‘No. I can say … no secret. It wasn’t utterly foul, really. Just infuriating and, well, quite frankly insulting. He really is the most unpleasant person. I quite liked the other fellow, in the dark glasses, Bell-something, quite, civil, polite, and at least completely honest. But Grottorosso never quite hits the point, you know what I mean? Evades, slides away. I said, quite frankly, “Now look here, we have had one meeting and I’m not convinced at all; I have thought things over, re-read a good deal of the script-thing … had time to consider, and I see absolutely no point in discussing things any further if you still have it in your mind, whether it is in the ‘dialogue’ or not, to pursue this outrageous innuendo relating to Prokesch. It seems to me,” I said, “that it is the absolute ‘nub’ of your story, and it won’t do. I simply couldn’t, wouldn’t, give my name to such a piece of infamy.” I was quite calm, made myself plain as a pikestaff. Left him in no doubt. He just sat there smiling a little, shaking his head as if I was some kind of half-wit. And then this Bell-fellow said, most politely, that he really hadn’t seen it in that light at all and was sure that I had misinterpreted the thing. Perhaps I was not used to reading film whatever-they-are. Scripts. Perhaps I was being a little over-sensitive? I pointed out, as gently as I could, that this was a subject on which I had spent a great many years in research, and about which I was considered, by quite a number of people, to be something of an authority. I didn’t boast, or anything of that sort. Just the facts. And that if I was over-sensitive I probably was. And would stay so. And then Grottorosso said that it wasn’t just my approbation which he had so desired for his work, he had hoped I would have been tempted to assist him with the thing in Vienna! I ask you! As a Technical Adviser! Sort of form of blackmail; I swear that I could hear the clink of coppers rattling in his begging-tin! Quite frightful! I said that I wouldn’t be technical adviser, or whatever it was, to this piece of salacious distortion for anything he cared to offer. Made it plain. I was absolutely wild.’

‘I do see,’ Cuckoo murmured.