"All right," said Dr Ernest Henderson, "I will deal with you."

Horace waited among the shards of pottery and broken lilacs, pondering his own position vis-a-vis the law.

73

Dr Ernest Montgomery Charles Maguire Henderson had a hell of a temper. It always surprised those who witnessed it, for ninety-nine per cent of the time he was a taciturn bachelor not given to loud noises. And then: whizz, bang, a plate or a horse's shoe or an Oxford dictionary was sailing through the air, on its way to a windowpane or towards a painting or a wall, and the chunky little man (as hard as an armchair stuffed with too much horsehair) would seem, momentarily, to compress, to compact his muscled frame, and just when you expected the poltergeist that had propelled the object through the air to take possession of him and expand with a malevolent rush, he would go quite limp, bite his small moustache thoughtfully, and go back to the ordinary business of life.

Discovering shards of pottery or dictionaries with broken spines he would be inclined to regard them with surprise, and move them around a little with the toe of his shoe as if they were birds run down by speeding automobiles.

Yet the thing that had made him lose his temper was exactly the same thing that made him, on this April night, leave his empty echoing house happily, with relief, and follow the Hispano Suiza eagerly: he was in love with a lady already spoken for.

The lights of the doctor's Packard, which blazed into the back windows of the Hispano Suiza, seemed to Horace to be charged with the malevolence of an inquisitor.

"I'm in for it now," he told Molly who had been silent since her tyre-squealing departure from the doctor's house. "He'll have me charged."

Molly sucked in her breath and expelled it. She accelerated grimly. She had heard every word of Horace's speech as it swooped from high falsetto to surprising baritone.

"Love her," she snorted, attacking the gearbox with anger. "Love her. Some way to show your filthy love."

"She begged me," Horace said, aghast to find one more enemy. "She wept. Dear lady, please…"

"Don't 'dear lady' me," said Molly grimly. "If she dies I'll charge you too. I have one hundred thousand pounds", she said, "and I'll spend every penny of it on lawyers if I have to."

"Oh God," moaned Horace. "Oh God, dear God."

"You pray to God. Pray to God she doesn't die."

"The love is platonic."

Molly shuddered at such a dirty-sounding word. She fled from its filth at seventy miles an hour down Ballarat Road with the doctor's Packard roaring at her tail.

"She asked me to do it," Horace cried as they bounced on to the track to the house. As Molly ploughed into her rose bed with the handbrake full on, Horace was catapulted upwards from his seat and slammed his shorn head against the roof.

She turned off the engine. "Pray," she said, "if you know what's good for you."

Ernest Henderson, arriving a minute later, caught the sight of a woman in a huge black taffeta dress splendidly decorated with rose appliques. Seen in the headlights of his car, she appeared large and blowzy and theatrical. She strode towards the house with the poet stumbling miserably behind.

No one stayed to escort the doctor inside. He entered the kitchen to find the large black taffeta dress at prayer with her knees on extravagant linoleum and her head on the kitchen table. The poet was leaning against a window and staring out into the night.

The doctor coughed.

Horace turned to face his executioner.

"She's praying."

"Yes."

"If you don't charge me, she will."

The doctor winked. "Let's see the patient, mmmm?"

Horace took him to the bedroom where they found Phoebe in her husband's arms. The doctor asked for more light. Horace brought back a second lamp and when he returned he found the doctor standing and silently contemplating the embracing couple. Horace held up the lamp and sadly regarded this evidence of his complete betrayal.

74

When the doctor had contented himself that the patient's stomach was quite empty, he administered a draught of Galls solution to stop the spasms and gave her a strong sedative.

In the kitchen he found atheistic Horace kneeling at the kitchen table beside the mother whose bosom, whether from religious passion or anger, was heaving in a manner that was impossible to ignore.

I leaned against the kitchen sink too weary and worried to counterfeit devotion.

It was Horace (looking up from pragmatic prayers) who asked the question about the patient.

The doctor was pleased to announce that both mother and child would survive the ordeal. He helped Molly up from the floor.

"Just the same," he said to me, "you should be indebted to your lawyer mate. You'd never have got me here if not for him."

Molly gave the poet and the doctor a look of utter disgust.

"If not for him?" she said, sitting with a grunt.

Horace stared at Molly with his mouth open, but when she did not continue, he shut it again.

"What lawyer?" I said. Relief had made my face go as soft and foolish as a flummery.

"He's just a Rawleigh's man," said Molly.

"Is he now?" said the doctor, chewing his moustache and raising his eyebrows at the poet in question.

"For Man or Beast," said Molly. "Door to door. Horse and cart."

"Then he makes a prettier threat than any barrister I ever heard. You should have heard him," he told me. "He would have had me drawn and quartered, locked in gaol and left to rot. He had judges and juries and clerks of court ready to grab me and tie me up. So if he is a Rawleigh's man, I'll wager a quid he will end up a rich one, and he deserves it too."

Thus Ernest Henderson brought all his power to save the skin of a man in love.

"You should thank this man," he told me, "and the dear lady who drove so well. It was a performance few men would be capable of."

Molly and I exchanged glances. Somewhere in the air, half-way between us, incredulity met a star-bright beam of triumph.

"She can't drive," I said. "I know it."

"She can," the doctor said. "Like a dream."

Molly blushed deep red with pleasure.

"Granted," the doctor said, "it is a fine motor car, but she raced it like a gentleman."

But Molly could not be appeased quite so easily. She folded her arms across her bosom, as if to ward off further flattery, and demanded to be told the cause of her daughter's problem. The doctor said that he had no doubt it was caused by a gastric attack similar to many he had seen that day, that it was, if anything, milder than normal; there was no risk to the child.

It was I who raised the question of poison. I raised it meekly, pointed to it, as though it were a household mouse I wished a stronger soul to kill.

Ernest Henderson, if you want my opinion, was not normally an inventive or practised liar. But that night the muse was with him and he constructed such a dazzling thread of pure invention and looped it back and forth so many times that I could not work out where anything started or stopped; he buttoned it neatly with Latin words (like bright-coloured pills with shiny coatings) and, although Molly did not trouble herself to believe a word he said, Horace and I, for different reasons, looked at the fabric he wove with appreciation and relief.

Well, tell me then, what was my choice? To believe my wife deceitful? A liar? A cheat? A collaborator with other cheats? Of course not. I took the lies and held them gratefully. I wrapped them round me and felt the soft comfort a child feels inside a woollen rug. And this, of course, is what anyone means when they say a lie is creditable; they do not mean that it is a perfect piece of engineering, but that it is comfortable. It is why we believed the British when they told us we were British too, and why we believed the Americans when they said they would protect us. In all these cases, of course, there is a part of us that knows the thing is not true, and we hold it closer to ourselves because of it, refusing to hold it out at arm's length or examine it against the light.