The gentle put-putting of The Pride of the River Wey soothed the senses as it glided upstream from the provincial redoubt of Guildford into deepest Surrey. On the foredeck, seated in a row in four deckchairs, the quadrumvirate partook of their ease, occasionally swatting a low-hanging branch out of the way as it tickled their faces.

The Trappist turned over to page 76 of ‘The Uncommon Reader’:

“But more and more now the Queen began to take books out of her own libraries - Balzac, Turgenev, Fielding, Conrad, books which she once would have thought beyond her, but which now she sailed through, pencil in hand, and in the process, incidentally, becoming reconciled even to Henry James, whose divagations she now took in her stride.”

“So what’s the plot?” questioned the Antipodean, pulling his cloak even more tightly around him, despite the summer sunshine.

“All is proceeding as planned,” said the Elderly Sage emolliently, puffs of smoke from his long clay pipe forming ethereal strands over the river as the motion of the boat carried them. “Thanks to the divagation which I can hold myself personally responsible for, we are now safely back on this side of the river. Normal service has been resumed.”

“And we can all retreat into our riverside burrows,” said the Trappist, looking up from his book.

“Hardly,” said the Sage. I would take for myself the role of the good Badger, whose home, of course, was in the Wild Woods. You my dear Trappist are the poor bumbling Mole. Our antipodean friend will have to content himself with the role of the Rat. And our Western colleague finds himself in the slightly inflated character of the loveable Toad, whose penchant for fast motor cars is only surpassed by a predilection for theological argument.”

“And the weasels?” said the Eastern Monk, two ferrety eyes blinking through his deeply enfolded cowl.

The question was left unanswered, suspended somewhere between Shalford Meadows and St Catharine’s Mount. Farncombe Boathouse undid me. At Godalming I raised my knees, supine on the floor of a narrow canoe. After the event, he promised me ‘a new start’. I made no comment. What should I resent? On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing. To Carthage then I came, burning, burning, burning, burning. O Lord Thou pluckest me out. O Lord Thou pluckest. Burning.