I raise my eyes above the balcony for a moment to shake off the long night and the doubt and perhaps to be only one person again, and when I look back down the bus has come and carried off its passengers. I look at the incongruent lights still lit beneath the sun that is making them insignificant as it rises, and they are time, respectful, benign time that wants to leave some record of what has now ceased, until the sleepy hand of some civil servant takes note of the waste and puts out the light and then puts it out. And even then the passengers are still there, and even then the light has not been put out.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Given that both the author and narrator of this novel spent two years in the same post at the University of Oxford, some statement may be in order on the part of the former, before he finally yields the floor to the latter, to the effect that any resemblance between any character in the novel (including the narrator, but excluding “John Gawsworth”) and any other person living or dead (including the author, but excluding Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong) is purely coincidental as is any resemblance between any event in the story and any historical event past or present.
J.M.