Every so often he experienced the sensation of an abrupt descent in an infernal lift. He started out of fits of sleep into a waking nightmare. He told himself he should write to his agent and to his publisher, but the mere thought of doing so tasted as acrid as bile and he sat and listened for the telephone instead.
On the third morning a heat wave came upon Rome. The roof garden was like a furnace. He was alone in his corner with an uneaten brioche, a pot of honey and three wasps. He was given over to a sort of fretful lassitude and finally to a condition that he supposed must be that of Despair itself. “What I need,” he told himself on a wave of nausea, “is a bloody good cry on somebody’s bloody bosom.”
One of the two waiters came out.
“Finito?” he sang, as usual. And then, when Barnaby gave bis punctual assent, seemed to indicate that he should come indoors. At first he thought the waiter was suggesting that it was too hot where he was and then that for some reason the manageress wanted to see him.
And then, as a sudden jolt of hope shook him, he saw a fattish man with a jacket hooked over his shoulders come out of the house door and advance towards him. He was between Barnaby and the sun and appeared fantastic, black and insubstantial, but at once Barnaby recognized him.
His reactions were chaotic. He saw the man as if between the inclined heads of two lovers, and to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. And whether the sensation that flooded him was one solely of terrified relief, or of a kind of blessed anti-climax, he could never determine. He merely wondered, when the man advanced into the shade and drew an attaché case from under his jacket, if he himself was going to faint.