I moved about. I had many acquaintances but few friends. I stayed with one or two of them. One even produced a woman but she proved to be a serious academic and a structuralist to boot. God, I might as well have shacked up with Rick L. Tucker!

I moved to Italy and irony at once took charge, for I chummed up with an Italian woman of near enough my own age and more or less in a pass of the windy Apennines, like the man said. I was fond of her, I suppose, but what kept me there for more than two years was a piano nobile like a museum and servants who hid their sneers. I was so chuffed, I remember—oh Barclay, Barclay, what a snob you are!—I rang Elizabeth and got Emily out to me for a bit. She hated Italy, the place, my Italian chum and, I’m still sorry to say, me. So back she went, and we didn’t meet again for years.

All this time, though I hardly noticed except as a small irritant, Professor Tucker kept sending letters which Elizabeth forwarded because it gave her an excuse to nag me about my papers. They were strewn through the house and increasing daily from one source or another. I ignored the letters. Only when she sent me a cable, FOR GODS SAKE WILF WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOUR PAPERS, did I reply, BURN THE BLOODY LOT. But she never did. She took to nailing them up in tea chests and dumping them in the wine cellar. Outside a game reserve or a rifle range Capstone Bowers was such an ignorant sod he never grasped what they would be worth on the open market or, worse, on the closed one.

My Italian connection came to an end. The fact is that religion, in the shape of Padre Pio, had got to her. Out of curiosity we’d been to one of those dawn masses which always ended in a stampede of the faithful, anxious to get a glimpse of the man’s stigmata before his helpers carried him away out of sight. I was a bit shocked to see that cool, civilized woman scrumming with the rest. She came back to me at last, her veil down and tears streaming behind it. Her voice was deep with a kind of triumphant grief.

“Now, can you doubt?”

That irritated me.

“All I saw was a poor old man being half-carried away from the altar. That was all!”

She said nothing more in the church, but the argument started again in the back of the car on the way “home”. I know now that what was significant about my reaction as well as hers was the fact that we were involved, both of us, and driven to quarrel so bitterly. My driving force was a passionate need for there not to be a miracle.

“Look, it’s all hysteria!”

“I saw them, I tell you, the wounds. God forgive us, we’re not worthy even to speak the word!”