Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [6]
Four
The next day round about ten o'clock I was walking down Welbeck Street. I was in a bad temper. By daylight the whole project seemed very much less attractive. I felt that to be snubbed by a film star would put me in a bad state of mind for months. But I regarded the matter as something which had been decided and which now simply had to be carried out. I often used this method for deciding difficult cases. In stage one I entertain the thing purely as a hypothesis, and in stage two I count my stage one thinking as a fixed decision on which there is no going back. I recommend this technique to any of you who are not good at making decisions. I felt a certain temptation to return to the theatre to see if I could find Anna again, but I was afraid of offending her. So there was nothing to be done but to get over with seeing Sadie. Sadie's flat was on the third floor, and I found the door open. A naive char appeared who told me that Miss Quentin was not at home. She then informed me that Miss Quentin was at the hairdresser, and she named an expensive Mayfair establishment. I had taken the precaution of mentioning that I was Miss Quentin's cousin. I thanked her and set off again towards Oxford Street. I have often visited women in hairdressing establishments and the idea held no terrors for me. Indeed I find that women are often especially charitable and receptive if one visits them at the hairdresser, perhaps because they like being able to show off some captive member of the male sex to so many other women when the latter are not so fortunate as to have their male retainers by them. To play this role, however, one must be presentable, and so I went straight away to a barber's and had a good shave. After that I bought myself a new tie in a shop in Oxford Street and threw away my other tie. As I mounted the heavily perfumed stairway of Sadie's hairdresser and caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror I thought that I looked a fine figure of a man. Women's hairdressers obey some obscure law of nature which rules that, contrary to what is the case in other spheres, the more expensive the firm the less is the privacy given to the clients. Shop girls in Putney can have their hair done in the seclusion of a curtained cubic'e, but wealthy women in Mayfair have to sit exposed in rows and watch each other being metamorphosed. I found myself in a big room where elegant heads were in various stages of assembly. A row of well-dressed backs were presented to me, and as I looked up and down searching for Sadie, I felt myself under observation in a dozen rose-tinted mirrors. I couldn't see her anywhere. I started to glide along one of the rows, looking into each mirror, and seeing here a young face and there an old one looking at me from under crimped and plastered locks. Each pair of eyes met mine with a questioning look until I began to feel like a prince in a fairy tale. I was glad I had thought of investing in the new tie. At the end of the row there were several figures whose heads were covered by purring electric driers. Here at last I met in the mirror a pair of eyes which were unmistakably Sadie's. I stopped and put my hands on the back of her chair. I stood a while and looked gravely into these eyes while their owner returned my glance first with casualness, then with hostility, and at last with dawning recognition. Sadie gave a little scream. 'Jake!' she cried. I could feel we were being looked at. I began to be pleased that I'd come. 'Hello, Sadie!' I said, and I didn't have to fake my delighted smile. 'My dear creature,' said Sadie. 'I haven't seen you for centuries! How lovely! Were you looking for me?' I said that I was, and I fetched a chair and sat just behind her shoulder. We grinned at each other in the mirror. I thought we were a fine-looking pair. Sadie looked very handsome, even with her hair in a net, and if anything younger than ever. Even allowing for the rosy glass, her complexion was exquisite, and her brown eyes were absolutely blazing with vitality. I quite involuntarily put my hand on her arm. 'You charming fellow!' said Sadie. 'What sports do you devise these days? Tell me all!' There was an affectation in her voice and manner which struck me as new. Also she spoke in a curiously loud and ringing tone so that what she said echoed audibly all the way down the room. The explanation of this occurred to me in a moment; she was partly deafened by the purr of the drier and didn't realize how loudly she was speaking. I replied, also raising my voice, 'Oh, I'm still at the old writing game. Books, books, you know. I've got about three on hand at the moment. And publishers will keep pestering me.' 'You always were such a clever chap, Jake,' Sadie shouted admiringly. Silence reigned throughout the rest of the shop except for the whispering voices of a few assistants, and I could feel every ear strained in our direction. I thought it impossible that there was anyone in the room who didn't know who Sadie was. I settled down to enjoy the conversation. 'How's life treating you?' I asked. 'Oh, it's too utterly boring,' said Sadie. 'I'm simply worn out with work. On the set from dawn to dusk. I've only just managed to escape to get my hair done here in peace. I've quarrelled with the hairdresser at the studio. I'm so tired, I quarrel with everyone these days.' She cast me an enticing smile. 'When are you going to have dinner with me, Sadie?' I asked. 'Oh, darling,' said Sadie, 'I'm tied up for days and days. Someone's even coming to fetch me away from this place. You must come round some time and have a drink at my flat.' I calculated quickly. Sadie's days probably were heavily mortgaged and this might be my only opportunity of talking with her for some time. So if I was going to raise the ticklish subject it had better be done now. 'Listen, Sadie,' I said, lowering my voice. 'What's that, darling?' shouted Sadie from under the drier. 'Listen!' I shouted back. 'I gather that you want to let your flat while you're away.' I couldn't bring myself, in front of such an audience, to put the matter less delicately. I hoped that Sadie would pick it up with tact. Sadie's response was even more amiable than I had bargained for. My dear boy,' she said, 'don't speak of letting. I want a caretaker, in fact I want a bodyguard--and you can take on from now if you like.' 'Well, I'd be very glad,' I said. 'The lease of my present place has just expired and I'm pretty well on the streets.' 'Then, my dear, you must come at once,' roared Sadie. 'You'll be most enormously useful if you can just be around the place a little. You see, I'm being persecuted by the most frightful man.' This sounded interesting. I could feel the ears being pricked up all round us. I laughed in a masculine way. 'Well, I suppose I'm fairly tough,' I said. 'I don't mind keeping an eye on things, provided I can get some work done too.' Already I had visions of something even better than Earls Court Road. 'My dear, it's an enormous flat,' said Sadie. 'You can have a suite of rooms. I'll just feel so much safer if you can come and stay there till I go away. This fellow is quite madly in love with me. He keeps calling and trying to get in at all hours, and when he doesn't call he rings up, and I'm just a nervous wreck.' 'You won't start being afraid of me, I suppose?' I said, leering at her in the glass. Sadie went off into peals of laughter. 'Jake, darling, no, you're just too utterly harmless!" she called out. I didn't so much care for this turn in the conversation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see several elegantly dressed women craning their necks to get a look at me. I felt we should change the subject. 'Who is this intolerable person?' I asked. 'I'm afraid it's the big chief himself, it's Belfounder,' said Sadie. ' So you can just imagine how embarrassing it all is. I'm simply beside myself.' At the utterance of this name I nearly fell off my chair. The room spun round and round, and I seemed to be seeing Sadie through a cloud. This altered everything. With an enormous effort I kept my face composed, but my stomach was rearing inside me like a wild cat. I wanted nothing now but to get away and think over this astonishing news. 'Are you sure?' I said to Sadie. 'My sweet boy, I know my own boss,' said Sadie. 'I mean, sure that he loves you,' I said. 'He's absolutely demented about me,' said Sadie. 'By the way,' she said, 'how did you know I wanted a caretaker?' 'Anna told me,' I said. I was beyond caution now. Sadie's eye glittered in the mirror. 'So you're seeing Anna again,' said Sadie. I hate that sort of remark. 'You know Anna and I are old friends,' I said. 'Yes, but you haven't been seeing her for ages, have you?' said Sadie, still at the top of her voice. I began to dislike the conversation very much indeed. I just wanted to get away. 'I've been in France for a considerable time,' I said. I didn't imagine Sadie had any close knowledge of Anna's doings. I could see Sadie's face focused now into a look of intelligent venom. She looked like a beautiful snake; and the curious fantasy came to me that if I were to look under the drier at the real face and not at the reflection I should see there some terrible old witch. 'Well, you call on me next Tuesday, early,' said Sadie, 'and I'll install you. I mean it about this bodyguard act.' 'That'll be splendid, Sadie dear,' I said automatically, 'I'll be sure to come.' And I rose. 'I have to see my publisher,' I explained. We exchanged smiles, and I strode out of the place, followed by a large number of fascinated female eyes. I omitted to mention earlier that I am acquainted with Belfounder. As my acquaintance with Hugo is the central theme of this book, there was little point in anticipating it. You will hear more than enough on this subject in the pages that follow. I had better start by explaining something about Hugo himself and then I will tell you of the circumstances in which I first met him and something of the early days of our friendship. Hugo's original name was not Belfounder. His parents were German, and his father adopted the name Belfounder when he came to live in England. He found it, I believe, on a tombstone in a Cotswold churchyard, and he thought that it would be good for business. It evidently was, for Hugo in due course inherited a flourishing armaments factory, and the firm of Belfounder and Baermann, Small-arms, Ltd. Unfortunately for the firm, Hugo was at that time an ardent pacifist; and after various upheavals, in the course of which the Baermann faction withdrew, Hugo was left with a small concern which came to be called Belfounder's Lights and Rockets Ltd. He had contrived to convert the armaments factory into a rocket factory; and here for some years he concerned himself with the manufacture of rockets, Very lights, small commercial dynamite, and fireworks of all kinds. It started out, as I say, a small concern. But somehow money always stuck to Hugo, he simply couldn't help making it; and within a short time he was extremely rich and prosperous, almost as prosperous as his father had been. (No one can be quite as prosperous as an armaments manufacturer.) He always lived simply, however, and at the time I first got to know him he used to work on and off as a craftsman in his own factory. His speciality was set pieces. As you probably know, the creation of a set piece is a highly skilled affair, calling for both manual dexterity and creative ingenuity. The peculiar problems of the set piece delighted Hugo and inspired him: the trigger-like relation of the parts, the contrasting appeal of explosion and colour, the blending of pyrotechnical styles, the methods for combining eclat with duration, the perennial question of the coda. Hugo treated the set piece as if it were a symphony; he despised the vulgarity of representational pieces. 'Fireworks are sui generis,' he once said to me. 'If you must compare them to another art, compare them to music.' There was something about fireworks which absolutely fascinated Hugo. I think what pleased him most about them was their impermanence. I remember his holding forth to me once about what an honest thing a firework was. It was so patently just an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. 'That's what all art is really?' said Hugo, 'only we don't like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.' The enjoyment of fireworks, according to Hugo, ought to be an education in the enjoyment of all worldly splendour. You pay your money,' said Hugo, 'and you get an absolutely momentary pleasure with no nonsense about it. No one talks cant about fireworks.' Unfortunately he was wrong, and his theories turned out to be his own undoing as a craftsman. Hugo's set pieces began to be in enormous demand. No smart house-party or public festival was complete without one. They were even exported to America. Then the newspapers began to talk, and to refer to them as works of art, and to classify them into styles. This so much disgusted Hugo that it paralysed his work. After a while he began to conceive a positive hatred for set pieces, and after a while he abandoned them altogether. It was through the common cold that I first met Hugo. This was in a period when I was particularly short of cash, and things went very ill indeed with me until I discovered an incredibly charitable arrangement whereby I could get free board and lodging in exchange for being a guinea pig in a cold-cure experiment. The experiment was going forward at a delightful country house where one could stay indefinitely and be inoculated with various permutations of colds and cures. I dislike having a cold, and the cures never seemed to work when they tried them on me; but on the other hand it was free, and one got fairly used to working with a cold, which was good practice for ordinary life. I managed to get a lot of writing done, at least up to the time when Hugo appeared. The controllers of this charitable scheme used to propose to the victims that they be domiciled in pairs since, as they observed in the prospectus, few people can tolerate complete solitude. I don't care for solitude myself, as you know, but after a few tries I came to dislike even more the company of garrulous fools, and when I returned to this admirable place for a second season I asked to be allowed to live alone. The limited and protected isolation which such an institution offers in fact suits me quite well. This was granted; and I was hard at work, and battling too with a particularly appalling cold, when it was announced to me that the accommodation problem was now such that I must after all accept a companion. I had no choice but to agree, and I looked with very ill favour upon the enormous shaggy personage who then shambled in, put his things on the bed, and sat down at the other table. I grunted some sort of ungracious greeting, and then returned to my work, to make it clear that I was no fit companion for a chatterbox. I was further irritated by the fact that whereas I had only the cold, my companion was given both the cold and the cure, so that while I was choking and sneezing and using up a sackful of paper handkerchiefs, he remained in complete possession of his human dignity, and looking the picture of health. It was never clear to me on what principle the distribution of inoculations was made, though it always seemed that I got more than my fair share of colds. I had feared that my companion would chatter, but it was soon plain that there was no such danger. Two days passed during which we did not exchange a single word. He seemed, indeed, absolutely unaware of my presence. He neither read nor wrote, but spent most of his time sitting at the table and looking out of the window across the pleasant parkland that surrounded the house. He sometimes mumbled to himself and said things half under his breath. He bit his nails prodigiously and once he produced a pen-knife and absently chipped holes in the furniture until one of the attendants took it from him. I thought at first that perhaps he was mentally deficient. During the second day I even began to feel a little nervous of him. He was extremely large, both stout and tall, with very wide shoulders and enormous hands. His huge head was usually sunk low between his shoulders, while his brooding gaze traced around the room or across the countryside a line which seemed to be suggested by none of the ordinary objects which lay in his field of vision. He had dark rather matted hair and a big shapeless mouth which opened every now and then, occasionally emitting a semi-articulate sound. Once or twice he began humming to himself, but broke off abruptly on each occasion--and this was the nearest he seemed to get to acknowledging my presence. By the evening of the second day I was completely unable to go on with my work. Devoured by mingled nervousness and curiosity, I sat too looking out of my window, and blowing my nose, and wondering how to set about establishing the human contact which was by now become an absolute necessity. It ended up with my asking him, with undiplomatic abruptness, for his name. He had been introduced to me when he arrived, but I had paid no attention then. He turned towards me a very gentle pair of dark eyes and said his name: Hugo Belfounder. He added: 'I thought you didn't want to talk.' I said that I was not at all averse to talking, that I had just been rather immersed in something when he arrived, and I begged his pardon if I had appeared churlish. It seemed to me, even from the way he spoke, that he was not only not mentally deficient, but was highly intelligent; and I began, almost automatically, to pack up my papers. I knew that from now on I should do no more work. I was closeted with a person of the utmost fascination. From that moment on Hugo and I fell into a conversation the like of which I have never known. We rapidly told each other the complete story of our lives, wherein I at least achieved an unprecedented frankness. We then went on to exchange our views on art, politics, literature, religion, history, science, society, and sex. We talked without interruption all day, and often late into the night. Sometimes we laughed and shouted so much that we were rebuked by the authorities, and once we were threatened with separation. Somewhere in the middle of this the current experimental session ended, but we forthwith enrolled ourselves for another consecutive one. We eventually settled down to a discussion the nature of which is to some extent germane to my present story. Hugo has often been called an idealist. I would prefer to call him a theoretician, though he is a theoretician of a peculiar kind. He lacked both the practical interests and the self-conscious moral seriousness of those who are usually dubbed idealists. He was the most purely objective and detached person I had ever met--only in him detachment showed less like a virtue and more like a sheer gift of nature, a thing of which he was quite unaware. It was something which was expressed in his very voice and manner. I can picture him now, as I so often saw him during those conversations, leaning far forward in his chair and biting his knuckles as he picked up some hot-headed remark of mine. He was, in discussion, very slow. He would open his mouth slowly, shut it again, open it again, and at last venture a remark. 'You mean...' he would say, and then he would rephrase what I had said in some completely simple and concrete way, which sometimes illuminated it enormously, and sometimes made nonsense of it entirely. I don't mean that he was always right. Often he failed utterly to understand me. It didn't take me long to discover that I had a much wider general knowledge than he on most of the subjects we discussed. But he would very quickly realize when we were, from his point of view, at a dead end, and he would say: 'Well, I can say nothing about that,' or 'I'm afraid that here I don't understand you at all, not at all,' with a finality which killed the topic. From first to last it was Hugo, not I, who conducted the conversation. He was interested in everything, and interested in the theory of everything, but in a peculiar way. Everything had a theory, and yet there was no master theory. I have never met a man more destitute than Hugo of anything which could be called a metaphysic or general Weltanschauung. It was rather perhaps that of each thing he met he wanted to know the nature--and he seemed to approach this question in each instance with an absolute freshness of mind. The results were often astonishing. I remember a conversation which we had once about translating. Hugo knew nothing about translating, but when he learnt that I was a translator he wanted to know what it was like. I remember him going on and on, asking questions such as: What do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French? How do you know you're thinking it in French? If you see a picture in your mind how do you know it's a French picture? Or is it that you say the French word to yourself? What do you see when you see that the translation is exactly right? Are you imagining what someone else would think, seeing it for the first time? Or is it a kind of feeling? What kind of feeling? Can't you describe it more closely? And so on and so on, with a fantastic patience. This sometimes became very exasperating. What seemed to me to be the simplest utterance soon became, under the repeated pressure of Hugo's 'You mean ', a dark and confused saying of which I no longer myself knew the meaning. The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it. Yet at the same time Hugo's inquiries rarely failed to throw an extraordinary amount of light on whatever he concerned himself with. For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew. During the early part of my discussions with Hugo I kept trying to 'place' him. Once or twice I asked him directly whether he held this or that general theory--which he always denied with the air of one who has been affronted by a failure of taste. And indeed it seemed to me later that to ask such questions of Hugo showed a peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality. After a while I realized that Hugo held no general theories whatsoever. All his theories, if they could be called theories, were particular. But still I had the feeling that if I tried hard enough I could come somehow to the centre of his thought; and after a while my passion became to discuss with Hugo not so much politics or art or sex, but what it was that was so peculiar in Hugo's approach to politics or art or sex. At last we did have a conversation which seemed to me to touch on something central to Hugo's thought, if Hugo's thought could be said at all to have anything so figurative as a centre. He himself would probably have denied this; or rather, I'm not sure that he would have known what it meant for thoughts to have an orientation. We arrived at the point in question by way of a discussion about Proust. From Proust we were led on to discuss what it meant to describe a feeling or a state of mind. Hugo found this very puzzling, as indeed he found everything very puzzling. 'There's something fishy about describing people's feelings,' said Hugo. 'All these descriptions are so dramatic.' 'What's wrong with that?' I said. 'Only,' said Hugo, 'that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt "apprehensive"--well, this just isn't true.' 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'I didn't feel this,' said Hugo. 'I didn't feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards.' 'But suppose I try hard to be accurate,' I said. 'One can't be,' said Hugo. 'The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I'm done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you.. 'Touch it up?' I suggested. 'It's deeper than that,' said Hugo. 'The language just won't let you present it as it really was.' 'Suppose then,' I said, 'that one were offering the description at the time.' 'But don't you see,' said Hugo, 'that just gives the thing away. One couldn't give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one's heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression--it would be for effect, it would be a lie.' I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn't see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, 'But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There's a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie.' Hugo pondered this. 'I think it is so,' he said with seriousness. 'In that case one oughtn't to talk,' I said. 'I think perhaps one oughtn't to,' said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end. 'That's colossal!' said Hugo. 'Of course one does talk. But,' and he was grave again, 'one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate.' 'What do you mean?' 'All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us--and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.' What would happen if one were to speak the truth?' I asked. 'Would it be possible?' 'I know myself,' said Hugo, that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person.' So we never really communicate?' 'Well,' he said, 'I suppose actions don't lie.' It took us about half a dozen cold-cure sessions to reach this point. We had arranged by now to have the cold alternately, so that whatever intellectual diminution was entailed by it should be shared equally between us. Hugo had insisted on this; though I would willingly have had all the colds myself, partly because of a protective feeling I was developing towards Hugo, and partly because Hugo made such an infernal noise when he had the cold. I don't know why it didn't dawn on us earlier that we didn't have to stay in the cold-cure establishment in order to continue our talks. Perhaps we were afraid of breaking the continuity. I don't know when it would have occurred to us to leave of our own volition; but eventually we were turned out by the authorities, who feared that if we went on having colds much longer we might do some permanent injury to our health. By this time I was completely under Hugo's spell. He himself never appeared to notice the extent of the impression he made on me. In conversation he was completely without any sort of desire to score points, and although he often silenced me, he seemed unaware of having done so. It was not that I always agreed with him. His failure to grasp certain kinds of ideas often filled me with annoyance. But it was as if his very mode of being revealed to me how hopelessly my own vision of the world was blurred by generality. I felt like a man who, having vaguely thought that flowers are all much the same, goes for a walk with a botanist. Only this simile doesn't fit Hugo either, for a botanist not only notices details but classifies. Hugo only noticed details. He never classified. It was as if his vision were sharpened to the point where even classification was impossible, for each thing was seen as absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light. When we were turned out of the cold-cure establishment I had nowhere to live. Hugo suggested that I should come and live with him, but some instinct of independence forbade this. I felt that Hugo's personality could very easily swallow mine up completely and much as I admired him I didn't want this to happen. So I declined his offer. I had in any case to go to France about this time to see Jean Pierre, who was making a fuss about one of the translations, so our conversation was interrupted for a while. During this interval Hugo returned to work at the Rocket Factory, and began to develop his great ingenuity with set pieces, and generally resumed the pattern of his London life. His attempts to break out of this pattern always took some eccentric form or other; his inability to take a normal comfortable expensive holiday was the nearest thing to a neurotic trait that I ever discovered in him. When I got back from Paris I took a cheap room in Battersea, and Hugo and I resumed our talks. We would meet on Chelsea Bridge after Hugo's day's work, and wander along the Chelsea embankment, or make the round of the pubs in the King's Road, talking ourselves to exhaustion. Some time previous to this, however, I had made a move which turned out to be fatal. The conversation of which I have given a small extract above had interested me so much that I had made a few notes of it just to remind myself. When I glanced at these notes again after a little while they looked very scrappy and inadequate, so I added to them a bit, just to make them a better reminder. Then later still when I looked them up it struck me that the argument as it stood on paper didn't make sense. So I added some more, to make it look intelligible, still drawing on my memory. Then when I read the thing through it began to occur to me that it was rather good. I'd never seen anything quite like it. I ran through it again and made it look a bit more elegant. After all, I am a natural writer; and since the thing was now on paper it might as well look decent. So I polished it up quite a lot and then began to fill in the preliminary conversation as well. This conversation I found wasn't so clear in my memory, and in reconstructing it I drew on a number of different occasions. Of course, I didn't tell Hugo about this. I intended the thing as a private and personal record for myself, so there was no point in telling him. In fact, I knew in my heart that the creation of this record was a sort of betrayal of everything which I imagined myself to have learnt from Hugo. But this didn't stop me. Indeed, the thing began to have for me the fascination of a secret sin. I worked on it constantly. I now expanded it to cover a large number of our conversations, which I presented not necessarily as I remembered them to have occurred, but in a way which fitted in with the plan of the whole. A quite considerable book began to take shape. I kept it in the form of a dialogue between two characters called Tamarus and Annandine. The curious thing was that I could see quite clearly that this work was from start to finish an objective justification of Hugo's attitude. That is, it was a travesty and falsification of our conversations. Compared with them it was a pretentious falsehood. Even though I wrote it only for myself, it was clearly written for effect, written to impress. Some of the most illuminating moments of our talk had been those which, if recorded, would have sounded the flattest. But these I could never bring myself to record with the starkness which they had had in reality. I was constantly supplying just that bit of shape, that hint of relation, which the original had lacked. Yet though I saw the thing quite plainly as a travesty I didn't like it any the less for that. Then one day I couldn't resist showing it to Dave Gellman. I thought it might impress him. It did. He immediately wanted to discuss it with me. Not much came of this, however, as I found myself quite incapable of discussing Hugo's ideas with Dave. Greatly as I was moved by these ideas, I was totally unable to reproduce them in talk with anyone else. When I tried to explain some notion of Hugo's it sounded flat and puerile, or else quite mad, and I soon gave up the attempt. After that Dave rather lost interest in the book; nothing is true or important for Dave which can't be maintained in an oral discussion. However, he had during this time, and contrary to my instructions, showed the book, which he had taken home to finish, to one or two other people who were also very impressed by it. Since I knew how much the whole project would displease him, I had felt myself bound to conceal Hugo's identity. I had presented the thing to Dave as a dramatic exercise, rather remotely based on conversations which I had had with a variety of people. But now in a little while I found myself being regarded in certain circles as a kind of sage, and many of my friends pressed me to let them see the manuscript. Eventually I did show it to a few more people and began to get used to the idea that it should circulate a little. All this time I was still working on it, and drawing additional matter from my current conversations with Hugo. I had continued to keep my friendship with Hugo completely secret from all my other friends. I did this at first out of a jealous desire to keep my remarkable find to myself, and later on also because I feared that Hugo might discover my treachery. People were now constantly suggesting to me that I should publish the thing, at which I just laughed. But the notion was attractive to me all the same. It was attractive at first in the way something can attract one when one knows one will never do it. As publication was so absolutely out of the question I felt it was quite safe to brood upon it in imagination. I thought what a remarkable book it would make, how original, how astonishing, how illuminating. I amused myself inventing titles for it. I would sit holding the manuscript in my hands, and then I would fancy it reproduced a thousand-fold. I suffered continually at that time from a fear of losing the manuscript, and although I typed out two or three copies I still felt it very likely that somehow or other they would all be destroyed and the thing lost for ever--which I couldn't help thinking would be a pity. Then one day a publisher approached me directly with a proposal for its publication. This took me by surprise. I had never been spontaneously approached by a publisher before and such condescension rather turned my head. It occurred to me that if this book were a success, which I couldn't doubt, this might smooth my way considerably in the literary world. It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown. If I could leap to fame in this way my career as a writer would be made. I set this idea aside, telling myself that the project was an impossible one. I couldn't palm off Hugo's ideas as my own. Most of all, I couldn't use material drawn from my intimacy with Hugo to present the public with a work which would fill Hugo himself with repulsion and disgust. But the idle dreams of publication which I had nourished earlier now unmasked themselves as a real will. I became obsessed with the notion that I would publish. A sort of fatality drew me towards it. I saw all my past acts as leading inevitably to this end. I remembered a drunken evening during which I passed in fantasy through every stage of the process which should bring the dialogue into print. By then the idea had too great a reality in imagination for it to be long before it should become actual. I rang up the publisher at his home. He knew of my reluctances, and arrived early the next morning with the contract, which I signed with a flourish of abandon and a splitting headache. After he had gone I took out the manuscript and looked at it as one looks at the woman for whom one has lost one's honour. I entitled it The Silencer and added an author's preface to the effect that I owed many of the ideas contained therein to a friend who should be nameless, but that I had no reason to believe that he would approve of the form in which I was presenting them. Then I sent the thing away and left it to its fate. While this crisis had been gathering, Hugo had begun to put his money into films. He started to do this in a vaguely philanthropic way, in order to give the British film industry a leg up. But then it all began to interest him, and by the time Bounty Belfounder was founded Hugo knew his way about pretty well in the film world. He was in fact a remarkable man of business. He inspired universal confidence and had an iron nerve. Bounty Belfounder went ahead like wildfire. It had an experimental stage, if you remember, largely I think inspired by Hugo himself, when it produced a lot of silent films of the kind which used to be called 'expressionist'; but it soon settled down to making quite ordinary films, with occasional experiment departures. Hugo didn't talk to me much about his film ventures, though we were seeing each other frequently all this time. I think he was a little ashamed of being so successful. I, on the contrary, felt proud of him for being so versatile, and took an especial pleasure in going to the cinema to see, before the credit titles, the familiar shot of City Spires, and hear the crescendo of City Bells, while the words Presented by Hugo Belfounder grew solemnly upon the screen. At first my secret activity had seemed to make no difference at all to my friendship with Hugo. Our talks continued, with all their old freshness and spontaneity, and our subject matter was inexhaustible. As the book grew and gained strength, however, it seemed to drain some of the blood away from my other intimacy. It began to constitute itself a rival. What had seemed at first an innocent suppressio veri began to grow into a very poisonous suggestio falsi. The knowledge that I was deceiving Hugo took the frankness out of my responses to him even infields quite unconnected with this particular deception. Hugo never seemed to notice anything, and I continued to take great pleasure in his company. But when at last I had signed the contract and the book had gone away to the publisher I felt I could hardly any more look Hugo in the face. After a day or two I got used to seeing him, even under these conditions, but an awful melancholy began to hang over our association. I knew now that our friendship was doomed. I wondered whether I dared, even at this stage, tell Hugo the truth. Once or twice I felt myself on the brink of a confession. But each time I drew back. I was unable to face his scorn and anger. But what most deterred me was the feeling that after all the thing was still not totally irrevocable. I could still go to the publisher and ask to be released from my contract. By offering him some pecuniary compensation I could probably even now get out of the thing altogether. But at the thought of this my heart sank. My only consolation lay in a dreadful fatalism--and the notion that I was still a free agent, and that the crime could still be avoided, was too intensely painful to entertain. The mere idea that Hugo might demand that I withdraw the book caused me such distress that I could not bring myself even to contemplate telling him of my action; and this was not because I had any longer a desire to see the book in print. The sweetness of this prospect had been killed for some time now by my desolation at the thought of losing Hugo. It was just that I could console myself with nothing except the dreadful certainty, which I hugged closer to myself every day, that the die was cast. I fell during this period into such a melancholy that, although I saw Hugo as often as ever, I found it extremely difficult to talk to him. I would sometimes sit for hours in his presence, silent except for such brief responses as were needed to keep him talking. Hugo soon noticed my depression and questioned me about it. I feigned illness; and the more worried and solicitous Hugo became concerning my condition, the greater grew my torment. He started sending me presents of fruit and books, tins of glucose and iron tonic, and implored me to see a doctor; and indeed by this time I had made myself really ill. On the day when the book was to be published I was beside myself. I had an appointment to meet Hugo that evening, on the bridge as usual. By about midday I felt that evidence of my treachery must be displayed in every bookshop in London. I thought it likely that Hugo would not yet have seen the book. But it could only be a matter of a short time before he would see it, as he often went into bookshops. Our appointment was at five-thirty. I spent the afternoon drinking brandy--and about five o'clock I went out into Battersea Park. A sort of calm had descended on me, as I knew now that I should not meet Hugo that day, or any other day ever again. A tragic fascination drew me to the riverside, from which I could see the bridge. Hugo appeared punctually and waited. I sat on a seat and smoked two cigarettes. Hugo walked up and down. After a while longer I saw him cross the bridge to the south bank and I knew he was going to my lodgings. I lighted another cigarette. Half an hour later I saw him walk slowly back across the bridge and disappear. I then returned to my room, gave in my notice, packed up my things, and left immediately by taxi. About a week later a letter from Hugo was forwarded to me in which he inquired what had happened to me and asked me to get in touch with him. I left the letter unanswered. Hugo is not a great hand at letter-writing and finds it very hard to express himself on paper at all. I received no more letters. Meanwhile The Silencer was being treated to a few lukewarm reviews. Such reviewers as undertook to say anything about it at all had clearly found it unintelligible. One of them labelled it 'pretentious and obscurantist'. But on the whole no one paid much attention to it. It was a quiet flop. So far from its opening to me a career of literary fame, it did my reputation considerable harm, and I came to be regarded as a solemn highbrow with no powers of entertainment; and that in quarters where I had been at some pains to build up a quite other impression. I cared very little about this, however. I was anxious only to forget the whole business and to live the relationship with Hugo out of my system altogether. The Silencer went through only one edition which, after being conspicuously remaindered in Charing Cross Road, mercifully disappeared from the market. I didn't retain a copy myself, and just wished most heartily that all could be as if the accursed book had never been. I stopped going to the cinema, and avoided looking at the more sensational dailies which tended to feature Hugo's activities. It was about now that Finn turned up and attached himself to me, and gradually my life took on a new pattern and the powerful image of Hugo began to fade. Nothing had interrupted the fading process until the moment when Sadie so unexpectedly mentioned Hugo's name in the hairdresser's shop.