It was too much. The village festival, that weekly collecting of all our yesterdays, must look after itself. I crept, as I thought, softly through the house. I opened the door of “our” bedroom, in blinding daylight. Elizabeth turned over.

“I’m not asleep.”

“Look, Liz—”

“‘Longing to be with you. Lucinda.’”

I was too miserable to speak. I gathered the eiderdown from my bed and found my way, half-blind, to the hole I sometimes call my study. The dawn chorus had died away and I knew that the sounds of Monday morning would begin long before my head was anywhere near rescued from ruin. It was at that—well, not moment but juncture—that I realized something not so much with a start as with a convulsion. There were torn photographs in the dustbin as well. Why had I gone through those boxes to rid myself of old shames, my past, and dumped them in the dustbin instead of burning them? Why had I told Tucker? Why was he such a dedicated, such a determined, single-minded fool? Somewhere in all that spilt rubbish, crumpled, torn, smeared with jam or fat—now there was no knowing who in the household, our daily, or out there, the dustmen, or milkman—or lying in a badger’s stomach or its sett: the point was that Rick L. Tucker and a badger with their dawn antics had put me in danger of losing my wife and my dignity at the same time. The assiduity and humble determination that had seemed comic at first now seemed to threaten me like a disease. It was as if all paper had become sticky by nature so that whether it was lard or marmalade you could never rid yourself of the stuff, once committed to it. It was flypaper and I was the fly. It was the Venus Flytrap, the Sundew. It was those footsteps in the sands of time that I now saw I preferred not to leave behind me.

Chapter II

“And who is Lucinda?”

That was the beginning of the end of my marriage to Liz. Never marry a woman nearly ten years younger than yourself. It took years, what with the state of the law as touching divorce. We were and are and always shall be profoundly connected, not in love or hate, nor in the trite compromise of a love/hate relationship. Whatever it was, the thing was there, to be enjoyed, fought against and suffered. We were entirely unsuitable for each other and for making anything but a dissonance. As long as Liz stayed healthy she was integrated and moral. I lived in the simple conviction, I now see, that I could only remain integrated by immorality. This immorality carried in it the necessity of concealment—though who knows now what Liz knew or suspected? That dirty piece of paper was a catalyst. If I had been sufficiently aware, I might have seen in its appearance from the dustbin the corner of a pattern that was to prove itself universal. Lucinda pre-dated my marriage to Liz and at the time of the dustbin I was involved with a girl successfully concealed. Irony? The Eye of Osiris?