Which brings us right up to today. I have taken all the papers from the chests and built them into a bonfire down by the river. As I sit at this desk I have only to lift my head and over the typewriter I can see the pile, a positive mountain of mostly white paper waiting there—startlingly white against the dark woods on the other side of the river. When I’ve rounded off this manuscript I shall take a can of paraffin down there, drench the lot and set fire to it—a rite of passage made out of the detritus, the nail clippings, cut hair, the worn-away time, unnecessary correspondence, reviews, theses, financial statements, manuscripts, interlinears, proofs, the paperweight of a whole life!

Then I shall find Rick and give him this small sheaf of papers, all that is necessary, all that will be left, all that means anything to set over against the lying stories, the partial journals and all the rest. It will be a kind of dying. Freedom forsooth, freedom quotha.

I am happy, quietly happy. How can I be happy? Sometimes the experience is like a jewel, exquisite, sparkling, without words. Sometimes it is calm and beyond all my ordinary experience, because of its perfect calmness. I am happy. That’s not reasonable, it’s a fact. Either I have broken away from the intolerance which is impossible, or it has let me go, which is also impossible.

How could I change? But I have changed. Drink, for example. After more than a quarter of a century of trying I have now given up drink for good without trying at all! It may be a perilous thing to write in view of the times the clown’s trousers have fallen down; but I know with absolute, inward certainty that I have drunk my last drink.

Who knows? With intolerance backed right out of the light there is room for an unconvenanted mercy like the one that drives me to give Rick these papers: a mercy by which those unsatisfactory phenomena, Wilfred Townsend Barclay and Richard Linbergh Tucker, may be eternally destroyed. Is that what keeps me happy?

Rick is a hundred yards away across the river, flitting from tree to tree like playing Indians. I shall have an audience for my ritual. Now he is leaning against a tree and peering at me through some instrument or other.

How the devil did Rick L. Tucker manage to get hold of a gu

About the Author

When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Foundation said of his novels that they ‘illuminate the human condition in the world of today’. Born in Cornwall in 1911, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor, a musician and a schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck.