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Francis’s book, premature pre-existent beginnings to property and wealth, premature post-existent beginnings to creation, that summon up therefore a harsh spur or reminder of potentialities mixed into fields of indifference to life, callousness mixed into hope, war into peace, reluctant or unfulfilled lives into apparently lived or living or born lives.
    And thus he was drawn to Eleanor and Harlequin and distant Leonard as to his own children, his own half-created past and half-uncreated future, peculiarly tragic, peculiarly hopeful, in its capacity to relate to strangers, to the gaiety and the madness in others who are utterly strange to oneself yet utterly true to oneself as to a dialogue between creator and created….
    Eleanor and Harlequin had stopped and were sitting on a bench in the park as if to reconnoitre their approaches to Queen Julia.
    Harlequin began to change his winter morning gear and to put on flannels and an open-necked shirt. He executed this with such ritual propriety that no one spotted the slightest impropriety on his part.
    On the other hand all eyes in the park were rooted in Eleanor’s thick golden flesh as if to imbue her with self-made projections and characteristics. Perhaps she was afortunate film star come back from the dead to play a nude scene, as she stripped out of her furs in broad daylight into a voluptuous body and a light grassgreen summer dress.
    Harlequin was naturally an indolent man with a curious suppressed twinkle in his eye, blue, black, sometimes red, like an inner (minuscule and elusive) mask of blue, black, red blood he wore within flesh and bone.
    His affairs with his wife were normal, even inhibited, in tone. “Sex is a complex theatre”, Francis wrote, “in which father inhabits son, rebukes son, fights with son over the possession of a resurrected property of lust….”
    All eyes were rooted in the half-open field of paint that Eleanor wore. Was it the beginnings of a gateway into the fantasy of a queen, into a genuine mystery of serenity, as father time fought with the sons of time, played rhapsodically with the daughters of time …?
    “My father was fascinated by handguns,” said Harlequin suddenly, “duelling pistols, revolvers, rifles, the lot. He had quite a collection which included the replica of a fifteenth-century European handcannon of a type probably used at a later date in the conquest of Peru and Mexico. It was certainly used in Europe as we know from recent excavations. My father told me he acquired it from a gentleman who lived in Holland Park Gardens with his black queen and wife a long time ago—one Francis Cortez Esq. My father told me she died the day he was married, the year I was born. Born. ” He was smiling inwardly at himself. “It’s all a fiction Eleanor, I’m sure, a recurring dream in which something happens, grips one, tends to release one…. My life’s a page in another man’s gun or book.”
    Eleanor wasn’t listening. She had heard it all before except the matter of Julia’s pigmentation. This interested her, this aroused her.
    “Black? Was Julia black?”
    “ Black with the flame of the sun when it shines in snow. A painter would give his eye-tooth … Black. White. My father said she was a creole beauty from the island of Zemi in the West Indies. A long time ago. He—I mean Francis—apparently vanished within a month or two of her death. My old man was intrigued by the whole affair. All sorts of stories circulated. She was quite wealthy you see. My old man was able to secure quite a collection of guns from the Cortez estate. It all seems an age ago like the Spanish Civil War and all that in which my father enlisted. So you see he was in his forties or fifties—and that’s a body of years I would think—when he met my mother. An old man in fact. If he’d been killed as a young man in Spain where would I be now? Indeed sometimes I wonder …” He half-smiled at Eleanor who had caught sight, in that instant, of