He was standing up, gripping the edge of the table and leaning forward.

“They made a kinda party piece out of that record, Wilf. When I got my dee fill they played it at the party. No, sir, it was not my doing so don’t blame me. I’m just telling you, sir. In fact that party was the first time I listened to what you were saying, ’stead of picking out phonemes. I was real sick of phonemes by then.”

I found I had been standing too. I sat down, heavily.

“That’s vicious. That’s really vicious!”

“No, sir. Apart from the sounds it wouldn’t have been funny except for the coincidence. You were going on about the British social system—said the British were Greeks and the Americans Romans. You went on about the ‘Spartan incorruptibility’ of the civil service. You gave examples of their perfect devotion, like traditionally conservative civil servants organizing the nationalization of industry for the socialists. Only of course when he played the tape at my party we’d just heard the way your civil service was full of Philby and those guys. Laugh? People were falling about. They were real sore, too. Your civil service hadn’t just dropped you in the shit. They’d dropped us! You and your Limey accent!”

I found to my surprise that I was gripping my side of the table the way he was gripping his.

“That was most unwise of you, Rick, if you’ll forgive my elaborate Limey way of putting things. You let yourself go, didn’t you? Now we know, don’t we?”

The fire began to die down in him. He was deflating, returning to that state which I now saw not to be vacant, ignorant or servile but inscrutable. We were learning.

“You’ve shot your bolt, son. Wine in the saucer if you would be so kind.”

He still waited.

Tucker. Tucker the fucker.

“No wine in the saucer, no authorized biography. No letters from MacNeice, Charley Snow, Pamela, oh a whole chest full of goodies! Variant readings. The original MS of All We Like Sheep which differs so radically from the published version. Photographs, journals dating right back to Wilf’s schooldays, the happiest days of your life, Tucker, when you get your claws into it—a placated Halliday. You will be able to get off your knees. The pearly gates will open. A modest fame.”

“Scholarship—”

“Balls.”

Heavily he reached out his hand, heavily poured Dôle into one of the little saucers.

“Put it on the floor.”

For the first time in my life I saw eyes literally fill with blood. There were blood vessels in the corners and they engorged. I thought for a moment that they might burst. Then he laughed with a kind of crack and I laughed with him. I shouted yap yap at him and he shouted it back and we laughed and he put the saucer down on the floor laughing and he got on his knees having caught on and understood what was required of him. I could hear him lap it up.