Werry took a long drink of beer and leaned forward with a solemn expression on his face. “Rob,” he said, his voice charged with sincerity, “I really envy you.”

“Is it my money or my looks?” Hasson parried, genuinely surprised.

“I’m not kidding, Rob. I envy you because you’re a human being.”

Hasson produced a lopsided smile. “And you aren’t?”

“That’s exactly it.” Werry was speaking with the utmost conviction, like a preacher trying to make a convert. “I’m not a human being.”

Hasson, although baffled, realized with a sinking feeling that his tête-à-tête with Werry was not going to be an easy run. “Al, you’d pass for a human being any day.”

“But that’s all I do — I pass for a human being.”

“Rhetorically speaking,” Hasson said, wishing that Werry would get on with making his point in a more direct manner.

Werry shook his head. “It might be rhetoric, and it might not. Is it right to regard yourself as human if you haven’t got any human feelings? Isn’t that what the word human means -having humanity?”

“I’m sorry, Al” Hasson decided to show some impatience. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. What’s the problem?”

Werry drank more beer, his eyes remaining fixed on Hasson’s, somehow transferring a weight of responsibility to him. “You saw what happened at my place this morning. Buck came walking in like he owned the place and started leaning on me in front of my kid — and I just stood there and took it. What would you have done, Rob? What would you have done if you’d been in my shoes?”

“It’s hard to say,” Hasson replied, toying with his glass.

“All right — would you have got mad at him?”

“I daresay I would.”

“That’s it, you see. I didn’t get mad — because there’s something wrong with me. I don’t feel anything. Sometimes I hear this little voice telling me I ought to get mad in a situation like that, but it doesn’t carry any weight with me. I’m not afraid of Buck, but I don’t care enough about anything to make it worth my while to stand up to him. Not even my own boy.”

Hasson felt totally inadequate to receive such a confidence. “I don’t think any of us are qualified to analyse ourselves the way you’re trying to do, Al.”

“There’s no analysis — I’m just reporting certain facts,” Werry said doggedly. “There’s something wrong with me, something about the way I’m put together, and it affects everything I do, big or small. Tell the truth, Rob — when we met at the rail station yesterday you didn’t know me from Adam, did you?”

“I haven’t got much of a memory,” Hasson said, feeling he had lost the thread of the discussion.

“It doesn’t matter how good your memory is — the point is that you know what it’s safe to forget. You know what you can let go. But I’m so busy trying to convince people I’m one of the boys that I remember everything that happens so that I can enthuse about it afterwards and tell everybody about the great times we had, but the truth is I never have any great times. I don’t really exist, Rob.”

Hasson began to feel embarrassed. “Listen, Al, do you think this is a…

“It’s true,” Werry cut in. “I don’t really exist. I go around in my uniform most of the time, because when I’m wearing it I can convince myself I’m the city reeve. I haven’t even got a sense of humour, Rob. I don’t know what’s funny and what isn’t. All I do is remember things that other people laugh at, and then when I hear them again I laugh too, but when I hear a joke the first time I’m not even sure if it is a joke.

“I can’t even argue with people, because as soon as I hear the other guy’s point of view that becomes my point of view, as well. Then when I run into somebody who starts telling me the opposite I side with him right off.

“I don’t even …” Werry paused to drink more beer, again fixing Hasson with an intent, brooding stare. “I don’t even get much of a kick out of sex. I’ve read about the ecstasy of love, but I’ve never experienced it. When I’m on the lob and it’s right at the big moment … you know, when people are supposed to feel they’re knocking on the door of paradise … all I can think about is that I might have left the lights on in my car, or that my backside is cold. Things like that.”

Hasson felt a sudden heartless desire to laugh. He picked up his glass and studied the swarming of the tiny bubbles in the beer froth.

“That’s part of the reason Sybil walked out on me,” Werry continued. “We had arguments about the treatment for Theo’s eyes — she wanted to let the hospital cut the middle out of them, and I wouldn’t hear of it — but I think she got sick of living with somebody who was nobody. That’s why I get on okay with May. She’s another nobody. Her one ambition in life is to go around looking cute, and that’s all she does, so I know where I am with her.”

There was a longer pause, and Hasson knew that Werry had spoken his piece and that it was up to him to make some appropriate response. He glanced down at the plastic bag containing his dream cassettes and wished he could be locked in his bedroom in the parchment-coloured shade at drawn curtains, with the television set bestowing its sweet absolution. The unfairness of the situation-here was another person making impossible demands upon him — began to weigh heavily on his mind.

“Al,” he said finally, “why are you telling me all this?”

Werry looked slightly nonplussed. “I thought you would want to know — after what you’ve seen at my place — but I’ve probably got it wrong.”

“No, naturally I’d be concerned about a friend’s problems — it’s just that I’ve no idea of anything to say which might help.”

Werry gave him a wan smile. “Who said I wanted help, Rob? I’d need to care about things being wrong before I could care about getting them put right.” He finished his half-litre of beer and signalled a waiter at the other side of the room to bring a replacement.

Hasson gazed at him for a moment, then took refuge in a classical British non-sequitur. “Do you think there’ll be any change in the weather?”

As soon as they got back to the house Hasson went up to his room and locked the door. The bed had been neatly made up and somebody had drawn back the curtains to admit the days snow- reflected brilliance. He set his new purchases out on a tallboy, selected a cassette and dropped it into a slot on the television set. Gratifyingly familiar music seeped into the air and under the set’s proscenium tiny figures began to act out a domestic comedy, part of a series he had watched in England only twelve months earlier. He drew the curtains together, shed his outer clothing and got into the beds stoically waiting for the spasms in his back to subside. The artificial world of the television stage occupied his entire field of vision. It was as though he had retreated through time and space, back into his previous life, and he felt safe.

He had completed a day and a half of rest and recuperation and the thought of three further months of same kind of thing was unbearable. It was much better to be curled up in a womb-cave of eider, and to submerge his mind in the dreaming of other men’s dreams.