CHAPTER TWO

Nicholas Webb raised the pale-green china teacup to his parched lips and stoically sipped the hot black tea which he was in the habit of drinking at about 10.30 every morning. Leaning back in his comfortably-padded swivel chair, with ankles crossed on top of his desk, he appeared to be staring fixedly at his expensive new shoes when, in reality, he was thinking about the new art exhibition which was due to open at the Merlin Gallery on Friday afternoon. Why-on-earth, he wondered, couldn't it have opened a week earlier, so that he could have sent someone along to review it for the forthcoming edition of 'Arts Monthly'. As things stood, all he could hope for was a largely retrospective review in the October edition, by which time the exhibition would be in its last week! And, if rumour counted for anything, it was quite an important exhibition this time too - one whose controversial paintings were bound to attract considerable publicity. Really, it was a wonder to him that he didn't revert to editing a weekly magazine sometimes, the number of times circumstances had obliged him to ignore or forego important events in the world of contemporary art.

He sipped a little too stoically at his hot tea and burnt his tongue. "Damn it!" he gasped, returning the offending cup to its saucer and placing them on a relatively uncluttered part of his desk. Frowning, he wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand and then trained an aggrieved expression on the head of his senior sub-editor, who was bent over the manuscript of a collection of poems which some young scribbler had had the audacity to offer for publication. From where he sat, all Webb could see of his colleague's face was part of a hooked nose protruding from beneath a thatch of curly-brown hair. Alas, the nose remained - and in the nature of such things could only remain - impervious to his negative expression. But the spectacle nonetheless gave him the analogy of some kind of inverted bird's nest with a chick hanging out of it - an analogy which partly served to dispel his irritation and return him to a less-aggrieved frame of mind. A titter of laughter from the 'inverted bird's nest' prompted him to snigger back. "I thought they'd amuse you," he averred, with ironic detachment. "Nothing like a fledgling surrealist for arousing one's sense of humour, is there?"

The 'inverted bird's nest' momentarily became the smiling face of Martin Osbourne. "Possibly not," he admitted, before turning back into Webb's analogical chimera again. And, reading aloud from the poem in his hand, he quoted three of the lines which he found particularly amusing.

"Yes, the 'persistent malaise of strawberry clits' makes the mind boggle rather, doesn't it?" commented Webb, chuckling gently. He crossed his fingers behind his head and stared meditatively at the opposite wall. "What about the 'diaphanous horizon on the legs of bloated peas'?" he asked, quoting from memory. "Can you make any sense of that?"

"Not the slightest!" came the inevitable reply from Martin Osbourne, after a short pause. "But, then again, I don't think one is supposed to make any sense of it." And, returning the manuscript to Nicholas Webb's desk, the sub-editor inquired of his superior whether he was intending to publish any of it in the forthcoming edition of their magazine.

"Certainly not!" replied Webb sternly, casting his colleague an incredulous look. "I can't afford to lose any more subscriptions. As soon as you publish one imbecile, there are a million others who imagine they've just as much entitlement to be published, too. And from there it's simply a matter of time before you end-up in the workhouse."

"The unemployment exchange these days," corrected Osbourne humorously and with a dash of anachronistic sentimentality. "Our century is really quite the reverse of the previous one. Before the rise of the proletariat, it was a punishment to be made to work. Now, on the contrary, not having any work ..."

"Yes, well, whatever the case," Webb rejoined with an air of impatience, "we can't afford to publish trash like that ..." he frowned down at the manuscript on the right-hand corner of his desk ... "and have intelligent, industrious, self-respecting citizens poisoning their minds with the 'tears of age on rumps of sin', or whatever the damn nonsense was! They'd think we're running a kindergarten here."

"We sometimes are," said Osbourne facetiously. "Only a kindergarten in which the youngest members are the only real adults," he added, more for his own benefit than Nicholas Webb's.

There was a short, sharp buzz from the internal telephone. Still frowning, Webb grabbed the receiver and heard the nervous voice of young Anthony Keating requesting to see him. "Unfortunately I'm in the middle of an important meeting at present," he lyingly pretended. "But you can do so in about half an hour. By the way, how did that interview with Mr Tonks go yesterday?"

"Er, not too badly," replied the strangled voice on the other end of the line. "In fact, that's what I wanted to see you about actually."

"Indeed?" Nicholas Webb raised his furrowed brows in feigned surprise. It was a long-standing habit of his to indulge in amateur theatricals when speaking to junior members of staff, and this habit persisted even when he was on the telephone and the person to whom he was speaking had no chance of seeing him act. But he would be accessible in thirty minutes and, with a curt "Alright?", he slammed the receiver down and returned to the 'important meeting'.

"Not too serious, I trust?" Osbourne ventured to speculate, as an expression of annoyance suddenly suffused his senior colleague's stern face.

"Probably not," the latter responded, picking up his by-now lukewarm cup of black tea and drinking what remained of it down in one thirsty gulp. "With young Keating, however, one can never take anything for granted. As long as he didn't insult Tonks and get himself thrown out of his bloody house, I needn't worry too much.... You can't imagine what a devil-of-a-job I had finding anyone to accept that assignment yesterday! What with Wilder catching a cold or something at the last moment, probably on purpose."

"Perhaps it was just as well that I happened to be out of town at the time," remarked Osbourne, who chuckled dryly. "Otherwise you might have picked on me instead."

"As it happened, I was almost contemplating a return to the old days and conducting the bloody interview myself!" Webb exclaimed in a tone of voice not far short of desperation. "Fortunately for me, however, young Keating didn't have all that much on his plate, so I kind of threw him in at the deep-end. Naturally, he wasn't particularly keen on the idea. He had his misgivings about interviewing someone whom he knew next-to-nothing about and whose music, apparently, doesn't appeal to him. But I got round him in the end! After all, his is not to reason why, his is but to do or die!"

"Not quite," objected the sub-editor good-humouredly. "His is but to do or lie. The necessity of death shouldn't enter into it these days."

"Don't be too sure about that!" countered the editor, guffawing loudly. "But seriously, one has to remember that Keating is a relatively inexperienced interviewer. It takes a lot of practice to make a Neil Wilder, you know."

Returning the empty cup to its saucer, Nicholas James Webb got up from his chair and strolled over to the single window his office possessed. At forty-two he was a tall, well-built man of resolute character and, apart from the few streaks of grey which were slowly tarnishing his black hair, relatively youthful appearance. Coming from what would be considered a well-educated background, he had served under Sir Cecil Thomas as sub-editor of the 'Literary Review' before going on, following the retirement of his knowledgeable predecessor, to become its editor. It was during his five-year spell of editorship of this prestigious monthly that another periodical, the 'Music World', ran into serious financial difficulties and was managed by a succession of editors who only succeeded in making matters worse. The last of these was Martin Osbourne, an acquaintance of Webb's from undergraduate days, who implored the latter, in conjunction with his directors, to offer capital to save the periodical from liquidation. At first, the leading lights of the 'Literary Review' would have nothing to do with the idea. But, before long, the prospect of taking over the 'Music World' altogether and amalgamating it with their own periodical began to appeal to them, since it had a more impressive building and, being in the vicinity of London's West End, was better situated. So the eventual outcome of the music magazine's financial plight was the establishment of 'Arts Monthly', for which, once art and sculpture had been added to its brief, there had been a steady demand, much to the surprise and delight of everyone concerned.

This synthesizing process had taken place a few years previously and, since then, Nicholas Webb had retained the responsibilities of editor with even greater success than before. And in tandem with Andrew Hunt, a former sub-editor with the 'Literary Review', Osbourne had proved his worth as a competent assistant. Indeed, so much so that Webb had evolved a private joke having its basis in a certain incredulity for the fact that some fool had previously denied Osbourne his rightful place in life by appointing him editor instead of keeping him sub-editor, where he evidently belonged! At the moment, however, the thirty-nine-year-old assistant in question was proving his competence in nothing more than sitting still in his chair whilst he drank the remains of a mild cup of sugared tea and, in-between whiles, puffed complacently on a slender cigar.

Standing in front of the large window that gave-on to a quite wide expanse of Bedlam Square, Nicholas Webb had caught sight of a young woman passing on foot below and, with his usual enthusiasm for the enticing curvatures of seductive females, was now following her along the pavement with lascivious gaze. The graceful swaying of her flounced knee-length skirt to the gentle rhythms of her gait were almost hypnotizing him, as he followed the progress of her exquisitely-shaped calf muscles along to that point in the near distance where the physical limitations of the window frame inevitably got in the way, and one was accordingly obliged to turn one's attention back to someone within easier range. As luck would have it, on this occasion, the only person to whom one could turn one's attention back was a bowler-hatted gentleman in purposeful stride and so, with an air of disappointment, he directed it across at the greenery in the middle of the square instead. Together with the expanse of sky the view permitted, this provided him with the next best thing to watching attractive young women passing below, and constituted, moreover, a significant part of his allegiance to the philosophy of Elementalism, to which he had been moderately converted by various of the more tragic writings of John Cowper Powys. By regularly 'plunging into', in Powys' phrase, whatever vegetation could be found amidst so much glass, steel, concrete, and other artificial materials, he believed he was gathering a sort of quasi-occult strength from it which would endow him with a psycho-physical advantage over those less enlightened than himself. The buildings of the square became, at such plunging moments, evil powers from which one sought deliverance in the trees. One's salvation from urban life was guaranteed not by any otherworldly allegiance or aspiration, but by a daily fidelity to Nature, to those benign manifestations of Nature, more specifically, which sprouted from the soil in the middle of the square.

And so it was with the consciousness of one who realizes he is taking part in some esoteric and essentially anti-existential rite that Nicholas Webb now stared across at a couple of old oak trees standing close together, and reverently acknowledged the powers of good. How strong they appeared! And how eternal when contrasted with the stylistic transience of the surrounding architecture which, despite an appearance of solidity, was destined to perish with the birth of new styles, to grow progressively more antiquated with the passing of time, until there was no longer any place for it in a rapidly changing world and it was accordingly demolished without a trace of regret! But the oak trees belonged not to time and society but to Nature and Eternity. They had existed as a species for thousands of years and, providing man didn't hack them all down in the name of some hypothetical future progress, some as yet unrealized technological millennium, they would doubtless continue to exist in the recognizable form of their species for thousands of years to come. And what applied to the oaks applied no less, in Webb's deferential estimation, to the other representatives of almighty Nature which could also be seen and plunged into from his office window, and which were just as important a source of psycho-physical strength to their humble devotee.

Yet, if the truth were known, Webb wasn't quite the humble devotee these days that he had once imagined himself to be. For he was obliged to admit that one could gather more strength from the larger and more powerful forces of good than from the smaller and less powerful ones - albeit there was always the possibility, he pedantically reflected, that a sufficient number of smaller ones plunged into together might, between them, add-up to something just as psychically stimulating and invigorating as one or two of the larger ones plunged into separately, in noble isolation from the rest. Yes, that was always possible, he thought. But, for the time being, it was enough to plunge into the couple of large trees he had singled out from their lesser fellows, and to do so, moreover, with all the determination of a famished suckling bent on drawing sustenance from its mother's copious breasts. For there were so many yards between himself and the garden that one just had to pick on the largest representatives of almighty Nature if one hoped to draw anything substantially elemental from it, to establish a subtle reciprocity of psychic emanations between their deeper selves, bearing in mind that such a reciprocity also had the intervening window to contend with - an obstacle which could only weaken it and thereby reduce its therapeutic effect. Such, at any rate, was how the moderate convert to Elementalism had first reasoned, when he began to adopt the habit of exploiting the public garden in the interests of his psycho-physical well-being, several months before. True, he had brought a few of his own theories to bear on those of John Cowper Powys in the course of elemental time, and thus created a slight variation or two on the original pantheistic theme. But, by and large, the great man's elemental theology was still the cornerstone of his own theological edifice, and the great man himself still the quasi-druidic high priest, as it were, of his elemental devotions. Variations on the original theme, he mused, were virtually inevitable!

A pretty nurse passing along the pavement below suddenly distracted him from his psychic tête-à-tête with the tallest of the old oaks and brought him back to the more sentient world of human beings. A vague excitement in the loins accompanied the explicit excitement in his mind as, with freshly charged vision, he proudly followed the graceful progress of her dark-stockinged legs for a number of exciting yards. How they delighted one! And how, when he embraced a more comprehensive perspective of her person, she reminded him of that young nurse he had seduced the previous year! The same dark hair, the same slender build, the same shapely calf muscles ... and what an extraordinary creature! One woman with her nurse's uniform on, a completely different one with it off. And a virgin, to boot! At least she had been when he accosted her in the square, one summer's evening, and summarily invited her to have dinner with him. A hapless virgin, if ever there was one. Quite desperate for male company. But completely transformed once she'd got it, completely the slave of the master she elected to make him! Yes, indeed! An attractive young nurse every once in a while wasn't at all a bad idea, providing one didn't get carried away by it. After all, he wasn't quite the democratic Don Juan these days that he had aspired to being in his undergraduate days, some two decades ago. The dark-stockinged legs disappeared from view at the far side of the window. He couldn't crane his neck around any farther.

"Was there anything for me this morning?" Osbourne's suave voice was heard to inquire out of the blue.

"Only a couple of things," came the reply in a high-pitched female voice.

Startled out of his sexist preoccupations at the window, Webb swiftly turned round, to encounter the slender fair-haired figure of his secretary standing in front of his desk with a pile of letters in her hands. He almost blushed with the luxury of undergraduate shame.

"You don't appear to have any room for these on your desk," she remarked, referring to the typed but unsigned letters to which the editor was obliged to put his signature in due course.

He frowned responsively and, snatching them from her, plumped them down on top of a London street-atlas. Then, catching sight of the poetry manuscript again, he smiled faintly and picked it up. There were, in all, some sixty large pages of quasi-surrealistic hogwash held together by a couple of treasury tags - hogwash which he had been expected to wade through. And not only in his capacity as editor but, more importantly in the view of its perpetrator, as 'Champion of the arts'! Yes, it was only, apparently, as something more than an editor, a mere bureaucratic cogwheel, that he could be expected to do adequate justice to the poet by publishing his contributions in the name of the almighty 'champion' he was elected to be!

Well, even if by some special ordinance he was such a man, he still had the right to differentiate between hogwash and poetry and to reject the former in his hard-pressed endeavour to champion the latter! If he had his own way, if he could really be the 'champion' such people seemingly required, he would do better than simply to reject the prosy hogwash. He would tear it up into tiny pieces, throw the pieces into the largest metal wastepaper bin he could lay hands on, and set fire to them with the aid of some liquid paraffin. And he would do so, moreover, without the slightest qualm or moral doubt as to the validity of his actions. He would proceed, in short, with all the fanatical conviction and unflappable self-righteousness of one who habitually burns witches at the stake! Unfortunately for the arts, however, his powers were limited. He could only champion them to the extent of rejecting the hogwash. Admittedly, that was better than nothing, since it enabled him to avenge himself on the philistines and sham artists and/or anti-artists to some extent, though not, alas, to the extent he would have preferred! The complete destruction of the hogwash would at least have compensated him for the inconvenience of having had to wade through it all in the first place! Better, it would have encouraged him to do so. For he had now got to the point where, cognizant of the limitations imposed upon his championship, he would only partly and, as it were, superficially wade through it. The rest he would leave unread.

Turning to the fifth poem of the manuscript, his smile deepened somewhat. He quoted a line which had conspicuously come to his attention earlier and, still smiling, inquired of his secretary, who probably knew as much about poetry as a horse about philosophy, whether she could enlighten them to any extent.

"The 'persistent malaise of strawberry clits'?" Judith Pegg repeated doubtfully, an emotional upheaval instantaneously transforming her bureaucratically impassive expression into one of baffled incredulity. And, just as instantaneously, her emotions changed course and she began to laugh. "It sounds rather 'risqué' to me," she confessed, as soon as her amusement would allow her to speak again.

"Risqué?" queried the editor, casting an ironically conspiratorial glance in Osbourne's deferential direction. "Yes, I suppose one could say that, depending what sort of a mind one has!" He chuckled both secretary and sub-editor into chuckling along with him for a moment.

"I trust I needn't enlighten you any further," said Mrs Pegg from a strawberry-coloured face which momentarily accentuated her bright-blue eyes. At thirty-four, she was still quite an attractive woman, but one from whom neither man present had been able to profit in other than purely professional terms in over two years. For, apart from a night spent in the editor's bed shortly after she joined the firm, and a couple of nights spent in the sub-editor's bed shortly after the editor had joined with her, she had resolutely kept her body for her husband and given herself almost exclusively to him - the only notable interruption of her conjugal fidelity having occurred whilst a dashing correspondent by name of Glen Walters was working at the office. But he had resigned and gone abroad in search of greater temptations over six months ago, leaving her sadly to her marital probity.

"No, I don't think we'll be requiring any further enlightenment on that line," murmured a disdainfully smiling Nicholas Webb. "Though you might be able to throw some light on the 'tears of age on rumps of sin'?" He focused a mildly inquisitorial gaze on his blond secretary, which she duly acknowledged with an appropriately ironic chuckle.

"I don't think I could possibly permit myself to comment on that!" she protested in a tone of mock reproach. "For it doesn't even begin to make sense to me. But it has a faintly Baudelairean ring to it, don't you think?"

"More a tinkle than a ring," Osbourne chimed-in smilingly. "But, according to our contributor, it's supposed to be closer to André Breton."

"I'm afraid I haven't read him," confessed Mrs Pegg nonchalantly. "So you'll just have to make do with Baudelaire." She smiled benignly at the sub-editor and, taking the manuscript held out to her by an almost-imploring Nicholas Webb, abruptly turned on her high-heeled feet and headed towards the door. The little cross-shaped pencil mark on the top left-hand corner of its first page indicated quite unequivocally what was expected of her. The rejection letters were never, except in rather exceptional cases, dictated on the spot. They were pre-printed in an appropriately terse, noncommittal, polite format, and distributed accordingly. No unnecessary time-wasting! The execution was quick, clean, simple, and, above all, impersonal. 'Impersonality', Webb had often asserted, 'is the best mode of concealing one's identity', and, besides, it provided him with a further means of avenging himself on the philistines!

Flicking the burnt-out remains of his cigar into the swan-shaped ashtray which invariably stood, as though on-guard, to the front of Webb's mahogany desk, Martin Osbourne mumbled something about having printers' bills to attend to and, with a see-you nod of his head, followed Mrs Pegg out through the open door.

"Alone at last!" sighed Webb, as soon as the door had closed again. "Free to carry on with my work!" Saying which, he sat down and, with something approaching pleasure, proceeded to apply his signature to the pile of letters his secretary had just brought him. How many times circumstances had obliged him to put signature to paper over the years! It was a wonder to him that he hadn't availed himself of some kind of mechanical means of doing it by now; though where such means could be obtained he had never quite discovered, nor, so far as he knew, had anyone else. Nevertheless he hadn't always found it inconvenient to sign letters. There were times, indeed, when it enabled one to relax one's brain or think of other, more interesting matters. Even times when it enabled one to satisfy a kind of egotistical gluttony for advertising one's name far-and-wide, making it more important-looking with each successive batch of letters. And on the relatively rare occasions when one happened to be writing to someone who entertained an inflated opinion of one's professional status, who took one for a famous poet or essayist or something, it wasn't altogether far removed from signing an autograph, being a sort of autograph-substitute or equivalent.

He had got to the 'W' of the eighth signature when the external phone rang. Completing the remaining letters of his surname with a flourish, he picked up the receiver and, with moderately suave intonation, advertised his name afresh. A female voice on the other end of the line responded to it with reassuring familiarity. "Oh, hello darling!" Webb ejaculated, dropping his pen. "I'd almost forgotten you were going to ring me. How did the dental appointment go, by the way?"

"Just a tiny filling on a lower-left molar, so nothing to worry about," replied the sensuous voice of Deborah Wilkes. "I got the impression that the dentist was disappointed he couldn't do anything else."

"Why, is he hard-up or something?" suggested Webb facetiously.

"Well, you know ..." She sent a burst of meaningful laughter reverberating along the line. Then, swiftly returning to her usual self, she casually inquired of him whether he was still intending to take her out to dinner that evening.

"Naturally," Webb confirmed. "Six o'clock sharp! But be ready, because I don't want to miss the beginning of the concert afterwards. You know how much I hate turning-up during the performance."

"Of course, Nicky." This reassuring statement was followed by a short pause while Deborah pondered something in her mind a moment. "Would you like me to dress in any specific clothes this evening?" she at length asked, mindful of her lover's sartorial preferences, which had lately developed into a veritable fetishistic convention between them.

"Er, I think I'll leave that decision entirely with you for once," replied Webb evasively. "As long as it's something ... you know, kind of sexy. Anyway, you should know my tastes pretty well by now."

"Oh I do, I do," his girlfriend admitted. "Who knows them better? All the same, you sometimes change your mind at the last moment, don't you?"

Nicholas Webb fidgeted uneasily in his chair at the critical change of tone in Deborah's voice. "Well, as long as you wear your new black seamless stockings, pink suspenders, and matching ..."

The office door suddenly burst open and in walked young Anthony Keating with a determined look on his serious face. The half-hour postponement of his meeting with the editor had run its trying course, and he was now itching to confess what he had to say as quickly as possible. He shut the door and headed with ominously purposeful stride towards Webb's desk.

"Wouldn't you prefer me to wear the pale-blue undies this evening?" protested the female voice on the other end of the line. "After all, you saw the pink ones on Sunday, didn't you?"

"Er, suit yourself!" the editor curtly responded, as the intrusive presence of the junior correspondent loomed menacingly above him. "Just do what you think best." Waves of blood seemed to be rushing to his face and unbalancing his head.

"You see, the pink undies are in the wash and they're the only ones I've got in that colour at present, Nicky," his girlfriend explained. "But the pale-blues ones ..."

"Yes, alright, alright!" Webb assured her. "If that's the way it is!" He was virtually shouting.

"And they go so well with my dark-blue nylon stockings, don't they?" she purred.

"Perfectly!" he well-nigh rasped. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have some urgent business to attend to this morning. Thanks for calling." He slammed the receiver down and sighed in manifest exasperation. His face was almost as dark as a beetroot. This wasn't the first time someone had intruded upon his privacy at an inopportune moment. And, to judge by the way Miss Wilkes kept pestering him, it probably wouldn't be the last! He frowned sullenly and motioned Keating to take a seat. It was unlikely that the young correspondent had overheard more than the outgoing part of the conversation but, even so, a word or two about advertising costs probably wouldn't be inappropriate ... just in case. "Now then," he added, after the advertising industry had been summarily dismissed as extortionate, "you had something appertaining to yesterday's assignment on your mind, if I remember correctly."

"Yes, I'm afraid so," admitted Keating who, with as much articulation as could be mustered, under the difficult circumstances, now proceeded to produce a slightly revised version of what had actually happened. The composer, for all his cheerful spirits, had been suffering from a sore throat which, alas, had prevented him from giving the interview. But to compensate the magazine for such inconvenience as this was bound to cause, he had played some delightful piano music - here Keating tactfully produced the Schumann tape - and had generously agreed to grant the interview at a later date. Unfortunately, circumstances compelled him to go to Birmingham for a couple of days, so, assuming he was well enough on his return, it couldn't be granted before Thursday. Which of course meant ...

"Yes, I get the picture," said a still-frowning Webb, who emitted another sigh, this time more heartfelt. "Too late for the September edition!" He shook his head and mumbled something vaguely obscene under his breath about bloody composers. "Is his throat likely to be better by Thursday?" he asked without thinking.

"Assuming we can take his word, it ought to be," replied Keating, who naturally felt somewhat uncomfortable.

"If we could postpone the printing for a week, all would be well," Webb declared. "Unfortunately, however, the printers have other clients besides us and work to a pretty tight schedule. Printing us later would mean printing someone else earlier, later, or not at all, which would almost certainly be out of the question. So we shall just have to settle for what we can get and publish the interview in the October edition instead. No doubt, we shall look pretty foolish if our chief competitors come-up with something substantial to commemorate Howard Tonks' sixtieth birthday in September. He didn't mention anything about other interviews, by any chance?"

"Not a word," Keating responded with alacrity, telling the truth for once. "Although if he was on holiday earlier this month, it would be highly unlikely that anyone else could have got to him before us, surely?"

"Don't be too sure!" retorted the experienced voice of the editor. "I've heard of people who were interviewed as long as six bloody months before their birthday or the anniversary of a particularly important professional occasion in their life. Some editors won't take any chances, you know. They gather their nuts well in advance and store them up for future use." At which point he broke into a smile for the first time since Keating had entered the office - the smile of a crafty squirrel. "But we're not entirely lacking in that respect, Anthony," he hastened to assure his young employee. "There's a short essay on the composer written by your colleague, Neil Wilder, some weeks ago which will serve as a fill-in, as well as a longish interview with the painter, Miles Coverdale. So, in a sense, your next visit to Howard Tonks' house isn't strictly necessary. But since the public expects an interview from us once a month, and since the composer agreed to grant us one, you had better go back there and gather what information you can. I take it you're still prepared to do that, in the absence of Wilder?"

Keating impulsively nodded his head. He was more than prepared; he was positively itching to go back there and peer out at the garden again!