II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "My God, is happiness so simple then?"

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

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

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

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

       "This is very absurd."

       "I know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "What?"

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

       "Caradoc!"

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

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

       "And Geneva!"

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

       "Do you think we can go?"

       "Of course."

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

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

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

*    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Then why come back?"

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

       "Everything's all right again" I cried.

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

       "What?" said Benedicta incredulously.

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

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

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

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

       Caradoc paused.

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

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

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

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

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

                                      "Surrender and identify and nod.

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

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

                                      "Hail!  Ejaculatio praecox,

                                      No more love among the haycocks;

                                          Yet psyche chloroformed by science

                                          In poems will breathe her last defiance!"

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

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

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

       "What?"

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

       "The firm?"

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

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

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

       "It must be devastating."

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

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

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

       "But what the devil is it?"

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

       "Well I'm damned."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       Of course I did.

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

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

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

       "But why in European characters?"

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

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

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

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

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

       "Perhaps I have."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "I count on you."

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

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

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

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

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

       "That was a good one" said Benedicta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "And the United Nations?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       I was thinking; O yes, I was thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                               pro CREATION re CREATION

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

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

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

       "Yes but free association" I said peevishly.

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

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

       "You sent him to Russia to buy mercury."

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

       "Where is he?"

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

       "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

       "Building her?"

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

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

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

       "I know you did."

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

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

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

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

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

       "Why Rackstraw?"

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

       "What can he tell you?"

       He gave a small impatient gesture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       Poor Julian!  Rich Julian!  Vega and Altair!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*    *    *    *    *

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

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

       "Julian?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "All right I'll book."