The paper was still there, lying on a newly dusted and polished table. Had the fat, grey-haired woman dusted round it, or had she lifted it carefully, dusted, polished, then replaced it with the precision of a referee putting back a snooker ball? There the paper was.

It seems I owe you my life.

That brought me to, like the school bell. I owed him my life, nothing less. It was like every boy’s story that ever was.

“I owe you my life, old man.”

“That’s all right, old fellow. It was nothing.”

“Your arm’s broken, old man.”

“It’s not my right arm, old fellow.”

It was sheer, low comedy all over again.

Well, there the paper was. I turned my attention away from it and into myself. Wilfred Barclay didn’t fit into any boy’s adventure story, only into a parody of one: and even then not as the hero or the hero’s little chum with whom junior could empathize, but perhaps as a small-time crook put in to demonstrate that crime does not pay or that virtue does. He would get laid out with a straight left. Wilfred Barclay would reel away, holding his jaw and vowing filthy revenge. He would never be fool enough to sign that paper. He would have taken the wife and scarpered.

Scarper!

Never mind the wife. There are wives everywhere. Anyway, had I deceived myself? Had she ever been offered to St Wilfred? Careful! Was I mad? Was Rick mad? There was an intensity at times about his stare, white showing all round the pupils, as if he were about to charge dangerously. A psychiatrist would find him interesting. To hell with a careful examination of him. His hair—he was disgusting. It would be less risky to keep tabs on a rhinoceros. This was a mad house and Wilfred Barclay, St Wilfred, no longer a character in a boy’s book, would do a bit of levitation, gravitation. He would not bow out, he would simply disappear, vanish down the rack railway, hey presto!

As soon as I had decided that, my heart became high and giggly. I had not known till then what a strain sheer companionship had been. I got hold of the manager and found that the Tuckers had gone walking. I explained myself. After the shock I needed solitude. Though I had booked in for a week, I must go now. (I promised him compensation—a full meed of praise for him and the hotel in a book! I do, in fact, some years after, I forget how many, discharge that debt. The hotel Felsenblick, Weisswald, Switzerland, is comfortable, the view superb, the drop ghastly. You will find Major Adolf Kaufmann, a very retired general by now, unobtrusive and silent.) The fat woman packed for me and carried my bags to the rack railway, where I caught the three o’clock descent. So I escaped, leaving behind me as forwarding address The Hotel, Akureyri, Iceland. Three hours after I was in a plane bound for Florence and another hire car. By early evening I was driving through the Apennines on my national home, an autostrada. I was calm, watching the motionless landscape stream past. I was surrounded by metal and I was my own master. That night I spent in a sleazy hotel a biscuit toss from La Rotonda. I remember the joy and freedom with which I flung up my window, gazed out on the magnificent shadow and invented quite unfair bits of dialogue for Mr and Mrs Rick.