Vintage Classics

One

The play - for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper- was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a break- fast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor -in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on 'a windy sunlit day in spring'.

Mrs Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the author's arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother's face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap -ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet -and said that the play was 'stupendous ',and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl's ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.

Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfilment. Nothing came near it forsatisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony's services as a bridesmaid.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way -towards their owner -as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony's was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table -cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice -suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen's army awaiting orders.

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool's gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel's skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

At the age of eleven she wrote her first story -a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folk tales and lacking, she realised later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader's respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric',a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation', the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory 'journey through the night, the king's fur- rowed brow was the 'hieroglyph'of his displeasure. Briony was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and older sister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding her family's total attention as she cast her narrative spell.

Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia's enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word- a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. A crisis in a heroine's life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.

The play she had written for Leon's homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine's face -beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had in finite variation. A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. The Trials of Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the term. The piece was intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order, and the innocent intensity with which Briony set about the project -the posters, tickets, sales booth -made her particularly vulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed Leon with another of her stories, but it was the news that her cousins from the north were coming to stay that had prompted this leap into a new form.

That Lola, who was fifteen, and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot, were refugees from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more to Briony. She had heard her mother criticise the impulsive behaviour of her younger sister Hermione, and lament the situation of the three children, and denounce her meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had fled to the safety of All Souls College, Oxford. Briony had heard her mother and sister analyse the latest twists and outrages, charges and counter charges, and she knew her cousins'visit was an open-ended one, and might even extend into term time. She had heard it said that the house could easily absorb three children, and that the Quinceys could stay as long as they liked, provided the parents, if they ever visited simultaneously, kept their quarrels away from the Tallis household. Two rooms near Briony's had been dusted down, new curtains had been hung and furniture carried in from other rooms. Normally, she would have been involved in these preparations, but they happened to coincide with her two-day writing bout and the beginnings of the front-of-house construction. She vaguely knew that divorce was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject,and gave it no thought. It was a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder. Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union. A good wedding was an unacknowledged representation of the as yet unthinkable - sexual bliss. In the aisles of country churches and grand city cathedrals, witnessed by a whole society of approving family and friends, her heroines and heroes reached their innocent climaxes and needed to go no further.

If divorce had presented itself as the dastardly antithesis of all this, it could easily have been cast onto the other pan of the scales, along with betrayal, illness, thieving, assault and mendacity. Instead it showed an unglamorous face of dull complexity and incessant wrangling. Like re-armament and the Abyssinia Question and gardening, it was simply not a subject, and when, after a long Saturday morning wait, Briony heard at last the sound of wheels on the gravel below her bedroom window, and snatched up her pages and ran down the stairs, across the hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was not insensitivity so much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her to shout to the dazed young visitors huddled together by the trap with their luggage, 'I've got your parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow! Rehearsals start in five minutes!'

Immediately, her mother and sister were there to interpose a blander timetable. The visitors -all three were ginger-haired and freckled -were shown their rooms, their cases were carried up by Hardman's son Danny, there was cordial in the kitchen, a tour of the house, a swim in the pool and lunch in the south garden, under the shade of the vines. All the while, Emily and Cecilia Tallis maintained a patter that surely robbed the guests of the ease it was supposed to confer. Briony knew that if she had travelled two hundred miles to a strange house, bright questions and jokey asides, and being told in a hundred different ways that she was free to choose, would have oppressed her. It was not generally realised that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone. However, the Quinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this boded well for The Trials of Arabella :this trio clearly had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely resembled the characters they were to play. Before lunch Briony slipped away to the empty rehearsal room- the nursery - and walked up and down on the painted floorboards, considering her casting options.

On the face of it, Arabella, whose hair was as dark as Briony's, was unlikely to be descended from freckled parents, or elope with a foreign freckled count, rent a garret room from a freckled innkeeper, lose her heart to a freckled prince and be married by a freckled vicar before a freckled congregation. But all this was to be so. Her cousins'colouring was too vivid -virtually fluorescent! - to be concealed. The best that could be said was that Arabella's lack of freckles was the sign -the hieroglyph, Briony might have written -of her distinction. Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. There was a further problem with the twins, who could not be told apart by a stranger. Was it right that the wicked count should so completely resemble the handsome prince, or that both should resemble Arabella's father and the vicar? What if Lola were cast as the prince? Jackson and Pierrot seemed typical eager little boys who would probably do as they were told. But would their sister play a man? She had green eyes and sharp bones in her face, and hollow cheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strong will and a temper easily lost. Merely floating the possibility of the role to Lola might provoke a crisis, and could Briony really hold hands with her before the altar, while Jackson intoned from the Book of Common Prayer?

It was not until five o'clock that afternoon that she was able to assemble her cast in the nursery. She had arranged three stools in a row, while she herself jammed her rump into an ancient baby's high-chair - a bohemian touch that gave her a tennis umpire's advantage of height. The twins had come with reluctance from the pool where they had been for three hours without a break. They were barefoot and wore singlets over trunks that dripped onto the floorboards. Water also ran down their necks from their matted hair, and both boys were shivering and jiggled their knees to keep warm. The long immersion had puckered and bleached their skin, so that in the relatively low light of the nursery their freckles appeared black. Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her colouring. Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.

BIRDSONG - CHAPTER ONE

The Boulevard du Cange was a broad, quiet street that marked the eastern flank of the city of Amiens. The wagons that rolled in from Lille and Arras to the north made directly into the tanneries and mills of the Saint-Leu quarter without needing to use this rutted, leafy road. The town side of the boulevard backed on to substantial gardens which were squared off and apportioned with civic precision to the houses they adjoined. On the damp grass were chestnut trees, lilac and willows, cultivated to give shade and quietness to their owners. The gardens had a wild, overgrown look and their deep lawns and bursting hedges could conceals small clearings, quiet pools, and areas unvisited even by the inhabitants, where patches of grass and wild flowers lay beneath the branches of overhanging trees.

Behind the gardens the river Somme broke up into small canals that were the picturesque feature of Saint-Leu; on the other side of the boulevard these had been made into a series of water-gardens, little islands of damp fertility divided by the channels of the split river. Long, flat-bottomed boats propelled by poles took the town-dwellers through the waterways on Sunday afternoons. All along the river and its streams sat fishermen, slumped on their rods; in hats and coats beneath the cathedral and in shirtsleeves by the banks of the water-gardens, they dipped their lines in search of trout or carp.

The Azaires' house showed a strong, formal front towards the read from behind iron railings. The traffic looping down towards the river would have been in no doubt that this was the property of a substantial man. The slate roof plunged in conflicting angles to cover the irregular shape of the house. Beneath one of them a dormer window looked out on tot the boulevard. The first floor was dominated by a stone balcony over whose balustrades the red creeper had made its way up to the roof. There was a formidable front door with iron facings on to the timber.

Inside, the house was both smaller and larger than it looked. It had no rooms of intimidating grandeur, no gilt ballrooms with dripping chandeliers, yet it had unexpected spaces and corridors that disclosed new corners with steps down into the gardens; there were small salons equipped with writing desks and tapestry-covered chairs that opened inwards from unregarded passageways. Even from the end of the lawn it was difficult to see how the rooms and corridors were fitted into the placid rectangles of stone. Throughout the building the floors made distinctive sounds beneath the press of feet, so that with its closed angles and echoing air the house was always a place of unseen footsteps.

Stephen Wraysford's metal trunk had been sent ahead and was waiting at the foot of the bed. He unpacked his clothes and hung his spare suit in the giant carved wardrobe. There was an enamel wash bowl and wooden towel rail beneath the window. He had to stand on tiptoe to look out over the boulevard where a cab was waiting to the other side of the street, the horse shaking its harness and reaching up its neck to nibble at the branches of a lime tree. He tested the resilience of the bed, then lay down in it, resting his head on the concealed bolster. The room was simple but had been decorated with some care. There was a vase of wild flowers on the table and prints of street scenes in Honfleur on either side of the door.

It was a spring evening with a late sun in the sky beyond the cathedral and the sounds of blackbirds from either side of the house. Stephen washed perfunctorily and tried to flatten his black hair in the small looking glass. He placed half a dozen cigarettes in a metal case which he tucked inside his jacket. He emptied his pockets of items he no longer needed: railway tickets, a blue leather notebook and a knife with a single, scrupulously sharpened, blade.

He went downstairs to dinner, startled by the sound of his steps on the two staircases that took him to the landing of the first floor and the family bedrooms, and thence down to the hall. He felt hot beneath his waistcoat and jacket. He stood for a moment disorientated, unsure which of the four glass-panelled doors that opened off the hall was the one through which he was supposed to go. He half-opened one and found himself looking into a steam-filled kitchen in the middle of which a maid was loading plates on to a tray on a large deal table.

'This way, Monsieur. Dinner is served,' said the maid, squeezing past him in the doorway.

In the dining room the family were already seated. Madame Azaire stood up.

'Ah, Monsieur, your seat is here.'

Azaire muttered an introduction of which Stephen heard only the words 'my wife'. He took her hand and bowed his head briefly. Two children were staring at him from the other side of the table.

'Lisette,' Madame Azaire said, gesturing to a girl of perhaps sixteen with dark hair in a ribbon, who smirked and held out her hand, 'and Gregoire.' This was a boy of about ten, whose small head was barely visible above the table, beneath which he was swinging his legs vigorously backwards and forwards.

The maid hovered at Stephen's shoulder with a tureen of soup. Stephen lowered a ladleful of it into his plate and smelt the scent of some unfamiliar herb. Beneath the concentric rings of swirling green the soup was thickened with potato.

PART ONE

1

HALE knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong— belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian watercolour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost in Brighton. Fifty thousand people besides himself were down for the day, and for quite a while he gave himself up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wherever his programme allowed. For he had to stick closely to a programme: from ten till eleven Queen’s Road and Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way all down the parade to the West Pier and then to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and widely advertised sentry-go.

Advertised on every Messenger poster: ‘Kolley Kibber in Brighton today.’ In his pocket he had a packet of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route; those who found them would receive ten shillings from the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for whoever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and with a copy of the Messenger in his hand: ‘You are Mr Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize.’

This was Hale’s job to do sentry-go, until a challenger released him, in every seaside town in turn: yesterday Southend, today Brighton, tomorrow—

He drank his gin and tonic hastily as a clock struck eleven and moved out of Castle Square. Kolley Kibber always played fair, always wore the same kind of hat as in the photograph the Messenger printed, was always on time. Yesterday in Southend he had been unchallenged: the paper liked to save its guineas occasionally, but not too often. It was his duty today to be spotted—and it was his inclination too. There were reasons why he didn’t feel too safe in Brighton, even in a Whitsun crowd.

He leant against the rail near the Palace Pier and showed his face to the crowd as it uncoiled endlessly past him, like a twisted piece of wire, two by two, each with an air of sober and determined gaiety. They had stood all the way from Victoria in crowded carriages, they would have to wait in queues for lunch, at midnight half asleep they would rock back in trains to the cramped streets and the closed pubs and the weary walk home. With immense labour and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure: this sun, this music, the rattle of the miniature cars, the ghost train diving between the grinning skeletons under the Aquarium promenade, the sticks of Brighton rock, the paper sailors’ caps.

Nobody paid any attention to Hale; no one seemed to be carrying a Messenger. He deposited one of his cards carefully on the top of a little basket and moved on, with his bitten nails and his inky fingers, alone. He only felt his loneliness after his third gin; until then he despised the crowd, but afterwards he felt his kinship. He had come out of the same streets, but he was condemned by his higher pay to pretend to want other things, and all the time the piers, the peepshows pulled at his heart. He wanted to get back—but all he could do was to carry his sneer along the front, the badge of loneliness. Somewhere out of sight a woman was singing, ‘When I came up from Brighton by the train’: a rich Guinness voice, a voice from a public bar. Hale turned into the private saloon and watched her big blown charms across two bars and through a glass partition.

She wasn’t old, somewhere in the late thirties or the early forties, and she was only a little drunk in a friendly accommodating way. You thought of sucking babies when you looked at her, but if she’d borne them she hadn’t let them pull her down: she took care of herself. Her lipstick told you that, the confidence of her big body. She was well-covered, but she wasn’t careless; she kept her lines for those who cared for lines.

Hale did. He was a small man and he watched her with covetous envy over the empty glasses tipped up in the lead trough, over the beer handles, between the shoulders of the two serving in the public bar. ‘Give us another, Lily,’ one of them said and she began, ‘One night—in an alley—Lord Rothschild said to me.’ She never got beyond a few lines. She wanted to laugh too much to give her voice a chance, but she had an inexhaustible memory for ballads. Hale had never heard one of them before. With his glass to his lips he watched her with nostalgia: she was off again on a song which must have dated back to the Australian gold rush.

‘Fred,’ a voice said behind him, ‘Fred.’

The gin slopped out of Hale’s glass on to the bar. A boy of about seventeen watched him from the door—a shabby smart suit, the cloth too thin for much wear, a face of starved intensity, a kind of hideous and unnatural pride.

‘Who are you Freding?’ Hale said. ‘I’m not Fred.’

‘It don’t make any difference,’ the boy said. He turned back towards the door, keeping an eye on Hale over his narrow shoulder.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Got to tell your friends,’ the boy said.

They were alone in the saloon bar except for an old commissionaire, who slept over a pint glass of old and mild. ‘Listen,’ Hale said, ‘have a drink. Come and sit down over here and have a drink.’

‘Got to be going,’ the boy said. ‘You know I don’t drink, Fred. You forget a lot, don’t you?’

‘It won’t make any difference having one drink. A soft drink.’

‘It’ll have to be a quick one,’ the boy said. He watched Hale all the time closely and with wonder: you might expect a hunter searching through the jungle for some half-fabulous beast to look like that—at the spotted lion or the pygmy elephant—before the kill. ‘A grape-fruit squash,’ he said.

‘Go on, Lily,’ the voices implored in the public bar. ‘Give us another, Lily,’ and the boy took his eyes for the first time from Hale and looked across the partition at the big breasts and the blown charm.

‘A double whisky and a grape-fruit squash,’ Hale said. He carried them to a table, but the boy didn’t follow. He was watching the woman with an expression of furious distaste. Hale felt as if hatred had been momentarily loosened like handcuffs to be fastened round another’s wrists. He tried to joke, ‘A cheery soul.’

‘Soul,’ the boy said. ‘You’ve no cause to talk about souls.’ He turned his hatred back on Hale, drinking down the grape-fruit squash in a single draught.

Hale said, ‘I’m only here for my job. Just for the day. I’m Kolley Kibber.’

‘You’re Fred,’ the boy said.

‘All right,’ Hale said, ‘I’m Fred. But I’ve got a card in my pocket which’ll be worth ten bob to you.’

‘I know all about the cards,’ the boy said. He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like an old man’s in which human feeling has died. ‘We were all reading about you,’ he said, ‘in the paper this morning,’ and suddenly he sniggered as if he’d just seen the point of a dirty story.

‘You can have one,’ Hale said. ‘Look, take this Messenger. Read what it says there. You can have the whole prize. Ten guineas,’ he said. ‘You’ll only have to send this form to the Messenger.’

‘Then they don’t trust you with the cash,’ the boy said, and in the other bar Lily began to sing, ‘We met—’twas in a crowd—and I thought he would shun me.’ ‘Christ,’ the boy said, ‘won’t anybody stop that buer’s mouth?’

‘I’ll give you a fiver,’ Hale said. ‘It’s all I’ve got on me. That and my ticket.’

‘You won’t want your ticket,’ the boy said.

‘I wore my bridal robe, and I rivall’d its whiteness.’

The boy rose furiously, and giving way to a little vicious spurt of hatred—at the song? at the man?—he dropped his empty glass on to the floor. ‘The gentleman’ll pay,’ he said to the barman and swung through the door of the private lounge. It was then Hale realized that they meant to murder him.

‘A wreath of orange blossoms,
When next we met, she wore;
The expression of her features
Was more thoughtful than before.’

The commissionaire slept on and Hale watched her from the deserted elegant lounge. Her big breasts pointed through the thin vulgar summer dress, and he thought: I must get away from here, I must get away: sadly and desperately watching her, as if he were gazing at life itself in the public bar. But he couldn’t get away, he had his job to do: they were particular on the Messenger. It was a good paper to be on, and a little flare of pride went up in Hale’s heart when he thought of the long pilgrimage behind him: selling newspapers at street corners, the reporter’s job at thirty bob a week on the little local paper with a circulation of ten thousand, the five years in Sheffield. He was damned, he told himself with the temporary courage of another whisky, if he’d let that mob frighten him into spoiling his job. What could they do while he had people round him? They hadn’t the nerve to kill him in broad day before witnesses; he was safe with the fifty thousand visitors.

‘Come on over here, lonely heart.’ He didn’t realize at first she was speaking to him, until he saw all the faces in the public bar grinning across at him, and suddenly he thought how easily the mob could get at him with only the sleeping commissionaire to keep him company. There was no need to go outside to reach the other bar, he had only to make a semicircle through three doors, by way of the saloon bar, the ‘ladies only’. ‘What’ll you have?’ he said, approaching the big woman with starved gratitude. She could save my life, he thought, if she’d let me stick to her.

‘I’ll have a port,’ she said.

‘One port,’ Hale said.

‘Aren’t you having one?’

‘No.’ Hale said, ‘I’ve drunk enough. I mustn’t get sleepy.’

‘Why ever not—on a holiday? Have a Bass on me.’

‘I don’t like Bass.’ He looked at his watch. It was one o’clock. His programme fretted at his mind. He had to leave cards in every section: the paper in that way kept a check on him; they could always tell if he scamped his job. ‘Come and have a bite,’ he implored her.

‘Hark at him,’ she called to her friends. Her warm port-winey laugh filled all the bars. ‘Getting fresh, eh? I wouldn’t trust myself.’

‘Don’t you go, Lily,’ they told her. ‘He’s not safe.’

‘I wouldn’t trust myself,’ she repeated, closing one soft friendly cowlike eye.

There was a way, Hale knew, to make her come. He had known the way once. On thirty bob a week he would have been at home with her; he would have known the right phrase, the right joke, to cut her out from among her friends, to be friendly at a snack-bar. But he’d lost touch. He had nothing to say; he could only repeat, ‘Come and have a bite.’

‘Where shall we go, Sir Horace? To the Old Ship?’

‘Yes,’ Hale said. ‘If you like. The Old Ship.’

‘Hear that,’ she told them in all the bars, the two old dames in black bonnets in the ladies, the commissionaire who slept on alone in the private, her own half dozen cronies. ‘This gentleman’s invited me to the Old Ship,’ she said in a mock-refined voice. ‘Tomorrow I shall be delighted, but today I have a prior engagement at the Dirty Dog.’

Hale turned hopelessly to the door. The boy, he thought, would not have had time to warn the others yet. He would be safe at lunch; it was the hour he had to pass after lunch he dreaded most.

The woman said, ‘Are you sick or something?’

His eyes turned to the big breasts; she was like darkness to him, shelter, knowledge, common sense; his heart ached at the sight; but, in his little inky cynical framework of bone, pride bobbed up again, taunting him, ‘Back to the womb . . . be a mother to you . . . no more standing on your own feet.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sick. I’m all right.’

‘You look queer,’ she said in a friendly concerned way.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Hungry. That’s all.’

‘Why not have a bite here?’ the woman said. ‘You could do him a ham sandwich, couldn’t you, Bell,’ and the barman said, Yes, he could do a ham sandwich.

‘No,’ Hale said, ‘I’ve got to be getting on.’

—Getting on. Down the front, mixing as quickly as possible with the current of the crowd, glancing to right and left of him and over each shoulder in turn. He could see no familiar face anywhere, but he felt no relief. He thought he could lose himself safely in a crowd, but now the people he was among seemed like a thick forest in which a native could arrange his poisoned ambush. He couldn’t see beyond the man in flannels just in front, and when he turned his vision was blocked by a brilliant scarlet blouse. Three old ladies went driving by in an open horse-drawn carriage: the gentle clatter faded like peace. That was how some people still lived.

Hale crossed the road away from the front. There were fewer people there: he could walk faster and go further. They were drinking cocktails on the terrace of the Grand, a delicate pastiche of a Victorian sunshade twisted its ribbons and flowers in the sun, and a man like a retired statesman, all silver hair and powdered skin and double old-fashioned eyeglass, let life slip naturally, with dignity, away from him, sitting over a sherry. Down the broad steps of the Cosmopolitan came a couple of women with bright brass hair and ermine coats and heads close together like parrots, exchanging metallic confidences. ‘“My dear,” I said quite coldly, “if you haven’t learnt the Del Rey perm, all I can say—”’ and they flashed their pointed painted nails at each other and cackled. For the first time for five years Kolley Kibber was late in his programme. At the foot of the Cosmopolitan steps, in the shadow the huge bizarre building cast, he remembered that the mob had bought his paper. They hadn’t needed to watch the public house for him: they knew where to expect him.

A mounted policeman came up the road, the lovely cared-for chestnut beast stepping delicately on the hot macadam, like an expensive toy a millionaire buys for his children; you admired the finish, the leather as deeply glowing as an old mahogany table top, the bright silver badge; it never occurred to you that the toy was for use. It never occurred to Hale watching the policeman pass; he couldn’t appeal to him. A man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg and arm and shoulder, and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. ‘Shoelaces,’ the man said hopelessly to Hale, ‘matches.’ Hale didn’t hear him. ‘Razor blades.’ Hale went by, the words lodged securely in his brain: the thought of the thin wound and the sharp pain. That was how Kite was killed.

Twenty yards down the road he saw Cubitt. Cubitt was a big man, with red hair cut en brosse and freckles. He saw Hale, but he made no sign of recognition, leaning carelessly against a pillarbox watching him. A postman came to collect and Cubitt shifted. Hale could see him exchanging a joke with the postman and the postman laughed and filled his bag and all the time Cubitt looked away from him down the street waiting for Hale. Hale knew exactly what he’d do; he knew the whole bunch; Cubitt was slow and had a friendly way with him. He’d simply link his arm with Hale’s and draw him on where he wanted him to go.

CHAPTER 1

I

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: ‘I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,’ then sat pen in hand with no more to record. The captain in a white soutane stood by the open windows of the saloon reading his breviary. There was not enough air to stir the fringes of his beard. The two of them had been alone together on the river for ten days – alone, that is to say, except for the six members of the African crew and the dozen or so deck-passengers who changed, almost indistinguishably, at each village where they stopped. The boat, which was the property of the Bishop, resembled a small battered Mississippi paddle-steamer with a high nineteenth-century forestructure, the white paint badly in need of renewal. From the saloon windows they could see the river before them unwind, and below them on the pontoons the passengers sat and dressed their hair among the logs of wood for the engine.

If no change means peace, this certainly was peace, to be found like a nut at the centre of the hard shell of discomfort – the heat that engulfed them where the river narrowed to a mere hundred metres: the shower that was always hot from the ship’s engine: in the evening the mosquitoes, and in the day the tsetse flies with wings raked back like tiny jet-fighters (a board above the bank at the last village had warned them in three languages: ‘Zone of sleeping sickness. Be careful of the tsetse flies’). The captain read his breviary with a fly-whisk in his hand, and whenever he made a kill he held up the tiny corpse for the passenger’s inspection, saying ‘tsetse’ – it was nearly the limit of their communication, for neither spoke the other’s language with ease or accuracy.

This was somewhat the way in which the days passed. The passenger would be woken at four in the morning by the tinkling sound of the sanctus bell in the saloon, and presently from the window of the Bishop’s cabin, which he shared with a crucifix, a chair, a table, a cupboard where cockroaches lurked, and one picture – the nostalgic photograph of some church in Europe covered in a soutane of heavy snow – he would see the congregation going home across the gang-plank. He would watch them as they climbed the steep bank and disappeared into the bush, swinging lanterns like the carol singers he had once seen during his stay in a New England village. By five the boat was on the move again, and at six as the sun rose he would eat his breakfast with the captain. The next three hours, before the great heat had begun, were for both men the best of the day, and the passenger found that he could watch, with a kind of inert content, the thick, rapid, khaki-coloured stream against which the small boat fought its way at about three knots, the engine, somewhere below the altar and the Holy Family, groaning like an exhausted animal and the big wheel churning away at the stern. A lot of effort it seemed for so slow a progress. Every few hours a fishing village came into sight, the houses standing high on stilts to guard them against the big rains and the rats. At times a member of the crew called up to the captain, and the captain would take his gun and shoot at some small sign of life that only he and the sailor had eyes to detect among the green and blue shadows of the forest: a baby crocodile sunning on a fallen log, or a fishing eagle which waited motionless among the leaves. At nine the heat had really begun, and the captain, having finished reading his breviary, would oil his gun or kill a few more tsetse flies, and sometimes, sitting down at the dining-table with a box of beads, he would set himself the task of manufacturing cheap rosaries.

After the midday meal both men retired to their cabins as the forests sauntered by under the exhausting sun. Even when the passenger was naked it was difficult for him to sleep, and he was never finally able to decide between letting a little draught pass through his cabin or keeping the hot air out. The boat possessed no fan, and so he woke always with a soiled mouth, and while the warm water in the shower cleaned his body it could not refresh it.

There yet remained another hour or two of peace towards the end of the day, when he sat below on a pontoon while the Africans prepared their chop in the early dark. The vampire bats creaked over the forest and candles flickered, reminding him of the Benedictions of his youth. The laughter of the cooks went back and forth from one pontoon to the other, and it was never long before someone sang, but he couldn’t understand the words.

At dinner they had to close the windows of the saloon and draw the curtains to, so that the steersman might see his way between the banks and snags, and then the pressure-lamp gave out too great a heat for so small a room. To delay the hour of bed they played quatre cent vingt et un wordlessly like a ritual mime, and the captain invariably won as though the god he believed in, who was said to control the winds and waves, controlled the dice too in favour of his priest.

This was the moment for talk in garbled French or garbled Flemish if they were going to talk, but they never talked much. Once the passenger asked, ‘What are they singing, father? What kind of song? A love song?’

‘No,’ the captain said, ‘not a love song. They sing only about what has happened during the day, how at the last village they bought some fine cooking-pots which they will sell for a good profit farther up the river, and of course they sing of you and me. They call me the great fetishist,’ he added with a smile and nodded at the Holy Family and the pull-out altar over the cupboard where he kept the cartridges for his gun and his fishing-tackle. He killed a mosquito with a slap on his naked arm and said, ‘There’s a motto in the Mongo language, “The mosquito has no pity for the thin man.”’

‘What do they sing about me?’

‘They are singing now, I think.’ He put the dice and counters away and listened. ‘Shall I translate for you? It is not altogether complimentary.’

‘Yes, if you please.’

‘“Here is a white man who is neither a father nor a doctor. He has no beard. He comes from a long way away – we do not know from where – and he tells no one to what place he is going nor why. He is a rich man, for he drinks whisky every evening and he smokes all the time. Yet he offers no man a cigarette.”’

‘That had never occurred to me.’

‘Of course,’ the captain said, ‘I know where you are going, but you have never told me why.’

‘The road was closed by floods. This was the only route.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

About nine in the evening they usually, if the river had not widened and thus made navigation easy, pulled into the bank. Sometimes they would find there a rotting upturned boat which served as shelter when it rained for unlikely passengers. Twice the captain disembarked his ancient bicycle and bounced off into the dark interior to try to obtain some cargo from a colon living miles away and save it from the hands of the Otraco company, the great monopolist of the river and the tributaries, and there were times, if they were not too late in tying up, when they received unexpected visitors. On one occasion a man, a woman, and a child, with sickly albino skins that came from years of heat and humidity, emerged from the thick rain-forest in an old station wagon; the man drank a glass or two of whisky, while he and the priest complained of the price that Otraco charged for fuelling wood and spoke of the riots hundreds of miles away in the capital, while the woman sat silent holding the child’s hand and stared at the Holy Family. When there were no European visitors there were always the old women, their heads tied up in dusters, their bodies wrapped in mammycloths, the once bright colours so faded that you could scarcely detect the printed designs of match-boxes, sodawater siphons, telephones, or other gimmicks of the white man. They shuffled into the saloon on their knees and patiently waited under the roaring pressure-lamp until they were noticed. Then, with an apology to his passenger, the captain would send him to his cabin, for these were confessions that he had to hear in secret. It was the end of one more day.

II

For several mornings they were pursued by yellow butterflies which were a welcome change from the tsetses. The butterflies came tacking into the saloon as soon as it was light, while the river still lay under a layer of mist like steam on a vat. When the mist cleared they could see one bank lined with white nenuphars which from a hundred yards away resembled a regiment of swans. The colour of the water in this wider reach was pewter, except where the wheel churned the wake to chocolate, and the green reflection of the woods was not mirrored on the surface but seemed to shine up from underneath the paper-thin transparent pewter. Two men who stood in a pirogue had their legs extended by their shadows so that they appeared to be wading knee-deep in the water. The passenger said, ‘Look, father, over there. Doesn’t that suggest to you an explanation of how Christ was thought to be walking on the water?’ but the captain, who was taking aim at a heron standing behind the rank of nenuphars, did not bother to answer. He had a passion for slaughtering any living thing, as though only man had the right to a natural death.

After six days they came to an African seminary standing like an ugly red-brick university at the top of the clay bank. At this seminary the captain had once taught Greek, and so they stopped here for the night, partly for old times’ sake and partly to enable them to buy wood at a cheaper price than Otraco charged. The loading began immediately – the young black seminarists were standing ready, before the ship’s bell rang twice, to carry the wood on to the pontoons so that the boat might be cast off again at the first hint of light. After their dinner the priests gathered in the common-room. The captain was the only one to wear a soutane. One father, with a trim pointed beard, dressed in an open khaki shirt, reminded the passenger of a young officer of the Foreign Legion he had once known in the East whose recklessness and ill-discipline had led to an heroic and wasteful death; another of the fathers might have been taken for a professor of economics, a third for a lawyer, a fourth for a doctor, but the too easy laughter, the exaggerated excitement over some simple game of cards with matches for stakes had the innocence and immaturity of isolation – the innocence of explorers marooned on an icecap or of men imprisoned by a war which has long passed out of hearing. They turned the radio on for the evening news, but this was just habit, the imitation of an act performed years ago for a motive they no longer remembered clearly; they were not interested in the tensions and changing cabinets of Europe, they were barely interested in the riots a few hundred miles away on the other side of the river, and the passenger became aware of his own safety among them – they would ask no intrusive questions. He was again reminded of the Foreign Legion. If he had been a murderer escaping from justice, not one would have had the curiosity to probe his secret wound.

And yet – he could not tell why – their laughter irritated him, like a noisy child or a disc of jazz. He was vexed by the pleasure which they took in small things – even in the bottle of whisky he had brought for them from the boat. Those who marry God, he thought, can become domesticated too – it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word ‘Love’ means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and ‘Ave Maria’ like ‘dearest’ is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves – it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

The laughter rose higher. The captain had been caught cheating, and now each priest in turn tried to outdo his neighbour by stealing matches, making surreptitious discards, calling the wrong suit – the game, like so many children’s games, was about to reach an end in chaos, and would there be tears before bed? The passenger got impatiently up and walked away from them around the dreary common-room. The face of the new Pope, looking like an eccentric headmaster, stared at him from the wall. On top of a chocolate-coloured dresser lay a few romans policiers and a stock of missionary journals. He opened one: it reminded him of a school magazine. There was an account of a football match at a place called Oboko and an old boy was writing the first instalment of an essay called ‘A Holiday in Europe’. A wall-calendar bore the photograph of another mission: there was the same kind of hideous church built of unsuitable brick beside a priest’s verandahed house. Perhaps it was a rival school. Grouped in front of the buildings were the fathers: they were laughing too. The passenger wondered when it was that he had first begun to detest laughter like a bad smell.

He walked out into the moonlit dark. Even at night the air was so humid that it broke upon the cheek like tiny beads of rain. Some candles still burned on the pontoons and a torch moved along the upper deck, showing him where the boat was moored. He left the river and found a rough track which started behind the classrooms and led towards what geographers might have called the centre of Africa. He followed it a short way, for no reason that he knew, guided by the light of moon and stars; ahead of him he could hear a kind of music. The track brought him into a village and out the other side. The inhabitants were awake, perhaps because the moon was full: if so they had marked its exact state better than his diary. Men were beating on old tins they had salvaged from the mission, tins of sardines and Heinz beans and plum jam, and someone was playing a kind of home-made harp. Faces peered at him from behind small fires. An old woman danced awkwardly, cracking her hips under a piece of sacking, and again he felt taunted by the innocence of the laughter. They were not laughing at him, they were laughing with each other, and he was abandoned, as he had been in the living-room of the seminary, to his own region where laughter was like the unknown syllables of an enemy tongue. It was a very poor village: the thatch of the clay huts had been gnawed away a long time since by rats and rain, and the women wore only old clouts, which had once seen service for sugar or grain, around their waists. He recognized them as pygmoids – bastard descendants of the true pygmies. They were not a powerful enemy. He turned and went back to the seminary.

The room was empty, the card-game had broken up, and he passed to his bedroom. He had become so accustomed to the small cabin that he felt defenceless in this vast space which held only a washstand with a jug, basin and glass, a chair, a narrow bed under a mosquito-net, and a bottle of boiled water on the floor. One of the fathers, who was presumably the Superior, knocked and came in. He said, ‘Is there anything you want?’

‘Nothing. I want nothing.’ He nearly added, ‘That is my trouble.’

The Superior looked in the jug to see whether it was full. ‘You will find the water very brown,’ he said, ‘but it is quite clean.’ He lifted the lid of a soap-dish to assure himself that the soap had not been forgotten. A brand-new orange tablet lay there.

‘Lifebuoy,’ the Superior said proudly.

‘I haven’t used Lifebuoy,’ the passenger said, ‘since I was a child.’

‘Many people say it is good for prickly heat. But I never suffer from that.’

Suddenly the passenger found himself unable any longer not to speak. He said, ‘Nor I. I suffer from nothing. I no longer know what suffering is. I have come to an end of all that too,’

‘Too?’

‘Like all the rest. To the end of everything.’

The Superior turned away from him without curiosity. He said, ‘Oh well, you know, suffering is something which will always be provided when it is required. Sleep well. I will call you at five.’

The hour shortly after dawn found Captain Antonio Corelli waiting in vain at the entrance of the yard for Carlo to come and fetch him away. The latter had broken a shackle on the suspension of his jeep, and was engaged in kicking the tyres and swearing at the profound potholes in the road that had undone his early start. He already possessed a deep horror of letting down the captain, a horror shared by all the men who served under him, and his fractious ill-temper was exacerbated when he tried to light a cigarette, only to find that the desiccated rod of powdery tobacco slid out of its tube of paper and smouldered insolently in the dust, leaving him with a piece of scorchingly hot paper that stuck tenaciously to his lower lip. He pulled the paper away, and it removed a tag of skin. He licked the stinging wound, touched it with his finger, and cursed the Germans for their success in monopolising the supplies of the best tobacco. A thin old peasant mounted sidesaddle on a donkey passed him by, saw the broken state of the vehicle as it sagged to one side, smiled with satisfaction, and raised a hand in a gesture of casual greeting. Carlo gritted his teeth and smiled. 'Fuck the war,' he said, since one greeting was as good as another to a Greek. It looked as though there would be no La Scala that morning, unless the Opera society could manage the Soldier's Chorus on its own. He abandoned the jeep and began to trudge towards the village.

Velisarios passed him, and the two men looked at one another with something like recognition. However thin and bedraggled he had become since going to the front, Velisarios was still the biggest man that anyone had ever seen, and Carlo, despite his equivalent experiences on the other side of the line, was also the biggest man that anyone had ever seen. Both of these Titans had become accustomed to the saddening suspicion within themselves that they were freaks; to be superhuman was a burden that seemed impossible to share and impossible to explain to ordinary people, who would have been incredulous.

They were both astonished, and for a moment forgot that they were enemies. 'Hey' exclaimed Velisarios, raising his hands in a gesture of pleasure. Carlo, stumped for an exclamation that would make sense to a Greek, aimed inaccurately for a failed compromise that sounded very much like 'Ung'. Carlo offered one of his atrocious cigarettes, Velisarios took one, and they gesticulated and made sharp faces to each other as they drew on the smoke that was as sharp as needles. 'Fuck the war,' said Carlo, by way of farewell, and the two went on their opposite ways, Carl beginning to feel very content. A kilometre away, Velisarios came across the crippled jeep, paused in thought and went to fetch a friend. He returned, lifted the vehicle at each corner in turn, and his companion removed the wheels. Then he drained the water from the radiator, and refilled it with petrol from the jerrycan strapped to the back.

Corelli continued to wait. The doctor passed by on his way to the Kapheneion, in an anticipatory state of annoyance on account of the fact that the coffee being served these days tasted of river mud and tar, and was becoming more expensive by the second. 'Bon giorno', called the captain, and the doctor turned. 'I trust that you slept badly,' he said. The captain smiled resignedly, 'For some reason I dreamed about animals made of bakelite. They were like dolphins with sharp edges, and they were leaping about. It was very disturbing. Also, your cat bit me.' He held out his wounded finger, and the doctor inspected it. 'It's very swollen,' he said, 'and it will probably go septic. Pine martens can have a nasty bite. If I were you I would show it to a doctor.' With that he went on his way, leaving the captain to repeat foolishly, 'Pine martens?' He realised that Pelagia had only made a small joke at his expense, but, curiously, it left him feeling let down and very gullible.

When Pelagia came out she found the usurper of her bed throwing Lemoni up and down by the armpits. The child was whooping and laughing, and it appeared that what was transpiring was a lesson in Italian. 'Bella fanciulla,' the captain was saying. He waited for Lemoni to repeat it. 'Bla fanshla,' she giggled, and the captain threw her up exclaiming, 'No, no, bella fanciulla.' He dwelt lovingly upon the doubled L, waited for Lemoni to descend, and raised an eyebrow as he awaited her next attempt. 'Bla fanshla,' she said triumphantly, only to be launched skyward again.

Pelagia smiled as she watched, and then Lemoni saw her. The captain followed the cast of her glance, and straightened up, a little embarrassed, 'Bon giorno, Kyria Pelagia. It seems that my driver has been delayed.'

'What's it mean, what's it mean?' demanded Lemoni, whose faith in the omniscience of adults was such that she was sure that Pelagia would be able to tell her. Pelagia patted her cheek, cleared the strands of hair from her eyes, and told her, 'It means "pretty puss", koritsimou. Off you go now, I am sure that someone is missing you.'

The little girl skipped away in her usual capricious and erratic manner, waving her arms and chanting, 'Bla, bla, bla. Bla, bla, bla.'

Corelli reproached Pelagia, 'Why did you send her away? We were having a wonderful time.'

'Fraternisation' answered Pelagia. 'It's indecent, even in a child.'

Corelli's face fell, and he scuffed the toe of his boot in the dust. He looked up at the sky, dropped his head, and sighed. Without looking at Pelagia, he said with heartfelt sincerity, 'Signorina, in times like this, in a war, all of us have to make the most of what little innocent pleasure there is.'

Pelagia saw the resignation and weariness in his face, and felt ashamed of herself. In the silence that followed, both of them reflected upon their own unworthiness. The captain said, 'One day I would like a pretty puss like that, of my own,' and without awaiting a reply he set off in the direction from which he expected Carlo to come.

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. 'Is Orr crazy?'

'He sure is,' Doc Daneeka said.

'Can you ground him?'

'I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule.'

'Then why doesn't he ask you to?'

'Because he's crazy,' Doc Daneeka said. 'He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.'

'That's all he has to do to be grounded?'

'That's all. Let him ask me.'

'And then you can ground him?' Yossarian asked.

'No, then I can't ground him.'

'You mean there's a catch?'

'Sure there's a catch,' Doc Daneeka replied. 'Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.'

CHAPTER 1

I

WHEN I think of all the grey memorials erected in London to equestrian generals, the heroes of old colonial wars, and to frock-coated politicians who are even more deeply forgotten, I can find no reason to mock the modest stone that commemorates Jones on the far side of the international road which he failed to cross in a country far from home, though I am not to this day absolutely sure of where, geographically speaking, Jones’s home lay. At least he paid for the monument – however unwillingly – with his life, while the generals as a rule came home safe and paid, if at all, with the blood of their men, and as for the politicians – who cares for dead politicians sufficiently to remember with what issues they were identified? Free Trade is less interesting than an Ashanti war, though the London pigeons do not distinguish between the two. Exegi monumentum. Whenever my rather bizarre business takes me north to Monte Cristi and I pass the stone, I feel a certain pride that my action helped to raise it.

There is a point of no return unremarked at the time in most lives. Neither Jones nor I knew of it when it came, although, like the pilots of the old pre-jet air-liners, we should have been trained by the nature of our two careers to better observance. Certainly I was quite unaware of the moment when it receded one sullen August morning on the Atlantic in the wake of the Medea, a cargo-ship of the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company, bound for Haiti and Portau- Prince from Philadelphia and New York. At that period of my life I still regarded my future seriously – even the future of my empty hotel and of a love-affair which was almost as empty. I was not involved, so far as I could tell, with either a burnt-out case Jones or Smith, they were fellow passengers, that was all, and I had no idea of the pompes funèbres they were preparing for me in the parlours of Mr Fernandez. If I had been told I would have laughed, as I laugh now on my better days.

The level of the pink gin in my glass shifted with the movement of the boat, as though the glass were an instrument made to record the shock of the waves, as Mr Smith said firmly in reply to Jones, ‘I’ve never suffered from mal de mer, no sir. It’s the effect of acidity. Eating meat gives you acidity, drinking alcohol does the same.’ He was one of the Smiths of Wisconsin, but I had thought of him from the very first as the Presidential Candidate because, before I even knew his surname, his wife had so referred to him, as we leant over the rail our first hour at sea. She made a jerking movement with her strong chin as she spoke which seemed to indicate that, if there were another presidential candidate on board, he was not the one she intended. She said, ‘I mean my husband there, Mr Smith – he was Presidential Candidate in 1948. He’s an idealist. Of course, for that very reason, he stood no chance.’ What could we have been talking about to lead her to that statement? We were idly watching the flat grey sea which seemed to lie within the three-mile-limit like an animal passive and ominous in a cage waiting to show what it can do outside. I may have spoken to her of an acquaintance who played the piano and perhaps her mind leapt to Truman’s daughter and thus to politics – she was far more politically conscious than her husband. I think she believed that, as a candidate, she would have stood a better chance than he, and, following the pointer of her protruding chin, I could well imagine it possible. Mr Smith, who wore a shabby raincoat turned up to guard his large innocent hairy ears, was pacing the deck behind us, one lock of white hair standing up like a television aerial in the wind, and a travelling-rug carried over his arm. I could imagine him a homespun poet or perhaps the dean of an obscure college, but never a politician. I tried to remember who Truman’s opponent had been in that election year – surely it had been Dewey, not Smith, while the wind from the Atlantic took away her next sentence. I thought she said something about vegetables, but the word seemed an unlikely one to me then.

Jones I met a little later under embarrassing circumstances, for he was engaged in trying to bribe the bedroom steward to swop our cabins. He stood in the doorway of mine with a suitcase in one hand and two five-dollar bills in the other. He was saying, ‘He hasn’t been down yet. He won’t make a fuss. He’s not that kind of a chap. Even if he notices the difference.’ He spoke as if he knew me.

‘But Mr Jones . . .’ the steward began to argue.

Jones was a small man, very tidily dressed in a pale grey suit with a double-breasted waistcoat, which somehow looked out of place away from lifts, office crowds, the clatter of typewriters – it was the only one of its kind in our scrubby cargoship peddling the sullen sea. He never changed it, I noticed later, not even on the night of the ship’s concert, and I began to wonder whether perhaps his suitcases contained no other clothes at all. I thought of him as someone who, having packed in a hurry, had brought the wrong uniform, for he certainly did not mean to be conspicuous. With the little black moustache and the dark Pekinese eyes I would have taken him for a Frenchman – perhaps someone on the Bourse – and it was quite a surprise to me when I learnt that his name was Jones.

‘Major Jones,’ he replied to the steward with a note of reproof.

I was almost as embarrassed as he was. On a cargo-steamer there are few passengers and it is uncomfortable to nourish a resentment. The steward with his hands folded said to him righteously, ‘There’s really nothing I can do, sir. The cabin was reserved for this gentleman. For Mr Brown.’ Smith, Jones and Brown – the situation was improbable. I had a half-right to my drab name, but had he? I smiled at his predicament, but Jones’s sense of humour, as I was to find, was of a simpler order. He looked at me with grave attention and said, ‘This is really your cabin, sir?’

‘I have an idea it is.’

‘Someone told me it was unoccupied.’ He shifted slightly so that his back was turned to my too obvious cabin-trunk standing just inside. The bills had disappeared, perhaps up his sleeve, for I had seen no movement towards his pocket.

‘Have they given you a bad cabin?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s only that I prefer the starboard side.’

‘Yes, so do I, on this particular run. One can leave the porthole open,’ and as though to emphasize the truth of what I said the boat began a slow roll as it moved further into the open sea.

‘Time for a pink gin,’ Jones said promptly, and we went upstairs together to find the small saloon and the black steward who took the first opportunity as he added water to my gin to whisper in my ear, ‘I’m a British subject, sah.’ I noticed that he made no such claim to Jones.

The door of the saloon swung open and the Presidential Candidate appeared, an impressive figure in spite of the innocent ears: he had to lower his head in the doorway. Then he looked all round the saloon before he stood aside so that his wife could enter under the arch of his arm, like a bride under a sword. It was as though he wanted to satisfy himself first that there was no unsuitable company present. His eyes were of clear washed blue and he had homely sprouts of grey hair from his nose and ears. He was a genuine article, if ever there was one, a complete contrast to Mr Jones. If I had troubled to think of them then at all, I would have thought that they could mix together no better than oil and water.

‘Come in,’ Mr Jones said (I somehow couldn’t bring myself to think of him as Major Jones), ‘come in and take a snifter.’ His slang, I was to find, was always a little out of date as though he had studied it in a dictionary of popular usage, but not in the latest edition.

‘You must forgive me,’ Mr Smith replied with courtesy, ‘but I don’t touch alcohol.’

‘I don’t touch it myself,’ Jones said, ‘I drink it,’ and he suited the action to the words. ‘The name is Jones,’ he added, ‘Major Jones.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Major. My name’s Smith. William Abel Smith. My wife, Major Jones.’ He looked at me inquir ingly, and I realized that somehow I had lagged behind in the introductions.

‘Brown,’ I said shyly. I felt as though I were making a bad joke, but neither of them saw the point.

‘Ring the bell again,’ Jones said, ‘there’s a good chap.’ I had already graduated into the position of the old friend, and, although Mr Smith was nearer the bell, I crossed the saloon to touch it; in any case he was busy wrapping the travellingrug around his wife’s knees, though the saloon was well enough warmed (perhaps it was a marital habit). It was then, in reply to Jones’s affirmation that there was nothing like a pink gin to keep away sea-sickness, Mr Smith made his statement of faith. ‘I’ve never suffered from mal de mer, no sir . . . I’ve been a vegetarian all my life,’ and his wife capped it. ‘We campaigned on that issue.’

‘Campaigned?’ Jones asked sharply as though the word had woken the major within him.

‘In the Presidential Election of 1948.’

‘You were a candidate?’

‘I’m afraid,’ Mr Smith said with a gentle smile, ‘that I stood very little chance. The two great parties . . .’

‘It was a gesture,’ his wife interrupted fiercely. ‘We showed our flag.’

Jones was silent. Perhaps he was impressed, or perhaps like myself he was trying to recall who the main contestants had been. Then he tried the phrase over on his tongue as though he liked the taste of it: ‘Presidential Candidate in ’48.’ He added, ‘I’m very proud to meet you.’

‘We had no organization,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘We couldn’t afford it. But all the same we polled more than ten thousand votes.’

‘I never anticipated so much support,’ the Presidential Candidate said.

‘We were not at the bottom of the poll. There was a candidate – something to do with agriculture, dear?’

‘Yes, I have forgotten the exact name of his party. He was a disciple of Henry George, I think.’

‘I must admit,’ I said, ‘that I thought the only candidates were Republican and Democrat – oh, and there was a Socialist too, wasn’t there?’

‘The Conventions attract all the publicity,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘vulgar rodeos though they are. Can you see Mr Smith with a lot of drum majorettes?’

‘Anyone can run for President,’ the Candidate explained with gentleness and humility. ‘That is the pride of our democracy. I can tell you, it was a great experience for me. A great experience. One that I shall never forget.’

II

Ours was a very small boat. I believe that a full complement of passengers would have numbered only fourteen, and the Medea was by no means full. This was not the tourist season, and in any case the island to which we were bound was no longer an attraction for tourists.

There was a spick-and-span negro with a very high white collar and starched cuffs and gold-rimmed glasses who was bound for Santo Domingo; he kept very much to himself, and at table he answered politely and ambiguously in monosyllables. For instance when I asked him what was the principal cargo that the captain was likely to take aboard in Trujillo – I corrected myself, ‘I’m sorry. I mean Santo Domingo,’ he nodded gravely and said, ‘Yes.’ He never himself asked a question and his discretion seemed to rebuke our own idle curiosity. There was also a traveller for a firm of pharmaceutical manufacturers – I have forgotten the reason he gave for not travelling by air. I felt sure that it was not the correct reason, and that he suffered from a heart trouble which he kept to himself. His face had a tight papery look, above a body too big for the head, and he lay long hours in his berth.

My own reason for taking the boat – and I sometimes suspected that it might be Jones’s too – was prudence. In an airport one is so swiftly separated on the tarmac from the crew of the plane; in a harbour one feels the safety of foreign boards under the feet – I counted as a citizen of Holland so long as I stayed on the Medea. I had booked my passage through to Santo Domingo and I told myself, however unconvincingly, that I had no intention of leaving the ship before I received certain assurances from the British chargé – or from Martha. The hotel which I owned on the hills above the capital had done without me for three months; it would certainly be void of clients, and I valued my life more highly than an empty bar and a corridor of empty bedrooms and a future empty of promise. As for the Smiths, I really think it was love of the sea which had brought them on board, but it was quite a while before I learnt why they had chosen to visit the republic of Haiti.

The captain was a thin unapproachable Hollander scrubbed clean like a piece of his own brass rail who only appeared once at table, and in contrast the purser was untidy and ebulliently gay with a great liking for Bols gin and Haitian rum. On the second day at sea he invited us to drink with him in his cabin. We all squashed in except for the traveller in pharmaceutical products who said that he must always be in bed by nine. Even the gentleman from Santo Domingo joined us and answered, ‘No,’ when the purser asked him how he found the weather.

The purser had a jovial habit of exaggerating everything, and his natural gaiety was only a little damped when the Smiths demanded bitter lemon and, when that was unavailable, Coca-Cola. ‘You’re drinking your own deaths,’ he told them and began to explain his own theory of how the secret ingredients were manufactured. The Smiths were unimpressed and drank the Coca-Cola with evident pleasure. ‘You will need something stronger than that where you are going,’ the purser said.

‘My husband and I have never taken anything stronger,’ Mrs Smith replied.

‘The water is not to be trusted, and you will find no Coca- Cola now that the Americans have moved out. At night when you hear the shooting in the streets you will think perhaps that a strong glass of rum . . .’

‘Not rum,’ Mrs Smith said.

‘Shooting?’ Mr Smith inquired. ‘Is there shooting?’ He looked at his wife where she sat crouched under the travelling- rug (she was not warm enough even in the stuffy cabin) with a trace of anxiety. ‘Why shooting?’

‘Ask Mr Brown. He lives there.’

I said, ‘I’ve not often heard shooting. They act more silently as a rule.’

‘Who are they?’ Mr Smith asked.

‘The Tontons Macoute,’ the purser broke in with wicked glee. ‘The President’s bogey-men. They wear dark glasses and they call on their victims after dark.’

Mr Smith laid his hand on his wife’s knee. ‘The gentleman is trying to scare us, my dear,’ he said. ‘They told us nothing about this at the tourist bureau.’

‘He little knows,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘that we don’t scare easily,’ and somehow I believed her.

‘You understand what we’re talking about, Mr Fernandez?’ the purser called across the cabin in the high voice some people employ towards anyone of an alien race.

Mr Fernandez had the glazed look of a man approaching sleep. ‘Yes,’ he said, but I think it had been an equal chance whether he replied yes or no. Jones, who had been sitting on the edge of the purser’s bunk, nursing a glass of rum, spoke for the first time. ‘Give me fifty commandos,’ he said, ‘and I’d go through the country like a dose of salts.’

‘Were you in the commandos?’ I asked with some surprise.

He said ambiguously, ‘A different branch of the same outfit.’

The Presidential Candidate said, ‘We have a personal introduction to the Minister for Social Welfare.’

‘Minister for what?’ the purser said. ‘Welfare? You won’t find any Welfare. You should see the rats, big as terriers . . .’

‘I was told at the tourist bureau that there were some very good hotels.’

‘I own one,’ I said. I took out my pocket-book and showed him three postcards. Although printed in bright vulgar colours they had the dignity of history, for they were relics of an epoch over for ever. On one a blue tiled bathing-pool was crowded with girls in bikinis: on the second a drummer famous throughout the Caribbean was playing under the thatched roof of the Creole bar, and on the third – a general view of the hotel – there were gables and balconies and towers, the fantastic nineteenth-century architecture of Port-au-Prince. They at least had not changed.

2

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident.

But I could not be certain about this.

I went through Mrs Shears’ gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog. I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.

The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs Shears who was our friend. She lived on the opposite side of the road, two houses to the left.

Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles, but a big poodle. It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chicken.

I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.

The Book of Contraries



I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy



The man who has just come into the shop to rent a video bears on his identity card a most unusual name, a name with a classical flavour that time has staled,neither more nor less than Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. The Máximo and the Afonso, which are in more common usage, he can just about tolerate, depending, of course, on the mood he’s in, but the Tertuliano weighs on him like a gravestone and has done ever since he first realised that the wretched name lent itself to being spoken in an ironic, potentially offensive tone. He is a History teacher at a secondary school, and a colleague had suggested the video to him with the warning, It’s not exactly a masterpiece of cinema, but it might keep you amused for an hour and a half. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is greatly in need of stimuli to distract him, he lives alone and gets bored, or, to speak with the clinical exactitude that the present day requires, he has succumbed to the temporary weakness of spirit ordinarily known as depression. To get a clear idea of his situation, suffice it to say that he was married, but can no longer remember what led him into matrimony, that he is divorced and cannot now bring himself to ponder the reasons for the separation. On the other hand, while the ill-fated union produced no children who are now demanding to be handed, gratis, the world on a silver platter, he has, for some time, viewed sweet History, the serious, educational subject which he had felt called upon to teach and which could have been a soothing refuge for him, as a chore without meaning and a beginning without an end. For those of a nostalgic temperament, who tend to be fragile and somewhat inflexible, living alone is the harshest of punishments, but, it must be said, such a situation, however painful, only rarely develops into a cataclysmic drama of the kind to make the skin prick and the hair stand on end.What one mostly sees, indeed it hardly comes as a surprise any more, are people patiently submitting to solitude’s meticulous scrutiny, recent public examples, though not particularly well-known and two of whom even met with a happy ending, being the portrait painter who we only ever knew by his first initial, the GP who returned from exile to die in the arms of the beloved fatherland, the proofreader who drove out a truth in order to plant a lie in its place, the lowly clerk in the Central Registry Office who made off with certain death certificates, all of these, either by chance or coincidence, were members of the male sex, but none of them had the misfortune to be called Tertuliano, and this was doubtless an inestimable advantage to them in their relations with other people. The shop assistant, who had already taken down from the shelf the video requested, entered in the log book the title of the film and the day’s date, then indicated to the customer the place where he should sign.Written after a moment’s hesitation, the signature revealed only the last two names, Máximo Afonso,without the Tertuliano, but like someone determined to clarify in advance something that might become a cause of controversy, the customer murmured as he signed his name, It’s quicker like that. This precautionary explanation proved of little use, for the assistant, as he transferred the information from the customer’s ID onto an index card, pronounced the unfortunate, antiquated name out loud, in a tone which even an innocent child would have recognised as deliberate. No-one, we believe, however free of obstacles his or her life may have been, would dare to claim that they had never suffered some similar humiliation.Although, sooner or later, we will all, inevitably, be confronted by one of those hearty types to whom human frailty, especially in its most refined and delicate forms, is the cause of mocking laughter, the truth is that the inarticulate sounds which, quite against our wishes, occasionally emerge from our own mouth, are merely the irrepressible moans from some ancient pain or sorrow, like a scar suddenly making its forgotten presence felt again. As he puts the video away in his battered teacher’s briefcase, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, with admirable brio, struggles not to reveal the displeasure provoked by the shop assistant’s gratuitous sneer, but he cannot help thinking, all the while scolding himself for the vile injustice of the thought, that the fault lay with his colleague and with the mania certain people have for handing out unasked-for advice. Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso does not know, cannot imagine or even guess that the assistant already regrets his gross impertinence, indeed, another ear, more finely tuned than his and capable of dissecting the subtle vocal gradations in the assistant’s At your service, sir, offered in response to the brusque Good afternoon thrown back at him, would have told him that a great desire for peace had installed itself behind the counter.After all, it is a benevolent commercial principle, laid down in antiquity and tried and tested over the centuries, that the customer is always right, even in the unlikely, but quite possible, eventuality that the customer’s name should be Tertuliano.

Sitting now on the bus which will drop him near the building where he has lived for the last six or so years, that is, ever since his divorce, Máximo Afonso, and we use the shortened version of his name here having been, in our view, authorised to do so by its sole lord and master, but mainly because the word Tertuliano, having appeared so recently, only three lines previously, could do a grave disservice to the fluency of the narrative, anyway, as we were saying, Máximo Afonso, found himself wondering, suddenly intrigued, suddenly perplexed, what strange motives, what particular reasons had led his colleague from the Mathematics department, we forgot to mention that his colleague teaches Mathematics, to urge him so insistently to see the film he has just rented, when, up until then, the so-called seventh art had never been a topic of conversation between them. One could understand such a recommendation had it been an indisputably fine film, in which case the pleasure, satisfaction and enthusiasm of discovering a work of high aesthetic quality might have obliged his colleague, over lunch in the canteen or during a break between classes, to tug anxiously at his sleeve and say, I don’t believe we’ve ever talked about cinema before, but I have to tell you, my friend, that you absolutely must see The Race is to the Swift, which is the title of the video Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has in his briefcase, something we also neglected to mention. Then the History teacher would ask, Where’s it being shown, to which the Mathematics teacher would respond, explaining, Oh, it’s not being shown anywhere at the moment, it was on four or five years ago, I can’t understand how I missed it when it first came out, and then, without a pause, concerned as to the possible futility of the advice he was so fervently offering, But maybe you’ve already seen it, No, I haven’t, I hardly ever go to the cinema, I just make do with what they show on TV, and I don’t see very much of that,Well, you should make a point of seeing it then, you’ll find it in any video store, you can always rent it if you don’t want to buy it. That is how the dialogue might have gone if the film had been worthy of praise, but things happened rather more prosaically, I don’t want to stick my nose in where it isn’t wanted, the Mathematics teacher had said as he peeled an orange, but for a while now you’ve struck me as being rather down, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso agreed, You’re right, I have been feeling a bit low, Health problems, No, I’m not ill as far as I know, it’s just that everything tires me and bores me, the wretched routine, the repetitiveness, the sense of marking time, Go out and have some fun, man, a bit of fun is always the best remedy, If you’ll forgive me saying so, having fun is only a remedy for those who don’t need one, A good answer, no doubt about it, but meanwhile, you’ve got to do something to shake off this feeling of apathy, Depression, Depression, apathy, it doesn’t really matter, what we call the factors is arbitrary, But the intensity isn’t,What do you do when you’re not at school, Oh, I read, listen to music, occasionally visit a museum, And what about the cinema, No, I don’t go to the cinema much, I make do with what they show on TV, You could buy a few videos, start a collection, a video library if you like, You’re right, I could, except that I haven’t even got enough space for my books,Well, rent some videos then, that’s the best solution, Well, I do own a few videos, science documentaries, nature programmes, archaeology, anthropology, the arts in general, and I’m interested in astronomy too, that sort of thing, That’s all very well, but you need to distract yourself with stories that don’t take up too much space in your head, I mean, given, for example, that you’re interested in astronomy, you might well enjoy science fiction, adventures in outer space, star wars, special effects, As I see it, those socalled special effects are the real enemy of the imagination, that mysterious, enigmatic skill it took us human beings so much hard work to invent, Now you’re exaggerating, No, I’m not, the people who are exaggerating are the ones who want me to believe that in less than a second, with a click of the fingers, a spaceship can travel a hundred thousand million kilometres,You have to agree, though, that to create the effects you so despise also takes imagination, Yes, but it’s their imagination, not mine, You can always use theirs as a jumping-off point, Oh, I see, two hundred thousand million kilometres instead of one hundred thousand million, Don’t forget that what we call reality today was mere imagination yesterday, just look at Jules Verne, Yes, but the reality is that a trip to Mars, for example, and Mars, in astronomical terms, is just around the corner, would take at least nine months, then you’d have to hang around there for another six months until the planet was in the right position to make the return journey, before travelling for another nine months back to Earth, that’s two whole years of utter tedium, a film about a trip to Mars that respected the facts would be the dullest thing ever seen, Yes, I can see why you’re bored,Why, Because you’re not content with anything, I’d be content with very little if I had it, You must have something to hang onto, your career, your work, it doesn’t seem to me that you have much reason for complaint, But it’s my career and my work that are hanging on to me, not the other way round,Well, that’s a malaise, always assuming it is a malaise, that I suffer from too, I mean, I myself would much rather be known as a mathematical genius than as the long-suffering, mediocre secondary school teacher I have no option but to continue to be, Maybe it’s just that I don’t really like myself, Now if you came to me with an equation containing two unknown factors, I could give you the benefit of my professional advice, but when it comes to an incompatibility of that sort, all my knowledge would only complicate things still further, that’s why I suggested you pass the time watching a few films, as if you were taking a couple of tranquillisers, rather than devoting yourself to mathematics, which would really do your head in, Any suggestions, About what, About what would be an interesting, worthwhile film, There’s no shortage of those, just go into a shop, have a look around and choose one, Yes, but you could at least make a suggestion. The Mathematics teacher thought and thought, then said, The Race is to the Swift, What’s that, A film, that’s what you asked me for, It sounds more like a proverb,Well, it is a proverb, The whole thing or just the title,Wait and see,What sort is it,What, the proverb, No, the film, A comedy, You’re sure it’s not one of those old-fashioned, crime of passion melodramas, or one of those modern ones, all gunshots and explosions, It’s a light, very amusing comedy, All right, I’ll make a note of it, what did you say it was called, The Race is to the Swift, Right, I’ve got it, It’s not exactly a masterpiece of cinema, but it might keep you amused for an hour and a half.

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is at home, he has a hesitant look on his face, not that this means very much, it isn’t the first time it’s happened, as he watches his will swing between spending time preparing something to eat, which generally means nothing more strenuous than opening a tin and heating up the contents, or, alternatively, going out to eat in a nearby restaurant, where he is known for his lack of interest in the menu, not because he is a proud, dissatisfied customer, he is merely indifferent, inattentive, reluctant to take the trouble to choose a dish from amongst those set out in the brief and all-too-familiar list. He is confirmed in his belief that it would be easier to eat in by the fact that he has homework to mark, his students’ latest efforts, which he must read carefully and correct whenever they offend too extravagantly against the truths they have been taught or are overly free in their interpretations. The History which it is Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s mission to teach is like a bonsai tree the roots of which have to be trimmed now and then to stop it growing, a childish miniature of the gigantic tree of places and time and of all that happens there, we look, we notice the disparity in size and go no further, ignoring other equally obvious differences, the fact, for example, that no bird, no wingèd creature, not even the tiny hummingbird, could make its nest in the branches of a bonsai, and that if a lizard could find shelter in the tiny shadow the bonsai casts, always supposing its leaves were sufficiently luxuriant, there is every likelihood that the tip of the creature’s tail would continue to protrude. The History that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso teaches, as he himself recognises and will happily admit if asked, has a vast number of tails protruding, some still twitching, others nothing but wrinkled skin with a little row of loose vertebrae inside. Remembering the conversation with his colleague, he thought, Mathematics comes from another cerebral planet, in Mathematics, those lizard tails would be mere abstractions. He took the homework out of his briefcase and placed it on the desk, he also took out the video of The Race is to the Swift, these were the two tasks to which he could devote the evening, marking homework or watching a film, although he suspected that there wouldn’t be time for both, especially since he neither liked nor was in the habit of working late into the night. Marking his students’ homework was hardly a matter of life and death, and watching the film even less so. It would be best to settle down with the book he was reading, he thought. After a visit to the bathroom, he went into the bedroom to change his clothes, he donned different shoes and trousers, pulled a sweater on over his shirt, but left his tie, because he didn’t like to leave his throat exposed, then went into the kitchen. He took three different tins out of the cupboard and, not knowing how else to choose, decided to leave the matter to chance and resorted to a nonsensical, almost forgotten rhyme from childhood which, in those days, had usually got him the result he least wanted, and it went like this, eeny, meeny, miney, moe, catch a tigger by his toe, if he hollers let him go, eeny, meeny, miney, moe. The winner was a meat stew, which wasn’t what he most fancied, but he felt it best not to go against fate. He ate in the kitchen, washing the food down with a glass of red wine, and when he finished, he repeated the rhyme, almost without thinking, with three crumbs of bread, the one on the left was the book, the one in the middle was the homework, the one on the right was the film. The Race is to the Swift won, obviously what will be will be, don’t quibble with fate over pears, it will eat all the ripe ones and give you the green ones. That’s what people usually say, and because it is what people usually say, we accept it without further discussion, when our duty as free people is to argue energetically with a despotic fate that has determined, with who knows what malicious intentions, that the green pear should be the film and not the homework or the book. As a teacher, and a teacher of History, this Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, for one has only to consider the scene we have just witnessed in the kitchen, entrusting his immediate future and possibly what will follow to three crumbs of bread and some senseless childhood drivel, this teacher, we were saying, is setting a bad example to the adolescents whom fate, whether the same or an entirely different one, has placed in his hands. Unfortunately, we do not have room in this story to anticipate the doubtless pernicious effects of the influence of such a teacher on the young souls of his pupils, so we will leave them here, hoping only that one day they may encounter on life’s road a contrary influence which will free them, possibly in extremis, from the irrationalist perdition that currently hangs over them like a threat.

BOOK ONE

I

A STORY has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all— has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn’t seen you yet.’

For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.

It was strange to see Henry out on such a night: he liked his comfort and after all—or so I thought—he had Sarah. To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort. There was too much comfort even in the bed sitting-room I had at the wrong—the south—side of the Common, in the relics of other people’s furniture. I thought I would go for a walk through the rain and have a drink at the local. The little crowded hall was full of strangers’ hats and coats and I took somebody else’s umbrella by accident—the man on the second floor had friends in. Then I closed the stained-glass door behind me and made my way carefully down the steps that had been blasted in 1944 and never repaired. I had reason to remember the occasion and how the stained glass, tough and ugly and Victorian, stood up to the shock as our grandfathers themselves would have done.

Directly I began to cross the Common I realized I had the wrong umbrella, for it sprang a leak and the rain ran down under my macintosh collar, and then it was I saw Henry. I could so easily have avoided him; he had no umbrella and in the light of the lamp I could see his eyes were blinded with the rain. The black leafless trees gave no protection: they stood around like broken waterpipes, and the rain dripped off his stiff dark hat and ran in streams down his black civil servant’s overcoat. If I had walked straight by him, he wouldn’t have seen me, and I could have made certain by stepping two feet off the pavement, but I said, ‘Henry, you are almost a stranger,’ and saw his eyes light up as though we were old friends.

‘Bendrix,’ he said with affection, and yet the world would have said he had the reasons for hate, not me.

‘What are you up to, Henry, in the rain?’ There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn’t share. He said evasively, ‘Oh, I wanted a bit of air,’ and during a sudden blast of wind and rain he just caught his hat in time from being whirled away towards the north side.

‘How’s Sarah?’ I asked because it might have seemed odd if I hadn’t, though nothing would have delighted me more than to have heard that she was sick, unhappy, dying. I imagined in those days that any suffering she underwent would lighten mine, and if she were dead I could be free: I would no longer imagine all the things one does imagine under my ignoble circumstances. I could even like poor silly Henry, I thought, if Sarah were dead.

He said, ‘Oh, she’s out for the evening somewhere,’ and set that devil in my mind at work again, remembering other days when Henry must have replied just like that to other inquirers, while I alone knew where Sarah was. ‘A drink?’ I asked, and to my surprise he put himself in step beside me. We had never before drunk together outside his home.

‘It’s a long time since we’ve seen you, Bendrix.’ For some reason I am a man known by his surname—I might never have been christened for all the use my friends make of the rather affected Maurice my literary parents gave me.

‘A long time.’

‘Why, it must be—more than a year.’

‘June 1944,’ I said.

‘As long as that—well, well.’ The fool, I thought, the fool to see nothing strange in a year and a half’s interval. Less than five hundred yards of flat grass separated our two ‘sides’. Had it never occurred to him to say to Sarah, ‘How’s Bendrix doing? What about asking Bendrix in?’ and hadn’t her replies ever seemed to him . . . odd, evasive, suspicious? I had fallen out of their sight as completely as a stone in a pond. I suppose the ripples may have disturbed Sarah for a week, a month, but Henry’s blinkers were firmly tied. I had hated his blinkers even when I had benefited from them, knowing that others could benefit too.

‘Is she at the cinema?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, she hardly ever goes.’

‘She used to.’

The Pontefract Arms was still decorated for Christmas with paper streamers and paper bells, the relics of commercial gaiety, mauve and orange, and the young landlady leant her breasts against the bar with a look of contempt for her customers.

‘Pretty,’ Henry said, without meaning it, and stared around with a certain lost air, a shyness, for somewhere to hang his hat. I got the impression that the nearest he had ever before been to a public bar was the chophouse off Northumberland Avenue where he ate lunch with his colleagues from the Ministry.

‘What will you have?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a whisky.’

‘Nor would I, but you’ll have to make do with rum.’

We sat at a table and fingered our glasses: I had never had much to say to Henry. I doubt whether I should ever have troubled to know Henry or Sarah well if I had not begun in 1939 to write a story with a senior civil servant as the main character. Henry James once, in a discussion with Walter Besant, said that a young woman with sufficient talent need only pass the mess-room windows of a Guards’ barracks and look inside in order to write a novel about the Brigade, but I think at some stage of her book she would have found it necessary to go to bed with a Guardsman if only in order to check on the details. I didn’t exactly go to bed with Henry, but I did the next best thing, and the first night I took Sarah out to dinner I had the cold-blooded intention of picking the brain of a civil servant’s wife. She didn’t know what I was at; she thought, I am sure, I was genuinely interested in her family life, and perhaps that first awakened her liking for me. What time did Henry have breakfast? I asked her. Did he go to the office by tube, bus or taxi? Did he bring his work home at night? Did he have a briefcase with the royal arms on it? Our friendship blossomed under my interest: she was so pleased that anybody should take Henry seriously. Henry was important, but important rather as an elephant is important, from the size of his department; there are some kinds of importance that remain hopelessly damned to unseriousness. Henry was an important assistant secretary in the Ministry of Pensions—later it was to be the Ministry of Home Security. Home Security—I used to laugh at that later in those moments when you hate your companion and look for any weapon . . . A time came when I deliberately told Sarah that I had only taken Henry up for the purpose of copy, copy too for a character who was the ridiculous, the comic element in my book. It was then she began to dislike my novel. She had an enormous loyalty to Henry (I could never deny that), and in those clouded hours when the demon took charge of my brain and I resented even harmless Henry, I would use the novel and invent episodes too crude to write . . . Once when Sarah had spent a whole night with me (I had looked forward to it as a writer looks forward to the last word of his book) I had spoilt the occasion suddenly by a chance word which broke the mood of what sometimes seemed for hours at a time a complete love. I had fallen sullenly asleep about two and woke at three, and putting my hand on her arm woke Sarah. I think I had meant to make everything well again, until my victim turned her face, bleary and beautiful with sleep and full of trust, towards me. She had forgotten the quarrel, and I found even in her forgetfulness a new cause. How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air. I said to her, ‘I’ve lain awake thinking of Chapter Five. Does Henry ever eat coffee beans to clear his breath before an important conference?’ She shook her head and began to cry silently, and I of course pretended not to understand the reason—a simple question, it had been worrying me about my character, this was not an attack on Henry, the nicest people sometimes eat coffee beans . . . So I went on. She wept awhile and went to sleep. She was a good sleeper, and I took even her power to sleep as an added offence.

Henry drank his rum quickly, his gaze wandering miserably among the mauve and orange streamers. I asked, ‘Had a good Christmas?’

‘Very nice. Very nice,’ he said.

‘At home?’ Henry looked up at me as though my inflection of the word sounded strange.

‘Home? Yes, of course.’

‘And Sarah’s well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have another rum?’

‘It’s my turn.’

While Henry fetched the drinks I went into the lavatory. The walls were scrawled with phrases: ‘Damn you, landlord, and your breasty wife.’ ‘To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.’ I went quickly out again to the cheery paper streamers and the clink of glass. Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

I repeated to Henry the two lines I had seen. I wanted to shock him, and it surprised me when he said simply, ‘Jealousy’s an awful thing.’

‘You mean the bit about the breasty wife?’

‘Both of them. When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.’ It wasn’t what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there—in the phrase—the bitter ness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love. Yet suddenly across the shiny tiled surface of the bar-table I felt something, nothing so extreme as love, perhaps nothing more than a companionship in misfortune. I said to Henry, ‘Are you miserable?’

‘Bendrix, I’m worried.’

‘Tell me.’

I expect it was the rum that made him speak, or was he partly aware of how much I knew about him? Sarah was loyal, but in a relationship such as ours had been you can’t help picking up a thing or two . . . I knew he had a mole on the left of his navel because a birthmark of my own had once reminded Sarah of it: I knew he suffered from short sight, but wouldn’t wear glasses with strangers (and I was still enough of a stranger never to have seen him in them): I knew his liking for tea at ten: I even knew his sleeping habits. Was he conscious that I knew so much already, that one more fact would not alter our relation? He said, ‘I’m worried about Sarah, Bendrix.’

The door of the bar opened and I could see the rain lashing down against the light. A little hilarious man darted in and called out, ‘Wot cher, everybody,’ and nobody answered.

‘Is she ill? I thought you said . . .’

‘No. Not ill. I don’t think so.’ He looked miserably around— this was not his milieu. I noticed that the whites of his eyes were bloodshot; perhaps he hadn’t been wearing his glasses enough— there are always so many strangers, or it might have been the after-effect of tears. He said, ‘Bendrix, I can’t talk here,’ as though he had once been in the habit of talking somewhere. ‘Come home with me.’

‘Will Sarah be back?’

‘I don’t expect so.’

I paid for the drinks, and that again was a symptom of Henry’s disturbance—he never took other people’s hospitality easily. He was always the one in a taxi to have the money ready in the palm of his hand, while we others fumbled. The avenues of the Common still ran with rain, but it wasn’t far to Henry’s. He let himself in with a latchkey under the Queen Anne fanlight and called, ‘Sarah. Sarah.’ I longed for a reply and dreaded a reply, but nobody answered. He said, ‘She’s out still. Come into the study.’

I had never been in his study before: I had always been Sarah’s friend, and when I met Henry it was on Sarah’s territory, her haphazard living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment. Everything was used there; just as in Henry’s study I now felt that very little had ever been used. I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scott was only there because it had—probably— belonged to his father, like the bronze copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his: his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

‘A whisky?’ Henry asked. I remembered his eyes and wondered if he were drinking more than he had done in the old days. Certainly the whiskies he poured out were generous doubles.

‘What’s troubling you, Henry?’ I had long abandoned that novel about the senior civil servant: I wasn’t looking for copy any longer.

‘Sarah,’ he said.

Would I have been frightened if he had said that, in just that way, two years ago? No, I think I should have been overjoyed— one gets so hopelessly tired of deception. I would have welcomed the open fight if only because there might have been a chance, however small, that through some error of tactics on his side I might have won. And there has never been a time in my life before or since when I have so much wanted to win. I have never had so strong a desire even to write a good book.

He looked up at me with those red-rimmed eyes and said, ‘Bendrix, I’m afraid.’ I could no longer patronize him; he was one of misery’s graduates: he had passed in the same school, and for the first time I thought of him as an equal. I remember there was one of those early brown photographs in an Oxford frame on his desk, the photograph of his father, and looking at it I thought how like the photograph was to Henry (it had been taken at about the same age, the middle forties) and how unlike. It wasn’t the moustache that made it different—it was the Victorian look of confi- dence, of being at home in the world and knowing the way around, and suddenly I felt again that friendly sense of companionship. I liked him better than I would have liked his father (who had been in the Treasury). We were fellow strangers.

‘What is it you’re afraid of, Henry?’

He sat down in an easy chair as though somebody had pushed him and said with disgust, ‘Bendrix, I’ve always thought the worst things, the very worst, a man could do . . .’ I should certainly have been on tenterhooks in those other days: strange to me, and how infinitely dreary, the serenity of innocence.

PART ONE

I

I

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in darkblue gym smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters.

Sitting there, facing Bond Street, he had his face turned to the sea. His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from it into the port: so did his lack of interest in the schoolgirls opposite. He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy. Below him the black clerks moved churchward, but their wives in brilliant afternoon dresses of blue and cerise aroused no interest in Wilson. He was alone on the balcony except for one bearded Indian in a turban who had already tried to tell his fortune: this was not the hour or the day for white men—they would be at the beach five miles away, but Wilson had no car. He felt almost intolerably lonely. On either side of the school the tin roofs sloped towards the sea, and the corrugated iron above his head clanged and clattered as a vulture alighted.

Three merchant officers from the convoy in the harbour came into view, walking up from the quay. They were surrounded immediately by small boys wearing school caps. The boys’ refrain came faintly up to Wilson like a nursery rhyme: ‘Captain want jig jig, my sister pretty girl school-teacher, captain want jig jig.’ The bearded Indian frowned over intricate calculations on the back of an envelope—a horoscope, the cost of living? When Wilson looked down into the street again the officers had fought their way free, and the schoolboys had swarmed again round a single able-seaman: they led him triumphantly away towards the brothel near the police station, as though to the nursery.

A black boy brought Wilson’s gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel—or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses—a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: ‘Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love . . .’ His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he had his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie—it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him—brown dog’s eyes, a setter’s eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

‘Excuse me,’ a voice said, ‘aren’t you Wilson?’

He looked up at a middle-aged man in the inevitable khaki shorts with a drawn face the colour of hay.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘May I join you? My name’s Harris.’

‘Delighted, Mr Harris.’

‘You’re the new accountant at the U.A.C.?’

‘That’s me. Have a drink?’

‘I’ll have a lemon squash if you don’t mind. Can’t drink in the middle of the day.’

The Indian rose from his table and approached with deference, ‘You remember me, Mr Harris. Perhaps you would tell your friend, Mr Harris, of my talents. Perhaps he would like to read my letters of recommendation . . .’ The grubby sheaf of envelopes was always in his hand. ‘The leaders of society.’

‘Be off. Beat it, you old scoundrel,’ Harris said.

‘How did you know my name?’ Wilson asked.

‘Saw it on a cable. I’m a cable censor,’ Harris said. ‘What a job! What a place!’

‘I can see from here, Mr Harris, that your fortune has changed considerably. If you would step with me for a moment into the bathroom . . .’

‘Beat it, Gunga Din.’

‘Why the bathroom?’ Wilson asked.

‘He always tells fortunes there. I suppose it’s the only private room available. I never thought of asking why.’

‘Been here long?’

‘Eighteen bloody months.’

‘Going home soon?’

Harris stared over the tin roofs towards the harbour. He said, ‘The ships all go the wrong way. But when I do get home you’ll never see me here again.’ He lowered his voice and said with venom over his lemon squash, ‘I hate the place. I hate the people. I hate the bloody niggers. Mustn’t call ’em that you know.’

‘My boy seems all right.’

‘A man’s boy’s always all right. He’s a real nigger—but these, look at ’em, look at that one with a feather boa down there. They aren’t even real niggers. Just West Indians and they rule the coast. Clerks in the stores, city council, magistrates, lawyers—my God. It’s all right up in the Protectorate. I haven’t anything to say against a real nigger. God made our colours. But these—my God! The Government’s afraid of them. The police are afraid of them. Look down there,’ Harris said, ‘look at Scobie.’

A vulture flapped and shifted on the iron roof and Wilson looked at Scobie. He looked without interest in obedience to a stranger’s direction, and it seemed to him that no particular interest attached to the squat grey-haired man walking alone up Bond Street. He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined—the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

‘He loves ’em so much,’ Harris said, ‘he sleeps with ’em.’

‘Is that the police uniform?’

‘It is. Our great police force. A lost thing will they never find— you know the poem.’

‘I don’t read poetry,’ Wilson said. His eyes followed Scobie up the sun-drowned street. Scobie stopped and had a word with a black man in a white Panama: a black policeman passed by, saluting smartly. Scobie went on.

‘Probably in the pay of the Syrians too if the truth were known.’

‘The Syrians?’

‘This is the original Tower of Babel,’ Harris said. ‘West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Of- fice of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsatian priests.’

‘What do the Syrians do?’

‘Make money. They ran all the stores up country and most of the stores here. Run diamonds too.’

‘I suppose there’s a lot of that.’

‘The Germans pay a high price.’

‘Hasn’t he got a wife here?’

‘Who? Oh, Scobie. Rather. He’s got a wife. Perhaps if I had a wife like that, I’d sleep with niggers too. You’ll meet her soon. She’s the city intellectual. She likes art, poetry. Got up an exhibition of arts for the shipwrecked seamen. You know the kind of thing—poems on exile by aircraftsmen, watercolours by stokers, pokerwork from the mission schools. Poor old Scobie. Have another gin?’

‘I think I will,’ said Wilson.

II

Scobie turned up James Street past the Secretariat. With its long balconies it had always reminded him of a hospital. For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients; periodically at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place—Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers and Directors of Public Works. He watched their temperature charts every one— the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult. The patient was always right.

Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had gathered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. No one could have been adequate to so rhetorical a conception. But the idea in any case was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice—it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.

Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation—a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market, an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easychair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.

He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’

‘Anything to report?’

‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’

‘Anything on the charge sheet?’

‘Two black men fight in the market, sah.’

‘Mammy trouble?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah. I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’

‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’

‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’

‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’

‘Very good, sah.’

Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the wall: he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.

‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fiftythree— one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.

‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’

‘I know.’

‘I suppose everyone knows.’

‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’

‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’

Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’

‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do nothing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just.’

‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that.’

‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’

‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said.

‘Your wife won’t like it.’

‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? and he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here—somewhere far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee. He said aloud, ‘You know I like the place.’

‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’

‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.

‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’

‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’

‘They haven’t got that far yet. That’s the next stage. No, you sleep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel insulted.’

‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl. Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’

‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up something different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’

‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’

‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right.’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’

Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You don’t live here, do you?’

‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’

‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary—no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.

The girl said, ‘My landlady—she broke up my home last night. She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’

‘You got plenty lodgers?’

‘Only three, sir.’

He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a oneroomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin partitions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece—a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an employer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dangerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’

‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’

‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’

‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah in Sharp Town?’

‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’

‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’

‘No, sir. Same father.’

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

DOCTOR EDUARDO PLARR stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

The rails, the cranes, the maritime building – these had been what Doctor Plarr first saw of his adopted country. The years had changed nothing except by adding the line of smoke which when he arrived here first had not yet been hung out along the horizon on the far side of the Paraná. The factory that produced it had been built when he came down from the northern republic with his mother more than twenty years before on the weekly service from Paraguay. He remembered his father as he stood on the quay at Asunción beside the short gangway of the small river boat, tall and grey and hollow-chested, and promised with a mechanical optimism that he would join them soon. In a month – or perhaps three – hope creaked in his throat like a piece of rusty machinery.

It seemed in no way strange to the fourteen-year-old boy, though perhaps a little foreign, that his father kissed his wife on her forehead with a sort of reverence, as though she were a mother more than a bed-mate. Doctor Plarr had considered himself in those days quite as Spanish as his mother, while his father was very noticeably English-born. His father verso running head belonged by right, and not simply by a passport, to the legendary island of snow and fog, the country of Dickens and of Conan Doyle, even though he had probably retained few genuine memories of the land he had left at the age of ten. A picture book, which had been bought for him at the last moment before embarkation by his parents, had survived – London Panorama – and Henry Plarr used often to turn over for his small son Eduardo the pages of flat grey photographs showing Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and a vista of Oxford Street, filled with hansoms and horsedrawn cabs and ladies who clutched long skirts. His father, as Doctor Plarr realized much later, was an exile, and this was a continent of exiles – of Italians, of Czechs, of Poles, of Welsh, of English. When Doctor Plarr as a boy read a novel of Dickens he read it as a foreigner might do, taking it all for contemporary truth for want of any other evidence, like a Russian who believes that the bailiff and the coffin-maker still follow their unchanged vocations in a world where Oliver Twist is somewhere imprisoned in a London cellar asking for more.

At fourteen he could not understand the motives which had made his father stay behind on the quay of the old capital on the river. It took him more than a few years of life in Buenos Aires before he began to realize that the existence of an exile did not make for simplicity – so many documents, so many visits to government offices. Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted. The Spanish language was Roman by origin, and the Romans were a simple people. Machismo – the sense of masculine pride – was the Spanish equivalent of virtus. It had little to do with English courage or a stiff upper lip. Perhaps his father in his foreign way was trying to imitate machismo when he chose to face alone the daily increasing dangers on the other side of the Paraguayan border, but it was only the stiff lip which showed upon the quay.

The young Plarr and his mother reached the river port at almost this hour of the evening on their way to the great noisy capital of the republic in the south (their departure having been delayed some hours by a political demonstration), and something in the scene – the old colonial houses, a crumble of stucco in the street behind the waterfront – two lovers embracing on a bench – a moonstruck statue of a naked woman and the bust of an admiral with a homely Irish name – the electric light globes like great ripe fruit above a soft-drink stand – became lodged in the young Plarr’s mind as a symbol of unaccustomed peace, so that, at long last, when he felt an urgent need to escape somewhere from the skyscrapers, the traffic blocks, the sirens of police-cars and ambulances, the heroic statues of liberators on horseback, he chose to come back to this small northern city to work, with all the prestige of a qualified doctor from Buenos Aires. Not one of his friends in the capital or his coffee-house acquaintances came near to understanding his motive: he would find a hot humid unhealthy climate in the north, they all assured him of that, and a town where nothing ever happened, not even violence.

‘Perhaps it’s unhealthy enough for me to build a better practice,’ he would reply with a smile which was quite as unmeaning – or false – as his father’s expression of hope.

In Buenos Aires, during the long years of separation, they had received one letter only from his father. It was addressed on the envelope to both of them, Señora e hijo. The letter had not come through the post. They found it stuck under the door of the apartment on a Sunday evening about four years after their arrival when they returned from the cinema where they had watched Gone with the Wind for the third time. His mother never missed a revival, perhaps because the old film and the old stars made civil war seem for a few hours something static and undangerous. Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh bobbed up again through the years in spite of all the bullets.

The envelope was very dirty and scrumpled and it was marked ‘By Hand’, but they were never to learn by whose hand. It was not written on their old notepaper, which had been elegantly stamped in Gothic type with the name of the estancia, but on the lined leaves of a cheap notebook. The letter was full, like the voice on the quay had been, of pretended hope – ‘things’, his father wrote, were bound to settle down soon; it was undated, so perhaps the ‘hope’ had been exhausted for a long time before the letter arrived. They never heard from his father again; not even a report or a rumour reached them either of his imprisonment or of his death. He had concluded the letter with Spanish formality, ‘It is my great comfort that the two whom I love best in the world are both in safety, your affectionate husband and father, Henry Plarr.’

Doctor Plarr could not measure himself exactly how much he had been influenced to return to the small river port by the sense that here he would be living near the border of the country where he had been born and where his father was buried – whether in a prison or a patch of ground he would probably never know. He had only to drive a few kilometres north-east and look across the curve of the river. He had only like the smugglers to take a canoe . . . He felt sometimes like a watchman waiting for a signal. There was of course a more immediate motive. Once to a mistress he had said, ‘I left Buenos Aires to get away as far as possible from my mother.’ It was true she had mislaid her beauty and become querulous over her lost estancia as she lived on into middle age in the great sprawling muddled capital with its fantástica arquitectura of skyscrapers in mean streets rising haphazardly and covered for twenty floors by Pepsi-Cola advertisements.

Doctor Plarr turned his back on the port and continued his evening promenade along the bank of the river. The sky was dark by now so that he could no longer distinguish the plume of smoke or see the line of the opposite bank. The lamps of the ferry which linked the city to the Chaco approached like an illuminated pencil at a slow-drawn wavering diagonal as it fought through the current moving heavily south. The Three Marys hung in the sky like all that was left of a broken rosary chain – the cross lay where it had fallen elsewhere. Doctor Plarr, who every ten years, without quite knowing why, renewed his English passport, felt a sudden desire for company which was not Spanish.

There were only two other Englishmen, so far as he was aware, in the city, an old English teacher who had adopted the title of doctor without ever having seen the inside of a university, and Charley Fortnum, the Honorary Consul. Since the morning months ago when he had begun sleeping with Charley Fortnum’s wife, Doctor Plarr found he was ill at ease in the Consul’s company; perhaps he was plagued by primitive sensations of guilt; perhaps he was irritated by the complacency of Charley Fortnum who appeared so modestly confident of his wife’s fidelity. He talked with pride rather than anxiety of his wife’s troubles in her early pregnancy as though they were a kind of compliment to his prowess until Doctor Plarr was almost ready to exclaim, ‘But who do you suppose is the father?’

There remained Doctor Humphries . . . though it was still too early to go and find the old man where he lived at the Hotel Bolívar.

Doctor Plarr found a seat under one of the white globes which lit the river-front and took a book out of his pocket. From where he sat he could keep his eye on his car parked by the Coca-Cola stall. The book Doctor Plarr carried with him was a novel written by one of his patients, Jorge Julio Saavedra. Saavedra too bore the title of doctor, but it was an authentic title, for twenty years ago he had been awarded an honorary degree in the capital. The novel, which had been Doctor Saavedra’s first and most successful, was called The Taciturn Heart, and it was written in a heavily loaded melancholy style, full of the spirit of machismo.

Doctor Plarr found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time. These noble and uncommunicative characters in Latin-American literature seemed to him too simple and too heroic ever to have had living models. Rousseau and Chateaubriand were a greater influence in South America than Freud – there was even a city in Brazil named after Benjamin Constant. He read: ‘Julio Moreno would sit for hours in silence, on those days when the wind blew continuously from the sea and salted their few hectares of dry earth, shrivelling the rare plants which had survived the last wind, his chin in his hands, his eyes closed as though he wished to live only in some hidden corridor of his nature from which his wife was excluded. He never complained. She would stand beside him for long minutes, holding the maté gourd in her left hand, and when he opened his eyes Julio Moreno would take it from her without a word spoken. Only a relaxation of the muscles around the stern and unbeaten mouth appeared to her like an expression of thanks.’

Doctor Plarr, who had been brought up by his father on the works of Dickens and Conan Doyle, found the novels of Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra hard to read, but he regarded the effort as part of his medical duties. In a few days he would have to take one of his regular dinners with Doctor Saavedra at the Hotel Nacional and he must be ready to make some comment on the book which Doctor Saavedra had so warmly inscribed ‘To my friend and counsellor Doctor Eduardo Plarr, this my first book to show him I have not always been a political novelist and to disclose, as I can only do to a close friend, the first fruit of my inspiration.’ Doctor Saavedra was in fact far from taciturn, but Doctor Plarr suspected he regarded himself as a Moreno manqué. Perhaps it was significant that he had given Moreno one of his own Christian names . . .

Doctor Plarr had never caught anyone else reading in the whole city. When he dined out he saw only books imprisoned behind glass to guard them from humidity. He never met anyone unawares reading by the river or even in one of the city squares – except occasionally El Litoral, the local paper. There were sometimes lovers on the benches or tired women with shopping baskets, or tramps, but never readers. A tramp would proudly occupy a whole bench. No one cared to share the bench with a tramp, so unlike the rest of the world he could stretch at full length.

Perhaps reading in the open air was a habit he had acquired from his father who always took a book with him when he went farming, and in the orange scented air of his abandoned country Doctor Plarr had got through all the works of Dickens except Christmas Tales. People when they first saw him sitting on a bench with an open book had looked at him with keen curiosity. Perhaps they thought it was a custom peculiar to foreign doctors. It was not exactly unmanly, but it was certainly foreign. The men here preferred to stand at street corners and talk, or sit drinking cups of coffee and talk, or lean out of a window and talk. And all the time, while they talked, they touched each other to emphasize a point or just from friendship. In public Doctor Plarr touched nobody, only his book. It was a sign, like his English passport, that he would always remain a stranger; he would never be properly assimilated.

He began to read again. ‘She herself worked in an unbroken silence, accepting the hard toil, like the bad seasons, as a law of nature.’

Doctor Saavedra had enjoyed a period of critical and popular success in the capital. When he began to feel himself neglected by the reviewers – and still worse by the hostesses and the newspaper-reporters – he had come to the north where his great-grandfather had been governor and where he was shown the proper respect due to a famous novelist from the capital, even though there were probably few people who actually read his books. Strangely enough the mental geography of his novels remained unaltered. Wherever he might choose to live now, he had found his mythical region once and forever as a young man, the result of a holiday which he had taken in a small town by the sea, in the far south near Trelew. He had never encountered a Moreno, but he had imagined him very clearly one evening in the bar of a small hotel, where a man sat in melancholy silence over a drink.

Doctor Plarr had learnt all this in the capital from an old friend and jealous enemy of the novelist, and he found the knowledge of Saavedra’s background of some value when he came to treat his patient, who had suffered from bouts of voluble manic-depression. The same character appeared again and again in all his books, his history changed a little, but never his strong sad silence. The friend and enemy, who had accompanied the young Saavedra on that voyage of discovery, had exclaimed scornfully, ‘And do you know who the man was? He was a Welshman, a Welshman. Who has ever heard of a Welshman with machismo? There are a lot of Welshmen in those parts. He was drunk, that was all. His weekly drunk when he came in from the country.’

A ferry left for the invisible shore of scrub and swamp, and later the same ferry returned. Doctor Plarr found it difficult to concentrate on the taciturnity of Julio Moreno’s heart. Moreno’s wife left him at last with a casual labourer on his land who had youth and good looks and some facility in talking, but she was unhappy in the city by the sea where her lover remained unemployed. He soon became habitually drunk in bars and garrulous in bed, and she felt a nostalgia for the long silences and the dry salt ruined earth. So back she came to Moreno, who made room for her without a word at the table where he had prepared a meagre dinner, and afterwards he sat mutely in his customary chair with his chin in his hands while she stood beside him holding his maté gourd. There were still another hundred pages to come, though the story, it seemed to Doctor Plarr, might well have ended there. However Julio Moreno’s machismo had not yet found full expression, and when he indicated to his wife, in the fewest possible words, his decision to visit the city of Trelew, Doctor Plarr felt quite certain of what would happen there. Julio Moreno would encounter the labourer in a bar of the city and then there would be a fight with knives, won of course by the younger man. Hadn’t his wife, when he left, seen in Moreno’s eyes ‘the expression of an exhausted swimmer who surrenders to the dark tide of his ineluctable destiny’?

Introduction by Colm Tóibín, 2005

On 15 May 1967 Graham Greene wrote to his brother Dr Raymond Greene to ask him how a character could be killed off without arousing suspicion. 'Could you help me with a suggestion?' he wrote. 'I am writing of a man in the Secret Service who is suspected of being a double agent.' The man, Greene went on, 'has to be made to die apparently naturally from some disease or other. The bacteriological War Establishment is at the disposal of the Secret Service. Is there some bug they could use with the help of those experts? . . . The death has to appear a natural one to escape an awkward inquest and questions in Parliament about security.'

Greene had been thinking for years, he wrote later, of a serious novel about the Secret Service, 'a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service.' During his own years in the Service during the Second World War, first in West Africa and then in London, he 'had certainly found little excitement or melodrama coming my way.'

The idea of working within a genre such as spy fiction and refusing to play the game according to its rules would have fascinated Greene. He loved scenes of boredom, lassitude, ennui, grim introspection. His own war had lacked adventure or the obvious stuff of drama. The mystery he wanted to work with was the mysterious self, the strange longings and cravings that can cause people to betray themselves or others, the private obsessions which can cause characters to risk everything.

Greene began The Human Factor more than ten years before it was published. He realised as he wrote that his knowledge of the Secret Service was outdated, which may explain the sketchy descriptions of the work his characters are doing in the novel. After two or three years, he abandoned the novel in despair, thinking that 'it would join all those other unfinished projects which had littered my desk . . . I abandoned it mainly because of the Philby affair.'

Kim Philby, born in 1912, had been a senior officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service for ten years, while also working for the KGB. In 1951, while in Washington, he fell under suspicion and was recalled. In 1963, when the case against him could be proved, Philby defected to the Soviet Union, where, at first, he was miserable because his hosts suspected that he was a British plant. His name became associated with other spies with whom he had been at Cambridge, most notably Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and later Anthony Blunt.

Greene had worked with Philby in London in 1944; they drank together in the King's Arms pub behind St James's Street. Although they shared certain attitudes, notably a dislike of the United States and a schoolboy sense of humour, it is important not to exaggerate their closeness. Philby later told Greene's biographer Norman Sherry:

I cannot remember Graham ever visiting my quarters; I certainly never visited his. Our contacts were limited to the lunch hour, and to the after-hours drink at a pub before dispersing to our homes . . . There were usually colleagues to put a distance between us. But I felt in him a more personal factor: a deeply held sense of privacy on matters which seriously engaged him . . . not once did he refer to Catholicism in any context whatsoever. I had no wish to enter the forbidden zone. Any attempt . . . to probe his defences would have exposed me to his probing of mine, which for obvious, if melancholy reasons, was inadmissible.

Greene was ambitious enough as a novelist to want his novels to be as significant as public events, to outshine them if possible. He had no interest in merely reflecting what was already known and widely reported. Thus he cared too much about his art and his characters to want to write a novel about Philby, or to write a novel and then spend the next decade denying that it was about Philby. 'My double agent Maurice Castle,' he later wrote, 'bore no resemblance in character or motive to Philby, none of the characters has the least likeness to anyone I have known, but I disliked the idea of the novel being taken as a roman-à-clef.'

Like many novelists, Greene sought his inspiration from within. He felt a sort of craftman's pride at the idea that he did not actively model his main character on anyone. 'I know well from experience,' he wrote, 'that it is only possible for me to base a very minor and transient character on a real person. A real person stands in the way of imagination. Perhaps a trick of speech, a physical trait may be used, but I can write no more than a few pages before realising that I simply don't know enough about the character to use him, even if he is an old friend.'

Greene had no interest in dramatising the life of a man with fixed political beliefs, who was prepared to betray his country for them. Greene's Catholic characters are generally beset with doubt; he could not, then, invent a communist who believed with certainty in the teachings of Marx. His protagonist in The Human Factor is therefore impelled by love for a woman and gratitude to those who rescued her rather than by a wish to save mankind. Greene makes Castle's love private and fanatical; his domestic happiness is always in danger.

Castle moves with care; Greene offers him no flourishes or colour. The step he took while posted in South Africa, and deeply in love with a black woman, was his single defining step. He is not a sensuous man, or a man on whom nothing is lost. He is of no interest, except for his obsession and his fear. He longs for nothing save dull happiness. He is the least glamorous spy ever made. Thus he is, in fact, of great interest.

For many writers, the landscape of childhood, the contours of the first-known places, become not only useful, but oddly necessary tools for later work. Henry James, for example, set his novel Washington Square in his grandmother's house which he had known as a child. So, too, Greene offered Maurice Castle his own childhood scenery, and allows him to return there and make the place his home as well. This gave Greene a sort of emotional anchor as he worked; it was a way of reviving lost time. Thus the scenes in Berkhamsted are scenes from Greene's own boyhood; Castle's stories of childhood unhappiness, as relayed to his son, belong also to Greene. 'Lurking in so many crevices in his novels,' Norman Sherry has written, 'are pages and pages of his secret history.' He placed Colonel Daintry, for example, in 'a two-roomed flat in St James's Street' which he himself had once inhabited, with the same views and the same neighbours. 'His bedroom and his bathroom looked out on a tiny ancient court containing a sundial and a silversmith.' This was precisely the scene viewed from Greene's bedroom and bathroom.

Greene's way of structuring a novel was clean and brisk and businesslike. His flashbacks were carefully chosen to seem intimate, like someone whispering. They thickened and deepened the psychological tone, but they were not allowed to delay the movement of the novel. Thus the first chapter of The Human Factor is set in Castle's office in central London, establishing his fear in the face of official scrutiny, his care, his deliberate caution versus the nonchalance of Davis, his deputy.

The second chapter is set in his lair, where his wife is waiting for him, where the daily routine is disrupted, in a way which unsettles him deeply, by his son's illness. This chapter ends with a scene both intimate and disturbing as his wife wakes in the night and asks him if he minds that the child is not his, going over their own escape years earlier from the grips of apartheid. It is clear now that Maurice Castle is a man living in fear, waiting for the axe to fall, dreaming of nothing except a peaceful old age in the company of his wife and child, realising, with the reader, that, unless he is very careful and lucky, this may not be possible.

When Greene finished his novel The Honorary Consul, published in 1973, he viewed the years ahead, as many novelists do, when a good book has been completed, as blank; his 'imagination', he wrote, 'seemed dead as a bird. And yet there were some good things in the twenty thousand words [of The Human Factor] which I had written - I liked especially the shooting party at C's country house. The memory of it nagged me. I couldn't settle to any other work, and so reluctantly and doubtfully I took the novel up again, telling myself that the Philby affair belonged now sufficiently to the past.'

The shooting party comes in Chapter 3 of the book, when the sense of Castle's fear and insecurity and brittle happiness are still fresh with the reader. The issue now, as the three men at the party decide to react with a new ruthless efficiency, is whether they will be clever enough to see that it is the dull man, the unlikely one, who is guilty and not Davis, his more vulnerable and flamboyant assistant.

In a disclaimer at the beginning of the book, Greene wrote that 'a novel based on life in any Secret Service must necessarily contain a large element of fantasy.' Nonetheless, his suggestion that his former colleagues in the British Secret Service would poison a junior member of the staff on the merest suspicion of being a double agent did not please them. Michael Shelden, in his biography of Greene, writes: 'Maurice Oldfield and other members of SIS were offended by Greene's treatment of their world. They could accept the comic vision in Our Man in Havana, since no one thought it would be taken seriously. But The Human Factor showed too much disloyalty to the old firm and too much sympathy for Philby.'

Although Greene claimed not to draw characters from life, it is clear that two of the women in The Human Factor were based on Greene's mother and his former lover. During the war, his wife Vivien and children were evacuated to Crowborough where his mother lived, while Greene stayed in London. Vivien recalled: 'We went from Clapham Common in a taxi to Crowborough. I had a kitten and a canary in a cage and my children . . . Graham's mother's house was very cold and there wasn't much room really. The cat was never allowed in the living quarters of the house. The canary we had to give away at Crowborough.' Thus the idea came for the war between the dog and the cat in Castle's mother's house in The Human Factor, and also the idea of Castle's wife being abandoned there. The physical description of Castle's mother fitted Greene's mother, as did the coldness of her tone. Greene's cousin Barbara remembered that 'she was a most formidable and cold woman.'

In December 1975 Greene wrote to Catherine Walston, with whom he had had an affair for many years, that he wanted to get back 'to the novel I abandoned six or eight years ago.' At the time of publication of The Human Factor in 1978 Walston had six months to live. Greene gave her a walk-on part in the novel as the wife of Sir John Hargreaves, the head of Intelligence, who gives the weekend shooting party. Lady Hargreaves, like Catherine Walston, is a good hostess who gives weekend parties and has a faint American accent. Her husband, like Walston's, sometimes walks with a limp.

Greene was not as interested in geo-politics, or the brutality of apartheid, or the ruthlessness of power, as much as the lonely drama of the single conscience, the man alone with a secret he cannot share, his love, like his hatred, a danger to his safety. By using elements of his own past - his mother, his exlover, his childhood haunts, his old London flat - he managed a depth of feeling in a book which is as orderly in its structure, at times, as a screenplay. But Greene was also a master of the single phrase which forces the reader to stop, which works like a depth charge. When Castle is telling stories to his son, for example, Greene adds the weary sentence: 'There were still fathers around even today who told their children that God existed.' When Castle asks his mother if he was a nervous child, she replies: 'You always had an exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness. It was a sort of insecurity, though why you should have felt insecure with me and your father . . . You once gave away a good fountain-pen to someone at school who had offered you a bun with a piece of chocolate inside.' Greene was skilled at working in the detail which could make the reader shiver.

When the book came out, Greene sent a copy to Philby in Moscow, signed 'to my friend Kim'. Philby wondered in his reply if Dr Percival had been recruited from the CIA. 'Dr L,' Greene wrote, 'whom we had both known, was hardly capable of deliberately poisoning a man, even though his diagnoses were notoriously inaccurate.' Castle remarks in the novel that Dr Percival 'tried to make out I had diabetes. They sent me to a specialist who found I had too little sugar instead of too much.' Similarly, Dr L, Greene wrote, 'had tried to prevent me going to West Africa by diagnosing me as a diabetic. A more reliable specialist found a small sugar deficiency.'

Philby also wrote that Greene had made Castle's circumstances in Moscow 'too bleak'. Philby insisted that 'he had found everything provided for him, even to a shoehorn, something he had never possessed before.' Greene pointed out in his reply that he had based his depiction on the account given by Philby's wife Eleanor in her book The Spy I Loved. But Greene the novelist could not have easily handled Philby's defection into paradise. Even though Eleanor's book spoke of Philby's having 'done a marvellous job inside the flat, and by Russian standards, it was amazingly spacious and comfortable', Greene preferred to dwell on her view of the building they lived in 'from the rear, our huge grim block reminded me of the Lubianka Prison.' In Greene's bleak vision, even heaven itself would have to be disappointing.

Part One

Oxford

63 Fillebrook Avenue, Leigh-on-Sea, 11 September 1949

This so dull life, mingled with hate and annoyance and pity. No attempt here at method or speed. The housework drags on all day – cleaning, hoovering, dusting, making beds, sewing, washing-up and so on. No one ever sits down before suppertime. It is wrong, but the smallness of the rooms and the house is so noticeable now. The nursery stuffed full of things, always untidy; the dining-room dark and gloomy – only the lounge is tolerable, and one never lives there. The cloistered life with no one to talk to, no one to laugh with – here I am like a hermit, and quite unnatural. An absolute craving for new faces, new meetings, new places. I would tell them so much, but a curious obstinacy prevents this. Always an air of mulish hostility.

24 September

Two beautiful things. A big, spacious sunset sky – elegant and not ostentatious, but curiously in the east, to the west nothing but a bank of low, dark clouds. The end of a Spergularia in the microscope – like a minute green saturn. A tiny shining ball with a ring of gauzy skin around it. Also the sails of some Thames barges half-hidden by mist. A curious thing. About to throw a piece of screwed-up paper into the yellow jug which serves as waste-paper basket, I said to myself, ‘As much chance as you have of being genius.’ It fell into the jug without a murmur, a 20 to 1 chance, at the least.

Another day of silence, listening to other people’s trivialities – a dreadful hour at night when all the completely banal information gained from a visit of relatives is repeated and reviewed. Two mathematical impossibilities I should like to see. One, a graph of the words spoken by me each day over a year – the rise and fall would be eye-opening. Near zero here, and normal everywhere else. Two, a count of words spoken by my mother and myself – David and Goliatha!

The visit by unknown relations is frightening, slightly, to the ego, and being. I feel awkward, not because I feel superior, but because I feel that they feel I am. Probably oversensitivity. But they are definitely not at home with me.

Trying to get at oneself is a continual unwrapping – each new skin decreases steadily in beauty and value after it is exposed. Always the seed of truth, the maximum fulfilment of self, appears to be just beneath the next layer. Plainly there is no end to this unwrapping, but the sensation is damping.

Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature – a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’ True, yet, poetry, making, is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.

25 September

3 a.m. Beautifully played New Orleans jazz, with clarinet in low register, and very jazzy tuba and cornet. Bessie Smith singing. This sort of stuff has in it the germ of music that will last.

Op. 55. Splendidly vigorous, with some of the secret lyricality of the last quartets.

Writing fever. Can’t get any university work done. Full of ideas for ‘Cognac’ and full of frustration at not having the time to do them. ‘Cognac’ must aim at being popular, with art overboard. The idea came all in two hours last night and this morning.

30 September

Another appalling half-hour of talk. When screaming was close. Talk of the utmost banality, on prices of mattresses, on Mrs Ramsey’s daughter who married a doctor in Montreal. A few comments are made on poetry. So hopeless to try and explain. They would never understand. No mention of art can ever be developed in case we are ‘highbrow’ – God, how I hate that word! No philosophy is mentioned, without Thomas Hardy and Darwin getting dragged in. It is la mère. Her attitude to conversation is one of complete alertness. I must break in, and I must say something – and in she breaks and says something, whether she has any knowledge, real opinion or not. It is with great difficulty that I can keep my oyster silence. But I must not hurt. With le père, it is partly a defence; modernity is ignored, age is suspicious of invention.

I feel violent with ‘hate’ against this bloody town. Least violent, now, against the geographical situation (once I longed for Devon), most against the way of life, and then the people who allow it to sap all the beauty of life out of them. All my sympathy goes out to the boy who ran away to be a bullfighter. I’m sure he must have ‘felt’ the complete horror of this place. This town can have as much horror mentally for a sensitive person as a blitzed city may have, physically, for a turnip. It is the unsociability, the not-knowing-anyone, the having-no-colour, that kills. No interesting people to talk to, no sincere people, no unusual things to do.

Then there is ‘niceness’ as a standard of judgement – God, how I hate that word, too! – ‘a nice girl’, ‘a nice road’. Nice = colourless, efficient, with nose glued to the middle path, with middle interests, dizzy with ordinariness. Ugh!

Oxford, 6 October

Reread some early poems. All bad. It is like seeing oneself in a film walk naked through a crowded street.

But then to feel oneself unfolding, like a flower.

*

7 October

Lunch with Guy Hardy and Basil Beeston and a serious Pole. In the Kemp. I cannot concentrate on those with whom I happen to be. Always there are more interesting people at the next table. Beautiful women to be watched. G and BB seem so set up in the world – they sit on a terrace by the sea and I drift past, watching them, jealous, unhappy. Yet I have the jewel. I may drift to even-more-to-be-coveted terraces, and land. * Immortality is a convention, a white elephant. A futility. There is no logic in planning for it. No enjoyment, no beauty can come out of it. All life should be designed to be contained within life. Within the closed circle. Outside the theatre, the bouquets won’t be seen. The turnip who gains fame in his life, and lives, has an immense superiority over the poet who becomes famous after his death, and obscurely exists. Immortality is the gravestone of the spirit. What use is the gravestone?

5 November

Guy Fawkes night. A great crowd of people, vaguely contented at shaking off the discipline of the world as it is. The undergraduates form the largest part, for the most part just watching, with a few active spirits shouting, calling, singing, making speeches. A certain air of forcedness about all these crowds. Fireworks shooting up, and people exploding away from them when they land. The police and the proctors standing ineffectively. Buses moving slowly, cars being rocked and thumped. Many climb up the scaffolding around the Martyr’s Memorial, then a vague move is made to the Taj Mahal restaurant where there is a man climbing up, men shouting, and a solid mass of people. Water out of the windows.

Basically one cannot help feeling contempt for all this canaille, noisily and offensively drunk yet not doing anything positive. Most of them posturing in a ridiculous manner. A good many girls, who seem the most genuinely excited.

To a certain extent there is a vast good will that can be sensed; roughly everyone is together and enjoying themselves, with the police and the proctors symbolizing all kinds of emotion and, ultimately, the determinism in life. GH and BB both enjoy themselves, and look for some means to manifest their lawlessness. I have absolutely no desire to do anything else but watch, wanting to be everywhere and see everything, observing people’s faces. Roger Hendry is like me but not so finely ‘set’, for he has to pretend to a certain lawlessness which isn’t innate in him at all.

Too many of the faces are vacuous and want filling.

The sight of the girl in green, about whom I wrote the Hospital story, with a thick well set-up young man, is distressing. Above all the sight of the moon, nearly full, in a clear night sky, not particularly cold, after a dull, rainy day. I wanted very much to see one of the people who climbed the Memorial fall down to his death. The indrawn breath and sudden laugh would have been most effective.

12 November

A self-searching night at the Podges,’ with Faith.

Faith, a curious kind of extrovert, conversation-dominating, with the same strident rise in pitch (when she wishes to break in on top of anyone else) as M. Confidential, bold, tomboyish – revealing about her monastic father, whom she says worries her greatly at times.

Podge and Eileen are a perfect duo; in harmony or perfect discord.

During this evening (having felt ill all day, with a certain amount of pain) I keep very quiet and feel unable to assert myself in any way. Not particularly self-conscious and oversensitive but lacking more than lost colour. Two mes: ego, thinking with and at tangents from the others, full of the right words, curious ideas and so on; and the alter ego, not being able to break into the discussions.

An empty walk home with Faith, yawning myself and she whistling and singing. I feel a vague need to explain myself, and also to know what she is thinking. A wet, warm, windy night.

I can feel more concretely a philosophy of life on occasions like these. To be persuasive, to watch and analyse, externally; internally, to record and create. It is absolutely necessary to remain balanced; that is, never to become submerged completely – always to have the intention of creating beauty for others, however reduced this infusion into action and society becomes. Theoretically I want to become a core receiving prehensions, being moulded by them, yet remaining pointed in the one direction, towards creation of beauty. I can’t pretend that this is a natural attitude; it leads to compression of feeling, to a dangerous bottling of the need to express, an overtense introversion. The advantages are 1. the forming-house for creation (although some kind of objectivity and self-criticism must be obtained), 2. that the final axion is one of external expression in fame through beauty created. It is creation which acts as a safety-valve, as well as being the ultimate purpose. The essentials are constant attention to practice of the means and a self-confident devotion to the end.

I think that this is the nearest I can get to self-fulfilment, considering, as I do now, that everything is purely relative, and that no beauty is immortal. I can see little point in immortal fame; yet can believe in the human illogic of doing good by the creation of beauty, even though it will only be temporarily existent. (Not forgetting the time-space question, when nothing that has existed can disappear.) Must strive after living glory; it is unnatural to push, but it is necessary.

We also talked of the parent–child relationship.

The crux is when the bridge of realization is reached. The otherness of parents, their separate personality, their defaults and often their inferiority. A solid link of respect should be maintained (E)– but respect can’t come when the ‘truth’ (however false) seems to be clear. One’s parents seem inferior ‘x’ and nothing can make them respected ‘y’. Only hypocrisy and convention. It’s like being C of E when there is no faith. Eileen’s interesting theory that this break is good for creating individuals; that happy families are those when the children have failed to ‘personalize’ or ‘separate’ their parents and so become submerged within the family ‘soul’ with unrealized individuality.

Going through a long period of self-discontent; no faith. Fair certainty that several of the projects, especially the plays, are good, but impossibility of long concentration and doubt about powers of technique and realization. Moreover, the consciousness that nothing will be done for at least a year. And at times the deliberate withdrawal from the world becomes too much of an effort to permit any surety.

21 November

The constant quantum of self-estimation and the temporary urges to write which must die away because there is no time to canalize the inspiration. Sense of waste.

JW. Dapper, impeccable, and fairly well off. Conventional and sociable, but without great originality except for a certain facility of wit. Easy to get on with. Not strikingly dressed. Slightly French in manner, not thoroughly English (brought up for some years in France).

GH. Ex-RAF – still a flyer in the OR. Self-possessed, insensitive, often unintentionally rude because of his certainty in self. Intelligent, but apparently not imaginative. His egoism is annoying, partly because it is not fully conscious on his part; it is not deeply objectionable, but annoying. A question of limited assurance, but still assurance. No one sensitive is ever assured. Well-liked by others.

RF. Religious, obtuse, wet. Wishes to be a schoolmaster. Earnest worker, never relaxing. Constantly a Boy Scout badge in his lapel. Bad French accent, with many stupid remarks. Naïve to an infuriating degree. Reliable, always willing to help. Keen on amateur photography; no sense of art, of beauty. Insensitive.

PW. The most interesting character. An ex-POW, with a brilliant Oxford career. President of French class and OUDS, editor of Isis. A very quiet and silent little person, chubby-faced, with dark glasses always. A problem because his past and his present silence seem to suggest hidden depths, which may or may not exist in truth. By no means infallible or intolerant – an excess of diplomacy, never impolite, brusque or outspoken. Sense of humour; well-chosen opinions and remarks. Listened to deferentially. Today, revealed a little about himself to me for the first time since I met him, i.e. his shyness in discussion, which he confessed.

MLG. An easy character. Provincial Provençal, but with no great meridional traits, except a certain quickness of temperament. Great sense of humour; polite and very conventional. Not basically a prude, yet unapproachable externally. No warmth of relationship, such as one might find in an English girl (without any implication of love).

HF (Henri Fluchère). Small, temperamental, Provençal. Sense of humour, excellent conversationalist, with sophist and sophisticated dissertations on literature. Unprepossessing appearance – a certain foxiness, slyness, which is misleading. Excellent but badly pronounced English.

3 December

Feature of twentieth century – the mass of authors; difficult to rise above a struggling welter. Need for order; genius is crowded out, stifled. It is pleasant to think of some perfect state where only the official writers may write. Increased education means increased tyroism in the arts – everyone tries their hand. Need to find a striking individuality.

Cycling along a wet road under a sky full of scudding clouds, with a full moon shining through them with a variety of strange effects, pinknesses, opaque masses. The wind very strong from the west. A feeling of momentary jubilation, being at one with nature, and sensing the good fortune of being human, the leading actor standing out from the harmonious background. This is a rather eighteenth-century sentiment, but one which is full of happiness for those that can still genuinely feel it. Everything related by love within the whole, a pantheistic joy. Science and civilization are encroaching on this relationship between man and nature, but the irreducible element of comparative immortality prevents any kind of total conquest. The sky remains. Feeling such a moment is like looking back into the Promised Land.

Three days running, a red ladybird lands on my desk in spite of the cold weather. The superstition still vaguely makes itself felt.

The question of intimacy in style – the objectivist always writes for a potential reader other than himself; he is never half alone and chez soi, never getting to the rock-bottom of things, for the style affects the expression. The subjectivist writes purely for himself, egotistically saying a thing in the way which seems to himself best to express exactly his own view of it. All creation tends to one of these two poles, which are, very approximately, classical and romantic. This is an interesting test to perform on all memoirists and diarists. What if the greatest combines the two qualities?

The vital thing is time. It is the fundamental problem of life, around which all metaphysical speculation ought to turn. Time as a notation, as a measurement, is valueless, an artificial invention. The important thing is the becoming, the dynamism.

Some arts use time more than others. Painting, sculpture, present a more or less static object. Poetry and music, the cinema, a fluidity absolutely reliant on time for effect. The miracle of photography, challenging time, fixing.

Death is simply not becoming, a loss of fluidity. The loss of the element of presence. Death kills time and enthrones, enhances place.

Life is the gift of consciousness of time. A gift which, once it has been given, cannot be rejected. Awareness is becoming. There is a continual awareness of presence.

Could death punish by stopping enjoyment and awareness, which are the benefits of time, and reward by changing time?

Awareness can give our highest imagined happiness. We cannot imagine timelessness and unawareness as a higher happiness, since they are conceptions unrelated to our present condition.

Given the gifts of awareness and time, it is futile to pursue timelessness, like the mystics. The gift of awareness must be fully enjoyed, since it is the highest potential in the present condition. This belief is necessary, though not absolutely true. It has relation truth.

Absolute happiness is timelessness and unawareness, but imperfect organisms cannot apprehend absolutes.

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so ... was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon." I expect you might put down your teacup and say, 'Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!" Ordinarily I'd have to laugh at myself and agree with you. But the truth is that the afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka lchiro really was the best and the worst of my life. He seemed so fascinating to me, even the fish smell on his hands was a kind of perfume. If I had never known him, I'm sure I would not have become a geisha.

I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I wasn't even born in Kyoto. I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan. In all my life I've never told more than a handful of people anything at all about Yoroido, or about the house in which I grew up, or about my mother and father, or my older sister-and certainly not about how I became a geisha, or what it was like to be one. Most people would much rather carry on with their fantasies that my mother and grandmother were geisha, and that I began my training in

dance when I was weaned from the breast, and so on. As a matter of fact, one day many years ago I was pouring a cup of sake for a man who happened to mention that he had been in Yoroido only the previous week. Well, I felt as a bird must feel when it has flown across the ocean and comes upon a creature that knows its nest. I was so shocked I couldn't stop myself from saying:

'Yoroido! Why, that's where I grew up!"

This poor man! His face went through the most remarkable series of changes. He tried his best to smile, though it didn't come out well because he couldn't get the look of shock off his face.

'Yoroido?" he said. `You can't mean it."

I long ago developed a very practiced smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it. I decided I'd better use it just then, and of course it worked. He let out all his breath and tossed down the cup of sake I'd poured for him before giving an enormous laugh I'm sure was prompted more by relief than anything else.

"The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. 'You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!" And when he'd laughed again, he said to me, "That's why you're so much fun, Sayuri-san. Sometimes you almost make me believe your little jokes are real."

I don't much like thinking of myself as a cup of tea made in a bucket, but I suppose in a way it must be true. After all, I did grow up in Yoroido, and no one would suggest it's a glamorous spot. Hardly anyone ever visits it. As for the people who live there, they never have occasion to leave. You're probably wondering how I came to leave it myself. That's where my story begins.

In our little fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a "tipsy house." It stood near a cliff where the wind off the ocean was always blowing. As a child it seemed to me as if the ocean had caught a terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells when it let out a huge sneeze-which is to say there was a burst of wind with a tremendous spray. I decided our tiny house must have been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and took to leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way. Probably it would have collapsed if my father hadn't cut a timber from a wrecked fishing boat to prop up the eaves, which made the house look like a tipsy old man leaning on his crutch.

Inside this tipsy house I lived something of a lopsided life. Because from my earliest years I was very much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or older sister. My mother said it was because we were made just the same, she and I-and it was true we both had the same peculiar eyes of a sort you almost never see in Japan. Instead of being dark brown like everyone else's, my mother's eyes were a translucent gray, and mine are just the same. When I was very young, I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, which she thought very funny. The fortunetellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality, so much that the other four elements were hardly present at all-and this, they explained, was why her features matched so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She had her mother's pouty mouth but her father's angular jaw, which gave the impression of a delicate picture with much too heavy a frame. And her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by thick lashes that must have been striking on her father, but in her case only made her look startled.

My mother always said she'd married my father because she had too much water in her personality and he had too much wood in his. People who knew my father understood right away what she was talking about. Water flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack to spill through. Wood, on the other hand, holds fast to the earth. In my father's case this was a good thing, for he was a fisherman, and a man with wood in his personality is at ease on the sea. In fact, my father was more at case on the sea than anywhere else, and never left it far behind him. He smelled like the sea even after he had bathed. When he wasn't fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mending a fishing net. And if a fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn't even have awakened it, at the speed he worked. He did everything this slowly. Even when he summoned a look of concentration, you could run outside and drain the bath in the time it took him to rearrange his features. His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his own face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.

When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never known. One day I asked him, "Daddy, why are you so old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that they formed little sagging umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his head and said, I don't know." When I turned to my mother, she gave me a look meaning she would answer the question for me another time. The following day without saying a word, she walked me down the hill toward the village and turned at a path into a graveyard in the woods. She led me to three graves in the corner, with three white marker posts much taller than I was. They had stern-looking black characters written top to bottom on them, but I hadn't attended the school in our little village long enough to know where one ended and the next began. My mother pointed to them and said, "Natsu, wife of Sakamoto Minoru." Sakamoto Minoru was the name of my father. "Died age twenty-four, in the nineteenth year of Meiji." Then she pointed to the next one: Linichiro, son of Sakamoto Minoru, died age six, in the nineteenth year of Meiji," and to the next one, which was identical except for the name, Masao, and the age, which was three. It took me a while to understand that my father had been married before, a long time ago, and that his whole family had died. I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have made a good balance and produced children with the proper arrangement of elements. I'm sure it was a surprise to them that they ended up with one of each. For it wasn't just that I resembled my mother and had even inherited her unusual eyes; my sister, Satsu, was as much like my father as anyone could be. Satsu was six years older than me, and of course, being older, she could do things I couldn't do. But Satsu had a remarkable quality of doing everything in a way that seemed like a complete accident. For example, if you asked her to pour a bowl of soup from a pot on the stove, she would get the job done, but in a way that looked like she'd spilled it into the bowl just by luck. One time she even cut herself with a fish, and I don't mean with a knife she was using to clean a fish. She was carrying a fish wrapped in paper up the hill from the village when it slid out and fell against her leg in such a way as to cut her with one of its fins.

Our parents might have had other children besides Satsu and me, particularly since my father hoped for a boy to fish with him. But when I was seven my mother grew terribly ill with what was probably bone cancer, though at the time I had no idea what was wrong. Her only escape from discomfort was to sleep, which she began to do the way a cat does-which is to say, more or less constantly. As the months passed she slept most of the time, and soon began to groan whenever she was awake. I knew something in her was changing quickly, but because of so much water in her personality, this didn't seem worrisome to me. Sometimes she grew thin in a matter of months but grew strong again just as quickly But by the time I was nine, the bones in her face had begun to protrude, and she never gained weight again afterward. I didn't realize the water was draining out of her because of her illness. just as seaweed is naturally soggy, you see, but turns brittle as it dries, my mother was giving up more and more of her essence.

Then one afternoon I was sitting on the pitted floor of our dark front room, singing to a cricket I'd found that morning, when a voice called out at the door:

"Oi! Open up! It's Dr. Miura!"

Dr. Miura came to our fishing village once a week, and had made a point of walking up the hill to check on my mother ever since her illness had begun. My father was at home that day because a terrible storm was coming. He sat in his usual spot on the floor, with his two big spiderlike hands tangled up in a fishing net. But he took a moment to point his eyes at me and raise one of his fingers. This meant he wanted me to answer the door.

Dr. Miura was a very important man-or so we believed in our village. He had studied in Tokyo and reportedly knew more Chinese characters than anyone. He was far too proud to notice a creature like me. When I opened the door for him, he slipped out of his shoes and stepped right past me into the house.

'Why, Sakarnoto-san," he said to my father, I wish I had your life, out on the sea fishing all day. How glorious! And then on rough days you take a rest. I see your wife is still asleep," he went on. 'What a pity. I thought I might examine her."

"Oh?" said my father.

I won't be around next week, you know. Perhaps you might wake her for me?"

My father took a while to untangle his hands from the net, but at last he stood.

"Chiyo-chan," he said to me, "get the doctor a cup of tea."

My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn't be known by my geisha name, Sayuri, until years later.

My father and the doctor went into the other room, where my mother lay sleeping. I tried to listen at the door, but I could hear only my mother groaning, and nothing of what they said. I occupied myself with making tea, and soon the doctor came back out rubbing his hands together and looking very stern. My father came to join him, and they sat together at the table in the center of the room.

"The time has come to say something to you, Sakarnoto-san," Dr. Miura began. 'You need to have a talk with one of the women in the village. Mrs. Sugi, perhaps. Ask her to make a nice new robe for your wife."

I haven't the money, Doctor," my father said.

'We've all grown poorer lately I understand what you're saying. But you owe it to your wife. She shouldn't die in that tattered robe she's wearing."

"So she's going to die soon?"

"A few more weeks, perhaps. She's in terrible pain. Death will release her."

After this, I couldn't hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird's wings flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don't know. But if you've ever seen a bird trapped inside the great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my mind was reacting. It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn't simply go on being sick. I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.

I thought I would die first," my father was saying.

`You're an old man, Sakamoto-san. But your health is good. You might have four or five years. I'll leave you some more of those pills for your wife. You can give them to her two at a time, if you need to."

They talked about the pills a bit longer, and then Dr. Miura left. My father went on sitting for a long while in silence, with his back to me. He wore no shirt but only his loose-fitting skin; the more I looked at him, the more he began to seem like just a curious collection of shapes and textures. His spine was a path of knobs. His head, with its discolored splotches, might have been a bruised fruit. His arms were sticks wrapped in old leather, dangling from two bumps. If my mother died, how could I go on living in the house with him? I didn't want to be away from him; but whether he was there or not, the house would be just as empty when my mother had left it.

At last my father said my name in a whisper. I went and knelt beside him.

Something very important," he said.

His face was so much heavier than usual, with his eyes rolling around almost as though he'd lost control of them. I thought he was struggling to tell me my mother would die soon, but all he said was: "Go down to the village. Bring back some incense for the altar."

Our tiny Buddhist altar rested on an old crate beside the entrance to the kitchen; it was the only thing of value in our tipsy house. In front of a rough carving of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, stood tiny black mortuary tablets bearing the Buddhist names of our dead ancestors.

"But, Father ... wasn't there anything else?"

I hoped he would reply, but he only made a gesture with his hand that meant for me to leave.

PART ONE

I

After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. A lot of old women in black trousers squatted on the landing: it was February and I suppose too hot for them in bed. One trishaw driver pedalled slowly by towards the riverfront and I could see lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes. There was no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street.

Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation, but surely in that case he would have telephoned to the restaurant—he was very meticulous about small courtesies. I turned to go indoors when I saw a girl waiting in the next doorway. I couldn’t see her face, only the white silk trousers and the long flowered robe, but I knew her for all that. She had so often waited for me to come home at just this place and hour.

‘Phuong,’ I said—which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes. I knew before she had time to tell me that she was waiting for Pyle too. ‘He isn’t here.’

‘Je sais. Je t’ai vu seul à la fenêtre.’

‘You may as well wait upstairs.’ I said. ‘He will be coming soon.’

‘I can wait here.’

‘Better not. The police might pick you up.’

She followed me upstairs. I thought of several ironic and unpleasant jests I might make, but neither her English nor her French would have been good enough for her to understand the irony, and, strange to say, I had no desire to hurt her or even to hurt myself. When we reached the landing all the old women turned their heads, and as soon as we had passed their voices rose and fell as though they were singing together.

‘What are they talking about?’

‘They think I have come home.’

Inside my room the tree I had set up weeks ago for the Chinese New Year had shed most of its yellow blossoms. They had fallen between the keys of my typewriter. I picked them out. ‘Tu es troublé,’ Phuong said.

‘It’s unlike him. He’s such a punctual man.’

I took off my tie and my shoes and lay down on the bed. Phuong lit the gas stove and began to boil the water for tea. It might have been six months ago. ‘He says you are going away soon now,’ she said.

‘Perhaps.’

‘He is very fond of you.’

‘Thank him for nothing,’ I said.

I saw that she was doing her hair differently, allowing it to fall black and straight over her shoulders. I remembered that Pyle had once criticized the elaborate hairdressing which she thought became the daughter of a mandarin. I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.

‘He will not be long,’ she said as though I needed comfort for his absence.

I wondered what they talked about together. Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years. Democracy was another subject of his—he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world. Phuong on the other hand was wonderfully ignorant; if Hitler had come into the conversation she would have interrupted to ask who he was. The explanation would be all the more difficult because she had never met a German or a Pole and had only the vaguest knowledge of European geography, though about Princess Margaret of course she knew more than I. I heard her put a tray down on the end of the bed.

‘Is he still in love with you, Phuong?’

To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow. There had been a time when I thought none of their voices sang like Phuong’s. I put out my hand and touched her arm—their bones too were as fragile as a bird’s.

‘Is he, Phuong?’

She laughed and I heard her strike a match. ‘In love?’—perhaps it was one of the phrases she didn’t understand.

‘May I make your pipe?’ she asked.

When I opened my eyes she had lit the lamp and the tray was already prepared. The lamplight made her skin the colour of dark amber as she bent over the flame with a frown of concentration, heating the small paste of opium, twirling her needle.

‘Does Pyle still not smoke?’ I asked her.

‘No.’

‘You ought to make him or he won’t come back.’ It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man’s sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover. Now she was kneading the little ball of hot paste on the convex margin of the bowl and I could smell the opium. There is no smell like it. Beside the bed my alarm-clock showed twelvetwenty, but already my tension was over. Pyle had diminished. The lamp lit her face as she tended the long pipe, bent over it with the serious attention she might have given to a child. I was fond of my pipe: more than two feet of straight bamboo, ivory at either end. Two-thirds of the way down was the bowl, like a convolvulus reversed, the convex margin polished and darkened by the frequent kneading of the opium. Now with a flick of the wrist she plunged the needle into the tiny cavity, released the opium and reversed the bowl over the flame, holding the pipe steady for me. The bead of opium bubbled gently and smoothly as I inhaled.

The practised inhaler can draw a whole pipe down in one breath, but I always had to take several pulls. Then I lay back, with my neck on the leather pillow, while she prepared the second pipe.

I said, ‘You know, really, it’s as clear as daylight. Pyle knows I smoke a few pipes before bed, and he doesn’t want to disturb me. He’ll be round in the morning.’

In went the needle and I took my second pipe. As I laid it down, I said, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.’ I took a sip of tea and held my hand in the pit of her arm. ‘When you left me,’ I said, ‘it was lucky I had this to fall back on. There’s a good house in the rue d’Ormay. What a fuss we Europeans make about nothing. You shouldn’t live with a man who doesn’t smoke, Phuong.’

‘But he’s going to marry me,’ she said. ‘Soon now.’

‘Of course, that’s another matter.’

‘Shall I make your pipe again?’

‘Yes.’

I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her. Of course it would be agreeable to feel her thigh beside me in the bed—she always slept on her back, and when I woke in the morning I could start the day with a pipe, instead of with my own company. ‘Pyle won’t come now,’ I said. ‘Stay here, Phuong.’ She held the pipe out to me and shook her head. By the time I had drawn the opium in, her presence or absence mattered very little.

‘Why is Pyle not here?’ she asked.

‘How do I know?’ I said.

‘Did he go to see General Thé?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘He told me if he could not have dinner with you, he wouldn’t come here.’

‘Don’t worry. He’ll come. Make me another pipe.’ When she bent over the flame the poem of Baudelaire’s came into my mind: ‘Mon enfant, ma soeur . . .’ How did it go on?

Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble.

Out on the waterfront slept the ships, ‘dont l’humeur est vagabonde.’ I thought that if I smelt her skin it would have the faintest fragrance of opium, and her colour was that of the small flame. I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home. ‘I wish I were Pyle,’ I said aloud, but the pain was limited and bearable—the opium saw to that. Somebody knocked on the door.

‘Pyle,’ she said.

‘No. It’s not his knock.’

Somebody knocked again impatiently. She got quickly up, shaking the yellow tree so that it showered its petals again over my typewriter. The door opened. ‘Monsieur Fowlair,’ a voice commanded.

‘I’m Fowler,’ I said. I was not going to get up for a policeman— I could see his khaki shorts without lifting my head.

He explained in almost unintelligible Vietnamese French that I was needed immediately—at once—rapidly—at the Sureté.

‘At the French Sureté or the Vietnamese?’

‘The French.’ In his mouth the word sounded like ‘Françung.’

‘What about?’

He didn’t know: it was his orders to fetch me.

‘Toi aussi,’ he said to Phuong.

‘Say vous when you speak to a lady,’ I told him. ‘How did you know she was here?’

He only repeated that they were his orders.

‘I’ll come in the morning.’

‘Sur le chung,’ he said, a little, neat, obstinate figure. There wasn’t any point in arguing, so I got up and put on my tie and shoes. Here the police had the last word: they could withdraw my order of circulation: they could have me barred from Press Conferences: they could even, if they chose, refuse me an exit permit. These were the open legal methods, but legality was not essential in a country at war. I knew a man who had suddenly and inexplicably lost his cook—he had traced him to the Vietnamese Sureté, but the officers there assured him that he had been released after questioning. His family never saw him again. Perhaps he had joined the Communists; perhaps he had been enlisted in one of the private armies which flourished round Saigon—the Hoa-Haos or the Caodaists or General Thé. Perhaps he was in a French prison. Perhaps he was happily making money out of girls in Cholon, the Chinese suburb. Perhaps his heart had given way when they questioned him. I said, ‘I’m not going to walk. You’ll have to pay for a trishaw.’ One had to keep one’s dignity.

That was why I refused a cigarette from the French officer at the Sureté. After three pipes I felt my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions easily without losing sight of the main question— what do they want from me? I had met Vigot before several times at parties—I had noticed him because he appeared incongruously in love with his wife, who ignored him, a flashy and false blonde. Now it was two in the morning and he sat tired and depressed in the cigarette smoke and the heavy heat, wearing a green eyeshade, and he had a volume of Pascal open on his desk to while away the time. When I refused to allow him to question Phuong without me he gave way at once, with a single sigh that might have represented his weariness with Saigon, with the heat, or with the whole human condition.

He said in English, ‘I’m so sorry I had to ask you to come.’

‘I wasn’t asked. I was ordered.’

‘Oh, these native police—they don’t understand.’ His eyes were on a page of Les Pensées as though he were still absorbed in those sad arguments. ‘I wanted to ask you a few questions—about Pyle.’

‘You had better ask him the questions.’

He turned to Phuong and interrogated her sharply in French. ‘How long have you lived with Monsieur Pyle?’

‘A month—I don’t know,’ she said.

‘How much has he paid you?’

‘You’ve no right to ask her that,’ I said. ‘She’s not for sale.’

‘She used to live with you, didn’t she?’ he asked abruptly. ‘For two years.’

‘I’m a correspondent who’s supposed to report your war— when you let him. Don’t ask me to contribute to your scandal sheet as well.’

‘What do you know about Pyle? Please answer my questions, Monsieur Fowler. I don’t want to ask them. But this is serious. Please believe me it is very serious.’

‘I’m not an informer. You know all I can tell you about Pyle. Age thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission, nationality American.’

‘You sound like a friend of his,’ Vigot said, looking past me at Phuong. A native policeman came in with three cups of black coffee.

‘Or would you rather have tea?’ Vigot asked.

‘I am a friend,’ I said. ‘Why not? I shall be going home one day, won’t I? I can’t take her with me. She’ll be all right with him. It’s a reasonable arrangement. And he’s going to marry her, he says. He might, you know. He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,’ ‘a white elephant.’

Vigot said, ‘Yes.’ He seemed to be looking for words on his desk with which to convey his meaning as precisely as I had done. ‘A very quiet American.’ He sat there in the little hot office waiting for one of us to speak. A mosquito droned to the attack and I watched Phuong. Opium makes you quick-witted—perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important. Phuong, I thought, had not caught his tone, melancholy and final, and her English was very bad. While she sat there on the hard office-chair, she was still waiting patiently for Pyle. I had at that moment given up waiting, and I could see Vigot taking those two facts in.

‘How did you meet him first?’ Vigot asked me.

Why should I explain to him that it was Pyle who had met me? I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm. The tables on the street were most of them full. ‘Do you mind?’ he had asked with serious courtesy. ‘My name’s Pyle. I’m new here,’ and he had folded himself around a chair and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up into the hard noon glare.

“Was that a grenade?’ he asked with excitement and hope.

‘Most likely the exhaust of a car,’ I said, and was suddenly sorry for his disappointment. One forgets so quickly one’s own youth: once I was interested myself in what for want of a better term they call news. But grenades had staled on me; they were something listed on the back page of the local paper—so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon: they never made the European press. Up the street came the lovely flat figures—the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh. I watched them with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions for ever. ‘They are lovely, aren’t they?’ I said over my beer, and Pyle cast them a cursory glance as they went up the rue Catinat.

‘Oh, sure,’ he said indifferently: he was a serious type. ‘The Minister’s very concerned about these grenades. It would be very awkward, he says, if there was an incident—with one of us, I mean.’

‘With one of you? Yes, I suppose that would be serious. Congress wouldn’t like it.’ Why does one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learnt that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.

‘Is he in the mortuary?’ I asked Vigot.

‘How did you know he was dead?’ It was a foolish policeman’s question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without intuition.

Something Special

By Iris Murdoch

'Why wouldn't you take him now?' said Mrs Geary. She was setting the evening papers to rights on the counter.

Yvonne sat astride a chair in the middle of the shop. She had it tilting precariously and was rubbing her small head animal fashion on the wood of the back, while her long legs were braced to prevent herself from toppling over. In answer to the question she said nothing.

'She's cross again,' said her uncle, who was standing at the door of the inner room.

'Who's she? She's the cat!' said Yvonne. She began to rock the chair violently to and fro.

'Don't be breaking down that chair,' said her mother. 'It's the last we have of the decent ones till the cane man is back. Why wouldn't you take him is what I asked.'

Close outside the shop the tram for Dublin came rattling by, darkening the scene for a moment and making little objects on the higher shelves jump and tinkle. It was a hot evening and the doors stood wide open to the dust of the street.

'Oh leave off, leave off!' said Yvonne. 'I don't want him, I don't want to marry. He's nothing special.'

'Nothing special is it?' said her uncle. 'He's a nice young man in a steady job and he wants to wed you and you no longer so young. Or would you be living all your life on your ma?'

'If you won't wed him you shouldn't be leading him up the garden,' said her mother, 'and leave breaking that chair.'

'Can't I be ordinary friends with a boy,' said Yvonne, 'without the pair of you being at me? I'm twenty-four and I know what I'm about.'

'You're twenty-four indeed,' said her mother, 'and there's Betty Nolan and Maureen Burke are married these three years and they in a lower form than you at school.'

'I'm not the like of those two,' said Yvonne.

'True for you!' said her mother.

'It's the women's magazines,' said her uncle, 'and the little novels she's for ever reading that are putting ideas in her head until she won't marry except it's the Sheik of Araby.'

'It's little enough she finds to do with her time,' said her mother, 'so that she's always in there in the little dark room, flat on her tum with her nose inside a novel till it's a wonder her two eyes aren't worn away in her head.'

'Can't I live my life as I please,' said Yvonne, 'since it's the only thing I have? It's that I can't see him as something special and I won't marry him if I can't.'

'He's one of the Chosen People,' said her uncle. 'Isn't that special enough?'

'Don't start on that thing again,' said her mother. 'Sam's a nice young fellow, and not like the run of the Jew-boys at all. He'd bring the children up Church of Ireland.'

'At that,' said her uncle, 'it's better than the other lot with the little priest after them the whole time and bobbing their hats at the chapel doors so you can't even have a peaceful ride on the tram. I've nothing against the Jews.'

'Our Lord was a Jew,' said Yvonne.

'Don't be saying bold things like that!' said her mother.

'Our Lord was the Son of God,' said her uncle, 'and that's neither Jew nor Greek.'

'Is it this evening the Christmas card man is coming?' said Yvonne.

'It is,' said her mother, 'though why they want to be bothering us with Christmas cards in the middle of summer I'm at a loss to know.'

'I'll wait by and see him,' said Yvonne. 'You always pick the dull ones.'

'I pick the ones that sell,' said her mother, 'and don't you be after hanging around acting the maggot when Sam comes, there's little enough room in there.'

'If you were married at least you'd be out of this,' said her uncle, 'and it isn't your ma you'd be sharing a bed with then, and you always complaining about the poky hole this place is.'

'It is a poky hole,' said Yvonne, 'but then I'd be in another poky hole some other place.'

'I'm tired telling you,' said her mother, 'you could get one of those new little houses off the Drumcondra Road. The man in Macmullan's shop knows the man that keeps the list.'

'I don't want a new little house,' said Yvonne. 'I tell you I don't see him right and that's that!'

'If you wait till you marry for love,' said her uncle, 'you'll wait ten years and then make a foolish match. You're not Greta Garbo and you're lucky there's a young fellow after you at all. Sensible people marry because they want to be in the married state and not because of feelings they have in their breasts.'

'She's still stuck on the English lad,' said her mother, 'the tall fellow, Tony Thingummy was his name.'

'I am not!' said Yvonne. 'Good riddance to bad rubbish!'

'I could not abide his voice,' said her uncle. 'He had his mouth all prissed up when he talked, like a man was acting in a play.'

'Isn't it the like of the bloody English to win the Sweep again this year?' said her mother.

'He brought me flowers,' said Yvonne.

'Flowers is it!' said her uncle. 'And singing little songs to you you said once!'

'He was a jaunty boy,' said her mother, 'and a fine slim thing with some pretty ways to him, but he's gone now. And you wait till you see what Sam'll bring you one of these days.'

'Ah, you're potty with that diamond ring story,' said her uncle. 'You'll turn the child's head on her. That fellow's as poor as we are.'

'There's nobody is as poor as we are,' said Yvonne.

'He's a hired man,' said her uncle. 'I don't deny he may get to have his own tailoring shop one day and be his own master. I can see that in him, that he's not a Jew for nothing. But he's no fancy worker now and he's poorly off.'

'Those ones are never poor,' said her mother. 'They just pretend to be so their own people won't be taking their bits of money off them.'

'It's near his time to come,' said Yvonne. 'Don't be talking about him when he comes in, it's not manners.'

'Listen who's mentioning manners!' said her uncle.

'You recall the time,' said her mother, 'we met him at poor Mr Stacey's sale and we went to Sullavan's bar after and he paid for two rounds?'

'He was for catching Yvonne's eye,' said her uncle, 'with flashing his wad around. I'll lay he had to walk home.'

'You're a fine one,' said her mother, 'and you telling me to encourage the child!'

'Did I ever say she should marry him for his money?' said her uncle.

'Well, you'll see,' said her mother. 'It's the custom of those ones. When they want to be engaged to a girl they suddenly bring the diamond ring out and the girl says yes.'

'If they do it's on hire from the pop shop,' said her uncle, 'and it's back in the window directly.'

'What's Julia Batey's ring then?' said her mother, 'and what's her name, young Polly's sister, who married Jews the pair of them, and it happened that way with both. One evening quite suddenly ''I want to show you something'' says he, and there was the ring and they were engaged from then. I tell you it's a custom.'

'Well, I hope you're right I'm sure,' said her uncle. 'It might be just the thing that would make up the grand young lady's mind. A diamond ring now, that would be something special, wouldn't it?'

'A diamond ring,' said Yvonne, 'would be a change at least.'

'Perhaps he'll have it with him this very night!' said her mother.

'I don't think!' said Yvonne.

'Where are you off to anyway?' said her mother.

'I haven't the faintest,' said Yvonne. 'Into town, I suppose.'

'You might go down the pier,' said her uncle, 'and see the mail boat out. That would be better for you than sitting in those stuffy bars or walking along the Liffey breathing the foul airs of the river, and coming home smelling of Guinness.'

'Besides, you know Sam likes the sea,' said her mother. 'He's been all day long dying of suffocation in that steamy room with the clothes press.'

'It's more fun in town,' said Yvonne. 'They've the decorations up for Ireland At Home. And I've been all day long dying of boredom in Kingstown.'

'It's well for you,' said her uncle, 'that it's Sam that pays!'

'And I don't like your going into those low places,' said her mother. 'That's not Sam's idea, I know, it's you. Sam's not a one for sitting dreaming in a bar. That's another thing I like about him.'

'Kimball's have got a new saloon lounge,' said Yvonne, 'like a real drawing-room done up with flowers and those crystal lights. Maybe we'll go there.'

'You'll pay extra!' said her uncle.

'Let Sam worry about that!' said her mother. 'It's a relief they have those saloon lounges in the pubs nowadays where you can get away from the smell of porter and a lady can sit there without being taken for something else.'

'Here's the Christmas card man!' said Yvonne, and jumped up from her chair.

'Why, Mr Lynch,' said Mrs Geary, 'it's a pleasure to see you again, who'd think a whole year had gone by, it seems like yesterday you were here before.'

'Good evening, Mrs Geary,' said Mr Lynch, 'it's a blessing to see you looking so well, and Miss Geary and Mr O'Brien still with you. Change and decay in all around we see. I'm told poor Mrs Taylor at the place in Monkstown has passed on since now a year ago.'

'Yes, the poor old faggot,' said Mrs Geary, 'but after seventy years you can't complain, can you? The good Lord's lending it to you after that.'

'Our time is always on loan, Mrs Geary,' said Mr Lynch, 'and who knows when the great Creditor will call? We are as grass which to-day flourisheth and to-morrow it is cast into the oven.'

'We'll go through,' said Mrs Geary, 'and Mr O'Brien will mind the shop.'

Yvonne and her mother went into the inner room, followed by Mr Lynch. The inner room was very dark, lit only on the far side by a window of frosted glass that gave onto the kitchen. It had a bedroom smell of ancient fabrics and perspiration and dust. Mrs Geary turned on the light. The mountainous double bed with its great white quilt and brass knobs and rails, wherein she and her daughter slept, took up half the room. A shiny horsehair sofa took up most of the other half, leaving space for a small velvet-topped table and three black chairs which stood in a row in front of the towering mantelshelf where photographs and brass animals rose in tiers to the ceiling. Mr Lynch opened his suitcase and began to spread out the Christmas cards on the faded red velvet.

'The robin and the snow go well,' said Mrs Geary, 'and the stage-coach is popular and the church lit up at night.'

'The traditional themes of Christmas-tide,' said Mr Lynch, 'have a universal appeal.'

'Oh look,' said Yvonne, 'that's the nicest one I've ever seen! Now that's really special.' She held it aloft. A frame of glossy golden cardboard enclosed a little square of white silk on which some roses were embroidered.

'That's a novelty,' said Mr Lynch, 'and comes a bit more expensive.'

'It's not like a true Christmas card, the fancy thing,' said Mrs Geary. 'I always think a nice picture and a nice verse is what you want. The sentiment is all.'

'Here's Sam,' said Mr O'Brien from the shop.

Sam came and stood in the doorway from the shop, frowning in the electric light. He was a short man, 'portly' Mr O'Brien called him, and he could hardly count as handsome. He had a pale moon-face and fugitive hands, but his eyes were dark, and his dark bushy head of hair was like the brave plume of a bird. He had his best suit on, which was a midnight blue with a grey stripe, and his tie was of light yellow silk.

'Come on in, Sam,' said Mrs Geary. 'Yvonne's been ready this long time. Mr Lynch, this is Mr Goldman.'

'How do you do?' they said.

'You're mighty smart to-night, Sam,' said Mrs Geary. 'Going to have a special evening?'

'We're choosing the Christmas cards,' said Yvonne. 'Have you got any with the ox and the ass on, Mr Lynch?'

'Here,' said Mr Lynch, 'we have the ox and the ass, and here we see our Lord lying in the manger, and His Mother by, and here the three Maji with their costly gifts, and here

the angels coming to the poor shepherds

by night, and here the star of glory that

led them on. When Jesus was born in

Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod

the King-'

'I still like this one best,' said Yvonne. 'Look, Sam, isn't that pretty?' She held up the card with the golden frame.

'You two be off now,' said Mrs Geary, 'and leave troubling Sam with these Christian things.'

'I don't mind,' said Sam. 'I always observe Christmas just as you do, Mrs Geary. I take it as a sort of emblem.'

'That's right,' said Mr Lynch. 'What after all divides us one from another? In My Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you.'

'I'll just get my coat,' said Yvonne.

'Don't keep her out late, Sam,' said Mrs Geary, 'Good-bye now, and mind you have a really nice evening.'

'Abyssinia,' said Yvonne.

They left the cool musty air of the shop and emerged into the big warm perfumed summer dusk. Yvonne threw her head back, and pranced along in her high-heeled shoes, wearing the look of petulant intensity which she always affected for the benefit of Sam. She would not take his arm, and they went a little aimlessly down the street.

'Where shall we go?' said Sam.

'I don't mind,' she said.

'We might walk a bit by the sea,' said Sam, 'and sit on the rocks beyond the Baths.'

'It's too windy down there and I can't go on the rocks in these shoes.'

'Well, let's go into town.'

At that moment from the seaward side came a sonorous booming sound, very deep and sad. It came again, was sustained in a melancholy roar, and died slowly away.

'Ah, the mail boat!' said Sam. 'Let's just see it out, it's ages since I saw it out.'

They walked briskly as far as the Mariners' Church and turned along the front into the racing breeze. In the evening light the scene before them glowed like a coloured postcard. The mail boat had its lights on already, making pale, shifting reflections in the water which was still glossy with daylight. As they came nearer the boat began to move very slowly, and drew away from the big brown wooden quay revealing upon it the rows and rows of people left behind agitating their white handkerchiefs in the darkening air. The scene was utterly silent. A curly plume of black smoke gathered upon the metallic water, hid the ship for a moment, and then lifted to show it gliding away between the two lighthouses, whose beams were kindled at that very time, and into the open sea. Beyond it a large pale moon was rising over Howth Head.

'The moon hath raised her lamp above,' said Sam.

'I've seen the mail boat out a hundred times,' said Yvonne, 'and one day I'll be on it.'

'Would you like to go to England then?' said Sam.

Yvonne gave him a look of exaggerated scorn. 'Doesn't every Irish person with a soul in them want to go to England?' she said.

They walked more slowly back now, past the golden windows of Ross's Hotel to take the Dublin tram. By the time they had climbed the hill the ship was half-way toward the horizon, its trail of smoke taken up into the gathering night, and by the time they got off the tram at Nelson's Pillar the daylight was gone entirely.

'Now where would you like to go?' said Sam.

'Don't be eternally asking me that question!' she said. 'Just go somewhere yourself and I'll probably follow!'

Sam took her arm, which she let him hold this time, and walked her back toward O'Connell Bridge and along onto the quays. The Liffey flowed past them, oily and glistening, as black as Guinness, bound for Dublin Bay. It had not far to go now. Along the parapet at intervals, and hanging suspended from the iron tracery of the street lamps, were metal baskets full of flowers, while a banner hanging on the bridge announced in English and in Irish that Ireland was At Home to visitors. There was a mingled smell of garbage and pollen.

Sam turned her toward the river, and was for lingering there in a sentimental way, his arm creeping about her waist. The moon was risen now over the top of the houses. But Yvonne said firmly, 'You'll get your death with the smell of the drains here. Let's go to Kimball's place and try the new saloon lounge.'

OSTEND

I

The purser took the last landing-card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the grey wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks. They went with coat-collars turned up and hunched shoulders; on the tables in the long coaches lamps were lit and glowed through the rain like a chain of blue beads. A giant crane swept and descended, and the clatter of the winch drowned for a moment the pervading sounds of water, water falling from the overcast sky, water washing against the sides of channel steamer and quay. It was half past four in the afternoon.

‘A spring day, my God,’ said the purser aloud, trying to dismiss the impressions of the last few hours, the drenched deck, the smell of steam and oil and stale Bass from the bar, the shuffle of black silk, as the stewardess moved here and there carrying tin basins. He glanced up the steel shafts of the crane, to the platform and the small figure in blue dungarees turning a great wheel, and felt an unaccustomed envy. The driver up there was parted by thirty feet of mist and rain from purser, passengers, the long lit express. I can’t get away from their damned faces, the purser thought recalling the young Jew in the heavy fur coat who had complained because he had been allotted a two-berth cabin; for two Godforsaken hours, that’s all.

He said to the last passenger from the second class: ‘Not that way, miss. The customs-shed’s over there.’ His mood relaxed a little at the unfamiliarity of the young face; this one had not complained. ‘Don’t you want a porter for your bag, miss?’

‘I’d rather not,’ she said. ‘I can’t understand what they say. It’s not heavy.’ She wrinkled her mouth at him over the top of her cheap white mackintosh. ‘Unless you’d like to carry it—Captain.’ Her impudence delighted him. ‘Ah, if I were a young man now you wouldn’t be wanting a porter. I don’t know what they are coming to.’ He shook his head as the Jew left the customs-shed, picking his way across the rails in grey suède shoes, followed by two laden porters. ‘Going far?’

‘All the way,’ she said, gazing unhappily past the rails, the piles of luggage, the lit lamps in the restaurant-car, to the dark waiting coaches.

‘Got a sleeper?’

‘No.’

‘You ought to ’ave a sleeper,’ he said, ‘going all the way like that. Three nights in a train. It’s no joke. What do you want to go to Constantinople for anyway? Getting married?’

‘Not that I know of.’ She laughed a little through the melancholy of departure and the fear of strangeness. ‘One can’t tell, can one?’

‘Work?’

‘Dancing. Variety.’

She said good-bye and turned from him. Her mackintosh showed the thinness of her body, which even while stumbling between the rails and sleepers retained its self-consciousness. A signal lamp turned from red to green, and a long whistle of steam blew through an exhaust. Her face, plain and piquant, her manner daring and depressed, lingered for a moment in his mind. ‘Remember me,’ he called after her. ‘I’ll see you again in a month or two.’ But he knew that he would not remember her; too many faces would peer during the following weeks through the window of his office, wanting a cabin, wanting money changed, wanting a berth, for him to remember an individual, and there was nothing remarkable about her.

When he went on board, the decks were already being washed down for the return journey, and he felt happier to find the ship empty of strangers. This was how he would have liked it always to be: a few dagoes to boss in their own tongue, a stewardess with whom to drink a glass of ale. He grunted at the seamen in French and they grinned at him, singing an indecent song of a ‘cocu’ that made his plump family soul wither a little in envy. ‘A bad crossing,’ he said to the head steward in English. The man had been a waiter in London and the purser never spoke a word more French than was necessary. ‘That Jew,’ he said, ‘did he give you a good tip?’

‘What would you believe? Six francs.’

‘Was he ill?’

‘No. The old fellow with the moustaches—he was ill all the time. And I want ten francs. I win the bet. He was English.’

‘Go on. You could cut his accent with a knife.’

‘I see his passport. Richard John. Schoolteacher.’

‘That’s funny,’ the purser said. And that’s funny, he thought again, paying the ten francs reluctantly and seeing in his mind’s eye the tired grey man in the mackintosh stride away from the ship’s rail, as the gangway rose and the sirens blew out towards a rift in the clouds. He had asked for a newspaper, an evening newspaper. They wouldn’t have been published in London as early as that, the purser told him, and when he heard the answer, he stood in a dream, fingering his long grey moustache. While the purser poured out a glass of Bass for the stewardess, before going through the accounts, he thought again of the schoolteacher, and wondered momentarily whether something dramatic had passed close by him, something weary and hunted and the stuff of stories. He too had made no complaint, and for that reason was more easily forgotten than the young Jew, the party of Cook’s tourists, the sick woman in mauve who had lost a ring, the old man who had paid twice for his berth. The girl had been forgotten half an hour before. This was the first thing she shared with Richard John—below the tramp of feet, the smell of oil, the winking lights of signals, worrying faces, clink of glasses, rows of numerals—a darkness in the purser’s mind.

The wind dropped for ten seconds, and the smoke which had swept backwards and forwards across the quay and the metal acres in the quick gusts stayed for that time in the middle air. Like grey nomad tents the smoke seemed to Myatt, as he picked his way through the mud. He forgot that his suède shoes were ruined, that the customs officer had been impertinent over two pairs of silk pyjamas. From the man’s rudeness and his contempt, the syllables ‘Juif, Juif,’ he crept into the shade of those great tents. Here for a moment he was at home and required no longer the knowledge of his fur coat, of his suit from Savile Row, his money or his position in the firm to hearten him. But as he reached the train the wind rose, the tents of steam were struck, and he was again in the centre of a hostile world.

But he recognized with gratitude what money could buy; it could not always buy courtesy, but it had bought celerity. He was the first through the customs, and before the other passengers arrived, he could arrange with the guard for a sleeping compartment to himself. He had a hatred of undressing before another man, but the arrangement, he knew, would cost him more because he was a Jew; it would be no matter of a simple request and a tip. He passed the lit windows of the restaurant-car, small mauveshaped lamps shining on the linen laid ready for dinner. ‘Ostend— Cologne—Vienne—Belgrade—Istanbul.’ He passed the rows of names without a glance; the route was familiar to him; the names travelled back at the level of his eyes, like the spires of minarets, cupolas, or domes of the cities themselves, offering no permanent settlement to one of his race.

The guard, as he had expected, was surly. The train was very full, he said, though Myatt knew he lied. April was too early in the year for crowded carriages, and he had seen few first-class passengers on the Channel steamer. While he argued, a bevy of tourists scrambled down the corridor, middle-aged ladies clutching shawls and rugs and sketchbooks, an old clergyman complaining that he had mislaid his Wide World Magazine—‘I always read a Wide World when I travel’—and in the rear, perspiring, genial under difficulties, their conductor wearing the button of an agency. ‘Voilà,’ the guard said and seemed to indicate with a gesture that his train was bearing an unaccustomed, a cruel burden. But Myatt knew the route too well to be deceived. The party, he guessed from its appearance of harassed culture, belonged to the slip-coach for Athens. When he doubled the tip, the guard gave way and pasted a reserved notice on the window of the compartment. With a sigh of relief Myatt found himself alone.

He watched the swim of faces separated by a safe wall of glass. Even through his fur coat the damp chill of the day struck him, and as he turned the heating-wheel, a mist from his breath obscured the pane, so that soon he could see of those who passed no more than unrelated features, a peering angry eye, a dress of mauve silk, a cler ical collar. Only once was he tempted to break this growing solitude and wipe the glass with his fingers in time to catch sight of a thin girl in a white mackintosh disappearing along the corridor towards the second class. Once the door was opened and an elderly man glanced in. He had a grey moustache and wore glasses and a shabby soft hat. Myatt told him in French that the compartment was taken.

‘One seat,’ the man said.

‘Do you want the second class?’ Myatt asked, but the man shook his head and moved away.

Mr Opie sank with conscious luxury into his corner and regarded with curiosity and disappointment the small pale man opposite him. The man was extraordinarily commonplace in appearance; ill-health had ruined his complexion. Nerves, Mr Opie thought, watching the man’s moving fingers, but they showed no other sign of acute sensibility. They were short, blunt, and thick.

‘I always think,’ Mr Opie said, wondering whether he had been very unfortunate in his companion, ‘that as long as one can get a sleeper, it is so unnecessary to travel first class. These second-class carriages are remarkably comfortable.’

‘Yes—that’s so—yes,’ the other answered with alacrity. ‘But ’ow did you know I was English?’

‘I make a practice,’ Mr Opie said with a smile, ‘of always thinking the best of people.’

‘Of course,’ the pale man said, ‘you as a clergyman—’

The newsboys were calling outside the window, and Mr Opie leant out. ‘Le Temps de Londres. Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça? Rien du tout? Le Matin et un Daily Mail. C’est bon. Merci.’ His French seemed to the other full of little copybook phrases, used with gusto and inaccurately. ‘Combien est cela? Trois francs. Oh la-la.’

To the white-faced man he said: ‘Can I interpret for you? Is there any paper you want? Don’t mind me if you want La Vie.’

‘No, nothing, nothing, thank you. I’ve a book.’

Mr Opie looked at his watch. ‘Three minutes and we shall be away.’

She had been afraid for several minutes that he would speak, or else the tall thin woman, his wife. Silence for the time being she desired more than anything else. If I could have afforded a sleeper, she wondered, would I have been alone? In the dim carriage the lights flickered on, and the plump man remarked, ‘Now we shan’t be long.’ The air was full of dust and damp, and the flicker of light outside reminded her for a moment of familiar things: the electric signs flashing and changing over the theatre in Nottingham High Street. The stir of life, the passage of porters and paper-boys, recalled for a moment the goose market, and to the memory of the market she clung, tried to externalize it in her mind, to build the bricks and lay the stalls, until they had as much reality as the cold rain-washed quay, the changing signal lamps. Then the man spoke to her, and she was compelled to emerge from her hidden world and wear a pose of cheerfulness and courage.

‘Well, miss, we’ve got a long journey together. Suppose we exchange names. Mine’s Peters, and this is my wife Amy.’

‘Mine’s Coral Musker.’

‘Get me a sandwich,’ the thin woman implored. ‘I’m so empty I can hear my stomach.’

‘Would you, miss? I don’t know the lingo.’

And why, she would have liked to cry at him, do you suppose I do? I’ve never been out of England. But she had so schooled herself to accept responsibility wherever and in whatever form it came, that she made no protest, opened the door and would have run down the slippery dusky road between the rails in search of what he wanted if she had not seen a clock. ‘There’s no time,’ she said, ‘only one minute before we go.’ Turning back she caught sight at the corridor’s end of a face and figure that made her catch her breath with longing: a last dab of powder on the nose, a goodnight to the door-keeper, and outside in the bright glittering betrayal of the dark, the young waiting Jew, the chocolates, the car round the corner, the rapid ride, and the furtive dangerous embrace. But it was no one she knew; she was back in the unwanted, dreaded adventure of a foreign land, which could not be checked by a skillful word; no carefully-measured caress would satisfy the approaching dark.

The train’s late, Myatt thought, as he stepped into the corridor. He felt in his waistcoat pocket for the small box of currants he al ways carried there. It was divided into four sections and his fingers chose one at random. As he put it into his mouth he judged it by the feel. The quality’s going off. That’s Stein and Co. They are getting small and dry. At the end of the corridor a girl in a white mackintosh turned and gazed at him. Nice figure, he thought. Do I know her? He chose another currant and without a glance placed it. One of our own. Myatt, Myatt and Page. For a moment with the currant upon his tongue he might have been one of the lords of the world, carrying destiny with him. This is mine and this is good, he thought. Doors slammed along the line of coaches, and a horn was blown.

Richard John, with his mackintosh turned up above his ears, leant from the corridor window and saw the sheds begin to move backwards towards the slow wash of the sea. It was the end, he thought, and the beginning. Faces streamed away. A man with a pickaxe on his shoulder swung a red lamp; the smoke from the engine blew round him and obscured his light. The brakes ground, the clouds parted, and the setting sun flashed on the line, the window, and his eyes. If I could sleep, he thought with longing, I could remember more clearly all the things that have to be remembered.

The fire-hole door opened and the blaze and the heat of the furnace for a moment emerged. The driver turned the regulator full open, and the footplate shook with the weight of the coaches. Presently the engine settled smoothly to its work, the driver brought the cut-off back, and the last of the sun came out as the train passed through Bruges, the regulator closed, coasting with little steam. The sunset lit up tall dripping walls, alleys with stagnant water radiant for a moment with liquid light. Somewhere within the dingy casing lay the ancient city, like a notorious jewel, too stared at, talked of, trafficked over. Then a wilderness of allotments opened through the steam, sometimes the monotony broken by tall ugly villas, facing every way, decorated with coloured tiles, which now absorbed the evening. The sparks from the express became visible, like hordes of scarlet beetles tempted into the air by night, they fell and smouldered by the track, touched leaves and twigs and cabbage-stalks and turned to soot. A girl riding a cart-horse lifted her face and laughed; on the bank beside the line a man and woman lay embraced. Then darkness fell outside and passengers through the glass could see only the transparent reflection of their own features.

CHAPTER I I

THE VICTIM

THE SECOND EVENING OF THE VOYAGE:
IN WHICH A CERTAIN IMPORTANT PASSENGER IS
INTRODUCED TO THE READER.

12°49W; 51°11N.
- 8. 15 P. M. -

The Right Honourable Thomas David Nelson Merridith, the noble Lord Kingscourt, the Viscount of Roundstone, the ninth Earl of Cashel, Kilkerrin and Carna, entered the Dining Saloon to an explosion of smashing glass.

A steward, a Negro, had stumbled near the doorway, bucked by a sudden roll of the vessel, letting slip an overloaded salver of charged champagne flutes. Someone was performing an ironic slow-handclap at the fallen man’s expense. An inebriated mocking cheer came from the farthest corner: ‘Huazzah! Bravo! Well done, that fellow!’ Another voice called: ‘They’ll have to put up the fares!’

The steward was on his knees now, trying to clear the debris. Blood was rivuleting down his slender left wrist, staining the cuff of his brocaded jacket. In his anxiety to collect the shards of shattered crystal he had sliced open his thumb from ball to tip.

‘Mind your hand,’ Lord Kingscourt said. ‘Here.’ He offered the steward a clean linen handkerchief. The man looked up with an expression of dread. His mouth began to work but no sound came. The Chief Steward had bustled over and was barking at his subordinate in a language Merridith did not understand. Was it German, perhaps? Portuguese? Saliva flew from his mouth as he hissed and cursed the man, who was now cowering on the carpet like a beaten child, his uniform besmirched with blood and champagne, a grotesque parody of commodore’s whites.

‘David?’ called Merridith’s wife. He turned to look. She had half risen from her banquette at the Captain’s table and was gaily beckoning him over with a bread-knife, her knotted eyebrows and pinched lips set in a burlesque of impatience. The people around her were laughing madly, all except the Maharajah, who never laughed. When Merridith glanced back towards the steward again, he was being chivvied from the saloon by his furious superior, the latter still bawling in the guttural language, the transgressor cradling his hand to his breast like a wounded bird.

Lord Kingscourt’s palate tasted acridly of salt. His head hurt and his vision was cloudy. For several weeks he had been suffering some kind of urinary infection and since boarding the ship at Kingstown, it had worsened significantly. This morning it had pained him to pass water; a scalding burn that had made him cry out. He wished he’d seen a doctor before embarking on the voyage. Nothing for it now but to wait for New York. Couldn’t be frank with that drunken idiot Mangan. Maybe four weeks. Hope and pray.

Surgeon Mangan, a morose old bore by day, was already pink in the face from drinking, his greasy hair gleaming like a polished strap. His sister, who looked like a caricature of a cardinal, was systematically breaking the petals off a pale yellow rose. For a moment Lord Kingscourt wondered if she was going to eat them; but instead she dropped them one by one into her tumbler of water. Watching them with a sullen undergraduate expression sat the Louisiana columnist, Grantley Dixon, in a dinner jacket he had clearly borrowed from someone larger and which gave his shoulders a boxy look. Merridith disliked him and always had, since being forced to endure his socialistic prattle at one of Laura’s infernal literary evenings in London. The novelists and poets were tolerable in their way, but the aspiring novelists and poets were simply insufferable. A clown, Grantley Dixon, a perfervid parrot, with his militant slogans and second-hand attitudes: like all coffee-house radicals a screaming snob at heart. As for his imperious guff about the novel he was writing, Merridith knew a dilettante when he saw one, and he was looking at one now. When he’d heard Grantley Dixon was going to be on the same ship, he had almost wanted to postpone the journey. But Laura had told him he was being ridiculous. He could always count on Laura to tell him that.

What a collection to have to abide over dinner. A favourite expression of his father’s came into Merridith’s mind. Too much for the white man to be asked to bear.

‘Are you quite all right, dear?’ Laura asked. She enjoyed the role of the concerned wife, particularly when she had an audience to appreciate her concern. He didn’t mind. It made her happy. Sometimes it even made him happy too.

‘You look as if you’re in pain. Or discomfort of some kind.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, easing into his seat. ‘Just famished.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Surgeon Mangan.

‘Excuse my lateness,’ Lord Kingscourt said. ‘There are two little chaps I know who insist on being told bedtime stories.’

The Mail Agent, a father, gave a strange, baleful smile. Merridith’s wife rolled her eyes like a doll.

‘Our girl Mary is ill again,’ she said.

Mary Duane was their nanny, a native from Carna in County Galway. David Merridith had known her all his life.

‘I don’t know what’s come over that girl,’ Lady Kingscourt continued. ‘She’s barely left her cabin since the moment we boarded. When usually she’s hale as a Connemara pony. And quite as bloody-minded as one too.’ She held up her fork and gazed at it closely, for some reason gently pricking her fingertips with the ends of the tines.

‘Perhaps she is homesick,’ Lord Kingscourt said.

His wife laughed briefly. ‘I hardly think so.’

‘I notice some of the sailorboys giving her the glad eye,’ said the Surgeon affably. ‘Pretty little thing if she didn’t wear so much black.’

‘She was bereaved of her husband not too long ago,’ said Merridith. ‘So she probably shan’t notice the sailorboys I should think.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear. Hard thing at her age.’

‘Quite.’

Wine was poured. Bread was offered. A steward brought a tureen and began to serve the vichyssoise.

Lord Kingscourt was finding it difficult to concentrate. A worm of pain corkscrewed slowly through his groin: a stone-blind maggot of piercing venom. He could feel his shirt sticking to his shoulders and abdomen. The Dining Saloon had an ashy, stagnant atmosphere, as though pumped dry of air and filled up with pulverised lead. Against the cloying odour of meat and over-bloomed lilies another more evil stench was trying to gain. What in the name of Christ was that filthy smell?

The Surgeon had clearly been in the middle of one of his interminable stories when Merridith had arrived. He resumed telling it now, chuckling expansively, enfeebled by duckish clucks of self-amusement as he gaped around at the dutifully simpering company. Something about a pig who could talk. Or dance? Or stand on its hind legs and sing Tom Moore. It was an Irish peasant story anyway: all of the Surgeon’s were.Gintilmin. Sorr. Jayzus be savin’ Yer Worship. He tugged his invisible forelock and puffed out his cheeks, so juicily proud of his facility for imitation. It was something Merridith found hard to stomach, the way the prosperous Irish were never done lampooning their rural countrymen: a sign, they often claimed, of their own maturity on matters national, but in truth just another form of cringing obsequiousness.

‘Will you tell me now,’ the Surgeon chortled, his bright eyes streaming with excess of mirth, ‘where else could that happen but darlin’ auld Oirland?’

He spoke the last three words as though in inverted commas.

‘Wonderful people,’ agreed the heavily perspiring Mail Agent. ‘A marvellous logic all their own.’

The Maharajah said nothing for a few long moments, grim-faced and bored in his stiff robes. Then he muttered a few gloomy syllables and snapped his fingers to his personal butler who was standing like a Guardian Angel a few feet behind him. The butler brought over a small silver box, which the Maharajah reverently opened. Out of it he took a pair of spectacles. He looked at them for a moment, as though surprised to have found them there. Cleaned them with a napkin and put them on.

‘You’ll remain at New York for some time, Lord Kingscourt?’

It took a moment for Merridith to realise whom the Captain was addressing.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I mean to go into business, Lockwood.’

Inevitably Dixon gave him a look. ‘Since when did the gentry stoop to working for a living?’

‘There’s a famine in progress in Ireland, Dixon. I assume you stumbled across it on your visit there, did you?’

The Captain gave an apprehensive laugh. ‘I’m sure our American friend meant no offence, Lord Kingscourt. He only thought – ’

‘I’m quite aware of what he thought. How can an Earl be fallen low as a tradesman? In a way my dear wife often thinks the same thing.’ He looked across the table at her. ‘Don’t you, Laura?’

Lady Kingscourt said nothing. Her husband went back to his soup. He wanted to eat it before it coagulated.

‘Yes. So you see my predicament, Dixon. Not a man on my estate has paid rent for four years. My father’s death leaves me with half of all the bogland in southern Connemara, a great deal of stones and bad turf, a greater deal of overdue accounts and unpaid wages. Not to mention the considerable duties owing to the government.’ He broke a piece of bread and took a sip of wine. ‘Dying is rather expensive,’ he smiled darkly at the Captain. ‘Unlike this claret. Which is muck.’

Lockwood glanced uneasily around the table. He wasn’t accustomed to dealing with the aristocracy.

A young woman had begun to pluck the ornate harp that was sitting near the dessert table in the middle of the saloon, beside the dripping ice sculpture of Neptune Triumphant. The melody sounded tinny and just slightly out of tune, as harp music habitually sounded to Merridith, but she played with a seriousness he found affecting. He wished the Dining Saloon were empty except for himself and the young woman. He would have liked to sit there and drink for a while: drinking and listening to the out-of-tune music. Drinking until he felt nothing.

Connors? Mulligan? Lenihan? Moran?

Earlier in the day, through the cast-iron bars that fenced off the people of steerage from their betters, he had noticed a man he had often seen in the streets of Clifden. The fellow was in chains, and either drunk or half mad, but Merridith still recognised him, he wasn’t mistaken. He was a tenant of Tommy Martin’s at Ballynahinch. Apparently – so the Methodist minister from Lyme Regis had said – he had been flung in the lock-up for being drunk and violent. Merridith had been quite astounded to hear it. That wasn’t at all how he remembered him.

Corrigan? Joyce? Mahony? Black?

He would come in to Clifden on a Monday morning to sell turnips and kale with father, a smallholder: a pugnacious little jockey of a typical Galwayman, full of spit and strength and snap. What the hell was his name? Fields? Shields? A widower, anyway. Wife died in'36. He'd scraped a living for himself and seven children out of a perch of quartzite shale on the slopes of Bencollaghduff. Ridiculous to say, Merridith had often envied them.

He knew himself how ridiculous that was. And yet the father was clearly so proud of his son. There was a tenderness between them, an embarrassed affection, even though they were never done goading each other. The farmer would accuse his son of idleness; the son would retort that his father was a drunken gawm. The man would clip his son across the head; the son would fling a half-rotten turnip at him. The women of Clifden would congregate around their rickety stall as much to watch them trade imprecations as to buy what meagre goods they offered. Abusing each other had become a kind of pantomime. But Merridith knew that was all it was.

Meadowes?

Very early one December morning, driving the phaeton to meet his sister off the mail-coach at Maam Cross, he had seen them kicking a ragged football in the middle of the empty marketplace. The morning was still: a little misty. Their stall had been set up near the gates of the church, the turnips polished like gleaming orbs. The whole town was asleep except for the father and son. Leaves were drifting in the deserted streets; the fields in the distance were silvered with dew. He remembered it all now, as he sat in the Dining Saloon, plunging through the rolling darkness of the sea. The strange beauty of everything in the Connemara morning. Their shadowed forms gliding through the mist like celestial beings. The thuk as one of them would hoof into the ball. The muffled shouts. The impish obscenities. The extraordinary music of their unrestrained laughter echoing against the high black walls of the church.

In all his childhood Lord David Merridith had never kicked a football with his own father. He wasn’t sure his father would have recognised a football. He remembered saying as much to his sister when he met her off the Bianconi that morning, weighed down with Christmas parcels and boxes of candied fruits; brimming with news and gossip from London. The way she had laughed and agreed with his remark. Probably, Emily said, if Papa had ever seen a football, he would have rammed it into a cannon and tried to shoot it at a Frenchman.

He wondered where his father was now. His body was buried in the churchyard at Clifden; but where washe? Was there any shred of truth to it, after all, the pietistical absurdity of life after death? Could the story be metaphor for some other, more scientific reality? Would the sages of the coming times be able to decode the allegory? And if such a truth existed, how did it work? Where was Heaven? And where was Hell?

Am I all my fathers? Are they all me?

Three weeks before embarking on the Star of the Sea, Merridith had locked up the house in which he and his father and grandfather had been born, shuttered up its shattered windows, closed it and locked it for the last time. He had handed the keys to the valuer from Galway and walked around the empty stables for a while. Not a single former tenant had turned up to see him off. He had waited until dusk but nobody had come.

Accompanied by his bodyguard – the man had insisted – he had ridden out from Kingscourt to visit his father’s grave at Clifden, only to find that it had been desecrated again. The granite sea-angel had been smashed in two, the words ROTTIN BASTARD whitewashed across the tombstone, along with the emblem of those who had put them there. His grandfather’s grave and those of the ancestors had all been marked with the splattered badge of their loathing. Merridith’s own name appeared on several of the stones, and those ones, too, had been defaced. His mother’s tomb alone had not been touched, a pardoning which had merely made the despoliation around it seem starker. But looking at the scene, he had been able to feel nothing. Only the misspelled words had truly taken his attention. Did they mean that his father was rotten or rotting?

He wondered about that now: the awful inadequacy of his response. And what precisely had they meant to say, these men who had ruined his father’s grave? Their symbol was an H enclosed in a heart, but what heart was it that could violate the dead? ‘Hibernian Defenders’, his bodyguard had explained; the name the local troublemakers gave to themselves. Another name they went by was ‘the Liable Men’, primarily because they dealt out liability; also they were gruesomely reliable in doing so. And Merridith had quietly pretended not to know these etymologies already, had feigned his usual interest in the customs of the indigenous, as though the constable had been enlightening him about jig steps or fairytales. Had they truly hated his father quite so much? What had he done to deserve their repugnance? Yes, he had been an inflexible landlord, in the latter years especially; that was undeniable. But so had most other landlords in Ireland, and in England too, and everywhere else: some far worse and many more cruel. Didn’t they know, these night-stalking mutilators, how much his father had tried to do for them? Couldn’t they understand he was a man of his time, a conservative by instinct as well as politics? That politics and instinct were often the same thing, in the pebbled fields of Galway, in the statued halls of Westminster. Probably in every other place, too. ‘Politics’ the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.

For some reason Merridith found himself thinking about his children: a memory of his younger son as a baby, sobbing in the night with the pain of teething. The puppet-stuffed nursery in the London house. Stroking the child’s head. Holding his hand. A blackbird hopping on the rain-spattered windowsill. The tiny fingers tendrilling around his own, as though mutely to plead, ‘stay with me’. Like Christ in the garden. Watch with me one hour. The heart-rending smallnesses we finally want. Strange thought that Merridith’s father had been a baby once. And in the minutes before he died he had seemed so again; that vast, indignant, iron-hearted seaman whose portrait hung in galleries all over the empire. He had reached out his frail, white hand to David Merridith and squeezed his thumb as though trying to break it. There was fear in his eyes; gleaming terror. And David Merridith had wanted to say, It’s all right. I’ll stay with you. Don’t be afraid. But he had not been able to say anything.

I

THE MAN OUT OF TIME

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

...Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,-just what is wholly
unsayable.

- from The Ninth Duino Elegy,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Stephen Mitchell

FIRST DATE, ONE

Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare is 20)

CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble. I sign the Visitors' Log: Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I have never been in the Newberry Library before, and now that I've gotten past the dark, foreboding entrance I am excited. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit, almost silent. I stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a Reader's Card, then I go upstairs to Special Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden floor. The room is quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with books and surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light shines through the tall windows. I approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips. I'm writing a paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it. But I also want to read about papermaking at Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go back to the desk to ask for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to find, she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind me. "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," she says. I turn, prepared to start explaining again, and find myself face to face with Henry.

I am speechless. Here is Henry, calm, clothed, younger than I have ever seen him. Henry is working at the Newberry Library, standing in front of me, in the present. Here and now. I am jubilant. Henry is looking at me patiently, uncertain but polite.

"Is there something I can help you with?" he asks.

"Henry!" I can barely refrain from throwing my arms around him. It is obvious that he has never seen me before in his life.

"Have we met? I'm sorry, I don't. . . ." Henry is glancing around us, worrying that readers, co-workers are noticing us, searching his memory and realizing that some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him. The last time I saw him he was sucking my toes in the Meadow.

I try to explain. "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl..." I'm at a loss because I am in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all. Everything is in the future for him. I want to laugh at the weirdness of the whole thing. I'm flooded with years of knowledge of Henry, while he's looking at me perplexed and fearful. Henry wearing my dad's old fishing trousers, patiently quizzing me on multiplication tables, French verbs, all the state capitals; Henry laughing at some peculiar lunch my seven-year-old self has brought to the Meadow; Henry wearing a tuxedo, undoing the studs of his shirt with shaking hands on my eighteenth birthday. Here! Now! "Come and have coffee with me, or dinner or something. . . ." Surely he has to say yes, this Henry who loves me in the past and the future must love me now in some bat-squeak echo of other time. To my immense relief he does say yes.We plan to meet tonight at a nearby Thai restaurant, all the while under the amazed gaze of the woman behind the desk, and I leave, forgetting about Kelmscott and Chaucer and floating down the marble stairs, through the lobby and out into the October Chicago sun, running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels, whooping and rejoicing.

HENRY: It's a routine day in October, sunny and crisp. I'm at work in a small windowless humidity-controlled room on the fourth floor of the Newberry, cataloging a collection of marbled papers that has recently been donated. The papers are beautiful, but cataloging is dull, and I am feeling bored and sorry for myself. In fact, I am feeling old, in the way only a twenty-eight-year-old can after staying up half the night drinking overpriced vodka and trying,without success, to win himself back into the good graces of Ingrid Carmichel. We spent the entire evening fighting, and now I can't even remember what we were fighting about. My head is throbbing. I need coffee. Leaving the marbled papers in a state of controlled chaos, I walk through the office and past the page's desk in the Reading Room. I am halted by Isabelle's voice saying, "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," by which she means "Henry, you weasel, where are you slinking off to?"And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as though I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches.Obviously she knows me, and I don't know her. Lord only knows what I have said, done, or promised to this luminous creature, so I am forced to say in my best librarianese, "Is there something I can help you with?" The girl sort of breathes "Henry!" in this very evocative way that convinces me that at some point in time we have a really amazing thing together. This makes it worse that I don't know anything about her, not even her name. I say "Have we met?" and Isabelle gives me a look that says You asshole. But the girl says, "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl," and invites me out to dinner. I accept, stunned. She is glowing at me, although I am unshaven and hung over and just not at my best.We are going to meet for dinner this very evening, at the Beau Thai, and Clare, having secured me for later, wafts out of the Reading Room. As I stand in the elevator, dazed, I realize that a massive winning lottery ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present, and I start to laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run down the stairs to the street I see Clare running across Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears and I don't know why.

Later that evening:

HENRY: At 6:00 p.m. I race home from work and attempt to make myself attractive. Home these days is a tiny but insanely expensive studio apartment on North Dearborn; I am constantly banging parts of myself on inconvenient walls, countertops and furniture. Step One: unlock seventeen locks on apartment door, fling myself into the living room-which-is-also-my-bedroom and begin stripping off clothing. Step Two: shower and shave. Step Three: stare hopelessly into the depths of my closet, gradually becoming aware that nothing is exactly clean. I discover one white shirt still in its dry cleaning bag. I decide to wear the black suit, wing tips, and pale blue tie. Step Four: don all of this and realize I look like an FBI agent. Step Five: look around and realize that the apartment is a mess. I resolve to avoid bringing Clare to my apartment tonight even if such a thing is possible. Step Six: look in full-length bathroom mirror and behold angular, wild-eyed 6'1" ten-year-old Egon Schiele look-alike in clean shirt and funeral director suit. I wonder what sorts of outfits this woman has seen me wearing, since I am obviously not arriving from my future into her past wearing clothes of my own. She said she was a little girl? A plethora of unanswerables runs through my head. I stop and breathe for a minute. Okay. I grab my wallet and my keys, and away I go: lock the thirty-seven locks, descend in the cranky little elevator, buy roses for Clare in the shop in the lobby, walk two blocks to the restaurant in record time but still five minutes late. Clare is already seated in a booth and she looks relieved when she sees me. She waves at me like she's in a parade.

"Hello," I say. Clare is wearing a wine-colored velvet dress and pearls. She looks like a Botticelli by way of John Graham: huge gray eyes, long nose, tiny delicate mouth like a geisha. She has long red hair that covers her shoulders and falls to the middle of her back. Clare is so pale she looks like a waxwork in the candlelight. I thrust the roses at her. "For you."

"Thank you," says Clare, absurdly pleased. She looks at me and realizes that I am confused by her response."You've never given me flowers before."

I slide into the booth opposite her. I'm fascinated. This woman knows me; this isn't some passing acquaintance of my future hejiras. The waitress appears and hands us menus.

"Tell me," I demand.

"What?"

"Everything. I mean, do you understand why I don't know you? I'm terribly sorry about that-"

"Oh, no, you shouldn't be. I mean, I know...why that is." Clare lowers her voice. "It's because for you none of it has happened yet, but for me, well, I've known you for a long time."

"How long?"

"About fourteen years. I first saw you when I was six."

"Jesus. Have you seen me very often? Or just a few times?"

"The last time I saw you, you told me to bring this to dinner when we met again," Clare shows me a pale blue child's diary, "so here,"-she hands it to me-"you can have this." I open it to the place marked with a piece of newspaper. The page, which has two cocker spaniel puppies lurking in the upper right-hand corner, is a list of dates. It begins with September 23, 1977, and ends sixteen small, blue, puppied pages later on May 24, 1989. I count. There are 152 dates, written with great care in the large open Palmer Method blue ball point pen of a six-year-old.

"You made the list? These are all accurate?"

"Actually, you dictated this to me.You told me a few years ago that you memorized the dates from this list. So I don't know how exactly this exists; I mean, it seems sort of like a Mobius strip. But they are accurate. I used them to know when to go down to the Meadow to meet you." The waitress reappears and we order: Tom Kha Kai for me and Gang Mussaman for Clare. A waiter brings tea and I pour us each a cup.

"What is the Meadow?" I am practically hopping with excitement. I have never met anyone from my future before, much less a Botticelli who has encountered me 152 times.

"The Meadow is a part of my parents' place up in Michigan. There's woods at one edge of it, and the house on the opposite end. More or less in the middle is a clearing about ten feet in diameter with a big rock in it, and if you're in the clearing no one at the house can see you because the land swells up and then dips in the clearing. I used to play there because I liked to play by myself and I thought no one knew I was there. One day when I was in first grade I came home from school and went out to the clearing and there you were."

"Stark naked and probably throwing up."

"Actually, you seemed pretty self-possessed. I remember you knew my name, and I remember you vanishing quite spectacularly. In retrospect, it's obvious that you had been there before. I think the first time for you was in 1981; I was ten. You kept saying 'Oh my god,' and staring at me. Also, you seemed pretty freaked out about the nudity, and by then I just kind of took it for granted that this old nude guy was going to magically appear from the future and demand clothing." Clare smiles. "And food."

"What's funny?"

"I made you some pretty weird meals over the years. Peanut butter and anchovy sandwiches. Pâté and beets on Ritz crackers. I think partly I wanted to see if there was anything you wouldn't eat and partly I was trying to impress you with my culinary wizardry."

"How old was I?"

"I think the oldest I have seen you was forty-something. I'm not sure about youngest; maybe about thirty? How old are you now?"

"Twenty-eight."

"You look very young to me now. The last few years you were mostly in your early forties, and you seemed to be having kind of a rough life. . . . It's hard to say.When you're little all adults seem big, and old."

"So what did we do? In the Meadow? That's a lot of time, there."

Clare smiles. "We did lots of things. It changed depending on my age, and the weather. You spent a lot of time helping me do my homework.We played games. Mostly we just talked about stuff.When I was really young I thought you were an angel; I asked you a lot of questions about God. When I was a teenager I tried to get you to make love to me, and you never would, which of course made me much more determined about it. I think you thought you were going to warp me sexually, somehow. In some ways you were very parental."

"Oh. That's probably good news but somehow at the moment I don't seem to be wanting to be thought of as parental." Our eyes meet.We both smile and we are conspirators. "What about winter? Michigan winters are pretty extreme."

"I used to smuggle you into our basement; the house has a huge basement with several rooms, and one of them is a storage room and the furnace is on the other side of the wall.We call it the Reading Room because all the useless old books and magazines are stored there. One time you were down there and we had a blizzard and nobody went to school or to work and I thought I was going to go crazy trying to get food for you because there wasn't all that much food in the house. Etta was supposed to go grocery shopping when the storm hit. So you were stuck reading old Reader's Digests for three days, living on sardines and ramen noodles."

"Sounds salty. I'll look forward to it." Our meal arrives. "Did you ever learn to cook?"

"No, I don't think I would claim to know how to cook. Nell and Etta always got mad when I did anything in their kitchen beyond getting myself a Coke, and since I've moved to Chicago I don't have anybody to cook for, so I haven't been motivated to work on it. Mostly I'm too busy with school and all, so I just eat there." Clare takes a bite of her curry. "This is really good."

"Nell and Etta?"

"Nell is our cook."Clare smiles."Nell is like cordon bleu meets Detroit; she's how Aretha Franklin would be if she was Julia Child. Etta is our housekeeper and all-around everything. She's really more almost our mom; I mean, my mother is...well, Etta's just always there, and she's German and strict, but she's very comforting, and my mother is kind of off in the clouds, you know?"

I nod, my mouth full of soup.

"Oh, and there's Peter," Clare adds. "Peter is the gardener."

"Wow. Your family has servants. This sounds a little out of my league. Have I ever, uh, met any of your family?"

"You met my Grandma Meagram right before she died. She was the only person I ever told about you. She was pretty much blind by then. She knew we were going to get married and she wanted to meet you."

I stop eating and look at Clare. She looks back at me, serene, angelic, perfectly at ease. "Are we going to get married?"

"I assume so," she replies. "You've been telling me for years that whenever it is you're coming from, you're married to me."

Too much. This is too much. I close my eyes and will myself to think of nothing; the last thing I want is to lose my grip on the here and now.

"Henry? Henry, are you okay?" I feel Clare sliding onto the seat beside me. I open my eyes and she grips my hands strongly in hers. I look at her hands and see that they are the hands of a laborer, rough and chapped. "Henry, I'm sorry, I just can't get used to this. It's so opposite. I mean, all my life you've been the one who knew everything and I sort of forgot that tonight maybe I should go slow." She smiles. "Actually, almost the last thing you said to me before you left was 'Have mercy, Clare.' You said it in your quoting voice, and I guess now that I think of it you must have been quoting me." She continues to hold my hands. She looks at me with eagerness; with love. I feel profoundly humble.

1

WHEN HE WAS nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right-angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn't? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley's strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practising medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher's dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich.

It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon's homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton. The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full.

When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his practice. Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch's Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County. Atticus's office in the court-house contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checker-board and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defence for anybody. They persisted in pleading Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Atticus could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father's profound distaste for the practice of criminal law.

During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practised economy more than anything; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother's education. John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to study medicine at a time when cotton was not worth growing; but after getting Uncle Jack started, Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law. He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Simon Finch's industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town.

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the court-house sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people; Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

We lived on the main residential street in town - Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.

Calpurnia was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was near-sighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard. She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn't behave as well as Jem when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn't ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, mainly because Atticus always took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family. I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him.

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs Dubose was plain hell.

That was the summer Dill came to us.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day's play in the back yard, Jem and I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford's collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy - Miss Rachel's rat terrier was expecting - instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke:

`Hey.'

`Hey yourself,' said Jem pleasantly.

`I'm Charles Baker Harris,' he said. `I can read.'

`So what?' I said.

`I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it ... '

`How old are you,' asked Jem, `four-and-a-half?'

`Goin' on seven.'

`Shoot no wonder, then,' said Jem, jerking his thumb at me. `Scout yonder's been readin' ever since she was born, and she ain't even started to school yet. You look right puny for goin' on seven.'

`I'm little but I'm old,' he said.

Jem brushed his hair back to get a better look. `Why don't you come over, Charles Baker Harris?' he said. `Lord, what a name.'

`'s not any funnier'n yours. Aunt Rachel says your name's Jeremy Atticus Finch.'

Jem scowled. `I'm big enough to fit mine,' he said. `Your names longer'n you are. Bet it's a foot longer.'

`Folks call me Dill,' said Dill, struggling under the fence.

`Do better if you go over it instead of under it,' I said. `Where'd you come from?'

Dill was from Meridian, Mississippi, was spending the summer with his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb from now on. His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother worked for a photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to Dill, who went to the picture show twenty times on it.

`Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the court-house sometimes,' said Jem. `Ever see anything good?'

Dill had seen Dracula, a revelation that moved Jem to eye him with the beginning of respect. `Tell it to us,' he said.

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck-fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the centre of his forehead.

When Dill reduced Dracula to dust, and Jem said the show sounded better than the book, I asked Dill where his father was: `You ain't said anything about him.'

`I haven't got one.'

`Is he dead?'

`No...'

`Then if he's not dead you've got one, haven't you?'

Dill blushed and Jem told me to hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and found acceptable. Thereafter the summer passed in routine contentment. Routine contentment was: improving our treehouse that rested between giant twin chinaberry trees in the back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas based on the works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton and Edgar Rice Burroughs. In this matter we were lucky to have Dill. He played the character parts formerly thrust upon me - the ape in Tarzan, Mr Crabtree in The Rover Boys, Mr Damon in Tom Swift. Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.

But by the end of August our repertoire was vapid from countless reproductions, and it was then that Dill gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering.

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the colour of the slate-grey yard around it. Rain-rotten shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard - a `swept' yard that was never swept - where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.

Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was high, and peeped in windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions. A Negro would not pass the Radley Place at night, he would cut across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. The Maycomb school grounds adjoined the back of the Radley lot; from the Radley chicken-yard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the school yard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked.

The misery of that house began many years before Jem and I were born. The Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb's principal recreation, but worshipped at home; Mrs Radley seldom if ever crossed the street for a mid-morning coffee break with her neighbours and certainly never joined a missionary circle. Mr Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and came back promptly at twelve, sometimes carrying a brown paper bag that the neighbourhood assumed contained the family groceries. I never knew how old Mr Radley made his living - Jem said he `bought cotton', a polite term for doing nothing - but Mr Radley and his wife had lived there with their two sons as long as anybody could remember.

The shutters and doors of the Radley house were closed on Sundays, another thing alien to Maycomb's ways: closed doors meant illness and cold weather only. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes. But to climb the Radley front steps and call, `He-y', of a Sunday afternoon was something their neighbours never did. The Radley house had no screen doors. I once asked Atticus if it ever had any; Atticus said yes, but before I was born.

According to neighbourhood legend, when the younger Radley boy was in his teens he became acquainted with some of the Cunninghams from Old Sarum, an enormous and confusing tribe domiciled in the northern part of the country, and they formed the nearest thing to a gang ever seen in Maycomb. They did little, but enough to be discussed by the town and publicly warned from three pulpits: they hung around the barber-shop; they rode the bus to Abbotsville on Sundays and went to the picture show; they attended dances at the county's riverside gambling hell, the Dew-Drop Inn and Fishing Camp; they experimented with stumphole whisky. Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr Radley that his boy was in with the wrong crowd.

One night in an excessive spurt of high spirits, the boys backed around the square in a borrowed flivver, resisted arrest by Maycomb's ancient beadle, Mr Conner, and locked him in the court-house outhouse. The town decided something had to be done; Mr Conner said he knew who each and every one of them was, and he was bound and determined they wouldn't get away with it, so the boys came before the probate judge on charges of disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, assault and battery, and using abusive and profane language in the presence and hearing of a female. The judge asked Mr Conner why he included the last charge; Mr Conner said they cussed so loud he was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them. The judge decided to send the boys to the state industrial school, where boys were sometimes sent for no other reason than to provide them with food and decent shelter: it was no prison and it was no disgrace. Mr Radley thought it was. If the judge released Arthur, Mr Radley would see to it that Arthur gave no further trouble. Knowing that Mr Radley's word was his bond, the judge was glad to do so.

The other boys attended the industrial school and received the best secondary education to be had in the state; one of them eventually worked his way through engineering school at Auburn. The doors of the Radley house were closed on weekdays as well as Sundays, and Mr Radley's boy was not seen again for fifteen years.

Hugo has often been called an idealist. I would prefer to call him a theoretician, though he is a theoretician of a peculiar kind. He lacked both the practical interests and the self-conscious moral seriousness of those who are usually dubbed idealists. He was the most purely objective and detached person I had ever met - only in him detachment showed less like a virtue and more like a sheer gift of nature, a thing of which he was quite unaware. It was something which was expressed in his very voice and manner. I can picture him now, as I so often saw him during those conversations, leaning far forward in his chair and biting his knuckles as he picked up some hot-headed remark of mine. He was, in discussion, very slow. He would open his mouth slowly, shut it again, open it again, and at last venture a remark. "You mean . . . " he would say, and then he would rephrase what I had said in some completely simple and concrete way, which sometimes illuminated it enormously, and sometimes made nonsense of it entirely. I don't mean that he was always right. Often he failed utterly to understand me. It didn't take me long to discover that I had a much wider general knowledge than he on most of the subjects we discussed. But he would very quickly realize when we were, from his point of view, at a dead end, and he would say: "Well, I can say nothing about that," or "I'm afraid that here I don't understand you at all, not at all," with a finality which killed the topic. From first to last it was Hugo, not I, who conducted the conversation.

He was interested in everything, and interested in the theory of everything, but in a peculiar way. Everything had a theory, and yet there was no master theory. I have never met a man more destitute than Hugo of anything which could be called a metaphysic or general Weltanschauung. It was rather perhaps that of each thing he met he wanted to know the nature - and he seemed to approach this question in each instance with an absolute freshness of mind. The results were often astonishing. I can remember him going on and on, asking questions such as: What do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French? If you see a picture in your mind how do you know it's a French picture? Or is it that you say the French word to yourself? What do you see when you see that the translation is exactly right? Are you imagining what someone else would think, seeing it for the first time? Or is it a kind of feeling? What kind of feeling? Can't you describe it more closely? And so on and so on, with a fantastic patience. This sometimes became very exasperating. What seemed to me to be the simplest utterance soon became, under the repeated pressure of Hugo's "You mean", a dark and confused saying of which I no longer myself knew the meaning. The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it. Yet at the same time Hugo's inquiries rarely failed to throw an extraordinary amount of light on whatever he concerned himself with. For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew.

During the early part of my discussions with Hugo I kept trying to 'place' him. Once or twice I asked him directly whether he held this or that general theory - which he always denied with the air of one who has been affronted by a failure of taste. And indeed it seemed to me later that to ask such questions of Hugo showed a peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality. After a while I realized that Hugo held no general theories whatsoever. All his theories, if they could be called theories, were particular. But still I had the feeling that if I tried hard enough I could come somehow to the centre of his thought; and after a while my passion became to discuss with Hugo not so much politics or art or sex, but what it was that was so peculiar in Hugo's approach to politics or art or sex. At last we did have a conversation which seemed to me to touch on something central to Hugo's thought, if Hugo's thought could be said at all to have anything so figurative as a centre. He himself would probably have denied this; or rather, I'm not sure that he would have known what it meant for thoughts to have an orientation. We arrived at this point in question by way of a discussion about Proust. From Proust we were led on to discuss what it meant to describe a feeling or state of mind. Hugo found this very puzzling, as indeed he found everything very puzzling.

"There's something fishy about describing people's feelings," said Hugo. "All these descriptions are so dramatic."

"What's wrong with that?" I said.

"Only," said Hugo, "that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt "apprehensive" - well, this just isn't true."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I didn't feel this," said Hugo. "I didn't feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards."

"But suppose I try hard to be accurate," I said.

"One can't be," said Hugo. "The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I'm done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you . . ."

"Touch it up?" I suggested.

"It's deeper than that," said Hugo. "The language just won't let you present it as it really was."

"Suppose then," I said, "that one were offering the description at the time."

"But don't you see," said Hugo, "that just gives the thing away. One couldn't give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one's heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to make an impression - it would be for effect, it would be a lie."

I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn't see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, "But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There's a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie."

Hugo pondered this. "I think it is so," he said with seriousness.

"In that case one oughtn't to talk," I said.

"I think perhaps one oughtn't to," said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end.

"That's colossal!" said Hugo. "Of course one does talk. But," and he was grave again, "one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate."

"What do you mean?"

"All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods."

"What would happen if one were to speak the truth?" I asked. "Would it be possible?"

"I know myself," said Hugo, "that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person."

"So we never really communicate?"

"Well," he said, "I suppose actions don't lie."