He could never go to sleep during the day; but when he looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What’s What , and resumed his interrupted reading.

“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”

This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth.

“Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact—sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”

Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered on to the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the bottom of the page the initials S.M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and therefore public property. He read:

Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday’s Thirteen hundred thousand sermons; Somewhere between Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards; Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere Between our soiled and greasy currency of words And the first star, the great moths fluttering About the ghosts of flowers, Lies the clear place where I, no longer I, Nevertheless remember Love’s nightlong wisdom of the other shore; And, listening to the wind, remember too That other night, that first of widowhood, Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark. Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably! But I, no longer I, In this clear place between my thought and silence See all I had and lost, anguish and joys, Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass, Blue, unpossessed and open.

‘Like gentians,’ Will repeated to himself, and thought of that summer holiday in Switzerland when he was twelve; thought of the meadow, high above Grindelwald, with its unfamiliar flowers, its wonderful un-English butterflies; thought of the dark blue sky and the sunshine and the huge shining mountains on the other side of the valley. And all his father had found to say was that it looked like an advertisement for Nestlé’s milk chocolate. “Not even real chocolate,” he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. “ Milk chocolate.” After which there had been an ironic comment on the water colour his mother was painting—so badly (poor thing!) but with such loving and conscientious care. “The milk chocolate advertisement that Nestlé rejected.” And now it was his turn. “Instead of just mooning about with your mouth open, like the village idiot, why not do something intelligent for a change? Put in some work on your German grammar, for example.” And diving into the rucksack, he had pulled out, from among the hardboiled eggs and the sandwiches, the abhorred little brown book. What a detestable man! And yet, if Susila was right, one ought to be able to see him now, after all these years, glowing like a gentian—Will glanced again at the last line of the poem—‘blue, unpossessed and open.’

“Well . . .” said a familiar voice.

He turned towards the door. “Talk of the devil,” he said. “Or rather read what the devil has written.” He held up the sheet of notepaper for her inspection.

Susila glanced at it. “Oh, that ,” she said. “If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!” She sighed and shook her head.

“I was trying to think of my father as a gentian,” he went on. “But all I get is the persistent image of the most enormous turd.”

“Even turds,” she assured him, “can be seen as gentians.”

“But only, I take it, in the place you were writing about—the clear place between thought and silence?”

Susila nodded.

“How do you get there?”

“You don’t get there. There comes to you. Or rather there is really here.”

“You’re just like little Radha,” he complained. “Parroting what the Old Raja says at the beginning of this book.”

“If we repeat it,” she said, “it’s because it happens to be true. If we didn’t repeat it, we’d be ignoring the facts.”

“Whose facts?” he asked. “Certainly not mine.”

“Not at the moment,” she agreed. “But if you were to do the kind of things that the Old Raja recommends, they might be yours.”

“Did you have parent trouble?” he asked after a little silence. “Or could you always see turds as gentians?”

“Not at that age,” she answered. “Children have to be Manichean dualists. It’s the price we must all pay for learning the rudiments of being human. Seeing turds as gentians, or rather seeing both gentians and turds as Gentians with a capital G—that’s a post-graduate accomplishment.”

“So what did you do about your parents? Just grin and bear the unbearable? Or did your father and mother happen to be bearable?”

“Bearable separately,” she answered. “Especially my father. But quite unbearable together—unbearable because they couldn’t bear one another. A bustling, cheerful, outgoing woman married to a man so fastidiously introverted that she got on his nerves all the time—even, I suspect, in bed. She never stopped communicating, and he never started. With the result that he thought she was shallow and insincere, she thought he was heartless, contemptuous and without normal human feelings.”

“I’d have expected that you people would know better than to walk into that kind of trap.”

“We do know better,” she assured him. “Boys and girls are specifically taught what to expect of people whose temperament and physique are very different from their own. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the lessons don’t seem to have much effect. Not to mention the fact that in some cases the psychological distance between the people involved is really too great to be bridged. Anyhow, the fact remains that my father and mother never managed to make a go of it. They’d fallen in love with one another—goodness knows why. But when they came to close quarters, she found herself being constantly hurt by his inaccessibility, while her uninhibited good fellowship made him fairly cringe with embarrassment and distaste. My sympathies were always with my father. Physically and temperamentally I’m very close to him, not in the least like my mother. I remember, even as a tiny child, how I used to shrink away from her exuberance. She was like a permanent invasion of one’s privacy. She still is.”

“Do you have to see a lot of her?”

“Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world ‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving—isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”

“So all’s well now . But what about then ? What happened when you were a child, growing up between two people who couldn’t bridge the gulf that separated them? I know what that means—the fairy-story ending in reverse, ‘And so they lived unhappily ever after’.”

“And I’ve no doubt,” said Susila, “that if we hadn’t been born in Pala, we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things considered, remarkably well.”

“How did you manage to do that?”

“We didn’t; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that’s home-made and gratuitous?”

Will nodded. “I was just reading it when you came in.”

“Well, in the bad old days,” she went on, “Palanese families could be just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today. In fact they were so awful that Dr Andrew and the Raja of the Reform decided that something had to be done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were skilfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation the whole family system was radically changed.” She hesitated for a moment. “Let me explain,” she went on, “in terms of my own particular case—the case of an only child of two people who couldn’t understand one another and were always at cross purposes or actually quarrelling. In the old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the new dispensation I didn’t have to undergo unnecessary suffering, I wasn’t wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the moment I could toddle, I was free to escape.”

“To escape?” he repeated. “To escape?” It seemed too good to be true.

“Escape,” she explained, “is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement—to migrate to one of its other homes.”

“How many homes does a Palanese child have?”

“About twenty on the average.”

“Twenty? My God!”

“We all belong,” Susila explained, “to an MAC—a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents—everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers.”

Will shook his head. “Making twenty families grow where only one grew before.”

“But what grew before was your kind of family. The twenty are all our kind.” As though reading instructions from a cookery book, “ ‘Take one sexually inept wage-slave,’ ” she went on, “ ‘one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.’ Our recipe is rather different. ‘Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humour in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.’ ”

“And what comes out of your open pan?” he asked.

“An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages.”

“Do people stay in the same adoption club all their lives?”

“Of course not. Grown-up children don’t adopt their own parents or their own brothers and sisters. They go out and adopt another set of elders, a different group of peers and juniors. And the members of the new club adopt them and, in due course, their children. Hybridization of micro-cultures—that’s what our sociologists call the process. It’s as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens. Healthier relationships in more responsible groups, wider sympathies and deeper understandings. And the sympathies and understandings are for everyone in the MAC from babies to centenarians.”

“Centenarians? What’s your expectation of life?”

“A year or two more than yours,” she answered. “Ten per cent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can’t earn. But obviously pensions aren’t enough. They need something useful and challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in return. The MAC’s fulfill those needs.”

“It all sounds,” said Will, “suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese Communes.”

“Nothing,” she assured him, “could be less like a Commune than an MAC. An MAC isn’t run by the government, it’s run by its members. And we’re not militaristic. We’re not interested in turning out good party members; we’re only interested in turning out good human beings. We don’t inculcate dogmas. And finally we don’t take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there’s no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby-tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world—better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like—but freedom in a telephone booth.”

“Locked in,” Will elaborated, “(and I’m thinking now of myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr and a little girl who’d been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the martyr’s appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbecility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my Aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped.”

“And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you .”

“That’s not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!”

“Not so lyrical! Free, let’s say, as a developing human being, free as a future woman—but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn’t guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They’re apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they’re going to have to live when they’re grown up. ‘Holy’, ‘Healthy’, ‘whole’—they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the un holy family.”

“Amen,” said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. “What happens,” he asked after a pause, “when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?”

“It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That’s because, fundamentally, they’re very happy at home. I wasn’t, and so when I walked out, I’d sometimes stay away for a whole month.”

“And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?”

“It’s not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that’s being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that’s being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn’t think,” she added, “that it’s only when they’re in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience. And it isn’t just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights—brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the bird cages, minding the baby while the mother’s doing something else. Duties as well as privileges—but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer—working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying . . .” She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald’s mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, “But what about you ?” she went on. “I’ve been so busy talking about families that I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last.”

“Thanks to Dr MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practising medicine without a licence. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?”

Susila smiled. “You did it to yourself,” she assured him. “I merely pressed the buttons.”

“Which buttons?”

“Memory buttons, imagination buttons.”

“And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?”

“If you like to call it that.”

“What else can one call it?”

“Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?”

“But what did happen?”

“Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn’t we?”

“We certainly did,” he agreed. “And yet I don’t believe I even so much as looked at you.”

He was looking at her now, though—looking and wondering, as he looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.

“How could you look at me?” she said. “You’d gone off on your vacation.”

“Or was I pushed off?”

“Pushed? No.” She shook her head. “Let’s say seen off, helped off.” There was a moment of silence. “Did you ever,” she resumed, “try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?”

Will thought of the small neighbour who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.

“Poor little darling!” Susila went on. “He means so well, he’s so anxious to help.”

“But the paint’s on the carpet, the finger prints are all over the walls . . .”

“So that in the end you have to get rid of him. ‘Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!’ ”

There was a silence.

“Well?” he questioned at last.

“Don’t you see?”

Will shook his head.

“What happens when you’re ill, when you’ve been hurt? Who does the repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? Do you ?”

“Who else?”

“You?” she insisted. “ You? The person that feels the pain and does the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you capable of doing what has to be done?”

“Oh, I see what you’re driving at.”

“At last!” she mocked.

“Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?”

“Don’t ask me,” she answered. “That’s a question for a neurotheologian.”

“Meaning what?” he asked.

“Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology.”

“And the children?”

“The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups.”

“And so must be told to run along and play.”

“Exactly.”

“Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?” he asked.

“Standard procedure,” she assured him. “In your part of the world doctors get rid of the children by poisoning them with barbiturates. We do it by talking to them about cathedrals and jackdaws.” Her voice had modulated into a chant. “About white clouds floating in the sky, white swans floating on the dark, smooth, irresistible river of life . . .”

“Now, now,” he protested. “None of that!”

A smile lit up the grave dark face, and she began to laugh. Will looked at her with astonishment. Here, suddenly, was a different person, another Susila MacPhail, gay, mischievous, ironical.

“I know your tricks,” he added, joining in the laughter.

“Tricks?” Still laughing, she shook her head. “I was just explaining how I did it.”

“I know exactly how you did it. And I also know that it works. What’s more, I give you leave to do it again—whenever it’s necessary.”

“If you like,” she said more seriously, “I’ll show you how; press your own buttons. We teach it in all our elementary school The three R’s plus rudimentary S.D.”

“What’s that?”

“Self-Determination. Alias Destiny Control.”

“Destiny Control?” He raised his eyebrows.

“No, no,” she assured him, “we’re not quite such fools as you seem to think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable.”

“And you control it by pressing your own buttons?”

“Pressing our own buttons and then visualizing what we’d like to happen.”

“But does it happen?”

“In many cases it does.”

“Simple!” There was a note of irony in his voice.

“Wonderfully simple,” she agreed. “And yet, so far as I know, we’re the only people who systematically teach DC to their children. You just tell them what they’re supposed to do and leave it at that. Behave well, you say. But how? You never tell them. All you do is give them pep talks and punishments. Pure idiocy.”

“Pure unadulterated idiocy,” he agreed, remembering Mr Crabbe, his housemaster, on the subject of masturbation, remembering the canings and the weekly sermons and the Commination Service on Ash Wednesday. “Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbour’s wife. Amen.”

“If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don’t take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they’re apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have all those thousands of jails and churches and Communist cells.”

“Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few.”

Susila shook her head.

“No Alcatrazes here,” she said. “No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas of Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other home-made imaginary universe. And it really isn’t your fault. You’re almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behaviour.”

“ ‘For the good that I would,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“The man who invented Christianity—St Paul.”

“You see,” she said, “the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them.”

“Except the supernatural method of having them realized by Somebody Else.”

Throwing back his head, Will Farnaby burst into song.

“ There is a fountain fill’d with blood, Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, And sinners plunged beneath that flood Are cleansed of all their stains. ”

Susila had covered her ears. “It’s really obscene,” she said.

“My housemaster’s favourite hymn,” Will explained. “We used to sing it about once a week, all the time I was at school.”

“Thank goodness,” she said, “there was never any blood in Buddhism! Gautama lived till eighty and died from being too courteous to refuse bad food. Violent death always seems to call for more violent death. ‘If you won’t believe that you’re redeemed by my redeemer’s blood, I’ll drown you in your own.’ Last year I took a course at Shivapuram in the history of Christianity.” Susila shuddered at the memory. “What a horror! And all because that poor ignorant man didn’t know how to implement his good intentions.”

“And most of us,” said Will, “are still in the same old boat. The evil that we would not, that we do. And how!”

Reacting unforgivably to the unforgivable, Will Farnaby laughed derisively. Laughed because he had seen the goodness of Molly and then, with open eyes, had chosen the pink alcove and, with it, Molly’s unhappiness, Molly’s death, his own gnawing sense of guilt and then the pain, out of all proportion to its low and essentially farcical cause, the agonizing pain that he had felt when Babs in due course did what any fool must have known she inevitably would do—turned him out of her infernal gin-illumined paradise, and took another lover.

“What’s the matter?” Susila asked.

“Nothing. Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re not very good at hiding your feelings. You were thinking of something that made you unhappy.”

“You’ve got sharp eyes,” he said, and looked away.

There was a long silence. Should he tell her? Tell her about Babs, about poor Molly, about himself, tell her all the dismal and senseless things he had never, even when he was drunk, told even his oldest friends? Old friends knew too much about one, too much about the other parties involved, too much about the grotesque and complicated game which (as an English gentleman who was also a Bohemian, also a would-be poet, also—in mere despair, because he knew he could never be a good poet—a hard boiled journalist, and the private agent, very well paid, of a rich man whom he despised) he was always so elaborately playing. No, old friends would never do. But from this dark little outsider, this stranger to whom he already owed so much and with whom, though he knew nothing about her, he was already so intimate, there would come no foregone conclusions, no ex parte judgments—would come perhaps, he found himself hoping (he who had trained himself never to hope!) some unexpected enlightenment, some positive and practical help. (And, God knew, he needed help—though God also knew, only too well, that he would never say so, never sink so low as to ask for it.)

Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, “Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys.”

Will decided to take the plunge—but to take it indirectly, by talking first, not about his problems, but hers. Without looking at Susila (for that, he felt, would be indecent), he began to speak.

“Dr MacPhail told me something about . . . about what happened to your husband.”

The words turned a sword in her heart; but that was to be expected, that was right and inevitable. “It’ll be four months next Wednesday,” she said. And then, meditatively, “Two people,” she went on after a little silence, “two separate individuals—but they add up to something like a new creation. And then suddenly half of this new creature is amputated; but the other half doesn’t die—can’t die, mustn’t die.”

“Mustn’t die?”

“For so many reasons—the children, oneself, the whole nature of things. But needless to say,” she added with a little smile that only accentuated the sadness in her eyes, “needless to say the reasons don’t lessen the shock of the amputation or make the aftermath any more bearable. The only thing that helps is what we were talking about just now—Destiny Control. And even that . . .” She shook her head. “DC can give you a completely painless childbirth. But a completely painless bereavement—no. And of course that’s as it should be. It wouldn’t be right if you could take away all the pain of a bereavement; you’d be less than human.”

“Less than human,” he repeated. “Less than human . . .” Three short words; but how completely they summed him up! “The really terrible thing,” he said aloud, “is when you know it’s your fault that the other person died.”

“Were you married?” she asked.

“For twelve years. Until last spring . . .”

“And now she’s dead?”

“She died in an accident.”

“In an accident? Then how was it your fault?”

“The accident happened because . . . well, because the evil that I didn’t want to do, I did. And that day it came to a head. The hurt of it confused and distracted her, and I let her drive away in the car—let her drive away into a head-on collision.”

“Did you love her?”

He hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

“Was there somebody else—somebody you cared for more?”

“Somebody I couldn’t have cared for less.” He made a grimace of sardonic self-mockery.

“And that was the evil you didn’t want to do, but did?”

“Did and went on doing until I’d killed the woman I ought to have loved, but didn’t. Went on doing it even after I’d killed her, even though I hated myself for doing it—yes, and really hated the person who made me do it.”

“Made you do it, I suppose, by having the right kind of body?”

Will nodded, and there was a silence.

“Do you know what it’s like,” he asked at length, “to feel that nothing is quite real—including yourself?”

Susila nodded. “It sometimes happens when one’s just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It’s like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high.”

“Or low,” said Will. “In my case, the shift wasn’t up, it was down. No, not even down; it was into reverse. The first time it happened I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the centre of the universe. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible click, they were all maggots.”

“Maggots?”

“You know, those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people’s faces were the same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not even real maggots—just the ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that maggot-world for months. Lived in it, worked in it, went out to lunch and dinner in it—all without the least interest in what I was doing. Without the least enjoyment or relish, completely desireless and, as I discovered when I tried to make love to a young woman I’d had occasional fun with in the past, completely impotent.”

“What did you expect?”

“Precisely that.”

“Then why on earth . . .?”

Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. “As a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex-life of the phantom maggot.”

“After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal.”

“Even more,” he agreed, “if that was possible.”

“But what brought on the maggots in the first place?”

“Well, to begin with,” he answered, “I was my parents’ son. By Bully Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents’ son,” he went on after a little pause, “I was my Aunt Mary’s nephew.”

“What did your Aunt Mary have to do with it?”

“She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And after that nine months of X-rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the liver, and that was the end. I was there from start to finish. For a boy in his teens it was a liberal education—but liberal .”

“In what?” Susila asked.

“In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after the close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course. World War II. Followed by the non-stop refresher course of Cold War I. And all this time I’d been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I simply don’t have what it takes. And then, after the War, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but try to write something decent—good prose at least, seeing that it couldn’t be good poetry. But I’d reckoned without those darling parents of mine. By the time he died, in January forty-six, my father had got rid of all the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be supported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a success that were completely humiliating.”

“Why humiliating?”

“Wouldn’t you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success because I was so irremediably second-rate.”

“And the net result of it all was maggots?”

He nodded. “Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here’s where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot-party in Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane conversation about non-objective painting. Not wanting to see any more maggots, I didn’t look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly had very pale grey-blue eyes,” he added parenthetically, “eyes that saw everything—she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it, just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me why I was so sad. I’d had a couple of drinks and there was nothing impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her about the maggots. ‘And you’re one of them,’ I finished up, and for the first time I looked at her. ‘A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion’.”

“Was she flattered?”

“I think so. She’d stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain weakness for crucifixions and holy women. Anyhow, next morning she called me at breakfast time. Would I like to drive down into the country with her? It was Sunday and, by a miracle, fine. I accepted. We spent an hour in a hazel copse, picking primroses and looking at the little white windflowers. One doesn’t pick the windflowers,” he explained, “because in an hour they’re withered. I did a lot of looking in that hazel copse—looking at flowers with the naked eye and then looking into them through the magnifying glass that Molly had brought with her. I don’t know why, but it was extraordinarily therapeutic—just looking into the hearts of primroses and anemones. For the rest of the day I saw no maggots. But Fleet Street was still there, waiting for me, and by lunch time on Monday the whole place was crawling with them as thickly as ever. Millions of maggots. But now I knew what to do about them. That evening I went to Molly’s studio.”

“Was she a painter?”

“Not a real painter, and she knew it. Knew it and didn’t resent it, just made the best of having no talent. She didn’t paint for art’s sake; she painted because she liked looking at things, liked the process of trying meticulously to reproduce what she saw. That evening she gave me a canvas and a palette, and told me to do likewise.”

“And did it work?”

“It worked so well that when a couple of months later, I cut open a rotten apple, the worm at its centre wasn’t a maggot—not subjectively, I mean. Objectively, yes; it was all that a maggot should be, and that’s how I portrayed it, how we both portrayed it—for we always painted the same things at the same time.”

“What about the other maggots, the phantom maggots outside the apple?”

“Well, I still had relapses, especially in Fleet Street and at cocktail parties; but the maggots were definitely fewer, definitely less haunting. And meanwhile something new was happening in the studio. I was falling in love—falling in love because love is catching and Molly was so obviously in love with me—why, God only knows.”

“I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you because . . .” Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled, “Well, because you’re quite an attractive kind of queer fish.”

He laughed. “Thank you for a handsome compliment.”

“On the other hand,” Susila went on, “(and this isn’t quite so complimentary), she might have loved you because you made her feel so damned sorry for you.”

“That’s the truth, I’m afraid. Molly was a born Sister of Mercy.”

“And a Sister of Mercy, unfortunately, isn’t the same as a Wife of Love.”

“Which I duly discovered,” he said.

“After your marriage, I suppose.”

Will hesitated for a moment. “Actually,” he said, “it was before. Not because, on her side, there had been any urgency of desire, but only because she was so eager to do anything to please me. Only because, on principle, she didn’t believe in conventions and was all for freely loving, and more surprisingly” (he remembered the outrageous things she would so casually and placidly give utterance to even in his mother’s presence) “all for freely talking about that freedom.”

“You knew it beforehand,” Susila summed up, “and yet you still married her.”

Will nodded his head without speaking.

“Because you were a gentleman, I take it, and a gentleman keeps his word.”

“Partly for that rather old-fashioned reason, but also because I was in love with her.”

“ Were you in love with her?”

“Yes. No, I don’t know. But at the time I did know. At least I thought I knew. I was really convinced that I was really in love with her. And I knew, I still know, why I was convinced. I was grateful to her for having exorcised those maggots. And besides the gratitude there was respect. There was admiration. She was so much better and honester than I was. But unfortunately, you’re right: a Sister of Mercy isn’t the same as a Wife of Love. But I was ready to take Molly on her own terms, not on mine. I was ready to believe that her terms were better than mine.”

“How soon,” Susila asked, after a long silence, “did you start having affairs on the side?”

Will smiled his flayed smile. “Three months to the day after our wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office. Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a curly-headed little Jewish girl that Molly had helped with money while she was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her Studio twice a week, from five to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it.”

“And, I gather, she was upset?”

“Much more than I’d ever thought she’d be.”

“So what did you do about it?”

Will shook his head. “This is where it begins to get complicated,” he said. “I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing—what she really forced me to do—she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity,” he repeated, “not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me, and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering. Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I mean—sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time her unhappiness came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her unhappiness and to the pain her unhappiness was inflicting on me) that tenderness was always frustrated before it could come to its natural consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment—a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn’t commit myself, maybe I genuinely couldn’t. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old drama—the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contrapuntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curly-headed painter.”

“I hope at least they were enjoyable,” said Susila.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Only moderately. Rachel could never forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real enjoyment and of course the real agony—I never experienced them until Babs appeared on the scene.”

“When was that?”

“Just over a year ago. In Africa.”

“Africa?”

“I’d been sent there by Joe Aldehyde.”

“That man who owns newspapers?”

“ And all the rest. He was married to Molly’s Aunt Eileen. An exemplary family man, I may add. That’s why he’s so serenely convinced of his own righteousness, even when he’s engaged in the most nefarious financial operations.”

“And you’re working for him?”

Will nodded. “That was his wedding present to Molly—a job for me on the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I’d been getting from my previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly.”

“How did he react to Babs?”

“He never knew about her—never knew that there was any reason for Molly’s accident.”

“So he goes on employing you for your dead wife’s sake?”

Will shrugged his shoulders. “The excuse,” he said, “is that I have my mother to support.”

“And of course you wouldn’t enjoy being poor.”

“I certainly wouldn’t.”

There was a silence.

“Well,” said Susila at last, “let’s get back to Africa.”

“I’d been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line for Uncle Joe. It was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to her.”

“Next to the young woman you couldn’t have liked less?”

“Couldn’t have liked less,” he repeated, “or disapproved of more. But if you’re an addict you’ve got to have your dope—the dope that you know in advance is going to destroy you.”

“It’s a funny thing,” she said reflectively, “but in Pala we have hardly any addicts.”

“Not even sex-addicts?”

“The sex-addicts are also person-addicts. In other words, they’re lovers.”

“But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love.”

“Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly—that’s part of the Art of Loving.”

As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before—the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to a higher power—Rachel squared, Rachel to the n th. And the unhappiness that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel. Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting, what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become more demanding, was claiming ever more and more of his time—time not only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and nightclubs, at her horrible friends’ cocktail parties, on week-ends in the country. “Just you and me, darling,” she would say, “all alone together.” All alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the craving persisted. After one of those dreadful week-ends, he was as hopelessly a Babs-addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no less hopelessly a Will Farnaby-addict. Hopelessly so far as he was concerned—for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the addiction was always and irrepressibly hopeful. She never ceased to expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind, unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her and going to live with Babs—it was only then that hope had finally given place to hopelessness. “Do you mean it, Will—do you really mean it?” “I really mean it.” It was in hopelessness that she had walked out to the car, in utter hopelessness had driven away into the rain—into her death. At the funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again. That evening, while he was sitting at his desk, trying to write an article on “What’s Wrong With Youth”, trying not to remember the hospital, the open grave and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of condolence, no doubt . . . He had opened, and there, instead of the telegram, was Babs—dramatically without make-up and all in black.

“My poor, poor Will!” They had sat down on the sofa in the living room, and she had stroked his hair and both of them had cried. An hour later, they were naked and in bed. Within three months, as any fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.

“Do you really mean it, Babs?”

She really meant it.

There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant later, startlingly loud and slightly out of tune, “Here and now, boys,” shouted a talking bird.

“Shut up!” Will shouted back.

“Here and now, boys,” the mynah repeated. “Here and now, boys. Here and . . .”

“Shut up!”

There was silence.

“I had to shut him up,” Will explained, “because of course he’s absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren’t they? What about your husband’s death, for example? Is that irrelevant?”

Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her head. “In the context of what I have to do now—yes, completely irrelevant! That’s something I had to learn.”

“Does one learn how to forget?”

“It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.” She gave him a sad little smile and added, “It isn’t easy.”

“It isn’t easy,” Will repeated. And suddenly all his defences were down, all his pride had left him. “Will you help me?” he asked.

“It’s a bargain,” she said, and held out her hand.

A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr MacPhail had entered the room.