I, you, Benson, you are crawling on your belly along a crack in the ground, urged on by the cicadas. In front of you, some yard or two, crawls Lance-corporal Thompson, you can see the soles of his boots, and his rump, and the back of his helmet. You are looking for a place to put a forward machine-gun post. It seems incredible. You are in fear because this crack in the ground is a shallow one and the enemy positions are close. You know they are close and you think you know where they are but you might be wrong. In this complex delta of the Moletta the lines are hopelessly confused, we are just where the winter offensive left us.

This day is sunny. You are crawling and sweating and afraid and the sound of the cicadas is in your ears. Late April then, not so long before the break-out. In April the weather got warmer. The cicadas seemed to start up at once and all together, like a sudden celebration of something – not peace or an end to fear and boredom. But it was a cry of life. It laid a pulsing swathe of sound over the ruins of war and winter, the devastated landscape of the Wadis. That shrilling intensified with the heat as if in some way a response to pain.

That must mean there was shrub. Yes, the ground in that sector was not churned up so much. Good cover then. Walters behind you … No, not that day. By that day you had been doing your act for a month, more than a month. Burlington Bertie and Velma the Vamp. No, you are with Thompson. This was the first day of heat. This was the first day of real heat. This was the day you came upon the German and shot him.

He was there, inexplicably in the open, in the sunshine. He had taken off his helmet, He was combing his hair. In some way quite beyond determining he had mistaken matters, misunderstood the terrain. Cardinal crime. Otherwise what was he doing there, alone, dreaming, unprotected, the Spandau before him, its barrel pointing towards the ground? The sun had brought him out. Some hope, relaxed caution, prospect of change after the misery of winter, the weeks of stalemate, the murderous closeness of the lines? That long constraint of the trenches, the random deaths, the oppression of fear. Then the rain stops, the clouds roll away, the sun shines down. Like an unwary insect. No, human.

“He’s yours,” Thompson whispers courteously, keeping his head down. “Shoot the fucker.”

You can’t shoot him yet. Why not? Is it because he seems to be putting on a performance, not merely enjoying the sunshine but somehow, though he doesn’t know we are there, signalling his enjoyment? He is handsome with his fair hair and prominent chin. He puts the comb away. He yawns and pats his mouth. He stretches his arms and arches his back. Alone there, with no audience that he knew of, he was acting. Like a child. You glance from him to ferrety Thompson, whose eyes under whiteish lashes are fixed, staring with ferocious intent. Go on, he says. Shoot the fucker. Thompson despises you. The cicadas are loud. The German doesn’t know that Thompson and you are watching him but he behaves as if he had an audience. That is strange, metaphysical. So he is performing for death. What else? So he is not in the wrong place at all. You can smell the sweat and clay of both Thompson and yourself. For fuck’s sake get on with it. He must have heard the sound of the bolt because at the last moment he raised his head. You squeezed the trigger, smack in the temple, twenty yards. His legs jerked up, he fell backwards. As he went over he made one single loud squawking sound like a hen. Ugly sound, oddly contemptuous. It was exactly as though he had booed himself off stage.

That is the way the show ends, not with a whimper but a squawk. You have killed him over again a good many times since. Not so much out of guilt. He was there to be shot just as you were there to shoot him. Why else were you crawling about with a gun? No, because he, Thompson, compelled you, with his rage and contempt. Shoot the fucker. In some sense you have been in servitude co Thompson ever since. To this noisome street singer, bin-scavenger. Thompson noted the place so he could return in the dark, pick over the body. Star looter Thompson, he brought the helmet back. That was another day. That was the day Slater spoke to you about his idea for putting on a show. He spoke about it that same night, back at B-echelon, after we had been relieved.

Well after midnight when we got back. We were exhausted. Can you spare me a few minutes, Benson? Why did he choose you? There was a full moon that night. We stood talking near the water in the shadow of a bombed house. Dirty-smelling haze over the water from the smoke canisters we used to protect our shipping. Through this the sea had a smooth, oily gleam on it. Slater’s face haggard, handsome in its severe way, very regular, level brows, straight mouth. His mouth sharp in the corners. His eyes were light – pale blue or grey. Alive and eager that night because of his idea. “I want to get a concert party together,” he said.

The gods had favoured Second-Lieutenant Slater. You knew that, little as you knew of the world, little as you knew of him. Not so much visible signs of privilege or wealth, but it was there in his voice and looks. Most of us there were reduced to common paste, mere blobs of humanity, even the officers. But there was a distinction about Slater, as if he knew himself to be special. “I want to get a sort of concert party together,” he said. “Using people from the unit.”

As he spoke there was a swift flash of gun-fire from somewhere further along the coast, then a whole series of flashes, one after the other. In that second of silence the sky was lit up and Slater’s face caught some light from the glow. He was smiling slightly. He began to say something else, but then the crashes of the guns came, drowning his voice.

That was the same day. Earlier that day, early in the morning, Thompson came back with the German helmet. Looter Thompson had to come back with something. He carried it up-ended, like a begging bowl …

“You don’t look well.” Rathbone took a feverish drag at his cigarette. “That woman,” he said, apparently in reference to his last client. “Very unfortunate for you,” he said, “getting on the wrong side of Dollinger. Has he made his move yet?”

“No.”

“Well, he takes his time over things, Dollinger does. He keeps his seasons and his rages. He moves in a mysterious way. Dollinger was a wrestler, you know.”

“So they say.”

“The story goes that he was forced to retire from the ring after killing a man. Have you seen her?”

“Yes, once or twice. She just gives me a look, you know. Dragon.”

“Don’t malign the dragon. It’s a very complex symbol, terrible but necessary, something you could hardly say about Mrs Dollinger. Only he who conquers the dragon can become a hero. Jung goes so far as to say that the dragon is a mother image.”

“Really?”

“Of course it can be anything. I’ve been thinking about that fire of yours, that started all the trouble. The difficulty is to know whether to take the positive or the negative side of it. If you take the positive side it looks very good indeed because the owl is Athena’s bird and she is the principle by which a man can combine power and wisdom. She is the embodiment of harmony, enabling us to see the pattern and the meaning of life. And of course the beetle, which rolls its eggs along in a ball of its own dung, is an age-old symbol of creation. From that angle, as I say, it looks very good, especially for someone in your line of business. But of course the owl is the death harbinger too. Balance and order can become inflexible and sterile. This aspect of Athena’s nature is reflected in her shield, which bore Medusa’s head, and in later fairy tales where the birds symbolically associated with her had the power to turn men to stone. As for the beetle … have you read Kafka’s Metamorphosis?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you have the negative symbolism of the beetle. Industry and the brittle shell – the façade adopted for work – have completely taken over. Take someone like yourself, a writer. Suppose for the sake of argument you are drying up. As your creative impulse gets more and more crusted over, you spend less time actually writing and more and more time researching, making notes, keeping records of one sort or another. Now the culmination of that process—”

“Excuse me,” Benson said. “All this is fascinating stuff but I’ve got a client due to arrive in a couple of minutes.”

“I hope you’re telling them all about my show?”

“I am, yes.”

“They can have a free ticket,” Rathbone said. “Money is not the object. I want a good audience. You won’t forget the date?”

“No.”

He was not likely to forget the date: Rathbone was making his debut as a stage hypnotist on May 22, the day of the break-out from Anzio.

He duly told Hogan, the client referred to, about Rathbone’s show, not of course mentioning the coincidence of the date. Rather to his surprise Hogan said he would like a ticket. Benson entered his name on the list and told him the address. Rathbone was having his show in an obscure church-hall off Lodge Lane – he had not succeeded in getting a proper theatre.

“It should be interesting,” Benson said.

Hogan made no reply to this and a silence developed which Benson for some time lacked energy to break. He felt exhausted this morning, after a night of uneasy memories and broken dreams; and Hogan’s face, which misery had made stiff and immobile, seemed, in a rather nightmarish way, like a projection of his own psychic disorder. The other’s props and attributes too gave him this morning the same disturbing sense of emanating from himself, from some dark, unacknowledged recess of his own being: the navy suit, the neat maroon tie, the shiny briefcase with gilt clasps, the expanding scent of sweetness from the plastered hair, were like secret vices of his own.

“Well,” he said at last, with a sense of enormous effort, “how is your novel coming along?”

“I’ve been getting on with the research,” Hogan said.

With a continued sense of unwilling involvement, Benson watched the other open his briefcase, saw him extract the roll of paper, saw him unfurl it, hold it out, saw words and asterisks and arrows in red and green and blue. There was more of it now – the unfurled part was eighteen inches long at least. Hogan sat holding it up to view.

“But you are going farther and farther back into the past.” With feelings of dismay Benson peered at the strip of paper. “Last time you had stopped at your parents’ wedding,” he said. “I thought that was pushing it a bit for an autobiographical novel. Now I see references to Zeppelins and your grandfather’s emigration from Donegal.” There were ominous arrows pointing even further back. “Death of Queen Victoria,” he read. “Potato Famine.” Hogan had slipped into the nineteenth century.

Benson took a deep breath. “Michael,” he said, “this can’t go on. What will happen, how will you keep it all in your scheme? You can’t go on adding things to the roll. It will be impossibly long.” He paused a moment, casting around for arguments. “What happens when it gets too long for your arms?” he said.

He looked across the desk. Hogan’s blue eyes were dilated, enormous. He was disappearing, swooning into the past; he was in the grip of an infinite regression. Benson felt he should throw him a lifeline, try to tow him back. But it wasn’t that altogether, it wasn’t a surrender. Hogan’s face registered so little, that was the trouble. Faces vary in their power to register sorrows and below the pallor and rigidity of depression Hogan’s seemed to lack all notation.

“You must come back to yourself,” Benson said gently. “This was to have been a novel based on your own life, perhaps not completely, but in general outline based on your early life, experiences of childhood and so on and in particular the love affair of the adolescent boy with an older woman, Mrs Rand, then his return to childhood sweetheart, Mirabel, whom he marries. That was about it, wasn’t it?”

Hogan nodded.

“Then why all this about Zeppelins and the Potato Famine?” But, even as he asked this, Benson knew the answer. Life had broken the idyll for Hogan. The promise of the plot had not been fulfilled. Experience of passion with Mrs Rand, return to virginal sweetheart Mirabel, happy ever after. But he had lost his job and failed to find another and Mirabel had walked out on him, taking the children. Now with his arrows and his coloured inks he was trying to find a place in the past for the blame to lodge. Am I not doing the same? Benson thought. He had been lying awake half the night trying to do the same. What was there to be found now, at this stage, in that murderous labyrinth of the Wadis, but some clue to the crusted silence of the present? Empty bellies in Ireland, Thompson crawling with the German helmet up-ended like a begging bowl … Brothers, he thought, looking at Hogan’s rigid face.

“If only you could find a beginning,” he said. “A few words are enough to begin a story. ‘Her eyes were shining’, for example, or ‘A gin and tonic, please’. Even one word is enough – ‘Dawn’, say, or ‘Mosquitoes’. An expletive will often do the trick, ‘Fuck it!’ for example. Then you are launched.”

He enlarged on this, time passed. Hogan had stood up to go, was extracting from his briefcase the volume he had brought to give Benson, when the door bell rang. It was Anthea Best-Cummings, in such haste to read her latest poem that she barely paused to acknowledge Hogan’s presence.

“It’s called ‘Flying to Byzantium’,” she said, tossing back her hair. “With apologies to William Butler.” The accent was extraordinary, the invincible, throat-articulated modulations of the upper class conflicting violently with Anthea’s efforts to sound like a prole.

“Go ahead.” Benson noticed with some surprise that Hogan had seated himself once again and folded his arms with every appearance of interest.

“It’s quite short.” As always, Anthea passed from haste to hesitation when it came to the actual moment of reading. She had come on her motorbike, he saw – she was dressed in her studded black leathers. These gave her a squat appearance, belied by her face, which was thin and undernourished-looking, with spots here and there. She wore her usual tense, sulky expression. Not for the first time Benson wondered what Anthea’s parents must make of it all. She had fled them and the green belt of Surrey where they lived, fled ponies and promising young men and a job in an art gallery run by one of daddy’s friends, fled the lush lands of the South for this decaying city. What did they make of her in the wilds of Birkenhead, where she had chosen to live? Life is more real here, she had once said to him. Standing there, frowning over her piece of paper, she seemed to him now a living battleground of nature and nurture. Training, precept, exhortation had clashed with Anthea’s yearning for urban slums and heavy rock and black leather and poetry and pot. But there had been no victory; the unhappy, defensive face proclaimed that.

“It needs reworking here and there.” She glanced at Hogan, who gave her a sudden smile of encouragement.

“Well, we are listening,” Benson said.

“Here goes then:

“Borne on the wings of a dick-trip

Through icon haze and star burst,

Uterine splendours of purple and gold,

Sperm shower,

To that city of coiners and theologians

Where my cunt

Conquers the cross.”

Anthea looked up. A flush had crept into her face. “It needs one or two things doing to it,” she said.

“Hm.” Benson was silent a moment. Then he said cautiously, “That’s an effective ending, with the repeated hard ‘c’ and those strong monosyllables. But haven’t you made a mistake in the first line? You seem to have transposed the syllables. Shouldn’t it be triptych?”

“Good God!” Anthea cried, running a hand through her long and rather greasy hair. “You’ve missed the whole point. It’s meant to be written like that.”

Suddenly, most unexpectedly, Hogan leaned forward and began to speak. “As I see it,” he said, “this is a play on words. The poem is about a trip, right? A trip is a journey but it is also an experience. Now the experience in this poem is to do with female orgasm. So it is a dick-trip, right? But a triptych has wings and they could carry you off into a different sort of experience. As I see it, this is a very complicated pun.”

Benson felt his mouth inclined to fall open. In all his dealings with Hogan, he had never heard him say more than half a dozen words together. Now his face had lost some of that terrible stiffness. His eyes had a light in them.

“That’s it exactly,” Anthea said excitedly. Again she ran a hand through her hair. In suddenly lowered tones she said, “You have understood my poem completely.”

“It’s a very good poem,” Hogan said. “As I see it, it is also a feminist poem.”

Anthea looked at him like the first woman looking at the first man. It was a look that pierced through Hogan’s despicably bourgeois appearance and went straight to the core. “Are you a writer too?” she said.

“I am working on a novel,” Hogan said.

“What is it about?”

“Well, it is partly autobiographical. It’s about childhood and adolescence in Liverpool. When the hero is eighteen he meets this older woman at a dance. She is from the South and she – you are from the South too, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Anthea was ashamed of it. “Surrey,” she said.

“Surrey,” Hogan said lingeringly. “Anyway, they, you know, have an affair.”

“You two carry on,” Benson said. “I’m going to make some tea. Oh, Michael,” he added, turning at the door, “You might remember to tell Anthea about Rathbone’s show.”

From any distance away this great deathtrap vanished, the torn and devastated earth seemed to heal its own gashes, all the gullies and channels of the labyrinth closed together, smoothed themselves over. From the road that went north to Carroceto it looked like a dead level plain. Nothing was visible of their lines or ours, the water-courses, the crumbling dykes, the corpses cluttering the streams, rotting in the soft earth of the banksides and the brambled ditches. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that in the fighting of that winter whole regiments had been swallowed up here. If you had fought in them, seen people die in them, looking across those innocuous-seeming levels brought a terrible sense of unreality and despair, as if some last vital shred of meaning had been taken away. Enough to make one distrust for ever all appearances of peace. Perhaps it was that, echoing childhood fears of the still surface, scum on a deep pond, motionless leaves or grasses, which gives me now as I enter old age such a taste for signs and emblems – meanings that lurk below the placid surface. Once through that calm screen you are in the jungle. Archetypal Jungle, must tell Rathbone that one … I wasn’t much more than a child, at least from present perspectives – twenty years old, I was twenty that April. Those few months my only experience of battle. It was like being a child again. Childhood games of stalking and hiding, make-believe of terror, not much different from the real thing.

He lay on his back staring up through the darkness, wide-eyed and sleepless, the silence of these memories constricting his heart. There was the smell that lay over everything; no healing perspectives could cloak that. Not death only: a compound odour, wet clay, excrement, decay. Smell always plays the traitor. Like a pall over the place. The docks of Liverpool stank of the slave traffic, the shambles-odour mixed with smells of tar and rum. It came from the holds and decks of the ships. The stench of it would have been wafted on a sea breeze to the nostrils of the wigged merchants and their rouged wives on the steps of their fine houses. On warm days through open windows into their stuffed parlours. Easier to avert the eye than block the nose. Much easier for me at least with my famous sense of smell. Hearing too first-rate still and my eyes, until recently … Some, of course, who neither see nor smell anything untoward, they could wade through shit and come out smelling of lavender. The inimitable Doctor Dobson, for instance. Writing in 1772 he found Liverpool the most salubrious of places. Slave-trade at its height, worst urban slums in Europe …

Perhaps not so surprising. The ships went forth with goods not offensive to the smell – Lancashire cottons, trinkets, small arms. And when they got back months later to Salt House or Queen’s Dock they were stuffed with the aromas of the New World, sugar, coffee, tobacco. The cargoes they carried in between, on the Middle Passage, the long haul from Africa to the plantations of Jamaica and Carolina, these printed stronger odours. No scrubbing or hosing could get rid of it. Ship after ship, year after year. How many? Seventy years of it. Perhaps two million men, women and children carried in those Liverpool ships. The smell of misery ingrained in the timbers … Steam of blood and soaked khaki, between two rows the medic walks down, looking right and left, not pausing long. Walters a bundle of bloody rags left alone there in the gully, his face dark with blood and the boot polish we had put on for the patrol. He lies still, legs drawn up, as if he is ashamed to have lost half his insides, ashamed to be dying …

Benson lay tense, taking shallow breaths, tracing repeatedly in the darkness familiar, darker shapes, the lines of the wardrobe, owl’s launching pad; the folds and drapes of the curtain; the marble horse on the table below the window – this he knew well as he had often held it in his hands, and so was not sure now, in the obscurity of his room, whether he was seeing or merely remembering the lines of its body, jags of its mane. We charge things with reality by giving our attention to them. One of the great seductions of literary creation, godlike to confer reality. What I miss, what I lack. Truth is the glory of reality, Simone Weil said. I don’t understand that, he whispered in the darkness. That is the religious view. My father might have understood it. He was after all a man of God. But reality for my father was something not to be transcended but corrected. He corrected my realities with the rod. Squawk of the killed soldier, Walters dying for my mistake, the man clambering over the white railings in that freakish weather, miseries of the slave-trade, a baby crying in the night in the condemned estate where Thompson lives, the peculations of financiers, prominent in my scrapbooks, insatiable greed of men who live in mansions, who have millions, these are realities to me. What could unify and transcend them, spread over them this glorious paste of truth?

The horse was real, he had touched it. Sheila’s body was real too, though he hadn’t. As real as Alma Corrigan’s, more real in a sense as he had not so far permitted himself to think in that way about Alma, not charged her body with reality, so to speak, though her face came often to his mind, the slightly bitter mouth, the brilliant eyes, contempt in them for what she saw as his self-indulgence. He felt the stirring of excitement. I invoke thee, O Muse.

The Wadis were real for ever, though long since drained and bulldozed into vineyards. I all but left my bones there, I, you, Benson’s bones, the bones of Voluptuous Velma, the Beachhead Vamp. Slater asked me to be the woman. You have such small bones, Benson, the reason I ask. Little Benson, he called me.

They liked it, one great roar when we came on stage, our act was twenty years out of date even then, but they liked it, that duet we did and the dance, I sang falsetto, hurt the throat. Parody of Edwardian flirtation and then the bit of stripping at the end, down to my bra and pants. The CO stopped that. I can see myself in the red silk dress or the black blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, black stockings, garters. I shaved my legs. High-heeled shoes. Blaspheming companionably there with Walters, waiting to go on, listening to Killer Thompson’s dirges. When this bleeding war is over, no more soldiering for me. He always struck a mournful note. Hymns now. I wore make-up, wig, all padded out. They ransacked the wrecked houses of Anzio and Nettuno to get costumes for us.

Anzio, Nettuno, Carroceto, Campo Leone … He drifted back into sleep on this litany of names and woke groaning and fearful in the first light of morning with shreds of names and nicknames fluttering still in his mind. Stonk Corner, Gordon’s Ridge, Smelly Farm. Beyond the ridge of Buonriposo lay the Wadis of the Upper Moletta Stream …

Buonriposo, good repose. The irony of some of those names. Isola Bella, Campo di Carne. He lay on his back while the light strengthened slowly and the fear that had come with waking grew less. That geography of the war varied strangely in intensity. Features that had gone unregarded would assume terrible importance. A ruined farm house, a few yards of embankment. An hour later, after the deaths, they might as well have been on the moon. Significant only because they were fought over. We gave them our attention, charged them with reality. Perhaps it was this that made me want to write, a wish to make the places constant, rebut this indecent fluctuation. No, childhood formed my intentions without my knowing it, seeing my composition on the wall with a gold star from the teacher, my parents and others stopping to look, my father with something to be proud of at last. That is when I started to want to make the names constant and splendid.

Not many gold stars lately. My sixty-three-year-old body under the sheets in this room not my own. The same that danced and strutted in its red dress and the silver lamé shoes with ankle straps, smooth, shaved legs in sheer stockings. Every little movement tells a tale. That was the best one we did, our best number. Thompson came back from a killing trip one morning with the stain of orgasm showing through his trousers …

He raised his head, looked carefully at the shape of his wardrobe, followed with his eyes the complex folds of the curtains. Ritual inspection was a habit he had formed in terror-ridden childhood and never lost; he had used it all his life like a sort of meditation, to ward off evil; he had used it in the Wadis, striving to print on his mind the configuration of the ground in the most intimate detail possible. Familiarise yourself with the terrain. Slater meant the stage as well. We were frightened there too, he thought. There on the stage. Frightened of displeasing Lieutenant Slater, who had put on the show. Frightened of getting the steps and movements wrong somehow, spoiling things, disappointing the audience. What an audience that was. Acting, moving about on the stage, every movement buoyed on sound. They knew the song by heart. The words flickered through his mind again in their precise, imperishable order.

‘Every little movement has a meaning of its own,

Every little movement tells a tale.

At the back, round here, there’s a kind of

wibble-wobble

And she glides like this … ’

With every inflection there was a movement to make, a place on the stage for me to be. Walters too, aping the Edwardian Johnnie, doing the sort of comic, randy, strutting dance that Slater had taught him, rather stiff, leaning forward slightly, sticking out his bum, leering, winking, raising his straw boater. A parody of course, because I wasn’t a woman, everybody knew that, though I was indistinguishable from one. In a sense it didn’t matter. Objective gender description was hardly the point. On stage, made-up, padded-out, wiggling and gliding, schooled by Slater, I was a woman. I was a symbolical woman for the thousands of men there, a woman in the eyes that watched me and the throats and mouths that applauded. And punctuating the dance that great breath of applause, the rising ooh when the skirt lifted, derisive, savage, and the baying roar for Walters, whose movements, as Salter had designed them, made every man in the audience an accomplice.

This same body, he thought with wonder. The same that danced. The same that crawled through the maze of watercourses. Lying now so quiet and apprehensive, prey to recollection. He tensed his body, curled and flexed his fingers. The things these hands have done …

“Would you be interested in a free ticket to a stage show that is being put on by a friend of mine, a hypnotist?”

“Yes, yes,” Jennifer Colomb said. “Give me one, no two. Perhaps father might like to come.” She was fidgety, impatient as always to hear his verdict on her latest pages.

“Well now,” he said, looking down at the neat page. Jennifer always typed her work immaculately.

Lady Margaret sat her chestnut yearling like the true horsewoman she was, her posture erect and supple. ‘‘So now,” she said, “I trust your conscience is at rest.”

Despite the teasing intention of her words, they came a thought hastily, a thought breathlessly. She had mused much upon this man in her maidenly reveries, aware of his power and domination, the steely will that lay behind his gentle manner. In his words there was sometimes the insinuation of some special relationship between them. Did she want that? Could she handle fire without getting burned? There was something dark in him, a hint of brutality in the curl of his lip, something restless, permanently unsatisfied, which in her woman’s way she could surmise but never understand. How different from the gentle Sir Denis, to whom she was affianced, who was away now on a tour of the family estates in Dulwich. Denis, with his guileless blue eyes, his love of country pursuits, coursing and rackets and partridge pie. Denis, whom she knew so well. As different, she thought, seeking to find the words that would do justice to her thought, yes, as different as the hawk from the dove.

She fell into a dream as they rode ever deeper into the wildwood, their horses treading softly on the leafy carpet. The trees closed around them. Gradually, without her noticing it, they had left the lords and ladies of their retinue far behind. She was startled, almost, to hear Sir Reginald’s deep voice at her side. “The trees grow close here,” he said. “Shall we play a trick on them? It would be good sport to conceal ourselves somewhere about these thickets and give them the slip. What think you?”

Veteran of many a desperate throw, he was gambling on her youthful spirit of adventure. Madcap Maggie, she had been called in her nursery days – not so far behind, as she was barely eighteen summers. All the same, she hesitated. Despite the jesting tone there had been that in his voice that might inspire caution in a maid. Something was here that needed to be brought out in the open. “La, Sir,” she said. ‘‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s coming on.” There was not much, by this time, that could really be said about Treacherous Dreams. It went on its way, followed a certain obscure logic of its own. Strictures would merely wound the author. Sooner or later whatever it was that needed to be brought out in the open would perhaps flash forth, but there seemed no reason to suppose it would be very soon.

“Do you really think so?”

“I do, yes.”

“But do you think I’m getting the feel of the period?”

“What period is it?” Benson said unguardedly.

“What period? Do you mean to say that you have been reading my novel all this time and you still don’t know what period it is?”

“Well, of course,” Benson said hastily, “there is a flavour of the Regency in it. Sir Reginald is a Byronic character, isn’t he?”

She had flushed, he saw, and seemed close to tears. “It is eighteenth-century,” she said. “I have tried so hard to get the true accent of the time.” She paused, clutched her handbag, tried to smile. “Of course,” she said, “I know how busy you are.”

How is it, I wonder, he thought, that all of them, without exception, manage to say something in the course of these sessions that goes straight to my heart? In a lifetime of self abnegation this novel was her only autonomy. “No,” he said, “not busy, just terribly stupid. It’s not really much excuse but I am a bit preoccupied these days. You go on with your book, Jennifer. Try to get the feelings right. Period detail can always be tidied up afterwards.”

Later, sleepless, pages strewn around him, he tried to come to his own terms with the accents of the period:

Some wet and blowing weather having occasioned the port holes to be shut and the grating to be covered, fluxes and fevers among the negroes ensued. While they were in this situation, my profession requiring it, I frequently went down among them, till at length their apartments became so extremely hot as to be only sufferable for a very short time. But the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of their flux that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting. Numbers of the slaves had fainted, they were carried upon deck, where several of them died, and the rest were, with difficulty, restored.

The Grand Pillage is executed by the King’s soldiers, from three hundred to six thousand at a time, who attack and set fire to a Village and seize the Inhabitants as they can. In the Lesser Pillage, parties lie in wait about the Village and take off all they can surprise which is also done by Individuals who do not belong to the King but are private Robbers.

Sestro, december the 29th 1724. No trade to day tho’ many Traders came on board, they informed us that the People are gone to War within Land and will bring prisoners enough in two or three Days in Hopes of which we stay.

The 30th. No Trade yet; but our Traders came on board to Day and informed us the People had burned four Towns of their Enemies and indeed we have seen great smoke all morning a good Way up the Country so that tomorrow we expect Slaves.

On leaving the Gulf of Guinea, that part of the ocean must be traversed, so fatal to navigators, where long calms detain the ships under a sky charged with electric clouds, pouring down by turns torrents of rain and of fire. This sea of thunder, being a focus of mortal diseases, is avoided as much as possible, both in approaching the coasts of Africa and those of America.

The slave ship Louisa on her fourth voyage, having sold 326 negroes at Jamaica for the sum of £19,315, 13s, 6d, the profit (after adding interest on account sales, £1051, 19s, 7d, and deducting £1234, 2s, 8d for disbursments & commissions etc.) amounted to £19,133, 10s, 5d, which was apportioned among the owners as follows: —Thomas Leyland £9566, 15s, 2½d; R. Bullin £4783, 7s, 7¼d; Thomas Molyneux £4783, 7s, 7¼d.

No gold finders can endure so much noisome slavery as they do who carry negroes; for those have some respite and satisfaction, but we endure twice the misery; and yet by their mortality our voyages are ruined, and we pine and fret ourselves to death, to think we should undergo so much misery, and take so much pains to so little purpose.

I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves,

And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;

What I hear of their hardships, their tortures and groans

Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

For how could we do without sugar and rum?

Speculum oris; This instrument is known among surgeons, having been invented to assist them in wrenching open the mouth as in the case of a locked jaw; but it is used in this trade. On asking the seller of the instruments on what occasion it was used there, he replied that the slaves were frequently so sulky as to shut their mouth against all sustenance, and this with a determination to die; and that it was necessary their mouths should be forced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased them might incur no loss.

The degrees of the soil, the purity of the waters, the mildness of the air, the antiseptic effluvia of pitch and tar, the acid exhalations from the sea, the pregnant brisk gales of wind and the daily visitations of the tides render Liverpool one of the healthiest places in the kingdom.

“I mean it,” he said. “I think it is coming along quite splendidly.” It was a relief to be able for once to be totally sincere. Elroy Palmer was his most promising client. He was also the only black person that had come to him in the whole history of his consultancy business. For an unemployed young black to come here at all meant breaking through quite a number of barriers; it argued determination and a strong sense of literary vocation. Benson had hopes of Elroy. He sat opposite now, across the desk, in a fringed black leather jacket, dreadlocks surmounted by the long red rasta hat, gold hoop dangling from his left ear. His expression was watchful and at the same time curiously heedless. He said nothing in reply to Benson’s comment, merely nodded slowly in full agreement. There was a certainty about Elroy which was impressive. Benson looked down again at the passage he had just been reading:

Zircon bring down the spacecraft with its black and silver official markings, careful like setting down an egg, dead centre of the landing stage marked out on the Ministry roof. The last thing he wants is his mission getting screwed up in the traffic regulations on Gareg, this the most viciously bureaucratic of planets, traffic offenders classed with violent psychopaths on Gareg, Park Pretty the eleventh commandment. Zircon knows he has been watched coming in. Typical, that area marked out by the white lines. No reason why you shouldn’t land outside it, plenty of space. But that is Gareg all over. This whole planet gone mad through too much regulation. He sent to put this right.

He taxies carefully over and park his craft in the space for visitors, park exactly equidistant between the lines. He switch off his engine, opens his nearside door and gets out. Then he lean back in again for the black briefcase with the big gold crest which have in it his official letters of credit. Afterwards he shut and lock the door and walks at the regulation pace, you got to walk one speed on this planet, towards the entrance to the Ministry complex, this huge, each office is exactly the same, same size, same shape, square of course, it occupies the whole of this twenty-storey building in the heart of downtown Zandor.

“There is still this business of the third person singular,” Benson said. “It would be better to leave the ‘s’ off altogether than to have it sometimes and not others. Since the book is written in the present tense, this is an issue of some importance. But I wouldn’t worry until you have got the whole thing together. A little careful editing—”

“I don’ worry,” Elroy said. “He’s going in there, look around, decide what he got to do.”

He always spoke of his hero Zircon as if he were an independent being and it was this certainty about the responses of the character to the exigencies of the situation, that most heartened Benson with a belief in the ultimate success of Elroy’s story.

“I think,” he said after a moment, “that there is too much dwelling on the series of actions Zircon performs on arriving on the Ministry roof. I mean, switching off the engine, opening doors, getting out, shutting the door, locking it, getting his briefcase. Anyone does that who parks a spacecraft, don’t they? In general, things like that are only worth dwelling on if they are important in some way.”

“Jarrold watching every move he makes,” Elroy said. “So it is important to say everything he does.”

Benson thought for a moment. He was reading the book in bits and pieces with intervals between; in that way one lost something of the continuity. “Maybe you are right,” he said.

Jarrold was the demented hermaphrodite ruler of Gareg, who had imposed his mad passion for order, symmetry and rectilinear form on the unfortunate planet, reducing it to a sort of gigantic geometrical theorem. Curves of any sort were forbidden; there were no arches, no tapering lines; hats were square and even shoes were fashioned in right angles. There was a vast bureaucracy endlessly engaged in monitoring infringements, which were punished with ferocity by Jarrold’s eunuch guards. An army of slave labourers was currently employed under conditions of great hardship and brutality in straightening the roads. However, there was a revolutionary group in Zandor, whose secret signal was the sign of the circle. Jarrold was now threatening to secede from the Galactic League and cut off access to the valuable mineral deposits on Gareg. Zircon, a sort of super interplanetary diplomat and hit-man, had been sent to negotiate with Jarrold and make contact with the rebels.

“It’s looking good anyway,” Benson said. “Tell me one thing. Is Zircon going to kill Jarrold?”

Elroy considered a moment, looking at his long bony fingers and their array of copper rings. He looked up at last and fixed Benson with a sombre stare. “He might have to,” he said.

“So I may have unleashed upon the world a concussed, demonic owl that will become a man-eater in due course. I may have disturbed the whole ecological balance. Who knows? We never see the whole shape of things.”

The floodlit cathedral rose above them into the night sky. On this razed plateau, with the huddle of mean streets beyond, it was like an outpost of some extinct race of titans. Below, where the slope levelled out a little, they could see the lights of the Chinese restaurants and food stores on Lower Duke Street. Beyond that, a sense of space and luminous distance, the constant glow of the city, one of its greatest beauties to Benson.

Dolores uttered a groaning sigh.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Benson said. “It’s like this cathedral. Liverpool was dying when it was built. Or even earlier, when they were expanding, building the new docks to accommodate the slave clippers, the writing was on the wall. Look at the Mersey Tunnel, longest underwater tunnel in the world when it was built. Look at me, for instance. Because of a basic complaisance of demeanour, no one suspects anything is wrong with me. I am slowly dying and no one suspects it. Yes, I’m talking about death, ceasing upon the midnight. I can’t talk to people who know me. If there’s a relationship I feel inhibited. I can’t talk to my Fictioneers, they come to discuss their work. I have to talk to somebody. I saw an old mate of mine the other night, singing in the street. Hymns. Thompson by name. Comrade in arms. He was a killer. Still is, I suppose. The leopard doesn’t change his spots, does he? Did you say something? Less scope for it now, of course. We were at Anzio together.”

Dolores made a sudden movement with his left arm and Benson saw that he was starting the process of lighting a cigarette. Across the road, through the wire mesh fence that closed off the building side, he thought he saw a figure moving slowly against the faint glow of the sky. “People still camping out there,” he said. “No fires tonight. You are too young to have been in the war, aren’t you? Been in your own war by the look of it. This man I am talking about was always on his own. That way he didn’t have to share. If you could get to the body before anyone else, you could get a wallet, a watch – amulets, chains, things people wear for luck. Wedding rings. An officer particularly – he might have something like a gold-plated cigarette-case, hip flask, anything. It was surprising, you know, what people took with them. Thompson amassed quite a collection, he was noted for it. It wasn’t only the Germans, he combed through shelled-out villas for things that had been overlooked. I saw him once with a gold and onyx cigarette lighter. He had a set of ivory monkeys, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. He had a beautiful rosewood cigarette box. He could have set up a shop with what he got.”

Benson paused. Dolores was silent beside him. It was true that Thompson had been more interested in keeping things than selling them. His was a pure love of loot; they were trophies. And of course they were a pretext for the killing. He wanted to tell Dolores about the dark patch of ecstasy on Thompson’s trousers, but it was a violation of people to tell them things like that.

“He has a birthmark on his left cheek,” he said. “That’s how I knew him. I once heard him telling somebody how you can suck a ring off a finger.”

He fell silent again, thinking of this. A driver in a Signals Regiment, the man was – Thompson’s only friend. Scottish name. McIvor, McInlay? The only one he talked to. He drove the officers around, picked up things. Thompson’s friendship wouldn’t be an unmixed blessing … Perhaps this is what I ought to be writing about, he thought suddenly, instead of ransacking the past for horrors, crushing my mind with the slave-trade. Horrors enough here.

“I’ve got ideas,” he said, “but there’s no pressure to express them. My situation is opposite to that of King Midas’s barber. Perhaps you know the story? I read it when I was a child, in a book called Tales from Olympus, which had beautiful coloured plates. Midas was foolish enough to get on the wrong side of Apollo by voting against him in a music composition. To show what he thought of him as a critic Apollo gave him ass’s ears instead of his human ones. Midas was extremely ashamed of having these great hairy ears standing up at the sides of his head. He wore a turban indoors and out and never told anyone about it. But the one person he couldn’t keep it from was his barber – you’ll stop me if you’ve heard this, won’t you? The barber was astounded when he unwound the turban and saw that the king had ass’s ears. There was a picture of it in my book, the king sitting there in the chair and the barber all goggle-eyed. He didn’t dare to tell anyone because Midas threatened him with instant death if he did. He didn’t dare tell his wife or anybody. After a while the secret began to get too big for him. He had to tell somebody, he couldn’t contain it, he was bursting with this enormity of the king’s ears. He couldn’t sleep. So one day he went out into the countryside and he told it to the reeds along a river bank. ‘Midas has ass’s ears,’ he whispered. After that he felt a whole lot better. But the reeds picked it up. Every time the wind blew through them they whispered it, Midas has ass’s ears, Midas has ass’s ears. The reeds told everybody in the end.

“The reason this story stuck in my mind was the picture, first of all, and then that marvellous sibilance. Midas has ass’s ears. It is human speech and at the same time it is the language of the reeds when the wind shakes them. The most perfect example of assonance in the English language, if you’ll forgive the pun, and it was right there in my book. But lately I’ve come to see the story in a different light. I see it now as the perfect illustration of the literary impulse. All literature begins with the pressure of a secret, some unique perception that needs urgently to be expressed.”

Benson was silent for some moments looking down towards the lights of the city. “I used to feel that urgency myself at one time,” he said. “People talk about writer’s block as if it were some humorous occasional impediment or recurrent hazard of the trade or just a sort of swank term for laziness or a headache or a hangover. This takes no account of the violence in the word, the choked arrest. Block. It’s a violent affliction. I have become sensitised to it. I see it in the eyes of children, I see it on the faces of people walking about this city, mothers pushing prams, mad old ladies, men in business suits with briefcases. Block is the great psychic disease of our time. It atrophies those parts that other diseases cannot reach. It isn’t a joke at all. It is nausea and dread, it is the foretaste of dissolution. When I listen to myself it’s like the silence of a battlefield after the cries have died away, before the birds start singing again. Of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the last war lately.”

In the silence that followed he was startled to hear the distinct clicking of teeth. He saw Dolores make a sudden rearing motion of the head. The voice, when it came, was hoarse and deep. It uttered a single syllable.

“Did you say something?” Benson was astounded. For some moments he still could not believe that the other had actually spoken. “What?” he said. “I didn’t catch it.”

“Gold. He turned things to gold.” Dolores was still looking rigidly before him, in the direction he always looked, towards the glow in the sky above the river.

“Do you mean Thompson?”

“Couldn’t get his teeth into it.”

“Midas, you mean? Yes, that was another story about him, that everything he touched turned into gold. He was a miser and he was given a wish and he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. He couldn’t eat anything because it turned to gold before he could sink his molars into it. Is that what you mean?”

He waited anxiously as the moments passed. He heard the click of teeth again. Then a series of strange, harsh exhalations. Dolores was laughing.

It was chilly in the room. Benson took off his pyjamas and put on the pair of red boxer shorts that he always used for his exercises. He looked at himself in the glass front of the wardrobe. Need some sunshine, you do. His skin was white. Over his chest and shins it was glazed and shiny-looking. The lines of collar-bone and rib-cage were clearly traceable. Some sunshine and a bit more weight and you’d look better. Not sleeping enough makes you thin. Unless it is some wasting disease. Not bad though, on the whole. No senile blotches, no purpurea. Musculature firm enough. Beneath this façade of imperishable man a frantic deterioration going on. Losing collagen at a furious rate, brain cells dying, tissue degenerating, marrow drying out. It’ll happen quite soon, he thought. I shall wake up to find myself an old man.

He began to do his reaching exercises, up, down, up, down. Limbering up. Then the one for stretching the waist muscles, turning the body from side to side, arms outstretched, hand following round, left – one – two, right – one – two. His limbs were reluctant. When feeding time was over the slaves were compelled to jump in their chains. I am chained in my skeleton, Benson thought. My collar-bone a halter, my shin-bones shackles …

As he proceeded his body warmed, his heart quickened, he began to breath more deeply, think more calmly. Eyes always on his turning, stretching, genuflecting body, he thought again about the war days, that distant life at the Beachhead. Why had he been led to Thompson? It must mean something, if he could disentangle the threads. Precisely what, though, was the difficulty. Like trying to keep my plasticene separated out in its pristine colours. Those strips of primary colour in their chaste tissue wrappings, every time I got a new set I vowed in my first delight to keep them pure and apart forever. It worked so long as you only used one colour. You could make a red elephant or a blue monkey. But then you might want to make Dopey the Dwarf, for example; and he would have to have a red nose and blue blobs for eyes and perhaps a green or yellow cap. The heat from your hands while you tried to make a good Dopey would start to get the colours clogged together. The penalty for ambition was always the same: you ended with one amorphous lump, in which could still be seen the swirls and veins of original colour, forever lost.

That happened over and over again, he thought. It was possible as a child both to know it would happen and to promise not to let it. And now? The faith much less. Those few months of the war branded on me. Some things not possible to see or think about, even after so many years, except through the prisms of that time; and yet the colours run together.

Veins of colour in the lump: dead, bloated sheep, song of the nightingales, the beetle races we used to have back at B-echelon. Walters’s face. Brown eyes, very clear and steady, short-lashed, so they seemed prominent, black hair, a mouth slightly pouting, giving him an expression of protest, not petulant though – humorous rather. Your happiness to be with him. Even there, when the world was the range of a grenade, the field of fire not much more than the length of this bedroom. Moist, crumbling sides of the banks held together by wet blankets to stop them falling in on us. The horizon the top of the next scrub-covered ditch. Even there.

In April the weather got warmer. The cicadas seemed to start up all at once. They shrilled louder with the heat, as if in pain.

He paused, breathing deeply, in – one – two – three, out - one – two – three. He had suddenly remembered the torture of spiders, witnessed in remote childhood, when boys too fearsome to challenge, armed with magnifying glasses, subjected them to slow combustion by intensified sunlight. Slowly those tortured creatures smoked into ash. In silence. But if they had been able to make any sound at all, he thought, it would have been like that, a shrilling that got louder with the heat … Birdsong too, by that time the valleys of the Moletta were showing fresh green. Thrushes, some kind of pipit. Tentative, desultory song, more like the birds of home. But the nightingale was the bird of the Wadi country. It sang in the light and the dark, through all the fighting, in a bubbling melody that had no register for violence, an incessant, demented chorus. Hateful in the end. The bubbling voice of wounds. The sense of something beautiful betrayed and made mad.

He was on his back now, arms outstretched, grasping his weights. Forty years on, still trying to keep death at bay, still with lumps of metal in my hands. He brought his arms up slowly till the weights touched, lowered them again. Up, one – two – three, down, one – two – three. He heard his regular, small grunts of exertion, felt his body brace to take the weight. The frogs too made a great din. After the rain there was a big population of them in the marsh up the gully. When they heard someone coming they stopped croaking. They were silent the night Walters died … Another time, another time, before that, it was still very wet, I, you, Benson, you are crawling along a gully, Walters is just behind you, he always was behind, you were the one who knew the ropes, knew the ground, your only talent. Thompson had it too. You are quite close to the platoon lines, looking for a place for a latrine. You see them first, blue-grey bundles caught in the brambles in the bankside. They had been picked over – usual flabby litter of papers, photographs around them. Litter lying in litter. Drained, waxen faces, eyes and mouths open. Their teeth looked sharp. We crawled over, checked for watches, rings, but there was nothing. Everybody stole from everybody, from the dead, from the disabled. On your own side too – wounded men were lucky to get to the field hospital still wearing a wrist-watch.

It was another day, before that, before the Show started, early in the morning, misty morning, when Thompson came crawling back with the German helmet up-ended like a begging bowl. He always had to bring something back. Deep Panzer helmet. Alone – Thompson was always on his own. Most people teamed up with someone, like Walters and me, but not Thompson. Nearest thing he had to a mate was the Signals driver. They used to play darts and drink together when we were out of the line. Scottish name. The mist was dangerous, it had rifts in it, difficult to judge the ground. And your own body always denser than you think. But Thompson knew all that, none better. He gave the helmet to Crocker.

Crocker’s face streaked with blood. He daren’t raise his head. He has to crouch down there to wash the blood out of his hair. The Welshman is sitting in the mud on the floor of the trench, huddled up against the wet clay wall, his head and face and body are up against the wall of the trench. Evans. Nobody can make him move. Eyes wide open, looking at the trench wall. Something went wrong with him during the night. After many similar nights. Now nobody knows what to do with him. The Sergeant put his arm round Evans’s shoulders and talked to him but it didn’t make any difference. He is sitting in his own shit. In the fear we knew you could clasp yourself for comfort, you could keep the heart in your breast. But Evans has gone beyond this, his body has loosened away from him. All he can do is keep close to the wall. Crocker, gross, fat-faced Crocker, middle-aged joker, takes the helmet from him, from Thompson. Give us that a minute. Flat Midlands accent. He was a builder’s labourer in civilian life. He takes the helmet and puts it on. Self-appointed clown. From under the helmet his face looks alien. Loose jowls – trench life has taken the flesh off. Jawohl, this face says, thin lips. He crouches to make a Nazi salute. No one thinks it is funny. Rausch rausch. All the German he knows. He starts to creep up on poor, jellied Evans. Crocker winks at whoever will catch his eye. When he gets close enough he prods Evans with his rifle in the small of the back. Rausch, rausch, schweinhund. Bursting with laughter. Evans jerks like a stranded fish and his eyes are all whites. Crocker laughs and chuckles, looks around for applause. Brute. Then he gets a thoughtful look like the moment you realise the baby has peed in your lap …

Benson released the weights, moved his hands down to his sides and began his breathing exercises, five seconds in, five seconds hold it, five seconds out, remembering with pleasure undimmed by the years that deepening thoughtfulness on Crocker’s face, and then the exact sequence of his actions. He takes the helmet off, looks closely into it, throws it down. He raises his hands to his head, sandy-coloured hair. Full of fucking dust, he says. He has dust from the helmet thick in the roots of his hair. Thick dust. Too thick for dust. He scrabbles at his hair, can’t get rid of the clogging stuff. He looks at his fingers, sniffs at his fingers. Everyone is watching Crocker now, he has his audience at last. Everyone but Evans. It is blood. He has got the roots of his hair full of dried blood.

Breathing exercises over, he rose to his feet. He always rounded his exercises off with some running on the spot. Up-down, up-down. Three hundred times. Raising the knees higher for the last fifty, trying to keep on breathing through the nose. Crocker’s face danced before him, up-down, up-down, watered blood running over the forehead into his eyes. Water was short, we were due for relief that night, that was the same night Slater spoke to me about his idea of putting on a show. Crocker had to use a billycan of drinking water to wash the blood-dust out of his hair. He couldn’t put his head up over the trench – he had to do it crouching. The German’s blood, reliquefied, ran down Crocker’s face in a pink stream, making a cursing clown of him. Poor brute Crocker, he was killed in the break-out.

How much of this is truly remembered? he wondered. How much embroidered, how much invented? Does it matter? Memories have to be aided by invention or they could not be formulated at all. He watched his body in the red shorts, making these motions, jogging up and down. These panting breaths, this labouring memory. Servitude.

What happened next? Baxter started pontificating. Cavernous face, never smiled. Good light baritone, very good for an untrained voice. He was in the show for a while. Ballads. Last Rose of Summer. Martha, Lovely Rose of the Wildwood. Clean chap. Brushed his teeth every morning. Hair wet-combed. Off stage he was always laying the law down. He knew all about the intentions of the high command. He had a sidekick, forgotten his name, freckled, small, little round spectacles. I must name him, so I do – Popeye. These two, Baxter and Popeye, made up the Bren-gun unit. They always spoke in turn, Baxter leading. Something like this:

“That is not last night’s blood. Never in this world. Hasn’t had time to dry out since last night. Stands to reason.”

“Hasn’t had time to dry out and powder up, couldn’t of humanly fucking done it, course not.”

“It would of still been wet. Another thing. It’s been raining, ain’t it? It’s been raining on and off since we come here. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Sunny Italy.”

“Well then. If that helmet had been standing wrong side up the rain would of kept the blood wet. If not, the blood would of run out before it got a chance to dry. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“You fucking cunt.” That is Crocker.

“Right, mate.”

“Well then. What I’m coming to is he must of fallen with his face in it, then bled in it, see what I mean? That way the rain wouldn’t of been able to get in.”

“He must of bled for a good long time then. You need a fair bit of blood to make that much powder. You’d need a fucking pint.”

“More than that, mate. Nearer two.”

Baxter wasn’t in the Show for long. A limited number of appearances. In April, before it stopped raining, he got a leg blown off.

“Aren’t you sorry for Albert?”

“He has to work out his destiny,” Carter said.

“Well, I must tell you that I am. Apart from anything else, he must have a monumental balls-ache by this time.” The language of literary debate between Carter and himself was degenerating, Benson was obliged to admit. After waiting some moments for the other to reply he said, “Well, let me read this to you as an illustration of what I mean. Sometimes, you know, hearing your work read aloud gives you a fresh perspective on it.”

Carter nodded warily, as if he had recognised a gambit or seen a trap opening. He was less offended by criticism now than at the beginning, having apparently decided to view these sessions as contests which he could win if he could manage to justify what he had written; his talent for this type of polemic was growing steadily as the quality of his prose deteriorated.

“It’s on the same page, no, next page, wait a minute, here it is.” Benson paused and looked at Carter, who this morning, in deference to the warmer weather, was wearing a sports jacket with a vivid pattern of yellow and green checks. “Albert has just removed Sheila’s blouse and skirt. He is looking down at her. She is in her bra and panties, suspender belt, stockings. She is saying, please no, Albert. But of course words like that just bounce off Albert by this time. He is about to strip the rest of her things off. Do you remember the bit I mean?”

Carter’s eye had a fugitive gleam at the recounting of these details but Benson thought he looked a bit bemused too – small wonder, with so many closely similar scenes scattered through these latter wastes of his book.

“Page 703.” Benson thought suddenly of the reply made by Mephistopheles to Faust’s question concerning the location of Hell: Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it. In Hell times and distances were cancelled out. He had come in a finger-breadth, in a whisper, from his labouring fictions of the night, clay smell, rot smell, Crocker’s streaked face, to this maze of words, the square-faced, obstinate fictioneer before him. As if I took a wrong turning in the Wadis, slithered down and found Carter squatting in the deeps, armed with his deadly green bag. “Albert was reaching out to remove her briefs,” he read aloud. “Suddenly he stopped in his tracks. He was brought to a standstill, dazed, dazzled and completely taken aback by the magnitude of her whole ensemble.”

He regarded Carter for some moments in silence. Then he said, “That is very imprecise, Harold. A new note is creeping in. What you seem to be doing is somehow simultaneously blurring and inflating things, so we are not really clear what Albert is after. Are we to understand something transcendent? The Promised Land? The gate to the rose garden? The flight of the soul? Are you saying there is something more to it than just getting between Sheila’s legs? I don’t mean he doesn’t respect her and so on,” he added hastily. ‘‘I know he does.”

Carter settled back in his chair. “It is a variety of the quest novel,” he said. “Wayne Booth, in his Rhetoric of Fiction—”

“I know the book you mean. Tell me, these odd jobs Albert is always doing for her, tightening up the washers on her taps, for example, polyfillering her cracks, plastering her sitting-room recess and so on, I’ve been meaning to ask you whether that is a system of sexual symbols, based on the notion of Freudian transference, whereby you set out to satirise the fact that we live in a ruttish age?”

Long before reaching the end of this sentence he was deeply sorry he had begun it. In his haste to forestall a disquisition on Wayne Booth he had said the first thing that came to his head. Carter was looking at him in surprise and some indignation. This is one below the belt, he seemed to be saying. “Albert is good with his hands,” he said after some moments of pause.

“But he isn’t terribly, is he? Not when it comes to Sheila anyway.”

“That is the whole point.” To his dismay Benson saw that Carter had made a recovery. His face was wearing again that sly, triumphant look of the small boy about to catch the teacher out. “You’ve missed the whole point,” he said.

“Well?”

“Albert’s ability at odd jobs, his dexterity as you may say with his tools, is meant to be a contrast with his uncertainty and clumsiness about feelings and relationships with the opposite sex. This is a statement about man the tool-wielding animal losing touch with his own tool, as you might say.”

Carter folded his arms with the look of a man who knows he has made a palpable hit. Suddenly Benson knew that he could not go on any longer with Carter. Not money, not habit, not his intermittent compassion nor his fearful passivity could make him endure these absurd discussions any longer. Without some sort of jolt Carter would die before he finished his novel, thus condemning Albert and Sheila to an eternity of unfulfilled desire, a sort of endlessly repeated reaching for the briefs. He could not have it on his conscience.

“Harold,” he said, “I think you will have to stop coming to see me.”

Carter’s look of triumph vanished at a stroke. “But why?” he said, and the hurt in the question and the dismay on the rough face brought a feeling of tightness to Benson’s throat. Carter depended on these visits, he knew that. “I can’t go on,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. It’s about a patient in a lunatic asylum. He was totally apathetic, he seemed to be indifferent to everything, just passed his days in a sort of stony silence. They tried to interest him in things, construction kits, model aeroplanes, weaving, painting pictures. Nothing worked. Then one day the doctor suggested that he might try to write something. He brightened up at this. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I’ve always wanted to write a novel.’ ‘But that is marvellous,’ the doctor said, and they provided him with everything he needed, paper, pens, a quiet room with a view over the grounds. After a while the doctor asked him how he was getting on. ‘I’m getting on very well,’ he said. ‘I shall need some more paper.’ The doctor was delighted. They had given him quite a lot of paper to begin with. Now they gave him a whole lot more. ‘What is your novel called?’ the doctor asked him one day. ‘It’s called Riding through the Desert,’ he said. ‘That is a very good title,’ the doctor said. ‘How far have you got with it?’ ‘I am at page 420,’ the man said. ‘Surely it must be nearly finished by now?’ ‘No,’ the man said, ‘I’m barely half way through. I’m going to need some more paper.’ So they gave him a few hundred sheets more. Finally the man came to the doctor with his manuscript. It was over 800 pages by this time. ‘I’ve finished it,’ he said. ‘I’m really pleased to hear that,’ the doctor said. ‘May I read it?’ The man said yes, he could read it if he wanted and so the doctor took it home with him and after supper he settled down with eager curiosity to read it. He saw that the first page consisted of clippety-clop, clippety-clop repeated over and over again, and as he read on he found that every page was exactly the same, covered with clippety-clop, clippety-clop. Then, on the very last page, right at the end, there was a change. The last two words of the novel were, whoah there!

He glanced at Carter, on whose face there was no expression at all. “The ride was over, you see,” he said. “The man knew exactly how long it would take to ride across the desert. He had a strong sense of form, of the dynamic of his narrative – and that includes, it must include, the sense of an ending. Now if you want to go on writing clippety-clop for the rest of your days, Harold, I can’t stop you, and it may even be what you need, but I don’t feel I can assist in it any longer. I’d like you to think this over very carefully.”

There was a long silence. It was clear from Carter’s face that he was hurt and offended. He began to put Sheila and Albert slowly back into his green bag. He stood up to go. At the door, however, he rallied. Some flicker of controversy, the final desire to score a point, returned to his face. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “If he was riding across the desert, the hoofbeats would be muffled. There wouldn’t be any clippety-clop.”

At this moment, possibly the last in their professional relationship, Benson felt more sympathy for Carter than he perhaps had ever felt. Prose-mangler, Thatcher-lover, tormentor of his own creatures, it nevertheless had to be admitted that he had spirit. Benson smiled at him with genuine affection. “That is true,” he said. “There’s a fault in verisimilitude there and you have put your finger on it. But the man was mad, don’t forget.”

“But why Banana Split?”

“I don’t know, really. Probably some sinister resonance from my childhood. It has a snarling menace about it, don’t you think? I carried it around with me, like a sort of verbal talisman or magic formula to keep off evil, or in this case grievous bodily harm.”

I’m talking too much, he thought. He was nervous. Alma’s face was only three feet away in the quietness of this noontime pub. There are faces that disappoint on a second encounter but hers was not one of them, not for him. The glitter of the eyes, the tenderness and bitterness of the mouth, the abrupt, impatient movements, were enhanced rather, making his memory of them seem poor. He wanted her to like him.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “it doesn’t seem to have worked on this occasion.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought at first it had been a failure, just another example of the mildewed Logos. As if I needed examples of that. I know more about loss of word power than almost anybody.” He paused on the brink. Mustn’t start boring her with my block. “No,” he continued, “when I thought about it afterwards I realised that it had worked, in a way. They were about to start on me when I said it. They must have thought, you know, that I was making some filthy proposition. They were outraged, they were shocked that someone about to be bashed would have the invincible lechery to suggest an evil perversion.”

Alma smiled. It was the first time he had seen her do this and the effect on him was considerable. That drawn look of the mouth in repose gave the smile when it came a look of elemental joy about it.

“So,” she said, “in the first shock—”

“They relaxed their grip, just enough for me to break away.” He said nothing about the undignified sprint down the alley. There were limits to confidence after all. “Like another drink?” he said.

“My turn.”

When she came back from the bar the smile was there no longer. “It’s no wonder,” she said as she sat down, “that you’ve got these disaffected young people, when you think of the damage to the social fabric of this country that woman and her junta of yes-men have done in two terms of office.”

“Disaffected young people?” It seemed an odd way of describing the youths that had ringed him round the other evening, whether they’d had the proper chances in life or not. “If you were one of my fictioneers,” he said, “I would take you to task for a phrase like that.”

“Who are they?”

“Some people I help with their writing.”

“Well I’m not, thank God. There’s too much fiction in the world already, just look at the newspapers. What’s wrong with it, anyway?”

“It does what language shouldn’t do. It is tendentious. It tries to make those thugs look better for the sake of making the government look worse. You can’t really think that a readiness to batter unoffending strangers half to death has been brought about by two terms of Tory rule?”

“I’m quite ready to batter the Home Secretary half to death, or the Minister for Health and Social Security, and they’re both complete strangers to me. Of course they’re not unoffending. I suppose you’re right, one must be even-handed. I’d be willing to admit that those thugs in the Cabinet are no more than disaffected middle-aged or elderly persons, victims of narrow education, moral undernourishment and a deprived imagination, or perhaps I mean depraved. That satisfy you?”

The smile was there again but it was different now, tauter, combative – it was the mouth that gave instant register to changes of feeling on this face, the brightness of the eyes was unchanging. Accident of physiognomy, the eyes, he thought. Some capacity for holding more light than was normal …

“You take a reasonable line, don’t you?” she said. “I’ve got you down for an Alliance voter.”

It was as close as she probably ever allowed herself to come to a sneer. Benson felt his blood quicken. She was waiting with something of the air of a prosecution lawyer but he would not let himself be cross-examined for his political views – or lack of them. Attempting to explain oneself gave up too much ground, it was bad tactics – he would need tactics, he suddenly saw, if he wanted to keep on with Alma. He would have to contest the space. Doctrinaire, foe to metaphor, impatient of the delicate middle ground of doubt on which all fiction depends – what kind of muse was this?

He leaned towards her with a contrite expression. “It’s not only that, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m fond of opera too.”

He saw the belligerence leave her face. Quite suddenly she laughed. “Yes,” she said, “you have a penchant for owls too, haven’t you?”

“I don’t aspire to albatrosses.” Should he tell her about his sacrificial fire, his invocation? No, better she should feel her body desired than her spirit – and perhaps that was the truth of it anyway. “There was one, you know,” he said.

“Was there?” She looked away for some moments, glancing through the window at the street outside. The bar door was open and sunlight from this warm May morning fell in a broad shaft half across their table. “All the same,” she said, “there is a generation growing up in the rubble of the inner cities that has known nothing but Thatcherism. Think of what it has done to them. Now we are in for another four years of it. People don’t know, they don’t know what has been done to Liverpool. I’d like to bring people up in bus-loads from the Home Counties and take them around Toxteth on a guided tour, show them the realities of this property-owning democracy of ours.”

“Yes,” he said, “it is appalling what has been allowed to happen here.”

“Allowed to happen? They have brought it about, it’s the direct result of Conservative policies.”

Benson felt oppressed: she allowed no space for difference, vagueness. It was assent she wanted, instant, total. At the same time the words seemed to come to her unexamined, too easily.

“Well,” he said, “I am older than you and more cynical, I suppose. What is happening here seems to me to be because no one has cared enough, no one with the means of change has been capable of caring enough, none of the parties. When you look at the sum of folly and misery in Liverpool and on this planet as a whole, when you see how far things have gone, people who put the blame on a particular system seem like solemn lunatics to me, whether they do it at Westminster or at City Hall – or here in the Cambridge Arms, for that matter. This place is rotting from the heart while people argue about priorities.”

“Where is that?”

“What?”

“This heart you are talking about?”

“I was thinking of Toxteth, of inner-city decay generally.”

“I don’t know how it is,” she said after a moment, “but some things seem to come from you too easily, as if the words were more important than the thing you are describing. I get the same feeling I had before about you, as if the whole thing is there just to provide a metaphor. Toxteth isn’t the heart of Liverpool. It’s just a ghetto.”

Benson took a swallow of his beer. It was what he had been mentally accusing her of some minutes before. “All right,” he said, waving his glass as if to give her the platform.

“The North of England is full of ghettoes. You don’t need walls, people are kept there by poverty and illness. Do you know what the life expectation is in places like that, compared to the national average? The incidence of chronic illness caused by sub-standard housing, the figures for mental disturbance, break-down, suicide? They’ve been trying to suppress the medical reports for years on one pretext or another. Not that it would matter if they shouted them from the roof tops. There’s nothing left to shock in the conscience of this country or that gang would never have been voted back in again.”

Her voice had softened as she spoke, her whole manner grown less combative. It was with the vehemence of what she was saying, he realised suddenly, something that happened to him quite often. The last shreds of his resentment at her dogmatism were dissolved. He said, “In the sense you mean, the heart of this city is where the heart of a city always is, where the capital is managed. That goes on pumping away whatever happens in Liverpool 8. But that heart is ramiform – you can’t locate it.”

“Ramiform, that’s a good word.” With a sort of awed fascination he saw her mouth draw down into a taut line, the whole face harden into an expression of passionate violence. “If you could locate it, we would have torn it out long ago,” she said.

“Metaphor is an instrument of truth too,” he said slowly. “A good one is worth a lot of doctrine. It was with a metaphor that you defended me, that evening when we met.”

“How did I defend you?”

“You remember, I was talking about the man I had seen jump from the top of a tower block. I was making it into a story, which I shouldn’t have done. I got a bit excited and I spilled some of Morton’s beer. He said something that made me feel a fool.”

“Oh, that.” She made the sudden movement of the head he liked so much, impatient, defiant, proud – he could not quite have said which. “Ben Morton is a lightweight character.”

A certain silence followed upon this, one of those pauses that lengthen when no appropriate response is found. Benson looked at the broad shaft of sunlight streaming in through the open door. It lay across their table, shone on the brass handrail of the bar, on the head of the landlord as he leaned over his paper, gleamed on the bottles suspended behind him, upended, like vessels in some complicated life-support system. Did she mean she would have taken anyone’s part against Morton? And he himself, how did she rate him as a contender? On her scales he would probably weigh in as a bantam; useless at any weight as he didn’t really believe in fighting. She did, it seemed; but fighting, actual warfare, was practically the only area of experience, apart from male orgasm, that she couldn’t make equal claim to. She wouldn’t be interested in heroics. But it was not heroics that he now suddenly and urgently wanted to talk to her about.

“I saw a man in the street the other night,” he said, not quite looking at her. “That same night, the night of the Banana Split. Someone I was in the war with. I was in the last war, you know.”

“Which one was that? Chad, the Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf?”

“I’m talking about the Second World War,” he said steadily. “That was the last war for me. I only saw action for a few months of 1944. I was in the Anzio landing, the fighting of that winter to establish the Beachhead, then the break-out on May 22. I was wounded during the break-out and spent the next three weeks in hospital in Naples. By the time I was fit again we had taken Rome and I stayed behind there in an office job. That was the end of the fighting for me.”

“Is that how you got the scar on your face?”

“Yes. I got a bigger piece in my thigh. I was lucky not to lose a leg like poor Baxter.”

“Who was he?”

“One of the others. He was always laying the law down. Most of the wounds were from shrapnel, you know. Grenades, mortars. Both sides used air-burst shells. And mines of course.”

Alma was silent for a moment, then she said, “Did you say May 22? That’s the day I was born, the night rather. May 22, 1944.”

“During the night?” He looked at her in wonder: her birth cries might have coincided with his wounds; two voices, one blended sound. “That is extraordinary,” he said.

“Perhaps it is.” The remarkable smile lit up her face again. “One or two other people might have been born that night too, you know.”

“He was singing,” Benson said. “Singing in the street. Begging. It seemed strange because he used to sing in this show some of us were in, run by a man called Slater, Second-Lieutenant Slater. We put on a show during those months of the stalemate, while they were building up for the attack. There were a lot of men there and almost no women. People were bored, a lot of the time. The show was a great success. Slater made it a success.”

“What did you do in it?”

“I was one half of a double act. Song and dance. The other half was a man called Walters.”

He paused on the name. Now he had come to it he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control his voice. There were other risks too: he knew that if she mocked him or became sarcastic he would get up and leave and that would be that.

“In conditions like that,” he said, “you form strong links with people, either of liking or disliking. Conditions of fighting, I mean. It was very difficult ground and the positions were always shifting – not very much but enough to make things uncertain. Walters and I always went out together. We were a double act at the front too. We were what you would call inseparable. He was very funny, you know, quick to see a joke. He was a good mimic too – he could take people off, other people in the platoon, various officers. It was an extraordinary friendship in some ways. We came from quite dissimilar backgrounds. His parents were working people. He had left school at fifteen and gone to work in a bank – he was a bank clerk in civilian life. I had grown up in a Norfolk vicarage, been to boarding school and so on. But it didn’t matter.”

He paused for a moment or two, then he said, “I suppose I loved Walters.”

He stopped again and waited, looking not at her but at the table between them, their almost empty glasses. If this was tedious or in some way distasteful she could make an excuse to leave, she could change the subject. But she did neither. Glancing up he saw that her eyes were fixed on him, not discernibly sympathetic, but intent. “I wouldn’t have expressed it like that at the time,” he said. “Free use of that word is the licence of age. It was a very possessive feeling. I was an only child, you know, and I had never had a close friend. I was jealous if he seemed to be getting on well with other people. I wanted to keep him with me. I had one strong advantage, which was a very highly developed sense of direction and the kind of visual memory that makes a print on the mind of landmarks, details of ground. I had sharp senses too, hearing, smell. Still have, as a matter of fact, though my eyes are going now. In the Wadis – that was what we called this part of the front – that sort of thing was very important. It was a kind of labyrinth, you see. I used to line things up, a barn with the door hanging off, a heap of rubble of a particular shape, a shattered tree stump. Even down in the stream beds, thirty feet below ground … No features look exactly alike if you look hard at them, and I did. I always knew where I was. Nearly always. I navigated by a system of signs, pointers – almost like a private language of symbols. I find myself doing the same thing now when I am walking around.”

He drank the rest of his beer. “Not much of an accomplishment,” he said, “but it was useful there. Like another drink?”

“No thanks. I’ll have to be leaving in a few minutes. Do go on.”

“You’re sure I’m not boring you?”

“I’d let you know if you were.”

He nodded. The question had been merely a reflex of politeness; he was intent in his story now. “Thompson had it too,” he said. “That’s the man I saw the other night. He used it differently. I just wanted to survive. Some people, quite a few actually, were without it completely. Walters was one of them. On his own he was liable to go astray, and that could be fatal. He followed me – I always went in front. He trusted me completely. One night we had gone out to recover some ammunition. We were short of Browning ammunition and there was a stack of it in a position we had recently abandoned, a forward observation post, as they were called. It was up a gully near a bridge. The ground near the bridge was marshy. After the rain there was a population of frogs there. They kept up a chorus of croaking, quite loud, but they always fell silent if there was anyone about. There were three of us, me, Walters and a corporal, a man named Peters. He was in charge really but I led the way. I always went first. We had blacked our faces and hands but there was a moon, we knew we could be seen. We came round a bend and saw the arch of the bridge perhaps twenty-five yards away, quite clear in the moonlight. The frogs were absolutely silent. I stopped – I was afraid to go on. The others stopped behind me. As soon as we stopped we heard a rattle of bolts in front of us and a shout and the Spandaus opened up. They had been waiting until we got as near as possible. I could see the traces of the bullets going by me and I could see the flames from the barrels of the guns. By some miracle none of us was hit. There was a channel, a sort of shallow ditch going off the stream bed, and we got into it in time and started crawling back. We had to make a number of detours – we didn’t dare show ourselves above ground. We got into a narrow gully about eight or ten feet deep. I knew we were going in the right direction for our platoon position but I didn’t recognise this gully. At least, I wasn’t absolutely sure. Moonlight is deceptive and there had been no time to take bearings. This was an area we had mined ourselves but there were tracks through it, all of which I thought I knew. We had an argument. Peters said this wasn’t the right track, we should make a wider detour so as to be sure of it. He was frightened. We all were. I saw that Walters was listening to Peters. I said I was certain it was the right track and I started off down it. Walters followed me and then Peters. After I had taken about twenty steps everything went up in a sheet of flame. I felt a tremendous punch on the back of my neck. I was thrown forward onto my hands and knees. For a while I couldn’t see or hear anything. Then I heard moaning sounds. I turned round and I saw Walters lying with his knees drawn up. It was he who was making the noises. I tried to lift him. Then I saw that the middle part of his body had been blown away. I took his head in my hands and he stopped moaning. Then, after a few seconds, he made a single sound which I can’t describe and I knew he had died. Peters led the way back, inch by inch, prodding the ground with his bayonet. He wouldn’t speak to me. He never spoke to me after that.”

Just another story, he thought, trying to shift some impediment in his throat. I’m always telling stories of one sort or of another. “Walters’s body wasn’t recovered,” he said. “The unit that relieved us poured creosote over the corpses to keep down the smell. Of course, I didn’t need Thompson to help me remember all this. In a way I’ve never stopped thinking about it. But I thought, you know, he might help me to find direction somehow. In my life now, I mean. If I could line him up, the way I used to line things up in the Wadis.”

“It was the kind of mistake anyone might have made,” Alma said after a long moment.

But he knew this was merely an impulse of sympathy – it could not be what she really felt. “No,” he said, “I was jealous, I thought it was my only power, the only thing that kept him with me. I still think so. I tried to make the ground conform to my conception. It was an early example of my propensity for metaphor.” On an impulse, to forestall any further kindness on her part, he said quickly, “A man I know called Rathbone is putting on a sort of show next Saturday evening. I’ve got two tickets. I don’t know if you’d like to go. Oh, but it’s May 22, that’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

“What sort of show?”

“It’s a hypnotism show. It is this man’s début as a stage hypnotist.”

“It’s being my birthday doesn’t matter.” She made the abrupt movement of the head with which she seemed to accompany all apparent concessions. “I don’t make much of birthdays.” She glanced at her watch and stood up. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ve got a meeting at two. What did this Thompson say? Did he know you?”

Benson had got up too. He hesitated briefly, then he said, “I didn’t speak to him. I followed him to where he lives but I didn’t speak to him. I don’t seem able to take initiatives these days.”

“You took one with me,” she said. “Where does he live?”

“On the Railton Estate.”

“But those blocks are condemned.”

“There are people living in them all the same,” he said. “Do you mean that you’ll come on Saturday?”

I could have asked her out to dinner, he thought. Something like that. Why this wretched hypnotism show? But he had promised Rathbone.

Alma paused, considering. She was quite small, he noticed for the first time, now that they were standing close together. He was not a tall man but he was taller than she by some inches. He took, in this confused moment of hope, a rapid inventory: the vivid, small-boned face, the straight shoulders, the breasts below the thin jumper not large but definite, and obviously unconfined.

“Yes, if you like,” she said. “But I wish you would go and see this Thompson first.”

All the same it was Zircon the assassin that finally decided him. Elroy Palmer came to see him next day, bearing a key passage. Zircon had now penetrated into the inner sanctum of Jarrold, demented hermaphrodite ruler of Gareg, a planet stultified by too much order, where only straight lines were allowed and wheels had to be enclosed in square casing. Jarrold had just signed his own death warrant by refusing to accept Zircon’s authority as imperial envoy.

Zircon laugh with a laughter inside himself. This the Assassin laugh. He is trained to do this laughter. Not a muscle of his face is moved. Out of your own mouth, Jarrold. At the same time he laughs he feels eloquent disgust for this obscene person stood there in woman’s clothes, red robe with lace trimming, big blond wig all in square waves. Silver baton of power cradled in his soft white arms. Jarrold, your time has come. Not because he dress as a woman, people can dress how they like. But he is an obscene tyrant.

Zircon works the blade down from its pouch in his armpit. No scanning device known on Gareg can detect this knife. His eyes flicker to Bender on the right. Bender going to take care of the guards. In his palm now. This knife will fly at speed of light, aimed by the impulses of Zircon’s brain. He is trained for this work. He perform again that inside laughter as he seeks out with his.eyes the target vein on Jarrold’s neck. That laughter part of the killing, works up power for the knife. Now good-bye, Jarrold. The days are accomplished. Now this knife restore the world of forms, flow of life comes with his death blood.

Benson considered this for some moments. There were the usual vagaries of grammar and syntax but this was Elroy’s language and it worked effectively in subverting an over-regulated planet. He wasn’t sure about eloquent disgust and suspected that Elroy had put the adjective in because he liked the sound of it, which was something he did quite often – it added a certain mysterious charm to his work. And he wasn’t convinced that Zircon could have got an audience with Jarrold without being subjected to a body search. All the same …

“Elroy,” he said, “this has power. Making the maniac for geometrical form himself soft and indeterminate is a masterstroke. I congratulate you.”

Elroy looked back at him seriously and nodded but did not speak.

“He does actually kill Jarrold, I suppose?” The death was not yet described and Benson had the fear still that Zircon would get blocked with his own murderous mirth, trapped for ever in a soundless paroxysm, eyeing the tyrant’s jugular in that room of square-faced sycophants.

“He dies in the next paragraph.” As always Elroy spoke as if the decision had been made elsewhere.

“I’m delighted to hear it. There is one point that occurs to me. Don’t you think it would be better if the weapon that puts an end to Jarrold were curved somehow? A boomerang, say, made out of the same undetectable metal, or a scimitar or a razor-sharp disc? The symbolic shape of liberation, see what I mean?”

“They talked a lot about it on Vekrona before Zircon set off,” Elroy said. Vekrona was the ruling planet of the Confederation. “They understood it had to be the right symbol. They know about symbols on Vekrona. Zircon can kill in any way, he is a trained man. But Jarrold sentenced to die by his own excesses. He is killed by what he loves too much.”

“Killed by what he loves too much,” Benson repeated slowly. He looked at Elroy with a sort of wonder and Elroy looked back with the placid watchfulness which was all his own. Everything about him was the same: dreadlocks, earring, voluminous red hat; the full, slightly everted mouth was set in the same firm mould; the eyes in their boney sockets were heedless, really, of anything he might say, but without insolence. Benson looked down again at the last words of the paragraph: flow of life comes with his death blood. The sign was there. It was not simple but it was there.

He had, almost from the beginning, looked for certain kinds of indications in the productions of his Fictioneers. Relations with them might vary but were always intimate, with something of the intimacy of the confessional; he had thought it possible that threads of vital communication might creep into the texture of what they wrote, pointers, something that might show the way forward.

On the whole he had been disappointed in this. Poor Hogan was burrowing backwards all the time and looked like ending up as some more primitive form of life altogether. Anthea’s poems had a certain shock value but they certainly didn’t prompt anything in him. It was true that Albert and Sheila had affected him in various ways, but none of them constructive. In any case these two seemed trapped in an endless cycle now – the only imminent prospect in Can Spring Be Far Behind? was a broken spring in Sheila’s sofa. As for Madcap Maggie and the saturnine Sir Reginald, they were riding ever deeper into the wildwood, side by side, oaks and anachronisms thickening around them. Not much hope of daylight there.

Zircon was a different matter entirely. Zircon redeemed them all. Here was a man in the remote future, bubbling with lethal laughter, about to act, to break out, to restore the world.

“Elroy,” he said, “I’ve just decided something. Several things in fact. One of them is that I am going to give up my consultancy business, I’m going to disband my Fictioneers. Clive Benson’s name comes down from the door. But I’ll go on with you if you’re willing. I’ll give you any help I can.” He smiled at the serious Elroy. “I would regard it as an honour,” he said.