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'He learned, for instance, that the bridge evening happened to be its first a
'I thought you didn't believe in fate, sir.'
But Morse was oblivious to the interjection, and continued his fantastic tale. 'When Laius, Jocasta's husband, was killed, it had been on the road between Thebes and Corinth-a road accident, Lewis! When A
Morse's voice trailed off, and his eyes drifted along the other tables in the lounge bar where groups of people sat exchanging the amusing ephemera of a happier, if somewhat shallower, life than A
'So,' resumed Morse, lapping his lips into the level of his pint without a word of gratitude, 'A
'She'd been reading the Oedipus story again in the Penguin translation-probably with one of her pupils-and the ground's all naked and ready for the seeds that were sown that fateful evening. Adoption and birthdays-they were the seeds, Lewis, and it must have been the most traumatic shock of her whole life when the terrible truth dawned on her: Michael Murdoch was her own son. And as the implications whirled round in her mind, she must have seen the whole thing in terms of the fates marking her out as another Jocasta. Everything fitted. Her husband had been killed-killed in a road accident-killed by her own son-a son with whom she'd been having sex-a son who was the father of the child she was expecting. She must have felt utterly powerless against the workings of what she saw as the preordained tragedy of her own benighted life. And so she decides to do the one thing that was left open to her: to stop all the struggling and to surrender to her fate; to co-operate with the forces that were now driving her inexorably to her own death-a death she slowly determines, as she sits through that long and hopeless night, will be the death that Queen Jocasta chose. And so, my old friend, she hanged herself… And had she but known it, the curse had still not finally worked itself out. Michael Murdoch is in the Intensive Care Unit at the J.R.2, and he's blinded himself, Lewis-just as Oedipus did. The whole wretched thing's nothing less than a ghastly re-enactment of the old myth as you can read it in Sophocles. And as I told you, if there was one man guilty of A