“ ‘What are you going to do with the stone?’ I asked him.

“ ‘You saw me take it?’ he said. ‘I’ll get rid of it. Throw it away.’

“ ‘I wouldn’t throw it a second time,’ I said.

“ ‘What else?’ said he.

“ ‘If it really bothers you, you must come to terms with it,’ I said. ‘In your place I’d do something symbolic: hold it in your hand, re-live the moment when you threw it at Ramsay and hit my mother, and this time don’t throw it. Give yourself a good sharp knock on the head with it.’

“ ‘That’s a damned silly game to play,’ he said. And would you believe it, he was pouting—the glorious Boy was pouting.

“ ‘Not at all. Consider it as a ritual. An admission of wrongdoing and penitence.’

“ ‘Oh, balls to that,’ he said.

“I had become uncomfortable company: I wouldn’t be eaten, and I made peculiar and humiliating suggestions. Also, I could tell that something was on his mind, and he wanted to be alone with it. He started the car and very shortly we were at my hotel—the Royal York, you know, which is quite near the docks. He shook hands with the warmth that I suppose had marked him all his life. ‘Glad to have met you: thanks for the advice,’ said he.

“ ‘It’s only what I would do myself, in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘I’d do my best to swallow that stone.’ Now I swear to you that I only meant what I said symbolically—meaning to come to terms with what the stone signified. And he seemed not to notice.

“ ‘I meant your advice about the Abdication,’ he said. ‘It was stupid of me not to have thought of that myself.’

“I suddenly realized what he meant. He was going to abdicate, like his hero before him. But unlike his Prince of Wales he didn’t mean to live to face the world afterward. There it is, Dunny: Liesl and I are convinced that the man who truly granted his inmost wish, though only by example, was the man who decided not to live as Edward VIII.

“What should I have done? Insisted that he come to my room, and plied him with hot coffee and sweet reasonableness? Not quite my line, eh? Hardly what one expects of a brother wolf, quonk?”

“You let him leave you in that frame of mind?”

“Liesl likes to talk about what she calls my Magian World View. She makes it sound splendid and like the Arabian Nights and dolls it up with fine phrases from Spengler—”

“Phantasmagoria and dream-grotto,” said Liesl, taking a swig of her cognac; “only that’s not Spengler—that’s Carlyle.”

“Phantasmagoria and dream-grotto if you like,” said Magnus, “but—and it is a vital but—combined with a clear-eyed, undeluded observation of what lies right under your nose. Therefore—no self-deceiving folly and no meddlesome compassion, but a humble awareness of the Great Justice and the Great Mercy whenever they choose to make themselves known. I don’t talk about a Magian World View; I’ve no touch with that sort of thing. In so far as it concerns me, I live it. It’s just the way things strike me, after the life I’ve lived, which looks pretty much like a World of Wonders when I spread it out before me, as I’ve been doing. Everything has its astonishing, wondrous aspect, if you bring a mind to it that’s really your own—a mind that hasn’t been smeared and blurred with half-understood muck from schools, or the daily papers, or any other ragbag of reach-me-down notions. I try not to judge people, though when I meet an enemy and he’s within arm’s length, I’m not above giving him a smart clout, just to larn him. As I did with Roly. But I don’t monkey with what I think of as the Great Justice—”