I forgot to say that there was a photograph hanging in the bar. I looked at it idly enough at first. It was the sort of photograph you see in the cheaper glossies, Commander W. F. “Gutsy” Hunkelberry-Fawcett sitting this one out with a young friend at Fartmouth Hunt Ball—

Then I saw that the waiter was the manager’s uncle, old Kaufmann deceased. This led me to a consideration of the bearded oaf sitting at the table and grinning clownishly across it at the wench on the other side. Yes of course, our sins shall find us out, there’s One Above with a note book and a camera and he doesn’t allow us to pose but simply snatches the pic at his own sweet will and at our disadvantage. It was Wilfred Barclay all right, famous Wilf, who thus conferred such distinction on the bar that they hung him there—taken at a moment when sitting down he couldn’t fall down drunk; taken by his old chum, meaty Rick L. Tucker, the hairy Ainu, the strong man with his warmth and his deodorant and his bulging flies—why was there no photograph of them? They would do credit to any establishment. The flies, I mean.

And the girl. Yes, the girl. That’s the thing about a flash. It blasts the life and colour out of a face, however delicate, so that this was not so much the Mary Lou who had adored her big strong man and tried as far as she could to complete the magic circle—oh no! This was the doll, the fashion model, the plastic imitation of a girl, white-faced, black-haired, the cloud of it frozen, the gentleness gone, destroyed. And yet they tell you that a camera does not tell the truth! There we were, Wilf the clown, still libidinous half a generation after he should have known better; and the girl, her lipstick black as her hair, her dumb, flat face an exact expression of that mind as interesting as a piece of string! I shut my eyes, unable to go on looking at the thing.

Even so, the oaf in the photograph was not as repellent as the man I had examined in my mirror. That would have made a photograph and a half! And Mary Lou, what had the years of failed marriage, the years of Halliday, done to her? Rick ought to take a photograph of us all over again, I thought, before and after, but of course it was like Lucinda, there are circumstances where you can’t get the two faces you want on to the same pic, can’t possibly get them there. So I went back, put on a change of underwear, confirmed that I couldn’t buy a suit off the hook in Weisswald, wrenched open the french windows in “my” sitting-room, glanced at the Spurli, took a deep breath, strode across the balcony, seized the rail with both hands, bent over and looked down.

It was what commonly passes as hell for about five seconds. Then it was nothing but a quantity of space with a smash at the bottom, which was even a bit comforting. So I informed myself.