"And his wife's very attractive?"

"Well, she was," I said. "I've never spoken to her."

"But you've seen her since you got down here?"

"Only in the distance," I said. "She wouldn't know me."

"Was she around in the old days when you used to stay here as an undergraduate?"

"She could have been," I said, "but I never met her, or the husband. I know very little about them."

"But you knew enough to recognise her children when you saw them the other day?"

I felt myself getting tied up in knots. "Darling," I said," what is all this? Magnus occasionally mentions names of friends and acquaintances, and the Carminowes were amongst them. That's all there is to it. Oliver Carminowe was married before and Isolda is his second wife, and they have two daughters. Satisfied?"

"Isolda?" she said. "What a romantic name."

"No more romantic than Vita," I replied. "Can't we give her a rest?"

"It's funny", she said, "that Mrs. Collins has never heard of them. She's such a mine of information on local affairs. But in any case there's a perfectly good stables up the road from here at Menabilly Barton, she tells me, so I'm going to fix something up with the people there."

"Thank God for that," I said. "Why not fix it right away?"

She stared at me a moment, then turned round and went out of the room. I surreptitiously got out my handkerchief and wiped my forehead, which was sweating again. It was a lucky thing the Carminowes were extinct, or she would have run them to earth somehow and invited a bewildered descendant to lunch next Sunday.


Two, nearly three days to go before Magnus came to my rescue. It was difficult to fob Vita off once her interest was aroused, and it was typical of his malicious sense of fun to have mentioned the name. The rest of Wednesday passed without incident, and thank heaven I had no return of confusion. It was such a relief to be without our guests that little else mattered. The boys went riding and enjoyed themselves, and, although Vita may have suffered from anti-climax and a normal reaction from a hangover, she had the good sense not to say so, nor did she make any further reference to our party the preceding night. We went to bed early and slept like logs, awaking on Thursday to a day of steady rain. It did not worry me, but Vita and the boys were disappointed, having planned another expedition in the boat.

"I hope it's not going to be a wet weekend," said Vita. "What in the world shall I do with the boys if it is? You won't want them hanging about the house all day when the Professor is here."

"Don't worry about Magnus," I told her. "He'll be full of suggestions for them and for us. Anyway, he and I may have work to do."

"What sort of work? Surely not shutting yourselves up in that peculiar room in the basement?"

She was nearer the truth than she imagined. "I don't know exactly," I said vaguely. "He has a lot of papers tucked away, and he may want to go through them with me. Historical research, and so on. I've told you about this new hobby."

"Well, Teddy might be interested in that, and so should I," she said. "It would be fun if we all took a picnic to some historical site or other. What about Tintagel? Mrs. Collins says everyone should see Tintagel."

"Not exactly Magnus's line of country, and anyway too full of tourists," I said. "We'll see what he wants to do when he arrives."

I wondered how the hell we should be shot of them if Magnus wanted to visit the Gratten. Anyway, it would be his problem, not mine.


Thursday dragged, and a dreary walk along Par sands did little to alleviate it. Magnus had told me to sweat it out, and by the evening I knew what he meant. Sweat was the operative word, and in the physical sense. I had seldom if ever been troubled by this common affliction of mankind. At school, yes, after violent exercise, but not to the extent suffered by some of my companions. Now, after any minor exertion, or even perhaps when sitting still, I would sweat from every pore, the perspiration having a peculiar acid tang to it that I fervently hoped nobody would be aware of but myself.

The first time it happened, after the walk along Par sands, I thought it was merely connected with the exercise I had taken, and I had a bath before dinner, but during the course of the evening, when Vita and the boys were watching television and I was sitting comfortably in the music-room listening to records, it started again. A clammy feeling of sudden chill, then the sweat pouring from my head, neck, armpits, trunk, lasting for perhaps five minutes before it passed, but my shirt was wringing wet by the time the attack was over. Laughable, like sea-sickness, when it happens to anyone but oneself, this side-effect, which was obviously a new reaction from the drug, threw me into sudden panic. I switched off the gramophone and went upstairs to wash and change for the second time, wondering what on earth would happen if I suffered a further attack later when I was in bed with Vita. Nervous apprehension did not make for an easy night, and Vita was in one of her conversational moods that lasted through undressing and continued until we were lying side by side. I could not have been more nervous had I been a bridegroom on the first night of honeymoon, and I found myself edging away to my side of the bed, giving vent to prodigious yawns as a sign that excessive fatigue had overtaken me. We turned out the bedside lights, and I went through a kind of pantomime of heavy breathing on the verge of sleep which may or may not have fooled Vita, but after one or two attempts to coil close — which I ignored — she turned over on her side and was soon asleep.

I lay awake thinking of the hell I would give Magnus when he arrived. Nausea, vertigo, confusion, a bloodshot eye, and now acid sweat, and all for what? A moment in time, long past, that had no bearing on the present, that served no purpose in his life or mine, and could as little benefit the world in which we lived as a scrapbook of forgotten memories lying idle in a dusty drawer. So I argued, up to midnight and beyond, but common sense has a habit of vanishing when the demon of insomnia rides us in the small hours, and as I lay there, counting first two, and then three, on the illuminated face of the travelling clock beside the bed, I remembered how I had walked about that other world with a dreamer's freedom but with a waking man's perception. Roger had been no faded snapshot in time's album; and even now, in this fourth dimension into which I had stumbled inadvertently but Magnus with intent, he lived and moved, ate and slept, beneath me in his house Kylmerth, enacting his living Now which ran side by side with my immediate Present, and so the two merged.

Am I my brother's keeper? Cain's cry of protest against God suddenly had new meaning for me as I watched the hands of the clock move towards ten past three. Roger was my keeper, I was his. There was no past, no present, no future. Everything living is part of the whole. We are all bound, one to the other, through time and eternity, and, our senses once opened, as mine had been opened by the drug, to a new understanding of his world and mine, fusion would take place, there would be no separation, there would be no… This would be the ultimate meaning of the experiment, surely, that by moving about in time death was destroyed. This was what Magnus so far had not understood.

To him, the drug released the complex brew within the brain that served up the savoured past. To me, it proved that the past was living still, that we were all participants, all witnesses. I was Roger, I was Bodrugan, I was Cain; and in being so was more truly myself.

I felt myself on the brink of some tremendous discovery when I fell asleep.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I DID NOT wake up until after ten, and when I did Vita was standing by the bed with the breakfast tray of toast and coffee.

"Huh," I said. "I must have overslept."

"Yes," she said, and then, looking at me critically, "Are you feeling all right?"

I sat up in bed and took the tray from her. "Perfectly," I said. "Why?"

"You were restless during the night", she told me, "and perspired a great deal. Look, your pyjama top is quite damp."

It was, and I threw it off. "Extraordinary thing," I said. "Be an angel and get me a towel."

She brought me one from the bathroom, and I rubbed myself down before reaching for the coffee.

"Something to do with all that exercise on Par beach with the boys," I said.

"I wouldn't have thought so," she replied, staring at me, puzzled, "and anyway you took a bath afterwards. I've never known you perspire from exercise before."

"Well, it happens to people," I said. "It's my age-group. The male menopause, perhaps, striking me down in my prime."

"I hope not," she said. "How very unpleasant." She wandered over to the dressing-table and surveyed herself in the mirror as if that might hold the answer to the problem. "It's odd," she went on, "but both Diana and I remarked on the fact that you weren't looking yourself despite that suntan from sailing." She wheeled round suddenly, facing me. "You must admit you're not a hundred per cent," she went on. "I don't know what it is, darling, but it worries me. You're moody, distrait, as if you had something on your mind all the time. Then that funny bloodshot eye…"

"Oh, for heaven's sake," I interrupted, "give it a miss, can't you? I admit I was foul-tempered when Bill and Diana were here, and I apologise. We all had too much to drink, and that was that. Must we do a post-mortem on every hour?"