“Liz!”

She bent down and picked up a scrap of paper that had fallen from Tucker somewhere. With one hand up to her hair she turned the paper over, read it silently at first, then aloud.

“. . . longing to be with you. Lucinda.”

She turned the paper over again and sniffed it with delicate connoisseurship. “And who is Lucinda?”

Then, as if she had switched channels, she became the perfect hostess. She had to be assured that Tucker’s now concealed hairiness had not suffered. She indicated that the whole thing was the sort of joke she was used to and enjoyed. Quite soon she left us still sitting at the table. My hangover was back, increased and only made endurable by the depth of fury I felt.

“I wish to God I had shot you!”

Tucker nodded submissively, willing to be shot in the cause of scholarship, even conceding my right to do it, marvellous me. He was prepared to concede my wonderful right of control over everything in the wide world except the words I had written or received, which were by their nature, no, by my nature—oh, what the hell? Even now I can remember my hatred of Tucker, apprehension over Liz and anger with impossible, daft Lucinda. Stir into that fury with myself and sheer blazing rage at the farcical improbability and implacability of the Fact. Beyond all the contrivances of paper, manipulations of plot, delineation of character, dénouements and resolutions, there, in that real world, real dustbin, the quite implausible actions of individuals had brought into the light of day a set of circumstances I had thought concealed from the relevant person and finally disposed of. Nor, in all this, had I the comfort of any morality, only immorality.

“Tucker.”

“You were calling me Rick, Wilf.”

“Listen, Tucker. Tomorrow you were leaving. I mean today. You are never coming back. Never, never, never, never, never.”

“You make me deeply unhappy, Wilf.”

“Go to bed, for God’s sake!”

I put my elbows on the table and my forehead in my hands. All at once a black despair descended on me.

“Go to bed, go away, get out. Leave me alone, alone—”

He answered me out of the depths of his reverent absurdity.

“I understand, Wilf. It’s the Burden.”

At last the kitchen door closed. Sheer self-pity was filling the dark hollows behind my eyelids with water. Lucinda, Elizabeth, Tucker, the book that was going so badly—the water spilled into my palms the way the blood had trickled out of Tucker. In the trees the dawn chorus was in full, joyous swing.

Presently I opened my eyes. Yes, of course I should have known. The evidence had been staring me in the face. It stood by the sink, the bottle I had opened that I couldn’t persuade anyone to drink. It was empty. By its side stood another one. That was empty too.

Immediately my hangover became desperate. I hunted about for pills, stole some of Liz’s that had been effective before. By the back door the dustbin fell over. Furiously I staggered out. A black-and-white creature with a bristly back was running along by the river bank, making for the mill dam where it could cross into the woods opposite us. The dustbin, ashcan, trashcan, poubelle, the evidence, the incriminator, lay on its side with a trail of household rubbish, refuse, cartons, bottles, bits of meat, eggshells strewn from it all the way along the wake of the badger; and in the mess, scribbled, typed, printed, black-and-white and coloured—paper, paper, paper!