4

THE VISITING LECTURER from England came in on the late afternoon of a September day. Bernard Froelich, a lover of meetings, arrived at the railroad depot a little early for the day’s one transcontinental train. There was no one around, but he reversed his car with an ornate gesture into the dusty, deserted parking lot, and lay down on the front seat, with his feet sticking out of the window. It was an intensely hot day, without a wind blowing, and Froelich took it as a day of omens, a day for arrivals; he was sure in his heart that the train would stop and Walker descend. His sensations were already disposed to be those of pure awe; it was a day, he felt, he had spent a lifetime preparing for, by spiritual activity and political conniving; it had to go just right, and it would. He looked out across the plain, his head on the hand-rest on the door; it was bare and silent, but after ten minutes had passed he heard suddenly, faintly blown across the hard flat landscape, the cry of the train. The metals began to shudder; a bundle of noise rolled over the platte. The train had to halt; there had to be a Walker on it. And sure enough, the brakes began to groan, the flyer began to slow, the moment took on historic dimensions. He was coming. Froelich watched the train ride by. The great single eye on the front, which had seen the way all the thousand and more miles from Chicago, glinted in the western sun.

The train stopped, and now the ceremonial was beginning. Passengers looked out of the cars to see what was happening, what special event had halted them in the middle of the void. The blue-coated negro porter lowered the steps, wiped the handrail clean with his rag, and handed Walker down from the high car on to western soil. It had to be Walker. It could be no one else. There he stood, dishevelled, panting, his long English hair hanging down; pure poetry. Froelich had one thought as he looked at him; it was: he isn’t real, he’s a toy. He looked, immediately, so lost, so deculturalized, that Froelich, controlling the urge to rush forward and meet him, stayed in his car and savoured the experience.

‘This is it, sah, Bushville,’ said the conductor, grinning. ‘Sure this where you want to be?’

Walker seemed not to be sure at all. He looked around twice, as if to make sure that what he was seeing was true – he was in the middle of nowhere. The countryside around him was completely, endlessly flat, the only horizon a vague haze that prevented him looking downhill clear to Chicago. In this haze, like big white icebergs, stood indeterminate white shapes, the forms of distant barns and farm-buildings. The scene offered only two sensations, of levelness, and dryness. It was like a painting by Buffet – straight lines, blurred by their parallels, composed every aspect of the scene. Above were streaks of cloud, enormous, significant. Only the unwavering, shining tracks of the railroad formed a reasonable order, a firm hard line of ingress and egress. Froelich, watching Walker, saw it all anew, in its strange and challenging poverty.

‘Oh!’ said Walker nervously, evidently wondering whether he could possibly get back on the train; the High Plains always took people that way. What clearly worried him was the fact that there appeared not to be any town, any place, here at all; presumably he was thinking that the train had simply stopped at some chance spot on the route, at someone’s whimsy, and they had simply decided to put him off. No doubt he was assuming that he would be left to wander about the deserted landscape until, stricken with sunstroke and starving, he stumbled into a drain and died. Froelich could imagine the feeling, the special foreign shiver, the English nervousness (were there Indians, and if so were they friendly?). It was an old experience that the west had always given, felt the sharper now because of the distance this man had come. It was the first lesson, and Froelich lay back and watched while it sank in. It was not cruelty but regard that made him do this; this moment, which he had created, was one that he wanted to be a central one in Walker’s life.

The porter came down from the coach again and placed beside Walker, to bedeck the barren scene, his two suitcases and his typewriter, all generously covered in flapping labels explaining who he was and where he was supposed to be going, labels that assumed men to read and helpers to direct. The word Fulbright stood out, in red letters, appealing to a standard of civilization and urbanity that went without saying in the seaboard states, but said precisely nothing in those western deadlands. Fulbright? Now the conductor had taken the . . . dime, was it? . . . that Walker, confident in his largesse, had given him, and had jumped back into the car and pulled up the steps. The locomotive shrieked, the wheels turned and painfully yet gently the train moved out, the faces of the passengers turning inward again. Left alone, silent, bare, Walker stood for a moment, looking after it. Then he turned and looked at the plain again, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Froelich, extending the golden moment, pulled in his feet and imagined the growing doubt in Walker, and within it the profound and English confidence. Froelich knew the English and was a devout Anglophile; he had a psychiatric fascination with the race. People, that English mind would now be thinking, were not left stranded in the middle of what was, after all, a reasonably civilized country. Action was surely being taken, with so valuable a property as himself on the way. The only question was, what was the action, how was it being taken, what did one do to put oneself in the way of it? There was nothing here except a shuttered house and an apparently empty car. There were no telephones in evidence, no taxis, no people. Froelich, peering with fascination through the spokes of the driving wheel, watched the anxious face turn from side to side. Still the figure made no move, standing there in his baggy country suit, the English genius, the man who was to change Party. The suit was made of thick Harris tweed, and Froelich could see, from this distance, the beads of sweat forming on his brow and dripping on to the jacket, forming pearly droplets on the tips of its shaggy fibres. For this western sun, the get-up was farcical, and in a sense noble. Moreover it was so travel-stained and dishevelled that it was impossible to avoid concluding that Walker had slept in his clothes in the Pullman. Well, British modesty probably demanded no less, as British phlegm demanded the uneasy courage with which Walker was facing his situation. Froelich, in spirit, wanted to applaud.

And now Walker suddenly seemed to resolve his dilemma. He buttoned up his tweed jacket, picked up his suitcases, tucking the typewriter under his arm, and began to stride confidently along the tracks as if he had made up his mind to walk back to New York, two thousand miles to the east. Froelich, in whom there was endless fascination but no cruelty, felt he had let the matter go on long enough. Now he wanted to know and love this man. He opened the car door and hurried after Walker, who was stepping off into the skyline like the end of a supremely hopeful movie. He wanted to succour him, to save him, to win him in friendship. He was a genius and a soulmate, and it was he, Froelich, who had won him for the west. Froelich prided himself on his cosmopolitanism; he had, so to speak, graduated from England, and had a special love of its men and its minds. He had done the voyage in reverse; he had had a Fulbright to London University. There he had been almost odiously American, as Walker now was being English; in the British Museum, in the professional academic hush, he would lean over some English scholar, smelling as musty as the books he was reading, and say, ‘Say, those books look interesting. More interesting than mine.’ But now, back home, he usually wore imported British shoes and spoke with an imported British accent; they were part of his academic style. Harris Bourbon, his department head, one day had stopped him in the doorway of the faculty lounge and complimented him on his looks – skilful use of tweed sports-jacket, briar pipe, hair cut slightly long. ‘I like your style, Dr Froelich; all you need now are a few publications,’ he had said, puffing on his briar and knocking the ash off his tweeds (he was a local man who had been a Rhodes Scholar in the twenties). Froelich was so touched by England as to be, in a sentimental way, something of a monarchist. ‘I think he’s a communist; he says the United States ought to have a king,’ one intense girl student of his had complained when she went to Bourbon to ask to have Froelich fired. Froelich could hardly wait to introduce Walker to all these congenial sympathies, to show him that here he could be at home. ‘Hi! hi!’ he shouted. Walker turned, saw Froelich, and increased speed perceptibly. Froelich caught up and tugged at the tail of his jacket, jerking him to a standstill and tumbling his suitcases round him. ‘Hey there, old fruit,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’ He held out his hand in hospitality.

‘How do you do?’ said Walker, not taking it. ‘I wonder whether you could give me some directions?’

‘You are James Walker, aren’t you?’ asked Froelich. The evidence was plentiful; there could scarcely be two such Englishmen wandering the plains in this way; but there was just faint room for doubt. Walker had been classically vague about his arrival; his cablegram had said, with simple purity, ‘Arrive station 5 p.m. Walker.’ Isn’t that cute?, everyone had said; one of the graduate assistants, Ewart Hummingbee, had taken it home to frame it. Meanwhile Harris Bourbon had assigned various members of the faculty to cover the three train stations and, as an afterthought, the three bus depots in a thirty-mile radius, at one of which, he hoped, Walker would arrive. This was the west; there was no station in Party. It had been suggested in the department that the heavens would open up at five and Walker would descend in a golden car, like Juno in The Tempest, but though this had been dismissed as improbable everyone felt that one didn’t know with the English. Subdued excitement had grown; and thus, even now, faculty members up to the rank of distinguished service professor were bounding up to strangers in places of public concourse throughout the state, asking the question Froelich was now putting. But of course Froelich had struck lucky; Walker’s face shone, as if a new bulb had been put in, and said, ‘Yes, I’m Walker. Are you someone from the university?’

‘That’s right,’ said Froelich, ‘my name’s Bernard Froelich, and I’m an associate professor in the English Department here. Look, you weren’t leaving, were you?’

‘Oh, no, not at all!’ said Walker.

They shook hands, and then Froelich reached out and took the two suitcases as Walker bent to retrieve them.

‘Not going anywhere special?’ asked Froelich.

‘No,’ said Walker.

‘Good, that’s fine. We’d hate to lose you now you’ve got this far. We’ve all been looking forward to having you here very much.’

‘No, I was just looking.’

‘Looking?’ said Froelich, stepping out toward the car.

‘Where is it?’

‘It?’

‘The university.’

‘Oh, that. Well, we’re about fifteen miles out of town here.’

‘Rather a funny place to put a railway station, isn’t it?’

Froelich began to laugh; it took a finished social world, twenty generations of teapots and civilization, to produce a remark, indeed a cultural artefact, like that. ‘You see, there’s no railway station’ – it was a pleasure for Froelich to use the English phrase – ‘in Party itself. The western habit is just to drop you off in nowhere. Of course, there’s a good historical reason. The railroad was built before most of these towns were settled. People went further west before they came to Party. What you have here is the Great Plains – the high plain west of the platte that Cooper said was like the steppes of Tartary. It’s all treeless, shortgrass prairie, buffalo country; people thought it was unfit for cultivation. In fact, a lot of people around still think the same.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Walker, ‘it’s very unvaried. It doesn’t look like a landscape. Just a concatenation of circumstances.’

‘That’s right,’ said Froelich, reaching the Pontiac and opening up the trunk, ‘when you come out here you have to develop a new brand of aesthetics. I’m still groping for mine; I’m a stranger here myself.’

‘Is this your car?’

‘That’s right,’ said Froelich. In fact the car wasn’t his but Harris Bourbon’s; Harris, knowing the broken-down state of Froelich’s own automobile, had lent him his expressly for the purpose of hunting down Walker and bringing him to the English Department faculty lounge, wherein the faculty were even now assembled and currently passing bowls of pretzels over one another’s heads and developing a tension over the new arrival. ‘You look after it very well,’ said Walker. Froelich realized they were in the midst of one of those Anglo-American confusions that gave life such relish; he had simply meant that it was the car he was driving. But Walker had meant, of course, as he ought to have known, do you possess this car? Is it your property? Ergo, do you exist? The English, Froelich recalled, didn’t think they’d described anything until they’d said to whom it belonged. ‘Like it?’ asked Froelich.

‘It’s very big, isn’t it?’

Froelich got in behind the wheel and noticed that Walker was waiting politely outside until, presumably, Froelich unlocked the passenger door, which was not of course locked – this was the west. ‘Come on in,’ said Froelich, reaching over and pushing it open. ‘If there’s anything you want you don’t see, just ask.’

Walker got in and sat close to the door, his hands on his knees.

‘Do you drive?’ asked Froelich.

‘No,’ said Walker, looking ahead through the windshield.

‘Well, I’m afraid you won’t get by in this section of the country without a car of your own. As you’ve seen, the public sector of life isn’t very well supplied out here. We’re all individualists. You’ll have to learn.’

‘I’m quite prepared to,’ said Walker.

‘Here,’ said Froelich, ‘why don’t you try? There’s nothing round here you could hit.’

Walker looked nervously at him and said, ‘No, I’d better not.’

Froelich pressed a button and the windows went up and down; he pressed another and the seat whirled upward and backward. Walker looked even more frightened. ‘We have all the gadgets,’ said Froelich. ‘Do they make cars like this in England?’

‘I wouldn’t know, I ride a bike.’

‘Well, let’s go,’ said Froelich. ‘I hope you don’t mind meeting a lot of people. Out here you’re a real celebrity, because we get so few visitors.’

‘I’m a bit nervous of big gatherings,’ said Walker.

Froelich, looking for signs of stature and genius, felt a faint wave of disappointment, sensing that here was a man not quite cut out for his destiny. This did not lessen his genial regard for him; if anything, it increased it. But it did mean that more depended upon him, Froelich, the man who had claimed stature for Walker and was determined that he should have it. ‘You’ll like the people here; they’re simpler than they would be in the east, but they have a lot of style and interest. The west’s a special place, another state of mind,’ he said, switching on the ignition and letting out the clutch. The car reversed and smacked into the paling fence behind them. ‘Jesus,’ said Froelich, ‘what was that?’ He looked at Walker, who appeared to have noticed nothing; he gazed steadily ahead into his future. Froelich fiddled with the gearstick and let out the clutch again. The fence swayed in his driving mirror but the car failed to move. ‘We’ll have to wait a second,’ said Froelich. ‘We’re in some trouble.’ He got out and went round the back to survey the tangle. The fender was neatly fixed over a metal spike.

‘Oh dear,’ said Walker, coming round the other side of the car.

‘Well, that’s how it is,’ said Froelich, ‘no matter how careful you are, there’s always the other fellow.’

‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Froelich.

‘You must have been in reverse,’ said Walker, his longish roundish English face peering seriously into the damage, as if a word or two from him might rectify the situation.

‘Well,’ said Froelich, ‘don’t just do something, stand there. Now look, will you give me a little help? Why don’t you bounce up and down on the fender, and I’ll try to drive her out.’

‘All right,’ said Walker.

As Froelich got into the car again, he was worried. Though luckily I have tenure, he thought. Still, the idea of damaging Bourbon’s new car wasn’t very freshening. However, the sight he now had in his mirror, of Walker pumping himself up and down on the fender, his eyes round with surprise, his expression serious and slightly dispirited, as if to imply that this was not quite what he was used to – this reminded Froelich that he was living out a classic day. He could have wished for a photograph; it would have been a superb illustration for his book. He released the clutch again and let the car go gently forward. The fender on Bourbon’s new car stood up as it might have been expected to do on a highly finished piece of modern engineering, the flower of American experiment – it ripped away from the bodywork and fell with a loud clang to the ground. Walker toppled precipitously from his perch. ‘Come on, Mr Walker, jump in before someone sees us,’ shouted Froelich through the window, noticing that the fence was also down. Walker got in dejectedly and put his hands on his knees again, saying nothing; Froelich drove off at some speed. ‘What happened back there, Mr Walker?’ he asked when they were on the open road.

‘The bumper came off and the fence broke when I fell on it.’

‘You fell on the fence? I hope you’re not hurt.’

‘As it happens, I don’t think I am,’ said Walker. He looked displeased and Froelich grew worried for the friendship he felt was growing between them.

‘Well, here you have it, the shortgrass plain,’ said Froelich, gesturing out of the car, ‘your spiritual home for the year.’ The land was flat and lightly cultivated. Corn stood, seemingly withered, in the fields, in gross misshapen clumps. A sign on a barn end said: Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco. Treat Yourself to the Best. Strange prehistoric mating calls, ferocious cries, sounded out of the haze. It was the whistle of the train Walker had come on, heading out towards the Rockies. Dust flitted into the car. ‘It’s hot here,’ said Walker.

‘This is about the average for the season. Actually you’re fine if you dress for the climate. You’ll feel it as long as you stick to those clothes.’

‘I’m certainly sticking to them now,’ said Walker. This touch of whimsicality didn’t soften his face, which still seemed to detest all that was happening to it. Froelich grew embarrassed, as if it was he who had brought this man here to make him unhappy.

He said, ‘Why don’t you loosen your neck-tie?’

‘I’m all right, thank you. In a new place you have to be careful not to catch cold.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Froelich, driving close to the centre line, not quite sure how wide the car was. A farm truck coming the other way made him swerve over, and he ran up on the shoulder, tilting the car and scattering gravel. Walker winced and put his hands on the instrument panel. Froelich began to hope piously that he would get Walker to Party alive. There might be faint credit in being found dead in a roadside smash with a distinguished British novelist, but Froelich had more complicated plans for Walker than that. He hoped he was going the right way to achieve them, but with one thing and another the relationship didn’t seem to be taking the turn he would have wished. He tried anew. ‘Tell me, Mr Walker,’ he said, ‘are you an Oggsford marn?’

Walker looked at him and said, ‘Pardon?’

‘Did you go to Oxford?’

‘No,’ said Walker. ‘To tell the truth, I went to one of the provincial universities.’ Froelich knew this – he had researched his subject thoroughly, and knew all the essential factual details, even down to Walker’s poor degree – but he wanted to prompt some of that intense social observation that had made Walker’s name hit the quarterlies.

‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘You won’t have heard of it.’

‘Why won’t I?’ asked Froelich, rather stung at this.

‘It’s not particularly well known.’

‘I’ve been in England.’

‘Oh, very nice. Which part?’

‘All of it, it’s not so goddam big.’

‘Well, it’s big enough,’ said Walker.

Froelich was a sure, confident man, not used to rebuffs, and it came hard to him to discover that he was doing very badly in this relationship, one he had come to prize intensely. He had been thinking about Walker for weeks, worrying about him, planning this good day, planning this good year. But as he looked at Walker, his side pressed against the side of the car, as if indicating an urgent subconscious impulse not to be in it at all, he felt his failure. Was he pushing too hard? That, of course, the English didn’t like; there was something craggy and hard about their personalities that discouraged access. Americans knew this problem of old. Froelich could remember saying to his wife, in the Earl’s Court days, as they sat lonely and huddled for warmth over the one-bar gas fire, beneath that iron there’s solid gold. You’ve simply got to keep chipping away, and forget the notion that if you haven’t established a relationship in the first five minutes these people don’t want to know you. The thing about the English is that they really stand out against the light, the word ‘character’ means something here, they fully exist, more so than we do. They don’t spend themselves in relationships until they know what the odds are; long hours spent as babies lying in the rain outside greengrocers’ shops have made them tough.

So they drove on in silence for a bit, the big car humming on the concrete. Now wide low automobiles, their visages set in bright metal grins, began to flip by them. A few wooden houses appeared in clusters, with an occasional imbecile farmhand doddering in the weedpatch at the back. The land, black and arid, changed its texture under the busy sky; here and there, a large hog, lowslung and menacing, rooted on wire-fenced land. Occasionally they saw a steer, carrying with it the whole ethic of the west. These were lands that Froelich had come slowly to love, and he wanted to share them, but Walker seemed only to gaze on them in mystery, as if vainly trying to discover their imaginative principle. He tried again and said: ‘What do you think of America, old boy?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Walker. ‘I think it’s confusing. I can never make up my mind whether people are being friendly or hostile. Most of the time they seem to be both simultaneously. And in New York . . . well, in New York I never knew whether I was going to be welcomed or murdered. You don’t know who to trust.’

Trust me, Froelich wanted to say, except that he wasn’t trustworthy. He said, ‘I suppose we make relationships differently.’

‘If that’s what they are. I was beginning to think that in America relationships had nothing to do with people at all.’

‘I can see that. We make up our minds first and then spray the attitudes we have on to the people we meet. Not like jolly old England.’

‘No, quite.’

‘Talking of relationships, are you married?’

‘I’m not a homosexual, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Oh, sorry, so many Americans seem to think that Englishmen are.’

‘No, I tell you, I’ve been to England, you can go easy with me.’

‘Well, yes, I am married,’ said Walker, as if he was loath to make the confession.

‘Good, that’s nice. Any kids?’

Again there was a silence, until Walker forced himself to say, ‘One.’

‘A girl or a boy?’

‘A girl.’

‘Great.’

‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ said Walker.

‘Why didn’t you bring them along with you?’

‘The money wasn’t good enough,’ said Walker, as if pleased to be slightly discourteous again.

‘You should have written and told us. We might have been able to rustle up a grant from somewhere.’

‘Well, no,’ said Walker. ‘Actually, I think I shall work better on my own.’

‘Are you planning to do some work out here? I mean, besides your teaching?’

‘I want to start another book, if I get the time and the ideas.’

‘Well, this really is the place. You couldn’t come to a better. It’s a really creative atmosphere. All the men write books and all the women get pregnant. One long fertility rite. I suppose the point really is that we’re so cut off there’s nothing else to do.’

‘I see,’ said Walker. ‘Do you write?’

‘I’m writing a scholarly book, but I don’t write novels, if that was your question. I have this block: I can’t bear to put my friends down on paper.’

‘I suppose someone has to stand by and watch.’

‘Oh, I do that,’ said Froelich. He was pleased to see that Walker was growing more genial; the day brightened again for him, like the sun coming out on the dark plain.

‘By the way,’ said Walker, growing forthcoming. ‘I met someone you probably know coming over from England on the boat.’

‘Did you? Who was that?’

‘Someone who teaches here at Benedict Arnold, a man called Jochum.’

‘You met Jochum?’ cried Froelich. It was a name that brought Froelich no pleasure at all, and he was worried to think that someone else not of his spirit might have reached this man first, have taught him about a different west and a different Benedict Arnold.

‘Yes,’ said Walker patiently. ‘He was on the same ship.’

‘There’s a person you need to watch,’ said Froelich.

Walker bristled and grew distant again. ‘He seemed a very pleasant man indeed,’ he said.

‘Oh, he’s pleasant. We have a whole crowd of those people. They’re our émigré colony. They all play chess and eat apfelstrudel together. And shake their fingers at you. “Ach, mein friendt, you Americans, you are zo innocent, zo liberal.” ’

‘That’s it,’ said Walker. ‘Nice man.’

‘Yes, good with the finger.’

Walker went silent once more. They drove past more houses, more hogs, more gullys, more cars. ‘Tell me something, Mr Walker,’ said Froelich, after some minutes. ‘What’s all this you’ve been getting so mad about over there in England?’

‘Mad?’

The point of Froelich’s question was that Walker had been described in the press as ‘an angry young man’. He had been pictured in Time magazine, leaning against a tree, in the rain, a long scarf down to his crotch, over the caption: ‘Phoneys make me puke.’ Froelich had the clipping in his wallet, along with several others about Walker. But far from seeming, now, angry, Walker looked excessively phlegmatic. As for being an angry young man, he didn’t look all that young either – though the English were notoriously deceptive, since none of them took enough exercise, except those who took too much. He was going bald; his stomach was potted; he wore a dotard’s knitted cardigan, and his suit made him look as if he had been rolled over by a sheep. The general impression suggested middle age. Nor, clearly, was he a scintillating conversationalist, if this car ride represented his talents in that direction; in fact, you couldn’t get a tweet out of him. Froelich was still prepared and ready to respect him, but truth to tell he had been expecting, when he drove out to the depot, someone a bit more like Tom Wolfe or D. H. Lawrence, someone burning with tension, articulate about his plan for saving the world. Walker gave the impression of being permanently on the edge of sleep; he looked like that kind of Englishman who seems to have been rained on too much. Froelich, knowing the difficulties of the English, was not disappointed, but he was more than ever curious about the principle of Walker’s anger. He knew it as a critic, observed it in the books, but where did it lie in the man? What kind of turmoil was he going to cause in the Department? How would he fill out the role Froelich had designed for him? He said: ‘Aren’t you an angry young man?’

Walker said, angrily, ‘No.’

‘This angry young man business just doesn’t make sense to me,’ said Froelich. ‘The way I understand it, and I may be wrong on this, but the way I see it is that a lot of fellows who have been sent free to university by the government are complaining that the government is lowering standards by letting fellows like them in. I suppose this is English liberalism.’

‘I’m not one,’ said Walker. ‘Admittedly there are a lot of things I dislike about England just now. I’ve written about some of them.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Well, I think we’re being over-Americanized, for a start.’

‘How tough,’ said Froelich.

‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘No, I agree with you.’

‘I mean that we take the wrong things and we use them badly. It means American hamburgers that don’t taste like hamburgers and American television programmes of the worst rather than the best kind . . . I’d like us to take other things, some of the excitement and freedom that Americans seem to have. But I’m not an angry young man. It’s a silly label and I hope it won’t be pinned on me. It makes me so furious.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Froelich, trying to forget the posters for Walker’s public lecture in the Fogle Auditorium (which he still didn’t know about) which, draped all over Humanities Hall and the English Building, used the phrase with what Froelich now recollected as ceaseless repetition. ‘So you came to the States for the excitement of it?’ asked Froelich.

‘Yes, if it really exists. Does it?’

‘Well, you’ll see. I think you’ll find a certain amount of excitement in Party. It’s mainly a university town.’

‘Where is it?’ asked Walker.

‘Don’t worry, that really exists. It’s over this next rise. You’ll see it in a couple of minutes.’

‘So there’s plenty going on, is there?’

‘Intellectually? Yes, I suppose there is. Scrabble, red-baiting, wife-swapping. The auditorium series brings visiting plays and orchestras. There’s an art theatre just off campus, mainly showing Sellers and Bergman. There’s a university bookstore with the best selection of ring-binders in the state. It’s a mixed campus. We teach things like driver-education and animal husbandry, but the English Department, well, they’re not entirely committed men, but they have character. I don’t know how you’d measure it against the civilization you come from. My guess is that you’ll find what you take for granted in England is only veneer out here in Party. But that’s the thrill, I think. Oh, there’s one thing. It’s a dry campus. There are no liquor stores in Party. If you go into the bars they serve 2.5 beer. To buy real liquor you have to go a couple of miles away from campus.’

‘Why is that?’ asked Walker.

‘It’s a state law. Benedict Arnold is slightly paradoxical in that it’s both a private and a state university. We draw on some state funds. This means that the state has some power over us, and that means they can keep us dry and also apply the loyalty oath. In fact, because of our constitution, their rights are a little hazy, and we keep challenging them. You’ll see some activity in that direction while you’re here, I would guess. Are you a liberal?’

‘Yes,’ said Walker, ‘I think I am.’

‘Good.’

‘What about the students?’

‘They’re mixed too. We have a lot of out-of-state students because of the attractions of Party. But quite a number of instate students too.’

‘They live at home?’

‘Some of them do, others in dormitories and apartments. I have a girl in one of my classes who lives with her parents in the south of the state and flies herself in by private plane every day. You know – I’m sorry I cut class, Professor, but there was a fog hazard and I had to fly on to Detroit. But most live in apartments and the fraternities and sororities. Nice kids. You’ll probably hear them in a minute, baying for someone’s blood. Incidentally, they’re pretty liberal and they fight with the citizens – who aren’t.’

At that moment the car topped a rise and they could see the town, quite suddenly, laid out on the slope in front of them. It was set in trees. They drove downward to meet it. As they did so, they could see, on the long dark line of the horizon, something new. Where the grey grasslands seemed to end, a row of wigwam-like formations, some straight, some tilted, some grey-brown in colour, others streaked with green, some touched at the top with white, were scribbled upwards into the sky. These imperfect triangles had an immense quality; something striking and sombre about them always gave Froelich a catch of pleasure whenever he topped this ridge and saw them. He heard Walker gasp at his side. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Those are the Rockies.’

Walker said, ‘Aren’t they marvellous?’

Froelich looked at him and loved the man. The eye, embedded in that cold flesh, saw, then; passion could take root, enthusiasm grow, in that fleshly rind. Froelich warmed, as he had intended to do, in his genius, and felt the man grow in stature. Walker too knew an occasion when he saw one. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I will take off my tie.’

‘Do that,’ said Froelich. He watched as Walker unknotted his tie and loosened the top button of his shirt, spreading the great wings of his collar wide, English-style, as in old movies, across the lapels of his jacket. The gesture took Froelich back to Earl’s Court and the beach at Brighton, where middle-aged Englishmen, beaming with paternity, exposed pallid pink-tinged sweating flesh to public view, as if to make a positive assertion of their asexuality. Walker’s flesh had the same kind of grossness and unreality, as if it didn’t exist for anything, as if none of his living was done in relation to it. But the gesture was more important than that: it was assertion of comradeship and commitment; it was an abandonment of a whole culture; it was a promise that here was a man who would yield and give something to America and to Party. Froelich knew that there was more than a collar to be undone over these next few months. ‘There,’ he said, feeling a strange warm glow of triumph and promise, ‘now you’re a beatnik.’

Walker looked at the mountains and knew that they had come just at the right time. For the Walker who descended from the transcontinental flyer into the middle of the American void, and now sat beside his terrifying companion in the car, washed over by landscape and incomprehensible discourse, was not the man, was less than the man, who had sailed in, a few days before, past the Statue of Liberty with a note of hope in his spirit. So much had happened since then; and all of it was bad. What was sought, on his part, was sense and design; what was offered, on the world’s part, was the other – violence and meaninglessness and anarchy. Was this then the promise, the liberty? If it was, why grumble at chains? The days had gone by, immersing him in disjunction. What New York had begun, the train journey westward had finished. For nearly two days now he had sat in lowered spirits as the train perambulated the country, while cities faded and were replaced by untiring plain. The tree became a forgotten European elegance. Onward they drifted, coursing, bells ringing, through the backs of middle-western towns and cities, where grey cupolas had peered through the window-glass at him over liquor stores, and where networks of iron fire-escapes had competed with high-tension wires to give a sense of temporariness and disorder and clutter. The towns were as he expected Russian towns to be, half-staked settlements clinging to the steppe. Dogs in dustbowls celebrated a somnolent deadness; small boys exposed their genitals on ashpits; birds with heavy feet plodded about the landscape. The dust from the Pullman seats flew about the coach. America grew vaster and vaster, less and less controllable. When the nothingness reached its greatest, and the prairie reached its barest, when nature said nothing and did less, then the train had stopped, to deposit him and him alone, to put him between naked sky and naked ground, to leave him stranded where his style and his thoughts bounced shimmering mirages and unwatered desert.

And from out of the desert, like the djinn in the Arabian Nights, had come Froelich, big and bouncy, threatening and cajoling, all bonhomous destruction, demanding an accounting. In the car, watching the concrete road stretch ahead of him into the unpromising future, Walker thought again of home. A faint name stated itself: it said, Elaine, Elaine. Walker wanted to let it go, wanted to be here, but it sang and sang. Froelich picked it up, as if by intuition, and twisted it with a question. It needed the mountains, and they came. He had seen the Rockies, wigwams of stone, and the seed that had grown enough to bring him here began to sprout again. They dominated the sky and designed it. Below them, as if in response, the world began to change. Signs began to flick past. They said WATCH FOR SNOWPLOWS and YIELD and REACH FOR A CIGARETTE AND DIE. A few houses appeared on each side of the highway; a sign said THICKLY SETTLED. Then a vast spread of roadside services appeared, small restaurants and diners and service stations, recognizing human existence and human need. They addressed the traveller with monosyllabic communications, clearly knowing he must be exhausted: EAT, they said, and GAS and SLEEP and (rather more mysteriously) WORMS. Then came the boundary of the citadel, the social note: a sign said Party: Pop. 15,000 Happy People and a Few Soreheads. The Lions, declared a sign adjacent, met lunchtime Thursdays in the Van Der Pelt Sunshine Hotel. The Hallelujah Baptist Church on Main Street was ‘the Church where Jesus is REAL’. The KKK Motel was recommended by the AAA. Here was life and God and love; all these things could still go on, even out here; man in his inexhaustible inventiveness could be social anywhere. That in itself gave a sort of hope.

‘Here we go!’ cried Froelich, waving his hand around him. ‘Party!’ The car wobbled and he grabbed the wheel again. ‘There’s your neighbourhood shopping centre, out here we buy our groceries.’ Walker looked out at a large expanse of parking lot, around which a few stores had congregated; the Grabiteria, advertising a free bear’s paw with a five-dollar food order, a laundromat called the Doozy Duds, and an establishment called the Big ’n’ Beefy dominated by a sign showing a gross, meat-laden hamburger. A few girls clad in clothes that suggested they had just come off the line of chorus-girls at the theatre walked among cars carrying small trays. Then came society of greater complication yet. The fire-station, a palace of crystal with an incongruous Swiss-chalet roof, looked like a romp of Eero Saarinen; the court house, one block later, was a domed institution in high Gothic style, capped with a lead roof and defended on two sides by a Civil War cannon, muzzle packed with paper, and a small naval aircraft missing its propeller. Loungers sat on the low walls around, chewing Mail Pouch tobacco and reflecting with all the sagacity of the local yokel on the passing parade.

‘Can we stop at the post office?’ said Walker, feeling vastly better, able to plan and to prognosticate. ‘I’d like to send a telegram. It’s to abroad.’

‘You can’t send a telegram from the post office,’ said Froelich. ‘You send it through Western Union.’

‘Where’s that?’ asked Walker.

‘Oh, you can call them from my place.’

‘We’re going to your place?’ asked Walker.

‘I guess you want to wash up.’

‘Wash up?’

‘You know, clean yourself up a bit.’

‘I see,’ said Walker, relieved. ‘Well, if it won’t inconvenience the university . . .’ And indeed he did want to go to the lavatory; he had not liked to go on the train, because he was afraid of missing his destination, and that little walk up the line into the desert, which had perplexed Froelich so, was no more than a search for a public convenience. Now to be clean and new was Walker’s first ambition. He looked out at the town. A prairie schooner stood out on Main Street, and a number of the inhabitants, walking through the stretch of active life that extended from Penneys, where farm overalls hung in the windows, to the First National Bank, which was giving away free balloons, wore prospector’s beards and spring ties. Two rodeo riders horsed showily down the street, blocking traffic and delighting the tourists heading west, canvas sacks of water hanging off their fenders. The motif of ancient and modern was repeated right through the town centre: here was a store in glass and aluminium, where ski-clothes and western boots shrivelled in the sun-glare, and there was a Victorian structure in gargoyle style, called the Van Der Pelt Sunshine Hotel (‘Party’s Coolest Finest Driest Martini’). Of the university there was no sign, no hint, almost no possibility.

‘Where’s the college?’ asked Walker.

‘Doesn’t look like the place where you could have one, huh?’ said Froelich. ‘Well, that’s about right. Still, Party does have its provincial virtues. Actually you have to drive eighty miles to the state capital – Dimity – to find out the right time, but time is, after all, a relative concept. No, the university’s just out on the edge of town.’

‘How do you mean? Why don’t you know the time?’

‘All the townships round here can vote their own time. There’s sometimes a two-hour difference between two settlements five miles apart. That’s what we call out here real democracy.’

‘It sounds like anarchy, to me,’ said Walker.

‘Well, that’s right, that’s another word that fits the case. That’s what people forget about the States. They think it’s a land of conservatism and conformity. Okay, there is that, there’s plenty of it out here, and you’ll meet it. But the important thing is that at bottom America is free-floating and anarchic. You’ll find it in the students. They all have their little conservatisms. With one it’s virginity, with another it’s segregation, with another it’s straight know-nothing agrarianism. But these are just momentary stays against confusion. The real America is anarchy, right? The real Americans are the free-floating, do-anything students who don’t believe in a goddam thing except life. Riding on the back of history, flux and flow.’

‘Well, I have some sympathy with that,’ said Walker, ‘but I think I take a stand on time.’

‘Yeah, that figures. The English think of time as being made in England . . . all that Greenwich Mean Time bit. Greenwich Mean . . . that’s real time, the fundamental absolute time, and you can live by it because no one’s challenged it yet. They may do, but they haven’t yet. But in the States we have five time-zones, and variations locally. So we know time is relative . . . you can manipulate it, cheat it.’ Froelich took the car around three Bermuda-shorted girls who were crossing the street, and said, ‘Hi, luscious,’ through the window at the one nearest to him. ‘Hello, fella,’ said the girl.

‘Those are co-eds, college kids,’ he said. ‘No, the American attitude toward time is the same as the American attitude to the law. That means we can take it and we can leave it alone. We used to make our own law around here; we still do, to a point. And we still brew our own time. I sometimes figure that this is why American novels are more experimental than English ones. In your novels the narrative line runs chronologically, and why? Greenwich Mean Time. In American novels, time and law are jumbled; point of view goes all over; that’s because our visions and our experience are more fragmentary and separate. We each live in our own time and value zone.’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Walker.

‘Am I the man I was ten years ago?’ asked Froelich. ‘I believe, as an American, no. I’m not the man I was last week. Now you . . . you know what you are. You stay the same, through every situation. You put out the flags, old school tie, Englishman’s suit, all the fitments that keep you right there in line. But what’s the line? Who made the line? Our clothes change with our personalities. We change our whole psychological and physiological systems when we go from one room to another. Call me Proteus.’

‘Everyone sees foreigners as more static than they are,’ said Walker. ‘That’s because the first thing you identify us by is by our nationality. I don’t lead the moral life of my father . . .’

‘Sure,’ said Froelich. ‘That’s right. But we don’t even remember our fathers.’

Now they had reached the residential part of town. Great boat-like American cars oozed past on the streets, and slid silently up driveways sprigged with exotic greenery. The houses behind were white and shiny in the sun. Housewives sipped cool drinks on patios; sprinklers revolved on green lawns; there was an aroma of peace, and no one seemed put out about time at all. Walker looked at the life and liked it. ‘This is where the fathers live,’ said Froelich. ‘Republicans and proto-fascists. You can bet there’s a bomb shelter under every patio. Rigged out with machine-guns to keep the hicks from downtown getting in. We live up here one block.’

Presently Froelich turned the car off the street and parked in the driveway of a small, noticeably unpainted property with a long decaying porch. ‘Well, this is it,’ he said, opening up the car door. ‘It takes a heap o’ heapin’ to make a heap a heap, as the Hoosier poet once said.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Walker, getting out too.

‘It does. Sometimes I have the urge to set fire to the goddam thing and collect on the insurance. But it’s all right. Anti-conspicuous consumption. It has real style.’

They walked up the path. Suddenly some trigger mechanism in the lawn sprinkler turned it through ninety degrees and it sprayed fine water brightly over Walker’s tweeds. Froelich had stepped up on to the porch and opened the screen door.

‘Hi! hi!’ he shouted.

‘Hi!’ said a female voice.

‘Come on in,’ said Froelich.

Walker stepped into the entrance, which gave directly on to a living room furnished in modern, or primitive, style, the general aim of which seemed to be to suggest that one wasn’t buying real furniture since one might be moving to a better place soon. There was an old divan, and four butterfly chairs, made of tangerine canvas stretched over a metal frame, and shaped for people with two heads. The bookcases along the walls were of unvarnished planks and unpainted bricks. Over them hung a medley of decorational devices: Aztec masks, bongo drums, spears, and a Speed map of Leicestershire. Hi-fi wires trailed around the walls and there were unpainted speakers in at least two corners; the record player itself stood on a shelf, all its technology exposed. An opening gave directly into a bedroom, where an unmade bed was evident, on it a nightdress, a girdle, and two empty Coke bottles.

‘Hi!’ said Patrice Froelich, coming out of the kitchen. She was wearing a shift dress which made her look as if she might be pregnant; she had dark hair and a delicate thin face. ‘This is Mr Walker,’ said Froelich.

‘Hello,’ said Patrice, holding out her hand, ‘you’re all wet.’

‘He took a shower without stripping off.’

‘Well, we’re really pleased to see you here, you know,’ said Patrice. ‘Everyone’s crazy to meet you. I guess everyone in town has borrowed your books.’

‘How nice,’ said Walker.

‘I’m sorry the place is so mussed up. Actually I thought Bernie was supposed to take you straight to the reception in the faculty lounge.’

‘That’s right,’ said Froelich, sitting down. ‘But I thought he might like to freshen up first. Also I wanted him to meet you. He’s going to meet some terrible people and I wanted him to see something good first. She is good, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, very,’ said Walker.

‘Well, don’t be so goddam polite,’ said Froelich. ‘Say what you mean around here.’

‘I did mean it. Your wife’s a very attractive woman.’

‘Damn right she is,’ said Froelich.

‘Would you care to use the bathroom?’ asked Patrice.

‘Oh yes,’ said Walker, relieved. ‘I’ve been wanting to go to the lavatory for ages.’

‘Show him the john, Bernie.’

‘Right here,’ said Froelich. He led Walker to the bathroom, on the door of which hung a little card which Froelich turned to reveal a message saying Seat occupied. United Airlines.

Walker sat in the toilet and heard the Froeliches laughing outside. It made him uncomfortable. Once he heard Bernard Froelich say: ‘What a character.’ At one point something seemed to be being shouted at him. A moment later the door was pushed open. Walker, sitting there contemplatively, crossed his hands in front of his face and said, ‘Go away.’

‘I just wanted to know, martini or Manhattan?’ said Froelich, adding, ‘What have you got to hide?’

‘Martini,’ said Walker. When he came out, Froelich stood outside the door, stirring martinis with a glass stick. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘you know how it is. This is the free-and-easy west.’

‘Quite,’ said Walker.

‘Don’t mind Bernie,’ said Patrice. ‘He’s a psycho case from way back. Well, you’re here. That’s good. I hope you like Party.’

‘Let’s go outside on to the porch,’ said Froelich, ‘and really get to know one another.’

‘Well, take it easy,’ said Patrice. ‘I expect Mr Walker’s had a really tiring journey. How was it?’

‘Yes, tiring,’ said Walker.

‘He’d be disappointed if we didn’t keep up that fast pace of living they talk about all the time in England,’ said Froelich. ‘Okay, now let’s ask him some really searching questions. Look, sit over there out of the sun. Where we can’t see you.’

‘I love that suit,’ said Patrice, ‘is that Harris?’

‘Yes,’ said Walker, ‘it’s all wet.’

‘You want to change into something of Bernie’s?’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Froelich. ‘What are you trying to do, destroy his character? That suit is his nature. Don’t worry, the sun’s hot, it’ll dry right away.’

‘Speaking of Harris,’ said Patrice. ‘Is that right you’re staying with the Bourbons?’

‘Harris is Bourbon’s first name,’ said Froelich.

‘That’s right,’ said Walker. ‘He invited me to stay there until I found somewhere suitable to live.’

‘Very good,’ said Patrice, ‘though we could have taken you in here. You’d have liked that better.’

‘Yes, why not?’ asked Froelich. ‘We intended to ask you, but Harris got in first.’

‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ said Walker.

‘Well, okay, if you can’t, you can’t.’

‘No, he’s right, Bernie, he already made an arrangement.’

‘I guess not, it’s just that Bourbon has these crazy kids. They’ll give you a terrible time.’

‘Yeah, we should have warned him ahead of time. Then he could have come here.’

‘What’s the matter with these kids?’ asked Walker suspiciously.

‘Well,’ said Patrice, ‘the oldest boy, that’s Crispin, is a j.d., a juvenile delinquent. He graduates from high school next year.’

‘Then he’ll be an adult delinquent,’ said Froelich. ‘That’s progress; if you’re going to be a delinquent, why be juvenile about it?’

‘What does he actually do?’ asked Walker.

‘Oh, he runs around with a funny crowd, steals cars and drives them off cliffs for kicks, takes drugs, that kind of thing. I’d guess you’d say he was a normal child of intellectual parents. If intellectual is the word for Harris Bourbon.’

‘He’s shook up,’ said Patrice. ‘They all are, but he’s extrovert and has become a delinquent, whereas all the best kids round here are introvert and become psychotics. I much prefer that kind.’

‘That’s right,’ said Froelich. ‘What we need in this country is a government that will come out on the desirability of suicide over murder.’

‘Then there’s the twins. The Bourbons abstained for about twelve years after they had Crispin, cut out intercourse entirely. I guess they felt it had failed, once they saw Crispin. It worries me sometimes. But then they went to it again and came up with these twins.’

‘I guess, if there are any real measurements on these things, they’re worse.’

‘How?’ asked Walker.

‘Well, they figured they were too permissive with Crispin, so they tried to repress the twins, made them hate their father and venerate him and all. Dr Bourbon worked on his super-ego and developed a bunch of authoritarian traits. My guess is they’ll ask you to try some of that English discipline on them. Dr Bourbon had a cane shipped over from England. Brandy, that’s the girl twin, hit him across the face with it. He was two days in the hospital.’

‘I told Bourbon he should have stayed continent or tried adultery, but this monstrous sexuality bowed him down.’

‘What’s he like?’ asked Walker.

‘Harris? Oh, well, what is he like, Patty? I find it so goddam hard to remember him once he’s out of the room.’

‘Well, he’s a sort of cross between Dr Johnson and a Texas cowpoke. He’s sort of impressively unimpressive.’

‘No, he’s not. I’d say he’s even unimpressively unimpressive. When I went out there this morning to borrow his ca . . . his electric mixer, he was out shooting bottles in his yard in a Brooks Brothers suit. That seems to me a kind of basic image of him. And he said to me, “Ho, there, boy, you know, son, this her-ed-it-ary business gits mo’ and mo’ mysterious to me ivery day. Alphonse, that’s one of mah little fellers, he come into the bunkhouse this mo’nin’ at sunup and his maw said sumpn or other to hum and, you know, he started to laugh. Ah bin scratchin’ mah brains all day but it still don’t figger. Cause his maw and me – we don’t niver laugh.” ’

‘Oh come on, Bernie, you’re giving Mr Walker the wrong impression.’

‘I don’t believe so.’

‘Why does he have a revolver?’ asked Walker.

‘Well, this is the west, you know, Jamie,’ said Froelich. ‘It’s really tough country. Out here, well, a fella gotta be able to defend himself. Keep your mouth buttoned and shoot from the hip.’

‘Don’t believe him,’ said Patrice.

‘You shoot a-tall, Mis’ Walker?’

‘No.’

‘Well, walk in the middle of the street and keep looking around.’

‘It’s not that way any more,’ said Patrice. ‘Dr Bourbon happens to be a morsel of the old west, to a point.’

‘Yes, you can say that again, to a point.’

‘But there’s a lot of the west alive here still.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Froelich, gulping his drink, ‘time we was hittin’ the trail, stranger. Whole bunch of fellas lookin’ out for you ahead a-ways.’

‘Are people waiting?’ asked Walker. ‘I was wondering about that.’

‘Yes, they’ve been waiting a while,’ said Froelich. ‘Better not tell them we stopped in here.’

‘Well, I really enjoyed meeting you, James,’ said Patrice. ‘Do come round and have dinner with us soon. And if you have any problems or difficulties, you know, just call us. We’ve all been waiting for you here. You’re just what this town wants.’

Outside the house, the sprinkler, awaiting his reappearance, turned again through its angle and once more filled Walker’s trouser cuffs with water. He got into the car and they drove toward the campus, past the fraternity houses and by the lake, Bernard Froelich and the man who was just what the town wanted, the stranger from the east. ‘How’d you like Patrice?’ asked Froelich. For once the old question could be given a positive answer. ‘Very much,’ said Walker.

Meanwhile on campus, in the faculty lounge of the English Department, the assembled guests were waiting. They had convened some two and a half hours earlier, in the heat of the afternoon, when they had had to drink iced water and blow on one another to keep cool. Five times their emissaries had returned with tales of barren buses and Walker-less trains; five times they had poised themselves for a welcome. Now President Coolidge had gone to keep another appointment and Dr Bourbon had, in a wild issue of departmental funds, bought Cokes all round, which had revived some and finished others. Old ladies in flappy dresses who taught children’s literature sat on the floor with their shoes off, penned in by forests of legs, thinking vaguely of little Hans in the forest and the gingerbread house. Young instructors in Ivy League suits, bright Jewish fellows who had been Ph.D’ed at Columbia at the age of eighteen, argued fiercely about the incest theme in the Ancrene Riwle. The faculty’s one beatnik, who taught a course in The Novel and Fascism, leaned against the wall and said dreamily, ‘Man, listen to that silence.’ A blonde and willowy graduate student named Cindy Handlin was describing to Ewart Hummingbee, that apathetic phoneticist, her custom of writing a poem a day in her notebook before going to bed; she had now been doing this for four years and had ambitions of publishing a stout volume, the stoutest volume of poetry that had been seen around for some time. Hamish Wagner laughed loudly as he told a story about a graduate student who went to interview a famous American author and had been chased off the property and partly eaten by the novelist’s dogs. ‘Did that affect his critical estimate?’ asked his interlocutor, Dr Evadne Heilman, a large lady with a booming voice. ‘No,’ said Wagner, ‘I think it was the great event of his life.’ The pretzels had run out, the peanuts had gone, and there were some who had forgotten what the occasion was convened for. Nonetheless all obscurely recognized their duty to stand firm until something happened – until someone had a coronary or Dr Bourbon left. Wallowing in corporate unhappiness, they handed glasses about over their heads and swallowed in cigarette smoke, secretly swearing that they never wanted to see their fellows again until this time next year.

Dr Bourbon, his six foot six inches leaned against the wooden wall of the English Building, was worried. He thought back to the Visiting Writer he had most detested – a poet from the east coast who always wore sneakers and shirts open to the waist, who managed to get through 400 reams of departmental quarto paper, an all-time record of consumption, and who had since been picked up by the California State police for broadcasting obscene messages on short wave to patrol cars. He had an uneasy feeling that the experience was to be repeated. There was a time when he would have supposed that Englishness was a guarantee of security, but the long delay, and the fact that all the current English novelists were reputed to be factory workers who devoted their art to baiting the middle class, had made him inwardly dark and depressed. He also did not know what he would do with the man if and when he arrived. Some of the younger staff members, the group Dr Bourbon thought of as the Partisan Review clique, bright young fellows who believed in at the most one God and had petitions to sign whenever you went to see them, had argued at a departmental meeting that the resident writer should not be asked to do anything at all; he should not mean but be. Dr Bourbon had been compelled to protest; he could think of only one word for the suggestion, and he said it. ‘Socialism,’ he cried.

But what was happening? The wooden floor outside resounded with footfalls, and the door swung open. Bourbon craned over the mob; at the same time a voice cried, ‘Froelich’s found him!’; and the throng galvanized into action, pressing forward, snickering, pinching one another. Before them stood a muddled, tired, dispirited figure. They noted the corpulent shape, the young but worn demeanour, the Harris tweed suit, so signally inappropriate as to be a considered eccentricity. Walker, who in his slim social past had got by on an argument about abortion, a habit of reading while talking and a few desultory spurts of lechery, tried to take command of resources he had not got. He stood silent. It was, as it happened, enough. ‘Pip pip, old top, what ho!’ cried jovially a large man at the front of the assembly, a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling ostentatiously at his side. ‘I’m afraid we didn’t wait tea.’

‘Take no notice of Hamish,’ said a large woman, coming and gripping his elbow, ‘I’m Evadne Heilman. I’m a Chaucer man.’ She seized one of her bosoms in an intimate gesture, which Walker only understood a moment later; for, suddenly, she reached forward, grabbed him by the lapel, dragging him sideways and downwards.

‘Awk!’ cried Walker.

‘Just a little ceremonial,’ said Miss Heilman through clenched teeth. ‘Now you’re ready to face them.’

She let him go and he discovered on his lapel a little cellophane-covered ticket that said, like a gravestone, JAMES WALKER, A.B. (NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND), GUEST OF HONOR. He saw that all the company wore the same. A tall and lanky man in blazer and a loose sports shirt, pipe clenched between his teeth, showing whiteness of dentistry against the hard brown tan of his skin, broke through the crowd. ‘Howdy there, son,’ he said. ‘Mighty honoured to have you with us. Have a pleasant journey to find us?’

‘Terrible,’ said Walker, feelingly, ‘I thought I was lost in the middle of the desert.’

‘Waal, we lost five faculty members jus’ last year in accidents while travellin’. You do well to be scared. I’m Bourbon, chief of this little outfit. I have apologies for you from President Coolidge. He was due at the state penitentiary at six. But you’ll meet him again.’

‘Oh, I see, splendid. On parole, no doubt,’ said Walker.

Bourbon chuckled, and then said confidentially, ‘There’s something I ought to tell you right now. And that is I hadn’t gotten round to readin’ yore fine books. I usually stick around in Elizabethan territory, that’s a big range to ride, so I leave most of them moderns to . . . well, you met Dr Froelich. Ride much, Mr Walker?’

‘A bicycle.’

‘Never on a horse?’

‘No.’

‘Not even a high one?’ said Bourbon with an amiable chuckle. ‘Forgive me. You ought to try it some time. We’re an athletic set of hands round here.’ He tapped his pipe on the heel of his hand and stuck it in his top pocket, drawing himself up to release another half foot or so of physique, and said, ‘Let’s mosey over to the other side the room and meet Mrs Bourbon; she really wants to meet you.’

‘Tip-top trip, eh?’ asked the large man with the Phi Beta Kappa key as they passed him, ‘and how’s the Queen? Well, I trust.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Walker.

‘This is Dr Wagner, Dr Walker. Dr Wagner is medieval.’

‘How do you do?’ said Walker.

‘Nicely, thank you,’ said Wagner. ‘See you around, pip pip.’

‘A droll, Dr Wagner,’ said Bourbon, dragging him onward.

‘I was wondering,’ said Walker, ‘whether there was anything to drink?’

‘I’m afraid you’re right out of luck, Dr Walker; we’re dry here. This is a state-assisted institution and it’s illegal to have liquor on campus. Tell you what, though, we’re drinking Cokes. Miss Handlin.’ He called over a younger girl, around twenty, who looked Walker over with bright eyes. ‘Miss Handlin, this here is Dr Walker, the English novelist and our guest of honour, and I was wonderin’ if you’d do us the privilege of takin’ this dime and walking down the hall to the Coke machine and bringin’ one back for Dr Walker, seeing as how he’s come all the way from England to be with us today.’

‘I surely will,’ said Miss Handlin, smiling richly at Walker.

‘I didn’t know you could run a university without sherry,’ said Walker, trying a bit of patter.

‘We git along, we git along,’ said Bourbon slowly. ‘I was a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford myself, but there’s some things the same and there’s some things different, and that’s one of the things that’s different and I guess that’s the way life is. This here is Mrs Bourbon. She’s an English lady.’

So this was the mother of the twins, previously without intercourse for twelve years, thin and sharp-nosed; she said, ‘Yeah, we met up in Oxford all those years ago. I still remember and love that city. Know it at all?’ Her accent was hybrid, so was she. ‘Amazing how quickly one forgets, though. Stay here in the States and I give you two years. For two years you can stay an Englishman and do all those quaint things that Englishmen do and everyone thinks it’s fine and dandy. Then . . . you become an American, or you go home. Either way the privileges are withdrawn. So you must enjoy them now, Mr Walker, while you can. You’re in a favoured position.’

Walker looked in her sharp eyes and knew she was saying something interesting. He said, ‘That can be tiring too.’

‘And false,’ said Mrs Bourbon, ‘I know that. Still it’s a nice lie while it lasts. So long as it doesn’t become everything you have.’

‘Well,’ said Walker lightly, ‘perhaps I’ll try and enjoy it, then. It’ll be the first time.’

‘Oh, come now, you’re a famous man . . .’

Walker was spared answering this; ‘Coke?’ said Miss Handlin. ‘Dr Walker, I just want to tell you that I’m going to be in your creative writing class next year and I’m looking forward to it very much. I just finished reading your last novel. It’s a fine noble book.’

‘Thank you,’ said Walker.

‘A fascinating book.’

‘Thank you,’ said Walker.

‘Dr Walker, I just wanted to ask you one question if Mrs Bourbon doesn’t mind, do you, Mrs Bourbon?’

‘No, go ahead, take him. I was just telling him to enjoy life while he can.’

‘Well, yes, surely I think everybody ought to enjoy life as much as it’s humanly possible because that’s why we exist. I believe.’

Walker let Miss Handlin lead him away. ‘Oh, that Mrs Bourbon, she’s a lovely person.’ she said. ‘Now, what I wanted to ask was, you know, how do you write? I mean, you know, do you write straight on to a typewriter or in longhand first or how, how do you write?’

Miss Handlin had a bosom which rose and fell rapidly as she spoke, quite the best thing it could do. She wore a shirt with buttons down the front and a slim skirt; she had seamless stockings and white shoes; it was smart, but wanting the style of the Hillesley girls. Walker said, ‘I thought she was a bit of a tough nut.’

‘Mrs Bourbon? The girls simply love her. I’m sure she’s delighted to have an Englishman here.’

‘Does it matter how I write?’

‘Oh, sure it matters, because you have to find the way that’s right for you, you have to have everything exactly right. I mean, I write a little, you know, and I’ve tried all kinds of ways of writing, you know, like sitting in chairs and lying down and in the bath and all, and I find sometimes I’m fluent and sometimes I just block. Do you block at all?’

‘Not often. Well, I write in longhand and copy on to a typewriter.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Yes.’

‘The guy who was here last year could only write when he could smell horses nearby.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Walker, ‘I wish I could say that I wrote suspended on pulleys from the ceiling, but it’s just not true.’

‘Well, that’s a pity, because I think if you can find a new position it makes it more interesting.’

‘You still mean writing?’ asked Walker, surprised.

‘Well . . . oh, you mean sex.’

Walker found Miss Handlin’s bright young eyes fixed on him inquisitively. ‘I’m glad you said that. That means you’ve found the analogy, too. It is like sex. Did Freud say that somewhere? He should have.’

‘I don’t know. I can see we’re going to have a great class,’ said Miss Handlin.

‘I hope so.’

Suddenly Walker found that Miss Evadne Heilman, whose sturdy shoulder had for some time been rubbing familiarly against his own, whose buttock met his, as they stood back to back in the press, had been gyrated round to face him. ‘Can I wrest you for a moment?’ she said. ‘Let’s sit on the floor and talk. Can I have a sip of your Coke?’

‘With pleasure,’ said Walker, when they had found a space on the wall.

‘Like it here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Miss your afternoon tea?’

‘No.’

‘What made you choose Benedict Arnold?’

‘They chose me.’

‘And why did you pick us, why the west?’

‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.’

‘Like Dr Johnson. The Dr Johnson, that is; I say that because Benedict Arnold has its Dr Johnson too; he’s done some fascinating things in yeast research.’ She handed back the Coke bottle.

‘No, do finish it,’ said Walker.

‘You know, you’re so polite? Well, it turns out you’re a very splendid writer. I’ve just been reading an article about your books, and if you’re doing all that, then, brother, I congratulate you.’

‘Oh, what am I doing?’

‘Disentangling the fibres of existence was one thing I particularly remember. Placing in an immediate and urgent social context the sempereternal problems of man; presenting and yet challenging the anarchy of modern life and morals; evolving a metaphysic out of your uncertainty and your despair. And more,’ said Miss Heilman.

‘Who wrote this article?’

‘Why, our own Dr Froelich.’

‘Froelich?’

‘Yes, the man who met you at the station. It was in Studies in Modern Fiction, I’ll let you have my offprint. You could have it tattooed behind your ear.’

‘I didn’t know Dr Froelich had written about me.’

‘Yes, that’s why you’re here, he’s an expert on you. Knows about your bowel movements at the age of three. You didn’t know?’

‘I didn’t know anyone was an expert on me,’ said Walker, ‘even me.’

The large man with the Phi Beta Kappa key, Dr Hamish Wagner, came and leaned on the wall on Walker’s other side. ‘How’s the cricket, old top?’ he said.

‘England were all out for 165 in the last test, according to the New York papers,’ said Walker.

‘165 wickets, eh?’

‘No, that means we scored 165 runs.’

‘Not much runs, huh?’

‘No,’ said Walker, ‘not much runs at all.’

‘Ah well,’ said Wagner, ‘sticky wicket.’

Now Dr Bourbon came loping toward them, scattering the crowds as he came. ‘Ho there, boy,’ he said, ‘well, it’s gettin’ toward sundown. What say we mosey up to the ranch house and cook ourselves a hunk of thick steak?’

‘That sounds very nice.’

Dr Bourbon raised his hand high, so that it touched the ceiling, and said in a deep booming voice, ‘Well, folks, we’re hittin’ the trail; good evenin’ to you all.’ The group fell silent and as Dr Bourbon nodded to him Walker realized that he, too, was expeceed to say a word. ‘Goodnight,’ he said, ‘and thank you very much.’ Then, realizing that this sounded a little pallid, he added what he believed to be a standard American rubric. ‘Take it easy now,’ he said. Looking round the assembled faces he saw Bernard Froelich hooting with laughter. Then Dr Bourbon took him by one arm, Mrs Bourbon by the other, and they trooped through the wooden hall and out into the balmy air. Though the sun was going down the evening remained hot and sticky. They led him to a car, that looked oddly like the car Froelich had met him in. Bourbon, with cowboy gallantry, held open the front passenger door for its two riders. As Walker made a motion toward getting in the rear, Mrs Bourbon pulled his arm. ‘We can all get in front,’ she said. Then Dr Bourbon went behind the car to get into the driver’s seat, and they heard, from inside, a cry go up from him. ‘Goddern it!’ he yelped, and his face appeared in the window. ‘Pardon my French, folks, but some skunk ripped off my rear fender. We’ll have to figger that one out in the morning.’ He got in and started the engine.

‘Isn’t this Dr Froelich’s car?’ asked Walker in his innocence.

‘Dr Froelich’s car is a ’37 Chevvy he ain’t managed to git started for a few weeks now. Did he tell you this was his car?’

‘I must have misunderstood,’ said Walker.

‘Did he do that damage?’

‘We had an accident at the station.’

‘Really now,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘You hit a lot of traffic out there?’

‘No, there was no one around.’

‘I think we’d better talk this out with Dr Froelich,’ said Mrs Bourbon grimly, and they set off through the campus paths.

‘He didn’t say nothin’ to me,’ said Bourbon reflectively. ‘There’s a mighty strange fella, Dr Froelich. A clever enough man, but with no ethical basis.’

‘He’s an out and out liar,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

‘But a mighty clever fella.’ There was something staid and comforting about the Bourbon family, and Walker sat back to enjoy his ride while he was still in their good books.

‘I feel sorry for his wife,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘She’s a very nice girl. You’ll meet her.’

‘I already have,’ said Walker, ‘she is very nice.’

‘Can’t figger out whether she’s carryin’ or not,’ said Dr Bourbon.

‘She could do more with that house,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

‘I rather liked it,’ said Walker.

‘I thought,’ said Mrs Bourbon, ‘you told him to bring Mr Walker straight to the reception?’

Dr Bourbon looked wearily at his wife. ‘I did,’ he said.

They were moving out of the campus. ‘Isn’t it big!’ said Walker.

‘It’ll be bigger,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘I suppose really I ought just to say a word of warning. I say this to all my new men. A lot of folks come out from the east expecting to find a progressive atmosphere here. In some ways there is. The west is really moving. This is new country, we are working out our own life here. But you won’t find here the fancy-dan educational experiment you find in City College, Hunter, Bennington, them places. Our biggest benefactor, he’s a Texas oil-man, only the other day gave a speech where he said the mistake America made was not to desegregate slavery and open it up to whites as well. Now I call that backward-looking thinking. But you have to take account of that kind of thing out here.’

‘I see,’ said Walker, crouched between the two Bourbons, and feeling the winey air driving him toward sleep.

‘We live out of town a ways,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘These are the town limits. See the package store? You can buy liquor out here.’

‘Can we stop?’ said Walker.

Bourbon looked surprised, but said, ‘Well, sure,’ and pulled into the parking lot.

‘I shan’t be a minute,’ said Walker.

Inside the store a wealth of bottles, many of them kinds he had never seen before, dazzled him with dreams of alcoholic promiscuity. The owner, wearing a Stetson and smoking a panatella, appeared from the back and said, ‘Howdy there!’

‘Hello,’ said Walker. It seemed to be the wrong remark.

The man said, ‘You over twenty-one?’

‘I’m over thirty,’ said Walker. ‘I’ve got a child of seven!’

‘Got an ID card?’

‘What’s that?’

The man grew more suspicious. ‘Identification. A driver’s licence.’

‘I don’t drive,’ said Walker.

‘Then how the hell you get here?’

‘I was brought.’

‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I can’t serve you unless you swear an oath.’

Walker, who was about to, looked at the little pad the man pushed forward. In giving the oath, it said, both you and the purchaser should raise your right hand. You should ask: ‘Do you swear you are 21 years of age or older?’ Purchaser should reply ‘yes’ or be refused the purchase.

‘You unnerstand the penalties for perjury?’ said the man. ‘Okay, raise your right hand. Do you swear all that bullshit there?’

‘I do,’ said Walker.

‘Sign the form. Now, what can I do for you?’

‘A box of matches’ was what Walker wanted to answer, but the owner seemed too menacing, and he asked for the bottle of Scotch he had come for. When he got outside he presented it to his hosts. ‘Waal, that’s mighty kind of you,’ said Dr Bourbon, letting out the clutch. ‘Mrs Bourbon and me almost never touch the stuff, but when we have guests around . . . mighty kind.’

‘I had to swear an oath,’ said Walker.

Bourbon turned off the main highway, which disappeared back into barren land, and on to a dirt road, saying, ‘It don’t mean nothing, lots of the college kids come out there and perjure themselves black and blue.’

A mailbox with an ironwork coach and horses and the name BOURBON worked into it showed beside the ruts and Bourbon drove through high grass into a clearing before a long, low, modern house of a kind that Walker had learned from the billboards to call ‘ranch-style’. Mrs Bourbon got out of the car and said, ‘Come on in.’ They walked across the gravel; at the same time, from somewhere close by, shots rang out. Walker nearly dropped the bottle he was carrying. ‘Crispin’s home,’ said Mrs Bourbon without concern, and opened the screen door. Inside the house was dark and cool. ‘We want you to think of this as your home,’ said Mrs Bourbon. The proposition was quietly laughable; the house existed in a different economic universe from anything Walker had ever known. The decor was modern; baffle-board ceilings and oiled wood walls showed themselves. The walls, throughout, were decorated with masks and other atavistic items. Walker’s bedroom proved to be on the ground floor; Mrs Bourbon led him into it and sat down on the big bed, neatly coverleted in flower-sprigged nylon. She patted a bath towel, two hand towels and a facecloth in matching floral design, and said, ‘The guest set.’

‘Very nice,’ said Walker.

At the bedhead was a bookcase containing a row of novels by Zane Grey and the complete works of Carlyle; they were in matched bindings, as consistent as the guest set. Beyond the screened window in the luminous light was a view, uninterrupted by a single human object, of the wigwams of the Rockies. Walker stared for a moment until suddenly, all interruption, there came into it a youth in jeans; he was firing a large gun into the undergrowth in a desultory, inhuman sort of way. ‘That’s my son,’ said Mrs Bourbon in tones that mingled pride and disgust. A moment later Dr Bourbon came into the room, unpuffed, carrying Walker’s suitcases suspended round him. The off-colour rugs, their tentative unfinished patterns suggesting they had been woven by incompetent Navajos, slid beneath his feet on the vinyl-tiled floor. ‘Dern it,’ he said, his deep voice booming off the soundproofed ceiling, ‘These all, boy? You travel mighty light for a stranger.’

‘Well, you never know when you might have to run, do you,’ said Walker.

‘Guess not,’ said Bourbon, taking the remark rather coolly.

‘Well, Mr Walker will want to take a shower,’ said Mrs Bourbon. There was, in fact, nothing further from Walker’s thoughts, but he knew a hint when one was given.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘Well, come and join us in the conversation pit when you’re all washed up.’

Walker didn’t understand this but said, ‘Yes.’

‘The bathroom’s right here,’ said Mrs Bourbon, opening the first door in the passageway and switching on the light. Immediately a frantic whirring and buzzing and whirring began in the room; Walker jumped back. ‘It’s just the extractor fan,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘It’s activated by the light. You’ll find us through here.’

When they had gone Walker locked the door and took off his clothes, which smelled of Pullman. He piled them in a corner of the bathroom and got under the shower, turning the handles. A blow of hot water made him jump out again. He reached through the shower curtain and fiddled with the taps until the water was slower and cooler. Now he got in and stood passively while pins of water bored gimlet holes in his head. Getting out, he found that the shower water had soaked the bathroom and all his clothes. For decency’s sake, he clad himself in his dirty wet underwear and his trousers and ran back along the corridor to his bedroom, clutching the rest of his outer gear. Here he stripped again and began to unpack his cases, looking for his underwear and thinking that he must really write to Elaine. This thought stirred up a complex of emotions that he did not know what to do with, so he sat on the coverlet and peered out through the window, only to discover a small round female face looking curiously at him from outside. ‘Hello,’ said Walker. The child pointed coldly at Walker’s private parts and said nothing. ‘Go away,’ said Walker. The child puffed out a large round globule of bubble gum, shrank and enlarged this for some moments, and then walked off. Walker drew the drapes, completed his toilet in some unease, and tried to restore his hair, which adhered in a thick wet cake on his pate, before entering into company. He found Mrs Bourbon in a large room quite big enough for a dancehall, sitting surrounded by space and time, time and space. She sat on a bergère settee, stroking a Siamese cat and reading the supermarket advertisements in the Party Bugle; before her, tea was laid.

‘Here comes Mr Walker,’ said Mrs Bourbon to the cat, which went away. ‘Hullo, feeling fresh?’

‘Very fresh,’ said Walker.

‘Good. Do take a seat, please. Harris is just frying us up some steaks. How do you feel about outdoor cuisine?’

‘Oh, I like it,’ said Walker, who could not remember having eaten anything outdoors other than fish and chips.

‘It’s adventurous, we all do it out here.’ While she spoke, there appeared, through an aperture which in England would have been blocked by a door, a small child, wearing a confederate general’s hat and pedalling a tricycle. ‘Charge, man, charge, wipe out the enemy,’ he cried, speeding dramatically across the room until he slapped hard against the opposite wall, which dismounted him and cracked open his tricycle wheel.

‘Don’t show off, Alphonse,’ said Mrs Bourbon from the conversation pit. ‘Are you all intact?’

Alphonse, dry-eyed, said, ‘Yeah.’

‘Come over here and show me how intact you are.’

Alphonse went over and sat on his mother’s knee, staring fixedly at Walker as he did so. ‘What you want to go and do that for?’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to ride that thing in here?’

‘I wanted to see the crazy Englishman,’ said Alphonse. Walker felt a shiver of foreboding. ‘What’s your name?’ getting off the knee and coming over to stand by Walker, said Alphonse, looking hard at him. ‘And talk fast – or I’ll let you have it.’

‘His name’s James Walker,’ said Mrs Bourbon, ‘and he’s come over from England to be in Harris’s department, and he’s staying with us for a few days. How’s that?’

‘Crazy,’ said Alphonse. ‘His name’s James. James likes dames and games and pames and mames and bames . . .’

‘Come here,’ said Mrs Bourbon to Alphonse, who took no notice; instead he said to Walker, ‘Are you from England?’

Walker risked speech; he said, tentatively, ‘Yes.’

‘Huh,’ said Alphonse, ‘well your teeth are all crooked. Whydya got such crooked teeth? Whycha go get ’em straightened? Whycha wearing a brace like me?’

‘Cut that out, Alphonse,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘Look, isn’t it time you were hitting that old sack?’

‘England’s a nutty crummy country,’ said Alphonse.

‘How do you know?’ said Walker.

‘That’s the word,’ said Alphonse.

‘It’s time you were in your bunk,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

‘Okay, okay, I’m just going. But I’m hungry. Can I take a piece pie out the icebox?’

‘Yes, just one piece, and then get right undressed.’

When Alphonse had gone, Walker stroked his eyebrow with one finger and said, ‘And do you have a small daughter also?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘My twins. Do you have children too, Mr Walker?’

‘Yes, one daughter.’

‘I’m afraid we haven’t made too good a job of ours.’

Alphonse passed by the entrance space, carrying a whole pie and shouting, ‘Nutty crummy Englishman.’

‘I always felt that if I’d brought them up in England . . . they wouldn’t, you know . . . have been such bastards.’

‘Oh, you can’t say that,’ said Walker, much excited to discover in nuance that same mythical England to which several people had already referred, fulcrum of moral sanity, fine and formal society.

Outside the house a gong boomed sonorously. ‘Come and GIT it,’ cried Dr Bourbon’s booming voice.

‘He loves the kids,’ said Mrs Bourbon. She got up and led the way out on to the patio where Dr Bourbon stood in an attitude of warm anticipation, like a big amiable dog, wearing a chef’s tall hat and an apron with Danger: Not Recommended by Duncan Hines inscribed upon it. Smoke was rising in some quantity from a barbecue grill of modern design. Beyond the eating pit Walker noticed a small kidney-shaped swimming pool, in the blue water of which a small kidney-shaped girl without clothing lay on an inflated air mattress. ‘I thought you were in bed, Brandy,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

‘Aw, go jump in the lake,’ said the girl, whom Walker recognized as the Face at the Window.

‘Time you was bedded down, Brandy baby,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘Come ’long now for yer paw.’ The child tipped off the float, swam to the steps and padded in past Walker. ‘Huh,’ she said. Mrs Bourbon followed her in.

‘Don’t lit your steak git cold, sweetie,’ cried Dr Bourbon after her.

Then Walker and Bourbon ate their steaks together silently in the half-light, while monstrous flies pierced holes in Walker’s leg and tapped the vein. The steaks were on paper plates and were intensely flavoured; Dr Bourbon had apparently been overly generous with a bottle labelled SMOKE: Gives That Real Smoke Flavor to Your Bar-B-Q. Finally Mrs Bourbon came back and began to eat. The night was clear and cool and the mountains were still visible. They seemed to speak of a world away from families, a world away from mankind altogether, a world of pure action and pure being. The threads and frenzies of family life that he had met in the Bourbon household reminded him of home; but the mountains suggested something better, the thing that had summoned him away. And thinking in the darkness, Walker brought his mind round to a thought that had been hunting through his mind since the day he left home, and which the mountains had brought to fullness. He looked up and said, ‘I wonder if I might send a telegram, Dr Bourbon.’

Dr Bourbon swallowed and said, ‘Sure, boy, go right ahead.’

He reached down, lifted a large stone, and produced an extension telephone in a pleasant shade of light blue. ‘What do I do?’ asked Walker.

‘Call Western Union and give them the message,’ said Bourbon.

‘What’s the number?’

‘Hold on,’ said Bourbon, putting a last morsel down his throat. ‘I’ll git ’em for you.’ He hooked his long fingers into the dialling mechanism and presently said, ‘Hi there, Western Union. Hold the line, I got you a customer.’ Then he nodded to Walker and passed the mouthpiece over to him, saying, ‘Just talk into this bit right here, and the girl who’s on the other end will take your message. It’s pretty simple.’

‘I wonder . . . it’s rather personal, this,’ said Walker.

‘He wants us to go inside, Harris,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

When they had disappeared inside and shut the door behind them, Walker, speaking quietly but firmly, dictated his message to the girl who was treacling on the other end of the line. The message said ARRIVED SAFELY STOP WILL YOU GIVE ME DIVORCE QUERY MARRIAGE UNSUCCESS STOP LOVE JAMES. The operator, without concern, repeated the message to a Walker now shaking all over with it. ‘That’s it,’ said Walker.

‘I guess from the nature of the message you’ll want it reply-paid?’

‘Oh yes, please,’ said Walker.

‘Address for reply?’

Walker thought for a moment and then offered the address of the English Department at Benedict Arnold; a wise caution told him that Dr Bourbon might not like to receive this kind of message at his home. After he had replaced the receiver and put the apparatus back beneath its stone, Walker sat back and found that he was feeling very upset indeed. And he realized something else also. The tall lanky youth in jeans, the one who had interrupted the mountains a little earlier, was sitting in a patio chair behind him. He was smiling and directing at Walker a pair of hostile sunglasses with mirror-faced lenses in which Walker could see only two shrunken images of himself. It was Crispin, the Bourbons’ third child; Walker looked blankly at him. ‘Boy, oh boy, oh boy,’ said Crispin, grinning. ‘What a story . . . boy, oh boy.’