“You mother-fucking bastard!”

Then he was gone.

Well, well, I thought! There are moments when one’s pets surprise one. Sometimes they are almost human. You’d swear they know what you’re talking about. Dear Fido! Of course they never bite. They merely growl in fun and seize master’s hand with hurtless jaws. Besides, it’s company.

I sat back and looked round the sitting-room in which we had held our kind of joust with paper lances, or at most old-fashioned biros. The saucer still lay on the carpet. I let it lie with a feeling that it had ceased to be just a saucer. It was now like all those objects which have received mana, power. Probably it was a flying saucer, visiting. What the hell. Then again what about the drops of water on the table? Some of them were smeared I saw and the rest drying with a tiny line of whatever salts they contained already showing round each. Probably in magic there was great virtue in such drops. Virgin tears? If you can find the tears of a grown man, my son, gather them up at the full moon and they are a sovran remedy against boredom, flatulence, world-weariness: and are one in the eye for old intolerance who thereby is getting its own back.

I poured myself some Dôle. I looked at it and somehow seemed not to want to drink it which was absurd. The moment he had disappeared I had become more aware of the steel string and now it seemed to be not merely tight but cutting into my chest. I forgot Rick and concentrated on the string which by magic now ceased to be length with little breadth but widened into a band, then into a strap. I felt as if it were tightening all over me, even my head, my head. Then I was shuddering and yelling and fingering my flies like a kid in a kindergarten.

Chapter XIII

This bit can’t be connected. I cannot, simply cannot remember the succession of events that followed our second meeting in the Weisswald. The wire came in too close, was too tight. I have to remember in scenes as if I had reels of film with great gaps. One scene is in Zurich where I found a lawyer though I can’t remember how. He was a she and when she found what the agreement contained she looked at me more as if she was going to buy me rather than do me a service. She was small and wrinkled and one of those women who combine an extreme ugliness with an extraordinary degree of femininity. I don’t mean a jolie laide. That phrase puts the subject straight into the sexual mess where we are not, nor were not. She had a kind of security—that kind which stems perhaps from getting on very well without some of our less attractive qualities, such as the need for revenge, more success than other people, protection from other people or indifference to them. I remember thinking it was a good job I was no longer bothering with writing beautifully a Wilfred Barclay book because she again was a real person and useless to the novelist because he cannot describe them and they do not bother to describe themselves, existing more in their silences than their speech. I am still not clear how she got me to see that I didn’t need the document at all but could leave the business for the time being as I had no intention of meeting Rick again until the steel wire was slackened a bit. I remember ending our time together envying her bitterly. The things you could see that woman had no need of!