I spent that day in dressing-gown and pyjamas both of which I sent out for, having discovered that my luggage consisted of nothing at all. I spent the next few days in the hotel getting tailors and suchlike along to fit me out. I also began to deal with the mail bags and the first letter I opened was from Liz. I précis it here. It amounted to, Capstone Bowers has scarpered. I am past it now & I guess you are. Why not return? The moment I had read that I sent off a telegram saying, yes but few days am rekitting! I would sit on the edge of my bath with my feet under water and my hands under the cold tap while a tailor, it may be, would sit on the loo and we would talk about life or allied subjects. The fact is it took me days and days to come to terms with being happy! You have to acquire the knack or it knocks you clean off your feet. So I talked to tailors and shoe-makers and shirt-makers and hatters and jewellers a most agreeable set of men. I ordered a book for keeping a journal but when I tried to fill it with that same lucid prose which people will find in most of my books, my writing hand hurt like the devil and I had to stop. It was then I began to see things coming together. I saw that intolerance hadn’t done with me and there was still a book that I or someone had to write, not a journal but more hippity-hop. As the hypnotist said all those years ago I am a perfect subject for suggestion. I saw how suggestion had altered my books especially Birds of Prey and Horses at the Spring. I cried a lot and was ashamed of it not being overly accustomed to the lachrymose life. I drank of course as I thought an instant renunciation of the bottle would be dangerous but I did ration myself to a daily bottle more or less.

The time came when I began to consider my dog. It wouldn’t be a good thing to have him down to the house before I’d discovered how he stood with Liz and Emmy. I thought I’d make an appointment with him at the sleazier of my clubs, the Random. I thought I’d talk Rick over with Liz. I envisaged us sitting either side of the kitchen table where we’d had such good times and rows.

That was a strange time in the hotel! There I would be on the balcony, facing the dung-coloured city half as old as time and trying to understand why my dream had been more than a dream and more than being awake. Then I’d consider the book I had to write, picking a story out of a mess. I’d consider its recipient and think how my feet and hands would stop hurting when I finished writing. Then I’d be back in the bath with a bottle on the tray. It may be there’d be a bootmaker sitting on the loo glass in hand and telling me quite fascinating things about his clients and I’d stow the information away in my mental filing system, quite forgetting I had no use for it. Always my mind would come back and dwell in the dream. I began to move about a bit and had the dream explained to me in, let me see, yes, scientific, psychiatric, religious, and isness terms (that last from the shirt-maker) all of which are mutually exclusive or so it seemed. Mostly I brooded on the isness. Why this harping on isness? you’ll ask. Are you up the wall? you’ll say. Isn’t quote reality unquote good enough for you? Well the answer lies in the genius of the language. This wasn’t reality which is a philosophical concept but quote isness unquote a word from the seamy side of speech for the involuntary act of awareness. I’ve invented it myself because the dream didn’t happen to a philosopher but to me. Religious, scientific, psychiatric, philosophical, all straight up the spout!