“But not Raw,” said Maria. “Nowadays we call it liberated.”

“Exactly, Mrs. Cornish. I see you have an almost masculine mind. So let us proceed. My client is John Parlabane’s son—”

“Proof,” said Mr. Carver. “We’ll want proof.”

“Excuse me, my friend,” said Mr. Gwilt. “I don’t understand your position in this matter. I have assumed that you are in some way an amicus curiae–a friend of the court—but if you are going to advise and interfere I want to know why, and who you are.”

“Name’s George Carver. I was with the RCMP until I retired. I do a little private investigation work now, so as not to be bored.”

“I see. And have you been investigating this matter?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I might, if it came to anything.”

“But you don’t regard this meeting as anything?”

“Not so far. You haven’t proved anything.”

“But you think you know something relevant.”

“I know that Wally Crottel got his job as a security man in this building by saying, among other things, that he had seen some service with the RCMP. He hasn’t. Failed entry. Education insufficient.”

“That may have been indiscreet but it has nothing to do with the matter in hand. Now listen: I said at the beginning that my client and I are relying on the ius naturale—on natural justice, what’s right and proper, what decent people everywhere know to be right. I say it is his right to benefit from anything that accrues from the publication of his father’s novel, Be Not Another, because he is John Parlabane’s rightful heir. And I say that Professor Clement Hollier and Mrs. Arthur Cornish have suppressed that book for personal reasons, and all we ask is some recognition of my client’s right, or we shall be forced to resort to law, and insist on recompense, after publication of the book.”

“How would you do that?” said Darcourt. “Nobody can be forced to publish a book.”

“That’s as may appear,” said Mr. Gwilt.

“Well, it will appear that nobody wants to publish it,” said Maria. “When all the scandal blew up, a great many publishers asked to see the book, and they turned it down.”

“Aha. Too Raw for them, eh?” said Mr. Gwilt.

“No. Too dull for them,” said Maria.

“The book was chiefly an exposition of John Parlabane’s philosophy,” said Darcourt. “And as such it was derivative and tediously repetitious. He had interspersed his long philosophical passages with some autobiographical stuff that he thought was fiction, but I assure you it wasn’t. Stiff as a board.”

“Autobiographical?” said Mr. Gwilt. “And he may have included portraits of living persons that would have caused a fine stink. Political people? Big people in the world of business? And that was why the publishers wouldn’t touch it?”

“Publishers, too, have a fine sense of the O.K. and the Raw, and of that lively area where the two kiss and commingle,” said Maria. “As my dear François Rabelais puts it: Quaestio subtilissima, utrum chimaera in vacuo bombinans possit commedere secundas intentiones. I make no apologies for the Latin, as you are such a dab hand with that language.”

“Aha,” said Mr. Gwilt, imparting a wealth of legal subtlety into the exclamation, though his eyes flickered with incomprehension. “And precisely how do you apply that fine legal maxim to the matter in hand?”

“Translated very roughly,” said Maria, “it might be taken to suggest that you are standing on a banana skin.”

“Though we would not dream of disparaging your admirable argumentum ad excrementum taurorum,” said Hollier.

“What’s he say?” said Wally to his legal adviser.

“Say’s it’s all bullshit. Well, we don’t have to take that kind of thing from people just because they have money and position. Our legal system guarantees a fair deal for everybody. And my client has not had a fair deal. If the book had been published, he would have a right to a share, if not all, of the payment proceeding from that publication. You have not proceeded to publication and we want to know why. That’s what we’re doing here. So I think I’d better be more direct than I’ve been up to now. Where’s this manuscript?”

“I don’t know that you have a right to ask that,” said Hollier.

“A court would have that right. You say publishers refused it?”

“To be scrupulously exact,” said Maria, “one publisher said he might take it if he could put a ghost on it and make whatever could be made of the story, leaving out all Parlabane’s philosophy and moralizing. He said it would have to be made sensational—a real murderer’s confession. But that would have been utterly false to what Parlabane wanted, and we refused.”

“I put it to you that the novel was Raw, and brought in recognizable portraits of living people, and you are protecting them.”

“No, no; so far as I remember the novel—what I read of it—it wasn’t Raw. Not for modern tastes,” said Hollier. “There were references to homosexual encounters, but Parlabane was so allusive and indirect—as compared to his description of how he murdered poor old Urky McVarish—that it came out as rather mild stuff. Not so much Raw as half-baked. He was not an experienced writer of fiction. The publisher Mrs. Cornish has spoken of wanted to make it really Raw, and we would not degrade our old associate Parlabane in that way. What’s Raw and what isn’t is really a matter of taste; the taste may be pungent, but it shouldn’t be nasty. We didn’t at all trust the taste of that publisher.”

“Do you tell me you haven’t read the novel?” said Mr. Gwilt, with stagy incredulity.

“It was unreadable. Even a professor, who is professionally obliged to read a great deal of tedious stuff, couldn’t get through it. Outraged nature overcame me at about page four hundred, and the last two hundred and fifty pages remain unread, so far as I am concerned.”

“That’s how it was,” said Maria. “I couldn’t read it either.”

“Nor I,” said Darcourt. “And I assure you I tried my very best.”

“Aha!” said Mr. Gwilt. It was a verbal pounce. “You admit ignorance of this book, considered by its author to be one of the greatest works of fiction in the realm of the philosophical novel to be produced in history, and yet you have had the mind-boggling gall to suppress it—”

“Nobody would take it,” said Darcourt.

“Please! I’m speaking! And I’m speaking now, not as a man of the law, but as a human soul peering into an abyss of snotty intellectual infamy! Now see here—if you don’t produce that manuscript for our examination and the opinion of the experts we shall put to work on it, you face legal action which will make you smart, let me tell you!”

“No alternative of any kind?” said Maria. She and the two professors seemed calm under the threat of exposure and ignominy.

“My client and I don’t want a stink, any more than you do. I know it may seem strange for me, as a lawyer, to advise against going to court. I suggest that a composition might be made.”

“A pay-off, you mean?” said Hollier.

“Not a legal term. I say a composition in the sum of, let’s say, a million dollars.”

Hollier and Darcourt, both of whom had experience of publishing books, laughed aloud.

“You natter me,” said Hollier. “Do you know what professors are paid?”

“You are not alone in this,” said Mr. Gwilt, smiling. “I don’t suppose Mrs. Cornish would have much trouble over a million.”

“Oh, not a bit,” said Maria. “I fling such sums to the needy, at church doors.”

“Let us keep this serious,” said Mr. Gwilt. “A million’s the word.”

“On what grounds?”

“I have already spoken of the ius naturale,” said Mr. Gwilt. “Common justice and decency. Let me recap: my client is the son of John Parlabane, and at the time of his death the late Mr. Parlabane did not know of the existence of that son. That’s the nub of it. If Mr. Parlabane had known, at the time he made that will, would he have overlooked the claim of his own child?”