"OK," was all he replied.

But it was Richard who did the soliciting after the people's well-being.

"We came round the corner and turned over," the young man in the group of three said. His mother and sister stood beside him staring mesmerised at the car, overturned and motionless.

"You should have someone round the corner to slow people down," Richard said.

"We already do," the young man replied with a slow completely unconcerned voice, "everything's under control."

It was useless to argue, they were in a state of shock, unaware of how dangerous it was to stand beside the wreck no more than twenty yards around the corner.

As they drove on towards Devon, Richard considered whether the police had been informed, and whether he should inform them. He felt pleased at his quick reaction to rounding the corner and finding the car blocking his path. An excellently controlled skid.

Later that night they were in a crash. A car at full speed came up behind them, braked at the last minute, smashed into them, they went hurtling and skidding around and around following the iimpact, jerked back in their seats as though they were taking off in a spaceship. They stopped spinning around about twenty yards further on. They were on the other side of the road. The offending car had come to a dead halt at the point of impact, like a striking billiard ball, the driver was sitting dazed in his seat, perhaps he was drunk, he looked groggy. Arnold too had that bemused post-crash look. Richard surprised him with his alacrity in reacting to the crash.

"Quick! Get out!"

Arnold was groaning to himself, head hung down, as though he had too many drinks and might be sick. At Richard's urging his deep brown eyes focused themselves into a functioning unit, the force of Richard's urgency took hold of him, he was back to his own very awak senses, but not before he had realised that in the very heart of an emergency he was temporarily confused while Richard was sure of exactly what to do.

Richard's steady calm reassured a passer-by on her pedal cycle. She was warm and efficient.

"Everyone alright?"

"Oh yes."

She suddenly roared out laughing, catching Richard's detachment from the hurried events which had just taken place.

"Not like one crash" - she was laughing in great merriment, could hardly contain the mirth - "all we found was a brain in the middel of the road, nothing else, just a brain."

Finally, she could contain the exploding mirth within no longer. It burst out with a roar. She became calm and matter of fact.

"We found him later, up a tree."

Oh well, she cycled off, nothing much had happened, she had shown him that she was a nurse, like he needed something more than this to be knocked out of her stride. Two kindred souls.

He didn't now who Arnold was speaking to, being upstairs while he was on the phone. But Richard was extremely interested in the voice Arnold was talking to. The bulrushes were in his nose even now. The bulrushes had been so full of spring, so raggedy tag, unconfined and bursting, he had to pick some. There was Arnold, camera at the ready to get shots of the fall of the wild bulrushes, to accompany the seducing of the majestic white swan, the sun shooting past the the car above the tree tops, the car bogged down in a field, and other subjects a little recondite for a more than a little recondite stage director.

The two friends had arrived after the car crash at a place of great calm and peace. Both gulped in th pure, yet a little painted and polished, air. The sun shone in the morning across the top of the hill down into the bay.There, the sparkling white cottage with its nicely blue doors, the rising waters of the inlet, the disappearing footprints of the waddling swans, had all combined to add a sense of newness to the day. Although mid-February the air was mild and no clouds obstructed the light of the sun. A great number of evergreen trees stetching around the bay and back up the hill strenthened the impression of ripening spring.

Arnold had obtained the cottage - with its three floors of bedrooms, reception rooms and bathrooms, rather a large house by a Londoner's standards - through an acquaintance of more successful days when Electric Enterprises was actually half way through the first play, with a New York contract almost signed, with auditions and a script in outline for the second play looking very promising, with a record company planned as just one of the the creative offshoots of the parent body. Electric, according to the critics who created overnight success myths about London, had made it. Arnold's personality half carried the day before he ever started talking about Electric's achievements. He had successfully arranged a backer for the production, written the script, cast, directed and produced the show, all within six months. With so little happening in London it was not very difficult to obtain more than a little advance publicity for Arnie Lloyd, as he styled himself for the press. Besides Arnold was black, and with Londoners still refusing to believe a black man could actually create anything artistic, especially if it contained ambitions to be taken seriously, he became something of an overnight success. For a time all went well, Arnold did have talent it was true, the papers and critics wrote warmingly of him, of what he intended to do, of how he came to be black in Britain in the the theatre, of how the finished product would be on show at the big festival in Edinburgh. Arnold was delighted by the fanfare, he liked to gush over everyone he met, prove by his effusiveness and niceness that there was nothing to worry about dealing with him, it was true he had been wilder in the past and become connected with tough black groups who wanted a showdown with 'whitey' but Arnold was a little scared of all that, there was no knowing who the assassins would start on once they got going, more than likely the boss before too long.

And, of course, there ws Arnold and his women. One day Arnold confessed to Richard that it was she who had had first been unfaithful. And Arnold, Richard reflected, had seemed rather and unusually sincere.

"I've never told that to anyone before." he muttered in a bemused way half to himself.

It was more a justification for his own behaviour than the real reason for it. Arnold, young, gets himself a nice, ordinary woman. Not incredibly intelligent, or beautful, but loyal and white. Three months later, after Arnold is signing the papers it seems like the thing to do, an ongoing relationship, and besides Arnold liked to behave with regard for the accepted family codes. His family was a good family, he frequently intimated.They were held in high respect in the West Indies.

"One day I wake up and didn't know the woman next to me."

His eyes looked suspiciously , for a moment, at Richard, who was still confident of his rank in life, and then they both roared with laughter. Roaring must be the way to describe this laughter, for both were somehow crowing and cockatooing at this irony. You could live with a woman for years, smoke a marijuana cigarette, wake up the next day and find the whole institution of marriage tumbled into disbelief. That is why they laughed so much, both were recovering from and thinking about how to finish, in one way and another, their relationships with socially regarded women. The time was December when Arnold's affair had cracked wide open, exactly the time Electric had started to look insecure. Leonora had abandoned him in New York City.The final talks were in hand to get Electric's show on Broadway, she knew she would finish him this way, with all the black political angles of the play it would be well received, probably the production rights would be sold, but it was a last desperate effort, the backer of Electric had gone into financial liquidation himself, it was extremely difficult to get into the theatre at this time, money was already becoming very scarce as the West wobbled in its determination to withstand Communism, Wall Street was crashing, confidence was drawing rapidly away, bad times were expected.

Richard had briefly met Leonora on her return from America, she looked jittery, said she hadn't slept for a week: she, Leonora, daughter of a much respected professional man, had brazenly appeared in the papers with Arnold, arm in arm. It seemed to Richard meeting her in Finch's in the Portobello Road, that the man she was with was more her refection, even if she hadn't slept for a week - clean tidy jacket, in discreet check, white shirt, pipe - she was still wearing a cat suit, black all over, she was revealed as skinny. Richard had said all along she was involved with Arnold to surprise a few of the family, She was interested in the theatre, that was how she had met Arnold Lloyd, interviewing him for some university newspaper, Sennet, she wrote a column for.

Richard was not particularly concerned about who Arnold was talking to downstairs. He stood at the window of the first floor drawing room, split over two levels, looked out across the bay. The room was comfortable, thick warm capets, cosy chairs, bright colours, agreeable pictures, everything in its proper place, some cushions scattered about the floor. To the young girls they had brought here the previous weekend it had been overwhelming, this feeling of leisure, and Arnold had become a potentate once sequestered in the steady rich calm of someone else's country residence. She was Polish, the seventeen year old, Richard had taken upstairs for 'five minutes' before the meal. Stripped to her naked breasts she was saying, "I'm not that sort of girl". Rather than fight Richard had let her go down the stairs in disgust, he knew it was not very decorous to have a girl in ten minutes, but he just felt like that. Why had she been so friendly? It was strange hw the young girl needed to be stripped of her clothes before she could become very plaintive and serious. Such an unhappy life. Arnold amused himself teasing her after Richard angrily denounced here before him.

He could not not get any good reason for her moral behaviour, particularly as the small, rather fat, rather plain, Polish girl was sitting in a room which quietly and firmly said wealth and success. Richard was over anxious, desperate, for any sign of female favour, his gaping wound dealt by Jane ached. The woman had been infatuated, as they used to say, with him. The closer he had come to her, seeing the reason she would not allow the romance to be on, the more she struggled to slip away from his embarrassing closeness. She was too confused about wealth, background, breeding to know how to cope with him. She was trying to go down to him, he was trying to go up to her. They finally met in no man's land, she retired to the parental fortress, he invaded and was savagely repelled. That marked the beginning of the war.Sending Jane tokens of love and affection, his heart, as Arnold's in the American affair, switched between extreme anger and remorse, but quietly at the back of his mind he waited for revenge. His mind was going back to the Jane affair again, he must send her all the poems he had composed so laboriously and painfully, that would rid her from his mind, return of image, he reflecting back the final rays from her bewitching brain, he was worried about this twitch around his eye. Knew it was the sign of severest strain, apart from the dark long months of January at the the height of the Jane affair, when one day she was coming to him, the next day hated him, he had not experienced this constant, irritating, unwished for movement about his eye since the days when he would study for hours and days with only a break for sleeping as the public examinations approached.

Arnold had been talking a long time on the phone, loudly, sometimes uproariously, he was pleased with this new number, friend of the girlfriend, given to him by Steve, young, Jewish, sucessful, with a clothes factory. Arnold laughed and giggled.

"Ah, but can you prove to me money always comes into it?"

He paused in mid-flight, taking the attack to the opponent, he was a good actor indeed with more than a few parts in his past from the stage and television.

"Oh, I know you have to pay for this and pay for that, but this is only a form of demonstration of love."

He was getting into his sliver tongue phase.

"Now, I will put it to you." - Arnold, although cosily tucked away a the front of the cottage, pastel shaded, pink flower printed, ornaments of a filigree nature, was nevertheless addressing the room as he declaimed into the mouthpiece amid the still calm of the house, only the sound of a rushing record made a background for him as he continued. "Now I will seriously suggest to you that all the money part is a form of giving, what we really desperately want to do is give...no," - he chuckled at this point, bursting out into a giggle of laughter at himself, a very endearing habit of Arnold's, he would never allow himself to get too pompous - "No...you must understand me, people pretend...." - here he gave a great emphasis to the word - "...people pretend they don't care if no one else has any, but I know..." - here he gave a quick aside as if to the phone - "...perhaps you know ..." - great stress on 'you' - "...that it's all a load of balls."

Here he broke down into a great cackle of laughter, bending down to grip his ankles, flecks of water appearing in the inner corner of his eyes, an emotional presence of intensity. Richard walked jauntily into the room from upstairs, let out a great unheld-back laugh in time with Arnold, it was a healthy out-of-doors laugh. Richard knew it would be well received by the gaily tinkling, very sympathetic, questioning voice on the other end, he didn't know who she was, but she was going to be at the prty that Saturday. Richard left Arnold still holding forth to the telephone, to him, to the world, even to the girl on the other end of the line. He returned to the drawing room windows as the poetry of the LSD, the bay where Tennyson had stayed, the music, the comfort, all weaved themselves into a glorious, vivid whole.