CHAPTER EIGHT

It was with a distinct feeling of apprehension that Anthony Keating arrived outside the editor's office door at nine-thirty on Tuesday morning and gave it a gentle knock.

"Come in!" responded Webb's voice in its usual brisk manner.

With attaché case in hand, Keating pushed open the door and strode towards the editor's desk.

"Ah yes, take a seat!" Webb advised him, briefly looking-up from a letter which he held in crab-like fashion between the chubby fingers of each hand. The young correspondent did so, and his employer evinced no desire to look at him again until approximately a minute had passed and the letter duly been cast aside without comment. "Now then," he remarked, leaning back in his soft-leather chair and fixing a pair of dark eyes upon the worried face in front of his desk. "I take it you have something to tell me."

"As a matter of fact, I wish to apologize for not being here yesterday but, unfortunately, I was rather sick on Sunday evening and didn't feel particularly well enough to return to work the following morning," confessed Keating nervously.

"That's alright, Anthony!" affirmed Webb, smiling understandingly. "As long as you're feeling well enough to do some work today." He glanced down at the attaché case on the young correspondent's lap and then returned his gaze to its former position. "How did the review at the Merlin Gallery go, by the way?" he asked.

"Quite successfully on the whole," replied Keating, recalling to mind the few hasty notes he had compiled on Friday afternoon and endeavoured to expand into a review on Sunday evening. "I sent the finished product off to the printers late Friday evening." Under the circumstances of what had actually transpired, lying seemed the best solution.

"Ah good! I hoped you'd been able to do so," Webb remarked. "That means they should be working on it today." He frowned briefly, as though in spite of himself, and lowered his gaze a moment. "And what about the interview with Howard Tonks the previous day?" he continued, looking up again. "How did that go?"

After some hesitation, a slightly nervous correspondent replied: "Better than I'd have expected. For Mr Tonks had fully recovered from his sore throat and was only too keen to oblige. I have the recording here." At which point he tapped the top of his large attaché case and offered Nicholas Webb a complaisant smile. "If you'd like to hear some of it now, I need only ..."

"Frankly I don't think I can spare the time now, Anthony," averred Webb solemnly. "But I should be grateful for an opportunity of listening to it during the next few days." There was a pause before he added: "I take it the transcription has still to be done."

Keating fidgeted nervously in his chair. "Well, as a matter of fact, I managed to transcribe some of it to paper on Friday morning, before setting off for the Merlin Gallery, and I did a little more yesterday afternoon," he said. "So if there are no pressing engagements lined up for me today, I should have it completely transcribed and edited by tomorrow evening. But if it's scheduled for the October edition, then there's no immediate rush, is there?"

"Quite so!" agreed Webb, his face suddenly becoming hard. "Especially as far as you are concerned."

"I'm afraid I don't quite follow you," responded Keating, bracing himself for the worst.

Webb had abandoned his informal posture and was now leaning across the desk with fingers intertwined in a business-like manner. "I sincerely regret having to tell you this, Anthony, but you had better resign yourself to finding alternative employment as from the end of this month. For the fact is that I just cannot continue to employ a person who lies to my face as much as you do, and since you entered my office this morning you've done very little else!"

The young correspondent's head jerked backwards, as though from the force of a blow to the chin, and his face darkened appreciably. "I don't quite understand," he confessed, with intent to covering up the truth.

"Don't you?" retorted Webb in a patronizingly sceptical manner. "Then permit me to enlighten you!" At which point he proceeded to expatiate on the subject of Howard Tonks' telephone call on the Friday afternoon of the previous week, followed by the conversation he had conducted with Martin Osbourne shortly afterwards, during which time it was ascertained that Keating had confessed to having conducted the interview on schedule, when he visited the senior sub-editor's flat late Thursday evening. Unfortunately, Osbourne wasn't as forthcoming as he ought to have been in the circumstances," the editor continued, frowning regretfully, "since he withheld valuable information from me regarding the whereabouts of Neil Wilder on the evening in question. But I suppose that was only to be expected, in view of Wilder's official absence from work at the time. However, it was Wilder himself who, soon after returning to work, yesterday morning, confessed the truth and admitted that he had talked to you at Osbourne's flat and offered, albeit reluctantly, to bail you out of trouble by conducting the interview with Howard Tonks on your behalf. As things stood, he hadn't realized the extent to which you'd deceived him until his phone call to you on Saturday morning, and, even then, what you told him wasn't the whole truth, since he was literally astonished by some of the things I was obliged to impart to him regarding Mr Tonks' call last Friday. Now partly because of this deceitfulness on your part, Anthony, and partly because I threatened him with dismissal if he tried to contact you before I'd had an opportunity to see you today, he wisely consented to keep his mouth shut and allow you to speak for yourself, which of course you have done. So if you're wondering why you haven't heard from your colleague since Saturday, it's because of what I said to him yesterday!"

Keating bowed his head under the ton weight of shame that had descended upon it in the wake of the avalanche of sordid revelations which issued from Webb's glib tongue. No doubt, that explained why he hadn't seen Neil earlier this morning as well. For his office had been empty. And even Osbourne had made what seemed, at the time, an implausible excuse about having to attend to an important task, when encountered on the main stairs not less than ten minutes ago.

"Having got this far, I suppose I had better inform you of the telephone call I made to Mr Tonks' residence first thing yesterday morning, in order to ascertain whether your intention of getting a late interview, revealed to me by your one-time collaborator, had in fact borne fruit," the editor went on, ignoring Keating's shame. "As luck would have it, the composer answered the phone personally and admitted, not without serious misgivings, that he had agreed to see you in the afternoon. I asked him to keep my call confidential, since I had no wish for you to learn that I'd been checking up on you, and this he graciously consented to do. Thankfully he kept his word. Though even if he hadn't, and you had modified your explanation accordingly, the outcome for you would have been exactly the same, since your disgraceful behaviour towards his juvenile daughter last Thursday afternoon is, of course, more than sufficient grounds for your dismissal. Indeed, you can consider yourself jolly fortunate that you've got away from all this so lightly, and that Mr Tonks didn't call the police and have you arrested for indecently assaulting her."

"I didn't indecently assault her!" protested Keating on the verge of tears. "She freely consented to my advances."

"So I was led to understand from Neil Wilder yesterday morning," Webb conceded. "Though what her father himself told me, last week, was somewhat less than a romantic account of the affair! But even so, even if she 'freely consented' to your advances, the fact that you initiated them at a time when you ought to have been conducting an interview or, failing that, reporting back here for something else to do in the meantime is, beyond question, a gross impertinence and flagrant breach of our trust in you. While you're being paid to work for 'Arts Monthly', you damn-well ought to be working for it, not fooling around with the only daughter of such an eminent man as Howard Tonks and causing his elderly housekeeper the shock of her miserable life. Goodness knows, we pay you well enough, don't we? And that was after you'd failed to wrap-up the interview on Monday when it should have been done and, had you used a little more intelligence and common sense, jolly-well could have been done! Instead of which you encouraged the composer to play the piano and then told me some cock-and-bull story, the following day, about his suffering from a sore throat which had prevented him from taking part in the interview! Really, I fail to understand how you had the audacity to walk in here today and carry on lying to my face as though I were an ingenuous idiot fresh out of college or something! If anyone was being made to look a fool it was you, and not only with regard to Howard Tonks." Here Webb imperiously cleared his throat, as though to change gear and steel himself for what was to come, before continuing: "I received a call from our printers, earlier today, informing me that the review of the Alan Connolly exhibition which you ostensibly dispatched to them on Friday evening still hadn't arrived. Now if you sent it when you claimed you did, they'd have received it by yesterday morning. But they hadn't even received it this morning, which doubtless means you lied to me about that as well!"

Keating was experiencing an apotheosis of shame, as he stared down unseeingly at his attaché case and reluctantly nodded his head in bashful confirmation of the editor's inference. He couldn't remember an occasion when he had felt more ashamed of himself for being so obviously in the wrong. It was even worse than how he had felt when Neil Wilder phoned him, Saturday morning, to break the news of his failure to clinch the interview the previous day. Rebecca notwithstanding, there had been no-one else present save himself then. But now he was in Webb's presence, and Webb had always given him the impression of being a useful and likeable member of the staff, a veritable credit to his profession.

"Have you dispatched the review yet?" asked the editor, whose voice was trembling with barely concealed exasperation. "Indeed, have you even written it yet?"

"Yes, I wrote and dispatched it on Sunday," confessed Keating, momentarily raising his eyes to the level of his interlocutor's chest. "Unfortunately, circumstances prevented me from working on it earlier."

"And what kind of circumstances would they be?" Webb imperiously wanted to know.

Something about the arrogant tone in which the editor delivered this question stung Keating into anger, and his response was simply: "Is that any business of yours?"

"Only inasmuch as it concerns the welfare of my periodical and the well-being of my staff!" retorted Webb sharply. "But if you dispatched the review to the printers on Sunday and they didn't receive it this morning, we may infer, I suppose, that it has either gone astray in the post or will turn up there tomorrow. And tomorrow, as you should know by now, is too damned late!"

"Not if we postpone the distribution of the magazine for another couple of days and get them to print it first thing in the morning," suggested Keating, who was now flailing around out of his depth.

"Goodness gracious, how many times have I told you that we can't arbitrarily interfere with their schedule like that?" shouted Webb, his face positively twitching with exasperation. "By rights we shouldn't have had to request them to reserve a space for it in the first place.... Though I suppose I'm mostly to blame for having taken the chance and put more trust in you than circumstances evidently warranted!"

Keating frowned gravely and pursed his lips in desperation. Being so preoccupied with the Tonks affair over the weekend, he had scarcely given a thought to the possible repercussions which might result from his inability to get the review posted as quickly as possible. Or, rather, he had thought about the necessity of getting it written on Friday evening, but had then been prevented from doing so by Rebecca's company and his overriding desire to please her. Giving-in to which, he had again thought about it on Saturday morning, only to be prevented from executing his thoughts, that time, by Neil Wilder's phone call and the subsequent state of his nerves. So Sunday was the first real opportunity he'd had to do anything about it. But, even then, he hadn't been able to give the review his full attention, primarily on account of the amount of noise being generated by both the upstairs neighbour, who was entertaining various friends in what sounded like a seventh-day orgy, and a neighbour in the flat next-door, who spent at least five hours of the day driving nails into wood with the aid of a heavy metal hammer. Now this latest of Webb's sordid revelations was really quite disastrous, particularly in light of the immense effort put into getting the review written.

"So what are you intending to do?" he at length asked the editor.

"Fortunately, what had to be done was taken care of before you entered my office," Webb revealed. "As soon as I heard the bad news, I arranged to have the page reserved for your review taken over by one which our principal art critic did of the painter Catherine Williams, a couple of weeks ago, before he went on vacation. They will consequently be printing a rather scathing review of an artist whose work is largely derivative and whose exhibition is now, in any case, entering its last week. Needless to say, I'm not at all happy with this last-moment change of plan. But, since you failed in your duty, it's the only alternative available to me at present, and one which I had no option but to endorse. Doubtless, it will cause some brows to be raised somewhat higher at our expense than would have been the case, had you submitted your review on time and thereby given the public an opportunity to find out what the exhibition was all about and what we thought of it. But I dare say a blank page would be even worse from our standpoint!"

"Yes, I dare say it would," echoed Keating, his head still bowed under the imponderable weight of so much shame. "I really don't know how to apologize for all the inconvenience this has caused you."

"Don't bother trying!" the editor rejoined, turning an uncompromisingly disdainful gaze upon Keating's bowed head which, unlike Osbourne's, had nothing of the 'inverted bird's nest' analogy about it and held no source of amusement for him in consequence. "It's too late as far as you're concerned. For nothing you could say, by way of an apology, would do anything to alter my low opinion of you. There's only one thing I now require from you," he went on, rising in temper, "and that is to get out of my sight once and for all! Your Connolly review is no longer needed and neither, needless to say, is the interview with Howard Tonks."

Keating's head suddenly jerked up in horrified disbelief. "What d'you mean?" he gasped.

"Exactly what I said!" Webb declared. "Since you are being dismissed from the firm, your latest assignments are no longer valid. The October edition will feature an interview with the author Michael Bagshott instead. Naturally, I've little doubt that Mr Tonks will be disappointed by my decision to omit his interview at this late juncture. Once I impress upon him my motives for doing so, however, I'm quite confident that he'll understand and lend me his unequivocal support. Indeed, he may even agree to grant the magazine another interview in the not-too-distant future, one, needless to say, that would have to be conducted by someone more trustworthy and competent in the matter than you. For as far as you are concerned, end of story! I cannot allow your name to appear in print, as the instigator of that interview, after you're no longer here. Therefore much as I regret having to do this, in view of the work involved, I would be grateful if you'd kindly hand over the tapes, to ensure you don't get it into your devious head to take them elsewhere. That, after all, would be quite inadmissible!"

"You dirty rotten bastard!" screamed Keating, jumping to his feet and angrily staring down at the editor, while clutching to his chest the attaché case in which the tapes were still locked. "If you think I'm simply going to hand these over for you to destroy or store away somewhere, then you've got another thing coming, you double-crossing pig!"

"Mr Keating! Would you mind restraining your language and kindly hand over the tapes, please!" insisted Webb.

"Fuck you, bastard!" shouted the young correspondent, who, beside himself with rage, was now on the point of throwing the attaché case at his employer's flushed head.

"Mr Keating!" shouted back the editor, who had also got to his feet as he held out his hand for the tapes. "I need hardly remind you that you are still under obligation to the magazine to do as requested and behave in an orderly and responsible manner. Otherwise I shall have no alternative but to call the police." His tone was firm but not threatening. Authority was on his side, after all.

For an instant Keating felt like throwing the attaché case and all its precious contents, which included the cassette recorder, at the editor. But realizing that such an act, no matter how seemingly justified under the circumstances of his outrage, would almost certainly result in his being accused of assault and landed in still deeper trouble, he begrudgingly complied and, by way of emphasizing his wholehearted distaste for the act, slammed the attaché case down on Webb's desk. There was a rattling noise, as of something breaking, and then, apart from the sound of Keating's heavy breathing, complete silence.

"Right!" said the editor, returning his hand to his side. "Now get out!"

It wasn't an order Keating had any immediate desire to obey right then, given his loathing for the man and the fact that both of them were locked in an eyeball confrontation which seemed unbreakable in its near-hypnotic intensity. But, as the seconds ticked by, the suspenseful undesirability of the situation became increasingly unbearable and, as though snapping out of an evil spell, the junior correspondent briskly turned on his heels and strode purposefully towards the door which, on reaching, he wrenched open and, without looking back, slammed shut behind him. A picture calendar fell from the wall in which the door was located, and the tall window of the office vibrated with an intensity hitherto unknown to its occupant.

"Phew!" sighed Webb, once the office was his own again. "Thank goodness for that!" He slumped into his capacious swivel chair and brushed a nervous hand across his worry-strained brow. He hadn't expected Keating to react in such a forceful way to his decision to invalidate the interview.... Not that he was absolutely sure he would invalidate it - at least not before he had listened to it and considered the possibility of amending its contents slightly. But the temptation to hit back at Keating by asserting the contrary had been too strong to resist, particularly in view of the fact that the young correspondent had evidently gone to some considerable pains to get the interview taped and was doubtless confident his work would be fully rewarded. Now, however, Keating would have a good reason to curse himself for having lied his way into trouble in the first place. And that might be a sufficiently cogent motive to deter him from doing the same thing again in future, wherever the future might take him.

The door opened and in walked old Mrs Tyler, the charwoman, with her employer's mid-morning tea things. By rights, she ought to have brought them in about fifteen minutes earlier, but the tone of conversation reaching the passageway from Webb's side of the door had inhibited her from doing so, and duly necessitated her throwing the original tea away and brewing him a fresh pot when matters had quietened down again. "I hope you don't mind it a little later today," she murmured, gingerly approaching Webb's desk. "Only, I didn't want to disturb you while you had that rowdy young man in here," she added in a confidential and vaguely conspiratorial whisper.

"That's alright, Lilly!" affirmed Webb cheerfully, clearing a space for the tea-tray. "Quite frankly, I wouldn't have wanted it any earlier today!"

The old charwoman obediently lowered the tray onto the space provided by her employer and commenced pouring him some black tea, to which she nervously added, in due course, a spoon-and-a-half of brown sugar. When the bounds of her duty were reached, however, she reluctantly shuffled back towards the half-open door and gently closed it behind her departure.

Left alone with his thoughts again, Nicholas Webb continued to reflect upon Keating's disgraceful behaviour and the means by which he had endeavoured to punish him for it. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had sworn at him so viciously, and was now feeling somewhat humiliated by the fact that young Keating had dared to insult him in such unequivocally vulgar terms. But to some extent he had brought it upon himself, to some extent it was probably true to say that he had brought everything upon himself, including both the interview with Howard Tonks and his decision to press ahead with the Alan Connolly review at the last moment. And, no less humiliatingly, it was even true to say that, to some extent, young Keating hadn't been entirely to blame for what had happened over the past week, since circumstances had forced it all upon him. Determining the exact extent to which this was true, however, was no easy matter! Indeed, it was well-nigh impossible, if only because there were so many factors involved. What was clear, however, was that Keating had been dealt with in the only credible way, that is to say, by being dismissed from his post. The circumstances in which the dismissal had taken place were perhaps open to dispute, but the dismissal itself ... no, there could be no room for doubt as to the legitimacy of that! Anthony Keating had got what he deserved, including, of course, the rejection of his work.

Leaning back in his comfortably padded chair, the editor sipped steadily of the hot black tea, which sent small tickling spirals of steam up his nostrils and simultaneously had a calmative effect on his nerves. He was grateful, on further reflection, that Keating hadn't done anything worse than to swear at him; that, despite his manifest rancour, the young man had managed to restrain the impulse to resort to violence, and thereby impose upon him the onerous necessity of recourse to some mode of formal vengeance. But what a shame that matters should have come to such a sorry pass, considering how useful and generally reliable Keating had shown himself to be, during the brief course of his promising career at 'Arts Monthly'. It was just too bad that fate should have decreed his dismissal at a time when he was becoming increasingly respected and, hence, respectable as a talented correspondent. And all because of a young woman whom he had been unlucky enough to get himself caught deflowering by an old woman of seemingly delicate sensibility!

For a moment, the association of young woman and deflowering caused Webb to recollect that time during his youth when his dear mother had caught him in a patently erotic position with his first girlfriend - a girl whom, at the time, he had been madly keen to deflower. Fortunately, it hadn't resulted in anything worse than a stern lecture from his father on the importance of behaving 'properly' towards young ladies one was not in a financial position to marry. But the shock and shame which had overcome him, when his mother suddenly walked into a room she believed to be empty and discovered him lying on top of his girlfriend with his pants down and his upturned member buried deep inside her ... was something he remembered years afterwards with unavoidable distaste!

Yet that was also true of another, albeit later, incident which had occurred whilst he was serving under Sir Cecil Thomas at the 'Literary Review', and had been caught red-handed by that venerable old man fondling his then-secretary, Mary Ashcroft, in the office assigned to him as sub-editor. Since it was after official office hours, Sir Cecil hadn't taken it too gravely, merely advising him, in a patronizingly ironic manner, not to do anything he wouldn't do. For Nicholas Webb, who had a profound respect for the old devil, the experience of being caught in flagrante delicto, with one hand up his secretary's skirt and the other on her heaving breasts, was enough to make him refrain from repeating such an act on the premises for the remaining time he spent there.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough, however, to prevent him from getting caught, less than a year later, glancing through the pages of a pornographic magazine which a junior colleague had lent him to while away the time when things became too tedious, as they sometimes did. Barging into his small office without forewarning, one midsummer's afternoon, the editor-in-chief, as he was formally known, had given him no time to thrust the magazine either back into the drawer in which it had been secreted or, alternatively, under a pile of papers on top of the desk, with the regrettable consequence that he was left holding it between his fingers while the chief informed him of an important board-meeting he was due to attend later that afternoon and, to make matters worse, stared down at the garish item in Webb's hands with a somewhat forbidding expression on his pallid face. Oh, how embarrassing it had been, as Sir Cecil stood in front of him with his waxed moustache twitching uncontrollably and his inflamed eyelids blinking so rapidly that they suggested some kind of silent cinematographic apparatus bent on animating the large inverted rump which, at that moment, photographically presented itself to his horrified gaze! What had taken the chief but fifteen seconds to narrate seemed to its recipient like an eternity, so acute was the embarrassment which resulted from the old man's untimely intrusion. Again, the experience had made such a profound impression on Webb that he absolutely forbade himself the luxury of such pornographic material thereafter, resolving to lead as chaste a life on the premises of the magazine as, to all intents and purposes, did Sir Cecil himself.

But what had all this to do with Anthony Keating? Puzzled by his lapse into personal reminiscence, the editor returned his by-now empty teacup to its saucer and, carefully depositing them both on the desk, ambled across to the window, where he hoped to recover a little of his managerial dignity by 'plunging into' whichever representatives of almighty Nature first met the eye. Fortunately, the trees in the middle of the square were still in full bloom and appeared more summery, if anything, than the week before, when a strong breeze had heralded the approach of hostile autumn. For all that, however, there was little about them he could take any genuine pleasure in, little in which his glum mood and difficult circumstances would permit him to take any genuine pleasure. The world was, indeed, too much with him, as he stared through the window and reflected anew on the ironies of editorial fate. Had Keating the sense to pay more attention to the eternal in Nature than to the temporal in cultures, he might not have got himself into such a fix in the first place. But his obsession with the decline of the West had gradually brought about his own moral decline as a human being, had sanctioned a defeatist attitude to life which made it easier or more credible to behave in a disgraceful manner than to behave reasonably well.

At least that was how it now seemed to Webb, as he stared unseeingly across the square and recalled to mind what he had read in Lewis Mumford, some years ago, about the decline of Western civilization owing more to individual perversity than to historical necessity. And yet, if that was indeed the case, why were so many people choosing to drag the West down instead of to build it up still further? What was it about modern life that gave so much encouragement to the barbarians? Perhaps this was a question Keating would know how to answer.... Though, if Nicholas Webb knew anything about modern life, he had enough answers of his own, and not only philosophical ones either! But it was curious, all the same, that he should have been privately criticizing Keating the previous week, in light of his apparent need of female company, at a time when the young man in question was helping himself to all the female company he could. There was indeed something curiously ironic about that!

Turning away from the window, Webb returned to his desk and unlocked the attaché case, which had been so violently deposited there by the lover of Howard Tonks' daughter that it looked somehow evil and threatening. The cassette recorder was still more or less in one piece, but whether it would now be working...? Removing it from the interior of the case, he placed it on an uncluttered part of his desk and, noting the presence of a tape inside, pressed the ON button. Yes, thank goodness for that! A rather too loud "Having been born with perfect pitch, I'm able to compose in my head" assaulted his eardrums and induced him to lower the volume. Evidently Tonks was answering a question that had just been put to him, and answering it, moreover, with some relish, since he went on to explain that he had composed at least fifteen works, including four orchestral ones, without the assistance of a piano, having mastered the art of "... imagining or hearing the actual sound of just about any combination of notes in my head, so that, with few miscalculations, I was able to transcribe to paper the various complex chordal and melodic progressions I had invented more or less as they occurred. I don't know whether you're familiar with my third piano sonata, but you might be interested to learn that the whole of the first movement, which is rather long, was composed in a railway carriage whilst I was travelling between Paris and Rome one year. It took at least two hours of busy transcription from my head to manuscript paper - a feat of which I'm still rather proud, inasmuch as I had to compete with both the clatter of the train's wheels and some tedious intermittent chatter from fellow-passengers. By the time we arrived in Rome, however, I had completed the entire movement and was beginning to string together a number of musical ideas for the second one. I had often wanted to emulate Saint-Saëns, you know."

"And you obviously succeeded! Tell me, do you have a time of day when you prefer to compose, when you do most of your best compositional work?" The voice was Keating's, and it sounded slightly hoarse with nerves.

"Yes, in point of fact, I usually do most of my best work in the morning," came Tonks' confident rejoinder. "Though I sometimes compose in the afternoon as well. But never at night! To me, the night is too negative a time, too complacent a time for me to do any serious or arduous work. At one time, incidentally, I did compose at night - from about eight till eleven o'clock. But I subsequently realized that the music resulting from this was rather pedestrian, lacking in imagination and flair. Had I been writing nocturnes, however, then the night would have been an ideal time. But I was never a nocturne writer. Consequently ..."

Webb pressed the OFF button on the cassette recorder and fast-forwarded the tape to another part of the interview. Then he pressed the ON button again and, ignoring one or two clipped words, continued to listen:-

"... it isn't a question of endeavouring to resurrect Bach or Handel or any of the other great composers of the classical past, but of being oneself and giving the world into which one was born something it can recognize as relatively contemporary. Naturally, you may not like or understand a great deal of what you hear in this respect. But that is no reason for you to assume it's wrong, corrupt, irrelevant, and therefore shouldn't exist. The only alternative to contemporary serious music is no music, irrespective of whether or not you prefer to regard this music in an antipathetic light, as I understand you, for one, do, given its acoustic limitations. What we contemporary composers are doing has been thrust upon us by historical precedent and cannot possibly be avoided.... An acquaintance of mine once asked me whether I would rather have been born in Bach's time than in our own, and I immediately answered: 'Yes! Good God, yes!' From the cultural point of view it seemed incontrovertible to me that one would have been better off as a minor composer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than as a so-called major one today. Yet this acquaintance, a man of considerable technological expertise, was perfectly justified, when I put the same question to him, in asserting that Bach's time would have proved virtually anathema to him - the reason apparently being that he had everything going for himself in the twentieth century. So, you see, it depends on who or what you are, as to whether you're likely to take an appreciative or an unappreciative view of the age in which you happen to live.... Broadly speaking, the men of religion and the arts profit in one age, those of science and technology in another - the two groups rarely or never profiting equally at the same time. Admittedly, there has always been this fundamental dualism, since the one group can't be expected to exist completely independently of the other. But, in practice, it's more of an oscillatory than a balanced dualism, which favours either the one group or the other according to the nature of historical circumstances at any given time."

Webb pressed the OFF button again and pushed the cassette recorder to one side. He wasn't sure that he agreed, in principle, with everything the composer had said, nor that he even understood it, but he felt fairly convinced, from what little he had sampled, that the interview would be well-worth publishing in the near future. It almost seemed as though young Keating had won Howard Tonks' confidence to an extent and in a way he would probably failed to have done, had he not become amorously involved with his daughter beforehand. Which was surprising really, considering all the fuss that had been made of the issue. But if, as appearances suggested, the interview would be well worth publishing, then what about the interviewer himself? How could Keating be disposed of without causing a breach of contract or some other ticklish legal problem? Obviously it was now too late to inform him of any change of intention in that respect, since the nature of his dismissal had been so peremptory as to preclude the possibility of any reconciliatory prospects. The only option open to himself, Webb felt, was to transcribe and edit the interview personally, so that Keating would have no reason to suppose it was going to be used - as he might do were the task duly entrusted to someone like, say, Neil Wilder or even Martin Osbourne. And in case Keating duly informed Mr Tonks that the interview had been invalidated, as he might well do during the next few days, it would be necessary to telephone or, better still, write to the composer in order to enlighten him concerning one's change of intention, to bring him into one's confidence with regard to one's motivation for misleading Keating, and to ask him, in accordance with the trust that had already been established, to refrain from passing on news of this change of intention to anyone else. Since Tonks had already complied with one such request, it seemed not improbable that he would also comply with another, thereby guaranteeing himself a degree of revenge upon a young man who had, after all, caused him a considerable amount of personal trouble over his daughter and housekeeper, the latter of whom had of course resigned.

With a faint smile of conspiratorial satisfaction on his patrician lips, Webb leant back in his upholstered chair and crossed the fingers of both hands behind his head. It was almost lunch time, and he was beginning to feel a wee bit peckish.