V.

"Your way would leave them strength to prolong it. My employers must move in a straight line. No sidetrackings. Annexationists are a minority in Italy, but bothersome."

"Absolute upheaval," a nostalgic smile: "that is your way, Victoria, of course." For in Florence, during the bloody demonstration before the Venezuelan Consulate, he had dragged her away from an unarmed policeman, whose face she was flaying with pointed fingernails. Hysterical girl, tattered velvet. Riot was her element, as surely as this dark room, almost creeping with amassed objects. The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him.

"Shall I tell you where I have been since our last closed room?"

"No. What need to tell me? No doubt I have passed and repassed you, or your work, in every city Whitehall has called me to." He chuckled fondly.

"How pleasant to watch Nothing." Her face (so rarely had he seen it that way!) was at peace, the live eye dead as the other, with the clock-iris. He'd not been surprised at the eye; no more than at the star sapphire sewn into her navel. There is surgery, and surgery. Even in Florence - the comb, which she would never let him touch or remove - he had noted an obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter.

"See my lovely shoes," as half an hour before he'd knelt to remove them. "I would so like to have an entire foot that way, a foot of amber and gold, with the veins, perhaps, in intaglio instead of bas-relief. How tiresome to have the same feet: one can only change one's shoes. But if a girl could have, oh, a lovely rainbow or wardrobe of different-hued, different-sized and shaped feet . . ."

Girl? She was nearly forty. But then - aside from a body less alive, how much in fact had she changed? Wasn't she the same balloon-girl who'd seduced him on a leather couch in the Florence consulate twenty years ago?

"I must go," he told her.

"My caretaker will drive you back." As if conjured, the mutilated face appeared at the door. Whatever it felt at seeing them together didn't show in any change of expression. Perhaps it was too painful to change expression. The lantern that night had given an illusion of change: but Stencil saw now the face was fixed as any death-mask.

In the automobile, racketing back toward Valletta, neither spoke till they'd reached the city's verge.

"You must not hurt her, you know."

Stencil turned, struck by a thought. "You are young Gadrulfi - Godolphin - aren't you?"

"We both have an interest in her," Godolphin said. "I am her servant."

"I too, in a way. She will not be hurt. She cannot be."

III

Events began to shape themselves for June and the coming Assembly. If Demivolt detected any change in Stencil, he gave no sign. Maijstral continued to report, and his wife kept silent; the child presumably growing inside her, also shaping itself for June.

Stencil and Veronica Manganese met often. It was hardly a matter of any mysterious "control"; she held no unspeakable secrets over his balding head, nor did she exert any particular sexual fascination. It could only be age's worst side-effect: nostalgia. A tilt toward the past so violent he found it increasingly more difficult to live in the real present he believed to be so politically crucial. The villa in Sliema became more and more a retreat into late-afternoon melancholy. His yarning with Mehemet, his sentimental drunks with Demivolt; these plus Fairing's protean finaglings and Carla Maijstral's inference to a humanitarian instinct he'd abandoned before entering the service, combined to undermine what virtú he'd brought through sixty years on the go, making him really no further use in Malta. Treacherous pasture, this island.

Veronica was kind. Her time with Stencil was entirely for him. No appointments, whispered conferences, hurried paper work: only resumption of their hothouse-time - as if it were marked by any old and overprecious clock which could be wound and set at will. For it came to that, finally: an alienation from time, much as Malta itself was alienated from any history in which cause precedes effect.

Carla did come to him again with unfaked tears this time; and pleading, not defiant.

"The priest is gone," she wept. "Whom else do I have? My husband and I are strangers. Is it another woman?"

He was tempted to tell her. But was restrained by the fine irony. He found himself hoping that there was indeed adultery between his old "love" and the shipfitter; if only to complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago, a beginning kept forcibly from his thoughts for the same period of time.

Herbert would be eighteen. And probably helling it all about the dear old isles. What would he think of his father . . .

His father, ha.

"Signora," hastily, "I have been selfish. Everything I can do. My promise."

"We - my child and I: why should we continue to live?"