Grey Area

Chest

The pavement outside Marten’s the newsagent was streaked with sputum. In the outrageously dull light of a mid-afternoon, in midwinter, in middle England, the loops and lumps of mucus and phlegm appeared strangely bright, lurid even, as if some Jackson Pollock of the pneumo-thorax had been practising Action Hawking.

There was an incident — of sorts — going on in the entrance to the shop. A man in the middle of his middle years, dressed not so much warmly as tightly in a thick, hip-length jacket, corduroy trousers, brogues, and anaconda of woollen scarf, was upbraiding the shop manager. His voice — which was in the middle of middle-class accents — would start off at quite a reasonable pitch, but as he spoke it would creep up the scale until it was a melodramatic whine. The shop manager, blue-suited, nylon-shirted, with thinning hair and earnest expression, kept trying — albeit with appropriate deference — to break in, but without success.

‘I can’t put up with this any more, Hutchinson,’ said the man, whose name was Simon-Arthur Dykes. ‘I’ve two sick children and an invalid wife, as well as other dependants. God knows how many times I’ve told your boy to bring the paper to the door and knock, but he still won’t do it. The paper is vital for my work — it’s useless to me if it’s damp and soggy, but every single day it’s the same, he just chucks it over the fence. What the hell does he think it’s going to do, grow legs and scamper up to the house?’

‘But Mr Dykes — ‘

‘Don’t “but” me, Hutchinson, I’m paying you for a service that I don’t receive. I’m a sensitive man, you know, a man who needs some caring and consideration. My nerves, you see, they’re so very. . so very. . stretched, I feel that they might snap. Snap! D’you appreciate that? The nerves of the artist — ‘

‘I’m not un — ‘

‘You’re not what? Unaware? Unsympathetic? Unaffected? All of the above? Oh, I don’t know — I don’t know — it’s all too much for me. Perhaps my wife is right and we need a redeemer of some kind, Hutchinson, a reawakening. .’ And with this, Simon-Arthur Dykes’s voice, instead of climbing up towards hysteria, fell down, down into his chest where it translated itself into a full-bodied coughing. A liquid coughing, that implied the sloshing about of some fluid ounces of gunk in his lungs.

The shop manager was left free to talk, which he did, fulsomely. ‘No, Mr Dykes,’ he began, sounding placatory, ‘I’m not unsympathetic, I do feel for you, really I do. I can imagine what it must be like only too well. Out there at the Brown House, isolated, with the wet, exposed fields all around you, damp and encompassing.’ His fingers made combing motions, ploughing dismal little furrows in the air. ‘I can see what a torment it must be to receive a wet newspaper every morning’ — now the manager’s own voice had begun to quaver — ‘knowing that it may be the only contact that you will have with the world all day, the only thing to touch your sense of isolation. I don’t know. Oh Christ! I don’t know.’

And with that the manager’s voice cracked, and he began to weep openly. But the weeping didn’t last for long, for having given way to the flow in one form, the manager’s will to resist the ever present tickling in his own chest was eliminated. Soon, both of the men were hacking away, producing great caribou-cry honks, followed by the rasping eructation of tablespoon-loads of sputum, which they dumped, along with the rest of the infective matter, on the pavement fronting the newsagent’s.

A group of adolescents was hanging about outside Marten’s, for this was where the buses stopped, picking up passengers for Oxford, High Wycombe and Princes Risborough. They wore padded nylon anoraks, decorated with oblongs of fluorescent material and the occasional, apparently random, selection of letters and figures: ‘zx — POWER NINE’, was written on one boy’s jacket; and ‘ARIZONA STATE 4001’ on his girl companion’s. With their squashy vinyl bags at their rubber-ridged feet and their general air of round-shouldered indifference, the adolescents gave the impression of being a unit of some new kind of army — in transit. Part of a pan-European formation of Jugend Sportif.

None of them paid any attention to the two men, who were now reaching the rattling end of their joint coughing fit. They were all focused on one of the older boys, who held a small red cylinder attached to a valved mouthpiece. Mostly he kept the mouthpiece clamped in his teeth and breathed through the double-action valve with a mechanical ‘whoosh’, but every so often he would pass it to one of the others, and they would take a hit.

Straightening up the manager said, ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Kevin-Andrew?’

‘It’s oxygen, Mr Hutchinson,’ said the lad, removing the mouthpiece.

‘Well, give us both a go, Kevin, for the love of God. Can’t you see the state poor Mr Dykes and I are in?’

‘I don’t know if I can, Mr Hutchinson. .’ The lad paused, looking shamefaced. ‘You see, it’s the family cylinder. I just got it recharged at the health centre and it’s got to last us till the weekend.’

‘If that’s the case, why are you giving it out to your pals like a tube of bloody Smarties!’ This was from Simon-Arthur Dykes. He too had straightened up, but was still gasping and visibly blue in the face. He shouldn’t really have expostulated with such vigour, for it got him wheezing again, and he began to double over once more, one hand clutching at the doorjamb, the other flopping around in the air.

‘Come on, Kevin-Andrew,’ said the manager, ‘give him the mouthpiece, for heaven’s sake. Tell you what, you can all have a belt off of my Ventalin inhaler, if Mr Dykes and I can just get ourselves straight.’

Grudgingly, and with much shoulder-shrugging and foot-shuffling, the youth handed over the small red cylinder. In return Hutchinson passed him the angled plastic tube of the Ventalin inhaler.

For a while there was a sort of calm on the wan stage of the pavement. The two men helped one another to take several much needed pulls from the oxygen cylinder, while the group of adolescents formed a circle around which they passed the inhaler. There was silence, except for the whirring whizz of the inhaler and the kerchooof! of the oxygen cylinder.

All the parties began to look slightly better than formerly. Their pale cheeks acquired an ulterior glow, their eyes brightened, their countenances took on the aspect of febrile health that only comes to those who have temporarily relieved a condition of chronic invalidism.

Simon-Arthur Dykes drew himself up in the doorway, passing the oxygen cylinder back to Kevin-Andrew. ‘Thank you, Mr Hutchinson, really I thank you most sincerely. You are a man of some honour, sir, some Christian virtue in a world of ugliness and misery.’ Dykes clutched the manager’s upper arm. ‘Please, please, Mr Dykes, don’t upset yourself again — think of your poor chest.’ The manager gave Dykes his copy of the Guardian, which he had dropped during the coughing fit.

Dykes looked at the paper as if he couldn’t remember what it was. His rather protruberant grey eyes were darting about, unable to alight on anything. His thick brown hair was standing up in a crazy bouffant on top of his high, strained forehead.

He took the manager by the arm again, and drew him back into the shop a couple of paces. Then he leant towards him conspiratorially saying, ‘It’s Dave Hutchinson, that’s your name, isn’t it?’

‘Ye-es,’ the manager replied uneasily.

‘And your patronymic?’

‘Dave as well.’

‘Well, Dave-Dave, I want you to call me Simon-Arthur. I feel this little episode has brought us together, and I stand in debt on your account.’

‘Really, Mr Dykes — ‘

‘Simon-Arthur.’

‘Simon-Arthur, I don’t think it’s at all — ‘

‘No, I do. Listen, I’ve just picked up a brand-new nebuliser in Risborough. I’ve got it in the car. Why don’t you come around this evening, and give it a try — bring your wife if you like.’

This invitation, so obviously felt and meant, softened the manager’s resistance, broke down his barriers of social deference and retail professionalism. ‘I’d like that, Simon-Arthur,’ he said, grasping the artist’s right hand firmly in both of his, ‘really I would. But I’m afraid my wife is bed-bound, so it would only be me.’

‘I am sorry — but that’s OK, just come yourself.’

‘I’ve got a few mils of codeine linctus left over from the monthly ration — shall I bring it with me?’

‘Why not. . we can have a little party, as best we can.’

The two men finished, smiling broadly, in unison. Simon-Arthur took Dave-Dave Hutchinson’s hand warmly in his and gave it several pumps. Then they parted; and whilst Dave-Dave Hutchinson turned back into the interior of the shop, Simon-Arthur Dykes crossed the road to where his car was parked in the middle of the town square.

As he gained the herringbone of white lines that designated the parking area, Simon-Arthur felt a whooshing sensation behind him. He turned to see the 320 bus bearing down on the stop outside Marten’s. Observing the way the rows of yellow windows shone through the murky air, he jolted into greater haste. Darkness was coming; and with it the great bank of fog, that had hung two hundred feet above the ground all day, was beginning to descend, falling around the shoulders of the grey stone houses like some malodorous muffler.

Simon-Arthur kept his mouth clamped shut, but sniffed the fog judiciously with a connoisseur’s nose. Lots of sulphur tonight, he thought, and perhaps even a hint of something more tangy. . sodium, maybe? He turned on the ignition. His headlights barely penetrated the thick fog. As he pulled out and drove off down the road Simon-Arthur avoided looking at the fog too closely. He knew from experience that if he peered into it for too long, actually concentrated on its twistings, its eddies, its endless assumptions of insubstantial form, that it could all too easily draw him down a darkling corridor, into more durable, more horribly solid visions.

But halfway home he had to stop. A heavy mizzle was saturating the air. The A418 was a tunnel of spray. Heavy lorry after heavy lorry churned up the fog and water. Simon-Arthur was jammed between two of these grunting beasts as he gained the crest of the hill at Tiddington. The vacuum punched in the air by the one ahead was sucking his flimsy 2cv forward, whilst the boil of turbulence pushed up by the one behind propelled him on. The wheels of the car were barely in contact with the tarmac. He dabbed the brakes and managed to slide off the road into a lay-by.

Sort of safe, Simon-Arthur slumped over the Citröen’s steering wheel. He felt more than usually depleted; and the thought of facing his family produced a hard, angular sensation in his gorge. Without quite knowing why he opened the door of the car and got out. If he had felt unsafe in the car — he was now totally exposed. Lorry after lorry went on slamming by, throwing up clouds of compounded gas and liquid.

Simon-Arthur lurched round to the other side of the car and stood transfixed by the hard filthiness of the verge. The bank of grass and weeds was so stained with pollutants that it appeared petrified. It was as if the entire lay-by had been buried in a peat bog for some thousands of years and only this moment disinterred.

Simon-Arthur stood, lost in time, ahistoric. He looked along the A418 towards his house. The road manifested itself as a serpent of yellow and orange, winding its way over the dark country. Each ploughing vehicle was another muscular motion, another bunching and uncoiling in its anguiform body. But if he turned away from the road he was enclosed in his lay-by burial ship. A Sutton Hoo of the psyche. The armour of mashed milk cartons and crushed cans, the beadwork of fag butts, the weaponry of buckled hub caps and discarded lengths of chromium trim. They were, Simon-Arthur reflected, entirely useless — and therefore entirely apt — funerary gifts, for his sustenance in this current afterlife.

He would have stayed longer, savouring this mordant feeling, but the fog was seeping into his chest, producing acute sensations of rasp and tickle that grew and grew until he began to cough. When he was underway again he had to drive with the Citröen’s flap window open so that he could spit out of it. And by the time he turned off the main road, up the track to the Brown House, he was as blue as any Saxon — chieftain or otherwise.

The house stood about twenty yards back from the track, in an orchard of diseased apple trees; their branches were wreathed in some type of fungus that resembled Spanish moss. The impression the Brown House gave was of being absolutely four-square, like a child’s drawing of a house. It had four twelve-paned windows on each side. As its name suggested, it was built from brown brick; atop the sloping brown-tiled roof was a brown brick chimney.

As Simon-Arthur got out of the car, he looked up at this and noted with approval that it was gushing thick smoke. The fog was so dense now that he could barely make out the point at which this smoke entered the atmosphere; it looked, rather, as if the Brown House were sucking in the murk that wreathed it.

He took a tightly sealed cardboard box from the back of the Citröen, and tucking this under one arm and his Guardian under the other he struggled over the buckled wire fence. There was a gate, but it was awkward to open and as Simon-Arthur was the only member of the family who now left the immediate purlieus of the Brown House, he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The fence and the gate had been Simon-Arthur’s stab at being a countryman. It was summer when he built it and Simon-Arthur, stripped to the waist, spent a sweaty afternoon hammering in the stakes and attaching the netting. He imagined himself like Levin, or Pierre, communing through labour with the spirit of Man. It was a vain delusion.

Even then the fog had been in evidence — albeit as a shadow of what it later became. That afternoon it gave the air a bilious tint. It made everything seem disturbingly post-nuclear, irradiated. When Simon-Arthur had finally finished and stood back to admire his work he saw an aching disjunction between what he had imagined he had achieved — and what was actually there.

The fence zigged and zagged and sagged its way along the track’s tattered verge. It looked like a stretch of wire looming up across the shell-holed sludge of no man’s land in an old photograph of the Somme.

For as long as the children had played in the garden the fence had acted more as a psychic barrier than a physical one. While it prevented them from getting on to the farm track, it also turned them in on themselves, in on the sepia interior of the Brown House. The fog came. Now it had been over two years since any of them had even ventured out of the house for more than a few minutes. Every time Simon-Arthur contemplated the fence he thought of pulling it down, but to do so was to counsel defeat on too many different levels.

Simon-Arthur opened the front door and stepped into the small vestibule. The first sound that met his ears was of some child plainting in the sitting room. He ignored it and kicking off his muddy boots went into the parlour and set the nebuliser box down on the table. He was unpacking it when his wife’s cousin, Christabel-Sharon, came wafting in.

‘Is that the nebuliser?’ she said, without preamble. He grunted assent. ‘Well, as soon as you’ve got it up and running we’d better put Henrykins on it for a while — the poor child is panting like a steam engine.’

‘What about Stormikins?’

‘Stormikins is fine, she can have second go. It’s Henrykins who’s really acting up.’ Christabel-Sharon pulled one of the cane-backed chairs out from the table and slumped down on it with a sigh. A sigh that turned into a choke, a splutter and then a full-blown rasping cough. A bronchitic cough that, was of such sub-sonic, juddering intensity that Simon-Arthur, as always, could hardly believe her narrow chest capable of producing — or containing — it.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, whilst continuing to ready the nebuliser. Christabel-Sharon was very thin — almost anorectic. Her ginger-blonde hair was done up in a chignon, revealing what once must have been a graceful swoop of pale, freckled neck, but what was now a scrawny shank of a thing with greaseproof skin stretched over a marbling of vein. She had once been very pretty, in a sylphlike way. Her grey eyes were deep-set, like Simon-Arthur’s own, although he could no longer remember whether they had always been so. They glittered under her brows, sending out a coruscating beam with each heave of her chest. Her breasts, fuller than the rest of her, moved under the stretchy fabric of her pullover; the nipples were erect and to Simon-Arthur they betokened nothing more than an autonomous and involuntary sexuality, parasitic on its hacking host.

He had the nebuliser assembled now and he plugged it in to the mains and switched it on. The rubber suction pads moved up and down in the glass chambers of Salbutimol and steroid. He turned on the stopcock of the oxygen cylinder and pressed the mask to his mouth. The sense of relief was overpowering. He could feel the electric engine adjusting itself to the motion of his ribcage, so that with each of his trembling and ineffectual inhalations it pushed more drug-laden oxygen into him.

It was bliss — like breathing normally again. The sensation marched at the head of a procession of memories: windows flung open and deep gouts of ozone-flavoured air drawn in unimpeded; running up hills and gasping with joy not pain; burying his head in the bosom of the earth and drawing its warm fungal odour in through flaring nostrils. These pneumo-recollections were so clear that Simon-Arthur could visualise each molecule of scent and gas burying itself in the pinkness of his membranes.

Christabel-Sharon’s woollen bosoms came into the corner of his eye. ‘Come on, Simon-Arthur, don’t you think you’re being a little selfish with that thing?’

‘Selfish! What the hell do you mean?’ As suddenly as the gift had been bestowed it was snatched away. Simon-Arthur’s anger rose up in him unbidden. ‘Listen, Christabel-Sharon, I’m the person in this house who has to go out, to engage with the brutal commerce of the world. I come back after a gruelling trip, blue in the face, on the verge of expiring, and just because I dare to take a few breaths — a few trifling puffs — on this nebuliser, this nebuliser which I abased myself to get. . you call me selfish. Selfish! I won’t stand for it!’

Christabel-Sharon had recoiled from him and was pressing herself up against the side of the tiled Dutch stove that stood in the corner of the parlour. Simon-Arthur noted through stinging tears of self-pity and frustration that she was doing something he found particularly disgusting: jettisoning sputum from her full lips into a pad of gauze that she had pressed against her mouth. She had quantities of these fabricated pads hidden about her person, and after use, deposited them — together with their glaucous contents — in a bucket lined with a plastic bag that she kept in her room. The dabbing practice further erased her beauty. For Simon-Arthur could never look at her without seeing little parcels of infective matter studding her body.

Simon-Arthur’s wife, Jean-Drusilla, came hurrying into the kitchen. In her arms she carried Henry-Simon, their son, a child of about eight.

‘Simon, thank God, thank God! The nebuliser. Praise be to the Father and to the Son. Praise be to the Mother of God especially, for granting us this deliverance.’ She set the child down on a chair and attached the mask, which was still giving out little ‘poots’ of oxygen, to his pallid face. Then she fell to her knees on the cold stone flags. ‘Simon-Arthur, Christabel-Sharon. . You will join me.’ It was a command, not a request.

Looking sheepishly at one another Simon-Arthur and Christabel-Sharon knelt on the flags. The three adults joined hands. ‘Oh merciful Mother,’ Jean-Drusilla chanted, ‘giver of all bounty, repository of all grace, we thank you for this gift of a nebuliser. Be sure, oh Blessed One, that we will employ it solely in furtherance of your Divine Will. So that our children and ourselves might breathe freely, and so that my dear husband might create beautiful art, the greater to glorify your name.’

Simon-Arthur had knelt grudgingly, and cynically observed the way that this spiritual intensity shaped his wife’s rather homely features. Her thick black hair was cut so as to frame her broad brow and firm chin, but the flesh hung slackly on her and there was a yellowish tinge to the whites of her eyes when she rolled them up to stare beatifically at the fire-resistant tiles. Even so, the effect of her measured chanting, which adapted itself to the background chuffing of Henry-Simon and the nebuliser, was mesmeric.

Perhaps there is a Redeemer, Simon thought. Perhaps He will come in a cloud of eucalyptus, freeing up all our passages, gusting through us with the great wind of the Spirit. And before he knew it tears were coursing down his cheeks. Jean-Drusilla, seeing this, leant forward and, taking his head, cradled it against her breast. Christabel-Sharon leant forward as well and stretched her thin arms around the both of them, and for quite a while they stayed like that, gently rocking.

When Dave-Dave Hutchinson, the manager of Marten’s the newsagent, arrived at the Brown House about three hours later, the ecstasis had somewhat subsided. He knocked, and waited on the metal bootscraper, treading gingerly from one foot to the other. After a few minutes Simon-Arthur himself came to the door. ‘My God, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it over tonight, the fog’s ridiculously thick.’

‘I’ve got the new radar in the car. It’s a bit tricky but once you’ve got the hang of it you can drive well enough.’

‘Come in, come in.’ Simon-Arthur almost yanked Dave-Dave in off the doorstep. ‘The children aren’t quite in bed yet and I don’t want them getting a lungful of this.’ He grabbed at the air outside the door and brought a clutch of the fog inside, which stayed intact, foaming like a little cloud on the palm of his hand for some seconds.

‘I brought this along with me.’ Dave-Dave pulled a small brown bottle from the side pocket of his sheepskin jacket.

‘Is that the codeine?’

‘Yeah, I’m afraid I’ve only about sixty mils left, but I pick up tomorrow.’

‘Sixty mils!’ Simon’s face lit up. ‘That’s splendid, that’ll bring us some warm cheer, but’ — and here his face fell — ‘what about your poor wife?’

The newsagent’s face adopted a serious expression. ‘I’m afraid she gets Brompton’s now.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, that’s too bad. Anyway, come in now, come in here to the drawing room, where it’s warm.’

Simon-Arthur ushered Dave-Dave into a long room that took up half of the Brown House’s ground floor. Dave-Dave could see at once that this was where the family spent the bulk of their time. There were two separate groupings of over-stuffed armchairs and sofas, one at either end of the room. Mahogany bookcases went clear along one of the walls, interrupted only by two windows in the centre and a door which presumably led to the garden.

On the other wall there was a vast collection of icons set on a number of shelves that were unevenly spaced, giving the impression that the icons were somehow radiating from the smouldering fire in the grate. Everywhere in the room, set on little tables — occasional, coffee and otherwise — on the arms of the chairs, and even the floor itself, were votive objects: crucifixes, incense burners, hanks of rosary beads, statuettes of the Blessed Virgin. The long room vibrated with the hum of so many patterns flowing into one another: wallpaper into carpet; carpet into seat-cover; seat-cover into cushion; cushion into the gilded frame of an icon. It was like a peacock’s tail under the glass dome of a taxidermist’s collation.

The overwhelming clutteredness of the room so impressed itself upon Dave-Dave Hutchinson that it wasn’t until Simon-Arthur said, ‘Jean-Drusilla, I want to introduce Mr Hutchinson, he manages the newsagent’s in Thame,’ that he realised there was anyone in it besides the two of them. A rather gaunt woman with severely chopped black hair and a prominent, red-tipped nose rose from behind the moulting back of a horsehair armchair where she had been seated.

‘I am so pleased to meet you, Mr Hutchinson,’ she said, holding out her hand. Dave-Dave Hutchinson advanced towards her, picking his way between the outcroppings of religionalia. She was wearing a crushed velvet, floor-length dress. Both the lace at her throat and that of her handkerchief broadcast the caramel smell of Friar’s Balsam.

He kissed her hand, and releasing it looked up into her eyes, which were deep brown. There, he caught a glimpse of her graphic religiosity: circling the two diminutive Hutchinson heads, reflected in her pupils, hovered imps, satyrs, minor demons and hummingbird angels. ‘A-and I you, Mrs Dykes,’ he stammered.

‘Simon-Arthur told me about the help you gave him this afternoon — and the concern you showed him as well.’

‘Really, Mrs Dykes, it was nothing, nothing at all.’

‘No, not nothing, Mr Hutchinson, far from it. It was a truly Christian act, the behaviour of a man of true feeling. A Samaritan casting aside the partisan claims of place, people and estate, selflessly to aid another.’

She was still holding his hand and she used it to draw him round and pilot him into an armchair that faced her own. ‘I fear my husband was asthmatic even before the fog, and he will let his emotions run away with him. Like all artists he is so terribly sensitive. When he gets upset. .’ She tailed off and shrugged expressively, both of her hands held palm-upwards. Dave-Dave Hutchinson stared at the many heavy gold rings, studded with amethysts and emeralds, that striped her fingers.

‘What exactly is it that you paint, Mr Dykes?’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson asked, turning in his chair to face Simon-Arthur, who was still hovering by the door. Even as the newsagent said it, he felt that the question was both too prosaic and too forward. He was painfully aware that his own social position was quite inferior to that of the Dykeses, and while it didn’t matter when he and Simon Dykes had formed that spontaneous bond of friendship at Marten’s — which was after all his own preserve — here at the Brown House he felt awkward and gauche, on guard lest he commit some appalling gaffe, or utter a solecism that would point up his humble origins.

‘Oh, I don’t paint much besides icons nowadays. These are some of mine around the fireplace.’

The newsagent rose from his chair and walked over to the wall. The icons were really very strange indeed. They featured all the correct elements of traditional icons, but the Trinity and the saints depicted were drawn not from life, nor imagination, but from the sort of photographs of public personages that are printed in the newspapers. These bland faces and reassuring eyes had been done in oils with total exactitude. The artist had even rendered the minute moiré patterning of coloured dots that constituted the printed image.

‘I can see why you’re so concerned to get your newspaper in good condition each day, Mr Dykes,’ he said — and immediately regretted it, it sounded so trite, so bourgeois a comment.

‘Ye-es,’ Simon-Arthur replied, ‘it’s very difficult to get that level of detail if you’re working from a soggy paper.’

‘Is there much of a demand for icons at the moment?’

‘A huge demand,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes, ‘a vast demand, but Simon-Arthur doesn’t sell his. He paints them for the greater glory of our Saviour, for no other client.’

Just then the door of the room swung open and Christabel-Sharon came in, carrying her three-year-old daughter Storm in her thin arms. The little girl was feverish. She was murmuring in a distracted way and had two bright, scarlet spots high up on her cheeks. Christabel-Sharon herself was in tears. ‘Henry has thrown Storm out of the oxygen tent again, Simon-Arthur; really, you must do something about it, look at the state she’s in.’

Simon-Arthur didn’t say anything, but left the room immediately. Dave-Dave Hutchinson could hear heavy feet thudding up the stairs and then voices raised in the room above, one deep, the other reedy.

‘Christabel-Sharon,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes when her husband had gone, ‘this is Mr Hutchinson who manages the newsagent’s in Thame. Mr Hutchinson, this is my cousin Christabel-Sharon Lannière.’

‘I’m delighted to meet you, Ms Lannière, said Dave Hutchinson, and waited for her to put the child down somewhere so that he might kiss her hand. She dumped the little girl quite unceremoniously on a chaise-longue, and advanced towards him smiling broadly, hand outstretched, the tears already drying on her cheeks, like snail trails in the morning sun.

And as he took the hand, and noticed how small and fine it was, Dave-Dave Hutchinson decided that she was unquestionably the most beautiful woman he had seen in a very long time. He was, after all, so conditioned to accepting emaciation as a body-type, that he could dwell on the hollow beneath a woman’s clavicle, even if it threatened to bore through her thorax. Christabel-Sharon must have sensed this silent homage on his part, for, as she curtsied, she gave an extra little bob, as if acknowledging this new allegiance to her attractions.

They stood like that for a while, looking at one another, whilst Jean-Drusilla Dykes tended to the little girl, propping her up on some cushions, finding a coverlet for her, and eventually placing the nebuliser mask over her whispering mouth and turning the machine on.

‘Oh, is that the nebuliser?’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson asked. ‘It looks absolutely fantastic.’

‘Isn’t it,’ said Christabel-Sharon, with equal enthusiasm. ‘We’ve been on the waiting list for one now for months, but somehow Simon-Arthur managed to get priority — ‘

‘We don’t talk about that, Christabel-Sharon,’ Jean-Drusilla Dykes cut in. ‘It isn’t seemly.’

‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson said hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean to seem intrusive.’

‘No, no, Mr Hutchinson, it’s not your fault, but the truth of the matter” is that Simon-Arthur did use connections to get hold of the nebuliser; and even though I’m delighted to have it I can’t help feeling that the way in which it was obtained will tell against us eventually. Oh Mr Hutchinson, what a shoddy, cheap world we live in when a fine man like my husband, a moral man, a just man, has to resort to such expedients merely in order to aid his suffering family — ‘ Her voice broke, quite abruptly, and she began to sob, screwing the handkerchief soaked with Friar’s Balsam into her eye.

Then the large, velvet-robed woman started to cough. It was, Dave-Dave Hutchinson noted — being now as adept at judging the nature of a cough as any doctor — a particularly hoarse and rattling cough, with an oil-drum resonance about it, admixed with something like the sound of fine shingle being pulled this way and that by breakers on a beach.

‘Now there — there, Mrs Dykes, please don’t upset yourself, please. .’ He pulled the little brown bottle of codeine linctus from his pocket and showed it to her. ‘I have some linctus here — that’ll help us all to stop coughing for a while.’

‘Ach-cach-cach-cach-Oh Mr ach-cach-Hutchinson, you are too kind, too kind. Christabel-Sharon, kindly fetch the linctus glasses.’ Christabel-Sharon exited. The two of them were left regarding one another over the chaise-longue; on which the child lay, her laboured breath wheezing contrapuntally to the choof-choof of the nebuliser.

‘Did you say,’ asked Dave-Dave Hutchinson, by way of making polite conversation, ‘that you had an oxygen tent?’

‘It’s nothing really,’ she replied, ‘hardly a tent at all, more of an oxygen fly-sheet.’ They both laughed at this, and it was a laughter that Dave-Dave Hutchinson was profoundly grateful for. It ruptured the rather fraught atmosphere of the room, earthing the static sheets and flashes of his hostess’s spiritual intensity. But his gratitude didn’t sustain for long, because even this trifling response to her witticism, this strained guffaw, was enough to give him a coughing fit — this time a bad one.

He sat back down on the armchair, both hands clasped against his mouth. Dave-Dave’s lungs heaved so, they threatened to turn themselves inside out. He laboured to retain some element of composure, or at any rate not to void himself on the Dykes’ Persian carpet. The edges of his visual field turned first pink, then red, and eventually purple. He felt himself losing control, when a cool, white hand was placed on his arm and he heard a voice say, ‘Here, Mr Hutchinson, pray take one of these, it looks as if you could do with one.’ It was Christabel-Sharon. She had materialised back inside the room and was proffering him a neat pad of gauze. ‘You’ll doubtless need it for the — ‘

‘Buh, buh —’ he laboured through his hands to express his shame and embarrassment.

‘Now, now, Mr Hutchinson, you musn’t worry about a bit of sputum with us,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes firmly. ‘We know how it is, we understand that the normal proprieties have had to be somewhat relaxed during the current situation.’ He gratefully seized the pad and as discreetly as he was able deposited several mouthfuls of infective matter into its fluffy interior. When he had finished Christabel-Sharon passed him a bucket lined with a plastic bag.

Simon-Arthur Dykes came back into the room. ‘Did you sort the children out, Simon-Arthur?’ asked his wife.

‘Ye-es.’ he sighed wearily. ‘Henry and Magnus are back in the small room, so Storm can go up to the oxygen tent whenever she’s ready; and then Dave-Dave can take a turn with the nebuliser. He obviously has need of it — and I’m not surprised, coming out on this vile night.’

‘Is the humidifier on in the boys’ room?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And the ioniser in ours?’

‘Yes, yes, dear Jean-Drusilla, please don’t trouble yourself.’ He crossed the room to where his wife stood, and taking her arm, bade her sit beside him on a divan covered with brocade cushions. Their two heads leaned together and the four feverish spots on their cheeks reached an uneasy alignment.

‘Look, Simon-Arthur,’ said Christabel-Sharon, gesturing towards the round silver tray she had brought in from the kitchen, ‘doesn’t the linctus look pretty?’

It did look pretty. She had poured the thick green liquid out into tiny, cut-glass linctus glasses. In the yellow-and-blue light from the fire the whole array sparkled the spectrum. She offered the tray to Dave-Dave Hutchinson. ‘Mr Hutchinson, will you have some?’

‘Thank you, Ms Lannière.’

‘Please, do use my matronymic — and may I use your patronymic?’

‘Certainly. . Christabel —’

‘Christabel-Sharon,’ she said with her ever-so-slightly affected voice, ‘and you are Dave-Dave, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right.’ He blushed.

Taking one of the tiny glasses, Dave-Dave sipped judiciously, savouring the thickness and sweetness of the stuff, whilst assaying the weight of the crystal it came in. At home he and Mrs Hutchinson drank their linctus from Tupperware. Christabel-Sharon handed two glasses of linctus to the Dykeses and took one herself. Then they all sat together in silence for a while, contentedly tippling.

It was a good little party. One of the best evenings that any of the inhabitants of the Brown House could remember having in a long time. After Storm-Christabel had gone up to the oxygen tent and Dave-Dave had had a good long go on the anaboliser, Simon-Arthur set up a small card table and they played whist for a couple of hours. Christabel-Sharon paired off with Dave-Dave, and there was an agreeably flirtatious character to the way they bid together, often taking tricks through shared high spirits rather than any skill at the game.

There was no discussion of weighty matters or what really preoccupied them all. The mere presence of Dave-Dave at the Brown House was a sufficient reminder. The codeine linctus helped to free up the constrictions in their four pairs of lungs, which did necessitate frequent recourse by all parties to Christabel-Sharon’s supply of gauze pads and the attendant bucket. But such was the bonhomie that the linctus engendered that none of them felt much embarrassment, or awkwardness.

Only when Jean-Drusilla went out to the kitchen to ask the maid to make them some ham sandwiches, and her husband followed her to get a bottle of port from the cellar, was there any exchange that alluded to the wider issue. ‘It is strange, is it not, my dear,’ said Simon-Arthur, leaning his head against the wall and fighting the dreadful torpor that threatened to encase him, ‘to have a newsagent for company of an evening.’

‘Yes, dear, I suppose it is,’ she replied distractedly — she was helping the maid to de-crust some slices of bread, ‘but he is a very nice man, a very Christian man. I don’t imagine for a second that simply because we receive him in this fashion that he imagines we think him quality for an instant.’

‘Quite so, quite so.’

‘Christabel-Sharon seems to have taken quite a shine to him — is he married?’

‘Oh yes, but I fear the poor man’s wife is in extremis. He told me this afternoon that she was getting Brompton’s — hence his oversufficiency of linctus.’

‘I see. Well, while in the normal course of things such a flirtation might not be seemly, I think that in these times we live in, almost anything — within the bounds of propriety, of course — that serves to inculcate good feeling can be accepted.’

‘You are entirely right, my dear,’ replied Simon-Arthur, who had, like so many men of his age and class, long since abandoned the matter of making these practical moral judgements to his wife.

But late that night when Simon-Arthur was in his dressing room, readying himself for bed, the fog and all the awful misery that hung about it began to impose itself on him once more. He slumped down in a broken rattan chair that he kept in the little room — which was barely more than a vestibule. The codeine linctus was wearing off and he could feel the tightness in his chest, the laval accumulation of mucus, flowing down his bronchi and into each little sponge bag of an alveolus. Felt this fearfully, as his nervous system reintroduced him to the soft internality of his diseased body, its crushable vulnerability.

He remembered reading somewhere — God knows how many years ago — that if the human lungs were unfolded in their entirety, each little ruche and complicated pleat of veined tissue, then the resulting membrane would cover two football pitches. ‘Or two damp, exposed fields,’ Simon-Arthur murmured to himself, remembering Dave-Dave’s eloquent description of the Brown House and its environs earlier that day. He pulled off his socks by the toe, wheezing with the effort.

In the bedroom next door he could hear his wife breathing stertorously. She was going through a cycle in her sleep that was familiar to him. First she would inhale, the twists and loops of mucus in her throat soughing like electricity cables in a high wind. Then she would exhale through her nose. This sounded peculiarly like a waste-disposal unit being started up.

The noises would get closer and closer together until they were continuous: ‘Soouuugh-grnngchngsoouuugh-grnnchng.’ Eventually she would seize up altogether and begin coughing, coughing raucously, coughing and even spluttering like some beery fellow in a bar, who’s taken a mouthful of lager and then been poked in the ribs by a drinking buddy: ‘Kerschpooo-kerschpooo-kerschpooo!’ Over and over again. He couldn’t believe that this colossal perturbation of her body didn’t wake her — but it never seemed to. Whereas he was invariably yanked into consciousness by his own coughing in the night, or by that of the children, or Christabel-Sharon.

He could, he realised, hear all of them coughing and snoring and breathing in the different rooms of the Brown House. To his left there was the sharp rasp of Christabel-Sharon, to the right there were the childishly high and clattery coughs of his two sons, and in the small room immediately opposite the door to his dressing room he could even detect the more reposeful sighs of Storm-Christabel. He even thought — but couldn’t be certain — that he could just about hear the maid, hacking away in the distant attic room. But on consideration he decided this was unlikely.

Yes, it wasn’t the maid he could hear, but the furthest reaches of his lungs, playing their own peculiar, pathological fugue. Clearly each of the innumerable little pipes and passages had its own viscous reed, and as the air passed around them they produced many hundreds — thousands even — of individual sounds. Simon-Arthur concentrated hard on this and found himself able to differentiate quite subtle tones. He could screen the background noise out, so as to be able to pick up the individual notes being blown in the pipes of his internal organ. Or else he could relax, and taking in breaths as deep as he could manage, produce swelling chords.

This discovery of the hidden musicality of his own lungs transfixed Simon-Arthur. He sat breathing in and out, attempting to contort his thorax in various ways, so as to bring off various effects. He even fancied that a particular sort of scrunching up in the rattan chair, combined with a two-stage inhalation, and long, soft exhalation, could, if pulled off properly, make his lungs play the magisterial, opening chords of Mozart’s Mass in C major.

So peculiar and absorbing was this new game that Simon-Arthur became enveloped in it, fancying that he was himself inside a giant lung. The coughing and breathing of the other inhabitants of the house were integrated into his bronchial orchestration. He could no longer tell which noises were inside him and which outside. Then senses merged in the painter’s disordered mind. Looking around him at the many tiny icons — icons he himself had painted — that studded the walls of the dressing room, Simon-Arthur no longer saw them for what they were. Everything, the pattern of the carpet, the texture of the walls, was transmogrifying into a gothic scape of pulsing red tubes and stretched, semi-transparent membranes.

In the midst of this fantasy the despair clamped down on him. The black bear bumped under the bed of his mind. He saw that the walls were studded with carcinomas, the corridors lined with angry scars and lesions. Up and down the stairs of the lung-house ran rivulets of infective matter. The thoracic property was choking with disease. The alveolar bricks that made up its structure were embedded in nacreous mortar. And then the final horror: the carcinomas took on the faces of people Simon-Arthur had known, people he had not done right by.

The contrast between his light-hearted silliness of a split-moment ago and the sickening despair of this image plunged Simon-Arthur into retching tears. He ground his fists into the sockets of eyes. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! The ugly realisations came winging in on him, each scything into his chest from a different trajectory. He buckled as the images of his loved ones choking on their own blood, drowning in it, impinged on him with dread force, awful certainty.

The fog was never going to lift, just thicken and thicken and thicken, until the air curdled. Stopping up the mouths of babies as surely as if they were smothered in the marshmallow folds of a pillow. Simon-Arthur knew this. Knew it as his tears called forth the inevitable and irresistible coughing fit.

After a turbulent, feverish night Simon-Arthur awoke for the sixth time with what passed for dawn long past. He could hear Christabel-Sharon, his wife and the children moving around downstairs, coughing their matitudinal coughs.

Then there was another sharp spatter against the window, a repeat of the spattering sound that he now realised had awoken him. He sat up. It was shot, he thought, it has to have been shot. It’s too early in the autumn for hail.

He got up, and dressing as hurriedly as he could, he went downstairs. In the dining room his eldest son, Henry, was eating Rice Crispies, taking time out after each mouthful for a few pulls from the mouthpiece of the nebuliser. The crunch-crunch — choof-choof noise was slightly eerie. Simon-Arthur found the rest of the family, and the maid, gathered in the vestibule. The two smaller children were still in their nightclothes.

‘Is that the shoot?’ asked Simon-Arthur, although he already knew that it was.

‘We can’t understand why it’s so early,’ said Jean-Drusilla. The children were looking apprehensive.

‘They’re shooting d — ed near to the house as well. I’d better go out and have a word.’ He took his scarf from the rack by the front door and wound it around his throat.

‘Won’t you put on a mask, dear?’

‘No, no, don’t be silly, I’m only popping out for a minute.’

As Simon-Arthur groped his way down the side of the Brown House he berated himself: Why worry about such stupid things? Why need it concern me if Peter-Donald and his cronies see that I can only afford a chemical mask? Such pride is worse than stupidity. But it was the truth — for he was a proud man. And he was right in assuming that the members of the shoot would be fully masked, because the fog was unusually thick this morning, the visibility down to fifteen yards or less.

Once Simon-Arthur had begun to acclimatise he could see the line of huntsmen beyond the low scrub of bushes at the bottom of the garden. He also fancied he could make out a few beaters in among the tangle of sick trees to the rear of the house. He made for the tallest figure in the middle of the former group and was gratified to find, when he got closer, that it was his landlord, Peter-Donald.

‘Good morning, Peter-Donald,’ he said, on coming up to him. ‘You’re early today.’

‘Ah, Simon-Arthur.’ Peter-Donald Hanson rested his Purdey in the crook of his arm and extended his right hand. ‘How good to see you, old chap.’ The big man’s voice issued from a small speaker, just above the knot of his cravat; and was crackly, like a poorly tuned radio.

Simon-Arthur had been right about the mask. Peter-Donald was wearing a full scuba arrangement. The rest of his cronies were all clad in the same, overdone shooting kit: Norfolk jackets and plus-fours, cravats and tweedy hats with grouse feathers in their bands. They looked like the usual mob of city types, members of Peter-Donald’s Lloyds syndicate, Simon-Arthur supposed.

‘You know, Peter-Donald, the shot is spattering against the windows of the house, I think it’s making the children feel a little anxious.’

‘Awfully sorry, but the fog’s so damn thick today. Wouldn’t have come out at all but I got delivery of these yesterday, so we thought we’d give them a try.’ He held out his wrist, to which was strapped a miniature radar screen. ‘They could make all the difference to the shooting around here.’

Simon-Arthur looked from his landlord’s masked face to the black LCD of the mini-radar screen. If there was any trace of irony, or even self-awareness, in Peter-Donald’s voice it was effectively destroyed by the throat mike, and his expression was, of course, completely hidden.

A thread of white luminescence circled the screen. When it sped past a certain region there were splutters of light.

‘Are those the birds?’ he asked, pointing towards the fading gleams.

‘Ya, that’s right. Charlie-Bob has rigged them all up with little radar cones. Mind you’ — he barked a laugh, which the throat mike transmitted as a howl — ‘I don’t think you could put ’em on grouse. Poor buggers would be dwarfed by the things!’

There was a scatter of microphonic squawks from the other guns — they were obviously getting restive. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, old boy,’ said Peter-Donald, cocking his gun, ‘I’ll get this drive started and then we’ll be off your property, eh?’

Despite the warning painful catch in his throat Simon-Arthur stood his ground, interested to see what would happen. The guns formed up again into a ragged line. Even in the short time he and Peter-Donald had been chatting, the fog had grown denser. Now, not only were the beaters no longer within sight, but the trees themselves were little more than shadows.

Peter-Donald took a wafer-thin cellular phone from the pocket of his jacket and punched one of the buttons on its console. ‘I think we’re ready now, Charliekins,’ he barked, the mouthpiece pressed against his throat mike. ‘D’you want to start the drive?’

There was a ragged chorus of shouts and ‘Halloos!’, together with the sound of stout sticks being smote against the underbrush. Then there was a warbling, almost grunting noise, and ten or fifteen pheasants came staggering out of the bank of fog. They had radar cones tied around their necks. These were silvery-grey rhomboids, at least four times bigger than the birds’ heads. The effect was ridiculous and pathetically unnatural: the birds — who Simon-Arthur knew found it hard to fly anyway when the fog was thick — were still further handicapped by this new sporting technology. Only two or three of them could get airborne at all, and then only for a couple of wing beats. The rest just zigzagged in a loose pack across the traverse of the guns, the sharp corners of the radar cones banging first into their eyes and then their soft throats.

There were a few scattered shots — none of which appeared to find a mark. Most of the guns held their fire.

‘Not much sport in this, is there?’ said Simon-Arthur sarcastically, and then realised with a shock that he had spoken audibly. He had been out in the fog for so long that he had begun to assume that he must be wearing a muffling mask.

But this didn’t seem to offend Peter-Donald. He was striding towards the fence, and signalling to the other guns to follow. He turned on his heel for a moment, facing back towards Simon-Arthur, and publicly-addressed him. ‘It is, if we let them get into the fog bank. D’ye see? Then we’ve got a shoot entirely on instrumentation’ — he indicated the wristscreen — ‘now that’s real sport!’ Then he swivelled round and marched off.

The birds had managed to reach the fence and stagger over or under it. Then they were enveloped by the fog. The guns followed them, and finally trailing behind came the donkey-jacketed figures of the beaters, who also disappeared, still hallooing. Simon-Arthur noticed that most of them weren’t even wearing chemical masks.

Simon-Arthur stood for a moment, and then turned towards the house. But when he reached the front door, and was just about to turn the knob, he saw that one of the pheasants hadn’t managed to make it over the fence. It was running about distractedly, crazily even, in the area between the house and the fence. As Simon-Arthur watched it, it charged towards him and then veered away again locking into a spiralling path, like an aeroplane in a flat spin, or a clockwork toy run amok.

The pheasant was producing the most alarming noises, splutterings and gurgles. Simon-Arthur walked towards where its next circumnavigation of the muddy patch of ground ought to take it, arriving just in time for the bird to cough up at his feet an enormous dollop of blood and mucus, and then expire, its radar cone jammed into the ground. ‘My God!’ exclaimed Simon-Arthur. He leant down to examine the corpse. The pheasant’s feathers were matted, greasy and lustreless. It was a male bird, but its plumage was almost entirely dun-coloured. Simon-Arthur felt nauseous upon noticing that there were flecks and dollops of some white matter in the spreading stain of fluid that was still pouring from its beak.

One of the guns must have been lingering behind the group and heard Simon-Arthur’s exclamation, because a masked figure carrying a shotgun came striding out of the fog bank, clambered none too nimbly over the fence and walked over to where he was crouched by the dead pheasant. As the figure approached he pulled off his mask. It was, Simon-Arthur realised with an access of warm feeling, Anthony-Anthony Bohm, the local doctor.

‘Anthony-Anthony!’ Simon-Arthur said, standing up and thrusting out his hand. It was taken and warmly shaken by the doctor, whose rubicund face was registering some concern.

‘You really should get inside, Simon-Arthur,’ he said. ‘This is no kind of a day to be out without a mask, and preferably a scuba.’

‘I know, I know, I was just going in when this poor creature expired at my feet. What d’you think of that?’

The doctor crouched down, puffing, and peered at the dead bird. One of his hands went to the ruff of white beard that fringed his pink buttock of a chin, while the other probed the pheasant’s neck. It was a gesture so familiar to Simon-Arthur from Anthony-Anthony’s consulting room that he smiled to see it in this unusual circumstance. ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm-hmm.’ the Doctor hmm-ed and then, picking up the bird, opened its beak and looked down it.

‘Look at that white matter in the blood — what on earth can it be?’

‘Oh that — that’s a carcinoma. Nothing particularly mysterious.’

‘A carcinoma?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘So what did it die of?’

‘Oh cancer, of course. Yes, definitely cancer — of the throat, and no doubt of the lung as well. The effort of being driven by the beaters like that must have given it a massive haemorrhage.’

‘I had no idea the animals were getting cancer in this fashion, Anthony-Anthony.’

‘My dear Simon-Arthur, we get cancer, why shouldn’t all of God’s other creatures, hmm?’ The doctor was struggling to his feet again; Simon-Arthur gave him an arm.

‘Ooof! Well, that’s me for this morning, I think I’ll head back to the health centre, I’ve a surgery this afternoon. Do you mind if I take the pheasant with me, Simon-Arthur?’

‘Not at all. Are you going to run some tests on it, Anthony-Anthony, do an autopsy, or whatever it is you call it?’

‘Good heavens, no! Oh no, ahaha-no-no-aha-ha-h’ach-eurch-cha-cha — ‘ The doctor’s jolly laughter turned with grim predictability into a coughing fit. Simon-Arthur thumped the tubby man on his broad back, whilst Anthony-Anthony struggled to don his scuba mask again. When he had it on and was breathing easily, he took the dead bird from Simon-Arthur who had picked it up by its sad scruff.

‘Thanks very much, old fellow. No, no, I know what killed the thing so it’s of no interest to medical science. I used to be a dab hand with the scalpel, so I’ll cut the tumours out and the lady wife and I can have this one for Sunday lunch. Now, do get inside, Simon-Arthur, I don’t want to see you at surgery this afternoon.’ They bade farewell, and the doctor vanished into the sickly yellow of the boiling fog bank.

* * *

The Doctor didn’t see Simon-Arthur at his emergency surgery that afternoon, because against Jean-Drusilla and Christabel-Sharon’s pleading, he decided to take a walk.

Simon-Arthur had been trying to work in his studio all morning, but the terrible vision from the previous night kept haunting him. He fancied he could still hear every faltering breath and choking cough of the Brown House’s inhabitants. And when in the mid-morning he took a break and went down to inhale some steam with Friar’s Balsam, the sight of the children sitting in a silent row on one of the sofas in the drawing room, while the maid passed the nebuliser mask from one to the next, brought tears to his eyes.

When they were all seated at the dining-room table, eating off the second-best china because it was a Saturday, Simon-Arthur addressed the table at large, saying, ‘I think I’ll go out after lunch, just for a breath’ — he bit back the figure of speech — ‘for a walk.’

‘I really feel you oughtn’t, Simon-Arthur;’ said his wife. ‘You were out for far too long this morning, and without a mask. You know what Anthony-Anthony says, even with a chemical mask you shouldn’t really be out for more than half an hour at a time.’

‘It’s just that I feel terribly claustrophobic in the house today. I haven’t had a walk for almost a month now. I’ll go up to the golf course and then I’ll come straight back. I’ll be fine. I didn’t even have too much of a turn after going out this morning.’

‘Please don’t, Simon-Arthur,’ said Christabel-Sharon. Her freckle, spattered features were tight with concern. ‘You know the Patriarch is coming to say a special mass tomorrow. You won’t want to miss that. And if you go out for a walk you’ll have been out for forty minutes — and you shan’t be able to go and get the medicated incense for his censors in Risborough.’

‘Please, everyone, don’t worry!’ Simon-Arthur said this a little louder than he intended to. But he hated having it drawn to his attention just how dependent all of them were on him, right down to the very practice of their religion. ‘I’m going out for a walk and that-is-that.’

Simon-Arthur went up the farm track, through the farm and past the manor house where Peter-Donald and his family lived. The fog had lifted ever so slightly and he could see the crenellated chimneys of the house. He wondered whether Peter-Donald had managed to get a good bag, or at any rate a non-cancerous one.

It was uncomfortable walking. The mask he wore was a cheap model. Really only a plastic mouth- and nose-piece, containing a thick wad of cotton wool soaked with Ventalin. The straps chafed the back of his head, and the smell of the chemicals when he inhaled was almost worse than the fog itself.

Simon-Arthur reached the road on the far side of the estate and crossed it. The ground here was completely devoid of grass cover. The land had been bought up by a Japanese syndicate about a year before the fog descended. It was less expensive, then, for Japanese golfers to fly to England to play than to join a club in their own country. The syndicate had landscaped the course, but when the fog came they abandoned the whole project. Now the prospect of bare mud, formed into useless fairways, bunkers and greens that were really browns, looked wholly unearthly and anti-natural, like some section of an alien planet, poorly terraformed.

As he walked, Simon-Arthur dwelt once again — as he had so many times before — on the crippling irony of his bringing his family to live in the country. He had done it because Henry had bad asthma — as he did himself. Their doctor in London was certain that it was pollution-related. About four months after they had taken up residence in the Brown House the fog moved in with them.

‘Oh Christ! Oh God, oh Jesus. Please come! Please help us. We are but clay, but dust. .’ Simon-Arthur muttered this through his mask; and then, not quite knowing why, but feeling that if he wanted to pray aloud it was unseemly to do it with this ugly mask on, he took it off.

To his surprise the fog didn’t taste that bad, or catch in his throat. He took a few shallow, experimental breaths to check that he wasn’t mistaken. He wasn’t: the fog no longer oozed soupily into his constricted chest. He took some deeper breaths, and with a further shock felt his eustachian tubes clear — audibly popping as they did so — for the first time in years. Now he could hear cars moving along the road behind him with great clarity. He took a few more, deeper breaths. It was amazing, the fog must be clearing, he thought; the miasma must be departing from our lives!

Then he started to take in great gouts of air, savouring the cleanness of its taste. ‘At last, at last!’ he shouted out, and heard his voice reverberate the way it should do, not fall flat. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thankyou, thangyou, thangyu,’ he garbled. The fog was lifting, there was a bright light up ahead of him, beyond the fourth green of the half-constructed course. Simon-Arthur strode towards it, his legs feeling light and springy. He was an intensely religious man, and he crossed himself as he staggered forward; crossed himself and counted out a decade on the rosary in his pocket. He was prepared for Redemption.

They didn’t find the icon painter’s body until the following day. Jean-Drusilla had alerted the authorities after Simon-Arthur had been gone for forty minutes, but by then it was already getting dark and the fog was too thick for a search party, even with high-powered lights. As for radar, that too was useless, for there was a particularly high magnesium content building up in that evening’s opacity.

By chance Peter-Donald and Anthony-Anthony were in the party that found him. He was spread out, smeared even, on the muddy surface, in much the same posture that the cancerous pheasant had expired on the day before. Like the pheasant, a pool of blood and mucus had flowed out from his mouth and stained the ground. And, as before, the doctor knelt down and examined the white flecks in the stain.

‘Poor bugger,’ he said, ‘how strange, he had cancer as well. Never thought to give him an X-ray, because I felt certain that his asthma was going to get him first. He wasn’t well at all, you know.’

Peter-Donald was taking his ease on a shooting stick he’d pressed into the mud. ‘Well, at least the fellow had the decency not to die on the green, eh?’ It wasn’t that he was being disrespectful to Simon-Arthur’s memory, it was only that the times bred a certain coarseness of manner in some — just as they engendered extreme sensitivity in others.

‘Yes, well, he must have had the haemorrhage on the green, and then rolled into this bunker and died.’

‘Tidy, what?’

‘You could put it that way.’ The doctor stood up and indicated to the stretcher bearers who were with them that they should remove the body. ‘The peculiar thing is that he and I saw a pheasant die in just this fashion yesterday.’

‘What, of cancer?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, y’know, Anthony-Anthony, I can’t say I’m surprised in Simon-Arthur’s case. Not only was the fellow asthmatic, but I used to see him all over the shop without a scuba on. Bloody silly — foolhardy even.’

Without bothering further with the corpse, the two men turned and headed off back towards the manor. They were looking forward to a glass of linctus before lunch. Both of them had chronic bronchitis — and neither was as young as he used to be. For a while their conversation could be heard through the clouds of noxious dankness:

‘You know, Peter-Donald, I don’t believe the Dykeses can afford proper scubas. Hardly anyone in the area can, apart from yourself — I have one because of my job, you know.’

‘Really? Oh well, I suppose it stands to reason. Did you say that bird had cancer? D’you think I should get some special masks made for the pheasants? I shouldn’t want them all to get it — ‘

And then they too were swallowed up by the fog.