Crammed into the passenger seat with his knees knocking against the mahogany dashboard of the ancient Wolseley, the Returning Son watches himself enter the dusty haze that in India you must always pass through on your way to somewhere. And when you arrive, the haze is waiting for you. On lush hillsides he recognizes the deserted stone breweries built by the Raj to wash down the Major's curry. It's the road we drove down when they sent us back to England, he thinks. These are the bullock carts we honked at. These are the children who stared at us but I didn't stare back.

The bends have acquired a rhythm. Like a willing dray-horse the Wolseley responds to it. Brown mountains with their peaks sawn off by haze lift ahead of them. To their left lie the foothills of the Hindu Kush, presided over by the mother peak of Nanga Parbat.

"Your very town, sahib!" cries Mahmoud, and there it is: a glimpse of brown houses perched on a ridge, gone again with the next turn. Now the relics of the departed British take on a military note: a collapsed sentry post, a dying barrack hut, an overgrown reviewing stand. A final push by the Wolseley, a few more turns. They are in the town. From tour guide and chauffeur Mahmoud promotes himself to estate agent, conversant with every fine property in Murree and the bargain price that will secure it. This main street, sahib, is today one of the most fashionable in all of Pakistan: note the fine restaurants, food stalls and clothes shops. In these secluded side streets you may observe the elegant summer villas of the richest and most discerning citizens of Islamabad.

"Kindly reflect upon the most superb views, sahib! Admire the distant plains of Kashmir! As to the climate, it is most jolly. And the pine forests are full of animals at all times of year! Smell also the sweet Himalayan air! Oh gladness!"

Please drive on uphill, says the Returning Son.

Yes, this way. Past the Pakistani Air Force base and keep going.

Thank you, Mahmoud.

The air force base is made of smart tarmac instead of grass. A second floor has been added to the officers' quarters. _Those bloody pansies in blue, they hog the budget every time,__ Mundy hears the Major fume. The road is pitted now, and overgrown. Dusty poverty replaces the affluence of the town. After a couple of miles they reach a brown slope strewn with abandoned military cantonments and poor villages.

Stop here, please, Mahmoud. Thank you. Here is fine.

Goats, pye-dogs and the eternal poor drift across the overgrown parade ground. The dust-patch next to the mosque where the great cricketers of tomorrow honed their skills is today a hostel for the dying. The same hand that erased Number Two, The Vale has turned the Major's bungalow into a half-dried skull, ripping off its tin roof, doors and balcony but leaving the eyeless sockets of the windows to stare at the destruction.

Do the asking, please, Mahmoud. I have forgotten my Punjabi.

_Ayah? Everyone's an ayah, sahib! What's her name?__ She has no name but Ayah. She was very big. Mundy wants to add that she had a huge bottom and perched on a tiny stool in the corridor outside his bedroom, but he doesn't want the children to laugh. She worked for an English major who lived here, he says. The major left suddenly. He drank too much whiskey. He liked to sit under that neem tree over there and smoke cheroots called Burmas. He mourned his wife, loved his son and regretted the Partition.

Does Mahmoud translate this? Probably not. He too has his delicacy. They find the oldest man in the street. _Oh, I remember Ayah__ most _well, sahib! A Madrasi, as I recall. All her family had perished wretchedly in the many massacres, except for the good lady herself. Well, sir, yes, there we are, as we say. After the English left, nobody wanted her anymore. First she begged, then she died. By the end, she was most diminutive. The sahib would not have recognized her as the large lady he is describing. Rani?__ he speculates, warming to his work. _Now which Rani would that be, sahib?__ The Rani whose father ran a spice farm, Mundy replies, by a feat of memory that bewilders him until he recalls how she used to bring him gifts of spices wrapped in leaves.

Suddenly the oldest man in the street remembers Rani exactly! _Miss Rani, she is married__ most _suitably, I assure you, sahib. You will rejoice to hear of her good fortune, thank you, sir. When she was but fourteen years of age her father gave her to a rich factory owner resident in Lahore, what we call in this region a most suitable match. To date they have been blessed with three fine sons and one daughter already, which I say is not bad going, thank you, sahib. You are most gracious, like all the British.__ They are walking back to the Wolseley but the oldest man is still with them, clutching Mundy's arm and peering into his eyes with unearthly benevolence.

_And now I beseech you to go home, sir, please,__ he advises, with the utmost good humor. _Don't bring us your commerce, I implore you. Don't send us any more soldiers, we have quite enough, thank you. You British have taken what you need from us. You have enough now. It's time you gave us a bit of a rest, I say!__ Wait here, Mundy tells Mahmoud. Look after the car.

He treads softly down the forest path, thinking he is barefoot. In a minute, Ayah will call to me, telling me I mustn't go too far. The two great tree trunks are as vast as they ever were. The zigzag footpath between them leads down to the stream's edge. The rock pool still flashes with mother-of-pearl. But the only face he sees in it is his own.

_Very dear Judith,__ Mundy writes the same night in stern school English, from his hotel room in a poor part of Lahore. _You owe me at the very least some sign of yourself. I need to know that our time together meant as much to you as it did to me. I have to believe in you. It's one thing to keep searching in life. It's another to have no firm ground under one's feet. I believe you would love this place. It is populated by what you would call the true proletariat. I know about Sasha and I don't mind. I love you. Ted.__ Which doesn't sound like me at all, he decides. But what does? The postbox in the hotel bears Queen Victoria's insignia. Let's hope Her Majesty knows where to find the Kreuzberg squat.

He is in England again. Sooner or later you have to turn yourself in. Perhaps his visa ran out. Perhaps he grew tired of his own bad company. Availing himself of time-honored tradition, the former head prefect and cricket hero signs up with a rural preparatory school that accepts unqualified teachers at a discount. Embracing its discipline like an old friend, he throws himself with his habitual zeal on the Germanic mysteries of verb-comma-verb, gender and plurality. In the hours left him after correcting schoolwork, he masterminds the school's production of _Ambrose Applejohn's Adventure__ and makes furtive love to a Judith substitute, who happens to be the science master's wife, in the scorers' shed beside the cricket field. In the school holidays he persuades himself that he is the coming Evelyn Waugh, a view not shared by publishers. Betweentimes he dashes off ever more desperate letters to the squat. Some propose marriage, some profess a broken heart, but all are mysteriously dogged by the prosaic tone of his letter from Lahore. Knowing only that her family name is Kaiser and she is from Hamburg, he plows through telephone directories in the local library, besieges Overseas Inquiries, and pesters Kaisers across the North German seaboard in case they have a Judith. None points him in the direction of his former language pupil.

Towards Sasha he adopts a reserved approach. There are too many bits of his erstwhile roommate that in retrospect he finds difficult to enjoy. He resents the spell Sasha cast over him when they were face to face. He regrets his undue reverence for Sasha's zany philosophical abstractions. He is irked, despite his protestations to the contrary, that Sasha went before him as Ilse's lover, and after him as Judith's. One day I'll write to him. Meanwhile, I'll write my novel.

All the more disconcerting, therefore, that a full three years after being thrown out of Berlin, he should receive a battered bunch of readdressed envelopes sent care of his Oxford college and forwarded to his bank after long months of convalescence in the porters' lodge.

There are a round dozen of them. Some are as long as twenty sides of single-spaced typescript from Sasha's Olivetti portable, with addenda and postscripts in his spiky Germanic hand. Mundy's first dishonorable thought is to consign the whole lot to his wastebasket. His second is to hide them somewhere he won't find them: behind the chest of drawers, or in the rafters of the scorers' shed. But after days of shifting them from place to place he pours himself a stiff drink and, laying out the letters in their chronological order, works his way through them.

He is at first moved, then ashamed.

All his self-indulgent obsessions disappear.

This is Sasha in despair.

This is a cry of real pain from a fragile friend who has not left the battle front.

Fled the snappish tone, the dogmatic statements from the throne. In place of them, a desperate appeal for a glimmer of hope in a world that has collapsed around his ears.

He asks nothing material. His daily wants are few and easily taken care of. He can cook his own food--Mundy shudders. He does not lack for women--when did he ever? He is owed money by magazines; one or other will pay before it goes under. Faisal at the cafe makes an illicit arrack that can blind a horse. No, the tragedy of Sasha's life is of a grander, nobler order altogether. It is that West Germany's radical left is a spent force and Sasha is a prophet without a country.

"Passive resistance has become no resistance, civil disobedience has become armed violence. Maoist groups are fighting each other for the entertainment of the CIA, the extremists have taken over from the radicals, and those who do not conform with the Bonn reactionaries are banished from what is to be called society. Perhaps you did not know that we now have a law which officially bars from public life all who do not pledge allegiance to the _basic principles of liberal democracy?__ One-fifth of West German employees, from train drivers to professors to myself, are to be considered nonpersons by the fascists! Think, Teddy! I am not allowed to drive a train unless I agree to drink Coca-Cola, bomb the Red River dam and napalm Vietnamese children! Soon I shall be forced to wear a yellow S declaring me a socialist!"

Mundy is by now searching hungrily for word of Judith. He finds it submerged in a footnote devoted to matters not associated with the letter's central theme, which as usual is Sasha.

"People leave Berlin in the night, often we cannot tell where they go. Peter the Great, one hears, has gone to Cuba. He will fight for Fidel Castro. If I had two good legs and Peter's shoulders I would perhaps offer myself to the same great cause. Of Christina, we have depressing rumors that through her father's influence she has been permitted to return to Athens. By kind consent of her country's American-backed fascistic military dictatorship she will join her family's shipping company. Judith, ignoring my advice, has joined Karen in Beirut. I fear for her, Teddy. The path she has taken is heroic but misguided. Even among revolutionaries, there are too many cultural differences to be resolved. According to a friend who recently returned from those regions, not even the most radical Arabs take kindly to our sexual revolution, dismissing it as decadent Westernism. Such prejudice does not bode well for Judith's libertarian appetites. Unfortunately by the time of her departure I exerted little influence over her actions. She is a willful woman, led by her senses and not easily persuaded by arguments of moderation."

Such an unjust portrait of Mundy's true love rekindles his romantic longings: _Go to her! Fly to Beirut! Comb the Palestinian training camps! Join the struggle, separate her from Karen, bring her back alive!__ Discovering that he is still sitting in his chair, however, he reads on.

"I am so sick of _theory,__ Teddy. I am so sick of bourgeois posturers whose idea of revolution is smoking pot instead of tobacco in front of their children! The hated Lutheran in me will not sleep, I admit it, I admit it. Writing to you at this moment I am ready to give up half of what I believe in exchange for one clarifying vision. To see one great rational truth glowing on the horizon, to go to it regardless of cost, regardless of what must be left behind, is what I dream of beyond all things. Will tomorrow change me? Nothing changes me. It is only the world that changes. And here in West Germany there is no tomorrow. There is only yesterday, or banishment, or enslavement to the forces of imperialism."

Mundy begins to feel the old fuzziness descend on him. If he were listening, he would by now have switched off. Somehow he continues reading.

"Any acts of protest currently performed by the Left only legitimize the rightist conspiracy that we are forced to call democracy. Our very existence as radicals underpins the authority of our enemies. Bonn's military-industrial junta has strapped West Germany so tight to the American war wagon that we shall never be able to raise a finger against its atrocities."

He thunders on. Mundy is by now reading him diagonally.

"Our officially tolerated voices are all we have left to fight the corporate tyranny.... True socialist ideals have become the court eunuchs of the Bonn Pantheon..."

Did the Pantheon keep eunuchs? Mundy the pedantic schoolmaster doubts it. He licks a finger and skims a couple more pages, then a couple more. Great news. Sasha is still a cyclist. _I have taken no more falls since that day you taught me in the Tiergarten.__ The news of his former mentor in Cologne is less good: _The bastard has retracted half his writings and done a bunk to New Zealand!__ Mundy pushes the letter aside and takes up the last of all. It opens with an ominous announcement: _Here beginneth the second bottle of arrack.__ The writing is freer and, for all its high-flown style, more intimate.

"I do not begrudge you your silence, Teddy. I grudge you nothing. You saved my life, I stole your woman. If you are still angry with me, please remain angry. Without anger we are nothing, nothing, nothing." Good to hear it. _Now__ what? "If you are guarding your literary muse with silence, guard her well, write well, tend your talent. I shall never again take you for granted. When I talk to you I talk to that good ear that has listened to so much of my bullshit that I blush." Well, now you know. "Does it listen still? I believe so. You are not ideologically encumbered. You are my bourgeois confessor as I pursue my odyssey of logical metamorphosis. To you alone I am able to think aloud. Therefore I will whisper to you through the grille that I am like the Persian poet who, having heard all the world's great arguments, evermore comes out of the same door he went in through. I see the dark door before me now. It is open, waiting for me to enter." _Dark door?__ What the hell's he bleating about--suicide? For Christ's sake, Sasha, get a grip on yourself! thinks Mundy, but he is seriously alarmed.

Unfinished page. Turn to the next one. The writing is now hectic, a message in a bottle from a marooned man contemplating the jump off the rocks.

"Therefore, Teddy, you see your friend standing at the crossroads of his life"--a crossroads, or a dark Persian door? Get on with it, arsehole! "What names do I read on the signpost? The fog is so thick I can barely decipher them! For answer me this, dear friend. Or better, answer my new seducers. If our class enemy is capitalist imperialism--and who can doubt that it is?--who ultimately is our class friend? Do I hear you warn me that Sasha is venturing into a quicksand?"--Ah, got it, your dark door opens onto a beach, naturally--"You are right, Teddy! You are right as always! Yet how many times have you not heard me declare that it is the duty of every true revolutionary to throw his weight where it will be most effective to the cause?" Mundy recalls no such times, but then probably he wasn't listening. "Well, Teddy, now you may see for yourself how neatly I am impaled on the imperfect logic of my own convictions! Go well, dear Teddy. You are my absolute friend! If I decide as I fear I have already decided, I shall carry your loyal heart with me!"

Groaning theatrically, Mundy pushes the letter away from him, but he has one more page to go.

"Write to me care of Faisal at the Istanbul Cafe. I shall arrange for your letters to reach me in whatever improbable circumstance I find myself. Have the pigs left you with a limp? Oh, what bastards those fellows are! Can you still found a dynasty? I hope so, for the more Teddys there are in the world, the better place it will be. What about the headaches? All this I need to know. Yours in Christ, in agape, in friendship, in despair, Sasha."

Seized with guilt and concern, as well as some kind of habitual unease whenever Sasha's shadow falls across his path, Mundy grabs pen and paper and applies himself to the task of explaining his silence and vowing eternal loyalty. He has not forgotten how precarious was Sasha's hold on life; or the feeling, whenever he hauled his little body out of the room, that he might never come back. He remembers the uneven shoulders, the dramatic head, the daffy, uncoordinated hobble, on or off a bicycle. He remembers Sasha by Christmas candlelight, soliloquizing about the Herr Pastor. He remembers the brown, overstudious eyes, fervently searching for a better world, incapable of compromise or diversion. He determinedly forgives him Judith. He forgives Judith too. He has been forgiving her for longer than he cares to think, and failing every time.

The writing starts well but dries.

Do it in the morning when I'm fresh, he tells himself.

But morning is no better than the night before.

He tries a moment of postcoital lassitude after a particularly satisfying encounter in the scorers' shed, but the fond, lightly humorous letter that he plans remains stubbornly unwritten.

He makes the usual feeble excuses to himself. It's three bloody years, for God's sake. Four probably. Faisal will have closed down the Istanbul, he was saving up to buy a taxi.

Anyway, whatever mad step Sasha was contemplating, he'll have taken it. And besides, I've got this pile of fifth-form German compositions staring at me.

Mundy is still prevaricating in this way when the science master's wife, yielding to an implausible fit of remorse, makes a clean breast of her misdemeanors to her husband. The trio are summoned to the headmaster's study, where a solution is crisply arrived at. By adding their signatures to a document the headmaster has obligingly prepared for them in advance, all parties contract to put their passions on hold until exams are over.

"You wouldn't care to take her on for the holidays, would you, old boy?" the science master murmurs in Mundy's ear in the village pub while his wife pretends not to listen. "I've been offered this rather good part-time job at Heathrow airport."

Mundy regrets that he has already made his holiday arrangements. And it is while he is debating what these arrangements might be--and not just for the holidays--that he is freed from his writer's block. In a few warmhearted sentences, he echoes Sasha's pledge of undying loyalty, urges him to cheer up and not be so serious--Dr. Mandelbaum's term _foolishly earnest__ springs happily to his pen. He recommends the middle way. _Don't be so hard on yourself, man, give yourself a break! Life's a botch and you can't solve it single-handed, nobody can, least of all your new seducers, whoever the hell they are!__ And for amusement's sake, but also as a way of saying he has put male jealousy behind him, he provides a Rabelaisian and not wholly accurate account of his recent affair with the science teacher's wife.

And I _have__ put it behind me, he reasons. Judith and Sasha had a bit of free love and I paid for it. And as Sasha so rightly says, without anger we are nothing.

Launching himself upon a career in journalism as a stepping stone to literary immortality, Mundy submits to a correspondence course and enrolls as a cub reporter with a dying provincial newspaper in the East Midlands. At first, all bodes well. His coverage of the decline of the local herring fleet is admired; his descriptions, sensitively embroidered, of the goings-on in the mayoral parlor are found amusing, and no colleague's wife offers herself as a Judith substitute. But when, during the absence on holiday of his editor, he files an expose of underpaid Asian labor in a local canning factory, the idyll ends abruptly. The owner of the factory is the proprietor of the newspaper.

Transferring his talents to a pirate radio station, he interviews local celebrities and plays songs of yesteryear to Mum and Dad on their golden day until a Friday evening when the producer suggests they pop down the road together for a jar.

"It's the class bit, Ted," the producer explains. "The punters say you sound like some overfed geezer from the House of Lords."

Bad months follow. The BBC turns down his radio play. A children's story about a pavement artist who produces a chalk masterpiece and recruits a gang of street kids to help him remove the flagstone finds no favor with publishers, one of whom responds with unwelcome frankness: _We find the actions of your German police violent and their language offensive. We fail to see why you have set your story in Berlin, a city of unpleasant connotations for many of our British readers.__ But from the depths of gloom Mundy as ever sees a chink of light. In a quarterly periodical devoted to readers with literary ambitions, an American foundation offers traveling scholarships to writers under thirty who seek the inspiration of the New World. Undaunted by the prospect of venturing into the giant's castle, Mundy beams his charm at three kindly matrons from North Carolina over tea and muffins in an elderly hotel in London's Russell Square. Six weeks later he finds himself once more aboard ship, this time bound for the Land of Opportunity. Standing on the afterdeck, watching the imperial outlines of Liverpool fade into the drizzle, he has the unaccountable feeling that it is Sasha and not England that he is leaving behind.

The years of directionless wandering have yet to run their course. In Taos, a real writer at last, Mundy rents an adobe hut with a fine view of desert sagebrush, telegraph poles and a pack of shiftless pye-dogs wandered in from Murree. Seated at his window, he drinks tequila and rhapsodizes about the long mauve dying of each day. There are many such days and many tequilas. But so there were for Malcolm Lowry and D. H. Lawrence. The natives are not merely friendly, they are sun-soaked, benign and frequently stoned. He has no sense of the ravening world colonizers he deplored in Berlin. His efforts to raise a local drama group are balked not by unbridled aggression but differences of ethereal perception.

Achieving fifty pages of a novel about civil strife in a fictional European country, he packs them off to a publisher with the suggestion that he should advise him how to complete it. The publisher is not inclined to do so. Next comes a slender volume of poems to Judith, privately printed on handmade paper and entitled _Radical Love.__ Undiscovered talents like himself are unanimous in their admiration, but the cost is twice the estimate.

Time loses its impact. Ambling down the dusty streets on his evening pilgrimage to the Spanish Inn and Motel, Mundy wears a perpetual and slightly shameful grin. News of causes that were once dear to him reaches him like the Major's incomplete readings of Kipling. The Vietnam War is a continuing tragedy. All Taos says so. Several of its young have burned their draft cards and disappeared to Canada. The Palestinians have launched a campaign of terror, he reads in an old copy of _Time,__ and Ulrike Meinhof's Red Army Fraktion is giving them a helping hand. Is Judith the face behind the mask behind the gun? Is Karen? The notion appalls him but what can he do? _Karen subscribes completely to the words of Frantz Fanon that violence exercised by the oppressed is invariably legitimate.__ Well, I don't. And nor does Sasha. But you do, presumably. And your sexual liberation is not compatible with the moral standards of Rejectionist Arabia.

If Mundy feels the occasional pang of conscience because he isn't marching and being beaten up, a couple of tequilas can suppress it anytime. In a paradise where everyone around you lives for art alone, it's only civilized to do the same. But paradise has other snags that no number of tequilas can quite overcome. Shut out your past at the front door, and it creeps in at the back. Sit on the veranda of your adobe hut with a yellow pad on your lap watching the same damned sun disappear yet again behind the same damned mountaintop--prowl round your typewriter night after night glowering at the blank paper or the blank window and cranking up your genius with tequila--and what do you _hear,__ if not Sasha with his mouth full of garlic sausage lecturing you on the genesis of human knowledge? On your way to the Spanish Inn and Motel, when the desert loneliness hits you with the sunset and you start to count old friends--who if not Sasha hobbles along beside you over the Berlin cobble as the pair of you make your way to the Shaven Cat for Sasha to put the world to rights? And when you are in the arms of one of the many female painters, writers, transcendental meditators and truth-seekers whose road to enlightenment includes a detour in your bed, whose peerless body, plus or minus its long white woollen tights, presides over your dutiful endeavors?

And then--as Hemingway might say--there is poor little Bernie Luger, the bearded, rich, undersized action painter with his Cuban model Nita, who never poses for him, because how can she?--Bernie's not painting fucking female flesh anymore, he's way beyond that shit, man! His eight-foot-tall masterpieces are black-and-crimson infernos of the Last Day, his work-in-progress is a triptych of the Napalming of Minnesota, so tall he needs a ladder. Do all small painters paint large canvases? Mundy suspects they do.

Bernie--if you believe him, and you'd better--is the greatest libertarian and freedom fighter since Thoreau, whose work he reads aloud at his all-night parties, while he peers over the brown precipice of a Spanish pulpit that he claims was given him by Che Guevara in gratitude for services he may not name. Bernie has done civil disobedience in Memphis. He's been clubbed insensible by National Guardsmen more times than he remembers--see this scar? He's led marches on Washington and stewed in jail for insurrection. The Black Panthers call him Brother and the FBI taps his phone and reads his mail--or that's if you believe him, which few do.

So how on earth can Mundy put up with him, this loudmouthed rich boy, with his oily-thick spectacles, his awful paintings, gray ponytail and ludicrous pretensions? Perhaps it's because Mundy understands the state of constant terror Bernie lives in--one puff could knock him down. Nita understands it too. Fierce-eyed, rude and fearless, she sleeps with all male Taos in the name of human liberty, but protects her baby Bernie like a lioness.

"That shit you did in Berlin," Bernie declares late one night, raising himself on one elbow to bark at Mundy across the recumbent Nita stretched between them.

The scene is Bernie's dude hacienda, an old Spanish farmhouse at the meeting of two stony rivers. A dozen guests are sprawled round them, relishing the hallucinogenic wisdom of peyote.

"What about it?" says Mundy, already regretting that a few days back, in a moment of weakness or nostalgia, he confessed his radical past.

"You were a Communist, right?"

"Only with a small _c__."

"What the fuck does 'small _c__' mean, Limey?"

"Communist philosophically maybe. But not institutionally. A plague on both your houses, basically."

"So you were the _Middle Way,__" Luger sneers, starting to heat up despite the soothing tones of Simon and Garfunkel in the background. "A fucking _safe Liberal__ with a big L and a small dick."

Mundy knows from experience that it is best to offer no opposition at these moments.

"Well, _I__ was that person once," Luger goes on, leaning right across Nita now but lowering his voice. "I did Middle Way, the path of peace and fucking concord. And I'll tell you something, man. There _is__ no Middle fucking Way. It's a cop-out. When the chips are down, there's one way only. Do we jump aboard the fucking train of history, or do we stand at the trackside scratching our British candy-asses while we watch the fucking train go by?" Mundy remembers how Sasha posed much the same question in his letters, but keeps the thought to himself. "And _Jesus,__ man, am I on that train! I'm on that train in ways you could never dream of, ways you would never _dare__ to dream of--hear me, comrade? Hear me?"

"Loud and clear, old boy. Just don't know what you're telling me exactly."

"Then count yourself fucking lucky, man, because you could _die__ from knowing." In his passion he has seized Mundy's forearm with a trembling hand. Now he relaxes his grip and pulls a beggar's smile. "Just joking, okay? I love you, Limey. You love us. I never said it, you never heard it. Not if they pull out our fucking fingernails. Swear to me, man. Swear!"

"Bernie, I've forgotten already," Mundy insists and, wandering home, reflects uneasily that there are no lengths a deceived lover will not go to in order to disguise his frailty.

One day a letter reaches him, but it is not from Sasha. The envelope is of high quality, and this is fortunate since, having begun its journey in Canada, it has twice crossed the Atlantic and, while on dry land, passed through many hands. The sender's name is printed in waxy capitals in the top left corner: Epstein, Benjamin & Longford, suite something-or-other, assume grand offices in Toronto. Mundy duly assumes them, and assumes further that he is about to be sued by an outraged husband. Leaving the envelope to mature for a week or two, therefore, he waits until the right number of tequilas has brought him to the right level of insouciance, and rips it open. The letter inside is three and a half pages long. The home address and telephone number, also in Toronto, are unfamiliar. The signature, which he has not seen before, is an executive scrawl, one name, illegible.

Dear Teddy, Well, I guess you will be surprised to hear from me after all these years, but what goes around comes around. I am not about to weary the shit out of you with an account of my travels (travails!) after we all split from Berlin--Jesus, who _were__ we in those days?--except to say that I have discovered that in life, if you take enough wrong turnings, at a certain age you end up right where you started, and I guess in a way, if I'm totally rational, which in my job I have to be, that's where I am now. From Berlin, I thought I couldn't go any further downhill but I was wrong, but maybe if I hadn't hit bottom I would never have realized just how crazy my life had become, and I would never have gone to the embassy in Beirut or called my parents and told them to get me the hell out before I killed someone, or got blown to fuckareens like Karen, making some fucking awful bomb in a Nairobi backstreet.

So what am I now? (A) I am a respected member of the Ontario Bar, a successful Toronto lawyer and (B) the mother of a cute little girl called Jasmine who is going to look _just__ like me, if you remember how _that__ was!! and (C) married to the sweetest, dearest man, a _great__ father, who adores his little girl and her mother, naturally, and is the creepiest, the most fucking boring and the most deceitful little shit in the world. And rich, which by Canadian middle-class standards we both are, except don't run away with the idea that Canadian lawyers get paid U. S. rates, which is a subject I could dwell on at considerable length! (Larry is kind of placid about LCD--Lawyers' Comparability Drive--but you know me: I'm right up there with the ringleaders!) I left (D) to the end and I guess that's why I'm writing this, Teddy. Maybe it's a long shot, but I have a hunch it may not be. You know something? Jesus, Teddy, I love you too. All that hot talk you put into your letters--well, it _really__ chimed my bells, and not just my bells, but a few other parts of me that you know pretty well! One day, I thought, I'm going to write and tell Teddy just how hot I am for him! But well, fuck, I guess I'm just the world's second lousiest correspondent with no first prize yet awarded. So let's just say I _would__ have told you if I'd gotten around to it. Okay, you were my first straight fuck, you had my cherry if that means anything these days, but, dammit, Teddy, there's _more to it than that.__ Why did I go first for Teddy when I could have gone for Peter the Greatest Stud on Earth, or Sasha our charismatic Socrates (who later admitted me to his harem, I may add, to absolutely _no__ great effect) or for any of the pretty boys hanging around the Republican? Why did I go _wet__ every time I saw you strolling through the squat with everybody screwing and jawing and doping around you, and you not even fucking _looking__ at them, you were so cool! It's because you were something special, Teddy, and you for me still are. If I bitched at you from time to time, well, I guess that's just because you opened my mind and my something else to normality, which thank Jesus is where I am at these days...

But by now Mundy is doing what he did when he was reading Sasha's letters: hurrying through the rest to see what she wants. He doesn't have to search for long: she wants Teddy instead of Larry. She's checked Larry out, and she's confirmed what she long suspected: he's cheating on her. She doesn't handle divorces herself, but a partner in the firm who does has told her strictly off the record that he reckons that, with the evidence she has, a settlement could come in at around two to two-five. And she's talking millions, not peanuts.

So Teddy, here's what I propose. Like I said, it's a long shot. We have a cabin on Lake Joseph. Winterized. It's all mine. I made Larry buy it that way. He doesn't even get to own a key. I want you to take me there, and I want it to be our second Berlin. You remember how you called it our fuckathon? Well, let's have another, and take life from there. I have an excellent maid for Jasmine.

Judith In short, further proof, thinks Mundy, if proof were ever needed, that a lawyer is always an arsehole.

The same night, in a secret ceremony, Mundy burns his remaining copies of _Radical Love.__ His bed companion of the moment is an expatriate painter named Gail, who in a former life worked for something called the British Council, which, according to Gail, does for British art what the Foreign Office does for British politics but better. Prompted by Mundy she appeals urgently to her former employer, a married man who is the cause of her exile. By return of post an application form arrives, accompanied by a two-line unsigned letter advising Mundy to complete the enclosed and never tell anyone where he got it from. In offering the British Council his services, Mundy neglects to mention that he does not, strictly speaking, possess a university degree. Propped on the railings of his slow boat back to England, he watches Liverpool's same muddy shoreline reach out to reclaim its own. Sooner or later, he thinks for the second time, I had to turn myself in.

Everybody in the British Council likes him from the start, and Mundy likes everything about the British Council and everybody in it: breezy, unfettered people, keen on art and spreading the good word, and above all, no politics.

He likes getting up in the morning in his bedsit in Hampstead and catching the bus to Trafalgar Square. He likes his monthly paycheck and pottering down the corridor for a coffee and a natter in the canteen. He even likes the suit he has to wear. And he likes Crispin, whose job in Greeting Section he'll be taking over as a way of cutting his milk teeth, just as soon as Crispin hits sixty--though actually, old boy, don't tell personnel, it's seventy, they got it wrong--as he confides to Mundy over lunch in the little Italian around the corner. In honor of the occasion, Crispin has donned the greeter's full monty: the black homburg and the red carnation in the velvet collar of his coat.

"Best job in the world, ducky. The hardest part is avoiding being promoted out of it. All one does is ride up and down to Heathrow in one's slow but steady government limo--ask for Henry the driver, he's a brick--_flash__ one's pass to the nice boy at the barrier, and make the _hugest__ fuss of one's distinguished foreign guest in the name of Her Maj's government before dumping him in his cut-rate hostelry in King's Cross. _Pray__ the plane will be delayed so that you can have a little glass of something helpful in the VIP room while you wait. _Pray__ his room won't be ready when you arrive at the hotel so you'll have to give him another in the bar. _Hurry__ back to base to fill in your expenses with _just__ the right amount of panache, and Bob's your uncle. I say, are you paying _all__ the bill? Oh, you'll go a _long__ way."

And Mundy will. In no time at all, he's the best greeter in the business.

"Well, _what__ an honor, sir"--or senor, monsieur, madame, or Herr Doktor--he cries, sometimes twice in one day, stepping forward from behind the immigration officer's desk and flinging up an arm. "No, no, for _us,__ not for _you!__ Never _dreamed__ you'd accept our invitation--minister absolutely _beside__ himself with pleasure--and may I just say what an _enormous__ fan I personally am of your [fill in as appropriate]. Here, let _me__ take that--my name's Mundy, by the way, and I'm the minister's humble emissary--no, no, just plain _Mister,__ I'm afraid. I'm in charge of your comfort while you're here and anything at all we can do to make your stay more enjoyable, here's my card. The phone rings right on my desk. And here I am at home if ever there's an emergency..." Or the same in German, or passable French. And a buttonhole like Crispin's for that extra touch.

But life in the British Council is not all greeting. Unlike Crispin, Mundy has his eye on higher things. For the right man, plum jobs abound, as the kindly lady in personnel, who seems to have taken a liking to him, makes clear at their first interview. There are British ballet and theater groups to be escorted to faraway places, not to mention painters, writers, musicians, dancers and academics of every stripe. Under her motherly encouragement, Mundy begins to form a vision of himself as a kind of cultural roving ambassador, nurturing the talents of established artists while discreetly cultivating his own. If a post is advertised that in Personnel's estimation might serve him as a springboard, he applies for it--which is how within months he advances from mere greeting to the richer pastures of twinning, with the delicate task of forging cultural links between reluctant British communities and their more eager counterparts in the land of their former enemy.

With the new job comes an office of his own and a map of Britain indicating the most stubborn pockets of anti-German resistance. In whistle-stop tours around the shires, he blandishes village elders, mayors and masters of the hunt. He acquires an opposite number in a reserved but amiable Frau Doktor of the Goethe Institute. British schools also feature large in his ambit. And thus it happens that without fanfare he meets Kate, a pretty, bespectacled North London deputy headmistress who teaches mathematics and gives up her spare evenings to licking envelopes for the St. Pancras Labor Party.

Kate is fair-haired and practical. She is tall and topples slightly as she walks, a thing that touches Mundy in ways he can't explain until he recalls the string-bean Irish nursemaid in the group photograph of the victorious Stanhope Family at Home. Her complexion is creamy and always slightly out of focus. Her hazy smile seems to stay on him after she has switched it off. A low sun beats through the nineteenth-century windows of her study at the edge of Hampstead Heath as Mundy makes his pitch. The Frau Doktor nods gravely at his side. The trick is in the _matching,__ he insists: no good marrying a lame duck with a high flyer. And _this__ marvellous school, Miss Andrews, if you don't mind my saying so, is a high flyer if ever I saw one.

"I say, we haven't kept you from _class,__ have we?" he cries in alarm, after administering twice his usual dose of charm. "Well, look here. _Anything__ you're worried about--the _smallest__ thing--call me at this number. And here's me at _home__ if"--he does a double-take--"well, _probably__ quicker just to pop up the road, turn left at the lights, it's Number Seven, and ring the top bell!"

"And here is _my__ card, Miss Andrews," the Frau Doktor murmurs, in case they have forgotten her.

A courtship gets quickly under way. On Friday evenings Mundy will collect Kate from school, arriving early for the pleasure of watching her cope with swarms of multiethnic children. At the Hampstead Everyman cinema Kate pays for her own ticket. Over Dutch dinners at the Bacchus Greek taverna they laugh over Mundy's tales of Council intrigues and Kate's raging feuds inside the St. Pancras Labor Party. Mundy admires her for being a mathematician and says he can't add for toffee. Kate respects his interest in things German, though she has to confess that, purely practically speaking, she regards languages as a poor investment, given that the whole world will soon be speaking English. Mundy confides to Kate his dream of promotion to Overseas Drama and Arts. Kate thinks he's absolutely cut out for it. At weekends they walk on Hampstead Heath. When Kate's school puts on an exhibition of artwork, Mundy is first on the doorstep. Her solid socialist values--in her family home they were the only ones to have--mesh comfortably with whatever remains of Mundy's, and before long he too is giving up a couple of hours a week to lick envelopes for Labor. His posh voice and manners are at first a butt for the wit of his new comrades, but soon he has them laughing with him rather than at him. Away from headquarters, Kate deplores the infiltration of the party she loves by Trotskyists and other militants. Mundy judges that the moment is not yet ripe for him to confess that he once played roommate and batman to a red-toothed anarchist who stole his girl.

A couple more months must pass before the pair manage to go to bed together. It is Kate who takes the initiative. Mundy feels oddly shy. She selects his flat, not hers, and a Saturday afternoon when downstairs are watching an international soccer match on television. It's a day when Hampstead is bathed in the browns and golds of autumn. Their walk on the Heath has been a journey through sloping shafts of sunlight scented with woodsmoke. Closing Mundy's front door behind her and putting the chain across, she takes off her coat, then continues to take off her clothes until she has none left. Then she buries her face in Mundy's shoulder while she helps him off with his. It is afterwards a secret joke between them that they won their first match three-love. And yes, of course she will marry him. She's been hoping he will ask. They agree that the Frau Doktor must come to the wedding.

The great decision taken, everything else, as so often in life, slots neatly into place. Kate's father, Des, provides the down payment on an unconverted Victorian house on Estelle Road. Des is a bruised-up former boxer turned builder, and a man of solid opinions, all rebellious. The house is an honest redbrick worker's cottage, nothing fancy, one of a row in a street where dads of all colors kick soccer balls at their kids between inexpensive cars. But as Des remarks when they have their first look round together, it's got all the trimmings and then some: the Heath and the lido just across the footbridge, a soccer field, swings and merry-go-rounds and even an adventure playground!

The walk to Kate's school takes her ten minutes and they've got the railway from Gospel Oak if they're feeling like a day in Kew. And if we're talking money, Ted, that house is a snip, believe me. Only last week, Number Sixteen over the way went for twenty grand more than what yours ever did, and it's got one bedroom less which is stupid, half the sun, and a living room you couldn't swing a cat in, well, could you?

Was there ever a time when Mundy's life looked so good to him? He refuses to believe there was. He loves it all, his job, her family, the house and the sense of belonging. And when Kate comes home from the doctor grinning like the baby she's just heard she's going to have, he knows that his cup of happiness is full. At the wedding, he wasn't able to whistle up a single relative to call his own. Well, just you wait till the christening!