Pulse

The Limner

MR TUTTLE HAD been argumentative from the beginning: about the fee – twelve dollars – the size of the canvas, and the prospect to be shown through the window. Fortunately, there had been swift accord about the pose and the costume. Over these, Wadsworth was happy to oblige the collector of customs; happy also to give him the appearance, as far as it was within his skill, of a gentleman. That was, after all, his business. He was a limner, but also an artisan, and paid at an artisan’s rate to produce what suited the client. In thirty years, few would remember what the collector of customs had looked like; the only relic of his physical presence after he had met his Maker would be this portrait. And in Wadsworth’s experience, clients held it more important to be pictured as sober, God-fearing men and women than they did to be offered a true likeness. This was not a matter that perturbed him.

From the edge of his eye, Wadsworth became aware that his client had spoken, but did not divert his gaze from the tip of his brush. Instead he pointed to the bound notebook in which so many sitters had written comments, expressed their praise and blame, wisdom and fatuity. He might as well open the book at any page and ask his client to identify a remark left by a predecessor ten or twenty years before. The opinions of this collector of customs so far had been as predictable as his waistcoat buttons, if less interesting. Fortunately, Wadsworth was paid to represent waistcoats rather than opinions. Of course, it was more complicated than this: to represent the waistcoat, and the wig, and the breeches, was to represent an opinion, indeed a whole corpus of them. The waistcoat and breeches showed the body beneath, as the wig and hat showed the brain beneath; though in some cases it was a pictorial exaggeration to suggest that any brains lay beneath.

He would be happy to leave this town, to pack his brushes and canvases, his pigments and palette, into the small cart, to saddle his mare and then take the forest trails which in three days would lead him home. There he would rest, and reflect, and perhaps decide to live differently, without this constant travail of the itinerant. A pedlar’s life; also a supplicant’s. As always, he had come to this town, taken lodgings by the night, and placed an advertisement in the newspaper, indicating his competence, his prices and his availability. ‘If no application is made within six days,’ the advertisement ended, ‘Mr Wadsworth will quit the town.’ He had painted the small daughter of a dry-goods salesman, and then Deacon Zebediah Harries, who had given him Christian hospitality in his house, and recommended him to the collector of customs.

Mr Tuttle had not offered lodging; but the limner willingly slept in the stable with his mare for company, and ate in the kitchen. And then there had been that incident on the third evening, against which he had failed – or felt unable – to protest. It had made him sleep uneasily. It had wounded him too, if the truth were known. He ought to have written the collector down for an oaf and a bully – he had painted enough in his years – and forgotten the matter. Perhaps he should indeed consider his retirement, let his mare grow fat, and live from what crops he could grow and what farmstock he could raise. He could always paint windows and doors for a trade instead of people; he would not judge this an indignity.

Late on the first morning, Wadsworth had been obliged to introduce the collector of customs to the notebook. The fellow, like many another, had imagined that merely opening his mouth wider might be enough to effect communication. Wadsworth had watched the pen travel across the page, and then the forefinger tap impatiently. ‘If God is merciful,’ the man wrote, ‘perhaps in Heaven you will hear.’ In reply, he had half-smiled, and given a brief nod, from which surprise and gratitude might be inferred. He had read the thought many times before. Often it was a true expression of Christian feeling and sympathetic hope; occasionally, as now, it represented scarce-concealed dismay that the world contained those with such frustrating deformities. Mr Tuttle was among those masters who preferred their servants to be mute, deaf and blind – except when his convenience suited the matter otherwise. Of course, masters and servants had become citizens and hired help once the juster republic had declared itself. But masters and servants did not thereby die out; nor did the essential inclinations of man.

Wadsworth did not think he was judging the collector in an un-Christian manner. His opinion had been forged on first contact, and confirmed on that third evening. The incident had been the crueller in that it involved a child, a garden boy who had scarcely entered the years of understanding. The limner always felt tenderly towards children: for themselves, for the grateful fact that they overlooked his deformity, and also because he had no issue himself. He had never known the company of a wife. Perhaps he might yet do so, though he would have to ensure that she was beyond childbearing years. He could not inflict his deformity on others. Some had tried explaining that his fears were unnecessary, since the affliction had arrived not at birth, but after an attack of the spotted fever when he was a boy of five. Further, they pressed, had he not made his way in the world, and might not a son of his, howsoever constructed, do likewise? Perhaps that would be the case, but what of a daughter? The notion of a girl living as an outcast was too much for him. True, she might stay at home, and there would be a shared sympathy between them. But what would happen to such a child after his death?

No, he would go home and paint his mare. This had always been his intention, and perhaps now he would execute it. She had been his companion for twelve years, understood him easily, and took no heed of the noises that issued from his mouth when they were alone in the forest. His plan had been this: to paint her, on the same size of canvas used for Mr Tuttle, though turned to make an oblong; and afterwards, to cast a blanket over the picture and uncover it only on the mare’s death. It was presumptuous to compare the daily reality of God’s living creation with a human simulacrum by an inadequate hand – even if this was the very purpose for which his clients employed him.

He did not expect it would be easy to paint the mare. She would lack the patience, and the vanity, to pose for him, with one hoof proudly advanced. But then, neither would his mare have the vanity to come round and examine the canvas even as he worked on it. The collector of customs was now doing so, leaning over his shoulder, peering and pointing. There was something he did not approve. Wadsworth glanced upwards, from the immobile face to the mobile one. Even though he had a distant memory of speaking and hearing, and had been taught his letters, he had never learnt the facility of reading words upon the tongue. Wadsworth raised the narrowest of his brushes from the waistcoat button’s boss, and transferred his eye to the notebook as the collector dipped his pen. ‘More dignity,’ the man wrote, and then underlined the words.

Wadsworth felt that he had already given Mr Tuttle dignity enough. He had increased his height, reduced his belly, ignored the hairy moles on the fellow’s neck, and generally attempted to represent surliness as diligence, irascibility as moral principle. And now he wanted more of it! This was an un-Christian demand, and it would be an un-Christian act on Wadsworth’s part to accede to it. It would do the man no service in God’s eyes if the limner allowed him to appear puffed up with all the dignity he demanded.

He had painted infants, children, men and women, and even corpses. Three times he had urged his mare to a deathbed where he was asked to perform resuscitation – to represent as living someone he had just met as dead. If he could do that, surely he should be able to render the quickness of his mare as she shook her tail against the flies, or impatiently raised her neck while he prepared the little painting cart, or pricked her ears as he made noises to the forest.

At one time he had tried to make himself understood to his fellow mortals by gesture and by sound. It was true that a few simple actions could be easily imitated: he could show, for example, how a client might wish to stand. But other gestures often resulted in humiliating games of guessing; while the sounds he was able to utter failed to establish either his requirements or his shared nature as a human being, part of the Almighty’s work, if differently made. Women judged the noises he made embarrassing, children found them a source of benign interest, men a proof of imbecility. He had tried to advance in this way, but had not succeeded, and so he had retreated into the muteness they expected, and perhaps preferred. It was at this point that he purchased his calfskin notebook, in which all human statement and opinion recurred. ‘Do you think, Sir, there will be painting in Heaven?’ ‘Do you think, Sir, there will be hearing in Heaven?’

But his understanding of men, such as it had developed, came less from what they wrote down, more from his mute observation. Men – and women too – imagined that they could alter their voice and meaning without it showing in their face. In this they were much deceived. His own face, as he observed the human carnival, was as inexpressive as his tongue; but his eye told him more than they could guess. Formerly, he had carried, inside his notebook, a set of handwritten cards, bearing useful responses, necessary suggestions, and civil corrections to what was being proposed. He even had one special card, for when he was being condescended to by his interlocutor beyond what he found proper. It read: ‘Sir, the understanding does not cease to function when the portals of the mind are blocked.’ This was sometimes accepted as a just rebuke, sometimes held to be an impertinence from a mere artisan who slept in the stable. Wadsworth had abandoned its use, not because of either such response, but because it admitted too much knowledge. Those in the world of tongue held all the advantages: they were his paymasters, they wielded authority, they entered society, they exchanged thoughts and opinions naturally. Though, for all this, Wadsworth did not see that speaking was in itself a promoter of virtue. His own advantages were only two: that he could represent on canvas those who spoke, and could silently observe their meaning. It would be foolish to give away this second advantage.

The business with the piano, for instance. Wadsworth had first enquired, by pointing to his fee scale, if the collector of customs wished for a portrait of the entire family, matching portraits of himself and his wife, or a joint portrait, with perhaps miniatures of the children. Mr Tuttle, without looking at his wife, had pointed to his own breast, and written on the fee sheet, ‘Myself alone.’ Then he had glanced at his wife, put one hand to his chin, and added, ‘Beside the piano.’ Wadsworth had noticed the handsome rosewood instrument and asked with a gesture if he might go across to it. Whereupon he demonstrated several poses: from sitting informally beside the open keyboard with a favourite song on display, to standing more formally beside the instrument. Tuttle had taken Wadsworth’s place, arranged himself, advanced one foot, and then, after consideration, closed the lid of the keyboard. Wadsworth deduced from this that only Mrs Tuttle played the piano; further, that Tuttle’s desire to include it was an indirect way of including her in the portrait. Indirect, and also less expensive.

The limner had shown the collector of customs some miniatures of children, hoping to change his mind, but Tuttle merely shook his head. Wadsworth was disappointed, partly for reasons of money, but more because his delight in painting children had increased as that in painting their progenitors had declined. Children were more mobile than adults, more deliquescent of shape, it was true. But they also looked him in the eye, and when you were deaf you heard with your eyes. Children held his gaze, and he thereby perceived their nature. Adults often looked away, whether from modesty or a desire for concealment; while some, like the collector, stared back challengingly, with a false honesty, as if to say, Of course my eyes are concealing things, but you lack the discernment to realise it. Such clients judged Wadsworth’s affinity with children proof that he was as deficient in understanding as the children were. Whereas Wadsworth found in their affinity with him proof that they saw as clearly as he did.

When he had first taken up his trade, he had carried his brushes and pigments on his back, and walked the forest trails like a pedlar. He found himself on his own, reliant upon recommendation and advertisement. But he was industrious, and being possessed of a companionable nature, was grateful that his skill allowed him access to the lives of others. He would enter a household, and whether placed in the stable, quartered with the help, or, very occasionally, and only in the most Christian of dwellings, treated like a guest, he had, for those few days, a function and a recognition. This did not mean he was treated with any less condescension than other artisans; but at least he was being judged a normal human being, that is to say, one who merited condescension. He was happy, perhaps for the first time in his life.

And then, without any help beyond his own perceptions, he began to understand that he had more than just a function; he had strength of his own. This was not something those who employed him would admit; but his eyes told him that it was the case. Slowly he realised the truth of his craft: that the client was the master, except when he, James Wadsworth, was the client’s master. For a start, he was the client’s master when his eye discerned what the client would prefer him not to know. A husband’s contempt. A wife’s dissatisfaction. A deacon’s hypocrisy. A child’s suffering. A man’s complacency at having his wife’s money to spend. A husband’s eye for the hired girl. Large matters in small kingdoms.

And beyond this, he realised that, when he rose in the stable and brushed the horsehair from his clothes, then crossed to the house and took up a brush made from the hair of another animal, he became more than he was taken for. Those who sat for him and paid him did not truly know what their money would buy. They knew what had been agreed – the size of the canvas, the pose and the decorative elements (the bowl of strawberries, the bird on a string, the piano, the view from a window) – and from this agreement they inferred mastery. But this was the very moment at which mastery passed to the other side of the canvas. Hitherto in their lives they had seen themselves in looking glasses and hand mirrors, in the backs of spoons, and, dimly, in clear still water. It was even said that lovers were able to see their reflections in each other’s eyes; but the limner had no experience of this. Yet all such images depended upon the person in front of the glass, the spoon, the water, the eye. When Wadsworth provided his clients with their portraits, it was habitually the first time they had seen themselves as someone else saw them. Sometimes, when the picture was presented, the limner would detect a sudden chill passing over the subject’s skin, as if he were thinking: so this is how I truly am? It was a moment of unaccountable seriousness: this image was how he would be remembered when he was dead. And then there was a seriousness beyond even this. Wadsworth did not think himself presumptuous when his eye told him that often the subject’s next reflection was: and is this perhaps how the Almighty sees me too?

Those who did not have the modesty to be struck by such doubts tended to comport themselves as the collector now did: to ask for adjustments and improvements, to tell the limner that his hand and eye were faulty. Would they have the vanity to complain to God in His turn? ‘More dignity, more dignity.’ An instruction additionally repugnant given Mr Tuttle’s behaviour in the kitchen two nights ago.

Wadsworth had been taking his supper, content with his day’s labour. He had just finished the piano. The instrument’s narrow leg, which ran parallel to Tuttle’s more massive limb, ended in a gilt claw, which Wadsworth had had some trouble in rendering. But now he was able to refresh himself, to stretch by the fire, to feed, and to observe the society of the help. There were more of these than expected. A collector of customs might earn fifteen dollars a week, enough to keep a hired girl. Yet Tuttle also kept a cook and a boy to work the garden. Since the collector did not appear to be a man lavish with his own money, Wadsworth deduced that it was Mrs Tuttle’s portion which permitted such luxury of attention.

Once they became accustomed to his deformity, the help treated him easily, as if his deafness rendered him their equal. It was an equality Wadsworth was happy to concede. The garden boy, an elf with eyes of burnt umber, had taken to amusing him with tricks. It was as if he imagined that the limner, being shorn of words, thereby lacked amusement. This was not the case, but he indulged this indulgence of him and smiled as the boy turned cartwheels, stole up behind the cook while she bent to the bake oven, or played a guessing game with acorns hidden in his fists.

The limner had finished his broth and was warming himself before the fire – an element Mr Tuttle was not generous with elsewhere in the house – when an idea came to him. He drew a charred stick from the edge of the ashes, touched the garden boy on the shoulder to make him stay as he was, then pulled a drawing book from his pocket. The cook and the hired girl tried to watch what he was doing, but he held them away with a hand, as if to say that this particular trick, one he was offering in thanks for the boy’s own tricks, would not work if observed. It was a rough sketch – it could only be so, given the crudeness of the implement – but it contained some part of a likeness. He tore the page from the book and handed it to the boy. The child looked up at him with astonishment and gratitude, placed the sketch on the table, took Wadsworth’s drawing hand and kissed it. I should always paint children, the limner thought, looking the boy in the eye. He was almost unaware of the laughing tumult that broke out when the other two examined the drawing, and then of the silence which fell when the collector of customs, drawn by the sudden noise, entered the kitchen.

The limner watched as Tuttle stood there, one foot advanced, as in his portrait, his mouth opening and closing in a manner that did not suggest dignity. He watched as the cook and the girl rearranged themselves in more decorous attitudes. He watched as the boy, alert to his master’s gaze, picked up the drawing and modestly, proudly, handed it over. He watched as Tuttle took the paper calmly, examined it, glanced at the boy, then at Wadsworth, nodded, deliberately tore the sketch in four, placed it in the fire, waited until it blazed, said something further when in quarter-profile to the limner, and made his exit. He watched as the boy wept.

The portrait was finished: both rosewood piano and collector of customs gleamed. The small white customs house filled the window at Mr Tuttle’s elbow – not that there was any real window there, nor, if there had been, any customs house visible through it. Yet everyone understood this modest transcendence of reality. And perhaps the collector, in his own mind, was only asking for a similar transcendence of reality when he demanded more dignity. He was still leaning over Wadsworth, gesturing at the representation of his face, chest, leg. It did not matter in the least that the limner could not hear what he was saying. He knew exactly what was meant, and also how little it signified. Indeed, it was an advantage not to hear, for the particularities would doubtless have raised him to an even greater anger than that which he presently felt.

He reached for his notebook. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘we agreed upon five days for my labour. I must leave tomorrow morning by daybreak. We agreed that you would pay me tonight. Pay me, give me three candles, and by the morning I shall work such improvement as you require.’

It was rare for him to treat a client with so little deference. It would be bad for his reputation in the county; but he no longer cared. He offered the pen in the direction of Mr Tuttle, who did not deign to receive it. Instead, he left the room. While waiting, the limner examined his work. It was well done: the proportions pleasing, the colours harmonious, and the likeness within the bounds of honesty. The collector ought to be satisfied, posterity impressed, and his Maker – always assuming he was vouchsafed Heaven – not too rebuking.

Tuttle returned and handed over six dollars – half the fee – and two candles. Doubtless their cost would be deducted from the second half of the fee when it came to be paid. If it came to be paid. Wadsworth looked long at the portrait, which had come to assume for him equal reality with its fleshly subject, and then he made several decisions.

He took his supper as usual in the kitchen. His companions had been subdued the previous night. He did not think they blamed him for the incident with the garden boy; at most, they thought his presence had led to their own misjudgement, and so they were chastened. This, at any rate, was how Wadsworth saw matters, and he did not think their meaning would be clearer if he could hear speech or read lips; indeed, perhaps the opposite. If his notebook of men’s thoughts and observations was anything to judge by, the world’s knowledge of itself, when spoken and written down, did not amount to much.

This time, he selected a piece of charcoal more carefully, and with his pocket knife scraped its end to a semblance of sharpness. Then, as the boy sat opposite him, immobile more through apprehension than a sitter’s sense of duty, the limner drew him again. When he had finished, he tore out the sheet and, with the boy’s eyes upon him, mimed the act of concealing it beneath his shirt, and handed it across the table. The boy immediately did as he had seen, and smiled for the first time that evening. Next, sharpening his piece of charcoal before each task, Wadsworth drew the cook and the hired girl. Each took the sheet and concealed it without looking. Then he rose, shook their hands, embraced the garden boy, and returned to his night’s work.

More dignity, he repeated to himself as he lit the candles and took up his brush. Well then, a dignified man is one whose appearance implies a lifetime of thought; one whose brow expresses it. Yes, there was an improvement to be made there. He measured the distance between the eyebrow and the hairline, and at the midpoint, in line with the right eyeball, he developed the brow: an enlargement, a small mound, almost as if something was beginning to grow. Then he did the same above the left eye. Yes, that was better. But dignity was also to be inferred from the state of a man’s chin. Not that there was anything patently insufficient about Tuttle’s jawline. But perhaps the discernible beginnings of a beard might help – a few touches on each point of the chin. Nothing to cause immediate remark, let alone offence; merely an indication.

And perhaps another indication was required. He followed the collector’s sturdily dignified leg down its stockinged calf to the buckled shoe. Then he followed the parallel leg of the piano down from the closed keyboard lid to the gilt claw which had so delayed him. Perhaps that trouble could have been avoided? The collector had not specified that the piano be rendered exactly. If a little transcendence had been applied to the window and the customs house, why not to the piano as well? The more so, since the spectacle of a claw beside a customs man might suggest a grasping and rapacious nature, which no client would wish implied, whether there was evidence for it or no. Wadsworth therefore painted out the feline paw and replaced it with a quieter hoof, grey in colour and lightly bifurcated.

Habit and prudence urged him to snuff out the two candles he had been awarded; but the limner decided to leave them burning. They were his now – or at least, he would have paid for them soon. He washed his brushes in the kitchen, packed his painting box, saddled his mare and harnessed the little cart to her. She seemed as happy to leave as he. As they walked from the stable, he saw windows outlined by candlelight. He hauled himself into the saddle, the mare moved beneath him, and he began to feel cold air on his face. At daybreak, an hour from now, his penultimate portrait would be examined by the hired girl pinching out wasteful candles. He hoped that there would be painting in heaven, but more than this he hoped that there would be deafness in Heaven. The mare, soon to be the subject of his final portrait, found her own way to the trail. After a while, with Mr Tuttle’s house now far behind them, Wadsworth shouted into the silence of the forest.

Complicity

WHEN I was a hiccuping boy, my mother would fetch the back-door key, pull my collar away from my neck, and slip the cold metal down my back. At the time, I took this to be a normal medical – or maternal – procedure. Only later did I wonder if the cure worked merely by creating a diversion, or whether, perhaps, there was some more clinical explanation, whether one sense could directly affect another.

When I was a twenty-year-old, impossibly in love with a married woman who had no notion of my attachment and desire, I developed a skin condition whose name I no longer remember. My body turned scarlet from wrist to ankle, first itching beyond the power of calamine lotion, then lightly flaking, then fully peeling, until I had shed myself like some transmuting reptile. Bits of me fell into my shirt and trousers, into the bedclothes, on to the carpet. The only parts that didn’t burn and peel were my face, my hands and feet, and my groin. I didn’t ask the doctor why this was the case, and never told the woman of my love.

When I divorced, my doctor friend Ben made me show him my hands. I asked if modern medicine, as well as using leeches again, was also going back to palmistry; and if so, whether astrology and magnetism and the theory of humours could be far behind. He replied that he could tell from the colour of my hands and fingertips that I was drinking too much.

Later, wondering if I had been duped into cutting down, I asked him if he had been joking, or guessing. He turned my hands palm upwards, nodded in approval, and said he would now look out for unattached female medics who might not find me too repugnant.

The second time we met was at a party of Ben’s; she had brought her mother. Have you watched mothers and daughters at parties together – and tried to work out who is taking care of whom? The daughter giving Mum a bit of an outing, the mum watching for the sort of men her daughter attracts? Or both at the same time. Even if they’re playing best friends, there’s often an extra flicker of formality added to the relationship. Disapproval either goes unexpressed, or is exaggerated, with a roll of the eye and a theatrical moue and a ‘She never takes any notice of me, anyway’.

We were standing there, in a tight circle with a fourth person my memory has blanked. She was opposite me, and her mother on my left. I was trying to be myself, whatever that might be, and at the same time trying to make that self acceptable, if not actually pleasing. Pleasing to her mother, that is; I wasn’t bold enough to try to please her directly – at least, not in company. I can’t remember what we talked about, but it seemed to be going OK; perhaps the forgotten fourth helped. What I do remember was this: she had her right arm down by her side, and when she caught me looking in her general direction, she inconspicuously made the smoking gesture – you know, the first two fingers extended and slightly parted, the other fingers and thumb bent away out of sight. I thought: a doctor who smokes, that’s a good sign. While the conversation continued, I got out my packet of Marlboro Lights, and without looking – my activity, too, was at waist level – extracted a single cigarette, returned the pack to my pocket, took the cigarette by the filter tip, passed it round her mother’s back, felt it being taken from my fingers. Noting a slight pause on her part, I went back to my pocket, took out a book of matches, held it by the striking end, felt it being taken from my fingers, watched her light up, exhale, close the cover of the book-matches, pass it back behind her mother. I received it, delicately, by the same end I had given it out.

I should add that it was perfectly obvious to her mother what we were doing. But she didn’t say anything, sigh, give a prim glance, or rebuke me for being a drug-peddler. I instantly liked her for this, assuming she approved of this complicity between me and her daughter. She could, I suppose, have been deliberately holding back her disapproval for strategic reasons. But I didn’t care, or rather, didn’t think to care, preferring to assume approval. Yet this isn’t what I was trying to tell you. The point wasn’t about her Mum. The point was those three moments when an object had passed from one set of fingertips to another.

That was the nearest I got to her that evening, and for weeks to come.

Have you ever played that game where you sit in a circle and close your eyes, or are blindfolded, and have to guess what an object is just from the feel? And then you pass it on to the next person and they have to guess? Or, you keep your guesses to yourselves until you’ve all made up your minds, and then announce them at the same time?

Ben claims that once, when he played it, a mozzarella cheese was passed round and three people guessed it was a breast implant. That may just be medical students for you; but there’s something about closing your eyes which makes you more vulnerable, or drives the imagination to the gothic – especially if the object being passed is soft and squishy. In the times I played the game the most successful mystery item, the one guaranteed to freak somebody out, was a peeled lychee.

There was a production of King Lear I went to some years ago – ten, fifteen? – played against a bare-brick backdrop, with brutalistic staging. I can’t remember who directed it, or who played the title role; though I do remember the blinding of Gloucester. This is usually done with the earl pinioned and bent back over a chair. Cornwall says to his servants, ‘Fellows, hold the chair’, and then to Gloucester, ‘Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.’ One eye is put out, and Regan chillingly comments, ‘One side will mock another; the other too.’ Then, a moment later, the famous ‘Out, vile jelly’, and Gloucester is pulled upright, with stage gore dripping down his face.

In the production I saw, the blinding was done offstage. I seem to remember Gloucester’s legs flailing from one of the brick wings, though perhaps that is a later invention. But I do remember his screams, and finding them the more terrifying for being offstage: perhaps what you can’t see frightens you more than what you can. And then, after the first eye was put out, it was lobbed on to the stage. In my memory – in my mind’s eye – I see it rolling down the rake, faintly glistening. More screams, and another eye was tossed out from the wings.

They were – you guessed – peeled lychees. And then this happened: Cornwall, lanky and brutish, stamped back onstage, tracked down the rolling lychees, and set his foot on Gloucester’s eyes a second time.

Another game, from back when I was a hiccuping boy at primary school. In the morning break we used to race model cars in the asphalt playground. They were about four inches long, made from cast metal, and had real rubber tyres which you could roll off the wheels if you felt like simulating a pit stop. They were painted in the bright colours worn by the racing marques of the day: a scarlet Maserati, a green Vanwall, a blue… perhaps something French.

The game was simple: the car that went the furthest won. You pressed your thumb down on to the middle of the long bonnet, pulling your fingers up into a loose fist, and then, at a signal, transferred the pressure swiftly from a downwards to a forwards direction, sending your car off into the distance. There was a certain technique involved in obtaining maximum propulsion; the danger being that the knuckle of your middle finger, held a fraction of an inch above the playground’s surface, would scrape against the asphalt, tearing skin and costing you the race. The wound would scab up, and you would have to adjust your hand, dropping the knuckle of the third finger into the danger area. But this could never produce the same velocity, so you went back to the usual, middle-finger technique, often ripping off the newly formed scab.

Your parents never warn you about the right things, do they? Or perhaps they can only warn you about the immediate, local stuff. They bandage the knuckle of your right middle finger and warn against getting it infected. They explain about the dentist, and how the pain will wear off afterwards. They teach you the highway code – or at least, as it applies to junior pedestrians. My brother and I were once about to cross a road when our father put on a firm voice and instructed us to ‘Pause on the kerb.’ We were at that age when a primitive understanding of language is intersected by a kind of giddiness about its possibilities. We looked at one another, shouted, ‘Paws on the kerb’, then squatted down with our hands flat on the edge of the roadway. Our father thought this was very silly; no doubt he was already calculating how long the joke would run.

Nature warned us, our parents warned us. We understood about knuckle-scabbing and traffic. We learnt to look out for a loose stair carpet, because Grandma had once nearly taken a tumble when one of her brass stair rods, removed for annual polishing, hadn’t been replaced properly. We learnt about thin ice, and frostbite, and evil boys who put pebbles and sometimes even razor blades into snowballs – though none of these warnings was ever justified by events. We learnt about nettles and thistles, and how grass, which seemed such harmless stuff, could give you a sudden burn, like sandpaper. We were warned about knives and scissors and the danger of the untied shoelace. We were warned about strange men who might try to lure us into cars or lorries; though it took us years to work out that ‘strange’ did not mean ‘bizarre, hunchbacked, dribbling, goitred’ – or however we defined strangeness – but merely ‘unknown to us’. We were warned about bad boys and, later, bad girls. An embarrassed science master warned us against VD, misleadingly informing us that it was caused by ‘indiscriminate sexual intercourse’. We were warned about gluttony and sloth and letting down our school, about avarice and greed and letting down our family, about envy and wrath and letting down our country.

We were never warned about heartbreak.

I used the word ‘complicity’ a bit ago. I like the word. An unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of presense if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you ‘share the same interests’, or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, when we look back, we will fetishise and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes perhaps her, and, Yes perhaps him.

I tried to explain this to Ben, a few days after his party. Ben is a crossword-doer, a dictionary-lover, a pedant. He told me that ‘complicity’ means a shared involvement in a crime or sin or nefarious act. It means planning to do something bad.

I prefer to keep the term as I understand it. For me it means planning to do something good. She and I were both free adults, capable of making our own decisions. And nobody plans to do anything bad at that moment, do they?

We went to a film together. I had as yet no clear sense of her temperament and habits. Whether she was punctual or unpunctual, easy-going or quick-tempered, tolerant or severe, cheerful or depressive, sane or mad. That may sound a crude way of putting it; besides, understanding another human being is hardly a matter of box-ticking in which the answers stay the answers. It’s perfectly possible to be cheerful and depressive, easy-going and quick-tempered. What I mean is, I was still working out the default setting of her character.

It was a cold December afternoon; we arrived at the cinema in separate cars, as she was on call and might be bleeped back in to the hospital. I sat there, watching the film, yet equally alert to her reactions: a smile, silence, tears, a shrinking from violence – all would be like silent bleeps for my information. The heating in the cinema was underpowered, and as we sat there, elbow to elbow on the armrest, I found myself thinking outwards from me to her. Sleeve of shirt, sweater, jacket, raincoat, pea jacket, jumper – and then what? Nothing more before flesh? So, six layers between us, or perhaps seven if she was wearing something with sleeves under her sweater.

The film passed; her mobile didn’t pulse; I liked the way she laughed. It was already dark when we got outside. We had walked halfway to our cars when she stopped and held up her left hand, palm towards me.

‘Look,’ she said.

I didn’t know what I was meant to be looking for: proof of alcoholism, her line of life? I moved closer, and noticed, with the occasional help of passing headlights, that the tips of her first, second and third fingers had turned a pale yellowish colour.

‘Twenty yards without gloves,’ she said. ‘It happens just like that.’ She told me the name of the syndrome. It was a question of poor circulation, of the cold making the blood concentrate in more important areas and withdraw from the extremities.

She found her gloves: dark brown ones, I remember. She pulled them on a little haphazardly, then meshed her fingers to push the wool down to the base of each finger. We walked on, discussing the film, paused, smiled, paused, parted; my car was parked ten yards beyond hers. As I was about to unlock it, I glanced back. She was still standing on the pavement, looking down. I gave her a few moments, decided something was wrong, and walked back.

‘The car keys,’ she said without looking up at me. There wasn’t much light and she was digging in her bag, feeling as much as looking for them. Then she added, with sudden violence, ‘Come on, you fool.’

For a moment I thought she was talking to me. Then I realised she was angry only with herself, embarrassed by herself, and the more embarrassed that her inability to find her keys – and also, perhaps, her anger – were being witnessed by me. But I was hardly going to dock her points. As I stood there, watching her struggle, two things happened: I felt what I would describe as tenderness, were it not so ferocious; and my cock gave a sudden spurt of growth.

I remembered the first time a dentist gave me an injection; he left the room while the anaesthetic took effect, returned briskly, slid his finger into my mouth, ran it round the base of the tooth he was going to fill, and asked if I felt anything. I remembered the numbness that strikes when you sit too long with your legs crossed. I remembered stories of doctors pushing pins into a patient’s leg without the patient reacting at all.

What I wanted to know the answer to was this. If I had been bolder, if I had raised my right hand against her left, laid palm gently against palm, finger against finger, in some lovers’ high five, and if I had then pressed the tips of my first, second and third fingers against hers, would she have felt anything? What does it feel like when there’s no feeling there – both to her, and to me? She sees my fingers against hers, but feels nothing; I see my fingers against hers, and feel them, but know that she feels nothing?

And of course I was also asking myself the question in a wider, more alarming sense.

I thought about one person wearing gloves and the other one not; about how flesh feels against wool, wool against flesh.

I tried to imagine all the gloves she might wear, both now and in the future – if there was to be a future I was present in.

I’d seen one pair of brown woollen gloves. I decided, given her condition, to equip her with several extra pairs in different colours. Then, for colder days and nights, some warmer, suede ones: black, I imagined (to match her hair), with heavy white stitching along the fingers, and beigey rabbit-fur lining. And then perhaps a pair of those gloves like paws, with a single thumb and a broad pouch for the fingers.

At work she would presumably wear surgical gloves, thin, latex ones offering the least barrier between doctor and patient – and yet any barrier destroys that essential feel of flesh on flesh. Surgeons wear tight-fitting gloves, other medical staff looser ones, like those you see in delis when you order ham, and watch slices peeled from the rotating blade.

I wondered if she was, or would ever become, a gardener. She might wear latex gloves for light work in well-tilled soil, for sorting out rootlets and seedlings and delicate foliage. But then she would need a stronger pair – I imagined yellow cotton backs, with grey leather palms and fingers – for heavier work: pruning, forking the ground over, pulling up bindweed and nettle roots.

I wondered if she had any use for mitts. I’ve never seen the point of them myself. Who wears them, apart from Russian sleigh-drivers and misers in TV Dickens? And given what happened to the tips of her fingers, all the more reason not to.

I wondered if the circulation to her feet was curtailed as well, in which case: bedsocks. What would they be like? Big and woolly – perhaps some ex-boyfriend’s rugby socks, which would fall loosely around her ankles when she stood up? Or close-fitting and female? In some lifestyle supplement, I’d seen gaudy bedsocks made with individual toes. I wondered if I’d find them a neutral accessory, comic, or somehow erotic.

What else? Might she ski, and have a pair of puffy gloves to match a puffy jacket? Oh, and of course, washing-up gloves: all women had them. And always in the same, brashly unconvincing colours – yellow, pink, pale green, pale blue. You’d have to be a pervert to find washing-up gloves erotic. Make them as exotic as you like – magenta, ultramarine, teak, pinstripe, Prince of Wales check – they’d never do anything for me.

No one says, ‘Feel this piece of parmesan’, do they? Except perhaps parmesan makers.

Sometimes, alone in a lift, I will run my fingers lightly over the buttons. Not enough to change the floor I’m going to, just to feel the bumpy dots of Braille. And to wonder what it must be like.

The first time I saw someone wearing a thumbstall, I couldn’t believe that there was a real thumb underneath it.

Do the slightest damage to the least important finger, and the whole hand is affected. Even the simplest actions – pulling on a sock, doing up a button, changing gear – become fraught, self-conscious. The hand won’t go into a glove, has to be thought about when washed, mustn’t be lain on at night, and so on.

Imagine, then, trying to make love with a broken arm.

I had a sudden, acute desire that nothing bad ever happen to her.

I once saw a man on a train. I was eleven or twelve, alone in my compartment. He came down the corridor, looked in, saw it was occupied, and passed on. I noticed that the arm he carried by his side ended in a hook. At the time, I thought only of pirates and menace; later, of all you couldn’t do; later still, of the phantom pain of amputees.

Our fingers must work together; our senses too. They act for themselves, but also as pre-senses for the others. We feel a fruit for ripeness; we press our fingers into a joint of meat to test for doneness. Our senses work together for the greater good: they are complicit, as I like to say.

Her hair was up that evening, held by a pair of tortoiseshell combs, then pinned with gold. It was not quite as black as her eyes, but blacker than her linen jacket, which had a fade and a crease to it. We were in a Chinese restaurant and the waiters were paying proper attention to her. Perhaps her hair looked a bit Chinese; or perhaps they knew it was more important to please her than me – that pleasing her was pleasing me. She asked me to order, and I chose conservatively. Seaweed, spring rolls, green beans in yellow-bean sauce, crispy fried duck, stewed aubergine, plain boiled rice. A bottle of Gewürztraminer and tap water.

My senses were more alert than usual that evening. As I’d followed her from the car, I noticed her lightly floral scent; but this was soon blotted out by restaurant smells, as a mound of glistening spare ribs passed our table. And when the food came, it was the familiar amicable contest of taste and texture. The paperiness of the chopped leaf they call seaweed; the crunch of the beans in the heat of their sauce; the slick of plum sauce with the bite of spring onion and the firm shred of duck, all wrapped in the parchment pancake.

The background music offered a milder contrast of textures: from easy-listening Chinese to unobtrusive Western. Mostly ignorable, except when some overfamiliar film number nagged away. I suggested that if ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago came up, we should both make a run for it and plead duress in court. She asked if duress was really a defence in law. I went on at what might have been too great a length about this, then we talked about where our professional areas overlapped: where law came into medicine, and medicine into law. This led us on to smoking, and at which precise point we’d like to light up if it wasn’t now banned. After the main course and before the pudding, we agreed. We each declared ourselves light smokers, and each half-believed the other. Then we talked a little, but warily, about our childhoods. I asked how old she had been when she first noticed the ends of her fingers turning yellow in the cold, and whether she had many pairs of gloves, which made her laugh for some reason. Perhaps I’d hit upon one of the truths of her wardrobe. I almost asked her to describe her favourite gloves, but thought she might get the wrong idea.

And as the meal went on, I decided that it was going to be all right – though by ‘it’ I meant only the evening; I could see no further. And she must have felt the same, because when the waiter asked about pudding she didn’t look at her watch apologetically, but said she could just find room for something as long as it wasn’t sticky and filling, so chose the lychees. And I decided not to tell her about that game from long ago, nor about that production of King Lear. And then I did momentarily dare a future, and thought that if we came back again sometime, maybe I’d tell her. I also hoped that she’d never played the game with Ben, and been handed a mozzarella.

Just as I was thinking this, ‘Lara’s Theme’ oozed out of the speakers. We looked at one another and laughed, and she made a gesture as if to push back her chair and rise. Maybe she saw alarm in my eyes because she laughed again and then, playing along, threw her napkin down on the table. The gesture took her hand more than halfway across the cloth. But she didn’t get up, or push her chair back, just went on smiling, and left her hand on top of her napkin, knuckles raised.

And then I touched her.

Harmony

THEY HAD DINED well at 261 Landstrasse, and now passed eagerly into the music room. M-’s intimates had sometimes been fortunate enough to have Gluck, Haydn or the young prodigy Mozart perform for them; but they could be equally content when their host seated himself behind his violoncello and beckoned at one of them to accompany him. This time, however, the lid of the klavier was down, and the violoncello nowhere visible. Instead, they were confronted by an oblong rosewood box standing on legs which made the shape of matching lyres; there was a wheel at one end and a treadle beneath. M- folded back the curved roof of the contraption, disclosing three dozen glass hemispheres linked by a central spindle and half-submerged in a trough of water. He seated himself at the centre and pulled out a narrow drawer on either side of him. One contained a shallow bowl of water, the other a plate bearing fine chalk.

‘If I might make a suggestion,’ said M-, looking round at his guests. ‘Those of you who have not yet heard Miss Davies’s instrument might try the experiment of closing your eyes.’ He was a tall, well-made man in a blue frock coat with flat brass buttons; his features, strong and jowly, were those of a stolid Swabian, and if his bearing and voice had not obviously denoted the gentry, he might have been taken for a prosperous farmer. But it was his manner, courteous yet persuasive, which impelled some who had already heard him play decide to close their eyes as well.

M- soaked his fingertips in water, flicked them dry and dabbled them in the chalk. As he pumped at the treadle with his right foot, the spindle turned on its bright brass gudgeons. He touched his fingers to the revolving glasses, and a high, lilting sound began to emerge. It was known that the instrument had cost fifty gold ducats, and sceptics among the audience at first wondered why their host had paid so much to reproduce the keening of an amorous cat. But as they became accustomed to the sound, they started to change their minds. A clear melody was becoming detectable: perhaps something of M-’s own composition, perhaps a friendly tribute to, or even theft from, Gluck. They had never heard such music before, and the fact that they were blind to the method by which it came to them emphasised its strangeness. They had not been told what to expect and so, guided only by their reasoning and sentiment, wondered if such unearthly noises were not precisely that – unearthly.

When M- paused for a few moments, busying himself on the hemispherical glasses with a small sponge, one of the guests, without opening his eyes, observed, ‘It is the music of the spheres.’

M- smiled. ‘Music seeks harmony,’ he replied, ‘just as the human body seeks harmony.’ This was, and at the same time was not, an answer; rather than lead, he preferred to let others, in his presence, find their own way. The music of the spheres was heard when all the planets moved through the heavens in concert. The music of the earth was heard when all the instruments of an orchestra played together. The music of the human body was heard when it too was in a state of harmony, the organs at peace, the blood flowing freely and the nerves aligned along their true and intended paths.

The encounter between M- and Maria Theresia von P- took place in the imperial city of V- between the winter of 177- and the summer of the following year. Such minor suppressions of detail would have been a routine literary mannerism at the time; but they also tactfully admit the partiality of our knowledge. Any philosopher claiming that his field of understanding was complete, and that a final, harmonious synthesis of truth was being offered to the reader, would have been denounced as a charlatan; and likewise those philosophers of the human heart who deal in storytelling, would have been – and would be – wise not to make any such claim either.

We can know, for instance, that M- and Maria Theresia von P- had met before, a dozen years previously; but we cannot know whether or not she had any memory of the event. We can know that she was the daughter of Rosalia Maria von P-, herself the daughter of Thomas Cajetan Levassori della Motta, dance master at the imperial court; and that Rosalia Maria had married the imperial secretary and court counsellor Joseph Anton von P- at the Stefanskirche on 9th November 175-. But we cannot tell what the mixing of such different bloods entailed, and whether it was in some way the cause of the catastrophe that befell Maria Theresia.

Again, we know that she was baptised on 15th May 175-, and that she learnt to place her fingers on a keyboard almost as soon as she learnt to place her feet on the floor. The child’s health was normal, according to her father’s account, until the morning of 9th December 176-, when she woke up blind; she was then three and a half years old. It was held to be a perfect case of amaurosis: that is to say, there was no fault detectable in the organ itself, but the loss of sight was total. Those summoned to examine her attributed the cause to a fluid with repercussions, or else to some fright the girl had received during the night. Neither parents nor servants, however, could attest to any such happening.

Since the child was both cherished and well-born, she was not neglected. Her musical talent was encouraged, and she attracted both the attention and the patronage of the empress herself. A pension of two hundred gold ducats was granted to the parents of Maria Theresia von P-, with her education separately accounted for. She learnt the harpsichord and pianoforte with Kozeluch, and singing under Righini. At the age of fourteen she commissioned an organ concerto from Salieri; by sixteen she was an adornment of both salons and concert societies.

To some who gawped at the imperial secretary’s daughter while she played, her blindness enhanced her appeal. But the girl’s parents did not want her treated as the society equivalent of a fairground novelty. From the start, they had continually sought her cure. Professor Stoerk, court physician and head of the Medical Faculty, was regularly in attendance, and Professor Barth, celebrated for his operations on cataract, was also consulted. A succession of cures was tried, but as each failed to alleviate the girl’s condition, she became prone to irritation and melancholia, and was assailed by fits which caused her eyeballs to bulge from their sockets. It might have been predictable that the confluence of music and medicine brought about the second encounter between M- and Maria Theresia.

M- was born at Iznang on Lake Constance in 173-. The son of an episcopal gamekeeper, he studied divinity at Dillingen and Ingolstadt, then took a doctorate in philosophy. He arrived in V- and became a doctor of law before turning his attention to medicine. Such an intellectual peripeteia did not, however, indicate inconstancy, still less the soul of a dilettante. Rather M- sought, like Doctor Faustus, to master all forms of human knowledge; and like many before him his eventual purpose – or dream – was to find a universal key, one that would permit the final understanding of what linked the heavens to the earth, the spirit to the body, all things to one another.

In the summer of 177-, a distinguished foreigner and his wife were visiting the imperial city. The lady was taken ill, and her husband – as if such were a normal medical procedure – instructed Maximilian Hell, astronomer (and member of the Society of Jesus), to prepare a magnet which might be applied to the afflicted part. Hell, a friend of M-’s, kept him informed of the commission; and when the lady’s ailment was said to be cured, M- hastened to her bedside to inform himself about the procedure. Shortly thereafter, he began his own experiments. He ordered the construction of numerous magnets of different sizes: some to be applied to the stomach, others to the heart, still others to the throat. To his own astonishment, and the gratitude of his patients, M- discovered that cures beyond the prowess of a physician could sometimes be effected; the cases of Fräulein Oesterlin and the mathematician Professor Bauer were especially noted.

Had M- been a fairground quack, and his patients credulous peasants crowded into some rank booth, as eager to be relieved of their savings as of their pain, society would have paid no attention. But M- was a man of science, of wide curiosity, and not obvious immodesty, who made no claims beyond what he could account for.

‘It works,’ Professor Bauer had commented, as his breath came more easily and he was able to raise his arms beyond the horizontal. ‘But how does it work?’

‘I do not yet understand it,’ M- had replied. ‘When magnets were employed in past ages, it was explained that they drew illness to them just as they attracted iron filings. But we cannot sustain such an argument nowadays. We are not living in the age of Paracelsus. Reason guides our thinking, and reason must be applied, the more so when we are dealing with phenomena which lurk beneath the skin of things.’

‘As long as you do not propose to dissect me in order to find out,’ replied Professor Bauer.

In those early months, the magnetic cure was as much a matter of scientific enquiry as of medical practice. M- experimented with the positioning of the magnets and the number applied to the patient. He himself often wore a magnet in a leather bag around his neck to increase his influence, and used a stick, or wand, to indicate the course of realignment he was seeking in the nerves, the blood, the organs. He magnetised pools of water and had patients place their hands, their feet, and sometimes their whole bodies in the liquid. He magnetised the cups and glasses they drank from. He magnetised their clothes, their bedsheets, their looking glasses. He magnetised musical instruments so that a double harmony might result from their playing. He magnetised cats, dogs and trees. He constructed a baquet, an oaken tub containing two rows of bottles filled with magnetised water. Steel rods emerging from holes in the lid were placed against afflicted parts of the body. Patients were sometimes encouraged to join hands and form a circle round the baquet, since M- surmised that the magnetic stream might augment in force as it passed through several bodies simultaneously.

‘Of course I remember the gnädige Fräulein from my days as a medical student, when I was sometimes permitted to accompany Professor Stoerk.’ Now M-was himself a member of the Faculty, and the girl was almost a woman: plump, with a mouth that turned down and a nose that turned up. ‘And though I can recall the description of her condition then, I would nonetheless like to ask questions which I fear you have answered many times already.’

‘Of course.’

‘There is no possibility that the Fräulein was blind from birth?’

M- noticed the mother impatient to reply, but restraining herself.

‘None,’ her husband said. ‘She saw as clearly as her brothers and sisters.’

‘And she was not ill before becoming blind?’

‘No, she was always healthy.’

‘And did she receive any kind of shock at the time of her misfortune, or shortly before?’

‘No. That is to say, none that we or anyone else observed.’

‘And afterwards?’

This time the mother did answer. ‘Her life has always been as protected against shock as we are able to make it. I would tear out my own eyes if I thought it would give Maria Theresia back her sight.’

M- was looking at the girl, who did not react. It was probable that she had heard this unlikely solution before.

‘So her condition has been constant?’

‘Her blindness has been constant’ – the father again – ‘but there are periods when her eyes twitch convulsively and without cease. And her eyeballs, as you may see, are extruded, as if trying to escape their sockets.’

‘You are aware of such periods, Fräulein?’

‘Of course. It feels as if water is slowly rushing in to fill my head, as if I shall faint.’

‘And she suffers in the liver and the spleen afterwards. They become disorderly.’

M- nodded. He would need to be present at such an attack in order to guess its causes and observe its progress. He wondered how that might best be effected.

‘May I ask the doctor a question?’ Maria Theresia had lifted her head slightly towards her parents.

‘Of course, my child.’

‘Does your procedure cause pain?’

‘None that I inflict myself. Though it is often the case that patients need to be brought to a certain… pitch before harmony can be restored.’

‘I mean, do your magnets cause electric shocks?’

‘No, that I may promise you.’

‘But if you do not cause pain, then how can you cure? Everyone knows that you cannot remove a tooth without pain, you cannot set a limb without pain, you cannot cure insanity without pain. A doctor causes pain, that the world knows. And that I know too.’

Since she had been a small child the finest doctors had employed the most respected methods. There had been blistering and cauterising and the application of leeches. For two months her head had been encased in a plaster designed to provoke suppuration and draw the poison from her eyes. She had been given countless purges and diuretics. Most recently, electricity had been resorted to, and over the twelvemonth some three thousand electric shocks had been administered to her eyes, sometimes as many as a hundred in a single treatment.

‘You are quite sure that magnetism will not cause me pain?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Then how can it possibly cure me?’

M- was pleased to glimpse the brain behind the unseeing eyes. A passive patient, merely waiting to be acted upon by an omnipotent physician, was a tedious thing; he preferred those like this young woman, who displayed forcefulness beneath her good manners.

‘Let me put it this way. Since you went blind, you have endured much pain at the hands of the best doctors in the city?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet you are not cured?’

‘No.’

‘Then perhaps pain is not the only gateway to cure.’

In the two years he had practised magnetic healing, M- had constantly pondered the question of how and why it might work. A decade previously, in his doctoral thesis De planetarum influxu, he had proposed that the planets influenced human actions and the human body through the medium of some invisible gas or liquid, in which all bodies were immersed, and which for want of a better term he called ‘gravitas universalis’. Occasionally, man might glimpse the overarching connection, and feel able to grasp the universal harmony that lay beyond all local discordance. In the present instance, magnetic iron arrived on earth in the form and body of a meteor fallen from the heavens. Once here, it displayed its singular property, the power to realign. Might one not surmise, therefore, that magnetism was the great universal force which bound together stellar harmony? And if so, was it not reasonable to expect that in the sublunary world it had the power to placate certain corporeal disharmonies?

It was evident, of course, that magnetism could not cure every bodily failing. It had proved most successful in cases of stomach ache, gout, insomnia, ear trouble, liver and menstrual disorder, spasm, and even paralysis. It could not heal a broken bone, cure imbecility or syphilis. But in matters of nervous complaint, it might often effect startling improvement. Again, it could not overcome a patient mired in scepticism and disbelief, or one whose pessimism or melancholy undermined the possibility of a return to health. There must be a willingness to admit and welcome the effects of the procedure.

To this end, M- sought to create, in his consulting room at 261 Landstrasse, an atmosphere sympathetic to such acceptance. Heavy curtains were drawn against the sun and external noise; his staff were forbidden from making sudden movements; there was calm and candlelight. Gentle music might be heard from another room; sometimes M- would himself play upon Miss Davies’s glass armonica, reminding both bodies and minds of the universal harmony that he was, in this small part of the world, seeking to restore.

M- commenced his treatment on 20th January 177-. An external examination confirmed that Maria Theresia’s eyes showed severe malformation: they were quite out of their normal alignment, grossly swollen and extruded. Internally, the girl seemed to be at a pitch where the passing phases of hysteria might lead to chronic derangement. Given that she had suffered fourteen years of disappointed hope, and fourteen years of unremitting blindness, this was not an unreasonable response from a young body and mind. M- therefore began by emphasising again how different his procedure was from all others; how it was not a matter of order being reimposed by external violence, but rather of a collaboration between doctor and patient, aimed at re-establishing the natural alignment of the body. M- talked generally; in his experience it did not help for the patient to be constantly aware of what was to be expected. He did not speak of the crisis he hoped to provoke, or predict the extent of the cure he envisioned. Even to the girl’s parents, he expressed only the humble ambition of alleviating the gross ocular extrusion.

He explained his initial actions carefully, so they would come as no surprise. Then he addressed the loci of sensitivity on Maria Theresia’s head. He placed his hands, formed into cups, around her ears; he stroked her skull from the base of the neck to the forehead; he placed his thumbs on her cheeks, just below the eyes, and made circular motions around the affected orbs. Then he gently laid his stick, or wand, on each eyebrow. As he did so, he quietly encouraged Maria Theresia to report any changes or movements she experienced within her. Then he placed a magnet on each temple. Immediately, he felt a sudden sensation of heat upon her cheeks, which the girl confirmed; he also observed a redness in the skin and a trembling of the limbs. She then described a gathering force at the base of her neck which was compelling her head backwards and upwards. As these movements occurred, M- noted that the spasms in her eyes were more marked and at times convulsive. Then, as this brief crisis came to its end, the redness left her cheeks, her head resumed its normal position, the trembling ceased, and it appeared to M- that her eyes were in a better alignment, and also less swollen.

He repeated the procedure each day at the same time, and each day the brief crisis led to an evident improvement, until by the end of the fourth day the proper alignment of her eyes had returned and no extrusion was to be remarked. The left eye appeared to be smaller than the right, but as the treatment continued, their sizes began to balance. The girl’s parents were amazed: M-’s promise had been fulfilled, and their daughter no longer showed the deformity which might alarm those who watched her play. M-, however, was already preoccupied with the patient’s internal condition, which he judged to be moving towards the necessary crisis. As he continued his daily procedures, she reported the presence of sharp pains in the occiput which penetrated the whole of her head. The pain then followed the optic nerve, producing constant pinpricks as it travelled and multiplied across the retina. These symptoms were accompanied by nervous jerkings of the head.

For many years, Maria Theresia had lost all sense of smell, and her nose produced no mucus. Now, suddenly, there was a visible swelling of the nasal passages, and a forceful discharge of green, viscous matter. Shortly afterwards, to the patient’s further embarrassment, there were additional discharges, this time in the form of copious diarrhoea. The pains in her eyes continued, and she reported feelings of vertigo. M- recognised that she was at a time of maximum vulnerability. A crisis was never a neutral occurrence: it might be benign or malign – not in its nature, but in its consequences, leading either to progress or regress. He therefore proposed to the girl’s parents that she take up residence for a short period at 261 Landstrasse. She would be looked after by M-’s wife, though she could bring her own maid if necessary. There were already two young female patients established in the household, so questions of decorum need not arise. This new plan was swiftly agreed.

On Maria Theresia’s second day in the house, and still in the presence of her father, M-, after touching her face and skull as before, placed the patient in front of a mirror. Taking his wand, he pointed it at her reflection. Then, as he moved the wand, the girl’s head slightly turned, as if following its movements in the glass. M-, sensing that Herr von P- was about to give tongue to his astonishment, quieted him with a gesture.

‘You are aware that you are moving your head?’

‘I am.’

‘Is there a reason why you are moving your head?’

‘It is as if I am following something.’

‘Is it a noise that you are following?’

‘No, not a noise.’

‘Is it a smell that you are following?’

‘I still have no sense of smell. I am merely… following. That is all I can say.’

‘It is enough.’

M- assured Herr von P- that his house would always be open to him and his wife, but that he expected progress in the ensuing days to be slow. In truth, he judged the girl’s cure more likely if he could treat her without the presence of a father who struck him as overbearing, and a mother who, perhaps by reason of her Italian blood, seemed liable to hysteria. It was still just possible that Maria Theresia’s blindness was caused by atrophy of the optic nerve, in which case there was nothing that magnetism, or any other known procedure, could do for her. But M- doubted this. The convulsions he had witnessed, and the symptoms reported, all spoke of a disturbance to the whole nervous system due to some powerful shock. In the absence of any witnesses at the time, or of the patient’s memory, it was impossible to determine what kind of shock it might have been. This did not perturb M- unduly: it was the effect he was treating, not the cause. Indeed, it might be fortunate that the Fräulein could not recall the precise nature of the precipitating event.

In the preceding two years, it had become increasingly apparent to M- that in bringing the patient to the necessary point of crisis, the touch of the human hand was of central, animating importance. At first, his touching of the patient at the moment of magnetism was designed to be calming, or at best emphatic. If, for instance, magnets were placed on either side of the ear, it seemed a natural gesture to stroke that ear in a manner confirming the realignment being sought. But M- could not help observing that when all favourable conditions for cure had been created, with a circle of patients around the baquet in the soft candlelight, it was often the case that when he, as a musician, removed his fingers from the rotating glass armonica and then, as a physician, laid them on the afflicted part of the body, the patient might be instantly brought to crisis. M- was at times inclined to ponder how much was the effect of the magnetism, and how much that of the magnetiser himself. Maria Theresia was not apprised of such wider considerations, any more than she was asked to join other patients around the oaken tub.

‘Your treatment causes pain.’

‘No. What is causing pain is that you are beginning to see. When you look in the mirror you see the wand I am holding and turn your head to follow it. You say yourself that there is a shape moving.’

‘But you are treating me. And I am feeling pain.’

‘The pain is a sign of a beneficial response to the crisis. The pain shows that your optic nerve and retina, so long abandoned from use, are becoming active again.’

‘Other doctors have told me that the pain they were inflicting was necessary and beneficial. You are a doctor of philosophy as well?’

‘I am.’

‘Philosophers can explain anything away.’

M- took no offence, indeed was pleased with such an attitude.

Such was the girl’s new susceptibility to light that he had to bind her eyes with a triple bandage, which remained in place at all times when she was not being treated. He had begun by presenting to her, at a certain distance, objects of the same kind which were either white or black. She was able to perceive the black objects without distress, but flinched at the white objects, reporting that the pain they produced in her eyes was like that of a soft brush being drawn across the retina; they also provoked a sense of giddiness. M- therefore removed all the white objects.

Next, he introduced her to the intermediate colours. Maria Theresia was able to distinguish between them, though unable to describe how they appeared to her – except for the colour black, which was, she said, the picture of her former blindness. When the colours were ascribed their names, she often failed to apply the correct name the next time a colour was shown. Nor was she able to calculate the distance objects were from her, imagining them all to be within reach; thus she extended her hands to pick up items twenty feet away. It was also the case, in these early days, that the impression an object left upon her retina lasted for up to a minute. She was obliged, therefore, to cover her eyes with her hands until the impression faded, else it would become confused with the next object presented to her view. Further, since the muscles of the eye had fallen into disuse, she had no practice at moving her gaze, searching for objects, focusing upon them and accounting for their position.

Neither was it the case that the elation felt by both M- and the girl’s parents when she first began to perceive light and forms was shared by the patient herself. What had come into her life was not, as she had expected, a panorama of the world so long concealed from her, and so long described by others; still less was there an understanding of that world. Instead, a greater confusion was now heaped upon the confusion that already existed – a state exacerbated by the ocular pains and feelings of vertigo. The melancholia that was the obverse of her natural cheerfulness came much to the fore at this time.

Understanding this, M- resolved to slow the pace of his treatment; also, to make the hours of leisure and rest as pleasant as possible. He encouraged intimacy with the other two young women living in the household: Fräulein Ossine, the eighteen-year-old daughter of an army officer, who suffered from purulent phthisis and irritable melancholia; and the nineteen-year-old Zwelferine, struck blind at the age of two, whom M- had found in an orphanage and was treating at his own expense. Each had something in common with one of the others: Maria Theresia and Fräulein Ossine were both of good family and imperial pension-holders; Maria Theresia and Zwelferine were both blind; Zwelferine and Fräulein Ossine were both given to the periodic vomiting of blood.

Such company was a useful distraction; but M- believed that Maria Theresia also needed several hours in the day devoted to a peaceful and familiar routine. He therefore took to sitting with her, talking of subjects far from her immediate concern, and reading to her from his library. Sometimes they would play music together, she with bandaged eyes at the klavier, he on the violoncello.

He also used this time to know the girl better, to assess her truthfulness, her memory, and her temperament. He noted that even when her spirits ran high, she was never headstrong; she showed neither the arrogance of her father nor the wilfulness of her mother.

He might ask, ‘What would you like to do this afternoon?’

And she would reply, ‘What do you propose?’

Or he might ask, ‘What would you like to play?’

And she would reply, ‘What would you like me to play?’

When such courtesies were finished with, he discovered that she had clear opinions, arrived at through the use of reason. But he also concluded that, even beyond the normal obedience of children, Maria Theresia was accustomed to doing as she was instructed: by her parents, her teachers, her doctors. She played beautifully, with a fine memory, and it seemed to M- that it was only when she was at the klavier, immersed in a piece familiar to her, that she truly felt free, and allowed herself to be playful, expressive, thoughtful. It struck him, as he watched her profile, her bandaged eyes, and her firm, upright posture, that his enterprise was not without some danger. Was it possible that her talent, and the pleasure she evidently took in it, might be tied to her blindness in a way he could not fully understand? And then, as he followed her hands moving in their practised, easy manner, sometimes strong and springy, at others as leisurely as ferns wafted by a breeze, he found himself wondering how the first sight of a keyboard might affect her. Might the white keys throw her into turmoil, the black ones remind her only of blindness?

Their daily work continued. So far, Maria Theresia had been presented with a mere sequence of static objects: his concern had been to establish and accustom her to shape, colour, location, distance. Now he decided to introduce the concept of movement, and with it the reality of a human face. Though she was well used to M-’s voice, he had so far always kept out of her lines of perception. Gently, he undid the bandages, asking her immediately to cover her eyes with her hands. Then he came round to face her, placing himself at a distance of a few feet. Telling her to take away her hands, he began slowly turning his head from one profile through to its opposite.

She laughed. And then placed the hands she had removed from her eyes over her mouth. M-’s excitement as a physician overcame his vanity as a man that he should provoke such a reaction in her. Then she took her hands from her mouth, placed them over her eyes, and after a few seconds released them and looked at him again. And laughed again.

‘What is that?’ she asked, pointing.

‘This?’

‘Yes, that.’ She was giggling to herself in a manner which, in other circumstances, he would have judged uncivil.

‘It is a nose.’

‘It is ridiculous.’

‘You are the only person cruel enough to have made that observation,’ he said, pretending to be piqued. ‘Others have found it acceptable, even agreeable.’

‘Are all… noses like that?’

‘There are differences, but, charming Fräulein, I must warn you that this is by no means anything out of the ordinary, as far as noses go.’

‘Then I shall have much cause for laughter. I must tell Zwelferine about noses.’

He decided on an additional experiment. Maria Theresia had always enjoyed the presence, and the affection, of the house dog, a large, amiable beast of uncertain species. Now M- went to the curtained door, opened it slightly, and whistled.

Twenty seconds later, Maria Theresia was saying, ‘Oh, a dog is a much more pleasing sight than a man.’

‘You are, sadly, not alone in that opinion.’

There followed a period when her improving sight led to greater cheerfulness, while her clumsiness and error in the face of this newly discovered world drew her down into melancholy. One evening M- took her outside into the darkened garden and suggested that she tip her head backwards. That night the heavens were blazing. M- briefly found himself thinking: black and white again, though happily much more black than white. But Maria Theresia’s reaction took any anxiety away. She stood there in astonishment, head back, mouth open, turning from time to time, pointing, not saying a word. She ignored his offer to identify the constellations; she did not want words to interfere with her sense of wonder, and continued looking until her neck hurt. From that evening on, visual phenomena of any distinction were automatically compared to a starry sky – and found wanting.

Though each morning M- continued his treatment in exactly the same way, he now did so with a kind of feigned concentration. Within himself he was debating between two lines of thought, and between two parts of his intellectual formation. The doctor of philosophy argued that the universal element which underlay everything had surely now been laid bare in the form of magnetism. The doctor of medicine argued that magnetism had less to do with the patient’s progress than the power of touch, and that even the laying on of hands was merely emblematic, as was the application of magnets and of the wand. What was actually happening was some collaboration or complicity between physician and patient, so that his presence and authority were permitting the patient to cure herself. He did not mention this second explanation to anyone, least of all the patient.

Maria Theresia’s parents were as astonished by the further improvement in their daughter as she was by the starry heavens. As the news spread, friends and well-wishers began to turn up at 261 Landstrasse to witness the miracle. Passers-by often lingered outside the house, hoping to glimpse the famous patient; while letters requesting her physician’s attendance at sickbeds across the city arrived each day. At first M- was happy to allow Maria Theresia to demonstrate her ability to distinguish colours and shapes, even if some of her naming was not yet faultless. But such performances palpably tired her, and he severely restricted the number of visitors. This sudden ruling had the effect of increasing both the rumours of miracle-working and the suspicions harboured by some fellow members of the Faculty of Medicine. The case was also beginning to make the Church uneasy, since the popular understanding was that M- had only to touch the afflicted part of a sick person for the sickness to be healed. That anyone other than Jesus Christ might effect a cure by the laying on of hands struck many of the clergy as blasphemous.

M- was aware of these rumours, but felt confident in the backing of Professor Stoerk, who had come to 261 Landstrasse and been officially impressed by the working of the new cure. What then did it matter if other members of the Faculty muttered against him, or even dropped the slander that his patient’s new-found ability to name colours and objects was in fact due to close training? The conservative, the slowwitted and the envious existed in every profession. In the longer term, once M-’s methods were understood and the number of cures increased, all men of reason would be obliged to believe him.

One day when Maria Theresia’s state of mind was at its calmest, M- invited her parents to attend him that afternoon. He then proposed to his patient that she take up her instrument, unaccompanied and unbandaged. She enthusiastically agreed, and the four of them proceeded to the music room. Chairs were set out for Herr von P- and his wife, while M- took a stool close to the klavier, the better to observe Maria Theresia’s hands, eyes and moral condition. She took several deep breaths and then, after a barely endurable pause, the first notes of a sonata by Haydn fell upon their ears.

It was a disaster. You might have thought the girl a novice and the sonata a piece she had never played. The fingering was inept, the rhythms flawed; all grace and wit and tenderness vanished from the music. When the first movement stumbled to a confused halt, there was a silence during which M- could sense the parents exchanging glances. Then, suddenly, the same music began again, now confidently, brightly, perfectly. He looked across at the parents, but they in turn had eyes only for their daughter. Turning towards the klavier, M- realised the cause of this sudden excellence: the girl had her eyes tightly closed and her chin raised high above the keyboard.

When Maria Theresia reached the end of the movement, she opened her eyes, looked down, and went back to the beginning. The result, again, was chaos, and this time M- thought he guessed the reason: she was following her hands transfixedly. And it seemed that the very act of watching was destroying her skill. Fascinated by her own fingers, and the way they moved across the keyboard, she was unable to bring them under her full control. She observed their disobedience until the end of the movement, then rose and ran to the door.

There was yet another silence.

Eventually, M- said, ‘It is to be expected.’

Herr von P-, red with anger, replied, ‘It is a catastrophe.’

‘It will take time. Every day there will be an improvement.’

‘It is a catastrophe. If news of this gets out, it will be the end of her career.’

Unwisely, M- put the question, ‘Would you rather your daughter could see, or could play?’

Herr von P-, now choleric, was on his feet, with his wife beside him. ‘It was not, sir, a choice I remember you offering when we brought her to you.’

After they left, M- found the girl in a deplorable condition. He sought to reassure her, telling her it was no surprise that the sight of her fingers disconcerted her playing.

‘If it was no surprise, why did you not warn me?’

He reminded her that her sight had been improving on an almost daily basis, and so it was inevitable that her playing would also improve, once she became accustomed to the presence of her fingers on the keys.

‘That is why I played the piece a third time. And it was even worse than the first.’

M- did not argue the point. He knew from his own experience how, in matters of art, the nerves occupied a vital part. If you played badly, your spirits fell; if your spirits were low, you played worse – and so, decliningly, on. Instead, M- pointed to the wider improvement in Maria Theresia’s condition. This did not satisfy her either.

‘In my darkness, music was my entire consolation. To be brought into the light and then lose the ability to play would be cruel justice.’

‘That will not happen. It is not a choice. You must trust me that such will not be the case.’

He looked at her, and followed the development, and the departure, of a frown. Eventually, she replied, ‘Apart from the matter of pain, you have always been worthy of trust. What you have said might happen has happened. Therefore, yes, I trust you.’

In the following days, M- was made aware that his earlier dismissal of the outside world’s opinion had been naive. A proposal arrived from certain members of the Faculty of Medicine that endorsement of the practice of magnetic healing should only be given if M- could reproduce his effects with a new patient, under full lighting and in the presence of six Faculty examiners – conditions which would, M- knew, destroy its effectiveness. Satirical tongues were already asking if in the future all doctors would be equipped with magic wands. More dangerously, some were questioning the moral wisdom of the procedure. Did it help the status and respectability of the profession if one of their number took young women into his household, cloistered them behind drawn curtains, and then laid hands upon them amid jars of magnetised water and to the caterwauling of a glass armonica?

On 29th April 177-, Frau von P- was shown into M-’s study. She was clearly agitated, and refused to sit down.

‘I have come to remove my daughter from you.’

‘Has she indicated that she wishes to cease her treatment?’

‘Her wishes… That remark, sir, is an impertinence. Her wishes are subordinate to her parents’ wishes.’

M- looked at her camly. ‘Then I shall fetch her.’

‘No. Ring for a servant. I do not care for you to instruct her how to answer.’

‘Very well.’ He rang; Maria Theresia was fetched; she looked anxiously from one to the other.

‘Your mother wishes you to cease treatment and return home.’

‘What is your opinion?’

‘My opinion is that if this is what you wish, then I cannot oppose it.’

‘That was not what I asked. I was asking your medical opinion.’

M- glanced across at the mother. ‘My… medical opinion is that you are still at a precarious stage. I think it very possible that a complete cure may be effected. Equally, it is very possible that any gains made, once lost, could never be recovered.’

‘That is very clear. Then I choose to stay. I wish to stay.’

The mother instantly began a display of stamping and shouting, the like of which M- had never before encountered in the imperial city of V-. It was an outburst far beyond the natural expression of Frau von P-’s Italian blood, and might even have been comical, had not her nervous frenzy set off an answering spasm of convulsion in the daughter.

‘Madam, I must ask you to control yourself,’ he said quietly.

But this enraged the mother even more, and with two sources of provocation in front of her, she continued to denounce her daughter’s insolence, stubbornness and ingratitude. When M- tried to lay a hand on her forearm, Frau von P- turned on Maria Theresia, seized her, and threw her headlong into the wall. Above the women’s screams, M- summoned his staff, who held back the termagant just as she was about to set upon the doctor himself. Suddenly, another voice was added to the bedlam.

‘Return my daughter! Resist me and you die!’

The door was thrown violently open, and Herr von P- himself appeared, a framed figure with sword aloft. Hurling himself into the study, he threatened to cut to pieces anyone who opposed him.

‘Then, sir, you will have to cut me to pieces,’ M- answered firmly. Herr von P- stopped, uncertain whether to attack the doctor, rescue his daughter, or console his wife. Unable to decide, he settled for repeating his threats. The daughter was weeping, the mother screaming, the physician attempting to argue rationally, the father noisily promising mayhem and death. M- remained dispassionate enough to reflect that the young Mozart would have happily set this operatic quartet to music.

Eventually, the father was pacified and then disarmed. He departed with malediction on his tongue, and seeming to forget his wife, who stood for a few moments looking from M- to her daughter and back again, before herself leaving. Immediately, and for the rest of the day, M- sought to calm Maria Theresia. As he did so, he came to conclude that his initial presumption had been confirmed: Maria Theresia’s blindness had certainly been a hysterical reaction to the equally hysterical behaviour of one or both of her parents. That a sensitive, artistic child, in the face of such an emotional assault, might instinctively close herself off from the world seemed reasonable, even inevitable. And the frenzied parents, having been responsible for the girl’s condition in the first place, were now aggravating it.

What could have caused this sudden, destructive outburst? More, surely, than a mere flouting of parental will. M- therefore tried to imagine it from their point of view. A child goes blind, all known cures fail until, after more than a dozen years, a new physician with a novel procedure begins to make her see again. The prognosis is optimistic, and the parents are rewarded at last for their love, wisdom, and medical courage. But then the girl plays, and their world is turned upside down. Before, they had been in charge of a blind virtuoso; now, sight had rendered her mediocre. If she continued playing like that, her career would be over. But even assuming that she rediscovered all her former skill, she would lack the originality of being blind. She would be merely one pianist among many others. And there would be no reason for the Empress to continue her pension. Two hundred gold ducats had made a difference to their lives, And how, without it, would they commission works from leading composers?

M- understood such a dilemma, but it could not be his primary concern. He was a physician, not a musical impresario. In any case, he was convinced that once Maria Theresia became accustomed to the sight of her hands on a keyboard, once observation ceased altering her performance, her skill would not merely return, but develop and improve. For how could it possibly be an advantage to be blind? Furthermore, the girl had chosen openly to defy her parents and continue the cure. How could he disappoint her hopes? Even if it meant distributing cudgels to his servants, he would defend her right to live under his roof.

Yet it was not just the frenzied parents who were threatening the household. Opinion at court and in society had turned against the physician who had walled up a young woman and now refused to return her to her parents. That the girl herself also refused did not help M-’s case: in the eyes of some it merely confirmed him as a magician, a bewitcher whose hypnotic powers might not cure, but could certainly enslave. Moral fault and medical fault intertwined, giving birth to scandal. Such a miasma of innuendo arose in the imperial city that Professor Stoerk was provoked into action. Withdrawing his previous endorsement of M-’s activities, he now wrote, on 2nd May 177-, demanding that M- cease his ‘imposture’ and return the girl.

Again, M- refused. Maria Theresia von P-, he replied, was suffering from convulsions and delirious imaginings. A court physician was sent to examine her, and reported to Stoerk that in his opinion the patient was in no condition to be sent back. Thus reprieved, M- spent the next weeks devoting himself entirely to her case. With words, with magnetism, with the touch of his hands, and with her belief in him, he succeeded in bringing her nervous hysteria under control within nine days. Better still, it presently became evident that her perception was now sharper than at any previous time, suggesting that the pathways of the eye and brain had become strengthened. He did not yet ask her if she wanted to play; nor did she suggest it.

M- knew that it would not be possible to keep Maria Theresia von P-until she was fully cured, but did not wish to surrender her until she had acquired sufficient robustness to hold the world at bay. After five weeks of siege, an agreement was reached: M- would return the girl to her parents’ care, and they would allow M- to continue treating her as and when it might be necessary. With this peace treaty in place, Maria Theresia was handed over on 8th June 177-.

That was the last day on which M- saw her. At once, the von P-s reneged on their word, keeping their daughter in close custody, and forbidding all contact with M-. We cannot know what was said, or done, in that household, we can know only its predictable consequence: Maria Theresia von P- relapsed immediately into blindness, a condition from which she was not to emerge in the remaining forty-seven years of her life.

We have no account of Maria Theresia’s anguish, of her moral suffering and mental reflection. But the world of constant darkness was at least familiar to her. We may presume that she gave up all hope of cure, and also of escape from her parents; we may know that she took up her career again, first as pianist and singer, then as composer, and eventually as teacher. She learnt the use of a composition board invented for her by her amanuensis and librettist, Johann Riedinger; she also owned a hand printing machine for her correspondence. Her fame spread across Europe; she knew sixty concertos by heart, and played them in Prague, London and Berlin.

As for M-, he was driven from the imperial city of V- by the Faculty of Medicine and the Committee to Sustain Morality, a combination which ensured that he was remembered there as half charlatan, half seducer. He withdrew first to Switzerland, and then established himself in Paris. In 178-, seven years after they had last seen one another, Maria Theresia von P- came to perform in the French capital. At the Tuileries, before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, she introduced the concerto Mozart had written for her. She and M- did not meet; nor can we tell if either of them would have desired such a meeting. Maria Theresia lived on in darkness, usefully, celebratedly, until her death in 182-.

M- had died nine years previously, at the age of eighty-one, his intellectual powers and musical enthusiasm both undiminished. As he lay dying at Meersburg, on the shores of Lake Constance, he sent for his young friend F-, a seminarist, to play for him on the glass armonica which had accompanied him through all his travels since he left 261 Landstrasse. According to one account, the pangs of his dying were soothed by listening a final time to the music of the spheres. According to another, the young seminarist was delayed, and M- died before F- could touch his chalky fingers to the rotating glass.

Carcassonne

IN THE SUMMER of 1839, a man puts a telescope to his eye and inspects the Brazilian coastal town of Laguna. He is a foreign guerrilla leader whose recent success has brought the surrender of the imperial fleet. The liberator is on board its captured flagship, a seven-gun topsail schooner called the Itaparica, now at anchor in the lagoon from which the town gets its name. The telescope offers a view of a hilly quarter known as the Barra, containing a few simple but picturesque buildings. Outside one of them sits a woman. At the sight of her, the man, as he later put it, ‘forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore’.

Anita Riberas was eighteen, of mixed Portuguese and Indian descent, with dark hair, large breasts, ‘a virile carriage and determined face’. She would have known the guerrilla’s name, since he had helped free her native town. But his search for both the young woman and her house was in vain, until he chanced upon a shopkeeper of his acquaintance who invited him in for coffee. And there, as if waiting for him, she was. ‘We both remained enraptured and silent, gazing on one another like two people who meet not for the first time, and seek in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past.’ That’s how he put it, many years later, in his autobiography, where he mentions an additional reason for their enraptured silence: he had very little Portuguese, and she no Italian. So he spoke his eventual greeting in his own language: ‘Tu devi esser mia.’ You must be mine. His words transcended the problem of immediate understanding: ‘I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which death alone can annul.’

Is there a more romantic encounter than this? And since Garibaldi was one of the last romantic heroes of European history, let’s not quibble over circumstantial detail. For instance, he must have been able to speak passable Portuguese, since he’d been fighting in Brazil for years; for instance, Anita, despite her age, was no shy maiden but a woman already married for several years to a local cobbler. Let’s also forget about a husband’s heart and a family’s honour, about whether violence occurred or money was exchanged when, a few nights later, Garibaldi came ashore and carried Anita off. Instead, let’s just agree that it was what both parties deeply and instantly desired, and that in places and times where justice is approximate, possession is usually nine points of the law.

They were married in Montevideo three years later, having heard reports that the cobbler might be dead. According to the historian G. M. Trevelyan, they ‘spent their honeymoon in amphibious warfare along the coast and in the lagoon, fighting at close quarters against desperate odds’. As good on a horse as he, and as brave, she was his companion in war and marriage for ten years; to his troops she was mascot, invigorator, nurse. The birth of four children did not impede her devotion to the republican cause, first in Brazil, then Uruguay, and, finally, Europe. She was with Garibaldi in the defence of the Roman Republic, and, after its defeat, in his retreat across the Papal States to the Adriatic coast. During their flight she fell mortally ill. Garibaldi, though urged to flee by himself, stayed with his wife; together they dodged the Austrian white-coats in the marshes around Ravenna. In her final days, Anita held resolutely to ‘the undogmatic religion of her husband’, a fact which draws from Trevelyan a tremendous romantic flourish: ‘Dying on the breast of Garibaldi, she needed no priest.’

Some years ago, at a booksellers conference in Glasgow, I found myself talking to two Australian women, a novelist and a cook. Or rather, listening, since they were discussing the effect of different foods on the taste of a man’s sperm. ‘Cinnamon,’ said the novelist knowingly. ‘No, not just by itself,’ replied the cook. ‘You need strawberries, blackberries and cinnamon, that’s the best.’ She added that she could always tell a meat-eater. ‘Believe me, I know. I did a blind tasting once.’ Hesitant about contributing to the conversation, I mentioned asparagus. ‘Yes,’ replied the cook. ‘It shows in the urine but it also shows in the ejaculate.’ If I hadn’t written the exchange down shortly afterwards, I might think I was remembering part of some hot dream.

A psychiatrist friend of mine maintains that there is a direct correlation between interest in food and interest in sex. The lustful gourmand is almost a cliché; while aversion to food is often accompanied by erotic indifference. As for the normal, middle part of the spectrum: I can think of people who, because of the circles in which they move, exaggerate their interest in food; often, they are the same sort of people who (again, because of peer pressure) might claim more of an interest in sex than they actually feel. Counter-examples come to mind: couples whose appetite for food, and cooking, and eating out, has come to supplant the appetite for sex, and for whom bed, after a meal, is a place of repose not activity. But on the whole, I’d say there’s something to this theory.

The expectation of an experience governs and distorts the experience itself. I may not know anything about sperm tasting, but I know about wine tasting. If someone puts a glass of wine in front of you, it is impossible to approach it without preconceptions. To begin with, you might not actually like the stuff. But allowing that you do, then many subliminal factors come into play before you’ve even taken a sip. What colour the wine is, what it smells like, what glass it is in, how much it costs, who’s paying for it, where you are, what your mood is, whether or not you’ve had this wine before. It is impossible to factor out such pre-knowledge. The only way to get round it is an extreme one. If you are blindfolded, and someone puts a clothes peg on your nose, and hands you a glass of wine, then, even if you are the greatest expert in the world, you will be unable to tell the most basic things about it. Not even whether it is red or white.

Of all our senses, it is the one with the broadest application, from a brief impression on the tongue to a learned aesthetic response to a painting. It is also the one that most describes us. We may be better or worse people, happy or miserable, successful or failing, but what we are, within these wider categories, how we define ourselves, as opposed to how we are genetically defined, is what we call ‘taste’. Yet the word – perhaps because of its broad catchment area – easily misleads. ‘Taste’ can imply calm reflection; while its derivatives – tasteful, tastefulness, tasteless, tastelessness – lead us into a world of minute differentiations, of snobbery, social values and soft furnishings. True taste, essential taste, is much more instinctual and unreflecting. It says, Me, here, now, this, you. It says, Lower the boat and row me ashore. Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, says of Nancy Rufford: ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ Falling in love is the most violent expression of taste known to us.

And yet our language doesn’t seem to represent that moment very well. We have no equivalent for ‘coup de foudre’, the lightning strike and thunderclap of love. We talk about there being ‘electricity’ between a couple – but this is a domestic not cosmic image, as if the pair should be practical and wear rubber soles to their shoes. We talk of ‘love at first sight’, and indeed it happens, even in England, but the phrase makes it sound rather a polite business. We say that their eyes met across a crowded room. Again, how social it sounds. Across a crowded room. Across a crowded harbour.

Anita Riberas didn’t, in fact, die ‘on the breast of Garibaldi’, but rather more mundanely, and less like a lithograph. She died while the liberator and three of his followers, each holding a corner of her mattress, were moving her from a cart into a farmhouse. Still, we should celebrate that moment with the telescope and all it led to. Because this is the moment – the moment of passionate taste – that we are after. Few of us have telescopes and harbours available, and in the rewinding of memory we may discover that even the deepest and longest love relationships rarely start with full recognition, with ‘you must be mine’ pronounced in a foreign tongue. The moment itself may be disguised as something else: admiration, pity, office camaraderie, shared danger, a common sense of justice. Perhaps it is too alarming a moment to be looked in the face at the time; so perhaps the English language is right to avoid Gallic flamboyance. I once asked a man who had been long and happily married where he had met his wife. ‘At an office party,’ he replied. And what had been his first impression of her? ‘I thought she was very nice,’ he replied.

So how do we know to trust that moment of passionate taste, however camouflaged? We don’t, even if we feel we must, that this is all we have to go on. A woman friend once told me, ‘If you took me into a crowded room and there was one man with “Nutter” tattooed on his forehead, I’d walk straight across to him.’ Another, twice-married friend confided, ‘I’ve thought of leaving my marriage, but I’m so bad at choosing that I wouldn’t have any confidence I’d do better next time, and that would be a depressing thing to learn.’ Who or what can help us in the moment that sets the wild echoes flying? What do we trust: the sight of a woman’s feet in walking boots, the novelty of a foreign accent, a loss of blood to the fingertips followed by exasperated self-criticism? I once went to visit a young married couple whose new house was astonishingly empty of furniture. ‘The problem,’ the wife explained, ‘is that he’s got no taste at all and I’ve only got bad taste.’ I suppose that to accuse yourself of bad taste implies the latent presence of some sort of good taste. But in our love choices, few of us know whether or not we are going to end up in that house without furniture.

When I first became part of a couple, I began to examine with more self-interest the progress and fate of other couples. By now I was in my early thirties, and some of my contemporaries who had met a decade earlier were already beginning to break up. I realised that the two couples whose relationships seemed to resist time, whose partners continued to show joyful interest in one another, were both – all four – gay men in their sixties. This may have been just a statistical oddity; but I used to wonder if there was a reason. Was it because they had avoided the long travail of parenthood, which often grinds down heterosexual relationships? Possibly. Was it something essential to their gayness? Probably not, judging from gay couples of my own generation. One thing separating these two couples from the rest was that for many years and in many countries their relationship would have been illegal. A bond made in such circumstances may well run deeper: I am committing my safety into your hands, every day of our lives together. Perhaps there is a literary comparison: books written under oppressive regimes are often more highly valued than books written in societies where everything is permitted. Not that a writer should therefore pray for oppression, or a lover for illegality.

‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ The first couple, T and H, met during the 1930s. T was from the English upper-middle classes, handsome, talented and modest. H came from a Jewish family in Vienna, who were so hard up that when he was a small boy (and his father at the First World War), his mother gave him away to the poorhouse for several years. Later, as a young man, he met the daughter of an English textile magnate, who helped get him out of Austria before the Second World War. In England, H worked for the family firm, and became engaged to the daughter. Then H met T under circumstances which T, rather coyly, refused to specify, but which were life-changing from the start. ‘Of course,’ T told me after H’s death, ‘all this was very new to me – I hadn’t been to bed with anybody at all.’

What, you might ask, about H’s deserted fiancée? But this is a happy story: T told me that she had ‘a very good instinct’ for what was going on; that in due course she fell in love with someone else; and that the four of them became close and lifelong friends. H went on to become a successful clothes designer for a high-street chain, and on his death – given the liberal nature of this employer – T, who for decades had committed many illegal acts with his ‘Austrian friend’, found himself in receipt of a widow’s pension. When he told me all this, not long before his own death, two things struck me. The first was how dispassionately he narrated his own story; all his strongest emotions were aroused by the misfortunes and injustices of H’s life before the two of them had met. And the second was a phrase he used when describing the arrival of H into his life. T said he was very bewildered, ‘But sure of one thing: I was determined to marry H.’

The other couple, D and D, were South African. D1 was formal, shy, highly cultured; D2 more flamboyant, more obviously gay, full of teasing and double entendres. They lived in Cape Town, had a house on Santorini, and travelled widely. They had worked out how to live together down to the smallest detail: I remember them in Paris, explaining that as soon as they got to Europe they would always buy a large pannetone, on which to breakfast in their hotel room. (A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.) On one occasion D2 came to London by himself. Late in the evening, after drink had been taken, and we were talking about provincial France, he suddenly confessed, ‘I had the best fucky-fuck of my life in Carcassonne.’ It was not a line you would easily forget, particularly since he described how there had been a storm brewing, and at what the French call le moment suprême, there was an enormous roll of thunder overhead – a coup de foudre indeed. He didn’t say he had been with D1 at the time, and because he didn’t, I assumed he hadn’t. After he died, I put his words into a novel, though with some hesitation about the accompanying weather, which raised the frequent literary problem of the vrai versus the vraisemblable. Life’s astonishments are frequently literature’s clichés. A couple of years later, I was on the phone to D1 when he alluded to this line and asked where I had got it from. Worrying at my possible betrayal, I admitted that D2 had been my source. ‘Ach,’ said D1 with sudden warmth, ‘we had such a wonderful time in Carcassonne.’ I felt relief; also a kind of surrogate nostalgia about the fact that they had been together.

For some, the sunlight catches on the telescope out there in the lagoon; for others, not. We choose, we are chosen, we are unchosen. I said to my friend who always picked nutters that maybe she should look for a nice nutter. She replied, ‘But how could I tell one?’ Like most people, she believed what lovers told her until there was a good reason not to. For several years she went out with a nutter who always left promptly for the office; only towards the end of the relationship did she discover that his first appointment of the day was always with his shrink. I said, ‘You’ve just had bad luck.’ She said, ‘I don’t want it to be luck. If it’s luck, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ People say that in the end you get what you deserve, but that phrase cuts both ways. People say that in modern cities there are too many terrific women and too many terrible men. The city of Carcassonne looks solid and enduring, but what we admire is mostly nineteenth-century reconstruction. Forget the hazard of ‘whether it will last’, and whether longevity is in any case a virtue, a reward, an accommodation or another piece of luck. How much do we act, and how much are we acted upon, in that moment of passionate taste?

And we shouldn’t forget that Garibaldi had a second wife (also a third – though we may ignore her). His ten years of marriage to Anita Riberas were followed by ten years of widowhood. Then, in the summer of 1859, during his Alpine campaign, he was fighting near Varese when a message was brought to him through the Austrian lines by a seventeen-year-old girl driving alone in a gig. She was Giuseppina Raimondi, the illegitimate daughter of Count Raimondi. Garibaldi was immediately smitten, wrote her a passionate letter, declared his love on bended knee. He admitted the difficulties to any union between them: he was nearly three times her age, already had another child by a peasant woman, and feared that Giuseppina’s aristocratic background might not play well with his political image. But he convinced himself (and her), to the extent that on 3rd December 1859, as a later historian than Trevelyan worded it, ‘She put aside her doubts and entered his room. The deed was done!’ Like Anita, she was evidently dashing and brave; on 24th January 1860, they were married – in this instance, with the full dogma of the Catholic Church.

Tennyson met Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight four years later. The poet greatly admired the liberator, but also noted that he had ‘the divine stupidity of a hero’. This second marriage – or rather, Garibaldi’s illusions about it – lasted (according to which authority you believe) either a few hours or a few days, the time it took for the bridegroom to receive a letter detailing his new wife’s past. Giuseppina, it turned out, had begun taking lovers at the age of eleven; she had married Garibaldi only at the insistence of her father; she had spent the night before her wedding with her most recent lover, by whom she was pregnant; and she had precipitated sexual events with her husband-to-be so that she could write to him on 1st January and claim to be carrying his child.

Garibaldi demanded not just an immediate separation but an annulment. The romantic hero’s deeply unromantic reasoning was that since he had slept with Giuseppina only before the wedding and not after, the marriage had technically not been consummated. The law was unimpressed by such sophistry, and Garibaldi’s appeal to higher influences, including the king, also failed. The liberator found himself shackled to Giuseppina for the next twenty years.

In the end, the law is only ever defeated by lawyers; in place of the romantic telescope, the legal microscope. The freeing argument, when it was eventually found, ran like this: since Garibaldi’s marriage had been solemnised in territory nominally under Austrian control, the law governing it might therefore be construed as the Austrian civil code, under which an annulment was (and perhaps always had been) possible. So the hero-lover was saved by the very nation against whose rule he had been fighting at the time. The distinguished lawyer who proposed this ingenious solution had, back in 1860, prepared the legislative unification of Italy; now, he achieved the marital disunification of the nation’s unifier. Let us salute the name of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini.

Pulse

MY PARENTS WERE walking down a farm track in Italy about three years ago. I often imagine myself watching them, always from behind. My mother, greying hair pulled back in a bunch, would be wearing a loose-cut patterned blouse over slacks and open-toed sandals; my father has a short-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers and polished brown shoes. His shirt is properly ironed, with twin buttoned pockets and turn-ups, if that’s the word, on the sleeves. He owns half a dozen shirts like this; they proclaim him a man on holiday. Nor do they give the least hint of athleticism; at best, they might look appropriate on a bowling green.

The two of them could be holding hands; this was something they did unselfconsciously, whether I was behind them, watching, or not. They are walking down this track somewhere in Umbria because they are investigating a roughly chalked sign offering vino novello. And they are on foot because they have looked at the depth of the hard clay ruts and decided not to risk their hire car. I would have argued that this was the point of renting a car; but my parents were a cautious couple in many ways.

The track runs between vineyards. As it makes a bend to the left, a rusting, hangar-like barn comes into view. In front of it is a concrete structure like an oversized compost bin: about six feet high and nine across, with no roof or front to it. When they are about thirty yards away, my mother turns to my father and pulls a face. She may even say, ‘Yuck’, or something similar. My father frowns and doesn’t reply. This was the first time it happened; or rather, to be exact, the first time he noticed it.

We live in what used to be a market town some thirty miles north-west of London. Mum works in hospital administration; Dad has been a solicitor in a local practice all his adult life. He says the work will see him out, but that his type of solicitor – not just a technician who understands documents, but a general giver of advice – won’t exist in the future. The doctor, the vicar, the lawyer, perhaps the schoolmaster – in the old days, these were figures everyone turned to for more than just their professional competency. Nowadays, my father says, people do their own conveyancing, write their own wills, agree the terms of their divorce beforehand, and take their own advice. If they want a second opinion, they prefer an agony aunt to a solicitor, and the internet to both. My father takes this all philosophically, even when people imagine they’re capable of pleading their own cases. He just smiles, and repeats the old legal saying: the man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.

Dad advised me against following him into the law, so I did a BEd and now teach in a sixth-form college about fifteen miles away. But I didn’t see any reason to leave the town where I grew up. I go to the local gym, and on Fridays run with a group led by my friend Jake; that’s how I met Janice. She was always going to stand out in a place like this, because she has that London edge to her. I think she hoped I’d want to move to the big city, and was disappointed when I didn’t. No, I don’t think that; I know it.

Mum… who can describe their mother? It’s like when interviewers ask one of the royals what it’s like to be royal, and they laugh and say they don’t know what it’s like not to be royal. I don’t know what it would be like for my mum not to be my mum. Because if she wasn’t, then I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, be me, could I?

Apparently I had a difficult birth. Perhaps that’s why there’s only me; though I’ve never asked. We don’t do gynaecology in our family. Or religion, because we don’t have any. We do politics a bit, but rarely argue, since we think the parties are as bad as one another. Dad may be a bit more right wing than Mum, but essentially we believe in self-reliance, helping others, and not expecting the state to look after us from cradle to grave. We pay our taxes and our pension contributions and have life assurance; we use the National Health Service and give to charity when we can. We’re ordinary, sensible middle-class people.

And without Mum we wouldn’t be any of it. Dad had a bit of a drink problem when I was little, but Mum sorted him out and turned him into a purely social drinker. I was classified as ‘disruptive’ at school, but Mum sorted me out with patience and love, while making it clear exactly which lines I couldn’t cross. I expect she did the same with Dad. She organises us. She still has a bit of her Lancashire accent left, but we don’t do that silly north-south stuff in our family, not even as a joke. I also think it’s different when there’s only one child, because there aren’t two natural teams, kids and adults. There are just the three of you, and though I might have been more coddled, I also learnt from an earlier age to live in an adult world, because that’s the only game in town. I may be wrong about this. If you asked Janice if she thought I was fully grown up, I can imagine the answer.

So my mother pulls a face and my father frowns. They walk on until the contents of the concrete bin become clearer: a curving slope of purply-red muck. My mother – and I am guessing here, though her vocabulary is familiar to me – now says something like,

‘Pretty whiffy.’

My father can see what my mother’s referring to: a pile of marc. That’s the name, apparently, for what’s left after grapes have been crushed – the discarded skins and stalks and pips and so on. My parents know about this sort of thing; in their non-fanatical way they are keen on their food and drink. That’s why they were on this farm track in the first place – looking for a few bottles of that year’s wine to take home. I’m not indifferent to food and drink, just regard them more pragmatically. I know which foods are healthiest and also most energy-providing. And I know precisely how much alcohol relaxes me and gives me a good time, and how much is too much. Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: ‘One’s perfect. Two’s too many. And three’s not enough.’ Except in my case: I once ordered a martini – and half was just about right.

So my father approaches this great heap of detritus, stops about ten feet away and consciously sniffs. Nothing. Five feet – still nothing. Only when he puts his nose almost into the marc does anything register. Even so, it’s just a faint version of the pungent smell his eyes – and his wife – tell him exists. My father’s response is more one of curiosity than alarm. For the rest of the holiday he monitors the ways in which his nose lets him down. Benzene fumes when filling up the car – nothing. A double espresso in a village bar – nothing. Flowers cascading over a crumbly wall – nothing. The half-inch of wine a hovering waiter has poured into his glass – nothing. Soap, shampoo – nothing. Deodorant – nothing. That was the oddest thing of all, Dad told me: to be putting on deodorant and not be able to smell something you were putting on to stop something else you also couldn’t smell.

They agreed there wasn’t much point in doing anything until they got home. Mum expected she’d have to badger Dad to call the health centre. The two of them shared a reluctance to bother the doctor unless it was serious. But each thought something that happened to the other was more serious than if it was happening to them. Hence the necessity to badger. Eventually, one might simply ring up and book an appointment in the other’s name.

This time, my father did it for himself. I asked what had decided him. He paused. ‘Well, if you want to know, son, it was when I realised I couldn’t smell your mum.’

‘You mean, her perfume?’

‘No, not her perfume. Her skin. Her… self.’

There was a fond, absent look in his eye as he said it. I didn’t find this at all embarrassing. He was just a man at ease with what he felt about his wife. There are some parents who make a display of marital emotion in front of their children: look at us, see how young we still are, how dashing, aren’t we just the picture? My parents weren’t like this at all. And I envied them the more for it, that they didn’t need to show off.

When you run in our group, there’s the leader, Jake, who sets the pace and also makes sure no one falls too far behind. At the front are the heavy guys who keep their heads down, check their watches and heart monitors, and talk, if at all, about hydration levels and how many calories they’ve done. At the back are those who aren’t fit enough to run and talk at the same time. And in between are the rest of us, who like both the exercise and the chat. But there’s a rule: no one’s allowed to monopolise anyone else, not even if they’re going out together. So one Friday evening, I checked my stride to fall in with Janice, our newest recruit. Her running gear had clearly not been bought at the local shop where the rest of us go; it was looser cut, and silkier, and had needless bits of piping on it.

‘So what brings you to our town?’

‘Been here two years, actually.’

‘So what brought you to our town?’

She ran a few yards. ‘Boyfriend.’ Ah. Then a few more yards. ‘Ex-boyfriend.’ Ah, better – maybe she’s running him off. But I didn’t like to probe. Anyway, there’s another rule in the group: keep it light when you’re running. No British foreign policy, and no big emotional stuff either. Sometimes it makes us sound like a bunch of hairdressers, but it’s a useful rule.

‘Only a couple more k.’

‘So be it.’

‘Fancy a drink afterwards?’

She looked across and up at me. ‘So be it,’ she repeated with a grin.

She was easy to talk to, mainly because I did all the listening. And more of the looking too. She was slim, neat, black-haired, well manicured, with a slightly off-centre tweak to her nose that I found instantly sexy. She was in motion a lot, gesturing, flicking at her hair, looking away, looking back; I found this exhilarating. She told me she worked in London as PA to the section head of a women’s magazine I’d just about heard of.

‘Do you get lots of free samples?’

She stopped and looked at me; I didn’t know her well enough to tell if she was really put out or just pretending. ‘I can’t believe that’s the first question you ask me about my job.’

It had seemed reasonable enough to me. ‘OK,’ I replied, ‘Let’s pretend I’ve already asked you fourteen acceptable questions about your job. Question 15: do you get lots of free samples?’

She laughed. ‘Do you always do things in the wrong order?’

‘Only if it makes someone laugh,’ I replied.

My parents were plump, and good advertisements for plumpness. They took little exercise, and their response to having a big lunch was to lie down and sleep it off. They treated my fitness programme as a youthful eccentricity: the only time they reacted as if I was fifteen rather than thirty. In their view, serious exercise was appropriate only for people like soldiers, firemen and the police. Once, up in London, they had found themselves outside one of those gyms which let you glimpse some of the activities within. It’s meant to be alluring, but my parents were horrified.

‘They all looked so solemn,’ my mother said.

‘And most of them had earphones and were listening to music. Or watching TV screens. As if the only way to concentrate on getting fit was not to concentrate on it.’

‘They were ruled by those machines, ruled.’

I knew better than to try and convince my parents of the pleasures and rewards of exercise, from increased mental alertness to heightened sexual capacity. I’m not boasting, I promise. It’s true, it’s well documented. Jake, who goes on hiking holidays with a succession of girlfriends, told me about a paradox he’d discovered. He said that if you walk for, say, three or four hours, you build up a good appetite, enjoy a nice dinner, and as often as not fall asleep as soon as you get into bed. Whereas if you walk for seven or eight hours, you find yourself less hungry, but when you get to bed you’re unexpectedly more up for it – both of you. Perhaps there’s a scientific reason for this. Or else the act of reducing expectation to near zero frees up the libido.

I’m not going to speculate on my parents’ sex life. I’ve no reason to think it was anything other than what they wanted it to be – which I realise is a contorted way of putting things. Nor do I know if they were still happily active, in contented decline, or if sex for them was an unmourned memory. As I say, my parents held hands whenever they felt like it. They danced together with a kind of concentrated grace, deliberately old-fashioned. And I didn’t really need an answer to a question I didn’t anyway want to put. Because I’d seen the look in my father’s eye when he talked about not being able to smell his wife. It didn’t matter one way or the other if they were actually having sex. Because their intimacy was still alive.

When Janice and I first got together, we used to head straight back to her place after we’d finished running. She’d tell me to take off my trainers and socks and lie down on the bed while she took a quick shower. Knowing what was coming, I’d usually have a bulge in my shorts by the time she reappeared with a towel wrapped round her. You know how most women have that trick of tucking the towel in just above their breasts with some kind of fold which keeps it all in place? Janice had a different trick: she tucked the towel in just below her breasts.

‘Look what’s on my bed,’ she’d say with a twitch of a smile. ‘What big beast is this on my bed?’

No one had ever called me that before, and I’m just as susceptible to flattery as the next man.

Then she’d kneel on the bed and pretend to inspect me. ‘What a big sweaty beast we’ve got here.’ She’d hold my cock through my shorts and start sniffing at me, at my forehead, then my neck, then my armpits, then she’d pull up my singlet and begin licking my chest and breathing me in, all the while tugging on my cock. The first time it happened, I just came on the spot. Later, I learnt to hold myself back.

And the thing was, she didn’t just smell of the shower. She used to put scent on her breasts and hold them above my face.

‘Here are your free samples,’ she’d say.

Then she’d lower a nipple until it was tickling the end of my nose, and tease me by making me guess the name of the perfume. I never knew the answer, but I was in heaven anyway, so I’d usually make up some silly brand instead. You know, Chanel No. 69, that sort of thing.

Speaking of which. Sometimes, after she’d teased my nose, she’d swivel round above me, and the towel would be gone, and she’d lower herself on to my face, and pull down the top of my shorts. ‘What’ve we got here?’ she’d say in a carrying whisper. ‘We’ve got a big sweaty stinky beast, that’s what we’ve got.’ And then she’d take my cock in her mouth.

The GP looked up my father’s nostrils, and said these things often righted themselves over time. It might just be the aftereffect of a virus Dad didn’t even know he’d picked up. Give it another six weeks or so. Dad gave it another six weeks, went back, and was given a prescription for some nasal spray. Two squirts up each nostril night and morning. By the end of the course nothing had changed. The doctor offered to refer him to a specialist; naturally, Dad didn’t want to bother one.

‘It’s quite interesting, you know.’

‘Is it?’ I was round at my parents’ place, smelling midmorning Nescafé. I didn’t believe it could be ‘interesting’ when something went wrong with the body. Painful, irritating, frightening, time-consuming, but not ‘interesting’. That’s why I took such care of my own body.

‘People think of the obvious things – roses, gravy, beer. But I was never much of a one for smelling roses.’

‘But if you can’t smell, you can’t taste, right?’

‘That’s what they say – that all taste is really smell. But it doesn’t seem to apply in my case. I can still taste food and wine the same.’ He paused. ‘No, that’s not quite right. Some white wines seem more acidic than they used to. I wonder why.’

‘Is that what’s interesting?’

‘No. It’s the other way round. It’s not what you miss, it’s what you don’t miss. It’s a relief not to smell traffic, for instance. You walk past a bus in the market square just sitting there with its engine running, spewing out oily fumes. You’d hold your breath before.’

‘I’d carry on holding it, Dad.’ Breathing in noxious fumes without even noticing? The nose was there for a purpose, after all.

‘You don’t notice the smell of cigarettes, that’s another plus. Or the smell of them on someone – I’ve always hated that. BO, burger vans, Saturday-night vomit on the pavement…’

‘Dogshit,’ I suggested.

‘Funny you should mention that. It’s always made me heave. But I stepped in some the other day and cleaning it off didn’t really bother me at all. In the old days I’d have put the shoe outside the back door and left it there for a few days. Oh, and now I cut up onions for Mum. They don’t have any effect on me. No tears, nothing. That’s a plus.’

‘That is interesting,’ I said, half meaning it. Actually, I found it typical of my father’s ability to put a positive spin on almost anything. He would have said that examining matters from every point of view was part of his legal habit. I thought him an incorrigible optimist.

‘But you know… It’s things like stepping outside in the morning and sniffing the air. Now I just register whether it’s warm or nippy. And furniture polish, I miss that. Shoe polish too. I hadn’t thought of it until now. Doing your shoes without being able to smell anything – just imagine it.’

I didn’t need to, or want to. Coming over all elegiac about tins of Kiwi polish – I hoped I’d never end up like that.

‘And, of course, there’s your mum.’

Yes, my mum.

Both my parents wore glasses, and I sometimes used to imagine them sitting up in bed reading, then putting their book or magazine down, and turning off the bedside light. When did they say goodnight to one another? Before taking off their glasses or after? Before turning out the light or after? But now I suddenly thought: isn’t smell meant to be a central factor in sexual arousal? Pheromones, those primitive things that order us about at the very moment we think we’re really in charge. My father complained that he couldn’t smell my mother. Perhaps he meant – had always meant – something more than that.

Jake used to say I had a nose for trouble. With women, he meant. That’s why I was still unmarried at thirty. So are you, I replied. Yes, but I like it that way, he said. Jake is a big, rangy, curly-haired fellow who comes on to women in a gentle, unthreatening manner. It’s as if he’s saying, Look, I’m here, I’m fun, I’m not long-term, but you’ll probably enjoy me and afterwards we can still be friends. Quite how he manages to convey such a complicated message with little more than a grin and a lifted eyebrow is beyond me. Perhaps it’s those pheromones.

Jake’s parents split up when he was ten. That’s why he’s got no big expectations, he says. Enjoy the day, he says, keep things light. It’s as if he’s applied the rules of his running group to the rest of his life as well. Part of me’s impressed by this attitude, but most of me doesn’t want it or envy it.

The first time Janice and I split up, Jake took me to a wine bar, and while I sipped my daily allowance of a single glass, he told me, in a sympathetic, roundabout way, how in his opinion she was untruthful, manipulative and quite possibly psychopathic. I replied that she was a lively, sexy but complicated girl whom I sometimes couldn’t read, especially at the moment. Jake asked, in an even more roundabout way, if I realised that she’d come on to him in the kitchen when he was round to supper three weeks previously. I told him he was just misreading her friendly manner. That’s why she’s a psychopath, he replied.

But Jake often called people psychopaths when they were simply more focused than he was, so I didn’t take it too much amiss, and a couple of weeks later Janice and I were back together. In that first rush of renewed sex and excitement and truthfulness, I nearly told her what Jake had said, but thought better of it. Instead, I asked if she’d ever thought of going off with someone else, and she said yes, for about thirty seconds, so I gave her marks for honesty and asked who, and she said no one I knew, and I accepted that, and not long afterwards we got engaged.

I said to my mother, ‘You do like Janice, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. As long as she makes you happy.’

‘That sounds… conditional.’

‘Well, it is. It would be. A mother’s love is unconditional. A mother-in-law’s love is conditional. That’s how it’s always been.’

‘So if she made me unhappy?’

My mother didn’t reply.

‘And if I made her unhappy?’

She smiled. ‘I’d put you across my knee.’

As it turned out, we almost didn’t get to the wedding. We each postponed once, and even got an official warning from Jake about discussing heavy stuff while out running. When I put it off Janice said it was really because I was scared to commit. When she put it off it was because she wasn’t sure about marrying someone who was scared to commit. So somehow it was my fault both times.

One of my father’s bridge partners suggested acupuncture. Apparently it had done wonders for the fellow’s sciatica.

‘But you don’t believe in that stuff, Dad.’

‘I’ll believe in it if it cures me,’ he replied.

‘But you’re a rationalist, like me.’

‘We don’t have a monopoly of knowledge in the West. Other countries know things too.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. But I felt a kind of alarm, as if things were slipping. We need our parents to remain constant, don’t we? And all the more so when we’re grown up ourselves.

‘Do you remember – no, you’d’ve been too young – those photos of Chinese patients having open-heart surgery? All they had by way of anaesthetic was acupuncture and a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.’

‘What chance those photos were complete fakes?’

‘Why should they be?’

‘Mao worship. Proof of the superiority of the Chinese way. Also, if it worked, keeping down medical costs.’

‘You see, you said if it worked.’

‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘You’re too cynical, son.’

‘You’re not cynical enough, Dad.’

He went to this… whatever acupuncturists call their surgery or clinic, in a house on the other side of town. Mrs Rose wore a white smock, like a nurse or dentist; she was fortyish and sensible-looking, Dad told us. She listened to his story, took his medical details, asked if he suffered from constipation, and explained the principles of Chinese acupuncture. Then she left the room while he stripped to his underpants and lay down under a paper sheet with a blanket on top of it.

‘It was all very professional,’ he reported. ‘She starts by taking your pulses. In Chinese medicine there are six, three on each side. But the ones on the left wrist are more important because they’re for the major organs – heart, liver and kidneys.’

I didn’t say anything – just felt my alarm growing. And I expect my father read my mood.

‘I said to Mrs Rose, “I’d better warn you, I’m a bit sceptical”, and she said that didn’t matter because acupuncture works whether you believe in it or not.’

Except presumably it takes longer with sceptics and so costs more money. I didn’t say this either. Instead I let Dad tell us how Mrs Rose measured his back and marked it up with a felt-tip pen, then put little piles of stuff on his skin and set light to them, and he had to sing out when he felt the heat, and she’d pick them off him. Then there was more measurement and felt-pen markings, and she began sticking needles in him. It was all very hygienic and she dropped the used needles into a sharps box.

At the end of the hour she left the room, he put his clothes back on and paid her fifty-five pounds. Then he went off to the supermarket to buy dinner. He described standing there in a sort of daze, not knowing what he wanted – or rather, wanting everything he looked at. He wandered around, buying all sorts of stuff, came home in a state of exhaustion, and had to take a nap.

‘So you see, it obviously works.’

‘You mean, you smelt your dinner?’

‘No, it’s early days – that’s only my first treatment. I mean, it clearly has some effect. Both physical and mental.’

I thought to myself: feeling tired and buying food you don’t need, that sounds like a cure?

‘What do you think, Mum?’

‘I’m all for him trying something different if he wants to.’ She reached across the table and patted his arm, near where his mysterious new pulses lay hidden. I needn’t have asked – they would have discussed things beforehand and come to a joint conclusion. And as I well knew by now, divide and rule was never successful with my parents.

‘If it works, I might try it for my knee,’ she added.

‘What’s wrong with your knee, Mum?’

‘Oh, I sort of twisted it. I tripped and bashed it on the stairs. I’m getting a bit trippy in my old age.’

My mother was fifty-eight. She was wide-hipped, with a good, low centre of gravity, and never wore silly shoes.

‘You mean, you’ve done this before?’

‘It’s nothing. Just age. Comes to us all.’

Janice once said that you can never really tell about parents. I asked what she meant. She replied that by the time you were able to understand them, it was too late anyway. You could never find out what they were like before they met, when they met, before you were conceived, afterwards, when you were a small child…

‘Children often understand a lot,’ I said. ‘Instinctively.’

‘They understand what parents let them understand.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘So be it. The point remains. By the time you think you’re capable of understanding your parents, most of the important things in their lives have already happened. They are who they are. Or rather, they are who they’ve decided to be – with you, when you’re around.’

‘I don’t agree.’ I couldn’t imagine my parents, once they closed the door, turning into other people.

‘How often do you think of your father as a reformed alcoholic?’

‘Never. That’s not how I think of him. I’m his son, not a social worker.’

‘Precisely. So you want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum. It doesn’t work like that. There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’

‘You’d be laughed out of court,’ I said.

She looked at me. ‘I think that what happens with most couples over time is that they find a way of being with one another that is basically untruthful. It’s like the relationship depends on mutually assured self-deception. That’s its default setting.’

‘Well I still don’t agree.’ What I thought was: crap. Mutually assured self-deception – that doesn’t sound like you. It’s some phrase you picked up from that magazine you work for. Or from some bloke you wouldn’t mind fucking. But all I said was,

‘Are you calling my parents hypocrites?’

‘I’m talking generally. Why do you always take things personally?’

‘Then I don’t understand what you’re saying. And if I do, then I can’t think why you want to be married to me, or anybody else.’

‘So be it.’

That was another thing. I was beginning to dislike her use of that phrase.

Dad admitted that he hadn’t expected acupuncture to hurt as much as it did.

‘Do you tell her?’

‘Certainly. I say, “Ow.”’

If Mrs Rose stuck a needle in and didn’t get the reaction she expected, she’d do it again, near the original spot, until she got what she was looking for.

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s a sort of magnetic pull, an energy surge. And you can always tell because that’s when it hurts most.’

‘And then?’

‘And then she does it in other places. The backs of the hands, the ankles. That’s even more painful – where there isn’t much flesh.’

‘Right.’

‘But in between she needs to see how your energy levels are coming along, so she’s always checking your pulses.’

At which point I lost it. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad. There’s only one pulse, you know that. By definition. It’s the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood.’

My father didn’t reply, just cleared his throat slightly and looked at my mother. We don’t do rows in our family. We don’t want to do them, and we don’t know how to, anyway. So there was a silence, and then Mum started on another topic.

Twenty minutes after his fourth treatment, my father walked into Starbucks and smelt coffee for the first time in months. Then he went to the Body Shop to get some shampoo for Mum, and said it was like being hit over the head by a rhododendron bush. He was almost nauseous. The smells were so rich, he said, that it was as if they had bright colours attached to them as well.

‘So what do you say about that?’

‘I don’t know what to say, Dad, except congratulations.’ I thought it was probably coincidence or auto-suggestion.

‘You’re not going to pretend it’s a coincidence?’

‘No, Dad, I’m not.’

Mrs Rose, to his surprise, greeted his account neutrally, with a little head-nodding and some scribbling in a notebook. She then explained her proposed course of action. There would, if he agreed, be fortnightly appointments building towards the summer – by which she meant the Chinese, not the British, summer, because that, based on my father’s date of birth, would be his time of maximum responsiveness. She added that his energy levels were rising every time she checked his pulses.

‘Do you feel more energetic, Dad?’

‘That’s not what it’s about.’

‘And have you smelt anything since your last appointment?’

‘No.’

Right, so ‘energy levels’ had nothing to do with ‘levels of energy’, and having higher ones didn’t increase his smelling power. Fine.

Sometimes I wondered why I was being so hard on my father. Over the next three months he reported his findings matter-of-factly. From time to time he smelt things, but they had to be strong to get through: soap, coffee, burnt toast, toilet cleaner; twice, a glass of red wine; once, to his joy, the smell of rain. The Chinese summer came and went; Mrs Rose said that acupuncture had done all it could. My father, typically, blamed his own scepticism, but Mrs Rose repeated that attitude of mind was irrelevant. Since she was the one who proposed ending the treatment, I decided that she wasn’t a charlatan. But perhaps it was more that I didn’t want to think of Dad as the sort of person who could be taken in by a charlatan.

‘Actually, it’s your mother I’m more worried about.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She seems, I don’t know, a bit off the pace nowadays. Maybe it’s just tiredness. She’s slower, somehow.’

‘What does she say?’

‘Oh, she says there’s nothing wrong. Or if there is, it’s just hormonal.’

‘What does she mean?’

‘I was rather hoping you could tell me.’

That was another nice thing about my parents. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.

‘I probably don’t know any better than you, Dad. But in my experience, “hormones” is a catch-all word for when women don’t want to tell you something. I always think: hang on, haven’t men got hormones as well? Why don’t we use them as an excuse?’

My father chuckled, but I could see his anxiety wasn’t allayed. So on his next bridge night, I dropped in on Mum. As we sat in the kitchen, I could tell immediately that she hadn’t bought my excuse of ‘just being in the neighbourhood’.

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Decaf or herbal tea, whatever you’re having.’

‘Well, I need a good dose of caffeine.’

Somehow, it didn’t take more than that to bring me to the point.

‘Dad’s worried about you. So am I.’

‘Dad’s a worrier.’

‘Dad loves you. That’s why he notices things about you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t.’

‘No, I suppose that’s right.’ I looked at her, but her gaze was elsewhere. It was perfectly clear to me that she was thinking about being loved. It could have made me feel envious, but it didn’t.

‘So tell me what’s wrong, and don’t mention hormones.’

She smiled. ‘A bit tired. A bit clumsy. That’s all.’

About eighteen months into the marriage, Janice accused me of not being straightforward. Of course, being Janice, she didn’t put it as straightforwardly as that. She asked why I always preferred discussing unimportant problems rather than important ones. I said I didn’t think this was so, but in any case, big things are sometimes so big that there’s little to say about them, whereas small things are easier to discuss. And sometimes we think this is the problem, whereas it’s actually that, which makes this seem trivial. She looked at me like one of my stroppier pupils, and said that was typical – a typical justification of my natural evasiveness, my refusal to face facts and deal with issues. She said she could always smell a lie on me. She actually put it like that.

‘Very well, then,’ I replied. ‘Let’s be straightforward. Let’s deal with issues. You’re having an affair and I’m having an affair. Is that facing facts or not?’

‘That’s what you think it is. You make it sound like a one-all draw.’ And then she explained the falseness of my apparent candour, and the difference between our infidelities – hers born of despair, mine of revenge – and how it was symptomatic that I thought the affairs were the significant thing, rather than the circumstances which gave rise to them. And so we came full circle to the original charges.

What do we look for in a partner? Someone like us, someone different? Someone like us but different, different but like us? Someone to complete us? Oh, I know you can’t generalise, but even so. The point is: if we’re looking for someone who matches us, we only ever think of their good matching bits. What about their bad matching bits? Do you think we’re sometimes driven towards people with the same faults as we have?

My mother. When I think of her now, there’s a phrase that comes to mind – one I used when Dad was rabbiting on about his six Chinese pulses. Dad, I said to him, there’s only one pulse – the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood. The photographs of my parents that I’m most attached to are those taken before I was born. And – thank you, Janice – I do actually think I know what they were like back then.

My parents sitting on a pebble beach somewhere, his arm around her shoulders; he has a sports jacket with leather elbow patches, she’s in a polka-dot dress, looking out at the camera with passionate hopefulness. My parents on their honeymoon in Spain, with mountains behind them, both wearing sunglasses, so you have to work out how they’re feeling from their stance, their obvious relaxation with one another, and the sly fact that my mother has her hand slipped into my father’s trouser pocket. And then a picture which must have meant a lot to them despite its shortcomings: the two of them at a party, clearly more than a bit drunk, with the camera flash giving them the pink eyes of white mice. My father has absurd muttonchop whiskers, Mum frizzy hair, big hoop earrings and a kaftan. Neither looks as if they could possibly grow up enough to be a parent. I suspect this is the first picture ever taken of them together, the first time they are officially recorded as sharing the same space, breathing the same air.

There’s also a photo on the sideboard of me with my parents. I’m about four or five, standing between them with the expression of a child who’s been told to watch the birdie, or however they might have put it: concentrating, but at the same time not quite certain of what’s going on. I’m holding a junior watering can, though I have no memory of being given a junior gardener’s kit, or indeed of having any interest, real or suggested, in gardening.

Nowadays, when I examine this photo – my mother looking down at me protectively, my father smiling at the camera, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – I can’t help remembering Janice’s words. About how parents decide who they are before the child has any awareness of it, how they develop a front which the child will never be able to penetrate. Whether intentional or not, there was something poisonous in her remarks. ‘You want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum.’ And then: ‘There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’ What am I to do with that thought? Even if I were to pursue it and find it led nowhere?

There’s nothing mimsy or flaky about my mum and nothing – note this, please, Janice – nothing neurotically self-dramatising. She’s a solid presence in a room, whether talking or not. And she’s the person you would turn to if anything went wrong. Once, when I was little, she managed to gash herself in the thigh. There was no one else in the house. Most people would have called an ambulance, or at least disturbed Dad at his work. But Mum just got a needle and some surgical thread, pulled the wound together and sewed it up. And she’d do the same for you without turning a hair. That’s what she’s like. If there is a secret in her life, it’s probably that she helped someone and never told anybody about it. So fuck Janice, is what I say.

My parents met when Dad had just qualified as a solicitor. He used to maintain that he’d had to chase off a number of rivals. Mum said there wasn’t any chasing to be done because everything was perfectly obvious to her from the day they met. Yes, Dad would reply, but the other fellows didn’t see it that way. My mother would look at him fondly, and I could never work out which of them to believe. Or perhaps that’s the definition of a happy marriage: both parties are telling the truth, even when their accounts are incompatible.

Of course, my admiration for their marriage is partly conditioned by the failure of my own. Perhaps their example made me assume it was more straightforward than it turned out. Do you think there are people who have a talent for marriage, or is it just a question of luck? Though I suppose you could say that it’s luck to have such a talent. When I mentioned to Mum that Janice and I were going through a bad patch and trying to work at our marriage, she said,

‘I’ve never really understood what that means. If you love your job, it doesn’t feel like work. If you love your marriage, it doesn’t feel like work. I suppose you may be working at it, underneath. Just doesn’t feel like it,’ she repeated. And then, after a pause, ‘Not that I’m saying anything against Janice.’

‘Let’s not talk about Janice,’ I said. I’d already talked enough about Janice to Janice herself. Whatever we brought to that marriage, we sure as hell took nothing away from it, except our legal share of money.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer? I don’t know. Only that I don’t blame my parents; nor, really, do I blame Janice.

My mother promised that she would go to their GP if Dad saw a specialist about his anosmia. My father was typically reluctant. Others had it far worse than him, he said. He could still taste his food, whereas for some anosmiacs dinner was like chewing cardboard and plastic. He’d been on the internet and read about even more extreme cases – for instance, of olfactory hallucination. Imagine if fresh milk suddenly smelt and tasted sour, chocolate made you retch, meat was just like a sponge of blood to you.

‘If you dislocate your finger,’ my mother replied, ‘you don’t refuse to get it looked at because someone else has broken their leg.’

And so the bargain was made. The waiting and the bureaucracy began, and they both ended up having MRI scans in the same week. What are the chances of that, I wonder.

I’m not sure we ever know exactly when our marriage ends. We remember certain stages, transitions, arguments; incompatibilities which grow until they can’t be resolved or lived with. I think that for much of the time when Janice was attacking me – or, as she would put it, the time when I stopped paying attention to her and just went missing – I never really thought this was, or would cause, the end of our marriage. It was only when, for no reason I could comprehend, she turned on my parents that I first began to think: oh really, now she’s crossed the line. It’s true, we’d been drinking. And yes, I had exceeded my self-imposed limit – well exceeded it.

‘One of your problems is, you think your parents have the perfect marriage.’

‘Why is that one of my problems?’

‘Because it makes you think your marriage is worse than it is.’

‘Oh, so it’s their fault, is it?’

‘No, they’re fine, your parents.’

‘But?’

‘I said they’re fine. I just didn’t say the sun shines out of their arses.’

‘You don’t think the sun shines out of anyone’s arse, do you?’

‘Well, it doesn’t. But I like your dad, he’s always been nice to me.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, mothers and only sons. Do I have to spell it out?’

‘I think you just did.’

A few weeks later, one Saturday afternoon, Mum phoned in a bit of a fluster. She’d driven to an antiques fair in a nearby town to get Dad a birthday present, had a puncture on the way back, managed to get the car to the nearest petrol station, only to find – none too surprisingly – that the cashiers wouldn’t leave their tills. They probably didn’t know how to change a wheel anyway. Dad had said he was going to have a lie-down and -

‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be along. Ten, fifteen minutes.’ I didn’t have anything else to do. But before I could hang up, Janice, who’d been monitoring my end of the conversation, shouted across at me,

‘Why can’t she call the fucking AA or RAC?’

It was obvious that Mum would have heard, and that this was what Janice had intended.

I put the phone down. ‘You can come too,’ I said to her. ‘And lie under the car while I jack it up.’ As I fetched the car keys, I thought to myself: right, that’s it.

Most people don’t like to bother their doctor. But most people don’t like the idea of being ill. And most people don’t want to be accused, even implicitly, of wasting the doctor’s time. So in theory, going to the doctor is a win-win situation: either you come out confirmed as healthy, or else it’s true that you haven’t been wasting the doctor’s time. My father, his scan revealed, had a chronic sinus condition for which he was prescribed antibiotics followed by more nasal spray; beyond that lay the possibility of an operation. My mother, after blood tests, EMG and MRI, and then a process of elimination, was diagnosed with motor neuron disease.

‘You’ll look after your father, won’t you?’

‘Of course, Mum,’ I replied, not knowing if she meant the short term or the long term. And I expect she had a similar exchange with Dad about me.

My father said, ‘Look at Stephen Hawking. He’s had it for forty years.’ I suspect he’d been on the same website as I had; from which he would also have learnt that fifty per cent of MND sufferers die within fourteen months.

Dad was incensed by the way they handled it at the hospital. No sooner had the specialist explained his conclusions, than they took Mum and Dad down to some supply room and showed them the wheelchairs and stuff which would become necessary as her condition inevitably deteriorated. Dad said it was like being taken to a torture dungeon. He was very upset, for Mum’s sake mainly, I think. She took it all calmly, he said. But then she’d worked at that hospital for fifteen years, and knew what its rooms contained.

I found it hard to talk to Dad about what was happening – and he to me. I kept thinking: Mum’s dying, but Dad’s losing her. I felt that if I repeated the phrase enough times, it would make sense. Or stop it happening. Or something. I also thought: Mum’s the one we turn to when anything goes wrong; so who do we turn to when something goes wrong with her? In the meantime – waiting for the answers – Dad and I discussed her daily needs: who was looking after her, how her spirits were, what she’d said, and the question of medication (or rather, the lack of it, and whether we should push for Riluzole). We could, and did, discuss such matters endlessly. But the catastrophe itself – its suddenness, whether we might have seen it coming, how much Mum had been covering up, the prognosis, the unavoidable outcome – these we could only hint at from time to time. Perhaps we were just too exhausted. We needed to talk about normal English things, like the probable effect on local businesses of the proposed ring road. Or I would ask Dad about his anosmia and we would both pretend it was still an interesting subject. The antibiotics had worked at first, making smells come back in a rush; but soon – after about three days – the effect wore off. Dad, being Dad, didn’t tell me at the time; he said it felt like an irrelevant joke, given what was happening to Mum.

I read somewhere that those who are close to someone who’s seriously ill often take to doing crossword puzzles or jigsaws in their hours away from the hospital. For one thing, they don’t have the concentration for anything more serious; but there’s also another reason. Consciously or unconsciously, they need to work at something with rules, laws, answers, and an overall solution; something fixable. Of course, illness has its laws and rules and sometimes its answers, but that’s not how you experience it at the bedside. And then there’s the remorselessness of hope. Even when hope of cure is gone, there is hope for other things – some specific, others not. Hope means uncertainty, and persists even when you’ve been told there is only one answer, one certainty – the single, unacceptable one.

I didn’t do crosswords or jigsaws – I don’t have that sort of mind, or patience. But I became more obsessive about my exercise programme. I lifted more weights and increased my time on the step machine. On Friday runs, I found myself at the front of the pack, with the heavy guys who don’t do chat. That suited me fine. I wore my heart monitor, checked my pulse, consulted my watch, and occasionally I talked of the calories I’d done. I ended up fitter than I’d been at any time in my life. And sometimes – crazy as it may sound – that felt like solving something.

I sublet my flat and moved back in with my parents. I knew Mum would be against the idea – for my sake, not hers – so I merely presented her with the fait accompli. Dad took leave of absence from his office; I cut out all extra curricular activities; we called in friends, and later nurses. The house sprouted handrails, then wheelchair ramps. Mum moved downstairs; Dad never spent a night apart from her, until she went to the hospice. I remember it as a time of absolute panic, but also a time with a rigorous daily logic to it. You followed the logic, and that seemed to hold the panic at bay.

Mum was amazing. I know MND sufferers are statistically less likely to be depressed about their condition than patients with other degenerative illnesses, but even so. She didn’t pretend to be braver than she was; she wasn’t afraid to cry in front of us; she didn’t make jokes to try and cheer us up. She treated what was happening to her soberly, without flinching from it or letting it overwhelm her – this thing that was going to crush out her senses one by one. She talked herself – and us – through her life and our lives. She never referred to Janice, or said she hoped I’d eventually have her grandchildren. She didn’t lay anything on us, or make us promise stuff for afterwards. There was a stage when she weakened dramatically and every breath sounded like a hike up Everest; then I wondered if she was thinking about that place in Switzerland where you can make a decent end to it all. But I dismissed the thought: she wouldn’t want to put us to such bother. This was another sign that she was – as far as she could be – in charge of her own dying. She was the one who made sure the hospice was lined up, and told us it was better to move sooner rather than later, because you could never predict when places became free.

The bigger the matter, the less there is to say. Not to feel, but to say. Because there is only the fact itself, and your feelings about the fact. Nothing else. My father, faced with his anosmia, could find reasons why such a disadvantage might, if viewed from the right perspective, become an advantage. But Mum’s illness was in a category way beyond this, beyond rationality; it was something enormous, mute and muting. There was no counter-argument. Nor was it a matter of not being able to find the words. The words are always there – and they are always the same words, simple words. Mum’s dying, but Dad’s losing her. I always said it with a ‘but’ in the middle, never an ‘and’.

I was surprised to get a call from Janice.

‘I’m very sorry to hear about your mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Who did you hear from?’

‘Jake.’

‘You’re not seeing Jake, are you?’

‘I’m not seeing-seeing Jake, if that’s what you’re asking.’ But she said it in a frisky tone, as if excited that she might, even now, be provoking a stir of jealousy.

‘No, I’m not asking.’

‘Except that you just did.’

Same old Janice, I thought. ‘Thank you for your sympathy,’ I said, as formally as I could. ‘No, there’s nothing you can do, and no, she wouldn’t like a visit.’

‘So be it.’

The summer Mum was dying was hot, and Dad wore those short-sleeved shirts of his. He used to wash them by hand, then struggle with the steam iron. One evening, when I could see he was exhausted, and trying unsuccessfully to fit the yoke of a shirt across the pointy end of the ironing board, I said,

‘You could send them to the laundry, you know.’

He didn’t look at me, just carried on wrenching at the damp shirt.

‘I am well aware,’ he eventually replied, ‘that such businesses exist.’ Mild sarcasm from my father had the force of rage from anyone else.

‘Sorry, Dad.’

Then he did stop and look at me. ‘It’s very important,’ he said, ‘that she sees me looking neat and tidy. If I started getting scruffy, she’d notice, and she’d think I couldn’t manage. And she mustn’t think I can’t manage. Because that would upset her.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ I felt rebuked; I felt, for once, a child.

Later, he came and sat with me. I had a beer, he had a careful whisky. Mum had been in the hospice three days. She had seemed calm that evening, and packed us off with no more than the switch of an eye.

‘By the way,’ he said, settling his glass on a coaster, ‘I’m sorry your mother didn’t like Janice.’ We both heard the tense of the verb. ‘Doesn’t,’ he inserted into the sentence, far too late.

‘I never knew that.’

‘Ah.’ My father paused. ‘Sorry. Nowadays…’ He didn’t need to go on.

‘Why not?’

His mouth tightened, as I imagine it did when a client told him something unwise – like, Yes I was at the scene of the crime after all.

‘Come on, Dad. Was it because of the garage incident? The puncture.’

‘What puncture?’

So she hadn’t told him that.

‘I always rather liked Janice. She was… sparky.’

‘Yes, Dad. The point.’

‘Your mother said she thought Janice was the sort of girl who knew how to make people feel guilty.’

‘Yes, she was particularly good at that.’

‘She used to complain to your mother about how difficult you were to live with – somehow implying that it was your mother’s fault.’

‘She ought to have been grateful. I’d have been a lot harder to live with it if hadn’t been for Mum’s love.’ Once again, a mistake born of tiredness. ‘Both of you, I mean.’

My father didn’t take the correction amiss. He sipped his drink.

‘So what else, Dad?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘I just think you’re holding something back.’

My father smiled. ‘Yes, you might have made a lawyer. Well, this was towards the end of – of your… when Janice was hardly herself.’

‘So spit it out and we’ll laugh at it together.’

‘She told your mother she thought you were a bit of a psychopath.’

I may have smiled, but I didn’t laugh.

We saw so many different people at the hospital and the hospice that I can no longer remember who told us that when someone is dying, when the whole system is shutting down, the last remaining senses still at work are usually those of hearing and smell. My mother was by now quite immobile, and being turned every four hours. She hadn’t talked for a week, and her eyes were no longer open. She had made it clear that when her swallow reflex weakened, she didn’t want a gastric feed. The dying body can exist for long enough without the sludge of nutrients they like to pump into it.

My father told me how he went to the supermarket and bought various packets of fresh herbs. At the hospice he closed the curtains round the bed. He didn’t want others to see this intimate moment. He wasn’t embarrassed – my father was never embarrassed by his uxoriousness – he just wanted his privacy. Their privacy.

I imagine them together, my father sitting on the bed, kissing my mother, not knowing if she could feel it, talking to her, not knowing if she could hear his words, nor, even if she could, whether she could understand them. He had no way of knowing, she no way of telling him.

I imagine him worrying about the ripping noise as he opened the plastic sachets, and what she might think was happening. I imagine him solving the problem by taking a pair of scissors with him to cut open the packets. I imagine him explaining that he had brought some herbs for her to smell. I imagine him rubbing basil into a roll beneath her nostrils. I imagine him crushing thyme between finger and thumb, then rosemary. I imagine him naming them, and believing she could smell them, and hoping that they would bring her pleasure, would remind her of the world and the delight she had taken in it – perhaps even of some occasion on a foreign hillside or scrubland when their shoes tramped out a rising scent of wild thyme. I imagine him hoping that the smells wouldn’t come as a terrible mockery, reminding her of the sun she could no longer see, gardens she could no longer walk in, aromatic food she could no longer enjoy.

I hope he didn’t imagine these last things; I hope he was convinced that in her last days she was granted only the best, the happiest thoughts.

A month after my mother died, my father had his last appointment with the ENT specialist.

‘He said he could operate, but couldn’t promise more than a 60/40 success rate. I told him I didn’t want an operation. He said he was loth to give up on my case, especially since my anosmia was only partial. He thought my sense of smell was waiting there and could be brought back.’

‘How?’

‘More of the same. Antibiotics, nasal spray. Slightly different prescription. I told him thanks but no thanks.’

‘Right.’ I didn’t say any more. It was his decision.

‘You see, if your mother…’

‘It’s all right, Dad.’

‘No, it’s not all right. If she…’

I looked at him, at the tears pent up behind the lenses of his spectacles, then released to run down his cheeks to his jaw. He let them run; he was used to them; they didn’t bother him. Nor did they bother me.

He started again. ‘If she… Then I don’t…’

‘Sure, Dad.’

‘I think it helps, in a kind of way.’

‘Sure, Dad.’

He lifted his glasses from the creases of flesh in which they sat, and the last tears ran down the sides of his nose. He wiped the back of a hand across his cheeks.

‘You know what that buggery specialist said to me when I told him I didn’t want an operation?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘He sat there meditating for a bit and then said, “Do you have a smoke alarm?” I told him we didn’t. He said, “You might be able to get the council to pay for it. Out of their disability funds.” I said I didn’t know about that. Then he went on, “But I suppose I’d advise a top-of-the-range number, and they might not be willing to cover the cost.”’

‘Sounds a pretty surreal conversation.’

‘It was. Then he said he didn’t like to think of me being asleep and only realising the house was on fire when I was woken by the heat.’

‘Did you punch him, Dad?’

‘No, son. I got up, shook him by the hand, and said, “That would be one solution, I suppose.”’

I imagine my father there, not getting angry, standing up, shaking hands, turning, leaving. I imagine it.