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Anthony Burgess

Earthly Powers

First published in 1980

TO LIANA

ONE

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

"Very good, Ali," I quavered in Spanish through the closed door of the master bedroom. "Take him into the bar. Give him a drink."

"_Hay dos. Su capellán también._"

"Very good, Ali. Give his chaplain a drink also."

I retired twelve years ago from the profession of novelist. Nevertheless you will be constrained to consider, if you know my work at all and take the trouble now to reread that first sentence, that I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening. But there is really nothing of contrivance about it. Actuality sometimes plays into the hands of art. That I was eighty-one I could hardly doubt: congratulatory cables had been rubbing it in all through the forenoon. Geoffrey, who was already pulling on his overtight summer slacks, was, I supposed, my Ganymede or male lover as well as my secretary. The Spanish word _arzobispo_ certainly means archbishop. The time was something after four o'clock on a Maltese June day--the twenty-third, to be exact--and to spare the truly interested the trouble of consulting Who's Who.

Geoffrey sweated too much and was running to fat (why does one say running? Geoffrey never ran). The living, I supposed, was too easy for a boy of thirty-five. Well, the time for our separation could not, in the nature of things, be much longer delayed. Geoffrey would not be pleased when he attended the reading of my will. "The old bitch, my dear, and all I did for him." I would do for him too, though posthumously, posthumously.

I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not. Geoffrey put on his sandals puffing, creasing his stomach into three bunches of fat, and then his flowery coatshirt. Finally he hid himself behind his sunglasses, which were of the insolent kind whose convexities flash metallic mirrors at the world. I observed my eighty-one-year-old face and neck quite clearly in them: the famous ancient grimness of one who had experienced life very keenly, the unfleshed tendons like cables, the anatomy of the jaws, the Fribourg and Treyer cigarette in its Dunhill holder relating me to an era when smoking had been an act to be performed with elegance. I looked without rancour on the double image while Geoffrey said: "I wonder what his archbishship is after. Perhaps he's delivering a bull of excommunication. In a gaudy gift wrapper, of course."

"Sixty years too late," I said. I handed Geoffrey the half-smoked cigarette to stub out in one of the onyx ashtrays, and I noticed how he begrudged even that small service. I got out of bed, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated. My summer slacks were, following nominal propriety, far from tight. The shirt of begonias and orchids was ridiculous on a man of my age, but I had long drawn the fang of Geoffrey's sneers by saying: "Dear boy, I must habituate myself to the prospect of reverential infloration." That phrase dated back to 1915. I had heard it in Lamb House, Rye, but it was less echt Henry James than Henry James mocking echt Meredith. He was remembering 1909 and some lady's sending Meredith too many flowers. "Reverential infloration, ho ho ho," James had mocked, rolling in mock mirth.

"The felicitations of the faithful, then."

I did not care at all for the aspirated stress Geoffrey laid on the word. It connoted sex and his own shameless infidelities; it was a word I had once used to him weeping; it carried for me a traditional moral seriousness that was no more than a camp joke to Geoffrey's generation.

"The faithful," I aspirated back, "are not supposed to read my books. Not here, on Saint Paul's holy island. Here I am immoral and anarchic and agnostic and rational. I think I can guess what the archbishop wants. And he wants it precisely because I am all of those things."

"Clever old devil, aren't you?" His mirrors caught golden stone from the Triq al-Kbira, meaning Street the Big or Main Street, outside the open casement.

I said, "There is much neglected correspondence down below in what you call your office. Sickened by your sloth, I took it upon myself to open a letter or two, hot from the hands of the mailman. One of them bore a Vatican stamp."

"Ah, fuck you," Geoffrey smiled, or seemed to: I could not of course see his eyes. Then he mocked my slight lisp: "Thickened by your thloth." Then he said "Fuck you" again, this time sulkily.

"I think," I said, hearing the senile dry wavering and hating it, "I'd better sleep alone in future. It would be seemly at my age."

"Facing facts at last, dear?"

"Why"--I trembled at the big blue wall mirror, brushing back my scant strands--"do you make things sound mean and dirty? Warmth. Comfort. Love. Are those dirty words? Love, love. Is that dirty?"

"Matters of the heart," Geoffrey said, seeming to smile again. "We must watch that rather mature pump, must we not? Very well. Each of us sleeps in his sundered bed. And if you cry out in the night, who will hear you?"

Wer, wenn ich schrie... Who had said or written that? Of course, poor great dead Rilke. He had cried in my presence in a low beershop in Trieste, not far from the Aquarium. The tears had flowed mostly from his nose, and he had wiped his nose on his sleeve. "You have always managed to sleep soundly enough at my labouring side," I said. "Soundly enough not to be sensible even of the sharp prodding of my finger." And then, quavering shamefully: "Faithful, faithful." I was ready to weep again, the word was so loaded. I remembered poor Winston Churchill, who, at about my present age, would weep at words like greatness. It was called emotional lability, a disease of the senile.

Geoffrey did not mouth a smile now, nor set his jaw in weak truculence. The lower part of his face showed a sort of compassion, the upper the twin and broken me. Poor old bugger, he would be saying to himself and, later perhaps, to some friend or toady in the bar of the Corinthia Palace Hotel, poor senile decrepit lonely old impotent sod. To me, with kind briskness: "Come, dear. Your fly is properly fastened? Good."

"It would not show. Not inflorated as I am."

"Splendid. Let us then put on the mask of distinguished immoral author. His archbishship awaits." And he opened the heavy door which led straight into the airy upper salon. At my age I could, can, take any fierce amount of light and heat, and both these properties of the South roared in, like a Rossini finale in stereophony, from the open and unshuttered casements. To the right were the housetops and gaudy washing of Lija, a passing bus, quarrelling children; to the left, beyond crystal and statuary and the upper terrace, the hiss and pump hum came up of the irrigation of my orange and lemon trees. In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort. We trod cool marble, heavy white bear fur, marble, fur, marble. Over there was the William Foster harpsichord, which I had bought for my former friend and secretary, Ralph, faithless, some of its middle strings broken one night in a drunken tantrum by Geoffrey. On the walls were paintings by my great contemporaries: now fabulously valuable but all acquired cheap when, though still young, I had emerged from struggle. There were cases showing off jade, ivory, glass, metal bibelots or objets d'art. How the French terms, admitting their triviality, somehow cleansed them of it. The tangible fruits of success. The real fight, the struggle with form and expression, unwon.

Oh, my God--the real fight? I was thinking like an author, not like a human, though senile, being. As though conquering language mattered. As if, at the end of it all, there were anything more important than clichés. Faithful. You have failed to be faithful. You have lapsed, or fallen, into infidelity. I believe that a man should be faithful to his beliefs. O come all ye faithful. That could still evoke tearful nostalgia at Christmas. The reproduction in my father's surgery of that anecdotal horror--no, who was I to say it was a horror?: the wide-eyed soldier at his post while Pompeii fell. Faithful unto death. The felicitations of the faithful, then. The world of the homosexual has a complex language, brittle yet sometimes excruciatingly precise, fashioned out of the clichés of the other world. So, cher maitre, these are the tangible fruits of your success.

Geoffrey shuffled into step with me, mockingly, as if to emphasise his, my dear, role of aide de camp. Side by side, tread by tread, in comic neatness, we descended the first marble flight. We arrived at a spacious landing with a Jacobean cupboard in which exquisite glassware hid--for use, dear, for actually imbibing out of--and an eighteenth-century chess table permanently set with men of Mexican obsidian (for show only, dear--his playing days are done), then turned right to engage the final marbled cataract. I looked at the gilt Maltese clock on the wall of the stairwell. It said nearly three.

"Nobody's come to repair it," I said, hearing my petulance. "It's been three days now. Not, of course, that it really matters."

We were three steps from the bottom. Geoffrey tapped the clock as if it were a barometer, then viciously mimed a punch at it.

"Bloody place," he said. "I loathe and detest the bloody place."

"Give it time, Geoffrey."

"We could have gone somewhere else. There are other islands if it's islands you bloody want."

"Later," I said. "We have visitors."

"We could bloody well have stayed in Tangier. We could have got the better of the bastards."

"We? It was you, Geoffrey, who were in trouble, not I."

"You could have damned well done something. Faithful. Don't use that bloody word faithful to me."

"I did do something. I took you away from Tangier."

"Why to this bloody place? Bloody priests and police working hand in bloody hand."

"There are two bloody priests waiting to see us. Moderate your tone."

"If you want to die here I bloody well don't."

"A man has to die somewhere, Geoffrey. Malta seems to me a reasonable kind of compromise."

"Why can't you die in bloody London?"

"Taxes, Geoffrey. Estate duty. Climate."

"God blast and bloody well damn this bloody stinking place."

I minced the three treads down to the hall, and he followed, damning and bloodying now merely under his breath. Three steps away, on a silver salver, blessed by a Chinese bowl full of flowers of the season, lay a fresh batch of felicitations brought by Cable and Wireless motorcyclists. The bar was across the hall, to the right, between the wreck of an office where Geoffrey neglected his secretarial work and my own fussily neat study. On the wall between the bar and the study was the Georges Rouault--a scrawled ugly ballerina, impatient thick black strokes and bitter washes. In Paris that time Maynard Keynes had hotly recommended that I buy it. He had known all about markets.

CHAPTER 2

His Grace was quite at his ease in the bar. I had expected to find him sitting fidgeting at one of the tables with an untouched orange squash before him, but here he was perched at the counter on a fawn leather stool, neat little foot on the rail, neat little fat hand holding what looked like a neat scotch. He was talking loudly and affably with Ali--who, white-coated, stood behind as bartender--in, to my astonishment, Ali's own language. Was this a gift of the Pentecostal Paraclete? Then I remembered that Maltese and Moghrabi Arabic were sister dialects. His Grace began to climb down from his stool when he saw me, smiling and greeting in English: "To meet you at last, Mr Toomey. A privilege and a pleasure. I know I speak for the whole community when I wish you, as I do now, very many happy returns."

A swarthy young man in a plainer clerical habit than his superior's shouted from the far corner: "Happy birthday, sir, yes. It is an honour to wish it to you in person." The bar was small and there was no need to shout, but some of the Maltese use an abnormally high voice level even when whispering. He had been looking at my framed photographs on the walls, all of me with various of the great--Chaplin in Los Angeles, Thomas Mann in Princeton, Gertrude Lawrence at the close of one of my long London runs, H. G. Wells (with, of course, Odette Keun) at Lou Pidou, Ernest Hemingway on the Pilar off Key West. There were also framed posters of in stage successes--He Paid His Way, The Gods in the Garden, Oedipus Higgins, Break Break Break, others. Both clerics cheerfully raised their glasses at me. Then His Grace put his glass on the counter and ambled toward me somewhat slyly, his right hand raised horizontally at ring-kissing level. I shook it.

"My chaplain, Father Azzopardi."

"My secretary, Geoffrey Enright."

The archbishop was a few years younger than myself, evidently vigorous though very plump; being plump, not much lined or wrinkled. We eyed each other with friendly wariness, opposed in trade but united in our generation. I noted, in my frivolous way, that we all made up a reasonable poker hand--two pairs, Ali discarded. I said to Ali in Spanish: "Gin and tonic. Then you can go."

His Grace sat now at one of the three tables, draining his glass first then rocking it humorously in his hand. He was very much at home. This was, after all, his archdiocese.

I said, "It's perhaps, after all, too early for drinks. Would you like tea?"

"Oh yes," the chaplain cried, turning with eagerness from myself and Mae West outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, "tea would be very nice."

"Drinks," pronounced the archbishop. And he told Ali, in Maltese-Moghrabi, to give him the same again. Then, he seemed to say, Ali could go. "This lovely house," he said. "These lovely gardens and orchard. I have visited here often. In the time of Sir Edward Hubert Canning. In the time of the late Mrs Tagliaferro. Father Azzopardi, I know, would be very delighted to be shown all around or about it, everything, by Mr... by your young friend here with the mirrors on his eyes. The young, is it not, Mr Toomey? These young people. The house was, this you may not know or perhaps may know, it was built in 1798 when Buonaparte invaded. He sent the Knights away. He tried to restrict or constrict the powers of the clergy." His Grace chuckled grimly. "He did not succeed. The Maltese people would not have it. There were incidents. There were deaths."

I took my gin and tonic from Ali and brought it to the table. I sat down opposite the archbishop, who had already been served with a large neat Claymore. "Well," I said to Geoffrey, "you have your instructions. Show his ah reverence around the house and gardens. Give him tea."

Father Azzopardi drained his glass of whatever it was with nervous haste and began to cough. Geoffrey banged him on the back with excessive energy, saying at each stroke of his fist, "Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault."

"Geoffrey," I said sharply, "that is not funny."

Geoffrey put out his tongue and led coughing Father Azzopardi off. His Grace made one final Semitic joke at Ali, who too, laughing, went off. "A good boy," His Grace said, "one can see that. These young people," he added, nodding toward Geoffrey's voice that could be heard, full of aspirated stresses, moving toward green and sunlight. And then: "You play bridge here, I should think. A room pleasantly appointed for the playing of bridge," his eyes on the shelves full of bottles. "A harmless and civilised pastime." He raised his fat hand in what seemed to be both a blessing on the game and a gesture of regret that he could not accept, ever, an invitation to come and play. "I played. I play no longer. I have far too much work. His late Holiness too played. And then he too had far too much work. This you will know." His modest smile was meant, I assumed, to diminish the comparison.

So, as I had been foretold in that Vatican letter, the visit was to be about His late Holiness. I said, "When Carlo was raised so high, his bridge-playing days were already over. Far too much work, as you say, as he said. But he had been a superb player--very clever and fierce. Like Mrs Battle, you know."

His Grace had not heard of the lady. "Ah yes, I can believe that. Clever and fierce. But also human, or is it humane? Perhaps both. But also a saint." He looked at me with small unwilling awe. Carlo, I had said.

I was ready to joke about there being no bridge saints, but that would have been cheap and unworthy. Instead, I said, "I know of the proposal, naturally. I gather there is still much to be done."

His Grace waved the hand that was not holding his drink. "I speak, of course, of course--"

"Proleptically?"

"You are a master of the language, Mr Toomey. It will, I fear, be always a foreign language to me. The language of the Protestant, if you will forgive me. That you are a master is well known. I have little time, of course, for reading. I have been often told that you are a master of the English language."

"Something," I said, "that most Maltese must be content to be told. Those interested, I mean. They are forbidden to find out for themselves."

"Oh, one or two of your books are permitted. This I know. But our people must be protected, Mr Toomey. But I think that soon our censorship may be a little bit relaxed. There is a new spirit abroad, at home as well, aha. Already you may now buy the works freely of the atheist Monsieur Voltaire. In French, too."

"Deist, not atheist." I knew what he was here for, but I decided to use pretended ignorance to get a point in. "Archbishop," I said, "I take it you are not here in any shall I say pastoral capacity? You will know, I think, that I was born in the faith. But I propose to die out of it. I have lived long enough out of it. I ought to make my position absolutely clear." And yet I gulped on that faith.

"You propose," he said cheerfully. "Man proposes." And then: "No no no, oh no. One thing I have learned, we are all learning, His late Holiness was, aha, very clever and fierce in teaching us all, one thing is that there are many ways to salvation. But let me put it this way to you, Mr Toomey. You know the Church. Whatever you are now, you are not a Protestant. Certain doctrines, words, terms--these have meaning for you. I am right, I think."

"Permit me to give you more whisky," I said, taking his glass and getting up, stiff, an old man. "Allow me to offer you a cigar. Or a cigarette."

"A lethal action, smoking," he said without irony. "Smoking makes the life shorter. Just a little drop, then." I took a cigarette for myself from the Florentine leatherbound box on the counter. There was also a huge wooden bowl from Central Africa full of matchbooks, trophies of the world's airlines and hotels. I had toyed once with the notion of a travel book arranged on the aleatory taking out of matchbooks from this bowl, rather like filthy Norman Douglas's autobiography based on the random selection of visiting cards. It had come to nothing. There is sense, however, in keeping a bowl full of such trophies: there are addresses and telephone numbers there, as well as a palpable record of travel helpful to an old man's memory. I lighted my cigarette with a match from La Grande Scene, a restaurant at the top of the Kennedy Centre in Washington, 833-8870. I could not for the life of me remember having been there. I puffed and shortened my life. Then I gave His Grace his whisky. He took it without thanks, a kind of intimacy. He said, as I sat down again: "The word miracle, for example." He looked at me sharply and brightly.

"Ah, that. Yes, well, I received a letter, a note rather, from my old bridge. playing acquaintance Monsignor O'Shaughnessy."

"Ah, the bridge I did not know about. Interesting."

"He mentioned the virtues of the personal approach. I see his point. Some things do not go well on paper. For all that, they seem to be building up a vast dossier of saintly evidence. A piece of evidence from a known apostate and self-proclaimed rationalist and agnostic would be of far greater value than the testimony of some superstitious old peasant woman in black. This is what Monsignor O'Shaughnessy's note seemed to imply."

His Grace swayed rather gracefully on his bottom, flashing his rings. "To me," he said, "he spoke when I was in Rome. It is strange, Mr Toomey, you must admit it, it is even bizarre, if that is the word--yourself, I mean. I mean a man who has rejected God--that is what they would say in the old days, now we are more careful--and yet had such close contacts with--I mean, you could write a book, is not that true?"

"About Carlo? Ah, Your Grace, how do you know I haven't? In any case, it would never get into Malta, would it--a book by Kenneth Marchal Toomey about the late Pope. It would be bound to be well, not hagiography."

"Monsignor O'Shaughnessy mentioned to me that you have already written some little thing. You wrote it while he was still alive. Before he became what he at last became."

"I wrote a certain short story," I said. "About a priest who--Look, my Lord Archbishop, you can read the story for yourself. It's in my three volumes of collected stories. My secretary could hunt you out a copy."

He looked at me. Was there bitterness there, was there shame? One should never say that one had no time for reading. It meant, with him, no time for my kind of irreligious trash. But there were times when even a great cleric should be prepared to do his homework. "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy," he mumbled in a very un-Maltese manner, "telephoned to me yesterday, saying that he had read somewhere that it was your birthday today. That it was a good day for me to come. There was some article on you, he said, in an English newspaper."

"Last Sunday's Observer. The article has not, officially speaking, been read by anyone in Malta. The reverse page carried a large article, copiously illustrated, on ladies' swimwear. The censors at Luqa Airport cut it out. They thus also cut out the little birthday article on myself. I received an uncensored copy through the British High Commission. In the bag, as they put it."

"Yes yes, I see. But our people must be protected. But some of these men with their scissors at the airport are not of the most educated. However, there it is."

"While we're on the subject, I may as well tell you that the General Post Office in Valletta have, after some trouble, kindly allowed me to have a copy of the poems of Thomas Campion that was sent to me, a limited edition of some value. They said that they had at last discovered that Thomas Campion was a great English martyr, so it must be all right."

"Good, that is good, then."

"No, not good. The great English martyr was Edmund, not Thomas. Thomas Campion wrote some rather dirty little songs. Clean songs too, of course, but some quite erotic."

He nodded and nodded, not displeased. Something or other, my agnostic depravity probably, was confirmed from my own mouth. He seemed unabashed at his ignorance of English martyrology.

"Well, now, that is very interesting. But it is the other thing we are concerned about." He was right, the conversational economy of the confessional against the author's tendency to divagate. "And, of course, to wish you a happy birthday yet again." He toasted me, smiling plumply. Absent-mindedly, I toasted myself.

"Monsignor O'Shaughnessy says that you are said to have said in some interview or somewhere about there not being any doubt of the miracle. That you witnessed it. And so I am to offer you every facility to set down, to write, to make some little--"

"Deposition?"

He played an invisible concertina for two seconds. "Your mastery of the language. Canonization. Miracles. It is the usual thing. Your Thomas More, man of all seasons. Joan of Arc."

"In what way are you to offer me every facility? I have paper, a pen, a sort of memory. Ah, I think I know what is meant. I am not to put off doing it. I am to be prodded. The saint-making is somewhat urgent."

"No no no no, you are to take your time."

I smiled at him, seeing my jawed grimness in the fine old mirror over the bar, a genuine antique that advertised Sullivan's Whiskey. "So I, who don't believe in saints, am involved in the making of a saint. Very piquant. Bizarre, to use your own term."

"It is surely only a matter of the fact. It is not even a matter of you using the word miracle. It is a matter of you saying that you saw something that could not by normal means be explained." He seemed to be growing bored already with his assignment, but suddenly a spark of professional concern animated his brown droll eyes. "And yet surely miracle is the only word for what is seen clearly to be happening but cannot be explained except except--"

"--As the intervention of some force unknown to common sense or to science."

"Yes yes, you will admit that?"

"Not altogether. The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It's just a matter of waiting."

"But this. It was in a hospital somewhere, was it not? And the doctors had despaired of the life of whoever it was? Yes?"

"It happened a long time ago," I said. "And I don't know whether you, Your Grace, would understand this, but writers of fiction often have difficulty in deciding between what really happened and what they imagine as having happened. That is why, in my sad trade, we can never be really devout or pious. We lie for a living. This, as you can imagine, makes us good believers--credulous, anyway. But it has nothing to do with faith." I shut up; I could feel my voice beginning to crack--on that word.

"Aaaaah," he sighed. "But there will be witnesses other than yourself. People who do not lie for a living." What was meant to be a mere echo of my own words took on in his voice the tone of frivolous sin. "If you can get witnesses, it will be the better. There are hard men, you see, who must pretend that they do not want the canonization. They are called the advocates of the devil." That too sounded terrible.

"Witnesses?" I said. "Oh, heavens, it was so long ago. I honestly think you'd better go to some old peasant woman in black."

"No hurry," he said. His glass emptied, he got up. I got up with him. "You cannot be forced. You are to consider it, at least consider. That is all." He pointed his archepiscopal ring toward the picture gallery of myself and the great. "I see," he said, "that he is not there." He had had a look at them then, a minor bit of homework, the cheating kind done in a rush in school just before the teacher comes in, seeking a picture of Voltaire and Christ together, smiling, godless artists and actresses all about.

"That," I said with finicking care, "is a secular portrait gallery. Although there, you see, is Aldous Huxley." And I gestured at myself grim and the stone-eyed mescaline saint laughing.

"Yes yes." He did not seem to have heard of him. He beamed through the tall window at the garden scene: Father Azzopardi and Geoffrey taking tea together at a small green table under a white umbrella, Geoffrey talking and gesturing with animation, Father Azzopardi nodding, taking it all in. "These young people," said His Grace. And then, prodding my ribs very familiarly: "No hurry, I say. But still please regard the matter as urgent." One of those contradictions that come easily to the religious mind, God being quite as large as Walt Whitman.

CHAPTER 3

The gardeners kissed his ring, the maids kissed his ring, Joey Grima the cook kissed his ring. Ali did not but was shaken hands with very cordially and treated to a final Semitic quip. And when Geoffrey and I escorted His Grace to his Daimler, which was parked by Percius's Garage, the Triq Il-Kbira being narrow and my house possessing no forecourt, many villagers came running to kiss his ring--the two Borg sisters from the corner grocery, the entire staff of the police station opposite, an ancient squat known atheist in a flat cap who, all dusty, looked like some effigy from Malta's Palaeolithic past newly exhumed, embarrassed children pushed to it by their mothers, even the drivers and conductors of three converging buses whose passages the emerged Daimler blocked. I would now be thought better of in Lija and even neighbouring Attard and Balzan. The retired brigadier down the road, who, so Geoffrey had told me, despised me as a man grown rich on the writing of filthy yarns, was not so graced by archiepiscopal visitations. Geoffrey was saying, too loudly, to Father Azzopardi: "We could arrange a private showing for you. We have all the gear here. You'll never see it in the public cinemas. But for Christ's sake don't tell the archbish." Father Azzopardi laughed terribly heartily. To me His Grace said: "I'll be happy to see your deposition then. Mastery of the English language. Many happy birthdays once more. And please tell your young friend to be careful." No fool, then: he did not miss much. Father Azzopardi got in front with the driver, His Grace waved and blessed from the dead middle of the rear cushions, and the holy car sped soundlessly toward, say, Birkirkara.

"Poor young swine," Geoffrey said as we went indoors. "I told him all about copulating priests and nuns in hot pants in the States. He doesn't know his arse from his elbow. What was it all about then?"

"As I foresaw, I am to assist in the canonization of the late Pope."

"Oh God, oh my God, oh my dear God, you? Oh, Christ help us."

"Don't be silly, Geoffrey. You forget certain facts of my biography, if you ever, which I am inclined to doubt, knew them."

"Ah, getting all stuffy now, are we?"

"His Grace also asked me to tell you to watch your step."

"Did, did he? I see. Highly honoured. Has his bulldogs sniffing round Strait Street, does he? Oh Jesus Lucifer Beelzebub Almighty, how I loathe and detest this bloody place."

"You mean, I think, that there is no decent tradition of Islamic pederasty here. The whole place is dedicated to good Catholic family making. It is also, you would say, excessively hippy and bosomy. No dirty little boys with bodies like straight sharp knives."

"You fucking hypocrite." He said this with little malice and followed it with a snigger. "None of that, eh? You must accompany me to the Gut sometime, dear."

"The Gut?"

"What the sailors call Strait Street."

"I see, I see." We walked out into the garden with its fine high thick walls, walls built by men used to sieges. "I think the archbishop was right to ask me to ask you to watch your step," I said.

"Fucking shithouse of a bloody place."

I said, as we strolled down a shaded path, seeing the three cats play ambushes: "You know, Geoffrey, if you're really unhappy--"

"Yes yes, dear. Percy in the Bahamas would be only too ready to have me, and there's Frank palpitating for friendship in Lausanne. The vicariously literary life of Geoff Enright, or from pillow to post office among the expatriate masters." He kicked a pruned twig out of his path. "I suppose, though, I have been just a bit wayward. The mail's piling up, as I am well aware. There are probably one or two royalty checks lying under the scum. But tomorrow morning--early--on the stroke of ten--I will really get down to the grind again." Knowing, of course, perfectly well, of course, that the old bitch hadn't much longer to go and one might as well, my dear, see the whole bloody business through. "Because you see, Kenneth"--he aspirated and nasalized my name and made it campily preposterous--"I am, in spite of my frequently quite unvolitional and usually deeply regretted misdemeanours, the thing you have averred rather too often that I am not. I mean faithful." I felt tears again ready to prick at that word. "Spiritually, I mean, I think I mean. I mean, what do you call it when it isn't just physical? That other thing doesn't really matter, does it? You've positively sermonised on that yourself, isn't that so? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you announce this very afternoon that that sort of thing was all over? For you, that is. All all, ah, over."

We had arrived at a massive siege wall crawling with greenery, so we turned about, seeing the ambushing cats from another angle. The two gardeners, Mr Borg and Mr Grima--these seemed to be very nearly the only two surnames in Lija--were still placidly irrigating.

I said, "Why don't we at least look at the more important letters after dinner? I've always, as you know, tried to be--"

"Gentlemanly and punctilious, yes dear. But we're dining out. And there is to be a birthday cake, though not, I surmise, with eighty-one candles."

"I didn't know. I'm not going. I'm not up to it."

"But you have to be up to it, dear. It's the British Council man, Ralph Ovington, and the Poet Laureate, no less, is on a visit."

"Oh, my God. And who defers to whom?"

"A nice point, isn't it? You're the senior, of course. But he has the O. M."

Yes, Dawson Wignall had the O. M. I saw myself in Geoffrey's twin mirrors--quite cold, not at all bitter. Willie Maugham, poor old bastard, had always maintained that the Order of Merit was really the Order of Morals. Three years previously I had been made, like him, a Companion of Honour and then heard the door of official laureation bang shut on me. The C. H. is about what the old bitch is worth, I'd say. As for the Nobel, I did not write inelegantly or tendentiously enough. I was not, like Boris Dyengizhdat, in political chains which, I felt sure, he would break soon enough when the dollar royalties had mounted sufficiently. I did not, like Chaim Manon or J. Raha Jaatinen, belong to a gallant little nation that, possessing no strategical resources, had to be compensated with a great writer. I was, they had always said, cynical, not given to deep feelings or high thoughts. But I still sold well enough. Geoffrey's office bulged with as yet unanswered fan mail; my birthday had been very adequately remembered. I fulfilled a need, and that was for some reason wrong.

I said, sulkily, "I didn't know about this. Nobody told me."

"You held Ralph Ovington's note in your very own hand, dear. You said nice of him nice of him or some such rubbish. You forget, you know, you forget things."

"I'm entitled not to be well enough."

"Listen, dear," Geoffrey said. "Have we not here the most delicious classical bit of psychowhatsit of everyday life? It's Ralph, isn't it, the name Ralph?" I looked at him. Strangely enough, it was true. Strangely, because I thought I'd got over Freud. I'd even dreamt of Freudian interpretations of the dreams I had just been dreaming. And there I had been kicking Ovington's name and note and invitation out of my head because of an onomastic coincidence. "Black bastard," Geoffrey said with no tone of malice. "Black bitch. Dear, you really must show yourself as often as possible at your advanced age, you know. Oh, you and I know you're alive and well and, well, wonderful really, but it's a good thing to show it to the Poet Laureate, who's an awful little gossip. If you didn't turn up he'd take it back home, you know, that the old bugger's on his way off to the neverneverland, and you'd have the newspapers sharpening their obituaries. Terrible thing, that."

I sighed deeply. "Very well. I'll rest a little before dressing. In the study. Get Ali to bring me in some strong tea and a few pastries."

"Is that wise, dear?" There was the old harridan in a terminal coma, oozing with goo.

"Of course it's not wise. Nothing I do will be wise any more."

CHAPTER 4

On the walls of my study I had a Willem de Kooning female in mostly red crayon and one of the first sketches Picasso had done for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, also an Egon Schiele wash drawing of ugly lovers and an abstract composition by Hans Hartung. I had two oxblood leather club chairs and a matching couch, old-fashioned and chunky. Also books in glass cases, mostly of the well-thumbed-favourite variety: the main library was next to the upper salon. Near the original Quiller-Couch edition stood, not well-thumbed, not favourite, the revised Oxford Book of English Verse, bloody Val Wrigley as editor. I took this down and lay on the couch with it, looking for the inevitable selection from Dawson Wignall. I did not much care for what I found--insular, ingrown, formally traditional, products of a stunted mind. Wignall's themes derived from Anglican church services, the Christmas parties of his childhood, his public school pubescence, suburban shopping streets; they occasionally exhibited perverse velleities of a fetischistic order, though his droolings over girls' bicycles and gym tunics and black woollen stockings were chilled by whimsical ingenuities of diction. For this sort of thing, then, he had been honoured by the monarch: Thus kneeling at the altar rail We ate the Word's white papery wafer. Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer. But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel's food. Dear God! I reeled beneath the shock: My Eton suit, your party frock, Christmas, the dark, and postman's knock!

I returned the book to the shelf and took down Who's Who, nearly staggering under its weight. I humped it over to what I called my Directory escritory and laid it on the blotting pad. There he was: Wignall, Percival Dawson--not yet OM, but tinkling with other awards. His list of literary achievements was exiguous enough, spare output being the mark of a gentleman writer, but the autobiographical epic called Lying in Grass was probably the dehydrated equivalent of ten of my watery novels. I turned to my own entry and gloomed proudly over a whole column of overproduction. Wignall was also Harrow and Trinity College; I was the Thomas More Memorial School and nothing. Ali knocked and I called adelante. While he placed the tea tray on the coffee table I heaved Who's Who back, shouldered rather. The aroma was of Twining's Breakfast Tea, which I took at all times except breakfast; at breakfast I drank Blue Mountain. Ali stood waiting as I poured.

"Si?"

He was troubled about something but found difficulty in expressing it. Something metaphysical then, not wages or women or living conditions. At length he said, "Allah."

"Allah, Ali?"

"Este pais," he said, "es católico, pero se dice Allah."

"Yes, Ali." The cakes were Kunzel, imported in dainty packets of six. It was a comfort to be on a sort of British soil again. "Their word for God is evidently the same as yours, but it means the Christian version of the Almighty, not the Muslim one."

This clearly troubled him. He said excitedly that there was no God but Allah, but Allah was not worshiped in churches, only in mosques, and that Allah was certainly not, so to speak, administered by arzobispos. In Tangier, he said, the whole situation had been perfectly understandable. The Christians had spoken of Dios. He understood that in their churches they had spoken of Deus--the same name almost. Here, however, in their churches--the arzobispo had told him in the bar there, while he drank deep in the manner of Christians--they referred to God as Allah. He did not understand. Not, of course, as I well knew, that he was what one might term a religious man. But the situation here struck him as strange. He had been taught as a boy that there was no God but Allah, and the Tangerine Christians had said there was no God but Dios or Deus. But these Maltese Christians said, just like Muslims, that there was no God but Allah. In churches. It was a strange situation. More, it was what might be termed a bad situation. That I should properly understand this, Ali gave me all available ways of putting it: mala-malvada-maligna-aciaga.

I had now eaten my third Kunzel cake, enough. I said: "Once, Ali, in Catholic churches all over the world, they used the Latin name Deus. But now they have what is called the vernacular, since very few ordinary people know Latin. In mosques all over the world they say Allah, but in Catholic churches all over the world they use the vernacular. In Serbo-Croat Bog, in Finnish Jumala, I think, and in Swahili, I know, Mungu. Now here in Malta their language is a kind of Arabic, though it uses the alphabet of the Romans. And in Arabic and Maltese the word for God is the same--Allah. Is that moderately clear?"

It was clear, he said, but it seemed somehow bad. Still, presumably the big men--arzobispos and so on--knew what they were doing, but nevertheless it did not seem right for Catholics in their churches to be calling on Allah. Then he changed the subject by taking from his white jacket pocket a small parcel and shyly handing it to me. It was a little regalo, he said, today being my cumpleaños. I checked the emotional lability by wondering why he had not made the presentation earlier. Perhaps because he knew that Geoffrey would say something sneering about it and this was the first time today he had found me alone. "Thank you, Ali, very very much," unwrapping it. It was pretty horrible, of course, by the standards of the sneerers of the world: a cigarette lighter of cheap metal encrusted with a Maltese cross. "Beautiful," I said. Ali waited. I struck it and it worked. Ali waited. I got myself a cigarette and lighted it. "Wonderful," I said, having drawn deeply. "It imparts a special taste to the tobacco." This was the kind of manifestly insincere response that Al's culture required. Satisfied, he nodded and went out, saying something with Allah in it, perhaps appropriate to a birthday. So. It looked as if it were not going to be easy to get away from His late Holinesss Pope Gregory XVII today, meaning fat little Don Carlo Campanati. His reforms were upsetting even Ali.

I lay on the couch shortening my life and clutching Ali's gift like some token of faith--not inappositely, considering the Maltese cross. I thought of my brother Tom, who had smoked three cigarettes in his entire career and yet had died of lung cancer at forty-four. Tommy Toomey. With a name like that he had been destined to set up as a professional comedian, and he had done well enough, especially on the British radio in the 1930s. But the cough had become increasingly a hindrance to his sharp bright somewhat high-pitched delivery. Comedians of the old demotic school, like George Formby, Sr., had been able to make comic capital out of audibly dying ("Coughing better today, lads" and so on), but Tom's way had been one of rapid wit. His specialty had been the surrealist reshaping of English history, and this had presupposed an audience of some education. Such an audience was ceasing to exist when Tom's onstage or in-studio coughing began to be uncontrollable. He had had the best of his time when he came to die, and he knew it. He died in the faith in a hospital near Hendon, having tried to joke some few hours before about a special niche in Purgatory for British Catholic comedians. He died clutching something--rosary beads, probably. I put Ali's gift in my trouser pocket. I supposed that Tom might find it easier to get out of Purgatory--if the now much impaired eschatology of fat Carlo's Church still admitted its existence if he had a saint more or less in the family, or should I say more precisely had a saint as brother to his sister's husband. Then, having doused my life-shortener, I savoured an old man's doze.

CHAPTER 5

The residence of the British Council representative was in a quieter and perhaps more patrician part of Lija than my own. Geoffrey, sitting tied and jacketed next to Ali, who was driving, pointed this out, adding however that the whole bloody island was bloody terrible and he bloody hated it. Having arrived, we told Ali to come back in two hours, and then Geoffrey rang the doorbell, composing his sullen face, now unadorned by twin mirrors, to a twinkling vacuity. The British Council representative appeared, together with his wife. Mrs Ovington was a big fair woman in a long candy-striped dress, her face bronzed and wrinkled. The bronze and, to some extent, the wrinkles were a badge of long service in the sunnier and duller stations of the world. They had had Warsaw for a couple of years, and there had once been talk of their being sent to Paris, but it had usually been places like Beirut and Baghdad. The wrinkles could also be accounted for by the long professional habit of insincere smiling. Ovington, who had a sun-and-tobacco-bleached stallion forelock falling onto his forehead, was also a smiler, but only with his teeth, which were of various shapes and colours and usually, as now, had a hearty Dunhill pipe stuck between them. They greeted me with laughs and shouts of "Got here, then?" and "Jolly good" but no happy returns. They were no strangers to me. They had presided over the Writers' Week that I had been asked to inaugurate, all of twelve years back, in Sydney. Sydney was regarded as a great British Council plum, but Ovington had not got on with the Aussies. They had also come to see me when I had been settling in here in Malta, with "Jolly good" and a jar of homemade cognac-flavoured orange and lemon marmalade. It was good marmalade and I had not yet quite finished it. They were good people.

Ann Ovington dramatically stopped wrinkling and dragged me out into the forecourt. "Rather unfortunate," she said rapidly. "But you'll understand, and he won't. Sciberras, the Maltese poet, I mean. We had to have him along to meet Dawson, and he took the wrong turning out of the loo and barged into the kitchen, and there he saw the damned cake. Then he said how thoughtful and kind and the rest of it. Apparently it's his birthday today as well as yours, and he doesn't know it's yours, happy birthday by the way, and--well, you see the awkwardness of it. I've already primed everybody else--well, not your Geoffrey yet of course, but I will, no good leaving it to Ralph, he'd take all night explaining anyway. I know you'll see it as, well, you know, humorous. Short story stuff."

"Indeed," I said. With sadness I saw it as (indeed) short story stuff. If these had still been my writing days I would have itched to go off with that little seed of fiction, abandoning the party, knowing that what I was to invent would be far more entertaining and, in a sense, truer than the impending reality. "Does this Mr er--"

"Sciberras."

"Does he know me? My work, I mean."

"I don't think so. You know what these people are like."

"A job for the British Council."

"How right you are. No lady guests, by the way. Except John's girl friend. I hope that's in order."

"Why what how--"

"Your Geoffrey said something about giants of literature meeting and no damned nonsense about sexual symmetry."

"But this is absurd. Also insolent. I would never make such a stipulation. This you know."

"I'm inclined to agree with your Geoffrey. All you bachelors. I discovered there was a Mrs Sciberras, but it's the poet's mother. She speaks only Maltese and prefers to watch television anyway. So that's all right."

"I'll have a word with that damned Geoffrey."

"Oh, don't spoil your evening." She wrinkled and took my arm and urged me in. In the mould-smelling downstairs salon the two other writers were on their feet, drinking. Dawson Wignall O. M. decided we had met before, which we hadn't, and came for me with a hand out at shoulder level, the other hand tremoloing an iced whisky like a little bell (I tintinnabulate for you/A birthday wish that's warm and true).

"What?" he laughed. "Eh?" Question tags, not questions: British upper-class greetings often sound like confirmations of something. I gave him hearty congratulations without specifying on what, and he said, with mock-embarrassed mock seriousness, "Well--you know." Then he was all laughter again, a round duck-down-headed hamster-toothed children's book illustration of a benign humanoid who held the office John Dryden had once held. Sciberras, the Maltese poet, was introduced to me, or it may have been the other way round. I was given a sturdy gin and tonic in a rummer almost too heavy for me to hold. I got in first at Sciberras with many happy returns and he must forgive my not knowing his work, I hadn't had time yet to start trying to learn Maltese.

"Ah, but I write in Italian too," he shouted conversationally. "You must start to learn Italian."

"Then," the Poet Laureate said, with a tartness that made me want to like him, "he could read Dante as well as you."

"I know some Italian," I said. "Indeed, we once had Italians in the family."

"I know," Dawson Wignall said somewhat irritably. "Of course I know." Meaning that we great public men had no secrets from each other.

"I was saying that to him," I said. "Mr Scribble er ass here."

"And I was saying what I said to him too," Dawson Wignall said.

"Yes yes," I said. "I understand--a _mot_." Sciberras looked from one to the other of us, sipping a cold drink as if it were a hot one. "A _mot_," I repeated, straight at him. "The French word for a word. But perhaps you write also in French."

"In Maltese and in Italian," Sciberras said more loudly, as if I had not clearly understood him the first time. "Only good night in Malta do we say in French. The French were not here long. The Maltese people made the French to go."

"Yes," I said. "So your archbishop told me. The Maltese people got rid of the French. One of my mother's ancestors just missed being one of the French that the Maltese got rid of, by the way. He was got rid of very nastily by the Mamelukes. In Egypt. The same expedition." I saw Geoffrey down a whisky mac in one draught and then give me an exaggerated wink. I stared coldly back. God knew how much tanking up he had done before leaving home. No ladies, indeed.

"But you are British," Sciberras said.

"My mother was French."

"The Maltese people got rid of the French," Sciberras shouted.

"When you got rid of them," Wignall said, "did you perhaps arrange that they were got rid of at night? So you could say bon soir to them?" I was beginning to find Wignall tolerable.

"It is bonne nuit we say. And in the daytime it is buon giorno. That is Italian."

"Go to bed French," Wignall said, "and wake up Italian. The best of both worlds. And in the middle you're Maltese. Jolly good."

Ann Ovington stood by us, benign, wrinkling away. Literary giants meeting. Then she said, "Well, must see how things are getting on."

"I look forward to my cake," Sciberras shouted roguishly, as though he already knew that he would not much care for the preceding courses.

"Jolly good," she said, wrinkling at him, leaving.

"He's looking forward to his cake," said Wignall very seriously. "Talking of your family, by the way. Mrs Campanati sends her love."

"It is not pronounced like that," declared Sciberras. "It is not neighty but nahty. I know the name. It is an Italian name."

"And so you should know the name," Wignall said. "But in America it rhymes with weighty."

"Hortense?" I said. "You met Hortense?" I pronounced the name in the French way our mother had always insisted on.

"They call her Hortense over there," rhyming with pence. "There used to be a song about my sweet Hortense, as I remember. Got no money and got no sense. Not true of yours, of course. She looked very well. I thought you might like to know. I'd say she looked very modern, very smart and slim and so on. She sends fond regards and so on."

"What were you doing in Bronxville?"

"Reading poems, some of them mine. At Sarah Lawrence. She was at the little party afterwards. Not so little, really. Long, anyway. She seemed to me to be very well." But he nodded somewhat sadly.

"Not," I said in old man's candour, "knocking it back? Not getting stoned or blind or anything?"

"Very fit, I thought. A few, yes. Not too many. She seemed to me to be very well. I told her I'd be going to Malta. She said to say happy birthday and so on. When the time comes, that is." Wignall raised his glass at me and drank. Wignall, I decided, was a very tolerable person. Poet, that was a different matter, but who was I after all really to say?

Geoffrey was talking with Ovington, just by the drinks table, already on his third whisky mac. "She's probably written," I said. "We haven't had time to go over the mail lately, have we, Geoffrey?" He made a vulgar gesture of staggering against the ropes. I introduced him. Wignall said jolly good and Sciberras shouted something cordial and unidiomatic. Wignall said, slowly and clearly, to Sciberras: "Mr Toomey, besides being perhaps the most distinguished living writer in the British Commonwealth, was also related by marriage to His late Holiness Pope Gregory the Seventeenth."

It was little fat Carlo's day all right. "That I did not know," Sciberras said. Most people were awed on the revelation, but Sciberras kept whatever feelings he had well in check. "I wrote a sonetto about him. It is a strange story, also wonderful. He came to me in a dream and said to write it. So I wrote it." He started to shout it out:

"_Sempre ch'io veda nel bel cielo azzurro

levarsi bianca vetta scintillante

quel radioso di Sua bontà gigante

al cuore mi rammenta in pio sussurro..._"

Both Wignall and I listened in embarrassment, our eyes surveying the icescapes of our drinks. Wignall was not going to let him get away with the whole thing: he was, after all, Poet Laureate. He said, "Very profound. It needs to be looked at, I can tell, and really pored over. Pity to waste it just by blurting it out. Jolly good sonnet, I can tell, though."

"There is also," cried Sciberras, "the wonder of the visit in the dream."

"Yes, I see that. Remarkable, when you come to think of it."

The Ovington boy and his girl friend had not greeted us. She wore a dirty Mother Hubbard and had neglected damp straw hair about her shoulders. John Ovington's hair was not neglected: it was contained in a headband glistening with bits of coloured glass. He wore what I can only think of as a Natty Bumppo outfit, though his long soiled feet disdained moccasins. Home for the holidays, both, I presumed. The two young people sat tailorwise in the far corner on the floor, sharing a hand-rolled cigarette that stank of autumn twitchfires. Geoffrey kept leering at the boy, but the boy was not interested. Geoffrey was saying to Ralph Ovington: "Don't know how you stand the bloody place. Bloody place gives me the bloody creeps." He could be more himself without lady guests.

"There are worse." Ovington smiled, his pipe pluming away as if dinner were over. "You can put up with any place if you have to be in it. If you have to be there you look for the good side. It's being too free that's the trouble perhaps." He swivelled his smiling head toward the boy and girl, who whispered together, shackled in the conformism of the young. "If you're free you're never satisfied. I've never been free."

"Oh, bloody Christ. The call of duty and all that balls."

The word duty made my eyes prick, just like faith and its derivatives. There was a line of Walt Whitman that--"There's a line of Walt Whitman," I said to Wignall, "that always brings tears to my eyes. Something about 'all intrepid captains and mates, and those who went down doing their duty.'" And there, to prove it, were the tears in my eyes.

"Stock response," said Wignall. "The Cambridge School invented the phrase, but only to sneer at. It's a useful phrase. And you can't make literature without the stock response."

Geoffrey was sniggering at me. "Those who went down," he sniggered. "Dear old Walt knew all about going down."

"Shut up, Geoffrey," I found myself saying with prep schoolmaster's sharpness. "Do you hear me? Shut up."

"Sorry, dear. But you must admit it's a bit comic, going down, doing his duty. Nurse Walt. A whale of a time in the war."

"It is not to be laughed at," cried Sciberras. "We did our duty. We did not go down. Except to the air-raid shelter."

"Yes yes yes," said the Poet Laureate, somewhat unhappy, but not half as unhappy as I. "We're all very proud of you, yes yes. The George Cross and all that. Jolly brave people, you Maltese."

"Who is he, then?" Geoffrey said. "This George Cross character, I mean."

"It is not a person but a thing," Sciberras shouted. "For valour in the Second World War, the whole island. I wrote a sonetto--"

"In Italian too?" said Wignall. "Jolly forgiving of you."

"No relation to Double Cross," Geoffrey said, helping himself to his fifth or sixth whisky mac, "the bugger who always came twice? And while we're on notable personalities, did you ever meet Joe Plush, the man with the velvet--"

"I said stop it, Geoffrey," I ground out. "Stop this nonsense at once."

"Or Chunky, the man with the pineapple ballocks?"

"Not heard that one before," Wignall lied. "Jolly good."

"The names," Sciberras called, "are not familiar to me."

"Oh Jesus bloody Belial Beelzebub, Lord of the Open Flies. Where's your bloody sense of bloody humour?"

Ovington kept smiling, pipe gripped hard. His wife came in, wrinkling jollily, to say: "Grub's up, chaps."

"Bring that in," Ovington said to Geoffrey, pipe gripped hard.

"Not worth it, old boy old boy," and he drained it. "Now lead me to the costly vintages."

"Maltese wines tonight," Ovington said. "You did say you wanted to try some, Dawson. Improved a lot lately."

CHAPTER 6

Geoffrey quietened down when the imported cod fillets were brought on, and this had much to do with the Maltese wine. He insulted everybody during the avocado course, and the insults were taken with good humour by all except me and Sciberras. First he ribbed young John Ovington about his presumed philosophy of life: "I mean, we can't all be bloody parasites, can we? Got to be a host, hasn't there, to be parasitic on, right? So it won't work for everybody, so that means there's got to be a parasitic elite, which doesn't change the bloody world much, does it? Too right, it doesn't, sport." To the Mother Hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: "It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you're the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other." He did a comic oenophile act with the bottle of Marsovin: "Oh, I'd definitely say those raisins came from Grima's backyard not Fenech's, the north side where that diabetic tomcat goes for a piss, wouldn't you?" He told Sciberras that the Maltese language sounded like somebody sicking it all up, and no bleeding wonder, mate. It was ill-advised of him to make the similitude. He was telling the Poet Laureate that he ought to give the Maltese and the expats, if any of the sods turned up, and he wouldn't blame the buggers if they didn't, a recital of Great Filthy Poems, instead of the muck about sniffing little girls' knickers that he was probably going to drone out, when his colour changed radically. Everybody noticed it but only Sciberras remarked on it.

"You are now very bloody green, mate," he shouted. He was no fool, despite the sonetti and the not going down. Subdued Geoffrey got up, saying nothing, and left the table with speed but dignity.

"You know where it is," called Ovington. To me, who had said nothing, he said, "Not at all, think nothing of it. He's a good chap, I know. Overworking, a little overexcited perhaps. It happens to the best of us."

"He hates us," Scriberras declared, with a bit of cod on his tongue. "This I can see. He hates both Malta and the Maltese. He thinks we are a small island and an inferior people."

"You are, you know," Wignall said. "A small island, I mean. No getting away from that."

"It is no reason to despise or for hate. 'This precious jewel set in the sea.'"

"Jolly good, very apt bit of quotation." Wignall finished his fish. To me he suddenly said, "When are you coming home?"

Home. Another of those damned emotive words. I must give up seeing people, I told myself, sniffing the tears back. All the old bitch can do these days is lay on the weepy-weepies. Self-pity, you know. "I doubt if I'll see England again," I said. "I'll perhaps have my cremation there. Or in France. I don't know. I suppose I'd better start making up my mind."

"You look jolly fit to me," Ann Ovington said. "Ah, talking of ah incinceration--" She meant the pork chops that were now being brought in by a moustached Maltese matron, each chop topped with a pineapple slice. She saw that that was probably tactless.

Wignall said, nodding, grinning at me, "Chunky, eh? I hadn't heard that one."

"A sort of anthropophagous aura hovering." I smiled, consciously thinly. Wignall was delighted.

He said, "Yes yes yes. Significant perhaps that the Real Presence is on its way to becoming the Real Absence. Except for a few like me. It must be because secular cannibalism is on its way in." Sciberras looked bewildered, chomping away at his chop. "I refer," Wignall told him, "to the population explosion and so on. Cans of Mensch in the supermarkets." Sciberras was still bewildered. "Kosher for those who want it. Nothing in Leviticus or Deuteronomy against it, is there? Or Munch, perhaps. Or Manch, even. But that sounds like canned Manchurian." He was disclosing a talent submerged in a nobler vocation. "Or a whole line of dressed meats presided over by Ann Thropp. Like Sara Lee, you know," he said to Sciberras, who did not know. I noticed that the two young people of the party took only vegetables. This would not, of course, be Wignall putting them off; this would be an aspect of their lifestyle, as it was called. The girl Janie, who was on my left, said: "You're the Great Writer, aren't you? What do you write?"

"I'm retired now. Very old, as you can see."

"What sort of things did you write when you did write?" She had quite clean fingernails and a slight venerean strabismus, rather like--No. Wait.

"Novels, plays, short stories. Some of the stories were filmed. Did you ever see Fitful Fever or Down Came a Blackbird? Or Duet or Terzetto?" No to all those, and I couldn't really blame her. "Do you like reading?"

"I like Hermann Hesse."

"Good God," I said, surprised. "There's hope for us all. I knew Hesse."

"You knew him?" Her jaw dropped, showing half-chewed greens. She goggled and then cried across the table, "Johnny. He knew Hermann Hesse."

"Who did?" He had his own family-size bottle of Coca-Cola to help the greens down.

"Him here. Mr er--"

I was not quite all things to all men, but I had plenty to offer: for the Catholics a potential saint as good as in the family; for the young a much overrated German novelist of my acquaintance. And there was always my own work for those who cared for that sort of thing.

"Hesse is great," John Ovington pronounced.

"You've read him in German?" asked cunning Wignall.

"He's above language," John Ovington pronounced.

"There I must respectfully beg to differ," said Wignall. "No writer is above language. Writers are language. Each is his own language." I was impressed to hear a slight tremor of what I took to be vocational conviction.

"It's the ideas," the boy told us. "They count, not the words."

"And how about Shakespeare's ideas? Damn it, Shakespeare had no ideas worth talking about." Trembling more, rightly.

"Perhaps that's why we don't read him." The boy swigged straight from his family-size bottle.

"Dig is what you used to say, dear," wrinkled his mother.

"Following," said his father, smilingly chewing, "the behest of the bard himself. 'Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here.'" He looked round for approval and got a sort of grin from me. Sciberras looked blankly from face to talking face, eating heartily though.

"A dead scene," the boy said. He made the gesture of being willing to pass his bottle across to Janie, but she shook her locks at him.

"A dead shakescene," smiled his father. Wignall's jowls shook as he prepared unguestly reproof, outrage, disgust, something, so I got in quickly with, addressing Sciberras out of politeness: "He was a nice rather unhappy old man when I saw him last. It must be all of fifteen years ago. In Lausanne or Geneva or somewhere. He was as old then as I am now. He didn't seem to care much for his work any more. He wondered if he'd done the right thing in getting out of Germany and concentrating on fake orientalism and higher games."

"What higher games?" Janie asked and, simultaneously, John pronounced, "I'm quite sure he didn't say fake."

"Das Glasperlenspiel," I said, "for which he got the Nobel. And no, he didn't say fake, he said ersatz."

"This cannot be so," Sciberras said, and I could see he thought I was referring to Shakespeare.

"The East, the East," in a manner wailed Wignall, and I feared he was starting to recite a poem. But then, "You think you've wrung the West dry, you kids."

"Wrung us dry," John said, pleased, smirking.

"What do you know about the East?" I said, angry at the smirk, also at last feeling the sugary acid of the wine bite, sickened by Geoffrey's behaviour and by a birthday that was going to end miserably, remembering too late that the Ovington boy had been born in Kuala Lumpur and now undoubtedly to be told that the girl Janie, smirking "I was born in New Delhi."

"Oh, it was the sahib's East for both of them," Ovington admitted. "I should have mentioned that Janie's father is the Assistant High Commissioner. This new orientalism has nothing to do with being children of the Foreign Service. I think they're partly right, I think they've been let down--"

"Oh my God," Wignall said, "who hasn't been let down? But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold." I felt sure that he must have written a poem on some such theme. Nay, perhaps his entire oeuvre was erected on it. Anger I could not well explain started to bubble in me. I was about to say, angrily, that we'd all let down our past, our culture, our faith when Sciberras saved me from public tears by speaking quite quietly over his emptied plate.

He said, "I will tell you this. It is as follows. It is that we must look for what we want where we are and not in some other place." I gaped at that good sense as if this comic Maltese had turned into an oracle. Then I saw him as a symbol that, had I still been writing, would have been of immense potency: the whole incarnated Mediterranean-Phoenician, Arabic-speaking, inheritor of Greek philosophy, Roman stoicism, a provincial faith promulgated in Aramaic that had built its own empire. "It is also that we do not sneer at duty and at the faith we are taught at home."

Ah, that terrible emotive trinity. The force of the words was softened by the comic Mediterranean accent, otherwise the tears that started would have flooded onto the congealed sauce on my plate. And then we were all saved, except the children, who were past saving, by the appearance of the birthday cake, brought in by Ann Ovington herself, its shape that of an open book, three candles only on top out of, I presumed, deference to my shortness of breath. Sciberras, beaming now, had plenty of breath. The children la-lahed "Happy Birthday to You" with a knife-on-bottle punctuation from John Ovington while Sciberras, a smiling moon of delight, blew out and commenced cutting.

He said, "Where is our friend? Perhaps now he will be less bloody green."

"I think," I said, starting to rise, "I'd better go and--"

"Leave it to me," Ovington said, quicker. Wignall nodded and nodded, putting crumbs of the cake to his mouth, smiling down some long vista of the years at perhaps some fateful childhood party in Hampstead or an as yet uncorrupted Golders Green. I settled myself again and brought out, thinking to give pleasure to their author, the lines I had read that afternoon: "But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel's food. Ah God! I quailed beneath the shock: Your something something party frock--"

"Shut it," he cried. Shock was right. "Shut it, shut it. It's nothing to you except a chunk of--" His eyes now were the ones to fill. "All over, it's all over. Sorry," he sniffed to his hostess, who wrinkled painfully though not in bewilderment: she had entertained plenty of authors in her time. And then to me: "Sorry. It's just that--Growing old isn't easy," he said loudly to the children, who had been crumbling cake in what I took to be embarrassment. He was all of sixteen years my junior. "Everything's spat upon now. Everything." Then Geoffrey came in, ahead of Ovington, pale and with a big damp patch on his jacket where, I assumed, vomit had been hastily wiped off with a face flannel. Ovington was trying to steer him into the salon, saying something about coffee, but Geoffrey said: "Just in time for that thing, I see. Won't have any, though. Just a beaker of that shitty local raisin juice." And he went back to the place he had vacated at the time of the fish course.

"Is that wise?" his hostess asked.

"It will either settle the guts or effect a definitive ah purgation," said Geoffrey in what I took to be a parody of my voice. He helped himself. "How's my booful lil boy?" he leered at John Ovington. Then he swigged.

"Stop that, Geoffrey," I said, very weary. But then something hit out at the weariness, something a man of my age ought not to have had, namely a twinge of toothache. It was the cake, of which I had tasted the smallest possible fragment. It seemed unfair somehow, injury to insult.

Geoffrey said, "Yes dear of course dear. Behaved badly, haven't I? It's this bloody place, you know. Shitty nasty little bloody island. Still, it is your birthday, after all." Oh my God. "Should have behaved better on Grand Old Man's bloody birthday."

Sciberras cut into the general shock with: "You make a mistake. It is my birthday. But I do not think you are able to get anything right. You have a mind very badly arranged."

"Deranged you mean," Geoffrey said. "You're not the only bugger in the world or even on this shitheap of an island to have a birthday today. If you knew anything about anything you'd know whose birthday it primarily bloody well is." He raised a recharged glass. "Many happy returns, cher maitre, and all that shit," he leered at me. Sciberras had to be made to take all this as a very tasteless joke.

"A tasteless joke," Wignall soothed a fellow poet, "but still a joke. It's your birthday," patting Sciberras blindly. "That's right, isn't it, Toomey? His and his only, isn't it?"

I had given up many things in my time but had never yet had to deny the most basic fact of my life. "Certainly not mine," I said. I heard, thank God, what could only be our car coming back for us.

CHAPTER 7

I was stupid not to go straight to bed, initiating the new regime of sleeping alone, instead of having it lengthily and dangerously out with Geoffrey. In the upper salon he sat at the untuned harpsichord, picking at ensoured harmonies while I tried to address him with calm, to treat him as some errant character of my own fiction. But my inner agitation was too strong to permit me to sit. I tottered up and down on the fur and marble, a weak nightcap whisky and water atremble in my claw.

"It was deliberate, wasn't it? An attempt, highly successful, to make me look a fool. What I want to know is why. But I think I know why. This is my punishment for making you leave Tangier. A punishment for consulting your own interest and, indeed, safety. And, as far as that matter is concerned, you are very far from being out of the wood. But still I had to be punished."

"Oh, bloody balls." And, as if this were opera buffa recitative, he struck a sort of chord. He had his mirror glasses back on, though the salon lights were dim enough. His stomach seemed to have settled, and his speech was unblurred.

"Stop that. Stop that stupid noise."

He twanged a foul fortissimo cadence and got up. Shambling over to the leather couch he said, before falling onto it, "Things just got a bit out of control, that's all." He lay glooming up at the dead chandelier. "Didn't care much for the atmosphere. Hostile. That stupid bloody poet too. Making you hand over your birthday like that. It was on your behalf really. Got irritated, got pissed."

"Well, it obviously can't go on, can it? I obviously can't afford to let it go on."

"You mean peace in your declining years, tranquil twilit fulfilment and the rest of the bloody crap. Honour and fucking dignity. You mean I've got to go."

"You're not happy here." I was being very reasonable. "And I've no intention of making another move. This one was shattering enough."

"You're bloody well telling me it was bloody shattering. So I have to go."

"Oh, I don't really want you to go, you must know that. But it's a matter of it's a matter of self-preservation."

"Very cold words, sir, after all those former hot avowals. Right right right. Go. Pack my pitiful possessions and go. London first, I think, sort myself out from there. And then Percy in the Bahamas or that epileptic snuffling sod in Lausanne. Good good good. I shall need some money."

"Three months' salary. That seems to me just and reasonable."

"Yes," he said quietly. He took off his mirrors to eye me coldly. "A just and reasonable bastard, that's what you are. And when you've snuffed it I'll be just and reasonable too. Ten thousand quid's what I want, dear."

"You're joking."

"No, not really. As a matter of fact, you foresaw all this. You set it all down in that stupid bloody sentimental shitbag of a novel called The Affairs 0f Men, fucking silly pretentious bloody title. You know, this just and reasonable writer bastard who's getting old but has the O. M. and the Nobel and his best friend goes in for the term as I remember is posthumous blackmail. And there's all this guff about when the writer's dead he's finished with and it doesn't matter a monkey's ballock what anybody writes about him so up your arse Jack and publish and be damned. Then he bethinks himself that he's a Great Writer and doesn't want to go down in history as a Right Bastard so he pays up in return for a Solemn Promise in Writing to produce nothing of a haha Biographical Nature after the great writer sod has snuffed it. And the great big subtle marvellous point is that he knows there's nothing to stop this shit of a best friend spewing all the muck up when he's kicked but at least he'll go to his tomb in Westminster Abbey knowing that if the shit is shovelled out at least it is Unjust."

The nightcap was spilling. I sat on the edge of the armchair and tried to drink it but could not. I could see Geoffrey grinning with a film gangster's laziness at the tremolo of teeth and glass. I put the glass down on the fretted Indian table with care and difficulty. "Bastard," I choked. "Bastard bastard."

"A bastard who's read your books," he said. "And a prissy old-fashioned load of fucking codswallop they are. Things have changed, my old darling. Now we're allowed to set it all down stark and bare, not in ah ah elegant periphrases, your term I think. About a dirty old man trying to get it up and in and crying because he can't come. And snuffling about darling boy oh this is such ecstasy. You just and reasonable bastard, you."

"Go on," I said, rising. "Out. Get out now. Before I put you out."

"You and whose fucking army?"

"I'm ordering you to go, Geoffrey. You can spend the night at a hotel and have the bill sent here. You can pack your bags tomorrow. I shall not be around. A check will be waiting for you on the hall table. Three months' salary and enough for your air fare to London. Now get out." I had to sit down again.

"Ten thousand nicker here and now and I'll be on my merry way. Didn't you write some fearful shitty nonsense called On Our Merry Way or was it that bloody twerp Beverley? Never mind." He grimaced and painfully belched. "Christ, that bloody muck. Alum and cat piss. Cheeseparing sods."

"Out of my house, go on."

"I've got a fair amount done already, dear. You always said that my letters showed I could have flair if I got down to it. That business at Rabat makes quite a nice paragraph--you know, when pocky little Mahmud literally shat on you."

"Go on, go." Then I collapsed into snivelling. "To think of all I've done for you--the faith--the trust--"

"Ah, here we go: faith and duty and the rest of the boxroom junk. Boo hoo hoo. Tears idle tears. You do really, you know, cry most bee-ootah-flah. England, home and duty. Jesus Christ on the fucking cross. Owwwwwwww."

"Out of my house--" I was on my feet again, hands blindly seeking something to hold on to. He lay there comfortably, admiring the shaking ineffectual pathetic shrunken trembling mannikin. "There's a police station across the street. I can have you thrown out."

"I'll scream bloody blue murder, dear. I'll tell them you were trying to bugger me. It's the death penalty here, I believe."

There was no time for me to see clearly what Geoffrey's real intention could be. The rage was too fierce a tenant. I felt collapse impending but held it off. "You want me to die," I gasped. "That's it. Easier that way."

"Very neat, to do that on your birthday. Like Shakespeare, if he really did. And then that Maltese sod can write a sonetto about it. A homo generoso. He gave me his birthday, cake and all."

"Don't. Can't."

"Do control yourself, dear. You've gone all blue around the lips." And then, in a deliberately bad parody of my dictating: "Geoffrey lay unperturbed on the ah settee while his aged friend exhibited all the symptoms of an approaching ah cardiac ah spasm. In impeccable cockney he remarked: 'Yer've gawn owe bleeoo abaht ye--'" And then, getting up in concern: "Oh God, no."

"Get me the... can't... it's the..." An obscene shaft of indigestion followed by mild toothache followed by agony that shot from clavicle to wrist, all on the left side, the right serenely aloof. I went down to the rugs as neatly as in a stage fall but without syncope.

"All right, dear, the white ones, I know--" He was into the bedroom to the bathroom, I heard the click of the medicine cupboard door. Then I passed out, as it were, volitionally. I came to, it seemed, no more than a second later, but I was in pyjamas and bed and Dr. Borg or Grima, it had to be one or the other, was taking my pulse. When I opened my eyes I saw Geoffrey standing there. He gave me a sweet and loving smile. Dr. Borg or Grima was also wearing pyjamas but an egg-stained dressing gown as well. He was severely unshaven and had a cigarette in his mouth. I had once seen an Andalusian priest conducting a burial service unshaven with a cigarette in his mouth. It took the seriousness out of things.

He dropped my wrist and his own, which had a wristwatch on it. He said, "No excitement. Eighty-one is a good age, but my father is ninety-five. I tell him no excitement but the television programs sometimes excite him. The Italian ones, not the Maltese. It is the girls who make the announcements even that excite him. I give him," he said, "simple sedatives," taking out and dousing his cigarette, a presumable sign that the examination was over.

"He did get excited," Geoffrey said. "It was what you might call literary excitement. But I'll make quite sure there's no more of that."

"Yes, and next time please telephone me. You woke up the family with the knocking."

"I can't telephone," Geoffrey said with his dangerous sweetness, "because we have no telephone. They tell us there is a long waiting list for the telephone. They say we have to wait at least eighteen months for a telephone. Or even longer, for a telephone. During the day, if I wish to telephone, I go to the shop at the corner, which has a telephone and allows me to use the telephone. But when that shop is shut I cannot telephone. That is why I did not telephone."

"There is always the police station."

"Yes," Geoffrey said, "and a right lot of snotty bastards they are." I found that I could not speak. "Well," the doctor said, "this is Malta."

"You're bloody well telling me that it's bloody well bloody Malta." I found that I could speak. "Please, Geoffrey, no."

"No excitement," the doctor ordered. "I'll watch him," Geoffrey said.

CHAPTER 8

This intention went unfulfilled that night, although, despite my avowed purpose of the afternoon, I did not sleep alone. I did not, for that matter, sleep very much. After an hour or so I woke ridiculously refreshed and, as it were, cathartized, and none of the properties of the Maltese night conduced to sleep's resumption. The electric mosquito repellers whirred and clicked and puffed, and public clocks all over the island announced in imperfect unison the full hour or the part hour and, as an exordium to the part hour, the full hour which had already been completed. I watched Geoffrey, instead of he me. He was snoring irregularly, his fat back turned to me, and occasionally forgetting how to breathe, remembering only in a bed-shaking spasm. At one point he started to breathe easily and then he said something in Latin. It sounded like "Solitam Minotauro--pro cans corpus..." I listened with care and surprise, having believed that he had attended a minor public school that despised the classical tongues and taught in their stead a kind of elementary anthropological linguistics.

I took a cigarette from the silver box, a gift from the Sultan of Kelantan, that stood on the night table, seeing it clearly in the very rich moonlight, and, to my vague astonishment, was able to light it with Ali's flaring gift that lay beside it. I had, I thought, left that below in my study. The big flame seemed to impinge on Geoffrey's sleeping mind, for he flailed as if fighting it and then turned toward me. After a pause he snored out a ghastly odour that was neither vinous nor vomitory, more ferrous in its basic tone, with indefinable harmonics of gross decay. It puzzled more than appalled me: it was remotely familiar.

Moonlight showed a heavy sweat on Geoffrey's nakedness, which was now too close for my comfort. I had not, on my first waking, been sure whether to encourage a certain vague hunger for tea and a sandwich to attain a solidity that demanded satisfaction; now I was quite sure. I got out of bed on firm legs and found my slippers and dressing gown. The bed was all Geoffrey's now. I felt for him none of the bitter resentful loathing I might properly, in spite of his eventual yielding to duty or fear, be expected to feel and, indeed, expected to feel. I felt only the generalised pity one always feels for the defenceless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenceless prisoner of life. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction. I told myself, untruthfully perhaps, that I knew the world and had learned tolerance. That it was too late for me to take human passions seriously, including my own. But I remembered saying something of that kind publicly at the age of forty-five. Give us peace in our time, whatever the time. Which logically meant throwing Geoffrey out. And then feeling no peace because of a lack of charity, of awareness that I was, all said and done, a dithering nuisance, a hypocrite, a prissy product of a bad period, ludicrous in my senile sensuality, everything that, in blunter language, Geoffrey had termed me. Let him sleep, let it all sleep.

I went down and entered the great white kitchen, its surgicality qualified by the ghosts of spices, softly, very softly. Ali's room was just beyond it and he was, the desert life only three generations behind him, a featherweight sleeper. Very softly I boiled water, made a sandwich from the remains of the luncheon roast chicken, scalded the Twining creature. Then I softly carried my bever to the study on a tray, helped by moonlight to toe-on the footswitch of the standard lamp. It was not urgency but curiosity, as well as a disquiet that would clarify itself later, that made me want to look again at the story of the priestly miracle. I munched while I searched for the three volumes of my collected shorter fiction, beautifully leatherbound and tooled, my American publisher's ten-year-old Christmas gift. That it was in the second volume I knew, since the first was given over to tales with a European setting, the third to the harvest of my Eastern travels, and the second to the Americas. The event on which the story had been based had taken place in Chicago in the twenties, this I knew, but the title I had totally forgotten. It turned out to be Laying on 0f Hands and the style more slipshod even than I remembered. A thousand-dollar effort done hastily for a long-dead illustrated monthly. I read with shame, sipping and chewing, trying to reach the tones of a reality under the shabby professionalism.

The faceless and nameless narrator (I apologise to those who know the story already) is a British journalist visiting Chicago to write about the Reverend Elmer Williams, publisher of Lightnin', a periodical devoted to the exposure of gangsterism and corrupt politics. In the foyer of the Palmer House Hotel he renews acquaintance with a priest, Father Salvaggiani, whom he knew ten years previously on the Italian front, the priest a chaplain, the journalist an ambulance driver. The priest, a fat undistinguished little man who smells of garlic and speaks comic English, is distressed. He has come all the way from Italy to see his brother, who is dying in a private ward in a hospital from multiple cranial fractures and ice-pick wounds in the stomach. The narrator realises that the brother, Ed Salvaggiani, is a noted gangster and, scenting material for a little colour story, goes along to the hospital with the priest. Father Salvaggiani gives his brother the final comforts of the Church and, knowing that he cannot last much longer, weeps. Passing through a public ward he hears terrible screams from a child dying of tuberculous meningitis. The doctors shake their heads: nothing can be done. But Father Salvaggiani lays his hands on the child and prays. The screaming lessens and eventually ceases and the sufferer falls into a deep sleep. To the surprise of the doctors there is a progressive improvement, recorded each day as the priest comes to weep over his dying brother. The brother dies but the child recovers. The faithful among the hospital staff do not doubt that this was a miracle. But Father Salvaggiani talks, in his comic English, of the terrible unintelligibility of God's will. Why could he do nothing for his brother, whom he loved, and yet be the agent of divine mercy for a total stranger? Perhaps the Lord intends this child to grow into a vessel of his own redemptive purpose and has used this meanest of his priestly servants to defeat nature and initiate the accomplishment of that end. He thinks these thoughts aloud at his brother's funeral, a great affair of flowers and unshaven mourners. The narrator thinks such speculations are idle. Life is a mystery and God probably does not exist.

I fitted a cigarette into my holder and flared Ali's lighter, which, for some reason, I had brought down with me in my dressing-gown pocket. There was hardly a table in the whole house that did not have its own cigarette box and matching heavy Ronson, Queen Anne silver or chunky onyx. Ali ought to be pleased. I thought about the story and could not for the life of me reassemble all the historical facts upon which the fiction was founded. There had certainly been a magazine called Lightnin', and its publisher had been the Reverend Elmer Williams. Father Salvaggiani had really been Monsignor Campanati, at that time a kind of wandering chairman of the Association for the--was it the Propagation of the Faith? His elder brother, Raffaele, had indeed died of gangster violence in Chicago, but as a loud and annoying voice of decency and incorrupt politics. I had been in Chicago, staying at the Palmer House, but not to write about brave crusaders against cruel racketeers. I had come to see the Manet and Monet and Renoir collection of the Chicago grande dame Mrs Potter Palmer, so much I remembered. To write about it? To buy from it? Sell to it? This had disappeared from my mind. I saw clearly still the agonised face of Raffaele, whom I had, though with certain qualifications, admired but who had never much cared for me. This had everything to do with my homosexuality, which, in the manner of decent Latins, he believed was a matter of free election in brutal sinfulness. Carlo was never so censorious. He never saw my homosexuality in, as it were, action; he was not inclined to be interested in stories retailed about me. The sins of libido he knew of were strictly limited to the heterosexual sphere and were two in number. If men desired little boys or each other, that was because they were deprived of the company of women. Or perhaps, though rarely, they might have been set upon by exorcizable demons of buggery. As for those with a holy vocation who had chosen the celibate way, God's grace sustained them like quinine, and that was that. Of such is the kingdom. I Campanati were a highly moral family, except for the youngest boy, Domenico, whom my sister married. The only daughter, Luigia, became a very martinetish mother superior.

Which hospital had it been? Had the miracle, if it was a miracle, been after all so spectacular? Was the disease in my story the same as the disease in fact? Might it not have been some disease not quite so lethal, its course reversible under the influence of a powerful benign will united to the wavering will of the sufferer? I had, of course, no real need to puzzle all this business out; I was under no obligation at all to help turn Carlo Campanati, a good but greedy man, into a saint. But there was this niggling matter of the truth. The term truth did not flood my eyes as did faith and duty and sometimes home, but a man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth, and, though my days in the service of language were over, I could not deny the other, timeless, allegiance. But I was less concerned now with that deeper truth, the traditional attribute of God, which literature can best serve by telling lies, than with the shallower truth we call factuality. What had happened in Chicago? I was not sure.

There were records. There had been witnesses. They could be found, consulted, though with trouble. But the real question for me was: how far could I claim a true knowledge of the factuality of my own past, as opposed to pointing to an artistic enhancing of it, meaning a crafty falsification? In two ways my memory was not to be trusted: I was an old man, I was a writer. Writers in time transfer the mendacity of their craft to the other areas of their lives. In that trivial area of barroom biographical anecdotage, it is so much easier and so much more gratifying to shape, reorder, impose climax and denouement, augment here, diminish there, play for applause and laughter than to recount the bald treadmill facts as they happened. Ernest Hemingway, as I remembered well (but what do I mean by remembering well?), reached a stage where, even though he had virtually ceased to produce fiction, he was totally in thrall to its contrivances. He told me, and he was only in his fifties at the time, some years my junior, that he had slept with the beautiful spy Mata Hari and that she had been "good though a little heavy in the thigh." I knew, and records could confirm, that Hemingway had not yet even paid his first visit to Europe at the time when Mata Hari was executed.

I had, it is true, been in the habit of keeping certain records, especially in my first twenty years as a professional writer of fiction. The little notebook in the waistcoat pocket, Samuel Butler said, betokens the true writer. And so I had jotted down mots, ideas for stories, descriptions of leaves, the flue on women's arms, dogmerds, the play of light on gin bottles, slang, technical terms, naked factualities of time and place (the better to fix some extraordinary, to use Jim Joyce's term, epiphany), and these notebooks survived, though not in my possession. The notebooks of Kenneth Marchal Toomey were lodged in the archives of some American university, to be published--probably with all the trimmings of scholarship--after my death. I did not object to the opening up of the junkshop of my brain when that brain had ceased to be mine and had become merely part of the economy of the soil; for the present, considerations of reserve and privacy prevailed. Now which was the university? There were letters to and from that university on file, also details of the few thousand dollars paid for the dubious treasure, but my files, thanks to the hurried move from Tangier but also, and mainly, to Geoffrey's inefficiency, were in total disorder. I did not want to bring on another heart attack by insisting on at least a minimal sorting-out, though Geoffrey could be reminded of his grudging promise of the afternoon. What afternoon? What day? Did I? Geoffrey lived entirely in the present; he had shed, perhaps wisely in his case, the burden of being burdened by memory. No, not strictly true: he remembered, far more clearly than I, what it suited him to remember. I trembled again as I remembered what things he had decided to remember about me.

Best let Carlo achieve sainthood through other miracles, better attested. But then faith and duty trumpeted a muted two-part invention in a chamber of my brain. Saint Gregory, enthroned to some extent by grace of the attestations of K. M. Toomey, Companion of Honour, pray for us. Pray for me, hypocrite, lecher, waster of seed in sterile embraces. Not just faith (lacking now, long volitionally discarded, but, because of a new and final sterility, contemplating return). Not just duty (servant of faith and hence disregarded, but reread that last sentence). Fear then, a kind of fear.

I knew what I would find in Geoffrey's office. A ghastly mess of toppling files, a snow of unopened letters, corded bundles of the same, books, periodicals, press cuttings, earnest theses with titles like K. M. Toomey and the Thanatic Snydrome, filing cabinets lying on their sides like dead square dogs (K. M. Toomey and Figurative Ineptitude), empty bottles, heel-ground cigarette ends, a desk covered with "gay" periodicals showing naked simpering boys and frank scenes of pedication, a chair sticky as with semen. Nevertheless, I took several deep breaths, and then some Peveril of the Peak watered from the tap in my adjoining washroom. Then I softfooted into the hallway, passed the bar, and entered Geoffrey's office. I switched on the light, whose rawness flooded the foul leer of chaos. I expected to be appalled but not so appalled as I was.

CHAPTER 9

The crackling of the letter in my left dressing-gown pocket was a crackling as of fire. But I was maintaining calm pretty well. The letter had, to cool the metaphor, ignited my cerebral engine, which was throbbing away nicely. I had everything worked out, I thought. When Ali rose at dawn, he found me seated at the kitchen table sipping Blue Mountain. He respected, as ever, my preference for total morning silence and merely nodded a buenos dIas. Nor was he surprised to see me there so early: he knew my scant need of sleep. He nodded and nodded as I poured coffee into another cup, added ample sugar, filled a glass with orange juice from the refrigerator, and put the two eye-openers on a tray. Geoffrey's were the eyes that had to be opened. I left the kitchen, balancing the tray with an admirable (I admired) control of nerves, and mounted to the master bedroom.

Geoffrey lay across the bed, his head over the edge like a man lapping from a pool. I put down the tray and shook him. He made foul noises and at last awoke, blinking down at the floor as if wondering what it was. Then he forced himself onto his back in a crucifixion posture, groaned, coughed, blinked rapidly, then almost sightlessly grasped the orange juice I proffered. He drained it blind, smacked, shuddered, belched, shivered, sighed deeply and handed back the emptied glass. I gave him his coffee. He was half awake now.

He sipped, then muttered "Cat piss." He did not mean the coffee. "Mouth like a fucking all-in wrestler's jockstrap. Awfully kind, dear." I sustained my morning silence. "Any more there?" He blinked for the tray and, he hoped, coffeepot. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it with Ali's lighter. He coughed long and obscenely and then said, "Better. Much." Then he lay down again and smoked, rolling the dirty whites of his eyes at me. "To what do I owe the inestimable so to speak fucking honour?" I cleared my throat and spoke my first words of the day, saying: "Last night you asked me for ten thousand pounds."

"Did I? Did I really? A nocturnal inspiration, as they say." And then, "Oh yes, my God, last night. Behaved badly, I seem to recall. It was that bloody Maltese raisin jam and vinegar." He recalled more. "Ah yes, indeed." He appraised me, who was sitting on the edge of the bed. "You seem fit, dear. Does you good, that sort of fuse-blow, so it would appear, yes. Must do it more often. What's that about ten thousand pounds?"

"Geoffrey," I said. "Listen with very great care and do not say anything until I have finished. First, you shall have your ten thousand pounds."

"Jesus Beelzebub, are you serious?"

"I said no interruptions, didn't I? Attention now, please, close attention."

"Hanging on to your lips, sir."

"In the early hours I was in your office, which, I may say, was and still is in an unbelievable state of squalor and disorder. It was by sheer chance that I found this letter on the floor, a cigarette-end crushed into it by, I presume, your heel." I took out the dirty envelope and, from that, the letter. "This is from Everard Huntley in Rabat."

"That shit."

"Geoffrey, please. You have no conception of the effort I am expending on keeping calm. I will not read out the letter, which is to me but altogether concerns you. I will merely tell you what it says. It says that a certain Abdulbakar called on the British consulate in great and indeed tearful distress. He spoke of the death of his son, Mahmud."

Geoffrey went terribly pale and whispered, "Oh bloody Jesus."

"Yes, Geoffrey, the injuries you inflicted in what you termed play proved lethal. This letter, I must inform you, is already a month old, and I have no knowledge of what has happened since. However. Abdulbakar quickly modulated his distress to cries and angry shouts and demands that justice be done. He expected justice to be done by the consular representative of Her Britannic Majesty. First, though, he had gone searching for you in Tangier, finding at length our house, only just vacated by us and already in the possession of the expatriate painter Withers."

"Oh Christ, get on with it."

"That was while Mahmud, poor boy, was still alive and in hospital with an even chance of recovery after his operation."

"What operation for God's sake? Oh Christ, yes--"

"Abdulbakar had only a garbled version of your name. My name fits easily into Arabic, as you know. The teller of tales Tumi, so said Withers, had departed. Abdulbakar will have no difficulty in finding out where he is now, though Huntley kindly kept quiet about it. Huntley says that you, Geoffrey, are in grave danger."

"Bugger it, I wasn't the only one. You had a go at pocky little Mahmud yourself, prissy bastard that you are."

"Abdulbakar's instinct is not to leave justice to the law, which he, reasonably considering his background, does not trust."

"Bloody pimp. Pimping for his own kid, bastard."

"He is much more likely, thinks Huntley, to effect, or try to effect, or have effected, a wild justice of his own. Of course, in desperation at not being able to afford a fare to Malta, where he will have no trouble, incidentally, in finding the house of Tumi, he may bring in the police. You cannot be charged with murder, perhaps not even with manslaughter, but there is a very nasty penalty attached in most countries to Grievous Bodily Harm Resulting in Death. Extraditable, surely. Have I made myself clear so far?"

"Right, right, I've got to skip."

"If I were you I should get washed, shaved, dressed and packed now. This is goodbye, Geoffrey. You're leaving the place you detest so much. A plane departs for London at midday. With luck you should get a seat on that plane. You must first go to Sliema to the travel agency on the High Street. I am making out a check for you, in Maltese pounds. I shall give you another check, on the National Westminster Bank, Stanhope Gate, to cover expenses in London prior to your leaving London and travelling to the United States. That check will also take care of a return ticket, tourist class of course, to Chicago via New York. I trust you are taking all this in."

"Chicago? Chic--What the fucking hell am I to go to Chicago for? Return, you said. I'm to return here? To get fucking done in by Abdulfucking bakar?"

"There's a job of work you have to do for me in the United States. I'll give you yet another check on the Chemical Bank, New York, for five thousand dollars. You may have to travel around, it all depends on what you discover in Chicago. As for return, I mean return to London. In London you will render your report, to me in person--Wignall asked me when I was coming home, I did not think I would be coming home so soon--and, if I find you have worked diligently, you will be given a final check. This will be for the ten thousand pounds you ah desiderated last night."

Geoffrey was on his second cigarette and in control of the situation, lolling easy, even faintly grinning. "Such fucking decency and ah charity, such a colossal change of heart." As he would not be sleeping here again, he stubbed the cigarette out on the polished cedarwood of the bedside table.

"I have plenty of money, Geoffrey. You know exactly how much is in the British account. I found the most recent bank statement mixed up with your pornographic magazines. Cognate, I suppose you would say, equally exciting or obscene reading. I have other accounts too, of which even you know nothing. I think, for all my wealth, that ten thousand pounds is sufficiently generous. But you have to do a little work for it. Not hard, but, to me, important."

"What work, dear?"

"I'll tell you over breakfast. It has something to do with the archbishop's visit of yesterday."

"Oh fucking Christ. Very well, sir. I shall get up." And he got out of bed, naked, not hairy, running to fat (why running? Geoffrey never ran). The living had been too easy for him.

CHAPTER 10

It was the tooth that had begun to twinge at the Ovingtons' dinner party. It was now aching intolerably, and the gum above it was swollen and tender. The tooth itself was loose. An abscess, probably. Cognac quietened it, also some essence of cloves that Ali bought me from Grima or Borg the pharmacist, conveniently next door to my house. Toothache was, I supposed, a kind of luxury to a man of my age. My father had been a dental surgeon; he had lectured his children on the importance of healthy dentition as other men lectured theirs on the importance of getting on in the world and being discreet where they could not be moral. For all that, I had never taken special care of my teeth, yet here I was in my eighty-second year with twenty-six of them, discoloured but sharp and sound, except for this rebellious premolar. I thought that even this might be saved, but I could not risk going to a strange dentist, the waiting room full of aromatic Maltese, in Birkirkara or Valletta. I needed my regular dentist, Dr. Pes, on the Piazza Bologna in Rome. Pes is a Sardinian name, less fitting for a dental surgeon perhaps than a podiatrist. A monied gentleman of my generation naturally kept faith with such tenders of his health, comfort and utilitarian needs as had proved their own faith in the metaphysics of skill and quality. Distance no object. Teeth in Rome, silk shirts in Kuala Lumpur, leather goods in Florence, tea in Mincing Lane. I had to go to Rome, unaccompanied.

Both the pain and the prospect of travelling for the cure of its cause had come at the right time. I was lonely without Geoffrey, and not even his behaviour at the airport, a final and spectacular performance as it were, could altogether quell my bitter affection. Ali and I took him there in plenty of time for his plane, and this perhaps was a mistake. First he quarrelled with the police who wanted to stamp his passport with an exit chop, shouting that he refused to have anything further of his defiled by the fucking Maltese, and what would they do if he wouldn't have it, shove him in bloody jail? He got away with an undefiled passport but, in the bar, he treated me and all around us to a loud recapitulation, based loosely on the visas and entry permits in his passport, of the more scandalous elements of our life together. "New York, dear, and that pissy-arsed publisher of yours who tried to stop me going to the fistfuck party, dangerous he said, lethal, stupid sod. Toronto, that was where we had little whatsit at the same time, remember, lovely kind of henna colour, half-Indian half-French, not an ounce of bloody Anglo-Saxon blood, remember." He got drunk very rapidly on undiluted Pernod. "The man on the Washington Post who once had it off with a ghost. At the point of orgasm the pale ectoplasm shrieked 'Coming I'm coming--almost.'"We soon had the bar to ourselves.

"That's your plane there, Geoffrey."

"Got to unload the bugger first, haven't they? Too right they have. Time for another ah ah imbibition."

"Have you got eyerything?"

"Too right, sport." He slapped and slapped the old Gucci case I had given him as a parting present. "All in here positively aching to be encashed. And all the Pope Buggerlugs twaddle."

Geoffrey was the last to board the plane. He attempted to give the airport staff a voluble account, highly rhetorical and very loud, of my virtues, summing the vices up in: "Sentimentality and bloody prissiness as well as fucking ingrained hypocrisy, product of a bad bloody period. Apologies, ladies, for that bloody period. No, I don't fucking apologise. Malta is bloody lucky to have great international writer on its sanctimonious soil. And to Malta this." The lip fart he let off was monstrous; at the same time he pronged two devil's horn fingers at the roof. "Up all of yours and the very best of British arseholing luck. Look after Toomey, you bastards." At last he could be seen weaving across the tarmac, while the engine turned over and the ground menials waited to wheel away the steps. He tried to do a kind of staircase dance but was at length persuaded to get aboard. I did not envy either the stewardess or his fellow passengers.

And then the toothache. As I was here I might as well book my passage to Rome. I would have to wait till the day after tomorrow, I was told. Two parties of Maltese going off for a papal blesssing. I collected my ticket and paid by check. When I got back to the car Ali and I looked at each other. I had no doubt of Ali's cordial detestation of Geoffrey, but Ali had never indicated, in word, gesture, sigh or eyelift, his dislike or resentment. But now Ali nodded at me, his eyes fully on mine, took in a quart of air and then released it swiftly. "Home," I said, or rather "A casa." There was nothing in that to bring tears to my eyes. Halfway home the bad tooth sang a forte measure of rage. It was a prompt surrogate for Geoffrey. One o'clock, June 24, 1971. My eighty-second year lay all before me.

CHAPTER 11

"The point is, Father," I said, "that I shall never have any hope of making a good act of contrition. Not until the urge fails, or libido, as some call it. And why, for that matter, should I have to be contrite about the way God made me?"

Father Frobisher, S.J., gave me another glass of Amontillado. That was kind of him, because sherry was short, everything was short and growing shorter. We sat in an ugly dark parlour on Farm Street. My chair was a penitentially hard Windsor, but his was big and deep as a bed, old and with creaking springs, covered in dirty chintz. It was just before that green and muggy Christmas of 1916, when full graveyards were promised. Just one month before, the battle of the Somme had ended, with British losses estimated at nearly half a million. A green Christmas represented a kind of civilian expiation.

Father Frobisher said, "Who was it who sent you to me?"

"A man called Hueffer, Ford rather--he changed his name because of the war. An editor, poet, novelist." Father Frobisher frowned, couldn't seem to recall the man.

He said, "I've had one or two shall I say literary personages sent to me with precisely your problem. It's always such people who have the problem. Actors, too, though not musicians. You're a writer?"

"A novelist, reviewer, that sort of thing."

"Well, the situation is the same for writers as for dustmen, if dustmen ever have this problem, which I doubt. Heavy exercise and beer, Mr Toomey, are remarkable solvents of of of." He was a heavy man and could have carried dustbins himself with ease. His scalp was nearly nude but his eyebrows thrust out stiff filaments in all directions. His clerical black was filthy. "Holy Writ," he said, "is perfectly clear about the way God made us. Male and female created He them. The sexual urge was designed for the peopling of heaven with human souls. Aberrations are the work of men, not God. God gives us free will. We use it or we abuse it. You, from what you tell me, have been abusing it."

"You're wrong, Father. With respect. I did not will myself into being the way I am. From puberty on I was driven away from what the world and the Church would call the sexual norm."

"Have you prayed?"

"Of course I've prayed. Prayed to be attracted to what I find distasteful. Prayed even sometimes to be led into the carnal sins of the norm."

"You must never pray to be led into temptation, Mr Toomey." He pulled out a cheap snuffbox and offered it to me. I did not know whether it represented an alternative to sex or a type of sensual temptation. I shook my head. He fed a great pinch of what looked like white dust, though it smelt of pepperment, into each of his hairy nostrils. Then he carked and spluttered and pleasurably shivered. He drew a handkerchief of surprising snowiness from his sleeve and trumpeted into it. Then he said, with the smugness of one who has overcome the flesh, "I think you make too much of sexuality. It is a fault of your generation. Of the artists and poets of your generation. You have read the poems of Rupert Brooke? Distressingly--physical."

"Heterosexually so. He's paid for all that, Father." He had too, at Skyros the previous year. "Perhaps," I said, "we make too much of sexuality, as you put it, because there's so much death going on. Oh, I know what you'll say--that my sort of sexuality is sterile. But there's only the one fundamental urge. Alma Venus, and so on."

"Why," he said, as impertinently as any strange woman on a bus, "are you not in the army?"

"You mean that an army chaplain would know more of my problem? Or that an untimely death might solve it? The fact is," I said, "that the medical officers don't care much for my heart. The rhythm is irregular. Doubtless, if we have any more Somme disasters, it will be heard to beat healthful enough music. But may I return to the problem? What does the Church say?"

"First," Father Frobisher said very briskly, his hands folded in his lap and his thumbs rolling round each other, "all fornication is sinful outside the married state. You are therefore in ah the same position as any any any."

"Yes, but a normally sexed person can at least marry rather than burn. I cannot marry. Marriage would be a mockery and a sin. Yes, a sin."

"I will indulge your ah ah metaphor. But there is no knowing what the love and yes help of a good woman might achieve. You must pray for God's grace. You have no right to assume that your present present present represents a permanent and unchangeable state. God's mercy works strangely. You know nothing of what the future holds. You are still very young."

"Twenty-six, father."

"You are still very young. But old enough, may I say, to be beyond the expectation, I say the expectation--"

I finished it for him impatiently. "The expectation of loopholes, the hope of clauses of exemption and distinguished precedents, and all the rest of it." Just behind Father Frobisher and seeming, in his post-snuff tranquillity, to be riding on the apex of his scalp, was a dim reproduction of Michelangelo's Last Judgment--a Christ with wrestler's shoulders condemning everybody, impervious to his blessed mother's pleas, the painter himself standing in the foreground of the blessed, though as Saint Bartholomew grasping his own flayed-off hide. "Where," I asked, "is Michelangelo? In hell? He had dealings with men and wrote passionate sonnets about homosexual love. God made him what he was, a homosexual and an artist. He's one of the glories of the Church. Am I not right in supposing that the Church used to take the sins of the flesh less seriously, in a humane spirit of humorous resignation? There was a bishop, I've forgotten his name, who spoke of a man and a girl in a garden of a May morning, and if God would not forgive it he would. Meaning, I think, that God would forgive it. If God cares at all, which I doubt."

Father Frobisher spoke loud words now. "God does care. Man bears in himself the miracle of the seed planted there by the Creator. The power of generating new human souls for God's kingdom. The wanton spilling of the seed in the sin of Onan, or in the pseudo-Hellenic embraces of your your your." Then: "I never heard of this bishop. But he referred to a man and a girl. You must give up this deadly sin. You must vow never to commit it again. Do you hear me?"

"I have," with equal loudness, "regularly vowed to give it up. I have gone dutifully to confession once a month, sometimes more, and repented of impure thoughts or impure acts. And then I have regularly fallen again. This cannot go on forever."

"It certainly cannot. It certainly."

"So I have to make a choice. It is not easy. Are you, Father, a Catholic from your cradle?"

"That is not to the purpose. But no, I am a convert. As Newman was a convert. But it is not to the."

"My father too is a convert. He became a Catholic when he married my mother, who is French. But on my mother's side I look back to a thousand years or more of unswerving devotion to the faith. Oh, there was the odd deviation--Catharism, Jansenism, if that's truly a deviation. But now I face the breaking of my mother's heart, since I cannot both be true to my nature as God made it and a faithful son of the Church. For even if I committed myself, as you have done, to a life of celibacy, where would be my spiritual reward? I lack your vocation. I have another vocation, at least I consider it to be that, but it can't be fulfilled in priestly seclusion from the life of the flesh. To which God do I listen--the God who made me what I am or the God whose voice is filtered through the edicts of the Church?"

"There is no difference, you must not say that, this is wholly wholly wholly."

I looked at him disbelieving for a second, hearing the wrong word.

"Heretical, blasphemous," picking up the Amontillado bottle. "It is finished," he said, in the very tones he would have used on Good Friday. Then: "We are living in terrible times. Thousands, millions, dead on the battlefields of Europe, the German blockades attempting to starve us into submission. There are men coming back from the front maimed, limbless, their lungs rotted with gas, blind, paralysed, physically condemned to celibacy. Who are you to talk of a spiritual reward?"

I sighed and, without seeking permission, lighted a Gold Flake with a Swan vesta. He had himself taken in tobacco, and in a dirtier form. I blew out smoke with the pleasure he had shown in carking on the irritant. One substance, two forms. "I have to put it all off," I said. "Faith, grace, salvation. Perhaps when I'm sixty, if I reach that age, and the fires are burnt out, perhaps then I can come back. What did Saint Augustine pray--to be made pure, but not yet?"

"This is no occasion for frivolity or cynicism. You're in deadly peril."

"I no longer believe that, Father," I said, but the hand holding the Gold Flake shook. "Thank you for your time and help. For you have helped."

"I think you had better come back and see me again. Next week. Having prayed and meditated. Pray to our Holy Mother for the grace of purity. She will listen."

"Embarrassing, Father. I'd prefer to address a saint who knew about these things. Are there any? Or perhaps Our Lord himself. He, if what Renan hints at is true--"

"I know what you're going to say. Don't say it. I see already the way you're going. God help you. You've withdrawn, by a perverse act of the will, from the opportunity of grace. So quickly can these things happen. Come, we'll kneel, we'll pray together now." And he got up from his creaking chair and indicated the fireside rug.

"No, Father. Too late. Or too soon. It won't be easy, I can assure you. I'll always have a kind of--" It was my mother's language that came out, though the English word was available. "--nostalgie. But I can't come home. Not yet. Not for a long time yet." And I got out of the place as quickly as I could.

CHAPTER 12

The above must not, of course, be taken as a verbatim account of what happened. I cannot remember the name of the priest or whether the cigarettes I smoked in those days were Gold Flake or whether he or I took tobacco in that Farm Street room, one substance, two forms. But the gist is true. I walked through Mayfair shakily, with the sense that my feet belonged to somebody else, and my haed spun as though it were with a doctor's negative prognosis. On Berkeley Street the Star poster of a newspaper vendor said NIVELLE REPLACES JOFFRE. Yes, of course, there was a Great War going on, and here I had been trying to reconcile my sexual urges with my religious faith. LLOYD GEORGE WAR CABINET SITS. I turned onto Piccadilly. Outside Green Park station holly and chrysanthemums were being sold. A barrel organ in a side street played "Keep the Home Fires Burning." A middle-aged woman of the governing classes, whaleboned rigid, her hat a froth of feathers, gave me a hard look. She saw a fit, even jauntily fit, young man in a good grey suit with an open grey dustcoat, the wide-brimmed hat of the "arty" set back on his head like a halo. I bought an evening paper in the station and went down the stairs to get my train to Baron's Court. A trio of Tommies on leave, tipsy, their uniform collars undone, came up abreast and forced me to press myself against the stairrail. One of them began to sing, and the others raggedly joined in: "You was with the wenches When we was in the trenches Afacing our German Joe--"

It might or might not have been meant for me.

In the train I opened my paper and read: On getting into the flat the prisoner lit a gas fire, sat on a chair, and then committed the offence complained of. Witness did not say anything but tried several times to get away, but prisoner pulled him back. Prisoner kissed him and gave him a shilling, also a screwdriver, telling him the latter was a keepsake from him.

That was Norman Douglas of the English Review, to which I sometimes contributed. Douglas, who was getting on for fifty, spent much of his spare time picking up little boys. He had been unlucky on this occasion. I was no casual pederast and would never, I believed, put myself in danger; still, I shivered. I had said goodbye to my warm loving mother and elected for cold, uncertainty, sin, the horror of the normal and respectable, their claws, latent but acute.

How ironic it was that the small reputation I had so far made for myself had begun with the publication of a novel considered heterosexually assertive, also daring, even scandalous. This was, as some of you may know, Once Departed, published by Martin Secker (three printings of 1,500 each, with 4,000 sets of sheets sold to the United States). The epigraph was from FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám ("You know how little time we have to stay...") and the story dealt (deals, I should say, but I cannot help thinking of the book as a dead letter) with a young man due to die from an incurable though not superficially obnoxious disease who is determined to drain the cup before he goes. His sexual exploits, with girls great-limbed and firmbreasted under their 1911 carapaces, their hair tumbling in an odorous cataract on the removal of the innumerable pins, I described with a suggestiveness regarded as shocking by many, and the invocation of the powers of the Public Prosecutor was seriously urged in, I think, John Bull. It was a tyro work, published just after my twentysecond birthday, and it was composed as a cold and deliberate exercise in the presentation of heterosexual passion. It was assumed by many, especially by the young women I met at parties, that it mirrored my own tastes and appetites. I told no one that I could bring myself to compose the more intimate scenes only by imagining them as homosexual, though this was sometimes difficult with torrents of scented hair and swinging breasts getting in the way. What, of course, I was trying to prove was the limitlessness of the creative artist's province, his capacity for imagining feelings and situations totally beyond his personal encompassment.

This young man who was, cynically some might think, prepared to force his name on the reading public with a work of scandalous eroticism (or what passed for it in the year of Pygmalion, the loss of the Titanic, and Scott's last expedition) was still a deeply religious being, confessing and communicating weekly, hearing mass on occasions when the Church did not oblige him to, scrupulous in examining his conscience nightly, always on guard against sin. He had, naturally, no control over his dreams, which tended to the homosexually extravagant, nor over the spontaneous floodings of semen which they occasioned. The books he wrote and intended to write could, he considered, be justified as cathartics, or warnings (the hero of Once Departed died, or dies, not of his fatal disease but of knife wounds in a Madagascar brothel). My second novel, Before the Hemlock, dealt with Socrates and Alcibiades and had naked males embracing offstage, but Socrates was found guilty of the corruption of youth and condemned to death. My novels could, in a word, at a pinch, be defended as instruments of morality. And yet I suppose they had something to do with my spiritual corruption, my eventual ability to throw off faith by an act of the will. But my sexual orientation was the true instigator of apostasy. God forced me to reject God.

Yet in the time of my faith I was, and I must make this clear, faithful to a degree hardly known in the countries of the Mediterranean (which Norman Douglas maintained to be, to their credit, wholly pagan), though Catholics of the North have not infrequently exercised belief to the excruciating limit. Having accepted the major premise about the divine foundation of the Church, they must of need accept everything it teaches, from Limbo to Ember Days. I had no doubt at all that, if I persevered in the sexual courses which had been planted on my inescapable path, I would end in hell. I knew what hell was: it was having an infinitude of teeth drawn without cocaine. It was a live coal falling on my six-year-old fingers when I was picking a celluloid blow-football ball out of the grate. But, since God had made me homosexual, I had to believe that there was another God forbidding me to be so. I may say also that I had to believe there were two Christs--one the implacable judge of the Sistine fresco, the other the mild-eyed friend of the disciple John. You will not be surprised to know that this second Christ played occasional parts in my erotic dreams.

However and anyway, as I climbed the steps of the station at Baron's Court, it was with the guilty lightness of one who knows he has gone the way he had to go. I had done my best, the God of the Church could hardly deny it. He and the God of my glands were, perhaps at that moment, conferring about my case. They would have to conclude that I must be left alone to practice a vocation (in the service of a divine attribute) which was inconsistent with celibacy and that a deathbed repentance was more than in the cards. So there it was, Deo gratias.

Now, entering the apartment house on Baron's Court Road, climbing the stairs to my top-floor flat, I was free to think about another kind of faith or faithfulness. Val Wrigley was to spend the night with me, as he did at least once a month. We were friends, we were lovers, but he was not free to enter the homosexual equivalent of the married state. He was nineteen years old and lived at home with possessive parents. He was a poet by vocation and worked in Willett's bookshop on Regent Street. He was fair, delicate, and very beautiful. He was fine-skinned and weak-lunged. He had read an article I had contributed to the English Review on the poetry of Edward Thomas and had written me a letter saying that he had thought himself to be the only admirer of Thomas's work and he took the liberty of enclosing three little poems much, he believed, in Thomas's style. One of the poems, as I seem to remember, contained the lines: I had not thought to hear A thrush in the heart of Ealing Like a heart throbbing, unsealing My waxed London ear.

We met for tea and buns in a shop of the Aerated Bread Company and then went to the Queen's Hall where, I think, the first British performance of Le Sacre du Printemps was given. I may be wrong, but I seem to associate the final movement with his cool hand touching mine in excitement. We became lovers almost at once.

He was able to spend the occasional night with me because his parents (his home, of course, was in Ealing) believed he did voluntary duty at the tea urn in the Salvation Army all-night troops' canteen at Euston station. He shared the shift, so he told his parents on my recommendation, with a nice harmless bookish man called Toomey. This was not too risky a tale: his parents, who had no right of access to a troops' canteen, could never check on it, and he could discuss rue and recount my dicta without fear. In other words, he would not have to lie too much. "And this Mr Toomey, dear--is he married?"

"I don't know, Mother, I never asked."

"You must ask him to tea sometime." But I never went to tea in Ealing. Val left my flat early to go home to breakfast looking dog-tired. The deception worked well.

I unlocked my flat door, went in, and lighted the gaslight and the gasfire. Mrs Pereira, my Portuguese landlady, had been in already to leave post--a couple of books for review and a letter from my mother in Battle, Sussex. It was Mrs Pereira's snooping privilege to enter whenever she liked, but she preferred the pretext of performing a little service. She regarded me as a good tenant--I paid regularly and never brought women into my room.

At seven Val knocked--three shorts and a long, out of the scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth--and I rushed to open. "I'm starved. What are you giving us, old thing?"

It was gas-ring cookery. "A kind of ragout. A tin of bully beef with onions and carrots. And the remains of the Médoc."

"I'm starved." Like myself, Val spoke with a slight lisp. Telling Geoffrey of my past, I had mentioned this. Geoffrey had been delighted and did a fine cruel parody. "Thuch ecthtathy."

"Yeth, it wath, wathn't it, my thweet thweet boy." Val threw his long limbs into the shabby armchair and read the paper. He was not much interested in the war news, except when it got into the literary columns with the deaths of poets. He was a little distrait this evening, peevish. He went through the pages irritably, going ts-ts occasionally. It was as if he expected to be mentioned in the paper and, through editorial enmity, was not.

"What's the matter, dear? A bad day in the shop?"

"Oh, the usual, old thing. The only books people want to buy are Beat the Hun in the Vegetable Plot and the Pip Squeak and Wilfred Annual. Which reminds me. What are you giving me for Christmas?"

"I hadn't thought. There's not much to buy, is there?"

"You hadn't thought, no. There are one or two things about. If you don't want the trouble of going round the shops, you could always give me the money, you know."

"What's the matter with you tonight, Val?" I set the ragout on the small round table by the window. A District Line train hammered by.

"Ah, I see this friend of yours is in trouble." He found the item about Norman Douglas. He came to the table reading it.

"He's no friend. A colleague, you could call him." I served; the ragout had a faint odour of metal.

"Wasn't careful, was he? I say, this stew thing smells of army mess tins or something."

"The bully's army issue. But the civilian stuff's just the same."

"Why can't we eat out occasionally? Soho or somewhere. It's not nice having to sleep in the odour of bully. And onions." He forked in the stew listlessly. He was supposed to be starved.

"What's into you, Val?"

"Not quite your usual loving boy, am I? Oh, I'm a little depressed. Hole in the corner stuff. Not much in life, is there?"

"Love, Val, love. Try this cider."

"Windy stuff. All right, a little. Ah, I wrote something today." And he took a scrap of paper from his inner pocket. "Listen.

Do ye the savage old law deny. Let me repay, in age or youth An infinitude of eyes for an eye, An infinitude of teeth for a tooth.

It needs tidying up a little, of course." He smiled, not at me, but in pleasure at his performance.

"Strafing Jesus again," I said. "I'm not impressed. Besides, that means nothing any more. I gave it all up today. I went to Farm Street and had it all out, or up. I made my choice. You can't shock me any more with your adolescent atheism."

"Fergus in the shop told me that in the army they split up the different religions by saying Catholics this side, C. of E. that, and fancy buggers in the middle. So you and I are now both fancy buggers." He giggled. "And you gave up Jesus for me."

"I gave up the Church because of the inescapability of living in sin. If you like, you can say I did it for you."

"Charmed, old thing. Awfully flattered." He forked his stew with a boy's spoiled pout making him look silly and ugly, also desirable. "I say, this is awful muck. Why don't we go and eat out? Celebrate being fancy buggers together."

"A matter of money, Val. I have exactly two shillings and ninepence farthing."

"Wouldn't take us very far, would it?"

"You said you were starved. This seems edible enough." I ate some. "Many a starving German would give his back teeth for it."

"Wouldn't need any teeth at all, would he? It's just mush." He spooned some of the thin grey sauce out of the ragout dish and deliberately let it slowly ooze onto the tablecloth.

"Don't do that, laundry costs money. That's a silly thing to do."

"Anyway, I don't believe the Germans are starving. I think it's just government lies. Oh, this horrible war. When's it going to be all over?"

"Nineteen nineteen. Nineteen twenty-one. Does it matter? You're not going to be in it."

"Nor are you. Well, I'm hungry, but not hungry enough for that muck. I think I'll go home. I can always say I'd a pain in my chest and they let me off tonight. Mother got a nice leg of lamb. Father managed to find some Christmas whisky for the butcher, ten years in the vat or something. Novelists don't have anything to barter, do they?"

"Nor poets."

"Except their lives, except their lives, except their lives. Die on the Somme or at Gallipoli and your poetic name is made forever. Still, I'm in the Keats tradition. A poet with phthisis."

"You're talking silly nonsense. You could have bread and margarine and jam if you like. And a nice cup of tea." I put my hand persuasively on his. He snatched his hand away. "What is the matter with you, Val?"

"I don't know. Don't maul me. I don't like being mauled."

"Val, Val." I got out of my chair and on my knees beside him. I took his hands, which were limp enough, and kissed each in turn, over and over.

"Slobberer. Making me all wet."

"There's something on your mind. Something's happened. Tell me."

"I'm going home." He started to get up, but I pushed him back into his chair, saying: "No. Don't say that. Don't break my heart."

"There speaks the popular novelist. 'And then he tried to take him in his arms, slobbering over him.' No, that's not popular novel stuff, is it? Not yet." (Did he say not yet? The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet. I nearly wrote, some lines back, "1918. November the something. Does it matter?")

"Be honest with me, Val, darling. Tell me what the matter is."

"Go and sit down. You must get used to not kneeling any more."

"Some things have to be done kneeling." It was a coarse thing to say; it was the spray off a mounting wave of desire. He ignored that but looked at me with a lifted upper lip. I went to the gas ring and put the kettle on for tea. I had no coffee.

Val said, "It's all take with you and no give."

"I give my love, my devotion. But I take it that you've begun to want more."

"Not me. Not want. I'm tired of having only an audience of one for my poems."

"Ah. I see. So you're letting that come between us. I've tried to place them, you know that. I've shown you the letters of rejection. But they all say you must keep on writing."

"Jack Ketteridge, that pal of Ezra Pound's. He's been given an old handpress. By someone both loving and generous."

"I'd give you an old handpress if I had one. I'd give you anything."

"I don't mean that, silly. I don't want a handpress. I want to be printed, not to print. Ketteridge is calling his little enterprise the Svastica Press. Apparently the svastica is a Hindu sun symbol. It means good luck too. He'll do my volume for twenty pounds. Two hundred copies. That's cheap, I think."

"So that's what all the sulks were about. I never give you anything. And you know I can't give you twenty pounds. Why don't you ask your father?"

"I prefer to go," Val said, "to those who say they love me. And I don't mean what my father calls love, which is just possession and bossiness."

"I'll get the money. Somehow. An advance on royalties, perhaps. Though I'm not really ready to start the next novel, the one I've told you about, the modern Abelard and Eloise--"

"I know, the man who has his pillocks blown off at Suvla Bay. I know too that you don't like taking money in advance. You've told me often enough about it making you resent doing the work when you've spent the money and thus doing it badly. I know, I know, Ken. You needn't bother. I just want you to know my motives, that's all."

My heart sank, the water bubbled cheerfully. Faith. Faithfulness. I had stemmed the thought at the very moment of unwinding the can of corned beef: what right had I to expect fidelity if I was myself withdrawing it? Superstition was already replacing faith. And here it was coming now, my punishment. Men are right to be superstitious. I said nothing for the moment, keeping my back to Val, making tea, weak tea because I was near the end of the packet of Lipton's Victory Blend. At length I said, in what in my fiction in those days ("And in your later days too, dear" Geoffrey) I would have termed a strangled voice: "Who is it?"

"I want you to understand me properly, Ken. Do turn round and look me in the eye. I want money, not for myself, but for what I think's important. Oh, I may be stupid thinking it's important, but it's all I have."

"You have me." I looked into the pot to see how the tea was drawing. "Had me."

"This is different, Ken, you old stupid, you know it's different. Anything for art. Bernard Shaw said something about it's right to starve your wife and children for the sake of art, art comes first."

"No, no, it doesn't." I poured two cups of tea and put canned milk and grey wartime sugar on the table. "Love first, faith, I mean fidelity. Who is it? I want to know who it is."

"You won't know him. He comes into the shop, he has an account. A great seeker of first editions of Huysmans. He knew Wilde, or so he says. Older than you, of course."

"And richer. Prostitute," I then said. "Whoring. You don't know what love is."

"Oh yes I do. It's eating corned beef stew, or not eating it, and then getting cramps in a single bed and smelling the ghost of onions at dawn. Sounds a bit like Blast, doesn't it? That Rhapsody on a Windy Night man. Well," and he cocked his head at me whorishly, "do you fancy a bit of a farewell tumble, dearie?"

"Why do you do this? Why?"

"Perhaps," he said solemnly, "it's to make you turn against me. That tea looks awful. Warm cat piss. One thing anyway. No more Saturday afternoon tumbles and the odd night with the onions. My dear father and mother have known nothing, guessed nothing. Caution, Ken, is it right to be so cautious? Well, no more caution. After the leg of lamb tonight--and I'd better go now or I'll have to eat it cold--I tell them I'm leaving. Yes, leaving. We always have dinner late and then father gets somnolent. This will wake him up."

I, during the above, moved with the slowness of a tired old man to the bed with its harlequin cover and sat on the edge. The tea steamed untasted. "You propose telling them you're going to live with another man?"

"Ah yes, but they're so innocent. They'll think: Well, at least he's not going off to live in sin with a woman. What I'll say is that I'm sick of living at home. I want to come home as late as I please. And if they say young, you're too young, I say: Yes, young, but not so young as some killed at Ypres and on the bloody Somme. This, I'll say, is the new age, the modern world. Two men sharing a flat in Bloomsbury. Though, between you and me, Ken dear, it isn't a flat. It's quite a nice little house full of books and bibelots."

"Who is it? I want to know who it is."

"You've asked that already, in exactly those words. 'A certain monotony of locution.' Who was the beastly reviewer who said that? Ah, the Times Lit Supp, wasn't it, no names no packdrill. Look, a last loving kiss and then I must fly. I'm starving."

And so he left me starving. I lay on the bed and wet the pillow. Then I smoked a cigarette (I had almost written: lighted a cigarette with Ali's Maltese cross present). I had given him no last loving kiss, the little whore. I brooded less on Val's perfidy than on the injustice of the what I would have called had the term been available then Sexual Establishment. Nothing to hold together two male lovers, or female either, no offspring, no sense of the perpetuation of a name and a family face over the centuries. But of course I had nothing to offer a wife or wife surrogate--no house, no income. The great clanking chains of Justice sounded from without, a Piccadilly Line train supplying the basic fantasizable datum. My washed eyes took in my mother's letter, the French scrivener's hand in violet ink on the envelope, the Battle postmark on the decollated head of George V. Home, warmth, the bleeding patients passing from the surgery through the hall, my mild father with blood on his hands, my mother's precise English with the Lille tonalities. I had gone out into the world and the world was making me bleed.

CHAPTER 13

My mother said in her letter that they were managing, but her heart was torn with the tearing of France. They had enough to eat, an advantage of living in a farming district, and Father, rather in the manner of Irish country doctors, was prepared to take his fees occasionally in eggs and butter. Tom, my brother, in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Boyce Barracks, had completed a gas corporal's course, whatever that was. My sister Hortense, named for my mother as I had been named for my father, had had as good a sixteenth birthday party as could be expected in these sugarless times. Father Callaghan of St. Anthony's in St. Leonards had heard from Dublin that his cousin Patrick's appeal had been rejected and that he was to hang for his part in the abortive rising of last Easter. My mother hoped I was happy in London and was herself so happy that I would be coming home for Christmas. If only Tom too could get leave, but that apparently was too much to ask for. All this was written in neat violet-inked French, making the news about Father Callaghan's cousin somewhat remote and literary, and even the butter and eggs seemed to belong to Un Coeur Simple.

I finished the letter, buried my head in the pillow for another passionate cry, this as much to do with lost innocence and the mess of the world as with Val's defection. Then I dried my tears, smoked another Gold Flake, and got up to look at my eyes in the cracked blue mirror of Mrs Pereira. Then I washed them in warm water from the kettle, soaking a tea towel corner for the purpose, and afterwards took several deep breaths. I had books for review; I could review them more comfortably in Battle than here, in the smell of onions and among the remembered smells and sounds of Val. I had money enough for a single fare to Battle; there was, I knew, a train from Charing Cross just after nine.

And so I packed my little bag, put on my arty hat and my warm coat, and went out into the dark that was crowned by a zeppelin moon to Baron's Court station. I travelled to Earl's Court, changed, arrived at Charing Cross. The station milled with soldiers and sailors, many of them drunk. There were whores in trim boots and boas, also grim respectable ladies ready with grim looks for fit young civilians. Such patriots had once been ready with white feathers, but there had been too much handing of that badge of cowardice to men blinded at Ypres not well able to understand the meaning of the proffer. I was looked at, but no more. I decided, as I sometimes did, to limp to the train. It was as much a certificate of immunity as a uniform.

There were not many on the Hastings train, and I had a compartment to myself. I was travelling back to my youth via Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, Frant, Stonegate, Etchingham, Robertsbridge, via defecting Val and two boys I had myself betrayed, the young man met on a station platform who had given me a look to which I had responded and about which I had been mistaken and who had shouted aloud and made me scurry off scarlet and trembling. I was travelling back to the origin of it all, my back turned for the moment (for I preferred perversely to sit facing the engine) to a future I did not care to think about.

I had been seduced at the age of fourteen in, of all places, the city where Father Callaghan's cousin was to be hanged. Not at the Thomas More Memorial School, where there were ravening priests enough and an Irish headmaster who did his share of cautious fumbling, but in a fair city which regularly exported its sexual perverts to London and Paris. We were all there in Ireland that June of my fourteenth birthday, Mother, Father, little Hortense and growing Tom, myself in a school blazer and flannel trousers and a blue cap with a TMMS badge in yellow stitching. For the evening I had a stiff grown-up-style suit that was becoming short in the leg. We stayed in the Dolphin Hotel. My father was taking his annual holiday early because he could find no locum tenens for July or August; also Tom had had severe bronchitis and had been recommended a quiet couple of weeks by the sea. My father had once enjoyed a stay in Kingstown, now called Dun Laoghaire, and my mother was curious to see an English-speaking Catholic capital. She had also read Les Voyages de Gulliver and been moved by the brief account of Swift's life prefixed to the edition she had. We stayed some days, as I remember, in Wicklow and then in Dublin before moving north to Balbriggan.

I was tired of poor still-coughing Tom and my noisy drawer-wetting little sister. My parents proposed a trip to the Phoenix Park; I elected to stay in the hotel, though the weather was gorgeous, and read an old bound Boy's Own Paper I had picked up for twopence on a bookstall. So I sat in the lounge of the Dolphin, sucked lemon toffee, read. I was alone there. From the bar came hearty noise, Dublin being a bibulous town. And then there was a man sitting quietly beside me. He was in early middle age (thirty-seven, as I was to discover later), bearded, wearing curious clothes that, again later, I found out were homespun. He had a rather pleasant smell of peat and peppermint overlaid with Irish whiskey (I knew even then the difference between Irish and scotch) and he seemed desirous of talking.

He said, "Reading, I see. But would you not consider it to be very trashy stuff?" For he could see it was the Boy's Own Paper.

"I like it. The stories are exciting."

"Yes, inculcating the imperial virtues, games and discipline and cold baths in a cold dawn. And all but the British very comic, comic niggers and froggies and even micks and paddies. Amn't I right?"

"Well, yes." I couldn't help smiling. What he said was a plausible, if biassed, summary of the ethos of the B. O. P.

"But you're young, of course, and out for excitement and not much concerned with the world as it truly is. How old would you be?"

"Nearly fourteen. Fourteen a week from today."

"A fine age to be, my boy, and the world before you. And there will be changes in your life, you will see." He had a pleasant soft voice with blurred consonants. "It will be a different world from what the trash you are reading bids you believe is the fixed and unchanging one. But never mind, never mind. In youth is pleasure." He searched in his pockets for something, perhaps a pipe or snuffbpx, and came up with a drawing of a pig lined like a map with frontiers and named regions--hock, ham, saddle and so on. "The Pig's Paper they call the journal I edit, not at all like the one you're reading. Our friend Sus scroja, Ireland's friend, the gintleman that pays the rent. I'm in damnable need of a wash and brush-up," he then said. "Are you staying in the hotel? A room of your own? Who's with you?" I told him of the Phoenix Park outing. "A bathroom up there, is there? I don't know the upper regions. I should be grateful if you'd show me the way."

So I took him upstairs and, to cut a long story short, he came into my room to borrow my comb for his beard, and said, all glowing from his wash, "Now there's just time to show you a bit of Irish wrestling from the County Meath, for I'm due soon at the offices of the Homestead. Now this we do stripped, as we may well do on a warm day like today. So strip then and I'll show you some of the holds." One of the holds involved what I was to learn later was called fellation, a term not found in the B. O. P. nor, for that matter, in any dictionary of the time. There seemed to be no Irish name for it, though this pigman used the word blathach for what was stimulated to burst and flow. He gave me a shilling for myself before leaving and said, "Now you may resume reading your imperialistic trash, though I'll wager it will seem less exciting after today." And, smiling kindly, he went.

Jim Joyce devoted a whole big novel to the Dublin day on which I was seduced. I have never been able to take this book seriously, as I told him myself in Paris. All the inner broodings and exterior acts of the work seem so innocent. I remember none of the public events described or reported--the viceregal cavalcade (though I seem to recall a distant military band shrilling and thudding), the charity bazaar fireworks, news about the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River and Throwaway winning the Ascot Gold Cup at very long odds, nor the evening rain nor the heaventree of stars appearing later hung with humid nightblue fruit. My mother that evening stayed in with the younger children; my father took me to see an excessively dull melodrama called Leah.

I said to Joyce in a bar in Paris in 1924: "Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library."

"I wouldn't want to call you a liar," Joyce said, his eyes as cloudy as the ghastly cocktail he had before him (absinthe with kümmel in lieu of water), "but I'd always thought Russell more likely to commit sodomy with a pig than a boy. Ach, the world is full of surprises."

I liked Jim Joyce but not his demented experiments with language. He threw away the chance of becoming a great novelist in the great tradition of Stendhal. He was always trying to make literature a substitute for religion. But we met in an area of nostalgie. His common-law wife Nora was a strong-minded and strong-jawed woman who would not put up for long with his nonsense. I took him back drunk one day, and Nora was waiting for him like thunder. As soon as the door shut I could hear the hitting begin.

CHAPTER 14

I walked from Battle station to my father's combined surgery and residence on the High Street, a stone's throw from the abbey. A railway porter going off duty walked two hundred yards behind me, singing, to the tune of "Pretty Redwing": "Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin, His boots are cracking For want of blacking, And his little baggy trousers they'll want mending Before they send him To the Dardanelles."

I arrived. There was a holly wreath encircling the door-knocker. I knocked and was benignly pricked. Then I heard my sister Hortense running, calling, "It's him, I know it's him." And then I was encircled by arms and the odours of home.

The smells of that time, the smell of that time. I have always cherished the smells of places and eras. Singapore--hot dishrags and cat piss. Moscow builder's size and the unflushed stools of the smokers of cheap cigars. Dublin roasting coffee which turns out to be roasting barley. The whole of 1916 had a mingled smell of unaired rooms, unwashed socks, bloody khaki, musty mufti, the rotting armpits of women's dresses, margarine, cheap gaspers made of floorsweepings, floors swept with the aid of damp tea leaves. It was a very an-American smell, one might say. The smell of my father's house, however, mingled the neutral surgical and the Anglo-French domestic. As I entered I met the ghost of a gigot for dinner, well-garlicked, and caramel, and hovering over the distracted faint fumes of cocaine and nitrous oxide. The two worlds met in the aroma of oil of cloves. And then there was my mother, the familiar odour of a red wine on her breath (like the priest bending with the host at the altar rail) and the delicate envelope of eau de cologne.

"What a surprise, what a lovely surprise," said Hortense, who adored me. "You said you wouldn't be coming till the twenty-first."

"I got Mother's letter this afternoon. And then I thought: Why not now? There was nothing to keep me in London." My eyes pricked.

"Lonely, a lonely place," said my mother with her deep voice. And my father, in his alpaca house jacket, watch chain flashing on his growing paunch, smiled from a kind of shy distance. We were now in the parlour, where a fire of pearwood explained another delicious odour I had not been able to place. Hortense, home from school, had festooned the room with paper chains. Holly and mistletoe and ivy. A Christmas tree in the corner with little dangerous candles not yet to be lighted.

"Belated happy birthday," I said to Hortense. I took the parcel out of my bag.

"A book, I can tell," she said, but without rancour. "Always a book."

"I'm only rich in books," I said. "Review copies at that. But it's the thought that counts, so they tell me." Hortense's present was a new edition of The Diary of a Nobody. We needed laughter in those days, but we had to go to the Victorians for it. Oh, there was W. W. Jacobs, there was P. G. Wodehouse, but their humour was thin with a touch of the defensive about it, an apology for purveying the stuff of escape.

"You must be starved," my father said. I shook my head, I could not trust myself to speak. "Perhaps you could give him a cut off the cold gigot," he said to my mother. I shook my head vigorously. My mother appraised me with solemn brown eyes. Being a woman, she saw more than my father saw. I wish I could see her clearly now, but all I can see is an elongated fashion plate of the time--the long brown dress low-waisted, unfrivolous in deference to a period that badly needed true frivolity, not the gruesome insouciance of the politicians and the General Staff, the pearls that had belonged to her Aunt Charlotte, the soft brown greying hair up-piled.

She said, "I think you are not very happy there. You seem to me thin and tired. You do not have to be in London in order to write. You were happier working on the Hastings newspaper. At least you were home each night and also well fed."

"It's a question of being close to the literary life," I said. It was, of course, untrue. It was a question of, a matter of, it was.

"We're very proud and so on," my father said, shaking his head, "but it's not a profession. We've been talking about it, your mother and I."

"Oh come, Dad," I said, "you can't take a university degree or a licentiate and set up as a writer with a brass plate, but it's as honourable a profession as drawing teeth."

"How are your teeth, by the way?"

"Splendid," I said, showing them. "Mother," I said, turning to her graceful solemnity, "you'd not denigrate Flaubert and Balzac and Hugo? I want to be like them."

"I do not read novels," she said. "I read yours, naturally, but that is different. That first one of yours. Mrs Hanson took it from the circulating library and was rude to me about it. Of course, because I am French she thinks I have brought you up to be immoral."

"Sister Agnes," said Hortense, in her clear young candid voice, "said it was very artificial and was obviously by a very young man. She said it was not believable."

"Sister Agnes is," I said, "a very shrewd critic."

"Oh she is, she's always criticising."

"You look extenué, Kenneth," my mother said. "I will make cocoa for all of us, and then we shall go to bed. Your room is always ready for you but I will put in a hot water bottle. There is all tomorrow for talking."

"And the next day and the next," said Hortense. "Oh, it's lovely to have you home." Hortense, her hair in what was to be called by Yeats honey-coloured ramparts at her ear, promised great beauty. She had a slight venerean strabismus and a strong straight French nose. Then she said, "Heimat. A lovely word." There was a brief breath of embarrassment from my parents.

My mother said, "If you would not speak German in the house, Hortense, I should be much happier."

"Now you're getting like the other parents," said Hortense. "Sister Gertrude says that to blame the German language for the war is like blaming German sausage. Anyway, there are still three of us doing German. And we're reading a book by Hermann Hesse, and he's a pacifist in Switzerland or somewhere. Is that wrong?"

"Henry James stopped taking walks with his dachshund," I said. "And even the royal family had to change its name. It's all very stupid."

"If you were French--" began my mother.

"I'm half French."

"That reminds me," said my father. "Talking of Mr James, I mean. There's something that was sent over from Rye for you." He put on his nipnose glasses and went out.

My mother said, "Cocoa. And a hot bottle." And went out too. Hortense smiled at me with a girl's radiance. The madness of it all was that if there was any girl to whom I could feel attracted it was Hortense. My capacity for love was hedged in by all the thundering edicts of Moses.

"You promise fair," I said ridiculously. "I mean, don't let them make you all burly and beefy and land-army. Hockey and so on." She blushed. "Sorry," I said.

She said, blushing deeper--it was as if the blush already there for one cause might as well be used for another--"Do you have affairs in London?"

"I get on with my work," I said. "Such as it is. I can't afford affairs. I mean, affairs begin with dinner and wine and candlelight and continue in commodious apartments. I live in one room and sleep in the smell of gas-ring cookery."

She put her fingers to her lips; I blinked the water back; Father had come back in again with a letter. "They were tidying his things up," he said. "Apparently there were a lot of letters he'd written but hadn't sent off yet. Here."

It was the usual involved periphrastic infinitely qualified Henry James, O.M. He had made his major pronouncement about the contemporary British novel (of which, with his naturalisation of 1915, he became the great though retrospective luminary) in a couple of articles in the Times Literary Supplement. I had written a mild protest in a stand-in literary column in The Illustrated London News, the regular man being ill and incapable: I had found as much fault with his imagery as with his judgment. He had spoken of the fine play of oar of Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole and had D. H. Lawrence bringing up "the dusty rear." He had hit on a "persistent simile" of an orange and said it was "remarkably sweet" in the hands of Walpole. The great stylist could not be allowed to get away with that. He had replied to me but had delayed sending the letter off, or perhaps, obsessed with his Napoleonic fantasies, he had just forgotten he had written it. Well, here it was my dear young friend and the rest of it. I bow my head with shame at your naked rebuke (the bowing, alas, comes all too naturally, though from the physiological causes altogether appropriate in one whose advanced age and concomitant bodily decay bid him increasingly look earthwards) but would say in feeble extenuation that the exigencies imposed by frantic copy editors, et cetera, et cetera.

My mother brought in the cocoa.

CHAPTER 15

It was a mistake to go home for Christmas. For much of the rest of the world the feast was sentimentally pagan, and tears at the birth of the Prince of Peace were altogether compatible with rage at the Hun. For me, for the family, the redeemer was born, and I had the intolerable task of keeping to myself my recent decision not to believe that the redeemer was born. The carolers came round singing "O Come All Ye Faithful," words which to them were a means of earning odd coppers for a winter-woolies.for-our-brave-boys fund or of being invited in for hot eggnog and mince pies. To me they were a reminder of my voluntary but ineluctable exclusion from the world of the faithful.

When Christmas Eve came, my mother said, "This evening we take the train for St. Leonards and go to confession. Your father will finish his surgery early. And then tomorrow morning we all go to communion together."

"Can't we stay in St. Leonards and go to the kinema and then go to midnight mass?" asked Hortense. Kinema. Pedantic nuns, I supposed.

"There will be no trains," said my mother. "No. Very early mass tomorrow. And then we come back to our special Christmas breakfast and then put in the oven the turkey."

My heart was sinking all through this. And I can see how you, my readers, will sigh with another kind of sinking of the heart. We are into Graham Greene territory, are we not? Or, since the betrayal of a mother is involved, James Joyce territory (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been published that year, to be mainly misunderstood but fulsomely praised as "Swiftian" by H. G. Wells). Some things, may I remind you, are anterior to literature. Literature does not manufacture them. Literature about them is there because they are there. Graham Greene invented a kind of Roman Catholicism, but not a kind easily intelligible to Catholics of 1916.

I said, "I shan't be going to confession."

"No sins on your soul?" teased my sister. "Unspotted by sinful London?"

"When did you last go to confession?" my mother asked.

"I could say, Mother, that that is a matter between me and my soul," I said gently, smiling. "But in fact I was in Farm Street only a few days ago."

"Well then, if you think you are still in a state of grace--"

"I'll stay home and write my review." It was a long one on the oeuvre to date of Eden Phillpotts, a writer then thought important, especially by Arnold Bennett, who called him "a master of the long sentence."

"But it is fine weather and very mild, and we can walk a little by the sea."

"I must pay my rent, Mother, and I was promised payment on receipt of the article."

"Very well, then." And I sat by the fire writing the rough draught in pencil on a pad on my knee, chewing dates, sipping sherry. My father's house was short of very little.

I lay awake that night, juggling agonizedly with alternative courses of action. If I no longer believed, then the host on my tongue would be no more than a bit of bread, and the family would be happy, all having taken Christmas communion together. But I knew that the host was more than a bit of a bread, and I could not take it cynically. A sacrilegious communion--terrible phrase. In the morning I prayed briefly to the God of my glands: Help thou my unbelief. Unbelief takes time, I know, but please make the time short. I heard the family stirring. It was still dark, and the electric light was on on the landing. My father came in, lather on his face. "The train goes in half an hour, son." The God of my glands was already responding. "You don't look well," said my father. I had switched on my bedside lamp. It showed, I did not doubt, pallor and hollow eyes.

"I don't," I said, "feel all that well. I don't think, somehow, I can... a slight stomach upset. I'm not used to good food."

My mother came in, ready dressed and cologned. "You are sick? Perhaps you should not have eaten so much of the"--she pronounced the name of the dish in, as it were, quotation marks: an item in a barbarous cuisine, cooked because my father liked it, admissible just about, Christmas Eve being, despite the wartime dispensation, a day of abstinence for us--"fish pie."

"I'll go tomorrow. Tomorrow's Saint Stephen's Day."

"If you are better you can go to the last mass today. And good, yes, Saint Etienne Protomartyr. And the feast of your poor uncle Etienne. We will go together." Hortense came in, full of a young girl's morning energy and Christmas radiance.

"Merry Christmas. I knew somehow you wouldn't come. It's all London's fault. Gottlose Stadt, Sister Gertrude calls it."

"And probably Kaiser Bill too," warned my father, studding his stiff white collar.

"Please, child. No German. Especially this day."

"Entschuldige. Je demande bien ton pardon. Leave him to rot in his sin, then. Come on, we'll miss the train."

They went, and I lay rotting a while longer while the house, creaking rebuke, let in the mild dawn and the milder daylight of my Gottlose Christmas. I was ravenous. I dressed (stiff collar and tie, always formal, even when declaring the love that durst not speak its name) and went down to the kitchen, where the stove was banked and hot. I made strong tea and toast, opening the window to discharge the crumbs and the smell of burning, then made the fire in the dining and living rooms. Then I put my presents by the Christmas tree--Mr Britling Sees It Through for my father; a new edition of Three Men in a Boat for my sister; for my mother a homage-to-a-brave-ally anthology called La Belle France, with a parody of Mallarmé by Beerbohm, a tactless polemic on the sins of France by Bernard Shaw, a pastiche of Debussy by Cyril Scott. It was perhaps not a good choice; it would make my mother tearful. I peeled a lot of potatoes. The surgery bell buzzed loudly. There was a middle-aged man at the door, a kind of ostler to judge from his oaty smell. He had a raging toothache; he needed my father.

"He's gone to St. Leonards. To church."

"What for? Want me Christmas dinner like everybody else. It ain't fair."

I took him into the surgery. The soldier on the wall looked in fearful exophthalmia at burning Pompeii. "You should look after your teeth," I said. "You should get your teeth ready for Christmas." I looked for oil of cloves but could see none. There were forceps there, though, neatly laid in lines, shining in the Christmas morning light. "Sit in that chair," I ordered. "Let's have a look at it."

"Here, it's the dentist I want. You're not the dentist."

"Like Christian baptism," I said. "Anybody can do it in case of emergency. Open." He opened and let out a hogo of medicinal rum and beer. The bad tooth was a premolar. It wobbled when I fingered it.

"Hurts, that does, ow."

"You don't want an anaesthetic, do you? It may upset your stomach."

"I want something what will kill the pain."

"Through fire," I said, "to peace and cool and light." I took the largest forceps in my right hand, pushed back the chair, inserted the pincers and caught the tooth, squeezing hard to hold it. He kept his mouth well open in protest and pain, ow for both. I worked the tooth to and fro, felt it loosen and then break from its moorings, and then pulled it out. "Spit," I said. He spat, howling from a pursed mouth. "Rinse," I said. I gave him cold water. "Better," I said. "Better now, eh?" I showed him the decayed horror at the end of the tongs.

When he could speak he said, "There ought to be a law."

"Don't grumble. I'm not charging you anything. Call this a Christmas gift."

He went off bleeding, grousing about bloody butchers. I threw the tooth into the kitchen stove and rinsed the forceps under the kitchen tap. There was blood on my fingers but I did not at first wash it off. A corporal work of mercy and the badge thereof. If I were to be good in this my post-Christian life, it must be totally without hope of reward.

I said nothing of what I had done when the family came home. Yes, better, a little better, but I could not stomach eggs, bacon and sausages. I missed last Christmas mass. I ate heartily of Christmas dinner, though. Better, much better.

In the evening there was a little party--Dr. Brown and his wife and three slackmouthed children, Mackenzie the bachelor bank manager, a Belgian evacuee widow whom my mother had befriended. I wore the tie my mother had given me, smoked the Muratti Turkish from my sister, crackled in my trouser pocket the five one-pound notes, God bless him, from my father. Cold turkey and stuffing, ham, trifle, Christmas cake, mince pies, a punch of burgundy and fizzy lemonade for the children, Beaune and Pouilly-Fuissé for the rest of us, a toast to the end of war, absent friends, absent Tom. My mother held back her tears. I went to bed a little fuddled.

My mother came, not at all fuddled, into my bedroom and switched on the main light. Electric light in those days was surely softer, pinker, more intimate, even when it shone from the ceiling. My mother wore her new dressing gown, a gift from my father, cornflower blue and frilled at wrists and lapels. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me with sober eyes. Throughout our colloquy she spoke not one word of English.

"No confession, no communion. Indeed, no mass. This is the first time it is so at home at Christmas. I do not believe you were not well, my son."

"I was not well in my body perhaps because I was not well in my soul." I was grateful for French; it distanced a little, though not enough. Acting the vowels and the intonation, I was also acting the predicament. But French was literally my mother tongue. It had the power to knock down solid-seeming English, language of my education and street games and craft, disclosing the solidities as mere stage-flats. It had this power because it had fluted and hurled through my foetal bones and flavoured my milk and soothed me to sleep. But it was still a language of the brain; its words for faith and duty and home would never make me cry.

"You lied too. You said you were at confession in London. I want to know what is wrong."

"I was scrupulous in not lying. I said I was at Farm Street, where the Jesuits are. I talked with a priest."

"What did you talk about?"

"I talked about the necessity of giving up my faith."

"Necessity? Necessity?" The word hissed like gaslight.

I set up a pasteboard shield. "It is a necessity that many Christians are talking of. We pray to the same God as the Germans. Must God answer only the prayers of the French and the English? Is the sacrifice of the mass offered only that we may be granted grace?"

"This is a just war."

"It began as a just war. I and many others believe that it is being prolonged for reasons other than justice."

"You have not talked of this before, to me or to your father. If you are convinced of what you say it should have come bursting out of you, as so many things you were convinced of came bursting out of you on other of your visits home. There is something else. Are you perhaps living in sin?"

"We are all living in sin, Mother."

"Very clever, but you know very precisely what I mean. Are you keeping house with some woman?"

"No woman, Mother. No woman, no woman." And then it came, as it had to, bursting out. She listened at first with disbelief and then puzzlement. I did not speak French much these days; perhaps I was not expressing myself correctly. But I was expressing myself all too correctly. Then her machine would not play my record. She smashed the shellac on the floor.

"What you're saying makes no sense. You have been drinking too much wine. You took also three glasses of cognac after supper. You are making a very silly stupid joke. In the morning perhaps you will speak reasonably."

"You want to know the truth, Mother. I'm telling you the truth. Some men are made this way. Some women too, as I have seen for myself in London."

"London, yes. I can believe many things of London. But this I will not believe. Not of you."

"Mother, Mother, I cannot help it. It is some strange freak of the chemistry of the glands. I am far from alone in this, other men have been so, great men, writers, artists, Michelange, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde. Wilde suffered for it, in prison. It is not a thing a man would want to choose. Not in a world like this, which looks with horror on it."

She did not hear the latter half of that. She picked on the grands hommes and repeated the phrase in distaste. "So, because the great men were like that, you must be like that too." Then belatedly she took in Oscar Wilde, remembering the scandal well enough. "If he was a great man, then it would be best for you to have ambitions to be a very little man. I cannot," she said, "believe, I cannot take this into my head."

"I'm sorry, Mother. I do not know how long I could have kept this secret from you or from Father, but I wished it to be a secret. Now you have probed and asked and been given the truth you sought."

Her tears were a sign that she was beginning to accept the unacceptable. "Your father," she said, "he must not know." And she muffled her sobs in a cologne-smelling square of cambric she took from her sleeve.

"Father will know sometime," I said, "but let him rest in his ignorance for now. There is sometimes neither goodness nor beauty in truth."

She could not resist crying aloud at that. "You try to be clever, you try to be the great man like Oscar Wilde. And you will end like him because you will think it clever to be what you say you are. Oh my God. What have I done, why should this happen to me?"

"I have no doubt, Mother," I said with some coldness, "that Tom will make a good marriage and provide you with grandchildren. Hortense, too."

"That innocent child. If you breathe, if you hint--" She looked very old now. "But all must know sooner or later. There will be scandal. The police. The newspapers." And then: "Poor Tom, serving his country, both his countries. And you being the great man with your scandalous books in London."

"I am sorry, Mother, that the authorities have found me unfit to go and be slaughtered. I cannot help that either. I cannot help my heart being the way it is any more than I can help the other thing. It would solve so many problems, your unworthy wrongly made elder son dying for his country or countries. It may happen yet. The medical officers may be kinder or less kind to my poor heart next time. Next month, indeed. I report again next month. I hope everything will work out to your satisfaction."

"Now you add viciousness and cruelty to the other wrong."

"That's right, Mother. All my fault. There's a line from a poem I shall copy out neatly for you and frame." I gave it her as it was, in English: "'Gently dip, but not too deep.'" And then back to French with: "You asked for all this. I volunteered nothing. Tomorrow is the feast of the first martyr, but I shall be going to neither mass nor communion. I shall get the first train back to town. Whether you wish to see me again is entirely up to you."

She heard noises I did not hear, holding herself straight the better to listen. "Guns," she said. "Across the Channel. Nothing but ruin, ruin. And Christmas ruined." She got up and looked at her face in my dressing-table mirror. "My face in ruins." It sounded less melodramatic in French. "I hope to God your father is already asleep. I am a bad actress."

"A good mother, though," I said, "a good mother."

She went out without bidding or kissing me good night, leaving it to me to get out of bed and turn the light off.

CHAPTER 16

Nineteen seventeen was, among other things, the year in which I began to make money. The medical board convened in Hounslow, to which I was summoned on January 16, found my heart still unacceptable and condemned me to the continued shameful life of a civilian. One of the medical officers, a patriot with a sewn-in whisky smell, insolently recommended that I take up "real war work," meaning the manufacture of guns and bullets, instead of merely trying to keep British culture alive. I told him that I proposed helping the country's morale by writing something humorous for the stage. They all shook their heads sadly.

In my one room on Baron's Court Road, with a view of the tube trains clashing along aboveground, I wrestled with my piece. I was sustained, as before, by bully beef, army issue, sold to me by the office boy at the English Review. His uncle was a quartermaster sergeant in the Service Corps. I wrote, in very cold blood, never once even smiling at the cunning hilarity of my lines, a kind of French farce, not much of a tribute to the culture of my mother's native land. A married woman pretends to leave Paris for a few days in order to see her sick mother in Lille, but she actually spends the time with her lover in a little hotel in the Old Marais. Her husband, a singer with an artificial leg who she believes is performing in a concert in Dijon to raise money for soldier comforts, turns up with his mistress at the same hotel. The manager of the hotel has lost his voice as a consequence of the shock of hearing Big Bertha boom, his wife is huge and domineering but becomes gentle and amorous if you can find a particular trigger-point on her ample bottom and press it firmly. The sinning husband faints if he sees eggs, having been pecked by a hen as a child. The lover cannot bear to hear talk of rats. Say "All arks eventually reach their Ararats" and he starts to scream. At the end of the play the husband sings a song about rats and boiled eggs are served for breakfast. The landlord recovers his voice when Big Bertha booms again. There are epigrammatic cadenzas which have little to do with the action. I called this work, constructed in three brief acts, Jig a Jig Tray Bon. Reg Hardy at the Comedy Theatre loved the play but hated the title, which he thought vulgar. It was rechristened Parleyvoo.

I finished it on February 1, the day when unrestricted submarine warfare began. The full dress rehearsal was held on March 11, when British troops occupied Baghdad. The play opened, along with the Russian Revolution, on March 12. When, on April 6, the United States declared war on Germany, much applause was accorded the specially inserted pro-American gags. On April 13, the search for the patron's wife's trigger-point was presented in terms of the Battle of Arras and the taking of Vimy Ridge. When the Third Battle of Ypres began at the beginning of that hot July, the play seemed likely to run as long as The Bing Boys if not Chu Chin Chow. I was making money and writing a new play in a more commodious apartment where, like Mr Ivor Novello, I served cocktails in a silk dressing gown. This was at Albany Mansions. I also had a new lover, Rodney Selkirk, who played the part of the singing husband and for whom the role had, in a sense, been created. He was himself in real life a husband and also a father. He had joined the Artists' Rifles in August 1914, run a concert party at Mauberge, had a pelvic bone splintered at Mons, lost his left leg on the Marne. He bravely made comedy out of his new stiff walk in Grigson's farce Teeny Weeny Winny, that ran for six weeks at the Lyric in the autumn of 1916 and in which I saw the returned hero act for the first time. He pretended to his wife that a wound in the prostate rendered him totally incapable of a husband's office. He was three years older than myself, talented, witty, charming, ugly. We spent many Sunday nights together, he having usually feigned to his wife a troops concert in the North or Midlands. Real life, like drama, has few devices for the encompassing of clandestine sin. Sin? Such nonsense.

The British theatre is full of homosexuals and also of Catholics, and sometimes the two areas of conviction seem to conjoin with none of the gloomy Cartesian misgivings that had led to my apostasy. Albert Wiscomb, who played the lover in my farce, arrived cheerfully late at one of the evening rehearsals with "Sorry, darlings. I went to have my pan scraped and it tsook rather a tsime"--the latter phrase done simperingly and uproariously suggesting a load of sin which that small and elegant body seemed singularly unfitted to bear. Wiscomb was a happy and lucky pederast who loved lacy altar boys. I spoke to him one early evening in his dressing room while he was making carefully up.

"You confess it?"

"Sins of impurity, dear? Oh yes. I don't specify, of course, and I'm always properly penitent. I mean, we have to try, don't we? But no more than try. Can't go against our nature, can we?"

"That's not how it was put to me."

"Yes, but you're a great fusspot and everything has to be just right for you, doesn't it? Me, I'm not fussy, and I don't think the Almighty is, either." And he carefully gave himself black eyebrows. Me, I could not take it so easy.

My father came up to see the play, catching the last train back to Battle immediately afterwards. He thought it vulgar but he laughed. My mother did not come, but she wrote to me in English just before Easter: I have tried hard to keep to myself the shock. Your father I am certain suspects nothing and thinks we saw little of you at Christmas and hear little from you because you are busy working to become famous in the great but bad city. I must warn you again to say no word of what you say you are to Hortense, though I fear you must have said something since she mentioned a book about a man who loves a boy in Venice and she had known of such things before. It is a German book. I think she must leave that school because the nuns are more on the side of the Germans than should be allowed. You are still my son and I love you with all a mother's heart but I think you must stay away from home until I can live with the shock. I pray that it is only a temporary thing as is sometimes so with boys in English schools and that it will end soon. Tom has been on a short leave and it was a comfort to have him. He says he is to be a permanent gas instructor at Boyce Barracks in Aldershot. It is now Easter and I pray for the miracle that you will say I will change and be pleasing to God and make my duty. We are all well though I have little fainting fits which I am sure come from the shock. I send you my love. I pray for you.

The new play I wrote had as its setting a dentist's waiting room. I had already travestied my mother's country as a place of silly fornication and intrigue; now I was to make people laugh at my father's profession. The comedy was a loose adaptation of Moliere's Le Médecin Malgré Lui, and its germ was my own corporal work of mercy on the Battle ostler. It opened, with Charles M. Brewster in the lead, at the Criterion on October 24, the day on which the Austrians defeated the Italians with great severity at Caporetto. It was successful. Soon (on November 7, in fact, the day of the Bolshevik Revolution) the Daily Mail honoured me by mentioning the new comedy in its editorial: "We can assure the Kaiser that the principle of a tooth for a tooth will be fulfilled to the limit, and there will be no Mr Toomey to sweeten the extractions with laughter." My play was in fact called A Tooth for a Tooth--a title I considered grim, if not blasphemous, but Brewster, as actor-manager, insisted on it.

I was already working on a new comedy as Christmas approached. Willie Maugham had had, in 1908, four plays running in London at the same time, prompting a Bernard Partridge cartoon in Punch that showed Will Shakespeare not too happy about his namesake's success. I was not so ambitious. I still regarded myself as a novelist making plays somewhat cynically for money, and three plays would be, for the time being anyway, quite enough. I was working in my silk dressing gown on the day when the Russo-German armistice was signed, smoking cigarettes continually and refreshing myself with an endless stream of green tea. It was eleven in the morning. Who should come to the door but my sister Hortense.

She was just seventeen and very pretty. We embraced fondly. She was dressed as a smart young lady and not as a schoolgirl. She had brought luggage with her. "You're staying?" I said.

"May I? For a few days, anyway. Then we can go home together for Christmas."

"I am not," I said, "going home for Christmas. I have a play to write. I have two plays to touch up with topical references."

She sat on the settee, yellow with black stripes, and bumped herself up and down to relish its springiness. "Golly, you are doing well," she said, taking it all in. "The rewards of literature." She pronounced this with a German accent, so I took it to be a phrase used by one of her nuns.

"No, dearest Hortense," I said. "The wages of prostitution, if you know the term."

"I know the term all right." She looked at me sparkling. It evoked in her sweet innocent young mind images of wholesome sexual freedom and female elegance. She had probably read Mrs Warren's Profession without understanding it.

"That," I said sternly, "is a lubricious look. I mean that I'm sacrificing my talents in the service of a very doubtful art but a highly commercial craft."

"Will you take me to see your plays?"

"Of course, and also to smart places for lunch and dinner. And to the Café Royal too if you're a good girl."

She said, as I'd expected, "I didn't think good girls went to the Café Royal."

"Sweetest little sister, won't Mother be annoyed at your not going straight home? And, moreover, staying with your bad brother? For I am bad, you know. I'm celebrating my first year out of the Church."

"I knew," she said. "I knew when you said you were ill last Christmas. Sister Agathe said there was a lot of terrible atheism these days among young men, and it was all because of the war. But they'll get over it, she said, when the war's over."

"And when does the knowledgeable Sister Agathe think the war will be over?"

"Oh, she says next summer the German army will try one more great offensive and it will be the last, and the English and French and Americans and Canadians and Australians will either push back or they won't, and everything will depend on this great offensive, she says."

"Would you like tea or coffee and biscuits or a glass of sherry or something?" I asked.

"I'd like you to show me my room and then I'll unpack and bathe and change, and then it will be time for lunch." She was very sure of herself, little minx, and I said so. "Minsk, Sister Gertrude says it really is. She says it's German for hussy. Hallo, this is all very tremendous luxury." She meant the master bedroom, the door of which was open and which we had to pass on the way to the little spare one. Then she saw something it would have been better for her not to have seen, namely Rodney's spare, original really, artificial leg, lying on the right side of the bed as if to establish, like the living leg of the old manorial lords, a droit du seigneur. It was more comfortable, Rodney said, than his later one, or Mark Two, better cushioned where it met the fleshy stump, but, with the gradual subsidence of the tissues of that part, it had become a little too short. He did not normally keep it here but at home. Why was it here now and in that particular place? Was it really there or is memory speaking false? I think it really was there, the Mark One, an ingenious structure of straps, springs and metal, with a rich red leather cushion, a little darkened by sweat, for the thighstump. It caught Hortense's eye at once.

I said, "That belongs to the leading actor in the French-style farce I shall take you to see tonight. He is a fine actor, also a war hero mutilated in a bloody battle."

"Does he live here with you?"

"No, he lives with his wife and children, but his house is in Swiss Cottage and he finds it convenient sometimes to come here, this flat being so central, to freshen up before or after a performance. Does that answer your question, madam?"

"Very stuffy. Sometimes I don't know whether you're joking or not. Poor man. Easier for a man, though. Sister Agathe says that skirts will be very short after the war because of the shortage of material. It seems to be made very well, that leg, a very nicely made artificial leg. I've never seen one before." And she looked at me acutely as though she more than half divined what was going on. I very nearly said: There's nothing going on, you know.

She divined further that evening at the Comedy Theatre. She had had a reasonably good dinner at Frith's, where they often had a very fair game pie, into whose contents it was imprudent to enquire too particularly. She'd had also a tinselly dessert which was really no more than a cleverly disguised bread pudding, and had shared with me a bottle of something eely and alumy and North African with a Pommard label. And then she had loved the first act of Parleyvoo, even the heavy jokes about the Balfour Declaration and the fall of Jerusalem. In the first interval she came with me into the vestibule, flushed and bright-eyed and proud of her brother. I was proud of her too, in her dressy waistless gown with sequins, something she wore for the once-a-term all-girl dances at her school, probably with Sister Agathe or Gertrude being grimly efficient on the piano with the Turkey Trot. She also had an eye-matching bandeau round her honey-coloured hair and a very little rouge on her lips. I was given an awed nod by some I did not know who had been told by some who did know that this was he, the author. And there, one of those who did know me and very well too, was Val Wrigley, my former boy-lover. I felt no bitterness. He seemed to be alone. He seemed also not very well, thinner, his sunken chest sunk further, the points of his cheekbones crimson.

"Well, Kenneth dear." Hortense was all attention. "Not what you and I used to mean when we talked of the glory of literature, is it?"

I did the introductions. "Where," I asked, "is your friend?"

"Oh, he's gone off. Left as soon as you fired that little joke about an asylum for the Jews. Not funny, he thought. Nor me."

"Ah," I said, "but you stayed."

"Saw you coming in, old thing. With this delightful girl on your arm. Hortense, eh? Always proud of the French blood, weren't you, dear?" Hortense giggled. "Thought it might be nice," Val leered, "to renew an old friendship."

"Did you get your little book printed?"

"Some small difficulties, old thing. But I doubt not that they'll be overcome in God's good time." The stress he laid on the holy name indicated an all too mortal tyranny. "But soft," he then said, "whom have we here?" I felt dirty. I felt my linen was already grimy from the sweat of guilty embarrassment that had at first trickled but now gushed. Linda Selkirk was there, very beautiful, her eyes of a preternatural blue, her fine abundant black hair in a chignon. Her companion was Phil Kemble, whose father had been plain Watson but who had dug out the Kemble from his mother's side, invoking the name of a great theatrical family to prime the engine of his own theatrical career. I had heard, though, that his mother's Kembles had nothing to do with Fanny and Charles but were really Campbells, small distillers with a Kelvinside accent. Phil was a good actor, though difficult to suit with his aptitude for tragedy and his long comic body. Seeing him and Linda together, I felt the thought flash: They are lovers. Was this artist's intuition or the wishful thinking of my own guilt?

Val had recognised Kemble but did not know him. I introduced everybody to everybody. Phil pulled me into a space between the box office and the house full notice. "You never replied," he reproached.

"I'm still thinking about it, Phil. I'm not sure whether it's the sort of thing I can do. I can see that that kind of part would be right, of course--" It would, too; Phil could make a very moving, complex and unusual William Pitt. He had something of the look of Pitt in the Gillray cartoon, where he and Boney are carving the pudding of the world. "There's the question too of not offending the French," I said.

"The war will be over next spring," Phil said. "We'll be able to offend the French all we want to, mean-souled bastards that they are. A spring opening, think, the first big play of the peace: patriotic, comic, tragic. 'England has saved herself by her exertions.'" He made a kind of Pitt arise out of that line; people began looking at him. I was aware, and was uneasy about it, that Val was doing a lot of talking and Hortense was doing a lot of talking, while Linda listened, smiling. She turned, caught my eye, then did not smile. I didn't like this. Phil went on about good plain straight John Drinkwater dialogue without prithee and egad and who could play Fox and who George III till the bell went.

I said, "This your first visit to this?"

"Yes. Awful tripe, as you'll be the first to admit, old lad, but who can blame you? We all have to eat, if you can call it eating these days. Linda's first too, did you know? Had to drag her here practically. Things not going so well in that household, but you know better than I, I should imagine. Well, we'll give it another couple of weary gags or so and then I'll take her to supper." He nodded pleasantly and went to collect Linda. Val left, waving sadly at me. I took Hortense in.

After the performance, back at the apartment, I gave Hortense a large cup of hot strong milky cocoa. She was overexcited, she would not sleep without some such nursery nightcap. I had picked up the last mail delivery of the evening from the table downstairs. "Here's news," I said, while she sipped shoeless on the striped couch, feet tucked under her. "My agent says that Bourreau wants to do it in Paris. As a typical piece of English farce."

"That means a lot more money," she said.

"Dearest Hortense," I said, putting the letter down, "I realise I've been very selfish and neglectful. All I gave you for your birthday last year was a book. For Christmas too. And the books didn't even cost me anything. Tomorrow we must go out and buy really magnificent presents for you. And for Father and Mother as well. And Tom. But what would you like?"

"Not the way you give presents, that," she said. "Presents are meant to be surprises. Nice surprises." And then: "Why did Mrs Whatsit seem nastily surprised tonight?"

"Selkirk? Linda Selkirk? How? What about?"

"Well, you know one babbles things out when one's nervous, I mean Mrs Whatsit is a bit overwhelming, blue eyes and raven hair, very unusual that, and I was being complimentary about her husband's acting and the stiff walk was funny but tragic really. She said it was an artificial leg and I said I knew and I'd seen his spare one and... There was nothing wrong in saying that, I thought, but she went all white. Why? And that poet boy, I'm sure he's consumptive, trying to be like Keats I suppose, laughed in a very strange way. He said better to wake up to that than to onions. What did he mean? Was he trying to be modern like Sister Anastasia's favourite poet? You know, the one who has smells of steaks in passageways--"

I too had, I knew, gone white. I tried to breathe easily. Hortense's eyes, too bright for this time of night, grew wider.

She said, "Oh golly, oh saints in heaven, it's not possible, is it?"

"What, Hortense? What is not possible?"

"The Café Royal, Oscar and Bosie, oh my dear Lord, are you one of those?"

"One of what, Hortense?"

"You know, you know. So this boy deserted you because you had no money, and now you're making money, and he said it was all his fault you turning from great literature and writing muck for the stage. Oh my dear dear Lord in heaven, it all fits in."

"You," I said carefully, "are having a modern education. Mother and Father--it would never be possible for them to--too late, I mean. If you told them that in prisoner of war camps man and man were driven by sheer necessity but apart from that, there are, and I suppose they're comparatively rare, cases, I mean... what I mean is, your mother knows and is inexpressibly shocked. Father doesn't and, says your mother, mustn't. As for corrupting poor innocent Hortense, she said--"

"Well." She tucked her feet under more comfortably. "It is a bit of a surprise, my own brother, that is. Oh, I'll shut up about it at home, pretend not to know. It happens in schools, I know. Jill Lipton's brother. And with girls. Two of our girls were caught, fourth-formers, immature, inexperienced, it's silly to get caught."

"I've got caught, haven't I?"

She looked at me with adult seriousness. "Not like Oscar. Bosie got away with it, didn't he, being a lord. Oh my dear Lord, you must be careful." And then, with a pose of scientific curiosity which her shining eyes and flushed cheeks belied, "What exactly is it that men do together?"

CHAPTER 17

I lived a celibate life from Christmas till Shrovetide. This was not a matter of caution: what went on behind locked doors was nobody's business but the consenting participants'. But Rodney had already given warning that he would leave the play in the new year, handing over his part to Fred Martins. He had been invited to appear in a sort of trial production of Shaw's Heartbreak House in Manchester, taking what most considered to be the totally unsuitable role of Captain Shotover--a role that nevertheless fascinated him and which he was determined to attempt. Val tried to make a pathetic return into my life, finding his present friend tyrannical and parsimonious, but I was stern in my rejection of his advances. I was far from lonely; I had my work, I had my friends in the theatre.

The new comedy broke, for me, unexpected ground. When I showed the draught first act to J. J. Mannering, he breathed on me his chronic odour of cigars and said, "Lad, it's a musical comedy."

"Never."

"Oh yes. Look--parallel love stories, those people there could be blown up into a chorus, this boozer character is pure rich low comedy. God, even some of these speeches suggest lyrics. Have you ever written lyrics?"

"Well, I wrote poetry at school."

"That's all musical comedy lyrics are, lad--poetry you write at school. Drury Lane, get that into your noddle, big stage, open out, let the thing breathe, dancing, singing, get down to it. Duets, patter songs, choruses. You start with a chorus and end with a chorus. Two acts. Second act in Monte Carlo, Biarritz, somewhere naughty and foreign. Do the lyrics, you know, you know the word, along with the book, let them spring out of the book, you know the word--"

"Pan passu?"

"Knew you'd know the word. Joe Porson's itching for a job. Wasn't his fault Tilly Tulip closed after a month. At least three good numbers in it, he has the gift, Joe, Jerome Kern touch, Irving Berlin, jazzy, we're past that Chu Chin Chow muck. Get down to it, lad."

I was being driven further and further away from literature all the time. You could hardly call this sort of thing literature: Waking and sleeping, It's always the same, Sleeping and waking I call on your name. Sleeping I cry, Waking I sigh, Knowing there's no reply.

What would Henry James have said? I remembered, or perhaps it is now I remember, walking with him in the autumn garden of Lamb House after the publication of my Socrates novel, him saying, "Keep away from the stony bosom of the theatre, my dear young friend, is the considered advice of one who has suffered the agonies of the damned from the--There is a nakedness, there is a laying on of whips, there is a--" Emotion would not let him get the words out. He shuddered, his mouth opened and shut. He picked up his dachshund Max and clasped him to his unstony bosom as if to protect him too from the theatre. He was, I could tell, remembering the hoots and howls that greeted Guy Domville, himself responding in innocence to the cruel call of "Author," standing there to be ridiculed, his mouth opening and shutting. Oh for the concealing warmth of the novel, the tortuous caverns of style wherein to hide. Nakedness was right.

The musical comedy was called Say It, Cecil and was based on a very silly idea. A young man named Cecil loves a young girl called Cecilia but cannot bring himself to utter the ultimate endearment. In August 1914 he said I love you to a girl and immediately war broke out. In France he said Je t'aime to a girl and the surrounding village was blasted to smithereens. Somebody taught him to try Ya vas lublu and his brought about the Russian Revolution. Cecilia thinks she loves him but refuses to be sure until she hears him utter the unequivocal formula. He says Ich liebe dich, despite the snarls of the patriotic, and this brings about the collapse of Germany. Great jubilation, but he still dare not say I love you. He has a song with chorus--"What I want to say"--and the chorus sings it for him, but this still will not do. The problem is solved (I blush, I still blush) through a trick involving the names of islands. Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Isle of Capri, Isle of You. No further disasters. Final reprise of chorus "Oh, say it, Cecil" as "You've said it, Cecil." Is it possible for the reader to imagine anything stupider? I was haunted throughout the writing by an image of the great stone head of Henry James, unmoved, unmoving, eye and brow all eternal reproach.

I finished the final chorus on Sunday, February 24: We're versing and voicing Our heartfelt rejoicing, Your troubles belong to the past. So nuzzle and nestle, For you've said it, Cecil, At last.

Curtain. The shame, the salivation at the prospect of more money.

There was a knock at the door.

"Rodney, dearest. Such a lovely lovely surprise."

Kiss. "Angel, it's seemed like a long time." He put down his bag.

"But why the diffident knock?"

"No keys. The whole damned bunch of them disappeared just before I went northwards. No matter. Must have a drink, angel. Parched." And he mixed himself Haig and water. Strange to consider that we had no refrigerators in those days. He drank and poured himself more. Then he sat on the striped couch, his artificial leg grotesquely stiff before him. "One of my bad days, angel. The bloody chafing."

"Take it off, Rodney. We shan't be going out, shall we? I managed to get hold of a nice piece of mutton. And capers. And a virtually immaculate cauliflower. We'll have a pleasant dinner." I looked on him with love, neat and compact in his stiff grey suit, humorously ugly, tanned as though he'd been to summer Blackpool, not Manchester. "How was it?"

"Messed up as from Thursday. Dear Mabel, Mrs Hushabye you know, got a telegram, War Office. Poor bitch, I'd met Frank, nice lad. She did the brave little woman, the show must go on, but she forgot her lines and broke down, nerve-racking. What Manchester thinks today London will think tomorrow. Manchester says pshaw to Shaw. And it wasn't really my part, not my part at all. You writing something for me?" He saw the manuscript on the desk.

"This is singing and dancing. Do take that leg off."

"You? Singing and dancing? Well, I suppose it had to happen. I can sing, as you know, angel. A peglegged dance might bring the house down. But no, I have to get down to Claudius for Bentinck. God, I'm so thirsty." I mixed him a fresh drink. "Had the shivers on the train. Cold early train in the dark of foredawn. A bit feverish. Feel my head."

"Hot. Get nearer the fire. Sweat it out."

He had a bad cold, sure enough. He could eat little dinner. I got him to bed with a hot water bottle and a tumbler of grog. I lay beside him. He threshed, he mumbled his Captain Shotover lines in the night.

"Nothing but the smash of the drunken skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a trap."

"Rodney, Rodney dear--"

"The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water, and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?"

He sweated in gushes, soaking the sheets, then woke raging with thirst. I gave him tepid barley water. "Thanks, angel. A bit better, I think. Sweated a lot of it out. God, we'd better do something about this bed." I got him out of his soaked pyjamas and made him sit, shivering now, wrapped in the counterpane while I turned the mattress over and fetched fresh sheets. Then, both naked, we got back in and clasped each other, and I soothed his poor aching stump with stroking fingers. So embraced, we finally slept, lullabyed by the first milk floats.

In full winter morning rainlight I dreamed that the bedroom door was open and that there were people standing there. Was I sickening too? No, it was no dream. There were people in the room, three, two men and a woman.

"I see. Filth," said Linda Selkirk in sable coat and sable toque. The two men might have been younger and elder brother, both with glum Old Bill whiskers, in drab herringbone overcoats, one, the elder, with his bowler hat on.

"Get out," I said to them all, pulling my numbed arm from under sleeping Rodney. "You've no right in here. You broke in, I'll have you for trespass." One never says the right things. Linda Selkirk bitterly jingled a keyring from the end of her gloved right index finger. Rodney began to snore to compete with the voices.

She said, "Trespass. A wife has a right to be with her husband. Have you gentlemen," she asked her companions, "seen enough?"

The elder, he with the hat on, said in a Thamesside whine: "There's certain differences, madam. If that gentleman there was a lady--..." pointing at me. "You see the difference, madam. Soldiers sharing a bivouac, that's not adultery."

"What are you two?" I tried to shout. "Police officers? Where's your warrant?"

"Ah, expected police officers, did you?" said the other one. "And why would that be, sir?"

"As for entering without permission," the still-hatted one said, "the lady was frightened of violence. Any citizen has the right to protect. And she has a right to be in here."

"You two look," said Linda, "and remember. Men in bed, their arms round each other, disgusting. He comes straight here, ignoring his wife and children, wallowing in filth."

I nearly said, We changed the sheets. Infection from my trade. I said, "Here you see a sick man." Unfortunately Rodney was now awake, audible licking a parched mouth, looking with wide-eyed hate on his wife. He did not seem surprised at her presence here; he did not seem to see the two whiskered men. "He came here sick. I've spent the entire night looking after him. Your job," I said stupidly to Linda Selkirk.

"He can act sick," she said. "He's acted sick before, just as he's acted love. And don't you tell me what my job is, you filthy sodomite."

"Careful, madam," said the unbowlered.

Rodney was trying to sit up, well-backed by pillows. There we were, two men in bed, clearly naked from the waist up. I grabbed my dressing gown from the bedside chair and, like any spinster, covered my breasts.

"Prothero Agency, eleven Wardour Street," the hatted man said, making the gesture of getting ready to produce a card from an inner pocket. "Witnessing an act of infidelity being the purpose of our business."

"Take that bloody hat off in my house," I cried.

"Yes, sir." And he took it off. He seemed to have dyed his hair some time past; the dye was working out; there were patches of dirty grey and dead black and a residual henna glow. "Madam," he said, "you can lay an evidence. Perhaps you've been told that already."

Rodney now seemed to be acting a well though demented man. "Bitch," he said, "you can go to bloody Kemble as he calls himself. He has two legs and he can shove them both between yours. Leave us alone, we're all right as we are."

"I'll leave you alone," she said, "and I'll make sure you leave the children alone. Have you," she said to the two witnesses, "seen enough?"

"The act's always hard to prove," said the younger. "That's well-known in law. It's all circumstantial."

"You heard that," she said, "from his own filthy mouth. About leaving them together."

"Yes," Rodney said, getting out of bed. "Get out, go on. You can have Kemble, making a bloody fool of me all over London."

"Discretion of the court," muttered the younger witness. He looked at Rodney getting out of bed naked, lacking a leg. "Ah," he said. The other shook his head sadly, as in pity, as at the hopelessness of our situation, the leglessness being an added perversity. Rodney, hissing "Bitch bitch," hopped two paces, holding on to the bed, ready to spring and hold on to her for support while strangling her. Then he fell and could not get up.

"Do you admit," said Linda to me, "that you're sodomising my husband, you swine?"

"Not at the moment," I said. The farce had really entered my blood. Then, putting on my dressing gown, I went over to poor Rodney. The dressing gown lacked its belt. I might as well have been naked. I heard one of the men going tut-tut while I got hold of Rodney's artificial leg. The idea perhaps was to strap it on to him and enable him to get over there, naked and legged, to strangle Linda.

Linda said, "I want to be sick. I want to vomit. The filth. Trying to be Oscar Wilde. I'll break you, I'll ruin you both. Jail for both of you, filth. I'll have it all over the newspapers, everything."

"Law of obscenixy," muttered the younger.

I grasped the artificial leg like a club and raised it to hit, my dressing gown open, showing all I had. Rodney on the floor groaned and tried to get up. His poor arms were too feeble to take the strain of lifting. He collapsed again. The two witnesses sturdily placed themselves in front of their agency's client as I came forward diffidently. I lowered the leg and seemed to be presenting it as a seller of legs, lovely leg here madam admire the action, as one who offered the leg as a legal defence, blame it all on the war. Linda showed her teeth in disgust.

She said, "You'll hear. You'll be punished. You can keep him." And then: "Can't, can you? You'll be in different cells, they'll send you to different prisons." Then she neatly spat, turned her back, and, went out. She herself, of course, had been a small actress, not successful, abandoning art for marriage. The two men put their hats on, nodded, made tentative hand gestures of goodbye, all in very fair comic synchronisation. Then they too went. I followed, seeing them off the premises. They did not look back. I returned to Rodney and got him into bed. He was both burning and shivering and could say nothing but bitch and bloody bitch. I went to the kitchen and made tea. The sad Monday rainlight would not ray down rain; it was a harsh and costive February sky. I made toast and spread real butter, gift of an Irish admirer. I still refused to think. I took in a tray to Rodney. He could eat nothing but drank thirstily of the milk-cooled tea. Then it was my turn to tremble, though with fear.

I said, "What's she going to do?"

"Bitch, the bloody bitch. I have to get up, I have to go and see Bentinck." He tried to get out of bed but I pushed him back. "We're reading at two. I want my bag, I want my Hamlet."

"You're staying here," I said. "I'll ring Bentinck. I'm also ringing the doctor."

"I don't want a bloody doctor."

"What's she going to do?" I said again.

"She can do what she bloody well likes. I'm finished with her. Give me more tea, angel."

He drained three more breakfast cups and then slept uneasily. His forehead flamed. I dressed and went below to the hall telephone. I could not get Bentinck but left a message with his wife. Dr. Chambers said it sounded like a bad attack of flu and he would be around when he could; flu was on the rampage, I'd better watch myself. I went back to Rodney. He slept and oozed, and there was a bubbling noise in his chest. It seemed natural for me now to set my affairs in order. A phase of my life was coming to an end, perhaps in brutal public scandal, the leers of my enemies, tears of my family, the whips of the vindictive state. They had devoured Wilde like a great meat meal; me they would swallow as a Continental breakfast. I packed Say It, Cecil in a heavy legal envelope and addressed it to J. J. Mannering, stamped it and took it below to the hall table for the porter to post. The morning mail had already been laid out on that table, but there was nothing for me. It was as though a silence premonitory of violence was already setting in. It still would not rain.

I sat by Rodney and thought. As always with me, thought expressed itself in dramatic images. Two grave men in ulsters and bowlers arrived with a warrant. "If you would come quietly sir and make no fuss it would be better no point in protesting to us sir we are merely indifferent arms of the law." One of the men had a twitch in his left cheek. Or if it were merely a matter of divorce then there would be a long wait before the civil action bred the criminal one. The scandal. How would the newspapers put it? Patients in my father's waiting room reading the papers there, going into the surgery, noting my father's slight tremor, eyes lowered to his instruments in shame. "Needn't say Mr Toomey how much we sympathise my wife asked me to tell you terrible thing who would have thought it yes that's the one hurts when I eat anything sweet." No, the mere act of filing divorce action would entail the laying of an information, if that was the term. I sweated as I saw myself with heavy baggage at Dover or Folkestone, furtively climbing the gangplank in merciful seafog. When the doorbell below rang at noon I sat frozen. My door was knocked impatiently. I sat frozen. No good, they had the right to force an entry. I went to the door on legs of oatmeal. It was, of course, Dr. Chambers, dressed in doctor's old style with top hat in bad need of reblocking.

"He lives here?" he asked sternly, looking down on bleary rambling Rodney.

"No," I said blushing. "He came on a visit. He arrived yesterday. From Manchester."

"The flu's bad up there. A new strain, very tough. Don't at all like the sound of that chest. His face looks familiar."

"He's Rodney Selkirk. The actor. He was in one of my plays."

"Not seen any play of yours." The guilt mounted. "Must have been something else I saw him in."

"Very likely. What can be done for him?"

"I'll have to get him a bed."

"This is a bed." Oh God, a laugh in every line, Mr Toomey excels himself, 365th hilarious performance.

"I mean in the London Clinic. Ambulance too. He obviously can't walk."

"He has only one leg. On the Marne. A war hero, you know." "War hero, eh?" Nothing sounded too good. "Danger of pneumonia. A killer, that. Needs careful nursing. Even so, even so." He shook his head. My heart fell; I felt the beginnings of the exhilaration of treacherous liberty; dead Rodney, no divorce action, no criminal action. Oh Christ: dead Rodney, Rodney dead. "Can I use your phone?"

"Downstairs. You don't mean that, do you?"

"Mean what?"

"A killer, you said."

"Mark my words," he said loudly, poking his finger at me. "It's going to be a very sour peace when it comes if it comes. Epidemic proportions, you mark my words. You don't look any too good yourself." And sternly he went down to the telephone.

When they took Rodney away he was too delirious to know where he was or who I was.

"Do you think the laws of God will be will be." And then he was King Claudius. "Who, impotent and bedrid, impotent and bedrid, what the hell comes next, prompt, damn it."

"Rodney, Rodney."

The rear stretcher-bearer shook his grizzled head. The ambulance driver carried Rodney's bag downstairs, but I forgot to give him the artificial limb. I told Brett, the porter, that I was going away for a time and gave him five pounds to pack my books and household effects into boxes and stow these in the cellars. I scribbled a note to the landlord terminating my lease. Secret war service, I said, an urgent posting. God knows what happened to poor Rodney's leg.

CHAPTER 18

I registered at the Marmion Hotel in Bloomsbury under the name of Henry M. James. The M., chosen randomly, I later discovered stood for the dachshund Max. I had a few words with Humbert Wolfe, poet and civil servant, who eased my way to obtaining a visa from the consular department of the French Embassy. We were, after all, at war, and only the doomed had free access to the fields of France. I could claim a sort of business in Paris: the British farce Goddam, freely adapted from my French farce Parleyvoo, was going into rehearsal at the Odéon, with André Claudel in the lead, and it seemed reasonable that I should at least look in and protect such features of the original as I valued. I got my visa without trouble and then wondered whether I dared risk visiting poor Rodney to tell him of my impending flight. But the police might already be seated by his bed, awaiting me. I telephoned and learned that he was "very poorly."

It was on the packet from Folkestone that I read of his death. The boat was really War Department transport taking odds and sods to the other shore: officers with strange specialisations, journalists, two men of the French War Ministry, nursing sisters, a platoon of intellectual-looking weeds called an Extraordinary Offence Unit, a bearded but uniformed war artist who left his Evening Standard on one of the deck benches. It was in this newspaper that I read the few lines dedicated to the untimely demise of a notable actor. I wept in the windy marine dark; I had loved him and he, I believed, me. It must be hard for my younger readers to take in the fact that a man could die of influenza. We of that age had electricity, gas, automobiles, rotary printing presses, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, canned goods, Gold Flake cigarettes, mass destruction, aeroplanes, but we did not have antibiotics. Millions were to die of influenza before that year was out. This was, in art, the modern age, the age of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, surrealism, atonality, but of science we knew very little. Even our war was waged on the mediaeval assumption that the enemy was encastled on a hill that was called Central Europe, and that the hill had to be climbed painfully, trench by trench. As for homosexual love, this was a sin against society. I did not know whether, with poor Rodney dead, I was still in danger from Mrs Selkirk and the law, but there was no turning back now. I had committed myself to exile. Save for odd business visits, I would never see England again.

The train journey from Boulogne to Paris was wretched, full of stops and jerks and railwaymen's shouts in the night. The war artist sat next to me, charcoal-sketching in the dim light a kind of general outline of a scene of slaughter. A fat Belgian opposite had an inexplicable supply of powdery Turk ish delight, which he would offer from a sticky palm. An old lady smoked what looked and smelled like Russian papirosi. When we arrived I had difficulty in finding a taxi. The only motor vehicles around seemed to be Red Cross ambulances. The blackout was intenser than London's. Of the few blue-clad porters at least half wore black bands of mourning. I must get my own black band, I told myself.

The crippled cabdriver found with difficulty the little Hotel Récamier, which hid in a corner near the huge porticoed church of Saint-Sulpice. I had cabled my request for a reservation, but they had not received the message. Nevertheless, they had a cold little room for me, and there on the rickety table I laid out my unlined paper and fountain pen, earnest of serious work, no more farces. I undressed shivering and cried myself to sleep.

The next day's windy cloudy Paris was no improvement on the sad and empty city of the night. After a cup of bitter chicory coffee and a stale croissant I went to the bank on the Rue de la Paix to which my London bank had transferred the greater part of my funds. I left with my pockets full of dirty francs, watching without pleasure the stream of Red Cross motors, noting that great hotels had been turned into hospitals, hearing a shattering crump that could only be Big Bertha.

"Big Bertha," an Englishman said to me in a sad bar on the Boulevard Saint Germain. "Saw a shell explode on the street yesterday. The thing to do is not to run down into the Metro with the rest of the shitscared bastards. If it comes for you, bow it a welcome. Who the hell wants to live anyway?" And he gloomily downed a small glass of something purplish. He then peered at me, pushing his glass toward the barman for a refill. "Know you, don't I? Were with Norman back there on that literary rag, that right? Douglas, that is. Ran away after he got picked up. Buggering little boys, that is. He's her; living off rotten chestnuts. You also in necessary but fearful exile? I'm Wade-Browne, by the way." He was lean and high and hollowchested. "Clever idea, that filthy novel of yours full of tits, putting every bugger on the wrong track. Didn't take us knowing ones in, though." He chuckled sadly and dirtily. "Toomey. Let me see if I can recall Norman's limerick. Ah." And he recited: "A notorious bugger called Toomey Has a heart that's excessively roomy. For shagging and shoving He substitutes loving. Prognosis: exceedingly gloomy."

My hand trembled as it lifted the ballon of course rouge. I sipped and wet my tie. This man could not yet know of my bereavement. His friend Douglas had a fair idea, though, of my temperament. Even those of my own fleshly persuasion were prepared to find love absurd. Such gigglers, shagging and shoving where they could, were surely damned. But why not also the oiled cheap Casanovas, chalking up shopgirl conquests? Perhaps they too, but not so damned as this boyshagging Douglas. I had only just arrived in Paris; already I knew I had to get out. Douglas defiled it, already defiled as it was.

Wade-Browne watched me, leering. Then, by way of a sad sneer, he relapsed into his initial gloom. "The problem is," he said, "to make the negative fatalistic wait on the positively suicidal. I mean, in a war people don't take guns and knives to themselves. Suicide rate's very low in wartime. A sought-out blighty one's different. Self-mutilation in the trenches indicates a powerful desire to survive. I'd never do myself in, not with Big Bertha banging away. But getting in the way of the shells is bloody difficult."

"Why," I said, "do you want to die?"

"Ah, got a tongue in your arse, sorry, head, eh? Why, you ask. Well, give me a good reason for living. Go on, you do that."

"Certain physical sensations. The beauty of the earth and of art."

"Oh Jesus, such shit."

I said no more. I was not going to mention love.

"Western civilization has the right idea," he said. "Blowing itself up." Big Bertha crumped again, northeast of us. The barman crossed himself, then shrugged as to say: An inherited superstition, a mere reflex, forgive it. I decided I had better move south. I was a free man, wasn't I? I had a right to flee from dark and danger and deprivation and move to the woods of mimosa. My pockets were full of dirty francs. I could arrange for a drawing account on a branch of the Banque Nationale when I got to where I was going. I would go and pack at once. I nodded coldly at Wade-Browne, then drank up. He called something obscene and whining after me as I left.

In the street I saw Maynard Keynes with a briefcase under his arm. He was grinning manically at an official-looking Frenchman who spoke rapidly but deferentially, as though this big, confident and clever-looking man had already been created a milord. Keynes evidently wanted to get away from him. He waved at me as though I were the one man he had come to Paris to see, then strode toward me, throwing back fluent commercial French with a Cambridge neigh to the other, a dapper and bowing hat-doffer. Big Bertha crumped somewhere across the river. Keynes and I knew each other, having been fellow guests at at least three Bloomsbury parties. Morgan Foster had been kind to me and had even made tentative gestures in the direction of the possibility of our perhaps conceivably becoming perhaps friends. But, though I liked Morgan well enough, I did not greatly care for his smell, which, incredibly, considering his agnosticism, was not unlike that of stale holy water in a church stoup. Keynes was at that time, as all Bloomsbury knew, trying to turn himself into a heterosexual with a ballet dancer. He now pumped my hand and leered at me, as if he knew why I had left London. He seemed to consider that his own presence required an explanation.

"Buying pictures cheap for the government. The prices are down to nothing, what with Big Bertha and all the panic. I could," he said, "put you in the way of something. A Georges Rouault, dirt cheap, absolutely."

"Why me?"

"Why not you?" He then surveyed me with an eye closed and his bowler-hatted head on one side, not grinning. "You look bruised and lonely. You look like a man who needs a picture to look at. Come to the Ritz and see. Absolutely rock-bottom dirt cheap."

CHAPTER 19

It was not, and never is, possible to ignore the square porticoed bulk of the church of Saint. Sulpice. As I approached the Hotel Récamier with a Rouault under my arm, ready to pack, pay, search for a cab and get to the Gare de Lyon, I had the sensation of a small bomb bursting in my heart. Was I not free not only in the vague sense that is conveyed by odd pictures of oneself drinking at café tables under palm trees, but also in the particular sense of being liberated from fleshly desire? Rodney was dead and I wanted no other lover; wanting no other lover, I did not require physical embraces. Should the itch of the flesh ever come in a depersonalised form, I had only to conjure an image of giggling Norman Douglas handling little dirty boys in order to dispel it. Partly magnetised by the solidity of the church itself, partly thrown toward it by the bursting bomb of hope, I mounted the steps and walked into the stale religious gloom animated by sinners come to confess. It was Saturday, traditional day for the scraping of the pan. I joined the seated bourgeoisie, half of them black banded, awaiting shrift from Father H. Chabrier. The man next to me, who smelt of cloves, was openly reading a copy of Le Rire, or rather taking in a drawing of a skirt-dancer. He was like one who relishes the last drink before closing time.

Confessing in French was like confessing to my mother. I could see only Father Chabrier's hands beyond the grille, gnarled pale hands that sometimes beat time to his words with a rolled copy of a daily paper.

"Very nearly two years, hence I missed my Easter duty. Also mass on Sundays and feast days. Also my morning and night prayers."

"Oui oui oui." He was impatient, he wanted sins of commission.

"Sins of impurity, Father."

"Avec des Jemmes?"

"With men, Father."

"Aaaaaah."

I had trouble with the word love. In French, in all its forms and their derivatives, it seemed frivolous or cynical or grossly physical.

"Do you sincerely repent of those sins?"

"I cannot very well repent of love, mon père."

"You must repent of it, you must."

"How can I repent of what God ordains that we do? Agape, diligentia. I will not say l'amour. I loved a man, and he is now dead. What have I done wrong?"

"There was the physical in it, as you have said. That was a deadly sin."

"But that was tenderness, the expression of agape--"

"Do not use that word agape to me, agape means Christian love, that is blasphemous." He sighed, groaned, then smote the grille thrice irritably with his newspaper baton. "You have committed deadly sin, do you sincerely repent of that sin?"

"Whatever it is or was, I firmly resolve not to do it again. Will that suffice?"

"Resolution is only part of it. There must be penitence. Are you sincerely penitent?"

"You ask me to repent of love?"

"L'amour expressly forbidden, l'amour filthy and obscene."

"If that love was truly filthy and obscene, then I repent of it. Will that do?"

He was not going to be tricked. If there was to be any casuistry, it was for him, a priest of the Church, to perpetrate. He said: "There are without doubt many waiting outside. I do not think you have sufficiently prepared yourself. You must examine your conscience more thoroughly than you evidently have so far done. Come and see me again on Monday. My horaire is fixed to the door, you will see the times when I am here. Go now and pray to be made penitent." And he crashed down his baton in a final beat, like his namesake on the last chord of, say, the Marche Joyeuse.

So, then, I was to go south unshriven. None could say I had not done my best. When I left the confessional the waiting sinners looked up at me with vague interest. They had perhaps heard the bang of the rolled newspaper. A young girl in black looked up in disquiet and reproach: le père Chabrier was in a bad mood, and all my fault. As I walked to my hotel, Rouault also unshriven, I felt myself to be gently fingered by the savants of the Enlightenment. Tap tap, they tapped. Do more than write farces and sensational fiction. Construct something in which to believe. Love and beauty are not enough.

CHAPTER 20

As some of my readers will know, I wrote a little book called Moving South. I had originally thought of the title Austral, an austere and learned reaction to abominations like Fig a Jig Tray Bon, but filthy Norman Douglas in a manner preempted it with his South Wind. It is part travel book, part highly selective autobiography, part record of my reading en route and en voyage, part trite philosophical essay, ending with an Affirmation of Life, meaning sun, sea, wine, bad peasant cooking. I started it in the Gare de Lyon, during the long wait for the train to pull out, continued it at Orleans, Saint-Etienne, at Toulouse, at Marseilles.

Spring came, and the war rolled destructively toward its end. The new battle of Arras. The new German offensive. The British naval raid on Zeebrugge and Ostend. The appointment of Foch as commander-in-chief of the allied armies. The sinking of the Vindictive in Ostend harbour. The last German offensive. The successful attack of British Dominion forces at Amiens. The end of the Turkish army at Megiddo. By that time, summer had gone and I was basking in the Cagliari autumn. I had obtained an Italian visa at Nice, spent some weeks in Florence, taken a boat from Leghorn to Corsica, jumped across the narrow Strait of Bonifacio into Sardinia, then travelled slowly by train down the west coast to Cagliari. The Bulgarians signed an armistice, the last general offensive in the west began, the Germans accepted President Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Italians massively advanced, the Turks surrendered, the Austrians accepted the Italian terms. Bell-clashes and vinous rejoicing on the Via Roma while I sat, friendless, chaste, unloved, at an outside table of the Café Roma, with a bottle of black cold local wine. On November 9, the day of the Kaiser's flight and abdication, I was writing in my hotel room on the Largo Carlo-Felice: I do not want to use terms like good and evil. If such terms possess a meaning, it must be only in a general context of theology. Right and wrong will do for me, variable in meaning though they are. It has been right to hate the Germans; soon it will be right to love them. It was wrong to eat overmuch bread; soon it will be wrong to deprive the wheatmen of their golden profits. I know that many have been talking of an evil war, as though God had abdicated like Kaiser Wilhelm and the Devil presided over his own Revolution, but can one say more than that the war was both wrong and right? It was right to spring to arms to the defence of the little nations, wrong to condemn so many to death and mutilation. Men do what has to be done in order that some great basic principle of movement may be fulfilled. History is movement and movement is life. Who, except Hegel or Marx, would be so bold as to affirm that the movement of history is toward the better and may end with the establishment of the satisfactory and unchangeable? All we know is that men move, men change, and that the sufferings they undergo--and will themselves to undergo--are both wrong and right. As for good, do not tell me that God is good. If God exists, he is indifferent to men, and if he is indifferent, then he may as well not exist. Good is what I find in the taste of an apple, in the curdling of the clouds over the sea here at Cagliari, in the benison of the sun in the morning, new bread, coffee, friendship, love.

Oh my God, I can say now, and shudder.

On November 11 I wrote my final words: We have all suffered, in one way or another, and now many of us will unreasonably expect a reward for having borne up so bravely. We have taken our medicine, and father will buy us a bag of sweets. The truth is that father will buy us nothing. The truth is that father does not exist, either as unpredictable Jehovah, beneficent Nature, or omnipotent State. We must look for our own sweets and not be disappointed if they are hard to find. For strictly we deserve nothing. We wanted this war. If we had not wanted it we would not have had it. Whatever we want we shall always have, but we ought always to calculate whether we can afford to pay for it. Ask little, expect less: let that be the pokerwork slogan we hang above our beds this eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The little and the less are sufficiently satisfying. Seek the good.

I was young, a very young and immature man who believed it was a fine thing to be a writer. Sufficiently satisfying, indeed. Satisfactorily satisfactory. These things are almost as shameful in old age as fleshly sin or spiritual meanness, and they spring out of the same fault, which we may term unawareness. If I could write so blatant a tautology, I could write also of the goodness of evil or the badness of good, and probably, somewhere or other, did.

I had finished my little book, then, and I went out to celebrate a double completion. The bells clanged and whirred, and men and women in native costume and in the drabber garbs which aped the bourgeois modes of Milan strolled happily in the evening passeggiata or drank at the outside café tables in the mild autumn air. I climbed a corkscrew street down which a late loaded donkey slithered, whoaed by his master, moustached, fierce-eyed as a warrior, with his sock-cap twisted in the Phrygian mode. I entered a little wineshop and was welcomed, the Englishman, his war ended only a few days later than theirs. I drank too much of a colourless spirit that smelt of old sheepdog, brought, winking, by the fat proprietor from a back room: something strong, special, reserved. I sang: "You wore a tunic, A dirty khaki tunic, While I wore civilian clothes."

Even though nobody there knew English, I perverted the words of the parody to the truth. I had come through, better men than I had been slaughtered or maimed. And here I was, speaking bad Italian on behalf of my victorious nation. My fellow drinkers were in the bright stockings, bunched-up clouttrunks, flop-caps, stiff red jackets of rural Sardinia, or else in the baggy trousers and clumsy boots of workers of the town.

"Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin, His boots are cracking For want 0f blacking."

They all knew Charlie Chaplin. I believed that writers were fine people and the legislators of the world and so on, but I was already desperately out of date. The future belonged to the universal eye, to be tricked and overfed with crude images; it did not belong to the imagination. The last thing I clearly remember of that evening was a young man doing a very competent imitation of Charlie running from the cops and braking on one foot as he turned a corner. And then I was waking up in my hotel room at four in the morning, queasy and drymouthed, with a naked woman next to me.

Feeling warm flesh there, I thought at first it was Rodney. Then my hand caught the protrusion of a female breast. I was in bed with my mother, Hortense was in bed with me. Wait, I was in Sardinia. The woman snored. There was not enough light from outside the window for me to see what or who, how young or old. A church bell told four. I began to retch. I got out of bed hastily. I too was naked. On the table over there there should be mineral water. I could, I knew, find it in the dark. I retched. I must get to the gabinetto two doors down the corridor, but not naked. My dressing gown hung behind the door; I got it on.

I came back shaky to drink off the half-full bottle of mineral water. I shivered. It was a cold night and dawn was a long way off. I took off my dressing gown and got back into bed. My bedfellow stirred and muttered something about, or to, somebody called Pietro. I was lying on my back to her left, she was turned away from me. She then supinated briskly and struck my chest with the length of a hard forearm. The bed was narrow. She rasped out a single harsh snore that woke her. She smacked her lips. I could almost hear her eyeballs rolling, trying to pierce the dark as she wondered where she was. A distant cock crowed viciously at some sudden light somewhere, an immature cock with an illlearnt cocorico. She knew where she was. Then she was on her left side, breathing on me. I could hear the swishing of her eyelids. I expected garlic and the foul accumulations of the night, but she smelt of apples. I pretended sleep and feigned slow sleeper's breaths, spiced now and then with a snort. Her right hand was on my penis. She tweaked my nose with her left. I acted the part of a man waking.

"Eh what who." And then: "Francesca."

I was damned if I could remember any Francesca. If one got drunk enough one could commit murder and know nothing about it. I remembered once in London surfacing from somewhere or nowhere to find myself in a strange bedsitter full of affable strangers, sitting on a divan-bed genteelly eating a kipper. What had happened in that little wineshop up the hill? The Englishman, one of a notoriously tepid race, taunted rollickingly with his stiffness, or lack of it, forced to prove his virility by taking off a girl notoriously loose, knowing that the virility would not have to be proved to the hilt? Or a prostitute picked or picking up on the Via Roma afterwards? You fall, you drunk, I take you ome. I cautiously felt Francesca's face with two fingers, a young smooth face with a frame of wild hair that smelt faintly scorched. She took my hand and firmly put it to her clitoris.

I was technically a virgin. I had spilled seed in sleep or with other males but never with a woman. I knew what men did with women but now for the first time (November 12, 1918) was drawn from duty not desire, far far from desire, to enact what I had learnt in sniggering school urinals and later, somewhat modified, from bar talk and books. The sexual stimulation of an invisible but very warm and solid female body I performed coldly and with distaste. I tried to turn myself into a character in one of my novels, initiating the act in joy, which the Germans call Lust, but I could not. I was disgusted with the hypocrisy the trade committed me to, since the time for homosexual fiction was not yet, and might never be yet. I would continue to write about male and female reeling and writhing and fainting in coils, but it would always be a foul lie for me, also disgusting. I was damned if I was going to carry over a simulated tropism from the desk, where it was necessary, to the bed, where it was not. I removed my hand but not, it seemed, prematurely. She grasped my penis with the intention of guiding it toward herself, but there was nothing to guide except an inch or so of flaccid indifference. She laughed. I turned from her and mumbled into the pillow: "Via via, non posso. Via via via. Voglio dormire." She laughed.

She did not seem to require any light. A farm girl perhaps, not used to light that the Lord had not said let there be. I heard a rustle and a clop of shoes. Like a cat. But she laughed all the time. Enough to make a cat laugh. Charley's Aunt had preempted that slogan. It could not be used of the comedies of Kenneth M. Toomey. "Soldi?" I said, still into the pillow. But she laughed at that too. She had probably been paid in advance. I remembered nothing. Before she opened the door she said something rapid and derisive that might have been a Sardinian proverb about men not able to get it up. Then she was off. I felt terrible. Thank God I was leaving. She would know me all right, the Englishman who had sung about Charlie Chaplin. She would bring her friends to see me. Sitting at a café table I would be pointed out and giggled at. Let them do what the hell they wished. I was not staying, but I would go in my own good time. Where, though? To a place where I could find an English-language typist and a reliable postal service. I had a book to send to England. Had this sort of thing ever happened to Norman Douglas? He was probably an omnifutuant swine who could do it with anything. Watch this tautology, Toomey. That is what omnifutuant means. Live for style.

I sat at an outside café table next day going over my manuscript with a thick blunt pencil. Nobody laughed at me, but I had the feeling that I was looked at occasionally with grim wonder: a genuine English homosexual, regard. It may, of course, have been my lonely literary fussiness--tutting and striking things out. The tables were full except for mine, which had two empty chairs. None wished to take them. My loneliness was a visible property. Then a bulky shadow blotted the sun out. I looked up. My God, they were sending a priest after me. A bulky priest, his black rusty. A layman was with him. He flashed a handsome mouth at me, indicated the free chairs and said, "Possiamo?"

"Si accomodino."

They sat, and the cleric wrinkled a little at my foreign vowels. They talked quietly to each other in what I took to be the Milanese dialect. It was a busy noontime and they had trouble in getting a waiter. The layman clicked and clicked his fingers, then smiled at me as in deprecation of a vulgar but needful gesture. He looked down frankly at a page of my manuscript. "English?" he said.

"Yes, it's English."

"No, no, you. You are English? Or American?"

"English will do. British really. Britannico."

The waiter came, upright, fierce, moustached, a warrior. He took an order for vermouth from them, from me the same again. Coffee. Cognac. I was trying to cure my hangover. The priest drank and said, with comic tartness: "We end a long war and we celebrate by drinking wormwood."

"Such excellent English," I said. No flattery was necessary. The accent was faintly American; there was none of the interpolation of a linking vowel that so many Italians use to protect themselves from the bruising of our final consonants. I had taken this man to be a parish priest of no particular distinction, though I might have asked myself what a Milanese was doing in Cagliari. The layman was very ready to answer all the questions I had not yet asked.

He said, "Our mother, you understand, was born in the United States. In New Jersey, though Italian. Our father met her when he was in America on business. He brought her back to Milan, or near to it. The place of the famous cheese, Gorgonzola. She insisted very much that we should learn English. It was the language of the future, she said. I have been staying here to work at my music. My brother has come for a holiday. We have both been in the war, but he was in the war longer than myself." There it was, then, all: no picking and guessing and holding back, as with British table acquaintances.

"I am an English, or British, writer. I have published certain books. I have had certain stupid comedies presented in the London theatre. I have just completed a little book. I am sitting here correcting it. I have not been in the war. My heart was said to be unreliable."

"You knew these comedies were stupid when you wrote them?" the priest asked. "Or have you since discovered they are stupid? Or have others told you they are stupid?"

"When I say stupid, I mean not of the highest artistic excellence. The comedies were intended as devices to promote laughter, in a bad time. They succeeded in promoting laughter."

"Then you should not have said that they were stupid."

"Would your name be a famous name?" his brother asked.

"I think not," I said, "outside London theatrical and literary circles. It is," I said humbly, "Kenneth Toomey."

They both tried out that name: tuuuumi. They liked it, though they did not know it. It fitted an Italian mouth very nicely. The layman said, "I am Domenico Campanati, a composer of music." He waited with small hope. No, I hadn't heard of him. "My brother is Don Carlo Campanati." It was not expected that I, or anyone, should have heard of him.

I said, "I have not yet seen my latest work for the stage. You say you are a composer of music. I should think you would despise the music of this work, which is a musical comedy. I have not, of course, heard the music," I added. I looked at Don Carlo and waited.

"If the music is good, why should he despise it? If you have not heard the music, then how can you know that it is not good?"

I was beginning to enjoy this in a bad-tooth-biting way. I said, "The story of this musical comedy is excessively stupid." Don Carlo shook his head amiably, as at a student slow but worth the teacher's perseverance. "It is the story of a young man," I began, "who cannot say I love you." And I blurted it all out. They listened with attention, Domenico Campanati smiling, Don Carlo with Stagyrite seriousness. At the end Domenico gave a happy little gurgle apt for such a nugacity, but Don Carlo said: "There is nothing stupid there. There is a profound truth embedded in a play of words. For love is great, and the professing of love is not to be done lightly."

I bowed my head. I said, "I should be honoured if you would have lunch with me. At the ristorante of my albergo." I invited them a microsecond or so before knowing why. It was Domenico, of course, handsome, simpatico, an artist. My glands were sniffing around. The brothers looked at each other and Don Carlo was the first to say they would be honoured. He also said, as I drained my coffee and then my cognac: "I presume you will take your luncheon backwards. You will end, after the soup, with a glass of wormwood." We got up and Don Carlo looked critically at the money I had left on the table. "That is too much. A mancia of two lire. The waiter will be dissatisfied with those who leave a smaller but more rational mancia."

"You disapprove of generosity? Perhaps they will call me Don Quixote della mancia." Neither of them thought that funny. I have frequently used that quip with Italians, but it has never been considered funny. We set off through the noon crowd toward the Largo Carlo-Felice. The weather was mild still, but Don Carlo wore a heavy black cloak. With my manuscript flapping under my arm in the breeze, I peered warily about for girls who would laugh and point the finger at me. But none did.

Don Carlo said, "Your eyes are busy. You are not a married man?" His own sharp black eyes missed nothing. He turned them to me, along with a nose that was a complicated structure of wide hairy nostrils, great firm wings, a number of hillocks on the shallow slopes, a zigzagging nose gristle. I smiled guiltily and shook my head. He was fat and came up to my chin; about five years my senior, I thought. His brother was younger than I and almost as tall. He had what I took to be the family eyes, black and wideset, but without sharpness: he was a dreamer, one of my own breed. His black oiled hair was long, as a musician's was expected to be in those days. He wore a suit from a good Milanese tailor, sober dark blue but the lapels assertive as his ears, ready to catch whatever sounds were going. I divined that there was money in the family. I guessed that his music was being subsidised by family money.

I said, as we walked, "What music are you composing?"

"An opera in one act. La Scala needs such things. Why should Cavalleria Rusticana always have to go with I Pagliacci?"

"Yes. Cavnpag we say in London."

"Why should the whole of Puccini's Trittico have to be done when they wish only to do Gianni Schicchi?"

"You have a good libretto?"

He raised his shoulders to bury his neck, dug his elbows into his ribs, fanned out his fingers. "It is by Ruggero Ricciardelli. You know him? No. A young poet who worships D'Annunzio. There are too many words. There is not enough happening. There is too much standing around and doing nothing. You understand me?"

"Perhaps," I said, "you would permit me to look at it."

"Would you, would you?" He was ready to wreathe himself about me in gratitude. "You say you have written for the theatre, yes? Music comedy, you said. Meaning a kind of operetta, yes? Well, why not in my little opera new things, very American? Ragtime, jazz. I hear and see very clearly a mixed quartet drinking cocktails and the music becoming more and more ubriaca."

"Drunk, yes. Why not?"

Don Carlo rumbled "Drunk," prolonging the vowel into a Milanese ah. "Not too drunk, fratello mio."

I said, ready to be knocked down again, "Art and morality have little to say to each other. We do not go to the play or the opera to be taught what is bad and what is good."

"That is not what the Church tells us. But you are English and do not belong to the Church."

"My family is a Catholic family. My mother is French. She converted my father."

"Nevertheless," Don Carlo said, "I do not think you belong to the Church." And that was that. We had arrived at the hotel and we entered its restaurant, trattoria really, and Don Carlo went in first, bowed at, leading the way to a table as though the meal were on him. The place was not full. There was an old man patiently feeding soup to a little girl. There was a party of flashy young men, already on the cheese course and loud with wine. Our tablecloth was clean but threadbare, the glasses cloudy, the forks bent. Black cold wine was brought in two terra-cotta pitchers. The waiter looked hard at me, though without malice. He knew. Don Carlo poured. "Let us drink," he said, "to the end of war."

"You mean all war?" I said. "Or just the one of which the armistice was signed yesterday?"

He drank deep and poured himself more. "There will always be wars. A war to end war, that is, to use your beloved word, a stupidity." This was hardly fair; I had not used that word at all. "My brother there," he said, "got himself out of it quickly. He gave himself no opportunity to learn certain things."

"Got yourself out of it how?" I asked Domenico. For blatant buggery in the trenches. I thumped that unworthy thought away.

"A nervous condition," Domenico said. "Before Caporetto." He said no more.

Don Carlo said, "I was a chaplain. I gave the comforts of the Church to the Austrians as well as to the Italians. It was an Italian anarchist who shot at me. There is humour for you." He did not smile.

"Shot at you? Wounded you?"

"In a fleshy part. It did no harm. Ah." The soup came in a large chipped bluestriped white tureen. It reeked of cabbage but, as Don Carlo was quick to show with a questing ladle, contained also bits of celery, potato (very expensive in Cagliari), broccoli, even stringy meat. He served himself and broke thick coarse grey bread into it. He spooned it noisily, sighed with content, pointed his dripping spoon at me, saying, "What I learned was less of the badness of war than of the goodness of men."

I had not, for some reason, expected this. I looked at Domenico to see if he agreed. He sipped soup delicately. "But," I said, "think of the thousands and millions dead or mutilated. The starvation, the atrocities, children shattered and their mothers raped."

"You say you were not in the war?" asked Domenico.

"Heart. As I said. No, not in it."

Don Carlo snorted over his raised spoonful of brewis. He said, "My brother was in the artillery. He knows what I say is true. The death of the body. Man is a living soul who must be tested in suffering and death. He too saw the goodness of men. Then he got himself out quickly."

"You too," I said. "You were not in at the end."

"I was called to Rome." Don Carlo glared at me as though it were not, which it was not, any of my business. "There were other things. There were plenty of other chaplains ready to be shot at."

"Some men were good," Domenico said with caution. "You can always find good men. In the war there were many men, so of course there were many good men." I chewed that over with a bit of cabbage. It seemed reasonable enough. Don Carlo took more soup, bread, wine. He said, "I fini e i mezzi. The war has been a means of bringing out men's goodness. Selfsacrifice, courage, love of comrades."

"So let us at once start another war?"

He rolled his head in good humour. "No. The devil has his work to do. God permits him to do his work. But of course you will not believe in the devil." The waiter brought fish in one hand and tried to take the tureen away with the other. Don Carlo put out burly arms and grasped it by its rim: there was still half a plateful there. The fish was a kind of mackerel cooked with head and tail on, swimming in oil, adorned with lemon slices. Don Carlo took his soup fast, so as not to be cheated of his fair share of the fish. Taking more than his fair share, but he was welcome to it, he had leisure to say, "It is all in your English Bible. In Genesis. The fallen Lucifer was permitted to implant the spirit of evil in the souls of men. Where is evil? Not in God's creation. There is a great mystery but the mystery sometimes becomes less of a mystery. For the devil brings war, and out of the war comes goodness. You must believe in the goodness of men, Mr Mr--"

"Tuuuumi," his brother said. And then, "He is like me. He has no time for theology. We leave all that to you, Carlo. We work at our art." I could not resist giving him a smile of excessive intimacy. He smiled back. Don Carlo seemed pleased to be granted a temporary manumission from instructing the heathen. He finished his fish, soaking up the oil with bread, and asked for more bread when the main course came. This was a mixed roast of kid, chicken and what was possibly veal. There was a big boiled oiled cauliflower which Don Carlo at once, as though performing a sacrifice, chopped into three unequal portions. Also a whole grey loaf cut in thick wedges. Don Carlo ate with strong crushing teeth. My father would admire those. My poor father, ignorant of my sins as my womenfolk were not. I had hardly written. I was travelling abroad, I had said, and would be incommunicado for some time. Now I must start thinking of arranging a little holiday in the warm south for my sister Hortense, perhaps also for my brother Tom when he should be demobbed. I had no desire to go home again, but I could import temporary fractions of my home to wherever I was, warm and monied. The musical stupidity was doing well, that I knew. I had a mind to spend the winter in Nice. Sardinia could, so I had heard, be, though blue, bleak from December to March.

Domenico agreed: bleakish. He had been here for quiet, in the house of Guglielmi between Cagliari and Mandas. Guglielmi was in Naples now, fiddling. I had never heard of Guglielmi. "I must," Domenico said, "be in Catania for Natale, Christmas that is. There is to be a concert in the Opera House. They are to play my little partita for string orchestra. I had thought of trying to finish my opera in Pasi's house, outside Taormina. He has a Steinway." We musicians and writers, always on the move. "Finish," he said, his large black eyes melting like jammed fruit as he looked at me, "or start again? You said you would look at the libretto."

"I'm no da Ponte," I said. "I can only work in English."

"Why not?" he said, his eyes reflecting a new vista. "I had not thought of that. Why not in English?"

"Free men," Don Carlo said. "Free to say yes or no or go where you wish to go. I, who may say neither yes nor no, must go back to Milan."

"The boy?" asked Domenico.

"The boy will be all right. The devils are cast out."

"What's this," I said, "about devils?"

For reply Don Carlo worked away at the nibbled-looking chunk of pecorino sardo, the strong cheese which comes, among all Mediterranean cheeses, closest in flavour to an English cheese. A new crock of cold black wine was put on the table. I wondered whether to raise the theological issue of gluttony, but I knew what the answer would be. Eating your fill was not gluttony; it was a good, nay a necessity. As for eating beyond your fill, that was the devil's work and it contrived a kind of purgation along with the temporary agony, both salutary things. "Milan, but for a brief stay only. I must get my French ready for Paris. L'Institut Catholique on the rue d'Assas. La Catho, they call it. The History of the Church," Don Carlo said, pointing his bulky nose at me like a weapon. "I will teach that."

CHAPTER 21

The libretto, as far as I could tell with my small Italian, was wordy but sound. There are very few plots available to the librettist--or to the novelist for that matter--and Ricciardelli's was the one that found its best expression in Romeo and Juliet. The title was Pirandello-like: I Poveri Ricchi. The Corvi are rich and the Gufi are poor. Gianni Gufo loves Rosalba Corvo. The Corvi forbid marriage. Old Man Corvo loses his money, and Old Man Gufo is left a fortune by a forgotten uncle in America. Now the Gufi forbid marriage. Old Man Corvo nevertheless gets drunk with Old Man Gufo and the two become friendly. Corvo offers to invest Gufo's fortune for him, and Gufo says yes. Corvo's scheme fails, and both families are now poor. The boy and girl may marry with everybody's half-hearted blessing. But Gianni and Rosalba are now so accustomed to clandestine trysts that they lose interest in each other when they are free to kiss in the open. So the two families (and this was stolen from Rostand) pretend a great enmity which they no longer feel and the lovers love each other again. Telegrams arrive speaking of restored fortunes for both families. Embraces, bells, wine, curtain. This story had to be put across in seventy minutes, with the terrace of the Corvo house overlooking a piazza full of choral market stallholders. Ricciardelli's lyrics and recitative were far too wordy and overbrimmed with poetic colour: leave colour to the music. Domenico needed a greater variety of forms--trios, quartets, quintets as well as duets--and he needed the pithiness which an admirer of D'Annunzio could not easily provide. Indeed, he needed what I was not--a new da Ponte.

I worked not in Nice but in Monaco, in the Condamine on the rue Grimaldi. I had a bare and airy top-floor apartment rented, on a six months' lease, from a M. Guizot, who was visiting Valparaiso. When I had finished the first draught I telegraphed Domenico in, or just outside, Taormina. He came. I hired a piano, a tinny Gaveau. He stayed. We ended with two versions of the libretto, one in Tuscan, the other in a kind of American with the title The Richer the Poorer. I learned a lot of Italian. He learned something about English prosody. He began to dream of doing something popular for the New York stage. He had no strongly individual musical style but could imitate anybody. This opera was mainly in the style of late Puccini, with acerbities stolen from Stravinsky. It had a ragtime sequence and a drunken duet. A drunken quartet would not fit into the narrative pattern, but the finale was loud and vinous.

While Domenico warbled and struck chords on the wretched Gaveau in the long bare salon, I worked on my novel two rooms away. This was The Wounded, about the legless man coming back from the war (poor Rodney) and nobly trying to make his betrothed marry another, a whole man. But his betrothed is blinded in a car accident and the whole man who has fancied her no longer does so. So the two maimed marry and live happily and beget limbed and sighted children. This sounds worse than it really is, though, pace Don Carlo Campanati, it is still pretty stupid. What I was trying to do at that time was, in a sense, Shakespearean. I was taking a story that could not fail to be popular, especially when adapted to the screen, as The Wounded was in 1925, and attempting to elevate it through wit, allusion and irony to something like art.

And all during this time I lived a loveless life. Domenico, without my telling him, divined quickly what and how I was and regretted that he could not help. He took the train to Ventimiglia once a week, sometimes twice, and came back looking rested. I for my part bitterly masturbated, sometimes seeing, as I approached climax, the figure of Don Carlo spooning in soup and shaking his head sadly. I tried to purge some of the rage of my loneliness in housework and cooking, though Domenico was a better cook than I and an old woman came in to clean three times a week. Friends, we were friends, he said, as well as brothers in art, but--ah, that kind of love seemed to him, if I would forgive his saying so, an abomination.

When Don Carlo came from Paris to stay with us for two days, I looked guiltily at him, as though his image had been a real presence. He had come, he said, when he had done panting from the long climb to the top story, to play roulette.

"Is that," I asked, getting him a whisky with a little water, "permitted? To a priest, that is?"

"The first shareholders of the Casino," he said, "were the bishop of Monaco and Cardinal Pecci. And you know what Cardinal Pecci became."

"Pope Leo the Thirteenth," Domenico said.

"We must exorcise the puritan in you," Don Carlo said, roguishly wagging his whisky at me without spilling a drop. "You think there is something irreligious about gambling. But it is only the opposing of one free will to another--"

"Talking of exorcism," I said. "Domenico promised that you would tell me the whole story. About this boy in Sardinia possessed by devils or whatever they were--"

"Domenico has no right to promise anything on my behalf. It's of no interest to you, who would not believe it anyway."

"What right have you to say what I believe and what I do not?" I asked, and that made him grunt as at a light blow struck at an ailing liver.

He said, "It is a thing I do. Indeed, any priest. But some do it better than others. Some take a chance."

"What do you mean--a chance?"

"You bring me back to what I was trying to say. One free will against another--that of the player, that of the little white ball on the big wheel--"

"You mean that figuratively? You mean an inanimate object can really have free will? What do you mean?"

"I am rebuked. You must soften the rebuke with more whisky." I took his empty glass. "I mean," he said, while I poured, "that what cannot be predicted looks very much like free will. I meant no more than that. I need," he said to his brother, "a necktie. I must go in as one of the laity. I must not scandalise the faithful. It is bad enough," chuckling, "to scandalise the faithless."

"Me? You mean me?" I said, giving him his fresh whisky.

"Why not you? You are not of the Church. You are not one of the faithful. Ergo you are one of the faithless. Does that annoy you?"

"I would," I said sadly, "be one of the faithful if I could. If the faith itself were more reasonable. I was in the faith, I know all about it."

"Nobody knows all about it," Don Carlo said.

"It's easy for you," I said, somewhat loudly. "You've put off the needs of the flesh. You've been gelded for the love of God."

"Gelded? A rare word, I think."

"Castrated, deballocked, deprived of the use of your coglioni."

"Not deprived," he said in no gelding's voice. "Not not deprived. We choose what we wish, but nobody may choose deprivation. I will take a bath now."

He took a very loud splashing bath, singing what sounded like highly secular songs in a coarse dialect. He shouted, in the same dialect, what sounded like a complaint about the lack of a bath towel. "I'll take it," I said to Domenico, who was scoring what looked like a semiquaver run for the strings at the round centre table. I got a towel from the corridor cupboard and took it to Don Carlo. He stood in the swimming bathroom, squeezing a blackhead on his chin. His eyes flashed from the mirror at my entrance. He was naked, of course, big-bellied but also big-ballocked, with roadworker's arms and shoulders, very hairy everywhere. He took the towel without thanks, began to dry himself, balls and belly first, and said: "If all goes well, it will be dinner at the Hotel de Paris. But some light nourishment is called for before we go. Bread. Salami. Cheese. Wine."

"Certainly, Father."

"What is your father?" he asked sternly.

"A dentist."

"In England?"

"In the town of Battle in East Sussex. The name celebrates the disaster of Senlac, when the Anglo-Saxons lost to the invading Normans."

He dried his shoulders, exposing his balls and what the Romans called dumpennente without shame. "And when are you going home?"

"I have no intention of going home. Not yet."

"It is not now the invading Normans," he said. "It is what some call the intangible visitation. You have read the newspapers?"

"You mean influenza?"

"The Anglo-Saxons are being invaded worse than most. It is a cold country. February is a cold month there. A long war ends and a long winter follows. Paris suffers too. I lost three students this week. I hope you do not have to go home."

I shivered, as though the influenza were being conjured here in mild safe Monaco by this naked priest. "Why did you mention my father?" I said. "Have you some occult vision of his succumbing to the--?"

"Occult," he bawled. "Do not use that word to me." And he pushed me out of the bathroom.

"Occult," I bawled back through the shut door. "It only means hidden. It only means concealed." But he was singing again.

I was sulky and vaguely fearful as we walked together up the road which separated the Condamine from the Casino. But I was maliciously glad too that Don Carlo was puffing and wheezing from the steep climb. Also the February sea wind was stiff, and he had to hold on hard, grumbling, to his black trilby, while Domenico and I wore sporty caps that could not be buffeted off. We were in country day wear, though of course with stiff collars, while Don Carlo was in wrinkled alpaca and an overtight shirt of his brother's, the tie rich but not modest. He looked like a cynical undertaker. He was panting hard when we reached the Casino, while Domenico and I, with breath to spare for the crescendo, were singing a chorus from our opera: "Money isn't everything, It's only board and bed, The only thing distinguishing Being living, being dead (So I've heard said)."

Domenico liked those ings and had stressed them in the orchestration with triangle and glockenspiel.

But there was no grumbling when Don Carlo began to play. Domenico and I staked our few francs at roulette and promptly lost them, but Don Carlo was rapt in the miracle of winning. We were, of course, in the "kitchen," not one of the salles privées for the rich and distinguished. It was the depressed postwar time and there were not many playing. We had heard that the Société des Bains de Mer was being saved from bankruptcy only by the pumping in by Sir Basil Zaharoff of thousands out of his armament millions. We had seen him and his Spanish mistress, the Duquesa de Marquena y Villafranca, getting out of a huge polished car outside the Hotel de Paris. He wanted to take over the principality and instal himself as its ruler; his fat mistress longed to be elevated to princess. He never came into the gaming rooms; he did not believe in gambling.

"Messieurs, jaites vos jeux."

And there was Don Carlo playing consistently a cheval, greedily wanting a return of seventeen times his stake. He got it too, twice. The plaques were piling up. Then he went into an anthology of other possible stakings: en plein, which should have brought him thirty-five times his money but didn't; transversale--I think it was 25, 26, 27--and there he won, eleven times his stake. Carré? Quatre premiers? He shrugged at losing: you only got an eightfold return. He went back to horseback, his stake on the line between 19 and 22. By God, it came up. Then he put three hundred francs on 16, en plein. He lost. Muttering something to himself, he tried a sixain, putting his plaque on the line dividing 7, 8, 9 and 10, 11, 12. It came up--five times the stake. He shrugged. He returned to that damned intractable en plein--16. He approached it cautiously, with a fifty-franc stake. He lost. "Basta, Carlo," his brother said. Don Carlo frowned, grunted, then seemed sotto voce to curse. He reverted to putting three hundred francs, the "kitchen" upper limit, on 16 once more: the curse was on his timidity. The croupier spun the cylindre.

"Les jeux sont jaits, rien ne va plus."

There were about ten round the table. Domenico and I dared not, of course, breathe. A middle-aged man with only three fingers on his left hand and on his right eye a black patch kept his singular gaze on Don Carlo's face, as though his study were gamblers' reactions to their own self-imposed hells. A silver-haired beldam seemed ready, blue at the lips, to suffer cardiac arrest on Don Carlo's behalf. "Oh my God." That was myself. Don Carlo looked sternly at me and my vain name-taking. Then he looked at the wheel, where the ball was just rolling to rest.

On 16. He went: "AH"

"The luck," I said infelicitously, "of the devil." He did not seem to hear. He hugged his chips to his bosom, then threw one, in the incense-splashing swipe of the asperges at high mass, at the croupier. The croupier, who had never, to my knowledge, seen him in his life before, said: "Merci, mon père--" Don Carlo sketched an unabashed blessing and moved away from the table.

"That's wise," I said.

"Trente-et-quarante," he said.

"No, Carlo, no. Basta."

"Roulette," Don Carlo said, "is really for children. Trente-et-quarante is for men. Tonight I feel myself to have," and he frowned at me humorously, "the devil's luck."

So we watched him while he sat at the trente-et-quarante table with untrustworthy-looking Milanese and Genoese who had come over the border for the weekend. He quipped with them in various dialects while the seals of the six new packs were broken. Trente-et-quarante is simpler than roulette, since it deals not in specific numbers but in pair, impair, couleur and inverse, but the stakes are double those of roulette: it is the serious gambler's game. Don Carlos staked a cheval most of the time. He seemed to know more about it than anybody there, including the chef de partie, and, stacking his winner's plaques in two high piles, he delivered a little lecture or sermon on the mathematical probabilities of recurrences--card rows to the value of 40 coming up only four times, as compared with thirteen times for a row of 31 and so on. He aspersed gratuities at the croupiers, then got up sighing with content as from a heavy meal. But the heavy meal was to come; he had promised us that.

Before cashing his chips he hesitated, looking back at the gaming salon with, in his eyes, the signs of a lust not sure yet whether it was satisfied. "Two things I have not done," he said. "The finales sept and the tiers du cylindre sadest. In both cases par cent, I think. I think I shall do them now."

"Basta, Carlo."

"What in the name of God--"

"You are too ready," he told me, "with your casual use of the holy name of the Lord God. The finales sept par cent is one hundred francs on 7 and 17 and 27. The other one is one hundred francs a cheval on the numbers on the southeast segment of the wheel--"

"Where did you learn all these things?" I asked. "Is it a regular part of theological instruction in Italy?"

"Have you read," he counter-asked, "but I know you have not so there is no point in asking, the books of Blaise Pascal?"

"I know the Pensées. I glanced at the Provincial Letters. You have no right to assume to assume--"

"The holy and learned Pascal was first to use the word roulette. He was much concerned with the mysteries of chance. He also invented the calculating machine and the public omnibus and the watch on the wrist. The mystery of numbers and of the starry heavens. Who are you to sneer and scoff and rebuke?"

"I'm not sneering and scoffing and... I merely asked--"

"You would do well to think about the need for harmless solace in a world full of diabolic temptation. I will not play the finales and the tierce." As though it were all my fault that he was thus deprived of further harmless solace, he sulkily cashed his plaques. He was given a lot of big notes, some of which he dropped and Domenico picked up. Then he began to waddle out. Domenico shrugged at me. We followed.

Despite postwar shortages, the ornate but airy restaurant of the Hotel de Paris was able to offer us the following: Saumon Fume de Hollande Velouté de Homard au Paprika Tourte de Ris-de-Veau Brillat-Savarin Selle d'Agneau de Lait Polignac Pommes Dauphin Petits Pois Fine-Fleur Sorbet au Clicquot Poularde Soufflée Impériale Salade A Ida Crèpes Flambées au Grand Mariner Coffret de Friandises Corbeille de Fruits Café Liqueurs. I had expected little more than a choice of ornate renderings of the flesh of the pigeons that, wounded by palsied triggerfingers in the famous Monte Carlo pigeon-shoot, wandering trustingly pecking round the outdoor tables of the Café de Paris opposite, were picked up as easily as kittens. But this was God's plenty and I said so. Don Carlo, after two seconds of consideration, accepted the term. It cost a lot, but Don Carlo had the money. For drink we began with champagne cocktails, went on to a good Chablis and a fine Chambertin, took a refreshing Blanquette de Limoux with the dessert, and ended with an acceptable Armagnac in flutes not balloons. Don Carlo ate with sweating concentration but, when we arrived at the sorbet, spared time to take in the charming belle époque decor. I said to him: "This decor of the belle époque. You find it charming?"

He said, as I'd expected, "There is a vagueness about these expressions. Who says that epoch was beautiful? Beauty is one of the attributes of the divinity. And charming, I do not know what is meant by charming."

"Alluring. Pretty. Pleasing. Ocularly seductive. Unprofound but sensuously satisfying. Tasteful and delicate. Like that lady behind you."

He grunted, turning, munching the bread that was still on his breadplate and which he had forbidden the waiter to clear, to look at an animated woman in a chain-stitch-embroidered dress of very fine black pure silk chiffon. Ocularly unseduced, he turned round again. "A frivolous people," he said.

"The French?" I said, joyously. "All the French? The French in myself? My mother? And what do you mean by frivolous?"

He wagged his bit of bread at me. "Remember," he said, "that language is one of our trials and sorrows. We are forced, by the very nature of language, to generalise. If we did not generalise we would have nothing to say except such as," wagging it still, "this bread is a piece of bread."

"Tautologia," Domenico said.

"Is language then," I said, "of diabolic provenance?"

"No," he said, and this time he munched. "Read Genesis, and you will see that God made Adam call things by name, and that was the birth of language. When Adam and Eve fell, then language became corrupted. Out of that corruption I say that the French are a frivolous people." And he swallowed his bread. There was nothing more to eat on the table. Don Carlo called for the bill. It was a big one. The table swarmed with paper money.

"This decor of the belle époque," I said. "You find it charming?"

His response was unexpected. He bellowed at me, so that heads turned: "Adiuro ergo te, draco nequissime, in nomine Agni immaculati--"

"Basta, Carlo."

Don Carlo grinned at me without mirth but with a sketch of menace appropriate to the words of exorcism he had uttered. "That is excessive," he said. "That goes too far. I address a little demon only, and I will call it a demon of frivolity. We will burn him out of you yet. We will have you back before you are finished. We will have you home." For the first time ever on hearing that word my eyes pricked, and the charming decor dissolved momentarily in coloured water. "Now," he said, "ask me again about the decor of the beautiful epoch." I said nothing, though my lips and tongue formed We? There was no bread in my mouth but I swallowed as if there were. Don Carlo was, I was learning, formidable. He drew from a side jacket pocket a big cheap watch that ticked at me across the table. "Seven o'clock mass at Sainte Devote," he said. "You know Father Rougier?" he asked of his brother.

"Lo conosco."

"I will say mass in my best Parisian Latin," he said to me. I had forgotten it was Sunday tomorrow, but the days of the week had long ceased for me to have individual flavours; they all tasted of the same loneliness and frivolity, which I termed work. So then, it was after ten and we must walk downhill from Carlo's mount to Carlo's lodging, that he might go to bed and be well rested for his early mass. In the vestibule of the Hotel de Paris Don Carlo smiled at the bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV and then, with neither malice nor menace, at me. The effigy had been there only about twelve years, but the raised knee of the horse had been so often touched for luck that it shone golden. Don Carlo rubbed it affectionately. Then he turned to the greeting of a British voice.

"The Don and the Monte. I knew sometime you two would meet. How are you, caro Carlo, Carlo querido?"

"Muy bien." And Don Carlo shook hands with a pale-haired English smiler with a cricketer's body, got up in the uniform of an Anglican bishop, complete with gaiters. Domenico was introduced. I too.

"The writer? The playwright? Well, quite an honour. Saw one of your things when I was back. A real scream." This man was the Bishop of Gibraltar. The pale hair was parted on the right, which in those days was called the girl's side, and a lock fell engagingly over the left very blue eye. Looking back on him now I see a fusion of Messrs. Auden and Isherwood, homosexual writers like myself. Most of the bishop's strong brown teeth were on show as he shook hands manlily. The Bishop of Gibraltar's diocese extended to the Côte d'Azur, and one of the earlier episcopal duties had been to warn the sunning British of the dangers to their souls of gambling. As I was almost at once to see, those days were over. What puzzled and a little shocked me was the amicality subsisting between an Anglican and a Catholic prelate. "I saw your brother in the Windy City," the bishop said to Don Carlo. "We had dinner. We played."

"Craps?" asked, to my further shock, Don Carlo.

"The Idaho variety."

"What a good idea. You have, ha, i dadi?" He rerubbed the raised bronze pastern.

"Los dados? Cierto."

"Basta." Domenico was visibly tired from eating. I was weary too, but did not dare, for fear of exorcism, to protest. So we all went up to the episcopal suite on the third floor, and in the drawing room, full of belle époque charm, his lordship served whisky and brought out the dice in a cup of Florentine leather. Don Carlo lugged forth his big cheap watch and placed it on the table, where it beat aggressively.

The bishop said, "Fasting from midnight, of course. The blessed mutter of the, as the poet has it. Browning, is it not?" he asked me.

"Chicago," I said, nodding. "Why, if I may ask with a writer's professional cheek, Chicago?"

"Anglican matters," the bishop said, shaking the dice. "An episcopal conference. I say no more. Come on, seven, eleven." He threw a total of 12 and then of 9 and then of 7 and lost. Don Carlo burlily cast, muttering a prayer, and got 11, fifteen to one. It was all between the two clerics: Domenico and I were hopeless. But, ever the enquiring novelist, I stayed to drink and listen. The bishop, presiding over an Anglican enclave at the foot of a fiercely Catholic peninsula, had a special social if not theological relationship with, ha ha, the sons of the Scarlet Woman. Big Eight: even money. Hardways: seven to one. Baby wants a new pair of shoes. Roll dem bones. This was madness. They talked about colleagues: men with reversed collars were all in the same business despite the electrified fence of the Reformation. The third Campanati brother, Raffaele, was an importer into the United States of Milanese foodstuffs. He had trouble, there was a kind of Neapolitan brigandage in Chicago, different from other American cities where the Sicilians were the dealers in monopoly and violence, which they termed protection. Craps: seven to one.

The bishop said, "The big word came up, as you may suppose."

"Ecumenico?" Big Six: even money.

"Early days," the bishop said. I didn't understand. The word was new to me, who had done little Greek. But I began to understand, from fragmentary allusions, how it was that Don Carlo and the Bishop of Gibraltar knew each other, indeed were a sort of friends. Nothing to do with religion, though to do with Rome. His lordship liked autumn holidays in Rome. Don Carlo, in Rome for a task of translation of a very knotty document for the Holy Father's own benefit (English to Italian that was, about capital and labour or something), got to playing bridge with his lordship, not at the time more than a dean. Auction, of course, contract not yet having come in. The bishop proposed a session of contract, though, for the next day, after he had preached to the British and Don Carlo had eaten a long breakfast after his blessed mutter at Sainte Devote. Contract was the coming version; it would supplant auction totally; had I read the article in The Times by the Reverend Causley, D. D.? Did I, for that matter, play? A little auction. You will soon pick up contract. No, I said, alas, I had some writing to do.

At one minute to midnight Don Carlo was served a stiff whisky. He finished it as, all eyes on synchronised watches, the hour came up. Like going into battle, the bishop said. Over the top into Sunday, and the best of luck. "It's a battle, yes," Don Carlo said. "It's all a battle." And he looked at me as though I were a white-feathered malingerer. I nearly made some excuse about my heart.

CHAPTER 22

Not my father but my mother. I read and reread the telegram as the Sunday day train crawled toward Paris. Don Carlo was not with me: he was going to take the late sleeper. Gravely ill come immediately. I could not make the curt summons mean anything other than that she would be dead by the time I got to Battle. It's a battle, all a battle, rattled the wheels. I dined late at the restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, surrounded by charming decor of the belle époque. I tried to push guilt back down my throat with boluses of lukewarm gigot unsharpened by mint sauce. My hand trembled and I spilt coffee on my tie. The killer influenza was a neutral life force going about its proper business, or else an agent of Don Carlo's devil, or more probably a punishment from the other shop for our not having punished ourselves enough with a punitive war. It was not, then, my fault that my mother was dying or already dead. Death is never the point; the point is the peacefulness of the death. My mother would grieve about my apostasy, a pervertedness she would regard as within the realm of choice, the shamefulness of an exile which she would interpret as Wildean or, if she knew of the ghastly man, Douglasian. I had let her down. There would be a deathbed message for me, possibly a letter, a dying mother's plea for a promise that could not be fulfilled. I hoped, of course, that she was already gone. I did not want dying eyes aghast on me, pleading, modulating into a horror that I must, as it were, pin above my perverted bed.

I took a taxi to the Gare du Nord and then the boat train to Calais. The sole other occupant of the compartment was an old man indecently drunk who mumbled incoherently about the sins of the intellectuels. Did I consider myself to be an intellectuel? Non, monsieur, je suis dentiste. The dentists too, he said, were a sort of intellectuals. Hope lay only in the common people who could not cure their own toothache; France would fall before twenty years were done, and it would be because of the defection of the intellectuels. Home, country, loyalty: such terms were not to be analysed or questioned. Unreasoning faith, that was what was wanted. Cons puez les intellectuels.

The bar of the cross-channel steamer was open. I drank cognac to defy the cruelty of the February Manche whooshing and battering. There was a man drinking light ale who, he said, was going to write a little book about the pet animals of famous people. He did not tell me his name and I did not tell him mine, for fear he might not know it. Dogs, he said, chiefly. Prince Rupert's Boy, for instance, dead at Marston Moor, his death rejoiced in by the Cromwellians, who believed he was an evil spirit. Charles Lamb's Dash, who first belonged to Thomas Hood. King Richard II's Math, who forsook his master at Flint Castle and attached himself to the usurper Bolingbroke. Flush. Mrs Browning's spaniel, scared of the big spiders under the bed of her filthy room. Flush.

There was no means of getting direct from Dover to Hastings, so I took the train to Victoria. Somebody had left a Sunday newspaper in the compartment, and there was a silly quip in a silly Sunday chat column about Peace opening the window and in flew Enza. Flu deaths reaching alarming figures. Black jazz bands. The pivotal pig. Short skirts oo la la for nightclub wear. An article about a certain Ernest Allworthy, Labour Boss of New Zealand--E. A. controlled N. Z., it said. The influence of wartime matiness on the postwar relationship between maid and mistress. The influence of wartime shortages on postwar culinary ingenuity. The influence of Hugh Walpole on the younger postwar novelists. Say It, Cecil was still running.

The black sky wept bitterly over London. I had forgotten English weather. I had nearly forgotten to bring my waterproof. I got to Charing Cross and caught a foredawn train to Hastings, stopping at Battle. I slept and nearly overslept my station, but a railman's voice yelled "Battle" through the rain. I squelched in the Monday dark, soaked and alone, to my father's surgery and house, my former home. On the High Street I had a very strange physical sensation. It was as though my shoes were full of nothing but air but where my heart should be there was nothing at all. I was giving out breath but taking none in to replace it. A rapid pen wrote in fire all down my left arm from shoulder to wrist. I staggered to rest against the window of a shut shop, a family butcher's. So this was the cardiac trouble that had kept me out of the war. It was, I could sense even in my panic, going to be a useful solvent of various kinds of guilt. My heart then resumed the vigorous thumping it had, like a drum in an orchestral score, followed some direction to intermit. The scrawled signature of pain in my left arm vanished, as though written in disappearing ink. My shoes refilled with flesh and bone and spelt out toes again. Air rushed, as into a pierced vacuum tin, back in lungs that groaned relief. I trembled for a cigarette, a ship's bar Gold Hake, and lighted it with a Swan vesta. I drew in the lovely smoke, feeling madly how good life had become. I was twenty-eight, a young man, an established writer, and life lay all before me. I splashed jauntily to my father's house.

The blinds were drawn and the curtains closed, but light escaped from the chinks. Light in the hallway, in all the front rooms, including the surgery. I knocked many times. The knock, I knew, was heard but was being for the moment ignored. There was something very urgent going on there. She was dying, it was the actual point of death, and there I was waiting outside in the rain. I was interrupting death, knocking. I nearly ran away, I would come back later at a time more convenient. Then I could hear my sister coming, sobbing my name. The door fumbled open and she was in my wet raincoated arms, crying: "Ken, oh Ken, it was just now, she heard the knock and she knew it was you, and she tried to live a minute longer but she couldn't, oh it was terrible."

"It was just now?"

"Poor poor Mother, she suffered, Ken, it was terrible."

So it was all over. No, I didn't want to see her, she wasn't there any more, it was just a dead body. Oh Ken, Ken. My father came leaden downstairs, dryeyed, with no greeting for me except a bitter look as at a bad son. And there was my brother Tom, demobbed, still short-haired, in a suit too big for him. His grief was being expressed in a coughing fit. I embraced him and at the same time thumped him on the back. They were all in crumpled day clothes. Up all night. She suffered. Extreme unction at seven in the evening and she had seemed (and even to restore health if God sees it to be expedient) to recover a little. But then the final slide downhill. Brown, the doctor, had done all he could. People were dying of flu like flies all over England. There was a Mrs Levenson round the corner who did laying-out jobs. A busy woman these days. It was too early to call on her. It was too early for anything except the making of a pot of tea. We all sat round the kitchen table, drinking it, Hortense and Tom and I smoking my ship's Gold Flake. Tom coughed. With the coming of the wet dawn we were already adjusting ourselves to a motherless or wifeless future. Or so I thought. There was a question I had to ask.

"No, no letter," my father said harshly. "It came too suddenly for her to think of writing letters. But she made it very clear what I have to say to you."

"Look, I couldn't, not even for her. A man's soul. It's his own--I couldn't go through a lie, not even for her."

"A man's soul. It's not just the soul, is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"No, not now. Not with the children here. And her lying there upstairs."

"She's not lying upstairs," said Tom. "She's in purgatory or somewhere. One lot of suffering and you're straight into another lot. Christ, is there anything but suffering?"

"You too?" I asked.

"Him too," said my father, "as far as that's concerned. I say it's the war, I say it will pass. We expected peace and look what we get. But we'll all get over it."

Hortense went to the cupboard for biscuits. "There's a lot of God-hating going on just now," she said, slim, pretty, her ankle-length pale green smart if crumpled, the boat-shaped neckline elegant, a woman now. "I can't think that God's so stupid as to be surprised. But Mother didn't hate, oh no." She sobbed fiercely and then crammed half a Garibaldi biscuit into her mouth.

"Not disbelief," Tom said. "There has to be a God, that stands to reason. Just hate. But we'll get over it. As he says." The he sounded hostile, certainly un filial. And then: "Children, he says. One child turned into a sort of expert on poison gas. The other seduced by her art teacher."

"No, no, no," Hortense said. "He tried, that's all. What they call irony," she said to me. "Mother didn't like my German nuns so she had me go to the French school at Bexhill. But that's all over now."

"So," Tom said, "the children know all about you, Ken. We're not shocked. We belong to the new unshockable generation."

"You condone it," said my father. "An unnatural generation."

"Your bloody natural generation started the war," Tom said.

"You will not speak to me like that, Tom."

"Oh, for God's sake," I said. "This is no way to behave."

"I think we all ought to get some rest," said my father. "I think I'll go and lie down for an hour."

"Oh, come, Dad," Hortense said, "why don't you tell Ken all about Mrs Scott?"

"Lydia Scott," said my father, "has been a good friend."

"Mrs Scott," Hortense said, "is to be the second Mrs Toomey."

"I never said that," my father said weakly.

"A patient?" I asked. I didn't wait for an answer. "Is this true? Mother hardly cold in her--No, no clichés. I see. It's been going on for some time, has it?"

"There are some things a man needs," Tom said, and I could tell he was quoting my father. My father glared at him.

"The privacy of a dental surgery," Hortense said. "A little trouble with that impacted wisdom tooth."

"How dare you," my father trembled. "You are not to, it is--"

"A widow?" I asked.

"A war widow," Hortense said, both hands about her teacup. "The gallant Major Scott caught it early. On the Marne or the Somme or somewhere."

"I will not have--"

"Why not, why not?" I said. "Some men need marriage."

"There are certain decencies," Tom said primly.

"Oh, for God's sake, come off it, Tom," I said. "Life has to continue, resume, whatever the word is."

"Whatever life is."

"I'm going to lie down in the spare room," my father said. And he got up wearily. "Your room," he amended to me. "It was your room."

"I see," I said. "So this is the end of the family."

"I didn't say that," irritably. "Hortense, you'd better go and get Mrs Levenson. Tom, ring up Brown. There has to be a certificate of... of...

"Death death death death," Tom said, with an intonation suggesting the Westminster chimes.

"You're a coldhearted lot," my father said.

"Oh yes, cold," cried Hortense and burst into loud sobbing. My father made a sketch of holding out comforting arms, then shook his head and shuffled off. "Sorry," said Hortense, wiping her eyes on a tea towel.

"Well," I said. "Will he be all right?"

"Some things a man needs," Tom repeated bitterly. "That's what he said when I caught them at it."

"Caught them?"

"Kissing, that's all. I'm sure Mother knew all about it. She wasn't well, you know. It wasn't just this bloody epidemic."

"Sex," I said, "can be a damned nuisance. As I know. As I shall continue to know. And now what?"

"I'm not staying," Hortense said. "I don't want a stepmother. I'll get a job somewhere."

"You're under age," I said. "And what kind of job can you do?"

"I can take one of these six-week courses in Pitman's and typing. Ah," she then said. "Do you need a secretary?"

"I think," I said, "you'd both better come back with me. Get away from this climate. Think things over."

"I've thought things over," Tom said. "I'm all right. Thrown into it in a way. Well, it was your name that did it. Any relation to the playwright wallah? Yes, I said. Let's see what you can do, they said. I just stood there and said any damned thing that came into my head. About Henry the Eighth and his wives. They thought it was funny."

"What is all this?"

"The show's called Rob All My Comrades. Or Run Albert, Matron's Coming. One can be the kind of sequel to the other. Or the two can run at the same time, two different troupes."

"It's what they call the RAMC," Hortense said. "The Royal Army Medical--"

"Look, I may have been a scrimshanking civilian--"

"Like the Roosters," Tom said. "And that Australian troupe called Les Girls. They reckon there'll be a lot of scrimshanking civilians who'll flock to see an army concert party. Old soldiers too. Professionally done, of course. Highest possible standards. The man we have, Jack Blades, QMS as was, he was in that sort of thing before the war. March twenty-first we start the tour. Summer we have a choice of seaside engagements."

"And you just stand there and talk?"

"Well, there are sketches. Choruses. I'm what's known as a Light Comedian." Yes, that was about it. I looked at him, thin, fair, frail, voice light and pitched well forward. My brother Tom the Light Comedian. "Tom Toomey, Tommy Toomey, which do you think?" he asked.

"Oh, the second one, without a doubt."

"That's what they all think."

"Well," I said, handing round the Gold Flake again, "who would have thought it? Two of us in the theatre. Mother wanted something a bit more dignified in the French manner. I always got the impression she felt that tooth drawing was not quite a real vocation. Medicine for you, law for me. And now look at us."

"Marriage," Hortense said. "That's the French idea. You know, there's even a dowry tucked away in the District Bank on the High Street. Mother could never get that out of her head, that there had to be a dowry. Mademoiselle Chaton said that the days of free love were upon us."

"At this school in Bexhill?"

"Poor Mother. She thought it must be all right if it was French. And there they were, saying there was no God and we all had to be free. Have you read any D. H. Lawrence?"

"Free love," I said with weight, "is precluded by the facts of biology. I refer, of course, to heterosexual love."

"And now," Tom said, "tell us all about homosexual love."

"It was a shock?"

"Of course it was a shock. And it was a shock to know that our innocent sister here knew already and wasn't shocked."

There was a groan from upstairs. "Oh my God." The Gold Flake almost fell from my fingers. "She's--" And then I remembered that our father was up there, starting to fade out of our lives.

Hortense said, "I'd better go and get Mrs Levenson."

I said earlier that Tom smoked three cigarettes in his entire career. The first was in the school urinal when he was fourteen. The other two were from my ship's bar Gold Flake packet on this occasion of our mother's death and the breakup of the family.

CHAPTER 23

Hortense went back with me to Monaco. It was only when the train was nearing Nice and she was gold-flushed with excitement at her first view of the Côte d'Azur that I began to wonder at the propriety of having her stay in an apartment where a susceptible Italian artist sometimes made our morning coffee naked and occasionally micturated without shutting the toilet door. I had thought of Tom and Hortense visiting together and two brothers protecting her from possible southern lust, not necessarily Domenico's. Besides, Domenico was always on the verge of going to Milan to see Merlini about Poveri Ricchi. The vocal score was finished and had been copied by a professional copyist in Cannes named Pécriaux, with the text in English and Tuscan set in beautiful print script under the vocal lines, the alternative ties and additional notes made necessary by the bilinguality done with exquisite spider penwork. There was no need for him to stay in my apartment, to whose upkeep he contributed little, in order to get the orchestration completed. In a day or two, he kept saying, he would be off to Milan. But he delayed, perhaps because, like most artists, he feared the consigning of his art to the coldness of the mere entrepreneur, feared too the possible confirmation of his own doubts about its value, even its competence, when it became orphaned, undressed and prodded by institutional strangers. We were cosy, the two of us, mothers at different stages of gestation, our art babies not yet ready to confront the exterior light and air. He diverted himself once a week, sometimes twice, in a casino at Ventimiglia, but, as the train drew into Monte Carlo station, I could foresee very lucidly his response to the presence of a lovely Anglo-French girl here, on the spot, on holiday, wanting diversion of her own.

I had foreseen accurately. The great melting eyes of admiration, quick to grow moist when he heard our bad news--mother dead, your mother dead, O Dio mio, for an Italian, hearing of another's mother dead has a terribly vivid image of the death of his own, may God not permit the day of that eventuality to dawn--and then the hands caressing the sheets drawn from the corridor linen cupboard to deck her bed, dinner tonight at the Vesuvio, on me, my mother's check has arrived (madre, madre, O Dio mio), then lasagne and pepper steaks, cassata, Bardolino and grappa. "Your brother," he said, eyes glistening in candleshine, "is my brother also."

"That's nice," Hortense smiled, glowing with wine from her charming low brow to her crossover V neckline. "What Sister Gertrude called Kunstbrüder. Brothers in art, you know. You two boys working away together at your art." She was only a girl but she had this pert and affectionate disdain which women, who produce real children, often show for men who give themselves airs about their child surrogates, broken-backed books and limping sonatas.

"My real brothers," he said, "laugh at my music."

"Italians laughing at music? Goodness, I thought Italians were the first people in the world for loving music."

"The Italians," Domenico said, "are mostly stone deaf."

"Tone deaf."

"What I said."

"Stone deaf, you said."

"Very well, both, tone and stone. They cannot hear music unless it is very loud. They cannot like it unless it is very sexual." Daring that word, very, in 1919, from a man to a girl he had met only three hours before. "I mean love duets. La Bohème. Butterfly." And he gave out, wretchedly, with a bit of Pinkerton at the end of Act One.

"Composers can't sing," she said. "Tone and stone, you'd think. Sister Agnes used to do an imitation of Beethoven singing Küsse gab sie uns und Reben, einen Freund geprüft im Tod." But she sang it herself very sweetly before doing a harsh monotoned growl, frowning, underlip thrust out.

"You should hear Carlo sing mass," Domenico said. "Like a dog." And he looked with a dog's adoration at Hortense, a known gambit which she was too young to know, unless that art master--I must ask her about that art master.

"Can you dance?" Hortense asked.

"Oh, I can do all the latest dances," Domenico said i'i feigned boasting. "The Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot and the Castle Walk."

"Everybody's doing it," sang Hortense with the same sweetness as for the "Ode to Joy."

"Doing it, doing it," sang Domenico. "Addition, s'il vous plait," pulling out a wad of francs with the kind of bored automatism of one who always pays the bills, which was not true.

There was dancing going on at the Louisiane, not far from the Casino. "Ah, the famous Casino," Hortense said, as we got out of the cab.

"That word," Domenico said, with the hint of a leer, "is not a word used politely in Italy. A casino, you see, is a little house."

"A little house in Ventimiglia," I said brutally, "for example," prematurely perhaps warningly, a warning itself being a kind of encouragement. Domenico flashed a warning of his own back, though with leering warmth in it, being encouraged.

"You mean a bordel," Hortense said in her clear innocent girl's voice. "I see," looking at the rococo prettiness of the façade. "So that's what it is really. I read in The Illustrated London News I think it was about Mata Hari there and the other one, La Belle whoever it was, covered in jewels and nothing else. So the gambling is just a thing, you know, a whatsit."

"Pretext," I said. "No, not true. A difference between French and Italian Usage."

"My holy brother has been very lucky in there," Domenico said. "A French kind of casino is permitted to a holy man."

I did not like this sort of talk. I must get Domenico on that damned train to Milan very soon. And Hortense wouldn't like that, released from cold England to the smile of southern teeth, wooed southernly by an Italian musician of good looks and family whose brother was a priest, meaning he wouldn't go too far, her spoilsport own brother as gloomy protector of her honour and him a homosexual anyway, what right had he and so on. We went downstairs into the Louisiane.

"Goodness," Hortense said, "a genuine fig to make it authentic." But the black man in the little band was, from his features, only authentically Senegalese; he played his cornet like a colonial army bugler. The saxophonist, pianist, banjoist and drummer were whites. They played from sheet music, commercial or diluted ragtime not real jazz. The banjoist was singing, in Frenchified American, an old song by W. C. Handy called "The St. Louis Blues": "I love dat gal like a schoolboy loves his pie, Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint an' rye, I'll love ma baby till de day I die."

"Let's dance," Hortense said to Domenico, and it was left to me to order three beers. The decor of the place was black and white, as if the artist had studied the illustrations in Wyndham Lewis's 1915 Blast, and the motif seemed to be of stylized Manhattan skyscrapers ready to topple. The Modern Age, Jazz Age, we were into it now. There was a loud American with two local girls, a beefy man who proclaimed himself as hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio, round at the ends and high in the middle, probably left over from his country's Expeditionary Force, in some racket or other to do perhaps with sides of army beef, spending freely. He shouted at the band to play "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" and they did. He sang: "Remember when we get there honey, The twosteps I'm goin' to have 'em all."

He decided he would cut in on Domenjco and Hortense but Domenico was not having that. Hortense said, "You sit down like a good little boy."

"Eo," the man from Cincinnati said, "gud leedle bawee."

"All right," I said, "cut it out."

He was three tables away and feigned not to have fully caught my rebuke. He aped a deaf old man, beefy hand cupped at ear, and said, "You make some remark, my friend?"

"I asked you to cut it out."

"Thought that's what you said," he said, and he tottered over to me. "Hog's piss," he said of the three beers on the table, making a gesture of being ready to smash them to the floor. "Garsong," he called, "whisky tooty sweety for this main sewer." The waiter did not respond. "Frogs," the man said to me, knocking one chair over but sitting on another. "Spilled good red blood for the bastards, drove the Krauts out of fucking Frogland and what you get?"

"Watch the language," I said. "My sister's not used to it."

"Sister, you got a sister?" He swerved round to look at Hortense then back again to me, achieving with some difficulty a maitre d'hôtel's bunched finger spécialité de its maison kiss. "You sure have," he said. "Cute little can there, see it shimmy, aaaaaoooo," doing a dog howl. "British?" he said. "You British sure were a long time getting the Hun on the run, I'll say, I'll tell the world, aaaaaoooo, garsong, whisky tooty sweety," and, in his beefy swerve, he sent a full beer glass crashing. It was then that Domenico left Hortense on the floor and came over smiling with his good Italian mouth. He now disclosed something I had not suspected in him, though I knew it to be an aspect of Italian gang protectionism, namely neat professional, as it were musical, violence. Meaning that in a swift clean and economical rhythm he slashed the Ohio man with his ringed right hand thrice on his beef face, in a single measure of slowish mazurka time. This surprised Cincinnatian, whose town was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general of great and simple virtue, looked up at Domenico open-mouthed, an aitch of bursting red on cheeks and upper lip.

"Now," said Domenico, "we leave." And to the bald moustached manager, troubled, coming to see what the trouble was: "Ce monsieur américain va payer." Then we were off, and Hortense's eyes shone in delight and, for Domenico, admiration. This was better than dreary cold old England, and she'd not been here yet for much more than half a day. She wanted to go dancing somewhere else, where perhaps there might be other rude Americans to be slashed by Domenico, but I said no, home. But then, just outside a bar called the Palac (which might have been an English word in adventitious apocope or else the Serbo-Croat for Thumb), I was given my own chance to put down brutishness. A young fair-haired man was being sick on the pavement and two Monegascan policemen were bullying him to stop vomiting in public or else come with them, vomiting or not, to the lockup. The young man said, very English, "I've said I'm sorry, damn it, look, one can't really stop this sort of thing, something I ate, fish or something, oh dear, I have to again," and he did. While doing it he was punched on the shoulder by one of the constables, and the other laughed. I was over there at once with my good maternal French, abashing them. How dare they, did they not know who this was, a personal friend of His Serene Highness, and so on.

"Where do you live?" I asked the young man.

"A village in Berkshire, you may not know it. As for stay, here that is, hotel up the hill there, the Immoral, Balmoral that is, little joke, very moral place really, oh my God here we go again." So I held his head. The policemen went through the gestures of saying I was in charge, get him off the street, look at all that defilement of the pavement of the playground of the rich, disgusting (they did a kind of long-skirt-lifting mime), does the place no kind of good, then they saluted me and marched off. "Awfully sorry about all this," the young man said. "My name's Curry," holding up his hand for shaking while, perhaps under the stimulus of his own name, he got more up and then, splash, down.

"Look," Hortense said, "while you're being the Good Samaritan, can't Domenico and I go dancing somewhere else and see you there?"

"See you in the bar of the Hotel de Paris," I said. Not home this time, oh dear me no, not those two together alone going home, oh no. So off they went, her arm in his. A handsome couple, much of a height. "Better?" I said to the young Curry. "Ready to try walking up the hill? Take deep breaths, go on, really deep."

"You're really being most awfully decent. It was some damned fish I ate, loup or something, wolf that means, wolfing a wolf, oh my God." But there seemed little more to come up. He stood upright and sniffed in briskly sea air. "Better, I think. That loup is still around though, flying through the ozone, I can smell it, a bloody werewolf, I say, what's the French for werewolf?"

"Loup garou. Those police, look, are still looking. Can you walk more or less straight?" I took his left elbow and trembled. The first male flesh, or bone at least, I had handled since, ah God. "You needn't just blame the loup for my benefit," I said. "You've ingested more than loup tonight."

"Looooo garOOOOO. I say, I like that. Very well, right turn, quick whatsit." And off we went. "My name," he said, "is, no, better not say it, damned unfortunate name sometimes, can't stand the stuff, Indian muck."

"I know it. It's to do with leather."

"Ah, know it, do you? Interesting. Don't know yours though." He was weakishly handsome, very blond, thin, supple, smart in grey serge unspotted by vomit, a neat vomiter, not like, say, a Glaswegian at Hogmanay. "Ought to know yours really." I told him. "Ah, I like that. Rhymes with roomy, gloomy. To do with tombs, is it? Tomby. Grave, gravy. Oh my dear God." He heaved emptily.

"Deep breaths. See, we're there."

The little vestibule lounge was quite empty. He flopped, done, spent, soft, supple, edible, on a soft settee. I sat down more stiffly, saying, "You're here alone?"

"Orphan," he said. "Only got aunts and things who don't give a Chinese damn. Just jumped twenty-one so that's all right as far as administration of things goes." He drunkenly thumbed his nose at someone unseen.

"Half an orphan, me," I said. "Just buried my mother. Flu, you know."

"Mine," he said boastfully, "was seen off in the second month of the war. In the VAD, matron. Bomb on base hospital near Mauberge. The old man was luckier. Amazing luck till Amiens, less than a year back. Sir James. That makes yours humbly and sincerely Sir Richard." He puffed himself up and then collapsed into tired limp thinness again.

"All, baronet."

"Sir Dick, Bart. Got a handle to it. I say, I've a mouth like a whatsit. Uncleaned parrot cage. Could do with some Perrier or Evian or something. Eau minerale," he called to the solitary man at the desk, writing. "You got any of that?" The man shrugged, peeked toward the vestibule clock, put an arm out at a closed bar, locked cupboards, then wrote again. "All well, got some upstairs, a drop," Sir Richard Curry Bart said, "in my gloomy room." The sight of writing, my rimesakes, then the memory of my name made him then turn with some small vigour toward me and say, "I say, you said Toomey. Are you Toomey who writes things? That Toomey?"

"I've written things, yes. Kenneth M. Toomey, playwright, novelist, that sort of nonsense, yes."

"Well, that Toomey and no stuck-up big lyamity, the Good Samaritan and all that rot, I say, that was kind, I shall remember that."

"You're staying long?"

"Thought of going to Barcelona. I say, I read one of your things, all about her heavy hair and heavy breasts and their lips were glued in a, ugh, I can taste that damned loo garoo."

"It tastes that way to me too," I said. "What the public wants. The law doesn't allow some of us to be honest, if you know what I mean." He knew all right. Bright green eyes though a little bloodshot appraised me under a fallen blond lock. "That dare not speak its name, if you know what I mean." Oh, he knew all right.

"Live here, do you?" he said. "Marine villa and chauffeur and apéritifs on the terrace?"

"Nothing like that. Not a bit like that, not yet. I say, why don't you get a decent night's sleep and perhaps we could have a bit of a chat tomorrow if you feel like it. Have lunch if you want. Get a decent lunch here, do you?"

"A bit gloomy, the dining room downstairs. Quiet, though. See you about oneish if you like, make up our minds about it. No loo garoo, though. What do I call you besides Mr Toomey?"

"Oh, Ken will do very well. They all call me Ken."

"When a new planet swam into his, right, Ken it is, Ken. I have a small bottle of, upstairs, not such a good idea, no, I can see that. Bedfordshire, sir, my old man used to say. Home's in Berkshire, great big bloody house, roomy, gloomy, coming up all the time now those aren't they, tomby, yes, you could say that. Tomorrow, then." And he got up. We shook hands, I gripping his warmly, his yielding, limp, boneless. Then I remembered that Hortense and Domenico were in the Hotel de Paris bar waiting, and that he, hot on seduction, would be getting her drunk. So I didn't see Sir Dick to the lift.

Hortense was drinking crème de menthe frappée and laughing too much. Domenico was telling her some story that made her laugh. As far as I knew, Domenico knew no funny stories. When I went up to them they turned from each other, together on the red velvet banquette, to grin at me with what I would have termed in those days affectionate derision. Or, if you wish, the derision of conspiratorial heterosexuality, two young people who found each other attractive--no, wait, that young is vague and dangerous: Hortense was a child, Domenico an unattached man, hence by definition a womaniser, Latin also, also not of my persuasion--and were encouraged to be bold by their shared knowledge of my sexual aberrancy, an ambulant dirty joke forced upon them; nothing like a dirty joke to foster intimacy. And of course I saw what I was doing and saw why my position was hopeless: proposing an affair in a hotel bedroom and thus taking time off from guarding Hortense from possible indeed probable indeed certain importunacy from Domenico. "Pouring in oil and wine," Hortense said crudely. Then she hiccuped like a character in a French comic paper: hips. Domenico was delighted to bang her on the back. She separated her back from the banquette so that he could bang it better.

"You're not used to it, Hortense," I said kindly. "Let's go--" I could not say home.

"You. The Good hips Samarit hips. Dancing's the thing for. Let's hips go back to that place."

"Bed for you, dear. And for me. It's been a long day for both of us."

"Dance of the sheets, I see, hips. What do men do together?"

"That's quite enough, Hortense. Drink your drink and we'll go." And then, as she hipsed and hipsed, "Nine sips and hold your breath."

Domenico counted gravely nine crotchets in Italian. "Brava," when she emerged gasping.

She filled her lungs in much the same rhythm as Sir Richard Curry Bart had. "Good. Gone. Hips. Damn." But she got up to go, and Domenico obeyed me too in mock meekness, making himself sib and coeval to Hortense, submissive to frowning elder brother, something incestuous in it. "Hips. Bloody thing."

"Hortense, language."

So we walked back down the hill, sea lights flashing on our left. Hips. She recovered with the three-story climb. My bedroom was between Domenico's and hers, and I lay awake for a time, listening for padding feet and whispers. But I heard nothing except Domenico's light snores and Hortense's crying "Mainan" once in her sleep and then sobbing.

CHAPTER 24

My old-fashioned inlocoparental fears for Hortense's honour were, you will say out of the future which is your enlightened present, absurd as well as hypocritical. They were also, if Domenico were to be considered the sole candidate or ingrate for battering at that honour, proved, temporarily at least I thought, needless by his receipt of a letter from Merlini in Milan. A letter I brought with his coffee the following morning, being up early to resume my moral watch. Idiot, considering that I proposed going off duty in the mufti of my own lust at the most sensitive time of the day. However. Merlini urgently wanted at least the vocal score of I Poveri Ricchi. It was proposed to open the autumn season at the Teatro alla Scala with the first two little operas of Puccini's Trittico. There had been serious consideration of making up the weight with Bayer's Die Puppenfee, last performed on February 9, 1893, after the prima rappresentazione of Verdi's Falstaff, but an examination of the score had confirmed the legend of its mediocrity. So, though there was no firm promise, here might be Domenico's big chance. The letter made Domenico fandango barechested about the apartment, kissing Hortense in joy and also, though with less conviction, myself. He remembered at one point that I was part-librettist and went into a mist-eyed routine about what dressing-gowned uncrapulous Hortense called Kunstbruderschaft. But soon it was all his dawn again.

Hortense and I went with him to the station just before noon. He would be back, he had left most of his clothes, his luggage being mostly the full vocal and half-completed orchestral scores, he would send news. He kissed us both again, in the same degrees as before, before climbing aboard the stopping train to Ventimiglia. Extravagant Tuscan waves from him, prim Anglo-French ones from us. Hortense and I looked at each other when he had gone.

She said, "It's all right, you know. I'm not a Henry James heroine, all eager to be seduced by the glamorous south."

"I see. 'Which particular heroine were you thinking of?"

"Oh, that one in the little book he gave you, Maisie or Tilly or somebody, he's a terrible old bore. The one with the long loving scrawl from your alas temporarily infirm but still fundamentally gay friend and master. Is it too early for lunch?"

"Well, now," I said. "Today I have a luncheon appointment. Do you mind terribly? A young actor who happens to be on holiday here. Why don't you make yourself a snack and we'll have a big dinner tonight, the two of us, and talk about the future. Èze, perhaps. The place where Nietzsche was. He wrote part of Also Sprach Zarathustra there."

"And that makes the food good, does it? Sister Gertrude was always going on about the übermensch. The Menschlein you met last night, is it? The willowy blond one you succoured?"

"What's that word?"

"Helped, assisted in his vomity torment, held the suffering head of."

"I recognised him, you see. He was going to be in one of my things, but then he wasn't. I knew his father too," I added. "Sir James Curry. Dead now. He's a double orphan now, poor boy."

"You needn't give me all that," she said. "I could see you positively dithering to take his willowy form in your arms. All right, get on with it. But please do stop being the big moral disapproving elder brother with me, that's all. Ugh." And then, "What do men do together?"

"Pretty men I mean pretty well what men and women do together. Except there's an obvious difference. A matter of equipment, you might say."

"And it's wrong, isn't it? It's what Sister Magda would call a sin against biology. It has to be wrong, it's not natural." We were walking down rue Grimaldi in March sunlight.

"To some of us," I said, "the natural thing seems unnatural."

"And that's obviously wrong, isn't it? Diseased, isn't it?"

"So Michelangelo's diseased, is he?" I had said that before to her. No, of course, it had been our mother. But, of course, there was something diseased about the extravagant musculature of the David and the Sistine Last Judgment. "It's the way some of us are," I said as I'd undoubtedly said before, "the way we're made."

"I don't believe it, nobody's made that way. God wouldn't allow it."

"Ah, bringing in God again. Got over the God-hating, have we?"

"You ought to see a psychowhatsit," she said.

"I thought the Church didn't hold with amateur soul surgery."

"You're not in the Church. Only the biologically pure can be in the Church. All right, forget it." We had arrived at the front door of the apartment house opposite the Société Marsellaise de Credit. On this door there was a smirking cowled monk's head knocker, perhaps a pun on the name of the principality. I gave her the keys.

"I'll be back about three or four," I said. "You'll find cold ham and salad and things in that sort of cooler thing."

She looked evilly at me and then sadly smiled, saying, right hand on my left cheek, "Poor old Kenny Penny."

What happened that afternoon after lunch in the single bedroom of the Immoral or Amoral, as Sir Dick Bart indifferently called it, need not be described here. It was satisfying to deprived glands and, indeed, emotions. But the term love, despite the warning implicit in that filthy limerick of filthy Norman Douglas (whom Dick had once met and been drunkenly fingered by briefly and whom he called Abnorman Fuckless), threatened to mean more than merely lust and gratitude. I love you, my lovely and lovable boy, signifying desire to possess dog-in-the-mangerishly (Who is this man you're having dinner with? Who was that one you smiled at on the Boulevard des Moulins? Who are these people who invited you aboard their yacht? Yes yes, I know I'm taking my sister to Eze or Antibes or Cannes, but that is duty, not pleasure. I have to know where you are, and so on). Yet Dick was amusing as well as capriciously accommodating, though he made too many jokes about his name. Coming to the hotel on the third day of our liaison I found an enraging note awaiting me: "Off with the Pettimans. Pizzle in sauce piquante not on the menu today." On the fourth afternoon he pouted and said, "I expected a little gift, you know, something nice and useless, you know, from Cartier's." But, though I now had it to give, he would never demand money, like that little whore Val, for the private printing of his poems. He had plenty of money of his own and he did not write poems. He did not do anything. Some time in the early autumn, he said, he would cease his wandering over Europe and go back to the tomby house in Berkshire, there to consider putting the greenhouses in order and, my dear, start learning something, seriously, you know, really seriously, about orchids, lovely ballock-shaped things.

Hortense, as I had half anticipated, developed her own routines. There were no real facilities for seabathing at Monaco, though the organisation that ran us was called the Société des Bains de Mer, so she took to travelling by train further up the coast, to Beaulieu or Menton, where there was sand as well as rocks, and lunching off a pan bagnat and a ballon blanc, playing tennis back in the principality in the late afternoon with some nice harmless English people (right out of the court, what, thought I was playing cricket haha) who had a bookish seventeen-year-old pimpled son, and dining with me in the evening, least I could do, sometimes a film show at the Prince after, Lon Chaney, Charlot.

"Off to Barcelona," Dick said, showing me half-packed bags. "Call in at Avignon on the way." This was the tenth day, or eleventh.

"You said not yet. You said not till April."

"Change my shirt, can't I, gentleman's privilege. Nothing to stop you coming, is there? Rather have you as a travelling companion than that nasty toothy Boogie character."

"Who is this? What is all this? What has been going on?"

"Free as the pure and limpid, you always say. Unencumbered like a whatsit. My pens and paper and aha sacred talent and a monastic cell with a chained richardtionary. Live anywhere. So we go to Barcelona and Avignon on the way. Sons les ponts de. Chase each other round the papal palace."

"But there's my sister, damn it."

"Yes, always hearing about her, aren't we, believe when I see."

"She exists all right, damn it. I can't leave her all alone."

"Well, isn't there this wopera character you told me about? He'll look after her, won't he? Sing to her, very oily."

"He's not here, thank God he's not. But you can't leave a girl of eighteen on her own."

"Put it in, would he, as soon as look. Man, woman, dog, throw them all on a bed. All right, no hurry for Avignon. Today I have a fancy for a bit of rough. Nice, you know, the old port. Funny, just saw that sort of written on the wall, like meeny meeny tickle your arse. My father, you know, after dinner. The old port, very nice. Still, Nice could be nice, very."

"What is all this? What are you after? Sailors? Fights? You want to be thrashed and flayed?"

"Highly yellowdramatic. No, just see, look. Hurtling bottles knocking one's body off the table, got that the wrong way round, oh I don't know though. Torn clothes and filthy language. Make a change."

"I think it's a rotten idea."

"Oh, listen to the transmuter of experience into deathless words. Read that somewhere, they didn't mean you, dear. Miss Mouse, writing about what he won't do, living by poxy, proxy that is."

"Has somebody been talking to you about me?"

"Oh, all self self self, as ever. None of my friends has even heard of you, dear. Come, a cab to the gare and a puffpuff to Nice."

"I have to be back by seven. Hortense expects me."

"Hortense? So that's her name. Oh yes, of course, half frog, the two of you. Chance for you to show off with the lingo wherever we end up at. Rare argot. Speaks it like a native. Monsieur is veritably formidable. Come on then."

So, despite my unease, we went. In the old port we drank cognac mildly in two cafés decorated with nets and anchors. It was the wrong time for whatever action Dick expected, it was the time for sleep after a heavy luncheon. Then, in Le Crampon, I was proved, to Dick's delight, wrong. There were roistering matelots, and they were not French but British. Tars, my dear. Their caps, thrust back to haloes, said HMS BELLEROPHON. The Bully Ruffian, out there in the harbour. Spring cruise. There was a horned gramophone on the counter, protected by a sour bulldoggy woman with frizzed ginger hair and bare mottled arms thick as thighs. Some of the tars danced. It was a wartime tune, from The Bing Boys: Notherlildrink notherlildrink notherlildrink wondousanyharm. It began to run down, to sailors' cries and groans. Naw lal droooonk. The patronne rewound muscularly. A Liverpool tar, brown as a nut, black hair knotty, then began to paw her, saying, "Summat nice, love. A bacon butty. No bub without grub." She hit out at him without anger. There was a strong hogo of sick and urine, and the flow from under the WC door showed the apparatus was blocked.

"Ce monsieur-ci," Dick said, with governess clarity, "voudrait quelque chose à manger. Un petit sandwich, par exemple." The patronne gave out with a hoarse gobful of Niçois. "Just trying," Dick smiled to the sailor, "to get you that little something." A worn bald man in a filthy apron appeared yawning, showing gold and a caked tongue, just emerging from his siesta. "Deux absinthes," ordered Dick.

"Water with mine," I said.

"Nonsense. Sacrilege. Makes the heart grow fonder," he smirked at the sailor. He tossed it off. "There," he said. "Toss it off, that's the way."

"We've all done it," the tar said, "but there's some as won't admit it. You two lads live here then?"

A lone petty officer sat glazed at a soaked table. "Bloody did for the bastard," he said, several times.

"Dancin with im," another matelot said, impelled by his partner's boisterous whirl toward us. His partner crashed to the wall, under a picture of Pierrot and Pierrette all sprinkled with artificial gold dust. Im was Dick.

"Charmed," Dick said, and swallowed his third.

"Toss off, that's right, when you can't get owt else."

"Watch it, please," I said, still on my first.

"Old fusspot." And, in the arms of the dancing matelot, a young man with a simian brow but honest eyes, he one-stepped willowily. The record had been turned over. If yoooo war the ownly garl in the waaaarld.

"You two lads live here then?"

"Did him proper, the bastard."

I hate to remember, and why should I remember, when I cannot remember a miracle? Your distrust of me should have begun a long time ago. Dick, I cannot forget, insisted on mixing a modified Hangman's Blood in, pulled from its nail on the wall, a metal chamber pot with the head of a sale Boche painted inside, sale bouche screaming mutely to be muted in. Cognac, whisky from Indochina with slant-eyed bonny Scot on the etiquette, white rum, genuine nearblack Nelson's blood, gin, port, some of that sticky muck there like plumjuice, need a bottle of Guinness really, never mind, some of that pissy belch water will have to do.

"Really a sir, is he, your mate, like what he said?" breathed rummily on me a matelot called Tish.

"Smooth," said the sir, handing it round in tumblers, "you have to admit the smoothness of it." Dancing went on still, one dancer delicately gnawing his partner's throat, oh do do that it's nice. Dusking sea air outside when the land breeze burst open the door. Then we were battened in again to snug smelly dark with bulbous paper lampshades aswing. Oh, smooth all right, right.

"Princer Wales smokes that, did you know?" said the scowse whom they called Wet Nelly, one of the fighting Starkeys really he is though from the Dingle, they has a fight afore they goes to bed. "Won many a bet on that, wack. Baby's Bottom it's called. You can buy it in shops."

The patronne wanted to know who was paying. Sir will pay. He unclawed a cram of bills onto the swimming zinc countertop. "For God's sake, careful." I scooped up most, thrust it into my own right jacket pocket, haggled about change.

"Better," swaying Dick said, "with an absinthe in it. Reinforce that whatsit. Put one in next time. Smooth, though."

"Who's absent when she's at home?"

"Sang de bourreau," Dick told patroness and own-rolled-caporal-puffing filthy-aproned barman. "Put that on list of genuine deuces étrangers."

"Etrangéres," I could not help correcting, pedantic fool. "Feminine in plural."

"What you say about lemonade in Bootle? You potty, wack?"

A no-lipped matelot with milky eyes had been watching me for some time from round the bend of the bar. He now came up and spoke in my ear with bitter sincerity. "You look to me like," he said, "a bastard that's fair crying out to be done, you fucker."

I drank nervously.

"Fair swaller on him," said a boy fair as an angel whom the others called Porky. The working class always looks best in uniform.

"The working class," I began to say.

In a quiet fury, "Fair begging for it, I know his fucking type, jimmy-the-fucking-one voice on the bastard." I thought we had better be going.

"Be going."

"It's his sister," announced Dick. "He shags his sister before dinner. Gives him an appetite."

"Nothing lower than that," Tish or somebody said. "Dad and daughter, that's different, stands to reason. Fuck a bugger that shags his sister which is his own flesh and blood."

"A joke," I said. "Crude, but still a joke."

"It's no bleeding joke, you bastard," gritted the one with milky eyes, his neck muscles knotty with the intensity of his speech. "That's why you've got to get done."

"Oh, this is nonsense. Dick," I called, "we're going." And I drank a random glass from among many. It was not thirst, it was a gesture of the nerves. Dick did not hear, or listen. He was dancing with a sulky-lipped bullock they called Sparks, and this Sparks was thrusting at Dick in rhythm. Lat the grite big warld keep taming. I wondered whether to have a heart attack, but that organ beat strongly, well fueled by the muck I was toping or stuping. For I ownly knaow that I lay yew sao.

"You'll get done yet, you fucker."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," and oversqueezed my glass, which broke. Blood on my fingers. "Damn and bugger it."

"Porky'll suck that off for you. A real little bloodsucker is Porky here," Tish said. But Porky was a sweating angel, very pale.

"Damn and damn." I did my own sucking. The gramophone ran down and no one rewound. The big fat frizzed bitch was going on at me about the broken glass. Fahnd saaaam waaaan laaaaaak yaaaaaaaaow.

"I want to throw," retched Porky. "I got to."

"Come, dear," Dick said. "Daddy will holdum head for um." And he put an arm tenderly about Porky. Porky sicked spittle. "All right, madame, you fat unsavoury cow. All will be taken care of." And he staggered Porky toward the door.

"What he is," said Tish, "is like a gentleman. Stands to reason, him being a sir." The door opened to a black wind. Sparks shut it with his arse. Dick and Porky were out there. I was going to go too.

"You're staying here, fucker," the milky-eyed one said. "You've got to get done."

"You and whose navy?" I quoted vulgarly from one of my own stupid plays.

"Summat to say about it?" somebody said, flushed face an inch from mine. "Got it in for the fucking Andrew?"

"I'm getting out of here," and I marvelled at myself as I grabbed the rump of the smashed glass from the runny zinc and swivelled it from one to another of the blue swayers like a flashlamp.

"Ah, playing dirty. Right, here it comes." But the proffered fist with its tattooed LOVE AND DUTY with blue flowers could not really connect, drink having drained strength from the arm beyond it. The door opened again and to a windier blackness two genuine matelots came in, French, pomponned caps with MAZARIN on them.

"Parleyvoo wee wee. Jigajig traybon." Of course, my original play title. I dropped the tumbler stump on the filthy wet floor and, for some reason, ground it growling with my heel among the un-ground-out fag-ends. Then I shouldered and pushed out. "Come back, fucker, to get fucked."

"Dick," I called to the sidestreet. There was only one lamp, dimmish, near a Byrrh poster. I ran inland and came to an alleyway. I heard groaning, then a splash. The thin moon emerged to show Dick, sober and vigorous, holding the doubledup sailor up with strong clasping arms round his middle. The sailor's trousers were right down, hobbling his ankles. Dick was buggering away deep and cheerfully in brutal Norman Douglas style.

"Just one second, dear," Dick smiled, "then he's all yours. Not all that tight, surprising really. Relaxation consequent on nausea and so on." And still he ground away. Then he shuddered, lips apart, as on unsugared lemon juice as he spattered. "Delicious. So mindless. There, come on, angelface, get it all up for daddy." The two voidings were one. I had an erection. I was bitterly ashamed. Then there were voices calling.

"Porky. Fucking Porky."

"Fucked Porky, really," Dick said, releasing him into his own vomit. "All right, dear," buttoning up, "he's all yours." And Dick ran with long expert strides into the blackness of the alley as the moon buttoned itself into its fly of cloud. It was as if he knew the damned place blind. The boy lay heaving, terribly besmirched, bare arse to the sky. A great gust blew the cloud tatters off the moon. Then Porky's mates were there.

CHAPTER 25

The important thing, I explained as well as I could from my bloated mouth, was to get a message to my sister. No, we had no telephone. A telegram. But the post offices were closed and there was no night telephonic service. The plainclothes sergeant by my bed in the Hôpital Saint Roch said a message could be telephoned to the Monaco police and it would then be delivered by hand. For God's sake, please, no mention of what's happened, don't want the poor young recently orphaned girl highly nervous panicking, say met by chance my publisher on his yacht staying on his yacht discussing book. Be back Saturday. The hovering sister shook a grim grey head at that samecli. Amend to lundi. Ah, said the plainclothes sergeant, so monsieur was a man of letters as well as a foreign visitor. That made the whole thing worse. And what was monsieur doing in that particular part of the old port, notoriously low and perilous, no place for, especially lettered, foreign visitors? Ah, I said, but surely in order for man of letters conducting examination of cultural or vivental spectrum of great southern marine city. Monsieur is writing a report on the criminal elements of Nice? Monsieur is doing a dangerous thing. See what monsieur has permitted himself to be led into. No, no, I said, my métier is that of romancier, I am a writer of fiction. Fiction, pronounced the sergeant, is written from the imagination, it is invention, it requires no meddling with the dangerous exterior world. The sergeant was a young plump man smelling of overgarlicked ratatouille, his celluloid collar overtight, eased with irritable fingers when he was not pencilling in his little notebook. Could monsieur remember more than he had already remembered, which was not, if he might be permitted to say so, much? Monsieur could not, monsieur said. Set upon suddenly by thieves when pursuing noise of a cat in pain apparently, we others English are given to love of animals, fought back, was vindictively torn and thumped. And also, the sergeant reminded, anally violated, though not severely, more in a token manner. Were monsieur's assailants francophone? Oh yes, most certainly francophone, though with a strong Algerian accent. Ah, monsieur knows Algiers, he has been conducting similar researches into the unsavoury moeurs of the backstreets of that city? No, a guess really.

Contusions mostly, a tooth loose, but the behaviour of the heart not well liked by either palpating Dr. Durand or stethoscoping Dr. Castelli. Found unconscious near pool of vomit partially unclothed, light rain beginning to needle body already chilled. Patrolling police, following scream of pain, not monsieur's, disclosed with questing lantern. Evidence of intake of alcohol, whether excess or not not easily judicable, but no matter anyway. Police would continue investigations. No need, I said too eagerly, you'll never find them, besides, I've learnt my lesson. Ah, monsieur has learnt his lesson, is it not? Monsieur should occupy himself with being man of letters and not go carousing in unsavoury lousehaunts of old port. Snap shut notebook, last irritable fingering of overtight celluloid collar, a sort of noose, metaphor of the stringency of duty. Message would at once be sent to monsieur's sister. Back God willing lundi prochain.

The heart had settled grudgingly to a steady enough rhythm by Friday evening. Though bruised and wretched, I wanted to be out of there. The ward was full of mostly old men who wanted to treat me as an official representative of a Britain that, in the war just won, had behaved treacherously to France. II n'y a qu'un enneini, kept nodding a dithering grayhead. You mean, I said, that we treacherously would not allow you with impunity to overcharge us for horse provender and the use of filthy troop trains to drive the Hun off your soil not ours? The Germans are at least Europeans, some other old fool said. I could walk, and I was going to walk out. Dr. Durand had, I discovered, his account at the Banque Nationale de Paris, my bank too. Would he sell me a check form? You also BNP, monsieur? He would sell me two check forms, one for settling my bill here; the check poundage could be added to my bill. I was permitted to entrust to a male ward orderly, squat with Eskimo hair, a message to the manager of the Banque Nationale de Paris on the Place Massena, requesting him to telephone my branch in Monte Carlo and, thus reasssured as to funds, kindly cash enclosed, seal cash in envelope and give to bearer. The bearer brought me this cash and I overtipped him. Then I asked him to buy me the cheapest possible impermeable at the nearest men's clothing store. Yes, I know it is not raining, but these filthy and torn garments, regard, must be concealed from the common eye.

This Saturday was March 29, 1919, day of the total eclipse of the sun which Einstein had predicted. I can remember a sudden darkness and feeling no surprise, as if it were natural enough for the sun to be occluded by my guilt and shame. I was so awash with shame and guilt that I could hardly think. Dick? Sir Richard Curry Bart? Was there had there ever been such a person? The name of that ghastly bistro was what? Thudding fists and ripping nails, spit and foul words clear enough in memory but not the inflicting of pain. I resented nobody except myself. But was this just or logical, seeing that I was made as I was? But who had made me as I was, since, as that German up at Eze had affirmed, there was no longer a God? Had I so made myself? When and how? What, anyway, was the solution save gelding? Brow bruised, left eye black, lips blubbered, hands in pockets of cheap raincoat, I limped from the station down rue Grimaldi, earning the odd look of curiosity. I had my keys still, their chain secured to my trousertop, though I had little else. I opened the main door and panted, near dropping, up to the top story. I opened the flat door quietly and knew at once that Domenico was back: his own impermeable, not cheap, hung on the hallstand. I knew, as you know, what was happening.

But it seemed already to have happened. When I opened the door of Hortense's bedroom I found them both sitting up naked in bed calmly smoking. My first instinct was to snatch that cigarette out of the wicked girl's hand. It was the smoking naked that was so intolerable. But I stood there, nodding, taking all the blame. I heard a dog yelp bitterly out on the street. The dog was being run over by an automobile, and that too was my fault. These two in bed were at first too shocked by my appearance to be abashed at being caught post flagrantem. "What have they done to you?" cried Hortense.

"What has he..." I began, but I knew the answer. "You dirty swine, you bastard," I told Domenico. "My own sister."

"Many women," Hortense said, her pert breasts still blazing from the bed, "are the sisters of somebody. Out, both," she ordered. "I want to get dressed."

"Get your clothes on," I said to Domenico. "You're going to be hit."

"You couldn't hit an underdone custard," she said. "Who's done this to you? Your nonexistent publisher on his nonexistent yacht? Or that willowy blond little puffball? Out, both of you."

I went into the salon and poured myself whisky. Domenico was soon after me, on bare feet, in shirt and trousers like a man surprised in seduction, which was what he was. "I cried," he said. "She comforted me."

"You cried so she could comfort you, you mean, swine."

"It was the bad news I brought back from Milan. They will not do the opera."

"Serve you bloody well right, you bloody filthy leering little Don Giovanni."

He was ready to cry again at this reference to an opera that had been done often and would be done often again, in Milan too.

"Pack your traps," I said. "Out. I don't want to see you ever again. Or," I added not really relevantly, "that greedy gambling hypocrite of a brother of yours. Defiling me and my house and my sister. Go on. I'd throw you out if I had the strength but you see how I am. The whole world's rotten."

"And what if it is love, what if she said love and I said it too? And another thing, it is the English that are the hypocrites."

"Don't give me that about love." I spilled whisky with my shaking. "I will not hear that word again, do you hear? Not from any man's lips and much less from yours. Go on, I won't look at you. You don't exist except as filth for the poubelle of the world. Out of the place for which I and I only pay the rent." Then Hortense came in with her honey-coloured hair in a blue ribbon and wearing a wool and silk dress with pleated sides and bishop sleeves and artificial cherries on the left lapel.

She said, "I'll have a drink too." But I barred the drinks table from her like an innocent she would defile, saying: "Oh yes, of course, sex and cigarettes and whisky. Be the big authentic fallen woman, you a mere kid of eighteen. God, the shame of it." But it was all, I was more and more aware, my fault.

"I do not," she said in a very sharp governess tone, "wish to hear from you anything at all in the moral line. You are not qualified to judge others. Normal others." The cheap novelist in me wanted, in a way, to forgo judgment and ask questions about what it was like to be deflowered by an urgent Tuscan: I might as well get some professional advantage out of what was all my fault, and of course heterosexual Nature's, and of course theirs.

"It is a kind of jealousy," said Domenico, "and it is very sad."

"Deflowerer," I tried to snarl. "Defloratore." That sounded too mild. Domenico seemed to think so too.

He suggested "Stupratore." And then, artbrothers, we looked at each other with the promise of unwilling warmth, working again, happy innocent days, on the opera Milan did not want.

"You bloody men," came the clear sweet voice of fallen Hortense, "with your bloody deflowering." She saw that the expletive was a genuine unpurposed, though redundant, adjective of description and she blushed. "Treating a hymen as though it were a whatsit a commodity. In any case, it was the French school that did it." I was bewildered--of poetry? Painting? Phenomenology? "Mother wouldn't have me taught by German nuns and that was the result. Domenico, go and get some clothes on. More clothes, I mean."

"And then I go?"

"Oh yes, you bloody go all right," I said. "I'm in charge here."

"And," he said, wary dog-eyes on Hortense, "you come with me?" I could tell from the belated teeth clamping his tongue that he had put himself into a situation of near avowal totally unwonted, but Hortense was quick with: "No, Domenico, me not with you. You want me to live in sin, as they call it? And you with a brother a priest? Are you proposing marriage? No, of course not, you oleaginous little Don Giovanni--"

"Just what I called him," I muttered inaccurately into my whisky.

"I am not," also muttered Domenico. "The ime is not. It is my art."

"Go on, sing it," I jeered, "like flaming Tosca."

"I will strike you," Domenico cried, bunching his fists. "I have had enough of your English hypocrisy."

"Oh," said Hortense in a kind of resignation, "they're all hypocrites. The French too. Burbling about the beauties of Monet."

"So the art master got there, did he?" I said, the whisky partly at fault, crudely.

"You nasty thing," Hortense hissed. "It was a horse. It was the riding we were made to do: There's nobody more English than some of the French. Un cheval," she added, "not ein Pferd." It would, she led me to believe, have been all right with Sister Gertrude demonstrating, black habit tucked up, hallooing like a Valkyrie. "As for the other, yes and no. The door opened, you see." And then, irrelevantly I thought, "You crude and unpleasant homosexual."

"Poor Mother," I said.

"Mother?" Domenico cried, not having well understood, perhaps even holding an image of a horse covering poor Hortense. "You mean you are already, that it, he--"

"Our mother, fool," Hortense cried back. "The French could do no wrong. She had no opinion about the Italians." That was well said. Then: "Go on, get out, Domenico. Go for a walk or a swim or seduce somebody or something. My brother and I have to talk."

"If you mean he's to come back," I said, "you're mad and also wicked. Have I not made myself clear? Out and out now and forever. And yes, talk, by God, I'm going to do the talking."

"I am sick at heart," Domenico said, hands limp at his sides. His intonation suggested an aria, perhaps from the Principe di Danimarca of Enrico Garitta, which I had not seen. "I will go to a hotel. I will come for my things tomorrow. I am too sick to pack now."

"Everything out this minute," I said. And then, not wanting Domenico to make an operatic scena out of filling his suitcases: "Tomorrow. At nine o'clock. Hortense will not be here."

"Ah, sending me away too, are you? Back home to Dad and the second Mrs Toomey? That's what we have to talk about."

"I meant you would not be available to be seen and cajoled and perhaps also even... Ugh."

"Terrible, isn't it, a man and a woman together? At least I'm not all beaten about, rough sailors I suppose it was, friends of that bloody blond tulip, and look at the state of your clothes. Change them now. We've got to talk seriously later."

Dad sent a "To you?"

"To you."

"How dare you interfere with my mail. Have you been opening other things too? I won't have this, Hortense, you've gone too far, you need a really stern hand, the sooner you--" The sooner you what? Go back to the German nuns? Learn the disciplines of a seducible London stenographer? Marry?

"Oh, don't talk silly. It came three days ago. I knew it must be urgent."

"Where is it? I demand to see it."

"Get it, then. On your desk. On your way to changing your disgusting clothes. Ugh, blood and other things."

"I'm not leaving you alone with that bastard over there."

"I will not be called a bastard, you English hypocrite." And Domenico padded out, groaning his fancied wrongs.

"Can I have that drink now?" she said quietly, sitting in the armchair, as heavily as her frailty would allow. But no, women are not frail.

"Whisky?" I said almost humbly. "What does he say?" getting it for her, a single finger. "If it's an upsetting letter I don't particularly want to read it."

"Did you a favour then really, didn't I? Thanks." She sipped then coughed. Not all that grown-up. "The second Mrs Toomey isn't going to be the one I thought. It's another patient, Doris something, and she's only in her twenties. Dad's selling the practice. He's going to Canada. So you see my situation. He sees it too, in his long-winded way. Oh, read it."

"Later. I see." I poured more for myself. "He has to have you, though. You're still under age."

"I don't want to go to Canada. I don't want a stepmother a few years older than myself. I don't want to stay with you."

"I can see," I said, "why you wouldn't want to stay with me. Unnatural goings on. And me going on about morality. On the other hand I don't have any duty to you, you know. Except what--family affection dictates." I would not say love.

"You bloody bore. You real horrible hypocrite."

Domenico, going off down the corridor parallel to, but at no point visible from, the long salon, must have heard that with approval. He sang a strangled "Ciao, Orténsia" as he turned left into the hallway, visible from the part of the salon where she and I sat through the arch with its twisty columns, opened the flat door and went out quietly. He could be heard going down the marbled stairway on sad punching feet.

"Operatic," Hortense said, "in everything. It's in the language, way of life. Sex, too. Religion, of course. England could never take to it. Still," she said, "I'm going to marry him."

"I'll go and change," I said. I switched off thought and feeling, though I could not switch off physical pain, as I stripped off my defiled clothes and put on a silk shirt and tennis trousers. Thus dressed as for games I came back to ask her to repeat what she had said. She repeated it. "You mean," I said quietly and tiredly, "that you love him? That you let him do what he did because you love him? I never heard such wretched and wicked and adolescent nonsense. You don't know what love is. You don't know anything of the world. He's practically the first man you've ever been in contact with. Social, I mean, apart from the other wretched and evil thing."

She ignored all that, swinging one crossed white-silk-stockinged leg. "It's not worthwhile, you know, trying to explain things to you. You're dense as well as homosexual. Marriage and love are not the same thing. Mother used to make that clear to me when we had our little talks. How can you ever know about the one big whatdoyoucall destined love when there are so many millions and millions of the other sex in the world, that's what she used to say, and it was very sensible. You don't go looking or waiting. Too much world and too little time. You take what you can get if you're at all keen on marriage. I mean somebody physically all right and talented enough and with enough money. Domenico seems all right. I mean, I've seen him naked, for instance."

"This is terrible."

"Oh yes, terrible. There's money in that family. With the right sort of encouragement Domenico can make a name. That opera thing you did together, he played some of it for me on that rotten old piano there, weeping while he played. Then I took him to bed."

I sat on the hard chair facing her, my hands clasped between my knees, bent forward, looking at the lemon-coloured rug between tufts of which a minute intact cylinder of cigarette ash rested. I said without expression, "He arrived sad. They had rejected his opera, mine too incidentally. This this they have rejected, he cried, and sat down at the piano and sang you one of his brilliant arias. So you felt sorry for him and kissed him and took him to bed. He was willing, I don't doubt, but, I should imagine, also surprised."

"Well, yes," she said, smiling with reluctant admiration at the exactness of the reconstruction. "Just like that. Of course, you're a novelist, of course. I forget that sometimes. Most of the time you're so stupid."

"We were converging on you. He and I. But his train got in first. Such a pity."

"No no no no. He arrived the day before yesterday. I took him to bed then, but since then he's been taking me to bed. As broad as it's long, really."

"What is as broad as it's long?"

I could not understand for a moment why she railed at me. "You obscene horrible vulgar and tasteless horror." I looked bewildered. "Sorry," she said. "Perhaps I don't always do you justice. Perhaps I think too much about men being naturally coarse. Domenico isn't coarse, though. He'll be all right. He needs bossing and so on. I'll get that talent of his working. That was always Mother's regret, you know, that she hadn't married a man of talent."

"He was a talented dentist." And then I shook myself and said, "I have never in my life heard such madness."

She ignored that, of course. "I've no talent," she said. "Except perhaps for choosing the right father for my children. That's woman's responsibility now. Replenish the stock. All boys. Too many women in the world."

"This is very old-fashioned. And stupidly biological. As if you only knew about marriage from its its its--"

"In terms of its primary function," she said crisply, impatiently. "To breed good children. Haven't you read Bernard Shaw?"

"Back to the Ubermensch," I mocked bitterly.

"Sister Gertrude made us read him in German. She said he was better in German. English wasn't his real language, she said."

"And when," I still mocked bitterly, "is this Ehe or Ehestand or Eheschlies sung to take place?"

"The Eheschliessung," she said, "will be in Italy, I suppose. At that cheese place. With his brother officiating. And my elder brother gives me away. In," with her own bitterness, "the absence of a father."

"And when Domenico comes tomorrow morning to collect his clothes," I said, "he will be informed that he is to marry you and breed supermen for the new age, and he'll be overjoyed and leap in the air and cry che miracolo or meraviglioso or something."

"No," she said, ignoring my sarcasm, "not quite like that. But it'll be a relief for him, really. It's always a relief for a man not to have to go chasing women any more. For a time, anyway. Anyway, he's not to know yet what he's got to do. I've got to be cool and just friendly as though nothing happened, and then he'll wonder why and be worried and eager, men are such fools, and then he'll be down on his knees, you'll see, or rather you won't see."

"You know so little of the world," I said, "so very little."

"I know," she flashed, "a million times more about what goes on between a man and a woman than you'll ever know." She made a vulgar gesture with her fingers, the vulgar child, one of the new breed, coarsened by war. "So put that in your pipe or up it."

"All right," I said with patience. "I know certain biological facts, even if not out of direct experience. I know that when a male and female copulate, if you know the word--"

"You and your prissy stupidities. That's what's so diabolic about you and your lot. Pleasure without danger of conception or joy of it for that matter. I know what your bloody copulation if that's what it really is is all about. Pollution, that's what Sister Berthe called all sexual acts where you spill your seed, disgusting, the sin of Onan. With a man and woman it's a matter of taking a chance."

"Oh, no, it's not, it's not that at all, it's not by any means that. Do you mean you took a chance with that filthy smirking Domenico creature?"

"I used toothpaste, if you want to know. A girl at school used it. Domenico, and he's less of a filthy creature than you are, you homo, he remarked on the taste of the peppermint."

"Oh my God, oh my dear God, oh Jesus Christ, oh sacred Father in Heaven--"

"Hypocrite. You're a damned hypocrite, he was right, a bloody hypocrite is what you are, Ken Toomey."

"Oh my dear God." Then the doorbell rang. We looked at each other. "That's the doorbell," I said.

"Well, answer it; then. It's your doorbell."

"Who do you think it might be?"

"The Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin and Horatio Bottomley. Idiot," and she got smartly up and went out to the door. She had nobody to be afraid of, such as a new avenging boatload of sailors or the plainclothes sexual police. I heard her opening the door and then, the voice of one surprised but quickly recovering, going "Oh" twice. The other voice was male and breathy and pleading and scared. I had not thought, I genuinely had not considered that that filthy Domenico would return so soon. Hortense entered the salon demurely and said, "He's got this telegram." She handed it to me. Domenico was still, I assumed, cowering by the door. The telegram said: ARRIO LUNEDI GIORNI CINQUE MISSIONE DELICATA NIZZA CARLO. Typical of a damned priest, assuming that other people's lives could never be so disrupted as to render their homes unavailable for damned priestly intrusion. Still, this somehow. It was rather.

I said, "Let's have him in." I heard no acerbity in my voice, I heard rather the effect on the vowels of the incipient lip-spreading of a smile. So Domenico was brought in. Eyes round and rolling, sweat on his cheeks, hands and arms most eloquent, he babbled a recitative: Was in the café across the street and the telegram man saw me and he said it was for me he knows me you see and he was glad not to have to climb the stairs with it. Was in the café or rather at a table outside taking a small cognac for my sorrow when he gave it to me. The, this, telegram from my brother. My brother Carlo has something to do in Nice. Missione delicata, I know what he means, it was also that that time in Sardinia. So as before he expects to stay here, so what can I do? On Monday he comes, the day after tomorrow which is Sunday, so what can I do?

Of course, I have to eliminate later knowledge from this scene, an image of His Holiness the Pope snoring away dead out but, by his sacred presence, thwarting the fornicatory designs of his brother. It was just fat Carlo who was going to snore, but he was a priest and a formidable spiritual entity, and I knew that Domenico feared him. "No problem," I said. "He can have my bedroom and I can sleep on this sofa here. Or I can go to a hotel, no problem." Domenico and Hortense both looked at me with care and suspicion, what the hell was I up to as if they didn't know. "Domenico, Hortense," I said, even wagging two fingers, "you have been naughty children. But in the eyes of God we are all naughty children."

"Hypocrite," Hortense said unemphatically. Domenico gulped and gave her a most hypocritical glance of reproach.

"You are still my brother," I said, "though an erring one, just as Hortense remains, though also erring, my sister. Don Carlo, I give you my solemn word, shall know nothing of the reprehensible things that have transpired here. He will, however, I trust, be unable to fail to observe the evidence of a certain warmth between you. He will, I doubt not, be a help to all of us."

"Oh yes, the warmth," Domenico said, not really understanding me at all, and sidling an inch or two nearer Hortense, who said, still, or even more, unemphatically: "Bloody bloody bloody. Homosexual prig, setting yourself up as as as...

"This is not generous, Orténsia," Domenico said, still sidling.

CHAPTER 26

"I never," Dr. Henry Havelock Ellis told me, "prescribe castration. But, of course, I never prescribe anything these days. Like you, I call myself a man of letters."

This was on Sunday, March 30, 1919. That I have admitted to a large vagueness about past events, and yet am able so often to assume the exact chronicler, need in no wise be a puzzle to the reader who looks for consistency in his author. Photostats of my diaries and notebooks arrived from the United States about three months after my eighty-first birthday, and I found therein days and weeks of my life pretty fully recorded, though there are considerable lacunae. That the shameful events beginning at the time of my return from England to Monaco with Hortense, and culminating on March 29, 1919, were as I have set them down, you may accept without question, though the truth of the dialogues is rarely a verbatim one. About meeting Havelock Ellis at the Hotel de Paris the day after I am unsure, but it was certainly in that year and almost certainly in the principality. The meeting and the things he said are wholly pertinent to this phase of my narrative, such as it is, so I expect the reader to expand his concept of truth to accommodate what follows.

Ellis was then about sixty with scant white hair and a great white beard, quite the prophet. He had practised as a physician but had given up medicine to devote himself to literature. Many of us had been grateful for his Mermaid Series of the Elizabethan Dramatists, published in the late 1880s. It was in connection with an erroneous statement Ellis had made about the origins of Elizabethan act division that I first came into personal contact with him. I forget where he had given his public lecture about Sackville and Norton and the Inns of Court and Gorboduc and Locrine, but I remember vividly a kind of proletarian hogo (beer, black tobacco and inerasable grime) haloing it, so presume it was part of some London County Council extension series for selfimproving workers; Ellis said that the Elizabethan dramatists got their five acts from Seneca, along with much else, and I counter-affirmed that they got them from Terence and Plautus, Seneca's brief closet tragedies following Greek procedure in admitting no act division. Ellis had to admit that he had not thought much about the matter, and later that I was right, but the fallacy he propounded on that occasion was taken up by T. S. Eliot and eternized in one of the magazine reviews he collected and called essays. I corrected Eliot in the dining room of the Russell Hotel in, I think, the late 1930s (he fed himself with crumbs of Wensleydale the while), but the error has survived his death. There was a lot of the dilettante about Eliot. The first volume of Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928) was the occasion of scandal and state prosecution, and to many of my generation Ellis was a martyr-hero.

He had acquired, he said, a taste for beer in Australia when a teacher there, and he was drinking it in the bar of the Hotel de Paris when I encountered him that Sunday at noon. He had various curious mannerisms. He would screw up his face so as to exclude the passage of air through his nostrils, at the same time snoring faintly and rapidly; he showed his teeth, which were not good, in unexpected and irrelevant as it were demonstration snarls; he swilled his mouth with beer before gulping it audibly; and he plucked at his crotch as if to extract music from it.

"Homosexuality," he told me. "This friend of mine at Roquebrune is a homosexual of long standing. I think there is little that can be done about it, and I fail to see why it should be regarded as morbid. It is the law that is morbid, but the law will in time be changed. What is your problem?"

"The aetiology of it--"

"You cannot very well say that. Dear Sigmund in Vienna has rejected altogether the grossly physical Helmholtzism on which all his generation was raised. He will have it that neuroses and hysterias and what the world calls, if it knows the term, sexual aberrations and inversions and so on have no physical cause though they may have physical symptoms. The so-called aberration of homosexuality has nothing whatever to do with an irregular endowment of hormones or whatnot. No one is born homosexual. No one is born heterosexual either. But everyone is born sexual. This sexuality is first fixed, inevitably, on the mother, source of oral and other gratifications."

This was dry and cold and un-Elizabethan discourse, and it was far too loud. There was an English family of father, mother and two puppyish daughters seated nearby at a table, and they were taking it all in. Ellis suddenly roared with laughter, plucked a couple of harp chords from his tweeded crotch, and cried: "Freud the Jewish scientist will end up a Christian Scientist if he is not careful. Eh? Eh?" He then snarled brown and yellow at the room, which was filling up at this aperitif hour, and said, "Most of the people here are heterosexual. Though, of course, we must not leave out of account the fact that the Côte d'Azur is a refuge for those of the opposed persuasion. Like, I presume that is your reason for being here, yourself." He then looked, it seemed, appraisingly at the bartender and said, "Encore un bock?'

"Forgive me," I said. "All this is of the greatest interest, but--"

He was quick to understand. "Too loud, eh?" he said too loudly. "Yes, a foul fault. It comes of my going deaf." Then he began to whisper quite as audibly as he had declaimed. "Everyone, as I said, is born sexual. There are stages of infantile development which lead, in the majority of cases, to a declaration of heterosexual tropism. Now the homosexual is made out of an inordinate Oedipal situation. But his homosexuality is not a neurosis or psychosis. Only his attitude to it, which means his attitude to society's attitude to it, can produce a condition in which it is in order to talk of an aetiology. Do I make myself clear?"

All too clear, all too too clear.

He downed his bock and said, to my relief, "Let us walk a little. It seems to be a gorgeous day."

We walked only about the square bounded by the hotel, the Casino, the Café de Paris and the little park. It was indeed a gorgeous spring day, a day for the heterosexual flirtations of literary tradition. I said: "My father. The mildest of men, the kindest, as I well remember. I was never afraid of him. Despised him a little, perhaps, for not being firm enough with me, leaving all that to my mother. Despise him now for another thing, but let that pass." Then I suddenly caught a memory, shrill as the flapping seagull over the Casino, of myself screaming, held down, unable to get away, while my father approached me grimly with forceps. No, not his dental chair. Myself in bed with my mother, her arm about me, and my father coming into the bedroom grinning in (it must have been) mock ferocity with the kitchen tongs in his fist (impossible) and gripped in the tongs a monstrous brown and bloody molar. "Biggest I've ever seen," he seemed to leer, thrusting the tooth toward my hidden genitals. "Remember this, boy, remember to look after your pegs." There was a fire (why?) blazing in the bedroom grate, and he untonged the molar and let it drop among the coals. Then he waved the tongs at me, making a dull metallic castañetting, and went out singing. Was that what they called the primal scene, or something?

"Despise?" said Havelock Ellis. "Nothing to do with it. I say," hands suddenly clasped behind him, swivelling his whole body to get a better look, "that's an awfully pretty girl." She was too, about eighteen, smooth olive, coming from mass with her mother, a blancmange-coloured missal in her hand. As though he had merely done a conventional homage to old man's lechery, he dismissed his admiration and turned back to me, saying, "Put it this way. Your father owned your mother and was very ready to deballock you for being his rival in love, and you conceived the fearful assumption that your father owned all women. That's what dear Sigmund teaches. It will do as well as any other theory. Like false etymology, you know. Tell some ignoramus that Mary Queen of Scots liked to eat marmalade when she was ill, and so they called the stuff Marie est malade. Or that Alexander loved roasted eggs, and when he came in from battle they yelled All eggs under the grate, hence his historic title. Nonsense, but it fills in a sort of gap in the brain. Like the Freudian mythology. It doesn't have to be rational, you know, indeed it can't be. But your father scared you off all women, and that's why you are what you say you are. So forget it. Enjoy yourself, life's short." Though in full view of a group of, from their twang, New Englanders, he arpeggiated a chord on his crotch.

"And how," I asked, "am I suppose to feel about my sister?"

"Sister, eh? Younger than you? Interesting business, having a sister. Sigmund had a hell of a row with one of those errant disciples of his, the one that started up on his own with a theory about everything stemming from the birth trauma, Otto Somebody, something in it probably, a row about homosexuality and incest. The sister, one of them said, I don't know whether it was this Otto or the great old bugger himself, she's outside the net. The father doesn't own her as he owns the mother. She's not a sex object, not during that phase, if you see what he's getting at, whichever one it was. Did you read my introduction to 'Tis Pity She's a Whore?"

"I read the play in the Mermaid Series. I don't remember an introduction."

"Never mind. Now I come to think of it, I didn't write one. Meant to, perhaps. It doesn't matter. Anyway, the only way out of homosexuality is incest."

"Or castration."

"I never prescribe castration. But, of course, I never prescribe anything these days. Like you, I call myself a man of letters." He made a terrible face and leered terribly: "Sororal incest." We were standing on the periphery of the terrace of the Café de Paris. Ellis looked at the aperitif-takers as if they were a zoo, then said clearly to a laden waiter, "L'inceste avec la soeur." The waiter shrugged, as to say it was not on the tariff. "That flashes on the conscious level, like sheet lightning on the marine horizon. To be watched, the occasion of the fall avoided. Out of the frying pan into the other thing. Though that can lead to the seeking of sister substitutes, sororal surrogates and so forth. Interesting. You ought to write a play about it. No, surely it was done by Philip Massinger. Perhaps not. A novel, a bigger form, no room in a play really." I did write a novel, in 1934. Half of one, anyway. But I knew I'd never get away with it, not in an age when the editor James Douglas, who called Aldous Huxley The Man Who Hates God, poor Aldous the God--drunk, declared he would rather give his children prussic acid than let them read The Well of Loneliness. My working title had been She Hath No Breasts.

"Which is the greater sin?" I asked. I was asking the wrong man. The right man to ask was arriving from Paris the following day. He would probably deny the existence of either of them, except as items in some hypothetical list worked out a priori by the Angelic Doctor, who had been so fat that they had to cut a half-disk out of his dining table. Copulatio cum aure porcelli, copulation with a pig's ear, is to be regarded in no different wise from the same act performed in natibus equi, in a horse's arse (A, 3, xiv), this being pollution and the unlawful spending of the seed which is intended for generation and the peopling of the heavenly kingdom with saved souls. Incest wasteth no seed so may be accounted the lesser sin, but see Ambrosius Fracastor, Bibellius, Virgilius Polydor Upyourarse, et cetera, et cetera.

"Sin? Sin?" cried Ellis at a small dog. "Oh my God, sin quotha."

It comes clear in memory now, but I cannot understand why I had walked painfully up from the Condamine to Monte Carlo, prepared to show my bruises to strangers who would think: "He was in a roughhouse with jolly jack-tars, the dirty bugger, serves him right." Had I come to look for that little traitor Curry at the Balmoral? Certainly not. Anyway, he had left. Hortense and Domenico, the hypocrites, had gone to late mass at Sainte Devote. Why had I not stayed in the bed I must the next day give up to Don Carlo, catching up on the sleep I had missed during a long night given over to listening for sounds of padding fornicatory feet (watch this, Toomey; oh, to hell with watching things all the time)? Had I wanted my sister to be defiled and did I now wish her to be married? Masochism, sexual identification with my artbrother Domenico? Did I wish them both to be uneasy about my apparent change of heart? What was going on? I have practised the craft of fiction for many years, but I know less than I ever knew about the tortuosities of the human soul.

Havelock Ellis now looked toward the little hill street between the Casino and the Hotel de Paris and, at the sight of a man coming up it, opened eyes and mouth wide with joy. This man, about fifty, clad in what seemed to be a suit of alpaca that shimmered purply in the intense light, now began to trot toward Ellis, grinning like a gridiron. Ellis met him halfway with speed, though not trotting. "My dear, my dear." This would be the homosexual from Roquebrune. I found out later that Ellis's wife was unabashedly lesbian and he himself quite impotent. There they were, Ellis and this man, embracing each other, the man going "What? What? Eh?" in the patrician manner. Then they went into the Hotel de Paris, embraced. Ellis had forgotten me already, the rude thing. I did not exist. And it was he who had brought me out into the square, leaving me now standing aimless and feeling a fool under the sun and gulls.

But lo, here they are coming up that same hill street to have luncheon with me at the Hotel de Paris--Hortense in appropriate off-white cotton with flowered sidebow at the waist, wide wrapover collar, glass bead necklace, deepcrowned narrow-brimmed hat with wide silk band, and Domenico in decent grey, wearing a curl-brimmed trilby of the kind that Puccini, one of his masters, favoured. They have come out of mass and look sober and demure, the sinners. What is the nature of the luncheon--celebratory, penitential?

"The ceremony," I said over the coffee, "will, I presume, take place in Gorgonzola." Domenico, who was drinking his coffee, spluttered. He had not expected this. I had deliberately kept, during the meal, to the topic of my and Domenico's little opera. Milan's rejection of it, I said, was not the end of the world. My theatrical contacts in London did not include operatic ones, but I was sure that I could get my agent to get Sir Hilary Beauclerk at Covent Garden to consider its production. Domenico had at first been suspicious, but I was affable and charming, despite my half-closed eye and bruises; I was being a gentleman, a breed that Domenico had read about if not previously met. "The marriage ceremony," I amplified.

Hortense said, "Look, Domenico, this is not my idea, you know that. This is him being pompous and heavy and in loco parentis and bloody hypocritical."

"With your brother," I said, "performing that ceremony. I suppose that Hortense must go with you soon to meet the family. This is something that we can work out with Don Carlo when he comes tomorrow. I take it that your family is living in the modern age, with all its social liberties, just as you are. I take it that there will be no antiquated nonsense about a dowry or a marriage settlement. You love each other, enough, no more, no less. Don't you," I said with sudden ferocity, "love each other?"

"You're a nasty filthy pig," said Hortense.

"Don't," I snarled. "How dare you address me in that manner. You're not too old to be smacked. On your bare bottom too." At a table some five meters away Ellis's friend from Roquebrune was fluting at Ellis some Jacobean lines which I recognised: "Kiss me. Never aftertimes should hear Of our fast-knit aflections, though perhaps The laws of conscience and of civil use May justly blame us, yet when they but know Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour, Which would in other insects be abhorr'd."

Then he giggled.

"Yes yes," growled Ellis, too loud, a bit tipsy, "vocal metathesis. Scared of the word. I shall never forget the occasion, the bloody fool. Like 'Good Hamlet, cast thy coloured nightie off.' But that was only in rehearsal, got it out of her system."

"That play," I said to Hortense. She did not seem to know the keyword of the title for all her sophistication, sophistication meaning defilement. "Cognate with German Hure. Sister Gertrude may perhaps have used the word in some admonitory context or other."

"Yes," Domenico now said, having drunk his coffee and wiped thoroughly his lips with his napkin. "We love each other." And he put his hairy paw out toward Hortense's thin wrist across the table.

CHAPTER 27

Don Carlo's telegram had said he was coming for five days, but in fact he stayed well over a week. He had been gaining a reputation, I gathered, in the field of exorcism, and there was a tough job of exorcism to perform just outside Nice. The Bishop of Nice had requested his services, and so he had been granted a week's leave of absence from the Catho in Paris. A bit irregular, apparently, but Don Carlo was said by His Grace to be the best man in Europe at fighting the devil, and this was meant very literally. The devil was no metaphor to some of these churchmen but a palpable entity, or rather a well-structured army of entities (hence the name Legion, as in British Legion), with the Son of the Morning as generalissimo in charge of Belial and Beelzebub and Mephistopheles, as well as a large number of NCOs and privates eager to fight the bad fight and gain promotion. A lot of nonsense I thought at the time, but Don Carlo was ready to march in armed with the Rituale Romanum and, so to speak, knock hell out of these minor devils that had camped in the bodies of the innocent. He never had any doubt about the externality of evil, and this is what made him so formidable. Man was God's creation, and therefore perfect. The devil got in in the Garden of Eden and taught man how to be evil, and he was still doing it. Why didn't God annihilate the devil, then, and all his works? Because of free will. He had permitted the Revolt of the Angels because of free will. A divine bestowal by no manner of means nor in any wise to be rescinded. But let us hear the words of Don Carlo himself. The tough process of exorcism at which he daily laboured (I imagined him with coat off and sleeves rolled up) had got into the columns of Nice-Matin. The victim of the attentions of some minor but limpet-like devils who had, apparently, names like Chouchou, Ranran, and Piquemonsieur, was a boy of eight, son of a railway worker who talked to a reporter in a bistro. Don Carlo believed, not without cause, that the press could do with its own exorcism and he refused to speak to its representatives. Instead he spoke to the world at large, or such of it as it was represented at eleven o'clock mass the following Sunday at Sainte Devote. He gave a sermon in very reasonable, though Milan-accented, French, taking as his text the ninth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark, the one about our name being Legion and us being many. He said: "A mere five months ago we came to the end of an excruciating, debilitating, murderous, thoroughly evil war. When I use that word evil I do not do so in the way of the politician or the journalist. For they use it loosely and vaguely, as a mere synonym for painful or undesirable. We have all heard phrases like 'the evils of capitalism' or 'the evil of slum landlordism' and we have permitted the term to take on a purely secular meaning. But mal, male, evil properly means an absolute force that has run riot in the world almost since the day of its creation and will only be quelled at the Day of Judgment. This force, being absolute, is not man-made. It is the monopoly of spiritual beings, creatures of God, high and majestic and beautiful servants of the Almighty who, under a leader, the most beautiful of them all, one whose name was Bringer of Light, rejected God's dominion, conceived rebellion, declined to serve, and were thrown from the empyrean into dark and empty space. They arrested what would have been an endless fall, for space knows no limits, by willing into existence a new abode of their own, which we call Hell, and substituting for the principle of eternal good the opposed principle of eternal evil.

"Now how do we define this evil? Very simply. As a principle, an essence designed to counter God's good and, through a series of acts of war, eventually to defeat it. Blind angels, misled in their sinful pride, hopelessly setting themselves up against the ever powerful, their own Creator, Him who could, with a snort from His divine nostrils, puff their being out like a candle-flame! But God is defined as the Creator, not as the Annihilator, nor is it in His nature to destroy what He has created. Why then, the ignorant may ask, did He not quell that act of rebellion in its initiatory spark, choke the avowal of disobedience in the very throat of him who enunciated it? Because He gave to His creatures the awful and mysterious benison of freedom of choice. It may be said that God, being omniscient as well as omnipotent, foreknew from the very beginning that the act of angelic rebellion would be conceived and fulfilled, and that this foreknowledge must, of necessity, be a denial of the freedom of the creature. But this is a shameful and all too human imposition on the nature of the Godhead of a limitation which leaves out of account the illimitable fervour of His love. He loves His creatures so well that He grants them the gift of His own essence--utter freedom. To foreknow would be to abrogate that gift, for what can be foreseen is predestined, and where there is predestination there is no freedom of will. No, God, in His terrible love, denied Himself foreknowledge, imposed upon Himself a kind of human ignorance which we may take as the very seed of his eventual incarnation in human form. With the ghastly cataclysm of the Fall of the Angels God begins already to assume the potentialities of the Redeemer.

"Redeemer of whom or what? Not of Lucifer and his wickedness. There there is no turning back. Evil has been chosen and may not now be unchosen. But, out of a mysterious and awful divine necessity, God is drawn to the making of man. When I speak of the making of man I do not necessarily ask you to conceive of a literal forging of a being of flesh and bone from the dust. I will leave it to the literalists of America to deny the possibility of a long process of creation which we may even term evolution. Take it, anyway, that, at some point in the long workings of time, the creature called man emerges, flesh, blood, bone, into whom His Creator breathes a soul, and the essence of this soul is the endowment of freedom of choice, the pledge of His love. And what is the nature of this choice? It is a choice between the kingdom of good and the kingdom of evil. Indeed, we may say, as certain Church Fathers have said, Theodosius among them, that evil is a necessity, since if there were only good there would be only good to choose, and that would be no choice. So God makes man and gives man the divine liberum arbitrium, and behold there are two kingdoms for him to choose between, that eternal and luminous one of the Divine Lord's own making, and the noisome stinking pit of pain and horror that is the abode of God's Enemy.

"Let me make it clear to you, brethren, that as good is beyond man's making, being an eternal essence revealed to him for his choosing, so is evil, that deadly opposite, similarly beyond his making. It is the work of another eternal, leader of the Legion of the lost and damned, who seeks to strike at the Almighty through striking at His dearest creation. To speak of the evil works of man is possible only in an extreme looseness of thought and phraseology. To employ a convenient image, we may say that man plays on a keyboard the melody of evil, but he is not its composer. No, there is a deadly genius behind him, invisible but revealed through his works, and these works have a common property, a signature, a recognisable essence. As God is the Creator, so the Enemy of God, and of man, is the Destroyer. Evil is destruction, but we must consider now briefly the nature of this destruction.

"To destroy, as we know, is not in the human dispensation necessarily an action to be deplored or condemned. A decayed building may be razed to the ground that a fairer building may be erected on its site. An epoch of tyranny may be destroyed in order that an age of freedom may take its place. But note that these modes of destruction are of a special kind: they destroy what is already recognised as destructive. The decayed building is a danger to its inhabitants, more, it is ugly and displeasing to the sight. Ugliness is a recognisable attribute of the bad. The tyrant is a destroyer, and to destroy the destroyer and his works is the first step in the building of an era of good, of which beauty is a recognisable attribute. The nature of diabolic destruction is wholly different. It seeks to strike at the good and the beautiful, seeing in these things reflections of the divine. It strikes also at the true, the third of the blessed trinity of God's attributes. The devil's works of destruction may be recognised by their wantonness, by their apparent meaninglessness. They serve no end, other than that of spitting in the face of the Creator. We have seen, in the war that ended but five months ago, an unexampled panorama of destruction, with the meaningless loss of millions of lives, the infliction of wanton cruelty, the sowing of the seed of disease and destitution, the crushing of great cities, the poisoning of the air and the earth. And there are some who speak of the waste, the madness, the human dementia, the inexplicability of man's seeking to destroy himself. But may we speak of waste, when so many men, and women too, were driven to acts of heroism, love and self-sacrifice that could never have been persuaded to emerge out of an era of peace and torpor? May we speak of madness when the devil manifests such care and cunning in his setting up of the occasions of the massive enactment of evil, making the bad cause appear the good? May we speak of the inexplicable, when Holy Scripture and the teachings of Holy Church make it all too clear that the prevalence of evil is one of the two abiding facts of our lives, the other being the prevalence of good?

"Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I have spoken of a great evil and I will speak now briefly of a lesser one--though I would stress, had I the time and, indeed, had I the expository skill and the eloquence, that we may not properly make quantitative judgments on the devil's work, since every act whether great or small that he perpetrates is an abomination, is an attempted defilement of God's goodness and majesty. Let him slaughter a myriad of the flower of the world's manhood, let him enter the being of an innocent child, and he must call forth from us an equal voice of protest in the name of the All Highest. I, the humblest and weakest of God's servants, have been engaged these last days on one of the regular duties ordained to the priesthood, commanded to His disciples by Our Lord Jesus Christ, I mean the driving out of evil spirits. I have been engaged in the quelling of small and dirty agents of the Father of Lies, filthy but formidable creatures and yet cowardly, striking in their cowardice at the innocent and defenceless. They settled, as arbitrarily as a swarm of bees, on the person of a small boy, the son of a good and humble Catholic family, and sought, by driving this poor child to madness, to destroy one of God's perfect creatures. There they were, their voices many but their theme the common one of whining blasphemy and obscenity, snarling back at God's minister, spitting at the holy cross, howling down the holy words of exorcism. But at the end they fled screaming and, praise be to God and His Blessed Son, the innocent was restored to his innocence, and there will be forever in that humble family a lively sense of God's greatness and of the final impotence of evil.

"I say these things to you, brethren, that you may be newly made aware of the struggle that God, in His ineffable wisdom, has decreed shall be the lot of our days. The struggle takes many forms but at bottom we must recognise the one enemy, the army whose name is Legion and whose warriors are many. Let me now make clear to you the true meaning of a very terrible word that you use and hear used every day of your lives, that you have shouted at you by prelates like myself, but which you perhaps have never sufficiently pondered upon. The word is péché, peccato, sin. I ask you to distinguish very carefully between that word sin and that other word evil. For sin is a thing that human souls can commit, but evil is the already existent entity that, through the act that we term a sin, a human soul may voluntarily embrace. Holy Church teaches that the capacity for sin derives from that first sin committed by our first parents when they listened to the seductive voice of the Father of Evil and ate of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. We have inherited this capacity for sin from them as we have inherited the other features of the Adamic, or human, identity. Now sin we may define as a transgression made possible by our ingrained capacity for confusing the truly or divinely good with what the fallen Son of the Morning represents as a higher good. Of course, there is no higher good than God's good, but, in our blindness, in the fleshly net that exalts mere appetite, in the credulity of our fallen state--a state we must blame on the fact that evil had already been brought into being by the devil--we may all too often succumb to the diabolic skill and cunning, accepting the ugly as beautiful, the false as true, and the evil as good. Now I say to you this: do not mourn that this should be so but rather rejoice in the struggle to perceive the truly and beautifully good, in the great and divine gift of freedom to pursue the struggle.

"Man was made by God in His own image. God made man without flaw, but also free to become flawed. Yet the flaws are reversible, the return to perfection is possible. If we call ourselves, sometimes with great justice, 'miserable sinners,' we must remember that we have willed ourselves to be so, that this is not the state which the Divine Creator has imposed upon us, that this is the working of free will. But that free will which enables us to sin is the most glorious gift of the Heavenly Father. We must learn to join that will to His, and not to that of the Adversary. This is, in a word, the meaning of our human life. The urge to sin is in us, but sin presupposes the prior existence of evil, and that evil is not in us but in the Powers of Darkness that harry us. Rejoice because God is in you. Rejoice in the war that God ordains. 'Our name is Legion, and we are many.' Yes, but the armies of divine grace are infinitely greater, flash in armour a million times more shining than the sun, brandish weapons of ineffable terror. Do not be afraid. Even from the most noisome evil the most radiant good may spring. We have fought the beast at Ephesus and elsewhere, and we shall fight him again and all his progeny, great and small. He shall not prevail. God is good and so is His world, so are His children. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

Don Carlo, who occupied the master bedroom while I--on my own unresisted insistence--slept on a couch in the salon, considered himself in charge of the household and as good as commanded me to attend the mass at which this sermon was preached. So, with a kind of sour good humour, I attended, along with my prospective brother-in-law. Hortense, of whom Don Carlo deeply approved as a good pretty innocent Catholic girl, went to an earlier mass, so that she might have ready for fasting Don Carlo a large English Sunday dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with Colman's mustard. She was a good hand with a Yorkshire pudding: it rose high on one side of the baking tin and was crisp brown without, gold feathery within. Don Carlo ate with the relish that he must have brought to the exorcising of Chouchou, Ranran and Piquemonsieur.

CHAPTER 28

"He can show nothing of his sentiments," Signora Campanati said, "but I know he is happy." She referred to her husband, who sat in a wheelchair, five years paralysed. He was the still centre of a lively open-air wedding party.

I have moved now to the summer of 1919, and soon I can be done with that first of the postwar years. In this summer Alcock and Brown achieved the first direct flight over the Atlantic and the interned German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow. On June 28 a Treaty of Peace with Germany was signed at Versallies and, the day after, Domenico and my sister were joined by Don Carlo in the bonds of holy matrimony in the chapel of the home of the Campanati family just outside Gorgonzola, a small town east of Milan. My and her father, whose permission for the marriage had had to be sought, sent a brief cable from Battle expressing no objection. He left the job of giving away the bride to me.

I had now left Monaco and moved to Paris, where I had an apartment on the rue Bonaparte. Hortense and Domenico, more he than she, talked of coming to live in Paris after a honeymoon in Rome and a spell at Gorgonzola again, where they had now been for a couple of months. All of us in Paris, then, Carlo at the Catho, me breathing in the oxygen of literary modernism, Domenico, as he said, making a name with the new jazzy spices of Les Six, perhaps studying under Nadia Boulanger or Martinú, certainly, for the fun and money of it, playing jazz piano with nègre saxophonists in night boItes. Paris was the only place, he said.

As for Gorgonzola, this place, as the reader will know, originated a famous cheese, and it was the manufacture and foreign sale of this cheese that had made the Campanati family rich. Everyone knows the cheese but few the town, so that to set down the name is to evoke an oxymoron of savoury taste and foul aroma rather than merely to indicate a locality. I travelled by wagon-lit from the Gare de Lyon to Milan, had luncheon (riso al burro, vitello, a bottle of Vighinzano) with Elio Spagnol, who had published two of my books, spent the night at the Excelsior Gallia on the Piazza Duca d'Aosta, and was driven in a hired open coupé the following morning to the Villa Campanati by way of Cernusco sul Naviglio and Cassina de' Pecchi. The driver, who was well-fed and scornful of peasants, spoke of the tribulations of postwar Italy, which he blamed mostly on the British, and found his only hope in a communist revolution. It was a beautiful day, and the larks, unshot at, were permitted to ascend. He had a weak r sound, rhotacismus as it is called, a speech peculiarity not popularly associated with the Italians but common in Lombardy. 'voluzione. 'bellione. Lo spi'ito 'ivoluziona'io. It made his tumbrils roll as though with muffled wheels. It was a beautiful day, heady with magnolia and cedar. "Capitalists," he said when we arrived at the high walls of the Villa Campanati. "Those walls will be down, you will see." On the gateposts were the huge stone balls, left and right, which the English used to call infangthief and outfangthief. "Their heads will be placed here," the driver promised. He haggled bitterly over the fare. It was a beautiful day, and the breeze that blew in from the town brought no whiff of its specialty.

"But I know he is happy." My chair at the great open square table on the great lawn was next to hers. The house behind us was a queer architectural mixture. It was basically a small mansion completed, I gathered, in the year when, at Bosworth Field, the English ceased to have English rulers, and formerly in the possession of a cadet branch of the Borromeo family. The eccentric Principe Dragone had raved there, riddled with syphilis, till his violent suicide in the 1880s, and the property had been put up for sale. The Campanati family had taken over the house complete with certain artistic treasures, including a Venere e Cupido of Annibale Carracci, an Annunciazione of Bernardino de' Conti, and a Maddalena Penitente of Antonio Boltrafflo. A large library of rare erotica was said to be bricked up in the cellars and an obscene stone satyr by, I think, Tallone had been permitted to go on cavorting among the cypresses. The family chapel, where my sister's wedding was solemnised, lay at the back of the house, across a wide courtyard, and it had four holy pictures by Lanzetti as well as a swooning Christ (eventually claimed by the Borromeo family: you may see it in the Palazzo Borromeo on Lago Maggiore) attributed to Zenale. I Campanati had added two undistinguished wings to the original structure, big stucco boxes full of hotel-style bedrooms, rather American, foreshadowing indeed the flavour of a Holiday Inn. On the ground floor of the left, or east, wing was the suite of the paralysed head of the family, with a sort of subsuite for the resident nurse, a Miss Fordham, an American.

"Happy," Signora Campanati said, a lady in her early sixties, Italo-American, her family from Leghorn, with a slight venerean strabismus that made Hortense, who, as you will remember, had the same charming ocular abnormality, seem more her daughter than her newly created daughter-in-law. She was slim and smart in the American manner. Strictly, it was the responsibility of the bride's family to provide the marriage feast, but, despite my offer of a catered banquet (I had the money, the royalties were not ineptly named that year), the Campanati family had insisted on taking charge of everything. There was a kind of relief in the air, even among the servants, that Domenico was being made to settle down at last.

He and Hortense had spent some time with me in Paris, she to see about her wedding dress and trousseau. The dress was made by the rising house of Worth and was very modern, that is to say it had a tubular bodice, low waist, gathered skirt that only just covered the knees, shirt-type sleeves, flared lace oversleeves, low U-shaped neckline, and a fine chiffon veil with embroidered edges. It was in Paris that she said, while Domenico was meeting the composer Germain Tailleferre somewhere, that she would never forgive me.

"For what?" I said in honest astonishment. We were having lunch at a restaurant that has now long disappeared, the Pélléas et Mélisande on the rue Buffon, south of the Jardin des Plantes, and I had just cut into my steak au poivre. "For what, for God's sake?"

"For your vulgarity. It was a beastly and vulgar thing to do, forcing things like that. It made me feel unclean, and Domenico too. It was not up to you to start saying when's it going to be and get on with it, make an honest woman out of my sister you cad and all that sort of thing."

"But you said you wanted to marry him."

"In my own good time. It was up to me to make up his mind for him, and there you go with your nasty heavy-handed hypocrisy and bless you my children and the rest of the filth."

"I don't understand, I just don't. I just wanted you to get settled with the man you say you love and--"

"Shuffle me off, a burden to you, and get on with your nasty pansy life. Besides, I'm not sure whether I do love him now."

"Oh, that's common, just before marriage, the realisation of till death do us part and so on. And," I said, "I will not have you using expressions like that about my life, the one you used then. My life is my own life."

"And mine's mine, or was till you decided to take it over."

"You're a girl, you're under age."

"That's only what the law says, and the law's an ass. Now I feel caught and trapped and hemmed in and not free any more. And it's all your fault."

"It is not my fault. You took him to bed and then said you were going to have him and--"

"Those are English people over there. They're listening. Keep your voice low."

"You started all this. Look," and I put knife and fork down, "you don't have to, you know. There's many a marriage been called off even at the altar."

"Oh, I'll go through with it." And she picked at her endive salad. "I'll be very very happy," she said bitterly.

"The way you feel, or think you do. It's not uncommon, you know."

"You know all about it, of course."

"I know a bit about life. I have to. I'm a writer."

She pushed the salad aside and joined her hands as though about to say grace.

"He scares me," she said.

"Domenico? Oh, that's imp--"

"Not Domenico. Carlo. There's something creepy about the way he looks at me. As though he can see what's going on in my mind. He looks at me, then he sort of grins and nods."

"Yes, I've seen that. But he's just nodding with satisfaction. He approves of you. Domenico's been a bit of a wild one, as you know. Now he's going to settle down."

"Yes, that's it, everything's going to be fine for Domenico, it's always what everybody else wants, nobody thinks of me. And then Carlo starts talking of the children we're going to have, and he sort of sees them as though they were already there. Every good Catholic family, he says, gives somebody to God, what does he mean? Anyway, I feel all shut in, and I can't get out, ever. I'll never forgive you for this."

"This is the most absolute nonsense."

"It's not nonsense, and you know it's not. I mean, what's happened to us, to our family? We don't exist any more, and there are the Campanati, with the Church behind them, flourishing like a like a--"

"Vineyard?"

"No. Yes. Oh, alive, and not falling to bits despite the old man being near death, and there am I being swallowed up by them."

"You can walk out," I said, "now."

"You know I can't. That damned Carlo won't let me. Oh, perhaps it is nonsense."

"More than perhaps," I said, and I went on eating my steak au poivre, though not with much appetite. And then, with Signora Campanati next to me, I was eating a slice of the wedding cake, a most brilliant rococo edifice of many tiers, infested, as with flies, by fat-arsed patti or cherubim, designed and built by architectural confectioners in Milan. I was also drinking a glass of Dom Perignon, which helped it down. The paralytic head was fed some crumbs of the cake by Nurse Fordham. Hortense was somewhat drunk, which was in order, but not so drunk as Domenico, who flashed extravagant joy, though with an Italic leer in it, at uncles, aunts, cousins, school friends, monsignori, retainers, operatives of the caseificio, nuns. Among the nuns was the sole daughter of the family, Luigia, Suor Umiltà, a big moustached girl in her middle twenties, openly and without visible effect steadily tippling. Carlo gave a long ribald speech in dialect and sank a half-litre of bubbly in one applauded go. Signora Campanati's forced smile told me that this was not the way of the family: they were staid moneymaking people, speakers of a language called Italian, meaning a neutralisation for national use of the Tuscan dialect, with all its nuances of culture and rule, while Carlo, as a kind of pastoral duty, would perform the stage act of one marrying the speech of earth to that of heaven. Another thing: Carlo was physically gross in comparison with that pared and elegant family. In a flash I saw him as a changeling, a goblin baby dumped in a Campanati pram. He was certainly unlike his elder brother Raffaele.

Raffaele was in Italy not because of the wedding but because, at this time of the year, he always left Chicago and came home. He looked like what he was, an international businessman, but there was an aura of refinement and even piety over him, as if the impulses that had made, respectively, Carlo a priest and Domenico a musician had been arrested and frozen into the intriguing inconsistencies of a personality which, I understood, was ironlike in its concern with commercial success. He was about thirty-eight and already a widower. His wife had been an Anglo-Saxon Catholic from St. Louis, dead of septicemia after her third, aborted, attempt at providing a Campanati heir. He had not remarried and said he would live and die a widower. The line was to be continued through Domenico and my sister, hence the importance of this occasion.

"He can show nothing of his sentiments," Signora Campanati said, "but I know he is happy." Meaning, again, her husband, a desiccated parody of Raffaele, dumb, bewildered, but theoretically under the necessity of being happy that the family was not to die out.

"Our happiness," Raffaele was telling the guests in Italian. He was as richly black-haired and moustached as King C. Gillette on the safety razor blade label. Also as handsome, in the old stiff way of the turn of the century-statuesque, stern, with no connotation of the flirt or masher. He was naturally chaste, so I had been told, and his appetites were, in comparison with those of Carlo, very frugal. He had eaten little and drunk less. He, I and his father were the only totally sober males present. "La nostra Jelicith," he said gravely.

The happy couple were to leave for Rome on that evening's sleeper. They could dine on the train, if they still had appetite, and might conceivably attempt formal consummation on one of the narrow bunks. But they had already anticipated that, the hypocrites, and would probably wait for the following afternoon, the shutters closed on the large Roman heat in the Hotel Raphael on the Largo Febo near the Piazza Navona. None of my or anybody's business.

Nor was I myself, I considered, having done my duty, or my father's, anybody's business but my own. I, the free writer. I intended to get away along with the other guests and spend another night in the Excelsior Gallia in Milan. I had left my bag there. A Dottor Magnago was very ready to give me a lift in his chauffeured limousine, no problem, not out of his way at all. Then, the next day, I would have a brief look at the islands of the Lago Maggiore, going from one to another in pleasure steamers, and catch the Lyon-bound train at Ascona. But it was Raffaele who insisted that they would all take it hard if I did not spend the night at the Villa Campanati: a room had been prepared in the west wing; toilet articles had been laid out. "We must have," he said, "a talk."

"About what?"

"A talk." We were all down at the big open gates in the first of the evening, delicious with lemon and magnolia, a peach-coloured moon hung aloft. The car had arrived that would take the happy couple to the railway station. I kissed the bride in her grey going-away dress with crossover straps at low waist and neck, light satin coat over it open to the balm of the evening.

I whispered, "Everything will be all right, you'll see. We'll meet in Paris. Am I forgiven now?" Not, of course, that there was anything to forgive. She was grasped at once by Carlo, who hugged her till she howled, and then I had to kiss, though on the cheeks, a Domenico ready for tomorrow's shave. Kisses and cries and blessings and a nightingale in the cypresses.

Old Campanati had been wheeled to the gates. His nurse grabbed his right arm, limp as a piece of rope, and waved it at the departing couple. "They're off now, sweetie," she said. Like a dog being made to wave he looked the other way. Signora Campanati alternately wiped her sniffs and waved with a cambric handkerchief. Ribald Milanese advice was shouted at Domenico by his coevals, one of whom made a vulgar gesture with a clenched fist. Waves and waves and cries and a couple of frail showers of flower petals from, to my mild surprise, the nuns.

"Good luck to you both," Sister Humility called in English.

In England or Ireland the wedding party would have gone on all night and finished, certainly in Ireland, with a brawl. Here it ended with the departure of the bride and groom. There was family dinner, cold, rightly. A platter of leftover meats and an insalata mista. Estate red wine in bottles without labels. We ate, Suor Umiltà, Signora Campanati, Carlo, Raffaele, myself, in an aggressively antique dining room that smelled of damp. Over the sideboard was an Ultima Cena by Giulio Procaccini. The electrolier had many dead bulbs. Carlo ate as though he had fasted all day. When coffee was brought he asked for the estate liqueur, a grappa with a powerful reek of unwashed sheepdog. Nothing was said about the absence of Nurse Fordham. I presumed, having fed her charge with something from a feeding bottle, she cooked something American for herself in her own kitchen. We all spoke English--it was as easy for them as Italian. Raffaele said to me: "Where in Paris?"

"Me or them?" He looked at me sternly and silently. I was in his view being frivolous. "Well," I said humbly, "I promised to help there. Find a studio or something. And if Carlo too hears of anything--" Strange, we were a sort of relatives now. "I have a large second bedroom they can use while we're looking. If, that is, nothing satisfactory has been found by the time that... Domenico said something about a grand piano. I mean, there's no terrible hurry, is there?"

"Domenico," his mother said, "is anxious to start earning money. It is difficult with music, as we all know."

"No hurry there either, is there?" I said, perhaps insolently. "At least," while they looked at me and said nothing, "I understood that all that was realised, the difficulty, I mean, of Domenico's earning his living as a composer of serious music. He says he is still learning his craft. He talks of taking lessons in orchestration. He talks also of playing the piano in nightclubs. For the experience, that is. He believes ragtime and jazz and so on have something to give to serious music. Ravel thinks so too," I said defiantly, "also Stravinsky."

"A player of jazz music in nightclubs," Raffaele said. "Married to the sister of a writer of novels. How things change, how life changes."

"You made," I said boldly, "both those trades sound unseemly. Your tone, if you'll forgive me, was somewhat disparaging. Any trade that brings harmless solace is a respectable trade. Remember also, please, that Domenico and I first became, well, friends, through collaboration on an opera. It was intended for La Scala. I take it you will not be disparaging about La Scala."

"It was rejected by La Scala," Raffaele said, and his look implied that that had been the fault of the libretto, something dirty in it perhaps.

"It may not be rejected by Covent Garden."

"That is where you have your English opera. I know." He made the shrug that used to be made by Germans and Italians when music and England were mentioned in the same breath.

"A theatre surrounded by vegetables," Suor Umiltà said. Nun though she was, she knew the great world.

"That too," I said, now my hand was in, "sounds disparaging."

"Asparaging and cabbaging," Carlo struck in. "Come, come, let us have less gloom and more rejoicing." He meant Raffaele, whose fine eyes seemed to see a melancholy future for somebody or everybody in the bowl of oranges set out on a bed of their own leaves that stood in the middle of the table. "Change," Carlo said. "You say change as if it were not the essential property of living things. What would this family have been if it had not opened itself to the world? You fear the world of jazz and novels and Anglo-Saxons will swallow us up? No, it is we who swallow up them. You fear the loss of family dignity? We never had dignity, meaning we were always on the side of change and life. Take our poor father. He plucked our dear mother like an orange from East Nassau or wherever it was--"

"East Orange." His mother smiled sadly.

"Very good, like a nassau from East Orange then. He brought America into the family and with it the language of America. And now we have English blood and French blood coming in. If Raffaele would marry a black girl--"

"Enough," Raffaele said. "There are some jokes that ought not to be made."

"I say blood," Carlo went on, "but all blood is the same. Well, no, there is hot blood and cold blood. Cold blood like Kenneth's here, and hot blood for the Mediterranean--" It was the first time he had used my first name: I was really in the family now. "Well, no, we are all septentrional here, all a bit cool. What is Mother? Genova and the Alto Adige. Coolest of them all."

"I thought," I said, "all Italo-Americans came from the south. Calabria or Sicily. I had assumed Sicily."

"We want nothing to do with Sicily," Raffaele said. "It's the Sicilians who are ruining the United States. Chicago is mostly Neapolitans, who are bad enough, but at least the Sicilians are kept out. New York," he said, and shuddered.

"Change change," Carlo cried. "There you are, Raffaele, a real Chicago man, though you know by right and tradition you should be here in poor Father's seat. But change told you that the future lay in American big business--"

"I've thought much about that," Raffaele said. "But Zio Gianni does well here. Besides, our product is becoming a very small part of the whole. Panettoni. Canned pomodori--"

"Zio Gianni?" I asked. "Was he the one who sang the song with the comic stutter in it?"

"Stutter? Oh, balbuzie. No, that was old Sambon," Carlo said, "the manager. Uncle Jack, as you would call him perhaps, is in agony with his stomach and could not come. He ate something bad in Padova. Outside his own region he cannot eat. You will see him tomorrow or the day after perhaps."

"I'm leaving tomorrow," I said. "I have a book to finish."

"I must leave now," Suor Umiltà said. "Till ten o'clock only I was given." Her convent, I understood, was at Melzo, no great distance. "No, nobody rise." Her English was less idiomatic than that of the others. She kissed her mother and brothers and then kissed me, saying, "You have given dear Domenico a wife," which was not strictly true. Then, "Can you remember where my bicycle was put?" Carlo remembered.

When she had left, Carlo said, "A book? A novel?"

"Yes. Twenty pages or so still to do. About a blind girl and a crippled man who marry and produce lovely children." Unwisely I added, "Not very good, a lot of nonsense really."

"There you go," Carlo cried. "Why do you write these things if they are a lot of nonsense?"

"They start off," I said, "by being promising and even exciting. Then I become conscious of my own ineptitude, the streak of sentimentality in me that is ineradicable, the poverty of the style and my inability to improve it. Yet I cannot destroy what I have done, because that would be to destroy what to me are still living creatures. Moreover, I have a living to earn and readers who are less fastidious than myself. So, in a kind of hopelessness, I complete the book, send it away, try to forget, hope I will do better next time."

"Pray too, perhaps?" their mother said.

"In a way," I said cautiously. "In a way pray, yes."

"But," Raffaele said, "if the book were an immoral book and one that would make scandal, you would still think it possible to pray to write the book better?"

"Oh," I smiled, "I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias. It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality."

"There is divine morality," Raffaele said, "and that is the only morality which is important." He was entering Carlo's field, but Carlo was busy sucking an orange as a weasel might suck a brain. "I think it is possible and I think it is in fact not uncommon to have books which deny divine morality and are dangerous books to put into people's hands."

"I don't think my books are of that type. The novels I've written are morally rather conventional. I mean, I present wrongdoing but the wrongdoing is always rather conventionally punished. Nobody," I said, "gets away with anything in my novels. That worries me sometimes. I mean, the world is not like that. You remember the novel Miss Prism writes in The Importance of Being Earnest. The good end well, she says, and the bad end badly. That is why it is called fiction."

"I don't know it," Raffaele said. "Who is it by?"

"Oscar Wilde. It was he, by the way, who said that there is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly."

"That is nonsense," Carlo said, taking another orange. "You cannot make moral judgments on things, only on actions."

"But writing is a kind of action," I said. "You would make a moral judgment on a carpenter who made bad chairs."

"Only if he sold them as good chairs."

"Oscar Wilde," Raftaele said darkly. "You would call yourself a disciple of Oscar Wilde?"

"Oh no," I smiled. "Very much a writer of the Victorian era. We must write like writers of the twentieth century, and now like people who have experienced the terrible cataclysm of the war. We cannot go back."

Carlo ceased sucking and got up. "I will," he said, "take some oranges with me." He scooped an armful. "For if I wake in the night. But it has been a very full day. I think I shall sleep like a dog."

"It has been a very full day," his mother agreed, also rising. "But a happy one." She kissed her sons and then, not to my surprise, kissed me. "You will find your room ready," she said. "Raffaele will show you which one. Your sister is the most delightful of girls," she added. "I am very happy."

"If," Raffaele said to me, "you would come into the library for a moment."

"You look at me as my father used to look. When I had a bad school report."

"It is something to do with a report."

"Dear dear dear. You make me very apprehensive."

The library was notable for a number of bad busts of Italian authors: Foscolo, Monti, Niccolini, Pindemonte, all of whom, blind and as it were smelling toward the light, seemed interchangeable. There were leatherbound books, all, as in a library in an English country house, unreadable, but there were not all that many, Italy not really possessing all that much literature. But there was a very fine Florentine terrestrial globe or mappamondo, and near it we sat in club chairs, I spinning the globe backwards, Raffaele pouring whisky from a square decanter he released, with a key, from an English tantalus. I took the initiative in glass-clinking. "To the happy couple," I brindized.

"I hope so. I hope it will work out well. I do not know your sister, you see, I do not know your family. But Domenico has made his choice."

"And Hortense has made hers."

"Yes, yes, I should think so. You know a man named Liveright?"

"Why yes, my New York publisher. I mean, we correspond. I've never met him."

"I belong to a club in Chicago, it is called the Mercury Club, for businessmen, you understand, Mercury is said to be the god of businessmen."

"Also of thieves."

He did not find that funny. "This publisher Liveright was the guest of a business friend of mine. At the Mercury Club. If I may say so, since he is your publisher, he did not seem to be a man of great morality. He is out to make money. He is as ready to make it out of scandal as out of piety or devotion or serious instruction. This he calls being a good businessman. Not good, I told him, prosperous perhaps but not good."

"He has a Calvinistic background. I don't think he'd see the difference."

"No? I talked about your work and he seemed surprised that I knew it. I said only that I had seen a book of yours without reading it. At least, I read the first page. I remembered the name Liveright because the first page seemed to be a discussion about--what one of the characters called the good life."

"That would be Before the Hemlock," I said. "No, wait, a different title in America. Dash Down Yon Cup, not a good title. The one about Socrates. I'm sorry you found it unreadable."

"No no no no, please. I find most novels unreadable. I am not perhaps what you would call a reading man. But I knew of your name, of course, because of Domenico and his falling in love, as my mother put it in her letter."

"You make it sound ungenuine. They're in love all right. But, forgive me, I wish you'd come to the point."

"Liveright kindly sent me a folder of articles about your work. There was one article about uncleanness and obscenity and I think the word was sensuality. I have the folder in a drawer in that desk there. Perhaps I should get it out." But he seemed tired, a very full day.

"That would be my first novel," I said. "Once Departed. I think the Americans called it Return No More. It's a nuisance, having these different titles."

"Liveright also said something about you having to leave England and not daring to go back. Because of some scandal or other. Is that true?"

"Look, Raffaele, if I may call you that, all this is my business. To deny what Liveright alleges would be an admission that it's your business as well. I see I must change my American publisher."

"It is the business of the family into which your sister marries. You become a kind of relative. Let me tell you. There was a British actress on Broadway. The name is in that folder. A widow apparently, her husband dead of influenza. She said that her husband had begun to live an irregular life some time before he died. There was a party at which Liveright was present. He was going to publish the play this lady was acting in. The lady became violent and abusive about the part she alleged that you played in her husband's estrangement from her. She spoke of your sexual irregularities. When I asked if you were a disciple of Oscar Wilde I meant it not only in the sense of literature. We call this thing a disease and sometimes the English disease. I spent two years at a school in England called Orpington School. It is in these schools that the disease often first appears."

"Homosexuality is the term," I said. "It is not a disease. The world's attitude to it is probably morbid, but it is a condition that exists widely and is often found allied to artistic ability. Sometimes great artistic genius. Your Michelangelo, for instance."

"Michelangelo caused no scandal."

"And, you might add, he had no sister to marry into the Campanati family."

"Whether we call it a disease or an attribute of the artistic temperament, it is still a sin."

"You mean the homosexual act or the homosexual condition?"

"One makes the other so I see no difference."

"In that case you've no right to talk about sin. Sins are the products of free will. Your brother Carlo made that very clear to us all in the sermon he gave at Sainte Devote in Monaco in the spring. I did not choose to be homosexual. Because the Church condemns it, illogically I would say, I find myself out of the Church. But all this is my business."

"I do not think so. I was seriously prepared to advise Domenico against this marriage, even last week when all was ready, but I saw that might be unjust. Moreover, Domenico is old enough to go his own way. I certainly could not forbid it. Still, the family must be protected, and I have become the head of the family. I have a duty to ask you not to bring scandal on the family."

I kept down my heat. "Also a duty to ask my father to watch his step in Battle, at the same time querying his right as a very recent widower to marry a young girl whose antecedents none of us know. You have a duty also to go to whatever theatre my brother Tom is performing in and persuade him to keep his act clean."

"Now you are talking stupidly. You are a writer and have the opportunity to incite publicly to scandal. There is also the matter of your private life. This has become public even as far away as New York."

I still stayed outwardly cold. "So what does the head of the Campanati family wish me to do? To seek some other career? To dissimulate my true nature? To drown myself in the Lago Maggiore?" Then the heat broke through. "I never in my life heard such sanctimonious impertinence. I'm a free man and I'll do what I damned well please. Within," so as not to appear totally anarchic and thus to some extent justify his view of me, "the limits imposed by my own nature and by the laws of society and literary ethics. The Campanati family," I added, sneering, "una famiglia catissima, religiosissima, purissima, santissima. With your brother Domenico shagging everything that offered and likely to do so again, despite the state of holy matrimony."

"I do not know that word. And I do not think I will have you speaking in this manner."

"My sister, I may add, wished to make a man of your brother. She recognised a talent that had to be encouraged. Oh yes, she loves him as well, whatever love means. He's prepared to work for a living, or so he says, instead of writing music as a cheese-subsidised hobby, and you twitch your naso raffinatissimo at the prospect of his discoursing harmless twaddle on a brokendown piano. Your holy brother Carlo, a waddling banner for the deadly sin of gluttony--at least he's realistic and charitable and has no time for the first deadly sin. The pride," I said, "of a putrefier of lactic solids. A pride that stinks like the commodity itself."

He drank his whisky in one irritable gulp and stood up. "Perhaps this was not the best time for talk. It has been a long day. Perhaps I have not spoken to you with the right--discretion."

"The theme is clear." I also got up but did not finish my whisky. "Clear as a bell. I'll sleep in Milan tonight."

"No no no no no. Your room is prepared. I will show you where it is. Perhaps we both need a good night's sleep. You are more upset than I expected. I don't think, however, that you understand my position. Surrounded by corruption, by immorality. Chicago is a most vicious city and it will grow worse. I am sensitive to these things, they become... a physical oppression. If you are angry, I apologise for making you so."

"I suppose I'll have to walk back to Milan. Perhaps I can pick up some filthy little Milanese boy on the way. Ready to hire out his edo for a couple of centesimi."

"There is no need to be disgusting."

"Oh yes there is. Pharisee. I thank thee God that thou hast made me pure. I never did much care for your putrid specialty. I'm getting out of here."

And so I did, walking to the town under the honeyed moon and finding a garage with a Daimler that had probably been left behind by the defeated Austrians, the bonnet dented and what looked like bulletholes in the rear offside door, the driver an Old Bill type who blamed the British for dragging Italy into the war and thus implementing her present distress. Still, he took me to my hotel, shaking with rage and contempt as I was, and charged me exorbitantly. The Milan Metro did not at that time exist.

I did not, the following day, make my proposed trip to Lago Maggiore. It was necessary for me to take a taxi from the hotel to the Stazione Garibaldi, there to catch a train for Arona on the western shore of the lake. But there were militant workers on the streets with portraits of Lenin and slogans about liberty. A knot of five had knocked down a carabiniere and were kicking his bloody body to death. When my taxi approached this same knot it seemed to them that I must be a bloodsucking Milanese industralist who had to be dragged out and given to brisk revolutionary justice. Some window smashers joined them, jeering but with their claws out. Good Northern Italian faces, terribly distorted by politics. My driver was not on their side. He rushed at them, bumping sickeningly over the carabiniere's body, and they howled and stumbled and fell and rose and chased us. I felt approaching a cardiac spasm of the kind I had last known in Battle on the High Street in the rain, walking to confront the news of my mother's dying immediately on my knocking at the door. The attack missed its trajectory, seeming, in my temporary delirium, to crack at the window behind me. But what hit the window was a lump of lead piping. The driver rushed me and my bag circuitously without my telling him to the main railway station. He knew I was a foreigner; let me get back to foreign parts and not witness any more of Italy's shame. There were troops, armed, in the station yard.

"Hypnotised, that's what they are," he said, when I paid him. "But what can you expect? Drunk with what's happened in Russia. Bolshevism as the answer to the whole damned mess-up. Gutless politicians and gutless police. But they won't win, they can't. The patriots of the Trentino won't let them, and I'm one, by the mother of Jesus Christ. You heard of the Sansepolcrista? No, you're a foreigner. They'll remember the Piazza San Sepolcro, I can tell you, and what's been decided there. Last March, it was."

March 10, to be exact. In a room lent by a Milanese Jew overlooking that square of the Holy Sepulchre. Borrowing the black shirts of D'Annunzio's arditi and calling themselves the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. They would stop red thugs killing policemen in the streets.

CHAPTER 29

Robert panted, "It will do you no harm, you will like it, you will see." And he gently undid the boy's shirt and drew it over his crisply curled head, casting it to the floor, where it lay limp as the boy's own body. "Ralph, Ralph," murmured Robert as he caressed the young warm flesh, running a hand ever and again over the thin but muscular arms with their delicate flue, the smoothness of the taut belly, the silkiness of the back, the delicate moving contours of the breast, where the tiny nipples had already begun to respond to the moist fervour of Robert's kisses. It was while his mouth held his in passionate prolongation that Robert blindly tore at the buttons of the boy's trousers. He whispered, "See, Ralph my darling, we must be the same, naked as the day when we were born, and rightly so since we are both at this moment being reborn. The whole world will seem to have changed, you will see, it is the beginning of a life for both of us." The world outside, the alien world of disgust and hate, impinged in the clash of the Angelus bell, but, yes, it was the bell of the Annunciation, the Angel of the Lord, an impending miracle. His questing hand was aware of the boy's own nascent excitement, the silken sheath about the iron of tumescence, and he smoothed with a shaking hand the royalty of the sceptre and the twinned orbs. Then: "It must be now," he gasped, "it is the moment, do not move, Ralph my love." Thus, newly locked in a kiss, Robert found the antrum amoris and eased his body up to engage it with his own palpitant rod, now grown and glorified to a mace of regal authority. The boy cried out, and it seemed not to Robert to be a cry of pain, rather a call or crow of acceptance. Encouraged, Robert gently eased his throbbing burden into the timid heat of the sacred fissure, soothing with gentle words, words of love, while the angelic bell pounded and pulsed without. And then the promise loomed, the declaration of the Angel of the Lord, and the rhythm of ancient drums pulsed in imperceptible gradations of acceleration under a choral utterance that was emitted from the silver throats of all the Angels of the Lord, filling the universe to the remotest crevices where lurked, like shy sea beasts, stars not yet named, galaxies uncharted. And then the madness followed, the drought of a demented hoarseness of arcane and terrible incantations, the rasp of words ineffable, prayers to gods long thrust under earth or set to gather the dust of eons in caverns remote and hallowed only by mouths themselves long filled with dust, for the rancorous hordes of those who flaunted the banners of Galilee had smitten and broken and flattened the ancient empire of Faz and Khlaroth.

And then, O miracle of miracles, the drought was overtaken by the bursting of the dam, by the flooding of the whole desiccated earth, and Robert's voice rose like a trumpet in the ecstasy of his spending. A love nameless, unspeakable, spoke the name over and over again, "Ralph Ralph my beloved," and the lips that were agape in a wordless prayer of gratitude now closed about the head and flower of the boy's Aaronic baston, mouthed softly as about a grape to effect and yet delay its bursting, and Ralph writhed and groaned and the words were strange. Solitam... Minotauro--.--pro cans corpus... Latin, the memory of some old lesson, of some ancient attempt at seduction in that Jesuit school library he had spoken of: the supposition flashed in Robert's cooling brain. Then, with the speed of incontinent youth, Ralph gushed his burden out, sweet and acrid and copious, and Robert gulped greedily of the milk of love. Then they lay a space, wordless both, the thunder of their twin hearts subsiding, Robert's head couched on the boy's loins, Ralph's right hand smoothing his lover's wet and tangled hair.

They did not, when they walked to the café around the corner, do so as lovers, hands entwined or even touching. They walked discreetly an arm's breadth from each other, as though to admit room for a third, silent, invisible, whose presence they sensed but whose identity they lacked words to define. Then they sat at an outside table, Robert with his absinthe and small bottle of Perrier, Ralph with his pressed citron. August Paris breathed exhaustion about them. A bearded Franciscan went by, swinging his breviary in rhythm with his jaunty step. "Sin," smiled Ralph. "He would say sin."

"Did it feel like sin?"

"It was enjoyable enough to be called sin. No, enjoyable is a stupid word. It can't be described. It can only be done again."

"What would you like to eat for lunch?"

"Meat. Red meat." And Ralph smiled knowingly. He put out his freckled hand to touch Robert's, brown, lean, unfreckled, and then drew it back guiltily.

"States and churches alike," said Robert, "must forbid pleasure. Pleasure renders the partaker indifferent to the power of both. I would like you to look at this," he then said. "It won't take long. A little thing I started to write." He had taken from the inside pocket of his jacket a page or two of his neat script, the ink purple, the deletions fastidiously ruled, the insertions enclosed in delicate boxes sharply arrowed.

Ralph said, "You read it to me. There's nobody around who speaks English. Indeed, there's nobody around." So Robert read slowly and clearly: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the lights in the sky and the thundering sea and the beasts of earth and air and water. And he created a man named Adam and set him in a fair garden and said to him: 'Adam, you are the crown of My creation. Your duty to Me is to be happy, but you must work for your happiness, discovering that it is in work that happiness lies. Your work will be pleasant work, that of tending this garden wherein all manner of pleasant fruits and roots have been planted by My Divine Hand for your delectation and sustenance. And you shall overlook the lives of the beasts, that none may prey wantonly on another. And this must be so that death may not come to the garden, for it is a garden wherein immortality must flourish like the rose.' And Adam said, 'I do not know these words, death and immortality. What do they mean?' And God replied, 'Immortality means that each day will be followed by another day and there will be no end to it. But death means that you would not be able to say: This I will do tomorrow; for the existence of death means the doubting of the existence of tomorrow. Do you understand?' Adam in his innocence said that he did not understand, but God said it was no matter, the less he understood the better. 'There is,' God said, 'a tree that I have planted in the middle of the garden and this tree is called the Tree of Knowledge. To eat of that tree is the surest way to understand death, for its fruit brings death. Touch it not. You know that to touch it is forbidden, but the beasts do not and I may in no wise make them understand that to eat of its fallen fruit is to court death and the means of death. But it shall be part of your work to keep the beasts away from the fruit of the tree, but therein you shall not wholly succeed, for there are beasts subtler than Adam, and the subtlest of these beasts is the crawling snake of the meadow. No fence shall keep it from the tree or its fruit, but I, your God and Maker, abide by this, since it is I Myself that have implanted the subtlety in the brain of the serpent. To work now, for the day is come, and you shall, when the dark descends, cease from your work and eat of the fruit unforbidden and drink of the water of the crystal stream that runs through the garden, and then you shall compose yourself to rest.'

"So Adam toiled and ate and drank and slept, and day followed night and night followed day and Adam was content but for one thing, and that was his loneliness. For the Lord God had given him the blessed power of speech, but this gift he had not granted to the beasts. Yet sometimes the serpent, that coiled in a kind of love about Adam's body, seemed to understand his words but could not himself reply to them. One evening, when God was walking in the cool of the garden, Adam spoke boldly and said, 'Lord, I am lonely.' The Lord exclaimed at that and said, 'Lonely? How can you be lonely that have My love, that were created to ease My own loneliness, for in you I see the lineaments of Myself and in your voice hear something of My own voice.' But Adam said, 'Lord, I would that You created one like to myself, endowed like myself with speech, one that could tend the garden with me and, at day's end, eat and drink and rest in companionship, two of one kind, the one like to the other.' And God said, 'It is right that I made you, Adam, for you conceive of things whereof I do not conceive, and in this are you become an arm of Myself, Who am Lord of all conception and creation. It shall be as you ask. Eat, drink, retire to rest, and when you wake with the sun you shall find lying beside you one like to yourself who shall be as a companion to you, and his name shall be Yedid, whose meaning is friend.'

"And it was as God said. For while Adam slept God took of the dust of the earth and breathed life into it, and when Adam awoke there lay by him one like unto himself, who spoke his speech and answered to the name Yedid. And in joy Adam was impelled to grasp his companion in love and kiss him with the kiss of his mouth. God saw this and wondered, for Adam had learned that fullness of heart for another that He, the Lord God, felt for Adam but which Adam, who sensed doubtless that his love for God must ever be the love of the created for the creator, could conceive in no fullness. But, thought God, through love of Adam for Yedid and of Yedid for Adam both might be brought to a greater love for their maker. So He was well content. And He watched them entwined in love at day's end or the beginning of the morning and granted them all the joy he could in their embraces. For out of the closeness of their locked lovingness sprang from the bodies of both a substance of joy, gushing like a fountain, of the colour of opals, and where it lay on the earth flowers sprung. And all this the serpent too watched, and watched in envy, for he was alone and there was none other of his kind for converse or the joy of love. Thus it was, out of this envy, that the serpent one morning, while Yedid lay still asleep but Adam newly awakened, used words for the first time. And Adam heard the words in wonder.

"The words were these: 'You could in no wise keep me from the fruit of the forbidden tree, fallen or still on the branch, for I am subtle and slender and no way is barred to me. So I have eaten of the fruit and delicious was the taste, yet more delicious was the fruit of the fruit, for this was the fruit of knowledge. Lo, I speak as you speak, and this gift came from the first bite of the fruit, and of the last bite came a most bitter taste and yet delicious, for I saw that in another mouth the taste would be ecstatic and I rejoiced through my imagination in that ecstasy. But the bitterness was the taste of myself, who may see but not act, who may conceive but not create, who may dream of power but not encompass it. The power is for you and for your companion Yedid. Why should you be set in this garden as a mere day labourer, forced to the contentment of food and sleep and the embraces of love, when God who made you rejoices in the abundance of power and knowledge? Knowledge is there for you to taste, and with that knowledge power, and what is God's love that it should deny you a fruit which lies to your hand or dangles in temptation level with your lips? You see a thing, and yet that thing is denied you. What manner of love is this? I have eaten of the fruit and I am transformed and, subtle as I was, am rendered yet more subtle. Eat now, make your breakfast of the fruit, and bid Yedid do likewise.' Then the serpent glided away and left Adam to his thoughts which, when Yedid awoke, he was quick to share with him.

"So it came to pass that both plucked the fruit of the tree and ate, and at once they were furnished with thoughts, and with the means of expressing them, that were able to see God as a thought and, in consequence, see as a thought that which was not God, namely His negation or enemy. This in their eyes diminished their Lord and Creator and they doubted of His power. But this power struck at them. God, Who knew all, knew of their disobedience and was angry, and the expression of His anger was terrible to behold and feel and hear. For the earth shook, so that the beasts ran around with growls and shrieks of fear, and the sky erupted in lightnings and thunders and torrents of seething rain, so that Adam and Yedid prostrated themselves in their terror, but Yedid spoke loud, for the thunder and tremors were deafening, into Adam's ear, crying: 'Is He become the other one? Is He become the one that is His opposite? Is He transformed into the enemy?'

"But then the terror of earth and sky subsided, and God appeared in wan sunlight to Adam and his friend, in the guise of an old man, and He spoke, though in the wavering tones of an ancient, most terrible words. 'Cursed,' he said, 'both of ye, and I repent Me that I made man.' But Adam, with the boldness imparted by the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, replied, 'The creator may not repent of his creation. The creator may not wish to be a destroyer.' And God said, 'True, but I may destroy at the same time as I sustain My creation, but in a manner that no eating of the fruit of the tree may reveal to you, for you are still man and hence less than God. From Adam and from Yedid I take the gift of immortality, for both shall die when you are become like to this guise under which I appear to you. You shall grow old and you shall lie at length without life, prey to the sharp-toothed beasts and the birds of the air that will learn to feed on carrion. But though Adam and Yedid may die, the race of man shall continue, and it will be through the coupling of Adam and Yedid.' And Yedid, in his curiosity, asked, 'How shall this thing be, Lord?'

"The Lord replied not in words but in the action of His hand, for He touched Yedid, and Yedid changed. He ceased to be like unto his companion Adam, for his breasts swelled and his belly and hips grew gross, and his sceptered pride was shrunken to nothing as likewise were the twin orbs of his manhood, and he shrieked aloud and covered his loins and cried, 'I am smitten, I am split asunder,' and Adam heard his voice in fear, for it was not the voice he knew, it was a higher voice, closer to the trilling of the birds of the air than to the growl of the beasts of the wood. And the Lord God said, 'Henceforth you are not man but woman, and your name shall no longer be Yedid but Hawwah, which means life, for from your loins life will come and the breed of man shall be sustained. For into where My hand has smitten you the milk of passion shall flow, and from out of where My hand has cleft you the new life shall emerge, for the milk of your embraces shall hold the seed of generation, and from your breasts shall pour the waters of sustention, yet account this transformation no miracle but a curse. For your love shall be a curse, and your bringing forth shall be accomplished in pain. Now get ye hence, both, and take on the burden of life that becomes death and quit the garden of immortality. And the beasts of earth and the birds of the sky and the fishes of the deep shall be tainted with your curse, for immortality shall henceforth be an attribute of the heaven of the spirit and the body shall decay and return to the dust whereof it was fashioned.'

"So Adam and Hawwah went forth in sorrow, and the curse yet holds on the generations of man, save for the blessed. For the blessed remake in their lives the innocence of Adam and Yedid, and their embraces call back the joys of Eden."

Ralph said nothing for a while, then he nodded, saying, "Why shouldn't that be as true as the other story?"

"This," said Robert, "is made true by the sheer act of writing it. Shall we eat something now?"

After their luncheon of red meat and redder wine the two lovers returned to their Eden on the fifth floor of 15 his, rue St. André des Arts. In the midst of their writhing sweat-soaked embraces Ralph said, "So the beasts become our brothers."

"What do you mean?"

"This." And the boy took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpared nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen.

CHAPTER 30

"Benedicent numen my arse," Ford Madox Ford pronounced. He breathed out, with the smoke of his caporal, a mephitic hogo that soured the wine in its glasses. That halitosis, however, had to be excused, indeed reverenced: it was the olfactory equivalent of a missing limb, since Captain Ford had breathed in lung-rotting gas, a volunteer infantryman contemned by some of the London literary for his patriotism, a good soldier among despicable scrimshankers. "Not my arse," he then said. He then said, "It won't do, will it?"

"Do you mean content, or do you mean style?"

"You can't separate them, as you ought to know. Joe Conrad's sea smells of Roget's Thesaurus, as I was always telling him, but he wouldn't listen. Your act of buggery here smells of unfrocked priests. Or untrousered, if you like." He delivered another whiff of phosgene rot. "If by content you mean the general subject matter, seducing a boy and then justifying it by rewriting the Book of Genesis--well, that's nasty enough, but there you have my view as a heterosexual, not as an editor. As an editor, I think your style reeks of dirty shirts and sweaty socks. You may be making your living by writing books, but don't start calling those books literature."

"And what is literature?"

"Oh my dear fellow. Ask Ezra over there. Words charged with meaning, he'll tell you. Make it new, he'll say."

Ezra Pound was, I think, dancing with Sylvia Beach, or it may have been Adrienne Monnier. And you may as well have Ernest Hemingway shadowboxing his way round the periphery. Ford had just lumbered about the floor with a little Irish girl, frizzed auburn, who came up to his breast pocket and so missed the greater part of his panting effluvium. The Irish girl called herself a painter. The band consisted of a black cornetist named True Vanderbilt, a drummer with an artificial left arm who came from Marseilles, a consumptive violinist, and my brother-in-law Domenico. The place was the Bal Guizot on the Boulevard des Capucines.

The passage from my novella A Way Back to Eden, which Ford had been pretending to read (he read nothing through, ever, unless it was in French; he would just pick out the odd trope and never forget it: ah yes Benedicent Numen Toomey) and you have just read, may seem, from its position here, to represent a fiercely resentful reaction to Raffaele's sanctimony, but it was written four years later than that day of the wedding and was rather an attempt to cash in on the new candour which the Paris expatriates, particularly Jim Joyce, were dishing out in the sacred name of modernism. Ford Madox Ford was starting a new magazine called tiansatlan, tic review (the lower-case initial letters were modish, the Charvet cravat of modernism), and I had a transient itch to be taken seriously by the littérateurs as opposed to my lower-middle-class readers in Camden Town. I had half expected Ford's verdict, but I was bitter.

I said, "You seem to be implying that there's something wrong with making a living out of writing books. I call literature verbal communication. I'm communicating verbally with a largish readership. You'd give such teeth as you have left to be able to do that."

"Not at the price one has to pay, my dear fellow."

"The price of clarity, intelligibility?"

"The price of cliché, half-truth, compromise, timidity."

"There's nothing timid about this," I said, taking from his limp podgy hand the typescript of Chapter Three of A Way Back to Eden and waving it at him like a notice of distraint on his goods. "This has never been done before. Don't start telling me about compromise. You can't run a magazine without consulting your financial backers. Don't sneer about timidity. You just wouldn't have the nerve to publish it."

"Call my lack of courage aesthetic fastidiousness. I wouldn't have the nerve to publish a newly discovered draught of a suppressed chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Or a Manx rhapsody from Hall Caine. Empurpled royal greatness, indeed. Benedicent numen."

"What's that about Newman?" The music had stopped and Ezra Pound was back at the table. Hemingway was engaged on another lap of shadowboxing. The band was getting up to take its break and Domenico was being rebuked by the cornetist for something, failure to keep time probably. Pound frowned, a bearded but moody poet of great energy. He had substituted for his native Idaho accent a kind of eclectic British English with a rolled Scotch r. "There are not," he said, "many prose writers as good as Newman." He gulped wine.

"Better," Ford blasted at me with his breath. "Perhaps that's what you meant. The empurpled royal greatness of the prose of the benedicent cardinal." He wheezed what was meant to be laughter. "You really have to think these things out first," he told me. "Harmonics, purposed ambiguities. You see how absurd it is having a sainted British cardinal beaming down on a pair of buggers." There were no ladies at the table. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier were on their feet near the bandstand, arguing hotly with, I think, Larbaud. I sulked briefly then perked up. It was envy, these people were envious, even Pound was envious. I had made money out of writing--Windfalls of the Storm was in its seventh printing. Anyway, Domenico had arrived at the table. He sat down, at his ease with literary men; his brother-in-law was a literary man. Mineral water was brought for him, stronger drink was forbidden the musicians till closing time. The patron had lively memories of a drunken Algerian trombonist who had, the night he was fired, used his instrument offensively.

Domenico said to Pound, "You saw Antheil?"

"It will go in, he says. It's the right length." Ford, having a dirty mind, wheezed briefly. Domenico beamed. He looked very much the Latin Quarter Parisian these days, thin, shabby, unshorn, the garret musician straight out of Murger. He and Hortense had a two-room apartment overlooking a timberyard in the Quartier des Gobelins. They were young strugglers, no more money coming in from Gorgonzola, but that was the way she wanted it. He played the piano and copied band parts in a neat hand. He did orchestrations for Paul Trentini-Patetta, the light opera man. He kept on with his composition. He had, I knew, written a fantasia for four player-pianos, six differently pitched Javanese gongs, and a wind machine. This was a kind of belated futurism, stale Marinetti, and it chimed, in its cracked bell way, in with what the American George Antheil was making modish-aeroplane symphonies and factory chaconnes and the rest of the Bolshevik nonsense. These two, Ford and Pound, thought more highly of Domenico than they did of me. Domenico was modern. He played jazz in a real jazz band with a genuine Negro cornetist. This sedulously dissonant fantasia of his was going into a concert that Antheil was organising. The craze--hungry with money would be there--Harry and Caresse Crosby, Lady Gertrude (Binky) Carfax, the Principessa Cacciaguerra. So Domenico beamed. Those days when we had concocted a tuneful and witty oneact postPuccinian diversion were over. My failure to get the thing done at Covent Garden did not depress him in the least. He was into the avant-garde now. Lessons from Nadia Boulanger? She could teach him nothing about the harmonics of the internal combustion engine. MartinŸ? He had actually seen a key signature in one of MartinŸ's scores, terribly vieux jeu. He was going to write a concerto for railway engine and orchestra, the orchestra to be accommodated in drawn coal trucks. Harry Crosby would back that. Then would follow a quartet for Cunard liners, unbacked by Nancy Cunard.

I said to him, "A word with you. At the bar."

He got up shrugging. At the bar were a couple of bored poules. It was early yet. The place would fill up with Americans at about two in the morning. The decor of the bar was martini-glass aluminium templates tacked to a steel-blue ground on which clouds of genuine duck down floated. Boris the Russian prince served me a cognac. "She says," I said, "that she's not coming back. Not until she gets a written apology. And if I were you I'd add some flowers."

"I cannot afford flowers and you know it. Bitch."

"You mean myself or my sister? If the latter, don't dare to use that expression again."

"Her place is with her husband. I have my rights."

"She also has rights. Including the right not to be struck in the face wantonly, cruelly, peevishly and repeatedly."

"You know why it was so."

"I know why it was so. And I know," I said more kindly, "that it will happen again unless you both go to see a doctor, a specialist in these matters. There are simple tests. There are cures."

Domenico groaned. He looked furtively around. The patron would be in his office at this hour, eating a tray supper brought in from Les Hespérides, a restaurant on the rue de S�ze. "Vite, Boris," he said. Boris gave him a sly cognac. Domenico downed it, returned the glass, the glass was washed, all over. The patron, perhaps having once got into the line of fire of Captain Ford, did not go around smelling breaths. To the table of Ford and Pound, I now saw, Hemingway had come, sweating heavily. Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach were also there. John Quinn, a stern American lawyer, attired as for court, entered and looked around him with distaste. Ford and Sylvia Beach waved. Quinn approached them. Pound did frantic fingerclicking for a waiter. I saw what was going on. Quinn had money and was a great buyer of literary holographs. They were going to try to get Quinn drunk.

"It cannot be me," Domenico said. "Carlo says it cannot."

"That's because there are no sterile men in the Bible," I said, "only barren women. Does he propose praying over Hortense to drive out the demons of fruitlessness? Fruitless, totally. Go to a doctor, both." But I knew that Domenico did not desire a child, a son of course, out of pure philoprogenitiveness. There was a lump of Gorgonzola money involved in the production of an heir.

"I'll give you fifty francs," I said, "to buy some flowers. You should be able to get some good ones with that." He sulked. "Look," I said, "I'll write the note of apology for you. All you have to do is to sign it."

He smiled at me with his mouth only. "You are on my side. Why should that be?"

"Male solidarity," I lied. "No man likes to be accused of sterility. Besides, I want her out of my place. Damn it, I'm not her mother, heaven rest her. I'm a strictly male establishment."

"What is she doing now?"

"Sitting there, waiting for that letter of apology." This was not strictly true. She was still in bed, moaning in hangover. I should have been stronger and not let her go the previous night to the Four Arts Ball at the Porte d'Auteuil. Domenico certainly would not have let her. But what could I do? She was twentytwo now, a responsible married woman. Harry and Caresse Crosby, American playfolk, both with beautiful parchment skin and quivering mouths, had seen her lunching with me the day before at L'Alouette on the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. Me they knew vaguely and vaguely respected as a writer who earned money. They did not know my work but they assumed, since I was living in Paris, it must be fashionably unintelligible except for the sex scenes. They cooed over Hortense's beauty, which was now considerable. That skin, they raved, that hair. She must come to the Four Arts Ball. How, I wondered, did Harry Crosby think he was going to be admitted, he was not a student. It was different, of course, for girls. He would get in all right, said Harry Crosby. He would pose as one painting a nude for the Prix de Rome. The motif this year was Roman and senatorial. Bedsheet togas, bodies painted bloody with Caesar's blood, fantastic Medusa coiffures for the girls. I did not like the idea at all. Hortense did, very much. Her eyes grew large, mirroring twice a fat woman nearby who gorged on June strawberries and Chantilly. What could I do?

She had been dumped, this noon after, outside the main door of my apartment building on the rue Bonaparte, red-painted and naked except for a long pale blue man's shirt, with a note attached to a string of Woolworth pearls around her neck: POUR M. TOUMY. The concierge quacked long and loud in disgust. I got Hortense up to my flat and fed her strong coffee which did not only not stay down but, the black wave meeting the breakwater of her uvula, came whooshing out unswallowed.

At five o'clock, the hour for my China tea and petits fours, she was blind but articulate, aspirin bouncing off her centres of pain like little rubber balls, in occasional agonies of eructation as effervescent salts chewed at her acid. A supper party first at 19 rue de Lille, where the Crosbys lived. Sackcloth over the walls and chairs and bookshelves. "Stripped like a destroyer for action," Crosby had said. Eighty guests, students and girls. A champagne punch made of forty bottles of brut, five each of gin, whisky and cointreau. Canapes by Rumpelmayer, mostly trampled into the carpet. Harry, Caresse, Mai de Geetere (who?) all in the bath together. Harry took a sack with ten live snakes in it to the Porte d'Auteuil. He opened the sack and dropped them from their party loge onto the stripped dancers. Screams, but at the end of the affair a fat black girl was seen suckling one of the serpents. There were some pigeons ritually slaughtered to the opening words of the mass in default of appropriate pagan Latin. Real though thin blood dripping onto the writhing bodies of a couple coupling. Copulation? Oh yes. What did you...? Do you remember anything more? Oh Christ I remember a lot but don't remember everything. She remembered waking up that morning in the Crosby bed with five other people. It was a gramophone woke me up. A man no one seemed to know playing it, dressed only in that pale blue shirt there. Tell me more. I want to know what happened. Oh Christ let me sleep.

"Waiting for that letter of apology."

He nodded and then shook his head as if to shake the nod away, left the bar and went back to the dais and the reassembling musicians. Domenico nodded in time to the four-in delivered by the drummer with the false arm, then did a fourbar intro and then they were playing "The Darktown Strutters' Ball." That took me back a bit, all of four years, Domenico and Hortense and I and then that damnable Curry boy. I had been good since, comparatively. Creating lovers on paper. Buying the occasional thighs of a complaisant Senegalese. No commitments, no talking of love except on paper. Lonely as hell, except for my art, such as it was. Adrienne Monnier was trying to persuade John Quinn to dance, but he wouldn't or couldn't. A great big golden woman in royal blue. "Son frère," Boris said, "est pr�tre." I said I knew.

If Carlo had ever spoken to his brother about the divine mystery of fatherhood, I doubt if Domenico listened or, listening, believed. I had been only a week before to the Catho (I was thinking vaguely of making my next hero an unfrocked priest) to hear Carlo give a very lucid lecture about certain heresies that had had to be uprooted from the Early Church. "Procrustes, Varius, Torquatus and others could not wholly accept the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. They argued over the true meaning of parthenos, which they said did not necessarily denote a lack of sexual experience. Saint Vitellius"--or somebody; there were so many of these early saints with names like Roman senators--"delivered a sermon at Antioch in which he said that there are a myriad myriad mothers but only one true father, our Father in heaven. The act of begetting is a creative act as miraculous as the making of the firmament: the divine seed passes from God to woman, but usually God employs a human male as the intermediary seminiferent. There is no necessity for God to do this, and, as a manifestation of his creative monopoly, he fructified the Virgin Mary directlyin the person of the Holy Spirit, whose primary function is that of God the Creator showing himself in human history--so that the birth of his Blessed Son might blazon the true nature of paternity. Human law wisely mirrors theological truth in that it stresses the frivolous impertinence of any human claim to fatherhood by regarding paternity as a state of its nature unprovable. The awful truth, as Tertullian wisely said, is, as so often, enshrined in the speech of the common people. It is a wise child that knows its own father, and, of course, vice versa. Any questions?"

I have a strong recollection of leaving the Bal Guizot (Hemingway drunkenly making an unfriendly Pavian gesture at me, or it may have been one from Oak Park; Quinn very sober, face averted from Ford's breath as if he were confessing Ford) and almost immediately encountering Jim Joyce and Wyndham Lewis at an outdoor table of a café not far from the rue Auber. Joyce liked sometimes to drink in the onomastic vicinity of minor operatic composers. But if this was late June, time of the Four Arts Ball, and the year was 1923, Joyce ought to have been in Bognor Regis listening to the gulls cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" This quark was later to be the name given to any of three hypothetical subatomic particles having electric charges of magnitude one-third or two-thirds that of the electron, proposed as the fundamental units of matter. We writers, building greater than we know. I will abide by my recollection in defiance of biographical fact and affirm that I went to sit at his table in June night air that carried the prickle of the charge of a coming storm. Joyce was drunk. He had an empty Sweet Afton packet in his hand, the cigarettes themselves lying on the ground virginal and wasted in a sort of quincunx pattern. Things tended to form into patterns for Joyce, but he could not see the fallen cigarettes at all, not merely because of drunkenness but because of his deteriorating ophthalmic condition, the consequence of adolescent malnutrition and various kinds of self-abuse. Wyndham Lewis was sober and got up to look like an anarchist, though he resembled rather an undertaker. God, was the whole literary world in Paris in those days? Let us bring on Thomas Stearns Eliot so that I may tell him (out of a discovery made in the thirties) that he had no right to be ignorant of, and hence misuse in his The Waste Land, the constitution of the Tarot pack. A novelist could never get away with that sort of inattention to detail. But no, I did not meet Eliot till the time of the Spanish Civil War. Did I perhaps tell Lewis to inform Eliot that he had been stupid with his Man with Three Staves, "authentic member" indeed? Joyce said, in his querulous tenor: "Is that Toomey there?"

He had not read me but he had heard doubtless that I was a mere popular novelist and not to be feared as a literary rival. I think he rather admired me for having made money out of a trade which he himself could pursue only with lavish subventions. I had put on successful plays, whereas his Exiles had failed; he recognised that playmaking was more skilled craft than inspired art. He prized my story about being seduced by George Russell in 1904, though he had made me swear to keep it to myself: he feared the impairment of the structure of a book which was supposed to possess the primary virtue of strict adherence to historical truth. Finally, I think he envied me my maternal French, and he sometimes tried to persuade me to spend the rest of my life as chief of the Joycetranslate d-into-French synod.

"This is Toomey. Your servant, Lewis." Lewis snarled something back. I put a cigarette in Joyce's mouth and his lips took it with greed like the lips of a diabetic in coma being fed with a sugar lump. I lighted it, and he drew on the scorched tobacco as if only the sensation of labial heat could inform him that he was smoking. A waiter came and I ordered coffee and cognac. Lewis frowned at the waiter and did a squint and lip thrust in Joyce's direction to show that Joyce had had enough of the potable urine in the near empty bottle before him. The typescript of Chapter Three of A Way Back to Eden, jolted up by my brief walk, protruded from my inside pocket. Lewis, as if he knew what was in it, seemed to sneer. Well, damn it, for all its crudities it was genuine narrative: something happened in it, for God's sake. Lewis's Tarr, out five years back, was all solid bodies that could be moved only with a crane; Joyce was all wordflow. I felt a certain contempt for them both; I said, "A fictional situation. A young man and woman, married, desperately desire a child but fail to produce one. Is it he who is sterile or is it she? He, to whom fertility is an aspect of virility, is reluctant for either to undergo a scientific test. Best to avoid the truth and berate his wife for barrenness. She, more realistic, resolves the issue by becoming impregnated by an unknown man at a party in the dark, an uncharacteristic vitiation of her virtue motivated by love of her husband. A child is born. The husband dare not suspect the truth. Continue the story from there."

"Very piquant," Lewis said. "You come to us for help with the writing of one of your novelettes."

"Och, you're a double-dyed snob, Lewis," Joyce said thickly. "What," to me, "do you call an earwig in your part of the world?"

"An eeriwiggle," I said.

"Eire wiggle," Joyce said in blind smoking joy. "Write it down on this cigarette packet. You err and then you wiggle out of it. Och," he said, "I was never much good at continuing stories. You end there where you said, Toomey. The chief thing is to get a child born." Joyce was, for all his verbal obsessions, often very direct, especially about money. But he had a short story mind. Worse, he didn't like movement if he could avoid it, so that he and Lewis were artistically more akin than either would admit. Novels as still life or sculpture for the one, for the other as massive arias with a lot of ornamentation. "Stertility," he said with sober excitement. "A stertile baron or bassinet of fruitfuit condominya. Shaun. Take that down, Lewis, there's a dear fellow." He could not see the sudden shaft of levin. But, a count after, he heard the thunder. "Oh Jesus," he said, "I can't stand the bloody stuff. Get me a taxi, I have to get hoooome. Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph," as the rumble renewed. Rain began to needle. I got up to look for a cab. Poor fearful Joyce. "Oh blessed Sacred Heart 0f Jesus keep us from harm." I would, I decided, get Harry Crosby to publish A Way Back to Eden. He was always going on about starting the Black Sun Press. Stertile thunder tonitruated terribly. "Oh Lord forgive us our bloody sins." Rain flow pelted. It was hard work finding a taxi.

CHAPTER 31

I went into the bathroom, and there was my sister Hortense taking, reasonably enough, a bath. Still, the vaysay was also in this room and I wished desperately to use it. She looked rosy and well, though languid, and her clean brown eyes knifed me as she grabbed a towel to cover her breasts.

"Ridiculous," I said. "You're my sister, I believe."

"You should knock."

"You should lock the door. Anyway, this pudeur of yours is a lot of non sense. D'ailleurs, je veux pisser."

"I'm getting out now. There's no more hot water. Go on, go." It was an oldfashioned bath with lion paws. The plumbing, in the French manner, tried to hide its inefficiency with boastful noise. I saw myself in the washstand mirror, the writer at thirty-three, with the same eyes as Hortense, our mother's eyes, though mine closer set and overwatchful, the brow creased a little in the pain of control of a brimming bladder, the strawy hair sleek with Clovis brilliantine, the guardsman's moustache. "Go," I said.

"May I do this? My back will be turned to you." I pounded my stream, saying loudly, "I want to know what happened last night. And this morning. I want to know who dumped you on my doorstep in that shameful condition."

"Hurry up. This water's freezing."

"Get out of it then, idiot. Wrap yourself in a towel. I don't want to see your nudity. I've no incestuous designs."

She sat shortly after, rosy-footed, in a pair of my black Charvet pyjamas, sipping warm milk. This was in the salon, on the seventeenth-century sofa, product of Provence, garniture en tapisserie au point polychrome de l'époque. I sat opposite her in a matching fauteuil. I had taken the apartment unfurnished and had made it elegant with a bowlegged commode, its marquetry of the epoque Régence, richly ornamented with gilded bronze; a North Italian credence of walnut with angel's heads, flowery urns, roses; other things. My twentieth-century paintings were in the dining room. Here my pictures of the School of Barbizon-Daubigny, Troyon and Veyrassat--did not quite fit, but there was time enough, there would be money enough. "Do you not worry," I asked, "about the possibility of the hotheaded Domenico's hearing about your participation in the Four Arts Ball?"

"Don't talk in that stupid pedantic way. Reserve it for your stupid readers. He'll only find out if you tell him. Besides, I did nothing wrong."

"This morning you arrived here naked, in a condition of not caring whether anybody saw you naked or not. That's what makes your pudency of just now so hypocritical."

"I was drunk. Anybody can be drunk. I was sober when I woke up and then they started mixing Hangman's Blood. That brought the drunkenness back again. And both these Crosbys said oh what a sweet little girl where did you come from, so they didn't remember. Nobody knew who I was. Then I said I wanted a taxi and they said where to and I said here. Toomey, they said, Toomey, seem to know the name, oh that pederastic purveyor of shopgirl vomit."

"You're making this up."

"Oh, no. I remember very clearly that bit. It's last night I can't remember. And if I can't remember then it never happened is what I say. So you shut up about it and tomorrow I'm going back to Domenico and cooking angelotti or capelli d'angeli or whatever they are. I never realised there were so many different kinds of bloody pasta."

"I don't like this swearing, Hortense. And it's no use your saying if I don't remember then it never happened. Supposing you killed somebody and didn't remember, that somebody would still be dead."

My doorbell rang. "Oh Christ, Domenico," she started.

"It's only eleven," I said. "He's still playing. And if you did nothing wrong and nobody remembers what are you worrying about, you foolish child? I know who it is," I said, and got up to open the door. It was Carlo, accompanied by Father O'Shaughnessy and P�re Leclercq, temporary professors both of the Catho, Moral Law the one, the Sacraments or something the other. They had come to play bridge.

"A marital quarrel," nodded Carlo, and, in mock-Irish learned doubtless from O'Shaughnessy, "and ye in your night attire flaunting yourself before the holy priests of the Church itself."

"Not bad," O'Shaughnessy conceded, a wiry little man with red hair from the County Athlone, destined, one would have thought, to be curate of a pub rather than one of souls. He and Carlo and Leclercq had been coming here now once a week for the last three months. They had never once been invited. Carlo had brought them in one night, himself uninvited, had handed round the whisky and picked two new packs of cards out of the pocket of his clerical raincoat. He always took charge, of time as well as place. P�re Leclercq, from the Midi, liked gin mixed with a little altar wine, or alt, as O'Shaughnessy termed it, and a bottle of this, a sort of sugary British port surrogate with Jesus Christ crucified on the label, had been presented to my drinks cupboard by Leclercq himself, myself to provide the gin. Leclercq was too handsome to be a French priest; he had the sort of physique and golden god glow (whence in the Midi? Goths, Visigoths, transient crusaders?) which go with, say, the Director of the Chaplains' Department in the British Army. He would have made, but for his faith, a good bishop of Gibraltar. He had been keen on le sport in his time, le tennis, le rugby, la boxe. He was not yet running to fat (why do we?) despite the gin and alt. They were, all three of them, very good bridgemen. "Sure, I'll teach him proper English in God's good time," O'Shaughnessy leprechaunishly twinkled at me. "Shall we then?" and he pulled the folded green baize card table from behind the époque Regence commode. Leclercq got chairs.

Carlo said to Hortense, with a heavy jocular fingerwag, "Too much of this quarrelling, Orténsia. You need that place of yours crawling with babies." He made them sound curiously unsavoury.

Hortense struck back. "Are you speaking as his brother or as a bloody priest of the Church?" Leclercq, who spoke little English, responded to the tone with bland puzzlement, wetting with his lips the while a Monte Cristo he had taken, uninvited of course, from the humidor. But O'Shaughnessy was delighted.

"That's the way, girl. You give it him hot and strong. Bloody bloody bloody." His psychology was good: she blushed. Carlo remained goodhumored. He was really terribly ugly, fatter than when I last showed him, his big complicated nose a cornucopia of hairs unplucked. His head hair though was fast receding. Those were very gross fingers for the pincering of the host. His clerical suit was crumpled and spotted. Formidable, however, always formidable.

He said, "Mother sends her affection."

"How are things there?" I asked. "How's everybody responding to Mussolini?"

"There's a man," Carlo said to Hortense, "you can say bloody at all you will. Because he is a bloody atheistical farabutto with his bloody blackshirts that don't show the dirt. Full of devils and perhaps the big one himself. And nothing inside him to fight back at them. The devil taking possession of bloody Italy."

"But now," I said, "you've nothing to fear from bloody atheistical communism."

"You do not use Beelzebub," he cried, "to drive out Beelzebub. Let us pray, I mean play," he said more gently. "Orténsia, you seem to be very tired, cara.

Your brother perhaps has been taking you to the Four Arts Ball." It was meant as a joke, but I got a sudden novelist's vision of Carlo disguised as a saxophonist in one of the two bands, seeing it all, including Hortense yielding (now where did that detail come from?) to a young pared man wearing drooped Icarus wings. Hortense, not blushing, said: "Poked about by Dr. Belmont. At his centre gynécologique. A very tiring experience."

"Aaaaaah," Carlo went. "You will have good news for us all?" He was already at the card table, flicking a new pack skrirr skrirr with powerful gambler's fingers. He had a stock of packs, a gift, for some shady reason, from the manufacturer Rouach et Fils. Or perhaps he had just waddled in and said: "Give me those."

"Life is more than that," Hortense said. "A woman is not a childbearing machine. There is the whole of life to be lived. Je vous quitte, messieurs," pertly. "I leave you to your fun." And, with no other valediction but "I won't forget my night prayers," she padded on her lovely rosy feet to the spare bedroom.

"A delightful wilful girl," O'Shaughnessy said, "and very close to the Almighty, I should think. Is there any Irish in either of you?" I served him Irish, saying nothing. Gin and alt. Scotch, scotch. O'Shaughnessy raised his Irish whimsically to Carlo, bowing as he did so. "Your health, Monsignore."

"Monsignore?" I said.

"Not yet, not yet," grumbled Carlo, dealing.

Nineteen twenty-two would seem in the far future to have been a momen tous year for literature, what with productions like Ulysses and The Waste Land, though not of course my own Windfails of the Storm. That it had been a big year in the sphere of public enactments was, to some, already evident. Mussolini had marched on Rome, or rather his henchman had marched and he had rolled into Termini in a wagon-lit. Pope Benedict XV, that great pacific prelate to whom neither the Germans nor the Allies would listen, Giacomo Della Chiesa, James of the Church, lawyer and diplomat, hopeless with money, his prodigality of aid to the needy having put the Vatican in the red, had died and been succeeded by Pius XI, Achille Ratti from Desio near Milan, Archbishop of Milan for a year, a friend, I gathered, of the Campanati family. "Monsignore?" I should have expected that there would be something for Carlo in the new dispensation.

"The supervision of the spreading of the word," O'Shaughnessy announced as though it were the title of a brief. "The imparting of efficiency to the propagation of the faith. Three diamonds. He'll lose some weight now perhaps."

"Four spades," Carlo said. "I told everybody that the war would seem like a childhood memory of a country outing compared to what would come afterwards. Well, here it is, the diabolic forces more vigorous than ever. Ah, let us play our game."

But we did not play it, chiefly because I was playing like a fool. "You make it too simple," I said, throwing down my cards. "God and the devil stuff. Childish."

"Very well," Carlo bellowed, fanning me with his cards as though the flames were getting at me. "You look at last yearnineteen twenty-two. Stalin elected to the general secretaryship of the central committee of the Communist Party and talking about making the central control commission clean up the country. Purges, he talks of. Look," he turned to O'Shaughnessy, "at your Four Courts being blown up in Dublin and killing everywhere. Greeks," he turned to Leclercq for symmetry's sake, "being massacred by the Turks." We were talking, by the way, in French, except for certain proper nouns. "Nineteen twentythree and the villains are settled in, grinning. Villainy is very simple, Kenneth caro. And the weapons for quelling it are very simple too. The first thing is to stop the flames spreading." He fanned me again. "That is my task."

"The Volstead Act," Leclercq said. "Evil also."

"Evil breeding more evil," Carlo agreed. To me, "I have something for you. From Raffaele." He pulled out a fat wallet whose leather had been nourished, in the manner of Tartar horsemen, by greasy fingers. He looked, grumbling, through its contents. O'Shaughnessy was very red and wagging a nicotined finger at Leclercq. His French became very Irish: "Don't you call a thing evil that will be the occasion of less of the damnable thing that happened to my sister Eileen in Baltimore. Black men drunk on cheap gin molesting white women."

"They will still get their cheap gin," Leclercq said. "Gin or whisky or cognac that will blind them and give them paralysis and even kill them."

"The Volstead Act was right, the Volstead Act was needed."

"Something from Raffaele to me? Another rebuke for writing filthy novels?"

"He read your new one. He said it was wholesome and not at all filthy. He talks about a change of heart. Ecco." He gave me a folded newspaper cutting.

"So," said Leclercq. "Have it in Ireland too. Have it here. Let us empty those bottles into the vaysay."

"It's different with us. We're civilised. We have self-control. A thing like the thing that happened to my poor sister Eileen would not have happened in Westmeath."

"All men are the same. All men have the same rights. To get drunk. To molest women. To repent."

"Wine," bawled Carlo, "you miss the point. The falsification of doctrine. They are saying that Christ turned unfermented fruit juice into his own precious blood--I read. It was a brief article written by Raffaele and published in some newspaper. I was presumably to read it in order that my pride in being a professional author should be mitigated by the reminder that anybody could write if he had something to write about. "The law is evil and cannot be enforced in the great centres of population. Scotch whisky being shipped to the British islands of the West Indies and to the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the Canadian mainland is being smuggled into the United States by means of swift motorboats. The whole of the eastern coastline of the United States is insusceptible to adequate policing. The expected rivalry between bootleg gangs seeking rule over city territories is already being expressed in murder which the police are too corrupt to wish to investigate. I condemn this lawlessness and anarchy, but first I condemn the United States Government and all of the blind Rechabite persuasion of such as Congressman Volstead...

"Yes," I said. "He's right, but he'll get himself into trouble. Why do you want me to read this?"

"He writes well, yes?"

"Well enough. Grammatically, clearly. And so?"

"He wants you to write. You have a name, he says, in the United States, you are known. Articles, he says. You are right about the trouble. He has names and facts. He has contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation but so far they do little. There is need for great airing of the question. To shame the Congress and the President and the people. Articles, perhaps even stories. You will be safe, you see. He not so safe. He was shy of writing to you direct. He asks me to ask you."

"Carlo," I said, "this is not my trade. I practice an art, such as it is. I'm unskilled in propaganda. Besides, there seems to be a lot of fear in America. Land of free speech but, so I hear, the consequences of free speech can be lethal. Editorial offices set on fire. Editors with meat axes in their bellies. I can write, but there's no guarantee that I'll be published."

"Propaganda," Carlo mused an instant, his scarlet lower lip thrust out. "What is this I hear about your writing propaganda for the children of Sodom? Domenico mentioned seeing something of yours on that desk there."

"I write no such thing," I said, flushed somewhat. "I'm a teller of tales. Domenico had no right--" When could that have been? But publication, the making public, began with the rolling of the paper into the typewriter. I had given up the pen, a more private instrument. Domenico coming in one evening to say he had a solution for one of Joyce's problems. Joyce had said to me something about insect and incest. The dread word could not be uttered even in a dream, hence the metathesis. But there was something superficial there, whimsical, a mere snigger. There had to be another justification. A musical one? I had suggested. Domenico told me one was available. Joyce's hero HCE resolved into a musical theme, H being the German for B natural. The SEC of insect was, again in German, E flat E natural C. The two three-note themes went together in perfect harmony. CES would not do. (Joyce had been delighted.) And I had gone to the toilet and Domenico had read part of Chapter Two.

"All words are propaganda," Carlo said. "Propagandise for a good cause. The sodomites are always with us, happy with their self-elected devils." Innocent, always. "You can speak out and help a man who has become your brother. He must fight with caution. He says the situation will get worse."

I looked at him. "What does Raffaele import, besides dry goods? Chianti, Strega, Sambuca, grappa?"

"The liquor trade has been liquidated. But that is not his main concern. Will you think about doing what he says?"

"No harm in thinking," I said, thinking the foolish laws of the United States to be no business of mine. They had chosen independence a century and a half back and could now stew in their own Californian grape juice. I had my own things to do.

"Let us," Carlo cried, "have a few hands of poker. I cannot concentrate on bridge. That freak in the tournament at Juan-lesPins," he said in sudden English to O'Shaughnessy. Then he went on rapidly about the proper defence to North's bid of seven hearts, West ruffing the conventional club lead. Then he was overrufled and lost his trump trick. To be expected. A formidable man, the new monsignore.

"Formidable," P�re Leclercq said, meaning, of course, something different, the flavour of the Romeo and Juliet I had just lighted for him. Or something. I cannot be expected to remember everything.

CHAPTER 32

On the first day of spring 1924 my sister Hortense, in the nursing home run by the Petites Soeurs de la Passion, gave birth to jumeaux, gemelli, twins. Joy and wonder. Especially since they were, like William and Anne Shakespeare's own pair, a girl and a boy. Two girls would have looked like deliberate Anglo-Saxon insolence to the Campanati family. Two boys might have involved disputes about seniority. A boy and a girl, splendid, both doing well, mother too, genetically artistic, so neat, like an Easter gift box of a red and a white of the same cru. The twins seemed to me when I saw them plausibly Anglo. Franco-Italian.

No black or yellow blood there, which was a relief. Hortense, sitting up in early spring rainlight in her turquoise bedjacket, looked me in the eye and I looked her back in the eye. "No more," she said. "I thought you were all for repopulating the world."

"This is enough."

Call them Hamnet and Judith. No, perhaps Harry and Caresse.

"You nasty filthy sterile disgusting pig."

"My fertility has never been, nor will it ever be, tested. It doesn't worry me in the least. I am not Domenico."

"Go on, get out of here."

"You used to like me, Hortense. You used to admire me. There was a time when I could honestly say that I believed you adored me."

"Don't make me laugh," she scowled. "Get out or I'll get the nuns to throw you out." I wondered whether to take away with me the huge bunch of mimosa I had brought and give it to the first poor old woman I saw on the rue des Minimes. But Hortense was, after all, my sister.

The twins were christened in the Madeleine, which was the parish church of Hortense and Domenico, since they had now moved to the rue Tronchet. The names chosen were John and Ann, simple names that did not lose their identity when put into French or even Italian: Giovanni would quickly become Gianni, and that sounded like Johnny in American English. Indeed, the boy was destined to be Johnny Campanati when he was taken to California. Those poor children, I think, looking back, one of them to suffer directly and terribly, the other vicariously; but I must not anticipate. I must be like God, giving them the illusion of free will, allowing their future in the spring of 1924 to be as velvety blank as the fine bond which the author, all too soon, will commence to defile with his pen.

Nineteen twenty-four was a good year for Domenico. He rode on the wave of the success of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, first performed that year, being commissioned to compose for the pianist Albert Poupon, who had heard his ridiculous fantasia the previous October, a jazzy concerto with saxophones and wa-wa trumpets and the rest of the nonsense. This work was considered by Vladimir Jankelevitch (Ravel; Editions du Seuil, 1958) to be a sleeping influence on Maurice Ravel, who produced his own jazzy concerto seven years later. This year Ravel had his L'Enf ant et les Sortil�ges presented (libretto by Colette Willy, a very catty woman with a considerable sensual appetite), and there was talk of preceding it with my and Domenico's Les Pauvres Riches, but Ravel's friend Ducrateron got in instead with his banal and now forgotten Le Violon d'Ingres (which was actually about Ingres and his violin, as though putting all your eggs in one basket meant literally that). Domenico did not repine since, as I have already indicated, he considered that he had travelled beyond that early rubbish, though I observed that he was not above using one or two of its themes for his jazzy concerto. He and Hortense and i gemelli were in a much bigger apartment than before, and he had an old j3roadwood grand bought at the auction of the effects of poor Edouard Hecquet.

The year began and continued well for me too, though (and my stomach shudders at the prospect of having to set it all down) it ended in agony. It was the year of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. This was presided over by the Prince of Wales (whose sculpted effigy in New Zealand butter was one of the attractions of the show) and opened by his father on Shakespeare's birthday. There were Palaces of Art and Industry and Engineering, and this last was six times the size of Trafalgar Square. There was a model coal mine and cigarette factory and printing works, and there were pavilions dedicated to the industrial achievements of the dominions and colonies. There was also the Queen's Doll's House, which had tiny books in its library, distinguished auctorial holographs, myself unincluded as not yet sufficiently distinguished. Kings and queens came to visit the exhibition, and I seem to remember that it was in June that the nominal ruler of Italy and his consort were there, thus being absent from Rome on the occasion of the brutal murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the great progressive and bitter foe of Italy's true new ruler, by fascist thugs. That stupidly overt criminal act might have been the end of Mussolini, but Britain, along with other nations fearful of bolshevism, showed stupid cordiality to him, and Austen Chamberlain was in the Holy City later in the year to praise the ghastly régime.

On May 25 (the day of the deposition of George II, King of the Hellenes, and the declaration of a Greek Republic), my new play, The Tumult and the Shouting, opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. This was a tonguein-cheek piece whose popular success Jim Joyce would have given his left eye (not much use to him, admittedly) to emulate. It was appropriate to the spirit of imperial enthusiasm that abounded and was seen by many visitors to London, but you will not find it in the three volumes called Toomey's Theatre. The plot dealt with a young anarchic firebrand, only son of a retired colonial official who suffered terribly from sandfly fever, and he began the first act by screaming against British imperial oppression and shouting the necessity of declaring the Universal Republic of Man. His father, dithering in a febrile bout theatrically highly effective, told him to get out of their Swiss Cottage home if that was the way he felt. I will, I will. He slammed the door, and the quavering father regretted his dismissive heat. The young firebrand did some screaming about human liberty at a public meeting and was beaten up by fascists (I had modelled these on the Italian blackshirts whom I had seen in the European illustrated papers; they anticipated Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley's cornerboys by some seven years). Picked up broken and bloody by a kindly Hindu doctor and nursed back to health by him, he was gently instructed in the virtues of British imperialism and told that from it was already emerging the international commonweal he desiderated. He also fell in love with a dusky beauty, a quadroon from Trinidad, whom the Indian doctor had adopted, and declared his wish to marry her. She ended the play with a speech in which she expressed regret that the time for the mingling of the bloods was, despite the precedent of her own parentage, not yet, though some day it would come. Some day, she said, the brotherhood of all who lived under the British flag would be more than a pious (sanctimonious really) aspiration. For now it was necessary to defer to the prejudices of the unenlightened, thinking particularly of the cross of others' stupidity and ignorance that the offspring of a mixed union, such as herself, still had to bear. The reformed firebrand nodded and nodded, taking on the appearance of a wiser, older, more patriarchal man with a sandfly fever dither, and kissed the sensible quadroon gently on the brow as the curtain went slowly down and the applause started: It is strange now to reflect that both coloured parts were taken by uncoloured players coloured for the occasion, these being Phil Kemble (who still, incidentally, wanted to play Pitt) and Rosemary Fanshawe. We have come a long way since then.

Rudyard Kipling, with his bossy American wife, came to the first night. After all, the title was taken from his own "Recessional" and he had a right to a couple of free tickets and a free drink in the first interval in the manager's office. His wife watched closely as Ferguson, manager, poured Kipling whisky. "Plenty of wawder," she said. When Ferguson offered a refill she said, "No, Ruddy." Kipling began to sing, unexpectedly, from Gay's and Handel's Acts and Galatea: "Oh ruddier than the cherry oh sweeter than the berry."

"See what I mean?" Mrs Kipling said sternly to a piece of the wall between myself and her husband.

Kipling said to me, "You young men, you never see what it's all about. The insincerity comes through." His intonation had a lilt which suggested a Welsh background; one did not dare think of it as babu, chichi, a long-learnt gesture of solidarity with the Indian anglophones. The moustache was grey but the heavy eyebrows still black. He had been sunning in Hastings perhaps and was browner than an Englishman should be. His spectacles were as thick as bottle-bottoms, and the eyes swam fierce and enlarged. "A bad play," he pronounced, "so far. But that won't worry you. I wouldn't have come if we hadn't been in town already. That damned tattoo," he cried.

"Now, Ruddy."

"You weren't there, Toomey?" No. "The most crude pantomime of my little poem about Gunga Din, with a burnt-corked bishti doling out drops of pawnee to the wounded under fire and then being shot by whooping tribesmen. He knifejacked up before dying and then saluted. The cheers of the kuchnays. Oh my God. And the music. What was that music, Carrie?"

"'Nimrod,'" said Ferguson, who had read the reviews. "Elgar. Sir Edward.

From the Enigma Variations."

"Oh yes, poor Elgar."

"Poor?" Mrs Kipling exclaimed. "You should have no sympathy for the man. He ruined your big steamers." I did not understand and showed it. "'Oh where are you going to all you big steamers?'" clarified Mrs Kipling. "His setting. Elgar's setting. The music he put to the words."

"We were in the royal box," Kipling told me, "with George and Mary and young David puffing away at his gaspers. Elgar at one end, the wife and I at the other, separated by a large wedge of whatwhatwhat nobility."

"Stop that, Ruddy."

"Kuchnays with coronets. We exchanged glances of shame. We're both long past that tawdry expansionism. Elgar and those damnable words. Land of grope and whoredom."

"Ruddy, that is not amusing."

"I'll have another drop of that."

"The bell has gone, Ruddy. We must return to our seats."

"Must we? Got to, have we? You want us to, Toomey? Ah, well. Elgar," he suddenly chortled. "Hippism and microscopy, given up music as a mug's game. And me?"

"Guilt, symbolism and technology," I said, or perhaps did not. I say it now anyway.

"Not bad," Kipling said. "Is there a toilet anywhere near here? Bladder not as good as it was."

"Show Mr Kipling," Mrs Kipling ordered me, "to the nearest facility."

The second bell was trilling as Kipling pounded away. "Saw the other Tooniey," he gasped. Micturition seemed to take a lot out of him. "Any relation?"

"My brother."

The public had not yet tired of Rob All My Comrades at the Cambridge, but the khaki element was giving way to mufti, and in the second act the entire cast was in evening dress. There were also real girls instead of hairylegged transvestites The title was taking on a bolshevik flavour, and it changed to Friends, Just Friends for its next edition. Tommy Toomey's turn was military enough. He was a hawhawing subaltern giving his platoon a lecture on the Empire. Occasionally he would cough and say, "No good, I shall have to give 'em up, what." This catchphrase caught on widely among the million or so British scratchers of carborundum pyrites when Tom did this and other turns on 2L0 the following year. The Prince of Wales was to use it while trying an Argentine gasper at the British Exhibition in Buenos Aires. The catchphrase Ceased to be funny when Tom's cough was revealed as clearly unvolitional and could no longer be interpreted, to use the new jargon, as a suprasegmental prosodic trope. The damned irony of it, as I have already, I think, said. But Tom was well enough and coming into his success in 1924. He was very amusing with his mixed-up story of Clive of India and the Black Hole of Calcutta (No, Jones 69, I do not mean B Company's latrines). He was too good for the show.

We had a late supper one night at Scott's, top of the Haymarket. His lady friend came too, a girl with a blue-black bob and kohled eyes, Estella some thing, a small actress, an artist's model, anything that offered. She knew exactly what she wanted as we took our seats in the crowded smoky restaurant: potted shrimps, lobster Mornay, a carafe of house Chablis. How we all smoked in those daysGold Flake, Black Cat, Three Castles, Crumbs of Comfort. All except Tom, who merely coughed. He had goujons frits, I coulibiac of salmon. Estella read books. She had read one or two of mine. She thought little of them. Sentimental, she said. Contrived. Old-fashioned.

"All right, Stell, enough," Tom smiled. "This is just biting the hand that feeds you."

"Oh, his treat, is it? Well, I mean, compared with Huxley. Antic Hay, that's marvellous, isn't it, Tommy, marvellous."

"I only read the papers. Gags, you know," he said to me in apology. "Topicalities. I try to keep the act up to date. You know, so they built a statue of Clive in ghee but it didn't last long."

"'There was a young man of East Anglia whose loins were a tangle of ganglia.' That's in Antic Hay, that's marvellous."

"What are ganglia?" Tom asked.

"It won't do," I said. "There's no other rhyme. Anybody can start a limerick--"

"Now you're jealous." She drank Chablis and left a coating of chewed white bolus on the rim. "Aldous is marvellous."

"You know him?"

"We all know him. He's our voice. Postwar disillusionment, you know, marvellous."

"An overtall gangler with glass eyes, mooning after Nancy Cunard. Marvellous, yes."

"Good God," she said, not listening, "there's a coincidence." A young man, very upright, with a trimmed golden beard and, just behind him, a mor, sluttish version of Estella, overrouged and dirty looking and wobbling on heels like stilts, had just come in, laughing loudly. "That's Heseltine," Estella said. "Or Peter Warlock, his other self. He's in two books, isn't that marvellous, Women in Love and this Aldous one." There seemed to be others in Heseltine's company. Heseltine clapped his hands for a table. The place, as I said, was crowded. He lalled mockingly the coda of the finale of Brahms's First Symphony. There had been a Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Queen's Hall.

Every eye was on him, he glowed. The others in his company seemed to include Val Wrigley, my former lover. I nearly choked on a fishbone as I looked at him. What seven years can do. He had become what used to be known as a queen, his hair henna and his gestures elegantly petulant. To my horrible shock Estella waved at him with vigour, rattling the tortoiseshell bangles on her arm. "Val, Val, Val, there's room here."

"Oh no," bot

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