“What did you mean by ‘her side of the story’?”

“I understood, Wilf, sir. The need for freedom. Why even with Mary Lou, between you and me—”

“Her side of the story.”

“She was real nasty about some time you, like she said, ‘shot off’ to South America. She was having trouble with Emily. I forget which country in South America. When would that be?”

It was strange. I was seeing a process. It was not an intellectual concept, it was felt as well as seen, feared as well as grasped. It was simple, trite. It was universal. It was just one thing coming out of another—oh, just that, no more—Margaret, the letters, Lucinda, my fright, my running and running, one thing after another—

South America.

What year indeed? What would he turn up, dull and indefatigable, treading through my past life with his huge feet, shoving his nose down to that old, cold trail? A really modern biography without the subject’s consent. Cheap printing in Singapore, ten million pulp copies from a backstreet factory in Macao. No control, sold over or under every counter. How they would laugh at Wilf Barclay, masturbating round South America in sheer fright of police and fear of women. Barclay got his fear of the clap from way down by his feet and Lucinda’s idea that a night on the town was for her to be had against the dockyard wall by a dockie and, if possible, by the dockie’s mate. And Barclay’s heroic encounter with a revolution—three days spent shivering in a cellar; and so driving in a panic towards safety! He would turn it up.

Dead.

How closely would they look? How worthy was I of being dug round? Worth it to Rick, evidently, who could find no one better, no one behind whom the pseudo-scholars were not queueing up in our dreadful explosion of reconstituted rubbish. He would have access to more mechanisms than Boswell, not just paper, not just tapes, videos, discs, crystals with their hideous, merciless memories, but others, sniffers, squinters, reconstitutors, mechanisms doubtless that listened in a room and heard echoes of every word, saw shadows of every image that were trapped on the walls, like Capstone Bowers’s gun.

Dead.

Of course. In South America, never mind where, even now there would be a record. That Indian—or perhaps not. It was so dark and I only had sidelights because of getting away and my determination was to say if necessary that he walked right across the road into my headlights—Was there any way in which they could find out that in panicky forgetfulness I had been driving along that dirt road as in England, on the left-hand side? They say if you stop, the other Indians will kill you. It was an occasion to be pushed back down and down and away and at last hardly believed in, not believed in, though never forgotten. It was near-enough jungle, and anyway it was an Indian, probably and quite possibly he wasn’t killed or even injured much, might have been an animal. Then I’d driven fast through a ford so that water had cascaded clean over the roof. Who could examine that river for bloodstains? Will all the waters, ha et cetera, and unlike her I didn’t really know anything. Nudged a shadow and the slight shock, the rutted road, the cry, a bird or something. If there was a record—such and such an Indian found, well, dead—I’d told no one, not even myself, only gone over it later, over and over— How could I have gone back after ploughing through the ford? Go back again? Put myself in the hands of some louts in uniform and all to explain that I might have, wasn’t sure—the language was the difficulty, of course. My Spanish wouldn’t be up to it. I’d end by accusing myself through sheer inability to cope with the subjunctive.