Tom's Version E-Book

Robert Irwin

• Herausgeber: Dedalus Original English Language Fiction
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 310

Beschreibung

Tom's Version is a lament for the sixties and then a mad race towards old age and death. Hovering in background are the ghostly presences of St Ignatius of Loyola, St Joseph of Copertino, Robert Louis Stevenson and M.R. James. This is the story of a story that plays out in real life. Tom is a stock controller. Though management of the shelves kept him busy in the daytime, his nights were frightful. Again and again he dreamt of guns, conjuring tricks, car chases, burials, disinterments, Martian landscapes and Molly . Tom is new to the Story as it was known to the sinister crew who first appeared in The Ruins Have Been Cast. They make their reappearance in this new novel.... .Molly is a hoplophiliac, Quentin is the sort of person who knows what a hoplophiliac is (someone who likes the use of guns in sex), Lancelyn is terrified of women, Jaimie has committed murder in order to understand what it is like to be evil, Ferdie is a conjuror with bad breath, Bernard is an expert on ghost stories, Mortimer is a thug who works at the The Times Literary Supplement. But Tom is just so ordinary (apart from his visions of Fairyland).

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Robert Irwin (born in 1946) is a novelist, historian, critic and scholar. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Robert is the author of ten novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997), Satan Wants Me (1999) Wonders Will Never Cease (2016), My Life is Like a Fairy Tale (2019), The Runes Have Been Cast (2021) and Tom’s Version (2023).

All Robert’s novels have enjoyed substantial publicity and commercial success although he is best known for The Arabian Nightmare which has been translated into twenty languages and is considered by many critics to be one of the great literary fantasy novels of the twentieth century.

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ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 44 1

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First published by Dedalus in 2023

Tom’s Version copyright © Robert Irwin 2023

The right of Robert Irwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

all the people in this novel are, unfortunately, fictional, except of course for Philip IV of France, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. R. R. Tolkien and Tom Byrne

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

POSTSCRIPT

RECOMMENDED READING

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CHAPTER ONE

October, 1970

Their clothes were piled around the edges of the room. It had taken Philip nearly twenty minutes to persuade them that they needed to be naked before they started. Clothes were just another form of armour that would conceal their real personalities not only from other people but also from themselves. Not that he was ordering them to strip. He was only their guide and he was there to take the group wherever the group wanted to go. The rather nice-looking young Scottish woman protested at length that she did not want all these men ogling ‘ma manky body’. But Philip had his way and now he was proposing that each of them in turn should stand up, give their Christian name and then in a sentence or two say something about why they were here or make a statement that defined who they were, or both. He was only proposing, mind, not instructing, and, if the group wanted to do something else, that was fine by him.

There were twelve of them, six men and six women, plus Philip. And they were mostly young, middle class and all white. They lounged awkwardly on cushions arranged in a circle. The basement had no windows, its floor-level lighting gave their faces a cadaverous look and the smell of burning joss sticks suggested that some strange ritual was about to begin. Several of the women looked attractive. Even so, the set-up did not seem very promising to Tom. His companions looked hesitantly at one another, until finally the man whose demeanour and discarded clothes had suggested that he was some kind of businessman rose to his feet.

‘I am Raymond,’ he said and then he added, ‘I am so lonely.’

Philip nodded and indicated that it was the turn of the jolly middle-aged woman sitting next to Raymond.

‘Hi, I’m Melanie and I’m a hundred-per-cent pro-life.’

‘I’m Jeff and I thought this might be a bit of a laugh and you’re not going to tell me that I am wrong… here we all are sitting starkers.’

‘Sally is my name and I want to find my way to the Golden Land that I have glimpsed in my dreams.’

Then, ‘I am Leon. I have cancer and I want to learn how to die well.’

That was weird and he was so young! But what followed was weirder yet, when a statuesque and beautiful young woman rose to speak, ‘My name is Molly and I am accursed, for I bring bad luck, fucking bad luck, to every man I sleep with.’

This was so very weird that Tom missed the names and statements of the next three participants. Perhaps this Molly person was using the I-am-accursed spiel as a kind of chastity belt? Or, more likely, she was just nuts.

Then it was his turn, ‘Hi, I’m Tom. I am here to achieve my inner potential and find in others a mirror of my hopes and ideals.’

A load of old cobblers of course. He had picked up this sort of feel-good garbage from the literature put out for encounter groups by Esalen and Quaesitor. Some of this group looked impressed, though Philip was looking at him suspiciously. So Tom was lying, but so what? He did not believe that any of those he had heard had spoken the truth about themselves.

Then Philip wanted every participant in succession to turn to the person on their left, and on the basis of that person’s appearance and the statement that he or she had just made, they should act out their impression of that person. This was awkward for Tom since, distracted by Molly’s self-denunciation, he missed the name and statement of his neighbour. Though this was a bit embarrassing, it was soon sorted out. Ferdie was on drugs and he loved the drug experience, but now he wanted to find a straight way of achieving a high. Apart from anything else, it might be cheaper. Tom thought that this was not entirely true and that Ferdie probably had more serious problems. But he did his best with what Ferdie had given him. The man’s thick black hair which stuck out in triangles on either side of his head gave him the appearance of a clown. His teeth were awful and there was a hint of bad breath. As for Ferdie’s take on Tom, Tom was Mister Super-Cool.

Meanwhile, a row had broken out elsewhere in the circle. Sally had refused to believe that Leon really had cancer and he was slapping her face and weeping with rage as he did so. So Philip strode over and separated them. Then he went out of the room and came back with two swords and instructed them, no, advised them, to fight it out in the middle of the circle. This was so very daft. The blades of the swords were of foam rubber. But Tom, watching the fight, thought that he might be able to use this for what he had in mind, only the swords would have to have blades of steel. After ten minutes of this nonsense, it was the turn of Sally to start weeping. Perhaps some kind of catharsis had been achieved. No, not quite, for she could not stop weeping. So Philip advised the rest of the group to gather round Sally, lift her off the ground and rock her gently in their arms. She was safe and part of a group, all of whom loved her.

And so it continued. Each person had to act out one of their parents. One by one they had to dance to the music that was in their head. Towards the end there was a meditation. Finally Philip announced that he was going to pair them up for co-counselling and in the coming fortnight, sometime before the next Quaesitor session, they should arrange to meet and try to work as their opposite number’s guide or therapist. Co-counselling is not the same as having a chat. They should take turns to be the counsellor who would listen at length and with full attention to whatever their companion who was their client wanted to say. The client had to be absolutely free to say whatever he or she wished, and whatever was said should remain totally confidential. Then, when the fortnight was up, they should all report briefly to the group on how the co-counselling had gone, without revealing any personal confidences. Tom was assigned Melanie, a cheery middle-aged woman, but when they had made their way up to the ground floor, they were stopped in the hall by Raymond and Molly.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ said Raymond, ‘but we don’t feel we would be very suited to one another. Would you mind dreadfully if we swapped and you co-counselled Molly, while I took Melanie off your hands?’

Tom had no objection to swapping Melanie for a younger model, but what he said was, ‘Philip won’t like it. He decided who should go with who.’

‘But Philip is not in charge is he? He said that he wasn’t and that we are not here to live up to his expectations.’

Molly smiled. It was the smile of a glamorous woman. Tom threw up his hands. And so it was agreed. Raymond and Melanie went off together.

Turning to Tom, Molly said, ‘Thank God, not Raymond. I did not want to be the answer to his lonely hearts column ad.’

‘When? And your place or mine?’

‘I think it should be on neutral ground don’t you?’

Tom proposed a weekend meeting, but she was not free then. It would have to be a weekday lunchtime. Cranks Vegetarian Restaurant in Marshall Street was reasonably close to where she worked. Thursday after next. They walked in silence to St John’s Wood Underground Station, but at this point Tom decided that he was not in the mood that evening to spend more time with this difficult woman and that he was going to walk on down the hill to Chalk Farm Station.

London was so full of stories. The moon, one of Yeats’ ‘silver apples’, was riding high over the clouds. This encounter business seemed to promise well for him. It would be so easy to satirise, but then the satire should deepen into tragedy. Maybe that madwoman would turn out to be good material. A new life, a new career might be about to begin. He was still young and the road of life stretched endlessly ahead. Somewhere on that road Maeve was surely waiting for him. He was Tom in the City of Adventures.

CHAPTER TWO

Though it had not been easy for Tom to take time off, on the specified Thursday he made his way to Cranks. He was early and he would have liked a proper drink, but there was nothing on offer except dodgy-looking fruit-and-vegetable-juices. The seats were uncomfortable and the food on offer looked horribly healthy. Molly arrived a few minutes later. He had not noticed what she was wearing at the encounter group. Then, of course, most of the time she had been wearing nothing. But now, as she made her entrance, heads turned. She was wearing a broad-brimmed floppy scarlet hat, a red embroidered waistcoat over a white blouse and a black maxi skirt. Though she was certainly beautiful, Tom judged that she might have been born too late and that her beauty belonged to a past age. Her style, her luxuriant hair and slightly florid features suggested a grande dame of the nineteenth-century stage. She was beautiful, but not, he thought, as Maeve was beautiful. Molly scanned the room carefully before joining him at his table.

They shook hands before going to the counter and they both collected mixed vegetable soup with a salad and a wholemeal roll on their trays. The salad had a lot of odd-looking red seeds in it and they had to ask, what they were. ‘Quinoa.’ The answer left them none the wiser, but with the quinoa problem unresolved, they cautiously began the conversation that should turn into a co-counselling session.

‘That blonde hair, that tan, that moustache — until you opened your mouth I’d guessed you were American, maybe Californian,’ she said. ‘You’re a surfer dude who just needed dark glasses to complete the outfit.’

‘Well, no. I come from a small village in the south of Ireland.’

‘What do you do for a living, Tom?’

‘I supervise a warehouse in Nine Elms in south-east London,’ he said and enjoyed the look of disappointment on her face. ‘And you?’

‘I was born in Guildford. I am with the sales department at Sotheby’s auction house. I used to sit at the reception desk, give directions, sell catalogues and stuff like that, but now they use me to greet prospective high-rolling bidders. Also they get me to pose for press photographers. I hold up a Flemish miniature or a Japanese vase and I have to look at it lovingly, as if I could imagine no greater happiness than to possess such an object.’

For both of them that meeting last week had been their first experience of an encounter group. What an oddly assembled gang of people, needy folk, perhaps the discards of society. They both agreed that Philip had seemed very nervous. It was probably his first time at being group leader and the slightest challenge to his authority seemed to worry him. As for the group exercises, it was a bit like being at primary school again, though there was also the unpleasant undercurrent of an adult truth game. What is the worst thing you have ever done? When did you last cry? Whom would you most like to kiss in this room? Sooner or later, if they kept turning up to that basement in St John’s Wood, these and similar questions would come up. One would have to be a real masochist to want to attend these sessions — The St John’s Wood Masochists Anonymous. It was easy for the two of them to agree on all this, but it was not co-counselling. So eventually Tom asked, ‘What was all that stuff about you being accursed and a hazard to all men?’

‘Oh no, you first. Why did you leave Ireland and have you found fulfilment as a warehouse manager, or is it just possible that there’s something a teeny-weeny bit more exciting that you are ready for and that is why you have signed up for the group?’

How to reply? How much truth did this woman deserve?

‘I come from the village of Cashel in County Tipperary. It is, as I have said, in the south. As a boy, I played in the shadow of the medieval ruins of Cashel Mount. When childhood was over, I left the village to study law in Dublin. But the law did not suit me and besides Maeve remained in Cashel. It was Maeve who had introduced me to the poetry of W. B. Yeats and I am not sure that she did me any favours by that, for the poetry is now like a fever in my blood. “Irish poets learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made…” We were standing on the slope of Cashel Mount in a high wind and we were both shouting. I shouted that I had decided to become a poet. She laughed in my face and she told me that, now that I had failed at law, my best chance was to find employment as the local butcher’s boy. I remember her long red hair blowing across her face as she spoke and that she looked like a Celtic prophetess who was speaking from behind a veil. I told her that I would not return to Cashel except as a successful poet. Then she should kneel before me on this hillside and confess her error. I did not look back as I walked down to the village. Then I crossed over to England to prove myself…’

Molly interrupted, ‘Fine words! Or, to look at it another way, gobshite! And you are not a successful poet are you? And what are you? Thirty?’

‘Almost.’

Molly was relentless, ‘But perhaps Maeve will be impressed, if she follows you over to England and finds you installed with your packing cases in your warehouse in south-east London.’

Tom hesitated, before continuing, ‘I suppose I do deserve your mockery. Yet I find that the warehouse is a blessed place, for it gives me the space and time that I need and I never feel quite alone in it, for I live with my memories of Cashel Rock, the village, the ruins and Maeve. And there is more, for it is my belief, my mad fancy perhaps, that somewhere in my warehouse, hidden behind the vast crates and packing cases, there is a door which opens onto a land of mists and, coming through the mists, the sound of fiddles and high-pitched laughter. I might hear the fiddle music and the laughter, but I can never find the door and I doubt I ever will.’

‘Oh for God’s sake! Were you really hoping to stumble across laughing fiddlers hiding behind a pile of crates filled with machine tools, bananas, or whatever? That is so sodding fey! Give over!’

Tom put out his hands apologetically.

‘Lady, there is no need to jump down my throat. We may take it that I was speaking figuratively. Putting aside my fantasy of the mist behind the lost door, you should know that warehousing can be a thing of great beauty, for, though it is not commonly known, it is both a science and an art. A well-run warehouse shelters a wonderfully intricate display of three-dimensional geometry in motion. As in a tangram puzzle, everything has to fit precisely. The pallets are — hang on. You do know what a pallet is?’

‘Yes, of course. We sometimes get stuff delivered on pallets at Sotheby’s.’

‘OK, well then, the pallets are of standard sizes and they have their designated pallet racks stacked in colour-coded and numbered bays, and the forklifts that move backwards and forwards between them are eerily quiet in part of the slow-motion kinematics that is the life of the warehouse. But it is not just a matter of matching size to size, pallet to pallet rack, for the additional dimension is time and some of what has been delivered and stacked will be going out much sooner and maybe in greater quantities than stuff that the warehouse has taken in earlier. So, in the interest of efficiency, that is speed, it will need to be stacked closer to the docking doors, and the logistics of docking requires that the shortest pathways have to be plotted both for those deliveries that are destined to be stored for a long time and for those more recently arrived but scheduled to be going out soon. One could fancy that one is looking on the rearrangements of the molecular structures that form the stuff of the universe as one watches these blocks rising, falling and turning until they find their destined settings. Behind all the rise and fall of pallet blocks which are raised up or lifted down from their pallet racks, there are lifts echoing that rise and fall as they carry yet more blocks to be stored on the mezzanine. The inventories that must register all these movements look like complex algebraic equations. Their necessary calculations are abstract and yet they represent what is tangible and which has to serve human needs. We who work in such a place are its willing slaves. At least, that is when the place is busy, but, on a quiet day as the winter’s afternoon shadows spread across the floor, the place seems more like some pharaoh’s tomb with its attendant sarcophagi stacked all around me. Indeed, I should say…’

Molly interrupted again, ‘You manage all that? No, now I think about it, I am guessing that you are not really the manager are you? I can hear it in your voice that you are not so very grand.’

‘To be honest, no, you are right. You have a good ear. I am more of a day-watchman, though I like to think of myself as doubling up as the warehouse’s poet in residence.’

She had listened stony-faced to his account of the mystic warehouse and by now it was obvious that she was impatient to talk about herself. He shrugged, ‘Your turn. Tell me about the men who were brought to ruin in your bed.’

‘I’ll not be defined by the men I slept with! The hell with that! It is not what I want to talk about.’

‘So if you don’t want to be defined by those men, why did you rush to tell the group about these ill-fated fellows? And what do you want to talk about?’

‘Oh, I had to say something, but fucking is not that fucking important to me. So, to be brisk, the first man, no he was more of a boy really, is either in prison, just out of prison, or just about to go back into prison. The second man I married and then he vanished into thin air. The third went mad and had to be shut up in a lunatic asylum. The fourth I left, but he continues hopelessly and tiresomely to stalk me. I don’t want to say anything about the fifth man — that might even be dangerous. OK? Now what I really want to talk about is history and adventure. Have you ever heard of the Countess Markiewicz?’

‘You are talking to an Irishman.’

‘Yes, sorry. The Countess wore silk kimonos. She drove a coach and four. She had a Colt revolver with which she practised by shooting the tops off candles. She took part in the Easter Rising and she was sentenced to death before being pardoned, but ten years later she died in a pauper’s ward. That is a life! I want to have adventures! I want to become an adventuress, though it is hard to have adventures if one does not have much money. So right now I may be a kind of superior floorwalker in an auction house, but I am saving up to become an adventuress like Markiewicz, Lola Montez or Milady de Winter.’

‘Who is this Lola?’

She explained that Lola Montez was a lady who became famous as a Spanish dancer. She had an affair with Alexandre Dumas. Her second husband was killed in a duel outside Paris. After that she moved to Munich where she met King Ludwig of Bavaria who asked her if her breasts were real. She tore open her bodice to prove that they were and after that became his mistress and then Ludwig made her a countess. This was not popular with the Bavarians and Ludwig was forced to abdicate, and Lola moved to London but then she and the Englishman she had married had to flee the country because a charge of bigamy was impending… and then… and then… scandal followed scandal.

Tom thought that Lola Montez, who brought bad luck to every man she associated with, might indeed be Molly’s role model. Meanwhile Molly had moved on, ‘One of my first essays at Oxford was on…’

‘You were at Oxford?’

‘Oh yes. I am not stupid, though my tutors certainly thought I was. I well remember my first proper essay…’

She remembered it all too well. She even remembered the exact title: ‘How successful were the fiscal policies of Philip IV of France?’ In her essay she had shown how the King, bizarrely known as ‘Philip the Fair’, no longer heeded the advice of the honourable old nobility and instead used clever civil servants like Marigny to get rid of feudalism. The King was ‘neither a man, nor a beast, but a statue’. His fiscal policy was simple. It was to make as much money for himself as possible. To that end, the King and his pen-pushing ministers debased currency, so that everybody had less money. Then he confiscated people’s silver to make new coins and revalued the currency, so that everybody had even less money. (How did that work?)

Tom listened with growing impatience and incredulity. How could this woman care so much about things that had happened centuries ago? It was not as if this French King had seized any of her property. But it seemed that for Molly history was a form of spectator sport and she was there in the stands, booing the baddies and trying to shout her support for the doomed goodies. She would not be stopped and she went on about how Philip seized the property of the Jews and taxed the clergy. Then he arrested the Knights Templars, seized their property and had them burnt at the stake on the trumped-up charge of heresy. From his funeral pyre the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, cursed the King and his ministers and summoned them to the tribune of Heaven and the last thing the horrified crowd could see of Jacques de Molay was his blackened hand pointing to heaven.’

Molly’s voice grew louder as she reached the climax of her narrative and quite a few people had turned to look at her. Now she raised her right hand and pointed to the ceiling of Cranks. It was as if she was now cursing vegetarianism. People looked away embarrassed.

‘Within a year of Jacques de Molay’s curse the King and his evil minister Marigny were dead. What good had all their money done them? It could hardly be used to bribe the Judge in the hereafter.’

God and then Molly had judged the evil King. It seemed that everything that was important in Molly’s life had happened hundreds of years ago before she was born and she went on and on about what she saw as the fiscal policies of fourteenth-century France. Well, according to her, they were called ‘fiscal policies’, but really it was just greed dressed up as sound economic measures. Today’s historians could not see that it was their duty to denounce evil whenever they saw it. Dons worshipped the power of certain medieval Kings for their success in employing modern management techniques in order to hasten the end of the Middle Ages.

‘My tutor asked me in a patronising voice if I was sure that I was in the right subject. Of course I was sure. It was godbollocking her who wasn’t. She gave me gamma minus for that essay and said that she was being kind. Well, Fuckadoodledoo!’

Then Molly went on a new riff about Boadicea, the pirate Anne Bonney and Lady Emma Hamilton. The other thing about Molly was that she always liked to back the losers, such as Boadicea, the cavaliers, or Anne Bonney who ended up in prison and would have been hung if she had not been pregnant. From time to time she surveyed the restaurant as she talked. Then, ‘Look at the drab clothes everyone is wearing in here. All those blacks and browns! And things were better when men wore swords, for then there was the spice of challenge and danger in the streets. But, as well as danger, there used to be honour, courtesy and ceremony. Now it’s efficiency, sound economy and all things boring.’

Molly had taken three-quarters of their hour setting out her view of history. All that natter must be some kind of displacement activity, though it was pleasant to see her so animated. Sadly, she had shown no real interest in warehousing. Tom told her that he did not think that what they had been talking about over lunch really counted as co-counselling. Though he had been paying full attention, he could not see that anything she had said gave as much as a hint as to why she had joined an encounter group. She nodded in agreement, ‘Bugger that! We will try and do better next time. Perhaps then I will tell you about my men.’

As they came out of Cranks, she looked left and right. Then, ‘Can you walk me back to Sotheby’s?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m running late and I really ought to catch a bus now. My boss did not give me much time off.’

The next minute she had hailed a taxi and darted into it. Looking round, Tom saw behind him a young man who was looking furious. Doubtless he had hailed the cab first. Tom made his way over to Piccadilly, caught the 88 bus to Vauxhall and walked on from there to the warehouse. He and Molly had wasted their lunch in avoiding the truth. But then, why not? Lies are usually nicer, kinder things than truths.

CHAPTER THREE

Molly arrived at the second encounter session flustered and out of breath. Under her canary yellow raincoat she was wearing a green shift dress and a cloche hat. Almost everybody else was wearing glum winter clothing. The exception was Ferdie, the man with wiry black hair who had been Tom’s neighbour in the previous session. He was in full evening dress. The session started late and, as the group waited for Leon, they discussed whether they should all take their clothes off again, before deciding against it, since they had already done that, been there and, as it were, lost the T-shirt. When Leon did arrive, he entered carrying a long and broad white strip of cloth.

‘What is that Leon?’

‘It is my winding sheet. I want to know what it will be like when I am dead.’

Philip was about to say something, but Ferdie cut in, ‘Hey, great! Just lie down there and we will give you the funeral you deserve.’

Sally started to wrap the cloth round the recumbent Leon, starting with his feet. For a few minutes Ferdie stood silent behind Leon’s head. He was thinking. Then he started, ‘Brothers and Sisters of Quaesitor, we are gathered here this evening to bid our beloved colleague, Leon, farewell. I’d like to share with you these thoughts.

‘Though we felt we hardly knew him before he went and died on us, he will be greatly missed. We shall not see his like again, not in this basement anyway. He was always ready to help our group to which he contributed so much. As you know, he had been seriously ill for some time. He fought bravely, but the cancer turned out to be a tougher and more ruthless fighter than he was and at last it came upon him like a thief in the night and, piff-paff, that was the end of him! “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight and burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.” And now I think that it is for me to invite you to come up one by one and pay your own personal tributes to our dear departed Leon.’

Meanwhile, the wrapping had been going slowly, since it was an awkward business, as Sally and Fiona, her of the ‘manky body’, kept having to get Leon to roll over in order to slide the winding sheet under him. Also Melanie was lying at Leon’s feet sobbing unconvincingly. Nick was raising and lowering his hands in lamentation. Josephine was sitting in a corner with her hands over her ears and humming to herself. (Later they learnt that she believed that talking about cancer, or even thinking about it, could bring it on.) The rest of the group were looking at one another, all reluctant to be the first to offer a funeral tribute.

‘Perhaps our beloved leader, Philip, would like to lead us in this memorial tribute,’ Ferdie suggested. But it was Jerome who staggered to his feet.

‘Actually I think he is well out of it since…’

But he was cut off by Philip who bellowed, ‘Stop this nonsense, all of you, now, immediately! Quaesitor is not cheap and it is your money you are wasting! Let Leon out of that stupid sheet and get back into the circle.’

Ferdie insisted on adding, ‘ “And say to all the world, this was a man.” But hist! He breathes yet!’

‘Yes, he is blinking his eyes,’ Melanie confirmed.

Then Ferdie sat down quickly and Melanie followed. Leon, who was looking furious since he had hoped for something more serious, threw off his grave-cloth and rejoined the circle, remarking as he did so, ‘The rest of you have thirty, forty, maybe fifty years ahead of you. I have at most two.’

Once they were all back in what were supposed to be their proper places and Philip had calmed down, he continued, ‘From now on no trophies are to be brought to the group sessions. So no teddy bears, no urns full of ashes, no stuffed animals, no er…’

Raymond jumped in to finish the list for him, ‘No firearms, flick knives, uncooked meats, pornography, uncut diamonds or large quantities of foreign currency.’

Philip sighed and then got them doing ten minutes of communal humming in order to help everyone calm down and get on the same wavelength. Then he went round the room checking on how the co-counselling sessions had gone. He got a lot of vague but affirmative responses. One had to learn to affirm the identity and needs of others. All so much blah, until he got to Tom who said, ‘I am sure that I am speaking for Molly as well as myself when I say that we cannot stand each other and, so far at least, we don’t really seem to have any problems that can be resolved by talking them through.’

Molly nodded emphatically.

‘Well, I suppose that I could take over the co-counselling of Molly,’ said Philip tentatively.

The protests of Tom and Molly were simultaneous.

‘That would leave me without a co-counselling partner!’