‘Every little movement has a meaning of its own,

  Every little movement tells a tale.

  At the back, round here, there’s a kind of

  wibble-wobble

  And she glides like this … ’

  With every inflection there was a movement to make, a place on the stage for me to be. Walters too, aping the Edwardian Johnnie, doing the sort of comic, randy, strutting dance that Slater had taught him, rather stiff, leaning forward slightly, sticking out his bum, leering, winking, raising his straw boater. A parody of course, because I wasn’t a woman, everybody knew that, though I was indistinguishable from one. In a sense it didn’t matter. Objective gender description was hardly the point. On stage, made-up, padded-out, wiggling and gliding, schooled by Slater, I was a woman. I was a symbolical woman for the thousands of men there, a woman in the eyes that watched me and the throats and mouths that applauded. And punctuating the dance that great breath of applause, the rising ooh when the skirt lifted, derisive, savage, and the baying roar for Walters, whose movements, as Salter had designed them, made every man in the audience an accomplice.

  This same body, he thought with wonder. The same that danced. The same that crawled through the maze of watercourses. Lying now so quiet and apprehensive, prey to recollection. He tensed his body, curled and flexed his fingers. The things these hands have done …

  “Would you be interested in a free ticket to a stage show that is being put on by a friend of mine, a hypnotist?”

  “Yes, yes,” Jennifer Colomb said. “Give me one, no two. Perhaps father might like to come.” She was fidgety, impatient as always to hear his verdict on her latest pages.

  “Well now,” he said, looking down at the neat page. Jennifer always typed her work immaculately.

  Lady Margaret sat her chestnut yearling like the true horsewoman she was, her posture erect and supple. ‘‘So now,” she said, “I trust your conscience is at rest.”

  Despite the teasing intention of her words, they came a thought hastily, a thought breathlessly. She had mused much upon this man in her maidenly reveries, aware of his power and domination, the steely will that lay behind his gentle manner. In his words there was sometimes the insinuation of some special relationship between them. Did she want that? Could she handle fire without getting burned? There was something dark in him, a hint of brutality in the curl of his lip, something restless, permanently unsatisfied, which in her woman’s way she could surmise but never understand. How different from the gentle Sir Denis, to whom she was affianced, who was away now on a tour of the family estates in Dulwich. Denis, with his guileless blue eyes, his love of country pursuits, coursing and rackets and partridge pie. Denis, whom she knew so well. As different, she thought, seeking to find the words that would do justice to her thought, yes, as different as the hawk from the dove.

  She fell into a dream as they rode ever deeper into the wildwood, their horses treading softly on the leafy carpet. The trees closed around them. Gradually, without her noticing it, they had left the lords and ladies of their retinue far behind. She was startled, almost, to hear Sir Reginald’s deep voice at her side. “The trees grow close here,” he said. “Shall we play a trick on them? It would be good sport to conceal ourselves somewhere about these thickets and give them the slip. What think you?”

  Veteran of many a desperate throw, he was gambling on her youthful spirit of adventure. Madcap Maggie, she had been called in her nursery days – not so far behind, as she was barely eighteen summers. All the same, she hesitated. Despite the jesting tone there had been that in his voice that might inspire caution in a maid. Something was here that needed to be brought out in the open. “La, Sir,” she said. ‘‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s coming on.” There was not much, by this time, that could really be said about Treacherous Dreams. It went on its way, followed a certain obscure logic of its own. Strictures would merely wound the author. Sooner or later whatever it was that needed to be brought out in the open would perhaps flash forth, but there seemed no reason to suppose it would be very soon.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “But do you think I’m getting the feel of the period?”

  “What period is it?” Benson said unguardedly.

  “What period? Do you mean to say that you have been reading my novel all this time and you still don’t know what period it is?”

  “Well, of course,” Benson said hastily, “there is a flavour of the Regency in it. Sir Reginald is a Byronic character, isn’t he?”

  She had flushed, he saw, and seemed close to tears. “It is eighteenth-century,” she said. “I have tried so hard to get the true accent of the time.” She paused, clutched her handbag, tried to smile. “Of course,” she said, “I know how busy you are.”

  How is it, I wonder, he thought, that all of them, without exception, manage to say something in the course of these sessions that goes straight to my heart? In a lifetime of self abnegation this novel was her only autonomy. “No,” he said, “not busy, just terribly stupid. It’s not really much excuse but I am a bit preoccupied these days. You go on with your book, Jennifer. Try to get the feelings right. Period detail can always be tidied up afterwards.”

  Later, sleepless, pages strewn around him, he tried to come to his own terms with the accents of the period:

  Some wet and blowing weather having occasioned the port holes to be shut and the grating to be covered, fluxes and fevers among the negroes ensued. While they were in this situation, my profession requiring it, I frequently went down among them, till at length their apartments became so extremely hot as to be only sufferable for a very short time. But the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of their flux that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting. Numbers of the slaves had fainted, they were carried upon deck, where several of them died, and the rest were, with difficulty, restored.

  The Grand Pillage is executed by the King’s soldiers, from three hundred to six thousand at a time, who attack and set fire to a Village and seize the Inhabitants as they can. In the Lesser Pillage, parties lie in wait about the Village and take off all they can surprise which is also done by Individuals who do not belong to the King but are private Robbers.

  Sestro, december the 29th 1724. No trade to day tho’ many Traders came on board, they informed us that the People are gone to War within Land and will bring prisoners enough in two or three Days in Hopes of which we stay.

  The 30th. No Trade yet; but our Traders came on board to Day and informed us the People had burned four Towns of their Enemies and indeed we have seen great smoke all morning a good Way up the Country so that tomorrow we expect Slaves.

  On leaving the Gulf of Guinea, that part of the ocean must be traversed, so fatal to navigators, where long calms detain the ships under a sky charged with electric clouds, pouring down by turns torrents of rain and of fire. This sea of thunder, being a focus of mortal diseases, is avoided as much as possible, both in approaching the coasts of Africa and those of America.

  The slave ship Louisa on her fourth voyage, having sold 326 negroes at Jamaica for the sum of £19,315, 13s, 6d, the profit (after adding interest on account sales, £1051, 19s, 7d, and deducting £1234, 2s, 8d for disbursments & commissions etc.) amounted to £19,133, 10s, 5d, which was apportioned among the owners as follows: —Thomas Leyland £9566, 15s, 2½d; R. Bullin £4783, 7s, 7¼d; Thomas Molyneux £4783, 7s, 7¼d.

  No gold finders can endure so much noisome slavery as they do who carry negroes; for those have some respite and satisfaction, but we endure twice the misery; and yet by their mortality our voyages are ruined, and we pine and fret ourselves to death, to think we should undergo so much misery, and take so much pains to so little purpose.

  I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves,

  And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;

  What I hear of their hardships, their tortures and groans

  Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

  I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

  For how could we do without sugar and rum?

  Speculum oris; This instrument is known among surgeons, having been invented to assist them in wrenching open the mouth as in the case of a locked jaw; but it is used in this trade. On asking the seller of the instruments on what occasion it was used there, he replied that the slaves were frequently so sulky as to shut their mouth against all sustenance, and this with a determination to die; and that it was necessary their mouths should be forced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased them might incur no loss.

  The degrees of the soil, the purity of the waters, the mildness of the air, the antiseptic effluvia of pitch and tar, the acid exhalations from the sea, the pregnant brisk gales of wind and the daily visitations of the tides render Liverpool one of the healthiest places in the kingdom.

  “I mean it,” he said. “I think it is coming along quite splendidly.” It was a relief to be able for once to be totally sincere. Elroy Palmer was his most promising client. He was also the only black person that had come to him in the whole history of his consultancy business. For an unemployed young black to come here at all meant breaking through quite a number of barriers; it argued determination and a strong sense of literary vocation. Benson had hopes of Elroy. He sat opposite now, across the desk, in a fringed black leather jacket, dreadlocks surmounted by the long red rasta hat, gold hoop dangling from his left ear. His expression was watchful and at the same time curiously heedless. He said nothing in reply to Benson’s comment, merely nodded slowly in full agreement. There was a certainty about Elroy which was impressive. Benson looked down again at the passage he had just been reading:

  Zircon bring down the spacecraft with its black and silver official markings, careful like setting down an egg, dead centre of the landing stage marked out on the Ministry roof. The last thing he wants is his mission getting screwed up in the traffic regulations on Gareg, this the most viciously bureaucratic of planets, traffic offenders classed with violent psychopaths on Gareg, Park Pretty the eleventh commandment. Zircon knows he has been watched coming in. Typical, that area marked out by the white lines. No reason why you shouldn’t land outside it, plenty of space. But that is Gareg all over. This whole planet gone mad through too much regulation. He sent to put this right.

  He taxies carefully over and park his craft in the space for visitors, park exactly equidistant between the lines. He switch off his engine, opens his nearside door and gets out. Then he lean back in again for the black briefcase with the big gold crest which have in it his official letters of credit. Afterwards he shut and lock the door and walks at the regulation pace, you got to walk one speed on this planet, towards the entrance to the Ministry complex, this huge, each office is exactly the same, same size, same shape, square of course, it occupies the whole of this twenty-storey building in the heart of downtown Zandor.

  “There is still this business of the third person singular,” Benson said. “It would be better to leave the ‘s’ off altogether than to have it sometimes and not others. Since the book is written in the present tense, this is an issue of some importance. But I wouldn’t worry until you have got the whole thing together. A little careful editing—”

  “I don’ worry,” Elroy said. “He’s going in there, look around, decide what he got to do.”

  He always spoke of his hero Zircon as if he were an independent being and it was this certainty about the responses of the character to the exigencies of the situation, that most heartened Benson with a belief in the ultimate success of Elroy’s story.

  “I think,” he said after a moment, “that there is too much dwelling on the series of actions Zircon performs on arriving on the Ministry roof. I mean, switching off the engine, opening doors, getting out, shutting the door, locking it, getting his briefcase. Anyone does that who parks a spacecraft, don’t they? In general, things like that are only worth dwelling on if they are important in some way.”

  “Jarrold watching every move he makes,” Elroy said. “So it is important to say everything he does.”

  Benson thought for a moment. He was reading the book in bits and pieces with intervals between; in that way one lost something of the continuity. “Maybe you are right,” he said.

  Jarrold was the demented hermaphrodite ruler of Gareg, who had imposed his mad passion for order, symmetry and rectilinear form on the unfortunate planet, reducing it to a sort of gigantic geometrical theorem. Curves of any sort were forbidden; there were no arches, no tapering lines; hats were square and even shoes were fashioned in right angles. There was a vast bureaucracy endlessly engaged in monitoring infringements, which were punished with ferocity by Jarrold’s eunuch guards. An army of slave labourers was currently employed under conditions of great hardship and brutality in straightening the roads. However, there was a revolutionary group in Zandor, whose secret signal was the sign of the circle. Jarrold was now threatening to secede from the Galactic League and cut off access to the valuable mineral deposits on Gareg. Zircon, a sort of super interplanetary diplomat and hit-man, had been sent to negotiate with Jarrold and make contact with the rebels.

  “It’s looking good anyway,” Benson said. “Tell me one thing. Is Zircon going to kill Jarrold?”

  Elroy considered a moment, looking at his long bony fingers and their array of copper rings. He looked up at last and fixed Benson with a sombre stare. “He might have to,” he said.

  “So I may have unleashed upon the world a concussed, demonic owl that will become a man-eater in due course. I may have disturbed the whole ecological balance. Who knows? We never see the whole shape of things.”

  The floodlit cathedral rose above them into the night sky. On this razed plateau, with the huddle of mean streets beyond, it was like an outpost of some extinct race of titans. Below, where the slope levelled out a little, they could see the lights of the Chinese restaurants and food stores on Lower Duke Street. Beyond that, a sense of space and luminous distance, the constant glow of the city, one of its greatest beauties to Benson.

  Dolores uttered a groaning sigh.

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” Benson said. “It’s like this cathedral. Liverpool was dying when it was built. Or even earlier, when they were expanding, building the new docks to accommodate the slave clippers, the writing was on the wall. Look at the Mersey Tunnel, longest underwater tunnel in the world when it was built. Look at me, for instance. Because of a basic complaisance of demeanour, no one suspects anything is wrong with me. I am slowly dying and no one suspects it. Yes, I’m talking about death, ceasing upon the midnight. I can’t talk to people who know me. If there’s a relationship I feel inhibited. I can’t talk to my Fictioneers, they come to discuss their work. I have to talk to somebody. I saw an old mate of mine the other night, singing in the street. Hymns. Thompson by name. Comrade in arms. He was a killer. Still is, I suppose. The leopard doesn’t change his spots, does he? Did you say something? Less scope for it now, of course. We were at Anzio together.”

  Dolores made a sudden movement with his left arm and Benson saw that he was starting the process of lighting a cigarette. Across the road, through the wire mesh fence that closed off the building side, he thought he saw a figure moving slowly against the faint glow of the sky. “People still camping out there,” he said. “No fires tonight. You are too young to have been in the war, aren’t you? Been in your own war by the look of it. This man I am talking about was always on his own. That way he didn’t have to share. If you could get to the body before anyone else, you could get a wallet, a watch – amulets, chains, things people wear for luck. Wedding rings. An officer particularly – he might have something like a gold-plated cigarette-case, hip flask, anything. It was surprising, you know, what people took with them. Thompson amassed quite a collection, he was noted for it. It wasn’t only the Germans, he combed through shelled-out villas for things that had been overlooked. I saw him once with a gold and onyx cigarette lighter. He had a set of ivory monkeys, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. He had a beautiful rosewood cigarette box. He could have set up a shop with what he got.”

  Benson paused. Dolores was silent beside him. It was true that Thompson had been more interested in keeping things than selling them. His was a pure love of loot; they were trophies. And of course they were a pretext for the killing. He wanted to tell Dolores about the dark patch of ecstasy on Thompson’s trousers, but it was a violation of people to tell them things like that.

  “He has a birthmark on his left cheek,” he said. “That’s how I knew him. I once heard him telling somebody how you can suck a ring off a finger.”

  He fell silent again, thinking of this. A driver in a Signals Regiment, the man was – Thompson’s only friend. Scottish name. McIvor, McInlay? The only one he talked to. He drove the officers around, picked up things. Thompson’s friendship wouldn’t be an unmixed blessing … Perhaps this is what I ought to be writing about, he thought suddenly, instead of ransacking the past for horrors, crushing my mind with the slave-trade. Horrors enough here.