Dear Forster (he wrote),

Many thanks for your letter. It requires a frank answer and I give it for what it is worth. Wai-ata-tapu is, as you suggest, the property of my sister and her husband, who run it as a thermal spa. In many ways they are perfect fools, but they are honest fools and that is more than one can say of most people engaged in similar pursuits. The whole place is grossly mismanaged in my opinion, but I don’t know that you would find anyone else who would agree with me. Claire is an army man and it’s a pity he has failed so signally to absorb in the smallest degree the principles of system and orderly control that must at some time or another have been suggested to him. My sister is a bookish woman. However incompetent, she seems to command the affection of her martyred clients, and I am her only critic. Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that they make no money and work like bewildered horses at an occupation that requires merely the application of common sense to make it easy and profitable. On the alleged therapeutic properties of the baths you have evidently formed your own opinion. They consist, as you are aware, of thermal springs whose waters contain alkalis, free sulphuric acid, and free carbonic acid gas. There are also siliceous mud baths in connection with which my brother-in-law talks loosely and freely of radioactivity. This latter statement I regard as so much pious mumbo-jumbo, but I am alone in my opinion. The mud may be miraculous. My leg is no worse since I took to using it.

As for your spectacular patient, I don’t know to what degree of comfort he is used, but can promise him he won’t get it, though enormous and misguided efforts will be made to accommodate him. Actually there is no reason why he shouldn’t be comfortable. Possibly his secretary and man might succeed where my unfortunate relatives may safely be relied upon to fail. I doubt if he will be more wretched than he would be anywhere else in this extraordinary country. The charges will certainly be less than elsewhere. Six guineas a week for resident patients. Possibly Gaunt would like a private sitting-room for which I imagine there would be an extra charge. Tonks of Harpoon is the visiting medical man. I need say no more. Possibly it is an oblique recommendation of the waters that all Tonks’s patients who have taken them have at least survived. There is no reason why I should not keep an eye on your man and I shall do so if you and he wish it. What you say of him modifies my previous impression that he was one of the emasculate popinjays who appear to form the nucleus of the intelligentsia at home in these degenerate days. Bloomsbury.

My magnum opus, as you no doubt ironically call it, crawls on in spite of the concreted efforts of my immediate associates to withhold the merest necessities for undisturbed employment. I confess that the autobiographical outpourings of persons connected with the theatre seem to me to bear little relation to serious work, and, where I fail, Mr Geoffrey Gaunt may well succeed.

Again, many thanks for your letter,

Yours, JAMES ACKRINGTON

PS. I should be doing you and your patient a disservice if I failed to tell you that the place is infested by as offensive a fellow as I have ever come across. I have the gravest suspicions regarding this person.

J.A.