By the next day, he felt as ill as ever, which was now intimidatingly ill. Keeping up his spirits by recalling everything he had disliked about the specialist in tropical diseases, he recalled an allusion to ‘that charlatan Gregory Ionides’. He looked up the charlatan in the telephone directory and, finding that he lived in King’s Road, Chelsea, decided to give him a try. Gregory Ionides was a sturdy, swarthy man with a beard and a diamond ring. Aubrey felt he was a man who at any rate could be trusted not to behave like the Harley Street lot. His trust was deepened when the consultation turned to an interchange of views about the Lebanon, and agreement as to the incomparability of its bedbugs. On these lines, he went on consulting Dr Ionides, and by their fourth meeting succeeded in reintroducing the subject of his health, artfully presenting it as an aspect of the Levant. Dr Ionides warmed to it. Aubrey warmed to it, too, answering questions that were relevant and assenting to suppositions that hit the mark. Dr Ionides passed from 179warmth to fervour; it was as though each detail he drew from Aubrey were an ingredient thrown into an elaborate sauce, a sauce that at every cook’s sip declared itself as coming together into something superlative. When he began diving into a tin box filled with cheap notebooks, he seemed to be suspended over the spice-box. When, to a question whether Aubrey sometimes felt as if a key were being turned in his navel, Aubrey replied that this described the feeling to a nicety, Dr Ionides emitted a solemn ‘A-ha!’ and, as it were, took off his cook’s apron.

‘I thought so. I thought so. I have already had a case like yours. He was a pig-driver in Thrace. He had been treated with viper fat, toads boiled with artemisia, fumigations, wood lice, medals of the Virgin—all the usual things. I gave him liquor arsenicalis, camphor …’ Dr Ionides detailed the treatment with creative fullness.

‘Did it work?’ said Aubrey, so full of hope that he could be natural.

‘I have no doubt it would have done the trick. But just after I had taken him in hand, he was stabbed through the heart at a wedding. An unsatisfactory patient.’

A book published soon after its author’s death is pretty sure of being favourably received. Western Tartary: A Vindication of Sir John Mandeville had excellent reviews, and continued to sell in thousands even after it had been acclaimed as a minor classic. Aubrey Cutbush was compared to Kinglake, Richard Burton, Borrow, Laurence of Arabia, Herodotus and Omar Khayyám. He was invited to join committees, promote nudist colonies, help to 180suppress (or defend) democracy, church schools, and blood sports; to buy a tiger skin; to write a few words that could be used in promoting the sale of a new brand of Tokay; to repent of his sins before it was too late; and to subscribe to a news-cutting agency—invitations that his executors impartially declined.