Uncurling his friend’s fingers from the spider web wheels, Bleak pushed the chair around a corner so the light of the dying sun stained their faces a healthy red, and added, ‘Look, life gives us everything. Then it takes it away. Youth, love, happiness, friends. Darkness gets it all in the end. We didn’t have enough sense to know you can will it – life – to others. Your looks, your youth. Pass it on. Give it away. It’s lent to us for only a while. Use it, let go without crying. It’s a very fancy relay race, heading God knows where. Except now, in your last lap of the race, you find no one waiting for you on the track ahead. Nobody for you to hand the stick to. You’ve run the race for no reason. You’ve failed the team.’

‘Is that what I’ve done?’

‘Yes. You weren’t hurting the boy. Actually, what you were trying to do was make him grow up. You were both wrong for a while. Now you’re both winning. Not because you want to, but because you have to.’

‘No, it’s only he who’s ahead. The idea was to grow them as fruit for the grave. But all I did was give them—’

‘Love,’ said Bleak.

Quartermain could not say the word. That dreadful sweet, candy–sickening word. So trite, so true, so irritating, so wonderful, so frightening, and, in the end, so lost to himself.

‘They won. I did them a favor, my God, a favor! I was blind! I wanted them to race about, like we run about, and wither, and be shocked by their withering, and die, like I’m dying. But they don’t realize, they don’t know, they’re even happier, if that’s possible.’

‘Yes.’ Bleak pushed the chair. ‘Happier. Because growing old isn’t all that bad. None of it is bad if you have one thing. If you have the one thing that makes it all all right.’

That dreadful word again!

‘Don’t say it!’

‘But I’m thinking it,’ said Bleak, trying mightily to keep an unaccustomed smile from creasing his lips.

‘So you’re right, so I’m miserable, and here I sit, crying like a goddamn idiot fool!’

The freckled leaf–shadows passed over his liver–spotted hands. They fitted, for a moment, like a jigsaw and made his hands look muscled, tanned, and young. He stared at them, as if delivered free of age and corruption. Then the freckling, twinkling motion of passing trees went on.

‘What do I do now, what do I do? Help me, Bleak.’

‘We can help ourselves. You were heading for the cliff. I tried to warn you. You can’t hold them back now. If you’d had any sense, you might have encouraged the children to continue their damned revolution, never grow up, to be egocentrics. Then they really would have been unhappy!’