V

Some ten days later, having made my arrangements with Marchant and Said to keep Iolanthe "feeding": that is to say "charging": and to fill in the time by working on the male dummy Adam until my return ... having done all this, I drove a patient Benedicta down to Southampton, our point of embarkation for the journey to Turkey.  A freezing rain fell upon a muted landscape of rime-stiffened hills and clay-pits - the winter at its beastliest.  Perhaps it was a trifle wicked to allow the heart to lift with every thought of a spring-pierced Mediterranean, with its oranges glowing on far-away islands and its lofty March seas ... but lift it did.  Only she was thoughtful while I whistled to myself cheerfully to drown the skirling of the tyres upon the black wet roads.  Moreover it was impossible not to feel that this would turn out to be some sort of holiday - despite, I mean, the sobering news of Jocas and his death-oriented preoccupations.  A holiday feeling was in the air, and it was accentuated when we at last ran Caradoc to earth in a dockside pub on Pier 3 to which, for some mysterious reason, we had been directed.  We were not going by sea, were we?  I would have preferred the old Orient Express with its long romantic rumble across the heart of Europe.  But we were in the hands of the firm's travel people.  Everything had been arranged, as usual.

       As for Caradoc, he looked both flushed and incoherent, as much with pleasure as with alcohol; but it was quite appalling the physical state he was in - his clothes dirty and torn, his new shaggy beard ungroomed.  "I know" he said, taking in our consternation.  "Don't look now; I've been camping in Woodhenge and Stonehenge - damn disagreeable month I can tell you, living like an ape under a bush.  But the firm is sending me down a couple of suitcases of decent clothes and shaving kit.  I'll soon be worthy of your respect."  He made a hermetic gesture which the barman instantly translated into three double whiskies.  "I'm back in the firm" he said suddenly, jubilantly, laughing a harsh ho-ho.  "Once more into the breach, dear souls.  For the moment I'm being forced to work in the graveyard section it seems, laying out cemeteries, designing mausolea and all that; but Julian says if I'm a good boy I can work my way back through public conveniences and council-houses towards some real architecture.  For the moment it's a sun-oriented mausoleum - once more Jocas has called for a funeral monument!  It may be my last really free job - but who am I to worry?  Two more Mnenons in today's paper, have you seen?"  He was beside himself with self-congratulation.

       "And now to cap it all," he added, jerking a thumb "look what the firm has hired.  Just look."   The mystery of our presence in the dock-area was at last explained by the old grey flying-boat which lay at anchor in the swell, snubbing the light craft surrounding it, and presumably waiting for its passengers and crew.  My misgivings were only to be allayed when we finally did go aboard by tender and found out just how spacious and comfortable it was with its two decks, its bars and conference room where we were to dine and pass most of our time.  It was a good choice, really, but as a craft she was slow, slow as the devil; moreover I gathered we would have to touch down almost everywhere to refuel - Marseille, Naples, Bari, Athens.... Ah, but that was something else in its favour for we could stop overnight anywhere.  Perhaps in Athens we could look in on the Countess Hippolyta, Ariadne?  I conferred with Caradoc and despatched a telegram warning her of our threatened descent upon Naos, her country house.

       What was not easy was the take-off, however; we leeched up and down the sound trying to get up sufficient speed to free ourselves, to get airborne, but in vain.  We were stuck to the water as if to a flypaper; the great engines groaned and screamed, the spars shuddered, the hull vibrated under the thwacking of waves.  But at long last, after a run which seemed to last an eternity she suddenly broke free, tore herself loose from the shackles of the water and swayed up into the free air, turning in a long slow curve over the land with its toy houses and gardens and infantile piers and railway stations - turning her prow towards the tall blue spring sky which waited for us somewhere off Corsica.  And all at once the noise diminished and speech became possible; from everywhere stewards appeared with drinks and sandwiches.  A few light pantomime clouds puffed around us in glorious Cinerama, giving us the illusion of speed and mastery.  Our spirits rose.

       There was so much room that each of us had a choice of different corners if we wanted to read or work or doze.  Vibart, for example, he had gone off to the far end of the saloon to sit alone, briefcase on knee, gazing out of the window.  We had hardly had a chance to exchange a nod.  He had arrived at the last minute in an office car, and had been forced to gallop down to the tender and crawl aboard with scarcely enough time to exchange a wave with his friends and colleagues.  But he looked sad and somehow withdrawn in his dark city clothes and broad-brimmed Homburg.  Goytz on the contrary looked splendrous but completely relaxed.  One might imagine him to be perhaps a great violinist on his way to fulfil an engagement abroad.  He had a mysterious leather box which, though somewhat like a gun-case in shape, could easily have housed a master's Stradivarius.  Spectacles on nose he benignly if sleepily leafer his way through what looked like a large seed catalogue - though the illustrations were of corpses in various states of prize-winning splendour.  But if Vibart looked unhappy and withdrawn how much more so did Baum, the firm's overseas sales representative?  He looked as if he were listening intently to his own inner economy and trying to ascertain whether he was going to be sick or not.  I went to pass the time of day with him, for he was very sensitive, very Jewish, and quick to imagine that neglect by a senior might be a slight.  I found though that his preoccupations, though unusual, had nothing to do with air-sickness.  "I am worried about England" he said broodingly, gazing down at as much of it as swam into visibility through the low cloud.  "I am worried about the young, Mr Felix.  They are all studying economics.  They are all taking degrees in it - you can get them anywhere now.  Now you know and I know that economics isn't really a subject at all.  But the mental evolutions necessary to study it can easily fix one at the anal stage for the rest of one's life.  And people fixed at the anal stage are a danger to humanity, Mr Felix.  Is it not so?"  It was.  It was.

       I agreed seriously with him; his brooding concern for the national fate was so well grounded and so sincere.  I wondered if Goytz was fixed at the anal stage ... and Nash?  Or Julian, trotting about with that golden turd in the brown paper parcel?  I patted Baum's shoulder in silent sympathy and signalled the steward for another reviver.  Benedicta slept, so innocently, so discreetly.  If I had to be murdered, I thought, by somebody I would like it to be by somebody like her.  Caradoc's voice poured in upon me, raised half a tone against the massive thrum of the great engines as they pushed us across the skies of France.  "I haven't wasted my exile one bit" he said exultantly.  "Although the trip to Stonehenge nearly killed me with cold.  I went down with Pulley and a sextant to take some readings and do some drawings.  You know my old interest in deducing a common set of principles for all our architectural constructions?  It still stands up, and wherever I touch the matter I get verifications, whether the Parthenon or the Celebes - whether ancient or modern, whether Canberra or Woodhenge.  It's as if city-builders had a built-in gyrocompass which pushed them to build in respect to certain cosmic factors like sun, moon and pole."

       He sipped his drink and adopted a pleased and somewhat glassy expression as he divagated about megaliths aligned to the sun as early as 1800 B.C.; about early Pole Stars like Vega and Betelgeuse and their influence upon the orientation of cities and temples.  "Why," he said regally "Pulley and I even discovered a magnetic field at Stonehenge - a certain place near the centre which gave off enough juice to demagnetise a watch, or make a compass squeal with pain.  It's reminiscent of the spot at Epidaurus where the acoustic wave is at its highest and clearest.  I hadn't got anything to leave as a marker but my drawings have it.  I don't know as yet what such a thing might prove.  And by the way the same goes for St. Paul's Cathedral - there's a magnetic spot in the main isle, about where they've sunk that black hexagonal stone.  Again I'm not surprised as perhaps I should be.  St. Paul's is of course more an engineering feat than any of the other cathedrals and naturally much less aesthetically beautiful.  It was build by a great artificer in conscious pursuit of mathematical principles; it was not a dream of godhead full of poetry or frozen music or what not.  No, it belonged to its age; it was a fitting symbol for a mercantile country in an age dedicated to reason, hovering on the edge of the Encyclopaedia and the Industrial Revolution.  It is not accident that the business part of the city, the moneyed part, grouped itself round this great symbol of the stock and share.  Nor is it an accident that it should in some ways feel strongly reminiscent of a railway station - say Euston or Waterloo.  It stands as a symbol for the succeeding ages which produced both.  But after St. Paul's where do we go?  The Dome's rise is like the South Sea Bubble.  The Mercantile dream has been shattered.  And now the mob has too much pocket money we can expect nothing so much as a long age of bloodshed expressed by the concrete block.  It is hard nowadays to distinguish a barracks from a prison or a block of dwellings -indeed I'd go so far as to say it was impossible.  They belong to the same strain of thought - Mobego I call it after our old friend Sipple.  I wonder if we'll see him in Turkey?  It is quite impossible to predict what might come out of it, though one can almost be sure that some sort of universal death by boredom and conformity is being hinted at.  And I won't live to see what happens after the blood bath...."  He mooned on, slowly drumming himself into innocent slumber with his tongue rocked by the soft throbbing and jolting of the huge plane in the aircurrents of the French mountain-ranges.

       I wondered what Julian might make of these considerations.  Obviously he would have seen the results of Caradoc's work.

       As Benedicta still slept with the new Vogue on knee I started to make my way across to Vibart in order to exchange a word with him, but I was waylaid once more by the pensive Baum who motioned me to sit down with the obvious intention of opening his heart to me.  I hoped we would not have to dwell any longer on the English nation and its habits, as I had long since given up worrying about it; fortunately not, it was the turn of the Jews.  "I am wondering" said Baum sotto voce, looking round to see if we might be overheard "if there isn't a touch of anti-Semitism entering the firm from somewhere.  Lately I have been troubled."  When Baum was troubled he had a very troubled look indeed.  "From where?" I said, longing to break free from what threatened to be a curtain lecture.

       "From Count Banubula" he said surprisingly enough, suddenly staring me in the eye in a challenging manner.  "Banubula?" I said with genuine puzzlement.  Baum nodded with compressed lips and went on slowly, with emphasis.  "Yesterday I overheard something in the senior boardroom which made me pause, Mr. Felix.  He was there addressing a very large group of salesmen.  I don't know what the meeting was about or where they were selling but what he was saying was this: I made a note."  Always meticulous, Baum produced a pocket diary with a note in shorthand.  He cleared his throat and read in a vague imitation of Banubula's aristocratic drawl the following: "'Now the foreskin, as everybody knows, is part of the poetic patrimony of man; whether firmly but gracefully retracted or in utter repose it has been the subject for the greatest painters and sculptors the world has known.  Reflect on Michelangelo, his enormous range....'"  Baum put the book away and pursed his lips and said, "That was all I heard because they closed the door, but I was very struck.  I wondered if all those salesmen were Jews and whether he was...."  I drained my drink and took the dear fellow by the forearm.  "Listen," I said, "for Godsake listen Baum.  Michelangelo was a Jew.  Everybody was a Jew: Gilles de Rais, Petrarch, Lloyd George, Marx and Spender, Baldwin, and Faber and Faber.  This much we know for certain.  BUT THEY HAVE ALL KEPT THEIR FORESKINS. What you don't know is that Banubula himself is a Jew.  So am I."

       "He is not.  He is Lettish" said Baum obstinately.

       "I assure you he is.  Ask anyone."  Baum looked mollified but in some deeper way unconvinced.  He said: "Now that this work of his is so delicate that it is on the Top Secret list one doesn't quite know what he is doing.  I hesitate to accuse the firm of course; but with a Lett one never knows where one is."  He looked overwrought.  I took my leave of him in lingering loving fashion, smoothing out his sleeve and assuring him that everything would be all right.  "Above all resist the impulse to become anti-Lettish" I said, and he nodded his acquiescence, though his face still wore a twisted and gloomy expression.  He buried himself in his papers with a sigh.

       Nor did Vibart seem the less gloomy as he sat looking sideways and down across the clouds to where somewhere slabs of blue sky were beginning to fabricate themselves.  "Ah Felix" he said moodily.  "Come and sit down; you never answered my letter."  I admitted the fact.  "It was hard to know what to say; I was sorry.  One couldn't just be awkwardly flippant - and flippancy has been our small change up until I ran away, got banged on the head, and wound up in the Paulhaus munching sedatives."

       "I had to tell someone" he said.  "And I was hoping that you would stay mad and locked up with the information.  But it didn't work."

       "Heard about Jocas?"

       "Of course."

       "Are you coming to see him?  Or are you on some other mission and just using the firm's transport?"  Vibart peered sideways at me and shot me a quizzical twisted look.  He said nothing for a long time; then he replied with considerable hesitation.  "I deliberately made an excuse to come, a publisher's excuse.  But I wanted really to see him once more in the flesh."

       "But you know him, have met him."

       Vibart sighed.  "I knew him without really recognising him as the man who had completely altered my life.  I suppose it is a common enough experience - and always a surprising one.  But what puzzles me is that in getting me my job with the firm he knew full well that I would be transferring myself to London and taking her with me.  Why did he, then, feeling as he did and she did?  Why not let me moulder away for another four-year spell in the Consular, rising by slow degrees to a Chancery and some trite Councillorship in Ankara or Polis?  When I suddenly heard the truth I closed my eyes and tried to remember this benign little man's face.  'So that was him,' I said to myself 'all the time that was him.'  All right, it's not good grammar; but the surprise hit me between the eyes.  And death was the result.  It's so very astonishing that I don't believe it yet.  But I want just to look at him for once - my only link with Pia now on earth, Felix.  My Goodness, what a sublime trickster life is, what a double-dealer."

       His eyes had filled with tears, but he conjured them away manfully by blowing his nose in a handkerchief and shaking his head.  He stamped on the floor and cursed, and then all of a sudden turned quite gay.  I recognised this feeling: after one has talked out a problem there is no longer the weight of it upon the heart; one can get almost gay, though the situation remains as desperate or as disagreeable as ever.  "Now" he said, putting away his handkerchief with an air of decision and clearing his lungs.  "Now then.  That's enough of that."  Poor Vibart and his lovely wife; I felt rather ashamed to have the figure of the reclaimed Benedicta lying asleep in one of the seats back there.  But then death ...?  We were all crawling about like ants on the Great Bed of Ware, choked with our so-called problems; and with this extraordinary unknown staring us in the face.  "To hell with death" said Vibart robustly, as if he had read my mind.  "It is merely a provisional solution for people who won't take the full psychic charge."

       "What on earth's that?"

       "To live for ever, of course.  Immortality is built-in my dear boy; it's like a button nobody dares to touch because the label has come off it and nobody knows what might happen if one dared to press it.  The button of the unknown."

       "You are romancing, Vibart."

       "Yes: but then no.  I am serious."  He shot another look at me, pensive and thoughtful, and settled himself deeper in his seat.  "The thing is," he said "that things turn into their opposite.  For example this man wounded me to the heart, and naturally I hated him - hated him long and with concentrated fury.  But after some time the hate began to turn into a perverse kind of affection.  I hated him for what he had done, yes; but in the end I was also feeling affectionate, almost grateful for the fact that he had made me suffer so much.  Do you see?  It was something that was missing from my repertoire, a most valuable experience which I might never have had without him.  So now I am ambivalent - love-hate.  But I am also consumed with curiosity just to see this chap - this demigod who could hold the future and the happiness of a fellow human being in the palm of his hand.  Could administer such advanced lessons in suffering and self-abnegation to others - for I presume that in sending me to the firm in England he knew that I would take her away from him.  Did he think more of the firm than of her?  And was the inner knowledge of this what decided her fate, made her commit suicide, eh?"

       What could one add or subtract?  These long and furiously debated questions had obviously gnawed him almost away; they were responsible for the new grey-blond hair, thick and dusty, which had given his features a rare glow of refinement.  They were equally responsible for his present slimness - for people who don't sleep well usually get thin.  He had never, in fact, looked handsomer or in better physical trim; the weary, well-cut features had lost the last suspicion of chubbiness, had become mature, had settled into the final shape which the death-mask alone could now perpetuate.  Vibart was complete.  (I found myself thinking rather along the lines of a dummy-builder, occupied with the stresses and strains of false bone and ligament, nylon skin.)

       "You know" he said "that we had a child very late in the day?  No?  Well we did, or rather perhaps they did.  At any rate it was too late in the day for Pia for the result was a Mongol - a horrible little thing with flippers.  Thank God, it died after a very short time - but there again I am not sure: did it fall or was it pushed?  I think Pia did away with it in pure disgust, and I am glad that she did, if she did.  And so on.  And so on in endless mélopée.  Ouf! my dear Felix, here I am chewing your ear down in a stub when you yourself have really been through it.  I came to share your distrust and terror of the firm after I had been in it awhile, after I had watched your antics, your long battle in and around the idea of a personal freedom which must not be qualified by this Merlin octopus.  I too wanted to react against all this moral breast-feeding and might well have run away like you did, in order to hide myself away and start something uncontaminated, something really my own.  But I decided that we were looking at it from the wrong point of view.  I mean that in thinking of the Firm as a sort of Kafka-like construct exercising pressure on us from without we were wrong; the real pressure was interior, in was in ourselves, this pressure of the unconscious lying within our consciousness like a smashed harp.  It is this which we should try and master and turn to some use in the fabrication of ... well, beauty."

       "Lumme!" I said.  "Beauty?  Define please."

       "In the deepest sense Beauty is what is or seems fully congruent with the designs and desires of Nature."  We both burst out laughing, like people discovering each other for the nth time in the same maze - instead of finding each other outside the exit, I mean.

       "Enough of this" I said and he bowed an apology, his eyes full of laughing exasperation.  "Anyway, now it's too late" he went on.  "So we must put a firm face on it; here, have a look at this outline will you?  Some spy in the industry has unmasked all the activities of the firm in the drug business.  Fortunately for us the manuscript was sent to me; they - he must have been unaware that my house was a Merlin subsidiary.  So it gave me a chance to look at it and to muse; how much of this do we want out, and what can be done about it if we don't?  That is why I am here; the Polis end of the drug business is shrouded in mystery, simply because business methods are so different; abacus-propelled, old man.  So I want Jocas to see and judge.  That's my excuse anyway."

       He absented himself for a while and I took a look through his drug dossier which was written in rather a jaunty journalistic vein which reminded me vaguely of Marchant's minutes - though the paper could hardly have been by him.... "Resin of cannabis is collected in various ways including, in Turkey, running through the fields naked to catch it on the bare skin.... Cigarettes are dosed with the dried tops, the shoots, or the flower-pistils powdered.... As for qat, you must chew leaves or branches of the plant, but smoke while you chew and drink water copiously.  In Ethiopia it is mixed in a paste with honey or else dried into a curry powder for use with food.  In Arabia the leaf is rolled and smoked.  But these are only some of the humbler drugs in which Merlin's has come to deal.  The firm has also a virtual corner in Mexican Morning Glory seed - ololiuqui.  But if the oriental end of the firm handles products which give it rather an old-fashioned air, the London end is fully aware of contemporary standards and demands.  The pharmaceutical subsidiaries of Merlin have gone further than any other such organisations.  Befotenin, for example, is a drug first found in the skin-glands of toads (the Bufo vulgaris) and also in the leaves of the mimosacea of the Orinoco.  This is already finding new medical uses as a hallucinatory snuff, though it is still on the secret list of the firm.  Merlin subsidiaries are also working on a protein fraction obtained from the blood serum of schizophrenes which has been named taraxein; injections of this substance induce apparent schozophrenia in monkeys.  But most disturbing of all the new secret drugs is Ditran - which is calculated to be very much more powerful than LSD or Mescalin...."

       Here at last I came upon some marginalia in the characteristic handwriting of Marchant.  "Ref. Ditran.  A single dose of 15 mg. rocks the world, old man; for extreme cases in the Paulhaus they supply multiple doses of 30 mg. intramuscularly.  God, you should hear them scream!  It is so painful and so terrifying that the cures are often instantaneous as Lourdes and often much more general.  The author is also slightly out about LSD.  When the syndrome gets out of hand chlorpromazine can save the day with 20 to 50 mg. intramuscular doses repeated every thirty minutes - unless the heart gives out."

       Vibart was back from his wash and brush up.  "Well, I see nothing wrong about all this."  He lit a cigar and said: "I don't know.  It's a question of degree.  For example we have launched (under the counter, so to speak) a new cocktail with immense adolescent appeal - equal parts of vodka and Amabuta muscaria juice - the hallucinogenic mushroom, no less.  It's called a Catherine Wheel, after Catherine the Great I suppose who used to mushroom herself insensible in between love-affairs.  For my part I just don't know how much of all this should go out or not.  We shall see what Jocas thinks, and then what Julian says."  He read in a sententious voice a phrase which went: "'Since earliest times a change of consciousness had been accredited with great healing power; this was recognised since the Eleusinian Mysteries and long before them.'"  Then he snapped the MS shut and thrust it back into his glossy briefcase.  "We shall see" he said.

       Night was falling over the dark sea, the clouds were straining away westward.  We had lost altitude and gained the last frail blueness of the evening; softly we came down with an occasional rubbery bump, as if an air bladder had been as often smacked with the flat of the hand, until we were moving along almost in the water.  Under us a fresh spring sea tilted and coiled back on itself, its simply lazy gesturing suggesting all the promise of sunshine which could not long be deferred.  The lights went on and turned the outer world to lavender and then to dark purple.  We were running along a heavily indented coastline with an occasional mountain pushing its snout into the empty sky.  Somewhere a moon was rising.  In another hour or so we should be skating and strumming across the Bay of Naples, where the captain had elected to stay the night and refuel.  But it was not worth going ashore as his plan was to start on the next leg of the flight a good hour before dawn, to gain as much light as possible for the Greek touch-down which he seemed to regard as rather more chancy than the Naples halt.  None of this was our affair; we dined early and slept in our comfortable bunks.

       Athens when at last it came was something quite other - at least for me; poised in its violet hollows like some bluish fruit upon the bare branches of night.  The day had been brilliantly calm with here and there a mountain in the deep distance showing its profiles of snow, and a sea calmly pedalling away to a ruled horizon.  But of course it was not only the old and often-relished beauty of the site, it was really the thronging associations.  I suppose that Athens will always be for me what Polis must be for Benedicta - a place as much cherished for the sufferings it inflicted on one as for the joys.  I had spent part of my youth here, after all, that confused and rapturous period when everything seems possible and nothing attainable.  Here I had lived for a while with Iolanthe - not the semi-mythical star whom we were trying to recreate out of the pulp of rubbers and resins; but a typical prostitute of a small capital, resolute, gay, and beautiful.  (I repeated her name to myself in the Greek way, reclaiming the original image of her, while I pressed Benedicta's arm with all the recollected tenderness I felt for this other shadow-woman whom I had not recognised as a goddess when I actually owned her.  Was I later to start almost to love her retrospectively, so to speak?  And perhaps this is always the way?  The amputated limb which aches in winter?  I don't know.)

       We moved now in a great fat bubble of violet and green sunlight, sinking softly down into the darkening bowl to where the city lay atrembling.  The night was darkling up over Salamis way.  The outlines were turning to blue chalk, or the sheeny blue of carbon paper.  But always the little white abstract dice of the Acropolis held, like a spread sail, the last of the white light as the whole of the rest of the world foundered into darkness.  Hymettus turned on its slow turntable showing us its shaven nape.  We were just in time.  We circled the city and its central symbol in time to see what was to be seen.  Ants waved to us from under the plinth of the Parthenon and Caradoc waved back in a frenzy of amiability - to what purpose I could not discover since nothing could be seen of us save smudges of white.  Nevertheless.  Meanwhile my eye had taken a swift reading, basing itself upon the plinth, and was racing through the streets to find the little hotel where, in Number Seven, so much of my life had passed.  But I was not quick enough; by the time I got my bearing right the street had slid into another and the buildings formed fours, obscuring the site I was hunting for.  By now of course we had come down low for our landing, but must perforce carry out a long loop which would take us several miles out to sea, thus enabling us to run landwards into Phaleron and touch down upon its placid waters.  Everything went calmly, smoothly; a naval tender full of chattering Greek customs officials carried us joyfully towards the shore, making us feel that we had been anxiously awaited and that our arrival had thrown everyone into ecstasy.  It was simply the national sense of hospitality manifesting itself; later on land we started to have trouble with an elderly official but all at once Hyppolyta's chauffeur appeared.  "Grigorie" we all cried and there was much embracing and dashing away of happy tears.  Overcome by our bad Greek and obvious affection for the venerable Grigori the customs people passed us through with bows and smiles.  We were in.  There were two cars, and after a short confabulation we decided on our various objectives.  Caradoc, Benedicta and myself were to go to Naos and stay with the Countess while Vibart elected to spend the night in Athens with the other members of the party.

       Caradoc was strangely subdued as we set off; Benedicta peeled a mandarin which a child had handed her; I thought, for no known reason, of the sunken rose-garden with its nodding yellow tea-roses, and of the draughts of music which flowed out into it on those still summer nights when we would sit so late by the cool air which hovered around the hushing lily-pond.  It would be too cold to dine out as yet.  It was an age since I had seen Ariadne.  I asked Grigori how the Countess Hyppolyta had been keeping and he shot me a glance in the mirror.  "Since Mr. Graphos died," he said "she hardly goes out any more.  She is gardening very much and has built a little church for St. Barbara on the property."  He paused, racking his brains for something else to tell me, but obviously there was not much.  Or perhaps he did not wish to speak too freely before the others.  Grigori was a northerner and had rather a fanatical sense of rank and the general proprieties.  Chauffeurs should be reluctant to discuss their mistresses, even with old friends.  So!

       It was dark now, but the house was ablaze with light as we crossed the garden, leaving such luggage as we had to Grigori.  She came to the door, she must have heard the engines of the car - Hyppolyta, I mean.  She stood rather shyly holding it open and gazing short-sightedly into the darkness from which, one by one, her friends - her lifelong friends - would emerge.  The greetings were long and tender.  Back in the firelight in the huge room with its medieval vaulting one could see how thin she had become.

       "Welcome to Naos" she said softly.  "O strangers to the Greeks."  A quotation doubtless, and perhaps a soft reproof for so long a neglect.  "But still out of season" she added, leading us in to divest ourselves of our coats.  Yes, the rose-gardens, the green citrons, the oleanders would have to wait until the spring became more generous with its sunlight.  But the big awkward country house was gay with light.  fires blazed hospitably in the long vaulted rooms with their oil-paintings of three generations of Hippolytas echoing each other.  Degenerate trophies of the past - she had once called them that.  The vaulted monastic rooms echoed with our voices.  We had a chance to really look at each other.  Ariadne, though very much the Countess still, and though transformed by age and experience - as we all had been - registered no really critical change for the worse.  She had become thinner, yes, but this only emphasised the new frail boyishness of her figure, the slenderness of her arms.  But nothing could submerge the dark mischievous Athenian eyes, with their swift sympathies and swifter touches of mirthfulness.  The naïveté, the candour, these were there still; and from time to time touched by a kind of lofty sadness.  Watching her smiling, and thinking about her love for Graphos the politician, and what it had done to her life: and then of his death - I searched in my mind for a word which might do justice to this new maturity.  She had the fruitful, sad yet happy look one sees on the faces of young widows.  "Undamaged" I cried aloud, at last; and she gave me a tiny shrug.

       "I mean you are still living a life" I went on.

       Now she laughed out loud and said: "Get thee to a nunnery, Felix, and see how it feels.  The boredom!  Ouf!"

       The servants brought in trays of drinks and olives now, and we pledged each other in the firelight.  Once Ariadne had hated Benedicta, but now this feeling appeared to have given place to a warmer one.  At any rate she held B.'s hands and shook them until the bracelet of ancient coins on her wrist clicked.  Then she said in her frank way: "Once I remember hating you; it was because I was jealous of Felix and sorry for him and you were hurting him.  But it didn't go really deep with me.  Do you think we could be friends now?  Shall we try?"  Benedicta, with a word, put an arm round her waist, and together the two slender women walked the long length of the room in sisterly comradeship, saying nothing.  I was delighted.

       The companionable silence was broken only by a vast and somewhat typical hiccough from Caradoc.  "Alcohol provokes the fruitful detonations from which ideas flow.  But my digestion is not what it was, I must beware."  Ariadne smiled down upon him benignly.  "An echo from the past" she said.  "For when did whisky never detonate you?"

       "I am old, my locks are white" he replied gravely.

       But she clapped her hands softly together, saying "No; it is just that we all have changed places, haven't we?  The pack has been shuffled.  Everyone will be going round counter-clockwise now.  I expect the good to get badder and the bad to get gooder; except in the exceptional cases - where one or another have got up enough momentum to stop the pendulum.  Then if bad, they will achieve greatness by becoming horrible, unspeakable.  If good they will become angels.  What do you say to that?"  In the calm of the great country house such propositions did not sound what they perhaps were - a trifle sententious.

       "All change for the worse" said Caradoc testily.  "Why since last we met I have been dead in Polynesia.  I have been a bigamist, a trigamist, and heaven knows what else.  I have been unrepentantly happy, Ariadne, and still am.  I am just in the right mood to build Jocas the mausoleum he wants."

       "Good Lord" she said.  "Has he started all over again, poor darling Jocas?  There's an echo for you.  Do you remember the last time?"  She laughed and  replenished Caradoc's drink.  He too gave his histrionic lion's roar and slapped a knee.  "Damn him, yes" he said.  "He wanted nothing less than the Parthenon.  At least he wanted the Niki temple - I just had to add a few rooms to that for members of the Merlin triple and he would have been quite happy.  The ass!"

       I remembered in a vague and indeterminate fashion the movement and bustle - and not less the mystery -  of that long ago period.  I had first met Caradoc here, in this house, and had subsequently spent a night in a brothel called the Blue Danube with him - a brothel run by Mrs. Henniker of all people, and where Iolanthe herself had worked for a while before being swept away on the wings of good fortune into the world of the film.

       "I simply never got to the bottom of that business" I said.  "Nobody would explain anything."

       "Nobody could; or rather everybody thought something quite different.  We were misled by Julian and also by Graphos.  I only pieced it together slowly over the years.  I don't think even Benedicta knew what was going on; all she knew was that you were in some sort of danger in Polis - you were then regarded as quite expendable, since the firm had complete possession of your notebooks.  Yes, but here in Athens something else was going on; first of all a tug-of-war between Julian and Jocas, all over this blasted temple.  Julian, as you know, had set his heart on getting control of the Parthenon for the firm.  Now of course it's a fait accompli, everyone is used to it, but then ... where would he find a politician daring enough or crooked enough to sign a secret protocol vesting the Parthenon and the hill it stands on in Merlin's?  Of course Graphos was the obvious choice, but he demanded a very heavy price, partly out of patriotism and partly out of personal greed.  On the one hand Merlin's must wipe out the National Debt, on the other rig an election to get him in as Prime Minister and keep him in until he had invested a personal fortune in Switzerland.  They all told me lies: Graphos said he was saving the Parthenon from Julian, not selling it behind my back.  Jocas, getting wind of this, wanted to walk off with the temple of Niki.  That would have given the show away, so he had to be stopped.  Julian did it somehow.  But then came another complication.  You remember a small, rather despicable figure called Sipple, the ex-clown?  Caradoc does.  He admired him extravagantly I remember.  Well Sipple got wind of the protocol from some indiscretion of Caradoc and rang me up, hinting at blackmail.  Silly fool ... one word would have course have ruined Graphos.  So Sipple had to be neutralised and sent away.  We did that, and we were lucky to be aided by a personal scandal which made the little spy anxious to leave Athens and hide away somewhere.  There, that is my story, at any rate.  How right and how wrong I don't know.  I still don't know."

       "It was all my fault" said Caradoc.

       I thought vividly of the boy with his throat cut lying on his side in Sipple's bed; of the birds beginning to chirp and preen as the dawn came up over the Salamis sealine; I saw Sipple standing there in his braces with traces of clown's makeup still on his face, round the eyes I thought of Iolanthe who had committed the murder.  It was unbelievable really.  Unbelievable.

       "It's all like a dream" I said.

       "So much is.  Time plays such strange tricks.  Do you remember the old brothel, the Blue Danube, Caradoc?"

       "Of course" he said robustly.  "How could I ever forget what it taught me from the great book of life?"

       "Well," said Ariadne "the other day I was driving along the corniche and I suddenly thought of you; I was passing the place in the car and I decided to stop and look at it.  But my dear, it had gone.  There was nothing but an empty sand dune where this quite considerable villa had once stood.  I could hardly believe my eyes.  I stopped the car and started to search like a lunatic.  I knew the spot like the back of my hand.  No good.  There was nothing there.  Yes, by dint of poking about in the sand I uncovered a few pieces of plaster and the tracing of what might have been a bit of foundation ... yes, but an archaeologist would not have dated it as different from the old pieces of the Thermistoclean wall one sees down towards Phaleron.  Gone!  The windows, the doors, the cupboards, the beds ... all vanished.  Even the house had vanished.  What do you make of that?  I wondered if there weren't gaps like that in the middle of our memory, vanished people and events.  I felt so awful that I had to lean against a wall.  I was very nearly sick when I thought of you and Felix moving from room to room there.  I suddenly thought of you as if you were dead.  So long ago, all of it."  She repeated the phrase in Greek in her low musical voice, and then added under her breath, "And death behaves in such an arbitrary fashion, striking when you are not looking, not expecting."

       "I refuse to be sad" said Caradoc.  "May my dying breath be a giddy oath, that's all I can say."  Benedicta patted his hand reassuringly as if to comfort him.

       Ariadne turned to me and in a lower register said: "I saw a good deal of Julian, of all people; he was in Switzerland when I was.  To my surprise he decided to manifest and was most attentive in his strange way.  You are building him some sort of echo of her - Iolanthe - aren't you?  He told me and I felt suddenly alarmed.  Not from the fact but from his way of speaking about it.  What has come over Julian?  He seems to have lost his devil, to have become somehow subdued.  For example he said in a sweet and resigned sort of way: 'Obviously Felix will betray me when he can' and I wondered whether he was serious or not.  As for what you are building, any Greek would warn you against hubris - tempting the wrath of the Gods...."

       "The Gods are all dead, or gone on holiday" I said gloomily.  "They've left their looms and spindles behind for us to use as we see fit.  Has Julian really changed so much?"

       "Yes.  A sort of resignation.  'The firm has given and the firm has taken away; blessed be the name of the firm.'"  She intoned softly but mockingly with her arms crossed on her breast.  "No Felix.  Some new element has entered the picture.  Julian has become so human!"  I don't know why, but the remark seemed to me to be one of the most sinister I had ever heard.  It was ridiculous, of course, but a sort of shiver ran down my neck.  I looked over at Benedicta and saw, or thought I saw, that she herself had turned quite white; but it may only have been her hair, the candlelight.  "Human" I said, turning the word over like a playing-card and gazing at its face, so to speak.  Spades or hearts, which?  There was a silence broken only by Caradoc's champing of celery.  He was not paying the least attention to what was said.

       Ariadne went on.  "He told me a great deal of his last long wait by her bed all that night when she was dying - the last night.  How he felt so crazy with grief and surprise, so unhinged that he found himself doing strange things like making up his lips in the mirror with her lipstick.  It terrified him but he felt compelled to do it.  And then the lines of Heine kept going through his mind, his lips moved, he kept repeating them to himself in a whisper, over and over again, quite involuntarily.  Do you know them, remember them?  The Faustus ones?

                                      "Du hast mich beshworen aus dem Grab

                                      Durch deinen Zauberwillen

                                      Belebtest mich mit Wollustglut -

                                      Jetzt kannst du die Glut nicht stillen.

                                      Press deinen Mund an meinen Mund;

                                      Der Menschen Odem ist göttlich!

                                      Ich trinke deine Seele aus,

                                      Die Totem sind unersättlich.

                                      You conjured me from my grave

                                      By your bewitching will,

                                      Revived me for this passionate love,

                                      A passion that you'll never still.

                                      Press your cold mouth on my cold mouth;

                                      Man's breath's by the Gods created.

                                      I drink you essence, I drink up your soul,

                                      For the dead can never be sated."

       A silence fell once more, in which the tenebrous and perverted verses of the returned Helen talking to her Faust echoed on impressively in the mind, vibrated on the heart; lighting up with their fitful shadow play the figure of Julian crouched there batlike in a clinic chair, watching a fly moving upon a dead eyeball.  A picture to inspire both pity and despair.  Ariadne went on in a low voice: "It was clear that only some sort of vampire would do for him - nothing less."

       Benedicta pressed her hands to her cheeks and said: "I know, Ariadne.  I know only too well.  But he has had reason enough to become what he is; I tell myself always that it should still be possible to love him despite it all.  But I don't know whether I can myself any more.  I don't know whether I can.  And who else will?  It's all so unlucky, so meaningless."

       A draught blew in from a window and the candles wagged and danced on the long refectory table; we were quite startled, as if in some intangible way it was the breath of Julian which had entered the room, attracted perhaps by the verses or by the mention of his name.  "An unquiet ghost" she said in Greek, and shivering drew her shawl about her shoulders.  The impression of some such silent visitation was slightly heightened when, in a little while, the telephone began to peal in the depths of the house, insistent as a child calling.  Ariadne went out into the hall to answer it while we took our cigars and coffee back to the warm firelight in the outer room.  We sat down, each absorbed in the thoughts set in motion by the verses of Heine and the mood they evoked.  Presently Hippolyta came back and said: "The firm is calling you from London; they've traced you here.  Shall I say you are out or in bed?"

       "Why?" said I, "I'll see what they want."

       I went out into the hall where the little phone booth stood; it had been converted from a satin-lined sedan chair.  Inevitably the line was poor and the voices were criss-crossed with whirrs and clicks - it was like talking across the reverberations of some giant sea-shell.  But yes, it was Nathan, waiting patiently for me.  "It's Mr. Marchant, sir.  He has been asking for you rather urgently.  Hold on while I put you through to him."

       Marchant sounded testy, as if he had been called out of bed in the middle of the night; and yet relieved.  "I wouldn't have bothered you," he said "only Julian told me I should try and make contact and tell you that we've had rather a nasty accident on our hands here."

       "Iolanthe!" I cried, my heart beating faster from sheer anxiety.  "What has happened to her?"

       "No.  No" said Marchant.  "It's the man, Adam.  He's a total wreck, a write-off I fear; but he's gone and killed poor old Rackstraw, of all people.  Completely unexpected."

       It could not well have sounded more astonishing, more improbable.  "But how?  Where?"

       Marchant sighed with exasperation and said: "You know we had orders to let old Rackstraw into the lab to acclimatise himself to Iolanthe, and to test any reactions he might have.  It was Julian's idea; I wasn't keen on it but he said he'd discussed it with you and that you had seen no reason why not.  Well, anyway, he drew a blank from the point of view of reactions.  The old boy simply stared at our girl-friend for ages without moving a muscle; I think he would have gone on for ever had he not been led away by Henniker.  Incidentally the effect on her was terrific; I have never seen anyone cry so hard and so long and so passionately.  She kept saying 'My God, she's so real' over and over again and going into paroxysms, leaning against the wall.  She is hardly calm as yet and they've been visiting us in the lab every day for a few hours.  The old boy just hissed and croaked and wagged his eyebrows; but really they'd drawn a blank with him.  He kept asking about the whereabouts of a chap called Johnson, that was all.  Then yesterday we got so used to him standing there motionless that when I went to lunch Said forgot to lock up; or rather he just went out of the lab for a second overlooking the fact that Rackstraw was still there.  There next thing is he heard a crash and smelt a roasting smell.  He rushed back to find Rackstraw rolling all over the floor like a centipede with this Adam creature wrapped round his neck; it was what you'd call a muscular reflex with a vengeance.  I don't know what he could have been trying to do but he was badly burnt and concussed and covered with Ejax into the bargain.  Well, Said gave the alarm, and of course we had some difficulty over the current, the dummy had become live.  But anyway they finally turned everything off and disentangled Rackstraw who was led away to hospital.  The next thing we heard in the middle of the night was that he had died of heart-failure.  It's been hushed up, the whole episode, and presented as a normal death - heaven knows it was about time; he'd long overstayed his welcome, the old man.  But Julian said that you ought to be told.  There is a bit of electrical damage to the big feeder but that can be repaired.  Otherwise we are moving along; you will have to make a much stronger temperature control stat. or else she will overheat, and then she's likely to write free verse: I suppose as any normal person might do in a delirium.  It all happened yesterday.  She lost optimum temperature control and committed a poem.  Felix, are you still there?"

       "Yes.  I was thinking of Rackstraw.  Poor old thing.  Is the dummy completely smashed, irrecoverable?"  Marchant thought for a moment.  "Yes" he said, but doubtfully.  "But the funny thing is that Julian has told us to stop work on it and get on with Io.  I had a funny sort of feeling that in a way he was almost jealous of the mate.  He said 'We don't really need a male dummy do we?'  He said it in a funny sort of voice, too, kind of complacent and rather pleased - unless of course I am romancing, which I don't think.  Indeed when I spoke of trying to recover the outline drawings of Adam with a view to rebuilding he looked extremely peeved and told me sharply to lay off and consign the plans to the wastepaper basket.  So there.  The funeral was yesterday afternoon.  I don't believe anybody went except Julian.  I didn't, though I am sorry for the old sod.  Anyway, I have told you all and done my duty.  There is nothing else to report unless you would like to hear the fever-verses that Iolanthe produced yesterday.  First verses from beyond the grave, my boy, and not half bad.  I thought of sending them to a paper."

       "Have you got them on you?"

       "Just a sec.  Yes, I have."

       "Read them, then."

       It was a strange feeling to hear these dissociated ramblings which had been produced by a simple temperature rise; was it an illusion or did they make a strange kind of sense, perhaps "poetic" sense - since poetry isn't a stock report on experience, or written for a seed catalogue.  (So I have been told.)

                                      Just supposing because

                                      death is never too fervent

                                      though water suffer little damage

                                      and women have a descriptive function

                                      simple conjectures about loving

                                      in adolescence sweet and turbid

                                      brief caption on the love-box merely,

                                      will announce her engagement to spring

                                      or winter or one of its forms, yes,

                                      its memory kicks back and throbs

                                      if bivouacked on Windermere

                                      made one with the ferny forms.

                                      All and none of these functions

                                      would be valid, a cause for surprise

                                      when reality is so taut and gnomic,

                                      digestible and without unction,

                                      all and none, I say, all and none.

                                      just supposing because, now

                                      surely every allowance should be made for such things?

       "Bravo" I said, but in a confused puzzled sort of way.  The line went dead.  The roaring in the sea-shell stopped.

       Somewhat to my surprise they had all taken themselves off to bed save Ariadne who was waiting up for me; she sat, lost in thought, and gazing into the fire.  I poured myself another drink and joined her - extremely depressed by the story of poor Rackstraw.  I had got quite fond of him, of using him as a sort of touchstone for my own sanity in the Paulhaus where, at a certain time, I even placed Benedicta among the disorderly figments of my own waking dreams.  Fancy to find when I woke that she was really there, in my arms!  Not just a daymare.  "Thinking?" I said and she: "Yes. A lot of muddled and inconsequent thoughts - what a jumble.  Thinking about you all with an affectionate concern - it's allowable in a friend, no?"

       "Concern, Ariadne?"

       "Yes.  For example this new Benedicta - she's suddenly normal, sensible, in full possession of herself; won't you find her diminished, less interesting than the other?"

       I groaned.  "My God, you aren't wishing me another long spell of misery with her are you?"

       "But the whole mystery must have gone."

       "Thank God it has, if its only manifestation is in hysteria.  Besides, she's exactly how I wanted her, always imagined her.  I almost invented her.  It was written on the package so to speak; if the contents were different there was many a good reason.  We now know the reason.  But when I fell for her I saw the possible person embedded in the witch.  I fell for the blueprint of what she might be.  It was a terrific gamble, but I've won, don't you see?  Ariadne, you've always thought of me as one of nature's mother-fixated cuckolds who revelled in his suffering; but it doesn't go very deep, my masochism.  You must have misjudged the issue."

       She looked at me with smiling relief tinged with doubt.  "And you don't hate Julian any more?"

       "How can I now I can see him close-up?  His life has been such a calamity, and the type of genius he was given was a catastrophic gift for someone condemned to impotence."

       She put her hand on my cheek and I kissed it.  "You are an ass" I said.  "I'm sorry" she replied, and then went on.  "Strange how we ascribe fixed qualities to ourselves - and really we are only what others think of us: a collection of others' impressions merely."

       We sat a long time in silence now, smoking and pondering.  Vague thoughts passed through my mind like shoals of fish.  I thought of the effect that her love for Graphos had had on her life.  Then of a sudden a fragment of my intuition stirred and an original thought made its appearance which was disturbing and upsetting.  It was: "Ariadne has outlived the death of Graphos now, it has melted, with all the luxurious pain and emptiness it conferred.  She is now in mortal danger of relinquishing her hold on life, of dying from pure ennui."  I took her hand as if to hold her back, as if to prevent her slipping downstream.  And as if to confirm and echo this dispiriting thought she said: "We can't believe it, can we?  That we are all condemned, that it's only a matter of time?  Death is something we accept as part and parcel of others.  Why do we never get used to it in regard to ourselves?  O the boredom of waiting!  One has the impulse to race towards it, get it over."  There!  I had no consolations to offer; neither love nor opium ever really meet the case.  For a pure scientist and an impure man - how to steer a safe course between the inconsequent and the outrageous?

       We said goodnight; Ariadne spent all her mornings in bed reading, and would not be awake when the cars came for us at nine.  She opened a window to purge the room of its cigarette smoke.  The smell of lemons came in out of the darkness like a friendly animal.  We did not know when we would meet again - if ever.

       We had been put in the room with the ikons and the heavy old-fashioned beds; the sheets were of course island linen.  Prison-bars on the windows.  By the light of a single guttering candle Benedicta slept, her pale blonde head on her arm; so utterly motionless was she that she might have been dead.  I climbed in beside her.  She was naked and deliciously warm.  She turned in her drowsing and asked me about the telephone call, and I told her of the death of Rackstraw and the destruction of the model.  This awakened her.  She stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and then at me.  Then she said: "There!  You see?" as if the mishap proved something, as if she had foreseen it.  "But I wish to God it had been the dummy of Iolanthe.  That would have solved something."

       I was outraged.  "Darling," I said "take pity on me.  You aren't developing a jealousy of my poor dummy, are you?"

       "In a perverse way, yes.  I expect you will want to sleep with it out of curiosity one day - to see how real it is, to compare it with me perhaps."  My breath was taken away by this scandalous statement.  "With Iolanthe?" I said in tones of mortal injury.  "And why not?" she went on, talking to herself almost.  "It must stir up all the most perverse instincts.  Wait, vampirism.  I know exactly what Nash would say."

       Ah! so did I.  And not merely the matter but the manner as well - oblique regard of the cuttlefish, fussy voice and so on.  And the ideas all neatly laundered and folded by courtesy of Freud.  (Now him I love for his modesty, his hesitancy, his lack of a dogmatic theology; it is what poor Nash has done to him that I condemn, avaunt, conspue.)  Anyway I had a long dream colloquy with him in which I manfully defended my dear dolly against the  penetrating criticism of this marvellous but as yet incomplete science.  Ah, the infantile theory with its congeries of undigested impulses jumping about in the mud like fish leaping from the subconscious water.  Why was I, poor Felix, to deny the double fantasy - both of birth and of coprophilia: the faecal matter which the infant will one day knead into cakes, and then from cakes, into sugar dollies and statues of bronze and stone?  Yes, but dead dollies these.  Ah, there we were - poor Iolanthe for ever dead, for ever part of the merde, that cosmic element which makes up the Weltanschauung of the groping analyst; element in which the poor fellow struggles waist high, holding his nose, and yet convinced on the basis of the evidence that what he is slithering about in is really gold.  GOLD, remark you - the cement of a basic material value which binds together the shabby cultural brickwork of the times.  The citizen's toy and talisman, the giver's gift and the receiver's wafer.... Gold, bread, excitement and increment pouring from the limited company of the dreaming big intestine.  And then, via the same nexus of associated ideas direct from the chamber-pot to Aphrodite, the austere and terrible and mindless, her sex tolling like a bell.  What a vision of judgement for a simpleton like Felix ... I heard Marchant singing at his work!

                                               O, O, O,

                                               You great big beautiful doll.

       Benedicta stirred in her sleep, dreaming no doubt of the scarlet Turkish slippers she had promised herself, of the slices of holy muslin out of which she would make a ballgown.  Softly breathing as she circumnavigated those vast and shadowy fields of sleep - the other reality which is a mirror image of our own.  A living corpse like myself suffering only from the beta decay of the world within us.  (The wish to die together is the image of the wish to lie together.)

       And then all the shaggier motives which wake and howl like ravening mastiffs after dark.  Through them I could align my faecal image of the ideal Aphrodite with everything that woke and stirred in the bestiaries of necrophilia, in the huge syllabaries of vampirism.  Sliding, sliding the good ship Venus through the conundrum of the anus mundi, plop into the ocean where time has run wild: to circle the huge constipated Sargasso of the reason and melt at last into the symbolon tes gennesiois, the symbol off rebirth which Plato knew was the sea, cloaca of the archetypal heart.  ("The grave so longed for is really the mother's bed."  "All right, Nash, I take your point.")

       And then of course a natural and completely ineradicable sadism is always inflamed but he thought of communion with a dead body - partly because of the helplessness of the latter: it cannot defend itself: "lie down, dead dolly, and come across": and also partly, but much more important is the idea (so firmly implanted) that the dead mistress cannot be wearied by excessive caresses.  In death there is no satiety.  Yet beyond the foetal pose and the faecal death the mystery of decomposition offers the promise of renewal, of a new life for dolly.  Grave Aphrodite, formed from the manure out of which we are all constructed, has coaxed the gift of fertility - for manure also nourishes; death is defied by a change of code, of form.  The smoking midden is also of this world, of this culture, of our time - indeed of all time.  The compost generates another life, another echo, to defy with its heat the fateful laws of decomposition, of dissolution.

       "You groaned, my darling, in your sleep."

       "A nightmare; I dreamed we were at the World's Fair and I bought you a pretty sugar doll.  And you ate it, crunch, and the paint ran all over your tongue, turning it scarlet.  And when we kissed my lips grew bloody too."

       Somewhere a dog barked, and the wind lightly shuffled the sleeping trees; listening hard I thought I could perhaps discern the sound of the sea.  I rose mechanically and lit a candle under one of the little ikons in the niche; other eyes in other corners woke and winked.  Then I got back into bed and took her in my arms.  The pretty seizures of the love act brought us once more to comfort, to wholeness and at last to sleep - a sleep so innocent that it seemed we had invented it for ourselves, as the only fitting form of self-expression.  Tomorrow would be Turkey.  Tomorrow would be Turkey.

*    *    *    *    *

So we embarked on the next long leg of our journey, skimming over the taut and toothy ranges of the northern chain of mountains - much higher now, and a good deal snowier; although we in our heated cabin were blissfully warm and were made welcome by innocent morning clouds, soft cirrus.  No boundaries to this airy world save the very last peaks stretching out their necks like upward flying geese.  Then at long last, clearing them, we moved down once more to a lower octave over an evening sea which played quietly, half asleep.  Water and sky here divided the lavender dusk, parted and shared its clouds, and presaged a spring nightfall.

       Here somewhereabouts scouts came out of the sky to salute us - grim visages staring out of the fighter-planes like Mongolian dummies; faces like medieval armoured knights' of the Japanese Middle Ages.  Yes, but they were all smiling and beckoning, and they wished us softly down until we landed in a dense whacking of waves and great spools of white foam, almost under the heroic bridge itself.  Through this thick water we taxied like mad, hunting for a windless lea which might let us moor safely.

       We had taken it all in, however: there had been time and light enough: the huge thickets of spars moving in soft unison, the beetle-grooves carved by the tankers and small brigantines upon the blue skin of the gulf.  It was sunset, too, and blowing fresh and keen from Marmara.  And my goodness, how sinister it all felt to me as I sat smoking and gazing down upon the long walls once more - the long irregular buckler of hide or mud-daubed osier such as savages might run up about a stockade.  From a great height they looked absurdly flimsy but as we scaled down out of the sky the whole mass began to take up a denser stance, obdurate and threatening: and softly the tulips rose like the horns of shy snails, to take the colours of the sinking sun upon their pale skins.  Benedicta, leaning at my side, stared down with me; her nostrils dilated a little, and with an expression of mingled horror and anticipation, of nostalgia and regret, upon her pale face.  We were swimming together once more into the great tapestry of Polis - and at a certain moment, quite precisely, everything spun round as if on a jeweller's turntable, to present its profile: fused into the single dimension of an old shadow-play manipulated by the fingers of some great invisible shadow-master.

       The journey had been tiring; everyone had been grumpy, out of sorts, in some way or another.  Vibart buried himself in his papers, was angry with himself for confessing as much as he had to me on the day before - I know not why.  Caradoc too was in a scolding mood, and only the promise of a glass of authentic raki or makstika seemed to give him hope.  I think in a way all our thoughts had begun to turn one way, to quest out towards that long bare headland where, among the jumble of forts and kiosks and shattered palaces - the fabled Avalon of old Merlin's dream - somewhere out there Jocas, the brother, was waiting for us.  I suppose that Benedicta must have read my thoughts for she said softly, echoing in a strange way the recent thoughts of Ariadne: "We tend to forget it, but people do have this awful tendency to die."

       "Come.  Come" said Caradoc peevishly.  "You will never console me in this way.  Cut out all this nonsense."

       It was natural that in this developing gloom, this heavy preoccupation with what waited for us, I should take refuge in Baum: for he had business of his own, he was not heading for Avalon as the rest of us were.  The town itself was his objective.  Yet even he was depressed in a smaller way, though of course his behaviour was exemplary.  I was soon to learn the reason.  It was our good friend Banubula who was causing him anguish.  "You see," he said "I am disquieted because the Count has begun to hunger for the power to initiate.  So long as he was quietly working for the firm his role was a fulfilling and useful one.  But now ... you see Mr. Marchant has played this dirty trick on him and he has taken it seriously.  And the awful thing is that it has become serious.  The thing is launched.  You must never joke in the hearing of the firm, Mr. Felix, because the firm takes everything deadly seriously."

       "What dirty joke, Baum?"

       "Fresh sperm" said Baum moodily, poking his ear with a long spatulate fingernail, as if to clear it.  "Fresh sperm!"

       "What is that all about?" I asked, perplexed.

       "Mr. Marchant was very drunk and he said that the latest findings of the chemical section showed quite clearly that the only really nourishing skin-tonic for women was fresh male sperm.  This is all very well, Mr. Felix, but he went on to add that there was really nothing to stop the firm marketing the stuff if only it could be collected on a large enough scale; and of course if one paid for it well enough one would be able to get as much as one wanted from private producers - just like any other commodity in our modern civilisation.  From doner to factory, at controlled temperatures, presented (according to Mr. Marchant) hardly more complicated a problem than picking lavender and taking it to the perfumery.  This was very wicked of him; he should have known how gullible the Count is.  But he should also have known that the firm takes everything very seriously indeed.  Just what Mr. Marchant envisaged I have no idea - I suspect he had none himself when he made the joke; it was simply to tease his friend.  On the face of it the idea is mad - thousands upon thousands of people making this sort of contribution to a factory which fills up phials with it and markets the product.  On the other hand, as Marchant said, conserved sperm was already used in artificial insemination, why not in skin-food?  I was of course horrified when Count Banubula told me this; but what is worse the whole thing was set out as a memorandum and discussed by the chemistry board, and passed.  I could hardly believe my ears when I heard.  Not only that, a subsidiary called Lovecraft Products had been set up, and a subscription list for willing doners had been opened.  Moreover it shows every sign of sweeping the continent.  Can you imagine it, hundreds of thousands of males all over the world selling their ... product?  And yet the chemical group say that they can sort and grade it, keep it in a temperate emulsion form, and distribute it to all who seek beauty through skin-tonics.  I must admit I was sharp with the Count when I saw what had happened.  But he produced a number of disingenuous arguments in which is immediately recognised the drunken hand of Mr. Marchant.  Why, he said, was it any worse than the sale of Chinese or Malayan hair by the women of underprivileged nations?  Why should the overprivileged nations be denied the right to part with their surplus - assuming it was a surplus?  At any rate, whatever my own reservations, the scheme has gone ahead so fast that I fear it will get out of hand; so many doners have joined that new factories have been opened and the whole project has had to be twice re-financed by the Germans and Americans.  Meanwhile, too, all the letterpress and the advertising devised by the Count and Lord Lambitus I find distasteful to a degree.  Look."

       He whipped out his briefcase and groped about in it, to extract at last a thick batch of letterpress which bore the unmistakable imprint of Banubula's innocent genius.  I was surprised that Marchant was the author of the jest which the firm had so swiftly turned to profit.  It was the sort of thing Caradoc might have done, but not Marchant.  Yet here it was.

       Nor was it hard to see and to sympathise with poor Baum's misgivings, for he was in the advertising and promotion department, charged to dish out all these pamphlets and advertisements to a weary world.  They were designed both to attract new donors ("Why not give your all for Lovecraft and be in the swim?  You can make a fortune if you work at it.  Study our bonus scheme.  Moreover it's work you can do at home in your own time.  Why not have fun with the firm?  Take life in hand and double your income" etc. etc.); and also to appeal to a gullible beautician's market ("The safest natural skin-food, so kind to the thirsty pores") ... but why go on?  I could see that Banubula's literary side had been quite carried away by the whole scheme.

       Baum had been scanning my face as I read in order to gloat sympathetically on my expressions of horror.  "You see?" he said, as I handed back all the gaudy letterpress.  I did.  "Moreover" he went on "I have been sent out here to try to sound out the Turks, to get them interested in the scheme as possible donors.  Of course everything has its market value, Mr. Felix - I would be the first to admit that.  But there are dangers here, we might make a mistake.  The Turks are Moslems and deeply religious - suppose we started a holy war without meaning to, eh?  I prefer simpler, more material ideas; I like to know where I stand.  Now when Lord Lambitus proposed marketing whips in gold lamé I saw the possibilities instantly.  But this could prove to be ... well, grotesque!  I am supposed to meet the religious leaders tomorrow to outline the scheme.  I am much afraid of what might happen.  How, for example, will all this stuff translate into Turkish, eh?  One doesn't know.  I don't want to die with a spear through me just for encouraging Turks to ... well, market their product through Merlin's.  Yet on the other hand it's my duty to obey orders."  He sighed heavily.  I wondered whether he was wearing a bullet-proof waistcoat.

       There was no time, however, for long-drawn-out commiserations for by now the officials had come aboard, clucking like hens, and stamped our passports.  Long strings of coloured lights had demarcated the outlines of the bay; the nether sky was still molten but cooling fast, like the steel lid of a furnace.  Out of the nearby darkness a large white pinnace whiffled once, and then, at a signal from a man in uniform, began to sidle towards us sideways - like a smart cat.

       Our belongings sorted out and our various destinations decided upon, we crawled aboard her - Benedicta, Caradoc and I.  The others had other duties and would spend the damp Turkish night in the magnolia-scented gloom of the Pera.   But Vibart?  "I thought you were coming with us?"  But he had made one of those inexplicable volte-face.  "So did I" he said.  "And now suddenly I'm not.  I'm not even sure I shall come and see Jocas - I don't seem to need to any more.  It came over me just as we hit the water."  He looked suddenly elated, his smile had grown younger, more self-confident.  "I shall walk about Polis tonight and think myself over" he said, and with a brief nod joined the others in the pilot's launch.  I was curious enough to want to question him further, but Benedicta pulled softly at my sleeve and I desisted.

       The wind was fresh as we came out of the sea, but the sturdy little pinnace rode sharp at fifteen knots.  In the comfortable little cabin with its smart leather-upholstered seats we found a small insect-like man dressed in white who turned out to be the doctor who was looking after Jocas.  He spoke only French, and he smoked very slowly and thoughtfully as he spoke.  He held the white bone cigarette holder in a tiny clawlike hand which suggested that of a mantis.  But what he had to say to us disabused us immediately of any notions we might have had about astrology and destiny and suchlike.  Unless of course the progress chart could accurately trace the course of a long-drawn out metastasis.  It was our old friend, the contemporary scourge.  On the other hand he said: "He is weak, but in very good courage, in spite of knowing the truth.  But the place is in an awful mess and needs clearing out.  He has got rid of many of the servants and has more or less moved in with his birds.  C'est gênant from the medical point of view - washing him and so on."  We were silent now for the rest of the journey.  B. looked at her fingers.  Caradoc contented himself with a heavy sigh from time to time.  The little doctor sat watching us and smoking and reflecting.  The journey seemed to last an age.  But finally our nose sank into still water, we throttled down and softly ebbed along a dark landing stage where a figure from the past - the old eunuch of my first visit - stood holding a lantern high above his head and giving the Islamic greeting to the darkness.  Mouth, forehead and shoulder, mouth, forehead and shoulder.  But even when we stepped ashore he gave no intimate signs of recognition - perhaps because Benedicta had her head done up in a scarf.  He did not at any rate recognise me.  We huddled ashore in the humid darkness to the slapping and slobbering of water along the wooden piers.  A sense of desolation invaded me, I do not know exactly why.  One felt that everything here had run down, gone to seed - but how one could feel such a thing when one was surrounded by darkness I really cannot imagine.  Perhaps the little doctor's few brief words had prepared us for such a thing.  At any rate, leaving our baggage we followed the major domo with his hissing white light, the doctor leading us.  The paths had been marked out with little kerosene lamps which faltered here and there in the wind; but they gave hardly any light, and were simply markers upon which to orient ourselves.  Uprooted trees and creepers and bushes lay about beside the path, and once a couple of starved-looking mongrels emerged from the dark to sniff at us and retire.  I thought of the fine pack of hunting dogs with their lustrous fur which had been Jocas' pride in the old days; they would have simply wolfed mongrels like these, or driven them into the sea.

       The air of desuetude must have been largely imagined, then, for we could take in few details until we reached the cypress glades with their kiosks.  The eunuch was talking now to the doctor, with a sort of high clucking voice; it appeared that a once elaborate lighting scheme which illuminated everything, had recently foundered owing to a faulty generator, and that nobody had bothered to have it repaired.  He wagged his huge bald head in resigned disapproval.  "You will see" said the doctor.

       There was more light in the two villas with their cracked windows and starred mirrors - but the smell of kerosene was everywhere.  The flagged floors were full of chicken bones and unswept feathers.  We were asked if we would eat first - indeed in the old salon a table had been clumsily laid with a dirty tablecloth (of the finest Irish linen), several branches of dribbling candles and a solitary bunch of dusty artificial grapes in a cracked plate of alabaster.  Here the stink of the birds warred with the kerosene.  The walls showed cracks.  The door jambs heaved and creaked - the sea salt had been at them.  There was a swallow's nest in one corner of the room.

       But it was to Jocas that we were going, and he had apparently moved out lock, stock and barrel into the old shot tower - on the eastern ramparts of what had once been a fort with a high keep overlooking the gulf.  Here in the old days he had spent his time delecting in a huge marine telescope pitched on a low tripod.  Sitting in a deck chair, pausing only to eat an olive from time to time, Jocas could follow the whole movement of the shipping in the gulf below.  But to gain access to this martello one had to walk along a crazy broken parapet built along the sea-face of the headland; a ruined staircase which Benedicta as a girl had come to know as "The Battlements of Elsinore".

       On this stone ramp we embarked in single file.  I could hear the squinch of my rubber soles on the stone.  Hereabouts too an occasional lemon-yellow lizard darted for cover - they are always first to emerge with the spring sunlight.  But the climb was steep.  Smell of thyme.  So at last we crossed a walled courtyard, skirting an uncoped wall disguised by tall thistles, and then climbed on to a balcony and opened a huge door.

       It couldn't have been much smaller than a good-sized parish church, the room in which Jocas had taken up residence; but the height of it was such that the upper shadows pressed upon the lighted areas like a whole sky of darkness.  One expected to see stars upon that black damascened darkness.  For the rest it was a robbers' cave from some old fairy tale.  A huge fire of thorns blazed in one corner.  Branches of candles and small oil lamps picked out and punctuated the foreground where the figures of men and boys worked and moved.  Wait.  We stood upon the threshold and gazed into this cave with its dark flapping shadows, expectantly, hesitantly.  We had come at an inconvenient moment.  An enormous Victorian hip bath was being filled with steaming water by a small boy while two other shapes were carrying a shrunken form from the bed towards it - the figure you'd say of a large white frog, legs spread apart.  The bed itself was enormous and hung about with a dark red velvet baldaquin whose ropes bore the unmistakable signs, even in that erratic light, of greasy hands.  The curtains were drawn back.  Jocas therefore advanced towards us, carried by four arms, helpless as a child, but cheerfully smiling; the smiling languor of the small infant longing for the surcease of hot water.  It had a powerful resonance this sudden glimpse - like some sombre oil painting of the Spanish school.  Moreover there was enough light here on the ground to take in the dirty deal tables, the flagged floor covered in droppings of bats and birds, the smashed windows.

       Our natural instinct at this unwitting intrusion was to draw back in some confusion, but the white figure waved at us with cheerful languor and cried: "At last you come.  Very good."  His tone, his mien, transformed the tableau suddenly into something different, say a friendly rag in a boys' dormitory, something which might end in a pillow fight.  But he was shrunken and much withered, had lost the sturdiness of his buttocks and thighs.  Yet his face was still agleam with intelligence and the little gold caps on his canines glittered as he smiled upon us.  "Don't go" he said.  "I will soon be washed."  The two expressionless figures carrying this pale frog deposed their burden with slow carefulness in the tub.  Jocas sighed to feel the water rise up round his waist.  He leaned his head back against the high rim of the bath and then extended a pale hand for us to touch.  There was a kind of lucid and rather moving simplicity about the gesture; his helplessness was as disarming as his smile.

       His magnificent head of hair, now plentifully touched with white, was combed loosely back; it fell in a straight shock almost to his shoulders.  Benedicta knelt down to kiss his cheek and then turned aside to order the rumpled bed while Caradoc and I stood looking down at him.  His servants sponged him softly and rhythmically.  "Well this is a fine business" said Caradoc harshly, disguising his affection and concern in a habitual gruffness.  The doctor made some professional movements among the bottles and pans which were laid out on one of the long white tables in the corner.  What a jumble of spoons and forks, of half-eaten dishes, and broken fragments of meat for the birds.  The birds!  They would account for that heavy rotting fragrance in the vaulted air of the room.  The were ranged like trophies along the end wall, the darkest corner of the room, all but invisible, but one could hear the tinkle of their bells as they stirred and sighed.  His belongings stood about in isolation, as if they had lost context.  It was a trifle surrealist, the old horn gramophone with its records (Jocas loved military marches and had quite a collection).  There was a tall cupboard whose doors hung open.  A few articles of attire were hanging up in it; but for the most part his belongings occupied the other wall, and were hung on nails.  A fez, a deerstalker, binoculars.  An old-fashioned typewriter lay on the floor beside a flowered chamber-pot.  Thigh boots.  Two gaunt armchairs, of the style called Voltaire, stood beside the bed with a strip of tattered carpeting between them.  Everything looked quite haphazard, the result of a series of hasty afterthoughts.

       But now they were finished with him and carefully lifted him from the bath.  He let them with the same air of weary innocence, smiling, but delightfully unashamed of his nakedness.  They laid him out upon one of the white deal tables to dry him - and I was reminded at once of the white "cooling-tables" of the embalmers.  His hissed in with pleasure at the harsh touch of the towels and in a whisper urged the men to curry him harder and yet harder, like a horse; until at last his pale flesh took on the faintest warmth of tone.  Then they produced an old-fashioned night-shirt and slipped it over his head.  Now it was the doctor's turn; first an enema and then various injections.  The little man whistled softly, abstractedly as he worked on his patient.  Jocas had a whole lot of new and very beautiful expressions on his face - a whole new repertoire it seemed born of the illness, no doubt, and all the consideration which it raised.  Had he thought very much about death, I wondered?

       But once in bed lying back like an emperor under a Byzantine covering, pressed into puffed pillows, he became suddenly completely himself.  I mean one would not have thought him ill at all.  He held Benedicta's hand in his own confiding childlike grip and spoke in a new calm voice, smiling.  "I wanted just to take leave" he said, and I realised that he was planning to die in the time-honoured, traditional eastern fashion.  Here death itself had a ceremonial value and form; in the East there always seemed to be time to gather all one's relations together and take a formal leave of them.  To distribute alms tot he poor and order the family estate.  We used to die like that once in England, a hundred or so years ago.  Now somehow people are rushed into the ground unceremoniously, like criminals thrown into quicklime.  Jocas was doing it in the old style.  I caught sight of his scarlet slippers (les babouches); there was an ink-spot on one.  Under the bed, as if hastily thrust aside there was a bit of railway line and a model train lying on its side.  In the far corner under the window stood a huge and beautifully coloured box-kite with a long tail.  Of course!  One could lie in bed and fly a kite through the window.

       He said suddenly: "But they must be hungry.  They must eat."

       It took some time to penetrate the heavy Turkish skulls of the servants, but at last the message got through and several heavy silvery trays made their appearance with two huge loaves of village bread, some olives, tinned meat, and a rank black wine.  Caradoc carved all this into the semblance of helpings and we fell to, suddenly ravenous.

       The fire was built up with wood-shavings until it bellowed and bristled, throwing our shadows about the room.  The small dark eyes of Jocas watched us with a benign affection - the expression on the face of a mother watching her children eat.  I took my doorstep-sandwich and sat on the edge of the bed to share a friendly smile with him; he sighed with deep satisfaction as he watched us dispose ourselves around his bed.  Like a child arranging his toys upon the counterpane.  And I saw also that this whole visit of ours was part of a design, a deeply considered design.  His architect was there to consult about a funery monument; the embalming team were already on the spot.  Jocas was good at mind reading, and followed my thoughts clearly, like somebody reading print.  "Yes" he said.  "It is like that.  I had at first difficulty in my ideas because Julian could not understand; but now he's united with me.  He has agreed with me.  The need to have all our unhappy family - Merlins - under one roof, in one ground."  He spread his hands in the direction of Caradoc who was munching.  Then from under his pillow he produced a piece of parchment and handed it to me.  It was in Greek.  "Permission of the Orthodox Church to remove the body of the old man; Koepgen will bring it.  He is still alive there in Spinalonga working, happy.  I saw him last week."  He chuckled softly.  "Then what else?  Yes, I wish myself to be golded, or do you say gilded?  All gold.  I have a firman for the whole headland, Caradoc."  But this sort of talk made Caradoc extremely uneasy and shy; it seemed to him rather ill-mannered to talk so openly about death.  "It's bad form" he said severely and munched his bread.  Moreover he was very superstitious, had no intention of dying himself, and didn't want to hear about such matters.  I watched the new vivid imperial face of Jocas and racked my brains to think of the prototype; at last click, up came the Ravenna mosaics, together with a whole lot of half-forgotten debris about Justinian and Theodora, that brave soul.  I felt the long heavy night of the Turkish soul exemplified in its old half-dead capital - the Venice of the East.  "And Julian will give me a service in St. Paul's."  It is impossible to describe the smiling childish joy with which he uttered the words.  His eyes sparkled with cupidity.  "St. Paul's!"  He crooned the words almost.  He had begun to make everything sound extremely attractive - death should be like that.  It was the ancient Greeks who couldn't take the idea.

       He took a long drink from a glass at his bedside and subsided again into sighing happiness.  "Though I have never seen it," he said "Julian once had a photograph faked to appear as if I was there at a memorial service.  It was politically necessary, Amin Pasha.  Here everyone thought I was in London specially for him; but it was a fake, I was here.  Julian did it.  Ah Julian!  Only now I have come to understand him a little bit.  He will never love me, but now he doesn't care.  And he fears death very much.  O yes."

       The little doctor coughed.  It was time for him to take his leave.  He shook us each by the hand and said goodnight, placing a hand briefly upon Jocas' forehead and nodding, as if to say that he was satisfied with his patient.  The bald old eunuch recovered his lamp from the outer darkness and led him slowly away.  They had put some knobs of frankincense on the fire and the air had become rich and fragrant.  The servants had retired, though one remained on call.  He sat on an uncomfortable-looking kitchen chair in the shadows by the birds; appeared to sleep, head on breast.  But Jocas was not done with us; he still radiated energy, and it reminded me of the Jocas I had first encountered, the tough and tireless countryman, hunter, swimmer.  We sat around him on the bed - the stiff brocaded counterpane of some Byzance weave, the candles, the frail oil-lamps ... all that.  And the past sat heavily on us, too.

       "Felix," he said, still holding the white hand of Benedicta in his "I followed with so much interest all your attempts to destroy us, to sabotage the firm, to escape from us.  It was all in my heart, and it was so very interesting, so very passionately interesting to me.  You see, I could understand you, but Julian not really.  For Julian the firm perfectly expresses something, perhaps his impotence?  Eh?  I am not clever like him, and because I am not clever I was always in danger from him.  O but I love him so."  An air of rapturous infantility took possession of him.  He licked his red lips and went on slowly, picking and choosing his words from his limited knowledge of English as one might pick flowers at random in a field.  But he could express himself well, and here and there tumbled upon a mistake which itself was a felicity.  "But you I sympathised," he said "and for why?  Because I myself had the greatest search for the freeing of my soul, Felix.  I too made a great calculation.  But I had no courage to do it because I was afraid of Julian.  He was so clever, he could simply kill me."  He thrust out a hand to arrest my interpretation of the remark.  "I was not afraid of the death.  But I did not wish to join everything else in Julian's conscience; you see he pretends he has none.  You must not have with the firm.  But he has.  Julian has seen much weeping."  He swallowed and looked sad for a moment.  One saw that he really did love this enigmatic figure, it was not simply oriental exuberance.  One detected too the kind of pity that the simple, uncomplicated and healthy man can have for the cripple.  Julian had never shot, flown a bird or a kite; yes, but he had made love I suppose.  I caught a glimpse of Benedicta's white serene face.  She sat to me in profile, still holding Jocas' hand and gazing at him with an air of admiring confidence.  He had sunk back among the pillows and closed his eyes - not out of weariness but in order to recover the thread of his argument.

       "In the old days," he said "at the very beginning when the firm was a small thing, a [he inserted the Greek word for a newly born infant] ... in those days every one of our transactions had to be done on trust, on an exchange of salt mostly.  Arabia and so on.  People could not write, Felix.  All was human memory.  Even quite late our whole accounting was with the old-fashioned abacus which you still see in Greek grocery shops today.  The only factor that made for our security was mutual trust.  When I thought about freedom and remembered the old days I thought very heavily - elephant-heavily - around the quite small but precise condition.  All our money was deployed around the sea of the east, and while here and there was some little scraps of paper signed with thumbs, the most was in risk of trust.  We had to believe in such a thing as an exchange of salt with a sheik.  It was the only strong thing, the only plank.  Now then all this paper came, all this contract business came.  The whole firm became so big, so complicated.  The salt had lost its savour, doesn't it say somewhere in the Bible?  I thought.  I thought.  When Julian told me that the whole of the contracts of the firm had been photographed on film and that one little house held them all I had an extraordinary idea ... I thought one night very late, while I was talking to myself.  I thought: suppose we destroyed all contracts - the whole of the written thing.  What would happen?"

       He looked terribly excited, swallowed twice heavily, and then joined his hands on his breast.  I suddenly felt myself face to face with one of those tremendously simple, but at the same time critical, veins of thought which belonged to what Marchant and I (in the case of Iolanthe) had labelled the contingency vector; it was the "supposing scale" and I suppose it represented in rough mechanical terms that sector of the human consciousness where the full horror of the idea of freewill comes to be understood or felt.  It is this terrifying idea which causes people to throw themselves off cliffs (just to see what will happen): or to play Russian roulette with a pistol they just happened to find on a shelf.... If is the key of If.  And then I thought of the little library which housed the total contractual commitments of the firm on microfilm.  There had been a good deal of newspaper ballyhoo when Merlin's went on to microfilm; its contract department had by then grown to the size of the Bodleian.  Now all the paper had gone.  A special little funerary monument - not by Caradoc this time - had been erected to house the film in a London suburb.  An ungainly little building, something between a Roman villa and the old Euston station.  I recalled Caradoc's fury at this awkward neo-Egyptian monster of a creation with its four stout elephant columns.  Above it was a small flat where the egregious Shadbolt lived (the same old chap who had drawn up Benedicta's marriage contract with me).  He was now Registrar of Contracts.  Well, it was not unlike a small and hideous crematorium.  But I interrupted this train of thought to concentrate rather more deeply on what Jocas was trying to tell me.  "What would happen?" he repeated again, dramatically, but in a lower register.  "Either the whole thing, the whole construction would dissolve."  He threw his eyes back into his skull, showing the whites, which is the Turkish way of illustrating total catastrophe.  "Or else ... nothing at all.  Without the bonds of the paper and the signatures trust might come back, the idea of obligation to one's word, one's spoken bond, one's salt."  I realised that I was in the presence of a great, but completely insane idealist.  Trust indeed!  But he went on headlong.

       "Now I am so happy to know that you will try this freedom yourself - you will do this thing when once you are the head of the firm.  Zeno has seen it all very clearly.  He sees you give a last supper with twelve people in the big house.  That same night you will completely burn every contract and announce it to the world.  Very exciting.  It will be a big fire.  One old man will be burnt in it.  But it will be the crown of your career.  Only what happens after, if the firm continues or if it dissolves, Zeno cannot see clearly and he is too honest to pretend all this."

       He gave a little chuckle and added, "Of course Julian doesn't believe in these nonsenses, perhaps you don't either.  But she does, Benedicta does.  She has lived long enough in Turkey to know how sometimes strange things are real."

       "Who is Zeno?" I asked purely to avoid taking up a definitive position vis-à-vis all  these shadowy postulates.  It seemed that he was an old Greek clerk who worked in the counting house in the city; subject to visions.  Genus epileptoid, I had no doubt.  It was as if the great aborted dream of Byzance lived on in the weaker psychic specimens of Polis, troubling their sleep with its tenebrous floating visions of a future which chance had aborted.  I suddenly seemed to hear the disagreeable yelping of the barking dervishes ringing in my ears; how they flopped about the floor of the mosque yelping and foaming just like the schizos in the Paulhaus.  Or else fell about like toads, beating up the dust and screaming.  It was all part and parcel of the same type of phenomenon I have no doubt.

       Beside the bed lay a stout old-fashioned family Bible encrusted with coloured wax from the candles.  From between its leaves Jocas produced a small piece of paper written over in a very fine Greek hand; there was a drawing of a table-plan.  From the red thumbprint (the attested signature with date) I recognised it as a witnessed prophecy - the sort of thing that idiots and hysterical soothsayers produce on saints' days.  But the writing was crafty and very beautiful, the hand of an educated man.  I took it and put it away to study at leisure - cursing the infernal rustiness of my Greek.  "He does not know the people," said Jocas "but he described them and I put the name in with a pencil.  You shall see.  Anyway."  He made a vague gesture and sank back, dropping a little from fatigue at last.  I wondered whether we should leave him.

       Benedicta seemed disposed to stay awhile as yet, and he for his part seemed to derive comfort from the touch of her hand on his.   But Caradoc provided a slight diversion by picking up a lantern and saying that he must attend to the calls of nature; and I took the chance of joining him to get a breath of air.  We climbed out upon the unwalled shelf, the balcony above the sea, and made our slow way along the paths which led to the headland of which Jocas had spoken.  A cloudy sky obscured the nascent moonlight; far below us the ocean gulped.  Somewhere in the obscurity below us ships moved, their lights glimmering frail as fireflies.  But clouds were rolling in slowly towards the shore and a heavy dew had fallen.  At last we came out upon the site of this proposed building - perhaps it was an old threshing-floor, built up belvedere-like over the sea.  Despite the general darkness one could feel the dominance of the position, could divine the splendour of the surrounding views in fine weather.  But Caradoc was morose; he set down the lantern to attend to his business, and then came and sat beside me on a boulder, shaking his head and growling a bit.  "What is it?" I said.  "Don't you think you can do it?"  I said this to annoy him, and the remark was quite successful.  "Do it?" he snarled.  "Of course I can do it.  That's not what's worrying me.  The problem is Jocas.  He has got ancient Greece on the brain, and has been pining for the bloody Parthenon for half a lifetime now - he will never pass my drawings; not of the sort of thing I have in mind.  Not in a month of Sundays.  He does not realise the first thing about building; his idea would be something between a cassata ice cream and a Georgian rotunda.  He doesn't realise that a real piece of building must be responsive to the emanations of the ground upon which it stands.  To a certain extent the available materials create limitations and point out clues.  In the Celebes, for example, bamboo, fern, leaves, lianas, they all dictate the weight and form of the construction - but they also echo the soul-form of the man who inhabits them.  For those islanders the notion of life and death are dream-like, unsubstantial, poetical; their culture is born in a butterfly's soul.  Just as Tokyo is all mouse-culture, a mouse-capital.  We must build with this sense of congruence to place.  The Parthenon would be a joke propped up here on this Turkish headland.  Why?  Because the soul-form of the Greeks was different, their metaphysical attitude to things was sensual, relatively indifferent to death and time.  And their sense of plastic was really related to plane surfaces decorated on the flat, not to volume.  All their stuff is radiantly human because the scale is small, nothing larger than life size.  Their sunny philosophy domesticated not only life, but also death, one has the feeling that even the huge Gods were home-made, perhaps formed by the hands of children in a cookery class.  No morality either to shock and frighten.  Innocence, a gem-like trance.  All the ominous or minatory elements in their history were imported from death-saturated lands like Egypt, like this here bloody Turkey?"  He flashed me a glance of righteous indignation from under his shaggy prophetic brows.  "Just sit here and listen to Turkey, listen to what it says" he went on.  "It's a heavy death-propelled wavelength, the daze of some old alligator slumbering in the mud.  It has all the solemnity of the heavy somnolence of Egypt, the one country above all which specialised in death; if Turkey ever showed flower in a cultural way it will echo Egypt, not Greece.  That is why all this embalming business of Goytz is a stroke of genius.  Some cultures are so death-weighted that they store up their dead, they are ancestor-obsessed like the Chinese.  That is the call-sign of this gloomy old land.  Consequently if one tunes in and tries to set it to an architecture one is almost driven to echo the grave ponderous style of an Egypt; the bright blue and white of Greece would never work.  But how to tell Jocas that?"

       I changed the conversation abruptly.  "That well over there" I said gravely.  (I was surprised to find myself a trifle drunk.)  "That well already houses the genius of your mausoleum.  Jocus has imported a snow white python from the island of Crete; and he has planted an almond tree for it to climb.  Prophecies will spring from this tomb, Caradoc."  I invented all this of course in order to scare him.  I knew he was particularly frightened of snakes.  It had the desired effect.  He secured his lantern and said irritably, "Why didn't you say so before?   We might have sat on the damn thing."

       When we got back to the house it was to find most of the lights turned low and Jocas asleep with a smile on his face; Benedicta had disappeared.  The attendant drowsed on his upright chair.  We made our uneven way back to the villa where we had been allocated rooms.  Caradoc holding his lantern high examined the cracked plaster cherubs, the broken marble fireplaces, the litter on the dirty flags, with a sustained curiosity.  I found a candlestick and lit it.  Benedicta had been given a room to herself on the balcony side of the house.  I had been allocated a sort of uncomfortable box-room.  Though I was weary I found it difficult to sleep, I suppose because of the atrocious but heady black wine we had been sluicing.  So I wrote a little letter to Benedicta - something to read when she woke up alone in bed.  "Dear Benedicta, the whole point - why will you never grasp it?  The whole point is that time gives birth to space, but space gives death to time.  (The ancient liver mantic was an attempt to read forward into time - and it might have worked for them.)  That is the only reason for my loving you - because you simply cannot grasp the meaning of causality in the new terms.  I would add an equation or two but I am rather drunk and the light is bad.  So I will content myself by warning you gravely about the perils of such homely ignorance.  It saps the will and rots the cortex.  Squinch.  Felix."  I suppose it lacked warmth; and it certainly wasn't what I intended to say when I took out my pencil.  I pondered, and at last traced the missing component.  My postscript read: "I would be quite willing to dismantle and abolish Iolanthe if you asked me to do so."

       An uneasy night of shallow dreams, bird noises, howling of dogs; but then I dozed off and slept quite a way into the morning.  It was a dark and gloomy day with huge shaggy clouds hanging motionless over everything; the gulf was the colour of gunmetal.  Beside my bed I found the response to my letter of the night before.  "It's my job now to see that you do what you feel you must.  Anything else would be fatal to both of us.  I must say you are an awful fool, which is consoling in a hopeless sort of way.  Meet me at Eyub at four."

       I was startled to find that it was already ten o'clock; she had taken the launch into Polis, in order to spend the day wandering about its streets and mosques.  Meanwhile the returning boat brought the little doctor with it.  Jocas was wide awake and alert in his birdlike way.  "She wants you to meet her in Polis" he said.  I said I knew.  From the only bathroom came the sound of prodigious swishing - as if a herd of elephants were housing each other down.  "It is Caradoc taking a bath" said Jocas solemnly, and then added (for all the world as if he had mind-read the whole of our conversation of last night): "I have told him that I do not wish to see any plans.  He is free to design what he pleases.  He has the money and the site.  I will trust him to make a most characteristic thing for the family."  I whistled with surprise and pleasure.  Presently Caradoc, hale and ruddy after his ablutions, emerged from the depths.  He was looking happy for a change, indeed radiant.  "Did you hear?" he boomed.  "Jocas is going to trust me all the way."  This seemed to call for a celebration and despite the earliness of the hour and the slight trace of hangover I coyly accepted a glass of fiery raki.

       I left the company gathered about the huge bed and (grateful for an old umbrella I had brought) found my way down through the gardens to where the white launch lay at the landing stage, waiting with steam up to take me into town.  The sea was black and calm, luminous and bituminous all at once; we rustled across it at full speed.  I studied with interest (perhaps amusement, so foolish am I) the prophecy of Zeno and the elaborate table-plan he had drawn for this classical last supper of mine.  What the devil was it all about?  It reminded me a little of the Banubula Tunc talisman - twelve places of which three were empty.  But the pencilled names were those of my friends - Vibart, Pulley, Marchant, Banubula, Nash, etc. etc.  There were empty places, too, at this table and I wondered a little about them.  It seemed that neither Julian nor Jocas was to be of the party; and perhaps one of the missing places might belong to Iolanthe?  I don't know.  It was all pretty vague as these things so often are; and of course there was no precise date for the thing - there never is!  However I felt charitably disposed towards occultism on Tuesdays, and I pocketed it with a sigh, and turned to regale myself with the black water and the livid marks we were making in it.  And the sombre city came up like a long succession of "states": I am groping for the image of an etching evolving through a number of different stages, slowly as the elaborations of detail are multiplied.  I wondered what Benedicta might be doing; I closed my eyes and tired to imagine where she was - perhaps sitting on a block of masonry by her mother's grave in Eyub or else (more likely) sitting in the little garden by the mosque where Sacrapant fell, drinking a benedictine and smoking a gold-tipped cigarette.  There was time to kill.  In this gloomy sodden-looking weather I found my way across the arcades of the grand bazaar to the little restaurant where once (how many centuries ago?) I had dined with Vibart and his wife, and listened to his histrionic dissertations on good books and bad.  Pia, I had almost forgotten how she looked; I had a recollection of brilliant eyes, watchful, amused.  For the life of me I could not associate her with Jocas - but there it was.  And following out this train of thought I bumped into Vibart himself just as he was about to seat himself at a table.  "Join me" he said, and all of a sudden it was a new version of my old friend which presented itself to my vision; no more was he morose and cast down.  He radiated rather a recovered composure, a temperamental calm.  He saw me looking at him and smiled.  "It's come out, the equation" he said at last, turning his handsome smiling head sideways to examine himself in the mirror.  "I spent all last night walking about until I found the missing collar-stud.  I've solved it, man.  It's the smallest thing imaginable but it has been teasing my reason for so long now that it was a great relief to catch it by the tail.  I was right to do it for myself and not ask poor Jocas foolish questions.  It has to do with the quality of my loving, the subtle thing that didn't click between Pia and me.  It came from the fact that I loved her not as a man loves a woman, but as a woman loves a man.  In a subtle sort of way my attitude qualified my masculinity in the exchange.  I wonder if you see?  It is so clear to me.  I'd turned the flow of affect or whatever upside down; and she was too much a woman to love except as a woman.  It's such a relief, I feel like singing."

       "I can see Nash," I said "bicycling like mad towards you and muttering things about the 'homosexual component'."

       "Yes, it would seem from my diagnosis that I am a common or garden bugger at heart.  What do you know?"

       He burst out laughing.  Thunder crackled and a brief skirl of rain fell.  "Just like last time we were here, isn't it."

       "What a weird light; the whole damn city so subaqueous and sfumato.  How is Jocas?"

       I gave him an account of the patient to which he listened thoughtfully, patiently, nodding from time to time as if what I had to say confirmed his inner convictions.  (The strictest style in classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white.  Why?  This singular fact has never been satisfactorily explained.  Must ask Caradoc what he thinks about it.)

       "I bet you" he said, falling to work with knife and fork "that Benedicta hasn't gone up to Eyub with all this uncertain weather; bet you she's hiding in Gatti's eating ice cream or something.  Anyway it's on the way so we shall see.  And by the way there's a telegram for you from Marchant which they gave me down in town.  Take."

       It was a simple and brief message to tell me that our model was "critical" - a word we used to denote the final stages before she woke up.  That meant in about a fortnight's time.  I felt my pulse quicken at the thought that we were so near launching day.  Perhaps mingled with the feeling was a small touch of misgiving; this parody of a much loved person, how would it stand the test of scrutiny by those who had known her?

       There was time before my rendezvous with Benedicta, and we elected to dawdle away an hour or so in the Grand Bazaar where I surrendered completely to the long stride of Vibart and the longer memory he had for everything in it.  It was delightful to hear him talk now, with nostalgia and affection for the past - no longer hatred and shock.  As for the Bazaar - despite its size he knew every flagstone, every stall; and despite gaps and changes brought by the times there was enough for him even to evoke what was absent as we rambled about it.  The circumference of the place cannot be less than a mile, while about five covered arcades radiate from its hub, the so-called Bezistan.  It is really a walled and gated city within the city, and it claims to contain 7,777 shops.  Mystic numbers?  Vibart walked about it all with a sense of ownership, like a man showing one round his private picture gallery.  He had, I think, come to realise how intensely happy those long years in Turkey had been for him, and indeed how formative; yet he had spent the whole time grumbling about books he could not write.  The little square Bezistan, so clearly Byzantine in feel, is less than fifty yards long; square and squat, it spiders this stone cobweb.  The one-headed Byzantine eagle over the Bookseller Gate places the building as tenth century, after which time the eagle became two-headed.  The gates are called after the quarters which they serve, each characterised by a product - Goldsmiths, Embroidered Belt Makers, Shoemakers, Metal Chasers....

       I could see now that Vibart was living in the romantic schoolboy glow of the mysterious East.  These empty rainy stalls once held demascened armour, silver-hilted pistols, inlaid rifles, musical instruments, gems of every water, seals and terra-cottas and coins.  Even what wasn't there he was able to describe with complete fidelity in this new youthful voice.  I think too that in a way he was talking to Pia in his mind, remembering for her, to so speak.  I fell silent and let him go on, as one lets a hound off the lead.

       "And to think" he said "that in a few days we'll be back in bonny Blighty facing up once more to all the contingencies which face the creative man - buggery, gin, and menopause Catholicism.  Well, I shall take it all calmly from now on.  To each his well-deserved slice of sincere dog.  To each his cinema picture - the best way of trivialising reality."

       But despite the characteristic grumbling tone and matter of his discourse one felt his calm elation.  Now was he wrong about Benedicta for she was indeed at Gatti's, sitting at the end of the terrace in a brown study with a cassata before her.  In her absentmindedness - or was it due to old memories, old hauntings? - she had adopted a style of sitting with one gloved hand in her lap.  One glove off always - that seemed once so characteristic of her; the glove hid a ring Julian had given her, a ring which came from the tomb of a dead Pharaoh.  But with the new dispensation she had thrown it away thus symbolically marking the new freedom which she claimed to have won.

       Catching a glimpse of her sitting this way, her blonde head turned away to scan the nebulous city with its turrets and minarets, I suddenly thought of what Vibart had been saying about  Pia and realised not only how much I loved her but also why; and by the same token why she must love me, why she would never break free again.  It was one of those cursed paradoxes of love which hit one like an iron bar.  I sat down with a bump in the chair next to her and said to myself: "Of course, we are most united in the death of Mark, our son.  The child we unwittingly murdered.  At bottom what brings this hallowed sadness to our loving is a sort of criminal complicity in an evil deed."  I longed at that moment to embrace her, to comfort her, to protect her.  But this train of thought would not do.  Instead we listened to Vibart in full exposition while she let me hold her ungloved hand in mine.  (Bookstores near the mosque of Bayezid in the old Chartopratis or paper-market; here in an old Byzantine portico resided a turbaned and gowned old gentleman who sat at a table with reed pen and colour box, with gold leaf and burnisher, filling page after page of parchment with exquisite illuminated script.  Left over from a forgotten age in which his art was as necessary as it was graceful.  Now all he got in the way of commissions were a few petitions from government clerks or illiterate farmers.  For the jewellery and the silks you must try Mamoud Pasha Kapou....)

       "Astonishing how much you've remembered and how much I've forgotten" said Benedicta; to which Vibart replied with a certain smugness, "Isn't it, though?"

       Clouds furled back to admit a streak of sunlight; we were joined by a relaxed and almost gay Baum. "So they didn't put esssence of powdered rat in your soup?"  He shook his relieved head and sighed.  "To my intense astonishment I found them most receptive to this new idea; the religious leaders heard my exposition in complete silence.  Am I to assume that there are passages in the Koran which sanction solitary practices - unless I misunderstood the interpreter I think that is the case?  What impressed them was the insistence on the modern world with its change of viewpoint.  After all Turkey abolished the fez out of a desire to make itself a modern state, and then the Latin alphabet replacing the Arabic ... I rubbed it all in.  And when I had finished they practically gave me a standing ovation, if I may use the phrase without indelicacy, and rushed to fill in membership forms at once.  Moreover from every minaret and pulpit in the city the news will go out and true believers will flock to the standard.  I am so relieved."  He smiled all over his face.

       Our rendezvous with the pinnace was for dusk, so we idled away the afternoon in the shelter of Gatti's awnings while Baum and Vibart completed several small purchases in the immediate environs.  Once again we were favoured by a calm sea.  It was dusk by the time we landed once more at the jetty and straggled our way up to the house, to the bed, the lamps and candlesticks; to Jocas who was completing his toilet, but in a very good mood.  "Everything has gone well" he said.  "All our plans agree.  Even Caradoc is happy and when has he ever been happy?"

       Caradoc was enthroned in a Voltaire and was playing with coloured bricks, absorbed as a child; it was indeed a child's toy - this architectural kit.  And I could see that having sat for an hour or two on the site by daylight had fired his fancy and given him the itch to begin his task.  The evening passed very pleasantly indeed; we almost forgot the plight of Jocas he was in such a good humour, and so lively.  But at last when dinner was brought in he said: "So you will go tomorrow will you?  Yes, I think it is best.  Now that I have seen you all I am quite content to say goodbye."

       It was the end of an epoch I suppose, but it did not feel very momentous so natural were the talk and banter in the firelight.

       It is retrospectively that one marks up and weighs the value of experiences.  Looking back - as a matter of fact looking down - over Polis as the huge lumbering aeroplane swam in widening gyres, gaining height over the capital, I was touched by a nostalgia which I had not felt on terra firma.  Benedicta too I suppose felt it, and perhaps more sharply than I.  Yet she said nothing.  Dawn was breaking over the forest of tilting masts and spires, the long walls turned briefly poppy-coloured before the lengthening rays of sunlight made them revert to bronze, then to umber.  I had a feeling that I should not come back for a very long time, if ever; and I was also glad in a perverse sort of way that the pilot had decided to overfly Greece on the return flight.  The melancholy and solitude of Ariadne had saddened me; it was so absolute that one could think of no consolations worth the offering - you cannot console anyone against reality.

       "Thinking?"

       "Yes.  Thinking and cross-thinking; all the map references are criss-crossed.  I was thinking of Jocas, of you as a child, of Ariadne in Athens.  And I was thinking of that absurd prophecy of Zeno."  I took it out of my pocket to study once more.  The idea of destroying the firm's entire contract system had begun to tease the edges of my mind; of course it was preposterous, but then everything was.  What was more preposterous than returning to England to set Pygmalion's image walking?

       "I saw Sipple" said Vibart.  "He's blind now and pale and ghostly as a mouse.  He is head of the embalming section which Goytz has started up.  He does everything by touch, like a mouse nibbling at cheese.  He was at work on a small corpse, a boy, silently, happily.  It terrified me.  I buzzed off hastily."

       He looked round carefully to see that Goytz was sleeping tranquilly, and had not heard the remark.  Goytz was so easily offended when his craft was mentioned in flippant tones.  "He's become like one of those pink transparent eyeless lizards which live in caves in total darkness.  Opaque, completely opaque.  You can see the sunlight shining right through him, Sipple."

       I had forgotten until now that the clown was still with us, in the land of the living, the land of the dying.  A steward brought drinks.  Benedicta had fallen into a doze now with her head on my shoulder.  Soon we would be booming across the high spurs of Albania, bound for England, home and Iolanthe.