How can I explain this? – yes, yes it had; but Stonehenge belonged, as it were, to the old dispensation. It was the last act of a drama that was still somehow for me. It was done to spite me – I knew that, of course – but even that meant that I still had a hand in its production. Whereas the jealousy I was now braving my instinctive vertigo for was the real McCoy. I was out of the reckoning this time. I was the last thing on anybody’s mind. I was as good as gone. So if I actually could swing by my heels from these gnawed and crumbling cliffs, ignore the blinding spray and falling rocks, distinguish from the cries of the kittiwakes and the plunge-diving gannets Camilla’s gasps of wholly elemental and thoroughly un-connected to Barney Fugleman pleasure, and still not plunge puling into the heaving oily sea below, then I would be well on my way to beating this thing, wouldn’t I?

Well wouldn’t I?

[2]

The question’s academic anyway. I never got to find out what I could beat. Things moved just that bit too fast for me.

On the last night Camilla and I spent under the same roof I dreamed a terrible dream. Generally I slept badly in the sleeping bag. The floor was hard, and Camilla would come and go at all hours, making late snacks and deceptively innocent phone calls. Her only acknowledgement of my presence was to step over me where I lay. She never once kicked me, I’ll say that much for her. But I suspect that was only because she didn’t want to give me ideas. And she was right to be careful. One inadvertent prod from her foot and I’d have been reduced to a blubbering heap of nostalgia and needs. I would lie for hours, pretending to be asleep, hoping. So you can see why my nights were unsettled. But on this night I had put myself to floor early, after a long fruitless day following Camilla up the coast and finally losing her in a sea mist off Windy Beak. If I hadn’t been so tired I’d have stayed awake and read, or watched the spiders. I knew that early nights were not good for me. All my worst nightmares came to me when I retired early, and tonight was no exception.