The Blue Guitar

II

THE SILENCE WAS the thing that struck me first. It settled on the house like a hard frost and under it everything went frozen and stiff. I thought of winter evenings in childhood — yes, here it comes, the past again — when our country neighbours’ sons from round about, and daughters, too, those raucous tomboys, would gather on the hill outside the gate-lodge and sluice bucketfuls of water down the road to make a slide. I imagined I could see the frost falling as the night came on, a glistening grey mist sifting out of the sky’s dome of gleaming deep-blue darkness. I seemed to hear it, too, a hushed metallic tinkling everywhere around me in the stinging air. And later on, when the slide was hard as polished stone, how blackly the ice would shine in the starlight, as enticing as it was daunting, daring me to take my turn and sprint forwards like the others and let myself go skimming down the hill, my knees braced and trembling and the cold air searing my lungs. But I was timid and didn’t dare, and hung back in the sheltering shadows of the gate-lodge, watching enviously. The voices of the sliders rang sharply in the glossy darkness, and the trees stood motionless, like silent spectators at this wild play, and the countless stars too seemed to be looking on, with a flinty, spiteful glitter. Whenever a motor car approached the children would scatter amid shrieks of laughter, and the driver would roll down his window and hurl curses after them and threaten to call the guards.

The hushed place I’m speaking of, the place I’m in now, is Fairmount, my noble-fronted dog-house on Hangman’s Hill, also known, by me, in secret, with unconsoling humour, as Château Désespoir. I must say, being home again is strange, despite the short time I was gone — can I really have been away only a matter of days? There’s the silence, as I say, but also my wife’s glacial calm, though the former is largely an effect of the latter. Of my precipitate departure and hangdog return she makes no mention. She doesn’t appear to be angry with me for having run off, and not a word is spoken of Polly and all that. How much does she know? Has she spoken to Marcus — has he spoken to her? I’d dearly like to know but daren’t ask. And so I am on tenterhooks. Her manner is distracted, dreamily remote; in this new version of her she reminds me, disconcertingly, of my feyly affectless mother. As we go about our day here in the house she hardly looks at me, and when she does, a slight crease forms between her eyebrows, not a frown, exactly, but a sort of ripple of perplexity, as if she can’t quite recall who I am — an echo of Polly and me in the studio mirror that day, in fact. I would say this distant demeanour is a tacit rebuke, only I don’t think it is. Maybe she has given up on me, maybe I have been banished from the forefront of her mind altogether. She is, it appears, concentrating on the future. She talks of returning to the south, to the Camargue, erstwhile home of the godless, war-loving and triumphant Cathars, where we lived for a time, more or less tranquilly. She says she misses the salt marshes down there, the enormous skies and limitless, sun-struck perspectives. There’s a house for rent in Aigues-Mortes that she’s looking into — that’s what she says, that she’s looking into it. I don’t know how seriously to take this. Does it mean she’s bent on leaving me, or is it just a taunt, intended, like her silence, to wound and worry? It was in Aigues-Mortes that we plighted our troth, sitting outside a café one sunny autumn afternoon long ago. There was a hot wind blowing, scraping the sky to a dry whitish-blue and making the sunshades in the little square crack like whips. I extended an open palm across the table and Gloria gave me her strong cool big-boned hand to hold, and there we were, plighted.

I’ve known Fairmount House since I was a child, though in those days I knew it only from the outside. A well-to-do doctor and his family lived here then, or maybe he was a dentist, I can’t remember. It was built in the middle of the eighteenth century, on the hill from where a hundred years previously my namesake Oliver Cromwell directed his forces in their infamous and vain assault upon the town. After the rout of the New Model Army and the lifting of the siege the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russet-coated captains up here, from a makeshift gibbet erected for the purpose, on the very spot, so it’s said, where lately had been pitched the Lord Protector’s tent, before he cut and ran for home and an ignominious end. The house is foursquare and solid, and its tall front windows gaze down upon the town with a blank disregard worthy of Old Ironsides himself. I used to imagine that the life lived within these walls must surely be commensurate with such a grand exterior, that those inside must have a sense of themselves as equally grand and imposing. A childish fancy, I know, but I clung to it. I bought the place three decades later as a form of revenge, I wasn’t sure for what — perhaps for all the times I had passed by and looked up with envy and longing at those unseeing windows and dreamed of being behind them myself, in velvet smoking-jacket and silk cravat, sipping a cut-glass beaker of burgundy, thick and spicy as the blood of his ancestors, and following with a sardonic eye the progress of that small boy laboriously traversing the foot of the hill, with his satchel on his back, humped and snail-like in his grey school coat.

I hardly sleep, these days, these nights. Or, rather, I go to sleep, put under by jorums of drink and fistfuls of jumbo knock-out pills. Then at three or four in the morning my eyelids snap open like faulty window blinds and I find myself in a state of lucid alertness the equal of which I never seem to achieve in daytime. The darkness at that hour is of a special variety too, more than merely the absence of light but a medium to itself, a kind of motionless black glair in which I am held fast, a felled beast prowled about by the jackals of doubt and worry and mortal dread. Above me there is no ceiling, only a yielding, depthless void into which at any moment I might be pitched headlong. I listen to the muffled labourings of my heart and try in vain not to think of death, of failure, of the loss of all that is dear, the world with its things and creatures. The curtained window stands beside the bed like an indistinct dark giant, monitoring me with fixed, maniacal attention. At times the stillness in which I lie comes to seem a paralysis, and I’m compelled to get up and prowl in a state of jittery panic through the empty rooms, upstairs and down, not bothering to switch on the lights. The house around me hums faintly, so that I seem to be inside a large machine, a generator, say, on stand-by, or the engine of a steam train shunted into a siding for the night and still trembling with memories of the day’s fire and speed and noise. I will stop at a landing window and press my forehead to the glass and look out over the sleeping town and think what a Byronic figure I must cut, perched up here, solitary and tragic-seeming, no more to go a-roving. This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.

I suspect Gloria hates this house, I suspect she has always hated it. She consented to come back with me and settle in the town only to indulge me and my whim to be again where I was before. “You want to live among the dead, is that it?” she said. “Watch out you don’t die yourself.” Which I did, in a way, I mean as a painter, so serves me right. Rigor artis.

I wish I understood my wife a little better than I do, I mean I wish I knew her better. Despite the time that we have been together I still feel like an old-style bridegroom on his wedding night, waiting with burning impatience and not a little trepidation for his brand-new bride to let fall her chemise and loose her stays and at last reveal herself in all her blushing bareness. Can the disparity in age between us account for these blank patches? But perhaps, after all, she is not the enigma I take her to be. Perhaps behind her smooth exterior there are no seething passions, no storms of the heart, no plunging cataracts in the blood, or not ones that are unique to her. I can’t believe it. I think it’s just that sorrow for our lost child hardened about her into a carapace as impenetrable as porcelain. Sometimes, at night especially, when in the dark we lie sleepless side by side — she, too, suffers from insomnia — I seem to sense, to hear, almost, from deep, deep within her, a kind of dry, soundless sobbing.

She blames me for our daughter’s death. How do I know? Because she told me so. But wait, no, wait — what she said was that she couldn’t forgive me for it, which is quite a different thing. I hasten to say that the child died of a rare and catastrophic condition of the liver — they told me the name for it but I made myself forget it on the spot — no one could have saved her. Hard to think of such a little thing having a liver at all, really. It was years later that Gloria turned to me and said out of the blue — what blue? black, more like—“You know I can’t forgive you, don’t you?” She spoke in a mild, conversational tone, seemingly without rancour, indeed without emotion of any kind that I could register; it was simply a fact she was stating, a circumstance she was apprising me of. When I made to protest she cut me off, gently but firmly. “I know,” she said. “I know what you’ll say, only there has to be someone for me not to forgive, and it’s you. Do you mind?” I thought about it, and said only that minding hardly came into it. She, too, reflected for a moment, then nodded curtly and spoke no more, and we walked on. Very peculiar, you’ll think, a very peculiar exchange, and so it was; yet it didn’t seem so at the time. Grieving has the oddest effects, I can tell you; guilt, too, but that’s another matter, kept in another chamber of the over-full and suffering heart.

I’ve forgotten so much about our child, our little Olivia — very handy, these sink-holes I’ve sunk in the seabed of memory. She has become mummified, for me. She endures inside me like one of those miraculously preserved saintly corpses that they keep behind glass under the altars of Italian churches; there she reposes, tiny, waxen, unreally still, herself and yet other, changeless through the changing years.

We had her when we were living in the city, in a rented house on Cedar Street, a poky place with tiny windows and ill-fitting floorboards that squealed in fright when trodden on. The attraction for me was an attic with a north-facing roof-light under which I set up my easel. I was working a storm in those days, half the time in awe of my gift and the other half in a blue terror, fearing I was getting nowhere and fooling myself that I was. The worst of Cedar Street was that our landlady was Gloria’s mother, the Widow Palmer. She’s ill-named, for there’s nothing in her of the palm tree’s polish and languid poise. On the contrary, she’s a stiff old bird of hawk-like aspect — she’s on her perch even yet — with iron curls and a clenched and bloodless mouth, and one of those noses — retroussé, on dit, though that’s far too handsome a word for what it describes — that offer an unwelcome view into the caverns of the nostrils even when the face is viewed full-on. But I’m being hard. Hers wasn’t an easy life, not only in her widowhood but even more so when her husband was still around to torment her. This rakish fellow, Ulick Palmer of the Palmers of Palmerstown, as he used straight-facedly to style himself, was a waster who scorned her while he was alive and at his death left her as good as destitute, except for a few bits of property scattered about the city, hence the Cedar Street house, for which I was compelled to pay an outrageously disproportionate rent, a matter of smouldering resentment on my part and of bristling defensiveness on Gloria’s. Incidentally, how such a pinched pair as Ma and Pa Palmer managed between them to produce so magnificent a creature as my Gloria I’m sure I don’t know. Maybe she was a foundling and they never told her; it wouldn’t surprise me.

It was sorrow that drove us to the sun-dazed south. Sorrow encourages displacement, urges flight, the unresting quest for new horizons. After the child’s death we made ourselves into moving targets, Gloria and I, in order to dodge, to try to dodge, the fiery darts the god of grief shoots from his burning bow. For loss and love have more in common than might seem, at least so far as feeling goes. I suppose it was inevitable we would hurry back to the scenes of our first dallyings, as if to annul the years, as if to wind time backwards and make what had happened not happen. Gloria took our tragedy harder than I did, and that also was inevitable: it was a part of her, after all, flesh of her flesh, that had died. My role had been not much more than to release, three trimesters previously, the tiny mad wriggler whose one intent had been to kick his way free of me and go tadpoling towards his disdainful yet in the end all too receptive target. Another piercing, among piercings. How neatly it all seems to hang together, this life, these lives.

I wouldn’t have thought the child had been with us long enough to make her presence, or her absence, rather, so strongly felt. She was so young, she went so soon. Her death had a deadening effect in general on our lives, Gloria’s and mine; something of us died along with her. Hardly surprising, I know, and hardly exclusive to us; children die all the time, taking a part of their parents’ selves with them. We — and in this instance I think I can speak for Gloria as well as for myself — we had the impression of standing outside our own front door without a key and knocking and knocking and hearing nothing from within, not even an echo, as if the whole house had been filled to the ceilings with sand, with clay, with ashes. There were subtler effects, too, as when for instance I struck a fingernail against even the lightest and most potentially musical of objects, the rim of a wine glass, say, or the lid of that little Louis Quatorze rosewood box I stole from the desk of an art dealer in the rue Bonaparte years ago, and there would come back to me no ringing resonance. Everything seemed hollow, hollow and weightless, like those brittle casings of themselves that dead wasps leave on window-sills at the dusty end of summer. Grief was flat, in other words, a flat dull empty ache. I suppose that’s why when children die in sultry desert zones, where feelings are more readily freed, the parents, along with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins at multiple removes, all wind black rags around their heads and rend the air with ululating shrieks and throaty warblings, determined their loss shall have its terrible and noisy due. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of rending and shrieking myself; better that than the restrained snivels and snuffles that we felt were all that the rules of decorum would allow us, in public, at least. There must be, it seemed to us, a limit to the mourning we could do for a life not lived. That, however, was the point. What we were sorrowing for was all that would not be, and that kind of vacuum, believe me, will suck in as many tears as you have to shed.

Grief, like pain, is only real when one is experiencing it. Up to then I hardly knew what it was to grieve. My mother had barely entered on her middle years when she fell ill and simply drifted away, her death seeming hardly more than an intensification, a final perfecting, of the general distractedness in which she had passed her lamentably brief life. My father, too, went quietly, after that moment of violent protest on his last visit to the shop, when he kicked over the print stand. He appeared less concerned for his own suffering than for the distress and disruption he was causing in the lives of those around him. In his final moments on his deathbed he squeezed my hand and tried to smile reassuringly, as if it were not he but I who was launching out into uncharted distances with no prospect of return.

Gloria and I had a fight one day not so long ago. It was strange, for we rarely even argue. Our disagreement, let’s call it that, was over a potted ornamental tree she keeps by the window in the kitchen. I’m not sure what variety of tree it is. Myrtle, perhaps? Let’s say myrtle. I didn’t realise how fond she was of it, or how fiercely she would cling to it, until, seemingly for no reason, it began to decline. The leaves turned grey and drooped despondently, and wouldn’t revive, no matter how lovingly she watered the soil or fed the roots with nutrients. At last she discovered what the matter was. The tree had been invaded by parasites, minuscule spider-like creepy-crawlies that flourished on the undersides of the leaves and were gradually sucking the life out of them. I was fascinated by this teeming, relentlessly devouring horde, and even bought a powerful magnifying-glass the better to study the little beasts, so industrious, so dedicated, so disregardful of everything around them, including me. Particularly impressive was the intricate filigree of webbing, strung in the angles of the leaf-stems, in which the young, no bigger than specks of dust, were suspended. Gloria, however, white-lipped and with eyes narrowed, went immediately and mercilessly about the business of eradication, dousing the tree with a powerful insecticide spray and afterwards taking it into the back yard and throwing pitcherfuls of soapy water over it to wash away any possible survivors. I, unwisely, protested. Had it not occurred to her, I asked, that she might have her priorities in the wrong order? True, the tree was alive, but the mites were more so. Why should they not be allowed to go on living, for as long as the tree could sustain them? Was the pretty spectacle the tree provided for us more important than the myriad lives she was destroying in order to protect and preserve it? For a long minute she looked at me in silence from under lowered brows, then flung the spray bottle at me — she missed — and stalked out of the room. A little while later I found her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, her head down and her hands plunged in her hair, just like my mother, weeping. I thought to apologise, I wasn’t exactly sure for what, but instead went away quietly and left her there to her tears. What did it mean? I don’t know, though it must have meant something — many of the real things I meet with in waking life are to me as baffling as the fantastical apparitions I encounter in dreams. I tried to talk to her about it, when her temper had cooled, but she cut me off with a sidewise slice of her hand and rose from where she had been crouching and walked away. I have the notion she was thinking of our lost Olivia. The tree recovered, but refuses to flourish.

Speaking of death — and I hardly seem to speak of anything else, these days, even when the subject is supposedly the living — I want to tell of a fatal accident that I witnessed as a young man, more than witnessed, and that haunts me still. It happened in Paris. I was there as a student, working in the atelier of a third-rate academician who had grudgingly taken me on for the summer through the good offices of an older Francophile painter whom my mother somehow knew, and whom she had charmed into giving me a letter of introduction to Maître Mouton. I lodged in a cheap hotel on the rue Molière, in a maid’s room on the fifth floor, directly under the roof. It was stiflingly hot, and the ceiling was so low that I couldn’t stand fully upright. Also the flights of stairs, that were of a normal width lower down, grew steadily narrower the higher they went, and coming home at night, when the minuterie on the second landing had clicked off, I would have to negotiate the top flight in darkness and on hands and knees, feeling as if I were scrambling up the inside of a chimney. I was penniless, hungry, and mostly miserable, passing my days in that state, one that is peculiar to the young, I believe, of torpid boredom mingled with thrashing desperation. One overcast, airless afternoon along the quays I was waiting at a corner for the traffic lights to change. A young Frenchman of about my own age was standing beside me, in a splendidly crumpled white linen suit. I remember how that suit glowed, giving off a sort of aura, despite or perhaps because of the day’s humid gloom, and, envious, in my imagination I made him into the spoiled son of a rich plantation owner sent home to pretend to finish his studies at some impossibly exclusive grande école. His head was turned back and he was speaking over his shoulder, volubly and gaily, to someone close behind him, a girl, I imagine, though I don’t remember her. The traffic clanked and rattled past in the way that it does on those broad thoroughfares, seeming to be not a series of individual vehicles but one immense ramshackle engine, welded together from innumerable ill-fitting components, a clamorous, smoking and endlessly extended juggernaut. The young man in white, laughing now, was turning to face forwards again, and somehow lost his footing — whenever, passing into sleep, I seem to misstep and start awake, it’s him I see at once, in his impossibly shining garb, there on the quai des Grands Augustins, opposite the Pont Neuf — and stumbled off the pavement just as an olive-green army lorry was approaching, close in to the gutter and travelling at breakneck — the apt word — speed. It was high and square with a rapidly shuddering tarpaulin stretched over the back of it. A big mirror stuck far out at the driver’s side, riveted in place on two or three steel struts. It was this mirror that struck the young man full in the face as he teetered on the side of the footpath, trying to regain his balance. I used to wonder if there had been time for him, in the last instant, to catch a glimpse of himself, startled and incredulous, as self and reflection met and annihilated each other in the glass, until I realised that, of course, the mirror would have been turned the other way, and that it was the metal back of it that had hit him. And did I really see a perfect corona of blood exploding around his head at the moment of impact? I’m doubtful, since it’s the kind of thing the imagination, ever eager for a gory detail, likes to imagine; also it’s suspiciously an echo of that halo of light I had noted surrounding his suit. As he toppled backwards, it was into my instinctively offered arms that he collapsed. I recall the damp warmth of his armpits and the tap-dancer’s brief, rapid tattoo that his heels played on the pavement. Slight and slender though he was I hadn’t the strength to support him — he was already a dead weight — and when he slipped out of my arms and flopped to the ground his smashed-up head fell back between my splayed feet and struck the pavement with a soggy thud. One leg of his trousers, the right one, had been neatly severed above the knee, don’t ask me how, and the bottom part of it was concertinaed around his ankle. The leg that was thus exposed was tanned, smooth and hairless; he wore, I saw, no socks, in the casual French way that I emulated, if Polly’s memory of me the first time I called into Marcus’s workshop can be trusted. The unfortunate fellow’s face — ah, that face. You’ll have seen it in more than one of my early things, particularly that awful Bacchae triptych — how the mere thought of my past work taunts and shames me! — where it looms low above the corpse-strewn plain, a featureless disc, ghastly and glaring, the bluish-red of a freshly flayed side of beef and dripping gumdrops of glistening pink gore. I went blue in the face myself from having to assure purblind commentators over and over that this smeared and ruddied blob wasn’t a case of deliberate distortion in the manner of Pontormo, say, or Bosch the devil-dreamer — and many did say it — but on the contrary was a careful and accurate rendering of a real sight I had seen, with my own eyes, and felt called on to commemorate, repeatedly, in paint.

Everything up to the moment of the young man’s death I remembered with stinging clarity, but everything after it was wiped from my mind. People must have gathered round, there must have been police, and an ambulance, all that, but for me the aftermath of the accident is a blessed blank. I do remember the army lorry careering on regardless — what to it was one more death, among the so many it must have witnessed in its time? But what about the girl the young man had been talking to, if it was a girl? Did she crouch beside him and cradle his poor pulped head in her lap? Did she throw back her own head and howl? How protectively the mind suppresses things. Some things.

It fell to me to get rid of our Olivia’s effects — does a child of three have effects? — her suits and smocks and pink bootees. I was supposed to take them to the church round the corner for distribution to the poor, but instead I rolled them into a big ball that I tied up with string and dropped into the river on a tearily indistinct midnight hour. The ball didn’t sink, of course, but bobbed away on the tide towards the docks and the open sea. For months afterwards I worried that it would wash up on the riverbank somewhere and be found by a rag-picker, and that one day I, or, worse, Gloria, would spot a toddler in the street, all togged out in a heartbreakingly familiar outfit.

One of the phenomena I sorely miss, from the days when I was still painting, is the stillness that used to generate itself around me when I was at work, and into which I was able to make some sort of temporary escape from myself. That kind of peace and quiet you don’t get by any other means, or I don’t, anyway. For instance, it differed entirely, in depth and resonance, from the stealthy hush that accompanies a theft. At the easel, the silence that fell upon everything was like the silence I imagine spreading over the world after I am dead. Oh, I don’t delude myself that the world will shut down its clamour just because I’ve made my final brushstroke. But there will be a special little corner of tranquillity once my perturbations have ceased. Think of some back alley, in some dank suburb, on a grey afternoon between seasons; the wind whips up the dust in spirals, turns over scraps of paper, rolls a bit of dirty rag this way and that; then all stops, seemingly for no reason, a calm descends, and quiet prevails. Not amid celestial light and the voices of angels, but there, in that kind of nothingness, in that kind of nowhereness, my imagination operates most happily and forges its profoundest fancies.

You will want to hear about our time down there in the warm south, with the mistral snapping those sunshades in the place du Marché, and our hands entwined on the table amid the dishes of olives and the glasses of greyed pastis, and the delightful strolls we took and the colourfully disreputable people we encountered, and the straw-coloured wine we used to drink with dinner in that little place under the ramparts where we went every evening, and the funny old house we leased from the eccentric lady who kept cats, and the bullfighter who took a shine to Gloria, and my brief but tempestuous affaire with the expatriate titled Englishwoman, the lovely Lady O. — all that. Well, you can want away. I grant you it’s an earthly paradise in those parts, but a tainted paradise it was, for us, with many a serpent slithering among the convoluted vines. Don’t misunderstand me, it was no worse there than anywhere else, for two poor numbed souls lost in listless mourning, but not much better, either, once the bloom wore off the fabled douceur de vivre and the beaded bubbles winking at the brim had all winked out. Forget your ideas of an idyll. I seem to have spent most of my time in supermarket car parks, baking in the passenger seat of our little grey Deux Chevaux and listening to some heart-stricken chanteuse sobbing about love on the car radio, while Gloria was off in a shaded corner having a smoke and yet another quiet cry.

Damn it, here’s another digression: there must surely be something or somewhere I don’t want to get to, hence all these seemingly innocent meanderings down dusty by-roads. One summer when I was a boy and we were staying at Miss Vandeleur’s, a circus came to town. At least, it called itself a circus, although it was more a sort of fit-up travelling theatre. Performances took place in a rectangular tent where the wind made the canvas walls flap and boom like mainmasts. The audience sat on backless wooden benches facing a makeshift stage, under multi-coloured light-bulbs strung on tent-poles that swayed and lunged, creating a lurid and excitingly inebriated effect. There were no more than half a dozen players, including a hot-eyed girl contortionist, who at the intervals sat on a chair in front of the stage and sang sentimental ditties, accompanying herself on a piano-accordion, the pearly lustre of which illumined for me many a nocturnal fantasy. The circus stayed for a week and I went to all seven nightly shows and the Saturday matinée as well, entranced by the gaud and glitter of it all, though it was the same experience every night, since the acts never varied, except for the odd fluffed line or an acrobat’s unintended tumble. Then, on the morning after the final performance, I made the mistake of hanging about to watch the magic being dismantled. The tent came down with a huge, crumpling sigh, the benches were heaved like carcasses on to the back of a lorry, and the girl contortionist, who had exchanged her sequins for a high-necked jumper and rolled-up jeans, stood in the doorway of one of the caravans with a vacant stare, smoking a cigarette and scratching her belly. Well, that’s just how it was in the south, at the end. The iridescent glow went dull, and eventually it was as if everything had been folded up and shunted away. And yes, that’s me all over, for ever the disappointed, disenchanted child.

My chronology is getting shaky again. Let’s see. We stayed down there for, what, three years, four? There was the first visit, when we sneaked off for a holiday together and I proposed and Gloria accepted, after which we returned home and lodged in Cedar Street. It was to Cedar Street that Ulick Palmer, my louche father-in-law, would come knocking at dead of night, drunk and tearful, to beg for a bed, and Gloria, against my hissed protests, would bring him in and put him to sleep on the sofa in the living room, where he would pollute the air with an awful stench of stale whiskey and sulphurous farts, and puke on the carpet too, as often as not. Ma Palmer also was a frequent visitor, alighting unheralded, in her crow-black coat and her hat with a veil, to sit for hours on the same living-room sofa, her back ramrod-straight, her nostrils dilating and seeming always about to shoot out dragon-jets of smoke and flame. Then the child came, unexpectedly, and as unexpectedly went. After that there was nothing for it but to abandon everything and flee south in desperation to the one place where we had been unequivocally, if briefly, happy. Foolishness, you’ll say, pathetic self-delusion, and you’ll be right. But desperation is desperation, and calls for desperate measures. We thought our pain would be in some way assuaged down there; surely, we thought, even grief couldn’t hold out against all that Provençal mirth and loveliness. We were wrong. Nothing more cruel than sunshine and soft air, when you’re suffering.

As a matter of fact, I think that sojourn in the south was one of the things that set me on the road to painterly ruin. The light, the colours, drove me to distraction. Those throbbing blues and golds, those aching greens, they had no rightful place on my palette. I’m a son of the north: my hues are the hammered gold of autumn, the silver-grey of the undersides of leaves in rainy springtime, the khaki shine of chilly summer beaches and the winter sea’s rough purples, its acid virescence. Yet when we abandoned the salt flats and the strident song of the cicada and came back home — we still called it home — and settled here at Fairmount, on Cromwell’s hill, the bacillus of all the sun-soaked beauty we had left behind was still lodged in my blood and I couldn’t rid myself of the fever. Is this so, or am I scrambling again after explanations, excuses, exonerations, all the exes you can think of? But take that last thing I was working on, the unfinished piece that finished me for good: look at the blimp-coloured guitar and the table with the checked cloth that it rests on; look at the louvred window opening on to the terrace and the flat blue beyond; look at that gay sailboat. This was not the world I knew; these were not my true subject.

But, then, what is my true subject? Are we talking of authenticity here? My only aim always, from the very start, was to get down in form that formless tension floating in the darkness inside my skull, like the unfading after-image of a lightning flash. What did it matter which fragments of the general wreckage I settled on for a subject? Guitar and terrace and azure sea with sail, or Maggie Mallon’s fish shop — what did it matter? But, somehow, it did; somehow, there was always the old dilemma, that is, the tyranny of things, of the unavoidable actual. But what, after all, did I know of actual things, wherever they rose up to confront me? It was precisely actuality I took no interest in. So I ask again if that’s what really stymied me: that the world I chose to paint was not my own. It’s a simple question, and the answer seems obvious. But there’s a flaw. To say the south wasn’t mine is to suggest that somewhere else was, and tell me, where might that rare place be found, pale Ramon?

—

It wasn’t Gloria’s car I heard stopping outside the gate-lodge that day — no more than half a week after my storm-tossed flight to freedom — when I was finally run to ground and led out of my lair by the ear. My wife wasn’t the only one who had guessed where I was in hiding. I must admit I felt put out to have been recaptured so easily. I would have thought everyone would assume I had made off to somewhere distant and exotic, the kind of place favoured by legendary artistes maudits, Harar in darkest Ethiopia, say, or a South Sea island with flat-faced, big-breasted brown women, and not that I had scurried back to that most banal of refuges, the house where I was born. My first instinct, when I heard the car turning in at the gate and drawing to a crunching stop outside, was to dart to the front door and shoot the bolt home and dive under a table and hide. But I didn’t. The truth is, I was relieved. I hadn’t really wanted to disappear, and my going had been less flight than frolic, however desperate to escape I had thought I was. I had gloried in being out on the roads that night of tempest and black rain, when the stubbled old farmer picked me up in his lorry and told me about the lovelorn lover found drowned under the bridge. It had seemed I was running not away from but towards something, the wildness of the weather matching the storm raging in my breast. But what had seemed bravado was, in truth, pure funk. I had been happy to carry on with Polly in secret, but when the secret was discovered I swept my coat-tails around me and ran, but even then I didn’t have the courage of my actions, and all along had waited in secret anticipation of being caught up with and — what? Reclaimed, or rescued? Yes: rescued from myself.

Gloria’s arrival on the doorstep, then, was what I had been half expecting and more than half hoping for all along, but anyone else, Marcus, say, or Gloria’s winged and scaly, fire-breathing mother, even an officer of the law, brandishing a warrant for my arrest on a charge of gross moral turpitude, would not have been more of a surprise than what I did find confronting me when I cautiously drew open the front door. For there she was, Polly herself, my dearest, darling Polly — how my blood sang at the sight of her! — with the child in her arms. My jaw dropped — really, jaws do drop, as I’ve had reason to discover, on more occasions than I care to recall — and my heart along with it, my poor old yo-yo of a heart that was so knocked about and bruised already.

But why the great surprise? Why shouldn’t it have been Polly? I don’t know. I just had not imagined she would be the one to find me. Why wasn’t it Gloria, I wanted to know? Shouldn’t my wife have been the one to come and fetch me? It’s a puzzle that she didn’t. She had phoned me, she knew where I was. Why didn’t she get in her car and drive out to the gate-lodge, as surely any wife would have done? But she didn’t. It’s strange. Can it be she didn’t want me back? That’s a thing I don’t wish to consider.

Polly has a way, when she’s upset and agitated, of breaking on the instant into unexpected and startlingly rapid movement. These sudden light-footed flurries, remarkable in a young woman as solidly built as she is, must be related to the skittish bouts of dancing that Marcus described her performing about the house, in happier days, before the catastrophe struck and while the pillars of the temple were still standing. Now the door was no sooner open than she fairly flung herself at me, with a stifled sound that could have been an expression of joy, of anger or relief, of recrimination or anguish, or of all these things together, and ground her mouth against mine so fiercely that I felt the shape of her overlapping front teeth through the warm pulp of her lips. I was shocked and confused, and couldn’t think of anything to say. What I felt was something like a happy seasickness, my knees wobbly and my insides heaving. I hadn’t realised how acutely I had been missing her — I find it unfailingly amazing how much can be going on inside me without my knowing. Polly said something similar once, didn’t she, about dreams and the dreaming mind? Now, with her mouth still glued to mine and mumbling incomprehensible words, she pushed me backwards into the hall, while the child, sandwiched between us, wriggled and kicked. It was like being seized upon by a mother octopus bearing one of her young before her. At last I freed myself from that entangling embrace and held both of them, mother and child, away from me — held, mind, not thrust. I was breathing heavily, as if I had been brought to a sudden halt in the middle of a desperate run, which was the case, in a way. The cut that Marcus’s ring had made on Polly’s cheek was healed, but a tiny livid scar remained. How, I asked her, how had she found me, how had she known where to look for me? She gave a brief high laugh, tinged with hysteria, so it seemed to me, and said that of course this was the obvious place for me to have fled to, since I had talked so much about the gate-lodge and being here with my parents and my siblings, long ago. This gave me a shock. I couldn’t recall ever mentioning to her the subfusc life I had led here as a child. Is it possible to say things and not be aware of it, to speak while awake as if one were asleep, in a state of talkative hypnogeny? She laughed again, and said I had made her so curious that she had driven out one afternoon during the summer to have a squint, as she put it, at the scenes of my childhood. I stared at her in dull bewilderment. “You were here,” I said, “here in the gate-lodge?”

“No, no, not inside, of course not,” she cried, with another wild-sounding laugh. “I just stopped at the gate and sat in the car. I’d have come and looked in through the windows but I didn’t have the nerve. I wanted to see where you were born and where you grew up.” But why, I asked, still at a loss, why would she do that? — why would she be curious about such things? For a moment she didn’t reply. She stood before me, holding the child hitched on her hip, and tilted her head to one side and surveyed me with a fondly pitying smile. She was wearing a heavy woollen jumper and a woollen skirt, and her unruly hair was held at the back of her head by a big broad-toothed tortoiseshell clasp. “Because I love you, you sap,” she said.

Ah. Love. Yes. The secret ingredient I always forget about and leave out.

In the kitchen she put the child sitting on the table — from which, need I say, I had already smartly removed to hiding the thick school jotter containing these precious ruminations — and looked about the room and wrinkled her nose. “Smells damp,” she said. “It’s cold, too.” She was right — I was wearing my overcoat and scarf — yet I felt immediately and absurdly defensive. I pointed out stiffly that the place hadn’t been lived in for a very long time, and that there had been no one to look after it. She snorted and said, yes, that was obvious. The harsh light through the window gave to her face a scrubbed, raw look, and standing there, in her jumper and her matronly flat shoes, she seemed, although there was no mirror about, barely familiar, and might have been someone with whom I was no more than distantly acquainted, even though I yearned to take her in my arms and hold her tenderly against me and chafe her cold cheeks back to rosy warmth. She was, after all, and despite everything, my own dear girl, as how could I ever have thought otherwise? Far from cheering me, however, this realisation, this re-realisation, caused in me a sort of plummeting sensation, as if the bottom had fallen out of something inside me. The snares I had thought to free myself from were still firmly clamped around my ankles, after all. And yet I was so pleased she was here. Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves.

Polly, eyeing the bare shelves and the cupboards that had the look of being equally empty, asked what I was living on. I said I had been going down to Kearney’s, the pub at the crossroads, where there was soup to be had at lunchtime, and sandwiches in the evening, made up on the quiet and specially for me by the publican’s daughter, Maisie her name, in whose heart I seemed to have found a soft spot. “Is that so?” Polly said, and sniffed. I almost laughed. Imagine being jealous of poor rough-hewn Maisie Kearney, pushing fifty, chronically unwooed and definitively unwed. I said nothing; Polly’s manner now, sceptical and imperious, was making me cross. Isn’t it remarkable how even the most outlandish circumstances will after a minute or two adjust themselves into a humdrum norm? Here I was, surprised by a cruelly abandoned lover, in my formerly parental home, where I had been in hiding from her, as well as from her husband and my wife, and already, after the initial shocking irruption, we were back once more amid the old, accustomed trivia, the squabbles, the resentments, the petty recriminations. Yes, I could have laughed. And yet, such was the jumbled state I was in, at once harried, distraught and desirous, that I could hardly think what to say or what to do. Desirous, yes, you heard me. I ached for my girl’s achingly remembered flesh, so familiar and yet always a new and uncharted land. What a shameless cullion it is, the libido.

The child began to fret but was ignored. She was still sitting in the middle of the table, pot-bellied and inanely pouting, like a miniature and unsmiling Buddha. I wondered vaguely, not for the first time, if there might be something the matter with her — she was nearly two and yet was showing scant sign of development, was barely at the walking stage and still couldn’t talk. But what do I know about children? “You must be lonely here,” Polly said, in a sulkily accusing tone. “Didn’t you miss me?” Yes, I hastened to say, of course I had missed her, of course I had. But there had been, I said, brightening, there had been my rat to keep me company. She lowered her head, tucking her chin into that notch above her clavicle that I used to love to dip my tongue into, and regarded me with a hard frown. “Your rat,” she said, in an ominously toneless voice. Yes, I said, unable to stop, he was a friendly fellow and often came out of his lair under the gas cooker to see what I was up to. He was, I guessed, of a good age, and solitary, like myself. The front he presented to me was an equal blend of curiosity, boldness and circumspection. Often of an evening I would bring back from the pub the remains of one of Maisie’s lovingly assembled sandwiches, a buttered bit of crust, or a morsel of Cheddar, and set it on the floor in front of the cooker, and eventually, sure enough, he would come nosing out, making little feints and jabs with his snout, his pinkly glistening nostrils twitching and his slender, delicate claws making scratching sounds on the linoleum, so tiny and faint that to hear them I had to sit perfectly quiet and even suspend my breathing. While he ate, which he did with the finical niceness of an aged and dyspeptic gourmet on the umpteenth course of an imperial banquet, he would glance up at me now and then with a speculative and, so it seemed, drily amused expression. I imagine he considered me an accommodating simpleton, only mildly puzzling, and obviously harmless. His tail, lank, nude and finely tapered, wasn’t a pleasant thing to look at; also, in the course of consuming the tidbits that I offered him, he had a way of bunching up and arching his hindquarters that made it seem as if he were preparing to vomit, though he never did, in my presence. These things aside, I was fond of him, wary old-timer that he was.

Polly’s look had turned beady. “Is that meant to be a joke?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” I mumbled, and hung my head.

“Well, it’s not funny.” She sniffed again. “So, it’s me, or a rat, one as good as the other.” I made to protest but she wasn’t in the mood to listen. “I suppose you’ve given him a name?” she said. “And I suppose you talk to him, tell him stories? Do you tell him about me, about us? God, you’re pathetic.” She plucked up the child and cradled her almost violently against her breast. “And germs all over the place, too,” she said. “Rats go everywhere, up the legs of chairs, on the table, especially if you feed them — which you’re mad to do, by the way.”

I could hardly keep from smiling, though I was afraid she would hit me if I didn’t. For all that they made me cross, I relished these brief bouts of domestic badinage that Polly and I used to engage in — or that she engaged in, while I stood by indulgently, aglow with a kind of proprietorial fondness, as if I had fashioned her myself out of some originally coarse but precious primordial clay. I am, as you may guess from all I have to say on the subject passim, an enthusiastic advocate of the ordinary. Take this moment in the kitchen, with Polly and me standing among the gauzy shades of my childhood. The sky in the window was clouded yet all inside here was quick with a mercurial light that picked out the polished curves and sharp corners of things and gave to them a muted, steady shine: the handle of a knife on the table, the teapot’s spout, a nicely rounded brass doorknob. The wintry air in the room was redolent of unremembered things, but there was, too, a quality of urgency, of immanence, a sense of momentous events in the offing. I had stood here as a boy, beside this same table, before this same window, in the same metallic light, dreaming of the unimaginable, illimitable state that was to come, which was the future, the future that for me, now, was the present and soon would fall away and become the past. How was it possible, that I had been there then and was here now? And yet it was so. This is the mundane and unaccountable conjuring trick wrought by time. And Polly, my Polly, in the midst of it all.

“I want to paint you,” I said, or blurted, rather.

She looked at me askance. “Paint me?” she said, widening her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I say: I want to paint you.” My heart was thudding in the most alarming way, really thudding, like a big bass drum.

“Oh, yes?” she said. “With two noses and a foot sticking out of my ear?”

I ignored this travesty of my style. “No,” I said, “I want to paint your portrait — a portrait of you as you are.”

She was still regarding me with sceptical amusement. “But you only paint things,” she said, “not people, and even when you do you make them look like things.”

This, too, I let pass, though it wasn’t without a certain point, a certain sharp point, whether she was fully aware of it or not, another instance of the fact that true insights come from the most unexpected quarters. The truth is, what I wanted, what I was angling for, with this urgent talk of painting and portraits, was for her to take her clothes off, right now, right here, in this chilly kitchen, or better still for her to let me do it, to peel her like an egg and look and look and look at her, naked, in what was literally the cold light of day. Don’t mistake me. I had not been seized by lust, at least not by lust in the usual sense, which is a different class of a thing altogether from desire, in my opinion. I’ve always found women most interesting, most fascinating, most, yes, desirable, precisely when the circumstances in which I encounter them are least appropriate or promising. It’s a matter to me of unfailing amazement and awe that under the dowdiest of clothes — that shapeless jumper, the drab skirt, those characterless shoes — there is concealed something as intricate, abundant and mysterious as the body of a woman. It is for me one of the secular miracles — is there any other kind? — that women are as they are. I don’t speak here of their minds, their intellects, their sensibilities, and for this I’ll be shouted at, I know, but I don’t care. It’s the visible, the tactile, graspable fact of womanly flesh, draped so snugly over its cage of bone — that’s what I’m talking about. The body thinks and has its own eloquence, and a woman’s body has more to say than that of any other creature, infinitely more, to my ear, at any rate, or to my eye. That’s the reason I wanted Polly to be rid of her clothes and for me to look at her, no, to listen to her, rapt and rapturously undone, I mean listen to her corporeal self, if such a thing could be possible. Looking and listening, listening and looking, these, for one such as I, are the intensest ways of touching, of caressing, of possessing.

Well, why, you will ask, in your sensible way, did I not invite Polly to step into one of the bedrooms, even the dank and musty one at the back of the house that I used to share with my brothers when I was a lad, and have her undress there, as surely she would have done, willingly, if our recent history together was anything to go by? That only shows how little you understand me and what I have been saying, not just here but all along. Don’t you see? What concerns me is not things as they are, but as they offer themselves up to being expressed. The expressing is all — and oh, such expressing.

Polly had been gazing at me with a perplexed frown, and now she started, and gave herself a shake, as though she were coming out of a trance. “What are we talking about?” she said, in the fluting, tremulous voice she had been speaking in since she arrived, of so high a register that it kept seeming she might topple over and fall off of herself. “I’m here to find out from you why you ran away, and you’re babbling about painting a portrait of me. You must be mad, or must think I am.” I lowered my eyes, displaying dumb contrition, but she was not to be so easily placated. “Well?” she demanded. She hitched the child higher on her hip — she has a way of flaunting that daughter of hers like a weapon, or as a shield that could be turned into a weapon — and waited, fiercely glaring, for me to account for myself. If her eyes were some more vivid shade than grey I would say they blazed. Still I stood mute. She had every right to be cross with me — she had every right to be furious — but all the same I didn’t know what to say to her, any more than I had known what to say to her suffering husband that other day when he came blundering up the stairs to the studio and poured out all his woes. How could I unravel the complex web of reasons for my going, since I was hopelessly tangled up in them myself? “I know you stopped being in love with me,” she said, with an intensified quiver in her voice, at once sorrowful and accusing, “but to run away like that, without so much as a word — I wouldn’t have believed even you could be so cruel.” She was looking at me with a kind of wounded pleading, and when I still said nothing, only stood there with my head hanging, she bit her lip and gave a cut-off, gulping sob and sat down suddenly on one of the kitchen chairs, plonking the child on to her lap.

Outside, in the overcast yet strangely radiant day, a soft uncertain rain began to fall. I note, by the way, how rain punctuates my narrative with a suspicious regularity. Maybe it’s a substitute for the showers of tears that by rights I should be shedding, at the simple sadness of all this that was transpiring between us, between Polly and me, between Polly and me and Marcus, between Polly and me and Marcus and Gloria, and who knows how many others? Drop a pebble into the sea and the ripples roll out on all sides, bearing their sorrowful tidings.

I filled the battered kettle and put it on the stove to boil and laid out tea-things, glad of the excuse to be pottering about, just like a real human being, using up time and not having to say anything, or anything Polly could seize on, anyway, and turn against me. At bottom I’m just a cautious old mole. Indeed, I often think I would like to be truly old and at my last, a beslippered shuffler, wearing long johns, and gloves without fingers, and a dirty scarf wrapped round my stringy throat, and have a drip always on the end of my nose, and be forever moaning of the cold, and snarling at people, and phoning the guards to complain of children kicking footballs into my garden. Somehow I’m convinced things would be simpler, then — will be simpler, with only the end in view. Polly sat with a fist pressed to her cheek, gazing starkly before her, like that oddly burly angel in Dürer’s Melencolia. A glinting tear ran over her knuckles but I pretended not to see it. The child was gazing up at her with moon eyes, her wet, shiny-pink bottom lip stuck out. I remarked — having first to do a noisy clearance job on my throat — what a quiet child she was, how biddable, how good in general; it was, of course, no more than a craven attempt to get round the mother by lauding the child. Polly, however, was lost in herself and wasn’t listening. The kettle came to the boil. I made the tea and put the pot on the table, a delicate plume of vapour curling up from the spout like a half-hearted genie trying and failing to materialise. I sat down. The child transferred her — I keep wanting to say its — speculative gaze to me. I did my best to smile. Lifting a fat little hand she inserted an index finger into her right nostril and began luxuriantly to probe inside it. Have I remarked before how eerie children are? To me they seem so, anyway. My own little one, my lost Olivia, comes to me in dreams sometimes, not as she was, but as she would be now, a grown girl. I see her, the dream-she, quite clearly. She has the look of her mother, the same pale, blonde beauty, though she is slighter, of a more delicate make. Delicate, yes; that’s how they used to describe girls like her, when I was young. It meant they would not live long, or that if they did they would be anaemic, and childless themselves. In my dreams she wears a pink dress, very demure, with a crimped, flowered bodice — remember the kind I mean? — and white ankle-socks and patent-leather pumps. She doesn’t do anything, just stands, with a solemn and faintly questioning look, her arms pressed close to her sides, a bright figure at the centre of a vast, dark place. There seems nothing strange or even worthy of remark in her being there, older than she ever got to be in life, and it’s only when I wake that I wonder what these visitations mean, or if they mean anything — after all, why should my dream life have a meaning, when my waking one does not?

Little Pip took her finger out of her nose and gravely inspected what she had retrieved from the depths of her nostril.

“Are you not going to say anything at all?” Polly demanded of me. “What’s the use of us being here if we don’t talk?” I was tempted to point out that it was she who had come here, uninvited and, if I were honest, not entirely welcome, either; but I kept my peace. She sighed. “I’ve left Marcus, you know.”

“Ah.”

“Is that all you can say? — ah?”

I made to fill her cup, but she waved the teapot brusquely aside.

“Was there a fight?” I asked, keeping a steadily neutral tone, I don’t know how. I felt like a soldier trapped in a crater under enemy bombardment at whose feet there is lodged a recently launched, still warm and unexploded shell. Polly gave an angrily dismissive shrug, dipping and twisting her shoulders, like an acrobat in pain. “Why did you turn against me all of a sudden?” she wailed. The child left off studying her fingertip and fixed her eye upon her mother; her gaze, I noticed, took a moment to adjust itself, and I wondered if she, too, was going to have a cast in her eye, just like her mother. Polly had lifted up to me an anguished face; with that look, and the child on her lap, she made me think, disconcertingly, of a classic pietà—it’s what I do, I transform everything into a scene and frame it. I said I hadn’t turned against her — what would make her think such a thing? “You did, you did!” she cried. “I saw it in your face long before you ran off, the way you wouldn’t look at me, the way you kept making excuses and going around mumbling to yourself and sighing.” She paused, and her shoulders sagged. There is indeed, I’ve noted it before, a touch of the operatic to all discourse: there are the arias, the coloratura passages, the recitatives by turns bustling, reflective, or furiously hissed upon the air, in a spray of spittle. “After you went,” she said, “I’d wake up in the morning and tell myself that today you’d call, that today I’d hear your voice, but the hours dragged on until night and still the phone didn’t ring. I couldn’t think of anything but you and why you went away and where you might be. And all the time I was walking around in a fog. Yesterday when I was doing the washing-up a glass broke in the sink. I didn’t see it under the suds and didn’t feel it cutting me until the water started turning red.” She lifted her hand to display the dressing on her thumb, a wad of lint held in place with sticking-plaster and stained with rust-coloured blood, and at once I saw Marcus, in the studio, holding up his hand to show me his ring finger and the ring he had cut her face with. I reached out to her but she snatched her hand away and hid it behind the child’s back. There was a silence. The small rain worried at the window-panes. I said I was sorry, trying to sound humble and heart-sick. I was heart-sick, I was humbled, but I couldn’t seem to make myself sound as if I were. Polly gave an angry laugh. “Oh, yes,” she said archly, “you’re sorry, of course.”

The child began to cry, weakly and as it were exploratively, making a sound like a rusty hinge being effortfully opened inch by inch. Polly drew her to her breast again and rocked her, and at once she grew quiet. Motherhood. Another conundrum I shall never crack.

We sat there, at the table, for a long time. The tea, undrunk, went cold, the afternoon light turned leaden, the dreary rain outside drifted down at a slant. I did not feel as upset as by rights I should have felt. I have a knack of finding little pockets of peace and secret quiet even in the most fraught of circumstances — the harried heart must have its rest. Polly, with the child dozing now in her lap, talked and talked, to herself more than to me, it seemed, requiring me only to listen, or perhaps not even that — perhaps she had forgotten I was there. Grief, she had discovered, was a physical sensation, a kind of ailment that affected her all over. This was a surprise, she said; she had thought that kind of suffering was entirely a thing of the emotions. I knew what she meant; I knew exactly what she meant. I, too, was familiar with the soul’s ague, but I didn’t say so, the moment in the limelight being hers. Her fingers under her nails were sore, she said, as if the quicks were exposed — again she waved her hand in front of me, though this time there was nothing to be shown — and her eyes scalded, and even her hair seemed to hurt. Her temperature soared and plummeted; one minute her blood was on fire, the next she felt chilled to the bone. Her skin was hot and puffy to the touch, and slightly sticky, the way that the more delicate parts of her, the backs of her knees, or the plump puckers at her armpits, used to get when she was a child and stayed out too long in the sun. “Can you feel it?” she said, pulling back the sleeve of her jumper and thrusting the underside of her arm at me. “Can you feel the heat?” I could feel it.

Marcus, she said, had taken to ignoring her, or treating her with an icy politeness that stung more sharply than any insult or recrimination he might fling at her. He had a little smile, the faintest flicker, ironical, superior, that she was helpless to protect herself against and that made her furious and want to hit him. When he smiled like that, usually as he was turning away, and turning away was all he seemed to do now, she realised that she could come to hate him, as he seemed to hate her, and this frightened her, this violence she felt inside herself. And he, too, who had always been mild and diffident, he seemed so furious, so vengeful. On the day after I fled she fell coming down the stairs into the workroom, missed the last step and went sprawling, flopping helplessly on her front and hurting her breasts and hitting her nose on the floor and making it bleed. As she was getting herself up, big startling drops of nose-blood splashing on her blouse, she glanced across at her husband where he was sitting at his bench and caught a look of cold satisfaction in his eyes, which shocked her. Could he be so bitter towards her that he would gloat to see her there like that, on her knees, injured and bleeding?

“That terrible wind,” she said to me, “it blew for days after you went, all day and all night.” The house around her had felt like a ship running under full sail against a relentless storm. Windows creaked, fireplaces moaned, doors swung shut with a bang, their keyholes whistling. At times she could hardly distinguish between the storm outside and the sound of her own pain rearing and plunging inside her. She hid herself away in the little room above the workshop, her room, the one that had always been hers by tacit agreement between her and Marcus. She sat for hours in a rocking-chair by the window, while the child played on the floor at her feet. The salt carried in on the wind from the estuary had hazed over the window-panes, and the people in the street below her seemed like ghosts passing soundlessly to and fro.

Then, on the second or third day after I had gone, Marcus surprised her by coming up from the workshop and tapping on the door. His tap was so light she hardly heard it above the tumult of the gale outside. He had brought her a cup of tea, on a tray, with a lace doily. He asked why was she sitting in the dark but she said it was only twilight yet. “You should turn on the lamp,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. She willed him to look at her but he would not. The sight of the doily almost made her cry. He was haggard; he seemed to be as shocked as she was by this terrible thing that had burbled up between them, like foul-smelling waters from a poisoned well. He stood at the window. He had to bend forwards a little to see out, for the window was low-set and deeply recessed. He put an arm against the glass and laid his forehead on his arm and sighed. She caught the familiar smell of the watchmaker’s oil that he used in his work, a smell that was always on his fingers, even in the mornings before he had sat down to his bench. She could feel no warmth in him, no softening, no sympathy. Why had he come up, then? Little Pip was in her cot by the fireplace, lying on her back and playing with her toes, as she liked to do, cooing to herself. Marcus paid her no heed; maybe she, too, was spoilt for him. He sighed again. “I don’t know why he came back here,” he said quietly, sounding almost weary. Still he leaned there, watching the street, or pretending to.

“Who?” she asked, although she knew the answer. He didn’t say anything, didn’t look at her, only smiled his cold little wisp of a smile. So: he knew. For a second her heart lifted. “Had he seen you, I wondered, had he stumbled on you somewhere and you admitted the truth, and that was how he knew?” His knowing didn’t matter, she said, she didn’t care about that. All she cared about was the simple, momentous, overwhelming possibility that if he had seen me, if he had talked to me, it meant he might know where I had fled to, where I was to be found. But, no, she could see it from his expression that he hadn’t met me, hadn’t spoken to me, that he had guessed, that was all, just guessed, the moment I ran off, that I was his wife’s secret lover. Now it was her turn to sigh. Was he waiting for her to deny it, to insist he was mistaken, to say it was all in his imagination? She couldn’t speak, couldn’t bring herself to tell him more lies. He might as well know the truth. Maybe it was best that he should know; maybe things would be easier, that way. But still she couldn’t confess it, not out loud, in words, couldn’t say my name. Anyway, she didn’t have to. She knew he knew.

How fiercely the wind blew, how swiftly the darkness was descending, on the two of them there in that little room.

Things hadn’t got better, she said, hadn’t got easier. She didn’t think they ever would, and so she had told him, had said it straight out, not about me, no no, she would never utter my name to him but only that she was leaving him. He showed no surprise, no dismay, just looked at her in that owlish way he always used to do, in the old days, when she got angry with him, and pressed a fingertip to the bridge of his old-fashioned, round-rimmed spectacles, another of those endearingly defensive little gestures he had, all of which I knew well, as well as she did, I dare say. I wonder if we both, she and I, loved him still, even a little, despite everything. The thought just flitted into my mind, like a small bird flying up into a tree, without a sound.

He must have known already what she had decided, she said, he must have guessed that, too, guessed that she was going to leave him.

And then, she said, the strangest thing happened. Suddenly, in that moment, she sitting in the rocking-chair and Marcus at the window, suddenly she knew where it was I had run off to, where it was that I was in hiding. Of course, it was the obvious place, she said. She couldn’t understand how she had not thought of it before. And now here she was.

“You mean,” I said slowly, “you left him today, just now, before coming here?” She nodded swiftly, smiling with eyes wide and her lips tightly shut, gleeful as a schoolgirl who has run away from school. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to go home,” she said.

“Home?”

“Yes.” She coloured a little. “Go on, laugh,” she said, looking away. “It’s what wives do when they get in trouble, I know, they run home to their mothers. Not,” she added, with a forlorn little laugh, “that my mother will be of much help to me.” She paused, and took on a look of such deep and serious portent that I felt myself quailing before it; what new trial had she thought up for me, what new hoop would she produce for me to jump through? “I want you to take me there. I mean I want you to go with me. Will you? Will you take me home?”

—

She had come in Marcus’s old Humber. I was surprised, even shocked. Surely Marcus hadn’t agreed to her taking it, for he treasured that car, and tended it like a beloved pet. Had she just got in and driven away? I thought it safest not to ask; in the crater where I lay trapped that unexploded shell was still there, its pointy end lodged in the mud and its all too smooth flank brassily agleam, ready to go off at the slightest stir I might make. I watched Polly at the wheel. This was a new manifestation of her I was seeing, brusque and swift and set of jaw; it takes a full-scale calamity to smarten up a girl as easy-going as she is, or as she had been, until now. Of this unfamiliar Polly I was, I admit, wary, if not downright scared.

She had packed a suitcase for herself and had stuffed the child’s things into an old cricket bag that had belonged to her father; there was the impression of everything having been snatched up and bundled together in anxious and angry haste. She was indeed a woman in flight. I confess it was all in a small way exciting, despite my grim forebodings.

Along the narrow roads the big motor yawed and swayed, seeming more ponderous than ever, as if weighted down by the freight of trouble it was carrying. The rain had turned sleety, and swarmed and slithered on the windscreen like blown spit. Trees loomed blackly before us, and rents appeared in the clouds, burning white glares within a dull grey surround, though the wind quickly sealed them up again. Behind the salty fumes of the engine I caught hints coming in from outside of drenched grass and loam and leaf-mould, the smells of autumn and of childhood. I looked at Polly’s hands on the wheel, one of them with its bandaged thumb, and saw with a mild jolt of surprise that she was still wearing her wedding ring. But why was I surprised? I was sure she didn’t believe her marriage to Marcus was at an irreparable end; at least, it was my strong hope that she didn’t. But what, then, did she think? I shifted in my seat with grave unease. The child was asleep, trussed up in her special seat in the back, her head lolling sideways and a thread of silver drool dangling from her lower lip. I had noticed that Polly no longer referred to her as Little Pip, that she was just Pip, now; another custom gone, another fragment of the old life cast aside. By the way, that can’t be her real name, can it, Pip, it can’t be her full name? Strange, the things one doesn’t know, the things one has never bothered to find out. Is it short for Philippa, perhaps? But who would call a child Philippa, a name I’m not even sure I know how to pronounce? Though there are Philippas, who must once have been infants, just as there are Olivias. These and others like them were the idle thoughts I revolved in my mind, if thoughts they could be called, as we bowled along the rainy road. In my desperation I was, of course, seeking by whatever means to set myself at a remove from all this, mentally at least: from Polly, from the child in the back, from the wallowing car, from myself, even, my uncertain and increasingly apprehensive self. Polly as fugitive was an altogether novel phenomenon, and a far more ample handful than she had been hitherto. The old masters of apologetics were right: the imperative of self-preservation is stronger than the generative urge and all that it dictates and entails. Poor old love, what a frail and tremulous flower it is.

I asked Polly if her father was expecting her. She didn’t take her eyes off of the road. “Of course he is,” she said, with a dismissive quick lift of her head. “Do you think I’d just turn up without warning, and set my mother off on one of her jags?” Rebuffed, I said no more, and fell to twiddling my thumbs and looking out of the window beside me. The passing trees tossed their tops wildly about in the wind, and leaves flew haphazard, speckling the air, yellow with jade-green patches, burnt umber, floor-polish red. Streaks of rainwater glinted in the flooded fields, and a flock of small dark birds, struggling into the wind, seemed to be flying strenuously backwards against a sky of smudged pewter. I had refrained from asking Polly why she should want me, me of all people, to accompany her on this momentous, indeed this desperate, return to the place of her birth and scene of her youthful days: home, as she said. So far, in fact, I had asked her almost nothing. I always assume everything is perfectly simple and obvious, and that I am the only one who doesn’t understand what’s going on, and so I tend to say nothing, ask nothing, but keep quiet, for fear of being laughed at for a dullard. It’s my essential character to lie low and let the hounds go hullabalooing past. It used to serve me well, that prudent policy; not any more, alas.

The ancestral seat of the Plomers — Plomer is Polly’s maiden name, another nice soft plosive — is called Grange Hall, or, more commonly, the Grange. This was my first visit to the place, although I had heard Polly speak of it often — as often, I’m sure, as she insisted she had heard me speak of my old home; how the past does cling, raking us lovingly with its tender claws. The iron gates to the narrow drive stood open, as they must have done for decades, and sagged dejectedly on their hinges; rust had made a knobbled filigree of their bars, and the lower ones were overgrown with scutch grass and nettles. As we were turning in from the road something inside me seemed to shift and slide, and for a moment I felt nauseous, and panic sent a hot bead rolling down my spine. Would I, too, be caught here, like these gates, caught and held fast? What was I letting myself in for? What awaited me in the midst of these ragged fields, in an unknown house where an improbable couple, Polly’s doddery father and her poor daft mother, were seeing out their days? Slowly the nausea gave way to a stifling sensation, as if an invisible caul were being pulled down over my head and shoulders. However, a moment later the child woke, and the qualm passed. “Here we are,” Polly said, in what seemed to me a fatuously cheery voice, causing in me a flash of annoyance. What, I demanded of myself again, what was I doing here, along with this desperate young woman and her insupportable tribulations? I would have made a poor knight errant, my lady’s veil a tattered and muddied pennant drooping from my drooping lance.

The house was built of granite, heavyset and plain to the point of severity, save for the arched, mock-Gothic front door, which lent a vaguely ecclesiastical effect overall. Many tall chimneys stood out against the sky, portly and self-important; rapid white smoke issued from one of them, like a papal proclamation, and was no sooner out than it was snatched up by the wind and torn to shreds. The gravel was thin on the turning-place before the front steps and patches of shiny wet marl showed through. An ancient retriever, which once would have been golden but now was the colour of damp hay, came forwards to greet the car. “Oh, there’s Barney!” Polly said, a wail of sad pleasure. The dog was arthritic and had a floppy, disjointed gait, as if its various parts were strung together on an internal frame of slack wires and hooks and rubber bands. It wagged its heavy tail and gave an effortful, happy-sounding bark, saying distinctly, Woof!

Polly, grunting from the effort, lifted the child out of the back seat, while I went round and unloaded the boot. She snapped at me for setting the cricket bag on the ground, where the bottom of it would get wet. We might have been, I grimly reflected, a middle-aged, middling couple, inveterately married, by turns testy, disputatious and indifferent in each other’s company. When I shut the lid of the boot and straightened up, I found myself looking about in sudden startlement. The day seemed huge and luridly luminous, as if a lid somewhere had been abruptly lifted. How extraordinary, after all, the perfectly ordinary can sometimes seem, the Humber’s cooling engine ticking, the rooks wheeling above the trees, the dowdy old house with its incongruously churchly door, and Polly, with her daughter clinging to her front, looking distracted and cross and pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes.

“Oh, God,” she said, under her breath, “here comes Mother.”

Mrs. Plomer was approaching stumblingly over the gravel. She was tall and bonily thin, with a shock of wild grey hair that made her look as if she had recently suffered a severe electric shock. She wore a mouse-coloured mackintosh, a crooked tweed skirt and a pair of green wellington boots that must have been four or five times too big for her. “Good,” she said briskly, arriving before us and beaming at the child, “you’ve brought little Polly.” She frowned, still smiling. “But who are you, my dear,” she enquired sweetly of her daughter, “and how do you come to have our baby?”

—

When I consider the possibility — or perhaps I should say the prospect — of eternal damnation, I envisage my suffering soul not plunged in a burning lake or sunk to the oxters in a limitless plain of permafrost. No, my inferno will be a blamelessly commonplace affair, fitted out with the commonplace accoutrements of life: streets, houses, people going about their usual doings, birds swooping, dogs barking, mice gnawing the wainscot. Despite the quotidian look of everything, however, there is a great mystery here, one that only I am aware of, and that involves me alone. For although my presence goes unremarked, and I seem to be known by all who encounter me, I know no one, recognise nothing, have no knowledge of where I am or how I came to be here. It’s not that I have lost my memory, or that I am undergoing some trauma of displacement and alienation. I’m as ordinary as everyone and everything else, and it’s precisely for this reason that it’s incumbent on me to maintain a blandly untroubled aspect and seem to fit smoothly in. But I do not fit in, not at all. I’m a stranger in this place where I’m trapped, always will be a stranger, although perfectly familiar to everyone, everyone, that is, except myself. And this is how it is to be for eternity: a living, if I can call it living, hell.

First of all there was high tea. Pots of a peat-brown brew were prepared, slices of bread were laid out like fallen dominoes, cold meats were displayed in sweaty, glistening slabs. There were biscuits and buns, and homemade jam in a sticky dish, and, the pinnacle of all, a mighty plum cake, quite stale, with a glacé cherry on top, which was produced with a conjuror’s flourish from a big japanned tin with shiny dents in it. Janey the cook-cum-housekeeper-cum-maid, ageless and feral, with a tangle of wiry, grizzled hair reminiscent of Mrs. Plomer’s fright-wig, through which her scalp showed pinkly, ferried it all up from the kitchen on a vast tray, in three or four staggering relays, her elbows stuck out at either side and the tip of a moist grey tongue showing. Mrs. Plomer, still in her gumboots, drifted in and out through doorways, smiling on everyone and everything with remote benevolence, while her husband hovered, chafing his hands and humming to himself in happy nervousness. The day was waning, yet a great glare of yellow-gold light was filling the westward-facing windows and casting all indoors into greyish-brown shadow. The china was mismatched, the milk jug was cracked. Janey snatched up Polly’s teaspoon and used it to take a slurp of milk from the jug, testing it for freshness, then dropped the spoon into Polly’s tea with a clatter and a splash. She eyed the child darkly. “Are you feeding that babby at all?” she demanded. “She looks starved to me.”

Seated at the centre of this parody of rustic domesticity, I felt like a lately hatched cuckoo, huge and absurd, around which the nest’s rightful chicks were doing their best to fit themselves, flapping stubby wings and chirping weakly. Polly had introduced me in the vaguest terms, saying I was a friend of Marcus’s who had come along to help her with the child and the bags; of Marcus himself, of his whereabouts or his state, she said not a word. Janey in her apron pointedly ignored me, looking through me as if I were perfectly transparent; I’m sure she had the measure of me. So did Polly’s father, I should say, though he was too polite to show it. “Orme, Orme,” he said, putting a finger to his paper-pale brow and frowning at the ceiling. “Aren’t you the painter who’s living in town in Dr. Barragry’s old house?” I said yes, that I did indeed live at Fairmount, but that I did not paint any more. “Ah,” he said, nodding, and gazing at me with blank brightness. He was a small, neat man with a fine, hollow-cheeked profile and pale grey eyes — Polly’s eyes. He had overall a worn, dry aspect, as if he had been left out for a long time to weather under the elements. His sparse hair must once have been, improbably, red, and still had a sandy cast, and his nose, prominent and strong, might have been carved from a piece of bleached driftwood. He wore a three-piece suit of greenish tweed, and a venerable pair of highly polished brown brogues. Though his complexion was in general colourless, there was a ragged pink patch, finely veined, in the hollow of each cheek. He was a little deaf, and when addressed would draw himself quickly forwards, his head tilted to one side and his eyes fixed on the speaker’s lips with bird-like alertness. He had struck me at first as much too old to be Polly’s father. Her mother, as I was to learn, had been peculiar in the head even as a girl, and the family, casting about for someone to marry her off to, had fixed on her cousin Herbert, the last, it had been expected, of the Plomers of Grange Hall. Herbert, the Mr. Plomer seated before me now, was then a bachelor in his middle years, vague, kindly, easily coerced, and in possession of a fine old house and a few hundred acres of decent land. It all sounded much too plausible, in a novelettish, nineteenth-century sort of way, and for a mad minute I thought perhaps the entire thing — the old stone mansion, the aged father and loony mother, the crusty retainer with her groaning trays of grub, even the grass under the gate and the wheeling rooks — had been got up to lull me into thinking I was Ichabod Crane come to seek the hand of fair Katrina and win the riches of Sleepy Hollow. And would there be, I asked myself, a Headless Horseman, too?

Janey, fuming and muttering, was handing round plates of bread-and-butter and ham and pickles, with indifferent haste, as if it were a pack of greasy playing cards she was dealing out. It was a long time since I had eaten a pickled onion. It had a strongly familiar, metallic taste. Remarkable, how much our mouths remember, with such sharpness, and over aeons.

Pip, who in my mind will always be Little Pip, sat in a high-chair, itself a relic from Polly’s own infancy. Polly’s mother regarded the child with snatched, sidelong glances, blinking suspiciously. At the outset of the meal her husband had assured her, speaking loudly and slowly, that the young woman seated at the foot of the table was indeed her daughter, Polly, grown up now and a mother herself, as evidenced by the child perched there in the high-chair, but I could see the poor woman wondering how this could be, since here was Polly, still little, banging her spoon on the table and dribbling into her bib. It must all have been very puzzling, to such a scattered mind as hers. Polly, I knew, had been the couple’s only child, her arrival a surprise, if not indeed a shock, to everyone, not least to her mother, who I am sure had hardly known how the thing had come about. The condition that Mrs. Plomer suffered from, as it was explained to me, was an early, mild and for the most part placid form of dementia, although on occasion, when something startled or vexed her, she could become severely agitated, and stay that way for days. Mr. Plomer chose to present his wife’s malaise as if it were merely a form of chronic and endearing eccentricity, and greeted all manifestations of it with elaborate displays of amazement and rueful mirth. “But look, my dear,” he would exclaim, “you’ve put my trousers in the larder! What were you thinking of?” Then he would turn to whoever was present, smiling indulgently and shaking his head, as if this were a unique occurrence, as if boot polish had never appeared in the butter dish before, or a lavatory brush on the dining-room table.

The child in her chair gave a squeak, surprising herself, and looked about the table quickly to see what the rest of us had made of her sudden intervention. Yes yes, children are uncanny, no doubt of it. Is it because the things that are familiar to us are to them a novelty? That can’t be right. As Adler tells us, in his great essay on the subject, the uncanny arises when a known object presents itself to us in an alien mode. So if children see everything as new, then blah blah blah, etc., etc., etc. — you get my drift. Yet is there a them and an us, and can we make such distinctions? The young and the old, we say, the past and the present, the quick and the dead, as if we ourselves were somehow outside the temporal process, applying an Archimedean lever to it. The living being, so one of the philosophers has it, is only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that; likewise, and obviously, the young are only an early version of the old, and should not be treated as a separate species, and wouldn’t be, if they didn’t seem so strange to us. I looked at Little Pip and wondered what could be going on in her head. She had no words yet, only pictures, presumably, with which to make whatever sense it was she made of things. There seemed to be figured for me here a lesson of some sort, for me the former painter; it rose up out of my vaguely groping thoughts, shimmered a moment tantalisingly, then dispersed. I can’t think in this fashion any more, rubbing concepts against each other to make illuminating sparks. I’ve lost the knack, or the will, or something. Yes, my muse has flown the coop, old hen that she was.

Polly’s mother frowned and lifted her head as if she had heard something, some far faint sound, a secret summons, and rose from her place and, frowning still, wandered out of the room, taking her napkin with her, forgotten in her hand.

I turned to Polly, but she wouldn’t meet my eye; it must have been a great strain for her, being here in the withered bosom of her family with me sitting opposite her like something she had brought in by mistake and now couldn’t think how to get rid of. She was transformed yet again, by the way. It was as if in coming here she had taken off a ball-gown and put on instead a house-coat, or even a gymslip. She was all daughter now, plain, dutiful, exasperated, lips pursed in sullen resentment, and quick to anger. I could hardly see in her the wantonly exultant creature who of an afternoon not so long ago on the old green sofa in the studio would cry out in my arms and dig her fingers into my shoulder-blades and burrow with her avid mouth, sweet succubus, into the delightedly flinching hollow of my throat. And as I sat there, contemplating her in her porridge-coloured jumper, with her hair drawn tightly back and her face rubbed clear of make-up and harrowed by this long day’s tensions and travails, there came to me what I can only call a breathtaking revelation — literally, for it was a revelation, and my breath was taken away. What I saw, with jarring clarity, was that there is no such thing as woman. Woman, I realised, is a thing of legend, a phantasm who flies through the world, settling here and there on this or that unsuspecting mortal female, whom she turns, briefly but momentously, into an object of yearning, veneration and terror. I picture myself, assailed by this astounding new knowledge, slumped open-mouthed on my chair with my arms hanging down at either side and my legs splayed out slackly before me — I’m speaking figuratively, of course — in the flabbergasted pose of one suddenly and devastatingly enlightened.

I know, I know, you’re shaking your head and chuckling, and you’re right: I am a hopeless and feeble-minded chump. The supposedly tremendous discovery that announced itself to me there at the tea-table was really no more than another of those scraps of unremarkable wisdom that have been known to every woman, and probably to most men, too, since Eve ate the apple. Nor did it, I confess, have any grand illuminating effect on me — sadly, the light that accompanies such insights quickly fades, I find. No scales fell from my eyes. I did not look on Polly with a new scepticism, measuring her mere humanness and finding it unworthy of my passion. On the contrary, I felt a sudden renewed tenderness towards her, but of an unimpassioned, mundane sort. Nevertheless, though the magic had evaporated on the spot, I think I treasured her more, that evening, than I ever had before, even in those first, ecstatic weeks when she would come running up those too many steps to the studio and fling herself at me in a flurry of cries and kisses and walk me backwards to the sofa, fumbling at my buttons and laughing and hotly panting into my ear. I now in turn would gladly have taken her in my arms and swept her up the stairs to her bedroom and her bed, still in her woollens and her hockey-girl’s skirt, there to lose myself in her pinky-grey, bread-warm, most cherished, plasticiney flesh. But it would have been Polly, plain Polly herself, that I was caressing, for at last she had broken through the casing that my fantasies had moulded around her and had become, at last, at last had become, for me — what? Her real self? I can’t say that. I’m supposed not to believe in real selves. What, then? A less fantastical fantasy? Yes, let’s agree on that. I think it’s the most that can be hoped for, the most that can be asked. Or wait, wait, let’s put it this way: I forgave her for all the things that she was not. I’ve said that before, somewhere. No matter. Similarly she must have forgiven me, long ago. How does that sound? Does it make sense? It’s no small thing, the pardon that two human beings can extend to each other. I should know.

And yet, and yet. What I see now, at this moment, and didn’t see then, was that this final stage, for me, of Polly’s pupation, was the beginning of the end, the true beginning of the true end, of my, of my — oh, go on, what else can it be called? — of my love for her.

We did go up to her bedroom. Once inside the door I set down her suitcase and the cricket bag with the child’s things and stood back awkwardly, feeling suddenly shy. I tried not to look too closely, too interrogatively, at the objects in the room. I felt like an interloper, which is, I know, what I was. Polly glanced about and heaved a sigh, puffing out her cheeks. This had been, she said, her bedroom from when she was a child until she left home to marry Marcus. The bed, high and narrow, seemed too small for a grown-up person, and looking at it I felt a sharp little pang of compassion and sweet sorrow. How cherishable it seemed, how moving, this moveless, inexpectant cradle that had held and sheltered her through so many of her nights. I pictured her asleep there, oblivious of moonrise, bat-flit, dawn’s stealthy creeping, her soft breath barely a stir in the darkness. I felt like shedding a tear, I really did. How confusing everything was.

The fireplace had tiles down either side of it with a pattern of pink flowers painted on them, under the glaze. A log fire had been lit, but it hadn’t taken — the logs were wet and the kindling’s pale flames lapped at them ineffectually. “It always smoked, that grate,” Polly said. “I’m surprised I wasn’t suffocated.” The small, four-paned square window opposite the bed looked out on a cobbled yard and a line of disused stables. Further on there was a half-hearted hill topped by a stand of trees, oaks, I think, though to me most trees are oaks, their already almost bare branches stark and inky-black against a low sky of chill mauve shot through with silvery streaks. Inside the room the shadows of dusk were gathering fast, congregating in the corners under the ceiling like swathes of cobweb. I heard Janey down in the kitchen doing the washing-up and whistling. I strained to make out the tune. Polly sat on the side of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. She gazed out of the window. A last faint gleam clung to the cobbles in the yard. “The Rakes of Mallow,” that was the tune Janey was whistling. I was absurdly pleased to have identified it, and I turned, smiling, to Polly — what was I going to do, sing to her? — but at that moment, without warning, she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob. I held back, aghast, then went to her, creeping on tiptoe. I should have gathered her in my arms to comfort her, but I didn’t know how to manage it, so amorphous a shape she seemed, crouching there, her shoulders heaving, and all I could do was move my hands helplessly around her, as if I were forming a model of her out of air. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, dear God.” I was frightened by the depth of desolation in her voice, and inevitably I blamed myself for it; I felt as if I had tampered with some small, inert mechanism and made it spring into noisy and unstoppable movement. My fingers by chance brushed the eiderdown where she was sitting and the chill, brittle touch of the satin made me shiver. I, too, called on God, though silently, praying to his inexistence to rescue me from this impossible predicament; I even saw myself jerked by magic backwards into the fireplace and sucked in a whoosh up the flue, my arms pinned to my sides and my eyes elevated in their sockets in a transport of El Greco — esque ecstasy, emerging a second later from the chimney, like a clown shooting out of the mouth of a cannon, and disappearing into the sky’s dragonfly-blue dome. Escape, yes, escape was all I could think of. Where now was all that reinvigorated tenderness for my darling girl that had come over me at the tea-table not half an hour before? Where indeed. I felt paralysed. A weeping woman is a terrible spectacle. I heard myself saying Polly’s name over and over in a low, urgent voice, as if I were calling to her into the depths of a cave, and now I touched her gingerly on the shoulder, getting the same small shock I had got from the eiderdown. She didn’t lift her head, only flapped a hand sideways at me, waving me away. “Leave me alone,” she wailed, with a great racking sob, “there’s nothing you can do!” I lingered a moment, in an agony of irresolution, then turned and sneaked out, shutting the door behind me with appalled, with exquisite, with shaming, care.

I made my way down through the house. Everything seemed known to me, in an odd, remote sort of way, the smell of must on the air, the faded stair carpet, the muddy ancestral portraits lurking in the shadows, that hat-stand and those mounted antlers in the hall, the grandfather clock hanging back in the shadows. It was as if I had lived there long ago, not in childhood but in a stylised antiquity, in the big frowsty mansion at the back of my mind that is the past, the inevitably imagined past.

After opening two or three wrong doors I at last found the drawing room. On a rug in front of the fire the child was playing with a set of wooden building bricks. Her grandfather was seated in an armchair, leaning forwards with his elbows on the armrests and his fingers laced before him, smiling down on her bemusedly. Night had fallen, with what seemed remarkable swiftness, and the curtains were drawn, and the shaded lamps with their forty-watt bulbs cast a misty glimmer over the heavily looming furniture and along the striped and faded wallpaper. I noted the vast mirror over the fireplace with its ornate chipped frame, the faded hunting prints, a chintz-covered sofa lolling exhaustedly on its hunkers, worn out it seemed after so many years of being sat on. All this too I knew, somehow.

“Such a fascinating age,” Mr. Plomer said, twinkling at me and at the child. “All of life before her.” He invited me to sit, indicating an armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace. “You have no motor car of your own with you,” he said, “is that right? We must find a bed for you, or”—his mild gaze did not waver yet I seemed to catch a glint in it, a sharp, bright knowingness—“or is Polly looking after that?” Well, he wasn’t a fool, he must have guessed what Polly was to me, and I to her, despite the obvious disparities between us, age being not the least of them — I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a better idea of our relations than I did. A flaming log subsided in the fireplace, sending up a spray of sparks. I said I should call for a taxi but he shook his head. “Not at all, not at all,” he said. “You must stay, of course. It’s merely a matter of airing a room for you. I shall speak to Janey.” He twinkled again. “You mustn’t mind poor Janey, you know. She’s not as terrible as might seem from her manner.” I nodded. I felt heavy-limbed and slack, sunk in a half-hypnotised trance by the old man’s mild, almost caressing tones. The child at our feet had assembled a tower of bricks, and now she knocked it over, giving a satisfied chuckle. “Surely it must be her bedtime,” the old man murmured, frowning. “Perhaps, after all, you should go up and speak to her mother?” I nodded again but made no move, asprawl and helpless in the armchair’s ample and irresistible embrace. I thought of Polly sitting on the side of the bed, her head bowed and her shoulders shaking. “But I haven’t offered you anything to drink!” Mr. Plomer exclaimed. He rose stiffly, wincing, and shuffled to a sideboard at the far end of the room. “There’s sherry,” he said over his shoulder, his voice emerging hollowly from the dimness. “Or this.” He held up a bottle and read from the label. “Schnapps, it’s called. A gift from my friend the Prince — Mr. Hyland, that is. Do you know him? I’m not sure what schnapps is, but I suspect it’s rather strong.” I said I would prefer sherry, and he came back carrying two glasses hardly bigger than thimbles. He sat down again. I sipped the unctuous sweet syrup. I was so tired, so tired, a wayfarer stalled halfway along an immense and torturous journey. I recalled a dream I had dreamed one night recently, not a dream really, but a fragment. I was at a railway station somewhere abroad, I didn’t know where, and couldn’t tell what the language was that the people around me were speaking. The station resembled a Byzantine church, or perhaps a temple or even a mosque, its domed ceiling plated with gold-leaf and the floor-tiles painted in bright, swirling patterns of blue and silver and ruby-red. I was waiting anxiously for a train that would take me home, although I wasn’t at all sure where home was supposed to be. Through the station’s wide-open doors I could see refulgent sunlight outside, and billows of dust, and milling traffic with vehicles of unfamiliar make, and crowds of olive-skinned people moving everywhere, headscarved women clad in black and men with enormous moustaches and piercing, pale-blue eyes. I looked about for a clock but couldn’t see one, and then it came to me that my train, the only train on which I could have travelled, the only one my ticket was valid for, had departed long ago, leaving me stranded here, among strangers.

“He was walking on the castle wall in a storm,” Mr. Plomer said. I gazed at him blear-eyed from under leaden lids. In his left hand he was holding a book, a quaint little volume bound in faded crimson cloth, open to an inner page from which it seemed he had been reading, or was about to read. Where had it come from? I hadn’t seen him get up to fetch it. Had I dozed off for a minute? And the dream about the train, had I been remembering it, or dreaming it anew, or for the first time, even? The old man was regarding me with an eye benign and bright. “The poet was lodging at a castle owned by his friend, a princess, and walked out on the battlements one stormy evening and heard the voice of the angel, as he said.” He smiled, then lifted the book close to his eyes and began to read aloud from it in a soft reedy singsong voice. I listened as a child would listen, in rapt incomprehension. The language, since I didn’t know it, sounded to my ear like so many hawkings and slurrings. After reciting a few lines he broke off, looking sheepish, the dabs of pink glowing in the hollows of his cheeks. “Duino was the place,” he said, “a castle on the sea-coast, and so he called the poems after it.” He closed the book and set it on his knee, keeping a finger inside it to mark the page. Thick-tongued, I asked him to tell me the meaning of what he had read. “Well,” he said, “since it is a poem, much of the meaning is in the expressing, you know, the rhythm and the cadence.” He paused, making a faint droning sound at the back of his throat, and looked up to consider the shadows under the ceiling. “He speaks of the earth—Erde—wishing to become absorbed into us.” Here he singsang again a phrase in German. “Is not your dream, he says — says to the earth, that is — to be one day invisible. Invisible in us, he means.” He smiled gently. “The thought is obscure, perhaps. Yet one admires the passion of the lines, I think, yes?”

I gazed into the white heart of the fire. It seemed to me I could hear the big clock out in the hall ponderously ticking. The old man cleared his throat.

“The Prince — I know I shouldn’t call him that — will come tomorrow,” he said. “If you are still here perhaps we can have a talk, the three of us.” I nodded, not trusting my voice to work. I was thinking of the dream again, and the departed train. Lost and astray, in an unknown place, alien voices in my ears. Mr. Plomer sighed. “I suppose we shall have to give him lunch. Perhaps Polly will preside. My wife”—he smiled—“doesn’t care for the poets.” He turned and spoke into the shadows beyond the firelight. “What do you say, my dear? Will you stand in for your mother and receive”—he smiled again—“our dear friend Frederick?”

I really must have been asleep for a time, since there was Polly, as I now saw, sitting on the chintz-covered sofa by the door, with the child in her lap. I struggled to haul myself upright in the armchair, blinking. Polly was wearing the same jumper and skirt as before, but had changed from her shoes into a pair of grey felt slippers with bobbles, or pom-poms, or whatever they’re called, on the toes. Even in the dim lamp-light I could make out her tear-swollen eyelids and delicately pink-rimmed nostrils. “He’s coming here,” she said, “tomorrow? Two visitors in a row — Janey will have a fit.” She laughed wanly, and her father went on smiling. She didn’t look at me. The child was asleep. The toppled tower of bricks was at my feet.

—

When I was little — ah, when I was little! — I cleaved to caution, to cosiness. There can have been few small boys as unadventurous as I was in those far-off days. I clung to my mother as a bulwark against a lawless and unpredictable world, a vestigial umbilical cord still strung between us, fine, delicate and durable as a strand of spider’s silk. Caution was my watchword, and outside the shelter of home I would perform no deed without considering its possible perils. I was a regular little regulating machine, tirelessly lining up in neat rows those things I encountered on my way through life that were amenable to my rage for order. Disaster awaited on all sides; every step was a potential pratfall; every path led to the brink of a precipice. I trusted nothing that was not myself. The world’s first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.

Not that I was a namby-pamby, no indeed, I was known for my sturdiness, my truculence, even, despite my want of physical prowess and my well-known and wonderfully laughable artistic leanings. What I couldn’t do with my fists I aimed to do with words. School-yard bullies soon learned to fear the knout of my sarcasm. Yes, I think I can say I was in my way a tough little tyke, whose fear was all internal, a smoking underground swamp where dead fishes floated belly-up and high-shouldered birds with bills like scimitars scavenged and screamed. And it’s still there, that putrid inner aigues-mortes of mine, still deep enough to drown me. What I find frightening nowadays is not the general malevolence of things, though Heaven knows — and Hell knows even better — I certainly should, but rather their cunning plausibility. The sea at morning, a gorgeous sunset, watches of nightingales, even a mother’s love, all these conspire to assure me that life is flawless good and death no more than a rumour. How persuasive it all can be, but I am not persuaded, and never was. In earliest years, in my father’s shop, among those worthless prints he sold, I could spot in even the most tranquil scene of summer and trees and dappled cows the tittering imp peering out at me from the harmless-seeming greenery. And that was what I determined to paint, the chancre under the velvet bodice, the beast behind the sofa. Even stealing things — it came to me just this minute — even stealing things was an attempt to break through the surface, to pluck out fragments of the world’s wall and put my eye to the holes to see what was hiding behind it.

Take that strange afternoon at Grange Hall, with Polly and her parents, and the even stranger hours that followed. I should have made my getaway at the end of that gruesome tea-party — at which I felt like Alice, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare all rolled into one — but the atmosphere of Grange Hall held me fast in an unshakeable lassitude. I was given for the night a servant’s room under the eaves. It was small, and peculiarly cramped. The ceiling on one side sloped to the floor, which forced me to hold myself at an angle, even when I was lying down, so that I felt horribly queasy — it was almost as bad as that garret on the rue Molière where I lodged that long-ago Parisian summer. But then, I always seem to be off-kilter, in rooms large and small. There was a camp-bed to sleep in, set low on two sets of crossed wooden legs that groaned bad-temperedly when I made the slightest movement. Janey had lit a coal fire in the tiny grate — she was a great one for the bedroom fire, was Janey — which smouldered on for hours. I, too, like Polly, felt that I might suffocate, especially as the only window in the room was painted shut, and I woke up more than once in the night feeling as if some small malignant creature had been squatting for hours on my chest. Did I dream again? Don’t they say we dream all the time we’re asleep but forget the bulk of what we dreamed about? Anyway, you get the general picture, painted by Fuseli: discomfort, bad air, fitful sleep and frequent wakings, all to the pounding accompaniment of a headache’s horrible gong. It was still muddily dark outside when I woke for what I knew would be the last time that night, with a searing thirst. Sitting up in that low bed, under the ceiling’s leaning cliff, with my head in my hands and my fingers in my hair, I might have been a child again, sleepless and in fear of the dark, waiting for Mama to come with a soothing drink and turn down the sheet at my chin and put her cool hand for a moment on my moist brow.

I switched on the light. The bulb shed a sallow glimmer over the bed and the balding rug on the floor; there was a cane chair, and that wooden cabinet thing they have in old houses, don’t know what it’s called, with a white bowl and matching jug placed on top of it. How many maids and manservants, long dead now, had crouched here shivering on bleak mornings like this one to perform their meagre ablutions? I got up. I was not only thirsty, I also badly needed to pee; this circumstance, with its skewed symmetry, seemed wholly unfair. I bent down to look under the bed, in the hope there might be a chamber pot, but there wasn’t. I realised I was shivering and that my teeth were clenched — it really was very cold — and I stripped a blanket from the bed and draped it over my shoulders. It smelt of generations of sleepers and their sweat. I went into the corridor, at once groggy and keenly alert. I suspect that at such times one is never as wide awake as one imagines. I couldn’t locate the light switch, and left the bedroom door ajar so as not to lose my bearings. I turned right and shuffled forwards cautiously. As I moved out of the feeble glow from the doorway behind me, the darkness I was advancing into seemed to mould itself clammily around my face, like a close-fitting mask of soft black silk. I reached out and touched the wall with my fingertips, feeling my way along. The wallpaper was that old-fashioned stuff — what do you call it? — anaglypta, strange name, must look it up, heavily embossed and slightly glossy to the touch, the gate-lodge used to be and indeed still is plastered all over with it upstairs and down, between the skirting board and the dado rail, there’s another singular word, dado, my mind is bristling with them today, words, I mean. Here to my left was a door; I turned the knob; no good, the door was locked and there was no key in the keyhole. I moved on. The darkness now was almost complete, and I saw myself being wafted through it as if on air from another world, a substanceless wraith wrapped in a musty blanket. I made out the frame of a spectral window. Why when it’s dark like that do the shapes of things seem to tremble, to waver ever so slightly, as if they were suspended in some liquid medium, viscid and dense, through which weak but super-rapid currents are flowing? I looked out into the night, in vain. Nothing, not the faintest glow from a distant window, not the glint of a single star. How could it be so dark? It seemed unnatural.

I tried the lower sash of the window. It let itself be raised an inch and, resistingly, another, and then stuck fast. I hesitated, thinking of what, in raucous novels of a previous century, so often happens to gentlemen when they foolhardily expose themselves in such hazardous circumstances, but my need was great — why does a bursting bladder make one’s back teeth ache? — and casting caution aside I stepped forwards and began to urinate copiously into the fastnesses of the night. As I stood there, micturating and musing, and enjoying in a childish, shivery sort of way the feel of the sharp night air on my tenderest flesh — how strangely we are made! — I came to realise that I was not alone. It wasn’t that I heard anything — the crashing as of a distant cataract coming up from the cobbled yard below would have drowned out all save the loudest noise — but I felt a presence. A spasm of fright went through me, shutting off on the instant the releasing flow. I turned my head to the right and squinnied into the darkness, making slits of my eyes. Yes, someone was there, standing motionless off at the end of the corridor. I would have yelped in fright had not my mouth gone instantly dry.

I am afraid of the dark, as you would expect. It’s another of my childish afflictions that I’m ashamed of, but there seems no cure for it. Even when there are people about me I feel I’m alone in my private stygian chamber of horrors. I pretend to be at ease, stepping stoutly forwards into the sightless void and cracking jokes along with the rest, but all the while I’m desperately holding in check the terrified, thrashing child within. So you can imagine how I felt now, standing there, in my vest and drawers, draped in a blanket, with an essential part of me poking out of the window, goggling in speechless terror at this awful apparition looming before me in the barely penetrable gloom. It didn’t move, it made no sound. Was I imagining it, was I seeing things? I stepped away from the window and drew my blanket protectively around me. Should I approach the ghostly figure, should I challenge it—What art thou that usurp’st this time of night? — or should I take to my heels and flee? Just then on the floor below a door opened and a light came on, faintly illuminating a narrow set of stairs to my right that I hadn’t known was there. “Who’s that?” Polly called up querulously, and the shadow of her head and shoulders appeared on the wall in the stairwell. “Mother, is that you?” It was, it was her mother, there in the dark before me. “Please, come down.” I could tell from the tremor in her voice that she had no intention of venturing up the stairs, for she, too, fears the dark, as I know, bless her heart. “Please, Mummy,” she said again, in a babyish, lisping voice, “please come down.” Mrs. Plomer was watching me with a lively surmise, frowning slightly yet ready to smile, as if I were an exotic and potentially fascinating creature she had chanced upon, amazingly, at dead of night, in the upper reaches of her own house. And I suppose, with the blanket clutched around me and my bare feet and furry little legs on show, I must have had something of the aspect of one of the smaller of the great apes, improbably decked out in drawers and vest and some sort of cape, or else a fallen king, perhaps, witlessly wandering in the night. Why did I not speak — why did I not give Polly a sign that I was there? After some moments her silhouette sank down on the wall, and the light was quenched as she shut the bedroom door.

I know there are no norms, although one speaks, and lives, as if there were, but there are certain rare occasions when even the extremest limits seem to have been exceeded. Standing in a conspiratorial hush in close proximity to one’s lover’s demented mother in a pitch-dark attic corridor in the middle of a freezing late-autumn night, cowering under a blanket in one’s underwear, surely counts as such an instance of exceeded plausibility. Yet despite the unlikeliness of being there, and taking into account my dread of the darkness, a darkness that seemed deeper than ever after Polly had shut her door and the light went out, I felt almost cheerful — yes, cheerful! — and full of mischief, like a schoolboy off on a midnight jape. It was interesting, almost exhilarating, to be in the company of a person who was harmlessly mad. Not that I could be said to be in Mrs. Plomer’s company, exactly; in fact, that was the point, that what was there was someone and no one, simultaneously. I fell to puzzling over this curious state of affairs, and I puzzle over it still. Was it that for a brief interval I was allowed entrance to the charmed if sombre realm of the half-mad? Or was I simply harking back, yet again, to the obscure echo-chamber that is the past? For there was definitely something of childhood in the moment, of childhood’s calmly uncomprehending acceptance of the incommensurability of things, and of the astounding but unremembered discovery, a discovery that I, like everyone else, must have made in my infancy, at the very dawn of consciousness, namely, that in the world there is not just me, but other people as well, uncountable, and unaccountable, numbers of them, a teeming horde of strangers.

Only now, as my eyes adjusted and I began to be able to make her out again, did I take note of what Mrs. Plomer was wearing. She had on her wellingtons, of course, and a long, heavy cardigan with drooping pockets over a man’s old-fashioned collarless striped shirt. What was most remarkable, however, was her skirt, which wasn’t really a skirt but an affair like an upside-down cone, assembled, or constructed, rather, from many overlapping petticoats of stiff gauze, the kind of garment that in my young days girls used to wear under tightly belted summer dresses, and that on the dance-floor would balloon outwards and up, sometimes rising so high, if we spun the girl fast enough, that we would be given a heart-stopping glimpse of her frilly bloomers. Draped thus in her motley, Mrs. Plomer reminded me not so much of the summer girls of my youth as of one of those figures in a medieval clock-tower, biding there in the gloom, waiting for the ratchets to engage and the mechanism to jerk into motion, so that she might be trundled out to enjoy another of her quarter-hourly half-circuits in the light of the great world’s regard. She was still watching me — I could see the glint of her eyes, crafty and vigilant. She had given no sign of having heard Polly when she called to her up the stairs; perhaps she had heard, but suspected it was part of a ruse, in which I was complicit, aimed at ensnaring her and winkling her out of her hiding place, and therefore to be firmly ignored. For I did have the impression that she thought herself to be in hiding here, though from whom or what I couldn’t guess — she probably didn’t know herself. What should I do? What could I do? It began to seem I might be held there all night, in thrall to this deranged and silent apparition in her rubber boots and her improvised tutu. In the end it was she who made the decisive move. She stirred herself and came forwards, with a quick, exasperated sigh — obviously she was of the opinion that even if I was a conspirator I was risibly hesitant and patently inept and not to be feared in the least — and stepped past me with a rustle of tulle, brushing me to one side. I watched her make her way down the stairs, her stooped, cardiganed back seeming to express blank dismissiveness of me and all I might represent. I waited a moment, and heard Polly opening her door again, and again the light from the room behind her fell at an angle along the wall, and there again was the shadow of her head, like one of Arp’s stylised, elongated ovals.

I followed Mrs. Plomer down the stairs. I couldn’t, in all conscience — what a phrase — have remained in hiding any longer. Polly saw me over her mother’s shoulders and her eyes widened. “It’s you!” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You gave me a fright.” I said nothing. It seemed to me that instead of being frightened she was making an effort not to laugh. She had on a thick wool dressing-gown, and was, like me, barefoot. I hitched the blanket more closely about me and gave her what was meant but surely failed to be a lofty glare. I must indeed have looked like Lear, returned from the heath and sheepishly not dead from sorrow. “Come along,” Polly said to her mother, “you must go back to bed now, you’ll catch your death.” She led her away, glancing back at me and indicating with a sideways dip of her head that I was to go into her bedroom and wait for her.

The air inside the room was thick with sleep. The fire in the grate had died and left behind an acrid resinous reek. Under the light of the lamp the bedclothes were thrown back in what seemed an artful way, as if someone like me — someone, that is, like I used to be — had arranged them just so, in preparation for the model who, disrobing now behind a screen, would in a moment appear and drape herself against them in the pose of an overripe Olympia. You see, you see what in my guilty heart I hanker after? — the bad old days of the demi-monde, of silk hats and pearly embonpoint, of rakes and rakesses astray on the boulevards, of faunish afternoons in the atelier and wild nights on the sparkling town. Is that the real, shameful, reason I took up painting, to be the Manet — him again — or the Lautrec, the Sickert, even, of a later age? Polly came back then, no Olympia but a reassuringly mortal creature, and the room was just a room again, and the rumpled bed the place where she had been innocently asleep until two desperate night wanderers had awakened her.

Now she shed her dressing-gown with a vexed shrug and, chilled from wherever she had taken her mother to, clambered hurriedly into bed in her pyjamas — winceyette, I believe that stuff is called, another notable word — and pulled the bedclothes to her chin and lay on her side with her legs drawn up and her knees pressed to her chest, shivering a little, and ignoring me as thoroughly as her mother had when she turned away from me on the stairs. I wonder if women realise how alarming they are when they go tight-lipped and mute like that? I suspect they do, I suspect they’re very well aware of it, although if they are, why don’t they use it more, as a weapon? I sat down beside her carefully, as if the bed were a boat and I were afraid of capsizing it, and adjusted the blanket around my shoulders. Have I said how cold I was by now, despite the woolly warmth there in the room? I gazed at Polly’s cheek, which used to glow so hotly when she lay with me on the sofa in the studio of old. The lamp-light gave to her skin a rough-grained, papery texture. Her eyes were closed but I could tell she was far from sleep. I groped around on the eiderdown — that crackly satin giving me the creeps again — until I found the outline of one of her feet, and pressed it in my hand. She said something that I didn’t catch, still with her eyes closed, then cleared her throat and said it again. “Such a get-up! My mother. I don’t know what goes through her head.” No comment seemed required of me and so I said nothing; as far as I was concerned, Mrs. Plomer was beyond discussion. I could feel the warmth returning to Polly’s foot. Was a time I would have grovelled in the dust before this young woman just for the privilege of taking one of her little pink toes in my mouth and sucking it — oh, yes, I had my moments of adoration and abjection. And now? And now the old desire had been replaced by a different kind of ache, one that would not be assuaged in her arms, if it could be assuaged at all. What was it, this thing gnawing at my heart, as in former times quite other things had gnawed at quite other of my organs? As I sat there turning over this question there came to me, to my great consternation, the thought that the person lying beside me under the bedclothes with her knees clutched to her breast might be — I hesitate to say it — might be my daughter. Yes, my lost daughter, brought back by some bright magic from the land of the dead and given all the attributes, commonplace and precious, of a lived life. This was a very strange notion, even by the standards of the extraordinary and turbulent times I was passing through. I let go of her foot and sat back, light-headed and aghast. It sometimes occurs to me that everything I do is a substitute for something else, and that every venture I embark on is a botched attempt at reparation for a thing done or left undone — don’t ask me to explain it. Outside in the night it began to rain again, I heard it, a gathering murmur, like the sound of many voices in the distance speaking together in hushed tones.

Slightly salty to the taste, those toes of hers were, when I sucked them. Salty like salt tears.

She stirred now and opened her eyes and put a hand under her cheek and sighed. “Do you know what it was that first attracted me to Marcus?” she said. “His weak eyesight. Isn’t that strange? His eyes were affected by all that close-up work he had to do for so many years when he was an apprentice. You know that’s why he seems so awkward, why he moves so slowly and so carefully? It was sweet to see the way he touched things, getting the feel of them, as if that was the only way he could trust what he was doing. That’s the way he would touch me, too, the barest touch, just with the tips of his fingers.” She sighed again. Her hair always smells a little like musty biscuits; I used to love to bury my face in it and snuffle up that soft fawn odour. She stirred, extending her legs under the covers, and turned over and lay on her back, with her hand behind her head now, looking up at me calmly. The way she was lying made the skin at the outer corners of her eyes became slightly stretched and shiny, which gave to her features a curiously lacquered, Oriental cast. “Tell me why you ran off,” she said. I didn’t attempt to reply, only shrugged and shook my head. She pulled her mouth sideways in a grimace. “You can’t have known how humiliated I would be — at least, I hope you didn’t, or you’re even more of a monster than I thought.” I said I didn’t know what she meant — I did, of course — and she made that moue again with her mouth. “Don’t you? Look at all you were, all you had, all that you’d done, and look at what I was, a watchmaker’s wife whiling away her days in a no-hope backwater.” This was spoken with such a sudden harshness that it took me aback, I who by now was driven so far back it had seemed there was no further I could go. But I nodded, trying to look as if I understood and sympathised. Nodding, it struck me, was an apt way, in this instance, of repeatedly hanging my head. Shame, though, I find, even at its most burningly intense, is always somewhat detached, as if there were a secret escape clause written into it. Or maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m incapable of true shame. After all, I’m incapable of so much. Polly was regarding me now with a sort of rueful scepticism, almost smiling. “I thought you were a god,” she said, and at once, of course, I thought of Dionysus taking pity on poor abandoned Ariadne and plucking her up from Naxos and making her immortal, whether she wanted it or not; the mighty ones of Mount Olympus always had a soft spot for a girl in distress. But they have all departed, those gods, into their twilight. And I was no god, dear Polly; I was hardly a man.

Now, at this moment, in this late afternoon, as my pen scratches away crabbedly at these futile pages, somewhere outside on Hangman’s Hill a solitary bird is singing, I hear its passionate song, limpid and bright. Do birds sing at this late time of year? Maybe their kind also has its bards, its rhapsodes, its solitary poets of desolation and lament, who know no seasons. The day wanes, the night comes on, soon I’ll have to light my lamp. For now, though, I am content to sit here in the October gloaming, brooding on my loves, my losses, my paltry sins. What’s to become of me, of my dry, my desiccated, heart? Why do I ask, you ask? Don’t you understand yet, even yet, that I don’t understand anything? See how I grope my way along, like a blind man in a house where all the lights are blazing.

The day wanes.

—

As I squat here, vainly flapping my tinsel wing, I feel like putting down the heading A Treatise on Love, and following it with a score or so of blank pages.

—

We talked for half of what remained of that night, or Polly talked while I did my best to listen. What did she talk about? The usual, the sad and angry usual. She had pulled herself up to a sitting position, the better to have at me, and since her pyjamas were no match for the cold she wrapped herself in the eiderdown — there in the tepee of lamp-light we must have looked like a pair of Red Indians engaged in an interminable, rancorous and one-sided powwow. I was tempted to reach out and take her in my arms, winceyetted as she was, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. That is another of my versions of Hell, sitting for all eternity in a freezing bedroom under an inadequate blanket being railed at for my lack of ordinary human sentiment, for my indifference to other people’s pain and my refusal to offer the commonest crumb of comfort, for my callousness, my neglect, my heartless betrayals — in a word, for my simple inability to love. Everything she said was true, I admit it, yet at the same time it was all mistaken, all wrong. But what would have been the point of arguing with her? The trouble is that in these matters there is no end to the round of dispute, and however deep the disputants go there will always be another un-dived-into depth. When it comes to casuistry there is nothing like a pair of quarrelling and soon to be parted lovers debating on which side lies the greater guilt. Not that there was much in the way of debate that night. And in fact my silence, which I considered forbearing, was only making Polly all the more angry. “Jesus Christ, you’re impossible,” she cried. “I may as well be talking to this pillow!”

Yet it ended in a not altogether unhappy truce when Polly, exhausted by her own rhetoric and the steadily ravelling tangle of accusations she had been bringing against me, gave in and turned off the lamp and lay down again, and even permitted me to lie beside her, not under the covers, no, but on top of them, wrapped up tight like a caterpillar in the scratchy cocoon of my blanket. And so we rested there, somewhat together on her impossibly narrow bed, listening to the rain falling on the world. I could feel Polly drifting into sleep, and so did I, soon after. It wasn’t long, though, before the cold and the damp wakened me again. The rain had stopped and all was silent save for the rhythmic soughing of Polly’s breathing. She must have been having a bad dream — she would hardly be having a good one, considering all that had gone on that night — for now and then she gave a soft moan at the back of her throat, like a child crying in its sleep. The curtains were open and through the window I could see that the sky had cleared, and the stars were out, sharp and atremble, as if each one were hanging by a fine, invisible thread. I know the dark before dawn is supposed to be the bleakest hour of the day, but I love it, and love to be awake in it. Always it is so still then, with everything holding back, waiting on the sun’s great roar. Polly was lying against me now and even through the thickness of the eiderdown I could feel her heart beating, and her breath was on my cheek, too, slightly stale, familiar, human. I saw a shooting star and, almost immediately, in rapid succession, two more. Zip, zip zip. Then in stately stealth an airship appeared, rising on a slant out of the east, light greyish-blue against the sky’s rich purplish-black, its cabin slung underneath like a lifeboat with lighted windows, sailing steadily at no great height, sausage-shaped, preposterous, yet a thing for me to marvel at, a frail and silent vessel travelling westwards, carrying its cargo of lives.

Oh, Polly. Oh, Gloria.

Oh, Poloria!

—

In the morning there was another round of comic scenes, with no one laughing. For all our sakes I shall pass over breakfast in silence, except to say that the centrepiece of the repast was a big soot-black pot of porridge, and that Barney the dog, who had taken a shine to me, came and flopped down under the table at my feet, or mostly on my feet, in fact, and produced at intervals a series of soundless farts the stench of which made me almost gag on my stirabout. Afterwards I locked myself away for half an hour in the bathroom I had not been able to find the night before, possibly because it was next door to the room I had slept in. It was cramped and wedge-shaped, with a single narrow window at the pointed end. There was a hip bath, the porcelain chipped and yellowed, and an enormous stately lavatory with a wooden seat like a carthorse’s yoke, on which I sat at stool for a long time, with my elbows on my knees, gazing into a vast and torpid emptiness. Then, standing at the sink, I saw that the window looked out on the same view, of stables, hill and trees, that I had seen from Polly’s room on the next floor down. The sky was cloudless and the yard below was awash with watery sunlight. I had brought nothing with me from the gate-lodge, and had to shave as best I could with a pearl-handled cut-throat razor I found at the back of a cabinet beside the bath. There was a diagonal crack in the shaving mirror hanging on a nail over the sink, and as I scraped away the stubble — frustratingly, though probably fortunately, the blade was blunt — I looked to myself disconcertingly like one of the demoiselles of Avignon, the jut-faced odalisque in the middle, with the jaunty top-knot, I should think. How sad is my ridiculousness, how ridiculous my sadness.

Somewhere nearby, down in the stables, it must have been, a donkey began to bray. I hadn’t heard a donkey braying since — since I don’t know when. What did it think it was saying? Most creatures of this earth, when we raise a solitary voice like that, have only one thing on our minds, but could those glottal bellowings, a truly astonishing noise, be a cry of love and longing? If so, what does the damsel donkey think, hearing it? For all I know, it may sound to her bristling ears like the tenderest lay of the troubadour. What a world, dear Lord, what a world, and I in it, old braying donkey that I am.

I spent the rest of the morning dodging about the house, anxious to avoid another confrontation, even in daylight, with Polly’s crack-brained mother. Nor did I care to encounter her father, who I feared would manoeuvre me gently but inescapably into a corner and require of me, in his diffident way, an account of what exactly my intentions were towards his daughter, who was a married woman, and on whom, not by the way, I had nearly a good twenty years in age. Intentions, did I have intentions? If so, I certainly had no clear idea any longer of what they were, if I ever had. I thought I had broken free from Polly, thought I had jumped ship and paddled away in the dark at a furious rate, only to find myself, at first light, still wallowing helplessly in her wake, the painter — the painter! — tangled round the tiller of my frail bark, the knots swollen with salt water and tough as a knuckle of bog-oak. Why when she fell asleep didn’t I get up from her bed and go, as I had gone before, a thief, verily a thief, in the night? Why was I still there? What held me? What was that woody knot I couldn’t unpick? For her part, Polly in the course of the morning paid me scant heed, engaged as she was in the tricky task of being at once a mother and a daughter. When on occasion we came unavoidably face to face, she gave me only a harried stare and barged past me, muttering impatiently under her breath. The result of all this was that I began to feel oddly detached, not only from Grange Hall and the people in it, but from myself, too. It was as if I had been pushed somehow off-balance, and had to keep grasping at air to stop myself falling over. Odd sensation. And suddenly, now, I recall another donkey, from long ago, in my lost boyhood. A sweep of concrete-coloured beach, the day overcast with a whitish glare; there is the sharp ricochet of children’s voices along the sand and the happy shrieks of bathers breasting the surf. The donkey’s name is Neddy; it is written on a cardboard sign. He wears a straw hat with holes cut in it for his outlandish ears to stick through. He stands stolidly on his prim little feet, chewing something. His eyes are large and glossy, they fascinate me — I imagine he must be able to see practically all the way around the horizon. His attitude to everything about him is one of vast indifference. I refuse to ride on him, because I’m frightened. They don’t fool me, animals, with their pretence of dullness: I see the look in their eye that they try to hide but can’t; they all know something about me that I don’t. My father, breathing heavily, grasps me roughly by the shoulders and orders me to stand next to Neddy, to do that much, at least, so that he can take my photograph. My mother gives my hand a secret squeeze, we are conspirators together. Then, as my fussy father at last presses the button and the shutter clicks, Neddy shifts heavily on his haunches, and in doing so leans against me, no, leans into me; I feel the solid, tight-packed weight of him and smell the dry, brownish odour of his pelt, and for a moment I am displaced, as if the world, as if Nature, as if the great god Pan himself, has given me a nudge and knocked me out of true. And that’s how it was with me again, that morning at Grange Hall, as I drifted through the house in search of my own displaced self.

There was another reason, more immediate and prosaic, to feel pushed to the sidelines. Although Polly’s father had been acquainted with the Prince, so-called, for many years, this was the first time His Nibs had paid a personal visit, and the household was agog with nervous anticipation. Already Janey had taken offence over some suggestion as to what she should serve for lunch, and had shut herself away in the kitchen to sulk. Pa Plomer, though outwardly vague and absent as usual, seemed to emit a continuous high-pitched hum, and his hands must have been raw from the constant rubbings he was giving them. His wife, alone of all the household, floated above the general excitement, serene behind a smile of secret knowing.

The princely arrival was announced by the sound of tyres on gravel and a volley of Barney’s deep-throated barks. Polly and her father went to the front door to greet their noble visitor, while I hung back in the hallway, feeling like an assassin sullenly in wait with a fizzing bomb under his coat. Freddie was driving, I saw, what used to be called a shooting-brake, a high-set antiquated vehicle that looked more like a well-appointed tractor than a car. He climbed down from the driving seat and advanced across the gravel, removing his leather gauntlets and smiling his sad, strained smile. He wore a woollen coat of seaweed-green and a short tweed cape, a cap with a peak, and rubber galoshes over a pair of patent-leather shoes as dainty as dancing-pumps. He does dress the princely part, I’ll say that much for him. “Ah, good day, good day,” he murmured, removing his cap and gravely taking Polly’s hand and then her father’s, bending towards them each in turn his long, narrow face and showing his slightly tarnished teeth in an equine grimace. Glancing beyond them he spotted me, Gavrilo Princip himself, lurking in the shadows. We hadn’t met since our encounter outside the jakes that long-ago day of the fête at Hyland Heights when he delivered his unwittingly acute criticism of my drawings, and I could see that once more he had forgotten who I was. Polly introduced us. Barney padded about among our legs, grinning and panting. We walked along the hall, the four of us, followed by the dog. No words to be spoken, and all aware of panic in face of the social abyss. How peculiar a contraption it is, the human concourse.

Lunch was served in the high brown vault of the dining room, at a long brown table. The table was scarred and pitted with age, and I kept running my fingers lightly over the wood to get the burnished, silky feel of it. I like things when they are smoothed and softened by time like that. All we have are surfaces, surfaces and the self’s puny interiority; that’s a fact too often and too easily forgotten, by me as well as by everyone else. Through two high windows I could see the sky, where the wind was bunching up the fleecy, new-born clouds and driving them before it in a flock. Strange to have the eye and the urge to paint and not be able to do it. I stand stooped before the world like an agued old man in impotent contemplation of a naked and shamelessly willing girl. Rue and rheum, that’s my lot, poor pained painster that I am.

Conversation, I think I may fairly say, did not flow. The weather and its vagaries sustained us for a while — or sustained them, I should say, since I was for the most part a silent presence at the table. I am a sulker, as you will have gathered by now; it’s another of my unappealing traits. Polly’s father and the Prince spoke desultorily of poets obscure and long dead — obscure to me, anyway. Pip in her high-chair banged and burbled — amazing how much clamour so small a creature can make — beaming about her in delight, charmed that we should all have gathered here to attend her musical recital. Yes, it would not be long now until her consciousness stubbed itself against the hard fact that she is not the fulcrum of the world. The new science teaches, if I understand it rightly, that every tiniest particle behaves as if it were — as in a sense it is — the central point upon which all creation turns. Welcome, runner, to the human race.

What a type he is, dear old Freddie. I could hardly take my eyes off him, his exquisite suit, tailored surely by captive dwarfs in one of the subterranean workshops of high Alpinia, his silken neckwear of royal blue, the discreet little pin in his lapel that is the sign of his membership of the Knights of the Rosy Cross, or the Brotherhood of Wotan, or some-such elect and secret consistory. Add to all that his bloodless cheeks and phthisic frame, the weary stoop and the infinite sadness of his eye, and what have you but the very figure of a dying lineage. How would I portray him, if I were asked to? A listing iron helmet on a painted stick. He suffers from dandruff, I notice — there is always a scatter of powdery flakes on his collar; it is as if he were shedding himself, steadily, stealthily, in this unceasing fall of wax-white scurf. Though all his attention was directed towards the Plomers, Vater und Tochter, his glance on occasion drifted in my direction with hesitant surmise. Polly’s mother, too, was showing a keener interest in me than heretofore, and watched me with a considering eye, like a visitor to a museum circling some particularly enigmatic piece in order to get the look of it from every angle. No doubt somewhere in the labyrinthine caverns of what passed in her for consciousness there lingered still the recent image of a dim shape draped in a blanket doing something highly suspect at a pitch-dark window. Polly seemed as remote from me now as her mother, and for the first time in a long time I found myself pining for Gloria. Well, not Gloria, exactly, or not her alone, but all she represented, hearth and home, in other words the old ground, which, after all, if not a bower of bliss, had for many years suited me well enough, in its way. When I was a surly schoolboy I spent many a day on the mitch, little recking every time that a moment would come, usually around noon, when the attractions of being at large while others were held captive would pall, and despite myself I would fall into yearning for the fusty classroom with motes of chalk in the air and the pitiless face of the big clock on the wall and even the teacher’s dreary drone, and eventually I would straggle home, where my mother, knowing full well what I had been about, would consent to be lied to. That’s me all over, no fortitude, no sticking-power; no grit.

Gloria. Once more I wondered, as I wonder yet, why she had not come for me when I was at the gate-lodge. Even she would not be able to guess where I had landed up now, here with the Plomers and their Prince.

“Ah!” Freddie suddenly said, making the rest of us start, even Polly’s mother, who raised her eyebrows and blinked. He was looking at me, with what in him passed for animation. “I know who you are,” he said. “Forgive me, I’ve been trying to remember. You’re that painter, Oliver.”

“Orme,” I murmured. “Oliver is my first—”

“Yes yes, Orme, of course.”

He was tremendously pleased with himself to have remembered me at last, and slapped his hands flat on the table before him and leaned back, beaming.

Mr. Plomer cleared his throat, making a sort of extended rolling bass trill. “Mr. Orme,” he said, a trifle over-loudly, as if it were we who were hard of hearing, “is a great admirer of the poets.” He turned to me invitingly, as though to give me the floor. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Orme?”

What was I to say? — picture a helpless fish-mouth and a wildly swivelling eye. Pip, perhaps mistaking the slight tension of the moment for a wordless rebuke directed at her, began to wail.

“Polly needs changing,” Mrs. Plomer announced, gazing complacently at the red-faced infant.

“Oh, there there,” Mr. Plomer said, leaning across the table towards his granddaughter, baring his dentures in a desperate smile.

Extraordinary what a crying child can do to a room. It was like that moment in the ape-house when one of the big males sets up a howl, leaning forwards on his knuckles and turning his lips inside out, and all the animals in their cages round about begin to gibber and shriek. As Pip screamed on, we all, except Polly’s mother, did something, moved, or spoke, or lifted hands in helpless alarm. Even Janey appeared, popping into the doorway with a wooden spoon in her fist, like the goddess of chastisement made balefully manifest. Polly rose exasperatedly from her chair, surging up like some great fish, and fairly flung herself at the child and plucked her from the high-chair and dashed with her from the room. I, stumbling, trotted after, Jack to her Jill.

It has just struck me, who knows why, that old Freddie is probably younger than I am. This is a bit of a shock, I can tell you. The fact is, I keep forgetting how old I am; I’m not old-old, but neither am I the blithe youth I so often mistake myself for. What was I thinking of, at my age, to fall in love with Polly and make such a ruinous hash of everything? As well ask why I steal — stole, I mean — or why I stopped painting, or why, for that matter, I started in the first place. One does what one does, and blunders bleeding out of the china shop.

When I got into the hall Polly was nowhere to be seen. I tracked her, guided by the sound of the child’s wails, to a curious little cubby-hole connecting two much larger rooms. The tiny space was dominated by a pair of opposing white doors and, between them, a tall sash window looking out on to the lawn and the drive winding away in the direction of the front gates and the road. Under the window there was a padded bench seat, and here Polly sat, holding the babe on her knee. Mother and child were by now equally distressed, both of them crying, more or less forcefully, their faces flushed and swollen. Polly glared at me and gave a muffled cry of anguish and anger, her eyes shiny and awash and her mouth an open rectangle sagging at the side. One sees why Pablo, the brute, so often went out of his way to make them cry.

Polly, before I could get in a word, began to rail at me with a violence that even in the circumstances seemed to me uncalled-for. She started off by demanding why I had come here. I thought she meant here to Grange Hall, but when I protested that it was she who had insisted I take her home — her very words, remember? — she cut me off impatiently. “Not here!” she cried. “To the town, I mean! You could have lived anywhere, you could have stayed in that place, Aigues-whatever-it’s-called, with the flamingos and the white horses and all the rest of it, but no, you had to come back to us and ruin everything.”

In her agitation she was bouncing the child violently up and down on her knee, like a giant salt-cellar, so that the poor mite’s eyes were rolling in her head and her sobs were compressed into a series of gargles and burps. The sudden shadow of a cloud swooped across the window, but a moment later the pallid sunlight crept out again. No matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond.

“Polly,” I began, holding out suppliant hands to her, “dearest Polly—”

“Oh, shut up!” she almost shouted. “Don’t call me that, don’t call me dearest! It makes me sick.”

Little Pip, who had stopped crying, was fixed on me with moony intentness. All children have the artist’s dispassionate gaze; either that, or vice versa.

Now abruptly Polly’s tone changed. “What do you think of him?” she asked, in almost a chatty tone. I frowned; I was baffled. Who? “Mr. Hyland!” she snapped, with a toss of her head. “The Prince, as you call him!” I took a step backwards. I didn’t know what to say. Was there a catch in the question, was it a test of some kind? I progress through the world like a tightrope walker, though I seem always to be in the middle of the rope, where it’s at its slackest, its most elastic. “He’s very shy,” she said, “isn’t he?” Is he? “Yes,” she said, “he is,” glaring at me, as if I had contradicted her.

Outside, once more, the sunlight was doused with a soundless click, and yet again cautiously reasserted itself; far off, a line of bare, gesticulating trees leaned their branches slantwise in the wind.

Polly sighed. “What are we going to do?” she said, sounding not angry now but only vexed and impatient.

The child pressed her head against her mother’s breast and snuggled there possessively, casting back at me a spiteful, drowsy-eyed glance. I say it again, children know more than they know.

I asked Polly if she intended to go back to Marcus. The question was no sooner out than I knew I shouldn’t have asked it. Indeed, more than that: I knew before I asked it that I shouldn’t ask it. There is something or someone in me, a reckless sort of hobbledehoy, lurking in the interstices of what passes for my personality — what am I but a gatherum of will-less affects? — that must always poke a finger into the wasps’ nest. “Will I go back to him?” Polly said archly, as if it were a novel notion, one that had never occurred to her until now. She looked aside then, seeming more uncertain than anything else, and said she didn’t know; that she might; that anyway she doubted he would have her, and that even if he would, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be taken back, like damaged goods being returned to the shop where they had been bought. Evidently I figured nowhere in these considerations of hers. And why should I?

I felt tired, immeasurably tired, and Polly made room for me beside her on the seat and I sat down, leaning dully forwards with my hands on my knees and my eyes fixed vacantly on the floor. The child was asleep by now, and Polly rocked her back and forth, back and forth. The wind keened to itself in a chink in the window frame, a distant, immemorial voice. When the time arrives for me to die I want it to happen at a stilled moment like that, a fermata in the world’s melody, when everything comes to a pause, forgetting itself. How gently I should go then, dropping without a murmur into the void.

Why did I come back and ruin everything? she asked. What a question.

I heard footsteps approaching and sprang guiltily to my feet. Why guiltily? It’s a general condition. Little Pip, still huddled against Polly’s breast, stirred too and awoke. Yet another thing about children: you can fire off a revolver next to their ears and they’ll sleep on without a stir, but pocket the weapon and try tiptoeing out of the nursery and you’ll have them up yelling and waving like shipwrecked sailors. Pip had particularly sharp hearing, as I learned on the one disastrous occasion when Polly brought her to the studio and tried to get her to sleep while we made furtive love on the sofa. She did sleep, curled in a splash of sunlight on a nest of paint-encrusted dust-sheets, until Polly, eyelids aflutter and her throat pulsing, let escape the tiniest, helpless squeak, and I peered over my shoulder to see the child sit up abruptly, as if jerked by a string, to stare in solemn-eyed amazement at the single, naked, monstrously entangled creature into which her mummy and her mummy’s naughty friend had somehow been transformed.

The footsteps, soft and slurred, were Mr. Plomer’s. He hesitated when he saw us there, me standing guard, like poor old Joseph at a bivouac on the flight to Egypt, and Polly seated, cradling the child, with the window and the wind-blown day at her back. Little Pip held out eager arms to her granddad, wanting to be lifted up. He touched her cheek distractedly. “My dear,” he said to his daughter, “I wonder if you’ve seen the little book I was showing to you last evening — the volume of poems? I want to return it to Mr. Hyland, whose property it is, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”

—

By late afternoon the rain was back with a vengeance, and I went for a walk. Yes yes, I know what I said about walks and going for them, but on this occasion outdoors was more tolerable than in. A great search had been instituted for Freddie’s missing book. To join in it, under Janey’s command, two extra housemaids were summoned. Up to this they must have been confined in some chamber deep in the lower regions of the house, for I hadn’t known of their existence until they popped up, blushing and tittering. Meg and Molly they were called, a mousy pair, with red knuckles and their hair in buns. There was much clattering of heels on stairs and a raucous calling of voices from room to room, and many a red-bound volume was carried hopefully to Mr. Plomer, but over all of them he sadly shook his head. “I can’t think what has become of it,” he kept repeating, in an increasingly agitated tone, “I really can’t.” Impatient with all this fuss, and seeing in it a reason if not an excuse to be off, I waylaid Janey in the hall and asked if there was some rain-gear I could borrow. Polly, cross with me again because I had declined to take part in the search, caught me slipping out at the front door and gave me a wounded glare. “Daddy’s in an awful sweat,” she said accusingly, “and now Mr. Hyland has taken offence and is threatening to leave because we can’t find his blasted book — and you’re going for a walk. Take Pip with you, at least.” I said I would love to take the child, of course, of course I would, except that it was raining, look, and stepping smartly out on to the glistening step I shut the door behind me and made off.

I walked down the drive, sloshing through the rain happily enough and whistling “The Rakes of Mallow.” I think escape is all I really yearn for, everything being contingent on the simple premise of being at large. Janey had found for me a splendid hat, a sort of sou’wester, with a sloping flap at the back and an elastic string to go under my chin, and an oilskin coat that reached almost to my ankles. Also she produced a pair of stout black boots; they were a perfect fit, which, I thought, could only be a signal of encouragement from the household deities whose task it is to arrange such small, happy congruences. I took a walking-stick, too, from among a bristling bundle of them in an elephant’s foot receptacle in the hall. Come, Olly, I bade myself, step forth and claim the freedom of the road.

The rain somehow negated whatever utilitarian aspect that being on a walk might have had, and so, as I went along, I was free to look about me with a lively interest. Here was a field of cabbages, each coarse and leathery leaf bestrewn with wobbling jewels of rain. The wet branches of the trees were almost black, though underneath they were of a lighter shade, a darkish grey; when the wind gusted they let fall clatters of big, random drops, and I thought of the priest at my father’s funeral and the short, thick, ornate metal thing with a perforated knob on the end of it that he dunked repeatedly in a silver bucket and scattered holy water from, over the coffin, and over the mourners, too, the ones standing most closely round. Decaying leaves squelched and squirmed under my tramping boots. I felt a cold drop trembling at the tip of my nose, I wiped it away and a minute later another one had formed. All this was curiously pleasant and cheering. At heart I am I think a simple organism, with simple desires that I keep on foolishly elaborating to the point where they get me into impossible fixes.

I was glad, in the end, that our child turned out to be a daughter. True, I had set my heart on having a boy. However, there is something at once absurd and slightly grotesque in the spectacle of a father and his son, especially when there is a marked resemblance between them. It’s as if the father had set out to make a creature in his own image, an exact scale-model of himself, but through lack of skill and general clumsiness had managed to produce, in this tottering homunculus, only a comic parody. My little girl was very bonny, oh, yes, and looked nothing like her whey-faced, freckled and spheroid papa, or not that I could see, anyway. I was particularly taken by her upper lip, which was perfectly the shape of those stylised seagulls children draw with crayons, and had in the middle of it a little bleb of flesh that was almost colourless, that was almost indeed transparent, and that delighted me, I don’t quite know why. How well I remember her face, which is a foolish claim to make, since any face, especially a child’s, is in a gradual but relentless process of change and development, so that what I carry in my memory can be only a version of her, a generalisation of her, that I have fashioned for myself, as an evanescent keepsake. There are photographs of her, of course, but photographs of children are no good. I think it’s because of the artless way in which they gaze into the lens, without that giveaway flash of vanity, defensiveness, truculence, that in an adult’s portrait reveals so much.

I never tried to paint her, in life or afterwards. All the same I seem to see a trace of her in this or that of my things — not a likeness, no no, but a certain, what shall I say, a certain echoing softness of tone, a certain tenderness of colour or form, or just the slope of a line, or even a perspective, shading off into infinity. They leave so little trace, our lost ones; a sigh on the air and they’re gone.

What did my father make of me, I wonder, what did he feel for me, the last of his children? Love? There’s that difficult word again. I’m sure he did cherish me, let’s put it no more strongly than that, but that’s not what I mean. What had he hoped for, from life, overall? Whatever it was I’m sure it can’t have been personified in me, or anyone else, for that matter. Gloria told me, long after he was dead, that one day he had turned to her without warning or cause and had said, forcefully, angrily, even, that he, too, could have been a painter, like me, had there been the means for him to be educated and trained. I was startled. If other people are a puzzle, a parent is an unfathomable mystery. I stepped over both of mine, stepped on them, rather, as if they were stones in a river, the deep and swollen river separating me from that far bank where I imagined real life was being carried on. How had he said it, I asked Gloria, what had been his tone, his look? Her only answer was one of those smiles of hers, gentle, pitying, not unfond.

By the time I got to the gates at the end of the drive the rain had stopped, which rather disappointed me. I had fancied the notion of myself braving the elements, an old sea-dog lubbered on land, in my sou’wester and seven-league boots, heedless of rain and gale. After I stopped being a painter I noticed that I had to keep verifying myself, had to keep knocking a knuckle against myself, as it were, to check that I was still a person of at least some substance, and that often, getting back only a hollow sound, I would slip into imagining another role for myself, another identity, even. Polly’s lover, for instance, was something for me to be, as was the ingrate son, the false friend, even the failed artist. The alternatives I conjured up didn’t have to be impressive, didn’t have to be good or decent, didn’t have to feed my self-esteem, so long as they seemed real, so long as they could pass for real, by which I mean authentic, I suppose. Authentic: there’s another word that always worries me. The notable thing in this strategy of setting up new selves was that the results didn’t feel much different from how things had been with me before, in the days when I was still a painter and didn’t doubt, or didn’t realise I doubted, my essential selfness. It’s a rum business, being me. But then it would be rum being anyone, I’m sure that must be so.

From the gates I turned on to the road and walked along the sodden verge, astray in my thoughts of many things, and nothing. The rained-on tarmac before me gleamed in the failing light. Now and then a bird, disturbed by my passing, would burst from the hedge beside me and go skimming off, calling out a strident warning. They tell us of the welter of other worlds we shall never see, but what of the worlds we do see, the worlds of birds and beasts, what could be more other from us than these? And yet we were of those worlds, once, a long time ago, and frolicked in those happy fields, all the evidence assures us it’s the case, though I find it hard to credit. I am more inclined to think we came about spontaneously, sprung from the roots of the mandrake, perhaps, and were set despite ourselves to wander over the earth, blinking, bewildered autochthons.

I hadn’t eaten anything at lunch, yet I wasn’t hungry. The belly knows when it’s not going to be fed and, like an old dog, settles down to sleep. That’s how it is, I find, with the creature and its comforts, so that all is not ill, and sometimes the Lord does temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

Now came the strangest thing — even yet I do not know what to make of it, or if it even happened. I began to hear ahead of me a mingled, musical dinning that grew steadily louder, until presently there appeared from around a bend in the road a little tribe of what I took to be merchants, or peddlers, or the like, got up in eastern apparel. I stopped, and drew close in to the hedge and watched, as slowly they advanced through the gathering dusk, a trundling procession of half a dozen caravans painted blue and bright red, with curved black roofs, drawn by sturdy little horses, like those tin clockwork ones we used to get for Christmas presents, their nostrils flared and the whites of their eyes gleaming. Lean, dark-skinned men in long robes and ornate sandals — sandals, in this weather! — padded along beside the horses at a loose-limbed, swinging stride, holding on to the bridles, while from within the dimness of the caravans their plump, veiled women looked silently out. At the rear came a straggle of ragged children playing a cacophonous, whining music on fifes and bagpipes and little brightly coloured finger drums. I watched them go past, the men with scarred, narrow faces, and the women, what I could glimpse of them, all huge, kohl-rimmed eyes, their hands tattooed with henna in intricate arabesques. None took notice of me, not even the children glanced my way. Perhaps they did not see me, perhaps I only saw them. And so they passed on, the clinking, variegated troupe, along the wet and shadowed road. I followed them with my gaze until I could see them no longer. Who were they, what were they? Or were they, at all? Had I chanced upon some crossing point where universes intersect, had I broken through briefly into another world, far from this one in place and time? Or had I simply imagined it? Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Now I walked on, heedless of the encroaching dark, unnerved by that hallucinatory encounter and yet strangely elated, too. Presently all the foliage round about began to be lit up by the headlights of a vehicle approaching behind me. I stopped and stepped back on to the grass verge again, but instead of passing me by the thing slowed and drew to a shuddering halt. It was Freddie Hyland’s absurd, high-backed jalopy, and here was Freddie himself, peering down at me from the cab.

“I thought it was you,” he said. “May I offer you a lift?”

How does he do it, how does he manage it, that grave, patrician sonority, so that the simplest things he says convey the weight of generations? After all, he was only Freddie Hyland whom my brothers used to bully in the school-yard, snatching his schoolbag from him and kicking it around for a football. I wonder if he remembers those days.

My first impulse was to thank him for his kind offer and politely decline it — a lift to where, anyway? — but instead I found myself walking round by the front of the throbbing machine, through the glare of the head-lamps, and climbing up into the passenger seat. Freddie bestowed on me his slow, melancholy smile. He was wearing his cape and his peaked cap. Chug-chug, and off we went. The big steering-wheel was set horizontally, as in an old-fashioned bus, so that Freddie had to lean out over it, like a croupier spinning a roulette wheel, at the same time devoting much intricate footwork to the pedals on the floor. He drove at an unhurried rate, sedately. The road before us seemed an endless tunnel into which we and our lights were being drawn inexorably. Freddie asked if town was where I wanted to go and, without thinking, I said it was. Why not? As well there as anywhere else. I was on the run again.

I asked Freddie if he had encountered the caravan from the east, as he was coming along the road. He didn’t speak, only shook his head and smiled again, enigmatically, I thought, keeping his eyes on the road.

“The town is where you were born, yes?” he said, after a little time. In the glow from the dashboard his face was a long, greenish mask, the eye-sockets empty and the mouth a thin black gash. I told him about the gate-lodge, rented to us by his cousin, the well-named bearish Urs. To this, too, he returned no comment. Perhaps there is for him a clear band of reference, demarcated long ago, and all that falls outside it he declines to acknowledge. “I have nowhere that I think of as home,” he said pensively. “Of course, I am here, but I’m not of here. The people laugh at us, I know. And yet it’s a hundred years since my great-uncle first came and purchased land and built his house. I’ve always thought we should not have changed our name.” He braked as a fox sprinted across the road in front of us, its brush low and its sharp black snout lifted. “Do you know Alpinia?” he enquired, glancing sideways at me. “Those countries, those regions — Bavaria, the Engadin, Gorizia — perhaps there is my home.” The engine groaned and rattled as we picked up speed again. I seemed to feel a cold sharp breath, as of a gust of wind blowing down from snowy heights. My hat was on the floor at my feet, my blackthorn stick was between my knees. “Our family were Regensburgers,” the Prince said in his weary way, “from the town of Regensburg, in the old time. I often dream of it, of the river and the stone bridge, of those strange Moorish towers with the cranes’ nests built on the top of them. Perhaps I shall go back there, one day, to my people’s place.”

I looked out at the trees as they rose up abruptly in the headlights and as abruptly toppled away again into the darkness behind us. Remember how, in the days when we were little, and what was to become Alpinia was still a mess of warring peoples, there used to be free offers on the backs of corn-flakes packets? You cut out so many coupons and sent them off to an address abroad, and days or weeks later your free gift would come in the post. What a thrill it was, the thought of a stranger somewhere, maybe a girl, with scarlet nail polish and her hair in a perm, wielding her paper-knife and taking out your letter and holding it, actually holding it in her fingers, and reading it, the letter you wrote, and folded, and slid, crackling, as white and crisp as starched linen, into its envelope that smelt so evocatively of wood-pulp and gum. And then there was the thing itself, the gift, a cheap plastic toy that would break after a day or two but that yet was a sacred object, a talisman made magical simply — simply! — by being from elsewhere. No cargo-cultist could have experienced the mystical fervour that I did when my precious parcel came tumbling from the sky. I’ve said it before but I’m going to say it again: that’s the function of stealing, that stolen, the most trivial object is transfigured into something new and numinously precious, something which—

I knew I’d get on to stealing, the subject is never far from my thoughts.

But whoa, you’ll cry, dismount for a minute from that fancy hobby-horse of yours and tell us this: How was it that Polly Pettit née Plomer, whom you pinched from her husband and sought to set among the stars, how was it that she so suddenly lost her goddess’s glow? For that’s what you were out to do, we all know that, to make her divine and nothing less. All right, I admit it, I did attempt the task usually allotted to Eros — yes, Eros — the task of conferring divine light upon the commonplace. But no, no, it was more than that I was about: it was nothing less than total transformation, the clay made spirit. Pleasure, delight, the raptures of the flesh, such things mean nothing, next to nothing, to a man like me. Trans-this and trans-that, all the transes, that’s what I was after, the making over of things, of everything, by the force of concentration, which is, and don’t mistake it, the force of forces. The world would be so thoroughly the object of my passionate regard that it would break out and blush madly in a blaze of self-awareness. There were times, I remember, when Polly would shy away from me, covering herself with her hands, like Venus on her half-shell. “Don’t look at me like that!” she would say, smiling but frowning too, nervous of me and my devouring eye. And she was right to be nervous, for I was out to consume her entirely. And what was this urge’s secret spring? Love’s limitless mad demands, the lover’s furious hunger? Surely not, I say, surely not! It was aesthetics: it was all, always, an aesthetic endeavour. That’s right, Olly, go ahead, hold up your hands and pretend you are misunderstood. You don’t like it, do you, when the knife gets near the bone? Poor Polly, was it not the worst thing of all you could have done to her, to try to have her be something she was not, even if only in your eyes? And look at you now, in flight from her yet again, in some sort of queer cahoots with the Prince of the Snowy Shoulders. What a sham, what a self-deluding, shameless sham you are.

Ah, yes, nothing like the silken whip of self-reproach to soothe a smarting conscience.

Where was I, where were we? Rolling along, yes, Freddie and I, through the darkling eve. We got to the town as the shops were shutting. Always a saddish time of day, in autumn especially. Freddie asked where he might set me down. I didn’t know what to say, and said the railway station, which was the first place that came into my head. He looked surprised, and asked if I were going on a journey, if I were going away. I said yes. I don’t know why I lied. Maybe I did mean to go, to be gone, thus removing the fly, the buzzing bluebottle, from everyone’s ointment. He eyed my oilskins and my blackthorn stick, but made no comment. I could see him thinking, though, and even seemed to detect a stir of unwonted animation in his manner. What could it be that was exciting him?

The station when we pulled up at it was in darkness, and I clambered down from the cab and he drove away, the exhaust pipe at the back of that absurd machine puttering out gasps of night-blue smoke.

Now what should I do? I walked along the quayside, holding on to my trawler-man’s hat. It was a raw and gusty night, and the heaving sea off to my left was as black and shiny as patent leather, with now and then a white bird swooping in ghostly silence through the darkness. My brain was barely functioning — perhaps this is what walks are for, to dull the mind and still its restless speculations? — and my feet, seemingly of their own will, turned me away from the harbour, and presently, to my mild surprise, I found myself standing in the street in front of the laundry and the door to the steep stairway that led up to the studio. It occurred to me that I could stay there for the night, sleeping on the sofa, old faithful itself. I was searching my pockets for the key when a figure slipped out of the darkness of the laundry doorway. I started back in fright, then saw that it was Polly. She was wearing a beret and a great black overcoat that was too big to have been her father’s and must have been left behind by some mighty yeoman ancestor. I was confused by her appearing so suddenly like that. I asked her how she had got there, noting the high-pitched, panicky warble in my voice. She ignored my question, however, and demanded that I open the door at once, for she was, she said, perishing with the cold. We trudged up the stairs in silence; I thought, as so often, of the gallows.

In the studio the big window in the ceiling was throwing a complicated cage of starlight across the floor. I switched on a lamp. It seemed colder in here than it had been outside, though my feet, in those borrowed boots, were unpleasantly and damply hot. I looked about at familiar things, that slanting window, the table with its pots and brushes, the canvases stacked with their faces to the wall. I felt more estranged than ever from the place, and curiously ill at ease, too, as if I had burst in crassly on someone else’s private doings. Polly in her giant’s coat stood with her eyes on the floor, clasping herself in her arms. She had taken off her beret and now she threw it on the table. I looked at her hair, and remembered how in the old days I would wind a thick swatch of it around my hand and pull her head far back and sink my vampire’s teeth into her pale, soft, excitingly vulnerable throat. I asked if she would take some brandy, to warm her up, but then I remembered that Marcus and I had finished the bottle. I enquired again, carefully, diffidently, how she had got here. “I drove, of course,” she said, in a tone of haughty contempt. “You didn’t see the car in the street? But of course you didn’t. You never notice anything that’s not yourself.”

I often think, in puzzlement and vague dismay, of my pictures, the ones that are in galleries, mostly minor ones, all over the world, from Reykjavik to the Republic of New South Wales, from Novy Bug to the Portlands, those sadly separated twins of coastal Oregon and Maine. The pictures have, in my mind, a hovering, liminal existence. They are like things glimpsed in a dream, vivid yet without substance. I know they are connected to me, I know that I produced them, yet I don’t feel for them in any existential way — I don’t register their distant presence. It was the same, now, with Polly. Somehow she had lost something essential, to my outward eye but more so to the inward one. Which was the greater mystery: that she had been for me what she had been once, or that she had ceased to be it now? Yet here she was before me, unavoidably herself. And of course that was it, that she was herself at last, and not what I had made of her. How dull and dulling they can be, these sudden insights. Better not to have them, perhaps, and cleave to a primordial bumpkinhood.

I started to apologise for having run off yet again, but I had hardly got going before she turned on me in a fury.

“How could you?” she said, with her chin tucked in and her wounded, furious eyes blazing at me accusingly. “How could you insult us like that?”

Us? Did she mean the two of us, her and me? It seemed not; it seemed decidedly not. Terror twanged in me like a gut string jerked tight. I said I didn’t know what she meant. I said I had gone for a walk — she had seen me going out at the front door, after all. I told her of my encounter, if encounter it really was, with the strange caravan of dark-skinned folk, and of how Freddie Hyland had come along and in his princely way had offered me a lift, and how I had thought to take the opportunity to pop into the studio here and check that all was—

She sprang at me. “Where is it?” she demanded, in a very loud voice, almost shouting in my face, and a speck of her saliva landed on my wrist; surprising how quickly spit cools, once it’s out.

“What?” I responded, a frightened quack. “Where is what?”

“You know very well what. The book — his book. The book of poems by what’s-his-name. Where is it?”

I said again that I didn’t know what she meant, that I had no idea of what she was talking about. My voice now had become light and tearful and sort of tottery, the voice in which the guilty always protest their blamelessness. There followed the inevitable back-and-forth music-hall routine of accusation and denial. I blustered and fussed, but in the end she refused to listen to any more of my bleatings, and shook her head and held up a hand to silence me, with her eyes lightly closed and her eyebrows lifted.

“You took it,” she said. “I know you did. Now give it back.”

Oh, dear. Oh, double dear. My life, it often seems to me, is a matter not of forward movement, as in time it must be, but of constant retreat. I see myself driven backwards by a throng of furiously shaking fists, my lip bleeding and my coat torn, stumbling over broken paving and whimpering piteously. Yet in this instance what impressed me most, I think, was not Polly’s rage, and outrage, impressive as they were, but the simple, plain dislike she was displaying towards me, the lip-curling distaste she seemingly felt at merely being in my presence. She had a withdrawing look, as of a person shrinking away from something unclean. This was new; this was wholly new.

“Come on, give it to me,” she said, in the tone of a tough policeman, putting out her hand with palm upturned. “I know you have it.”

Yes, I could see she did, and I felt something contracting inside me to the size and wrinkly texture of a not quite deflated party balloon.

“How do you know?” I asked, old rodent that I was, looking for a crack to escape through.

“Pip told me. She saw you take it.”

“What do you mean, Pip?” I cried. “She can’t even talk!”

“She can, to me.”

I was all in a muddle by now. Had the child really seen me take the book, had she really managed to betray me? If she had, and I must believe it, or accept it, at least, then the game was up. I reached under my oilskin coat and fumbled the book out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her. “I was only borrowing it,” I said, in a whine, sounding like a sulky little boy caught pilfering the gifts at a birthday party.

“Ha!” she said, with angry disdain. “Like you borrowed all the other things, I suppose?”

I peered at her. My heart was going now at a syncopated patter. “All what other things?”

“All the things you’ve taken from all of us!” She snorted, throwing back her head. “You think we don’t know about your stealing? You think we’re all blind, and fools, into the bargain?” She opened the book and riffled through the pages. “You don’t even speak German, do you?” she said, shaking her head in bitter sadness.

So here it was at last, the reckoning, and all so unexpected. As far as I knew, I had never been caught in the act before, never in all my years as a thief. Gloria, I had supposed, would have her suspicions — there’s not much one can keep from a wife — but I believed she had never actually witnessed me pinching something, and even if she had it wouldn’t have counted, somehow. But that I should have been found out by Polly, that indeed she should have known all along about my thieving, that was a great shock and humiliation, though humiliation and shock are inadequate terms in which to describe my state. I seemed to have suffered a physical attack; it was as if a stick had been stuck into my innards and waggled violently about, and I thought for a second I might be sick on the spot. Something had been taken from me; now I was the one who had lost something secret and precious. The little crimson-covered volume, that in my pocket had throbbed with a dark, erotic fullness, had become, as I handed it over to her, inert and exhausted, another sad little leaking balloon.

One thing I think I can safely say: I shall not steal again.

And yet there was more — yes, more! — for Polly herself had suffered another, a final, transformation in my eyes. There she stood, in that big rough coat, wearing no make-up, her hair misshapen from the beret, her calves bare and her feet planted flat on the floor, and she might have been, I don’t know, something carven, a figure at the base of a totem pole, a tribal effigy that no one venerated any more. As a deity, the deity of my desiring, she had been perfectly comprehensible, my very own little Venus reclining in the crook of my arm; now, as what she really was, herself and nothing more, a human creature made of flesh and blood and bone, she was terrifying. But what terrified me was not her anger, the recriminations she was hurling at me, the lip curled in contempt. What I felt most strongly from her now was plain indifference. And at that, finally, finally of finallys, I knew she was gone from me for good.

Gone for good? Gone for bad.

That, then, was the end, if one may speak of an ending, given the unbreakable continuum that is the world. Oh, inevitably it went on for some time, there in the studio, the redoubled outbursts of anger and the floods of tears, the accusations and denials, the how-could-you’s and how-can-I’s, the don’t-touch-me’s and don’t-you-dare’s, the cries of anguish, the stammered apologies. But underneath it all, I could see, she cared for none of it, and was going through it only for form’s sake, fulfilling the necessary ritual. And to think how lofty was the regard she used to hold me in! She thought I was a god, once, she said so, remember? When she saw me first, in Marcus’s workshop that day when I brought in my father’s watch for repair — it’s here on the table before me now, ticking away accusingly — she went to the library, she told me afterwards, and took out a book on my work — Morden’s monograph, I imagine, a paltry thing, for all its earnest bulk — and sat with it open on her lap by the window in her parlour, running her fingers over the reproductions, imagining that the surface of the cool glossy paper was me, was my skin. “Have you any idea what a fool I feel,” she asked now, mildly, wearily, “admitting such a thing?” I hung my head and said nothing. “And all the time you were just a thief,” she said, “a thief, and you never loved me.” Still I held my peace. Sometimes it’s an indecency to speak, even I acknowledge that.

The lamp-light shone on the floor at our feet, the star-light shone in the window above our heads. Night and night-wind and flitters of cloud. A very storm, outdoors and in. O world, O worlding world, and so much of it lost to me, now.

When at length Polly ran out of things to say, and with a last rueful shake of the head turned towards the door, I flew into a belated sort of panic and tried to stop her going. She paused for the briefest moment and looked at my hand on her arm with mild distaste, aloof as a stage heroine, then stepped away from me and walked out. I stood in a dither, my heart aflutter and my blood racing. I felt like one who, strolling along the harbour’s edge at twilight, has taken it into his head to leap at the last moment on to the deck of a departing ship, and stands now in the stern, watching in giddy disbelief as the known country steadily recedes, its roofs and spires, its winding roads, its smooth cliffs and sandy margins, all growing small, and faint, and fainter, in the fading light of evening, while behind him, in the far sky, malignant blue-black clouds roll and roil.