'Don't come out here or we'll both be stuck. Just reach out to me.'

I was trying to do that. I was now as near to her as I could get without letting go of my support and plunging out into the jelly. I braced one foot against the wood and reached out with one hand. I touched something. Her fingers. This sort of pulling would be no good. I should simply fall myself.

'Can you not move at all?'

'No. That's what's so silly. When I started to slip I jumped and both legs just went straight in. Just as well, otherwise I would have been hurt.' The brave voice, but the panic.

Something loomed up above. For the moment I had forgotten Gunnar. I called up, 'Don't come down, get a rope or a plank or anything. I can't reach her.' There were sounds, hollow echoes from the boards. The whole scene was strangely shut in, almost silent. The traffic passing on the embankment made a background murmur, but here even the sound of the river seemed louder. We were alone in a small cold cavern of dim light and thick air.

'I think I'll take off my coat,' said Kitty. 'I'll throw it to you.'

'Better keep the coat. Just don't plunge around. We'll have a rope in a minute.'

The mink coat arrived in a bundle, soft and warm and smelling of Kitty's perfume. Only the hem was muddy. It was a strange thing now to handle. I thrust it up above me, hanging it over one of the wooden supports. And as I reached up I felt how much my shoulder was hurting and how much the side of my face was hurting from the blows I had received from Gunnar.

'Your coat's all right. I'm going to have another try at reaching you.'

'I'm falling over,' said Kitty. 'Oh it's so stupid - '

I could see her more clearly now. The effort of pulling off the coat had thrown her off her balance and she had descended a little further into the mud, as if she were kneeling on one knee. She seemed also to have fallen away from the jetty and the distance between us was greater. I tried to keep very steady and to calculate. I prayed that she would not start struggling and crying out.

I held onto the slimy wood with one hand, taking one step out into the mud and extending my arm to its utmost. I touched nothing, not even her finger tips.

'I can't - ,' said Kitty, 'my arm's caught on that side - I can't - I'm sort of sitting down now - ' Her courage was giving, her voice, high, not quite breaking.

I shouted up to Gunnar. 'Get help, get help, find somebody, ring the police - '

There was silence above, probably he had already gone for help.

The step which I had taken away from the jetty had plunged one leg into the mud up to the thigh. I struggled to extricate it, clamping myself onto the sloping wooden support now with both hands. It was becoming very hard to hold on because of the cold, the soft sliminess of the wood, the pain in my shoulder. My leg came out of the heavy grip of the mud with a sucking sound and I drew myself up to the jetty in a kneeling position, suspended by my arms which were now trembling with weakness. I called out 'Help! Help!' The cries slipped like small birds into the thick dark. Behind me Kitty was groaning.

'Kitty, don't panic. Someone will come in a minute. Just don't move. Look, I'm going to take off my jacket and throw it. Grab one sleeve if you can.' I took off my jacket, hanging on batlike. Holding one sleeve and with my other hand clawing the wood, I threw the coat across the gap between me and Kitty. I could see her hand take the sleeve, felt the material tighten between us. But it was at once clear that it was hopeless, she was too tightly wedged. All that happened was that the moment of tension dislodged my now practically frozen hand from the slimy wood and I plunged back over my knees in the mud, letting the jacket drop.

'It's no good,' said Kitty. 'I'm falling over more and more.' She was trying hard to speak steadily.

'I can't reach you. If I get in the mud too I can't lift you. They'll bring a rope - '

'I couldn't hold a rope, my hands are too cold, I wish I'd kept my coat - '

'Someone will come in a minute - '

'I think I'm dying of cold.'

'Shall I throw your coat back?'

'I couldn't get it on.'

'Courage, Kitty, darling, courage.'

'It's all my own fault - '

'What the hell can have happened to Gunnar - Oh God, if I could only think of something else to do - '

'The water's just here,' she said.

I was shifting my position, edging along a little. I could see her now sitting, almost reclining in the mud, so close to me, a matter of feet, and yet inaccessibly lost and, I could see, sinking. The tenacious bottomless mud held one leg to the knee, one to the hip, and one arm which she had stretched out when she lost her balance. Another bout of struggling and she would keel over onto her back. I could see her dress, it was the mousy brown dress, an ornament glinting at the neck. I could see, for a second, her face. She was crying. I grimaced and gasped at the idiotic terrible helplessness of it all. I had decided that if Kitty lost her head and started to struggle or sink, I would launch myself out towards her. But for the moment I was more use watching, talking even.

'If I could only get into the river I could swim.'

'Kitty, the river would kill you.'

'I'm a good swimmer.'

'It's too cold. Just wait. You're OK. Wait. And for God's sake keep still.'

'I can't wait,' said Kitty, her voice breaking. 'I'm gradually falling back. It's coming onto my shoulder. I think I'll just try and flounder into the river.'

'Don't, don't, you'll only make things worse!' I lunged towards her again, in a desperate attempt to cover somehow that fatal gap between her hand and mine. Again the mud simply took my footstep, burying my leg to the knee, to the thigh, and I had to draw back, my arms cracking, one knee braced against the wood, the captive leg rising slowly.

At that moment to my immense relief I heard the rumble of footsteps up above. There was a trembling in the wood and I saw that somebody was beginning to climb down just beyond me almost at the end of the jetty. I could see the bulky form and feel its weight. It was Gunnar. 'Kitty,' said Gunnar's voice, 'Hang on, they're just coming.'

I was about to call out to Gunnar when there was a slithering scrabbling sound and then a loud sticky watery report. Gunnar had fallen.

He had fallen between me and the water and I could see that like Kitty, he had immersed himself almost thigh-deep and had at once keeled over sideways away from the jetty. I could hear the plopping thrashing sound of his struggle to right himself.

'Gunnar, don't do that, wait, wait.' I moved monkey-like along the edge. I could not see him clearly, but I could almost at once reach him, touch him, fumble at the stuff of his coat. I felt his shoulder, his arm, then his hand gripping mine. 'Don't struggle. Pull on me.' For a moment my arm and shoulder took his weight. I gasped with pain. I heard footsteps and shouts up above. Then I was clamping his hand onto the lowest of the wooden beams and he lay below me, holding on now with both hands, like a stranded whale: while over him I suddenly saw, dim yet somehow clear, Kitty floundering madly upon the very edge of the dark racing river. For a second it seemed that she was up to her neck in the mud, only her head emerging from the muddy agitation. I cried out, and leaving Gunnar I let go of the jetty and plunged towards her. I saw her turn over, her whole body now encrusted with mud, as if she were about to sink at last into the hole which her own struggles had created. Then, and I heard her scream as she did it, with a last wild panic-stricken flurry she was beating the water; and then in a second she was gone. She had got herself into the river and the river had taken her away.

I was now myself unsupported in the mud, already falling forward onto my front. One leg lagged, held below as if some fiend had actually got hold of it and were tugging it down. I kicked the fiend in the face. I hurled my body towards the water, attempting to slide upon the muddy surface. One arm was caught by another fiend. Mud slapped one side of my face, touched my mouth. Then I felt upon my outstretched arm a new grip of coldness such as I had never felt or conceived of, a coldness beyond coldness. I screamed. I was in the river.

After that there were no more purposes, or rather only one purpose, the intent to survive as, in an awful jumbled darkness, the Thames rushed me onward, squeezing me with its icy coldness, squeezing the remaining warmth out of my body, whirling me about and hurrying me onward and trying to kill me, to crush me to death in its cold embrace.

IT WAS later, later, later. There were no more days. I was pressing my key into the door of Clifford Larr's flat in Lexham Gardens.

Kitty did not drown. There was no water in her lungs. She was even alive when she was taken from the river. She died of exposure. The poor body had become too cold, the blood froze and never recovered its pathways. She died in hospital.

I was not in the water for very long. During that time I forgot Kitty, I forgot everything except the absorbing task of not dying, of getting out of that cold hell before it killed me. The current was swift and powerful, the banks steepish and slippery. A huge dark chain appeared and I hung onto it. A moored barge, a trailing cable, led me from mud to stones. I crawled on hands and knees up some steps and sat on the pavement with my back against the embankment wall. The hue and cry after Kitty actually passed me by. Shouts, a police launch with a floodlight, people running to and fro. 'They've taken a woman from the river.' 'Is she alive?' 'Yes.' On that I went home. I walked. No one, on that dark night, marked me. I heard the news the next day from Mr Pellow, who saw the name of my department mentioned in the newspaper report. There was a picture of Kitty, also of Gunnar. Whitehall Chief in Wife Rescue Bid. There was nothing about me. Once again I had dropped out of the story as if I had never existed.

I pushed open the door of Clifford's flat. It was an evening, not Monday. I had telephoned him both at home and at the office and had had no reply. I wanted to see him. He was, at that time, the only person whom I wanted to see. I had come to Lexham Gardens on a sudden needful impulse and had seen with a pang of relief that a light was on in his sitting-room.

There was a faint clattering in the kitchen. The flat felt slightly odd. I was about to call out to him when I saw, looking into the drawing-room, that the Indian miniatures had been taken from the walls. Unfaded rectangles of Morris wallpaper stood in their stead. Then my gaze found upon the hall table a large Chinese bowl, now filled with an unusual collection of oddments. I saw among these something which stopped my breath even before I fully took in its significance. Lying there among the miscellany of things, matchboxes, letters, keys, was the chain with the signet ring upon it which Clifford had been used to wear about his neck.

I must then have made some sound. A bald round-faced man whom I did not recognize emerged from the kitchen and stared at me with hostile surprise.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'I was looking for Clifford.'

'Oh. You didn't know?'

But by then I did. 'Is -?'

'I'm sorry to have to tell you that Clifford is dead, he committed suicide.'

'I see. He - often said he would - ' I stood for a moment looking through the drawing-room door at the miniatures lined up, leaning against the wall: the princess on the terrace watching the thunderstorm, the prince leaving his mistress by moonlight, two girls of transcendent beauty striding through a garden, a girl rather like Biscuit braiding her hair. Presumably they were on their way to the sale room.

I turned to go.

'I say, one moment, would you mind giving me those keys? I am the heir and - '

I handed over the flat and the front door key, which I was still holding in my hand, to the piggish cousin, and made my way downstairs.

Milder weather had come and it was raining slightly as I made my way back through Cornwall Gardens to Gloucester Road Station.

Just before I reached Gloucester Road I noticed the church, St Stephen's, at which, Clifford had once told me, T. S. Eliot served for many years as a churchwarden. Obeying an imperative need to sit down I went into the church and sat in one of the pews in the darkness. As I did so I suddenly began to wish that I had asked the cousin if I could have the signet ring and the chain as a memento. It was impossible to go back now; and anyway, who was I to wear that now forever mysterious token? Clifford had been carried away by the cold river and I had not stretched out my hand to him, not even touched his fingers.

I sat in the obscurity of the church and stared at the high golden wall of the reredos and watched the little baffled fights flickering in the dark, like the light upon the jetty at Cheyne Walk, and tears of vain tenderness and self-pity came into my eyes. I needed Clifford, needed his mockery which was cold and yet not cold, needed him to hear that which now could be told only to him. Only he was gone, and it felt to me as if I had killed him in a fit of anger, as I had, in a fit of anger, killed Anne. And where there might have been the relief of reconciliation or even the relief of retribution, there was blankness and solitude, a greater blankness and a quieter solitude than ever before. I had been turned silently out into the desert, there was no one now to whom I could speak at all of the things which were hourly and minutely devouring my heart.

It only dawned on me gradually, as I suffered the shock of Kitty's death, that no one knew that I had been there at all. At least, Gunnar knew and conceivably Biscuit; but no one else knew and I had told no one. I had not revealed to Crystal when it was that I was going to see Kitty to say good-bye. Kitty's accidental fall from the jetty and her husband's heroic effort to save her burst in upon the story from the outside, and when I saw Crystal afterwards I did not conceal my shock, but let her assume (and she did) that death had forestalled my final scene with Gunnar's wife. And no one eke, except Arthur, even knew that Kitty and I had ever met except as mere shadowy acquaintances. In deciding not to tell Crystal what really happened I made an important and in some ways terrible decision. I had let the full weight of Anne's death fall upon my sister, I had let her share everything. This, I decided, I would deal with alone. I would not inject into that innocent life this further and perhaps at last fatally crippling nightmare. But my silence divided me from Crystal in a new way, and obscurely she felt that some deep severance had taken place and we looked at each other across a gap with puzzled sorrowful eyes.

I wondered in the days afterwards whether I should write a letter to Gunnar explaining - and yet what explanation would serve my turn? I could not write the truth without seeming in some way to cast blame, or at least responsibility, upon Kitty; and my own conduct in any case was inexcusable. I wondered too whether Gunnar would write to me, and for a while I watched the post like a lover, hoping to see, whatever horrors it might contain, an envelope with his tiny handwriting. But none came. (He resigned from the department almost immediately after the catastrophe and went back into politics. A timely by-election took him into parliament where he shortly became a junior minister. But this was at an even later time.) I wanted him to know that I was saying good-bye to Kitty forever when he found us together. But as time passed it seemed a pointless attempt at extenuation. And was it even true? I would also like to have known who had sold me. Who had told Gunnar, who had prompted that apt arrival? Biscuit? Clifford? Was it even conceivable that it was a plot prearranged between Gunnar and Kitty to set a scene for murder, was I to that extent exonerated? It was an exoneration for which I could not wish, and of course I did not really believe Kitty to have been, even half willingly, her husband's instrument.

I sat in St Stephen's Church crying for Clifford as I had not cried for Kitty, and just then his death seemed even more awful than hers. Crystal had seen Kitty as a femme fatale luring me to my doom. In fact I had lured Kitty to her doom as I had lured Anne. But the world's will had mingled in our loves and the purest of chances had been present at those deaths. I could at least see that much now. Clifford had died differently, he had died of being unloved and uncared for, as if the door had been shut upon him on a cold night. I did not know, and would never know, how much he had really cared for me. Perhaps he had died as a part of some quite other drama, for someone of whom I had never even heard. And I wept, and gradually in the vagueness of misery, wept for Kitty, for Gunnar, for Anne and in some quieter way for myself. And after a while I began thinking about Mr Osmand, and how he had died alone, and how he had once taught me out of Kennedy's Latin Primer to conjugate the verb of love, his shabby coat sleeve pressing gently against my arm.

In the few days after the river scene I had expected to go mad. I passed the time alone in my bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. The resolution not to tell Crystal came early, without its reasoning, just as an imperative. This albatross, I could not hang around her neck. But could I bear it alone? It did not then occur to me to talk to Clifford, I had as yet no grain of desire to expose this delicate horror to his mockery, to his, as it seemed, bottomless coldness. At first the thing itself, wrapped up in this awful sentence of silence, simply confronted me and I felt that no rational or even conceptual judgment could be made upon it. It and I were alone together and my mind was frozen by grief and fear, and the possibility of madness seemed like a refuge. Later, as I became able to talk to myself and to reflect and turn the matter round and, in however chilled a way, to see facets, the desire to speak to Clifford, the memory of, in spite of everything, his wisdom, and of, however self-mocked, his affection, made him appear providentially as a last resource. Now there was no resource and that too seemed like the work of a mercilessly just providence.

It was indeed crucial that, this time, I had not told Crystal. Then I had someone, a passive spectator who was also a fellow sufferer, to enact it all to. I suffered before Crystal as believers suffer before God; only doubtless the latter derive more benefit from their suffering than I did. And she, innocent loving darling, connived, out of her sheer goodness and her identification with me, at an establishment of pure desolation. I was determined that our lives should be wrecked and she, poor sparrow, had so readily made her little nest in the wreckage. How profitless it had all been I could now very clearly see. Repentance, penance, redemptive suffering? Nothing of the sort. I had destroyed my chances in life and destroyed Crystal's happiness out of sheer pique, out of the spiteful envious violence which was still in me. It was burning the orphanage down all over again, only now there was no one to stop the work of destruction. I had spoilt my talents and made myself a slave, not because I sincerely regretted what I had done, but because I ferociously resented the ill-luck which had prevented me from 'getting away with it'. What had impressed me really was not the crime itself but the instant and automatic nature of the first retribution, the loss of Oxford, my 'position' and the fruits of my labour. If I had indeed got away with it I could perhaps have recovered. As so often, as in my own childhood, guilt sprang from the punishment rather than from the crime. And I perpetuated my suffering out of resentment. If I had been the only recipient of this violence the incident might have been, in some recording angel's book, regarded as closed. But I deliberately made Crystal suffer with me. Could her pure suffering have redeemed me? In some ideal theory, yes, in reality, no.

Of course I regretted what I had done. I regretted all those wrong choices with their catastrophic results, and not just as pieces of ill luck. I saw where I had behaved badly, the selfishness, the destructiveness, the rapacity. But I could now see too how hopelessly this 'penitence' was mixed in with the grosser elements which composed almost all of me. There are religious rituals for separating out the tiny grain of penitence. There are rituals for this, even when, as anything experienced, the penitence does not exist at all. But I could not use these machines. It all remained, for me, grossly muddled up, penitence, remorse, resentment, violence and hate. And it was not a tragedy. I had not even the consolation of that way of picturing the matter. Tragedy belongs in art. Life has no tragedies.

I wondered about the future. Was another cycle of misery, intensified, more dense, beginning for me? If so, it would last out my lifetime. Did not the same crime twice committed merit more than double retribution? Or was it now quite a different scene? I was older, I lacked the recklessness of youth and its generosity. When I was in the cold Thames I soon forgot about Kitty. The deepest me who knew of no one else was desperate to survive. The middle-aged are more careful of themselves. Would such a desperation, or such a mean carefulness, now at last and in this more awful need, guard me from the self-destruction to which I had earlier doomed myself? Would it help me now that I could more coolly see the ingredients of chance? Was it cynicism to hope this? Would even cynicism help me? Or was I perhaps actually wiser? How Clifford would have loved to discuss these questions. Certainly I could better measure now, what had been invisible to me then except as a provocation to rage, the amount of sheer accident which these things, perhaps all things, contained. Then I had raged at the accidental but had not let it in any way save me from my insistence upon being the author of everything. Now I saw my authorship more modestly and could perhaps move in time towards forgiving myself, forgiving them all. Or was this the most subtle cynicism of the lot? There is a religious teaching which says that God is the author of all actions. What I wonder is its secular equivalent?

My grief for Kitty and my memory of her love for me, whatever it had meant, remained and would remain clear. Perhaps such griefs are the most unalloyed and enduring things in the fickle muddled selfish human heart: grief existing not as guilt or calculation or rational regret, but as pains and pictures. These would go with me secretly until the end. I wished, with a surly bitter sadness, that I could communicate even once more with Gunnar, but that was impossible, and even to imagine that he would one day return to kill me was a romanticism which the more awful reality of life forbade. There was simply a loose end which guilt would twist and the only salve, indeed the only duty, was to recognize the impossible, standing as it were at attention before some end-point of human endeavour.

There was, however, one glint of light and I was blessed to have, amid these fruitless burdens and these blank obstacles, a place of decent labour after all. I could still, before it was too late, try to make Crystal happy. Before I had had the force to envisage that future, some right instinct had led me to keep the catastrophe concealed. I would look after Crystal now, as I ought always to have done, as if she were my child, not darkening her soul with my private atrocities, but working practically to give her happiness and ease and the kind of simple joy which was so native to her but of which I had so consistently deprived her. Everything could please Crystal, provided only I were well, every simple little thing could please her. So it was a monstrous scandal that she had not had a happy life. I could not work for her now as I had meant to do when I was young, as I had thought it and envisaged it at that moment in Oxford when she had said, 'This is the happiest day of my life.' I could not give her that happiness. But I could work myself weary to give her another smaller shorter more modest happiness wherein her native joy could frisk about at last. This would be now my only task. Crystal was the only being whom I loved and I was fortunate to be able to express this love in innocence and fullness of heart and to devote to it what remained of my life. I would take her far away from London and find in some country place the very best-paid job which my talents could command. And I would live with her in a cottage and she should have her garden and her animals and all her little heart's desires, and I would simulate with her a kind of peace, perhaps even a kind of joy, into which some of the reality of these things might merge at last. We two alone shall sing like birds in the cage.

I got up to leave the church. I felt exhausted by grieving and the thought that Clifford was now dead came freshly again to my heart. I walked into the south aisle to make my way out. At one end of the aisle under a tasselled canopy the Christ child was leaning from his mother's arms to bless the world. At the other end he hung dead, cut off in his young manhood for me and for my sins. There was also, I saw, a memorial tablet which asked me to pray for the repose of the soul of Thomas Stearns Eliot. How is it now with you, old friend, the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings being over? Alas, I could not pray for your soul any more than I could for Clifford's. You had both vanished from the catalogue of being. But I could feel a lively gratitude for words, even for words whose sense I could scarcely understand. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.

CHRISTMAS EVE.

'WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?'

'I do.'

'I, Arthur Mervyn Fisch, take thee, Crystal Mary Burde, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part, in accordance with God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.'

Arthur mumbled his part. His eyes were glowing with joy, his face was blazing with triumph, but he was shuddering as if at any moment he might fall to the ground. Crystal, who was crying as if her heart would break, whispered her part. When I touched her to perform my act of giving her to Arthur she was rigid. Arthur fumbled the ring onto her finger and she stared at it through her tears with a sort of amazement, then turned round to me with the look of a frightened child. 'With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, with all my worldly goods I thee endow ...'

It was over. The parson led us to the vestry to sign the register. Crystal wrote her maiden name for the last time: Crystal Burde. Arthur dropped the pen and made a blot. I signed my name as a witness. Tommy signed hers, taking up a great deal of space with various Scottish flourishes: Thomasina Uhlmeister.

The rites had been blessedly short. Crystal had wanted us to sing He who would valiant be, but with my last act of authority in her life I had vetoed that. Ours was the last ceremony of the day and the parson, who was probably anxious to scurry along to some seasonable celebration, shook our hands and smiled his way out. It was Christmas Eve.

Tommy and I were left alone with Mr and Mrs Arthur Fisch. Tommy had also been in tears throughout. 'Well, congratulations, Arthur,' I said and shook his hand. He had resumed his moustache but happiness had in other ways improved his appearance.

'Don't greet so, my poor bairn,' said Tommy to Crystal.

'Must you use these affected Scotticisms?' I said to Tommy. 'Stop crying, Crystal, my duck, there's my darling. You're a married woman now.'

'That's what's fashing her,' said Tommy. 'Oh dear, oh dear - ' Tommy's own tears overwhelmed her.

I tried to exchange glances with Arthur, any cliche would have helped, only he was hovering over Crystal and seemed about to start howling himself. Someone at the back of the church coughed meaningfully. No doubt they wanted to flossy the place up for midnight mass. Arthur had now endowed Crystal with the Empire State Building firescreen and the aeroplane armchair and was licensed to worship her with his body. Tommy had made for the fifth time the joke about Crystal having changed from being a crystal bird into being a crystal fish. I had given my sister away. It was time to go.

All sorts of matters had been moving fast. This was in fact the second wedding to which I had been invited since the events of Chelsea. I was asked, but of course did not go, to celebrate the (registry office) union of Alexandra Marilyn Bisset (spinster) and Christopher Jameson Cather (bachelor). At the tune when I received my invitation I had not as yet realized they were acquainted. However it appeared that Biscuit, visiting the flat on various occasions in search of me, had seen and coveted Christopher. Why not? The marriage was generally considered to be her idea (I was not so sure), and had attracted, according to Arthur who was my informant, some cynical comments. I could only bow my head before another impenetrable mystery. Biscuit had found her prince, Christopher, one hoped, the 'true lover' desiderated in his song. Both could be lucky. Biscuit was now, it was rumoured, a rich woman as the result of Kitty's will. The couple were honeymooning in Benares. Christopher was proposing to use Kitty's money to launch Biscuit as a model. Nothing more had been heard of the Waterbirds.

In so far as this could touch me I felt rather sad about Biscuit. I had somehow got used to her, there had been a sort of servants' hall complicity, and I could not help wondering how much better things might have turned out if only I could, as befitted my station, have loved the maid and not the mistress. I would have liked to see again that sallow waiflike face raised in naive anxious questioning to my own. I had felt akin to Biscuit because we were both wanderers in society, both disinherited, both lost and both unclaimed. I would have liked to kiss Biscuit again, not passionately but with a kind of exhausted sadness. Now she was Christopher's, she belonged to a man in whose eyes I must figure poorly, even without the information about me which Biscuit must by now have imparted. I felt sad about Christopher too. He had liked me once. We might have been friends. I had almost systematically destroyed his respect and affection and finally driven him away. I had indeed busied myself thus with most of the people whom I had known. It was the more remarkable that Clifford had hung onto me for so long. Yes, I would have liked a talk with Biscuit. I would have liked to ask her, out of the compassion of total shipwreck, whether it was she who had betrayed me. Or whether perhaps she did not even know that I had taken part in Kitty's death. But for these questions, as for so much else, it was now too late.

Crystal's decision, suddenly so firm, to marry Arthur, came like a bombshell. I had completely forgotten Arthur. I thought about him, oddly enough, on that awful Tuesday night, thought how he would be waiting for me with the tongue and the potatoes and the peas and the cheese and the bananas. Would that I had been with Arthur on that night, that he had had the power to compel me. After that Tuesday he vanished completely from my consciousness until the moment when Crystal told me, with a new voice and a new face, that she had decided to get married. Why? I could not help feeling that in some blind secret way my decision not to tell her about what had happened to me had brought about her resolution to leave me. The perfect communion between us had been broken by a silence on my part which she must have felt, though she could not interpret it, and a deep fear, a sense of losing me, may have driven her into Arthur's arms. So by my heroism perhaps I had lost her, and if I had weakly told her everything she would have pitied me and stayed with me. Or it might all have been simply the fruition of a long intent, Crystal's desire for a child, which she knew so much annoyed me, or indeed a genuine love for Arthur, which she had not mentioned because she knew that it would annoy me even more. This was another question which would have to remain eternally unanswered.

So now I would never live with Crystal, we two would never sing like birds in a cage. Arthur, not I, would look after her and love her and fulfil all her little heart's desires. She and Arthur were going to move out of London, Arthur had asked for a transfer to Harrogate, they were already searching for a country cottage. They would live up there far away in the Yorkshire dales and I would visit them occasionally, more and more infrequently, and hear them call me 'Uncle Hilary' and see their children stare at me with hostility and incomprehension. That this would be so I of course concealed from her loving tear-filled eyes. In this time I had pretended and pretended, and the sheer rigour of the playacting had been itself to some extent a distraction from the agony which occasioned it. I feigned pleasure at the marriage, enthusiasm for Arthur, happy anticipation of my nephews and nieces (who would certainly arrive, adopted if necessary). I even spoke blithely of perhaps moving up to Yorkshire too. (I had by then left the office, and had found a job in an insurance company, duller but better paid.) Whom did these lies convince? Crystal needed to at least half believe them and perhaps she did. She clung to me till the last moment, with a face of terrified guilt and a torrent of exclamations of love. I play-acted heroically. The last thing I could do for her was to send her to her fate with some peace of mind. Callousness would doubtless have its feast day later on.

We came out of the church (not St Stephen's) into the extremely cold night air. There was an illuminated Christmas tree in the churchyard. I remembered that I had never taken Crystal to see the decorations in Regent Street. We walked to the car which Arthur had hired and in which tomorrow he would drive Crystal to Christmas celebrations with his cousins in Lincolnshire. Tommy and I crawled into the back. Arthur and Crystal sat in the front. Crystal turned round and gave me her hand and I heroically held it and squeezed it and smiled though I wanted to howl like a dog. Arthur drove with careful efficiency towards the wedding supper at Blythe Road. We climbed the stairs, Arthur first, Crystal still holding my hand, Tommy. The table was laid, the chicken and the plum pudding were warm in the oven. The room was decorated with paper chains. In festive mood Arthur had put little paper hats on the two ladies representing Dawn and Dusk. There was laughter and tears. We took off our coats. Arthur and I were in our best suits. Tommy was wearing a most unsuitable dress with sequins, Crystal an orange satin robe which fought with her hair. I kissed Crystal and told her to stop crying. Tommy kissed her. The women went on weeping and trying to laugh. Arthur and I began to open the champagne.

CHRISTMAS DAY.

I WAS walking home. Tommy, whose path lay in the other direction, was still walking with me. A few snow flakes were appearing here and there under the street lamps and floating idly about before descending and vanishing upon the frosty pavements. Tommy was wearing her blue knitted night-cap and had pushed her ringlets inside it for extra warmth. We had walked for some time in silence.

I was picturing, as I was now condemned to do for the rest of my life, Kitty floundering in the mud on the edge of the river. What had happened to the mink coat? Human beings might perish but valuable properties like mink coats had to be looked after. Perhaps Biscuit had it now.

'Hilary, are you crying?'

'No.'

'I thought you were.'

'No.'