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wild story might purvey some thrill – it might be true, and if it were not, then indeed where was the reader’s sense of humour! I do not know how Desmond had started on this job; he had wanted to be a writer; but there was a part of him that seemed always to be saying – But don’t you see that life is venomous! And so
Die Flamme
magazine became a home for him; because there was something very practically, and powerfully, successful about its venom. Several people who worked for
Die Flamme
magazine called themselves Christians (Desmond was a Catholic) but it seemed to me they were more like Manichaeans – if you think the world is irredeemably evil then you have no responsibility for it; you can do what you like; you have some licence simply to amuse and to be amused.
    Or perhaps it was just that the
Die Flamme
people had been to English public schools; and their contacts with their own and other people’s bodies had been often to do with cruelty.
    Desmond would sometimes bring in to the pubs or restaurants where we met a bundle of newspaper cuttings which had been gathered for him by a secretary; he would read out items in funny voices and then would put the papers on the table and would draw lines round paragraphs with a red pencil as if he were marking out bombing areas for an attack.
    There was one story being run by
Die Flamme
at this time which was about a left-wing politician whom they called Dirty Lenin. Dirty Lenin had at one time been caught (or had he? but this uncertainty was the point) doing something in the City with what are called bonds; there had been an activity called washing bonds, which was improper. So when the
Die Flamme
people made this public, they called the bond-washer Dirty Lenin: do you see? Do you? Another of the points of this stuff is that a reader may feel himself in the know; one of an élite. For this, of course, it does not matter whether or not a story is true.
    When questioned, Desmond would puff his cheeks out and reach for his pipe. He would say – Well he’s an arrogant sod anyway.
    Oh, I might have felt some enmity against Desmond!
    There was an evening when Desmond did have to stay up in London for the night: he had a date with some television people early in the morning. We had dinner together; he frowned and blew his cheeks out: I wondered if he might say something like – I have a headache: what bad luck! I did see, of course, that he probably loved his wife. Up till recently I had still been staying in that house in Ruskin Square; this had been a suitable background for whatever strange business it was that Desmond and I were up to: I mean he could frown at me intently and say – Ah, it would be different, wouldn’t it, if we could go back to your place! And so he need not feel guilty – or too absurd. But just recently I had moved out of Ruskin Square and had gone to stay in a cheap hotel, or hostel, at the back of Victoria Station. I had not told Desmond about this (I have not told you! but this is another story). Perhaps I did not want to put burdens on to him. But then when he and I were having dinner that evening and he was frowning and blowing even more portentously than usual, eventually he said ‘But the terrible thing is I’m booked in to stay with friends!’ And I thought – But this is beyond even being ridiculous! At the same time, however, he also looked so miserable that I thought – Perhaps after all his burden is not that he thinks he might almost have to go to bed with me but that he has to go through all this rubbish every time; and might he not long to be liberated from this? So I said (what are the connections here, between good and evil!) ‘Well, we could go back to my place.’
    He said ‘To Ruskin Square?’
    I said ‘No, I’ve moved out.’
    He said ‘Where have you moved to?’
    He seemed genuinely both excited and alarmed. I thought – Is it some