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really dream of them so that they come to you and say ‘Hey, I didn’t say that.’ ”
    “No,” said Chris.
    “Your characters don’t live their own lives?”
    “No, they live the lives I give them.”
    “They don’t take over? With me, the characters take over.”
    “I’m in full control,” Chris said. “I never thought they could have another life but what I provide on the typed page. Perhaps the readers, later on, will absorb them in an extended imagination, but I don’t. Nobody in my book so far could cross the road unless I make them do it.”
    “How strange. Most creative writers and novelists feel quite the opposite. That’s the usual experience. That’s how I feel, too, with my characters, I feel bound to say.”
    “Well, I’m a beginner,” Chris said.
    Rowland could have stabbed the boy for his modesty and calm. He walked away. He left Chris alone for two days, speaking to him only briefly at mealtimes. But Rowland was off his food, he wasn’t well.
    “Every writer gets writer’s block,” Nina said. “That should be an essential theme of one of your creative writing talks. There must be a known way to deal with the situation.”
    “I haven’t got writer’s block,” Rowland said. “It’s only that my characters are so real, so very real. They have souls. If you are writing a novel from the heart you have to deal with hearts and souls. The people you create are people. You can’t control people just like that. Chris is writing a novel where he controls people.”
    “Oh leave Chris out of it. What do you know about him, after all? In five years’ time he might be working in a private bank, managing a sandwich company, teaching history, anything.”
    “He told me he controls his characters. He creates them and they have no lives of their own.”
    “Well,” said Nina, “they haven’t of course.”
    “He doesn’t see them as flesh and blood, as human.”
    “Well,” said Nina more emphatically, “. . . flesh and blood—the author can always kill off a character. It isn’t a crime. Chris is writing about historical figures, anyway. They killed each other, those characters. What are you worried about?”
    “His way of going on with his book makes my No. 3 creative writing lecture look silly.”
    “You could change it.”
    “Perhaps I’ll modify it. How does he mean, he has control of his characters? He didn’t create Mary Queen of Scots and her little musician. They’re taken out of history, aren’t they? They’re ready-made.”
    “I don’t think so, Rowland,” said Nina. “From the bit we’ve read, his Mary Queen of Scots, his Darnley and Rizzio, are his. He’s already said to me that he doesn’t care a damn if Bonivard was probably an invalid after spending six years in the Castle of Chillon. Chris said, ‘He’s as healthy as I make him.’ The only thing he wants to be precise about is the state of the weather on the day that Rizzio’s brother came to Geneva to see Bonivard, and the weather when Darnley was murdered, and always, always, the weather. He says it gives an authentic background.”
    “Quite right, I advised that myself, in my second lecture. The weather—”
    “So you did. Yes, he must have been listening after all. I always think Chris looks vague when one is teaching.”
    “An awfully nice boy,” Rowland said. In his tone was a touch of regret, as if Chris had been an awfully nice dog that however, for some overwhelming reason, had to be taken to the vet to be put down.

8
    At College Sunrise, unlike at other, larger, schools of the time in Switzerland, the end of the school year was in mid-December instead of in the summer. Rowland and Nina always arranged a large dinner party and dance for the students, friends and parents (at their willing expense), with school-prize givings part of the show. This year it was to be held at the nearby five-star hotel. Nina, knowing that the coming term would be full of normal work, was using the school