“Yes.”

  “Well, there you have the negative symbolism of the beetle. Industry and the brittle shell – the façade adopted for work – have completely taken over. Take someone like yourself, a writer. Suppose for the sake of argument you are drying up. As your creative impulse gets more and more crusted over, you spend less time actually writing and more and more time researching, making notes, keeping records of one sort or another. Now the culmination of that process—”

  “Excuse me,” Benson said. “All this is fascinating stuff but I’ve got a client due to arrive in a couple of minutes.”

  “I hope you’re telling them all about my show?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “They can have a free ticket,” Rathbone said. “Money is not the object. I want a good audience. You won’t forget the date?”

  “No.”

  He was not likely to forget the date: Rathbone was making his debut as a stage hypnotist on May 22, the day of the break-out from Anzio.

  He duly told Hogan, the client referred to, about Rathbone’s show, not of course mentioning the coincidence of the date. Rather to his surprise Hogan said he would like a ticket. Benson entered his name on the list and told him the address. Rathbone was having his show in an obscure church-hall off Lodge Lane – he had not succeeded in getting a proper theatre.

  “It should be interesting,” Benson said.

  Hogan made no reply to this and a silence developed which Benson for some time lacked energy to break. He felt exhausted this morning, after a night of uneasy memories and broken dreams; and Hogan’s face, which misery had made stiff and immobile, seemed, in a rather nightmarish way, like a projection of his own psychic disorder. The other’s props and attributes too gave him this morning the same disturbing sense of emanating from himself, from some dark, unacknowledged recess of his own being: the navy suit, the neat maroon tie, the shiny briefcase with gilt clasps, the expanding scent of sweetness from the plastered hair, were like secret vices of his own.

  “Well,” he said at last, with a sense of enormous effort, “how is your novel coming along?”

  “I’ve been getting on with the research,” Hogan said.

  With a continued sense of unwilling involvement, Benson watched the other open his briefcase, saw him extract the roll of paper, saw him unfurl it, hold it out, saw words and asterisks and arrows in red and green and blue. There was more of it now – the unfurled part was eighteen inches long at least. Hogan sat holding it up to view.

  “But you are going farther and farther back into the past.” With feelings of dismay Benson peered at the strip of paper. “Last time you had stopped at your parents’ wedding,” he said. “I thought that was pushing it a bit for an autobiographical novel. Now I see references to Zeppelins and your grandfather’s emigration from Donegal.” There were ominous arrows pointing even further back. “Death of Queen Victoria,” he read. “Potato Famine.” Hogan had slipped into the nineteenth century.

  Benson took a deep breath. “Michael,” he said, “this can’t go on. What will happen, how will you keep it all in your scheme? You can’t go on adding things to the roll. It will be impossibly long.” He paused a moment, casting around for arguments. “What happens when it gets too long for your arms?” he said.

  He looked across the desk. Hogan’s blue eyes were dilated, enormous. He was disappearing, swooning into the past; he was in the grip of an infinite regression. Benson felt he should throw him a lifeline, try to tow him back. But it wasn’t that altogether, it wasn’t a surrender. Hogan’s face registered so little, that was the trouble. Faces vary in their power to register sorrows and below the pallor and rigidity of depression Hogan’s seemed to lack all notation.

  “You must come back to yourself,” Benson said gently. “This was to have been a novel based on your own life, perhaps not completely, but in general outline based on your early life, experiences of childhood and so on and in particular the love affair of the adolescent boy with an older woman, Mrs Rand, then his return to childhood sweetheart, Mirabel, whom he marries. That was about it, wasn’t it?”

  Hogan nodded.

  “Then why all this about Zeppelins and the Potato Famine?” But, even as he asked this, Benson knew the answer. Life had broken the idyll for Hogan. The promise of the plot had not been fulfilled. Experience of passion with Mrs Rand, return to virginal sweetheart Mirabel, happy ever after. But he had lost his job and failed to find another and Mirabel had walked out on him, taking the children. Now with his arrows and his coloured inks he was trying to find a place in the past for the blame to lodge. Am I not doing the same? Benson thought. He had been lying awake half the night trying to do the same. What was there to be found now, at this stage, in that murderous labyrinth of the Wadis, but some clue to the crusted silence of the present? Empty bellies in Ireland, Thompson crawling with the German helmet up-ended like a begging bowl … Brothers, he thought, looking at Hogan’s rigid face.

  “If only you could find a beginning,” he said. “A few words are enough to begin a story. ‘Her eyes were shining’, for example, or ‘A gin and tonic, please’. Even one word is enough – ‘Dawn’, say, or ‘Mosquitoes’. An expletive will often do the trick, ‘Fuck it!’ for example. Then you are launched.”

  He enlarged on this, time passed. Hogan had stood up to go, was extracting from his briefcase the volume he had brought to give Benson, when the door bell rang. It was Anthea Best-Cummings, in such haste to read her latest poem that she barely paused to acknowledge Hogan’s presence.

  “It’s called ‘Flying to Byzantium’,” she said, tossing back her hair. “With apologies to William Butler.” The accent was extraordinary, the invincible, throat-articulated modulations of the upper class conflicting violently with Anthea’s efforts to sound like a prole.

  “Go ahead.” Benson noticed with some surprise that Hogan had seated himself once again and folded his arms with every appearance of interest.

  “It’s quite short.” As always, Anthea passed from haste to hesitation when it came to the actual moment of reading. She had come on her motorbike, he saw – she was dressed in her studded black leathers. These gave her a squat appearance, belied by her face, which was thin and undernourished-looking, with spots here and there. She wore her usual tense, sulky expression. Not for the first time Benson wondered what Anthea’s parents must make of it all. She had fled them and the green belt of Surrey where they lived, fled ponies and promising young men and a job in an art gallery run by one of daddy’s friends, fled the lush lands of the South for this decaying city. What did they make of her in the wilds of Birkenhead, where she had chosen to live? Life is more real here, she had once said to him. Standing there, frowning over her piece of paper, she seemed to him now a living battleground of nature and nurture. Training, precept, exhortation had clashed with Anthea’s yearning for urban slums and heavy rock and black leather and poetry and pot. But there had been no victory; the unhappy, defensive face proclaimed that.

  “It needs reworking here and there.” She glanced at Hogan, who gave her a sudden smile of encouragement.

  “Well, we are listening,” Benson said.

  “Here goes then:

  “Borne on the wings of a dick-trip

  Through icon haze and star burst,

  Uterine splendours of purple and gold,

  Sperm shower,

  To that city of coiners and theologians

  Where my cunt

  Conquers the cross.”

  Anthea looked up. A flush had crept into her face. “It needs one or two things doing to it,” she said.

  “Hm.” Benson was silent a moment. Then he said cautiously, “That’s an effective ending, with the repeated hard ‘c’ and those strong monosyllables. But haven’t you made a mistake in the first line? You seem to have transposed the syllables. Shouldn’t it be triptych?”

  “Good God!” Anthea cried, running a hand through her long and rather greasy hair. “You’ve missed the whole point. It’s meant to be written like that.”

  Suddenly, most unexpectedly, Hogan leaned forward and began to speak. “As I see it,” he said, “this is a play on words. The poem is about a trip, right? A trip is a journey but it is also an experience. Now the experience in this poem is to do with female orgasm. So it is a dick-trip, right? But a triptych has wings and they could carry you off into a different sort of experience. As I see it, this is a very complicated pun.”

  Benson felt his mouth inclined to fall open. In all his dealings with Hogan, he had never heard him say more than half a dozen words together. Now his face had lost some of that terrible stiffness. His eyes had a light in them.

  “That’s it exactly,” Anthea said excitedly. Again she ran a hand through her hair. In suddenly lowered tones she said, “You have understood my poem completely.”

  “It’s a very good poem,” Hogan said. “As I see it, it is also a feminist poem.”

  Anthea looked at him like the first woman looking at the first man. It was a look that pierced through Hogan’s despicably bourgeois appearance and went straight to the core. “Are you a writer too?” she said.

  “I am working on a novel,” Hogan said.

  “What is it about?”

  “Well, it is partly autobiographical. It’s about childhood and adolescence in Liverpool. When the hero is eighteen he meets this older woman at a dance. She is from the South and she – you are from the South too, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Anthea was ashamed of it. “Surrey,” she said.

  “Surrey,” Hogan said lingeringly. “Anyway, they, you know, have an affair.”

  “You two carry on,” Benson said. “I’m going to make some tea. Oh, Michael,” he added, turning at the door, “You might remember to tell Anthea about Rathbone’s show.”

  From any distance away this great deathtrap vanished, the torn and devastated earth seemed to heal its own gashes, all the gullies and channels of the labyrinth closed together, smoothed themselves over. From the road that went north to Carroceto it looked like a dead level plain. Nothing was visible of their lines or ours, the water-courses, the crumbling dykes, the corpses cluttering the streams, rotting in the soft earth of the banksides and the brambled ditches. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that in the fighting of that winter whole regiments had been swallowed up here. If you had fought in them, seen people die in them, looking across those innocuous-seeming levels brought a terrible sense of unreality and despair, as if some last vital shred of meaning had been taken away. Enough to make one distrust for ever all appearances of peace. Perhaps it was that, echoing childhood fears of the still surface, scum on a deep pond, motionless leaves or grasses, which gives me now as I enter old age such a taste for signs and emblems – meanings that lurk below the placid surface. Once through that calm screen you are in the jungle. Archetypal Jungle, must tell Rathbone that one … I wasn’t much more than a child, at least from present perspectives – twenty years old, I was twenty that April. Those few months my only experience of battle. It was like being a child again. Childhood games of stalking and hiding, make-believe of terror, not much different from the real thing.

  He lay on his back staring up through the darkness, wide-eyed and sleepless, the silence of these memories constricting his heart. There was the smell that lay over everything; no healing perspectives could cloak that. Not death only: a compound odour, wet clay, excrement, decay. Smell always plays the traitor. Like a pall over the place. The docks of Liverpool stank of the slave traffic, the shambles-odour mixed with smells of tar and rum. It came from the holds and decks of the ships. The stench of it would have been wafted on a sea breeze to the nostrils of the wigged merchants and their rouged wives on the steps of their fine houses. On warm days through open windows into their stuffed parlours. Easier to avert the eye than block the nose. Much easier for me at least with my famous sense of smell. Hearing too first-rate still and my eyes, until recently … Some, of course, who neither see nor smell anything untoward, they could wade through shit and come out smelling of lavender. The inimitable Doctor Dobson, for instance. Writing in 1772 he found Liverpool the most salubrious of places. Slave-trade at its height, worst urban slums in Europe …

  Perhaps not so surprising. The ships went forth with goods not offensive to the smell – Lancashire cottons, trinkets, small arms. And when they got back months later to Salt House or Queen’s Dock they were stuffed with the aromas of the New World, sugar, coffee, tobacco. The cargoes they carried in between, on the Middle Passage, the long haul from Africa to the plantations of Jamaica and Carolina, these printed stronger odours. No scrubbing or hosing could get rid of it. Ship after ship, year after year. How many? Seventy years of it. Perhaps two million men, women and children carried in those Liverpool ships. The smell of misery ingrained in the timbers … Steam of blood and soaked khaki, between two rows the medic walks down, looking right and left, not pausing long. Walters a bundle of bloody rags left alone there in the gully, his face dark with blood and the boot polish we had put on for the patrol. He lies still, legs drawn up, as if he is ashamed to have lost half his insides, ashamed to be dying …

  Benson lay tense, taking shallow breaths, tracing repeatedly in the darkness familiar, darker shapes, the lines of the wardrobe, owl’s launching pad; the folds and drapes of the curtain; the marble horse on the table below the window – this he knew well as he had often held it in his hands, and so was not sure now, in the obscurity of his room, whether he was seeing or merely remembering the lines of its body, jags of its mane. We charge things with reality by giving our attention to them. One of the great seductions of literary creation, godlike to confer reality. What I miss, what I lack. Truth is the glory of reality, Simone Weil said. I don’t understand that, he whispered in the darkness. That is the religious view. My father might have understood it. He was after all a man of God. But reality for my father was something not to be transcended but corrected. He corrected my realities with the rod. Squawk of the killed soldier, Walters dying for my mistake, the man clambering over the white railings in that freakish weather, miseries of the slave-trade, a baby crying in the night in the condemned estate where Thompson lives, the peculations of financiers, prominent in my scrapbooks, insatiable greed of men who live in mansions, who have millions, these are realities to me. What could unify and transcend them, spread over them this glorious paste of truth?

  The horse was real, he had touched it. Sheila’s body was real too, though he hadn’t. As real as Alma Corrigan’s, more real in a sense as he had not so far permitted himself to think in that way about Alma, not charged her body with reality, so to speak, though her face came often to his mind, the slightly bitter mouth, the brilliant eyes, contempt in them for what she saw as his self-indulgence. He felt the stirring of excitement. I invoke thee, O Muse.

  The Wadis were real for ever, though long since drained and bulldozed into vineyards. I all but left my bones there, I, you, Benson’s bones, the bones of Voluptuous Velma, the Beachhead Vamp. Slater asked me to be the woman. You have such small bones, Benson, the reason I ask. Little Benson, he called me.

  They liked it, one great roar when we came on stage, our act was twenty years out of date even then, but they liked it, that duet we did and the dance, I sang falsetto, hurt the throat. Parody of Edwardian flirtation and then the bit of stripping at the end, down to my bra and pants. The CO stopped that. I can see myself in the red silk dress or the black blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, black stockings, garters. I shaved my legs. High-heeled shoes. Blaspheming companionably there with Walters, waiting to go on, listening to Killer Thompson’s dirges. When this bleeding war is over, no more soldiering for me. He always struck a mournful note. Hymns now. I wore make-up, wig, all padded out. They ransacked the wrecked houses of Anzio and Nettuno to get costumes for us.

  Anzio, Nettuno, Carroceto, Campo Leone … He drifted back into sleep on this litany of names and woke groaning and fearful in the first light of morning with shreds of names and nicknames fluttering still in his mind. Stonk Corner, Gordon’s Ridge, Smelly Farm. Beyond the ridge of Buonriposo lay the Wadis of the Upper Moletta Stream …

  Buonriposo, good repose. The irony of some of those names. Isola Bella, Campo di Carne. He lay on his back while the light strengthened slowly and the fear that had come with waking grew less. That geography of the war varied strangely in intensity. Features that had gone unregarded would assume terrible importance. A ruined farm house, a few yards of embankment. An hour later, after the deaths, they might as well have been on the moon. Significant only because they were fought over. We gave them our attention, charged them with reality. Perhaps it was this that made me want to write, a wish to make the places constant, rebut this indecent fluctuation. No, childhood formed my intentions without my knowing it, seeing my composition on the wall with a gold star from the teacher, my parents and others stopping to look, my father with something to be proud of at last. That is when I started to want to make the names constant and splendid.

  Not many gold stars lately. My sixty-three-year-old body under the sheets in this room not my own. The same that danced and strutted in its red dress and the silver lamé shoes with ankle straps, smooth, shaved legs in sheer stockings. Every little movement tells a tale. That was the best one we did, our best number. Thompson came back from a killing trip one morning with the stain of orgasm showing through his trousers …

  He raised his head, looked carefully at the shape of his wardrobe, followed with his eyes the complex folds of the curtains. Ritual inspection was a habit he had formed in terror-ridden childhood and never lost; he had used it all his life like a sort of meditation, to ward off evil; he had used it in the Wadis, striving to print on his mind the configuration of the ground in the most intimate detail possible. Familiarise yourself with the terrain. Slater meant the stage as well. We were frightened there too, he thought. There on the stage. Frightened of displeasing Lieutenant Slater, who had put on the show. Frightened of getting the steps and movements wrong somehow, spoiling things, disappointing the audience. What an audience that was. Acting, moving about on the stage, every movement buoyed on sound. They knew the song by heart. The words flickered through his mind again in their precise, imperishable order.