“I’ve got ideas,” he said, “but there’s no pressure to express them. My situation is opposite to that of King Midas’s barber. Perhaps you know the story? I read it when I was a child, in a book called Tales from Olympus, which had beautiful coloured plates. Midas was foolish enough to get on the wrong side of Apollo by voting against him in a music composition. To show what he thought of him as a critic Apollo gave him ass’s ears instead of his human ones. Midas was extremely ashamed of having these great hairy ears standing up at the sides of his head. He wore a turban indoors and out and never told anyone about it. But the one person he couldn’t keep it from was his barber – you’ll stop me if you’ve heard this, won’t you? The barber was astounded when he unwound the turban and saw that the king had ass’s ears. There was a picture of it in my book, the king sitting there in the chair and the barber all goggle-eyed. He didn’t dare to tell anyone because Midas threatened him with instant death if he did. He didn’t dare tell his wife or anybody. After a while the secret began to get too big for him. He had to tell somebody, he couldn’t contain it, he was bursting with this enormity of the king’s ears. He couldn’t sleep. So one day he went out into the countryside and he told it to the reeds along a river bank. ‘Midas has ass’s ears,’ he whispered. After that he felt a whole lot better. But the reeds picked it up. Every time the wind blew through them they whispered it, Midas has ass’s ears, Midas has ass’s ears. The reeds told everybody in the end.

  “The reason this story stuck in my mind was the picture, first of all, and then that marvellous sibilance. Midas has ass’s ears. It is human speech and at the same time it is the language of the reeds when the wind shakes them. The most perfect example of assonance in the English language, if you’ll forgive the pun, and it was right there in my book. But lately I’ve come to see the story in a different light. I see it now as the perfect illustration of the literary impulse. All literature begins with the pressure of a secret, some unique perception that needs urgently to be expressed.”

  Benson was silent for some moments looking down towards the lights of the city. “I used to feel that urgency myself at one time,” he said. “People talk about writer’s block as if it were some humorous occasional impediment or recurrent hazard of the trade or just a sort of swank term for laziness or a headache or a hangover. This takes no account of the violence in the word, the choked arrest. Block. It’s a violent affliction. I have become sensitised to it. I see it in the eyes of children, I see it on the faces of people walking about this city, mothers pushing prams, mad old ladies, men in business suits with briefcases. Block is the great psychic disease of our time. It atrophies those parts that other diseases cannot reach. It isn’t a joke at all. It is nausea and dread, it is the foretaste of dissolution. When I listen to myself it’s like the silence of a battlefield after the cries have died away, before the birds start singing again. Of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the last war lately.”

  In the silence that followed he was startled to hear the distinct clicking of teeth. He saw Dolores make a sudden rearing motion of the head. The voice, when it came, was hoarse and deep. It uttered a single syllable.

  “Did you say something?” Benson was astounded. For some moments he still could not believe that the other had actually spoken. “What?” he said. “I didn’t catch it.”

  “Gold. He turned things to gold.” Dolores was still looking rigidly before him, in the direction he always looked, towards the glow in the sky above the river.

  “Do you mean Thompson?”

  “Couldn’t get his teeth into it.”

  “Midas, you mean? Yes, that was another story about him, that everything he touched turned into gold. He was a miser and he was given a wish and he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. He couldn’t eat anything because it turned to gold before he could sink his molars into it. Is that what you mean?”

  He waited anxiously as the moments passed. He heard the click of teeth again. Then a series of strange, harsh exhalations. Dolores was laughing.

  It was chilly in the room. Benson took off his pyjamas and put on the pair of red boxer shorts that he always used for his exercises. He looked at himself in the glass front of the wardrobe. Need some sunshine, you do. His skin was white. Over his chest and shins it was glazed and shiny-looking. The lines of collar-bone and rib-cage were clearly traceable. Some sunshine and a bit more weight and you’d look better. Not sleeping enough makes you thin. Unless it is some wasting disease. Not bad though, on the whole. No senile blotches, no purpurea. Musculature firm enough. Beneath this façade of imperishable man a frantic deterioration going on. Losing collagen at a furious rate, brain cells dying, tissue degenerating, marrow drying out. It’ll happen quite soon, he thought. I shall wake up to find myself an old man.

  He began to do his reaching exercises, up, down, up, down. Limbering up. Then the one for stretching the waist muscles, turning the body from side to side, arms outstretched, hand following round, left – one – two, right – one – two. His limbs were reluctant. When feeding time was over the slaves were compelled to jump in their chains. I am chained in my skeleton, Benson thought. My collar-bone a halter, my shin-bones shackles …

  As he proceeded his body warmed, his heart quickened, he began to breath more deeply, think more calmly. Eyes always on his turning, stretching, genuflecting body, he thought again about the war days, that distant life at the Beachhead. Why had he been led to Thompson? It must mean something, if he could disentangle the threads. Precisely what, though, was the difficulty. Like trying to keep my plasticene separated out in its pristine colours. Those strips of primary colour in their chaste tissue wrappings, every time I got a new set I vowed in my first delight to keep them pure and apart forever. It worked so long as you only used one colour. You could make a red elephant or a blue monkey. But then you might want to make Dopey the Dwarf, for example; and he would have to have a red nose and blue blobs for eyes and perhaps a green or yellow cap. The heat from your hands while you tried to make a good Dopey would start to get the colours clogged together. The penalty for ambition was always the same: you ended with one amorphous lump, in which could still be seen the swirls and veins of original colour, forever lost.

  That happened over and over again, he thought. It was possible as a child both to know it would happen and to promise not to let it. And now? The faith much less. Those few months of the war branded on me. Some things not possible to see or think about, even after so many years, except through the prisms of that time; and yet the colours run together.

  Veins of colour in the lump: dead, bloated sheep, song of the nightingales, the beetle races we used to have back at B-echelon. Walters’s face. Brown eyes, very clear and steady, short-lashed, so they seemed prominent, black hair, a mouth slightly pouting, giving him an expression of protest, not petulant though – humorous rather. Your happiness to be with him. Even there, when the world was the range of a grenade, the field of fire not much more than the length of this bedroom. Moist, crumbling sides of the banks held together by wet blankets to stop them falling in on us. The horizon the top of the next scrub-covered ditch. Even there.

  In April the weather got warmer. The cicadas seemed to start up all at once. They shrilled louder with the heat, as if in pain.

  He paused, breathing deeply, in – one – two – three, out - one – two – three. He had suddenly remembered the torture of spiders, witnessed in remote childhood, when boys too fearsome to challenge, armed with magnifying glasses, subjected them to slow combustion by intensified sunlight. Slowly those tortured creatures smoked into ash. In silence. But if they had been able to make any sound at all, he thought, it would have been like that, a shrilling that got louder with the heat … Birdsong too, by that time the valleys of the Moletta were showing fresh green. Thrushes, some kind of pipit. Tentative, desultory song, more like the birds of home. But the nightingale was the bird of the Wadi country. It sang in the light and the dark, through all the fighting, in a bubbling melody that had no register for violence, an incessant, demented chorus. Hateful in the end. The bubbling voice of wounds. The sense of something beautiful betrayed and made mad.

  He was on his back now, arms outstretched, grasping his weights. Forty years on, still trying to keep death at bay, still with lumps of metal in my hands. He brought his arms up slowly till the weights touched, lowered them again. Up, one – two – three, down, one – two – three. He heard his regular, small grunts of exertion, felt his body brace to take the weight. The frogs too made a great din. After the rain there was a big population of them in the marsh up the gully. When they heard someone coming they stopped croaking. They were silent the night Walters died … Another time, another time, before that, it was still very wet, I, you, Benson, you are crawling along a gully, Walters is just behind you, he always was behind, you were the one who knew the ropes, knew the ground, your only talent. Thompson had it too. You are quite close to the platoon lines, looking for a place for a latrine. You see them first, blue-grey bundles caught in the brambles in the bankside. They had been picked over – usual flabby litter of papers, photographs around them. Litter lying in litter. Drained, waxen faces, eyes and mouths open. Their teeth looked sharp. We crawled over, checked for watches, rings, but there was nothing. Everybody stole from everybody, from the dead, from the disabled. On your own side too – wounded men were lucky to get to the field hospital still wearing a wrist-watch.

  It was another day, before that, before the Show started, early in the morning, misty morning, when Thompson came crawling back with the German helmet up-ended like a begging bowl. He always had to bring something back. Deep Panzer helmet. Alone – Thompson was always on his own. Most people teamed up with someone, like Walters and me, but not Thompson. Nearest thing he had to a mate was the Signals driver. They used to play darts and drink together when we were out of the line. Scottish name. The mist was dangerous, it had rifts in it, difficult to judge the ground. And your own body always denser than you think. But Thompson knew all that, none better. He gave the helmet to Crocker.

  Crocker’s face streaked with blood. He daren’t raise his head. He has to crouch down there to wash the blood out of his hair. The Welshman is sitting in the mud on the floor of the trench, huddled up against the wet clay wall, his head and face and body are up against the wall of the trench. Evans. Nobody can make him move. Eyes wide open, looking at the trench wall. Something went wrong with him during the night. After many similar nights. Now nobody knows what to do with him. The Sergeant put his arm round Evans’s shoulders and talked to him but it didn’t make any difference. He is sitting in his own shit. In the fear we knew you could clasp yourself for comfort, you could keep the heart in your breast. But Evans has gone beyond this, his body has loosened away from him. All he can do is keep close to the wall. Crocker, gross, fat-faced Crocker, middle-aged joker, takes the helmet from him, from Thompson. Give us that a minute. Flat Midlands accent. He was a builder’s labourer in civilian life. He takes the helmet and puts it on. Self-appointed clown. From under the helmet his face looks alien. Loose jowls – trench life has taken the flesh off. Jawohl, this face says, thin lips. He crouches to make a Nazi salute. No one thinks it is funny. Rausch rausch. All the German he knows. He starts to creep up on poor, jellied Evans. Crocker winks at whoever will catch his eye. When he gets close enough he prods Evans with his rifle in the small of the back. Rausch, rausch, schweinhund. Bursting with laughter. Evans jerks like a stranded fish and his eyes are all whites. Crocker laughs and chuckles, looks around for applause. Brute. Then he gets a thoughtful look like the moment you realise the baby has peed in your lap …

  Benson released the weights, moved his hands down to his sides and began his breathing exercises, five seconds in, five seconds hold it, five seconds out, remembering with pleasure undimmed by the years that deepening thoughtfulness on Crocker’s face, and then the exact sequence of his actions. He takes the helmet off, looks closely into it, throws it down. He raises his hands to his head, sandy-coloured hair. Full of fucking dust, he says. He has dust from the helmet thick in the roots of his hair. Thick dust. Too thick for dust. He scrabbles at his hair, can’t get rid of the clogging stuff. He looks at his fingers, sniffs at his fingers. Everyone is watching Crocker now, he has his audience at last. Everyone but Evans. It is blood. He has got the roots of his hair full of dried blood.

  Breathing exercises over, he rose to his feet. He always rounded his exercises off with some running on the spot. Up-down, up-down. Three hundred times. Raising the knees higher for the last fifty, trying to keep on breathing through the nose. Crocker’s face danced before him, up-down, up-down, watered blood running over the forehead into his eyes. Water was short, we were due for relief that night, that was the same night Slater spoke to me about his idea of putting on a show. Crocker had to use a billycan of drinking water to wash the blood-dust out of his hair. He couldn’t put his head up over the trench – he had to do it crouching. The German’s blood, reliquefied, ran down Crocker’s face in a pink stream, making a cursing clown of him. Poor brute Crocker, he was killed in the break-out.

  How much of this is truly remembered? he wondered. How much embroidered, how much invented? Does it matter? Memories have to be aided by invention or they could not be formulated at all. He watched his body in the red shorts, making these motions, jogging up and down. These panting breaths, this labouring memory. Servitude.

  What happened next? Baxter started pontificating. Cavernous face, never smiled. Good light baritone, very good for an untrained voice. He was in the show for a while. Ballads. Last Rose of Summer. Martha, Lovely Rose of the Wildwood. Clean chap. Brushed his teeth every morning. Hair wet-combed. Off stage he was always laying the law down. He knew all about the intentions of the high command. He had a sidekick, forgotten his name, freckled, small, little round spectacles. I must name him, so I do – Popeye. These two, Baxter and Popeye, made up the Bren-gun unit. They always spoke in turn, Baxter leading. Something like this:

  “That is not last night’s blood. Never in this world. Hasn’t had time to dry out since last night. Stands to reason.”

  “Hasn’t had time to dry out and powder up, couldn’t of humanly fucking done it, course not.”

  “It would of still been wet. Another thing. It’s been raining, ain’t it? It’s been raining on and off since we come here. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “Sunny Italy.”

  “Well then. If that helmet had been standing wrong side up the rain would of kept the blood wet. If not, the blood would of run out before it got a chance to dry. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “You fucking cunt.” That is Crocker.

  “Right, mate.”

  “Well then. What I’m coming to is he must of fallen with his face in it, then bled in it, see what I mean? That way the rain wouldn’t of been able to get in.”

  “He must of bled for a good long time then. You need a fair bit of blood to make that much powder. You’d need a fucking pint.”

  “More than that, mate. Nearer two.”

  Baxter wasn’t in the Show for long. A limited number of appearances. In April, before it stopped raining, he got a leg blown off.

  “Aren’t you sorry for Albert?”

  “He has to work out his destiny,” Carter said.

  “Well, I must tell you that I am. Apart from anything else, he must have a monumental balls-ache by this time.” The language of literary debate between Carter and himself was degenerating, Benson was obliged to admit. After waiting some moments for the other to reply he said, “Well, let me read this to you as an illustration of what I mean. Sometimes, you know, hearing your work read aloud gives you a fresh perspective on it.”

  Carter nodded warily, as if he had recognised a gambit or seen a trap opening. He was less offended by criticism now than at the beginning, having apparently decided to view these sessions as contests which he could win if he could manage to justify what he had written; his talent for this type of polemic was growing steadily as the quality of his prose deteriorated.

  “It’s on the same page, no, next page, wait a minute, here it is.” Benson paused and looked at Carter, who this morning, in deference to the warmer weather, was wearing a sports jacket with a vivid pattern of yellow and green checks. “Albert has just removed Sheila’s blouse and skirt. He is looking down at her. She is in her bra and panties, suspender belt, stockings. She is saying, please no, Albert. But of course words like that just bounce off Albert by this time. He is about to strip the rest of her things off. Do you remember the bit I mean?”

  Carter’s eye had a fugitive gleam at the recounting of these details but Benson thought he looked a bit bemused too – small wonder, with so many closely similar scenes scattered through these latter wastes of his book.

  “Page 703.” Benson thought suddenly of the reply made by Mephistopheles to Faust’s question concerning the location of Hell: Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it. In Hell times and distances were cancelled out. He had come in a finger-breadth, in a whisper, from his labouring fictions of the night, clay smell, rot smell, Crocker’s streaked face, to this maze of words, the square-faced, obstinate fictioneer before him. As if I took a wrong turning in the Wadis, slithered down and found Carter squatting in the deeps, armed with his deadly green bag. “Albert was reaching out to remove her briefs,” he read aloud. “Suddenly he stopped in his tracks. He was brought to a standstill, dazed, dazzled and completely taken aback by the magnitude of her whole ensemble.”

  He regarded Carter for some moments in silence. Then he said, “That is very imprecise, Harold. A new note is creeping in. What you seem to be doing is somehow simultaneously blurring and inflating things, so we are not really clear what Albert is after. Are we to understand something transcendent? The Promised Land? The gate to the rose garden? The flight of the soul? Are you saying there is something more to it than just getting between Sheila’s legs? I don’t mean he doesn’t respect her and so on,” he added hastily. ‘‘I know he does.”