2 The Mansion of Midnight

The Minister was clutching at straws but he clutched ferociously.

That very morning, as I tested the Ambassador’s letter in another part of the Bureau of Determination, the Minister’s computers had startled him by registering a significant analogy. They posited certain correspondences between the activities of the proprietor of a certain peep-show who had operated his business upon the pier at the seaside resort of S. throughout the summer and now showed signs of quartering himself there for the winter. It seemed a small enough clue to me; hardly worth the importance the Minister placed on it – and hardly enough to justify my new promotion. Nevertheless, promoted I was; between lunch and teatime, I became the Minister’s special agent and my mission was, if I could find him, to assassinate Dr Hoffman as inconspicuously as possible.

I was chosen for the mission because: (a) I was in my right mind; (b) I was dispensable and (c) the Minister’s computers decided my skill at crossword puzzles suggested a facility in the processes of analogical thought which might lead me to the Doctor where everyone else had failed. I think the Minister himself thought of me as a kind of ambulant computer. Even so, in spite of the encouraging voice with which he wished me farewell, I guessed it was something of a forlorn hope.

The computers constructed me an identity sufficiently foolproof to take me past the checkpoints of the Determination Police, for I was the most secret of agents. I was to pose as an Inspector of Veracity, first class. At the town of S., some sixty miles further up the coast, I was to make a special report on the mysterious affair of the Mayor, who had disappeared some time before. The inscrutable business of bureaucracy went on, war or no war, and my bureaucratic credentials were impeccable. I was issued with a small car, a complement of petrol coupons and a pocket arsenal of revolvers, etc. I packed a bag with a notebook or two and a shirt. I took with me no souvenirs or objects of sentimental value because I had none. Even though I did not know when, if ever, I would see it again I did not bother to say good-bye to my arid room. I left the city the next morning; as I passed the Bureau of Determination, I saw a slogan had appeared on the wall. It read: DR HOFFMAN PISSES LIGHTNING. I drove off through a gigantic storm. It was still before breakfast time but the sky was so black that an unnatural darkness filled the streets which today, as if on purpose to speed my departure, had reverted to the forms I had always known, streets without magic or surprise, streets as boring as only those of home can be.

I did not have much hope of returning to them; nor did I believe the city would survive very long after I had gone, not only because I had always obscurely felt I was one of the invisible struts of reason which had helped to prop it up for so long but because it seemed inevitable it would soon collapse. Yet I felt no nostalgia when, after I speeded up the interminable negotiations with the Police by the gift of several cartons of the Minister’s cigarettes, I took the road that led north. I suppose I hoped that, if the city fell, at least it would coffin the environment which bred my unappeasable boredom. There was nothing in the great heap of stucco, brick and stone behind me to which I felt the least attachment except the memory of a certain mysterious dream and that I took with me. And, if I felt a certain excitement as the miles wound away beneath me, it was because of that dream and the name, which seemed to shelter three magic entities, the glass woman, the black swan and the ambassador. The name was a clue which pointed to a living being beneath the conjuring tricks, for such tricks imply the presence of a conjurer. I was nourishing an ambition – to rip away that ruffled shirt and find out whether the breasts of an authentic woman swelled beneath it; and if around her neck was a gold collar with the name ALBERTINA engraved upon it.

And then? I would fall on my knees in worship.

Under all my indifferences, I was an exceedingly romantic young man yet, until that time, circumstances had never presented me with a sufficiently grand opportunity to exercise my pent-up passion. I had opted for the chill restraints of formalism only out of sharp necessity. That, you see, was why I was so bored.

The appearance of the countryside had not altered. The flat fields of vegetables around the capital stretched, as before, to the horizon and still seemed to produce nothing but commonplace roots and tubers. The villages had put up their shutters to keep out the rain but otherwise looked as vindictively peasant as they had always done. Even the scarecrows looked only like scarecrows. The road itself was the only casualty, or the first casualty, for the volume of wheeled traffic was reduced almost to nothing and already vigorous growths of weeds and flowers pushed up through the cracks in the asphalt while no holes had been repaired, so now brown troughs of water gaped everywhere. The drive took some hours more than it should have done; I reached my destination in the middle of the afternoon when a magnificent rainbow was arching over the town and, together with a shimmering brilliance in the sky over the sea, it heralded the end of the downpour. As I drove into the suburbs, the rain first fell aslant and then ceased altogether. The sun came out and the pavements began to steam gently.

S. was a bright, pleasant, pastel-tinted town redolent of dead fish and wet face flannels, clean as if the abrasive sea scrubbed it twice a day. Before the war, families came out from the city to spend a summer fortnight at guest houses where the doormats were always full of sand and the hallways littered with tin buckets and tiny spades. There was a pier made of such lacy striations of iron it looked like the skeleton of an enormous bird or a drawing of itself made with a fine pen and Indian ink on the pale blue paper of the well-mannered sea. The fishermen lived at the other end of the beach in cheerful, white-washed cottages overgrown with that summer’s abundance of roses and they hung out their nets to dry on picturesque and primordial poles, weighing them at the corners with balls of dark green glass. It was late August and the shops offered pink rock, coloured postcards, candy floss, straw hats and all the appurtenances of the holiday maker but, though all the doors were open, I could see no shopkeepers within, behind the counters, and the entire place was quite empty of humanity.

Along the promenade, striped umbrellas cast pools of shade over deserted tables at which no ice-cream eaters sat, though there were plenty of saucers smeared with residual traces and also glasses half full of pink, green and orange drinks in which the ice had not yet melted and the paper straws were still indented at the top from the pressure of lips. The pale acres of sand were empty but for a few waddling sea-birds and I noticed a corpse who lay where the sand had left him, unattended but for a cloud of flies. There was nobody at the turnstile of the pier to take my coin. Some of the sideshows were shuttered but here half a dozen ping pong balls bounced on jets of water and the rifles were laid out in invitation to no cracksmen. Though the bed was made up ready to tip the lady out, the lady herself had vanished. Yet the loudspeakers blared cheerful music and nowhere looked deserted. It was as if the entire population of the town had slipped off somewhere, called to witness some event to which I alone had not received an invitation, and would all be back at their posts in five minutes. A sea breeze blew the bright pennants this way and that way. I passed a fortune teller’s booth and another booth which smelled of hot dogs simmering by themselves in a tin vat of hot water and then, with most suspicious ease, I found my first quarry, the peep-show.

It was indeed the coloured replica of the canvas tent I had seen in monochrome in the files of the Bureau – coloured but faded, left out too long in the rains of years, a sagging box of pink striped canvas with the flap drawn up and held back with a fraying cord. A yellowed play-bill in old-fashioned lettering announced that the SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD IN THREE LIFELIKE DIMENSIONS awaited one inside and I bent my head and stepped into the warm, dim cave. It was lit only by the beams of the afternoon sun, creeping in through the many gaps in the structure. A startled gull started up from a perch upon an iron wheel with a wild beating of wings as I came in and swooped around the interior until it found the exit. At the sound, an old man whose sleeping shape had been obscured by the thick brown shadows awoke with shouts and curses. There was a chink and rumble of a rolling, overturned bottle and the air filled with fumes of raw spirit.

‘Is there no peace?’ demanded the old man, rearing like a seal from a rustling heap of straw and instantly, with a groan, falling back. He was the first living thing I had seen since I arrived in the town and he was nothing but a piece of verminous flotsam overgrown with a white weed of hair. There was not a single tooth left in his head and a stained and matted beard straggled over the lower part of his face while the upper part was hidden by a pair of wire-rimmed, green-tinted glasses, the left lens of which was cracked clean across. He wore the ruins of striped trousers and a dinner jacket, relics, perhaps, of more prosperous days, and no shirt – only a torn, filthy vest. His feet were bare; his blackened toe-nails had grown into claws. He poked about for a few moments until he gained a handhold on one of the curious machines which filled the tent and, clinging to it, steadied himself sufficiently to rise again. He looked in my direction but did not look at me; he looked all about the tent as if trying to locate me and then wearily shook his shaggy head.

‘Though this is by no means Gaza, yet I am eyeless,’ he said and I knew for certain he was blind.

‘If you are a customer,’ he said, ‘please place twenty-five cents in the receptacle you will find placed for that purpose on the tea-chest beside the door and take your fill of the wonders of the world. But if not,’ he added and his voice began to trail away, ‘then not… However, whatever you are, kindly restore me my bottle.’

When it rolled out to the middle of the floor, the bottle had spilled all it contained.

‘There isn’t a drop left,’ I warned as I handed it to him. He shook it to hear if there was a rattle, sniffed the neck voluptuously and then, leaning behind him, parted the canvas walls and dropped it into the sea below, where it gurgled and sank.

‘I have drunk sufficiently deeply of humiliation, anyway,’ he said. ‘Please pay your quarter, do your business and go away.’

He relapsed on his pallet and made no more sounds but the murmurous roaring of his breathing. The saucer contained two trouser buttons, a shell and a coin I identified as a Japanese one-sen piece, long out of circulation, but I put a quarter there, all the same. The machines were of ancient rusted cast iron decorated with impressions of cupids, eagles and knots of ribbons. Each was the size and shape of an old-fashioned oven and, at the front, a pair of glass eye-pieces jutted out on long, hollow stalks. I examined all the exhibits in turn. Inside each one, underneath the item it represented, was a sign, clumsily lettered by hand, giving a title.

Exhibit One: I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

The legs of a woman, raised and open as if ready to admit a lover, formed a curvilinear triumphal arch. The feet were decorated with spike-heeled, black leather pumps. This anatomical section, composed of pinkish wax dimpled at the knee, did not admit the possibility of the existence of a torso. A bristling pubic growth rose to form a kind of coat of arms above the circular proscenium it contained at either side but, although the hairs had been inserted one by one in order to achieve the maximal degree of verisimilitude, the overall effect was one of stunning artifice. The dark red and purple crenellations surrounding the vagina acted as a frame for a perfectly round hole through which the viewer glimpsed the moist, luxuriant landscape of the interior.

Here endlessly receded before one’s eyes a miniature but irresistible vista of semi-tropical forest where amazing fruits hung on the trees, while from the dappled and variegated chalices of enormous flowers the size of millstones, perfumes of such extraordinary potency that they had become visible to the eye exuded as soft, purple dew. Small, brilliant birds trilled silently on the branches; animals of exquisite shapes and colours, among them unicorns, giraffes and herbivorous lions, cropped up buttercups and daisies from the impossibly green grass; butterflies, dragonflies and innumerable jewelled insects fluttered, darted or scurried among the verdure so all was in constant movement and besides the very vegetation was continually transforming itself. As I watched, the pent-up force of the sweet juice within it burst open a persimmon and the split skin let out a flight of orange tawny singing birds. An elongated bud on the point of opening must have changed its mind for it turned into a strawberry instead of a waterlily. A fish sprang out of the river, became a white rabbit and bounded away.

It seemed that winter and rough winds would never touch these bright, oblivious regions or ripple the surface of the lucid river which wound a tranquil course down the central valley. The eye of the beholder followed the course of this river upwards towards the source, and so it saw, for the first time, after some moments of delighted looking, the misty battlements of a castle. The longer one looked at the dim outlines of this castle, the more sinister it grew, as though its granite viscera housed as many torture chambers as the Château of Silling.

The rest of the machines contained the following items.

Exhibit Two: THE ETERNAL VISTAS OF LOVE

When I looked through the windows of the machine, all I could see were two eyes looking back at me. Each eye was a full three feet from end to end, complete with a lid and a tear duct, and was suspended in the air without any visible support. Like the pubic hair in the previous model, the lashes had been scrupulously set one by one in narrow hems of rosy wax but this time the craftsmen had achieved a disturbing degree of life-likeness which uncannily added to the synthetic quality of the image. The rounded whites were delicately veined with crimson to produce an effect like that of the extremely precious marble used in Italy during the late baroque period to make altars for the chapels of potentates and the irises were simple rings of deep brown bottle glass while in the pupils I could see, reflected in two discs of mirror, my own eyes, very greatly magnified by the lenses of the machine. Since my own pupils, in turn, reflected the false eyes before me while these reflections again reflected those reflections, I soon realized I was watching a model of eternal regression.

Exhibit Three: THE MEETING PLACE OF LOVE AND HUNGER

Upon a cut-glass dish of the kind in which desserts are served lay two perfectly spherical portions of vanilla ice-cream, each topped with a single cherry so that the resemblance to a pair of female breasts was almost perfect.

Exhibit Four: EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT THE NIGHT IS FOR

Here, a wax figure of the headless body of a mutilated woman lay in a pool of painted blood. She wore only the remains of a pair of black stockings and a ripped suspender belt of shiny black rubber. Her arms stuck out stiffly on either side of her and once again I noticed the loving care with which the craftsmen who manufactured her had simulated the growth of underarm hair. The right breast had been partially segmented and hung open to reveal two surfaces of meat as bright and false as the plaster sirloins which hang in toy butcher’s shops while her belly was covered with some kind of paint that always contrived to look wet and, from the paint, emerged the handle of an enormous knife which was kept always a-quiver by the action (probably) of a spring.

Exhibit Five: TROPHY OF A HUNTER IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

A head – purporting, presumably, to have been taken from the victim of the preceding tableau – hung in the air, again with no strings or hooks in sight to reveal how this position was maintained. From the point of severance dripped slow gouts of artificial blood, plop, plop, plop, but the receptacle into which they fell was outside the viewer’s field of vision. A very abundant black wig tumbled around her pallid features, which wore a hideous expression of resignation. Her eyes were closed.

Exhibit Six: THE KEY TO THE CITY

A candle in the shape of a penis of excessive size, with scrotum attached, in a state of pronounced tumescence. The wrinkled foreskin was drawn far enough back to uncover in its importunate entirety the grossly swollen, sunset-coloured tip as far as a portion of the shaft itself and, at the minute cranny in the centre, where a wick must have been lodged, burned a small, pure flame. As the viewer watched, the candle tipped forward on its balls and pointed towards one accusingly.

I was struck with the notion that this was supposed to represent the Minister’s penis.

Exhibit Seven: PERPETUAL MOTION

As I expected, here a man and a woman were conducting sexual congress on a black horsehair couch. The figures, again exquisitely executed in wax, looked as though they might have been modelled in one piece and, due to a clockwork mechanism hidden in their couch, they rocked continually back and forth. This coupling had a fated, inevitable quality. One could not picture a cataclysm sufficiently violent to rend the twined forms asunder and neither could one conceive of a past beginning for they were so firmly joined together it seemed they must have been formed in this way at the beginning of time and, locked parallel, would go on thus for ever to infinity. They were not so much erotic as pathetic, poor palmers of desire who never budged as much as an inch on their endless pilgrimage. The man’s face was moulded into the woman’s neck and so could not be seen but the head of the woman was constructed so as to oscillate in the socket of her neck and, as it rolled from side to side, her face was intermittently visible.

I recognized this face instantly, although it was fixed in the tormented snarl of orgasm. I remained staring at it for some time. It was the beautiful face of Dr Hoffman’s ambassador. The old man interrupted my reverie. His voice was as raucous as a rooster’s.

‘Is there enough money in my saucer to buy me a bottle?’ he demanded.

‘I’ll buy you a drink with pleasure,’ I said.

‘Thank ’ee; thank ’ee kindly,’ he replied and painfully heaved himself to his feet. He fumbled around in his corner until he finally produced a peaked cap of the style worn by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When he had set this jauntily on his head, he began another search but I soon uncovered his white stick for him.

Now the pier was peopled. A ragged youth with caked snot in the grooves under his nose stood behind the rifle range idly probing the inside of his ear with a piece of twig and a blowsy woman in a rayon slip, with hair dyed the colour of apricots, yawned and scratched her buttocks at the entrance to the fortune teller’s booth. Three little boys clung to the rails by their feet holding fishing rods over the sea with one hand, and, in the other hand clutched jam jars of water by the string handles tied round the rims. The beach, too, presented an everyday holiday panorama of frisking dogs, children building sandcastles and a great deal of skin exposed to the sun. But all these Johnny-come-latelies had the yawning, vacant air of those just awakened from a deep sleep and walked uncertainly, sometimes, for no reason, breaking into a stumbling run and then halting just as suddenly to stare around them with startled, empty eyes or, turning to speak to a companion, they would stop, mouth ajar, as if they no longer recognized him. And, for so great a number of people, they made very little noise, as if they knew they had no existential right to be here.

The peep-show proprietor was blind and lame but he certainly knew his way about the town and led me unerringly to a small bar so deep inside the fishermen’s quarter the streets no longer bothered to keep up appearances and relapsed thankfully into slumminess. We sat down at a marble topped table and, without waiting for our order, a black brought us two glasses of the crude spirit that passes for brandy among the poor. He left the bottle on the table. The peep-show proprietor emptied his glass at a draught.

‘The purpose of my display,’ he remarked, ‘is to demonstrate the difference between saying and showing. Signs speak. Pictures show.’

I filled up his glass again for him and he thanked me by leaning across the table and comprehensively stroking my face with his gnarled finger-tips, as if learning my dimensions before sculpting me.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I’ve come to investigate the disappearance of the Mayor,’ I replied guardedly.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘She sits like Mariana in the moated grange, poor girl! Mary Anne, the beautiful somnambulist.’

He drank again, more slowly, and then remarked: ‘My life is nothing but a wind-blown rag.’

With that, he fell silent. I was to learn he spoke only in a series of disconnected, often gnomic statements usually tinged with melancholy, bitterness, self-pity or all three together. I sipped my eau-de-vie quietly and waited for him to speak again. After the third glass, he did.

‘I was not Mendoza. I never had that honour.’

‘Who were you, then?’

He became bashful and secretive.

‘Once, I was a very important man indeed. Even, you might say, a great man. Once they used to take off their hats to me as I walked down the road and murmur to me ingratiatingly and barmen were glad of my custom, yes! proud and glad! Instead of merely sullenly tolerating me.’

The barman, who must have heard all this many times before, flashed his teeth and smiled at me as if to create complicity. I poured more brandy into the old man’s glass.

‘They used to say, “We’re honoured to have you honour us with your presence, Professor”…’ And then he stopped, as though he knew he had already said too much, which was perfectly true – he had given me the principal letters of a clue and now I had only to fill in the blanks. I made an initial guess.

‘The greatest success a teacher can boast is the pupil who surpasses him.’

‘Then why has he humiliated me so?’ wailed the old man and I knew instantly he had taught elementary physics to Dr Hoffman at the university all those years ago. When he finished the fifth glass, the last vestiges of his discretion vanished.

‘He doesn’t even allow me to work in the laboratories. He gave me a set of samples and let me loose, left me to wander, up and down, here and there, hither and thither, pushing my wheelbarrow in front of me… tripping over stones and rotting my guts with filthy liquor…’

‘His set of samples?’

‘Plenty more in my sack,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of samples. Dozens and scores and hundreds and thousands of samples. You’d think they breed in there and I just put them in the machines, don’t I, and stick a sign along with them and sometimes people pay and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they scream and sometimes they giggle and sometimes the police turn me out of town and off I go down the road again, pushing my barrow. And times grow worse, since he began to put it into practice. No more money to spare for an old man’s disgusting if didactic demonstrations; you can get as good at home. Soon I’ll have to charge a pin to see it – or a jam jar, or a cigarette card. And who will exchange such rubbish for liquor, then? When that day dawns, poor robin must tuck his head under his wing, poor thing, and pretend to be warm, yes!’

‘But,’ he added, pouring out the seventh glass for himself, ‘the singular privilege of becoming Mendoza was never granted me. I was allowed to make my own transformations and if you look at me you can see how well I have succeeded.’

A tear trickled out from under his glasses so that I knew he had eyes even if they were sightless and I seemed to remember a cutting in the files that said Dr Hoffman’s old professor had suffered some injuries in an accident in a laboratory many many years before. I judged the old man was now sufficiently drunk and handed the bottle back to the barman.

‘I should like to kill him,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If I were ten years younger, I would go to the castle and murder him.’

‘Do you know the way to the castle?’

‘I should follow my nose,’ he said.

But then a cock crowed and the sound affected the old man curiously. He sat up and listened attentively; it crowed a second time and then a third.

‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ shrieked the old man.

With that, he struck me full in the face with his cane so that blood streamed into my eyes from a cut above my forehead and, when I could see again, he was gone. I hurried immediately back to the pier but, though he could only hobble, I caught no sign of him along the way and when I reached the place where his booth had been, it was, of course, also completely gone. So I made my way to the Town Hall, to do my official business.

The plaster scrolls and garlands on the pompous exterior of the Town Hall were crumbling like dry sponge cake and all the windows were screened with green blinds but the heavy mahogany doors swung open readily enough and, though puffs of dust rose up when I trod on the maroon plush carpeting and most of the offices were empty but for cobwebs spun from inkwell to pen-rack across blurred surfaces of desks, at last a yawning clerk came out of the ante-room of the Mayor’s office to greet me. Metal bracelets hoisted up his shirt-sleeves to bare his wrists for work; he had been left in charge.

The Mayor’s office itself was a mausoleum. It had been tidied since he left so there were no papers or files to be seen and they had drawn his carved, pompous chair so tightly up to the scrupulously denuded desk that it looked as though it were denying admittance there to any future body. The Mayor’s pink blotter was thickly furred with mildew and his dried-out water flask, topped with an inverted tumbler, had grown hunched shoulders of settled dust. The indefatigable spiders had woven a canopy across a photograph of the late President on the wall. The clerk opened a cupboard to reveal half a decanterful of mayoral sherry, now grown viscous as treacle, groped on a lower shelf and produced the fur-collared overcoat the Mayor had left behind him on the snowy morning he vanished. The pockets contained only a single balled glove and a dirty handkerchief, nothing of significance.

But after only the briefest search through the other offices, I found evidence that a certain peep-show proprietor had filed an official request to open a booth on the pier in the preceding month of April; this form, signed with a tentative cross, still waited for the official stamp so my ramshackle friend had clearly gone ahead on his own and set up shop regardless. It was, at least, a connection. I tucked away this form to take back to the Minister, took the clerk’s name and briefly checked his reality rating with my information. It appeared satisfactory. Then I asked him to ring the Mayor’s home, where his daughter still lived with a housekeeper. The clerk got through after only seven or eight minutes and I noted the services were still functioning satisfactorily though the clerk told me the telephone switchboard could neither take nor receive calls outside the immediate neighbourhood while even these local calls were constantly interrupted by voices in unknown languages. After a good deal of country town chat with the Mayor’s house, he ensured me some nights’ lodging there, at the probable source of my bureaucratic mystery.

‘It’s all got very run down since the Mayor left,’ he said dubiously. ‘Just the old woman and the, er, girl…’

Something in his voice indicated a strangeness in the girl. I pricked up the ears of my mind, briskly jotted down the directions he gave me and went to my car. It was now early evening and, since I stopped on my way to eat a supper of meat pies in a fly-blown café too squalid to be illusory, I did not reach the house until it was almost dark. It lay some way out of town at the end of an old-fashioned, rutted lane, where there were no other habitations than one abandoned barn. The sky was the tender, transparent blue of a late summer’s night and a slender intimation of the moon hung above a copse of fir although the tiger lilies of the setting sun still growled in the west. I parked my car in the road and, once the engine ceased to throb, there was no other sound but a faint shimmer of birdsong and the rattle of the quilled boughs of the pines.

Although I knew it was inhabited, at first I thought the house was quite forsaken for the extensive garden which surrounded it was sunk in the neglect of years. Whoever made the garden first must have loved roses but now the roses had quite overrun the garden and formed dense, forbidding hedges that sent out such an overpowering barrage of perfume that my head was soon swimming. Besides, roses sprayed out fanged, blossoming whips from cupolas which almost foundered under their weight; roses reared up in groves of sturdy standards now the size of young oaks; and roses sent vine-like tendrils along the sombre branches of yew trees, of ornamental rowans, of cherry trees and apple trees already half-suffocated with mistletoe so this summer, which had suited roses so well, seemed to have conspired with the gardener to produce an orgiastic jungle of all kinds of roses, and though I could not distinguish any of their separate shapes or colours, their individual scents all blended into a single, intolerably sweet essence which made every nerve in my body ache and tingle.

Roses had climbed up the already luxuriantly ivied walls and lodged in knots on the roofs where flowering weeds were rooted in the gaps between the mossy tiles while a great, unlopped elm with lice of rooks in its hair towered over the house as if about to drop its great limbs upon it, to smash it, while at the same time its roots clutched the foundations under the earth in a ferocious embrace. The garden had laid claim to the house and was destroying it at its arborescent leisure. Those within the house were already at the capricious mercy of nature.

Enormous clumps of mugwort had torn apart the gate and blocked the path entirely so I had to clamber over the tumbledown wall, dislodging a few more stones as I did so. Looking towards the shaggy outlines of the house, I saw a greenish glimmer of light on the ground floor filtering through the leaves which obscured the windows and took this for my clue out of the hostile, vegetable maze which, as I moved forward, lashed me, scored me, stung me and left me sick, bleeding and dizzy with its odorous excess. As I drew nearer to the house I heard, over the pounding of the blood in my ears, notes of music falling ‘plop’, like goldfish in a quiet pool. Breathless, I halted for a moment to find out if the sound was true. It went wistfully on. Somebody in that ruinous place was playing Debussy on the piano.

At last I reached the lighted window and parting the foliage which covered it, I peered through. I saw a drawing room with worn Persian rugs on the floor and walls hung with a once crimson brocaded paper that was now faded and figured with damp and mould, rucking and buckling over the dank walls beneath. There was an alabaster fireplace with a bouquet of shell flowers in a misted glass dome upon it and a fan of silver paper in the grate. Oil paintings so heavily varnished one could not make out their subjects hung here and there askew in pompous frames of tarnished gilt and an unlit cut-glass chandelier in the centre of the ceiling scintillated with reflections from the two candles in a branched stick which stood on the grand piano and threw a soft light over the girl who played it.

Her back was turned towards me but when I craned my neck I could see her white, thin, nervous fingers on the keyboard and caught a glimpse of the pale curve of her cheek. Her hair, the lifeless brown of a winter forest, hung down the back of her black dress. She played with extraordinary sensitivity. The room was full of a poignant, nostalgic anguish which seemed to emanate from that slender figure whose face I could not see.

I thought it best not to disturb her and made my way round to the back of the house where I found a black cat washing itself on an up-turned bucket, and inside an open door, a fat old woman who sat in a darkened kitchen to save, she said, the electricity; and that was also the reason why she made the mistress of the house play the piano by candlelight. The housekeeper guessed who I must be from my lumpish shape in the shadows. She greeted me warmly and turned on the lights in my honour to reveal a blessedly commonplace kitchen with a gas stove, a refrigerator and a saucer of milk put down for pussy. She settled me down at the scrubbed table with a cup of tea and a saucerful of shortbread biscuits, asked about my journey and hoped, too solicitously, that I would find the accommodation adequate.

‘Though how could we put you up luxuriously, sir, I mean – in the circumstances…’

She had a slippery, ingratiating quality which was meant to disarm but somehow offended me and she loquaciously set sail on a rattling stream of nothings while the girl in the drawing room continued to play the piano exquisitely and the music echoed down a corridor into the room. The old woman spoke of the vanished Mayor with neither embarrassment nor surmise. She had apparently absorbed the fact that he was gone so well into her world that if, one day, he returned, she would feel subtly affronted. She hinted that she suspected a woman might lie behind it for, she said: ‘Not many women would want Mary Anne for a step-daughter. Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She rolled her eyes significantly and chatted on about the difficulty of obtaining women’s magazines and knitting wool. Presently the music ceased and Mary Anne herself came into the kitchen, on some errand she forgot as soon as she saw me for the housekeeper had not bothered to tell her an unexpected guest would arrive at her home. She stood in the doorway, transfixed with surprise and apprehension; in her face, only eyes the colour of a rainy day moved this way and that, as if looking for a way out.

She had the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red. Her mouth was barely touched with palest pink though it had exactly the proportions of the three cherries the artmaster piles in an inverted triangle to illustrate the classic mouth and there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks. Now she was standing up, she was almost hidden in her dress and her tiny face, shaped like a locket, looked even smaller than it was because of a disordered profusion of hair streaming down as straight as if she had just been plucked from the river. I could see her hair and dress were stuck all over with twigs and petals from the garden. She looked like drowning Ophelia; I thought so immediately, though I could not know how soon she would really drown, for she was so forlorn and desperate. And a chilling and restrained passivity made her desperation all the more pathetic. The housekeeper clucked to see the wraith-like girl’s bare feet.

‘Put your slippers on at once, Miss! Bare feet on those stone flags! I never did! You’ll catch your death!’

Mary Anne moved awkwardly from one foot to the other as if her chances of catching death from the stone floor of the kitchen were halved if only one foot came in contact with it at a time. She was about seventeen. Her distant gaze wandered vaguely over the table and she whispered in a pleading undertone:

‘Perhaps a little tea…’

‘Not unless you step on to the rag rug,’ said the housekeeper, too authoritatively for the circumstances perhaps.

The girl edged into the room until she stood on the bright strip of carpet, allowing her eyes to rest on me again while the housekeeper got her a cup and even a biscuit, although she muttered to herself as she did so.

‘I am Mary Anne, the Mayor’s daughter. Who are you?’

‘I am a civil servant and my name is Desiderio.’

She repeated the name quietly to herself but with a curious quiver in her voice which might have been pleasure and eventually she confided:

‘Desiderio, the desired one, did you know you have eyes just like an Indian?’

The housekeeper went ‘tsk! tsk!’ with annoyance for we whites were not supposed to acknowledge the Indians.

‘My mother always found it embarrassing,’ I replied and at that the girl seemed obscurely pleased and thrust out her hand in such a sudden, unexpected gesture of goodwill it was more like a thwarted blow than an offer to shake. But I took her hand and found it was icy. She would not let go of me for a long time.

‘Mr Desiderio is going to stay in the spare room for a while,’ said the housekeeper grudgingly, as if reluctant to share the information with her mistress. ‘He’s come from the government.’

Mary Anne found this very mysterious; her eyes grew wide.

‘You won’t find my father, you know,’ she informed me.

‘Why not?’ I asked. My fingers were still in the snow trap of her clutch.

‘If he didn’t come back in time to prune the roses, he won’t come back at all,’ she said, and shook with such silent but vigorous laughter her tea slopped from her cup on to her dress, which was already stained with all manner of other spilled food and drink.

‘What do you think happened to him, Mary Anne?’ I asked gently for, though I knew from the records and my own intuition she was quite real, I had never before met a woman who looked so conversant with shadows as she.

‘He disintegrated of course,’ she said. ‘He resolved to his constituents – a test-tube of amino-acids, a tuft or two of hair.’

She gestured with her cup for more tea. She had not given me any answer I might have expected and, when I tried to question her further, she only giggled again and shook her head so that a twist of apple leaves fell to the floor and her hair flopped over her eyes. Then she put her cup down on the table with the excessive care of the born clumsy and ran up the dark corridor again. She must have left the door of the drawing room open, for her piano sounded louder this time, and she must have changed her music, for some irrational reason; now she played the lucid nonsense of Erik Satie. With a sigh, the housekeeper gathered up the cups.

‘A screw loose,’ she said. ‘A piece missing.’

Soon she took me to a bed with a patchwork quilt in a simple but pleasant room at the back of the house. It was a soft, warm night and the girl at her piano picked out an angular fretwork of audible lace on the surface of my first sleep. I think I woke because the music stopped. Perhaps her candles had burned out.

Now the moon had fully risen and shone straight into my room through the screen of ivy and roses so that dappled shadows fell with scrupulous distinction on the bed, the walls and the floor. Inside looked like the negative of a photograph of outside and the moon had already taken a black and white picture of the garden. I woke instantly and completely, with no residue of sleep in my mind, as though this was the proper time for me to wake although it could only have been a little past midnight. I was too wakeful to stay in my bed and got restlessly up to look out of the window. The grounds were far more extensive than I had at first thought and those behind the house were even further on the way to wilderness than those through which I had passed. The moon shone so brightly there was not a single dark corner and I could see the dried-up bed of a large pond or small lake which was now an oval of flat-petalled lilies while the roses had entirely engulfed in their embrace a marble Undine who reclined on her side in a touching attitude of provincial gracefulness. Delineated with the precision of a woodcut in the moonlight, a family of young foxes rolled and tumbled with one another on a clearing which had been a lawn. There was no wind. The night sighed beneath the languorous weight of its own romanticism.

I do not think she made a sound to startle me but all at once I grew conscious of a presence in the room and cold sweat pricked the back of my neck. Slowly I turned from the window. She lived on the crepuscular threshold of life and so I remember her as if standing, always, hesitantly in a doorway like an unbidden guest uncertain of her welcome. Her eyes were open but blind and she held a rose in her outstretched fingers. She had taken off her plain, black dress and wore a white calico nightgown such as convent schoolgirls wear. As I went towards her, so she came to me and I took the rose because she seemed to offer it to me. A thorn under the leaves pierced my thumb and I felt the red rose throb like a heart and saw it emit a single drop of blood as if like a sin-eater it had taken on the pain of the wound for me. She wound her insubstantial arms around me and put her mouth on mine. Her kiss was like a draught of cold water and yet immediately excited my desire for it was full of an anguished yearning.

I led her to the bed and, in the variegated shadows, penetrated her sighing flesh, which was as chill as that of a mermaid or of the marmoreal water-maiden in her own garden. I was aware of a curiously attenuated response, as if she were feeling my caresses through a veil, and you must realize that all this time I was perfectly well aware she was asleep, for, apart from the evidence of my senses, I remembered how the peep-show proprietor had talked of a beautiful somnambulist. Yet, if she was asleep, she was dreaming of passion and afterwards I slept without dreaming for I had experienced a dream in actuality. When I woke in the commonplace morning, nothing was left of her in the bed but some dead leaves and there was no sign she had been in the room except for a withered rose in the middle of the floor.

Mary Anne did not appear at breakfast though the housekeeper supplied me so amply with eggs, bacon, sausages, pancakes, coffee and fruit that I guessed, for whatever reasons, she was well satisfied with her house guest. In the bright light of morning, the old woman’s plump, lugubrious face looked indefinably sinister, even malign. She pressed me to return to the Mayor’s house for supper and at last, to quiet her, I agreed to do so and gave seven o’clock as the probable hour of my return, although I did not know if I would still be in the town at that time. When I went to my room to collect my briefcase, I passed an open door and, glancing inside, saw my nocturnal visitant sitting in front of a dressing-table mirror in an untidy room full of scores. She was still in her austere night-shift as she gave her tangled hair its (probably) single combing of the day.

‘Mary Anne?’

She smiled at me remotely in the mirror and I knew she was awake.

‘Good morning, Desiderio,’ she said. ‘I hope you had a good night’s sleep.’

I was bewildered.

‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Though occasionally people are frightened by the nightingales, because they make such a noise, sometimes.’

‘Mary Anne, did you dream last night?’

Her comb caught in a knot and she tugged it impatiently.

‘I dreamed about a love suicide,’ she said. ‘But then, I always do. Don’t you think it would be very beautiful to die for love?’

It is always disquieting to talk with a person in a mirror. Besides, the mirror was contraband. Her voice was high and clear and, though she always talked softly, very sweetly piercing, like the sight of the moon in winter.

‘I’m not at all sure it would be beautiful to die for anything,’ I said.

‘One only resolves to one’s constituents,’ she said with a trace of precocious pedantry. I stepped into the room, leaving a crude trail of heavy footprints on her white carpet, and, lifting her hair, I bent to kiss the nape of her neck. As I did so, I saw my own reflection for the first time since the beginning of the war. I saw that I had aged a little and was now as cynical as a satyr in a Renaissance painting. My face, poor mother, had all the inscrutability of the Indian. I greeted myself like a friend. Mary Anne allowed me to kiss her but I do not think she noticed it.

‘What will you do today, Mary Anne?’

‘Today, I shall play the piano, of course. Unless I think of something better to do, that is.’

And I do not know if, for a moment, I saw another person glance briefly out of her eyes for I was not looking at her in the mirror, only myself.

By the time I left the house, it had become a musical box for she was already playing. Now she was practising Chopin’s Etudes. By daylight, I could see the house was very large, one of those rambling country houses, half farmhouse and half mansion, though it must already have been three-quarters tumbledown when the Mayor himself lived there for whole sections of the roof had caved in beneath the monstrous burden of vegetation upon it while what had once been stables and outhouses now lay open to the weather and nature had already thrown too thick a green blanket over them to have been woven in only a few months. In the pure light of the morning, the fallen bricks, the exposed beams, the roses and the trees still seemed to sleep, murmuring and stirring a little as if a vague, unmemorable dream disturbed a slumber as profound as that of their mistress, the beauty in the dreaming wood, who slept too deeply to be wakened by anything as gentle as a kiss.

I slipped into the Town Hall and glanced desultorily once more through the Mayor’s files but I could find nothing that threw any further light on a disappearance I was now inclined to believe was quite unconnected with Dr Hoffman but just a simple suicide which might have taken place anywhere, at any time, on the spur of a despairing moment, for somehow I guessed the Mayor had been prone to anguish. When I had satisfied the conditions of my post as an Inspector of Veracity, I once again left the Town Hall in the sole hands of the yawning clerk and went to the bar where the peep-show proprietor had taken me. But even the massive black presided there no longer. Only a golden girl far more Indian than I, in a skimpy dress of bright striped cotton, wiped glasses as she stared aimlessly at the sunlight in the street outside, where only blow-flies buzzed in the choked gutters and, though I described the peep-show proprietor to her, she did not remember ever seeing him.

So I downed a single brandy and then sauntered along the Promenade, a place now dedicated solely to the joys of summer, although these joys were undertaken with a singular, silent listlessness. As I leaned on the iron railing gazing out over the prim corrugations of the ocean, I heard a tapping behind me. As inconspicuously as I could, I looked round. He scuttled past me, accompanied by the staccato rattle of his cane, muttering to himself; at a discreet distance, I followed him.

I cannot begin to describe his crabbed, crouched, scrambling walk – how first he tapped with his cane, then set it upon the ground and half swung himself forward on it with a wheezing, triumphant gasp as if at every step he defied and vanquished the ordinary laws of motion. And he managed to perform these senile acrobatics with immense speed, as if there were springs in his stick and the worn heels of his boots, too. He was indescribably filthy. He might have spent the night in a sewer.

He had moved his pitch to a dreary quarter of creosoted warehouses in which, from the stench, dried fish was stored. At the end of the alley hung with banners of washing, was a small shrine to a fisherman’s madonna with a few dead flowers stuck before it in a chipped coca-cola bottle and, behind it, a little bare plot of grass now almost filled by the familiar, pink-striped tent. And here I lost him. One moment he was there, hopping jerkily through the thick barriers of wet laundry, and the next he was gone, slipped, perhaps, into one of the hovels along the way. So I decided to wait for him in his own booth for a while.

This time, the poster read: SEE A YOUNG GIRL’S MOST SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCE IN LIFELIKE COLOURS. To while away the time, I strolled from machine to machine, unaccountably disturbed by the things I saw there although, unlike the seven wonders of yesterday’s world, none contained any element of the grotesque. All were as haunting as the cards in Tarot and the very titles of each set-piece were set like an integral medallion into each elegant design. These new tableaux were not, like yesterday’s, models but actual pictures painted with luscious oils on rectangular plates in such a way that the twin eye-pieces of the machine created a stereoscopic effect. These plates were arranged in several layers which slid in and out of one another by means of a system of programmed clockwork which announced itself with a faint click and gave the impression of stilted movement in the figures. It also allowed sudden transformation scenes. Each picture was lit from behind and glowed with an unnatural brilliance so that the moonlight which suffused the first scene was far more luxuriously pure than everyday moonlight and looked like the Platonic perfection of moonlight. This transcendental radiance bathed ivied ruins and the slide shifted back and forth to allow bats to flit stiffly around them. A lugubrious owl perched on the crumbling chimney stack and slowly beat its wings upon the darkened air where hung in iridescent characters the words: THE MANSION OF MIDNIGHT.

In the second machine, the mansion split in half to reveal a crimson room and the warning: HUSH! SHE IS SLEEPING! She was as white as my last night’s anaemic lover and, like her, she was dressed in black, but this one had a medieval gown of sheer black velvet with sleeves that came to points on the backs of her hands while her streaming hair contained several shades of darkness. She lay back in the voluptuous abandonment of sleep in a carved armchair where spiders propelled themselves up and down on the high-wires they had spun themselves among the hangings.

When I looked into the third machine I saw a ferocious hedge of thorns; but then, before my very eyes, a young prince with juicy bunches of golden ringlets hanging on the shoulders of his slashed and padded doublet was superimposed on the hedge in a balletic attitude of pleading and from his mouth issued a scroll which read: I COME! The hedge parted forthwith to reveal, in a set of cunning perspectives, the sleeper inside the haunted house of the first machine complete with owl above, etc.

A KISS CAN WAKE HER. In the crimson room, the pretty prince with skin as pink as sugar candy and lips like strawberry ice cream bent over the sleeping girl; another slide slipped into place and showed them so close together, his ringlets mixed with her locks and his face pressed so close to hers her pallor took his colour and blushed. A click of the internal mechanism. The tints of warm flesh rushed back into her face. Her eyes opened. Her newly red lips parted.

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton. In one set of phalanges he carried a scythe and with the other pulled out and squeezed a ripe breast from the girl’s bodice while his bony knees nudged apart her thighs. The emblem read: DEATH AND THE MAIDEN.

The remaining two machines were empty.

It was now in the middle of the day and the heat inside the tent grew oppressive. I went outside and sat on a doorstep, smoking and waiting, but still there was no sign of the peep-show proprietor. A child with crinkled hair tied up in the innumerable pigtails the poor and superstitious adopt for, I think, reasons of voodoo approached and stared at me. Her plaits were so tight they revealed wide areas of the glossy, brown skin covering her skull and, though I questioned her, she answered me incomprehensibly in the multilingual patois of the slums and began to poke indifferently in a clogged drain with a stick. Her face was covered with the whorled eruptions of a skin disease. The good nuns had taken me away from such pastimes and such afflictions but, all the same, you will have noticed I possessed a degree of ambivalence towards the Minister’s architectonic vision of the perfect state. This was because I was aware of what would have been my own position in that watertight schema.

No shadows fell in the drowsing noonday. I inquired at several houses but even those who spoke the standard language knew nothing of the peep-show proprietor except that his booth had suddenly arrived in the shrine garden the previous evening. My shirt was soaked with sweat and at last I walked down to the ocean to catch the possibility of a breeze.

I wondered if all the holiday makers were nothing but phantoms. Nevertheless, most of them had dispersed for lunch and an afternoon nap and the beaches were again deserted. I strolled beside the margin of the water, among a detritus of discarded sandals and plastic sun-tan lotion jars the sea could not digest, watching the dancing white lace hems of the petticoats of the ocean and so, while I was thinking of nothing but sunshine, the breakers delivered her to my feet.

Mary Anne had indeed found something else to do that day besides play the piano. And now she had suffered a sea change, already. She was wreathed and garlanded in seaweed and shells clung to her white night shift. When I lifted her up, water spouted from her mouth. Dead, she could not have had a whiter skin than when she lived. She was dead. But still I tried to revive her.

I was overwhelmed with shock and horror. I felt I was in some way instrumental to her death. I crouched over the sea-gone wet doll in an attitude I knew to be a cruel parody of my own the previous night, my lips pressed to her mouth, and it came to me there was hardly any difference between what I did now and what I had done then, for her sleep had been a death. The notion ravaged me with guilty horror. I do not know how much time passed while I attempted to manipulate her lifeless body but, when the sound of voices at last broke into my waking nightmare, the sun was far in the west and cast long beams which fell with a peculiar lateral intensity over the sand. She and I were now both utterly bedaubed with wet sand, so that we looked like those Indian shamans who paint themselves with coloured mud when they want to summon back the spirits of the departed. And I was attempting to do no more than that. I looked up.

On the promenade I saw a dark, hump-backed figure who gesticulated in my direction with a white stick. Down the iron steps to the beach clattered a posse of the Determination Police in their long, leather overcoats and, at their head, ran the clerk from the Town Hall, an unusual animation contorting his features, and the housekeeper from the Mayor’s house, still in her white apron, plumply stumbling, crimson and breathless but radiating a horrid gratification. These two formed the very picture of malevolent glee and I was seized with the conviction they had, in collusion, murdered the Mayor for reasons of their own, probably connected with money or property, and trusted to the confusion of the times to hide their guilt. They thought I might discover it. Perhaps they had even murdered poor Mary Anne, too, and dropped her into the sea, in order to frame me, for how could I accuse them if I was myself accused?

They all came nearer and nearer and nearer and I realized I must quickly run away.

I do not know why I scooped up the dripping corpse of the girl in my arms and tried to make my escape with her. I think I wanted to rescue her from the housekeeper for I knew with instantaneous clairvoyance the old woman hated her, dead or living. Burdened with Mary Anne, I lurched along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards while she, twice her weight with water, slithered about so that it was like carrying a huge fish. Then one of the Determination Police drew his pistol and fired. I felt a tearing pain in my shoulder and fell. The second bullet whistled past my ear and, while I watched, shattered the exquisite rind of the dead girl’s features so that her blood and brains spattered over my face. At that, I fainted.

I was charged on four counts.

(1) obtaining carnal knowledge of a minor (for, in fact, Mary Anne had been even younger than she looked, only fifteen years old);

(2) procuring death by drowning of the said minor;

(3) practising necrophily on the corpse of the said minor, which act the police had witnessed with their own eyes;

and:

(4) posing as an Inspector of Veracity Class Three when I was really the fatherless son of a known prostitute of Indian extraction, an offence against the Determination Regulations Page Four, paragraph I c, viz.: ‘Any thing or person seen to diverge significantly from it or his own known identity is committing an offence and may be apprehended and tested.’

From the look in the eyes of the Determination Police, it seemed very likely to me that I would not survive the testing in order to stand my trial.

I was terrified to realize how much the autonomous power of the police had grown. Although I pleaded with them to let me telephone the Minister’s private number, they laughed at me and beat my head with the butts of their pistols. The papers in my briefcase had, of course, all been altered so that they presented masterpieces of the dubious; this was clearly the work of the clerk, done while I examined the files. My weapons were all gone, every one. I was uncertain of the role of the peep-show proprietor in all this except that clearly he wished to be rid of me and all the time I was waiting for him, he had himself been blindly spying on everything I did.

All the cells in the Police Station were filled with reality offenders so they took me to the Town Hall and put me in the Mayor’s office. They had tied up my wounded shoulder in a rough sling and treated it only with a douse of dilute carbolic acid but at least they were sensitive enough to let me wash away Mary Anne’s blood. They gave the clerk an overly melodramatic machine gun and posted him outside the door, to make sure I did not escape. I heard the key turn in the lock and the harsh, retreating clang of the heels of their jackboots. After a while, I heard a cackle of female laughter and then nothing more.

It was now night and the room was in utter darkness. I was in considerable pain but a seething fury kept me from despair. I knew I should sleep a little to clear my disoriented brain enough to face the ordeal I knew next day would bring but sleep was out of the question. Besides, I was ravenously hungry and as dry as a bone. I felt my way to the bureau to grope for the decanter of Mayoral sherry and discovered there an airtight tin of Marie biscuits, too, so I munched them all down, in spite of their earthy flavour. I pulled the stopper from the decanter with my teeth. The sherry had turned to liquid demerara sugar but I managed to keep it down and it and the food gave me sufficient strength to seat myself at the Mayor’s desk and look at my situation coolly. When I did so, I found it hopeless enough to be risible.

The moon soon came up and since it was full, shone through the blind over the window and let me see my makeshift prison fairly well. I listened carefully but could hear no sound in the corridor outside. I stood up, went to the window and pulled the blind aside a little. The room was on the second storey at the front of the building and the window was flanked on either side by a pair of stone goddesses. Anyone could have scaled that façade easily for the stucco breasts, rumps, pillars and pediments which covered it offered a multiplicity of foot- and handholds but, on the window-ledge itself, I would have been visible to any watcher in the square as if it had been daylight and, when I let the blind fall with a faint rattle, the sound provoked a volley of knocking on the door so I knew the guard was wakeful. I looked around the room for a better exit and my eyes fell upon the fireplace.

It, too, was flanked by a brace of caryatids who bore the massive, brown marble mantelpiece on their serene foreheads. In the grate was a screen embroidered with the town coat of arms. Although my shoulder was badly inflamed and I could hardly use my right hand, I managed to move the heavy screen without a clang or rattle and I poked my head into the fireplace. Looking up, I saw a disc of pure blue sky on which shone a few stars. A light fall of soot showered my head and I withdrew it but when I re-examined the interior of the chimney, I saw that, although caked with the soot of years, a series of clefts cut in the sides of it to facilitate the work of the chimney sweep made a staircase to the roof all ready for me. I could hardly believe my luck.

I waited until I judged from the position of the moon it was some hours past midnight. By then, my entire right arm was gripped rigid in a vice of pain and of no further use. Besides, my rising fever parched and racked me though there was nothing left to drink and I had to fight against a growing light-headedness which verged on delirium. Yet I was determined to escape. At last I crept to the door and listened. I thought I heard a faintly sawing snore and, fevered as I was, this was enough to encourage me. I had been stripped of everything but my trousers and my bandage; I was quite suitably dressed for climbing a chimney. I approached the fireplace.

Dank, powdered soot filled my mouth and nostrils and, before I had effortfully ascended three or four yards, my left hand before me was as black as the wall on which it rested and blood ran out of the rough bandaging, trickling down my right arm. The sky watched me from above with a single blue eye that looked so blithely indifferent to my predicament that tears of self-pity carved deep channels in the filth on my cheeks. The sweep had used a child to clamber up and down the chimney for him with the brushes but I was a grown man and it was a chamber of unease to me, an unease which increased with every moment of tortured confinement for my movements were too restricted to allow me to progress with any speed and the necessity for absolute silence forbade me to so much as clear my throat. Besides, my overwrought senses soon convinced me the passage was steadily growing narrower and the walls were shrinking to crush me. The building was some six storeys high. I shuddered at every dark mouth announcing the fireplace of some other room for fear a fall of soot would betray my ascent to anyone who waited there and when, now and then, one-handed, I mishandled a cleft, I nearly died with fear to hear how my own struggle betrayed me.

But up, up, I went, like an ambitious rat traversing an unaccommodating, horizontal hole and I gradually grew certain there was nobody in the upper storeys but my striving self. Yet, for some reason, this did not diminish my fear for the memory of the blasted face of the dead girl visited me very often and it seemed at times I still carried all her weight on my throbbing right arm and saw her teeth gleam from a mass of pulped flesh whenever I glanced down. At times, the sky seemed a mile away and at others I felt I could touch it if I stretched out my hand so the moment when my head broke into the fresh air surprised me as much as if I were a baby suddenly popped from the womb. At first I could only drink the fresh air in thirsty gulps, still half wedged within the chimney, but as soon as I got my breath back, I managed to clamber perilously out of the stack and rolled down the roof until I came to rest in the gutter where I lay still for a long time, for I was almost at the end of my strength.

The gutters were mercifully wide and a pediment of carved stone some three feet high concealed the domestic look of the furniture of the roof from the street, so I, too, was quite hidden. As soon as I returned to myself a little, I saw that the moon was setting and soon would come an hour or two of perfect darkness before the first signs of dawn. I waited for that darkness as for a friend. The dressings on my wound were so torn and filthy I ripped them off and flung them away. A persistent dull pulse like the pulse of pain itself reminded me they had not taken out the bullet and, unless I went to a doctor very soon, I might not last much longer. But I still had enough endurance left to escape.

The nearest building was the town bank. It lay across a narrow alley a mere six feet away and, by some miracle, it had a flat roof; but it was built on only three floors so the drop was of some eighteen feet. However, I could see the most inviting fire escape on the shady side of the building which, if I could reach it, offered me a clear route to freedom. But I do not think I would have attempted that frightful, downward plunge if my wits had not been shaking with fever. When it was quite dark, I made it; I pitched forward into the abyss and the sprawling fall winded me completely – but I landed on the other side, alive.

On this roof was a water tank and, though it contained no more than a puddle of scum, I scooped up a little in fingers where soot was now grained in the very whorls and was refreshed in proportion to the quality of the refreshment – that is, not much; but a little. I could see the silver salver of the ocean dewed at the rim with a pale shadow of dawn but otherwise the night was profound, for the street lights did not work any more. So I walked down the fire escape on my bruised, bare feet as bravely as you please and crept off down the alleys, steering clear of guard dogs, keeping my eyes skinned for the gleam of a patrolling policeman’s torch – though the fever was in my eyes and I trembled unnecessarily many times before I had left the town behind me.

On my way, I stole fresh trousers and a shirt from a clothesline and took the sandals from the feet of a drunken peasant sleeping in a doorway but I did not stop to wash myself at any of the dripping waterpumps. I waited until I came to a stream well away from the last of the suburbs and there sluiced myself down with the icy water. I screamed out loud when it touched my wound. I buried my rag of an old garment under a stone and dressed myself in my new clothes. Now nothing at all was left of the brisk young civil servant who had left the city such a short while ago. I looked the perfect offspring of the ancestors my mother had so strenuously denied and to that, perhaps, I owe my life.

I came to the main road and found a telephone box where I tried to ring the Minister but all the lines were out of order or had been cut for the instrument did not even crackle. So I left the highway and took a green path between hedgerows drenched with dew where soon the sweet birds sang. The day had begun and, moment by moment, the early morning mists grew brighter. I wished I did not keep glimpsing Mary Anne’s face behind the hawthorns where the hips were red already. I passed a public house, miles from anywhere, and resting against the rustic bench outside the door, wet with dew like everything else, lay a bicycle. I mounted the bicycle and rode on, though I could only steer with the one hand for a bicycle may be ridden only by a continuous effort of will and the will to live was all I had left.

I do not possess a very clear memory of this part of my journey. I was consumed by a terrible sickness and weak from hunger, too; I had eaten nothing but the dead Mayor’s biscuits since the treacherous housekeeper’s breakfast twenty-four hours before. I know I came to a very wide river towards the end of the morning and cycled along the embankment as the sun beat down on my uncovered head. My tyres described great, crazy arcs behind me. I was now, I think, very near to the end.

I saw a dappled horse cropping grass beside the path and, leaning against a post, a tall, brown, rangy man in rough garments smoking a meditative pipe. He watched me curiously as I wobbled faintly towards him and held out his arms to catch me before I fell. I remember his lean, dark face, almost the face I had seen so recently in Mary Anne’s mirror; and I remember the sensation of being carried through the air in a pair of strong arms; and then the creaking of boards and the motion of rocking on water, so I knew I had been placed in some kind of boat on the river. I recall the touch of fresh linen against my cheek and the sound of a woman’s voice speaking a liquid and melodious language which took me back to my earliest childhood, before the time of the nuns.

Then, for a long time, nothing more.