Dear Thief

14

And you? Content?

No; somewhat less than content. If I think about this desert of yours I see trees rather than sand, but it is a sparse scattering of trees, which are very upright, pines or birches, and in the middle a house, or more likely a hut. In this hut a table with a single chair and a bed, in fact the charpoy my parents brought back from India for you, but the base has holes in it where the ropes have come unknotted. Here you lie at your maximum discomfort without a mattress and with your legs falling off the end; charpoys were not made for your Eastern European stock — nevertheless you do have a pile of blankets, not particularly soft, but thick and heavy enough to keep you warm. Under the charpoy on the floor are your clothes, a pair of shoes and a pair of boots. In this spare and functional scene your womanliness lives in one single object — the fine, soft shawl over the back of the chair, ingrained with years of perfume and pulled shapeless where you have worked your fingers through the crochet.

There are also a small number of books and a solid-fuel stove and, let me see, a sandwich toaster. My imagination grants you electricity. If you are to have electricity then there is also an overhead bulb and a pump to supply water from the spring and — no, the luxury must stop there. On the whole you have a towering nonchalance about food and also the suspicion you reserve for everything that tells you you need it; but even so it is amazing what you’ve been able to make in that sandwich toaster. Toasted honey sandwiches are the supper staple and you also find that sliced apple and honey works, as does pear, and if those fruits, then why not vegetables — you boil them first on top of the stove and there it is: toasted carrot-and-swede sandwiches, or beetroot-and-cabbage, and potato dumplings; you’ve toasted a piece of gammon, smoked sausage, eel, and sometimes you’ve dispensed with the bread and clinched a filleted perch or herring between the ridged grills and eaten it off the hotplate. Who needs an oven? you mutter with a cigarette between your lips.

What is around you? Nothing. I see no neighbours or even a lake that would give the wilderness meaning, I just see these scattered trees for an indefinite distance. Early in the morning you come out of your hut and stretch. You collect pine needles from the ground to make a mulch for growing vegetables on the nine-feet-square plot you’ve dug over behind the hut, where you have some potatoes, carrots, mint, beans and peas, that sort of thing. Beetroot that keeps going into October, swedes into January. You grow them without gusto and with the almost reproachful lack of fuss that makes everything and everyone want to do its best for you, to be the one thing to hook your attention.

I suspect you walk for some part of the day out in the maze of trees and drop cigarette butts to guide your way back. By and large, though, you sit at the table and study the Upanishads. You appraise every word of them, each abstruse, unwavering and rousing word. Book II of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the book of joy: Man’s elemental Self comes from food: this his head; this his right arm; this his left arm; this his heart; these legs his foundation. You get up and pace. Food gives rise to the Self? Food gives rise to the Self? The Self — Atman — is in food, and rises from food to vegetation to earth to water to air to Spirit to Brahman. Atman and Brahman are in the eel pressed indecorously between two pieces of stale bread! In the lowest things the glow of universal Spirit — but wait, the elemental Self, the living Self, the thinking Self. Legs are the elemental Self, but is the head, the brain, the mind? Is the mind elemental or living or thinking? They who think of food as Spirit shall never lack. Shall never lack! Brahman in the eel, the smeared pork grease, the beetroot!

Often, these little revelations. They give you a radiant smile. You proceed at one page a day, if lucky, and when you have finished the ten books you start again, Book I, The Lord: This is perfect. This is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. At one time you’ll close your eyes, sit back and hook your hands over the ridges of your hips in pure pleasure at those opening words; at another time you’ll flatten your hand across the page in undiluted fury. What is perfect? Nothing is perfect! This is pompous. This is pompous. Pompous comes from pompous. Maybe you’ll throw the whole volume on the fire like you do the other books you hate, except its lies would probably put the fire out.

Later you will deride yourself for your lack of cultivation after all this time and for the way you live like an animal, or less than an animal, because at least animals mate and stay busy. You — you are just killing time on Earth before you can be allowed to die. On the loneliest or most self-denying of days you will try to affirm yourself again by writing a postcard to the one person on Earth you find simple enough to love. Dear Teddy, I’m well and still living in the desert, you’ll say.

Your last choice of postcard was exemplary, the chihuahua in the Tommy Cooper hat, and it warms me because I know why you chose it from whatever display carousel in whatever town you happened to be in. We watched Tommy Cooper die onstage in front of an audience who laughed because they thought it was part of the act, and though you never said it in so many words, I know you’ve felt this could be an analogy for your life. You were dying onstage in full view of everyone. This was the first thing I thought when I found your postcard to Teddy: she’s making a point, and the point is that she’s dying in such a way that everybody thinks she’s deep in the act of living. She is dying. She wants me to know, yet she doesn’t want me to take it seriously, at least no more seriously than you could take a chihuahua. No sooner does she make the cry for help than she lets loose the wry smile.

I see you pushing the half-written postcard to the side of the table and cooking up the mushrooms you foraged without the slightest idea of edibility. You pull the chair close to the table and take up your knife and fork with a serene hum. You eat with your back straight and your hair combed, in case it turns out to be your last supper.

15

As for me, most days I make an effort to do good. I flannel down withering bodies in baths and give insulin injections into bellies. I am asking a woman how it was to grow up during the war and, before she knows it, the needle has been in and come out again. Their poor bodies are pricked like dough with all the drugs in and the blood out. I help them get to their rooms to find a thing it turns out they never owned and which they wanted for a purpose they can’t remember, so we go slowly back to the chair from whence we came and say nothing of it. I spend much of the day taking people to the toilet, pulling down their underwear and waiting for the movement that was so urgent a minute before but which doesn’t come.

It’ll come when it’s ready, I say, which means nothing more or less than that. It isn’t to say it’ll come when we’re ready. Maybe we’ll have returned again to the chair and there won’t be time to get back to the toilet. What does it matter? We speak of dignity, but dignity is nothing more than being accepted. I feed them, I clear the food from their laps, I dab the spilt tea off their collars, I help them on with their nightclothes and out with their teeth, I snap the lids off their vials, I see past their rages, and furthermore they let me. The pay is abysmal and it isn’t true that job satisfaction, as such, makes up for it. It isn’t like a hospice that aids people as restfully as possible towards death, but more like an alpine crevasse in which people hang as desperately as possible onto life, and increasingly one they don’t even want. There isn’t any satisfaction in supporting the insupportable. For me, the satisfaction comes from somewhere else. One day I lifted the loose flesh of an old woman’s breast so I could wash underneath and I passed no judgement. I used to think: Why does it come to this? Why do we suffer? Why can’t you piss now that we’re here in the place people piss, rather than piss over there? If you pissed in the right place there’d be no pads, no rubber sheets. Why must our breasts collapse? Why must our teeth come loose?

I lifted that flaccid breast and all I thought was: Oh well, breast gone to the dogs. When I looked up at the woman’s face I saw a person who had borne the brunt of a joke, and without thinking I squeezed her hand and laughed. She looked down at her chest and began to laugh too, and as I carried on washing her neck, shoulders and arms the laughter died down into smiles that were so full of the shared joke that each time we caught one another’s eye we started up again.

What is it to be acceptable? Isn’t it just for somebody to accept us? The thought comes: Why can’t you feed yourself? Why does it come to this? Then the better thought comes: I accept you. But acceptance takes so much effort; am I really equal to the task? If I am asked to do overtime at work I refuse, because too long there makes you brutal. Sometimes I can feel it myself when I start seeing the place as an opportunity to scrape together a little more money and then realise in bitterness that the exhausting toil of it isn’t worth the money scraped. I take it out on the bodies that generate the never-ending toil by being a little less gentle, a little less patient, a little more coercive, and then I hate them for being so easily coerced.

I always wanted a gentle nature. I was over forty by the time I realised I was not going to develop one. My father had one, my mother too underneath the effusive spirit, which meant that it was in my genes and that there would be an onset at some point in life — a sudden, incurable onset of gentleness. The day it struck me that this wasn’t going to be the case was the day I saw Teddy being the diplomat, just like my father. I’d gone to pick him up after a night at the cinema and when I pulled up he was walking over to a group of men fighting. I watched him, a sixteen-year-old, extend his arms between the two factions and part them like curtains, without force or threat. Nobody would touch Teddy, he was dovelike; my father would have done just the same in that situation with the same effect, not only calming violence but converting violence into calm.

I know now that the gentle gene skipped a generation. It had come to Teddy by adolescence and most likely long before that. I heard you say, ‘If a thing you want isn’t coming by nature, then you must make it come by design; if you can’t design it either, spoof it.’ With this in mind I applied for the job at a care home just off the Finchley Road, up near Swiss Cottage — The Willows it’s called, and I do not (am I too serious?) join the others in calling it The Wallows. At work I do gentle things and through them I feel more like my father and Teddy. In feeling more like them I act more like them, and then feel more like them; the circle is virtuous as far as it goes. I hear stories that repeat on ten-minute loops, I pluck the hairs from a woman’s chin, I put dressings on a man’s bedsores, I hold the hand of a ninety-year-old screaming at her bowl of stewed rhubarb and look patiently into the back of her mouth at the vibrating uvula. I shrug as I remove the bowl. ‘I don’t like rhubarb much, either,’ I say. I put a steady hand against her cheek, against all their cheeks. It’s alright, I tell them. I don’t mean it is going to be alright, I mean it is now, already, so long as it can be accepted.

Happiness doesn’t come in the way I expected; not a massing of good things over time, but a succession of small, strange and unowned moments — the sun makes a hot oblong on the bedroom floor and I stand in it with my eyes closed. The coriander germinates in the window box and up comes the seedling. The bled radiators stop knocking at night. Just after the first bar of Coltrane’s ‘Naima’ I’m reminded of ‘Ruby, My Dear’ and at the end of ‘Ruby, My Dear’ I’m reminded suddenly of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’. New connections! As if the world’s hands are joined. I spent over half my life waiting for the accumulation of happiness and then I realised that it doesn’t accumulate at all, it just occurs here and there, like snow that falls and never settles. Not the drifts that you and I imagined we would plough ourselves into, but instead gently, opportunistically, holding one’s tongue out to catch the flakes.

Anyway, this morning when I caught my reflection getting out of bed, I was young; it must have been something to do with the movement, the transition that made me look it. I got dressed without looking again. Late morning I went out to meet Ruth, whom I know you’ll remember because she delighted you; a paediatrician, you’d said with a nod when I told you. ‘Oh, to be a sick child and be in Ruth’s hands,’ you said. ‘Doesn’t she make you feel comforted somehow, as if humankind is working? As if all the old loose ends are now accounted for?’

I saw her, and she gave me a ticket to a matinee that afternoon of a Pinter play that she couldn’t go to because she had been called into work; she was supposed to be going with her daughter and she insisted that I went so that her daughter wouldn’t be on her own. The play was Monologue, one man speaking for half an hour to the empty chair next to him where he imagined his friend of old to be. Ruth’s daughter was rapturous about it afterwards, about the subtext and everything that wasn’t said. For myself, for half of the play I’d fought the urge to go and sit in the empty chair. For the other half I’d fought the urge to leave and find an address to send this letter to. No good writing to Butterfly if Butterfly can never read what’s written, no good. Not a form of expression at all, but a form of silencing. No good this man talking to a chair, better that he talked to his own navel than to a seat without a sitter.

I went to the map shop on Long Acre and bought a map of Lithuania, which I took home and studied. How else am I to start finding you? If I went to the Lithuanian Embassy and asked to see a phone book I know you wouldn’t be in it. If I asked the handful of people I know who knew you, they’ll have less idea about you than I have. It feels like a form of code-breaking to squint at this map and try to fathom you from the printed pixels, to try to deduce your whereabouts from things you said, did, bought, thought, things you hoped for, things you hated. There are areas I know you won’t be, the towns and cities. I think you must be in the forest. Probably because of what you wrote on Teddy’s postcard about living in the desert I’m drawn towards Nida and the west, though I know there are far too many tourists for you to be near the dunes themselves. The north-western forests maybe, close to the Latvian border where nobody will think to look for you.

By the time Nicolas came round in the evening I was cooking; I smiled when I saw it was him at the door. I had been singing to the music coming in through the window. I had drunk a little. We ate a split portion of pasta and mussels and played a hand of Whist. But as we were lying in bed about to sleep I thought of the map I’d folded and put on the bookshelf, and then of the lost cow shin somewhere in the Thames or on the shore, and of the lock of black hair in a box between two sheets of newspaper. Every gentle notion I’d trained myself to have deserted me for no reason, as if I were two people in one form. I do good, I sponge down aching backs, I inject insulin painlessly, I massage knotted feet. Most things have become alright by me, most arrangements, I don’t distinguish between the conventional and unconventional or the good and bad, and I don’t have any interest in judging. But sometimes still, even on a day that’s going well, this lack of tolerance, what Nicolas this evening called the dirty fire: you burn and leave soot, he said when I asked him suddenly to go home.

But it was his fault, I told him. He came round on a whim, he ate half my dinner, I was still hungry as a matter of fact, I had nine mussels. Nine! I was starving. He had his elbow on my hair while we made love and because he was so deeply absorbed in his own pleasure I couldn’t attract his attention to tell him it was pulling. My scalp was sore, in case he was interested, and I was tired of winning at Whist and didn’t understand why he couldn’t make an effort. Just a small effort to win! Would it hurt?

So he got out of bed and plucked his clothes off the floor. ‘You burn and leave soot,’ he said on his way out. ‘My mother warned me about you, she warned me about beautiful women, their aftermath.’

‘Your mother was a despot,’ I replied, and I shoved the door closed behind him with my foot and sat down to write this, and have been writing it since with the map spread on the floor. Now that dawn is coming the feeling of intolerance has gone completely, and all I have, looking at the map, is a recollection of you talking about the disappearance of your country’s forests, hacked down by the Russians and replaced with chemical plants and fertiliser works. Whatever upset me before now seems to have transferred onto these lost ash and oak groves and become more a sense of regret. Nicolas’ mother was not a despot, she was soft-shouldered and charitable. When there are so many true things that can be said in life, I don’t know why I say the things that aren’t.

16

Does this come hard to you, when I say Nicolas was here? Or does it make you laugh?

There is a particular thing he used to always do with me; I don’t know if he ever did it with you. He would be bouncing a football from one knee to the other, or hurling a tennis ball at the back wall of the house and catching it on the rebound, or cooking, or reading Private Eye, and as I passed him he would tease, ‘It doesn’t matter how much you know, you will never know what I’m thinking now.’ It pleased him, he would stop what he was doing — put one hand on my stomach, one on my lower back, and kiss my neck in delight at this philosophical ace he found in his hand; ah yes, we are each of us fortified palaces! There is a room at the centre that nobody will ever reach. It made the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘Unless I tell you what I’m thinking, you can never know it. Even if you know everything else in the world,’ he would say.

When I think of him being here, or wait for him to arrive, I think of him as if he will still be like this — with his boylike smile and his curved brow and his pleasure at this little game that was almost sexual, that said I could never drill down deeply enough to know what he was really made of, but which invited me to try. But it is nothing like this any more, as I have perhaps said. There is no longer this simultaneous invitation and denial; instead he comes round and we talk about Teddy and he sits on the sofa with his hands clasped and smiles as if all I see is all I get. At night, he used to wake me up to tell me something of no consequence — sometimes a joke, sometimes an anecdote, bubbles that rose to the surface of his mind when it was dark and quiet; now he sleeps as if he is catching up with all those accumulated years of wakeful moments, sleeping off the jokes, the little tales, while I get stuck in bad dreams.

(I say bad dreams, and I mean it literally, as in a bad book or a bad film — dreams that show no imagination whatsoever. I am about to sit an exam without having revised, I have to catch a flight and I am walking with my suitcase along an empty road, in search of the airport. I wake up and remember the dreams with grubby embarrassment; they call up a flash of otherwise defunct religious shame. I see the Lord shift and roll his eyes. Why, when he has given his people brains of extraordinary power and infinite creativity, must they keep dreaming about exams and being late for flights? And I see him finally forsake me, not because I have wronged him but because I have bored him.)

But you know, it is strange, since beginning this letter on Boxing Day I have started having dreams on your behalf, or at least I don’t know if they are my dreams or yours — I dream them, but I am never in them. You’re in them, and everything is felt through you. Like this one with the rat, which I’ve had the last three times Nicolas has stayed. It is a dream with certain small variations, but each is essentially the same. You are in a room with a rat, which is running towards you. A boisterous dog appears and it picks the rat up in its mouth and brings it to the single bed where you sit pressed against the wall, pleading with the dog to go away, which of course it doesn’t. When it jumps on you, and lays the rat on your chest, you wake up.

Variations: a friend or parent is in the room and has let the rat loose on purpose to frighten you. Or you take the bedside table and smash the last ounce of oxygen out of the rat’s lungs until its flesh is pressed between the floorboards and its blood is all over the walls. Liquid always seems to increase when spilt; it didn’t seem like much blood when inside the rat, but now it looks enough to have come out of a goat.

I wake up when I have these dreams and usually get up, and Nicolas’ rosary clinks against the metal bedstead where he hangs it. I associate this sound with him being in my house. This is when I want to write to you most, after the rat dreams, and I often do. Much of this letter has been written in those odd hours of the night, where the darkness is thick and airless and like soil.

So what is this rat? Why, in my dreams, are you always cowering from it? See how many pages it has taken me to tell you that Nicolas comes over from time to time, and has been doing so for the last year, on and off — this is because I feel ashamed to say it. I think you will mock our cowardice at breaking away but not breaking away. Or you will think we are feeding on your scraps. You who perpetually gamble everything on a whim, just to be free. You who hear the bear in the woods and open your door to let it in. You who can so little stand the scenery staying the same that you have to run through it. To keep running. But Yannis said something the other day, when I asked him about his wife — he said it is the cowards who keep running, and I wonder if he is right. The bravest people are those who are not afraid of things staying the same.

17

You didn’t analyse personalities in the way I am analysing yours. Your strategy was to go to war with people first and ask questions later.

You sit at our table in the cottage in Morda, by the back window, dealing out cards for Solitaire. You take up position here for the best part of a year or two with your Go-Cat playing cards, which you picked up at a church sale in the village. Green-backed with a sinister picture of a tabby. A Square Meal for Bored Cats. You never meant to stay so long, certainly you never meant to live with us, but time bleeds. There is nowhere else you have to be, it is good for me to have an adult presence in the house when Nicolas is away, Teddy loves you for reasons nobody can quite identify, and anyway, time bleeds. You arrive, and before you know it six months have passed and then six more, and your money comes in useful and the back window would be empty without your silhouette.

Some days you are as plain and pale as the northerly light coming through the window behind and we leave you alone in the veil of smoke that makes you look like a sullen bride, bored at her own wedding table. Other days, like this particular and arbitrary day, your eyelids will be painted in heavy purples or oranges right up to the brow and sweeping wide towards your temples, lashes almost unliftably black and heavy. This particular and arbitrary day it is orange and Teddy touches the paint with his finger to see if it is hot. When you raise your eyes from the cards there appears to be an effort; already wide-spaced, these eyes look like they are trying to take off from your face like a weighty bird that needs something to launch itself from but is finally graceful in flight, an albatross, something that means to travel far.

Only your eyes are made-up, in contrast your face is naked and your lips as pale, plump and bare as a bottom, as breasts; I imagine this is what Nicolas is thinking when he says you are disconcerting to look at, like somebody undressed from the waist down. Some days you will be done up like this, some days not. For a time, when you are going most frequently back and forth to London, it is more often than not. You are too much for Morda, but then you always were. You hardly ever go out and when you do I am sure people comment between themselves on sighting you in a lane, as if you were exotica escaped from the zoo.

Instead you play our old table like a veteran croupier, sweeping up the Solitaire hand when I come along and transforming it in seconds into a Poker hand; you just want somebody to do light battle with. The combat zone, we call the table, and a ring forms in the oak grain where your ashtray sits, next to your right hand. You push half the matchsticks you have towards the centre to stay in the game, nails tapping while you wait for me to have a go, head resting languid in a cupped hand. Head surely heavy with the weight of your eyes. ‘Your hair is alive,’ you tell Nicolas when he sits with Teddy in his arms. The crown of his head touches the ceiling, which is lower in the alcove by the window, and his hair rises and waves with static like some plant on the riverbed. ‘You could sell that electricity back to the grid,’ I say. ‘We will be rich at last.’

I push my last few matchsticks in and you murmur, with a smile, Hallelujah! and astonish Nicolas by folding; you had nothing in your hand. I knew you had nothing, you knew I knew, I knew you knew I knew. It is like this with us, no explaining it. Just that games are more interesting between us when we pretend not to know what the other is up to. Teddy stands on Nicolas’ lap and pushes the static out of his hair, cackling with mirth. ‘There go our riches,’ you say, and gather the cards up as swift as a thief.

18

About four months ago, back in October or early November, Ruth mentioned that there was a shortage of life models at the drawing school she goes to, and two weeks later I found myself lying, as if shot, on crusted mustard velvet on an improvised bed in an old chapel with fan heaters turned on me, slightly aggressively I thought, like muskets. I didn’t think long about this decision and I can’t even say it really was a decision so much as a thing I found myself doing, and then doing again. The first time I went to meet the tutor for an interview her eyes lit up. Five foot ten of barely contained dilapidation! An elegance so surface that a pencil nib will scratch it away in no time and find the disaster beneath. This is all art wants, to scratch at the surface and find disaster beneath. You will be a perfect model, she said, and there was no interview, and now I am their emergency on-call nude body who has no regular class but goes when they need me and when work allows. After every class she says, ‘You were so perfect’ (like a bombed temple, she means), and gives me £20, which ought to be £21 for my three-hour sacrifice, but she never has the extra pound in change.

Is this one last act of vanity, I wonder? Yes, I’m sure. Vanity, and also its unlikely partner, surrender. It makes me feel like a piece of fruit in your photograph. I lie or sit (always on this mustard velvet drape that I think used to be a curtain back in its day and now has almost no velvet qualities at all, is more like the grit of a newly fired brick) and I can feel time acting on me, and I have the odd sensation that they can see me ageing as they draw. In some ways this is a tragic feeling, and in some ways wonderful. It’s too late, I think. The days of being desired and being burdened by desire and competing for it, these days are over and now I am what’s left. I give myself over as a sorry offering, I put the twenty-pound note in my pocket at the end and go and buy a book and some cigarettes and some ink, and feel cheap and free and taken from in some small way that I can’t afford. Give what you can’t afford, you used to say; give more than you have. Live in divine debt, it’s the only way to get any return from life. I think in many ways you were right about this. I ache all over and I have shown my bare, pale groin to strangers, and that £20 is the sorriest amount of money I ever make. And it is wonderful really, to be so open at last about this rigged deal we make with life. It is wonderful in its own way.

19

‘It’s sordid,’ Nicolas said when I asked him what he thought of your Still Life with Irascible Hole. He laughed at the title and said, with exaggerated purr, ‘irr-ascible’. And with exaggerated pout, ‘hole’. His mouth surrounded the word and closed it down. He is a man who has always leant a little towards darkness, and for him to call it sordid was no criticism. For him, back then at least, the world was too light, yet also never light enough. Even in the most literal of ways he craved darkness just so that he might shine light into it, and then resented the light for banishing the dark; but we are all paradoxical, aren’t we? We all give ourselves over to these internal battles that we’ll never resolve.

At dinner that evening with my parents I brought up the photograph again. I’m speaking here about events that happened almost a quarter of a century ago, so forgive some laxness with the detail — I remember so well the purr and the pout, and they seem to eclipse my memory around the point I’m trying to make. Because I am trying to make a point. I’m trying to tell you that Nicolas found your photograph sordid and that over the years this appraisal has changed, which I think symbolises something, the meaning of which might be too painful to face. It began when I said over dinner, ‘Nicolas finds the photograph sordid, do you think he’s right?’ When my father asked Nicolas in what way, he answered, ‘Well, it’s all juices and holes, is it trying to be funny?’ ‘Perhaps so,’ my father said, ‘perhaps it is trying to be funny in its own inadvertent way, but that would be its secondary function.’ My mother said that more than sordid or funny, it was a waste of fruit, to which Nicolas laughed guiltily in a way people do when caught between the sacred and profane.

I stayed out of this conversation, having provoked it. My father was right, if the photograph was funny at all it was only by default. You rarely made any attempt at humour, more at depreciation, which meant stripping away the borrowed value of something until it was left with whatever was its own. If that deflowering made it funny, then so it was. I saw Nicolas looking at it several times over the course of that weekend, which was his second visit to Morda, with morbid fascination as if something in him were being pulled into the hole at its centre.

I don’t recall him saying anything more about it for the next six years, even as it hung in the hallway of our home in London, and after that the living room of our miners’ cottage near Morda. He only made a comment again after he had met you for the first time, and then he said that as a work of art he suddenly found it quite trite, quite obvious. He meant by that something grave — that any benefit of the doubt he had given it before was annulled by meeting you, in whose context the photograph was now made clear. He no longer called it sordid. Sordid meant that it and its creator might stir him in some way, obvious meant that neither it nor its creator had any such power to stir one way or another.

Do you understand me when I say it is possible to see a change in another person that they do not yet see in themselves? My grandmother said that insight of this kind was the Lord working through one’s eyes, just as he may work through ears, hands and the senses in general, without limit and whenever so called upon. Lord or not, when Nicolas proclaimed your still life obvious I saw him, without knowing it himself, put up his first defence against his love for you. Two decades later and still it goes on. Recently, in a discussion of the photograph with Ruth and another of her friends from the hospital, he dismissed their praise of it and called it quaint. ‘The light’s good,’ he said. ‘But it’s not radical or troubling or even meaningful; if it’s anything, it’s just quaint.’

With this final denouncement of course he turns to you the hard side of his heart, but in the fumbled manoeuvre we see it — the soft part, the part that is still in such need of his protection.

20

I have been thinking increasingly about your sudden reappearance. Today I was shovelling snow from the front door and I looked up from the ground with a notion that you were there. It was just somebody passing on the street, though I note with interest that this someone was a tall person, far taller than you, and a man at that, which suggests that my memory of you has become overly monumental these long years.

We’ve had a winter of fluctuations, first mild and dreary, and then there was a fortnight of light snow after Christmas and into the new year, followed by a thaw that seemed to swill water around the whole city and flush out its spirit. I’ve never known the streets to be as quiet as they were at the beginning of this month. Now, at the end of February, we have a foot of snow in the parks and some verve has returned, perhaps an exasperated energy from all those who thought spring was coming.

At work we’ve lost three residents over the winter. I don’t know what curious biological programming makes a human who never steps outside more likely to die when the outside is cold. We’re such simple life forms, Butterfly, when it comes down to it. We see the days grow short and the branches bare and our enthusiasm for our own lives fades a little. Frances, under whose breast I found no judgement, is only just now recovering from five weeks of pleurisy and looked for a brief time as though she might make the sad tally four, which would be more losses than we’ve had during the last eighteen months put together. I was surprised by how much the thought of her death affected me. But slowly she’s improving. While Bing Crosby and Frankie Laine drone in the background we’re all given to turning our heads towards the big picture window that looks out over the garden and the summer house and waiting expectantly for a sighting of spring.

21

As you’ll remember, then, you arrived at our back door quite literally out of the blue. A lucid, blue evening in April when the light is so glassy that it is almost a thing in itself, a surface, onto which you seemed to condense. Such was your reappearance: a manifestation. You knocked on the open door and I came into the kitchen with Teddy on my hip to see who was there. You raised your arms outwards in apparent joy at seeing us. The sun, which was low behind you and bursting from cloud, spun through the wings of your crochet shawl, and Teddy jabbed his forefinger into the space between us and you and called — almost sang — your new name in an eruption of happy recognition as if he’d known you for years. ‘Butterfly!’ he said, and for a moment I think you hesitated on the doorstep quite humbled, or otherwise cautioned, at having been so instantly assigned a label in this way.

You stooped under the low door and filled the kitchen with a perfume that was more tree than flower.

‘Teddy, Nicolas, meet Butterfly,’ I joked. In truth I imagined you would hate the name, but it was strange how it so instantly became you. You had always been Nina, and suddenly you were something other, reinvented by the light as if it had dematerialised you and rebuilt you into a new existence. Nicolas had come into the room at some point in this and taken Teddy from me. You reached out your right arm to its full extent and I was surprised, almost perplexed, to see that you still wore the silver cobra. You shook their hands, Nicolas’ with a firm, haughty clasp that made something in his expression stand back as if challenged, and Teddy’s with lightness. His one-year-old hand had never known such formality.

Once you had kissed my cheeks and hugged me, you leant back against the kitchen table and folded your arms.

‘You’re still wearing blue,’ you said. ‘You always wore blue.’

I did often wear blue, dark blue, which you once said made me look like an impending storm, like the rainclouds that come in before the monsoon.

‘And you look like a tree that’s gone green for spring.’

You were wearing a peculiar long green tunic, which you had tied around the waist with a piece of twine, and your hair was unkempt but lustrous even so. Once it would have been long enough to become caught under the twine, but now it was slightly shorter, and thicker, and though you were never the kind of woman one could call ripe, there was something in your thinness that passed for slender, something that, in another less self-denying person, might have been described as energetic or radiant.

‘I can’t believe I’m seeing you.’

‘Nor I you.’

‘After all these years.’

It had been nine years in fact since you had left Morda; you left in ’73 when your parents moved to America, where your father had got a job as a botanist, or botany researcher — I never did quite know what it was he did — at the Smithsonian Institution. Off you went with them to Washington, but when I telephoned you a month later your mother said you had disliked Washington and had left to travel around America; one of your many typically abrupt departures. I can only think they were in temporary accommodation at that time, because by the next time I telephoned, a few months later, their number no longer worked. And neither did you call or write, but then, as we know, that wasn’t exactly your way.

We had been twenty-one the last time we saw one another. And in my mind this was just after you gave me the photograph, although perhaps I have collapsed time a little to fit my memories — but it must have been something like this. You came forward from the table with a bright smile and held your hands out in front of Nicolas. ‘May I?’

He gave Teddy to you. You held him as though you were weighing him for lovability, to see if there really was something in this fleshy little form that could sustain one’s adoration for a lifetime. Teddy was afraid of you. He didn’t often come across strangers. But you were never a person who asked for concessions and you tucked him on your hip in such a way that suggested you were providing a seat that he was very free to leave. He began to play with the great length of hair that fell over your chest and his expression changed from fear to resolve: after all, I will stay here. I will stay right here.

What a thing is this dispassion of yours, Butterfly, that causes everybody to make the same decision?

22

That evening we sat down for dinner. It was you, Nicolas and I.

You looked out of place in the cottage, which I thought was just the awkwardness of the situation. But actually, when I think of it now, you looked out of place almost anywhere substantial. You pulled out a chair and perched on it in a way that seemed to say you weren’t really for chairs, for old oak tables and ranges. I don’t mean to say you were contemptuous or ungrateful, you were just in transit. You looked trapped and as though you wished you could feel differently. Across the table you looked at me as if I were at once beloved and unknown.

‘Is the food okay?’ I asked.

You shook your hair, gestured abundance with your arms, and said to nobody in particular, ‘You were always going to be the most able cook. The most splendid wife and mother.’

I admit to being almost embarrassed as we looked at one another along the table, with a shoulder of beef between us, and Nicolas quietly eating.

‘As for you, Butterfly?’ Nicolas asked, because Butterfly had become, in the space of an evening, what you were called. ‘Do you have a husband or family?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You were never interested in men,’ I said.

‘Is that what you thought?’

‘You always ignored them.’

‘I’m waiting, that’s all.’

‘You might wait for ever,’ Nicolas said.

You put your fork down. ‘Do you mind?’ You pointed at a piece of beef on your plate. When I shook my head you picked up the meat and used your teeth, then licked your fingers. ‘I’m sorry, I was born without manners.’

Your unused knife felt like a betrayal of sorts on my part; I’d forgotten that you ate only with a fork and that if food needed cutting you’d use your teeth. We have these canines for ripping, you used to argue. These are better by half than knives, which require two hands to operate. Man’s overuse of tools is a mark of his stupidity, you’d said.

Nicolas had come to the end of his meal and brought out a pack of cigarettes that he laid on the table. Together we smoked, you whilst still eating. He leant back in his chair and put a hand in his pocket, or at least he probably did, since he always sat like that at the table after dinner, smoking, his face content in an interlude of quiet before he became restless. It seemed possible to me then that he did not see your tremendous beauty. At the most I thought he might see it in the abstract, but find it mistimed with his reality. It was an androgynous beauty of thick brows and strong nose and narrow hips, one that had lateral appeal, but which wasn’t fond or nurturing in the way our lives had become since Teddy’s birth. I’d had something of your androgyny too once, of course, and I’d had it still when Nicolas and I first met. But androgyny is a difficult thing to hold onto when a child has passed through your body, and not a desired thing, either. I worked on the premise — I’m sure very flawed — that people are wrong to believe that we desire what we cannot have. Instead we desire what we aren’t, but can conceivably be. And neither Nicolas nor I could any longer conceivably be what you still were in your absolute lack of ties. If he saw your beauty at all, he saw it as a person sees something at the far side of a field, and then, after a moment of curiousness, carries on with his walk.

Nicolas went to bed soon after dinner; he said he would get up for Teddy in the night if he needed to. You opened a second bottle of wine and took it out into the cold garden, wrapped your shawl around you, thin as you were, and smoked and drank in the darkness. When I realised you weren’t about to come back in I took a coat out and joined you. I spread the coat on the grass where you sat and gestured for you to move off the damp grass. We took half each.

‘I like Nicolas.’

‘He’s tired today, quieter than normal.’

‘You met him in Morda?’

‘No, in London. We lived there for four years after we got married and while he trained. Then Teddy came and we moved back.’

‘Trained for what?’

‘He’s a lighting man, for the stage. It means he goes off here and there to work on productions. Nothing major, we’re always broke.’

‘I thought you’d be in Borneo, Guatemala, America at least — not still here.’

‘I don’t even know where Guatemala is.’

‘It doesn’t matter, you get on a plane and the pilot finds the way.’

‘Where have you been, Butterfly?’

You put your hand on my knee and squeezed, then let the hand drop back into your lap. I liked the irony of your new name, that of the most fragile and temporary of creatures, and I called you by it as a joke as if to suggest that we’d had no past together to speak of. Teddy had invented you hours before. Did you hate that? If you did you took it with a certain amount of goodwill and collusion, because you responded earnestly enough to the name. ‘It doesn’t matter where I’ve been,’ you said. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

‘In America?’

‘No, no, not America, not there.’ You exhaled headily. ‘I was there for a few months but got swept out for working without a visa. They’re very literal, you know, the Americans. Very pedantic.’

‘But your parents are still there?’

You nodded, but had squinted off as if distracted, so I looked up, around us, at the night. ‘It’s beautiful here — better than Guatemala, wherever that is. I know the woods inch by inch, I know the shape of the river and how the sun moves, where the birds nest. We camp out a lot in the summer, even last year when Teddy was a baby. It’s just us, me, Nicolas and Teddy, in the way it was just me and you. I wouldn’t want you to pity my life.’

You tucked my hair behind my ear with resoluteness. ‘Did I say I did?’

A new direction of thought seemed to strike you. ‘My brother is trying to join the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences,’ you said. ‘Just like my father before him. Still trying to protect the place from the Soviets.’ You gathered the surplus of your shawl and wrapped it around me. ‘This time it’s a colossal nuclear-power station in the far east of the country, it’ll have three reactors when it’s finished. The Soviets have cut down all the trees; they’re trying to turn Lithuania into a factory, according to Petras.’

‘Has he gone back there to live, then?’

‘Yes, for a time.’

‘Is he safe?’

You shrugged. Because you had looked away and seemed suddenly restless with the subject, I took the tassels of the shawl in my hand.

‘I remember this.’

You rubbed the wool between your fingers for a moment, then nodded. ‘I haven’t taken it off for nine years.’

‘Nine hot years.’

‘Nine difficult-to-play-tennis years.’

‘It’s clean, for something that’s been worn ceaselessly for a decade.’

‘I bathe in liquid wool wash.’

‘Pass me a cigarette, Butterfly. Do you mind, if I call you that?’

You gave a generous shrug. ‘Let’s consider Nina dead.’

‘Surely not dead.’ I took the corner of the shawl idly between my own fingers. ‘Just retreating from view.’ And then dropped it. ‘Are you going to stay for a while — a couple of weeks?’

‘May I stay a longish while?’

‘How long is longish?’

‘A decade or two, I’m clean out of money.’

‘I’d have to ask Nicolas. If I say two decades and he objects, perhaps we could haggle it down to one.’

‘Well, a month or so would do. Put my case forward, would you? Tell him I can darn and iron and cook.’

‘But you can’t.’

‘But tell him.’

You kissed me on the temple and gathered yourself up to standing like you had always done, a cross-legged handless transition that was the only vaguely athletic thing your drawn-out body ever did. You passed the cigarette from your lips to mine and said you were cold and were going to bed. I extinguished the cigarette and came too.

That night you shouted out from your sleep, as you did the next night, and the next. For three days you stalked about the tiny house in your tunic, talking about politics and death and the Four Conditions of the Self. Seriousness was your way, but I don’t think it ever signalled unhappiness as such. Apart from the shouting out at night, my memory of you on that visit was one of a human being at ease with herself, languidly exuberant. It was true that the shawl didn’t ever seem to leave your body, which gave you a curious swaddled, limbless look; only once did I see your arms, when they shot outwards to beckon Teddy to you and the shawl fell back. I saw in the crook of your arm some holes from needle use and some bruising, which I never asked you about. Teddy loved you. You crouched earnestly on the floor of the living room teaching him letters of the alphabet and names of animals with a focus and patience I had never had.

In the evenings you sat outside in the cold and it was me who sat with you, Nicolas only managed it for one evening. He was subdued by you, that was the truth. After you left I thought often of how you had arrived — there at the back of the house, knocking on the open door and raising your arms in unmistakable joy — though I wondered even then on whose behalf you were joyful: your own or ours. You had the grin of somebody who knows their arrival is in some way triumphant, a triumph of surprise, a momentous thing.

23

Increasingly I am aware of life as a kind of dream. I will be thinking or feeling something and the thing appears or happens, and it’s as if the world, like my dreams, is a projection of my own mind. Today while walking I was thinking about what it will be like to be a grandmother, assuming Teddy goes on to have children. He is old enough; I could be a grandmother in a matter of months biologically speaking, and there I will be, not much over fifty, elevated into that final stage of being. As I was thinking it a toddler and her father walked past, and the child pointed at me and said, Nana. That’s not Nana, the father said. Definitely not, I smiled. Afterwards I thought: Did this happen or did I imagine it? The truth is that it makes little difference either way to the experience itself.

That example makes it sound like I’m talking about coincidences, which wouldn’t be true. Not coincidences but manifestations, ideas that resolve into form. I write down our old conversations, fanciful and ill-remembered though they are, as if to pretend that’s exactly how they were, almost as a joke to myself, to take a sketchy memory and write it as if fact. But then, somehow, that sketchy memory takes form in the world. Not long after I wrote that last conversation I heard two men by the banks of the Thames, peeling themselves out of wetsuits, discussing diving in Guatemala. One of them raved about diving down to the extinct crater of a supervolcano, the other said he didn’t even know where Guatemala was. This is what I mean, you see, when I talk about the sense of the world projecting my mind.

And now this week a man called Gene has moved into The Willows, and I saw on his notes that he is Lithuanian, or of Lithuanian descent; so he appears, like the residue of a thought I’d had. Yesterday I saw what I thought was a piece of jewellery on the pavement and it was two green bugs back-to-back, beautiful beyond description, like a piece of gold-inlaid polished jadeite. There was no trenchant message here, only the sense that they had been set in my path as a reminder of the remarkable. The sense that I get, to put it another way, is that far from drifting through a world of arbitrary objects and happenings, I am tuning in through static to a collection of sensory things that have been put there to reveal my mind to me.

On the other hand perhaps it’s the light. We’re finally in spring and the light is as it was that April evening when you arrived at the back door. It’s clean and sudden and at times it confuses me. Or confuse might be too strong a word — sometimes it distracts me, in the way the luminous words in a poem distract me from the poem’s meaning. The ink on the last few pages of this letter is already fading from exposure to these unpredictable outbreaks of light. The first few pages are still unfaded, those from December. It gives the odd impression of the reverse passing of time.

Meanwhile, I keep looking but I do not get the impression you intend to be found. I have been tracing my eyes around the map of Lithuania, wondering where the bee-keeping farm might have been, where Petras was staying with friends. I am reduced to the wildest suppositions. What do I know about Petras, Lithuania or bees? And yet, this is where my mind has decided you are and my mind is not a thing that is easily changed, as I have often lamented. You are not at the farm itself, bees would trouble you, as do all things in large numbers — no, you have found a spot half a kilometre behind the farm where the pine forest deepens and nobody goes.

There: you amble half desperate through the forest and you see it, a hut. Maybe there is a lake after all. For one short interlude the forest thins and gives way to a lake, but a lake that eases from the shore so gradually that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. You stay clear for fear of drowning. Inside the hut are his things, his shoes, his writings, his name doodled repeatedly down the margin, Petras Petras Petras, a childlike fascination with himself. You sit at the table and read his notes, but you can’t read his notes. Too faded, simply illegible.

Then in my mind you come back to the Upanishads, which only serves to remind me of the poverty of my imagination. The Self has four conditions, you read, cupping the sides of your head with your hands. Always, just as this tentative, hypothesised you is about to break into action or do something instructive, she starts reading the Vedas, as if the whole of her life and future is snagged on their wisdom, as if she doesn’t know how to operate any more in the world, how to have agency, how to live in time like the rest of us and suffer the consequences of her actions.

24

(Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio. It turns out I am not at my desk in central London but in a cell awaiting trial without bail, because whoever bought the cottage in Morda decided to dig foundations for an extension to the kitchen, which was admittedly always too small, and the digger turned up bones and teeth and a silver cobra, which they believe would have been worn on a woman’s upper arm, some small hooped earrings and some scraps of undecomposed leather and zip from a pair of winter boots.

People in the village mutter: How could she have done it? Which leads me to think: How did I do it? Suffocation is the kindest way, especially if you were in one of your stupors; strangulation unlikely since you would not have let me; knifing or bludgeoning impossible because you are, after all, a friend, one held dearly and much loved, and I am not a monster.

I will plead guilty to a crime of passion, something I have often imagined with fondness and craving, as though nothing could be more wonderful than such a crime. Some days I look around me at the hundreds of people all moving purposefully towards a blind fate, or not even at this, but at something more banal — the arch of the underground train tunnels, which are made with human hands and are as courageous as a swan’s neck, or a swan’s neck as breakable as a hazel twig, or the sheer, pointless, brilliant glare of sun on glass that makes you blink and long for something that vanishes before you know what it was — and it seems to me that this whole universe is a crime of passion. So reckless in its short-termism, wreaking such magnificent havoc on those who come to live in it, so unreasonable and grotesque and glorious and rampant and murderous, because nothing escapes it alive, yet nothing escapes it without having lived either, without having been zealously loved and brought to its knees — even if only once, for a moment — by it.

Oh, to have murdered you, Butterfly, with my heart on fire. And then to write out my defence just as the universe defends its crimes with a sunset. Happy days, happy, wild and playful thoughts. Meanwhile, both (probably) alive, I suppose we proceed meekly on.)

25

Yesterday evening after work Ruth’s daughter was waiting for me. Or I should say I saw her outside in the driveway of the care home about half an hour before I was due to finish, so I went out to her, and she said she’d be happy to wait. She sat in the summer house until seven.

‘You could have come indoors,’ I said, when I was finished. ‘The evenings are still so cold.’

‘I prefer it outside.’

‘Did you want to talk about something?’ I asked, at the same time as she said, ‘I’d like to talk about something.’

So I suggested that we walk towards the Tube, and go to a café there. By the time we got to the café it was closing, so we just walked up past the farmers’ market at Swiss Cottage and made a loop behind Hampstead Theatre and back, and repeated it. She told me that she wanted to give up her religion, this was the gist of it. It had suddenly become very clear to her that she needed to leave it behind.

‘Do you feel guilty for that?’ I asked.

‘Guilty? No, no.’

I was going to ask her in that case why she was telling me and not her parents, why she seemed to be coming to me for reassurance. But then I saw she hadn’t come for reassurance, she had come to be heard as an adult. She must be twenty-one, a year younger than Teddy, but she has a plump dimple in the middle of her chin that makes her look perpetually childlike. All of Ruth’s children have this, a look that is almost Amish — thick honey-coloured hair and smoke-grey eyes and fresh, gentle features. We hardly ever saw them when they were growing up, they were always at this group or that class, or staying with Ruth’s mother in Suffolk. I can’t even remember when you would have last seen Lara; it must have been when she was four or five, and I can’t say she’s changed much essentially since then. Goodly, we called Ruth’s children; the goodly brood. All the same we — you too — were awestruck by their looks and kindness in our own way.

‘It’s since we saw the Pinter play,’ she said. ‘I watched that old man speaking to an empty chair and pouring a glass of wine for nobody, and it’s exactly like speaking to God, and taking communion for God. Have a glass of wine, God. Here, let me drink it for you since you haven’t shown up again.’ She paused and looked at me.

‘Is that how you see it, that God stands you up?’

There was a small sound that was almost laughter and she looked at me as if to say I didn’t know the half of it. Then she asked, ‘Did you think that man in the play seemed lonely?’

When I answered yes she said, ‘Every Christian, Jew, Muslim is lonely. They speak to God, and God never speaks back.’

I had been moved, or maybe impressed, by her rapture at the Pinter play. It wasn’t a child’s rapture. Now I suppose I could see why, though I wasn’t prepared for this kind of discussion or for how agitated she was. And I realised that she had chosen me to speak to about it, not arbitrarily or for lack of other opportunities, but very specifically, because she viewed me as the godless family friend who countered their piety with cynicism; I wanted to say: But I am not godless! It’s just that God has got tired of me. I could feel how much she wanted my cynicism now, and for that reason I couldn’t give it — because I didn’t want her to give up the cause so easily.

‘My grandmother used to tell me that everybody without God is lonely,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s what they say isn’t it? That’s the official thing, the—’

‘Party line.’

‘Yes.’

‘But maybe the point is that we’re lonely either way — sometimes anyway. Atheists and believers alike.’

‘At least atheists aren’t also stupid. I sit in church every week with my head all low like a bad dog, falling for the biggest joke that ever was.’

I couldn’t help but smile. ‘There’s no shame in falling for a joke,’ I said, and I might not have sounded sincere but I was, oh I was — because of course all life is a joke and falling for it is the best we can do. Better than refusing to laugh along, which I sometimes think is the route to madness.

I put my hand on Lara’s shoulder as we walked, and I wondered at how much courage had gone into this conversation on her part, or how much going against the grain. If ever the phrase ‘in the bosom of one’s family’ could be used without irony, it would be in relation to the belonging, wholesomeness and gentle piety of her family, its sheer warmth and durability. I remember Ruth once saying that she had created for her children a home that was failsafe; there were no needs, spiritual at least, that could not be met by the love they found there. And in light of that, Lara seemed to me, in the dusk, a fledgling that had crept out of the nest and up the branch an inch or two, and wanted to go neither back nor forward, nor up nor down.

‘When I used to ask God to speak to me,’ she said, ‘I was always sure he did. I heard a man’s voice, which actually is just my Uncle Billy’s voice. Not God at all, just Uncle Billy, who Dad says is a gambler, a womaniser and a racist. And now when I ask there’s nothing at all.’

I took my hand from her shoulder and put it in my pocket. ‘Then withdraw your belief. If God exists he’ll wait for you to come back, and if he doesn’t you won’t feel his loss.’

For a while she didn’t answer, and when I looked at her she was staring straight ahead, and I thought she was irritated with me for being facile. Her cardigan was draped over her bag and the belt was dragging along the ground, so I picked it up and looped it around the bag strap. Then she said, ‘I feel like I’m always carrying a sack of stones.’ And she smiled, as though I had given her permission to put it down.

All the same I wanted to retract my comment, and I was sorry I had made it. I wasn’t sure it was true at all that God would wait for her; he has always struck me as the life and soul, wanting to be where the action is. But she did look genuinely brighter and less racked, as Teddy once did when I lent him money he desperately needed.

‘You won’t tell my mum I’ve spoken to you, will you?’ she said. I told her no, and I had the sense that we had just shared an entirely asymmetrical conversation in which one person idly muses while the other weighs up their life. All the same, I told her she could talk to me any time and I gave her my number.

It was only when she’d walked away and I was going down the escalator into the Underground that I wondered if there was a man involved in this religious crisis. I remember you saying that everything essentially is about men wanting women and women wanting men, that everything came down to this brute thing, no matter how heavenly it might have reckoned itself to start with. God himself is just the ultimate sexual fantasy, you said. The infinite, ultimate mover and maker and dominator. I thought of that as I rattled along in the Tube, which you also interpreted sexually. I thought of a church full of folk poised like naked bodies on beds waiting to be loved. A funny image, a sad one. A body wide open, and nobody entering.

What I mean (another day now, but I feel like I can’t let this lie) is that Lara, who has never had much to do with me, has singled me out as an ally in her defection from God. Not just God, from religion. And as soon as I left her at the station I began to wonder why I felt uncomfortable in accepting that role. I don’t know. Perhaps it is because I suspect that my reasons for being dismissive of religion are not very good ones.

Let me tell you something. In our house, growing up, God was a celebrity, and my parents threw lavish parties for him, which alarmed the church-going population. There was always red wine, whisky and ginger beer, smoked salmon and crackers, meringues, piles of fruit. I know you know this, but I write it to make a point you do not know. In our house, the question of religion was one of love and an open heart, regardless of denomination; everybody was welcome, whoever they were and whatever they believed. The holy city of the heart. The heart is where God, the infinite, takes his seat without jealousy, but with passion. All creatures can live there, all men, all their beliefs. All conflict is settled there. My mother’s faith was firm, but she practised it with a pot-pourri of rituals. She burnt Indian oils in a little crucible under the rosary that hung from the wall light, and she wore attars of sandalwood and jasmine sambac, or majmua, meditative fragrances that kept the Lord near, she said. They gave the straight-faithed women of Morda dreadful headaches behind the eyes and in the temples — or so I overheard once in the post office. And so, in time, every member of the congregation fell out with my mother and father over their religious promiscuity and their lack of moderation, their winters in India and their drinking of whisky and ginger on the rocks, and their smattering of Sanskrit followed by quotes from the smokiest passages of the Song of Solomon, all of which made them seem vaguely lewd and aristocratic and incapable of an authentic feeling. The falling-out went only one way, though. My parents argued with nobody and continued to throw the parties, and people continued to come because they were fascinated despite themselves.

And so I lived with my open heart that had no religious preferences but was tilted towards God like the Earth is tilted towards the sun; just spinning harmlessly. I was wreathed in his spirituality, I never had to practise devotion because my life itself was the devotion. When I was born I was given to him, my mother said, like a drop of rain is given to the ocean. When did I lose my right to this faith? When did I question it? You imagine we question and lose it gradually, that it seeps away. But not so; I think I can name the moment, on a hilltop overlooking Bala Lake, with you, in the late summer of the year you arrived at our door.

(Ah, it would have to involve me, I hear you say. To which I reply, yes, it all involves you, of course. I see you put your elbows on the table and lean your chin on your fists, to fortify yourself against the coming slander.)

You had been in a buoyant mood all day, which was unnerving at the best of times, but alone with you in the Welsh hills on a fifteen-mile walk while you pranced in those terrible purple loons that you had salvaged from the rubbish after Nicolas threw them away, this was like being visited by a jester on death row. By this point in life your ups never came without downs, nor did they often come naturally.

So you strode about in some suspect interval of high spirits, in Nicolas’ trousers and Petras’ cap, which you said you were not wearing, but storing on your head until he came back. By the time we got to the top of the hill, before our last climb down to the lake, we had been talking about war, which had somehow moved on to religion. It was a hot day and we had drunk all our water and the valleys were stale. I know that you were feeling helpless: Petras in Lithuania, and people he knew being sent off to some or other Russian labour camp for speaking against the state. You never did say where you had been in the years since I had last seen you (you were singularly, bloody-mindedly silent on this subject) but I know there had been one trip to Lithuania because the baggage label had been on your suitcase when I finally — perceiving you were not about to leave — put it in the loft.

But this would have been nothing more than a short, unwelcoming visit. We heard about these things back then, Westerners travelling behind the Iron Curtain, funnelled towards tourist hotels and eagerly encouraged to part with their strong Western currency, and then just as eagerly encouraged to go home. I doubt you ever saw your brother, or anyhow if you did then briefly, over a coffee or brandy in a hotel bar where he came to meet you. Any longer with him and you both would have been considered suspicious; any trips into the countryside to his farm would have had you questioned. I think those times in your so-called homeland, supposing they happened, only confirmed to you your lack of belonging. By anything but birth it was not your country. Britain was, this mannered land that was too small for you and which you were striding across in cap and bright flares.

As we got stickier and more tired you started, with an inversely proportionate enthusiasm, to talk about how little there was to be done about war; it was always and everywhere and man would never learn. I took issue with this, maybe because, in part, we could see from that point the abandoned Frongoch Camp, where German prisoners were kept in the First World War and then Irish dissidents after the Easter Rising. My father had taken me there when I was about ten, when it was redundant and ghostly, and it had left me with a feeling I am proud to own: that we are better now than we were. No longer do we accept war with our neighbours. A childish thought, but as I said, I am proud to own it, it is my one optimistic vehemence: our politics are more peaceful now, we are better than we were.

You dismissed the idea. Politics could never solve war because it created it; asking politics to be peaceful was like asking a gun to shoot droplets of sunlight. And man — man! Man was not better, he was what he was and always would be: frightened and selfish. We were toiling up the hill at the time, you ahead of me. I was surprised by how well Nicolas’ trousers fit you, snug across the hips where they had been looser on him, and tight and long on the thighs before they flooded outwards. I am glad to have had no cause to think of them for years, but now that I do I see you striving up the hill and telling me about the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer.

They were not idols, you said, they were not supposed to be worshipped as real. They were merely illustrations of ideas that could not be conceptualised otherwise, almost like dreams. I remember you saying this because the more time that grows between me and that conversation, the more I realise how true it is, that we are forced to invent form to understand the formless, time to understand the timeless. Religion has trinities, you said, because a triangle is the holiest and most elegant of things; with two lines you can only create two lines, but with three you can create a shape. This is why three is a transformative number. Brahma and Vishnu — creation and preservation — these are two lines. It is Shiva that transforms them into something new. And then, just as abruptly, you said, ‘By the way I have a new lover.’

You knew I would be pleased. ‘Who?’ I asked, as we were reaching the summit. ‘In London,’ you said. ‘Does he have a name?’ ‘Don’t they all? One man is so very like another.’ The summit had a view over the lake and a different, more hopeful kind of air that made us both turn our faces upwards. You sat at the base of a cairn. I remember this very well, the way you brushed your hair back behind your shoulders and looked down towards the lake and town. You said, ‘Nicolas is coming to get us from Bala, yes?’ and I nodded. ‘Are you happy with him?’ Again I nodded, or said yes, or of course, and you stared out with something that was almost a smile, and almost sad. ‘You’re lucky to have him, he’s a good find.’

I watched you. In the four or five months you had been staying with us you had never spoken about him in that way before, in fact you barely referenced him at all. ‘Two is not a holy number,’ you said, and you leant across and put a rock on top of the cairn. ‘Maybe that’s why I get tired of relationships so quickly.’

‘Come on. You’re not tired of yours already?’

‘Like I said, you’re lucky.’

I became aware that the conversation had been sliding between subjects until I no longer knew what it was about. First politics, then the trinity, then your inadequate lover, then Nicolas; and when you talked about Nicolas a kind of repose took over you. I felt that you were moving in on me with your talk of Hinduism and perfect triangles, and this was when I began to feel threatened, not comforted, by religion. I watched you sit and I knew you were thinking of Nicolas. The breeze flapped the bottom of your loons. This was the early eighties, nobody wore such things any more. But you had joined me in the bathroom that morning and put them on uncertainly, asking for approval, as if they were a new fashion. You could be so naive and guileless, so out of step that, at those times anyway, I always wanted to give you the approval you asked for in the same way I would give it to Teddy when he showed me a drawing or an attempt at handwriting.

Very suddenly I felt outmanoeuvred, and I was. Wasn’t I? You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy, and I, pinned like a snared bird to one corner of a triangle, would have to watch it happen. And it felt to me, if you will forgive the overblown metaphor, that in religion I’d had a magnificent wild cat, which I fed and watered and loved and to which I granted respect and freedom, in return for protection. And then, when I came under threat, when my house was besieged, it did not protect me but glanced back once, skulked away and gave itself to somebody else.

It astonished me that I saw your ‘trinity’ coming so clearly, yet didn’t stop it, as if, in a way, I chose not to stop it. I said nothing about this to you at the time, though; as I remember, the two of us just looked down into the valley we had to reach, thinking of Nicolas making his way along its road. We walked down, didn’t we, quietly, and I think I slept in the car on the way home while you and Nicolas played Twenty Questions. Or did I pretend to sleep? I honestly can’t recall.

26

Here you are, miles from your hut. Get up! Stir Yourself! the Upanishads have said. (Book I, Katha Upanishad, in which Death tries to evade difficult questions.) I imagine how it is — you read those words, Stir Yourself! When the book urges you along the hard path of wisdom, the sharp edge of the razor, you stand from your charpoy as if stung, throw on your shawl, leave the gloom of the hut and walk.

Let me see. I think there are the beginnings of a track you have worn through the forest, which snakes inefficiently between trees, twice the distance the crow flies. And amongst the spruce and ferns, suddenly a camellia. Its flowers are deep pink and the rain is drifting into them. You crouch and rub the sandy soil around its roots. You smell it, then sift it between your fingers. I know what you are thinking now; you are thinking of the time Petras told us about the genocide in the Polish forest of Bieszczady, not one act of genocide but several, in the hands of the Nazis, then the Ukrainians, then the Soviets. If you found sudden outbreaks of camellias or willowherb or rhododendron you would know that was a patch of soil made acid by fires where a family’s home had been burnt down. There would have been residue of blood in the earth without doubt. At that time he would have been in his early twenties and we fourteen, fifteen at most, and we had been walking through the woods at Morda in a perfectly relaxed mood. He said these things and then commented brightly on the soft loam underfoot, or the crunch of the beech leaves.

You stand and look around you for more; the isolation of this one camellia makes it all the more fabulous in the otherwise bare forest, among bonelike trees. Why have you never noticed it before? Maybe it is Petras reborn, his soul transmigrated. Of course, this is not the kind of soul-cycle bullshit you believe in, and yet. The Upanishads say it, don’t they? We hatch from the seed, we hatch from the seed, we hatch from the seed, until we no longer need to do it, and then we are finally free. Petras was, wasn’t he, the kind of person who made the unlikely probable, the one who shone a rare light? Or was he? The problem is that you have glorified him as people do with the dead, which is something you observed in others even as a teenager reading the obituaries in the paper. ‘All the people in the news today are liars, cowards and criminals,’ you said. ‘But all the people in the obituaries are loving, loyal and full of joy. It seems the wrong people die.’

Maybe Petras was not so much a gallant freedom fighter, but a dog blindly following a scent. There you go again — you are thinking about the walk in Morda, when he told us about Bieszczady; to think he had, for years, been writing dissident material about the Soviets uprooting local people, destroying the Lithuanian countryside just as they had done in Poland. Even you, who were not easily surprised, were surprised to see the book he pulled from his bag, full and battered by the onslaught of his private words. Then, a year or so after that, in 27972, he heard about the student who set himself on fire in Kaunas while proclaiming ‘Freedom for Lithuania!’, and he promptly added to a list of heroes that included Gandhi, William Wilberforce, Dos Passos, Jesus and Elizabeth Fry the name of Romas Kalanta, a student with long hair and a shabby jacket who, seen in some ways, might have been the softest, gentlest visionary of them all. He left to attend the funeral and, as we know, he never did return for any length of time, as if he thought he had to take up a cause Kalanta had left off.

You have never been able to stop imagining Petras out in an ethereal woodland examining and cataloguing indigenous bark samples, his pen his sword. It is only now that you have found yourself in a woodland that replaces the likes of that one, following your own blind scent, that you wonder if your brother and Kalanta were really visionaries at all, or just young men who saw their unhappiness and labelled it Russia. You have often considered how useful it would be to have something to blame that is not yourself, but you have not found a compelling victim. Am I right? I see you looking at the camellia bush and biting your lip in thought. You don’t know how you feel about it, so you stand in the light rain with your hands in your pockets. You are thinking several things at once, as humans — to their detriment — can. I cannot second-guess what they all are, but one of them is another line from the Kasha Upanishad that you read just a few hours before: Do not run among things that die.

28

First thing this morning when I was walking from the Tube to work I caught the smell of marzipan that comes off new gorse. It’s early for gorse, but possible, so I looked around, even detoured up a side street to see if I could find what was giving that scent. There was no gorse and anyway I lost the smell, but when I got back to the original spot I could smell it again.

So, in my mid-morning break I went back to that same place, just to see if I could still smell it, and I couldn’t, and I couldn’t account for why I had even thought I might, or why I had bothered to try. But it was the most curious thing, because as I was about to walk back I saw my bracelet on a low wall at the end of somebody’s front garden — the silver bracelet with the pearl inset. It must have somehow come undone when I was standing there earlier this morning, maybe when I turned my watch round to see if I had time to go and trace where the smell was coming from.

Again, that strange sense I described before, of tuning in through static. You see, the pearl in that bracelet is the one Nicolas found on our last pearl-fishing trip in Scotland, and I always associate this trip with the smell of gorse, because we went in late spring when the valley of the Oykel River was rife with it. We woke up in the morning and unzipped the tent to the smell of marzipan and heather, of water, sky, bracken.

I am writing this in Gene’s room — the man who has recently moved into The Willows. It must be almost nine at night and he is sound asleep. He sleeps a lot, and badly, waking up anxious every hour or so, but we have discovered that if somebody sits by his bed while he goes off to sleep he will probably go for hours, maybe all night, before waking up again. I’m writing by the shaving light, and I have been sitting here quietly in the chair with my eyes closed, listening to his breath. This is what remains of a big, strong man after eight-and-a-half decades on the planet — such a small amount of time relatively speaking, eight-and-a-half decades. Really nothing cosmologically, an eye blink, and yet it completely undoes a strong man.

There was an almighty storm on that last trip to Scotland. It has always felt to me that we ripped the pearl from its jaws, plunged our hands in and pulled it out a minute before the landscape collapsed. We arrived on the Friday night in good weather, pitched our tent by the river in the dark and got up just after sunrise. The sky was a pale, vast blue. Before bed, I had boiled water in the pot over the fire and filled up hot-water bottles, then dug the hot-water bottles into our bag of clothes so we could put them on warm and dry in the morning.

There was nobody and nothing in the valley, and every sound was of water, flowing through things, into things, around things and against things. Teddy probably ran the short distance down to the river beach where Nicolas stood and began shovelling the shingle into piles; he, like his father, loved to dig. I built a fire with the dry wood we had brought. Nicolas waded knee-deep into the river. To fish for river pearls you need shallow, fast-flowing water. You lower a glass-bottomed bucket into the river and scan the gravel bed, and if you find a mussel you use your hands or a cleft stick to pick it out, and you break it open. There will almost never be a pearl inside.

‘There,’ Nicolas said, and I too waded in and squinted onto the riverbed at the cluster of mussels. They were shallow enough to pluck from the gravel where they had been filtering the rushing water for food. In his palm I could see their exposed siphons, liplike and wide open, as if suffering an unbearable thirst.

We took them to Teddy who was standing at the river’s edge ankle-deep, stuffing his small hands between rocks to feel for mussels there, and we helped him prise them apart. ‘Look!’ he said. He ran his finger around the inside of a shell, the thick and silky layer of nacre. I told him about the nacre and how the pearl is made. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I said. ‘The purples and blues.’ I held the dead mussels in my palm while Teddy squatted, nose wrinkled, and peered at them.

Before we discarded the shells I sat with him and counted their rings to see how old the creature was. ‘Like trees,’ I explained. ‘The more rings, the older it is.’ Some must have been sixty or seventy years old, a figure that astounded Teddy into one of his stern, focused silences in which he would stare blankly and meanwhile prod at something with his thumb — the ground, his thigh, in this case the hollow of the shell. He would prod almost painfully. Then reanimate and leave the thought behind, whatever it had been.

We fished from daybreak until mid-afternoon. Often in the Highlands the very early mornings are clear and blue and then become gradually duller as if, I always thought, our human presence clouded the landscape like breath clouds glass. So by mid-morning the clouds were grouping around the mountains. The duller light made the mussels more visible — the water’s surface no longer glittered and reflected or threw down phantom shapes to the gravel bed. Nicolas handed them to me in fistfuls and I took them to Teddy on the shore where we sorted through them. Teddy would peer deep into the open shell. ‘Nope,’ he would say. And, ‘Nope again’, with a sceptical sigh that was adult and borrowed and, I knew with some embarrassment, was my own.

Nicolas could spend hours in the water without rest, and he did that day. Though he had always found pearls when he fished for them on his own, on our three or four pearl-fishing trips together we had never found one. It was a matter of pride to him to find one this time, and proof of purpose: I don’t assume this, I know it. He tells me that it is common amongst boys who have grown up without a father, in an environment of mother and sister and mother’s friends and sister’s friends and conversations that considered in depth the precise nature of men’s shortcomings, for the boy to be almost pathological about pleasing women, as though he might, and must, single-handedly right all male wrongs. In the cool, head-shaking statement, Typical men, which he heard so often after so many a story of maltreatment, selfishness and recklessness, the boy grew up wishing to be anything but a typical man. So he divests hours in the cold task of finding this proverbial needle in a haystack, turning himself inside out to find a pearl in this river for his wife.

You might not recognise this picture of a labouring, tireless man, because at home he was looser and lazier, whereas when he was pearl-fishing or mudlarking he interrogated the earth, he was almost merciless. There were no breaks in duty; I took tea out to him midstream and he drank it only because he had nowhere to put the mug down. For lunch he ate a bacon sandwich out of the same necessity. Otherwise he submerged his bucket into the monotone of his own reflection and waded slowly downriver and up. His shoulder bag would fill with mussels and every so often I’d go to him or he’d come to me to empty it, and we’d replace it with an empty bag.

One of the strongest memories I have of this day is of a moment that came just before we found the pearl. Teddy and I were breaking shells open on the shore. I looked up and for once Nicolas wasn’t leaning into the river, but was standing upright in the water with one of his feet in the bucket to stop it being taken by the current, and he was staring at us. He has a tendency to make the softest and saddest of faces when thoughtful, which I have never been able to interpret. Maybe they are real moments of sadness but, if they are, they come from somewhere else, and not from the moment at hand. And sometimes I am inclined to think I misread the expression altogether and what seemed sad is just pensive, or not even that. Just the way the flesh falls. Do you know the face I mean? Did you ever have a way of interpreting it? That was the way he looked at us then.

A moment later there it was, in the heap of mussels I had just taken out of the bag, a pearl. I laid it on the flat of my hand and our fingertips rolled it around. Like most freshwater pearls it was a baroque — like I mentioned before, an irregularly shaped pearl that is slightly pitted. It was no bigger than a back tooth and had a faint lilac sheen, coloration from the peat, Nicolas said when I called him to the bank. A good lustre, he said. A good pearl.

What you will know about Nicolas is that he has a simple way of seeing. Anybody who has spent any time with him will know this; he sees in images that can be held up on cards, sometimes unobvious but visual and graspable. I used to tell him that he has a mind like Japanese food: simple, yet strange. A pearl appears inside a mussel and we pick it out, killing the mussel. Along the way we squander hundreds of creatures for the sake of this one pearl, and we pile their shells up on the shore without shame. And when I comment blithely on that waste he says that taking a pearl is only like taking a perfect photograph, you get through hundreds just for the sake of one.

Days were always short on those spring trips, but this day got hunted down mid-afternoon by a highway of violet cloud that had come charging over the mountains. As soon as we had found the pearl we looked up and seemed to notice the cloud for the first time. The tent was rippling in a wind we hadn’t even been aware of. Nicolas put the pearl inside a matchbox, which he put in the pocket of his coat. As the rain started we went inside the tent and huddled together with the flysheet open so that we could see the storm. But when the wind began funnelling down the valley, blowing our stove and cups along the riverbank, lifting and shaking the tent, we made a run for it to the car, which was parked fifty yards up the track closer to the road. The rain came and pelted the insects and blossom off the windscreen, the thunder shook the old windows, the sky came down as low as the roof, a tree half a mile away across the river caught fire in a lightning strike. Nicolas rolled the car away from the apple blossom we had parked under, down the track towards the river.

It must have lasted the best part of an hour; the three of us clasped hands and laughed. Teddy cried as well as laughed, in little uncertain bursts. It was a kind of wonderment to watch the trees bend and the river turn mulberry and spin round the rocks. Our tent had collapsed but somehow stayed pegged, and we watched the rain hammer it to the ground. The rain itself was a wall shifting endlessly down the valley, and it was only apparent where the mountains were when the lightning earthed itself at their summits.

When the worst of the storm cleared, the rain continued and the thunder rumbled around quietly. We drifted off to sleep in the car, waiting for it to end so that we could go and assess the damage. I rested my head against the window, thinking, half awake and half asleep, of that small, dented pearl. Inside the pearl was whatever tiny thing got stuck in the mussel, the grit or dirt or parasite. Inside it was a fragment of the life of the river, the life of the river constituted by the salmon and trout, all the particles and the rocks that made the particles, the plants, the eroding mountains, the clouds, rain, sun, the cosmos stretching back through time. May we never, never stop wondering at this world we’re given. An image keeps coming to mind: those iterated shapes, a pentagon within a pentagon within a pentagon, say, and this is the form my feelings take of that trip now. Us inside the tent, the tent inside the landscape, the landscape inside the pearl, the pearl inside the tent, the tent inside the landscape, repeating onwards, iterating and reiterating.

When we woke up I thought for a moment that the river was all around us and we were floating down it inside the tent. And it was only when a man’s voice came from outside the car that I realised we were on dry ground and that he, the man, was impatient. Nicolas wound down the window.

It was illegal to fish for pearls, the man said. He was a salmon fisherman who had come down to the river after the storm and had seen the discarded mussels that the wind had scattered near our pitch. If we didn’t want him to report us we should pack up and go home. Nicolas said he didn’t know of that law, he hadn’t been aware. It was a new law, the fisherman said, and not a day too soon in coming; people like us were destroying the livelihood of people like him, who depended on the salmon, which depended on the mussels. We packed up our soaked things. We swept the pile of mussels into a bag and put it in the car. When we drove off, with the matchbox in the glove compartment, I said that I felt like a smuggler. Perhaps more accurately, a victor. The storm had passed and something of that bright day had come back. It was as if a great door slid closed behind us on that most lovely of lands, but that we had come away with a piece of it, a pre-formed memory. And that then we could take that memory and see if we could go and find the life to which it belonged.

Meanwhile Gene is still sleeping and it has just started raining here, pouring in fact. I can hear an owl-call, that hollow flute of the male, and then the female’s sharp reply, as if she is excited to see the rain drum the mice out of hiding; and Gene’s breath changes every time she screeches, it gathers up at the top of his chest and he looks like a puppet whose strings have been pulled. Then he relaxes, his strings fall around him. I will stop this and turn off the light.

29

Today at the life-class I accidentally said, out loud, ‘See me as God sees me!’

Butterfly, what on earth was I thinking? It was just that the tutor kept asking the students to measure the distance between my neck and my navel or my ear and my muzzle (yes, she calls it a muzzle), until all I could see were twenty people squinting at me with their pencils outstretched. Can my existence really be sized up in this way? When Teddy was born, did I squint at him with a plumb line? In fact I widened my eyes and devoured him in one go! And as I stood there this afternoon with my weight on one leg and my right hand on my left shoulder, gazing at the foot of an easel, I could feel the blood push suddenly through my limbs where they had been half dead and cramping, and my life moving in me — the most curious sensation, when you stop for a moment and fully realise you are alive. That your heart is beating, I mean, and your gut is processing lunch, and you are producing heat.

In the drawings my grandmother did of me I could see I was alive. She could peer at me over her glasses, take up her charcoal and strip me bare of everything I pretended to be. You are not your ego, she would say. And then, tapping my earrings with her fingernail: You are not all this nonsense, you are God’s handiwork. He made your flesh, your blood, your viscera and your soul. I see you as he sees you.

I have never seen anything like my grandmother’s drawings of me. They make me look raw and perfect like the preserved bog people dug up from the peat. So much time dead had made them urgent again. I remember an archaeologist on the radio saying how eerie they were to touch, as if they would sit up and start speaking — so ancient that they were closer to the moment of creation, more surging with life than us. When I walked around the life-room at breaktime today I didn’t see myself once. So when we were twenty minutes from the end and the tutor was telling them to finish off my hands and not to forget my hair, I only meant to say that this might be the time to try for my essence rather than my hair, to see me all at once. I had not meant to say what I said about God, and I sat for the rest of the twenty minutes seeing the distaste on their faces, and tried to suppress laughter.

On the way home from the class I called in to see Yannis and to get something quick for supper, and to my surprise Nicolas was there. He was just sitting at one of the tables with a coffee, waiting, he said, for me to come home. He and Yannis don’t know one another, so I introduced them and Yannis came from behind his counter and clasped Nicolas’ hand with both of his own. When he realised that it was me Nicolas had been waiting for, he gave me a curious look whose meaning I only discovered a few minutes later, when Nicolas and I left.

‘I have something to tell you and something else to ask you,’ Nicolas said when we were walking along the street to my building. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for New York for ten weeks and I wondered if you would consider marrying me again sometime after I get back. What is your friend called? Yannis. He suggested I should give you until then to answer.’

Yannis is gregarious and nosy; he will talk to anybody about anything. There he was, counselling a stranger in his shop on how to go about proposing to a woman, probably offering a little oval dish of calamari while his customer chewed over the options. No wonder he was surprised to find that I was the woman in question. Later, when Nicolas and I were eating Yannis’ infamous salted sardines on toast, I told him that he had taken advice from a man whose marriage was itself in a state of crisis, and this seemed to please him, as if it made it all the more authentic. I also told him what I had blurted at the life-class and he sat back, with a piece of oily toast on his fork, staring at the table in thought for a moment. ‘And how does God see you?’ he asked finally. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘this is what I want them to show me.’

He smiled and touched my cheek briefly, and I know that this act of wry softness said: You mean, you want them to make you look noble. That touch of my cheek was supposed to convey, by way of comfort, that all hopes of nobility were past, and it didn’t matter. Between us we have nothing splendid left, it is lost in all the cowardly little offerings we have made over the years. He looked somewhat triumphant in this loss of burden. I tell you, he chewed long and peacefully on that sardine as if hunger were no longer a reason for eating.

We spent most of the evening talking about New York, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he would be working on a touring production of Euripides’ Medea. He laid out his metre-square map of New York City, Manhattan on one side and Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island on the other. Turning it back and forth, he marked it up with points of interest in his guidebook. He wanted to go to Columbus Park to see elderly people playing Xiangqi, he has wanted to do that since he was a teenager and his erstwhile stepfather told him about it. Also the Public Library Reading Room, the Hunterfly Road Houses in Weeksville, the Chelsea Hotel. All of these places had been put in his mind by his stepfather, whom I have never heard him speak about before in anything but passing. When it was late he folded the map one more time than it was supposed to be folded and said he would not contact me when he was away. He forced it into his back pocket and stood; one of his typically abrupt, proud conclusions to a vulnerable topic. Then he took himself to bed.

Once again it has come to the early hours of the morning and I must get to bed too. I seem to be sleeping so little at the moment and finding myself restless or hungry at strange times of the night, especially when Nicolas stays. Then the urge to come back to this letter is stronger, or at least makes more sense, although I can’t explain how. As it is, he just came in from the next room, half asleep, to find out what I’m doing. I told him I was writing to you. He turned his back quickly. He sends his regards.