of another sort, and, like a real academic, she was wary of people outside the academic world—”laymen” they called them—who seemed to know a lot. Knowledge was for professionals of knowledge.

Sometimes Maria wondered if this administrative work was what she had married Arthur to do, but she dismissed the question as foolish. This was what came immediately to hand, and she would do it as what marriage seemed require of her. Marriage is a game for adult players, and the rules in every marriage are different.

As the wife of a very rich man, she could have become “a society woman”—but what does that mean in a country like Canada? Social life in the old sense of calls, teas, dinners, weekends, or fancy-dress parties was utterly gone. The woman who has no gainful job devotes herself to good causes. There are plenty of dogsbody jobs associated with art and music which wealthy volunteers are graciously permitted to do by the professionals. There is the great Ladder of Compassion, on which the community arranges a variety of diseases in order of the social prestige they carry. The society woman slaves on behalf of the lame, the halt, and the blind, the cancerous, the paraplegic, those variously handicapped, and, of course, the great new enthusiasm, AIDS. There are also the sociologically pitiable: the battered wives, battered children, and the raped girls, who seem to be more numerous than ever before, or else their plight is more often revealed. The “society woman” shows herself concerned with society’s problems, and patiently fights her way up the Ladder of Compassion through a net of committees, convenorships, vice-presidencies, presidencies, past presidencies, and government investigatory bodies. For some there waits, after years of work, a decoration in the Order of Canada. Now and again she and her husband eat an absurdly expensive dinner in the company of their peers, but not for pleasure; no, no, it is to raise money for some worthy cause, or for “research”, which has the prestige that belonged, a century ago, to “foreign missions”. The possession of wealth brings responsibilities; woe to the wealthy who seek to avoid them. It is all immensely worthy, but it is not much fun.

Maria had an honourable escape from this charitable treadmill. She was a scholar, engaged in research of her own, and thus she justified her seat in the social lifeboat. But with Arthur seriously ill she knew precisely what she had to do: she had to sustain Arthur in every way she could.

She visited Arthur as often and as long as the hospital would permit, chatting to a silent husband. He was very miserable, for the swelling was not only of his jaws; the doctors called it orchitis, and every day Maria lifted his sheets when the nurse was elsewhere, and grieved over the miserable swelling of his testicles, which gave him wretched pain in all the abdominal area. She had never seen him ill before, and his suffering made him dear to her in a new way. When she was not with him she thought about him too much to be able to do any other work.

The world is no respecter of such feelings, and one day she had a visit that troubled her greatly. As she sat in her handsome study—it was the first workroom she had ever had that was entirely her own, and she had made it perhaps a little too fine—her Portuguese housekeeper came to tell her that a man was anxious to speak with her.

“What about?”

“He won’t say. He says you know him.”

“Who is he, Nina?”

“The night porter. The one who sits in the lobby from five till midnight.”

“If it’s anything to do with the building, he should talk to Mr. Calder at the Cornish Trust offices.”

“He says it’s private.”

“Damn. Well, show him in.”

Maria did not know him when he appeared. Out of his porters uniform he might have been anybody. He was a small, not very engaging person, with a shrinking air, and Maria disliked him on sight.

“Good of you to see me, Mrs. Cornish.”

“I don’t think I know your name.”

“Wally. I’m Wally the night man.”

“Wally what?”

“Crottel. Wally Crottel. The name won’t mean anything to you.”

“What did you want to see me about?”

“Well, I’ll come right to it. You see, it’s about m’dad’s book.”

“Has your father made an application to the Foundation about his book?”

“No. M’dad’s dead. You knew him. You know the book. M’dad was John Parlabane.”

John Parlabane, who had committed suicide more than a year ago, and had thereby hastened the courtship and marriage of Arthur Cornish. But when Maria looked at Crottel she could see nothing whatever of the stocky frame, the big head, the compelling look of malicious intelligence that had distinguished the late John Parlabane. Maria had known Parlabane far too well for her own comfort. Parlabane the runaway Anglican monk, the police spy, the drug-pusher, and parasite to the most disagreeable man she had ever known. Parlabane, who had intruded himself into her relations with her academic adviser and, as she had once hoped, lover, Clement Hollier. When Parlabane committed suicide, after having murdered his nasty master, Maria had thought she was rid of him forever, forgetting Hollier’s repeated warning that nothing is finished until all is finished. Parlabane’s book! This called for deep cunning, and Maria was not sure she had cunning of the right kind.

“I never heard that John Parlabane had any children.”

“It’s not widely known. Because of my ma, you see. For my ma’s sake it was kept dark.”

“Your mother was a Mrs. Crottel?”

“No, she was a Mrs. Whistlecraft. Wife of Ogden Whistlecraft, the great poet. You’ll know the name. He’s been dead for quite a while. I must say he was nice to me, considering he was not my real dad. But he didn’t want me to have his name, you see. He didn’t want any Whistlecrafts hanging around that weren’t the genuine article. Not of the true seed, he used to say. So I was raised under my ma’s maiden name, which was Crottel. I was supposed to be their nephew. An orphan

nephew.”

“And you think your father was Parlabane.”

“Oh, I know that. My ma leaked it out. Before she passed away she told me Parlabane was the only man she’d ever had a first-class organism with. I hope you’ll excuse me mentioning it but that’s what she said. She became very liberated, you see, and talked a lot about the organism. Whistlecraft didn’t seem to have the knack of the organism. Too much the poet, I guess.”

“Yes, I see. But what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“The book. M’dad’s book. The big important book he wrote that he left in your care when he passed away.”

“John Parlabane left a mass of material to me and Professor Hollier. He left it with a letter when he killed himself.”

“Yeah, but when he passed away he probably didn’t know he had a natural heir. Me, you see.”

“I’d better tell you at once, Mr. Crottel, that the typescript John Parlabane left was a very long, somewhat incoherent philosophical work which he had tried to give special interest by including some disguised biographical material. But he had no skill with fiction. Several people who would know about such things read it, or as much of it as they could, and said it was unpublishable.”

“Because it was too raw, wasn’t that it?”

“I don’t think so. It was just incoherent and dull.”

“Aw, now, lookit, Mrs. Cornish, m’dad was a very intelligent man. You’re not going to tell me anything he wrote was dull.”

“That’s exactly what I am telling you.”

“I heard there was some stuff in it about people high up—government people, some of them—in their youths, that they wouldn’t want the public to know about.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.”

“That’s what you say. I don’t want to be nasty, but maybe this is a cover-up. I heard a lot of publishers wanted it.”

“Several publishers saw it, and decided they didn’t want it.”