Stemming from The Birds of Prey, or at least from the film of it, I wrote some travel articles and a few short stories which are exercises in how to cheat the public. The stories were for the glossies. They relied almost entirely on the exoticism of the places where I collected news, money and mail from my postes restantes. They were descriptively brilliant, with the minimum of event and character, but all garnished, as the French might say, with national costume long after national costume had ceased to be found anywhere but at folk festivals. I had ceased when my Italian chum severed our connection to make an effort to be pleasant to women. I cultivated what you might call universal indifference. Sometimes the thought and feeling of life would merge into a wave of astonishment that made me exclaim silently inside myself, this cannot be you! But it was; and I now see that on the edge of sixty years old I had reduced myself to what would think least and feel least. I was eyes and appetite. I flew as an answer to any question. It was the motor roads all over again. If I wondered where I was going, I flew somewhere. If someone tried to arrange an interview, I flew away. If I had been too filthy drunk in one place, I flew to another. If the view from the bar or café became boring, why, someone had said something about the gorge of the Brahmaputra, so I would fly to Calcutta.

There was an odd fly in the ointment. You could call it a faint, a distant awareness of Liz: and I see now that I’ve written it down that it wasn’t that at all.

It’s difficult to explain. I never got over, never have got over, thinking I’ve seen her. I never did see her after I left England until I went back there. But I’d be sitting outside a café at one of those round, white tables that are as placeless as motor roads and I’d be watching a crocodile of tourists, all, it may be, following their guide down round the corner to the Uffizi, and when they’d gone I’d remember that—surely! It had been a gesture, a dress, a voice. I’ve even started to my feet and made a step to follow, then stopped because even if it were so, what was the point? I was once coming down the stairs from an osteopath in Brisbane and I stood aside to let a woman go up; then when she had gone into his office I turned to follow her until I remembered Capstone Bowers and I went away. I worried sometimes about all this, but then I found a solution to that bit of nonsense in my brain. I came across the account of a solo voyage round the world by some sensible man—sensible, I thought, because his voyage was so like mine, an attempt to avoid everything. He heard voices and the rigging began to say things to him that he only just couldn’t understand. I “only just” didn’t see Elizabeth in my deliberate, crowded isolation. Having my Italian chum about the place—or rather, my Italian chum having me about the place, one should say—had masked or prevented this curious series of non-meetings from happening. Now she was busily on her knees and I was alone. I thought time would cure me. Ha et cetera.