GOD IN MONTE CARLO

My one and only personal encounter with the Almighty was when I met him in the South of France. In Monte Carlo to be precise. Outside the Casino. He was on his way home, in a bath chair, pushed by a very attractive young man whose broad shoulders looked almost lumpy under the navy blue crombie overcoat. I recognised God immediately because I had always had a very clear idea of how he looked: a small, rather wizened old man with a head far too big for his body, a wispy pointed beard, a hook-like nose, small round glasses with black metal rims, a furrowed forehead and one of those pill-box smoking-caps with a tassel on. In my visions (and I don't mean anything spectacular, like lights or manifestations, just the sort of image that one has in one's head of anything - the Matterhorn, say, or Everest, or the North Pole, or Erik the Red) he wore a shapeless robe, with deeply indented folds, of a delightful blue; if I were forced to describe it, I would say that the crests of the folds were the blue of a summer sky at dawn and the troughs the colour of a summer sky half-an-hour after sunset.

When I saw God in Monte Carlo, he was actually wearing a rather grubby gaberdine mac with an off-white muffler and a central European round fur hat, which would have left room for his smoking-cap underneath. He was wrapped up warmly because it was one of those chill and blustery winter days that sometimes strike the Riviera and make you wonder whether Bognor wouldn't be warmer as well as cheaper.

Never one to be abashed by the great, I marched smartly towards him and said hello, with the tone of recognition. The chair-pusher stiffened and stopped pushing. As God raised his head towards me, I realised that his eyes had been closed, and that he had been asleep.

'I never sign autographs,' he said, 'and anyway, I'm not who you think.' He lifted his right arm, as a signal for the pushing to continue, but I stepped boldly into the path of the chair, and said, 'But you are. You're God.' That made him sit up and open his eyes. He even took off his glasses and cleaned them on the cuff of his scruffy mackintosh - I could see now that it was far too big for him, and the cuff made an ample spectacle-wiper, in which his hands disappeared.

'What if I said I was the King of Bulgaria? A Grand Duke from Albania? A Romanov by-blow?'

I said nothing. My belief was unshaken, though I was becoming rapidly less and less impressed with the Almighty.

'Bela Kun's uncle? Ivar Kruger's butler? The Rector of Stiffkey?'

I remained impassive in the face of his flippancy. Resignedly, he waved his hand again towards the chair-pusher, whose expression combined boredom and truculence in equal measure. 'Home, Michael,' he said. 'There will be two for tea. And tea for two,' he added, half-humming the song, as we set off at a spanking pace towards the less salubrious quarter of the principality, following our noses, it seemed, by the sudden wafts of garlic and stale cabbage-water that came at us from the increasingly narrow side-alleys.

'Why do I have Michael to do the pushing? Well, he's the only one whose name I really dare to pronounce in public. Besides, Raphael's painting the hall ceiling - distemper, one colour only - to get rid of the damp patch where my bath overflowed last week. The landlord is very funny about these things.'

'And Gabriel's run off with a jazz-band,' interposed the taciturn chair-pusher, hunching his shoulders up even more, until it looked as though the overcoat would burst at the seams.

'Yes, but it's not the first time, and he always comes back, with a couple more dents in his trumpet. The other musicians find out he can't play piano, let alone pianissimo - and the café owners begin to get uneasy about the structural damage. There's no need to be resentful, you know,' said God, twisting round in his bath-chair, 'you see as much of the world as he does, I take you to the casino, don't I? I let you gamble with your wages, don't I?'

'Yes, but I always lose.'

'Is that my fault? Do you think you can blame everything on me? Do you think I have personal responsibility for all that happens in the world? I delegate, like everyone else. That is, I used to. Nowadays, I have nothing to delegate.'

'And the omniscience?' I asked, as sympathetically as I could. Michael stopped pushing the chair, as if to give God more time to answer.

'I don't know. I can't sort out what I remember from what I know. Luckily, I've always had a good memory - '

'For injuries,' said Michael, jerking the chair into motion again with what struck me as unnecessary roughness. 'Even unto the third and fourth generation - '

'Of them that love me!' said God, with rising pitch. 'I really don't think that's fair of you, Michael!'

Michael stopped pushing the chair so suddenly that God nearly flew out of it and might easily have landed in a heap on the cobbles, in between the dogshit and the dubious stains.

'You seem to think you're the only one that suffers because of the situation we're in,' Michael hissed, in the way people have when they're conducting perfectly private arguments in perfectly public places, 'you seem to think that life goes on just the same as it ever did for the rest of us. Well, let me tell you that it doesn't. There used to be some respect around for us - it didn't all go to you, you know - and now all that's over, it's you that gets the pity - it's all that's left and you get all of it - all of it! There was an old lady that went to Church and saw a statue of me killing the dragon of evil - and she used to light two candles, one for me and one for the dragon, because you never know, do you? And now she does know and she lights one candle and that's for the dragon. So don't come it with the self-pity and the poor old divinity stuff - you still get enough attention and enough belief to keep you warm in bed at night. Though maybe belief's the wrong word. Maybe it's curiosity - curiosity and credulity.'

One doesn't like to think of God being speechless; silent, yes - taciturn, certainly; choosing his time to talk, and not wishing to speak with all and sundry - naturally; but his voice now was very still and very small and very humble. 'Just take me home,' he said, 'please just take me home.'

Michael complied in silence. I don't know if he was deliberately seeking out the lumps and the bumps, or whether that was the best he could do on the uneven surface, but if God had been made of milk, there'd have been half a pound of butter sitting in the wheel-chair by the time we stopped outside one of those forbidding French apartment-houses that look like a volume of Maupassant short-stories: all smooth, classical forms outside (though a little too tall for the perfect proportion) - and inside, corruption, insanity, the depths of brutal degradation, and the kind of mould growing on the walls that you think will start growing on you if you stay there too long. The fan-light above the coffin-like front door was open, and the darkness of the hall-way seemed to be seeping out into the street, whose distant and constricted end was ablaze with an unexpected glimpse of the setting sun.

God produced a large and deformed key from the folds of his gaberdine and handed it - unwillingly - to Michael, who turned it gratingly in the rusty lock, withdrew it and handed it back to God, before presssing down the wrought iron handle and opening the door.

'Perhaps you would assist me,' said God, to my surprise. 'Thank you, Michael - we shall be taking tea in a quarter of an hour - the blue salon.'

'Only one there is,' muttered Michael under his breath as he clumped up the dusty wooden stairs to the first floor, took the key from the top of the lintel and let himself into the apartment. The clatter of crockery accompanied God's wheezing as I helped him out of the wheel-chair and supported him by the arm along the hallway.

'I'm afraid I don't trust him - not in the present circumstances. These angels, you know, these archangels - well, the lesser ones, the minions, you'd expect them to go away and find some kind of employment as putti - cherubim, you know - amoretti - fearfully pagan, but then what were they doing when I came on the scene and picked them up and gave them a purpose in their endless, pointless, full-buttocked lives, six-winged little - oof!'

We had reached the bottom of the stairs. God grasped the newel-post and began hoisting himself up, one mountainous step at a time. He was a lot fatter and heavier than I had realised, and as I heaved from behind I felt like a removal man with a mahogany wardrobe: about to be borne down by the force of circumstances.

'Of course,' God gasped, as he took a belay with his hands on the banister rail, 'it would all be so easy to have an - accident, they'd call it.' He puffed again and took a firmer hold, before essaying another step. 'Those archangels - they remember the one of them that I cast down, in the beginning. They'd like to cast me down, that's what it is - as if I weren't down enough already. They want to know what it is I keep under my bed, but they never will. I'm too clever for them.'

From my position as a kind of third-row forward in a vertical scrum, my left shoulder squarely under God's bottom and my head enveloped in trailing clouds of gaberdine, I thought he said he was too heavy for them, and agreed inwardly - but he repeated himself at the next heave, when my head became momentarily free, and I understood what he said.

Hard to say who was the more exhausted by our direttissima, when we at last reached the landing. Certainly I was panting more desperately for breath after being deprived of it for so long by the Gauloise-scented folds I had inhabited. On the flat, God had resumed his old serenity somewhat, as he approached his little realm. The Cyclopean single eye of the spyhole in the door was framed by a triangle, so that it looked like the Eye of God, with clouds around its unblinking gaze. God raised an imperious hand to smite the mighty oak, but it opened with Michael obsequiously behind it, flattening himself against the wall, as the everlasting door let in the King of Glory.

And who was the King of Glory, I asked myself, reflecting on that entry as I sat in the blue salon and waited for God to complete his toilette. Michael had ushered me in, and ostentatiously removed the dust-cover from a Louis Quinze settee, whose chipped and vulgar gilding made the random nineteenth century bric-à-brac of the rest of the room seem tasteful. As I took my place awkwardly on the jagged springs and slipped wads of horse-hair, he leant over me from behind and whispered, 'Of course, he'll tell you stories - but then you know that, that's all he's ever done, tell stories. Some of them are better than others. Some of them are so good, they might almost be true. Well, perhaps you'd like them to be true. In that case, they are. For you. But not necessarily for anyone else.'

He swung a silver salver under my nose. 'Your card, please. My master insists on knowing who he's talking to. After all, you know who he is.' I patted my pockets vainly, trying to suggest that I had come out without my wallet, trying to conceal that I had never thought enough of myelf to immortalise my name in print. Over my left shoulder, Michael's other hand appeared, with a fan of visiting cards. I began to read the names, firstly in humility, then in surprise, and finally in laughing, snorting, sneering, footstamping disbelief. 'Do you mean to tell me - ' I began.

'Pick a card,' he said. 'Any card. I don't mean to tell you anything. He's the one that means to tell you things. I just bring the tea. It's a ritual, the cards. Like the sofa. Like almost anything to do with him. Obsessed with ritual. Pathological, if you ask me. Take a card, anyway. Two or three, if you like. Save some for later.'

I riffled through the pack that he put into my hand and selected Robespierre, Rasputin and Joan of Arc, more out of a sense of devilment than anything else. As my rational side began to re-assert itself, I pocketed the first three, picked out Lawrence of Arabia and tossed it idly on to the silver salver, which was whisked away before I could change my mind.

As I sat and waited in that dreary room, the blue salon, whose walls had been blue when Napoleon was a little corporal and the kings of France still wore their heads on their shoulders, I felt the rays of failure and depression fall on me from the single naked light bulb that hung from the centre of the ceiling (where there should have been a chandelier) like the phallic stigma of some giant lily. I heard noises from the room where God was dressing especially for what was obviously that rarest of events: a visit. (After all, how many people recognised him? Even fewer than believed in him, no doubt. Though perhaps if you still believed in him, you wouldn't recognise him in the state to which he'd been reduced.)

'No, no, no!!!' went the noises. 'Not that one, you fool! Can't you see that would be totally wrong. Nor that one. No, I have not put on weight. It's just never fitted properly - or else it's shrunk because it got wet. Well of course it got wet when there was a flood! Are you trying to say I don't empathise with my creation? When they drown, don't I get wet? When they're consumed by fire, aren't I slightly singed? What are you, some kind of bloody atheist? That one's better - but don't pull it so tight! I'm a divinity, not a parcel! A divinity! The divinity! With a capital D! If you please!'

Whilst I was trying not to listen to this, trying to ignore the ripping of material, the opening of bottles, the spraying of atomisers, the slamming of drawers, the subtle noise that talcum powder makes when it's applied so liberally that for a moment the far side of the room disappears in a lavender-scented sea-fret - at one of these moments, the main door to the room, through which I had entered, was shoulder-charged open with a belated use of the handle, and a typical French ouvrier, a burly fellow in blue overalls with a paint-splashed black beret and a battered zinc bucket with a lick of whitewash and a whitewash brush in it, came barging in, leaving dirty footprints on the once-white goatskin rugs that lay like scanty sticking-plasters on the dull parquet floor. The bulges round his shoulders gave him away; but whilst he was still saying, 'Pardon, excusez-moi, je ne savais pas,' and I was trying to think what language to address him in, Michael shot out of the dressing-room, scooped up the ouvrier as if he had been a cat that had just pissed in the corner and whooshed him out the door with the muttered words, 'Ma Raffaelle, che fai? Che fai, Raffaelle?'

Smiling, Michael turned to me, his back to the door. I admired the way he preserved the serenity of his demeanour whilst clinging on to the door-handle, which was being agitated from outside. Eventually, the door actually did open a fraction, and the triangle of blue cloth trapped in it disappeared with a satisfied grunt. Michael smiled - his most ingratiating smile, the one that was very clearly based on a good imitation of an expression that had once been so close to being genuine that you couldn't have told the difference if you hadn't known.

'Poor old Raffaelle,' he said, 'he was always so fond of the Madonna. He's never been the same since---well, you know.'

'I don't, you know,' I said, with my usual English reserve.

'Come on,' said Michael, as if talking to a baby who believed that milk only came in bottles, 'she'd been in business on her own account since the early Middle Ages. Earlier. One of the great independent cults.' He lowered his voice. 'A model for us all,' he whispered, and raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. 'Anyway,' he said at normal volume, 'Raphael's all right for the rough jobs, but there's not much subtlety there - if there ever was,' he whispered again. 'Not that I'm one to criticise, but - '

'No, you aren't,' said God, framed in the doorway. The robe he wore was of such a blue that its rich, wavelike folds had two colours: the crests of the folds were the blue of a summer sky at dawn and the troughs the colour of a summer sky half-an-hour after sunset. I was a child again. I didn't even notice Michael slip out.

'I'll bet they were speaking Italian. They always do when I'm not around. Bad enough that my representative on earth always tends to speak that slimy, corrupt and corrupting language - all that was left of Latin after the natives and the under-classes had got through with it. Yes, I know all about Dante. Michael's got his card somewhere. Florentine. Mean, like all Florentines. All mouth, like all Italians. Don't tell me about Italians. I used to live there. In the Renaissance.'

'But why do they speak Italian, then?'

'Not just to annoy me. I don't flatter myself that much. No, it's because they can think of themselves as artists. Artists! Hah! They have the souls of chartered accountants. But without the brains. If they'd had the brains to do profit and loss and a few simple sums, things might be very different today. But no - they just wanted to go round calling each other "Raffaelle" and "Michelangelo" - posers, the pair of them.'

'And you?' I asked. There's a time when you stop being a child, because you hear your parents arguing. And lovely blue robes aren't enough. And you start asking questions. But you don't get answers. You get a cup of tea instead. And cucumber sandwiches. With the bread crisp and crunchy and the cucumber soft and flabby. Age, in both cases. I admired Michael's timing. But the tea was cold. And stewed. He'd obviously made it while God and I were ascending the Alpes maritimes and then let it age in oak.

'A typically English meal,' said God, smiling at me. 'I read Oscar Wilde, you know. A very great man - a very witty man - a pity about his - ahem - well, - ' - he squinted at the silver salver that Michael had placed within his reach, but out of mine. The card lay there forlornly and obliquely. 'But then you, too, Mr Lawrence, know all about the problems of being misunderstood in connection with sexual matters - of course, I've read your works, too - you mustn't imagine that my interest in literature stops with the nineteenth century - a little risqué, shall we say? - especially the one that's only available in France - ' He gave what he thought of as a roguish smile.

'I wasn't aware that the British Customs at Folkestone had started searching travellers' baggage for copies of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom,' I said. 'And this tea's cold. And stewed.' I thought it best to push my advantage. It's not often you can get authority figures on the run.

'Certainly, Aircraftsman Shaw - Michael, some fresh tea for Mr Ross?'

I gave him nine out of ten for a good recovery, and decided not to push any further, but just to have a conversation. 'So - tell me, what do you think of Henry James?'

God's sour face was not just the result of tasting the tea. 'It helps if you have the whole of eternity,' he said, 'especially if you want to get to the end of the sub-sub-clauses. The little entertaining things are fine, but some of the longer ones - a subtlety of analysis that recoils on the analyser, if you ask me.' He leant back expansively in the winged arm-chair and looked at the ceiling. 'Literature, though,' he said, 'is not really my major passion.'

I leant forward with a pinging sound and a shifting of horsehair. Here were the secrets. Here was the insight. The Spanish Inquisition explained. The Wars of Religion accounted for. The Crusades a socio-economic phenomenon. The Massacre of Saint-Bartholomew an exaggeration by the Press.

'My real passion is - ' Justice? Order? Humanity? Democracy? Free will? ' - ballet.' For a moment my mind was filled with an image of God in a tutu, dancing from cloud to cloud on his points, like one of those trained elephants in the circus.

'Why else would I be in Monte Carlo? What else does it have to commend it? A Casino for games of chance? I don't believe in chance - I make chance happen - or at least I used to. What else? That they can close the streets and have racing-cars screaming round them? That they have a little petty prince? They had princes in Italy, when I lived there, with less area than this place, and fifteen immortal artists, painting, painting, painting - everywhere fresh plastered and the artists running after with their brushes. You mustn't judge me by the literature, you see - please don't judge me by the literature. Any fool can make marks on paper, and they can all say they were 'inspired', whatever that means - well, of course, what it means is that somebody breathed it into them, and that somebody is supposed to be me, but it's not true, it's just not true, not even my farts would have produced anything as bad as - so - in Italy, it was the painting.'

He closed his eyes, just to see the colours again. His lips twitched. 'The Ravenna mosaics. Not just because they were in my honour. For their own sake...' He opened his eyes again, but they weren't looking at anything in the blue salon. 'Leonardo,' he said, 'The Last Supper - just to watch that scene coming out of the smooth plaster, slowly emerging. He gave more thought to the relationships and the characters and made the whole thing deeper and more symbolic than it ever was in reality - just a few friends getting together for a meal - not too happy about the future - a little worried about what it might hold - '

'What about...,' I began, but Michael was at my elbow, noiselessly bringing the fresh tea.

'Don't,' he said. 'Don't bring up family matters. It isn't something we ever talk about. Ever.'

I sipped my steaming Earl Grey and let the odour of bergamot oil enfold me. The tears were streaming down God's face and dripping on to his robe. I noticed that although he was crying so copiously, his nose wasn't running, and concluded that this must be one of the privileges of being the divinity.

'The colours,' said God. 'And the music. The architecture was there to help the music echo. The music was always sublime - well, until the nineteenth century, when it began to get out of hand and become maudlin and sentimental. Perhaps that was my fault. Maybe that was when my power really went. Or maybe it was because I was paying too much attention to ballet.' He let his head fall on to his chest and appeared to have sunk into a reverie.

'But why ballet?' I asked, after a respectful pause. The only answer I received was a gentle and regular breathing, with a slight rasp at the beginning and end that suggested an incipient snore.

'It's a long story,' said Michael, silent and impassive at my ear. 'And he won't be telling it to you tonight. He's not as young as he was, you know, and old age takes people different ways. Some of them complain about insomnia, and others sleep like babies all the time. At least, when he's awake he is awake. Unlike some I could mention.'

Gently, gently, Michael eased the cup out of God's slumbering grasp and put it on the tray. Then he arranged God's hands, with the fingers spread out, on his knees. 'Otherwise he gets a touch of cramp, and it wakes him up,' he explained. 'He doesn't eat enough, you know, says he hasn't got the appetite,' he continued, as he picked up God's plate with its tiny half-eaten crinkled sandwich. 'Mark you, he doesn't get any thinner, as I expect you discovered coming up the stairs.'

In response to the unspoken pressure to be gone, I drained my cup and put it on Michael's tray. He smiled at my gesture, and said, 'If you want to hear the long story, and have something to eat, then come into the kitchen with Raffaelle and me.' We tiptoed out, and Michael shut the door as quietly as only butlers can, as if he were brushing an invisible speck of dust from a butterfly's wing.

The kitchen was long, thin and warm. Only now did I notice how chilly it had been in the blue salon. Along one wall was the old-fashioned black kitchen range, whose heat was intended to percolate through to the blue salon itself. The fire-door was open, a ruddy glow in the mass of blackness that I took for a little image of hell in the universe - but then I always did have an excessively symbolic streak. An open pot of cassoulet bubbled slowly and glutinously, like volcanic mud. The other side of the kitchen was taken up with store-cupboards and a long plain deal table, at which Raphael sat, breaking pieces off a baguette and drinking red wine from a chipped mug. 'Ciao,' he said, 'salut!' and carried on eating and drinking, looking with a smile at the cassoulet. Obviously he thought it would be served up at last, now the guest had arrived.

He was right. Michael produced two more mugs, both chipped and one without a handle, filled them with rough red from a two-litre bottle under the table, and dished up portions of the cassoulet into large, flat soup-plates. I noticed that he was careful not to serve out the few pieces of pork and spicy sausage; I surmised that he was keeping them to tempt God's appetite for lunch the next day.

We ate and drank silently for a while. When Michael had finished wiping out his plate with bread, he pushed his chair back from the table and began:

'He was living in Russia. That's why the ballet became so important to him. Tchaikovsky and all that - oh, he knew about the sex-scandals and so on, but he never let that kind of thing affect him. There's some that have said he was against - you know, homosexuality - but I think he's always just thought the whole sex thing was a mess, from the very start - ah, you've finished - would you like an apple? - rather sour, I'm afraid - let's roast them - So, there he was in Russia - '

'But why was he in Russia?' I asked, made bolder by the wine, and the promise of the apple, and the desire for knowledge.

'That is what I always ask myself,' said the taciturn Raphael, scratching his head through the beret he still wore. 'Why did he ever leave Italy?'

'There were reasons - at the time.'

'So the Pope started losing his power, and just had this little Vatican City - so what? God isn't the Pope.'

'And the Pope isn't God,' I chimed in, but regretted it instantly, for they both looked at me very strangely. 'Of course not,' said Raphael. 'Of course not,' said Michael. Then he continued.

'Raffaelle - Italy was becoming a democracy - that's one part of it - and then - you know how he never liked being shut in - the time he had to spend in the Holy of Holies - it reminded him of that - the smell of cedar-wood, like living inside a pencil-box, he always used to say - I mean, when the Romans burnt down the Temple in A.D. 70 it was a kind of release for him - '

'If that's what he says, then that's what he says. To me he says: poor little Jewish divinity, with nowhere to go in the world.'

'Raffaelle - not in front of strangers - you know God only says these things because he's tired and depressed and an exile. You understand, don't you?' - he turned to me - 'You understand that it's not the nicest thing in the world when some syphilitic German professor of classics tells everybody that you're dead and nobody need worship you any more. Of course you tend to self-pity. It's only human - and don't forget you're made in his image.'

'So he didn't like democracies,' I said, helping myself to more wine, and refilling Raphael's mug. Michael put a hand across his own.

'Well, it just wasn't the way that he was used to doing things. There wasn't a vote taken when Sodom and Gomorrha went up in flames. We didn't have a referendum on parting the Red Sea. Pharaoh's chariots would have been there before we could have got the ballot papers out.'

'And the Ten Commandments didn't go through a committee stage,' I remarked. Raphael laughed, but had to stifle it when he saw how disapproving Michael was looking.

'Authoritarian,' said Michael, helping himself to more wine as though he needed it, 'is one way of putting it; paternalistic is another; the nicest word is probably fatherly. So, you go to a country where the ruler is called the little father of all the Russians.'

'And where his children try to blow him up. Repeatedly.' It was the wine talking, and I regretted it. And it was the truth.

'You English,' said Michael, 'you pig English! You believe in nothing, not even in yourselves! You sneer at it all, and then you sneer at the sneering! Just like your vegetables, boiled in plain water till all the flavour and the goodness has gone - and then you throw the lovely stock away and eat the soft worthless pap!' He took a swig of the wine, and refilled his mug. 'And of course you're right, and you mustn't imagine that I'm happy about the sort of bedfellows God has, or the people he's associated with. He operates through too many intermediaries and they're all out for their own gain - well, I suppose that's only natural, but it's not what you expect when you're dealing with somebody who has some claim to be the Absolute. Anyway, he was in Russia, and we used to spend a lot of time here on the Riviera - remember those train rides, Raffaelle? Three days it took - and the food - ah - and the world flying by! Time suspended: stations and level-crossings and bells ringing, and carts full of produce and people working in the fields and sometimes towns. And the noise when they had to change the wheels at Kovno, so we could ride on the narrow German rails!'

His eyes were shining. He was seeing the train bleu snaking along the coast from Marseilles, past all those little villages whose inhabitants were fishermen and archdukes in equal numbers.

'That's why he came here,' continued Raphael, as he saw that Michael was still wrapped up in his memories, ' - after the Revolution - well, he couldn't stay in Russia, could he? All they worshipped there was steel-works and hydro-electric schemes and mass irrigation. Disasters, all of them. Turning the Caspian into a muddy puddle - where's the caviar going to come from? And the other reason, of course, was the Ballets russes - they're here - here in Monte Carlo, with all the other dispossessed and cultured people who haven't anywhere to go.'

'Only it isn't the same,' said Michael.

'Nothing ever is,' I said.

'Nijinsky's gone totally mad - not just the half-mad, that helped him dance. Diaghilev - well, he's still commissioning things, though heaven knows what he uses for money, and he's still picking the right composers, but what he gets them to do - ! He's still living in the past, you can see.'

'We're all still living in the past, Michelangelo,' said Raphael, putting a meaty, work-stained hand on his colleague's fore-arm. 'It's the best place to be.'

In the silence, I could hear the roasting apples singing. I picked up a stained tea-towel to use as an oven-cloth and served them, without saying a word. Raphael brought a small jug of slightly sour cream out of the window-recess, where it was keeping cool. Michael just sat quiet and ate automatically. As we finished, I could hear a distant clock striking the hour. It was late. I rose to go, but they insisted I stay for café and cognac.

We didn't talk about God any more - well, you know us English - never discuss religion or politics - so we talked about all the Americans who had come to France, and what they thought they were going to get out of it, and how they made the fatal mistake of having the cognac before the café, and that was why they never got on to the café and hence never sobered up (you could see it in their writing, especially that Stein woman), and we talked about sport and the American negro who had won the hundred metres and the long-jump in Berlin (though that was very nearly politics) and then we speculated on the Tour de France (and that was very nearly politics for them, but not for me), and then we began to talk about jazz - and at that moment there was the rattle of gravel thrown at the window.

Up they sprang - Michael went to see if God was still asleep - Raphael lumbered downstairs to open the door. I sat still in the kitchen, drinking my coffee, sipping my brandy, waiting for what I felt must be a grand event. Suddenly there was a very lively, swarthy man in bright clothes, with an ear-ring in his left ear and a battered trumpet-case in one hand dancing about all over the kitchen. He huggd me and kissed me, and I noticed that a lot of his swarthiness had come off on my face. 'Sorry,' he said and started rubbing at it with the dirty tea-towel I had used for the apples, 'but they don't take you seriously as a jazz-player unless you're black and American, or just possibly a gypsy.'

'Did he tell you the news?' asked Raphael, coming into the kitchen with a large champagne-bottle covered in dust and cobwebs. 'Go on Gabriel, tell him, tell him!' and he started wiping the foil clean so as to get at the wire holding the cork in place.

'You've been under my bed! You've been under my bed! I know where that came from! Don't tell me lies! Thieves! Murderers!' It was God, in a striped flannel night-shirt (he'd obviously woken up, found his guest gone, undressed himself and gone to bed), closely followed by Michael, who was saying, 'Don't upset yourself, it's all right, it's a celebration, there's some very good news!'

'What sort of good news? Does everybody believe in me again suddenly? Oh no, they believe in the Devil, because they can see what he's getting up to, all over the world - but especially in Germany, you mark my words - I've had his mail misdirected to me before now, and it's Germany he's living in at the moment - What news, anyway?' he said, as his curiosity got the better of his anger. Gabriel stepped forward, straightened his clothing and made an announcement:

'I have become the possessor of a café in Mentone.'

'Menton, you mean,' said God, 'none of this Italian nonsense, it's the French side of the border. Become the possessor? How?'

'I won it,' said Gabriel. 'It belonged to this American who wanted to go back home, and he couldn't be bothered to sell the place properly because he was in a hurry, and so he raffled it, and the place I was playing, they ran out of money to pay me, so they gave me this raffle ticket, and you can bet I wasn't happy and I didn't believe a word they said, so I stomped off and left them to blow their own trumpet for the second half of the evening, and I thought I'd go and see this café that was being raffled, and when I came there, they were just drawing the raffle - and I won!! And it has no debts at all, and it has an apartment above! And it has a piano, so Raphael can play piano-bar, and Michael can wait table, and you can be the patron behind the bar, and I can do the wash-up and play trumpet every night.'

I don't know what vintage the champagne was, but the cork took out one of the leaded panes of the window, and the bubbles filled more glasses than you would have thought possible. We all danced round the kitchen with each other, and finished off the red wine and the cognac (there was no mention of coffee). At a pause in the proceedings, Michael said, 'We have to leave tonight. We can't afford to pay the rent we owe and buy stock for the café. Let's pack.'

I helped. I noticed that God didn't protest at all. If people don't believe in you, why should you pay them? There's a more than etymological link between credit and credence.

I was surprised at how little they actually owned between them (they took the cassoulet, though I don't think the pot was theirs, but then they could hardly carry it away in their hands). The furniture all went with the apartment. In a very short while, we were all at the bottom of the stairs with four suitcases and a large brown trunk with the initials B.O.G. on it, and Russian and French railway labels. They put the trunk in the wheelchair, which Raphael pushed, and Michael and Gabriel divided the suitcases between them. I took God's arm to steady him (though he didn't really need it any more) and we set off down the alleyway towards the sea-front.

A quarter-moon, low in the sky, caught the masts of the yachts at their moorings and silvered the tops of the waves in the gentle Mediterranean swell. We all stood and looked for a while, and then we all remembered simultaneously how far it was to Menton. Just at that moment, a taxi came slowly along the road, its driver also enjoying the view, on his way back from taking some late-night reveller home. We flagged him down, and, all talking together, persuaded him and haggled with him to take the little company to Menton. I gave him all the money I had on me (would you have done less?) including the Isle of Man sixpence and the Channel Islands threepenny bit - but there still wasn't enough room in the taxi for all of them. So poor old Raphael had to be left behind, slowly pushing the trunk in the wheelchair along that great curve of moonlit sea, as the taxi's lights disappeared in the distance, and I made my way back to my hotel, pausing every few hundred yards to see his bulky figure still pushing. Every time I stopped, I waved, even though I knew he wouldn't be able to see me.

There were good reasons (there always are) why I didn't manage to get along to see them in Menton. There were even better reasons why I didn't go to the South of France from 1939 to 1945. But after that, the reasons became a bit more threadbare, until finally they wore out, and I went.

That's the way it is with the past: first of all, you want to go back at once; then you're scared that it won't be quite the same as it was; then you start dreaming about it and don't want reality to interfere; and finally the dream is so secure that nothing in mere reality can shake it. And that's how it was when I returned.

Nothing was the way I remembered it. Even my French had gone (though I hadn't realised it) because when I asked someone if they could show me the way to God, they must have misunderstood, since they directed me to a cemetery. Mark you, it was a very nice cemetery. High up on a rock that rose out of the town between the mountains and the sea, with trees and flowers (I needed the shade in the midday sun), very lovely, very peaceful, and not too sad at all. Full of the graves of people who had come to Menton for their health, foreigners with T.B. I even found the grave of the Englishman who invented rugby (he had become a clergyman, probably out of guilt, and had been sent to Menton by his parishioners - but he didn't recover). There were some gravestones in Russian nearby, but I didn't think any of them looked like God's (though I don't read Russian characters too well, and I hadn't asked God what his surname was). By and large, though, I didn't think he was really dead.

I sat up in the cemetery and dozed and read till twilight. Then I wandered back through the town, listening for trumpet playing - loud trumpet playing.

And then I gave up, and thought: maybe you can't find him, if you're looking; and: maybe you can only find him if he wants you to; and: anyway, I've met him once already, even if it was only in Monte Carlo. (Menton is nicer than Monte Carlo any day, even if you don't find God).

Mike Rogers

Southampton/Milborne St. Andrew; finished 18.viii.91