“Boy died as he lived: self-determined and daring, but not really imaginative. Always with a well-disguised streak of petulance that sometimes looked like malice. The stone in the snowbalclass="underline" the stone in the corpse’s mouth—always a nasty surprise for somebody.”
“You think he gobbled the stone to spite you?”
“Unquestionably. Magnus thinks I kept the stone for spite, and I suppose there was something of that in it. But I also kept it to be a continual reminder of the consequences that can follow a single action. It might have come out that it was my paperweight, but even if it didn’t, he knew I would know what it was, and Boy reckoned on having the last word in our lifelong argument that way.”
“What a detestable man!”
“Not really. But it’s always a good idea to keep your eye on the genial, smiling ones, and especially on those who seem to be eternally young.”
“Jealousy, Ramsay, you battered antique.”
“A little jealousy, perhaps. But the principle holds.”
“Is that what you are making notes about, on all that excellent Savoy notepaper?”
“Notes for a work I have in mind. But it’s about Magnus; he told me, you know, that the Devil once intervened decisively in his life.”
“He likes to talk that way, and I am sure it is true. But life is a succession of decisive interventions. Magnus himself intervened in my life, and illuminated it, at a time when I needed an understanding friend even more than I needed a lover. It wasn’t the Devil that sent him.”
“Why should it be? God wants to intervene in the world, and how is he to do it except through man? I think the Devil is in the same predicament. It would be queer, wouldn’t it, if the Devil had only made use of Magnus that one time? And God, too: yes, certainly God as well. It’s the moment of decision—of will—when those Two nab us, and as they both speak so compellingly it’s tricky work to know who’s talking. Where there’s a will, there are always two ways.”
“That’s what you’re making notes about? And you hope to untangle it? What vanity!”
“I’m not expecting to untangle anything. But I’m making a record—a document. I’ve often talked to you about it. When we’re all gone—you dear Liesl, though you’re much the youngest, and Magnus—there may be a few who will still prove a point with ‘Ramsay says …’ ”
“Egoist!”