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This memoir includes the reminiscences of Radulph Tubbs (his Egyptian journals and Oxford papers have long been in my keeping)—prideful outpourings touched, it is true, by an undeniable wistfulness and more: remorse, yet filled with misconceptions and misinformed by a certain callousness of heart—surely the greatest burden of his vast inheritance. I also quote tatters from my sister’s own diary—so badly trampled by Tubbs as to be, for the most part, illegible.

To begin, then, my father, Angus Sphery, was a good man, this quality exasperated by a tendency to amplification, not to say inflation, and an insatiable desire for knowledge both worldly and divine. Angus Sphery was an eccentric and from the start my sister’s life was ruled by eccentricity. (Our mother’s notorious strangeness, so unnecessarily rendered public by gossips, was due to folly; up until the time of her fever, Margaret Sphery was strong-willed, even-tempered and balanced, if, for the love of Father, too eager to fly with his fancies and so share in his imprudence (for Father would become fixed upon an idea and not leave off ’til he has found the answer, or worried the thing to death).)

My mind nets this exemplary specimen: Angus Sphery believed that Adam and Eve had been created with navels, nipples and speech, and that if they had held on to their nipples and their navels, they had, at the instant of their fall, lost their ability to speak, and so, stumbling from Ede as dumb as stones, had tediously to reconstruct a language which, in fact, could only be a pale copy, a simpleton’s stuttering—compared to the Divine Original which Father claimed was so powerful as to conjure the world of things. All of Adam and Eve’s needs were seen to by this language of languages which was also a species of magic.

If Adam was hungry, let’s say, all he had to do was utter ‘roast quail’ and poof! The quail, brown to a turn, succulent and steaming, appeared before him run through on a handy birch wand so that Adam might dine without burning his fingers.

’Lord, I’ll have the cherry cobbler!’ Adam cried next; Eve after: ‘Strawberry fool!’ (If only things were still so, I should command at once a nice slice of mince pie!)

In his attempt to uncover the keys to the universal language, Angus Sphery charted the flight of butterflies above fields of wheat, mapped the beetle’s spots, copied down the patterns on the shells of wrinkles, on the hides of panthers, tigers, zebras, llamas and giraffes at the London Zoo, goats and cows of the field, cats in kitchens, dogs in alleys, turtles sleeping in gardens. He had alphabets of eyebrows, of his students’ and his neighbours’ facial moles; he ruined his eyes staring into the sky for he maintained that the Primal Language was spelled out phonetically by the planets. He spent many months living among the insane, ruining his ears with the hope that in their shrill ravings he might sweep up a few scattered crumbs of Original Speech.

Up until his experience in the asylum, Angus Sphery liked to speak of the clear relationship that existed all over the world between an object and its name. Everywhere from Bedrashen to Timbuktu a bowl of milk was a bowl of milk and a thumb a thumb. If the sounds of the words changed, their meanings did not. Father held to this unifying principle of human perception as a drowning man holds to a floating plank. It guided him; in the jumble of signification which is the world, it was his only certitude.

But his months among the mad at Bedlam upset him irretrievably. Here were people for whom a thumb might be perceived as a malignant tumor or a forest full of bears, and a bowl of milk as a malefic mirror. After this he abandoned his research for several years and only when Margaret Sphery was with child did the old fever return. The answer to his earlier quest lay there in his wife’s womb: all he had to do was wait for the child to be born, to embrace it in an affectionate silence and await the day it would begin to speak and with its tongue untie the riddle that had never ceased to plague him.