Liz came down from her room, calm and dull. She’d been given something.

“Sorry about that. No, not him. Me. Won’t you sit down?”

“I have to go away again.”

“Yes.”

“No, I’ll be back again. It’s Rick Tucker. I promised—”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet him at the Random. He’s not getting the papers, not those, anyway.”

“He’s mad, you know.”

“Yes.”

“So he won’t like it.”

“Well.”

We were both silent for a while. Liz took out a cigarette, changed her mind, made a gesture towards putting it back in the box, then threw it in the grate with the others.

“It’s odd, Wilf.”

“Yes. We shouldn’t have married. Ought to have been relatives, brother and sister, it’s been that sort of thing, lifelong, always connected no matter what.”

“I didn’t mean us. I meant you and him. The other day I was reading a biography. Mrs Hemingway said, ‘Aldous got better. Ernest got worse.’ When I read that I thought about you. She said nothing of critics and drudges. You know what? You and Rick have destroyed each other.”

Chapter XV

I went to London for three days. I’d have made it more only the club now had an even stricter time limit for staying nights. Somehow I couldn’t face the Athenaeum among all the bishops and vice-chancellors. Say what you like about the Random, there isn’t a bishop in sight. Come to that, nowadays there’s hardly ever a writer in sight. The first evening there was no one about I knew so I rang my agent but he’d gone home, of course. He lives in the country and I realized I didn’t even know his address—canny fellow! I thought of a girl but couldn’t be bothered or was too old or afraid or too sensible. I looked at some of the theatres and realized I just simply didn’t care about them or about the films. I stood on the pavement of Piccadilly and watched the human race off for its evening’s entertainment and thought to myself that Liz was right. I was destroyed in that I no longer belonged to that race but to the ghosts and memories of men. I had my dream and the solid pavement was insubstantial beside it. The violin string was either slack or snapped. Intolerance had drawn back and, though still there, was about as relevant to me as church furnishings. It was the dream singing which wasn’t singing; and since singing starts just where words leave off, where are you? Face to face with the indescribable, inexplicable, the isness, which was where you came in.

I wandered back to the Random and had a drink to pass the time. Sitting was so peaceful (the place was empty except for two strangers talking earnestly to each other at the bar) that I had another and then another and so on. I did slip a bit.