“The early years. Blairlogie.”

“Where exactly is Blairlogie?”

“Now you’re beginning to sound like The Times. I can tell you a little about the place as it is now. Like a good biographer I’ve made my pilgrimage there. It’s in the Ottawa Valley, about sixty miles or so north-west of Ottawa. Rough country. Perfectly accessible by car now, but when Francis was born it was thought by a lot of people to be the Jumping-Off Place, because you couldn’t get there except by a rather primitive train. It was a town of about five thousand people, predominantly Scots.

“But as I stood on the main street, looking for evidence and hoping for intuitions, I knew I wasn’t seeing anything at all like what little Francis saw at the beginning of the century. His grandfather’s house, St. Kilda, is cut up into apartments. His parents’ house, Chegwidden Lodge, is now the Devine Funeral Parlours—yes, Devine, and nobody thinks it funny. All the timber business that was the foundation of the Cornish money is totally changed. The McRory Opera House is gone, and nothing remains of the McRorys except some unilluminating stuff in local histories written by untalented amateurs. Nobody in modern Blairlogie has any recollection of Francis, and they weren’t impressed when I said he had become quite famous. There were some pictures that had come from his grandfather’s house that had passed into the possession of the public library, but they had stored them in the cellar, and they were perished almost beyond recognition. Just tenth-rate Victorian junk. I drew almost a total blank.”

“But are the childhood years so important?”

“Maria, you astonish me! Weren’t your childhood years important? They are the matrix from which a life grows.”

“And that’s all gone?”

“Gone beyond recovery.”

“Unless you can wangle a chat with the Recording Angel.”

“I don’t think I believe in a Recording Angel. We are all our own Recording Angels.”

“Then I am more orthodox than you. I believe in a Recording Angel. I even know his name.”

“Pooh, you medievalists have a name for everything. Just somebody’s invention.”

“Why not somebody’s revelation? Don’t be so hidebound, Simon. The name of the Recording Angel was Radueriel, and he wasn’t just a book-keeper; he was the Angel of Poetry, and Master of the Muses. He ago had a staff.”

“Wound with serpents, like the caduceus of Hermes, I suppose.”

“Not that kind of staff; a civil service staff. One of its important members was the Angel of Biography, and his name was the Lesser Zadkiel. He was the angel who interfered when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, so he is an angel of mercy, though a lot of biographers aren’t. The Lesser Zadkiel could give you the lowdown on Francis Cornish.”

Darcourt by now was unquestionably drunk. He became lyrical.

“Maria—dear Maria—forgive me for being stupid about the Recording Angel. Of course he exists—exists as a metaphor for all that illimitable history of humanity and inhumanity and inanimate life and everything that has ever been, which must exist some place or else the whole of life is reduced to a stupid file with no beginning and no possible ending. It’s wonderful to talk to you, my dearest, because you think medievally. You have a personification or a symbol for everything. You don’t talk about ethics: you talk about saints and their protective spheres and their influences. You don’t use lettuce-juice words like ‘extra-terrestrial’; you talk frankly about Heaven and Hell. You don’t blether about neuroses; you just say demons.”

“Certainly I haven’t a scientific vocabulary,” said Maria.

“Well, science is the theology of our time, and like the old theology it’s a muddle of conflicting assertions. What gripes my gut is that it has such a miserable vocabulary and such a pallid pack of images to offer to us—to the humble laity—for our edification and our faith. The old priest in his black robe gave us things that seemed to have concrete existence; you prayed to the Mother of God and somebody had given you an image that looked just right for the Mother of God. The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he—because he usually doesn’t know any Greek—can’t pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It’s the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination. But you, Maria, speak the old language that strikes upon the heart. You talk about the Recording Angel and you talk about his lesser angels, and we both know exactly what you mean. You give comprehensible and attractive names to psychological facts, and God—another effectively named psychological fact—bless you for it.”

“You’re raving ever so slightly, darling, and it’s time you went home.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Of course. This instant. Can I stand up? Ooooh!”

“No, wait a minute, I’ll see you out. But before you go, tell me what it is about Francis you want and can’t discover?”

“Childhood! That’s the key. Not the only key, but the first key to the mystery of a human creature. Who brought him up, and what were they and what did they believe that stamped the child so that those beliefs stuck in his mind long after he thought he had rejected them? Schools—schools, Maria! Look what Colborne has done to Arthur! Not bad—or not all of it—but it clings to him still, in the way he ties his tie, and polishes his shoes, and writes amusing little thankees to people who have had him to dinner. And a thousand things that lurk below the surface, like the conventionality he showed when he heard Francis might be rather a crook. Well—what were the schools of Blairlogie? Francis was never out of the place until he was fifteen. Those were the schools that marked him. Of course, I could fake it. Oh, I wish I had the indecency of so many biographers and dared to fake it! Not crude faking, of course, but a kind of fiction, the sort of fiction that rises to the level of art! And it would be true, you know, in its way. You remember what Browning says:

I could serve Francis so much better if I had the freedom of fiction.”

“Oh, Simon, you don’t have to tell me that you are an artist at heart.”

“But an artist chained to biography, which ought to bear some resemblance to fact.”

“A matter of moral conscience.”

“And a matter of social conscience, as well. But what about artistic conscience, which people don’t usually pay much attention to? I want to write a really good book. Not just a trustworthy book, but a book people will like to read. Everybody has a dominant kind of conscience, and in me the artistic conscience seems to be pushing the other two aside. Do you know what I really think?”

“No, but you obviously want to tell me.”

“I think that probably Francis had a daimon. As a man so much under the influence of Mercury, or Hermes, it would be quite likely. You know what a daimon is?”

“Yes, but go on.”

“Oh, of course you’d know. I keep forgetting what a knowing girl you are. Since you became the wife of a very rich man, it somehow seems unlikely that you should know anything really interesting. But of course you’re your mother’s child, splendid old crook and sibyl that she is! Of course you know what Hesiod calls daimons: spirits of the Golden Age, who act as guardians to mortals. Not tedious manifestations of the moral conscience, like Guardian Angels, always pulling for Sunday-school rightness and goodiness. No, manifestations of the artistic conscience, who supply you with extra energy when it is needed, and tip you off when things aren’t going as they should. Not wedded to what Christians think of as what is right, but to what is your destiny. Your joker in the pack. Your Top Trump that subdues all others!”