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By Root 838 0

was an atmosphere that seemed in some way familiar, like that of my grandparents’ house north of London in the years after the war—a certain overheated stuffiness that I associate with age. I experienced the same depressing and slightly guilty feeling that overcame me on those Sunday afternoons in Hendon—the sense of performing a slightly tedious obligation, coupled with a desperate desire to get away. Just as they had in Hendon, the minutes seemed an hour long, and every time I looked at my watch, I thought it must have stopped. I could not help feeling, too, that my visit gave the Durants as little pleasure as it gave me. I could hear Ariel banging pots and muttering in the kitchen, presumably infuriated because I had said yes when Will asked if I would like a cup of tea—for Ariel was ahead of her time in rejecting all forms of domesticity as unnatural impositions on womankind—while Will, however serene his smile, occasionally glanced surreptitiously at his watch. No doubt I was keeping them from a brisk afternoon spent producing five or six thousand words on the ideas of Hume or Hobbes, followed by a nut burger and a glass of herb tea, then early to bed with Pascal’s Pensées.

Will and I sat companionably for a few moments. He had a tendency to go blank from time to time, perhaps as he contemplated the vast stretch of history still left to him to cover, with or without his wife’s help. In the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization he had reached the seventeenth century. True, that only left him with three centuries to go, but since he planned to devote a whole volume to the age of Louis XIV, another to Rousseau and the French and American revolutions, and a further one to Napoleon, the work before him must have weighed heavily on his shoulders. I chatted with him about the nineteenth century and suggested it might be called The Age of Victoria, but he gave me a kindly smile of reproof and shook his head. He did not think he would live to reach the nineteenth century, he said, but felt it would probably require two volumes: The first might be named after Darwin and the second after Marx or Freud. He was not an admirer of Victoria. But if he reached Napoleon, he would be content. (He did, but only just.)

He wanted to be very frank with me, he said. It was of course a pleasure to see me, but there was a purpose to my being here, a small problem that needed to be dealt with between himself and S&S, which I might be able to raise with Max on my return. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and fell silent again.

Might the subject be that of joint authorship? I asked, hoping to put him out of his misery, for he was clearly having a great deal of difficulty bringing the subject up himself. A look of immense relief appeared on his face, and he glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where the kettle could be heard whistling. “Ariel talked to you then?” he asked. I wondered what he had supposed we were doing in the garden. “Do you think Max will mind?”

I suspected that Max would hate the idea, but of all people he should understand that Will wasn’t going to stand in the way of whatever Ariel wanted. After all, however scared Will might be of Ariel, it could hardly exceed Max Schuster’s fear of Ray. All the same, it didn’t seem to me that Will was all that happy about the idea himself. He had the look of a man who has given in to overwhelming pressure and was determined to put the best face on it. I guessed that in his own quiet, passive-aggressive way, Will had been resisting this change for a long time.

There might be problems, I told him. The sales department would probably raise all sorts of objections, as might the Book-of-the-Month Club. But I didn’t think the general public would be affected one way or the other. What mattered most was his own comfort and peace of mind. It might even be a good opportunity to get some publicity for the Durants, who complained constantly that Will had never been on the cover of Time or a guest on the Today show and that Max had failed to