“What could that mean?”

“Well, professor, it says on the books you can get life for pushing. Nobody does, but some of the sentences are tough. Lets look on the bright side and say Wally comes out of hospital with a short leg, or a hole in his head, or something showy like that. The judge might go easy on him. He’ll still go to the pen, of course, but if he’s a very good boy, and squeals on a few people he knows, and sucks up the governors and the chaplain, he might be on the street again in seven years, but not a minute less. I’d hope for nine or ten. Pushing to kids is very, very unpopular. Wally has lost face, as the Chinese say. Your friend with the book Wally was whimpering about can forget Wally. How is that nice lady?”

“At this moment, she’s expecting a baby.”

“Couldn’t be better. If you see her, wish her luck from me.”

The very night he heard of Wally’s fall Darcourt hastened to the Cornishes’ apartment, thinking that such news would create an atmosphere friendly to his real mission. He was not pleased to find Powell there before him, making himself very much at home. He could not possibly include Powell in any discussion about The Marriage at Cana. But he told Arthur and Maria about Wally, and about Carver’s forecast of Wally’s future.

“Poor old Wally,” said Maria.

Arthur was dumbfounded. “Poor old—! Maria, don’t you see? This disposes of that business of Wally wanting his father’s book. He wouldn’t get anywhere with a court case about that.”

“Aren’t the courts supposed to forget past misdeeds, when somebody has been foully wronged?”

They’re supposed to, but they don’t. From henceforth, Wally is null and void.”

“I’m astonished at you men. Do you want to have your own way at the expense of a fellow creature’s suffering?”

“I haven’t the least objection to you getting your own way at the expense of anybody’s suffering. Except mine, of course,” said Arthur.

“Wally is suffering because he is stupid,” said Darcourt. “Trying to break away from the cops! Ah, these amateurs! He is obviously a criminal of no real flair.”

“Wouldn’t you have tried to escape?”

“If I were hanging around schoolyards, peddling dope to kids, I would hope to have more grip on my job. If I were a criminal, I would try to use the brains God gave me.”

“All right. Wally is a bad boy and Wally is stupid. But it ill becomes you, as a Christian priest, to be exulting and sniggering. Where’s your pity?”

“Maria, stop playing the Many-Breasted Mother, gushing compassion like a burst waterpipe. You’re kidding. You’re just as glad as we are that Wally’s out of the way.”

“I shall indeed be a mother within quite a short time, and I think a show of compassion becomes me. I know my role.”

Maria smiled a farcical Madonna smile.

“Good! Then I’ll play my role as a Christian priest. Arthur, will you get on the phone and send Wally your own lawyer? Meanwhile I’ll phone the newspaper sob-sisters and shed a few tears about Wally’s sad plight. Geraint, you lodge a complaint under the Charter of Rights. Wally was an employee of this building, and thus of the Cornish Trust, of which Arthur is the Big Cheese. So Arthur must rush to the aid of a victim of our social system. Maria, prepare to appear in court, heavy with child and wearing a veil, to say what a sweet little fellow Wally always was, and how Whistlecraft’s denial of his name to Wally gave him an Anonymity Complex. Wally will have to go to jail, but we can float him in and out on a flood of tears. Of course we’ll keep mum about how Wally tried to shake you down for a million. Come on, let’s get to work. There must be more than one phone in this palace.”

“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that we do anything,” said Maria. “I was just suggesting that we talk a little more compassionately.”

“You don’t understand modern compassion, Sim bach. It’s a passive virtue. I see what Maria means; let’s pity Wally, and maybe send him a few grapes in the slammer. If anybody is going to be nasty to the criminal classes, it must be those horrible cops and the hard-faced men in the courts. That’s what we pay them for. To make the world cosy for us. We smash Wally without having to harbour a hateful, revengeful thought; our servants do all that kind of thing for us.”

“That’s a new dimension of the Kater Murr philosophy,” said Darcourt. “Thanks for explaining it to me, Geraint bach.”

“After the baby is born, I think I shall write a whole volume, expanding Kater Murr,” said Maria. “Hoffmann didn’t begin to get all the good out of him. Kater Murr is really the foremost social philosopher of our time.”

This was what Darcourt wanted. This was almost the old Maria, the woman infused with the spirit of François Rabelais, a spirit vowed to the highest reaches of scholarship and illuminated by a cleansing humour. Arthur, he thought, was looking decidedly better. Had some sort of new serenity descended on the Cornish household? Well—Powell was still there, and Powell was making himself very much at home.

“I must leave you shortly,” said he, “but meanwhile I am enjoying the peaceful retirement of your dwelling. This is one place where I am sure I can’t be got at by the abominable Al Crane.”

“Oh, don’t think you are safe here,” said Arthur. “Last night Al and Sweetness turned up and he cross-examined me for two hours, taking a full five minutes to formulate each question. In the modern lingo, Al lacks verbal skills; lingually, Al is a stumblebum. He brought a tape-recorder, so that every precious Um and Ah would be preserved forever. He wanted to know what my Motivation was for putting the Fund behind the opera scheme. He doesn’t believe anybody might do something for a variety of reasons; he wants one great, big, juicy Motivation which would be, he says, a significantly seminal thread in a complexity of artistic inspirations. He wants to identify all the threads that are woven into the complex tapestry of a work of art—I am quoting Al, you understand—but some threads are more seminal than others, and mine is wonderfully seminal; it could even be the warp, or maybe the woof, of the whole tapestry. I thought I would faint from boredom before I finally got him out of the house.”

“Arthur did not suffer alone,” said Maria. “All the time Al had him on the spot I was being bored rigid by Sweetness, who thanked me for receiving her in my Gracious Home, and then talked about what she called Our Condition. There are countless ways of making pregnancy nauseating, and I think Sweetness explored them all.”

“Sweetness is delighted with you. She told me so,” said Darcourt. “Because of your both being pregnant, of course. You and she, greatly in pod, are what she calls an Objective Correlative of the job of bringing this opera to birth. You, and she, and the opera all burst upon a waiting world at roughly the same time.”

“Spare me Sweetness’s scholarly insights,” said Maria. “She is not an Objective Correlative of anything, and she disgusts me as parodies of oneself always do. She expects me to embrace her as a loving companion in gravidity, and if she gives me much more sisterly love I may miscarry. But she would be sure to interpret that as an ill omen for the opera, so I don’t think I’ll oblige her. Never again does she cross the threshold of my Gracious Home.”

“They didn’t get a great welcome in Nilla’s Gracious Home,” said Powell. “Nilla doesn’t know what an assessor is, and I can’t tell her. I always thought the word meant a judge, or somebody who estimated something. What is an assessor, exactly, Sim bach?”

“It is something new in the academic world,” said Darcourt. “Somebody who watches something happen, and gives an enormously detailed report on it; somebody who shares an experience, without having any real involvement with it. A sort of Licensed Snoop.”

“But who issues the licence?” said Arthur.