These kitchen execrations saw Clive through a second drink, and then a third. He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future. But Clive wanted to write something now precisely because he might not feel so strongly in a week’s time. He compromised with a terse postcard, which he would leave for a day before sending. Your threat appalls me. So does your journalism. You deserve to be sacked. Clive. He opened a bottle of Chablis and, ignoring the saumon en croute in the fridge, went up to the top floor, belligerently determined to start work. There would come a time when nothing would remain of Vermin Halliday, but what would remain of Clive Linley would be his music. Work-quiet, determined, triumphant work, then—would be a kind of revenge. But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring at the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of his twirling thoughts and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage/ And what about Molly?

At nine-thirty he stood and decided to pull himself together, drink some red wine and get on with the work. There was his beautiful theme, his song, spread out on the page, craving his attention, needing one inspired modification, and here he was, alive with focused energy, ready to make it. But downstairs he lingered in the kitchen over his rediscovered supper, listening to a history of the nomadic Moroccan Tuareg people on the radio, and then he took his third glass of Bandol for a wander about the house, an anthropologist to his own existence. He hadn’t been in the living room for over a week, and now he drifted about the enormous room, examining paintings and photographs as though for the first time, running a hand over the furniture and picking up objects from the mantelpiece. His whole life was in here, and what a rich history! The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. Clive had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone’s help. And he drank to his success, down in one, and returned to the kitchen for a refill before setting out for a tour of the dining room. At eleven-thirty he was back in front of the score, whose notes now would not hold still, not even for him, and he had to agree with himself that he was seriously drunk, and who wouldn’t be after such betrayals? There was a half-bottle of scotch on a bookcase, which he took to Molly’s chair, and there was some Ravel already in the machine. His last memory of the evening was of lifting the remote control and pointing at the disk player.

He woke in the small hours with the headphones askew across his face and a terrible thirst from dreams of crossing a desert on hands and knees, carrying the Tuaregs’ only grand piano. He drank from the bathroom tap and put himself to bed and lay there for hours, open-eyed in the dark, exhausted, desiccated, and alert, once more forced to attend helplessly to his carousel. Neck in shit? Moral position! Molly?

When he woke from a brief sleep in the mid-morning, he knew the roll, the creative spree, was over. It was not simply that he was tired and hung over. As soon as he sat at the piano and tried out a couple of approaches to the variation, he found that not only this passage but the whole movement had died on him—suddenly it was ashes in his mouth. He didn’t dare think too hard about the symphony itself. When his secretary called to try to make arrangements for collecting the final pages, he was short with her and had to phone back with an apology. He took a walk to clear his head and post the card to Vernon, which today read like a masterpiece of restraint. Along the way he bought a copy of the Judge; to protect his concentration, he had been denying himself newspapers, and the TV and radio news, so he had missed the buildup.

It was a shock, then, at home, when he spread out the paper on the kitchen table. Garmony posing before Molly, camping it up for her, and the camera in her warm hands, her living eye once framing what Clive saw now. But the front page was an embarrassment, not because, or not only because, a man had been caught out in a delicate private moment, but because the paper had worked itself up into such a lather about it and brought to bear such powerful resources. As if some criminal political conspiracy had been uncovered, or a corpse under the table in the Foreign Office. So unworldly, so misjudged, so uncool. It was inept too in the ways it tried so hard to be cruel. The overstated and contemptuous cartoon, for example, and the crowing leader with its childish pun on “drag,” the doomed crowd-pleaser of “knickers in a twist,” and the feebly opposed “dressing up” and “dressing-down.” Again the thought recurred: not only was Vernon loathsome, he had to be mad. But that wouldn’t stop Clive loathing him.

The hangover lasted all weekend and into Monday—one didn’t get off so lightly these days—and the general nausea presented an appropriate background for bitter brooding. The work was stalled. What had been a luscious fruit was now a dry twig. The copyists were desperate to receive the last twelve pages of the score. The orchestra manager phoned three times, his voice trembling in controlled panic. The Concert-gebouw had been booked from next Friday for two days’ rehearsal at huge expense; the extra percussionists Clive had asked for had been retained, along with the accordionist. Giulio Bo was impatient to have sight of the work’s conclusion, and all the arrangements had been made for Birmingham. If no complete parts score was in Amsterdam by Thursday, he, the manager, would have no option but to drown himself in the nearest canal. It was soothing to be exposed to an anguish greater than his own, but still Clive refused to let the pages go. He was holding out for his significant variation, and in the way of these things, it was beginning to seem to him that the work’s integrity depended on it.

This, of course, was a ruinous conception. When he entered the studio now, its squalor oppressed him, and when he sat in front of his manuscript—the handwriting of a younger, more confident and gifted man—he blamed Vernon for the fact that he could not work, and his anger redoubled. His concentration had been shattered. By an idiot. It was becoming clear that he had been denied his masterpiece, the summit of a lifetime’s work. This symphony would have taught his audience how to listen to, how to hear, everything else he had ever written. Now the proof, the very signature of genius had been spoiled, and greatness had been snatched away. For Clive knew that he would never again attempt a composition on such a scale; he was too weary, too emptied out, too old.

On Sunday he lolled about the sitting room, numbly reading the rest of the stories in Friday’s Judge. The world was its usual mess: fish were changing sex, British table tennis had lost its way, and in Holland some unsavory types with medical degrees were offering a legal service to eliminate your inconvenient elderly parent. How interesting. All one needed was the aged parent’s signature in duplicate and several thousand dollars. In the afternoon he took a long walk around Hyde Park and reflected at length on this article. It was true, he had entered into an agreement with Vernon, which, after all, entailed certain obligations. Perhaps a little research was in order. But Monday was wasted in a pretense of work, a self-deceiving tinkering that he had the sense to abandon in the evening. Every idea he had was dull. He shouldn’t be let near this symphony; he was not worthy of his own creation.