Mr. Fox

THE TRAINING AT MADAME DE SILENTIO’S

Madame de Silentio takes in delinquent ruffians between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and turns them into world-class husbands by the time they are twenty-one. You’re admitted to Madame de Silentio’s Academy if you answer at least eighty-five percent of her entrance exam correctly, and you graduate with a certificate that is respected in every strata of polite society. No one can ever remember any of the questions that were on Madame de Silentio’s entrance exam. I know I can’t — I tried my best to fail the exam. I preferred not to be educated, fearing it wouldn’t suit me. Of course, I know better now. I won’t lie, it took me half a year, but I now realise how lucky I am to have this opportunity to become a man of true worth, to have the man I will be intercept the boy that I was.

What is her secret, you may ask. How did Madame de Silentio attain her ranking amongst the great educators of the modern world? It’s simple. Madame de Silentio knows what’s best for young people. She knows what’s appropriate. She refrains from cluttering our minds with information we don’t need to know. Here at Madame de Silentio’s our textbooks get straight to the point — European history is boiled down to a paragraph, with two sentences each for the histories of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Australasia doesn’t count. Young men at Madame de Silentio’s Academy learn practical skills that set us in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women. Here is a sample of the things we are taught:

Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotence.

It says in the prospectus that Madame de Silentio’s students eat, sleep, and breathe good husbandry. That’s true. We’re taught to ask ourselves a certain question when we wake up in the morning and just before we fall asleep: How can I make Her happy? “Her” being the terrible, wonderful goddess that we must simultaneously honour, obey, and rule (she’d like us to rule her sometimes, we’re told) — the future wife. In our Words of Love class we learn all the poems of Pablo Neruda by heart, and also Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields lyrics. Love Letters, a compulsory extracurricular course of study, involves a close reading of the letters of Héloïse and Abelard. Our Decisive Thinking examinations are conversations conducted before the entire class, and your grade depends not on the answer you give but on the tenacity with which you cling to your choice. You earn a grade A by demonstrating, without a hint of nervousness or irritation, that you are impervious to any external logic. You earn an A+ if you manage this whilst affecting a mild and pleasant demeanour.

We sleep eight to a dormitory, and our dormitory bedsteads are iron, with shapes from the end of days twisted into the headboards — lions lying alongside lambs, children caressing serpents. Some of the boys sit up in these dormitory beds and scream in the night, but then the matron comes with a cup of warm milk and puts a few drops of her special bittersweet medicine in it, and the screaming boy drinks deep and the trouble goes away. Madame de Silentio understands that becoming a man of true worth is a difficult process. And we understand that once we’re in the Academy we’ve got to stay here for as long as it takes — there’s no recourse to parents or guardians, as they’ve signed their rights to us away in their contract with Madame de Silentio, and it’s our own stupid fault for having been so unmanageable. Eighteen is the age at which any student is free to leave the Academy, but by then we’ve become used to the place. This is no philanthropic institution, mind you — the families of heiresses pay Madame de Silentio considerable sums of money, sums that we students can only guess at and whisper about, to ensure that they get the perfect husband for their precious Elaine, to ensure that their wayward Katherine is settled with the right life partner. The Academy is in many ways a business, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Madame de Silentio has found her niche, and the way of the world is such that if she did not demand recompense for her efforts she would receive none. So, good for Madame de Silentio.

Having recently been made Head Prefect, it’s my duty to write a new chapter of the handbook that each new pupil is given on his first day, that awful first day when you just think you’re not going to be able to stand it. I take this responsibility very seriously, just as seriously as I take keeping the juniors in order and being a good ambassador for the Academy when we have to leave the grounds to round up the runaways. I’ve consulted the annals of school history, and I found mention of an act of disobedience committed by two moderately promising students — it happened twenty-five years ago, and the consequences were quite grave. I conducted interviews with Madame de Silentio herself, and with those teachers who remembered what had happened, and I’ve pieced together a narrative that I’d like to try out on you. I think it makes an invaluable cautionary tale for any new boy who is thinking of defying our headmistress.

Charles Wolfe and Charlie Wulf met in their second year of studies at Madame de Silentio’s, when they were assigned neighbouring beds in the same dormitory. Charlie, at seventeen, was Charles’s elder by a year. By all accounts the boys took notice of the fact that they essentially had the same name. In diaries, and in correspondence intercepted by staff, each boy declared that there must be meaning in the similarity between their names. They felt they were brothers. Interesting, because they were very different.

Photographs reveal Charlie Wulf to have been a bit of a pretty boy. Eyes like great big puddles, Byronic waves of hair, the spare frame of a longtime drug addict — before joining the student body he had been forcibly and abruptly weaned off opium in our soundproof music room, which was placed off-limits for three weeks. It seems favouritism brought Charlie to the Academy. I refer to the letter written to Madame de Silentio a full year before he was admitted, in which his mother and father, taking turns to write a word each, explain that in the silence of the heart every parent chooses a favourite. In Mr. and Mrs. Wulf’s case they chose the same one, much to the jealousy and rage of their other nine children. Siblings always detect these things, but without proof there’s not a lot they can do. Charlie seemed to have been born an escapist; at the age of seven, having complained of a boredom that made him “feel sick in his tummy,” he broke into his father’s liquor cabinet and drank himself into a state of catalepsy. By the age of fifteen he was seeking oblivion in opium dens, and since his wealthy parents made him a separate allowance twice the size of that allotted to each of his siblings, Charlie was able to buy almost as much oblivion as he desired, running through a month’s allowance in less than a week and beatifically starving until the time came for the next installment. The letter from Mr. and Mrs. Wulf also lists certain diseases Charlie had contracted and been treated for, ending with a deadly scare that was the last straw. He’d been sent to rehabilitation clinics and boot camps, and each time he had escaped with the aid of his captors. Mr. and Mrs. Wulf believed Madame de Silentio’s Academy was the only institution without a trace of indulgence at its heart, and therefore the Academy was the only place that could clean their son up. They would give custody of their son over to Madame de Silentio if it would save his life. Charlie’s life shall be saved, Madame de Silentio assured them. Better than that — his life shall be made useful. Charlie Wulf was weak of character, consistently receiving D grades or lower for his Decisive Thinking. He was also a cheat when it came to exams, and a plagiarist when it came to essays — he was punished for the latter two faults twenty-seven times in his first year alone. These faults aside, he was well liked for his easy manner and the way he successfully avoided snitching on others, even when it was easier, perhaps even advantageous, to do so.

Charles Wolfe was fair-haired, and secretive. His features were crooked and unattractive. Much less is known about him, much more conjectured. Charles’s father was a government official in India; his household included several guards and a poison taster, all of whom were present at every meal. Major Wolfe’s very brief letter to Madame de Silentio, referring to Charles simply as “the boy,” indicates disgust at Charles’s habit of stealing things. Blue things — always blue things — the boy seems to reckon there isn’t enough blue in the world. See what you can do with him. Mr. Curie, one of our science teachers, recalls seeing Charles Wolfe leaning against the Academy railings during recreation, drinking Coca-Cola through a blue straw, with such a tough look in his eyes that no one dared mock the dainty way he took his refreshment. Mrs. Engels, one of our English Literature teachers, recounts her suspicion, unsupported by any documentation, that it had taken Charles Wolfe much longer than normal to learn how to speak. He seemed to have learnt to read long before he learnt to speak. Mrs. Engels says that she sometimes remarked on the unusual way Charles Wolfe formulated his sentences, and when she did he fell silent and seemed ashamed. Charles Wolfe held grudges. He wrote in his diary that he would like to kill Mrs. Engels. It seems Charles Wolfe was capable of hating with a single-mindedness that sometimes took him into trances. Subdue this, he wrote several times in his diary. Subdue this. Charles Wolfe took every prize and passed every test and exam with distinction. He was going to make a first-rate husband. The teachers weren’t sure about him, though. They kept an eye on him. There had been incidents in the first year — there had been no evidence that the incidents were connected to him. But still. We won’t blame them for their vigilance.

The grounds of the Academy are extensive. One asset we used to boast, but are now denied access to, is the lake. A thirty-year-old prospectus shows a group of prefects boating on the lake as a treat, but the lake has a dark and forbidding aspect, and the prefects don’t seem to be having much fun. The boys were allowed to boat occasionally, but they were forbidden to swim. And Charles and Charlie seem to have been magnetised by the lake. The water is very green and has a sweet taste, both boys wrote in their diaries, at different times. Exactly the same phrase at different times. Charles Wolfe goes on to conjecture that it’s a vial of the lake water that the matron carries around with her and uses when someone needs medicine in his milk. He notes that after a few mouthfuls of the lake water you “feel fine. Like a king.” He also notes that Charlie Wulf guzzled the lake water in a manner that worried him slightly. If you’re wondering about the diaries, Madame de Silentio insists that we keep them, and that we write full accounts of our thoughts and our days. Then she spends all Sunday reading them. It’s a tricky business, writing the diaries. Madame de Silentio doesn’t want to be acknowledged in our diaries, so we have to write them as if we don’t know anyone’s going to read them. It’s like prayer, somehow. She never comments or acts on what she reads in our diaries, no matter what’s in there — that makes it even more like prayer.

In his diary, Charlie, a weak swimmer, records the afternoon he leant too far into that sweet green taste and fell: Into the shock of the water. My mouth opened and the lake rushed into me, a strong, cold, never-ending arm rammed down my throat. I didn’t know you could fall like that inside a body of water, that when you fall it’s as hard and helpless a thing as falling through air. Charles Wolfe dived and retrieved his pathetic friend, and they both saw something incredible. I say incredible even though during my interview with her Madame de Silentio shrugged and spoke of it as something quite commonplace. In swimming to shore, the boys stirred the water with open eyes, and beneath them they saw a bed of silt and rock with a shape pressed into it. Each stroke was firm and clear, even the gap between the emaciated thighs. It was a man down there. A man trapped at the bottom of the lake, wrapped round and round with a great rusty padlocked chain. His face seemed very white and stiff to them at first, then they realised that a mask had been forced over it — a commedia dell’arte mask, with its thick ivory grimace. Under the weight of all that water, the man was alive, and he saw them seeing him, and he struggled, and struggled. “Yes, I had a prisoner out there,” Madame de Silentio says. “Thought it was the safest place, but no. Reynardine was his name. No use dwelling on all that, though. Won’t do a blind bit of good.”

The next seven days of each boy’s diary hold the dutifully scrawled lines: “Nothing today,” the bare minimum required to meet Madame de Silentio’s demand that we record something every day. Matron Seacole, who has since retired, very kindly responded to my written enquiry with the recollection that Charlie Wulf kept the dormitory up three nights in a row with the shouting and kicking he did in his sleep, and had to be dosed a total of ten times. Charles Wolfe was wakeful but didn’t fuss and said he was fine. The boys wrote notes to each other, in a code that I have been unsuccessful in cracking. I can draw no firm conclusions as to what was happening inside the heads of these boys during the seven days of what they described as “nothing.” Charlie’s schoolwork slipped badly. Charles’s schoolwork remained at an excellent standard.

On the eighth day, both boys meticulously recorded a “conversation with a prisoner” in their diaries. They had learnt the prisoner’s name, and they had learnt that he had been a prisoner a long time, longer than he could remember. They had learnt that Madame de Silentio had imprisoned this man, and that the man wished to be freed. And they wished to free him.

Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote in red ink, beneath that day’s diary entry. Why did you do this to Reynardine?

Madame de Silentio stuck to her policy of not responding to diary entries.

The teachers suggested keeping a close watch on the boys, but Madame de Silentio insisted that they were intelligent boys undergoing a thought experiment, that they were not seriously planning to do anything.

The teachers kept the boys under close observation anyway.

Charles and Charlie didn’t return to the lake for quite some time. If it were not for the fact that they knew the man’s name was Reynardine, I would say the “conversation with a prisoner” recorded in their diaries is a fabrication, and an artless one at that. It looks fake to me; the tone of the exchange is almost unbearably stilted. But then the entire situation is unusual. And if the conversation was indeed a fabrication, it’s difficult to establish where else they could have got the name Reynardine from.

The boys must have developed some system of passing notes that made them feel safe — perhaps they found a hiding place — either way, they stopped corresponding in code. Flurries of extant notes are filled with guesses at the relationship between Reynardine and Madame de Silentio and, oddly, a semi-serious argument about Reynardine’s face beneath his mask. He must be like a freak — a fish, Charles wrote to Charlie. He can breathe down there. He can speak. Charles writes to Charlie of having swum down with a diving light between his teeth and spoken face-to-face with the prisoner, of having held the padlock that bound him in both hands, of testing the mechanism inside with a fingernail while Reynardine breathed bubbles in his ear. This in the darkness of three a.m., while the rest of the school — including the heavily dosed Charlie Wulf — snored. . I can’t imagine.

I reckon he looks like you or me, Charlie responded. The question is, which?

What do you mean by that? Charles wrote back to him, in very precise, very black lettering, the handwriting of hostility.

Thinking that the boys had been reduced to mere squabbling over aesthetics, the teachers relaxed. That was their mistake, because when the staff relaxed, the boys struck, bribing three first-years to report a sighting of rats in a first-floor broom cupboard and locking Madame de Silentio and Miss Fortescue, the deputy head teacher, into the broom cupboard when those two worthy ladies went marching in to investigate. After that Charlie stood guard outside Madame de Silentio’s office. Within, it was the work of a few minutes for Charles, the experienced thief of small items, to unobtrusively comb Madame de Silentio’s belongings and pocket two keys. He knew his padlocks but was too pressed for time to exercise proper Decisive Thinking — all he could be sure of was that one or the other of these keys would free Reynardine.

When imagining such relationships — prisoner and gaoler — you’d imagine that the gaoler is always aware of the whereabouts of the key that gives her her power. You — or I; let’s say I — imagine her stroking the key and gloating over it, taking it out nightly and admiring it. Not so. Madame de Silentio says she’d just tossed the key into a drawer somewhere and hadn’t looked for it for years. She didn’t miss it. Her office was in the order she’d left it in, and the baffling time spent in the broom cupboard was brief enough to be passed off as minor mischief on the part of the first-years, all of whom she punished with a severity disproportionate to the crime. “Can’t be slapdash with these things. Got to let them know it’s not on.”

And so Reynardine was freed. That simply, that easily, because Madame de Silentio was unable to believe that she could be disobeyed, Reynardine was freed by a boy who conspicuously asked for a dose and let the milk run out of his mouth and soak his pillow once the matron had walked down to the other end of the dormitory.

Reynardine rose up amongst the loose chains, his legs twitching, as he had forgotten how to walk. Neither of the boys record this; that’s just how I think those first few seconds of freedom were. He told Charles he would be gone by morning. He flexed his hands in a way that worried Charles but gave a gurgling laugh and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, boy.”

He told me he won’t forget what we did for him, Wolfe wrote to Wulf.

By the middle of the next day, Madame de Silentio knew that Reynardine had been released. This wasn’t due to any psychic connection; it was due to the local news. “The thing about Reynardine,” Madame de Silentio explains, “is that he is a woman-killer. He doesn’t do it joyously — oh, no, he does it with dolour and scowling. Women upset him. He said to me once that he hates their Ways, that from the moment he encounters one of them he’s forced to play a Role, and he won’t stand for it. Paranoid nonsense.” The night he was released he passed through Greenwich, killing and killing. Forty women gone between two-thirty and four a.m., and he went quickly on throughout the country, doing more. Worse, in the days that followed, other killers, killers of children and aged parents and love rivals and husbands, they, too, swelled the murder rate, as if inspired. A bad week in time, an awful week of red shivers, the streets empty of civilians and full of police.

Madame de Silentio called the boys into her office and took the key back from Charles. Useless now, but still, it was hers. The boys didn’t know what they’d done, they didn’t connect this red week with Reynardine, until Madame de Silentio explained it to them.

For the rest of their time at the Academy they were in hell, without her even laying a finger on them or saying another reproving word to them. The two boys went around together, always together, without speaking to each other, their hair limp, their eyes bulging, their faces the faces of drowned men. Each day brought news of Reynardine’s work in the world. He didn’t look like what he was, Charlie Wulf wrote in his diary. That was his last entry before all the leavers’ diaries were handed in. Charles Wolfe didn’t mention the lake incident again.

Upon their graduation Madame de Silentio sold Charles to a beautiful woman named Helene. She had blue eyes, which it thrilled him to look into. He believed that the petty thievery of his childhood had simply been impatience for the day when he would have two blue eyes like these to adore. But Helene was haunted by her past self. She’d been a fat child; even her ankles had been fat. In a letter to Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote that Helene had a serious fit of the hysterics when she saw him making supper for her — he was frying fish fingers in oil. She was unable to accept a hot meal as a gesture of love; she was convinced Charles was trying to make her fat again. He was able to soothe her — our training covers all emergencies, but he wished he hadn’t had to draw upon it. Helene didn’t like introducing Charles to her friends, either, because she found him ugly. She left him at home, or if she entertained at home she left him skulking around in the kitchen. As a test, Charles went missing for two weeks, roaming London, sleeping under newspapers on park benches. When he came home, Helene spoke of a party she’d recently been to, running rapidly through a list of anecdotes connected to names he didn’t know, and she looked irritated when he asked her to slow down and explain who was who. “I already told you,” she said. She hadn’t noticed that he’d been gone. She’d probably come home from her parties and chattered away to thin air, believing that he was hidden in it somewhere, listening attentively. She hadn’t been worried at all during his fourteen-day absence, hadn’t looked for him.

“How can I be a better husband?” he asked her humbly.

Helene gave Charles Wolfe a mask to wear. A white mask. Not flat white; rather, a colour suggestive of earth, brilliant but faintly fibrous, as it is beneath the skin of a pear. The mask’s expression was neither happy nor sad. Its lips ran in a straight geometric line, a humanly impossible one. It was a heavy mask; it changed the way Charles held his head, and, by extension, it changed the way he moved. As long as Charles wore the mask, Helene allowed him to escort her to dinners out, friends’ weddings, etc. Helene’s friends tried to behave as if her masked husband didn’t bother them, but he bothered them tremendously. I suppose it’s difficult to find a face friendly if you see it every day and it never smiles at you.

Charlie Wulf. . Charlie Wulf was sold to a plainlooking woman. Plain but wholesome and good-hearted. Laurel. She turned her back on the frivolous pursuits of her class and trained as a nursery school teacher. She wore long skirts and always found a kind word and a hug for even the most tiresome of the children who played at her feet. Charlie had absorbed more training than anyone had credited him with, and he had no trouble speaking Words of Love to his wife. Laurel didn’t like to hear them. It was all too insincere. She worried about how they looked as a couple — on the street, in their home. She turned all the household mirrors to the wall. She heard people making fun of her, even though Charlie assured her that she was imagining things. She became jealous if he appeared to take too much of an interest in conversation with her female friends. Laurel wrote Charlie tearstained letters, turned him out of the house again and again, arrived unannounced at his hotel room in the early hours of the morning, just to check that he was alone. She couldn’t believe in him.

At his wits’ end, he asked her what he could do to help her believe.

And Laurel gave Charlie a mask to wear. .

Reynardine might have come to the rescue. (That would have been unfortunate for Mrs. Wolfe and Mrs. Wulf.) But favours aren’t always returned. Charles and Charlie don’t seem to have communicated at all after graduating. Not a word, not even an attempt at a word. They no longer had need of each other.

Or—

I realise I’m reading very finely between the lines here, but maybe those two had fallen in love, and wanted to spare each other the anxiety of speaking with subtext, each wondering what the other wanted. A boy of weak character and his strong-minded friend: Neither would have been likely to declare themselves first. It’s not impossible, is it, that what I’m saying could be true? It’s the abruptness more than anything. In the first place they seem to have chosen each other to confide in, out of all the boys in the Academy, when actually it would have been safer to do as most of us do and confide only in our diaries. For many months these two found something to say to each other every day. Then they married, and nothing. There are feelings of some kind in this matter, even if I don’t know what they are. The lake deeper than either of them had supposed, Charles kicking for shore with Charlie in his arms, the seconds without light or breath before both heads rose up and claimed them. .

I’m surprising myself. I’m not a romantic.

At any rate, I’ve derived some interest from finding out about my father’s time at the school. Before this I had been looking for answers. I’d wondered about the cloud that seems to hang over my name when it’s called in the register, and I’d wondered why the murder rate is so high nowadays, and I’d wondered about the mask, and about the difficulty my father had in looking at me and speaking to me. My mother didn’t speak to me, either — she was always busy; she sat on committees and things. Only after years of schooling do I talk as others do. Even now Mrs. Engels sometimes looks more thoughtful than usual when I volunteer an answer in class. And I wondered, of course, why I was sent here when I hadn’t done anything wrong. It must have just been Decisive Thinking.

Mr. and Mrs. Fox were hosting a dinner party. Downstairs, a motherly-looking woman with fat grey pin curls laid the table and checked on the various items being cooked in the kitchen. Upstairs, the Foxes were engaged in a dispute. Mrs. Fox had left her dressing-room blinds up, and Mary Foxe stood on a block of air and observed the scene with interest. Mrs. Fox had a lot of nice things, and she was careless with them — perfume bottles with plush atomisers peeped out of embroidered pillowcases. Silk stockings tangled themselves around ivory combs shaped like castles. A gleaming sable fur rippled in the light. Mrs. Fox seemed to be using it to protect the carpet from her pots of face cream. The lady herself sat at her dressing table, her hair swept up into a chignon, her eyes downturned. She spoke, then her husband spoke, then she spoke again, with stubborn emphasis, and all the while she toyed with a brooch, a pink-and-white gold fox, complete with filigreed brush tail. Its eyes were two garnets.

Mrs. Fox pinned the brooch to the collar of her dress, stood, and made for the door, which Mr. Fox promptly closed and leant against with his hands in his pockets.

Mrs. Fox said something sarcastic. Her husband looked into her eyes and said nothing. Mrs. Fox laughed nervously until the gaze ended. Then Mr. Fox saw Mary. He grimaced slightly, and winked. Mary grimaced and winked back.

“What do you care whether I wear it or not? No one will notice.”

“You know what our friends are, D. Everyone will notice. So shut up and put it on.”

“What did you say to me, St. John Fox?”

“Shut up and put it on.”

“You can’t tell me to—”

“Shut up and put it on. Or I’ll phone round and cancel.”

“Appearances,” Mrs. Fox said. “Got to keep up those appearances, haven’t we?”

“What do you want, a slap?” He made his offer in a tone of flat pragmatism, like an expert barterer at market; it was as if he was saying, Let’s face it, you’ll be lucky to get a slap.

“Ha, ha!” Mrs. Fox’s voice rang out scornfully. “Go ahead!”

He took a step towards her and she ducked behind a standing mirror. He moved it aside and scooped her up in his arms. Within moments Mr. Fox was pacing around the room with his lady wife over his shoulder, kicking ineffectually.

“I can’t wear it,” Mrs. Fox said breathlessly. “I told you.”

“Yes, you said it gives you a rash.” Mr. Fox exchanged disbelieving glances with Mary.

“It’s true.”

“Why now? You’ve had it awhile.”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t love me.”

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” Mr. Fox said, in a voice that was both hearty and hollow.

“What’s ridiculous is you bullying me like this. Put me down, please. I’ll wear the stupid ring — I’ll wear it, I said, even if it makes my finger swell up to the size of my head. Then you’ll be sorry.”

Having been set on her feet again, Mrs. Fox caught sight of her disarranged hair and wailed. Mr. Fox went downstairs and, as he spent a few minutes charmingly obstructing the caterer’s efforts to finalise preparations, Mary watched Mrs. Fox pick up her wedding ring and slip it onto her finger. Mary watched Mrs. Fox rub at her ring finger as she redid her chignon, pushing the gold band first above and then below her knuckle, until at last she yanked it off and crossed over to the sink in the next room, where she plunged her hand under a running tap, so relieved by the cold in the water that she fell to her knees and splashed her face and her dress. Mary would have liked to speak to the woman, to try and offer her some kind of assurance that she would be happy at a later date. The urge to do so became overwhelming, so she left. Mr. Fox was out in the garden, smoking his pipe. He murmured a pleasantry, which Mary ignored.

“Mr. Fox. You’re not going to change, are you?”

“I don’t think I will, no.” His tone was light but measured.

“For example — you’re working on something at the moment, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me what it is.”

He looked at her, considering. “You really want to know?”

“I really want to know.”

“Well. It’s about a man who works hard as an accountant all day and likes to go out driving late at night, to. . to relieve his stress. And one night he’s driving so fast he doesn’t see a woman who’s trying to hitchhike from the side of the lane, and he knocks her down. But he keeps going because he’s afraid he killed her and would be arrested and go to jail and all sorts of unpleasantness like that. The next night he stays at home. But the night after that he goes driving again, and, well, he more or less deliberately knocks someone down. Over six months he makes a real career of it, knocking down pedestrians, mainly hookers. . It really relieves his tensions—”

“Stop,” Mary said brusquely.

“But I haven’t even told you the best part yet.”

“You’ll always refuse to see — or refuse to admit that what you’re doing is building a world—”

He smiled slightly, and she amended her words: “What you’re doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, ‘Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,’ and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because ‘nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman’; it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.”

He shrugged. “These are our circumstances. I’m just trying to make sense of them,” he said.

Mary was silent.

“Everyone dies.” He smiled crookedly. “I doubt it’s ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?”

“Yes!” She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been wasting your time,” Mr. Fox said softly. The darkness in the garden absorbed the blue-black mane of his hair and made it look as if the sides of his face and the top of his head had been chiselled away.

He asked her: “Do you want to stop playing?”

Mary began to answer him, but the guests arrived, in pairs. Three couples in all, and each brought wine, even though their hosts had plenty waiting. A blonde woman named Greta was very huffy with Mr. Fox, refused to surrender her cheek for a greeting kiss but somehow made a joke of it. Her husband, a sleek blond man with a strong jaw, touched Mrs. Fox’s arm as he kissed her hello. The blond man’s accent had the slightest hint of the foreign to it, and everyone called him by his surname: Pizarsky. Even his wife called him that. Pizarsky. . Mary recognised the name. Her eyes widened.

Pizarsky looked at Mrs. Fox often throughout the evening, and each time he looked it was for a moment longer than was casual. His gaze was hesitant. Almost meek.

Nobody seemed to notice this but Mary, who saw it all from her place outside the window, her heels grinding into the flowerbed. Should Mr. Fox fear this Pizarsky, as a rival? The man was so quiet that it was impossible to tell. The other husbands vied endlessly for the most outrageous comment of the evening, planned a forthcoming fishing trip in great detail, and addressed Mrs. Fox with elaborate compliments on the food. Mrs. Fox, pale-faced, accepted their tributes without a single guilty blush. She displayed her wedding ring for five minutes or so, then kept her hand beneath the tabletop. She and the other women spoke of ascending and descending skirt hems, and how difficult it was to hit upon the right length. Their eyes danced with the satisfaction of secret society members talking in code. They interrupted one another. “Do you remember. .” they said. “Do you remember when. .”

After dinner, the six of them moved to the drawing room. Mr. Fox had a dab of sauce at the corner of his mouth — Mrs. Fox removed it with a swift, affectionate gesture and the corner of a very white napkin. Mr. Fox kissed Mrs. Fox’s hand. When the teasing started up he mildly remarked that he thought a man might kiss his wife in his own drawing room on a Sunday evening if he felt like it. The others laughed hysterically. They’d started out sipping genteelly from glasses, but as they got drunker the drinking grew more lavish, and was done straight from bottles. They played charades, very badly, and were unable to establish who had won.

To Mary it looked like a great deal of fun.