Outline: A Novel

IX

The assignment was to write a story involving an animal, but not all of them had completed it. Christos had invited them to go Lindy Hop dancing the previous evening; it had been a late and exhausting night, though Christos himself appeared unaffected. He sat there beaming with his arms folded, proud and fresh, laughing startlingly and loudly at their observations concerning the evening’s events. He had got up early to write his story, he said, though he had found it hard to introduce an animal into his chosen subject-matter, which was the hypocrisy of our religious leaders and the failure of public commentators to subject them to the proper scrutiny. How would ordinary people ever become politicised, if the intellectuals of our time didn’t show them the way? This was something about which he and his close friend Maria, incidentally, disagreed. She was an adherent of the philosophy of persuasion: it sometimes did more harm than good, she said, to try to force people to recognise unpleasant truths. One had to stay close to the line of things, close but separate, like a swallow swooping over the lineaments of the landscape, describing but never landing.

So he had struggled, Christos said, to bring an animal into his account of the scandalous conduct of two orthodox bishops at a recent public debate. But then it had occurred to him that this was perhaps what I had intended. I had wanted, in other words, to present him with an obstruction that would prevent him from going the way he was naturally inclined to go, and would force him to choose another route. But try as he might he could not think of any way of getting an animal into the debating chamber of a public building, where it had no right to be. Also his mother kept disturbing him by coming in and out of the dining room, the room in their small apartment that was least often used and where, consequently, he usually did his studies, spreading his books and papers all over the old mahogany table that had stood there for as long as he could remember. Today, however, she had asked him to clear his things away. A number of family members were coming to dinner and she wanted to clean the room thoroughly in preparation for their arrival. He asked her, with some irritation, to leave him be — I’m trying to write, he said, how can I write without my books and papers and with you coming in all the time? He had completely forgotten about this dinner, which had been arranged a long time ago, and was being held in honour of his aunt and uncle and cousins from California, who had returned to Greece for their first visit in many years. His mother was not, he knew, looking forward to the occasion: this particular branch of the family was boastful and ostentatious, and his aunt and uncle were forever writing letters to their Greek relatives that pretended to be loving and concerned but were really just opportunities for them to brag about how much money they had in America, how big their car was, how they had just had a new swimming pool installed and how they were too busy to come home for a visit. And so, as he had said, many years had passed in which he and his mother had not laid eyes on these relatives, except in the photographs they regularly sent, which showed them standing in bright sunlight beside their house and car, or else at Disneyland or outside the Hard Rock Cafe, or in some other place where you could see the big Hollywood sign in the background. They also sent photographs of their children, graduating from this college or that, in mortar boards and furred gowns, baring their expensive teeth against a fake blue sky. His mother displayed these photographs dutifully on the sideboard; one day, he knew she hoped, Christos too would complete his degree and she would be able to put his photograph beside them. The photograph Christos hated most of all was the one of his handsome, grinning, muscular cousin Nicky, which showed him in some sort of desert setting with a giant snake — a boa constrictor — draped across his shoulders. This image of superior manhood had often haunted him from the sideboard, and looking at it now, he no longer felt annoyed with his mother: he felt sympathy for her, and wished that he had been a better and braver son. So he stopped what he was doing and helped her clear things away.

Georgeou put his hand up. He had observed, he said, that where yesterday we had the windows open and the door shut, today it was the other way around: the windows were sealed, and the door to the corridor was significantly ajar. Also, he wondered whether I had noticed that the clock had moved. It was no longer on the wall to the left, but had taken up the mirroring position on the wall opposite. There was certainly an explanation for the movement of the clock, but it was hard to think of what it might be. If an explanation occurred to me perhaps I would inform him, because as things stood he found the situation disturbing.

He had finished writing his story, Christos continued, on the bus here, after he had realised that the photograph of Nicky had after all given him a way out of his dilemma. One of the bishops has a hallucination, there in the debating chamber: he sees a huge snake, draped over the shoulders of the other bishop, and realises that this snake symbolises the hypocrisy and lies they have both been spouting. He vows then and there to be a better man, to tell only the truth, and never to mislead and deceive his people again.

Christos folded his arms again and beamed around the room. Presently Clio, the pianist, put her hand up. She said that she too had found it difficult to write about an animal. She knew nothing about animals: she had never even had a pet. It would have been impossible, given the exacting nature of her practice schedule even in early childhood. She would have been unable to look after it and give it the attention it needed. But the assignment had caused her to notice things differently: walking home, she had not looked at the things she usually looked at but instead had become, as she walked, increasingly aware of birds, not just the sight of them but also their sound, which, once she attuned her ear to it, she realised she could hear constantly all around her. She remembered then a piece of music she had not listened to for a long time, by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom.

It was interesting to consider, Georgeou said, that the role of the artist might merely be that of recording sequences, such as a computer could one day be programmed to do. Even the question of personal style could presumably be broken down as sequential, from a finite number of alternatives. He sometimes wondered whether a computer would be invented that was influenced by its own enormous knowledge. It would be very interesting, he said, to meet such a computer. But he sensed that any system of representation could be undone simply by the violation of its own rules. He himself, for instance, leaving the house this morning had noticed, perched on the verge beside the road, a small bird that could only have been described as being lost in thought. It was gazing at something in that unfocused way one observes in people trying, for example, to work out a mathematical problem in their heads, and Georgeou had walked right up to it while it remained completely oblivious. He could have reached out and grabbed it with his hand. Then, finally, it noticed he was there and nearly jumped out of its skin. He did have some concerns about that bird’s capacity for survival, however. His own story, he added, was based entirely on his personal experience, and described in detail a conversation he had had with his aunt, who was researching mutations in certain particles at a scientific institute in Dubai. His only invention had been the addition of a lizard, which had not been there in reality, but which in the story his aunt kept tucked safely under her arm while they spoke. He had showed the story to his father, who had confirmed that all the details were accurate, and who said he had enjoyed witnessing the conversation, whose subject interested him, for a second time. He described the lizard, if Georgeou remembered the phrase correctly, as a nice touch.

Sylvia said she had written nothing at all. Her contribution yesterday, if I recalled, had in fact concerned an animal, the small white dog she had seen perched on the shoulder of the tall dark man. But after the others had spoken she wished she had chosen something more personal, something that would have allowed her to express an aspect of her own self, rather than a sight that was asking, as it were, to be seen. She had looked out for that man again on the train home, as it happened, feeling that she had something to say to him. She wanted to tell him to take the dog off his shoulder and let it walk, or better still get a dog that was ordinary and ugly, so that people like her wouldn’t feel so distracted from their own lives. She resented him for his attention-seeking behaviour and for the fact that he had made her feel so uninteresting; and now here she was, mentioning him in class for the second time!

Sylvia had a small, pretty, anxious face, and great quantities of ash-coloured hair worn in maidenly rolls and tresses — which she touched and patted frequently — around her shoulders. In any case, she continued, she obviously didn’t see him again on the way home, because life wasn’t like that: she returned to her apartment, which since she lives alone was exactly as she had left it that morning. The telephone rang. It was her mother, who always phones her at that time. How was school today, her mother wanted to know. Sylvia works as a teacher of English literature, at a school in the suburbs of Athens. Her mother had forgotten she had the week off to do the writing course. ‘I reminded her of what I had been doing,’ Sylvia said. ‘Of course, my mother is very sceptical about writing, so it’s typical that she wouldn’t remember. You should have gone on holiday instead, she said, you should have gone out to one of the islands with some friends. You should be living, she said, not spending more time thinking about books. To change the subject I said to her, Mum, tell me something you’ve noticed today. What would I have noticed? she said. I’ve spent all day in the house, waiting for the man to come and fix the washing machine. He never even turned up, she said. After our conversation I went and looked at my computer. I had set my students an essay assignment, and the deadline had now passed, but when I checked my emails I saw that not a single one of them had sent the essay. It was an essay about Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, the book that has inspired me more than anything else in my life, and none of them had a single word to say about it.

‘I went and stood in my kitchen,’ she continued, ‘and thought about trying to write a story. But all I could think of was a line describing the exact moment I was living in: a woman stood in her kitchen and thought about trying to write a story. The problem was that the line didn’t connect to any other line. It hadn’t come from anywhere and it wasn’t going anywhere either, any more than I was going anywhere by just standing in my kitchen. So I went to the other room and took a book off the shelf, a book of short stories by D. H. Lawrence. D. H. Lawrence is my favourite writer,’ she said. ‘In fact, even though he’s dead, in a way I think he is the person I love most in all the world. I would like to be a D. H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try. The story I started to read’, she said, ‘was called “The Wintry Peacock”. It is an autobiographical story,’ she said, ‘in which Lawrence is staying in a remote part of the English countryside in winter, and one day when he is out on a walk he hears an unusual sound and discovers that it is a peacock trapped out on the hillside, submerged in the snow. He returns the bird to its owner, a strange woman at a nearby farm who is waiting for her husband to return home from the war.

‘At this point,’ she said, ‘I stopped reading: for the first time, I felt that Lawrence was going to fail to transport me out of my own life. Perhaps it was the snow, or the strangeness of the woman, or the peacock itself, but suddenly I felt that these events, and the world he described, had nothing to do with me, here in my modern flat in the heat of Athens. For some reason I couldn’t bear it any longer, the feeling that I was the helpless passenger of his vision, so I closed the book,’ she said, ‘and I went to bed.’

Sylvia stopped speaking. My phone rang on the table in front of me. I saw the number of Lydia at the mortgage company flashing on the screen, and I told the group that we would take a short break. I went out and stood in the corridor among the notice-boards. My heart was beating uncomfortably in my chest.

‘Is that Faye?’ Lydia said.

Yes, I said.

She asked me how I was today. She could hear from my dial tone that I was abroad, she said. Whereabouts are you? Athens, I said. That sounds nice, she said. She was sorry she hadn’t been in touch earlier. She’d been out of the office the last couple of days. A few of them in the department had been given some corporate seats for Wimbledon: yesterday she’d watched Nadal get knocked out, which was a big surprise. Anyway, she hoped it wasn’t going to spoil my holiday, but she had to tell me that the underwriters had rejected my application to increase my loan. They don’t need to give a reason, she said, when I asked her why. That was just their decision, based on the information they were provided with. As I say, she said, I hope it won’t affect your holiday too much. When I thanked her for calling to tell me, she said it had been no problem at all. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been with better news, she said.

I moved along the corridor and through the glass front doors at the entrance to the building and out into the ferocious heat of the street. I stood there in the glare while the cars and people passed, as though I was expecting something to happen or for some alternative to present itself. A woman in a polka-dot sun hat with an enormous camera hung on a strap around her neck asked me the way to the Binyaki Museum. I told her and then I returned inside and went back to the classroom and sat down. Georgeou asked me if everything was all right. He had noticed, he said, that I had closed the door, and wondered if that meant I now wanted the windows to be opened. He was happy to perform that service if so. I told him to go ahead. He bounded out of his chair with such eagerness that he knocked it backwards. Surprisingly deftly, Penelope shot out her hand to catch it, and set it carefully back on its feet. She had been certain, she said somewhat enigmatically, that she would have nothing whatsoever to bring to class today, except her dreams, which were often so lurid and strange she thought she ought to tell someone about them. But generally speaking it was not possible, she had accepted after yesterday’s class, for a person in her position to be a writer, someone whose time was not their own. And so she had spent the evening in the way she usually did, cooking dinner for her children and ministering to their ceaseless demands.

While they were eating the doorbell had rung: it was Stavros from next door, who had just dropped by to show them a puppy from the new litter his bitch had just produced. Of course the children were wild about this puppy: they left their food to get cold on its plates and went to stand around Stavros, begging in turn to be allowed to hold it. It was a very tiny puppy, its eyes barely open, and Stavros said they would have to be very careful, but he let each of them hold it one by one. ‘I watched each child’, she said, ‘become transformed, as it received the puppy into its arms, into a creature of the utmost gentleness and caution, so that it was almost possible to believe the puppy had brought about an actual refinement in their characters. Each of them stroked the little soft head with their fingers and whispered into its ears, and this would apparently have gone on and on had Stavros not said that he needed to go. The puppies, he mentioned, were for sale; and at these words the children began to bounce up and down with the most genuine, infectious excitement, so that much to my own astonishment,’ she said, ‘I began to feel excited too. The thought of relenting, and of the love I would receive if I did, was almost irresistible. Yet my knowledge of Stavros’s bitch, who is a fat and disagreeable animal, was stronger. No, I said to him, we weren’t going to have a dog; but I thanked him for showing it to us and he left. Afterwards the children were very disappointed. You always spoil everything, my son said to me. And it was only then, when the spell the puppy had cast had completely worn off, that logic returned to me, and with it a sense of reality that was so harsh and powerful it seemed to expose our household as mercilessly as if the roof had been torn off the building in which we stood.

‘I sent the children to their rooms, without finishing their supper, and with my hands trembling I sat at the kitchen table and began to write. I had in fact once bought them a puppy, you see, two years before, under circumstances almost indistinguishable from those I have just recounted, and the fact that we had returned to that same moment, having learned nothing, made me see our life and particularly the children themselves in the coldest possible light. It was, as I say, two years ago now: the dog was a very pretty animal we called Mimi, with a curly tobacco-coloured coat and eyes like two chocolates, and when she first came to live with us she was so tiny and charming that the work I had to do looking after her was balanced against the pleasure the children took in playing with her and showing her off to their friends. It could almost be said that I didn’t actually want them to have to clean up after Mimi, who made the most foul-smelling messes all over the house, for fear that their pleasure would be spoiled; but as Mimi grew bigger and more demanding I came to want them to take some responsibility for her, since it was through their choice — as I constantly told them — that we had got a dog in the first place. But very quickly they grew inured to these remarks: they didn’t want to take Mimi for walks or clean up after her; what’s more, they began to get annoyed by her barking, and by the fact that she would sometimes go into their rooms and create havoc and destroy their things. They didn’t even want her in the sitting room with them in the evenings, because she wouldn’t sit still on the sofa but paced around and around the room, obstructing their view of the television.

‘Mimi, as well as quickly growing to be far bigger and more energetic than I had expected, was also obsessed with food, and if I took my eye off her for a moment she was up on the kitchen counters, foraging and eating everything she could find. I quickly learned to put things away, but I had to be very vigilant, and also to remember to shut all the doors in the house so that she couldn’t go into the other rooms, doors the children were forever leaving open again; and of course I had to take her for walks, when she would pull me along so fast I thought my arm would come out of its socket. I could never let her off the lead, because her love for food sent her running off in all directions. Once she ran into the kitchen of a café by the park and was found by the furious chef eating a whole string of sausages he had left on the counter; another time she snatched the sandwich right out of the hand of a man who was sitting on a bench eating his lunch. Eventually I realised I would have to keep her tied to me forever while we were out, and that in the house I was similarly bound to her, and it began to dawn on me that in getting Mimi for my children I had, without much thought, entirely given away my freedom.

‘She was still a very pretty dog, and everybody noticed her. So long as I kept her on the lead, she would always receive the most lavish compliments from passers-by. Harassed as I was, I started to become curiously resentful and jealous of her beauty and of all the attention she got. I began, in short, to hate her, and one day, when she had been barking all afternoon and the children had refused to take her out, and I discovered her in the sitting room chewing to shreds a new cushion I had just bought while the children stared, unconcerned, at the television, I found myself seized by such an uncontrollable fury that I hit her. The children were deeply shocked and angry. They threw themselves on Mimi, to protect her from me; they looked at me as though I were a monster. But if I had become a monster, it was Mimi, I believed, who had made me one.

‘For a while they reminded me constantly of the incident, but gradually they forgot about it, and so one day under similar provocations it happened again, and then again, until my hitting Mimi became something they almost accepted. The dog herself began to avoid me; she looked at me with different eyes and became very devious, sneaking around the house destroying things, while the children developed a very slight coolness in their manner towards me, a new sort of distance, which liberated me in a way but also made my life less rewarding. Perhaps to compensate for this feeling and to try to close the distance between us, I decided to make a great fuss of my son’s birthday and stayed up half the night baking him a cake. It was a cake of the greatest beauty and extravagance, with chestnuts in the flour and shaved chocolate curls on top, and when it was finished I put it well out of Mimi’s reach and went to bed.

‘In the morning, after the children had gone to school, my sister stopped by to see me. In my sister’s company I am always a little distracted from my own purpose; I have a sense that I need to perform things for her, to present them to her, to show her my life rather than let her see it naturally, as it really is. And so I showed her the cake, which she would have seen in any case as she was coming to the birthday party later. Just then there was the sound of a car alarm from the street, and thinking it must be her car — which was new, and which she disliked parking outside my house because the area, she says, is not as safe as where she lives — she panicked and ran outside. I followed her, because as I have already said, when I am with my sister I see things from her point of view rather than my own, am compelled to enter her vision, as I used to be compelled to enter her room when we were children, always believing it to be superior to my own. And as we stood out in the street making sure that her car was intact, which of course it was, I became aware of this feeling of having deserted my own life, as once I would desert my room; and I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on knives that no one else can see.

‘I stood there while my sister talked, about her car and what might have set off the alarm, and felt this compelling pain of loneliness; in admitting which, I knew, I was also admitting the blackest vision of life. I knew, in other words, that something terrible would happen, was happening right then, and when we returned inside and found Mimi on the counter with her face thrust deep into the birthday cake, her jaws churning, I was not the slightest bit surprised. She looked up as we came in, frozen in the act, the chocolate curls still hanging around her muzzle; and then she seemed to make a decision, for instead of jumping off the counter and running away to hide, she looked me defiantly in the eye and bending over it again, thrust her face wolfishly into the cake once more to finish it off.

‘I crossed the kitchen and grabbed her by her collar. In front of my sister, I yanked her off the counter and sent her scrambling to the floor, and I proceeded to beat her while she yelped and struggled. The two of us fought, me panting and seeking to punch her as hard as I could, she writhing and yelping, until finally she succeeded in pulling her head free of the collar. She ran out of the kitchen, her claws scrabbling and sliding on the tiled floor, and into the hall, where the front door still stood open, and then out into the street, where she tore off up the pavement and disappeared.’

Penelope paused and placed her fingers first gently and then probingly to her temples.

‘All afternoon,’ she continued presently, ‘the telephone rang. Mimi, as I have said, was a very distinctive and beautiful dog, and she was well known to people in the area, as well as to my acquaintances elsewhere in Athens. And so people were calling me to tell me they had seen her running away. She was seen everywhere, running in the park and the shopping centre, past the dry cleaner and the dentist’s, past the hairdresser, past the bank, past the children’s school: she ran everywhere I had ever been forced to take her, past the houses of friends and the piano teacher’s house, the swimming pool and the library, the playground and the tennis courts, and everywhere she ran people looked up and saw her and picked up the telephone to tell me that they had seen her. Many of them had tried to catch her; some had given chase, and the window cleaner had driven after her for a while in his van, but no one had been able to catch her. Eventually she got to the train station, where my brother-in-law happened to be getting off a train: he phoned to say that he had seen her and tried to corner her, with the help of the other passengers and the station guards, and she had eluded their grasp. One of the guards had been slightly injured, colliding with a luggage trolley when he lunged to grab her tail; but in the end they had all watched her run off down the tracks, to where nobody knows.’

Penelope let out a great heaving breath and fell silent, her chest visibly moving up and down, her expression stricken. ‘That is the story I wrote,’ she said finally, ‘at the kitchen table last night, after the visit of Stavros and the puppy.’

Theo said it sounded like the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog in the first place. He himself had a pug, he said, and he had never experienced any difficulties.

At this, Marielle readied herself to speak. The effect was of a peacock bestirring its stiff feathers as it prepared to move the great fan of its tail. She had come dressed in cerise today, high-throated, with her yellow hair gathered up in a comb and a sort of mantilla of black lace around her shoulders.

‘Once I too bought my son a dog,’ she said in a shocked and quavering voice, ‘when he was a little child. He loved it madly, and while it was still a puppy it was run down before his eyes by a car in the street. He picked up its body and carried it back into the apartment, crying more wildly than I have ever known a person to cry. His character was completely ruined by that experience,’ she said. ‘He is now a cold and calculating man, concerned only with what he can get out of life. I myself put my trust in cats,’ she said, ‘who at least can settle the question of their own survival, and while they might lack the capacity for power and influence, and might be said to subsist on jealousies and a degree of selfishness, also possess uncanny instincts and a marked excellence in matters of taste.

‘My husband left me our cats,’ she continued, ‘in exchange for certain pre-Columbian artefacts he was extremely reluctant to lose sight of, but he claimed that a part of himself was left behind with them, to the extent that he almost feared being out in the world without the sense of guidance the cats provided. And it is true,’ she continued, ‘that his choices since then have been less blessed: he bought an etching by Klimt that afterwards was shown to be a fake, and has invested heavily in Dadaism, when anyone could have told him that public interest in that era was irreparably in decline. I, meanwhile, have been unable to avoid the most generous fondlings from the gods, even finding in the flea market a small bracelet in the form of a snake that I bought for fifty cents, and that my husband’s friend Arturo caught sight of on my arm when we happened to meet one day on the street. He took it away to his institute to analyse it, and when he returned it, told me it had come from the tomb itself at Mycenae and was quite priceless, a piece of information I am certain he will have passed on to my husband in the course of their nightly conversations at the Brettos Bar.

‘But cats, as I say, are jealous and discriminating creatures, and since my lover came to share my apartment they have been very slow to yield, despite his constant attentions to them, which as soon as his back is turned they instantly forget. He is unfortunately an untidy man, a philosopher, who leaves his books and papers everywhere, and while my apartment is not fragile in its beauty, it needs to be dressed a certain way to look its best. Everything is painted yellow, the colour of happiness and the sun but also, so my lover claims, the colour of madness, so that very often he needs to go out to the roof, where he stands and concentrates on the cerebral blue of the sky. While he is gone I feel the happiness returning; I start to put away his books, some of which are so heavy I can barely lift them with both hands. I have conceded, after a struggle, two shelves to him in my bookcase, and he kindly chose the ones at the bottom though I know he would have preferred the top. But the top shelves are high, and the works of Jürgen Habermas, of which my lover has a large collection, are as heavy as the stones they used to build the pyramids. Men went to their deaths, I tell my lover, in building these structures whose bases were so large and whose final point so small and distant; but Habermas is his field, he says, and at this stage of his life he will be offered no other to roam in. Is he a man or a pony? While he stands gazing on the roof this is the question I ask myself, almost nostalgic for my husband’s appalling nature, which made me run so fast I always slept well at night. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I retreat to my women friends, all of us weeping and weaving together, but then my lover will open the piano and play a tarantella, or bake a kid all afternoon in wine and cloves, and seduced by those sounds and smells I am back, lifting the rocks of Habermas and placing them on the shelves. But then one day I stopped, recognising that I couldn’t hold it off any longer and that disorder had to reign; I painted the walls in eau de nil, took my own books off the shelves and left them lying there, allowed the roses to wither and die in their jars. He was delirious and said this had been an important step. We went out to celebrate, and returned to find the cats amok in the fallen library amidst a snowstorm of pages, their sharp teeth ravaging the spines even as we watched, with the Chablis still in our veins. My novels and leather-tooled volumes were untouched: only Habermas had been attacked, his photograph torn from every frontispiece, great claw-marks scorched across The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. And so,’ she said in conclusion, ‘my lover has learned to put his books away; and no longer does he bake or open the piano, and for this mixed blessing that is the shrinkage of his persona I have the cats — if not perhaps also my husband — to thank.’

Was it not the case, said Aris — the boy who the previous day had mentioned the putrefying dog — that we use animals as pure reflections of human consciousness, while at the same time their existence exerts a sort of moral force by which human beings feel objectified and therefore safely contained? Like slaves, he said, or servants, in whose absence their masters would feel vulnerable. They watch us living; they prove that we are real; through them, we access the story of ourselves. In our interactions with them we — not they — are shown to be what we are. Surely — for human beings — the most important thing about an animal, he said, is that it can’t speak. His own story concerned a hamster he had when he was small. He used to watch it run in its cage. It had a wheel it ran around. It was always running — the wheel whirred and whirred. Yet it never went anywhere. He loved his hamster. He understood that if he loved it he had to set it free. The hamster ran away, and he never saw it again.

Georgeou informed me that the hour, according to the clock I could no longer see, because it was positioned directly behind my head, was now up. He had added on a few minutes for the time I had spent in the corridor: he hoped I was in agreement with that decision, which he had had to take alone, so as not to interrupt.

I thanked him for this information, and thanked the class for their stories, which, I said, had given me great pleasure. Rosa had produced a pink box tied with a ribbon, which she passed to me across the table. These were almond cakes, she said, that she had baked herself, from a recipe her grandmother had given her. I could take them away with me; or, if I preferred, I could share them out. She had baked enough for each member of the class to have one, though since Cassandra hadn’t turned up, there would be one left over. I untied the ribbon and opened the sweet-smelling box. Inside there were eleven little cakes, perfectly arranged in white frilled wrappers. I turned the box so that all of them could see what Rosa had done before passing them around. Georgeou said he was relieved to have been given the opportunity to examine the contents of the box, which he had noticed early on and had been somewhat anxious about, thinking there might be an animal inside.