“One billion, I should think.”

“Come along, Wilf. Can’t afford to lose you, can we?”

With that sort of money Rick could afford to have the CIA and the FBI and our own useless lot, let alone the KGB, on my track! It accounted for my justifiable unease in so many places, passports and all that.

“Off with our tiny flippers, Wilf, there’s a dear.”

“Bugger off, Johnny, if you’re capable of it.”

“Now that was horrid.”

“I mean it.”

“I must say, Wilf, apart from my unnatural affection for you, you intrigue me. Why a man ostensibly so indifferent to society should be, if I may coin a phrase, so shit-scared of critical opinion—”

“Well. Aren’t you critical opinion, and if so can you wonder?”

“Rudesby!”

Clearly Halliday was more dangerous than Rick. After all, with his sources of information he didn’t have to guess. He simply knew my biography and could pass it on to that hairy hack Rick Tucker.

“Who knows your biography?”

Johnny was standing on the front step of the hotel. He had stopped pulling me by the wrist, though he still had hold of it and he was staring into my face. I shook off his hand.

“Got to shower.”

“The water won’t be on yet, as well you know.”

“Got to lie down.”

Johnny nodded seriously.

“That’s—er, the ticket. Great nature’s second course. Macbeth, q.v.”

“Ha et cetera.”

Johnny was still nodding to himself when I got myself away from him.

I was tired from swimming and knew that any clothes I put on would be sticky from salt and then sweat. I sat on the edge of my bed and determined to do nothing. I did not move, I hardly breathed. I did not think or feel. I willed myself into a state of nothingness, of deliberate catatonia like a limpet that the tide has left. I came to out of that state with an anguished click!—perhaps it was audible—like a blind running up and letting in cruel daylight. I was remembering Prescott. I never knew the man himself only his letters and the manuscript he kept plaguing me with. It was bad, hopelessly bad, though there was a good idea buried in it. I told him all that, yet he kept plaguing me for years with requests and ideas. At last I had to ignore him. But the thing was that the central idea in my fourth novel was exactly the good one hidden in Prescott’s awful manuscript! Of course, it was properly treated and all that, but still! I swear that when writing The Endless Plain and ever since I had not even thought of Prescott or the manuscript or the whole trying non-association which is only too familiar in type to any writer once he has got out before the public.

Had I remembered? Was it wholly the work of the unconscious that Liz didn’t believe I suffered from, or had I stolen the idea deliberately at some point? As far as I knew, Prescott had never succeeded in publishing the MS he sent me, though by now he had enough books to his name and was probably as well known as I am. Would he remember and make a point of it in some interview? It seemed to me, as the afternoon turned into a somewhat cooler evening, that there was not a single absurd, humiliating or quasi-criminal act in my life that did not come back to sting and burn me.