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handling – glasses, plates. The flat was also able to produce water in the kitchen and bathing areas, had radiators, and lights and a music centre which would require electricity.

How had the breakable or heavy items been got into the apartment, how had the washing machine been plumbed in and cooker connected? Only the freelance limber or foolhardy would chance that ladder up from the fire-escape. Certainly no one from the electricity board or the water services, let alone anyone delivering a piano.

There had to be, did there not, another entry and exit from the flat. But neither I nor Mr C, the expert, had spotted one.

At nine that night, just after I’d finished off the Vilmos chapter upstairs, someone rang the bell.

I went down and I thought, This won’t be him. But before I could decide what I felt, let alone open the door, the letter-box flipped up. George called through, “Roy, it’s me. Just a little something.”

I had no inclination to open up for George, but established habits linger. Or was it that? I unfastened the door quite swiftly despite its new bolts and locks.

The sun had only just gone. The sky was a broad silky blue, high clouds catching a peach afterglow, fading.

And there was George with a plate, and on the plate a round dark fruit cake.

“Vita, you see,” he said, with an abashed vaingloriousness. “She baked this afternoon, and she thought you might like this one.”

I stood at a loss again.

Belatedly it had occurred to me how I had been hoodwinked before by George and Vita, Sej using them to gain access. Now too he could have been out here. He could have been. But he was not.

The cake smelled good. My mother had sometimes baked, but not so successfully as Vita. My mother’s forte was jam tarts, her fruit cake tended to be merely laxative.

“That’s much too kind, George,” I said. I took the plate. “Wonderful. Please thank your wife very much.”

“Just look after yourself,” admonished George. He managed to convey this cake was not a reward, but a tick for effort. I still needed to keep up the work.

He plodded back and went in. I stood holding the cake looking up and down the road.

The bicycling boy bicycled past. The prancing poodle was being taken for a walk by the new man in the life of No 73.

Going in myself I shut the door, and re-secured it.

In the kitchen I put the cake to one side. After the coffee and biscuits I didn’t want it. I wasn’t sure I wanted it anyway. Too much contact with my neighbours could prove time-consuming and draining.

Besides, I hadn’t forgotten George and the scissors.

Poor old sod. It hadn’t been his fault.

I closed my mind to him and went upstairs to back up the last chapter I’d done of ‘Untitled’ on the machine. I supposed I should be pleased with it. It seemed to me I might suddenly have concluded the thing. But in a way I found that uncomfortable. The novel had been with me so long. And now what was I to do with it? No one would even want to glance at it. Writers, if they have any success at all, are always expected to remain in their handy and clearly-labelled ghettos A pseudonym? But all that was hypothetical. Probably tomorrow I’d want to rewrite that last chapter entirely.

Ten minutes later the door bell went again.

I was disinclined to go down. It must be George, or Vita even, coming to see what I thought of the cake. There’d been a similar visit over the last piece of cake she’d awarded me, years ago.

Idly I went to the unlit study window and looked down. George was there, standing on the paving talking to the paunchy man with cigars from No 80.

I drew back and took out the sheets of ‘Untitled’ from my printer-tray and left them lying by the computer.

The bell went again. I ignored it.

I ran a bath and lay in it listening to the Third Programme. By which I mean Radio 3. It was Rachmaninov, the Third Symphony, or do I mean Symphony 3?

As a boy I’d found him too emotional. But that was insanity. Every age of one’s life seems to carry some particular intellectual failing. If we learn one thing we seem to have lost another. Or probably only most of us. Some, surely, truly do grow up. But they are rare.

He returned into my life a couple of evenings later.

It was slightly less time than Mr C had promised. More, perhaps, than I had originally instinctively credited.

XIX

(‘Untitled’: Page 323)

TO be on fire, to burn, was neither an agony nor alarming. The fire was cool, and although he felt it moving upward through his body, it had a certain familiarity. He seemed to have experienced its passage once or twice before. Then, however, it had given no light, and so he must not have known what happened to him.

Nothing of him had burned away. Still he stood, motionless in the centre of the Wheel of Life. No other light but that within him now illuminated the Chamber of Revelation.

It had begun with the deepest rose red, which flooded not only the lowest area of his belly and the area of his loins, but shone outward there and through his thighs. The veins and arteries in his calves and feet were also lighted with this colour. One could not be afraid of it, the gorgeous redness. It seemed life-giving.

Despite that, and the fact the chants and magical gesturings of the assembly had caused it to ignite, a concerted groaning gasp had risen from them all when the red fire began.

Vilmos had gazed down at it, his head bending a very little and so enabling him to see. He was delighted, intrigued.

He knew very well what now must follow.

He felt in fact a curious, perhaps inexplicable excitement, as the ruby colour seared upward and in turn awoke the intense