“And Abelard and Heloise lived again for approximately ninety seconds. Or have you persisted?”

“No, certainly not. I’ve never spoken to her about it since.”

“Once. I see.”

“You can imagine how I felt at McVarish’s party when he was plaguing her about being a virgin.”

“But she handled that brilliantly, I thought. Was she a virgin?”

“Good God, how would I know?”

“There are sometimes indications. You’re a medievalist. You must know what they looked for.”

“You don’t suppose I looked, do you! Do you take me for a Peeping Tom?”

“I’m beginning to take you for a fool, Clem. Have you never had any experience of this sort of thing before?”

“Well, of course. One can hardly avoid it. The commercial thing, you know, twice when travelling. Years ago. And on a conference, once, a female colleague, for a couple of days. She talked incessantly. But this was a sort of daemonic seizure—I wasn’t myself.”

“Oh, yes you were; these daemonic seizures are the unadmitted elements in a lopsided life. So you’ve promised Maria the Rabelais manuscript to make it up to her? Is that it?”

“I must make reparation.”

“I don’t want to talk too much like a priest, Clem, but you really can’t do it like that. You think you’ve wronged a girl, and a handsome gift—in terms you both value greatly—will make everything right. But it won’t. The reparation must be on the same footing as the wrong.”

“You mean I ought to marry her?”

“I don’t imagine for a minute she’d have you.”

“I’m not so sure. She looks at me sometimes, in a certain way. I’m not a vain man, but you can’t mistake certain looks.”

“I suppose she’s fallen for you. Girls do fall for professors; I’ve been telling you about it. But don’t marry her; even if she is enough of a sap to say Yes; it would never work. You’d both be sick to death of it in two years. No, you stop fretting about Maria; she knows how to manage her life, and she’ll get over you. It’s yourself you need to put back on the rails. If there is any reparation, it must be made there.”

“But how? Oh, I suppose you mean a penance?”

“Good medieval thinking.”

“But what? I suppose I could give the College chapel a piece of silver.”

“Bad medieval thinking. A penance must cost you something that hurts.”

“Then what?”

“You really want it?”

“I do.”

“I’ll give you some tried and true penitential advice. Whom do you hate most in the world? If you had to name an enemy, who would it be?”

“McVarish!”

“I thought so. Then for your penitence go to McVarish and tell him what you have just told me.”

“You’re out of your mind!”

“No.”

“It would kill me!”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“He’d blat it all over.”

“Very likely.”

“I’d have to leave the University!”

“Hardly that. But you could wear a big red ‘A’ on the back of your raincoat for a year or so.”

“You’re not being serious!”

“Neither are you. Look here, Clem: you come to me and expect me to play the priest and coax me into prescribing a penance for you, and then you refuse it because it would hurt. You’re a real Protestant; your prayer is ‘O God, forgive me, but for God’s sake keep this under Your hat.’ You need a softer priest. Why don’t you try Parlabane; you’re keeping him, so he’s safely in your pocket. Go and confess to him.”

Hollier rose. “Good night,” he said. “I see I made a great mistake in coming here.”

“Don’t be a goat, Clem. Sit down and have another drink.”

He did—another great belt of Scotch. “Do you know Parlabane?” he said.

“Not as well as you do. But when we were undergraduates I saw quite a bit of him. An attractive fellow, very funny. Then I lost track of him, but I thought we were still friends. I’ve been wondering when he would come to see me. I didn’t want to invite him; under the circumstances it might embarrass him.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“When we knew one another at Spook he made great fun of me for wanting to go into the Church. He was the Great Sceptic, you remember, and he couldn’t understand me believing in Christianity in the face of all reason, or what he would call reason. So I nearly fell out of my chair when I had a letter from him a few months ago, telling me that he was a monk in the Society of the Sacred Mission. Such turnabouts are common enough, especially with people in middle age, but I would never have expected it of Parlabane.”

“And he wanted to leave the Brotherhood.”

“Yes, that’s what he told me. Needed help, which I provided.”

“You mean you sent him money?”

“Yes. Five hundred dollars. I thought I’d better send it. If it did him any good it was charity towards him; if it didn’t it was a charity to the Sacred Mission. He wanted to get out.”

“That cost me five hundred, too.”

“I wonder if he sent out a circular letter. Anyhow I don’t want to seem to gloat over him, or to be asking about repayment.”

“Simon, that fellow is no damned good.”

“What’s he been up to?”

“Leeching and bumming and sornering. And wearing that monk’s outfit. And getting Maria into bad ways.”

“Is he pestering Maria? I thought he was a homo?”

“Nothing so simple. A homo is just unusual; I’ve known some who are unusually good people. Parlabane is a wicked man. That’s an old-fashioned term, but it fits.”

“But what’s he been doing to Maria?”

“They were thrown out of a students’ restaurant a few nights ago for shouting filthy songs, and they were seen fighting in the street afterwards. I’ve found him a job—a fill-in in Extension. I’ve told him he must find another place to live, but he just yields as if I were punching a half-filled balloon, and continues to hang around my rooms and make claims on Maria.”

“What kind of claims?”

“Insinuating claims. I think he knows about us. About Maria and me.”

“Do you think she told him?”

“Unthinkable. But he smells things. And I find now that he’s seeing McVarish.”

I sighed. “It’s true as it’s horrible: one never regrets anything so profoundly as a kind action. We should have left him in the Society; they know a few things about penances that might have sorted him out.”

“What I can’t understand or forgive is the way he seems to be turning on me.”

“That’s his nature, Clem; he can’t bear to be under an obligation. He was always proud as Lucifer. When I think back to our student days, I’d say he was as Luciferian as a not very tall fellow with a messed-up face could be; we tend to think of Lucifer as tall, dark, and handsome—fallen angel, you know. But if Parlabane was ever an angel it’s a kind unknown to me; just a very good student of philosophy with a special talent for the sceptical hypotyposis.”

“Mmmm. . .?”

“The brainy over-view or the chilling put-down or whatever you like. If you said something you thought was fine, and that meant a lot to you, he would immediately put it in a context that showed you up as a credulous boob, or a limited fellow who hadn’t read enough or thought enough. But he did it with such a grand sweep and such a light touch that you felt you had been illuminated.”

“Until you got sick of it.”

“Yes, until you gained enough self-confidence to know you couldn’t be completely wrong all of the time and that exposing things as cheats and shams or follies couldn’t do much for you. Scepticism ran wild in Parlabane.”

“Odd about scepticism, you know, Simon. I’ve known a few sceptical philosophers and with the exception of Parlabane they have all been quite ordinary people in the normal dealings of life. They pay their debts, have mortgages, educate their kids, google over their grandchildren, try to scrape together a competence precisely like the rest of the middle class. They come to terms with life. How do they square it with what they profess?”

“Horse sense, Clem, horse sense. It’s the saving of us all who live by the mind. We make a deal between what we can comprehend intellectually and what we are in the world as we encounter it. Only the geniuses and people with a kink try to escape, and even the geniuses often live by a thoroughly bourgeois morality. Why? Because it simplifies all the unessential things. One can’t always be improvising and seeing every triviality afresh. But Parlabane is a man with a kink.”