Ghosts

2

LET US REGRESS. Imagine the poor old globe grinding to a halt and then with a cosmic creak starting up again but in the opposite direction. Events whizz past in reverse, the little stick figures hurrying backwards, the boat hauling itself off the sandbank with a bump and putting out stern-first to fasten the unzipped sea, the sun calmly sinking in the east. Halt again, and we all fall over a second time and then pick ourselves up, blinking. The fact is, I did find myself outside the gates one grey morning, I did have a brown-paper parcel under my arm. I had imagined this moment so often that now when it had arrived I could hardly believe in it. Everything looked like an elaborate stage-set, plausible but not real. It was early, there was no one about except a schoolboy, with satchel and one drooping sock, who gave me, the freed man, a resentful, murky stare and passed on. A harsh wind was blowing. I hesitated, uncertain which way to turn. It is a desolate spot, this cobbled sweep where the broad gates give on to the road. I suspect it was a site of execution in former times, it has the shuddery, awed air of a place that has known some dreadful dawns. Minor devils surely hang about here, on the look-out for likely lads. I, of course, am already spoken for, by the boss.

I felt, I felt — oh, what did I feel. Well, fearful, for a start, but in an odd, almost girlish way. For the first minute or two I kept my eyes lowered, shy of the big world. It is laughable, I know, but I was terrified someone would see me there, I mean someone from the old life who would recognise me. And then, my horizons had been limited for so long: high walls make the gaze turn inward. For years I had only been able to see beyond the confines of my sequestered world by looking up. I was the boy at the bottom of the well, peering aloft in awe at the daytime stars. In captivity I had got to know the sky in all its moods, the great, stealthy drifts of light, the pales and slow darkenings, the twilight shoals. Out here, though, this morning, all was wide air and flat, glimmering spaces, and the prospect before me looked somehow tilted, and for a moment I had a bilious sense of falling. A lead-grey plume of smoke flew sideways from a tall chimney and a flock of crows wheeled afar in the wind. I turned up the collar of my jacket and set off shakily down the hill, towards the quays.

Sartorially my situation left a lot to be desired; I had, unwisely, as it now turned out, garbed myself for the occasion in the white — by now off-white — linen suit I had been wearing on the day I was apprehended ten years before. It had seemed to me that a ceremonial robing was required, that my outfit should somehow both proclaim my shriven state and mark me out as a pariah, and this was the best I could do. I must have looked as if I had dropped from Mars, an alien trying to pass for human, in my out-of-season suiting, which probably was risibly out of fashion too by now. Also, there was a cutting wind off the river and it was bloody cold.

I have always loved the river, the grand sweep of it, that noble prospect. The tide was high today, the water shouldering along swiftly with a dull, pewter shine. I leaned at gaze on the embankment, just breathing the dirty air, and sure enough my racing thoughts began to slow a little. There are certain harsh, knife-coloured mornings in springtime that are more plangently evocative than any leaf-blown autumn day. On the far bank the nine o’clock traffic flowed and stopped, flowed and stopped, the car-roofs darkly gleaming, humped like seals. By the river it is always the eighteenth century; I might have been Vaublin beside the Seine, I could see myself in a cloak and slouch hat, could almost smell the flowers and the excrement of Paris. The city, this dingy little city for which I have such a grim affection, seemed hardly changed. I scanned the skyline, looking for momentous gaps. A few landmarks had been taken away, a few incongruities added, but generally the view looked much as I remembered it. Strange to have been here all this time and yet not here at all. At dead of night I would lie awake in my cell, in that hour when the beast briefly ceased its bellowings, and try to hear the hum of life from beyond the walls; sometimes I would even get up, haggard with longing, and sit with my face pressed to the meshed window of my cell to catch the tiny vibrations in the glass, telling myself it was the noise of the great world I could feel beating there, its whoops and cries and crashes, that whole ragged, hilarious clamour, and not just the faint drumming of the prison generator.

I leaned out over the river wall and dropped my poor parcel of belongings into the oily water and watched it bob away. It was something I had planned to do, another ceremonial gesture; not very original, I suppose, but all the same a small sense of solemnity informed the occasion. The brown-paper wrapping came undone and rode the little waves like a sloughed skin, undulant and wrinkled. Here it is, I said to myself, here is where it really starts: my life. But I was not convinced.

By the window of a boarded-up shop two derelicts were having a confab. One was a tall, emaciated fellow with a woollen cap and matted beard and drooping, tragic eyes. It was he who caught my attention. I thought I remembered him, from former times; could that be, could he still be going about, haunting these streets the same as ever, after all these years? It seemed impossible, yet I felt sure I recognised him. A survivor, just like me! The idea of it was unwarrantedly cheering. His companion, in burst running-shoes and an outsize pair of maroon-coloured trousers, was short and rumpled-looking, with a babyish back to his head. He was doing most of the talking, jabbing a finger in the air and vigorously nodding agreement with himself, while the tall one just stood and stared bleakly into the middle distance, slowly champing his jaws, on the dim memory of his last square meal, probably, pausing now and then to drop in a considered word. Professional men, exchanging news of their world, its ups and downs. I wondered if I might become like them. I pictured myself falling through darker and darker air, tumbling slowly end over end, until the last, ragged net caught me. Down there in that shadowed, elemental state I would learn a new lingo, know all the dodges, be one of that band, one of the lost ones, the escapees. How restful it would be, traipsing the roads all day long, or skulking in rainstained doorways as evening came on, with nothing to think about but hunger and lice and the state of my feet.

While I lingered there, idly watching these two, I became aware that I too in my turn was being watched. On the humpbacked bridge over the river a man was standing, with one hand on the metal rail, a thin, black-haired, shabbily dressed man. This one also I seemed to know, though I could not say how, or from where; he might have been someone I had dreamed about, in a dream long forgotten. His face was lifted at an awkward angle and although his eyes were not directly on me there was no doubt that it was me he was regarding, with peculiar and unwavering interest. He was very still. There was an air about him that was at once sinister and jaunty: I had an impression of hidden laughter. Standing above me there against the whitening sky, nimbed with soiled light and with people passing to and fro behind him, he looked flat and one-sided, like a figure cut out of cardboard. We remained thus for a moment, he scrutinising me with his covert, angled glance and I staring back boldly, ready to challenge him, why, or for what, I could not say. Then he turned away swiftly and slipped into the crowd and was gone.

After this encounter, if that is what it can be called, I found myself going along with a lighter step, almost gaily, despite the bitter wind and the ashen light. It was as if I had been sent a signal, a message of encouragement, from my own kind. All at once the world about me seemed more vivid, more dangerous, shot through with secret laughter: my world, and I in it. This was not what I had expected, this sudden, unlooked-for lightening, this chipper step and brisk straightening of the shoulders. Surely it was not right, surely in common decency the least I could do would be to put my head down and creep away abjectly into some dark hole where the world would not have to look at me. Yet I could not help feeling that somehow something like a blessing had been bestowed on me here, in this moment by the river. Oh, not a real blessing, of course; the paraclete will never extend forgiving wings above my bowed head. No, this was a benison from somewhere else. The angels sing in hell, too, remember, as the prophet K. tells us — and ah, how sweetly they sing!

Billy was waiting for me in the Boatman. It is not the kind of place I would have frequented in the old days. A handful of drinkers were at it already despite the early hour, rough-looking, indeterminate types hunched over their pints in the furry grey gloom. The sour stench from the quays outside was mingled with the smells of stale beer and cigarette smoke. At that hour the atmosphere of the place was watchful and faintly piratical; I would not have been surprised to glimpse a peg-leg under a chair, or the flash of a cutlass. Whenever the door opened a whitish cloud of light from the river came in like ectoplasm, hovered a moment and then sank down among the scarred tables and the plastic stools. Billy sat on a bench seat with a glass of beer untouched before him, tense as a pointer, gazing up in rapt attention from under a fallen lock of oiled black hair at the busy television set above the bar. He had been out for six months. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, with the cuffs buttoned, and very clean jeans and very shiny black shoes with thick leather soles. A fag-end smouldered in one fist, and with the other hand he was kneading pensively the bunched muscles of his upper arm. When he saw me he stubbed out the cigarette hastily and scrambled up. He shook my hand with violent energy, rolling his shoulders and frantically smiling. Behind him on the television screen a cartoon bulldog was holding aloft by the neck a cartoon cat and slapping it back and forth rapidly across the snout with grim gusto.

This, I told myself, this is a mistake.

Billy was blushing. He blushes easily. He went on pumping my hand as though afraid that if he let it go he would have to do something even more awkward and embarrassing. His hand was as hard as stone. He has the body of a boxer, short and broad and packed with muscle. He seems made not of flesh but of some more solid stuff, a sort of magma, pliant and weighty and warm; beside him I feel bloated and cheesy, a big, soft, wallowing hulk. He exuded a faint, plumbeous smell, like the smell of machine oil; there used to be talk, I remembered, of an enthusiasm for motorbikes: perhaps this whiff of hot oil was their ghostly after-burn. He must be, my God, he must be nearly thirty by now, though he looks about eighteen. He still had a trace of that washed-out, tombal pallor that I suppose our kind never lose. His eyes, though, brown as sea-snails, were clear and clean as ever. Billy the butcher, we used to call him; very handy with a flensing knife, our Billy, in his younger days.

We sat down at the table and there was an awful silence, like something tightening and tightening in the air between us. I wondered if I still smelled of prison: something musty and mildewed, with a hint of wet wool and old smoke and cold cocoa. Billy kept shooting his white cuffs and plucking at the knees of his jeans. I pictured the nerves fizzing and popping under his skin like bundles of electric wires. He had a bag between his feet. It was a very small bag, black, solid, and peculiarly dangerous-looking; all Billy’s things give off an air of casual menace. When I pointed to it and asked him if he was going somewhere he shook his head. ‘Just gear,’ he said, mysteriously. Billy always seems on the point of departure. Even in our early days inside, when I was still in shock, searching for the first hand-holds on the ziggurat of my sentence, he had the air of an innocent confidently awaiting imminent release. He would sit on his bunk, braced to leap up, his legs folded under him like a complicated pair of springs, or stand at the cell door beating out tense little rhythms with his fingertips on the bars, as if it had not sunk in even yet that this was real, that they were not going to come pounding down the corridor any minute now, redfaced and apologetic, to tell him it was all a preposterous mistake and slap him on the back and let him go. Ah, Billy. His trial was held on the same day as mine (a perfunctory and dispiriting affair, I’m afraid, much as I expected), which made us natural chums; he was by then already an experienced jailbird, having passed his adolescence in a variety of correctional institutions between riotous and increasingly brief bouts of freedom, and he was a great help to me in there in those first months, poor fledgling jailbird that I was.

The shirt-sleeved barman came over, wiping his reddened paws on a filthy rag. I asked for tea and got a sour look.

‘Not drinking?’ Billy said, with a sly, sideways grin. He has an unshakeable notion of me as a terrible fellow.

The barman slouched off. Why do barmen wear such awful trousers, I wonder? I hate to generalise, as I have probably remarked already, but they do, it is a thing I have noticed. On the screen before us the incorrigible cat, having suffered another whacking, sat slumped and skew-eyed under a spinning halo of multi-coloured stars.

‘Well, Billy,’ I said, ‘tell me, how do I look? Honestly, now.’

‘You look great.’

‘No, really.’

He rolled his shoulders again and squinted at me, biting his lip.

‘You look like shit,’ he said, with a crooked little apologetic smile.

‘I took a breath.’

‘Do you know, Billy,’ I said, ‘the last time I was in a pub, a very long time ago, someone said the same thing to me. Exactly the same thing. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?’

All at once I thought I was going to weep; I felt that tickle in my sinuses and the tears squeezing up into my eyes. I stood up hurriedly, fumbling in my pockets for a hankie and muttering under my breath, terrified of making a spectacle of myself. I could not start blubbing now. I had thought I was finished with all that. Prison is supposed to harden but I’m afraid it softened me. I am like one of those afflicted sinners in a medieval altarpiece, skulking under my own little personalised cloud that rains on me a steady drizzle of grief.

There was a telephone at the far end of the bar. I hurried to it. I had difficulty getting it to work; I was out of practice with such things. The drinkers looked up from their pints and watched me with sardonic interest. ‘Them are the wrong coins,’ one of them said, and the barman, waiting for the kettle to boil, snickered. It is by such little signs — outmoded width of the trouser-leg, sideburns cut too long or too short, a constant expression of surprise at the price of things — that the old lag betrays his provenance.

My wife answered. She took her time. I was convinced, mistakenly, I’m sure, that she had known it was me and had deliberately waited to pick up the receiver until I was about to hang up. Why do I think such things of her?

‘You,’ she said.

It was a bad connection, hollow and crackly and overlaid with an oceanic surge and slush, as if great waves were breaking in the distance across the line.

‘Yes, me,’ I said.

She was silent for so long I thought we had been cut off. I leaned my back against the wall, hearing myself breathe into the clammy hollow of the mouthpiece, and watched Billy where he sat with his legs crossed, lighting another cigarette, self-conscious and ill at ease, glancing about him with studied casualness as if he thought there might be someone watching, waiting to laugh at him. He caught my eye and smiled uneasily and then let his gaze drift, dismantling his smile awkwardly in a series of small, covert readjustments of his facial muscles. He had seemed so natural when we were inside, so sure of himself, in his affably menacing way, padding along the catwalks with feline grace. I am convinced there are people who are born to go to jail. It is not a fashionable notion, I know, but I believe it. And I, am I one of those fated malefactors, I wonder? Was it all determined from the start? How eagerly, quaking like a rickety hound, my poor old conscience leaps for the well-gnawed bone of mitigation.

‘You could have told me it was today,’ my wife said.

‘I would have,’ I said, ‘but …’

‘But?’

‘But.’ Amazing how we had fallen straight away into the old routine, the deadpan patter that used to seem so sophisticated, so worldly, in the days when we had a world in which to perform it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

I pictured her standing in the hall, a big, dark, serious woman waylaid for a moment in the midst of her day, a day in which until now there had been nothing of me. My wife. What shall I call her this time — Judy? Perhaps she will not need to have a name. I have dragged her deep enough into the mire; let her be decently anonymous.

‘I’d like to see you,’ I said.

Again she was silent. I listened to the harsh susurrus on the line and thought myself sunk in the deeps of the sea.

‘I don’t think,’ she said slowly then, in a toneless voice, ‘I don’t think I want you to come here. I don’t think I want that.’ This time I said nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘You don’t sound sorry.’ In fact, she did. ‘I need my things,’ I said. ‘My clothes. My books. I have nothing.’ I was feeling aggrieved by now, in a happily sorrowful, self-pitying sort of way.

‘I’ll send them to you,’ she said. ‘It’s all packed up. I’ll post it.’

‘You’ll post it.’

Silence.

One of the drinkers at the bar tranquilly raised his backside off the stool and farted.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay away.’ I waited. ‘How are you —?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, too quickly, and then paused; I could almost hear her biting her lip. ‘I’m all right.’

‘What do you mean, all right?’

‘I mean I’m all right. How do you think I am?’

Was that a hint of tears in her voice? She does not weep easily, but when she does it is a terrible thing to see. I put a hand over my eyes. I felt weary all of a sudden. Come, I told myself, make an effort, this may be your last shot at what will be the nearest you will ever get to normal life. I still had hopes, you see, that the human world would take me back into its simple and forgiving embrace.

‘Can’t I see you?’ I said plaintively.

She sighed; I imagined her tapping her foot impatiently. She is not unfeeling — far from it — but the spectacle of other people’s sufferings always irritates her, she cannot help it.

‘Someone was looking for you,’ she said.

‘What? Who?’

‘On the phone. Foreign, by the sound of him. Or pretending to be. He seemed to think something was very funny —’

An angry bleating started up: my money was running out. I gave her the number and hung up and waited. She did not call back. The absence of that ringing still tolls faintly in my memory like a distant mourning bell.

My cup of tea was on the table, with one of those swollen brown bags submerged in it, its horribly limp string dangling suggestively over the rim. The tea was tepid by now. I put in four lumps of sugar and watched them slowly crumble. My sweet tooth: another vice I picked up in the clink.

‘Everything all right?’ Billy said.

‘Oh, tip-top,’ I said. ‘Tip-top.’

He nodded seriously and took a sip of beer. How calm he is, how incurious! They expect so little from the world, these people. They just stand there quietly, looking at nothing and chewing the cud, until the bone-cart comes for them. Sometimes I think I must belong to a different species. Suddenly he brightened and reached down and unzipped his bag and brought out a bottle of gin and thrust it at me with another awkward dip of his shoulders and another embarrassed smile. A present! He had bought me a present! For a moment I could not speak, and sat, dumb with emotion, clutching the bottle in helpless hands and nodding gravely. I could feel him watching me.

‘Is that kind all right?’ he said anxiously. Billy does not touch spirits; he is quite the puritan, in his way. ‘I got it from my brother-in-law.’

‘It’s splendid, Billy,’ I said thickly. ‘Really, splendid.’ I was on the verge of tears again. Honestly, what a cry-baby I am.

Things improved after that. Billy became talkative and kept on laughing breathily in the enthusiasm of relief. He told me about his job. It seemed he delivered things, I cannot remember what they were supposed to be, for that brother-in-law, the gin merchant. It was all very vague. He had his own van. What he really wanted to do, though, was get into the army. He did not know if they would take him. He hesitated, sitting on his hands and gnawing the corner of his mouth, and then blurted it out: would I write a reference for him?

‘You know,’ he said excitedly, ‘sort of a character reference.’

I laughed. That was a mistake. He looked away from me and brooded darkly, staring before him with narrowed eyes. There are moments, I confess, when I am a little afraid of him. Not that I think he might injure me — he would not dream of it, I know. I am just aware of a general uneasiness, a creeping sensation along the spine, the kind of thing I would feel walking past the cage of some crouched and simmering, green-eyed, big-shouldered animal. I wonder if others find me frightening in the same way? I can hardly credit it, yet it must be so, I suppose. Do they realise, I wonder, how afraid of them we are, on our side, for all our bruited ferocity, as we watch them sauntering abroad out there in the world, masters of the whip and chair?

A rain-shower clattered briefly against the window. Idly I watched the drinkers at the bar.

‘Can they spot us, Billy, would you say?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Oh, they can. They’d spot us, anyway.’ He grinned and made a clockwork motion with his arm, wielding an invisible club. ‘Two of a kind, you and me. Sort of a brotherhood, eh?’

A man with an orange face and desperate eyes and a mouth like a trap came on the television and began to tell jokes at breakneck speed, mugging and leering, mad as Mister Punch.

‘Yes, Billy,’ I said, ‘that’s right: sort of a brotherhood.’

WIND AND SMOKE and scudding clouds and wan sunlight flickering on the rain-splashed pavements. The river surged, steely and aswarm. Billy strode forward muscularly with his hands stuck in the pockets of his jeans and his bag under his arm, fairly springing along on his stout leather soles, careless of the cold wind. I remembered the two tramps at their colloquy; we must look an odd pair too, Billy all brawn and youthful tension and I scurrying at his heels huddled around myself as if I were running in a sack-race. We passed by junk shops and bargain stores and flyblown windows with the names of solicitors painted on them in tarnished gold lettering. A plastic bag flew high up into the sky, slewing and snapping. These are the things we remember.

Billy’s van was a ramshackle contraption with fringes of rust around the mudguards and a deep dent in one wing. In the back seat a spring stuck up at a comical angle through a hole in the upholstery. I could see he was anxious to get away from me, making a great show of looking for his keys and frowning like a man awaited importantly elsewhere. I did not blame him: I find myself creepy company, sometimes. When he bent forward to open the door I looked down at the crown of his head and the little white twirled patch there and without thinking I said:

‘Listen, Billy, will you give me a lift somewhere?’

He looked up at me in alarm. ‘What? Where?’

‘Down south. I have to get a boat in the morning.’

His frown deepened slowly.

‘You mean, now?’ he said. ‘You mean just … go?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just go.’

He turned his troubled eyes to the river. There was his mam to think about, he said, she was expecting him home for his dinner, and he was supposed to see his girl tonight — and the day’s deliveries, what about them? I said nothing, only waited. What was I thinking of, trying to hold on to him like that? Was it just that I did not want to travel alone, trapped with my haunted thoughts? Yes, that must have been it, I’m sure: I wanted company, I wanted to rattle along in Billy’s banger with the wind whistling in the leaky doors and that spring waggling in the back seat like a broken jack-in-the-box. Loneliness: that, and no more. Sometimes it strikes me what a simple organism I must be, after all, without knowing it.

He gave in in the end. At first he drove hunched over the wheel, frowning worriedly out at the road, but as we got away from the city centre he cheered up. He has, like me, a fondness for the suburbs. What is it about these tidy estates, these little parks and shopping malls, that speaks so eloquently to us? What is still living there that in us is dead? The miniature trees were tenderly in leaf and the little clouds fleeted and the streets shimmered and swayed with pale swoops of sunlight. As we bowled along Billy talked, between long, thoughtful pauses, about his girl. She was, he confided, an apprentice hairdresser. She did not mind about his crimes, he said, even that rape business, regarding them it seemed as no more than the follies of youth. In fact, she rather fancied the idea of being a lifer’s girl: Billy was a bit of a celebrity round their way, having cut out the tripes of a fellow on the street one night for making a remark about his sister. He was all for getting married right off, but she had said no, they should wait: when he got into the army they would have a place of their own at the camp and she would open a salon for the camp wives. I listened happily, slumped in my seat like a child at bedtime, as he filled in with loving strokes the colours — olive-drab, eiderdown-pink — of his dream of the future. This is how we used to while away the time inside, spinning each other stories of the life to come. In return now I told him my plans, how I was going to redeem myself through honest labour and all the rest of it; it must have sounded as much of a fairytale to him as his talk of a rosy future seemed to me. I even showed him my letter of introduction to Professor Kreutznaer, written for me by a kindly and forgiving woman. I was troubled to see that although I had kept it carefully it had already taken on that grubby, greyed, dog-eared look that prison somehow imparts to all important papers; how many such tired documents have I handled — my opinion was much sought after, inside — while young bloods such as Billy sat on the edge of their bunks twisting their hands and watching me with eyes in which anxiety and hopefulness struggled for command. Believe me, you do not know the tenderness of things in there, the strange mingling of violence and sorrow and unshakeable optimism.

‘Anna who?’ Billy said, squinting at the letter where I held it out for his inspection.

‘Behrens,’ I said. ‘An old friend. Her late father was a very rich man who collected pictures. I borrowed one of them, once.’ Billy quietly sniggered. ‘They were very understanding about it, I must say. Anna has quite forgiven me. See what she says: Please give him any help you can as he has lost everything and wants to make a new start. Isn’t that fine of her? I call that very fine, I must say.’

The van rattled and shook, lurching to the left every time Billy pressed the brakes, yet it felt as if we were flying swiftly through the soft, spring air. I love to travel like this, it is one of my secret joys. Any motorised mode of conveyance will do, car, bus, van — black maria, even. It is not the speed or the womby seclusion that works the magic, I think, but the fact of being enclosed on all sides by glass. The windscreen is for me one of the happiest inventions of humankind. Looked at through this moulded curve of light the travelling world outside seems itself made of crystal, a toylike place of scattering leaves and skimming shadows, where trees flash past and buildings rise up suddenly and as suddenly collapse, and staring people loom, standing at a tilt, impossibly tall, like the startled manikins in the shop-windows of my childhood. If I were to believe in the possibility of anything other than endless and unremitting torment in store for me after I die — if, say, a power struggle on Mount Olympus were to result in a general amnesty for mortal sinners, including even me — then this is how I see myself travelling into eternity, reclining like this, with my arms folded, in a sort of happy fuddlement, at the warm centre of this whirling, glassy globe.

It must have been Billy’s talk of his girl that got me thinking about my wife again. Idly I pictured her there in the hall after I had been cut off, listening to the hum of the dead line and then putting down the receiver and standing with a hand to her face in that sombre way she has when something unexpected happens. This time, however, as she stood there in my musings, I gave her, without really intending it, a companion. He was indistinct at first, just a man-shape hovering at the edge of fancy, but as my imagination — bloodshot, prehensile — took hold of him in fierce scrutiny the current crackled in the electrodes and a shudder ran through him and at once he began to walk and talk, with awful plausibility. Where do they come from, these sudden phantoms that stride unbidden into my unguarded thoughts, pushy and smug and scattering cigarette ash on the carpet, as if they owned the place? Invented in the idle play of the mind, they can suddenly turn treacherous, can rear up in a flash and give a nasty bite to the hand that fashioned them. This one was taking on attributes by the instant. He was tall and lean, with lank fair hair and a square jaw, togged out in tweeds and a checked shirt and scuffed, oxblood brogues. He would have a pipe about him somewhere, and strong, coarse tobacco in a fine, soft pouch. He cultivates an air of faint disdain, behind which lurks a crafty-eyed watchfulness. There is a touch of the rake about him. He drives a sports car and rides a large horse. He is probably a Protestant. And he is fucking my wife.

I had forgotten about the gin but now with trembling hands I fished the bottle out of my jacket pocket hurriedly and got it open. I love that little click when the metal cap gives; it is like the noise of the neck of some small, toothsome creature being snapped. I took a swig and gasped at the chill scald of the liquor on my tongue and an entire world came flooding back, silvery-blue and icily atinkle. I felt immediately drunk, as if that first mouthful had stirred up a sediment left over in me from the gallons of the stuff I used to drink in the old days. Billy glanced at me with a deep frown of disapproval; I know what he is thinking — that a gent like me should not be seen rattling along in a rusty jalopy and slugging from the neck of a gin bottle at ten-thirty in the morning. I would be in spats and a monocle if he had his way.

We were in the country now, lurching down a leafy road, with a preposterously lovely view before us of rolling fields and silver streams and vague, mauve mountains. Not once in all the years I endured inside had it occurred to me to be jealous. Oh, I knew that most likely I had lost my wife, yet I had thought of her all along as somehow safe, chained to the rock of my absence, like one of those mysteriously afflicted, big-eyed Pre-Raphaelite maidens. The idea of her cavorting with some hard-faced horseman of the kind who in the old days were always hanging around her struck me with the force of a blow to the heart. I sat aghast, hot all over, blushing in pain, and saw the whole thing. They are in a hotel on the market square of some small, nondescript midland town. The bedroom looks out on the square, where his roadster is discreetly parked under blossoming trees. Soft light of the deserted afternoon falls from the high window. She looks about her in faint surprise and a kind of amusement at the bed, the bureau, the worn rug on the floor: so, she thinks, what had seemed like accident was really something willed, after all, and here she is, on this blank Tuesday, in this anonymous room in a strange town miles away from her life. He stands awkwardly, not looking at her, a little nervous now despite all his easy talk on the way here, and takes things from his pockets and lines them up neatly on the bedside table: change, keys, that thing he uses to scrape the ash out of his pipe. The back of his neck is inflamed. The sight of that childish patch of pink makes something thicken in her throat. He turns to her, talking to cover his awkwardness, and stops and stares at her helplessly. She hears him swallow. They stand a moment, poised, listening to themselves, to that swelling inner buzz. Then a hand is lifted, a face touched, a breath indrawn. This is what shakes my heart, the thought of this wordless moment of surrender. All that will follow is terrible too — there is no stopping this imagination of mine — but it is here, when his fingers brush her cheek and her mouth softens and her eyes go vague, that my mind snags like a broken nail. Yet I know too there is something in me that wants it to have happened, wants to lean over them with face on fire and feed in sorrow on their embraces and drink deep their cries. What awful need is this? Am I the ghost at their banquet, sucking up a little of their life to warm myself? Her phantom lover is more real than I: when I look into that mirror I see no reflection. I am there and not there, flitting in panic this way and that in the torture chamber of my imaginings, poor, parched Nosferatu.

On a straight stretch Billy put his foot down and we fairly flew along. I sat watching the countryside rise up and rush to meet us and I drank more gin and felt faintly sick. She is a troubled sleeper, my wife, yet I always envied what seemed to me the rich drama of her nights, those fretful, laborious struggles through the dark from one shore of light to another. She would drop into sleep abruptly, often in the middle of a sentence, and lie prone on the knotted sheet with her face turned sideways and her mouth open and her limbs twitching, like a long-distance swimmer launching out flounderingly into icy black waters. She used to talk in her sleep too, in dim grumbles and sudden, sharp questionings. Sometimes she would cry out, staring sightlessly into the dark. And I would lie awake on my back beside her, stiff as a drifting spar, numb with that obscure anguish that wells up in me always when I am left alone with myself. Now I wondered if there was someone else who lay by her side at night with a dry throat and swollen heart, listening to her as she slept her restless sleep: not the prancing centaur of my inventing, but some poor solitary mortal just like me, staring sightlessly into the dark, still leaking a little, doing his gradual dying. I think I would have preferred the centaur.

‘Stop here, Billy!’ I cried. ‘Stop here.’

I AM ALWAYS FASCINATED by the way the things that happen happen. I mean the ordinary things, the small occurrences that keep adding themselves on to all that went before in the running total of what I call my life. I do not think of events as discrete and discontinuous; mostly there is just what seems a sort of aimless floating. I am not afloat at all, of course, it only feels like that: really I am in free fall. And I come to earth repeatedly with a bump, though I am surprised every time, sitting in a daze on the hard ground of inevitability, like Tom the cat, leaning on my knuckles with my legs flung wide and stars circling my poor sore head. When Billy stopped the van we sat and listened for a while to the engine ticking and the water gurgling in the radiator, and I was like my wife in that hotel room that I had conjured up for her imaginary tryst, looking about her in subdued astonishment at the fact of being where she was. I had not intended that we should come this way, I had left it to Billy to choose whatever road he wished; yet here we were. Was it another sign, I asked myself, in this momentous day of signs? Billy looked out calmly at the stretch of country road before us and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

‘Where’s this?’ he said.

‘Home.’ I laughed. The word boomed like a foghorn.

‘Nice,’ Billy said. ‘The trees and all.’ I marvelled anew at his lack of curiosity. Nothing, it seems, can surprise him. Or am I wrong, as I usually am about people and their ways? For all I know he may be in a ceaseless fever of amazement before the spectacle of this wholly improbable world. He twitches a lot, and sometimes he used to wake up screaming in his bunk at night; but then, we all woke up screaming in the night, sooner or later, so that proves nothing. All the same, I am probably underestimating him; underestimating people is one of my less serious besetting sins. ‘Your family still here?’ he said. ‘Your mam and dad?’

He frowned. I could see him trying to imagine them, big, bossy folk with loud voices clattering down this road astride their horses, as outlandish to him as medieval knights in armour.

‘No,’ I said. ‘All dead, thank God. My wife lives here now.’

I opened the door of the van and swung my legs out and sat for a moment with my head bowed and shoulders sagging and the gin bottle dangling between my knees. When I lifted my eyes I could see the roof of the house beyond the ragged tops of the hedge. I found myself toying with the notion that this was all there was, just a roof put up there to fool me, like something out of the Arabian Nights, and that if I stood up quickly enough I would glimpse under the eaves a telltale strip of silky sky and a shining scimitar of moon floating on its back.

‘Did I ever tell you, Billy,’ I said, still gazing up wearily at those familiar chimney-pots, ‘about the many worlds theory?’

Of the few scraps of science I can still recall (talk about another life!), the many worlds theory is my favourite. The universe, it says, is everywhere and at every instant splitting into a myriad versions of itself. On Pluto, say, a particle of putty collides with a lump of lead and another, smaller particle is created in the process and goes shooting off in all directions. Every single one of those possible directions, says the many worlds theory, will produce its own universe, containing its own stars, its own solar system, its own Pluto, its own you and its own me: identical, that is, to all the other myriad universes except for this unique event, this particular particle whizzing down this particular path. In this manifold version of reality chance is an iron law. Chance. Think of it. Oh, it’s only numbers, I know, only a cunning wheeze got up to accommodate the infinities and make the equations come out, yet when I contemplate it something stirs in me, some indistinct, fallen thing that I had thought was dead lifts itself up on one smashed wing and gives a pathetic, hopeful cheep. For is it not possible that somewhere in this crystalline multiplicity of worlds, in this infinite, mirrored regression, there is a place where the dead have not died, and I am innocent?

‘What do you think of that, Billy?’ I said. ‘That’s the many worlds theory. Isn’t that something, now?’

‘Weird,’ he answered, shaking his head slowly from side to side, humouring me.

Spring is strange. This day looked more like early winter, all metallic glitters and smooth, silver sky. The air was cool and bright and smelled of wet clay. An odd, unsteady sort of cheerfulness was gradually taking hold of me — the gin, I suppose.

‘What’s the first thing you noticed when you got out, Billy?’ I said.

He hardly had to think at all.

‘The quiet,’ he said. ‘People not shouting all the time.’

The quiet, yes. And the breadth of things, the far vistas on every side and the sense of farther and still farther spaces beyond. It made me giddy to think of it.

I got myself up at last, feet squelching in the boggy verge, and walked a little way along the road. I had nothing particular in mind. I had no intention as yet of going near the house — the gate was in the other direction — for in my heart I knew my wife was right, that I should stay away. All the same, now that I was here, by accident, I could not resist looking over the old place one more time, trying my feet in the old footprints, as it were, to see if they still fitted. Yet I could not feel the way one is supposed to feel amid the suddenly rediscovered surroundings of one’s past, all swoony and tearful, in a transport of ecstatic remembrance, clasping it all to one’s breast with a stifled cry and a sudden, sweet ache in the heart, that kind of thing. No; what I felt was a sort of glazed numbness, as if I were suspended in some thin, transparent stuff, like one of those eggs my mother used to preserve in waterglass when I was a child. This is what happens to you in prison, you lose your past, it is confiscated from you, along with your bootlaces and your belt, when you enter through that strait gate. It was all still here, of course, the ancient, enduring world, suave and detailed, standing years-deep in its own silence, only beyond my touching, as if shut away behind glass. There were even certain trees I seemed to recognise; I would not have been surprised if they had come alive and spoken to me, lifting their drooping limbs and sighing, as in a children’s storybook. At that moment, as though indeed this were the enchanted forest, there materialised before me on the road, like a wood-sprite, a little old brown man in big hobnailed boots and a cap, carrying, of all things, a sickle. He had long arms and a bent back and bandy legs, and progressed with a rolling gait, as if he were bowling himself along like a hoop. As we approached each other he watched me keenly, with a crafty, sidewise, leering look. When we had drawn level he touched a finger to his cap and croaked an incomprehensible greeting, peering up at me out of clouded, half-blind eyes. I stopped. He took in my white suit with a mixture of misgiving and scornful amusement; he probably thought I was someone of consequence.

‘Grand day,’ I said, in a loud voice hollow with false heartiness.

‘But hardy, though,’ he answered smartly and looked pleased with himself, as if he had caught me out in some small, deceitful strategem.

‘Yes,’ I said, abashed, ‘hardy indeed.’

He stood bowed before me, bobbing gently from the waist as if his spine were fitted with some sort of spring attachment at its base. The sickle dangled at the end of his long arm like a prosthesis. We were silent briefly. I considered the sky while he studied the roadway at my feet. I was never one for exchanging banter with the peasantry, yet I was loth to pass on, I do not know why. Perhaps I took him for another of this day’s mysterious messengers.

‘And are you from these parts yourself, sir?’ he said, in that wheedling tone they reserve for tourists and well-heeled strangers in general.

For answer I made a broad, evasive gesture.

‘Do you know that house?’ I asked, pointing over the hedge.

He passed a hard brown hand over his jaw, making a sandpapery noise, and gave me a quick, sly look. His eyes were like shards from some large, broken, antique thing, a funerary jar, perhaps.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I know it well.’

Then he launched into a long rigmarole about my family and its history. I listened in awed astonishment as if to a tale of the old gods. It was all invention, of course; even the few facts he had were upside-down or twisted out of shape. ‘I knew the young master, too,’ he said. (The young master?) ‘I seen him one day kill a rabbit. Broke its neck: like that. A pet thing, it was. Took it up in his hands and — ’ he made a crunching noise out of the side of his mouth ‘ — kilt it. He was only a lad at the time, mind, a curly-headed little fellow you wouldn’t think would say boo to a goose. Oh, a nice knave. I wasn’t a bit surprised when I heard about what he done.’

What was this nonsense? I had never wrung the neck of any rabbit. I was the most innocuous of children, a poor, shivering mite afraid of its own shadow. Why had he invented this grotesque version of me? I felt confusion and a sort of angry shame, as if I had been jostled aside in the street by some ludicrously implausible imposter claiming to be me. The old man was squinting up at me with a slack-mouthed grin, a solitary, long yellow tooth dangling from his upper gums. ‘I suppose you’re looking for him too, are you?’ he said.

A cold hand clutched my heart.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Who else was looking for him?’

His grin turned slyly knowing. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there’s always fellows like that going around, after people.’

He winked and touched a finger to his cap again, with the smug, self-satisfied air of a man who has properly settled someone’s hash, and bowled himself off on his way. I looked after him but saw myself, a big, ragged, ravaged person, flabby as a porpoise, standing there in distress on the windy road, dangling from an invisible gibbet in my incongruous white suit, arms limp, with my mouth open and my bell-bottoms flapping and the neck of the gin bottle sticking out of my pocket. I do not know why I was so upset. There came over me then that sense of dislocation I experience with increasing frequency these days, and which frightens me. It is as if mind and body had pulled loose from each other, or as if the absolute, essential I had shrunk to the size of a dot, leaving the rest of me hanging in enormous suspension, massive and yet weightless, like a sawn tree before it topples. I wonder if it is incipient epilepsy, or some other insinuating cerebral malady? But I do not think the effect is physical. Perhaps this is how I shall go mad in the end, perhaps I shall just fly apart like this finally and be lost to myself forever. The attack, if that is not too strong a word for it, the attack passed, as it always does, with a dropping sensation, a sort of general lurch, as if I had been struck a great, soft, padded punch and somehow had fallen out of myself even as I stood there, clenched in fright. I looked about warily, blinking; I might have just landed from somewhere entirely different. Everything was in its place, the roof beyond the hedge and the old man hobbling away and the back of Billy’s seal-dark head motionless in the van, as though nothing had happened, as though that fissure had not opened up in the deceptively smooth surface of things. But I know that look of innocence the world puts on; I know it for what it is.

I found a gap in the hedge and pulled myself through it, my shoes sinking to the brim in startlingly cold mud. Twigs slapped my face and thorns clutched at my coat. I had forgotten what the countryside is like, the blank-faced, stolid malevolence of bush and briar. When I got to the other side I was panting. I had the feeling, as so often, that all this had happened before. The house was there in front of me now, quite solid and substantial after all and firmly tethered to its roof. Yet it seemed changed, seemed smaller and nearer to the road than it should be, and for a panicky moment I wondered if my memory had deceived me and this was not my house at all. (My house? Ah.) Mother’s rose bushes were still flourishing under the big window at the gable end. They were in bud already. Poor ma, dead and gone and her roses still there, clinging on in their slow, tenacious, secret way. I started across the lawn, the soaked turf giving spongily under my tread. The past was gathering ever more thickly around me, I waded through it numbly like a greased swimmer, waiting to feel the chill and the treacherous undertow. I veered away from the front door — I do not naturally go in at front doors any more — and skirted round by the rose bushes, squinting up at the windows for a sign of life. How frowningly do empty windows look out at the world, full of blank sky and oddly arranged greenery. At the back of the house I skulked about for a while in the clayey dampness of the vegetable garden, feeling like poor Magwitch on the run. A few big stalks of last year’s cabbages, knobbed like backbones, leaned this way and that, and there were hens that high-stepped worriedly away from me in slow motion, or stood canted over on one leg with their heads inclined, shaking their wattles and uttering mournful croaks of alarm. (What strange, baroque creatures they are, hens; there is something Persian about them, I always feel.) I was not thinking of anything. I was just feeling around blindly, like a doctor feeling for the place that pains. I would have welcomed pain. Dreamily I advanced, admiring the sea-green moss on the door of the disused privy, the lilac tumbling over its rusted tin roof. A breeze swooped down and a thrush whistled its brief, thick song. I paused, lightheaded and blinking. At last the luminous air, the bird’s song, that particular shade of green, all combined to succeed in transporting me back for a moment to the far, lost past, to some rain-washed, silver-grey morning like this one, forgotten but still somehow felt, and I stood for a moment in inexplicable rapture, my face lifted to the light, and felt a sort of breathlessness, an inward staggering, as if an enormous, airy weight had been dropped into my arms. But it did not last; that tender burden I had been given to hold, whatever it was, evaporated at once, and the rapture faded and I was numb again, as before.

I put my face to the kitchen window and peered inside. I could see little except shadows and my own eyes reflected in the glass, fixed and hungry, like the eyes of a desperate stranger. Crouched there with my breath steaming the pane and the bilious smell of drains in my nostrils, I felt intensely the pressure of things behind me, the garden and the fields and the far woods, like an inquisitive crowd gathering at my back, elbowing for a look. I am never really at ease in the open; I expect always some malignity of earth or air to strike me down or, worse, to whirl me up dizzyingly into the sky. I have always been a little afraid of the sky, so transparent and yet impenetrable, so deceptively harmless-looking in its bland blueness.

The back door was locked. I was turning to go, more relieved I think than anything else, when suddenly, in a sudden swoon of anger, or proprietorial resentment, or something, I don’t know what, I turned with an elbow lifted and bashed it against one of the panes of frosted glass in the door. These things are not as easy as the cinema makes them seem: it took me three good goes before I managed it. The glass gave with a muffled whop, like a grunt of laughter, guttural and cruel, and the splinters falling to the floor inside made a sinister little musical sound, a sort of elfin music. I waited, listening. What a connoisseur of silences I have become over the years! This one had astonishment in it, and warm fright, and a naughty child’s stifled glee. I took a breath. I was trembling, like a struck cymbal. How darkly thrilling it is to smash a pane of glass and reach through the jagged hole into the huge, cool emptiness of the other side. I pictured my hand pirouetting all alone in there, in that shocked space, doing its little back-to-front pas de deux with the key. The door swung open abruptly and I almost fell across the threshold; it was not so much the suddenness that made me totter but the vast surprise of being here. For an instant I saw myself as if lit by lightning, a stark, crouched figure, vivid and yet not entirely real, an emanation of myself, a hologram image, pop-eyed and flickering. Shakily I stepped inside, and recalled, with eerie immediacy, the tweedy and damply warm underarm of a blind man I had helped across a street somewhere, in some forgotten city, years ago.

I shut the door behind me and stood and took another deep breath, like a diver poised on the springboard’s thrumming tip. The furniture hung about pretending not to look at me. Stillness lay like a dustsheet over everything. There was no one at home, I could sense it. I walked here and there, my footsteps falling without sound. I had a strange sensation in my ears, a sort of fullness, as if I were in a vessel fathoms deep with the weight of the ocean pressing all around me. The objects that I looked at seemed insulated, as if they had been painted with a protective coating of some invisible stuff, cool and thick and smooth as enamel, and when I touched them I could not seem to feel them. I thought of being here, a solemn little boy in a grubby jersey, crop-headed and frowning, with inky fingers and defenceless, translucent pink ears, sitting at this table hunched over my homework on a winter evening and dreaming of the future. Can I really ever have been thus? Can that child be me? Surely somewhere between that blameless past and this grim present something snapped, some break occurred without my noticing it in the line I was paying out behind me as I ran forward, reaching out an eager hand towards all the good things that I thought were waiting for me. Who was it, then, I wonder, that picked up the frayed end and fell nimbly into step behind me, chuckling softly to himself?

I went into the hall. There was the telephone she had delayed so long before answering. The machine squatted tensely on its little table like a shiny black toad, dying to speak, to tell all, to blurt out everything that had been confided to it down the years. Where had everyone gone to? Had they fled at the sound of my voice on the line, had she dropped everything and bundled the child in her arms and run out to the road and driven away with a shriek of tyres? I realised now why it was I could touch nothing, could not feel the texture of things: the house had been emptied of me; I had been exorcised from it. Would she know I had been here? Would she sense the contamination in the air? I closed my eyes and was assailed anew by that feeling of both being and not being, of having drifted loose from myself. I have always been convinced of the existence somewhere of another me, my more solid self, more weighty and far more serious than I, intent perhaps on great and unimaginable tasks, in another reality, where things are really real; I suppose for him, out there in his one of many worlds, I would be no more than the fancy of a summer’s day, a shimmer at the edge of vision, something half-glimpsed, like the shadow of a cloud, or a gust of wind, or the hover and sudden flit of a dragonfly over reeded, sun-white shallows. And now as I stood in the midst of my own absence, in the birthplace that had rid itself of me utterly, I murmured a little prayer, and said, Oh, if you are really there, bright brother, in your more real reality, think of me, turn all your stern attentions on me, even for an instant, and make me real, too.

(Of course, at times I think of that other self not as my better half but my worse; if he is the bad one, the evil, lost twin, what does that make me? That is an avenue down which I do not care to venture.)

I climbed the stairs. I felt oddly, shakily buoyant, as if there were springs attached to the soles of my shoes and I must keep treading down heavily to prevent them from bouncing me over the banisters. On the first landing I stopped and turned from side to side, poor baffled minotaur, my head swinging ponderously on its thick tendons, a bullish weight, my humid, blood-dark glower groping stubbornly for something, for some smallest trace of my past selves lurking here, like the hidden faces in a comic-book puzzle. As a child I loved to be alone in the house; it was like being held loosely in the friendly clutches of a preoccupied, mute and melancholy giant. Something now had happened to the light, some sort of gloom had fallen. It was not raining. Perhaps it was fog; in these parts fog has a way of settling without warning and as quickly lifting again. At any rate I recall a clammy and crepuscular glow. I walked down the corridor. It was like walking in a dream, a sort of slow stumbling, weightless and yet encumbered. At the end of the corridor there was an arched window with a claret-coloured pane that had always made me think of cold churches and the word litany. The door to one of the bedrooms was ajar; I imagined someone standing behind it, breathless and listening, just like me. I hesitated, and then with one finger pushed the door open and stepped in sideways and stood listening in the softly thudding silence. The room was empty, a large, high, white chamber with a vaulted ceiling and one big window looking out into the umbrage of tall trees. There was no furniture, there were no pictures on the walls, there was nothing. The floorboards were bare. Whose room had this been? I did not remember it; that elaborate ceiling, for instance, domed and scooped like the inner crown of a priest’s biretta: there must have been a false ceiling under it in my time that now had been removed. I looked up into the soft shadows and felt everything fall away from me like water. How cool and calm all was, how still the air. I thought how it would be to live here in this bone-white cell, in all this emptiness, watching the days ascend and fall again to darkness, hearing faintly the wind blow, seeing the light edge its way across the floor and die. And then to float away, to be gone, like dust, dispersed into the vast air. Not to be. Not to be at all. Deep down, deep beyond dreaming, have I ever desired anything other than that consummation? Sometimes I think that satyr, what’s-his-name, was right: better not to have been born, and once born to have done with the whole business as quick as you can.

A bird like a black bolt came flying straight out of the trees and dashed itself with a bang against the window-pane.

Something jogged my memory then, the bird, perhaps, or the look of those trees, or that strange, misty light in the glass: once, when I was sick, they had moved me here from my own room, I cannot think why — for the view, maybe, or the elevation, I don’t know. I saw again the bed at the window, the tall, fluted half-columns of the curtains rising above me, the tops of the autumnal trees outside, and the child that I was then, lying quietly with bandaged throat, grey-browed and wan, my hands resting on the turned-down sheet, like a miniature warrior on his tomb. How strangely pleasurable were the illnesses of those days. Afloat there in febrile languor, with aching eyes and leaden limbs and the blood booming in my ears, I used to dream myself into sky-bound worlds where metallic birds soared aloft on shining loops of wire and great clouded glass shapes sailed ringingly through the cool, pellucid air. Perhaps this is how children die; perhaps still pining somehow for that oblivion out of which they have so lately come they just forget themselves and quietly float away.

A faint reflection moved on the glass before me and I turned to find my son standing in the doorway, watching me with a placid and enquiring smile. I thought, I met Death upon the road. I sat down on the window-sill. I felt feeble suddenly.

‘Van!’ I said and laughed breathlessly. ‘How you’ve grown!’

Did he know me, I wonder? He must be seventeen now, or eighteen — in my confusion I could not remember his birthday, or even what month it falls in. I had not seen him for ten years. Would it upset him to come upon me suddenly here like this? Who knows what upsets him. Maybe nothing does, maybe he is perfectly at peace, locked away inside himself. I picture a far, white country, everything blurred and flat under a bleached sky, and, off on the horizon, a bird, perhaps, tiny as a toy in all that distance, flying steadily away. But how huge he was! — I could do nothing at first except sit leaning forward with my hands on my knees, gaping at him. He was a good half head taller than I, with a barrel chest and enormous shoulders and a great, broad brow, incongruously noble, like that of a prehistoric stone statue standing at an angle on a hillside above the shore of some remote, forgotten island. The blond curls that I remembered had grown thick and had turned a rusty shade of red; that is from me. He had his mother’s dark colouring, though, and her dark, solemn eyes. His gaze, even at its steadiest, kept pulling away distractedly to one side, which created a curious, flickering effect, as if within that giant frame a smaller, frailer version of him, the one that I remembered, were minutely atremble. In my imagination I got up out of myself, like a swimmer clambering out of water, and took a staggering step towards him, my arms outstretched, and pressed him to my breast and sobbed. Poor boy, my poor boy. This is awful. In reality I am still sitting on the window-sill, with my hands with their whitened knuckles clamped on my knees, looking up at him and inanely, helplessly smiling; I never was one for embraces. He made a noise deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle and walked forward with a sort of teetering and unexpectedly light, almost dancing step, and peered at the stunned blackbird perched outside on the sill, glazed and motionless and all puffed up around its puzzlement and pain. It kept heaving shuddery little sighs and slowly blinking. There was blood on its beak. What a shock the poor thing must have had when what looked like shining air turned suddenly to solid glass and the world snapped shut. Is that how it is for my boy all the time, a sort of helpless blundering against darkly gleaming, impenetrable surfaces? He pointed to the bird and glanced at me almost shyly and did that chuckle again. He had a musty, faintly sweet smell that made me think of wheelchairs and those old-fashioned, cloth-padded wooden crutches. He was always fascinated by birds. I remembered, years ago, when he was a child, walking with him one blustery autumn day through the grounds of a great house we had paid a shilling to see. There was a peacock somewhere, we could hear its uncanny, desolate cry above the box hedges and the ornamental lawns. Van was beside himself and kept running agitatedly back and forth with his head lifted in that peculiar, angled way that he had when he was excited, looking to see what could be making such extravagant sounds. But we never did find the peacock, and now the day came back to me weighted with that little absence, that missed, marvellous bird, and I felt the pang of it, distant and piercing, like the bird’s cry itself.

‘Are you all right?’ I said to him. That curious, dense light was in the trees and pressing like gauze against the window-panes. ‘Are you happy?’

What else could I say? His only response was a puzzled, fleeting frown, as if what he had heard was not my voice but only a familiar and yet as always incomprehensible, distant noise, another of the squeaks and chirrups thronging the air of his white world. I have never been able to rid myself of the notion that his condition was my fault, that even before he was born I damaged him somehow with my expectations, that my high hopes made him hang back inside himself until it was too late for him to come out properly and be one with the rest of us. And no matter what I may tell myself, I did have hopes. Of what? Of being saved through him, as if the son by his mere existence might absorb and absolve the sins of the father? Even that grandiloquent name I insisted on hanging around his neck — Vanderveld! for God’s sake, after my mother’s people — even that was a weight that must have helped to drag him down. When he was still an infant I used to picture us someday in the far future strolling together down a dappled street in the south somewhere, he a grown man and I still miraculously youthful, both of us in white, my hand lightly on his shoulder and him smiling: father and son. But while I had my face turned away, dreaming of that or some other, equally fatuous idyll, the Erl King got him.

Suddenly, as if nothing at all had happened, the blackbird with a sort of clockwork jerk rose up and flexed its wings and flew off swiftly into the cottony white light. Van made a little disappointed mewling noise and pressed his face to the glass, craning to see the last of the bird, and for a second, as he stood with his face turned like that, I saw my mother in him. Dear Jesus, all my ghosts are gathering here.

Things are sort of smeared and splintery after that, as if seen through an iridescent haze of tears. I walked here and there about the house, with Van going along softly behind me with that dancer’s dainty tread. I poked about in bedrooms and even looked through drawers and cupboards, but it was no good, I could make no impression. Everything gave before me like smoke. What was I looking for, anyway? Myself still, the dried spoor of my tracks? Not to be found here. I gathered a few bits of clothes together and took down from the top of a wardrobe an old cardboard suitcase to put them in. The clasps snapped up with a noise like pistol shots and I opened the lid and caught a faint smell of something that I almost recognised, some herb or fragrant wood, a pallid sigh out of the past. When I looked over my shoulder Van was gone, leaving no more than a fading shimmer on the air. I saw myself, kneeling on the floor with the case open before me, like a ravisher hunched over his splayed victim, and I stuffed in the last of my shirts and shut the lid and rose and hurried off down the stairs. In the kitchen the back door with its broken pane still stood open; it had a somehow insolent, insinuating look to it, like that of a tough lounging with his elbow against the wall and watching me with amusement and scorn. I went out skulkingly, clutching my suitcase and flushed with an inexplicable shame. I shall never, not ever again, go back there. It is lost to me; all lost. As I emerged from the gap in the hedge I felt myself stepping out of something, as if I had left a part of my life behind me, snagged on the briars like an old coat, and I experienced a spasm of blinding grief; it was so pure, so piercing, that for a moment I mistook it for pleasure; it flooded through me, a scalding serum, and left me feeling almost sanctified, a holy sinner.

I was surprised to find Billy still waiting for me. After all I had been through I thought he would be gone, taken by the whirlwind like everything else I seemed to have lost today. Someone was leaning in the window of the van, talking to him, a thin, black-haired man who, seeing me approach, straightened up at once and legged it off around the bend in the road, stepping along hurriedly in a peculiarly comic and somehow ribald way, one arm swinging and the other hand inserted in his jacket pocket and the cuffs of his trousers flapping.

The air in the van was thick with cigarette smoke.

‘Who was that?’ I said.

Billy shrugged and did not look at me. ‘Some fellow,’ he said. He threw his fag-end out of the window and started up the engine and we lurched on our way. When we drove around the bend there was no sign of the black-haired man.

‘See the family?’ Billy asked.

‘I told you,’ I said, ‘I have no family. I had a son once, but he died.’

I THINK OF THAT TRIP SOUTH as a sort of epic journey and I an Odysseus, homeless now, setting out once more, a last time, from Ithaca. The farther we travelled the lighter I felt, the more insubstantial, as if I were steadily throwing out bits of ballast as we went along. The van kept breaking down, and Billy, shaking his head in rueful amusement, would get out and hammer at something under the bonnet while I leaned across and pumped the pedals at his shouted command. It was strange, sitting there in the sudden quiet in the middle of nowhere. The countryside around wore a look of surprise and tight-lipped disapprobation, as if by these unexpected stops we were flouting some general rule of decorum; deep silence stood over the fields and the trees stirred restlessly, rustling their silks in the soft, varnished air. This lovely world, and we the only blot on the landscape. We, or just me? Sometimes I think I can feel the world recoiling from me, as if from the touch of some uncanny, cold and sticky thing. I recall one day when I was a child walking with my mother into a hotel in town, one of those shabby, grand places that are gone now, and halting on the threshold of the lounge as all the people there in the midst of their afternoon tea fell silent suddenly. It was only a coincidence, of course, it just happened that everyone had stopped talking at the same moment, but I was convinced it was because of me this dreadful hush had fallen, that somehow I had infected the air and struck the people dumb, and I stood there hot with shame and terror as stout matrons paused with teapots lifted and rheumy old men looked about them in startlement and blinked, until the next moment the whole thing calmly started up again, and my mother took my hand and gave me an impatient shake, and I trailed dully after her, stumbling in all that noise and light.

An early dusk was falling when we got to Coldharbour, a humped little town clinging to a rocky foreland facing the Atlantic. The houses shone whitely in the failing light and smoke swirled up from chimney-pots, mussel-blue against the paler blue of evening, and beyond the harbour wall the thick sea heaved like a jumble of big, empty iron boxes bobbing and jostling. I seemed to hear melodeon music and smell kippers being smoked. Billy parked outside a large pub that looked like a ranch and we went in for a drink. We sat before a turf fire in a low room with fake rafters and smoked yellow walls and listened to the wireless muttering to itself. Horse-brasses, plastic ivy, an astonished, stuffed fish in a glass case. We were the only customers. The publican was a big, slow man; he stood behind the bar ruminatively polishing a pint glass, frowning vacantly as if he were trying in vain to remember something very important. What did he make of us, I wonder? He seemed a decent sort. (Mind you, there are probably times when even I seem a decent sort.) His daughter, a skinny little thing with a pinched face and bitten fingernails and his eyes, came down from upstairs, still in her green school uniform, and said he was to help her with her sums, her mammy had said so. While he muttered over her jotter, a fat tongue-tip stuck in the corner of his mouth, she leaned against the bar and hummed a tune whiningly and made a great show of not looking in our direction. He showed her the solved sums and spoke to her softly, teasing her, and she kept saying: ‘Oh, da!’ and sighing, throwing up her eyes and making an El Greco face. We crouched over our grog, Billy and I, and watched them covertly, our noses pressed to the briefly lit window of all we had forfeited, and Billy, prompted I suppose by something in the example of this little familial scene, suddenly launched into a halting confession, keeping his head down and speaking in a stumbling monotone. He had no girl, he said. He had made it all up, the hairdressing salon, the wedding plans, everything. There was no job, either, no iffy brother-in-law in the delivery business; he had been on the dole since he got out. Even the stuff about his mam was an invention: she had not been at home keeping his dinner hot for him, she was in the hospital, dying of a rotted liver. And now his parole officer would be after him for leaving the city without telling him.

We were silent for a long time, as if listening to the reverberations after an enormous crash, and then I heard myself in a flat voice say:

‘Where did you get the gin?’

Hardly what you would call an adequate response, I know, but it was an awkward moment. Billy shrugged.

‘Robbed,’ he said.

‘Ah. I see.’

I was not surprised by all this — I think in my heart I had known all along that the whole thing was a fantasy — and certainly I did not disapprove: after all, why shouldn’t he make up a life for himself? I confess, though, that I was cross, not because he had lied to me but, on the contrary, precisely because he had changed his mind and owned up, damn it. Had I asked for honesty? I had not. In my opinion the truth, so-called, is a much overrated quantity. The trouble with it is that it is closed: when you tell the truth, that’s the end of it; lies, on the other hand, ramify in all sorts of unexpected directions, complicating things, knotting them up in themselves, thickening the texture of life. Lying makes a dull world more interesting. To lie is to create. Besides, fibs are more fun, and liars, I am convinced, live longer. Yes, yes, I am an enthusiastic advocate of the whopper. But now bloody Billy had developed scruples and what on earth were we to do? From some things there is no going back. We sat and stared solemnly into the fireplace for a while, slumped in another horrible silence, and the publican’s daughter went back upstairs and the publican returned to his glasses, and then — oh, my God, it was appalling! — Billy began to cry. In all the years we had spent together in the jug I had never once seen him shed a tear, even on his worst days. And this was not even proper crying, he did not blub or wail, as I would have made sure to do, but just sat there with his head bowed and the water squeezing out of his eyes and his shoulders shaking. The embarrassment of it! — I was thankful the place was deserted. I glanced at the publican but he was carefully looking the other way, his lips pursed, whistling without sound. I cannot imagine what he thought we were or what was happening. I had been sure it was I who would be the one to do the weeping today. I touched Billy’s shoulder, less to console, I’m afraid, than as a signal to him that really I thought it was time for him to get a grip on himself, but I snatched away my hand at once, for the feel of that warmly quivering flesh brought back disturbing echoes of old intimacies: behind bars, Eros finds his comforts where he can. I finished my drink and stood up, clearing my throat, and said, still in that toneless voice that I hardly recognised as my own, that I had to go outside for a minute. Billy nodded but did not look up, and I walked away from him almost on tiptoe, a craven Captain Oates, and went through the lavatory and across a yard and came out in a lane at the back of the pub and stood for a little while in the marine darkness with my eyes closed, breathing deep the stink of another dirty little betrayal.

I got my suitcase out of the van and set off in the direction of the harbour. It was black night by now and I had nothing to guide me but the starshine on the cobbles and an occasional, dim streetlamp shivering in the wind. I seemed to be going somewhere. My steps took their own way, down a sloping street and along by the sea wall and on to the pier. A few dim boats reared at anchor out on the jostling water, their mast-ropes tinkling. Have I mentioned My Search For God? Every lifer sooner or later sets out on that quest; I have seen the hardest inmates, fellows who would slit your throat before you could say knife, kneeling meek as toddlers beside their bunks before lights-out, their fingers clasped and eyes shut tight and lips moving in silent communion with the Lord. I am glad to say I managed to hold out for what I consider was a creditably long time. I had never really thought about religion and all that; this world had always been enough of a mystery for me without my needing to invent implausible hereafters (the adjective is redundant, I know). True, I had, and have still, off and on, a hazy sort of half belief in some general force, a supreme malignancy in operation behind the apparent chaos and contingency of the world. There are times, indeed, when I even entertain the notion of a personal deity, a God out of the old books, He that laughs, the deus ridens. I remember, when I was a young man and tenderly impressionable, reading in some book of an event in the history of the Xhosa people of the eastern Cape Province. Do you know about the Xhosa? They were a proud and sophisticated race, and great warriors, too, yet unaccountably, for nigh on a hundred years, they had been losing battle after battle against the armies of the white settlers. Again and again they had stormed across the veldt and hurled themselves with perfect confidence against the bullets and the bayonets of these grub-coloured pygmies in their scarlet tunics and were repulsed every time, suffering terrible losses. Then one day in a vision a young girl whose name was Nongqawuse was instructed by the voices of her ancestors to inform her people that they must slaughter all their cattle and give up all forms of agriculture, after which sacrifices the tribe’s ancestral dead would return to life, bringing with them great new herds and boundless supplies of corn, to form a ghostly, invincible army that would drive the white man into the sea. The tribal elders conferred and decided that the people must do as they were bidden; even the wise king Sandili (see, I have even remembered the names), who had been sceptical at first, in the end declared himself a believer in the New People. The livestock was slaughtered, the fields were laid waste, and the tribe settled down in confidence to await the day of days, which came and went, of course, without the appearance of a single phantom warrior. Nothing happened. The sun did not stand still in the sky, no great herds came thundering out of the dust, not a grain of corn appeared in the emptied bins. In that year of 1857 alone seventy thousand of the Xhosa died of starvation. Clearly I remember letting the book fall from my hand and staring before me with the mad light of the convert shining for a moment in my eyes and thinking yes, yes, there must be a God, if such things can happen! And I pictured Him, a rascally old boy with a tangled yellow beard and a drinker’s nose, reclining on a woolly cloud with his chin on his fist and chuckling to himself as that proud people walked out in solemn ritual into the fields and butchered their cattle and burned their crops. Probably by the time the famine came He had lost interest, had turned his attention somewhere else entirely, leaving the Xhosa to die alone, huddled and speechless, on the parched savannah. In time, of course, I lapsed from my faith in this prankster God, preferring to believe in the Great Nothing instead, which when you think about it is itself a kind of force. However, the moment came one impossible night in prison when I felt so far from everything, so lost in fear and anguish, that I found myself reaching out, like an abandoned baby reaching out its arms beseechingly from the cold cot, for someone or something to comfort me, to save me from these horrors. There was no one there, of course, or not for me, anyway. It was like coming to in the dark on the battlefield amid the cries and the flying cannon-smoke and feeling around for a limb that had been shot off. I had never known a blackness so vast and deep as that which my groping soul encountered that night. Almost as bad as the emptiness, though, was the fact of the need itself, that bleeding stump I could not bring myself to touch. And now as I stood on the pier, whirled about by the night wind, I felt pressing down on me the weight of another vast darkness and another unassuageable need, for what, I could not say precisely. I looked back at the town; how far off it seemed, how distant its little lights, as if I had already embarked and my voyage were under way. It came to me that I had reached the end of something, that this long day drawing to a close was the last of its kind I would know. What next, then? The voices spoke to me out of the wind, the dead voices. I stood above the black, heaving water and imagined how it would be, the blundering leap and then the plunge and the sudden, bulging silence as I sank. And in the morning they would find my suitcase standing on the pier, unique and incongruous, a comic prefigurement of my tombstone. Strange: I never seriously considered doing away with myself, even in prison, where regularly fellows were found strung up by ropes of knotted bedsheets from the waterpipes in their cells. But what did I have to lose now, that I had not lost already, except life itself, and what was that worth, to me? Cowardice, of course, plain funk, that was a stalwart that could be counted on to keep me dragging along, but there are times when even cowardice must and does give way to stronger, irresistible forces. Yet I knew I would not do it; not even for a moment did I think I might. Was it that in a way I was already dead, or was I waiting for some new access of life and hope? Life! Hope! And yet it must have been something like that that kept me going. Unfinished business, a debt not paid — yes, that too, of course, of course, we know all about that. But beyond even that there was something more, I did not know what. I felt that whatever it was — is! — it must be simple but so immense I cannot see it, as immense as air: that secret everyone is in on, except me. When I look back all seems inevitable, as if under everything there really were a secret structure, held immovably in place by an unknown and unknowable force. Every tiniest action I ever took was a grain of sand in the flow of things tapering towards that moment when I let go of myself, when with a great Tarraa! I flung open the door of the cage and let the beast come bounding out. Now I am condemned to sit here in my filthy straw and sift through the bones of it all over again. Eternal recurrence! That is what I realised that night, standing in the blackness at the end of the pier above the roiling, seductive sea: there was to be no end of it, for me; my term was just beginning. But what I was sentenced to this time was freedom. Freedom! What a thought! The very word gave me the shivers. Freedom, formless and ungraspable, yes, that was the true nature of my sentence. For ten terrible years I had yearned to be free, I had eaten, slept, drunk the thought of it, lay in my bunk at night, heart racing and eyes popping, panting like a decrepit masturbator towards that fantastic moment when the gates would swing open and I would be released, and now it had arrived and I was appalled at the prospect. I am free, I told myself, but what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me. Forget the past, then, give up all hope of retrieving my lost selves, just let it go, just let it all fall away? And then be something new, a sticky, staggering thing wi th myriad-faceted eyes and wet wings, an astonishment standing up in the world, straining drunkenly for flight. Was that it, that I must imagine myself into existence before tackling the harder task of conjuring another? I closed my eyes. My poor brain throbbed. I did not know what to do, whether to go on or go back or just stay here, somehow, forever. Presently I turned and retraced my steps to the town, ploddingly, confused as always, lost, and alone.

Statues. I am thinking of statues. I have always found something uncanny about these sudden, frozen figures, the way they stand so still among moving leaves, or off at the end of an avenue, watching something that is not us, that is beyond us, some endless, transfixing spectacle only they can see. Time for them moves as slow as mountains. I am remembering, for instance, that great photographer old Père Atget’s matutinal studies at Versailles and St Cloud of rainstained Venuses and laughing fauns, Vertumnus removing his winter mask, that rapt Diana with her bow starting out of the shrubbery into the sunlight beside the motionless pond; how vivid and rounded his lens makes them seem, how immanent with intent, these bleached, impetuous creatures poised as if to leap down from their plinths and stride away, trailing storms of dust behind them. Diderot developed a theory of ethics based on the idea of the statue: if we would be good, he said, we must become sculptors of the self. Virtue is not natural to us; we achieve it, if at all, through a kind of artistic striving, cutting and shaping the material of which we are made, the intransigent stone of selfhood, and erecting an idealised effigy of ourselves in our own minds and in the minds of those around us and living as best we can according to its sublime example. I like this notion. There is something grand and tragic in it, and something of essential gaiety, too. Diderot himself had great reverence for statues; he thought of them as living, somehow: strange, solitary beings, exemplary, aloof, closed on themselves and at the same time yearning in their mute and helpless way to step down into our world, to laugh or weep, know happiness and pain, to be mortal, like us. Such beautiful statues, he wrote in a letter to his mistress Sophie Volland, hidden in the remotest spots and distant from one another, statues which call to me, that I seek out or that I encounter, that arrest me and with which I have long conversations … I like to picture him, that cheerful philosophe, at St Cloud or Marly or the great park at Sceaux, talking to the cherubs on a carved vase or lecturing a stone Pygmalion on the hegemony of the senses.

What statue of myself did I erect long ago, I wonder? Must have been a gargoyle.

Here’s a story. Chap I knew in Spain once, in a previous life, painter, not very good, got a commission to do a portrait of a local bigwig in the village where we were both scraping a living at the time. My pal would go to the old boy’s house in the mornings and work on the canvas for an hour or so while it was still cool; he had not much Spanish and anyway in those parts they spoke an incomprehensible dialect, so conversation was at a minimum. For a long time the work did not go well. It was very hard to fix a likeness. The mayor, I think he was the mayor, an ugly old peasant with enormous hands and a simian brow, would sit very stiffly in his best blue suit in a white room staring fixedly before him with a hunted look, as if, said my friend, he were at the oncologist’s waiting to hear the worst. Some subjects, my friend explained, simply do not look like themselves; shyness, embarrassment, self-consciousness, something compels them to put on a mask and hide behind it; they will look like their mothers, their siblings, complete strangers, even, but not themselves. With such sitters the painter must coast along, biding his time, waiting for them to relax and forget themselves for long enough to be themselves. The mayor was such a one. He just sat there like a stuffed barbary ape, blank, featureless, folded up in himself. Until one morning my friend arrived and found him transformed; he was no more animated than at other times, but suddenly at last his face was open, the mask cast aside, his character — violent, rapacious, fearful, melancholy — legible in every wrinkle and mole and ill-shaved whisker. Well, the portrait was finished within the hour — and damned good it was, too, according to my friend — yet still the mayor sat there, gazing before him with a pensive and faintly puzzled look. You know of course what had happened, you saw it coming, didn’t you: the old man was dead, had died calmly of a stroke a few minutes before the painter arrived. You see, you see what I mean? To thine own self be true, they tell you; well, I allowed myself that luxury just once and look what happened. No, no, give me the mask any day, I’ll settle for inauthenticity and bad faith, those things that only corrode the self and leave the world at large unmolested.

I am reading Diderot on actors and acting, too. He knew how much of life is a part that we play. He conceived of living as a form of necessary hypocrisy, each man acting out his part, posing as himself. It is true. What have I ever been but an actor, even if a bad one, too much involved in my role, not detached enough, not sufficiently cold. Yes, yes, it’s so. You think me cold? I am not. Harsh, perhaps, uncaring of the proprieties, too apt to make poor jokes, but not cold, no. Quite the opposite, in fact, hot and sweating in my doublet and hose, trying not to see the upturned faces beyond the footlights, the eyes greedy for disaster fixed on me as I stumble among my fellow players, stammering out my implausible lines and corpsing at all the big moments. This is why I have never learned to live properly among others. People find me strange. Well, I find myself strange. I am not convincing, somehow, even to myself. The man who wishes to move the crowd must be an actor who impersonates himself. Is that it, is that really it? Have I cracked it? And there I was all that time thinking it was others I must imagine into life. Well well. (To act is to be, to rehearse is to become: Felix dixit, or someone like him.) This has the feel of a great discovery. I’m sure it must be a delusion.

Do you notice how the gull’s cry echoes through these pages, sounding its note of hunger and harsh beseeching? It is my emblem; my watermark. Next morning it was everywhere around me, a disembodied keening in the calm, white air. The wind had died and there was a kind of luminous, faint fog. I walked along the pier again, carrying my suitcase, but in daylight now, the scene a developed print of last night’s heartsick negative. The boat was a blunt vessel with a rusted chimney and a limp flag dangling in the cordage. When I arrived it was already loaded up with a cargo of tomatoes and potato crisps and bales of toilet paper and mysterious, complicated machine parts, all gleamingly, implausibly new. The skipper, a big-bellied man with a red face, stood in the wheelhouse and yawned. (If I were a visitor from another planet — but then, am I not a visitor from another planet? — I think that of all the earthlings’ quirks it is the act of pandiculation that would surprise and fascinate me most, that slow stretch and then the soundless ape-howl, in which they indulge themselves with such languorous relish.) There was a boy also, a nimble, bow-legged fellow with red hair and buck-teeth; he did all the work, scurrying about the deck and cursing violently to himself while Bulkington in the wheelhouse watched him with amusement and a kind of fond contempt, taking a quick nip now and then from a secret bottle stowed under a shelf behind the wheel. I seemed to be the only passenger. As soon as the cargo was loaded we got under way. I always feel a childish surge of excitement when the last mooring rope is cast off and the boat backs away shudderingly from the dock. We swerved into the middle of the harbour and swung about smartly and headed out past the lighthouse into the open sea. I stood in the bow and watched Coldharbour turn into a miniature of itself, complete with smoking chimneys and bristling masts and tiny figures moving on the quayside. I spotted Billy’s van, still parked outside the pub. Probably he had slept in it last night, huddled on the back seat with that wobbly spring sticking up and his knees in his chest, I, of course, had passed the hours of darkness in my accustomed fashion, hanging upside down under the tavern eaves wrapped in my leathern wings.

The morning was extraordinarily still under a sky of pure pearl. The coast dwindled behind us; when I looked out from the prow we might have been a thousand leagues from land. The sea stretched away empty save for a white ship far off on the high horizon, unmoving, it seemed, impossibly tall and lit somehow from below, a glimmering, ghostly vessel. I like the sea; I am afraid of it, but all the same I like it, its strangeness, its indifferent thereness; in all that space I can forget for a while who and what I am. A pair of dolphins broke the surface and swam with us, criss-crossing our bows and gambolling in the wash, seeming emblematic of something, and now and then long-necked brown birds appeared out of nowhere, singly, flying low and straight at great speed above the water. The skipper kept to the wheelhouse and the boy sat on the deck with a transistor radio pressed to his ear, dead-eyed and rhythmically twitching. Soon the sky cleared and a delicate wind sprang up and the water turned to splintered sapphire. I lay and drowsed on a pile of tarpaulins, lapped about by sea-sounds and cool zephyrs. I slept briefly and dreamed that I was back in prison and could not understand why the floor of my cell was swaying; then a warder wearing a seaman’s cap at a jaunty angle came and told me not to worry, that I would soon be let out, and laughed extravagantly, pointing a finger at me through the bars.

I woke with a start and struggled groggily to my feet, rubbing my eyes. It was as though I had fallen asleep in one world and woken up in another. The air seemed brisker, the sky bluer. The boat fairly skimmed along, tensed in every timber, eager and light, as if at any moment it might take to the air in a great, groaning leap. I felt light-headed; when I looked out to the horizon it seemed it was not the boat but rather the sea itself that was swaying. Despite the early hour I brought out the gin bottle and took a steely swallow straight from the neck and walked to the bow-rail and stood and watched our wake unfurling behind us. Cloud-shadows, whale-blue and swift, skimmed the glittering surface of the sea. Have I said all this already? Suddenly there came to me the memory of a day when I was a boy and I cycled across country to the coast with my friend Horse. My friend; I had not many such, and those that I had did not last long, and nor did Horse. But that day our friendship was still at the tremulous, solemn stage that I sometimes think is all I have ever known of what they seem to mean when they chatter about love. We left our bikes hidden in a ditch and made our way through a little, dense dark wood and came out on the river estuary and found moored in the shallows among the reeds the punt that Horse’s father kept there for duck shooting. A keen hunter, Horse’s father, I remember him, a big, slow-moving, smooth-faced man, which Horse in his turn must be by now, I imagine. Horse undid the mooring rope and pushed us out of the reeds with a negligent deftness that filled me with envy and made me feel proud to be his pal. How lightly, with hardly a sound, the white punt glided over the water, seeming barely to touch the swiftly running surface. Horse stood above me in the bow and plied the scull, his eye fixed on a far horizon. We saw not a soul; we might have been alone in the world. For a mile or two we went along close to the river bank and then all at once sky and sea opened before us and we crossed a broad reach and came in sight of a long, low, khaki-coloured shore. I can see it, I can see it all, as clear as day, the white punt and that sunlit shoreline and the two of us there, Horse and me. It must have been a place where the river waters met the open sea, or perhaps it was something to do with the currents, or the tide was turning — I do not understand these things — but for a minute we were halted and held motionless on the unmoving water in the midst of a golden calm. The burnished surface of the sea was high and heavy and smooth as metal, and a small, repeated wave gambolled like an otter along the margin of the shore. The sun was hot. Nothing happened. We just stayed there for that minute, poised between sea and sky, suspended somehow as if in air, no, not air, but some other, unearthly element, and it seemed to me I had never known such happiness, and never would again, though happiness is not the word, not the word at all. That is where I would like to live, on some forgotten strip of sandy shore, with my back to the land, facing out into the limitless ocean. That would be freedom, watching in solitude the days pass, marking the seasons, observing the spring tides and the autumn auroras, weathering the summer sun and the storms of winter. Pure existence, pure existence and nothing else.

Now, a grown-up, so-called, I stood there in the bows, for how long I do not know, watching the white waters purling behind us and the little clouds flying overhead, and then all at once I heard that soft, roaring noise coming to us across the water and I turned, startled, and there it was, the island, looming up in front of us, with sheep-strewn hill and tiny trees and the narrow road winding away, as if it had been conjured up that moment out of sea and clouds. We chugged into the deserted harbour past jagged, chocolate-coloured rocks such as the Italian masters liked to set at the backs of their madonnas. Red-headed Pip had put aside his radio and was furiously at work again with ropes and winches while the skipper in the wheelhouse, his bottle empty, plied the wheel with ample and unsteady grapplings. I took another drink of gin and looked about me brightly at the harbour and the hill as they disposed themselves glidingly like well-oiled stage machinery around our smooth advance.

We docked. Everything went quiet suddenly. The skipper came out of the wheelhouse and spat over the side. The boy was already on the pier, winding a rope around a bollard. When I stepped up after him on to dry land the world went on moving under my feet. Hyperborean Apollo, I prayed, make haste to help me! Mr Tighe’s van came bumping along the pier and drew to a shuddering halt at the dockside where the boy was unloading the cargo from the deck. How vivid and gay everything seemed to my gin-tinted gaze, the acid-green hill and the opalescent water shimmering under a lemon light. I set off up the hill and presently Mr Tighe in his laden van drew level with me and offered me a lift which I declined, making large gestures of thanks. He nodded in friendly fashion and drove on, the van farting petrol-blue billows of exhaust smoke. Shall we describe him now? I think not. Mr Tighe, and that old dog that comes and goes, and the horse I am supposed to have heard but never saw: holes in the backdrop, through which the bare sky twinkles. When I looked back from the last bend of the road the boat was already under way again, veering out past the jetty like an offer of reprieve being unceremoniously withdrawn. What had I done, coming to this far-flung place? Yet how light I felt, how fleet, as if I were aloft on wings! I went on and soon spotted the house, perched in its solitude under the oak ridge. The hawthorn was in blossom. Here is the little bridge. Wind, shine, clouds, the unwarranted yet irrepressible expectancies of the heart. I am arrived.

I MUST HAVE LOOKED like something out of a Bible story, toiling up that stony track in my soiled suit with my cardboard suitcase in my hand and my collar turned up against the wind. I should have been on my knees, of course, or, better still, barefoot, with staff and falcon, like the penitent pilgrim I was pretending to be. I could still feel the sway of the sea, and of that other sea of gin sloshing around inside me, and the ground kept rearing up under my feet in the most alarming way, like a carpet with the wind under it; I stumbled more than once, making the stones fly and getting grit in my shoes. I could hear myself breathing. I always know I am drunk when I can hear myself breathing; it sounded as if I were carrying a large, fat, winded man on my back. At the gate I paused to gather my wits but that only made my head spin; I set off again sternly, marching up the path to the front door like a wooden man, snorting and muttering, with my head thrown back and swinging my free arm. I rapped the knocker smartly and turned and surveyed the scene before me, chest out and nostrils flared, snuffing up the air.

I had to knock a second and then a third time before Licht came at last. He opened the door a crack and stuck out his little face and peered crossly past my shoulder, the tip of his sharp little nose twitching. I told him my name and he pursed his lips and sniffed.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it,’ he said. I thought he might shut the door on me, but after a moment of sullen indecision he stood aside grudgingly and motioned me in. ‘I’m Licht. The Professor said you were coming.’

He sniffed again.

The hallway was high and hung with shadows. I experienced a mysterious shock of recognition: it was as if I had stepped inside myself, into the shadowed vault of my own skull.

‘He’s working,’ Licht said truculently. ‘There’s a room ready for you.’ That seemed to amuse him.

He shut the door, fussing with the lock. I stood breathing; I could feel a horrible, tipsy leer slipping and sliding uncontrollably about my face. I seemed to be floating in some heavy, sluggish substance, a Dead Sea of the mind. I had a sense of vague, violent hilarity, and there was an inner roll and lurch as if something inside me had come loose and was yawing wildly from side to side. Licht still would not look directly at me but eyed vexedly a patch of the floor between us with his mouth pursed and a hand twitching in his pocket and one leg jigging. Never still, never still. I did not know what to say to him. At bottom I am a shy soul — yes, yes, I am, really. My kind always are. When I hear on the wireless a report of some grimy little atrocity — the bloodstained body discovered in the wood, the pensioner beaten to death in his bed, the mother-in-law dismembered and packed in a trunk and sent off on the night mail to Dundee — I think at once not of the victim, as I know I should, but of the other one, the poor, shivering, dandruffy, whey-faced fellow in his sleeveless pullover and cheap shoes, with his shaking hands and haunted eyes, caught there, frozen in the spotlight, realising with a falling sensation in the pit of his stomach that he will never again have a moment’s privacy, never a second he can call his own, that they will poke at him and probe him and ask endless questions and then put him in the dock to be gawped at and then send him for life — life! — to that panopticon where he will not even be able to void his bowels without an audience looking on. This is how you lose yourself, this is how they wrench you out of what you thought you were and hang you up by the hair and invite the world to gather round and point and laugh and take a shy at you for free. And all the time of course you know you deserve it, deserve it all, and more.

‘You look awful,’ Licht said with satisfaction and grinned uncontrollably and bit his lip. ‘Were you seasick?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a little, just a little … tired.’

I tramped behind him up the stairs. The upper flights grew progressively narrower and our footsteps thudded ringingly on the uncarpeted boards. My room was cramped and low, with peeling wallpaper and a tilted floor. I could see why Licht had been amused. There was a rush-bottomed chair — a relic of St Vincent — and a pine dressing-table and a coffin-sized wardrobe. On the floor beside the bed there was a worn, blue and grey rug. (How many more such cells must I invent?) One of the panes in the little window was broken and someone had mended it by wedging a bit of cardboard in the hole. Pigeons had got in, there were droppings on the sill and down the wall, hardened to a whitish stuff, like coral. The window framed a three-quarters view of indistinct greenery and the corner of a sloped field. I put my suitcase on the bed and looked about me. There was a steady, pulsing hum in my head as if a delicately balanced pinion spinning in there had developed a wobble.

Licht hovered on the threshold with a hand on the doorknob, frowning hard at the wardrobe.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re another expert, are you?’

‘An expert?’ I said blearily.

‘On art.’ His lip curled on the word.

‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘no, not at all.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘One is enough.’

We stood a moment saying nothing, each thinking his own thoughts. I felt a weight in my jacket pocket and brought out the half-empty gin bottle. We both looked at it dully.

‘How is the Professor?’ I said.

He glanced at me sharply.

‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Why?’ I had no answer to that. He looked away from me again and nibbled the nail of his little finger. ‘So you were in jail,’ he said and tittered, and then quickly recomposed his sullen glare. ‘What was it like?’

‘Like hell,’ I said. ‘Very warm and crowded.’

He nodded, thinking, still chewing his fingernail. We might have been talking about the weather.

‘I wouldn’t like that,’ he said, ‘jail.’

‘No,’ I said.

He slid a rapid glance across the floor and let it settle somewhere near my feet.

‘Bad, was it, yes?’

I said nothing. Still he waited, eyes aglitter with eager malice, hoping for the worst, I suppose, for some tearful cry or terrible, blurted confession. The wind in the chimneys, the gulls, all that: the strangeness of things. The strangeness of being here — of being anywhere.

‘When did you get out?’ he asked.

‘Yesterday,’ I said, and thought: Yesterday!

Licht nodded.

‘I’ll tell Professor Kreutznaer you’re here,’ he said. ‘We have our tea at five o’clock.’

He tarried a moment more, then muttered something under his breath and abruptly withdrew, shutting the door behind him with a soft bang.

I sat down on the side of the bed with my hands on my knees, gazing at the floor between my feet and sighing the while, in a kind of weary and not wholly unpleasant dejection. Thus the prodigal son must have felt — shaky, dazed, a little hollow — as the haunch of veal was wheeled in and the infuriate brother slunk away gnawing his knuckles.

Professor Kreutznaer did not fall upon my neck. The first thing that struck me about him was how plausible he appeared, how authentic, at least when looked at from a decent distance; compared to him I seemed to myself a thing of rags and smoke, flapping helplessly this way and that at the mercy of every passing breeze. I had met him once before, many years ago, in a golden world now gone. He had hardly changed at all; I do not imagine he has ever been much different from what he is now. I see receding versions of him — young man, boy, babe in arms — all nestling inside each other, each one smaller than the next and yet all the same, with the same big bloodless head and filmy stare and that same air of standing somehow sideways to the world. He is calm, remote, taciturn, possessed of a faintly shabby imperium; he is, or was, at least, a legend in the world of art, foremost authority on Vaublin, frequent guest at I Tatti in the great days, co-author with the late Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures of that controversial monograph on Poussin, consultant for the great galleries of the world and valued adviser to private collectors on however many continents there are. It used to be said that a Thyssen or a Helmut Behrens would not lift a finger in the auction room without first consulting Kreutznaer. Yet when Licht ushered me at last into his presence and left me there, the thing I felt most strongly was the urge to laugh. Yes, laugh, as I want to laugh for instance in the concert hall when the orchestra trundles to a stop and the virtuoso at his piano, hunched like a demented vet before the bared teeth of this enormous black beast of sound, lifts up deliquescent hands and prepares to plunge into the cadenza. I was immediately ashamed of myself, of course, convinced this tickle of raucous glee must be the self-protective reflex of the second-rater before the spectacle of excellence, the guffaw of the half-educated in the presence of the scholar. I thought of a monkey leaping among the palms, pointing and shrieking and hilariously hurling excrement as the famous naturalist in his baggy shorts comes tramping down the jungle track on the heels of his burdened bearers, his nose buried in his field-notes. It has always been thus with me. Even in what I like to think of now as the renaissance period of my life, when my interests were catholic and everything was a matter of perspective, I always worried that I would burst into shrieks of laughter in the face of this or that grand savant and so show myself up for the hopelessly shallow creature that I am. But then sometimes too I comfort myself with the thought that, as someone or other has rightly pointed out, shallowness has no bottom. Is it any wonder I went to the bad?

So there we are in the turret room, with the transparent sky of morning all around us, he seated in his sea-captain’s chair and I standing meekly before him, exchanging solemnities with him and trying to keep a straight face while with protruding lower lip he read over yet again my letter of introduction from the administrator of the Behrens Collection. I was still three-quarters drunk, but the hot, brassy taste of gathering sobriety was in my mouth and I could hear in the distance the dull tom-tom beat of an approaching headache. It was like being up before the beak — and I should know, after all. Presently, however, and most unexpectedly, another sensation came over me, a sort of burning flush, which it took me a moment to identify. It was shame. I mean the real thing, the sear, the scald, the pure, fat, fiery stuff itself: shame. Do you know what it is to feel like that, to cringe and writhe inside yourself as if your flesh were on fire? It is not given to every man to know without the shadow of a doubt that he is a scoundrel. (It takes more courage than you think to name yourself as you should be named. You do not know what it costs to bring yourself to that pass, I can tell you.) I wanted to abase myself before him, to cast myself down at his feet with cries and imprecations, drumming my fists and weeping, or wrap my arms around his knees and cry my sins aloud and beg forgiveness. Oh, I was in a transport. In the end, however, I only put my head back and snuffled up a deep breath, like a diver surfacing, and brought out with a certain ceremonial air the fact of our previous meeting, as if it were the broken half of the precious amulet that would identify me as the long-lost son of the palace, despite my rags and sores. He stiffened, I thought, and rolled his soft-boiled eyes at me suspiciously.

‘We met?’ he said. ‘Where was that?’

‘At Whitewater,’ I said. ‘Oh, twenty years ago. We were house-guests there one weekend. We walked together in the gallery, I remember; you spoke of Vaublin.’

Talk about another life! The windows of the great house filled with greenish summer light and the pictures on the walls like high doorways opening on to other, luminously peopled worlds. The Professor wore black that day, too; for all I know it may have been the same outfit as the one he was wearing now, the same rusty velvet jacket and tubular trousers and boots so old the uppers looked as if they were made of crěpe paper. He had reminded me, I remember, with his big body and little legs and great, round, suet-coloured head, of one of the mighty Germans, Hegel, perhaps, someone like that, someone solemn and ponderous and faintly, unconsciously ridiculous. It struck me how he managed to be both abstracted and sharply watchful. What did we talk about as we paced the polished timbers of that long, high gallery, stepping through blocks of sunlight streaming in the immense windows? I can’t remember, though I can see us there, clear as anything. The Professor, however, was firmly sceptical.

‘No no,’ he said brusquely, ‘you have mistaken me for someone else.’

I persisted gently, determined to establish my connection, however tenuous, with the great days of Whitewater when Helmut Behrens was still alive and I had not yet forfeited my place in the realm of light. I should have married his daughter, I would be master there now, would even have a Vaublin of my very own. Whitewater! I think of permed girls in old-fashioned tennis shoes and pleated skirts and slacks — remember slacks? — and the grass green as it only can be in memory, and gin-and-tonics on the terrace and everyone smoking, and all day long that general air of idleness shot through with languid lusts. When I conjure up those days I feel like old Adam pausing in anguish in the midst of the stony fields, mattock in hand, pierced by paradisal visions of a past now hardly to be believed in. The more I insisted, the more firmly the Professor denied we had ever met; a sort of tussle resulted, elaborately polite, of course, I pushing and he pulling, our teeth gritted. It was all very awkward and in the end embarrassing. We fell into a rueful silence and looked out of the windows for a while, he fiddling with things on his desk and I standing behind him with my hands plunged in the pockets of my jacket; we must have looked like something out of one of Munch’s more melancholic studies. A sea-fret had blurred the far dunes and clouds the colour of wood-smoke were piling up from the horizon, and as we watched, two thick, butter-coloured pillars of sunlight stepped slowly over the far, unmoving waves; sometimes even Dame Nature overdoes her effects. The Professor cleared his throat, huffing and frowning. He dropped Anna Behrens’s letter on the desk and sat brooding, palping his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger.

‘A very great collection,’ he said.

‘Yes, wonderful, wonderful,’ I said, with what I suppose must have seemed a horribly suggestive, pushy coyness. ‘There is that Vaublin, for instance.’

He shot me a rapid, sideways glance and cleared his throat. What had I said? His chair gave a stifled cry of protest under him as he rose. He walked heavily to the window and stood looking out, hunched and motionless, his fat, bloodless little hands clasped tight behind his back, the two stubby thumbs busily circling each other. Whenever I think of him this is how I see him, in the act of turning away from me like this, in the furtive way that he has, with one fat shoulder lifted and that great, round head bowed, like a man anticipating a hail of brickbats. Outside, rain fell glittering through sunlight.

‘Miss Behrens speaks highly of you,’ he said, and directed at me over his shoulder a sort of fishy rictus.

‘She’s very kind,’ I said. ‘We have known each other a long time.’

‘Ah.’ He sniffed.

‘I would like to have seen Le monde d’or,’ I said. ‘It is the centrepiece of the collection, as you know.’ A definite plumminess was creeping into my tone; I was beginning to sound like the suave cat-burglar in the old movies — where was my silver cigarette case, my patent-leather pumps, my cummerbund? The Professor sniffed again, louder than before. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I would not go to Whitewater now. It would hardly be …’ I could not think of the word; the language is not commodious enough to encompass the notion of a return by me to — well, yes, to the scene of the crime. ‘I can’t go home either,’ I said and essayed a light, melancholy laugh. ‘I have burnt my boats, I’m afraid.’

He did not seem to be listening, standing motionless at the window with his back firmly set against me. At length he turned, frowning abstractedly at the floor between us.

‘There is a lot to be done,’ he said. ‘Papers, notes …’ He waved a hand over the disorder on his desk. ‘Secretarial work, really. Licht does what he can, but of course …’ He shrugged.

‘Then I can stay?’ I said.

It came out like a whoop. He flinched, as if he had been pounced upon by something large and heavy.

‘Yes,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders again, trying to extricate himself from the woolly embrace of my enthusiasm, ‘yes, I suppose you … I suppose …’

I thanked him. There was a catch in my voice, thick as it was with the pent of unshed tears; had I let them flow they would have come out forty per cent proof. Feeling the unabating waft of my gratitude he blinked and gave me one of his consternated, slow stares and turned away from me again uneasily. You must understand, this was a fraught moment for me, the commencement of my return from the wilderness into the place of humankind. I had come prepared to throw myself at his feet and here I was, still standing. Conceive of my joy, spiced though it was, I confess, with the actor’s secret triumph at having moved the house to tears (I have said it before, I shall say it again, the stage has lost a star in me). I went down the stairs and locked myself in the lavatory on the landing and sat on the bowl and gazed at the space between my knees, swaying a little and humming to myself, lost in a euphoric, unfocused introspection. I brought out my broad-shouldered comforter and took another good stiff nip of gin. My nose was running. Here I was, hardly a day out of prison and already a hand had come down from the clouds to haul me up to celestial heights. Why then, behind the euphoria, did I have the impression that something was being palmed off on me? Was there, I asked myself, a trace of dirt under the fingernails of that helping hand? Oh, not the greasy black stuff flecked with blood and hair that is lodged immovably under my splintered nails, but just the ordinary grime, the stuff that humans naturally accumulate as they claw their way through this filthy world. Would the Professor draw me up out of myself, or was I to help him to descend?

*

Thus I had alighted at last in what I suppose I may as well call my destination. I had a feeling of weightlessness, a floating sensation, which I recognised; I always feel like this when I first come to a new place, as if something of me were lagging behind the physical arrival, some part of myself hanging back, out on the ocean, or in the air, dazed by speed and change. Thus the angel when he came to Mary must have felt, trembling on one knee with his wings still spread in this other, denser azure, stammering out his amazing message. But what annunciation did I bring, what grotesque incarnation did I herald? What word? What flesh?

We ate our tea in the kitchen, the Professor frowning at his plate and Licht eyeing me narrowly and saying things under his breath. I felt like the interloper that I was. Interloper: what an apt word: as if I had run up quietly and pressed myself between them. I had an awkward sense of myself caught up in a sort of antique dance, smiling and wincing and mouthing excuse-me’s as together they trod out the measures of their ancient minuet, their eyes fixed on something elsewhere and their feet dragging leadenly.

Licht could not contain himself.

‘Why don’t we open a hostel?’ he said at last, loudly, his voice shaking.

The room cringed. The Professor put on a bland expression and did not lift his eyes, and Licht, white-faced and furious, glared across the table at his inclined, broad bald pate. ‘Why not turn the place into a doss-house?’ he cried. ‘We could take in every tinker and drunkard that happens to be passing by.’

A long and weighty silence followed. Licht sat and stared before him with livid fixity, his knife and fork clutched in his fists and his knuckles white and one leg going like a sewing-machine under the table, making the cruets rattle.

‘How was the crossing?’ the Professor enquired of me at last, in a resonantly courteous tone.

The effects of the gin were wearing off and the faint buzzing of a hangover had started up. My eyes felt as if they had been toasted and my breath came out in furnace blasts.

‘There’s the extra work,’ Licht shouted. ‘There’s the cooking, for instance. Am I expected to do all that? — because I won’t.’ He beat a fist softly on the table; there were tears in his eyes, big, shining drops brimming on the lids. ‘You never tell me anything!’ he cried. ‘You never consult me!’

Professor Kreutznaer fixed his eye on a patch of the tablecloth beside his plate and sighed.

I fell to quiet contemplation, as is my wont at times of social awkwardness such as this. How shyly chance portions of the world dispose themselves — a bit of yard spied through a doorway at evening, clouds crowding in the corner of a window — as if to say, Look at us! we mean something!

The dog came waddling in from the yard (yes, yes! — Mr Tighe will make a full appearance yet, arm in arm with Miss Broaders the postmistress, and a winged horse will put its head over the half-door, and there will be no mysteries left). Licht took our plates and set them on the floor for the beast to finish off the scraps. Its name was Patch; all dogs are Patch, to me. It had a bad case of pink-eye. As it gulped and gasped Licht talked to it loudly in angry good humour that was meant to sound a general rebuke, tousling its rank fur and slapping it on the rump, raising a cloud of brownish dust.

Another prison, I was thinking, its walls made of air, and the old self inside me still in its white cell snarling for release.

‘Good dog,’ Licht said heartily. ‘Good old dog!’

That’s me.

*

In time of course we got used to each other. Even Licht in the end reconciled himself, not without a lingering and occasionally eruptive resentment, to my invasion of his little world. What an oddly assorted trio we would have seemed anywhere else; the island, however, with its long tradition of inbreeding and recurring bouts of internecine strife, was well used to peculiar and contingent arrangements such as ours. We were like a family of orphaned, elderly siblings, the resentments and rivalries of childhood calcified inside us, like gallstones. When I think of it I am surprised at myself for the brazen way in which I insinuated myself here — it is not like me, really it’s not — but the truth is I had nowhere else to go. The house, the Professor, the work on Vaublin, all this represented for me the last outpost at the border; beyond were the fiery, waterless wastes where no man or even monster could survive.

Eventually the house too in its haughty way accommodated itself to my coming, though there were still times when the whole place seemed to twang like a spider’s web under the weight of my unaccustomed tread. I suspect it was not any noise that I made but on the contrary the uncanny quiet of my presence that was most unsettling. I have always moved gingerly, excessively so, perhaps, among the furniture of other people’s lives, not for fear of disturbing things but out of an obscure terror of being myself somehow caught out, of being surprised among surprised surroundings, red-handed. At times I fancied I could hear everything going silent suddenly for no particular reason, listening for me, and then of course I too would stop and stand with held breath, straining to catch I knew not what, and so the silence would stretch and stretch until it could bear the strain no longer and snapped of its own accord when a floorboard groaned or a door banged in the wind. At moments such as that I sympathised with the aboriginal tenants as they too stood stock-still, Licht in the kitchen and the Professor in his tower, straining despite themselves to catch the faint, discordant note of my presence. It must have been as if some large and softly padding animal had got into the house and was hiding somewhere, in the dark under a bed, or behind a not quite closed door, breathing and waiting, half fierce and half afraid. Licht in particular seems unable to prevent himself from listening for me, from the moment I wake in the morning until I drag myself up to my room again at dead of night. He wants to ask me things, I know, but cannot formulate the questions. He is like a child longing to learn all the thrilling, dirty secrets of the big world. He listens to the beast stirring, and smells blood.

Poor Licht. I seem unable to utter his name without that adjective attached to it. He keeps himself busy; that is his aim, to keep busy, as if he fears dissolution, a general and immediate falling apart, should he stop even for a moment in his headlong stumble. He cleaves to the principle of the perfectability of man, and gives himself over enthusiastically to self-improvement programmes. He sends off for things advertised in the newspapers, kitchen utensils, hiking boots, patented remedies for this or that deficiency of the blood or brain; he possesses books and manuals on all sorts of matters — how to set up a windmill or grow mushrooms commercially, how to draw and paint, or do wickerwork; he has piles of pamphlets on bee-keeping, wine-making, home accountancy, all of them eagerly thumb-marked for the first few pages and in pristine condition thereafter. He writes letters to the newspapers, does football competitions, labours for days over prize crossword puzzles. Always busy, always in motion, frantically treading the rungs of his cage-wheel. Nor does he neglect the outer man: at morning and evening, unfailingly, he strips down to his vest and drawers and spends a quarter of an hour ponderously bending knees and flexing arms and touching fingertips to toes; on occasion, looking up from the garden, I catch a glimpse of him in his room engaged in these shaky callisthenics, his strained little face yo-yoing slowly behind the shadowed glass like a lugubrious moon. He aims to get in shape, he says — but what shape, I wonder, is that? I suspect that, like me, he is convinced that large adjustments need to be made before he can consider himself to have reached the stage of being fully human.

We each of us have our ceremonies. There is the Professor’s nightly bath, for instance, which has all the solemn trappings of a royal balneation. I hear him in the cavernous bathroom on the second-floor return, vigorously sluicing and sloshing; then for a long time all goes quiet except for an occasional aquatic heave or the sudden, echoing plop of a big drop falling from chin or lifted elbow. I picture him sitting up in the tub like a big, mottled frog, just sitting there with the steam rising around him, quite still, water-wrinkled, hardly breathing, the lids dropping abruptly now and then over those little bulging black eyes and as abruptly lifting again. Afterwards I discover his damp trail on the stairs, dumbbell-shaped footprints dark in the moonlight, at once comic and sinister, winding their splayed way upwards to the mysterious fastness of his bedroom.

Strange, now that I think of it, how many of the rituals of the house involve water; we are a little Venice here, all to ourselves. There are the plants to be watered, the kettle to be kept simmering on the stove for the endless pots of tea the house requires, the washings-up, the launderings. I do our clothes, the girl’s and mine, in an old tin bath in the scullery; there is an antiquated washing-machine I could use, but like all lifers I am set in my ways. I used to hang the laundry in bits and pieces out of the window of my room to dry, until Licht complained (‘We’re not living in a tenement here, you know’), and then I rigged up a line in a corner of the garden. Still Licht was not pleased — he is pained I suppose by the sight of my flapping shirts excitedly embracing the girl’s slip. I confess I derive a certain wan pleasure from annoying him; it is wrong of me, I know, but somehow he invites cruelty. He patronises me, seeing in my ruin an encouragement to lord it over me. I do not mind, moth-eaten old lion that I am, and obligingly open wide my toothless jaws and let him put in his head as far and for as long as he likes. He confides in me, despite himself, under cover of a blustering anger that does not convince either of us, telling me how he loathes the life here, the harshness of it, the isolation. The villagers laugh at him, Mr Tighe cheats him on the grocery bill, Miss Broaders listens in when he goes to the post office to use the telephone. He professes to hate the house, too, speaking of it with deep disgust, in a furious, spitting undertone, as if he thinks the walls might be eavesdropping; it bears him along like a big old broken-down ship, its ancient timbers shuddering; he looks forward to the day when it will founder at last. He is convinced it plays tricks on him. Inanimate things rear up at him, trip him up, give way under his feet, fall on his head. He will put down something and return an hour later and find it gone. Door handles come away in his hand, curtains when he tries to draw them will collapse suddenly in a muffled cascade of dust and jangling brass rings. He retaliates, letting the rain come in through open windows, allowing filth to gather in hidden corners of the kitchen, neglecting things until they break, or get scorched, or overflow. He dreams of escape, of getting up one morning before dawn and sneaking off like a hotel guest doing a flit. He has no idea where he would go to, yet flight, just flight itself, is a constant theme, a kind of hazy, blue and gold background to everything he does. I could tell him about freedom, but I have not the heart; let him dream, let him dream.

How at a word things shift suddenly, the whole pattern falling apart and reassembling itself in a new way out of the old pieces. I had been here some time before I discovered that it is not Professor Kreutznaer who owns the house, but Licht. This was a great surprise. I had, naturally, I believe, taken it for granted that the Professor was the man of property and Licht his vassal, but not so; in fact, the Professor is as much the parvenu as I am. Licht has lived here since he was a child — he may even have been born here. I would not have thought of him as a native, mind you, he is not exactly the craggy, weatherbeaten type one would expect an islandman to be. His mother it seems was a widow of many years; I pictured her as a scattered, birdlike creature with wild white hair and demented eyes, a sort of anile, genderless version of her son, but then Licht showed me a picture of her and she was nothing like my imagining, but a big strapping termagant with an implacable stare and a boxer’s biceps. It is not clear when she died, or even that she did die; an inexplicably imperative sense of delicacy prevents me from enquiring too closely. He may have her in the cellar, or boarded up in the attic, for all I know. He speaks of her, on the rare occasions when he does speak of her, with the startled, heart-in-mouth air of a man stepping over a gaping crevice that has suddenly opened up before him in the pavement, frowning, his eyes cast down in alarmed despondency. I understand, however, that she had been long gone, by whatever means of departure she had chosen, by the time the Professor turned up, like me, looking for shelter. It seems he came over on the boat and climbed up here to enquire after lodgings and has been here ever since. In retirement from life, just like me.

Thus the days passed, the weeks. I walked the island, taking consolation from stray things, a red geranium in a blue window, a white sail in the bay, the suspense and then the sudden plummet of a hawk. In the evenings I lay on the frowsty bed in my room with my back against the wall and my hands behind my head and watched the dusk deepen in the window and the world out there fade from green to grey and turn at last to glossy black. I felt nothing, almost nothing. All my life I had been on my way elsewhere, despising the present, pressing always into the future, wanting the next thing, always the next thing; now at last I had come to rest, if that is what it can be called, as sometimes in my dreams I land with unexpected lightness after a long, tumbling, heart-stopping plunge through emptiness and dark air. I had sailed the sea and come to Cythera. That much I could say. Now I was waiting. The days would whiten and then flutter to the floor like so many leaves torn from a calendar; I would write my notes, do my chores, eat, sleep, be. And then one day, a day much like any other in that turning season between spring’s breathless imminences and the first, gold flourishings of summer, I would look out the window and see that little band of castaways toiling up the road to the house and a door would open into another world. Oh, a little door, hardly high enough for me to squeeze through, but a door, all the same. And out there in that new place I would lose myself, would fade and become one of them, would be another person, not what I had been — or even, perhaps, would cease altogether. Not to be, not to be: the old cry. Or to be as they, rather: real and yet mere fancy, the necessary dreams of one lying on a narrow bed watching barred light move on a grey wall and imagining fields, oaks, gulls, moving figures, a peopled world. I think of a picture at the end of a long gallery, a sudden presence come upon unexpectedly, at first sight a soft confusion of greens and gilts in the calm, speechless air. Look at this foliage, these clouds, the texture of this gown. A stricken figure stares out at something that is being lost. There is an impression of music, tiny, exact and gay. This is the end of a world. Birds unseen are fluting in the trees, the sun shines somewhere, the distances of the sea are vague and palely blue, the galliot awaits. The figures move, if they move, as in a moving scene, one that they define, by being there, its arbiters. Without them only the wilderness, green riot, tumult of wind and the crazy sun. They formulate the tale and people it and give it substance. They are the human moment.