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By Root 2354 0

Ellesmere became a stock-holder, then a publisher, and also dabbled in theatre matters as an investor and in this context I came across him. Some time just after my ‘bad patch’ we met at a first night party and Ellesmere said, ‘I suppose you know your cousin has become a Buddhist?’ I was fascinated and amazed by this news. I had never connected James with religion. We had both of us acquired that vague English Christianity which disappears in adolescence. My mother, I should say here, did not force her particular evangelical beliefs upon my father and me. Perhaps she realized that ‘it would not do’. However she took it for granted that we were Christians. We attended an Anglican church. Naturally James and I did not discuss religion. If I had considered the matter when we were young I think I would have said that the basic spiritual principle of James’s life was an avoidance of vulgarity. Religion as ‘good form’? One could do worse. I would never have imagined him as an enthusiast in pursuit of the exotic mysteries of the East. How extremely odd!

My surprise soon wore off. What did it mean after all? Obviously James could not believe in the transmigration of souls. When I met my cousin again it was somehow another era in our lives. My father’s death, my period of professional despair, my misadventures in Hollywood, these things were now behind me. I had made peace with Clement. (We were in Japan together.) I was by now a very successful man, in Aunt Estelle’s country a king indeed. I said to James, ‘So you’re a Buddhist, I hear?’ He smiled and said ‘Oh yes!’ in a tone which could mean either ‘Yes’ or ‘What nonsense!’ I dropped the subject. Later on he came to live more permanently in London and to work in the Ministry of Defence, as he still does. His flat in Pimlico is full of Buddhas, but then it is full of all sorts of eastern trash, some of it I daresay Hindu.

James is now a general of course, I forget what kind. I suppose he too has been in a way a successful man. My own feeling that I have ‘won the game’ comes partly from a sense that he has been disappointed by life, whereas I have not.

‘A man would drown there in a second.’

‘Three seconds.’

‘A second.’

‘Three seconds.’

Example of Black Lion conversation and level of debate. The clientele seem to resent the fact that I go swimming in a sea whose killer propensities they are so proud of. Conversations of this sort arise as soon as I appear, not of course addressed to me.

I join in. ‘I’m a strong swimmer.’

‘It’s them that drowns.’

‘You swim bare,’ someone adds.

‘Bare?’

‘You swim bare.’

‘Oh—you mean naked.’ So I am watched.

They look at me with dull silent hostility.

‘Seen any seals?’ Mr Arkwright asks brightly.

‘No, not yet.’

I was sorry to observe, visiting the tower steps this morning, that my curtain ‘rope’ had also somehow come undone and vanished. I swam nevertheless. I think that my muscles are stronger and I am becoming more skilful at climbing out. I always manage to scrape or cut myself however. The yellow rocks, which look so smooth from a distance, have a rough scratchy surface, as if they were closely covered over with millions of tiny sharp broken-off limpet shells. Yesterday I dived from Shruff End ‘cliff’ at high tide and managed to get out all right, though a little anxiety spoilt the swim. I am certainly not going to lose face at the Black Lion by going along to the ‘ladies’ bathing place’!

Today there is a pleasant very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they could without showing any trace of foam. It is a compact radiant complacent sort of sea, very beautiful. There ought to be seals, the waves themselves are almost seals today, but still I scan the water in vain with my long-distance glasses. Enormous yellow-beaked gulls perch on the rocks and stare at me with brilliant glass eyes. A shadow-cormorant skims the glycerine sea. The rocks are thronged with butterflies. The temperature remains high. I wash