The Rebel Angels

"Here's the omelette. More Orvieto? I will. I need sustaining during our next big instalment.

"This was a descent into Hell. I'm not being melodramatic; just wait and see. I came back here, and got a job teaching philosophy – which has always been quite a good trade and keeps bread in your mouth – and Spook was happy to reclaim one of its bright boys. Not so happy when they could no longer blind themselves to the fact that I was leading some of their students into what they had to regard as evil courses of life. Kids are awful squealers, you know; you seduce them and they like that, but they also like confessing and bleating about it. And I wasn't a very nice fellow, I suppose; I used to laugh at them when they had qualms of conscience.

"So Spook threw me out, and I got a couple of jobs teaching out West, where the same thing happened, rather quicker. This was before the Dawn of Permissiveness, you must remember.

"I managed to get a job in the States, just as the first rosy gleam of Permissiveness appeared on the horizon. By this time I was in rather a bad way, because rough fun with kids didn't erase the memory of what had happened with Henry, and I was pretty heavily on the booze. A drunk, though I didn't see it quite in those terms. And booze wasn't a complete answer, so it being the mode of the day, I had a go at drugs, and they were fine. Really fine. I saw myself as a free soul and a great enlightener of the young… Maria, that ring on your finger twinkles most fascinatingly every time you lift your fork to your mouth. Isn't that rather a big diamond for a girl who entertains her friends at The Rude Plenty?"

"Just costume jewellery," I said, and took it off and tucked it into my handbag. I was stupid to wear it, but I had put it on for McVarish's cocktail party the day before and had worn it to dinner with Arthur Cornish, who took me out afterwards. I liked it, and absent-mindedly put it on today, breaking my rule never to wear that sort of thing at the University.

"Liar. That's a very good rock."

"Let's go on with your story. I'm spellbound."

"As if by the Ancient Mariner? 'He listens as a three-years child, The Mariner hath his will.' Well, not to drag things out, the Mariner was shipped back to Canada by the F.B.I, because of a little trouble at my American university, and the next thing the Mariner knew he was in a Foundation in British Columbia, where some earnest and skilled people were working to get him off the drugs and the drink. Do you know how that's done? They just take the drugs away from you and for a while you have a thorough foretaste of Hell, and you sweat and rave and roll around and then you feel as I imagine the very old feel, if they're unlucky. Then, for the drink, they fill you full of a special drug and let you have a drink when you feel like one, only you don't feel like one because the drug makes the effect of the booze so awful that you can't face even a glass of sherry. The drug is called, or used to be called when I took it, Antabuse. Get the featherlight pun? Antibooze! God, the humour of the medical world! Then, when you're cleared out physically, and in terrible shape mentally, they set to work to put you on your intellectual feet again. For me that was worst of all – Ah, thank God for spaghetti! And Chianti – no, no, not to worry, Maria, I'm not slipping back into addiction, as they so unpleasantly call it. Just a mild binge with a friend. I can control it, never you fear.

"Let's see, where were we – ah, yes, Group Therapy. Know what that is? Well, you get together with a group of your peers, and you rap together about your problems, and you are free to say anything you like, about yourself or anybody else who feels like talking, and it's all immensely therapeutic. Gets it all out of your system. Real psychological high jinks. Blood all over the walls. Of course I had some private sessions with a shrink, but the Group Therapy was the big magic.

"The only trouble was, I wasn't with a group of my peers. Who are my peers? Brilliant philosophers, stuffed with everything from Plato to the latest whiz-kids of the philosophical world – Logical Positivists, and such intellectual grandees. And there I was with a dismal coven of repentant soaks – a car salesman who had fallen from the creed of Kiwanis, and a Jewish woman whose family misunderstood her attempts to put them straight on everything, and a couple of schoolteachers who can't ever have taught anything except Civics, and some business men whose god was Mammon, and a truck-driver who was included, I gather, to keep our eyes on the road and our discussions hitched to reality. Whose reality? Certainly not mine. So the imp of perversity prompted me to make pretty patterns of our discussions together, and screw the poor boozers up worse than they'd been screwed up before. For the first time in years, I was having a really good time.