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is going to England to perfect the operative technique under the best masters. Hence his demand for a visa. How many months he will be away we don’t know yet, but he is setting out with all the air of a knight in search of the Holy Grail. For he intends to complete the operation himself. Meanwhile, Semira will wait for him here, and I have promised to visit her frequently and keep her interested and amused if I can. It is not difficult, for the real world outside the four walls of her house sounds to her strange and cruel and romantic. Apart from a brief glimpse of it at carnival-time, she knows little of our lives. For her, Alexandria is as brilliantly coloured as a fairy-story. It will be some time before she sees it as it really is — with its harsh, circumscribed contours and its wicked, pleasure-loving and unromantic in-habitants. But you have moved!’

Mountolive apologized and said: ‘Your use of the word

“unromantic” startled me, for I was just thinking how romantic it all seems to a newcomer.’

‘Amaril is an exception, though a beloved one. Few are as generous, as unmercenary as he. As for Semira — I cannot at present see what the future holds for her beyond romance.’ Clea sighed and smiled and lit a cigarette.

‘ Espérons’ she said quietly.

* * * * *

VIII

hundred times I’ve asked you not to use my razor’ said Pombal plaintively ‘and you do so again. You know I am

‘A afraid of syphilis. Who knows what spots, when you cut them, begin to leak?’

‘ Mon cher collègue’ said Pursewarden stiffly (he was shaving his lip), and with a grimace which was somewhat intended to express injured dignity, ‘what can you mean? I am British. Hein? ’

He paused, and marking time with Pombal’s cut-throat de-claimed solemnly:

‘ The British who perfected the horseless carriage Are now working hard on the sexless marriage.

Soon the only permissible communion

Will be by agreement with one’s Trade Union. ’

‘Your blood may be infected’ said his friend between grunts as he ministered to a broken suspender with one fat calf exposed upon the bidet. ‘You never know, after all.’

‘I am a writer’ said Pursewarden with further and deeper dignity. ‘And therefore I do know. There is no blood in my veins. Plasma’ he said darkly, wiping his ear-tip, ‘that is what flows in my veins. How else would I do all the work I do? Think of it. On the Spectator I am Ubique, on the New Statesman I am Mens Sana. On the Daily Worker I sign myself as Corpore Sano. I am also Paralysis Agitans on The Times and Ejaculatio Praecox in New Verse. I am …’ But here his invention failed him.

‘I never see you working’ said Pombal.

‘Working little, I earn less. If my work earned more than one hundred pounds a year I should not be able to take refuge in being misunderstood.’ He gave a strangled sob.

‘ Compris. You have been drinking. I saw the bottle on the hall table as I came in. Why so early?’

‘I wished to be quite honest about it. It is your wine, after all. I wished to hide nothing. I have drunk a tot or so.’

‘Celebration?’

‘Yes. Tonight, my dear Georges, I am going to do something rather unworthy of myself. I have disposed of a dangerous enemy and advanced my own position by a large notch. In our service, this would be regarded as something to crow about. I am going to offer myself a dinner of self-congratuladon.’

‘Who will pay it?’

‘I will order, eat and pay for it myself.’

‘That is not much good.’

Pursewarden made an impatient face in the mirror.

‘On the contrary’ he said. ‘A quiet evening is what I most need. I shall compose a few more fragments of my autobiography over the good oysters at Diamandakis.’

‘What is the title?’

‘ Beating about the Bush. The opening words are “I first met Henry James in a brothel in Algiers. He had a naked houri on each knee.”

‘Henry James was a pussy, I think.’

Pursewarden turned the shower on full and stepped into it crying: ‘No more literary criticism from the French, please.’

Pombal drove a comb through his dark hair with a laborious impatience and then consulted his watch. ‘ Merde’ he said, ‘I am going