Collected Stories

The Printmaker

In the large room Charlotte hangs her prints to dry, like clothes on clothes lines. Three crows, framed by the legs and belly of a cow, have rested for an instant beneath its udder: all over the room this stark image is multiplied, in black and white and tones of green.

The reality was years ago, in France: Charlotte senses that confidently, without being able to recall the moment of observation. Familiar to her is the feeling that a glance from the window, or from a motor-car, has been retained for half a lifetime. ‘This is still the Langevins’ land,’ Monsieur Langevin said in English, the first time he drove her in his white Citroën the fifteen kilometres from Massuery to St Cérase. Obediently she inspected the fields to her right, treeless and uninteresting, cattle grazing. Perhaps there were three crows also.

In the room the suspended sheets are scrutinized, and one in every seven or eight rejected. Fragile, tapering fingers loosen the tiny, variously coloured pegs that hold the prints in place; each inferior reproduction floats softly to the bare-wood floor. Intent upon her task, Charlotte moves silently in the room, seeming almost a ghost among the ubiquitous repetition of what she has created. At thirty-nine she is as slender as ever, her bones as apparent as her flesh. Bright azure eyes illuminate a face that is still a girl’s. Shattered only twice in Charlotte’s appearance is the illusion that time has been defeated; grey strands creep through hair that once was as pale as corn, and on the backs of her hands are the reminders that sun and weather do not pass gently by.

One by one, she picks up the rejected prints where they have dropped. She tears each in half and bundles it into the wooden box that is the room’s repository for wastepaper. Then she examines one of the. suspended sheets, holding it obliquely against the light to see if it has wholly dried. Satisfied that this is so, she releases the pegs and trims the paper in her guillotine. She signs it and writes in pencil 1/50, then places it in a pale green portfolio. She repeats all this with each remaining print, then loosely ties the folder’s tattered ribbons.

‘To look at, there is l’église St Cérase,’ Monsieur Langevin said, that first Wednesday afternoon. He stopped the car in the Place de la Paix and pointed out the way. There was nothing much else in the town, he warned. A park beside the Maison de la Presse, tea-rooms and cafés, the Hostellerie de la Poste. But the church was quite impressive. ‘Well, anyway, the façade,’ Monsieur Langevin added.

Charlotte walked to it, admired the façade and went inside. There was a smell of candle grease and perhaps of incense: it was difficult precisely to identify the latter. Charlotte was seventeen then, her presence in the Langevin household arranged by her father, who set great store by what he referred to as ‘perfect French’. Some acquaintance of his had a connection with a cousin of Madame Langevin; an arrangement had been made. ‘I’ve been good about your drawing,’ her father had earlier claimed, in the parental manner of that time. ‘I’m only asking in return that you acquire the usefulness of perfect French.’ Her father did not believe in her talent for drawing; a businessman himself, he anticipated for his only child a niche in some international commercial firm, where the French she had perfected would float her to desirable heights. Charlotte’s father had her interests – as he divined them – at heart. A prosperous marriage would come latter. He was a conventional man.

In the church of St Cérase she walked by confessionals and the Stations of the Cross, taking no interest at seventeen, only wishing her father hadn’t been insistent on sending her to Massuery. She had every Wednesday afternoon to herself, when Madame Langevin took her children riding. She had Sunday afternoons as well, and every evening when the children had gone to bed. But what on earth could she do on Sunday afternoons except go for a walk in the woods? And in the evenings the family seemed surprised if she did not sit with them. There were in all five children, the youngest still an infant. The twins were naughty and, though only six, knew how to tease. Colette sulked. Guy, a dark-haired boy of ten, was Charlotte’s favourite.

This family’s details were recorded in an unfinished letter in Charlotte’s handbag: the sulking, the teasing, Guy’s charm, the baby’s podginess. Her mother would read between the lines, winkling out an unhappiness that had not been stated; her father would skip a lot. Madame Langevin’s sister is here on a visit. She is tall and languid, an incessant smoker, very painted up, beautifully dressed. Madame Langevin’s quite different, smartly dressed too, and just as good-looking in her way, only nicer in the sense that she wants people to he all right. She smiles a lot and worries. Monsieur Langevin does not say much.

Outside a café in the square she completed the letter, pausing often to make the task last. It was July and necessary to sit in the shade. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky since I arrived. She drank tea with lemon and when she’d sealed the envelope and written the address she watched the people going by. But there were few of them because of the heat of the afternoon – a woman in a blue dress, with sunglasses and a poodle, a child on a bicycle, a man delivering shoe-boxes from a van. Charlotte bought a stamp in a tabac and found the park by the Maison de la Presse. The seats were dusty, and whitened with bird droppings; sunlight didn’t penetrate the foliage of the trees, but at least the place was cool and empty. She read the book she’d brought, The Beautiful and Damned.

Twenty-two years later Charlotte sees herself sitting there, and can even recall the illustration on the cover of the novel – a girl with a cigarette, a man in evening dress. Madame Langevin’s conscientious about speaking French to me, a line in her letter reported. Monsieur practises his English. Charlotte was timid then, and innocent of almost all emotion. In her childhood she’d been aware of jealousy, and there’d always been the affection she felt for her father and her mother; but she had no greater experience of the vagaries of her heart, or even of its nature, and only loneliness concerned her at first at Massuery.

In the room set aside for her work Charlotte slips a green Loden overcoat from a coat-hanger and searches for her gloves, the park at St Cérase still vividly recurring. She might have wept that afternoon, protected by the human absence around her; she rather thought she had. After an hour she had gone to the museum, only to find it shut. Beneath a flamboyant female figure representing Eternal Peace she had waited in the Place de la Paix for the bus that would take her back to the gates of Massuery.

‘Describe to me England,’ Madame Langevin’s sister requested that evening, practising her English also. ‘Describe to me the house of your father. The food of England is not agreeable, n’est-ce pas?’

Replying, Charlotte spoke in French, but the tall, beautifully dressed woman stopped her. She wanted to hear the sound of English, it made a change. She yawned. The country was tedious, but so was Paris in July.

So Charlotte described the house where she lived, and her mother and her father. She explained how toast was made because Madame Langevin’s sister particularly wanted to know that, and also how English butchers hung their beef. She wasn’t sure herself about the beef and she didn’t know the names of the various joints, but she did her best. Madame Langevin’s sister lay listening on a sofa, her cigarette in a black holder, her green silk dress clinging to her legs.

‘I have heard of Jackson’s tea,’ she said.

Charlotte had not. She said her parents did not have servants. She did not know much about the Royal Family, she confessed.

‘Pimm’s Number One,’ Madame Langevin’s sister prompted. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’

The Massuery estate was extensive. Beyond the gardens there were fields where sheep grazed, and beyond the fields there were plantations of young trees, no more than a foot high. On the slopes beyond them, firs grew in great profusion, and sometimes the chain-saws whirred all day long, an ugly sing-song that grated on Charlotte’s nerves.

In front of the house, early every morning, gardeners raked the gravel. An old man and a boy, with rakes wider than Charlotte had ever seen before, worked for an hour, destroying every suspicion of a weed, smoothing away the marks of yesterday’s wheels. The same boy brought vegetables to the house an hour or so before lunch, and again in the evening.

Marble nymphs flanked the front door at Massuery. A decorated balustrade accompanied the steps that rose to the left and right before continuing grandly on, as a single flight. The stone of the house was greyish-brown, the slatted shutters of its windows green. Everything at Massuery was well kept up, both inside and out. The silver, the furniture, the chandeliers, the tapestries of hunting scenes, the chessboard marble of the huge entrance hall, were all as lovingly attended to as the gravel. The long, slender stair-rods and the matching brass of the banister were regularly polished, the piano in the larger of the two salons kept tuned, the enamel of the dining-room peacocks never allowed to lose its brilliance. Yet in spite of all its grandeur, Massuery possessed only one telephone. This was in a small room on the ground floor, specially set aside for it. A striped wallpaper in red and blue covered the walls, matching the colours of an ornate ceiling. A blue-shaded light illuminated the telephone table and the chair in front of it. There were writing materials and paper for noting messages on. Madame Langevin’s sister, with the door wide open, sat for hours in the telephone room, speaking to people in Paris or to those who, like herself, had left the city for the summer months.

‘Mon Dieu!’ Monsieur Langevin would sometimes murmur, passing the open door. Monsieur Langevin was grey at the temples. He was clean-shaven, of medium height, with brown eyes that became playful and indulgent in his children’s presence. But the children, while agreeable to their father’s spoiling of them, were equally fond of their mother, even though it was she who always punished them for their misdemeanours. There was the day the twins put the cat in the chimney, and the day the bough of the apricot tree collapsed beneath their weight, and the morning old Jules couldn’t find his shoes, not a single pair. There were occasions when Colette refused to speak to anyone, especially to Charlotte, when she lay on her bed, her face turned to the wall, and picked at the wallpaper. Monsieur Langevin was as angry about that as he was about the cat in the chimney, but in each case it was Madame Langevin who arranged for whatever deprivation appeared to her to be just.

Madame Langevin’s sister was having an affair. Her husband arrived at the house every Thursday night, long after dinner, close on midnight. He came on the Paris train and remained until Sunday evening, when he took a sleeper back again. He was a vivacious man, not as tall as his wife, with a reddish face and a small black moustache. After his first weekend Madame Langevin told Charlotte that her sister had married beneath her, but even so she spoke affectionately of her brother-in-law, her tone suggesting that she was relaying a simple fact. Madame Langevin would not speak ill of anyone, nor would she seek, maliciously, to wound: she was not that kind of woman. When she mentioned her sister’s love affair, she did so with a shrug. On her sister’s wedding-day she had guessed that there would be such a development: with some people it was a natural thing. ‘Le monde,’ Madame Langevin said, her tone neither condemning her sister nor dis-paraging her brother-in-law in his cuckold role.

Charlotte descends dimly lit stairs from her flat to the street, the green portfolio under her arm. The chill of a December morning has penetrated the house. The collar of her Loden overcoat is turned up, a black muffler several times wound round her neck. Does it happen, she wonders in other people’s lives that a single event influences all subsequent time? When she was five she was gravely ill, and though she easily remembers the drama there was, and how she sensed a closeness to death and was even reconciled to it, the experience did not afterwards pursue her. She left it, snagged in its time and place, belonging there while she herself went lightly on. So, too, she had left behind other circumstances and occurrences, which had seemed as if they must surely cast perpetually haunting shadows: they had not done so. Only that summer at Massuery still insistently accompanies her, established at her very heart as part of her.

‘It is the yellow wine of the Jura,’ Monsieur Langevin said, in English still. ‘Different from the other wines of France.’

From the windows of Massuery you could see the mountains of the Jura. Spring and early summer were sometimes cold because of wind that came from that direction. So they told her: the Jura was often a conversational topic.

‘Is there a doctor at hand?’ Madame Langevin’s sister inquired, quoting from an English phrase-book she had made her husband bring her from Paris. ‘What means “at hand”? Un médian sur la main? C’est impossible!’ With the precision of the bored, Madame Langevin’s sister selected another cigarette and placed it in her holder.

‘The lover is a younger man,’ Madame Langevin passed on in slowly articulated French. ‘Assistant to a pharmacist. One day of course he will wish to marry and that will be that.’

First thing in the morning, as soon as I open my eyes, the smell of coffee being made wafts through my open window. It is the servants’ breakfast, I think. Later, at half past eight, ours is served in an arbour in the garden, and lunch is taken there too, though never dinner, no matter how warm the evening. On Sundays Monsieur Langevin’s mother comes in a tiny motor-car she can scarcely steer. She lives alone except for a housekeeper, in a village thirty kilometres away. She is small and formidable, and does not address me. Sometimes a man comes with her, a Monsieur Ogé with a beard. He speaks to me in detail about his health, and afterwards I look up the words 1 do not know. Other relations occasionally come on Sundays also, Madame’s cousin from Saulieu and her husband, and the widow of a general.

During the war, when there were only women and children at Massuery, a German soldier was discovered in the grounds. He had made himself a shelter and apparently lived on the remains of food thrown out from the house. He would not have been discovered had he not, in desperation, stolen cheese and bread from a larder. For more than a week the women lived with the knowledge of his presence, catching glimpses of him at night, not knowing what to do. They assumed him to be a deserter and yet were not certain, for he might as easily have been lost. In the end, fearing they were themselves being watched for a purpose they could not fathom, they shot him and buried him in the garden. ‘Ici,’ Madame Langevin said, pointing at a spot in the middle of a great oval flowerbed where roses grew. ‘C’était moi,’ she added, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. On a wet night she and her mother-in-law and a maidservant had waited for the soldier to emerge. Her first two shots had missed him and he’d advanced, walking straight towards them. Her third shot made him stagger, and then she emptied both barrels into his body. She’d only been married a few months, not much older than Charlotte was now. She seems so very gentle, Charlotte wrote. You can’t imagine it.

On 14 August, a date that was to become enshrined in Charlotte’s consciousness, she was driven again to her Wednesday-afternoon freedom by Monsieur Langevin. But when they came to the Place de la Paix, instead of opening the car door as usual and driving on to his mid-week appointment, he said:

‘I have nothing to do this afternoon.’

He spoke, this time, in French. He smiled. Like her, he said, he had hours on his hands. He had driven her to St Cérase specially, she realized then. On all previous Wednesday afternoons it had been convenient to give her a lift and, now, when it was not, he felt some kind of obligation had been established.

‘I could have caught the bus at the gates,’ she said.

He smiled again. ‘That would have been a pity, Charlotte.’

This was the first intimation of his feelings for her. She didn’t know how to reply. She felt confused, and knew that she had flushed. He’s such a charming man, she’d written. Both Monsieur and Madame are charming people. There’s no other word for it.

‘Let me drive you some place, Charlotte. There’s nothing to do here.’

She shook her head. She had a few things to buy, she said, after which she would return to Massuery as usual, on the bus. She would be all right.

‘What will you do, Charlotte? Look at the front of the church again? The museum isn’t much. It doesn’t take long to drink a cup of coffee.’

The French her father wished her to perfect was far from perfect yet. Haltingly, she replied that she enjoyed her Wednesday afternoons. But even as she spoke she knew that what she’d come to enjoy most about them was the drive with Monsieur Langevin. Before, she hadn’t dared to allow that thought to form. Now, she could not prevent it.

‘I’ll wait,’ Monsieur Langevin said, ‘while you do your shopping.’

When she returned to the car he drove to a country hotel, almost fifty kilometres away. It was ivy-covered, by a river, with doves in the garden and a stream near by. They sat at a table beneath a beech tree, but nobody came hurrying out to ask them what they’d like. The garden was deserted; the hotel seemed so too. Everyone was sleeping, Monsieur Langevin said.

‘Are you happy at Massuery, Charlotte?’

She was three feet away from him, yet she could feel a fondness that made her faintly dizzy. Her flesh tingled, as though the tips of his fingers had touched her forearm and were sending reverberations through her body. Yet they hadn’t. She tried to think of his children, endeavouring to imagine Colette and the twins at their most tiresome. She tried to think of Madame Langevin, to hear her soft, considerate voice. But nothing happened. All there was was the presence of the man she was with, his white car drawn up in the distance, the small round table at which they sat. A deception was taking place. Already they were sharing a deception.

‘Yes, I am happy at Massuery now.’

‘You were not at first?’

‘I was a little lonely.’

Charlotte walks swiftly through the grey December streets with her port-folio. There was another print, a long time ago, of that round white table, and two faceless figures sitting at it. There was one of three women blurred by heavy rain, waiting among the dripping shrubs. There was one of Massuery caught in dappled sunlight, another of children playing, another of a white Citroën with nobody in it.

They like you, Charlotte. Guy most of all perhaps.’

‘I like them now too.’

They returned to the car when they had talked a while. Only, perhaps, an hour had passed: afterwards she calculated it was about an hour. No one had served them.

‘Everyone is still asleep,’ he said.

How had it happened that he put his arms around her? Had they stopped in their walk across the grass? Afterwards she realized they must have. But in her memory of the moment she was only aware that she had murmured protests, that the palms of both her hands had pressed against his chest. He hadn’t kissed her, but the passion of the kiss was there. Afterwards she knew that too.

‘Dear Charlotte,’ he said, and then: ‘Forgive me.’

She might have fainted and, as though he sensed it, he took her arm, his fingers lightly supporting her elbow, as a stranger on the street might have. He told her, as he drove, about his childhood at Massuery. The old gardener had been there, and nothing much had changed in the house. A forest of birches that had been sold for timber after the war had been replanted. In the fields where sunflowers were grown for their oil now there had been wheat before. He remembered carts and even oxen.

The white Citroën turned in at the gates and glided between the plane trees on the drive, its tyres disturbing the gravel. There’d been an oak close to the house, but its branches had spread too wide and it had been felled. He pointed at the place. They walked up the steps together, and into the hall.

That evening at dinner Madame Langevin’s sister tried out a new phrase. ‘My friend and I desire to attend a theatre,’ she repeated several times, seeking guidance as to emphasis and pronunciation. No one remarked upon the fact that Charlotte had returned in the car with Monsieur Langevin, when always previously on Wednesdays she had arrived back on the bus. No one had noticed; no one was interested. It had been just a moment, she told herself, just the slightest thing. She hadn’t been able to reply when he asked her to forgive him. He hadn’t even taken her hand.

When Sunday came, Monsieur Langevin’s mother brought the bearded Monsieur Ogé who talked about his health, and the widow of the general was there also. The deceived husband was in particularly good spirits that day. ‘Mow chéri,’ Madame Langevin’s sister murmured on the telephone after he’d left for the railway station in the evening. ‘C’est trop cruel.’

When Wednesday came Madame Langevin asked Charlotte if she’d mind taking the bus to St Cérase today because her husband was not going in that direction. And the following Wednesday, as though a precedent had been set by that, it seemed to be assumed that she would take the bus also. Had Madame Langevin somehow discovered? Her manner did not suggest it, but Charlotte remembered her philosophical tone when she’d first spoken of her sister’s relationship with the pharmacist’s assistant, her matter-of-fact acceptance of what clearly she considered to be an absurdity.

Sitting at the café where her solitary presence had become a Wednesday-afternoon feature, Charlotte tried to feel relieved that she’d been saved a decision. But would she really have said no if he’d offered, again, to drive her somewhere pleasant, or would her courage have failed her? Alone at the café, Charlotte shook her head. If he’d asked her, her longing to be with him would have quenched her conventional protests: courage did not come into it.

That day, she went again to the museum and sat in the dusty park. She sketched a hobby-horse that lay abandoned by a seat. The deception was still there, even though he’d changed his mind. Nothing could take it from them.

‘Tu es triste,’ Guy said when she bade him good-night that evening. ‘Pourquoi es-tu triste, Charlotte?’ Only three weeks were left of her time at Massuery: that was why she was sad, she replied, which was the truth in part. ‘Mais tu reviendras,’ Guy comforted, and she believed she would. It was impossible to accept that she would not see Massuery again.

The man nods appreciatively. He knows what he wants and what his clients like. The décor he supplies is enhanced by a pale-framed pleasantry above a minibar or a television set. In the bedrooms of fashionable hotels –and in boardrooms and directors’ dining-rooms and the offices of industrial magnates – Charlotte’s summer at Massuery hangs.

While her patron examines what she has brought him today, she sees herself walking in the Massuery woods, a lone, slight figure among the trees. What was it about her that had made a man of the world love her? She’d not been without a kind of beauty, she supposes, but often she’d been awkward in her manner and certainly ill-informed in conversation, naïve and credulous, an English schoolgirl whose clothes weren’t smart, who hardly knew how to make up her face and sometimes didn’t bother. Was it her very artlessness that had attracted his attention? Had he somehow delighted in the alarmed unease that must have been displayed in her face when he said he’d wait for her to finish her shopping? With long hindsight, Charlotte believes she had noticed his attention from the very first day she arrived at Massuery. There was a fondness in the amused glances he cast at her, which she had not understood and had not sought to. Yet as soon as he permitted the frisson between them, as soon as his manner and his words created it, she knew that being in his company was in every way different from being in Madame Langevin’s, though, before, she had assumed she liked them equally. With that same long hindsight, Charlotte believes she came to love Monsieur Langevin because of his sense of honour and his strength, yet she knows as well that before she was aware of these qualities in him her own first stirrings of emotion had surfaced and, with unconscious propriety, been buried.

Madame Langevin’s sister embraced her warmly the day Charlotte left Massuery. ‘Farewell,’ she wished her, and inquired if that was what was said on such occasions in England. The children gave her presents. Monsieur Langevin thanked her. He stood with his hands on Colette’s shoulders, removing one briefly to shake one of Charlotte’s. It was Madame Langevin who drove her to the railway station, and when Charlotte looked back from the car she saw in Monsieur Langevin’s eyes what had not been there a moment before: the anguish of the sadness that already claimed their clandestine afternoon. His hands remained on his daughter’s shoulders but even so it was as if, again, he’d spoken. At the railway station Madame Langevin embraced her, as her sister had.

Journeying through late September sunshine, Charlotte wept in a corner of her compartment. He respected Madame Langevin too much to betray her in the way her sister betrayed the husband she’d once chosen. Nor was he a man to cause his children pain in order to gratify a selfishness in himself. She knew all that, and in turn respected him. Her resignation was melancholy on that train journey, but with the balm of passing time it became more bearable.

‘You’re miles away, Charlotte,’ young men would later amusedly accuse, and she’d apologize, already back at Massuery. Listening to the young men’s chatter, she descended again the wide staircase, and walked in the woods. Such memories made it easier when with embarrassed gaucheness the young men seized her hand, or kissed her. When proposals came, her private reply was to see the white car waiting for her in the Place de la Paix, while aloud she apologized to whoever had got it into his head that she was free to love him.

‘These’ll ring the changes,’ the man who has commissioned the new prints says. When a business-room or the bedrooms of a hotel are repainted he always likes to have fresh curtains and fresh prints as well; it’s something that’s expected. In six months’ time, he says, he may be ready for another contribution from her. ‘That’s something to be thinking about, my love.’ He always calls her that. He has mahogany-coloured hair with a spring in it; the stubble on his chin and neck grows so slightly and so softly that he hardly has to shave. ‘We’ll send a cheque,’ he says.

Charlotte thanks him. There are other such men, and women too, who remember her when they want something new and unexacting for their décor. They admire her prints more than Charlotte does herself; for her the prints are by the way. What matters more is the certainty of her faith: even without thinking she knows that time, for her lover also, has failed to absorb the passion that was not allowed. For all the years that have passed she has thought of him as that; and dwelling on the nature of love during all that time she has long ago concluded that it’s a mystery, appearing to come from nowhere, no rhyme nor reason to it. The truth will not yield: why did so unsuitably, so cruelly almost, two people love?

Daylight hasn’t properly penetrated the December drabness. Fog shrouds the streets; the pavements are dampened by it. Busy with their assets and takeovers, the men of the business-rooms have probably never noticed the prints that hang there. ‘How charming that is!’ a woman, half-dressed in a hotel bedroom, may have remarked after the scurry of afternoon love or in some idle moment during a weekend’s deceit.

Charlotte sits for a while in the corner of a bar, her green portfolio empty beside her. No one else, except two barmen, are there so early in the day. She sips with pleasure the glass of red wine that has been brought to her; she lights a cigarette and with slow deliberation drops the spent match into the discoloured plastic ashtray in front of her. Then idly, on the cover of her folder, she sketches a funeral procession, sombre between two lines of plane trees. When eventually he sees it the man with the mahogany hair will display no curiosity, for he never does; in the rooms destined for her funeral scene no one will wonder either.

She finishes her wine and catches the eye of the taller barman. He brings her another glass. She remembers her father being angry, and her mother frowning in bewilderment. She never told them what she might have; but her father was angry because she had no ambition, because one young man after another was so summarily rejected. ‘You’re alone so,’ her mother sadly observed. Charlotte did not attempt to explain, for how could happily married people understand that such flimsiness could become the heart of a human existence? Ambitions in this direction or that, and would-be husbands keenly persuading, seemed empty of seriousness, ludicrous almost, compared with what she had.

She has never seen Monsieur Langevin’s handwriting, but imagines it is large and sloping, a little like Guy’s was. She knows she’ll never see it, for the thoughts that occur to her from time to time leave no illusions behind them: no letter will ever inform her that Madame Langevin, a month or so ago, was thrown from her horse – as once, unable to help herself, she dreamed. The funeral is not a hope, only another image from her printmaker’s stock. Why should an honourable deception end in romance? Rewards for decency are not duly handed out.

Their love affair, for her, is there among the memories of a summer, with the people of a household, the town she visited, Guy saying she will return, the sound of the gravel raked, the early-morning smell of coffee. For Monsieur Langevin, the deception is lived with every day, pain blinked away, words bitten back. For both of them, the pattern of their lives has formed around a moment in an afternoon. It is not often so, her lover tells her in yet another silent conversation. He, too, is grateful.