'How many do you think would be ideal?'
'If we chose well, Irma, I should say a dozen.'
'No, no, Alfred, it's a party! It's a 'party'! Things 'happen' at parties ' not at friends' gatherings. I've read about it. Twenty, at least, to make the atmosphere pregnant.'
'Very well, my dear. Very 'well'. Not that we will include a mildewed and wheezy beast with broken antlers because he comes twentieth on the list when the other nineteen are stags, are virile and eligible. But come, let us go into this matter more closely. Let us say, for sake of argument, that we have whittled the probable down to fifteen. Now, of this fifteen, Irma, my sweet co-strategist, surely we could not hope for more than six as possible husbands for you. - No, no, do not wince; let us be honest, though it is brutal work. The whole thing is very subtle, for the six you might prefer are not necessarily the six that would care to share the rest of their lives with you; oh no. It might be another six altogether whom you don't care about one little bit. And over and above these interchangeables we must have the floating background of those whom I have no doubt you would spurn with your elegantly cloven hooves were they to make the least advance. You would bridle up, Irma: I'm sure you would. But nevertheless they are needful, these untouchables, for we must have a hinterland. They are the ones who will make the party florid, the atmosphere potential. '
'Do you think we could call it a soiree, Alfred?'
'There is no law against it that I know of,' answered Prunesquallor, a little irritably perhaps, for she had obviously not been listening. 'But the Professors, as I remember them, are hardly the types I would associate with the term. Who, by the way, 'do' comprise the Staff these latter days? It is a long time since I last saw the flapping of a gown.'
'I know that you are cynical. Alfred, BUT I would have you know that they are my choice. I have always wished for a man of learning to be my own. I would understand him. I would administer to him. I would protect him and dam his socks.'
'And a more dexterous darner never protected the tendo achilles with a double skein!'
'Alfred!'
'Forgive me, my own. By all that's unforeseeable I am getting to like the idea. For my part, Irma, I will see to the wines and liqueurs, the barrels and the punch-bowl. For your part the eatables, the invitations, the schooling of the staff - our staff, not the luminaries'. And now, my dear, 'when'? This is the question - 'when'?'
'My gown of a thousand frills, with its corsage of hand-painted parrots will be ready within ten days, and...'
'Parrots!' cried the Doctor in consternation.
'Why not?' said Irma, sharply.
'But,' wavered her brother, 'how many of them?'
'What on earth does it matter to you, Alfred? They are brightly coloured birds.'
'But will they chime in with the frills, my sweet one? I would have thought if you must have hand- painted creatures on your corsage, as you call it - that something calculated to turn the thoughts of the Professors to your femininity, your desirability, something less aggressive than parrots might be wise.... Mind you, Irma, I'm only...'
'Alfred!' Her voice jerked him back to his chair.
'My, province, I 'think',' she said, with heavy sarcasm. 'I imagine when it comes to parrots you can leave them to me.'
'I will,' said her brother.
'Will ten days give us time, Alfred?' she said, as she rose from her chair and approached her brother, smoothing back her iron-grey hair with her long, pale fingers. Her tone had softened. To the Doctor's horror she sat on the arm of his chair.
Then, with a sudden kittenish abandon, she flung back her head so that her over-long yet pearl- white neck was tautened in a backward curve and her chignon tapped her between her shoulder-blades in so peremptory a way as to make her cough. But directly she had ascertained that it was not her brother being wilful, the ecstatic and kittenish expression came back to her powdered face, and she clapped her hands together at her breast.
Prunesquallor, staring up, horrified at yet another facet of her character coming to light, noticed that one of her molars needed filling, but decided it was not the moment to mention it.
'Oh Alfred! Alfred!' she cried. 'I 'am' a woman, aren't I?' The hands were shaking with excitement as they gripped one another. 'I'll 'show' them I am!' she screamed, her voice losing all control. And then, calming herself with a visible effort, she turned to her brother and, smiling at him with a coyness that was worse than any scream - 'I'll send their cards to them tomorrow, Alfred,' she whispered.
FIFTEEN
Three shafts of the rising sun, splintering through the murk, appeared to set fire to the earth where they struck it. The bright impact of the nearest beam exposed a tangle of branches which clawed in a craze of radiance, microscopically perfect and adrift in darkness.
The second of these floodlit islands appeared to float immediately above the first, for the sky and the earth were a single curtain of darkness. In reality it was as far away again, but hanging as it did gave no sense of distance.
At its northern extremity there grew from the wasp-gold earth certain forms like eruptions of masonry rather than spires and buttresses of natural rock. The sunshaft had uncovered a mere finger of some habitation which, widening as it entered the surrounding darkness to the North, became a fist of stones, which, in its turn, heaving through wrist and forearm to an elbow like a smashed honeycomb, climbed through darkness to a gaunt, time-eaten shoulder only to expand again and again into a mountainous body of timeless towers.
But of all this nothing was visible but the bright and splintered tip of a stone finger.
The third 'island' was the shape of a heart. A coruscating heart of tares on fire.
To the dark edge of this third light a horse was moving. It appeared no bigger than a fly. Astride its back was Titus.
