“You were right about the chimney,” I said. “I heard every word. They’re going to pay you the money. There’s no question of that. But I wouldn’t believe a word they say about anything else. Those two are properly rattled by that tape.”

Maugham nodded grimly.

“Sometimes I think I’ll probably die at this desk,” he said quietly. “Like a spavined horse in harness. With a half-finished novel or play on the go. I often think of starting a new book just so I can make that possible, like Dickens. At other times I look at the painted bedstead in my bedroom and imagine what I’ll look like when at last I’m lying there dead, laid out like Miss Havisham’s wedding breakfast. Not good, I think. Not good at all, I’m afraid.”

“Is there a good way to look when you’re dead?”

“The embalmers would have you believe that the best way to look when you’re dead is alive. Healthy pallor, red cheeks, pink lips. Which I must say seems rather creepy to me. You’d think it wouldn’t bother me. But every morning when I awaken I look in the mirror and I can’t believe how much like a corpse I already am.”

“I’ve seen a lot of dead people in my time. More than is good for me, frankly. On the whole, the dead don’t mind what they look like. And I’d have thought having a face like shit is the best guarantee that you’ve had a full life. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.”

“By that standard I’ve lived at least two lives, both of them like Dorian Gray’s picture. Then again, all bodies are imperfect, aren’t they? Even those that we mistakenly idealize. Take that picture on the wall there. Eve by Paul Gauguin. You know why I bought her? To remind me how ugly I find women. That and because she has seven toes on her left foot. It’s almost as if Gauguin wants to remind us just how imperfect we all are. How fundamentally none of us is ever to be trusted. Imagine if she was wearing a nice pair of court shoes. You might never know she’s not all that she seems.”

I looked at the picture and nodded. “She’s not my type,” I said. “I do know that. I like my women to look more like women than Wallace Beery. That’s why high heels were invented, isn’t it? To stop women looking like us.”

“And you wonder why your relationships go wrong? Take it from Gauguin. You can’t trust Western ideals of beauty, Walter. Every angel is really a devil. And every woman is a whore.”

“Not every woman. Only the ones who ask for money.”

“They all want money.”

“Are your boyfriends any different?”