‘What sort of novel is it?’ asked Goldwasser.

‘Dynamic, devastating,’ wrote Rowe. He said: ‘Oh, you know, the usual sort of thing.’

‘Oh?’

‘I humbly urge everyone,’ wrote Rowe, ‘to read this truly remarkable document at the earliest possible opportunity.’

‘May I read it?’ asked Goldwasser.

‘Read it? Oh, well, it’s not really ready for . . . I mean, when it’s finished, of course . . .’

But Goldwasser was already looking over Rowe’s shoulder.

‘I see,’ he said after a moment. ‘God, I’m terribly sorry, Rowe! I mean, I didn’t realise . . . It was unforgivable of me.’

‘The point is,’ said Rowe, ‘I’ve decided to write the reviews first . . .’

‘First? You mean the novel’s not even written?’

‘No. You see, Goldwasser, I thought I’d do the reviews first, and then as it were reconstruct the novel from them.’

‘I see.’

‘I mean, writers work in different ways.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t think it’s unreasonable to go about it this way round?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘I mean, I sometimes wonder a bit myself.’

‘You do?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s a horribly lonely business, writing. One sometimes wonders if one hasn’t somehow – well – left the rails.’

Goldwasser thought for a bit.

‘Rowe,’ he said. ‘Do you have a plot for this novel? Or any characters?’

Rowe gazed silently at his typewriter. Terrible, tormenting, and true, he thought. Wicked relevance and devastating accuracy. Goes to the heart of the problem.

‘I’m feeling my way towards them,’ he said.

‘I see. Do you have any other – what shall I say? – point of departure fixed?’

‘Well,’ said Rowe. He knew what he wanted to write, but he couldn’t say it. Or write it, really. He couldn’t say it or write it because the visions he wished to describe were as warm and fugitive as dreams. The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory. Rowe wanted to write about scenes that came to him suddenly when his brain was warm, and seemed for an instant to contain the whole sweetness of life. There was a scene where a sharp March wind drove flickering pale sunshine across an industrial estuary. There was a scene where tired, half-innocent eyes saw the first grey light of a summer’s day spread over poplars and copper beeches in full leaf, and stone balustrades, and lawns white with dew. There was a scene where he walked through the fog on a November evening, and breathed out more fog into the yellow haze beneath a street lamp, and heard a motor-cycle engine ticking over, going ‘dyna-dyna-dyna-dyna.’ But how to begin to write them down so that even the smallest residue of their preciousness remained he had no idea.

‘No?’ said Goldwasser.

‘Not in concrete terms.’