“Well, I’ll be going, then.”

She did not turn completely to face me. She turned her head so that her profile was outlined against the worn tapestry. “It is enough.”

“What is?”

“The two of us.”

“Why?”

“It is enough. That’s all.”

I considered a number of inquiries. I meditated admitting the crudity of my response to Padre Pio and offering to go and give the poor old man a chance to convert me when I came back. Time, I thought, time was the great healer.

“When I come back we’ll talk.”

“Go! Go! Go!”

If that was not enough she followed it with a blast of Italian, gutter stuff I think, and of which I only got the general drift of her attitude to me, to Protestants, to men and to the English as I exemplified them.

So I took off for a conference in Seville at the old tobacco factory which chaps who know that sort of thing will remember is where Carmen waggled her hips, though now it’s only a university. Mostly at conferences I keep away until the last day, when it’s my turn to sound like an author. But the professor who had invited me, when asked if they had any Carmens still about said, “Yes, very many,” so I went along, forgetting it would be out of termtime.

There at the podium I would grace later was Rick Tucker, larger than ever and reading from a huge manuscript. A sleepy bunch of professors, lecturers, postgraduate students were all trying their hardest to stay awake and Professor Tucker was making it difficult for them. I sank into a vacant chair at the back of the hall and composed myself to slumber.

What jerked me awake was the sound of my own name in Tucker’s peculiarly toneless American. His head was down, and he was reading from the manuscript, and he was on about my relative clauses. He had counted them, apparently, book by book. He had made a graph, and if they consulted appendix twenty-seven among the goodies handed to them by the grace of the conference organizers, they would be able to find his graph there and follow his deductions. Here and there among the audience I saw heads nod, then jerk up again. A few females appeared to be taking notes. A male head fell back in front of me and a faint snore came from it. Prof. Tucker, still toneless, was now pointing out the significant difference between his graph and the one constructed by a Japanese Professor Hiroshige (that was what he sounded like), for Professor Hiroshige, it appeared, had not done his homework, to our surprise, and had also been guilty of the gross error of confusing my compound sentences with my complex ones. In fact Professor Hiroshige should get lost and leave the field to the acknowledged expert, who had heard from the author’s own lips that he did not tolerate so overly broad an interpretation in his iconography of the absolute, or words to that effect.