'Well, I think you have drained me now,' said my informant with a smile. 'My reminiscences are getting shallower and sillier – and I hardly think it worth while to add that Sebastian got a first and that we had our picture taken in full glory – I shall try and find it some day and send it to you if you like. Must you really leave now? Would you not like to see the Backs? Come along and visit the crocuses, Sebastian used to call them "the poet's mushrooms", if you see what he meant.'

But it was raining too hard. We stood for a minute or two under the porch, and then I said I thought I'd better be going.

'Oh, look here,' called Sebastian's friend after me, as I was already picking my way among the puddles. 'I quite forgot to tell you. The Master told me the other day that somebody wrote to him asking whether Sebastian Knight had really been a Trinity man. Now, what was the fellow's name? Oh, bother…. My memory has shrunk in the washing. Well, we did give it a good rinsing, didn't we? Anyway, I gathered that somebody was collecting data for a book on Sebastian Knight. Funny, you don't seem to have – '

'Sebastian Knight?' – said a sudden voice in the mist. 'Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?'

6

The stranger who uttered these words now approached – Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! How comfortable it would have been had the voice belonged to some cheery old don with long downy ear-lobes and that puckering about the eyes which stands for wisdom and humour…. A handy character, a welcome passer-by who had also known my hero, but from a different angle. 'And now,' he would say, 'I am going to tell you the real story of Sebastian Knight's college years.' And then and there He would have launched on that story. But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale. Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? repeats that voice in my conscience. Who indeed? His best friend and his half-brother. A gentle scholar, remote from life, and an embarrassed traveller visiting a distant land. And where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of St Damier. Laughingly alive in five volumes. Peering unseen over my shoulder as I write this (although I dare say he mistrusted too strongly the commonplace of eternity to believe even now in his own ghost).

Anyway, here was I with the booty that friendship could yield. To this I added a few casual facts occurring in Sebastian's very short letters belonging to that period and the chance references to University life found scattered amongst his books. I then returned to London where I had neatly planned my next move.

At our last meeting Sebastian had happened to mention a kind of secretary whom he had employed from time to time between 1930 and 1934. Like many authors in the past, and as very few in the present (or perhaps we are simply unaware of those who fail to manage their affairs in a sound pushing manner), Sebastian was ridiculously helpless in business matters and once having found an adviser (who incidentally might be a shark or a blockhead – or both) he gave himself up to him entirely with the greatest relief. Had I perchance inquired whether he was perfectly certain that So-and-So now handling his affairs was not a meddlesome old rogue, he would have hurriedly changed the subject, so in dread was he that the discovery of another's mischief might force his own laziness into action. In a word he preferred the worst assistant to no assistant at all, and would convince himself and others that he was perfectly content with his choice. Having said all this I should like to stress .the fact as definitely as possible that none of my words are – from a legal point of view – slanderous, and that the name I am about to mention has not appeared in this particular paragraph.

Now what I wanted from Mr Goodman was not so much an account of Sebastian's last years – that I did not yet need – (for I intended to follow his life stage by stage without overtaking him), but merely to obtain a few suggestions as to what people I ought to see who might know something of Sebastian's post-Cambridge period.

So on 1 March 1936, I called on Mr Goodman at his office in Fleet Street. But before describing our interview I must be allowed a short digression.

Amongst Sebastian's letters I found as already mentioned some correspondence between him and his publisher dealing with a certain novel. It appears that in Sebastian's first book (1925), The Prismatic Bezel, one of the minor characters is an extremely comic and cruel skit upon a certain living author whom Sebastian found necessary to chastise. Naturally the publisher knew it immediately and this fact made him so uncomfortable that he advised Sebastian to modify the whole passage, a thing which Sebastian flatly refused to do, saying finally that he would get the book printed elsewhere – and this he eventually did.

'You seem to wonder', – he wrote in one letter, 'what on earth could make me, a budding author (as you say – but that is a misapplied term, for your authentic budding author remains budding all his life; others, like me, spring into blossom in one bound), you seem to wonder, let me repeat (which does not mean I am apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis), why the hell I should take a nice porcelain blue contemporary (X does remind one, doesn't he, of those cheap china things which tempt one at fairs to an orgy of noisy, destruction) and let him drop from the tower of my prose to the gutter below. You tell me he is widely esteemed; that his sales in Germany are almost as tremendous as his sales here; that an old story of his has just been selected for Modern Masterpieces; that together with Y and Z he is considered one of the leading writers of the "post-war" generation; and that, last but not least, he is dangerous as a critic. You seem to hint that we should all keep the dark secret of his success, which is to travel second-class with a third-class ticket – or if my simile is not sufficiently clear – to pamper the taste of the worst category of the reading public – not those who revel in detective yarns, bless their pure souls – but those who buy the worst banalities because they have been shaken' up in a modem way with a dash of Freud or "stream of consciousness" or whatnot – and incidentally do not and never will understand that the pretty cynics of today are Marie Corelli's nieces and old Mrs Grundy's nephews. Why should we keep that shameful secret? What is this masonic bond of triteness – or indeed tritheism? Down with these shoddy gods I And then you go and tell me that my "literary career" will be hopelessly handicapped from the start by my attacking an influential and esteemed writer. But even if there were such a thing as a "literary career" and I were disqualified merely for riding my own horse, still I would refuse to change one single word in what I have written. For, believe me, no imminent punishment can be violent enough to make me abandon the pursuit of my pleasure, especially when this pleasure is the firm young bosom of truth. There are in fact not many things in life comparable to the delight of satire, and when I imagine the humbug's face as he reads (and read he shall) that particular passage and knows as well as we do that it is the truth, then delight reaches its sweetest climax. Let me add that if I have faithfully rendered not only X's inner world (which is no more than a tube station during rush hours) but also his tricks of speech and demeanour, I emphatically deny that he or any other reader may discern the least trace of vulgarity in the passage which causes you such alarm. So do not let this haunt you any longer. Remember too that I take all responsibility, moral and commercial, in case you really "get into trouble" with my innocent little volume.'