work, he said something that was so illuminating that I was confirmed in my conviction that he was a great teacher, an inspirer, an opener of new paths. But his obsession with the Gryphius MSS and the things he said about them and about Urquhart McVarish seemed to come from another man; an obsessed, silly, vain man. I had put out of my head all hope that he would spare any loving thoughts for me, and though I pretended I was ready to play the role of Patient Griselda and put up with anything for the greater glory of Hollier, another girl inside me was coming to the conclusion that my love for him was a great mistake, that nothing would come of it, and that I had better get over it and move on to something else, and of this practical femininity I was foolishly ashamed. But could I love Cain Raised?

All you want is a lover, said the scholar in me, with scorn. And what's wrong with that, said the woman in me, with a Gypsy jut of the hip. If you are looking for a lover, said a third element (which I could not identify, but which I suppose must be called common awareness), Simon Darcourt has lover written all over him.

Yes, but – But what? You seem to be yearning after one of these Rebel Angels, who people the universities and have established what Paracelsus calls The Second Paradise of Learning, and who are ready and willing to teach all manner of wisdom to the daughters of men. Yes, but Simon Darcourt is forty-five, and stoutish, and a priest in the Anglican church. He is learned, kind, and he obviously loves you. I know; that satisfies the scholar, but the Gypsy girl just laughs and says it won't do at all. What sort of a figure would I cut as a parson's wife? A scholar – and you have hopes of a reputation in that work – would be just the wife for a scholar-parson. And again the Gypsy girl laughs. I tell the Gypsy girl to go to hell; I am not prepared to admit (not yet, anyway) that a Gypsy trick with a love philtre has plumped poor Simon and me into this pickle, but certainly I am not going to put up with Gypsy mockery in my present position. What a mess!

This inner confusion plagued me night and day. I felt that it was destroying my health, but every morning, when I looked in the mirror expecting to see the ravages of a tortured spirit etched into my face in crow's-feet and harsh lines, I was forced to admit that I was looking as well as I ever had in my life, and I will not pretend that I wasn't glad of it. Scholar I may be, but I refuse to play the game some of the scholarly women in the University play, and make the worst of myself, dress as if I stole clothes out of the St. Vincent de Paul box, and have my hair cut in a dark cellar by a madman with a knife and fork. The Gypsy strain, I suppose. On with the ear-rings and the gaudy scarves; glory in your long black hair, and walk proudly, holding your head high. That is at least a part of what God made you for.

This, I concluded, was what life involved at my age; confusion, but at least an intensely interesting confusion. Since I was old enough to conceive of such a thing, I have longed for enlightenment. In private prayer, at school, I lifted my eyes to the altar and begged O God, don't let me die stupid. What I was going through now must be part of the price that had to be paid if that prayer were to be answered. Feed on this in thy heart and be thankful, Maria.

An unexpected sort of enlightenment broke upon me in mid-March, when Simon manoeuvred me into his rooms at Ploughwright (he thought he was being clever, but there was clearly a good deal of planning to it) and gave me coffee and cognac and told me he loved me. He did it wonderfully well. What he said didn't sound in the least contrived, or rehearsed; it was simple and eloquent and free from any extravagances about eternal devotion, or not knowing what he would do if I could not return his love, or any of that tedious stuff. But what really shook me out of my self-possession was his confession that in his life I had taken on the character of Sophia.

I suppose that most men, when they fall in love, hang some sort of label on the woman they want, and attribute to her all sorts of characteristics that are not really hers. Or should I say, not completely hers, because it is hard to see things in somebody else that have no shred of reality, if you are not a complete fool. Women do it, too. Had I not convinced myself that Hollier was, in the very best sense, a Wizard? And could anyone deny that Hollier was in a considerable measure (though probably less than I imagined) a Wizard? I suppose the disillusion that comes after marriage, about which so much is said now, is the recognition that the label was not precise, or else the lover had neglected to read the small print on the label. But surely only the very young, or the people who never know much about themselves, hang labels on those they love that have no correspondence whatever with reality? The disillusion of stupid people is surely just as foolish as their initial illusion? I don't pretend to know; only the wiseacres who write books about love, and marriage, and sex, seem to possess complete certainty. But I do think that without some measure of illusion life becomes intolerable.

Still – Sophia! What a label to hang on Maria Magdalena Theotoky! Sophia: the feminine personification of Wisdom; that companion figure to God who urged Him on to create the Universe; God's female counterpart whom the Christians and the Jews have agreed to hush up, to the great disadvantage of women for so many hundreds of years! It was overwhelming. But was it utterly ridiculous?

No, I don't think so. Granting freely that I am not Sophia, which no living woman could be except in tiny measure, what am I in the world of Simon Darcourt? I am a woman from far away, because of my Gypsy heritage; a woman, I suppose, of the Middle Ages. A woman who can in some measure talk Simon's language of learning and the kind of speculation learning begets. A woman not afraid of the possibilities that lurk in the background of modern life, but which so much of modern life denies utterly – a woman whom one can call Sophia with the certainty that she will know what is being said. A woman, in fact, whom a beglamoured man might think of as Sophia without being a fool.

Ah, but there is the word that pulls me up sharp – beglamoured. The word glamour has been so battered and smeared that almost everybody has forgotten that it means magic and enchantment. Could it really be that poor Simon was a victim of my Gypsy mother's cup of hocussed coffee, and saw wonders in me because he had been given a love philtre, a sexy Mickey Finn? I hate the idea, but I cannot say with absolute certainty that there is no truth in it. And if I cannot say that, what sort of Divine Wisdom am I, what possible embodiment of Sophia? Or is it not Sophia's part to split hairs in such matters?

Whatever the answers to these hard questions, I had the gumption to tell Simon that I did indeed love him, which was true, and that I could not possibly think of marrying him, which was also true. And as he could not consider doing anything about a physical love without marriage (for reasons that I understood and thought greatly to his credit, though I did not share his reluctance) that was that. The love was a reality, but it was a reality within limits.

What astonished me was his relief when the limits had been defined. I knew, as I don't suppose he did for a long time afterwards, that he had never in the truest sense wanted to marry me – didn't even want unbearably to make sexual love to me. He wanted a love that excluded those things, and he knew that such a love was possible, and he had achieved it. And so had I. When we parted each was richer by a loving and enduring and delightful friend, and I was perhaps the happier of the two because in the hour I had wholly changed my feeling about Hollier.

The knowledge of Simon's love made it easier for me to endure the painful tensions in Hollier's rooms from this time until Easter, and to respond whole-heartedly when Simon telephoned me shortly after seven o'clock on the morning of Easter Sunday.

"Maria, I thought you should know as soon as possible that Parlabane is dead. Very sudden, and the doctor says it was heart – no, no suspicion of anything else, though I feared that, too. I'll attend to everything, and there seems to be no reason to wait, so I'm arranging the funeral for tomorrow morning. Will you bring Clem? We're his only friends, it appears. Poor devil? Yes, that's what I said: poor devil."

4

Hollier, Darcourt, and I drove back from the funeral happy because we seemed to have regained something that Parlabane had taken from us. We were refreshed and drawn together by this shared feeling, and did not want to part. That was why Hollier asked Darcourt if he would come up to his rooms for a cup of tea. We had just finished a long, vinous lunch but it was a day for hospitality.

I stopped in the porter's lodge to see if there was any mail for Hollier; there is no postal delivery on Easter Monday, but the inter-college service in the university might have something from the weekend that had begun the previous Thursday.

"Package for the Professor, Miss," said Fred the porter, and handed me an untidy bundle done up in brown paper, to which a letter was fastened with sticky tape. I recognized Parlabane's ill-formed writing and saw that there was a scrawl of direction: Confidential: Letter before Package, Please.

"More of the dreadful novel," said Hollier when I showed it to him. He threw it down on the table, I made tea, and we went on with our chat, which was all of Parlabane. At last Hollier said, "Better see what that is, Maria. I suppose it's an epilogue, or something of the kind. Poor man, he died full of hope about his book. We'll have to decide what to do about it."

"We've all done what we could," said Darcourt. "The only thing we can do now is recover the typescript and get rid of it."

I had opened the letter. "It seems awfully long, and it's to both of us," I said to Hollier; "do you want me to read it?"

He nodded, and I began.

"Dear Friends and Colleagues, Clem and Molly:

– As you will have guessed, it was I who gave his quietus to Urky McVarish."

"Christ!" said Hollier.

"So that's who the flag was at half-staff for," said Darcourt.

"Does he mean it? He can't mean murder?"

"Get on, Maria, get on!"

"– Not, I assure you, for the mere frivolous pleasure of disposing of a nuisance, but for purely practical reasons, as you shall see. It lay in Urky's power to help me forward my career, by his death, and – a secondary but I assure you not a small consideration with me – to do some practical good to both of you and to bring you closer together. I cannot tell you how distressed I have been during the recent months to see Molly pining for you, Clem –"

"Pining? What's he talking about," said Hollier.

I hurried on.

"– while your mind was elsewhere, pondering deep considerations of scholarship, and hating Urky. But I hope my little plan will unite you forever. At this culminating hour of my life that gives me immense satisfaction. Fame for me, fame and wedded bliss for you; lucky Urky to have been able to make it all possible."

"This is getting to be embarrassing," I said. "Perhaps you'll take over the reading, Simon? I wish you would."

Darcourt took the letter from me.

"– You knew that I was seeing a good deal of Urky during the months since Christmas, didn't you? Maria once let something drop about me getting thick with him; she appeared to resent it. But really, Molly, you were so tight with your money I had to turn somewhere for the means of subsistence. I still owe you – whatever the trifling sum is – but you may strike it off your books, and think yourself well repaid by Parlabane, whom you used less generously than a beautiful girl should. Beautiful girls ought to be open-handed; parsimony ruins the complexion after a while. And you, Clem – you kept trying to get me rotten little jobs, but you would not move a finger to get my novel published. No faith in my genius – for now that I no longer have to keep up the pretence of modesty I must point out unequivocally that I am a genius, admitting at the same time that, like most geniuses, I am not an entirely nice fellow.

"– I tried to get a living by honest means, and after that by means that seemed to present themselves most readily. Fatty Darcourt can tell you about that, if you are interested. Poor old Fatty didn't think much of my novel either; and it may have been because he recognized himself in it: people are ungenerous about such things. So, as a creature of Renaissance spirit, I took a Renaissance path, and became a parasite.

"– Parasite to Urquhart McVarish. I supplied him with flattery, an intelligent listener who was in no sense a rival, and certain services that he would have had trouble finding elsewhere.

"– Why was I driven to assume this role, which seems distasteful to people like you whose cares are simple? Money, my dears; I had to have money. I am sure you were not entirely deceived by my explanation about the cost of having my novel fair-copied. No: I was being blackmailed. It was my ill luck to run into a fellow I had once known on the West Coast, who knew something I thought I had left behind. He was not a blackmailer on the grand scale, but he was ugly and exigent. Earlier this evening I sent the police a note about him, which will cook his goose. I couldn't have done that if I had intended to hang around and see the fun, gratifying though that would have been. But the thought warms me now.

"– The police will not be surprised to hear from me. I have been doing a little work for them since before Christmas. A hint here, a hint there. But they pay badly. God, how mean everybody is about money!

"– The paradox of money is that when you have lots of it you can manage life quite cheaply. Nothing so economical as being rich. But when you are on the rocks, it's all hand to mouth and no peace of mind. So I had to work hard to keep afloat, begging, cadging, squealing to the cops, and slaving at the ill-requited profession of parasite to a parsimonious Scot.

"– Urky, you see, had specialized needs that only someone like myself could be trusted to understand and supply. In our modern world, where there is so much bibble-babble about sexual preferences, people in general still seem to think that these must lie either in heterosexual capers or in one of the varieties of homosexuality. But Urky was, I suppose one must say, a narcissist; his fun was deeply personal and his fun-shop was his own mind and his own body, exclusively. I rumbled him at once. All that guff about "my great ancestor, Sir Thomas Urquhart" was not primarily to impress other people, but to provide the music to which his soul danced its solitary galliard. You have often heard it said of somebody that he loves himself? That was the simple truth about Urky. He was a pretty good scholar, Clem; that side of him was real enough, though it would not have suited you to admit it. But he was such a self-delighted ass that he got on the nerves of sterner egotists, like you.

"– He needed somebody who would be wholly subservient, do his will without question, bring to the doing a dash of style and invention, and provide access to things he didn't like to approach himself. I was just his man.

"– There are more things in heaven and earth, my dears, than are dreamed of in your philosophy, or in mine when I was safe in the arms of the academic life. It was the jails and the addiction-cure hospitals that rounded out my experience, taught me how to find my way in the shadowy streets and to know at sight the people who hold the keys to inadmissible kinds of happiness. Really, I know when I look back on our association that Urky got a bargain in me, because he was very mean with money. Rather like you two. But he needed a parasite and I knew the role as a mere unilluminated groveller never could. I was well up in the literature of parasitism, and I could give to my servitude the panache Urky wanted.

"– He was mad on what he called his 'ceremonies'. A sociologist would probably call them 'role-playing', but Urky had no use for sociologists or their lingo, which turns the spiciest adventure into an ill-written entry in a case-book. Urky liked to be able to explain a ceremony to his parasite, and then forget that he had ever done so; it was the parasite's job to make the ceremony seem fresh, truthful, and inevitable.

"– Shall I describe a Saturday night at Urky's? I was up in the morning early because I had to be at the St. Lawrence Market betimes to buy the pick of the vegetables, find a nice piece of fish and something for an entree – brains, or sweetbreads or kidneys to be done up in a special way, because Urky was fond of offals. Then up to Urky's apartment (I had no key but he let me in with head averted – didn't even say good morning) where I made preparations for the evening's dinner (those offals take a lot of getting ready) and called a French patisserie to order a sweet. I picked up the sweet in the afternoon, bought flowers, opened wine, and did all the jobs that go towards making a first-rate little dinner, which somebody is going to demolish as if it were not a work of art. I was on me feet all day, as we domestics say.

"– You didn't know I was a cook? Learned it in jail during one of my periods as a trusty; there was a pretty good course for inmates who wanted a trade that would lead them towards an honest life. I had a little gift in that direction – the cooking, I mean, not the life.

"– One of my jobs was to bake some of the special little confectioneries needed for the evening's entertainment. Grass brownies we called them in jail, but Urky didn't like low expressions. That meant cutting up some marijuana so that it was fine enough but not too fine, and mixing a delicate batter so that the cookies could be baked quickly, without killing the goodness of the grass. Also, I had to be sure there was enough of the old Canadian Black to make a pot of Texas Tea, and this might involve a visit to a Dutch Mill, where I was known, but not too well known.

"– Why was I known there? I don't want to embarrass you, my dears, but you were so unrelentingly stingy towards me that I had to pick up a little money by telling curious friends – policemen, I believe they were – who was selling Aunt Mary, and Aunt Hazel, and even jollybeans. I suppose in my own small way I was a double agent in the drug world, which is not pretty but can be modestly rewarding. Every time I dropped into a Dutch Mill I had a tiny frisson lest the boys should have rumbled me, which could have been embarrassing and indeed dangerous, because those boys were very irritable. But they never found me out, and now they never will.

"– Where was Urky, while I was so busy in his kitchen? Lunching sparely but elegantly at his club, going to a foreign film, and finally having a jolly good sweat at a sauna. L'apres-midi d'un gentleman-scholar.

"– I saw nothing of him until he returned in time to dress for dinner. I had laid out his clothes, including his silk socks turned halfway inside out, so that he could put them on with the greatest ease, and his evening shoes which had to be gleaming, and the insteps polished as highly as the toes. (Urky said you knew a gentleman that way; no decent valet would allow his master to have soiled insteps.) By this time I had changed into my own first costume, which was a houseman's outfit, with a snowy shirt and a mess-jacket starched till it was almost like the icing on a wedding-cake. (I did the washing on Wednesdays, when he was busy teaching the impressionable young, like you, Maria.)

"– Sherry before dinner set things going. Sherry is a good drink, but the way Urky sucked it was more like fellatio than drinking; he smacked and relished it with his beautifully shined shoes stuck towards the fire, which I had laid, and which it was my job to keep burning brightly during the evening.

"– 'The McVarish is served,' I said, and Urky strolled to the table and set about the fish. He would never hear of soup; low, for some reason. I said. 'The McVarish is served' with a Highland accent. I don't know quite what character in Urky's imagination I was bodying forth, but I think it may have been some faithful clansman who had followed Urky to the wars as his personal servant, and was now back with the laird in private life.

"– He never spoke to me. Nodded when he wanted a plate removed, nodded when I offered the decanter of claret for his inspection, nodded when he had gobbled up as much as he wanted of the gâteau and it was time for the walnuts and port. Nodded when I brought the coffee and fine old whisky in a quaich. I played the self-effacing servant pretty well; stood behind his chair as he ate, so that he couldn't see me munching mouthfuls I had snatched of the food he had not eaten – though that was little enough. Urky was close about food; not much in the way of crumbs from the rich man's table.

"– This was the first part of the evening, after which Urky retired to his bedroom and I cleared away and washed up and set the stage for the second act.

"– By half past nine or thereabout I had washed up, changed into my second costume, and made things ready. I tiptoed into Urky's bedroom, drew back the covers and exposed Urky, stark naked and a pretty pink from his sauna, lying on his turn. Very carefully I parted his buttocks and – aha! are you expecting something spicy to happen? A bit of the old Brown Eye? You think I may be about to give Urky the keister-stab? No such low jailbird tricks for the fastidious Urky, I assure you. No; I gently and carefully inserted into his rectum what I thought of as 'the deck', because it looked rather like a small pack of cards; it was a piece of pink velvet ribbon, two inches wide and ten feet long, folded back and forth on itself so that it formed a package about two inches square, and four inches thick; a length of two or three inches was left hanging out. Urky did not move or seem to notice, as I tiptoed out again.

"– I had rearranged the living-room so that two chairs were before the fire; for Urky, one of those old-fashioned deck-chairs made of teak that used to be seen on CPR liners, which I had filled with cushions and a steamer-rug in the McVarish tartan; for me a low chair of the sort that used to be called a 'lady's chair', without arms; between the chairs I placed a low tea-table with cups and saucers, and the marijuana tea in a pot covered with a knitted cosy, made in the shape of a comical old woman. I set the record-player going and put on Urky's entrance music; it was a precious old seventy-eight of Sir Harry Lauder singing 'Roamin' in the Gloamin'. I wore a baggy old woman's dress (bad style that, but I really did look like an old bag, so let it stand) and a straggly grey wig. I must have looked like one of the witches in Macbeth. When Urky came in, wearing a long silk dressing-gown and slippers, I was ready to make my curtsy.

"– This was the build-up for the ceremony that Urky called The Two Old Edinburgh Ladies.

"– Innocent fun, in comparison with some parties at which I have assisted, but kinky in the naughty-nursery style that appealed to Urky. We assumed Edinburgh accents for this game; I hadn't much notion what an Edinburgh accent was, but I copied Urky, and screwed up my mouth and spoke as if I were sucking a peppermint, and he seemed satisfied with my efforts.

"– We assumed names, too, and here it becomes rather complicated, for the names were Mistress Masham (that was me) and Mistress Morley. You get it? Probably not. Know then that Masham was the name of the Queen Anne's confidante, and Morley was the name the Queen assumed when she chatted informally with her toady, and drank brandy out of a china cup, calling it her 'cold tea'. What this pair had to with Edinburgh or with Urky you must not ask, because I don't know, but in the world of fantasy the greatest freedom is allowed."

Darcourt's eye had run ahead of his reading, and he was embarrassed. "Do you really want me to go on?" he said. Of course we did.

"– It was his fantasy, not mine, and it wasn't easy to improvise conversation to puff it out, and the burden was on me. What Urky liked was scandalous University gossip, offered on my part as if unwillingly and prudishly, as we sipped the marijuana tea and nibbled the marijuana cookies (I tried once or twice to get Urky to advance towards something a little more adventurous – a little acid on a sugar cube, or the teeniest jab with the monkey-pump – but he is what we call a chipper, flirting with drugs but scared to go very far. A Laodicean of vice.) So what kind of thing did I provide for him? Here is a sample that may interest you.

MRS. MORELY: And what do you hear of that sweet girl Miss Theotoky, Mistress Masham, my dear?

MRS MASHAM: Och, she keeps up with her studies, the poor lamb.

MRS. MORELY: The poor lamb – and why the poor lamb, Mistress Masham?

MRS MASHAM: Heaven defend us, Mistress Morley, my dear, how you take a poor body up! I meant nothing – nothing at all. Only that I hope she may not be falling into dissolute ways.

MRS. MORELY: But how could that be, when she has good Brother John to give her advice? Brother John, that best of holy men. Put aside your knitting, dear friend, and speak plainly.

MRS MASHAM: I fear good Brother John has lost all influence with her, Mistress Morley. If she has an adviser I doubt but it's that fat priest Father Darcourt, may Heaven stand between her and his great belly.

MRS. MORELY: Preserve us, Mistress Masham, what do you mean by such hints?

MRS MASHAM: God send I suspect nobody wrongfully, Mistress Morley, but I have seen him looking after her with a verra moist eye, almost like a man enchanted.

MRS. MORELY: You make me tremble, ma'am! Does not her good mentor, Professor Hollier, do anything to keep her from harm?

MRS MASHAM: Och, Mistress Morley, ma'am, how should anyone of your known goodness understand the wickedness of men! I fear that same Hollier –!

MRS. MORELY: You are not going to speak any evil of him?

MRS MASHAM: Not unless the truth be evil, ma'am. But I fear he has –

MRS. MORELY: Another cup of tea! – Go on, I can bear the worst.

MRS MASHAM: I never said whoremaster! Mind, I never said it! Who's to say he was not tempted? The girl – the Theotoky girl – I blush to say it – she's no better than a wee besom! She can entice the finest of them! Have ye looked at her likeness lately? That bronze figure now, that you had from poor Mr. Cornish –

"– Then Urky looked at the bronze and – nothing personal, you understand, Molly, but simply in aid of Urky's little game and in the line of duty as a parasite – I had previously put a dab of salad oil on the cleft of the mons, which is such a charming feature of that work, so that it seemed moist and inviting. An imaginative stroke, don't you think? It threw Urky into a regular spasm, so that it was touch and go whether or not he might anticipate his Little Xmas, which was supposed to be held back for the topper of the evening.

"– That was the object of this elaborate masquerade; to bring Urky very slowly to the boil. Dirty gossip and plenty of tea and cookies did the trick – the gossip to excite, the Mary Jane to hold back – with the pink ribbon as the fuse to his rocket.

"– You two were not the only ones to cut a figure in these fantasies, but you were regular favourites. Urky had a weak hankering after you, Molly, and as for Clem, I liked to toy with him to please Urky, because though I fully understand and forgive, I was well aware that Clem felt he couldn't drag me after his splendid career more than so much; one does what one can for old friends, but of course some must drop by the way. Clem did what he felt he could for me, but he was damn certain I wasn't going to be allowed to be too much of a nuisance. So I had some fun with you two, but as you will discover, I have recompensed your real kindness in fullest measure, pressed down and running over.

"– Another favourite figure in the ceremonies was Ozy Froats – always good for a giggle. There were lots of others; Urky's vast spite could embrace them all. But it was only play, you know. The popular sex-manuals urge their readers to give spice to the old familiar act by building fantasies around it. Who would grudge Urky his pleasure, or blame me for ministering to it, when the role of parasite was the only one left to me? Not you, dear friends; certainly not you.

"– Urky liked a good hour and a half of this sort of thing, during which his pleasure mounted, his laughter became harder to conceal under the role of Mrs. Morley. The lewd gossip pricked him on, while the Old Mary Jane held him back. As he talked and listened he worked his legs up in the deck-chair and his dressing-gown fell apart so that his bare bottom was to be seen. That was the cue for my culminating sequence, thus:

MRS MASHAM: Mistress Morley, ma'am, forgive the freedom in an old, though humble, friend, but your gown is disordered, ma'am.

MRS. MORELY: No, no, I'm sure.

MRS MASHAM: Yes, yes, I'm sure.

MRS. MORELY: It's nothing. Don't distress yourself, ma'am.

MRS MASHAM: But for your own good, ma'am, as a friend, ma'am, I shall be compelled to bind you, ma'am. Indeed I shall.

MRS. MORELY: Nay, nay, my good creature, you don't know what you're doing.

MRS MASHAM: That I do. It's the Urquhart blood declaring itself. See – there's old Sir Thomas himself looking down at you and laughing, the sly old Rabelaisian. He knows your nature may declare itself, and it's for me to act to preserve you from shame before him. Bound you must be.

"– Then I would produce some nice white sash-cord and bind Urky into the chair, just tight enough to give him the thrill of being under constraint, but not enough to hurt him. By this time he was well and truly sexually aroused. Not a pretty sight, but I was not supposed to notice. Instead –

MRS MASHAM: You must forgive me, ma'am. It's a deeply personal thing, but I cannot help observing, ma'am – because of the disorder of your dress – that you have a wee thing

MRS. MORELY: A wee thing? You are bold, ma'am.

MRS MASHAM: Aye, a wee thing. I'll go further – a wee pink tail. Yes, a wee pink tailie – I can see it, I can see it, I can see it –

MRS. MORELY: You must not peep!

MRS MASHAM: Aye, but I will peep! And I'll – how my fingers itch – I'll pull it –

MRS. MORELY: Creature, you dare not!

MRS MASHAM: I dare all! I'll pull it, I'll pull it, I'll pull it –

"– And when the tease was almost at its climax, I did pull it. Pulled Urky's little tag of ribbon, and ran with it across the room so that it unfolded rapidly and softly and ticklishly inside him, and he reached what he called his Little Xmas.

"– Then I ran to the kitchen and kept out of the way until Urky had freed himself from the easy bonds and retired to his bedroom. I cleaned up, put everything in order, and left, having picked up the envelope which he had left for me on the table by the door.

"– It contained twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five measly bucks for a day that had started at six in the morning and never ended before one! Twenty-five lousy bucks for a man of my attainments to serve as cook, butler, drug supplier, coosie-packer, character actor, sex-tease, and scholarly parasite for nineteen hours! Once, when I hinted to Urky that it was sweated labour, he looked hurt, and said he had supposed I got as much fun out of it as he did! All that delicious exciting pretence! His egotism was phenomenal in my experience, which has been great. If he hadn't nosed out a few things I preferred not to have known, I would have squealed on him long ago. Now I no longer have to dread blackmail, for I speak from the threshold of eternity, my dears. Pray for Brother John. Necessity, not my will, consented. Until tonight, when I decided I had had enough. Even a buzzard sometimes gags.

"– Not that my decision was a sudden one; I do not make up my mind about important things in an instant. It is at least three weeks since I decided that the time had come for me to disappear as Brother John, the joke-monk, and to re-emerge as John Parlabane, author of one of the few unquestionably great novels of our time. For that is what Be Not Another is: the greatest and in time the most influential roman philosophique written by anyone since Goethe. And when I am not around to be punished and patronized and belittled by my inferiors that is how it will be seen. It is jealousy – yours, Clem, God forgive you, and that of many others – that stands in the way of the book; you know me and you know me in my inferior guise as a needy friend who has taken some wrong turnings in his life, and so has not made his way to the scholar's safe harbour. You refuse to see me as what I truly am – a man of strongly individual nature, richly perceptive and an original moralist of the first order. I should not have been this if I had refused to get my shoes muddy, as you have done.

"– As an original moralist I value a truly fine work of art above human life, including my own. To ensure the publication of my book and its recognition for what it is, I am ready to give my own life, but I recognize that such an act would attract little attention. In the eyes of the world I am nobody; if I am to get the attention that is my due, I must become somebody. What easier way than by taking another into the shadows with me? All the world loves a murderer.

"– Few murders have been undertaken to ensure the publication of a book; offhand, I can't think of one, but as there may be some other instances I must speak with caution. People murder for other sorts of gain, or in passion. I do not even admit that I have polished off Urky for gain, because I shall reap no direct advantage – the advantage will all be the world's, which will be persuaded by this rough means to give fair consideration to my book, and in the course of time the world will see how enormously it is the gainer. Which would you rather have, Maria – the great romance of François Rabelais, or a living, breathing, sniggering Urquhart McVarish? Indeed, I am providing Urky with a kind of immortality he could not aspire to if he died by what are called natural causes. (Not, of course, that I write in Rabelais's vein, which I have always considered needlessly gross, but as a work of humanist learning my book is measurably finer than his.)

"– Why Urky? Well, why not Urky? I need someone and he fills the bill because his taking-off will cause a stir, especially in the way I have managed it, without in any serious way depriving the world of a useful human creature. Besides, I have become impatient with his hoity-toity ways with me, as well as his stinginess. It is an oddity of people with unusual sexual tastes that they must enjoy them in the company of somebody whom they can patronize and look down on; I think Oscar Wilde really liked his grooms and messenger boys better than he ever liked aristocratic Bosie. There are men who like vulgar women, as well as women who prefer vulgar men; snobbery in sex has never been carefully investigated. But I, to whom Urky was what a dog is to a man, have grown tired of playing the gossiping old Edinburgh wifie, to be snubbed and put down by The McVarish. The worm turns: the parasite punishes.

"– So, a few hours ago when the tedious charade of the Two Old Edinburgh Ladies had sniggered towards its close, I made a change in the script, which Urky at first saw as an ingenious variation designed for his pleasure. Oh, invaluable parasite!

"– Imagine him, tied up and giggling like a schoolgirl as I lean closer and closer.

MRS MASHAM: Mistress Morley, my dear, you do giggle so! It can't be good for you. I shall have to punish you, you naughty girlie. Look how you've disturbed your frock! I shall have to tie you up tight, my wee lassie, verra tight indeed. – But och! what a foolish giggler! Can ye not laugh a guid hearty laugh! Here, let me show you how. See, I am going to put this record on the machine; it's Sir Harry Lauder singing 'Stop Your Tickling, Jock'. – Now, listen how Sir Harry laughs; that's a laugh, eh? A guid, hearty laugh? Come on, Mistress Morley, sing with me and Sir Harry:

I'll just turn up the volume a bit to encourage you. And I'll tickle you! Yes, I will! See, I'm coming at you to tickle you! – Och, do ye call that a laugh? I know what! Ordinary tickling will never do the job. Now watch: ye see I have here my knitting needles. If I juist insert this one up your great red nose, Mistress Morley, and wiggle it a wee bit to tickle the hairs, eh? Ticklish, eh? But still not enough; let's put the other needle up the other hole in yer neb. See, when I wiggle them both how easy it is to laugh? Laugh right along with Sir Harry? Och, that's not laughin'. That's more like shriekin'. I'll just push them in a wee bit further. No, no, it's no good rollin' yer een and greeting, Mistress Morley, my dear. – D'ye know, a great idea occurs to me! Juist suppose now – I'll need some sort of a hammer – so juist suppose I take off my shoe, so. Then wi' the heel o't I gie the ends o' the needles a sharp tap – one, two: But Mistress Morley, ye're no longer laughin'. Only Sir Harry is laughin'.

"– And indeed only Sir Harry was laughing, for Urky with two aluminium knitting-needles well up into his brain was quite quiet. Whether it was the needles, or fright, or heart failure, or all three, Urky was dead, or too close to it to make a sound.

"– So – out of Mistress Masham's old gown in a flash, set the repeating-device and turn up the volume on the record-player to the full, so that Sir Harry will go on singing his song and laughing heartily until a neighbour phones the caretaker, and out of the flat, not forgetting my envelope. But no need to worry about fingerprints; I wanted to leave plenty of those, so that there would be no danger of anybody else stealing my murder.

"– No fingerprints, however, on one little thing I removed from Urky's apartment; he had it locked up in his desk and like so many vain people he had a simple faith in simple locks. You may open your gifts now, children. – Package Number One: yes, it's the Gryphius Portfolio and it's yours, my dears, to gloat over and keep for your own dear little selves. Especially those letters concealed in the back flap. Urky knew all about them, and he hinted about what he knew, underestimating my power to comprehend, as he always did, the poor sap.

"– The other package, the big one, is the complete typescript of my novel Be Not Another. I am writing to the papers, Clem, to tell them what I have told you here, and to say that you have my book, that it is rare and fine, and that applications from publishers who hope to get it must be made to you. And there will be applications! Oh, indeed, there will be applications! Publishers will fight to publish a murderer, when they had no time to spare for a philosopher. It's a hot property, so make the toughest deal you can, dear Clem. Revenge me, dear old boy; roast 'em, squeeze 'em, gouge 'em for every possible dollar. And keep a sharp eye on the kind of publicity they give it; I have provided the material for a first-rate campaign – 'The book a man murdered to place in your hands! – A great, misunderstood genius speaks to his times! – The philosopher-criminal bares his soul!' – that's the first line of fire, after which you'll easily get some eminent critic to plump it all out with praise as the distilled essence of a mighty, ruined spirit.

"– As for the monies accruing, I leave it to you to set up a handsome research fund at Spook, so that people like yourself can get some of the dibs to further their work. And I want it named the Parlabane Bounty, so that every pedant who wants a hand-out has to burn a tiny pinch of incense to my memory. You know how these things are managed. Don't worry that Spook won't take the money. The dear old coll. will sanctify my gift to its use, never fear.

"– That's all, I think. I hope you and Molly won't come to quarrelling over the Gryphius. Because I mean it for both of you, and if either one tries to bag it all, or cheat the other out of her due – you, Clem, appear to me as the most likely to try a dirty trick – there will certainly be hell to pay, if I have any influence in hell.

"– All that now remains is for me to put myself beyond the reach of the law. Not, let me assure you, because I fear it, but because I despise it. I could get a lot of interest in my book by hanging around, going to trial, and having my say from the dock. But you know what would happen in a modern court. Could I expect justice? Could I, who have planned a murder and killed a man in cold blood, expect to have my own life exacted as poetic justice (the only really satisfactory kind) demands? Not a chance! What a parade there would be of psychiatrists, eager to 'explain' me! They would assure the court that I was 'insane' because of course no man in his right mind ever wants revenge or personal advancement. People drunk with the cheap wine of compassion would assure one another that I was 'sick'. But I'm not insane and I am in robust health, and I will not expose myself to the pity of my inferiors.

"– So, one last tiny joke. Everybody will assume that I have committed suicide. Well, if I have, let them prove it. But you, dear friends, shall know. I am going to dress myself now in my habit; then I shall lie down on my bed with my prayerbook at hand, and I shall inject into a vein in my foot – there are lots of them – a few cc.s of potassium; in thirty seconds I shall be dead, and that will just give me time, I trust, to drop the needle through a hole in the floor under Ma Mustard's bedside carpet. Neat, don't you think? I shall be encharnelled (good, romantic word) before anybody thinks to look under the carpet. Keep this under your hat. I should like to puzzle my old friends, the police. Their doctors are very unimaginative.

"– However, should any snooper decide to dig me up, I make a final bequest under the provisions of the Human Tissue Gift Act of 1971. I leave my arsehole, and all necessary integument thereto appertaining, to the Faculty of Philosophy; let it be stretched upon a steel frame so that each New Year's Day, the senior professor may blow through it, uttering a rich, fruity note, as my salute to the world of which I now take leave, in search of the Great Perhaps. My blessings on you both, my dears,

John Parlabane

(sometime of the Society of the Sacred Mission)

When Darcourt had finished reading, Hollier was already deep in the letters from the back flap of the Gryphius; his face glowed, and when Darcourt spoke to him he seemed at first not to hear.

"Clem?"

"Hmm."

"We ought to talk about that manuscript."

"Yes, yes; but I'll have to go through it carefully before I can say anything definite."

"No, Clem."

"What?"

"You mustn't go through it. I know it's exciting, and all that, but you must realize it isn't yours."

"I don't follow you."

"It's stolen goods, you know."

"McVarish stole it. Now we've got it back."

"No. Not 'we'. You have no right to it whatever. It belongs to the Cornish Estate, and it's my job to see that it is returned to its owners."

Darcourt rose, and took the Gryphius Portfolio and the precious letters out of Hollier's hands, folded it up in its original wrappings, and left the room.

5

The following ten days were sheer hell for me. First, there was all the worry about Hollier, who collapsed within a few minutes of Darcourt's masterful recovery of the Gryphius Portfolio, and was in such a dreadful way that I feared he might die. I have often heard about people "collapsing" but what does it mean? In Hollier's case it meant that I could not get him to speak, or apparently to hear, and his eyes were fixed on nothingness. He was cold to the touch. He sat crumpled up in an armchair, and kept turning his head slowly towards the left and back again, for all the world like a sturdied sheep; I could not shake him into attention, or get him to his feet. In my alarm I could not think of anything except to call Darcourt back, and in half an hour he reappeared, accompanied by a doctor friend who was, I afterwards learned, the same one who had been called to certify the death of Parlabane.

Dr. Greene pushed Hollier about, and tapped him under the knees, and listened to his heart, and waved his hand in front of his eyes, and eventually came up with a diagnosis of shock. Had Hollier had some severe setback? Yes, said Darcourt, a severe setback related to his research, quite unavoidable; I was impressed by Simon's firmness, his refusal to budge an inch. Aha, said the doctor, he understood completely; such metaphysical ills sometimes came his way in his treatment of academics, who were a delicately balanced lot. But he had known old Clem since their days at Spook, and he was sure he would come round. Would need nursing and tender, loving care, however. So the two men heaved Hollier to his feet, and manhandled him into my small car, which was not really big enough for four people, one of whom was too ill to squeeze himself into a small space, and I drove to Hollier's mother's house in Rosedale – not very far from my own home.

It was not a place I would have chosen to provide tender, loving care. It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste, and Mrs. Hollier, whom I had never met, was stiff with Good Taste too. I was left in the drawing-room – positively the palest, most devitalized room I have ever been in – while the men and Mrs. Hollier lugged the invalid upstairs; after a while an elderly housekeeper toiled upwards with what looked like a cup of bouillon; after an even longer while Darcourt, and Dr. Greene, and Mrs. Hollier returned and I was introduced as a student of the professor's, and Mrs. Hollier gave me a look that could have etched glass, and nodded but did not speak. The doctor was talking reassuringly about a drop in blood pressure that was dramatic but not really alarming, and the necessity for rest, light diet, and detective stories when the patient seemed ready for them. He would keep in touch.

I felt very much out of things. Darcourt and Dr. Greene were the kind of Canadians who understood and could cope with such refrigerated souls as Mrs. Hollier. A Northern land and its Northern people can be brisk and bracing when faced with a metaphysical ill, but I was not of their kind. I had a disquieting feeling that, when Hollier was ill, this was the place where he belonged. However much an intellectual adventurer he might be, this cold home was his home.

That night, therefore, I told Mamusia everything, or as much as she would comprehend, because she insisted on seeing the situation from a point of view entirely of her own.

"Of course he is cold and cannot speak," she said; "the curse has been thrown back on him and he is looking inwards at his own evil. I told him. But would he listen? Oh, no! Not the great professor, not Mr. Modern! He thought he would be happy if he killed his enemy – because that is what he has done and don't you try to tell me otherwise – but now he knows what it is to kill with hate. The knife, the gun – perhaps you can get away with it if you are made of coarse stuff. But a man like Hollier to kill with hate – he's lucky he didn't die at once."

"But Mamusia, it was the other man – the monk – who killed Professor McVarish."

"The monk was a sly one. A real bad man. I wish I had known him. Such people are rare. But the monk was just a tool, like a knife or a gun –"

"No, no, Mamusia, the monk had terrible hatred for McVarish! For Hollier, too –"

"Sure! All that hate slinking around, looking for a place to explode itself. To think Hollier wanted to pull me in such a mess! He is a fool, Maria. No husband for you. Lucky the Priest Simon drank the spiked coffee."

"You won't look at it as it really is."

"Won't I? Let me tell you, you fool, that my way is the way it really is: all the other stuff is just silly talk by people who don't know anything about hate, or jealousy, or any of the things that rule their lives because they don't accept them as realities, real force. Now you listen to me: I want your car keys."

"What for? You can't drive."

"I don't want to drive. And you shall not drive. Not for forty days. You are mixed up in this, you know. How much I can't say, because I don't believe you have told me the whole truth. But you are not going to drive any car for the next forty days. Not while those men can still reach you."

"What men are you talking about?"

"McVarish and the monk. Don't argue. Give me the keys."

So I did, pretending a reluctance I did not altogether feel. I did not want to figure in one of those accidents in which, the newspapers ambiguously report, a car "goes out of control". Perhaps; but into whose control?

I was in great anxiety about what the newspapers would say. Had Parlabane written to them in the same unbuttoned spirit that he had written to me and Hollier? No: a joker in this as in everything, Parlabane had written his letter to us and delivered it by hand on the Saturday night after he had killed McVarish. The much-abbreviated accounts that he had written for the three Toronto papers and which were, I later learned, terrible muddles of crossing out and misused carbon copying, he had posted – but in a mailbox that was intended for overseas post only; upon each he had put a few details in his own hand, so that no paper received quite the same story. This confusion, and the fact that there was no postal delivery on Easter Monday, meant that the papers did not have their story until Thursday; the police, who had been sent a carbon and some further details, did not get their letter until Friday, such is the caprice of modern postal service. Therefore, the story of Urky's taking-off appeared on the Monday as a report of an inexplicable murder, and at the weekend figured again with all the rich embroidery of Parlabane's confession. God be praised, he had not named either me or Hollier in his accounts of the "ceremonies" – only as custodians of his great book. The police let it be known that they had information not granted to anyone else, and that they were not going to tell all they knew; great destruction among the drug-pushers was predicted by the press.

Between the news of the murder on Monday, and the revelation of its nature and its cause on Thursday, University authorities had lavished much praise on the character of Urky; a devoted teacher, a great scholar, a man of fine character and irreproachable conduct, a loss to the academic community never to be replaced – he was given the works, in a variety of distinguished styles. There was great speculation about The Demon Knitter who had slain the blameless scholar and grossly "interfered" with his body by stuffing him with velvet ribbon. This was a relief from the bread-and-butter murders with guns and hammers upon obscure and uninteresting victims, with which the press has to do the best it can. This came to an abrupt stop when the real story broke; the plans that had been going forward for a splendid memorial service in Convocation Hall were abandoned. Murray Brown spoke in the Legislature, pointing out that the education of the young was in dubious hands and something like a purge of the whole University community would not be amiss. And of course the news about Parlabane's book galvanized the publishers. The telephone began to ring.

Who was there to answer it but myself? I had been mentioned in Parlabane's letter as one of the two people who had access to the complete typescript, and Hollier could not be reached. He was still cosy, lucky man, in his bed at his mother's house and could not speak on the telephone, his mother said. So I temporized, and evaded direct questions and commitments, and refused to see people, and then was forced to see them when they pushed through the door of Hollier's rooms. Unwillingly I was photographed by newspapermen who lay in wait outside Spook, and hounded by literary agents who wanted to free me from tedious cares; I experienced all the delights of unsought notoriety. I was offered a lot of money for my story, John Parlabane as I Knew Him, and the services of a ghost to write it up from my verbal confession. (It was assumed that, as a student, I would not be capable of coherent expression.) I was invited to appear on TV. Hollier's mother was outraged by the newspaper publicity and suspected, by the sixth sense given to mothers, that I had designs on her innocent son, and seemed convinced that the whole thing was my fault. After someone had attempted a clumsy robbery in Hollier's rooms I put the typescript of Be Not Another in the vault at Spook – and attempted to have the telephone disconnected, but that took several days to accomplish. O tohubohu and brouhaha! –

Another thing for which I had cause to thank the spirit of Parlabane was that in none of his letters to police or newspapers had he mentioned the Gryphius Portfolio. Where it was now I had no idea. But late on the Friday of the second week of this siege by newspapers and publishers I was sitting in Hollier's outer room, trying to get on with some of my own work, and not managing to do so, when there came a knock at the door.

"Go away," I shouted.

The knock was repeated, more powerfully.

"Bugger off!" I called, in something like a roar.

But I had not locked the door, and now it opened and Arthur Cornish poked his head around it, grinning.

"That's no way to speak to an old friend, Maria."

"Oh, it's you! If you're an old friend, why didn't you come sooner?"

"I assumed you would be busy. I've been reading about you in the papers, and they all said you were closeted with publishers for twelve hours a day, making juicy terms about your friend's book, over magnums of champagne."

"It's all very well for you to be facetious; I've been living like a hunted animal."

"Do you dare to come out with me for dinner? If you wear a heavy veil, nobody will recognize you. A veil and perhaps a pillow under the back of your coat. I'll say you are an unpresentable aunt; a Veiled Hunchback. Anyhow, I'd thought of going to a nice dark place."

I was not in the mood to be teased, but I was very much in a mood to be fed. I had not dared to eat in a restaurant since the trouble began, and I was sick of Mamusia's grim meals. He took me to a very good place, sat in a dark corner, and ordered a very good meal. It was deeply soothing to the spirit – a far cry from The Rude Plenty in the company of Parlabane. Of course we talked about the murder, the excitement, and the trouble I had been having. There was no pretence of rising above the most interesting thing either of us knew about at the moment, but it was possible, in these circumstances, to see it in a different light.

"So Hollier has taken to his bed and left you holding the bag?"

"The loss of the Gryphius Portfolio was the last straw. He simply couldn't believe Darcourt would take it. Where is it now?"

"I have it. Darcourt was evasive about how he came by it, but I gathered it had something to do with McVarish."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"I'd rather thought of giving it as a wedding present."

"Who to?"

"Why, to you and Hollier, of course. You are marrying him, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not."

"Then I am mistaken."

"You never thought any such thing."

"But you and he were so absorbed in your work. You were so very much his disciple. What did the murderer-monk call you – his sorer mystica."

"You're being very objectionable."

"Not intentionally; I only want to get things straight."

"I wouldn't marry him even if he asked me. Which he won't. His mother wouldn't let him."

"Really? Is he under her thumb, then?"

"That's not fair. He lives for his work. People do, you know, in the University. But when I saw him in his mother's house, I knew that was where his emotions live still. His mother is on to me."

"Meaning?"

"When she looks at me I see a balloon coming out of her head with Gypsy Bitch written in it, like somebody in the comics."

"Not Bitch, surely."

"To people like her all Gypsy girls are bitches."

"That's a shame. I looked forward to giving you that Portfolio as a wedding present. Well, when you decide to marry somebody else, it's yours."

"Oh, please don't say that. Please give it to the University library, because Hollier wants it more than you can guess."

"You forget that it is mine. It was not included in the gifts to the University, and in fact I paid the bill for it less than a month ago; those dealers in rare manuscripts are slow with their bills, you know. Perhaps because they are ashamed of the prices they ask. I feel no yearning to oblige Professor Hollier; I once told you I'm a man of remarkable taste; I don't like a man who doesn't know a good thing when he sees it."

"Meaning –?"

"Meaning you. I think he's treated you shabbily."

"But you wouldn't expect him to marry me just to get the Gryphius, would you? Do you think I'd say yes to such a proposal?"

"Don't tempt me to give you an answer to either of those questions."

"You think very poorly of me, I see."

"I think the world of you, Maria. So let's stop this foolishness and talk to the point. Will you marry me?"

"Why should I marry you?"

"That would take a long time to answer, but I'll give you the best reason: because I think we have become very good friends, and could go on to be splendid friends, and would be very likely to be wonderful friends forever."

"Friends?"

"What's wrong with being friends?"

"When people talk about marriage, they generally use stronger words than that."

"Do they? I don't know. I've never asked anyone to marry me before."

"You mean you've never been in love?"

"Certainly I've been in love. More times than I can count. I've had two or three affairs with girls I loved. But I knew very well that they weren't friends."

"You put friendship above love?"

"Doesn't everybody? No, that's a foolish question; of course they don't. They talk about love to people with whom they are infatuated, and sometimes involved to the point of devotion. I've nothing against love. Most enjoyable. But I'm talking to you about marriage."

"Marriage. But you don't love me?"

"Of course I love you, fathead, but I'm serious about marriage, and marriage with anyone whom I do not think the most splendid friend I've ever had doesn't interest me. Love and sex are very fine but they won't last. Friendship – the kind of friendship I am talking about – is charity and loving-kindness more than it's sex and it lasts as long as life. What's more, it grows, and sex dwindles: has to. So – will you marry me and be friends? We'll have love and we'll have sex, but we won't build on those alone. You don't have to answer now. But I wish you'd think very seriously about it, because if you say no –"

"You'll go to Africa and shoot lions."

"No; I'll think you've made a terrible mistake."

"You think well of yourself, don't you?"

"Yes, and I think well of you – better of you than of anybody. These are liberated days, Maria; I don't have to crawl and whine and pretend I can't live without you. I can, and if I must, I'll do it. But I can live so much better with you, and you can live so much better with me, that it's stupid to play games about it."

"You're a very cool customer, Arthur."

"Yes."

"You don't know much about me."

"Yes, I do."

"You don't know my mother, or my Uncle Yerko."

"Give me a chance to meet them."

"My mother is a shop-lifter."

"Why? She's got lots of money."

"How do you know?"

"In a business like mine there are ways of finding out. You aren't badly off yourself. But your mother is something more than a shop-lifter; you see, I know that, too. She's by way of being famous among my musical friends. In such a person the shop-lifting is an eccentricity, like the collections of pornography some famous conductors are known to possess. Call it a hobby. But must I point out that I'm not proposing to marry your mother?"

"Arthur, you're very cool, but there are things you don't know. Comes of having no family, I suppose."

"Where did you get the idea I have no family?"

"You told me yourself."

"I told you I had no parents I could remember clearly. But family – I have platoons of family, and though most of them are dead, yet in me they are alive."

"Do you really think that?"

"Indeed I do, and I find it very satisfying. You told me you hadn't much use for heredity, though how you reconcile that with rummaging around in the past, as you do with Clement Hollier, I can't imagine. If the past doesn't count, why bother with it?"

"Well – I think I said more than I meant."

"That's what I suspected. You wanted to brush aside your Gypsy past."

"I've thought more carefully about that."

"So you should. You can't get rid of it, and if you deny it, you must expect it to revenge itself on you."

"My God, Arthur, you talk exactly like my mother!"

"Glad to hear it."

"Then don't be, because what sounds all right from her sounds ridiculous from you. Arthur, did anybody ever tell you that you have a pronounced didactic streak?"

"Bossy, would you call it?"

"Yes."

"A touch of the know-it-all?"

"Yes."

"No. Nobody's ever hinted at any such thing. Decisive and strongly intuitive, are the expressions they use, when they are choosing their words carefully."

"I wonder what my mother would say about you?"

"Generous recognition of a fellow-spirit, I should guess."

"I wouldn't count on it. But about this heredity business – have you thought about it seriously? Girls grow to be very like their mothers, you know."

"What better could a man ask than to be married to a phuri dai; now, how long do you suppose it might take you to make up your mind?"

"I've made it up. I'll marry you."

Some confusion and kissing. After a while –

"I like a woman who can make quick decisions."

"It was when you called me fathead. I've never been called that before. Flattering things like Sophia, and unflattering things like irreverent cunt, but never fathead."

"That was friendly talk."

"Then what you said about being friends settled it. I've never had a real friend. Rebel Angels, and such like, but nobody ever offered me friendship. That's irresistible."