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surface, and silvered its fish under a band of beaten gold. Those who know it well will admit that they hardly know it at all. No-one has been to the very bottom. Except by inference we do not know that there is a very bottom. We do not know it from observation.
    And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That’s where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
    I descend, I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving-bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish-tank. I may not have a very bottom, I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined. My real world, as I fondly call it, may be the necessary cable that holds me in waters I can manage.
    I, Handel, ask questions but can’t answer them, I’m not a hero, only a chessboard knight hoping to be swifter than the game. While I kept my life to a series of clever moves, I felt well, almost happy, I left no time for reflection. I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. The tight chain of events began to separate, not physically, I was as busy as before, but emotionally, spiritually. I began to slip between the gaps, the reassuring stepping-stones were pushing farther and farther apart. Handel, holding himself above the water with a pair of forceps, Handel, whose faith did not prove to be a life-belt. When I could no longer cling on, I let go, with some terror and yet some relief. Let go into unknown currents, a voyager through strange seas alone.
    The train was hosed in light. Light battering down on the roof. Light spraying over the edges in yellow bladed fans. Light that mocked the steel doors and broke up the closed windows into crystal balls.
    The dull straight lines of the dull straight station bent under twists of refracted light. The station buckled. The small smug cube of the ticket office shattered. The man waded over to it, he thought he was in a field of buttercups, the light up to his knees and rising. He tried to buy a ticket, but the confident coins melted under the heat of his fingers. The man wrote on golden paper and gave it to the golden clerk. He trod through the light and on to the golden train.

Picasso
     

P ICASSO , easel, brushes, bags, waited for the train.
    On the dark station platform, lit by cups of light, a guard paced his invisible cage. Twelve steps forward twelve steps back. He didn’t look up, he muttered into a walkie-talkie, held so close to his upper lip that he might have been shaving. He should have been shaving. Picasso considered the guard; the pacing, the muttering, the unkempt face, the ill-fitting clothes. In aspect and manner he was no better than the average lunatic and yet he drew a salary and was competent to answer questions about trains.
    Picasso decided to ask him one.
    ‘What time shall I expect the arrival of the 9:15?’
    He looked at her with undisguised contempt. It was his duty, she was a passenger, he was a guard. He held up his hand in an authoritative STOP sign, although he was the one moving. Picasso waited patiently until he had walked the twenty-four steps that reunited them. She repeated her question. Dramatically he lowered the phone from his upper lip and pointed to the passenger information board.
    ‘Yes,’ said Picasso. ‘The board tells me that the 9:15 will arrive at 9:20. It is now 9:30.’
    The guard looked at her as a priest looks at a blasphemer. His answer was spiritual and opaque.
    ‘When it arrives you’ll know what time it’s due.’
    He began again, pacing, muttering, pacing.
    Picasso went over to the refreshment kiosk, ‘ NOW SERVING FRESH COFFEE. ’ What had they been serving previously?
    Her father had said, ‘A woman who paints is like a man who weeps. Both do it badly.’ He had a right to call himself a patron of the arts. He had commissioned fifty-five pictures over