Kitabı oku: «Somewhere East of Life»

Somewhere East of Life

THE SQUIRE QUARTET

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.

Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.

Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.

Brian Aldiss
Somewhere East of Life

Dedication

with love

to Felicity and Alex

bearers of fruits

from

Kidlington and Osh

Contents

Cover

Somewhere East of Life

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1 Friends in Sly Places

2 Murder in a Cathedral

3 Bishops Linctus

4 FOAM

5 Some Expensive Bullets

6 Soss City

7 ‘The Dead One’

8 Looking for a Postcard

9 A Head Among the Throng

10 ‘Time Had Run Out’

11 ‘The Madonna of Futurity’

12 A Crowded Stage

13 Richard and Blanche

14 In the Korean Fast Foot

15 Makhtumkuli Day

16 Burnell Speaks!

17 Glimpse of Airing Cupboard

18 The Friendship Bridge

19 A Toe and a Tow

20 PRICC Strikes

21 Subterfuge

22 A Brief Discourse on Justice

23 To the Krasnovodsk Station

24 Singing in the Train

25 Snow in the Desert

26 The Executioner

27 Squire Ad Libs

28 Open to the Public

29 ‘Newcastle’

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

THE SQUIRE QUARTET

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

When you reach the point of no return there’s nothing for it but to go back.

Old Goklan saying

Introduction

In this, the final novel of the Squire Quartet, time has moved on slightly.

We meet Roy Burnell beside his friend’s hospital bed. Burnell is employed by WACH, the World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, which looks after precious things liable to be lost or lost already.

But soon among those lost things is Burnell’s memory. A thief has criminally but adroitly stolen a year of it through an illegal e-mnemonicvision operation.

Burnell has lost twelve vital months of his past. He summons his wife, Stephanie, though memory of her, including all scenes of their love-making, has gone. She comes, and Burnell learns they have been divorced.

E-mnemonicvision is one among the many ‘visions’ generated by technology in this novel. Memories can now be stored electronically and re-used; thieves sell them as pornography.

Partly to escape imprisonment in the present, Burnell accepts a WACH consignment to document an ancient church in Georgia. The church reputedly contains an old and valuable ikon – the Madonna of Futurity.

So Burnell goes to Georgia. Much of it has become a battlefield – ‘Moral emptiness. That’s what the world’s suffering from,’ one character claims.

Burnell eventually finds the ikon. It has been broken into three pieces, all carefully preserved.

For reward, Burnell is sent on a new assignment to Turkmenistan, a place I had never visited. I hired a researcher, who turned up such interesting facts about this little-known country that I determined to go there. It happened that I had a learned friend, Dr Youssef Azimun, who at one time had served as Cultural Director for the new Turkmenistan government, but he had proved so popular that the President – more about him in a moment – had dismissed him. I flew with Youssef and a lady from the BBC called Sue to Ashkhabad, the capital city, almost the only city, since much of Turkmenistan is occupied by the Black Sand – the Kara-kum Desert.

The Soviets had ruled the five trans-Caspian states for nearly seventy years. Now they had gone, leaving behind a strange legacy. After an earthquake in 1948, the Soviets had repaired much of the city of Ashkhabad. Some streets were rather pretty, with rows of small trees and little gutters of water running to cool the temperature. Curiously, the air was full of nostalgic cuckoo calls. Though the Turks were Muslim, after the long Russian stay they downed their vodka like true Moscovites.

Unfortunately – or so I was told – the head of the KGB had stayed on, dubbing himself President, while the KGB rechristened themselves the People’s Popular Party. Plus ça change, etc …

President Niyazov had a gold-plated statue built of himself, which rotated slowly so that it always faced the sun. Though he was clearly dotty, he seemed well-enough liked. He gave the citizens free salt; later free electricity. Yet, there seemed to be no attempt to build up any infrastructure – no hospital, I was told. Instead, a row of five or six hotels, all very similar and all without telephones – vital instruments in the days before mobile phones.

In my hotel room, I had an armour-plated radio. You could tune to two stations, Moscow 1 or Moscow 2.

You had to be eccentric to not grow fond of Ashkhabad.

It was an ideal place for Burnell to operate in.

When Burnell eventually returns to Europe he meets Sir Thomas Squire – now British head of the WACH – in Frankfurt and Squire gives him some good advice – it is his métier: there is something to be said for losing a year of your memory.

We end the Squire Quartet on a note of uncertainty, as we began, with people on the move or disappearing. Just like real life.

One little item happened in Ashkhabad that I found no place for in the quartet, but I have never forgotten it.

The morning was so beautiful and I so young that I got dressed and came downstairs early. At the turn of the stair I met a cleaning woman brushing the steps.

She was withered but she gave me a lovely smile and then uttered the few English nouns she had finally found a use for. Swinging the broom as indicator, she said, ‘The green. The Sky. The sun. The street. The music!’

And that was it. A spirited attempt to communicate.

As is the Squire Quartet.

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012

1
Friends in Sly Places

It seemed right to take flowers. A gesture had to be made. A nurse accepted them from Burnell and stuck them in a glass vase. Burnell went and sat by his friend’s bedside.

Peter Remenyi was still in a coma. He lay propped on pillows, looking the picture of health, his skin tanned, his jaw firm. So he had lain for two weeks, fed by drip, completely unaware of the outside world. Yesterday’s flowers dropped on a side table.

Burnell had escaped from the car crash with nothing more than a bruised arm. He visited the hospital every day. He had taken to reading aloud to Remenyi, from Montaigne or the poets, hoping that something might penetrate that deep silence into which his friend had fallen.

He stayed for half an hour. Rising to leave, he patted the patient’s cheek.

‘You always were a mad bugger at the wheel, Peter,’ he said, with some tenderness. ‘Stay put, old pal. Never give up the struggle. I’ll be back tomorrow. I have to go now. I have a date this evening with a beautiful lady, a star in the firmament of her sex.’

It was the evening of all evenings. The sun went down in glory, the lights came up in competition. Budapest’s Hilton Hotel, installed in the ruins of a sacred site, piled on extra floodlighting. A reception was being held by World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, which several important functionaries from several important countries were attending.

Everything was on a lavish scale, slightly tatty only round the edges. Gipsy orchestras raced through their notes in every available space. Their violins swooped through czardas after czardas, just as drink poured down throat after throat. A Ukrainian dance group threw themselves about with abandon in the centre of the main ballroom.

Undeterred by wars in the Caucasus, the East, the Far East, and several points West, the guests paraded in finest array, embracing or snubbing one another. Powdered shoulders, jewels, and luxuriant moustaches were on display. Many smiled, some meant it. Suave waiters, Hungarian and Vietnamese, moved among the crowds, delivering messages, pouring Crimean champagne into ever ready glasses. Conversations surged and popped like the bubbles in the champagne. Some who talked looked over the shoulders of their partners, in search of escape; others moved in closer. Loving, lingering glances were exchanged. Formality increasingly gave way to something more physical. The most recent jokes circulated, political or scabrous in content. Gossip chased itself among the international guests, the potted palms.

The air-conditioned atmosphere, as time wore on, became charged with alcoholic fumes, excitement, innuendo, enzymes, exaggeration, assignations, assassinations of character, and the most fragrant of sweats. Couples started to slip away. And Burnell looked deep into the green eyes of Blanche Bretesche, breathing faster while trying to keep his usual cool.

He, she, and some of her friends, left the reception and went together into the warm night. Music came faintly to them. They climbed into taxis, to be whisked downhill and across the great glittering city of Budapest. Streets, shops, restaurants sped by. The extravagant elephantine Danubian city prospered, fat on arms sales and many wickednesses, as befitted the over-ripe heart of Europe.

Burnell never quite learned the names of all his noisy new friends. His senses were alert to Blanche Bretesche, to her eyes, her lips, her breasts. Blanche was Director of the Spanish Section of WACH. One of her friends – the one in full evening dress – directed them to a restaurant he knew in Maijakovszki Street, near the opera house. Here were more crowds, more musics.

The restaurant was neo-baroque, ornate inside and out. Though it was late, the place was crowded with a confusion of people, laughing, eating, drinking. Two inner courtyards were filled with tables. Burnell’s party found a free table in the second courtyard. Above them, along flower-draped balconies, a woman sang passionate Hungarian love songs. The man in evening dress, summoning a waiter, ordered wild game specialities, which were not available. Without argument, they settled for lecso all round, accompanied by mineral water and a red wine from Eger. Although the main point of the gathering was to enjoy each other’s company, the food was also excellent. The warm evening held its breath in the courtyard.

Saying little as usual, Burnell allowed his gaze to alight on the flower of Blanche’s face as she talked. The quick wit of her replies always pleased him. Her contributions to subjects under discussion were shrewd, often dismissive. He liked that. She was as much a citizen of the talk as any of the men, though they did not defer to her. While the conversation grew wild and ribald, it remained magically on course, contributing, like all friendly talk, to a general understanding.

When the question turned to a scientific paper of Blanche’s, he saw her quick look, sheltered under long dark lashes, turning more frequently to him, as if questioning. A signal flashed unspoken between them. Round the convivial table, between spates of talk, they applauded every song the resin-voiced woman sang, calling up to the balcony in acclamation, though they had scarcely listened to a note. And at two-thirty in the morning, Burnell summoned a taxi. The taxi carried him back through the scurrying town, with his right arm about Blanche Bretesche, to his hotel.

Even before he woke next morning, he was conscious of her warmth. He found himself lying on his stomach. Her arm was across his back. Turning his head cautiously, he was able to watch her sleeping. Happiness flooded him.

He had always admired the look of her, from the alert walk – much like a stalk, he thought – to the well-shaped intellectual head. With those closed green eyes went a dark colouring particularly to his taste, though her hair was now cut fashionably shorter than when they had first met, some six years ago. She had been Stephanie’s friend, and was about Stephanie’s age, thirty-four or so. Now she was his friend – truly a friend, trusting and direct.

Raising himself gently, he surveyed her sprawling body. Nothing was one quarter as beautiful as the female body, no sky, no landscape.

Blanche was calm about her lovemaking, not stormy. The affirmatives she had uttered still sounded in his ears. There was another sound now, in their shared room. Not merely the distant hum of traffic as it crossed the bridge from Buda to Pest. A fly buzzed against one of the window panes.

Cautiously, Burnell manoeuvred himself out from under that arm with its lashes of dark hair chasing themselves from mid-forearm to elbow. Padding over to the window, he opened it. The bluebottle, after raging against the pane a minute longer, was caught by the breeze and made its escape into the open air.

Perhaps it said to itself, ‘Ha, I figured my way out of that …’ But flies had no hold on truth. For all their countless generations born since glass was invented, they had never comprehended its nature, and so remained continually trapped by it.

When he turned back into the room, Blanche’s eyes were open.

‘All the time I was asleep, one of that woman’s songs was going through my brain. What do you think she was singing about? Did you understand a word of it?’

‘It would be the usual things,’ he said, closing the window. ‘Love betrayed, a starry night, a white glove dropped in a garden …’

She smiled. ‘I wonder what Neanderthals sang about, if they sang at all.’

‘Oh, I’d guess love betrayed, a starry night, and a white mammoth tusk dumped in the cave. Why?’

‘Some Catalan archaeologists have found an undisturbed cave in the mountains near Burgos, the home of early man. I’m interested in the way primates turned into men and women. When did speech develop, when did simple simian games of tig become elaborate human games with rules, and aggression codified. That kind of thing.’

He went towards the bed. ‘Who sang the first love song. Who invented the wheel. Why did the English invent marmalade from Seville oranges.’

She reached out and took his hand. ‘Talking of the English, Roy, come and screw me again, please, just a little, will you?’

‘There’s no breakfast for you until you let me.’

The breakfast was good too. They ate in the room, talking mainly of their work. WACH both brought them together and generally kept them apart. Burnell had recently been in Milan, documenting the restoration of the Duomo. He was due to report to his superior in Frankfurt, where WACH had its headquarters, in two days. Blanche was now mostly at her desk in Madrid, able to get out on field work infrequently. She had to catch a flight back to Spain the following day.

‘I speak German and Spanish – in fact, Castilian – more frequently than I do French. I don’t regard myself as particularly French any more. I belong to the Community.’

‘You’re an enlightened woman.’

‘Don’t be silly. I know you speak half a dozen languages, you footloose creature. Why didn’t you go back to England for your leave, instead of pottering about Europe? Do you like the German domination of the EU?’

‘I don’t mind it. It was inevitable. One reason I’m here and not in England is there’s something I want to check in the anthropological museum. No, whenever I go back to England … well, everything seems to come in quotes nowadays. It all seems old fashioned. You know, things maintained for tourists, like “The Changing of the Guard”. People still have, insist on, “toast and marmalade” for breakfast. They “drive down to the coast”. They go to “the RA private view” and in “the season” they attend what they still call “Royal Ascot”, despite all that’s happened to the royal family. My father still likes his “cup of tea”, and talks of Europe as “the Continent”. That kind of thing.’

She laughed over her second croissant. ‘They only do that kind of thing in exalted Burnell circles. Oh, I remember you dislike those circles, but they’re bred in you. That’s why you’re so self-contained. I like that, really. It’s quaint …’

He put a hand over hers and laughed with her. ‘Quaint! Yes. The French also have their traditions, if I remember correctly. Listen, my boss has a bungalow on Lake Balaton. I’ve got a hire-car. Let’s drive down to Balaton for the day. We can swim and sail. You can tell me about your latest paper. Come on.’

She smiled at him, with slight mockery. ‘You look a little more boyish than you did yesterday. And I feel a little more girlish. Is that a word? Girlish? There are several things I am supposed to do today. I could cancel them. Let me make a few phone calls …’ Setting down her coffee cup, she gave a sudden exclamation. ‘Oh, Roy, come to Madrid and live with me. I’m sure we’d be so happy, truly.’

He lowered his gaze. ‘You know I don’t speak Spanish.’

They drove through hectares of sunflowers to Lake Balaton. They had chosen a perfect day for the jaunt. At one point they passed a refugee camp, protected by razor wire. Hungarian and Croatian flags hung limply from flagpoles. They were past it immediately.

At a minor crossroads, Burnell slowed the car. This was where the crash had occurred which left Peter Remenyi in a coma. Both cars involved had been wrecked. No sign remained of the collision. He reminded Blanche that the previous summer, he, Remenyi, and another friend had gone horse-riding in the Alps, bivouacking most nights.

‘What did you read him today, when you were sitting with him?’

‘Oh, whatever’s to hand – just in case it gets through to him, wherever he is. Shelley. “Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene The actors or spectators?”’

Blanche gave an appalled laugh. ‘Oh, that’s awful. Isn’t that a lament for someone dead?’

He speeded up again. ‘In this case, the nearly dead.’

The bungalow was situated in the diplomatic strip, away from the crowds. It proved to be a mansion built in ornate mock-art-nouveau style. Its verandah overlooked the blue waters of Balaton. They admired the frightful taste of its decor, joked about the garish nude paintings, sailed, swam, sunned themselves, and made love on the reindeer rug in the living-room to the music of Smetana. Although the forests and rivers the composer had celebrated were destroyed by pollution, his music remained pristine. The hairs of the rug came off on their damp bodies.

Sometimes she looked up at the mock-Mucha ceiling, sometimes he did.

At sunset, they strolled arm in arm to the nearest restaurant. Foal was on the menu, so they ordered foal.

As if an earlier conversation was in Blanche’s mind, she said, ‘Spain’s the most successful part of the Community, except maybe Sweden. Outside of Germany, that is. It’s a wonderful noble country. At least you might come and visit me, meet some of my friends. Drive down to Cordoba, meet the statue of Averroës.’

‘I hear Spain is rather autocratic, nowadays.’

‘Oh, that! They’ve banned this e-mnemonicvision craze, if that’s what you mean. EMV is treated as if it was – were, do you say? – the subjunctive? – a drug. I am inclined to agree. Violent videos were bad enough, but to experience other people’s actual memories – isn’t it a kind of rape? – it’s regarded as obscene in a Catholic state.’

‘You’ve never tried EMV? Properly used, it can be a good learning tool. I ran a bullet of Umberto Benjamin’s memories of cathedral building. It’s in the WACH library in Frankfurt. The insights were startling. It was as if for half an hour I really was Benjamin. EMV is mind talking to mind. There’s nothing like it.’

‘I would have guessed e-mnemonicvision would be too invasive for you.’

The waiter was pouring wine into their glasses, red and randy. As they toasted each other, Blanche said, ‘Mainly EMV is used for second-hand sex and misery and violence, not learning. I’m inclined to think it is demeaning to human nature.’ She laughed. ‘“If God had meant us to pry into other people’s minds, He’d have given us telepathy”…’

‘It may prove in the end to allow us better insights into others. God knows, we could use that. While you’re experiencing the false memory, you do seem to be the other person. You know the old Indian saying, “Don’t criticize your neighbour till you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins”.’

‘Well, I still prefer reading. Old fashioned of me, I know. I also think it’s an abuse that people – poor people – are forced to sell their memories. It’s selling your past, a new form of prostitution, worse than selling a kidney … Where’s that hunk of foal? I’m hungry.’

‘But lovers, exchanging memories …’

‘And becoming confused and neurotic. EMV is not a decade old and already it’s causing all kinds of psychoses. But not in Spain, happily.’

He saw it was time to change the subject. Besides, a violinist was sawing his way towards their table, eyes levelled at them along his instrument, a marksman aligning his sights on a target. A burst of ‘Elegaila’ was due. ‘Tell me more about your work. I’m so ignorant, spending my time in decaying places of worship. I’ve lost touch with the modern world.’

‘Lucky Roy! Well, my work is more interesting to me than its description would be. Let’s talk about you. I know you’ve got problems. We all have. You’ve heard about my mother’s lawsuit before. It goes on … It’s your quality of remoteness I like, do you understand? Everyone is so bloody engagé these days. To take a position, a stance. You don’t have a stance, do you?’

‘I’m ruled by circumstance. Blanche, I don’t know how you put up with me.’

‘I’m an idiot, that’s the reason.’ They laughed.

As the waiters began to load their table with plates, she began to talk about Spain, its recent past, its distant past. The full-bodied wine, the tender foal steak, the cry of the violin, robbed what Blanche was saying of its nuances.

Next morning, he drove her to Ferihagy airport. As they embraced and kissed each other goodbye, she said, ‘I’ll think of you – and remember we shall need more of one another very soon. Just bear my invitation in mind.’

‘Blanche – of course. Of course I will. It’s just …’

‘It’s still Stephanie, isn’t it?’ Lines of gathering frown appeared on her forehead. ‘I thought you might have stopped that foolishness.’

He shook his head, not in denial but in impatience with his own nature. The green eyes were suddenly luminous with anger.

‘Why don’t you bloody well forget Stephanie? She’s bloody well forgotten you.’

Then she was off, raising her boarding card above her head as she swept past the official at the entrance to the departures lounge. Elegant, in full control, moderately famous, one of the modern ladies of a united Europe.

He made his way up to the observation deck. Tall tails of planes like sails of yachts moved their insignia past his vision: Malev, Lufthansa, KLM, United British, EuroUnion, Singapore Airlines, SAS, Aeroflot, EuroBerlin, Alitalia, Bulgair, and her airline, her flight, Iberia, about to carry her back through Europe’s skies to the place where she lived and moved and spoke Castilian.

At last Burnell turned away. He jingled his keys abstractedly as he made his way to the short-term car park. Nothing for it now but the museum and old things, relics connected with death. His milieu.

He let self-hatred gnaw within him as he eased himself into the hired BMW.

Under genuine regret at Blanche’s departure, he tried to stifle some relief. Supposing he went to live with her, what then? What would he do? Find to do? Shouldn’t Castles in Spain – Châteaux en Asie, as the French called them – remain splendidly imaginary? What would it feel like to love, to have continuous intercourse with, another woman, while Stephanie remained as much part of his interior monologue as a separating language? He could ask himself the question even with Blanche’s physical presence still aromatically close. As he drove to the museum, he attempted a macrocosmic analogy. How could England ever become genuinely part of the European Community while its language kept the USA ever in mind?

By such linguistic artifice, he tried to distract himself from that ignoble sense of relief at Blanche’s departure. But self-knowledge is generally a traitor.

The dead were driving the living to the grave. The dead were represented by skeletons, frisky and grinning, unaware they were anatomically incorrect. The line of the living began with prelates in grand robes, the Pope in the lead. Following the prelates came a procession of merchants, hands on purses, then ordinary men and women, a soldier, then a prostitute in a low-cut, tight-laced dress; lastly, a crippled beggar bringing up the rear. Thus most ranks of medieval society were represented, together with inescapable gradations of decay.

This danse macabre had once formed an integral part of the stonework of the cathedral at Nogykanizsa. The slab on which it was carved had been saved when the cathedral was partially destroyed, to repose in the grandly named National Museum of Hungarian Anthropology and Religion.

‘Sorry, to do photographs is strickly forbidden,’ said the guide, seeing Burnell unzip his camera bag. ‘Better give it me your camera.’

She was a narrow bent woman in her fifties. A dewdrop pended at the end of her narrow nose. Her attitude suggested that nobody knew the trouble she’d seen, or that she was preparing to see in the near future. Her clothes – the nearest thing possible to a uniform – indicated that she neither shared nor approved the prosperity the new order of things had brought to her city.

She jangled her keys in best gaoler fashion. This part of the museum was officially closed for alterations, on the principle all museums adhere to, that some sections should always remain inaccessible. Only when Burnell had shown his World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage pass had he been reluctantly allowed entry.

He took a few measurements. In his black notebook he made notes and sketches. Could it conceivably be that the Pope was a representation of one of the sixteenth-century Clements whose portrait hung in the Uffizi in Florence? He made a more careful drawing of the papal figure. The frieze, severed and displayed on a bench, had suffered from weathering. Yet it was possible that the emblem carved on the Pope’s pocket represented the Castle of St Angelo, in which the pontiff Clement had been incarcerated. If so, Burnell had established an important connection hitherto overlooked.

Steering herself in her heavy shoes, the guide came to stare over Burnell’s shoulder. ‘It’s a disgust, der Todten Tantz. These skeleton, pah!’ She gestured towards the stone with an open hand.

‘Mortality – Christian stock-in-trade. But elegant rather than repulsive, to my mind.’

‘Repulsive, you say? Yes.’

He admired the way the leading Death gestured with some gallantry towards the open grave, its skull bizarrely decked with flags. The gesture could have been copied from a painting of skeletons disrupting a rural scene in a painting in the Campo Santo in Pisa. The helpful guidebook to the museum, published in Hungarian and German, attributed to the sportive Death the saying, ‘In this doleful jeste of Life, I shew the state of Manne, and how he is called at uncertayne tymes by Me to forget all that he hath and lose All.’

For a while, as Burnell measured and sketched, silence prevailed. The only sound was the footsteps of the guide, as she walked to the end of the gallery and back. She sighed in her progress, jangling her keys like a gaoler in a novel by Zola. The two were alone in the gallery, confined within the museum’s stone walls. The woman paused to stare from a narrow window at the city below. Then she called to her visitor from a distance, her voice echoing in the empty space.

‘Theme of Todten Tantz is much popular in Mittel Ages. In the stadt of Nogykanizsa, half of the population is wipe out by the Plague only one year after building of the cathedral. Only one year!’ She gave a harsh laugh, her larynx rattling in her throat. ‘Now we know better than this, praise be.’

Approaching Burnell step by step to punctuate her sentences, she launched into a discourse regarding the horrors of the Middle Ages. She concluded by saying, ‘Why you draw bad dead things? In those times was much misery here in Budapest. In these times now, everyone makes many money. Christianity and Communism, both is finish, forgotten. God and Marx – gone away! So the world is better place. People have more enlightenment than previous times.’ She sighed so that her breath reached Burnell. ‘I am old woman, of course – too late to benefit.’

It is always unwise to argue with guides. Burnell rejected both her assumption and her breath. ‘Can you really suppose people have become more enlightened? On what ground do you suppose that, madam? Have you forgotten all the fratricidal wars at present in progress on the fringes of Europe?’

The guide gave a wicked smile, pointing a large key at Burnell as if it were a gun. ‘We kill off all the Russians. Then the world is a better place. Forget about every bad things.’

Burnell closed the black notebook with a snap. ‘It’s the living who distress me, not the dead. Kindly let me out of here.’

Burnell took a light lunch in his hotel room. He ordered a small honeycomb, which he ate with butter and brown bread rolls, and goat’s cheese.

He could not but contrast the day with the happiness of the previous day with Blanche. Nevertheless, as he was never continuously happy – and did not expect to be – he was rarely continuously sad.

He enjoyed good health. Burnell in his mid-thirties was a muscular man of above average height who spent a good part of life outdoors. As a boy he had enjoyed riding, mainly on the family estate in Norfolk, while at school he had excelled at sport, cricket in particular. He had lost interest in such competitive activities after his mother’s death.

His expression was generally set, but he smiled readily. When he did so, he became almost handsome. There were women, including Blanche, who waited on that smile, so honest, so conceding of the world’s frailties. Burnell’s view of himself was harsh: he saw himself as a wanderer, without vision. In that, he seemed a typical man of his time, ‘The Era of the Question Mark’, as one political commentator had dubbed it. The dreadful inheritance of the twentieth century rumbled about everyone’s heads.

A major interest in Burnell’s life, perhaps strangely for such a passive nature, was travel. The sort of travel he engaged in on behalf of WACH hardly involved the idea of escape. His consignments involved him in the usual discomforts travellers experience, particularly those who travel alone: delay, disappointment, indifferent rooms, poor food, the insolence of petty officials, and sometimes even danger. Although Burnell gave no indication that he willingly embraced such discomforts, his friends observed how he volunteered for work in those parts of the world where such discomforts were most readily available. Italy, and Milan, had been for him, as he said, ‘an easy number’.

He scarcely realized that to his English and foreign friends he was already something of a legend. They saw him as the cool Englishman of tradition. Those who knew him in the field discovered his preoccupation with trivia: airline timetables, various states of the prints of Piranesi’s Carceri, the alcoholic strengths of various Hungarian raki, the perfumes used by whores, details of brickwork, barrel vaulting and buttresses, and the flavour of a samsa eaten in an ex-Soviet republic.

He was cool under fire and in love. He was kind in a weak way, though certainly never intentionally cruel to women. Being well born, he had a mistrust of others well born.

He had no vision. He regretted his divorce. He was cynical. But he ate his honeycomb with slow pleasure. Sitting in the sun by his window, he drank coffee and read the newspaper.

The main headline of the paper ran: ‘STAVROPOL AIRPORT BATTLE. First Use of Tactical Nukes: Crimea “Ablaze”.’ The accompanying photo consisted mainly of smoke and men running, like the cover of a lowbrow thriller.

There was as yet no admission by the EU that war had broken out in the Crimea. It was represented merely as a disagreement between Russia and the Ukraine. The disruptions would cease after various threats and admonitions from the EU Security Council. It was the form of words that that admonition would take which was currently being discussed in Brussels and Berlin.

He set the newspaper aside to gaze vacantly at the window. He admitted to himself he was feeling lonely. Blanche would be back in Madrid by now. Perhaps one of her many friends would have met her. She moved in cultivated circles. He looked at the photograph of his ex-wife on his bedside table, without seeing it. He just moved in circles.

In the afternoon, he visited Remenyi, still silent in his coma, and read to him as usual.

The grand steam baths under the Gellert Hotel were choked with bodies, male and female. Many of the bathers exhibited the bulk and the posture of wallowing hippopotami. Encompassing steam provided some kind of cloak for the torpid anatomies, while reinforcing a general impression of a bacchanalia or, more accurately, a post-bacchanalia.

The baths had been in use since Roman times; occupying Turks had enlarged them. Allowing himself his usual afternoon soak, Burnell reflected that little had changed since then. Everyone was taking it easy. The hairy stomachs surrounding him, the monumental buttocks, belonged to affluent members of Hungarian and European society. Next to him, Swedish was being languidly spoken. What with wars and trouble in the old Soviet Union republics, in the Caucasus and beyond the Caspian Sea, Swedes were prospering. Hungary was neutral, the Switzerland, the crooked casino, of Central Europe. It sold Swedish-made armaments to all sides with business-like impartiality.

Surveying hirsute figures wantonly reclining, Burnell thought, ‘That one could have made Pope; he has the nose for it. And there’s Messalina, with the cruel and creamy thighs, and that one could be Theodora, her blue rinse beginning to run a little in the heat. That little rat is Iago to the life … Blanche would be amused.’ It was Blake, it was Doré, it was also super-heating. He thought of Blanche’s nakedness, and was embarrassed to find an erection developing. He climbed from the sulphurous waters, wrapping himself with English discretion in a white towelling bathrobe.

On the way back to his room, Burnell encountered a lean bearded man clad only in a towel and hotel slippers. He was moving towards the baths, head forward in something between a slouch and a run, one eyebrow raised as if it were the proprioceptor by which he navigated. He and Burnell looked at each other. Burnell recognized the haggard lineaments, the eroded temples, the eyebrows. They belonged to a distant acquaintance from university days, Monty Broadwell-Smith.

Monty, eyebrow swivelling, locked on to Burnell at once.

‘Roy, old chap! How jolly to see you.’

‘Hello, Monty.’ Burnell knotted the bathrobe more tightly. Monty had been sacked from his post at the University of East Anglia some while ago. There had been a small scandal. Finances had gone missing. Burnell, not caring about the matter, had forgotten the details. ‘What are you doing in Budapest?’

‘Little private matter, old chum.’ He had a dated way of addressing people, smiling and nodding as he did so, as if agreeing with something off-stage. ‘Helping out a bit at what they call the “Korszinhaz”, the round theatre in the park. Scenery, you know. Well, scene-shifting. To tell the truth, only been here four days. Wandered round in a daze at first. Didn’t know where I was …’ He paused and then, seeing Burnell was about to speak, went on hastily, leaning a little nearer. ‘Between you and me, old boy, I’m here consulting a very clever chap, sort of a … well … a specialist. You see, something rather strange has happened to me. To say the least. I’d like to tell you about it, as an old friend. You still with WACH, I presume? Perhaps you’d care to buy us a drink? Fellow countryman and all that kind of stuff, compatriot … Excuse the towel.’

They went up to Burnell’s room. After opening the mini-bar, Burnell slipped into a shell-suit. He handed Monty a sweater to wear.

‘Fits me to a T,’ said his visitor. ‘You wouldn’t mind if I hung on to it, would you? Bit short of clothing, to tell the truth – here in Budapest, I mean. Some crook nicked all my luggage at the airport. You know what it’s like … They’re a dodgy lot.’

Burnell poured two generous Smirnoffs on the rocks. They raised their glasses to each other.

‘That’s better.’ Monty Broadwell-Smith sighed. He licked his lips. ‘I’ll come straight to the point, old pal. “Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory …” So says the poet. I expect you remember the quotation. But let’s suppose there’s no memory in which those soft voices can vibrate …’

Burnell stood by the window, saying nothing, contemplating Monty with distrust.

‘I’m forty, or so I believe. Four days ago, I found myself in an unknown place. You’ll never credit this. I found myself in an unknown place – not a clue how I got there. Absolutely at a loss, mind blank. Turned out that I was here, in Budapest. Budapest! Never been here before in my natural.’

He was already contradicting himself, Burnell thought. If he were lost, how had he known his luggage was stolen at the airport?

‘So now you’re staying in the Gellert?’ Burnell spoke challengingly, determined not to be touched for Monty’s air fare to England. Knowing something of the man’s background, he felt no particular inclination to help.

Monty leaned back in his chair so as to look as much the invalid as possible. ‘Terrible state poor old England’s in. Read the papers. To what do you ascribe it, Roy?’

‘Neglect of education, lack of statesmen. What’s your problem?’

‘Couldn’t agree more. I suppose that’s why someone like you has to scout round for a job abroad?’

‘No doubt. What’s your problem?’

‘It’s very serious. I know you’re a sympathetic chap. I’m attending the Antonescu Clinic. Mircea Antonescu is a foremost specialist, right at the cutting edge of psycho-technology. Well, he’s Romanian. They’re a clever race …’ He gave Burnell a sidelong glance under the eyebrow before hurrying on. ‘I’m not staying at the Gellert. Couldn’t afford it. Too expensive for someone like me. I’m renting a cheap room in Pest – view of the gasworks, ha ha … You see, Roy, old pal, this is the bottom line: I’ve lost ten years of my memory. Just lost them. Wiped clean. Can’t remember a thing.’

Burnell uttered a word of condolence. Monty looked slightly annoyed.

‘Perhaps you don’t understand. The last thing I can really remember is, I was thirty. Ten and a bit years have passed since then and I’ve absolutely no notion what I was doing all that time. No notion at all.’

‘How terrible.’ Burnell suspected a catch was coming, and was loath to commit himself.

‘FOAM. That’s Antonescu’s term. FOAM – Free Of All Memory. He sees it as a kind of, well, liberty. There I beg to differ. You know what it feels like to lose your memory?’

Despite himself, Burnell was interested.

‘It’s like an ocean, old chum. A wide wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have disappeared, sunk without trace. I suppose I couldn’t have a top-up of vodka, could I?’ He held out his glass.

As he poured, Burnell admitted he had seen Monty once or twice during the previous ten years, before his sacking; perhaps he could help to fill the gaps in his memory. Monty Broadwell-Smith made moderately grateful noises. There was no one else he could turn to in Budapest.

When asked if his memory-loss was caused by a virus, Monty professed ignorance. ‘No one knows – as yet at least. Could have been a car crash, causing amnesia. No bones broken if so. Lucky to be alive, I suppose you might say. But what’s going to happen to me, I’ve no idea.’

‘Your wife isn’t with you?’

Monty slapped his forehead with his free hand. A look of amazement crossed his face. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Don’t say I was married!’

He drank the vodka, he kept the sweater, he shook Burnell’s hand. The next morning, Burnell went round to the Antonescu Clinic as he had promised. Monty wanted one of the specialists at the clinic to question Burnell, in order to construct a few points of identification. Monty suggested that this would help towards a restoration of his memory.

Burnell had agreed. He felt ashamed that he had so grudgingly given his old sweater to a friend in distress.

2
Murder in a Cathedral

‘Nothing to worry about, old chum,’ Monty Broadwell-Smith had said. ‘They’re masters of the healing art.’

The Antonescu Clinic was not as Burnell had imagined it. Cumbersome nineteenth-century apartment blocks, built of stone expressly quarried to grind the faces of the poor, lined a section of Fo Street. Secretive Hungarian lives were lived among heavy furniture in these blocks. They parted at one point to permit entrance to a small nameless square.

The buildings in the square huddled against each other, like teeth in a too-crowded mouth. Instead of dentistry, they had suffered the exhalations from lignite still burnt in the city. A nicotiney taint gave the façades an ancient aspect, as if they had been retrieved from a period long before the Dual Monarchy.

The exception to this antiquity was a leprous concrete structure, a contribution from the Communist era which announced itself as the Ministry of Light Industry. Next to it was wedged a small shop hoping to sell used computers. Above the shop, when Burnell ascended a narrow stair, he found a huddle of rooms partitioned out of a loft. A dated modernity had been achieved with track-lighting and interior glass. Tinkling Muzak proved the Age of the Foxtrot was not entirely dead.

Burnell sat in a windowless waiting-room, looking at a post-Rothko poster which displayed a large black cross with wavery edges on a dark grey background.

A man with a thin cigar in his mouth looked round the door, sketched a salute in greeting and said, ‘Antonescu not here. Business elsewhere. Meet Dr Maté. Maté Joszef, Joszef Maté.’

He then entered the cubicle and proffered a long wiry hand.

In jerky English, Dr Maté explained that he was Mircea Antonescu’s second-in-command. They could get to work immediately. The best procedure would be for Burnell to ascend to a room where a series of questions concerning the forgotten years of Monty Broadwell-Smith could be put to him and the answers recorded electronically.

‘You understand me, Dr Burnell? Here using most modern proprietary methods. Dealing extensively with brain-injury cases. Exclusive. Special to our clinic. To produce best results in Europe, satisfied customers …’ Maté’s thick furry voice was as chewed as his cigar. As he bustled Burnell from the room, his haste almost precluded the use of finite verbs.

Burnell was shown up a spiral stair to a room with a skylight and technical equipment. Here stood a uniformed nurse with grey hair and eyes. She came forward, shaking Burnell’s hand in a friendly manner, requesting him in good German to remove his anorak.

As he did so, and handed the garment to the woman, he caught her expression. She was still smiling, but the smile had become fixed; he read something between pity and contempt in her cold eye.

At once, he felt premonitions of danger. They came on him like a stab of sorrow. He saw, seating himself as directed in an enveloping black chair, what clear-sighted men sometimes see. His life, until now modestly successful, was about to dip into a darkness beyond his control. In that moment there came to him a fear not for but of his own existence. He knew little about medical practice, but the operating table and anaesthetïc apparatus were familiar enough, with black tubes of gas waiting like torpedoes for launch. On the other side of the crowded room, e-mnemonicvision equipment stood like glum secretary birds, their crenellated helmets ready to be swung down and fixed to the cranium. These birds were tethered to computerized controls, already humming, showing their pimples of red light.

Maté bustled about, muttering to the nurse, stubbing out his cigar in an overflowing ashtray.

‘If you’re busy, I will come back tomorrow,’ Burnell said. The nurse pushed him gently into the depths of the chair, telling him soothingly to relax.

‘Like wartime,’ said Maté. ‘Still too many difficulties. Too many problems. Is not good, nicht gut. Many problems unknown.’ Switching on a VDU, he biffed it with the heel of his left hand.

‘Large inflation rate problems, too high taxes … Too many gipsy in town. All time … The Germans of course … The Poles … Vietnamese minority … How we get all work done …’

He swung abruptly into another mode, suddenly looming over Burnell. ‘Just some questions, Dr Burnell. You are nervous, no?’

As his long stained fingers chased themselves through Burnell’s hair, he attempted reassurance. The clinic had developed a method of inserting memories into regions of the brain, to restore amnesiacs to health. The method was a development of e-mnemonicvision. First, those memories had to be recorded with full sensory data on microchip, and then projected into the brain. While he gave a somewhat technical explanation, the nurse gave Burnell an injection in his arm. He felt it as little more than a bee sting.

‘But I don’t know Monty Broadwell-Smith well …’

‘Good, good, Dr Burnell. Now we must append electrodes to the head … Obtain full data in response to my questioning … No dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading on sharp nights …’

Burnell tried to struggle, as the words became confused with the heat.

He could still hear Dr Maté, but the man’s words had become mixed with a colourful ball, which bounced erratically away into the distance. Burnell tried to get out the word ‘discomfort’, but it was too mountainous.

He was walking with Maté in a cathedral, huge and unlit. Their steps were ponderous, as if they waded up to their thighs in water. To confuse the issue further, Maté was smoking a cigar he referred to as ‘The Trial’.

Offended, Burnell attempted a defence of Franz Kafka, distinguished Czech author of a novel of the same name.

‘As a psychologist, you must understand that there are men like Kafka for whom existence is an entanglement, while for others – why, they sail through life like your torpedoes.’

‘These differences are accounted for by minute biochemical changes in the brain. Neither state is more truthful than the other. For some people like the author to whom you refer, truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. We have the science of medicine now, but prayer used to be the great clarifier. The old Christian churches used to serve as clarifying machines.’

‘You mean they helped you to think straight in what you might call “this doleful jeste of life”.’

‘I’ve just got to get a millimetre further in.’

They continued to walk in a darkness the extent of which Burnell could hardly comprehend.

‘Anyhow, you’re good company,’ Maté said, affectionately. ‘Is there anything I can do for you in return?’

‘More oxygen,’ Burnell said. ‘It’s hot in this …’ Uncertain between the words ‘chair’ and ‘cathedral’, he came out with ‘chairch’. ‘As a chairch architect, I’ve visited most of the cathedrals in Europe – Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims …’

He listened to his voice going on and on. When it too had faded into the distance, he added, ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a hot and stuffy cathedral or chairch.’

‘I’ll put this match out. There are new ways. What we medicos call neural pathwise. Your friend Kafka – personally I’d have lobotomized him – he said that “all protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology”. Whingeing, of course, the fucker was always whingeing. But it’s the tiny little fist of nanotechnology which is smashing the walls between human and human. In the future, we shall all be able to share memories and understandings. Everything will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past.’

Burnell laughed. He had not realized that Maté was such good company. To continue the joke, he said, ‘In that connection, Jesus Christ was pretty au fait with nanotechnology. You remember? That resurrection of the body stuff? Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Dead one day, up and running the next.’

Maté professed himself puzzled. They halted under a statue of Averroës. He had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was almost the first time Burnell had ever encountered anyone walking in a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ.

Since the man was interested, Burnell tried to deliver a brief résumé of the Saviour’s life. The heat and darkness confused him. He could not recall how exactly Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Nor could he remember whether Christ was his surname or Christian name.

‘I see, so they hanged him in the end, did they?’ said Maté. ‘You’d be better not to remember such depressing things.’

It seemed sacrilegious to mention the name of Jesus in such a place.

The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the dark. The weight of masonry pressed down on Burnell’s head and shoulders. Great columns like fossil vertebrae reared up on every side, humming with the extreme messages they carried. In defiance of the laws of physics, they writhed like the vital parts of the chordata, click-clack, clickety-clack, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting overhead. He could feel them entwined up there.

Burnell and Maté had come to the junction of the great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering masterpiece sloped downwards. Burnell stopped to stare down the slope, though it was more sensed than seen. Instead of imagining that hordes of women were passing by in the gloom, he giggled at Maté’s latest joke; the demon claimed not to have heard of the Virgin Mary either. He was now sitting on Burnell’s shoulder in an uncomfortable posture.

‘The devil’s about to appear,’ he said. ‘Hold tight.’

‘The devil? But you hadn’t heard of the—’

‘Forget reality, Roy. It’s one of the universe’s dead ends …’

‘But would you happen to know if this is Sainsbury Cathedral?’

At the far distant end of the slope, the sallopian tube, a stage became wanly illuminated. In infinite time. The. Pause. Stage. Pause. Be. Pause. Came. Pause. Wan. Pause. Lee. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was flushed with a dull diseased Doppler shift red.

Funebrial music had begun, mushroom-shaped bass predominating, like a Tibetan at his best prayers.

For a few eons, these low levels of consciousness were in keeping with the old red sandstone silences of the Duomo-like structure. They were shattered by the incursion of a resounding bass voice breaking into song.

That timbre! That mingled threat and exultation!

It was unmistakable even to a layman.

‘The devil you know!’ Burnell exclaimed.

‘I’d better shove off now,’ said Maté.

‘Hey, what about those playing cods?’ But the man had gone.

Until that moment, the devil had been represented only as a vocal outpouring roughly equivalent to Niagara. Now he appeared on the wine-dark stage.

The devil was ludicrously out of scale, far too large to be credible, thought Burnell – even if it was disrespectful to think the thought. In the confused dark – weren’t those lost women somehow still pouring by? – it was hard to see the devil properly. He was an articulation, and approaching, black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s, right down to the hint of rubber. Nor was the stench of brimstone, as pungent as Maté’s cigar, forgotten.

He advanced slowly up the ramp towards Burnell, raising the rafters with his voice as he came.

Striving to break from the networks of his terror, Burnell threw out his arms and peered along the wide lateral arm of the cathedral.

‘Anyone there? Help! Help! Taxi!’

To the left, in the direction from which they had come, everything had been amputated by night, the black from which ignorance and imagination is fashioned. Towards the right, however, along that other orbit, something was materializing. A stain of uninvented liquid. An ox-bow of the Styx. Light with its back turned to the electromagnetic spectrum.

‘Help! My hour is almost come!’

The devil still singing was approaching still.

Atheist Burnell certainly was, in an age when no courage was denoted by the term. But too many years had been spent in his capacity as church custodian for WACH, investigating the mortal remains, the fossils, of the old faith of Christendom, for something of the old superstitions not to have rubbed off on him. He also had some belief in the Jungian notion of the way in which traits of human personality became dramatized as personages – as gods or demons, as Jekylls or Hydes. This singing devil, this bugaboo of bel canto, could well be an embodiment of the dark side of his own character. In which case, Burnell was the less likely to escape him.

Nor did he.

Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle towards that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian façade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man – however worthy of this unwedding cake – was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.

If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.

Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.

‘Mountebank!’ he screamed as he went.

But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up …

… and bit off his head.

Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was in her Madrid apartment with friends. It was late. The red wine of Andalucia was slipping down her red gullet as she talked to her friend Teresa Cabaroccas. The two women were discussing love in an age without faith. They’d been in a Madrid back street, watching a performance by a once famous flamenco dancer, now a little past it and married to an innkeeper. The singing had been in progress after midnight.

‘Oh, one more damned passionate wail!’ – suddenly Blanche had screamed and stood up. She practically dragged Teresa from the crowded tavern.

‘Why have these people some kind of licence to yell their sufferings?’

‘The audience empathizes, Blanche. You can wallow in it for a bit, can’t you? And with the suffering – that spirited arrogance! Oh, it’s the arrogance I admire, not the suffering. The defiance of poverty, misery, betrayal, fate. The body says it, not just the voice …’ Annoyed at being pulled from the entertainment she had not greatly enjoyed, Teresa was drinking as rapidly as Blanche.

‘Why shouldn’t I get up and wail my sufferings?’ Blanche asked. ‘My bloody discontents? Wail them from – oh, the square, the mountains, the TV studios …’ She kicked her shoes to the far end of the room and put her bare feet up on the table.

‘But your whole life – that speaks out for women, for fulfilment.’

‘Fulfilment. I spit on the word. When was anyone really fulfilled? When did anyone ever have enough? Tell me that. Go on, tell me when anyone ever had enough. I mean there’s not enough to have. The imagination’s always greedy for more. Like that Madame Fotril when I was a girl – she lived next door to us and she ate her five-year-old daughter, cooked – with cabbage, of all vile things. Cabbage! I’ve never eaten cabbage since. The mere thought makes me sick. And then my parents took me with them to the funeral. Funeral! What could have been in the coffin, I kept asking myself. I was possibly twelve, just growing breasts like unripe apricots and hair between the legs, and all I could think was that maybe the priest had thrown the saucepan into the coffin with the bones.

‘There was a woman – a fearsome woman – who wasn’t afraid of her imagination, who demanded enough, whatever it cost. Well, I feel like that. It’s love – no, it’s not really even love, it’s wanting something I can’t have, almost like a principle, the principle that we should never ever in this life be satisfied—’

‘Oh, calm down, we’ve all got problems,’ said Teresa. She got up and walked unsteadily to the balcony, trying to cool her cheek against a stone pillar. ‘Who is this guy you were talking about, anyway? A Hungarian?’

‘Not a Hungarian,’ said Blanche. She looked down into her glass, afraid to say ‘English’ in case her Spanish friend laughed. She didn’t wish to spoil the drama of the moment.

A pompous-looking man had accompanied them to the performance. He sat in a cane lounger with a lager on the table by his side, giving every appearance of lassitude. When he could be sure of being heard, he said, in his carefully enunciated tone, ‘What we’re talking about here in a secular age is a hunger for God. God or the Breast. You can have enough sex, Blanche, believe it or believe it not. You can never have enough of God. God’s the giant breast in the sky.’

Only Teresa felt qualified to comment on these remarks. From her vantage point on the balcony, overlooking the square, she said, ‘It’s a divine dissatisfaction.’

The man stretched his legs. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, dear. More gross, quite honestly, than divine. Do you realize how much of every day is taken up with food, with the belly? The pursuit of food, the eating of food, the recovering from its after-effects? The stomach’s as much a tyrant as the genitals.’

‘Not in my case,’ said Teresa, who was dieting.

Taking a rein on herself, Blanche said in a low desperate voice, ‘I was a friend of his wife’s. I loved him then … Was it just a case of “can’t have”? He looks so lovely. And he thinks I look lovely. And he’s good and pleasant to be with in bed. Isn’t pleasant better than good? The number of men I know who’re good in bed and nothing else. Good – and shits. Roy … Roy’s a decent man, and when I saw him again—’