I

                                            Aut Tunc, aut Nunquam,

                                            "It was then or never...."

                                                                   Petronius

                                                                  The Satyricon

_________________

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

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

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

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  But the book seems very much out of date - surely the Coronation was years ago?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

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

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

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

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

                                  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

                                  Bless the bed that I lie on,

                                  Ano-Sado-Polymorph

                                  Bless the pillow I slide off,

                                  Giving Sascher-Masch the slip

                                  With the twice-confounded whip.

                                  Let them take me from behind,

                                  But not too very sudden, mind.

                                  Polymorphouse and perverse,

                                  Revelling in the primal curse.

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

*    *    *    *     *

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

*    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Woof!  Woof!"

       "Felix, listen to me."

       "Ja, Herr Doktor."

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

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

       "And Benedicta?" says he.

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

       "Good heavens, Felix: how can you?"

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

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

*    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                          Mr. Vincent                    five years

                          Mr. Wilkie                     five years

                          Emmermet                     ten years

                          Porely                            ten years

                          Imhof                             ten years

                          Dobie                             five years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Your brother."

       "Yes."

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

       "He forbade me."

       "Even when we were married?"

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

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

       "I fired that shot."

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

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

       "And from his side?"

       "The death of that girl, Iolanthe."

       "How?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "But he said it with such feeling."

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

       "And your father?"

       "And my father!"

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

       "Drove Merlin out?"

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

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

       "But you were lovers."

       "Always.  Even afterwards.  We found ways."

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "That's it, my darling."

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

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

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

       "So he fell out of the sky?"

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

       "He sacrificed himself for me in a way."

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

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

       "Benedicta, darling, tell me one thing."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Pthotquyck" he says suddenly, brightly.

       "I beg your pardon?"

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

       "I see."

       "The dooced things get into everything."

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

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

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

         "Who are you?"

       "Who."

       "Who are you?"

       "Are you."

       "Are you Venetia Mann?"

       "Mann."

       "Are you?"

       "Are you."

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

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

       But pouring out a drink with shaking hand she says:

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

       "Well?"

       "I'm beginning to fee afraid again."

       "The very word is like a knell."

       "He says everything is different now."

       "It had better be."

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

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

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

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

*    *    *    *    *

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

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

                                                                        "Tell me

                                     What strange irrelevance

                                     Dogs the lives of elephants

                                     With trunk before

                                     And tail behind,

                                     With ears of such vast elegance

                                     How the control the state

                                     Of such a massive gait

                                     And still be reasonable and kind

                                     Though almost all behind?

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

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

                                                        "Alcibiades,

                                                         Alcibiades!

                                     Feeling it rise and recede

                                     Like the Pleiades, bids us

                                                        Take heed.

                                     'One gets tired of elderly parties

                                     Even when they are as wise as Secrátes.'

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

"item

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

       "Caradoc may be alive, do you hear?"

       "Of course."

       "Did you know it?"

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

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