Inglorious

WALPURGIS NIGHT

She heard the storm rattling the window when she woke. She lay on her side and stared at the room. In the distance, she could hear the humming of the fridge. Every so often the pitch rose, the fridge shuddered and there was a pause. Then it started up again. It was constant in its inconstancy, like the interrupted trilling of the birds. She heard Andreas breathing beside her. The place smelt of him, a musty smell of aftershave and warm skin. There was a high whine in the walls, sharp and penetrating. She didn’t mind it. She liked the mingled sounds. Now she could hear a noise in the pipes, like the beating of a distant drum. There was a clock somewhere in the room, scraping out seconds. She heard the city opening itself up to the morning. Cars and a low murmur of lorries. An engine moving up the gears. A few drills hammering into concrete, industrial arpeggios. Now a bird sang a soprano solo. She heard a train honking through a tunnel, the noise muffled, and the grinding of wheels on tracks.

Things to pack, she thought. She went on weighing things up with her head in the consoling softness of the pillow. A warm pair of shoes. A jumper. Your jeans. Socks and other small items. A shirt. Buy them some presents. Take a newspaper. Ask Andreas. But she thought she would phone him from the Lakes. She would try her father first, over lunch, and then she would go away and phone Andreas with the soothing distance of a few hundred miles between them. Through the window she saw it was a tempestuous day. The night had blasted at the clouds, tearing them into vapour rags. Everything was ragged, the trees were bowed. Rain was falling in thick lines and leaves were gusting along the pavement. She turned to Andreas and kissed his head. He moved slightly and said, ‘Was? What?’ She kissed him again, and he settled. She gathered herself in the half-light, reaching for her watch, twisting it onto her wrist. There was a plant on the table, something like an orchid, deep red. Behind it she saw faint rows of books. It was too dark to see the titles on the spines. She heard someone walking along the corridor outside; she listened to their footsteps on the stairs.

*

Slowly, she moved into the bathroom and shut the door softly behind her. She sat on the toilet, sluicing her mouth with toothpaste at the same time. Then she flushed the toilet and splashed her face with water. Still much the same, she thought, with a glance at the mirror. She heard the loud gurgle of the pipes and wondered if that would wake him. Then she took a raincoat from the cupboard in the hall, and left a note. Andreas, thanks so much for dinner. I’ve borrowed a raincoat. The oldest one you had. She tore that up. Andreas, my dear young man. I’ve gone away for a couple of days. Good luck with learning your fucks. Love, Rosa. That wasn’t quite right either.Andreas, my dear young pup. Thanks for dinner. I’m going away for a couple of days. Rosa. Rosa X. Rosa xxx. Back soon, Rosa x. So she took that one and folded it into her pocket. Andreas, thanks for dinner. Sorry to go without saying goodbye — I had to catch a train. Will call you on return. Took a raincoat — the oldest you have (I hope!), R x.

*

Outside she crossed the bridge and stepped under the Westway, alert to the morning clash of tyres and steel. She surrendered herself to the wind and the rain. Fumbling with the raincoat, she walked with her head bowed. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL; she saw the words on a lashed and rain-licked wall. She turned at a shop selling kimonos and passed on to Golborne Road. Mod’s Hair Salon was already busy, and in the window a woman was going blonde. The shops had their fronts open, and their shelves were filled with ornamental tagines. The street smelt of fish and coffee. A woman passed by wearing a sealskin coat. And there was a woman walking slowly in a green jellaba. A man sat on a bench in his shop. He was selling old ceramic baths and antiquarian mirrors. He had on a ski hat and shorts, and he was holding a cigarette and a mobile phone. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said, ‘right, yeah’, as she passed him. From the upper windows of a building a round of applause broke out. Thank you, thank you all very much, thought Rosa. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL. With the stone turrets of the Trellick Tower above her, she went to Café O’Porto and ordered coffee and custard tarts. It lifted her mood. She found a discarded paper and rustled through it. She ate a couple of tarts and sipped her coffee. She whistled a tune and wrote: I’d not mention a man, I’d take no account of him, if he were the richest of men, no matter if he had a huge number of good things, unless his prowess in war were beyond compare. She paused, and then she gripped her pen again. To the Guardians of the Laws, with my apologies for behaving so badly. She stared around at the others: a woman feeding a custard tart to her child; a man with a hacking bronchial cough, drinking greedy gulps of coffee in between his fits. To her left was another man, this one with a tie and an edgy stare. She recognised that look, the look of a man who had worked hard already, and would keep going all day. He was the last man to leave every evening, devoted to his four feet of office space. It had made him toad-like, flabby and flattened. There was a crowd who knew the café owner, speaking Portuguese into a cloud of smoke. The toad-faced man was assessing her with a beady glare. He had pushed his chair against the window and was leaning back, surveying the room. The room, or her? She was sure he had been staring. She was so certain that she was on the verge of turning round and asking him what he wanted. YOU! What do you want? How can I help you? Is there anything I can do? She knew she was being absurd, at one level she was quite lucid and aware that this was mental rambling, superfluous, even preposterous. She understood that a man is allowed to stare. Why look at me? she was thinking nonetheless. I can assure you I’m as befogged as you are! From my vantage point, even with the width of idle months between my former self and this person you see before you, I still have nothing to say on the compelling subject of TEMP. She was trying to clear her thoughts. Staring is quite common, she thought. There’s nothing to stop him, no law set against those who stare. He stared at you, then he stared at the man with the distressing cough. He stared at the counter where the cakes are, at the women talking, at his newspaper. He’s been staring all over the place. No doubt you are staring too, she said to herself. If she was honest she had given a good eyeing to the woman with a child. So she bowed her head and looked at her custard tart. She thought of the things she had to do. She gripped her pen and began a list.

Get a job (embrace your inner toad)

Wash your clothes

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture

Get a place to stay

Go to the bank and negotiate an extension on your overdraft

Meet your father

Explain to Andreas

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Buy Judy and Will some presents

Catch a train

Go to the Lakes

Understand the notion of participation

Be kind to their children

Stop thinking about Liam and Grace

The fifth combination?

Be bloody bold and TEMP

Retrieve the plot. Guard it well

Stop writing lists

Go to your father and beg! she wrote. Then get out of here for a night. Even a night, that would kick-start her conscience. She really might come back galvanised and determined to stop wasting her time. She only needed a change of scene, a simple remedy, age-old, well-practised, generally advocated. A nice dose of difference. Dr Kamen had been ragging on about holidays, taking it easy, others had said the same, Grace and Whitchurch and even the other day Jess had said it, though that had been a feint to get her out of the flat. Now, Rosa was quietly optimistic. A few gaudy fells, a few evenings spent listening to the soft sounds of the English countryside, a pub lunch, a change of mode, and she would send off applications while she was there. She would write to people who might want an amanuensis, someone roughly literate to proofread their work. She would try to find that sort of job while she was away. If not, she would seek out a good office and die quietly into it. She would learn to love the paper shredder, the coffee break, the woman with the squeaky voice who delivered sandwiches, the whirr of the lift running people up and down the building, the tea-stained kitchen, the photocopier, the round robins and office games, the squabbles over territories no one really wanted anyway, the conspicuous waste of time, the death in life! She would learn to love it all. You! You the toad-face, over there! I’ll come back with you, whenever you like. Just name the day and we’ll walk hand in hand, back to the open-plan office, and I’ll never ask WHAT THE TEMP again. Just tell me when. Now she told herself to stop. There was still Madame la Braze, who hadn’t called her yet. She would sort a few things out. Andreas, for one. She would certainly write to Andreas from the Lakes. Safely ensconced, far away, she would come clean. She would explain everything and ask him for a place to stay. Oh God, she thought, shaking her head. Tell him you’re a despairing toad. That you have dyspepsia. As long as she kept limping round to Andreas, she would never really resolve anything. But it was absurd to call him a distraction. He was so tranquil. Whenever she thought of him she felt a stabbing sense of guilt. Guilt or lust, she couldn’t quite tell. She desired him even as she sat there, and that confused her. She thought of his body — perfectly rounded buttocks, hair-downed legs, straight back, smooth skin, long nose, brown eyes — it amused her that she saw him buttocks up, first the moon-like rounds of his arse and then the rest. Cerebral, she thought. Now she wanted to call him. With Liam they suffered from platonic drift. By the end they were lying side by side in a sexless bed. Still, with Andreas she felt the sort of basic passion she had entirely forgotten. It recalled her youth when she was, she now saw, green in judgement but perfectly handsome in an unformed way. She wanted to go back to his flat and lie in bed with him. She wanted to touch his skin. Would that be so bad, she thought? Still she couldn’t decide, so she stayed there writing in her notebook.

She turned again and caught the ragged toad-face looking towards her. Now the tables between them were starting to clear. Any moment he would say something to her; she could see him leaning forward, licking his lips. He would be stern and decisive: Come back now! What do you think you’re doing? You’ve been out of work for months, and what have you got to show for yourself? NOTHING! A few books read, but that will hardly help! A few walks through the city! Who do you think you are, Henry James? Samuel Johnson? Get back where you belong! She could imagine him phrasing the order. Her last line of defence, the mother, put the child in her buggy and walked away. This made Rosa anxious, so she retreated. Banished by her inner fool, she took her tart and walked. As she left she looked over at the man and saw he was staring straight ahead. She went slowly along Golborne Road. The wind was still up, and the street was awash with coasting litter, leaves and cardboard and plastic bags. Everyone was a swirling mass of clothes and coats, smothered in ravaged cloth, holding their umbrellas to the wind. Rosa walked with an eye on her reflection in the windows. She was another tousled ruin as she walked, hair unkempt, coat flapping. Another burst of rain and she started to walk faster. The damp stalls were selling wine and cheese. A wooden table blocked the path so she edged round it. She heard a car behind her and stepped out of the gutter. Outside the shops were boxes of brightly coloured Turkish delight, scattered with sugar. Rows of dates and figs. And in another shop they were selling halal meat, Cash and Carry said the sign. Now the shop owners were pulling plastic sheets over the boxes, holding up their hands against the rain. She had once bought a table in a shop round here, she thought, just one of the bits of furniture Liam was refusing to pay her for. Her reflection was bouncing alongside her, this flapping form. Everyone was sublimely indifferent to her; the man selling copies of the Koran, collar up, the woman selling baguettes and tomatoes, hood over her eyes, the man going slowly past on a bicycle, nearly beaten by the wind.

At Jess’s flat, she put the key in the door and stepped into the hall. Concerned about the carpet, she scraped her feet on the mat. Once inside, she cast the raincoat onto a hook in the hall, wrung out her jumper and put it on a radiator. She undressed as she walked to the bathroom and then stepped into the shower. She poured shampoo on her hair. Things were quite simple, she thought, if you just kept yourself clean and warm. She closed her eyes and lifted her face. She flexed her thigh muscles, drawing her legs tightly together. Her skin was red now from the warmth of the water. As she watched water coursing down her body, she stood her ground. Here she was, a tall woman with wide shoulders. Her arms had always been lean. Her stomach was taut. Her legs were thin; her shins were covered in fine brown hairs. She agreed, she needed to bulk up a bit. Apart from that, she was attractive enough. She would attract men for a while, then they would deem her too old — most of them — and she would attract fewer of them. But she didn’t need a horde. She didn’t want an adoring mob behind her!

Later she turned off the shower and towelled herself down. She dressed quickly, putting on her jeans and sweater. She slung a few changes of clothes into a bag. She borrowed some books that might yet goad her into action. She took a notebook, an apple and some painkillers. She felt like a child, running away. In this spirit she made herself a cheese sandwich and wrapped it in paper. She took out the rubbish and slammed it into a bin outside, noticed the bins were overflowing but walked straight past them. The smell of rotten food was briefly pungent, whipped away by the wind. She was nervous as she walked down the steps. She was briefly devastated that Jess would be so pleased she had gone. She felt a low sense of melancholy about her small, rootless life. It was a shame, when you left a place and people were glad. But she was anomalous, the day was moving swiftly and a mass of people moved along the road. Above the clouds were grey, drifting across a pale sky. She was drawn into it all, the gliding shapes of cars and people.

She went to the shops, fearful of arriving empty-handed. Portobello Road was awash with people buying lunch. Crowds hung around the stalls, people holding multicoloured bags of fruit. She saw a green patch of park, gated off from the street. With her neck craned, Rosa saw the shops were full of winter cuts, big boots and long coats, clothes for dressing up in. The windows glinted in the sun, though the day was cold.

Wrapped in a thin coat, the wind gusting at her, Rosa stepped through the crowds. In the first shop she came to she bought bath salts and in the next some costly chocolates in a scenic box. She added in a couple of children’s books, splashed with cheerful colours. She had a small spasm when she handed it over, her ravaged credit card. The presents looked fine; the shop assistant wrapped them in pink paper, and wrapped a ribbon round them. There was a label which Rosa filled in. With love from Rosa. That was because she couldn’t remember the names — or ages — of Judy’s children. She was quite sure they would have everything they needed. But she stacked up presents anyway, eager to show willing. At noon she saw she was late, so she ran along panting like a hound. The street was flooded with people. With the inevitable bad luck of the furious, Rosa missed the bus. It passed her as Rosa ran up to the stop, and she saw no sign of another bus, so she clenched her fists and carried on. LYLA, said the sign. A STAR REALLY WILL FALL. And soon. THE KILLS were still celebrating the launch of their single. She went along fast enough, enjoying the wind on her cheeks, admiring the dextrous way she danced around other people, but then she turned onto Kensington Park Road and the street started winding uphill, which slowed her down. She passed a brasserie with fake flaming lamps and a yellow-stoned church like a piece of textured mustard and when she was at the top, sweating and muttering under her breath, she stood for a moment and watched three buses pass her. That made her curse but she was on a downhill slope now and she picked up speed towards Notting Hill. Then the crowds destroyed her momentum, it was impossible to get round them quickly, however dextrously she danced, and she was forced to slow down, raise her hands, make offerings to angry people. Apologising for everything, she kept running. She couldn’t look at the time because she knew she was late. She was sweating like a dog, but this had its advantages, she thought, at least her father would understand she had made an effort, really stubbed her toes on the kerbstones getting there.

She stood at the lights wheezing and marking time, and when they changed she passed quickly across the road, stumbling on the corner. She was gasping for breath as she ran. Antique shops in Victorian village style, and some of the buildings were older still. There was a pub garlanded in flowers. A bright blue house, she passed it swiftly, noting how clean it was. Polished windows. It was wrong to say the city was grimy. There were parts that surprised you; they were kept so clean. Here she was, avoiding a man with his hand outstretched, and finally she found the door and pushed it open. She arrived in a breathy state of panic, thinking that she must usher on lunch and be sure to catch the train. Across the restaurant she saw her father sitting — slouched — and stood there for a moment, paralysed by guilt. She was stock still and weighted down with it. It held her, until she saw his head turn, and found him not so sad and old from a different angle.

Her father had never really liked Liam. When she called him up and explained it all, he was sanguine. He was restrained and didn’t say, ‘I always disliked that untrustworthy man.’ That might have been the truth, but her father never said these sorts of things. He almost never said what he thought. He was an inscrutable man. It wasn’t that he was dishonest; he just hated to hurt anyone’s feelings by presenting them with something so unwieldy as the truth. So he dissembled, constantly, and no one had really known him except Rosa’s mother. Well, and Rosa knew him a little, though he rarely told her the truth either. It was an indication of how things had turned that he had been so honest recently. Rosa knew she was like him. She was ruder than her father, but she still had bouts of politeness, moments of insane performance, more stressful than an argument. It was like clamping a brace onto yourself, it left you with a sense of pressure, a dull ache.

He had once taken Liam down to the pub and they had, according to Liam, talked about the history of the railway and its effects on tourism in Bristol. They had also discussed the origins of dog racing. Liam had said it was all most informative. But they were never good friends. They shook hands readily; on special occasions they extended themselves to a mutual slap on the back. They gave each other suitable books at Christmas. It never quite sparked. Liam was a practised adept, good at putting people at their ease. He spilled words into pauses as if he was following instructions. Rosa’s father was silent for much of the time, shy and undemonstrative, except when he disagreed really violently with someone. Still it was clear to Rosa that they didn’t enjoy talking to each other. With Rosa’s mother, Liam was gracious and respectfully flirtatious. That was wily, though at the time it was most likely well intentioned. Perhaps sincere. He had always kissed her mother when they met, warmly, with conviction. It seemed so at the time.

Rosa’s father was tall and thin, with gaunt cheeks and large pale eyes. He had looked old for decades, perhaps because of his predisposition to overwork and smoking. One side of his family had been Flemish, some of them merchant seamen who arrived in Britain in the seventeenth century. They settled in Bristol, but little was known about them. There were odd relics: some fine pipes, a seaman’s trunk which Rosa’s father said his great-great-grandfather found floating in the harbour at Bristol. Rosa never believed him. The men of that famly went to sea; the women stayed on land. Neither sex had written memoirs or poems, and they had receded like the tide across the mudflats. Rosa’s father tried to be active, to play up to his nautical heritage, but he was hardly robust. He swam a little, and he played occasional games of tennis. In the autumn he sometimes liked to roam through the forests along the Avon Gorge, whistling out of tune. But really he was natively sedentary: he was a historian, he taught for a while at the university, and he had his own private archive of dusty books, their pages spotted with age. The shelves of his study were layered with ancient manuscripts in rolls, file cards, folders, neat boxes, drafts of his writings. For years he had written about local history and the Arthurian legends. Once her parents had a fight and Rosa’s mother told him to sell his books, his manuscripts in coils. ‘A waste of a life,’ she said. Then she was pale and penitent for a week. Perhaps as a result, his great work on the Round Table remained unfinished. For a while Rosa entertained a fear that it would be left for her to edit after his death. Now she thought Sarah could do it — Sarah with her scholarly air and round glasses, who taught him Spanish when he was trying to rebuild his life, as his friends had told him to — her father who took advice better than Rosa and was determined to salvage something. He met Sarah and Rosa hardly wanted to imagine the rest. Sarah was scented; she smelt of floral perfumes and she wore Omega workshop prints and sandals. That made it hard to love her. She told stories about everyday things, pleasing, convivial stories that Rosa might have liked, had her mood been better. But why, she thought, panting at the door, why the hell am I thinking about Sarah?

She was eager to see him, though she knew why he had come. The thought of him caused her a mixed sense of love and pain. Or a sense that she was causing him pain. As she said hello he stood and kissed her. He had been hopeful for a while and now he was searching and intent. It was clear that he had come to berate her. He had come there in an old pair of cords and a worn jacket, with a blue shirt that made him look paler than usual. She saw his hair was passing from grey into a more brittle whiteness. It was like fluff, or as if spring blossom had drifted onto his head. His eyes were tired, darting glances around the room. He kept fiddling with his knife. In short, her father seemed on edge. They sat under the wings of a fan, which beat a circular progress above their heads. For a while Rosa couldn’t talk, and then she got her breath back and her father said:

‘How are you? What are you doing at the moment?’

She had the menu in her hand. She understood his point. Because it was only in doing that you could prove your commitment to being. Being, alone, was insufficient. Being was a state of idle passivity — anyone could ‘be’. To ‘do’ was the thing. We do, therefore we are. And onwards, she thought, turning to her father.

‘You look tired,’ he added, when she didn’t reply.

‘So do you.’

‘Well, that’s the prerogative of the nearly dead. But you’re young.’

‘You’re not nearly dead.’

‘I feel half so.’

‘Half nearly dead, that doesn’t sound too bad. Sounds quite far from the final snuffing out to me.’

‘Who can say, my dear child, who can say,’ said her father.

They smiled at each other. There was a brief pause. Would they like wine, asked the waiter. Oh they thought they would. A nice bottle of house wine, said her father, looking at the price list with an eyebrow raised. An order was dispatched, and the waiter departed. Then her father got straight back to the bone, gnawing on. For a few seconds she pitied him, this old man, consigned to a house which must be — no matter how much Sarah talked and splashed her skin with floral potions — steeped in the past. At least Rosa was away from all of that, those synecdochical horrors, everything in her mother’s taste. She hardly visited him at all, for reasons of cowardice. He had come to London, a journey of several hours, and she pictured him sitting on the train with the paper, ruination on his weathered cheeks.

She said, ‘How have you been, Dad? How’s your health?’

‘Oh not too bad at all. The doctor says there’s not much to worry about. That’s a vagueness I positively encourage. I don’t want them giving me a sentence. So I see the doctor as seldom as possible, and he stays away from me. He’s told me I can drink a bit, in moderation, and that’s much better. Horrible when you have to eat yoga bars and dry biscuits. Quite takes the pleasure out of things,’ he said. His brow creased and he was smiling very slightly. These things embarrassed him.

‘That’s good,’ she said.

They ruffled their napkins and sipped their drinks. The restaurant was over-lit, and the roof was high above them. It made the place like an airport lounge. It was far too fashionable for her father. Simply a bad choice, thought Rosa. He would have been happy in a pub, with a pint of lager, a steak and kidney pie. He was pawing gently at the tablecloth, brushing crumbs onto the floor. He had been well, he explained. ‘And how is Liam?’

‘He’s getting married, I told you.’

‘Oh yes, when is that?’

‘Friday.’

‘And who’s the bride to be?’

‘Grace, you never met her. I told you all this, Father.’

‘Yes, yes, I remember.’ Of course he remembered. ‘Well, and you’re going to the wedding? Or staying well away?’ He was trying to be jocund. She understood why he adopted this insouciant tone. That particular quagmire was nothing. He had dealt with much worse. He had been ill when her mother died, distraught and abandoned. Of course it had been bad for her, but for her father — her rage and despair were nothing compared to her father’s grief. For some time he been alone, just the neighbours and a few old friends for company. He had his tennis friends and a crowd of local historians. But they could hardly fill the gaping void left by his wife. So Rosa always felt guilty when she saw him because she couldn’t help him, and, still worse, she had started to worry him. For months she had been causing him pain. It was clearly unfair. She should be taking care of him. Honouring him, even.

‘I’m going to stay with friends today,’ said Rosa. ‘There’s no point discussing Liam. I’m pretty much indifferent.’

‘Indifference seems unlikely in this situation,’ said her father.

‘That’s why I qualified it with “pretty much”,’ said Rosa, pertly.

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘How is Sarah?’

‘Oh, she’s very well. She’s redecorated the kitchen. And she likes teaching the neighbours Spanish.’

‘What are you doing now, father? Are you writing things?’

‘No no, not at the moment. But I have an idea. I wanted to write a history of the Avon Gorge, from the first settlers to the Suspension Bridge and then perhaps even to the present day.’

‘That would be interesting,’ said Rosa.

Perhaps it was something about authority. Her father never really had any. Still, here they were, in this smoke-strewn room which Rosa had inexplicably chosen. He had come to see her, finding his way here. Probably he had printed a street map off the Internet, an X marking the spot. He had brought her an article of his to read, a piece on local shipping which had been printed in an obscure journal. He had neatly stapled the pages and put them in a plastic folder. He had stapled the pages and packed them to show her. Oh God, thought Rosa. There was no need to pity him. Her father was fine. On the brink of death, so old his hands trembled when he grasped the handle of a knife, but he was fine. It didn’t work; life simply couldn’t wander along if you assumed everyone was in despair. So she took the folder and said it looked enthralling.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

The rest was undistilled palaver. She palavered on through the menu, musing on the specials, listening to her father talk about the quality of the wine. The table next door laughed uproariously. There were two bald men in suits trading jokes and two women screaming with laughter. The women were dressed in plumage and bright colours, little heels. Virtuously, they had won the coveted plume, and now they were being fed and watered. The men had their ties in their food. Now they all laughed again, and someone to Rosa’s left scraped a chair across the floor. Then a knife clattered on a plate.

‘Loud in here,’ she said. ‘My fault. Bad choice.’

‘Shall we order?’ said her father.

The waiter had arrived. They ordered. They had to raise their voices and as the waiter wrote things down the women laughed again. How polite they were! Or perhaps they are simply happy, thought Rosa. The waiter said, ‘What would you like?’

‘Yes, the pea soup,’ she said.Pea soup, everything is fine, just a nice bowl of pea soup, a bit of conversation with your father, then you’ll go and visit some friends, forget the TEMP, that word that you are investing with unjustifiable significance, as if to compensate you for your failed schemes, and you will return and go into service for Brazier, if she wants you. That’s that, she thought. That is damn well that. Now, on with lunch!

Another couple sat down at an empty table to Rosa’s right. The man bellowed as he sat down. Now they were cornered. Trapped in a crowd of people talking loudly, all of them certain, somehow, of the justice and solidity of their speech.

‘You have to grip life, or it all collapses into chaos,’ said her father.

‘But that’s the question, isn’t it?’ said Rosa. ‘It’s a question of courage.’

‘… Like your sweater,’ said the woman to the man on the next table.

‘Thanks, thanks. I did my seasonal shop.’

‘Very nice.’

‘Courage about what?’ said her father.

‘And Barry said, look, love, why not just leave your knickers here …’ said one of the bald men at the other table. The women screamed.

‘How about jobwise?’ said the man with the nice sweater.

‘Kind of OK. I do need to do more. I’ve applied for two jobs. One at CEA. The other was agency work. But I didn’t get interviews in either.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘I need a sideways move somewhere,’ said the woman.

‘HA HA HA HA HA HA HA,’ said the women on the next table.

‘And then I said what’s the fucking problem? And you know what Barry’s like with ten pints down him!’

HA HA HA HA HA HA

‘I wonder,’ her father said, ‘what is behind your … your …’ Then poignant ellipsis. She was meant to fill it.

Trying to be helpful, she said, ‘Father, I waste whole days in self-analysis. Don’t start wasting your time too.’

‘But you haven’t worked for such a long time. It worries me. It must worry you. I wonder …’ That was her father. As elliptical as anything. Always when he spoke about things that really mattered, he faltered. It was Grace’s old fatal caesura, except with her father it was less a caesura than total silence. Once he slipped into a pause there was nothing on the other side. That made her talk, of nothing much, and after she had presented him with a series of small things, cast and re-cast, pearled and knitted together, she paused for a sip of wine. Then the food arrived and they raised their forks. Her father said: ‘I don’t know what you live on. Why don’t you come home for a while?’

‘Thanks, but I’m not insolvent,’ lied Rosa. That was her congested lie, and now she would have to stick to it. That meant, and now she was furious with herself, that she couldn’t ask him for a loan. Failure of mission! Abort! Abort! Once more her cravenness made her fidget. She had her hands in her lap, and she scraped her nails together. Nothing to be said, she thought. Now you must sustain the illusion you have fostered. Even though he didn’t seem to believe it. ‘You must be living off your friends,’ he said, with a touch of scorn. He put a hand to his fringe. He had abundant curls — they softened his hard, thin face. His hands were covered in liver spots. They weren’t a long-lived family. Her grandparents had faded out long before seventy. They put in respectable performances. They dragged themselves towards the mean. Then the women became demented and the men dropped dead. Her mother had seemed to be robust and vital, with her bright eyes, her clear skin. She moved gracefully and well, and at fifty she had run in a local marathon. She played tennis with friends, even when she was sixty-three. She had good legs, fine broad shoulders. Now Rosa was saying, ‘I understand you’re worried. But I’m quite certain it’ll be all right. I’ll find a way to solve it, a way to live.’

‘None of us knows how to live. The quest for psychological perfection, for the right “state”, for “happiness” — my dear, we never troubled ourselves with this sort of thing,’ said her father. ‘We just got on with it.’

‘What was “it”, precisely?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This “it” with which you were getting on?’

Her father paused. ‘It was a job, a wife, a family, money, work. A life.’

‘Whose life?’

‘One’s own. The lives of one’s family. Your generation drifts towards forty without putting down roots.’

‘Who’s that, Dad?’

‘You, your friends.’

‘Don’t worry, they’re all putting down roots.’

Oh how they are putting down roots. All implanting themselves nicely. They do it well. Very well, thought Rosa. You don’t see the strain. It’s apparently effortless. Liam, for instance, look at the man. An indeterminate span of months with Grace — if we believe their story three months, if we believe intuition, rumour, more like nine — and already they’re going up for the legal bind, the holy blessing at the altar, till death do ’em part, and may they live long and prosper and the rest.

Tell your father. Ask him for help.

This is something you must do now. There was not much time left. The hour was slipping away. She had another course and coffee in which to marshal herself. Could she do it? That was the question hovering over Rosa as she sat there with a fork in her mouth. ‘Good food,’ said her father.

‘I mean, perhaps, that it is only when we are aware of the grounds of fear and hope, only when we really understand the nature of the problem, that we can really judge how to behave,’ said Rosa. Verbiage! Really she was thinking,Go on! Get him to lend you money. He is your father. It won’t kill him. Will it?

‘But that’s too much to ask. You want to understand before you enter into things. That’s quite impossible. You’ll never understand,’ said her father.

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

Her father said quietly, ‘Rosa. I don’t want to put pressure on you to behave in a certain way. Equally I don’t want you to throw your life away. Of course I want you to be happy. But there are sacrifices. Some things we have to do because they are necessary, not because we want to do them. This requires strength of character. You have to arm yourself.’

‘I want you to understand that I have been trying to get a job,’ said Rosa.

‘Somehow your generation got spoilt. We must have been too eager to please.’

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

‘For once I agree,’ said Rosa.

‘Really?’ said her father.

‘Not with you,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the laughter.

‘There’s no purpose in misanthropy,’ said her father. ‘It’s too easy to feel remote from your kind. You judge them from what they show to you, not from what they are.’

‘How can I find out the difference?’

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

‘I’ve always believed in patience,’ said her father. ‘No one is superior to anyone. It’s just circumstances and luck that differentiate between people. You have to understand.’

‘Dessert?’ said the waiter.A slice of tiramisu, to go with your existential crisis? They ordered dessert. Rosa was mentally calculating the cost, wondering if her father knew he was paying. Only one more course to go and how could she supplicate? If she implored him would he help? Just a thousand, nothing more, and by the time that ran out she would certainly have a job. She would take whatever came first, Brazier or whoever else she could persuade to pay her for her time. They were silent, while Rosa struggled with her native spinelessness and her father finished the wine. All she had to do was phrase the question. Still she couldn’t. She was quite chilled by the thought of it.

‘And is there anything else you would like to do?’ said her father.

‘Alchemy? Necromancy? Automatic writing?’

‘No dear, not those.’

‘And Bob said shut up, darling, I’m trying to make a fucking JOKE,’ added a man to her left.

HA HA HA HA HA HA.

HA HA HA HA HA HA.

‘I was on a frigging roller coaster,’ said the man.

‘Dad perhaps I will come and stay with you some time? I won’t come for ever. Just for a few days,’ asked Rosa.

‘Of course, I’d love you to come. You should come soon,’ said her father. ‘Before winter sweeps along the Gorge.’

‘I’d really like to, thanks.’

He wouldn’t be alive much longer, thought Rosa. And lying wouldn’t hurt for a while. It wasn’t fair. He had done enough already. She felt this was true — he had reared her, consoled her, supported her for many years, and he had always been kind. But was this cowardice? She had generally concealed from him her failures and small humiliations. She was his only child; of course she felt he had tried hard and she should strive to repay that. Why trouble him now with the truth? So they took their spoons and ate. Father, she thought. What have you discovered, in your long life? Anything to impart? All my other relatives went quietly to the grave, without spilling any secrets. My mother simply vanished one day, leaving no clues. Do you have anything further to say? She imagined a scene in the future, a few years hence, not long, she thought, looking over at her father’s hollow cheeks, his shrivelled hands. One day she would regret her lack of resolve. So much would go unsaid. It was that sort of family. Why rattle the cage? Her father had waved off his parents without saying anything violent or unpalatable. They just talked in careful phrases, too worried about bruising each other with anything like the truth. Grandfather Don and grandmother Mary had vanished into the dark. Grandfather Don had been dying — he knew it, his wife knew it, his son knew it. Yet none of them mentioned it to the other. They all kept it quiet, fastidiously. The way you should. It drove her wild. Yet it wasn’t her father’s fault. His love for Rosa was so unobtrusive, so unassuming, that it had always made her crave his attention. He had been aloof, hiding in his study, at work on another book he would never finish. He was a master of inconclusive prose. Then he spent hours marking essays, his glasses on his nose. Rosa’s mother was the garrulous one, and she was always talking to Rosa. Her father would spread the newspapers across the breakfast table, brew up a great cylinder of coffee, and pass the morning engrossed, answering Rosa’s questions in terse sentences. ‘The chairman of the Tory party, Rosa. You should know that.’ ‘He’s the Minister for Education, a vicious man.’ ‘That’s the Chief Whip.’ She had only ever really talked to her father about politics and battles. She liked to see him animated — he had a good memory, and he talked of cause and consequence, the origins of the House of Tudor, the Restoration, the World Wars. Always she had been careful when she spoke to him. No wonder she couldn’t ask him for a loan! But it was ridiculous. He had the money. He would be angry that she hadn’t asked. When she was finally taken off to debtor’s jail, there to rot with the shopaholic and the incontinent and plain unlucky, the much unluckier than her, he would tell her she should have asked for help. But she couldn’t anyway, and that was the end of it. She simply couldn’t phrase the words.

Contrite, she said, ‘Delicious dessert. Really good food. This place is better than I remember it,’ because her father was paying and it seemed ungrateful to complain. ‘Nice chocolate sauce. Delicious.’

Her father said: ‘We are meant to be industrious. And our industry should make us happy.’

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA said everyone together. The whole restaurant was laughing. It was only Rosa and her father who were sitting pensively at their small table.

Later Rosa allowed her father to pay for her lunch. He had known all along, and only grumbled briefly. Embarrassed, she said she would buy him lunch next time. They stood outside the door of the restaurant, and he eyed her bags. ‘Off on holiday?’ he said, arching his brows and, Rosa imagined, thinking of the money he had just spent.

‘No, I told you, I have to go to see a friend. Just for a couple of nights. I’ll apply for jobs while I’m away. Then I’ll be back and busy, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘But, Dad, are you sure you’re OK? I never really asked.’

Her father’s face was pale in the sunlight. But his eyes were still bright blue. He fixed her with them and said:

‘I told you Rosa, my days are very structured. I read a lot. Most importantly, I feel I have improved in some things since September. My Spanish is slightly better, even with my ancient brain. My bridge is much improved. I am fitter, if more deaf.’

He was like a character in Gogol, his jacket almost worn through at the sleeves. He was carrying folded papers in a shabby satchel. Now he was talking about the virtues of planning, about how important it was to plan a life.

‘You have to have a scheme,’ he said.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘Rather, I am in the process of developing one.’

‘Well, there’s the telephone,’ he said. ‘Give me a call soon. Don’t leave it another month.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course I won’t.’

They stood in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘Nothing is more important than happiness. Nothing is worth being unhappy about.’

A bus went past. The wind blew in their faces. Her father’s faded jacket flapped at the corners. Rosa was still thinking about the money and her unanswered question. She had it phrased. I wondered, could you lend me a small amount of money? I’ll pay you back almost immediately. Just to tide me over for a few weeks. Instead she said: ‘I understand that. But there’s the theory and the practice. It’s hard for the two to coalesce.’

Coalesce? she thought.

He turned to go, and she said, ‘Father?’

‘Yes, Rosa?’ He turned back towards her, holding his satchel with both hands. That was the moment! Just a hundred or so, though she knew that made little difference. Still she stood there, trying to say something. A thousand, and I will have a job by the end of the month! Just a thousand! He was expectant, troubled, waiting for a confession. He had come for lunch, hoping to rally her spirits. His story about having a friend to see — she wasn’t sure she believed it. Her father didn’t really have any friends. He had paid for a ticket, a lunch, the trip had cost him a couple of hundred. She had his stapled article in the pocket of her coat. She thought of him sitting on the train, holding a book to his face, his legs under a plastic table. If she divulged all, he would go home sad. She had caused him pain already. Now to ask him for money!

‘Have a good journey home. Thanks so much again for lunch,’ she said.

‘My pleasure,’ he said, and walked away quickly, not turning back.

She said goodbye to his retreating form and headed towards Notting Hill. She was thinking of him going to the station, his jacket flapping in the wind. She imagined him holding out his ticket to the guard, his face blank. It was clear she had no sense of proportion. But she was crying hot tears as she walked along. She was moving as fast as she could, rubbing her face. It was nearly too late, she was suddenly aware just how late it was. With her head down, she walked on. Her train was leaving soon, so she turned the corner and found a bus. It was a fine bus, which took her past the park, where she saw the trees in their autumn severity, thin and sinewy, and underneath she saw the lower lines of bushes and the meandering silver string of the river. With her nose against the glass, she noticed joggers on the path below, and the straight-backed forms of cyclists, turning circles with their feet. There was a queue of cars at Hyde Park Corner, jammed up at the lights, waiting. The traffic shifted slowly. The bus turned left at Marble Arch, and moved up towards Marylebone.

Hunched into her coat, she tried to stay calm. It was absurd to be so mournful about her father, who was a grown man with a lover and a sense of a benevolent deity to console him. Her father was religious, she thought. He had found his church and locked the door behind him. It was how he coped, in the end, with the death of his wife. His belief rendered things palatable, perhaps. When he went home, he thought of God and a celestial palace. He went to church on Sundays with Sarah on his arm. This should make her pity him less. It was of little importance if he was right or wrong. What matter if he boiled off into oblivion, so long as he was happy while he lived? He was right in that. Of course it didn’t matter, and the only thing to do was keep your head up, keep on going. Jung said that for psychotherapeutic purposes it was best if a person believed that death was not the end. For the sake of mental well-being, it was the most relaxing state to be in. You wouldn’t know until it was too late either way, so why not chance it? Still she couldn’t. And she thought of Tolstoy with his life crisis, at fifty or so he suddenly wondered what the point of it all was, and she had always thought he had left it late, but there he was trembling under the sentence, horribly frightened, in such torment he thought he would hang himself, and he resolved it by thinking himself into faith. He looked out at the peasants tilling the fields and worshipping a just God, and he rendered himself religious. Rendered himself, through a willed process of reasoning — it seemed impossible!

Even so, she was fortunate. It was a slick trade-off, from the former certainties of religion, to a better state of finitude. Instead of a cloudless eternity, the prospect of an afterlife, in this age you got the consolation prize — death as the unspoken secret of life, immanent but ignored, suffering as something that happened to other people, life to be lived free of the awareness of death, like being a dog or a cat. Free and ignorant. Then suffering came as a shock, and death as something incongruous, having nothing to do with life. Perhaps it was better like that. She had read about Zeno and she understood the argument though it hardly helped. If you were rational about it, death didn’t happen to the individual because it was at the point of death that the individual ceased to be. At death, one’s subjectivity ceased. You were no longer yourself. This was all well and good, thought Rosa, quite coherent philosophically but no damn consolation for the snuffing out of me! Me of all people! she thought. This made her grip her bag in a spasm of fear, and then she turned to a man near her who was shuffling his feet and wondered how he was bearing up under the knowledge, this irrefutable knowledge that he would be nothing, one day, or at best something else entirely. Then there were days when she thought it was absurd to mind so much. There was nothing of interest about her — why not feel far more scandalised by the death of Shakespeare, or the death of Socrates — murdered by Athens — or the death of Mozart with his works unfinished? With Rosa, the world would only lose another drone, supplied with her set of interests and anxieties. For her grief, her self-mourning, she was a fool. It had sent her off in a great hurry, trying to find something she was too unreasonable to identify. She was chasing over the hills, following the weft, thinking I lost it last time, but just one more try, I’m sure I’ll find it — stamping over ruins and then it would vanish and she would be thinking some miniature thought, something diced about Liam, or her concerns would shift to the rent, or she would notice her neighbour — and here she glanced to one side and found her neighbour was a gun-faced man of forty-five, baked in body odour. She moved away from him, she didn’t want his energies flowing into hers; she didn’t want to catch a trace of his aura or id, or any other categorisable aspect of him that might be coming her way.

On this bus full of people casting sharp glances at each other, she was thinking of Socrates, who said that it was foolish to fear death, because there was no knowing if death was a better state than life. That was sensible enough, in the abstract, but there were absolutes. In the here and now death — the deaths of others — robbed you of love. While you were living it robbed you; who could say what happened later. A couple of decades ago she had been a teenager, loved by both her parents, by her remaining grandparents. She had been young and mostly oblivious, and she had passed the days driving through the Avon countryside with her friends in borrowed cars. They went off drinking cider; they went to caves in the cliffs where the boys smoked pot. They were impetuous and lucky. There was nothing illustrious about her youth. She didn’t really read and she wasn’t talking ancient Greek at the age of six. She was bred on teenage magazines and TV; it was only later she started leafing through Plato with a guilty conscience, trying to please someone or impress herself, she wasn’t sure. Of course we were barbarous, thought Rosa, but it didn’t matter. That was our undeveloped state. Now we have no excuses for our barbarity. Then we could say — hand on heart — that we were truly witless. Pure in our lack of wit. We drove out with boys in the back of the car, thrilled by their closeness, the proximity to sex they represented. Peer pressure was mighty and terrible. Despotic youth, thought Rosa, smiling to herself.

And now she was thinking of grandmother Lily, who never really recovered from the death of her husband. Grandfather Tom went modestly, in his prime. It had become his custom to spend the days after his retirement working under the car, for no real reason other than his liking for spanners and grease. He emerged around teatime smelling of sweat, wiping his hands on a rag. In the evenings he liked to go to the working men’s club. He played bowls, watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, wrote comic verse, smoked with friends. One day he had observed the usual ritual, wiped a rag around the back of the car, polished it and washed his hands and he was sipping tea in the kitchen when it started to rain. Grandmother Lily ran outside to bring the washing in, calling to her husband to help. He failed to follow her; exasperated, she dragged the basket in, preparing to remonstrate, and found he had collapsed. He recovered a little in hospital, waking to say that he had fulfilled all his ambitions; he had no complaints, he said, and then he had another heart attack and died. But grandmother Lily preserved a quite unSocratic view of things. She wasted slowly, grew thin and blotched. And there was grandmother Mary, tall and graceful, with her hair newly permed. She was the direct antithesis of grandmother Lily: she was always smart and cheerful; she went out regularly for a shampoo and set. She had ten outfits that she wore in strict rotation. A pleated skirt or two, a cashmere jumper. Much of it in pink and blue. Then she had a pair of blue trousers, long and wide-legged. Her clothes were forties in style. She had fixed her taste as a young woman, and had never faltered. She liked watching snooker — she called it snukker — and reading crime novels. Rosa always thought it was incongruous: her delicate, kindly grandmother, holding a book with a bloody corpse on the cover. She had a drawer full of multicoloured pencils. They had belonged to grandfather Don, who had been an engineer. She was devout, a quiet member of the church. Dear grandmother Mary, who never worked in her life. She knitted jumpers and made Victoria sponges. She helped with a thousand village fetes. Early in her marriage she took in girls — fallen women, pregnant at sixteen, cast out by their families. It was a gentle life, spent in small villages, dealing with people who knew her well. Virtuous, in its way. When Rosa thought of grandmother Mary she saw her in the living room of her house surrounded by ancestral china, in repose.

Grandmother Mary believed that things were orchestrated by a benevolent deity. Still she died alone, stricken by dementia. She never questioned the God that sent her mad, but Rosa wondered how she might have understood it, had she still been capable of rational enquiry. Because the self was memory and memory defined the self, and at the last grandmother Mary had no memory at all. She would be a fugitive eternal being, unable to find anyone she recalled in the celestial wash of souls, or confusing those she found, mixing up her father and her husband, uncertain of her friends. Though there might be an essence, and Rosa had hoped this was what grandmother Mary had thought, on those few days when she was lucid enough to understand what was happening to her. There might still be a kernel of the self, untouched by disease, preserving the original personality of the creature. This might have been what Socrates meant, thought Rosa, when he talked of the self. Something untouched by all the things of life. Untouched even by memory and the shifting pattern of concerns that define the individual. An eternal spark, divorced from everything ephemeral.

She shook her head hard, and forced herself to focus. Now the bus was stuck behind a ritual file of cars, hemmed in on all sides. Gathering her bags around her, her hold all weighed down with a pair of Jess’s walking boots and now these presents in their plastic wrappers, Rosa stared at the street, at the flecks of brown and black on the buildings, flecks of great age, at the columns of a church, the glass sheen of an office block. The street was a mingled frieze of shine and drab. It was mottled, but she liked it. She stared around at the other passengers. She watched a pair of boys slapping each other warmly around the head. There was a man with an immense nose reading a paper, apparently absorbed in it. Each nostril a work of art. Truly unusual. That was a characterful face, she thought. The bus was taking its time, shuddering along Euston Road, the glass shaking. Not far from here, thought Rosa, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her works, birthed her children, and expired. Rousseau declares that a woman should be made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. What nonsense! Still the wind was gusting down the streets. Everything outside the bus was controlled by the force of the wind; on one side of the road people were hunched against it, on the other they were gusted onwards. The bus came to a sudden halt, and everyone jerked forwards. For a moment their faces showed confusion and injured pride. For a brief instant, they knew the whole thing was unnatural and absurd, being on this bus in this road jammed with traffic, being jolted around as the bus trembled on its sluggish course. They understood, briefly, all of them, that it was crazy, that wherever they were trying to go it didn’t really matter, and really they should have just stayed in the savannah swamps firing arrows at the fauna. That would have been better than sitting it out on this rattling clattering bus with a mounting feeling of nausea and this underlying sense of perplexity, this semi-suppressed question of why the hell? But then she looked around again and they were all rustling newspapers, and she was no longer sure if that was what they had been thinking at all.

The buildings were stained black and brown. She liked their weathered faces. At the junction of Tottenham Court Road everything stopped again, and Rosa stared up at the blank windows of the high-rise offices. But the sky was deep dark, clad in clouds, dynamic ether, even as Rosa festered in the bus. Rosa could see the grimy face of Euston Square station, with the dome of UCL just visible round the corner. She wondered if she should beg the driver to let her off. She sat up straight and looked at her watch. She sang quietly to herself: Would you like to swing on a star? And be better off than you are? Or would you rather be a Pig? Yeah yeah, tell ’em ‘bout the pig. She stared around, stared at the traffic stuck to the heels of the bus, remembered her bags and subsided. She was tense for a few minutes, then the bus started its shuddering progress again. It started, moved quickly, stopped as quickly again. There was a fierce sound of horns outside. And now she could hear the King’s Cross backing track of diggers and drills, the shuddering scrape of metal on concrete, and she saw clouds of dust dispersing.

When the bus came to a halt outside Euston, Rosa was staring up at the sky. Then she stood. Pulling her bags along, she moved towards the exit. It is almost too late, she thought, as she saw the glass doors of Euston Station. She passed the police with their guns, and arrived at a big clock telling her the time. If you were ever so slightly out of synch these clocks and the people beneath them quite confused you. You weren’t sure what might happen but you were fearful all the same. She was uncertain on the forecourt and then, with minutes to go, she remembered the drill. Thinking only of the task at hand, she rushed for a ticket, fumbling with her purse, dropping her credit card, stuffing it into the machine again, seeing the price and cursing faintly, receiving a delayed then spewed out ticket, running for the platform. She was trying to keep her thoughts clean and practical. She saw a train and ran towards it. But her hurry was superfluous; the train was delayed. Everyone was queuing at the doors. A man in uniform was holding a whistle, ready to blow. Was it a race? thought Rosa. They were all poised for the off. She saw some ruddy, fat families, and kids smiling, and a host of the elderly. Daytime travellers from London. A few business types in suits, men and women, holding their phones and palms and computer cases. Most of that crowd filed off to first class, while Rosa set her bags down on the floor and waited with the rest. The atmosphere was good-tempered. Everyone fidgeted and raised their eyes to each other. There was a strict sense of protocol — you had to be stoical and expectant. The train stood on the platform and the clock ticked past the hour. ‘Not too bad,’ said one old man when the carriage doors opened, and the clock said they were fifteen minutes late.

Things to do, Tuesday

Find a place to stay — call Andreas

Get a job

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

Call the bank and beg them for an extension — more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

Phone your father and apologise

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Distinguish the various philosophies of the way

THE TEMP

Distribute presents

Be polite and grateful

When the doors opened they streamed into the carriage, in search of the perfect seat. Within seconds, the seats were full of people. Still, Rosa was confused and couldn’t understand. She was constantly surprised by density, the sheer quantity of things around her. She wondered why they were heading north, all these people with their bags and coats. Entire families, squashed in with their cases and sandwiches and piles of crisps. Rustling away, feeding sandwiches to their young. If the train crashed, or was blown to pieces, dynasties would be wiped out. The children were already on the squawk, beginning their small symphony of need, trilling up the octaves. Rosa was a solitary passenger and this detail made her relatively desirable. Soon she was surrounded by the old in search of silence. She was joined by a woman with a Bible, a headscarf and a stringy neck, and an ancient man who edged slowly into the seat opposite her, kicking her foot and apologising. He apologised for so long that Rosa could see they were in danger of having a conversation. Really what she mostly wanted to do was sleep, but though she closed her eyes the sound of voices kept her conscious. Everyone was arranging plastic bags and bottles of water. There was a constant low-level rustling of bags and food and papers. A man was guarding an empty seat beside him. Earlier he had eaten a sandwich and left cream cheese and crumbs around his mouth. In his hand he held a piece of paper with PRODUCTION QUOTA written on it. The rest Rosa couldn’t read. His wrist was covered with threaded scars, as if he had once smashed his fist through a window. She wondered if he had done it as a child. And now he was a fat-cheeked man of fifty or so, one hand in his salted hair.

Days were passing, time’s limitless express-train was speeding onwards, hurtling everyone towards their own personal tunnel. Time’s TGV was breaking the sound barrier, though her real-time InterCity slugtrain was moving more slowly. She thought of a slogan for the railways in Britain, like an old slogan she had heard as a child, ‘We’re getting there’, only more applicable to the present day: ‘Our Trains are Slower than Time Itself.’ Yet, having queued patiently outside the carriage, nervous and worrying about her bags, Rosa had her own little seat, and her legs fitted snugly against the ancient legs of her opposite neighbour. The train had a welcoming smell, a homely aroma of coffee and chips. The windows were clean and through the glass she saw the girders of the station. ‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,’ said an automated voice. ‘Please remember that you are required to travel with a valid ticket. This train will call at Luton, Birmingham International, Birmingham New Street, Wolverhampton, Crewe, Preston, Manchester Piccadilly, Kendal, Oxenholme and Glasgow Central. There is a buffet service selling a wide variety of sandwiches, crisps, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, cakes and biscuits. First-class accommodation is at the front of the train. We hope you enjoy your journey.’

The train eased northwards, passing under a steel canopy into the dim light of day. They passed rusted tracks, faded grass sprouting between them, and Victorian bridges reinforced with steel. PRIZE she saw painted on the brick arch of a bridge. PRIZE. And the prize was what? TEMP TEMP TEMP she saw, and nodded. They passed a depot made of corrugated iron. She saw the blurred front of a carriage inside. They passed metal grilles and the red steel of a bridge. Cameras and lights suspended above the tracks and an interlocking network of wires. Metal railings merged into a grey wall as the train picked up speed. Now the sloped sides of the cuttings were covered in foliage, dry shrubs. ‘I’m on the train,’ said a man to her left. ‘Did Ed get the report done? On the way back I’ll get a taxi.’

‘You can’t worry about it,’ said another to his phone. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’

‘Tell Ed to sort out the report. I’m back in the office tomorrow.’

Outside the clouds were heavy above the long lines of trees. There were broad-brushed green fields and rows of post-war houses with bay windows and long thin gardens. Out of town debris, business parks and warehouses and building sites with planks stacked in piles. As the train climbed to its top speed, objects outside were flung backwards before she could fully describe them to herself. ASIA’S FINEST FOODS, she saw, on the edge of a warehouse. ‘The buffet car is now open’ said the tannoy. ‘The buffet car is selling a wide variety of sandwiches, crisps, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, cakes and biscuits as well as an assortment of narcotics and bandages, soma, hemlock, and gold, pure gold.’ She kicked off her shoes and slept, head on the window, arms on the table, and woke with a start to discover that the train was running even later. Something had failed, some rusty old signal, but she found she accepted it all, every minute tacked onto the journey, she reclined into it, watching the green and grey of Britain pass outside the window. The view was made up of contrasts: the soft moss on the bridges, the variegated textures of trees and fields and the primary colours of the stations. As they moved slowly through one station she saw FOOD TO GO in orange neon and turned her head away.

She put her hand above her eyes and stared out at fleeting buildings, factories and clouds of smoke and the compressed shapes of city centres. There was a thick smell of hops for a while, and then a sweet coil of sugar as they passed another factory. She saw rows of cars, parked at a station, but the train passed through with a shudder. BLUE written on a bridge, and something else she couldn’t read. The train moved through stretching ranks of suburbs, past the shabby backs of interwar houses, walls covered with peeling plaster, brickwork crumbling. Sand and gravel, litter at the side of the tracks, mingled with weeds. Then there were places so steeped in tranquillity that she envied their occupants: long low fields, pale lakes and careful gardens. In places the tracks cut a furrow through the land, and the train barely lifted its head above the fields. Then she only saw the outline of trees against the sky.

When the train slid into Birmingham New Street, the carriage partly emptied. The old man opposite edged slowly out of his seat, hitting her feet and smiling apologetically. She nodded goodbye. With a bank of vacant seats around her, Rosa found she could read in peace. She read slowly through the leftover newspapers, noting the by-lines of her former colleagues, and felt no sense of regret at all. She liked the fact they were all still there, working hard, advancing every day. At least poor old Peter hadn’t been let down by everyone else. She was glad about that, Peter with his worried way of looking and his tempered charisma. It was all too far away now, as the train moved through an old brick tunnel into a flush of countryside. The last suburbs receded, and the crumbling warehouses and chimneys gave way to fields. She saw rubbish and dust at the edges of the tracks. Beyond was a garden and she saw a child running on the lawn. As the train drew northwards there were long grey-backed ridges, sprawling under the sky. Then she smiled. Years and years, she thought, feeling a retrospective urge coming on. The train was taking her through the secondary scenery of her childhood, the provincial towns with their flyovers and whitewashed shopping centres and the long lines of the hills. She remembered their family journeys to the north. She travelled with her parents on the train. Oh lovely, the past, she thought, sinking idly into thoughts of when she was a child, and her family had gone on holiday to the Lakes, year after year. Those were comforting memories, purely happy, though she felt a jolt as she summoned them. They had rented the same cottage almost every time, near Lake Windermere, in the grounds of a farmhouse. Rosa’s mother grew up in the Lakes, near Barrow, and when grandmother Lily and grandfather Tom were still alive they used to come to visit. She was thinking about these summers, and she remembered the cottage they rented: slate slabs, a large fireplace with a bread oven, window seats in the bedrooms. The doors had latches, exotic to a child. The farmhouse was larger and more terrifying than the cottage, and the old professor who lived there said the cellar was haunted. It was a friendly ghost, he added, but after that Rosa could hardly bring herself to cross in front of the big house, and she only played in the small garden of the cottage. She wondered if the old professor was still there, still anywhere this side of silence. But he had been ancient when she was a child. He must be long vanished, he and his wife. Still, she thought she would find out what had happened to him while she was there. She wondered why she had never written to him. That would have been a gesture, kind at least. Dear Professor, I wanted to let you know that I was there, years ago, at your house. I was small and I remember the woods seemed like immeasurable forests. Your orchards were abundant with apples and — I confess! — I sometimes ate the windfalls. I remember the smell of wet ferns, and the ferns stuck to my legs as I went down to the lake to swim. In the mornings I woke to the sound of birds in the trees. When we arrived the cottage was often cold, and yet you had always left wood for a fire. My parents would light it and I would sit there looking at the flames. I remember placing my hands on the big cold stones of the walls, the slate stones. One night I slept in a tent in the garden. I remember my father had to stay there with me because I was so small. When it rained we played Monopoly. My mother always won. It drove my father mad. I don’t know why I never wrote before. She should write to him while she was there! But then she thought she wouldn’t after all. There would be the need to add, Recently, my mother died. Very abrupt, no pain. It was absurd, but it had stopped her writing to so many people: old friends from school, teachers, kids she had grown up with. Dear Mrs Morton, Thanks for teaching me about Hamlet. It helped me greatly when my mother died. Yet it hadn’t in the end.

Rosa thought that her mother had been an elegant and frugal woman, and it was a shame she couldn’t ask her advice. It would have been nice to be able to talk to her. Rosa had been idle and had never asked enough questions. Her mother — and now Rosa felt despair and yearning like a kick in the stomach. It was impossible to accept. And yet she had to. It had to be. Still, she despised it and wanted to cry out loud, protest. It was iniquitous! If she was undisciplined, it started, and she hated the way it made her feel, abandoned and unkempt. She remembered a tall woman, almost as tall as her daughter, with bobbed brown hair, vivacious and outspoken. Rosa’s mother had so many friends that when she died the church was heaving with mourners and some had to stand outside and listen to the service. Everyone was shocked, absurdly. ‘It was so sudden.’ ‘At least she didn’t suffer’ — dozens said that, and it was perhaps true, though Rosa was surprised by their certainty. Still, they took Rosa’s hand at the door, and said, ‘I’m so sorry. Look after your father, and yourself, dear Rosa’, and she smiled and thanked them for coming.

Bristol was hazy under a misty winter, which Rosa later remembered as pale and frigid. Her father was faint-hearted in the service. He couldn’t speak, so after the vicar (‘Oh Lord, we come here today to celebrate the life of Harriet Lane, loving wife and mother, who died recently after a short illness’ — a very short and despicable illness, a shock to the head, a haemorrhage which swept her out before she could say goodbye — ‘Oh Lord, thank you for smashing up Harriet Lane, so impressively …’) Rosa had to address the church. That was the worst of it, looking out at a sea of sympathetic faces, wanting to cast herself on the coffin and scream. The Ancients had it better. You could ululate as much as you liked. Wailing was positively expected, scrabbling in the sand quite allowed. The modern British funeral was all wrong, Rosa decided, as she said a few terse words and tried to imagine she was talking about a remote acquaintance. She read a poem, Larkin’s ‘For Sidney Bechet’, which had been one of her mother’s favourites. For a while she wanted to fall into a faint, she had never really noticed how long that poem was, but it coursed on, verse after verse and Rosa’s voice breaking with every word. On me your voice falls as they say love should/ Like an enormous yes. That messed the congregation up; they all started snivelling and rubbing their eyes. She kept on with it, though she saw her father had his head in his hands. My crescent City/ Is where your speech alone is understood/ And greeted as the natural noise of good/ Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity. She got to the end, bitterly and with a sense of mounting disbelief. The poem didn’t reflect her mood at all. She didn’t find anything natural or good at the time; she found her grief quite bewildering and devastating. Not only had she produced a dreadful reading but, more importantly, she had committed perjury over her mother’s coffin. She dropped the book on the floor as she walked back to her seat. When the music started playing her father had to be helped from the church. She was angry with him at the time, thinking he was weak.

Of course the dead faded away. It was impossible to mourn them all the time. The memories dissolved, slowly. But if she thought about it she became aware just how furious and abandoned she felt. She was sure her mother would have helped her. ‘The matter, Rosa? Explain to me?’ ‘Not sure, mother.’ ‘Well, write it down, call me up again when you want to talk. Let’s think of an action plan. Lots of love.’ Their conversations would have been pertinent, to the point. It was her father who was irresolute. Her mother was always brisk and quick-witted. The family home was shabby and comfortable. The kitchen was sparsely furnished with old-fashioned appliances, things her parents bought when they first married and never replaced. The cooker was a monument to an earlier era of domestic technology. The furniture was always second-hand, bought from adverts in newspapers, never fashionable or expensive. It wasn’t that her family was poor, though her parents had irregular jobs. Rosa’s mother with her shop in Clifton Village, selling jewellery and scarves. It never boomed, but it brought in enough. Her father worked hard on his works of local history. He was always engaged on a new project, working in his study for hours, and eventually a book was published, something about the Victorians in Bristol. He bought up dozens of copies and gave them all to his friends. That made Rosa cringe in her chair, because she remembered mocking him, talking with her friends about him and his free books. Suggesting they have a competition, first prize a copy of his book, second prize two copies, and her teenage friends snorting in the garden, hands to their faces. She had no idea at all; she was ignorant of everything that was important. In their home in Redland, a crumbling Victorian town house, Rosa remembered her mother and father preparing food, and it seemed now she thought about it that there had always been something steaming on the cooker, some pot of stew or soup. She saw her father standing over it, adding vegetables and talking to her mother in a soft voice, her mother pushing back her hair, leaning over him to stir the soup again. Hardly aware at the time, Rosa now knew that her parents had been happy.

Now she was sitting rigidly in her seat. Her mouth was trembling. She rested her arms on the table and put her head in her arms, feigning sleep. Certainly it would be a terrible thing to shatter the tranquillity of the carriage. No one would thank her, and the old Bible reader would be quite perplexed. Rosa lifted her head and cast a glance towards her, and still the woman was engrossed in the Holy Book. Her mother had always fallen silent as they approached the Lakes. Well, of course, thought Rosa, no reason to assume you have a monopoly on retrogression. Possible that the entire carriage is musing on years long vanished, the freefall of the seasons. Though the woman with the Bible and the knitting couldn’t be, thought Rosa. She would be praising the Lord, and the child eating crisps would be thinking about crisps, and the small hunched man by the door who was tapping his stick on the floor — it was impossible to know what he was thinking about! Perhaps he was reciting an Upanishad, in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself. Thereupon his first shout was, ‘It is I!’ whereupon the concept ‘I’ arose. Perhaps he was thinking something she couldn’t imagine, something so rich and holy she would never think it (or something so perverse and disgusting, she thought, glancing across at the man again).

Really, she had nothing to complain about. For hundreds of years — time uncharted — her ancestors were anonymous hordes, busy with the practical conditions of survival. They tilled fields; they went down mines. Some of them went to sea. Then in the twentieth century there was a subtle shift. At fifteen grandmother Lily left school and started work. She was one of seven children; two died in infancy. She went to work in a shop, a miniature revolution. At the age of thirty she married Thomas Marswick, a carpenter. Rosa remembered her grandmother as a tired old woman with a round face and tightly set hair, wearing an apron, distributing sweets. Her idea of leisure was to talk over the wall to the next-door neighbour, Jackie, about other neighbours who had recently died. Rosa’s grandmother loved disasters, and in response to polite social questions she would release a volley of despair, deaths, cheated expectations. This attraction to the mournful overtook her progressively, and she fell into depression after the death of her husband, sliding through the house in her slippers, muttering about adversity. According to family legend, she had hidden all her money around the house, and most of it was never found after her death. She had a pair of false teeth which she kept in a mug by the bed. She accepted the structures of society, the random distribution of wealth, accepted it all and died quietly.

For many years after, grandmother Lily was preserved in a few tattered photograph albums. She had been young in the 1930s, and there were bleached black and white shots of her on day trips to Windermere, smiling at the camera, wearing her smartest clothes. Grandfather Tom stood by her, in a group of young couples, soon to be married. There were photos of her laughing at an outrageous friend, hovering at the edges of a dozen groups, petite, her hair carefully curled. Sitting astride a donkey on the beach, waving at the camera; singing on stage, dressed in stage finery, feathers and furs; bent double at the sight of a vast turkey, which her husband had just won in a Christmas tombola. Her parents, Rosa’s great-grandparents, whose names she didn’t know, lived in a small cottage in the village of Cartmel, which Rosa always remembered as a verdant garden bathed in a rosy dusk. If she went, she thought, what would she find? Nothing changed like the landscapes of childhood; it was scale that changed, the simple fact of individual growth. Former vistas, vast plains, were compressed into simple playing fields and modest gardens. The aspect shifted but there was much in the mind that changed.

As they passed through Preston station she was thinking of grey-stained streets, and the old grey slate of her grandparents’ house. She was remembering the excitement she felt as a child on these trips north. For no real reason at all, Rosa had once had a vivid childhood dream that her grandfather Tom had turned into a camel. Worse still, because he died when she was six this camel version of the man became entwined with her early memories of him setting her on his back and crawling on all fours around the room. She had a few other fading visual memories of her grandfather: a large man, she thought, though all adults were large to a child, with ears that moved when he chewed. A man with a shining pate and a long pointed nose. To her his features were gargantuan, outlandish, though in photographs she saw he had been handsome enough.

The arrival was a series of snatched kisses, embarrassed expressions of affection, with grandmother Lily supreme in the kitchen, rattling cutlery, telling her mother — who pulled faces — what to do. Her father was feted, given a cigar. Grandfather Tom took Rosa into the living room, where there was an ornamental brass dog with a poker resting on its back, superfluous by the electric fire. He dressed her in his braces. He took her out and sat her on swings and there was a photograph of Rosa at four, her eyes glassy from the flash, clutching a terrified tiger cub, with her grandfather smiling beside her. It had been taken at a circus, under a Big Top when, after all the people juggling plates and women in leotards hurling themselves from high platforms, the ringmaster had taken the tiger cub into the crowd. You could hold the cub and pose for a photo. Grandfather Tom thought it seemed like a good idea, and called the ringmaster over. But when the ringmaster arrived, a fat man sweating under his greasepaint, Rosa had shrunk more from him than from the frightened animal, which looked like a soft toy, compressed into the fat man’s armpit. The ringmaster had been dismissed, but as the cub disappeared across the other side of the ring, Rosa had begun to cry. It was an early sense of a moment in time forever lost, demoted from memory to mere possibility. Of course she thought nothing like that at all, she just saw the tiger cub vanishing away from her and wailed. Her grandfather asked her what was the matter, reassured her that the cub had gone, that it wouldn’t bite her anyway, offered her ice creams and other small bribes, but she held her head in her hands and sobbed. He knew anyway, and just as the cub was about to disappear backstage he leapt from his seat and ran across the sawdust, to ask the trainer to bring the cub back to Rosa’s seat. So they took a photo of her and her grandfather bought it. Now the trainer, the cub and her grandfather were all dead, thought Rosa. Perhaps not the trainer. He might still be clinging on. But definitely the cub! The cub had been dead for years.

Grandfather Tom wrote comical verse in his spare time, after he had injured his knee, which ended his career in amateur football. He never published anything, but Rosa’s mother’s desk at home was crammed with folders of his writings, immaculately drafted and redrafted, poems for friends. He had written until the end, making neat copies of even his swiftest doggerel, storing them away. For years, Rosa thought he might have been an unsung genius of modern letters, and had prepared to campaign for his reputation, but after her mother died she read all his poems again. They made her cry, but she understood they would never be published. They were loving, funny poems, but nothing more. To my dearest Rosa/ Whose mother really chos-a/ tricky name to rhyme/ I’ve tried it time and time/ but can’t get my old brain/ To find a good refrain./ It’s hard to tell your daughter/ She really didn’t oughta/ Call her daughter Rosa/ Because the name would pos-a/ Such a rich conundrum/ To Rosa’s old and humdrum/ Very adoring grandpapa/ When he tried to write to her!! That was one she remembered. It was definitely not Swift. But it wasn’t bad for a man who left school at fourteen. His collected poems, his life’s work neatly copied into a school notebook, was inscribed Thomas Marswick, Barrow, 1975.

She had been lucky with her family. They had been kind and loving, these long-dead people. It was odd she thought about her grandparents so seldom. Only as the train ran north did she really consider them. It took a jolt, a change of location, for her brain to grind backwards. Of course she had hardly known them at all. It was just a dim sense of familial recognition, a twitch of the genes, but it made her shift sadly in her seat. They would have been appalled by her, she understood. They would certainly have told her to calm herself. Grandfather Tom had been a clever man, but he was pragmatic. He had a wife and a daughter, a group of good friends, he played sport at the weekends. He divided up his time — work and play, everything in its place, a time for fooling around and a time for getting your head down, earning some money. His daughter had done well, and he expected things to progress from there. Rosa’s parents expected her to better them, as they had bettered their parents. That was how they thought it went, they assumed — onwards and upwards with every generation. And if not upwards, then at least an effort, in honour of those who had tried before you. They were all trying to tell her this, her father and the ghosts of her family. You had to live. You had to try your best. There was nothing else for it. But at this she felt rebellious again and kicked them all off, these kind-eyed ancestors of hers.

And now Rosa watched the sun sink towards the hills. The day was drawing on. The closeness of the evening made her tired, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again she had gripped her pen, and she wrote:

God exists eternally, as pure thought, happiness, completeness. The sensible world, on the contrary, is imperfect but it has life, desire, imperfect thought. All things are in a greater or lesser degree aware of God, and are moved to admiration and love of God. So the sensible world aspires towards the perfection which is God. God is the cause of all activity.

Now she stopped. If you understood God as an ideal, as something thought, part of the human longing for perfection, perfection unattainable but possible to imagine, to feel a sense of, then perhaps she understood. The mind was impersonal and therefore divine. The body was personal and therefore mortal. Dream the dream the dream the dream … Yet she — like the rest of the race — possessed a mind that felt its finitude as unnatural, though really it was the most natural thing of all. That was the problem. Her mind felt the disappearance of her mother to be incomprehensible, whereas in reality it was inevitable. It seemed a crazy way for a species to think. It didn’t help with morale. Why, she wondered, had the species not evolved with an inbuilt acceptance of death — not the sort of acceptance that would cause people to die without a struggle, but a sort of inbuilt sense of death as the natural end of life? Why did the mind — the mind, or your mind, she thought? — return constantly to the very element of life which made it so unhappy? Especially when it sapped your will, stopped you from achieving anything? If you were so preoccupied with this immutable fact, so very concerned about it you could hardly participate, then what was the good of that?

Had she been more self-disciplined, altogether more Zen, she might have understood that age was an arbitrary marker, that growing old hardly mattered, because one could die any day. Would she not have apprehended the absurdity of human time? What about durée, she tried to remember, what about inner time? She could only perceive this relentless linear motion, this surging wave that was carrying her ever onwards. She should become more magnanimous, she thought. It was impractical to think so keenly about herself. Her hands were sweating, and there was a strong smell of coffee around her. It made her think about buying a cup, but she stayed in her seat, holding onto the table. For ten years, she had a simple means of self-definition. She was a journalist. It lent a confident ring to her voice. ‘Rosa Lane, calling from the Daily Rag, could you give me a few moments of your time.’ Through the years, Rosa’s voice had dropped, becoming more deep and jovial, trustworthy and efficient. ‘Hi, I’m Rosa, this is my partner, Liam. Yes, I’m a journalist. Liam is a political lobbyist.’ Subtext: We’re a pretty savvy couple, and you’d better know it. If something failed, if something went briefly awry, they could bask in the regard of the other — until the last stages at least, when there was no basking and mutual regard had been extinguished. Prior to that, she had delivered her lines well, with assurance, self-importance coursing from her larynx. ‘Hi, Rosa Lane here, I’m a veritable goddess of the media. Hey, listen to me! And I have a fine relationship as well, no doubt I’m on the way to something called a happy life.’ I hardly thought about this stuff at all, she thought. It was true she was sounding more hesitant. She had become afraid of striking up casual conversation with her neighbours. What do you do? they might say. Well, that was a question! What did you say? I do nothing, or nothing worth revealing anyway. I bow before the unrevealed secrets of TEMP. I am, professionally speaking, a despairing toad. Yet there are many things I intend to do! Even today, I fully intend to find a place to stay. Then I will phone Liam and ask about the furniture. I will call the bank and beg them for an extension — that’s Mr Sharkbreath, you see, he’s been quite cruel recently and I’m not very pleased with him. I assure you, it’s quite terrible what he did. He loaned me a load of money, and then he asked for it back, the callous varmint. I fully intend, after dealing with Sharkbreath, telling him exactly what I think, to read the comedies of Shakespeare, distinguish the various philosophies of the way, read History of Western Philosophy, Proust, Cervantes, Racine, the Ancient philosophers and the works of the major religions and a few more peripheral and the rest, find the TEMP — my own personal TEMP, you’ll have to find yours yourself — whatever that is, I don’t suppose you know either.

So she kept her head down.

Outside the sun was fading. The conductor appeared, a large gruff man, and she handed over her ticket. She saw people cycling along a path set back from the train tracks, a family out for an evening ride. It was cold and the children were wearing hats and scarves, smiling brightly. The whole family was smiling, frozen in happiness. She thought of a song; she was trying to remember the words, some eternal pop: Video killed the radio star … In my mind and in my car … Something she remembered singing when she was a child, picked up from her parents’ radio. That betrayed them — in those days, her parents were young and they even listened to the charts. The song struck her as funny and she longed to mouth the words. She noticed her hands were still sweating; they had created a sticky film on the table. Anyway the table was covered with empty crisp packets, grains of salt, an apple core, a few plastic cups full of cold dregs. The carriage had been converted, over a few hours, into a place of dust and debris. But she liked the refractions of light, the elegiac end of the day. She saw sheep grazing in fields, and a motorway receding out of view. There were deep red ferns on the hills, and the dwindling sun had stained the sky. When she arrived she would send her father a postcard. Loving, low-key. Daddy, gone to the Lakes. Remember, we went there all the time when I was child. Of course you remember. The stone cottage with the thatched roof and the wheelbarrow and the water barrel. At dusk bats flew from the rafters, zig-zagging across the garden. Thanks for taking me swimming in the lake in the mornings. I never appreciated it at the time, but there you were, on holiday, a couple of weeks off work, dragging your middleaged bones out of bed at dawn to take your small daughter to swim. Love Rosa.

Then she saw a series of hills emerging to the west, deep curves of rock and moss. She saw a cold pink band on the horizon. The train was nearly at Lancaster. There were steep slopes and small grey cottages scattered across them. A road winding through the fields. Tribes of sheep and cows, standing in the sketchy grass. She settled against the window, staring at the broad shanks of the hills. Now she slapped her pen down and thought of the view and the sky and the wandering flecks of cloud and the low light of the evening. The country was shadowed in dusk.

At a small country station she stepped down from the train. The air was clear and she could see the shadows of hills, silhouetted against the lights of distant towns. She found a taxi which drove her to Ulpha, through the rugged valleys of the southern Lake District. The roads wound over the backs of the hills, and the traffic streamed past on the other side. In the last light she saw a lake glittering between the mountains. That must be Coniston, she thought, as the road twisted up the gradient. There was a grey ferry moving slowly across the water. The car rounded the corners, picking up speed, and at the edges of the roads were dry stone walls, fields stretching beyond them. A few weeks ago, the driver had said, the fields had been covered with frost, but recently there had been a thaw. Rosa saw a quiet row of houses by the road, and in the distance she saw lights on blackening water.

The driver seemed like a friendly man, though after a few rounds of quick fire question and answer they fell into silence. In the seeping darkness the trees on the slopes were purple, their branches bare. And then there were rows of evergreens, leaves fluttering in the wind. She wound down the window though the air was cold, because she wanted to look at the trees. They drove through moorland, moss ground covered with dark hillocks. There were sheep lying on the rocks. Now the car went over a cattle grid and started to move slowly up a slope. There was a large slate building to the left, set back from the road. Ulpha was barely a village at all, a few houses with smoke pouring from their chimneys and a church. It seemed deserted when Rosa arrived; everything was so quiet. There was a light drizzle falling.

As she left the taxi, she wasn’t angry with anyone. She walked to a drive which looked promising, and as if it led to Will and Judy’s house. The ground was wet; mud coated her shoes as she walked. At the end of the drive she stood for a moment, breathing the cold air and listening to the sound of the River Duddon flowing swiftly. Her family had never stayed in this part of the Lakes. But her grandparents had lived nearby, and the air was thick with memories, as she glanced over at a cluster of slate cottages, set against russet fells. Already she was quite cold. Still she lingered in the evening air, puffing on her hands. On the muddy drive, the trees formed a canopy above her. The sky between the trees was serene, dotted with stars. She saw a bank of cloud hanging over the valley. She could hear a Land Rover in the distance, moving slowly over the cattle grid. Its lights swung around a corner, shining through a hedge. Then the sound of the engine receded.

Judy and Will’s house was a large farmhouse made of slate. Ivy creeping around the windows. When Rosa had walked up the drive she found a sign by a gate, saying ‘ULF’S FARM’. There was a low hedge, and over the hedge Rosa saw a garden, a large tree, a swing dangling from a branch. The gate creaked loudly as she pushed it open, and the curtains twitched in a first-floor window. She waded through the puddles on the path, and knocked briskly on the door. There was a scramble of children and dogs and adults and the door opened. Among the array of images, features, hands coming towards her, she distinguished Will, beaming broadly, half of his face covered in a ginger beard and his hair, also ginger, standing up in patchy clumps. Judy was looming behind, plumper than before, ruddy-cheeked. Still the same long blonde hair, gathered today in a wide plait. A big radiant face. Both were wearing mud-stained trousers, vast woolly jumpers and dirty wellington boots. There were dogs barking and jumping up, drooling on Rosa’s hands as she tried to pat them.

Judy grappled through the dogs and seized Rosa in a hug. Then she thrust her dramatically away and said: ‘My God, Rosa, you look so thin.’

Will, who was kissing Rosa on each cheek, rustling his beard against her skin, stood back too and eyed her silently. There was a slight pause, then Rosa shrugged.

‘Yes yes, I lost some weight, by accident rather than hunger strike,’ she said, trying to make a joke of it. She was suddenly aware how tired she was. Now she felt dizzy, and put a hand on the wall. She had forgotten to eat on the train. She had forgotten even to drink; she had sat in the carriage sniffing the smell of coffee and hadn’t drunk a drop. This abstinence was clearly having an impact on her hosts. Judy was staring at Rosa as if something awful had just happened, as if Rosa was actually naked, or covered in dung. Well, of course spiritually I am, thought Rosa, but is it now so obvious? Judy looked at Will. Will looked back at Judy. All you’ve heard is true, Rosa wanted to say. It’s me! The one they call crazy and sad. I’ve come here precisely for those reasons. Would I really lug myself all the way up here, in the middle of October, having failed to come and see you in the years you’ve been up here, if I was anything else? A crise, evidently! A minor crise! What were they expecting of her anyway, she wondered? They all stood around, and while they stood Rosa glanced up the hall. There were coats and hats hanging on pegs. There was a dog bouncing around by Rosa’s knees, a small yappy dog, Rosa couldn’t think what breed it was. And there were two larger dogs, something like collies with pointed faces, barking by the door. The animals were all fine, shaking their coats, while the humans were standing stock still, poised on the brink of gaucheness.

Striving to wrench things back, seeing as she was still in the porch and already the mood had shifted, Rosa turned to Judy and said: ‘Well you look wonderful.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Judy, blushing slightly, or was it just her ruddy glow, Rosa thought. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s lovely to see you. Come in, come in.’

A few things came to mind. Rosa, tall and thin, dressed in old jeans and a grey felt coat. Overburdened with bags and another sort of weight, failing to understand how frothy and ephemeral things are. Judy, large, rotund moreover, happy, dressed in mud-stained clothes. She and Will were both pretty splendid. That was quite the word for them, the rough and ready pair of them, standing in their practical garb. Eyeing her. Friendly, but inquisitive. Definitely observant. She could imagine them, later, mulling her over. ‘Terrible, she looks terrible.’ ‘Oh, quite terrible.’ ‘Oh, terrible.’ ‘Poor her.’ ‘Poor poor her.’ Or perhaps they were insincere, and later they would string her up with the thick cord of their condemnation. ‘Presumptuous as anything.’ ‘Fancy coming up here.’ ‘Desperate.’ ‘You’re so right, darling. Desperate.’ But she thought they were sincere after all. Now there was a subtle transition. Will gave Rosa a hug. ‘I think you look great,’ he said. ‘We’ll feed you up.’

That made her baulk a bit, but she was glad they were so rust-coloured, mud-coated, glowing. They looked like a different breed, that breed of country people who walk all day in fields or ride around on horses. She admired them for the girth and firmness of their legs, the strength in their arms. Their bodies were tested daily. They were fit, happy, fecund; they had birthed several children. Rosa could hear a couple of them crying in the bowels of the house. Will glanced towards the door. He put a long arm round Rosa, his hand flat like a spatula on her back, and guided her along a whitewashed hall. ‘Have I disturbed you in the middle of something?’ Rosa asked.

Judy laughed, boisterously. ‘Rosa, we’re always in the middle of something. But come in, come in, it’s wonderful you came.’

It was bonhomie, simple and reviving. They had all recovered from the opening, and now Rosa was being bonhomied along the hall and into the living room. There they stood for a moment, while Rosa felt the warmth of the room. There were lots of red cushions and red curtains and an orange sofa and some bright red rugs. The walls were decked with paintings and photographs of the children, of Judy and Will, of Lakeland landscapes. The mantelpiece was a domestic shrine, scattered with homemade birthday cards, big numbers painted on the front. HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY BOY! YOU ARE THREE!!!!! TWO TODAY WHAT A BIG GIRL! There were photos of christenings and baptisms, ‘in the village church,’ said Will, as she stared at them. There were pot plants everywhere. The dogs each had a cushion. Even the dogs had a sense of purpose, thought Rosa. It made her smile. There was the small brown mutt busy gnawing a plastic cat and the big white mutt eating a discarded shoe, and the other one sniffing something, all of them devoted to a specific end. There was a fire burning in the grate.

‘Would you like tea?’ said Will, as Judy sat on the sofa, arranging herself on several cushions, emanating joy.

‘Do you have coffee?’ asked Rosa. She sank into the beckoning folds of a large red armchair. Her head was pounding and her lips were dry. Despite the warmth of the room, she was nervous. That creeping sense of being anticipated, she thought, of discussions having preceded you. It was inelegant and she tried to stop it. She was trying to appear relaxed, resting her hand on the table.

Will was a robust man. He looked as if he spent his days chopping wood. He was shaking his head, flexing the muscles of his neck. ‘I’m afraid we don’t. Judy gave up coffee when she was having the babies, and I did too, for support. So now we just don’t keep it. But tea? We have some rooibos and some camomile. Probably some Earl Grey somewhere.’

‘Earl Grey would be lovely,’ Rosa said with a tight smile. And she was thinking they were a pair of super saintly swine. Even coffee banished! They would live a thousand years. There was a wail from upstairs, a baby’s cry. For a heavy woman, Judy was swift to move. She sprang up, saying, ‘So sorry, Rosa, I’ll have to get this. The other two are fine; Samuel and Leila are lovely. But Eliza has been very tricky. Very ill at ease. We’re worried it’s because she’s the third. She’s had so much less attention than the others had. My mother says it can make them very relaxed, they don’t feel the nervous eye of the parent upon them. But poor Eliza is struggling.’

‘Can I help at all?’ asked Rosa, knowing that she couldn’t.

Judy smiled, ‘Oh no, of course not. I’d love you to meet them a little later, when they’ve had their baths and the nanny has gone. But I’ll just go and see what she’s up to,’ as the wail reached a crescendo.

‘Of course, of course, you must go,’ she said.

Judy disappeared. Will had gone away. Rosa found a pile of magazines on the sofa, furniture magazines, gardening magazines, magazines about childcare. Guides to the Lakes. Country Life. House and Garden. Already she was aware of it. It seeped from the sofas, coursed across the dog baskets, flickered at the grate. There was an overwhelming sense of goodness to the house. Altruism, understanding and love. It swept you in, deposited you by a raging fire and a few handsome dogs. Rosa patted them each on the head. ‘Good dog,’ she said. ‘Good good, steeped in goodness, little dog dog.’ She ambled round, looking at the big plush curtains, read some cards set out on the bookshelves, loving notes from friends — ‘Thanks so much for a gorgeous stay. So lovely to meet the fabulous Eliza, and to see those sweeties Sam and Leila again. Love to all of you’; ‘Congratulations, my dear friends, on the birth of your third! Hope you’re all doing very well. All my love …’ They were doing the right thing, making a life for themselves. Three children, it was a towering achievement. And the place was a work of art, with the vivid upholstery and the fire spitting in the hearth and the neatly varnished window-frames. Everything was immaculate.

When Will returned, with a tea set on a tray, she was humbled and grateful. Now she looked at him carefully, he did look older. Perhaps his hair was thinning on top. Flecks of grey in it, anyway. Nothing too blatant, a subtle shift towards midlife. He had a few lines around his eyes. His hair had grown long at the sides. He had taken off his muddy wellingtons and his jacket, and was wearing shabby blue jeans and loafers and a green V-necked sweater. He put the tray down on a solid oak table. ‘Do you take milk?’ asked Will and Rosa nodded. She did. ‘Just a spot, thanks so much.’ A spot, she thought? Serving out tea from a silver tea service, Will looked incongruous. He had a furrowed brow, and sharp blue eyes. He looked like an overgrown choirboy with a holiday penchant for rugby. It was a curious combination. Judy obviously liked it. His children, judging from the photographs scattered around the room, were all as stocky as him. He would breed a tribe of prop-forwards who would never be ill.

He was staring at her, thinking of something to say. Determined to practise virtue in all its forms, Rosa reeled off pleasantries. She was digging in her store of remembered questions. It was a while since she had been so stubborn and polite. She said, ‘Well, you have a lovely house. How do you find it living here? Do you like it? How do you find the region? How did you find the house?’

‘Rosa,’ said Will, uncurling his big legs and setting his feet firmly on the floor. ‘I love it. We live in total bliss. You should try it.’

‘Any time, Will. Any time you feel like a house-trade, your lovely farmhouse for a room with a view of the train tracks, just let me know,’ she smiled.

Will smiled back. ‘Sounds great. Just what we need, an away-break in the city slums.’

‘How old are your children? What are they like? Are you planning more?’ asked Rosa.

Will rattled off their ages. Rosa nodded profoundly and failed to commit any of them to memory. Meanwhile Will was explaining that they wanted more children. Another one at least. Maybe two. ‘It’s genuinely miraculous. You hear everyone talking about it, and you can’t possibly understand it, but then you produce this being, and after a few weeks you can’t imagine that they never existed before. It’s extraordinary. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s so much work, of course. The work is insane. We farm some of it out. We have a nanny who lives a few doors away. She must be about to leave now. But she’s here most of the day. That’s a great bonus. And we have people from the village who help. But you know, we never sleep. One of them sleeps through the night, the other wakes up; Eliza goes mad at dawn, you know, it’s crazy. But still, it’s extraordinary how much I love them all.’

He was still smiling, beaming with wonder. When people talked about their children Rosa smiled and looked intent, but it seemed to her as if they alluded to something hermetic. Still she nodded, batted a few more questions towards him, about the neighbours and the sense of community, a few more platitudes, a compliment on the tea which was making her long for a hit of coffee.

He was grateful she was making the effort. Later, she knew, he would be just as polite to her. ‘Oh, they’re wonderful,’ he said. He meant the neighbours, she thought. Rosa was nodding with conviction. Now, as Will said: ‘Yes, the neighbours, really great. Some of them are incomers too. It’s such a quiet valley, the Duddon Valley, where we are. By summer there are fewer tourists than elsewhere. And we’ve helped a bit with local events. It’s sublime’ — as Will continued, Rosa felt her expression was becoming fixed, like a mask. ‘Sublime,’ she said. ‘How lovely.’ She nodded and smiled again. She couldn’t drop the smile for fear of losing it altogether. Will, she thought, I am quite sure that you are dear to the gods. They have poured blessings on your head. There was a pause and Rosa was hunting for something else to say when Will puckered his brow and said, ‘Rosa, I’m very sorry about everything that’s happened. About the death of your mother. And I couldn’t believe it when I heard about you and Liam. Neither of us could believe it.’ His expression was open; he looked like he meant it.

‘Well, thanks,’ she said.

‘We just wanted you to know that.’

‘Good of you,’ said Rosa. ‘But really, it’s fine. No need for sympathy. I was knocked back for a while, but now I’m fine.’

‘I have to say, you look a little strained,’ said Will. He was leaning towards her, he seemed to be thinking about putting a hand on her arm. But he didn’t. ‘You look like you haven’t been having the best time of it recently.’

But that was a funny thing to say. Who ever had a best time? How did you get a best time? Tell me where to go for a best time, she thought, and I’ll be out of here in a flash. But she stopped herself again. Discipline, she thought. Gratitude.

‘Oh that’s because of a lot of other things,’ said Rosa. ‘Other stuff. You know, existential.’

‘No, really, you look very worn.’

He was sipping his health tea and looking pensive. He seemed to find it painful, personally painful, that Rosa was so mashed. She was sure he was a good man. She certainly had them both pegged as good people. Their mantelpiece displayed it, all those shots of community functions and smiling small children. They were virtuous and productive. She had known them for years. She had met them — she could barely remember when she had met them. A long time ago, it must have been through mutual friends. A party, in the days when life was a pattern of parties and everyone thought they were unique and possibly immortal. In those days no one thought much about the essential unknowability of things in themselves, an sich and the rest. They hardly cared a jot if space and time were merely intuitions, and they hardly considered the ens realissimmum. If they thought about it, they talked it through over a beer, but in a detached way, as if it didn’t directly concern them. Mostly they drank and fell in love. They trusted the physical world, invested heavily in it. Judy and Will met during that period. She had known Judy first, yes, she remembered a few coffees with Judy early on, and she remembered something about Judy and Will meeting and becoming so compelled and excited by each other that Judy cried. Was that real? Or a disturbed echo of something else? She had always thought of them with affection, though distantly, people she semi-knew but liked. When they lived in London she and Liam had them round for dinner a few times a year. That was cosy, and then they met at parties, in large groups. It was the closeness of their scrutiny that was freaking her out. But if you lugged bags of unwashed breeches around the country, pursued by rapacious bank sharks, you had to accept it. Still she thought it was strange he wanted to question her so closely. For all he knew, she was truly mad. He was lucky she still had some of the carapace stuck to her.

‘It’s very kind of you to bother about it, but I really don’t much care what I look like,’ said Rosa, trying to shrug him off.

‘It’s not that I care what you look like,’ said Will. ‘I’m only concerned if this outer layer hints at any turmoil within.’ When he said turmoil, he stuttered. As if he hardly remembered the word. As if he was saying, Poor Rosa, I am not fluent in your dialect of crazy-mad. Really he was quite at ease. He folded his hands in his lap and waited.

Briskly, she said, ‘Really, Will, I’m fine. I’ve just got a job, well at least, a good prospect of a job, after a period which I just devoted to nothing at all.’

‘We were all surprised when you just walked out of your career. We had you pegged as the first female editor of the paper!’ He was laughing.

‘Best thing I ever did,’ said Rosa, fiercely. First female editor? How little they had known her. But she didn’t want to offend him. There was an uncomfortable pause, and then Will said, again: ‘I just think you look, sort of, fried. Frazzed. Done for. I don’t know how else to express it.’

God freedom and immortality, thought Rosa, looking at Will. The problem was, she didn’t believe in any of them. What do you think Will about the categorical imperative? Does it concern you at all? Well, he acted well enough, and if Will’s life became a general natural law, she wouldn’t complain. Will was looking at her in a kindly way, expecting an answer. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she gazed across the room, glancing at the careful arrangements of lamps, rugs, country furniture in mahogany, books, magazines, papers, toys, the flowers in the vases and the paintings — a view of Coniston Water, a view of Skiddaw, now she looked. With an effort, she said: ‘Oh, I’m not that serious at all. Not serious enough to be any of those things.’

After Will’s opening, there was the re-emergence of Judy, who lifted her reddish neck, threw back her hair (released for the evening, flying around her face like a force of nature) and said, ‘Oh Rosa! It’s so nice to see you!’ Then the children appeared, and they were dazzling and exhausting. It was impossible to imagine spending more than a couple of hours with them, as Samuel kept shouting and slapping his hand on Judy’s knee, and talked a lot of child nonsense and tried to kick Leila who played with boxes except when she was crying because Samuel had kicked her, and Eliza the baby dribbled and sometimes cried. Rosa played with them and sometimes over the sounds of the children they tried to talk. Then Will started to cook, and Rosa said she would help Judy put the children to bed. In the process, she read Samuel a story about a boy who saw snow for the first time, which Samuel knew by heart already. Then Judy reappeared to kiss him goodnight and turn off the light. When the children were settled Judy told Rosa about the mothers’ group in the village, and how Will thought it was unfair there wasn’t a fathers’ group and had proposed establishing one, but there were only a few couples with young children anyway. Most of the villagers were older, though they had all been welcoming and kind. There followed some stories about tractors and power cuts and the exchange of bacon and eggs and lifts to the playgroup. Then Judy said, ‘Of course you’d find the people I deal with deadly dull. If I wasn’t such an earth mother I would too, and there’s a side of me that knows I’ve completely lost my analytical faculties. If I ever had any! It’s amazing how it takes you. The first time you find the dugs and lactation thing actually quite bizarre, but the next time it doesn’t even seem odd any more. Do you want them?’

Rosa made a noise that sounded like benign coyness, and Judy laughed. ‘All about the right time, right place, of course?’ she said. And Rosa nodded again, smiling broadly, aware she wasn’t giving Judy much in return for all her generosity and charm.

‘Now, I want to show you your room, Rosa,’ said Judy. They passed along whitewashed corridors into a room with scruffy sofas arranged around an old slate fireplace, and piles of toys and books. ‘Where we really live,’ laughed Judy, and then into a room which had a long wooden table and a sculpture of an anguished naked woman in the corner. ‘Will made it,’ said Judy, and they stood in front of it for a few minutes while Rosa exclaimed in delight. ‘It’s me, when we were trying to get pregnant for the first time. Don’t I look depressed!’ ‘Mmm,’ said Rosa, leaning on the sound like a crutch.

‘A month later I found out, but when he modelled it, I really thought it would never happen.’ Judy turned, her eyes sparkling, and Rosa thought for a moment she was crying, but then Judy emitted another expansive laugh, and said, ‘Ridiculous! Quite neurotic. Chance would be a fine thing, to stop now!’ And you are, thought Rosa, like a conveyer belt, pounding out the human race. Forging it. They passed into Will’s study, which was crammed with careful clutter, books piled on books, a computer with Post-it notes stuck round the screen, a leather armchair, a battered sofa with the stuffing spilling out, and a sculpture which seemed to represent a man drowning in mud. Rosa admired it, knowing it was another one of Will’s. Was this Will when Judy was failing to conceive, Rosa wondered? It was pretty good, when she looked more closely. Will was a modest Renaissance type, working a farm and loving his wife and kids and cooking and occasionally fashioning something from stone. He was far from talentless! And the house was charming. Every room, Judy was telling her, had been completely restored. Much of it Will and his sister had done together. The bedrooms were cluttered with children’s clothes and toys, and Judy and Will’s marital bed was a bright orange fertility symbol.

Rosa was reeling from the colours and scents and the general vibrancy, and her repetitions of ‘lovely’ were echoing along the corridor as they passed into another room, spartan and nearly empty. As Rosa admired the frilly farmhouse curtains and the pristine whitewash of the walls Judy turned and said: ‘Rosa, this is a complete secret, for the moment, because I’m not quite at three months, but it’s so wonderful to see you and I really want you to know — I’m pregnant again!’

Rosa was genuinely startled. A fine tally. Four children. And Judy barely thirty-five.

‘But that’s really it,’ said Judy. ‘I really can’t do any more.’

‘Hardly surprised,’ said Rosa, and it was the first truthful thing she had said for an hour. ‘Hardly surprised at all.’

And Judy laughed and patted her on the arm. ‘Literally, Rosa, I will go mad if I do another!’ Now Judy turned her head and walked again, drawing her along another corridor, past the sleeping brood — Judy with a finger raised to her lips — and then they passed into a cold wing of the house, where the wind seemed to rattle at the shutters.

‘We’re still renovating this part,’ said Judy. ‘But we’ve done this guest room’, and she pushed open a latched door to reveal another immaculate whitewashed room, with an iron bed and a handsome iron fireplace, and an assortment of Lakeland prints on the walls. There were green jalousies across the windows. Judy walked across the room and flung them open.

‘You can’t see it,’ she said, gesturing into the blackness, ‘but this room has the most beautiful view of the lot. Tomorrow you’ll see. The fells are a brilliant red, and the sound of water you can hear, that’s the most gorgeous ghyll thundering down the slope, you’ll be able to see that too tomorrow. It’s exquisite. I wanted Will and I to use this room, but it’s too far away from all the children. You’ll be very glad of that when Eliza starts bawling at 4 a.m. Which she will, I assure you.’

Rosa put down her suitcase in the corner. There was a long mirror and a hat stand. There were some books on the windowsill. Sons and Lovers, Rosa noted. The complete works of Wordsworth. John le Carré. Some P.G. Wodehouse. They were educated but not showy. They didn’t stack up piles of Kant and Kierkegaard. There were fresh flowers in a vase on the bedside table, beautiful red and white flowers, she had no idea what they were. It was too much for Rosa. Feeling suddenly ashamed, she said, ‘Judy. I shouldn’t have come. You’re so busy with the children. And you put flowers in a vase. It’s so kind of you. But I really shouldn’t stay.’

Judy paused and turned, as if this was the frank admission she had been waiting for. She was stern and definite. Her face was puce, but her hands were steady. ‘Rosa. I won’t hear anything of the sort. You’re to stay as long as you like. I think it’s just dreadful, what’s happened. You have my utmost sympathy. I don’t know what happened between you and Liam, but I know there are always two sides to such things.’

‘Sometimes three sides,’ said Rosa. ‘When you’re in a triangle.’ She smiled, hoping by that to lighten the mood, but Judy was like a policeman, holding up her hand. ‘Rosa, I don’t want to get into it,’ she said. That was slightly bemusing, but it hardly mattered. ‘It’s wonderful to have you here’ — and Rosa murmured something in response. ‘Come on, let’s go to dinner,’ said Judy. And she turned them both around and sailed them back along the corridors, past the portraits of Judy and Will painted by Will and the watercolours by an unknown hand, the latches making solid, comfortable sounds as they opened the doors. In the bright living room, where the fire was crackling and candles had been lit, Will had a fistful of plates and on the table stood a casserole dish.

They patched an evening together. By the sheer force of Judy and Will’s goodness, they found some phrases and turned them out. Rosa was quite consumed by the strain of it, pawing at her food, striving to stay away from the truth. Judy and Will talked in a rich slew of adjectives — words like delightful, gorgeous, beautiful, special, wonderful and extraordinary. Rosa founded the repetition uplifting. It was like watching someone carefully remaking the universe, spilling shafts of light across the shadows, turning grey to yellow and black to gold. Rosa, lacking necessary words, tried out ‘lovely’ a dozen times, but couldn’t quite get her tongue around it. It wasn’t that Judy and Will lacked imaginative range, thought Rosa. It was just that the place repeated certain qualities. As in the city Rosa found her brain consumed by recurring thoughts of grime and grey and surprising beauty and moments of being and litter and menace and noise and insistent bass-beat and wide-eyed crackhead and insalubrious shanty town and sprawling chaos, so they talked about the fells and the silence and the freshness of the air and the beauty of the view and how much it revived them. Then they were bawdy for a while, and Judy told tales of cracked nipples, and the slow recovery of her body from childbirth, and how tired she was because Leila and Eliza never slept, and Will smiled at his wife, and kissed her hand. There was an established pattern. Judy emanated a worthiness that made Rosa feel still more acutely the isolation of her self-centredness, her overdeveloped ego. Her fear of subsuming her own desires and impulses. Her ambitions, unfounded as they were. Her lack of realism! Her squeamishness and moral cowardice. Her committed procrastination. Rosa thought that friendship was a curious thing. She really had little in common with Will and Judy. Yet they listened to her, committed themselves to a tumbling series of questions. In response, she really bored on. Stimulated by food and wine, she was mighty, boring and terrible. They raised their eyebrows and diagnosed her. Clearly a nervous breakdown, said Will. Not surprising in the circumstances.

‘I think I merely opened the doors of perception,’ said Rosa. That was after a jar or so of wine. Doors of perception! The words only came with drunkenness. Otherwise it was quite impossible to say them. They made her think of Blake with his naked tea parties, visions of souls dancing in trees, the rest. Jim Morrison in a kaftan with a chiselled chest. ‘Everything was obscured before. I wasn’t looking carefully at things. Without the death — you know — my mother, death death, I would have lived on for a few more years, quite content, in a dream. You understand.’

‘Rosa, you were under too much strain. You know, the death of a parent, it’s very hard. And your relationship was ending. There was a lot going on for you. And people are busy, they don’t have time,’ said Judy. ‘You should have come to see us sooner. Grace and Liam, we saw them not so long ago, when was it? They came to stay, it must have been a few weeks ago. Liam is a good person, Rosa, you mustn’t forget that. And Grace is very compelling. We understand their attraction.’

‘Oh, he is good, yes, of course,’ said Rosa. This made her angry, but she kept feeding herself wine.

‘Really, he is a fragile man,’ said Judy.

‘I’ve never thought of him like that,’ said Rosa. ‘But I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’

‘Of course it’s hard to say — but we understand some of what he’s been saying. What they’ve both been saying,’ said Judy.

‘You know, you were both at fault. Or rather, perhaps, there’s no one to blame. The relationship had clearly decayed,’ said Will. ‘That’s not to say his timing was sensitive.’

‘Decayed?’

‘They say you were depressive, overbearing, self-obsessed,’ said Will. He was so naturally congenial that he smiled as he said it.

‘Not really depressive, not then. But the others, of course,’ said Rosa. ‘I would have to confess to the others.’

‘Liam says you were wild for a long time, and he was too afraid to end it,’ said Judy. ‘He says you tired him, he couldn’t keep supporting you emotionally, and eventually he couldn’t cope. He felt he was only an emotional crutch to you, nothing more.’

‘No doubt I said a lot of foolish things.’

‘Perhaps you’re being too hard on them. Your relationship has clearly declined, you’re angry and frustrated, you explain to Grace how demoralised you are, how much you want to get out, and you tell her over and over and Liam is there — and of course Liam is attractive, intelligent — who would blame her?’ said Judy. ‘I mean, you can blame her, but can you be sure you wouldn’t have done the same?’

‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ said Rosa. ‘I haven’t been in a similar situation. I can’t possibly guess.’

‘They were in love. It sounds like a grand passion! And that’s hard to resist,’ said Judy, and Rosa detected a trace of autobiography in her voice.

‘Grace says you hit her once at a party, a few weeks back,’ said Will. ‘She had a cut eye. I remember that — it was still bruised when they came here.’ He was looking carefully at her now, monitoring her response. Did they think she was putting on a front? Did they assume she was about to lose control, release a screaming fit, a violent outburst? She had raged, of course, but internally, to the walls of Jess’s living room, to the self-assembly furniture. She had never really raged to anyone. Perhaps occasionally she had emitted something, but it was mere metonym. Anything she expressed was more like a personal code.

‘My jacket hit her, when I put it on to leave. I was in a hurry, I wanted to leave so she would stop talking to me,’ said Rosa. ‘I think that must be what she means. I seem to remember the zip caught her. I was being clumsy; I was desperate to get out of the room. She was hounding me at a party. You know she can be sanctimonious.’

They stayed silent.

She knew what Will was talking about. She remembered it clearly; her memories were cut glass, quite polished. In a flat on Elgin Crescent — one of those generic places of stripped pine floorboards and big mirrors, the proprietor a proper denizen, more so than most — Rosa had seen Grace moving slowly, wearing black. She hadn’t wanted to go to the party, this congregation of the righteous in a crowded room, but Jess had insisted and Rosa had followed orders. The flat was packed with the young and wealthy, picking at vol-au-vents and sipping wine, leaning their satin-clad limbs against fine antique furniture, and the place was too small for Rosa to hide. By the time she sighted Grace, there were only a few metres between them. Grace nodded, and came towards her, seeming to falter though that had to be an act — or who knows, perhaps she was nervous as anything, it was hard to tell and Rosa had long stopped thinking she had any grasp on the thoughts of others. Rosa gritted her teeth, waiting, drinking wine in gulps to steel herself.

Grace arrived, holding a glass of sherry, her beauty as striking as ever, her voice soft and her eyes cold. She was wearing a tense black dress, and it worked well on her hips. She had a slung motion to her walk, as if she was carrying something on her head. She delivered her opening line in a low tone, as if they were plotting someone’s downfall. She was saying connive with me and for a moment Rosa bent towards her. ‘Rosa,’ she said, a hand on her arm. ‘Rosa, I’m so glad to see you. I left you messages. I thought you were wasting your energy in rage and it pained me to think that.’

And Rosa said, ‘Grace, there’s no point us discussing anything.’ She was aiming for lofty indifference, a look of distaste, but she was slightly drunk and couldn’t control her mouth. Grace, pushing back her hair, said, ‘I want you to know that I struggled with my feelings,’ as if she had been swept towards Liam by forces beyond her control, and perhaps it was so, perhaps she had been overwhelmed, thought Rosa. ‘I struggled not because I thought my feelings were wrong but because I was concerned you weren’t yet ready, you couldn’t move on. I knew it was right, but I was aware you would find it difficult to understand. But months went by, and you were so angry, and finally I felt sorry for Liam.’ Grace’s mouth — small, rather too small somehow, thought Rosa, though she’d never really noticed it — was pursed in contrition. ‘But you must understand that for much of our friendship I just thought of Liam as your partner. I never thought of him in that way, the other way, I mean.’

‘As “not-my-partner”, you mean,’ said Rosa.

‘Exactly,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t want you to think I was biding my time, waiting for a chance.’ She struck this resoundingly, quite certain of herself.

Rosa smiled in embarrassment and took a slug of wine. She wasn’t sure why she had ever liked Grace. After a gap of a few months, Grace sounded like a zealot. Why the hell did I like Grace? she wondered. Why did I even invite her round for all those dinners? It turns out she’s contrived. Was she always so contrived? Grace was performing one of her old gestures, which Rosa had previously thought was quite charming, her head cocked to one side, a hand on her hip. Rosa couldn’t help it. She thought Grace looked funny. She began to laugh.

Grace pushed back her hair again, and licked her lips. She smiled a little. ‘Rosa, there’s no need for that. It’s very simple, wonderfully simple if you’ll just accept it. Our arms are open to you. We both love you, of course, as much as ever. If you could return to us, then you would find we could celebrate the friendship and closeness — all the elements you needed from Liam and myself — without the drag of a failing relationship. I know it sounds unpalatable to you, but if you think you could try that would make me very happy. Liam too, I’m sure. We miss you.’

Rosa found it hysterically funny. She was laughing, sipping wine. Then she started hiccoughing. Grace stood and stared, in apparent confusion.

‘Rosa, what’s wrong? We love you, and there’s nothing funny about that,’ said Grace.

There was Grace, dashing towards the winning tape, and Rosa, Rosa had trapped her spikes in the sand and fallen off the track. Rosa had thoroughly flunked the race. She had the element of surprise on her side, though. She had the inappropriateness of her response. She couldn’t quite control herself. Grace wasn’t sure whether this was the moment to walk away, shaking her head at the wreck that was now Rosa, or to stay and stare in bemusement. She stayed and stared. Hoping to drag out the scene, thought Rosa. Grace never backed off. She was usually victorious. It was Rosa who was dredging around for something to say, trying to wipe her mouth with her frock.

‘Rosa, come on, calm down,’ said Grace.

‘You’re like a large coiled snake,’ said Rosa. ‘And Liam is your rat. I mean, he is your nourishment, your perfect complement. You look better than ever, on your diet of perfect fodder.’ She watched Grace winding along with another phrase, a few more maxims for free living, deconstructions of stifling mores and the rest. Grace, sighing, suggested that Rosa sit down and have a glass of water. Then she supplied a staccato performance of sympathy and something else, something more mysterious and uncertain, a trace of condescension, that was what it felt like, as if Grace was approaching Rosa from a long way above her, drifting cloudlike over her mortal mess. Rosa didn’t sit and when water was found she refused to drink it. Grace was still there with her open gaze and her hands cupped around her glass.

‘Rosa, I’m sorry you’ve taken it all like this,’ she said. ‘I understand, things have been terrible for you. But you must see that I care, I care passionately about our friendship. I’m so sorry about the way it happened. But you spent months telling me you felt restless and bored. And I went to see him to say how sorry I was, and things just happened.’

‘You went to see him?’ said Rosa, very calmly now, regaining gravitas, apart from her occasional hiccoughs.

‘Yes, yes, of course, as a friend.’ Grace’s eyes had narrowed again. She took an elegant sip of sherry.

‘But you never told me,’ said Rosa. ‘When was that?’

‘I’m not going to get into this,’ said Grace, holding up a hand. ‘It won’t help us at all. You should understand that.’ She smiled again. Her hair was lustrous with health, and her skin shone. That despite her fags and booze, thought Rosa. She was plain lucky, and her face would be beautiful for years yet. Decades, perhaps. Her cheekbones were fine. Lovely shoulders she had, and the dress set them off well. All that made Rosa nod at the inevitable. Of course, some slide — slide into a slump, slump down and drop and the rest — and some ascend. Of course, she was thinking, nodding and smirking.

‘Roughly,’ said Rosa. ‘A week before he ended it all? Months before?’

‘Come on, Rosa,’ said Grace. ‘I understand that you feel betrayed but this is ultimately an erroneous feeling, a mistake in emphasis. It’s very straightforward. Your behaviour is textbook. You’re looking for people to blame for the mess you’re in. Liam and I seem to be likely culprits. But you know yourself the truth is more complex.’

‘Well thanks for letting me know,’ said Rosa. ‘Thanks so much for assuring me of the complexity of truth.’ Briefly she despised the pair of them. She definitely despised the party. This glass of cheap wine she was holding in her hand, she wanted to throw it to the floor and stamp on it. Childish, she thought. Truly childish.

‘Rosa,’ said Grace, trying to put her hand on Rosa’s arm, but Rosa flicked her away. ‘What can I say? How can I make things better?’

‘There is really nothing to say. And now I’d like you to stop talking to me.’

Now Grace — looking resolute, really determined to settle it — drank down her sherry. She set down the glass and put both her hands on Rosa’s arm. That was uncomfortable and Rosa moved away.

‘Rosa, come on. Don’t you think you’re being unreasonable? What, you didn’t want Liam, so no one is ever allowed to have him?’

‘Have him?’ said Rosa. The script was terrible. She wanted to shoot the writer. Who has produced these gutter-slinging phrases, she wondered? Were they really having this conversation? Was it really they, and not two women at some other party somewhere else entirely? She gathered herself together, she set down the glass of wine which had made her head ache and said ‘Grace, I don’t want to talk to you any more. As this room is too small for me to get as far away from you as I want to, I’m going home.’

‘Why don’t I walk with you to the tube?’ said Grace, with an open gesture that indicated she really thought that might be a good idea, a quick walk together would clear the air, sort everything out, Rosa’s jangling nerves and her failure to accept the justice of the case before her.

‘No,’ said Rosa, firmly. She grabbed her coat, whipping Grace on the cheek with it as she pulled it from under someone’s haunches. Well, it served her right for being so small, thought Rosa. She was overcome by an urge to slap her. But instead, like a slack coward, she slunk down the steps to the street.

Grace had always been a great talker. She liked to discuss everything in depth. She found the mistakes of others mostly funny, and she never really minded if people disliked her. Rosa could imagine how entertaining she had made that encounter, how much she had trimmed and tailored it. ‘Really,’ she said to Judy and Will, ‘she’s completely exaggerating. It’s a trait of hers. It can be really amusing. It makes her anecdotes larger than life. But you can’t rely on her at all. The truth is not her main concern.’

‘But you must have cared,’ said Will. ‘You must have been devastated by their relationship.’

‘No, no, that’s not it at all,’ she said. That sent them nodding away, looking as if they knew her well. Ever she was tempted. She was feeling a rising urge; she wanted to fling the plates across the table, scream at them, tell them it was they who were mad! Surrounded by darkness on every side, rolling coursing night and still they were sanguine! They had to be crazy. Napkin at her mouth, forkful of peas in her hand, she wanted to warn them. Vapour, she was thinking. Yes, she added, that would clarify it. Just say that. Judy and Will, all is vapour. That would surely convince them. So she stayed silent.

‘You’re upset they lied,’ said Judy, with parched understatement. ‘That they hid it from you. But perhaps they were afraid. They saw that you were distraught. You were grieving. They didn’t want to make things worse for you. Of course, they cared about you. But they were in love. It’s very hard, isn’t it?’

‘They’ve been indiscreet,’ said Will.

And they sat there nodding for a while. Silence settled over the table. There were candles burning in silver candlesticks. The tablecloth was white. Still, Rosa couldn’t finish her food, though it was delicious. She caught them glancing at each other. Halfway through the main course she had been diagnosed. It was impossible to tell if they believed her or not, and anyway it hardly mattered. Will kept massaging more food towards her and Rosa thanked him voraciously, with abandon. It was a wonderful meal, a big pile of lamb and vegetables, which Rosa knew was bound to have come from their farm, or someone else’s farm nearby, and she tried to eat. She didn’t have their appetite, but this hardly troubled her. The effort of the table was palpable. After a silence which pulsed around them, becoming acute and uncomfortable, they all started throwing each other bits of information about mutual friends, observations on the state of the nation, sprawling anecdotes. Will and Judy were delicate and practical, ladling food at her, smiling broadly when she told a joke, because now she felt obliged to be jovial, to show them just how rational she was. They both spent a lot of time patting her arm. It bemused her, the arm patting. It began to put her off. Will was patting her arm during the main course, offering her more. Judy patted her, and she couldn’t understand why. Was it an idiom? Did they pat everyone who came, or was she being treated to an intensity of pats, a concentration of reassuring gestures? Were they trying to put her at her ease? Did she seem so ragged to them? Quickly she tried to smile. She said, ‘So really, how are you both?’ She was trying for conviviality. She had her teeth gritted, her fists clenched. Conviviality or death! she thought. Pour encourager les autres.

‘You know how we are,’ said Judy. ‘But tell us more about what you’re doing now, Rosa.’ There she was, preparing for the pat, and Rosa said, quickly, ‘Well, I have a new boyfriend.’ That was to salvage her pride. It didn’t quite work even as she said it, but she was tired of them looking so lovingly towards her.

‘You do?’ said Judy, quite beaming with pride. ‘You do? Rosa!’ and she delivered another pat, but this time it lingered in enquiry. ‘Tell me, tell me everything!’

‘He’s called Andreas. He’s German. Hilariously, he’s twenty-five. He’s an actor.’

‘Twenty-five! Well, how about that!’ said Judy. Will was smiling in an avuncular way.

‘A real whipper-snapper,’ he said.

She laughed through her drunkenness and said, ‘Oh yes, he’s great. So young and vital and optimistic. He’s currently in a West End play.’ That sounded nervous, so she stopped.

‘What’s his name?’ said Will.

‘Will, you heard, he’s called Andreas. Rosa told us,’ said Judy, in a mock admonitory tone.

‘No, no, his full name.’

‘Oh, he’s not famous,’ said Rosa.

‘Go on, tell us. Or is it one of those liaisons where you don’t know each other’s full names. Each time you play a different part? Meet in disguise?’ said Judy, smiling broadly. Rosa was glad that she was entertaining them. ‘Oh, no, he’s called Andreas Beck. But you won’t find him on the credits of a film. Not yet.’

‘But soon, soon,’ said Judy. ‘I can picture him — is he very handsom? Blond? Gorgeous and slightly cruel blue eyes?’

‘No,’ said Rosa. ‘He’s not like that at all.’

‘Judy, you’re not being very serious. This is, after all, the new love of Rosa’s life,’ said Will, and now Rosa felt her arm once more caressed by a benevolent hand.

‘Rosa,’ said Judy, ‘I’m so sorry. I really am being disgraceful. Of course, I’m trivialising it. I’m so sorry. I’m just thrilled for you.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Rosa. ‘I understand the spirit of your questions. He’s not blond or blue-eyed. But I suppose you would say he is handsome. I find him so.’ That sounded pompous, so she said, ‘Anyway, most people at twenty-five have that lustre of youth.’

‘God, twenty-five, I can hardly remember it. Do you find he keeps saying worrying things about never having heard of The Cure, or never having watched Withnail and I, or that sort of thing?’ said Judy.

‘He claimed for a while only to listen to jazz.’

‘Jazz, oh he’s that sort of kid,’ said Will, knowingly. ‘You know, arty.’

‘Well, actors, they’re a pretty arty bunch,’ said Rosa.

‘I think he sounds lovely,’ said Judy, though Rosa had hardly described him at all.

She nodded at the kindness. ‘Will and Judy,’ she said, because she really was drunk now. ‘I want you both to know that my attraction to Andreas is not quite merely physical, as I imagine you are both assuming.’ She saw them denying it with short sharp nods of their heads, but she continued anyway. ‘Yes, he is a marvellous lover. Really, a virtuoso. But you don’t want to know that, I imagine. Anyway, that’s not it. It’s something else, something about his naivety — well, that’s unfair, perhaps patronising, but essentially he represents the unthinkingness of youth, its lack of suffering, its blissful ignorance of the worst elements of life, the way in which the young live naturally, natively, they are happy in their young bodies and live without a sense of easeful death coming to snuff them out, or some of them do, perhaps it’s that. I’ve analysed it enough, and it may be nothing more than the fact that I like his musky smell and the touch of his hands. But I think it’s the aforementioned … well, whatever I was saying. He is free of foreboding. Foolishly, of course, but I’m not going to shatter his idyll. It’ll get shattered anyway.’

‘What you mean is, he offers escapism,’ said Will.

There was a brief silence, while Rosa absorbed the crashing veracity of this remark.

‘Well, he sounds great,’ said Judy. ‘In the circumstances, I think whatever works for you is a good thing.’

‘Thanks,’ said Rosa. Now she was embarrassed she had brought up the subject anyway. She felt guilty and as if she had sold Andreas into slavery, or prostitution. Certainly she had been disloyal. ‘Anyway, that’s enough about that. How the hell are you?’ she asked again, determined to change the subject. She clinked her glass awkwardly at theirs, trying to toast them, but she clinked it too hard and there was a profound crack. One of the glasses broke. Wine gushed onto the tablecloth and there followed a flurry of apologies and reassurances. They all raised their voices to assert their benevolence. Rosa was really yelling her contrition, and Judy and Will were shouting back their lack of concern. ‘Old glasses, very cheap,’ said Judy loudly, and Rosa said, ‘God, I’m so sorry. I’m such a fool’, and Will was bellowing, ‘It had to happen soon enough. Got them from a garage.’ But of course they hadn’t. After that ruckus, after the wine had been mopped up and Judy had found another glass and filled it, Rosa said, again, ‘I’m so sorry. So, tell me how you really are.’

‘Oh us, us,’ said Judy, touching Will’s hand. ‘We’re just fine.’

‘Well, you certainly seem to be,’ said Rosa.

‘More lamb?’ said Will. Will with his thick hair and his look of health. A shank of meat at his elbow. As he handed some more lamb onto her plate, ladling vegetables after, Rosa was trying to formulate a thought, but discovered she was too drunk to finish it. There was no doubt that Will was hardworking. But he was blessed with fortune, all the same. His mother and father had bought this farmhouse for him, a fantasy playground, a breeding-ground. He had obliged them with a lovely brood; he was a worthy addition to the family line. She was happy for them, of course she was ecstatic, agog with delight, but something lurked beneath it. She was thinking of grandfather Tom, who had lived and died not far from here. At fourteen, his father told him to get a trade. He obeyed; the rest was compromise, happy enough, but hardly the dream. He always said he was fortunate to have been born in such a beautiful place — not Barrow itself, but the countryside around. He went walking in the hills at the weekend. He had never travelled the world; he had never gone far from home. He worked long days, brought home money for his family, played sport, walked a little and he had written comic poems. That wasn’t a bad effort, thought Rosa, as she accepted another spoonful of vegetables. She shrugged it off and tried to think lovingly about her hosts. Nothing more than this, she thought. From now on, nothing else, just kind thoughts.

She said, ‘I have this Platonic phrase in my head, is it Platonic? It runs something like if one person desires another, or loves them passionately, they would not desire them or love them passionately or as a friend unless they somehow belonged to their beloved either in their soul or in some characteristic, habit, or aspect of their soul. Where’s that from?’

‘What are you saying, Rosa?’ said Judy.

‘But this food is staggeringly lovely. Thanks very much.’

‘Perhaps it’s true, what you say,’ said Will.

Suddenly, there was a scream from upstairs, and Judy instantly leapt up and left the room.

‘That we are beholden to those we love, and accept their claims on us,’ said Will.

‘Santé,’ said Rosa.

‘You should try a bit more,’ said Will. He was smiling again, in that ready way he had. It was easy for him to be convivial.

‘Should try a bit more to do what?’ said Rosa. The remark seemed to apply to a spectrum of things.

‘No, no, try a bit more of the lamb shank. Try it, it’s excellent,’ said Will, tipping it onto her plate. Rosa was like a plotter in a melodrama presented with the simple goodness of the heroine. She was there in her cape, whispering away, soliloquising madly, and Will was reaching towards her with his lily-white virtuous hands. Offering her lamb shank. She was too ashamed to say thank you. There was another pause, while Rosa racked her brain for anecdotes, witticisms, anything to entertain her host. Now they had dealt with Liam and Grace, set up their stalls, it was time to say something light and vague. Will, she was thinking, you are very good. And useful to your family. That is to be admired. Then why, she wondered, am I beginning to fear him? It was his eager line in understatement, she thought. His unceasing kindness. It affected her chemically, as if it was alkaline to her acid. I’m like a leech, she thought, that has been treated with salt. Or was it fire? She couldn’t remember how the Moses you treated a leech and realised her simile had been ill-judged. So she turned to her host and forced a smile.

‘So, Rosa, what’s the plan?’ said Will, slicing his lamb neatly and putting a piece in his mouth.

‘The plan, for what?’

‘Well, for the future,’ said Will, with a waving gesture, as if signalling the time to come.

‘Whose future?’

Will laughed. ‘Yours, Rosa, your very own future. Your recovery, if you like.’

‘Oh, Will, you know, it’s only a very tiny crise. Nothing major. Just a freak out. Better to have it now than in ten years, I say! We are all quashing the freak-out, do you not think? The freak-out lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm. It’s not remotely important,’ said Rosa. ‘If you need a farm labourer, or a spinster governess for your children, you might think of me. My values are quite sound. I believe in truth and beauty, something like that, and I am sure there is such a thing as a good person.’

He laughed and patted her on the arm. I must look desperate, thought Rosa, as she held the fork to her mouth and tried to eat something. Now she thought she should never have come. The thick stone walls, the roaring fire, the farmhouse itself were too redolent of the places she had stayed as a child. The spectre of the past was lurking in the whitewashed rooms. The stacked-up books, the board games for a rainy afternoon, the fresh-faced lovely children; it was all making her think of when she was a child herself, forlorn in these draughty stone houses, fearful of going upstairs on her own, troubled by thoughts of immaterial things, conjurings. In one Lakeland house they stayed in, not the professor’s, a year when her mother wanted a change, there were big ancient portraits on the stairs, a man and a woman clad in Puritan garb, and Rosa hated them. She couldn’t pass them on her own and their eyes gave her nightmares. The shadows of the rooms disturbed her, and the creaking and rattling of old timbers. Her mother was always there, holding her hand. Now, what was she afraid of? As she and Will ate, and as she moved her mouth in pleasantries about the quality of the lamb, making light phrases, she realised. It was her mother! She was in the stone walls and the smell of the rain. She was treading softly in the garden. She was a distant reflection at the window, lurking behind the silence of the evening. Gently reproaching Rosa, for being so bound to the self, bound up in her selfishness. It had been a mistake to come, she thought. ‘Yes, yes, the lamb,’ she said, sounding desperate. ‘And what are your plans for Christmas?’ she asked. Will started to reply; he was always loquacious. She could rely on a full few minutes while he talked of in-laws and the logistics of driving children round the country. The Land Rover was apparently better. There was something about presents. Yet she faded him out, sat there nodding and thinking that she just had to tussle it all down again, push it back. She wanted to drop to the floor, grovel and wallow, beg them to send her mother back, but that was hardly appropriate. It was the stone and the smell of the rain, she thought again. Better still when she had confined herself to raging about Liam. Far better. More productive and possible to endure. Will was talking about Judy’s parents, and how tricky they were. Too generous, it seemed. Tendency to spoil the children. What do you do? What on earth do you do? Then there was a pause and when she looked up again she saw that Will was staring at her strangely. He had a hand in his orange hair; he looked like an attic frieze, expressing distraction. And she thought, there was the hand again, on her arm, but this time it wasn’t quite patting, more stroking. He was stroking her arm and saying ‘There, there, Rosa, really, it’s OK.’

Judy, who had just reappeared, was there in an instant. ‘Rosa, are you OK?’ She put her arm round Rosa. It was odd but she seemed to have caused a scene. She had started to cry. She couldn’t remember what had begun it but she was weeping into the lamb shank.

*

Later they went to bed, Rosa clattering along the corridor, quite ashamed even in the stew of her drunkenness. She had one hand to her head, in the other she held a pint of water. Judy had insisted. ‘You might need it in the night.’ She might need it when she woke, ravaged by embarrassment, that was the idea. She had developed a coursing headache, which seeped across her forehead and ebbed around her eyes. Her head was pounding and in a fleeting moment of lucidity she knew she had drunk all the wine.

Sobered by the coldness of her whitewashed room, she sat for a while staring at the floor, then she pushed open the jalousies and breathed in the night air. She could hear the sound of the ghyll spilling down the mountainside. It was a beautiful clear night. The sky was almost cloudless; the stars were brilliant in the sky. With the air bringing her round again, she knew she had behaved badly. She had started out well enough, but the wine had smashed her resolve. For a while she had perhaps convinced them, but her loss of control had done nothing for her cause. By the end they suspected her. They had been trying to help her, and that made it even worse. Whatever she might whisper, they had enough to think about already. Anyway, she had come to exploit them. She had come knowing that she could rely on them to host and understand her. She had only expected tolerance. They had once admired her, she thought, vanity seeping through her drunkenness. ‘Well,’ she said aloud, ‘they don’t now.’

She fell onto the bed. Fumbling for the covers, she managed to pull them around her. For a long time she lay there staring at the ceiling. The rich food was heavy in her stomach. Her heart ached and a lamb chop pained her colon. She thought of many things. She said out loud, ‘I am grateful after all. I am grateful to all of them.’ It was silent all around the cottage, and the room was steeped in it. Outside darkness stretched beyond. That made her start and shiver in the bed. Struggling against it all, these tidal waves of silence, she thought,

Go back to London

Find a place to stay, explain to Andreas

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

Get a job.

Sit down with Jess and apologise for everything

Go to the bank and talk to Sharkbreath.

Hoover the living room

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Understand the stranger verse of Blake.

Read The Vedas.

Write to Whitchurch and explain.

Phone Braze and beg her.

Stop writing these lists that waste your time

And she thought TEMP.

*

Grandfather Tom was dead tonight, untroubled by a sense of failure or banished hope. He had been dead for nearly thirty years. And then she wondered what grandfather Tom had to do with it, and why she was clutching at the covers, terrified. Go to the bank and negotiate an extension on your overdraft, and ask them if you can extend the limit on your credit card. Hoover the living room. Re-develop the carapace. Calm your nerves. Read Marcus Aurelius. Accept the necessary limits of human life. Immortality quite impossible. Eternal life implausible. Wash your clothes. Call Andreas and explain. Develop an awareness of the finer points of pragmatism. Determine whether you will sink or aim to float. Stop bothering people. Find a place to stay. Get a job. Stop writing these lists. Go your own way. It’s hard enough to go your own way without trying to second-guess the others. Read The Republic to the end — no dropping out. Gather names. Forget the longings of the self. Things are considerable but not insurmountable. It’s impossible that you would ever know how the universe was made. So stop worrying. Read Finnegans Wake. You’ve tried it before but this time you might enjoy it. Revere great art. Find a place to stay. Get a job. Sit down with Jess and apologise for everything. Redevelop the carapace. Calm your nerves. Read Marcus Aurelius. Accept the necessary limits of human life. Immortality quite impossible. Eternal life implausible. Call Andreas and explain. Develop an awareness of the finer points of pragmatism. Determine whether you will sink or aim to float. Stop bothering people. Find a place to stay. Get a job. Stop writing these lists. Don’t wait to become perfect. Just do it now. Go your own way. It’s hard enough to go your own way without trying to second-guess the others. Read The Republic to the end — no dropping out. Gather names. Forget the longings of the self. Things are considerable but not insurmountable. Read Finnegans Wake. Revere great art. Honour your father. Plunge into the void, dispense with the world. Accept the thunderbolt. Avoid the bell. OR should you ring the bell? Drop the jewel and pick up the lotus. FIND THE TEMP. Then she thought her grandfather Tom was sitting next to her, quite calmly and quietly, holding her hand. She shook off the thought, but she couldn’t open her eyes. She pulled the covers around her and tried to sleep. But she imagined him again, kindly, tall with his bent nose, explaining to her that she hadn’t behaved well, as he had done when she was a small girl. He wasn’t angry — she had never seen him angry — but he was disappointed. She thought he was there, emanating waves of kindly reproach. Your mother is very tired, and so we’ve left her to sleep. Mummy gets tired sometimes, when she’s had too much of her lovely daughter. That was how he spoke to her when she was a child. So darling, you just be nice to your mummy, won’t you? She’s a lovely girl, quite my favourite in the world, after you of course. And you must understand, Rosa, you haven’t time for this sort of thing. Life is sweeping you onwards. There’s hardly time to look around. You must get on with it. And she imagined — imagined, she knew, because she had her eyes shut tightly, and there was no way she was opening them, though she felt a cold wind around her, like a force gusting from the grave, but she clamped her eyelids down and huddled beneath the covers — her grandmothers behind him, and grandfather Don, and she saw them in the garden of a small suburban house, the kind of place they had worked a lifetime to buy, saying Come on, Rosa, look at you — you! In a room, drunk and out of control! She was hearing them as a discordant chorus, and she kept her hands down by her waist, she curled into the covers and hid herself, afraid that she would feel something, a real hand coming towards her, a real voice sounding through the silence of the room. She imagined him again, this kindly old man, her mother’s father, Please, Rosa, understand this, a jovial, talented man, a loyal friend, a good sportsman, who worked so hard to bring up the daughter who had died so suddenly, her death predestined or merely meaningless, she would never know, never never never and then she sat up in bed and with her eyes shut, still clamped tightly shut because she was a coward and drunk and still more cowardly in her drunkenness or intoxicated with fear, she thought TEMP must mean CONTEMPTIBLE and that means you and now she was shouting, ‘HELP! HELP! SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!’ She grabbed at the covers and tore them off her. She tumbled out of the bed and found she was bent double on the floor, shaking in the cold air, crying loudly. For a while she was quite beside herself; she couldn’t think at all. She was drooling and rubbing spittle across her face, trying to push back her hair, which was falling into her mouth. She said HELP HELP! again, down below the iron bed and she put her head down so sharply on her knees she bit her tongue. She came round, slowly, and realised that there was a danger Judy might come in and find her. Still, they frightened her, the cold white sheets and the stone room. And she was kneeling on the floor, speaking quickly, saying, ‘Mother, I understand, I am failing to enjoy the experience of being here. After all the trouble you went to, the years you passed in my birth and nurture. I am sorry for having deviated from the path. You spent decades trying to make me happy. And now! And NOW!’

‘And now!’ she cried, and stood up suddenly. ‘It has gone too far!’ She had let things slide. And now Rosa said, ‘It has gone too far!’ again. There was a thick feeling in her head, as if she couldn’t think fast enough. Agitation, rich in her veins. Her body was busy breaking down proteins, filling her cells with oxygen, her heart was busy pumping blood round her body. ‘To what end?’ she cried. ‘Why?’ She pushed the lamp off the table, grabbed Judy’s collection of classics and hurled them on the floor, stamped and shouted and it was only when she hurt her foot that she came to her senses. Then she sat down and looked at the mess she had made.

Hiccoughing loudly, and aware that she was far from heroic, she turned on all the lights. With the lights on she felt less afraid. She lay down on the bed, dragged the covers around her. Then drunkenness overtook her, and she fell into a snorting dreamless sleep.

*

She woke before dawn, coughing. Her head ached and she thought she would be sick. For a while she lay with her face above the floorboards, unable to move, hanging there like a warning to others. She had certainly lost her poise. She was blushing as she fished for her watch and reeled it in. Dragging herself up, she lay on her back. Once she had her watch in her hand, she saw it was 6 a.m. She tumbled out of the duvet and, finding she was still in her clothes, was glad she had saved a little time. At the window she stared into the darkness. When she pushed up the sash the stillness soothed her. She could hear the vibrant songs of birds in the hedgerows, the wind tousling the leaves. The sound of the ghyll, sweet and clear. When her nausea had passed, she packed up the few objects she had used. The goggles and walking boots hadn’t quite been necessary, but she had at least been prepared. She tidied the bed. She folded the sheet carefully over the duvet, as if that would save her. She drank the water down. The fresh flowers in the vase made her want to crawl to Judy and Will and beg their forgiveness. But going quietly seemed the only thing to do. Anyway, she couldn’t face the tight politeness of the closing scene, the benign protestations. They would drive her to the station and she would talk hopelessly on the platform, promising to write, then she would spend the journey rephrasing everything, muttering into her scarf, disturbing her neighbours. She saw the sky was growing lighter. Soon dawn would break. So she picked up the books and stacked them on the shelf. She tidied up the lamp. Then she crept out of the room, dragging her bag, trying not to scuff the walls. She moved slowly along the corridor. A creak in the timbers made her heart flutter, but after a few seconds with her face pressed against the wall, no one came.

She still had time and now she drew herself through the house and moved softly down the stairs. She arrived in the living room, sweating with the strain of moving so quietly. Her bag was heavy and hastily packed. Bits of it bulged as she walked. She left the presents she had forgotten to give them the previous evening, the chocolates, books and bath salts tied up with string. She stacked them in a pile on the living room table. She thought she should leave a note. So she stood there with her pen above the paper, thinking what to write. Dear Judy and Will, Thanks so much for your unstinting, humbling hospitality. I’ve had a lovely time. The sort of evening I haven’t had in ages. You have shamed me with your generosity. You are wonderful parents, and I admire you. You use your time so well. Your children are beautiful. Your idyll, this community you have created, makes me feel ashamed and as if I have been wasting my time. All is Vapour. Thanks so much again, Rosa. She stopped. She took the piece of paper and folded it into her pocket. Then she wrote: Dear Will and Judy. Thanks so much. I remembered in the middle of the night — oh horror! HORROR! I promised — ages ago — to meet someone today. I’m so sorry to have left without seeing you. These presents are no return for your great kindness. It made a huge difference, to see you here, so happy and tranquil. I’ll remember it with great fondness. I’m sorry about the small scene — I was merely drunk, nothing more — and wish you so much luck with the next baby. You have a wonderful set-up here. Fucking vapour. Thanks so much again. Love, Rosa.

So she tore that up. Dear Judy and Will, Thanks so much. I remembered in the night — I have a meeting in London. I’m so sorry to leave without seeing you — I didn’t want to wake you. The presents are small return for your kindness and warmth. Good luck with the new arrival. Thanks so much again. Love, Rosa.

And now she thought she heard a sound, so, abandoning the note on top of the presents, she turned. She was still for a moment, trying to listen. Furtive in the fresh dawn, she tiptoed past the table. Passing through the kitchen she felt sick again. She twisted herself out of the door, trying to keep everything as quiet as she could. Now the sky was grey. There was mist on the hills; white trails were falling across the trees. Her feet crunched on frost. A layer of ice had formed on the mud. She walked quickly down the drive, through the mist. At the road she stood and looked back at the farm. A light was on upstairs. Any minute now, she thought, a search party might issue from the solid walls — Will with a torch, flashing a light towards her. She stumbled and started to run. She wasn’t sure where she was running, but as she went, fumbling with her bag, she saw the sky growing paler. The stars were receding into the clear dawn. Ahead she could see the misty valley, mist-draped fells, the ghyll tumbling down the rocks. She could hear the river and the sound of it made her run faster. She heard a door slam behind her, and thought it must be Will. Trembling with shame, imagining him finding her there with her bag scuffed with mud, she thought she had to hide. Like a fugitive, she dived off the road and ran down the bank of the river. Her heart was beating unsteadily and the nausea had returned. She dropped her bag into long wet grass and soaked her feet. Now she thought she heard soft enquiring footsteps on the gravel, but she couldn’t raise her head to look. Shivering, she huddled by the river, wondering who it was.

As she waited by the river, she found she was questioning the Romantic assumption that nature was reviving to the soul. It was possible for a particularly dark and miserable soul to resist even the consolations of a perfect view. She thought of Wordsworth walking the fells. He had gone up — was it Helvellyn? — on his seventieth birthday, limber and bold-hearted. That was a fine man! Hwaer cwom Wordsworth, she thought. Whither Wordsworth. She snorted quietly and held her head. It felt swollen. Swollen with booze, she thought, her capillaries quite flooded with the stuff. The light seeped across the sky. Later, she dragged herself along the bank and threw up. That felt cathartic, so she walked upstream and washed her face. She stood and gripped her bag. Looking at the slender shapes of the winter trees, Rosa understood perfectly well that the scenery was ancient and she was very small. She was adequate to the task of perceiving the beauty around her, the lovely contours of the hills, the cold glinting waters. She saw no one when she raised her head above the bank, so she started to walk slowly. She found the road, no longer mist-clad, and followed it down the valley. She kept low on the ground, hoping they couldn’t see her, and when she lost sight of the farmhouse she began to breathe more easily. Through the gaps in the trees Rosa saw the sky, and then the sky looked like a lake, with the shapes of the hills spread around its shores. Then it started raining, and she turned sharply down the hill towards Broughton, passing a few houses with their curtains drawn. The rain slapped her face, and she held up her hands as she ran; through sheets of rain she could see the valley, grey and wind-blown. She stumbled slightly and brushed against the damp hedges, feeling the branches on her face. She watched the trees moving in the wind. The rain cooled her head, and made her feel better. The sheep were standing on the hills, sheltering under trees. Their funny faces turned towards her. In front of an audience of sheep she went over a cattle grid and slipped on the metal.

Then she felt a low boom of thunder across the valley, she could feel the vibrations under her feet and deep in her stomach. The sky flared, and thunder rolled around the valley, drawing echoes from the rocks. The rain was falling in thick white lines, more like flowing milk than water. She heard a gate slamming in the wind, and the thunder and the rain. The valley was drenched by the downpour, and now she could smell the bracken. Brackish, she thought, and she noticed the interwoven smells of grass and trees and the taste of dampness in the air. Another flash of lightning, followed by a round ricochet of thunder, and the trees shuddered under the wind and the fresh force of the rain. Now the rain sounded like a river in full flood. Above she saw a chastened sky, and the deep green colours of the leaves, the stained trunks of the trees.

Drenched and weighted down by her clothes, Rosa ran. She was revived by the forces around her, the wind blasting against her, volleys of thunder resounding deep within her. The sky flashed again. She saw a line of oaks bowing and shaking their leaves. Rain hissed at her feet, falling as steam. She darted around a puddle, brushed a wet hedge, lifted her bag higher on her back, heard the all-shaking thunder burst around the valley again, felt the rage of the wind and said, ‘Crack Nature’s moulds!’ Dense shards of rain. White steam and a cold sky. She moved through mud and newly created streams of water. She skidded at a corner and fell against a trunk to steady herself. Ingrateful man, she thought. Everything was monochrome, the trees and low houses dark against the blank sky. She turned onto a road where the cars lashed her with water.

Another throb of thunder, and the rain slapped her face and arms. When a woman in a car wound down her window and shouted out, ‘Do you need a lift?’ she tried to speak and found her lips were rigid with cold.

‘Thank you,’ she managed to say, shaking her head. She stepped aside as the woman drove off. The thunder was rich and raw; she was a sounding block, nothing more than another surface for the thunder to echo from. She saw the dusty sides of the rocks, doused to blackness by torrents of water, and she saw a flock of birds hanging in the air, sweeping a course across the furrowed mass of clouds. Then she felt a sense of great joy, of something glorious and ancient beneath everything. She was beginning to say, ‘But this is the sublime’, and then she said, ‘You have to be quite determined, not to become ridiculous.’ She shook her head and walked on.

She arrived in the village of Broughton as the clocks chimed 10 a.m.. She had lost a lot of time, hiding by the river and walking in the rain. She hadn’t noticed how far the morning had advanced. Now the rain was easing off. Her clothes were wet; her bag was heavy on her back. The local baker was just opening her shop, and Rosa briefly explained her predicament — terrible mess — she had come to borrow a friend’s house, forgot to bring the key, no one had it, would have to go back home to get it, have invited friends for the weekend, can’t break in, tragic start to a holiday. Never mind, she said, stoical in response to polite sympathy. Yes, it was a bit of a fuss but it would be fine in the end. The baker — a woman called Sue with perfect teeth and a thick Lancashire accent — called a taxi. Rosa waited in the shop, sipping coffee. She found herself writing in her notebook, though the pages were greasy with rainwater.

Will and Judy, I am more sorry than I can ever say. Words cannot express how sorry I am. They are inadequate to the task, or I can’t turn them so they would phrase a fifth of my feelings. Had I but words enough and time, I would verse you a verse — oh yes, such a verse, they would write about it for years to come — but my coat is soaked and my head is full of something — it feels like putty. I am quite aware I drank all the wine. But I don’t want you wasting any time thinking about me. Really, there’s no need. I am only sorry I lost my dignity. My bearings I lost long ago. Yours ever, Rosa.

Then she shivered violently and moved closer to the fire. She wrote:

Get a grip on yourself now. This is descending faster than you can winch it up. Your brain isn’t working fast enough. You need to be quick-witted. Contain yourself. No one is impressed by you, and Jess is furious. This wouldn’t bother you if you had managed things well for yourself. But you haven’t, that much is blindingly apparent. Now you have to:

Go back to London.

Find a place to stay

Explain to Andreas

Get a job

Match your words with actions

Get Liam to sell the furniture

Wash your clothes

Sit down with Jess and apologise for everything

Go to the bank and talk to Sharkbreath

Read variously

Detach yourself from illusion altogether

Scale the wall

Traverse the threshold

Find the TEMP

Then the taxi came.