The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

saw in one another’s arms the old flesh and the young flesh which were, in some sense, interchangeable and whose twinned textures was already part of my flesh, then I fell down on my knees beside them, ready at that moment to pledge myself entirely to them and even to give my own flesh to them, in whatever form they pleased, if they thought it would do them any good. I was almost overcome with trust and good faith. I do believe that I was crying, young fool that I was. And Aoi had her doll beside her; her hand clasped its red dress. It was an inexpressibly touching detail.

The wind blew through my soaking clothes and the cold woke up the old Desiderio. As I turned my back on the barges and set my face towards the distant lights of the town, I welcomed myself to the old home of my former self with a bored distaste. Desiderio had saved Kiku from the dear parents who would have dined off him but Kiku still could not find it in his heart just yet to thank Desiderio for it, as all his hopes of ease and tranquillity ran off and away from him like the river water that dripped from his clothing at every step.

‘I am not necessarily connected with him,’ he said. ‘There are no such things as necessary connections. Necessary connections are fabulous beasts. Like the unicorn. Nevertheless, since things occasionally do come together in various mutable combinations, you might say that the Doctor and I have made a random intersection. He remembered me in my blindness. I was blind and old and had half drunk myself to death. He remembered me and he saved me. He even made me the curator of his museum.’

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist. A vast encylopedia of mythological references supported this initial hypothesis – shamans of Oceania who sang rude blocks of wood ship-shape without the intervention of an axe; poets of medieval Ireland whose withering odes scalded their kings’ enemies with plagues of boils; and so on and so forth. At a very early point in his studies Hoffman had moved well out of the realm of pure science and resurrected all manner of antique pseudo-sciences, alchemy, geomancy and the empirical investigation of those essences the ancient Chinese claimed created phenomena through an interplay of elemental aspects of maleness and femaleness. And then there was the notion of passion.

Proposition: Time is a serial composition of apparently indivisible instants. Since the inception of the mode of consciousness we refer to as ‘the world’, man has always thought of time as in itself a movement forward, an onward flow leaving only a little debris behind it. Evanescence is the essence of time. And since temporality is the medium in which this mode of consciousness has itself been expressed, since time is, as it were, the canvas on which we ourselves are painted, the empirical investigation of the structure of time poses certain acute methodological problems. Could the Mona Lisa turn round, scratch her own background and then submit to a laboratory analysis the substance she found under her nail? No, indeed!

The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory – at best, a falsifying receptacle – but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as – if not sooner than – we are aware of it as the present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until the arrival of the preservative, cinema. The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassooed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification.

Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine. His mind puffed out ideas like the dandelion seed-head his chevelure so much resembled but we did not take any of his ideas seriously, not one of us, not any of them. Yet Hoffman refined Mendoza’s initially crude hypotheses of fissile time and synthetic authenticity and wove them together to form another mode of consciousness altogether. But we did not know that. We were content to laugh at Mendoza. We laughed uproariously.

Winchester repeater was a Stradivarius to her and her world was composed only of targets. Sexually, she preferred women. At one time she had worked a double act in an American burlesque house, where, in the trappings of a cowboy hero, she shot every stitch of clothing off her beloved mistress, a fluffy exuberant blonde of Viennese extraction whom she had abducted from a convent.

I turned my back on a whole sub-universe that had been wiped out as if with a huge eraser and on the corpse of yet another of my selves, that of the peep-show proprietor’s nephew. I stumbled away over the rough fields, vanquished again, now beyond tears.

The driver exclaimed: ‘Oh! What an appalling tragedy!’ But my host cuffed him sharply and snapped: ‘Lafleur, do I have to warn you again against softness of heart? Do as I do; salute nature when she offers us another coup de théâtre!’ Then he took a flask from his pocket and fed me brandy. ‘Did you witness it? Did many die?’ ‘The whole population of the town and also the members of a travelling fair.’ He sighed with gratification. ‘How I should have liked to have seen it! And gloried in the Wagnerian clamour of it all… the shrieks, the crash of rending stone. And little children dashed to smithereens by bounding boulders! What a spectacle! ‘You must know that I am a connoisseur of catastrophe, young man. I witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius when thousands were coffined alive in molten lava. I saw eyes burst and fat run out of roast crackling in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. I dabbled my fingers in the blood beneath the guillotine during the Terror. I am a demon for a cataclysm.’

Reminds me of Bauchelain

That silenced me. The wheels of the carriage wound the road on to an invisible spool and I began to feel the effect of a strange heaviness exerted on me, a perverse, negative fascination exercised by the gaunt aristocrat who sat beside me, though a shudder went through me when I saw his curiously pointed teeth for they were exactly the fangs with which tradition credits vampires. All the same, he drew me. His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met – always excepting the Minister, of course. Yet, apart from his mind, which was a bruising heavy-weight, I think what made him so attractive to me was his irony, which withered every word before he spoke it. Everything about him was excessive, yet he tempered his vulgarity – for he was excessively vulgar in every respect – with a black, tragic humour of which he was only occasionally conscious himself. He was particularly extraordinary in this: he had a passionate conviction he was the only significant personage in the world. He was the emperor of inverted megalomaniacs but he had subjected his personality to a most rigorous discipline of stylization so that, when he struck postures as lurid as those of a bad actor, no matter how ludicrous they were, still they impelled admiration because of the abstract intensity of their unnaturalism. He had scarcely an element of realism and yet he was quite real. He could say nothing that was not grandiose. He claimed he lived only to negate the world.

I never heard another man use the word ‘I’, so often. But I sensed an exemplary quality in his desperate self-absorption. I had not met anyone who lived with such iron determination since I left the Minister. He reminded me of the Minister.

‘Watch me! Watch me!’ he cried as though, in order to appreciate the effect of his own actions, he had to know that he was seen. But it was far too dark in the ruined church to see anything. I heard the grunts and whimpers of the valet and the amazing roars which accompanied the Count’s lengthy progress towards orgasm. The vault of heaven above us darkened and all the time frightful cries and atrocious blasphemies issued from the Count’s throat. He whinnied like a stallion; he cursed the womb that bore him; and finally the orgasm struck him like an epilepsy. Ecstasy seemed to annihilate the libertine and there was a silence broken only by the pathetic whimpering of the valet until, in the velvet and luminous darkness, the Count spoke, in a voice drained of all vigour. ‘I have devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh. I am an artist; my material is the flesh; my medium is destruction; and my inspiration is nature.’

I can hardly describe to you the man’s appalling, cerebral lucidity. He was like a corpse animated only by a demonic intellectual will. When he had rested a little, we climbed back into the carriage and rolled off across the green, spacious countryside, under a vertiginous arc of sky which began to clear and sparkle.

Together we travelled the various states. I gave certain evidence in the trials at Salem, Mass., which condemned eighteen perfectly innocent persons to death by pressing. I instigated a rebellion among the slaves on a plantation in Alabama which led to bloody and wholesale retribution; they were all tied to bales of cotton and ignited by ululating Klansmen. Then, in a perfumed bordello in New Orleans, I strangled with my legs a mulatto whore just as she coaxed the incense from my member with a mouth the shape, colour and texture of an overripe plum.

When noon came, he bought me beer and bread and cheese at an inn. He had not asked a single question of me or even seemed to ask himself what this stranger was doing in his company but I realized he regarded me as part of his entourage, now. I made a few tentative guesses as to what my role might be. Was I his observer, whose eyes, as they watched him, verified his actions? Did his narcissism demand a constant witness? Or had he other plans for me – would I, perhaps, figure among his amusements?

The Count began to murmur softly with anticipation and already his prick, which was of monstrous size, stood as resolutely aloft as an illustration of satyriasis in a medical dictionary. Then the maid handed us hood-like masks which went right over our heads, concealing them, and were attached by buttons to buttonholes in the collars of our waistcoats, so that our heads were changed into featureless, elongated, pinkish, rounded towers.

The walls were covered with a figured brocade of such a slumbrous purple the Count murmured: ‘It is the very colour of the blood in a love suicide.’

Though the mirrors reflected the hangings, sofas, chairs, tables, candlesticks and every cageful of venereal statuary, they did not give the Count and me our blank, pink faces back to us because here we had no names.

She spoke. I am ashamed to say I did not recognize her voice, although it stirred me. ‘My house is a refuge for those who can find no equilibrium between inside and outside, between mind and body or body and soul, vice versa, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.’

meridional

undeniable, insatiable nether mouths of archaic and shameless, anonymous Aphrodite herself, the undifferentiated partner in the blind act who has many mouths, even if not one of them ever asks for a name. And I had come with orders to worship here, I, Desiderio, the desired one, to kneel down before the twelve hairy shrines of this universal church of lust in a uniform that made of me only a totem of carnality myself. The Count now ostentatiously and continually increased his stature by such an effort of will I thought the swollen veins of his forehead would burst. His breast heaved like thunder. He seemed to graze the ceiling with the round tip of that bland, peachy, concupiscent hood, which turned his head itself into a monumental symbol of sexuality. He took on a ponderous and ecclesiastical gait, as if it were a kind of mitre that he wore – he, the Pope of the profane, officiating at an ultimate sacrament, the self-ordained, omnipotent, consecrated man-phallus itself; and when he snatched a candle from a monkey’s paw and used it to ignite the rosy plumage of a winged girl, I knew he was about to preach us a sermon and she was to be his text.

I pricked up my ears at that. Could he be, not the Doctor, but that other mystery man, Mendoza, who had written on just such a theme before he annihilated himself in a manner unknown? Could Mendoza have reconstituted himself out of infinity – perhaps by running a film of his own explosion backwards, so that he hatched out of the inward-turning egg of an implosion without a stain upon him? But the Count did not allow me to ponder this sufficiently; he surged on down a remorseless torrent of metaphor.

I do not know why she loved me at first sight, as I loved her, even though I first saw her in a dream. Yet we pursued one another across the barriers of time and space; we dared every vicissitude of fortune for a single kiss before we were torn apart again and we saw the events of the war in which we were enlisted on opposite sides only by the light of one another’s faces. I took her in my arms. We were exactly the same height and the arches of our bosoms met with a sonorous clang. A terrible cry from the Count’s whore did not interrupt our first embrace. The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth. The sense of seraphic immanence which had afflicted me in the city was now fulfilled. Her arms clasped my neck and her belly pressed against my nakedness as if striving to transcend the mortal flaw that divided us and so effect a total, visceral mingling, binding us forever, so that the same blood would flow within us both and our nerves would knit and our skins melt and fuse in the force of the electricity we generated between us.

I picked her up and carried her bodily into the passage but there she began to melt like a woman of snow. As I was holding her, she grew less and less. She dissolved. Still weeping, she dissipated into the air. I saw her. I felt her. I felt her weight diminish. I saw her, first, flicker a little; then waver continuously; then grow more and more indistinct, as if she herself were gradually erasing the pattern she made upon the air.

A shape had materialized in the shadows below us, a black some six and a half feet tall, with shoulders of a bison and a Plutonian head, armed with a knife, waiting in the well of the stairs. He wore the leather overcoat of a policeman but I knew he was no other than the man who searched for the Count because of the baleful mass of his presence and the appalling pressure it exerted, so that my eardrums throbbed as though I stood in a great depth of water. He seemed to wait only for the Count to show himself. He bore his vigil like a cloak and a certain quality in his waiting indicated the Count would come to him, in time; that the Count would roll to him as one drop of mercury rolls to another across a plate. He was like a man made of magnetic stone. ‘That man – if man he be – is my retribution,’ said the Count. ‘He is my twin. He is my shadow. Such a terrible reversal; I, the hunter, have become my own prey. Hold me or I will run into his arms.’

Despising roads, we galloped over the open country in headlong flight, the Count and I still in our phallic carnival costume, riding as wildly as crazed psychopomps. When we came to a spinney of poplars, we halted briefly to see what lay behind us. All within the House of Anonymity had turned to air and fire in an awesome, elemental transmutation and rising above the high walls, the fireball seemed to tug impatiently at its moorings within the earth while the turrets spouted jets of flame directly into the hearts of the rainclouds. Even from the distance of a mile, we could hear a symphony of agony and crashing brick, orchestrated like Berlioz. But the Count’s satanic laughter rang more loudly than all that tumult of destruction. ‘I, the lord of fire!’ he said in a low but piercing voice and I knew he thought his hunter must be destroyed. But I was too stunned by my own misery to rejoice with him for he meant nothing to me.

The Count’s terror showed itself in fits of hysterical laughter and outbursts of crazed blasphemies. His fear had a theatrical intensity not at all out of the character of a self-created demiurge – which is how I saw the Count. I did him the courtesy of seeing him as he wished to be seen, as the living image of ferocity, even if sometimes I found him risible. And yet his fear infected us all with such a quaking fever I wondered again if he might not be the Doctor in disguise, for he could communicate to us so well his own imaginings.

The first chance I had, I took off the uniform of the customers in the House of Anonymity and got the Count to buy me new clothes. He chose me as elegant and sober an outfit as he could find in a little country haberdashers, for he had offered me the post of his secretary and wanted to see me well dressed.

The Count refused to take off his tights and waistcoat, though the costume was even more paradoxical without the mask. ‘The livery of hyper-sexuality becomes me,’ he said, though he was hypocrite enough to keep his cloak wrapped tightly round him when it came to encounters with shop-keepers.

His conviction that he was a force of nature always suspended my disbelief for a time, if never for long.

We deceive ourselves when we say the eye is an expressive organ; it is the lines around the eye that tell their story and, with Lafleur, these lines were hidden. But I sensed a certain wistful kindliness in that abused little valet, though he hardly ever spoke to me and seemed only to communicate in sighs. Yet he pointed out to me one or two teasing anachronisms on shipboard.

I decided that, after all, he was not the Doctor, unless he was some bizarre emanation of the Doctor. I concluded he was some kind of ontological freelance who could certainly determine the period in which the ship sailed and this was quite enough to speculate upon. I would not have believed such a thing possible before I started on my journey. His monumental silence continued and then, before my eyes, he crumbled away to nothing so that I never admired him again. For we were betrayed.

This was the first time I ever heard him, however obliquely, answer a question, though it was hard to tell whether, in his reply, he acknowledged the presence of the person who posed it or if he thought the question was a fortuitous externalization of the self-absorption which had already doubled or tripled the chains with which he was bound, until he could no longer breathe without our hearing them rattle. But, to my astonishment, Lafleur coughed again to clear his throat and, with a touch of pedantry, in a curiously gruff, affected voice, gave the following exposition. ‘Master and slave exist in the necessary tension of a twinned actuality, which is transmuted only by the process of becoming. A sage of Ancient China, the learned Chuang Tzu, dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he was hard put to it to tell whether a man had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly was still dreaming he was a man. If you looked at your situation objectively for a moment, my dear Count, you might find that the principal cause of your present discomfort is a version of Chuang Tzu’s dilemma. You could effectively evolve a persona from your predicament, if you tried.’ But the Count was incapable of the humility of objectivity and took only a few hints to further his soliloquy from Lafleur. ‘Am I the slave of my aspirations or am I their master? All I know for certain is, I aspired to a continuous sublimity and my aspirations accentuate the abyss into which I have fallen. In the depth...

‘I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.’ Lafleur gasped at that and so did I for I felt myself instantly negated. To my horror, I discovered I immediately grew thinner and less solid. I felt – how can I describe it? – that the darkness which surrounded us was creeping in at every pore to obliterate me. I saw the white glimmer of Lafleur’s face and held out my hands to him imploringly, beseeching him to go with me together into the oblivion to which the Count had consigned us, so that I should have some company there, in that cold night of non-being. But, before my senses failed me, there was a sudden, dreadful clamour on deck.

They were swart, thick-set, yellowish men of low stature, equipped with immense swords and massive moustaches. They spoke a clicking, barking, impersonal language and never smiled though, when they decapitated the crew in a lengthy ritual by the light of flares on the deck, they laughed to see the heads roll and bounce. Once they knew we were murderers, they treated us with respect, cut off our chains with swift blows of their heavy swords, which were of incredible sharpness, and let us up on deck to watch the débâcle. No one was spared except ourselves. After all their heads were off, the torsos went into the sea, while the pirates set about improvising small fires to cure the heads, which they proposed to keep as souvenirs. The Count visibly grew fatter at the smell of blood. He watched the ghastly ballet of the execution with the relish of a customer at a cabaret. When he flung off his cloak and the pirates saw he still wore the uniform of the House of Anonymity in all its arrogant exoticism, they gasped with admiration and bowed deeply to him in a display of servility. Another reversal had re-established his continuity. He was in the ascendance again. But Lafleur lost all the crispness he had displayed in the cabin. He became wary and uneasy and stayed close beside me. Later, I learned he was very much afraid and almost about to reveal himself so that we might not die without knowing one another again, for the pirates were the mercenaries of Death itself.

These were heavy, double-bladed shafts of steel half the height of the pirates themselves, with handles constructed in such a way they had to be grasped with both hands. Though their use required great skill, it needed no finesse for the most telling stroke was a murderous, chopping blow that easily split a man in half. It was impossible to fence with such a sword. It was equally impossible to defend oneself except by attacking first. They were weapons which denied forethought, impulses of destruction made of steel. And the pirates themselves, so slight, so silent, so cruel, so two-dimensional, seemed to have subsumed their beings to their swords, as if the weapons were their souls or as if they had made a pact with their swords to express their spirit for them, for the flash of the sword seemed by far a more expressive language than the staccato monosyllables that came so grudgingly to their lips.

‘The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason,’ I replied. ‘When the full moon comes, they must get drunk even in the teeth of a hurricane.’ ‘I wish they did not worship steel,’ he said.‘Steel is so inflexible.’

The Count sat quite still above them, brooding above these Breughel-like antics, his face set in lines of aristocratic distaste.

Count hissed: ‘Scum!’ and spat upon the pirate leader. Stepping through the bodies and the puddles of vomit and excrement with fastidious distaste, he went to the stern of the ship and inexorably directed us into the eye of the whirlwind. We ran from the cabin to crouch at his side, like his dogs, for his protection, for now again we saw him in his tempestuous element. The tempest seemed his tool; he used this tool to destroy the black ship and its sailors.

The children fingered Lafleur’s bandages curiously because they thought the covering was a kind of upper face and he laughed with them with such affecting motherliness I ought to have suspected… but I suspected nothing! Shape-shifting was so much hocus-pocus to me. So the morning whiled away peacefully enough with never a hint of dread though we saw the women were busily tending huge cauldrons which hung over fires in the open air and, when the sun stood directly overhead, the captain of the female soldiers came to us and informed us that now we must go and pay our respects to the village chief whose grand ceremonial hut lay a little way out of the village.

Then I saw this dreadful chieftain was indeed the black pimp who was now about to avenge his lover’s murder, for such was the Count’s desire he should be and do so. The chieftain rose from his throne, stepped from his dais on to a footstool of grovelling concubines and took the Count into the warmest, most passionate embrace. But he concluded it by striking the Count such a heavy blow that he reeled out of the great black arms and fell to the ground. The chief set one foot on the Count’s chest in the attitude of a successful hunter and spoke, it seemed, to the sky above us, which showed in patches of azure electricity through the vivid fronds of the palms. ‘The customs of my country are as barbarous as the propriety with which they are executed.

‘Why, you may ask, have I built my army out of women since they are often held to be the gentler sex? Gentlemen, if you rid your hearts of prejudice and examine the bases of the traditional notions of the figure of the female, you will find you have founded them all on the remote figure you thought you glimpsed, once, in your earliest childhood, bending over you with an offering of warm, sugared milk, crooning a soft lullaby while, by her haloed presence, she kept away the snakes that writhed beneath the bed. Tear this notion of the mother from your hearts. Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined. Not one of my callipygian soldiery but has not earned her rank by devouring alive, first gnawing limb from limb and sucking the marrow from its bones, her first-born child. So she earns her colours. To a woman, they are absolutely ruthless. They have passed far beyond all human feeling.’

‘In a certain brothel in the city of New Orleans, once, I saw you strangle a prostitute solely to augment your own erotic ecstasy, my dear Count. Since that time, I have pursued you diligently across space and time. You excited my curiosity. It seemed I might be able to crown my own atrocities by making my brother in atrocity my victim. That I might, as it were, immolate myself, to see how I should bear it. ‘I wish, you understand, to see how I would suffer. ‘I have a great deal of empirical curiosity. A Jesuit in his black cassock once came to my tribe and lived among us for a year. When he learned my manners, he rebuked me so sternly, in the name of pity, that first I had him crucified – for he professed to admire so much this form of torture – and, while he was still quivering on the tree, I cut out his heart with my own hands, to see if such a professedly compassionate an organ had a different structure from the common kind of heart. But no! it did not. ‘Now I should like to see if we have a heart at all, dear Count. Are we ourselves so much the physical slaves of nature? ‘And I wish to see if I can suffer, like any other man. And then I want to learn the savour of my flesh. I wish to taste myself. For you must know I am a great gourmet. ‘Bind him.’ Two female officers pounced on the Count and tied his wrists together with cords. From the ranks of the chief’s retinue a plump, giggling being wearing only a white chef’s cap and a girdle hung with ladles stepped forward w...

acted instantly, without thought. I grasped the knife of one of my own guards and the musket of the other. I stabbed them both in their bellies and then I stabbed the women who were preparing her for the pot. I flung away my knife and embraced her with one arm while, with the other, I pointed the musket at the chieftain’s head and pulled the trigger. The antique bullet, larger than a grape, pierced the painted eye in the centre of his forehead. A great spurt of blood sprang out as from an unstoppered tap in such a great arc that it drenched us. He must have died instantaneously but some spasm of muscle jerked him to his feet.

‘My Albertina, how could you possibly have been both Lafleur and the Madame at the same time?’ ‘Nothing simpler,’

Oh, Desiderio! never underestimate the power of that desire for which you are named! One night, Yang Yu-chi shot what he thought was a wild ox and his arrow pierced a rock up to the feathering because of his passionate conviction the rock lived.’ I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful. I told her that, at that moment, I desired her with the greatest imaginable intensity but she only said she had been given her orders and was afraid that we must wait. ‘Let us be amorous but also mysterious,’ she said, quoting one of her selves with so much ironic grace that I was charmed enough to shrug away my disappointment and resign myself to walking through the wood beside her.

‘Yes; the Count was dangerous. I was keeping him under the closest surveillance. It was my most important mission of the whole war. I would have taken him to my father’s castle if I could, to enlist him in our campaign for he was a man of great power though he was sometimes a little ludicrous because the real world fell so far short of his desires. But he did what he could to bring it up to his own level, even if his will exceeded his self-knowledge. And so he invented those macabre clowns, the Pirates of Death. ‘What was chilling, even appalling, in the Count’s rapacity was its purely cerebral quality. He was the most metaphysical of libertines. If he had passions, they were as lucid and intellectual as those of a geometrician. He approached the flesh in the manner of one about to give the proof of a theorem and, however exiguous those passions seemed to him, they were never unpremeditated. He acted the tyrant to his passions. However convulsive the grand guignol in his bed, he had always planned it well beforehand and rehearsed it so often in his brain that his performance perfectly simulated an improvisation. His desire became authentic because it was so absolutely synthetic.

‘So, when he first felt pain, he died of shock. And yet he died a happy man, for those who inflict suffering are always most curious about the nature of suffering.

‘As soon as I took service with him, I realized I must abandon my plan of enlisting him for I soon realized he would never serve any master but himself. However, if he had wanted to, or willed it, he could have flattened my father’s castle by merely breathing on it and burst all the test tubes only with laughing at them. After that, I travelled with him to keep him in a kind of quarantine.’ ‘At first, I thought he was your father, the Doctor.’ ‘My father?’ she cried in astonishment and laughed very musically for a long time. ‘But at first we thought he was the Minister! Even after I met the Minister, I thought it might be possible. Both of them had such earth-shaking treads.’ ‘When did you cease to regard me as an enemy agent?’ ‘As soon as my father verified you were in love with me,’ she said, as though it were obvious.