“Oh for God’s sake, shut up!”

“All that must have gone from you, drifted away into the far beyond, yes, my dear, gone from you in the battle and strife. Yes. You need a woman.”

“Have you anyone in mind?”

“Therein the patient et cetera.”

“Macbeth, q.v.”

“Do you know what Apollo said? Well, of course you do! Know thyself. Perhaps you’ve gone all these years without knowing yourself at all. You need a chum. Start at the bottom with a dog.”

“I don’t like them.”

“Worms under the carapace isn’t just human sadism, you see. It’s the pure poetry of the art. Only One Above could be as inventive as that.”

“I’m tired of talking of Halliday. I mean—”

“Ah well. You always were a prose person, weren’t you?”

“With wit.”

“And where has your celebrated ‘callous wit’ gone, je me demande?”

“I’m old. I’m going faster and faster—”

“Where?”

I think I must have shouted.

“Where we’re all going, you bloody fool!”

I think I can remember what he said after that word for word, because I have a very clear picture of his face coming closer to mine across the little dinner table, so close I could see he had pencilled his eyebrows.

“Wilf, dear. Once more in return for the loan. See a priest or a shrink. If not, at least keep away from doctors acting in tandem. Otherwise they’ll have you inside before you can say ‘dipso-schizo’.”

Chapter XI

This isn’t a biography. I don’t quite know what it is, since there are enormous gaps where I don’t remember what happened and other gaps because I remember that nothing happened. If all that wasn’t bad enough in the attempt to get some kind of coherence into this mass of paper, the months after Lesvos and Johnny are patchy because of the state I was in. I remember seeing clearly, that same night after Johnny had done his ridiculous diagnosis, that I must get away at all costs. But instead I got sodden, moving in a haze of Minos from day to day and seeing little of Johnny, who didn’t number excessive drinking among his several vices. At last I did manage to get myself transported to the airstrip and flew off. (Forwarding address: Rinderpest, Bloemfontein, SA.) Thank God for planes! They can alter the whole outlook in the merest fraction of time like at the Last Trumpet. I remember sitting next to some chap, a Canadian I think, and maundering on about how marvellous flying was because if you flew enough you were bound to crash, and if you crashed in a jet death was instantaneous, much to be desired, Julius Caesar, q.v. This Canadian was what Johnny would call a cowardy cowardy custard and did not like to be reminded that we were suspended by a crazy application of the laws of aerodynamics over a lot of nasty deep water. He went and changed his seat. Well, I knew Athens would be stuffed with chaps from Great Britain or the States, so I simply changed planes and flew to South Africa, forgetting that South Africa was what I had given as a forwarding address. I remembered that on the way there and determined to come back by return. But—and here the patchiness comes in—I got into a nursing home somehow. I’d had a vivid encounter with the red hot worms under my carapace and a nice female doctor got them out of me through various chinks which she demonstrated by showing me a live lobster from the fish market and then again sometimes I think I dreamed the whole thing. Of course, she left the heat inside me but I thought I could put up with that. I felt that a milder climate would make the heat bearable perhaps but what with one forwarding address and another I was running short of countries where I’d not been compromised. So I flew to Rome (forwarding address: Shangri La, Katmandu, Nepal) and no sooner had we landed than I remembered Rick in the Piazza Navona. So I doubled back on my tracks, taking a local flight with a hire car at the end of it. I drove off very slowly for I hadn’t made much of a fist at signing my name to the thing you sign.