The sun was just rising as Dr Robert entered his wife’s room at the hospital. An orange glow and, against it the jagged silhouette of the mountains. Then suddenly a dazzling sickle of incandescence between two peaks. The sickle became a half circle and the first long shadows, the first shafts of golden light crossed the garden outside the window. And when one looked up again at the mountains there was the whole unbearable glory of the risen sun.

Dr Robert sat down by the bed, took his wife’s hand and kissed it. She smiled at him, then turned again towards the window.

“How quickly the earth turns!” she whispered, and then after a silence, “One of these mornings,” she added, “it’ll be my last sunrise.”

Through the confused chorus of bird cries and insect noises, a mynah was chanting, “Karuna. Karuna . . .”

“Karuna,” Lakshmi repeated. “Compassion . . .”

“Karuna. Karuna,” the oboe-voice of Buddha insisted from the garden.

“I shan’t be needing it much longer,” she went on. “But what about you? Poor Robert, what about you?”

“Somehow or other one finds the necessary strength,” he said.

“But will it be the right kind of strength? Or will it be the strength of armour, the strength of shut-offness, the strength of being absorbed in your work and your ideas and not caring a damn for anything else? Remember how I used to come and pull your hair and make you pay attention? Who’s going to do that when I’m gone?”

A nurse came in with a glass of sugared water. Dr Robert slid a hand under his wife’s shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. The nurse held the glass to her lips. Lakshmi drank a little water, swallowed with difficulty, then drank again and yet once more. Turning from the proffered glass, she looked up at Dr Robert. The wasted face was illumined by a strangely incongruous twinkle of pure mischief.

“ ‘I the Trinity illustrate,’ ” the faint voice hoarsely quoted, “ ‘Sipping watered orange pulp; in three sips the Arian frustrate’ . . .” She broke off. “What a ridiculous thing to be remembering. But then I always was pretty ridiculous, wasn’t I?”

Dr Robert did his best to smile back at her. “Pretty ridiculous,” he agreed.

“You used to say I was like a flea. Here one moment and then, hop! somewhere else, miles away. No wonder you could never educate me!”

“But you educated me all right,” he assured her. “If it hadn’t been for you coming in and pulling my hair and making me look at the world and helping me to understand it, what would I be today? A pedant in blinkers—in spite of all my training. But luckily I had the sense to ask you to marry me, and luckily you had the folly to say yes and then the wisdom and intelligence to make a good job of me. After thirty-seven years of adult education I’m almost human.”

“But I’m still a flea.” She shook her head. “And yet I did try. I tried very hard. I don’t know if you ever realized it, Robert: I was always on tiptoes, always straining up towards the place where you were doing your work and your thinking and your reading. On tiptoes, trying to reach it, trying to get up there beside you. Goodness, how tiring it was! What an endless series of efforts! And all of them quite useless. Because I was just a dumb flea hopping about down here among the people and the flowers and the cats and dogs. Your kind of highbrow world was a place I could never climb up to, much less find my way in. When this thing happened,” (she raised her hand to her absent breast) “I didn’t have to try any more. No more school, no more homework. I had a permanent excuse.”

There was a long silence.

“What about taking another sip?” said the nurse at last.

“Yes, you ought to drink some more,” Dr Robert agreed.

“And ruin the Trinity?” Lakshmi gave him another of her smiles. Through the mask of age and mortal sickness Dr Robert suddenly saw the laughing girl with whom, half a life-time ago, and yet only yesterday, he had fallen in love.

An hour later Dr Robert was back in his bungalow.

“You’re going to be all alone this morning,” he announced, after changing the dressing on Will Farnaby’s knee. “I have to drive down to Shivapuram for a meeting of the Privy Council. One of our student nurses will come in around twelve to give you your injection and get you something to eat. And in the afternoon, as soon as she’s finished her work at the school, Susila will be dropping in again. And now I must be going.” Dr Robert rose and laid his hand for a moment on Will’s arm. “Till this evening.” Half way to the door he halted and turned back. “I almost forgot to give you this.” From one of the side pockets of his sagging jacket he pulled out a small green booklet. “It’s the Old Raja’s ‘ Notes on What’s What, and on What it Might be Reasonable to Do About What’s What .’ ”

“What an admirable title!” said Will as he took the proffered book.

“And you’ll like the contents, too,” Dr Robert assured him. “Just a few pages, that’s all. But if you want to know what Pala is all about, there’s no better introduction.”

“Incidentally,” Will asked, “who is the Old Raja?”

“Who was he, I’m afraid. The Old Raja died in thirty-eight—after a reign three years longer than Queen Victoria’s. His eldest son died before he did, and he was succeeded by his grandson, who was an ass—but made up for it by being short-lived. The present Raja is his great-grandson.”

“And, if I may ask a personal question, how does anybody called MacPhail come into the picture?”

“The first MacPhail of Pala came into it under the Old Raja’s grandfather—the Raja of the Reform, we call him. Between them, he and my great-grandfather invented modern Pala. The Old Raja consolidated their work and carried it further. And today we’re doing our best to follow in his footsteps.”

Will held up the ‘ Notes on What’s What ’.

“Does this give the history of the reforms?”

Dr Robert shook his head. “It merely states the underlying principles. Read about those first. When I get back from Shivapuram this evening, I’ll give you a taste of the history. You’ll have a better understanding of what was actually done, if you start by knowing what had to be done—what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what’s what. So read it, read it. And don’t forget to drink your fruit juice at eleven.”

Will watched him go, then opened the little green book and started to read.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.

In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Because his aspiration to perpetuate only the ‘yes’ in every pair of opposites can never, in the nature of things, be realized, the insulated Manichee I think I am condemns himself to endlessly repeated frustration, endlessly repeated conflicts with other aspiring and frustrated Manichees.

Conflicts and frustrations—the theme of all history and almost all biography. “I show you sorrow,” said the Buddha realistically. But he also showed the ending of sorrow—self-knowledge, total acceptance, the blessed experience of Not-Two.

II

Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being. We can be virtuous without knowing who in fact we are. The beings who are merely good are not Good Beings; they are just pillars of society.

Most pillars are their own Samsons. They hold up, but sooner or later they also pull down. There has never been a society in which most good doing was the product of Good Being and therefore constantly appropriate. This does not mean that there will never be such a society or that we in Pala are fools for trying to call it into existence.

III

The Yogin and the Stoic—two righteous egos who achieve their very considerable results by pretending, systematically, to be somebody else. But it is not by pretending to be somebody else, even somebody supremely good and wise, that we can pass from insulated Manicheehood to Good Being.

Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.

Concentration, abstract thinking, spiritual exercises—systematic exclusions in the realm of thought. Asceticism and hedonism—systematic exclusions in the realms of sensation, feeling and action. But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences; so be aware—aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practising. The more a man knows about individual objects, the more he knows about God. Translating Spinoza’s language into ours, we can say: The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is—or rather Who (capital W) in Fact (capital F) “he” (between quotation marks) Is (capital I).

St John was right. In a blessedly speechless universe, the Word was not only with God; it was God. As a something to be believed in. God is a projected symbol, a deified name. God = “God”.

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalysed words much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s words—people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history—sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church’s inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

There was a tap at the door. Will looked up from his book.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” said a voice that brought back unpleasant memories of Colonel Dipa and that nightmarish drive in the white Mercedes. Dressed only in white sandals, white shorts and a platinum wrist watch, Murugan was advancing towards the bed.

“How nice of you to come and see me!”

Another visitor would have asked him how he was feeling; but Murugan was too whole-heartedly concerned with himself to be able even to simulate the slightest interest in anyone else. “I came to the door three-quarters of an hour ago,” he said in tones of aggrieved complaint. “But the old man hadn’t left, so I had to go home again. And then I had to sit with my mother and the man who’s staying with us while they were having their breakfast . . .”

“Why couldn’t you come in while Dr Robert was here?” Will asked. “Is it against the rules for you to talk to me?”

The boy shook his head impatiently. “Of course not. I just didn’t want him to know the reason for my coming to see you.”

“The reason?” Will smiled. “Visiting the sick is an act of charity—highly commendable.”

His irony was lost upon Murugan, who went on steadily thinking about his own affairs. “Thank you for not telling them you’d seen me before,” he said abruptly, almost angrily. It was as though he resented having to acknowledge his obligation, and were furious with Will for having done him the good turn which demanded this acknowledgement.

“I could see you didn’t want me to say anything about it,” said Will. “So of course I didn’t.”

“I wanted to thank you,” Murugan muttered between his teeth and in a tone that would have been appropriate to, “You dirty swine!”

“Don’t mention it,” said Will with mock politeness.

What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amused curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a statue’s but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—a Hellenistic face, mobile and all too human. A vessel of incomparable beauty—but what did it contain? It was a pity, he reflected, that he hadn’t asked that question a little more seriously before getting involved with his unspeakable Babs. But then Babs was a female. By the sort of heterosexual he was, the sort of rational question he was now posing was unaskable. As no doubt it would be, by anyone susceptible to boys, in regard to this bad-blooded little demi-god sitting at the end of his bed. “Didn’t Dr Robert know you’d gone to Rendang?” he asked.

“Of course he knew. Everybody knew it. I’d gone there to fetch my mother. She was staying there with some of her relations. I went over to bring her back to Pala. It was absolutely official.”

“Then why didn’t you want me to say that I’d met you over there?”

Murugan hesitated for a moment, then looked up at Will defiantly. “Because I didn’t want them to know I’d been seeing Colonel Dipa.”

Oh, so that was it! “Colonel Dipa’s a remarkable man,” he said aloud, fishing with sugared bait for confidences.

Surprisingly unsuspicious, the fish rose at once. Murugan’s sulky face lit up with enthusiasm and there, suddenly, was Antinous in all the fascinating beauty of his ambiguous adolescence. “I think he’s wonderful,” he said, and for the first time since he had entered the room, he seemed to recognize Will’s existence and gave him the friendliest of smiles. The Colonel’s wonderfulness had made him forget his resentment, had made it possible for him, momentarily, to love everybody—even this man to whom he owed a rankling debt of gratitude. “Look at what he’s doing for Rendang!”

“He’s certainly doing a great deal for Rendang,” said Will non-committally.

A cloud passed across Murugan’s radiant face. “They don’t think so here,” he said, frowning. “They think he’s awful.”

“Who thinks so?”

“Practically everybody!”

“So they didn’t want you to see him?”

With the expression of an urchin who has cocked a snook while the teacher’s back is turned, Murugan grinned triumphantly. “They thought I was with my mother all the time.”

Will picked up the cue at once. “Did your mother know you were seeing the Colonel?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“And had no objection?” ’

“She was all for it.”

And yet Will felt quite sure, he hadn’t been mistaken when he thought of Hadrian and Antinous. Was the woman blind? Or didn’t she wish to see what was happening?

“But if she doesn’t mind,” he said aloud, “why should Dr Robert and the rest of them object?” Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizing that he had ventured too far into forbidden territory, Will hastily drew a red herring across the trail. “Do they think,” he asked with a laugh, “that he might convert you to a belief in military dictatorship?”

The red herring was duly followed, and the boy’s face relaxed into a smile. “Not that, exactly,” he answered, “but something like it. It’s all so stupid,” he added with a shrug of the shoulders. “Just idiotic protocol.”

“Protocol?” Will was genuinely puzzled.

“Weren’t you told anything about me?”

“Only what Dr Robert said yesterday.”

“You mean, about my being a student?” Murugan threw back his head and laughed.

“What’s so funny about being a student?”

“Nothing—nothing at all.” The boy looked away again. There was a silence. Still averted, “The reason,” he said at last, “why I’m not supposed to see Colonel Dipa is that he’s the head of a state and I’m the head of a state. When we meet, it’s international politics.”

“What do you mean?”

“I happen to be the Raja of Pala.”

“The Raja of Pala?”

“Since fifty-four. That was when my father died.”

“And your mother, I take it, is the Rani?”

“My mother is the Rani.”

Make a bee-line for the palace. But here was the palace making a bee-line for him. Providence, evidently, was on the side of Joe Aldehyde and working overtime.

“Were you the eldest son?” he asked.

“The only son,” Murugan replied. And then, stressing his uniqueness still more emphatically, “The only child ,” he added.

“So there’s no possible doubt,” said Will. “My goodness! I ought to be calling you Your Majesty. Or at least Sir.” The words were spoken laughingly; but it was with the most perfect seriousness and a sudden assumption of regal dignity that Murugan responded to them.

“You’ll have to call me that at the end of next week,” he said. “After my birthday. I shall be eighteen. That’s when a Raja of Pala comes of age. Till then I’m just Murugan Mailendra. Just a student learning a little bit about everything—including plant breeding,” he added contemptuously—“so that, when the time comes, I shall know what I’m doing.”

“And when the time comes, what will you be doing?” Between this pretty Antinous and his portentous office there was a contrast which Will found richly comic. “How do you propose to act?” he continued on a bantering note. “Off with their heads? L’Etat c’est Moi ?”

Seriousness and regal dignity hardened into rebuke. “Don’t be stupid.”

Amused, Will went through the motions of apology. “I just wanted to find out how absolute you were going to be.”

“Pala is a constitutional monarchy,” Murugan answered gravely.

“In other words, you’re just going to be a symbolic figurehead—to reign, like the Queen of England, but not rule.”

Forgetting his regal dignity, “No, no ,” Murugan almost screamed. “ Not like the Queen of England. The Raja of Pala doesn’t just reign; he rules.” Too much agitated to sit still, Murugan jumped up and began to walk about the room. “He rules constitutionally; but, by God, he rules, he rules !” Murugan walked to the window and looked out. Turning back after a moment of silence, he confronted Will with a face transfigured by its new expression into an emblem, exquisitely moulded and coloured, of an all too familiar kind of psychological ugliness. “I’ll show them who’s the boss around here,” he said in a phrase and tone, which had obviously been borrowed from the hero of some American gangster movie. “These people think they can push me around,” he went on reciting from the dismally commonplace script, “the way they pushed my father around. But they’re making a big mistake,” he uttered a sinister snigger and wagged his beautiful, odious head. “A big mistake,” he repeated.

The words had been spoken between clenched teeth and with scarcely moving lips; the lower jaw had been thrust out so as to look like the jaw of a comic strip criminal; the eyes glared coldly between narrowed lids. At once absurd and horrible. Antinous had become the caricature of all the tough guys in all the B-pictures from time immemorial.

“Who’s been running the country during your minority?” Will now asked.

“Three sets of old fogeys,” Murugan answered contemptuously. “The Cabinet, the House of Representatives and then, representing me , the Raja, the Privy Council.”

“Poor old fogeys!” said Will. “They’ll soon be getting the shock of their lives.” Entering gaily into the spirit of delinquency, he laughed aloud. “I only hope I’ll still be around to see it happening.”

Murugan joined in the laughter—joined in it, not as the sinisterly mirthful Tough Guy but, with one of those sudden changes of mood and expression that would make it, Will foresaw, so hard for him to play the Tough Guy part, as the triumphant urchin of a few minutes earlier. “The shock of their lives,” he repeated happily.

“Have you made any specific plans?”

“I most certainly have,” said Murugan. On his mobile face the triumphant urchin made way for the statesman, grave but condescendingly affable, at a press conference. “Top priority: get this place modernized. Look at what Rendang has been able to do because of its oil royalties.”

“But doesn’t Pala get any oil royalties?” Will questioned with that innocent air of total ignorance, which he had found by long experience to be the best way of eliciting information from the simple-minded and the self-important.

“Not a penny,” said Murugan. “And yet the southern end of the island is fairly oozing with the stuff. But except for a few measly little wells for home consumption, the old fogeys won’t do anything about it. And what’s more, they won’t allow anyone else to do anything about it.” The statesman was growing angry; there were hints now in his voice and expression of the Tough Guy. “All sorts of people have made offers—South-East Asia Petroleum, Shell, Royal Dutch, Standard of California. But the bloody old fools won’t listen.”

“Can’t you persuade them to listen?”

“I’ll damn well make them listen,” said the Tough Guy.

“That’s the spirit!” Then, casually, “Which of the offers do you think of accepting?” he asked.

“Colonel Dipa’s working with Standard of California, and he thinks it might be best if we did the same.”

“I wouldn’t do that without at least getting a few competing bids.”

“That’s what I think too. So does my mother.”

“Very wise.”

“My mother’s all for South-East Asia Petroleum. She knows the Chairman of the Board, Lord Aldehyde.”

“She knows Lord Aldehyde? But how extraordinary!” The tone of delighted astonishment was thoroughly convincing. “Joe Aldehyde is a friend of mine. I write for his papers. I even serve as his private ambassador. Confidentially,” he added, “that’s why we took that trip to the copper mines. Copper is one of Joe’s side-lines. But of course his real love is oil.”

Murugan tried to look shrewd. “What would he be prepared to offer?”

Will picked up the cue and answered, in the best movie-tycoon style, “Whatever Standard offers plus a little more.”

“Fair enough,” said Murugan out of the same script, and nodded sagely. There was a long silence. When he spoke again, it was as the statesman granting an interview to representatives of the press.

“The oil royalties,” he said, “will be used in the following manner. Twenty-five per cent of all monies received will go to World Reconstruction.”

“May I ask,” Will enquired deferentially, “precisely how you propose to reconstruct the world?”

“Through the Crusade of the Spirit. Do you know about the Crusade of the Spirit?”

“Of course. Who doesn’t?”

“It’s a great world movement,” said the statesman gravely. “Like Early Christianity. Founded by my mother.”

Will registered awe and astonishment.

“Yes, founded by my mother,” Murugan repeated, and he added impressively, “I believe it’s man’s only hope.”

“Quite,” said Will Farnaby, “quite.”

“Well, that’s how the first twenty-five per cent of the royalties will be used,” the statesman continued. “The remainder will go into an intensive programme of industrialization.” The tone changed again. “These old idiots here only want to industrialize in spots and leave all the rest as it was a thousand years ago.”

“Whereas you’d like to go the whole hog. Industrialization for industrialization’s sake.”

“No, industrialization for the country’s sake. Industrialization to make Pala strong. To make other people respect us. Look at Rendang. Within five years they’ll be manufacturing all the rifles and mortars and ammunition they need. It’ll be quite a long time before they can make tanks. But meanwhile they can buy them from Skoda with their oil money.”

“How soon will they graduate to H-bombs?” Will asked ironically.

“They won’t even try,” Murugan answered. “But after all,” he added, “H-bombs aren’t the only absolute weapons,” He pronounced the phrase with relish. It was evident that he found the taste of ‘absolute weapons’ positively delicious. “Chemical and biological weapons—Colonel Dipa calls them the poor man’s H-bombs. One of the first things I’ll do is to build a big insecticide plant.” Murugan laughed and winked an eye. “If you can make insecticides,” he said, “you can make nerve gas.”

Will remembered that still unfinished factory in the suburbs of Rendang-Lobo.

“What’s that?” he had asked Colonel Dipa as they flashed past it in the white Mercedes.

“Insecticides,” the Colonel had answered. And showing his gleaming white teeth in a genial smile, “We shall soon be exporting the stuff all over South-East Asia.”

At the time, of course, he had thought that the Colonel merely meant what he said. But now . . . Will shrugged his mental shoulders. Colonels will be Colonels and boys, even boys like Murugan, will be gun-loving boys. There would always be plenty of jobs for special correspondents on the trail of death.

“So you’ll strengthen Pala’s army?” Will said aloud.

“Strengthen it? No—I’ll create it. Pala doesn’t have an army.”

“None at all?”

“Absolutely nothing. They’re all pacifists.” The p was an explosion of disgust, the s’s hissed contemptuously. “I shall have to start from scratch.”

“And you’ll militarize as you industrialize, is that it?”

“Exactly.”

Will laughed. “Back to the Assyrians! You’ll go down in history as a true revolutionary.”

“That’s what I hope,” said Murugan. “Because that’s what my policy is going to be—Continuing Revolution.”

“Very good!” Will applauded.

“I’ll just be continuing the revolution that was started more than a hundred years ago by Dr Robert’s great-grandfather when he came to Pala and helped my great-great-great-grandfather to put through the first reforms. Some of the things they did were really wonderful. Not all of them, mind you,” he qualified; and with the absurd solemnity of a schoolboy playing Polonius in an end-of-term performance of Hamlet he shook his curly head in grave, judicial disapproval. “But at least they did something. Whereas nowadays we’re governed by a set of do-nothing conservatives. Conservatively primitive—they won’t lift a finger to bring in modern improvements. And conservatively radical—they refuse to change any of the old bad revolutionary ideas that ought to be changed. They won’t reform the reforms. And I tell you, some of those so-called reforms are absolutely disgusting.”

“Meaning, I take it, that they have something to do with sex?”

Murugan nodded and turned away his face. To his astonishment, Will saw that he was blushing.

“Give me an example,” he demanded.

But Murugan could not bring himself to be explicit.

“Ask Dr Robert,” he said, “ask Vijaya. They think that sort of thing is simply wonderful. In fact they all do. That’s one of the reasons why nobody wants to change. They’d like everything to go on as it is, in the same old disgusting way, for ever and ever.”

“Forever and ever,” a rich contralto voice teasingly repeated.

“Mother!” Murugan sprang to his feet.

Will turned and saw in the doorway a large florid woman swathed (rather incongruously, he thought; for that kind of face and build usually went with mauve and magenta and electric blue) in clouds of white muslin. She stood there smiling with a conscious mysteriousness, one fleshy brown arm upraised, with its jewelled hand pressed against the doorjamb, in the pose of the great actress, the acknowledged diva , pausing at her first entrance to accept the plaudits of her adorers on the other side of the footlights. In the background, waiting patiently for his cue, stood a tall man in a dove-grey Dacron suit whom Murugan, peering past the massive embodiment of maternity that almost filled the doorway, now greeted as Mr Bahu.

Still in the wings, Mr Bahu bowed without speaking.

Murugan turned again to his mother. “Did you walk here?” he asked. His tone expressed incredulity and an admiring solicitude. Walking here—how unthinkable! But if she had walked, what heroism! “All the way?”

“All the way, my baby,” she echoed, tenderly playful. The uplifted arm came down, slid round the boy’s slender body, pressed it, engulfed in floating draperies, against the enormous bosom, then released it again. “I had one of my Impulses.” She had a way, Will noticed, of making you actually hear the capital letters at the beginning of the words she meant to emphasize. “My Little Voice said, ‘Go and see this Stranger at Dr Robert’s house. Go!’ ‘Now?’ I said. ‘ Malgré la chaleur? ’ Which makes my Little Voice lose patience. ‘Woman,’ it says, ‘hold your silly tongue and do as you’re told.’ So here I am, Mr Farnaby.” With hand outstretched and surrounded by a powerful aura of sandalwood oil, she advanced towards him.

Will bowed over the thick bejewelled fingers and mumbled something that ended in ‘Your Highness’ . . .

“Bahu!” she called, using the royal prerogative of the unadorned surname.

Responding to his long-awaited cue, the supporting actor made his entrance and was introduced as His Excellency, Abdul Bahu, the Ambassador of Rendang: “Abdul Pierre Bahu— car sa mère est parisienne . But he learned his English in New York.”

He looked, Will thought as he shook the ambassador’s hand, like Savonarola—but a Savonarola with a monocle and a tailor in Savile Row.

“Bahu,” said the Rani, “is Colonel Dipa’s Brains Trust.”

“Your Highness, if I may be permitted to say so, is much too kind to me and not nearly kind enough to the Colonel.”

His words and manner were courtly to the point of being ironical, a parody of deference and self-abasement.

“The brains,” he went on, “are where brains ought to be—in the head. As for me, I am merely a part of Rendang’s sympathetic nervous system.”

“ Et combien sympathique! ” said the Rani. “Among other things, Mr Farnaby, Bahu is the Last of the Aristocrats. You should see his country place! Like the Arabian Nights! One claps one’s hands—and instantly there are six servants ready to do one’s bidding. One has a birthday—and there is a fête nocturne in the gardens. Music, refreshments, dancing girls; two hundred retainers carrying torches. The life of Haroun al Rashid, but with modern plumbing.”

“It sounds quite delightful,” said Will, remembering the villages through which he had passed in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes—the wattled huts, the garbage, the children with ophthalmia, the skeleton dogs, the women bent double under enormous loads.

“And such taste,” the Rani went on, “such a well-stored mind and, through it all” (she lowered her voice), “such a deep and unfailing Sense of the Divine.”

Mr Bahu bowed his head, and there was a silence.

Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.

“I hope you don’t feel that my visit is an intrusion,” she said to Will. He assured her that he didn’t; but she continued to apologize . . . “I would have given warning,” she said, “I would have asked your permission. But my Little Voice says, ‘No—you must go now.’ Why? I cannot say. But no doubt we shall find out in due course.” She fixed him with her large, bulging eyes and gave him a mysterious smile. “And now, first of all, how are you, dear Mr Farnaby?”

“As you see, ma’am, in very good shape.”

“Truly?” The bulging eyes scrutinized his face with an intentness that he found embarrassing. “I can see that you’re the kind of heroically considerate man who will go on reassuring his friends even on his deathbed.”

“You’re very flattering,” he said. “But as it happens, I am in good shape. Amazingly so, all things considered—miraculously so.”

“Miraculous,” said the Rani, “was the very word I used when I heard about your escape. It was a miracle.”

“As luck would have it,” Will quoted again from Erewhon , “Providence was on my side.’ ”

Mr Bahu started to laugh; but noticing that the Rani had evidently failed to get the point, changed his mind and adroitly turned the sound of merriment into a loud cough.

“How true!” the Rani was saying, and her rich contralto thrillingly vibrated. “Providence is always on our side.” And when Will raised a questioning eyebrow, “I mean,” she elaborated, “in the eyes of those who Truly Understand.” (Capital T, capital U) “And this is true even when all things seem to conspire against us— même dans le désastre . You understand French, of course, Mr Farnaby?” Will nodded. “It often comes to me more easily than my own native tongue, or English or Palanese. After so many years in Switzerland,” she explained, “first at school. And again, later on, when my poor baby’s health was so precarious,” (she patted Murugan’s bare arm) “and we had to go and live in the mountains. Which illustrates what I was saying about Providence always being on our side. When they told me that my little boy was on the brink of consumption, I forgot everything I’d ever learnt. I was mad with fear and anguish, I was indignant against God for having allowed such a thing to happen. What Utter Blindness! My baby got well, and those years among the Eternal Snows were the happiest of our lives—weren’t they, darling?”

“The happiest of our lives,” the boy agreed, with what almost sounded like complete sincerity.

The Rani smiled triumphantly, pouted her full red lips and with a faint smack parted them again in a long-distance kiss. “So you see, my dear Farnaby,” she went on, “you see. It’s really self-evident. Nothing happens by Accident. There’s a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable little plans. A little plan for each and every one of us.”

“Quite,” said Will politely. “Quite.”

“There was a time,” the Rani continued, “when I knew it only with my intellect. Now I know it with my heart. I really . . .” she paused for an instant to prepare for the utterance of the mystic majuscule, “Understand.”

‘Psychic as hell.’ Will remembered what Joe Aldehyde had said of her. And surely that life-long frequenter of seances should know.

“I take it, ma’am,” he said, “that you’re naturally psychic.”

“From birth,” she admitted. “But also and above all by training. Training, needless to say, in Something Else.”

“Something else?”

“In the life of the Spirit. As one advances along the Path, all the sidhis , all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers, develop spontaneously.”

“Is that so?”

“My Mother,” Murugan proudly assured him, “can do the most fantastic things.”

“ N’exagérons pas, chéri. ”

“But it’s the truth,” Murugan insisted.

“A truth,” the ambassador put in, “which I can confirm. And I confirm it,” he added, smiling at his own expense, “with a certain reluctance. As a life-long sceptic about these things, I don’t like to see the impossible happening. But I have an unfortunate weakness for honesty. And when the impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I’m compelled malgré moi to bear witness to the fact. Her Highness does do the most fantastic things.”

“Well, if you like to put it that way,” said the Rani, beaming with pleasure. “But never forget, Bahu, never forget. Miracles are of absolutely no importance. What’s important is the Other Thing—the Thing one comes to at the end of the Path.”

“After the Fourth Initiation,” Murugan specified. “My Mother . . .”

“Darling!” The Rani had raised a finger to her lips. “These are things one doesn’t talk about.”

“I’m sorry,” said the boy. There was a long and pregnant silence.

The Rani closed her eyes, and Mr Bahu, letting fall his monocle, reverentially followed suit and became the image of Savonarola in silent prayer. What was going on behind that austere, that almost fleshless mask of recollectedness? Will looked and wondered.

“May I ask,” he said at last, “how you first came, ma’am, to find the Path?”

For a second or two the Rani said nothing, merely sat there with her eyes shut, smiling her Buddha smile of mysterious bliss. “Providence found it for me,” she answered at last.

“Quite, quite. But there must have been an occasion, a place, a human instrument.”

“I’ll tell you.” The lids fluttered apart and once again he found himself under the bright unswerving glare of those protuberant eyes of hers.

The place had been Lausanne; the time, the first year of her Swiss education; the chosen instrument, darling little Mme Buloz. Darling little Mme Buloz was the wife of darling old Professor Buloz, and old Professor Buloz was the man to whose charge, after careful enquiry and much anxious thought, she had been committed by her father, the late Sultan of Rendang. The Professor was sixty-seven, taught geology and was a Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret with his dinner, saying his prayers only twice a day and being strictly monogamous, he might almost have been a Muslim. Under such guardianship a princess of Rendang would be intellectually stimulated, while remaining morally and doctrinally intact. But the Sultan had reckoned without the Professor’s wife. Mme Buloz was only forty, plump, sentimental, bubblingly enthusiastic and, though officially of her husband’s Protestant persuasion, a newly-converted and intensely ardent Theosophist. In a room at the top of the tall house near the Place de la Riponne she had her Oratory, to which, whenever she could find time, she would secretly retire to do breathing exercises, practice concentration and raise Kundalini. Strenuous disciplines! But the reward was transcendentally great. In the small hours of a hot summer night, while the darling old Professor lay rhythmically snoring two floors down, she had become aware of a Presence: the Master Koot Hoomi was with her.

The Rani made an impressive pause.

“Extraordinary,” said Mr Bahu.

“Extraordinary,” Will dutifully echoed.

The Rani resumed her narrative. Irrepressibly happy, Mme Buloz had been unable to keep her secret. She had dropped mysterious hints, had passed from hints to confidences, from confidences to an invitation to the Oratory and a course of instruction. In a very short time Koot Hoomi was bestowing greater favours upon the novice than upon her teacher.

“And from that day to this,” she concluded, “the Master has helped me to Go Forward.”

To go forward, Will asked himself, into what? Koot Hoomi only knew. But whatever it was that she had gone forward into, he didn’t like it. There was an expression on that large florid face which he found peculiarly distasteful—an expression of domineering calm, of serene and unshakeable self-esteem. She reminded him in a curious way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was one of those happy tycoons who feel no qualms, but rejoice without inhibition in their money and in all that their money will buy in the way of influence and power. And here—albeit clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful—was another of Joe Aldehyde’s breed: a female tycoon who had cornered the market, not in soya beans or copper, but in Pure Spirituality and the Ascended Masters, and was now happily rubbing her hands over the exploit.

“Here’s one example of what He’s done for me,” the Rani went on. “Eight years ago—to be exact, on the twenty-third of November 1953—the Master came to me in my morning Meditation. Came in Person, came in Glory. ‘A great Crusade is to be launched,’ He said, ‘a World-Movement to save Humanity from self-destruction. And you, my child, are the Appointed Instrument.’ ‘Me? A world movement? But that’s absurd,’ I said. ‘I’ve never made a speech in my whole life. I’ve never written a word for publication. I’ve never been a leader or an organizer.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ He said (and He gave me one of those indescribably beautiful smiles of His), ‘nevertheless it is you who will launch this Crusade—the World-Wide Crusade of the Spirit. You will be laughed at, you will be called a fool, a crank, a fanatic. The dogs bark; the Caravan passes. From tiny, laughable beginnings the Crusade of the Spirit is destined to become a Mighty Force. A force for Good, a force that will ultimately Save the World.’ And with that He left me. Left me stunned, bewildered, scared out of my wits. But there was nothing for it; I had to obey. I did obey. And what happened? I made speeches, and He gave me eloquence. I accepted the burden of leadership and, because He was walking invisibly at my side, people followed me. I asked for help, and the money came pouring in. So here I am.” She threw out her thick hands in a gesture of self-depreciation, she smiled a mystic smile. A poor thing , she seemed to be saying, but not my own—my Master’s, Koot Hoomi’s . “Here I am,” she repeated.

“Here, praise God,” said Mr Bahu devoutly, “you are.”

After a decent interval Will asked the Rani if she had always kept up the practices so providentially learned in Mme Buloz’s oratory.

“Always,” she answered. “I could no more do without Meditation than I could do without Food.”

“Wasn’t it rather difficult after you were married? I mean, before you went back to Switzerland. There must have been so many tiresome official duties.”

“Not to mention all the un official ones,” said the Rani in a tone that implied whole volumes of unfavourable comment upon her late husband’s character, weltanschauung and sexual habits. She opened her mouth to elaborate on the theme, then closed it again and looked at Murugan. “Darling,” she called.

Murugan, who was absorbedly polishing the nails of his left hand upon the open palm of his right, looked up with a guilty start. “Yes, Mother?”

Ignoring the nails and his evident inattention to what she had been saying, the Rani gave him a seducing smile. “Be an angel,” she said, “and go and fetch the car. My Little Voice doesn’t say anything about walking back to the bungalow. It’s only a few hundred yards,” she explained to Will. “But in this heat, and at my age . . .”

Her words called for some kind of flattering rebuttal. But if it was too hot to walk, it was also too hot, Will felt, to put forth the very considerable amount of energy required for a convincing show of bogus sincerity. Fortunately a professional diplomat, a practised courtier was on hand to make up for the uncouth journalist’s deficiencies. Mr Bahu uttered a peal of light-hearted laughter, then apologized for his merriment.

“But it was really too funny! ‘At my age,’ ” he repeated, and laughed again. “Murugan is not quite eighteen, and I happen to know how old—how very young—the Princess of Rendang was when she married the Raja of Pala.”

Murugan, meanwhile, had obediently risen and was kissing his mother’s hand.

“Now we can talk more freely,” said the Rani when he had left the room. And freely—her face, her tone, her bulging eyes, her whole quivering frame registering the most intense disapproval—she now let fly.

De mortuis . . . She wouldn’t say anything about her husband except that, in most respects, he was a typical Palanese, a true representative of his country. For the sad truth was that Pala’s smooth bright skin concealed the most horrible rottenness.

“When I think what they tried to do to my Baby, two years ago, when I was on my world tour for the Crusade of the Spirit.” With a jingling of bracelets she lifted her hands in horror. “It was an agony for me to be parted from him for so long; but the Master had sent me on a Mission, and my Little Voice told me that it wouldn’t be right for me to take my Baby with me. He’d lived abroad for so long. It was high time for him to get to know the country he was to rule. So I decided to leave him here. The Privy Council appointed a committee of guardianship. Two women with growing boys of their own and two men—one of whom, I regret to say,” (more in sorrow than in anger), “was Dr Robert MacPhail. Well, to cut a long story short, no sooner was I safely out of the country than those precious guardians, to whom I’d entrusted my Baby, my Only Son, set to work systematically— systematically , Mr Farnaby—to undermine my influence. They tried to destroy the whole edifice of Moral and Spiritual Values, which I had so laboriously built up over the years.”

Somewhat maliciously (for of course he knew what the woman was talking about), Will expressed his astonishment. The whole edifice of moral and spiritual values? And yet nobody could have been kinder than Dr Robert and the others, no Good Samaritans were ever more simply and effectively charitable.

“I’m not denying their kindness,” said the Rani. “But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.”

“Of course not,” Will agreed, and he listed all the qualities that the Rani seemed most conspicuously to lack. “There’s also sincerity. Not to mention truthfulness, humility, selflessness . . .”

“You’re forgetting Purity,” said the Rani severely. “Purity is fundamental, Purity is the sine qua non .”

“But here in Pala, I gather, they don’t think so.”

“They most certainly do not,” said the Rani. And she went on to tell him how her poor Baby had been deliberately exposed to impurity, even actively encouraged to indulge in it with one of those precocious, promiscuous girls of whom, in Pala, there were only too many. And when they found that he wasn’t the sort of boy who would seduce a girl (for she had brought him up to think of Woman as essentially Holy), they had encouraged the girl to do her best to seduce him .

Had she, Will wondered, succeeded? Or had Antinous already been girl-proofed by little friends of his own age or, still more effectively, by some older, more experienced and authoritative pederast, some Swiss precursor of Colonel Dipa?

“But that wasn’t the worst.” The Rani lowered her voice to a horrified stage whisper. “One of the mothers on the committee of guardianship—one of the mothers , mind you—advised him to take a course of lessons.”

“What sort of lessons?”

“In what they euphemistically call Love.” She wrinkled up her nose as though she had smelt raw sewage. “Lessons, if you please,” and disgust turned into indignation, “from some Older Woman.”

“Heavens!” cried the ambassador.

“Heavens!” Will dutifully echoed. Those older women, he could see, were competitors much more dangerous, in the Rani’s eyes, than even the most precociously promiscuous of girls. A mature instructress in love would be a rival mother, enjoying the monstrously unfair advantage of being free to go to the limits of incest.

“They teach . . .” the Rani hesitated. “They teach Special Techniques.”

“What sort of techniques?” Will enquired.

But she couldn’t bring herself to go into the repulsive particulars. And anyhow it wasn’t necessary. For Murugan (bless his heart!) had refused to listen to them. Lessons in immorality from someone old enough to be his mother—the very idea of it had made him sick. No wonder. He had been brought up to reverence the Ideal of Purity. “ Brahmacharya , if you know what that means.”

“Quite,” said Will.

“And this is another reason why his illness was such a blessing in disguise, such a real Godsend. I don’t think I could have brought him up that way in Pala. There are too many bad influences here. Forces working against Purity, against the Family, even against Mother Love.”

Will pricked up his ears. “Did they even reform mothers?”

She nodded. “You just can’t imagine how far things have gone here. But Koot Hoomi knew what kind of dangers we would have to run in Pala. So what happens? My Baby falls ill, and the doctors order us to Switzerland. Out of Harm’s way.”

“How was it,” Will asked, “that Koot Hoomi let you go off on your Crusade? Didn’t he foresee what would happen to Murugan as soon as your back was turned?”

“He foresaw everything,” said the Rani. “The temptations, the resistance, the massed assault by all the Powers of Evil and then, at the very last moment, the rescue. For a long time,” she explained, “Murugan didn’t tell me what was happening. But after three months the assaults of the Powers of Evil were too much for him. He dropped hints; but I was too completely absorbed in my Master’s business to be able to take them. Finally he wrote me a letter in which it was all spelled out—in detail. I cancelled my last four lectures in Brazil and flew home as fast as the jets would carry me. A week later we were back in Switzerland. Just my Baby and I—alone with the Master.”

She closed her eyes, and an expression of gloating ecstasy appeared upon her face. Will looked away in distaste. This self-canonized world-saviour, this clutching and devouring mother—had she ever, for a single moment, seen herself as others saw her? Did she have any idea of what she had done, what she was still doing, to her poor silly little son? To the first question the answer was certainly no. About the second one could only speculate. Perhaps she honestly didn’t know what she had made of the boy. But perhaps, on the other hand, she did know. Knew and preferred what was happening with the Colonel to what might happen if the boy’s education were taken in hand by a woman. The woman might supplant her; the Colonel, she knew, would not.

“Murugan told me that he intended to reform these so-called reforms.”

“I can only pray,” said the Rani in a tone that reminded Will of his grandfather, the Archdeacon, “that he’ll be given the Strength and Wisdom to do it.”

“And what do you think of his other projects?” Will asked. “Oil? Industries? An army?”

“Economics and politics aren’t exactly my strong point,” she answered with a little laugh which was meant to remind him that he was talking to someone who had taken the Fourth Initiation. “Ask Bahu what he thinks.”

“I have no right to offer an opinion,” said the ambassador. “I’m an outsider, the representative of a foreign power.”

“Not so very foreign,” said the Rani.

“Not in your eyes, ma’am. And not, as you know very well, in mine. But in the eyes of the Palanese government—yes. Completely foreign.”

“But that,” said Will, “doesn’t prevent you from having opinions. It only prevents you from having the locally orthodox opinions. And incidentally,” he added, “I’m not here in my professional capacity. You’re not being interviewed, Mr Ambassador. All this is strictly off the record.”

“Strictly off the record, then, and strictly as myself and not as an official personage, I believe that our young friend is perfectly right.”

“Which implies, of course, that you believe the policy of the Palanese government to be perfectly wrong.”

“Perfectly wrong,” said Mr Bahu—and the bony, emphatic mask of Savonarola positively twinkled with his Voltairean smile—“perfectly wrong because all too perfectly right.”

“Right?” the Rani protested. “Right?”

“Perfectly right,” he explained, “because so perfectly designed to make every man, woman and child on this enchanting island as perfectly free and happy as it’s possible to be.”

“But with a False Happiness,” the Rani cried, “a freedom that’s only for the Lower Self.”

“I bow,” said the ambassador, duly bowing, “to Your Highness’s superior insight. But still, high or low, true or false, happiness is happiness and freedom is most enjoyable. And there can be no doubt that the policies inaugurated by the original Reformers and developed over the years have been admirably well adapted to achieving these two goals.”

“But you feel,” said Will, “that these are undesirable goals?”

“On the contrary, everybody desires them. But unfortunately they’re out of context, they’ve become completely irrelevant to the present situation of the world in general and Pala in particular.”

“Are they more irrelevant now than they were when the Reformers first started to work for happiness and freedom?”

The Ambassador nodded. “In those days, Pala was still completely off the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society. Pala was completely viable, I’d say, until about 1905. Then, in less than a single generation, the world completely changed. Movies, cars, aeroplanes, radio. Mass production, mass slaughter, mass communication and, above all, plain mass—more and more people in bigger and bigger slums or suburbs. By 1930 any clearsighted observer could have seen that, for three-quarters of the human race, freedom and happiness were almost out of the question. Today, thirty years later, they’re completely out of the question. And meanwhile the outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and happiness. Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer. What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable.”

“So Pala will have to be changed—is that your conclusion?”

Mr Bahu nodded. “Radically.”

“Root and branch,” said the Rani with a prophet’s sadistic gusto.

“And for two cogent reasons,” Mr Bahu went on. “First because it simply isn’t possible for Pala to go on being different from the rest of the world. And, second, because it isn’t right that it should be different.”

“Not right for people to be free and happy?”

Once again the Rani said something inspirational about false happiness and the wrong kind of freedom.

Mr Bahu deferentially acknowledged her interruption, then turned back to Will.

“Not right,” he insisted. “Flaunting your blessedness in the face of so much misery—it’s sheer hubris , it’s a deliberate affront to the rest of humanity. It’s even a kind of affront to God.”

“God,” the Rani murmured voluptuously, “God . . .”

Then, re-opening her eyes, “These people in Pala,” she added, “they don’t believe in God. They only believe in Hypnotism and Pantheism and Free Love.” She emphasized the words with indignant disgust.

“So now,” said Will, “you’re proposing to make them miserable in the hope that this will restore their faith in God. Well, that’s one way of producing a conversion. Maybe it’ll work. And maybe the end will justify the means.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But I do see,” he added, “that, good or bad, and regardless of what the Palanese may feel about it, this thing is going to happen. One doesn’t have to be much of a prophet to foretell that Murugan is going to succeed. He’s riding the wave of the future. And the wave of the future is undoubtedly a wave of crude petroleum. Talking of crudity and petroleum,” he added, turning to the Rani, “I understand that you’re acquainted with my old friend, Joe Aldehyde.”

“You know Lord Aldehyde?”

“Well.”

“So that’s why my Little Voice was so insistent!” Closing her eyes again, she smiled to herself and slowly nodded her head. “Now I Understand.” Then, in another tone, “How is that dear man?” she asked.

“Still characteristically himself,” Will assured her.

“And what a rare self! L’homme au cerf-volant —that’s what I call him.”

“The man with the kite?” Will was puzzled.

“He does his work down here,” she explained; “but he holds a string in his hand, and at the other end of the string is a kite, and the kite is forever trying to go higher, higher, Higher. Even while he’s at work, he feels the constant Pull from Above, feels the Spirit tugging insistently at the flesh. Think of it! A man of affairs, a great Captain of Industry—and yet, for him, the only thing that Really Matters is the Immortality of the Soul.”

Light dawned. The woman had been talking about Joe Aldehyde’s addiction to Spiritualism. He thought of those weekly seances with Mrs Harbottle, the automatist; with Mrs Pym, whose control was a Kiowa Indian called Bawbo; with Miss Tuke and her floating trumpet out of which a squeaky whisper uttered oracular words that were taken down in shorthand by Joe’s private secretary: ‘ Buy Australian cement; don’t be alarmed by the fall in Breakfast Foods; unload forty per cent of your rubber shares and invest the money in IBM and Westinghouse . . .’

“Did he ever tell you,” Will asked, “about that departed stockbroker, who always knew what the market was going to do next week?”

“ Sidhis ,” said the Rani indulgently. “Just sidhis . What else can you expect? After all, he’s only a Beginner. And in this present life business is his karma . He was predestined to do what he’s done, what he’s doing, what he’s going to do. And what he’s going to do,” she added impressively and paused in a listening pose, her finger lifted, her head cocked, “what he’s going to do—that’s what my Little Voice is saying—includes some great and wonderful things here in Pala.”

“What a spiritual way of saying, ‘This is what I want to happen! Not as I will but as God wills—and by a happy coincidence God’s will and mine are always identical.’ ” Will chuckled inwardly, but kept the straightest of faces.

“Does your Little Voice say anything about South-East Asia Petroleum?” he asked.

The Rani listened again, then nodded. “Distinctly.”

“But Colonel Dipa, I gather, doesn’t say anything but ‘Standard of California.’ Incidentally,” Will went on, “why does Pala have to worry about the Colonel’s taste in oil companies?”

“My government,” said Mr Bahu sonorously, “is thinking in terms of a Five Year Plan for Inter-Island Economic Co-ordination and Co-operation.”

“Does Inter-Island Co-ordination and Co-operation mean that Standard has to be granted a monopoly?”

“Only if Standard’s terms were more advantageous than those of its competitors.”

“In other words,” said the Rani, “only if there’s nobody who will pay us more.”

“Before you came,” Will told her, “I was discussing this subject with Murugan. South-East Asia Petroleum, I said, will give Pala whatever Standard gives Rendang plus a little more.”

“Fifteen per cent more?”

“Let’s say ten.”

“Make it twelve and a half.”

Will looked at her admiringly. For someone who had taken the Fourth Initiation she was doing pretty well.

“Joe Aldehyde will scream with agony,” he said. “But in the end, I feel certain, you’ll get your twelve and a half.”

“It would certainly be a most attractive proposition,” said Mr Bahu.

“The only trouble is that the Palanese government won’t accept it.”

“The Palanese government,” said the Rani, “will soon be changing its policy.”

“You think so?”

“I KNOW it,” the Rani answered in a tone that made it quite clear that the information had come straight from the Master’s mouth.

“When the change of policy comes, would it help,” Will asked, “if Colonel Dipa were to put in a good word for South-East Asia Petroleum?”

“Undoubtedly.”

Will turned to Mr Bahu. “And would you be prepared, Mr Ambassador, to put in a good word with Colonel Dipa?”

In polysyllables, as though he were addressing a plenary session of some international organization, Mr Bahu hedged diplomatically. On the one hand, yes; but on the other hand, no. From one point of view, white; but from a different angle, distinctly black.

Will listened in polite silence. Behind the mask of Savonarola, behind the aristocratic monocle, behind the ambassadorial verbiage he could see and hear the Levantine broker in quest of his commission, the petty official cadging for a gratuity. And for her enthusiastic sponsorship of South-East Asia Petroleum, how much had the royal initiate been promised? Something, he was prepared to bet, pretty substantial. Not for herself, of course, no, no ! For the Crusade of the Spirit, needless to say, for the greater glory of Koot Hoomi.

Mr Bahu had reached the peroration of his speech to the international organization. “It must therefore be understood,” he was saying, “that any positive action on my part must remain contingent upon circumstances as, when and if these circumstances arise. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” Will assured him. “And now,” he went on with deliberately indecent frankness, “let me explain my position in this matter. All I’m interested in is money. Two thousand pounds without having to do a hand’s turn of work. A year of freedom just for helping Joe Aldehyde to get his hands on Pala.”

“Lord Aldehyde,” said the Rani, “is remarkably generous.”

“Remarkably,” Will agreed, “considering how little I can do in this matter. Needless to say, he’d be still more generous to anyone who could be of greater help.”

There was a long silence. In the distance a mynah bird was calling monotonously for attention. Attention to avarice, attention to hypocrisy, attention to vulgar cynicism . . . There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Will called out and, turning to Mr Bahu, “Let’s continue this conversation some other time,” he said.

Mr Bahu nodded.

“Come in,” Will repeated.

Dressed in a blue skirt and a short buttonless jacket that left her midriff bare and only sometimes covered a pair of apple-round breasts, a girl in her late teens walked briskly into the room. On her smooth brown face a smile of friendliest greeting was punctuated at either end by dimples. “I’m Nurse Appu,” she began. “Radha Appu.” Then, catching sight of Will’s visitors, she broke off. “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know . . .”

She made a perfunctory Knicks to the Rani.

Mr Bahu, meanwhile, had courteously risen to his feet. “Nurse Appu,” he cried enthusiastically. “My little ministering angel from the Shivapuram hospital. What a delightful surprise!”

For the girl, it was evident to Will, the surprise was far from delightful.

“How do you do, Mr Bahu,” she said without a smile and, quickly turning away, started to busy herself with the straps of the canvas bag she was carrying.

“Your Highness has probably forgotten,” said Mr Bahu; “but I had to have an operation last summer. For hernia,” he specified. “Well, this young lady used to come and wash me every morning. Punctually at eight-forty-five. And now, after having vanished for all these months, here she is again!”

“Synchronicity,” said the Rani oracularly. “It’s all part of the Plan.”

“I’m supposed to give Mr Farnaby an injection,” said the little nurse looking up, still unsmiling, from her professional bag.

“Doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders,” cried the Rani, overacting the role of royal personage deigning to be playfully gracious. “To hear is to obey. But where’s my chauffeur?”

“Your chauffeur’s here,” called a familiar voice.

Beautiful as a vision of Ganymede, Murugan was standing in the doorway. A look of amusement appeared on the little nurse’s face.

“Hullo, Murugan—I mean, Your Highness.” She bobbed another curtsey which he was free to take as a mark of respect or of ironic mockery.

“Oh hullo, Radha,” said the boy in a tone that was meant to be distantly casual. He walked past her to where his mother was sitting. “The car,” he said, “is at the door. Or rather the so-called car.” With a sarcastic laugh, “It’s a Baby Austin, 1954 vintage,” he explained to Will. “The best that this highly civilized country can provide for its royal family. Rendang gives its ambassador a Bentley,” he added bitterly.

“Which will be calling for me at this address in about ten minutes,” said Mr Bahu, looking at his watch. “So may I be permitted to take leave of you here, Your Highness?”

The Rani extended her hand. With all the piety of a good Catholic kissing a Cardinal’s ring, he bent over it; then, straightening himself up, he turned to Will.

“I’m assuming—perhaps unjustifiably—that Mr Farnaby can put up with me for a little longer. May I stay?”

Will assured the ambassador that he would be delighted.

“And I hope,” said Mr Bahu to the little nurse, “that there will be no objections on medical grounds?”

“Not on medical grounds,” said the girl in a tone that implied the existence of the most cogent non-medical objections.

Assisted by Murugan, the Rani hoisted herself out of her chair. “ Au revoir, mon cher Farnaby,” she said as she gave him her jewelled hand. Her smile was charged with a sweetness that Will found positively menacing.

“Good-bye, ma’am.”

She turned, patted the little nurse’s cheek and sailed out of the room. Like a pinnace in the wake of a full-rigged ship of the line, Murugan trailed after her.