

# THE THIRD ADAM

## PHILIP MATTHEWS

## Smashwords Edition

## Copyright Philip Matthews 2016

## ISBN 9781370700561

## FOREWORD

The late Adam Auber's journal grew haphazardly from a desultory enquiry into what has remained an unknown phenomenon he called the Voice. The sources from which he compiled the journal vary in nature, from incidental jottings through notebook entries to lengthy dictations, in which his memories and musings are recorded often in an elliptical style. Though Adam elaborated the more gnomic passages for the journal, the reader may still find it necessary to read the text with care, especially in the later parts where the details of his spiritual experiences become rather obscure.

The title and the eccentric arrangement of the journal into five parts are Adam's own. Also, it is at his specific request that the journal is being published in an electronic form on this website – an acknowledgement apparently of the influence a novelist called Eliza Browne had on him. It is also at his insistence that it is being offered to the world for free.

To quote Adam on this point:

" _The most obvious is often the most hidden: it is intended for those who know what they are looking for."_

## 1 THE OTHER WOMAN

Standing on a street corner, waiting for traffic to clear. My only thought at that point was about ratings: how limits are defined. I had come to this point through a conversation with Jocelyn. Do you consider the highs and lows when rating, say a book or a film, or perhaps deviance from a central point, or even absolutes – like how we might decide the limit by means of a desire or wish? I mean can we make the limit ourselves, and thereby determine our experiences? Take a novel, any novel: decide it is absolutely true, then read it as absolute truth. See? What happens? The novel in a way becomes your universe. What would you learn from this experience?

I argued that you would learn everything. Maybe bit by bit over time; maybe all at once in a flash.

So, standing on the street corner waiting for the traffic to clear and I felt a twitch of some kind and a voice said, low in tone but very deliberately:

'Hold station until set. Clear.'

That was it. It was a voice I had never heard before: female but neutral, engaged but functional, decisive but dispassionate. The strange thing was that there was something familiar about the voice, as though it was a voice I had been expecting to hear, but did not realise I was expecting it until I heard it.

I was surprised by this realization, but only until what seemed a part of me replied:

'Junction three co-ordinating. Reflex.'

What I did then was to put all this out of my mind so that I could concentrate on getting across the road. The next time I heard this voice occurred several months later, when we were in the air over the Bay of Biscay. We were coming in from Miami and I was irritated again that my right foot had gone to sleep again, which caused spasms to run up my leg. This in turn set my hip aching, as it always does. It's the air circulation that causes it. Anyway, I couldn't move, trapped as I was in a window seat and the aircraft beginning its descent towards Paris.

I got more frustrated than usual under these circumstances and for once I was tempted to express this frustration. How I would do this wasn't clear; I'm not the angry sort. But I was tempted to do something, whatever that might be.

It was at that point that I heard a voice say:

'Index. Transmission shearing.'

I thought then that I had never heard this voice before: so penetrating in its precision, as though nothing else was happening at that instant.

Serafina chose that moment to lean over and ask if my foot had gone dead again. I nodded. She drew her hair back from her face and smiled for me, knowing that this was a balm that would console me until things improved.

It was in the relief that Serafina's smile gave me that I remembered the earlier encounter with this voice. I wondered immediately afterwards if there were other memories of this voice that I had forgotten, feeling all over again how familiar the voice was.

But when I felt that part of me preparing to reply to the voice, I quite sharply locked down on the impulse.

Why did I do this? I think I hoped for a response. I actually got one. The voice spoke again immediately:

'Vertex three point five and slowing. Clear.'

You must remember that I have since had many interactions with this voice and I have come to understand something of my relation to it. But back on that aircraft, dead foot and all, I was quick to realise that in some way the Voice was not addressing me. In other words, I was hearing snatches of what might prove to be quite meaningful sequences of observations and instructions.

But it took me a long time to understand the nature of my responses.

Eliza Browne. It was Jocelyn who discovered the first novel by her, on some US website among a million other novels. Drawn by the nondescript title, Memories of Mama, she downloaded it on impulse, free like so many of the titles on offer there. Read it in an hour or so, all forty thousand words, sweeping through the predictable prose, predictable plot, predictable ending. Searched "Eliza Browne" and found a nondescript website, discovered the other four novels available for free download. Downloaded and read in an evening.

Nothing more to say then: Jocelyn reads ebooks like others check Twitter, all the time. But this time she pointed out a novelty to me. Eliza Browne displays a stats panel in a left hand column on the Home page. One of the books, entitled The Other Woman, had been downloaded 15,000 times but read only twice. Question: how did Eliza Browne know this, how many times this novel had been read?

It is ingenious – and perhaps worth trying out yourself if you are a writer of online novels. Halfway through The Other Woman you will encountered an invitation to enter a competition. There is the promise of a substantial cash prize for the winner. The closing date is about four years from now, so about seven years from back then, when we first read about it. The clever bit is this: there are three questions to be answered and these can only be answered by reading the remainder of the novel, or at least as far as the beginning of the climax of the novel.

See? Eliza Browne simply counts the number of submissions she receives on her website. Isn't that clever?

Yet there is more. Intrigued, we studied the stats more closely. Now, The Other Woman is Eliza Browne's first novel. What we noticed then was that each of her later novels had more readers while not so many downloads, viz:

##

What do these stats suggest to you? Yes, someone discovered the way to complete the competition successfully and applied it consistently to three of the novels, thus increasing his or her chance of winning the cash prize in – counting from now – four years' time.

So Eliza Browne's scheme has a flaw, an obvious flaw. Ah well, there you go.

But there is another obvious feature of these stats. Given that once the method for completing the competition was found, why was it not applied in the case of Eliza Browne's first novel, The Other Woman? Rather than having to read all of the novels myself, I asked Jocelyn about this. Unfortunately, Jocelyn could not remember the plot of any of the novels(!). Still reluctant to get involved with the works themselves, I asked Jocelyn for her opinion: why would the clever dick not push his or her competition entries above the thousand mark by in effect screwing up the Reads value for The Other Woman?

Jocelyn of course wanted to duck this question. Having an opinion is not her style. However, I pressed her. I was becoming interested in the question. What Jocelyn offered as an opinion was pretty well what I expected: the manipulator of the competition was a woman and she was peculiarly sensitive to the subject of the Other Woman.

Well, that about completed our discussion of the phenomenon of Eliza Browne's novels and her competition. Even so, I remained intrigued by the conundrum of why our clever woman would not increase her chances of winning the substantial cash prize in Eliza's competition by manipulating the reads of The Other Woman. So I asked Jocelyn.

One of the better qualities that Jocelyn possesses from my point of view is that she tries to answer questions sincerely. I know sincerity is suspect nowadays – it is so easily feigned – but whatever about her easy social manner, Jocelyn is capable of sincerity to a surprising degree. I'm not a cynic – in case I appear to be one – rather I am what used to be called an ironist, that is, I think well of the world and its people but take into account the disjunct between human wishes and the actual state of affairs in the world.

Anyway, I ask Jocelyn about the Other Woman, specifically how she would approach the issue, the problem, the challenge: that is, how would the Other Woman present herself?

I was genuinely surprised by her reply, given almost without pause to reflect:

'She would be more beautiful. You would find her more beautiful than me.'

Can I say that this did surprise me? I have never considered Jocelyn in terms of beauty – which for me at least is a marketing tool of the cosmetic industry. She is pleasing to look at; but I have seen this quality as a kind of concomitant of the fact that I – simply – like being with her. No doubt Jocelyn appeals to some part of me that needs the validation she provides, but everything being equal (that is, that I provide some counter-approval to her) I am enhanced by her presence, grateful that she bestows her attention on me, that she is not shy of exposing herself to me.

So I say: 'Beauty? Why would you fear the beauty of another woman?'

She replies: 'I don't. But in a few years' time I will.'

Jocelyn was twenty nine then.

Return to the Voice. In view of what I am going to say, you might be surprised that I remembered the first encounters with this Voice. I think the associations with these encounters determined that I would remember. More on that later.

In any case, I decided at some point – after the fifth or sixth encounter – to keep some kind of record. It is a simple record, listing the date of the event and at best a paraphrase of what I heard. I now have about 60 entries in this list, but that fact is of little worth compared to what I discovered in the course of compiling it.

There are two discoveries, but I don't know which is the more significant here. I mean in the sense that, to the extent that each is important in explaining the other, which should be discussed first. But I will lay out the headings to begin with:

1 Series

2 Replies

Or:

1 Replies

2 Series.

I prefer to begin by discussing the topic of Series, if only because it is (reasonably) objective. Don't assume from this that it is of primary importance. Wait until both topics have been dealt with. So:

1 Series

During one of the later – later than the beginning of my record keeping, when I had no doubt grown used to the experience of the Voice – I sensed as though a channel remained open after a Voice event. I waited: sure enough, there was a second utterance, closely followed by a third. Revelation. My experience of the Voice was completely transformed. One: there was a structure of sorts to the phenomenon. Two: they were not addressed to me; I was in same way linked into a communications channel or network.

As might be expected, it was difficult to record the content of these series in any detail. The best I could manage was to jot down key words. This went on for several months, until I had an untidy heap of notes of all sizes: the result of the need to make these notes under a variety of conditions. Even so, I did notice relatively early on that some words were repeated. For instance, "transmission" occurred with some frequency, so much so in fact that I developed a habit of noting the words associated with it. Two words, especially, were prominent: "shearing" and "abutting". Another word that occurred often was "damper", which was used a number of times in conjunction with "result", and with "charging" – though not as often.

Most if not all of these messages concluded with a simple word not obviously associated with the rest of the message. The most common word in this case was "clear". There was always a delay before the next message after this word was used, so I conclude that it was a kind of end mark, perhaps in the sense that "over" was used in radio communications. Another word was "reflex". Here, a series of messages could each end with this word, which implies that it acted as a kind of spacer to separate these messages. A third word that was used from time to time was "beaming". Its use had one obvious peculiarity: it was always preceded by the word "concentre", while the remainder of the message of instruction usually varied.

I realise that detailed in this piecemeal way, the communications probably don't make very much sense. But you need to understand that each message was delivered with the same deliberate precision, the intention being that each message was to be acted upon in a specific way immediately. One major problem in interpreting what was going on is that I had no sense of what kind of audience these messaged were intended for, was it one person or unit only, multiple receptors, or perhaps it was simply a relay setup, channelling from multiple sources to multiple receivers.

Only when I reacted spontaneously to a message – the details of which I will recount in a moment – did I get a glimpse of what kind of network I was connected to.

2 Replies.

This reaction occurred during the last conversation I ever had with Serafina. I was listening closely to her when suddenly the Voice said something like:

'Welter scattering. Index.'

I was instantly extremely irritated by the interruption and shouted internally:

'Shut up, will you.'

Silence. I knew enough by then to realise that this was a significant event. Then the Voice said:

'Repeat borne. Repeat borne. Clear.'

The repetition here was unique. But then what was obviously another Voice said:

'Calibrate. Calibrate. Index. Event gauged. Clear.'

To which the more familiar Voice seemed to respond:

'Centre radiant. Index. Pivot concentred. Beaming.'

At this point Serafina realised she had lost my attention, and at which point I focussed once again upon her.

Of course, it is useless to attempt to draw much meaning from these exchanges. I had absolutely no context. But it was nonetheless significant that I could interact with this mysterious network. Even so, it was a long time before I thought to deliberately interrupt the network.

This occurred during a shuttle flight from London, where the journey time is such that it is impossible to settle down to any serious work. I was sitting there looking out the window at the urban sprawl, too hopped up on caffeine to even doze. It was an idle moment and I acted out of an idle curiosity.

There was no Voice communication to respond to; I simply as it were beamed my inner voice at the network:

'Seventy three ducks. Register.'

Why did I say what I said? It's what came to mind. It was offhand, even careless.

The result?

'Projection content. Clear.'

'Rogation netting. Clear.'

'Respace control. Index. Summit mark. Clear.'

All different Voices, all with the same deliberate precision.

Then I saw what seemed to be a dark blue field, a gold dot hopping rapidly in a random way. Then the dot stopped over towards the left of my vision and suddenly expended until a face appeared, sharp features, bright yellow skin, violet eyes, maroon lips. The lips moved even as I heard:

'Mark transform. Index. Beacon zeta. Clear.'

I was stunned. But then those violet eyes rotated to the right and I heard another Voice:

'Beacon delta. Index. Transmission shearing. Clear.'

Then the violet eyes swung back and I swear that, even though this vision was inside my head, that being could see me clearly. And in seeing me, knew me.

It was an extraordinary moment for me. I realised almost instantly that if I had even been able to define an experience most desirable in my somewhat crowded life, it would be what I experienced when that being looked at me so piercingly: To be seen by someone who would know me completely.

Notice that I do not say understand me. It is the all-important difference. If the being had merely understood me, it would have remained at a remove from me. Instead, in knowing me, that being had become in some way joined to me. It may seem an over-subtle distinction, but this is how the experience of that being's seeing me was like. It is not that the being loved or even liked me; it was simply that the ability to know me in that way meant that the being was in some way me already.

I allow the element of phantasy here. After all, all this was taking place in my mind. Yet I insist that this experience of being known by the being was real, if only because I did not know, until I experienced this state of being known, that such an experience was possible.

Another thing: I was happier at that moment than ever before or after. Not bliss, a simple thorough contentment.

We were in the hills above Addis, lucky to get out in time. Jocelyn again, with her talents for making the right connections. One hour's notice and we're off. Not that difficult really; we travel light, the miracle of modern hardware.

The night was clear. We could not see the city from where we were, but we could see the local instalment of the by then global Drone War. Such pretty lasers lighting up the sky, drones bursting apart in showers of sparks, the straining whine of the little engines audible even from here, the flash of the darting missiles. Fireworks: you could almost believe it was a festival of sorts.

I'm not old enough to have experienced a "big" war, tanks, real warplanes, lots of dead. How miniaturisation has reduced the world so that it will fit on the screen of a phone. How well Vietnam suited the televisions of the day, while Iraq looked great on a wall mounted flat screen. We sat on the side of that hill and watched what was little more than a display of fireflies on a summer's evening, but needed to link our phones to the appropriate app (one for each side, plus all the contingent observers) to get the close-up stream.

We get our reports uploaded without any problem, the link thankfully escaping the monitors on this busy evening. Three bursts at staggered intervals and that's it until tomorrow and Nairobi.

There was an hotel not far off, brightly lit for the season, but Jocelyn was for once reluctant. I sensed her mood. Jocelyn is a quiet person, reticent rather than hidden, and I can usually sense how it is with her. There's an obvious imbalance between us here: I am always aware of her, an awareness that deepens year by year, while she lets me run on until she feels I need attention, either in support or to caution me.

The work we do complements this relationship. Jocelyn is a journalist and I take pictures: she sees the world and then reports on it; I record the world and look at it afterwards. What is not so obvious here is that I do see the world before I record it, but the coordination of eye and hand here bypasses the kind of consciousness Jocelyn uses to assess the world. And that is how I am with Jocelyn too: I act towards her at that fundamental level, so that I can often predict her actions and so can guard her against unforeseen consequences. The imbalance between us can be seen here too. Many times Jocelyn's interventions in my life are superfluous, prompted more by convention than real need. But I always accept her advice, knowing that she does not connect with that part of me that links eye and hand.

The reason I've brought all this up is to explain in part what happened that night. We were holed up on the side of the mountain west of Addis, with only surprisingly clean water from the village well for refreshment, watching the firefly display. Quiet evening, even a little boring. Jocelyn was reading one of the ebooks on her phone, I was in one of my fugues – intensely involving but usually forgotten afterwards. So far so usual. At one point Jocelyn lays down her phone and dives into the tent. The phone lies right by me, so I see the title of the book she is reading. I'm surprised to read The Other Woman. Is it Eliza Browne's novel?

I ask Jocelyn when she returns. It is. Jocelyn is surprisingly defensive. So what that she rereads a novel. I ask her why: is it so good? She takes up the phone, looks at the screen, and I see that she feels caught out. To give her an escape, I ask what interests her about the novel. Her answer is as though dragged from her:

'She's mad. She is so obsessed with the suspicion.' She at lasts looks at me, that frankness of hers naked in her eyes: 'I mean, she tries everything to find out. She's really mad at the end.'

'Isn't that just the plot, Joss? You know, just to keep the novel going?'

Jocelyn is startled by this idea – which surprises me:

'No. Not like that. The writer must have gone through that experience herself.'

'But why did you go back to read it again? Surely you don't feel like that.'

Jocelyn suddenly brightens:

'Oh no, Adam. Nothing like that, dear. That conversation we had. Months ago. About her novels. I wondered afterwards what it was about The Other Woman that affected the other woman – the one you said had manipulated the competition entries.'

'And?'

Jocelyn now drops her head, breaking her gaze:

'I think it was the obsession itself. Like it was catching.'

I laughed at that stage, suddenly losing interest:

'And is it?'

Jocelyn looks up at me again:

'Actually yes.'

'And you?'

Jocelyn nods.

There was nothing that could be said then. The next day it was Nairobi and the day after that the incident at Mombasa. The tendon didn't seem to be seriously damaged at first, but after I was finally quietened it was. To walk further than a hundred metres afterwards required a stick (and some fortitude). A life changer. Intrepid war photographer to studio professional was a change in life that I could never fathom.

But I'll leave it there for now.

What I want to get at here is the last conversation, so offhanded as to be a blessing. We were lucky in Nairobi. The assault fizzled out early in the afternoon, which meant the comfort of an hotel that night. And we dined well, and we retired to the bar afterwards, cold beer for me, single malt for beloved Jocelyn. This is when and where the discussion about ratings occurred.

The website from which Jocelyn gets all her ebooks has a ratings system to which all readers are invited – actually badgered – to contribute. You will see that this conversation of ours was in fact a continuation of the previous night's talk – the only way in which Jocelyn could broach what she had indirectly called her madness.

The question was, What score for The Other Woman? Jocelyn hadn't bothered to score it on her first read – she never scored ebooks as a rule, simply passed on to the next one. So why score it this time?

Turns out that this was the fifth time Jocelyn had read the novel. But why score it this time? Because she had discussed it with me the previous evening.

Not having read it, I had no advice for her here. But it was possible to find out how others had scored it. Though Eliza Browne's website indicated that there had been only two readers, the ebook site actually listed over eight hundred – 832 to be precise – scores for the novel. These scores were arrayed over time by actual score. A number of facts were immediately evident. 1. The scores were bunched in a rough periodicity, within the months April to June of each year. 2. The number of scores in each bunch remained steady over time, one or two more or less. 3. The actual score values tended to diverge over time; that is, most were midrange in the early bunches but tended to widening extremes of high and low scores over time. It is noteworthy that while this divergence is very marked, it remains a constant equal division among the scores: that is, about half of the scores in any bunch will tend to the high extreme, while the other half tend to the low extreme. By then, that evening in Nairobi, the scores split between 95 and 10, pretty well at the limit of the possible divergence.

And this was the problem facing Jocelyn: she was in the situation where she couldn't decide whether her score should be 95 or 10.

I have to admit I was sufficiently inebriated (and frazzled and tender) to take her situation seriously. To begin with this time, I decided to get her to explain the remarkable effect the novel had on her, that is, Why did she believe there was an Other Woman? She should know me well enough to be certain that there wasn't. I mean, she knew I wasn't really interested – for whatever reason – in women.

Her sincerity again. Jocelyn was as tired and as drunk as I was, but her eyes at that moment were clear and forthright.

'Oh but there is, Adam.'

I could not get angry with her – I was too close to her, so that any negative response to her would rebound on myself. Besides, I knew she was speaking the truth – as she saw it.

'But there isn't, Joss. You must know that.'

Such a sad sad expression on her face then, almost hopeless.

'There is, Adam. I can see her.'

Jocelyn cried then, great quiet sobs. I put my arm around her bent shoulders to comfort her. She leans in to place her mouth against my neck, and says quietly:

'And she is so very beautiful, Adam.'

I could not stop her tears.

The sequel to that night of sorrow will have to wait. It is far too detailed to be elaborated at this stage. I have complicated this narrative enough as it is, raising perhaps questions in the reader that cannot be answered.

What I want to do now is jump forward and introduce Serafina. She is not herself important here, but she does serve – as you will see – as a kind of lightning rod (and serves very well at that).

Studio professional. The professional already knows the image and undertakes to copy it. That's what the professional does: makes copies.

I left the hospital armed with my stick and my fortitude. I had friends and a reputation. A career had already been prepared for me, based on a genuinely chance photograph I had taken.

We had been covering the Incursion and had retreated to an isolated Lebanese village as night came on. The twilight cast a wonderful glow over the stone houses, giving an eerie starkness to the extensive damage the village had suffered that day. One scene grabbed my interest: an undamaged tamarisk in a square, surrounded by shattered houses. A girl stepped into view as I took the shot, so I was obliged to retake it. At that point I should have realised that I had already lost the scene, for I went on to shoot over forty more frames, shifting with increasing uncertainty from position to position.

It was only when I came to select material for our nightly upload that I discovered that my first shot, with the girl's startled face against the backdrop of her ruined home, was in fact one of the finest photographs I had ever taken. At that time I uploaded it – on Jocelyn's advice – along with more objective images of the day, including some of that village. At the very least it would be useful for some human interest stories and perhaps earn me a little extra in royalties.

We never discovered who the girl was or what became of her, but her image captivated the world for a long time afterwards, a complex symbol of guilt, remorse, longing, even something like love. For my part, while the royalties fattened my bank accounts, I dismissed the image as an essentially unserious side-product of the more grim business of recording actual war and its horrors.

Fast forward to my new career. I am loaned a studio, given a portfolio of proposals aimed at exploiting this explosion of interest, even introduced to the model deemed most likely to fill the gap left by the absent village girl.

Enter Serafina. The eldest daughter of impoverished peasants from somewhere in the Peloponnese, who had been beaten, bullied and worked by her needy parents almost from the day she could walk. Not beautiful, stark bony face, strong bones, frugal breasts, blazing eyes. No soft Levantine beauty here. And yet. What magic the camera can work on a woman. There was a glance she had: face from the left, slightly back from the vertical plane but level on the horizontal plane, her face tilted slightly down and towards the camera, eyes riveted on the sensor when it was exposed for its fraction. Like something in her that preceded her harsh life on the family farm, that had been stored away against an opportunity such as I gave her. Her nose was too big, jaw too long, hair too raw – yet in her eyes was exactly the startled response of the Lebanese village girl.

Every day I copied this face, churned out images for proposal after proposal that neither of us ever looked at afterwards. That's professional. Serafina and I became very rich, very famous, very weary. We became lovers too, of course. No one ever remarked Serafina's mouth, with its large teeth and mobile thin lips; no one ever saw her long tongue. One session with her and I knew, a lust that stunned me even as it raged through my body. One lesson I learned quickly about lust – I had instinctively known it, as all men do – that it is no guarantee of either performance or satisfaction. What saved me here was Serafina's passion. There must have been a sexual element – or at least an erotic one – in her parents' mistreatment of her. Her passion was essentially reactive, both a dogged defence mechanism and also an unmediated sexual response to the sexual mistreatment. Her arousal, when it came, was little more than a child's terror before what she felt could utterly consume her.

I was never the equal of it, to tell the truth. Only a violent man could match her, which would be the death of at least one of them. Then I could only treat her as I would treat any woman, opening her up to my awareness of her. Where Jocelyn had been graced, Serafina was electrified; where the Light had bathed Jocelyn, it burned Serafina. Sex was a matter of pinning her down, taking her doggy and throwing my weight on her in the crisis, so that the passion could for a little while work into her rather than spark out into the void that surrounded her. Did she recognise this service? I doubt it.

What did she do for me? Cauterised a wound, how about that? Very well, that will only become clear later. For now, my cripplement matched in some way what she recognised as her own cripplement. Walking together, I never needed my stick, nor my fortitude. Yes, Serafina carried me in a sense. And me? I gave her a context, a boundary: I made her a copy. And the power of this for Serafina lay in the fact that no one could say exactly what she was a copy of, no more than anyone could say what the image of that Lebanese village girl copied.

As I have said, with fame came fortune. I was used to both, while Serafina was not. Take money first. We skipped a morning session in the studio because I had a check-up at the clinic. Got back about lunch time to find Serafina surrounded by designer type boxes and bags. Overstyled dresses and ostentatious jewellery, the kind made for those recently come into fortune. Strangely, though, they suited her, brought out the larger-than-life quality she possessed. She had a powerful presence in richly coloured clothes and bling, though it was also obvious that she in a sense had nowhere to go. There was another aspect of her brought out by this surfeit of money. She had a brother a priest in another poor part of the Peloponnese: she bought him new vestments, had his church renovated. She had a sister married to a bus driver in Athens: she bought out their apartment for them and had it renovated. She had a new house built for her parents and bought them a little Fiat. She turned her nose up at their expressions of gratitude. She did all this for Family, but not for those individuals, whom she hated.

What I learned from this was that money was for Serafina what paint is to an artist. And while the artist will work on a new canvas, Serafina systematically reworked her world till it glowed with false colour. And the point here is that she dressed and decorated herself in much the same spirit. And me? Oh, she renovated me too: gave me a hugely expensive tie, yellow and gold and rich red silken threads, what seems a peacock but was some other – perhaps fabulous – bird, head turned coyly towards the world, its wonderful tail descending to my navel.

I still have it here, still in its presentation box: if Serafina could love then that tie is an expression of that love. I treasure it as such.

And now we come to fame.

A more complex subject, if only because I shared very little of her fame, moving as we did in different circles. We did attend functions together, awards, presentations, and once a charity bash. At first she deferred to me, following my lead and learning the cues. Politesse did not become her – underlining the fact that socially she was a horse liable to stampede at any moment – and she could never subject herself to the mind-numbing chatter of the successful among the successful, fearful always that the illusion will suddenly fail them.

So we drifted apart in this sphere, I receding when let into an introspection tinged always with a by now familiar self-absorption, a state I like to call the morosa delectatio of the Renaissance poet. Serafina for her part drifted off-centre towards the clusters of sycophants and assorted moochers found usually around the doorways. No doubt she meant well, identifying herself with them at this early stage, until she realised that these people will never have an entrée. That marked her out as different from those she had felt herself to be like. She may not have been part of the inner cores – did not want to be – but she knew she was entitled to be there.

I am lucky in that I associate with the kind of people who are only interesting if you share their interests. You don't necessarily like many of them – you may like no one in fact – but what is important here is that you share their world of work and the entailed emotional compass. Together we imply a perfection – a perfect world – that we each long for in our individual pursuits. We are happy together, though none of us acknowledges this.

For Serafina matters were unfortunately different. She became a celebrity. The difference is not that subtle – between respect and adulation – but I doubt that Serafina ever grasped the difference. There is mutuality in respect, while the celebrity is raised up on the understanding that he or she can be just as easily torn down again. Even so, some instinct must have operated in her, because she managed to find a kind of protection – though this in turn exposed her to an even more deadly vulnerability in her. But let's prepare the ground first.

I've said that I was lucky to be able to associate with those like me. Serafina's route out of the stifling society of the successful was through association with those like her. One problem here was that Serafina differed quite radically from the other models: most of them traded on their looks while Serafina depended – at least at that stage – on a single glance. So, while the models socialised within the bubble of their trademark appearance, Serafina could run loose. And Serafina running loose was a highly charged woman, as likely to cause trouble as invite it. She turned out to be a sexual terrorist, aggressively uninhibited, a true ballbreaker. She left men broken, madly in love, or vengeful to the point that she could no longer go out alone at night – the other models had long since deserted her.

The media made a lot of this, of course, but that is of no importance here. Serafina herself was in truth utterly confused by the situation she found herself in. She withdrew into herself, completely unsure of herself and the world she inhabited. It was sad to see her become timid, to become what I then realised she had been as the bullied child. Only then did I get a true insight into the huge forces that must have churned inside her as a child and as a teenager. Not only beaten into submission but a pressure maintained by her parents against her powerful resistant will.

How she dressed then: indifferent tops, drab and shapeless, yet always silken pants, always yellow or red. Her hair in hanks about her face, jutting nose, curled lips, eyes that seemed always to be searching an horizon, she exuded a remarkable sexual attraction, while yet passive despite my inflamed response. An image: she was like a fiery coal, not flaming but pulsing heat.

There's a good chance that she would have drained me in time. Our studio work faltered. I could still shoot the copies that so many required, but I slowly lost conviction, not tiring of the image as such, more like seeing the resource in her – retained from early childhood – drain out. Lucky for her – this lose would affect her more than me – other studio photographers had begun to show an interest in her, finding that her now raw, haunted look fitted a society growing weary of the war. So she drifted away, then a sudden embrace one day and she was gone.

I had no direct experience of the next stage of her life. Chance remarks, images on a passing screen: she had entered a relationship with a notorious Bulgarian businessman. He was bulging out of expensive suits, always two burly friends at his back, sheep's eyes in a brutal face. Serafina now dressed in white, sunglasses, hair dyed blond, red lipstick. They became famous for their raging arguments: in restaurants, on the street, VIP lounges in nightclubs, always his two friends to define the ring for their bouts.

I chanced upon them once, at the airport. What surprised me most was how he stepped back at the very beginning of the encounter – his two friends stepping back behind him – while Serafina greeted me with something like relief, confiding and tactile, glasses removed so I could see the strain about her eyes. I could readily understand her situation. In this Bulgarian – Georgi – she found a foil that allowed to re-enact her childhood. I understood that almost at once, seeing it in how Georgi withdrew into a privacy he shared with Serafina, and how she laboured to break down the wall all the childhood torment had built in her.

So I wasn't surprised when she was charged with his murder, apparently driving a chisel into his head by main force. It was going to be one or other of them, two mistreated children struggling to see which of them would be avenged. And the sequel didn't surprise me either, given this situation. On remand, thanks to the expertise of her counsel, she ran her car into a wall late one night, face thoroughly smashed, the light gone from her eyes forever.

Her substantial estate was divided among the family she hated. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that her parents felt vindicated – in having trained her so well for life.

It was during this conversation with Serafina at the airport that I reacted against the Voice's interruption, as described earlier. My anger arose mainly because of how that Voice – its confidence, even certainty – contrasted with the pitiful state Serafina was in by then. And of course when the Voice reacted directly to my response, I was lifted to an altogether different plane of existence – where such confidence and certainty were possible – that only sharpened the contrast with Serafina's condition.

I cannot remember Serafina's exact words, but I do remember what is was that she wanted to tell me. At first I thought she was saying something to the effect that she was sad she wasn't good enough for me. This assumption merely betrays my own complacency with regard to Serafina, that she was never a threat to me. In other words, that I was never in danger of falling in love with her; that misfortune would be the fate of a brute like Georgi. But no, that wasn't what she was telling me. I have thought a lot since then about what she did say in so many words. Strange, I found it easy to recognise the sincerity of Jocelyn, but failed utterly to recognise the naked honesty in Serafina. What she told me was this: until I exposed myself completely to a woman, I would never fully be myself. Until then I would hide behind screens.

## 2 THE COOL HAVEN

Writing this account is not simply an exercise of memory. It is throwing up new insights and at times uncomfortable thoughts. I write this by way of preface to what I want to uncover now.

In Mombasa, Jocelyn called my name. We were at the outskirts of the city, on our way to meet a contact. It was an ambush. I looked up to see Jocelyn turned back towards me, arms upraised, a strange look on her face as she seemed to sink into the ground. It was a missile fired from a drone high in the sky, and it had just blown Jocelyn's legs off, killing her even as I stumbled forward and fell, shrapnel cutting into my body in numerous places, including my right ankle. They say I scrambled to gather Jocelyn into my arms and was found dragging her torso back along the road, my blood and hers leaving a snail-like trail in our wake.

I have cried again. The horror, the pity, the loss. If Jocelyn were still alive and here by me, I would still be travelling into her, still getting to know her. If we lived a million years together, I would still be travelling into her at the end, still getting to know her. She was inexhaustible.

Now I am like someone waiting for a train that will never arrive. What do you call that?

Some years have passed. I seem to reveal horror upon horror here, but I can nonetheless meet people and deal with them as needs be, business, socially, even in friendship, and nothing seems amiss, out of the ordinary. I conclude I am not the only one living with horrors, nor the only one haunted by loss.

This will serve to establish a sense of proportion here.

I am deemed lucky to have had the tendon survive for six years. Then it finally broke apart, rotted through some obscure slow-acting damage sustained in the attack.

I'd like to reflect for a moment on that ambush – in effect approach the loss of Jocelyn from another direction.

Most of what I'm telling you here is common knowledge by now, but I would like to review it as a way of preparing the ground for what I want to say. More than one commentator has called the Drone War the first internet war. The drones themselves are cheap to produce and can be fitted out to perform a myriad of functions, can be controlled from almost anywhere, a bunker on the far side of the world, an app on the evening commute. It is said that in the War itself, just one factory produced most of the drones used. The joke is that the Alliance drones were churned out on the day shift, the Federation drones were built on the night shift, and all the drones used by other interested parties, observers, media, protesters, even enthusiasts trying to get in on the act, were constructed during the meal breaks. The point here is that many of these non-military drones were armed. The weaponry was also cheap, lasers and missiles turned out in a single complex in northern China and freely available for purchase.

Who staged the ambush on us? Who knows? Rival media, any of the hundred plus armed groups involved in the conflict, even protesters unhappy with our coverage. Do I have an opinion? For the sake of my mental health: No, I do not. We proclaim out freedom to choose, to decide, but the truth is that the modern global world is so fragmented – held together only by greed, envy and social media – that the wisest simply go with the flow. Modern life is like a car on a slope, with a steering wheel but no brakes. Life of course was always like that, but large sectors of human societies could in the past secure degrees of stability and reasonable certainty through custom and the slow pace of a rudimentary technology. If a galloping horse was the fastest mode of transport, then not much could happen in a day, a year, a life.

So, the attack happened and beloved Jocelyn was cut in two by an anonymous missile. Deal with it.

Trouble is, I can't.

The medicos fixed me up with a simple and efficient device which allowed me to use my right leg, but not of course my ankle. Less fortitude needed now, but stumping along like a hobbledehoy quickly drained my spirit. In any case, the short career as a studio professional had come to an end even before Serafina's demise. I tried standard model work, but once the light readings were made there was not much to it. The models knew all the moves – they could have taken the shoots themselves using a remote (perhaps an enterprising model will do so one of these days).

I see now that a life can have a direction, so that events – especially the crucial ones – do not happen by chance. So it happened that as my studio career came to an end my mother died and left me the house – and the garden. I do remember once walking through the garden with her – this garden that my mother made during the latter half her lifetime – nodding as she listed the flowers, the shrubs, the trees, along this path, over by that path to a pond, and around here and then around there. The only memory that stayed with me of that day was the small fountain that stood in another small pond off to one side in the garden. It stuck in my mind, clearly etched against the green backdrop in the bright afternoon sun.

Visited the house once to collect the keys. Surprised to find it clean and dust free, despite the fact that mother had died four months previously. No incentive to visit again. The house is situated on the outskirts of a small town, out beyond the autodrive system, which means manual driving, awkward for me. So I stayed in the city, not working but enough social to-do to keep me occupied.

Even fell in love. They say that hunger is a great sauce, but loneliness is the most dangerous enticement. Not that love in this case was blind. I knew what I was doing, at least that. With my previous experience, it was easy to mark out the limits of my engagement. And it did seem to work. Social access and a comfortable income can serve to oil an intelligent relationship. The woman was equal to the task, with enough past experience and social nous to define her limits with me. Some gaps, of course, which we both passed off as either dangerous or unfeasible.

Worked very well for almost two years – even seemed possible to make the arrangement permanent. How little we know ourselves. It took only one little slip-up. Yes, the obvious one: wrong name at the wrong time. I never murmured Jocelyn in the heat of passion – it would have been Joss. No amount of explaining, rationalising, or even agonising, could cover over this faux pas. Why did I do it? I didn't. It happened. Deal with it.

This I could do. Suddenly saw the funny side one evening, months later. How must the woman have felt? And made worse by my earnest explanation that I always called Jocelyn Joss, even in passion, so that there must be some more innocent reason for the slip. But she was a beautiful woman; the perfect companion, confident, perceptive and diplomatic. But why had she reacted so badly to that mistake of mine? Can you guess?

Jealousy must be the most spiritual of our failings. How it transcends this world and all its compromises. It is the purest indication of our failure to love.

And yet. Why had I called out Jocelyn's name? Will I tell you what I didn't tell my lady friend? Simple. I heard my name called, Jocelyn's voice, very clear.

'Adam.'

How she called me once, early in our working relationship, at a crowded event. That was the moment our love came into being: hearing it in her voice, hearing it in my reply. I could not tell my beautiful companion that: for once you love you can never stop loving.

But she knew anyway.

That marked the end of another period in my life. The city and its distractions no longer worked for me. What to do? Happenstance again. A minor problem with the house on the outskirts of that small town. Nothing really that could not have been sorted out over the phone. Went down anyway. Managed the manual drive part, thanks to modifications to the buggy, ended up at the front door, flowers in beds under the windows, fragrant air of light dappled by the enclosing poplar trees. Birdsong. A sudden sense of what I can best call spaciousness, as though the world had drawn back out of some subtle consideration for me and my – what? – situation. As though some presence knew me to my depths, did not judge me, simply gave me the space in which I could act out the implications of this situation.

No big mystery, I hasten to add. That presence was me. And I knew that immediately. It was how a model might feel coming into the studio one morning, a day's shoot ahead, confident that today she herself would finally appear in the picture. Like an actor stepping out onto the stage knowing that the big part tonight was himself, the audience interested.

Then it was the key in the door and into the familiar hall. My mother favoured a very dark red, like a smouldering coal in daylight. It's a presence throughout the house, but nowhere as strong as in the hall, where it glows in the heavy wallpaper and runs like guiderails down the carpet. Only that day did I realise that it runs through my own life like a thread extending from my mother's womb to – no doubt – my death. This fact was hidden from me for years by my own emphasis on a particular hue of green, obviously the complement of that red.

The house was surprisingly clean and free of dust – I had expected mustiness, a remainder of decay left over from my mother's death. It was only later in that week that I discovered that arrangements had been made, by my dying mother, for the upkeep of the house – and, as I will later recount, for her garden.

The only major change that I could note was to find that my mother had moved into the downstairs bedroom, to the right at the rear, which had been kept hitherto for the use of guests. I was surprised by how strong her presence was there, not simply the family photographs that lined the mantle-shelf and cabinets, but in the very faint spoor left by her perfume. The rush of feeling caught me unawares, and threatened me until I realised that the feeling was one of something like gratitude mixed with a very honest happiness. It wasn't that I loved her and was realising this only now, more that I re-experienced the profound affection I'd had for her as a child, a mixture of boyish admiration and a kind of outsider's interest in everything she did and the way that she did it.

She wasn't beautiful, or even good-looking, rather she had a distinctive presence, as though she always accepted herself, even if she didn't necessarily know who she was. A kind of self-trust, I suppose. And such was this faith in herself that it extended to those she was close to, immediately to my father and me, but also to her sister and brother, and the few friends she kept close through the years. It wasn't that you could know yourself also in some magical way in her presence, only that you could grasp – however fugitively – the possibility of achieving a similar self-trust.

Of course, it was never going to be an easy achievement, perhaps it is impossible: my mother might well have been gifted with such a grace from birth, an accident or perhaps a kind of karmic reward. Neither her brother or sister shared this quality. Both were kind, decent people, well disposed to the world, but neither ever showed evidence of such a disposition. They would come to visit mother, walk in the garden and talk, and then each would leave smiling as though relieved of some accumulated unease, obviously the detritus of their daily lives. As for my father: well, I will leave that topic for the moment as it leads down a completely different avenue, as it were.

Climbing the stairs was difficult, so I left it for another day. For now, I contented myself with a glass of water in the kitchen and sat looking out at the familiar view of the tree canopy above the garden. Looking back, it's as though I regained an innocence for that afternoon, drinking tap-water and looking at the trees. I have no memory of what I thought or remembered, but I can see those tree-tops clearly, leaves as though floating in an eddying wind, throwing light off in sudden flashes. And considering what was to come, I can only regard that afternoon as a benison, perhaps granted by my mother, perhaps simply a time of preparation.

Whatever it was, the arrangement was thorough. There was food for a simple meal, even a bottle of sweet wine chilled in the fridge. I rarely listen to music – an uncomfortable distraction most of the time – but I sat late into the evening in the sitting room listening to the disk I found already in the player: piano concertos by Mozart. Afterwards, still unwilling to stump up the stairs, I slept in my mother's bed, surrounded by her perfume, falling asleep as though taking a chance – a last moment of indecision, afraid I was giving way to a temptation.

I have slept in that bed ever since, though my mother's presence has long since vanished, overlaid by my own funk, my sweats, my tears.

Glad to have all that said. It reads much worse than it actually was. I do not mean to be callous when I say that my mother's attributes were those of a woman, and that I always treated them as such. Otherwise, how should a son relate to his mother? I don't know. Children are as cuckoos in the nest, fed out of a blind instinct that does not seek gratitude. Only guilt can detain the child – more than a blind animal – seeing parents as angels dragged down to earth in order to have and rear it. This is the Fall, every human being's guilt, the price of their incarnation.

I don't write this in bitterness, as though denied love in this way: we all start out from this point and must therefore find some accommodation to it. I had every regard for my parents, while yet I saw their greater forbearance. They knew better than me, having been children themselves, caught in the trap of generation. Perhaps there is a roundness to becoming a parent – I don't know, not having fathered children – a balance that accounts for that patience. Even so, there is a surplus in this, how the love of the parent far exceeds the love of the child: one grounded in compassion, the other in need.

Dark thoughts today. Dark work ahead. But time enough for that. Let me return to my first weeks back here in the family home. It seemed sufficient to sit and sit and do nothing. And while I sat, my life as it were caught up with me, as though reviewed through some new perspective. For instance, photography: I had taken shots on the spur – as I have described – eye to hand. I had accepted the intuition at work here, calling it a gift, a talent, and the like. Now I could perceive something like a deliberate activity, as though in this case I was gathering evidence. If I had taken the trouble, I could have arranged the hundreds – possibly thousands – of photographs in a meaningful order, and by that means explicated the actual meaning of my life. Yes, I know this kind of conviction is tainted with paranoia, but surely that is the precise character of modern paranoia: finding order where there is none. The paranoiac panics because he or she momentarily glimpses the full reach of that order and recoils because overwhelmed by the scale of that order. Once we could contain that experience in the concept of God, now we are fully exposed to it as vulnerable mortal beings, unable to find ourselves within that abiding order.

You see? That is how I thought in those weeks. It was as though I was the still centre of reality, with the time and disposition for once to look about me.

And I thought also of Jocelyn, thoughts at once both beautiful and very painful. And I considered here how mystics speak of their experiences: of how they are enhanced even as they are escoriated; in a word, how they are burned up in the presence of the entity they reach for. Perhaps an extreme description? You need to consider the experience of total loss while yet convinced of the impossibility of that loss. If I forget that Jocelyn is dead – and remember that I saw her die – then at once she is alive for me, perhaps in the hallway, in another room, out under the trees. Is that not a mysticism? To be utterly convinced that what is not there – couldn't possibly be there – is there.

And I even thought at length about Serafina, even though it was she who made our relationship possible and sustained it through her hunger. In this case, it seemed always as though Serafina was resurrected from wherever she was buried – somewhere in Greece, I believe – to come back to my memory of her. Always that sense of her coming together again, always fresh and – not innocent – but prepared to relive our relationship again. How is that to be characterised? Would Hell be like that, do you think? Consider that possibility. Imagine re-enacting the worst moments of your life over and over again just because someone wants to remember them. It was of course phantasy, highly charged and weirdly erotic. I am not a sexual person, knowing that sex is more boring and repetitive than eating cornflakes. Yet to remember her in the studio, how she came to the camera with that trademark glance of hers, gave me a hard erection that left me almost helpless. It is the hunger, of course, and the helplessness it implies. That is, it was about power. And yet, despite the erection and quivering thighs, I knew that this passion could only be about death, that is, murder.

I didn't will Serafina's death or anything like that, simply that it was – as I realised at that time – immensely satisfying that she ran her car into a wall as she did and smashed her head open. Thus the truth about sexual desire: it cannot be satisfied, it is not designed for satisfaction, only for generation. So what can we do? Desire and desire without end?

What do you do?

Do you think this is bitterness? I write about a time of recapitulation in a time of terminal reflection. I cannot easily separate what I think now from what I thought then. Sex, for instance. Now it would weary me, depressed to see the fundamental reach that drives it reduced to an act of exhaustion, knowing now what it is we reach for. There. Do you understand that? It fills me with an unbelievable fury, a complete loss of my habitual patience, to contemplate what is traduced in all our desiring, grasping, lying, cheating. If you could grasp that even for an instant, you would throw this account away and just cry out also in enraged frustration.

Let me continue. A fourth matter that occupied my time back then was the perplexing matter of the Voice. I have already detailed about as much of the experience as I can. But only in those days did I realise that I heard the Voice only during my relationship with Serafina. Yet it is obvious that it had absolutely nothing to do with her. It's unfortunate that I cannot convey to you the precise character of that voice, its assurance and what I can best call its complete presence. It did not, I believe, speak to me, yet I heard it as though it spoke only to me. There is the possibility of self-deception here, I know, but that is how it seemed to me: a conviction that seems true at the moment of conception but which seems dubious at a remove.

And the words? Meaningless, yet consistent in form in some way. I have to admit that I never tried to decode the utterances, despite recognising this consistency. I would have forgotten the whole experience if that I had not seen that face. I have the same sort of conviction about that face: I knew that entity knew me thoroughly. And I have also the same kind of doubt now that I have written it here. I would even say that the entity was in some way me while knowing that it is nonsense.

It was this that finally bothered me. About what else in my life do I have such convictions? More to the point, how have I managed to avoid undermining them with doubt?

Having written this, I see again the question of paranoia. This time it threatens me with a fear that I know is not new: at any moment the very cohesion of my consciousness could be wrecked by a sudden insight, a sudden understanding. Have you ever experienced that fear? Like turning a corner and finding your world completely different, completely strange.

That is how I lived during that first week back home. Then one afternoon I heard a noise out in the kitchen. Investigating, I found a middle-aged woman in an apron cleaning up. It took only a fraction of a second to catch on, but it took longer to adjust.

The woman smiled brightly:

'Hello, Adam. I'm Mrs Bryce.'

The story. She had been the Home Economics teacher in the local school who lost her position because of a scandal. She became friends with my mother, helped in the garden for something to do, then helped in the house after mother had her stroke. Mother then arranged for her to look after the house until I decided what to do with it.

I had been only a week on my own in the house – and still in the early stages of my rather unsettling remembrances – but I saw that woman there in the kitchen, drying cloth in one hand, a cup – I think – in the other, and understood so much about her at once. Again, this is a matter of conviction, and while some of my insights were verified, many of the most significant could not be.

Mrs Bryce was in her early-mid fifties at that time. A pretty girl who had become a good looking woman, she carried herself always in a way that suggested that she was open to the world but at a price that few would pay. Can you see that? An availability that required a reciprocal availability. The question asked would be fundamental: Was she worth it? And the answer would be equally fundamental: Only if you needed what she offered.

One result of her disposition was that she was expert at handling space. The distance she maintained from you would be precisely calibrated: close in this circumstance, distant in that. This of course puts you in a quandary: however you feel about her, you could never approach her – or pull back, for that matter. It was something of a novelty at first. Mrs Bryce seemed coquettish, baiting what might seem to her a vulnerable man. I came to see that she gave this impression through how she held herself, suspecting then that she had an abiding problem with her bowel, perhaps Crohn's disease, that had made her over-sensitive to her rectum, so that she had developed a slight crouch that emphasised her buttocks.

Only when I saw how she reacted to my stumping gait – which can amount at times to a lurch – did I understand her keen sense of space. This transformed my relationship with her. Initially, I had been repulsed by what had seemed a vulgarity, then I came to recognise that she was a passionate person that would cling to whoever kindled that passion. You can see the element of temptation that appeared here. I was in the throes of my budding paranoia by them – feeling exposed to the possibility of a sudden and complete transformation – and felt that should I take up her offer – as it seemed to me at the time – I could grasp and thus control what I thought threatened me.

What may have saved me here was the fact that Mrs Bryce herself sensed my state of mind, for one day she suddenly said to me as I passed her in the hallway:

'You know, Adam, your mother used to say that the world won't be big enough for you.'

I let this go, of course, understanding at that moment that this was an attempt at intimacy. Only later that night, haunted by Serafina's repeated resurrections – her face coming together into that look of hers – did I see that Mrs Bryce was telling in her own way that my mother had already understood what I will call my destiny. And Mrs Bryce, what was she telling me? Why, of course, that she too lived in what she experienced as an inadequate body.

Perhaps I over-interpreted then what she said to me, but it has stuck in my memory over the years since, and not just as an insight into my mother. The truth is that people fit together by agreement, that granting permission is probably the basis of human life. But it is more an expediency required by the exigencies of this realm of accident than a fundamental disposition. I was aware even as a young child of how my mother fitted herself to others, and less aware – because of my focus on my mother – the extent to which others fitted themselves to her. Again, with Mrs Bryce I was made aware of this matter of fitting together – misunderstanding her at first, as described above – and the effect this time was to push me to consider how I managed to fit myself to others.

Serafina, of course. To discover how I fitted myself to her seemed initially very easy. Simply put, I was in effect a camera that made Serafina possible. That this led to murder and suicide was to me incidental, those acts were already in Serafina, I didn't instigate them. Fine so far. But consider how I became her camera, as I call it.

I didn't drink alcohol during that period at home, contenting myself with water during the long nights. I was sober, therefore, that night, though strung out on the endless self-analysis. Once I reached the point of examining how I became Serafina's camera, I saw what lay behind that. The image was overwhelmingly familiar, even though I was shocked to see it at that moment: Jocelyn's face as she seemed to melt into the earth. The expression on her face was familiar in memory – obviously I had seen it over and over since that day, but had no memory of this – yet it was an expression I had never seen before on anyone's face. Even now, when I understand so much about its significance, I cannot describe it exactly. A look of strangeness, as though at that last instant of her life she saw a truth, either about herself or about me. It might have been her experience of dying, that's all; or shock expressed in her face before it expressed itself in her body as death.

Allow that it was the face of death. Therefore it was death in some form that drove me into that studio, so that I became Serafina's camera man, which in turn brought her to murder and suicide, that is, death. I sat on my mother's bed and thought this, sober and quite calm.

I knew it wasn't true. A conviction, again. It was not true. Jocelyn understood something profound at that last moment: she saw it. And, what's more, I understood it too. That's why I photographed Serafina's look over and over again – in order to understand what Jocelyn saw.

A question: at her last moment, her car hitting that wall, did Serafina also understand something? A conviction: Yes. Serafina had to go that far in order to see that truth, in the way that Jocelyn had to go far enough in order to witness that truth.

These convictions lasted until the dawn: then they evaporated into the fantastical nonsense they were. I slept for ten hours, the deepest sleep in years.

That marked the end of the first stage of my sojourn in the family home. Didn't know it at once, of course. Not until a few days later when I encountered Mrs Bryce coming into the kitchen from outside, a large bunch of flowers – I recognised the asters at least – on her arm. She said:

'Have you been in the garden yet, Adam? No? You should take a look. It's very pleasant this time of the year.'

So I did.

I realise I should have extended my analysis of how I fit myself to people to the matter of my relationship with Jocelyn. I won't do that. I don't want to do it. Call it cowardice. Let me preserve my love for Jocelyn, even if it is only a fantasy.

The garden. What can one say about a garden? There are flowers and trees, pathways and ponds. Not until my third exploratory walk did I chance upon the fountain. Remembered it from so long ago. What can I say about the garden?

There is a fountain in the garden. The fountain trickles clear water all day and all night. It is a Berkeley fountain: it is there even when nobody sees it, trickling clear tinkling water down over its ornamented shaft into its little pond. It is still there today, even though I have not seen it for a long time.

There is a comfortable wooden seat for two or three, with a high back and convenient armrests, placed so that the fountain can be observed and the tinkling water can be heard. It is sheltered from the sun and rain by a spreading chestnut tree, back from the pathway in a little alcove. Friends could sit there and talk in complete harmony; lovers could dally there in quiet affection; a solitary man could sit and do nothing but observe and listen and marvel at the simplicity of it all, and perhaps from time to time attempt to plumb the symbolism of it all.

A fountain is a plant made of metal, a lesson about the nature of life. But a plant takes up water in order to produce flowers and after that seed. A fountain takes up water and shoots it up into the air with varying degrees of pressure, so that the water fall again to the earth from whence it came. A fountain is barren, yet the fountain is universally loved; loved as much as any plant. Why?

Try again. Think clear crystal fountain. Think water as liquid crystal. Think crystal. Now think fountain again. What do you see? Do you see something like eternity? That which is still flows and yet remains still. Grasp that: the unmoving moves yet remains unmoved. Again, the unchanging changes yet remains unchanged.

That is the fountain.

Comes the day when I arrive at the fountain and find a young woman on her knees before it. Her brown hair hangs down, so long that it grazes the surface of the pond. I ask in reaction:

'Have you lost something?'

This is a scene from an opera, in case you don't know, where an ageing king falls in love with a young woman who lacks courage. The young woman in the opera says she has lost a crown in the pond, but the young woman here simply looks up at me and replies, laughing:

'Oh no. I'm just checking for weeds.'

She then obviously recognises me and so scrambles to her feet, continuing as she does:

'There are lilies during the summer, but I try to keep it clear of weeds if I can.'

She gestures towards the fountain:

'They'd take over the pond, you know, and strangle the lilies when they come again next year.'

Now she comes towards me with her hand out:

'I'm Rachel Tallant. I know you are Adam.' She speaks with the kind of earnestness that only the sincere can manage. 'My father took over the garden when your mother became ill. I do it now – for the experience, that is.'

I want to be kind to this young woman, but I must report my response to her with the greatest honesty I can achieve. This is important for what is to follow here.

Rachel was then beautiful. Not model beautiful, you understand, just beautiful in the way it can shine up to the surface, not gleam at you from the surface. She has grey eyes and the kind of clear textured skin often seen on brunettes, very stable over a lifetime. Her mouth was full in the way that does not draw attention to itself – no bulbous lips, no heart shape either – a mouth you would like to kiss. The angle of her jaw was somewhat obtuse, so that her chin was longer than might be regarded as regular. This was saved by the narrowness of her face generally, however, which gave her expression a slightly wistful air, which suited the surroundings in the garden very well.

Her build was slender in the way that suggested she would fill out somewhat after even the first birth. Her bones were light, which told you that she would retain her figure such that her waist would always appear attractive to men. If she danced, then so much the better, for she would swing on such an embrace of her waist and groin would encounter groin. Her breasts were small, but judging from their movement as she scrambled to her feet, they were firm with fine nipples that would engorge easily.

Her health? You could judge by how easily she moved – getting to her feet, wiping the knees of her work denims clean, rubbing her hands before extending the right one for handshake, the quick smile, the attentive eyes – that she was used to good health and expected always to have good health.

All this I could assess in the seconds before we shook hands and my flesh encountered hers. Consider the kind of women I have touched since Jocelyn's death – the limitations etched in their every move – and you shouldn't wonder that I was powerfully drawn to this young woman. I felt so grown in strength and energy, in sheer blind possibility, at that moment of contact. Skin to skin it was as though I spread like a virus through her body. And I saw this register in her eyes, how they changed: one instant approaching and open, next instant suddenly dutiful, even submissive.

It was like that, I assure you. No virtue in this on my part, not charm, not compelling sexual charisma, just plain age and money, proprietor and lord of all we could see at that moment. I know you are incredulous, living as you do in some city, negotiating all the time with everyone as the middle ranks do. But here out at the periphery, people still know their place and are willing to take it. Why? Why do you think? These people are not fools: they calculate trade-offs just as you do, but – unlike you in your sorry cities with everything up in a heap – there remains the element of trust. Of course there are tyrants and cheats, fools and suckers, but those who know how the game plays play the game.

As I say, trade-offs.

What would Rachel get? A nice house, comfortable means for life, a man she could control, children. What else is there?

But. There's always a but.

What would I get?

We sat and talked many times on that wooden seat before the fountain. Many of the conversations run together in my memory. Sometimes I spoke at length, sometimes Rachel would speak at length. What did we talk about?

Well, for one thing, Rachel was unhappy with how her mother treated her father, finding her severe when she should be gentle and kind. Rachel would try to make up for her mother's harshness but found that her father nonetheless would return for more of his wife's severity. At times, Rachel would become quite upset over this. Once I had to hold her shoulders while she sobbed.

I could have replied to her here, introducing the topic of sexual guilt and discussing the relationship between violence and sex – like two sides of a coin – but I knew Rachel well enough to know that she was still a virgin, for whom the dialogue of love lay between eyes not between the legs. Time enough for her to discover that for herself and to make her own accommodation to it.

For my part, I do remember explaining at length how images were seriously misleading. Rachel watched me speak – as she nearly always did – with the kind of bated breath that I found very flattering, her eyes wide and totally focused on my mouth. Afterwards she said, which I have remembered very clearly, 'But pictures tell a truth, Adam.' I was surprised to hear her say this – out of the mouths of babes etc – and tried to get her away from that conviction. She forced me to think even as I argued against her, seeing the image of Serafina especially in an uncomfortable light, knowing its source in that unknown and possible unknowable Lebanese girl. I argued that you could take a thousand images of a person and all could be different (remembering as I spoke a remark Jocelyn had made once in sudden surprise). Rachel's reply here was also revealing, and simple: 'But one of them will stand for the rest, won't it?' Too true. There wasn't a model in the world who didn't know precisely what she looked like, no matter how many shoots she worked through.

Another topic was, unsurprisingly, gardens. This of course is Rachel's speciality. She pointed out that gardens differ completely from what people call Nature. They differ even from the cultivated field. Nature and the field are about life, providing sustenance. The garden is about beauty, which is achieved through death. How could a virgin know this? It still mystifies me. We equate innocence and virginity, but in Rachel they came to seem completely different capacities she possessed. She knew of death through her virginity – that is a conviction that has not yet been undermined – while, to balance out the potential analogy, she knew through her innocence something like eternality (yes, the fountain).

This is a digression, which I will now abandon.

Death and beauty. I suspect my eyes were out on sticks – as they have it – at this stage. This is when I understood what I can best call the quality of wisdom in Rachel. It's not a crude analogy here: Rachel was not giving me a clever irony. Flowers die because of how they instance beauty, not merely because they bear beauty as some kind of ascribed attribute. Rachel told me that even little insects – about which nothing is understood by modern thought (pace science/evolution) – can perceive the beauty of flowers. They are in awe of flowers for this reason: why they serve them so assiduously.

And how do flowers bear beauty? Rachel again: the plant reaches into the world of beauty and then burns up – as it were – through the action of beauty on the plant: hence the flower. I believed her utterly that morning, sitting before our fountain, shaded from the golden autumn sunlight. Do I believe her now? Nothing has ever contradicted her belief, but then I have never sought – out of whatever regard I was capable of for her – to find a contradiction. The truth is that by then I was willing to accept as true anything she told me.

You would need to be in the presence of this young woman, innocent of life, and see how her truth flowed through her. She was in many ways like an unripe fruit, also a credulous person ready to believe anything I told her – an index of her regard for me – unable in many ways to test her convictions, in fact she would be disheartened by the knowledge that opinion should be tested. It was, you would think in her presence, fatal to be as I was: I would kneel before her truth.

But that is how you would love Rachel then.

I have written as I have written. I marvel at the admission that I loved Rachel at that moment. I marvel that I loved Rachel to the very end.

I marvel that I could love Rachel, given who I thought I was then.

Now I must move on. If I could be sitting still at that fountain with Rachel the virgin I would still be there. And nothing more would need to be said. I would have destroyed this journal.

But. Again the but.

There comes the morning when we were speaking together by the fountain, and she looked up suddenly and her face lit up in the way that was so familiar to me. I was shaken. I looked behind me abruptly to see a young man approach, his face also lit up. Rachel stands up, her hands clutching together at her groin, the smile on her mouth shifting repeatedly, as though some part of her ran forward to a bright future and another part hung back and just observed.

Behind the young man walked Mrs Bryce, a faint ambiguous smile on her mouth, but her eyes settled firmly on me.

Rachel says: 'Paul.'

The young man says 'Rachel.'

I step away, completely thrown out, actually consternated by this sudden event. Mrs Bryce says at my back, very conversationally:

'Have you seen the stream yet, Adam?'

I turn to her, but trying to remember what Rachel and I had been talking about, especially trying to remember who had been speaking, Rachel or me.

Mrs Bryce looked very different for some reason this morning. It took me some moments before I understood why: I was at that moment remembering that Rachel had been speaking and that she had been explaining to me why birds don't remember their young.

Two points then: One, I could not bring myself to look back at Rachel and the young man, Paul, together. I could not bear to see her in his embrace, even simply to see the two of them shaking hands in a polite way. And second, I couldn't see why the fact that birds don't remember their young mattered; after all, it made good sense that they didn't. But I knew even so that Rachel intended this revelation to lead onto some deeper insight to do with me.

I realise that this will seem egotistical: the tenor of our conversation that morning had to do with an unease I had been feeling, though I had not expressed it in any way to Rachel – that would have been inappropriate. I would never let the distempers I suffer because of how I have lived soil the purity of her young life. Even so, the trouble is that I could not then – nor can I now – connect my unease (to do with how I never tried to caution Serafina about the dangers she courted in her relationship with her Bulgarian brute) with what Rachel was telling me. And I certainly cannot even guess the insight Rachel was leading me towards.

I know I have digressed and broken the flow of my narrative. Having written the last paragraph I find myself thinking of abandonment. Let me pursue this.

To begin with: ruled by instinct, animals do not need to be remembered by their parents: it would serve no purpose. Humans remember their parents and their children because...

Let me leave that for a moment. Serafina and abandonment. Allow that Serafina was trained by her parents and then sent out into the world, to succeed or fail. In a cruelly ironic sense, poor Serafina succeeded very well from her family's perspective: she left them rich.

But in truth that was not the source of my unease. That lay in the question: why did I become involved in Serafina's life in the first place? You just don't get involved with your models, and that's that. Asked thus, the answer now is simple: because of a vulnerability in me.

The perspective that opens here is quite extensive, to do analogically with the question: for what did my parents prepare me?

I will leave reflection of this question for now. I must first narrate two events that mark the culmination of this stage of my life.

What was different about Mrs Bryce? Remember that I had seen her only in the house in her role as housekeeper. Always comfortable work clothes – slacks and blouse in the summer, slacks and light jumper on cooler days, and always a brightly patterned clean apron to protect those clothes.

Dressed thus, her figure seemed as comfortably matronly as her clothes, even the slight bend at her midriff seemed no more than evidence of some minor ailment in a middle aged woman. Today, however, she cut an altogether different figure. She comes on strolling towards me, head tilted to one side as though conscious of the effect she was having on me, a somewhat old-fashioned summer dress belted tightly at her waist and a pair of white backless low-heels on her feet – toenails painted bright red. She says with a jolliness – as forced as the word itself suggests – I had never heard from her before:

'Come, Adam. I will show it to you.' Links me and draws me away as she continues: 'Let us leave the young people to get to know each other.'

I had no reason to demur, in fact I was willing to be drawn away from the spectacle of Rachel getting to know the young man beside what I by then saw as our fountain.

Mrs Bryce chats loudly as we walk the pathways under the trees and along by beds of flowers of different kinds. The young man is her son, who met Rachel on the occasion when he came to the house to help his mother move some furniture. And was smitten – as any young man would be. And Rachel? According to Mrs Bryce, Rachel was also instantly smitten. All this had happened several weeks previously. Mrs Bryce had finally relented to requests from her son to meet Rachel again. Mrs Bryce, knowing that Rachel was fond of the fountain, brought him there this morning, and the rest will be history (my facetiousness, not Mrs Bryce's).

Jealousy? I liked that morning to think not, and as you will see, with good reason. But the sudden interruption did rankle, feeling that Mrs Bryce had overstepped the mark by presuming to pursue such a personal matter in hers and Rachel's working time. There was a presumption here that did annoy me. It also disturbed me: did Mrs Bryce feel she could behave so freely with one she thought merely the son of her erstwhile employer, someone weakened perhaps by his misfortunes and so easily dominated?

This is not a rationalisation – then or now – but it did rankle nonetheless as we walked those paths, walking away from the fountain and away from my perhaps now-lost intimacy with the lovely Rachel. And Mrs Bryce chatted on. About the stream we were going to visit and how it descended through a little ravine from a spring on a hill above the garden proper. This spring fed the fountain – its sparkling tinkling water – and even supplied the house with its water in as ample a measure as required. Mrs Bryce had never seen this spring but seemed remarkably impressed by what she had been told about it. The spring feeds a natural pool in a shady glade, where birds sing and the scent of wild flowers fill the air under the trees, ash and hazel and holly.

I was surprisingly touched by what seemed Mrs Bryce's poetic enthusiasm for this spring and must admit that I warmed to her somewhat. She herself seemed quite carried away, gesturing strongly, grasping my arm at times, bending forward so she could catch my eye in order to impress a point on me.

And then we finally came to the stream. I had never been in this part of the garden. In fact, I had assumed it was a standard garden, walled all about and strictly delimited from the remainder of the world. But here I saw that the garden – the area of flower beds and winding paths – came up against a low cliff, maybe fifteen metres or so in height, above which peeked out tufts of wild grass, jumbled brambles and small trees unknown to me. Except over here towards the right end of the garden, where the cliff was cut through by the ravine Mrs Bryce had referred to. In this cleft there was a profusion of trees and bushes, so dense that underneath was quite dark. It was from this darkness that the stream issued, tumbling over rocks and spilling into little pools, and then on out into the garden proper to spread out over a level sandy floor in the cool green light of a glade formed by ash and willow trees.

The first thing I noticed here was a comfortable wooden seat sufficient for two or three, high backrest and convenient arm-rests – an exact copy of the seat to be found before the fountain on the other side of the garden. Mrs Bryce led the way to this seat. I was entranced by the character of the scene – so unexpected yet possessing a compelling charm. The glade was inviting, the seat placed so as to provide the best view, but my eye was constantly drawn upstream to the dark ravine from which the stream flowed.

I was frustrated to find it very difficult to make my way over the broken ground with my gimped foot, the first stumble enough to cause me to pause. It was then that Mrs Bryce said at my back:

'Are you a backdoor man, Adam?'

I had never heard the expression before, but I knew instantly what it meant, understanding Mrs Bryce's distinctive posture. I also understood the curiously erotic undertow in our outwardly domestic relationship, which I had not till that moment been able to define. Only then did I realise that I was not an indulgent person, despite what some may have thought over the years. I distrust the surplus, the surfeit, the unnecessary; I distrusted enlarging myself beyond what I found of myself at any moment. I fear temptation.

Mrs Bryce must have intuited that also in the moments after she asked her question, for she said into my silence:

'It is not the perversion you may have reason to believe it is. Nor is it merely a variation for those tired of ordinary sexual congress.'

Mrs Bryce spoke those last words with a disturbing exactitude, over-pronouncing the word sexual, as though it was the perversion. Her tone chilled me and I was reluctant to turn and face her, fearing a sight perhaps unknown to me hitherto and so offering me a temptation I was in no position to resist. I felt at that moment that Mrs Bryce had engineered the meeting of her son with Rachel this morning precisely to put me in this position.

When Mrs Bryce touched my shoulder, I literally jumped with fright. I had not heard her approach over the soft ground. With the merest pressure of her forefinger she managed to turned me about to face her. I tensed myself, expecting to be confronted by goodness knows what power of command, what shocking scene of depravity. Instead I found Mrs Bryce smiling with a most gentle sadness, her eyes – coloured a dark green, which I had never noticed before – lustrous in the reflected light of the glade. She ran her hand down off my shoulders onto my forearm and drew me towards the seat again, saying:

'You must understand, Adam, that I am talking about a sacrament, not some vulgar dalliance in the woods.'

She seats me beside her and takes my hand – my left hand in her right – and lays it in her lap. I doubt if she was conscious of doing this: it didn't register with me at that moment either. She explained in the most reasonable tone:

'This sacrament commemorates an event at the very beginning of the human race. When the Serpent visited Eve in the Garden of Eden to prepare her for this world, it did not only give her the forbidden fruit. The Serpent also created for her the body that she would need in order to consume it. Up to then Eve had no need of food; she would not need to eat until she came to live here on earth. The Serpent made this possible by entering her at one end of her body and hollowing out a channel that reached up to the other end. Where the Serpent entered became Eve's anus and where it existed became her mouth.'

Only then did I realise that Mrs Bryce was pulling at the fingers of the hand she held in her lap: what I sensed was an habitual actions of hers, though it had no effect on me. I did not understand its significance then, nor do I now.

'You see what the sacrament is now, Adam? The man takes the part of the Serpent. It is a powerful role in the hands of a committed man. It suffuses him and renders him capable of extraordinary endurance, both in the course of the sacrament itself and later in his life. As for the woman, well, you can see for yourself.'

When Mrs Bryce freed my hand and stood up – obviously intending to demonstrate her point with her own body – I got to my feet too and walked away, stumbling quite awkwardly in my haste, a growing pain up my right leg, and I stumped and hobbled as fast as I could back to the house and shut myself away in my mother's room.

I have admitted before to cowardice, but this time I did not act out of cowardice. It was not revulsion, nor was it fear. It was, simply, that the proposal Mrs Bryce made was meaningless. I have not fathered children, though I have engaged in what Mrs Bryce called sexual congress on occasions with a deep seriousness. With Jocelyn I saw it as a form of communication; with Serafina it seems now to have been a form of what I can best call tempering for me – that allowed me to brace myself against a world empty of Jocelyn. It may have been a form of communication for Serafina, but I don't know. I have never been able to shape up for casual sex; I too quickly lose interest in the woman herself.

Whatever about the seriousness of Mrs Bryce, for me it would be an utterly pointless act, and for that reason I would have been unable to perform it.

Yet, what about Mrs Bryce? No doubt she will be bold enough to face me when we meet around the house. But how could I ever face the woman again?

Mrs Bryce follows a fairly strict timetable, so it was easy in the following days to avoid her. I was keen to do so for obvious reasons – call it embarrassment if you will, even a kind of shame – but there is another reason, far darker than mere personal discomfort.

Mrs Bryce called after me as I stumbled away. Her voice was most uncanny. It rose in volume the further away I was, but never became shrill – as you might expect. Instead, it seemed to be present to me at a constant pitch and volume, steady and very exact, regardless of my distance from her.

What she called out was this:

'The Serpent is not evil as your kind wants to believe. It was through the office of the Serpent that we are able to survive on this Earth of extremes: dry and wet, solid and fluid, hot and cold. Each descendant of Eve bears the Serpent's marks, as you well know, where the tongue is the Serpent's head and the penis or clitoris is the Serpent's tail. We should all do the Serpent honour in memory of this service.'

There is surely a steady conviction here, probably carried forward over generations and sustained by some degree of vindication through physical practice. But, as Mrs Bryce herself acknowledged, I could not share this conviction: could not sanctify this wretched earthly existence.

I remained in my mother's room for the next two days, retreating into the mode of existence I first developed in the early days back in the house. Besides, I seemed to have strained my gimp leg in my headlong rush back to the house and wanted to rest it.

Even so, while I had plenty to dwell on – though many of the conversations with Rachel were a fog of words for the most part – I was in fact consumed by the flow of a sweet abiding feeling. I could sit on the edge of the bed and look down at the carpet seemingly for hours and float in this feeling, memories evanescent like a mist about me. No teenager had ever mooned over a girl to the extent I did during those days, sustained as I was by the acute wisdom of what I remembered of her words.

By the third day I was unusually restless. I could leave the house unseen, but the question was: where to go? I dare not go the fountain: the pain of seeing Rachel and her young man perhaps in happy embrace on the wooden seat would be unbearable. Not jealousy, as I have said, but plain and simple regret. To have had my time with her without treasuring it enough; to have looked at her for hours on end and not absorbed enough detail of her; to have listened to her day after day and remembered so little.

Nor could I walk to the stream for fear of encountering Mrs Bryce, who might think that I had reconsidered my response to her offer. I knew she would only speak again in that eerie full voice of hers and oppress me again with her alien desire, not revolting but just without point.

I dawdled in the yard behind the house, conscious that Mrs Bryce would be soon here to begin her day's work, wanting badly to walk without knowing where to go. Then I spied the old shed in which my mother had worked on her plants. I had never been in it, but often as a child playing in the yard I had looked over to see my mother through the dusty windows, her head bobbing as she went about her tasks. It had always contented me to see her occupied in this way, as though I had some instinct that it kept her from harm in some way.

The worn wooden door, panelled in the old way, was stiff and required my full weight in order to prise open just enough to let me through. It was obvious that it had not been used for a number of years, since my mother's stroke, yet there were a surprising number of plants in flower, mostly rampant geraniums with brilliant red blooms. Broken panes in the roof allowed sufficient moisture through to support the plants. It was very pleasant to stand among those flowers, feeling that my mother herself had laid these plants out. Not only pleasant, but also consoling in a way I would not otherwise have expected. It was not that I felt my mother had made this arrangement just for me, for this occasion – when I stood in particular need of consolation – rather it was that I felt I had entered into my mother's world. This was not a substitute for my mother's real presence, don't misunderstand me: I had managed to do something that morning I had never done before. I was in a way seeing beyond my mother – around her, if you like – to see her world in some way as she saw it herself. In this little shed and among those geraniums, I saw into the world my mother herself valued. And that pleased my greatly and made me for a while very happy.

In time I was contented enough to look around further. What I discovered was that what I thought was a small shed actually opened on the far side, away from the yard and house, into a long greenhouse. This was a more modern structure – metal framed – with a lot of piping, but still showed years of relative neglect: rust at the joints, some broken panes, a lot of pots scattered about higgledy-piggledy, dry soil and shrunken bulbs littering the benches and floor.

I had less of a sense of my mother here, a kind of semi-industrial feel to the place, as though a professional had worked here. Even so, it had the same atmosphere of arrested time that allowed me to pause again. Only a few flowering plants – mostly towards the further end – some geraniums again, but others I did not know. Some in fact were scented, and it was this fragrance, very light and fragile, that drew me down the shed.

The flower itself was small, in little bunches, each flower coloured slightly differently, ranging from a pale blue to a powder pink. I bent to smell more fully. A shadow passed over me.

Rachel stood on the other side of the bench, her surprise the equal of mine. Both of us went to speak, then stopped. We smiled. We smiled again.

I said, honestly enough: 'I didn't know where else to go.'

Rachel smiled more broadly. She had a pot in one hand and a trowel of sorts in the other. The gloves she wore were green with white stitching. Her arms were very white. Her blouse was blue, the white fabric of her bra peeking out where the blouse had slipped from her left shoulder. Her hair was tied back but caught in some way at her left ear.

I said, as though nothing had happened between us: 'Are you busy? Am I interrupting?'

Rachel smiled again. She looked at the pot in her hand and put it down on the bench. Then she placed the trowel beside it. She pulled the gloves off, pulled her blouse up onto her shoulder and lifted her hair free from her ear.

Her eyes sparkled in the reflected light in the shed. She shrugged her shoulders and asked:

'Did you like the stream?'

The expression that crossed my face must have told her enough, for she said, the merest smile this time:

'Ah.'

Then she paused with a start, and I guessed she was going to repeat something Mrs Bryce's son had said, probably as she towed me away to see the stream.

There was a vacancy at this point that frightened me, so I asked – too hurriedly, no doubt – into this abyss:

'What about the spring?' I was going to be ironic at that point about Mrs Bryce's lyricism on that subject, but I realised in time that Rachel had deliberately avoided mentioning the son. I should avoid all mention of the mother.

Rachel turned away towards the end of the shed, saying most matter-of-factly:

'Do you want to go there, Adam?'

She did speak my name at that point, that I remember. And I contrived to speak her name when I replied:

'Yes, Rachel. Very much so, if I can.'

I looked down at my gimp leg.

Rachel was pleased to hear me speak her name. Beyond that she just nodded and said:

'We can fix that, I think, Adam.'

And so she could. From a far corner of the shed she brought me a pole – used, apparently, as a support for young trees – about two metres high and thick enough to take a good grip. Tested, it proved more efficient than any medically approved stick.

Rachel looked me up and down:

'Very pilgrim, Adam.'

Just the thing to say to set the tone. So I said:

'We'll should bring a snack of sorts.'

Rachel raided the kitchen – I heard her cheery good morning to Mrs Bryce, no doubt just lately arrived for her day's work – and returned with a shoulder bag of bread, cheese and fruit.

All this probably seems contrived, a fantasy to console me in this hard time. No young woman – virgin, moreover – smitten with a young man smitten with her, would have time for a crocked middle-aged left-over. True, very true. But please read on and suspend your judgement until evening comes and all is revealed.

Rachel and I had never actually walked the garden paths together before, always meeting at the fountain, one of us already in situ. It was very pleasant to walk those paths with her. We didn't talk, our shoulders sometimes brushed together, once I asked about a particularly flamboyant blossom, and once Rachel asked me if I was comfortable with my pilgrim's staff. If it was possible for us to have walked those paths side by side for ever, I would have done so, and I like to believe that Rachel would have done so too.

Thankfully, the glade was deserted. But I looked around even so. I didn't expect to see Mrs Bryce, but I was haunted by an expectation, for what even now I do not know. There was a presence, as though Mrs Bryce had left a spirit on watch. Perhaps it was that sort of place; you know the kind of spot that seems significant, that become holy places in time.

Rachel went across immediately to the stream itself and seemed to search the flow over the sandy bed. Asked, she told me she had been here a number of times, but that the area was allowed to run wild.

'What are you looking for then?'

She beckoned me over. The water was only inches deep here, so I could step into the stream and go close to where she stood. Rachel pointed:

'See that little stone there? The bluish one? That's a garnet. They're in the hill and get washed down to here. I used to come here as a child to collect them. I have dozens of them. They're very tiny – not worth anything – but I like the colours, especially when they change.'

She bent and picked up the stone – which I had not managed to find – and handed it to me. She smiled:

'A souvenir, Adam.'

I put it into the pocket of my shirt. Moved by a sense of ritual, I asked her to find one for herself. She searched about for several minutes, then bent and picked up a slightly larger stone – but still quite small. She handed it to me, presumably so I could study it. I rolled it between my thumb and forefinger and was surprised to see it change colour, the blue become a pale violet, very lovely to see. I looked up with delight and Rachel nodded with satisfaction. I returned it to her and she put it into the breast pocket of her blouse with some ceremony.

Sentimental? I daresay it was, given the circumstances: it was a special day, quite possibly I felt then the last time we would ever have together.

In any case, I turned towards the dark cleft of the ravine, suddenly very eager to begin our climb. I didn't know what to expect, or even whether I could manage it or not, but I was determined to give it my best shot.

At the entrance to the ravine, within touching distance of the wall of vegetation that screened it off, I thought to ask Rachel if she had been up to the spring before. It turned out that she had not been. She had been too young to go on her own and her father wasn't at all interested. Since then, she had never had the occasion to climb up.

Now she had. I could see that she was delighted by the prospect.

So it was in through the screen of vegetation, Rachel leading with me and my pilgrim staff following closely behind.

Surprise. Beyond the screen it was clear, so that we could see some way up along the tumbling stream in the low light – while the vegetation reached only to about a metre from the edge of the stream, the taller trees overarched the ravine and closed off direct sunlight. So we girded ourselves, Rachel carrying our lunch and I with my staff, and set to clamber up the wet mossy stones that constituted the bed of the stream.

Another surprise. We had only climbed a few metres when Rachel discovered that steps had been created to run up the ravine on the left bank of the stream. Something of an anti-climax at first, we were soon glad of the convenience as the climb grew steeper and the rocky bed of the stream became very broken, water all the time tumbling in plashy little falls from rock to rock. It took me a while to get a pace on the steps – their height varied a lot owing to the nature of the terrain they have been cut from, here rock and boulder, then steps created in the root-filled ground using logs, then more rock, and so on. Rachel was attentive at first, but once she saw that I could manage she seemed to drift into a kind of daydream as she negotiated the steps. No doubt I would have done the same, except that I had a growing pain in the gimp leg, perhaps left over from the headlong flight earlier in the week. I said nothing about this to Rachel: I wanted her to remain blissful on this day of all days.

It took about forty minutes to climb to the top of the ravine. We had rested only once – on Rachel's advice, not knowing at that stage how far we had to climb. Rachel sat down on the step at her feet and seemed mesmerised by the water flowing over a rock just before her. I had drawn back out of her line of sight and was stretching the gimp leg this way and that in an attempt to ease the ache. Then Rachel suddenly said, speaking to me I knew but sounding distant and meditative:

'Adam, you have to see what is there.'

I of course followed her gaze and of course saw nothing but the water flowing over the rock, lichens marking the channel. So I said that I didn't understand her.

'I know it involves too much pain. It never seems worth it.'

I still didn't understand her, puzzled now because the tone of her voice was very different, an authority that seemed very uncharacteristic of this lively and intelligent young woman.

Then Rachel looked over towards me:

'Believe me, Adam, when I tell you that it hurts me too. It hurts me a lot, dear Adam.'

I was suddenly very upset. I forgot about my gimp leg and stumped over to her side and laid my hand on her shoulder.

'You need never suffer for me, Rachel. I would die to see you hurt.'

Rachel laid her hand on mine, then pressed it, looking up into my face, her eyes bright with incipient tears:

'I would die for you, too, Adam.'

I wanted to say something adequate, but what happened is that Serafina's wild face flashed before me, vivid and as though coruscating in a fiery light. I knew at once what was happening.

I knelt down beside Rachel, leaning forward until my face was close to hers:

'No, not death, Rachel. Never death.'

And Rachel simply nodded, sucking her lower lip in between her teeth. Then she smiled with a very pure happiness. She reached up and embraced my neck and kissed me quickly on the cheek:

'Thank you for saying that, Adam. Thank you.'

Then it was as though that conversation had never occurred. Both of us were super-bright, super-ready to continue the climb, super-cheery about how nice the day was: super-relieved.

Rachel and I were finally together. And I knew we would never be parted.

The top when we reached it was very welcoming, a bright halo of sunlight – beaming down through the gap at the centre where the trees didn't reach – shining bright light into the centre of the pool. I stepped forward in what I realised was a rehearsed gesture. Rachel said, to save the situation:

'This is how they said it would be, Adam.'

I didn't understand her:

'Who? What did they say?'

Rachel turned and pointed back towards the ravine:

'Darkness into light. They said that was the effect.'

I went and looked back down into the gloomy ravine, so little light getting through the canopy. The rocks looked as though abandoned, the water an empty rush. The ravine seemed more vacant than empty, looking very much like a disposable thing – to be used and then thrown away.

I could already sense that I would not return back down the ravine. And I sensed too that Rachel would not either. I had been nervous of the ravine when down below in the glade – intimidated might be a better way of putting it – but now I really feared it. Actually, not the ravine itself, but a sense that it led back to something I had managed to escape once, but wasn't sure I could escape a second time. Only then did I feel just how powerfully Mrs Bryce, or whatever allure she had used, had affected me. It was like a pull in the pit of my stomach, sexual despite her claims to the contrary, that might suddenly become active in me with goodness knows what consequences.

This knowledge dismayed me and I was afraid that the day would be spoiled by some inappropriate desire. Rachel would not reject me – I knew that – but both of us would be diminished, no matter how willing we were in the heat of the moment.

I was still looking down into the ravine, my back to Rachel, afraid to turn to her in case I gave myself away. I was really sick at heart, disappointed that the imbalance between Rachel and me – she a virgin and me having used lust to assuage the pain of loss – could now, at the crucial moment, ruin whatever it was that we had in us to achieve.

It was then that Rachel said at my back:

'All things are pure to the pure at heart, Adam.'

I shook my head in wonder, and said without turning around:

'How did you guess?'

'Because you are pure.'

Now I did turn around, caught out in a way I didn't understand. Rachel had laid the bag down on what I saw was another wooden seat, high-backed with convenient armrests. Seeing the seat worked a kind of trick with me, so that I laughed out. Then I nodded for Rachel's sake, seeing how she could be right about purity – if by purity was meant something more like an integrity than just keeping your hands clean. I had stood by those who placed trust in me: I took on dear Joss's death, keeping the image of her dying face before me against the day I would finally understood what she saw; I let Serafina go when she was ready to go, sometimes the greatest service you can do another; I had even left Mrs Bryce with her convictions, even if that proved me a coward; and Rachel...

I nodded for Rachel's sake. I was tempted to quip ironically out of the kind of shyness those unused to sincerity can feel, but I didn't. Instead I went and sat on the seat by the bag and said:

'Lunch, dear Rachel.'

And she smiled a warm doting smile and came and sat on the other side of the bag, saying with the simplicity of intimacy:

'And lunch it is, dear heart.'

And a mighty fine lunch it was, consumed by us with good appetite and a fine cheer. We had this glade to ourselves – excepting the birds, of course – the surface of the pond unruffled by wind and reflecting the trees above and gleaming where the sunlight glanced. Why is the reflection in water so different to reflections in mirrors? The world we saw reflected in the pond was far more wondrous than even the delightful world about us. It was still and lit in a subtle way, as though the light we saw there had its source in the objects it defined rather than in a star far away in cold space. That was the thing about this watery world: it was complete, self-contained, and so must contain all the mystery that a world must contain: the mystery that we sense our world should contain in order to be complete – so that we could account for what we don't know.

I admit the thought seems complex on paper, but believe me it was simple to us as we sat and looked into the pond. And when I said something to the effect that one could be tempted to enter the pond as a way of entering that reflection, Rachel got to her feet, undressed and walked into the pool up to her waist.

If the water was cold, Rachel showed no reaction. She let her hands trail the surface, her head down so that her hair fell about her face. Did I ever write that Rachel was beautiful? I could check but I suspect I over-described her back then. Standing in the pool up to her waist, Rachel was exceedingly beautiful, with her long slender waist, slender limbs, modest breasts enhanced – as I had guessed – by dark nipples that even now were distended by the chill of the water.

I wanted to say something – if only to pretend that she had done nothing out of the ordinary – but I was unwilling to break whatever spell had taken her over. I sat completely still and silent long enough to see the symmetry of Rachel lost in reverie in the pond and how I must have seemed when lost in my agonising as I looked back into the ravine. I had feared my loss of innocence then, but Rachel had detected the purity in me even so. Now I looked at Rachel and wondered what was working in her – and then looked to see what was working in me.

Should I tell you? What did I see? You know the story about Diana who was spied upon while bathing? Diana had the unfortunate man killed, or so the story goes. What was Diana thinking about while bathing? What was Rachel thinking about? No, I couldn't guess at the time, but I will tell you what I understand now: Rachel was dwelling on her power, not over, exactly, but for man: she was thinking about what she could do for the man. Was Diana thinking along those lines too?

And what was Actaeon thinking while watching Diana naked in her pool? What was I thinking? I thought that a beautiful being such as Rachel appeared to me at that moment could never die, couldn't die in some final absolute sense. That her beauty could never be destroyed in any way.

That's what I thought. Did Actaeon think that also? I'd say he did; after all, Diana is a goddess.

Did I think those thoughts that day? Maybe not exactly, but they ran along the lines of beauty and the eternal. Wishful thinking, like wishing that a happy moment might never end? Why not? But how is it that we are capable of such a thought? How can we lift ourselves above this realm of accident, the confines of the horizons that circumstances impose upon us?

I am prevaricating here: I don't want to end this moment as I hold it in my memory, now that so much has changed in such a short time. But I must go on, for I think worse needs to be told before this story ends.

Rachel standing in the pool, water up to her waist, in a reverie as she looks down into the water to see herself in the pool's reflected world. Then she puts her hands over her face and bursts out crying. I am startled, then alarmed, then deeply worried. I cry out her name, and she turns and looks at me, her eyes flooded with tears, and shakes her head. I go to stand up, forgetting about the gimp leg, but Rachel raises her hand to stop me, pushes her way through the water, runs up and throws herself down into my lap. My instinct is to embrace her, right arm about her neck and gripping her shoulder, my left arm in around her side and across her lower back. She presses her wet face into mine, crying with intense sudden sobs, her whole body convulsing. I whisper words to comfort her, feeling all the time the weight of her on my thighs, the cold wetness seeping through my trousers, and yet I am hyper-aware of the soft tissue of her thighs as she rocks against me.

Then she says into my ear:

'I will marry Paul and become a mother.' Then she draws back so that she can look me in the eye: 'And I will lose all this!'

She cries this last sentence out. I just look back into her eyes, the truth of what she says in me at once, so that I nod mutely. I cannot try to grasp the meaning, fearing my response – which would be worse, devastation or indifference?

So I nod again, and reach over to get her blouse, which I carefully lay across her back. I replace my right arm then across her back, gathering the cloth as best I can in order to warm her. My left arm I lay across her wet thighs, my forearm bent so as to lie along her upper thigh up to her hip.

I will hold her forever like that, mindful of every square inch of her flesh that I touch, every curve, every minor pulse. And her damp face will lie against mine for ever, and she will cry and I will simply hold her. For ever and ever.

That is what I wanted, but Rachel drew back after a while, her sobs subsiding to a manageable level, and then began to speak to me in a low clear voice, earnest, sincere, truthful:

'I will tell you everything now, Adam, and you can work to understand it in the coming years. Most important is this: you are not alone, Adam. You were never alone. No one is alone. This is also important: part of you cannot die, will never die. You exist as a man in order to find the being that accompanies you, to unite with it, and so allow yourself become a Mirror of Glories.'

The words here are not exact: in truth, they are flat and prosaic – no doubt the result of too much thought on my part. But I do remember my immediate response, for I said to her, as earnestly as I could:

'Jocelyn said she could see another woman. Is that what you mean?'

'You would see her as a woman. But your companion is not a woman, Adam. Don't make a mistake here.'

'But Jocelyn said she was very beautiful, Rachel. To be honest, I thought she saw you in some way.'

'Oh no, Adam. Don't think that. I'm here to serve you. Then I will become a mother and die. But your companion is beautiful, as beautiful as you are.'

I'm sorry, but these words are not exact either. They are clumsy. The problem is that I cannot catch the mood we were in while we spoke. My arms held Rachel intimately and her body was impressed on my body, so that a heat grew in my groin, but without an erection. The heat was very pleasant indeed, a kind of joyousness in me in place of excitation. Much of my attention was focused there, so that her physical presence was more important to me than what she was telling me. It wasn't that I didn't believe her, or believed it was just the excited confession of a very young woman. There was a kind of obviousness to what she said. When she told me, for instance, that I was not alone, I felt I already knew that. Even when she spoke of me being raised to be a kind of mirror of glories – well, that was perfectly believable too. Rachel could have told me anything at all at that moment under those circumstances and I would have believed her.

This might seem callous, I know, but I want to be honest here, if only for my own sake. I face a future I do not like – which I will explain in a moment – and it consoles me hugely in the depths of my depression to remember that so-beautiful young woman, with her beautiful young body, and my arms lying about that beautiful soft-firm flesh. That she spoke to me at all consoles me, no matter what she told me.

And yet our last time together was not yet complete. Rachel calmed somewhat after our conversation and in time she dressed herself and we readied ourselves for departure and the descent of the ravine. Then I noticed that the pool was fed by a stream of water coming seemingly from the cliff-face just behind us. We investigated and found that the actual spring issued from the earth inside a deep grotto.

We spoke in echoing whispers, subdued by the stark quality, the simplicity of water and rock alone. We could see exactly where the water rose up from the confines of the earth and bubbled on the surface, all set for its long journey to some ocean far away. The little pool itself was crystal clear, taking up every bit of light that strayed into the grotto. I knelt and drank straight from the pool, my face buried in the water. Rachel knelt beside me and I could see her face under the water, her mouth moving as she drank. Then she opened her eyes and looked over at me, a glint of merriment there, so that I laughed and had to surface at once spluttering to clear water from my nose and throat.

It was a good merriment – what could be called ordinary enjoyment, two people enjoying each other's company. Rachel had the idea of leaving some memento of our visit. I thought of the garnets we carried, but Rachel pointed to the garnets that littered the floor of the pool. We decided on a button each, cut from our shirts. And so it was: we each touched the other's button then we dropped them together into the pool.

If you ever climb to that pool, you can check to see if they are still there. Two white buttons.

We went back out into the open, sunlight strong on our eyes – and I fell on the ground shrieking in reaction to the sudden agony that ran up the length of my gimp leg.

Mercifully, I passed out.

Rachel and Paul married about six months ago. I was sent an invitation but never received it, there being no postal service where I was then.

This is therapy. As an exercise in connected rational activity I have pieced together what happened after I blacked out, using Accident, Police and Medical Reports as sources.

Rachel descended the hill on the side away from the house, got through a break in the estate wall and managed to flag down a car on the by-road that runs along there. The young couple brought their car up a track to within a hundred metres of the pool, so that it was possible to carry me out and take me to the local hospital. Stabilised with pain killers and a drip, I was transferred to a hospital in the city. There they discovered that some kind of necrosis – another side effect of the original injury – was eating away the bone in my gimp leg. They amputated the leg above the knee as a precaution. Recovery was slow, due mainly to my mental state, which rendered me indifferent to my situation and prospects of recovery. Of this metal state, all I can say is that I was somewhere for a long time, over six months according to the psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists that attended me. That somewhere was a dark place, and all I know is that I was very patient there, never bored, never interested, never moved, no laughter, no crying, no nothing.

What a way to end. But there might be some justice to it. I feel that threads have been connected, from my love for Jocelyn all the way to my love for Rachel, both of whom are gone from me.

I am here, what more can I say?

## 3 MEMORIES OF MAMA

I'm told that Rachel and Paul are happily married. They have two children, a girl and a boy. Paul is an engineer, a specialist in maintaining autodrive systems. They live in a city in the north, where Paul is head of the department, diligent and dependable. I was offered family photographs, but I left them behind when I came back upstairs.

For my own part: I have a weird prosthetic leg, that clicks into place in a precise way. If let, it would totally control my life, turning me into a comical marionette. The wonders of science. I also have a wheel-chair, motorised, with sockets for phones, music and gps. I could travel the world in it, camping gear in the little shelf under the seat. I also have a crutch, not hi-tec, adapted from the pilgrim staff that Rachel gave me that last day. Not perfect, but I use it most of the time around the house, the clumping muffled by the carpet.

I've had a lift installed, which gives me access to the upper floor. Had this done initially to allow me get away from the presence of Mrs Bryce – who is still housekeeper – but I have come to live up here most of the time now. I've taken over my old bedroom – which overlooks the garden – and have finally gained entry to my father's study. There is a story there that I have only just begun to explore.

I have a companion also. I would like to introduce her to you. You know what they say about coincidences? That science would not be possible without them. Well, my life would not be possible either. Perhaps no one's life would be possible. But you can answer for that yourself.

Kay, short for Catherine – actually Ekaterina – but a long time since her family used that form in public life. The story here – if it seems like myth, then so be it – is that one day when I was lost in the blue, this woman came by and shouted at me, thinking I was her brother (apparently my back was to her), and I flared up into a towering rage. We argued like mad until the nurses came and separated us. I was in a terrible state then, hysterical and utterly confused. Kay told me afterwards that I repeated one phrase over and over:

'Transmission shearing.'

Kay was in a position to follow this up with me, which took several weeks, but the result was that I began to piece together the utterances of the Voice. Later, when I was half-rational, I had the good sense to give her the early sections of the memoir – down to the death of Serafina, all that had been written at that stage – to read. She still says she doesn't really understand much of it – in the sense that she cannot see how the parts connect together as an explanation for what happened to me after the amputation.

Well, fair enough, I suppose. At least she didn't then – nor does she now – regard my breakdown as simply a reaction to the loss of the gimp leg, as her fellow professionals tended to do. After all, I was already partially crippled and I had adjusted my life to that fact as well as could be expected.

Fine so far, but how come she is now my companion, as I call her? Do I need a personal psychologist? No, but I need a – what? We are lovers, there's that, which began – no doubt improperly – in the hospital. She likes the comfort I provide, and I like the company she provides. But – and here's where it gets interesting – when she moved in here, about three months ago – she brought her library with her.

Digression. I had not planned on resuming this memoir/journal into a new part. I sorted what I have written so far into parts yesterday, after writing the last section above, about Kay. Hardly slept last night, thinking about what is in me now. I seem to have changed in some way, no doubt as a result of my blue period. Is that so? I find myself sort of levelled out, more deliberate, though perhaps also more throwaway than I would like, almost flippant. Fair enough, but what I want to say here is this: the mention of Kay's library leads my thoughts out into very complex areas, to do in part with my father, and it seems after that with my mother. In order to keep the possible confusion to a minimum, I propose dealing with what I regard as the most important topics separately and in some kind of order. Afterwards, these introductory sections can serve as reference points for the main narrative. Well, we'll see if this works.

Fine. I will start with my father. My family provided the main law practice in this town for well-nigh on two hundred years and built its fortune on the legal concerns of many of the landowners of the rich lands that surround us here. My father inherited the firm, but then he shot himself – out in the garden – when he was thirty six. The practice was sold off to a big legal firm in the capital and the proceeds invested.

I was eight years of age then. I have few memories of my father, remembering him only as a tall bearded man who seemed to have his head perpetually hung in thought. I was packed off to a boarding school in the south. It was a surprisingly pleasant place, with a large motherly nurse who seemed to go out of her way to console me for a loss I didn't really feel I had suffered. The school was run by a minor teaching order with origins in southern Spain. They were the kind of teachers who did their work with us very competently, while their minds seemed elsewhere – which I suspect is what made them such good teachers. Children are not present in the way adults are – for a variety of reasons – so it is best if the adults who deal with them can absent themselves for the duration. One thing, though, that I do remember. Perhaps because of their Spanish origins, the school seemed to be full of crucifixes, statues, paintings, with poor Christ – as I thought of him then – hanging from walls almost everywhere. They were bloodless representations: I became aware of this fact after a visit to the Superior's office, where a full-blooded crucifixion hung from the wall behind that venerable monk.

Anyway, to the point. Once ensconced up here, I set about an exploration, not having been through this part of the house since teenage years. The house is laid out foursquare, four rooms on the ground floor and another four room above. My old bedroom lies – which I occupy now – lies left back, overlooking the garden. My mother's old bedroom lies right back. My father occupied right front and his study occupied the front left. Just to complete the picture: the facilities lie behind the large square landing, which itself sits above the large square hallway. Now, my exploration began and ended when I discovered I could not get into my father's study. Mrs Bryce told me that the key was probably lost years ago, so long was it since anyone had reason to go in there. She suggested a locksmith or a carpenter, but one look at the massive door and its massive lock told me that that would be a kind of vandalism.

So, I began a systematic search of the house – undertaken in Mrs Bryce's absence – starting in the drawing room. Among other findings, I came upon a large sum of money in an envelope tucked into the back of an old cabinet in the dining room. The money was out of date – how long it had been hidden there, or why, we never discovered – which the bank was good enough to replace. I found the key in my mother's room, in a yellowed envelope at the back of the lowest drawer of her bedside cabinet. I also discovered that there is a wall safe of sorts behind a painting, but never found the means to open it. So far I have not felt the need to try to open it, either.

This is one of the reasons why I said earlier that my thoughts about my parents were opening onto complex areas.

My father's study. My father was a relatively young man when he committed suicide. I doubt he would have had time build up sufficient guilt, remorse, or secrets that would warrant taking his own life. The study was my father's, but also the study of his father, and grandfather, and all the way back to the first paterfamilias to occupy this house. It was a brown study, old heavy wallpaper, a lot of books on a lot of shelves, extremely comfortable armchair, large heavy desk and comfortable leather chair, thick carpet, drinks cabinet and a number of other cabinets, some with drawers, others with shelving behind securely fastened doors.

Books: law tomes, bound journals, wads of loose papers wrapped with faded yellow tapes, filled the shelves behind the desk. The shelves along the inner walls contained almost two hundred years of novels, adventures and crime mostly, ranging from collected editions, through cheap board, to paperbacks. The shelves around the window contained the classics, no doubt all of them, except two lower shelves to the right of the window. Here there were about fifty books on the occult, all contributed by my father.

The occult? My hackles rose when I realised what they were, mainly through a mixture of surprise and dismay. I might claim to be artistic and sceptical of science, but I share the everyman suspicion of the occult, believing like many that it was the road to delusion, madness, and – superstitiously – to some kind of improbable damnation.

Is this why my mother had hidden the key? I wouldn't say so. If she felt that way about those books, then the easiest solution would have been to bin them or burn them. So why had she hidden the key?

My mother. I described my mother earlier on in this journal. It is largely true – she did have what I called a self-trust – but now, approaching her from another perspective, I ask myself if she also had an element of calculation in her make-up. You know what they say about reputation, if people believe you're an early riser you can stay in bed till noon. Did my mother really have that self-trust or did her family and friends simply believe she did? Don't misunderstand me here: I don't mean to impugn her. She obviously helped people, however she did it, but what else did she do?

It is strange: now that I think of her, I find that I really know very little about her. She comported herself very well at all times. She was attentive, and I know she gave a lot of thought to my welfare, choosing my schools with care and listening to my proposal when I decided to study photography at the technical college in the capital, instead of doing law at the venerable university on the east coast. She wasn't tactile, she rarely embraced or even touched me – more because I think she never thought to do it, rather out of some kind of aversion – something I accepted as just how she was.

But why hide that key? I was tempted to broach the matter with Mrs Bryce. After all, she had been a close companion of my mother ever since my father died, or at least so it seems to me. But no. My relations with Mrs Bryce were already very ambiguous, even after all this time, and I did not want her involved in this stage of my life if I could help it.

So matters stood until Kay brought her library with her. She took over my mother's old bedroom, wanting the view out over the garden – which, incidentally, faces south and so gets the sun in winter. There were about six hundred volumes, for which she brought her own bookcases, very handsome objects that had been in her family for generations. Her books were mostly as expected: tomes on various aspect of psychology, most of which were unknown to me, excepting Jung. She had novels, by no means romances, but avant-garde stuff, existential dread and purposeful irrationality. Then she had a number of old books on the occult.

See what I mean about coincidence?

Sure, you might tell me that everyone nowadays reads books on the occult, chakras, tarot, qabalah, alchemy, while others like to dabble in a little light magic. Fine. But what about Boehme or Swedenborg, Steiner or Crowley, people who work with vision and imagination, entering realms that cannot be accounted for by rational means but which indubitably exist? Who dares to enter that hall of mirrors without proper guidance?

My point is that Kay's occult books belonged originally to her father, and they matched or complemented those owned by my father.

See what I mean about coincidence now? See now why we are together already before we discovered this coincidence?

Kay's father: Specialist in Poetry of the Romantic Period. Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the City University up to his early death at the age of forty five. Cause of death never positively discovered, though it is given as heart failure on the death certificate. His main publication is based on his doctoral thesis and entitled The Enigma of Alastor. Many of his papers and published lectures deal with the relationship between modern poetry and the romantic imagination. His final major work, to be entitled Answering Prufrock's Question, was left incomplete at his death and therefore cannot be published.

Kay was sixteen when her father died, away at boarding school. She never saw his body. His wife, Kay's mother, remarried a few years later and went to live in Japan. Kay spent her vacations with her father's brother and his family in Connecticut. She discovered her father's books on the occult when clearing out his room prior to the sale of the family house.

My next step was to discover if there was a connection between my father and Kay's. Except for a small press in a corner over beside the desk, none of the drawers or cabinets was locked. The only item of immediate interest was an address book I discovered in the bottom drawer on the left side of the desk. It contained few names and addresses, none of which was distributed through the alphabet, but written into the first three pages. At some point my father used the book for notes, most of them incidental. Except for a series of entries inserted under the letter L. They all had to do with someone named Angela, and seemed to concern a dispute about what would have been regarded as a legal matter to do with precedence. But one entry alerted me: it simply states "Told her no elevation was possible. Won't make any difference to her, I'm afraid".

The whole issue of the occult books fell into abeyance when I told Kay that our fathers seem not to have been acquainted. This suited me at that point. I didn't tell Kay about the references to someone called Angela. This was something I wanted to investigate on my own. It's probably pretty clear to you who I suspected of being Angela, with a maiden name beginning with the letter L. It was easy to check too. The business papers to do with the house were in the little office off the kitchen – used originally by the family butler to keep track of the household accounts. Sure enough, Mrs Bryce's first name is Angela, though her maiden name was not listed. No matter, I had the information I wanted. Next I needed to find out the details of the scandal that saw her dismissed from her teaching post.

I had a friend check the files of the newspapers of record for about forty two to forty five years ago for references to the scandal. Nothing. Even the back copies of our local paper, all of which are digitalised and are available through the public library, carried no mention. The scandal had been pretty thoroughly hushed up.

No matter. To be honest, Mrs Angela Bryce didn't really interest me at this stage. My curiosity was aroused by my father's note to the effect that no "elevation" was possible. Did this mean that he had a positive answer to Mrs Bryce's proposal – assuming that was the topic they discussed? I was profoundly interested to know what that was. Mrs Bryce's invitation had frightened me, and – as you no doubt have seen – still does. If my father could combat her on a positive ground, then I would like to know what it was.

So, my plan now is to read up on my father's occultism and see where that takes me.

How strange it is that such absolute paranoia can co-exist with a world-view that is utterly prosaic. Why doesn't one group annihilate the other? My conclusion has to be that if one of these viewpoints is meaningless, then the other must also be meaningless.

I found Kay in "her" room – I had by then come to regard the back right bedroom as hers – working on one of her medical reports. Seems she was almost complete, so she put it aside. I told her about my father's occult books. Other than a section on the emanation of a number of what Boehme calls qualities, there was nothing else but rudimentary Christian theology in the Boehme work, while Swedenborg seemed mainly concerned to get God to repeatedly condemn the Pope in Rome. Steiner seemed not to be a mystic at all, but a phenomenologist concerned to underpin a variant of Theosophy, while Crowley was obviously paranoid, a harsh and profoundly uncharitable man. Telling Kay this, I experienced a sinking sense of disappointment in my father. I had always thought well of him – without any evidence except my mother's apparent good opinion of him – but the aridity of these books, the egotism of their authors, disturbed me. Not alone did I doubt my father just then, but my hitherto complete confidence in my mother and all that she had done for me was shaken.

I sat down on the bed afterwards, stumped and at a loss for the first time in months, completely adrift now that I believed that I could not trust even my mother. Kay came then and sat beside, laying her right hand on my left. We had in effect ceased to be lovers – it was never very strong on either side – and had settled in a companionship that until this moment had never been tested. Now she told me that she had meanwhile looked into her father's occult books, and she recommended that I take a look at them next. Perhaps she was simply humouring me, giving me something to do in order to distract me from my sinking morale – as psychologists sometimes do – but she assured me that I would find them very different to what I had read in my father's books.

So off I went and started into them. Boehme again: he seemed to be a starting point for both men. But this Boehme was very different, remarkably so. Now the subject was Sophia, that is, Wisdom, which he seemed to regard as some kind of divine or semi-divine being. Two other authors were prominent in the collection, both Russian, Soloviev and Florenski. In truth, these two were almost impossible to read. Where my father's authors were paranoid and egotistical, those of Kay's father were hysterical and self-effacing: one lot as bad as the other. Lucky for me, there was a kind of introductory study of this Sophia theme that allowed me to make more sense of these authors, especially the Russians. I was taken by the fact that many important churches in the Orthodox tradition were named after Sophia, though whether this meant a veneration of an entity of this name – rather than a symbolic reference to Mary, Mother of God – remained uncertain.

Some weeks later. There was another book in Kay's father's collection that took my interest, and which had nothing to do with Sophia, or even a variant of Christianity. I got Kay's permission to take this away to read at length. Intended as an examination of Hermeticism or alchemy by a woman named Atwood, it had the curiosity of omitting an essential component of the object of study. This is admitted quite frankly by the author at the beginning of the work.

I knew nothing about alchemy – and I was probably reassured by the fact that a potentially dangerous component of what Mrs Atwood shows to be a practice, rather than just a theory, had been withheld. I was in no danger of condemning myself through my ignorance. Early nineteenth century, educated by her father, and gifted with a steady intelligence and a wonderful writing style, I slipped into her book and let it carry me on page after page, whiling away whole afternoons and evenings, safe from all harm in the care of what I came to see was a quite remarkable young woman.

Then, about quarter way through, I came upon a sheet of paper folded in half and tucked securely in between two pages. It was obviously written by Kay's father – the subject matter confirmed that. I wasn't too curious – references to Shelley and Eliot suggested it was academic stuff – so I dropped it into Kay later that evening and forgot about it.

Read on to the end of Mrs Atwood's book, very satisfied with the experience, though not much wiser about Hermeticism. Started reading it again almost without thought. Lost myself in it again in an hour.

Not sure how this started – thought initially it was an erotic response to the author's high style, very open and expansive – but a heat made its presence felt deep in my groin. Later that evening I found relief from this sensation by lying out on the bed and breathing slowly in and then out. In time I began to feel a sensation in my leg and a bit: an energy that flowed up on my inhale into that warm area, and flowed out and down my legs on the exhale. It was a wonderful experience. I felt as though I was drawing some element up from the earth in to a specific location behind my groin, where it seemed to find a home, after which it flowed out again, back into the earth.

Next day I continue reading Mrs Atwood's tome; afterwards I lay out on the bed and drew up and released that power. This went on for a day or two, until I suddenly remembered that day up by the pool above the garden, the heat in me then in the very same spot while Rachel sat and cried in my lap. What I remember now is this: Rachel had crouched herself down on my thighs – I thought then she did this because she was cold – and drew her legs up against my thighs, her calves flattened against the soft flesh on the underneath of my thighs. Now I think that she may have experienced a cognate heat in her groin, as though some quality or principle in her mirrored that heat in me and pressed down in order to draw as close to it as it could.

I must pause now. I will go out into the open in the garden and let this thought grow in me.

The evening was fine after rain, the sun brittle in the early spring light. Every flower I saw – yellow spring flowers – reminded me of Rachel, who may well have planted them. You cannot believe how vividly I recalled that afternoon up at the spring just then. Rachel's body is an index of some possibility. In itself it is not real, merely a sign of some other reality. But Rachel remains real, even if she has passed on to another reality. We think love is a relationship. It is a marker, like a beacon at sea, or an inscription in this place that says that some truth was found, and as truth would remain always valid. That's the thing about love: it is never forgotten, can never be forgotten.

The garden looked very different. Seated in the wheelchair I was down among the flowers, the trees far away up in the sky. I remembered how Rachel had described the garden as a place of death, plants burned up by beauty in order to make the flowers. Is that true? I don't know; I can't see that. Rachel knew a lot of other things that now seem true, so perhaps she is right here too.

Anyway, got back to reading, tucked into the comfortable armchair in my bedroom. When the heat came, I lay out on the bed and breathed that force up from the earth and exhaled it back down again. Now it was more than just a curious by-product of Mrs Atwood's wonderful writing, it was something integral to me – and perhaps, given what I intuited about Rachel – integral to everyone. No doubt stimulated by this knowledge, I began in a way to pump up the heat, and it did intensify, until the whole area between my gonads and anus seemed to glow. Then one evening, instead of heating up as before, I felt the force or whatever shoot up my spine and touch a new centre of heat somewhere just behind my solar plexus.

Over the following weeks I managed to raise this power up through another three centres until it found what seems to be its climax, above my head, where it sprays out flashes of light before beginning its descent again to the earth. I did wonder if I was actually doing all this. The force or energy did not have its origin in me, yet it seems to obey my will in some way. It won't fly off to any other part of me – to my hand or the like – but it does rise and fall at my command, or at least in accordance with my intentions.

Whatever the phenomenon is or however it is controlled, it has given me what I can best call a marvellous sense of expansion. It's as though I have come upon an aspect of myself that I didn't know existed. All credit to a young virgin for in some way knowing this structure exists in us, and blessings on Mrs Atwood's curious book for charging it up.

At this point – as though by some esoteric destiny – my complacency was seriously dented. I want to write this experience out carefully so that it will not on one hand be misinterpreted in one direction, as it were, while on the other hand not be misconstrued in another direction.

I think mainly because Mrs Atwood's book had been instrumental in activating these centres in me, I decided I should tell Kay about them. While I did want to tell someone about this wonderful discovery, I also believed Kay might herself try to activate the centres within herself, with my guidance if she wished for that.

I was very surprised by her initial response. My knowledge of Kay was limited to our acquaintance and the various levels of interaction between us. She had been – much like myself, as I have already written here – an indifferent lover, quick to move on from the moment of satiety. This probably had its origin in how we became lovers: one afternoon as we examined my experiences of the Voice, she leaned in over me to look for a quote in the report I held in my hand. I simply touched her arm, momentarily aroused by her proximity, and that was that. Then we went back to discussing the Voice.

In appearance – I realise now that I have never thought to describe her before now – in her early thirties, she is of slightly less than average height, slim build, very neat in appearance, tidy fair hair, favours trim slacks and blouse – plus a cashmere wrap if chilly – likes heavy-ish jewellery, with crystal/semi-precious stone insets – which gives her a faintly exotic air – and, I have to admit, rather sexy shoes. She uses little cosmetic: a little carmine lipstick, which fades to a faint blush that suits her very well. She may use pencil, too, but I never thought to find out.

You can see that she is an interesting person to be with, very articulate and direct, very knowledgeable and open to new thought. Professionally, she is well-regarded, attentive, observant, objective, but not without sympathy for those who need her help. With me, for instance, she realised that I had no idea what the whole Voice phenomenon meant, and accepted that as her starting point, knowing that it was not answers that I sought but a kind of re-orientation. And this she helped me to gain.

Why did she come here with me? Each morning she undertakes the hour-long drive into the hospital in the city, and the same commute in the evening. Yes, I know she can get a lot of work done with the autodrive system once she gets into the centre of town here, but still it's a long day for her, sometimes six days in a week. I have a better idea now about why she came, but before this I thought she, like me, wanted company and found me also interesting company. We often chatted as length about the arts, for instance, she has a very good visual sense, not only for the image – painting as well as photography – but for its use in the theatre and the opera house.

This aspect intrigued me about her. Hearing her talk about opera, especially – which I had enjoyed while with Jocelyn – showed me that she herself had a fine stage sense, which probably helped her with her patients: the theatre of the mind and its dramas, if you like. It also suggested to me that she might have a strong imagination, no doubt a capacity she inherited from her father.

I decided to introduce the subject of these inner centres I had discovered within me by talking about Mrs Atwood's book, assuming that she had some knowledge of it. I was taken aback by her instant dismissal of the work as worse than useless, no more than the giddy chatter of a spoiled girl. This was her father's opinion, which she had adopted without looking into the work herself. The only reason she had held on to it after her father's death was because it had belonged to his father, and was one of the few possessions he had at the time of his death.

It was a tricky situation, as you can imagine. My initial response was to let the whole subject go. I didn't myself need to have Kay understand my experience, I simply thought it would interest her. Rather wisely, I hadn't brought the book with me to her room, so it was a simple matter of shrugging my shoulders and nodding acceptance before thumping my way back to my bedroom. But Kay must have sensed something of what was pent up in me – she would have known that aspect of me very well after all the therapy – for she said suddenly, alert to me:

'Why, what are you getting from it, Adam?'

This was an even more awkward situation now. I was loath now to tell her about the centres. Her opinion would not sway me, but it might affect our relationship, which I realised just then was important to me. So what to say?

I shrugged again. The best I could come up with at that stage was to ask her a question, a leading question:

'Did your father ever talk about alchemy?'

The question did startle her, but not for the reason I expected.

'Alchemy? Is that what it's about? Jung – Karl Jung – thought alchemy was very important. You know Jung, do you?'

'I know the name. Something about unifying the individual, is that it?'

'Sort of. I studied Jung. I still use some of his strategies. They can be helpful. But I think his central idea, about what he called individuation, is essentially wrong. The individual, either male or female, cannot be integrated in the way he described.'

I must have looked either sceptical or dismissive, for she got to her feet – she had been sitting at her desk working up a report on her tablet – and strode over to me. I am about twenty centimetres taller than her, so she needed to look up in order to catch my eye.

'I have worked with enough broken people, Adam, to know that something is missing in us. I don't know what it is, but I do now that once whatever fix-up we have managed to develop over the centuries breaks down, it is very hard to pull it together again.'

I was shaken by her intense conviction. Needing to sit, I turned around and dropped onto the edge of her bed. She sat down beside me, still looking intently into my eyes. Once I had settled myself, stowing the crutch out of the way, she caught my left wrist in a firm embrace and asked:

'What do you know about alchemy, Adam?'

I was evasive at that point. What she had said about the incompleteness of the individual rang true and I wanted time to absorb that fact.

'The book is supposed to be about alchemy. Mrs Atwood calls it Hermeticism. It seems to be about making what she calls the Philosopher's Stone. Some kind of elixir of life, I think.'

What I said was true – that is about all I understood so far from reading the book two and a half times. Obviously, it wasn't the whole truth.

Kay nodded at this reply. I decided to shift the focus over to her:

'Why was your father so against it?'

Kay starts, tightening her grip on my arm:

'Against it? No, he wasn't against it, Adam. He thought it was irrelevant.'

I had my entry, not knowing then what I was setting in motion:

'So what was he interested in?'

Kay releases her hold on my arm and looks down. I could see she was biting her lower lip. Then she looks up into my eyes again and asks:

'You are working on something, aren't you, Adam? I can feel it about you.'

The charge between us was palpable. I understood where I was coming from, but I could not see what suddenly excited Kay so much. I didn't know how to reply to this question. In a sense I was not working on something – in the sense that I had an objective – it was a matter of something working in me, the end of which I didn't know. She saw my hesitation and said:

'I can help you, Adam.'

She grasped my hand as she said this and pressed it firmly. I quietened at once: I knew she was going to speak at length – I had seen her do this many times before.

'I take it you read some of my father's books about Sophia? Wisdom?'

I nodded.

'He believed that Sophia could be brought down to earth and incarnated in a person.' Kay spoke earnestly, looking straight out before her, as though she read a script from memory. 'Many men believe this, Adam. My father believed that if Sophia could be drawn into a woman, she would then use her divine knowledge to save us. My father believed this, Adam.'

Kay got up from the bed at this point and went across to the window and stood looking out at the trees, a sure sign that she was taking me into her confidence.

'My father asked me to help him achieve this. He explained his understanding in detail. He even bought that study about Sophia-Maria for me to read. You must understand, Adam, that I worshipped my father and would have done anything to help him. When he asked me to help him bring Sophia down to Earth, I agreed immediately, even though I didn't know what would be involved.'

The tension in the room was such that I felt the need to ask a question, any question:

'What age were you then, Kay?'

'Fifteen. It was summer. I was home from school and my father was on leave from the University.'

That was the point at which I should have found a way of leaving the room. I knew I couldn't manage that rapidly or even with any dignity, the crutch lying partially under the bed, the stump of my right leg jutting out, useless. So I resorted to subterfuge again, asking conversationally, as though I was politely interested in the subject:

'And was your father's ceremony successful, Kay?'

She was taken aback, deflating:

'Successful? I don't think so, Adam. I think now that he didn't make enough preparation.' Then suddenly animated again, 'But when you told me about the Voice, and about the lady you saw. The one you said knew you? Then I realised that you were prepared.'

Yes, that threw me. I was rhetorical now, knowing how it must have looked to her – considering how it had seemed to me:

'Prepared?'

She turned and looked across at me.

'Yes, Adam. That's why I agreed to come here with you. I want to help you. You see, I think you can do it.'

For just a second – an instant only – I believed her. The experience of the Voice and especially seeing the entity's face was suddenly meaningful: perhaps a being from another plane, perhaps Kay's Sophia.

What if this was true?

The pause was long enough to galvanise Kay with the prospect of being able to do what she obviously badly wanted to do. She hurried across the room and stood in front of me, bending to look into my eyes:

'I know how to do it, Adam. I know what is involved. And I am willing to do it for you.' She reached and touched my shoulder to hold my attention. 'My father said we couldn't use my vagina, because that led to babies only. To reach the woman herself we needed to go the other way.'

I started, at once realising what was involved, the same revulsion as before rising in me. But Kay pressed her hand into my shoulder, following my eyes with hers.

'I know how it is done, Adam. Trust me. It hurt the first time, but daddy used mineral oil after that, and that was fine. Listen, Adam. I can bear it. I want to do this for you.'

I slipped away from her hand on my shoulder, tipping over to my right to reach down for the crutch. There were tears in my eyes. Why? Pity, I think, just pity. Pity for the young girl that had been Kay, perhaps for her poor deluded father, perhaps for myself – that I was caught up in this sort of thing. Why was I not married to someone like Rachel, with two children and a good career? Why could I not have ordinary honest-to-god love and happiness?

By the time I had organised my by-then miserable self and got to my feet, Kay had undressed the lower part of her body. When she saw that I saw this, she turned and presented her back to me.

Kay is in her room at the far end of the landing from here, perhaps by now asleep in her bed. I cannot put a name on what I saw. Buttocks have a unique form though a myriad shapes, the whole structure of hips and thighs are an erotic magnetic for many, the anus a source of an almost frightening fascination for some. But I know I blaspheme in saying that what I saw was almost holy in its innocence. Regardless of what she had submitted to, when she had no real choice – what to another might have been a very real abasement – seems to have enhanced Kay in some way that made no sense to me. I was repulsed by what had been done to her, a horrible madness inflicted by a man who had used his prestige to suborn an chaste young girl to satisfy a delusion. He had done it many times, it seems, in a practical manner, with no thought for the effect on his daughter. What if there was a power in his mad scheme, a magic that could have infected his daughter to goodness knows what terrible end, insanity or damnation?

My first impulse was to flee – as I had done before. Not this time, though. I called her name, so that she would turn to me, and clumped over to her and put my free left arm around her shoulders and drew her over to where she had dropped her clothes. I said, in order to ease her:

'No, no, Kay. This is not the time. Dress yourself now.'

She nodded obediently and bent to do as I had instructed. When she was dressed, she came back to me and put her arms in around my waist – I think to draw me to embrace her shoulders again as much as out of affection. And I understood then the way in which she missed her father – what someone else might now have a use for – though I think Kay would see it as a need for – her special ability. But I squeezed her shoulders gently as both an expression of affection and as a statement of approval. However I might feel about what was done to her, I had no judgement to make regarding Kay. She had done right by her standards, and I would accept her conviction here as my own.

I kissed her brow – for all the world as if she was still a teenage girl – and suggested calling it a day.

Is that what it is like to be a father? To give approval?

It was a few days, after writing up the above account and looking out the window at the summer days as they passed, before I let what passes for normalcy here resume. I returned to reading Mrs Atwood, and for a couple of hours I struggled until I had to admit that something had changed. What I had feared for much of my life had finally happened.

Given the circumstances of my life at its various stages, I had had a lot of control over what happened to me. That is, I could always act. Now I feel cornered. Never before have I been dependent upon my immediate environment. Mrs Bryce downstairs looks after my material welfare. Kay – and this I admit now – looks after my morale, at least. More, both of these women have offered me more, so much more that I am in hiding from one and in agonies trying to work out what exactly it is about the other that draws me so powerfully. You have no idea how many times I have taken up the crutch and gone over to the door. How I listen for her car, listen for her on the stairs, hear the door close across the landing. I know if I go across and tap on her door, she will admit me and I could have anything I want from her.

The real horror here is not simply being tempted; it is not knowing exactly what tempts me. There is a kind of erotic pull here that has in a sense absolutely no object. And yet I know exactly what it is that draws me. I cannot bring this desire and this knowledge together, as though my desire is routed via Kay back to something in myself. I can grasp that, but I cannot see how I get "through" Kay and back to myself. If I try to locate what I seek in her, it collapses into something tawdry, even sordid. But when I recoil from this, I sense again what it is in her that I need.

The sensible thing to do is to go across the landing and speak to her about it, trusting that as a psychologist she would be able to negotiate this debilitating dilemma. But I know that will not work. I know very precisely how she will respond, as you do.

And that has to be the clue to what is going on here. I try to match what it is Kay offers me – which I think I understand fairly well, what Mrs Bryce from another perspective called a sacrament – and then isolate the knowledge I sense within me that is in some way connected to Kay's offer. This actually didn't take long to work out, once I grasped the essential issue. It was simple to say – I needed to do for myself, in some way or other, what Kay was offering to do for me – but it was very difficult to work out how I was to do it. I was too ignorant of whatever process was in train in me.

And a strange thing after that. I went to bed, slept deeply the whole night, got up on the morrow and decided I would walk/clump around the garden all day.

Which I did. But I should have realised it was not going to be a simple day out. For one thing, with the sandwich and flask of coffee I brought a notepad and pen in the shoulder bag. And I elected to stump along with the crutch rather than use the go-anywhere wheelchair. You can't walk far with the kind of primitive crutch I was using – remember Long John Silver huffing and puffing about – and the shoulder bag kept slipping from my shoulder. All of which meant I didn't walk very far, certainly not to the fountain or the glade with its stream. Got as far as another of those comfortable wooden seats, high back and armrests, this time in a sheltered alcove looking out onto a bed of yellow roses basking in the sun.

So, very agreeable. Now, I should have dwelt the morning through on the events of the previous evening, which is what I assumed I would do. But no, lazy summer day in a garden, buzz of bees and chirping birds, the scent of flowers – the yellow roses especially – and I slip into a very pleasant stupor. I daydream rather than think. My mind is blank, like a dark screen lit in some way by tiny flits of light. I came to feel as though I had risen about two or three metres into the air, and all sound came as though from inside my head.

Then, the screen as though cleared and I see a little iron pot, with a long thin neck and a small door in its side. I watch myself open the little door and reach inside the pot and take out what seems to be a handful of black mud. I look at the mud in my hand as it oozes out between my fingers and then sets in four trails each about seven centimetres long. It is very specific. Then I reach down to some soil, create a hole with my free hand and plant this congealed mud in the ground. At once the long strands perk up and lo! it is a plant.

I'm not surprised by this vision. In fact I take out the notepad and write it up as accurately as I can. Then I am overwhelmed again by the languor and drift back into my old cinema with its blank screen. I feel a contentment at this stage that has an edge of giddiness to it, as though I might jump up and frisk about in the way you see very young children do.

And now the screen clears again. I see I have a clump of black matter in my hand. This time it lies inert. I know this is the remains of the congealed matter I planted in the last vision. It is waste matter, I know, but I also know it is very important.

I find this less pleasant, but I take out the pad again and write the vision up. This time I leave the pad and pen on the seat at my side, knowing I will need it again. Sure enough, the screen darkens again after a while and I see:

There is broken ground running down to the edge of a sea, which is calm in a heavy, turgid way that I find vaguely revolting. I know I must traverse this broken ground to reach the sea's edge. I set off, and see what are beacons of sorts set in the ground, three in number, and when I look up towards the sea again, I find that the sun has risen over to the right, where it is blocked from view by the slope of a hill. The sun's rays are strengthening all the while, which fills me with hope, for the surface of the sea is brightening. But suddenly a figure appears, suspended in the sky between me and the rising sun, its arms outstretched, as if to block my way.

I am sombre after this vision, but even so I dutifully write it up in detail, even sketching the layout in case I should forget. I have no sooner finished writing up this account than I see the next vision:

I am now on the sea shore, whether the same sea as in the last vision I don't know – but that is not important – and I find a crystal bar on the sand at the sea's edge. It is a distinctive yellow in colour. I want to call it gold but I know it is not gold. It is about ten centimetres in length and would fit easily in my grasp. So I take it up, contemplate it for a moment and then throw it far out to sea.

I have a momentary regret about throwing the crystal back into the sea, suspecting it might have been some kind of spiritual gift. But I know I did the right thing. I write this vision up in full. I find at this point that I am hungry, so I have the sandwich and coffee, content as any worker would be after a good morning's work. It didn't cross my mind then, but I am now repeatedly surprised at how I could take this really strange series of events so calmly, like a secretary taking down dictation.

Anyway, after my lunch I find a quiet spot among some bushes in order to pee. I think then to walk further into the garden, but when I get back to the seat, and before I have time to sit down, I am subjected to another vision:

This is completely static: I am on the sea shore. It is very quiet, with low thick clouds that darken the scene. The sea is rolling in a way that abstractly nauseates me, in the sense that I know if this were a real experience I would feel sick. Then the vision is gone.

I sit down, stow the crutch and write out the vision. I put the pad and pen down, arrange myself for an afternoon of dozing, when I suddenly see quite clearly:

I am in a cave on the sea shore, and as I look out I see the sun rise, brilliant rays shooting up into the clear sky, a long shimmering path from the rising sun to the sea's edge and on into the cave to my feet. I know I must go to where the sun is rising. I know that this sunrise is symbolic and that I can therefore simply be at that spot. When I am there I see what looks like a rock with a chunk cut out of it, and in this space there a clear crystal stone. It is of the same dimensions as the earlier yellow stone and know therefore that it is a modification of some kind.

This vision cheers me no end. Though I am only an observer of these vision, I nonetheless feel that I have accomplished something significant here. I write it up and just for the pleasure of it, I draw the crystal in its rocky holder. It does please me very much, and I look over to the glowing yellow roses as though to celebrate my achievement.

I thought that was it then and began to put things away, the sandwich wrapping, the empty flask, the pad and pen. I even dragged the crutch up from the ground and laid it handy against the seat.

Then, just like that, I closed my eyes and there I saw a branch, as of a middle sized tree, behind which a moon shone. As I watched, this moon began to shimmer in some way, as though waves radiated from its centre, and the branch itself began to pulse in sympathy. Then, quite suddenly, I saw the whole tree lit by this moon, which shone down through the branches in the upper left part of the tree. The whole tree shimmered now, then just as suddenly as before, what had been moon-like now became like a glowing fire. It seemed to set the branches closest to it – those I had originally seen affected by the moon – aflame, even though the branches were not consumed. Then I see the tree again, and this time it is backed by a gigantic orb – almost as tall and wide as the tree – and the whole scene glows ruddily with a gentle effulgence. And I know now with certainty that this is the final vision. And I also know that what could be achieved through this process was achieved.

I write all this up and then attempt to draw the tree in some detail, drawing a circle about to indicate the dimension of the final orb.

The happiness I feel – calm and just-so – tells me that something of very great significance has happened to me. But at that point I haven't a clue what it is and what it means to me.

All I do it put the pad and pen away, take up my crutch and stump back to the house. I take the lift up to my room, lay out on the bed and stare at the ceiling without moving for what seemed like hours.

The plan was to transcribe the visions into this journal that evening, which went to plan until – fate? – intervened. You'll see.

After the long reverie – which refreshed me wonderfully – I went down and fixed an evening meal. Kay's car was not to be seen so I assumed she was detained by perhaps a patient or an emergency. I returned to the room and worked on the transcription for several hours, easy enough work so long as I paid attention.

It was getting dark and I had just put on the desk lamp when I heard a soft tap on the door. I was startled and attempted to get up too quickly, forgetting as I sometimes do that I am now seriously crippled. It was Kay, head around the door then full entrance. I was startled again by her. I was half in half out of the chair, the crutch unhelpfully lying on the floor, and Kay raised her hands to stop me.

'Only for a moment, Adam. You weren't here this afternoon and I wondered if anything was wrong.'

It had finally hit what it was about Kay that had startled me. I blurted out:

'You know, I've never seen you in a dress before, Kay.'

She smiled widely – something I had never seen before either.

'Oh, yes. There was a function. A colleague has won an important prize for his research and we organised a celebration dinner for him.'

I was shaking my head, hardly taking in what she was telling me:

'God, Kay, but you are a really beautiful woman. Do you know that?'

The dress was loose on her slender form, drawn in with a wide belt at the waist, so that it billowed out above and below. Kay has small breasts, but very firm with tight nipples, and these stood out against the billows of her dress in a way that was extraordinarily fetching. Below her waist the billows lifted above her hips to settle on her neat buttocks. But it was only when she began to walk over towards me that I saw her legs, exposed from above the knees, for the first time.

Again I could stop myself, and I had to chuckle in appreciation:

'And you have lovely legs, Kay. Really sweet legs.'

I wouldn't ordinarily expose myself by giving that kind of praise. For one thing, it rarely rings true, and for another, you have to live with it afterwards. I put if down to the day's events at first, plus perhaps trying to jolly us out of any post-mortem on the previous night's talk. But then I saw that Kay herself was more light-hearted than I had seen her before. I realised she must have had some drink – that's one of the advantages of the autodrive system: so long as you get your destination keyed in properly, you can be as drunk as you wish.

I found out that this latter fact accounted in large part for my ease with her. She liked my praise, and, more, she needed it. I think revealing those salient events of her young life to me released her to the present, so that she could be an extremely attractive woman in the company of a man whose attention she liked, perhaps even wanted and needed. I won't overdo this aspect. See for yourself.

She came right up to the desk, and stroked my head in an absent habitual way, as though it was something she had always wanted to do. She smiled a doting smile, her eyes glinting more brightly than usual:

'You weren't ill, Adam? I was afraid, you know, when you weren't here.'

Perfume. Kay had never worn perfume before. It was subtle, expensively so. What a woman pays for her perfume tells you the main thing to want to know about her: how she values herself for herself, not for others – all the other gear will tell you that.

Had everything been different at that moment – and I do mean everything – I would have reached to touch her waist, just to feel its curve. But everything wasn't, so I said in reply:

'No. I decided to spend the day in the garden with the flowers.'

This was intended as flip, but I saw the quick shadow that crossed her face. I should not have mentioned the flowers. Kay was thrown out, the alcohol jolliness was dented, and the more fugitive woman I knew appeared. I made an attempt to head this seriousness off:

'The shoes too. Do you know you always wear very sexy shoes? What do your patients make of them?'

But jolly Kay was gone, and in her wake the perfume and the lovely dusty pink pattern of the dress seemed misplaced, as though she had dressed in someone else's clothes that afternoon.

Who knows what would have happened then: Kay dropping like a satellite from space all the way down to earth again. So beautiful – her face so well defined by the makeup she wore, so full of character in the best sense – and she just crumbling like a – what else? – a dying flower.

But Kay noticed the pad on the desk, saw my notes from that day's visioning. She started back.

'This is alchemy, Adam. Are you studying it in detail? That's good.' She bends to read. 'Did you get this from one of your father's books? You did say he studied alchemy, didn't you?'

She turned the pages.

'Yes, this is a good version of the process, you know. It can vary so much. Only a fool would try to regulate the process.' She looks closely into my eyes, obviously wanting to advise me: 'Only the practitioner can really know if the process is a success. They say longevity is a sure sign.'

She starts back through the pages again:

'Yes, here's the faeces, and the yellow sulphur. That's it. Then the dissolution in the dark sea. Very good. The white stone, and even the tincture. This is a very good guide, Adam. You could depend on this. You see that all seven steps are here.' She looks up from the pad at me, very earnest while my insides go through hoops of elation and suspicion, one after the other, round and around:

'Seven steps are the usual. They relate them to the planetary orbs, but I don't think you need to bother with that.'

Kay had managed to divert herself from the depression that challenged her – though I don't believe she said what she did just for that purpose, she doesn't need to calculate and so has not the habit. That did please me, and I pushed all the other thoughts back and concentrated on keeping her on the even keel she had established. The jolliness is like that: just a balloon waiting for something to burst it.

You see I did nothing to disabuse Kay of the assumption that the visions were copied from a book. Yes, it's getting very awkward. The longer I hold off telling her the worse it's going to be. Actually, I suspect it is already too late. You see the extent to which the previous night's revelation have opened her up. But she has been able to do this only because she thinks she has re-established a relationship – with me rather than her father – that practically constitutes her very being. If she were ever to glimpse the possibility that I don't need her help – as she sees it – then she might well just break down completely.

Having got her into a better mood, I suggested we have tea and some of Mrs Bryce's biscuits downstairs in the kitchen. She agreed readily, so something of the high mood still in her – it was after midnight by now, a very late hour for Kay.

The bright light in the kitchen did us no good. Kay looked drawn in the mirrored window, especially about her eyes, while my beard looked merely scruffy. I noticed with some surprise that I was beginning to stoop, I think because of the crutch – which strictly is too long for me. No matter. A midnight feast with lovely Kay is a midnight feast.

There was tea and some of Mrs Bryce's chocolate biscuits. We sat at the big kitchen table, face to face. We were silent at first, in part out of habit, in part also even a bit shy of each other. I dived in:

'What was the gathering? You seemed to have enjoyed it.'

She looked decidedly grim for a moment – a surprisingly comical expression on Kay – then she lifted her head and smiled:

'Colleagues mostly. You know, shop talk. But it was nice to meet John again. He was the one who won the award. He came with his wife.'

'You knew him before, didn't you?'

Kay smiled again, a touch of the wry there – very unusual for her.

'Yes. At university. He's the only other man I've had sex with.'

That stopped me. Both the candour and how she described the relationship.

'Did you love him?'

'I don't know, Adam. That's the truth. I really didn't know how to behave. I mean, I could see how other girls handled their relationships with the boys, but I just could not grasp the trick. I knew there was a way of doing it – I could see girls switch it on when needed and then switch it off again. His wife is like that. French, perfectly turned out, she knows exactly what to do. It's amazing, you know.'

'Did you talk to him?'

Kay seemed surprised by how closely I could follow her evening: but it had to be something like that, a kind of echo, if you like.

'He came over after dinner. His wife was talking to some of the senior people.'

'And?'

'He said he hadn't realised how beautiful I was.'

'And he would have married you if he had known?'

Kay laughed out, released by what she felt was my complicity – the fact that I was on her side.

'Noo, nothing like that, Adam. He would have kept me by him until wife-material came along.'

Now the worldliness of that surprised me.

'You did have it worked out, didn't you?'

Kay sighs, puts down her cup and pushes herself to her feet.

'Yes, I suppose I did.'

I got my crutch in order, got away from the table pretty neatly.

'So you knew what you were looking for?'

Which got me a long significant look.

'Yes, Adam. I did.'

In the lift Kay asked if we could sleep together. When I seemed to hesitate, she said quickly:

'No, no, Adam. Nothing like that. You said you would tell me when you were ready. No. I just want to be with you tonight. I mean, after a night out in the world I want to get back into ours.'

I didn't want to refuse her anyway. We were both tired and frazzled after our various adventures, and I did like the prospect of the closeness. Unusually, Kay borrowed a pair of my pyjamas, ones with a cord that she could draw in tightly.

Last thing, washed up and ready for bed, I asked on the spur:

'Tell me, Kay, if this is not too intrusive: did you yourself ever experience anything special while with your father.'

She brightened immediately.

'Actually, yes. Only once, though. One afternoon, I saw what seemed to be a white bird flying up out of a bush, and as it flew up it became a dragon and opened its wings and turned a kind of deep red, a crimson, very rich. Its wings were beautiful, opened as wide as could be. And it had a small head with a beak for a mouth, and its tongue was long and forked, a brilliant red colour.'

I was moved by her vision, could easily imagine it.

'What did your father think of that?'

'I never told him. He said that Sophia was beautiful. He used to say she was a real princess. I couldn't tell him that I saw a dragon. I think he would have regarded it as an evil vision.'

'Was it?'

'No, Adam. It was my vision. It was part of me. It is part of me.'

To which nothing could be said.

We slept very close, and regardless of whatever understanding governed this night together, I woke up with my hand inside the flies of her pyjamas, Kay's hand pressing it against the bulge over her clitoris. It was our usual careful lovemaking, but very comforting for us that night.

I said to her afterwards, drowsy and feeling so very secure in her embrace:

'If marriage is ever on the cards, Kay, I will marry you.'

She nods in the dark, her face against mine:

'For ever and ever, Adam.'

I fell asleep nodding my assent.

I daresay it seems hypocritical to do true love while in a sense deceiving Kay. Well, to start with, I'm not taking advantage of her, should you think that. Sleeping with her like that for me was fraught with danger. I'm not superstitious, but there is a charge of one kind in Kay, and a charge of another kind in me. You know that, so I need not explain. I nodded Kay's vision away, but I felt a powerful frisson as her vision was repeated in me almost exactly as she described it. The image actually ran like a little video even as she described it, the bird flying up from the bush and becoming a dragon. I ask you, how is that possible? The only answer I have is that the image is also in some way in me.

Now, consider what might happen should I tell Kay about my experiences. Has she had these experiences herself already, or might they run in her as a video even as I described them to her. For some reason, which I can only vaguely grasp as an attenuated intuition, I don't think they would. I intuit that at some level men and women are very – if not absolutely – different. There is a kind of imbalance in the way both Kay and Mrs Bryce perform in these matters, compared with how I and the other men involved do. Can I substantiate this? It's not a matter of passivity or submission: I suspect now that Mrs Bryce initiates her sacrament, as she calls it, while Kay accepts – because of circumstances, perhaps – a passive role. And look also at how different are their experiences: Mrs Bryce talks about a serpent, while Kay not only saw a winged dragon, but also identifies with it.

And the men: Kay's father looked for a female being, and I'm not sure now what my father sought. For my part, I seem to be engaged in a complex process to do with alchemy. The imbalance, as I call it: both Mrs Bryce and Kay find images, while I, at least, engage in an activity. Can you see that? I would propose that I can enact this process to a real end – some kind of transformation or development in myself – while the two women receive images that I suggest reveal in some way, perhaps only symbolically, the object of the process. Thus, while the man can achieve a real end to the process, the woman can only have knowledge of that end.

That said, this does not belittle the woman's role here. The fact that the woman can perceive what is sought by the man means that she is potentially a guide for the man. I think now in Mrs Bryce's case, this role of guide has been subverted by her, so that rather than being a kind of midwife she has come to act as a priest officiating in a sacrament. But with Kay the matter is different. Her father put her in the role of subject for a sacramental operation, much as bread serves in some Christianity churches. She can see no other role for herself. But, as I will show in a moment, she is in fact acting as my guide, the midwife of whatever process is in train in me.

I would dearly like to explain this to her, but I cannot do it yet. She is too focused on helping me in her way. Until I can weaken that intent, I will not risk harming her. She will guide me in the interim, without knowing that she does so.

The above observations are based on several weeks' reflections. Kay's identification of the visions I'd had as constituting the alchemy process astonished me. While Mrs Atwood had entertained me, she had also impressed with the magnificence of the process she described in such detail. I assumed I would not be worthy of such an honour. The alchemists she described were devout dedicated men, who sacrificed a great deal in their search for the Philosopher's Stone. And even after Kay's revelation, I could not believe that a morning dozing in a garden could be a sufficient preparation for such a grand ritual.

The perennial question: Why me? What have I done to deserve this dignity? Born to wealth and comfort, in a position to do what I like with my life, and even now in my physical wretchedness I live a life that many would envy. Why should I be enlarged in this way?

I don't know. But what I will do, as it is in my power to do, is relay what I can of my circumstances and experiences so that others can undertake this process and achieve the end that is available to us all.

Of this last point I am convinced: to Raise the Dragon, as Kay might have done – and perhaps will do someday – is in the power of everyone. Allowing for something like reincarnation – which is implied in the woman's capacity to have access to what is a male process – then all can achieve this end, male and female.

Kay's description of my visions as part of the alchemy process played through my mind for days afterwards like both a promise and a threat. I was uplifted to think that this could happen to me, but I was also fearful of succumbing to a very seductive delusion by ascribing quite exaggerated titles to what might be mundane nervous responses. What saved me was an element of scepticism. Kay had said that the alchemy process involved seven steps, but I had found only five centres within myself. So, either I had not undertaken the alchemy process, or else I had not been able to open/contact the other two centres.

I would have left the whole matter there, teetering between grandiose delusion and anti-climax, except that in searching out my father's book on alchemy – which I had looked at and found very pedestrian indeed – I happened to glance at the title of the book beside it: Chakras. I had looked into this book too, and had found it quaint and suspiciously over-proven. Quaint? The basic illustrations of the individual chakras seemed fixed for eternity, and yet had more detail than anybody could explain. Over-proven? These chakras seemed to fit into every other esoteric system quite comfortably, regardless of time and provenance. The chakras seemed to me to be just symbols, nice to look at but not very useful.

But: the point about the chakras for me this time when I reread the little work was that there were seven of them, two of which fitted very nicely into gaps in the centres I had experienced in my own body: behind the sacral plexus, and at the throat.

The problem for me now was: how do I access these centres. It was not a matter of dialling in or rigging up some wires. I tried lying out on the bed and breathing in and breathing out. I ascended to the five centres I had already contacted, but I could not awaken/activate the other two. So what to do? I went back to Mrs Atwood and resumed reading her work, already halfway through on my third reading. It took a day or so before I started to read her in a different way. Previously, I had let her words flow into me and run riot through me. This time I observed the behaviour of her words. That's not a fully accurate way of putting it. I didn't observe indefinite articles or the like: I observed the words that I felt I reached for. Some examples: light, separation, fire, matter. As you can see, these are very ordinary words of general import, but they lit up in me. I read for several days like this, focusing on words as I say, until I slipped into my earlier reading mode and I would sit in the armchair through an afternoon and then the evening reading Mary Anne Atwood's seemingly inexhaustible language. Until one afternoon when in a startling flash I saw two triangular objects rotating against each other.

It was out of an instinct that I went and lay out on the bed. I breathed in until the first centre heated up. I then drew my breath as it were from that centre up and, sure enough, I see the vision of those two counter-rotating triangles again. But the presence here – just behind the sacral plexus where the second chakra is said to lie – was fugitive, flickering as though the rotation of the triangular objects interfered with the centre.

At this stage two tasks competed for my attention: 1. I should search on for the second missing centre, at my throat, or 2. I should relate the other centres to their corresponding chakras. I decided on the latter course, if only to get rid of what seemed to me to be no more than an intellectual curiosity. I suspected then that the other missing centre would also be in some way malfunctioning. I suspected also that these two problem centres were related in a significant way. Therefore this matter should get my undivided attention.

I won't go into the details of either project, there is enough technicality here already, and this is not a technical manual. Enough to say that I matched the centres in a neat chart on a sheet of A4. The only feature of note at this stage is the correspondence between the second chakra, which has six petals, matching the sum of the angles of the two triangles I had seen. Obviously there is a connection between the centres in me and these chakras, which are conceived as centres in the body. But this signified little in itself, just a set of names and attributes that had accumulated so many interpretations as to be useless.

So it was on to the search for the second missing centre. I found it in much the same way as the other centre. But this time it was as though it came to me, and came because I had already found the other missing centre. And as before, it was suddenly there as a vision as I sat reading Mrs Atwood: a ring of blue flames, like a gas ring. The corresponding chakra told me it had sixteen little flames. It seemed to be operating as it should, no flickering, yet I sensed it was not doing its job, as it were.

So, while I knew there was a task outstanding before I could regard the column of centres as operating correctly – and so allow me to pass on to the next stage, which I assumed would be the case – it was very satisfying to be able to climb up the column of seven centres, reaching the top centre above my head and see its blaze of glory before descending step by step again.

One thing I knew about the problem: the second centre, behind the sacral plexus, had to do with sexuality – insofar as the second chakra had to do with sexuality. How I would go about investigating this problem was beyond me. I felt I didn't have a perspective – as an essentially sexual being – that would allow me to interfere with this fundamental human drive. I knew it was not simply a matter of abstinence; the sexual drive had to be transformed/ redirected in some way.

I didn't have a clue how to do this.

I was in the situation where, because I couldn't do this one thing, I couldn't do anything else. The solution was to take to the garden again. This time, however, I used the wheelchair and spent days tootling along the pathways between the flowers, visiting the fountain and the stream glade among other places.

Late summer turning into autumn now. I dislike autumn flowers. They take on the colouring of the dying leaves, memorialising that general theme of autumn. You can't blame people for celebrating the ripeness of fruit, harvest festivals. After all, only the encroaching darkness of winter will follow.

No harm. I paid little attention to the garden anyway. I knew enough by now to know that these inner processes take time. How much time I cannot judge, having no knowledge of the mechanisms involved. I just drove the little sporty chair around and around, watching my stray thoughts as I went.

You can see that I expected some illumination upon a pathway, but it didn't happen that way. But what did happen only showed me how complex the issue of sexuality is from the perspective of the world in which I seem to be in now. Each morning I made myself a sandwich and a flask of coffee, not easy to do stumping around on one leg. I believe there is a telescopic crutch available, which clips onto the side of the chair, and extends with just one flip of the stick, just like an umbrella. I should get one.

Anyway, comes the morning when I am stumping about preparing my lunch and Mrs Bryce arrives, either earlier than usual or I am running later than usual. I get a surprise to see her suddenly in the kitchen, in civvies, her handbag dangling from her left hand, lose my balance and go down in an undignified huddle on the floor. Mrs Bryce helps me up, sits me at the table – I realising that this is probably the first time we have had physical contact of any kind. Yes, that is how we treat the service. I thank her. She suggests a coffee before I leave. She fixes coffee for the two of us and seats herself opposite me at the table.

This is a first time for something else, I think: I had never seen Mrs Bryce indoors without her apron before. I understood why the apron is necessary: Mrs Bryce has an imposing presence – not at all suitable for a housekeeper. She has, I saw, a powerfully built body, full figured but not fat, that she moves very easily. This morning, then, given the various accidents of the occasion, we have a very different and novel relationship. But one thing I know at once: I am no longer afraid of her. I can cite three reasons: the question I can ask her; my knowledge of Kay's service; and my own growing experience of the world she operates in. And while I am not afraid of her, Mrs Bryce seems unable to get my measure. I sensed this in how she moves while I am still.

There are a few moments of chat as we sip the hot coffee, and no doubt size each other up. Now, I do not initially make a connection between my main preoccupation and my conversation with Mrs Bryce. In fact, I begin it out of pure curiosity. I tell her about finding my father's papers and about the reference to her. She is non-committal, to be expected. Then I ask her:

'What did my father mean when he said you couldn't elevate?'

She knew instantly what I was talking about. She paused, obviously to prepare an answer – I thought this was a stratagem but realised once she began to talk that it was not: she didn't know what level of understanding I had of the subject.

'It depends on which side you approach the subject from, Adam.' She pauses to see if I have anything to say. I hadn't: I didn't know what she was talking about. 'Right. Your father assumed that I was subject to his control, so that I would operate on his behalf. In this case there is a limit on what can be done. By a woman, I mean.' Again she paused to see if I would answer. 'If the woman commands the operation then this problem of elevation doesn't arise. Yes?'

I finally shook my head. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Mrs Bryce got up from the table and brought the message board and marker from where is magnetically attached to the fridge door. She comes around and sits beside me. On the board she draws a simple representation of a man and a woman side by side. She marks these figures appropriately as she explains:

'Men and woman are constructed differently, but not for the obvious reasons. They are built on the same base, for reasons we needn't go into, with variations to suit their different roles. The male gonads are external, for an obvious reason, while the woman's are internal, again for obvious reasons. We can exclude the womb from consideration because it is an addition not derived from the basic model. Women develop the mammary function in the chest nipples, while in men they remain unchanged. Now the most obvious difference between men and woman is not sexual – as almost everyone believes – but has to do with functions regarding generation. Here the womb is again excluded from consideration because it is an autonomous system, an incubator, simply inserted into the woman. The difference then between the man and woman lies in the male sexual function, operating through his modified gonads, and the nurturing function in the woman, located in her breasts.'

The figures on the board have been almost obliterated by all the extra markings Mrs Bryce has made, so she pauses and cleans away the majority of these.

'Now, the difference here in function has important effects on sacramental operations. Broadly defined, operations in the woman with a source below her diaphragm cannot be brought up above the diaphragm, that is, they cannot be elevated. But no such barrier hinders male operations. This may seem an advantage, and many men believe it is, but there is always the danger that powers raised from the depths will run loose in untrained men and become phantasms, and so delude the man. The problem for the woman, on the other hand, is while containment protects the woman from fantasy, she is always in danger of letting the power circulate within her, which has the effect of overwhelming her will. In this condition, the woman becomes domineering, inflexible, and ultimately destructive.'

Mrs Bryce draws back from the table and smiles at me:

'Which I think you have witnessed in me, Adam, yes?'

It is a monument to the clarity of Mrs Bryce's presentation that I have managed to repeat it here so faithfully. I had never before heard her speak at length. I said to her, matching her candour:

'Where on earth did you learn all that?'

Mrs Bryce laughed easily, throwing her head back:

'My family have dealt with these matters for a long time, Adam.'

'So it was you who instructed my father, not the other way round?'

Mrs Bryce nodded:

'But as you know, it went to his head. All those books he bought. He near drove himself mad with his weird notions.'

'So you taught him?'

'Yes. Well, tried to.'

'About the serpent?'

'You remember, Adam. Yes, about the serpent.'

'Can I ask you what the problem was?'

'Your father wasn't content to be the recipient of the serpent. He wanted to be the serpent.'

'So he wanted to raise it in you?'

'Yes. Obviously he couldn't raise it in himself, Adam.'

This was the first intimation that this conversation had immediate interest for me.

'No?'

Mrs Bryce sensed the change in my tone immediately.

'Not in the way he wanted. But you have some other idea, don't you, Adam?'

I didn't think candour was called for here. As Mrs Bryce had herself admitted, she was not to be trusted, if only because she knew of just one way to operate.

'Oh, that's another line, really. But you say it runs in your family?'

The diversion worked, but only because Mrs Bryce wanted it to. She didn't want me running away today.

'Yes. You're curious, Adam? Very well. Have you ever heard of Lilith? She was the first wife of Adam. Instead of giving her fruit, the serpent entered her and so made her the wisest of all human beings. And Adam learned her wisdom by penetrating her and allowing the serpent embrace him. The very ancient image of the serpent encircling the Tree of Life celebrates this sacrament. And the women of my lineage have done this since the time of Lilith. And many other families have done likewise down through the ages,'

I saw the image she described even as she spoke, except I saw that the serpent devoured the man. I shook my head: there was something wrong with this fable.

Mrs Bryce went to turn on some appliance and incidentally dress for her day's work. In that time I contrasted Kay's liberating vision with this litany of containment that Mrs Bryce had related. Then I remembered what Rachel had said about the limitation on the woman when she becomes a mother.

Diplomatically, I prepared for departure to the garden. Mrs Bryce understood immediately when she got back. I thanked for taking the trouble to tell me so much. She looked somewhat crestfallen as I left. She was in her late fifties by now, so perhaps the energy was no longer there for her, either in herself or her partners.

It was probably a reflex, but I ran the wheelchair over to the glade and the stream. The path runs the length of the glade, a couple of metres back from the stream itself, heading for the dark gap that is the entrance to the ravine before turning sharply to the left and along under the cliff. I hopped over to the seat and sat in a corner, braced against the armrest, and so facing at an angle downstream. I didn't want to see the dark entry to the spring above today.

My thoughts felt constipated. There was something I wanted to think about, while some other line of thought pressed forward in contention. I could see Mrs Bryce in some kind of context, while seeing nothing at all. She loomed in my mind, not threatening as before, but as though she guarded some pass. Then I thought, Eve: why had she spoken about Lilith this time? Perhaps Eve was the story for the laity, as it were, while Lilith was the story for the insiders. I didn't know enough about either to evaluate the difference between them. All I could do was gauge my own responses to the two versions. I was frightened of Mrs Bryce when she told me about Eve, not so when she told me about Lilith an hour before. The serpent was the clue. According the Mrs Bryce's story, the serpent enters everyone through Eve, the mother of us all. Lilith seems not to have had any children, but seems nonetheless to be the origin of the serpent in women like Mrs Bryce. In the Eve version of Mrs Bryce's myth, men and women conjoin in commemoration of the creation of the human body. In the Lilith version they conjoin ostensibly so the man can be taught the serpent's knowledge by the woman, which I saw as the depletion of the man by the woman.

Then the thought that bothered came forward: is the man always in danger of losing himself in delusion? I could easily understand one aspect of the fear. Only if a thought had a secure referent in our world of affairs was it trustworthy. When you found yourself in a realm of pure action, all thoughts had to be suspect.

This line of reasoning made no sense to me at first. Only when I remembered my own rejection of labels for the centres I had encountered within myself, did I see where it led. We make references within a discourse: we know what we are talking about. I know next to nothing about the centres, so there is no discourse and therefore no references are possible. Kay's description of her experience used similes: it was like a bird, then like a dragon. Mrs Bryce spoke on both occasions as though her references were real, that there was an actual serpent. Kay's father regarded his Sophia as real, likening her to a princess. What about my father, how did he regard the serpent?

I found a chisel in the tool shed in the yard and slipped into the house through the door at the end of the hall, now behind the lift. It was difficult to brace the little cabinet – too light to withstand the pressure of the chisel, too big to hold on my lap in the wheelchair – not so difficult to force the door when I had managed to brace it against the desk. Only one slim volume in the cabinet, a sheet of paper lying on top.

The book was by Swedenborg, a little fantasy piece translated into English as The Generative Organs. On the sheet was written:

" _Even when I was with her and loved her in my accustomed fashion, I seemed to obtain wisdom in place of the intercourse itself."_

Alice warns me about her: if not your seed then your Soul. I grow big in her and I see the whole realm at once. Can this be deceit?

I clothe her with scales of green. She is like a snake in the grass, turning and turning in my hand. Be still, I tell her. Go down go down.

Yes, I ride her down and down. There is only one. There can be only one.

_I am crowned. My crest is ruddy. I sit among the stars_.

I tell Alice: there is no death. No death for anyone. That is the gift.

I sit at my father's desk, seeing the sun creep across the carpet as the evening wore on into dusk. I was afraid. My father was a lawyer, sharp and rational. What hope for me, then? My only hope lay in not thinking, not speaking.

I must be silent; silent and still.

Kay found me there, almost dark, seeing the door to the room ajar. She read my father's note before I had the presence of mind to tuck it away somewhere. She chuckled – at least I think it was a chuckle: recognition, a kind of mordant satisfaction. She put the sheet on the desk beside the book and leaned across to me:

'That's the way it goes, Adam. It's like a drug. You know, it's like giving yourself away. Wanting to reveal your deepest secret, deepest wish.'

I honestly didn't know what she was saying, forgetting for the moment that she was a psychologist and probably used to hearing this kind of stuff.

'It's mad, Kay. I know it is my father I'm talking about, but that is madness. Pure paranoia.'

Kay nods emphatically.

'Yes! Yes. Half of the people I see want only to tell me their secrets. I mean, to tell someone all their secret wishes. It's not unusual. Listen to any religious service from the outside and you hear the purest paranoia. It's not the paranoia itself that is at fault, but modern society's rejection of it.'

I shrugged even so:

'I don't want to be like that, Kay.'

She is surprised to hear this – I realising at the same time that I may have given the game away:

'Why would you be like that?'

I duck and dive and thankfully find a way out:

'What about your father, Kay? From what you've told me, he seems to have been pretty obsessed with his idea of Sophia.'

She stands back from the desk, staring at me. Then she nods and leaves the room. She is back in a moment with the sheet I recognise as her father's note. She gives it to me:

'Well, you can read this one now.'

Who is Shelley's ghost? We know who haunts Eliot, combing her hair in the sea. Why the fear? I am not afraid. Shelley's ghost can only appear wrapped in the symbols of death. But she is not dead, Shelley must go among the trappings of death to find her at the source. And Eliot must drown without drowning, no ears, no eyes: the cold dark silent sea.

It is to die without dying; it is to commit to death and risk that death might claim you, which it surely will if you do wrong. The Lady will come to you only when you have surrendered everything you love, even the most valuable possession. You must do down everything, not denial but abandonment.

Fail and you die forever.

Succeed and you live forever.

I commit to Sophia forever.

Concatenation: it was not a good idea to read these two testaments one after the other. I could not do justice to either now. Kay waits for me to speak. I can only say, a novel tiredness in me, as though I have gone too far already, beyond my strength:

'They are very different, aren't they?'

She bends over the desk towards me again:

'Was he abandoning me, Adam?'

I had never heard that tone in her voice before: what I would call incipient loss of faith. I temporise, though it is a useful question to ask:

'When did you read this?'

I hoisted myself from the chair and hopped over to the wheelchair and dropped myself in, a neat manoeuvre thanks to much practice. I set the chair in motion, out of that room, out onto the wide landing. Kay followed automatically – as I hoped she would – saying to my back:

'When you gave it to me. Why?'

I went to the lift, go in with Kay following me, then down to the kitchen. There is always a pie of sorts in the fridge, the makings of a late evening snack. Tonight it is steak and kidney, which I knew from experience will be very tasty. I gestured and Kay placed it in the microwave, got plates and cutlery. I hopped over to make tea in one of Mrs Bryce's ornamental teapots, strong tea.

All done, we awaited the chime of the microwave. I now said in the interim:

'What did you think of it then? And since then, for that matter.'

Then the chime. So we arrange the food, the beverage and ourselves at the table. The pie was delicious. I could see that Kay was very hungry. Good that the pie was a generous size: Mrs Bryce a good eater herself.

'Truth? I thought it was a bit pious. You know, all high-minded intent. I didn't take it seriously.'

'Fair enough. And this evening?'

'That's because of you, Adam. Your reluctance. I was surprised when you didn't jump at the chance. No, that's a bit crude. I mean you seemed to think there was an alternative. Can you see that? I thought there was only one way of doing it. That's the impression I got from my father. But you seemed never to have even considered the possibility. I mean, you've been with a lot of women. Sophisticated women, I mean, with a lot of experience. I assumed you must have been offered this before. But this evening, the word abandonment hit me hard. I felt then that my father had used me in some way. I thought he wanted his Sophia to incarnate in me. I mean, so that he could be with her, talk to her in the spirit and learn from her.'

There were biscuits to go with the tea. Even given the talk we were having, I was remarkably happy to be sitting with Kay and having this impromptu meal. I was blithe, and no doubt that came across.

'Well, you mustn't let this interpretation obscure the fact that you gave your assent in good faith. You must not think that you are tainted by the quality of your father's intentions.'

Yes, even as I spoke I realised how abstract this was. It is not about motive; it was about what remained – who Kay was now.

Kay brought the two sheets – one in each hand – to the bedroom with her. I prepared for bed as usual, waiting for the penny to drop. That didn't take long. What delayed her response was the need to prepare that response – a sure sign that she was considering my situation as I considered hers. That led me to wonder what it was she knew about me that I mightn't know. No doubt I will find out when I'm ready for it.

Finally, she asked, her voice small, as though reluctant to take up the subject:

'Who's Alice?'

'I don't know.'

'Your mother? And the other woman, who might be after your father's soul? Was that about what I think it is?'

I just nodded, not sure she would see me do it.

'God, Adam. Do they all do it?'

There was no way to avoid this.

'I don't know. Your father and my father did.'

'Who was the woman, do you know?'

I did evade this:

'I was just a child, Kay. I knew nothing about all this until a while ago.'

'I wonder how she feels now.'

Kay was standing in the middle of the room, arms limp by her side, head down. She looked forlorn, but also as though she had stepped aside for a moment. I could see that years as a therapist had given her resources I knew nothing about. She continued when she was ready:

'It killed my father. There must have been bad faith somewhere. Who did he wrong, I wonder, me or Sophia?'

I was startled by how she phrased that.

'Don't be so surprised, Adam. Remember I had a vision out of it. The dragon is not Sophia, but it was given to me by Sophia.'

'Do you think there is such a being?'

'Look at what both fathers sought: wisdom. They approached it in different ways, but they were looking for the same thing.'

And Mrs Bryce too, I realised.

'What do you want from Sophia, Adam?'

I had the answer at once, but I held off answering until I managed to get under the covers in bed. I lay out, sensing both legs extending below me – which happened often for some reason last thing at night.

'Nothing, Kay. Absolutely nothing.'

Give this to dear Kay: she goes into the bathroom, comes out naked, rubbing her arms down as though to brush the day's detritus off. Having seen her dressed up has increased my appreciation of her naked beauty, especially how her hips roll as she walks flat-footed.

She leans over me once she is abed:

'I didn't ask for anything, either, Adam'

To which I replied without pause:

'We're two of a kind, Kay. Two of a kind.'

I think today, after getting the journal written up, that I ought to do something practical in the world again. Get myself in shape again, learn the marionette walk. I could teach photography, maybe here at the college in the town. Kay and I could then regularise our life together. We are very comfortable together. I could easily spend the rest of my life with her, maybe children if not too late.

Considering the possibility makes me want it very much. Whatever about love, I do like Kay very much indeed. I feel that is more important than the romance. It has a future.

The plans of mice and men. I write this in dismay, the first entry here in five weeks. What I am going to do now is lay out a list of fourteen visions in the order in which I received them over the last month or so.

First I must outline the ritual involved. Out in the garden I picked up some beech nuts and brought them back with me. A day later I got the idea of laying one in the palm of each hand and one on my tongue. The first experience came then. After that, I would get the impulse to set up the nuts and a vision would follow.

1. First time the ritual produced a powerful emotional reaction. I sensed that this was intended to charge up the ritual space.

2. Experienced red on the left, pale yellow on the right, with fire in the centre that resulted from an interchange between left and right. Sensed this opened a passage running up and down.

3. I see a trident, where fire and water join, and felt the power move side to side, then back to front, then still at centre as a fire.

4. I see a vision of a knight on horseback, which I understand is Osiris.

5. I see a star-like shape and feel that a veil is being drawn back.

6. I see the star multiply one above the other till they look like a plant growing.

7. Left is fire, right is silent cold: one rising, the other counterbalancing till they resemble a dark star radiating darkness. I stand in an abyss, utterly alone.

8. The darkness again: a glowing pearl on the left, an intense fire on the right, in the centre a long shimmering rod extending up and then curving over towards me. This is the Soul's first freedom: now it will grow.

9. On the right: a plant grows, then surges into a green flame; on the left: a hollow globe, then a ring of fire, both rising strongly together; at the centre: dark until the serpent extends falling into this world, then becomes a tongue of fire curving up to the right. This is life

10. On the right: blue flames like fingers; on the left: white globular star rising; at the centre: five sparks of pure light. This is Being.

11. Heavy balls of fire in each hand, zigzagging up my arms to my head. Purification.

12. Weight on my hands and tongue very great: found I could push up – at once a slight flaring light rising.

13. The three seeds have weight and strength, then a fountain like plant rising, very powerful thrust.

14. Left: pillar of fire weighing down; right: two green shoots; centre: descending yellow rays of light; then clearly:

##

While all this can be subjected to meaningful analysis, even a sequence of development can be identified, I felt after the ritual was completed that it was more a plan that an actual spiritual event. What's more, I felt strongly that I was not the intended recipient. This is not to say that the experience of the visions was incidental. I've spent hours mulling over each vision as it came, and hours again trying to make sense of them. But in the long run I realised that what I learn from these experiences is of less import than the events themselves. As I tried to say a few weeks ago: the event, the action, is in itself more important than any knowledge of it. The event happens; knowledge doesn't.

I make a record here on the off-chance that it might help me in the future if this process gets very involved. It might keep me from feeling overwhelmed: a very frightening experience, as I discovered a few times over the last month, especially when I felt I stood utterly alone in that abyss.

Careless again; this time with potentially serious consequences. We're in the middle of whatever it is. I'm writing this both to get perspective and to get away from it for a while.

Finally getting the sequence written up properly gave me such relief that I walked out into the garden. I wasn't dressed for the chill, but I stumped along pathways among the now dormant plants, stepping on the brittle fallen leaves to hear that so satisfying crunching. Whatever the meaning and significance of the visions, I felt graced by them, that some being or entity thought it worthwhile to present them to me at a pace and in a form that I could cope with. Gratitude, that's perhaps a better word for how I felt, to feel that I was worthy for a reason I did not comprehend.

I walked for an hour, the elation giving me so much energy that I hardly felt the burden of stumping along at speed with my ill-fitting crutch. And I became so aware of the quiet of the garden, no birds, no insects, only the puffing of my breath in my ears. I did want to tell someone about this experience – I hadn't felt that about either the centres or the alchemy visions, mainly because I felt they were personal to me alone. Now, I saw the whole sequence as something that might benefit others. What if people saw that they too might have such visitations? Not just the descent of God or angels or the like, but something more like a capacity that resided in each individual, that could be brought to life by means of simple exercises. Would not that lift people from this trough of scepticism and abandonment?

The elation evaporated when I entered my room. Kay stood over by the desk, my notebook in her hand. I knew at once what had happened and I knew that what I had feared was now going to happen. She looked up at me. Her scarf was still around her neck – she had come to the room immediately upon arrival back from the city in order to see me. What she had found instead was what she too may have dreaded happening. Her expression was very unusual. I realised when I saw it that Kay had no control now over herself. I also realised that she had watched over herself very carefully for many years, fearing I suspect that her integrity was in fact broken, despite what the values and conventions of society might want her to think.

I've already admitted to cowardice, and this time that same caution ruled me. I nodded once to her and turned about, stumped over to the lift, and went down to the kitchen. You see I am willing to call this action cowardice, but you might also allow that there was some wisdom in my reaction. Both Kay and I needed time to absorb the situation from our respective angles. Kay had got a shock, but then so have I.

Mrs Bryce, as it happened, was just about to go out the door, a loose woollen coat on, handbag in her left hand, car-keys in her right. She took one look at me and turned back, laying the bag and keys on the table, and went with steady habitual steps to the kettle, filled it and switched it on, saying:

'Tea is a good idea?'

She turned and leaned back against the counter, bracing her hands against the top edge. It was a strange position for her to take, like a boxer waiting for the bell to start the next round. But she nodded at me with some ease, her eyes crinkling within her makeup there:

'Sit down, Adam. You've been hopping around all afternoon on that crutch. You must be exhausted.'

She waited until I had stowed the stick and hoisted myself up on to a chair by the table.

'What were you celebrating, I wonder?'

I had stopped thinking in any sequential way once I saw Mrs Bryce in the kitchen. It wasn't a matter of stumbling out of the pan into the fire, more like a kind of fatalism, how I always knew I would act if overwhelmed by events. Let it happen. As I had learned on my second day in school, if they can't kill you then nothing much will happen to you. Which turned out to be true. You'd be surprised how lenient fate is once you surrender to it.

So it was this time. I replied out of instinct:

'It's complicated.'

Mrs Bryce found this reply acceptable, for she nodded with pursed mouth and said:

'Yes, I can imagine.' The glint then in her eyes told me that she was going to take advantage of the opening provided: 'I could see that when you came back here. Adam.'

I nodded in reply to this, knowing now that Mrs Bryce and I had the measure of each other.

'Well, it wasn't planned, I can assure you.'

'No. I never thought it was, Adam.'

I understood by this that in the glade by the stream that day she had merely offered me a route, a process, that might be of use. In my hectic way, I had told her that it wasn't what I was looking for.

She waited for me to finish this cogitation before continuing:

'And now?'

The tea was ready for us, so Mrs Bryce busied herself pouring and distributing it. It was my turn to wait until she was finished, using the time available to prepare a reply. Perhaps I did arrange one, but what came out was spontaneous:

'Kay has less of an understanding, I'm afraid.'

Mrs Bryce sips the hot tea, testing its strength and flavour, before replying:

'And that is the complication, I take it?'

Succinctly put. Now I needed to work out why I had sought Mrs Bryce's help in this crisis. It wasn't a tactic I would have thought of using. After all, Mrs Bryce was as much of a minefield for me as Kay. Candour couldn't work here, too many explanations would be required, so I said, not concerned that the obfuscation was obvious. I assumed Mrs Bryce could take that in her stride:

'It's not a matter for a psychologist, really.'

Mrs Bryce nodded, very comfortable with my smoke screen, holding her cup in both hands, steam warming her face.

'But an answer is needed?'

Mrs Bryce pauses, looking intently at me over the steaming cup:

'And she is not just a psychologist?'

This now was an awkward point: how much did Mrs Bryce know, about Kay, and about Kay and me together? My silence was enough, for Mrs Bryce then said, putting her cup down to one side on the countertop:

'If Kay is a mule, then she will do as I would, Adam.' She smiles a bitter-knowing smile that had taken years to develop. 'She will die on you.'

It took a scramble – undignified – to get the crutch up and slotted in under my arm. I was surprisingly hurt by what Mrs Bryce had said. I had no problem with the word "mule" – though you might expect otherwise – allowing that this was trade talk, which I would never repeat. My retort was sharp, revealingly so:

'You haven't died, have you?'

Mrs Bryce stepped forward to lean now on the table across from me, her shoulders hunching forward so that her breasts pressed the table top:

'I'm not a mule, Adam. I know what I do. As I have told you.'

I flared in an instant:

'No, Angela. You don't know what you do!'

As intended, the use of her first name gave her pause. She bunched her hands into fists, a raw aggressive reflex. So I said:

'Wait here.'

I stumped off at a trot, up in the lift, asked Kay – who was sitting at the desk, still reading the notebook – where my father's note was. She had it by her on the desk. Down again at a trot, lay the note in front of Mrs Bryce, and stand back.

Am I guided in these matters? I could never have calculated this strategy. But I could understand how I might be guided at some subtle level by what I consider to be the purest element in this triangle of myself, Kay and Mrs Bryce.

So, Mrs Bryce reads my father's notes. Reads them again. I can see that she is now testing tactics, how she will play it. But I found a curious sympathy for her in myself. After all, I had already declared, magnanimously, that the process I was undergoing was available to everyone, which must include Mrs Bryce. I said:

'Did all your men achieve that level?'

I had another insight at this point, but I held back, wanting to hear what she had to say – if only out of curiosity.

'Only your father could hold his seed, Adam.'

I nodded, understanding much of what Mrs Bryce and her kind sought:

'And you? It needs to be done only once.'

Now Mrs Bryce did sigh, a kind of acceptance at last admitted through all the armour:

'No, your father was right, Adam. There could be no elevation.' She looks intently at me: 'I hadn't understood that and I was too proud to admit it.'

So I finished our very useful conversation:

'Then Kay was lucky, I think, though she might never believe that.'

I stumped out to the car with Mrs Bryce. The conversation had been much harder on her than either of us had expected. I touched her shoulder as she unlocked the car and she turned quickly and embraced me, her strong arms like a vice around my shoulders, her solid breasts a surprisingly comforting compress on my chest. Her last word was to thank me, to which I had the grace to thank her in return.

Relations with Mrs Bryce – Angela – will never be the same again.

Kay was still seated at the desk. She had put down the notebook and was staring at the dark screen of the computer monitor. I went and sat on the end of the bed, so that I was placed behind her to her right. I knew this would be difficult but I would be guided by the integrity of her vision, as I had been with Mrs Bryce in the kitchen.

She asks me without looking around:

'How advanced is this, Adam?'

'I don't know, Kay. I don't know where it is going.'

'And the alchemy visions? They didn't come from a book?'

'No.'

Now she does swing the chair around so as to face me:

'And you never told me, Adam.'

Such a disappointment in her voice. That's the limitation with sincerity: it can only do 100%.

'I didn't want to undermine you, Kay.'

Strange word to use, completely unexpected, and a tricky way to approach the problem.

Kay nods in reply. This encourages me to add:

'It was a new experience for both of us, Kay. I hope you can see that.'

There was an element of special pleading in this, but I wanted to draw her out into whatever middle ground was available to us here.

Kay now says, I suspect thinking aloud:

'And you could do it all on your own, Adam?'

I was tempted at first to adopt this line, but I knew that I had to push the truth as best I could.

'Not entirely, Kay. If you think about it, you gave me a number of clues. Leads, if you like. I think they were important.'

This was not intended as flattery, though if Kay took it as such then this dialogue was pretty well at an end.

'What leads?'

I was relieved she was not so easily led.

'About alchemy, and most of all your vision.'

She is genuinely puzzled now. I hasten to explain, wanting fervently to impress this fact on her, my sudden passion rising from my own conviction:

'What you said about alchemy led me to the chakras, which in turn allowed me to access the centres that had been hidden from me.'

She is even more puzzled now.

'What are you talking about, Adam. What centres?'

I remembered then that she knows nothing about the centres. I rush to tell her as much as I can:

'You know I read the Atwood book, about Hermeticism? Well, the lowest centre, in my groin, heated up while I was reading her. I was drawn to do a simple exercise, and after time I had opened five of these centres. The visions you called alchemical were seven in number, which led me to suspect there should be seven of these centres. I discovered that the Indian chakra structure mirrored the centres I'd found, which helped me locate the other two centres in my body. You see, Kay? What you told me about alchemy led me to that discovery. I don't know the significance of all this, but it keeps developing.'

Kay had listened closely. Now she asked, logically enough:

'How did you discover the first centre?'

'Through a gardener who used to work here.'

'Ah, Rachel. Mrs Bryce told me about her. She's married to her son? Did you have an affair with her?'

I started up, keen to head that assumption off.

'Oh no. Nothing at all like that. She was very perceptive, preternaturally so in fact. It had nothing to do with sex.'

I could see that Kay wasn't satisfied with this explanation, but was prepared to accept it. I was relieved, thinking at that stage that we had crossed the hurdle successfully.

Kay got up from the desk and walked over to the window. It was dark outside, so I could see her mirrored in the window. She had clasped her hands together in front of her. She spoke without looking around:

'You say that these last visions were inspired by what I told you about my vision of the dragon?'

This wasn't quite what I had said, and I decided it was wise to correct her:

'I think your vision prepared the ground, as it were, Kay. The way your reference to alchemy did in the context of the centres.'

There was something bothering Kay, and I could not see what it was. I thought we had all the ground covered by now. I decided on directness again:

'What's bothering you, Kay? I think I've explained everything. I mean, there's no secret in all this. I know no more than I've told you.'

She remained standing at the window, hands clasped, a set look on her face as she stared out into the dark. I had to do something. I hopped over to the wheelchair, asking:

'Have you eaten this evening?'

She shook her head. I went down and took a meal from the freezer, microwaved it, opened some white wine and brought the whole lot back up. Kay came and sat on the bed and ate the meal, tray on her knees, but would only sip a little wine. I don't drink much, so two glasses made me euphoric, allowing me to glimpse the whole process going on in me from a slightly drunken perspective. When I dwelt on the most recent vision, I literally saw all those forces rising out of my hands and gathering around my extended tongue.

It was only then that I realised just how powerful those visions were. I said to Kay, conversationally:

'You know, those last visions are only a plan, not the real thing.'

'How do you know that?'

'I just feel it. They are only images, Kay. But they intimate a coming process in my body.'

Kay put the tray away from her on the bed and stood up.

'But the pentagon, Adam. What does that mean? How could a man and a woman have the same vision?'

I was stunned for some reason by what she said, perhaps addled and so unprepared.

'In what way, Kay? Why couldn't a man and a woman have the same vision? We did.'

'No, Adam! Men and women are different. They shouldn't have the same visions.'

I couldn't get this at all, for some reason.

'How can you be so sure?'

'The wings, Adam. The wings.'

'Sorry, Kay. You've lost me.'

'The dragon I saw isn't me, Adam.'

Kay looked desolate, obviously these were new thoughts running through her.

'Why not, Kay? It was your vision. You said so.'

'No. it was for you, Adam. It was how I felt when they brought you to me at the hospital. You had been catatonic for months, then suddenly you began to babble about what you called the Voice. That's when I remembered the vision. I had forgotten it for years. People praised me for bringing you back to reality, but all I have done is bring you to the vision of the wings. Adam, remember this: It is the wings that are important, only the wings.'

Kay began to walk out of the room. I set the wheelchair in motion and followed her, saying at her back:

'Rachel said something too about wings, but I can't remember all the details.'

'No, you don't have to. She set something in motion in you.' Kay stopped and turned around and continued: 'And the other women you have known, what did they do for you?'

'Serafina told me I would only be myself when I exposed myself completely to a woman.'

'You've done that, haven't you?'

'Yes. With you.'

'And Jocelyn, what did she do?'

'She called her the Other Woman. She told me she was beautiful.'

Kay smiled that mordant smile I had seen earlier on Mrs Bryce:

'See? Sophia. Did my father die so you could have your vision? Or did your Other Woman use me as a beast to get it?'

'Kay! It can't be like that.'

She went from wry to bitter:

'You're a man, Adam. You don't know what shame is. Goodnight, my love.'

Though perhaps I ought not admit this, there is a degree of satisfaction just now. Kay and I seem to have plumbed the depths of the differences that threatened our happiness. Obviously, Kay needed to release those resentments she has carried since her teenage years. But it pleases me that she could pull all the threads together for me. I hope now, if she is interested in doing this, that she can begin her own spiritual journey. If as she said, the sexes are different, there would be the added interest in discovering what the process is like for the woman.

Mrs Bryce's experiences now seemed forced in the light of what she told me earlier this evening, a kind of compensation for the limitations imposed on her – by what? No elevation? Judging by what Rachel told me about the woman losing her virgin powers when she has a baby, it would seem that Mrs Bryce probably lost her power to elevate, as my father called it, because she had a baby. But Paul was born years after my father's death, which means that she must have had a baby around the time she knew my father. Did they have a baby? What became of it? Does it matter now? It happened years ago.

Another question comes to me now. Mrs Bryce seemed to accept my father's assertion that he achieved his objective. She didn't seemed surprised by the paranoia, which suggests she knew about it while undergoing the process with him. But the question is this: why did he commit suicide? Kay's father exposed himself to the possibility of death if he mishandled his process in any way, but my father appears not to have made such a commitment.

Over a year had passed since the last entry. I want to write up the final events in the house before I begin the last part of this journal. I am working from crowded and fractured memories, so you may have to make allowances for inconsistencies and omissions.

Shame. Almost the last word Kay spoke to me. And she was right: I do not know what shame is. But I do know this about shame: it leaves the woman with a most peculiar sense of abandonment. If you want figuration, try this: imagine yourself climbing up to a dark wooded place where there is a pond of cold water, and you remove all your clothes on the dark winter night and lie face down in the pond and let yourself drown.

That's abandonment. That's shame.

I couldn't cry. Something was blocked up in me. You could call it a guilt that has some relation to shame, at an angle to it, if you can see that. Applying the rule I am applying to my own experiences – that the experience in itself is what counts, not the thoughts, names, and the like – to Kay's experience. However you contrive to explain, rationalise, justify her father's use of her, you cannot escape the effect of the raw experience on Kay. You can see that she spent most of her life after that summer rationalising the experience as best she could. An important element in her relationship with me was the idea that my possible use of her would justify her father's use of her. I suspect she was dismayed by my obvious abhorrence of the very idea, but she went along with my temporising, the pretence that I might make use of her sometime in the future, when I was ready to.

I am using the blunt term "use" here on purpose, because ultimately that is how Kay felt about the experience. And it is her father who wrote about the need to abandon everything. In effect, her father sacrificed Kay, just as in earlier times children were sacrificed by their parents to gain a favour from a deity. My guilt here lies in part in the fact that – as Kay said – I didn't know what shame was, and especially I did not know what it did to Kay. Pressed on the issue, I would have agreed that Kay was misused by her father. I did believe that from the start, but I deferred to Kay's rationalisations and I did so for her sake.

Another aspect of my guilt lies in my attempt to find happiness with Kay. I thought that we could cope with her shame – and whatever damage I have accrued in my life – and somehow paper over these fault lines in our lives by making each other as happy as we could. Many do this, and do it successfully. And the really remarkable thing here is that it seems to me, even now, that we could have achieved some happiness in our lives.

And yet I know very well – as I did then – that it could not happen. If Kay was used in order that she witness the vision of the rising dragon, which is the net effect on her of the experience with her father here, then it could be said that I am being used by some power so that capacities latent in me can be activated for some unknown end. The only difference is that so far it has not subjected me to any indignity. Of course, this assumes that my progressive encripplement – more on this later – is not part of this process.

Writing this out has eased me. But I was disconcerted by my inability to cry for Kay. Even when her body was brought down from the pool and laid out on the stretcher in the yard for me to identify – there is no way to measure the horror of seeing the state of her then, she had been forty eight hours in the water, or to prevent the sudden and alarming plummet of pity to see her brought to such a lonely, miserable end – I still could not cry, though my throat was closed and my eyes stung and my nose ran loosely. I could see that the policemen and medics were contemptuous of what appeared to them my callousness – sugar daddy and his bint. The reason then was that there was no public aspect to our relationship. Even Mrs Bryce standing nearby could not add a social element, if only because we were never together in Mrs Bryce's presence.

But thankfully the time came when it was possible for me to cry. This was at the funeral. I was surprised that no relative appeared. Except for Mrs Bryce and myself, there were only five of her colleagues – all of whom had taken time off from work to attend and who therefore disappeared immediately afterwards, talking closely together. Except for the odd glance out of curiosity – at the man in her life – they ignored the two of us.

I had arranged the funeral, no religious component as such – I didn't know if Kay belonged to any church – but I did ask the local priest if he would say a few words of comfort over her coffin. It was when the priest had just finished – perhaps his final words "May the perpetual light shine upon her" triggered a release in me – but suddenly I could cry. I cried long and bitterly, my pain running hot through my whole body. And as I cried I saw Kay walking towards me, beautiful and smiling; walking and walking and walking for as long as I cried. I only stopped crying when Mrs Bryce took me by the arm.

It was at Angela's suggestion that we stopped for a meal, a funeral meal. A quiet modest place in a quiet modest suburb. Ordinary food, but the quality was good, and a bottle of wine. I call her Angela now because she was a different person after the funeral, more relaxed and sure of her ease with me. The truth is I probably knew her by then better than anyone else, and she knew me longer than anyone else alive. One talent she had that I appreciated that day: she could be a silent companion. She handled the waitress, knew how to settle us down in a strange place, could attend to me or look around her with interest as the occasion required.

I was not the best companion at first, but Angela did bring me round so that we began slowly to comment, then chat, and finally to talk. Luckily, it was the sort of restaurant where you are left alone, the staff attentive to the point only of keeping an eye out for when we wanted something else. After the coffee there was another bottle of wine. As I've said elsewhere, I'm not much of a drinker, but Angela and I got through the two bottles in a steady way, oiling the long conversation we had.

This conversation is important – the last section now of this part of the journal – and I want to record it here in paraphrase. As will be apparent, Angela's contribution is the more informative, so I will concentrate on that.

Obviously, we talked about Kay at first. This is when I spoke most, part confession, part tribute. Angela was attentive, eyes steady, nodding as required. It was apparent that she was listening, because at one point she suddenly asked me why I hadn't become involved with Rachel in that way. I didn't catch her drift at first – in fact a little irritated that her thinking could be so linear, thinking I would treat every woman in the same way. But then I made the connection she was trying to make. I didn't know how far I should divulge the basis of the relationship between Rachel and me, especially considering she was married to her son. As well as this, I didn't really know to what extent Angela could understand the nature of that relationship. What I did then was outline the relationship with Rachel in terms of how Kay and I had related.

This was surprisingly easy to do, if only because I understood then that Angela was in fact thinking of herself when she asked that question. At that point, Angela did not know the parallels between herself and Kay, how both had been used by men for personal occult ends. When I explained that Rachel had been a virgin, I could see by how Angela's eyes dilated that I had answered her question in full.

That answer also acted to break down the last barriers between us. I could see then the immense curiosity that Angela had about me. She had seen me grow up, off to schools, then college, then out into a world of adventure and high living. And that curiosity had a probing strength backing an acute perceptive power. I opened to it. I had been frightened of Angela for long enough to have taken her measure. My memories of her came mostly through my mother, how she would refer to Mrs Bryce with a rock-solid confidence, that she would do this and do that, and never doubt the woman's loyalty to her. This had impressed me then as an attribute of my mother, that she could command another person with such sureness. Now I could understand it in Angela as an ability to hold fast to a commitment.

What I mean here is that Angela was willing to do my mother's bidding, and did it competently and with good grace. In some ways, this relationship between my mother and Angela – Mrs Bryce then – became for me the model of the relationship that should obtain between people. I don't mean some kind of conventional master and servant relationship – I think Hegel was right in his analysis here, dependency always subverts – rather how my mother was loyal to Angela in turn. How she would never have broken the trust that lay between them. It is how Jocelyn and I related, each crossing from one personal sphere to another with respect. It was that quality of relationship – mutual regard – that gave me the confidence to love Jocelyn, to commit myself to her. The great lesson for me in that relation was to discover the inexhaustibility of the individual, and of course my own inexhaustibility.

Yes, the wine was flowing by then. But I am a different person now, finding value in the slightest details of other lives. More value than you perhaps would want to find now, but what of your future? Will you come to the point I am at now too?

Virginity. How it crowns Rachel in the eyes of Angela, and how it crushed Kay. Angela talked indirectly about virginity, how it was like a dam to her, an unimaginable freedom on the other side. a boy in a laneway at sixteen, probably not successful, but the attempt itself sufficient. Then she was ready for the world. Then she found the world vastly more complex that she expected. She sees the whole world charted in terms of how virginity is negotiated: how it is surrendered.

I could see the failing here: the lesson taught to me by Rachel. Virginity is a power that can be exercised only once. Angela threw it away on some little jack while Rachel exercised its power, then married and had children. You could ask, why me? Why did she do it for me? This is not a time for metaphysics. Be content with the knowledge that she did it for me. She might have done it for another, but she did it for me. Remember, Rachel undressed and walked into the pond. Just as Kay did. There is a lesson there, should you need to learn it.

And beyond virginity? What is beyond virginity? Life, I suppose. I am no longer in a position to concern myself with life. The truth is, I was never concerned with life. Life is like a stream tumbling down a mountain side, the molecules tossed hither and thither without sense. All reach that great ocean, but never by the same route.

That was enough alcohol for me and I left the rest of the bottle for Angela, who seemed well able to hold her drink. Being emptied out by grief didn't help, of course, and in truth I was beginning to weary of the need – as I felt it just then – to justify and/or rationalise how I found myself, as though I had used vulnerable women to gain an undeserved advantage. It didn't help that I felt trapped in that restaurant, more a matter of having nowhere else to go – we could not have this talk back in the house in case we could not save face afterwards. As it is, we could assume our household relations of master and servant no matter what transpired in this public arena.

The restaurant itself was almost empty. We were seated off to one side in an alcove, which gave us some privacy. I only noted this incidentally as I decided that it was time for Angela to start explaining herself. I asked her, without any notice – trusting I appeared more drunk than I was – what she had gained ultimately. It was a pointed question, yes, but it was also an open question. How Angela answered it might well be more revealing than what she actually said.

'Gained, Adam? You access what is already there. You know that. This is not mysticism or magic. It's a matter of paying attention, though you may need help getting in touch. That is how it was with your father. I worked in his firm during the summer before I started studying at the teachers' training college. I don't think he was a womaniser – at least I never knew him to do that – but whatever you might think of me now, I was a very attractive eighteen year old. It suited me, too. I was still young enough to think that sex was a power that could be used. I responded to his advances and we became lovers. He was an intensely passionate man, but like many of his kind a mediocre lover. Even so, I became pregnant about a year into the relationship. There was a child, a boy, and your father made me give it away. My mother wanted me to keep it in the family – which is what my people usually do: we value male children over female. Your father was adamant and took a hand in arranging the adoption, just to make sure my family didn't get it.

'I was angry with him and broke off the relationship. I finished at college, went to teach in a good school. There, I became involved with a senior member of the staff. His wife found out, so that a scandal threatened. You father stepped in then and used his influence to quieten everything down. But the price was that he become my lover again. This time, however, I coaxed him into my other activity. It was easier to do than you would think. When he asked why he should do what seemed to him at that stage to be impossible – to enter me and not climax – I told him that I would show him his own self.

'I grew up knowing about this technique, but this would be the first time I would try it myself. There were two reasons why I chose your father. One was because he was passionately involved with me – I say passionate here to emphasise the element of obsession in his relationship with me – and the second because I could see his self. Allow for the moment that I could do that. The technique is apparently simple in that neither party seems to do anything. Now the difference between me and a mule is this: the mule is not prepared in any way, is simply a passive vehicle for the man's operation, like a sacrificial animal in the old days. I know how to make the preparation. It is possible with just a little concentration and intention – and don't ever underestimate the power of intention-making, Adam – to open a receptive centre in the body. Once this is done and the man enters and remains completely still, I can draw the serpent from its lair within that centre and set it to wrap around the penis, a process that appears in my imagination as the serpent encircling the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden.

'The effect on the man – provided he does not become aroused – is sudden and initially devastating. It is like a bolt of lightning shooting from his penis up to the top of his head, where it sprays out in an immense fountain of light, which to many men appears as a huge starry sky. Your father was transfigured by this experience. He would not even consider vaginal intercourse after that. He also began to read widely. I tried to prevent this: knowledge is about the most dangerous poison the man can take in this state. The intellect has been obscured by the raising of the serpent so that all knowledge appears as though real. This has a primarily visual component and it is this aspect that the man focuses on, even though the less obvious elements – such as the effects on the soul – are far more dangerous. Once the soul has been corrupted, the will becomes seriously deformed, which can have quite drastic effects on the actions and even the appearance of the victim.'

Angela had finished the wine by now and called the waiter over to order more drink. I went along with this, knowing that she had more to tell me. I ordered tea, to clear my head, while Angela order whisky for herself. I was taken aback – even intimidated – by the fact that she drank whisky, until I reminded myself that she was no ordinary housekeeper. I would not have called her accomplished, but she was certainly developed in her own way.

In any case, I pressed her to answer my initial question, what did she herself get from all this.

'Within my own family, and for women like me, the vision of the serpent embracing the Tree of Life is, as I told you before, the sacrament. It allows us to be in the company of what we call our Source. It is not a god or a superstition of that kind. We are Lilith in the company of the being who made us what we are. We are not just incarnated women in this mad world; we are transcendent beings, powerful and eternal.

'I know you don't believe me, Adam, but so what? We have a gift for those men capable of accepting it. Such men are made powerful beyond their imaginings, fit rulers of this world.'

The riposte to this was obvious. But it was only as I made it that I saw Angela smile and realised that she had expected just this shaft from me:

'But my father committed suicide. Not the action of an all-powerful man, was it?'

Angela had worked her way through the whisky and had signalled for another as I spoke. She was drunk by now, but obviously able to handle it. Yet she had become ragged in some way, worn down, her face jowly with lines about her eyes. Part of the situation for her now was that she may never before have expressed her understanding of what she was about, and that she may have found the account she had given me less convincing than the personal vision she had nursed for years.

'Who says he committed suicide, Adam?' Angela's eyes glinted now, an edge of malice in her voice. It chilled me, and I feared I had inadvertently turned over the wrong stone. 'Your father became so obsessed with his experience of the rising of the serpent, and had overlaid it with so much theorising, that he could not perform the sacrament often enough, as though his memory of the event was being lost in the phantasmagoria that was his mind by now. I think he was trying to establish his experience of transcendence as a permanent state in himself. I was by then back in his employ as a kind of personal assistant, which allowed him almost continuous access to me. Even at the house, he contrived to have me there on pretext. We would usually go out into the garden in order to perform the sacrament. The high-backed seats that litter the place were perfect for us, where I could simply bend over at a height suitable for his entry.

'So one day, we happened to be using the seat over by the stream – where I propositioned you, if you remember – when his wife appeared carrying an old military revolver. She said nothing, so the first I knew of her presence was hearing the loud bang just behind me. Your father's penis was wrenched from me and I turned to see him falling away to one side, his blood spurting high in the air. His wife then turned to me and raised the gun, intent on shooting me too. I was only partially dressed, but I dropped onto my knees and bowed my head into the grass and begged her to spare me. When she hesitated, I looked up and offered my life to her in service.

'Your father was a bourgeois, but his wife was from an old aristocratic family – which had long ago provided our province with its dukes. She understood fealty, something I had hoped for. She nods her acceptance, placed the dirty muzzle of the revolver against my forehead and then put it into your father's right hand and walked away. She called it suicide and so suicide it was, no one having any reason to doubt her.'

While she still looked ragged, this disclosure lightened Angela's whole demeanour. She looked at me for a full minute, just looking without any apparent thought, then she found her glass empty and raised it again for the attentive waiter. The restaurant was beginning to fill up with the evening trade and I thought to point this out to Angela, suggesting that maybe it was time to go. Angela shrugged me away, so that I knew then that she had more to say.

How did I feel? A weight off me too. It is trite to say this: better know the truth than not. Yes, I believed Angela; she had no reason for lying to me. In a way, she lost nothing by my father's death; in fact she probably gained a measure of security and station – sneer if you wish – not available to her otherwise. Her relationship with my father? Sooner or later he would burn out and die or become hideously ill, which she fully expected for the reasons she had just given me.

Angela toasted me with her new drink, the nearest to irony I had ever seen in her, asking:

'Do you want to hear more secrets, Adam?'

The waiter had brought me another carafe of iced water – very thoughtful of him. I needed it. Refreshed, I decided it was my turn:

'What makes you think there is any reality to your vision?'

I knew Angela could answer this in a variety of ways, some of which could be personal. I allowed this: as usual, I was as much interested in how she responded as in what she said. In any case, her answer would be academic: she was nowhere near to the kind of experiences I have had to date.

'Good question, Adam. Does it matter to you? I think not? So, why do you ask it? Very well. Your father's point about elevation – which you were very quick to spot, I assume through your own experiences with your women – proved that my experience was real. What your father didn't understand – and it seems you don't either – is that my vision is true because it is constant. Give me a man tonight who can keep his seed and I will be Lilith with her serpent master. If you like, you can try it, Adam, and see the serpent rising in yourself.

'Will you try it? An objective test, if you like, nothing personal. And we can forget about it afterwards.'

Did I walk into that? Even before I could answer her, she added:

'And I will do it for you, Adam. Believe me.'

At this point we could have ended up with some kind of magical competition as I tried to trump her with alchemy/chakras, and even poor Kay's vision that cost her so much. But it didn't. What happened was simple and straight-forward: I had a vision. What I saw was two triangles overlaid so that they formed a hexagon. The image hung perfectly still, glittering slightly around the edges. Then another vision: the gas ring again, but this time as though crowned. This vision was less distinct, suggesting that the new part of it could not be shown clearly yet. Then finally a third vision: I see what looks like a white egg with wings. It rises slowly until it hangs directly in front of my eyes. Then the centre behind my eyes heats up.

I stand up, forget I have only one and a bit legs and stumble against the chair. I tell the waiter that I want to use the toilet. He is very kind and helps me hop across the restaurant, waits and helps me back. I tip him discreetly – in case this contravenes some house policy – not looking at the notes I give him.

The strange thing is this: Angela is completely abashed. So I say to her: knowledge coming to me like that:

'What you do is sterile. That's why it is unchanging.'

She is genuinely impressed by me, if not by what I've just said – which she may not have heard clearly. She asks:

'What's happened to you, Adam?'

I smile, the realisation coming to me as a sense of completion – vindicating both Rachel and Kay, which I can grasp easily – and I shrug dismissively:

'I have just conquered sexuality.'

Well, not quite: that's how it seemed immediately afterwards. Angela of course wasn't impressed. She doesn't think much of sex anyway. But what did intrigue her was how I behaved just before I made the pretentious announcement. I wouldn't tell her the truth – that goes without saying – so I said something like: that was how your proposal affected me, i.e. it was a complete turn off. Did this work? Not sure, but I didn't really care one way or the other. What I did say then was:

'You still refuse to consider the question of elevation, even after all these years. Do you know what my father meant?'

It was turning into a magic competition. I could see her trying to crank up the sacrament thing again: she had a way of carrying herself, as though she was bore an immense burden. What this signified was beyond me. I decided to answer the question myself:

'If you had been a virgin, elevation would have been possible. Then your serpent would have become the true image of who you are entire, not a debased image of what is missing in you.'

She didn't take this in, saying only in retort:

'Just like your little Kay, Adam?'

I nodded.

'And no doubt like her, too, Angela, you would die. As you said she would. But you are afraid of dying, having no reason to live. You are sterile.'

'But I had a child, Adam.'

'That's not what I mean, and you know it.'

And then the thought:

'Are you sure you didn't kill my father? I mean, once he learned that you couldn't elevate.'

Angela just shook her head, an uncertain play of feelings on her face, as though she couldn't work out the exact response needed:

'All the secrets, Adam. That house is so full of secrets.'

And that was it, I'm afraid. I believed Angela about the secrets, though I wasn't going to speculate. And I wouldn't ask her, not ever. The price wasn't worth it. Yet the intuitions: who am I? Who is Rachel, who seemed perfectly at home in the garden? Perhaps we are brother and sister, that would make sense in a Wagnerian way. I'll leave you to work that out and see destiny in action.

I managed to get into the wheelchair, pay the bill, get out to the car, Angela apparently guiding the chair but in fact leaning on, pretty smashed by then. Transferring from the wheelchair to the car, my leg gave way and I screamed out in the agony again, falling to the ground in a merciful faint.

## 4 THE FORCE OF LOVE

I am a mouse: I love the dark and fear the light. And in the dark I see everything, black forms in a black world, speaking a language I know but cannot hear.

I had planned yesterday as the day I would get to work again, but as you can see it didn't happen. It's good that they don't believe in depression around here: just another weather front, they say. So, weather is better today, not sunshine exactly but not rain either.

There's a lot to report before we continue. I'll try to be systematic about this, what's happened, where am I, and what kind of people I have fallen in with. Some of it will be more of the same, and some of it will be different, just how different I'm not yet sure.

That's enough for today.

What's happened:

Turns out that the necrosis had not been eliminated from my body by the first amputation. So I've lost my left leg too. They searched me diligently after that and found necrosis in the wrist of my left hand and in my lower spine. The situation with my left hand has worsened over the last year and looks as though it will go soon. My spine is a much more serious situation, as you can appreciate. They have encased it in a sort of body-crutch – very hi-tec – which supports my spine yet gives me quite a bit of mobility. I have a specially designed wheelchair that gets linked to the crutch in a way that resembles those toys that can be changed from a fighting man to a fighting vehicle by means of a few rotations. I won't be doing any fighting, but I can at least move around this place with some ease.

This place:

Tell you the story that I found on the internet first. There are two little convents in this county – in the far west of the country – operated by small obscure religious orders. One is called the Poor Sisters of Mary, and the other is called the Poor Sisters of Christ. One of these orders looks after wayward teenage girls – their phrasing – while the other is a hospice for the soon to be dead. The local people distinguish between these two orders by calling one the "Poor Marys" and the other the "Poor Christs".

I believe this story. The ones I'm with are the Poor Christs. So now you know.

The Poor Christs:

Apparently founded about two hundred ago in Zurich, by two converts, with the aim of easing very rich people into death. According to the internet, this is not quite true. The people they care for might be very rich, but they were also prominent members of a variety of obscure and less obscure esoteric societies. The reason given for the coincidence of wealth and esotericism is not vulgar graft, but based on the understanding that only the very rich could afford to waste their time on the occult, and they were the only ones in a position – having everything else – to recognise the need for the occult.

That explains what I am doing here. Mind you, just because they cater for the rich doesn't mean that we die in the lap of luxury. Intelligent frugality would be a good description. You may need to be rich to end up here but it is not an expensive place. You could probably afford it yourself, at least your medical insurance could, but they wouldn't have you because you can't fulfil the second requirement: you don't need the occult.

One last item today: the nuns' habit. Sort of down home plain, beautifully cut, splendid material, superb colour. The last is a sort of red that is almost scarlet. The idea here is that if you are a laity sort of person, you will think of the crucified Christ. But if you are the initiated sort then you see the risen Christus Rex. Again, there is a kind of headband, this time coloured a wonderful powder blue, very tactile indeed, around which is woven a thickish band of gold threading. This is apparently extremely expensive to produce, such that the order has only one hundred and eight of them. This means in effect that the order can never number more than one hundred and eight members, or whatever they called them. Now the point about the gold band: if you are laity, then crown of thorns, and if you are initiate, then crown of royalty.

Aren't they clever? Don't they love ambiguity? Let me tell you, they do.

I was going to break off for the day, but my carer (I think that's what they call themselves) has just come in. I want to take the opportunity to try out a feature of the program I'm using to dictate all this.

Story: Back in the hospital I got to know this bright young man in their IT department. He told me about this dictation program. The clever thing is that it can take dictation from more than one person in a session. You need only set it up to recognise the voices, give them a name or designation, and it can then type up the different personae in a conversation. It distinguishes the voices using quotes, abbreviated identifiers, full designations, or a mixture of the above. If there is only one voice, it can either provide an identifier or not. If there is one voice for a while and a second voice joins in – even without any introduction – the program use quotes, even going back over the session to insert initial quotes for the first voice.

A very ingenious device, yes?

Anyway, I want to record a short dialogue between myself and the carer, who is called Sister Veronica. She has already a designation with the machine. So, let's go:

Adam: 'How are you today, Sister?'

SV: 'I am very well, Adam. And you seem in good form.'

'Yes, I am getting down to work at last.'

'That's good to know. Soon we'll have you up to speed. We expect great things of you.'

'Em. Not that. Here, remember?'

'Sure. Tear it up. You were testing, right?'

Sister Veronica, as you may have noticed, is from the United States, from Oregon to be exact. (She's not here now, in case you're wondering). She's a spare, plain little woman who could be aged anything from twenty five to fifty five. She has a grim smile, is very neat and practical. And a little too bluff for my comfort. I have made enquiries about replacing her, but the other two nuns are, well I need to put it like this: worse. I won't specify in what way.

Incidentally, in case you might worry on my behalf, all this is being recorded into a secret file. That is, the Poor Christs don't get to see it. They may well be making their own recordings of what goes on in here, but that's their business, and they're welcome to it.

So that's it for now. Solid day's work if I say so.

Darkness again today. It's like I've fallen behind the world – like going in behind the stage scenery and the lights are off. Curious feeling. There's a lassitude, more a matter of not needing to act rather than an inability to act, and the vague anxiety that haunts me is something I know I have brought with me here.

This darkness is not empty, though my senses would register nothing. I'm too rational/educated to be able to conceive of this paradox. To say that there is something here beyond my sensorium I find meaningless. I can allow the possibility of such a world/realm but it is an abstraction that remains empty.

There is also something like sound in the darkness, but it cannot be heard. Strangely, though, while I cannot conceive of a world beyond sense, I can accept the notion of hearing these sounds. I listen now. The darkness extends away and away from me in complete silence, a silence that is at once a vacancy. The nearest analogy I can find for this is writing in sand in the dark. I cannot see what is written in the sand, yet I know that there is writing there, sensing the vacancies over the surface of the sand, the impressions made by the lettering.

It is extraordinary how real this dark world is to me now that I have found an analogy that conveys something of its character.

Curiously content this morning. Find I am thinking about Jocelyn. I never described her to you – hadn't expected my early notes to grow into this journal. I'll try now.

We met entirely by accident. I was jobbing as a freelance at a trendy show, taking snaps of personalities and flogging them on to the agencies. Good experience for the budding photographer. Everyone there had been photo'ed dozens of times, smiley pics, you know the sort, tits looking good and don't take my bum, you idiot. My shtick was to get candid shots that had some pictorial merit. Sort of arty, sort of novelty – spot the difference. But good training, as I have said.

Anyway, took a shot of this guy, all teeth and hair, from slightly below the plane, so that both his chin and his nose jutted out of perspective. I knew a lot of people didn't like the prig, so there was a good chance that one of the mags might go for it. What happened then was that I get a call from this woman complaining that I had caught her from a very unflattering angle and would I be kind enough to lose the pic. No way, of course. Two mags were nibbling and that meant money in the bank and some decent exposure.

I'm not a brute, so I took a quick look at the pic before sending it out to the mags. Yes, I could see what the unfortunate women meant. She had what they call a full figure, and she was silly enough to wear a clunky loose fitting dress made out of a heavy fabric. In the shot she is in the act of turning away, so that the dress billows out in one direction. Worse, and this is probably what upset her, she could be clearly identified by those who knew her. I assumed that the fact that she was a guest at the show meant she would be recognised by friends and enemies alike.

Did the decent thing and blurred her features. Got a call a few days later to thank me. No problem: but why were you wearing such an awful dress. Hello, Jocelyn. We met for coffee. I should have known, to be honest. Upper middle class Englishwoman. Slightly dumpy shape, shining dark hair and a creamy white skin. Grey eyes, pink lips. Beautifully fleshed hands. Later, I saw that she had full breasts that were nonetheless firm, hanging just that much and nipples that could feed millions. Upholstered, extremely comfortable.

Yet she could live for days with only her sleeping bag and a bag of nuts, some water, her tablet. Asked questions, got answers, regardless of the language. Smiled at princes, patted the heads of scabrous infants, kissed the dying everywhere. It got her the stories she was after. Me? I took the pics, following in her footsteps, shooting over her shoulder, ducking in time. Jocelyn made a world for me, guided me safely through it, and would say in the evening, 'We should rest now. Tomorrow is another day.'

What I didn't realise for a long time was the degree to which she was smitten with me. I was good-looking, could do nonchalant very well, and – something I only learned through her – was pretty indestructible. I mean, I would tell myself I was bolloxed, yet walk with her another six hours. So often certain of being shot or blown up and yet sitting in the evening with a glass of something, watching Jocelyn chewing her lip as she ran up the requisite number of words, as though it had been just another day at the office. What was it about me that got to her? Some childhood thing: maybe chubby girl and the hero boy next door, definitely something like that. Me? Jocelyn could be really fussy at times, really slow the world down, then she could just drift out suddenly into a daydream. She was a pixie, and I must like pixies – very left field, if you know what I mean.

The thing of course is that I was good at my job, as good as Jocelyn was at hers. We were equals while we were in many ways very different. Often back in civilization – especially in London – she would slip back into a world I couldn't get comfortable with, that English world where everyone expected to be born and to die in exactly the same place. Me? Though my own people were pretty staid too, I liked to feel the flow of life about me, looking at people and wondering where they had come from and what might happen to them in the future. Only in Paris did we mix together, often with people we barely knew, places we would visit only once. Except the opera. I don't know why, but opera – French Baroque opera especially – was like taking a single photograph that lasted for hours. While Jocelyn would analyse the sets, the singing, the plotting, I would sit looking out a window and see just one abiding image and hear what seemed to be just one note.

That's enough, I think. I can't get any closer to her now. She's gone. Deal with it.

Can't.

I need to get some work done today. Word is they're chopping the left hand off in two days' time. Local GP, surgeon at the county hospital, clinic downstairs, all over in an hour or so.

And so to work. Had a lot of experiences during the months in the hospital. Used the notebooks until this dictation program came along. I'm going to pull all of it together here, so we have it in one place.

As I have said before, I want to stick to the experiences themselves, no speculation or theorising. But often I would get a sense of extra detail during these experiences. I'll give you an example.

That evening in the restaurant after Kay's funeral I had a series of visions that you might remember. I'll list them here again, just for the record.

The first vision, at the sacral plexus, was of two triangles overlaid on each other so as to create a hexagon.

The second vision was of the gas-ring – at my throat centre – but this time crowned in some way.

The third vision was of a winged white egg that rose slowly until it hovered before my eyes. At the same time, the brow centre heated up.

Now, the first vision was accompanied by a sense of what I can best call separation. By this I understood that bringing the two counter-rotating triangle together in this way cut the flow of sexuality out of the stream between the centres. More on this in a moment.

I'll go straight to the brow centre now, as I think the activity here is directly connected with what happened down at the second centre – at the sacral plexus. I think the egg that rises slowly to this centre has come from the base centre, and that its passage upwards was permitted by closing off the sexuality flow. It seemed to me also that this flow of sexuality was sited in my Karma (very definite sense of this word at the time). I don't fully understand this, except that it might point beyond my quotidian sex drive to some more abiding condition in me.

The second vision in this context I take indicates that the throat centre has been modified in a specific way to enable some process that has to do with the egg now in the brow centre.

I'm not going to speculate beyond what I have already said here, at least not before I lay out the experiences I had in the hospital.

The main experiences which I am recording here came in a sequence over a period of about forty days at the point where I had recovered from the rigours of the operation but had not yet attempted to move about (which altogether took almost six months). I was lucid for much of the time, recovering from shock and indeed resting after what seemed to me at that stage to have been the hectic years living in the family home, that is, my experiences with both Rachel and Kay.

I will comment as needs be on each vision and try to draw the overall process together in some way:

The first vision almost escaped my attention because it seemed at first to repeat an earlier vision. I saw a hexagon, very clear, but this time as though hovering over the throat centre. The thought was that I was looking at something like a flame consuming paper, which represented life in this context.

The second vision was of what looked like a hollow breeze block filled with earth, on either side of which was a rotating spiral. My understanding was that this is the Earth, seen as a garden. Only later did I understand that the spirals represented two powers or forces that rise up from this garden and circulate around the centres.

The third vision was complex at first: three of the centres flashed hot, then an image – like an egg in an eggcup, the egg yellow, the cup blue – appeared at the lowest centre, in my groin, and at once the Garden beneath it became active, the coiled spirals separating and rising up, one hot and the other cold.

The third vision was of a winged orb hovering over the brow centre, the orb itself silver.

The fourth vision was of a complex form hovering over the third centre at the solar plexus, a pink sphere with ten faces, each of which contained an erect nipple at its centre. Powerful erotic reaction to this image.

The fifth vision at first appeared over the fourth centre at my heart as a layout of bright red spots, which then connected in a pattern of a saltire, each arm of which had three branches at its tip.

The sixth vision was of the image at the throat centre, but now the modified pattern was clearly seen: the gas ring was open at the top, while a shape like the image at the heart centre overlaid the lower part of the ring and was topped with horns that resembled the crescent moon.

The seventh vision involved three of the centres: first the hexagon appeared at the second centre, then at the brow appeared an image resembling a lozenge divided vertically in two, and finally there was a massive burst of light at the top centre above my head, which seemed to spray stars down over the whole column of the centres.

These visions came in sequence with a break of between four and ten days between them, time enough to dwell upon each one of them individually. It was fairly obvious early on that some of the images corresponded in general with the Indian system of the Chakras, especially in the number of elements in the respective centres. This shouldn't be surprising. The Chakras have been the objects of mediation, study and practice for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and they much surely have some kind of reality to justify such sustained attention. It would seem from the Chakra system that the two expanded spirals rising from the Garden at the base, one hot and the other cold, correspond to the lunar and solar channels that circulate about the chakras themselves.

Note: One prominent feature of the Chakra system was missing in my experiences. The Kundalini power can be brought to shoot up a central channel that connects all the Chakras. It is said to be a valuable power and is much sought after. This central channel seems to be missing from my column of centres, where the organisation of these columnar powers have this arrangement: the solar and lunar spirals terminate at the brow centre, and from there a column rises to meet the topmost centre, above my head. I'm not sure what is the significance of the absence of this central column, called Sushumna by the Indians, but notice that the Kundalini force that rises up along it is remarkably similar to the force that Mrs Bryce contrived to shoot up my father's spine. This suggests that the centre-system I have experienced is quite distinct from the Kundalini charge. There are further implications here, but they do not concern us.

Beyond that, there are two other differences of note. Some of the images I received differ markedly from the traditional Chakra forms, and the specific modifications to two of the centres is to the best of my knowledge unique. What these changes mean I don't know. One of them involved a sense of rectification to the column of centres, at the sacral plexus centre, which resulted in the vision of the egg rising to the brow centre. Without getting involved in too much speculation here, I would suggest that the egg has its origin in the bottom centre – where the existence of the centre system made itself known to me under specific circumstances, with Rachel, that had a strongly symbolic element. And I suggest also that the "egg" was moved to the brow centre as to an incubator, which is suggested by the modification in the form of the throat centre, which now resembles a container for an orb or oval.

What all this means for the future I will not guess. Let us wait and see what is to happen

In part at least owing the work involved in getting me mobile at the hospital, the aftermath of these visons and their possible import has been surprisingly quiet. Other than being the incapacitated individual that I am, with my days numbered, I could easily forget that the whole experience ever happened. Only when I think of Rachel or Kay, even in fact Mrs Bryce – who, incidentally, survived our night out and still holds the fort at the house – do the associations trigger memories of the esoteric aspect of my relations with them.

But if that is all there is to my experiences, then I ask why a wonderful person such as Kay had to be sacrificed so that I could have "spiritual" experiences that might have been achieved with less suffering by means of a course of yoga exercises. In other words, whatever this whole spiritual exercise is about, I hope it is worth all the trouble and pain – including a miserable death – it has so far caused.

Now to have my left hand chopped off.

SV: 'You're not providing the record, Adam.'

Adam: 'There's no agreement on that, Sister.'

'It was understood.'

'No, it wasn't. I'm a private patient here, who pays his way. This is not a laboratory or interrogation centre, is it?'

'Of course not, Adam. We're here to help you. But to help you we need to know how you are.'

'Look, Sister, you have your recordings. Consult them.'

'They're not vetted. You know we can't use them.'

'Sure. But you make them anyway.'

'They're part of the observation routines. In case there is a problem. That's all, Adam.'

'Well, you'll get what I choose to give, Sister. That's the agreement.'

'But we don't know what we are looking for unless you tell us, Adam.'

'There is nothing to tell you. That's the short answer.'

'I'm sorry you're taking this attitude, Adam. Without your cooperation there's not much we can do for you.'

'Look, Sister, nothing is happening. I don't have visions of God every night. I could just as well go back home. It would cost me no more to live there with the help of professional staff.'

'No, Adam. It's early days yet. You don't know what to expect. We do.'

'Is that a threat?'

'No, it's not a goddamn threat. We'd rather have you develop here where we can observe you and be on hand. If we have to bring you in at the critical stage, we will not have the preparations made.'

'Then you know what is going to happen, is that it?'

'Not exactly, Adam. There are projections, but without accurate ongoing data we're just guessing.'

'No, this scientistic jargon of yours nauseates me. This is not a painless experiment in your lab, Sister. You know, write it up afterwards and wait for the kudos.'

'Jesus, Adam! What do you think I am? Look, as far as I am concerned, if you can't be bothered then I can't be bothered either. There are other people we can help. You can clear off anytime you want to. We'll even call a taxi for you.'

It's the darkness. Oh help me, it's the darkness.

Six weeks on and I still cannot rid myself of the conviction that I have a left hand. I use it – try to use it, that is – all the time, as I have always done. Then, when I look down to see why I haven't a left hand anymore, I experience a sharp recession in me at the sight of the bandaged stump. One of these days, this recession shock will be so great that it will go right through me and I will die instantly.

As it is, when I do catch sight of the stump, I get a sense of unreality, not just that the stump is unreal, but the whole world that contains the stump is unreal.

I didn't have this problem with the leg amputations – or did I? Perhaps the blue period after the removal of my right leg may have had its origin in the amputation after all.

There is one thing that keeps me together during these shocks: a get well card.

Mrs Bryce came to see me at the hospital about a month after the left leg had been amputated. I was very surprised to see her appear suddenly at the door, the nearest to timid I daresay she has ever been. Little rhetorical tap on the door – even though I had already seen her – and the beginnings of an attempt at hospital cheer, which she wisely killed off at once. She has her big handbag in her left hand and a bunch of flowers in her right.

Nurse comes and puts the flowers in a vase of water and a chair is found for Mrs Bryce. She looks extremely well, seemed to have lost some weight, and some of her housekeeper decorum, I suppose because there is no one in the house anymore. We talk: yes, I am as well as can be expected in the circumstances; everything is fine at the house, garden beginning to bloom again.

Almost exactly twenty minutes pass and she gets to her feet, hauls up her handbag from the floor. She fetches an envelope from the bag and thrusts it into my hand. Then she suddenly catches my free hand – my left hand, as it happens – bends down and kisses me fully on the brow. Last thing she does is brush non-existent hair off my brow, a curiously affectionate gesture, turns and walks out of the room.

The card is a get well card from Paul and his family. It is signed first by Rachel, then Paul, then Alice, and then Adam. More than touched by this, you have no idea just how strong the feeling was. And it was a unique kind of feeling, at least unique to me. For a moment – actually for quite a long moment – I had a sense of what it is like to belong. Yes, that, simple belonging. To see my name on the card, signed in a child script. To go back over the signatures: the round steady hand of Rachel, the swift flow of Paul, the deliberate ornateness of Alice, and the modest me-too of Adam.

And there was more. On the facing page, Rachel had written: The drawing is by Alice and Adam did the wording, love, R.

The picture is of an imaginary tree, too perfect for this world, and sitting in its uppermost branch is a white bird, its beak wide open as it sings. The wording underneath states in shaky capitals done in green crayon:

GET WELL SOON UNCLE ADAM

It is sentiment, just pure sentiment. But it helps right now, believe me.

I want to talk about the darkness again. It seemed at first to be another bout of depression, but it has persisted in a steady way through the amputation of my left hand, despite some strong mood swings afterwards. Not only that, but the sense that it has a specific content has remained constant also. I've attempted already to characterise this content, and while the figurations have been helpful, they have brought me no closer to what is happening here.

Even so, while dictating this, it is as though part of me is permanently turned towards that darkness, and is listening and watching intently. It is never quiet enough for that part of me, and my concentration is never sharp enough. I lie awake at night now and try to focus, but I am frustrated by the fact that my conscious self can never find anything to focus on. And yet, I find at times that there are thoughts suddenly there in my mind, and I have no idea how they came to be there. I can never find a context or a line of association that would explain their presence.

At first I passed them over as just part of the jumble of thoughts, memories and images that flow all the time through my consciousness. What brought me to isolate them was, in the first place, the repetition of certain images/ideas, and secondly the fugitive aura of significance that surrounded them. I call them images/ideas in this way to try to indicate how they appear to me, in part an image but also an idea that I feel can lead out to associated ideas/knowledge. One image/idea that I am particularly taken by is a figuration of mother and child, with the idea that another interpretation – a much more significant one, at that – is available to me. Another of these images/ideas I associate with the visions of both Rachel and Angela, but here the idea is of a bird. I thought at first this referred to the phoenix, because this image/idea seems strongly associated with fire or perhaps a brilliant red light. Now I think it is more like an eagle, where the emphasis now is on its characteristic beak. Mind you, it could have to do with Kay's dragon.

Of the two images here, the mother and child one seems to be the more important, if only because the idea/image is new. I have nursed the mother and child image through a number of nights, but find so far that I cannot draw it forward to me (this sense of bringing forward is very exact). So, what I have done is ordered a particular representation of the classic Madonna and child, selected after an examination of dozens of images online.

Having dictated the above, I am struck again by how specific this experience is. I wonder now if this is another stage in the process begun with discovering the column of centres within myself. Suddenly my whole body goes on alert. Is it possible that there is another aspect or part of me which has lain dormant in some way until all the centres were contacted? More, is the correction of the malfunction or whatever in the second centre, at the sacral plexus, now figured as a hexagon formed by two triangles, the reason I now have this sense of presence. After all, remember that Rachel said that I was not alone – in fact that none of us was alone. Is that what the presence is, another part of me, now capable of communicating with me?

The implications of this thought overwhelm me, so many possibilities that I am swamped by thoughts and images. It as though there is a latent element in myself that understands what is happening and recognises the presence that is by me. Oh, but I fear delusion here. I could believe anything at this moment, especially anything I want to believe.

But I will try communicate with it. I ask the dark the question: What is it? Now wait. It is there, I can sense its presence so strongly. But when I try to know the presence, then the phantasmagoria starts up again.

I'm not doing this properly. I must have patience.

Adam: 'Ah, Sister Veronica.'

SV: 'And you're still here, Adam.'

'Still no news, I'm afraid.'

'Mmm? No, that's not why I'm here. I thought I might help. In a general way, I mean.'

'How so?'

'Have you tried prayer, Adam?'

'Ah. Please, Sister.'

'No. Not what you think, Adam. Three hours down in the Oratory?'

'Heh. I hope not.'

'No no. This is pretty simple. You could think of trying it anyway. Do you know the sign of the cross?'

'That takes me back, Sister. A preparatory school. An order of Spanish monks. Hang on. I've just remembered something. A bit of a coincidence, actually. The monks were very fond of the crucifixion and there were images of it everywhere, even a particularly bloody one in the Superior's office. I came to pity Christ on his cross and called him poor Christ.'

'And?'

'Isn't your order called the Poor Christs around here?'

'Ah, see it now. We don't think that is funny, Adam.'

'What? And the Poor Marys up the road? I think it is very humorous. Even verging on the blasphemous, isn't it?'

'Are you interested in praying or not, Adam?'

'Think of it, Sister. The Poor Marys looking after the fallen young women and the Poor Christs looking after the rich men who...'

'Stop it! That's no longer funny, Adam. You should know that.'

'No. I agree. It's not funny at all. Just a coincidence, yes?'

'You can make the sign of the cross, then?'

'Yes, I can.'

'Were you taught to join your palms together at the end, like this?'

'Yes.'

'Good. Now do this when you feel threatened or frightened.'

'And God will protect me?'

'Adam, will you please stop being facetious.'

'When you get more serious, Sister. Stop leading me on. Do you understand me?'

'It's all I can do, Adam.'

'Do you have to show results? Does your boss expect results on a weekly basis? Do you have a progress chart that you have to fulfil in order to keep your job?'

'Don't be silly, Adam.'

'Well, that's how it seems to me, Sister.'

'I need to connect with you, Adam.'

'Then you'll connect with me – as you put it – when a connection is possible. And I am the one to decide that.'

'No, Adam, it's not that simple. Look, the problem we both have is this. You think you know where you are and I think I know where you should be. Obviously, these assumptions don't fit together. Please remember that you are not the first candidate I have progressed. Oops. Not that way, yep? OK. I've been down the road with others. They haven't all gone the same route. Some of them, I can tell you, have been pretty hairy. We think there is always the potential for what we can best call contamination.'

'Yes. I get that. I agree with you there. But the problem as I see it is this, Sister. Unless you, your order, already know where I am headed – and I suspect you don't – you cannot judge where I am or where I am headed. You will probably recognise it if I go wrong, but only if others before me have gone off the road, as it were, in that way or at that point. Is that it?'

'Yes, Adam. That's pretty good. To be candid, the report on you has you as a kind of rich playboy. You know, plenty of money, women, do what you like. It just so happens that you – for whatever reason, accident or destiny – are on what for us is a very serious spiritual path. Now, the fact is – and you can take this on board, seeing that you want it straight – no man yet has succeeded on this path. We're not fully sure what is going on, but we do know bomb-outs when we see them. How's that, Adam?'

'That's pretty fine, Sister Veronica. So your job is to hold my hand until it is time to let go.'

'I wouldn't admit to saying this, Adam, but that's about it. But now, I want to tell you something about my side, if I might. OK?'

'Fire away, Sister.'

'At some point we will connect – as I have called it – and after that I will be able to let go, but only if I do it in time. Otherwise, I will get burnt too. Not in the way you might, but I will suffer a sort of contagion that will leave me seriously obsessed. And furthermore – in case you have a sense of responsibility – if you succeed, whatever that means, there is a good chance that I will die. There now, Adam. You have the full story.'

'And you're serious?'

'Perfectly.'

'Heww. How much background do you have on my situation?'

'Very little, Adam. You won't let us see your notes.'

'OK. What I'm going to do is this. I will email you a pdf which will contain one particular episode. I take it you're a virgin?'

'I'm not. I was married for two years before joining the order.'

'Children?'

'None.'

'Good. Then you're a virgin. I think you have to be a virgin, otherwise you will get trapped inside your head no matter what happens.'

'Are you serious, Adam?'

'Of course I'm serious. Jesus. Didn't you know that?'

'No, I didn't. Nor does the order. We assume virginity means no sex.'

'Huh. Don't over-rate sex, Sister. It's only sex when the woman conceives. Otherwise, it's just masturbation.'

'Wow, Adam. And a man is saying this?'

'Anyway, read the extract I'm sending you. I'll send it over just as soon as I've extracted it. Read it more than once if necessary. And don't let me see you until you've read and inwardly digested it, as they used to say. Over and out.'

The real danger is consciousness. The problem is that consciousness is all-pervasive and yet it is totally dependent on the senses. In a way it is evanescent. We experience it as a kind of continuity but it fades and strengthens according to stimuli or our response to these stimuli. What fools us here, I think, is the fact that the light of consciousness remains constant. Why is that, I wonder? Why is consciousness always on, as it were. I mean in the sense that when I am there, my consciousness is always there too, full on. Yet I know – however I know it – that I am not coincident with my consciousness. I can think way beyond the sense data it feeds me, I can remember earlier consciousness, I can even plan future consciousness.

How accurate is this? Consider habit. I can drive a car, eat, walk, and yet my mind can be elsewhere, and elsewhere to the point that I cannot remember what I was doing before my consciousness calls me back. So the trick is not to identify with consciousness, just see it as a window on the world, that I look out as the occasion demands, but can abandon otherwise if it suits me. But like driving a car, I might soon end up in a mess if I don't look out the window fairly often. But only while driving. Sitting alone in a room with no pressing concerns, we can simply go off and do something else.

Where can we go? Fantasy, memory, fears, hopes and wishes. Not an exhaustive list. What do they have in common? Each has a thread. See for yourself. The point is: each thread goes out from here – whatever here is. The here is me.

Now consider the issue in another way. Let's say instead that we vacate our consciousness – say seated in a comfortable chair – and instead of a thread going out from here, we look for a thread coming in here. Is that possible? Better still, how is that possible? Well, for a start, what comes to us would very obviously not have a source in us. We would not be familiar with it, would have no name for it, would perhaps not be able to even see it. How could we know it was there, if we cannot see it? Consider that seeing something is much like having a name for it, we learn the image much as we learn the word; both, after all, are signs.

Let's hypothesise. Say there is something in your awareness coming in from the outside world, and then say we become aware of it and then know it. How was that done? We found an image or word for it. Schematically, the unknown object attracted a sign to it. Now say the object is unique, that is, we have no prior experience of it: what happens then? Propose this: the unique object calls out a sign from our body of knowledge. Now we therefore know what the object is like, even if we don't know what it is itself. And in a situation such as this, the larger, the more extensive, our body of knowledge is, the better fit the simile will be, yes?

Granting all this: in the situation where an image/idea springs suddenly into our mind – having no obvious source – we should be able to deduce some insights into the nature of the hidden object by analysing the characteristics of the image/idea that it has invoked from our body of knowledge. Can you see that? Poets call this inspiration. We won't know immediately the nature of the strange object, but we will have a sort of first approximation through the kind of sign it attracts. With practice, it should then be possible to refine this process, whereby the nature, type, origin of the sign could provide more accurate information about the otherwise hidden object.

Experience in this area could then be greatly enhanced through the study of poetry, mysticism, and esoteric imagery such as that found in profusion in alchemy. This would both increase the range of our own stock of signs and increase our sensitivity to such sign activity in our own awareness.

The effect here would in part be to transform the use of consciousness, introducing an active element into what is usually a passive faculty. Over time, proficiency would improve, so that consciousness could become an instrument of enquiry, permitting us to search the dark world of whatever it is that lies beyond our senses.

SV: 'This came for you, Adam.'

Adam: 'Ah, the picture. Can you open it for me, Sister?'

'Hhh? Are you getting religion after all?'

'Ah yes. That should do the trick.'

'The Madonna and child. I've never seen this one before. Who is it by?'

'Raphael. It's from the Hermitage in St Petersburg.'

'Why this one, Adam?'

'It's simple. I want an uncluttered version. Can I hang it here? On the wall facing me?'

'Sure, why not? I'll have that done. Will take a day or so?'

'No, that's fine. Thanks.'

'Adam.'

'Yes?'

'I read the pdf. Who is the woman, Mrs Bryce?'

'No, Sister. No questions. You must make what you will of it. If we mix our understandings then there will be confusion. Can you see that? You must act out of your own light, as I act out of mine.'

'But what if I get it wrong, Adam?'

'Then you get it wrong, Sister. There are no guarantees. This is not about knowledge. There is no one in this process who knows. Everything – at all levels – is in act.'

'But that means we cannot judge the outcome, Adam.'

'That's right, Sister.'

'Then what am I doing here?'

'I don't know. Someone at the hospital thought your order was the place for me. I thought the hospice was for palliative care. But you are on to something else altogether, aren't you?'

'Oh, you're getting care, you know that. But they sent me to coordinate with you.'

'Coordinate? Who sent you?'

'We have a kind of clearing house in Washington. That's DC not the state.'

'Washington? Why Washington? I would have thought the Vatican. Are you from the Pentagon?'

'No, not the Vatican, anyway. It's Washington because the order inherited a large house there.'

'Why not the Vatican? It'd make more sense to have the Vatican checking me out. You know, to see whether what I have is to be quashed or adopted as the new faith.'

'Nothing like that, Adam. A lot of this sort of thing goes on. The churches, government, big business. They all check to see what's going on and see if it is useful to them.'

'Well, I don't think this will be useful to anyone, Sister.'

'I'm inclined to agree with you, Adam. But I can see where you are coming from, you know. This will happen and we'll never know how it turns out.'

'Yes. Something like that. I think the result, such as it will be, will have an effect elsewhere, beyond this sensed world.'

'And this painting? If I may ask, that is.'

'It's a kind of clue, Sister.'

'I don't want to break the bounds you've set, Adam, but I feel you are giving me a lot clues, too. I feel them work in me.'

'Just let it happen, Sister. You need only give permission.'

'Easily said, Adam. What if I am afraid? I signed up out of faith in Christ and belief in his goodness. Are you taking me beyond Christ?'

'Ah, poor Christ. How could you get beyond him, Sister, if you have faith in him?'

'Because you have gone beyond faith, Adam. What you are doing, the Church would call magic or animism.'

'And what do you call it, Sister?'

'I'm in no position to name it, Adam. As I suspect you know.'

'What if I say that you do not need to name it, Sister? What if I say that an action does not need a sign in order to be efficacious.'

'Then I say that I have never acted in my life, Adam.'

'Ah, very nice, Sister. Well, you'll act very soon, you'll see.'

'And if I am afraid, Adam?'

'The sign of the cross, Sister. That will protect you.'

'Seriously?'

'Why not? You thought it would protect me, didn't you?'

'But that was...'

'When you were a nun of faith, yes?'

'Then what about Christ, Adam?'

'I'd say you need only call on him, Sister.'

'What? But without faith?'

'Can I tell you a story. About a hundred years ago a spiritual movement selected a young man and proclaimed that he would be the second Christ. But the young man rejected the role and went off on his own. Then he had a powerful experience, that opened up a new level in human spiritual destiny. Though he had been intended as a Christ, it was the Buddha who supported him through his ordeal.'

'This actually happened?'

'Yes.'

'Do you expect the Buddha to come and support you?'

'Doubt it, Sister.'

'Who, then?'

'Who do you think might?'

'You're serious, aren't you? Aren't you afraid of paranoia?'

'A psychologist told me that we should allow that the paranoia is real.'

'Adam!'

'You can still pull out, Sister. There's no shame in that.'

'No, Adam. I could never pull out of this. Not now. I think I am already connected.'

'Yes? Then pray you make a good midwife.'

Strange how that one glance at the Raphael was enough. I realise now it was a detail I had not remembered in the online image that caught my attention: the book. Where did Raphael get the idea from? Given that he was the painter who depicted his fellow artists as a re-creation of philosophic Athens, you could assume that Raphael was a man of some insight.

The book = knowledge = Sophia. It was so obvious once I saw it. And teaching the infant too. Allow that it is the Sophia-Maria theme again, which is plausible given the Greek influence spreading in Italy after the fall of Constantinople. But that is not how it struck me. Though I knew I was not looking at the Madonna and child anymore, I could not quite grasp what the image was really about. I had many hints swirling around in me, memories, speculations, guesses.

And when it finally did come, it was so indirect that I almost lost the whole thread of thought. At first it was Angela's Lilith image that haunted me. It certainly fitted, allowing that instead of a mother and a child, we were looking at a representation of a relation between a woman and a man, cast here in symbolic form.

It may have fitted, considered as a symbol, but I had already rejected the Lilith myth as an aberration that would ultimately consume the man. Nonetheless, the fact that the image itself fitted set me working further along that line. It is probably obvious that having rejected my father's obsession, I would think of Kay's father's obsession, especially as Kay herself could complete what was lacking in her father's image. And once again I had Sophia. Now I pushed beyond the symbolic element and allowed that a reality may have underpinned the original image of the mother and child, which dates back to the beginning of human existence almost.

Then I had it: Sophia is teaching the man, who is shown as a child because that is how he was viewed in relation to Sophia. Man as an ignorant child, and Sophia as the wise woman, with knowledge of Heaven.

Having achieved this insight, my main feeling was one of relief. Only at that point did I realise how much my approach to the darkness that seems to surround me now depended on getting a coherent understanding of this primary image: that is, to prove it was possible to draw some sense from this darkness. However, it didn't take long for me to see that I had not achieved as much as I thought. The interpretation of the classic mother and child image as representing the relation between Sophia and the man was no more than a formality. It had no real content. The mother and child interpretation of the image opened up the whole world of human earthly existence. Considered as representing Sophia and man, it didn't of itself say very much.

It has taken long night hours to get this far. While it may not seem much, it has left me with the conviction that I am even so standing right at the edge of a very great and penetrating understanding. The realisation that truth can be drawn from the darkness heartens me more than I would admit otherwise. Sister Veronica may have placed her trust in me, but I don't think she realises that we both stand at the edge of a precipice now. I envy her trust in me. If only I were capable of an equal trust in whatever draws me on. But I can achieve no more than a fatalistic persistence, based on feeling that I have nothing to lose – having lost so much already.

SV: 'Here you are, Adam. Where do you want it?'

Adam: 'The Raphael? On the wall there, facing me. There's no reflection, Sister.'

'No. it's non-reflective. Plastic glass, I think. It looks well there. Can you see it clearly?'

'Yes. That's fine. Thank you for getting it done so quickly.'

'No problem, Adam. That's what I'm here for.'

'Well, thank you even so.'

'Yes. By the way, Adam, can I ask you a question?'

'Not that sort of question, I hope.'

'No. Not really, anyway. It's this. I took Veronica as my name here in memory of my aunt, who died when I was young.'

'Good name. Hasn't it something to do with the crucifixion? They had stations of the cross in the school chapel. I remember her in one of them.'

'That's right. She wiped Christ's face with a cloth.'

'Ah yes, that's it.'

'My aunt died saving me from drowning. I was eight. I slipped and fell into the local river. It was spring time and the water was high. She jumped in and grabbed me and handed me out to some loggers who had come down when I screamed. Then my aunt lost her footing and was swept away. I saw her go under, Adam. I've never forgotten the expression on her face. She was under the water and she was just looking as me at the current dragged her away.'

'Pretty traumatic, I'd say, Sister. When you were so young, I mean.'

'Sure, Adam. What I want to ask you is this. That woman you wrote about, Rachel, she looked at you under the water. At the spring. What did that mean?'

'Mean? In what way, Sister?'

'All through my life, since my aunt died, I have felt as though that expression on her face has kind of pushed me forward. And when I read about your experience, I got a huge shock. I couldn't sleep for hours afterwards, trying to work out what it means.'

'Haven't you already said what it means, Sister?'

'Huh? How?'

'You said it pushes you forward. That's what it means. I told you not to look for names or labels, Sister.'

'That's not enough, Adam. I need to know what I'm doing.'

'Then you shouldn't be here, Sister. Or maybe I shouldn't be here. I think I should arrange to move back to my home. There'll be better services there too.'

'No, don't do that, Adam.'

'Why? Will they sack you for losing a valuable client?'

'No. Please don't start that again.'

'Very well, Sister. Let me tell you what you are here for, and then you can decide which one of us stays or goes. Put succinctly, you are a vessel. Let me approach it through the legend of St Veronica. What did she do? The usual explanation is that she did poor Christ a good turn on a bad day. Isn't that it? Well, maybe what she did was show Christ to himself in his transfiguration. We benighted mortals can only see the bloody Christ, while Veronica saw Christ's Glory. Do you think she was venerated throughout Christendom for a thousand years because she wiped Christ's brow? And a face seen in water, what is that but a reflection. The face your aunt showed you as she died is not pushing you forward, it is the face you are going to meet. That's what you are, Sister, a vessel that will be filled at some point in the future. Try to take comfort in that understanding, Sister. And if you cannot, then please tell me so that I can make other arrangements.'

'Hey! I'm not just a thing, you know. I'm an individual person just like you, with the right to be treated with respect. I'm not just a kind of slave here. You're not my first case and I bet you won't be my last. Adam! Are you listening to me? I'm not the.'

Why does it always take a crisis? I see so much now. And it is strange. Once I could see it, what I saw was just obvious. I'll summarise it here for the record.

Once there was a male being, called Adam Kadmon by the kabbalists. He lived on the Old Earth, that had the consistency of a thick soup, and he resembled the modern day sea horse. His seed could grow itself in this soup. This male has two organs, one of expression and one of reception. The organ of expression was also his penis, which he used to pulse out his communication to the other males in the planet. The organ of reception, comprising two nipples on its breast, received the communications from the other males. All these beings ultimately communicated the same message, which told the story of their existence, so that the Old Earth resonated to the same pulse.

In time this being was divided into two separate entities. This was necessary because the earth changed, the soup separating out into fluid and solid parts. One of the resultant beings was male, while the other had a receptacle containing the Old Earth soup inserted into it, so that generation could continue. In the division, the organs were also divided, the penis staying with the male, while the organ of reception – together with all the knowledge Adam Kadmon had possessed – was apportioned to the second being. This organ was then adapted to produce milk (originally the foodstuff of the Old Earth) for the young.

How did I learn this? I had to wait several weeks for this to become clear. In the meantime I assumed at first that the splitting of the Adam Kadmon resulted in two distinct beings, the male and the sophic (I call it this for the reason that will become clear in a moment). But not so. What happened was more subtle. When Adam Kadmon was split, the two entities remained in him. The arrangement then was that if the male entity was dominant, the resultant incarnated individual was male. But if the sophic entity was dominant, then the result was a female individual. In the man, therefore, while the male entity informed him, the sophic entity remained hidden, and vice-versa for the woman.

You see that this arrangement accounts for much of the experiences of my father, Angela, Kay and her father, Rachel and me. You can work that out yourself. But the important point here and now is that correcting the fault – perhaps the wrong word: the diversion was necessary to achieve generation in what are forbidding circumstances – in the sacral plexus centre has permitted the sophic entity in myself to connect in some way with the male entity. One very notable result of this has been this flow of insight, in effect the Wisdom of the sophic entity, some of which I have recounted above.

There is very little else to say here. It will take time – how long I don't know – for the full implications of this reunion – called the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage, by the alchemists – to become apparent. When you consider that every individual will sooner or later achieve this union, then there is the prospect that human life as we know it will be utterly transformed.

Each human individual will experience himself as complete. The terrible anxieties, insecurities and hungers that beset the human race now will be at an end. We will all know just who we are, and will relate to each other as free autonomous beings.

This is what we will achieve. Love will have a reality at last.

## 5 WINGS OF FIRE

Consider yourself in Paradise. You have one limb and three stumps, a flaky spine encased in a hi-tech capsule that keeps your anus permanently dilated and your penis ice-cold in a suction device. How much Paradise are you getting?

Just bringing us back down to earth. This is six months later and a lot to catch up on. There has been another blue, but I know enough by now to just let it happen. Having a garden to sit in this time helped. Springtime too, a good antidote to gloom. Mrs Bryce on hand too, still the perfect housekeeper, sharing secrets with her employer, no doubt the best bond between master and servant. Sat in the garden then, only a hat on my head needed to protect against the elements, everywhere else enclosed in medical gear. Blue: like two charges cancelling each other out. I had no interest in what the charges were; just waited for one or the other to ease off so my life could start up again.

Otherwise sit under trees and let the story unfold. Not linear, of course: my sophic half knows nothing of narrative, presentations, holding interest. I dictated on and off, but trusted mostly to my instinct for what mattered. A lot of Wisdom is surprisingly mundane, run of the mill stuff. Like how God sits on a throne far far away and his angelic orders are arrayed about Him like the ramparts of a galactic castle. What I understand from this is that Wisdom's knowledge is of another realm altogether, out of time as we understand it, and probably just so much symbolism. The Adam Kadmons may have had a taste for fables, relieving humdrums lives, no doubt, yet there must be a thread of real description in all this.

Is it relevant to us? I feel that it is not. My instinct is to bring my sophic half up to date on our predicament, but I wonder what Sophia is like without the Wisdom. Perhaps just another pixie? I'm trying to get at an idea here. Take away the Wisdom and what is left of my male part in union with my sophic part? Would such a united being be any better suited to this realm of accident? Remember that the original man – Adam Kadmon – existed in a very different environment. So why go to so much trouble to unite them now? Do you see what I am getting at?

There has to be more to this process than just correcting the centres and uniting the entities. But what? I don't know. Only one clue: Kay and what she said about wings at the end. I've gone back and checked. This is what she said:

It is the wings that are important, only the wings.

Setting up the house for my present condition was less trouble than I anticipated. First I had a pretty thorough check-up in the city hospital. My situation is stable, reasonably so anyway. The spine is crumbling in a curious way, the cells in the bones being thinned out rather than wholesale destruction of the bones themselves. But the necrosis is active in my right wrist now, so there will be a crisis there in less than six months' time. At least there is little or no pain at the moment. The good news is that the prosthetic for my left arm is proving to be very useful. It has a variety of functions beyond just grip. There is a set of emitters, for instance, that I can use to operate a surprising number of appliances about the house. The signals are controlled by means of rotations of the elbow combined with muscle flexes. Even Mrs Bryce has got in on the act, equipped with a tidy remote that dangles from her left wrist.

The medical end is housed in the room adjacent to my mother's downstairs bedroom – which I have reoccupied as a study bedroom – with the on-duty staff housed upstairs. Their main duties at the moment have to do with the maintenance of the capsule and its ancillary gear, the futuristic chair-bed convertible. Incidentally, I'm back in touch with my IT friend at the hospital, which has got me a new and improved dictation device. I don't interest myself in the more sophisticated developments in the software – which I'm told are spectacular – so long as it does my work for me. It has proved possible to interface it with my prosthetic arm, thus allowing me to use it regardless of what else I'm doing.

The staff themselves are professional to a fault, yet can manage cordial relations with me, and with Mrs Bryce – who finds their company a source of great pleasure. I suspect her home life has always been fairly grim, and the formality imposed on her by my mother and, I suppose, myself, never allowed what I see now is a convivial personality to express itself. She cooks for them, will tidy their quarters, offers them flowers from the garden. But what has really charmed her is their practice of helping about the kitchen. These nurses and technicians are suburban people, used to sharing their lives informally with others, but it has been a great revelation for Mrs Bryce.

All this is fine, but as you may already suspect, I am missing an essential element. I live in a house that probably has never known so much ordinary good feeling. It is pleasant to hear chatter in the kitchen, bursts of laughter, the general hum of people going about their business. Even so, though I haven't sought it, I find myself outside this homeliness. Don't misunderstand me. I can chat when chatting is indicated, have many of my meals now in company, follow up on any personal details I hear about the staff. Yet all the time I am focused as ever on the darkness that is my constant companion.

Sophia and I relate through that part of my mind where I become aware of sense data. I'll explain. Someone addresses you, your hear sounds, part of you processes these sounds into words, and another part of you impresses the meaning of these words, combined in a statement, into that part of your mind where your understanding is receptive. At that stage there is no sound, there are no words, only meaning. And it is solely with this meaning that you are concerned.

Now, consider this scenario. On the other side, as it were, of this part of your mind that registers meaning, there is another voice, which is processed until its intended meaning appears in that part of your mind where your understanding is receptive. In this case, there are no sounds and no words either preceding the appearance of meaning. All you have is the sudden appearance of meaning in your mind.

This is how Sophia communicates with me. Of course, it is not infallible. I am faced always with the possibility that I will interfere with this process and modify Sophia's communications to fit into either my preconceptions or expectations. So I always operate at this level with a degree of scepticism, especially when I find any of Sophia's communications attractive – suspecting then that I have doctored her intended meaning to suit myself. In any case, I remain dispassionate about her communications, especially now that I see how irrelevant many of them are.

What I find lacking here is a confidante, someone with whom I can share this new understanding, and who could go forward with me to whatever it is that this new experience is preparing me for.

The failure of the relationship with the nun upset me more than I expected, mainly I think because I had begun to share with her quite a lot of what I was learning. Despite her obvious failings – her rather stupid literalism, the mediocrity of her training, and her immature subjectivism – I did sense that she was capable of making what she called a connection with me. I was able to, as it were, see around her, and could therefore easily carry her into the coming – what would be for her – maelstrom. What would happen to her then, of course, would be dependent upon her innate qualities of integrity and fortitude.

This failure has set me thinking about what kind of person would serve as a companion now. Jocelyn, for example, would respond to the effect: "See you when you're finished with that, darling." Her world was fixed at birth and nothing would ever change that fact. Serafina? Consider that I never even told her about the Voice. Rachel, then? Rachel is a mother, and what's more, she knows what that means. Kay? Strangely, no. Why? I have already considered my own susceptibility here, can you imagine Kay attempting to register the end when she already had a prefiguration of it? I could never trust her testimony and she could never fully grasp mine. Kay already knew too much.

A useful exercise. Would a man better suit? Obviously not. A man couldn't but mirror my experience. We would both end up deluded.

Looks as though this problem will need to be resolved by circumstances. That is, wait and see.

What a remarkable day! For two reasons. I will attend to the most pressing one first.

Mrs Bryce – out of her own wisdom, no doubt – gave me only an hour's warning that Paul, Rachel and their children were coming to visit their grandmother and uncle. My first response was one of annoyance – that Mrs Bryce should take it upon herself to invite them here. Then I had to allow that Rachel could have arranged it, if only to introduce her children to their uncle. The staff did an excellent job at short notice to clean up the spacesuit and undercarriage, and find a suitable way to diminish the impact of my infirmity upon the children. The nurse thought a cap of sorts would do the trick: she was right, good for her.

Obviously, there was some diplomacy involved. Paul came in first – I had decided to receive them in the study rather than the drawing room. He looked rock-solid, senior management with a lot of head room yet. Affable, considerate, even genuinely warm. We talked about nothing, we having only one thing in common – and it couldn't be up for discussion.

Then the children. Alice was about nine – not good at estimating this sort of thing, as you might expect – tall for her age. She carried herself well, very mannered, though – like her handwriting, in fact – but just very sweet. Then, when she came forward to greet me, she simply placed her hand on my cheek, her small fingers lying very lightly against my lower eyes lashes. This is how my mother used to greet me. I reached and laid my hand over hers and pressed it into my cheek. I had never the nerve to do this when my mother touched me, but it is to Alice's credit that she smiled while allowing me to do it.

Then Adam comes forward, hand out to shake mine, his father's gravity and self-possession. He then touches the capsule and asks me what it can do, as though it might take me to the Moon. Actually, he was techie enough to want to know what all the whiz-banks and do-dahs could do. Alice, I notice, walked over to the bookcase and studied the titles, her hands grasped behind her back in a formal manner.

Though I was bent over the prosthetic, head to head with Adam, I knew instantly when Rachel walked into the room. At once both children began an unobtrusive withdrawal, both of them with their eyes fixed on Rachel and me. They conspired to be still in the room when Rachel came across to me and bent to kiss me on the brow. Then it was just the two of us, the whole world having instantly vanished.

Rachel pulled over a nearby chair and sat close to my right. She reached her left hand and took my hand. Our eyes were locked on each other. I felt as though I was being downloaded into her and that she was being downloaded into me. A momentary shadow played across her face and then she smiled. I don't know what my own expressions were like. Her presence to me was whole, every inch of her in place. I could sense even the light perspiration on her body engendered by the effect of this meeting. And I could sense how her clothes – the light summer dress, the backless low heels and her underwear – lay against her body. But most of all, I could see how she had filled out just as I saw she would in the first moment of our meeting that morning at the fountain. If I had wanted to, I'm sure I could have seen her life forward until the day she dies, lying in her bed with Alice holding her hand.

Rachel and I sat like that until Mrs Bryce knocked gently and came in to call us to lunch out in the yard.

The lunch was remarkably jolly. Everyone sat around the big picnic table – that Mrs Bryce and the technician had brought out of the shed for the occasion – and ate their fill. Another aspect of Mrs Bryce was revealed that afternoon. She could do motherly. Adam was very taken with her and contrived to sit beside her, pushing his father one place away from his mother. Alice then sat beside her father, with me on her other side, then the nurse, with the technician between her and Rachel, who sat beside Mrs Bryce.

Afterwards, the nurse, Patricia, brought out a small electronic device and sang for us into the evening, light wine circulating for the adults, Mrs Bryce's homemade lemonade and cake for the children.

It's not every day that you meet your sister for the first time. I spent much of the lunch imagining Rachel as my mother's secret daughter, how much love must have existed between them, the spontaneous innocence of Rachel and the principled care of my mother, such trust on one side and such steadfastness on the other. I'm not sure which made me the more mollified, the security for my sister or the consolation for my mother. Did Rachel know then who her mother was? Perhaps, though she certainly would after Alice was born. Even so, I can picture my mother and Tom Tallant together gardening, she in her little shed with the red geraniums and Tom in the industrial annexe with the whole garden in hand, their little daughter under their feet.

Alice, on departure, extended me her hand again and suffered me to place mine on hers. Adam is in line for a decent gaming console, as soon as I can make arrangements with my IT friend. Paul? Paul is a happy man, and nothing that day did anything to dent his happiness.

Do I envy Paul? Paul will die too: in a car driven by a drunken chauffeur. He will be reborn twenty years later and become his son's accountant and later his wife. That's how it works, until it's your time to turn to the dark.

Rachel said on leaving, her only words to me:

'It's good to see you at home again, Adam.'

Now that the excitement has died down, I can deal with the second revelation.

I thought it a good idea to ask Sophia a question. I had assumed up till then that Sophia could only transmit her wisdom to me in some automatic fashion, much as it seems the Adam Kadmons did. But no. Question asked, you then have to be very alert to the answer. I was mulling along a line of thought one afternoon – a few days after asking this question – and suddenly there was a break in the flow. I felt distracted at first, but then caught on that the new thought related to the question I had asked of Sophia. Once I caught the thread then, there was a flow of thoughts unusually coherent.

I want to digress here to comment on this coherence. It told me that Sophia was more than just a repository of memory, that could be prompted to recite its contents on command. I am tempted to lose myself, and you, no doubt, in philosophic speculation here: but it seems to me now that Sophia is the principle of intelligence in us humans. I am obliged to use this apparently elevated language because we now view intelligence as simply the capacity to process the content of modern education. Otherwise expressed: for us, intelligence is the capacity to handle signs.

This requires elaboration. We live in a universe of signs. In order to uses signs – words, but images also – we must allow that what is otherwise called reality must be reduced also to the status of sign. Hence we lose what Kant called the thing-in-itself. It could be argued that all philosophy, and theoretical science for that matter, has struggled since than to reintroduce reality into modern thought and practice.

My question had been: What is missing?

Sophia's answer was this: The human being is composed of four bodies or shells, the physical body, the life body, the soul body and ego body. At birth, the individual has only the physical body present, with the other three elsewhere but nonetheless in contact with the infant. Later, the life body will have fully entered the individual by the seventh year, when it takes control of all the life processes – the mother's life body having had this charge until then. Then, at puberty, the soul body will have completed its entry, which is signalled by sexual maturation and increased affect. Lastly, the ego body achieves its entry by the twenty first year, but so far only a reflection of this body has presence in the individual. The millennia long process that leads to the full incarnation of the ego body is now almost complete, so that over the next thousand years every human being will experience this crucial event.

While this development occurs in each incarnated human, there is also an historical aspect. The history of man is in effect a history of the inauguration successively of these bodies in mankind. Most of this process is undocumented, but evidence exists to indicate the point at which the soul body first incarnated in man. The primary indication here is man's carving of rock for totemistic purposes, the megalithic evidence for which practice is found throughout the world. On the other hand, the first entry of the ego body – as a projection – is clearly marked by two significant events in the development of human civilization, which occurred about three thousand years ago: the advent of the intellect and the sudden pre-eminence of the sense of sight, indicated by the development of abstract philosophical thought, and the pre-eminence of fire and light in myths. Both point to the nature of the ego body's primary effect on man, which introduced light into human consciousness. Prior to this, the human sensorium had been restricted to its basic function as a register of differences, focused equally across all the senses.

Don't try to take all this on board at once. It has come to me as a series of overlapping insights that I dictated pretty well as they came. I printed them out then and collated from them what I've told you above. I'm not concerned here with the truth or otherwise of this material: it is what happens that counts, not what anyone, including my sophic element, thinks is happening.

What I would like to do here instead is dwell some more on the topic of intelligence. It is a huge philosophical subject in itself, especially within the Platonist tradition. But I will leave that to one side. My question is this: given my insight that Sophia is the intelligence principle in us, and given the kind of knowledge I seem to be receiving from this entity, what is intelligence?

The modern concept of intelligence posits it as a kind of instrument, either innate or subject to development through education. As an instrument it seems to be concerned mainly with making judgements or assessments. But the intelligence of Sophia seems a far more fundamental capacity than that. If I let an insight regarding intelligence "speak", then it seems to be a power or capacity that coincides with reality at a very fundamental level. In a nutshell, it's not that intelligence knows everything, but that it can know any thing.

If this is the case, then I could ask the sophic element any question I wished, confident that I would receive a true answer. But, of course, it is not that easy. My interest in the question could easily affect my reception of Sophia's answer, so that I could never be sure of the objectivity of that answer. That is a very real limitation on what otherwise is an extraordinary resource.

I received a packet today forwarding the Raphael print to me. The nun enclosed a long letter, perhaps using the pretext of sending on the print as an excuse for writing me this missive.

My first instinct was to read it, if only out of respect for the fact that she had taken the trouble to write to me, and then put it away. But some passages in her letter are haunting me. I don't intend replying – for reasons that should become clear – but I do want to record part of my response to them. I'm doing it here because I think it will add to this account of what I'm beginning to see might well be a momentous event – in my life, at least.

Two passages from the nun's letter:

First:

"Seeing my aunt die as I did had two strange effects on me. I felt that I became her daughter. My aunt was unmarried and a virgin, her family is very strict. But I also felt that I became her in a way. As long as I did not have a child I would be able to hold her here in this world, always at the point of dying. I have never been able to separate these two feelings even though they are very different. My therapist once said that I was trying to escape feeling guilty for her death. He said it was a good way to do it. He did not say this, but I think he thought it saved me from suicide."

Second:

"You have to understand how I am connected with you now. You know how to save souls. I cannot go near water on my own. It's like a voice calls to me from the depths. I think this is why my Superior assigned me to you. It's like my fear can act against your fear. My fear of going down into the water can stop you from burning up in your fire. This is what your friend did for you that time. She showed you what to do in the water. Like my aunt showed me. Do you understand that, Adam? How you can learn to be still, so the fire will not burn you up. Then I will know too how to be still in the water."

Why does the nun want to die? Is it guilt or does she want to replace her aunt? Whyever she wants to die, it is obvious she wanted me to do it for her.

What haunts me is this? I think, for various reasons, that the woman cannot do whatever it is that I – as a man – am doing. I had hoped that I might have seen this insight tested if Kay had tried the exercises that opened the centres in me. After that, she might have tried to correct the displacement in the second centre – allowing that her sacral plexus centre had the same disconnection.

Now, a related question is this: If a woman cannot make contact with the male entity hidden in her – which is what the woman would do, were she able – what effect does the man's operation have on any woman that is connected to him? If the nun's account is of any value, then the woman would see the process in the man as a kind of consumption by fire. See the equivalent stages in Rachel's and later Kay's descriptions of what they saw happening in the man. Rachel saw me becoming a mirror of glory, while Kay saw a bird flying up. You can see that the nun's description is analogous.

The woman's relation to the man will be significant, obviously so. Where the woman initiates the process – as in the case of Mrs Bryce and my father – the symbolic representations will largely similar, in their case that of the serpent. Where the man instigates the process in concert with the woman – as in the case of Kay and her father – there is also some agreement in the symbolism, here of Sophia, though for a specific reason, Kay being a virgin, there are explicable differences. In the situation of my relationship with the nun, there was no co-incidence in the symbolism. The only point of co-incidence in fact was the print of the Raphael Madonna, which triggered the nun's association of her aunt's death with the process I am undergoing.

Beyond these examples, there is my own situation. How was the process inaugurated in me? Thinking back, it seems it may have been triggered by Jocelyn's death. Not a happy thought, because I see from then on that each stage of apparent development was achieved at the cost of a woman's life – except in the case of Rachel, that is. I'm not sure what I should make of this. Is this process worth their lives? It must be. And I think now, remembering what the nun said about the eventuality of her own death, that the end of this process might well involve my own death.

The most important understanding for me here is this: I have tended to take the woman's role – which I do think now is extremely important, for reasons to do with the legend of St Veronica – for granted. The nature of the relationship between the woman and me, and the situation of the woman herself, can easily determine the outcome of the collaboration. It can very easily lead to delusion, both for the man and – more crucially – for the woman. This suggests that the woman must be both attuned in some naïve way to the process, yet capable of recognising the significance of the culmination when it comes.

A tall order, yes?

Something of a crisis looming. My arm is now aching continuously, signalling the imminent destruction of the limb. I'm reluctant to use painkillers, fearing they will interfere with the process. I sleep only fitfully, and then because exhausted. I know I should allow the amputation, all the preparations are already well in hand. But I don't think I can afford the time now.

The flow of insight has become unremitting, which only adds to the strain. I will note here that my relation to this flow of insight has changed. I feel now that I am the direct recipient of the knowledge, which indicates to me that the male and sophic entities have united in some way. This union has served to increase what I can best call my self-identity. It has put me in a state of calm acceptance, a feeling of blithe immunity that no amount of misgiving can dent.

I am ignoring most of what comes to me. I don't have the energy to think it over, and I also don't find much of it pertinent. I will note only the following. It will seem fragmentary: you will have to connect the various threads for yourself – depending, of course, on your level of interest in the matter.

The encounter of two "ultimate" beings brought all of what we call reality into existence. They can be called the Same and the Different after the manner of Plato's Timaeus. Reality is in effect a question, and the long career of humanity is part of an attempt to provide an answer to this question.

The question, of the form "What is it?" – though of course the question is only implicit in the encounter of the Same and the Different – strictly has no answer: these beings cannot know themselves. The solution, prepared by the "Mother", attempts to reflect the Perfections of the Same and the Different to each other. This will be achieved by the transformed man, in whom the ego body has been united with the male-sophic entity, where the unique qualities of the male-sophic entity, discernment and intelligence, augment the ego body's power of perception. The transformed man can thus act as the Reflector of the respective Perfections of the Same and the Other, which then allows these two beings to commune with each other. As all ego bodies are in effect one body – in the sense that they would all appear to us to occupy one point in space – all the transformed men would appear also as a single transcendent entity, that can be called the Third Adam.

The ego body will replace the Life principle in man. Thus the incarnation of the ego body in the man will plunge the transformed man into an utter darkness that to witnesses will be as death, the physical body and its sensorium being at that instant abandoned as superfluous. The transformed man will then be clothed in the Soul alone, free of the trammels of earthly existence.

The Mother is derived from the Different being. Therefore no knowledge of this entity is possible, except insofar as it acts on reality, where it appears to mankind as a providential hand that guides man towards his destiny.

Though the Mother's project can fail, to the extent that all of reality partakes of the Same and Different beings, nothing can be lost.

Adam: 'Alice, what are you doing here?'

Alice: 'I have come to see you, uncle Adam.'

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