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cannot be you! But it was; and I now see that on the edge of sixty years old I had reduced myself to what would think least and feel least. I was eyes and appetite. I flew as an answer to any question. It was the motor roads all over again. If I wondered where I was going, I flew somewhere. If someone tried to arrange an interview, I flew away. If I had been too filthy drunk in one place, I flew to another. If the view from the bar or café became boring, why, someone had said something about the gorge of the Brahmaputra, so I would fly to Calcutta.
    There was an odd fly in the ointment. You could call it a faint, a distant awareness of Liz: and I see now that I’ve written it down that it wasn’t that at all.
    It’s difficult to explain. I never got over, never have got over, thinking I’ve seen her. I never did see her after I left England until I went back there. But I’d be sitting outside a café at one of those round, white tables that are as placeless as motor roads and I’d be watching a crocodile of tourists, all, it may be, following their guide down round the corner to the Uffizi, and when they’d gone I’d remember that— surely! It had been a gesture, a dress, a voice. I’ve even started to my feet and made a step to follow, then stopped because even if it were so, what was the point? I was once coming down the stairs from an osteopath in Brisbane and I stood aside to let a woman go up; then when she had gone into his office I turned to follow her until I remembered Capstone Bowers and I went away. I worried sometimes about all this, but then I found a solution to that bit of nonsense in my brain. I came across the account of a solo voyage round the world by some sensible man—sensible, I thought, because his voyage was so like mine, an attempt to avoid everything. He heard voices and the rigging began to say things to him that he only just couldn’t understand. I “only just” didn’t see Elizabeth in my deliberate, crowded isolation. Having my Italian chum about the place—or rather, my Italian chum having me about the place, one should say—had masked or prevented this curious series of non-meetings from happening. Now she was busily on her knees and I was alone. I thought time would cure me. Ha et cetera.
    Yet here is a contradiction. My contacts were with waiters, chamber maids, receptionists, hostesses. I shared the occasional meal with some international commuter as rootless as myself. I remember one time, when only a little drunk, I and a man I never saw again argued as to which country we were in and agreed to differ. I forget who was right—neither perhaps. Then again, there was always bar talk. All the same, bit by bit it came over me. I was lonely.
    How mixed all this is! But I had reached sixty that time when I flew into Zurich and I had drunk far too much on the plane. To put it mildly, I needed somewhere to recover and the airport doctor advised Schwillen on the Zurich lake.

Chapter III
     
     
    So I made another of the predestined steps in my life. Schwillen was inevitable and so was meeting them. It was my first morning in Schwillen that it happened and I’d drunk a little, not too much, and was feeling just about right. I climbed a little bluff over the lake where there was a monument to some Lithuanians. There was a park and a castle and green-painted chairs to sit on. So I sat. I remember contemplating with some pleasure the fun it would be to have an aristocracy all named after cheeses and contrariwise. Le gratin indeed! Then I became aware of a large figure standing between me and the sun.
    “Wilfred Barclay, sir? Wilf?”
    “Good God.”
    “If I might—”
    He was huge—really huge. Or perhaps I had shrunk.
    “I can’t stop you sitting down, can I?”
    “It’s really great to see you!”
    “How are my dependent clauses?”
    “I ought to explain, Wilf—”
    “Don’t bother. Go away and teach.”
    “Sabbatical, Wilf. Every seven years.”
    “So long? It