So there Helen Davenant and young Ivo Clark rode their horses through the green fields of an English countryside that I was hard put to remember with anything like accuracy. Not that it matters, of course. Horses at the Spring is as much a pastoral as Daphnis and Chloë or one of Virgil’s Eclogues. I remember I was deeply moved by it myself. Helen owed something to Mary Lou—a kind of clumsy goodness, painstaking and ignorant, her innocence complete. Ivo, I don’t mind admitting, was that groom who had once been a bank clerk and I had to do a fair cleaning-up job on him. It was all so easy to write and so enjoyable! I have found out that the critical reaction was adverse (they said it stank) but I don’t think it was really as bad as all that. I had a very peaceful time. With modest triumph, though, and some regret, I let the manuscript go to my agent. I gave him a poste restante in Yugoslavia, then hung about, waiting for a reply, in Titograd which is where no tourists go.

The result was I got a whole load of stuff out from England. The first thing that arrived before the rest was a telegram from Liz. ONCE AGAIN WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOUR BLOODY PAPERS QUESTION MARK THEY ARE INCREASING DAILY HUMPH OBJECTS HOPE THIS FINDS YOU AS IT LEAVES ME EMMY SENDS WISHES. LIZ. The next was an enthusiastic telegram from my agent full of congratulations and saying he was having the MS retyped. I was very chuffed by the news and thought even better of myself. Liking sex but incapable of love, indeed!

Ha et cetera.

Then a hundredweight or so of mail turned up. I was getting tired of drinking Dingaç, which is the most fattening wine in the world and filthy sweet. So I took the lot back to Italy and sorted through. The only interesting thing was a deliberately reasonable letter (not telegram—the letter had been written before) from Liz. Would I keep the Tuckers off her back? Rick must be working for Pinkerton’s! She didn’t mind Humphrey making passes at Mary Lou, she was resigned to male nature and the leopard (a touch of unconscious humour there, I fancy) would never be shot of his spots. But she was afraid that Rick had been seeing Emmy in London. Did I remember Emmy? (Heavy sarcasm.) Emmy had suffered enough, was to be blunt not the sort of young woman normally attractive to men, and she felt that Rick was using her as a stalking horse, or one of the “hides” Humph kept on about, for keeping an eye on me: or even to screw (an unconscious pun probably) out of her memories of me as dad. Rick had a project and she must tell me the crown of his life’s work would be a biography of me, poor Wilf, but before that he was working on Wilfred Barclay, a Source Book. It was a pity the man Halliday couldn’t find a better use for his money but power corrupts and all that. She hoped wherever I was I had found happiness and (a real Liz touch) I had certainly spent enough time, money and people running after it. Now the bitterness was over she’d come to see that I’d been generous in allowing her to keep her share of the limited company, she didn’t know what she and Humph let alone Emmy would have done without it, he didn’t do a hand’s turn, a man’s man. P. P. S. Kestrel had had to be put down sorry, she hoped I was happy with whoever I was with. She wasn’t well.