When the li-low was inflated she lay face down upon it and untied the painted scarf that was her sole garment. It fell away from a back so thin that it presented, Troy thought, an anatomical subject of considerable interest. The margins of the scapulae shone like plough-shares and the spinal vertebrae looked like those of a flayed snake.

“I’ve given up oil,” the submerged voice explained, “since I became a Child of the Sun. Is there any particular bit that seems undertone, do you consider?”

Troy, looking down upon a uniformly dun-coloured expanse, could make no suggestions and said so.

“I’ll give it ten minutes for luck and then toss over the bod,” said the voice. “I must say I feel ghastly.”

“You had a late night, Dr. Baradi tells us,” said Troy, who was making a desperate effort to pull herself together.

“Did we?” The voice became more indistinct, and added something like: “I forgot.”

“Charades and everything, he said.”

“Did he? Oh. Was I in them?”

“He didn’t say particularly,” Troy answered.

“I passed,” the voice muttered, “utterly and definitely out.” Troy had just thought how unattractive such statements always were when she noticed with astonishment that the shoulderblades were quivering as if their owner was convulsed. “ I suppose you might call it charades,” the lady was heard to say.

Troy was conscious of a rising sense of uneasiness.

“How do you mean?” she asked.

Her companion rolled over. She had taken off her sunglasses. Her eyes were green with pale irises and small pupils.

They were singularly blank in expression. Clad only in her scarlet sans-culotte and head scarf, she was an uncomfortable spectacle.

“The whole thing is,” she said rapidly, “I wasn’t at the party. I began one of my headaches after luncheon, which was a party in itself and I passed, as I mentioned a moment ago, out. That must have been at about four o’clock, I should think, which is why I am up so early, you know.” She yawned suddenly and with gross exaggeration as if her jaws would crack.

“Oh, God,” she said, “here I go again!”

Troy’s jaws quivered in imitation. “I hope your headache is better,” she said.

“Sweet of you. In point of fact it’s hideous.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll have to find Baradi if it goes on. And it will, of course. How long will he be over your fellow-traveller’s appendix? Have you seen Ra?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve only seen Dr. Baradi.”

“Yes, yes,” she said restlessly, and added, “You wouldn’t know, of course. I mean Oberon, our Teacher, you know. That’s our name for him — Ra. Are you interested in The Truth?”

Troy was too addled with unseasonable sleep and a surfeit of anxiety to hear the capital letters. “I really don’t know,” she stammered. “In the truth—?”

“Poor sweet, I’m muddling you.” She sat up. Troy had a painter’s attitude towards the nude but the aspect of this lady, so wildly and so unpleasantly displayed, was distressing and doubly so because Troy couldn’t escape the impression that the lady herself was far from unself-conscious. Indeed she kept making tentative clutches at her scarf and looking at Troy as if she felt she ought to apologize for herself. In her embarrassment Troy turned away and looked vaguely at the tower wall which rose above the roof-garden not far from where she sat. It was pierced at ascending intervals by narrow slits. Troy’s eyes, glazed with fatigue, stared in aimless fixation at the third slit from the floor level. She listened to a strange exposition on The Truth as understood and venerated by the guests of Mr. Oberon.

“… just a tiny group of Seekers… Children of the Sun in the Outer… Evil exists only in the minds of the earth-bound… goodness is oneness… the great Dark co-exists with the great Light…” The phrases disjointed and eked out by ineloquent and uncoordinated gestures, tripped each other up by the heels. Clichés and aphorisms were tumbled together from the most unlikely sources. One must live dangerously, it appeared, in order to attain merit. Only by encompassing the gamut of earthly experience would one return to the oneness of universal good. One ascended through countless ages by something which the disciple, corkscrewing an unsteady finger in illustrations, called the mystic navel spiral. It all sounded the most dreadful nonsense to poor Troy but she listened politely and, because her companion so clearly expected them, tried to ask one or two intelligent questions. This was a mistake. The lady, squinting earnestly up at her, said abruptly: “You’re fey, of course. But you know that, don’t you?”

“Indeed, I don’t.”

“Yes, yes,” she persisted, nodding like a mandarin. “Unawakened perhaps, but it’s there, oh! so richly. Fey as fey can be.”

She yawned again with the same unnatural exaggeration and twisted round to look at the door into the tower.

“ He won’t be long appearing,” she whispered. “It isn’t as if he ever touched anything and he’s always up for the rites of Ushas. What’s the time?”

“Just after ten,” said Troy, astonished that it was no later. Ricky, she thought, would sleep for at least another hour, perhaps for two hours. She tried to remember if she had ever heard how long an appendectomy took to perform. She tried to console herself with the thought that there must be a limit to this vigil, that she would not have to listen forever to Grizel Locke’s esoteric small-talk, that somewhere down at the Hôtel Royal in Roqueville there was a tiled bathroom and a cool bed, that perhaps Miss Locke would go in search of whatever it was she seemed to await with such impatience, and finally that she herself might, if left alone, sleep away the remainder of this muddled and distressing interlude.

It was at this juncture that something moved behind the slit in the tower wall. Something that tweaked at her attention. She had an impression of hair or fur and thought at first that it was an animal, perhaps a cat. It moved again and was gone, but not before she recognized a human head. She came to the disagreeable conclusion that someone had stood at the slit and listened to their conversation. At that moment she heard steps inside the tower. The door moved.

“Someone’s coming!” she cried out in warning. Her companion gave an ejaculation of relief, but made no attempt to resume her garment. “Miss Locke! Do look out!”

“What? Oh! Oh, all right. Only, do call me Sati.” She picked up the square of printed silk. Perhaps, Troy thought, there was something in her own face that awakened in Miss Locke a dormant regard for the conventions. Miss Locke blushed and began clumsily to knot the scarf behind her.

But Troy’s gaze was upon the man who had come through the tower door onto the roof-garden and was walking towards them. The confusion of spirit that had irked her throughout the morning clarified into one recognizable emotion.

She was frightened.

ii

Troy would have been unable to say at that moment why she was afraid of Mr. Oberon. There was nothing in his appearance, one would have thought, to inspire fear. Rather, he had, at first sight, a look of mildness.

Beards, in general, are not rare nowadays though beards like his are perhaps unusual. It was blonde, sparse and silky and divided at the chin which was almost bare. The moustache was a mere shadow at the corners of his mouth, which was fresh in colour. The nose was straight and delicate and the light eyes abnormally large. His hair was parted in the middle and so long that it overhung the collar of his gown. This, and a sort of fragility in the general structure of his head, gave him an air of effeminacy. What was startling and to Troy quite shocking, was the resemblance to Roman Catholic devotional prints such as the “Sacred Heart.” She was to learn that this resemblance was deliberately cultivated. He wore a white dressing gown to which his extraordinary appearance gave the air of a ceremonial robe.