NUNQUAM

Lawrence Durrell's

NUNQUAM

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�� Aut Tunc, aut Nunquam,

�� "It was then or never...."

�� Petronius

�� The Satyricon

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Asleep or awake - what difference?� Or rather, if there were a difference how would you recognise it?� And if it were a recognisable difference would there be anything or anyone to care if you did or not - some angel with a lily-gilding whisper to say: "Well done."?� Ay, there's the rub.

�� My head aches, it isn't only the wound - that is on the mend.

�� "Guilty in what you didn't know, what you hoped to escape merely by averting your face."� Ah!

�� He wakes, then, this manifestation of myself so vaguely realised that it is hard to believe in him: he wakes in a room whose spare anonymity suggests one of the better-class hotels; no feudal furniture, no curtains smelling of tobacco or cats.� Yet the towels in the bathroom are only stencilled over with a capital "p".� The Bible beside the bed is chained to the wall with a slender brass chain; owing to some typographical mishap it is quite illegible, the ink has run.� Only the title-page can be made out.� Well, where am� I, then?� In what city, what country?� It will come back, it always does; but in waking up thus he navigates a long moment of confusion during which he tires to establish himself in the so-called reality which depends, like a poor relation, on memory.� The radio is of unknown provenance; it plays light music so characterless that it might be coming from anywhere at all.� But where?� He cannot tell for the life of him - note the expression: for the life of him!� His few clothes have no tabs of identity, and indeed some have no buttons.� Ah, that strikes a vague chord!� There is a small green diary by the bed, perhaps that might afford a clue?� It has the other one's name in it.� Felix Ch.� But the book seems very much out of date - surely the Coronation was years ago?� It seems, too, full of improbable Latin-American itineraries; moreover in the middle a whole span of months is missing, has been torn out.� Gone!� Vanished months, vanished days - perhaps these are the very days he is living through now?� A man with no shadow, a clock with no face.� Something about Greece and Turkey?� Had he ever been to Turkey?� Perhaps it was the other one.� That blow on the head had occluded his vision: the darkness turned violet sometimes and was apt to dance about in his skull.� (How she trembled in bed, this astonishing revivalist of a dead love.)� But of course he had!

�� April to October, but where were those vanished weeks, and where was he?� I would give anything to know.� It doesn't look like spring at all events; from the windows the snow meadows tilt away towards tall white-capped mountains; a foreground of pearling sleet upon window sills of warped and painted wood.� Some sort of institution, then?� (Dactyl, you are rusty and need taking down.)� Nothing of all this did you notice until the image in the mirror one day burst into tears.� Well, keep on trying.� No luck with the soft descriptive music.� I must have had a meal for the remains lie there, but they are quite unidentifiable.� Last night's dinner?� I turn over the remains with my fork.� Brains of a hall-porter cooked in Javel, one hundred francs?� I press the bell for the� maid but nobody comes.� Then at last I cry out as I catch sight of the little Judas in the door.� The pain of regained identity.� Ahhhh!� It opens for a second and then slowly closes.� This is no hotel.� Doctor!� Mother!� Nurse!� Urine!

�� Someone starts banging, fitfully, on a wall nearby and screaming in a frothy way; thud upon the padded wall, and again thud: and the peculiar reverberation of a rubber chamber-pot upon the floor.� I know it now, and the other knows it too - we slide into one identity once more, as slick as smoke.� But he feels desperately feverish and he takes my pulse, and his sweat smells of almonds.� O all this is quite perfect!� Hamlet is himself again.� Fragments of forgotten conversations, the whole damned stock-pot of my life memories has come back to me; and with it the new, the surprising turn of events which has given me the illusion of recovering Benedicta� (Hyppolyta saying: "How sick one is of les petites savoirs sexuelles").

�� I can see no reason why all this should have happened to me, but it has; they go on, their harpies both male and female, tearing their black hearts out.� "I received nothing but kindness from him (her) and repaid it with double-dealing though meanwhile unwaveringly loving (her-him).� Staunch inside, infirm without, lonely, inconstant, and mad about one woman (man)."� These raids on each other's narcissism.� And yet, if what she tells me is true?� It would be going back to the beginning, to pick up that lost stitch again; going back to the point where the paths diverged.� Hard, someone is calling my name - yes, it is my name.� Lying beside her I used to reproach myself by saying: "You were supposed to know everything; you arrived equipped to know all, like every human being.� But a progressive distortion set in, your visions withered slowly like ageing flowers."� Why did they, what have they?

�� She says that now she is allowed to visit me because neither is observably mad; we are simply mentally mauled by sedatives.� "And you, as usual, are pretending."� But then if I like to be mad it is my own affair - doctors are scared of schizophrenes because they can read minds, they can plot and plan.� They pretend to pretend.� Ah, but I care for nothing anymore.� Quick, let us make love before another human being is born.� More and more people, Benedicta, the world is overflowing; but the quality is going down correspondingly.� There is no point in just people - nothing multiplied by nothing is still nothing.� Kiss.� Eyes of Mark, beautiful grey eyes of your dead son; I hardly dare call him mine as yet.� (And what if you are lying to me, that is the question?)

�� Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

�� Bless the bed that I lie on,

�� Ano-Sado-Polymorph

�� Bless the pillow I slide off,

�� Giving Sascher-Masch the slip

�� With the twice-confounded whip.

�� Let them take me from behind,

�� But not too very sudden, mind.

�� Polymorphouse and perverse,

�� Revelling in the primal curse.

�� Serenity, Senility.� Serendipity ... ah my friend, what are you saying?

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

Of course I am on my guard, watching her like a hawk.� A hawk, forsooth?� She will feed me on the fragments of field-mice still warm, broken up tenderly bit by bit in those slender fingers.� She will teach me to stoop.� Of course a lot of this material is dactylised, belonging to lost epochs; they have recovered my little machines for me and returned them to me (give the baby his rattle now!).� I recover bits here and there which in the past Abel might well have appreciated.� Turn them this way and that, they smell of truth - however provisional it is; as when raising those deep blue, very slightly unfocused eyes she said: "But the sexual act is by its very nature private, even if it takes place on the pavement during the rush hour."� When I ask why I have been brought here she adds, on an imperious note: "To begin again, to recover the lost ground.� There is much that will be explained to you - a lot by me.� For God's sake trust me this time."� It is as enigmatic as her way of saying "Help me" in the past.� Must I resume the long paperchase once more, Benedicta?

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

I suppose that I owe my survival to the last-minute breakdown of Abel, or something of that order.� I can't believe that any other consideration would have motivated my capture.� Of course nobody knows how to put it right except me and I won't show them under duress.� All this is surmise, of course; nobody has said anything.� And I am shown every make of sympathy and consideration: many of my toys have been returned to me, and a place set aside for me to work if the mood is on me.� I resist these soft blandishments, of course, though it is hard in a way: time hangs heavy.� I admit that I took up an offer to work on the Caradoc transcriptions, largely out of curiosity.� The executors want some "order brought into them", whatever that means.� Indeed the notion itself is unwise since this type of material, by its very haphazardness, creates its own kind of order.� "Attempt to capture the idea quite naked before it strays into the conceptual field like some heavyfooted cow."� Thus do I kill time till time kill me.

�� And now, as I have explained, she has come back, for how long I don't know, or for what reason; but changed, irremediably changed.� Yet still the beauty of the domed egg-of-the-highmasted-schooner visage whose smiles turn into a stag: still the slant calamitous eyes.� Illness, imprisonment, privation - might not all this have brought us close together?� I wonder.� Why, she even helps me with my papers now.� The boy's death hangs over us, between us, the something unspoken that neither knows how to broach.� Resilient as I am, that was a thrust right through the heart of my narcissism; and the bare fact does not yet seem to correspond to any known set of words.� So I shuffle paper a bit, reflect and allow my moods to carry me where they will.� As for the executors, they do not care what I do with the material provided it goes into covers and provides money for the estate.� But ... there are no inheritors to claim it so some committee of cranks will divert it to crank projects: old men smelling of soap and singed hair.� Palmanism for rodents, birth control for fairies ... that sort of thing: everything for which Caradoc, if indeed he is dead, did not stand.� (I hear those growls, I have them recorded.)

�� And then, from time to time among my own ruminations float fragments which might almost seem part of another book - my own book; the idea occurs fitfully to me, has done on and off for years.� But so much other stuff has to be cleared first: the shadows of so many other minds which darken these muddled texts with their medieval reflections.� Abel would have been able to give them shape and position and relevance; human memory is not yet whole enough to do so.� Was it, for example, of Benedicta that I once said - or was it Iolanthe?� "Perhaps it is not fair to speak abusively of her, to note that she never thought anything which she did not happen to think.� No effort was involved.� Shallow, unimpeded by reflection, her chatter tinkled over the shallow beds of commonplace and platitude, pouring from that trash-box of a head.� But what beauty?� Once in her arms I felt safe for ever, nothing could happen to me."� Prig!

�� Today is cold again, a Swiss cold.� It has all started to become very clear.� The leaves are falling softly and being snatched away across the meadows like smoke.� My God, how long must I stay here, when will I get out?� And to what end if I do?� My life is covered in the heavy ground-mist of an impossible past which I shall never understand.� I sleepwalk from day to day now with a hangover fit for a ghost.

�� As for these scribblings which emerge from my copying machines, the dactyls, these are not part of the book I was talking about, no.� Would you like to know my method?� It is simple.� While I am writing one book, (the first part might be called Pulse Rate 103), I write another about it, then a third about it, and so on.� A new logic might emerge from it, who knows?� Like those monkeys in the Indian frescoes (so human, so engaging, like some English critics) who can dance only with their index fingers up each other's behinds.� This would be my way of doing things.� Smell of camphor: I must now get too vivacious when Nash, the doctor, calls.� I must remain as he sees me - an eternal reproach to the death-bed, the dirty linen, the urinals clearing their throats.� Yet vivacity of mind is no sin, saith the Lord God.

�� As far as Caradoc is concerned what ails me in gathering up this inconsequential chatter is that there are several different books which one could assemble, including some which couldn't have been foreseen by those who knew him; is everyone build on this pattern? - like a club sandwich, I suppose.� But here for example is a vein which would be more suitable to Koepgen - perhaps it is the part of Caradoc which is Koepgen, or vice versa.� I mean alchemy, the great night express which jumps the points and hurtles out of the causal field, carrying everything with it.� Alchemy with all its paradoxes - I would have logged that as Koepgen's private territory.� But no.� The vein is there in Caradoc, under the fooling.

�� I mean, for example: "Pour bien commencer ces �tudes il faut d'abord supprimer toute curiosit�"; the sort of paradox which is incomprehensible to those afflicted by the powers of ratiocination.� Moreover this, if you please, from a man who claimed that the last words of Socrates were: "Please the Gods, may the laughter keep breaking through."� Contrast it with the fine white ribbon which runs through the lucubrations of Aristotle - the multiplication tables of thought to set against this type of pregenital jargon.� (In between times I have not been idle: on the little hand lathe I have turned a fine set of skeleton keys in order to be able to explore my surroundings a bit.)� Is it imperative that the tragic sense should reside after all somewhere in laughter?

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

Yet now that I am officially mad and locked away here in the Paulhaus, it would be hard to imagine anywhere more salubrious (guidebook prose!) to spend a long quiet convalescence - here by this melancholy lake which mirrors mostly nothingness because the sky is so low and as toneless as tired fur.� The rich meadows hereabouts are full of languid vipers.� At eventide the hills resound to the full-breasted thwanking of cowbells.� One can visualise the udders swinging in time along the line of march to the milking sheds where the rubber nipples with electricity degorge and ease the booming creatures.� The steam rises in clouds.

�� Billiard-rooms, a library, chapels for five denominations, a cinema, a small theatre, gold course - Nash is not wrong in describing it as a sort of country-club.� The surgical wing, like the infirmaries, is separate, built at an angle of inclination, giving its back to us, looking out eastward.� Operations one side, convalescence the other.� Our illnesses are graded.� A subterranean trolley system plus a dozen or so lifts of various sizes ensure swift and easy communication between the two domains.� I am not really under restraint.� I am joking; but I am under surveillance, or at least I feel I am.� So far I have only been advised not to go to the cinema - doubtless there are good clinical reasons.� Apart from the fact that I might see a film of Iolanthe's again I do not care: the cinema is the No play of the Yes-Man, as far as I am concerned.� I am for sound against vision - it runs counter to the contemporary trend: I know that, but what can I do?� Knox Ompax and Om Mane Padme Hum are the two switches which operate my brain box: between the voting sherd and the foetal pose of the sage.

�� There are many individual chalets, too, dotted about upon the steep hillsides, buried out of sight for the most part in dense groves of pine and fir.� They are pretty enough when the snow falls and lies; but when not the eternal condensation of moisture forms a light rain or Scotch mist.� The further snows loom indifferently from minatory cloud-scapes.� One sleeps well.� No, I won't pretend that it is anything in particular, either comminatory or depressing or enervating: except for me, the eye of the beholder.� For I am here against my will, badly shaken, and moreover frightened by this display of disinterested kindness.� Yet it is simply what it is - the Paulhaus.� Subsoil limestone and conglomerate.� Up there, on the further edge of the hill among the pines are the chalets allocated to the staff.� Our keepers live up there, and the lights blaze all night where the psychoanalysts chain each other to the walls and thrash each other with their braces in a vain attempt to discover the pain-threshold of affect-stress.� Their screams are terrible to hear.� In other cells the theologians and mystagogues are bent over their dream anthologies, puzzled by the new type of psychic immaturity which our age has produced - one that it literally impermeable to experience.� When he is here Nash lodges with Professor Pfeiffer whose dentures are loose and who has a huge dried black penis on his desk - a veritable Prester John of an organ.� Swiss taxidermy at its best.� But nobody knows whose it is, or rather was.� At any rate it isn't mine.

�� Here they must discuss poor Charlock in low tones, speaking of his lustreless eye, the avain quality of his gaze.� "Such a lack of theme" Pfeiffer must say.� It is his favourite expression.� And there opposite him sits Nash in his bow tie, author of The Aetiology of Onanism, in three volumes (Random House).� Little pissypuss Nash.� You wait a bit, my lads.� My goodness, though, it was worth the journey, it was worth the fare.� Mind you, it is easier to get in than to get out - but that is true of other establishments I have known....

�� It was not entirely my fault that I awoke with a head like a giant onion - swathed as it was in layer upon layer of surgical dressing.� Like the Cosmic Egg itself, and I damned well felt like it.� Chips of skull (they said) had to be removed - like a hard-boiled egg at a picnic.� No damage to the Pia Mater.� Clunk with a couple of pick-helves as I reached for my knife.� Then a kind of bloody abstract but rather lovely abdication of everything with darkness hanging like a Japanese print of an extinct volcano.� Angor Animi - fear of approaching death.� It haunted me for a while.� But now I have gained a bit of courage, as a mouse does when the cat does not move for a long time.� I am just beginning to scuttle about once more ... the cat must have forgotten me.� Actually they must see that I am on the mend; by special dispensation I have been allowed some of my tools back, as I say; along with them some private toys.� One, for example, has enabled me to discover the position of the two microphones in my room.� Instead of plugging them as a clumsy agent might have done I fill them with the noise of cisterns flushing, taps running, dustbin lids banging -� not to mention the wild howls and squeaks of the tapes played backwards; and music too, prodigious wails and farts in the manner of Alban Berg.� Poor Pfeiffer, he must shake his shaggy head and imagine he is listening to the Dalai Lama holding service.

�� Lately Nash has taken to visiting me regularly about thrice a week - hurried and apologetic harbinger of Freud.� Pale with professional concern.� "Come Nash, let us be frank for a change.� Julian had me captured and brought here so that you can try to break me will with your drugs."� He laughs and pouts, shaking his head.� "Felix, you only do it to annoy, because you know it teases.� Actually he saved you just in time, for all our sakes.� Seriously, my dear fellow."

�� Nature becomes almost transparent to the visionary eye after even a moderate period of sedation.� I could see so to speak right into his rib-cage, see his heart warbling out blood, see his timid and orderly soul neatly laid up in dusted ranks like a travel library.� A telephone rings somewhere.� "Felix" he says tenderly, reproachfully.� "I suppose" I said "you must have dreamed of escaping once, when you were very young.� Where has it gone, Nash, the impetus?� Will you always be the firm's satrap, its druggist?"� His eyes fill briefly with tears, for he is a very emotional man and suffers when criticised.� "For goodness' sake don't give way to delusional ideas of persecution, I implore you.� Everything has turned out right after a very nasty and dangerous passage.� When you are rested and well and have seen Julian there is no need why you shouldn't send in your resignation if you wish.� There is no obstacle - all that is a comic delusion of yours.� We want you with us, of course, but not against your will...."� I can't resist acting him a little of a private charade based upon Hamlet's father's ghost - nearly managing to secure the heavy paper-knife which I made to drive into his carotid.� I bulge my eyes and wave my ears up and down.� But he is fleet enough when danger threatens, is Nash; once round the table and to the door, ready to bolt, panting: "Cut it out for God's sake, Felix.� You can't scare me with these antics."� But I have, that is what is mildly engiggling.� I throw the paper knife in the air and catch it; then place it betwixt my teeth in pirate fashion.� He comes back cautiously into the room.� "You want me mad" I say.� "And you shall have me so."� I comb out my overgrown eyebrows in the mirror and try a stern look or two.� He chuckles and continues to talk.� "It's lucky you have caught me during my safe period" I say.� "If it had been any other woman...."

�� "D'you know," he says effeverscently "I have a patient who makes up natural Mnemons just as Caradoc used to; he was a famous philosopher, and he illustrates the ruins of his dialectical system with them.� Free association is the Draconic law, no?� La volupt� est la confiture des ours - how is that?"

�� "Woof!� Woof!"

�� "Felix, listen to me."

�� "Ja, Herr Doktor."

�� "These dreams you are turning in to Pfeiffer - anyone can see they are faked.� I ask you, psychoanalysts riding on broomsticks and sliding down moonbeams with fairies ... a joke is a joke, but this is going too far.� Poor Pfeiffer says ..."

�� I play a little game with him for a while chasing him round and round the table, but he is nimble and I tire rapidly; I suppose that I am rather ill still, weak in the knees, and of a tearful disposition: and he knows it.

�� "And Benedicta?" says he.

�� "Was sent to help me compromise my reason and my feelings."

�� "Good heavens, Felix: how can you?"

�� "How did it all happen to me, Nash - to Felix Ch, eh?� Perhaps a desire to poke some frivolous and egotistical strumpet, to plough up some sexual ignoramus?� Ah, listen to the alpha rhythms of the grey matter."� I hold up a finger to bid him listen.� He shakes his head and sighs.� "Poor darling" he says.� "You wrong her and soon you'll know it.� Anyway she will be back on Tuesday and you'll see for yourself.� In the meantime you see how free you are to walk about, even without her.� Even walk into town if you want one afternoon.� Treat this like your own country-club, Felix.� It won't be long before we have you back in our midst - I've never been more confident of a prognosis.� Meanwhile I'll send you plenty of visitors to cheer you up."

�� I must have given him a woolly look for he coughed and adjusted his bow tie neatly.� "Visitors" he added in a lower key, filing out a longish prescription form with deft little Japtype strokes, and adding the magic word in block capitals at the foot of the page.� "This for the nurse" he added sportively, waving it as he stood up.� "Until next week then, my dear Felix.� Julian sends his warmest regards...."� He just got through the door in time before the heavy chair burst upon it; a leg fell off, a panel was cracked right across.� The German nurse came in clicking like a turkey; a strapping girl with the square walk of the sexually unrealised woman.� She had a big bust and an urchin cut.� I liked her white smooth apron and her manicured capable hands.� Nash had fled down the corridor.� I helped her gather up the pieces and redispose the furniture.� I asked her if it was time for my enema, but she registered shock and disapproval at this sally.� "If not, then will I to the library go," I said and she stood aside to let me pass.� As I walked, still puzzled by everything, I told myself: "Benedicta and I come from a long line of muddled sexers, spectres of discontent.� What dare I believe about her, or about anyone?"

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

Over the week-end I tested my freedom in tentative fashion by disappearing for the afternoon: no, not into town where I am always followed at a discreet distance by a white ambulance; but into the dangerous ward.� Who would ever have thought of looking for one there?� I reappeared in my own quarters as mysteriously as a conjurer's rabbit and simply would not tell them where I had been.� Would they have believed me?� I doubt it.� The thing is that I found I was actually picking up the thought-waves of a schizo on one of my little recording devices.� He was knocking on the wall at the end of the corridor and singing a bit.� I sneaked to the locked door and passed him a wire with a tiny mike on it.� (Of course I myself have lots of tinnitus, which is only static in loony terms.)� But we hit it off wonderfully well.� He didn't really want to get out, he said; he was only troubled by speculations as to the nature of freedom - where did it begin and where end?� A man after my own heart, as you see.� He turned out to be a wife-murderer; higher spiritual type than the rest of us.� Our electronic friendship flowered so quickly that I felt it about time to test my set of keys.� The second worked like a charm and I was inside the ward with the red light, shaking hands with my friend.� He was a huge fellow but kindly, indeed almost diffident about his powers.� The padded ward was just like anywhere else; spotless and obviously well conducted - and with a much more refined class of person than one finds in the rest of the place.� Yes, I liked it very much, even the corridor with its sickly saint-like smell: smell of sweaty feet in some Byzantine cloister?� And then all the pleasant diversified humours of Borborymi.� Woof!� Woof!� There would be no visitors between tea-time and supper, so we were free to play at nursery games - on all fours, for example, barking in concert at a full moon, trying to turn ourselves into wolf-men.

�� You see, anxiety is only a state of deadly heed, just as melancholia is only a pathological sadness.� I might have foundered here, I suppose, had she not appeared; foundered out of sheer exhaustion, out of defiance to Julian's obscure laws.� I could have retreated by sheer imitation into a genuine hebeprhenia, to follow out the dull spiral of some loony's talk; under the full sail of madness steered this cargo of white-faced gnomes towards the darkness of catatonia.� A Ship of Fools, like the very world itself.� My friend speaks of freedom without quite being able to visualise its furthest reaches; yet he is almost there.� Ah!� Folie des Gouffres.� But cerebral dysrhythmia will respond to a cortical sedative, even in some cases of cryptogenic epilepsy.... You ask Nash!� Om.

�� The thing is this: coming round in the operating theatre, under the arcs, surrounded by a ballet of white masks (white niggers, appropriates of a blood sacrifice): bending down to plunge needles into me: I heard, or thought I heard, the quite unmistakable tones of Julian.� They spoke, all of them, in quiet relaxed voices, like clubmen over their cigars while I lay there, a roped steer, with wildly rolling eye and flapping ear.� I knew that the operation was over by now; I was just waiting to be wheeled away.� The figure I mean stood just back from the circle and was obviously neither surgeon nor dresser, though he was masked and gowned like the rest of them.� It was this one that said, in the tones of Julian: "I think the X-ray findings followed up by a pneumogram should tell you...."� Talk filled the interstices of his phrases like clods raining down upon a coffin-lid.� Explanations proliferated into jargon.� I felt perfectly well by now, the pain had gone with the tachycardia, leaving only the spearpointed attentive fury of the impotent man.� Someone spoke of brainstem sedatives, and then another voice: "Of course for a while he will undergo what will seem like electric charges in the skull - weird haptic sensations."� Hence, I suppose, the longish period of surveillance among the odours of guilty perspiration; life among bedridden schizos under insulin torpor therapy, beings whose "Rostral Hegemony" is faulty - to quote the brave words of Nash.� Much of this is blank, of course, punctured by dim visions.� I dare say I ran the gamut of D Ward.� Petit Mal to Grand Malheur.� Bedwetting is common.� By day their speech exhibits uninhibited lalling.� Welcome, electrically speaking, my new-found friends, possessors of the spike-and-dome discharge!� I see the anxiety rising in the Centrocephalon, the rapid 25 per second high amplitude rhythms of the Grand Mal, the focal seizures rising in the cortex.� Last week the Countess Maltessa had an unrehearsed, unsupervised epileptic fit; she died from the inhalation of her own vomit.� "It so often happens" Pfeiffer will be saying, shaking his head.� "You can't watch everyone all the time."

�� I do my best to try and remember this ward, but in vain; nor indeed do I remember its inhabitants with their diversified idiosyncrasies, though of course some of them I have known about, have heard about.� But if I met them during my last sojourn here I have retained no memory of the fact.� They are all freshly minted - like for example the famous Rackstraw, who was Io's screenwriter, responsible for some of her most famous work.� I would have been glad to remember him; and yet it is strange for I recognised him instantly from her descriptions of him.� She used to visit him very often I recall.� In its way it was quite thrilling to see this legendary figure face to face, weighed down by the Laoco�n-toils of his melancholia.� "Rackstraw I presume?"� The hand he tenders is soft and moist; it drops away before shaking to hang listlessly at his side.� He looks at one and his lips move, moistening one another.� He gives a small cluck on a note of interrogation and puts his head on one side.� Watching him, it all comes back to me; how well she described his imaginary life here in this snow-bound parish of the insane.

�� How he would sit down with such care, such circumspection, at an imaginary table to play a game of imaginary cards.� ("Is it less real for him than a so-called real game would be for us?� That is what is frightening.")� I hear the clear dead husky voice asking the question.� Or else when walking slowly up and down as if on castors he smokes an imaginary cigar with real enjoyment; smiles and shakes his head at imaginary conversations.� What a great artist Rackstraw has become!

�� His hair is very fine; he wears it parted in the middle and pasted down at the sides.� It is someone else who looks back approvingly at him from the mirror.� His ears are paper-thin so that the sunlight passes through them and they turn pink as shells, with all the veins illustrated.� He will appear to hear what you say and indeed will often reply with great courtesy, though his answers bear little relation to the subjects which you broach.� His pale-blue eye gazes out upon this strange world with a shy fish-like fascination.� What a feast of the imagination too are the interminable meals he eats - course after course - cooked for him by the finest chefs, and served wherever he might happen to be.� Who could persuade him that in reality he is nourished by a stomach-pump?� No, Rackstraw is a sobering figure only when I think that these long nerveless fingers might once have caressed the warm smooth flesh of Iolanthe.� (The final problem of intellection is this: you cannot rape yourself mentally for thought creates its own shadow, blocks its own light, inhibits direct vision.� The act of intuition or self-illumination can come only through a partner-object - like a host in parasitology.)� If one is tempted to kiss, to embrace Rackstraw, it is to see if there is any of Io's pollen still upon him.� Can one leave nothing behind, then, that is proof against forgetfulness?

�� But Ward D is only another laboratory where people are encouraged to live as vastly etiolated versions of themselves - and Rackstraw has taken full advantage of the fact.� At certain periods of the moon his old profession seizes him and he fills the ward with his impersonations of forgotten kings and queens, both historical and contemporary; or will play for hours with a doll - a representation of Iolanthe in the role of Cleopatra.� At others he may recite in a monotonous singsong voice:

�� Mr. Vincent�� five years

�� Mr. Wilkie�� five years

�� Emmermet�� ten years

�� Porely�� ten years

�� Imhof�� ten years

�� Dobie�� five years

and so forth.� At other times he becomes so finely aristocratic that one knows him to be the King of Sweden.� He mutters, looking down sideways with a peculiar pitying grimace, lips pursed, long nose quivering with refined passion.� He draws hissing breaths and curls back his lips with disgust.� He sniffs, raises his eyebrows, bows; walking about with a funny tiptoe walk, lisping to himself.� When the evening bell goes and he is told to go to bed he bridles haughtily, but he may mount the bed and stay for a long time on all fours, thinking, "Rackstraw's the name.� At your service."� His every sense has become an epicure.� On the wall of the lavatory near his bed someone has written: Mourir c'est fleurir un peu.� Then also for brief spells, with the air of someone looking down a well into his past, he will produce the ghastly jauntiness of the remittance man - he is living in the best hotel.� "I say some ghastly rotter has pipped me ... top-whole Sunday ... the boots doesn't clean su�de properly...."� He has become the professional sponge of the 'twenties, cadging a living from the ladies.

�� But the difference between Rackstraw's reality and mine is separated by a hair - at least as things are now.� For me too, reality comes in layers suffused by involuntary dreaming.� Some mornings I wake to find Baynes standing by my bed with his silver salver in hand, though there is never any letter on it. �He says: "Which way up will you have your reality, sir, today?"� Yawning, I reply in the very accents of Rackstraw.� "O, as it comes, Baynes.� But please order me a nice L-shaped loveproof girl of marriageable age, equipped with learner plates.� I have in mind some heart-requiting woman to lather my chin; someone with sardonic eyes and dark plumage of Irish hair.� Someone with a beautiful steady walk and a thick cluster of damp curls round a clitoris fresh as cress."� He salutes and says, "Very good, sir. �Right away, sir."� But at other times I think I must be dying really because I am beginning to believe in the idea of Benedicta.

�� I had been about and around for several days when I caught sight of her, sighted along the length of the long corridor with its bow window at the end, standing in the snow in a characteristic distressful way.� She had rubbed a small periscope in the frosty glass in order to peer in upon me, her head upon one side.� A new unfamiliar look which somehow mixed diffidence and commiseration in one; I gave her the sort of look I felt she merited - O, it was all I could afford: a tired frog's smile: it was a package, a propitiatory bundle of nails, hair, menstrual rags, old dressings - everything that our joint life had brought us.� But it contained little enough venom - I felt too bad about it all, too emotionally weak to expend more upon the encounter.� And yet there was something in her face at once touching and despairing; her inner life, like mine, was in ruins.� It was the fault of neither.� So when she tapped with her nail upon the glass I said not a word but unfastened the glass door into the garden and let her in.� Of course it was suspicious.� We stood, featureless as totems, gazing at each other, but unable to thread any words on the spool.� Then with a soft groan she put her arms out - we did not embrace, simply leaned upon one another with an absolute emptiness and exhaustion.� Yet the personage in my arms in some subtle way no longer corresponded to any of the old images of Benedicta - images she had printed on my mind.� A qualitative difference here - you know how sometimes people return from a long journey, or from a war, completely altered: they do not have to speak, it is written all over them.� What was written here?� There was no discharge of electrical tension from those slender shoulders - the vibrations of an anxiety overflowing its bounds in the psyche.� Her red lips trembled, that was all.� "For God's sake be kind to me" was all I said, was all I could think of.� She started to cry a little inwardly, then began to cry.� She crew buckets, but without moving, standing quite still; so did I, too, from sympathy, just watching her - but inside like usual: tears pouring down the inside of my body.� "I am coming to you tonight - I have permission.� Somehow we must try and alter things between us - even if it seems too late."� Only that, and I let her go, a snow demon in her black ski clothes against the deep whiteness of the ground and the clouds.� She walked carefully in her own imprints towards the trees and disappeared, never once looking round, and for a moment this whole episode seemed to me a dream.� But no, her prints were there in the snow.� I swore, I raged inwardly; and when night fell I lay there in the darkness of my room with my eyes open staring right through the ceiling into the snow-sparkling night sky.� I have never understood the romantic cult of the night; day, yes - people, noise, motors, lavatories flushing.� At night one recites old phone numbers (Gobelins 3310.� Is that you, Iolanthe?� No, she has gone away, the number has been changed).� Recite the names of people one has never met, or would have liked to sleep with if things had been different.� Mr. Vincent five years.� Mr. Wilkie five years.� Yes, the night's for masturbation and death; one's nose comes off in one's handkerchief, an arm drops off like Nelson....

�� The minutes move like snails; the faintest shadow of a new hope is trying to get born.� It will only lead to greater disappointments, more refined despairs, of that I am sure.� Yet thinking back - years back, to the beginning - I can still remember something which seemed then to exist in her - in potentia, of course.� I wrestle to formulate what it was, the thing lying behind the eyes like a wish unburied, like a transparency, a germ.� Something like this: what she herself had not recognised as true about herself and which she was all but destroying by running counter clockwise to the part of herself which was my love.� (Go on, make it clearer.)

�� Every fool is somebody's genius, I suppose.� Just to have touched again those long, scrupulous yet sinister fingers gave me the sense of having reoriented myself with reference to the real Benedicta; it was because I myself had also changed a skin.� Past suicide, past love, past everything - and in the obscurest part of my nature happy in a sad sort of way; climbing down, you might say, rung by rung, heartbeat by heartbeat, into the grave with absolutely nothing to show for my long insistent life of selfish creativeness.� Put it another way: what I have left is some strong emotions, but no feelings.� Shock has deprived me of them, though whether temporarily or so I cannot say.� Ah, Felix!� The more we know about knowing the less we feel about feeling.� That whole night we were to lie like Crusader effigies, just touching but silently awake, hearing each other's thoughts passing.� I thought to myself "Faith is only one form of intuition."� We must give her time.... Are you stuck, then, dactyl?� Come let me clear you....

�� Later she might have been more disposed to try and put it into words: "I've destroyed you and myself.� I must tell you how, I must tell you why if I can find out."

�� To find out, that was the dream - or the nightmare - we would have to face together; following the traces of her history and mine back into the labyrinth of the past.� No, not simply looking for excuses, but hunting for the original dilemma - the Minotaur, which itself seemed to connect back always to Merlin's great firm which had swallowed my talents as Benedicta had swallowed my manhood.� It is this fascinating piece of research which occupies me to the exclusion of almost everything else now - perhaps you can guess how?� With the help of my keys I have vastly extended the boundaries of my freedom; for example, I can now traverse Ward D, and make my way into the central block without being specially remarked by anyone; but more important still I have found the consulting rooms of the psychiatrists and the library of tapes and dossiers which form a part of Nash's patrimony.� Up the stairs, then, past the ward with the huge Jewesses (big bottoms and nervous complaints: fruits of inbreeding).� Down one floor and along to the right, pausing to say a timely word to Callahan (pushed through a shop window, cut his wrist: interesting crater of a dried-up carbuncle on his jaw) and so along to the duty consulting rooms where the treasure trove lies.� The tapes, the typed dossiers, are all grouped in a steel cabinet, according to year - the whole record of Benedicta's illnesses and treatment....

�� I thought at first that she might find this prying into her past objectionable, but to my surprise she only said: "Thank goodness - now you will trust me because you can double-check me.� After so much lying to you ... I mean involuntary lying because things were the way they were, because Julian came first, his will came first; then the firm.� You have already guessed that Julian is far more than just the head of Western Merlin's for me, haven't you?

�� "Your brother."

�� "Yes."

�� "So much became clear when I discovered that simple fact - why did you never tell me?"

�� "He forbade me."

�� "Even when we were married?"

�� She takes my hand in hers and squeezes it while tears come into her eyes.� "There is so much that I must face, must tell you; now that I'm free from Julian I can."

�� "Free from Julian!" I gasped with utter astonishment at so preposterous a thought.� "Is one ever free from Julian?"� She sat up and grasped her ankles, bowing her blonde head upon her knees, lost in thought.� Then she went on, speaking slowly, with evident stress behind the words: "There was a precise moment for me, as well as one for him.� Mine came when the child was shot - like waking from a long nightmare."

�� "I fired that shot."

�� "No, Felix, we all did in one way and another."

�� She pressed my hand once more, shaking her head; continued with a kind of scrupulous gravity.� "The image of Julian flew into a hundred pieces never to be reassembled again; he had no further power over me."

�� "And from his side?"

�� "The death of that girl, Iolanthe."

�� "How?"

�� "He described it to me in much the same words, a sudden waking up with a hole in the centre of his mind."

�� Yet in Julian's case the emptiness must always have been there; one could imagine him saying something like: "A faulty pituitary foiled my puberty, and even later when the needle restored the balance, something had been lost; I had lived a complete sexual life in my mind so the real thing seemed woefully hollow when at last I caught up with it."� Hence the excesses, the perversions which are only the mould that grows upon impotence and its fearful rages against the self.

�� So lying beside her thus in the darkness I found myself looking back down the long inclines of the past which curved away towards the Golden Horn and the breezes of Marmora; towards the lowering image of the Turkey I had hardly known, yet where my future had been decided for me by a series of events which some might regard as fortuitous.� What a long road stretched between these two points in time and space.

�� Real birds sang all day in the gardens while indoors the mechanical nightingales from Vienna had to be wound up; at certain times one became aware of the beetles ticking away like little clocks behind the damascened hangings, full of dust.� The corridors were full of beautifully carved chests made from strange woods - delicately scented sissu, calamander, satinwood, ebony, billian, teak or camphor.

�� Somewhere among the wandering paths of these old gardens overgrown with weeds and brush-marked by cypresses I saw the pale figure of Benedicta wandering, stiff and upright in her brocade frock, holding the hand of a nurse.� How would it be possible to bring her back here again, to my side in this cream-painted sterile room among the snows?� It was a puzzle made not the less complicated by the new tenderness and shy dignity which now invested her, and which aroused my worst suspicions; I could not see how a new array of facts alone could clear the air, could exculpate her - or for that matter myself.� Ironic for a scientist who cares for facts, no?� We sat here side by side on the white bed eating mountain strawberries and staring at each other, trying the decipher the pages of the palimpsest.� "You see," she said slowly, staring deeply into my eyes, "we have lived through these frightful experiences together, killed our own child, separated, and all without ascribing any particular value to it.� It has brought us very close together so that now we can't escape from each other any more.� The numbness is wearing off - you are beginning to see that I was in love with you from the very beginning.� My appeals for help were genuine; but I was in the power of Julian - a power that dates back to my early childhood.� I loved him because I was afraid of him, because of all he had done to me.� I was trapped between two loves, one perverse and sterile, the other which promised to open up a real world for me, if only you could see in time how truthful I was - and act on it."� Then she bowed her head like a weary doe and whispered: "It's easy to say, I know.� Nor is it fair perhaps.� You were as much in Julian's power as I was, after all, and he could have had you killed at any moment, I suppose, had he not been in doubt about losing me for ever.� He took refuge from me in this strange love for that girl you call Io - and that perhaps saved us from his wrath, his fearful impotent fury which he hides so well under that calm and beautiful voice of his."� I said nothing for a long time.� In my mind's eye I saw once more those steamy gardens abandoned to desuetude, those chipped and dusty kiosks standing about waiting for guests who never came: the stern sweep of the tombs decorating the beautiful slopes of Eyub.� "In the cemetery there - it was your mother's tomb?"� Benedicta nodded sadly.� "She hardly enters our story.� She was ill, you know.� In those days syphilis, you couldn't cure it."

�� It dated back, dated right back. "Nothing could have exceeded the passionate rage and tenderness of Julian for Mother."� Here as she lay, after so very long, anchored in the crook of my arm: and talking now softly, rapidly, unemphatically: I saw come up in my mind's eye (beyond the golden head) the sunburnt mountains and peninsulas of Turkey rising in layers towards the High Taurus.� "Jocus was the illegitimate one, the changeling; he was never allowed to forget it.� He was ugly and hairy.� Whenever he spoke my father would get up without a word and open the door into the garden to let him out.� And Julian smiled, simply smiled."� Though I had never seen Julian I seemed to see very clearly that aquiline smile, the sallow satin skin, the eyes with the thick hoods of a bird of prey.� I saw too the landscape of their minds, locked up together in those tumbledown seraglios; a Turkey that had been so much more than Polis with its archaic refinements.� Plainland and lake and mountain, blue days closed by the conch.� "There was only hate or fear for us to work on after my mother died."� Yes, it was not simply themselves she evoked, the tangled pattern of questions and answers their lives evoked; but more, much more, which could only find a frame of reference within the context of this brutal humble land, kneeling down like a camel in the shadow of Ararat snow-crowned.� Her inner life lay with Julian, her outer with Jocas; one represented the city, the drawn bowstring of Moslem politenesses, the other the open air, the riding of falcons, the chase.� Remote encampments on the rim of deserts mirrored in the clear optic of the sky: to sleep at night under the stars, balanced between the two open eternities of birth and death.

�� It was much more than the facts which mattered, which had shaped their peculiar destinies, it was also place.� I mean I saw very clearly now the tiny cocksure figure of Merlin senior walking the bazaars dressed in his old blazer and yachting cap; high white kid boots and high collars fastened with a jewelled tie-pin: flyswish held negligently in small ringed fingers.� Behind him strolled the resplendent kavass - the negro dressed in scarlet and brocade, carrying the drawn scimitar of his office with the blade laid back along his forearm.� This was how it all began, with Merlin shopping for the firm, which at that time must have consisted only of a raggle-taggle of sheds and godowns full of skins or poppy or shrouds.� Yes, shrouds!� The Muslem custom of burying the dead without coffins but wrapped in shrouds had not passed unnoticed by that blue jay's eye.� (Was it the little clerk Sacrapant who mentioned this?)� Seven shrouds to a corpse, and in the case of the richer and more distinguished families no expense was spared to secure the most gorgeous embroidered fabrics the bizaars could offer.� Old Abdul Hamid used to order hundreds of pieces of the choicest weave - China and Damascus silk.� These were sent to Mecca to be sprinkled with holy water from the sacred well of Zem Zem.� Thus the dead person was secured a certain translation to Jennet, the Moslem Paradise.� It was not long before the caravans of Merlin carried these soft bales.� But all this was at the very beginning, before Julian could say of the firm: "It has great abstract beauty, the firm, Charlock.� We never touch or possess any of the products we manipulate - only the people to a certain extent.� The products are merely telegrams, quotations, symbolic matter, that is all.� If you cared for chess you could not help caring for Merlin's."� He himself loved the game in all its variety.� It is easy to see him aboard the white-winged yacht which the firm had given him, anchored upon the mirror of some Greek sound, sitting before the three transparent perspex boards in stony silence; playing three-dimensionally, so to speak.� How beautifully those little Turkish warehouses had metastasised, so to speak, forming secondary cancers in the lungs, livers, hearts of the great capitals.� In the long silences of Julian one saw the slow curling smoke of his cigar rise upon the moonlit sky.

�� "But Benedicta, all that rigmarole about them being orphans and all that...."

�� "My father invented that to get round some complicated Turkish legislation about inheritances, death duties."

�� "But he said it with such feeling."

�� "Feeling!� Jocas had murder in his heart for many years against Julian.� But by repressing his hatred he turned himself into a fine human being; he really did come to love Julian at last.� But Julian never lover him, never could, never will.� Julian only loved me.� Only me."

�� "And your father?"

�� "And my father!"

�� She said it with such a withering emphasis that I instantly divined the hatred between Merlin and Julian.� "Julian would not let me love him, forced me to hate him: at the end drove him out.� He too had reasons, Julian."

�� "Drove Merlin out?"

�� "Yes.� As he had driven out my mother."

�� In the long silence which followed I could hear her shallow breathing; but it was calm now, confident and regular.� "Nash always said that real maturity should automatically mean a realised compassion for the world, for people.� This Julian never had, only sadness, an enormous sadness.� Nor for that matter did my father.� He was a bird of prey.� What was I to do between them all - with no real human contact to work upon?� I dared not show my sympathies for Jocas even, hardly dared speak to him.� You know, Felix, they were all killers by temperament.� I never knew who might kill who - even though Julian was away so much, being educated.� If they met they met on neutral ground, so to speak, usually some dead spa like Smyrna or Lutraki. �All staying at different hotels with their retainers.� A sort of armed truce somehow enabled them to survive - it is very Turkish, you see.� Formal exchanges of meaningless presents.� Then discussions, perhaps in a special train on the Turkish frontier.� That was all.� Later of course the telephone helped, they did not need to meet, they could be cordial to each other in this way."

�� "But you were lovers."

�� "Always.� Even afterwards.� We found ways."

�� But I was mentally adding in the data derived from the steel cabinets - or as much of it as I had had time to read.� It was not hard to picture them there, the two children, in some deserted corner of the dusty palace among the tarnished mirrors with their chipped gilt frames.� The swarthy intent face of Julian, his eyes blazing with almost manic concentration, his lips drawn back from white teeth.� Each held a heavy silver candlestick with a full branch of rosy lighted candles.� They confronted each other thus, naked, like contestants in some hieratic combat, or like oriental dancers.� Perhaps too among the wheeling shadows of the high rooms and curling staircases they must have seemed to anyone who saw them (Merlin himself did once) like gorgeous plumed birds treading out an elaborate mating-dance with all its intricate figures.� So they shook the burning wax over one another, thrust and riposte, hissing at its hot tang; they were drenched as if with molten spray.� What else was there left to do?� They had learned and unlearned everything before puberty - disordering their psyches, forcing them on before they were ripe.� Will those who do this not prejudice their sexual and affective adult life: life forever in fantasy acts of sexual excess?� Never get free?

�� Well, who am I to say that?� But I could see deeper now into the pattern of their lives which had become so very much a reflection of Turkey - the miasma of old Turkey with its frigid cruelties, its priapic conspiracies.� This fitted in well with the small ferocious Calvinist soul of Merlin, bursting at its seams with guilty sadistic impulses.� (And him with all the quiet diligence and the family grace of feature!)� Here at last he was at home.� One saw him during those long winter evenings sitting over his books with some green-turbaned teacher drinking in the charms of the language with all its gobbling sententiousness, its lack of relative pronouns and subordinate clauses.� Sitting with the amber mouthpiece of a narguileh in his hand allowing one half of his mind to play with the idea of its cost - silver-hilted amber; (worth perhaps two hundred English pounds?)

�� Or else up on the bronze foothills (they all shoot like angels) following the cautious dogs - himself not the less cautious between the accompanying guns.� They walked in an arrowhead formation so that Jocas and Julian and the girl were a trifle ahead of him.� Up here, though, in the exultation of the open life of the steppe they were almost united in spirit, almost at one with each other.� Disarmed around a campfire at evening they would listen smiling to the ululations of tribal singers, stirred into an exultant tenderness by the magnificence of the night sky and the hills.� From this part of their lives single incidents stood out for ever in her memory clear and burnished.� Like when the little man was walking alone along an escarpment and was pounced upon by a pair of golden eagles.� He must have been near their nest, for they fell whistling out of the sky upon him, wing-span and claws powerful enough to have carried off a full-grown sheep.� He heard the whistle and the swish of the huge wings just in time; he had glimpsed their shadows as he ducked.� The others rushed to help him - he was defending himself with the unloaded gun, beating the eagles off; but by the time they arrived one of the birds lay breathless on the rock at his feet and the other had gone.� He was panting, his rifle was twisted, the stock was cracked.� He took a cudgel from a Turk and beat the quivering eagle to death with white face, his teeth showing in a grin.� He had deep wounds in his back, his shirt was torn to rags.� Then he sat down on a rock and buried his white face in trembling hands. Watching him she understood why she could never bring herself to call him "Father"; he was quite simply terrifying.� Julian says laconically: "I can see their nest" and taking a shot gun blazes away at it until it disintegrates.� If she closed her eyes and held her breath she could feel the weight of Julian's mind resting upon hers.� It was something more than the drugs; he held her by the scruff of the mind so you might say.� "He performed an elaborate series of psychic and physical experiments upon me - of course in the Levant there is nothing very uncommon or shocking about it."� When the telephone came into fashion she learned to ring him up and recite a string of soft cajoling obscenities until.... "Of course you can love somebody like that," says Benedicta with her eyes closed, resting her forehead on the cold rail of the bedpost.� "Nobody has got more than one way, his own, of showing his love.� Too bad if it's uncommon or perverted or what-not.� Or perhaps Julian would be 'too good'.� I can't say I didn't enjoy being owned by him, engulfed by him - utterly swallowed.� In another perverse way it is such a relief to surrender the will utterly.� Julian turned me into a sleepwalker for his experiments.� He led me up to the point of being able to kill."� The white face with the closed eyes looked like some remote statue forgotten in a museum.� A long time like that in a fierce muse of concentration, still as a burning-glass.

�� Was this before or after?� Ah, dactyl answer me.� No, I do not care.� It suffices that it should form part of the central pattern.� While Merlin prospered and bought ruined palaces and cypress-groves the children loved and despaired away their youth in sunken gardens guarded by a retinue of impersonal servants, governesses, retainers.� Jocas was born to the chase and was always glad to escape to the Asiatic side with his hunting birds and his kites.� Julian the tranquil, thoughtful, the vicious, was never without a book, and was already the master of several languages.� Yet withal he had in him some of the heavy-souled impersonality of the sleepy Ottoman world where the humid heat lay upon the nerves with the weight of lead.� Julian and his sister!� Later they were to be separated and his personal hold over her suffered a metamorphosis - he held her through the firm and the needs of the firm, no longer through the body and the personal will.� That was how she became the near-witch Benedicta.� But during this early time he taught her to fence; naked again, they faced each other on the stone flags and the room rang to the dry clicking of buttoned foils.� Then lying in the great bedroom with its mirror ceiling, in each other's arms, as if at the bottom of the ocean they made love, watching each other watch each other.� He was soon to meet his peculiar medieval fate - the fate of Abelard; for Merlin knew all.� Somewhere inside himself Julian was not really surprised when they all walked in holding candles - Merlin himself dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown and soft Turkish slippers with pointed toes.� Julian closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, until they touched his shoulder and led him away.� Benedicta slept on, slept on.� The tall bald eunuch held the long-shanked dressmaker's scissors reverently, like an instrument of sacrifice, which indeed they were.� Also the sterilised needle and the thread to baste the wound and stitch the empty pouch up like a gigot.� It was not pain that turned Julian into a raging maniac, it was quite simply the indignity.� When she told me this I could see suddenly the whole pattern of things lit up by the phosphorescent white light of his anger, translated out of impotence.� No, the cruellest thing about impotence is that it is fundamentally a comic predicament.� His father had not only punished him but had mocked him as well.� A phrase creeps back to mind from some other forgotten context.� "They were bound by a complicity of desire and purpose far stronger even than love, perhaps even independent of death."� I hardly dare to touch her, to put my hand upon her shoulder when she looks like this.� The closed eyes stare on and on into the centre of memory.� "All this I will have to be punished for some day I suppose" she said between her teeth.� "I was afraid you would find it endearing - another delightful feminine weakness to add to your collection."� I had already begun to undress.� I said, "I am not going to indulge your sense of guilt any more."� I told her to take off her ski pants and sweater and climb in beside me.� The sense of familiarity combined with the sense of novelty - new lives for old: a new version of an old model: new wine in old brothels: it held me spellbound.� Nor were her kisses any longer contaminated by nervous preoccupations - the stream was flowing clear, undammed at last.� "Tell me how you killed him, the husband."� Between quickly drawn breaths she said: "Now?"� "Yes, Benedicta, now."� While she spoke I was making love to her, I was happy.

�� They had been mounted, had ridden far across the fields and valleys to a marsh where he had been promised game to hunt.� By the side of a long narrow causeway ran a group of abandoned clay-cuttings with a rivulet flowing.� Beneath the causeway was quicksand, or rather a quagmire.� Urging her horse with her spurs she found it no hard matter to press his mount towards the end and softly push it over.� He landed in a huge sucking surprised calm, almost disposed to laugh, looking up at her from under the brim of his soft straw hat.� The sandy moustache.� Two realisations gradually welled up simultaneously in his fuddled mind: namely, he was slowly settling in the black viscous mud, and that she had become suddenly motionless, her eyes staring down at him with an almost expressionless curiosity.� But the horse knew and sent forth an almost human wail as it flailed with its legs to free them from the soft imprisonment, the anaconda coils of the mud.� Appalling sounds of the sucking farting mud.� As for the man he watched himself, so to speak, reflected in the pupil of the blue scientific eye, watched himself sinking down and away, out of time and mind: out of her life and out of his.� Surprise held him silent.� Only his youthful handsome face, now pale with sweat, held an expression of pained pleading.� The treachery was so unexpected: it seemed that he had to revise the whole of their past life, their past relationship in the light of it.� It was not only his past which swam before his astonished eyes but his future.� He whispered "help" from a parched throat, but his lips barely framed the word.� The moustache!� But she only sat down upon the parapet, turning her mount loose, and watched the experiment with a holy concentration, forcing herself to memorise the whole thing unflinchingly so that she might recount it to Julian when the time came, when she would have to.

�� So he settled slowly as the westering sun itself was settling beyond the hills.� They stared at each other in bitter silence, almost oblivious of the death-struggles of the horse which blew its muddy bubbles and groaned and rolled its eyes as it slowly heaved its way downwards, suffocating.� The mud sounded jocose.� Soon he was there buried to the breastbone like some unfinished statue of an equestrian knight.� "So that's it" he said, with a wondering croak.� "So that's it, Benedicta."

�� "That's it, my darling."

�� She lit a cigarette with steady fingers and smoked it fast with shallow inspirations, never taking her eyes off his.� But now it was horrible, he had begun to sob; the harsh sniffs broke down the features of his face into all the planes of childhood.� He was getting younger as he died, was becoming a child again.� And this was hard.� A hopeless sympathy welled up in her, battling against the deadly concentration.� It was becoming harder to watch with all the promised detachment.� He was panting, head on one side, his mouth open.� His hands were still free, but his elbows were becoming slowly imprisoned.� There might still have been time to throw him a rope and pass it round a tree?� She fought the thought, holding it at bay as she watched.� It wasn't the fear of death so much, she thought, as the ignominy of her betrayal - that was what lay behind the tears of this adolescent, this infant in the straw hat.� But in a little while he decided to spare her feelings, his tears ceased to flow; a lamblike resignation came over his face, for now he knew he was beyond hope.� Quickly she cut a slip of reed, cleft it and passed down the lighted cigarette so that he might take a puff.� But he brushed it away and with a small sigh turned his face inwards upon himself and floated thickly down in slow motion, with little shudders and no more sound - not even a reproach, a curse, a cry for help.� Not a bubble.� It was so quickly over.� She watched and went on watching until only the hat still floated on the quag.� She could hardly tear herself away from the spot now.� Muttering to herself, she felt all at once as if she were in a high fever; a fiery exultation possessed her.� She had shown herself worthy of Julian.� She managed to secure the straw hat - she would carry it back to him like someone carrying the severed head of a criminal.� The valley was silent, oppressively silent.� She tried to sing as she went, but it only made the silent dusk more eerie.� Once or twice she thought she heard the sound of horses' hooves behind her; and she wheeled about to see if there was anyone following - but there was nobody to be seen.

�� There!� Easy to recount, to bring to memory, hard to assimilate.� It still stuck in her throat like a bundle of bloody rags she could not swallow.

�� "And it's no good saying I am sorry; yes, I am, of course.� But what really ails me is the wound to my self-esteem, to find myself, my wonderful unique beautiful self guilty of so petty a betrayal.� You see what a trap the ego sets you?"� She raised a white fist and drummed softly on my breastbone, and then sinking down she fell, mouth to mouth in a suffocating parody of sadness which swallowed itself in the new unhindered sexual paroxysms.� "But by far the most absurd and humiliating thing that happened to me was to fall in love with you at first sight.� It was unbearable, such a blow to my self-esteem, such a danger to my freedom.� And also to you - you were in such danger for such a long time.� Poor fool, you wouldn't have believed it; how could I tell you?� I did not believe it myself.� All that comedy of errors with the little clerk, remember?� He was supposed to kill you in the cisterns.� Poor man!� First your hesitation about signing, then this poor foolish clerk being told to do away with you - he was unfitted for such a task, even though his own life depended upon it.� All that excursion you found so funny was a sort of dress rehearsal for the job Sacrapant had been set.� Mercifully you hesitated about signing, and this gave me a chance to reach Julian.� I persuaded him to countermand the order.� 'Leave him to me' I said.� 'I will suck him dry.� He has lots to offer us as yet.� If necessary I will marry him, Julian, until we can dispose of him.'� But in all the delay of sign and countersign the suspense became too much for poor Sacrapant, he knew he could never do it, that his time was up."

�� "So he fell out of the sky?"

�� "So he fell out of the sky.� Kiss me."

�� "He sacrificed himself for me in a way."

�� "Not really, there's no such thing.� I did."

�� I began to see a little deeper into the meaning of those first encounters, those first brushes with the firm.� They had already had a chance to see my notebooks which were from their point of view crammed with promises.

�� "Benedicta, darling, tell me one thing."

�� But she was asleep now with her blonde head against my breast rocked by our mutual breathing as a seagull is rocked by a calm summer sea.� "I see" I whispered to myself, but in fact I saw only relatively.� I recalled Jocas talking about the impossibility of ever tracing the real causal relationship between an act and its reason.� And in the context of beloved Sacrapant, too, I saw the little man's pale water-rat face in the wallowing waterlight of the great cisterns.

�� It was here in Turkey that Julian first contracted that thirst for the black sciences which has always coloured the cast of his mind; for here every form of enquiry could be pursued in absolute safety.� "The idolaters of Syrian and Judaea drew oracles from the heads of children which they had torn from their bodies.� They dried the heads and having placed beneath the tongue a golden lamen bearing unknown ciphers they fixed them in the hollows of walls, built up a kind of false body beneath them composed of magical plants fastened together: they lighted a lamp under these fearful idols and proceeded with their consultation.� They believed that the heads spoke ... moreover it is true that blood attracts larvae.� The ancients when sacrificing dug a pit which they filled with warm and smoking blood; then from the recesses of the dark night they saw the feeble and pale shadows rising up, creeping, chirping, swarming about the pit.... They kindled great fires of laurel, alder and cypress upon altars crowned with asphodel and vervain.� The night seemed to grow colder ..." (Julian silent in a high-backed chair with a book open on his knees).� Moreover, "if integrally and radically the woman leaves the passive role and enters the active, she abdicates her sex and becomes man, or rather, such a transformation being physically impossible, she attains affirmation by a double negation, placing herself outside both sexes like some sterile and monstrous androgyne."

�� I was beginning to see him much more clearly, and in ideas like these I thought I caught a glimpse of the altera Benedicta, that lovely petrifact which destiny had transformed back into the loved original, the beloved outlaw I had almost forgotten in all this exhausting struggle.� As for her mysterious and elusive lover, why should he not aspire to the mastery over age and time that Simon Magus first achieved?� "Sometimes appearing pale, withered, broken, like an old man at the point of death: at others the luminous fluid revitalised him, his eyes glittered, his skin became smooth and soft, his body upright.� He could be actually seen passing from youth to decrepitude, childhood to age."�� Nor did there seem to be any perversity in these speculations which swarmed in the young Julian's mind; everything was tinged with the vast oriental passivity of the place.� Down below the jetty at Avalon you could still see, if you dived, the weighed sacks with the heads of the women - some forty - done to death like cats by Abdul Hamid in a sudden rage of revulsion against sex.� Those that did not sink at once were beaten to death with oars in the green evening; their wails were piteous to hear, the boatmen had tears running down their faces as they worked.� And Hamid?� Do you remember the description of Sardanapalus the great king?� "He entered and saw with surprise the king with his face covered in white lead, and all bejewelled like a woman, combing out purple wool in the company of his concubines and sitting among them with blackened eyes, wearing a woman's dress and having his beard shaved close and his skin rubbed with pumice.� His eyelids too were painted...."� Then the great pyre he built to end his days; several storeys high it stood: and the conflagration lasted for weeks.� Everything, to the smallest of his belongings, went up.

�� Mind you, only once did she dare to say that she loved him to his face, only once.� His look of horror and fury was quite indescribable.� He struck her across the face with a book, without contempt yet deliberately.� "Hush" he said on a deep resonant note.� "Hush, my darling."� He was trying to say that it was not love, it was possession, and that her use of the word diminished the truth of the sentiment.� Sentiment?� No, that is not the word.� She endured every kind of physical and sexual humiliation at his hands with the deepest joy, the profoundest pleasure.� Julian was born never to weep.� It was Jocas who took the scissors and embedded them in the wall of the cellars with their handles protruding.� It had been decided that Julian was to go away, to be educated separately; partly it was the strain of the internal hatred between them all that decided the matter.� But it was also dictated by the future needs of the firm, the firm that was going to be; for Merlin's quiet calculations were all bearing fruit slowly.� His subtleties put many a fruitful project in his way: as when Abdul Hamid had given a concession for the purchase and sale of tobacco en r�gie to a company unwise enough to order Austrian cigarette paper stamped with the Sultan's tougra or monogram.� Nobody would have noticed this except a man like Merlin.� Was the Sultan, he asked, content to have his effigy spat upon daily by tens of thousands of cigarette-smokers in the kingdom?� It was the same with the postage stamps which bore the monster's head.� Were these also to be spittled over by scribes?� Within a short space of time he secured both concessions for himself, for the firm.

�� A kiss is always the same kiss, though the recipient may change from time to time; her kisses were the only thing which had remained young still about her, fresh as spring violets.� So many of our gestures are not prompted by psychological impulse but are purely hieratic - a whole wardrobe of prehistoric responses to forgotten situations.� (The sex of the embryo is decided at coition; but five whole weeks evolve before the little bud declares itself as vagina or penis.)� Io had suffered from a small and useful abnormality in being temporarily sterile: the closure of the lumen of the Fallopian tubes by scar tissue resulting from an early gonorrhoeal infection....

�� Much of this I could not stand, could not bear hearing, bear knowing.� I took refuge in the frivolity of my illness - purely in order to alarm her, to see if she cared.� Master Charlock had been naughty this week; he has thrown his porringer on the floor, beat upon the table with his spoon, spilt his soup, roared like a bull, wet his trousers.... Inventeur, Inventaire, Eventreur .... I lie just looking at her, so far from the invincible happiness of possession; all this dirty, all these contaminated circumstances turned my love to vomit for a while.� But this will not last; something which will prove to be stronger than the sum of these experiences will forge itself - is already rearing its flat head like a king cobra.� If the sex thing remains the way it is I will not falter again.

�� But even as I lie thinking this, looking into her eyes, the other half of my mind is following her out across the Cilician plains where once she used to be sent to hunt the harmless quail with the women of the little court.� They alight in great flocks during the spring when the sesame crop is ripening - from far off they seem to be one huge moving carpet of birds, running along the ground like mice, with a subdued chirping.� The women hunt the little creatures with a light net and an aba, a strange prehistoric contrivance shaped like a shield, or one side of a huge box-kite; a skeleton of sticks covered in black cotton, but pierced with eyelets.� Wearing this over their heads they advance in open order, staring through these huge eyes at the quail, which begin by running away: but soon appear to become mesmerised.� They sit down and stare at the advancing shapes, allow themselves passively to be scooped up in the nets and transferred to the wicker hampers.� Turning her mouth inwards upon mine I think of Dr. Lebedeff and his d�lires archa�ques.� Turkish delight, onanism in mirrors.

�� "It was not only Julian's life which was aberrant," she says clearly, trying to get it all off her chest, "it was the place, too.� My father had me sexually broken, as we say in Turkish, by his slaves."� Inexpressibly painful to her to retrace her steps over this poisoned ground, yet necessary.� There in the night of Turkey I saw Julian as more of a goblin than a youth.� The dust-devils racing across the plains, some spinning clockwise, some counterclockwise.� "You can see from the way they fold their cloaks which are female and which male" say the peasants.� In those days to bring rain two men used to flog each other until the blood poured down their backs and the heavens melted.� (They pissed on Merlin's eagle-wounds to disinfect them properly before dressing them.)

�� "Not all our eunuchs were artificially formed.� There were some villages on the high plateau which specialised in producing strange but natural androgynes with an empty scrotum like a tobacco pouch; they were bald usually and had high scolding voices."� Fragments of other lore have got themselves mixed up with the transcription somewhere here.� (A skeleton whitewashed and painted the colour of blood, to present its re-emergence in the world.� Or a phrase underlined by Julian in a book, "If faut annoncer en autre homme possible"; you will see from this how deeply he was concerned with his own soul, and for the fate of man.� It is not possible to consider him simply as an unprincipled libertine, or an alchemist who went mad under the strain of too much knowledge.� No.� His concern was with virtue, with truth.� Otherwise why should he have said that the most devastating criticism ever made of a human being was in the Republic where the phrase occurs: "Now he was one of those who came from heaven and in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered state, but his virtue was a matter of habit only and he had no philosophy"?� I do not really know him as yet; perhaps I will never know him now.)

�� Autumn is well on the way with its moist colouring, its rotting avenue of leaves; but these wards are quite seasonless.� Blood-orange moon over the Alps.� But I am miles away still in the heart of Turkey with Benedicta.� There is still so much to comprehend.� They have changed my nurse for a great big sad dun-coloured creature with eyes like conjugal raisins.� In the dangerous wards they are playing backgammon with little moans of surprise; men and women like outmoded, damaged pieces of furniture.� "Smoking spunk!" cries Rackstraw with peevish vexation.� "What has the dooced boots done with my su�des?"� There is no answer to the question.� Then at times a touching half-comprehension of his situation comes upon him - in the mirror on the white wall he will talk to himself thus: "Ah, my lifelong friend, I have led you up to this point, past so many deceits, so many suicides.� And you are still there.� Now what?� Something the blood deposits as it moves about like an old snake.� But the reticence of these ghosts is amazing.� Io!� Io!"� He listens with his head on one side, then turns away, shaking his head and whispering: "I was sent here because I loved too much.� It was out of proportion.� I had to pay for it with all this boredom."� Drawing in breath on the windowpane with a long yellow finger he will suddenly change mood and subject and exclaim: "Has anyone seen Johnson lately?� I wonder where he's gone.� I last heard he'd been locked up in Virginia Water for making love to a tree."

�� Where indeed was Johnson and why did he write so infrequently?� "They may have moved him from Leatherhead to Virginia Water.� He has had a great crisis of belief, Johnson.� They are studying his case with care; it is not like me, I am simply here to rest on my laurels."� Rackstraw scratches an ear.

�� "Pthotquyck" he says suddenly, brightly.

�� "I beg your pardon?"

�� "Pthotquyck.� It's the Finnish for mushroom."

�� "I see."

�� "The dooced things get into everything."

�� From various sources I have managed to piece together the story of his friend Johnson, the great lover.� Yes, they are holding him at Virginia Water, in the grip of his fearful but poetical Yggdrasil complex, or so I suppose they must call it.� "Things have closed in very much down here," he writes.� "The people are kind but not very understanding.� Out in the park there are some lovely trees, and next week when I have my first walk I will try and have a couple.� Elms!"� It was as simple as that - suddenly in the full flower of his sexual maturity Johnson found he loved trees.� Other men have had to make do with goats or women or the Dalmatian Cavalry, but Johnson found them all pale into insignificance beside these long-legged green things which were everywhere: he saw them as green consenting adults with diminished responsibility, loitering all round him with intent.� They beckoned to him, urged him to come on over; they could hardly do otherwise, for a tree has not much conversation.� Perhaps it was due to his long and severe training for the Ministry which had all but tamed him.� However it may be, long-suffering policemen on the prowl for more unsavoury misdemeanours used to chase the skinny figure round and round Hyde Park.� Johnson showed a surprising turn of speed, running distractedly here and there like a cabbage white, doing up his trousers fervently as he ran.

�� For several orgiastic weeks he led them a dance, and perhaps they would never have caught him had not the indignant prostitutes organised an ambush for this harmless satyr.� He was distracting trade they said, while some people were even complaining that the trees were getting bent, several of them.� This was pure jealousy of course.� So Johnson, priest and dendrophile, was committed to the doctors for attention.� And now Rackstraw is here, brooding on the destiny of his friend.� He sighs and says: "And Iolanthe - I wonder if you ever heard of her?� She was famous in her day, I made her famous.� I wrote them all except one - the one about the lovers in Athens.� Films.� The whole thing came from her diaries, she wouldn't let me change a word of the dialogue.� They young man had died or gone away, I don't know.� But she could never see it without weeping.� It used to upset me.� O I wonder what's happened to Johnson.� Pthotquyck!"

�� The woods are full of them, the wards are full of them!� Yet they contrive in their disjointed fashion to present a composite picture of a way of life, a homogeneous society almost - even the most alienated.� They smell each other's aberrations as dogs smell each other's tail-odours.� Even the hauntingly beautiful Venetia, the little girl with two cunts, who has specialised in a crooning echolalia which Rackstraw listens to with delectation - as if to the song of some rare bird.

��

�� "Who are you?"

�� "Who."

�� "Who are you?"

�� "Are you."

�� "Are you Venetia Mann?"

�� "Mann."

�� "Are you?"

�� "Are you."

�� Rackstraw shakes his head and gives a mirthless laugh.� "Priceless" he says.� "Priceless."

�� Ah, but one day we will be restored to the body of the real world - O world of Anabaptists, tax-dodgers and hierophants, O world of mentholised concubines!� Yes, my darling wife, with your bright eyes and snowburnt face, we shall leave this place one day, arm in arm.� A new life will begin, dining off smoked foreskin in Claridge's, on partridges in Putney.� We will leave Rackstraw to play chess with the deaf mute.� And Felix will go back to the firm with the same engaging adolescent manner which seems to say: please be nice to me, I have only been educated up to the anal stage.� Back to London, back to the vox pop of the banjo-group, back to the young with their unpsychoanalysed hair.� Kiss me Benedicta.

�� But pouring out a drink with shaking hand she says:

�� "Julian has said that he wants to see us together."

�� "Well?"

�� "I'm beginning to fee afraid again."

�� "The very word is like a knell."

�� "He says everything is different now."

�� "It had better be."

�� Not tonight, though; tonight we are alone, just the two of us, compounding fortune with all her little treacheries.� You will tell me once more, lying half asleep, about the locusts - of how the early winds brought them sailing over Anatolia, darkening the light of the sun.� How the hunters would see them first, being the longest-sighted: and give tongue.� Whistles and gunshots and the winking of heliographs from the ruined watch-towers of the coast.� Away across the bronzy stubble and the mauve limestone ranges the marauders came in innocent-looking puffs, coming nearer and nearer until the cauldron overflowed and they were on you.� Clouds at first soft, evanescent, tempted to disperse: but no, instead they gathered weight and density, formed into the wings of giant bats, spread out to swallow the pure sky.

�� The camp went grimly frantic with preparations: as if for an arctic blizzard, for the horny coarse-bodied little insects penetrate everywhere, everything, ubiquitous as smoke or dust itself.� Heads wrapped in cloth or duffel, wrists fastened, legs sheathed in puttees or leggings.� Then the long wait to determine if the cloud was preceded by an advance guard of wingless green young ones, pouring along the ground with incredible speed, turning the fields to a rippling torrent of scaly green.

�� Pits were dug, long barriers of tin or wood scooped the advance guard (as far as was possible) into them where kerosene fires smoked and flapped.� On they came pouring themselves unhesitatingly into the pits, piling upon the bodies of their burning fellows, until there were tons of them ablaze.� The stench deafened creation.� But the fliers approached with that ominous deep crackle - first from far away like thorns under a pot: then nearer, more deafening, like a forest fire, the noise of their shearing jaws.� The illusion of fire was also given by the speed with which they stripped the forest of every green leaf, hanging in long strings like bees swarming.� Shrubs keeled over with the weight of their bodies.� The horses kicked and shied at their horny touch; and however many precautions one took one always felt the creatures crawling up one's legs or arms, scratching the bare skin, tickling.� In a twinkling the whole visible world was stripped of life, bald as a skull.� A winter forest as nude as Xmas under the burning sun.� A very particular and utterly silent silence followed such attacks for weeks on end: that and the stench of charred bodies burning like straw.

�� Then camps were broken up, ranks redressed; but exhaustedly, listlessly.� Yet there had been no danger.� Only it was like they themselves had been stripped of everything except their eyeballs.� In one of the khans a circling vulture dropped a woman's hand into the camp.� Well and so back like ants to the skylines, to where the blue gulf carved and recarved itself, smoothing away towards the fitful city.

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

Deep sleep was good again though the research ferrets of the unconscious still sniffed around the motives and actions of my silent companion.� They past isn't retrievable is it? - too many burnt-out bulbs.� Try, Felix, only try!

�� Now this morning an unexpected envelope with a London postmark - this from Vibart; not a real letter, he explains, but a few pages torn from his desk pad.� "I should really have come to see you, Felix, but I'm superstitious about bins.� Always have been.� Suppose you are glassy, eh?� Ugh!� Even a real letter might be wasted, then.� But a few pages from my desk pad will give you news of me, broadening the old mind as we used to say.

��

�� "Tell me

�� What strange irrelevance

�� Dogs the lives of elephants

�� With trunk before

�� And tail behind,

�� With ears of such vast elegance

�� How the control the state

�� Of such a massive gait

�� And still be reasonable and kind

�� Though almost all behind?

�� "item

�� "It's awkward, isn't it, when the flippant, the effortlessly inconsequent, becomes a tic.� We have come a long way together haven't we old man?� Without being very much together either; from time to time, like model railways our paths cross at a critical junction.� Ting-a-ling!

�� "item

"Cogent Memo in Julian's own hand.� (He has begun to write very big and sprawly now.)� 'From a publishing point of view the only irresistible themes are Quests, Confessions, and Puzzles in that order.� Let Vibart govern his judgement by this unshakeable truth.'� An odd tone to take with me, isn't it?� What about all those poems which give us prestige - poems written with a stomach pump?� Koepgen's new volume for example.� It's all very well for him, Julian, just off to New York again with his star-spangled manner.

�� "item

"Felix, I am making a very great deal of money.� Yesterday my ideal novel came in.� It begins 'Smith was a nice big man in good health; but because he had been told as a child that his balls would fly off if he laughed too heartily his face always wore a strange twisted expression.� He lived in dreadful anticipation until one day the worst happened ... (now read on).'� I have had to refuse it for other reasons.

�� "item

"One lives and learns.� F.V. the novelist tell me that 'one should know as little as possible about one's characters.� The more detail you give the more they sink back into the undifferentiated mass.� All you need is one cardinal aspect for each one - a ruling bent, in fact the person's "signature" in the heraldic sense: hunchback money-lender, myopic scholar, deist king.� The rest is padding."� And I suppose that the proof of the pudding is in the publishing?

�� "item

"Felix, I'm miserable, how are you?� How would F.V. novelise us?� I wonder if we might presume ourselves to live in one of his fictions?� If only you knew, if only he knew.� Pia!� The last letters!� It is unfair.� I can't bring myself to throw them away: yet what purpose would they serve if I kept them?� They are fading anyway.� Time is very generous in some ways.� 'Death comes always by a sort of secret intention, a compact.� Like a love affair, one disposes towards it, one inclines, one intimates the secret need.'� I sometimes wish myself in the Paulhaus with you - at times I almost merit it.� My dreams, you should see them!� What an extraordinary fauna and flora sprouts from the infernal regions.

�� "item

"And all the time she was staring at me with those candid and unflinching eyes she knew that she was quietly and confidently betraying me all down the line.� She had decided I wasn't a man, I suppose.� And with whom?� Guess!� Yes, with Jocas.� I really can't believe it myself as yet.� The caption doesn't fit the picture.� And yet it's all there, written out in her own fair hand.� The riding lessons!� Then when we had to go away they both got ill from the separation.� How sordid.� All those doctor's bills.�� Damn.

�� "item

"The fear of solitude is at bottom the fear of the double, the figure which appears one day and always heralds death.� The triumph of death over the hero is ineluctable - le triomphe ignoble du mal remplit le monde d'une immense tristesse.� Would you buy a manuscript with such things in it?

�� "item

"Pia says: 'What matter?� One day my teeth will fall out like rocks out of a hillside.� Only the dignity of the mouth - its outline - which once haunted men might linger a little in certain postures.� Musculature giving in like an old banjo.� Then I shall die - but I have; while you are reading this I am.� The process has started.� Let's imagine Pia in a state of infinite dispersion, infinite extension, inhabiting every nook in imaginable space.� It will be hard to part with all my jewellery and clothes - even the toc.� And what of that family of little homeless shoes?� How could I do it to them?� But I must, I have.� Yet I cannot bring myself to leave them to anyone, for death is only apparent and mostly by scheming.� I would have liked to embrace you once, good and warm - but you would decipher my intention from my kiss.� I dare not risk it.� Only Jocas knows the date, the time, the minute; I am taking him with me in a funny sort of way, as a fellow-passenger.� He will still be on earth of course, and quite unchanged in the physical sense; but in a special sense not.� The not-part will have been expropriated.� I am trying not to punish him too much.� He did me one inestimable service in love - taught me to "listen with the clitoris" as he called it.'

�� "Well, and then it got mixed up with my obligatory reading.� Listen, 'Love, then, as both teleological and biological trigger'.� The weight of these massive ponderations illustrated by Pia's dead gnome's face.� Damn them all, the philosophic cut-throats.� Mumbo-jumbo, cant and twaddle.� In a book on esoteric something or other she has underlined a passage which goes: 'Nothing is hidden, there are no secrets.� But you can tell people only what they already know.� That is the infuriating thing.� And while they may know it, they may not be conscious that they know.� Hence the jolt provided by the dry-cell batteries of art.� In such a thing all that has been done is to create an area of self-recognition.� The reflected light plays upon the observer, he sees, becomes a see-er, a self-seer.'� The wisdom of other lands and other times, my lad.� What avails it all?

�� "Alcibiades,

�� Alcibiades!

�� Feeling it rise and recede

�� Like the Pleiades, bids us

�� Take heed.

�� 'One gets tired of elderly parties

�� Even when they are as wise as Secr�tes.'

�� "item

"So here I am, your old pal Vibart, still walking these rain-benisoned streets, rising morning after morning at cocksparrow-lantern to face the terrible effrontery of a bowl of porridge.� I listen to the news before checking latch-key and leaving house.� In the tube inhale the twirpy twang of urban English.� Life has no sharp edges.

�� "item

"Lately I have all but managed to see Julian face to face - I've been playing your sly game with him, just to tease him, I mean.� I even waited in his flat for a while as you did - of course with no result.� I found it much as you told me I would.� But those great blow-ups of Iolanthe, they were all slashed as if with a pair of scissors.� Someone too had written across one in Greek, �Arceitw bioV! �Iw! �Iw! [Enough of life!� Io!� Io!] �For the only time in my life my classical education proved of some use - for I recognised the quotation.� I don't know why it gave me such a pang.� Is it possible that such a man feels?

�� "item

"I see a lot of Pulley but in the question of Caradoc-Crusoe some new and ambiguous developments have thrown us into a state of indecision.� At any rate Robinson has been expropriated by the Australians and has disappeared.� They want his island as a proving-ground for one of your toys, ironically enough: something Marchant has modified and perfected.� May one perhaps see the hand of Julian in all this - or perhaps we exaggerate?� I'm sick of looking over my shoulder.� At any rate that is all we know about Robinson.� Meanwhile I enclose two little items from the usually so sedate Informateur of Z�rich which you may find highly suggestive.� Could they be ...?� Aimable yogi cherche nonne enculable vue marriage.� Box 346 X.� Also this: Young flesh fervently sought by aged but eclectic crosspatch.� Box 450 X.

�� "item

�� I stifled a cry of amused amaze, but my involuntary start must have jolted her out of sleep.� She lay with eyes closed, but awake and drowsy.� "My goodness" she said at last in a luxurious whisper settling that slender body warmly against mine, revising its posture so that it fitted as nearly as possible into the hollows of my own.� "You have begun to believe in me as a possibility at last."� It was only our sleepy minds making love, or recovering the part of it which had been so long left unmade.� Kiss.

�� "Caradoc may be alive, do you hear?"

�� "Of course."

�� "Did you know it?"

�� "Not for certain; I sort of felt it in my bones."

�� "We must try and find out."� In my enthusiasm I all but forgot the equivocal nature of the "freedom" Nash had so heartily conferred on this patient.� Free, yes.� To walk along the lakeside at twilight, hand in hand with B. if need be; but always following on behind us after a discreet interval came the small white ambulance, keeping its exact distance.� This was just in case I should become overtired.� Once I amused myself by entering a cinema and leaving at once by another entrance, but it was not long before they caught up with me.� The town is small, the streets short.� Besides I was, I am, tired; moreover I have no projects, nothing to look forward to, nowhere where I would rather be than in this clinical paradise.� A philosopher out of work.� Benedicta must have been following my thoughts with great accuracy for she said: "No, you won't be followed any more.� Let's go and try and find him, if you wish.� I know because Julian is here.� He telephoned about a meeting.� He said so, and you know he never lies."� So we sat down to eat together and plan.� It was unnerving in its unfamiliarity - I mean the simple act of eating off the same tray.� (In the age of chivalry, husband and wife, knight and lady, ate off the same trencher, he feeding her.)� Well, I want to keep an exact record of all this; I still don't trust anyone, except sporadically Benedicta herself.

The offices of the Informateur were easy to find; in an old building smelling of drains and printer's ink.� The editor a tiny mollusc in powerful spectacles.� The cuttings rather startled him, and he went to files to assure himself that they had indeed appeared in his august journal.� It was unusual, it was bizarre.� He was a little troubled on the grounds of good taste.

�� At any rate the offices which handled the advertising were at Geneva, and he thought that current practice would prevent them giving me the address of an advertiser.� It was a private matter, after all.� I would have to write.� This was disheartening; but since the project itself might well prove hopelessly chimerical it wasn't worth being too cast down about it.� We sent a couple of telegrams to the box numbers, one from some young flesh signed by Benedicta and one from an "enculable nonne" signed by myself, offering every enticement we could.� Then we wandered for a while in the streets, chafing ourselves upon the windows with all their finery, admiring everything.� "Buy me something" said Benedicta suddenly.� "I want to be given something, anything small and cheap.� In bad taste if you like."� But I had forgotten my wallet and while she had plenty of money on her it "wouldn't do", for some reason or other, it wouldn't do!� For some esoteric reason this made me suddenly happy.� I felt an absurd disposition to tears almost.� She stood me coffee and cream buns in a deserted caf� with plush seats and barely any light; and suddenly I felt a desire to rid myself of my cocoon of bandages which I did in the lavatory.� "Good" she said.� "Good.� Don't look rueful even if the hair hasn't covered the scars as yet.� The move is in the right direction."

�� "Loving" I said, sinking back into my seat with a sigh, though the word had a strange translated ring to it; it was as if I were trying it out, like a shoe.� Benedicta nodded, her blue eyes bright.

�� "Loving" she said, as if she too were trying it out.

�� Then she added as we rose to walk back up the hill to the Paulhaus: "No more of it for us.� We've done it.� We've committed it, and need never think of it again.� Unless.... How sure do you feel of yourself?"

�� "I don't know.� Remember a piece of my brain is missing; suppose it's the piece (like in the old phrenology skulls) which had the fatal word written on it?� Then what?"

�� "Nothing.� I've done it, I've had it, I am it."

�� "My God, is happiness so simple then?"

�� "When you are committed; when it's a fact."

�� "Benedicta, what are you planning, what are you dreaming about?"

�� "For the first time nothing.� I'm just content to be, to have escaped Julian, to have persuaded you to try and rediscover me.� Let's just let go, shall we, until we see Julian?"

�� The long walk, the long silence, the plenitude of it, refreshed instead of tiring me.

�� "This is very absurd."

�� "I know."

�� In some vague and unspecified way the wind of destiny seemed to have shifted.� A mild sun fumed upon the fir-clad slopes, filling the valleys with a ghostly mist; but now all benign.� Even the winding paths, the firmly shuttered look of the buildings, the cars parked in rows along the concrete drive-ins - they had all participated in this subtle shift of emphasis.� It only takes a little thing like an outing when you are a loony.... No, but there was substance to it.� "Come and spend tonight with me up at the chalet.� It's all right.� Just tell them."� Just tell them!� I wondered where she discovered this fund of easy insouciant optimism.� Nevertheless I returned for a bath and a change of the small dressings and with nervous sang-froid did as I was bid.� No objections were raised - though when I think of it what objections could have been raised?� It just shows the state of mind I had got myself into.

�� It was ten minutes' walk over the hill to the chalet with its little chaplet of firs; there were lights on inside, but soft lights suggesting candles.� I kicked off my snow and slush and tapped.� She was in the little hall already changed into a long dress cut like an abba and made of some heavy damascened material; she was in the act of combing out the new head of curly blonde hair.� "It all feel out during the course of my troubles and I inherited a new head from who knows where?� My mother perhaps.� There's a lot of white in it, Felix."� It was quite simply beautiful, much silkier and lightly curling.� The face I had so often seen lined with suffering, sulky, anaemic - it had also renewed itself; the so often lacklustre eyes (turning towards grey in candle-light) had a recaptured vivacity.� She could tell I liked her this way, better than ever.� Someone was moving about the little studio with its warm smells of polished wood, its crude peasant curtains.� Baynes was setting a small table for us before the throbbing log fire.� It was too much.� I reached towards a forbidden whisky, saying, "My God Baynes, is it really you?� I thought I dreamed you up."� Baynes smiled his wooden smile and said: "I came in once or twice to see you were all right, sir."� So he was really here.� No dream was old sobersides Baynes, but our very own reality.� "Here let me touch you to prove it."� It was partly that, and partly an excuse to embrace Baynes without causing him an attack of blushes.� Baynes submitted to these proofs of his existence like an elder churchman, modestly benign.

�� I walked around the little place which had been her self-imposed prison for so long with all the curiosity of a visitor suddenly entering the imperial apartments on St. Helena.� The disposition of everything suggested some far-reaching shift of values.� The old litter of half-empty medicine bottles, uncut French novels, widowed slippers, clothes tossed in corners - there was no trace of all this.� Even with a dozen maids to clear up after her the old Benedicta could leave her thumb-prints on her quarters after half an hour in residence.� The telephone rang, but it seemed to be a wrong number.� "O I forgot all about it," said Baynes penitently "but a gentleman rang up and left a message for Madam.� I wrote it down."� Sitting by the fire she took it and read it with a chuckle.� "There's your answer" she said.� "I told you so."

�� Baynes had laboriously transcribed it with a few spelling errors, but in sum it said: "Amiable yogi will meet green fruit at Manwick's English Tearoom Geneva Saturday for crumpet and butter.� Only place in Europe for crumpet."

�� I felt the blood rush to my heart.� "He's alive."� And characteristically the feeling was succeeded by one of vexation for all the amount of missing him I had done.� "Damn the old fool" I said.� And now a different set of preoccupations raised their heads.� Benedicta was putting a disc on the record player.� "What is it Felix?"

�� "I don't want to prejudice him - to make a gaffe and lead Julian to him.� That's what I was thinking."

�� "I think Julian has seen him" she said.� "So that isn't a problem.� In fact I bet you he has been trying to get Julian to take him back into the firm."

�� "What?"

�� "Yes.� I bet you.� And now probably Julian will refuse to do so!"

�� "Caradoc!"

�� It was an unheard-of departure after all this elaborate disappearance and fictitious immortality.� "How much do you know about it?� Benedicta lit a cigarette and said softly: "Only what I surmise.� Julian said nothing when he spoke to me; but once before he puzzled me because he himself seemed not to be quite sure whether it was Caradoc or not.� Perhaps Caradoc has changed very much; but I was amazed when Julian said something like 'either our own Caradoc or whoever might be impersonating him so perfectly'.... Perhaps it was just one of those things which slip out in conversation and mean nothing.� Come, let's meet him."

�� "He can't live without making a mystery of something" I said angrily.� "It's his ruling monomania."� Benedicta smiled and took my hand pressing me down beside her before the burning logs.� "I know" she said.� "And yet he has nothing really to hide - not more nor less than any man."� What made me angry, I think, was this sudden questioning of Caradoc's reality almost before he had been reclaimed from the grave.� Yes, that was it.

�� "And Geneva!"

�� "It's not far, just a short drive."

�� "Do you think we can go?"

�� "Of course."

�� She seemed so certain of everything as if something had happened to reassure her; what the basis of this new confidence could be I did not try to imagine.� It was good to be here in this way, relaxed within the boundaries of a new understanding that had lost the old fearful vigilance.� Outlines of a new maturity of vision?� One hardly dared to hope for so much.� And yet there we were, effigies of our old selves, sitting in front of the fire and gazing at each other with a curious sense of renewal.� "Tonight I want to sleep alone.� Can I?"� There was no need to ask me, was there?� "I want to collect myself a little bit.� Count out my loose change, so to speak."

�� Baynes came and solemnised a little after dinner as was his way before he said goodnight and set up the little silver thermos of coffee which was practically the only relic I could recognise from past habits.� "Do you still sleepwalk?"� Benedicta smiled.� "Not for ages now, perhaps never again.� Let's hope, shall we?"� I stood up to take my leave but she went on with a restraining hand laid upon mine.� "Stay just a second.� I want to do something with you here; will you?"

�� She went into the inner room and emerged with an armful of the little leather postiche-boxes which had been such a feature of her ancient wardrobe.� Opening them she tumbled out upon the floor in precious confusion all her wigs - the fine hair of nuns, of Swedish corpses, of Indonesian and Japanese geisha girls, of silk and thrilling nylon.� All tumbled together in a heap.� Then one by one, combing each softly with her long fingers, disentangling it, she began to put them on the fire.� Black smoke and flame rose from this pyre.� I did not question, did not exclaim, did not speak.� "From now on nothing that isn't my own" she said.� "But I wanted to do it with you, somehow.� Just to prove."

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

It was not a long run, and it was a comfortable one, for Benedicta had unearthed a black sports car with good heating and a turn of rampant speed wherever the surfaces had been cleared.� A heavy thaw had set in, the lakeside swam and wallowed in warm mist.� The attentive white snarls of white mountain came out and retired again endlessly, like actors taking innumerable curtain calls.� She drove with dash, but immaculately.� The whole thing was as easy as breathing, or so it seemed to me.� Even old Geneva looked its best with its snug Viennese flavoured architecture and its melancholy lake views; thawing ice was chinking along the river where the dark arterial thrust of the waters carved their way towards the southern issues - waters which would soon see Arles and Avignon.

�� We had lunch at the Quartorze, but were both too excited to eat very much.� We walked silently by the water until it was time to turn our steps towards Manwick's Tea Rooms - a relic which had been washed up at the end of the Victorian era and had remained as authentic as any Doge's palace, unchanged, unblushing, uncorrupted.... It was the headquarters of the Nannies of Geneva (like Bonington's in Rome).� Very old ladies clad in home-weave smocks wielded cake slices.� The tables were as heavy as William Morris, so was the cutlery; the walls were papered in something indeterminate which Ruskin would have admired.� There was even a complete set of Sherlock Holmes in a yellowed Tauchnitz edition which lined one window embrasure.� O the simplicity of everything was momentous.� I mean that we saw him directly we entered, sitting at the far end, with his face buried in a book.� It was not very crowded.� But we were both suffocated with a sort of weird apprehension - we tiptoed towards him as one might toward some rare butterfly, trying to get a closer view without disturbing the rare specimen.

�� The face of the matter is that we sat down at his table like a couple of gun-dogs in a point.� It seemed to last ages, this little tableau, but it could have been only a second or two before he closed his book and said in his familiar deep voice: "So there you are at last."� He must already have caught sight of us entering the place.� "Caradoc!"� He gave a raucous chuckle and threw back his head in a gesture which was familiarity itself.� And yet ... and yet.� There was no doubt that he had changed.� To begin with his hair, as plentiful as ever, was now no longer tabby, particoloured; it was white and as fine as the thread of silk.� His mouth was mantled by an equally soft and sparse moustache of a mandarin kind.� Beard there was none, and his pink rubicund face shone out upon the world like a winter sun.� "It's only old age," he said as if to explain "only old age, look you."� Yet in another way he had never looked - I was going to say "younger" - but it might be more accurate to say something like "healthier".� His skin was firm and unwrinkled, his eyes glittering with amiable malice and hardly crowsfooted.� Yes, one did have a moment of doubt about his real identity; but the voice clinched it.� "The death and the resurrection" he boomed, ordering crumpets with a capacious gesture, yet taking a precautionary look into a little leather purse while doing so.� An aged lady, all politeness, took his order with an approving smile.� She had caught his last phrase and doubtless thought he was some friendly religious maniac - Geneva is full of them.� The old darned plaid had been replaced with something of much the same style - a sort of evangelical overcoat with heavy cabman collars.� He looked like a rather smart music-hall coachman.

�� "My God, Caradoc!� You owe it to us to tell us everything."� He nodded briskly, as if he had every intention of doing so.� But as a preliminary he took a small silver flask of something which looked suspiciously like whisky and tipped a modicum into his teacup; then he produced a tiny tortoiseshell snuffbox and tapped it with a fingernail before whiffing up a grain or two from his extended thumb.� "Julian that old bodysnatcher wouldn't believe it was me" he said with a certain pride.� "That is what it does for you, escaping.� I had three lots of twins straight off in Polynesia - bang off like that, without a moment's effort.� The little woman was only a child but she had read the stud-book, she knew racing form.� More's the pity, I've had to leave them all behind because of funds.� They would have looked damn rococo in London, I can swear."

�� "But from the beginning, Caradoc.� Why did you cause all this fuss and flurry, cause us such anguish and despair?"

�� "In one way I had to," he said "to see how it felt.� I had to.� And the minute I'd done it I knew that it was the best, the most fruitful thing I had ever done.� At the same time I knew just as certainly that it wasn't necessary at all - it could have been done another way.� But when someone wants jam on their bread it's no good just describing it.� They want to taste some.� So you've got to provide some.� But of course the firm was hard to persuade about this - particularly Julian.� I bided my time, I thought in fact my chance would never come.� Year after year, my boy, all the time getting more and more successful, piling up less and less reasons to leave my beautiful billet.� But when the crash came I realised that I had to try.� But aut Tunc aut Nunquam - it was then over never!� And mighty successful it was, what I tasted of it, what I learned from it.� All that coconut oil, you should feel my breasts.� They are like a woman's only prettier."� He poured some more tea, spliced it, and plunged into the crumpets until the butter was running off his chin.� "After all," he said indistinctly "what is it really to buzz off to a remote isle with a tropical Venus?� Nothing very much.� Time takes on a wonderful never-quite quality.� Infinite extension, lad, causality pulling out like a rubber band.� At first of course one misses doctors and dentists and Shakespeare and all that.� Of course.� I don't deny it.� One dreams of cod's roe or roasted shad - many the night I've woken with tears in my voice at a New York restaurant.� Waiters always whisked the shad away before I'd eaten it.� But it didn't last.� Finally a sort of Prosperine feeling came over me.� Exhausted by night and droopy by day, living on paw-paw and piggy-wiggy: I was in the lap of the local lotus-eating Gods I was.� Never question it."

�� "Then why come back?"

�� "That was another jolt from the blue.� The whole group of those islands was scooped up by the Aussies.� One morning I woke up and found coastguards all over my place and warships poking about.� We were bought out for practically nothing.� Expropriated!� Then they started nosing into my papers because I cut up so very rough, and I was on rather weak ground there.� Apparently Robinson had quite a history behind him about which I knew nothing - he was bigamous to the core, old man, and the continent was studded with women crying out for vengeance and alimony.� It was a terrible fix.� I had to recover my own identity in order to escape from his wives.� Then of course I had the inevitable note from Julian telling me not to be a fool.� While I had no inclination to knuckle under I was in a squeeze and he knew it.� I went through a long period of debate and finally I decided I would come back and rejoin the firm on the old terms.� It cost me something to come to the decision, but I did it.� And in a funny sort of way I felt relieved at having done it - as if I learned all I needed to learn from the experience out there with little Inky the wife and the funny ten-toed nippers.� I bought them a coconut grove with my last cash - in another group - and said a tearful farewell.� Landed in England dead broke, dead broke.� And now...."

�� "Everything's all right again" I cried.

�� "Far from it" said Caradoc ruefully.� "Very far from it.� I am living for the time being on the charity of old Banubula."

�� "What?" said Benedicta incredulously.

�� He gave what in stage directions is sometimes called a "dark laugh" and snuffed once, with a pained hauteur.� "I rang up Julian when I arrived but he was awfully evasive though kind: just off on a long trip, you know the sort of thing.� I didn't like to talk about reinstatement point blank and he didn't mention it.� And I knew that Delambert had been given all my appointments and charges.� Well, the upshot of it was that he told me he would like to see me in Geneva to talk things over; and this he duly did a few days ago, but without any result."

�� "But it's scandalous" I said hotly.� Caradoc shook his head quickly and put out a hand as if to intercept the charge in mid air.� "O no" he said.� "It's not like that.� Don't get the impression Julian is out to punish me, to victimise me - nothing like that.� He is far above any such considerations.� No, it was as if, in a sense, I had missed a step on the ladder, on the moving staircase, and I would have to wait awhile until the turn came round again.� It was all to do with the firm, and the destiny of the firm: of us all, I suppose, in a way.� It was a most extraordinary interview.

�� "It took place in a suitably mysterious setting on the lake some way out beyond the United Nations buildings: (by the way, in the course of other matters he said nonchalantly that the firm was hoping to take the building over next year - and I wondered what about the inhabitants, all those people living in the woodwork?)� Anyway, I was summoned at dusk to meet a small motor-boat.� Dead calm oily water, heavy thaw, almost like a late autumn night with a full moon and all those blasted mountains showing their teeth like wolves.� It could have been eerie to some I suppose.� Nor was it very far along.� Just by a landing-stage amid a cluster of tall dark trees there was a rotunda of sorts with a rose arbour, and a table with cold marble chairs surrounding it.� He was sitting alone there waiting for me with a great goblet of wine in front of him, opposite in front of what was obviously to be my chair with another equally heartening-looking one of brandy.� It was warm; I feared I might get piles sitting on the marble but the sight of the brandy reassured me.� 'Well' he said.� 'At last.� I'm so glad it's over.'� Quite a promising beginning wouldn't you say?� So thought I.

�� "I advanced to receive his hesitant cool handshake.� Of course as always he was sitting with his back to the moon so that he was all outline, if you see what I mean.� Hid face was in half-shadow.� Once or twice I saw a moonflake alight on his crown - white hair or very blond, one couldn't say which.� And in a funny sort of way the optical illusion created by the watery moonlight gave the impression that he was altering shape all the time; not very conspicuously, you understand.� But it could be seen; it was like a gentle breathing, systole and diastole.� But his voice was just the same as always - the pained-lamb voice Pulley used to call it, remember?� He questioned me very calmly and quietly about what I had been doing on my island; showed every mark of considerate attention.� Also the brandy was excellent.� I roughed in my little crusoe, as you might call it.� Then he said: 'And you expected to be taken back just like that?� You expected the firm to grant you absolution and a hundred lines and take you back?'� I mumbled a bit and scraped the gravel with my toe.� Then somewhat to my surprise he went on.� 'And of course it will.� But you will have to wait until it can find a place for you, having abandoned your own so suddenly.� The ranks have closed you know.'"

�� Caradoc paused.

�� "Of course, I wouldn't want for a decent living outside the firm; I could get something good tomorrow.� But ... I don't know how it is, yet the idea didn't appeal to me very much.� All my adult creative life has been spent with the firm.� He said it really wasn't a question of money but of order.� If he took me back now, before waiting my turn, he could only offer me relatively menial things to do, things which might waste my grey matter and time and in the long run be bad for my credit and standing.� 'We have always treated you in the same way, and neither of us can change now' he added, sadly, I thought.� 'We have offered you only things which nobody else could do, nobody living.� So we will have to wait for our reality-jolt as you waited so many years for yours.'� I suppose you will think it nonsense but it carried a queer kind of conviction for me.� I drank my flowing bowl and gazed sleepily at him.� Really, he is a marvellous character, Julian, a strange one.� I'd like to know him better, to know more about it.� He seemed sort of hurt, as if he were nursing some sort of internal grievance against the order of things.� I don't know.� He surprised me by saying: 'Yes, we must wait for it - who knows till when?� Perhaps one of these days you will be asked to build a tomb for Jocas out there in Turkey.'"

�� Jocas!� Nobody could have been further from my own thoughts at that moment.� "And then what, Caradoc?"

�� Caradoc performed a rather clumsy mopping up operation with a spruce handkerchief.� "Nothing" he said.� "Or practically nothing.� He spoke a bit about you, with great affection I must add.� He said he still had hopes that you would understand the issues better - whatever that meant.� Then he said the time was getting on.� Right in the background, outside the large house shrouded in big trees, I had heard the continuous noise of car-tyres on gravel and seen the sweeping of headlights as limousine after limousine drew up and disgorged its occupants.� There was a steady movement into the lighted hallway of the building; it looked like people going to an opera, for I saw women in evening dress.� But Julian wasn't dinner-jacketed; striped shirt and speckled bow tie and dark suit, as I could half guess.� He caught the direction of my eye and said: "It's gambling, Caradoc.� For the first time I have started to gamble and lose, a thing I have never done.� It makes one most uncertain.� I had become over-confident and always risked very large sums.� I had got used you see, never to losing heavily.� But now, I don't know.� I dare not reduce my habits of play for fear of altering my luck, the basic psychic predisposition to win which I enjoyed over so many years.� I hope it doesn't mean something serious.� I have always avoided studying the matter of play because I believed in luck but lately I have been wondering if a computerised study might yield some ideas which would help me.� And yet I feel such a thing would be fatal, fatal.'� He repeated the word with such emphasis that I felt a vague sort of sympathy and alarm for him.� 'I'm stuck in a way' he said, and then abruptly stood up and said goodnight, keeping himself face forwards to me as I went down to the landing-stage where the little boat lay.� The driver lit the dash and kicked the engine over.� I turned and looked back across the inky water, just in time to see the dark indistinct figure of Julian moving away towards the house.� I could see the glow of a cigar in his fingers.� I don't know what I felt - a sort of confused relief mixed with disappointment and doubt; and also a kind of confidence in him.� I felt he'd have told me more if he could - if he had known any more than he did.� It must sound preposterous I suppose, but then the simplest things come to sound preposterous.� I don't know.� Also, he had not touched his wine.� How typical of him to sit there, flower in buttonhole, with a bubble of blood in front of him."

�� He lowered his massive head on his breast for a moment and seemed to brood, though in fact he was smiling a smile of resignation - or so it seemed, though perhaps I was misled by the new babyish contours of the familiar face.� "So there it is, roughly speaking - that is the state of play for the moment.� I am not unduly worried even though I realise that it may last for ever - I mean I might never get back.� At my age, you see."� He snuffed slowly once more and sat back in his seat to smile upon us with an unguarded affection as he supplied us with other characteristic details of his earthly life, such as, for example, that owing to his domestic exuberance he had developed a weakness in the belly wall which forced him to wear a suspensory which he called a soutien-Georges.

�� The abruptly turning back to the original matter of his conversation he said: "You might say that not having freed myself completely from the firm and yet not having come back either I was in a sort of limbo.� Not a ghost and yet still not quite a man."� I put out my hand to touch him - I must confess I went through a moment of doubt as to whether my fingers might not meet through his wrist.� "Take my pulse" he said.� I tried, but could find no trace of one; yet the flesh was solid flesh.� "I suppose you don't cast a shadow either like the traditional Doppelg�nger?"� But he was humming a light air and gazing about him with happy abstraction.� "The twentieth of every month is the day of Epicurus.� I celebrate mildly, ever so mildly.� With old soutien-Georges here I cannot go the whole hog.� Je n'ai plus des femmes mais j'ai des id�es ma�tresses."� But he was not disconsolate or cast down by having to make the confession.� He intoned to a fingerbeat.

�� "Surrender and identify and nod.

�� That's why you came, remember, little god?"

This was apparently a free translation from some Epicurean proverb.� Then next:

�� "Hail! �Ejaculatio praecox,

�� No more love among the haycocks;

�� Yet psyche chloroformed by science

�� In poems will breathe her last defiance!"

�� He paused, attempted to recover some more verses and failed in somewhat uncharacteristic fashion.� Then he gave a simulacrum of his ancient roar and gestured at the door.� "There he comes, Horatio the Magnificent"; and we saw with surprise and delight another familiar figure weaving its way towards us.� It was Banubula.

�� Yes, it was Banubula all right, but in a somewhat advanced stage of what might have seemed intoxication.� He wove towards us, all elegance, gesturing with the silver knob of his walking-stick.� He was gloved and circumspectly hatted, not to mention spatted - for he sported his favourite grey spats.� Radiant is hardly the word - he smirked his way over to us smiling with his loose lips and moving his eyebrows about.� Our greetings were effusive and somewhat confused.� The Count turned on Caradoc and said somewhat reproachfully, "I suppose you have told them about me - I suppose they know?� How vexatious, I would have liked to boast!"� Caradoc shook his burly dogged head.� "Not a word" he said gravely.� "Not a blasted word.� If they do know it's not from me."

�� "Do you know" said Banubula with breathless coyness "about me?"

�� "What?"

�� "That I'm in at last, in the firm?"� He seemed almost on the point of executing a brief dance.

�� "The firm?"

�� He gave a whiff of insipid laughter behind his gloves and sibilated.� "Yes, the firm.� Have been now for several months.� It's a post after my own heart and I think I may say that I am giving it everything I've got in me."

�� "Bravo!" we all exclaimed and I banged his rather portly shoulder-blade to register my excitement and approval.

�� "Co-ordinator of industrial disputes, no less.� I share the job with my old friend the Duke of Lambitus, who has left the F.O. to come to us.� My word, Felix, you have no idea how delicate and yet how all-embracing it is.� Everywhere there is a dispute or a falling off of production or simply tension due to a psychological cause - why we are there, I with my languages and Lambitus with his courteous diplomatic experience."

�� "It must be devastating."

�� "It is" said the Count meekly.� "It is."

�� Caradoc grinned at us and dug Banubula boisterously in the ribs.� "Tell me about your latest coup" he said and Banubula was in no way loth to do so.� "But I don't want to bore you with shop.� Yet this last case does illustrate the enormous tact and psychological insight we have to bring into play.� I'd like to tell you about it, if I may?"� Inspired by the raptness of our attention he went on.� "Well, just as an example: last year we started having trouble with our German branches in the applied industry sector.� It was a queer sort of general malaise, nothing one could really analyse, a lack of heart at the centre of things.� And, of course, disputes of one sort or another, mostly idle and foolish disputes for such an orderly and industrious nation.� Julian sent us over as psychological counsellors to study the matter and propose means of dealing with it.� Now what really was wrong?� Nothing we could see really: to account for the falling off of the statistics I mean.� Simply boredom it seemed to us.� At any rate it didn't seem something which salary rises could cure.� And this is where psychology comes in."� The Count pointed a long spatulate finger at his own temple and paused dramatically.� His eyes twinkled with keen joy, like summer lightning, like fireflies.� "Lambitus finally said: 'The whole thing is this.� They are not enjoying themselves, they do not know how to.� It is our job to find a way, Horatio.'� We pondered the matter and at last I hit upon a solution.� It may seem simple for such a complex people.� Baby Balls, that was it!"

�� "Baby Balls?" I exclaimed.� Banubula nodded and pursued his rigorous expos� with raised finger.� "You are perhaps too young to remember how the British sense of humour was saved and revived after the first World War?� By the Baby Balls organised by the Bright Young Things."

�� "But what the devil is it?"

�� "Simply a Ball to which you have to go dressed as a baby, sucking a bottle, and preferably in a pram wheeled by a close friend."

�� "Well I'm damned."

�� "It worked Felix" he cried.� "You would never have believed it.� All those huge German business-men crammed into prams, dressed as babies, sucking on their bottles of milk, and waving clusters of coloured balloons.� Nothing exceeded in pity and terror the sight of them entering so determinedly into the fun of the thing.� We have thought of everything, you see.� We had musical chairs, prizes for bobapple, buns and booby traps, cap-pistols and those streamers which uncurl when you blow them and go wheee...."

�� He mopped his face and laughed shyly adding only the vital words: "All Germany laughed and all Germany went back to work and the needle began to mount again on the production board.� Do you see the delicacy of the whole operation, I mean?"

�� To say that our collective breath was taken away would be an understatement.� We sat and gaped our humble admiration.� The Count himself seemed transfigured by this simple but subtle success.� "D'you know," he went on "we have a special interview with Julian in which he congratulated us and said that he would see to it that we got an O.B.E. each in the Prime Minister's next list."� The narration of this great coup de th��tre had so moved him that there was a long moment of silence while he applied himself to the delicacies of the establishment, giving himself totally, fervently, to the crumpets, and also to the toasted tea-cake.� Caradoc gazed upon him with what one might call tears of admiration welling up behind his eyeballs.� After so many years of waiting, of doing menial little jobs unworthy of his manifest genius ... and at last to find his real bent in the firm.� It was wonderful!� Benedicta pressed his hand with sympathy and congratulation.� Banubula himself was transported - he was quite beside himself, professionally speaking.� I mean there was not the slightest touch of complacence in his manner when he added "And this is only one occasion of many, many where we have been of vital use to the firm."

�� "Tell about the Koro epidemic" said Caradoc who for once seemed generously pleased to let his friend hold the floor.

�� "Ah that!" said Banubula rolling his fine eyes.� "That really did tax us to the hilt.� Lambitus was actually ill afterwards and imagined all sorts of things.� I wonder if I dare speak of it without indiscretion before...."

�� He nodded towards Benedicta who acknowledged the delicacy with a smile but spread her white hands in supplication.� "Yes, please do.� It is fascinating."

�� Banubula mopped his brow, poked his handkerchief into his sleeve and sat back.� "This will amaze you I think" he said.� "It certainly took us by surprise.� We had not heard of Koro before, which is known as Shook Yong to the Chinese of the Archipelago.� In fact the first we heard of it was when Nash, who had been sent out with a group of psychiatrists to stem this epidemic if possible, sent a signal back saying that nothing could be done.� It was an S.O.S. if ever there was one.� Lambitus and I were at the Savoy Grill when we got orders to move in and set our brains to work on this problem which was threatening to disrupt whole sectors of our work both in Singapore and throughout the whole network of islands where we had enormously important sources of raw materials at work for the firm.� By morning's early light then, we were in the air, sometimes holding hands a bit as neither of us liked air-travel and the journey was bumpy: we were on our way to Singapore.� May I have this last one?"� He took up the last crumpet on the dish and used it lightly as a baton to punctuate his discourse, pausing from time to time to take a small bite from it.

�� "Now Shook Yong" he said in a faraway fairy-tale voice "and its ravages are hardly known to us occidentals, and when one first hears of it one thinks it rather far-fetched.� But it is real, and it creates mass panics.� What is it?� Well, it is a belief that those who contract this disease experience a sudden feeling of retraction of the male organ into the abdomen; this is accompanied by a hysterical fear that should the retraction be allowed to proceed, and if swift medical aid is not available, the whole penis will simply disappear into the belly with fatal results for the owner."� He paused for the inevitable smiles.� "I know" he went on gravely.� "So it struck me at first.� But it spreads like wildfire, whose communities get taken with Shook Yong just as our medieval ancestors, I suppose, contracted dancing or twitching manias.� It is real, all too real.� Now when a community is so afflicted they experience utter terror and in their anxiety to hold on to their own property they grab and pull it to prevent it vanishing: worse still, they often use instrumental aids such as rubber bands, string, clamps, clothes-pegs and chopsticks, and frequently inflict severe bruising or worse damage on the organ.� Now what had caused all this trouble, which spread from Singapore like wildfire and gained the remotest corners of the landmass in next to no time, was a rumour set about (perhaps by the Indians) that Koro was caused by eating the flesh of swine which had recently been vaccinated in an attempt to combat swine fever.� At once there was an almost complete standstill in the pork sales in markets, restaurants and so on - but those who thought that they might have been exposed to the disease by accident took fright.� So Koro or Shook Yong became an epidemic to be reckoned with.� Everything was done to educate public opinion by press conferences and radio and journalism - but it was all in vain.� The Ministry of Health reported that both the public and private hospitals were swamped by mobs of yelling patients holding on to their organs and calling loudly for medical aid.� The scenes were indescribable.� Oriental mass panic has to be seen to be believed.� Poor Nash, who had arrived with some severe-looking but orthodox Freudians, was completely out of his depth, and indeed, when we found him, quite pale with terror at all the commotion.� He was holding on to his own organ, not, as he explained, because he felt he had Shook Yong but simply because he feared to lose it in the general m�l�e.� I don't mind confessing that for a while the whole problem seemed to me a bit out of our usual range.� They hadn't explained in London the meaning of these deplorable crowd scenes taking place all over the city.� Freud was no help, however much the disease might have suggested an ordinary anxiety neurosis.� You cannot ask a yelling Chinese to lie down on a couch and give you free associations for the word 'penis' when he is holding fast to his own, convinced that it is simply melting away.� Worst of all, the telephones were humming from the plantations telling us that the epidemic had already penetrated into the countryside where the people are even more susceptible to mass suggestion than in the towns.� We attended conference after conference, Lord Lambitus and I, listening to these grave accounts of a world turned upside down; and both of us completely perplexed as to what to do to lend nature a hand.� As I gathered that the scourge had already been signalled among the Buginese and Maassars in Coelebes and West Borneo at other periods, it seemed to me that the whole thing would sweep over the subcontinent and perhaps die a natural death in Australia, where they have another attitude to the male organ.� But it was very disturbing all the same.� It put us on our mettle.� Yet there we were in an unfamiliar world, with the most arbitrary sanitation and precious little ice for drinks, beating our heads, almost our breasts, so worried were we.

�� "And at every conference the case-histories poured in, collected by devoted and whey-faced doctors.� Just to give you a typical one to illustrate what was happening.� A fifteen-year-old boy was rushed into the emergency ward of the clinic by his shouting and gesticulating parents calling for aid.� The boy, they said, had contracted Shook Yong.� The youth was pale and scared and was pulling hard on his penis to prevent it being swallowed up.� He had heard about Shook Yong in school and that morning had eaten a little pow, which contains some pork, for his breakfast.� When he went to the lavatory he saw that his member had shrunk very greatly and concluded that he had contracted the scourge.� Yelling, he ran to his parents, who ran yelling with him to the doctor.� Here at least he might receive sedatives and reassurance provided he and his parents had reached the stage of evolution when things begin to make sense; mostly however they hadn't.� Well, as I say, Lambitus and I were at our wits' end to devise some equitable way of ending this intellectual debauch.� The Freudians keeled over one by one and even Nash, who had led the rescue group, was sent to hospital for a while and put under heavy sedation.� He had, I believe, become prone to the contagious atmosphere which Koro creates, and had almost begun to believe ... well, I don't know.� Anyway, everyone seemed privately highly delighted in rather a cruel way.� But still we could make no advance on the problem.� The season was breaking up, the monsoons were heralded.� And now Lambitus, who is a man of iron nerve, quite unimaginative, as you have to be in the higher diplomacy, began to show signs of strain.� He spent an awful long time in the shower-room every morning examining himself for signs of Koro.� I began to suspect him of suspecting.... Well, anyway the situation was desperate.� I sat night after night swatting giant moths with a bedroom slipper and brooding on the problem.

�� "Indeed I had reached the point when I had decided that we should return and confess our mission a failure when - how does it happen: Nash would know? - an old memory of my youth came to my rescue.� You may know that when I was first engaged to the Countess we went round the world together; she said she wished to see me anew in each continent before deciding whether she would marry me or not - so there was nothing for it.� It was a pre-honeymoon in a way, and by no means an unfruitful trip.� She was an expert botanist, and I was already then working on my comparative folklore of fertility symbols in east and west.� We came to Malaya, among other places, and indeed stayed a month on a plantation.� From the recesses of these old memories I suddenly resuscitated Tunc or Tunk - the small fertility God which is responsible for so much of the overpopulation in these parts and whose little effigy in clay one sees on cottage lintels.� It came to me with the force of a forgotten dream that we might perhaps invoke the little deity's aid once more to counter the nationwide (so it seemed at the time) retraction of the Malayan penis."

�� "Do you remember" said Caradoc suddenly "Sipple's account of his attack of Koro? - it must have been that.� In the Nube, a hundred years ago?"

�� Of course I did.

�� "It must have been" said Banubula seriously.� "It would have been terrible if such an affliction had spread into England.� It could topple a Government - I saw it do so.� And we couldn't invoke little Tunc there because nobody believes in him or it.� Anyway to resume my account of this strange episode: I woke Lambitus and breathlessly outlined my plan.� He was ready to grab at any straw and eagerly backed me up.� I obtained some ex-votos, some silk drawings unwittingly issued by the British Council, and set myself to think.� In half an hour I had roughed out a more modern effigy which, if fabricated in mauve plastic (the national colour, by the way) might have charm and appeal for the afflicted.

�� "We rang up Julian and flew him home a sample.� Of course we had visualised a vast free distribution of this charm, probably sowed broadcast from the air, but as usual Julian's keen mind took hold of the problem and solved it.� It would have no value to people unless they had to pay for it, he said, and I quite saw his point.� We were to give away only a few thousand through the hospitals but put the rest - some four million at first printing - on the open market in order to forestall some similar kind of effort by the Catholics.� Moreover he offered us one per cent which was really very handsome of him, and which has made us both extremely rich men.� So was Koro finally brought under control by the kindly intervention of Tunc.� I must say I am sentimental about the little God and always carry one on my wrist-chain for good luck - though God knows at my age...."

�� Musing thus the Count produced a new gold watch-chain of great lustre and showed us a copy of the charm.� "A pretty emblem, no?" he said modestly.

�� "But why in European characters?"

�� "Foreign magic has great cachet there.� This was the foreign issue given away by the hospital administration.� There was also a local version for sales distribution.� We were a little worried about religious sensibilities, but everyone was delighted.

�� He sighed at the memory of these great adventures and glanced at the pristine gold watch which depended from the chain.� "I have a conference" he said.� "I must run along.� I'll meet you at the plane at six, Caradoc.� Without fail, mind, and don't lose that ticket."� And so saying he waved us an airy goodbye, only pausing to add over his shoulder, "We'll meet in London I hope."

�� Caradoc squeezed the pot dry and took up the final teacup.� "Isn't it marvellous to see what happens when people really find themselves?"� It was, and we said so, somewhat sententiously I fear.� Banubula had emerged from his cocoon like the giant Emperor moth he had always been and was now in full wing-spread.� "You know," said Caradoc polishing up the butter on his plate with a morsel of tea-cake "that is all anybody needs.� Nothing more, yet nothing less."

�� And so at last the time came to take leave of him, which we did with reluctance, yet with delight to know that he was still to be numbered among the living.� I spoke to him a little bit about his papers and his aphorisms and recordings - and indeed all the trouble Vibart and I had been to, to try and assemble a coherent picture of this venerable corpse.� He laughed very heartily and wiped his eye in his sleeve.� "One should never do that for the so-called dead" he said.� "But it's largely my fault.� One should not leave such an incoherent mess behind.� I didn't know then that everything must be tidied up before one dies or it just encumbers one's peace of mind when one is dead, like I have really been, in a manner of speaking.� It was too bad and I am really sorry.� We'll order things better next time, for my real death.� There won't be a crumb out of place, you'll see.� The whole thing will be smooth as an egg, mark me.� Not a blow or a harsh word left over - and even tape recordings burn or scrub, don't they?"� He walked us with his old truculent splayed walk to the car-park and waved us goodbye in the misty evening.� I looked back as we turned the corner and gave him a thumbs-up to which he responded.� Lighting-up time by now with mist everywhere and foggy damp, and the wobble of blazing tram-cars along the impassive avenues.� "I feel sort of light-headed," I said "from surprise I've no doubt."

�� Benedicta put her hand briefly on my knee and pressed before turning back to the swerves and swings of the lakeside road.� "Perhaps you've contracted Koro" she said.

�� "Perhaps I have."

�� "You must ask for an amulet from the firm."

�� "I think I will.� You can never be certain in this world; even the innocents like Sipple can get struck down it seems."

�� The dark was closing in fast and soon I was drowsing in the snug bucket-seat, waking from time to time to glance at the row of lighted dials on the fascia.� "Why so fast?" I said suddenly.� "Light me a cigarette," said Benedicta "and I'll tell you.� Tonight we shall hear from Julian.� As it may be a phone-call I suddenly had a guilty conscience and thought we should get back."� I lit the cigarette and placed it between her lips.� "And how did you know?" I said.� "I had a postcard ages ago giving me this date, but it slipped my mind and I only remembered it all of a sudden while Caradoc was talking.� If it's too fast for you tell me and I'll slow down."

�� No, it wasn't too fast: but it wasn't a phone message either.� It was a telex to the hospital from Berne, saying: "If Felix feels up to it and if you are free please meet me with a small picnic on the Constaffel, hut five, at around midday on the fifteenth.� My holiday is so short that I would like to combine the meeting with a bit of a run on the snow.� Will you?"

�� "The polite request disguises the command" I said.� "Shall I decline?� And what the devil is the Constaffel?"

�� "It's where the practice slopes begin up on the mountainside; the Paulhaus always keep a camper's hut available there for the use of convalescents."

�� "Look Benedicta," I said severely "I am not webtoed, and I am not going to scull about in the mountains on skis in my present state of health."

�� "It's not that at all" she said.� "We can go up with the t�l�f�rique and the hut is about five hundred yards along the cliff-face with a perfectly good path to it.� It won't be snowed up in this sort of weather.� We could walk, if you'll go, that is.� If not let me send him a cable."

�� I was tempted to give way to an all too characteristic petulance but I reflected and refrained.� "Let us do it, then" I said.� "Yes, we'll do it.� But I warn you that if he appears disguised as the Abominable Snowman I'll hit him with an ice pick and polish him off for good and all."

�� "I count on you."

�� They were easily said, these pleasantries, but in the morning lying beside her warm dent, her "form", while she herself was making up her face in the little bathroom next door I found myself wondering what the day would bring, and what new information I would glean from this encounter.� I went in to watch her play with this elegant new face, now grown almost childish and somehow serene.� She had only half a mouth on which made me feel hungry.� "Benedicta, you don't feel apprehensive about this, do you?"

�� She looked at me suddenly, keenly.� "No.� Do you?" she said.� "Because there's no need to go.� As for me I told you I had come to terms with Julian.� I'm not scared of anything any longer."� I sat down on the bidet to wash and reflect.� "I used the wrong word.� What I dread really is the eternal wrangle with people who don't understand what one is trying to do.� I fear he'll just ask for me to come back, everything forgotten, but never to try and run away again.� It's what they do to runaway schoolboys at the best schools.� Whereas I am not giving any guarantees to anyone.� I intend to always leave an open door."� Benedicta finished her mouth and eyes without saying anything.� Then she went out and I heard her giving Baynes instructions about thermos flasks and sandwiches.� So I shrugged my shoulders and had a shower.

�� The day was fine and bright and really ideal for non-skiers; this year there had been very little snow and the press had made great moan about the fact that the season would be blighted because of it.

�� Rackstraw had seen some reference to the matter in a paper and had kept on about it until I could have strangled him.� In the old days he had been, it seems, some sort of ski-champion.� Though no longer allowed out he kept a close eye on weather and form.� Anyway, this was none of my affair, and about half past ten we set off - she in her elegant Sherpa rig of some sort of mustard-coloured whipcord - towards the t�l�f�rique which we found quite empty.� Operated by remote control, it was an eerie sort of affair, the doors flying open as one stepped upon the landing-ramp and closing behind one with a soft whiff.� We had the poor snowfalls and the excited press to thank for the empty car in which we sat, sprawling at ease among our packs and other impedimenta, smoking.

�� A few moments' waiting and then all of a sudden the cabin gave a soft tremor and began to slide forwards and upwards into the air, more slowly, more deliciously than any glider; and the whole range of snowy nether peaks sprang to attention and stared gravely at us as we ascended towards them, without noise or fuss.� Away below us slid the earth with its villages and tracery of roads and railways - a diminishing perspective of toy-like shapes, gradually becoming more and more unreal as they receded from view.� The sense of aloneness was inspiriting.� Benedicta was delighted and walked from corner to corner of the cabin to exclaim and point, now at the mountains, now at the snowy villages and the dun lakeside, or at other features she thought she could recognise.� The world seemed empty.� Up and up we soared until we had the impression of grazing the white faces of the mountains with the steel cable of our floating cabin.� "I don't know whether Julian is doing the sensible thing" she said "in ski-ing about up here; the surfaces have been flagged here and there for danger and there have been several accidents."� The lift came slowly to a halt in all this fervent whiteness, slid up a small ramp and stopped with a scarcely perceptible shock.� The doors opened and the cold world enveloped us.� But the sunlight was brilliant, dazzling, and the snow squeaked under our boots like a comb in freshly washed hair.� Nor was it far along the scarp to where the ski-huts stood; it was from here that the serious performers started their ascent.� Benedicta had the key and we opened up the little hut which was aching with damp and cold, but fairly well equipped for camp life.� There was a little stove which she soon had buzzing away - it promised us hot coffee or soup to wash down the fare we had brought.� We settled ourselves in methodically enough.� Then outside in the brilliant sun we smoked and had a drink together and even embarked on a snowman of ambitious size.� There had been several bad avalanches that year and I was not surprised when one took place there and then, as if for our personal delectation.� A white swoosh and a whole white face of the mountain opposite cracked like plaster, hesitated, and then broke away to fall hundreds of feet into the valley.� The boom, as if from heavy artillery, followed upon the spectacle by half a minute almost.

�� "That was a good one" said Benedicta.

�� There were some tree stumps and a wooden table under the fir in front of the hut, and we cleared these of snow and set our plates and cutlery thereon.� We had all but finished when by chance I happened to look upwards along the crescent-like sweep of the mountain above us.� Something seemed to be moving up there - or so it seemed out of the corner of my eye.� But no, there was nothing.� The unblemished snow lay ungrooved everywhere on the runs.� I turned away to the opposite side and saw with a little shock of surprise a lone skier standing among a clump of firs, watching us like a sharp-shooter.� We stayed for a long moment like this, unmoving, and then the figure, with the sudden movement of a Red Indian sinking his paddle into the river, propelled himself forward and began to ripple down towards us, cutting his grooves of whiteness of the clean snow.

�� Fast, too, very fast.� "Could that be Julian?" I said, and Benedicta following the direction of my pointing finger with eyes screwed up said: "Yes, it must be."� So we stood hand in hand watching while the small dark tadpole rushed towards us, growing in size as it came, until we could see that it was a man of about medium height, rather gracefully built in a slender sort of way, and as lissom on his skis as a ballet dancer.� When he had reached the little fir about fifty yards off he swerved and braked, throwing up a white fountain of snow; he took off his skis and made his way towards the hut beating the snow from his costume with his heavy mittens.� "Hullo" he cried with great naturalness, as if this were not a momentous, a historic meeting, but a casual encounter between friends.� "I'm Julian at last" he added.� "In the flesh!"� But of course in his ski get-up there was nothing very distinct to be seen as yet.� Then I noticed that there was blood running from his nose.� It had dried and caked on his upper lip and in the slender perfectly shaped moustache.� He dabbed it with a handkerchief as he advanced, explaining as he came.� "I tend towards an occasional nose-bleed up at this level - but it's well worth it for the fun."� His nostrils were crusted with blood, though the flow appeared to have stopped.

�� We shook hands, gazing at one another, while he made some perfectly conventional remark to Benedicta, perfectly at ease, perfectly insouciant.� "At last," I said "we meet."� It sounded somehow fatuous.� "Felix," he said in that warm caressing voice I knew so well (the voice of Cain) "it's been unpardonable to neglect you so but I waited until we could talk, until you felt well and unharassed by things.� You are looking fine, my boy."� I gave him a clumsy Sherpa-like bow which conveyed I hope a hint of irony.� "As well as can be expected" said I.� He still kept on his heavy mica goggles tinted slightly bronze so that I could not really see his eyes properly; also of course the padded suit and the peaked snowcap successfully muffled all clear outlines of his head and body.� All I saw was a very delicately cut aristocratic nose (like a bird of prey's beak), an ordinary mouth with blurred outlines because of the bloody upper lip, and the small feminine hand with which he grasped mine.� Benedicta offered to swab his lip with cotton wool and warm water but he refused with thanks saying: "O I'll clean up when I get down to terra a little firma."� So we stood, eyeing each other keenly, until Benedicta brought out some drinks and we settled down opposite him at the wooden table to drink gin slings in the sunny whiteness.� "Where to begin?" said Julian with a melodious lazy inflexion which was very seducing - the calm voice of the hypnotist.� "Where to begin?"� It was indeed the question of the moment.� "Well, the circle can be broken at any point I suppose.� But where?"� He paused and added under his breath "Running into airpockets, ideas in flight!"

�� Then he leaned forward and tapped my hand and said: "Our old quarrel is over, finished; with what more now you know of myself, of Benedicta, you must feel a bit reassured about things, less fearful.� I've been planning this meeting for a long time, and indeed looking forward to it, because I know that I should have to throw myself entirely upon your mercy, to try to win your heart, Felix.� Wait!"� He held up a hand to prevent my interjection.� "It is not what you think, it is not how you think.� I wanted to talk to you a bit, not only about the firm but about the general questions it always poses for the people involved in it - like the question of freedom."� (As I watched him I saw so clearly in my mind's eye the two grave children; he had tied up Benedicta's mind with his excesses, and then tried to liberate her by teaching her to fence!� Fool!� Dry click-click of their buttoned foils.� Now here he was with his nostrils full of dried blood.� Another image intervened, Julian tapping away on an Arab finger-drum while the monkey on its chain chattered and masturbated furiously.� And then Benedicta saying to me ... O centuries later, something like "You were such a surprise it was terrifying; I watched you sleep, off your guard, just to try and verify the feeling.� Caught between such tyrants as you and Julian is it a wonder I went mad?� With him it was love, but an actor's love - I knew no other.")

�� But here she was at my side, very composed and smiling, smoking her little cigar and watching us.� It was I who was trembling slightly, feeling the palms of my hands grow moist.� He was so attractive, this man, that for two pins I could have reached forward and strangled him as he sat there with his poise and his bloody face.� "Go on" I said.� "Go on."

�� He made a self-deprecating little gesture with his ungloved hand and sighed.� "I am" he said.� "I will.� But I was just thinking rather ruefully of how much thought and feeling and will I had put into the matter of the firm over all these years - not only running my side of it as best I could, but trying to penetrate also the meaning of it and the meaning of my own life in relation to it.� And of course yours, and everybody's.� The firm itself, Merlin's firm," he uttered the proper name with a profound, a sad bitterness "what is it exactly?� It isn't just a loosely linked association of enterprises co-ordinated under one name; its very size (like a blown-up photograph) enables us to see that it is the reflection of something, the copy of something.� Though on one plane you might consider it a money-making contrivance, the very terms under which it operates reflect the basic predispositions of the culture of which it is only an offshoot.� Of course it is both constricting for some and liberating for others, according to their position vis-�-vis the organism; but they can't escape reflecting the firm, just as the firm can't help reflecting the corpus of what, for want of a better word, we must call our civilisation.� O dear, Felix, reality is kindly - but inflexible.

�� It doesn't seem possible to break either the mould of the firm or the mould of ourselves as associates or even hirelings (you might think) of the thing.� Yet you seem to think it necessary, I suppose, because you are a romantic in some ways.� And perhaps it might be possible for some, though not in the violent and ill-considered way you seem to think necessary at your present level of understanding.� Ah!� You will reply that you have played a part in some of our manoeuvres and so you can judge - but I wonder if you can?� For example, the whole question of that upset in Athens (such a small, such a trivial part of the whole design) was not simply a question of buying the Parthenon - who would want it?� The firm manipulates without owning, that is part of its charm.� It is the invisible increment which it tries to conquer.� A long lease was all we asked for and a say in its management, if you like.� My dear chap, in this, our new Middle Ages, investment has become the motor response of all religion; not in God as he was known (he hasn't changed), not in the psychic Fund of Funds which pretends to chime with the ways of universal nature.� (That too is balls by the way.)� No, for us money is sperm, and the investment of it the ritual of propitiation.

�� "The pattern is only repeating itself; we have placed an unobtrusive hand on much more than the Stock Exchange.� Most of the Indian holy places like the Taj and Buddha's tree and so on are in our hands; the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Grant's Tomb.� The Parthenon held out for a while purely through the muddle of Graphos, the indecision of Graphos.� To wipe out the National Debt and balance the Greek budget for the first time ever ... and all in exchange for a treaty involving a few dead moments.� For us they still offer a fulcrum of operation and a power-yield if looked at from the point of view of our own religion - I use the word in its anthropological sense.� We have in fact begun to fit these old things into the corpus of our own contemporary culture where they can be of some use: not just brooding places for sickly poets."

�� "And the United Nations?" I said.

�� "That has great value as a relic of the future, like the Rosetta Stone.� No less than an Old Master of complete nullity which is overpriced because it happens to be the only one of its period.� Do you see?� Then let me go a little further.� If we are reflections of our culture, and our culture represents something like the total psychic predisposition of man in terms of his destiny, dare we not ask ourselves what makes it come about, what makes it last or decay?� At what point does such an animal get born?"� He was breathing hard now, as if the effort to enunciate his ideas clearly were a strain.� "In a world of brainless drones for the most part this question never gets asked, and it's very few of us who can see that some of the answers anyway lie about in obscure places - like The Book of Changes, for example.� Felix it's my belief that you can touch the quiddity, the nub of the idea of a culture only if you realise that it comes out of an act of association of which the primal genetic blueprint in the strictest biological sense is the uniting of the couple, man and woman.� In the compact and the seed."� Here he seemed to be suddenly overwhelmed by sadness.� He faltered, hesitated, and then recovered himself to go on.

�� "Nature, as you know, is very class-conscious and builds as carefully as a swallow, always in hierarchies; nothing but the best will do.� It's difficult in our age where the tail is trying to wag the dog to descry any shape at all in the overall dog.

�� "Moreover to attempt to analyse or comprehend such matters through chimerical abstractions like capital or labour - why it's like discussing chess in terms of ludo.� The problem is not there at all. �I first learned this in watching the pattern of Merlin's investments; among them were several singular departures.� Of course in his time species, bullion bars, tallies, shares and so on still had the relative value they do today.� But he went after other things as well; for example, he dreamed of owning (not owning of course, but manipulating) six of the largest diamonds in the world - what they call paragons: that's to say a stone with the minimum weight of 100 carats.� I remember him reciting their names and weights which he knew by heart.� The old 'Koh-i-noor' of course belonged to the Queen and there was nothing he could do about that - she didn't need money!� 106 carats that was.� Then the 'Star of the South' 125, the Pitt diamond 137, the Austrian 133, the Orloff 195, and last that monster from Borneo, 367 carats.� Some of them he actually did own briefly, though of course not all; but his dream was to hold a sort of mortgage on them.� He was looking always for an unchanging value or one which would increase on its own.

�� "No, looked at in this wider context things become vastly richer and more subtle than our polite social reformers would have us believe.� Nature is an organism not a system, and will always punish those who try to strap her into a system.� She will overturn the apple-cart - a horse with its leading-rein cut, careering over a cliff: that is what is happening today in a way.� On the other hand we ants must use our reason as much as possible in order to try to descry the hazy outlines of human destiny in nature as it evolves around us.� We are trapped, do you see?

�� "Nature improvises out of pure joy, always with a miracle in hand; why can't man? - or perhaps he could if he tried.� Why do we build these wormcasts around us like civilisations, defensive walled cities, ghettos, currencies?� Then another terrifying thought pops into one's head: the very concept of order may never have entered nature's own head.� Man has tried to impose his own from fear of the fathomless darkness which lies behind every idea, every hope?� Is it all self-deceit?� No Felix, it isn't - but how haltingly one begins to see the 'signatures' of things - the sigil left by the master mason, nature.� Yes.� Yes.� Don't shake your head!� They are to be seen.� The imprint is there in the matter, in the form things take, in the way societies cohere about a set of basic propositions, form around mysterious points of mind like God or Love.� One little misinterpretation of the data and the thing goes sour.� Look at our little love-asylum - everyone seeking for somebody with whom they can be thoroughly weak!

�� "And then all this whine about personal freedom - everyone feels it is his right to worry himself about the matter.� They don't see, you don't see, that nothing can be done in this field unless the firm itself becomes free; then and only then could the notion of a personal freedom be assured.� And even while the poor fool is waving his arms and talking about freewill he is being subtly grooved by his culture, formed by it - money, fashions, architecture, laws, machines, foods.� At what point can he really say that he stands free and clear away from the pattern in which he was cradled and by which he was formed?� God! will we never see more than one profile of reality at a time?� Yet it has been man's wildest hope one day to turn the statue round and gaze at it face to face.� Perhaps this too is a delusion based on faulty conjectures about its sovereign nature."

�� There was a long pause while he lit a short cigar from the packet which Benedicta had brought with her.� "I suppose you might agree that reality is sufficiently implausible to cause people great anxiety?"

�� "The aphorisms refuses to argue, Julian.� That is perhaps its strength - or perhaps its weakness.� Look both ways before crossing the road."

�� "Felix" he said, smiling and patting my knee once more.� "I can see that you are following me and it makes me glad.� But I have more to say about the firm - this tiny microcosm which has formed itself without consulting us and which is not based simply upon human cupidity so much as on a fear of the outer darkness.� It would be like taking a stern moral tone with a pigeon for being forced to eat grain to keep alive.� And then think of all the different types of society formed by nature from infusoria and fossils up to helpless dinosaurs with a pea for a head.� Don't we belong, culturally speaking, to the same canon - woven out of the invisible by powers we don't clearly understand and can only manipulate in certain tiny areas?� Think, Felix."

�� I was thinking; O yes, I was thinking.

�� "How do cultures come about, how do they vanish?� We would give anything to know.� Can the firm and its structure perhaps inform us a little - that's the point?� Well, to break a chain you must hit a link I suppose - the fragile link upon which the whole structure depends.� One such link in man's culture is the fragile link of association of one with another, articles of faith, contracts, marriages, vows and so on.� Snap the link and the primordial darkness leaks in, the culture disintegrates, and man becomes the coolie he really is when there is no frame of culture to ennoble him, to interpret himself to himself.� A crisis comes about.� Then the providers, the secret mole-like makers of the new, go to work to repair the link, or to put in a new one.� How easy to break and how laborious to repair!� Only a few men in every age are fitted for the grim task, the exhausting task.� For them the job in hand is self-evident, but to everyone else it seems a mystery that has got out of hand.

�� "Then think how puerile is our conception of such men we label with the word genius - it's on the level of Santa Claus!� There isn't such an animal.� But when a link is broken these rare men address themselves to the problem.� What we call genius occurs when a gifted man sees a relation between two or more fields of thought which had up till then been believed to be irreconcilable.� He joins the contradictory fields in an act of intellectual harmony and the chain begins to hold once more.� The so-called genius of the matter is merely the intuitive act of joining irreconcilables.� There is nothing new added, how could there be?� But these men realise that when you wish to do something new you must go tranquilly ahead in the full knowledge that there can only be new relations, new combinations of the age-old material.� The kaleidoscope must be given a jolt, that is all.

�� "I have always wondered whether the firm could not invent something like a death-predictor; most of our troubles come from the feeling of human transitoriness, of the precarious nature of our hold upon life.� But if you knew, for example, that on the 3rd March next year you were going to die it would change your whole attitude to people and things.� It would make for resignation, compassion and concentration on the precious instant.� It's anxiety over that unknown date which causes so much of the hysteria and consequently panicky judgement and thinking."

�� "Death" I said.� "But the firm itself inflicts death."

�� Julian nodded quietly.� "Merlin deliberately inured us to death - it was part of his code of things.� So that from the firm's point of view death itself was only a pastime.� One tried to keep one's hand in simply to make sure that one felt nothing about it one way or another.� I must confess it meant next to nothing to me: until - well, I should say that I have only once experienced death with its full force and that was not my own but someone else's.� I shall tell you more about that anon.� But for the moment let me just say that the firm itself, being an organism, feels neither compunction nor conscience nor doubt: it has no guilt - how could it since nature in making indiscriminate use of her raw material has none either?� Felix, a culture is based upon an act of association - a kiss or a handshake or a firm or a religion.� It communicates itself, flowers, perpetuates itself through a single basic principle, which is sharing.� In the genetic twilight of the firm, then, I have had a close look and found it wanting in much.� Could we not make a model perhaps, trace out the pathology of memory to follow the broad furrow of the genetic code with its basic structure of the male and female elements?� Sex might be the great clue here; certainly the pathology of the imagination was nourished in it, or so I thought.� We are still so backward in so many respects - I mean that we so often have to make a model to comprehend a little bit."

�� In a clean bit of snow at his feet he scratched a few words, but absentmindedly, as if he were doing it for himself rather than for his audience.� Like this:

�� pro CREATION re CREATION

�� Then he went on, still half musing.� "Such simple acts and such preposterous results!� Because every desire wins its response.� Hence the danger.� Nature is so rich that people only have to wish and they quite literally get what they want.� As most of us have unpurged desires the child born of the wish is so often a changeling - in fact the last thing one, in fact, wanted.� It is too late by then.� This so often happens to the mob-wish.� Inferior slaves beget inferior masters to parody the awful distortions of the psyches which wish them up.� Think of the mob-creations like Nero, Napoleon and Lenin - flowering from the bad dreams of masterless men who desired only to be led to their deaths - and had their wishes answered.

�� "I was thinking of course of the type of human association which gives rise on the one hand to the sexual compact - you'll say that love is more a seizure like epilepsy than a sober and conscious entry into a bond; but it contains in its genes, if you like to put it that way, the basic male-female dichotomy which mirrors itself in every manifestation of language, science or art even.� Whether a cave-culture, city culture, or a religious culture, or even in inventions like tools or wheeled things, chariots or motor-cars.� I was forced to consider all this in order to try to understand a little bit what I was doing, sitting in the cockpit of the firm, trying to direct its motions.� I didn't hope for much - but I would have liked very much to become a sort of goldsmith of its ideas.� Nor is anything I say the usual criticism which one hears all the time of an age of technology.� Technology in every age is simply the passive miracle which flows of our attitude to nature, helping the chrysalis to turn itself into the butterfly.� It has nothing to do with the worry about raping nature - you can't: because nature will round on you and punish you for transgressions of this sort.� But the idea of push and bite, the hand's scope allied to bronze or steel, gave us a new concept, namely 'spade'.� In other words technology comes after the Fall and not before it.

�� "The first man to put one stone upon another may or may not have been aware that he was building a wall but his delight was great when his sheep could shelter from the snow behind it; but when the stones grew too big or to many to lift he was joined by his nearest neighbour, and then he by his; and so gradually you got a wall-culture based on an act of free association - you got the Great Wall of China, if you wish."

�� "Yes but free association" I said peevishly.

�� "The minute you join in the act you are no longer free, you are bound by the articles of association not less than by the natural obstacles which are posed the minute you start messing about with the natural order of things.� Nature did not invent stones to stand up on one another, and will hasten to overturn them.� This problem created a secondary one - either stone pruned so accurately that it could stand the ground-swell (the Romans, say) or else some new idea - like sheer weight, or another still, mortar.� It is when you are in the act of working on your wall that another idea strikes you, namely if ever one did not have a trust in nature and its basic benevolence one would have none in death, and none in man."

�� He sat there looking at me, a strange blood-caked goblin of a man in his heavy ski-clothes and with his mica-tinted glance.� He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I remained obstinately silent.� I still wasn't clear in my mind about where he proposed to lead me.� At last he himself sighed and rose to take a turn upon the terrace and gaze out across the dazzle of mountains dancing and shimmering with such purity in the light of the slowly westering sun.� He spoke again, but it was almost musing once more, almost as if he were refuelling his mind to carry the argument forward upon another plane.� "So little time," he said "in which to realise ourselves, one iota of ourselves; and life so precarious in the pathetic overcoat of flesh and muscle; and there he goes, man, babbling about free will with gravity following him about like a salt bitch!� The leaden pull of the grave on the one hand and these huge towering structures in stone or paper which he has built to keep out the thought, the unbearable thought of his disappearance.� And moreover, each man with different needs, a different rate of acceleration, different physique even.� O I forgot, Felix. �Koepgen asked this to be sent to you so I brought it with me."� He dug into his breast and produced the slim volume of which Vibart had spoken.� I put it carefully away in my pack without stripping it of its cellophane covering.� He sat down again, smiling a little, and said: "Koepgen has earned an honourable retirement and he has just realised that many of the infuriating things the firm made him do actually belonged to the plan of self-realisation which he had set himself - he's an alchemist by temperament and has spent his adult life trying to smelt himself out."

�� "You sent him to Russia to buy mercury."

�� "Yes, Felix.� It must have seemed an arbitrary or even harsh decision.� But later on he realised that it was a fruitful one on completely non-material grounds.� You probably know that what the sea was for Plato, and indeed for Nash's famous Freudian unconscious, namely the symbol of rebirth - mercury is for the alchemist?� It is their primal water!� I deliberately did not tell Koepgen this; indeed at times I held my breath because he was on the point of disappearing or resigning.� Then one day, just in time, he discovered that what he was doing for the firm on the material plane he was also doing unconsciously on the spiritual.� He is glad now that he carried out the task."

�� "Where is he?"

�� "On an island.� He has discovered that prayer, if rightly orientated, can become an exact science.� I am quoting, of course, because all that line of enquiry isn't within my own interests.� It's the purest rubbish I believe.� But there you are, it makes him happy to think so.� Besides, just suppose it were true - prayer-wheels for the lazy.� We are making some already for the Tibetans...."� He smiled a smile of sad malice and shook his head ruefully, as if at the pure extravagance of human beliefs.� Then he looked up and said: "I tried to kill you, Felix, and you tried to kill me - in both cases it was a near thing.� But you lost a child, and I have been rendered incapable of making one.� In a way this makes us quits."

�� "Yes."

�� He had become very pale now, and his nostrils were drawn in.� He stared at his ungloved hand as it lay upon his knee with great intensity, as if he had never seen it before.� After a long pause, and without looking up, he said quietly: "Benedicta, will you do us the favour of leaving us alone together for a moment?� I want to talk to Felix about Iolanthe."� Obediently Benedicta rose, lit a cigar, and kissing me lightly on the cheek, walked away across the snow towards the tree where Julian had propped his skis.� So we sat immobile as the half-finished snow man on the tree stump.� I could see that he was wondering where to begin.� He wrote in the snow the word "Io" and then raised his head to look me in the eyes.� His whole posture reflected a tremendous contained tension - sometimes if a powerful but delicate dynamo isn't properly anchored to its base its vibrations can make the whole housing ripple and tremble.� But his voice was deadly calm, deadly calm.� "It's strange the things people have to say about love" he said surprisingly.� "About love at first sight, or love at no sight at all, or the love of God or of man.� It's a real honeycomb of a sound.� But from my point of view, and yours and the firm's, the genetic shadow of the love-child is always there, its silhouette hangs over the love-match.� It is generated by the eyes and the mind perhaps less than by the body.� The child is implicit in the transaction.� When it goes wrong of course you get monsters; changelings, like the umbratiles of Paracelsus or the angels of Swedenborg, are such productions, formed, so to speak, from sperm which has missed its mark or gone bad.

�� "I did not" he went on "choose my own ground for this duel either, the encounter with this weird sort of animal, love.� It was chosen for me by Merlin.� I saw her, having always believed she did not exist, and the blood rushed to my head - and all the Petrachian rubbish of our civilisation with it!� The anaconda coils of an immense lethargic narcissism wrapped themselves round me!� But unlike Dante, unlike that fool Petrach, I could not ingest the love-object and transform it into self-love.� I suppose because I wasn't that other kind of impotent, an artist.� No, I was a whole man in every sense but this vital one - this insult to my honour and my very being."

�� He had swollen now with suppressed rage, and his face had become flushed, feverish-looking, while the fine controlled voice shook slightly.� It was deeply moving to have this tiny glimpse of the driving power of Julian - sexlessness, impotence, fury, rage, sexual ferocity.� "I received sex and death in one blood-stained package, thrown in my face like the bundle of discarded bones the butcher wraps up for the dog."� He paused to master his breathing and then went on.� "One minute you are still there, breathing and planning and hoping: the next you are this appalling beautiful toy which will not respond to the controls.� Reality rushes in like some fearful bat and circles round the room, knocking over the candles and banging against the white screens.� I learned all this from Iolanthe."� He looked quickly around him, as if looking for something against which he could dash a clenched fist, or bang his head; and I was reminded of what Mrs. Henniker had told me of the last night of his vigil, of what she had seen in a brief moment between sleep and waking.� It must have been the critical moment.

�� In his confusion he had been completely disoriented.� He was hardly aware that he had a tremendous erection - the death-wish of the flesh itself.� Little incoherent sounds escaped his lips, little sighs and whimpers.� He snatched off the hanging cylinder of transfusion-blood which was hanging over the bed, stripped the needle, and drank it thirstily off, putting the rubber capsule in his mouth like a teat.� Never had he known such a thirst.� Then, with the same little soundless sobs he went to the mirror of the hanging cupboard and made up his face with her lipstick, staring like a ghoul.� He took the candle from in front of the icon in order to light the spectacle of himself standing here, staring abstractedly at the man called Julian whom he hardly recognised.� "Julian" I said, with compassion for his wretchedness.� "Steady on."� But he was already calm once more, in full control of body and voice.� He looked once more at me with a piercing calm and said: "So I come at last to the whole point of the matter.� If the firm could be freed, Felix!� On such a notion we could base a hope however faint of the freedom which you so desperately seek, which I too need.� But the only road to freedom of such a kind like through an aesthetic of some kind.� Beauty, from which alone comes congruence and the harmony of dissident parts and which echoes back the great contrivances of nature."� He gave a harsh bark of a laugh, as if at the very hopelessness of such an idea.� "Beauty, whatever it is, is the only poor yardstick we have; and in my own case Iolanthe's image is the model which suits our book, a universal beauty which has sent her round and round the world in celluloid and which has made her what she is for so many.� She has exemplified, projected the wild notion of this inner freedom which we can only realise through the female.� She is there like cumulus, she is everywhere like a world-dream - O! a twentieth-century shallow trashy dream, if you wish.� But not less real than Helen of Troy.� Only on her image can be built, only through her can we realise our mad experiment.� It is Iolanthe that we must try to realise."

�� Now something more astonishing happened.� He fell on his knees before me and spread his arms in supplication saying: "Felix, for God's sake help me.� We are building her."

�� "Building her?"

�� "I know.� It will seem to you like one of those fantasies which go with General Paralysis of the Insane. �It is nothing of the kind.� We are building her and her consort, just to see.� It is terrible to have to make models to comprehend, but it is all we can do.� Rubber, leather, nylon, steel - God knows in the matter of technological contrivance we have everything at our disposal.� But memory, Felix, for the conditioned responses, she will need a vastly extended memory.� She must sensitise to sounds, she must be word perfect in her role - ('Come darling open').� She needs you, she must have you, Felix.� Nobody else can do it.� We have nobody who could do it for us.� You know that for a while we all thought Abel was a typical Felix type of hoax.� It was only when the machine made pi come out that I woke up with a start and realised that in fact you had made something extraordinarily strange and original, a mnemonic monster."

�� He sat staring at me with a singular expression of exhaustion and triumph - the sort of relief a lecturer might feel at having completed a triumphant expos� of an abstruse theme.� "We dismantled it, you know, with the greatest care.� Marchant did it.� It was perfectly astonishing as an example of technical virtuosity, of technical insolence if you wish.� Parts of it you had only sketched out and tied together with string, so to speak.� They were only just holding, only just passing a current.� But such elegance of thought!"

�� "I know.� I went mad with rage against you and Benedicta and the whole set-up.� You see if didn't care if it worked or not; it's when you don't care that sometimes things work out.� And really I had need of about fourteen people on the technical side to build such a toy."

�� "I know you did."

�� He had by now risen from his knees and dusted himself as meticulously as a cat; he crossed and poured himself a drink with perfectly steady hand.� Then he turned to me and said in a low voice, a conspiratorial voice: "I implore you, Felix."

�� But now I was musing, staring at the ground, seeing in my mind's eye the sweating Marchant taking down Abel, probably with earphones like the people who de-fuse mines (after all the staked shot gun must have worried them); calling back in his firm but squeaky voice the name of every nut and bolt he touched.� So they had stolen Abel's memory, a thing still so terribly imperfect of execution. (I have since had a number of new notions about how to extent it.)� Here they were clearly thinking about a mnemonic contrivance which acted directly on the musculature - a walking memory: what else is man, pray?� It was breath-taking as an idea, and also monstrous.� "Yes" said Julian, as if he were thought-reading.� "It's monstrous all right, but only from one point of view."

�� "Who would have thought it, Julian?" I said.� "Iolanthe as the witch-fulfilment, the which fulfilment - how do you prefer it?� How did you reduce it all to size to fit into the confines of the human skull?"

�� "We can do almost anything with matter, in the field of imitation; all we can't do is create it."� He said it with such bitterness that I felt at once that he was thinking of his own castration.� And then I looked past him up the hill and saw this other blonde monster Benedicta leaning against a tree and smoking quietly, with her blue eyes raised towards the sunlight which had begun to weaken now, to send blue shadows racing down to the bluer roots of the snowpeaks - and I thought grimly of the long desolating periods of impotent fury I had had to live through because of this man: of the fears and illnesses of Benedicta herself: of a life half lived or at least ill lived (always some cylinders not firing): and thinking the whole damned cartoon-strip through from the beginning I felt a sudden surge of weakness, a lassitude of limb and mind.� I took a good swig from the gin bottle and set it carefully back in its place.� "So you want me to join forces on the science fiction, Julian?� I'll have to think it over, you know."� But he was already smiling at me in a curiously knowing way, as if he realised how deeply his arguments had pierced my armour, my self-esteem; and also how enticing was the prospect he had sketched in for me.� I also had the uncomfortable feeling that he had really gone out of his mind in a queer sort of way.� I wanted to say "You are schizoid my lad, that's what you are.� But with patience and rest and sedation ..." but I said nothing.� On the other hand, in a confused sort of way I began to wish I had never heard of this toy of his.� But here he was, still smiling at me with a funny hangdog tenderness, quite impenitent over the past and still hungry about the future.

�� "I have good hopes of you" he said softly.� "I will ring you up in a day or two.� I am making arrangements to take Rackstraw back to England.� He has moments, you know, when he becomes quite lucid and recalls quite a lot.� I have spared no research into Iolanthe, you know - into her character and her habits.� Almost everyone who knew her has had something to tell us, and we've built up a huge library on her, crumb by crumb, to feed into the Abel nervous system, if I can put it like that.� I think the elegance of Marchant's adaptation of Abel will please you very much - all sorts of new materials are to hand these days for modelling.� My dear Felix, I can't believe you'll refuse me.� It would be the crown of your life's work I believe to help me make her so perfectly that nobody would ever believe it wasn't her."

�� "Why Rackstraw?"

�� "He was her lover.� I want to suck him dry."

�� "What can he tell you?"

�� He gave a small impatient gesture.

�� "The least thing is important for her.� Nothing is too trifling to be overlooked."� He said this with such childish impish seriousness that I was tempted to laugh.� Quite insane!� All this would end in catatonia, some delicious twilight-state which would make the doctors croon with joy.� O boredom, boredom, Mother of the Arts!� But if I didn't do this, what else could I do to escape from it?� I was a compulsive inventor, nothing else fulfilled me.� I had an irrational rush of hunger and love for this new Benedicta staring into the clouds up there - perhaps she could save me from myself? �No.� I looked at Julian, and I realised with full force for the first time in my life what the theologians must mean when they speak of being tempted by the devil.� The hubris, the insolence, to arrogate to oneself the power of the Gods!� Vaulting ambition, etc.� I suddenly wanted to do a pee and be alone with myself for a second.� I retired behind the hut for a moment while Julian sat motionless, waiting for me to come back.� I did, and sat down.� "You are insatiable" I said and he nodded in a thirsty sort of way.� The inside of his mouth was very pink, very red, so that in some of his expressions one might descry a touch of vampire.� "Iolanthe" he said in a low voice as if she explained everything, the whole earth and the heavens above.� "I saw her, you missed her.� Now the firm must recreate her.� It must, do you understand? and you must help it."

�� "And when you have built your Adam and Eve, what then?� Will you ask Whipsnade to find a corner for them?"

�� "I am not going to speak to you as yet about that" he said in a sharp martinent's tone, a soft peremptory flash of fire.� "We will face that when and if we succeed in doing what I want done."

�� "We'll ask Caradoc to build them a pretty little Parthenon to live in I suppose; dependants of the firm with a firmly guaranteed pension scheme and health insurance...."� I badly felt the need to insult him, I loved him so much.� Badly.� He sat quite still and calm but said nothing.� I went on truculently, irrationally, "I shall be forced to regard you as a case of intellectual Koro, artificially induced.� A retractio ad absurdum."� He writhed and gritted his teeth with fury but said nothing, always nothing.� It would have been pleasant to hit him with something but there was nothing to hand.� Such weakness is despicable.

�� "I think you will" he said at last.� "I don't really see what else you can do now you know about it."� And all of a sudden he expelled his breath with relief and shrunk down to half his size, as if from exhaustion.� He became so pale I thought he would probably faint; he seemed to suddenly feel the cold, his teeth chattered.� Then after a minute or so his breathing steadied again and he regained his posture, his norm.� He became once more the pleasant conversational man.� "As for Caradoc," he said "as you know he is back and en disponibilit� until the firm finds something worthy of his genius.� But even a genius has a few intellectual holes in him and he is no exception; the sense of symbolic logic in architecture escapes him completely.� He finds no significance for example in the fact that the diameter of the outer stone circle of Stonehenge is some 100 feet which is about the diameter of the dome of St Paul's."

�� He stood up again and turned away to stare at the snowrange intently.� Then he said, but in a whisper and as if to himself: "One dares not neglect symbolism in either life or art.� It is perilous.� I threw a lighted torch into Iolanthe's grave!"� I was in the presence of someone who had suffered the full onslaught of the European disease, poxier than pox ever was - Love!� But of course allied as always to matter for he added in the same breath, "I own all her films now.� I play them over and over to myself, in order to regale myself with all that she wanted to be, all that she could not realise of herself.� My God, Felix, you must see them."

�� "So you brought her out at last!"� I simply could not resist the bitter note in my voice.� He nodded with set jaw.� How I hated this mechanical vulture!

�� "I finally forced her to abdicate" he said, but sadly now, as if the victory were a hollow one.� "She abdicated only after her death; and I could do nothing about her life or about mine.� Fixed stars!"� In a long sad pause he repeated the phrase like an incantation.� "Fixed stars!"

�� Poor Julian!� Rich Julian!� Vega and Altair!

�� "Now I must leave you," he said "and find my way down to the bottom of this damned mountain."� He gloved his precise small hand and stood up.� Together we walked across the snow to where Benedicta was.� She watched us quietly advancing towards her, unsmiling, calm.� "Eh bien" she said at last on a note of interrogation, but there was not much more to be said.

�� Julian took her hands in his in a somewhat ceremonial fashion.� "B., you betrayed us over Count B�cklin, didn't you?� Quite deliberately."� But there was no rancour in his tone, perhaps just a touch of regret.� Benedicta nodded in perfectly composed fashion and kissed him in sisterly wise on the cheek.� "I wanted to show myself that I was finally free, Julian."� Julian nodded.� "That word again" he said reprovingly.� "It has a dying fall."� B. put her arm through mine.� "All too frequently" she agreed.� "But not any more, at least for me.� You know, if Felix hadn't disappeared and left me alone I would have refused the task when you put it to me.� But I was scared, I was scared to death of you."� Julian started to put on his skis, tenderly latching up the thongs and testing them with precision on one leg and then the other.� "And now you can only pity me I suppose.� Don't Benedicta. �That might make me turn dangerous again."� Strange, agonisingly shy man!

�� "No" she said.� "You are de-fused for us, Julian."

�� He looked from one to the other for a long moment; then he gave a little nod as if at approval at what he saw.� "I shall order you some happiness for a change now that we have crossed the big divide in ourselves.� You might even come to love me one day, both of you.� I doubt, though.� Yet the road has opened in front of us.� But there is still quite a lot to be done in order to earn it.� Felix, I shall ring you up in a couple of days when you have had a chance to reflect."

�� "No need" I said.� "I am your man and you know it."

�� "What luck," he said in a low voice "what luck for me to have you at my side once more.� And so farewell."

�� He shuffled his way uphill until he gained the edge of the practice slope and then ebbed forward on his skis, propelling himself with his paddles; gathered momentum, curved up small, and glided away like a swallow into the valley.� Suddenly with his going we felt that the world had emptied itself; we felt the evening chill upon us as we returned to the hut to pack up and trudge back to the t�l�f�rique.

�� "You are signing on again" she said.� "Darling, this time I think you should; now I am at your side and you at mine, armed.� I'm holding my breath.� Do you think some happi....?"

�� I kissed her breathless.� "Not a word, not a single word.� Just go on holding your breath and we'll see what happens."

�� Sinking down the mountain side in the dark purple cusp of evening was more beautiful than the morning ascent; a somewhat inexplicable sensation of delayed shock had seized me.� I repeated in my own mind the words "Well, so Julian actually exists and I have met him in the flesh."� The phrase generated a perfectly irrational relief and - indeed why not? - happiness.� Also physical relief: I felt done in, exhausted.� Why?� I don't know.� It was as if, during the meeting itself, my mind had been in such a daze that I couldn't fully grasp the fact.� I suppose ordinary people might experience this sort of grateful shock-anaesthesia on meeting an admired film-star unexpectedly in a grocer's shop.� It was clear for me at any rate.� Julian had appeared like some figment of a lost dream flashed, so to speak, on the white screen of the snows.� He had disappeared just as dramatically - a dwindling black spot turning back into tadpole and racing away into the huge blue perspectives of the valley.� Gone!

�� Benedicta had burrowed her slender hand into my pocket and was softly pressing mine.� "It is fatuous to feel so serene," I said "and possibly dangerous too.� Do you know what he is up to?� Building a human being, if you please.� Moreover one we know.� God, I love you, Benedicta.� Wait!"

�� I had a perfectly brilliant idea for a new sort of jump-circuit.� It was so rich I feared it might disappear if I didn't make a note of it; yes, but pencil and paper?� Fortunately she had a very fine lipstick with her and in her methodical camper's way she had brought a few sheets of toilet-paper against emergencies since she knew there was no lavatory in the huts.� Saved!� She looked over my shoulder as I blotted and blatched with this clumsy tool.� I couldn't stop to explain for fear that the idea might fade.� It was my sort of poem to the blue evening, the sliding white mountains, the buzzing prismatic corolla of the sinking sun bouncing off the slopes, the trees, the world, to Benedicta herself.� And how patient she was; probably disappointed that it wasn't a love letter but a set of silly pothooks, equations.� (If it worked it might spell the death of the ordinary light-bulb as we know it.)� "I love you" I said.� "But don't speak for a moment.� O I love you desperately, but shut up please."

�� Ouf!� But I felt guilt when it was all duly noted down and stuffed into my pocket.� So I wrote on the window a rebus based on the word TUNC with a heart in the middle instead of a you-know-what and the words Felix amat Benedictam.� In fact such was my euphoria that I missed a step on the ramp and fell headlong into a snowdrift.

�� "That really is a sign of returning health" said Benedicta approvingly after her first concern about broken limbs was allayed.� "With the return of absentmindedness on such a scale we can really prognose a total cure."� That is all very well, but in fact I was whacked; I had a bath, got my dressings changed, and was all ready for visiting her at the chalet, but instead I lay down on the bed for a few moments of repose and reflection and fell instantly asleep.� It was early morning when I woke to find myself stiff as a lead soldier but wonderfully refreshed.� Beside me, scribbled on the temperature chart, was a note from B. which said: "Alarmed, I came to find you.� But I like you almost better asleep than awake.� You look such a fool, such a contented fool.� All the algebra has been drained from your body.� You look how one ought to look when one is dead but alas we don't.� Anyway I have enjoyed sitting beside you watching you going up and down in a steady purposeful sort of way.� In your Chinese book I read the following passage which pleased me.� 'Drunk, in a huge green garden, among flowering cherry trees, under a parasol, among diplomats, what a death, Tu Fu, poor poor dear.'� So goodnight.� (P.S. I want to sleep with you.)"

*�� *�� *� ��*�� *

But she had gone into town to do some shopping so I spent the morning in the so-called danger ward learning to tie seaman's knots from Professor Plon who was a specialist in the garotte; he had already disposed of a wife and two daughters in exemplary fashion (running bowline?) and was technically not supposed to have any access to rope.� But he had found a piece, I don't know how, and was shaping all kinds of elaborate and diverting knots and bows.� I finally got it away from him when his attention was diverted, though it was really a pity.� He could have emptied that whole ward by lunchtime.� But I didn't want poor Rackstraw to go the way of all flesh; though it was almost inconceivable that he should have anything very special to tell us about Iolanthe, it was only fair to let Julian satisfy his curiosity.� What else had I been doing but just that?� Those elegant debauched hands had roved all over that lovely body, touching it now here, now there, moulding the breasts and stroking the marvellous haunches of the paragon girl, the nonpareil.� I felt a sort of sick pang of tenderness when I thought of it.� Iolanthe the waif, and Iolanthe the breastless goddess of the silver screen; the sick romance of all our Helens, for whom somebody's Troy always goes up in flames.

�� Rackstraw himself was enjoying a period of rare lucidity.� "I have been invited to go away" he said happily "to a place which is a country house to stay with a man I used to know vaguely - I have forgotten his name, but anyway it wouldn't mean anything to you."

�� "Julian?" I said.

�� "'Pon my soul yes!" said Rackstraw.� "You do know him then?� He came to see me yesterday and told me about it.� It's more like a film-studio than a country house, it's full of inventors.� They keep popping out of doors and saying things like 'I've got it, old boy.� Look no further.� The answer is untreated sewage.'� It might prove boring in the long run; but they are going to make a long recording lasting months, perhaps years."� Ah the blessed intervals of insulin coma!� But he was radiant in a funny etiolated way.� He had cleaned his shoes and was fussing over an egg-stain on his waistcoat.

�� "Rackstraw" I said.� "What about Iolanthe?"

�� "I made the mistake" he said surprisingly "of treating women as grown-ups without believing in the idea; but later I found to my horror that they were.� It was I who was the child."� He shook his head slowly and looked around him.� "If only I could have a word from old Johnson.� There's no knowing if he will have a happy Christmas or not, down there in Leatherhead.� It is very remiss of him.� At our age, you know, there aren't very many more shots on the spool."� Then he said "Iolanthe!" in a tone of the greatest contempt, and suddenly shuddered with horror as if he had swallowed a toad.� "What does that mean?" I said.� He looked at me with blazing futile eyes and hissed: "Have you seen the sharks in the Sydney zoo?� Then I shall say no more!"� If he went on like this I could see that it was going to be a very long and very costly recording.� "To be belonged to!" he went on in the same tone of high contempt.� "Pah!� She killed someone and I found out because she talked in her sleep."� He knelt down and patiently undid my shoelaces, then stood up again apparently completely satisfied with his handiwork.� "My success with women" he said modestly "was all due to my voice.� They could not resist it.� When I wanted one I used to put on a special husky croony tone which worked like a charm.� I used to call this 'putting a lot of cock into it'.� It was infallible.� Naturally I took great pleasure in their company."

�� He walked up and down in his strange tottering fashion but with quite a strut of sexual vanity.� Then he stopped and raising his hand in a regal gesture said "Now go!� Vanish!� Decamp!� Vamoose!� Buzz off!"� So I did, albeit rather reluctantly, for I was intrigued by even this glancing reference to Io.� Who knows, perhaps if he sat week after week in the red plush projection room where Julian now spent so much of his time, staring at the films he had helped her to make, something might be evoked in him, some concrete response?� And yet to what end?� Once dead ... God, I wondered what sort of toy was in the process of being fabricated; a copy of the human dummy which would pose once more the eternal problem (how real can you get?) without ever being able to answer it.� Iolanthe!� I had missed her somehow and Julian had never enjoyed the real girl whom Henniker described in the words, "It was her animal fervour, her warmth, her slavishness which won men's hearts, going down to the ugliest client like a humble and devoted dying moon.� Later she became tired, and worse still something of a lady: and intelligent, worst of all.� She discovered she had a sensibility.� This tied men into worse knots, intellectual ones.� They were always trying to find metaphors to express things which are best left unexpressed."� All right.� All right.

�� I hadn't seen a paper for months, indeed had had no desire to know what was going on in the world.� So I was interested to catch myself lifting a copy of The Times from a consulting-room desk, to read with my lunch.� Nothing very much.� I missed Benedicta as I read.� Sometimes in some of our expression, straying into the visual field, so to speak, I saw my son very clearly.� Then he dimmed away and she became once more herself.� It made me feel shy in a way, and guilty; I had mounted that toy in order to kill Julian and it had recoiled on my head.� Bang!� I could never have foreseen, even with the help of Abel, that Mark himself might opt out of the whole compact, press the trigger.� I had such an ache too when I thought that Benedicta had never mentioned it, never alluded to Mark.� I saw now to what extent she had been a prisoner in this fantastic web spun by the firm - a web held firm by the fanatical tenacity of Julian.� Well, I read a little bit into the extraordinary fantasy of reality as captured by the so-called press.� The world had not changed since my absence, it was the same.� Fears of war as usual.� They were crying "punish me, punish me".� And of course a war was coming.� Hurrah!� Everybody would be miserable but gay, masochistically gay, and art would flourish on the stinking middens of our history.

�� I went into the other room to find Benedicta on her knees with half-open trunks all around.� "What the hell are you doing?"� She said: "Packing."� Well, on the one hand it might seem logical enough.� "Why?"

�� Benedicta said: "Nash rang me.� You are released, we are both released.� Free.� Julian is coming to get you tomorrow and drive you back.� I'm going by air.� Where do you want to live?� Mount Street is always there, and also that monster you hate in the country."

�� "Let me find out a little bit where and how I am working - and at what.� Let's go to a hotel first, let's go to Claridge's where the people are so insensitive, shall we?"

�� "All right I'll book."

III

But you'd have thought that Hitler himself had sent for me if you'd seen the four huge black limousines coming to a halt in the drive of the Paulhaus; Julian travelled like a Black Prince with numerous secretaries, perhaps even gunmen for all I knew.� He himself was in the back of the leading car holding the door open for me.� He wore an immaculate dark suit and soft black hat turned well down over his eyes - and, of course, characteristically enough, dark glasses.� Chauffeurs bustled about with my luggage.� "Come into my floating office and admire it" he said, indicating a shallow panel full of switches. �With childish pride he showed me the radio and telex arrangements, a secretary's folding desk; and there was even a telephone which worked externally.� A cocktail cabinet.� Everything in fact except a lavatory and a chapel to worship Mammon in.� "What splendour" I said to humour him.� "Could we call London and give them Benedicta's flight number?"� He was delighted to show his mysteries off and in next to no time was talking to Baum over the water.� Then he sat back in the comfortable seat of the mammoth and lit a cigar.� I watched him with curiosity, still consumed by a feeling of unreality; as much as I could see of him, that is, for the glasses shielded his eyes.� "Always the passion for disguise, Julian" I said, somewhat rudely I suppose.� "It has always puzzled me."� He looked round at me and quickly looked away again.� "It shouldn't really" he said.� I have always been terribly ... shy; but apart from that I have a thing, I suppose Nash would regard it as a complex, about faces.� They seem to be quite private things.� I do not see why we have to walk about with them sticking out of a hole in the top of our clothes, simply because convention decrees it.� I have perhaps over-compensated in one direction; you know that I have had my face made over twice by plastic surgery in order to get it the way I wanted it.� It's better than it was but I'm still not completely happy.� It is very boring, for example, always to have the same face - and nowadays thank goodness it's no longer necessary.� Here, I shall be quite honest with you and show you my dossier."� He groped in a shallow leather wallet and produced some passport photographs which he handed to me one by one, saying "That is how nature made me, this is where art stepped in, and this is the way I look now."� I gasped and stared incredulously at him.� "But it's three quite different men" I said.� "Not really.� Look more closely.�� There is much that cannot be changed."� Yes, he was there in each if one peered into the eyes, but in each case the change had been accompanied by a different hairstyle.� But the differences were more marked than the resemblances.� "But of course" he said coolly "this may not be the end of the affair if I begin to get bored with the way I look at present.� It's a marvellous feeling of liberty to know that you can change when you wish, even though very superficially."

�� He put the photographs away carefully and pocketed the wallet.� "Now you know all" he said, and lapsed into an indifferent silence as he watched the countryside rolling past us.� His hands seemed fatter and coarser than I remembered them to be, and he wore a seal ring.� But having disposed of the subject of his disguises he seemed to have nothing more to say.� In fact he seemed to doze off, to hibernate inside the dark wings of his overcoat.

�� We lunched in high mountains on smoked salmon and white wine; Julian had a long talk on his pet telephone to a branch in Holland which manufactured paperclips.� "We have two lazy men there I shall have to deal with; one sits all day in a bubble bath of self-esteem, and the other is too scared to move: Jaeger, you perhaps know?� A Jewish banker like a very very old very sharp scythe."

�� I had expected him to make some reference to the sort of work he was expecting of me but he said nothing at all about the Iron Maide, so I contented myself with dipping into unreality again - reading a newspaper I mean.� Dear old London!� At it again - reading a party pamphlet which would offer wholesome sex instruction to the under-fours and most probably begin: "Children, did you know that mummy was fully of eggs and that daddy had to hatch them, and that is how you are here?"� Life, as Koepgen never tired of reminding us, is only being let out on parole for a brief while.� Tous les exc�s sont bons.� Well, let Julian sleep.� But I myself was half asleep when late that night we slanted into Paris in a foul grey rain.� "I want" said Julian "to go first to the caf� where you met her, then to the hotel.� I want to see the room you took her to."� I protested feebly, but there was nothing for it; a note of such passionate urgency and hunger came into his voice that out of sheer sympathy I felt I had to give in.� Sordid rum-whiffing terrasse where we sat for a while at the chipped table; strong local colour was supplied by a little whore, a veritable midget, who uncrossed her legs and let loose an effluvium which could be smelt tables away, stables away, could almost be heard.... Then to that room where she had told me this and that, and her breasts and so on.� Then Henniker with her face flushed with rage, all red and bruised from the crying, protesting about Graphos and the whip.� "He taught her to enjoy it, but he couldn't make her love him.� No, if she loved anyone sexually it was me.� ME.� I seduced her, I calmed her, I loved her and was faithful right to the end."� What pitiful wounded stuff we carry around inside us; wounds that gush blood at the slightest touch of memory's lancet.� He sat in a chair looking dazed, like some very old tame monkey, gazing round him and yawning; but when I told him about the breasts he put his face in his hands and went very still for a moment.� Then he cleared his throat softly and said: "About death there is something curious - a sort of shrinking; if you copy the exact dimensions the effect of your statue or dummy always looks smaller than the remembered original.� In the waxworks, for example, everyone seems to have become reduced in size.� Just over life size is the best recipe for copies.� Let us go, I have heard enough."

�� He did not appear for dinner that night and I amused myself by reading Koepgen, ringing up Benedicta and leafing through Figaro.� Much literary prize-giving and distribution of honorary titles; why don't we?� The Epicurus of Letchworth, the great Aubergine of Clermont-Ferrand.� Hum!

�� Next morning Julian decided that he must go to Holland and as I was impatient to see this new-old wife of mine I took a plane, full of vertiginous excitement and shyness.� My impatience led to indiscreet arguments with everyone, officials, porters and lastly with an insolent cabby who had clearly never seen a man in love before, and made no allowances for this desperate illness.� (One should be put in an ambulance with a bell; or someone should walk in front of one with a red flag crying: "Enceinte.� Enceinte.")� But at last I arrived to find Benedicta in bed with a� cold, so pretty and so woeful that I as tempted to ring up the whole of Harley Street.� "You see what happens now when you leave me?� I get ill."

�� "O thank you, thank you."

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

But nevertheless, in spite of the infantile euphoria, I had the most dreadful dreams.� "Dreams are but the prose of quotidian life with the poetic quantum added."� All right.� All right.� Cut it out now.� They were horrible, and of course they made me wonder if perhaps I had been seduced once more upon the bitter path of.... I interrogated her silent form, sleeping so calmly beside me, one hand on her breast: the rise and fall so reassuring, like the spring swell of a marvellous free sea - a Greek sea.� And I felt suddenly terribly old and went into the bathroom to examine my old carcass with attention all over again.� Bits were falling out - a tooth would have to go: O not another!� The hair was coming back quite strong.� But an extra magnification of the bloody glasses.

�� It was amazing that my balls hadn't dropped off after all I'd been through - like Vibart's champion novelist.� It seemed to me that I had a very false cringing sort of smile, so I decided to change it all along and because of.... But smiling from left to right instead of right to left set the wrong groups of muscles moving.� Also the old knowing friendly kindly expression in the eyes looked just bleary to me.� What despair!� I knew exactly how I should look in order to rivet her attention forever.� But suppose it got stuck, that smile, from being artificial?� Suppose nobody could move it?� I would have to go every morning to Harley Street and accept facial massage from some torpid Japanese.� Perhaps acupuncture in the dorsal region, huge coloured pins being driven into my inventor's dogged bum?� O hell, please not that.

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

Marchant rang me the following day and at last I began to think that things were moving along as planned.� He asked me to meet him at Poggio's which I duly did, enchanted to see my old stablemate again.� But he had changed a good deal; his hair had gone very fine and quite silver and you could see pink scalp through it.� He sported a set of new false teeth of fantastic brilliance.� His clothes were much the same - the stage uniform of the absentminded professor: baggy grey trousers and a torn tweed coat (acid-stained here and there) with leather patches on the elbows.� And a huge college scarf of garish design, bearing his college colours I don't doubt.� But he was full of energy and excitement, gesticulating and twitching his face as he spoke like a lively earwig.� And yet somehow tired and highly strung; and I noticed that he was drinking rather heavily for such an abstemious man.� Anyway "How" he said, giving me the benefit of a Red Indian salute.� "How" I replied gravely.

�� "I had all your news from Julian.� Imagine my delight.� To hear you were coming to work at Toybrook with me.� I have been bored stiff among all those corpses."

�� "Wait a minute" I said.� "First Toybrook.� Isn't that a hush-hush plant of some sort?"� Marchant nodded and said: "It's where we work on anything which might be on a secret list for the forces; it's a security A factory.� I brought you a pass, all neatly made out for you.� When will you begin?� It's only a very few miles from the country house, if you have your car.� You could drive over every day.� Why the grimace, Felix?"� I sighed.� "Bad memories, painful memories.� I wonder.� I'll ask Benedicta."

�� "Do.� It would be convenient."

�� "Not what about corpses?"

�� "A literal fact; working on these models which I must say are beginning to look quite frighteningly like the real thing, we found we knew next to nothing about anatomy.� We could have called in great surgeons and all that, but they work on living bodies; we were only imitating and where possible simplifying in glass, wool, nylon, jute and so on.� In other words the inside of the Iron Maide did not have to be copied provided we mocked out a musculature and a nervous system and allowed her to imitate human behaviour, speech, gesture, mnemonic response.� Of course Abel has been invaluable with his memory bank which we have now reduced spectroscopically to the size of a pea virtually - talk about writing the Lord's Prayer on the point of a pin!� It's only a matter of detail.� She'll have twice the vocabulary of Shakespeare, and all the souplesse of a mummy trained for a ballet.� Gosh, it is really amazing.� Julian is incredible.� Do you know when they moved a model of her into Madame Tussaud's he used to go there day after day to watch the crowds filing by her.� One day I saw in the paper that this wax model had been damaged and I wondered if he had ... well, I don't know ... started kissing it or doing something even more drastic.� He hasn't dared as yet to see what they've got.� He says he will only come when you authorise him to.� You know he is scared, Felix, very scared by this nylon Iolanthe; and she is coming along so well that I'm rather scared too.� Suppose we get within three decimal places of a perfect copy?� What are we going to do with her?� Could she live an independent life as a free dummy, in a three-dimensional world?� Eh?"

�� "What about the sexual stuff - is she designed to poke the other one?� Will they be monogamous?"

�� "All that is feasible; but they will never to able to produce - the whole pelvic oracle is sketched in I'm afraid.� But the vagina will please you.� And incidentally, another chance remark of yours has borne fruit in a marvellous way.� You've probably forgotten.� Ejax!"

�� "Ejax?" I said vaguely.� It meant nothing to me.� Marchant chuckled and said: "One day when you were drunk you said that for real sexual pleasure the quantity of sperm was important.� The heavier the discharge the greater the excitement of the female."

�� "I said that?"

�� "Yes, you did."

�� "Good god!� Is it true?"

�� "Our new sperm-thickening pill called Ejax is having a wild success - surely you've seen the advertising in all the Tube stations? �No?� 'Have you taken your Ejax today?� If not what will the wifey say?'� It's swept the board.� And it was so easy chemically to work it out.� A very slight provocation of the prostate with an irritant does the trick.� So far no side-effects, but by the time these come along we'll have a counterblast to them."

�� "Marchant," I said "are you happy?"� I don't suppose it was the question to put at this time and place.� He stared at me angrily for a long moment and then said indignantly:

�� "Yes."

�� We went on looking at each other, critically and carefully.� "Yes" he said, and again, "Yes, Felix."� But it was stagy; he didn't want to be probed on this topic and I realised with a pang of regret the full measure of my tactlessness.� Whose happiness is whose business after all?� It was also a bit alarming to find that so much of my own was ultimately bound up with Benedicta - surely this was a fearful weakness?

�� "Go on," I said "go on, Marchant boy, and stop me from thinking.� I have never heard of such a beautiful project with all the problems it raises.� Why it's like having a baby!"

�� "Exactly" he said, resuming the flush of enthusiasm which I had cut short by my ill-judged intervention. "While society is happily creating a slave-class of analphabetics, 'les visuels', who have forgotten how to read and who depend on a set of Pavlovian signals for their daily bread and other psychic needs - surely we have the right to build a model which will be at least as 'human' as these so-called human beings?� Eh?� Whether her limitations of freedom in action will have to be circumscribed for her I cannot get Julian to discuss.� He turns a blind eye to the whole matter.

�� "But if we get what we might - why, we could turn Iolanthe loose one day, kiss her warmly, and say, now you are free - just as if she were being released from Holloway.� There is no reason that I can see why she shouldn't hold her own in the world as it is today.� Just release her, as a soap-bubble is flicked off a child's soap-pipe.� 'Go, my child.'� It's not an unfair analogy - babies are born this way; but they arrive helpless and have to be passed through the cultural mincer.� Suppose ours arrived at the age of thirty - mentally mature; with all her experience digested?� What is to prevent her taking her place with all the other dummies and pushing a lever for her living, her Pavolvian living.� A trap door opens and the soup comes in."� He was very drunk indeed in a cold and rational sort of way.� His cheeks had a hectic flush.� But he wasn't slurring and when he got up to go to the lavatory his walk was quite steady.� "Will she have opinions?" I asked, and he replied "That's up to us; we are building the library of her conditioned responses upon the old graph you drew for Abel.� Yes, she will feel certain things.� But it's for us to decide to a certain extent."� He absented himself and I reflected upon this weird assignment with a certain lustful satisfaction.� Iolanthe!

�� "Faustus!"

�� Marchant, reappearing, said: "On the one hand it might seem complicated, but in fact it's only terribly detailed and intricate.� Our responses are not infinite, from a muscular point of view, though of course they are various and numerous.� Speech and so on - again it's not infinite; your sound analysis was most useful and adapts perfectly in the new materials.� The voice is particularly successful in my view; here, I will play you a test strip."� He crossed to where his coat hung and eased out a small tape-recorder with a set of fine earphones.� Through them, and clear above the breathing silence of the machine, I heard the real voice of Iolanthe saying softly, dreamily: "Worlds of memory, worlds of desire, echo will set them both on fire.� Three two four, three two four.� Answer me.� Is there anyone in the room who has seen my, has anyone seen my, seen my ...? - no, I'll go further.� The reproduction was so beautiful that I was a bit bloodcurdled by it.� On the one hand it was all so remote, Athens, the Nube and all that.� But I suddenly felt the wild pang of the Acropolis at dawn with that warm scented little body lying tangled in mine in a sort of holy shipwreck; tasted those pious kisses.� "Iolanthe!"

�� "Isn't it her to life?"

�� "It's a funny way to put it, but it's true.� I suppose you built up the vocal thing direct from Abel - I had quite a lot to work on."

�� "Yes, and her films, for example."

�� "The damnedest thing" I said and for no known reason felt a disposition to laugh out loud.� "Muscles powered by tiny photoelectric mnemonic cells."

�� "That's it, my boy."� Marchant produced sheaves of boring-looking paper and drew out the circuits in very rough specification.� "She has five zones of response; her power storage is a new kind of dry cell with a longish life, and is replaceable.� We are weaving her from a selection of guts and nylons finer than any fisherman dreamed of, or any violinist for that matter.� The hands are extraordinary - utterly beautiful; probably more so than the originals.� She travels by the power of light, boyo, light-sensitised cells; becomes a trifle languid at twilight; and fades into sleep at any time you care to name.� But of course she isn't done.� It'll be weeks before it's all sowed into place and ready to walk down Regent Street."

�� "Soliciting I suppose?"

�� "That is for you to decide."

�� "Why me?"

�� "Julian seems to think your word is law in these matters.� Myself I think he is playing a dangerous game - with your so-called sense of humour.� But it's not my affair.� I'm playing my part as best I can.� But I realise now that I'm a mere interpreter of other men's ideas; you are the real scientist."� It sounded pretty strange to me, put that way.� I had always believed the direct opposite to be true.� "But Julian" I said "is the real brains.� None of us would be doing what we are doing had it not been for him."� Marchant agreed, wiped his teeth in a napkin and replaced them tenderly.� "We've photocopied the daily life of about twenty women to work out the range of situation-responses for Iolanthe.� It's really amazing how monotonous the ordinary range of movements, conversations, stock responses, can be.� Even with the total range of thought we can conceivably stock her up with it's perfectly adequate for most things that happen to most people.� Response-provoking through sound and light.� She will move about like some huge abstract dolly playing a perfect part in the world of our time."

�� "I'm getting to love her already" I said.

�� "Beware of Julian" said Marchant jokingly.� "We've built her a set of sexual organs which ... but I haven't done the detailed planning yet.� Waiting for you to come in with new ideas.� But the site of the temple is all there and the foundations of the thing are all sound."

�� "What temple?"

�� "Temple of pleasure.� I'm too much of a puritan, I avert my face a bit from all that; and Julian supplies no sort of guidance as yet.� But if we are to get her as perfect as a real person we can't deprive her entirely of her sexual response, even if it's battery-driven."

�� It was all very well to joke, but inside I felt rather solemn and indeed a little uneasy.� Marchant added an afterthought.� "You'll find several old friends down at Toybrook - among them Said, the little one-eyed Christian Arab of your salad days who has been doing the most imaginative and intricate work on the light-sensation and the sound.� The man who built your ear-trumpet, remember?"� Of course I did.� An absolutely marvellous artisan in little; the firm was lucky to have such a master craftsman on hand.

�� "And the corpses will intrigue you, the real ones; it's funny how things tend to call up other things.� Involuntarily, so to speak.� Just when we were having the first troubles over anatomy and invoking the aid of the Royal College of Surgeons and so on, Julian was faced with another opening for the firm in Turkey: embalming!� I know it sounds strange and of course at first we laughed very much in an exasperated sort of way because really we should have thought of it.� It is the most ancient of all cultus ploys and we could have launched it years ago.� Now, with the help of the two holy churches, East and West, we got everyone into a huddle and, basing ourselves on a profit-sharing scheme, with Rome and Byzantium we launched the whole thing with �clat.� It was of course preceded with a bombardment of clerical propaganda from the pulpit, specially prepared sermons, telling you that it was wicked for you to leave your nearest and dearest to rot when you could embalm them and stick them on the hall hat-stand as we used to stick wild boars or stags or what not.� Also a very nice decoration to very old-fashioned pubs might be Mine Host resurrected in this fashion (if ever so slightly glazed).

�� "Combined with this we got the avant-garde in Paris interested in it as a sort of beatnik curio with fascinating responses from all.� They don't really want to live, the young.� They want to be embalmed so that they can impress their friends.� Moreover they are prepared to pay for automatic posthumous embalming as one pays for life insurance.� The cult went off with a bang; we couldn't meet the demand.� It seems to them, I suppose, the only future guarantee that they had actually been alive.� And there's always the chance of lending out your mummy for that perfect party where everyone was so 'stoned'.� In short we were in business.� But ... on the technological side we ran into trouble with the quality of the embalming.

�� "In Turkey they were using methods unchanged for hundreds of years.� The result was a very friable effort which, if removed from the dry astringent desert air and moved into a more humid climate, deteriorated dreadfully.� In fact rotted.� Of course we moved 'Chemicals A' over on the job and we are still in the process of wrestling with the formulae for preservatives - it's more difficult than you can imagine.� But while the embalmers were using our brains we were using their dead bodies which can be played about with at will, in order to learn what we needed to know for Iolanthe.� So you will find a rather strange Embalming Studio (so called) chez nous.� It's very useful to us for checking; but they are training to conquer the whole Middle and Far East.� Nature, beautiful are thy ways!"

�� "Do you mean to tell me you have been poking about in corpses with a notebook in one hand, Marchant?"� By this time he was extremely drunk but not at all shaky; I mean one would have had to know him quite well to divine that he wasn't sober.� Also he gave me a funny feeling of being a bit scared.� Anyway he gave a great earwig chirp of laughter and said: "My dear chap, all that I know of the human anatomy is based on the dead.� I could not play around with the living, and I'm no surgeon, as you know.� But the dead have been of enormous help, specially while they are still fresh, while the motor responses are still working.� The rigor mortis buggers them up from my point of view - at least on the suppleness and response factor.� But it is most instructive and delightful to see them taken apart as clockwork is, bit by bit, and then pieced together into the sort of doll we are contemplating.

�� "In fact one has to stop and ask oneself from time to time 'Who is doing what, exactly?'� I'm damned if I know.� But anyway right next to us we have this vast embalming studio run by the Americans which provides us with models galore.� Of course the American market was already very advanced when all this happened; Europe is terribly backward in some ways."� We both cackled with the old-fashioned laughter which nowadays would merit a pistol fired through the skull.� "But the Middle East" he said "is going in for this with a vengeance, and Julian has already financed a couple of films based on the subject to orient public opinion towards the notion."� He paused.� "Always Julian" I said.

�� "I must go" he said, but he still sat on for a while cupping his brandy in a warming hand and staring at me.� Then he continued with remorse, "My God, I've done nothing but talk; I haven't asked you a thing, how you feel, how you are, whether you are keen to take this business on or not.... Forgive."

�� "I'm glad.� I would have been incapable of answering any of your questions.� I'm newly convalescent and very newly wed, if I dare to believe it, to a re-upholstered ghost called Benedicta.� I am just feeling my feet, as they say, but very uncertainly.� But whatever the state of things I'll come to Toybrook and look over the set-up with you.� Would you like Monday?� I'll be there betimes if you think that it would suit?"

�� Marchant drank of his glass and rose.� "Yes" he said.� "Monday.� I must let you hear a lecture by the top embalmer.� You will hardly credit your senses.� All good sense mind you.� Ahem!"

�� I took the tube back, crushed in among my fellow-countrymen who looked on the whole rather nice, after such a long absence from them.� But it was like travelling in a parrot's cage, I was all but deafened when I finally crawled up the steps of Claridge's.� I walked into the room and said: "Mark, Benedicta, Mark!"� She jumped up, radiant.� "Thank goodness you said that; I was thinking it.� It's the sorest place of our many.� So many thorns to be taken out of each other's paws, but Mark...."� I sat down: "What brought it on was the discovery that the place where I am working is very near...."

�� "Yes.� I see."

�� She lit a cigarette and marched up and down for a moment.� "We must try and incorporate him, relive him a little bit inside ourselves.� It's very selfish in a way, but I fear that if he goes on inside us like a suppurating thing, the memory of a bad act, then things will not grow right between us as they might.� Mark still stands at the cross-roads between you are me."� She sat down thump in a chair and still smoking furiously gave a gulp which was a much rage and frustration as just tears of regret.� I, too, could have beaten my head against a wall and yelled, but not being of that sort of minting I did damn all.� I tried as hard as I could to yawn, look natural, that sort of thing.� Tried to light a cigarette, burnt my finger, got a fit of coughing.� Went off to the lavatory to do a pee and swear quietly at the way things are arranged.

�� When I came back she was standing in the centre of the room, very composed and with a fine haughty kind of determination in her eye.� "We must go back to every place where we have been hurt, or where we have inflicted hurt on each other, and systematically exorcise the memory - what do you think of that?"� I jumped at it.� "But now" I said.� "This very night."� And she nodded.� "Otherwise it will be no good."

�� It did not take long to raise a car and alert the housekeeper - nor truth to tell to drive down through the roads which were horribly empuddled and the countryside looking devilish sad.� We didn't exchange a single word.� I had organised a thermos of coffee and some repellent ham sandwiches.� The night was cold.� It blew.� I suppose the same sort of thing was going on in her - I mean for my part I was rehearsing the whole past of this period in that horrid garish manner; it was less like a bad dream than an old abandoned tunnel into which one had fallen and been rescued.� But now one had to go back and clear it of fallen debris.� I thought too with a pang of Iolanthe's island cottage.� Ghosts, they need meat too!

�� Benedicta drove while I fed her with cigarettes; drove in her brilliant fast vein as if anxious to reach the end of the journey as soon as possible.� Long white headlight-ribbons winding away over the hills, melting down long avenues littered with a detritus of autumn.� Beauty and melancholy of the night country softening away towards winter and the white transforming snow.� At last we came slowly cracking down the long winding drive up to the house with its steely lake and horrid toffee-rose towers.� O Coleridge where wert thou?� A little bit slowed down perhaps by a temporary misgiving; every thing hereabouts spelt Mark, spelt sickness, hag-drawn nights of sleeplessness, Nash, Julian, Abel, Bang.... I put my hand inside her velvet coat and touched her breast.� "So," she said "here we are, gentlemen of the jury, here we are."

�� I hammered on the door and rang the interminable bloody bell-rope, while she turned the car and backed it up for shelter under an eave.� For a long time nobody.� Then the little old gnomish housekeeper came tottering down and tuttering about unaired beds and blown fuses.� There was no electric light in the place, and despite all her telephoning she had not been able to get a man in to do the repair.� Candles, then, a couple of big silver branches on the great marble table; perhaps more suitable in a way for visiting this great mausoleum of wasted hopes - in the sense of atrophy, I mean.� Attrition.� I saw her face rosy in the rosy light, so very grave and precious.� (Julian had said: "Open your legs, I am going to kiss you," but instead he had shaken the candlesticks and the burning wax sprayed her unmercifully.)

�� The long desolate galleries grew awake and attentive as they watched us come walk, walking in this warm bubble of candleshine; watched us pass and then slipped back into the anonymity of darkness behind us.� We went solemnly and without speaking, spending a moment at each of the stations of the cross in meditation.� Like visiting the picture gallery of a lost life.� Here we had married, here lain down in each other's arms in helpless silence, here quarrelled, here shouted deafly at each other, here smoked and mused.� Mark had slept here, woken there, played further on.� This death newly felt and revived vibrated on the heart like the concussion of some fearful drum.

�� Abel had gone - there was just a gaping hole in the musician's gallery; my toy of a pet of a monster of a brainstorm of a Thing.� I was� glad; it had integrated itself elsewhere, been melted down.� Here for some reason she kissed me and wept a small tear.� And so on through the tower bedrooms and thence down the great staircase to the larger of the two ballrooms.� The mirrors had not been replaced though the gunshot-splashed glass had been picked out to leave just the far gilded frames like so many reproaching frowns.� Here the silence was immensely real silence, the air stagnant; there was no other resonance except ours in this place.� Nobody had ever had a ball here, for a wedding or a birthday.� Just she and I and a shot gun and the Lord's Prayer written on the mirrors with number three shot.� The gun-room too was now empty except for a few twelves such as cottagers might need to chase rooks out of a tree.� But in the little fridge in the buttery the thoughtful gnome had placed a bottle of champagne and two goblets as green as Venice.� This too was appropriate.

�� We took it, tray and all, into the fake library with its tapestry of empty bookcovers; there was a fire laid in the grate which took no time at all to burst into bristling flame.� I scouted out cushions from everywhere I could and built a huge oriental divan reminiscent of Turkey in front of it.� Here we sat, thinking each other's thoughts and sipping the green champagne while the logs carved out their strange figures and strange faces.� Then of a sudden the telephone rang, which gave us both a tremendous start.� We looked at each other in curiosity touched with a certain consternation.� Who knew we were there?� Julian was in Divonne, gambling.� It rang, and rang, beseeching and beseeching.� I rose swearing, but she took my arm and said: "No.� Just for once let it ring.� Don't answer it Felix, I implore you."� I said: "Don't be superstitious B."� But she was adamant.� "I just know we must not answer it."� On it rang and on; I sat down again.� We couldn't talk or think any more for the noise of the damned instrument.� Then it choked off.� "Now we shall never know what it as, or who it was" I said with regret.� But she sighed a great sigh of relief and said: "Thank Goodness no.� Yet that one conversation might have made us change direction all over again - have put us back on a fatal course."

�� So we lay down at last and fell asleep by the warm fire, like hibernating squirrels, too drowsy to make love even.� It must have been nearly dawn when I woke in the chill to revamp the fire and to scout out our coffee and sandwiches. �Benedicta was yawning and combing her hair, quite refreshed.� I went to test the water in a nearby bathroom but found no hot; boilers unstoked for ages, I suppose.� Benedicta was saying: "There's that old cottage in the grounds which was revamped, do you recall?� Why couldn't we live there for a while and acclimatise?� I would like to live more alone with you.� We could have a little boat on the lake.� Felix, answer."� But I was struck dumb by the brilliance of the idea.� It was a very pleasant little wooden chalet, not too small; I had once started to build a studio in it.� It had originally been built to keep a housekeeper in, but proved too far from the house.� So there it was, yet another place lying empty.� "If I remember right the sanitation and kitchen were done over."

�� "Brilliant.� Let's go and see it."

�� This we did cutting swathes of dew across the meadows.� A tiny brook, a meadow, an abandoned mill.� A small jetty for a boat.... How the devil had I never thought of it before?� "Darling, you are speaking directly to the romantic bourgeois in my soul.� The secret of a happy life is to reduce the scale of things, circumscribe them; a girl doesn't need to fill up more than the circumference of one's arms.� I have never liked big women anyway."� Yes, it was there, the cottage, but I had to force a kitchen window to get in.� It was quite dry and warm because of all the timber I suppose, and spotlessly clean.� A pleasant studio looking out through a weeping willow on to the misty waters of the lake.� "It's ideal."� Was it too much to hope for a few happy years here without the nagging frontal brain intervening to much everything up with its bloody hysterias?� One hardly dared to formulate the sort of hopes it offered, this queer scroggy chalet, looking in a vague sort of way as if it had been influenced by Caradoc's Parthenon of Celebes.

�� "Don't you feel we should at least try here?" she said.� "It hasn't the terrible gloom of the big house with all its memories - the horrid backlash of the past.� But it's only across the meadow - we could go there from time to time like one goes to visit a friend in the cemetery."� I said "Yes."

�� With a certain amount of awe, though.� What had poor Felix done to deserve all this?� Invent Ejax by mistake?

�� "Yes.� Agreed!"

*� ��*�� *�� *�� *

"You say you've never been to Toybrook" said Marchant with a certain happy condescension.� "I can hardly believe it."� No, I was sure I hadn't.� "They were working upon an obscure nerve-gas and documented me once when I was doing Abel, but that is all I know.� Central nervous system."� He chuckled in a specious professorial way, like a don who is delighted to take you to lunch at the Athenaeum because you aren't a member.� He settled the car rug round him and fiddled with the heating - I detected indications of old age and badly lagged pipes.� The afternoon was mild and clammy.� "As a matter of fact," he said "I opened this morning's paper and got quite a start.� I thought I was looking at Toybrook but in fact what I was looking at...."� He fumbled among his cases and bundles and produced a paper which he opened and spread before me, stabbing with a lean nicotined finger.� The caption was one word, a familiar one: Belsen!� We laughed very heartily about this - a long terrain of old-fashioned potting sheds with the two funnels, like a liner or a soap-factory.� All indistinct and furry.

�� "Come," I said "didn't Caradoc build it?� It can't be less than a Parthenon of some sort in that case."

�� "It's very beautiful," he admitted sitting back and settling the rug around him "really very beautiful.� And also marvellous from our own point of view.� There are no labs like it in Europe, nowhere.� The nearest comparison is Germany, but even then I think we have the edge on them.� No, Toybrook is quite something.� Sounds like an invention of Enid Blyton doesn't it?� Do you know those children's book of hers?"

�� "Of course.� I read them in the Tube."

�� "Then?"

�� "Well, I'm curious to see what you've got and to find out where you want to go."� Marchant looked at me curiously, humorously.� He said: "We want to get as real as we can."� Silence.� "You mean fundamentally you want to give yourself the illusion of actually controlling reality?� How real can one conceive, I mean?"� Marchant gave a chuckle.� "Felix, Felix" he said reprovingly, putting his hand on my knee.� "The old weakness is peeping out.� You want to intrude metaphysical considerations into empirical science.� It's no go.� You are tapping on a door which does not exist.� The wall is solid."

�� "It's quite a consideration if the things you make get up off the operating table and start being MORE real than you?� You will surely be forced to reassess your ... dirty word ... culture?"� Marchant shook his head vigorously.� "We must move step by step, not in your quanta-like jumps - you can do nothing scientifically if you get the typical clusters; it's like seizing up your engine by overheating, hence the Paulhaus."� I watched the wonderful socialist country rolling by with all its marvellous advertising.� "Ejax makes a man of you."� Why not a woman, I wondered?� It damn soon would.� Hair down to the waist and a costume from Napoleon's Grande Arm�e.� Perhaps there was a future for poor Felix in all this?

�� "Bon" he said, with a growing sense of familiarity.� It was not simply the firm - it was the particular smell of self-satisfaction it unleashed.� "And Julian?" I said.� Once more Marchant gave a small earwig chuckle. "Gambling," he said "all the time.� But now he has started losing and this is not in nature - at least not in his.� I love Julian, you know, now that I have really got to know him.� He is humility itself - humble as the Pope.� Self-effacing.� Tender.� Felix, what a man!"

�� "What a man" I echoed piously, and indeed the funny thing was that I felt it; I felt a strange sort of reverence for this ... mummy.� I don't know if that is the right word.� But to have so much understanding humanity as Julian had and to manage to live apart, to play no direct part in its strange or deformed operations - why really it was something to doff the hat to.� "All that Planck stuff is fruitful from a theoretically viable point of view; but from our point of view it is a matter of scale, in our empirical test-tube business the three dimensions are all one can cope with."� He was pursuing the argument like a sort of granny.� He cleared his throat while I lit a cigarette.� "Our only problem down in Toybrook is a simple one, namely does it work ninety-nine times out of a hundred?� If it does it is real."� I coughed slightly and scanned off the scenery a bit.� We were travelling mighty fast with a chauffeur who, for all I knew, might have been a dummy invented by Marchant.� Then I said: "And the hundredth?� Is there no room in your system for the miracle?� That trifling shift of temperature or wrong mixture of chemical salts ... it's so easy to go wrong.� What exactly would be the miracle for you, Marchant?"� Chuckle.� "Well," he said "something like Iolanthe.� She can for a moment be exactly controlled.� Or so we hope.� So we hope."

�� But reassuringly enough Toybrook was not in the least like Belsen - quite the contrary; despite the two stout brick towers exuding a lick of white smoke from the ovens in the experimental section.� Toybrook was laid out with great dignity in two long complexes enfilading a piece of wild woodland, so that there was no laboratory or theatre without it fine green view.� Moreover in the woodland there were several families of wild stags which appeared and disappeared dramatically among the trees, mating and battling in full view of the scientists; sometimes even coming shyly down to put a wet muzzle on the plate glass of the aquarium-like laboratories.� It was both elegant and very peaceful - the chemists' studios with their long rows of microscopes glinting, their scales and pulleys and grapnels.� A long pendulum hung slowly swinging in the hall.� They had everything, these boys, even a wind tunnel and a cyclotron.� Marchant was in high good humour as he showed me round, stopping here or there to present me to a colleague.� Thence to the elegant theatre where the progress reports were read and recorded audio-visually for whatever posterity a scientist might believe in or hope for.

�� In the darkness Marchant flicked a couple of switches and a bald man appeared on close-circuit image.� "That is old Hariot" he said while the celebrated man read haltingly against a blackboard upon which someone had written in violet chalk: "Does perhaps the rate of blood-sedimentation dictate the oxygen intake?"� A vexing question, I should have thought.� Anyway Hariot went on: "As you know, oxygen pushes carbon dioxide out of the blood and vice versa; as far as the circulation is concerned, about five litres of blood a minute are pumped by the heart of an ordinary resting adult.� The distribution is not uniform; I mean that brain and kidneys get disproportionately large amounts compared to their relative size.� As far as the brain is concerned, a decrease of ten per cent oxygen will give the first signs of confusion; decrease it by twenty per cent and you get the equivalent of four or five strong cocktails, say; around forty per cent you would expect to get coma.� If the total supply is cut you get unconsciousness in a few seconds; and after four to five minutes the damage to the brain may be irreversible."

�� I said: "I suppose you had to mug all this stuff up for your dollies?"� And Marchant nodded as he faded down on Hariot and came up with an image of rubber hands occupying the whole screen, poking about in the entrails of something or someone.� However it was Hariot's flat voice again which continued the exposition with: "From the umbilical cord of twenty-five newborn children an appropriate test-length was clamped before first cry; blood samples were drawn anaerobically with special all-glass syringes from the umbilical vein and umbilical arteries.� Coagulation and glycolysis were inhibited by heparin and potassium oxalate and sodium fluoride...."� Marchant chuckled approvingly.� "You can call for any damn thing under the sun" he said, consulting a panel of data.� Other images wallowed up, once more of rubber fingers moving about in a uterus as if performing some obscure rite of divination.� "This particular demonstration monkey was merely anaesthetised, its abdomen opened and copious amounts of Bouin's fixative solution poured into it, over and around the uterus in situ.� At the end of three to seven minutes all uterine ligaments with their contained blood vessels were clamped and the specimen removed...."

�� "Ugh" I said.� "I think I must be getting home to the wife and kids if this goes on."� He laughed and tried another lucky dip on the dial to produce this time a strange surrealist picture of three men in white coats gathered round a seal which had been lashed firmly to a board and suspended above a water tank.� The poor animal was terrified and struggled with all its might, rolling bloodshot eyes and moaning through its long silky moustaches.� One of the men was holding a stethoscope to its body and saying something grave about lactic acid levels.� Then the pulley swung and down the whole contraption fell out of sight.� Crank!

�� "Enough" said Marchant.� "It was only to give you an idea of the data-processing side of the thing."

�� In the mathematical section there were a hundred small hanging mobiles gyrating slowly in the sluggish air of the studios; a tiny planetarium, mock-earth, and God only knows what else.� To Marchant's annoyance however the experimental embalmers had taken the day off and locked up the studio.� "It's most vexatious" he said.� "They have probably gone up to town for more dead.� It isn't all that easy to get them, and one cannot run and Burke and Hare body-snatching organisation from such a respectable address as this."� Why not, I wondered, surely old Julian could provide?� (Cut out the flippancy, Charlock.)� At any rate there was nothing for it now but to proceed to business and visit his own section, which would later become mine as well.� It had no name as yet, just Experimental Studio B.

�� He had doubtless been keeping this special treat for the last, deeming it the most exciting, which of course it was.� He unlocked two sets of doors and locked them again behind us with a stealthy gesture that reminded me of the Rackstraw ward in the Paulhaus.� A high, bright, airy studio almost as tall as a hangar for cub aircraft came to light; white silk curtains moved softly in the breeze.� Silence!

�� The bed she lay in was a long white surgeon's operating table with gleaming leverage members in tubular steel.� She lay so still, like the experimental aircraft she was, so to speak, (still on the secret list): covered completely in a sheet of soft parachute silk, which stretched down to the floor on both sides.� But her silhouette gave the illusion of completeness - a whole, undisbembered body of a corpse, woman, doll or whatever.� "You said she was still in bits" I said and Marchant tittered with pleasure.� "They are not completely joined up as yet for action, but I want to give you the illusion of how she's going to be by showing her to you bit by bit, so you don't see the joins.� The power isn't in yet, but I get some traction off another unit which enables us the check the whole flexion patterns of our fine plastic musculature.� I plug her into a g-circuit."� He performed some obscure evolutions in the corner, switched on powerful theatre lights above the body, and beckoned me over with a shy grin, lifting as he did so the corner of the silk to reveal the face.� It was extraordinary to find myself gazing down upon the dead face of Iolanthe - so truthful a copy of the reality that I started with surprise even though I had been expecting something like this.� But what really took me away was the perfection of that fresh and dewy skin.� "Feel it" said Marchant.� I put my finger to her cheek; "She's warm."� Marchant laughed; "Of course she is, she's breathing, look now."� The lips parted softly and a tiny furrow of preoccupation appeared on the serene brow.� In her dream some small perplexity had surfaced here.� It was skin, though, it was human flesh.� Here she was, simply lying anaesthetised upon an operating table.� "Iolanthe!" I whispered and the lips parted as if to answer me, but she said nothing.� Marchant watched my confused excitement with a happy air of complacence.� "Whisper again and she will wake" he said, and in an incoherent uncomprehending sort of way I said: "Darling, wake up, it's Felix."� For a moment nothing, and then the whole face seemed to draw a waking breath.� The lids fluttered and very slowly opened.� "Damn" said Marchant. "Said has taken out the eyes again for restitching.� I forgot, sorry."� But I was staring entranced through the eyesockets of the model into her skull with its intricate nest of coils and wires in different-coloured threads, finer than the finest cotton.� Marchant passed his palm over the eyelids to close them, as one does with the dead; I felt rather sick in an elated sort of way.� "The eyes are over there" he said, indicating a small white glass bowl in which the eyes of the goddess floated is some sort of mucus - gum arabic?� They lay there like oysters - unrecognisable now as the most famous eyes in the world, simply because they were detached from context.

�� Ah Osiris, we must gather up the loaves and fishes; O Humpty Dumpty we must put you together again.� But Marchant was irritated by this trifling misadventure and drew the sheet back over the face.� He went on to a demonstration of the thigh and ankle flexion - a perfect beautiful leg was revealed, of positively Botticellian elegance, and again warm, palpably real, a breathing leg so to speak.� "Of course most of the fun has been in playing with the surfaces, the decoration, since we were ordered to reproduce from a known model.� But her skin, boy, is just as beautiful as the real stuff and rather longer lasting.� I must say that nylon pencil you invented has been a godsend."� So I had invented a nylon pencil - what the devil can that have been?� "Once again you've forgotten" he said.� "It was just a hint you threw out once which we took up.� My dear boy, look."� He took a fine scalpel and cut a long incision in the thigh, spreading the wound with a clamp.� No blood, of course, nor sawdust as in an old-fashioned gollywog but a beautifully coiled nest of vivid plastic cones and wires, packed tight as caviar.� "Now look" he says and takes a thick metal pencil which he draws along the lips of the wound.� It closes instantly leaving no trace of the gash in the warm thigh.� "For running repairs - what would we have done without it?� So swift, so easy.� You can open it, her, up anywhere in an instant and reseal the wound.� Good old Felix" he added with an incandescent admiration.

�� "Good old Felix" I echoed.� We know not what to do, Bolsover, we know not what to do.� I sank into an armchair and began to smoke like Vesuvius.� "Mother of God, Marchant, what a treat she is.� Will you give me the specifications please?"

�� "Of course" he said, rubbing his hands.� "I don't think there will be much you don't understand; most of the data comes from your old scrying board - only of course very much reduced and in finer-web materials."� I shook my head doubtfully.� I had never worked on this scale before - through a jeweller's eyepiece or a microscope, so to speak.� I stared into the mental sky of science and muttered "E pur si muove."� That was the damnedest thing of all.� Marchant stared at me with schoolboy glee and said: "Yes, you can't put your telescope to your blind eye on this lot; we are getting as near as dammit to the target objective."

�� He was acclimatised, I could see; but despite all he had told me about the project I found this experience to be quite a shock.� Nor was it all.� "Come and look" he said "at the vagina, the real treasure."� He made some artful disposition of the shroud and revealed the downy sex of Iolanthe.� "Stick your finger in there and feel - a self-lubricating mucous surface imitated to the life."� I felt an awful cringe of misgiving as I did so, albeit reluctantly.� He cackled happily and slapped my back.� "You don't like it, do you?� It seems an intolerable affront to her privacy and her beauty?� I know, I know.� I couldn't do it for weeks, she had become so real to me.� But I had to.� I had to take myself in hand and remind myself that I was a scientist after all - a man rather than a mouse."� I felt shaken by a sort of remorse; it was silly to feel like this about the private parts of a dummy.� Yet, so deeply buried are these motor complexes derived from the education of the tribe, that they come to the surface in quite involuntary fashion.� Poor Iolanthe, lying there asleep and in pieces, to be fingered over by mousemen!� I felt as if I had insulted her dignity.� Marchant knew perfectly well the feeling.� He had already felt that way himself, and steeled himself against it.� I mopped my brow and thanked him.� "But why does Julian want this sort of thing copied?" I asked in an outraged and aggrieved fashion.� "Does he expect them to reproduce?"� Marchant shrugged.� "I don't know; they won't ever be anything but simulacra of fertility.� Not only that, they can neither eat nor excrete.� But he won't say what he has in mind.� What will she do for an �tat civil my lad?� No good asking me."� He burst into a small cackle of helpless laughter and sat down in a chair to wipe his spectacles.� "Phew!" I said.

�� The dossier on the figure was almost as thick as the Bible, though rather more intelligible for someone of my outlook.� I riffled it and put it in my briefcase abruptly.� I had a sudden feeling that I wanted to go away and be alone with myself, with my brief, with my dossier - and singularly enough with Benedicta.� Marchant seemed a little disappointed that I had nothing much more to say at this stage.� He eyed me keenly and said, "You are in on this thing Felix, aren't you?"� I smiled and nodded.� "You aren't" he went on "going to let theoretical considerations intrude on the work, are you?"� It was as if he were pleading for Iolanthe's life - the life of that marvellous mummy lying so silently under her silken shroud of grey.� "No" I said.� "I'm in it all right."

�� He heaved a sigh of relief, as we went out to the car.� I was to be driven home and dropped - the great d�m�nagement to the cottage from Claridge's was only a day or so old.� But I was glad when the chauffeur produced an afternoon paper for Marchant as it kept him busy, inveterate punter that he was.� A headline said MOBS SOB AS DALI LAYS EGG.� Good.� Good.� "I want to watch when you replace the eyes, remember."� But I was thinking to myself about memory - is everything recorded in it from the first birth-cry to the death-rattle?� Why not?� Or does it simply wear out like an old disc?� In Abel's system the sound unit, the pogon, gave you a clue to the basic predispositions of character which was then modified by experiences, environment, etc.... Yes, that side of the thing was all right.� "My God, it's begun to snow" said Marchant, and so it had; the sky fell out of its frame, turned into a great flocculent pane of melting confetti and came down over us locking up visibility; we nosed down the country roads between spectral hedges and sculptured gateposts - griffins in wigs on the front gates of Drue Manor.� Plastic elves in white cauls on the lawns of suburban houses.� Ah to be a quiet man, living sagely with a little plastic wife, following out the serpentine meanderings of my inner self ... why hasn't God made me a quietist?� Nigaud, va.

�� I made them keep the headlights on to enable me to grope my way across the meadow and skirt the disappeared lake; it was all crackly underfoot.� When I looked round the snow had swallowed them up.� Like a blind man I clutched my way up the steps of the chalet and at last found the latch.� Ah, the warmth inside, the blazing fire of thorn and oak, the smells, and Benedicta pyjama-clad asleep before the fire with Osmosis the cat on her stomach.� "One side of your face is all burning, bottom as well" I said.� "Better turn over."� But she preferred to wake.� "Caradoc has been ringing you this afternoon.� He seemed to be rather drunk.� I told him to record himself and go to hell, which he duly did."� But either he had been more than just drunk or else his sound track had got itself mixed with other stuff for it was a mighty incoherent display of temperament beginning with a poem of which I could only make out the lines:

�� Fornication's pedalled jam

�� Which has brought me where I am

and ending with a request for a Christmas Box of fifty pounds.� "I am at the Metrofat Hotel in Brighton with a young lady who is all warm breast of Christmas Turkey; greetings of the Season to one and all.� Did you see my little thing in The Times?� 'Grand g�nie, l�g�rement bomb� mais valide, cherche organiste.'� Had no replies yet."

�� "Well," I said "he sounds all right."� I poured a drink and resumed my inward brooding upon Iolanthe.� I told Benedicta a bit about the marvels of the dummy - it, her? -- and how it had given me quite a turn to see the faithfulness of her copy.� She looked at me curiously, seriously, and said nothing.� "I wonder if I could raise Julian!" I said.� "I would like to have a talk with him about her.� He hasn't seen her as yet himself.� I wonder if he knows what's in store if she really works down to the last rivet."

�� "Try the Casino in Divonne.� Anyway he always leaves his number wherever he goes."

�� The night switchboard at Merlin's took not much more than half an hour to trace him.� That characteristic voice, full of the illustrious melancholy of a dispossessed potentate.... "What is it Julian - you sound so sad?"� He sighed ruefully.� "Yes.� I am losing so heavily.� It gets more and more mysterious.� I wonder what I have done to shift the axis, so to speak, of my luck?� It was always in perfect working order.� I lost at Divonne and am continuing to lose down here in Nice, where it is snowing if you please."� He paused and in the background I could hear the yelping of croupiers.� "Consult Nash" I said and he sighed again.� "It would be useless.� He could tell me why I played but not why after always winning I have started losing - why the bung-hole has dropped out of my luck.� I have done everything, changed my game more than once.� Damn it all."

�� There was another long pause; of course Julian had always been of a melancholy and introspective cast of mind, but he had never given himself, his views, so freely to anyone.� "It's your fault for taking Abel apart" I said.� "He might have suggested an answer."� You can't hear a smile on the telephone but I did - a world-weary sad smile.� "It was another gamble.� I had to try to suck you dry in case you never came back, to ensure the perpetuity of the firm!"� A fine light irony played about the phrase.� "Like Rackstraw" I said and he nodded invisibly.� "The vulture always waits" said Julian.� I heard the puff puff of his cigar.� I stayed silent, feeling that perhaps there was something he wanted to get off his chest before listening to whatever I myself wanted to say to him.� But he said nothing, and an operator asked if we were still talking: actually we were.� All his loneliness and despondency were leaking down the wire like a low-tension current: also a certain anxiety.� I felt he was glad to have even this mechanical contact with someone.

�� "Felix" he said hesitantly, as if he were feeling slowly, blindly along the Ariadne-thread of an idea he wanted to express.� "How lucky you are not to be a gambler.� We constitute a different tribe, you know, belong to a different totem.� I realised tonight that I am only really at home in a casino; I really have no foyer, no hearth of my own, except here.� When I go from here I don't go anywhere in particular.� A hotel isn't a home; and my so-called home is only a hotel.� Now be a good boy, don't quote Freud.� The matter is much more fundamental than that."

�� Pause for breath.� "When you see all these pale, exhausted faces in the light of dawn, after their fruitless love-affair with the wheel or the dice or the pack: this sterile love affair, because even the winners express a haggard lost feeling - why, you realise that masturbation isn't the real clue.� The gambler is really dicing with death, as the popular saying goes.� Just as� all dancers are simply persuaders to the act, so gambling is a sort of questioning, an act of divination.� How weary of it we all are, yet it is only situation which enables us to feel vicariously alive, this side of death."

�� I said nothing; the sorrow in his voice was absolutely overwhelming.� He went on very slowly, like an exhausted climber reaching for handholds, languid for lack off oxygen.� "But then what is the question that the gambler put to himself by the act of gambling?� What does he hope that the dice will tell him?� Well, think of the strange symbolic pilgrimage he is forced to make to the casino when he can find one - as characteristic as that made by other men to a brothel.� He enters, reveals his identity by producing a passport or other document; he fills in a carte d'admission.� Then he passes in front of the 'physionomiste', a 'scanner' who subjects his face, hands and body to a close scrutiny.� This is as intensive as a police check though he does not touch you.� My various faces must be on record somewhere in somebody's mind.� A scar, a tattoo mark, a blemish - that is what they look for, this race of 'scanners'.

�� "Once past this barrier he is admitted to the temple of the supreme Game which he craves; and here everything speaks to him of the past, a vanished epoch.� An old-fashioned anachronistic d�cor, whole surfaces of dusty unspringing carpets such as one would find only in abandoned Edwardian hotels or in late spa hotels at Vichy, Pau, Baden.� The fuzzy chandeliers, broken-down salon de luxe festering away in their desuetude.� Even the costumes of the croupiers and often the gambler's own partake of this strange out-of-dateness.� It is as if everything had become stuck fast like an atrophied limb - death in aspic.� The formulae too are all part of this strange marvellous stereotype, as superannuated as a half-forgotten liturgy.� It smells like a page or two of Huysmans.� Yes, but all this is deliberate; this atmosphere is anxiously preserved, conserved, watched over.� And the premises themselves should if possible smell airless and ever so slightly dusty.� You do not want fresh air in a casino.� The ritual forbids it.� The air must rest, tideless, scentless, and only just breathable.� The gambler feels at home then like a fish in water of the right temperature.� His nostrils breathe this warm welcoming balsam.� He knows what he must do, he simply must."

�� In this slow near-soliloquy I felt once more all the rancour and despair of his inner loneliness welling up in him - though why for the first time he should choose to allow me to be a party to it I could not tell.� Somewhere a bell rang and voices buzzed to the tune of the big wheel.� Julian appeared to be listening to it all with half an ear even as he was talking to me.� So much of it I remembered myself, too, from my one brief flirtation with the law of probability - is there such a thing?� Poking the cat with my foot I shared Julian's curious muse in silence for a moment.

�� Yes, he was right: the weight of the ritual, the entering, the form-filling.... Then he decision between les Salles Priv�es and the cuisine.... On which front to attack the demon of hazard, he whom Poincar� called "the real mathematician of genius"?� Ah, those long interior debates on the thirty-seven slots in the wheel (alchemy?), eighteen red and eighteen black with the somehow inevitable white zero.� A sort of Tarot of probability instead of a calculus ... (perhaps Abel?).� But behind the silence of Julian I heard a voice calling, as if from a cloud, "Vingt-et-un rouge, impair et passe."� And I saw the lean face of the arbiter, the chef de partie, sitting up there on his throne, his baby-chair, overlooking the celestial game, impervious to human feelings of gain or loss, a sort of God.� And then I thought, too, of all the gambler's fevers and follies.� In that expensive and beautifully cut suit of his, in the breast pocket, he carried a typical talisman, a rabbit's paw.

�� "Change your talisman" I said.� "Why not get a fox's paw, or the dried paw of a great lizard, or a human hand?"

�� "Fatal" he replied drily.� "You know it."

�� Julian was a heavy staker in the Salle Priv�es and richly merited the French slang word for the breed, flambeur, inflamer: the flame of pure desire, the mathematical desire to know.� Not to be, but� to know.� And of course he had always won.� The croupiers had always passed him hiss mound of golden ordure which for him symbolised so much more than a unit of value.� Negligently but voluptuously he must have fingered it always, before throwing it back into the melting-pot - for only with gold can one make gold, whatever the wizards may tell you.� I remembered too that when numbers run in a series they are said in gambler's slang to be en chaleur, on heat.

�� "None of this can have anything to do with what you wanted to talk to me about," he said "and I apologise.� I was in rather a reflective mood this evening.� What did you want to tell me about, Felix?"

�� "Iolanthe.� I went to see her with Marchant today, and I'm still a little groggy with surprise.� It is the most astonishingly life-like thing I've ever seen.� And if everything he tells me is true it will be rather unique.� But I haven't read the specifications in detail yet.� I'll do that this week.� But there were one or two things which struck me about her, it."

�� "I'm delighted that you are excited" he said, and sounded almost moved himself.� "But" I went on "I felt that I wanted to go over some of the points with you in case we hadn't fully understood your idea - I suppose, for example, the male will be much the same?"

�� "Same what?"

�� "Fair without, false within.� I mean I found myself wondering why we were copying the outside with such fidelity when the inside is an artificially arranged thing with simply a stress, strain, flexion index."

�� "It's not entirely true - what about the brainbox?"

�� "But they will never eat, excrete or fornicate...."

�� "We are perhaps asking for too much at this stage.� Let's go step by step.� I wasn't hoping for reality so much as for the perfect illusion which is probably more real than reality itself is for most people; hence my choice of the screen-star symbol..� As for fornicating, I suppose they can go through the motions, though it will be without result, sterile; but they will try to illustrate an aesthetic of Beauty, which is always in the eye of the beholder as 'The Duchess' tells us.� Eh?"

�� "Eunochs!"

�� "If you wish; but did Aphrodite eat and excrete?� I am not enough of a classical scholar to quibble about it.� After all these are only serious toys, Felix, serious toys."

�� "But Marchant insists they are so perfectly adapted from the point of view of responses that they could, according to him, be turned loose in the real world without danger of being discovered for what they are."

�� "Why not, Felix?� They will probably be more real than most of the people we know.� But of course I have no intention of setting them free; first of all, Iolanthe's face is world-famous.� We mustn't run the risk of their getting damaged.� No, I thought of them living in seclusion quietly somewhere where we could work-study them; they are far the most advanced things of their kind, after all?"

�� "Hum.� And who will the male doll be based on; we only have legs and the outline of a pelvis as yet.� Eh?"

�� He yawned briefly and then went on in the same even tone.� "You can guess how much I would have liked to aspire to the role myself - but it would bee too Pharaonic, a sort of embalmer's picnic.� So I have stepped down in favour of Rackstraw."

�� "Rackstraw?"

�� "We will confer a vicarious immortality on him; he will end as a museum piece in some colony of waxworks.� But of course I mean Rackstraw as he was once, not as he is now.� Once again, we have all the information we need about him.� Any objections?"

�� "No.� But the whole thing seems bizarre."

�� "In one sense I suppose it is; but then Felix, it's only a gambler's idea.� I remember you once insisting that habit grooves the sensibility, that even movements repeated endlessly generate comprehension, just as an engine generates traction, or sticks rubbed together, fire.� What I wonder is this: will perhaps this creature of human habits one day, simply by acting as a human being, REALISE she is a dummy?"� The capital words was practically hissed into the telephone.� "As much, I mean, as the original realised she was Iolanthe?� It's a gamble, and like all prototypes our models may prove too clumsy for us to practise divination on or by them.� But then if one does not live on hopes in this life what else is there to live on?"

�� "I see."

�� "Good night Felix" he said.� "Wish me a run of luck will you?� I am in mortal need of it."

�� The line went dead.� I sat for a long moment before hanging up from my end.� Benedicta was laying out our dinner before the fire, ladling out soup into the bright earthenware pots which looked Italian.� I was in a state of unusual and rather violent excitement - though I honestly don't know why. �Of course in part it was all the implications of this extraordinary project; but I had seen others, far more theoretical, where the issues were much more in doubt.� And of course, with one half of my mind, I could not help thinking of it as a bit infantile.� Was it though?� At any rate, whatever the cause, I ate in very perfunctory fashion while I dipped here and there into my brief - the dossier.� It was all as beautifully and methodically laid out as the specifications for a new aircraft.� The only question was: would it fly, how would it handle etc. etc.?

�� "Benedicta," I said "I must go out for a walk.� I simply must."� She looked at me with surprise.� "In this weather?� It would be foolhardy, Felix."� But I was already groping for a heavy sweater and the stout ski-gear I had acquired in Switzerland.� Seeing I was serious she sprang up at once and joined me.� "I'm coming with you; I am not going to risk letting you fall into the lake or break your head against a tree.� It's all too new this, Felix, to be risked."� I felt a bit of a swine, but was really extremely glad to have her beside me as a sort of thinking generator.� It had stopped snowing, everything was hushed back into whiteness - apocalyptic flocks of solid cumulus which had filled out the world and blotted out the edges of things.� No moon, but an infinity of white radiance which turned the sky into an upturned inkwell.� We found a stout storm lantern in the kitchen for want of a torch, and let ourselves off the dry balcony as gingerly as swimmers entering the sea splashlessly.� The forest had still some edges left which were a help in judging our general direction - as if someone had spilled Indian ink over a lace shawl.� Within a few yards we divined rather than felt that we were upon the ice of the frozen lake.� The snow was so dry it screeched underfoot.� Somewhere in the sky wild geese cranked out to one another.

�� We made our way slowly across the lake to the little island in the centre, now piled up like a wedding-cake of whiteness.� At the far end of the lake itself a solitary figure, a gamekeeper, moved about in the greyness absorbed in a task which could only be gradually identified as we approached him.� With a crowbar and hammer he was knocking holes in the ice and pushing something down them - to feed fish perhaps?� We called out a greeting but he was completely absorbed and did not hear us.� We skirted the little islet - and gained the further shore, lengthening our stride at the feel of terra firma.� "Science is only half the apple," I told myself aloud "just as Eve is only half Adam."� Blundering along thus the mechanised philosopher could hardly help falling over the odd tree trunk, or banging his head on a branch or two.� But gradually we became accustomed to the light and were able to move about with as much certainty as one might have done by day.

�� A distinct violet shimmer in the light where it caressed the shoulders of the little hills.� On a branch one old and perished-with-cold-looking owl, fluffed out in his mink like some run-down actor.� (The margin of error in the case of such a talking mummy was, of course, enormous.)� "There is little that I can guarantee about her once she is buttoned up and launched.� I can't even say for certain that she will be good, for example, or bad; only that she is more likely to be clever than stupid."� So we struggled on down the avenues of shrouded elms, along the firebrakes which once we used to ride down, and over the frozen gudgeon.� Gradually the warmth came to our bodies despite wet boots and wetter trouser-bottoms.� Sometimes she looked at me for a moment without speaking.� So we passed the little crooked pub called The Faun which was locked and barred at this hour; a bedroom window glowed like a jewel.� Our boots rang musically on the frozen tarmac of the road as we traversed the hamlet.� Then from one of the dark barn-like houses we were surprised to see a deep red flame spring up, and spit out a great gush of brilliant sparks; it spurted and subsided, spurted and subsided, and we heard the massy ring the blacksmith's hammer on the anvil, and the wheeze of his bellows.� In the shadow of the smithy, bobbing his shadow about on the roof, moved the huge creature, stripped to the waist and sweating profusely.� We stood to watch him for a moment but he worked on methodically without giving us a glance.� Perhaps he did not even know we were there.

�� On we went, up into the white night, and it was only when we reached the old crown of Chorley with the famous "view" from its summit that Benedicta said: "By the way, I meant to tell you before I have completely surrendered, made away, all my share in the firm.� I now own nothing but what I stand up in, so to speak.� I am a public charge.� All that stands between me and starvation is your salary.� Do you mind?"

�� We stood up there gazing at each other smiling - like a couple of explorers on an ice floe, oblivious of everything but the extraordinary pleasure we were deriving from the new sensation of harmony, of comprehension and trust.� "How marvellous" I said.� "Is that what Julian meant about you having betrayed him?"� Benedicta nodded: "Only partly, though.� He was also thinking of the young German Baron; I was supposed to make him sign on the firm's strength, but I did the opposite and the firm didn't get him.� It was the first time I had deliberately set my face against Julian - he didn't like it; but so long as he needs you he can do nothing."

*�� *�� *�� *�� *

"O!� O!� O!"� Marchant was humming under his breath as he worked on Iolanthe.� "You great big beautiful doll!� I'm so very glad I found you.� Let me get my arms around you."� A low current was discharging itself through her throat and she stirred slightly in her sleep, turning her head from side to side, then yawning and smiling.� Marchant still adhered to his superstitious convention of keeping her covered while she was in pieces; so that we were working of different sections at the same time.� We would see her whole, so to speak, only when she came to be launched; by that decisive stage it would be hard to make rectifications without totally dismantling the power box with all its hair-fine infratopes - it would be as if we were forced to begin again at the beginning.� God knows how long she had cost already, probably years of amazingly detailed work.� I had a great reunion with Said, who was very smart in hefty British tweeds and who had assumed the habits and the dignity of the uniform with his usual equanimity.� It was good to feel that all that infinite patience and delicacy was really making its mark on a world which could reward him as I had never been able to when I began work with him in the Greek capital.

�� "Now" said Marchant "try her for kisses, Felix, just in case she ever needs one, or feels that way.� Eh?"� He gave her a scientific kiss on the lips and pronounced himself satisfied by their marvellous springiness, better than the real thing.� "And the mucus imitation is wonderful - like fresh dew.� And look!"� Iolanthe sighed and pouted like a child in her sleep, seeking another kiss.� Adorable!� "Your turn" he said, so I tried her out.� "I say, this is wildly exciting" I said.� "It's so damned ... well!"� Marchant burst out laughing.� "Art imitating nature" he said.� "But what about this? - come over here.� I just geared up Adam's penis yesterday for a simulated orgasm.� Man, it's perfect.� Shades of my prep school!"� On another table he uncovered, with a proprietorial air, the thigh and pelvis arrangement of the male dummy.� "Now watch" he said and began to rub the penis, which rose strongly, darkening as it became tumescent, to discharge its mock-semen.� "Talk about Ejax" said Marchant in high delight, wiping his hands on a towel.� "Once again, it's a much heavier orgasm than Dad was ever able to manage.� We could perhaps rent him out, Felix, and make a little dough.� Why shouldn't somebody love him a little, bring a little light into his male life, eh?� He should have as much chance as you or I?"� Gutta-percha, plastic, rubber, nylon....

�� "And to have done away with these two time-wasting and boring activities, eating and excreting, surely they will be grateful to us for having done it."� I scratched my head.� "Suppose she becomes too inhibited by half - I mean what does she do at mealtimes?"� Marchant replied tartly: "Exactly what any other actress does - takes out a cigarette and says, 'Darling, I think I'll just have a glass of water.'� She will go through all the motions without actually eating.� She is not forbidden tobacco, by the way.� My dear chap, she is fully fashioned this girl.� Easy to be with, easy to love...."� He was humming again, in high good humour.� What a strange thing the human body is - I was feeling that warm hand with its lazy fingers moving slightly under mine.� Strange foliage of toes and fingers, elaborate patterning of muscle, striped and streaky.

�� So the great work moved slowly forward towards launching day; it was arranged that Iolanthe should imagine herself to be waking in hospital after an operation, recovering from the anaesthetic.� Once dressed she would be moved into a small villa which had been furnished for he with her own possessions - Julian had acquired them all, furs, and ballgowns, and shoes and wigs.� In other words, to give her reaction-index and memory a chance to function normally, we would provide ideal test-conditions in ideal surroundings.� All around her would be the familiar furniture of her "real" life - her books and folios of film photos, her cherished watercolours by famous artists (careful investment: all film stars buy Braque).... There would, then, on the purely superficial plane, be very little to distinguish between Iolanthe dead and Iolanthe living.� Except of course.... The dummy would be living the "real" life of the screen goddess.

�� But if we were working, so was Julian in his tortuous way; he had returned from his gambling bender both poorer and richer - for the fever had left him abruptly as it so often did for months at a time.� It was like an underground river this illness, appearing and disappearing, now above ground now below - never constant.� But he spent long evenings now in the little projection theatre he had built for himself, playing through the films of Iolanthe in a quiet deliberate muse; beside him sat Rackstraw mumbling and nodding with flickering attention, and on the other side the strange graven image which was Mrs. Henniker.� There they sat, the three of them, fixed by the silver dazzle into silhouettes of hungry attention.� Mrs. Henniker was going to take up her old post as companion-secretary to Iolanthe as soon as she "awoke".� As for Rackstraw, there was little enough to be squeezed out of him.� At times he seemed to have glimmers of recognition, but then his attention would slip, and he would mumble incoherently before subsiding into sleep, the softly nodding drowse of old age.� Yet in some way, and for some particular purpose, Julian held this little group together for a whole winter - though really I could not understand for what reason.� At least, Henniker had a role to play, but what about Rackstraw? �Julian must clearly have had something fairly clear in mind which prompted these sudden periods of self-dedication to what might have seemed a futile activity. There was also in the case of Julian a curious intermittent play, an alternating current, so to say, between intellectual boldness and cowardice.� Perhaps the word is too strong - but when you think that the Iolanthe we were building was his particular obsession: why did he never come and see her?� He used on the contrary to ring up Marchant and myself and discuss the various stages of our work with a kind of voluptuary's nostalgia.� But when I said: "Why not come and see tomorrow what you think of her?" he replied at once: "No, Felix.� Not until she is word-perfect, until she is complete."� I sensed a tremor of something like fear in the words; but of course it was always accompanied by that wonderful self-deprecating charm.� "You see I have never met her, I shall have to be introduced."

�� As for Io, she was getting so real as almost to be a pet.� Machinery has this peculiar tug on the crude affections of the human race; why else do men christen their cars and sailing-boats?� I must confess that the first time we hooked up the memory-reproduction complex I had the most extraordinary thrill, almost sexual, in hearing that marvellous rather husky voice saying (as if she had a hangover): "And I told Henniker it wouldn't do, it simply wouldn't do; Felix, love is all in compartments, otherwise it wouldn't be a universal disease.� It's silly that we only have one word for it.� And the ones we have are very inadequate to deal with its variety - like esteem, affection, tenderness, sympathy.� It isn't classified as yet in any language."� I sat down with a bump on my chair and Marchant thrust a glistening sweaty face up against mine, exulting: "Do you think one could improve on her?� Now tell me honestly."� I could only shake my head wonderingly.� It really was quite devastating the extent of the dummy's habituation to the ordinary terms of what we might call the human condition - if you can just simply imagine an object called "self" operating with a frame of memory, habit, impulse, inhibition and so on.� It looked as if in another month or so she might be safely placed in the orbit of an ordinary life - held in harness as all of us are, purely by the routines of the daily round.� Feeding on the rarefied air of inner space, correcting by willpower the gravitational pull of the passions - which to so many modern scientists seem little better than a bundle of assorted death-wishes.� But of course inevitably the unlegislated-for quality made its appearance - for an example, we hadn't really thought of "charm" as an ingredient when we specified her; but her charm was devastating - and surely it is the one thing you would expect her makers to remember from the original actress?� So that, on the one hand, while we really knew all about her, she continued to surprise us during the long period which passed between her being in pieces, and being united.� The day I mean when she woke up completely, yawned, knuckled her eyes and said: "Where am I?� What time is it?"� And then as she gradually took in her surroundings and the men in white coats around her, added: "Is it all right - that old appendix?"

�� At the moment she was still a set of intermittent responses; her eyes were in, but had to be left a week or more to "set" properly so that she might use them.� So that she still slept all day, and still kept her eyes closed when she spoke, the sound welling sleepily out of that beautifully formed humorous mouth.� We have even forgotten (how is this possible: please tell me?), we had forgotten that she would know all about us, even our names.� Or let me put it this way: we knew with one part of our minds, but not with such conviction that it didn't give us a tremendous start to hear her use them.� It was even stranger when, fetching back a memory from the very beginning of our Athens days, she spoke to me in Greek.� "They say I shall never have a child, but I am glad.� Would you like to have a child, Felix?"� And it was here that my memory was faulty while her artificial one worked perfectly; I had forgotten what my answer was on that particular occasion.� She was full of small surprises like these.� But we still had to select a date for an awakening.