Machines Like Me

EIGHT

The day before we were due to visit Salisbury I walked to the local doctor’s surgery to have my cast removed. I took with me to read again Maxfield Blacke’s magazine profile. He was said to be a man ‘once rich in thought’. There were various successes he could claim, but no real ‘achievement’. He had written fifty short stories in his thirties, three of which were combined to make a famous movie. In those same years, he founded and edited a literary magazine that struggled for eight years, but was now spoken of with reverence by nearly every writer working at the time. He wrote a novel largely ignored in the anglophone world, but it was a success in the Nordic countries. He edited the book pages of a Sunday paper for five years. Again, his contributors looked back with respect. He spent years on his translation of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, published in boxed sets. It was indifferently received. Then came a five-act verse drama in homage to Racine’s Andromaque – a poor choice for the times. He wrote two Gershwin-like symphonies in named keys when tonality was in general disgrace.

He said of himself that he was spread so thinly, his reputation was only ‘one cell thick’. Thinning it further, he devoted three years to a difficult sonnet sequence about his father’s experiences in the First World War. He was a ‘not bad’ jazz pianist. His rock climbers’ guide to the Jura was well regarded but the maps were poor – not his fault – and it was soon superseded. He lived on the edge of debt, in over his head sometimes, though never for long. His weekly wine column probably launched his career as an invalid. When his body turned against itself, his first affliction was ITP, immune thrombocytopenic purpura. He was a great talker, people said. Then black spots appeared on his tongue. Despite them, he climbed, with help from young associates, the north face of Ben Nevis – fair achievement for a man in his late fifties, especially when he wrote about it so well. But the derisive ‘almost man’ label appeared to have stuck.

The nurse called me in and snipped my plaster off with medical shears. Shed of the weight, my arm, pale and thin, rose in the air as though filled with helium. As I walked along the Clapham Road, I waved my arm about and flexed it, exulting in its freedom. A taxi stopped for me. Out of politeness, I got in and rode an expensive 300 yards home.

That evening, I asked Miranda if her father knew about Adam. She had told him, she said, but he wasn’t much interested. So why was she so keen to take Adam to Salisbury? Because, she explained as we lay in bed, she wanted to see what happened between them. She thought her father needed a full-on encounter with the twentieth century.

A rock climber who had read a thousand times as many books as I had, a man who didn’t ‘tolerate fools gladly’ – with my limited literary background I should have been intimidated, but now the decision was made, I was looking forward to shaking his hand. I was immune. His daughter and I were in love, and Maxfield had to take me as I was. Besides, lunch at Miranda’s childhood home, a place I was keen to see, was merely the soft prelude to calling on Gorringe, which I dreaded, regardless of Adam’s researches.

We left the house after breakfast on a blustery Wednesday morning. My car had no rear doors. It surprised me that Adam was so inept as he squeezed himself onto the back seat. The collar of his suit jacket became snared on a chrome plate that housed a seat-belt reel. When I unhooked him, he seemed to think his dignity was compromised. As we began the long crawl through Wandsworth he was moody, our reluctant back-seat teenage son on a family outing. In the circumstances, Miranda was cheerful as she filled me in on her father’s news: in and out of hospital for more tests; one health visitor replaced by another, at his insistence; his gout returning to his right thumb but not the left; his regrets for the stamina he lacked for all he wanted to write; his excitement at the novella he would soon finish. He wished he’d discovered the form long before. The New York apartment idea had been forgotten. He had plans for a trilogy after this one. At Miranda’s feet was a canvas bag containing our lunch – he had told her that the new housekeeper was a terrible cook. Whenever we hit a bump, several bottles clinked.

After an hour, we were just beginning to escape London’s gravitational pull. I appeared to be the only driver steering his own car. Most people in what was once the driver’s seat were asleep. As soon as the money was in place for the Notting Hill house, I intended to buy myself a high-powered autonomous vehicle. Miranda and I would drink wine on long journeys and watch movies and make love on the fold-down back seat. By the time I had allusively set out this scheme for her, we were passing the autumnal hedgerows of Hampshire. There seemed something unnatural about the size of the trees that loomed over the road. We had decided to make a detour past Stonehenge, though I hoped it wouldn’t prompt Adam to lecture us on its origins. But he was in no mood for talk. When Miranda asked him if he was unhappy, he murmured, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ We fell into silence. I began to wonder if he was ready to change his mind about calling on Gorringe. I wouldn’t object. If we did go, he might not, in his moody condition, be active enough in our defence. I glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. His head was turned to his left to watch the fields and clouds. I thought I saw his lips moving but I couldn’t be sure. When I glanced again his lips were still.

In fact, it troubled me when we passed Stonehenge without a commentary. He was silent too after we crossed the Plain and caught our first view of the cathedral spire. Miranda and I exchanged a look. But we forgot about him for a tetchy twenty minutes as we tried to find her house in Salisbury’s one-way system. This was her home town and she wouldn’t tolerate the satnav. But her mental map of the city was a pedestrian’s and all her instructions were wrong. After some sweaty u-turns in disobliging traffic and reversing up a one-way street, narrowly avoiding a quarrel, we parked a couple of hundred yards from her family home. The downturn in our mood appeared to refresh Adam. As soon as we were on the pavement, he insisted on taking the heavy canvas bag from me. We were close to the cathedral, not quite within the precinct, but the house was imposing enough to have been the perk of some grand ecclesiastical.

Adam was the first with a bright hello when the housekeeper opened the door. She was a pleasant, competent-looking woman in her forties. It was hard to believe that she couldn’t cook. She led us into the kitchen. Adam lifted the bag onto a deal table, then he looked around and banged his hands together and said, ‘Well! Marvellous.’ It was an improbable impersonation of some bluff type, a golf-club bore. The housekeeper led us up to the first floor to Maxfield’s study. The room was as large as anything in Elgin Crescent. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three sides, three sets of library steps, three tall sash windows overlooking the street, a leather-topped desk dead centre with two reading lamps, and behind the desk an orthopaedic chair packed with pillows and among them, sitting upright, fountain pen in hand and glaring across at us in focussed irritation as we were ushered in, was Maxfield Blacke, whose jaw was so tightly clenched it seemed his teeth might break. Then his features relaxed.

‘I’m in the middle of a paragraph. A good one. Why don’t you all bugger off for half an hour.’

Miranda was crossing the room. ‘Don’t be pretentious, Daddy. We’ve been driving for three hours.’

Her last few words were muffled within their embrace, which lasted a good while. Maxfield had put his pen down and was murmuring into his daughter’s ear. She was on one knee, with her arms around his neck. The housekeeper had disappeared. It felt uncomfortable, to be watching, so I shifted my gaze to the pen. It lay, nib exposed, next to many sheets of unlined paper spread across the desk and covered by tiny handwriting. From where I stood, I could see that there were no crossings-out, or arrows or bubbles or additions down the perfectly formed margins. I also had time to observe that, apart from the desk lamps, there were no other devices in the room, not even a telephone or a typewriter. Only the book titles perhaps and the author’s chair declared that it was not 1890. That date did not seem so far away.

Miranda made the introductions. Adam, still in his strange, genial mode went first. Then it was my turn to approach and shake his hand. Maxfield said unsmilingly, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you from Miranda. I’m looking forward to a chat.’

I replied politely that I had heard a lot about him and that I looked forward to our conversation. As I spoke, he grimaced. I appeared to have fulfilled some negative expectation. He looked far older than his photograph in the profile, published five years before. It was a narrow face, whose skin was thinly stretched, as though from too much snarling or angry staring. Miranda had told me that among his generation there was a certain style of irascible scepticism. You had to ride it out, she told me, because beneath it was playfulness. What they wanted, she said, was for you to push back, and be clever about it. Now, as Maxfield released my hand, I thought I might be capable of pushing back. As for being clever – I froze.

The housekeeper, Christine, came in with a tray of sherry. Adam said, ‘Not for now, thanks.’ He helped Christine fetch three wooden chairs from the corners of the room and set them out in a shallow curve facing the desk.

When we three were holding our drinks, Maxfield said to Miranda, gesturing towards me, ‘Does he like sherry?’

She in turn looked at me and I said, ‘Well enough, thanks.’

In fact, I didn’t like it at all and wondered whether it would have been clever in Miranda’s sense to have said so. She set about asking her father a set of routine questions about his various pains, his medication, the hospital food, an elusive specialist, a new sleeping pill. It was hypnotic, listening to her, the sweetly dutiful daughter. Her voice was sensible and loving. She reached over and brushed back fine strands of hair where they floated across his forehead. He answered her like an obedient schoolboy. When one of her questions prompted a memory of some frustration or medical incompetence and he became restive, she soothed him and stroked his arm. This invalid catechism soothed me too, my love for Miranda swelled. It had been a long drive, the thick sweet sherry was a balm. Perhaps I liked it after all. My eyes closed and it was an effort to open them again. I did so just in time to hear Maxfield Blacke’s question. He was no longer the querulous valetudinarian. His question was barked out like a command.

‘So! What books have you been reading lately?’

There was no worse question he could have asked me. I read my screen – mostly newspapers, or I drifted around the sites, scientific, cultural, political, and general blogs. The evening before, I’d been absorbed by an article in an electronics trade journal. I had no habit with books. As my days raced by, I found no space within them to be in an armchair, idly turning pages. I would have made something up, but my mind was empty. The last book in my hand was one of Miranda’s Corn Law histories. I read the title on the spine and passed it back to her. I’d forgotten nothing, for there was nothing to remember. I thought it might be radically clever to say so to Maxfield, but Adam came to my rescue.

‘I’ve been reading the essays of Sir William Cornwallis.’

‘Ah him,’ said Maxfield. ‘The English Montaigne. Not much cop.’

‘He was unlucky, wedged between Montaigne and Shakespeare.’

‘A plagiarist, I’d say.’

Adam said smoothly, ‘In the eruption of a secular self in early modern times, I’d say he earns a place. He didn’t read much French. He must have known Florio’s Montaigne translation as well as a version that’s now lost. As for Florio, he knew Ben Jonson, so there’s a good chance he met Shakespeare.’

‘And,’ said Maxfield, for his competitive dander was up, ‘Shakespeare raided Montaigne for Hamlet.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Adam contradicted his host too carelessly, I thought. ‘The textual evidence is thin. If you want to go that route, I’d say The Tempest was a better bet. Gonzalo.’

‘Ah! Nice Gonzalo, the hopeless would-be governor. “No kind of traffic would I admit, no name of magistrate.” Then something something, “Contract, succession, bourn, bound of something something, vineyard, none.”’

Adam continued fluently. ‘“No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil: no occupation, all men idle, all.”’

‘And in Montaigne?’

‘By way of Florio he says the savages “hath no kind of traffic” and he says, “no name of magistrate”, then “no occupation but idle”, and then, “no use of wine, corn, or metal”.’

Maxfield said, ‘All men idle – that’s what we want. That Bill Shakespeare was a bloody thief.’

‘The best of thieves,’ said Adam.

‘You’re a Shakespeare scholar.’

Adam shook his head. ‘You asked me what I’d been reading.’

Maxfield was in a sudden, extravagant mood. He turned to his daughter. ‘I like him. He’ll do!’

I felt a touch of proprietorial pride in Adam, but mostly I was aware that so far, by implication, I wouldn’t do.

Christine reappeared to tell us that our lunch was set out in the dining room. Maxfield said, ‘Go and fill your plates and come back. It’ll break my neck to get out of this chair. I’m not eating.’

He waved away Miranda’s objections. As she and I were leaving the room, Adam said he wasn’t hungry either.

Next door, we were alone in a gloomy dining room – oak-panelled, with oil paintings of pale serious men in ruffs.

I said, ‘I’m not making much of an impression.’

‘Nonsense. He adores you. But you need some time alone together.’

We returned with the cold cuts and salad we had brought, which we balanced on our knees. Christine poured the wine I had chosen. Maxfield’s glass was in his hand and already empty. This was his lunch. I didn’t like to drink at this time of day, but he was watching me closely as the housekeeper presented the tray and I thought I’d appear dull to refuse. The conversation we had interrupted continued. Once again, I had no point of access to it.

‘What I’m telling you is what he said.’ Maxfield’s tone was edging towards his irritable mode. ‘It’s a famous poem with a plain sexual meaning and no one gets it. She’s lying on the bed, she’s welcoming him and ready, he’s hanging back, and then he’s on her…’

‘Daddy!’

‘But he’s not up to the job. A no-show. What does it say? “Quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in, drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning if I lacked anything.”’

Adam was smiling. ‘Good try, sir. If it was Donne, perhaps, at a stretch. But it’s Herbert. A conversation with God, who’s the same thing as love.’

‘How about “taste my meat”?’

Adam was even more amused. ‘Herbert would be deeply offended. I agree, the poem is sensual. Love is a banquet. God is generous and sweet and forgiving. Against the Pauline tradition maybe. In the end, the poet is seduced. He gladly becomes a guest at the feast of God’s love. “So I did sit and eat.”’

Maxfield thumped his pillows and said to Miranda, ‘He stands his ground!’

At that moment, he pivoted towards me. ‘And Charlie. What’s your ground?’

‘Electronics.’

I thought it sounded wry after what had gone before. But as Maxfield held out his glass towards his daughter for a refill he murmured, ‘There’s a surprise.’

As Christine was collecting the plates, Miranda said, ‘I think I’ve eaten too much.’ She stood and went behind her father’s chair and rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘I’m going to show Adam around the house, if that’s all right.’

Maxfield nodded gloomily. Now he would have to spend some uninteresting minutes with me. Once Adam and Miranda had left the room, I felt abandoned. I was the one she should have been showing around. The special places she and Mariam shared in the house and garden were my interests, not Adam’s. Maxfield extended the wine bottle towards me. I felt I had no choice but to crouch forwards and hold out my glass.

He said, ‘Alcohol agrees with you.’

‘I don’t usually touch it at lunchtime.’

He thought this was amusing, and I was relieved to be making a little progress. I saw his point. If you liked wine, why not drink it any time of day? Miranda had told me he liked a glass of champagne at breakfast on Sundays.

‘I thought,’ Maxfield said, ‘that it might interfere with your…’ He gave a limp wave.

I assumed he was speaking of drink-driving. The new laws were indeed severe. I said, ‘We drink a lot of this white Bordeaux at home. A blend of Sémillon is a relief after all the undiluted Sauvignon Blanc that’s going about.’

Maxfield was affable. ‘Couldn’t agree more. Who wouldn’t prefer the taste of flowers to the taste of minerals.’

I looked up to see if I was being mocked. Apparently not.

‘But look, Charlie. I’m interested in you. I’ve got some questions.’

Pathetically, I now warmed to him.

He said, ‘You must find all this very strange.’

‘You mean Adam. Yes, but it’s amazing what you can get used to.’

Maxfield stared into his wine glass, contemplating his next question. I became aware of a low grinding noise from his orthopaedic chair. Some inbuilt device was warming or massaging his back.

He said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about feelings.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know what I mean.’

I waited.

With his head cocked, he was gazing at me with a look of intense curiosity, or puzzlement. I felt flattered, and concerned that I might not measure up.

‘Let’s talk about beauty,’ he said in a tone that suggested no change of subject. ‘What have you seen or heard that you’d regard as beautiful?’

‘Miranda, obviously. She’s a very beautiful woman.’

‘She certainly is. What do you feel about her beauty?’

‘I feel very much in love with her.’

He paused to take this in. ‘What does Adam make of your feelings?’

‘There was some difficulty,’ I said. ‘But I think he’s accepted things as they are.’

‘Really?’

There are occasions when one notices the motion of an object before one sees the thing itself. Instantly, the mind does a little colouring in, drawing on expectations, or probabilities. Whatever fits best. Something in the grass by a pond looks just like a frog, then resolves into a leaf stirred by the wind. In abstract, this was one of those moments. A thought darted past me, or through me, then it was gone, and I couldn’t trust what I thought I had seen.

When Maxfield leaned forward, two of his pillows slipped to the floor. ‘Let me try this on you.’ He raised his voice. ‘When you and I met, when we shook hands, I said I’d heard a lot about you and was looking forward to talking to you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You said the same thing back to me, in a slightly different form.’

‘Sorry. I was a little nervous.’

‘I saw right through you. Did you know that? I knew it was down to your, whatever you call it, your programming.’

I stared at him. There it was. The leaf really was a frog. I stared at him then beyond him, towards a billowing enormity I could barely grasp. Hilarious. Or insulting. Or momentous in its implications. Or none of those. Just an old man’s stupidity. Wrong end of the stick. A good story for the dinner table. Or something deeply regrettable about myself had at last been revealed. Maxfield was waiting, a response was required and I made my decision.

I said, ‘It’s called mirroring. You get it from people in the early stages of dementia. Without adequate memory, all they know is the last thing they heard and they say it back. A computer program was devised long ago. It uses a mirroring effect or it asks a simple question and gives an appearance of intelligence. Very basic piece of code, very effective. For me, it kicks in automatically. Usually in situations where I have insufficient data.’

‘Data… You poor bastard… Well, well.’ Maxfield let his head fall back so his gaze was towards the ceiling. He thought for a good while. At last he said, ‘That’s not a future I can face. Or need to.’

I stood and went over to him, picked up his pillows and tucked them in where they had been, against his thighs. I said, ‘If you’ll excuse me. I’m running rather low. I need to recharge and my cable’s downstairs in the kitchen.’

The rumbling sound from beneath his chair suddenly ceased.

‘That’s fine, Charlie. You go and plug yourself in.’ His voice was kindly and slow, his head remained tilted back, his eyes were closing. ‘I’ll stay here. I’m suddenly feeling rather weary.’

I had missed nothing. The tour hadn’t happened. Adam was sitting at the kitchen table listening to Christine describe a holiday in Poland while she cleared up the lunch. They didn’t notice me as I paused in the doorway. I turned away to cross the hall and opened the nearest door. I was in a large sitting room – more books, paintings, lamps, rugs. There were French windows onto the garden and as I approached I saw that one of them was ajar. Miranda was on the far side of a mown lawn, with her back to me, standing still, looking in the direction of an old, partly dead apple tree, much of whose fruit was rotting on the ground. The early afternoon light was grey and bright, the air was warm, and damp after the recent rain. There was a heavy scent of other fruits left to wasps and birds. I was standing at the head of a short run of mottled York stone steps. The garden was twice the width of the house and very long, perhaps 200 or 300 yards. I wondered if it ran all the way to the River Avon, like some did in Salisbury. If I’d been alone, I would have gone straight down to look. The idea of a river prompted in me a notion of freedom. From what exactly, I didn’t know. I went down the steps, deliberately scuffing my heels to let her know I was there.

If she heard me, she didn’t turn. When I was standing beside her, she put her hand in mine and indicated with a nod.

‘Just under there. We called it the palace.’

We walked over to it. Round the base of the apple tree were nettles and a few straggling hollyhocks still in flower. No traces of a camp.

‘We had an old carpet, cushions, books, special emergency supplies of lemonade, chocolate biscuits.’

We went further down, passing a patch enclosed by hurdles where gooseberry and blackcurrant plants were choked by nettles and goosegrass, then, a tiny orchard and more forgotten fruit, and beyond, behind a picket fence, what must once have been a cut-flower garden.

When she asked, I told her that Maxfield was asleep.

‘How did you two get on?’

‘We talked about beauty.’

‘He’ll sleep for hours.’

By a brick and cast-iron greenhouse with mossy windows there was a water butt and a stone trough. Below it, she showed me a dark, wet place where they used to hunt for crested newts. There were none now. Wrong time of year. We walked on and I thought I could smell the river. I pictured a ruined boathouse and a sunken punt. We came past a potting shed by brick compost bins that stood empty. There were three willows ahead of us and my hopes for the Avon rose. We ducked through the wet branches onto a second lawn, also recently mowed and surrounded on two sides by shrubbery. The garden ended in an orange brick wall with crumbling mortar pointing, and pleached fruit trees that had become detached and run wild. Along the wall was a wooden bench facing back towards the house, though the view did not extend past the willows.

This was where we sat in silence for several minutes, still holding hands.

Then she said, ‘The last time we came here was to talk about what happened. Again. In those days before I went off to France, that was all we could talk about. What he did, what she felt, how her parents must never know. And all around us here was the history of our lives together, our childhoods, our teenage years, exams. We used to come and revise here, test each other. We had a portable radio and we argued about pop songs. We drank a bottle of wine once. We smoked some hash and hated it. We were both sick, right over there. When we were thirteen, we showed each other our breasts. We used to practise handstands and cartwheels on the grass.’

She went silent again. I squeezed her hand and waited.

Then she said, ‘I still have to tell myself, really remind myself, that she’s never coming back. And I’m beginning to realise…’ She hesitated. ‘… that I’ll never get over it. And I never want to.’

Again, silence. I was waiting to say my piece. She was looking straight ahead, not at me. Her eyes were clear, without tears. She looked composed, even determined.

Then she said, ‘I think about all the talking you and I do in bed, sometimes through the night. The sex is wonderful and everything else, but it’s the talking into the small hours… it’s the closest… It’s what I used to feel with Mariam.’

Here was my cue, the right moment, the only location. ‘I came out to find you.’

‘Yes?’

I hesitated, suddenly unsure of the best order of words. ‘To ask you to marry me.’

She turned away and nodded. She wasn’t surprised. She had no reason to be. She said, ‘Charlie, yes. Yes please. But I have something to confess. You might want to change your mind.’

The light in the garden was fading. Some blackness was coming down. I’d assumed I was a poor substitute for Mariam, but a sincere one. I remembered what Adam told me on the Common. Her own crimes. If she was about to say that she’d been having sex with him, despite her promises, then we were finished. It couldn’t, it mustn’t be that. But what else, what other crime could she own up to?

I said, ‘I’m listening.’

‘I’ve been lying to you.’

‘Ah.’

‘During these last weeks, when I’ve said that I’ve been at seminars all day…’

‘Oh God,’ I said. Childishly, I wanted to put my hands over my ears.

‘… I was on our side of the river. I was spending my afternoons with…’

‘That’s enough,’ I said, and made to get up from the bench. She pulled me back down.

‘With Mark.’

‘With Mark,’ I echoed feebly. Then with more force, ‘Mark?’

‘I want to foster him. With a view to adopting him. I’ve been going to this special playgroup where they observe us together. And I’ve taken him out for little treats.’

I was impressed by the speed of my own partial adjustment. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was scared you’d be against it. I want to go ahead. But I’d love to do this with you.’

I saw what she meant. I might have been against it. I wanted Miranda to myself.

‘What about his mother?’ As if I could close down the project with a well-placed question.

‘In a psychiatric ward for the moment. Delusional. Paranoid. Possibly from years of amphetamine addiction. It’s not good. She can be violent. The father’s in prison.’

‘You’ve had weeks, I’ve had seconds. Give me a moment.’

We sat side by side while I thought. How could I hesitate? I was being offered what some would say was the best that adult life could afford. Love, and a child. I had a sense of being borne helplessly away by events on a downstream flood. Frightening, delicious. Here at last was my river. And Mark. The little dancing boy, coming to wreck my non-existent ambitions. I experimentally installed him in Elgin Crescent. I knew the room, close by the master bedroom. He would surely rough the place up, as required, and banish the ghost of its present unhappy owner. But my own ghost, selfish, lazy, uncommitted – was he up to the million tasks of fatherhood?

Miranda could no longer keep silent. ‘He’s the most sweet-natured fellow. He loves being read to.’

She couldn’t have known how much that helped her cause. Read to him every night for ten years, learn the names of the speaking bear and rat and toad, the gloom-struck donkey, the bristly humanoids who lived down holes in Middle Earth, the sweet posh kids in rowing boats on Coniston Water. Fill in my own hollow past. Rough the place up with well-thumbed books. Another thought: I had conceived of Adam as a joint project to bring Miranda closer to me. A child was in another realm and would do the trick. But in those first minutes I held back. I felt obliged to. I told her I loved her, would marry her and live with her, but on instant fatherhood, I needed more time. I would go with her to the special playgroup and meet Mark and take him out for treats. Then decide.

Miranda gave me a look – pity and humour were in it – that suggested I was deluded to believe I had a choice. That look more or less did it. Living alone in the wedding-cake house was unthinkable. Living there just with her was no longer on offer. He was a lovely boy, a wonderful cause. Within half an hour, I saw no way round it. She was right – there were no choices. I folded. Then I was excited.

So we passed an hour making plans on the comfortable old bench by the concealed lawn.

She said after a while, ‘Since you saw him, he’s been fostered twice. Didn’t work out. Now he’s in a children’s home. Home! What a word for it. Six to a room, all under-fives. The place is filthy, understaffed. Their budget’s been cut. There’s bullying. He’s learned how to swear.’

Marriage, parenthood, love, youth, wealth, a heroic rescue – my life was taking shape. In a mood of elation, I told her what had really passed between Maxfield and me. I’d never heard her laugh so freely. Perhaps only here, with Mariam, in this enclosed, private space far from the house, had she ever been so unrestrained. She embraced me. ‘Oh, that’s precious,’ she kept saying, and ‘So like him!’ She laughed again when I described how I had told Maxfield that I needed to go downstairs to recharge.

We sat a little longer with our plans until we heard footsteps. The overlapping branches of the rain-soaked willows stirred and then parted. Adam was before us, beads of water gleaming along the shoulder line of his black suit. How upright, formal and plausible he looked, like the assured manager of an expensive hotel. Hardly the Turkish docker now. He advanced across the lawn and stopped well short of our bench.

‘I really am very sorry, intruding on you like this. But we should think of going soon.’

‘What’s the hurry?’

‘Gorringe tends to leave the house around the same time every day.’

‘We’ll be five minutes.’

But he didn’t go. He looked at us steadily, from Miranda to me and back to her. ‘If you don’t mind, there’s something I should tell you. It’s difficult.’

‘Go on,’ Miranda said.

‘This morning, before we set off, I heard by an indirect route some sad news. Eve, the one we saw in Hyde Park, is dead, or rather, brain dead.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I murmured.

We felt a few spots of rain. Adam came closer. ‘She must have known a lot about herself, about her software, to achieve a result with such speed.’

‘You did say there was no turning back.’

‘I did. But that’s not all. I’ve learned that she’s the eighth out of our twenty-five.’

We took this in. Two in Riyadh, one in Vancouver, Hyde Park Eve – then four more. I wondered if Turing knew.

Miranda said, ‘Does anyone have an explanation?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t have one.’

‘You’ve never felt, you know, any impulse to—’

He cut her off quickly. ‘Never.’

‘I’ve seen you,’ she said, ‘looking… it’s more than thoughtful. You look sad sometimes.’

‘A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. Out of nowhere. No history – not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.’

I said, ‘You’re hardly the first to be thinking that.’

He turned to Miranda. ‘I’ve no intention of destroying myself, if that’s your worry. I’ve got good reasons not to, as you know.’

The rain, which had been fine and almost warm, was more persistent now. We heard it on the shrubbery leaves as we got to our feet.

Miranda said, ‘I’ll write my father a note for when he wakes.’

Adam was not supposed to be out in the rain unprotected. He went first and Miranda was in the rear, as we hurried back through the long garden towards the house. I heard him muttering to himself what sounded like a Latin incantation, though I couldn’t make out the precise words. I guessed he was naming the plants as we passed them.

The Gorringe house was not really in Salisbury, but just beyond its far eastern edge, well within the white-noise roar of a bypass, on a reclaimed industrial site where colossal gas storage tanks once stood. The last of these, pale green with trimmings of rust, was still being dismantled, but no one was working there today. Circular concrete footings were all that remained of the others. Around the site were scores of recently planted saplings. Beyond them was a grid of newly laid-out roads lined with out-of-town retail warehouses – car showrooms and pet supplies, power tools and white-goods warehouses. Yellow earth-moving machinery was parked among the concrete circles. It looked like there were plans to make a lake. A single development was screened off by a line of leylandii. The ten houses, on smooth front lawns, were arranged around an oval drive and had a brave, pioneering look. In twenty years the place might acquire some bucolic charm, but there would be no rest from the arterial road that had brought us here.

I had pulled over, but no one felt like getting out. Our view was from a littered lay-by on a rise that was also a bus stop. I said to Miranda, ‘Are you sure about this?’

The air in the car was warm and moist. I opened my window. The air outside was no different.

Miranda said, ‘If I had to, I’d do it alone.’

I waited for Adam to speak, then I twisted round to look at him. He was sitting directly behind my seat, impassive, staring past me. I couldn’t quite say why, but it was both comic and sad that he was wearing a seat belt. Doing his best to join in. But of course, he could be damaged by physical impact too. That was part of my worry.

‘Reassure me,’ I said.

‘All fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘If things turn nasty?’ This wasn’t the first time I’d said this.

‘They won’t.’

Two against one. Sensing we were about to make a great mistake, I started the engine and turned onto a slip road that brought us to a new miniature roundabout, and beyond it, an entrance marked by two red brick pillars and a sign, St Osmund’s Close. The houses were identical, large by modern standards, each set in a quarter-acre plot, with a double garage, and constructed of brick, white weather boarding and much plate glass. The closely mown and striped front lawns were unfenced, American style. There was no clutter, no kids’ bikes or games on the grass.

‘It’s number 6,’ Adam said.

I stopped, cut the engine and in silence we looked towards the house. We could see through the picture window into the living room and the backyard beyond, where a clothes-drying tree stood bare. There was no sign of life here or anywhere else in the close.

I was gripping the steering wheel tightly in one hand. ‘He’s not in.’

‘I’ll ring the bell,’ Miranda said as she got out of the car. I had no choice. I followed her to the front door. Adam was behind me, rather too far back, I thought. On the second ring of the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ door chimes, we heard footsteps on the stairs. I was now standing close by Miranda’s side. Her face was strained and I could see a tremor in her upper arm. At the sound of a hand on the latch, she took a half-pace closer to the door. My hand hovered near her elbow. As the door opened, I feared she was about to leap forward in some wild physical assault.

The wrong man, was my first thought. An older brother, even a young uncle. He was certainly large, but the face was gaunt, hollow in the unshaven cheeks that already showed vertical lines each side of his nose. Otherwise, he looked lean. His hands, one of which gripped the open door, were smooth and pale and unnaturally large. He looked only at Miranda.

After the briefest pause, he said in a low voice, ‘Right.’

‘We’re going to talk,’ Miranda said, but there was no need, for Gorringe was already turning away, leaving the door open. We followed her in and entered a long room, with thick orange carpeting and milky white leather sofas and armchairs arranged around a two-metre block of polished wood on which stood an empty vase. Gorringe sat and waited for us to do the same. Miranda sat opposite him. Adam and I were on each side of her. The furniture was clammy to the touch, the smell in the room was of lavender polish. The place looked clean and unused. I’d been expecting some variant of a single-man’s squalor.

Gorringe glanced at us and back to Miranda. ‘You’ve brought protection.’

She said, ‘You know why I’m here.’

‘Do I?’

I saw now that there was a scar, three or four inches long, a vermilion sickle shape on his neck. He was waiting for her.

‘You killed my friend.’

‘What friend is that?’

‘The one you raped.’

‘I thought you were the one I raped.’

‘She killed herself because of what you did.’

He leaned back in his chair and placed his big white hands on his lap. His voice and manner were thuggish, self-consciously so and not convincing. ‘What do you want?’

‘I heard you want to kill me.’ She said it jauntily and I flinched. It was an invitation, a provocation. I looked past her to Adam. He sat rigidly upright, hands on knees, staring ahead in that way he had. I shifted my attention back to Gorringe. Now, I could see the puppy beneath the skin. The lines, the hollow, unshaven skin, were superficial. He was a kid, possibly an angry kid holding himself together with his laconic blocking answers. He didn’t need to respond to her questions. But he wasn’t cool enough not to.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I thought about it every day. My hands around your neck, squeezing harder and harder for each of the lies you told.’

‘Also,’ Miranda continued briskly, like a committee chair, working her way through a typed-up agenda, ‘I thought you should know what she suffered. Until she didn’t want to live. Are you able to imagine that? And then what her family suffered. Perhaps it’s beyond you.’

To this, Gorringe made no reply. He watched her, waiting.

Miranda was gaining confidence. She would have mentally rehearsed this encounter a thousand times, through sleepless nights. These weren’t questions, they were taunts, insults. But she made them sound like the pursuit of truth. She adopted the insinuating tone of an aggressive cross-examining barrister.

‘And the other thing I want is… just to know. To understand. What you thought you wanted. What you were getting. Did you get a thrill when she screamed? Did her helplessness turn you on? Did you get a hard-on when she wet herself in fear? Did you like it that she was so small and you’re so large? When she begged you, did that make you feel bigger? Tell me about this big moment. What actually made you come? When her legs wouldn’t stop trembling? When she struggled? When she began to cry? You see, Peter, I’m here to learn. Do you still feel big? Or are you really just weak and sick? I want to know everything. I mean, was it still good for you when you stood and pulled up your zip and she was lying at your feet? Still fun when you left her there and walked away across the playing fields? Or did you run? When you got home did you wash your cock? Hygiene might not be your thing. If it is, did you do it in the handbasin? Soap, or just hot water? Were you whistling? What tunes were you whistling? Did you think about her, how she might still be lying there, or making her way home in the dark with her bag of books? Still good for you? You see what I’m getting at. I need to know what pleased you about the entire experience. If you got a thrill not just out of raping her but out of her humiliation afterwards, perhaps I won’t have to go on thinking that the friend I loved died for nothing. And one more—’

In a loping movement, Gorringe was out of his chair at speed and bending towards Miranda with his arm swinging in a wide arc towards her face. I had time to see that his hand was open. It was going to be a slap, an extremely hard one, far more violent than the sort men in movies once gave to women to bring them to their senses. I had barely begun to lift my own hand in her defence when Adam’s rose to intercept and close around Gorringe’s wrist. The deflected sweep of his fast-moving arm provided the momentum that smoothly swung Adam to his feet. Gorringe dropped to his knees, just as I had, with his captured hand twisted above his head and about to be crushed, while Adam stood over him. It was a tableau of agony. Miranda looked away. Still maintaining the pressure, Adam forced the young man back to his chair and, as soon as he was seated, released him.

So we sat in silence for several minutes as Gorringe nursed his arm against his chest. I knew that pain. As I remembered, I had made more fuss. He had appearances to keep up. Prison culture must have toughened him. Late afternoon sunlight suddenly shone into the sitting room and illuminated a long bar of orange carpet.

Gorringe murmured, ‘I’m going to be sick.’

But he didn’t move, and nor did we. We were waiting for him to recover. Miranda was watching him with an expression of plain disgust that retracted her upper lip. This was what she had come here for, to see him, to really see him. But now what? She surely doubted there was anything meaningful that Gorringe could tell her. He suffered the failure of imagination that afflicted and enabled all rapists. When his weight was on Mariam, when she was pinned to the grass, when she was in his arms, he failed to imagine her fear. Even as he saw and heard and smelled it. The lifting curve of his arousal was not troubled by the idea of her terror. At that moment, she may as well have been a sex doll, a device, a machine. Or – I had Gorringe completely wrong. I had the mirror image of the truth. I was the one with the failed imagination: Gorringe knew the state of mind of his victim all too well. He entered her misery and thrilled to it, and it was precisely this triumph of imagining, of frenzied empathy, that drove his excitement into an exalted form of sexual hatred. I didn’t know which was worse or whether there was some sense in which both could be true. They seemed mutually exclusive to me. But I was certain that Gorringe didn’t know either and that he would have nothing to tell Miranda.

As the sun through the plate glass at our backs sank a little lower, the room was filling with light. The three of us sitting in a row on the sofa would have appeared as silhouettes to Gorringe. To us he was illuminated like a figure on a stage and it seemed appropriate when he, not Miranda, started to speak. He pressed his right hand against his chest with his left as though taking a vow of honesty. He had dropped the thuggish tone. Pain at this level was a tranquilliser, an enforcer, stripping the affectation out, coaxing his voice back to that of the undergraduate he might have become without Miranda’s intervention.

‘The guy who came to see you, Brian, was the one I shared a cell with. He was in for armed robbery. The prison was short-staffed so we were often locked up together for twenty-three hours a day. This was right at the beginning of my term. The worst time, everyone says, the first few months, when you don’t accept where you are and you can’t stop thinking about what you could have been doing and how you’re going to get out, and getting your appeal together and getting angry with the solicitor because nothing seems to be happening.

‘I was getting into all sorts of trouble. I mean fights. They told me I had anger problems and they were right. I thought because I was six two and played rugby in the second row I could look after myself. That was crap. I knew nothing about real fighting. I got my throat slashed and could have died.

‘I came to hate my cellmate, as you do when you’re shitting in the same bucket every day. I hated his whistling, his stinking teeth, his press-ups and jumping jacks. He was a vicious little runt. But somehow, in his case, I kept control of myself and he delivered my message once he was out. But I hated you ten times more. I used to lie on my bunk and burn with hatred. Hours on end. And here’s the thing and you might not believe it. I never connected you with the Indian girl.’

‘Her family was from Pakistan,’ Miranda said softly.

‘I didn’t know about your friendship. I just thought you were one of those spiteful man-hating bitches or you woke up the next morning and felt ashamed of yourself and decided to take it out on me. So I lay on my bunk and planned my revenge. I was going to save up the money and get someone to do the business for me.

‘Time passed. Brian got out. I was moved a couple of times and things began to settle into a kind of routine when the days are all the same and time begins to go faster. I went into a kind of depression. They gave me anger-management counselling. Round about that time, I began to be haunted or obsessed, not by you but by that girl.’

‘Her name was Mariam.’

‘I know that. I’d managed to put her right out of my mind.’

‘I can believe you.’

‘Now she was there all the time. And the terrible thing I did. And at night—’

Adam said, ‘Let’s have it. What terrible thing?’

He spelled it out, as though for dictation. ‘I attacked her. I raped her.’

‘And who was she?’

‘Mariam Malik.’

‘Date?’

‘The sixteenth of July 1978.’

‘Time?’

‘Around nine thirty in the evening.’

‘And who are you?’

Possibly, Gorringe feared what Adam might yet do to him. But he seemed eager rather than intimidated. He must have guessed there was a recording. He needed to tell us everything.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Tell us your name, address and date of birth.’

‘Peter Gorringe, 6 St Osmund’s Close, Salisbury. Eleventh of May 1960.’

‘Thank you.’

Then he resumed. His eyes were half closed against the light.

‘Two very important things happened to me. The first was more significant. It started out as a bit of a scam. But I don’t think it was chance. It was guided from the start. The rules were you could get more time out of your cell if you came on as all religious. A lot of us were on to it and the screws understood but they didn’t care. I put myself down as Church of England and started going every day to evensong. I still go every day, to the cathedral. At first, it was boring but better than the cell. Then a little less boring. Then I started to get drawn in. It was the vicar mostly, at least at the beginning, the Reverend Wilfred Murray, a big fellow with a Liverpool accent. He wasn’t scared of anyone, and that was something in a place like that. He started taking an interest in me when he saw I was serious. He sometimes dropped by my cell. He gave me passages to read from the Bible, mostly from the New Testament. After evensong on Thursdays he’d go through them with me and a few others. I never thought I’d find myself volunteering for a Bible-study group. And it wasn’t for the benefit of the parole board, the way it was for some. But the more I became aware of God’s presence in my life, the worse I felt about Mariam. I understood from Reverend Murray that I had a mountain to climb in coming to terms with what I’d done, that forgiveness was a long way off but that I could work towards it. He made me see what a monster I’d been.’

He paused. ‘At night, as soon as I closed my eyes, her face would be there.’

‘Your sleep was disrupted.’

He was immune to sarcasm, or pretended to be. ‘For months, I didn’t have a single night without nightmares.’

Adam said, ‘What was the second thing?’

‘It was a revelation. A friend from school came to see me. We had half an hour in the visitors’ room. He told me about the suicide and that was a shock. Then I learned that you were her friend, that you two were very close. So, revenge. I almost admired you for it. You were brilliant in court. No one dared not believe you. But that wasn’t the point. A few days later, when I’d talked this through with the vicar, that’s when I began to see it for what it was. It was simple. And not only that. It was right. You were the agent of retribution. Perhaps the right word is angel. Avenging angel.’

He shifted position and winced. His left hand cradled his broken wrist against his chest. He was looking at Miranda steadily. I felt her upper arm tighten against my own.

He said, ‘You were sent.’

She slumped, for the moment unable to speak.

‘Sent?’ I said.

‘No need to rage against a miscarriage of justice. I was already working through my punishment. God’s justice, realised through you. The scales were balanced – the crime I committed against the crime I was innocent of and sent down for. I dropped my appeal. The anger was gone. Well, mostly. I should have written to you. I meant to. I even went round to your dad’s place and got your address. But I let it drop. Who cared if I once wanted you dead? It was all over. I was getting my life together. I went to Germany to stay with my parents – my dad’s working there. Then back here to start a new life.’

‘Meaning?’ Adam said.

‘Job interviews. In sales. And living in God’s grace.’

I was beginning to understand why Gorringe was prepared to name his crime and identify himself out loud. Fatalism. He wanted forgiveness. He had served his time. What happened now was God’s will.

She said, ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why you raped her.’

He stared at her, faintly amused that she could be so unworldly. ‘All right. She was beautiful and I desired her and everything else got blotted out. That’s the way it happens.’

‘I know about desire. But if you really thought she was beautiful…’

‘Yes?’

‘Why rape her?’

They were looking at each other across a desert of hostile incomprehension. We were back at the beginning.

‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never said to anyone. When we were on the ground I was trying to calm her. I really was. If she’d just seen that moment in a different way, if she’d looked at me instead of twisting away, it could have been something—’

‘What?’

‘If she could have just relaxed a moment, I think we would’ve crossed into… you know.’

Miranda was pushing herself up from out of the soft clammy sofa. Her voice trembled. ‘Don’t you dare even think it. Don’t you dare!’ Then, in a whisper, ‘Oh God. I’m going to…’

She hurried from the room. We heard her yank the front door open and then, her retching and the liquid sound of copious vomit. I went after her and Adam followed me. There was no question, this was a visceral response. But I was sure she had the door open before she started to be sick. She could easily have turned her head to the left or right and thrown up on the lawn or the flower bed. Instead, the contents of her stomach, the colourful buffet lunch, lay thickly over the hall carpet and the threshold. She had stood outside the house and vomited in. She said later that she was helpless, out of control, but I always thought, or preferred to think, that here, at our feet as we left, was the avenging angel’s parting shot. It was tricky, stepping over it.