“That’s a good one! It goes far to restore my belief in your rottenness. Well. Soon you’ll be able to talk with no one to interrupt. Happy?”

I said nothing, did nothing. As so often, to speak the truth was impossible; for I was happy indeed—had remained happy ever since the dream. Nothing could alter that, not even poor Liz. The truth was shameful and it was too late to learn compassion or find another dog.

There was too much silence. I broke it at last.

“I’m staying, that’s all.”

“You must’ve got religion. Visiting the sick. You can’t go, can you? What would the biographers say? A dying woman who bore you a child. You have to stick round, Wilf, and see it through. A slice of life. No writer should be without them.”

“All right.”

“Robert Farquharson of The Keyhole knows. So does Rick Tucker.”

“Yap yap.”

“That’s what he kept saying the other day. I thought it must be some new catch word but I’m not au fait these days, don’t even watch TV.”

She scrabbled for a cigarette in the box on the table by her chair and lit it, then went straight into a coughing fit. She threw the cigarette into the grate but immediately she stopped coughing fumbled for another one.

“You still don’t smoke, do you, Wilf? Men! Even Humph was scared of this, this—”

“Illness. Sickness.”

“—this cancer.”

“Look, Lizzie, I’ll try to explain. This has struck me all of a heap. But I want to help. I’m not used to helping.”

“I’ll say! Christ! What is it? Have you been Received? Are you under instruction? What you need is reconstruction.’’

“You’ve been saving this up. Go right ahead. Get rid of all the vomit. When you’ve done I’ll try to say—”

“—and you’ll succeed. That’s one thing about you, Wilfred Barclay, when you do break a silence it may not be significant or profound but for sheer glibness—”

“Will you listen or not? Just tell me. If not, I’ll shut up.”

She coughed a bit then threw the second cigarette into the grate.

“All right.”

So I told her or tried to tell her. I went right through it, from waking up drunk but not drunk and knowing at last what it was like to be happy. I tried to explain the immediacy of the dream that had made everything else a kind of mirage. The longer I went on trying to describe the indescribable the sillier it sounded.

“—it turned me round, you see. I’d been screaming and holding on to time as if I could stop the whole process; but the dream turned me round and I knew that the way I was going, towards death, was the way everybody goes, that it was—healthy and right and consonant—here, what’s the matter?”

I found I was standing over her. I thought she’d had some kind of seizure or attack but then I saw that she was laughing.

“You utter, utter bastard! You clown! You, you—”