‘I am at my desk, writing.’

‘Is Florence with you?’

‘Who’s Florence? I write alone.’

‘What are you writing?’

‘Another novel.’

‘Another novel? Does that mean you have written several?’

‘For my pains.’

‘Are you a successful writer?’ Harry Vilbert was always curious to know how other people were doing; even those who had been dead for fifty years. I suspect he was on the point of asking Thomas how much he made, per book.

‘Successful? Not according to my critics, or my wife. But I have not sought worldly or social success. I do not care for loud acclaim.’

An odd thing happened to me here: I started shaking. Even at the time I grasped that I was riven by the enormity of the untruth I was telling. Not care for loud acclaim, eh? Not give a hoot that I could count Lady Ilchester and the Prince among my friends? My very knees, that’s to say Barney Fugleman’s knees, knocked together in rage and frustration; if I could have got my hands on the pathological liar that was opening and closing my mouth I would have strung him up, and you know outside which prison.

Harry Vilbert meanwhile, oblivious to this struggle, was nosing around the pains and privileges of popularity. ‘Are the critics harsh about your work?’ he wanted to know.

The question was meat and drink to the fraudulent old fibber. ‘The reviewers – they scarcely merit the cognomination, critic – are minor men whose minds lack all great power in judgement.’ (Not that he cared! Not that anything they said could bother him!) They differ with an author’s theology and claim the grounds for their antagonism to be a point of art itself. They’ll yap at my heels like hounds when they read what I am writing now, and their objections, which they will cunningly disguise, will be entirely moral. I don’t know, with all this public and domestic censure, why I continue.’

Harry Vilbert sighed sympathetically. He often wondered about the point of continuing himself. I think he was beginning to feel an affinity with this Thomas, who was, after all, his own age. I suppose he thought that there was every chance that I would find him more acceptable also. In which case a cheque from Sharon might be forthcoming.

‘I can understand the way you feel,’ he said. It must have been touch and go whether he added, ‘Point taken.’ Instead, he asked, ‘Why doesn’t your wife approve of what you write?’

‘She thinks me irreligious. She had ambitions to be a writer herself. And she is a lady. There is no more to say.’

‘But you are continuing with the present novel?’

‘Oh yes. It is very nearly finished. But it might well be the last I do.’

‘Will you tell me what you are writing about, Thomas?’