"Well, thank you both very much," I say. "It shall be my bedtime reading this very night."
But once back in my study I stuff the document deep in the file-and-forget compartment of my bookshelf, to take its place among other unreadable pamphlets Larry has pressed on me over the years.
I was picture gazing.
I was standing before the poster I had removed from Emma's love nest and impaled on a bent nail in my celibate retreat.
Who the hell are you, Bashir Haji?
You are OCL, Our Chief Leader.
You are Bashir Haji because that is how you have signed your name:
"Larry, you crazy bastard," I said aloud. "You
I was running. I was dodging through rain and darkness to the house. The urgency in me was something I could not control. I was bent double, knees striking at my chin, leaping down the slope and across the footbridge in the darkness, sliding, falling, barking knees and elbows, while blackened cloud stacks raced across the sky like fleeing armies and the driven rain dashed at me in gusts. Gaining the kitchen entrance, I glanced quickly round before letting myself in, but I could make out little against the density of the trees. With squelching feet I hastened across the Great Hall, down the flagstone corridor to my study, and found what I was looking for in the shelves behind my desk: the shiny, white-bound, desk-printed booklet like a university thesis, called "A People's Calvary." A quick glance inside, my first: three Russian writers were credited. Their names were Mutaliev, Fargiev, and Pliev. Translated by no less a hand than Larry's. Stuffing it under my pullover, I squelched back to the kitchen and let myself once more into the night. The storm had dropped. Pails of steam rose resentfully from the brook. Did I see the shadow of a man against the hillside—one tall man running left to right, fleeing as if observed? Regaining the priesthole, I made an anxious tour of my arrow slits before putting on the light, but I saw nothing I dared call a living man. Back at my trestle table, I opened the white booklet and spread it flat. These dons, so ponderous, so circuitous, no sense of time. In a minute they'll be talking about the meaning of meaning. I turned the pages impatiently. All right, another insoluble human tragedy; the world is full of them. The margins defaced by Larry's childish annotations, I suspected for my benefit: "Cf. the Palestinians"; "Moscow lying in its teeth as usual"; "The lunatic Zhironovskfy says all Russian Muslims should be disfranchised."
Belatedly I identified the typeface. Emma's electric portable. She must have typed it for him while they were in London. Then when they came back, they thoughtfully presented me with my complimentary copy. Jolly nice of them.
Once again I cannot tell you how much I knew, or to what extent my disbelieving spirit still demanded proof of what it knew but refused point-blank to acknowledge. But I know that as I uncovered one clue after the other, my guilt, so recently shuffled off, returned, and I began to see myself as the creator of their folly; as its provoker and negative instigator; as the essential bigot who by his intolerance brings about the circumstance he most deplores.
We are arguing, Cranmer versus the Rest of England. The argument began last night, but I managed to put it to bed. At breakfast, however, the smouldering ash again bursts into flames, and this time no sweet words of mine can put them out. This time it is Cranmer's temper that snaps, not Larry's.
He has been goading me about my indifference to the world's agonies. He has gone as far as is courteous, and then a little further, towards suggesting that I epitomise the shortcomings of the morally torpid West. Emma, though she has said little, is on his side. She sits demurely with her hands in front of her, palms uppermost, as if to demonstrate there is nothing in them. Now, with clenched precision, I have responded to Larry's attack. They have cast me as an archetype of middle-class complacency. Very well, then, that is what I shall be for them. In which perversity, I have spoken a mouthful:
I have said that I never considered myself responsible for the world's ills, not for causing them, not for curing them. The world was in my view a jungle overrun with savages, just as it had always been. Most of its problems were insoluble.
I have said I regard any quiet corner of it, such as Honeybrook, to be a haven wrested from the jaws of hell. I therefore found it discourteous in a guest when he brought to it such a catalogue of miseries.
