and backward, until they looked into the dome of his skull. Then he saw something indescribable — a kaleidoscope seen through something like an opal. Wretched little pieces of tinfoil, broken glass, crockery, metal, and paper spun between mirrors and came to rest in queer and beautiful patterns — and as soon as the Murderer settled down to admire these patterns there was a whirr and a buzz, and everything dis persed. It twirled away, and came to rest in a fresh pattern.
Someone said: ‘You’re dreaming.’
He replied: ‘Yes, yes … I’m afraid I am …’
Then he opened his eyes and saw the elegant, old-fashioned room, full of cigarette smoke, at the edge of which Asta Thundersley, red and damp as an autumnal dawn, was bullying the barman:
‘Mix, you idle man, mix! What did I hire you for? To get drunk?’
The barman began to laugh like a man who is being tickled under the arms. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his face had become mottled.
Meanwhile Sinclair Wensday was flirting conspicuously with Catchy, occasionally darting venomous glances in the direction of his wife Avril, who, looking at him with the eyes of an angry cat, deliberately rested her head on the shoulder of the young man called Roget. Five or six glasses had reduced him to the self-revelatory stage of intoxication.
‘You know,’ he was saying, ‘I’m good for nothing. I’m good for nothing at all. Some people, I mean, find happiness. Not me. I don’t know what it feels like to be happy. I’m not a man, I’m a slave. A slave,’ he repeated, while two maudlin tears trickled down his vacant face. ‘Yes, that’s all I am, a slave, a slave to pity.’
‘You poor dear!’
‘You understand me. Pity, that’s what it is, pity! I’m too soft. I hate to hurt people’s feelings; I’d rather kill a man than hurt his feelings.— do you know that? And it’s all my mother’s fault. I hate my mother. I suppose you think that’s a terrible thing to say, don’t you?’
‘I see you have the courage of your convictions,’ said Avril.
‘No, I haven’t. I haven’t got the courage of anything. I haven’t got the courage … of … of … a daffodil. A daffodil fights for its bit of hold in the soil. But could I fight for anything? No. And it’s all my mother’s fault. Did she ever treat me as a human being? I tell you, dezir sweet Avril, she always treated me like a dog, a dog!’
‘There, there, don’t cry.’
‘How can I help crying if my mother treats me like a dog? How can I help it? If I had had a father things might have been different, but I never had a father. He died in the War, at Ypres. There was an explosion and he was missing. The next time we meet, you kind, sweet, beautiful woman, I’ll bring you his photograph. He sits on that little chair like a man on a throne. Why did he have to die? Tell me, why did he have to leave me all alone with my horrible mother? Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She was afraid of losing me,’ said Roget, weeping. ‘She lost him and she didn’t want to lose me. She wouldn’t let me play football in case I got kicked, and she wouldn’t let me play cricket in case somebody hit me with a bat. And she wouldn’t let me let off fireworks on Guy Fawkes day in case I burnt my fingers, and she wouldn’t let me go and play with other boys in case one of them knocked me down and I fractured my skull on the pavement, and she wouldn’t let me cross the road and she wouldn’t let me climb trees. She wouldn’t let me do anything. She kept me on a lead, she turned me into a dog, a dog, a dog! She wouldn’t let me talk to any girls in case they led me astray or gave me diseases. You don’t know what I’ve had to go through! Everybody else had a pony. Not me, oh no, not little me. I might have fallen off, or it might have bitten me, or kicked me. She reads all the filthy newspapers, damn her, and she keeps a big book full of little bits she cuts out all about little boys who’ve had horrible accidents. Little boys and little girls. Sometimes they’ve been to a circus and they go home and try and do a trapeze act, and hang their bloody little selves. Or sometimes they blow up a toy balloon, and it goes the wrong way and they choke themselves. So she never let me go to a circus, so she never let me have a toy balloon, so she filleted every bit of fish because once in some paper or other she saw something about some nauseating brat who swallowed a bone in a bit of fried cod. She never let me do anything. I wanted to be a writer, but she read somewhere, in some idiotic book, that writers are all womanizers and drunkards, and she didn’t want me to go into business because she read somewhere in a paper about a business man who defaulted and blew his brains out. And here I am, here I am!’
‘Then why don’t you simply put on your hat and walk out?’
Roget cried like a child, wrinkling up his face, and said: ‘It’s pity! Pity is the ruin of me. She’d be so broken- hearted if I went away. She’d die. She told me so. I’m all she has and you don’t know — you’ll never know — you couldn’t possibly know how that woman has suffered. Oh my God, how I hate that woman! But she’s sick, very sick. Or at least, she pretends she is, and one of these days…’
‘— One of these days you’ll come into her money and go on the loose, I suppose?’
‘You’ve said it exactly. How well you understand me! One of these days..,.. Listen, I’m going to tell you something.’
He paused. Avril said: ‘Well?’
But Roget apparently had thought better of it. He looked as if he was going to be sick; but Avril’s eyes were elsewhere. Her husband had moved from Catchy to Oonagh Scripture, and Mothmar Acord had taken his place. That leering, sinister man approached Catchy with frank, open lustfulness, putting a hand on the back of her neck, which in those days was cool and round and fine of texture; a famous neck, solid-looking as ivory. He said: ‘You’re a very good-looking girl, aren’t you?’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I do. You can see I do. I want you to tell me something.’
‘What would you like me to tell you?’
‘Are you a masochist, by any chance?’
‘Why do you ask?’ said Catchy in an uncertain voice.
Mothmar Acord replied: ‘There’s something about you that invites violence.’
