“Your best friend’s wife?”

“The last—and undoubtedly the greatest—of many. You see, Sim, God tempts us. Oh yes, He does. Don’t let us pretend otherwise. Why do we pray not to be led into temptation?”

“We pray not to be put to the test.”

“All right, but we are put to the test, and for some of us the test is a right bugger, let me tell you, Sim bach. Look here: why did God endow me with a Byronic temperament, Byronic beauty efface, a Byronic irresistibility?”

“I have no idea.”

“No, you haven’t. You are a great soul, Sim; a great, calm soul, but nothing to speak of in the way of physical attraction, if I may be allowed the frankness of a friend. So you don’t know what it’s like to see some marvellous woman and think, ‘That’s mine, if I choose to put out my hand and take it.’ You’ve never felt that?”

“No, I haven’t, really.”

“There you are, you see. But that has been my life. Oh, the flesh! the flesh!”

The man on the other side of the white curtain was pushing it as hard as he could with his hand. “Hey, knock it off, you guys, will you? How do you expect me to hear the game if you yell like that?”

“Shhh! Keep your voice down, Sim, like a good man. This is confidential. Call it a confession, if you like. Where was I? Yes, the flesh; that was it.

You know that? Santayana—and there are people who say he wasn’t a fine poet! That was me; my love was all self-love and I have been a flesh-imprisoned man.”

Geraint’s face was wet with tears. Darcourt, who felt that this interview was going all wrong, but who had not a hard heart, wiped them away with his own handkerchief. But somehow he had to reduce this outpouring to order.

“Are you telling me that you seduced Maria just to test your power? Geraint, this two-bit Byronic act of yours has brought great unhappiness into the life of Arthur, whom you insist is your friend.”

“It’s this opera. Sim. You can’t pretend a thing like that is just a stage-piece. It’s a huge influence, if it’s any good at all, and this thing is going to be good. I know it. This opera has brought me back to Malory, and Maria—whom I truly love as a friend and not as a man desires a woman—is nonetheless a real Malory-woman. So free, so direct, so simple, and yet so great in spirit and so enchanting. You must feel that?”

“I know what you are talking about.”

“I knew it the first time I met her. What does Malory say? ‘A fair lady and a passynge wise’. But I never said a word. I was true to Arthur.”

“But you couldn’t stay true.”

“There came that night when we were talking about disguise, and I said that the beholder in very strong situations is a partner in the deception. He wills his own belief to agree with the desire of the deceiver. And Maria was scornful of that. Which surprised me, because she is so learned in medieval things, and surely has enough sense to understand that what underlay so much medieval belief is still alive in our minds today, and only waits for the word, or the situation, to wake it up and set it to work. That is often how we fall into these archetypal involvements, that don’t seem to make any sense on the surface of things, but make irresistible, compelling sense in the world below the surface. Didn’t Maria know that? I couldn’t think otherwise for a minute.”

“Well—you may have a point there.”

“And so there came that night when Arthur was away, and I had dinner with Maria and we worked till midnight at business details; contracts and agreements and orders for materials and all the complexity of stuff that is involved in a job like getting this opera on the stage. Not a word did we say that Arthur could not have heard. But from time to time I felt her looking at me, and I knew that look. But I never looked back. Not once. If I had, I think that would have been the end of it, because Maria would have understood what was happening, and she would have checked it in herself, and in me, too, of course.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“It was when I went to bed that I found I could not forget those looks, and I could not forget the laughing, rational Maria who had made fun of my theory of disguise. There I lay in bed, remembering those looks. So—I slipped into Arthur’s room, and pinched his dressing-gown, which was that very Arthurian thing Maria had made for him, when they were newly married and were still joking about the Round Table, and the Platter of Plenty and all that, and I put it on over my nakedness, and stole barefoot into Maria’s room, and there she was, asleep or almost asleep. A vision, Sim: a vision. And I demonstrated that my theory was true.”

“Did you? Could you swear she thought you were Arthur?”

“How do I know what she thought? But she didn’t resist. Was she under a delusion? I know I was. I was deep in such a tale as Malory might have told. It was an enchantment, a spell.”

“Now, just a minute, Geraint. That wasn’t Arthur’s Queen, that was Elaine Lancelot visited in that way.”

“Don’t quibble. As a situation it was pure Malory.”

“She must have known your voice.”

“Oh, Sim, what an innocent you are! We did not speak a word. No words were wanted.”

“Well, I’m damned.”

“No, Sim, you are not damned. But I think I am damned. This was more than adultery. I was a thief in the night—a thief of honour. It was breaking faith with a friend.”

“With two friends, surely?”

“I don’t think so. With one friend. With Arthur.”

“You put Arthur before Maria, whom you seduced?”

“I know that I deceived Arthur. I can’t say if I deceived Maria.”

“Well, whatever the fine points are, Maria is going to have a child, and it’s certainly yours. Did you know that?”

“I know. Arthur told me. He wept, Sim, and every tear was like blood from my heart. That’s something I can never forget. I wish I were dead.”

“Geraint, that’s self-indulgent rubbish! You’re not going to die, and Maria is going to have your child, and Arthur will have to find some way of swallowing the pill.”

“You see it from the outside.”

“Of course. I am on the outside, but I was a friend of Arthur and Maria before you were, and I shall have to do anything I can to make things work.”

“Don’t you think of yourself as a friend of mine, Sim? Don’t I need you at least as much as the other two? Me, the flesh-imprisoned man?”

“Stop blethering about the flesh as if it were the Devil himself!”

“What else is it? The Enemy of God, the Poison of Man, the livery of hell, the image of the animal, the Sinner’s Beloved, the Hypocrite’s refuge, the Spider’s Web, the Merchant of Souls, the home of the lost, and the demon’s dunghill.”

“My God, is that what you think?”

“That is what my father thought. I remember him thundering those words from the pulpit. He was quoting one of our Welsh poet-divines, the great Morgan Llwyd. Isn’t it lovely, Sim? Could you put it better?” Powell, whose normal voice was impressive, had risen to a Miltonic resonance and grandeur, declaiming with bardic vehemence; the man in the neighbouring, concealed bed was cheering at the top of his voice. The Hatters had won! Won by a last-minute exploit of the redoubtable Donniker!

A small nurse, big with authority and anger, burst into the room.

“What’s going on in here? Have you people gone crazy? Everybody on the corridor is complaining. We’ve got some very sick people on this floor, if you don’t know it. You’ll have to go.”

She took Darcourt by the arm, as he was the only able-bodied rowdy, and pushed him firmly toward the door. In his astonishment and confusion at the goings-on of Geraint, he had no resistance, and allowed himself to be, in a moderate use of the term, thrown out.