“Either would do,” said Kinghovn; “but you need a point of focus, you know. Otherwise you get this cinéma vérité stuff, which is sometimes interesting but it damn well isn’t vérité because it fails utterly to convince. It’s like those shots of war you see on TV; you can’t believe anything serious is happening. If you want your film to look like truth you need somebody like Jurgen to decide what truth is, and somebody like me to shoot it so it never occurs to you that it could appear any other way. Of course what you get is not truth, but it’s probably a lot better in more ways than just the cinematic way. If you want the death of Willard shot from the point of view of the Bearded Lady I can certainly do it. And simply because I can do it to order I don’t know how you can pretend it has any special superiority as truth.”

“I suppose it’s part of that human condition silly-clever people are always grizzling about,” said Liesl. “If you want truth, I suppose you must shoot the film from God’s point of view and with God’s point of focus, whatever it may be. And I’ll bet the result won’t look much like cinéma vérité. But I don’t think either you or Jurgen are up to that job, Harry.”

“There is no God,” said Kinghovn; “and I’ve never felt the least necessity to invent one.”

“Probably that is why you have spent your life as a technician; a very fine one, but a technician,” said Lind. “It’s only by inventing a few gods that we get that uneasy sense that something is laughing at us which is one of the paths to faith.”

“Eisengrim talks a lot about God,” said Ingestree, “and God seems still to be a tremendous reality to him. But there’s no question of God laughing. The bottle in the smoke—that’s what he was. I really must read the Bible some time; there are such marvellous goodies in it, just waiting to be picked up. But even these Bibles Designed to be Read as Literature are so bloody thick! I suppose one could browse, but when I browse I never seem to find anything except tiresome stud-book stuff about Aminadab begetting Jonadab and that kind of thing.”

“We’ve only had part of the story,” I said. “Magnus has carefully pointed out to us that he is looking backward on his early life as a man who has changed decisively in the last forty years. What’s his point of focus?”

“Nobody changes so decisively that they lose all sense of the reality of their youth,” Lind said. “The days of childhood are always the most vivid. He has let us think that his childhood made him a villain. So I think we must assume that he is a villain now. A quiescent villain, but not an extinct one.”

“I think that’s a lot of romantic crap,” said Kinghovn. “I’m sick of all the twaddle about childhood. You should have seen me as a child; a flaxen-haired little darling playing in my mother’s garden in Aalborg. Where is he now? Here I sit, a very well-smoked bottle like our friend who has gone to bed. If I met that flaxen-haired child now I would probably give him a good clout over the ear. I’ve never much liked kids. Which was the greater use in the world? That child, so sweet and pure, or me, as I am now, not sweet and damned well not pure?”