“As bad as that. Well, who cares so long as the money’s good?”

“Not you, dear, evidently. Even Lilian saying that when you tried to get warmth into a character it slopped all over the place is water off the duck’s back!”

I fished round for something to say. I think I was trying to be honest.

“After all—you have to write the bad books if you’re going to write the good ones.”

“Work on that, Wilf. At present it sounds like a poor translation from the French. At least you were approved of by Emmy’s young man.”

“What Emmy?”

“Your Emmy. Yours and Liz’s. The young man she went about with for a bit, that vast American academic—”

“Tucker! He’s still in Europe?”

“I had quite a tendre for him for a while—at least a week. He’s huge, isn’t he? Do you think he could be persuaded to be cruel? But then the trouble with these large Americans, they will keep on showering and using a positively asexual deodorant, unlike our local fishermen—have you sat down wind of them yet? It’s enough to give one an orgasm.”

“What was he doing with Emmy? I mean—where does he get his money from? He’s married to— He had a sabbatical only four years ago—perhaps he’s got the push. Goody goody.”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“That pretty little thing—”

“Helen—I mean, Mary Lou—”

“Right. Aha! So that’s where the warmth in Horses at the Spring comes from! Yes, she does have something, doesn’t she? So unfair. Well. She’s back in the States. Tucker has a line out to some philanthropist, a billionaire. She’s got a job with him as a secretary or researcher or something. Something, I suppose.”

“Halliday!”

“That’s the name.”

—and I was back in the Weisswald, sitting before the view of Mary Lou, truly inspirational.

No, Wilf. Mr Halliday is very fond of ladies.

Billions. Trillions. Mary Lou is interested in astronomy. Quadrillions. Money enough to start the Big Bang. Able to buy Mary Lou not with the lithe limbs of Paris. The girl you meet too late. The girl you have forgotten. That bit of you dissected out, a rare specimen. Able to buy Wilf, track him down, send forth. Run or stay still, in the end he’ll get you. He can stand still and wait for you to arrive. Purchasable purity, sanctity, holiness, beauty incomparable. Oh grieve for her, that circle she had tried to complete with Rick, make him invulnerable, now seen to be brittle and irretrievably broken—

“Wilf?”

“You know, when the circle’s broken and she’s no longer looking inward but can look outward at somebody else she’s probably quite different—probably a fascinating conversationalist and not physically heavy under the influence of his gravity but light as air, flirtatious—”

“You know? You’re in fugue!”

“Halliday.”

“I must say, Wilf—the sun is very strong, isn’t it? Perhaps—”

“What do you know about Halliday?”

“It’s time we got under cover.”

Rick probably left him a note on some enormous bare executive desk, oh acres and acres of it in consideration of the services hereinafter specified of my wife Mary Lou Tucker—