perceptually peculiar, in that the world is suddenly organized as a basis upon which the absence of what is sought is bodied forth in a ghostly manner. The familiar streets about my house, never fully to recover from this haunting, were filled with non-apparitions of the pair, fleeing, laughing, mocking, overwhelmingly real and yet invisible. Other pairs simulated them and made them vanish, the air was smoky with them. But it was too good a joke, too good a coup, for Arnold to risk my spoiling its perfection. By now they were somewhere else, not in the Fitzroy or the Marquis or the Wheatsheaf or the Black Horse, but somewhere else: and the white ghosts of them blew into my eyes, like white petals, like white flakes of paint, like the scraps of paper which the hieratic boy had cast out upon the river of the roadway, images of beauty and cruelty and fear.
Lying horribly awake that night I decided that the matter of Christian and Arnold was simple. It had to be simple: it was either simplicity or insanity. If Arnold «made friends» with Christian I would simply drop him. In spite of having solved this problem I could not sleep, however. I kept following series of coloured images which, like the compartments of a swing door, simply led me round and landed me back again in the aching wide-awake world. When I slept at last I was humiliated in my dreams.
«Well, why did you rush away in such a hurry? If, as you say, you decided ages ago to leave Roger, why didn't you pack a suitcase and go off in a taxi some morning when he was at the office, in an orderly manner?»
«I don't think one leaves one's husband like that,» said Priscilla.
«That's how sensible girls leave their husbands.»
The telephone rings.
«Hello, Pearson. Hartbourne here.»
«Oh, hello-«
«I wondered if we could have lunch on Tuesday.»
«Sorry, I'm not sure, my sister's here-I'll ring you back-Tuesday? My whole concept of the future had crumpled.
Through the open door of the bedroom as I laid the phone to rest I could see Priscilla wearing my red-and- white striped pyjamas, flopped in a deliberately uncomfortable position, her arms spread wide like a puppet, still steadily crying. The horror of the world seen without charm. Priscilla's woebegone tearful face was crumpled and old. Had she ever really resembled my mother? Two hard deep lines ran down on either side of her blubbering mouth. Beyond the runnels of the tears the dry yellow make-up revealed the enlarged pores of her skin. She had not washed since her arrival.
«Oh Priscilla, stop it, do. Try to be a bit brave at least.»
«I know I've lost my looks-«As if that mattered!»
«So you think I look horrible, you think-«I don't! Please, Priscilla-«Roger hated the sight of me, he said so. And I used to cry in front of him, I'd sit and cry for hours with sheer misery, sitting there in front of him, and he'd just go on reading the paper.»
«That's just nonsense, Priscilla.»> «Oh Bradley, if only we hadn't killed that child-She had already been onto this subject at some length.
«Oh Bradley, if only we'd kept the child-But how was I to know I wouldn't be able to have another one? That child, that one child, to think that it existed, it cried out for life, and we killed it deliberately. It was all Roger's fault, he insisted that we get rid of it, he didn't want to marry me, we killed it, the special one, the only one, my dear little child-«Oh do stop, Priscilla. It would be well over twenty now and on drugs, the bane of your life.» I have never desired children myself and can scarcely understand this desire in others.
«Twenty-a grown-up son-someone to love-to look after me-Oh Bradley, you don't know how I have yearned day and night for that child. He would have made all the difference to Roger and me. I think Roger began to hate me when he found I couldn't have children. And it was all his fault anyway. He found that rotten doctor. Oh it's so unjust, so unjust-«
«Of course it's unjust. Life is unjust. Do stop whingeing and try to be practical. You can't stay here. I can't support you. Anyway I'm going away.»
«I'll get a job.»
«Priscilla, be realistic, who would employ you?»
