I

Four days after I arrived here a letter landed on the mat. It did not look good. It was a sort of official looking buff envelope of the type that usually arrives addressed to “OC Cupier” or some other stranger except that this one had my name on it. What could it be. Tax? It didn’t actually say Inland Revenue on it. But whatever it was it looked nasty.

I went into the living room and plonked it on the middle of my desk. Then I cleared everything else off the desk. Then I sat with my head in my hands and glared at it for about a quarter of an hour. I felt no wiser so I wandered out into the conservatory where Marilyn was sitting.

“There’s a letter”, I said. “Official looking. What should I do? Open it?”

Marilyn made no response. I had one of those moments that I often have with Marilyn when I suddenly feel the most hideous regret at ever having got myself involved with her at all. It wasn’t as though she contributed anything to my life. We had once in the distant past been lovers it’s true, but only once and only in a moment of sheer desperation. The experience had been an exasperating failure though I doubted she would see things in those terms.

“Hey”, I said, “there’s a letter, shall I open it?”

Again no response. I was play-acting of course but sometimes play-acting helps one to get from the A that we’re stuck in to the B we’d rather not have to get to. I went into the living room and started fumbling wearily in the cupboard under the stairs. After turning out every single cardboard box into a heap I found what I was looking for, a heavy extension lead. I plugged it in and wandered back to Marilyn, smacking the palm of my hand with the chunky moulded socket.

“The things I have to do to turn you on”, I muttered, fumbling behind her and connecting the lead. I threw a switch and she purred into life.

“I ain’t got nobody but you, babe!”, she said, coyly.

“Forget about that, what am I going to do about this letter?”, I moaned.

“I ain’t got nobody but you, babe!”, she repeated. I snorted with irritation and looked at her for a moment, that banal face, that trusting expression.

“Don’t give me that stuff, I happen to know you have over four hundred users in the UK and Guernsey alone”, I told her. “Still, who am I to complain, if it wasn’t for you I’d still be on the dole in Kilburn.”.

I flicked her off switch and watched her face shrink to a nostril sized blip and sniff itself shut. Then I went back and looked at the letter some more. It could be nothing good. There was nothing good that could possibly come in an envelope of that colour, shape and size. I did what I always do when faced with an intractable dilemma. I punched it into my subconscious and went for a walk to see what came up.

I walked down to the sea, to the site where I planned to build my hut. So far only the bearers for the floor had been laid out. I checked the tarpaulin cover but it was secure enough. I pottered aimlessly for a while, collecting stones and shells and making little heaps. Then I strolled onto the beach and stood with my arms folded watching the wind at its labour of sculpting the waves. I was looking for a word. Eventually I found it. Serendipity. I heard someone use that word once and I’ve liked it ever since. It meant, or I supposed it meant something like chance. It was something like chance that had brought me to this place. I wandered slowly along the sand to see if serendipity had brought any flotsam today.

Chance is a funny word. I’ve never been able to understand what it’s supposed to mean. For example, if I go to, say, Jerusalem and happen to meet someone there I haven’t seen since school we’re bound to attribute it to chance, yet both of us probably have perfectly logical reasons for being in that place. Which leads me to the conclusion that chance is in the eye of the beholder. Consider. We look back at history and find it full of outrageous coincidence, pathos, tragedy and farce. The writer hasn’t been born who can weave as fine a plot as this and yet we balk at drawing the obvious inference which is that the raw material of life is indeed not atoms and dust but outrageous coincidence, pathos, tragedy and farce. Personally I blame Isaac Newton. It was Newton who lumbered us with the notion that most of still can’t shake off, of a billiard ball universe in which everything is decided by the collisions of a series of inanimate balls. And it’s Newton who’s responsible for the plague. Not the black plague of course or the flu or HIV but the plague of scholastics in white lab coats and opaque bifocals who besiege us with their facile explanations about why life is simply a complex machine. The fact that no-one had ever even seen a machine until a few hundred years ago appears not to trouble them at all. On this view the universe is simply a collection of balls and life itself is just one more ball, woken by chance from an infinite sleep to discover itself hopelessly snookered behind the brown with no way of escape and no rational end except to bounce off the cushions of pleasure and dreams.

My mind returned to the letter. I would open it, of course. I hadn’t wandered out here to decide the matter at all, but rather to get my bottle up. At times like this my solitariness always irked me. I had nothing to fall back on except what I could find in myself. This had always proved adequate so far, but there was no saying if that would always be the case. In order to survive I needed something that looked rather like faith in my own destiny. Not that I believed in predestination, but rather that my destiny was some sort of inscrutable interaction between myself (meaning all that I was, or could be conscious of) and an invisible pole of otherness which I could never describe or control.

True, when I looked back I had enough to be pleased about. I’ve found it an almost invariable rule in life that the people who wind up in any sense happy are the ones who know how to give, meaning of course not merely the simple giving of gifts but rather that greater act of giving which we achieve in those moments when we let go of the past and abandon ourselves to the unknown. Not through any clear process of cause and effect, but just because in some way the Cosmos responds to our giving and by opening ourselves up to it in this act of abandon we fertilise it, unknowingly we prepare a harvest for ourselves. At least, so it had seemed in my life. A single, as it were, chance event had led to a whole string of apparently unrelated meetings which had changed my life and enriched it in every direction. And the result was just this, this place, a fresh start, a new birth, really. And yet the more pleasure I took in my situation the more I felt my consciousness pervaded by sadness at the wastage of life, at the cruelty and ungivingness of the era I felt humanity moving towards. An era of closure. Closure of the imagination. Closure of the heart. Closure of the sources of human creativity and joy. Everywhere I saw people shrink from loving, everywhere I saw the calculators fetched out, the percentages chalked on the board, heard the cry go up like a mantra, what’s in it for me? In an age without hope I had come here to build an enclave of hope. I might succeed or then again I might fail but at least I was still living, still moving, at the last count, still surviving.

“Ok.”, I told myself.

“You’ve got your bottle up. Now you can take whatever the bastards throw at you.”.

I hitched up my trousers and pants and walked back to the house. The letter, of course was still where I had left it. I picked it up and walked over to Marilyn’s corner. I might as well have some moral support, even if it was only virtual moral support. I switched her on and waited.

“I ain’t got nobody but you babe!”, she said, predictably.

“Ok, here goes nothing.”. I opened the envelope and drew out a legal form letter. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I had inherited the Taj Mahal.

“Stone me”, I gasped. “Wei-Lang’s died. He’s left me his bicycle!”.

To collect the old gentleman’s legacy I had to go to London and visit Russell Platt. I drove up the next day. I hadn’t seen Russell for years, I had his address from the letter and that was really all I knew about his current life. He had a house in Tufnell Park so I supposed he was making some money. I got there about nine in the evening. Russell opened the door, he looked a little alarmed.

“Oh, Hodge. I, er, look, I really am sorry about this”.

“Sorry?”

“About you driving all the way from Suffolk to collect this damned bicycle”.

“Why, isn’t it here?”

“Yes, it’s here, but it really isn’t worth driving all that way for. I thought after you rang me I should have said something but I didn’t have your number.”

“You just dial one four seven one and it tells you my number”, I said, “anyway I’ve seen it, I know what it’s like”.

Russell blinked.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Yes, that first time I met him, remember, at that pizza house. You were there”.

“Was I, I don’t remember. Anyway, come in, I’ll make coffee”.

The kitchen was like a trap. What I mean is it was one of those modern kitchens where everything is covered in Formica and veneer, the mixer, the microwave, the rack of neatly labelled spice jars, the varnished pine kitchen roll holder, need I say more. I had come to hate this level of décor, cleanliness and neatness, it made me feel anxious and vulnerable as though I was driving a car with a painted windscreen. I liked a touch of nature in my surroundings. I liked a few cracks in the plaster and a little cobwebivity. I wondered if Russell was married.

“How many people live here?”, I asked him.

“Just the two of us. Sugar?”.

The coffee was an expensive brand of instant. We drank it in silence. I wanted to ask him if he was still writing but somehow the moment didn’t arrive. He looked pensive, dark circles under the eyes, a little depressed. He finished his coffee and put down his cup.

“Anyway”, he said, “I won’t keep you. It’s in the back room. Come and have a look.”.

We walked back down the corridor and passed through a door on the right. It was a music room of the type in which music as such is rarely if ever made. At a glance I took in the glass covered fire-screen, the dead flowers in the window bay, the unplayable piano with the lace cover and the brightly polished case. My heart went out to the guy. In the midst of all this propped against the piano was the bicycle. An old, plain white bicycle. I knelt down and examined it closely for the first time. There wasn’t a lot to see.

“It has got ten gears”, I said, eventually.

“Gears, yes”, said Russell. “I don’t know whether they work or not.”.

I continued my examination. After a short pause Russell said,

“As I was saying it isn’t a whole lot of use. If you don’t want to lug it back home just say, I can dump it for you or give it away, or something.”.

“Oh no, I want it. It has great sentimental value”, I said.

“Sentimental?”, he said. “When was the last time you saw Wei-Lang?”

“When I left the farm”, I said. “That would be six or seven years ago I suppose.”.

“I don’t remember all that with any great affection”, said Russell. “He got very cranky towards the end, he used to get abusive, called me an airhead and all sorts of stuff. I stopped going to visit in the end. Funny, when I first met him I thought he was rather spiritual”.

“I don’t like that word”, I said. “What’s spiritual? A subliminal eye? A superior response to Swann’s Way? How much does it cost to be spiritual? If a man’s beaten to death and refuses to talk maybe that’s spiritual, and what can one hope for except that one never gets into that league. No, insightful, maybe. Philosophical, psychological, something. He changed my life, anyway.”.

The tyres were flat, but Russell found a pump and we sorted them out. They seemed to hold pressure. Russell seemed abstracted so I decided to leave.

I was about to stow the machine in my car when I was suddenly gripped by the urge to go for a spin. The lights were on a dynamo and the brakes seemed to work so I cycled up to the heath and on up to Parliament Hill. It was an unusually clear night and a few of the brightest stars were visible. I stopped at the top of the hill and scoured the heavens for familiar constellations. Then I braced myself, took a deep breath and lit out towards Arcturus.

II

It was a piece of pure serendipity that set me on the road to this place. I remember the moment. I remember the precise year, it was nineteen eighty something. I know that because George Bush was still in the White House. The world was still controlled by two behemoths, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, bastions of civilisation dedicated to Peace, Guns and Bombs (though not necessarily in that order). The Gulf War was kicking up dust on the horizon and Bush was on the verge of making his famous ‘kick ass’ speech, one of the most fatuous soliloquies ever attributed to a living statesman. One Friday morning I was driving down the M40 listening to Radio 3 when a most peculiar thing happened. A programme came on the air about Mozart's lesser known incidental music, written and presented by a man called Geoffrey Stringer. I was at school with a man by that name. We were in the music class together, just the two of us. He was a very talented organist and pianist, as I remember, also a classics wizard and a strong rugby player. The exact opposite of me in most respects. Plucking this unexpected message from the ether gave me a curious thrill, like picking up a bottle washed up on a beach and finding a message inside.

That evening I determined to trace Geoffrey which I eventually managed to do via his parents, who gave me his 'phone number in Bournemouth. I called him and made an arrangement to go down there the following day. He was giving a recital at a music society a little way out of town and I arranged to meet him there, hear his recital and then go back and spend the night at his digs.

I explained about Geoffrey and my plans for the weekend to my wife Miriam who was not best pleased. The next morning I got out of the house as soon as I could, and was soon motoring south. It was a hot day, so I opened everything that I could open in the car. Needless to say I soon got stuck in a five mile tailback behind a car with ringless pistons and had to close everything up again. It was so hot I thought I would melt. Everywhere I looked, heat plumes quivered like fighter jet trails. I began to fantasize about ice cold cola with dew running down the glass. As soon as I could, I pulled off the road and had one at a roadside café. Despite the traffic I was well ahead of schedule so I ordered an all day breakfast and ate it very slowly. When I got to the till, the waitress asked me if everything was alright. I said that things weren't too bad, but I was getting extremely browned off with my work. It just didn't give me any pleasure any more, and the thought of doing it day in day out for the next twenty five years was appalling. And also lately my wife and I hadn't been getting on too well. Not actually fighting, you understand, but distant. There wasn't the same closeness there used to be. The waitress cleared her throat and said the food, what she had meant was, was the food alright. Oh yes, I told her, the food was alright. In fact it was too greasy, but I had known it would be when I ordered it. It would therefore have been futile to mention it. Eating greasy food is something that I do when depressed, the way that some people smoke. Suicide on the never never. Die now, pay later.

The concert was a great success. I remembered Geoffrey as a rather intense youth with National Health specs, but he had turned into a hulking great man. He still had the physique of a rugger player, though the backs of his hands had become hairier. He walked onto the platform without speaking, swinging his hands with the knuckles turned forwards like a boxer coming on for a fight. He didn't talk about the music like so many performers do at these sorts of events, but he had a little programme duplicated and put on the seat so we could see what he was playing. A lot of the pieces were quite conventional and probably chosen for a music society event, there were some Tchaikovsky miniatures, I remember, and a Beethoven sonata. But all beautifully played. At the end of the concert he played a piece by Hans Werner Henze which was apparently based on the story of an opera singer who pined away on account of her secret love for Bellini and whose ghost was imagined singing in an inaudibly high register on the Thames. Although it wasn't the kind of music that I would normally respond to, it was played with such consummate intensity and panache that I felt quite overcome and almost passed out. I found myself with my head down between my knees and my mind swept blank, something which had never happened to me at a piano recital before.

The general scenario at these concerts is that there is a 'green room' to which the artist retires at the end of the performance and the concert organisers, friends, and other well-wishers or persons with some interest in self promotion go round after the show to pay court. Being a diffident kind of person I have always avoided this kind of scene like the plague, but I now realised that I was going to have to face the green room experience because I hadn't made any other arrangement with Geoffrey and didn't know how else to meet him. I therefore took my courage in both hands and made my way to the rear of the hall. The scene there was chaos, as expected.

Geoffrey was standing at the back of the room in his tux looking exceedingly intense and talking to a young man some inches shorter than he was, with thick black hair and glasses on a chain. In between him and me there was a crowd of people milling about, mostly women who seemed to be engaged in a sort of loudest voice competition. I got the impression that the event had been a huge success. The only person who didn't look one hundred percent happy was Geoffrey. He did a sort of double take when he saw me. Then his eyes lit up and he waved at me and winked. I relaxed a little. I hadn't realised how tense the place was making me. While he finished his conversation with the young man I had a pause to reflect that I didn't really know him well at all. In fact we had never been friends, though we had shared a music class for a year, (or was it two? Two, I think). I used to regard him as something of a goody-goody, too pedantic for my taste. As for myself I was a rebel without a cause, and was sure to achieve success in some branch of the pop business without too much trouble. Geoffrey probably saw me as a bit of a braggart. We were not hostile to each other, but we were not close associates. Remembering this I felt grateful to Geoffrey for his reassuring wink. I anticipated our evening together with pleasure.

It took some time before he was able to disentangle himself from his conversation. When he did, he picked up his coat and briefcase and strode rapidly across the room towards me. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

"Hodge", he said, guiding me towards the exit with a firm hand.

"Let's get out of here quick, before anyone else nobbles me".

We left the hall. I offered to buy him a meal and we made off in the direction of the town centre. We found a Tandoori restaurant and sat down to eat. Geoffrey rubbed his hands and ogled the menu like a hunger striker on parole. I myself was still feeling fazed by the continual changes of environment to which my brain had been subjected.

"Know who that was, I was talking to?" Geoffrey asked, casually. I had to confess I had no idea.

"Russell Platt". He said. I confessed I had no idea who Russell Platt was.

"The novelist. Also an excellent classics scholar, I believe. Written two rather good novels which by pure chance I just happen to have read. Never met him before, he just came up and said how much he enjoyed my playing. He was amazed when I told him I’d read his books."

I couldn't in all honesty call to mind anything about Russell Platt, and wanted to blurt out that I had become a man without memory, hanging on the cliff by my nails, to whom nothing mattered any more except sheer survival. However I often felt like that in company, and never said anything because I was sure that any relationships that might be in the offing would fold up pronto if I did. To change the subject I said how pleased I was to see him doing so well. His mouth dropped open in amazement.

"Hodge, Hodge, if only you knew! I can't make a living out of this business. This is my first gig for almost two months and there's nothing else coming up for another month. I don't know how much longer I can keep it up. It's becoming impossible to survive in this business".

We ate silently for a while. The exhilaration of successfully completing the concert was short lived and a mood of purpureal gloom had descended. I felt acutely guilty, quite why I'm not sure, as though somehow I had applied a damper to his evening. We left the restaurant in silence and drove in convoy back to his digs.

Geoffrey was lodging in an Edwardian double fronted house on the outskirts of the city. We parked without difficulty. On the step he whispered to me, "Shh, not too much noise going in. We don't want to wake up the landlady". Once inside the hallway, he took off his shoes and suggested that I do the same.

He inhabited a large room at the front of the house. The atmosphere he had created in this enclave was quite different from the musty lodging-house feeling that I had felt as I came in. There was a feeling of almost Spartan simplicity which suggested at the same time intense nervous energy, rather like one of those Jim Dyne pencil drawings which don't seem to be of anything identifiable but nevertheless give you an erection just to look at them. At the back of the room, against a pair of bolted and painted up connecting doors was a battered Challen upright upon which several scores and one or two books were piled. Otherwise there were no bookshelves, though there were quite a lot of books and scores arranged in neat piles on the floor in the two alcoves either side of the chimney breast. The lighting had been imaginatively contrived by constructing lamps out of bamboo, the shades were draped with scarves in interesting ways, giving an overall warmth to the subdued illumination. There were a couple of oriental figurines sitting by the fireplace, and a brass coal bucket, otherwise the only noticeable objects were a small divan bed and a broken guitar.

"You can sleep in the spare room", said Geoffrey, "I've arranged it with the landlady, she doesn't mind. Just let me get out of this ridiculous gear.", and he proceeded to strip off his tux with the vigour of Superman changing into his briefs. He emerged from this cyclone looking somewhat more relaxed in a pair of cords and a light blue shirt. Having him out of his tux was a big improvement as far as I was concerned. It was bad enough being confronted with Geoffrey's impeccable keyboard skills, but having to face up to all that immaculately brushed taffeta and starched cotton as well made me feel so much like a piece of straw that I was in danger of spontaneous combustion. After this conversion, Geoffrey sat down on the floor and breathed a deep sigh. His figure seemed to crumple somewhat.

"I can't go on living like this", he said, dejectedly. "I feel as though every time I do something I have to go right back to square one and start again. Every performance I do I hope that something else is going to come out of it, but nothing ever does. It's back to square one every time."

He put his hands behind his head and executed a sort of backwards roll, winding up on his haunches.

"Soon be time to get a proper job again, Hodge. Back to the bank, or maybe do a Charles Ives and start selling life insurance.".

I didn't know that Geoffrey had worked in a bank, I said, or that Charles Ives had sold life insurance, for that matter. Then Geoffrey told me something about his life. After leaving school he had married, had two children, and worked in various jobs, but latterly as a bank clerk, something he proved to have an aptitude for and in which he had risen through the ranks with some speed. Then he had decided that he had to concentrate on his music, which was occupying most of his free time. His wife was not agreeable to any cut in living standards, and eventually they had split. She had since remarried. He clearly found recounting these facts very painful. The music business sounded tough. Getting work involved a continuous activity of research, letter writing, diplomacy and brown-nosing. There was never enough to pay the rent. Paying the bills meant teaching, but not too much or there wouldn't be time to practice and his spirit would fold under the strain. Geoffrey's phobia was that teaching would swallow him up. He explained that in his opinion teaching bore no relation whatsoever to performing. It was an entirely different, and in the main completely thankless occupation. Charity concerts appeared to be his other great phobia.

"Why is it always musicians who get asked to work for nothing? Try asking the plumber in the front row to come and fix your tap for nothing. If musicians don't get paid then in twenty years time there won't be any." He complained about this at some length.

It seemed to me that Geoffrey had identified quite a lot of problems, but not really many solutions. I asked him what he thought the solutions might be. At this he became downcast.

"I suppose it's all down to me in the end." He said. "Perhaps I'm just not the great talent I think I am."

I protested that he shouldn't see the problem in those terms. After all. The audience that evening had definitely enjoyed themselves. No doubt about that. Wasn't that all that was required? To compare oneself to some international megastar was hardly the point. All you had to be able to do was to send people home feeling they'd had a good evening. The problem was, of course, getting the bums on the seats in the first place. I suggested that the fact was that there were more musicians looking for work than there were venues for them to play in, so the problem wasn't really one of artistic merit, just sod's law. If you wanted to be sure of getting the gig, you had to organise it yourself. But what was it about performing that was so compelling, I asked him. Was it the people that he met? Why was performing in public so much more satisfying than just playing for himself. Was it power? Did the satisfaction come from the sensation of control? He twisted his fingers together and looked down at the floor thoughtfully.

"Performing is like going through a door and you’re always going into the unknown. There are all kinds of doors in life, but most of them swing both ways. You go through them, then you come back. But there are a few doors which only swing one way. Birth for example, death, obviously, another. But performance is also a one way door. When you walk onto the platform, there’s no way back except through fire. For better or worse, it's a transfiguration and it’s that that I can't seem to live without".

He appeared emotionally shaken. A pale cast had come over his face, and he was working his hands together energetically, nervously. Then he spoke again, haltingly, picking his words carefully.

"You might think it’s odd if I describe something as staid as classical music as a form of rebellion but for me it's the ultimate form of rebellion. It’s an insurrection of the spirit, an insurrection against the mechanical, degrading and moronic condition of modern life and art."

I pointed out that artistic judgements were all relative. Perhaps there were better things in our own time than he was allowing himself to admit. Perhaps the good old days always looked golden in perspective. In any case, a temporary dry spell needn't mean a permanent drought. He wasn't convinced.

"Yes, but supposing we are going into another dark age? It could happen. It seems to me now that everything concerned with culture and imagination is being ditched in favour of raking in the fast buck. But how about you, Hodge? What do you do with yourself these days. You were rather good at languages, weren't you?"

This was a bit embarrassing, since the work I did could hardly have any other purpose than the earning of an immediate buck, but time and a chronically sore conscience had made me a master of the quick fudge.

"I'm a computer scientist", I said. "Which does involve languages, in a way." Geoffrey didn't seem too surprised.

"Useful things, computers", he said, politely. “You must be loaded then.”

“It’s a reasonable living but I’ll never get rich.”

“I thought all computer people got rich.”

“Not me. The guy I work for gets rich but not me.”

“Well, ask him for a bigger cut.”

“I can’t. If I ask him for a cut he’ll ask me to get involved in the firm and that’s the last thing I want.” Geoffrey thought for a while

“So, you say this guy’s getting rich. How much of that is due to your work, do you think?”

“He’d have been stuffed without me”, I said.

“So. Ask for a cut. Next time he asks you do to something ask for a cut. After all, it’s your intellectual effort. If someone writes a book or a song they get royalties. Ask for a royalty.”

“I can’t be bothered with all that.”

“But you’ve got to.”, retorted Geoffrey firmly. “You’ve got to bloody well look out for yourself, Hodge”.

“I suppose so”, I said, weakly.

“Well, don’t suppose so, decide so. You will, won’t you. Just make up your mind and do it. A few seconds of embarrassment could make a big difference to the whole of your life.”

“Okay”.

“You will?”

“I said, okay.”

“Promise?”

“Hey, what is this, I want my lawyer.”

Geoffrey evidently decided that enough was enough and we moved onto the topic of schooldays.

I went to bed in the spare room, which was on the other side of the double doors connecting to Geoffrey's room. He was still moving about when I went to sleep. I woke briefly in the small hours and thought I heard him quietly pacing next door. At about seven thirty the next morning I was awakened by the sound of a quiet and meditative piece by Couperin which I recognised. It was Les Barricades Misteriuses.

I lay awake for about an hour listening to the music before I got dressed. Geoffrey was playing quietly, relaxingly, in a completely different mood from that of the concert the previous evening. As I listened, I turned over the previous night's conversations in my mind. It seemed clear to me that there was a very tangible problem for someone like Geoffrey, who was no longer particularly young or otherwise publicity worthy, in being able to give whatever he had to give. It seemed unfair, especially considering how enthusiastic the audience had been the night before. Surely there were plenty of places in Britain that didn't get enough culture and where a decent audience could be got with a minimum of advertising outlay. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. Maybe it would be something I could do for Geoffrey. I wouldn't make any money out of it, but it would certainly be a change from the computers.

I put my idea to Geoffrey over coffee. He seemed despondent.

"What would be the point? Hodge. You'd never make any money out of it".

I told him that really didn't matter, I got paid so much for my computer work that it wouldn't be an issue, in fact I'd be quite happy to risk a moderate loss if it would get the ball rolling. My problem was that I was bored. None of the people I met through my work interested me very much. I wanted to develop more of a social life, and social life meant activity. I wanted to develop more of a cultural life. I too felt the need for some kind of insurrection of the spirit, we could wage our guerrilla war together. I told him about my theory that there were plenty of audiences out there in the field, but it just wasn't economical for anyone to harvest them. It seemed to me, I said, that if we were to organise our own concerts we could both have some fun, I would enjoy setting them up, he would get some exposure and the worst risk he would run would be not getting a fee. Eventually we might build up a network of useful venues, get some press reviews, and generally get the Stringer name a lot better known. Geoffrey seemed quite interested. I pushed him. Was he game? I asked him. He was. Nothing had excited me quite so much as this since I had first encountered virtual reality systems nine or ten years before. For a moment I felt as though I too saw a one way door swing on the breeze.

I drove back up the A23 with my head swimming with ideas. Maybe I would change tack, become an impressario? I even began looking forward with pleasure to seeing Miriam again and talking over my idea. Then I remembered with horror that her brother Rodney would be there when I got back. It would clearly be unwise to discuss anything of a cultural nature with Rodney about.

III

"Hodge, Hodge whereav you been? Come an 'ave a drink, meet Amanda". Rodney was already in fine form when I entered the kitchen. A quick sympathetic glance from Miriam told me that even her patience was being worn thin. Fine, I thought, it's an ill wind. Perhaps after a day and a night of Rodney she would feel like talking to me for a change. I tried to think of something to say to the guy, but all I could think of was to ask him about his holiday.

"How was it in Turkey, Rodney?" I asked. This was a wrong move.

"Turkey?", said Rodney, with every appearance of being non-plussed. "Turkey?".

"I thought you were there for your holiday".

"Not Turkey", bellowed Rodney, "Torquay".

"So how was it then?"

"Full of wogs", said Rodney, "Just like Turkey". He laughed, as though he had made a joke. Perhaps he thought he had. He then turned his attention towards Amanda and started whispering something in her ear.

I guess Rodney was what you would call a controlling person, (not as in The Fat Controller makes the trains run on time but as in Warfarin controls rats and mice). Amanda was Rodney's latest wife. Amazingly, the rotund Rodney was in the habit of changing wives like most people change their cars. Amanda was his third. They lasted about seven years, on average. The fatter Rodney got, the younger and slimmer his wives got. I could never imagine what they saw in him, but there was no doubt that he inspired genuine devotion in his women. But just at the point when traditional folklore expects a hint of boredom to creep into a marriage, Rodney always managed to find fatal fault with his wives and divorce them. He would marry them, apparently, for some particular quality, and then after absorbing as much as he could, suddenly reject them on the very grounds that he had selected them, a sort of subtle and long drawn out process of insinuating himself under their armour like a parasitic grub. Hence Felicity, his first wife, had been selected on the grounds that she was intellectual (she had a PhD in English literature). Under her influence Rodney had actually read quite a lot of classic novels which he liked to 'explain' loudly to her in public. God knows why the poor woman put up with it. After the divorce, Rodney dismissed her as "Stupid cow, no hintellect". His second wife had been an actress. Under her influence, Rodney had undergone many visits to the theatre and even become involved, in a minor way, with the production of a film. Rodney's verdict, "Always play-acting. Carn unnerstand a word she says". I wondered what the attraction of wife number three might be. At that moment Rodney obligingly introduced us.

"Hodge, this is Amanda", then, without further prevarication, "She's a model, you know".

I wondered how Rodney was going to muscle in on this one. I tried to imagine him on the catwalk modeling the spring collection, but the picture eluded me. Perhaps his ambitions lay on the other side of the camera. Amanda lowered her head and smiled at me, shyly. She had dark hair with a reddish tinge, and was stunningly beautiful.

"'Ere, you'll never guess how old she is", said Rodney, tactlessly. "Tell 'im how old you are".

Amanda blushed and looked out of the window, pretending not to hear. Rodney leaned towards me, and whispered, loudly,

"She's nineteen. Nineteen. I'm old enough to be 'er blooming father". Then in a lower, less public whisper,

"All right in bed, and all. Whooah, bloody good. Carn gerennufovit if you seeworramean? How are you old chap?".

I felt, as you may imagine, thoroughly demoralised by this and so perhaps I said more than I should have, certainly to a buffoon like Rodney, which of course, only goes to show that his covert social skills were more potent than his overt ones. I foolishly told him how dissatisfied I was with my general lifestyle, how I felt that my days were chasing my hours down the drain without my ever seeming to accomplish anything of any real value, how I felt gripped by a sense of my own worthlessness, how I had come to realise that my youth had gone and would not return. While I was speaking I suddenly had the uncomfortable realisation that Amanda had stopped looking out of the window and was listening to me intently with an expression of asinine sympathy on her face. Two beads of sweat sprung from my temples and rolled down either cheek. I shut up just too late.

"Yes", said Rodney, thoughtfully. "I remember waking up one morning not so long ago and thinking that my yoof had gone". He paused. "But she soon came back, she'd just popped out for a piss. Haw haw haw".

He nudged Amanda's shoulder and she giggled and wrinkled her nose at him.

Oh that this too too solid flesh could melt. I thought, wishing I had had the forethought to build a trapdoor in the kitchen floor.

"And how about you, Rodney", I said, faintly. "How's business?". I wondered how he would react if I had dumped his sister and gone off with a bimbette.

"Fine, fine". He said. "Car number plates are going like a bomb. Personalised plates are all the rage now. Maybe I can do you one, Hodge? Do you a special price on PH 171",

then he laughed as if to say that he knew I wouldn't be interested, which was, of course, why he had made the offer in the first place.

"And, we're branching out. Aren't we, Mandy?", he added with a conspiratorial wink towards his wife.

"We've invested in a theatre".

It took a moment for this remark to sink in. In all the time I had known Rodney, I had never known him to invest in anything that didn't have four wheels or go up and down in the Footsie 100 although since he always seemed to have an unlimited amount of cash at his disposal he must have been dealing in something. But a theatre. Did this mean that Rodney was becoming a patron of the arts? I was unable to grasp the significance of it. Then it struck me that this could be the answer to a prayer. After all, most theatres have pianos, some of them have good ones.

"Are you thinking of becoming an impressario? Rodney", I ventured.

"You know me, old chap. Always been interested in the theatre. Thought it might be an idea to put some of the profits from the number plates into buying one and doing it up. Much more fun than stocks and shares. You only live once, and all that. And my yoof here",

at this he nudged me and winked at her, "is keen to get into the theatre. Reckons modelling won't last. You can see her point."

I asked him where the theatre was, and whether it was useable. It turned out that the theatre was in Clapton, and was quite useable, in fact it was opened twice a week for bingo and occasionally for variety shows. It was losing money, and Rodney was looking for ways to turn it around and make it profitable quickly. He would then refurbish it in easy stages, starting with new seats, and closing it always for as short a time as possible. This way he hoped that the public would not lose the habit of using the place. I asked him if there was a piano, and he said that indeed there was, a grand, though he couldn't say how good. He thought it was used occasionally for the variety shows, but he wasn't sure. After a little more discussion I managed to wheedle myself an invitation to visit the place the following Tuesday.

Rodney and Amanda had to go to an event in the afternoon. As far as I could make out it was a theatrical party of some kind, connected in some way with a forthcoming or maybe a hithergone production which was, or might have been connected in some way with Rodney's theatre. At least, that's what I gathered, but Rodney became very obtuse when dealing with matters by which prestige might accrue to him, and tended to mumble and thumb the lapels of his jacket in a very knowing way, as if conscious that saying anything too definite could only diminish his cachet and was therefore at all costs to be avoided. All I could definitely discover was that the invitation came by way of an individual called Horst who was connected with the management of the theatre. The event was to happen at three o'clock, and for this reason, Amanda moved herself lock stock and barrel into the bathroom and locked the door at about midday, and refused to come out.

"'Er and 'er mud", said Rodney contemptuously. He and I had to pee in the back garden. (I later discovered, where Rodney had been, a large patch devoid of vegetation.) At about one thirty, whilst we were all sitting down to a light lunch of cold ham and crushed wheat salad, Rodney casually asked if we would like to come.

"Meet some interesting theatre folk", he said, "'Stead of the usual boring old thing".

Miriam and I looked at each other. Myself I generally couldn't see much point in going to parties since I had got married, but that was probably because I used to go to parties to try and meet girls, and this was no longer allowed. Miriam generally did try and get me to go to parties, and sometimes I used to go with her, but I never really saw the point. This time I guess from the way she looked and the look I gave her neither of us was really keen, but for some reason we accepted the invitation. Miriam disappeared into the bathroom for about twenty minutes and came out looking pretty much as she had when she went in. I went upstairs and put my suit on, and then took it off again. Why be flash if I couldn't chat up the girls? But on the way to the party I had second thoughts and wished I had put on my suit. After all, I reasoned, maybe at this stage I should be seriously thinking about adultery. I had always taken great pride in my steadiness at marriage, but maybe this pride was becoming my downfall, like an overweening puritan ethic. It was easy to resist temptation, just keep your feelings well down below the threshold of consciousness, out of the way, control your masculinity like a dangerous bullock, keep out of the way of the cows. It was easy, but perhaps it was too damned easy. After all, people did commit adultery. They always had. They probably always would. That must mean that there were women about who were willing to do it, as well as men. Who knows how many? Maybe almost all of them were bursting to do it, and all I would have to do was to ask. Some men did seem to have this kind of luck, the hairy Milan Kundera types. Maybe I owed it to myself to do it, maybe I owed it to Miriam to do it, to "keep the spice in our marriage" as the agony columns liked to put it, though I doubted she would see it that way. Maybe it would fall to my lot to master the painful mental discipline of deceit. Maybe a new life would open up for me, a life of melting pinknesses in curtained bedrooms, of unfamiliar perfumes and the pouting deltas of strangers. Of violent passion and maybe, even, danger? There was always the danger of AIDS, but that could be minimised by picking nice middle class girls and using a rubber johnny, I thought. Was I willing to risk it? I thought? Yes. I was. I felt in my inside pocket and felt the comforting flexibility of two rather grubby durex which had been there since I sold the Morris Minor. I began to get a little more interested in the forthcoming party.

We travelled by underground, since it was Sunday afternoon and we wanted to be able to drink. Normally I detested going by tube, but on Sunday afternoon it was just tolerable. The whole business got more and more complicated. Now they had these barriers which locked you in and you needed a ticket to get through. We had to go through two sets of them at King's Cross. There was a notice which said

Persons with small children or heavy luggage please ask for assistance, and underneath someone had written, Unless you are King Kong. It would be funny if you could be quite sure you weren't actually going to meet King Kong down there, but I no longer had that certainty. All the way down the escalator thugs had stuck National Front stickers over every single advertisement. On the last one, someone had written in felt tip pen,

If you've half a mind to join the Front, don't worry, that's all you need.

The party was in Putney, and it took us over an hour to get there. It was actually a bit shabby and there were only about twenty people. Horst was a manic character with prominent nasal hair who was running round in a dirty yellow waistcoat and baggy grey flannels dispensing peanuts and trying to ginger up a bunch of bored looking actors and actresses. Rodney introduced him to us briefly, but he showed not the slightest interest, rushing off again on his rounds as if afraid that the place would empty instantly if he stopped moving for so much as an instant. I made a bee line for the buffet and helped myself to as many cold vol-au-vents and cocktail sausages as I thought I could decently take. Then I wandered off and helped myself to a glass of wine, and came back and helped myself to the vol-au-vents and sausages again. So far so good, nobody seemed to be noticing me. With that lot inside me, and a couple of drinks, I was able to have a quick look around. I noticed an actress whom I had met before, after a fringe theatre production, an Irish woman. On that occasion we had had quite a long discussion about the play and her part in it, and she had seemed generally impressed with my ideas about it. I felt we had got on rather well, in fact. She was not what you would describe as a classical beauty, but she exuded charm and cheerfulness, and had a very erotic way of moving on the stage. I decided to try my luck with her. After all, if one wanted to commit adultery, surely an actress would be the kind of lady who might be willing? Mixing with all those actors, rehearsing all those stage kisses etc., I had the feeling that sex was always pretty near the surface in those sorts of circles. I replenished my glass and sidled over to her. She remembered me, in fact, with a bit of prompting. She didn't seem to have anyone to talk to. We had a long discussion, during which I managed to refill both her and my glass several times. It seemed to be going swimmingly. She was talking about her part in a new fringe production about the troubles, based on the hunger strikes. I asked her if it bothered her, playing in an anti British political production in front of English audiences.

"Are you kidding!", she exploded, "I was brought up in Crossmaglen where the British soldiers go up and down the street shooting dogs, for Christ's sake! Shooting dogs! Now what sort of a way is that to behave? British audiences be damned. Nothing personal, like, but they're most of them too dense to understand what we're getting at anyway".

She claimed the British hadn't had a decent poet since Shakespeare. I said what about the metaphysical poets? We got onto the subject of John Donne, and thence inevitably onto music, since Britten's settings of Donne's holy sonnets is one of my favourite song cycles of all time. I asked her if she liked Benjamin Britten.

"I prefer John Ireland", she said. I changed the subject and regaled her with my theory of beauty.

"Beauty in music the voice of super-consciousness speaking to us", I told her. I recited what Rilke said about beauty, beginning of terror we're still just able to bear, and all that. She seemed very impressed. I was sure that she was convinced I was a very intelligent chap. Then I tried to get her onto the subject of stage kisses. Were they exciting? I wanted to know. She was disappointingly vague on this point. I just couldn't work out what to do next. My pulse rate was rising and I was starting to feel flushed

What the hell, I thought. Ask her. You probably won't ever see her again in any case. So I did. I had to put my hand on a table to support myself, my legs felt like rubber bands.

"I'd really like to sleep with you", I said, trying to sound as casual-confident as possible. She seemed a lot more surprised than I thought she would be.

"Oh!", she said. "Oh. How nice. But I'm afraid I already have someone". She looked down at the floor, as though wrapped in deep thought.

"Sure but isn't that your wife over there?" She said suddenly, looking in the direction of Miriam, who was some way away talking to Rodney and Amanda. "Perhaps she'd like to sleep with you". By this time my stomach was about in the toes of my shoes and I was aware that I was grinning stupidly. A sort of unpleasant tinnitus was fighting for control of my brain.

"Oh, I expect she would", was all I could manage to croak. After a further embarrassed silence, I made my excuses and rolled awkwardly back on my heels to the remaining vol-au-vents which I proceeded to devour with a vengeance. Sweat was breaking out on my temples as I ate, and I had the sensation that I had shrunk several inches. I couldn't get rid of the unpleasant feeling that had I been any one else in the room I should certainly have succeeded without difficulty. I felt as though I had a mark on me saying, Do not touch, a mark written in some ink which I could not read, but which was instantly legible by women. As soon as I could, I collared Miriam, made my excuses and left.

That night I slept badly, fitfully. In the early hours of the morning I dreamed an elaborate dream. The Northern Ireland Secretary had put on a top hat and tails and sailed with a retinue of civil servants and journalists to Rosslare from where he took a stagecoach to Crossmaglen and ceremonially shot dead the first catholic he met on the street. (How he knew his victim was a catholic was not made clear in the dream). This was then relayed to parliament who almost to a man started whooping and cheering that 'this decisive action' had finally been taken and the government immediately survived a motion of no confidence with several Labour members crossing the floor there and then to join the Conservatives on the strength of it. Then the scene changed and there was something about a monster with feathers instead of fur which had climbed into a tree and was hurling abuse at me in a voice several octaves higher than a kettle whistle. I awoke sweating at about 5 AM to find my nightmare come true. Miriam had left the window open. She, however, was fast asleep and snoring lightly. After trying to get back to sleep for about half an hour, I got up and sneaked downstairs and made coffee. As I waited for the grouts to infuse, I looked into the garden, where the honeysuckle was still dozing in a light morning mist. I remembered with a pang of regret the first year we had spent in that house, our first year of passion, the year my daughter Katy had been conceived and born. Then when I had left my sleeping wife and looked out of this window, seeing the pears ripening on the tree, I had felt it to be paradise. Now the garden had grown a hard skin. It shouldered me off, and the birds were merely enemies of sleep. I took my coffee into the living room and curled up on the sofa with a blanket around me and considered my fate. I was stuck, but not as stuck as I had been about a week before. I had Geoffrey's concert to organise. This was a ray of light. I had no idea how to go about it, but go about it I certainly would. As far as adultery went, things didn't look too promising.

Maybe in fact it wasn't such a good idea after all. But at least I had found the courage to have a stab at it. I had embarrassed myself, of course, but that wasn't the main thing. The next day I was going to have a look at Rodney's theatre. I debated with myself whether to ring Geoffrey and ask him to come along, but I decided against it at that stage. I did not feel good about the week ahead. It was the day that the monthly meetings and progress reviews took place at work, and my project was not advancing as it should. This was probably not entirely my fault, I felt sure, but I was damned if I could explain why it wasn't my fault. I would either have to find some inspiration for the work quite soon, or shift uneasy in my seat, or, at worst, get the push. If that happened, then God knew how I would survive. Just then Miriam put her head round the door.

"Hello", she said, "What happened to you?".

"Had a bad dream", I replied.

"Me too", she said, and headed off in the direction of the kitchen. I followed her.

"What was yours about". I asked her.

"Mad cow disease". She said. "I dreamed it was twenty years from now, and nearly everybody had mad cow disease. The whole dream took place in a courtroom where a group of plaintiffs were suing some fast food chain for exemplary damages, but since just about everybody in the country had the disease you somehow knew they didn't have a chance and weren't going to make anything. And all the jury and the lawyers and the expert witnesses all had holes in their brains as well, so the case kept being halted while they went off to go to other courts to sue for the holes in their own brains."

I told her about my dream. Then she produced a small piece of lined paper with childish pencil writing on it.

"Look at this letter that Katy wrote", she said.

TO PRESIDENT BUSH.

THE WHITEHOUSE

WASHINGTON

USA

YOU SAID YOU ARE GOING TO KICK ASS AND MY MUM SAID THAT IS

NOT GOOD ENGLISH. IF YOU CAN'T SPEAK ENGLISH WHY ARE YOU

THE PRESIDENT?

KATY HODGKINSON AGED 6

"Brilliant spelling", I commented.

"I corrected the spelling for her and she wrote it out again. She was most determined that it should all be correct. It was entirely her own idea. Do you want some sausages?", she said.

"No thanks". I went up to her and put my arm around her and she gave me a peck on the cheek. This made me feel better about the week in prospect.

I'm only doing it all for you. I thought, which was my regular cop-out whenever I had been particularly neglectful of her. (It was my solemn belief that neglecting her made me a more exciting person.) I must have been in a confident mood that morning, because the monthly meeting went well, I even managed to make it sound as though the project was progressing better than it was. Nobody made any comments, and for once they didn't pay much attention to what was going on in my project.

On Tuesday morning I had made an arrangement to look around Rodney's theatre at 10 am. I took the morning off and travelled to the theatre by bus, arriving about ten minutes before the appointment. It was a grey day, and a light drizzle was continually starting and stopping. It wasn't quite enough to drive one to shelter, but looked as though it might become heavier at any moment. I waited outside the theatre. It was obviously on old cinema. It looked deserted and it was hard to believe that it was still being used for anything. It had clearly been showing films until a year or two previously, because there was a faded poster for "2001 a Space Odyssey" inside the glass doors. It was a depressing part of town. Few people wandered past. Those who did exuded an air of bankruptcy or mental derangement or both. I tried to visualise them packing into a concert of classical music but I couldn't see it, somehow. I felt sure there were more salubrious areas of Clapton. I hoped that people would travel from other parts of town. Maybe. I looked at my watch and noticed that it was already 10.30. Where was Horst? An unhappy looking bloodhound picked his way amongst the accumulated piles of dog excrement and then deposited his own contribution, glowering at me reproachfully as if to say, What are you doing in my lavatory? I wished I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Eleven o'clock came and went. I decided to give him until 11.15. That time arrived. I decided to give him another fifteen minutes. I was just about to turn on my heel and go when a black cab pulled up on the other side of the road and a man in a yellow waistcoat got out. It was Horst. He engaged himself in a heated conversation with the driver who was clearly very unhappy. I crossed the road. Horst was trying to pay his fare with ten deutschmarks and a wad of luncheon vouchers. The taxi driver was adamant.

"No good to me mate. Seven pounds fifty you owe me. Luncheon vouchers no good to me, mate. I bring sandwiches. Seven pounds fifty".

Of course, I ended up paying. Horst seemed very agitated and his face was rather red. We crossed the road in silence as the taxi drove away.

"Stinkink taxi man", he said, eventually. "I am late. I am sorry". I waited for an explanation but none was forthcoming. I was hardly in a position to complain, so I didn't. I knew his name was Horst, of course, but I didn't want to address him as such on so slight an acquaintance, so I said,

"I'm sorry, but I didn't actually catch your name the other day". He looked at me with slightly glazed eyes. "I am Horst", he said. There's a poem by Ed Dorn in which he says that the mark of a complete nobody is that anyone can call them by their first name. I wanted to be generous, so I persisted.

"Mr Horst?" I asked, by way of a hint. He stared at me for a while with an earnest but vacant expression, then he slowly moved his hand towards his nose and made a sudden grab for one of the longest visible nose hairs. For an agonising moment he wrestled with it, then with a sharp tug and an "Ah!" of pain he pulled it out. He rolled it triumphantly between finger and thumb.

"My father vas called Kohler", he said, at length. "but I am still thinkink about it. You better chost call me Horst".

I put it down to the German generation gap and decided to say no more about it. Horst removed a key from his pocket and unlocked a padlock which secured a chain holding the push bars on the front doors of the theatre. As we went inside he asked me,

"You hef a project you vant to perform? A play?" I explained that I had the idea of arranging a piano recital.

"Clessical music, I love it", said Horst. "I studied for many years".

We passed through the foyer, which was very dusty. Horst left me at the entrance to the auditorium and disappeared into some kind of control room where he switched on a dim illumination which allowed us to make our way between the seats and mount the stage via a pair of steps at the front right hand side. I saw no piano.

"Where is the piano?" I asked, "Rodney said you had a piano".

"Ya, there is a Bechstein. A good piano. Doctor Brahms's favourite piano", he answered. He groped around amongst some drapes at the side of the platform and finally found the rope which controlled the backdrop to the stage. Together, with a little huffing and puffing, we managed to raise it. There in the shadows there was indeed a grand piano. Horst shuffled over to it, picking nervously at a nose-hair. He sat down at the piano and started to play one of the opus 117 intermezzi by Brahms. These are the pieces that Brahms wrote after he had told his publisher not to expect any more music from him, after he had made his last will and testament and the piece Horst was playing was the one Brahms called "a cradle for all my sorrows". I suppose it wasn't a good performance in technical terms. The piano was fairly out of tune, and the playing was not polished or note perfect, but it suited that piece and that rendition in that darkened empty theatre seemed to me the most beautiful that I had ever heard. When he finished playing I felt quite overcome with emotion. Fortunately the darkness concealed my plight.

"We'll have to get it tuned", was all I managed to say.

Afterwards I couldn't face public transport, so I set off to walk home. The visit to the theatre and the feeling that Geoffrey's concert was coming together had left me with an unusual feeling of elation, and the elation itself had thrown my mind into conflict. I found myself having the sort of pseudo conversation with myself which was becoming a terrifyingly regular feature of my life.

So, who do you think you are, then?

"Peter Hodgkinson. Age 41. Occupation, senior analyst programmer with Viron Virtual Reality Systems Ltd. Married. One child. In need of a new car, but otherwise a very solid type".

Don't give me that bullshit. You wouldn't go within ten miles of a computer if you didn't need the money.

"That's not fair and it's not true. I enjoy computers. I really do enjoy them. And besides, I'm really good at what I do. Everyone has to do something".

Yes, but with your brain and your education you ought to be good. Let's face it. You got into software because you were broke and bored and happened to get interested in playing around with a borrowed machine. Then you took an aptitude test to see if you could get on a course and your score was so high, they passed you on the first part of the test alone.

"Exactly. Like I said, I'm good at it".

But you passed the bloody test because you have a really excellent ability to solve problems in logic. You're not a solid type, you're a bloody tragedy. All that brainpower wasted on bits and bytes. Isn't there anything else you could do with it?

"Just shut up, voice of my forefathers. You're biased. You just can't accept the computer, that's all. Programmers are the Samurai class of the new modern techo-elite. I'm up there with the best of them, living on my wits. Okay, so I get bored sometimes. Who doesn't?"

So, who do you think you are, then?

And on and on in circles. The conversation never got anywhere. It was the psychological equivalent of bailing a leaky boat, I guess. After a while the walking soothed me. A pleasant feeling of lassitude came over me and my plimsoll line settled itself safely above water level. I was just considering whether to stop for a shandy when a graffiti on an advertising hoarding caught my eye.

when you die, will you go screaming and clinging to life as you lived screaming and clinging to your deadness?

I capsized and called a cab. When I got home I felt a bit better. I called in sick and made a few general business calls from home. I think that was the day that I realised that if anyone was going to get a second birth it was Stringer and not myself. I was just the midwife on call.

IV

I was in darkness. I wasn't sure which way was up. There was a lot of white noise to my left, to my right, above me and below in fact (or was it below and above?). Every so often a sound like a helicopter engine rose above the white noise. Then I started to see flashes of light. Blue at first, and rather distant, rapidly becoming closer and whiter, dazzling my eyes. Explosions. There seemed to be some other sound mixed up in them. I seemed to be wearing some kind of headgear. Then all of a sudden the whole sky was lit up and yes, I was upside down and looking through a gunsight. An unpleasant looking armoured flying machine was heading straight for me. In mounting panic I reached for a trigger and found my hand on what felt like a doorhandle. Before I could stop myself the door was sucked open and I was falling out of the craft. I found myself on a pale blue Teflon carpet looking into the eyes of a spotty Unix programmer.

"Er, what do you think?", he said, diffidently.

"Very good, Mark", I replied. A trickle of sweat had run into my left eye so I was now seeing the world much as I imagine a goldfish must see it. Furthermore I was still not altogether sure which way up I was. The fact is I found war games immensely unpleasant and tried not to work on them. Mark had no such inhibitions. His previous project had been a nuclear holocaust game in which you lost when you had more than sixty percent burns. Virtual reality systems were developing at an incredible pace within Viron Systems Ltd. When I had first joined the firm, eight years before, the state of the art project was a chess game with a 3-D 'look' on a flat screen. Now all the projects were all-enclosing virtual reality jigs. You sat in a cab, generally with some kind of head up display gear. Maybe you wore special gloves. Sometimes there were robots in there with you. All the systems had sound and vision, most had some kind of tactile experience and some even had smell. I was just putting the finishing touches to a virtual chess experience. It was most lifelike. You wore a head up display and a special glove that gave you the illusion of weight when you picked up the pieces. If you put them down hard you got a satisfying CLUNK and if you pushed them you felt the beize dragging on the chessboard veneers. Totally lifelike. You could select from a large repertoire of well-known opponents and historic venues. If you picked Karpov he sat opposite you eating different coloured yogurts while your seconds remonstrated with the FIDE officials. If you selected Najdorf he sat with his back to you and announced mate in seven whilst simultaneously playing twenty two other blindfold games. My favourite was Bobby Fischer. You started the clocks and he didn't turn up so you won by default. I couldn't claim that the machine actually played like Fischer when he did turn up. We bought the chess algorithms in from a firm who specialised in supercomputer chess. We got them to do some development on the stylistic aspects, it would obviously be absurd to have Morphy play a slow Sicilian, or Petrosian play bold attacking chess. But those aspects could be worked on later. Besides, the punters wouldn't know the difference.

I was sorry to see the end of the project. It gave me many entertaining hours, both programming and studying the appearances and habits of the chess masters. I was in some trepidation about what I might get landed with next. Sure enough, as I was picking myself up off the floor Stewart came breezing along with his usual I got rhythm happy smile on his face.

"Hello, this is your General here, General Factotum. Got a moment, Hodge?" He knew I had, since he was paying for it.

"Wondered if we could talk about the next project".

I followed him into his office, bracing myself for his unfair tactics. Somehow he had a way of always getting what he wanted out of me. Generally he did it by threatening me with something so horrific that I gratefully accepted something slightly less horrific as the lesser of two evils. After that it was up to me to get the project to a state where I could dump it onto a junior programmer for completion. You'd think that if people could create their own realities they'd create something less awful than everyday life, but not a bit of it. Blood and guts, firearms, explosions, infernal flying machines, these are the Beulah of the virtual reality freak. Projects like chess were few and far between. Stewart sat down and motioned me to sit, then offered me a cigar. I thanked him and put it in my pocket. He grimaced slightly, trying not to show his annoyance. He knew my accepting the cigar was a sign of truculence and that later I would throw it away. He knew it meant that I would probably raise objections to anything he proposed today. We knew each other's moods quite well, in fact. He opted to ignore the problem.

"What do you know about open heart surgery, Hodge?", he opened, leading with his right.

"About as much as I want to, thank you" I said.

"Not a lot, huh?" he said. He paused and lit his cigar with a cigarette lighter that looked like a penis with varicose veins.

"Got some interest from a couple of medical firms in the States. An open heart surgery simulator is one of the options. Could be a winner, you know. The deal is they would cover the development costs, we'd be free to sell the technology on to other customers. Could be a big market for that kind of thing".

"Are we talking about robots?" I asked.

"Robots, headgear, gloves, everything. This would be a big one. Probably have two or three people in there for training purposes."

"Why two or three?"

"For training assistants and nurses", he said.

"Why not just switch between a surgeon emulator and a nurse emulator".

"Well, yes, that's a possibility too, but you know, I've been thinking it's about time we started branching out into multi subject realities, and there are good reasons to attempt it on this one. It's an ideal opportunity".

I wasn't sure what objections to raise to this project. It sounded pretty gory and I wasn't sure I had the stomach for it.

"Could be hard to research", I said. "Where would we get the data?"

"Films, books, we could bring in some consultants", he said, jovially, as though the thing couldn't be simpler.

"Anyway, you'll think about it. Nothing yet, no firm orders. I'm still talking to them, you understand. But if you have any thoughts on the matter."

"I'll let you know,", I said, relieved that a start was not imminent. He said nothing for a while, so I assumed he had finished and I got up to go.

"Wait", he said. "There's another medical project which we have got a contract for".

By the way in which he waited so long to say it, and by the tone of his voice, I knew it was something bad.

"And I'd appreciate it if you'd keep this one under your hat. An artificial insemination clinic in Beverley Hills is looking for a virtual woman. Strictly for medical purposes, you understand".

"How do you expect me to keep a simulated woman under my hat?" I asked.

"I've got quite a collection of them under my hat", said Stewart, "but that's another story. Seriously, Hodge, the less people know about this, the better".

"Why?" I asked.

"Well, you know, think of the implications. If the feminists found out, or the Sunday newspapers."

"All the better for you, I should think. You'd sell a lot more units".

"You do me an injustice, Hodge. Do you think that's all I care about? Anyway, we want to get the project well under way before our competitors find out."

"That sounds more like you", I said. "But why the virtual woman. What do they want her for?”

Stewart explained that the sperm donors in Beverley Hills were used to all modern comforts and conveniences. A jam jar and an old copy of Playboy were no longer adequate to their needs. AI clinics either had to make the procedure more comfortable and entertaining or they would simply go out of business. The virtual woman would ensure a steady supply of donors and she would be constructed in such a way that she could be updated as fashions in female beauty changed. She would be built with a repertoire of faces from which the operator could choose, with flesh of variable colour, temperature and softness. With headgear and one or two other ancillary items the experience could be made very lifelike. In fact the problem would probably be not so much getting the donors into the cabin but getting them out afterwards. I suggested that after twenty minutes we could switch the girl's face for a picture of Sylvester Stallone. He said he didn't think that would make much difference in Beverley Hills. Then I said why didn't we make this one a multi subject experience and put a virtual man in there also, then the donor could do something useful like reading a book while the machine got on with it. He said ok, but could I write a program that could produce sperm. No? He thought not. I could tell he was getting tired of my flippancy. I asked him how we would research the project. He said magazines, dirty films, plus contributions from the group. He said he would also get some experts on female sexual response to give their reactions and make helpful suggestions. I said I didn't know there were any such experts. He said that there were indeed and they were called women. We went on in this vein for a while. Then he handed me a rough written specification for the project and asked me to go away and look at it. I accepted without enthusiasm. His parting shot was to tell me that we were taking the train down to Manchester the next day to talk over the project with the punters from Beverley Hills. What they were doing in Manchester he didn't explain. I had to meet him on the morning train at nine O'clock, rear carriage.

The train journey was like a lot of train journeys with Stewart, he never stopped talking, about software, life, the universe, everything. Today he was talking about his wife's relatives. They were giving him grief because Louise wanted to take a long holiday in Greece, and Stewart reckoned he could only manage a couple of days, but was amenable to Louise going on her own, or with a friend. I assumed he meant a woman friend. Louise was being very long suffering about it, but Stewart thought she was feeding it to her mother in order to bring pressure indirectly. Her mother was one of the breed who create, rather than endure, long suffering. I was getting rather bored with the topic, so in order to break up the conversation I suddenly did something I wouldn't normally do and asked Stewart if he had ever been off with another woman. He looked at me guardedly. Then he said,

"You've met the lovely Louise", as though that explained everything, whereas in fact I had no idea what he meant at all. Then he said it again, more quietly, and his eyes went sort of round and puffy, like those of a mole who has just been dug out of a lawn. I got the feeling I had touched on a sensitive topic. I was no wiser, but the flow of conversation was at least halted. In any case, the train was going much faster now, and the general noise level made conversation more difficult. Stewart took an electronic filofax out of his briefcase, then an electronic telephone. He thumbed something into the filofax and punched the dials of the phone.

"Hello, I want to contact Bill Webster". He said. I could vaguely hear an adenoidal female jobsworth at the other end saying

"I'm sorry sir, he's not in the office at the mow-ment, I can give you the number of his mobile phone, or would you prefer to leave a message?".

"No thanks, I've got the number of his mobile, thank you", said Stewart. His thumbs flailed expertly on the electronic dohickey and brought forth a fresh hoard of digits.

"Hello, hello, Bill? Stewart Baxter here. How are you. Yes, just ringing to chew the fat with you about the installation we put in last month at the Brighton Institute, the Star Wars special. Yes, that's right. Discovered a couple of teensy weensy buglets in the code since then. Nothing serious. Nooooo - nothing like that. Might be an idea to advise people if they've got weak hearts, pacemakers, anything like that not to use the smart rocks. For some reason if you use the smart rocks when you're in the manned space station it drops you on the dark side of the moon from a great height. Could frighten some people . . ."

and on and on in this vein. Frighten people? The thing was a bloody disaster, more bugs than a pop star’s pubes. The QA man who discovered this particular one three weeks previously came out of the cabin looking like a Vietnam vet and was still on indeterminate sick leave. As Stewart was holding the phone to the ear next to me, I could hear some of the reply.

"Right, no smart pebbles, better put a notice up in the cabin. Any idea how long to get it fixed?"

Stewart mentioned some ridiculously optimistic figure, and so it went on. As the conversation continued, I began to have the uncanny sensation that I was hearing the whole thing projected in stereo, as though some of the sound was being thrown at me from the back of the seat in front. On an impulse I said to Stewart

"Ask him where he is".

"Eh?",

"Ask Bill Webster where he is".

"By the way, old man, whereabouts are you today?".

"On a train, actually, going to Manchester".

"Oh really? So are we". A pause.

"Which carriage are you in? Oh really, so are we". Another pause. Then a rather red mustachioed face rose serenely above the seat in front of me. Stewart and Bill Webster looked at each other.

"Hello", Stewart said. Naturally the conversation died instantly.

The people from Beverley Hills were a drag, like all these super rich American customers. I can never get it right with them. We had to go and talk to them in a kind of rented office, all flash cheap furniture etc. There were two of them, both men, seated behind an imposingly long desk when we went in. One of them was wearing a ten gallon hat and smoking a cigar. They stood up and swung their arms around a lot like actors do in Dallas when they want to show how terribly pleased they are to see someone. Then they pumped our hands very vigorously, on and on and on. Then they sat down again. The one with the hat had a very gravelly voice.

"Hi. I'm Jim Marlowe, and this is my assistant Jake Spambone, we're from the Beverley Hills drive-in AI clinic".

Needless to say I thought this was a joke. I laughed and said

"Cervix with a smile?".

This was a mistake, and everything started to go downhill from this point. Their faces instantly froze. There was a lengthy and hostile pause. Then Jake Spambone said, in a strained voice, "Who is this guy?".

"This is Peter Hodgkinson. He's our chief programmer". Said Stewart.

"Is he a medic", said the one with the big hat.

"No, he's a programmer", explained Stewart, patiently. They conferred together, whispering. Then the one without the hat said, laconically.

"Does he really have to know about this? I mean, is it strictly vital he be here?". Stewart went into disaster recovery mode and explained at length how necessary I was to the project, how irreplaceable my expertise was, how they weren't to mind my sense of humour, that I hadn't meant to offend them, and so on. All this while my smile was getting broader and broader and more and more sheepish until by the time he had finished I'll swear I had wool growing out of my cuffs. When we finally got down to business it was a complete waste of time from my point of view because they didn't have anything to say that Stewart hadn't already told me, and they kept going on pretentiously about "customer acceptability" and "client comfort ratings" as though there were something deeply noble and uplifting about designing a Trust House Forte wank. Afterwards Stewart took me for an expensive meal to pacify me, and explained that it was mainly a customer relations exercise. He thought it had gone well, after the initial hiccup. On the spur of the moment I decided that the time had arrived to make good my promise to Geoffrey and to do my duty to myself. I decided to go in at an angle.

“Stewart”, I said.

“Yes? What can I do you for?”

“I’m sick of all this. I mean, dealing with people like that, I mean, I’ve had enough. I’ve been thinking about it for some time actually, I think it’s time for a change.”

I knew this would make him unhappy, and I wasn’t far wrong. His face went as white as a sheet.

“Change?”, he gasped. I knew how he hated that word.

“I want to get out of all this. I mean, I’m not going anywhere am I?”

Steward looked dumbstruck for a moment. Then from an inside pocket he produced a pair of reading specs, put them on, took them off, blinked several times, cleaned them with the big end of his tie, put them on again, took them off, blinked some more and put them back in his pocket. I sensed I was winning.

“This is a bit, um, er, inconvenient”, he said.

“I have to think of myself, Stewart”, I ventured.

“Of course, of course”, he said, winding the little end of his tie around his thumb. I decided to change tack a bit.

“You know me”, I said, “I’m no businessman.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“No it’s true, I’m no businessman. I’ve been with you what, eight years, but I’ve never bothered to go to Companies House and look at the accounts.”

“No need, no need”, muttered Stewart, winding the big end of his tie around the only other thumb he had available. He must have known what was coming.

“But I can see that Viron is doing quite well. We are, aren’t we?”

“Well, yes. And as I’ve always said and as I would freely admit to anyone a lot of it has been due to you Hodge, as you know.” I decided to bite the bullet.

“Look, we both know this is a disgusting and tedious job. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s unethical because if it was I wouldn’t do it, but it’s, it’s distasteful. The job’s distasteful, the customers are distasteful and my guts are telling me to walk away from it right now.”

“I know, I agree with you Hodge, but that’s the world we live in, what can you do?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I can do. I can do this sodding thing but on one condition. I want a royalty. On the software. I want a royalty on every unit sold.”

Stewart picked up the menu and studied it upside down. I could see his hand was shaking. I knew he wasn’t a mean man, but he was a businessman. He wouldn’t make a deal until he’d thought it through and he was thinking it through right now. After a couple of minutes of this there came a barely audible squeak from behind the menu.

“Shall we say fifteen percent?”

“How much would that be?”

“Oh, about fifty pounds on every sale.”

“It’s a deal.”, I said, “Let’s shake on it.”. We shook. I was sure we would sell at least a hundred and possible two hundred units. I could take a few months off, take Katy to China or something. Inwardly I offered up thanks and a benediction to Geoffrey. Stewart sat stunned and trembling for quite some time whilst I finished my coffee with as manful an air as I could muster. Eventually he plucked up his courage and offered me a cigar, which I refused in token of our reconciliation.

The following Saturday I arranged to go down to Bournemouth to see Geoffrey. I wanted to tell him about Rodney's theatre and discuss the possibility of organising a gig there. I meant to get up very early, but I overslept as usual. I downed a quick cup of coffee and five minutes later I hit the road towards Bournemouth.

I arrived at Geoffrey's digs at mid morning. He was surprised to see me so early. He was practicing. He made coffee, and I asked him to carry on practicing. I was tired anyway, and I wanted to read the newspaper which was lying on the divan. I took it into the next room so as not to disturb him. He was practicing a very difficult study or prelude, Rachmaninov I think. He was playing the same series of phrases over and over again. Every so often he would drop the tempo right back and play the whole series through very slowly two or three times. Then he would speed up again, then slow down. Then suddenly, as if desperate, he stopped, paused, and then played half a dozen bars of very breezy ragtime, then stopped, paused again and carried on. I made a mental note to ask him to try it in a concert sometime.

After about an hour the practicing ceased. Geoffrey came into the room where I was. He looked tense.

"I feel like a walk", he said. "Do you want to come?" We went out together. We walked along the seafront. Geoffrey was quiet while I outlined my plans for the concert. Afterwards he just said,

"Sounds risky, Hodge".

"Risky? How?" I asked him.

"Could lose a lot of money". He outlined the sort of costs involved. First there was the cost of the hall. Then tickets would have to be printed, and some kind of poster. A couple of newspaper ads would have to be taken. The piano would need to be tuned. If it was as badly out of tune as I said it was, it should probably be tuned twice, once to pull it up to pitch and then again just before the concert in case it had slipped. There was no telling what the piano technician might find. I countered his objections by saying that I could probably get the hall at a good price, even Rodney wouldn't charge his brother in law the top whack. I would put it to him that it was in his own interests, if the experiment was successful he could use the theatre in that way again. As for tickets and posters, one thing I had plenty of access to in my job was fancy desk top publishing. No problems there, then. The piano was a problem, sure, but overall I didn't estimate that my total financial exposure was going to be too great. In short, I could afford to take the risk and I was willing to do so. Geoffrey was silent about it, and I was miffed that he seemed less enthusiastic than I had hoped he would be.

"It’s an experiment. Do you want to do it, or don't you?" I asked him, finally. After another hesitation he agreed.

"Okay, let's give it a try. An experiment. Yes. An experiment."

When we got back to his room, we had a discussion about what sort of programme he ought to prepare. We decided that a mixed programme would probably be best for that sort of venue. He asked me if there was anything I specially wanted him to play. I said that was rather irrelevant, the point was what might an audience in Clapton want to hear. He said that nevertheless there might be something I liked that an audience in Clapton wouldn't take amiss. I mentioned the opus 117 intermezzi of Brahms. He said he couldn't perform late Brahms at the moment because as it happened he was working on the opus 76 pieces and the whole feeling of the music was too different, but he would be delighted to play them. We waffled on like a couple of pundits, me beginning to feel rather proud with myself, and the fact that my bits and pieces of musical knowledge were being taken seriously by someone who ought to know what he was talking about. I didn't know the opus 76 pieces, but Geoffrey said that in his opinion they were just as good as all the late stuff that most pianists played, at least as good as the G major Rhapsody and even the 'black pearl' intermezzo.

"Listen to this. This piece is really blue", he said, and he played the opening capriccio.

"And this one is really jazzy". He played the final piece, also a capriccio. I was captivated. I asked him to play some more, but he wanted to talk about the concert. Playing to me had put him in the mood. We discussed tickets, how to sell them. He suggested getting a ticket agent, or failing that a local music shop to sell them. We discussed publicity. He suggested sending posters to all the London music colleges in case any students had digs out in Clapton. That also seemed like a sound idea.

"Might get some nice girls along", I said.

"Never mind the girls, bums on seats, that's what we want. Girls are irrelevant".

"I can't agree about that", I said. "Girls seem highly relevant to me. Trouble is, I never meet any".

"Fifty per cent of the human race is female", said Geoffrey, looking a shade annoyed. "How can you say you never meet any. I thought you were a happily married man, anyway".

"I'm happily bored shitless." I said.

"Well, anyway, there are plenty of girls about". Said Geoffrey. "Just talk to them, Hodge".

I could see that he wanted to change the subject. As for me, I desperately wanted to ask him about his camp followers, specifically, did he or did he not get laid after his concerts like pop stars do, but I couldn't find the courage to put my question just at that moment. Geoffrey obviously had his mind on business.

"We ought to think about fixing up a date". He said.

We decided to work for a date in August, about two months hence. He gave me a list of dates which he couldn't do (there weren't very many of them), and we agreed that I would try and settle a date with Rodney and get back to him. I drove back that evening feeling strangely elated, as though something subtly exciting was happening to me. I put a tape of the Shostakovich preludes and fugues on the cassette machine, and was soon tapping my feet gaily. Overhead, across the darkened road strode the only constellation I knew, the colossus of Orion.

"What should I do, old man?", I asked him.

"Shut up and keep driving", he said.

The next morning, being a Sunday, Miriam had planned a family outing. Normally I found Sunday outings tedious beyond belief, but this Sunday wasn't so bad, because we were going to visit a friend of Miriam's called Sandy Baird. I was quite interested in Sandy because she used to be a call girl and she had interesting experiences to recount. Immodest women who have no inhibitions about sex have always fascinated me, not only because they provide obvious titillation and hint at ecstasies beyond the wildest dreams of Rod Stewart, but for the less obvious reason that they seem to provide a window into the obscure workings of female sexuality. They are, if you like, a sort of fifth column betraying the secrets of the female to the male. Sandy was this sort of lady, so I always went there in anticipation of hearing something new. I was never sure whether Miriam understood this or not, but in any case Sandy was a very old friend of hers, so it wouldn't have made any difference. Of course, all that was long in the past for Sandy, who had now settled down with a childhood sweetheart called Reg. I liked Reg and always got along well with him. He was a fairly ordinary sort of chap in most respects except for one thing, he was absolutely mad about astronomy. Anything to do with red giants, white dwarfs, quasars or neutron stars fascinated him. He had a telescope which he would set up in the garden when the night was clear enough. Once he had shown me Jupiter's moons, but the sky wasn't often clear enough for that in North London. His proudest achievement was that he had ground the reflector for the telescope himself, a process that had taken him several months and which involved not only painstakingly accurate craftsmanship but also the construction of the complex test rigs which were needed to ensure that the final form of the parabola was correct. Reg boasted that his mirror was accurate to better than one half a wavelength of light.

We arrived at Sandy's at about 10.30 am. Their familiar old yellow Rolls Royce was still outside the door, though I knew they were completely broke and had been trying to sell it for some time. We rang the doorbell and knocked a few times, but there was no reply. We went through the side gate into the back garden. On the lawn, a fluffy rabbit was nibbling a dandelion leaf whilst a white cat contemplated it seriously as though trying to figure out who this thing belonged to and how much trouble she would get into if she ate it. When she saw us she scarpered. We called out for Sandy and knocked on the back door. Eventually Reg came out in his braces with shaving cream all over his face.

"Come to see Sandy? Oh, sorry, man. She's gone to the shops. Won't be long now. Come in".

Reg always addressed his remarks to me. He disappeared upstairs to continue his shaving, while we went into the front room and sat down. After about ten minutes of peering at the spines of Sandy's books and leafing through last Sunday's colour supplement Sandy came back with her son Toby, who was just about a year older than Katy. Those two got on very well, and they immediately went out into the garden to play. Sandy was very apologetic, and wanted to know where Reg was, and whether he had looked after us properly. We said of course he had, he was just shaving. Sandy said that was probably because he had yet another prospect lined up who might want to buy the car.

"Honestly, you'd think you could sell a nice old Rolls like that. Nation of free enterprise and all that. Not a chance. Not A chance".

Just then Reg came in. He looked very spruce, his sideburns clipped off square like club feet.

"Honestly, Reg", said Sandy, "another Sunday up the spout. That car's going to be the death of me. Who is it this time?"

"A pop star", replied Reg. "Ooh, a pop star, eh?", said Sandy. "Should get a good price, eh, Reg?".

"Well, sort of a fading pop star, really", said Reg. "into his white dwarf phase". He looked at his watch, "better get down there and sell it to him before he turns into a black 'ole". With that he departed. Then Sandy got onto the subject of her life and loves.

"I had a pop star once". The story unfolded. This chap was a pop star who had dozens of groupie girls coming after him, but he was so petrified of being hit with a paternity suit or being smeared in the Sundays that he paid Sandy to come round after the show and pose as a groupie. That way he kept his ego intact and fended off the real groupies at the same time.

"Surprising, really", said Sandy. "He was quite human. When it came to it he didn't want to do nothing. He just said 'look, darling, here's an extra fifty for not telling anyone what didn't happen'. And I didn't tell anyone neither".

"I bet you wish they were all like that", I said.

"Not really, life would be a bit boring if they were all like that", said Sandy. "I can't see what all the fuss is about. I mean, surely in this day and age if a man and a women want to go to bed together it's no big event. I can't see why so many people get upset about it".

I said I agreed. Miriam looked daggers at me, or rather, nuclear tipped lance missiles.

"There were some like that, though." She went on. "There was this stockbroker. I suppose he was a bit of a masochist, if you like. He used to come in, strip down till he had nothing on but his socks, then he used to kneel in front of me and say 'Question my probity!'. Then there was this vicar . . .".

"Sandy, do you have those fish plates you were telling me about", interrupted Miriam. These sort of conversations made her uncomfortable. Sandy was easily distracted.

"Yes, dear, in fact, come in here and have a look. I've got some other plates which belonged to my mother that you might be interested in".

The two women went off into the kitchen leaving me on my own. I thought about Sandy and why I liked her, and it struck me for the first time that she reminded me of a woman called Leslie who I had gone out with long before I met Miriam. I used to call her 'Lilo' and she used to call me 'Water Wings'. I started wondering what happened to all the lover's nicknames in the world when people fell out of love and stopped using them. I imagined a big barn somewhere, full of discarded appellations, sussurating, whispering to each other. I imagined how they might flee like doves into the trees if you crept up and opened the door. I was thinking about this stuff when the women reappeared. I determined to re-open the conversation where it was interrupted.

"Didn't you ever feel guilty about these men?", I asked Sandy, "I mean like the vicar. Didn't you ever think about his wife?"

"Lord no!", said Sandy. "She wasn't interested in him. Hadn't been for years, so why should she care? Anyway, everyone's entitled to a few secrets, I say. I'm all for honesty, but everyone's entitled to their own private life".

"Did he ever talk to you about the effect on his life? Perhaps it put the spontaneity back into his marriage", I suggested.

"Well, I don't know what that is, spontaneity", replied Sandy. "People talk about it, but I reckon all married couples have their own timetables well worked out. If you ask me the real killer is the double bed. Sleep and sex ought to be kept separate. That's my opinion."

I told her about marriage laws in ancient Sparta. You could marry under the age of thirty, but you still had to live in barracks and conduct your marriage like a love affair. Sandy seemed to approve. Miriam, needless to say, was showing signs of increasing irritation. She regarded sex as something that shouldn't be talked about except in tones of reverential awe. We were saved, however by Reg's return.

"Howdya get on, Reg", said Sandy, excitedly. "Did you sell it?".

"Nah. Bloody bloke had done a bunk hadn't he". Reg seemed very pissed off. "Went round to his flat, there was three other geezers there. His agent, his wine merchant and his homeopath. All fuming, they was. Apparently several other pop stars, friends of his, footed the bill for him to make a comeback album, and when it made a lot of money his accountant advised him to declare himself bankrupt and move to Belgium, otherwise he'd have to pay them back out of the proceeds. So he scarpered. Now he ain't got no friends, but he's got loadsamoney".

I asked him if he knew what the record was called.

"Eh? oh yeah, 'What Are Friends For?' it's called. By Cat Strummer". He paused, then his face lit up, "that homeopath said he might be interested in the Rolls, though", he said. "He's going to give me a call next week".

"It's no use Reg", said Sandy, wearily. "Honestly, if we don't do something soon we'll have the bailiffs in. Won't we?"

"Nah, shouldn't think so", said Reg, offhandedly. "Got lots of bigger fish to fry than us".

"Well, I do hope so", said Sandy, "perhaps they'll have to take a little trip to Belgium. That'll keep them busy for a while, eh Hodge?", she winked at me.

"Yes, well, I'm looking, ain't I. I'm looking for a bloody job, only there just ain't nothing". Said Reg, picking up the Saturday newspaper job section and starting to leaf through it.

"I saw one that would be good for you, Reg", said Sandy. She went over to him and pointed out a box ad a couple of pages beyond the one he was looking at.

"No good". Said Reg. "Look, Bexley Council is an equal opportunities employer, and welcomes applications from all sections of the community regardless of race, colour or sexual orientation".

"So what's wrong with that?", said Sandy.

"No white males, innit", said Reg. "They're hardly going to print that lot and then hire a middle aged white male".

I cast a worried glance at Miriam but she seemed not to have heard. Then the whole party was interrupted again, this time by the white rabbit, which lollopped into the room with Katy and Toby in hot pursuit.

"Can we have him outside, please. No, please, can we have Roger outside", Sandy ordered, firmly.

"I want to hold him", said Katy.

"Well, you can hold him, but outside", I said to Katy.

"But Toby won't let me. Toby's being horrible".

"I'm sure Toby will let you, won't you, Toby?". Toby, having captured the rabbit, made a bee line for the back door.

"What have you got on your face, Katy?" Miriam asked the child.

"Face paint. We were playing cowboys and Indians. I was the Indians. Mum, why won't Toby let me play with the rabbit? Tell him to let me".

"There there, he will now, I'm sure". Miriam put her arms round the little girl and swayed with her, comfortingly. There was a certain amount of whispering and murmuring. Then Miriam said,

"Do you want me to come with you?”

"No, I know where it is", said the little girl. She headed off upstairs in the direction of the bathroom.

"How's the search for extra terrestrial intelligence going, Reg?", I asked, trying to get Reg onto one of his favourite subjects.

"Funny you should mention that", he said. "Just before you came I was reading an article about different forms of life and what they might look like. This geezer was saying that there's no reason why life forms on other planets should be based on carbon chemistry at all. They might be based on silicon or something else altogether. There might be living things out there which aren't single life forms at all, but symbiotic entities. Know what that means? It means when you've got, like, several different animals all living together and they're all different but they can't do without each other. We don't know how lucky we are, if you ask me. Imagine if your head was a separate person, most of the time it just sat there on your shoulders, hearing and seeing for you, masticating your food, but any time in your life, at any moment, it might suddenly decide to fly off and perch on another body, or even just disappear over the horizon.".

I said I couldn't imagine that.

"Yeah, and you'd only have about three seconds in which to grab it back and say 'aren't you a naughty boy'. After that you'd be deaf and blind and you wouldn't have a hope. Makes you think, dunnit. I mean, about how lucky we are. People'd have to spend their whole life just recognising the symptoms of a restless dissatisfied head. Your whole life would depend on it".

"Katy's been a long time up there", said Miriam, beginning to look worried.

"Shall I go and have a look?", I said.

"No, I'll go". She went off to look for her. I was just about to reopen my conversation with Reg, when I heard an outburst from upstairs.

"Katy, what are you doing with that flannel. You do not walk into a strange house and pick up a flannel and start washing your face with it".

Inaudible comment from Katy.

"Yes, I know, but grown ups use them for all sorts of things, they wash between their legs with them."

Another inaudible comment from Katy.

"Don't argue with me, Katy. You don't know who's been using that flannel. George Bush might have been here".

Very shortly, a weeping Katy rushed down the stairs and out into the garden.

As soon as we got home, I rang Rodney to ask about the use of his theatre. He was surprisingly affable.

"Organise it with Horst", he said, straightaway. I broached the subject of a hiring fee.

"No charge", he said. "Buy me a bottle of bubbly when you're an impresario, haw haw haw".

V

I went into Viron systems on the following Monday with the express intention of sussing out their desktop publishing systems. I had meant to get there bright and early, but as it happened I had to take Katy to the doctor about a little skin rash, so I didn't arrive until after midday. As I went in I was struck by an unearthly electronic wailing sound mixed with a high-pitched shriek of human terror which stopped me dead in my tracks. I stood, rooted to the spot. Shortly the whining stopped with an almighty crash, after which I heard a gasp, then a pause, then a burst of manic laughter. Mark tumbled out of a games booth right in front of me whooping with laughter.

"Afternoon, Mark".

"Evening Hodge. That bloody Star Wars is a scream. Just dropped me on the dark side of the moon for no reason. Ever crash landed on the moon?".

"I thought that bug had been fixed", I replied. It was no joke. Mark might think it was, but any ordinary human being would have been severely shocked by such a crash.

"I think it's a feature". He said. "We should sell systems on it".

"It's an officially notified bug", I told him, "and I'm nominating you to fix it". I went into my office. There were various notes and memos, nothing important, a lot of junk mail including fifty five invitations to the Unix show. I tried to get Stewart on the intercom, but he was out on a site somewhere. All the best DTP stuff was in his office, so that suited me fine. I went in there and played around for a while, produced a couple of posters. I got quite a good effect by scanning a passport photo belonging to one of the secretaries and enlarging it in a drawing program. It came out sort of dotty and in half-tones. I made a mental note to ask Geoffrey for a photo. Then I thought hang mental notes and I called Geoffrey there and then and asked him to dig one out for me. I was getting into my stride. I went back to my own office and called Horst. I felt immensely confident and elated. The phone rang and rang for a long time until just as I was about to put it down someone answered.

"Hello, Clapton Palladium, Horst Kohler. May I help you?".

"Horst", I said, affably. "We are go, go, go. I am looking at a date in August. Rodney says ok. So, what have you got?". There was a brief pause at the other end of the line.

"It vould help me if I knew who you vere". He said.

"Who, me? Hold on a minute, there's a label in the back of my underpants. Maybe it says here. Yes, indeed, this is Peter Hodgkinson speaking".

"Ah yes. The concert. The clessical concert. Ja. Vould you prefer ze beginning of August or end of August?".

I said the beginning of August.

"Ah yes. No, that von't be possible, I'm afraid. Ze beginning of August ve are going to remove all the seats und replace them".

I said I supposed the end of August would have to do.

"Ah yes. No, ve cannot do zat either. Ze end of August we shall be refurbishing the cafe. Is not possible".

I sensed defeat, imminent.

"The middle of August?", I ventured, tentatively.

"Ja, ja. okay, okay. Middle of August zis is okay. Vot date you want. Fifteenth? Okay?”

I consulted my list. The fifteenth was fine. It was a Saturday. Perfect. The appointment was made. I cracked my knuckles and wandered out to see how Mark was doing. From the sounds emanating from the booth I guessed he was crash landing himself again. I sidled up to the booth and using my own master key, I removed the dongle just as the orbiter was about to crash. Once the dongle is removed, the whole game just shuts off, the screens go blank, the feely gloves go limp. After a couple of seconds Mark emerged blinking.

"Found the bug, yet, Mark?", I asked him.

"No, I was just trying to find out what causes the crash".

"It's the smart rocks, isn't it? Got a listing?"

"No, I was just going to get one".

"You'll go square-brained playing VR games all day", I told him. "Why don't you go to a concert once in a while, or go and sit on a beach".

He mouthed silently like a goldfish. His pimples looked more than ever like worm holes in the space time continuum, and I told him so.

"Looked in your home directory lately, Hodge?", was all he said in reply. I must have gone white as a sheet. I knew what that meant.

"You mean?",

"Yes".

"Everybody?",

"Everybody".

"All?",

"All".

"How does he bloody do it! I changed every password on that system only last week. There's no way he could have got all those passwords".

"Got some kind of Trojan in there I guess", said Mark laconically.

"Perhaps you could figure it out, Mark", I said.

"Nah, too many files on that system, too many old shell scripts lying around with no comments in them. No idea who they belong to, what they do. Whole system's a dog's breakfast. I reckon we should just re-install it".

I went over to a terminal and logged myself on. Sure enough there was just one file in my account and it was called "ONE". I read it and of course it just said ,

“PARMENIDES WAS HERE". Same message as usual. I immediately started a grep across the whole network to see if I could find a shell script which produced such a file, but as always it turned up nothing. It gave me at least some satisfaction to try. It wasn't the loss of the files which bothered me, I had long since given up keeping important files on any machine connected to a network, it was the feeling of hurt pride that whatever I did I couldn't keep the bastard out. As I was thus engaged, Stewart came in. He seemed a little agitated. He beckoned me into his office for a discussion. He peered round nervously before closing the door, as though fearful of being overheard.

"I want to move fast on this virtual woman", he said. "The Americans want to see a beta test version within three months".

My jaw dropped. Software of this complexity just couldn't be written to that sort of timescale, even with the most up to date massively parallel VR compilers, which we didn't have anyway. Stewart knew this.

"That's impossible", I said. "We'd be hard pushed to get to a final draft design in that space of time".

"I know, that, I know that", said Stewart, "But the yanks won't wait. They need to see something. Apparently Sensegon Systems have been telling them they could have the whole thing up and running by November, and the Yanks believe them. Of course you know as well as I do it's a con, but the Yanks won't find that out until they're three months down the road, by which time it'll be too late for them to pull out, and we'll have lost the business".

I could see his point. In fact, some contingency of this sort generally did crop up at this stage of all our projects, which was probably why none of our software was ever properly designed.

"So, what's your scheme?", I ventured, warily.

"Leverage. We leverage some old code, you know, re-use it. The basic idea is, forget diversity for the moment, that'll come later. Just get a one woman beta cut up and running. Doesn't matter if she's subtle, just so long as she does the job."

"But we don't have any code that's remotely suitable!", I protested.

"I've thought about that, and I've got just the thing", he responded, laying his forefinger to the side of his nose in a worldly wise gesture which he reserved for such occasions.

"All-in wrestling. That old all-in wrestling booth we put together for the arcade at Margate. Tone it down a bit, take out the head butt and the half nelson and put a bit more movement in the hips. It'd work, Hodge. Believe me. We could do it. You can get the facial movement from the Karaoke game. You know, the one where Marilyn Monroe sings 'I ain’t got nobody but you, babe'. It's a patch, it won't be altogether consistent, but it'll give us what we want, Hodge. We'll have a working demonstrable beta test within three months".

I glared at him coldly, but had to admit his logic. Stewart knew the software game, and he knew what could be done. There was no point in arguing with him on that score.

"What about hardware?” I asked.

"Pretty much all there. I've got a booth, and a motherboard. Mark's installing the feely gloves right now. I'm looking for a hard disk, but I don't anticipate any serious problems there."

I continued looking at him, skeptically.

"There's a slight problem with her vagina", he continued, swallowing slightly, as who wouldn't. "The yanks are having to fill out all kinds of forms for Cocom or whatever it is now. Apparently it's a state of the art item and they're afraid that the Russians will get hold of it".

At this point I made an interjection which is better not repeated and which in any case he pretended not to hear.

"But we're assured we'll have it within the three months along with a collection of disposable liners for the first demo run. In the meantime Mark is rigging up a temporary solution".

"What sort of temporary solution?” I asked, suspiciously.

"Well, that doesn't matter the point is we have sufficient . . .",

"What sort of temporary solution", I interrupted, raising my voice which had autonomously taken on a tone more hysterical than I would have wished. Stewart swallowed quite hard, and his face took on a look like a cornered rabbit.

"It's, er, an old homburg hat and a couple of inflatable lumbar pillows", he said, wrapping the short end of his tie around his little finger.

"With a toupee stuck on the front".

"A toupee!” I exploded. "A toupee! Look, tell me one thing, Stewart? Who's going to test this thing? Who? Because I can tell you it won't be me. I hope that's absolutely clear. Okay?"

"Oh, come on, Hodge. What's the problem. You're a man of the world. Anyway, you're going to have to know how it works, you'll be programming it".

"Programming it, yes. Testing it, no. Get Mark to test it. He's spotty enough". Stewart wrapped the long end of his tie around his other little finger.

"That could be a problem", he said.

"Why a problem for him and not for me?" I said. "I'm a married man. I've got enough problems as it is. Why can't he do it?".

"Well", said Stewart, hesitantly. Then he walked over to the door, opened it, looked around to be sure he wasn't being overheard, then closed it again as quietly as he could.

"I shouldn't tell you this, but Mark doesn't like girls".

"I should have guessed", I said, despondently. What does he like, boys?”

"Well, er, no. He doesn't like boys either".

"What does he like, then?", I asked, nonplussed.

"Please, Hodge, I can't tell you. It's confidential. Please believe me, I can't tell you. Just take it from me, Mark won't test it. Not won't, can't. You'll just have to take it from me".

"Look", I said, "I'll get your machine working, okay? One way or the other I'll get her working. But I am not, repeat NOT going to test her. If any volunteers want to come forward, fine. If not, she'll go out in the field untested. I want that clearly understood, all right?"

Stewart looked less cornered and his shoulders dropped a little. I doubt if he had expected to achieve more than this.

"If that's that way it has to be then that'll have to do", he said.

"Just promise me one thing", I said, with as much restraint as I could manage.

"Anything", said Stewart, innocently.

"Get a decent new hard disk, don't put in one of those clapped out iffy ex-army Western Datastores".

"'Twill be done", said Stewart, "Have a cigar".

I took the cigar without acknowledgement and broke it in half and dropped it on the floor.

"That's the spirit", said Stewart.

VI

The next two months were especially enjoyable and exciting ones, as I got heavily involved in organising Geoffrey's concert. The first thing I did was to get a technician to go the theatre and work over the piano. He confirmed that it would need tuning twice, once immediately, and then again just before the concert after it had settled down a bit. I spoke to the technician on the phone after he had worked it over and he was quite pleased. He said it was a good piano, just badly out of tune. He had pulled it up to concert pitch with no trouble, and gone over the action. It needed a couple of springs and a bit of French chalk, nothing serious. The theatre was obviously a reasonable environment, neither too dry nor too humid. I persuaded Rodney to foot the bill. I got some fliers made up on the DTP system at work, and ran off copies on a xerox. It's surprising what you can do with plain black and white if you have access to scalable typefaces and scanners. The end result looked so professional that I began to wonder whether I had missed my vocation. Perhaps I should have been a graphic designer? I sent out copies to all the libraries, bookshops, and music shops in the Clapton area. I sent copies to Horst to stick in the foyer and windows of the theatre. I looked through the yellow pages and sent several copies to every listed music teacher. I notified the listings magazines, and the listing departments of the London and national dailies. I wrote to the music critics of a couple of local papers (I never got a reply from either of them). About a week before the concert, I arranged to go over to the theatre with Geoffrey. There had been a children's film show on in the morning, and Horst invited us to come and have a look at the place while the cafe and the foyer were still opened up, so we could see what the facilities were like and decide what we wanted. He also mentioned that the girl who usually sold tickets, Linda, would be willing to sell tickets for us on the night. She would do it for no pay, just so she could hear part of the concert.

Geoffrey and I arrived there at about twelve. The children were already streaming out of the theatre, their eyes round with mutant teenage ninja turtle awe. Horst was in the foyer, smiling seedily and looking even more fragile than usual. In the ticket office I could see an extremely attractive girl with blonde hair halfway down her back, engrossed in reading a paperback book.

"Is that Linda?", I asked Horst.

"Yes", he said, wistfully.

"What beautiful long hair she's got", I said.

"Is considered quite normal if you don't heff a dick", said Horst, crudely. I sidled over to the ticket booth and spoke through the little sausage shaped hole in the glass.

"Hi", I said, "You must be Linda". She looked up and smiled at me most charmingly.

"Horst says you'll be selling tickets for us".

"I'm looking forward to it", she said. "It will make a change from the usual bingo and stuff".

"What's that you're reading?", I asked her, by way of keeping the conversation going. She held the paperback up to the glass so I could see the cover.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, I read. "What's it about?", I asked. She smiled at me a sweet and innocent smile.

"It's about this woman who's travelling the world in search of the zipless fuck", she said.

"And what on earth is a zipless fuck?", I asked.

"Oh, you know. Just a nice fuck with no strings attached and no consequences. No zips to undo, no hassle. Instant passion. You know?"

I wasn't sure if I did know. I opened my mouth to say

"Does she find it?", but all that came out was a sort of high pitched squeak, which I'm (almost) sure she didn't hear. My throat felt as tight as if I had swallowed a golf ball. I backed away from the glass and bumped into Geoffrey who was engaged in a discussion with Horst.

"Horst had a good suggestion", said Geoffrey. "Local radio. Have you notified the local radio stations? Some of them probably have arts round up programs which might give us a mention".

I promised I would look into it. It did seem like a good idea. Just then an usherette came out of the auditorium and told Horst that the children were all out. We went in together to look at the piano. Geoffrey pulled up a chair and hung his jacket over the back of it. He kneaded his hands together in that familiar pianistic gesture of preparation. He strummed a few chords and arpeggios on the piano, quickly moving from the top of its range to the bottom checking the tuning and availability of the notes. It was slightly out of tune, but a lot less so than when I had heard it before.

"Good piano", he said. Then he started to play Reflets dans l'Eau. The particular rather pungent quality of the Bechstein suited the music very well. Outside it was one of those baking hot late summer days which make vapour rise from the street, and sun induced lozenges were still floating in my field of vision. I closed my eyes, and let the Debussy conjure up yet more lozenges in my imagination. They floated slowly upwards like the huge purple blotches in a mid period Rothko. When the music finished I looked at Horst, who was absolutely entranced. I remarked to him that Reflets dans l'eau must be the most synaesthetic piece of music ever written, but he didn't know what synaesthetic meant. I had to try and explain it to him, and while I was, Geoffrey started playing the Waldstein Sonata very loud, so we stopped talking and listened. He played about half of the first movement, then stopped suddenly, shut the piano lid and announced that he was starving and wanted some lunch. I suggested looking for a Chinese restaurant or a Tandoori house, but Geoffrey said that he had made an arrangement to meet a friend in a nearby pizzeria who would be able to give him a lift back to Bournemouth. He invited me and Horst to join him. I wanted to invite Linda, but she had gone home by this time.

Geoffrey's friend was already waiting when we finally found the pizzeria. As the weather was warm, he had taken a table on the verandah, and was sitting quietly engrossed in a book. He looked vaguely familiar. Geoffrey spotted him immediately and we joined him at his table. Geoffrey apologised profusely for our lateness.

"Russell, this is Horst and Hodge. Horst and Hodge, Russell Platt. Hodge, you know Russell already, I think".

"Yes", I said. I remembered I had seen him at Geoffrey's concert.

"Wei-Lang said he'd come", said Russell, addressing Geoffrey. "He's in town at the moment and he said he'd like to meet you.".

"Oh yes, I'd like to meet Wei-Lang", said Geoffrey.

"Well, he may well be late, knowing him", said Russell, "perhaps we'd better order anyway. If we order a bit extra we can always feed him when he gets here. He won't eat much.".

We went into a scrum over the menu and decided that three large pizzas should do for the four of us, and placed our order. Horst and Geoffrey seemed to have hit it off and while we waited for the pizza they had a long conversation about pianos. They were comparing notes, reeling off the names of piano makers, most of whom I had never heard of. Bluthner, Schaller, Gors and Kallmann, Chappel, Challen etc. In the main they seemed to agree about most of them. One particular name that Horst came up with caused them both to collapse in fits of hysterics. I can't remember what it was. Then they got onto the subject of pianists. There was one pianist, was it Godowsky? who was renowned for standing up in the middle of other people's performances and shouting, No, not like that!, and trying to get on the stage to show them how it could be played. Needless to say he was not very popular with his colleagues. They talked about how Rubenstein was a nonentity until he had passed forty, and then decided to take himself seriously and became a world class player. They talked about Rachmaninov who used to divide his time between farming and composition and owned the first tractor in Russia. When he was past forty he moved to America and had to get into training and start giving concert tours again. Very difficult. He learned his own third concerto on a dummy keyboard on board a boat from Russia to the US. Eventually the pizza arrived. It was rather doughy, not the best I have tasted by a long shot, but everyone tucked in. While we were eating, Russell suddenly touched Geoffrey's arm and said,

"Oh look, it's Wei-Lang.". I looked up and saw a middle to late middle aged Chinese man in a fawn cotton Tang jacket and loose trousers dismount from a white bicycle and come over to our table.

"Horst, Hodge, Geoffrey, Wei-Lang.". Wei-Lang bowed slightly and smiled, then sat down at the table next to Russell. A momentary silence descended upon the table. I took advantage of this lapse to put a query to Russell.

"Geoffrey tells me you're a classics buff."

"That's right."

"At the place where I work we have a hacker who keeps getting onto our systems and wiping out all our files. He calls himself Parmenides."

"Odd you should mention that. I'm just working on a novel about Parmenides."

"Really?"

"Well, it's not actually about Parmenides as such. It's about Socrates and what he really thought, but Parmenides is in it. "

"That must be interesting. I don't know much about Socrates, but he strikes me as a beautiful character."

“Actually he was famously ugly. Meno called him a torpedo fish, not just because of his looks, but the effect that he had on his enemies.".

"Adversaries", said Wei-Lang, abruptly.

"Well, okay, enemies, adversaries, what's the difference?".

"In philosophy, no enemies", said Wei-Lang. It was the first time he had spoken. Russell shifted uncomfortably.

"So, what did he really think?", I asked.

“No-one knows, really. But as a young man he visited Parmenides, who was then very old, on the island of Elea and he claimed to have learned a lot from him.”

“So why does our hacker calls himself Parmenides?"

"Well, what does he do, this hacker. Does he just wipe out all your files?", asked Russell.

"Basically, yes. He goes into every single user's account, wipes out all their files and creates his own file called 'ONE' which contains a message Parmenides was here.".

"You are the victim of a literate joker", said Russell. ”Parmenides believed that the world as revealed by the senses was an illusion. Behind the apparent variety of things lies a single entity, invisible, eternal, unbounded by space.”

"If so, how could you see it?" said Wei-Lang. Russell seemed unsettled by this apparently pointless remark, but he carried on regardless,

"Inaccessible, at any rate, to the rational mind. The difference between Parmenides and Plato is that Plato could be talking about almost any kind of mystical experience. All I need is to pop a pill and bang! Instant Plato. But Parmenides is making a statement about the way things actually are. Trouble is, since Plato, nobody's been able to understand him."

"Einstein understand him." said Wei-Lang.

"Did he?", said Russell.

"I wish I'd paid more attention to the classics when I was at school", I said, wistfully. "It all sounds so interesting."

"Well, I had a head start", said Russell. "I was taught all the Greek myths at my mother's knee."

"You talk about Plato's version of Socrates", I said, "but what about Socrates' own works. Surely they would give you the clearest idea of what he thought?"

"I read the complete works of Socrates before I was five", said Russell.

"In translation?"

"In the original."

I must have looked flummoxed. Geoffrey intervened on my behalf.

"Look, I may be showing my ignorance here, but I thought Socrates didn't actually write anything."

"This is true", said Russell. "Which simplified the task considerably, especially since I didn't start learning Greek until I was thirteen."

I went bright red. Russell and Wei-Lang laughed fit to bust. While this conversation was going on, Horst and Geoffrey had got bored, and between them they had managed to pick up a women's magazine which someone had left on one of the adjacent tables. Suddenly they both broke into hoots of laughter.

"Hey, hey, look at this", said Geoffrey, "How to tell if your husband is having an affair"

"Ja, number one is he alvays smiling? Number two is he going out vearing a vhite carnation? Number three, oh my God!", here they both roared and roared with laughter, Horst pulling his hair with both hands, and Geoffrey slapping his knees. "N - Number three has he suddenly started being nice to you!". Geoffrey laughed so much he started to choke, and Horst had to slap him on the back until he coughed.

"Ja, ja, I can chost hear it. George? George! I vant to speak vit you. You are vearing a vhite carnation and you are being nice. I am suspecting you of being heppy. I vant a divorce.".

Then some more laughter, a bit more page turning, then Geoffrey again,

"Oh no! Look at this. Nickerless Nicola's Naughty Nightline. Hi there, Bigboy, give me a bell, soon. Forty pee a minute peak, twenty eight pee off-peak".

Roars, gusts of laughter.

"That's all very well, but how do they know if you're peaking?", I said. Geoffrey and Horst didn't hear, but from the other side of the table, from Wei-Lang, came

"Hah!", a short sharp belly laugh. "What your name again?".

"Hodge.". A pause.

“How you know this lot?”

“I organise concerts for that fellow”, I said, indicating Geoffrey.

“Concert organiser, eh?”, Wei-Lang looked impressed.

“Well, not really. That’s just a sideline. Mostly I program computers, try and be a passably decent father, stuff like that. Just a member of the Plan B generation I suppose.”

“Plan B generation?”.

“Well, Plan A was socialism.”

“What Plan B?”. I shrugged. Wei-Lang pushed a pizza dish over to me.

"More pizza?"

"Thanks", I said. I reached out for the dish. It was empty. For an instant the tide receded as I stared at the empty dish. Then the hubbub re-ascended. The party was breaking up. Wei-Lang was mounting his bicycle, and Russell was calling the waiter to ask for the bill.

Before they left for Bournemouth Geoffrey and I had a quick confab. I made final arrangements to meet him on the afternoon of the concert and we had a last quick discussion about the publicity. I agreed to send out some more letters. Geoffrey suggested local health centres and community centres, and I agreed to ring local radio stations. Then we settled the bill and scattered for our several destinations.

First thing the following Monday I got the Yellow Pages and checked out the local radio. In the main they were not very helpful. They mostly gave me contact names and suggested that I put bumf in the post. The switchboard at LBC put me straight through to someone, but when I told him I was organising a concert in two weeks time and wondered if there might be a diary slot which would give us a mention, he asked me what relevance this might have to the topic under discussion, which was the muzzling of dangerous dogs, and why should his listeners be interested? I realised I had inadvertently been put through to a chat show program. I panicked and said

"Well, I think they should all be put down, Michael, we should have a national Barbeque your Dog day and be done with it", and slammed down the phone. Then I gave that up and stuffed posters in envelopes for a while. I was already starting to get that feeling of lassitude that you get when you know a moment of truth is approaching, but you don't really see what else you can do to prepare for it. At the core of this lassitude is a nucleus of low-level panic. Failure lurches towards you blinking its bloodshot eyes. Flight is impossible. You are strapped to the cannon. Commitments have been made. Promises have been given. I checked the music shops. No tickets had been sold. Well, that was okay with almost two weeks to go. I had sent out dozens of publicity packs with my phone number on, but the phone wasn't exactly ringing off the wall. In fact, nobody called. Right up until the day of the concert things were remarkably quiet. I was in a blue funk. I read 'Fear of Flying'. I read some poems. The days passed. Finally the big day arrived. Geoffrey turned up at my house at about mid-day. He looked expectant, primed and ready for action.

"How many tickets have we sold, Hodge?", was the first thing he asked. I took out my handkerchief and coughed loudly into it and mumbled something hoping he wouldn't hear.

"What was that?", he said.

"A few", I said, "don't worry about it". I felt like a man in the electric chair waiting while the technician fumbled in his toolbox for the right sized fuse. While Geoffrey sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and made a fuss of Katy, I surreptitiously rang the music shops. To my surprise, they had taken altogether forty pounds in tickets. This did cheer me up a bit. I didn't think I'd better announce the figure to Geoffrey, though, in case he didn't see it that way.

We got over to Clapton at about five. Horst was there, and he opened up the café and showed us how to help ourselves to coffee and tea. Geoffrey strummed the freshly tuned Bechstein and pronounced it superb. He then gave us an impromptu concert. While he was playing, Linda came in and draped herself over a seat, listening to the music with her eyes closed.

"How's the sound. Is it loud enough?", asked Geoffrey.

"A little too loud, if anything", I told him.

"Can't be too loud, that bit's marked triple forte", he said.

"Life begins at triple forte", I said. He ignored me and played some more. It sounded exceptionally good. At about 6.30 he stopped playing and lay down on the front row of seats to relax. Linda and Horst and I went to the cafe. Time passes when you're having fun, and at about 7.30 we saw the first customers come in. Linda hastily headed for the ticket office. I took up the usherette's spot by the door. As I showed them into the empty auditorium I noticed Geoffrey's feet poking out at the end of the first row.

"There you are", I said, "sit anywhere you like except on the pianist".

In the event we got about forty people which wasn't by any means as bad as it could have been. Geoffrey played superbly. When I had heard him before, at Bournemouth or in rehearsal, he had played solidly, brilliantly, even. But this was something entirely different. The many-petalled lotus seemed to open, as though he had tapped some boundless source of psychic energy that just couldn't stop flowing. I realised then, if I had not known it before, that the true skill of the virtuoso is to tap this unpredictable, uncontrollable source and ride it like a tiger.

The audience were wildly enthusiastic. Geoffrey had to play two encores. He played two pieces by William Byrd which gave me a lot of pleasure because nobody plays him much these days. As the audience were leaving the hall a man in a deerstalker hat came up to me and asked if there were any tickets left. It must have been clear that the hall had been nowhere near full, so I said yes, there were, whereupon he bought twenty. Souvenirs, he said.

The scene in the green room afterwards was ecstatic. Strangely enough, Geoffrey seemed less overwhelmed than the rest of us. He looked relaxed, and quite pleased, but neither exhausted nor manic with excitement as I've seen other performers after a recital. If he knew how to ride the tiger, he also knew how to dismount.

"Brilliant, Geoffrey", I said. "Absolutely brilliant. The pockets were as buckets and the balls mere pills".

He looked alarmed.

"What?"

"It's what they say on the snooker when Steve Davis clears the table in one break".

He beamed at me gently. I appreciated the solidity of his persona, and his refusal to surrender to self-congratulation, but then I reflected that this solidity was the product of a great deal of experience, and that without it he wouldn't have been able to produce the performance that he did. After all, it's the stone under the waterfall that makes the rainbow fly. Amongst the crowd in the green room was Linda, who had heard most of the concert and was obviously capable of appreciating it. She was gazing shyly at Geoffrey from a distance, and looking quite radiant. I went over to her. She smiled at me.

"Wasn't it great?", she said.

"Thanks for doing the tickets.", I said, "We appreciate your help".

"Oh, I enjoyed it", she said. We talked for a bit about the performance. She hadn't any musical training, but she had a keen ear, and had picked up quite a lot of detail.

"He didn't miss much", she said. "It was a really zipless performance",

"I read 'Fear of Flying'". I told her. "It was really quite amusing. I think the 'zipless fuck' is a great idea. Why can't man and women enjoy themselves together in that way. Though I think she concludes that they can't".

"I don't think she concludes that at all", she said, smiling at me a little sideways smile. My bowels slipped down the back of my trouser legs and stuffed themselves into my shoes. I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like a goldfish. I was positive that this beautiful young girl was giving me the come on. What was I to do? If you find gold ingot lying in the street you can't just walk by. You either have to take charge and return it to the cops, or tuck it under your vest and skedaddle. To walk past is an abnegation of life, responsibility and citizenship, an abdication of your responsibilities to yourself and to others. A choice must be made. I must either respond to her offer or I must go into father protector mode. To ignore her signals would be crass. Under normal circumstances I would probably have chosen the fatherly role as the safest and most hygienic option, but tonight I was feeling elated and also I had just read Gavin Ewart's 'Collected Poems' from cover to cover.

"Please don't be offended by what I'm about to say", I said, "But I find you a most beautiful woman, and it would give me great joy to share a zipless fuck with you".

She stared at me, hollow eyed. Her face went a delicate shade of white, then an unsubtle cherry red.

"Oh dear", she said. "Oh dear". Bells started ringing in my engine room and I went into panic mode. Out went the command from the bridge. Dive dive dive.

"I'm sorry", I mumbled. "I'm sorry if I upset you".

"Oh dear", she said, "I must go".

"Let me get your coat".

"Oh no, that's all right, no that's quite all right thank you". She grabbed her coat and bundled herself out without looking to the right or the left.

"Thank you again for your help", I said, gamely, to the back of her neck. Her reply was half sniffle, half animal yelp. Then she was gone. I gazed after her with undisguised longing, unaware that Horst had sidled up and was standing beside me looking at the door through which she had departed. I realised with a start that he was next to me.

"Tell me, Horst", I asked, "Have you by any chance read 'Fear of Flying'?".

"Oh yes", he said, as though entirely unsurprised by my question.

"I'm afraid I may have upset your ticket sales lady", I said, apologetically.

"I don't think so". He said.

"I guess I just don't understand women at all", I said.

"Don't you? Vell, I can tell you about zet one", he answered. "She's a refuser".

"A refuser?",

"Zet's right, a refuser. You know, like a hoss. She dashes up to ze fence und gets all excited, zen at ze last moment she refuses. Ze rider gets to go over her neck and into the vater chomp all on his own".

"No, Horst, I don't think so", I said, wistfully. "I think I just didn't understand the signals she was giving me. Oh God, Horst, I'm such a cad. The poor girl wanted to have an honest friendly discussion and I had to come on like some loathsome lothario. Oh, I just don't know anything anymore".

"May I ask you one rather personal question?", said Horst sympathetically. "Vhen vere you born?"

"5th of January 1951", I said. "Why?". Horst seemed to be doing some sort of elaborate calculation on his fingers which involved tucking his thumbs under each other whilst silently mouthing numerals under his breath.

"I can't vork zis out exactly, but if my calculations are not completely up ze spout, zet vas not yesterday", said Horst, finally and decisively. "I've known zis Linda for almost fife years, und during zis time, every time somebody new comes to ze theatre she is always reading 'Fear of Flying'. So, cheer up, Hodge, you are not alone".

I reddened. I rejected Horst's hypothethis and I was beginning to find him a little irritating.

"If I may say so, Horst", I interjected, "it's you who was born yesterday. Paranoia and suspicion are always the lazy way out. In any case, what does it matter. It's unlikely that I'll ever see or hear from her again".

Horst's expression switched to one of gleeful malice.

"I didn't qvite hear you, did you say un-likely?".

“If you want to make accusations like that about someone the onus is on you to prove them”.

“Nein. Nein. Ze anus is on you.”.

“Onus”, I corrected.

“Anus, onus, woss difference?” he persisted.

I decided to terminate the conversation by making my way over to where Geoffrey was packing away his gear. I helped him to the car in silence.

I went into Viron Systems on Monday morning feeling refreshed and ready for serious effort. Sunday had been a quiet day, for a change, and Miriam and I had enjoyed each other's company more than was usual of late, Katy had gone off to play with a friend and we two had gone for a long walk together. Oddly enough, the fact that I had found the courage to propose a liaison to Linda had given me a boost, and the fact that she had declined me was not a serious problem. Far better, for me, that I had screwed my courage up into a ball and asked. It is better to have loved and lost . . ., I ruminated. I was surprised to find I felt no feeling of guilt towards Miriam. I would have expected to, but I didn't. Viron Systems was busy. The virtual woman was well on her way to release, though I had not tested her except in a desultory and partial fashion. I had verified that the face appeared, and that the movements were functioning as expected, but only in a fully clothed state and in a condition of sexual detachment. One or two of the younger staff members, who seemed to make less of a distinction between virtual reality and the other sort had experimented further so we knew that her development was on target. As luck would have it, Parmenides had struck again, so I had to spend the whole morning and part of the afternoon trying to restore various letters and spreadsheets for unhappy members of staff. As for myself, I had, by now, removed my login from the network in disgust, preferring to use a portable. After that was sorted I went out for a bite of lunch, and eventually got down to doing a bit of development work at about 4 in the afternoon. Before I knew it 5.30 had come, and the rest of the staff had gone. I was sitting at my desk doing some paperwork when, it must have been about 7pm, the phone rang. Without thinking much of it, I picked up the receiver.

"Hello, Viron Systems, Peter Hodgkinson speaking. What can I do for you?"

"Oh, hello", said my respondent. The voice was female, slightly shy. I felt perhaps I should have known who was speaking, but I didn't.

"Who's that?", I said.

"It's me", said the voice.

"You probably don't realise this", I responded, "but I know rather a lot of people by that name, most of whom are blissfully unaware that there is anyone else out there using it. Could you be a little more specific?".

At this the lady gave a little peal of laughter and became specific.

"It's me, Linda. You know, from the concert on Saturday?".

"Oh, hello, Linda", I said, as nonchalantly as I could, hoping the fact that my heart was thumping fit to divert the Great Grand Coolee River was not audible over the phone line.

"How did you get my number?".

"From your wife. Horst gave me your home number, I called there and your wife gave me this number." She paused.

"I hope you don't mind me ringing up for a little chat?".

By this time my mouth had become very dry, and my stomach was eating itself in little spoonfuls.

"No, not at all", I said.

"I felt so awful, the other day, after I left". She went on. "I mean, it must have been so awful for you, being brought down like that, I really behaved like a bitch."

"No, no, not at all", I assured her. "The fault was all mine. It was crude of me to make such a suggestion. After all, you were kind and helpful to us. You deserved better than to have an ageing lothario come on to you like that. It's just that I thought that, you know, you might have wanted it too. So I was wrong. I was so wrapped up in my own problems that I misunderstood our conversation, I suppose. Please forgive me, it won't happen again.".

There was another pause. Then she replied.

"No really, you were so sweet, so gallant. I really appreciated your honesty, just that I suppose it was a bit sudden for me, caught me off guard, the way you came right out with it. But really I do think that men and women should be honest with each other, don't you?".

I assured her that I did. She changed tack.

"What's it like over there?", she asked.

"Where?".

"There, in your office. Is it busy?".

"No. Just me".

"I'm always intrigued by offices", she went on. "So many things must go on in them. All those people, studiously working during the day, getting up to who knows what in the evenings when they should be working late. I'll bet there are a few zipless fucks going on in a few offices right now, don't you think? I'd love to see your office. Does it have blinds on the windows? Can anyone see in? Whereabouts is it?".

By this time I could no longer locate my heart. Apparently my whole body was beating.

"Hammersmith", I croaked.

"Where?"

"Hammersmith", I managed, a little louder. "Why don't you come over?".

Time, space and British Telecom hung fire. At length her voice came back. It sounded strangely harder, less composed.

"No, I couldn't do that".

"Why not?",

"Do you want the three volume version or the short precis?", I said I would settle for the short version.

"It's just . . . just a question of how I feel about myself, that's all". She said. "It just wouldn't feel right, that's all".

"I'm sorry", I said, descending rapidly through heavy cloud cover desperately searching for runway number one.

"I'm so sorry".

"Oh, no", she said, "I'm sorry, I'm such an awful person. You don't know me at all, you see, I really am an awful person".

"Well, Linda", I said, somehow hoisting myself back into the authority of my years, "I doubt that, I don't expect you're such an awful person really. Perhaps you're a little mixed up, or perhaps it's me that's mixed up. But anyway, it was nice of you to ring. Let's just forget about it, shall we?".

"We're still friends", she said, "aren't we?".

"Yes", I said. "But I vote we forget about it. At my age these things don't have to be so serious as they used to be".

She rang off. I collapsed onto my desk and wrapped my arms about my head. I was aware that my elbows were noisily beating the desk. There seemed to be someone else in the building because I could hear a voice crying loudly

"Zut! fuck! merde! stronzo!", I raised my head to see who it was and discovered it was me. That's it, I thought. Slowly, with grim determination I made my way over to the virtual woman. I stripped off and entered the cabin. The service cover on top of the console was loose, and on top if it was a family pack of Durex. I broke one out and rolled it onto my member. I pushed the power switch and the Unix startup messages flashed on the screen. As the system booted, I located the homburg hat and slid it onto my cock. It felt good. I slipped on the feely gloves and pulled the head-up display over my eyes. I clasped the padded robot torso, and as I did so, Marilyn's face came up on the screen. She looked good, if I hadn't known where the frames came from I wouldn't have known she was singing a song, I would have sworn she was saying,

"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me".

I swayed into motion. Everything started to happen. I could hear her moaning. My body started to stiffen as though the lymph were freezing in my capillaries. Mark had done a good job on the feely gloves, I felt for her breasts and they were there, small and ripe with little buttons as hard as teddy bear eyes. I felt for her crotch and felt her clitoris expand and moisten and tremble as her cries of ecstasy mounted. This really was good. For a beta test it was brilliant. Something started to stir deep in my goolies.

"Oh, God!", I murmured. As I breathed the words her face disappeared and a message came up. Read error on hard disk, sector 0012587 head 5, double kernel panic, system halted. The head-up display went out, the feely gloves went limp. I found myself suspended in a pair of blacked out blinkers and a pair of limp gauntlets with a homburg hat on my cock crying

"No, no, no!".

But she was gone. Cursing and trembling I ripped the loose lid off the console. Cursing and trembling I read the dreaded legend on the hard disk case.

"Western Datastore 1966 M.O.D. reject. NOT for resale".

"I'll strangle him, I'll bloody strangle him", I whimpered. I threw off the headgear and the gloves and lay down on the floor of the cabin with the homburg hat.

"Linda, Linda, Linda", I cried. I imagined her face, her flawless blonde hair, oh yes. I heaved under the homburg hat. I imagined her small tight cunt, her downy underarms, I imagined her passion, her scent mounting into my nostrils as her cries mounted into my ears. The homburg hat was getting more and more excited. I slid my hand down my belly and stroked my pubic hair, imagining it was the hair on her pudendum. "Oh, Linda, Linda, oh, yes". In a white spasm I finished as her image drifted away like smoke. My head was tilted back, my knees pushed up awkwardly against the side of the cabin. My trembling gradually subsided. I felt empty and drained. My hamstrings were aching. There was a trace of elation, a trace of depression, a trace of resentment. All I wanted to do was to get out of the place and go home. I climbed stiffly out of the cabin and tied up the end of the Durex and stashed it in a full rubbish bag full of papers. I was naked except for my socks. Just as I was about to put on my trousers, the phone rang again.

"Hello", I said, wearily, "Peter Hodgkinson here".

"Oh hello", said a familiar sweet voice. "I do hope I'm not disturbing you, you sound depressed".

"Well, perhaps I am a little", I said, without enthusiasm. "But it'll pass. What can I do for you?"

"Well, I just felt awful after I called you just now. I mean, I do so want us to stay friends. I'm such a coward, you know, such an emotional coward. And now I've made you depressed. I feel so guilty about that".

"Well, like I said, it'll pass. Don't worry about it. I vote we just forget about it. Okay?".

"Well, okay, but you've got me feeling really guilty now about making you depressed. I hate to think I've done that. If there's anything at all I can do to help, I mean, anything".

"Linda", I interrupted, "there's only one thing you can do to make me feel less depressed".

"What's that?", she said.

I detected the tell-tale hint of hardness creeping into her voice.

"Just hang up the phone and dial some other number", I said, and put down the handset. I was just putting my left leg into my trousers when the damn thing rang again. I picked it up, furious.

"Look", I said, my voice trembling with barely suppressed anger. "You've made your point. You don't want me. That's okay. It's a lady's prerogative to say no. What do you want to do, come round here with your shears and cut my bollocks off? I get the message, the answer's no. You don't want to. Fine. Let's just forget it, shall we?".

"Oh, but I do want to", said a calm and rather bemused male voice at the other end. "Is that Mr Hodgkinson?"

"What, oh yes. Who's that? Please excuse me, I thought you were someone else".

"Oh, that's quite all right, Mr Hodgkinson", said the bemused male voice. "Believe me, I do understand. I'm Raymond King, we met the other day, at Geoffrey Stringer's concert".

"Did we?", I said.

"You wouldn't know me by name, but perhaps you remember. I was wearing a deerstalker hat".

"Oh yes", I said, "yes, indeed. What can I do for you?"

"I know this is a little unexpected, and please don't be afraid to tell me if it's inconvenient, but I have a bit of a problem. I'm a concert organiser and I've got a piano recital tour lined up. Ten concerts in Germany, that's five house concerts, two music festivals and three concert halls. Trouble is, my artiste has cried off. Not really sure why, nerves, I think. The fees are okay, not outstanding, about three grand in all. I wondered if your man would be able to do it? I realise it is short notice and I will understand if it's not possible. But Stringer greatly impressed me. He really is excellent. How soon can you get back to me on this?"

"How about right now." I shouted. "Do it? You bet he'll do it! I'll have to check with him, of course, but I'll do that right now. Give me your number I'll ring him and get right back".

By this time I was hopping around furiously trying to get my other leg into the other leg of my trousers. He started to dictate a number.

"Hang on, hang on", I yelled, I scrabbled around on my desk for a pen. I found one and wrote down the number. Then for good measure I wrote it down again. He rang off assuring me that he would be expecting my call.

Within five minutes the deal was done. Fortunately, Stringer was at home, and as expected he was as cock a hoop as I was. I returned Mr King's call. The tour was to start in two weeks time and we arranged a meeting to draw up contracts and discuss the itinerary. I don't believe my mood had ever shifted so far so fast as it did during the course of that evening. For once in my life I behaved like a real football lout. I put down the 'phone, walked over to the window, threw it open and yelled

"'Ere we go 'ere we go 'ere we go!"

VII

1. To commit adultery

2. To save some money

3. To spend more time with Katy

4. To try and get out of computers

5. Not to have anything to do with people who say 'no' and mean 'yes' or people who say 'yes' and mean 'no'.

6. To commit adultery.

It was New Year's day and I was jotting down what seemed to me like a sensible set of resolutions. Many changes had happened in my life, quite a lot of them connected in one way or another with Geoffrey. But I had not yet had any luck on the adultery front, and I was feeling increasingly desperate about it. Geoffrey's German tour had been a great success, far beyond our expectations. All the concerts had gone well, according to Geoffrey, but the one in Cologne was a key recital in a really quite prestigious music festival, and was recorded for German radio. Geoffrey had had five days to rest and rehearse before the concert, and instead of doing what he or any other pianist would usually do before such a date, i.e. rehearse his programme over and over and whittle his interpretations to a fine point, he had taken out a piece which he had learned as a student and not looked at since, Schumann's Kreisleriana. In just five days he had relearned it and committed it to memory so securely that he had felt able to take the plunge and change his concert programme to include it, instead of the Waldscenen. Kreisleriana is a piece that modern pianists find very hard to bring off despite, or perhaps even because of, their very thorough technical and musical training. It contains the essence of nineteenth century romanticism. It is humorous, mercurial, fiery, melancholy, warm and profound. Although the actual notes are nowhere near as hard as, say, Chopin's Etudes, which a lot of people play well, to make real sense of them requires an exceptionally strong and daring musical personality, and the piece remains one of the least known of Schumann's masterpieces just for that reason. Geoffrey came back full of Kreisleriana, and talked about nothing else for about three hours. He said the experience of feeling it all come together in his mind and fingertips was the most exciting of his whole life, and that he had never felt so much clarity and potential within himself. I pointed out that perhaps there was a moral within this, that he had learned the piece in five days which was exactly how long Schumann took to write it. This delighted him and he went off to the library to read up on Schumann's life. Of course I regretted not having heard his performance. I hoped I would hear him play it in recital soon, but my wish came true sooner than I expected. Radio 3 had a critic at the Cologne festival, and in his report back which was broadcast a week after Geoffrey's return he gave an exceptionally glowing report of the recital, describing it as the high point of the festival. After the report, the announcer said that the program would be broadcast the following Monday evening courtesy of German radio. We listened in, made a tape recording of it for Geoffrey's archives, and within the next few days my phone started ringing off the wall. There were music societies, concert promoters, people with large country houses and more money than they knew what to do with. There was Radio 3, who would consider any proposals we wanted to put. There were pianists and string players and ordinary music lovers who wanted to know where they could go and hear the maestro. I got my skates on and arranged a Wigmore Hall concert at fairly short notice (replacing a soprano who was suffering tonsillitis). To cut a long story short, the whole caravan started rolling along at a terrific pace. Geoffrey moved to London and found a comfortable Hampstead flat with the help of a well heeled admirer. He also proudly sported a new and luxuriant beard. I myself re-organised my work so that I was now spending one, or sometimes two days a week dealing with Geoffrey's bookings. I took a percentage of his takings, and although it didn't pay as well as virtual reality, I felt happier having another string to my bow, so to speak. I even considered taking on some more artists and making a profession out of it, but something held me back. I suppose at bottom I wasn't really sure if this was the right life for me in the long term. I didn't want to get too entangled in things that might be hard to get out of. So, on one level I had some excitement in my life, but on another level I was seething. I was starting to feel as though I was dragging a huge pantechnicon around with me, a pantechnicon full of churning unsatisfied desires which gurned out at the world desperately like prisoners out of the back of a black maria. When I was working, I felt okay, but socially I felt isolated and tense. I wanted to talk to Miriam about it, but I feared she would not sympathise and indeed it was difficult to see how she could. I knew that she was unhappy, that she found me distant and strange. I knew also that she had a jealous nature. She became uneasy if she even saw me talking to another woman for any length of time. Probably she had her own fears that she could not discuss. Perhaps she feared that I would slip away from her and go and live with someone else. I deduced that what I was suffering from was the dreaded 'seven year itch', but there was clearly more to it than that. The whole thing was linked to my general feeling that something was missing in my life. I found it hard to make friends, except where people impinged on some area of my work. I felt ashamed of all the virtual reality stuff and embarrassed when people asked me what I did. It didn't seem to me that leaving Miriam and setting up with another woman would in any way provide a solution to these problems, but since she and I were not able to talk about this stuff there was no way in which I could say this. My immediate project, as I saw it, was just to commit adultery. Nothing complicated or intense, just a sweet night with another woman that I felt sure would help me feel like a whole man again. I wanted to get it out of my system. I had no desire to hurt Miriam. I didn't want to tell her about it, or seek her permission, or say "Hey, hon, how’s about we declare an open marriage?". I found all these sorts of ideas repulsive. I would do it quietly. I would do it anywhere, and I would do it with anyone whom I liked and trusted and who physically turned me on.

I stashed my sheet of new year's resolutions in a drawer in my desk and applied my mind to the problem. I decided that the only way to solve it was the 'donner und blitzen' approach. I would make a list of ladies of my acquaintance whom I considered possible, and simply visit them in turn and try a direct and honest approach. I resolved never to lie to a woman and imply that I was seeking a more serious involvement than was in fact the case. I further resolved never ever to tell a women that I loved her (unless it happened to be true), even if I felt certain that those three little words would breach the last stronghold of her resistance and bring all her treasures within my reach. I would, however, stop short of saying that I was just after a quick bonk. I didn't think this would describe my situation well in any case. It was more a kind of angel of mercy that I needed now.

When I sat down and really thought about it, there were only two candidates. Susie Laing, who was a music copyist whom I had met via Geoffrey, and Helen Seagate, a feminist literary critic who was a mutual friend of Miriam’s and mine but whom we had not seen for some time. They were both women for whom I felt great affection and respect and whom I had desired of old, when my desires lived in the swamp and could not be named. I also thought that both of them felt some affection for me. I was troubled by the thought that I might wind up upsetting one or both of them, but I reasoned that they were adult women who would probably forgive sooner or later provided that I did not play false with them.

Since Helen knew Miriam, I decided to call on Susie first. She lived in Belsize Park, which wasn't all that far to get to. I thought I should ring first rather than go right on over, so first thing on Monday morning, I did.

"Hello, is that Susie?",

"Yes",

"This is Peter, Peter Hodgkinson",

"Hodge, how unexpected. How nice to hear from you. What can I do for you?". I thought that now was perhaps not the moment to elucidate.

"I have to be up in Belsize Park this evening, and I wondered if you would be in? I thought I might call on you?"

"Oh, Hodge! What a shame. It would be lovely, but I'll be out this evening and I probably won't get back until quite late. But some other time, perhaps? Do call if you're coming this way again"

"Well, actually I have to be in Belsize Park tomorrow evening as well, as it happens. Would you be in then?"

"Tomorrow. Tomorrow. No, tomorrow's my yoga class. What a shame. I'll be in all the rest of the week."

I had the bit between my teeth and I was not giving up. A bead of sweat rolled out of my hair and sank into the telephone mike.

"Well, I was just going to say, the funny thing is I'll be up there every evening this week. I've got this elderly relative you see, an uncle. (Gulp). Not many people know about him, actually, because he's a bit gaga, but anyway my aunt is going away and . . .",

"Oh, wonderful", she said. "Let's see. Why don't you come over on Wednesday. Would you like to eat something?"

I said I wouldn't eat, but would come after she herself had eaten, perhaps at about eight thirty. When I replaced the handset my heart was beating so fast that I had to go into the stockroom and lie down for half an hour. I could not envisage how the evening would go. It seemed to me possible, though not probable, that we might end the evening in bed together and though I would have expected this thought to keep me in agitation for the period of the long wait till Wednesday in fact I felt strangely calm about it, as though I had taken my own life by the reins and started doing what came naturally to me.

The remains of my working day passed peacefully, as did Tuesday. On Wednesday afternoon I slipped out of Viron Systems to see if I could find a little present for Susie. I had in mind a book or some chocolates, but I passed a music shop which was having a sale, and I was delighted to find a copy of Janacek's 'Overgrown Path'. Susie liked to play the piano for relaxation, and she did it fairly well, so I bought that instead. In the evening I set off early and walked over the Heath. I felt too shaky-excited to trust myself behind the wheel of my car, and I couldn't face the thought of the filthy carriages and unhappy faces on the Underground, not to mention the possibility of meeting King Kong. The weather was cold, but I put on an old leather flying jacket, though for all I could feel of the cold I might as well have worn a tee-shirt.

Susie answered the door wearing a pair of denims and a thick shirt of a sort of lumberjack style, but parted from the collar to show a little cleavage. I followed her upstairs to her flat as though in a dream. I realised, when I thought about it, that this was the first time in eight years that I had gone to visit a woman, alone, with the intention of asking her to sleep with me. The idea induced a sensation of shock to my system, so that my euphoria evaporated and I started to feel a serious doubt about what I was doing there. I decided to make a slight adjustment in my mental intention. This was a social call. Yes, I desired Susie. She desired me, maybe, but this was not certain. Maybe my motive in coming had not been so good, but I was here now. I would shelve my intention for the present and enjoy her company as freely as I could, beyond that, what would be would be. I would cease from my plan of adultery, but my willingness would remain. By shifting the furniture of my libido in this way I managed to recover my equanimity.

We talked for about an hour, I suppose. I told her about my new direction, about Stringer and his unexpected success. I said I thought maybe he would turn out to be another Rubenstein, an unexpected late developer who finds special powers of expression hidden within himself, and that being around someone who was developing in this way was a seriously exciting adventure. She told me about her work, the doldrums in the music publishing business, and how she was developing a sideline in proof-reading and even typing theses and suchlike at home. Then she told me that she was getting bored with proof reading, and was thinking of developing a sideline of her own.

"What sort of sideline?", I asked.

"I'm not sure. At the moment it looks like a toss up between Chinese foot massage and astrology".

"Oh, I hope you'll take up foot massage".

"Why?"

"Then you'll be able to do my feet", I said.

"Well, if I take up astrology I'll be able to do your horoscope won't I?"

"Not likely, I don't believe in it", I said.

"Why not?"

"Too mysterious."

"There's nothing wrong with a bit of mystery in life, surely."

"I've got my own theory about where mystery comes from".

"Go on, then, let's hear it."

"You won't like it."

"Perhaps not, but that's not going to stop you telling me about it, is it?"

"All right then. The theory goes that Adam and Eve were created suddenly one day in a state of complete happiness. They wandered round Eden admiring creation. Everything seemed perfectly clear. There was plenty to eat, nice things to look at. Only one thing they just couldn't understand. Why they had holes in their bottoms. They puzzled about this in between walking and eating and lying down amongst the flowers as Milton has it until Adam suddenly felt a pain in his tummy. He took himself off behind a rock and moaned and groaned, and after a while he came back and said to Eve

'Know that hole in my bottom'

'Yes'

'Something came out of it. Want to have a look?' They went round behind the rock and stared together in amazement.

'What is it?'

'Blowed if I know'

And so mystery was born."

Susie laughed. We talked some more about possible sidelines. I felt uneasy all the time at the thought of what Miriam would say if she knew where I was and what I was doing. I read somewhere that when people watch films their breathing becomes tense and shallow when the sexy bits come on. My breathing felt tense and shallow like that, and I sensed that hers was too. It was an extraordinary experience just to sit there talking to a woman knowing that the outcome of the evening was in no sense assured. Finally I decided the moment had come to leave. I stood up and put on my coat. Susie came to the door with me. I dragged up my courage from somewhere out of my socks where it was hiding and put my arms gently around her. She put her arms gently around me. My heart was pounding and I could hear the blood surging in my ears like a warm Niagara. Her heart seemed to be pounding too. I pressed my cheek against hers, and she pressed back, lightly. Then I moved my head back and brushed her lips lightly with mine. She did not resist.

"Susie", I said,

"Yes?",

"Spend the night with me. Just once. I don't want anything complicated or messy, and nobody has to know about it but us. I won't chase after you if you say no. It's up to you. If you want me, I'm here".

She frowned a little.

"It's difficult", she said.

"Why?” I said, trying to look into her eyes, which were cast downwards towards the floor.

"I'm sort of involved with someone", she said, "it's not very serious, I suppose, but I'd feel funny about it. Anyway, you can't stay, he'll be here later on tonight".

"Well, not tonight then. I have to go home anyway, but my wife is going away with my daughter at the weekend. I could come and get you. We could drive out to the country and find a little hotel. It would be so good for me, and perhaps it would be good for you, too."

"I don't know", she said.

"Look, I'll call for you at two o'clock on Saturday afternoon. We'll drive out somewhere. Go for a walk if it's a nice day. Have dinner, find a little hotel. Okay?".

"Okay", she said, doubtfully. "But I probably won't come".

I considered the prospect of waiting till Saturday and then turning up and getting a no. I couldn't handle the idea at all.

"Well, I won't come on Saturday, then".

"Okay", she said. "But thanks for asking". Then she kissed me again, lightly, on the lips and put her hands on my shoulders. They throbbed under her hands.

"You've got two pulses!", she said. "I'm sorry. Thanks for the present. Nothing's been spoilt".

I went down the stairs and walked home in a daze. Her kiss had elated me. I didn't really feel aroused and oddly enough I arrived home in quite good spirits, took a bath, retired early and slept like a log.

I was wakened early next morning by my radio alarm to the sound of a dour Radio 3 announcer saying,

"According to a new survey watching television is now the favourite leisure occupation of people in Britain. Seventy percent of households have more than one set. Fifty percent of household pets watch television and eight percent of people say they make love whilst watching TV. Good news for osteopaths, no doubt. Now on with the music, if you're not watching television, that is".

Thank God for Radio 3, I thought, as I dragged myself out of bed and wrapped a dressing gown around me. As I stirred the coffee pot the memory of the previous evening surfaced like a drowned sheep out of a bog. My elation had evaporated during the night, and I felt less positive about it than I had the evening before. Okay, so it was my lot to play the renouncing hero once again, but in my heart of hearts I didn't have to like it. I felt as though Susie had definitely given me the come on, but I couldn't really complain since I'd invited myself up there on a dubious pretext in the first place. I had a fleeting vision of all the vaginas in the universe, millions upon millions of them all hiding in their knickers, or knickerless wandering between busy legs staring at pavements or giving birth or relieving lonely sailors in foreign ports but all, all totally inaccessible to me. A feeling of the utter injustice of it all overwhelmed me. I pulled the spoon out of the coffee pot and started singing to it,

"How'd ya like to spoon with me? Dangle me upon your knee? ..." At that moment Miriam came in and gave me a funny look. We had a short conversation, but she seemed half asleep and a little depressed.

After breakfast I headed off early to my workplace. As I was driving, I remembered candidate number two, Helen Seagate. She lived in Stockwell, which was a bit more of a trek, but not difficult. It meant the dreaded Underground, but that could not be helped. Soon after I got to work I called her and got no reply, but I called again after lunch and she was there.

"Hello, Helen, this is Hodge. Look, I have to be in Stockwell this evening. I wondered whether you'd be around. I might look you up?"

"That'd be nice. Will Miriam be with you?"

"Er, no. I'm afraid it'll just be me this evening. Miriam's doing something else".

"What a shame. I haven't seen Miriam for ages. Why don't you persuade her to cancel whatever she's doing and come with you?"

"Well, you know Miriam. Once she makes up her mind about something she tends to be a bit of a sticker, ha ha!".

Talk about sweat, I was pouring with it. I wished I'd never got into this conversation, or at least that I'd had the forethought to pick up a bathtowel to soak it all up.

"Maybe I'll give her a ring and try and persuade her. It would be so nice to see you both. I'm sure I could make her change her mind".

At this point my brain started to pound like a jelly and my eyesight went awol like a diver who demists his goggles to find a shark swimming up towards him. My tie started to feel uncomfortably tight, and I reached for the knot to try and loosen it.

"Er, no, no, don't do that. Er, no that would be a very bad idea. It's just that, just that, I didn't want to tell you this but her favourite uncle has just died. Yes, that's, er, her favourite uncle has just died and she had to go over and sort out his stuff. Erm, she's shattered, you know. Distraught. Absolutely distraught, please don't ring her. She doesn't want to talk to anybody right now, I can assure you".

I was desperately trying to pull my tie off while I said all this, but each time I pulled the knot it got tighter instead of looser with the result that my voice was going effortlessly into higher and higher registers until I found myself giving a very passable impersonation of Donald Duck.

"I didn't know she had any uncles", said Helen, sweetly.

"Er, yes", I quacked. "But not a lot of people know about it. It's a secret that not a lot of people know. Why should they. Have you got any uncles?"

The bitch is playing with me, I thought. I'll be a bloody soprano by the time she's finished.

"Oh well", she said finally. "I'm so sorry to hear about that, Hodge. It must be awful for you too. Yes, do come over. I'll be here all evening".

I put down the receiver and slumped back in my chair, trembling exhausted and dripping with sweat. A secretary drifted past, a new girl whom I didn't really know with a bog standard jobsworthy voice.

"Awl right Mr. Hodgkinson?", she whined with a tone of subordinate concern.

"Yes, yes, all right", I said, fanning myself feverishly with an advertising brochure for a brand new combined fax, answering machine, printer, scanner and photocopier.

"SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS AT A STROKE", the headline screamed. My brain was seized.

Must get one, must get one, was all I could think. Then I realised what I was thinking and threw the thing in the bin. Hi tech couldn't solve this problem, I realised, not even the virtual woman. Helen was sure to get onto Miriam about this sooner or later. She'd probably send her a card. I don't generally smoke, but I cadged a cigarette off one of the girls and lit it with shaking hands. My lungs exploded,

"WHOAGH cough cough WHUURGHP".

"You're supposed to light the white end, Mr. Hodgkinson", said the girl with the whiney voice.

"Yes, yes, thank you, Elaine", I said, with as much authority as I could muster. I then staggered off to the gents where I locked myself into a cubicle and sat down with my head in my hands to try and think the thing out. I wasn't helped by the fact that the man in the next cubicle either had serious intestinal problems or was giving birth to a lion. But after a while he went, and I calmed down a bit. I reasoned that Helen wouldn't send a card today. I would have to go over there, of course, though the way I felt right now that was the last thing I wanted to do, but I would go over there and make a clean breast of it to Helen. It would be painful, but it would be the lesser of two evils. The card would not be sent, Miriam might be told, but at least there would be an end to deception. Helen would probably take pity on me if I told her the truth.

I got to Helen's place at about eight. I made sure I was there early because I was afraid that she might ring the house and ask if I was coming or something. She seemed pleased enough to see me, though she asked with some amusement why I had such a "long face". She made tea and we chatted a little. I asked her what she was working on, and she said she was writing a monograph on Sylvia Plath, and trying to find an answer to the critics who said it was tasteless of her to use the holocaust images in 'Daddy'. I said that in my opinion he daddy in the poem was the death instinct, it seemed to me that Plath had been at a crucial stage of her childhood when her father had died and that the trauma of death had become inextricably with the daddy figure. Helen seemed interested in my argument. She wasn't sure if she agreed, but she said she would think about it. We talked a little more, and then I decided the time had come to make a clean breast.

"Helen", I said, "I have a confession to make".

"Fire away", she said, looking, I thought, a little amused. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

"All that stuff about Miriam's favourite uncle. It wasn't true, you know. That wasn't why she didn't come".

"Well, I think I guessed as much", she said in a so far fairly friendly tone of voice. "So why did you ring me up?".

This was a difficult one and I wasn't quite sure how to put it.

"Well, you know, Miriam and I don't get on so well together these days, and, you know, I just like to go out on my own sometimes and see someone. I like, you know, a bit of female company now and again".

"I can understand that, but in that case why not be open about it? Why didn't you just ring up and say 'Helen, I'm coming over your way tonight 'cos I want to fuck you'. Wouldn't that have been simpler?"

I swallowed hard. "It's not so easy as all that", I protested. "I find these sorts of things very difficult".

She slapped her thigh loudly and an expression of mischievous merriment spread over her face.

"Oh, Hodge", she said, "don't you know?"

"Know what?"

"I'm gay!"

"Oh", I said. "No, I didn't know".

"I thought everyone knew that. Still, there's no reason why you should. I just think it's funny, that's all. It never would have occurred to me that you didn't know that".

"Well, even if you are", I said, weakly, "don't you ever feel like a bit of, you know, the other thing once in a while".

"Oh dear, no", she said. "I think you're a very sweet man to talk to, but as for the other thing I'm afraid I find men quite repulsive. Have done ever since I was at school. That's how I am, I'm afraid".

I decided to make my departure and rose to go.

"Well, for God's sake don't send a card to Miriam commiserating her on her favourite Uncle", I said, managing the ghost of a smile.

"Don't worry, Hodge. All's forgiven. I'll see you around sometime soon, but preferably with Miriam".

"Yes", I said. She embraced me gently and I went.

The underground train was delayed, and the loudspeakers kept booming out an indecipherable announcement which sounded like,

"Good evening, this is Northern Line information service. We apologise for the late arrival of this train which is due to (inaudible crackle). I wish I was born a duck! I wish I was born a duck! Thankyou".

When it finally arrived it seemed to stop for ten minutes of prayer and meditation in every single station and by the time I got home the fluorescent bulbs had given me a headache as wide as the Sahara. I finally got to sleep only after four large glasses of vodka which I normally avoid, but for once I felt was justified on medical grounds.

I was at the end of my list. It wasn't just the physical frustration that was getting me down, but the pure feeling of anger at having failed to fulfil my resolution. I sat at my desk in a cloud all the next day. I knew Miriam would be going away with Katy that evening. There was no-one else I could think of to call. Then on an impulse, first thing after lunch, I made my excuses and left and drove over to see Sandy Baird. I really didn't have any thought in my mind, I just needed to talk to a friendly woman. I hadn't called beforehand, and Sandy was pretty surprised to see me, but she welcomed me just the same. Reg wasn't there, but this was not so surprising because I knew he had got some kind of job. I asked Sandy about it, and she said he had got a job as a lab technician at London University. It wasn't too well paid, and Reg was probably a bit old for the job really, but he had been very keen to work in a lab and had impressed them at the interview and when they heard that he had ground an astronomical mirror they hired him on the spot. I asked her what kind of research they were doing and she said it was a genetics lab. A group of researchers were trying to grow vegetables with bar codes on for shipping directly into supermarkets. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether Sandy was really pulling my leg, and this was one of those times, but I didn't pursue it.

"You look awful, Hodge", she said, "what's the matter?"

"Sandy, you know you said one time that if a man and a woman want to go to bed together it's nobody's business but their own?"

"Yes, that's right".

"Well, er", I struggled for the right way to express this, "do you fancy a screw?".

This was not the right way, I realised the instant I said it, because I felt myself shrink perceptibly like Alice. Fortunately Sandy was not one to be phased by male panic and she was very calm and nice about it. She looked at me steadily for a moment. Then she spoke.

"Well, I might, but do you really want me, Hodge?"

My libido, locked in a half nelson with my conscience produced a sort of strange intermediate jerky nodding of the head which whether of a vertical or a horizontal nature Isaac Newton himself would have been hard pressed to determine.

"Look, Hodge, you've got a little list. Am I right? Of girls you'd like to hit the hay with. Am I right? And I'm either at the bottom of the list, or I'm not on it at all. Am I right, or am I up a gum tree?"

The indeterminate nodding got stronger and stronger as though I'd entirely lost control while my mouth tried to form meaningful words.

"Noo, noo, g-gum tree, g-gum tree, YOU'RE RIGHT"

I collapsed in a heap on the floor with my arms round her ankles and wept.

"Hodge, Hodge, what's the matter? Come on." She stooped and raised me up and steered me over to the sofa where she put her arms around me and my head on her shoulder and stroked my hair swaying gently.

"What's the matter? What's the matter?".

After a while I composed myself and stopped crying. She pulled back from me a little and looked at me with an expression of gentle concern.

"You know, Hodge, I would if it would do any good. But you don't want me, Hodge, I know about these things, believe me. It's not like that between you and me. Is it?".

"No",

I sobbed, bitterly, feeling a little calmer in her arms.

"You'd feel disgusted with yourself. Wouldn't you?"

"Yes", I sobbed. The tears were filling my eyes now so that I couldn't really see her face properly. She pulled me to her and patted my back gently and regularly.

"There there, it's all right", she said. "Want to tell me about it?"

It all poured out of me.

"I'm so frustrated, Sandy", I cried. "I really love Katy and Miriam. I don't want to lose them. But I need something else. I've been with Miriam for eight years and in all that time I've never had another woman. But there's no excitement there any more. Okay, we go to bed. We have sex and it's all right as far as it goes. But I'm a man. I need that excitement, you know, that feeling of going upstairs with a woman when you don't know the shape of her breasts or what colour her body hair is. I need something to make my pulse rate shoot up. I need that. What can I do? I hate creeping around trying to get laid. I hate it! It makes me feel like a worm. But I've got all these feelings locked up inside me, all this potential just locked up inside me. What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go on like this until I crawl into my grave? Why do we have all these feelings if we're not allowed to use them?”

Sandy held me tighter and stroked my hair. She seemed to be affected by what I was saying.

"I know a bit about that!", she said, "You should see some of the feelings I've seen coming out of people!".

"I know, Sandy I know", I said, "I'm sorry. Why am I doing this to you?".

I felt calmer now, and Sandy let me slip out of her grasp. She gazed at me steadily with that same expression of gentle concern.

"I know just the thing for you", she said, after a little thought. "I've got this friend. Sweet little thing. A bit younger than me she is, dark hair. I'm sure she'd be your type. She'd make your pulse rate go up, I can tell you", at this she laughed cheerfully. "But she is a professional. You'd have to pay her something. You've got some money at the moment, haven't you Hodge?"

I thought about it for a moment but not for long. I said I had no basic objection to paying someone, especially since I would probably have more money than they did. It seemed to me that most sexual favours were granted on a financial basis anyway. But I couldn't make love to a woman unless I knew that her pulse rate was going to go up too. Sandy said she thought that was understandable. She said a girl's pulse rate certainly could go up, even if she was a professional, but that this couldn't be guaranteed. For my part I felt a lot calmer, and I stood up to take my leave. Sandy straightened my collar and brushed my hair back. Then she said

"Don't feel guilty, Hodge. You can't help the way you're made. None of us can. You're a good man".

I drove home slowly and arrived in time to eat a snack tea with Katy and Miriam. Then they packed their bags and waited for their taxi. Miriam looked a little tense, but she kissed me affectionately as they went out of the door.

"Goodbye, Peter", she said.

"Yes, see you on Sunday night", I said.

"Goodbye", she said. Then they were gone.

On Saturday I stayed in bed. I picked up a novel which someone had recommended. I read and dozed and read some more and generally tried as best I could to relax. I was just coming to the conclusion that it was a fairly typical modern novel, i.e. nasty, brutish and about four hundred pages too long when the phone rang. I answered.

"Hello. Is that Hodge?",

"Yes",

"I am Horst, Horst from the Clapton Odeon",

"Hello Horst."

"How are you?"

"I'm ill in bed".

"Nicht sehr gut. Vot heff you got?"

"Portnoy's complaint".

"Is serious?",

"It can be when you get to my age",

"How long vill it last?"

The poor guy sounded seriously alarmed. He obviously didn't get the joke and I started to wish I hadn't made it.

"It's all right. I'll be okay in a day or so".

"Ja? Good. I'm ringing about the theatre. Is finally complete all the refurbishments und we are going to hef a little party tomorrow afternoon at four o'clock. Do you sink you vill be okay enough to come?"

I said I thought I would.

"Rodney asked me be sure and ask you to bring your vife. Vill she be okay also to come?"

I explained that she had gone away for the weekend to see her father, but that I would certainly ring her and see if she could come back early. Horst also asked me to ring Geoffrey and invite him as well. After he rang off I tried to ring Miriam but there was no reply from her father's house. Then I rang Geoffrey, who said he was feeling at a loose end and would be glad to come. Later that evening I rang Miriam's father again, but he said that he was looking after Katy, and that Miriam had gone over to Reading to see an old school friend and would probably stay the night. I didn't think much about it, but assumed the chances of getting her back early were now vanishingly small and decided to forget about it.

The party at the Odeon made a bit of a break for me, and I was pleased to go. By Sunday afternoon my spirits felt lighter anyway. Horst was there when I got there, of course, wearing his usual grubby yellow waistcoat and with his why am I here? Who knows, but here I am expression on his face. He was busy buttling wine and handing out vol-au-vents and little sausages on sticks. Linda was there, but she was doing an excellent impression of someone who didn't know me from Adam, and I was happy enough to keep it that way. I didn't much feel like talking to anyone. Rodney was talking to what looked like a group of theatre people, and by the look of joy and animation on his face I guessed that he was probably delivering his bring back hanging speech. I said a brief hallo to him and expressed my regret that Miriam hadn't been able to come. Geoffrey arrived later, and we got into a conversation about some business matters. While we were talking, Horst, having settled most of the guests and shown them how and where to replenish their glasses, came over.

"Oh, hi there, Hodge. Did Linda ring you? I giff her your number"

I wasn't too pleased to have the subject raised in front of Geoffrey, but couldn't finally be bothered to fend it off.

"Yes. You were right about her, Horst".

Horsts eyes twinkled a little. Geoffrey looked bemused. As I had discovered before, Geoffrey was very reticent when it came to sexual matters, and I expected him to let the subject go, but he'd taken a little drink by this time, and his curiosity was aroused.

"What happened with Linda, then?", he asked.

I had taken a little drink also, so instead of changing the subject I took the lid off the can of worms.

"I tried to lay her", I said, for the sake of simplicity.

"What her? But you hardly know her, Hodge".

"Yes, but we liked each other when we met, we got on well enough. How well do you have to know someone anyway?"

"Aren't you afraid of catching something?"

"Look", I said. "I'm a careful guy, but I'm not going to stop living just because there's some disease about. There are ways of protecting yourself. I mean, fatal asthma attacks are on the increase too, but I don't notice anyone giving up breathing".

"You're mad. Hodge".

I could see he was right, in a way, and this made me even more furious.

"It's just something I need to do. That's all. I don't want to go into details about it. I'm not promiscuous, quite the opposite. I'm a dull, steady, family man. Trouble is, I'm too damn dull and steady."

"But she's such a sweet little thing", said Geoffrey, "and you're old enough to be her father".

"She gave me the bloody come-on", I said, starting to feel dizzy with anger. "Anyway. How come you're such a saint? You don't have a wife. What do you do? You're so damn secretive about it. I bet you feel 'em up for ripeness in the green room. I bet you've taken a few groupies home with you". I was really getting upset.

"Maybe your friend is disciple of the great Huang-Ka", said Horst, meaningfully.

"Huang-Ka?” said Geoffrey, mystified. Horst opened his bloodshot eyes as wide as he could and thrust out his chin towards Geoffrey.

"Huang-Ka, Huang-Ka", he said, making an obscene masturbatory gesture.

"You two are pissed. I'll talk to you later", said Geoffrey, with enviable self-control, and wandered off to talk to Linda.

"Bloody soap box feminists", said Horst, wistfully, looking over in their direction. "They is blithering on at you about female liberation und the zipless fucks, but when you sidle up to them und say how about it please it turns out all is broadly seoretical. Chargink around in zeir chariots wavink their banners. Bodicea is steerink und is Marjory Proops in the back".

I laughed so much at this that I spilled my drink and had to go and get another one. On my way back to where Horst was standing I noticed with utter disbelief that Geoffrey was helping Linda on with her coat. He muttered something in her ear and she laughed and threw back her hair and gave him a sidelong glance. Then they slipped out together into the street. My stomach went cold and slack, as though suddenly filled with ice cubes.

"Did you see that?” said Horst.

"What an arsehole", I gasped.

"That is insult to a very useful part of your anatomy", said Horst. "I vouldn't worry. He von't touch her. Is too afraid of fatal asthma attack nicht var?".

I guessed he was right and this calmed me a little, though the ice cubes still rolled around in my gut.

"You know vot is your trouble", said Horst. "You are just too hungry. Zis frightens them off. A hungry cat never catches mouse. Zet fellow does not care. Even if he asks them for fuck is no problem to him if they say yes or no. His mind is on something else. Maybe his music, or maybe he is othervise inclined, do you see what I mean? I mean, you really don't know so much about him, do you?”

I had to admit that this was true.

"Anozer thing", said Horst. "You are married und they don't like that. Remember Linda knows all about your vife. Rodney told us all about her. The girl knows that your vife is a tough cookie. She has PhD und rollink pin. For all she knows, you might kiss und tell and she'd have your vife onto her. She vould be very insecure about getting involved into anything like zet, und rightly so because, let's face it, she is bird brain."

"Why would I tell my wife?” I said, astonished.

"Vy should she take ze risk?” he retorted.

"But if she didn't want to take the risk, why did she come on so strong in the first place?"

"Zet", said Horst, "is the mystery. Maybe she can't help it. Maybe she really doesn't know she's doing it. Or maybe", he added, "there's some vonderful combination you haven't divined that she needs to unlock her treasure box. Who knows what? Maybe she wants you to tell her you luff her und you'll take her away to a hot Spanish island. Maybe zis is vhat she's looking for. I chost don't know".

I started moaning about how unfair nature had been to the male, giving him such an absurd mechanism as male sexuality. If it had been up to me, I wouldn't have designed myself the way I was.

"But zere are compensations", Horst interrupted. "Remember, a woman can be as intelligent and vitty as she likes, but if she looks like overfilled vaterbed is hard for her to get offers. Men heff it more easy. Look at Pavarotti. Look at the size of him. Can you imagine undoink his shirt bottons one by one? Nein, nein. Me neither. But sousands of vomen would love to. Zey hear the silky voice, zey see the whole man, all three hundert fifty pounds und more. So remember, you hef another sirty years or so more for trying. Und can get fet as you like. Maybe you sort it all out in the end".

I thanked him for his sane advice and left.

I arrived home rather late and rather drunk. Katy was in bed, and Miriam was making cocoa in the kitchen. She seemed tenser than usual, and avoided my gaze. I supposed this was because I smelt of drink. I kissed her on the cheek, and told her about the party and how I had tried to ring her at her father's. At this she reddened a little.

"I went over to see Anna and Michael in Bicester", she said. "I hadn't seen them for such a long time, and Katy was quite happy to stay with Grandpa".

"That's funny", I said, "he said you'd gone to Reading".

"Well, you know what he's like", she said, "he's a bit deaf and he never listens to anything you say anyway".

Then she kissed me on the cheek and said she was going up to bed. I told her I would sleep in the study because I was full of wine and party food and my tummy was feeling upset.

I felt better in the morning. As I drove to work I pondered what Horst had said about Miriam. Perhaps I really should think about getting a divorce. I could find out about it anyway. I also felt sorry that I had been so hostile towards Geoffrey, who so far as I could see had only been his usual gentlemanly self. The first thing I did when I got to my desk was to ring him. He was quite cheerful, and fortunately not at all offended. He apologised for leaving so abruptly, and said that Linda had asked him to walk her to the Underground as she was afraid of the streets after dark. He thought she was rather charming and she reminded him of his daughter. I then asked him as casually as I could how he had gone about organising his divorce. He said it was all a long time ago, and rather tedious to think about, but he gave me the name of a firm of lawyers who specialised in such matters and offered a reasonable package at a guaranteed fee. He said he was sure they were in the London phone book. He asked if I was thinking of getting a divorce, but I said that I was just checking it out on behalf of a friend.

After lunch, when the office was empty, I located the phone book and looked for the firm that Geoffrey had given me.

Labouche, Lagrande, ah, there it was.

Lancelot and Cowgon, Lawyers. I dialled. A smooth sounding man answered.

"Hello", I said. "I was just ringing because, well, you see, I'm in a delicate situation and unfortunately I fear I may have to sue for divorce. I was wondering if you could give me a brief outline of what might be involved, in terms of fees, court appearances, timescales, and so on".

"Divorce, sir? No problem", the smooth man said cheerfully. "We're doing a fixed price special offer at the moment. A guaranteed seven hundred pounds for the decree, plus two hundred pounds for each of the children. I think we can safely say that we would be able to get you a divorce on the best terms currently available. May I ask, sir, are there any children involved?”

I told him there was one seven year old daughter.

"In that case, sir, may I ask, would you be seeking custody?"

I said that I would not.

"Well, then, that should be fine, sir. No problem. One more thing, if I might ask you this, what is your religion?"

I said that I didn't have one, neither did my wife, but that she was a Marxist-Leninist. His tone brightened.

"A Marxist-Leninist sir? Excellent. That should simplify matters considerably. I think I can safely say that should speed up the process considerably. We should be able to arrange a substantial discount on the divorce settlement if we work on that angle a bit, I should say so sir. Would sir like to make an appointment?"

I said not, I was still considering matters and there were other factors involved. I got off the phone as quickly as I could. I was shaking and the inside of my mouth felt and tasted very nasty.

Judas, I thought. What a Judas I am. I got up from my desk and poured a coffee from the cona machine. I paced up and down for a while, taking sips of the overbaked fluid and trying to collect my thoughts. Then I came to a decision.

Sod adultery, I thought. It's not bloody worth it. If it happens, it happens but I'm through with chasing it.

The decision made, I sat down at my desk and thought about Katy for a while. She really was a lovely daughter, I thought. In that, at least, I was lucky. So, I hadn't succeeded in my resolution but at least I could never reproach myself for not trying. I had enough to be going on with. Millions of people had less.

That evening after supper, Miriam went upstairs to read a book. I decided to make my peace with her as far as I could, and I went upstairs and lay on the bed beside her.

"God, I'm shattered", I said.

She looked at me strangely, as though afraid. She seemed in some way oddly poised and still, like a diver about to fall from a high board.

"Peter", she said. "What I said about, you know, going to see Anna and Michael".

"Oh yes", I said

"That was a lie. I spent the night with a man".

I was less shocked than I might have been, but it was still a hell of a surprise.

"Was it nice?” I said. She looked away.

"It was rather awful", she said. "I felt so guilty."

Guilty as I felt myself, I found it hard to behave as a cheated husband ought.

"You shouldn't. I know I haven't been there for you much lately. I know I've neglected you. You shouldn't feel guilty".

The thought of my wife in another man's arms suddenly filled me with a most peculiar mixture of jealousy and tender curiosity.

"Did you come with him?” I asked her. She blushed and looked away.

"I can't tell you that, that's private", she said.

"Oh go on, tell me", I begged.

"No", she said.

"Do you love him?” it occurred to me to ask.

"Yes", she said. This really was inconvenient.

"What do you want to do?” I asked her.

"He wants us to live together. He's working on a book and he wants us to work on it together. I've always wanted to do that, to live and work with someone. We've never managed to have that sort of relationship, you and I".

"But we have a child together. At least think of that".

"I know", she said. "But let's face it. Politically we're not on the same level. I'm a Marxist, Peter. I just can't live with someone who doesn't share my beliefs."

"It's not that I don't share your beliefs. I find them wholly admirable, as you know, It's just that, well, I don't see the world in that way, that's all."

"But you can't just cop out of it like that. In this struggle, you're either with us or against us".

"Well, then, I'm probably with you. Try me! Just start the revolution and see which side I join up on. Try me!"

"Don't be flippant, Peter, you know I can't stand it when you're flippant".

There was a short silence.

"So what's the book about, then?"

"It's called 'Dialectical Materialism and the First Five Year Plan'", she said, a hint of enthusiasm mounting into her voice.

"I'd better go", I said. I got up slowly off the bed and went over the chest of drawers and started pulling out odd socks and orphan pyjama bottoms in an aimless sort of way.

"Oh, Peter, don't be silly! There's no need to go tonight. We can talk about it in the morning. Stay here tonight".

I was suddenly gripped by a most intense desire for her.

"Okay", I said. I lay down on the bed and tried to pull her towards me.

"Peter, Peter, what are you doing?” she said, pushing and pushing me away with her arms.

"Fuck me", I said, "Just once more. Let me fuck with you tonight".

"No, Peter, I can't. Really, I can't. Please let go!"

"Just one more night. I didn't know, I wasn't expecting this. I came up here just now to be with you. It's been so long. Don't I get any notice? Please!” I babbled.

"No, Peter. I just can't. It wouldn't mean anything to me, you must understand that. You can't want to make love to a woman who doesn't want to make love to you".

"Try me", I pleaded.

She sat and looked at me for a while with a reserved but not unfriendly expression in her eyes. Then she reached out and touched my hand.

"I can't make love to you", she said. Her voice became more intimate. "But we could have a bath together, if you like. You know, like brother like sister?”

"No thanks", I said. "I'd rather have one on my own".

I left the room and ran a hot tub and immersed myself in the wisdom of Huang-Ka.

VIII

The months passed painfully after our separation. Like all mortal shock it hit me as though my world had been struck by an asteroid, and like all mortal shock I knew that whatever the pain, whatever the damage my life could only either end or start the slow process of repair. Besides, as the poet said, there's always some sweetness in the sorrow. Each end is a new beginning. The sense of the beauty of Earthly transience that separation reveals was some consolation to me also, and I was thankful that I was of a mind to appreciate such things.

After I moved out, I found a small flat in a housing co-op in King's Cross. For the first month I didn't contact Miriam or Katy. I felt bad about Katy, but felt my need to get away from the situation was absolute. I walked the streets as though in a daze. I mingled anonymously with the hordes of shoppers who feasted their eyes at the west end shop windows, but I saw within the glass only a golden heart bearing the images of Katy and Miriam for ever and ever away. I dreamed of a house which shuddered and broke its moorings like a ship and sailed off into the night with Katy and Miriam waving from the windows. Then I started to see mirages of them walking down the street towards me, or I would have the absolute conviction that they were waiting for me and I would turn a corner in eager anticipation only to be disappointed. Once I thought I saw them walking ahead of me in the street and I rushed after them, only to find as I reached them that it was a stranger with Miriam's hair and a child of Katy's age. What had seemed flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood became stone.

I lived frugally, and in a disorganised fashion. I shaved by rubbing soap on my skin and longed for the nice soft badger hair brush I had left behind. Perhaps home was where your badger hair brush was, I thought. In other ways, separation was not what I would have expected it to be. For one thing, I found I was able to do my work quite well. I worked calmly and efficiently. I took hardly any time off. The virtual woman had been fitted with her vagina and shipped off to Texas where the customers were delighted and declared her even better than the real thing. A repeat order for five more had come in from the States, and she had been featured on the Clive James show uttering carefully programmed witty obscenities. As for Geoffrey, the bookings kept on rolling in. I went to hear him from time to time, but my enthusiasm for his playing was not what it had been. His repertoire had ceased to grow, and he had become very relaxed. Too relaxed. He had taken to swaying around a lot and making faces when he played. I didn't know how he felt about it, and I didn't ask him because I assumed he had arrived where he wanted to arrive, and to tell the truth I didn't really care.

After the first month I started seeing Katy again. She seemed subdued but as far as I could tell, happy enough. I found her resilience amazing, but I reflected that Miriam was a caring and attentive mum and well able to provide shelter from the worst of the storm. I used to collect Katy from the house of a mutual friend, because I didn't feel up to confronting "Uncle Bob", neither did I want to see Miriam. Oddly, now that I was free, the desire to see other women had completely left me. My male apparatus seemed to have shrunk like a conker in vinegar. Perhaps my libido was still tied up with Miriam, but strange to say, it didn't feel so. Perhaps I was just tired. Another factor was certainly the fact that I didn't have a visible wife any more. After all, a wife is an essential prop for adultery. Without a wife a man has no defence against another woman moving in, at least, no defence except Wham, bam, thankyou mam, you can move along now and make room for the next one. I wasn't made that way, and I wasn't ready for another serious involvement at all.

One Monday morning in October, about ten months after the separation I got a call from Geoffrey to say that another agent had rung him up and asked him to accompany a 'cellist from New Zealand. He gave me three dates in November and told me to put them in my diary. They were all within about four days of each other. One was in Manchester, one in Edinburgh, and the final one was in London. It was the Festival Hall, so I knew the 'cellist must be good.

"What's his name", I asked.

"Her name", he said, "is Josephine Baines. I don't know much about her except that she's won any number of international prizes and apparently she's red hot. Believe it or not they broadcast that German radio recording in New Zealand, and she got on the 'phone to England and asked for me specially".

I said it was fine by me. Who was the other agent? He named Hobbes and Holloway, a very prestigious concert agency, but went on to say that they were only acting for her. He had told them that I was his agent, and any percentages due on his account went to me. I was pleased at this, of course, and asked if there was anything I needed to do. Geoffrey said he thought not, but he would be in touch nearer the date if he thought of anything.

Nearer the date Geoffrey did indeed ring. He said that Hobbes and Holloway had rung him to ask if he could collect his 'cellist from the airport on Saturday the seventh. Unfortunately he had a concert engagement that day and wanted to have a quiet day rehearsing. I said that would be no problem. I planned to have Katy that day, and a trip to the airport would be a great day out for her. But how would I recognise her? He said he had talked to her on the 'phone in New Zealand, and she said she had red hair, was aged about thirty, and would be carrying a 'cello. He would ring and tell her to look out for me. Thus it was settled. When the day came, I collected Katy early and we took the tube to Heathrow. On the train I asked her how she was. She said she didn't like Uncle Bob.

"He shouts at me", she said. "He says small children should be seen and not heard".

I explained to her that some people found children difficult, and especially other people's children, and that if she was patient she would probably get to like him better in the end.

"Not just children", she said, "He shouts at mummy, too".

I said that different couples had different ways of getting on with each other, and that just because people shouted it didn't mean they didn't love each other. I said perhaps it would have been better if her mother and I had shouted a bit more. I think she picked up on the fact that I found it hard to talk about, because she changed the subject after that, and started talking about her school.

When we got to the airport I told Katy we were going to meet a very special musician who was supposed to be a great 'cellist. We waited a while, and snacked in a cafe where Katy to her great delight could watch the aeroplanes land and take off. The flight from Wellington was a little late, but not much. It wasn't hard to spot the lady, she came briskly through the arrival gate carrying a 'cello case strapped over her shoulder and a medium sized suitcase in her right hand. Although she was a short woman, my first impression was one of immense solidity and confidence. She was wearing a slightly frayed looking sheepskin and a long embroidered black skirt which came down to her feet. She made in our direction.

"Josephine Baines?", I said.

"Yep", she said.

"I'm Peter Hodgkinson, but everyone calls me Hodge. And this is Katy".

"Hello", she said, "Hello, Katy".

Katy went shy on me and clung to my arm and danced in a little circle.

"Josephine plays the 'cello", I told Katy.

"She's not great", said Katy, hiding her face in my sleeve. "She's smaller than you are".

I glanced at Josephine apologetically.

"No she isn't", I said. "We're both the same size".

"No you aren't", said Katy.

"Yes we are", I said.

"Well, stand back to back and let me see".

I was a little bit embarrassed about this, but children will be children and Josephine didn't seem to mind. She put her things down immediately in order to be measured. We stood back to back and she pushed her back up against mine quite determinedly.

"You're bigger", said Katy, to me.

"Well", I said, "in one way I am, and in another way we're both the same size".

"How's that?", said Katy.

"Well, her head doesn't come up as far as mine does, but her feet go down as far as mine do. See?" Josephine laughed.

"Silly!", Katy said. "She is smaller".

"That's because she's a fieldmole", I said.

"Female", Katy shouted, crossly. She hated being reminded of her baby talk.

"A fieldmole?", said Josephine.

"Katy used to think that males and females were moles and fieldmoles", I explained.

"Well I was very little, and you shouldn't laugh".

"I know, I'm sorry, Katy". I said.

"Which hotel are you staying at?", I asked Josephine.

"I'm not staying in a hotel", she said. "I've borrowed a room in a house full of Kiwis. Some friends of mine, they've gone off to Paris for two weeks".

She showed me the address, which was in Gospel Oak. I explained to her that the best and fastest way to get into town was via the Underground. She was quite happy about that. I picked up her case, or rather, I tried to pick it up, but it took me two attempts because it was about twice as heavy as I had expected it to be.

"You're strong!", I said, looking at her in surprise.

"Yeah, well you git big muscles playing the 'cello", she said, laying the stress on the antipodean 'git'.

"Feel here".

She pushed the 'cello case back over her shoulder and flexed her right bicep for me to feel. It was not large, but it was as hard as a golf ball.

"Maybe I should call you Ms Schwarzenegger?", I said.

"If you're going to be like that, you can call me MUZZ Baines", she said.

I felt slightly taken aback by that remark, but I didn't say anything. As a matter of fact I found her a bit overpowering but at the same time there was something distinctly uplifting about her. She certainly wasn't anything like I would have expected a famous lady 'cellist to be. She had a walk like nothing I've ever seen. Her feet just seemed to swing out from under her one after the other like the slats on a windmill. I don't know how heavy the 'cello case was, but she seemed entirely oblivious to the burden. I had trouble keeping up with her, particularly carrying the case, but I didn't want to let her see that. At one point she asked me if I wanted her to carry it, but I declined as forcefully as I could.

On the train she asked me what I did "with my time, mostly", as she put it. I told her about the computers, omitting, I hasten to add, any reference to the virtual woman. I said it was very boring, and that I supposed she had an interesting life. She must meet a lot of interesting people, I said.

"Not really", she said. "Most professional musicians are pretty boring. Most of them spend the whole day hacking away on their instruments, as though that was going to get them anywhere".

"But surely, a musician has to practice?", I said, rather surprised.

"Well, yes. But not eight hours a day. Not on the 'cello anyway, unless you're learning a big, big piece. Three or four hours is plenty, if you're doing it right. You just need to get it sorted out in here", and she slapped her midriff decisively. "Better get a few ideas", she said. "Better do what Janacek did, stand on the deck of a boat writing the sound of the waves down on manuscript paper. What's the point of music if it doesn't live?"

I asked her if she liked Janacek, and she said she did. I asked her if he wrote anything for the 'cello.

"Yes", she said, "It’s ok. I play it now and again. But I really love his operas. Have you seen the House of the Dead?".

I hadn't. I asked her if she knew his piano music.

"Yes", she said.

I told her that I loved the Overgrown Path. I said I was sure she must know that both his children had died, and for me, the Overgrown Path was filled with the laughter and tears of his dead children. She didn't know about this, in fact, so I recounted as much as I could remember about what had happened to Janacek in his life, his struggle with public indifference, and the incredible romantic fruition of his last string quartet, which she hadn't heard either. Then she asked me about London. What was the cultural life like. What was there to see? I told her a few things. I told her about the galleries and the South Bank complex, then I realised that she was going to play there, so I mentioned this.

"Oh really? Is that the Festival Hall? What's it like".

I tried to give a general description, which was difficult, but I did my best to explain its general importance as a venue.

"Can we go see it? I want to go and see it, right now", she said, excitedly.

"Aren't you tired?", I said, "Don't you want to get some rest?"

"Tired?", she said.

She jumped up and down when she saw the South Bank complex.

"It looks like Sydney Opera House", she said.

We went in and looked around. I left her case in the cloakroom and took her up and showed her the gamelans.

"Will they let me have a go?", she said.

"I doubt it".

There was nothing on in the Festival Hall at that hour on a Saturday, and we peeked into the empty auditorium.

"Oh my God! She exclaimed. "I'm really going to get the squits playing in there!"

But her dancing eyes belied her words. She wrung her hands together in anticipation. It was the first time I had noticed her hands. They were small and wrinkled, but very muscular and the fingers on her left hand were like little tree trunks with spayed ends covered with white callous on the tips.

"Do you wash dishes with those hands?", I asked, in amazement.

"You bet", she said, "but I do wear gloves. Otherwise they go soft. They're very horny you know".

After the South Bank she still wanted more, so I took her to Chinatown and bought her lunch in the old Poons on Lisle Street. Katy was a pain and kept picking and refusing everything. She wanted chips. I said you couldn't get chips in Poons. Katy kept insisting. You could get chips anywhere she said. In the end I asked the little Chinese lady just to prove my point.

"Chips? No.", she said, and went on with her business in a busy inscrutable way. Then Katy consented to eat some rice with sweet and sour sauce. Josephine handled chopsticks like a native, I noticed. I asked her where she had learned.

"I was just watching that guy over there", she said. "It's easy enough".

It was about five o'clock by the time we got to Gospel Oak. I was completely bushed, even though Josephine had insisted on carrying the case from Chinatown on, and I had the 'cello which wasn't so bad. She introduced me to a couple of other New Zealanders, both men who as far as I could make out were studying music and trying to get work in one or other of the London orchestras. Then she said,

"Listen, I really must go to at least one concert while I'm here. Does anyone know what's going to be on?".

One of the men produced a handful of lists, one for the Wigmore, one for the South Bank, the Barbican, that sort of thing. Josephine studied them intensely.

"Oh, the Glagolitic Mass. I really want to hear the Glagolitic Mass. Do you think I could get a ticket for that?".

I checked the sheet. The performance was at the Festival Hall a couple of days after her concert, the night before Geoffrey had said she was planning to fly home, in fact. It was programmed as the second half of a choral concert, after a performance of Faure's Requiem".

"Should be easy enough", I said.

"How would I go about it?", she said.

"I'll ring up tomorrow and get you one", I said. "It's easy. I can do it on the plastic".

"Hey, could you get me two?", she said. "I might get someone to go with me".

"Of course", I said. "Perhaps Geoffrey would like to go. I don't think he's playing that evening".

"Good idea", she said.

I wasn't able to get to any of Josephine's concerts. I called Geoffrey after the first one, which was in Manchester, and asked him how it had gone. Unusually for Geoffrey, he sounded quite enthusiastic.

"She's bloody brilliant, Hodge", he said. "Bit of a pain to work with. Makes you feel like you're back at school standing in the dunce's corner. But it's worth it. Her control of the sound is just phenomenal".

I felt a twinge of jealousy when I thought about Geoffrey spending time cooped up in rehearsal with the bubbly lady, but I supposed that on a professional level he was being pushed to the limit, and I didn't think I would have wanted to be in his shoes myself. I was very sorry to miss the last concert, because on almost every other date I would have been able to get there easily, but I was installing a virtual woman for a Conservative MP and he had been on the 'phone every day for a week threatening to sue us if we didn't deliver on time. I decided it would just be trouble I didn't need if I tried to postpone, and besides, it was the only date in the month that we could get the hardware engineers. I imagined I wouldn't see Josephine again, and I can't say I was altogether sorry, but the day after the Festival Hall recital she called me at the office.

"Hodge?"

"Yes?"

"Hi, this is Josephine".

Her voice sounded a little more subdued than I remembered it. I imagined she must be tired after the gig.

"Hello, Josephine. How did it go. Did you get the squits?"

"What? Oh, yes. But I always get the squits".

"How do you manage then?"

"Oh, I just squit and squit and squit until I have to go on. Then I forget about it. I can give you all the details if you like!". I said I would forgo the details.

"I was ringing to ask, well, I still have this other ticket. Would you like to come to the concert tomorrow?"

"What about Geoffrey. Doesn't he want to go?"

"He can't make it", she said.

I considered. I'd never liked choral music much, but I did like Janacek and I thought it would be interesting to hear the Glagolitic mass. Besides, I was cast in the role of a sort of a patient host to Josephine, I thought, and it would be appropriate to bid her farewell.

"I'll be there", I said. "Meet you downstairs at a quarter to eight".

Quarter to eight came and went, of course, and so did ten to eight but at five to eight Josephine arrived, a little out of breath. I had already got a programme.

"Do you know these pieces?", she said.

"No", I said.

"You don't know the Faure?"

"No", I said. "I don't listen to much choral music. I don't know why, just never got into it".

"He wrote it for his parents", she said. "He started writing it when his father died, and by the time it was finished his mother had died too".

"Oh", I said.

I was getting anxious to go and sit down, so we did. After a while the orchestra drifted on and picked up their instruments and started fidgeting with them and tootling little bits of Count Basie like they do. Then the choir trooped on in a more orderly way all looking very neat and took up their places. In the centre of the choir I noticed a boy in a red surplice. I looked at my watch. I was starting to feel hungry and wondering why I had come. Then the conductor came on and everybody pounded their hands together. I looked at my watch again. The conductor raised his baton. A great susurration rose from the depths of the choir.

"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis".

I was hooked. Something was happening in this music that I had never heard before. Solemnity, gentleness, depth, the images flowed on and on without a single note of falseness, without a single forced device. I tried to formulate in my mind what it was that moved me so much, but every time I found words they broke up like surf beaching on a continent of sound. After a while the boy in the red surplice stood up and raised his score unsteadily. His voice rang out, pure and strong but with the slightest hint of huskiness.

"Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem. Sempiternam requiem".

Then I found the words for what was happening in this music. It was the purest expression of the agnostic soul faced with the mystery of death. And to hear the child in his innocence sing "dona eis requiem" brought back to me the bottomless grief of my first childhood confrontation with the awesome fact that the great protecting figures who gave me life would sooner or later leave me and vanish into eternity. This was more than just music. It was a crucial snapshot from the landscape of the human psyche. Purest passion in tranquillity. It was the child within Faure, unburied by grief, opening his arms in acceptance into the widening spaces of the heart of love.

Like a fool I was crying again. I hated to be crying. I tried to wipe my eyes as surreptitiously as I could, but I could see that Josephine had noticed. She didn't seem alarmed, more sort of curious but then she turned her head back to the music and left me to my sniffling. When the interval came, she asked me calmly if I felt all right.

"Yes", I said.

"It's a hell of a piece, isn't it?",

"Yes."

"Let's go outside and get some fresh air".

The fresh air hit me and sobered me up.

"I don't think I could listen to anything else", I said. "I think I'd better go".

"Okay", she said.

She had a serious look about her, and I was glad that at least she wasn't bubbling all over the place. That would have been the end. I turned around and walked away. As I went, she spoke.

"Hodge", she said. I turned back.

"Goodbye", she said.

"Goodbye".

"Hodge", she said again. I didn't want a complicated goodbye, I just wanted to get home.

"Don't be terribly terribly cross, but, er, come and stay the night with me".

"What," I said, flatly. I thought I was getting tintinnabulus.

"Sorry", she said. I walked towards her a little.

"Don't tease me", I said.

"I'm not teasing", she said. "I don't tease".

I went right up to her and put my arms round her weakly. She put her arms gently around me. This eventuality hadn't actually crossed my mind so I hadn't yet had time to think about whether I wanted this to happen. Perhaps I had mentally put her on a high shelf out of reach. Yes, probably that was it. It was nice to hold her, though it felt funny too. I didn't feel anything I could describe as sexual desire at all, but at the same time she felt incredibly solid and precious in my arms.

We went back to her place almost in silence. She didn't seem at all like the same woman I had met off the plane a week and a half before. We took a bus, and once in a while she would point out of the window and say, "Look", or "What's that?" and I would tell her, if I knew. I felt a bit shell shocked. I wasn't at all sure that she wasn't planning some kind of torment for me after all, but the decision was made. Every once in a while she would put her hand in mine, leave it there for a while and then withdraw it again. It was rather as though she wanted to know I was there, but to straightly hold my hand would have been too vulgar or intense. At one point I limply asked her how she had got on with Geoffrey. She said he was okay, but he had not played as well as she had expected him to. Then she gave a mischievous chuckle and said that after the Festival Hall concert he had tried to kiss her, beard and all, and that it had been like having a wet coconut shoved in her face. Then the bus passed through Camden Town and she asked me where we were.

When we got back to her place, there was nobody else there.

"All out painting the town red", she said.

She put the kettle on and slung tea bags into a couple of cups.

"Just make the tea", she said, "I'll go up and sort the room out".

Her windmill feet flew up the stairs. I poured water on the tea. Then I had a thought, and felt in my pocket for the durex. I saw with dismay that they were two years out of date.

"You won't need those", she said, coming in behind me, "I just finished my period".

"Don't you think we'd better?"

"Don't worry Hodge. I don't do this sort of thing very often", she said.

"Neither do I".

"I guessed".

We went upstairs carrying our tea. The room was a student's room, a double mattress on the floor, orange box bookshelves, sparsely furnished, mostly drapes. Her 'cello was lying on its side next to the wall with a yellow duster over the lower bout. A dim table lamp by the bed was the only illumination, and a joss stick was burning in one corner. She tossed her hair out of her eyes and started to unbutton her shirt. I stood a little away from her, and undressed myself, without daring to look. Then I turned towards her. She was naked. She was holding her left wrist with her right hand and turning it nervously. Her belly was slightly rounded as though she might have borne a child. Below it the hair was red and luxuriant. Her feet were slightly turned inwards. My belly felt tense with expectation, but my male equipment was limp and asleep. I stalled.

"You've got red toenails", I said.

"Oh yes", she smiled. "I always paint my toenails."

"Do you know, I've never heard you play?", I said, feeling as the words came out how ridiculous it was to stand there like this and say that.

"That's easily fixed", she said. She bent down and picked up the 'cello and the bow. She ran a little rosin over the bow and sat down naked with the 'cello with her red toenails peeping round the sides. I knelt down on the floor, feeling like a man reprieved. She plucked the strings and adjusted the tuning and started to play the prelude from Bach's suite in G. I had never heard the instrument played in a small room before. I had never, in any case, heard a player like this, or so it seemed at that moment. Her fingers, which were so small, flew over the strings like photons. The tone was flawless, but at the same time full of depth and at the climax of the piece she made the descending sequences flow together in a way that I would never have believed possible. When she had finished, she played the allemande, equally beautifully, her face looked so solemn in its concentration that it was almost like watching the face of someone making love. As I thought this, it occurred to me that we had come here to make love, but the idea slipped and wouldn't hold. It felt unreal. I couldn't form it in my mind. Then she stopped.

"Play some more", I said.

"Not now", she said.

She knelt down before me and leaned her face towards mine. I leaned towards her and our foreheads touched. She kissed me lightly on the lips, once, twice. I shuffled towards her and our knees bumped. She laughed quietly.

"Wait a minute", she said.

She shifted her knees up off the floor and squatted on her toes so I could slip my thighs under her shins. A gentle odour of feminine arousal drifted towards me like toasted bear's fur. I was trembling. My penis was limp. I feared she would notice. Then I put my hands behind her shoulders and noticed that she was trembling too. All of a sudden a lamp was lit in the centre of my body and hot lava was flowing towards the end of my cock and white ghosts were flying out of my arms. She shifted again, and I was inside her, actually inside her, my hands stroking the small bones of her back. We moved together, mole and fieldmole, she trembled and bit me and clutched the small of my back with her fierce little hands, and before I knew it, before I could control it, my seeds started to fly up like a flock of startled doves, I cried to them inwardly to be still but they flew on up, but her flower pulsed and opened to me and she drew me up inside her crying

"Yes, oh yes! Oh . . . YES!!"

Afterwards we lay together in silence on her bed, my head swimming with happiness. I felt a runny feeling in my nose and hoped to hell I wasn't going to start crying again, for I didn't feel like crying. Suddenly Josephine propped herself up on her elbow.

"Oh no, Hodge", she said, "your nose is bleeding!"

Why all that happened to me I never really knew. Perhaps because I never expected it to. Perhaps it was like Horst said, the hungry cat never catches the mouse. I saw Josephine off the next day. I half expected her to be cold after the event, to decide she had made a mistake and that it had all been out of hunger, or that she'd better make some distance between us or I'd follow her round the world. But she remained warm towards me. She gave me her address in New Zealand. Somehow it was unspoken that the best things only happen once, and we both understood that. Or perhaps it was that she was not the settling type. Or perhaps, for me at least, that I knew I could never handle a woman with her energy for more than a day at a time. At any rate, life went on more or less as usual for the next month, apart from quite a bit of extra time spent staring out of windows into space. Then one mid-December morning came a letter, addressed in Geoffrey's handwriting.

Dear Hodge,

I'm sorry to have to do this, but I want you to cancel all my engagements for the next six months. I'm completely at the end of my tether. Nothing seems to go right for me any more in music, love or life and I need to get away for a while. Please don't try and find me. I'll aim to be back for the recording sessions in June, and any engagements after that.

Yours

Geoffrey

IX

I tried my best to get hold of Geoffrey, but to no avail. I rang his flat, but there was no reply. I rang his mother, but she just said he had gone away 'for a rest cure' as she put it, and she didn't know where. I rang his flat again, and got a chap called Bill Wood who got very excited when I said who I was. Did I have any work for oboe players, he asked. I explained that I wasn't a full time agent, that I only worked for Geoffrey and that apparently that was now at an end, since he had walked out on a full diary of engagements and I had no idea how to contact him. Bill Wood didn't know where he was either. He was just renting the flat for six months and it had all been arranged through a friend, but I was to let him know if I heard of any work for an oboist. He assured me he was very good. Then he asked me to hold for a moment, which I foolishly did, after which he started to play his oboe down the phone. I promised to bear him in mind if he would reciprocate by holding a message for Geoffrey and sending it on if he got an address. However, when I sat down to write, I realised there was nothing to be said. The engagements would have to be cancelled anyway, since there was no way of knowing when or if the guy would re-appear. I decided the best course of action was to cancel everything up to the recording date, as Geoffrey had suggested, and then put the whole business out of my mind and try not to worry about it. Since Geoffrey had a phobia about committing himself too far ahead there was only one engagement arranged for after the recording session and that was a Monday evening recital in the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the International Piano Series. It was a very prestigious gig and I felt nervous about leaving it open, but in the end I decided that if the worst came to the worst a replacement could be found for such a venue.

The next few months really were hell. Canceling the concerts was a harrowing experience. Quite a lot of the clients were reasonable enough about it, but one or two got abusive. I started by trying to explain that Geoffrey had gone away for a rest, but I soon discovered that it was simpler and more effective to tell them that he was ill. Mostly they accepted that, though a concert organiser in Holland wanted to know the nature of the illness and whether I had a medical certificate. I told her the nature of the illness was confidential and she shut up and went away. At about this time, also, a minor crisis blew up at Viron Systems. Somebody in Brighton was dumped on the moon by the Star Wars game and suffered severe VR shock, which kept him off work for a fortnight. Fortunately for us the man was an employee of the VR arcade, and since he couldn't sue us directly without suing his employer we got let off the hook. We had to pay his two weeks wages plus a hefty sweetener, though. I had to switch into machine-think and mount a blitz on the Star Wars code to try and get it sorted out before another mishap occurred. I worked on it for seven days solid, often working until ten or eleven at night, running the code through the source level debugger on a large Unix machine. I just couldn't get the error to recur in the debugger, and the VR console itself had no facilities for tracing code whatsoever. In the end the error was spotted by a visiting programmer who walked past my workstation just as I had the code for a minor string manipulation function showing on the screen. He whistled through his teeth,

"Wheezz, dangerous stuff! You're returning the address of an automatic variable there."

This was very embarrassing for me, because anybody ought to know that returning the address of an automatic variable is a bum practice, but despite many years of successful programming, I'd never really understood that. It was one of those errors that are hard to spot because you nearly always get away with it. In fact the error didn't cause any problem on the Unix system because it switches to a different stack area when processing a kernel interrupt, but on the VR console the stack management was more Heath Robinson, and if you were unlucky enough to get an interrupt whilst in this particular routine you, well, you were dumped on the moon. Hard cheese. After this, we distributed the revised software, and things went quiet for a while. I continued my practice of working at home one or two days a week, but not as a concert agent. That phase of my life was behind me. When and if Geoffrey came back, we would part company, I felt sure. Not because I was angry with him, I soon got over that feeling, but because I knew I didn't want to expand in that direction, to become a clerk on Geoffrey's behalf. Instead I tried to develop a sideline writing articles for the computer and general scientific press. This gave me some satisfaction, and used a different part of my brain from just programming. It also brought in some money, though a little erratically. Oddly, although in theory my outgoings should have increased, because I was paying money to Miriam and Katy and also renting a flat, in fact I spent less. I lived very simply, listened to Radio 3 a lot, and read. So the drop in my income wasn't painful, in fact I was even saving a little money every month.

Another source of sadness to me was that Katy seemed less than her usual cheerful self. She could still get animated by an interesting fairground or a funny cartoon, but most of the time she was quiet and withdrawn. Sometimes she would grumble about her mother and say that she was no fun to live with any more. Occasionally she grumbled about Uncle Bob, but I think she had got the message that this was something I didn't want to talk about, and usually such conversations didn't go far. I tried my best to cheer her up. I took her away for her half term week, we went to Dublin and hired a car and drove around the south of Ireland. She really did seem cheerful, but when the time came to take her home to her mother, she started to cry and cling to me. Then she said she loved me the best, and couldn't she come and live with me? I said that I loved her too, but that even if I could look after her, which would be very hard for us both, I was sure that her mother would never allow it. I asked her if she didn't love her mother any more, and she said that she did, but her mother wasn't the same now, she was always looking after Uncle Bob. I told her that although it might be difficult, that was what made her mother happy, and that I was sure that as time went on and things settled down a bit, her mother would find more time for her, and perhaps one day when we were all a bit more organised we might even do some things together as a family again. This calmed her, and I was able to deliver her home with dry eyes.

Geoffrey had quite gone out of my mind by the time June came around, and it was a surprise to me when I picked up the 'phone in my office one Monday morning and heard the sound of his voice.

"Hodge?",

"Who's that?", I didn't recognise his voice immediately, it sounded somehow graver and more subdued than it had.

"Geoffrey. How are you? I'm sorry I dumped you in the shit like that".

I told him it didn't matter, that was all sewage under the bridge, I said. Then I reminded him about the recording date, which was now only one week away.

"Oh lord", he said, "Do you think you could ring them, put it off for a month or so?"

I contemplated telling him that he should do it himself, but while I was thinking about it, he said,

"Better still, I'll do it. If they're unhappy about it I'll go over there and talk to them about it. Yes, probably that's the best thing".

I then reminded him about the QEH recital which was in just under two weeks time.

"Oh yes", he said, "I want to do that."

"Will I see you beforehand?", I said.

He went quiet for a while. Then he said,

"No, I think I'll lock myself away and rehearse. I don't feel like seeing anybody just at the moment. But come and see me after the recital. You will be there, won't you?"

I checked my diary. I had to be out on a site in Tunbridge Wells that day, but I reckoned I would be back in time. I told Geoffrey I would do my best to get there, but if I was late I would catch the second half, and in any case I would certainly be back in time to meet him after the performance and take him for a meal. Then he hung up.

On the day of the concert I got tied up with various niggles at Tunbridge, and didn't get back to town until after the concert had started. In fact, I made it to the QEH just as the audience were going in after the interval. I grabbed a programme, and plonked myself down in my seat, feeling shattered after a day trying to appease an angry customer with one half of my brain and patch up a piece of geriatric software with the other. The hall was about half full, which is reasonable for that kind of concert. I looked at the programme and noted with dismay that Geoffrey had programmed a single work for the second half, the Liszt Sonata in B Minor. Not that I don't like it, it's a really great piece, but I hate getting trapped in a concert hall where someone intends to wrestle with it, because hardly anyone can make sense of it. There are one or two who can bring it to life, Brendel springs to mind as one of the best, but the architecture of the piece is so subtle, and the musical structure so profound, that even very great players, household names, frequently make a pig's ear of it. I didn't fancy Geoffrey's chances. I was just looking around deciding whether to slip out and watch on the monitors outside, when the lights dimmed, and a hush fell on the audience. I was stuck. After a moment of suspense, Geoffrey came on. I hardly recognised him. Firstly, the beard had gone. His hair, which had had been shoulder length the last time I saw him, was cut in a bosh crop, as the Italians say come un spazzo. Instead of striding on confidently with his knuckles swinging in a forward direction, he sort of shuffled on, like an old man, with his hands clasped in front of him as though in supplication. I felt more than a little alarmed. I didn't even know whether he had been practicing on his retreat, wherever that had been. Had he programmed the Liszt Sonata before he went away? Did he know the piece? In short, I suffered a stomach full of large and aggressive butterflies on Geoffrey's behalf. He sat down at the piano. There was another moment of silence. Too long, I thought. Almost capriciously so. Geoffrey was staring into space. I thought perhaps he might be saying his prayers. Then he started to play. He played quietly at first, as the piece demands. He sat almost completely still. No more swaying. No discernible expressions crossed his face. Then the music started to swell, the great handfuls of notes building and building to the first climax of the second subject. I was gripped by the clarity of his gradations and the strong tone colours that he drew from the piano, without any of the usual over-pedalling or thumping that generally occur in this subject. What impressed me even more, though, was the way he made the phrasing of the subject seem absolutely natural, as though it couldn't have been played any other way, down to and including a heart-wrenching twist on the tail of the theme that I had never heard articulated before. Then the music started to roll on, into its ever more fantastic and decorative developments. Geoffrey played superbly. Not only was he entirely in command of all the notes, which is no mean feat for anyone, but whichever voice the melody was in he made it stand out clearly above the accompaniment, articulating and accenting it in such a way that he seemed to find always new meanings in it at every repetition. At the climax of the piece, a single thought went through my mind, twice.

I am in the presence of a master; I may never hear anything so good again in my life. I am in the presence of a master; I may never hear anything so good again in my life.

After the performance, the audience were suitably enthusiastic and tried to bring the roof down with their cheering, shouting and thumping. Geoffrey returned slowly to the platform, once, twice and a third time, but declined to play an encore. After the third time he didn't reappear, and eventually the audience gave up and started to filter out of the hall. I went round to the green room. There were several people milling around the door, apparently being denied entry by a couple of ushers who had orders to keep the public out. This was uncharacteristic of Geoffrey, I noted. When I got to the door, one of the ushers said,

"Sorry, sir. We have strict instructions not to let anyone in except his agent".

"But I am his agent, Peter Hodgkinson".

"I do apologise, sir. He is expecting you, please, go on in ".

The room was dimly lit, by a single table lamp. Geoffrey was sitting at the back of the room, with his eyes half closed, with a look that might have been profound meditation or just simple exhaustion.

"Hodge", he said.

"Geoffrey", I said, "that was wonderful. Really absolutely wonderful. I'm so pleased".

"Thank the Abbe for that", he said, enigmatically.

"Abbe Liszt?", I said.

"Thank the Abbe for that".

I got him out of there as soon as the crowds had dispersed and took him for a meal in Chinatown. I picked somewhere slightly more sedate than Poons this time. I was surprised that he didn't seem in the least bit elated after the performance. Either that or he was controlling his feelings very well.

During dinner, I asked him where he had been for the last six months. He said he had been to stay on Wei-Lang's farm in Wales. Russell had suggested the idea. Russell was spending quite a bit of time there working on his book and was finding the atmosphere good for concentration. Then he asked me how I was getting on. I grumbled about my job at Viron Systems, about seeing so little of Katy and how upset and subdued she had become. I told him I still hadn't really figured out what I should be doing with my life, but I supposed that things were tolerable and that I shouldn't complain. He said why didn't I think about spending some time on Wei-Lang's farm. It sounded like just what I needed. I said I didn't think I could find the time, and besides I didn't have all that much money stashed away to be taking a long break with. Geoffrey said it wouldn't cost much, I'd only have to pay about £30 a week to cover the cost of my food, and I could easily cover that by subletting my flat. I still wasn't convinced, somehow the idea didn't grab me that evening, which is not surprising considering that it had never entered my mind before.

But the next day was one of those days when everything goes wrong. As soon I as got in we got an angry 'phone call from Texas. The virtual woman had suddenly sworn at a very important customer and called him a fudge-packer. Of course it was just a function stub left in by a junior programmer, but try explaining that to an angry old oil millionaire in a ten gallon condom. It took five minutes to fix the bug, but then I had to arrange for new ROMs to be blown and posted out to about a dozen addresses around the world. No sooner was that crisis put to bed than Stewart came into my office proudly bearing the artwork for a new brochure for the virtual woman. I read with mounting horror an entire paragraph devoted to

Our chief analyst programmer Peter Hodgkinson, whose determination and skill enabled this project to be completed and whose vigilant eye will continue to oversee the maintenance and development . . . and so on ad nauseam, all under the most ghastly overexposed photograph of myself that I'd ever seen. God knows where they'd got it. I realised that if Bodicea got to see this, or even Marjory Proops I was dead meat, so I had to tackle Stewart head on and demand that the paragraph and picture be removed. He was mortified. He couldn't understand my "modesty", as he put it. We wrangled about it for over an hour. I had to refuse a whole box of cigars before he gave in with a sigh and sent the brochure back for re-design. The final straw came when I tried to ring Brighton and got connected to an Italian number instead.

"Pronto? Chi parla?"

"Er, hello. Is that the Brighton Megadreams VR arcade?"

"Sbaglia! Sbaglia!" shrieked the voice, and the line went dead. I snapped. I rang Geoffrey right there and then. He promised to do what he could, and later that evening he rang me at home. It was all fixed, he said. I should arrange my affairs, and turn up at an address which he would give me. I should 'phone beforehand and tell them roughly when I was coming. He said that Wei-Lang remembered me from Clapton and was looking forward to having me as a guest. I remembered the empty pizza dish and hoped it was not a foretaste of things to come.

I tied up my affairs and sublet my room in the space of a week. I told Stewart I was having a nervous breakdown and handed all my projects over to Mark. Stewart wasn't pleased, but I dealt with his displeasure by closing my ears and generally walking wherever I was going so fast that he couldn't keep up with me. At home I used the answerphone to keep the world at bay. The main surprise was that Miriam was much more upset than I would have expected to hear that I was going away. I arranged to spend the whole weekend with Katy, partly to mollify her wrath, but mostly because Katy was the one special person whom I really did still want to see. She was surprisingly understanding when I told her I was going away for a rest.

"You look tired, daddy", she said, "You do need a rest".

This touched me, and I started apologising to her for being such an awful parent, and not living with her any more, and so on. Then she said,

"Don't worry, daddy. Most of the children in my class have parents who are divorced".

Which, coming from an eight year old left me speechless.

X

Here I guess I ought to give a blow by blow or step by step narrative of the journey from London to County Clare. After all, a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step and there's no journey that starts with the first step and ends with the next one. Or maybe there is, one step into a metal cigar and the next out and onto another continent. Maybe another world, in time, another century. But that wasn't this journey.

My journey was by rail and sea. I was burning, inside I was burning all the way, for what I don't know, for rest, release, to throw off my skin like a snake? All I remember was a patch of light that gradually became dark, a window perhaps, upon which rails and rocking carriages and tower blocks were shone like lantern slides, giving way to fields and steeples and bored looking cows who looked up mournfully as they passed, or was it I that was passing, a continual cold pressure on my forehead, a continual knocking which must have been my forehead on the glass, and a ring of steam which must have been produced by my nose. Then the train ground to a halt and the whole sleepy contents of it, Irish, English and for all I know holidaying Double Dutch shuffled off with their luggage and through a series of dingy corridors where bags were labelled and tickets checked and we boarded a boat which rocked us half sick all the way to Dublin. The rest is a blur. I suppose I must have got a bus, as instructed, and got off in a little country town, as instructed, and I remember an old Land Rover which took me through a series of lanes which got tighter and tighter through deserts of abandoned pine where fallen trees lay in all directions likepick-a-sticks, looking for all the world like monster reeds that have just been raked by monster hail. They told me later that I had been driven from Galway to Clare and that the pine forest was the descendant of the Great Forest of Aughty.

The Land Rover passed a huge lake, turned down a single track road which wound through another stand of pines and pulled up beside an old three story house. It was a glorious June day. I took in a lungful of muddy, mouldy, diesel scented air and for a moment I had a flashback of camping holidays half a lifetime ago. I looked at my driver. He was probably late twenties, blond hair light as candyfloss, skin pale but with a slight tan. His face shone with the quiet energy of someone who’s at ease out of doors and works with his hands.

“It’s ages since I did anything with my fucking hands”, I blurted out, looking as though I’d only just found them on the end of my arms. He laughed, “it’s a common enough complaint”, he said. “I’m Ariel.” He held out his hand.

“Hodge”, I said.

“I know who you are.” I shook the proffered hand.

“That’s one way to use a hand”, he said. “Did they tell you where you were sleeping?”

I had no idea, I said. He looked vexed.

“Oh. Wait a minute, no, bring that, come and sit in the kitchen, I’ll sort something out.” He took my big bag and I took the little one and followed him into the house. The kitchen was at the front; there was a pine table which looked home made and a catering sized enamelled gas stove. Blackened pots hung around the walls. Ariel filled a large copper kettle and lit the gas. Then he went out.

For such a large house the place was strangely quiet, I could hear the occasional voice outside in the distance, but nothing stirred in the house. I listened to the kettle boil. I was used to electric kettles but this one worked more slowly and moreover it boiled with a ladder of melodies peculiar to itself. I heard all kinds of interesting music within it, at times it sounded like a mountain brook bubbling over rocks, at times like ice sheets cracking in a thaw, at one point, in my dozy half-exhausted state it seemed to sing a passage from the all-night Vespers of Rachmanninov. That jolted me awake and I remembered where I was. The kettle had now finished its uphill slog and was churning out steam. I felt I ought to do something with it but I had no idea where the tea was kept, and wasn't bold enough to start turning the kitchen upside down in search of it. I took the coward's option and turned down the flame.

Silence reigned again. I leaned on my elbows and looked at the floor. It was made of irregular shaped slates fitted like a jigsaw. I stared at it for a long time, maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour; I started to experience something that became a regular feeling on the farm, a feeling of time dilation, a feeling that there was no hurry about anything, though in the background there was a continual message coming from my stomach, my stomach really did want a cup of tea. Eventually Ariel came back and he didn’t look too happy.

“Maybe you can put your things in the barn while we sort something out”, he said. I nodded. “But first let’s have tea”. He put the kettle back on the flame and produced a teapot and a tea caddy from under a worktop.

A figure appeared in the doorway. A girl, looked in, short, clipped black hair, patched jeans and a painter’s smock, brisk, no-nonsense, slightly annoyed.

“What’s up? Looking for me?”

“Brig. Any idea where Hodge is sleeping?”

“Nobody said 'owt to me. He can sleep in t‘ barn, can’t he?”

“The old man said he should have a room.”

“Why, what’s wrong wi’ ‘im?”

“I dunno.” He turned to me, “what’s wrong with you?”

I opened my mouth like a fish, but the girl carried on,

“Well none of t’ cabins is ready. Where is Wei Lang anyway?”

“Out on his bike.”

“Oh.” She leaned on the doorpost and thought for a moment. “How's about Tiny Tim’s room?”

“Which room is that?”

“Middle one at top.”

“We’ll check it out.”

I followed him out of the kitchen and up the stairs onto a landing, then opened a worm-eaten ledged-and-braced door onto a smaller, twisting staircase which we followed to another little landing with doors leading off in three directions. Behind another plank door I got my first glimpse of the room that was going to be my home for the next three months; it was painted white, dazzling, almost, and smelled of fresh emulsion. There was a wood floor with a faded patch of rug, a divan bed and a canvas director’s chair. By the bed was a small table which looked as though it had been knocked up from scraps of four by two and bits of plank, and on the table was an angle-poise lamp. At least I could read and sleep. If I could read, that is, and if I could sleep. The window was framed by plain cotton curtains which looked like cut up bed sheets, pulled back and tied with cotton strips. On the sill was an antique cup with "God Speed the Plough" on one side and a picture of a farmer stacking sheaves. The bed wasn’t made but there was a stack of clean bedding. Ariel picked up a sheet but I told him I would do the bed myself. I was tired after the journey. I dropped my bags on the bed and we went back downstairs.

Ariel showed me a couple of bathrooms, one on the first floor and one downstairs. Then we wandered round the back of the barn and pissed in the grass anyway. Then he took me into the barn. Outside it looked like a tractor shed, tall, green painted corrugated iron blistered with barnacles of rust, and with a rounded corrugated roof. Inside it had been lined with rough sawn timber giving an orange-box effect which was enhanced by the fact that an assortment of old lids from wine boxes and cigar boxes had been tacked onto the walls apparently at random. At one end of the space there was a large wood burner and a length of enamelled chimney pipe went straight up to a fat steel double-walled joint which went through the ceiling. The ceiling was done in a better quality tongue and groove than the lining of the walls, and the whole space exhaled a perfume of oranges mingled with creosote. A trestle table with benches down the sides, unvarnished and bearing a history of stains, was clearly from the same Heath Robinson school of design as my bedside furniture. At the end of the room by the stove a stepladder rose to a rectangular trap in the ceiling.

I sat down on one of the benches while Ariel went to the kitchen to make tea. Exhaustion gripped me again. I leaned my head on my elbows and looked down at the floor. It seemed to be wood but I couldn’t focus well enough to be sure. It certainly needed sweeping. Resting like that I felt my energy slowly starting to return. At least I had a room to go to and a bed. Warmth started to seep back into my back and my arms, the way it does when you have passed your lowest point and started to resurface.

After a couple of minutes I heard a scratching at the door and it was pushed open by a large black cat with a white bib who walked defiantly in with his tail in the air and came straight over and jumped on my lap. I tickled him under the chin. He purred. I turned him over and tickled his tum. He seemed to be fully reversible. Ariel came back with a tray. There was a teapot and cups, a plate of Rich Tea biscuits and a sandwich.

“So you’ve met Puffin”, he said.

“He introduced himself. I assume he is a he?”

“Sort of. He was fixed before the old man got him. He doesn’t seem that bothered about it, though.”

“I think he likes me.”

“Don’t get big headed, he likes everyone. I made you a ham sandwich, sorry, I should have asked if you’re vegetarian.”

“I’m not”, I said. I picked up the sandwich. Puffin also seemed not to be a vegetarian, so I pushed him off my knee. The purring stopped. I stripped off a bit of fat from the edge of the ham and threw it down to him. The purring started again.

“Take a rest”, said Ariel, “We eat here at seven.” He left me with Puffin. I poured more tea. I was torn between the desire to lie down after my journey and curiosity about the farm. I was wondering what to do with the tea things when the door opened and Brig walked in. She checked the teapot, it was empty.

“Shall I put a hot drop on that?”

I told her I’d had enough tea and I felt like a stroll round the farm. She looked at my shoes, slip-on suede shoes, programmer’s shoes, made to be kicked off under a desk not for wading through cowpats.

“In that case you’ll need wellies”, she said, “Come on, we’ll find you a pair.”

There was a lean-to behind the house, full of old implements and waterproofs, sou’westers, fishing waders, rubber boots. We rummaged around and found a pair of black rubber boots, a bit big but I could walk in them.

“They might leak”, she said. “But grab ‘em for now. And don’t say I never give you owt.”

We walked out into the yard and through a back gate. There was the hint of a path where the grass was trodden down and it led up to the right towards a fenced off garden.

“The fence is to keep the deer out”, she said.

“Wild deer?”

“We’ve wild deer here, and wild goats, and we even had wild pigs, once.” When I got closer I could see that there were cultivated beds with bamboo poles, and rows of green vegetation. There were several young men in there, a couple in shorts and bare-chested, and a couple of girls at the back tying netting over a bed of canes. There was also another figure in khaki shorts and with a loose white blouse who might have been of either gender.

“That’s where we grow our veg”, she said, “or some of it.” She waved to the working figures and one of the boys waved back. We didn’t stop to talk. Behind the garden was another building, older and darker, on approach it looked like stables though mostly built of stone with a wooden extension on the back.

“That’s where the lads sleep”, she said, “mostly.” To our left were a couple of big polytunnels where I could see more figures stooping over banked beds of earth. We passed them and carried on down behind the house where there was a fenced area with chickens pecking in the dirt, and a wooden coop.

“You have your own eggs?”

“Sometimes”, she said, “but they don’t lay enough for all of us. You have to ask Ariel about the farm stuff, I know next to nowt, I’m just the chippy.”

“Chippy?”

“Most of that furniture I made my sen.”

“You have a very distinct style.”

“Thanks for the compliment. If it was a compliment. Did you see that front door?”

“Of the house?”

“I just made it. From seasoned oak. It’s mouse proof.”

“I guess they can’t eat through oak.”

“And did you see how high I put the keyhole? Even if t‘ little bastards find key they can’t ger it open, see.”

“They might stand on each others’ shoulders”, I mused.

“Mice? No sense of balance, once they stack eighteen or nineteen high they topple ovver like clowns on stilts.”

After the chicken coop we went back to the stables and looked inside, there were two rows of bunks in there, some with bedding neatly folded, others higgledy piggledy. There was a length of old cable stretched across one end of the space, hung with socks and shirts and underclothes. A wood barrel sat in one corner, a large metal scoop with a long wooden handle leaned against it. A ray of light filtered down from a small skylight up amongst the beams, but the interior was in shadow giving an atmosphere of Dickensian gloom. A boy with bottle-bottom glasses was sitting in a canvas chair by the door sewing a cushion.

“Why don’t you do that in t‘ barn where it’s light?” Brig asked him. He looked at her and looked at me and went back to his sewing. She shrugged. “Daft as a brush”, she said. We carried on with our tour.

Behind the barn there was a path paved with slate which led to a large wooden building with a low roof and a big veranda. As we got nearer to the building I saw a couple of card tables on the veranda and some canvas chairs folded and stacked against the wall. There was a folding door which had been fixed open with loops of chain, and a bead curtain covering the entrance. Over the door was a wooden sign with Chinese writing on it.

“What does that say?” I asked her.

“I ‘aven’t a clue”, she said, “ask the old man.”

We pulled back the bead curtain and looked inside.

“This is t’ meditation hut”, she said. There was an unvarnished wooden floor with a strip of carpet running around the edge with black cushions on. At one end of the room was a wood burner and in one corner stood a small table, in the same rough style I had already seen, with a wooden figure on and an incense burner. The carving didn’t look like the usual kind of Buddhist statue I’d seen, but more like a female Hindu deity or possibly a Kwannon, carved with beautiful minute detail in a smooth waxy yellow wood.

“Who uses this place?” I asked. She said they had group meditation every morning and everyone came. I said it was something I’d never done and wasn’t sure about, she said it was no big deal, just quiet time together and nobody would hang me up by my thumbs if I didn’t join in. I said in that case I would join in. We didn’t enter, we let the beads drop and went on with our walk.

We walked over a large meadow which seemed to be left to grass, and came to a small wood. Among the trees there were a couple of cabins.

“That’s where your friend lives”, said Brig.

“My friend?”

“Howard.”

“I don’t know anyone called Howard” I said. She went up to the door of the first cabin and knocked.

“Howard!” There was no reply.

“I don’t know anyone called Howard!” She ignored me and tried the door. It opened.

“Have a look”, she said. I opened the door. There was a faint odour of wood smoke and paraffin. It seemed wrong to go in but I put my head around the door. I saw a pot-belly stove and a woven rug with a Mexican pattern on the floor. There was a divan bed with bedding neatly folded on it and a proper old desk with a scuffed leather top with a battered old typewriter on it. I shut the door.

“But really,” I insisted, “I don’t know anyone called Howard.”

“Well, he says he knows you”, she didn’t seem at all surprised. She told me that she often came up and wandered around in the woods. Part of the woodland belonged to the farm, but there was a boundary, marked by a stream where it became someone else’s forest.

“Want to see a right powerful place? Ovver t’ beck?” she said.

“Powerful? Powerful how?”

“Some places are just - powerful”, she said, and led me further into the trees. After a couple of minutes we came to the stream, and after walking about another half a mile there was a dip between two hillocks with a row of silver birches arranged along the rim. We walked into the dip. There was a fallen tree and Brig sat on the trunk and looked up at a canopy of leaves and at the row of silver birches.

“When I was a nipper there was a painting like this in our house”, she said, “just a row of trees on a slope, nowt else, dead simple, but I used to stand and stare at it. There was something like pain about those trees, remote and untouchable beauty and pain. Beautiful.”

I sat down beside her.

“I’ll sit here quietly for a while.”

“Can I sit with you?”

“I’ll do a breathing exercise”, she said.

“Show me?”

She showed me a very simple exercise. I just had to take ten slow deep breaths and then breathe in again and hold my breath for a few minutes and then let it out very slowly, relaxing my thoughts as I let out the breath, and then sit quietly for a minute or two, then repeat. So we sat on the log, two strangers, and did that together. After a while my eyes became soft and my surroundings dissolved into a mat of light and colour. I remembered a line from Andrew Marvell:

“Annihilating all that's made. To a green thought in a green shade.”

I don’t know how long we sat there. Probably not long by the clock, but eventually she stretched like a cat and stood up and I came out of my shallow trance and followed her.

“Get what I mean about a powerful place?” she said.

“Yes”.

“Maybe some other place‘ll be more powerful for you, though.”

“Is that yoga?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, I got it from a book”, she said.

I sat quietly for a while, torn between wanting to be quiet and the male instinct to keep talking to a woman for fear she might lose interest. I tried humour.

“What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?” She didn’t respond to that. As soon as the words were out I knew they were the wrong words in the wrong place at the wrong time. I picked up a twig and started peeling off the bark, awkwardly. I tried sanity.

“I mean, how long have you been here?”

“A couple of years, I reckon?” she calculated, “more ‘n two years.”

“What did you do before that?”

“I were a Zen monk.”

“A Zen monk?” I said, “I’ve never met a real Zen monk!” She looked embarrassed, “Well, I don’t know how real it were. I went to America to live in a pucker monastery, so called. It’s become right trendy lately, a fashion item, almost.”

I told her a lot of my friends at university had been interested in Zen. There was one guy with a huge beard and so much hair on his chest he could have pushed it up top and used it as a spare haircut. The word went round he was living on satori. His speciality was lying on his back making enigmatic pronouncements. We read Herrigel and DT Suzuki. John Cage used to tell stories about Dr Suzuki, each story took exactly one minute no matter how long, so some of them were told very fast and some of them were told very slow. I started to tell her the one about a man who goes to the dentist and won’t take his jacket off because he has a hole in his shirt, but she knew it.

“And the dentist says I have a hole in my sock and if you like I’ll take my shoes off”.

“That’s the one.”

“Some of Suzuki’s books were alright, though.”

“I agree. I read them. A lot of us read them.” She went on with her story. “The place I went to had imported a right strict kind of Japanese Zen, lots of different grades, lots of chants to learn in Japanese, lots of rituals, a grand panjandrum, all that stuff. The monastery were beautiful, grounds went to hundreds of acres, temple buildings no expense spared wi’ fitted black bamboo tiles all arranged so as to give a perfect simulation of poverty and rural life. At first it were romantic, all those gongs and rituals and foreign words, but as time went by I used to think if words have no meaning why use them? Don’t we have enough words in our own language that these monks have to use Hindu words with no idea what they mean?”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, I said.

“What’s that?”

“Wittgenstein. From the Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus.”

“Whew, what a name for a book! What was it, tractors lolloping possumus?”

“Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus. I think it was a joke, it’s hard to tell with Wittgenstein. He was a schoolteacher for eight years, but then he pulled some kid’s ears and had to give it up.”

“Quite right too. Can’t have ears pulled.”

“He inherited a fortune and gave it away to good causes. Go on with your story, though. You were saying, these monks …”

“Those monks. Hah, I stuck it for two years. But it weren’t what I thought it would be. I wanted an alternative to t‘ rat race, but it was just a rat race in miniature”,

“A mouse race?”

“A mouse race describes it. People weren’t there because they wanted out of self-delusion, they were there because they thought they would have a flash and become Einsteins without putting their brains into gear. Even if they had a flash it didn’t make them any less daft. I started to find the whole thing creepy. In the end I piled up my robes in t’ middle of yard, set fire to the lot and walked out.”

“Wow.”

“It was miles too dramatic, and a breach of fire regulations to boot”, she laughed. “The next thing I heard the abbot was back in Japan and an American had tekken over.”

“But you didn’t go back?”

“The Yank was even worse. I knew him of old. He got in because he was a fundraiser. Thick as two thieves with business and t’ military.”

“So how did you end up here?”

“Well, I came back to England to work for a medical firm. Then I met someone I’d known from over the pond, she’d come with the idea of trying this pebble soup.”

“Pebble soup?”

“That’s what the old man calls it.” She could see I was curious but she didn’t go on. After a pause for thought she told me I should ask Wei Lang about it, she said he could explain it better than she could.

Then she left me and I wandered alone for a while. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d walked amongst trees.

**

I woke to the sound of a gong being banged in the courtyard. For a moment I wondered where I was and why the air was so white. Then I looked up and saw the sheets hung over the window and it came back to me. I pulled on my clothes and went downstairs.

At the foot of the stairs I met Ariel coming in, he told me that the gong meant food in half an hour. I walked out into the courtyard. A girl passed me and went into the barn. I looked in the door, a couple of kids were laying eating irons on the table so I didn’t go in. As I loitered by the door Brig came through the gate.

“Hodge.”

“Hi.”

“Ariel asked me to take care of you.”

“Take care of me?”

“Show you the ropes,” she said.

“Oh”, I said.

“Is there owt you need while you’re here?”

“Coffee.”

“We can’t use t’ kitchen just now”, she said, “Maybe you could get a kettle in your room?” That seemed like a good idea. “We’ll talk to Ariel about it”, she said. A trickle of people had started to appear in the courtyard and one or two went into the barn.

“Come in and sit thysen down, it’s about supper time”, she said. I followed her in. There were a couple of boys at the table, one of them reading a book.

“What’s the book?” I asked. He raised his eyes and gave me a strange look, but said nothing. Then he showed me the cover. An old “Whole Earth Catalogue.” Brig leaned over, “We don’t natter during meals. Afterwards mebbe, but not while we’re eating,” she whispered. Nobody was eating yet, but I understood her to mean I should shut up, so I did. The room soon filled up with kids until almost every place was taken. It wasn’t completely quiet, there were odd whisperings going on, but not what you’d call conversation. I was clearly the oldest person there by some margin, no sign of Wei Lang, when Russell Platt walked in. He saw me instantly and waved. There was no place to sit beside me, but he came over and whispered, “When did you get here?”

“Today.”

“Talk to you later,” he slapped my shoulder and went and found a free seat.

Dinner was pretty good, there were two big cheese and onion pies and potatoes and cabbage followed by oranges for anyone who wanted one, and a large pot of tea. I tried to help clear the dishes, but Brig insisted I sat down. Russell came over and sat with us.

“I’d kill for a coffee”, I whispered.

“No killing allowed”, he whispered back.

“You can talk now”, said Brig, in a normal kind of voice. She said she’d try and help me find coffee when the kitchen had quietened down a bit. I asked them why they didn’t talk at mealtimes.

“Because we all eat together and some folk don’t like it”, said Brig. “So we agreed no talking at mealtimes. After supper people sometimes come in here for a natter”. Russell asked me when I had arrived and asked me about Geoffrey and I told him as much as I could. He said he was living in a hut up in the woods. I asked him if he was anywhere near the cabin I had seen, Howard’s cabin. He laughed.

“It is that cabin. I am Howard.”

“Oh.” That was a good start, I didn’t even know the guy’s name.

While we were talking the table was cleared and wiped and most of the diners left but a couple stayed and a couple of other people came in. A young black guy came over and sat next to us.

“Hey, man”, he said, “what you here for?”

“Here for a break”, I said.

“I’m Joel”, he said, and stretched out a hand. I went to shake it but it turned into a set of knuckles, so I closed my hand and we tapped knuckles. It seemed like telepathy.

“Doing Taiji with us?” he asked.

“Taiji?”

“Every morning.”

“I don’t know, I might.” I’d done a bit of karate when I was a teenager but I had no idea about Taiji.

Joel stood up and placed himself in the space between the end of the table and the gable and started doing a very slow and elaborate form. It was calming but a bit ragged and I found it distracting. His whole body seemed to go baggy like a plus sized suit on a very thin man. Fluid and relaxed. I think he was performing in half voice.

“Does everyone do Taiji?” I asked Brig.

“No, but everyone does summat”, she said. “This isn’t Butlin’s.”

“You’d better talk to the old man about it”, Russell interjected.

“I’d love to, but he seems to have gone awol.”

“He’s out on his bike, he’ll be back later. He’ll definitely be here tomorrow. Come up to my cabin later. We can talk.”

The evening was already drawing in when I got to Russell's cabin. There was a soft white glow in the window. I knocked and there was a pause, the sound of a chair being pushed back. Russell opened the door and invited me in. His jacket was draped over the chair by the desk, so I sat in the only other place, on the bed.

"Howard, I owe you an apology", I said.

"How so?"

"All this time I've been calling you Russell, I've no idea where I got that from." He smiled, "I am Russell, but the kids here call me Howard, because I hide up here and don’t come out much."

"Oh."

“As in Howard Hughes.”

“Ah.”

"People tend to get nicknames here, I daresay you'll have one soon enough. Like that girl you were with today."

"Brig?"

"They call her that because she comes from Brighouse."

"I gathered she was from the north."

"She didn't talk like that when she came here, though. She had a very proper Oxbridge way of speech. Then the old man found out she was from Yorkshire and got her talking like that, now she's become a fanatic, she's got books on it, Yorkshire dialect."

"I like it. Doesn't bother me."

"She calls it finding her roots. Well, she’d found her roots alright now, next thing she’ll have leaves coming out of her fingers. Then the old man discovered I'm from Scotland and he wanted me to wear a kilt and say och aye hootsmon there’s a moose loose aboot this hoose, but – well if you know anything about kilts you can guess where I told him to stick that."

"What about him, where's he from? China, obviously."

"I'm not too sure, south China, I think, but he went to University in the States and moved over there to live. "

When you have to admit you're not sure if you know someone’s name then you can't really know that person all that well. I really didn't know Russell well at all. But other than him I knew nobody so I guess he became a kind of life raft for me in this ocean of strangeness. Because I did think the place was strange.

“Brig kept talking about pebble soup.” I thought maybe I could start the conversation there.

“There’s an old story about a traveller who has no food so he lights a fire and puts water on to boil with a pebble in it. A passer by comes and asks what he's making and he says pebble soup and the passer by says why not put a leek in and gives him a leek, then someone else comes on the way to market and asks what he's making and he says pebble soup so this person gives him a potato. And in the end after many more contributions he takes out the stone and he has soup.”

“What does that have to do with this place?”

“Wei Lang calls it pebble soup Zen. He says we have to start with pure water and see what people want to put in it. He says there’s no use bringing cooked soup from Japan because people here won’t be able to eat it and even if they do it will make them sick.”

“So where’s the water?”

“The mountain spring. Just put a few people on a mountain and live in a simple way, manual labour, few distractions, maybe some communal thing every day like group meditation. Wait and see what comes. What starts as water slowly become soup. The question is, what can you bring to put in the pebble soup?”

This innocent question suddenly seemed like a huge demand. In my tired state, with my senses rocking from the regular swaying of the ferry, it sank onto my shoulders like the burden of Atlas. I sighed and leaned on my knees with my head in my hands.

“I mean, that’s the question to look at, not to be answered now”, he said, seeing my dismay.

“Well, thank goodness for that”, I said.

“You’re not here to hurt yourself”, he said, “finding your own strength should be a joyful thing.”

My eyes wandered around the room and up to the desk where I found the source of the soft white light. An oil lamp with a tall chimney was burning with a lucid white glow. On the other side of the desk was a bottle of whiskey.

“Want a drop of whiskey?” he said.

“I was looking at the oil lamp.”

“It’s an old Aladdin lamp”, he said. “It has a mica mantle, if you adjust them right they don’t smell at all.”

I stood up and walked over for a better look. On closer viewing I could see that the flames shimmering beneath the glowing mantle were blue and came from a circular wick arranged around a flame spreader. The hot gas rising from the glass was clean, though there was a sooty circle on the pine ceiling above it.

“But you’ll have a drop of whiskey?”

I hesitated. “You look like you need one.” I nodded. He got up and fetched two glasses out from a box under the bed and uncorked the whiskey. It actually had a cork so it must have been half decent. He poured two generous shots and then recorked the bottle and put it back on the desk.

“How do you take it?” he asked, “I’ve water or … or air.”

“Straight, as it comes from the cow.”

We clinked glasses and drank a toast to pebble soup.

“Don’t tell those kids down there I had whiskey up here”, he said.

“Why, isn’t it allowed?” it seemed like the kind of place that whiskey might not be allowed.

“Not really allowed, no. But he doesn’t care what I do up here.”

I asked him if he went down to the barn at mealtimes and he said not usually. He had a Calor burner and could make hot drinks and vegetable stew.

“Why did you come down today?”

“I came to find you”, he said. “Wei Lang asked me to butter your paws.”

“Butter my paws?”

“More whiskey?” When the second glass is poured that’s when you start eyeing the bottle and wondering how far the evening’s going to go. The bottle was wonderfully full and the night was young.

“Where is Wei Lang, anyway?” I said. I was feeling more and more curious about him, I had after all only met him the once.

“He went off on his bike and he probably won’t be back tonight”, said Russell.

“Where does he go?”

“Who knows, who cares”, he said. “But let me explain something about Wei Lang. He’s not someone you have long conversations with. If you want explanations, about this place, about the farm, about the kitchen, you’re better off talking to me or to Ariel or even that ‘ey up how’s thysen woman, anyone really, getting hard information out of the old man is like getting blood out of a stone.”

“I noticed his English didn’t seem too good.”

“His English is perfectly good when he wants it to be. But he turns it off when it suits him and starts speaking Chinglish and quoting Confucius and all that sort of stuff. When he has something to say to you, he’ll say it all right, don’t you worry.” That sounded slightly menacing. Probably Russell didn’t noticed my unease because he went on to say something along the lines of Wei Lang being the pebble in the soup rather than the flavour and me having to provide that myself. I forget his exact words, my head was starting to swim with the whiskey.

“But you talk to him, right?” I managed to say. I was trying to keep the conversation afloat, grasping at straws.

“I have talked to him, and one way or another I’ve managed to get an idea of where he’s coming from”, he said. “But that took a long time.”

“Oh”, I said, looking down despondently into my glass which was now empty again. Russell filled me up.

“Go a bit slow on that stuff”, he said.

“Right.” I always had the habit of wolfing things down. What were things for if not to be wolfed? “Right”, I said, again, absent-mindedly turning the glass.

“What are you here for, Hodge?” he asked, finally. This was the crux of the meeting. This had to be teased out of me, expressed.

“Are you my shrink, then?” I said, “should I lie on the coach, er the couch?” My speech now becoming ever so slightly slurred.

“Nothing like that. This is for you. If the old man was here he’d probably say something like a journey of a thousand miles starts with what’s under your foot.”

“But he’s not here.”

“Right.”

I stared into my glass and told him my life had become boring and meaningless. I was fed up with my work. My family life was a mess. In short, I said, I didn't feel that anything in my life, culture or education had prepared me for this painful experience I was going through, which was probably the onset of old age.

“The old man says that old age is mostly a mental disease”, Russell replied, “as we get older the mind becomes silted up with disappointments, prejudice and trauma. If we’re smart we try and do something about it.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as coming to a place like this, maybe.”

I lifted my glass to take a sip, then remembered the injunction to slow down a bit, so instead I held it towards the Aladdin lamp and peered through the amber fluid at the mantle’s glow. Brown stars and constellations spread within the glass. Somewhere a plasticine man flattened himself and slithered under a door. I blinked and looked at the floor.

“I always though it was a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, I said, for want of anything better.

“It’s usually said that way”, he said, “but Wei Lang says that’s wrong.”

“Oh.”

“He’s very particular about his Chinese proverbs.”

“I suppose he would be, being Chinese.”

“Going anywhere starts from where you are.”

“I suppose. I mean, you could hardly start from anywhere else, could you?”

“You’d have to be mad to try.”

“Or Irish”,

“Or Irish.”

“So what about you, why did you come here?”

“A man wants to change things, but first he has to live a sane life. Like the Chinese say, good health is the capital of the revolution. But what happens if living a sane life leads him to the conclusion things can’t be changed?”

“You’ve lost me.”

“I’m not explaining myself very well. I met Wei Lang, and I got interested in his project. I don’t know if it has any chance of succeeding, but, well I’ve got to be doing something and this fits in with the other thing I want to do, with the writing. Thoreau said there are philosophy professors but no philosophers. Living like this, in a way that’s different, well, it makes me feel like a philosopher in a small kind of way.”

“You keep talking about Wei Lang’s project, but what the hell is it? Is this some kind of spiritual health farm? I have no idea, I came here because it seemed to do Geoffrey good.”

He sat back in his chair and looked doubtfully at me for a moment.

“I can give you the long version or the short version”, he said, “if you’re tired it might be best to leave this till another day.”

He’d got my attention now, I told him he’d better tell me everything otherwise there’s no way I would ever get to sleep. He noticed my glass was empty and offered more whiskey. I have never been known to say no.

“In a nutshell, our mechanised world has driven itself into the buffers. We’ve gained the whole world but we’ve lost our soul. And civilizations grow like flowers and plants grow, they come out of the bud, they bloom, they put out more and more complex shoots till finally the petals drop and they return to the seed. In human life as in forest life, things go back into the ground and new things come up. But this cycle of destruction and renewal is painful for us humans. And now we’re in a cycle of growing beyond our strength, which ends in destruction.

Maybe we can go around with the clippers branch by overgrown branch pruning here and there but we can’t turn back the clock. There’s no point in moral re-armament because it just lead to conflict and repression. But what we can do is create spaces where a saner life is established. Within a limited space, with a limited set of rules, men and woman can come and experience a saner kind of existence. And they can take some of that sanity with them when they leave.”

“What’s the point of that, exactly?”

“Maybe some of it rubs off on people they come into contact with. Maybe more people get interested in coming to a place like this.”

“I suppose so.”

“You said yourself that it was Geoffrey who made you interested in coming here.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And why was that?”

“There was a change in him, and in his music making.”

“Well, there, you see.”

“But what does this place have to do with music?”

“Nothing. It has to do with you, it has to do with Geoffrey, it has to do with whatever you have to bring, whatever you yourself bring to the pebble soup.”

“I tried to get Geoffrey to talk about what happened to him, but he wouldn’t.”

“It’s good that he wouldn’t. Because if he did you might expect the same thing yourself. But it’s never the same. A lot of people go to retreat centres, places like this or Buddhist places or Christian places, and they go hoping for a special experience, a word from God or a flash from the void. And if they get what they want they think the retreat was a big success and they imagine themselves to have become better people, but they never get beyond thinking

of their own salvation. It’s not about your own salvation. It’s an influence. It’s a gift you give to mother nature, not something she gives you. It’s a tree in the desert than anyone can take shade beneath and whose perfume spreads over the sands. What any one person experiences is irrelevant. Well, except to that person I suppose.”

“What does it do for you?” I couldn’t resist asking, though he had just as much as told me that it would be pointless to say. But he did tell me. He sat back and pondered for a couple of minutes, I could see he was trying to find the right words and it wasn’t going to be easy.

“I’m a literary man. The Irish would say a scholar and a gentleman, though I’m not that deep a scholar and not that polite a gentleman come to that. But literature matters to me, music and the arts matter to me, and this place gives me perspective. There’s a viewpoint that says all judgements are relative, that every age produces its own art and all masterpieces are equal but different, but from the point of view of cultural evolution, you can see another pattern, one of development, flowering and decay. Look, you like music, don’t you? You managed Geoffrey, you must like music. What’s your favourite piece of music?”

“Do you mean my favourite piece of music I can listen to?”

“Of course. What else would I mean?”

“Because my favourite piece of music of all time is Faure’s Requiem, but I can’t actually listen to it, or at least hardly ever and only when I'm feeling very strong. But other than that I would have to say Kreisleriana.”

“It’s interesting you should say that, because I think Schumann and Brahms have a very special place in music”, he said. “I can see parallels in music and literature; in music, Bach forged the language for the classical and romantic composers and the music he wrote is second to none but it was Brahms who made use of that language in the D minor concerto to capture that exquisite moment when humanity stepped out of the shadow of the divinity, stripped naked in the face of the void. In literature that same moment comes in late Rilke, in the late fragments and elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. After that, there was good music and writing for sure, there were many people willing and able to pick up the tools that had been forged for us and use them skilfully, but there were never such moments of purity and truth again, it was all a falling away.”

“But there was plenty of great music written in the twentieth century, plenty of great poetry, surely. What about Eliot?”

“Eliot is more of a figurehead to me than a poet, there isn’t anything I would actually go to Eliot for that I wouldn’t rather find somewhere else. Owen surpassed him in compassion, Yeats beat him for prophetic wisdom. But if you want a single figure to nominate as a representative of poetry in this century then I guess Eliot will do. I think of him as the host at a vicar’s tea party, the vicarage belongs to Rilke, of course, but Eliot serves the tea.”

“What about Pound?”

“Pound? Pound is the car park attendant in a blue uniform and a peaked cap who directs Eliot carefully over the bridge of The Waste Land, then trips himself and falls into the bottomless pit of The Cantos.”

I laughed. It all seemed a bit oversimplified to me, I told him, it seemed to me that a lot of people wouldn’t agree, especially about Pound.

“For me a poet has to have some kind of particular human quality, some kind of magic. Compassion is probably the core of it. More than just skill, anyway. Pound had all the skill but his humanity was shrivelled. He appeals to literati, people who want to believe being a great poet is a personal achievement rather than a cosmic destiny. Who want to believe you can become a great poet sitting at a desk.”

I nodded obediently. The conversation was becoming too intense and I was already starting to feel drowsy.

“One for the road?” I nodded. He put a couple more fingers in my glass.

“So you think all this stuff and then what?” I felt I’d been railroaded onto an intellectual siding somewhere amongst a bunch of rotting trucks which didn’t belong in my century at all. “You just sit here and hone your ideas?”

He put his hands together and leaned forward, seemingly unsure as to how to answer me.

“Let me put it this way, the present springs from the past. To live creatively in the present, to think creatively, to write creatively, you have to pull the threads of the past together, that clear perspective of the past, and what it means, and particularly what it means to you, is what’s under your foot when you start that journey of a thousand miles. And you start that journey every day.”

“That’s rather a poetic way of putting it”

“Maybe. But what’s under your foot, or someone else’s foot, won’t be the same as what’s under my foot. You have to do this for yourself.”

I tried to get him talking about his own projects, but he was evasive. He was still working on something about the Greeks, he said, but it wasn’t really an academic project and he seemed reluctant to talk about it. He said the more he talked about his projects the less likely they were to ever be finished and it was bad luck to talk about work in progress. Then he said he didn’t know whether the book was any use anyway but writing it gave him a reason for getting up in the morning, when he did get up, which wasn’t every day.

The mood of the evening was dispersing. As we had been talking it had become dark outside and the moon had come up. I had no idea of the time but I knew it was late and I knew I was completely exhausted. I got up to go.

“Thanks for the chat.” I said, “and the whiskey.”

“I should thank you”, he said. “Wei Lang bought the whiskey.”

“Wei Lang?”

“He said it would help us to talk. And apparently it did.”

“Oh. So my confusion was planned. Intellectual date rape no less.” He laughed.

“If so, you're not much good in bed. Come again some time. I’m usually here.”

“Thanks”, I got up. I was a little unsteady on my feet and had to support myself with a hand on the bedstead.

“The old man said to tell you he’ll back in a few days. I’ll let you know when he’s back.”

I opened my mouth to ask when that was likely to be, but felt slightly nauseous so I decided to leave it. I glided, swaying across the room and Russell let me out. As I moved hesitantly down the path towards the house I heard fluid splashing in the grass and looked back clumsily towards the door of the hut in time to see the surprising sight of Russell emptying the rest of the whiskey onto the grass.

XI

And so I entered on a new kind of life. Where the old life was all about doing things, with occasional breaks for reflection, the new life was all about reflection, its purpose was reflection and its whole intention was reflection. There were things to do, for sure, things that needed to be done were done and other work was done sometimes, I suspected, just for the sake of having some reason to get outdoors and moving.

The second day, after my evening with Russell, I was up a bit late and somewhat the worse for wear, but after that I settled to the routine of the farm. I joined in the morning meditation. We had group sitting in the mornings from Monday to Saturday. Everyone filed quietly into the hut leaving their shoes outside on the porch. Sometimes there was incense burning, other times not, I tried to work out the logic of why some days rather than others but I couldn’t see a pattern. We sat down on the cushions facing the walls of the hut. Someone would lead the meditation by ringing a small bell to start and end the session. Each session went on for about forty minutes. After the first session we went over the barn and had tea or coffee and digestive biscuits. Nobody spoke, most of us were half asleep. Then we filed back to the hut and sat for another two sessions with a five minute break in between. I soon worked out that there were fourteen people at the farm, though there was always at least one person missing dealing with things in the kitchen. Breakfast was porridge and fruit.

People in general weren’t talkative so I became taciturn myself. Ariel asked me to help him with some of the work around the farm, and I attached myself to him and became his general factotum. We worked on fencing an area that he intended to use for planting an orchard. The wild deer made it impossible to plant fruit trees without protection. We cut our own fence posts from a stand of lodgepole pine on the edge of the forestry. Lodgepoles are self-thinning, they compete for resources until the weaker trees die where they stand and have to be culled. In dry countries this kind of forest is especially vulnerable to fire because the dry trunks fall on their neighbours and spread fire to the living trees. In Ireland, as I soon discovered, risk of forest fire is less because the forest is usually drenched. “Dear Ma”, as the postcard has it, “we’ve been in Ireland for two weeks and it’s only rained twice, once for eight days and once for six.” Well, it wasn’t as bad as all that, but it certainly rained at least half the time.

When it wasn’t raining we dug footings and hammered in fence posts. The posts were fixed with a mixture of shale and cement which we mixed by hand in a wheelbarrow, a load at a time. When it was raining we worked in a lean-to workshop behind the barn. We cut the logs square using a circular saw powered by a tractor, cut firewood, serviced farm equipment. I learned how to clean and sharpen a chainsaw using an air hose to blow chunks of oily sawdust out of the mechanism and how to take the chain off and turn over the bar to keep the wear on the blade balanced, how to file the chain’s teeth at the right angle and how to check the depth of cut. Ariel wouldn’t let me use the saw itself, he said that if I cut my leg off he would get the blame. But I got plenty of experience as a lumberjack’s assistant. I learned how to gauge which way a tree was likely to fall and how to help it fall the way you wanted it to by shaping the cut. I also learned the hard way that trees have a mind of their own and don’t always do what you want them to do, that sometimes the centre of gravity isn’t where you think it is and a tree will fall in an unexpected way, or twist and kick at the last moment, or trap the chainsaw and refuse to either budge or give up the saw.

During these hours of labour there was very little talking. If I tried to ask about the farm, sometimes I would get a cursory answer, sometimes just a grunt. Ariel always gave the impression of concentrating very hard on his private thoughts and not welcoming intrusions. A couple of times I asked him if Wei Lang was back, but he said no. There was no sign of Russell. I saw Brig sometimes, at meals, but she usually rushed off immediately after we had eaten. I wandered up to Russell’s cabin one time but there was no sign of him. Then one day, after about a week of this, Ariel volunteered some information.

“Apparently he’s gone to France.”

“Who?”

“Wei Lang.”

“I thought he’d gone out on his bike.”

“He has, he went out on his bike, and he went to France.” So that was that. Nobody had any indication when he would be back.

The labouring work was done in the mornings, afternoons people did different things. There was a small Taiji class that Joel ran, I used to watch them sometimes but I wasn’t tempted myself. I got into the habit of taking a walk. I would usually walk up towards the wood where the cabins were, giving Russell’s cabin a wide berth so as not to disturb him, then sometimes I would go to the place Brig had showed me, sometimes I would go to the stream and sit and watch the peaty flow, which was always particularly spectacular after a spell of heavy rain when the water would be brown and frothy and churn round the bends and leap over the stones.

One fine afternoon when there was nothing much to do I decided to take a really good long walk to nowhere in particular. I left the farm, and walked further on up the hill, then took a minor road towards what looked like a small wood. I was stirred by the conversion I had had with Russell when I arrived. Even thought the things he was saying didn’t really connect with my own problems, he made me concentrate my mind on things which I usually neglected or shied away from. I had an acute sense of the foreshortening of time, of the way so many things I took for granted, the motor car, the telephone, air travel, antibiotics, had all appeared seemingly from nowhere in the last hundred years, of the fact that in the scale of time, even the relatively brief flash of human time, this was such a tiny sliver of history that it would be barely visible on a graph, yet this tiny sliver of history had turned us upside down completely, we had wandered into the modern age as dreamers and learned to dream that things had been this way forever and that things would always be this way, getting better and better. We had surrendered ourselves, against the evidence that our senses gave us of the unparalleled destructiveness of the modern era, to a fake dream of progress, of endlessly improving medical science (for the privileged few), of endlessly improving technology (for the privileged few), yet for all we knew no phenomenon like modern man had ever existed before, anywhere, in this or any other cosmos, and for all we knew our present life might be nothing but an unstable instant, a puff of mist breathed on the cold window of existence, a brief aberration soon to vanish into the mists of eternity. I wandered on like this, watching my feet fall one in front of the other, mind full of wild speculations, images, faces, places, things that were and things that might have been, my own familiar chorus of ghosts. Always when I walked like this the ghosts nagged and pestered but today I felt warmer towards them than usual, as though it were my birthday and instead of threatening me they had come to bring gifts. When I got to the wood I followed a track through the trees until I came out into a large sloping meadow with a group of trees in the centre. The grass had been cut, or recently cropped by sheep (though I couldn't see any), but a moat of longer grass and weeds surrounded the little group of trees giving the impression of an island. The effect was so pleasing that I decided to sit down and contemplate it for a while. However, when I started to do my breathing exercise my attention shifted from the trees to the grass a few feet in front of my face. I experienced a feeling of whiteness and light which was gently intoxicating and made me want to go on and on sitting there. I lost my sense of time, and with every round of breathing I found my pleasure was enhanced and I wanted to go deeper. Eventually, I had the sensation that it was getting dark. I let go the focus of my gaze and looked into the centre of the field. A gentle breeze had blown up, and the grass was just long enough to move with the breeze in ripples like a lake. The ripples seemed to move around and around the island which sat in its stillness like a tropical oasis tinged with autumn brown. For a moment I had an uncanny sensation of an image drawn up from childhood, of a sense of what a tree can mean to a child, of the way the fineness of a tree's branches trace and mirror the complexities of human eyesight and perception, of the way a tree can trap eternity in its leaves and hold it there, filtering the light of a thousand sunsets into a single blade of light. Then I blinked and the image was gone. I stood up and found that I was trembling slightly. Then my legs gave way under me and I fell into the grass. Whilst I had been sitting in the grass, my right leg had gone to sleep. I rubbed it back into life. Tears welled up and I felt slightly choked with a melancholy which I couldn’t account for. As soon as my leg was functional I stood up and walked back into the wood. In the fading light it was becoming difficult to see where I was going, and at one point I caught my hair in a bush. When I pulled it out, I was scratched on my right cheek and beside my right eye and I had bits of twig sticking in my hair. At this point my melancholy became unbearable and I stopped and looked up at the trees. For one moment I had the overwhelming feeling that I had been walking through this wood with the twigs in my hair since the beginning of time and that the trees were crying to me with the voices of my ancestors that I had become their journey since they could journey no more. I envisaged them, not gone, but fixed in some region of perpetuity, neither existent nor non-existent, no longer conscious but somehow never erased. The words of the requiem mass flooded across my mind

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis

When I got back to the farm it was just starting to get dark. As I walked into the field above the house I heard the sound of the dinner gong, and as I looked down towards the source of the sound my eye picked up the movement of a solitary figure coming up the drive pushing a bicycle. As I noticed him he seemed to stop. He stood for a moment, and there seemed to be an extraordinary stillness in that standing, and I had a brief hallucination that he was covered by a cone of gold, like one of those conical Chinese cooley hats you see in films like Miss Saigon. Although he didn't look towards me, I was convinved he had seen me. Then he pushed his bike behind the house and disappeared. Wei Lang was back.

I assumed he would be resting, so I decided to put off going to seek him out till the following day, but while we were at dinner, Russell came down and told me Wei Lang had asked me to go round to his study later in the evening. After dinner I helped clear the table and wash dishes, then I went round and found his study at the back of the house on the ground floor. Through the window there was a moonlit view of the chicken coop and a field which sloped gently away towards some woodland behind. There was an old vellum covered desk with a long-stemmed tobacco pipe lying on it. The walls of the room were lined with bookcases. There were various masks hanging around the walls, Beijing opera masks, a couple of carved wooden masks, and on the top of one of the shelves there was a large papier-mâché dragon mask which looked like the kind of thing they use in Chinatown for the dragon dance at Chinese New Year. Wei-Lang and Russell were in dressing gowns sitting at a low table playing Go. They looked up as I entered the study.

“So, you got here?” said Wei Lang.

“Yes. I got here.”

“Look around?” he asked.

"A bit. Brig showed me round.”

“Brig?” he looked at Russell.

“The monk from afar.”

“Oh, Brighouse.”

Wei Lang put a white stone on the board. Russell blinked.

“I like the dragon", I said.

Wei Lang suddenly seemed to notice me. He turned and looked at me over his half moon glasses.

“Have a cup of tea?” he said, indicating the desk.

There was a teapot on the desk and spare cups. I poured for myself and watched as they completed the game. I had no idea what they were doing. After they finished they held a post mortem. Wei-Lang pointed to groups of stones as he talked.

“That move was probing move. I play that way so I can see how you going to play. When you answer there I know you not so interested in territory at top. But you should have played a forcing move here, then you could have played here and here keeping initiative. Playing in corner there very bad.”

“I wanted to play here, but it’s illegal, isn’t it?”

“In Japanese rules, yes. In Chinese rules no. In Chinese rules legal. But still not a good move.”

“There are different rules?” I said.

“Go like a lot of Japanese things, originally from China. Japanese like to take Chinese things and tidy up. In Chinese rules you can have draw, in Japanese rules no draw possible.”

“It looks complicated”, I said.

“Not complicated. Basic rules very simple. From simple rules comes great complexity. Just like life, like universe, I think.” Just then Puffin came in the half open door and strutted across the kitchen with his tail in the air. He jumped up on Wei-Lang’s lap and started to purr like two moths making love in a megaphone.

“Not a good moment, kitty”, said Wei-Lang. “Up sticks, skedaddle”. He pitched the cat off his knee and stood up and stretched. Then he started picking out the black and white stones and putting them back in the wooden bowls they had come from.

I looked along the rows of books. Nothing was arranged either by subject or author. There were Chinese books dotted here and there, randomly mixed with tracts on particle physics and astronomy. There were books by Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Feynman and other physicists. There were several books on quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics. Stuck amongst them were poems; Dante, Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Kathleen Raine, Rilke, Blake were poets that I knew something about. Others were unfamiliar. There were philosophy books as well, in particular a lot of translated Greek philosophy, also the empiricists, Hume and Locke were well represented, and Schopenhauer, Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" was there and also at least one volume of Hegel. There were quite a lot of books by, and about Freud and some by Jung and other psychoanalysts like Fromm and Melanie Klein.

Wei-Lang watched patiently while I took all this in.

“You finally escape?” he said, without looking at me.

“I guess so”

“How you get away?”

“Just opened a door and walked through.”

“Not so hard then?” he said. I looked at Russell, not sure where this train of thought was leading.

“Hodge is a good family man”, said Russell, “not like the surplus baby boomers you usually get here.”

“I’m not that good a family man”, I protested. “My family is falling apart.”

“Families falling apart everywhere,” said the old man. “Russell says you know about Parmenides?”

“Yes, I mean, not really, we have a hacker called Parmenides who gets into our computers”. He looked at Russell then he looked back at me. He seemed disappointed about something.

“So, what you plan to do here?” he said, finally.

I wasn’t sure how to answer, I had been doing some work on fencing the orchard, so I mentioned that.

“I can work on the farm, outdoor work does me good.”

“We have plenty of odd jobs if you want them, but what else?”

“I don’t think Hodge knows anything about how this place works”, said Russell.

Russell explained to me that people staying on the farm generally divided their time between some project of their own and helping with the gardening or building or other odd jobs.

“What gave you idea of coming here?” Wei Lang asked me.

“Geoffrey suggested it.”

“You know Geoffrey?”

“I’m his agent, at least, I was his agent.”

“Good businessman then? Maybe you can help us with the business side?” I laughed. “I’m the world’s worst businessman,” I said.

Then I turned Wei Lang’s question around and asked him why he had come to this part of the world.

“I retired,” he told me, “but not want to die. Many people say when you retire you just pack up living and go down the hill. So I bought this place. I want to make something different.”

“Different from what?”

“From everything. I want to return to beginnings. I want to make pebble soup.”

“Brig told me about pebble soup, “

“Brig?” he said. I got the impression he knew very well who she was. It was some sort of game he played with Russell.

“The monk from afar”, said Russell.

“Ah, Brighouse,” he said.

“Brighouse isn’t that far,” I put in.

“Huh,” he shrugged. “Chinese saying, everyone believe monks from afar.” I didn’t really get what he was driving at. “So why pebble soup?”

“Pebble soup Zen,” said Wei Lang. “Like a kind of medicine. I always had the idea our culture is sick. Our culture always move away from the centre, always expand, like a sick plant that blooms too soon, like a sick mushroom that eats its own gills and turns to slime.”

“When you explained it to me it was weedkiller or something”, Russell put in.

“Weedkiller, yes, there are some weedkiller that make weed grow too fast, weed grow so fast it fall over and die. Just this weedkiller, free money, toys, things, goods, convenient things, like weedkiller, we think we are growing but all we are doing is losing our centre, which is dying. Can’t go on like this, dying.”

“So where does pebble soup come in?” I said.

“I always thought Zen could be good medicine for sick culture. Zen talk about unity of things, about source of life, self-reliance. But a big problem because so many people go to Japan and come back with Japanese robes and Japanese books and Japanese words and Japanese, we, we Chinese know Japanese very brutal people. These people set up monasteries like military camps, brainwash kids, make them how say ketou?”

“Kowtow”, said Russell.

“Kowtow to grand master, then grand master go to big business and ask for money to make kids placid and obedient and grand master get very rich. This kind of business is repulsive to any educated people. So educated people stay away. So medicine don’t take. Like a transplant that don’t take. Problem is, these people come with a mind that say ‘we know everything, we have grand wisdom, you can come and sit by my feet and I will give my grand wisdom to you’ but really those people mostly very, how say, medium?”

“Mediocre”, said Russell.

“Mediocre, mediocre people and so this idea never catch on, maybe popular for a while, maybe get a few members but in end can only crash because it just poz, poz …”

“Ponzi scheme”, said Russell. “He means a psychological ponzi scheme. Fuck all in it.”

“Fuck all, exactly, in end blind lead blind down alley fuck all. My idea is just a place where there is simple life, simple practice, maybe morning sitting so everyone can be together, no special reason, no theory, no fairy story, no grand master who knows everything. Then maybe people will come and bring their knowledge. Because your culture is a great culture, many beautiful things, fine poets and scientists and thinkers. We hope those things can come here and be thrown in our soup, we hope some of those things can fly in our soup and add spice to our soup. We don’t know all the answers, maybe we don’t know any answers. So, pebble soup Zen. You understand a bit, Mr Hodge?”

“I think so. I’m beginning to.”

“When three people together one must be my teacher.”

“What?”

“A saying of Confucius, same as Chinese saying beyond the mountain there is a mountain beyond the sky there is a sky. What you going to put in our soup?”

I was put on the spot by this, but before I could attempt an answer Wei Lang laughed and slapped the table:

“This is not a matter for one morning and one evening.”

“There is one thing I wanted to ask you”, I said.

“So, ask”

“What do those Chinese characters say, the ones written over the door of the hut?”

“Another saying of Confucius. ‘What you know you know, what you don’t know you don’t know’”.

“Mm.” said Russell, “I always wanted to ask you what that said.”

“Confucius is very powerful”, said Wei Lang. “Foreigners think Confucius boring because twenty five centuries ago he think like modern person already.”

“More tea, vicar?” Russell picked up the teapot and filled Wei Lang’s cup. I finally managed to take a look at the teapot. It was a ridiculous novelty teapot made in the shape and colour of an old police box.

“Where the hell did you get the Tardis teapot?” I said. Wei Lang laughed.

“Tiny Tim gave it to me.”

“Tiny Tim, who had my room?” Russell nodded.

“Tim. Always saying universe so big I am so small, so I call him Tiny Tim.”

“But the universe is big, it’s huge compared to us”, I said.

“Just a policeman out”, said Wei Lang. I looked at him curiously.

“He means a cop out”, Russell explained.

“Cop out. Come here, Hodge, I want to show you something.” He stood up and walked to the door and picked up a walking stick. We walked out together and crossed the field by the chicken coop. Over the brow of the field the land sloped away in the direction of a lake. There was the outline of a trodden track. We followed it.

“One day maybe build an observatory. Smaller than meditation hut but more difficult. I want to get a telescope up here. Always wanted a telescope.”

“I know someone who made one.”, I told him.

“Maybe he make us one”, he said. We walked about halfway down the track. It was dark now, though after a moment my eyes adjusted to a hint of moonlight. Although there were still one or two wisps of cloud about most of the sky was clear and the star fields glittered like a jewelled hood within which the blinded Earth shifted restlessly like a hawk. I recognised Orion, which was then the only constellation that I knew.

"Look, stars!", said Wei-Lang.

"I'm looking."

"What do I know? Let's see. Look, there, that great W. Do you see it?".

“Yes.”

“Called Cassiopeia.” .

Wei-Lang pointed with his stick.

"And look there, the Pleiades, Seven Sisters. Cluster. See them?".

I followed the line of his stick and made them out.

"Star map oldest man made object on Earth. This object go back fifty thousand years. Like cosmic billboard. Look at constellations. Look at names of stars. Humans been leaving messages up there for fifty thousand years.”

He lowered his stick and gazed. Then he exhaled deeply and turned his face towards me.

"When you come here, which way you come. Did you come off main road and through village?"

"Yes. Through the village.".

"How far would you say village is?", he asked.

"About three miles I would guess".

"How you work that out?"

"It took us five minutes to drive it", I said, not quite clear where this line of questioning was leading. He stopped me and pointed to a bright star which was almost overhead.

"You know that star?"

"No."

"That star Polaris, the pole star. Before radio and all that stuff sailors use it to steer ships. Anglo Saxons called it the ship star. Looks small from here but actually many many brighter than Sun, distance from Earth three hundred sixty light years. You know what light year mean?"

"Its light takes three hundred and sixty years to reach us.".

"So, a long way?".

"I'd say so, yes".

"You don’t want to have to go there on your bicycle in fact?" I assumed he was teasing me, but the light was too dim for me to see the expression on his face.

"On my bicycle no", I said, by way of a non-committal answer, "but you should see my bicycle". He laughed.

“Suppose I give you my bicycle, with ten speed gear?”. I said nothing. I wasn’t at all sure where the conversation was going.

"Do you see what I say? Trouble is we fit one kind of scale to other kind of distance. We work out how long it take us to get there on bicycle, and when it turns out long time we throw hands up and say 'Oh! Oh! Universe so huge and I so small'. Do you see?".

"Maybe", I said, uncomfortably.

"Then think about this", he went on. "Even though you say universe so huge and all that, and stars so far, right this moment Polaris is touching you with its light".

He pushed his walking stick firmly into my side, just below the ribs.

"Can you get nearer than touching?"

I said I supposed not. I was losing his argument now, and the stick in my ribs felt uncomfortable. He took the stick away and put the tip back on the ground.

"When lost on ocean look at ship star. Then you know which way is North".

We stood together in silence for a while, but neither of us had anything left to say. He turned around and went back to the house. I stood for a while, then walked back to the house and up to the main road and over to the lake. There was hardly a breeze and the surface was calm enough to show an almost uninterrupted view of the heavens as clear as if in glass. I sat by the water and breathed deeply ten times. As I held my breath, the feeling of tension started to dissipate and was replaced by a feeling of lightness and stillness. I looked up and saw a shooting star crossing the sky, then another brighter than the first. I wished a wish so deep I had no words for it. I knew I had to learn about the stars.

**

There's more to the stars than meets the eye. Alcor, set midway in the handle of the plough, is a twin star. On a clear night you can see its companion Mizar with the naked eye. The red stars in the Northern Crown, a tiny little constellation bordering on Bootes, are actually luminous giants which periodically fade as they strain to blow off great shells of soot clogging their atmospheres. And the planets! With field glasses you can make out the moon Gannymede, dancing attendance upon the hulk of Jupiter, and the disc of Venus waxing and waning like a misty lunar pearl.

Over the next two months, every evening if the sky was clear I took a torch and a star chart and went out and looked at the sky. The Pleiades, Aldebaran, Betelgeuze and Rigel in Orion, Castor and Pollux in Gemini, Capella in Auriga, the brightest stars and the major constellations became friends to me. I learned to find Canis Major, home of Sirius, brightest star in the sky, revered Nile Star to the Egyptians, malevolent Dog Star, bringer of madness and plague for the ancient Greeks. Also in Wei Lang’s library were many works on astronomy and astrophysics, some far too mathematical for me, but some written for the layman, which I devoured voraciously. I read about the early pioneers of the telescope who sat in freezing observatories cataloguing the rich carpet of celestial bodies beyond reach of the naked eye. I read about the deaf-dumb prodigy John Goodricke, discoverer of Cepheid variables, who died at the age of twenty two from pneumonia from exposure at the telescope. I read about Edmund Halle, who predicted the reappearance of the comet which, after his death, humanity came to call by his name. I read, I gazed, I read. Every night, if the conditions were right, I spent at least an hour watching the stars. There seemed to be so much going on in that jewelled canopy, and yet all of it just a set of complex variations on a few simple physical laws. Within this mute, slow dance of galactic clockwork hydrogen and helium were being squeezed into tritium and boron, alpha particles were leaking across a loophole in a quantum band into carbon-12, the slow accretion of helium nuclei was building heavier and heavier elements, the heavier elements soaking up stray neutrons to become yet heavier still. The Earth, the Moon and I myself had all been forged in such a furnace, spewed out in the collapse of some main sequence star, recombined as our own sun, deity of ancient tribes, giver of light and life. The star field, quilt of wonder, cradle of paradox, each point of illumination so unimaginably distant yet touching us perpetually with fingers of light. Each friendly winking eye a fire-breathing dragon exhaling temperatures and pressures which could swallow a planet, yet germinating within its heart the seeds of life itself.

During this time I was happier than I had been for years. I soon settled into a routine. We had group sitting in the mornings from Monday to Saturday. After that we ate breakfast in silence and then I rested for half an hour and then went out and worked in the gardens, sometimes digging, sometimes putting up fences, sometimes other odd jobs. I found that usually I could identify things that needed doing and find jobs for myself, sometimes Ariel would find me jobs. Everyone washed their clothes by hand in plastic basins or tubs behind the barn. It didn't get the whites particularly white but as nobody was going to the opera, nobody cared. The feeling of life was very basic, very fluid, and there was a strange quality to the life there, that every so often the whole feeling and atmosphere would inexplicably change, as though the place had been shaken like a kaleidescope and a brand new pattern had suddenly formed in the mirrors.

I rarely saw Wei Lang, if I did catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye he would hurry away as though he was much to busy to pass the time of day, in fact I got the impression he was on the one hand observing me, spying on me even, and on the other hand avoiding me, or at any rate going out of his way not to speak to me. And that suited me fine, I had found a routine that worked for me, I had broken the stranglehold of the boredom of my routine working life and found myself again in an opening space. It was almost like being a child again, in some ways, everything being on the one hand relatively pointless and on the other hand somehow deeply satisfying all the same.

The really hard thing on the farm was to get a bath. Eating was easy, there was space outdoors to take a piss. There were a couple of WCs. But with fourteen people on the farm getting into the one bathroom when you needed to was very hit and miss. There was a notebook hanging by the bathroom door where you could write your name in advance and book the bath, but I was never good at thinking in advance and usually when I happened by the page was black with names and times as far as the eye could see. I had early on got myself a plastic basin and so I could give myself a basic wash, but nothing beats a real hot bath for getting into the nooks and crannies.

One day when I had failed to get in for almost two weeks and was almost mad with itching, I stood forlornly outside the bathroom door consulting the book. Someone was in there, I could smell lavender bath salts, and just as I was pondering whether or not to wait till the occupant emerged and jump ahead of the queue, a Chinese girl with a large towel and a rubber duck waltzed up and wished me the time of day and turned my plans to ashes. As I turned away, I saw Ariel watching me from the stairs.

“Want a bath?” he said. I nodded. He beckoned. I followed.

He took me up to the barn where the boys slept. There was a large stove in the corner, with a huge pan of water on it, and next to it the barrel I had noticed before. There were a couple of buckets, he took one and I took the other and I followed him down to the tap behind the house. When we had lugged the water back to the barn, Ariel deftly lifted the top off the barrel and put it on the ground, then poured both buckets of cold water in. It was dawning on me that he expected me to bathe myself in this thing.

“Will I fit?” I asked.

“Why not? I fit and you’re no bigger than me” he said. I peered into the barrel.

“What was in there before?” I asked, squeamishly.

“Whisky”, he said. “When we got it we cut the top off with a saw, we found half a bottle of quite decent whisky left inside.” I peered inside again, it looked black as though it might be lined with tar.

“It might be brewer’s tar or it might be charcoal, I’m not sure”, he said. “Anyway it’s clean.” He picked up a bucket and we went and fetched another couple of buckets of water.

“It’ll take a while to warm up”, he said, inspecting the water on the stove. I thanked him for his help and told him I could manage, but he sat down and started talking to me. He asked me how I had come to the farm and I told him my story, again, he asked me if I had talked to Wei Lang much and I said not much, he told me to be careful. I asked him what of but he clammed up. Then he asked me how I was getting on.

“It’s good. I have a routine here”, I said, “I like it, it’s calming. Every day I get up and think if I can go on like this for another week nothing else matters. No sails on the horizon. Good.”

“It’s the best life”, he said. “And I’ve tried a few.”

“So what did you do before you came here?”

“A whole bunch of things, odd jobs, squatting.”

“Squatting?” I’d known a few squatters when I lived in London, people who’d passed through the squats, perhaps he would have known some of them.

“I did a philosophy degree”, he said, “and the expectation was that I’d go into teaching, teach Liberal Studies in a tech or something. But I thought I don’t know anything, if I start teaching now I’ll just be recycling what I learned in college. I don’t know anything, I haven’t lived!”

“You might have been a good teacher”, I said.

“Huh.” He stood up and walked over and lifted the lid on the hot water pot, for a brief moment a vision flashed before me of him as a wizard, stirring a pot full of eye of newt and skin of toad. He put the lid back and sat down.

“I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was terrified of working men, I had no idea how to talk to them. So I decided the best thing I could do with myself was go out and work at an ordinary job, any old job. I was down in Norfolk. I worked as a lumberjack, as a loom cleaner, I worked in a pressed steel shop. And as I worked I thought, I concentrated my mind, I worked though my own middle class squeamishness about dirt, about labour, about calling a spade a spade, about sweat and piss and blood … and after seven years of that I was suddenly free of it, I could talk to anyone. I was free of my past. The silver spoon fell from my mouth.” He stopped talking and fell into his own thoughts. He leaned forward on his elbows and stared at the floor.

“And then you came here?” I asked him, to get him going again. He was starting to make sense now, I had always had a feeling that although he was a labourer up here he had some other kind of skeletons in his cupboard.

“Not straight away”, he said. “I got to the end of that thread. I’d gone as far as I could with it. I could have stayed in the factory knocking out radiators, but my learning would have stopped. I remember one weekend I went to Brighton and stood outside the Pavilion and there was a bird who had a nest in the stone arch I was standing under and every so often she would fall out of the nest, drop like a stone, but as she got near the ground her wings would open and she would float up and fly. And I thought there was a lesson in that, that if we let ourselves fall nature will bear us up, that like the bird, we're born equipped for freedom and that if I fell from the nest I would fly. So I left home. I walked right out of my skin.”

“And you came here?”

“Here? No. First I went to London. I wound up in a squat in King’s Cross. Jubilee Year, the height of the squatting movement. Most of it’s gone now, of course.”

“Thatcher killed it.”

“Thatcher killed it, ignorance killed it, apathy killed it, we killed it. Squatting wasn’t a particularly noble movement, if you could call it a movement, but it was a space for freedom. There were all kinds of people in those squats, locals, refugees from broken homes and boring little provincial towns, foreigners, Irish, New Zealanders, Italians and always lots of Americans coming and going. It was a strange community, it was self-selecting and a lot more organised than people give it credit for.”

“In what way?”

“Well, we had regular residents meetings to deal with problems like rubbish collection and services, we chased away pimps who were harassing the girls, we confronted antisocial people, I think we even kicked one family out. It was Wild West justice, for sure. But we helped each other. The interesting thing was the self-selecting thing, people were there because they had the nerve to walk out of their skins, once they were on the street with nowhere to go they would float down to the squat like water running into the valley. The people who said tell me when there’s room and I’ll leave home and come never came because the space was snapped up by people already on the street. It was a great period, a very creative space. There are less and less spaces like that now, spaces where people can live their own way without vicious pressure from the money men.”

“It sounds great, but it sounds like a bit of a pipedream. I mean, in the end we all have to sort out some kind of place to live.”

“Yes, but all this progress we have, these wonderful machines, they were supposed to do the work for us and make us richer so we could enjoy life more, have more leisure. But instead of that this so-called progress just makes slaves of us, drives up prices, makes us work harder and harder, take out bigger and bigger loans to keep up with it. People saw the squatting thing as something that didn’t concern them, just a bunch of kids getting something for nothing. But freedom is the spice of life. When you have a peppercorn of freedom the flavour spreads right through the soup.”

“How did you get to know Wei Lang?”

“Towards the end of the seventies it was obvious the squats were going to go, I’d been there for five years and like everything it was getting to be more of the same and it seemed like time for a change. A girl came to Midhope Street who'd been here; this was just starting up then. It sounded to me like a way of going on with the kind of communal living we’d known in the squat. So I came. That was fifteen years ago.”

He got up and inspected the water again. Then he fetched a bottle of soft soap and a tin mug down from a shelf and put it on the barrel top.

“You can use that to wash your hair”, he said, “hang your towel up here”, he indicated the back of a chair. I hung my towel up. He sat down again, evidently the water was not quite hot enough.

“Have you talked to Wei Lang much”, he said, eventually.

“Not much, just a few words when he got back from France.”

“What did he say?”

“Not a lot. Some stuff about stone soup.”

“He didn’t get on to his pet philosophical peeves then?”

“No, I don’t know, what are they?”

“It all has to do with knowledge, with what you can know and what you can’t know.”

“Oh yes, there was something about Confucius, about what you know you know or something.”

“That’s not exactly it”, he said. “How can I explain this. One of the things they made me look at in college was theory of knowledge. What you can know, and what’s beyond the scope of knowledge. No matter how powerful science becomes, it still needs the backing of philosophy to, how can I say this, to guard against going out of scope.” I said I thought I understood what he was saying, it sounded like metaphysics to me.

“The trouble is that science has become so powerful it's become a trap. We think the world is completely explained, and not only that, we the explanations are beyond us and only eggheads can understand them. And so we feel helpless, it sucks the all curiosity, all the colour out of our lives.” I could see that too, I said. I wasn’t sure what the answer was.

“But explanations don’t touch the thing itself, the cosmos itself is far bigger and stranger than our explanations can ever be. Wei Lang helped me to see that. That’s why I stay. I don’t want that kind of awareness to die. Like Haldane said, the universe is not only queerer than we conceive but queerer than we can conceive.”

“Doesn’t that open the door to every kind of flying spaghetti monster?” I said.

“No, because what’s beyond the scope of knowledge stays beyond the scope of knowledge. The rules of logic and evidence don’t change.”

He got up and checked the water again, then he took my towel off the chair back and used it to wrap round the handles of the pot, lifted the pot and poured the steaming hot water into the barrel.

“There. You can put your clothes on the chair” he said, hanging the towel back where it came from. I felt rather exposed, although there was nobody about.

“Thanks”, I said.

“Be careful”, he said.

“Careful?” Then he came out with something that had obviously been on his mind since he found me outside the bathroom.

“I was looking for you earlier to tell you the old man wants you to go to his study tonight.”

“Tonight? After dinner?”

“A bit later, maybe about ten.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know, he said something about a game of Go.” Then he left me and headed back towards the house. I undressed and got into the barrel.

Wei Lang was sitting beside his desk. The desk was illuminated by the light of an Aladdin lamp, of the same type I had seen in Russell’s room the first night I arrived. On the desk in front of him was an empty board. Wei Lang beckoned to me as I entered and indicated the empty chair in front of the desk.

“Know what this is?”

“Go.” I said.

“Ah, yes. Or Wei Chi, as we call in China. Know how many games there are?”

“How many games?”

“Possible games. How many possible games.”

“No”.

“Let’s say you take every atom in this universe, and put another universe inside it.”

“Is that possible?”

“No, I mean, I doubt it, but let’s say you did?”

“Oh, okay then.”

“And inside each of the atoms in each of those universes you put another whole universe.”

“Wow! And then what?”

“Then? Then there still wouldn’t be as many atoms in all of those universes as there are possible games of Wei Chi.”

“Oh. I mean, I have no idea what that means, but oh.”

“Oh. I don’t think I know what it means, either, except …”

I stared at the board blankly. I stared at his face. He seemed to be deep in thought, not looking at me directly at all.

“Go on?” I said.

“Except … except we can play a game or two, no fear of running out …”

Then he started to rock and roar with laughter and slap the table, I was just on the point of wondering whether I should call for medical assistance when he suddenly stopped laughing and sat up straight. He picked up two bowls of stones from somewhere under his desk and plonked them on the desktop, then pushed the black ones over to me.

“Play” he said, solemnly.

“Play?” I looked at him, beseechingly, having no clue as to the rules.

“Play”, he said. “Black starts. Usually play in a corner.”

I picked up a stone and put in on a corner point.

“Not right in the corner”, he said, “out a little bit, three four points.” I moved the stone. He picked up a white stone and put it down crisply in the corner opposite mine. I had absolutely not a clue what it had to do with my stone at all. It seemed to be my turn again. I looked at him, beseechingly.

“Keep taking corners,” he said, indicating with his hand the two as yet unoccupied corners. So I played in one of them. Quick as a flash Wei Lang played in the other corner, now all four were taken. Now what?

“Where can I play?” I asked him.

“Anywhere.” I looked around the board as though I had a clue and then put the next black stone somewhere near the first one. Wei Lang sat up, pushed his half-moon specs back on his nose and studied the position for some time. Then he started to laugh. He laughed and laughed for about three minutes then coughed for about two, again I was really afraid he was about to plunge me and himself into a medical emergency when he suddenly pulled himself together. He looked at me sideways beneath his glasses and I really couldn’t figure out whether his look said admiration or despair.

“Was that a good move?” I asked, no answer, “a, a, bad move?”

That set him off again laughing and coughing. I started to wonder how the hell I had got involved in playing this game that I had no idea of the rules of and wondering how I could gracefully admit defeat when he suddenly stopped laughing.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, he said. Anyone could make that move.” Then he picked up a white stone and played.

“That Russell”, he said, “first evening you go to his hut. What did he tell you?”

“Oh”, I said, “I’m not sure I can repeat it to you we just …” he rapped the board with another white stone he held in his hand.

“He say a lot stuff about Rilke and Brahms and TS Eliot in a mad hatter’s tea party or something?”

“Well, yes, something like that, it was rather beautifully put though, I agree with it.”

“Eliot not beautiful like Rilke, Eliot can only show us our own ugly faces. What about that Blig?”

“Brig?”

“Ridiculous girl who pretends to be from Yorkshire.”

“She is from Yorkshire.”

“Is from Yorkshire pretends to be from Yorkshire what difference? Pretends to be because she is or is because she pretends to be what the fuck do I care? What she teach you?”

“A breathing exercise.”

“A breathing exercise?”

“A breathing exercise.” He looked at me, as though puzzled. Then,

“Play”, he said. It was indeed my turn. I picked up a black stone. I really had no idea of the rules of this game, I looked at the bewildering array of intersections, my hand, holding the stone, started to tremble. I made a feint at a play, but hesitated,

“Can I play here?” I asked.

“Yes”, he nodded.

“Or how about here?” I said, pointing to another spot.

“Yes”, he nodded. I had no clue as to whether this spot was better or the last one.

“I mean, is this one better?” I asked him.

“All spots equal”, he said, bluntly.

“Equal?”

“Yes, equal. I been playing more than fifty years, you don’t know the rules, you think you put your stone here or put it there you gotta snowflake’s chance in Hell?”

I swallowed hard and put my stone in the first empty space I could find.

“I thought Brig’s breathing exercise had a lot of benefit”, I said.

“Benefit? What kind of benefit?” he asked, sceptically, staring at me from over his bifocals.

“Calming. At times I felt myself evaporating, floating away, I felt as though I merged into a still mirror-like state where time stopped, thoughts ceased to exist.”

He pondered this for a while, then

“Yes, I think that exercise has some benefit.”

“Oh?” I brightened up, “what?”

“When you doing it”, he said, “not cooking up mischief anywhere else.” Then he started laughing and coughing again. I sat and looked at my stones.

“Can I have that move again?” I asked him, for want of anything better.

“Yes, yes”, he spluttered through his cough, I left it where it was.

“Sorry”, he said. “Another time, another lifetime, I will teach you this game, I don’t mean to laugh at you that not why we play.”

“I know”, I said. I knew something serious was happening though I didn’t know what.

“Schoenberg and Eliot, Picasso, showed us our own ugly faces. Beauty retreated and ugliness won. Machinery, hatred, conformity, monotony.” A stark landscape passed before my inner eye,

“And after that?”

“Facts. Science, but not real science, scientism, facts, ugly facts, a straitjacket of facts, facts like boa constrictors, gripping tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out of us, squeezing the dreams out of us, the more we advance the more we squeeze ourselves dry, desiccate, denature ourselves. More than ever we need to know the truth that Parmenides taught us, that nothing is real, except what lies beyond the real. Einstein knew it, Einstein talked about something impenetrable to us, beyond the reach of science, the source of wisdom and beauty.”

“I truly believe that”, I said.

He looked at me in a very odd way.

“I don’t want you to believe it”, he said.

“What?”

“I want you to know it”, he said quietly. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him.

“What?” I asked again. He suddenly leapt to his feet, throwing the board and all the stones right across the room,

“I want you to KNOW IT!” he screamed.

I felt humiliated. The whole thing was so out of character that I felt completely and utterly unnerved. I stared at the backs of my hands, for a momentary flash I saw the white hairs, the claws, felt the sense of disabling impotence. I ran. I ran out of his study. I ran out of the farm. I ran to the wood where I had heard the voice of my ancestors. I ran to the only friend I had left, to the meadow with the tree, to my magic island. I stood at the edge of the wood trembling with what? Rage? Fear? Despair?

Who am I? What am I doing here? What am I doing in this stupid place? Why am I such a mess? Why can't I understand anything?

I opened my arms towards the tree as though begging for a miracle, for magic. And then out of the corner of my eye I noticed something. In the mid distance standing at the edge of the field against another clump of trees, bathed in moonlight, was a figure in a white hat. Man or woman I could not tell. I strained to make out any detail, but the figure was too distant. It stood, who knows, in silent contemplation of my island. And somehow it seemed that I knew that this figure possessed everything I could never possess. I imagined every detail of a life, a happy family, a warm kitchen, an everyday routine of sociable work and human reward. One by one all my broken dreams fell upon its head and still nothing seemed to weigh upon it standing there in its white cap as though unconscious of the river of despair coming over the field towards it. Then the figure turned and walked back into the wood. I turned also, as though by reflex to hurry after it, but my foot caught on a trees tump and I fell face down in the grass winding myself completely.

"Ayeeeurgh!", as I gasped for breath the chaos within me collapsed and I touched the unknown. How could I ever have been so ignorant as to know so much! The vast ocean of non-being flashed before me, yet though I had imagined non-being as darkness, emptiness, a fundamental absence of qualities, what my mind touched was light. Non-being, yes, but only in the sense that it was dimensionless, invisible, dwelling entirely beyond space and time, yet vibrating with a force of fundamental power and creativity which was awesome, rending, inscrutable, and of which all this creation of replicating molecules and fine boned mammals and birds and trees and planets and stars, the massed ranks of the galaxies were only the palest reflection.

XII

When I got back to London I didn't contact anybody for the first two weeks. It took me that long to start to re-adjust to the city, the unhappy crowds, the dirt, the endless beeping of unsatisfied motor horns. I walked a lot, in Regent's Park and on the Heath. And I read. I didn't turn on the radio or even look at a newspaper. But gradually I started to discover London's street markets, to find an inward joy in the ceaseless procession of faces, and the galleries of objects, the street cries, the endless perfume of everyday life. And I started to collect things. Not expensive things, but little objects like mugs and pencil boxes which caught my eye in markets or grubby second hand shops. I found an old straw chair on a skip and cleaned it up and stitched it with waxed thread where it was sagging. I found some attractive old rugs in a half-gutted house and cleaned them laboriously by hand. I took down the stained yellow curtains I had inherited when I moved in and put up white sheets instead. They looked stark and clean during the day, and glowed like watchful angels by night with the light from the street behind them. My flat gradually started to change, to look lived in, unique. It was as though a new personality was slowly assembling itself, piece by piece, through these objects.

After two weeks, I rang Stewart, told him I was back, and arranged to go in for a chat the next day. I was determined not to get re-involved in his business, but I wanted to clear my desk in an orderly way and do what I could to tie up any loose ends and help him in any way that I was able. The first thing I did when I arrived the next morning was to grab a cup of overbaked coffee from the Cona machine. As I put it to my lips, Stewart emerged from his office.

"Hodge", he said, "Have you heard the news?"

"What news?", I said.

"They've caught Parmenides. He's doing time in the States".

At this I laughed so much that the coffee went down the wrong way, and Stewart had to thump my back several times before I could breathe again. The secretary with the whiney voice was very concerned.

"Awl right, Mr Hodgkinson? Are you awl right, Mr Hodgkinson?"

Then I went into Stewart's office and we had a talk which was generally satisfactory to all parties concerned. I asked about my royalties and he said he would talk to the accountants and get back to me as soon as he could. It hadn’t occurred to me then that they would amount to more than a useful Christmas bonus. We arranged that I would come in for the next month or so in order to help the lads get to grips with some parts of the software that they were having trouble with. This would give me some income and would keep them going as well. As I pointed out to him, there was a lot to be said for letting the younger generation take some more of the responsibility on their shoulders, and having me out of the way could turn out to be not altogether a bad thing. He did see the logic of this. Then he told me that Miriam had rung a couple of times to ask if I was back. I decided I would have to tackle my family problems next.

As soon as I got home, I rang Miriam. She didn't sound specially surprised to hear from me, in fact her voice sounded rather flat and depressed, but she assured me she was all right. I made an arrangement to collect Katy at the weekend. Then I decided to ring the Clapton Odeon and see what Horst was up to. The 'phone was answered by a female who sounded suspiciously like Linda.

"Clapton Odeon. How may I help you?"

I pinched my lips together with my fingers in an attempt to disguise my voice.

"I'd like to speak to Horst Kohler please".

There was a short pause at the other end of the line.

"He's not here at the moment, sir, would you like to speak to the manager?".

I said I would. The line went quiet for a moment, then I heard Rodney on the other end.

"Hello, who's speaking?". I identified myself. "Hodge, Hodge whereav you been? Come an 'ave a drink sometime, meet Amanda".

I reminded him that I had met Amanda.

"Courseyouav, courseyouav. Ha. Hey, did I tell you how old she is?"

"Nineteen, if I remember correctly",

"Twenty one now. Got the key of the door and all that. First thing she did when I gave it her was try and go out on her own. Had to have a Chubb fitted, haw haw. What can I do for you, Hodge?"

I explained that I was calling because I wanted to speak to Horst.

"Horst? Been a bit iffy lately, Horst. Takes a lot of time off. Personal problems, I think. You could probably get him at home. Do you want his phone number?".

I said I did, and Rodney gave it to me. Then he asked me if I had spoken to Miriam. I told him I had, that morning.

"How did she seem?"

"Well, she seemed all right. A bit subdued I suppose. She said everything was alright".

Rodney became serious.

"Did she? Well, I can tell you I'm worried about her, Hodge. She ain't the girl she used to be. You don't mind me telling you this do you? I know it's none of my business."

"No, no, not at all, thank you for telling me."

"Try and talk to her, Hodge. I don't know what it is. She won't talk to me about it but she might talk to you. What do you think of that young man of hers?",

"I haven't met him."

"But you've spoken to him?",

"No, never. Not even on the 'phone.".

"Well, I can't work him out. Talks a lot of fancy stuff about class struggle and the politics of envy. I reckon he's a bullshitter.".

It didn't surprise me that Rodney felt this way, and I was hardly inclined to trust his judgement on Uncle Bob, but I felt uneasy about Miriam. She was someone he did know something about, after all.

I grasped the nettle, and rang the house. As luck would have it, Uncle Bob answered the 'phone, and for the first time I found myself speaking to him, ear to ear.

"Hello", he said, grumpily. "Who's that".

I told him who I was, and left the message that Miriam should ring.

"Okay", he said, and rang off abruptly.

I made a slice of toast and a cup of tea and then settled down in an easy chair to ring Horst. He answered almost immediately.

"Horst", I said, "this is Hodge. How are you?"

"Hodge. I am okay. Not so bad. So how are you?"

"Rodney told me you don't go in so often. Anything wrong?".

There was a slight pause, as of a man poised for confession.

"Ah Hodge, is chost so borink. Vhen you seen one bingo session you seen them all, und zet Rodney is complete asshole. Ze other day I go up to him and wave a big book right unter his nose und say ‘I look you up in Freud, Rodney, you are classic anal sadistic personality und vot you goink to do about it?’"

"What did he say?",

"Nossink. He chost say ‘I am ze boss, you vant to vork here, become a masochist.’".

"We should meet up.", I said.

"Are you goink to Bournemouth tomorrow?".

"What for?", there was a short pause and a rustle of paper.

"Bournemouth Amateur Philharmonic Society celebrity recital", he said, deliberately, as though reading from a programme.

"Piano soloist Geoffrey Stringer. Elgar pomp und circumstance, Mozart Elvira Madigan und Brahms Piano Concerto number one".

"He's playing two concertos in one concert?"

"Is an amateur orchestra, you know, student and music teachers, I guess. They vant to get zeir money's vorth."

"Are you going?"

"I heff no money und no transport.".

My car was at the garage, but I decided to there and then to splash out and rent a car for the day. Bournemouth. It was worth it. We had come full circle.

"I'll organise some transport, come over and pick you up and we'll make a day of it.".

Horst gave me his address and I arranged to pick him up at about two the next afternoon. No sooner had I put the phone down than I received another surprise, a call from Russell who had come up to London on an errand of some kind connected with his teaching. I invited him to come and stay and as it turned out to be only his second ever visit to London, I took him down to Chinatown for the mandatory lunch at Poons.

Miriam didn't ring that evening and the next morning I went out early with Russell to be sure of finding a car. After tramping round the various hire firms in King's Cross for about two hours we managed to find an immensely smart looking Japanese job with a sunroof and electric windows, central locking, the works. I drove it into a back street and Russell and I spent a happy half-hour playing with all the buttons to see what they did. I'd just elevated the sunroof a couple of times and wound all the windows up and down about four times in various combinations when two women strolled up. One of them, a tall blonde, leaned in at Russell's window and said,

"Want business?",

"What kind of business?", said Russell, brightly. I couldn't work out whether he was trying to be funny or was just very naive.

"Er, no thanks, thank you all the same", I beamed, "we just came round here to sit for a while and play with our buttons.".

"Oh, well, please yourselves gentlemen", the tall blonde said. After that we decided we'd better move on, so we went and had lunch in a cafe and then it was time to go over to Clapton and collect Horst.

We arrived at Horst’s flat at about two, as promised, and waited. After about forty five minutes he arrived, rather drunk, bundled himself into the back of the car and started to snore. I drove off towards Bournemouth. After about fifteen minutes Horst woke up and started mumbling incoherently under his breath something about being a Bohemian and wanting to live a good clean life and a lot of stuff about Rodney that I couldn't quite make out. Whenever we passed a nice looking woman he pressed his nose pathetically against the window and made little waving gestures with his hand. I stopped at a traffic light and heard the electric window go down in the back.

"Hello, darlink. I can giff you really nice time", bellowed Horst loudly and clearly. With great presence of mind I seized the master control on the driver's side armrest and wound up his window. There was a mutinous creak as Horst wound it down again. I wound it back up and flipped over the button marked "LOCK". Horst was jabbing impotently at the control as I pulled away from the lights.

"Vos matter if I vant to talk to a pretty girl? A nice decent healthy girl", whined Horst.

"Well, nothing, really", I had to say, "but why pick a policewoman. Do you want to get us locked up?"

"Because I like zem", said Horst, dreamily. "Zey are so healthy und vell disciplined. I vant to chuck my job und be a policeman.".

"You must be joking. They wouldn't have you.".

"Why not, is not so difficult. Zey measure you, make sure you're not too short, giff you liddle IQ test und make sure you're not too bright und so you are in.".

Then he mumbled under his breath again about wanting a good clean life and so on. Then he suddenly started banging loudly on the locked window and shouting,

"Let me out, let me out."

"Why?",

"I need a piss.".

"I'll look for somewhere.".

"I vant a piss now, very badly now.".

"All right, all right, look, here's a hedge, okay? You should be alright if you're quick.".

I stopped the car and Horst stumbled out. Russell turned to me his eyes round with wonderment.

"Is your friend always like this?"

"NO!, NO!", I shouted gesticulating desperately whilst trying to find the button for the passenger side window on the master armrest,

"Other side, Horst, other side of the hedge.". It was too late. Horst climbed back into the car buttoning himself up and beaming smugly.

"Vos difference, this side, that side?",

"You might at least have turned around".

"Vos difference, one dick more or less in the age of Aquarius?", he opined, stubbornly.

"Some of the children in that coach didn't even know they were in the age of Aquarius", I wailed.

As I moved out and pulled away Horst slipped off his shoes and lay down on the back seat with one foot on the padded ceiling.

"Ten years ago I am promisink music student", he moaned, "und ze vorld is mein oyster. Now I am vorking for fat number plate salesman und ze vorld is a clam.".

In this position he went to sleep and remained so, like an inverted flamingo, until we got to Bournemouth.

By the time we got to the concert we had taken some toast and a large amount of strong coffee, so Horst was considerably sobered up, though he still looked a little dour. The venue was a church, and by the time the doors opened to the public, there was a queue stretching round the block. In the concert itself there was an air of occasion not usual at the professional concerts I used to attend in London. The ticket prices were high, and it was rumoured that Geoffrey was getting a large fee for his appearance. The auditorium was packed, including the balcony where many were leaning over for a better view. From the snippets of conversation I could overhear I guessed that a good number of the audience were friends or relations of members of the orchestra. The Mayor came on wearing his chain and made a little introductory speech in which he particularly thanked the various officers of the Philharmonic Society for their work, and so on. Then the leader of the second violins stood up and played an 'A' on the piano for the orchestra to tune to. It was echoed, it seemed to me, by about fifty different and distinct 'A's, one for every member of the orchestra. Then the first violinist came on, in a neat low cut evening gown, closely followed by the conductor, smiling confidently and flexing his baton in a businesslike way.

The Elgar was dispatched with reasonable proficiency I would have thought, since it wasn't something I particularly liked. I sat on the edge of my seat when Geoffrey came on. He looked in our direction, but I wasn't sure whether he had seen us or not. He looked extremely relaxed and very solid. He gave a proficient reading of the Mozart concerto, which was what I would have expected, Mozart having always been something he was neither particularly good nor particularly bad at. During the interval, Horst wandered off to get a glass of wine, while Russell and I chatted with some neighbours, both students, who had friends in the orchestra. After about twenty minutes we were all seated again, the orchestra in their places, the audience in their seats. There was a long wait. After three or four minutes the mayor crept up to the piano and made a feint at it as though he was going to play it. The audience began to applaud, sporadically, delightedly. The mayor backed away and said

"In my younger days I would have been able to do something on it. Does anyone know the Brahms first concerto? There seems to be some kind of delay with the pianist.".

Horst put his hand up but no-one paid any attention. A smartly dressed woman came out of the stage door and walked across the auditorium.

"See. He has been havink a voman in there to put him in ze mood for ze Brahms", said Horst.

Just then the leader of the orchestra appeared, closely followed by the conductor and the soloist. The performance commenced. However, while the orchestra had been adequate to the Mozart, the Brahms was a little beyond them. The expressively surging phrases of the introduction were played with painful banality, the players frequently appearing to differ substantially as to where they had got to in the score. Geoffrey delivered his performance regardless, and it was superb. He seemed to be able to play the way he wanted to play despite the disconcerting and sometimes apparently random sounds emerging from the wind section and somehow despite the glitches I felt that this performance, which for many of the players would be their first and quite possibly their last attempt at this piece, contained more real music making than any flawless professional version could ever do. I was sitting behind Geoffrey, and beyond him on the far wall there was a set of stained glass windows, and while I concentrated on Geoffrey's playing I seemed to see an endless series of vistas, of fruit and flowers, of summer meadows and peaceful bouquets appear as though glimpsed not through the windows but beyond them. I looked over towards the orchestra and studied the faces of the players. I guessed most of them were citizens of Bournemouth, music teachers, perhaps, some advanced students, not quite up to the standard of a professional orchestra, but by no means rank amateurs. Functioning members of a thriving provincial community in the age of universal suffrage any one of them could explain him or herself, if asked, in terms of place, belief, occupation, aspirations. A complete enough description one might think. Yet tonight they laid these personae aside like the emptied husks of their instrument cases to sit in ranks and be touched by a common spirit, a spirit which, though they might never realise it, was more permanent and real than themselves, a force beyond the persona. Eros. That might be the name for it. The fountainhead, source of creativity, art, revolution; source of maternal tenderness and infant joy. I closed my eyes and felt the sensation of this fountain reaching through me, down into the pit of my stomach, an ascending wave of formless delight. And I imagined, for a moment, Eros as a comet streaking silently through eternity while from the brilliance of her head streamed civilisations, philosophies, the rallying cries of revolution and human renewal, whilst behind her flew the dark figure of Thanatos, the death principle, stuffing them all into his maw, a complementary, dependant, destructive deity. And I knew then that there's no security in forms, nor any shrine that can hold a god for more than the brief hour in which it pleases him to stay. What's shouted from the mouth of Eros today will be mumbled in the mouth of Thanatos tomorrow, and every truth that can be uttered becomes catechism, in the end. I opened my eyes and experienced a moment of complete weariness with the Brahms which, supremely beautiful as it was, I had heard so many times before. I felt the weight of the centuries upon me, the sins of the fathers enclosing me. I longed for something quite different, though what I didn't know. Perhaps something more basic, a more fundamental and simple life. Or perhaps some other form of renewal. I wondered whether, as a culture, we were any longer capable of renewal, of matching the profundity and nobility of the music I was hearing with something entirely new and of our own making. But the feeling passed over me and I became reabsorbed in the music.

The performance ended. As I joined in the applause I noticed that Horst wasn't clapping. He looked distinctly sour about it. As we made our way backstage to congratulate Geoffrey, he mumbled,

"Johannes Brahms three, Bournemouth Amateur Philharmonic Society nill, I sink."

"Oh, I don't know, I rather enjoyed it", I said.

Horst was unrepentant. As we passed the conductor he said,

"Vot was zet nice piece you played before ze Mozart. Vos it Ligetti?".

"Oh no", beamed the conductor, fortunately mistaking Horst's bile for simple ignorance.

"That was Elgar, Pomp and Circumstance.".

"Come on, Horst, Geoffrey's over here", I said loudly, pulling him by the arm before he could do any more damage.

Russell and I got back to my little flat in the wee small hours. There was a message on the answerphone from Miriam, saying she'd call back in the morning. At around nine thirty the next morning the 'phone went, and it was her.

"Peter", she said. "How are you? Bob said you called"

"I'm all right", I said. "Rodney said he was worried about you. How are you? How's the book?"

There was a short silence on the other end of the line. Then she said,

"Oh, that. Not going too well, I'm afraid. Um, I did my bit, but, er, Bob seemed to get stuck on his. Then he rattled it all off in a fortnight and just handed it over to me. It didn't really fit with what I'd done, but he insisted that it was all correct and that I shouldn't interfere. When the publishers saw the copy they asked him to make some changes, they were very polite about it, but he threw a paddy in their office and emptied a filing cabinet over the floor. Naturally they dropped the book on the spot, just dropped it, and now they're chasing us for the return of the advance."

"I'm sorry", I said. "It must make life a bit tricky for you two mustn’t it?"

"Oh, Peter, it's awful", she said. "He shouts at me, he shouts at Katy. And last week he really blew his top at me and hit me. I had a black eye, Peter. My very first black eye".

I knew how much this would have upset Miriam. I was pretty sure she was crying on the other end of the line.

"Why don't you ask him to go?", I said.

"I've asked him a couple of times, but he just gets really angry and says he's got nowhere to go and he can't leave until he's finished his thesis for his Social Science MA".

"What's it about?", I said.

"It's called Caring and Sharing. Community values in the nineties", she replied.

"How long is that going to take him?", I asked.

"It'll take him forever", she said, with a hint of the humour of the girl I used to know.

"He doesn't know the first thing about it".

I arranged to go round to the house the next day and try and speak to him. Miriam said she'd make sure she was out. I had no particular plan in mind. I didn't feel angry or anything, because I thought that whatever went on between him and Miriam was their business, and I had long ago given up thinking of myself as her father protector. I had in mind the idea of offering to help him find a flat. There were usually one or two going round my way. It seemed to me that this would probably suit all concerned, and that it was the least I could do for Miriam and little Katy.

I arrived at the house the next morning. I opened the front door with my key. As I entered the hallway, a man with an unkempt beard and a slightly purple face came out of the living room.

"Who are you?", he said.

"Peter Hodgkinson.", I said.

"Oh, the computer man", he said.

"That's right", I said, "I live here".

"Not any more", he said. "I thought that had been made perfectly clear. You've got a damn nerve coming in like that without knocking".

"I've got a key", I said.

"What have you come for?", he said. "Come to pick up your bits and bytes?"

"Did you hit my wife?", I said.

"None of your damn business", he said, rolling his eyes around furiously. "Give me that key and get out".

He put out his hands and pushed me towards the door. A sharp spur of energy rose from my stomach, whether of anger or practical necessity I had no time to think. I picked him up by the armpits and threw him bodily down the steps and onto the front path.

"Aaaargh. You damn maniac, you've broken my kneecap", he howled, clutching his right knee and rocking in agony. Like a man possessed I strode into the front room and grabbed the first thing I saw which was his typewriter and threw it out after him.

"There", I said, "I've broken your typewriter too. Anything else you'd like me to break?".

"You haven't seen the last of me", he thundered, picking himself up and hobbling out of the gate,

"I'll be back. You haven't seen the last of me".

But we had seen the last of him. Miriam got his things sent on to him via a third party, and he didn't come back. I didn't go back either. I was too settled now to living on my own. Miriam settled down once Bob had gone, and she and Katy didn't seem to find living together so bad. We saw quite a bit of each other, though, and started spending hours and days and weekends together en famille. Katy relaxed a lot, and seemed more and more her old cheerful self as time went on.

About three months after my return Stewart called and told me he had checked with the accountant and that the Virtual Woman had sold more than eleven thousand units worldwide. It took a little time for the maths to sink in