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god’s estate, and the consequences were never wholly to be forgotten. Memory, true and false, had arrived in the gateway of creation.
    Young Masters gained the sea-wall and continued running into New Forest. He arrived at the gate to his house, ran along the flagged pathway through sunflowers and sweetpea up the stairs through the front door. Then stopped. The house seemed unnaturally silent except for his own breath which came with the trapped force of a live creature from his heart and blood. The shadow of the false shaman still lay over him though he had run fast and left him behind on the foreshore. It lay over him and imbued his escape with uncanny excitement , akin to a fever, a drive, an energy, the shadow of Memory false and true. Did something reside in him now of the psychology of rape, the psychology of conquest? Was this the seed of Ambition to rule, to master a universe that had despoiled one, to march at the head of great armies into monsters one projected everywhere? (It was a question Masters was to frame long afterwards when we sat in Holland Park and discussed the psychology of power and the nature of Ambition at the heart of diseased politics around the globe.) Had he run forwards from the false shaman that New Forest day into the lust of light years, or backwards into the eye of a star cautionary and wise that forms in the spaces of the womb where fiction gestates? The fiction of Carnival began indeed to gestate from that moment.
    His trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the foreshore) toward his parents’ room. The door was very slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his mother’s tears that he saw, tears that masked her and suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were reflected in the glass. He was so riveted by them, by seeing them fall, by the charismaof grief they spelt to a profoundly disturbed, profoundly impressionable, child that he seemed to see through her side and back into the glass or mirror that ran down her front. Her tears seemed as a consequence to be woven from glass. They were fluid and divine cherries all white and edged with marbled fire. They were small yet unnaturally large as they fell upon her breasts that were open and bare in the shadowed glass front of flesh, and Masters was smitten by the sensation that she knew all that had happened to him that afternoon and was weeping for him, weeping for the lust, the Ambition, in Memory false and true.
    Of course she could not have known, the young Carnival god knew. She was weeping for something else of which he was never to learn exactly. Indeed, even if she had turned around then and told him what it was, he would have forgotten and remembered only the tears that were shed for him now, as in the past, and the present, and the future.
    She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was inside her, halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh, that she knew he was looking through her into a kind of fire that mingled with her tears.
    There was furniture in the room and that too stood within the glass and the cavity of flesh. There was a lampshade that sprang out of the cavity into the glass. There were china ornaments that framed themselves in the glass to greet the flesh. There was a bed in the room that seemed to slide from the glass into the flesh. Slices of all these shone in the fire, shone in the mirror, shone in each minuscule balloon or teardrop sculpted from his mother’s sockets and eyes. One slice seemed to rub against another until as they shone they silently sounded a note of music.
    “Here is the evolution of Sorrow,” the foetal Carnival child thought without articulate thought, the kind of thought