“Also he was anxious to know what it was you ate when you found yourself in the curious prison with the rounded walls.”

“It was a box of Cracker-Jack. I didn’t know what it was at the time, and had never eaten it before. Why should I have included those details in my story? I didn’t know them then. It would have been a violation of narrative art to tell things I didn’t know. Kinghovn ought to have more sense of artistic congruity.”

“He’s a cameraman. He wants to get a shot of everything, and edit later.”

“I edit as I go along. What did the others say?”

“Ingestree talked for quite a while about the nature of puritanism. He doesn’t know anything about it. It’s just a theological whimwham to him. He’s talked about puritanism at Oxford to Ronny Knox and Monsignor D’Arcy, but that stuff means nothing in terms of the daily, bred-in-the-bone puritanism we lived in Deptford. North American puritanism and the puritanism the English know are worlds apart. I could have told him a thing or two about that, but my time for instructing people is over. Let ’em wallow in whatever nonsense pleases ’em, say I.”

“Did Lind have anything to say?”

“Not much. But he did say that nothing you told us was incomprehensible to him, or even very strange. ‘We know of such things in Sweden,’ he said.”

“I suppose people know of such things everywhere. But every rape is unique for the aggressor and the victim. He talks as if he knew everything.”

“I don’t think he means it quite that way. When he talks about Sweden, I think it is a mystical rather than a geographical concept. When he talks of Sweden he means himself, whether he knows it or not. He really does understand a great deal. You remember what Goethe said? No, of course you don’t. He said he’d never heard of a crime of which he could not believe himself capable. Same with Lind, I suppose. That’s his strength as an artist.”

“He’s a great man to work with. I think between us we’ll do something extraordinary with this film.”

“I hope so. And by the way, Magnus, I must thank you for the very kind things you said about me tonight. But I assure you I didn’t especially mean to be kind to you, when we were boys. I mean, it wasn’t anything conscious.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t. But that’s the point, don’t you see? If you’d done it out of duty, or for religious reasons, it would have been different. But it was just decency. You’re a very decent man, Dunny.”

“Really? Well—it’s nice of you to think so. I’ve heard dissenting opinions.”

“It’s true. That’s why I think you ought to know something I didn’t see fit to tell them tonight.”

“You suggested you had been editing. What did you leave out?”

“One gets carried away, telling a story. I may have leaned a little too heavily on my character as the wronged child. But would they have understood the whole truth? I don’t after fifty years when I have thought of it over and over. You believe in the Devil, don’t you.”