“Is anything wrong?”

I burnt her husband’s letters, of course. I couldn’t even send them back.

I lived in a state of dreadful sanity and apprehension. I took off for South America as if the police were already after me. The thing surfaced for years, disguised in nightmares or strange half-waking dreams, until it had become a faint far-off thing only to be recalled when, as now, my mind was forced to walk backwards.

Odd to think that nothing would have happened without Lucinda. She was the sort of person who ends with hard drugs and charitable people saying she was her own worst enemy, hurting no one but herself. Little they knew or understood the adamantine chain that bound the lesser crime to the greater, led on to it step by step unless you turned and faced the fact instead of running from it. How wrong they would be about Lucinda! We are all members one of another. Ha et cetera.

“Can’t I share the joke?”

“I suppose it’s a joke. On a large scale. I’m drunk. Had too much brandy.”

“Wilf, there’s a strain of, call it diffidence, in you that won’t allow you to see the interest in a biography—”

Amused by the bank clerk, ruefully, jeeringly accepting the follies of Lucinda’s lover—(title for a romance in single syllables)—but the letters, Margaret, my crime—

“Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters—”

Running. Always running, a wing three running in panic lest I should be grabbed by some enormous oaf from the scrum—

“Just a note, Wilf, signed by you and empowering me, particularly in the event of your passing on, I am after all a generation younger—”

Well. He was an enormous oaf from the scrum.

“Rick. You do me the honour of including me among kings, presidents, multiple murderers, telly personalities—”

He caught on in what for him was a flash.

“Also Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Hawthorne and—” here his voice sank in a kind of awe, “White Melville!”

“I’m not American. A defect, of course. However, Elizabeth used to say—”

“Yes, Wilf? Go on!”

Her nastiest thrust; because like all deeply wounding marital broadsides there was a truth in it that only she could know. She told me (sitting the other side of the scrubbed kitchen table, all very homey), she told me that given half a chance I would act the genius, the great man—

That’s what you always wanted, Wilf—God, don’t I know it?—particularly before any pretty girl who’s fool enough to come near you and take you at your own valuation, the sacré monster outside the accepted rules, a national treasure, the point about you being words that the world would not willingly let die whereas what you write is—

“Popular.”

“It’s a common misconception, Wilf.”

“That my work’s popular?”

“Hell, no. I mean that what’s popular is—”

“—inferior.”

“I didn’t mean— I wanted her side of the story.”

Her jeer had been the work of a scalpel. It was one of the many things that had kept me running, that made me shun that offer and that more and more made me hide myself away, because apart from other considerations it proved to—to whom? her? me?—that I sought no fame, struck no attitudes.