A yellow beam of light, from one side of the apparatus, meets a blue beam of light projected from the other; the colours coalesce to form an electric green. As the green dissolves the blue beam of light has been changed to red: the colour in the centre of the apparatus, beneath an inverted reflector, changes to a vibrant orange.

  ‘No colour’s ever constant,’ Kendal says.

  Coloured discs revolve on either side, and from a third aperture below is projected an amorphous shadowed mass that changes its shape rhythmically in the centre of the coloured beams.

  Kendal is a small man, slight; he has dark, almost melancholic features, thin and sharp, the eyes large and full of liquid, glistening: hands like tiny claws manipulate the knobs and switches.

  ‘When the thing’s complete there’ll be a dozen beams, each projected through a multicoloured disc, each disc revolving,’ he he tells me, ‘at a different speed. You can do the same thing, too, with the revolving form. The thing’s invisible, you see.’ He switches it off.

  The beams disappear.

  We’re standing in the dark.

  He feels behind him, against the wall.

  ‘You can even switch it off,’ he adds, ‘in cycles. So the form dematerializes slowly; or, conversely, you can let it come on as quickly as you like.’

  The room, suddenly, is full of light.

  The apparatus, with its switchboard, stands on a table in the centre of the room.

  Other shapes, in metal and plastic, in wood and hardboard, partly dismantled or in the process of erection, stand on the other tables, or on the floor. The walls are festooned with wires, metal strips, and with racks containing welding, soldering and metal cutting tools.

  ‘Is this the students’ work, or yours?’

  ‘Theirs. My own,’ he says, ‘is over there.’

  On a box, in the corner of the room, stands what appears to be an Easter egg; it’s made of glass, its surface pitted with tiny scratches. Inside, distorted by the glass, is an assemblage of glistening rods and plates. A cable runs from the box to a plug on the wall.

  ‘If you turn off the light I’ll switch it on.’

  He pulls the box out to the centre of the room.

  ‘Hold onto your hat,’ he says, and laughs.

  I turn off the light.

  For a moment the room is dark.

  Then, faintly, a reddish glow appears. A low humming tone emerges from the bowl: the light, as if fractured, moves in odd patterns across the walls; alternating electronic notes, long, then short, oscillating, then abrupt, accompany the movement of the light itself. The colours change; the original red disintegrates; a kaleidoscopic frieze of colours blends slowly in the air around my head; a second, contrasting rhythm of electronic notes begins. The colours darken. In the bowl itself, with a sharper intensity of light, the assemblage of metal rods and plates revolves slowly, first one way then the other.

  The other objects in the room appear to move; it’s as if, suddenly, they’ve acquired their own momentum. The oscillation of light and shadow corresponds, it seems, with the rhythm of the electronic tones.

  The sounds grow more complex; the colours disintegrate; one side of the room has turned bright blue; the centre of the room is yellow. The air around my head turns green.

  Kendal, too, like some strange component of the machine, is moving round the room himself; at odd moments he disappears in shadow; at others, only his features are alight, the sharp nose and cheekbones, the gloomy, melancholic eyes. Then, like a block of wood, he fuses with the tables, the other assemblages, the tools, the walls.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know where I am,’ I tell him.

  ‘Still here, I hope,’ he says. ‘I’ll switch it off.’

  He crosses to the plug.

  The light, abruptly, disappears.

  The sound has stopped.

  I turn on the light beside the door. The room seems smaller, more compact, lifeless; some debris of the light itself.

  ‘The idea is to get three or four of these.’ He indicates the glittering bowl. ‘The variables, at the moment, are limited. And limitation in a thing like this is definitely a sign of impotence,’ he adds.

  ‘If the movements are definable, however many variables you have, the limitations,’ I tell him, ‘will be always there.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with this kind of art.’ He shakes his head. ‘Like the impressionists with that tedious, repetitious brushstroke: the texture of the thing, in a way, can never change.’

  ‘What does Wilcox think?’

  He looks across. ‘He’s threatened to close us down.’ He begins to smile. ‘What’s an artist need with an electric wire?’

  He picks up one of the soldering tools.

  ‘“What’s this, then? For mending somebody’s fuse?”’ He runs his small, mouse-like hands across the bench. ‘When I tell him we’re in the post-art age he goes a sort of red. “What’re thee, then, Kendal? A bloody mechanic? While there’s a tube o’ paint, a canvas and a brush you’ll not say art’s dead in my bloody college.”’

  Kendal has a small moustache; he might, quite easily, I imagine, have been a dentist, a locksmith, the inventor of some improbable toy. The bench we’re standing at is littered with metal tubes, with wire, with electronic circuits, with alternators, electric motors, bulbs, plugs, reflectors, pliers; a welder’s visor, a metal grinder and a machine for moulding plastic sheets stand on an adjoining bench against the wall.

  ‘Wilcox,’ he says, ‘is a kind of fossil. Preserved by the remoteness of the air up here. Provincial life.’ He waves his hand. ‘He comes in of an evening with a dustpan and a brush. An hour, sometimes, before the cleaner’s due. If I don’t lock everything away I’m sure, next morning, I’d find it gone.’

  ‘He’s invited me to dinner.’

  ‘He never has.’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘He’s coming here?’

  ‘To pick me up.’

  He begins to pick up pieces from the benches, putting them hastily in cupboards by the wall.

  ‘I couldn’t find the house, he says, alone.’

  ‘I better get these away before he comes. He’s usually at home on Monday nights.’ He adds. ‘That’s why I’m here. They’d be in the dustbin if I left them out.’

  I go out to the hall. The door to Wilcox’s office is standing open: it’s half-past six. Two cleaners, with mops and buckets, are working round the desk. On the wall, beyond the desk, is a rack of bottles, small, frosted, like the ones for holding acids in a chemistry lab.

  ‘You’ve got here, then?’

  Wilcox is standing in the passage that leads out from the hall to the back of the college.

  ‘I’ve just parked it in the yard.’

  He looks over to the office. At the same time as he sees the cleaners he sees the light in Kendal’s sculpture room.

  ‘By God: what’s happening there?’ He strides across.

  Kendal, it seems, has reconnected one of his machines; there’s a whirring sound from inside the room and a familiar purplish glow appears within the open door itself.

  ‘That’s not Kendal running up current, then?’

  He steps inside the room.

  ‘What’s going on in here, then? A mothers’ meeting, is it, or can anybody join?’

  The two women cleaners in the office have doused their cigarettes. Mops in hand, they saunter to the hall.

  ‘Do you know how much we pay in electric bills?’

  A fainter, less challenging voice has answered from inside.

  ‘There’s not just this, you know.’

  The purplish light goes out.

  ‘There’s the heaters in the life room. There’s the lighting for every evening class. There’s the electricity for the kiln. There’s money pouring out of here like water.’

  Some object, it seems, has fallen over.

  The Principal’s figure reappears. He rubs his arm. There’s a slight cut above his brow.

  He limps across. The light in Kendal’s room goes on; the cleaners, relighting their cigarettes, turn back towards the Principal’s office.

  ‘Just pouring out,’ he says. ‘The electric here.’

  He gestures to the yard.

  ‘If you wait by the car, I shan’t be long.’ He goes to the stairs. ‘They’re not expecting me tonight, you know.’

  His voice, a moment later, echoes from the rooms above.

  ‘And what’s going on in here? A mothers’ meeting, is it, or can anybody join?’

  ‘I thought once,’ Kendal says, emerging from his room, ‘of electrifying the handle to the door. I could always have found an excuse, afterwards. Not to mention being able to justify the expense,’ he adds.

  He looks to the stairs.

  ‘As it is, the sod’s too devious by half.’

  He locks the door.

  ‘That, at least, I’ve changed. Once locked there’s nobody else but me can go inside.’ He calls to the cleaners. ‘You can give me a miss tonight, my dears.’

  ‘Won’t Mr Wilcox notice, then?’ Their cigarettes alight they sidle to the door.

  ‘He’s taking Mr Freestone to dinner, then.’

  ‘Ooh,’ they say. They look across.

  ‘I’m not saying who’s paying, though,’ he says.

  He goes to the glass doors that open to the street. He waves goodnight.

  ‘I’ll go while the going’s good.’

  He disappears.

  ‘Is he taking you out, or going to his home?’ the cleaners say.

  ‘His home.’

  ‘Tell us what it’s like.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Nobody’s ever been inside.’

  I go out to the yard. The Armstrong Siddeley is parked at the foot of the steps. Hendrick’s sports car has already gone. The lights are out in the modelling shed.

  I try the boot, find it locked; try the doors: they’re locked as well.

  I light a cigarette: he appears in the doorway after a little while, silhouetted briefly against the light inside.

  ‘Not smoking are you?’

  ‘I’ve stubbed it out.’

  ‘I don’t like smoke, you know, inside the car.’

  He produces from his pocket a bunch of keys.

  ‘By God, the money that’s wasted in a place like this.’

  He gets inside; the lights come on.

  ‘Jump in,’ he says. ‘It won’t take long.’

  The car smells like his office; a stale smell of senna pods and weakened tea.

  ‘They don’t make them any more.’ He taps the car. ‘Not like the ones, you know, they have today.’

  The engine starts. The car moves off.

  We turn into the street.

  I lose track of the route after a little while: the road dips down towards the valley, then turns off, it seems, towards the west.

  Buildings loom up on either side; after a while it appears we’re driving through a tunnel. Trees enclose the road; an occasional light flies past.

  ‘Look at that, then,’ Wilcox says.

  He taps his finger at the petrol gauge.

  ‘There’s a garage on the road up here.’

  His voice is quieter now, his face lit up by the reflected glow from the lights outside.

  An illuminated garage sign appears some time later in the road ahead; the car turns in towards the pumps; the window’s lowered. Wilcox, with a strangled ejaculation, puts out his head. He calls to the attendant: the petrol, after a moment, flows into the tank behind.

  I can hear it gurgling inside the car.

  ‘That’s a nuisance.’

  Wilcox, stooping forward, is tapping at his chest.

  ‘I’ve come without my purse.’

  ‘You better tell him before he puts it in.’

  ‘It’s already in. God damn and blast.’

  He taps his pockets once again.

  ‘It’s not in that. Nor that. I could have sworn …’ He brings out a handkerchief, a pair of gloves: having looked at them briefly, shaking the latter out, he puts them back. He brings out a wallet. ‘Not in that.’

  The attendant, his face perspiring, appears at Wilcox’s side.

  ‘That’s two pounds, twenty pence,’ he says. ‘If you count the oil as well.’

  He passes inside a can of oil.

  ‘I got that to put in when I got back home.’ Wilcox holds the can out for my inspection. ‘It’s not worth looking at the dipstick here.’ He lowers his voice. ‘These attendants, you know, can never tell. Say you need a thing when it’s really full. I look in the garage, you know, when I’m by myself.’ His voice is harsh, almost inaudible, confiding. ‘You haven’t got a couple of pounds or so yourself?’

  I reach inside my pocket.

  Something tells me to shake my head.

  I bring the money out.

  ‘That’s very good of you,’ he says. He adds, ‘If you’ve got a tip, you know, it goes down well.’

  I pass another coin across.

  ‘I usually call in here,’ he says. ‘They give you good service, if you treat them well.’

  The attendant’s face has disappeared; the car moves off.

  ‘Cold tonight.’ He winds the window.

  The darkness of the road returns; I’m reminded, briefly, of Kendal’s oscillating glow: a pair of white, wooden gates, however, materialize after a while where the headlights of the car converge.

  ‘Be a chap. There’s a catch at the top. Just push them back.’

  I get out, step round the front of the car, find the catch: the gates slide into gravel the other side.

  ‘You need to push.’

  His head sticks out from the side of the car.

  ‘A bit harder,’ he says. ‘But mind the wood.’

  I can feel it splinter beneath my hand; I wonder whether to uproot it from its hinge: one side of the gate is stuck.

  ‘The knack’s to lift it,’ Wilcox says.

  I hoist it up: it slides across the gravel; the car comes past.

  ‘If you could just close them now, old man.’ His head leans out. ‘There’re not many people come past at night. But it’s best, you see, to have them shut.’

  I lift them back.

  ‘And set the catch.’

  I set the catch.

  As I climb back in he says, ‘It’s a longish drive. The house, you see’s, in a kind of wood.’

  The trunks of trees, like sentinels, glide slowly past.

  A house appears, low down, made up of white plaster-work and wood. A light, fainter than the beams of the car, glows inside a lattice window. The roof, it appears, is made of thatch.

  ‘Not many people know we’re here.’

  The engine stops.

  ‘The house, I mean. But for the gates, you’d never tell.’

  He gets out from the car.

  ‘We don’t often have a fire, in any case. A cold shower on a morning’s a damn good thing. A walk in the woods. There’s nothing wrong,’ he says, ‘with God’s good gifts.’ He swings his hand. ‘All the tools of existence you’ll find round here.’

  The inside of the house is colder than the air outside. Even Wilcox, after opening the door, has clapped his hands.

  ‘We’re here, my dear,’ he shouts, and adds, ‘Thatch keeps you warmer in the winter, cool in summer, and lasts, in my view, a damn sight longer than any stone.’

  Beams loom blackly above our heads: whitewashed walls, stained by soot, enclose the hall on either side. From the door at the end of the hall appears a light. It’s held by a woman with whitish hair.

  ‘Here’s young Freestone,’ Wilcox says. ‘Not too late for the food, I hope?’

  ‘No,’ the woman says. ‘Just right.’

  No sooner has she appeared, however, than the woman turns and, with the light, vanishes into the room beyond.

  ‘Straight ahead: no dithering,’ Wilcox says as if, by the warmth of this encounter, I might, quite easily, be overwhelmed. ‘The food awaits us, lad. Anon. Anon.’

  Three places have been set at a bare, rectangular table, one at its centre, halfway along one side, and the two others, some considerable distance away from it, at either end.

  ‘Food. Food. That’s what a man craves for in the evening,’ Wilcox says.

  The woman, as if her mission has been completed, has disappeared. There’s a faint tapping then a kind of groan from a room at the back of the house.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Wilcox says. He’s already found his own place at one end of the table.

  He tucks a napkin in the collar of his shirt.

  ‘I should sit in the middle, old man. Half-way between the two. I think that’s best.’

  He hums to himself a moment. There’s a further faint tapping from the back of the house.

  ‘Don’t want to wash your hands?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He gestures round. ‘You won’t find a modern house like this. Dedication. Art. Nowadays it’s nothing but bricks and regulations; trade unions,’ he adds, ‘and how much they can get. In the old days they built a place for living in, not for seeing how much they could squeeze you for. Just look at this.’

  He knocks his fist, sharply, against the table. It too, like the beams, is black with age. Apart from a spoon set in each place, a salt cellar and two glasses, one in front of Wilcox’s place and one in front of mine, the table itself is completely bare. The light immediately above it comes from a yellowish shade. I can barely, in the shadows, make out the shape of Wilcox’s face.

  ‘Fancy water?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘The wife doesn’t drink. Liquids. At night. They’re not much good.’

  The door has opened. A tray appears. Standing on it are a metal jug, three plates, and a metal scoop. The woman’s head, white-haired, manifests itself beyond.

  ‘Here we are. Worth waiting for is that.’

  A faint cloud of steam, almost incandescent despite its faintness, rises from the jug.

  ‘Stew.’

  ‘Soup.’

  The two words collide, it seems, above my head. I can imagine the looks which, in the shadows, converge from either end of the blackened table.

  ‘The grocers were closed,’ the woman says.

  ‘Closed?’

  ‘By the time I got there.’

  ‘No idea of service. Not nowadays,’ Wilcox says. ‘Open a couple of hours they think they’ve done enough.’