"Like masturbation."

"I thought it would come to that. I thought you'd have to bring sex into it sooner or later. Anyway, a kind of infinite Ninth Symphony. God as Eternal Beauty. God as Truth? Nonsense. God as Goodness. That means shehit has to be in some sort of ethical relationship with beings that are notGod. But God is removed, cut off, self-subsistent, not giving a damn."

"But that's horrible. I couldn't live with a God like that."

"You don't have to. Anyway, what have you or anybody else got to do with it? God doesn't have to be what people want shehit to be. I'm fed up with God," Enderby said, "so let's get on to something else." And at once he got up painfully and noisily to find the whisky bottle, this being about the time for. "I haven't got any glasses," he said. "Not clean ones, anyway. You'll have to have it from the bottle."

"I don't want any." She didn't want her tea either. Quite right: gnat piss. Enderby got down again. "If there's no life after death," she said, "why does it matter about doing good in this world? I mean, if there's no reward or punishment in the next."

"That's terrible," Enderby sneered. "Doing things because of what you're bloody well going to get out of it." He took some whisky and did a conventional shudder. It raged briefly through the inner streets and then was transmuted into benevolent warmth in the citadel. Enderby smiled on the girl kindly and offered the bottle. She took it, raised it like a trumpet to the heavens, sucked in a millilitre or so. "And, while we're at it," he said, "let's decide what we mean by good."

"You decide. It's you who are being interviewed."

"Well, there are some stupid bastards who can't understand how the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp could go home after torturing Jews all day and then weep tears of joy at a Schubert symphony on the radio. They say: here's a man dedicated to evil capable of enjoying the good. But what the imbecilic sods don't realise is that there are two kinds of good-one is neutral, outside ethics, purely aesthetic. You get it in music or in a sunset if you like that sort of thing or in a grilled steak or in an apple. If God's good, if God exists that is, God's probably good in that way. As I said." He sipped from the bottle she had handed back. "Before."

"Or sex. Sex is as good whether-I mean, you don't have to be in what they used to call a state of grace to enjoy it."

"That's good," Enderby said warmly. "That's right. Though you're still going on about sex. You mean lesbian sex, of course, in your case. Not that I have anything against it, naturally, except that I'm not permitted to experience it. The world's getting narrower all the time. All little sects doing what they call their own thing."

"Why do you keep showing your balls all the time?" she said boldly. "Don't you have underpants or anything?"

Enderby flushed very deeply all over. "I had no intention," he said. "I can assure you. What I mean is, I'll put something on. I was not trying to provoke-I apologise," he said, going off back to the bedroom. He came out again wearing nondescript trousers, something from an old suit, and a not overclean striped shirt. Also slippers. He said, "There." The hypocritical little bitch had been at the bottle in his brief absence. He could tell that from her slight slur. She said:

"Evil."

"Who? Oh, evil." And he sat down again. "Evil is the destructive urge. Not to be confused with mere wrong. Wrong is what the government doesn't like. Sometimes a thing can be wrong and evil at the same time-murder, for instance. But then it can be right to murder. Like you people going round killing the Vietnamese and so on. Evil called right."

"It wasn't right. Nobody said it was right."

"The government did. Get this straight. Right and wrong are fluid and interchangeable. What's right one day can be wrong the next. And vice versa. It's right to like the Chinese now. Before you started playing Ping-pong with them it was wrong. A lot of evil nonsense. What you kids need is some good food (there you are, see: good in non-ethical sense) and an idea of what good and evil are about."

"Well, go on, tell us."

"Nobody," said Enderby, having taken a swig, "has any clear idea about good. Oh, giving money to the poor perhaps. Helping old ladies across the street. That sort of thing. Evil's different. Everybody knows evil. Brought up to it, you see. Original sin."

"I don't believe in original sin." She was taking the bottle quite manfully now. "We're free."

Enderby looked on her bitterly, also sweating. It was really too hot to wear anything indoors. Damned unchangeable central heating, controlled by some cold sadist somewhere in the basement. Bitterly because she'd hit on the damned problem that he had to present in the poem. She ought to go away now and let him get on with it. Still, his duty. One of his students. He was being paid. Those brown bastards in whose hands he had left La Belle Mer would be shovelling it all from till to pocket. Bad year we had, señor. Had to near shut up bloody shop. He said carefully:

"Well, yes. Freeish. Wir sind ein wenig frei. Wagner wrote that. Gave it to Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger." And then: "No, to hell with it. Wholly free. Totally free to choose between good and evil. The other things don't matter-I mean free to drink a quart of whisky without vomiting and so on. Free to touch one's forehead with one's foot. And so forth."

"I can do that," she said. The latter. Doing it. That was the whisky, God help the ill-nourished child.

"But," Enderby said, ignoring the acrobatics. She didn't seem to be bothering to use her cassette thing any more. Never mind. "But we're disposed to do evil rather than good. History is the record of that. Given the choice, we're inclined to do the bad thing. That's all it means. We have to make a strong effort to do the good thing."

"Examples of evil," she said.

"Oh," said Enderby. "Killing for the sake of doing it. Torturing for pleasure-it always is that, though, isn't it? Defacing a work of art. Farting during a performance of a late Beethoven quartet. That must be evil because it's not wrong. I mean, there's no law against it."

"We believe," she said, sitting up seriously, checking the cassette machine and holding it out, "that a time will come when evil will be no more. She'll come again, and that will be the end of evil."

"Who's she?"

"Jesus, of course."

Enderby breathed deeply several times. "Look," he said. "If you get rid of evil you get rid of choice. You've got to have things to choose between, and that means good and evil. If you don't choose, you're not human any more. You're something else. Or you're dead."

"You're sweating just terribly," she said. "There's no need to wear all that. Don't you have swimming trunks?"

"I don't swim," Enderby said.

"It is hot," she said. And she began to remove her Coke-and-hamburger-stained sweater. Enderby gulped and gulped. He said:

"This is, you must admit, somewhat irregular. I mean, the professor and student relationship and all that sort of thing."

"You exhibited yourself. That's somewhat irregular too." By now she had taken off the sweater. She was, he supposed, decently dressed by beach standards, but there was a curious erotic difference between the two kinds of top worn. This was austere enough-no frills or representations of black hands feeling for the nipples. Still, it was undress. Beach dress was not that. He said:

"An interesting question when you come to think of it. If somebody's lying naked on the beach it's not erotic. Naked on the bed is different. Even more different on the floor."

"The first one's functional," she said. "Like for a surgical operation. Nakedness is only erotic when it's obviously not for anything else."