"I"ve not seen her name in the papers-"

"She's married again. A real marriage. A man with real money and real talent, also younger than you and, moreover, handsome."

"- But that confirms what I always thought, what you said then, I mean. I mean not refined. A bitch." The Kvadrat's Kloochy fell off his knees, as in conscious failure to convert. Dr Wapenshaw said harshly:

"Right. Now look at this." And Hogg had hurled at him his third fluttering paper bird of the afternoon. He caught it without much skill; he was already weary; it was a journal he at once recognised; it was called Confrontation, a cisatlantic quarterly transatlantically financed and of, he understood, little general appeal. He nodded, unsurprised. Dr Wapenshaw knew everything, then. Hogg understood all. He knew now what it was all about. This was it. He turned to the page where the sestet of that sonnet, which the ja-sayers had not wished to hear, spoke to no frequenters of expensive bars, though the octave certainly had:

Coiled on the rooftree, bored, inspired, their snake

Crowed Monday in. A collar kissed the throat,

Clothes braced the body, a benignant ache

Lit up a tooth. The papers had a note:

"His death may mean an empire is at stake."

Sunday and this were equally remote.

And it was signed with that former, forbidden, name. Hogg said, stuttering:

"I can explain everything. I started that before, you see, before you got hold of me. Cured me, I mean. Of antisocial activities, that is. But I couldn't finish it. And then one night when I was working in the bar it just came. It had sort of tidied itself up behind my back. It was perfect, if you'll pardon the expression. So I sent it off and they published it. A kind of last fling, as you might term it. Or posthumous, perhaps you could even say. And then no more poetry, not never no more." That last phrase was perhaps too ingratiating, too consciously the old-time barman. Dr Wapenshaw did not fall for it. Instead, he rose in wrath and cried: