Oh, God! not again. Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. Hickory dickory dock. Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair, said Simple Simon to the pieman Let me taste your ware. Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross—Your imagination had to be caught before you were fired by the need to write down a thing. You could, if your imagination was vivid, get to a stage when you were in bondage to an idea. When it became an idée fixe. You could become so enraptured by the pictured grace of a temple’s flight of steps that you would work for years to earn the money and gain the leisure to take you there. In extreme cases it became a compulsion, and you dropped everything and went to the thing that had seduced you: a mountain, a green stone head in a museum, an uncharted river, a bit of sail-cloth.
How far had B Seven’s vision ridden him? Enough to send him searching? Or just enough to make him write it down?
Because he had written those pencilled words.
Of course he had written them.
They belonged to B Seven as much as his eyebrows did. As much as those schoolboy capital letters did.
‘Those English capital letters?’ said the voice, provocative.
‘ Yes, those English letters.’
‘But he was a native of Marseilles.’
‘He could have been educated in England, couldn’t he?’
‘In two shakes you’ll be telling me that he wasn’t a Frenchman at all.’