The Blue Guitar

III

WONDERFUL WEATHER WE had for the funeral, yes, a positively sumptuous day. How callous the world can be. Foolish to say so, of course. The world feels nothing for us — how many times do I have to remind myself of the fact? — we don’t even enter its ken except perhaps as a stubborn parasite, like the mites that used to infest Gloria’s myrtle tree. It is late November and yet autumn has come back, the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam. In the night the temperature plunges and by morning the roses, flourishing still, are laced with hoarfrost; then comes the sun and they hang their heads and weep for an hour. Despite gales earlier in the season the last of the leaves have yet to fall. At the faintest zephyr the trees rustle excitedly, like girls shimmying in their silks. Yet there is a tinge of darkness to things, the world is shadowed, dimmed as it seems by death. Above the cemetery the sky looked more steeply domed than usual, and was of a more than usually intense tint — cerulean? cyan? simple cornflower? — and a transparent wafer of full moon, the sun’s ghost, was set just so atop the spire of a purple pine. I never know where to position myself at funerals, and always seem to end up treading on some poor unfortunate’s last long home. Today I hung well back, hiding among the headstones. Made sure I had a view of the two widows, though — for there are two of them, or as good as — standing on opposite sides of the grave, avoiding each other’s eye. They appeared very stark and dramatic in their swoop-brimmed black hats, Polly, with a markedly bigger Little Pip — how they grow! — who looked self-important and cross — children do hate a funeral — while Gloria stood with a hand pressed under her heart, like I don’t know what: like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or some such grand figure, damaged and magnificent. There was no coffin, just an urn containing the ashes, but still they dug a grave, at Polly’s insistence, so I’m told. The urn made me think of Aladdin’s magic lamp. Someone should have given it a rub; you never know. Still the penchant for tasteless jokes, as you see, nothing will kill that. They buried the urn along with the ashes. It seemed in bad taste, somehow.

There is a constant ticking in my head. I am my own time bomb.

It strikes me that what I have always done was to let my eye play over the world like weather, thinking I was making it mine, more, making it me, while in truth I had no more effect than sunlight or rain, the shadow of a cloud. Love, too, of course, working to transform, transfigure, the flesh made form. All in vain. The world, and women, are what they always were and will be, despite my most insistent efforts.

We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It’s as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.

Yes, quite a time we’ve had of it. I don’t know if my heart is in good enough shape for me to go back over it all, or all of it that seems to matter. In terms of duration it’s not much, weeks at most, though it might as well have been an age. I suppose I owe it to us, to the four of us, to give some sort of account, to record some sort of testament. When I was young, barely in my twenties though already puffed up with stern ambition, I had a memorable experience late one night, I hardly know how to describe it and perhaps shouldn’t try. I hadn’t been drinking, though I felt as if I were at least halfway drunk. I had started work at first light and didn’t stop until long after midnight. I worked too hard in those days, driving myself into a state of bleak, bone-aching numbness that at times was hardly distinguishable from despair. It was so difficult, sticking to the rules — I was no iconoclast, whatever anyone says — while at the same time struggling to break out and get beyond them. I didn’t know what I was doing, half the time, and might as well have been painting in the dark. Darkness was the adversary, darkness and death, which are pretty much the same thing, when you think about it, though it’s true I’m speaking of a special kind of darkness. I worked so fast, so feverishly, always terrified I wouldn’t survive to finish what I had started. There were days when the ruffian on the stair came right into the room and stood beside me at the easel, bold and insolent, jogging my elbow and whispering suggestively into my ear. Mind you, it was no symbol but death itself, the actual extinguishing, that I daily anticipated. I was the hypochondriacs’ hypochondriac, forever running to the doctor with a pain here, a lump there, convinced I was a terminal case. I was assured, repeatedly and with increasing exasperation, that I wasn’t dying, that I was as sound as a bell, as a belfryful of bells, but I wasn’t to be fobbed off, and sought second, third, fourth opinions in my doomed pursuit of the death sentence. What was it all about? What did I think was coming to get me? Maybe it wasn’t death but failure I was afraid of. Too simple, that, I think. Yet there must have been something wrong with me, to feed and nurture such a morbid obsession.

Anyway, back to that night at the weary close of a long day’s work. At the time I was embarked on something historical, what was it? — yes, Heliogabalus, I remember, Heliogabalus the bulbous boy. For months I was fascinated by him, that extraordinary head like a ripe pomegranate about to burst and shoot out its seeds in all directions. In the end I turned him into a minotaur, who knows why; you see what I mean about darkness. Where was I living at the time? In that festering den on Oxman Lane I rented from Buster Hogan’s mother? Let’s say it was, what does it matter. This was long before Gloria — have I mentioned how much younger than me she is? — and I was running after a girl who wouldn’t have me, another one out of Hogan’s harem, as it happens. Lot of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it. There I was, with pins-and-needles in my painting arm and my legs like petrified tree trunks from standing for so long in front of Helio’s shining head, when suddenly it came to me, namely, the true nature of my calling, if we can call it that. I was to be a representative — no, the, I was to be the representative, the singular, the one and only. This was how it was put to me — put to me, yes, for it did seem to come from somewhere else, the injunction, the commission. At first I was nonplussed, that’s the word. The Virgin herself, discovered at her devotions by the genuflecting youth with flaxen wings, could not have been more at a loss than I was that night. What or whom was I to represent, and how? But then I thought of the caves at Lascaux and that famous prehistoric hand-print on the wall. That would be me, that would be my signature, the signature of all of us, the stylised mark of the tribe. This wasn’t, I should say, good news. It wasn’t good or bad. In a way, it wasn’t even to do with me, not directly. Stags and aurochs would leap from my brush, and what say would I have in the matter? I would be merely the medium. Yet why me? What do I care about the tribe, what does the tribe care about me? That, I suppose, was the point: I was no one, and still am. Just the medium, the medium medium, Niemand der Maler.

I think of these days, these present days, as the post-war period. The sort of exhausted calm that has descended has a lingering whiff of cordite, and we who did not die have the shocked air of survivors. My second return home, no more than a matter of weeks ago, was a démarche for peace. That’s how it is with me. I’m like an artilleryman who every so often glimpses through a rent in the flying cannon smoke a devastated landscape where wounded figures stumble blindly, coughing and crying. Sometimes you have to surrender, just walk out on to the battlefield with your hankie tied to the barrel of your musket. At the beginning, I mean at the beginning of my homecoming, I felt myself to be a displaced person, a refugee, one might almost say. After the débâcle at Grange Hall and that subsequent grisly confrontation with Polly — bloody skirmishes on all sides — I hid for a few days in the studio, bunking down as best I could on the love-stained sofa, where sleep was impossible and all I could manage were intervals of fitful dozing. Oh, those ashen dawns, when I lay under the big bare window in the roof, skewered to the worn plush, like a moth pinned to a pad, watching the rain falling in swathes and the gulls wheeling, and listening to their forlorn screechings. It was worse when I heaved myself over on to my front, for then my face was pressed into the worn green velvet that smelt so pungently of Polly.

Did I miss her? I did, but in an odd way that perplexes me. What I came to feel at the losing of her, at the loosing of her, wasn’t the furnace blast of anguish that might have been expected, but rather a kind of pained nostalgia, such as, oddly, I knew in childhood, sitting by the window, say, on a winter eve, chin on fist, watching the rain on the road like a corps of tiny ballet dancers, each drop sketching a momentary pirouette before doing the dying swan and collapsing into itself. Remember, remember what they were like, those hours at the window, those twilight dreamings by the fire? What I was yearning for was something that had never been. By that I don’t mean to deny what I once felt for Polly, what she once meant to me. Only now when my mind reached out for her it closed on nothing. I could recall, and can recall, every tiniest thing about her, in vividest and achingmost detail — the taste of her breath, the heat in that little hollow at the base of her spine, the damp mauve sheen of her eyelids when she slept — but of the essential she only a wraith remained, ungraspable as a woman in a dream. What I mean to say is, the loss of my love for Polly, of Polly’s love for me, was — something something something, hold on, I’m groping towards it. Ah, no good, I’ve lost the thread. But love, anyway, why do I keep worrying at it, like a dog gnawing at its sores? Love, indeed.

A TREATISE ON LOVE, SHORTER VERSION

All love is self-love

There, does that nail it?

I couldn’t remain for long at the studio, sneaking out to buy the few essentials for survival and scuttling back again and huddling at the cluttered table drinking milk straight from the bottle and nibbling on crusts of bread and bits of cheese, like old Ratty, my friend and mascot from gate-lodge days. There was no Maisie Kearney nearby to make clandestine sandwiches for me. Also it was very cold. The heating system, such as it was, seemed to have broken down entirely, and if it hadn’t been for the fug of warmth seeping up through the floorboards from the laundry below I might have died — is it possible to be indoors and yet perish from exposure? And there was nothing to do, either, except brood, surrounded by what seemed the rubble of my life; the canvases stacked against the walls looked as if they had turned their faces away in shame. Conditions were primitive, as you would expect. Don’t enquire about hygiene. I hadn’t even a toothbrush, or a clean pair of socks, and for some reason never thought to purchase such items on my hurried outings to the shops. Mrs. Bird, the launderer’s wife, very kindly came to my rescue. I relinquished my clothes to her, passing them to her round the doorpost in a bundle, and she washed and dried and ironed them while I sat upstairs wrapped in a rug, sighing and sneezing. That was a low point, the very nadir, I would say, except that there was worse to come.

In desperation I thought of returning to the gate-lodge and lying low there again for a while, but there are only so many times one can revisit scenes of childhood; the past gets worn out, worn down, like everything else.

Anyway, after I had been three or four days on the run, Gloria turned up. Don’t know how she knew I was at the studio; wifely instinct, I expect. Or maybe Mrs. Bird told her I was there. Mrs. Bird has some experience in these matters, flighty Mr. Bird being a notorious philanderer and frequent bolter. I was cleaning brushes that didn’t need cleaning when there was a tap at the door. I froze, and caught sight of myself in the big mirror over by the door of the lavatory, round-eyed with fright. I knew it couldn’t be Mrs. Bird: she would not call on me unbidden. Good God, could it be Polly, returning to give me yet another piece of her mind, or the Prince, perhaps, old sad-eyed Freddie, to slap me across the face with his driving gauntlets and call me out for pinching his precious book? I crossed to the door on tiptoe and put my ear against the wood. What did I expect to hear? Someone fuming out there, the cracking of knuckles and the impatient tapping of a foot, or maybe even the repeated slap of a truncheon into a callused palm? Deep down I have always been terrified of authority, especially the kind that comes knocking on my door in the middle of an otherwise uneventful afternoon.

Gloria, when she is not quite at ease and feels called on to show her mettle, adopts a sort of swagger that I have always found endearing, and at the same time a little sad and, I have to confess it, a bit embarrassing, too. Of course, I do not let on that I can see through her pose — that wouldn’t do: we must allow each other our little subterfuges if life is to be lived at all. So into the studio she came sashaying, not quite but almost with a hand propped insouciantly on her hip — that’s how I always see her in my mind, hand-on-hip — and gave me as she passed me by one of her wryest, most knowing, most withering, small smiles. She is at the best of times a woman of few words, a thing in which she differs markedly from me, as you will know by now. That stillness, the air she has of keeping her own counsel and of having a lot of counsel to keep, was one of the traits that attracted me to her in the first place, long ago. I suppose it lent her a certain sibylline quality. Even still I always feel, with her, that I’m in the presence of a large secret studiedly withheld. Have I said that before? Nowadays it all feels like repetition. Think I’ve said that, too. Where will it end, I want to know: the painster in a padded cell, straitjacketed and manacled to the bed, muttering in a monotone the one word over and over, me me me me me me me me me me me.

Gloria stopped in the middle of the floor, turned and stood in her fashion model’s pose, head back, chin up, one foot thrust forwards, and looked about. “So this,” she said, “is where you’re skulking now.”

Skulking? Skulking? She was trying to provoke me. I didn’t mind. I was surprised at how pleased I was to see her, despite everything, including the thick ear I was bound to get at any moment now. There was something almost playful in her manner, however, something even flirtatious. It was very puzzling, but I was glad of the glimmer of warmth, wherever it was coming from.

Yes, I had been staying here, I said, with a sniff, standing on my dignity, what shreds of it were left. Needed time to think, I said, to consider my options, arrive at some decisions. “I thought you’d come for me before now,” I said.

That elicited a dry chuckle. “Like Mummy fetching you home after school?” she said.

I had been gone, in all, for little more than a week, first at the gate-lodge, then briefly at Grange Hall, then here. What had she been doing during that time? Certainly not watching by the window with a candle lit for my return, if her scathing look and brittle manner were anything to go by.

I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had been to the studio, and it gave me an odd feeling to see her there now. She was wearing a big coat made of white wool. I dislike that coat: it has a deep collar, like an upside-down lampshade, inside which her head sits very high, as if it had been severed bloodlessly at the neck. She was regarding me coolly, still with a smile of amused reproach that was hardly more than a notch at one corner of her mouth. Well, I must have been a sorry sight.

“Are you growing a beard?” she asked.

“No,” I answered, “I’m growing stubble.” The bristles, I had noticed, with a shiver, in the mirror that morning, were strewn with silver.

“You look like a tramp.”

I said I felt like a tramp. She considered me in silence, rotating one foot in a half-circle on the point of its shoe’s high heel. I recalled the empty brandy bottle Marcus had dropped on the floor. What had become of it? I couldn’t remember having picked it up. What a strange, furtive life it is that random objects lead.

“Perry has been calling again,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at me in merry spite. “He’s threatening to come over.”

Perry Percival, my dealer, former dealer. I am convinced she summoned him, just to annoy me. Though Perry does have a habit of turning up out of the blue — literally, since he flies his own aeroplane, a dinky little craft, nimble and swift, with a silver fuselage and the tips of the propellers painted red. If she did call on him, what did she expect him to do, be a sort of flying stand-in for my wingèd muse? She thinks my inability to paint is a pretence, a piece of irresponsible self-indulgence. I should never have married a younger woman. It didn’t matter, at first, but increasingly it does. That dismissive briskness of hers, it can’t be borne at my age.

Soft rain was falling on the glass above our heads. I’m fond of that kind of rain. I pity it, in my sentimental way; it seems to be trying so hard to say something and always just failing.

Gloria took a slim silver case from the pocket of her coat, thumbed it open with a click, selected a cigarette, and lit it with her little gold lighter. She’s such a wonderfully old-fashioned creature, both chilly and warm, like one of those vamps in the old movies.

I was very much in need of a drink, and thought again with mournful longing of that emptied brandy bottle.

Gloria has a way, when she lights a cigarette, of drawing in the smoke very quickly between her teeth, making a sharp sound that might be a little gasp of pain. The last time we had spoken, though it could hardly be called speaking, was the day when she telephoned me at the gate-lodge. Had she talked to Marcus in the meantime? Of course she had. I didn’t care. Is there in other people too an inner, barren plain, an Empty Quarter, where cold indifference reigns? I sometimes think this region is, in me, the seat of what is popularly called the heart.

Marcus would have told her everything. I could almost hear her saying it, letting it swell in her throat and giving it a histrionic throb. He told me everything.

She turned and strolled across to the table and began picking things up and putting them down again, a brush hardened with old paint, a tube of zinc white, a little glass mouse. Watching her, I saw all at once, distantly but distinctly, as it is said patients sometimes see themselves on the operating table, the true measure of the mayhem I had caused, saw it all in all its awfulness, the operation gone fatally wrong, the surgeon swearing and the nurse in tears, and I floating up there under the ceiling, with my arms folded and my ankles crossed, surveying the shambles below and unable to feel a thing. General anaesthesia, that’s the state I’ve always aimed to live in.

I asked her if she was all right. At this she dilated her already large blue eyes.

“What do you mean, am I all right?”

“Just that. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

Now she snorted. “A while!” Her voice was not quite steady.

“Gloria,” I said.

“What?” She glared at me, then crushed the last of her cigarette on one of my paint-encrusted palettes, nodding angrily, as if she had succeeded in confirming something to herself, at last.

I said I wanted to come home. It was only when I was saying it that I knew it was the case, as it had been all along. Home. Oh, my Lord!

—

So it was as simple as that: me, tail between legs, back in the dog-house. It seemed I had hardly been away. Or, no, that’s not quite true; in fact, it’s not true at all, I don’t know why I said it. Years ago, when we were living in Cedar Street, Gloria and I were motoring back one afternoon from somewhere down the country and got caught in a freak summer storm, the tail-end of a hurricane that against all the forecasts had come whipping in from the Atlantic, knocking things down and causing havoc on the roads. There were floods and felled trees, and we were forced to make four or five complicated detours that added hours to the journey. When at last we got home we were in a state of trembling exhilaration, like children at the end of an unsupervised and gloriously disorderly birthday party. The house, too, although it had suffered nothing more than a couple of broken slates, had a tousled, dizzied air, as if it, like us, had been out in the storm, battling through wind and rain, and, though it had gained once more the shelter of itself, would never be quite the same again, after its wild adventure. That’s how Fairmount seemed, when Gloria brought me home, at the close of my brief but tempestuous frolic.

We settled down as best we could, not, as I say, to life as it had been before, but to something that to a stranger’s eye would have looked very like it. I kept indoors. I saw nothing of Polly, of course, and certainly not of Marcus, and heard nothing from them. Their names weren’t mentioned in the house. I thought of the Prince and his poetry and the fragment of it that Polly’s father had recited. World, invisible! I felt that something had been imparted, that something had been delivered specially to me. Wasn’t that what I had struggled towards always, wasn’t that the mad project I had devoted my life to, the invisibling of the world?

After leaving it I stayed away altogether from the studio, for reasons that were not as obvious as may seem.

Presently there appeared, as threatened, the unavoidable Perry Percival. He landed his plane out by the estuary, on the disused famine road that the farmer who owns the fields round about, thinking to make his fortune, had transformed into a makeshift airstrip in the days when everybody was still flying. It was a blustery morning and the little machine buzzed down out of a lead-blue cloud bucking and swaying, the tips of its propellers flashing lipstick-red in the pallid sunlight, then settled as delicately as a moth, ran on gaily for some way, and bumped to a stop. Gloria and I were waiting in the shelter of the wooden hangar that used to be a barn. Perry, with his leather helmet in his hand, descended daintily from the cockpit. Farmer Wright’s two under-sized sons, in cardboard-coloured boiler-suits, one of them trailing a set of chocks, scuttled out to the plane and began swarming all over it, checking and tapping. Perry, a compact chrysalis, was peeling off his airman’s overalls as he tripped his way towards us, revealing in stages, from top to bottom, as if by an act of conjuring, his short, plump, immaculately suited self in all its burnished, dove-grey glory. I’m certain that in the depths of Hell, where he and I shall most likely end up together, Perry will manage to find a decent tailor. He wore a blue silk shirt and an electric-blue silk tie. I noticed his shoes of dark suede; he could have done with a lend of Freddie Hyland’s galoshes.

He called out a greeting, and came up and kissed Gloria quickly, rising on tiptoe to do it. For me he had only a deprecating frown, by which I knew Gloria must have told him all about my latest escapades. “I have”—he drew back a cuff and consulted a watch that was almost as big as his hand—“some hours. I’m due in Paris at eight, to dine with — well, never mind who with.” It is Perry’s policy to be always on the way to somewhere else, a place much more important than here. Every time I see him I’m impressed anew by the show of lofty magnificence he affects. He is ageless, and very short, with stubby arms and legs, like mine only even shorter, and a paunch in the shape of a good-sized Easter egg sliced in half lengthways. He has a disproportionately large head, which might have been fashioned from pounds and pounds of well-worked putty, and a large, smooth face, slightly livid and always with a moist, greyish sheen. His eyes are palely protuberant, and when he blinks the lids come down with a snap, like a pair of moulded metal flanges. His manner is brisk to the point of crossness, and he treats everything he encounters as if it were a hindrance. I’m fond of him in principle, although he never fails to vex me.

We turned towards the car. Perry stepped between Gloria and me and put an arm at both our backs, drawing us along with but slightly ahead of him, like a conductor at the triumphal end of a concert sweeping his soloists forwards into a storm of applause. He smelt of engine oil and expensive cologne. The wind from the estuary was ruffling everything except his hair, which, I noticed, he has started to dye; it was plastered back over his skull, tight and gleaming, like a carefully applied coat of shellac. “Damn fool air controllers tried to stop me landing here,” he said. “Now they’ll think I’ve crashed, of course, or gone into the drink.” He has a plummily refined accent with a faint Scots burr — his father was something high up in the Kirk of Canongate — and the barest trace of a Frankish lisp from his Merovingian mother. Very proud of his grand origins, is Perry.

Behind us, Orville and Wilbur were wheeling the plane effortfully towards the barn, one pushing while the other pulled.

In the car I sat in the back seat, feeling like a child being punished for naughtiness. The sunlight was gone now, and luminous veils of what was barely rain were drifting aslant the streets. As we went along, Perry, perched sideways in the front seat, turned his neat round head this way and that, taking in everything with appalled fascination, exclaiming and sighing. “Was that your name I saw over that shop?” he asked. I told him it used to be my father’s print shop, and that my studio was upstairs — my studio as was, I didn’t say. Perry turned all the way round and gave me a long look, shaking his head sadly. “You came home, Oliver,” he said. “I would never have thought it of you.” Gloria gave a soft laugh.

I encountered Perry Percival for the first time in Arles, I think, or was it Saint-Rémy? No, it was Arles. I was very young. I had come down from Paris, at the end of that summer of study, so-called, and was morosely wandering in the steps of the great ones who would never, I was gloomily convinced, invite me up to join them, sitting before their easels on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. There was a market on and the town was busy. I had been amusing myself by strolling from one crowded café to the next, swiping the tips that departing customers had left behind on the tables. It was a thing I had become adept at — talk about sleight of hand — and even the sharpest-eyed waiters missed me as I flitted among them with a muffled, tell-tale jingle. Although I was penniless, I wasn’t taking the money because I needed it; if I had, I would have tried to make it by some other means. It was at the Café de la Paix — don’t know why I’ve remembered the name — as I was pocketing a fistful of centimes, that I happened to glance up and caught, through the open doorway, deep in the brownish darkness of the interior, Perry’s sharp bright eye fixed on me. To this day I don’t know if he spotted what I was up to; if he did, he certainly never said so, and I’ve assumed he didn’t. My instinct was to run away — isn’t it always my instinct? — but instead I went into the café and approached Perry and introduced myself; when one is threatened with discovery, effrontery is the best defence, as any thief will tell you. I hadn’t a shred of a reputation yet, but Perry must have heard my name somewhere, for he claimed to be familiar with my work, which was patently a lie, though I chose to believe him. He was wearing the usual rig-out of the northerner holidaying in the south — short-sleeved cotton shirt, absurdly, indeed indecently, wide-legged khaki shorts, open-toed sandals and, bless your heart, stout woollen socks — yet still he managed to convey a lordly hauteur. You see me here mingling among tourists and other riff-raff, his manner said, but even as we speak, my man is laying out tie and tails for me in my suite at the Grand Hôtel des Bains. “Yes yes,” he drawled, “Orme, I know your things, I’ve seen them.” He invited me to sit, and ordered for us both a glass of white. To think that from this chance encounter there developed one of the most significant and — etc., etc.

I pause here to say that I never got the hang of being an exile. I don’t think anyone does, really. There’s always something smug, something complacently self-conscious, about the expat, as he likes to style himself, in his offhand way, with his baggy linen jacket and battered straw hat and his sun-bleached, sinewy wife. And yet once you go away, and stay away for any extended length of time, you never entirely return. That was my experience, at any rate. Even when I left the south and came back here, to the place I started out from and where I should have felt the strongest sense of being myself, something, some flickering yet intrinsic part of me, was lacking. It was as if I had left my shadow behind.

Is Perry a fraud? He certainly looks and sounds like one, but examine any soul closely enough and you’ll soon see the cracks. For all that he may be a bit of a crook, he has an eye. Put him in front of a picture, especially a picture in progress, and he will fix on a line or a patch of colour and shake his head and make a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “There’s the heart of the thing,” he will say, pointing, “and it’s not beating.” He is always right, I find, and many’s the bloodless canvas I stabbed with the sharp end of a brush on the strength of his strictures. Then he would shout at me for wasting all that work, saying pointedly that it wouldn’t have been the first flawed piece of mine that he, or for that matter I, had ever offered for sale. Barbs like that went in deep, and lodged fast, I can tell you. Well: if I’m the pot, he is surely the kettle.

“How is your friend?” Gloria asked him. “I can’t remember his name. Jimmy? Johnny?”

“Jackie,” Perry said. “Jackie the Jockey. Oh, he died. Horrible business.” He rolled a mournful eye. “Don’t ask.” He mused a while. “You know all these nasty new germs are coming from outer space, don’t you?”

Gloria was smiling through the windscreen at the rain. “Who says that, Perry?” she enquired, glancing at me in the driving-mirror.

Perry shrugged, arching his eyebrows and drawing down the corners of his wide mouth, thereby taking on a momentary and startling resemblance to Queen Victoria in her failing years. “Scientists,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Doctors. All the people who know.” He sniffed. “Anyway, the germs got Jackie, wherever they came from, and he died.”

Poor Jackie, I remembered him. Young, swarth, good-looking in a ravaged sort of way. Huge eyes, always slightly feverish, and a mass of curls, shiny as black-lead, tumbling on his forehead; think of Caravaggio’s sick young Bacchus, though less fleshy. He wasn’t a jockey — I don’t know how he came by the nickname, though I suppose I might hazard a guess. He was a filcher, like me; unlike me, he stole for gain. He and Perry were together for years, the unlikeliest pair. I should say that besides a succession of catamites, of which Jackie had been the latest one that I knew of, Perry also had, and has, a wife. Penelope is her name, though she is known, improbably, as Penny. She is a large, muscular, relentless woman, and I have always been a little afraid of her. Strange thing, though: when we lost the child, it was to Perry and his mighty missus that Gloria fled for shelter and succour. I never got to the bottom of that one. She stayed with them for a month and more, doing who knows what, crying, I suppose, while I solitarily stewed in Cedar Street, reading a vast study of Cézanne and every evening drinking myself into a stupor.

Cézanne, by the way, has always been a bone of contention between Perry and me, though the marrow should have been well sucked out of it by now. Perry thinks the master of Aix unsurpassed, I suspect for all the wrong reasons, while I have always resented him. I see the greatness, it’s just that I don’t like the things it produced. I confess I’m quietly at one with the old codger in certain matters, such as his insistence that emotion and what-have-you cannot be expressed directly in the work but must exude, like a fragrance, from form at its purest. I’m certainly with him there — see my own things, seriatim, through the years. They called me cold because they were too dense to feel the heat.

When we got to the house Perry dropped his leather flying helmet on the hall table, where it subsided slowly like a deflating football, draped his airman’s overalls on the back of a chair, and retired for a lengthy session to the downstairs lavatory, from which there issued upon the air a pulsating, spicy stink that would take a good quarter of an hour to disperse. Then, lightened and refreshed, he came bustling into the kitchen, where Gloria was preparing the pot of herbal tea he had ordered. He drew forwards a chair and sat as close up to the stove as he could get, rubbing together his little neat white hands. “I’m so cold,” he said. “My blood is thin. I’ve started taking regular transfusions, did I tell you? There’s a place in Chur I go to.”

Gloria, pouring water into the teapot, laughed. “Oh, Perry,” she cried delightedly, “you’ve become a vampire!”

“Very amusing,” Perry said stiffly.

Over his tisane he talked of this and that, who was selling, who was buying, how the market was behaving; to my ear, he might have been gossiping of the latest dealings on the Rialto, or assessing the state of the silk trade in Old Cathay. At one point in the tittle-tattle he paused and looked at me sternly. “The world is waiting on you, Oliver,” he said, wagging a finger.

Was it? Well, it could wait.

Gloria made an omelette, discarding the yolk of the eggs, at Perry’s behest, and using only the whites. It was his latest fad to eat only colourless foods, chicken breast, sliced pan, milk puddings, suchlike. Nor would he drink anything other than tea. He really is a wonderful type, as he would say, with a click of the tongue and a smacking of the lips, in the Frenchified manner that he affects. He is for me, now, the very breath of a lost, a relinquished, world, a place distant and quaint, like the background of a Fragonard, or one of Vaublin’s dusky dreamscapes, a place I know well but happily know I shall never return to.

“And how goes the work?” he asked, getting down to business. He was seated at the head of the table with a napkin tucked into the collar of his exquisite, iridescent, dragonfly-blue shirt. He looked at my blank face and sighed. “I presume you are about the making of some grand new masterpiece, hence the long silence.” That’s how he speaks, really, it is. “This is the reason I’m here, after all, to view the state of the edifice.”

Crumbling at the base, Perry, crumbling at the base.

“Olly is still on his sabbatical from work,” Gloria said. “From life, too.”

I threw her an injured look, but wasn’t she right, about me and life and the living of it? The truth is, I think, I never started to live in the first place. Always I was about to begin. As a child I said that when I grew up, that would be life. Next it was the death of my parents I secretly looked forward to, thinking it must be the birth of me, a delivery into my true state of selfhood. After that it was love, love would surely do the trick, when a woman, any woman, would come along and make a man of me. Or success, riches, bags of banknotes, the world’s acclaim, all these would be ways of living, of being vividly alive, at last. And so I waited, year on year, stage after stage, for the great drama to commence. Then the day came when I knew the day wouldn’t come, and I gave up waiting.

Just remembered: last night that dream again, of me as a giant snake trying to swallow the world and choking on it. What can it mean? As if I didn’t know. Always the disingenuous pose.

Perry glanced at his watch again, and frowned: France awaited, France and his dining companion too important to name.

After lunch we walked together to the studio. He had not been there before, I had made sure to keep him away. Why did I bring him now — what was there for me to show him, except elaborate failures? I had to lend him an overcoat, comically too long for his little arms. The rain had stopped and the sky was overcast and the streets had a watery sheen. Perry, his hands lost in the sleeves of my coat, cast a deprecating eye about him, taking in again the paltry scene. The houses and the shops, the very streets themselves, seemed to flinch before him. “You know what a fool you’re making of yourself,” he said, “don’t you, skulking in this ridiculous place and pretending you can’t paint?”

Skulk: that foxy word again. I answered nothing — what should I say?

When we got to the studio he flopped into a corner of the lovelorn sofa, complaining anew of the cold.

“Well, show me something,” he said crossly.

“No,” I said, “I won’t.”

He bent on me an injured glance. “After I flew all this way?”

I said I hadn’t asked him to come.

He got up moodily and began poking about the room. I watched as he made for the canvases standing against the wall. I could swear his little bloodless nose was twitching. The manner he adopts towards his trade is a calculated mixture of disdain and long-suffering impatience. On everything offered to his regard, everything, he turns at first a jaded eye, as if to say, Oh, what further dreary piece of trumpery is this? He doesn’t fool me: he’s ever on the lookout for something to hawk. Now he picked up that big unfinished thing, my last effort before lapsing into silence — this is silence? you ask — and held it up before him, drawing his head back and grimacing as at a bad smell. “Hmm,” he said, “this is new.”

“On the contrary.”

“I meant, it’s a new departure.”

“It’s not. It’s the end of the line.”

“Don’t be absurd.” He carried the canvas into the full fall of light from the window. “Are you going to finish it?” On the contrary, I said, it had finished me. He wasn’t listening. “Anyway,” with a sniff, “I can sell it as it is.”

I leaped from the sofa and ran at him across the room, but he saw me coming and whisked the canvas aside, pouting back at me over his shoulder. I made a grab, he trotted out of my reach; I reached further, caught him. There followed an unseemly tussle, with a lot of heavy breathing and muffled grunts. At length he had to concede. I snatched the canvas from him and raised it high above my head, meaning to smash it down on something. However, as anyone who has ever tried to hang a picture will know, they are damnably unwieldy things, big and flat and frail as they are, and I had to content myself by flinging it from me into a corner, where it landed with a satisfying clatter and crunch, like the sound of bones breaking.

“For God’s sake!” Perry, panting, cried. “Have you gone mad?”

I am thinking yet again of that dream, the world lodged in my gullet. They say a baby screaming for its bottle would destroy all creation if it could. My picture was smashed. What was I now, maker or breaker? And did I care?

“Look here,” Perry said, putting on a bluffly fraternal tone, “what’s the matter with you, exactly, will you tell me that?” I laughed, a sort of wild hee-haw. Brother donkey! Perry was not to be put off. “Is all this about some woman?” he said, trying not to sound overly incredulous. “I hear you’re having an affaire, or had. Is that the trouble? Tell me it’s not.”

One of the things from my painting days that I sorely miss is a certain quality of silence. As the working day progressed and I sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat, like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the centre of a great hollow stillness. It was more than an absence of sound: it was as if a new medium had risen up and enveloped me, something dense and luminous, an air less penetrable than air, a light that was more than light. In it I would seem suspended, at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form. Alive? Was that life, after all, and I didn’t recognise it? Yes, a kind of life, but not life enough for me to say I was living.

I wished Perry would go away now, just go away, be taken up into the air, and leave me here, alone and quiet. How tired I was; am.

Perry was prodding exploratively with the toe of his shoe at the wreckage of my poor painting. There it lay all in a heap in the corner, a tangle of wood and torn canvas, my final masterpiece. I was reminded of the giant kite that when I was a lad my mother paid Joe Kent the hunchbacked cobbler to make for me, from laths and brown paper, in his cave-like workshop down Lazarus Lane. It turned out to be too heavy, and I threw it on the grass and danced on it in a rage when it refused to fly. Yes, breaking things, that has been for me one of life’s small consolations — and maybe not so small — I see that clearly now.

“Have you nothing at all to show to me?” Perry asked, sounding both peevish and plaintive, eyeing again the dusty stacks of canvases against the walls. Yes, I said, I had nothing. I could see him losing heart; it was like watching the needle of mercury in a thermometer sliding down its groove. He consulted his watch yet again, more pointedly this time. “Such a shame,” he said, “to destroy a painting.” The pleasures of acquisition are well known — says the thief, the former thief — but who ever mentions the quiet joy of letting things go? All those botched attempts stacked there, I would gladly have stamped on them, too, as long ago I’d stamped on Joe Kent’s flightless kite. When Perry went, there would go with him my last claim to being a painter — not that I claim it, but you know what I mean — he would be yet another bag of ballast heaved out of the basket. You see how, with these figurative tropes, my fancy turns on thoughts of ascent and heady flight? And indeed, an hour later, when Gloria had driven Perry and me out to Wright’s field, and Perry had strapped himself into his neat little craft and was taxiing along the grassy runway, I had a sudden urge to race after him through the twilight and grab on to a wing and swing myself up into the seat behind him and make him take me with him to France. I imagined us up there, whirring steadily through the night, suspended above deeps of blue-grey darkness, the clouds below us like motionless thick folds of smoke and overhead a sky of countless stars. To be gone! To be gone.

We stood beside the hangar, Gloria and I, and watched the plane climb the murky air until it vanished into a cloud, the same one, it might be, that we had seen it descend from that morning. The shroud of silence that had fallen over the darkening field spoke somehow of deserted distances, forgotten griefs. Far at the back of the hangar a bare bulb was burning, and one of the Wright boys was hammering finically at something, making a metallic, melancholy tinkling. The night massed around us. I shivered, and Gloria, putting her arm through mine, pressed my elbow tightly against her ribs. Had she felt my sense of desolation, and was it comfort she was offering me? We walked away. I thought of Perry, bustling out of the lavatory after a final visit there, kneading his damp hands and giving me a disapproving, disappointed, frown. Yes, he had washed his hands of me. He need not have bothered: I had already washed my own hands of my own so-called self.

—

One day on my aimless rambles about the town — yes, I’ve become quite the walker, despite myself — I dropped in to see my sister. She is called Olive. I know, outrageous, these names. I don’t often have cause to visit her, and didn’t have that day. She lives in a little house in Malthouse Street. The narrow thoroughfare, hardly more than an alley, falls away at either end, but there is a rise in the middle, where her house is, and this, along with the fact that the footpath outside her door is very high, for what reason I do not know, always gives me the impression that access to the house entails a desperate scramble, as though it were a shrine, a fabled outpost, the way to which had been purposely made arduous. At the far end of the street is the malt store, long disused, a squat building of pinkish-grey granite with low, barred windows and big medallion-like rusted iron braces sunk into the walls. When I was little it was a place to avoid. There was always an unpleasant sour smell of malting barley that made my nostrils sting, and sounds of shifting and scurrying could be heard from within, where the rats, so Olive enjoyed assuring me, swam freely about like otters in the knee-deep stores of grain.

The tiny house is made tinier still by Olive’s great height. She’s much taller than I am, though that’s not a hard thing to be, and moves at a slow stoop, looming in doorways or at the foot of the stairs with her head thrust out and her bowed arms dangling behind her, so that her progress seems a permanent state of incipient toppling over. Of the four of us she is the one who most resembles my father, and as the years go on and her few womanly lines become ever less pronounced the likeness grows more and more marked. Her nickname in school, of course, was Olive Oyl. What an emblematic contrast we must have looked, she and I, back then: sceptre and orb, wishbone and drumstick, whip handle and little fat top. In her young days she had a reputation for outrageousness and rebellion — she wore a jacket and tie, like a man, and for a while even smoked a pipe — but in time all that became mere eccentricity. The town has many Olives, of all genders and varieties.

“Well well, if it isn’t the genius of the family,” she said. Answering my knock she had put her head around the front door cautiously and peered at me out of my mother’s — mine, too — large, blue and, in Olive, incongruously lovely eyes. She wore an apron over a brown cardigan; her skirt was hitched crookedly on the two knobs of her hip-bones. Someone should introduce her to Polly’s mother, they would make a matching pair, like Miss Vandeleur’s porcelain beauties, only in reverse. “What brings you down among the common folk?” She always had a sharp tongue, our Olive. “Come through,” she said, walking ahead along the hall and flapping a hand the size of a paddle behind her to beckon me on. She chuckled phlegmily. “Dodo will be delighted to see you.”

The house inside was redolent of fresh-cut wood and varnish. My sister’s latest hobby, as it would turn out, was the cutting and assembling of miniature crucifixes.

In the kitchen a wood stove burned with a muted roar, and the soupy atmosphere was heavy with heat. The smell here, where the air seemed to have been used many times over, was a medley of stewed tea, floor polish and a tarry reek from the stove, and came straight at me out of childhood. A square table covered with patterned oilcloth took up most of the room; it stood there on its four square legs, stubborn as a mule, to be edged around awkwardly and with caution, for its corners were sharp and could deliver a painful prod. There were dented pots and blackened pans on hooks over the stove, and on the windowsill stood a jam-jar of flowers, which, even though they were made of plastic, somehow managed to appear to be wilting. The ceiling was low and so was the metal-framed window that gave on to a concrete yard and a mean-looking stretch of overgrown garden. Windows are so strange, I find, seeming no more than a last-minute concession to the incarcerated, and always if I look for long enough I will seem to make out a trace of the missing bars. “See who’s here, Dodo,” Olive said, or shouted, rather. “It’s the prodigal brother!”

Dodo, whose full name I have forgotten or perhaps never knew — Dorothy somebody, I suppose — is my sister’s companion of many years. She is a stout though compact person with a bullfinch’s sharp little face and an unsettlingly piercing gaze. A concoction of frazzled pure-white hair sits proud of her tiny head, like a halo fashioned from spun sugar. I greeted her warily. Her disapproval of me is deep, bitter and abiding, for reasons I can only begin to guess at. That eye of hers, I suspect, sees deep inside my soul. She used to be a bus conductress until she was forcibly retired — something to do with a shortfall in the fare returns, I seem to remember Olive confiding to me, in an unaccustomed access of frankness.

Olive drew a chair out from the table for me, its legs scraping on the uneven, red-tiled floor, and once again the past tipped its hat to me. Olive herself rarely sits, but keeps sinuously on the move, like a large lean stoop-backed creature of the trees. She produced a packet of cigarettes from somewhere about her person, lit up, took a drag, then leaned forwards with her hand pressed on the table and treated herself to a long, racking and, in the end, seemingly satisfying bout of coughing. “Look at you,” she gasped at last, turning to me with teary eyes, the lower rims of which pinkly sagged, “look at the state of you — what have you been doing to yourself?” I said blandly that I was very well, thank you, determined to keep my temper. “You don’t look it,” she said, with a rasping snort.

Dodo, wedged into a small upright armchair beside the stove, watched me with a vengeful glitter; she is somewhat deaf, and is always convinced that she is being talked about. Her years of standing about on the buses left her with enormously swollen legs, and by now she has almost entirely lost the power of locomotion, and has to be helped everywhere. How Olive, whose own legs are as meagrely fleshed as a heron’s, and as complicatedly jointed, manages to joggle her friend out of her chair and manoeuvre her about the narrow confines of that gingerbread house I can’t imagine. I once offered to pay out of my own pocket — it was quite deep at the time — for the two of them to move to somewhere roomier, and in reply got only a terrible, white-lipped stare. Olive for many years worked as a clerk for Hyland & Co., in the timber factory, until it shut down. I suspect Dodo has a little stash of money put away — those fares again, I don’t doubt. They get by, somehow. Olive is fiercely protective of what she is pleased to think of as her independence.

“That wife of yours,” she said, returning to the attack, “how is she?”

Gloria also was well, I replied, very well. To this Olive said, “Huh!” and glanced across at Dodo with a lopsided grin and even, if I wasn’t mistaken, the shadow of a wink. Tongues in the town, it seemed, must have been wagging.

“She don’t come round,” Dodo said loudly, addressing me. “Not round here, she don’t.” Have I mentioned that Dodo is, or was originally, a Lancashire lass? Don’t ask me how she landed up in these parts. “I can’t say as I’d even recognise her,” she shouted, sounding more aggrieved than ever, “that Mrs. Orme.”

“Now now, Dodo,” Olive said scoldingly, but with a merry glint, as if indulging a favoured though misbehaving child. “Now now.”

I sat on the straight chair at an awkward angle to the crowding table, my hands on my knees, which were splayed, necessarily, to accommodate the pendulous soft melon that is my lower belly. I don’t like being fat, it doesn’t suit me at all, yet whatever I do I can’t seem to lose weight. Not, mind you, that I do much in the weight-losing line. Maybe I should give Perry Percival’s colourless diet a try. My father, for his amusement, used to call me Jack Sprat, however many times I informed him, with icy contempt but in a voice that shook, that it was Jack Sprat who would eat no fat, and therefore must have been thin, while his wife was the obese one. Odd, and oddly out of character, those flashes of cruelty he subjected me to, my dad; they had the power, some of them, of reducing me to tears. Perhaps he didn’t mean to be cruel. My mother never remonstrated with him over his teasing, which makes me think him innocent of malice. I think him innocent in general, and I believe I’m not wrong.

“Having a picnic, outside, in this weather,” Dodo yelled, more loudly still, in the tone of a town crier. “I ask you.”

How strange to think that I shall never see myself from behind. It’s probably for the best — imagine that waddle — but all the same. I could rig up an arrangement of mirrors, though that would be to cheat. Anyway, I would be conscious of looking at myself, and self-consciousness, that kind of self-consciousness, always leads to falsity, or misconception, at least. Is that true? In this context it is, the context of my looking at myself. The fact is I’ll never see myself, back or front, in the round, so to speak — aptly to speak, in my case — and certainly not as others do. I can’t be natural in front of a mirror; I can’t be natural anywhere, of course, but especially not there. I approach my reflection like an actor stepping on to the stage — as don’t we all? True, on occasion I get the odd unprepared-for glimpse by accident, in shop windows on sunny days, or in a shadowy mirror on the return of a staircase, or in my own shaving glass, even, on a morning when I am fuddled with sleep, or crapulous from the night before. How anxious I look in these moments, how furtive, like one caught out in some base and shameful act. But these glancing encounters are no good either: the unprepared I is no more convincing than any other. The inevitable conclusion being, in my reading of the case, that there is no I–I’ve definitely said that before, and so have others, I’m not alone — that the I I think of, that upright, steadfast candle-flame burning perpetually within me, is a will-o’-the-wisp, a fatuous fire. What is left of me, then, is little more than a succession of poses, a concatenation of attitudes. Don’t mistake me, I find this notion invigorating. Why? Because, for one thing, it multiplies me, sets me among an infinity of universes all of my own, where I can be anything that occasion and circumstance demand, a veritable Proteus whom no one will hold on to for long enough to make him own up. Own up to what, exactly? Why, to all the base and shameful acts that I am guilty of, of course.

Once, when I was in the middle of a particularly vigorous bout of guilty self-laceration, Polly said to me, not without a touch of impatience, that I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. I might have pointed out, but didn’t, that what this really meant was that she thought I wasn’t as bad as she thought I was. There’s no limit to how finely Orme’s Razor can slice. Gloria the unwitting sophist said to me one day, “At least be honest and admit you’re a liar.” Kept me mulling for days, that one did; I mull over it yet.

I looked about. The rim of the sink was chipped, its brass taps were flecked with green. I gazed at a blackened kettle, a tarnished teapot, at the dresser with its cups and plates — delph, we used to call it — and felt, unwillingly, dismayingly, and with awful complacency, at home.

Olive asked if I would like a cup of tea. I said I could do with a drink. I was acutely conscious of Dodo’s baleful monitoring — it was giving me the fidgets. “I don’t think we have any drink,” Olive said, frowning. It was as if I had asked for a draught of laudanum, or a pinch of moly. She rummaged through cupboards, making a great clatter. “There’s a bottle of stout here,” she said doubtfully. “God knows how old it is.” I watched her glug the blackish-brown stuff into a glass that was fogged all up the sides with the grime of ages. Yellow froth like sea spume, the taste of wormwood. I thought straight off of my father, whose tipple was a pint at evening, just the one. Sometimes the self, the famously inexistent self, can sob all of its own accord, inwardly, without making a sound.

Olive, leaning at the sink, watched me as I drank. She was smoking another cigarette, with one arm folded across her concave chest. “Remember how I used to make a googy-egg for you?” she said. “A boiled egg chopped up with breadcrumbs and butter in a cup — remember? I bet you don’t, I bet you’ve forgotten. I know you, you only remember what suits you.” This was said with amused forbearance, which is the way in which she habitually treats me. She regards me, I think, as a sort of guileless charlatan, who early on mastered a set of cheap though effective tricks and has been getting away with them ever since, fooling everyone except her, yet all the while remaining, like my father before me, essentially innocent, or just plain dim. “Ah, yes,” she said, “you’ve forgotten who took care of you when you were little and our Ma was off gallivanting.” She laughed at my look. An inch of cigarette ash tumbled down the front of her apron; it always seems to me that ash when it falls like that should make a sound, the far-off rush and rumble of a distant avalanche. “You didn’t know about that, did you, about Ma and her fellas? There’s a lot you didn’t know, and don’t, though you think you’re such a clever-boots.”

She bent and opened the stove and fed a log into the sudden inferno of its mouth, then kicked the iron door shut again with one of her slippered, foot-long feet.

Dodo was keeping an unremitting watch on me with her bird’s little glossy black eye. “And him not taking a bit of notice,” she said, disdainful and indignant, and looked from Olive to me and back again, setting her mouth in sulky defiance.

This time Olive ignored her. “Come out and I’ll show you my workshop,” she said to me, plucking me by the sleeve.

She dropped the butt of her cigarette into the sink, where it made a hiss that to my ear sounded a definitely derisive note.

We picked our way across the garden. Under a stunted, forlorn and skeletal tree a cloud of tiny flies, gold-tinted in the chill sunlight, were shuttling energetically up and down, like the fast-running parts of an intricate engine made of air. Wonderful little creatures, to be out and so busy this late in the season. Where would they go to, when the real cold came? I imagined them letting the engine wind down as they subsided slowly into the sparse shelter of the winter grass, where they would lie on, little scattered flecks of fading gold, waiting for the spring. Pure fancy, of course; they’ll simply die.

“Are you still doing your stories?” Olive asked.

The pathway was uneven and muddy, and I had to watch the ground to keep from slopping into a puddle or tripping over my feet.

“Stories?” I said. “What do you mean, stories? It’s pictures I do — did. I’m a painter. Was.”

“Oh. I thought it was stories.”

“Well, it isn’t. Wasn’t.”

She nodded, thinking. “Why?” she said.

“What?”

“Why did you stop? Painting pictures, or whatever.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, well, it makes no odds anyhow.”

This, I should say, was a perfectly typical exchange between my sister and me. I don’t know if she gets things wrong on purpose, to annoy me, or if she really is becoming confused — she’s a good ten years older than I am. And living with Dodo, of course, can hardly be conducive to mental agility.

What, I wonder, does she make of life, my gangly and unlovely sister, or does she make anything of it at all? Surely she has some notion, some opinion, of what it is to be a sentient being, alive on the surface of this earth. It’s a thing I often ask myself about other people, not just Olive. When she was young, seventeen or so, she was sweet on a boy who wasn’t sweet on her. I can’t remember his name; a grinning lout with crooked teeth and a quiff, is what I recall. I saw her weeping over him, the day she finally had to admit to herself that he would not have her. It was high summer. She was in the parlour. There was a seat there, in the bay of the front window, no more than a built-in bench, really, hard and uncomfortable, covered with fake leather that had an unpleasant, slightly faecal and yet oddly reassuring smell, like the smell of an elderly pet. It was there Olive had flung herself down, in an awkward pose, seated squarely, with her big feet, in a pair of pink sandals — I see them, those sandals — planted side by side on the floor, while her torso was twisted violently sideways from the waist and draped along the leather-covered bench. She was facing down, with her forehead pressed on her folded arms, sobbing. My mother was there too, kneeling on the floor beside her, stroking with one hand her daughter’s tangled, wiry mop of hair, in which already there were premature streaks of grey, while the other rested on the girl’s heaving shoulder. The sun through the window fell full upon them, bathing them in a great harsh blaze. I remember my mother’s expression of almost panic-stricken helplessness. Even to my young eye, the scene — fey matron comforting weeping maiden — seemed quaintly overdone and much too brightly coloured, like something by Rossetti or Burne-Jones. Nevertheless I looked on agog with fascination and mortal fright, hidden behind the half-open door. I had never seen anyone weep with such passion, such unselfconscious abandon, unashamedly; suddenly my sister had become transfigured, was a creature of mysterious portent, a sacrificial victim laid out upon an altar, awaiting the high priest and his knife. For a long time afterwards I was haunted by a sense of having seen something I should not have been allowed to see, of having stumbled clumsily upon a secret ritual that my presence had grossly polluted. Even a little boy, or a little boy especially, has an eye for the numinous, and out of such instances of transgression and sacred terror the gods were born, in the childhood of the world. Poor Olive. I think that day marked the end of what hopes she might have had for even a half-contented life. Thereafter, the tobacco pipe, the jacket and tie, the mannish lope, these were the ways she found of spitting in the world’s eye.

Her workshop was a sort of pitch-pine shed propped against the back wall of the garden. It had a sloping roof and a sagging door with a square window to either side of it. There was a wooden work bench, as massive as a butcher’s block, with a huge, oil-blackened iron vice bolted to it. The floor was covered with a thick pile of wood shavings that were pleasantly crunchy underfoot. Her tools hung on a long board fixed to the back wall, ranged neatly according to use and size. On the bench were her mitre-boxes, her miniature saws and hammers, her sanding boards and tubes of glue and sticky pots of varnish.

“This was all your father’s stuff,” she said, gesturing about, “all these tools and things.” She always speaks of our dad as being mine, as if to extract herself from the family equation. I said I hadn’t known he went in for woodwork. She shook her head to show how she despaired of me. “He was always out in the shed, sawing and hammering. That’s how he got away from her.” She meant, I had to assume, my mother, our mother. I took up a mitre-box and fingered it, frowning. “I suppose,” she said, “you’ve forgotten, too, how I made the wooden frames for them canvases you used to paint on?” Stretchers — did she make stretchers for me? If she remembered that, why did she claim to think that I wrote stories? She has an ineradicable streak of slyness, my sister. “Saved our ma a fortune, I did,” she said, “considering there wasn’t anything you couldn’t have, no matter how dear it was.” I examined the mitre-box more closely still. “I used to size the canvas for you, too, with wallpaper paste and a big brush. Is all that gone, all the work I did for you, all forgotten? You’re lucky — I wish I had a memory like yours.”

Slender lengths of hardwood were stacked in a corner, and along the front edge of the bench hung a dozen or more identical Christs, each held in place by a tiny nail driven through the palm of one hand, so that they dangled crookedly there like a line of sinking swimmers frantically signalling for help. They were made of hard plastic, and had the moist, waxy sheen of mothballs. Each one had a crown of plastic thorns and a dab of shiny crimson paint at the left side of the chest just under the rib-cage. Olive doesn’t go in much for religion, so far as I know; in another age she would probably have been burned at the stake. I pictured her here in her witch’s den of an evening, nailing these voodoo dolls to their wooden crosses and cackling softly to herself. “I’ve sent off for luminous paint, to do the eyes,” she said casually, pursing her lips and fingering a stray lock of hair — it was clear she thought this a particularly inspired innovation. I asked what she did with the crucifixes when they were made. Here she turned shifty. “I sell them, of course,” she said, with a dismissive shrug, lifting one bony shoulder and letting it fall again, and busied herself with the selection and lighting of yet another cigarette. I watched her drop the still smouldering match on to the shavings at our feet. I asked to whom did she sell them; I was genuinely curious. She began to cough again, leaning against the bench with her shoulders hunched and softly stamping one foot. When the attack had passed she stood with her head lifted, making a sort of mooing sound and pressing a hand to her chest. “Oh, there’s a shop that buys things like that,” she panted. This was patently a fib. I suspect she throws them away, or uses them for kindling in the kitchen stove. She took a deep drag from her cigarette and blew smoke at the window, where it became a soft billow, like a flattened pumpkin; so much of the world is amorphous, though it seems so solid. I could see Olive casting about hastily for a change of subject.

“How’s your friend?” she asked. “The fellow that fixes watches.”

“Marcus Pettit?”

“ ‘Marcus Pettit?’ ” she squawked, parroting me, and made an idiot face and waggled her head, which made her look like Tenniel’s long-necked Alice after she ate the Caterpillar’s magic mushroom. “How many watchmakers do you think there are in this mighty metropolis?”

I put down the mitre-box and cleared my throat. “I haven’t seen Marcus,” I said, looking at my hands, “for some time.”

“I’d say not.” She laughed huskily. “A nice game you have going, the gang of you.” The back of my neck had gone hot. One is never too old, I find, to feel oneself childishly admonished. “I suppose you haven’t seen his missus, either, for some time.”

I was about to reply, with who knows what kind of riposte, when suddenly she held up a hand and cocked her head to one side on its long stalk of neck, listening to some sound from the house that only she could hear. “Oh, there she goes,” she said, with flat annoyance, and at once was out of the shed and plunging across the garden towards the back door. I followed, at a slower pace. I think I was still blushing.

Dodo in her armchair was in great distress, her little face screwed up, uttering bird-like squeaks and fluttering her hands and her feet, while big, babyish tears rose up in her eyes. Olive, who was leaning down to her and making soothing noises, cast a dark glance at me over her shoulder. “It’s nothing,” she said, in a stage whisper, “only the old waterworks.” She turned back to Dodo. “Isn’t that all it is, Dodie,” she shouted, “only the waterworks, and not the other?” She leaned lower, and sniffed, and turned to me again. “It’s all right,” she said, “just a bit of damp, nothing worse.” She straightened up and took me by the arm. “You go out in the hall,” she said, “and wait.” A wind had sprung up suddenly; it groaned in the chimney and lifted the lid of the stove. Dodo, shamed and shamingly undone, was weeping freely now. “Go on, go on!” Olive growled, shooing me out.

It was cold in the dim hallway. A weak shaft of pink-stained light angling down through the ruby glass of the transom over the front door brought back to my mind the line of crookedly leaning, semi-crucified Christs out in the shed. I always found church statues frightening, when I was a child, the way they just stood there, not quite life-sized, with melancholy eyes cast down and slender hands held out, wearily imploring something of me the nature of which I couldn’t guess and which even they seemed to have forgotten long ago. The sanctuary lamp, too, was worrying, red like the glass in that lunette above the door here and perpetually aglow, keeping an unwavering watch on me and my sinful ways. Sometimes I would wake in the night and shiver to think of it there, that ever-vigilant eye pulsing in the church’s vast and echoing emptiness.

In the hall now a host of things out of the past hovered around me, there and not there, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

Muffled sounds of struggle and stress were coming from the kitchen, where I supposed Dodo’s linen was being changed. I could hear the fat little woman’s tearful cries and Olive’s gruff comfortings. This, I thought, must be love, after all, frail and needful on one side, briskly practical on the other. Not something I could manage, though: too plain and unembellished, for me; too mundane, altogether.

Why didn’t I leave the house, right then? Why didn’t I just slip out at the front door and creep away into the freedom of the afternoon? Olive probably wouldn’t have cared, probably wouldn’t even have noticed I was gone, while I’m sure poor Dodo would have been glad to be rid of a witness to her humiliation. What held me there in that hallway, what fingers reaching out of a lost world, caressing and clutching? Smell of linoleum, of old wallpaper, of dusty cretonne, and that beam of sanctified lurid light shining on me. I was astonished to feel tears prickling at my eyelids. For what or whom would I weep? For myself, of course; for whom else do I ever weep?

Presently I was summoned back into the kitchen. All seemed as before, except for a strong ammoniac smell, and Dodo’s high colour and downcast gaze. I sat again by the table. The wind was pounding at the house now, rattling the windows and setting the rafters creaking and making the stove shoot out spurts of smoke through tiny gaps in the door and along the rim of the red-hot lid. Sitting there, I felt myself being absorbed into the listless rhythm of the room. Olive, making yet another pot of tea, ignored me, and manoeuvred her way around me as if I were no more than a mildly awkward obstacle, one that had always been there.

I find myself thinking again, for no good reason, of Gloria’s potted myrtle tree, the one that nearly died. I keep calling it a myrtle but I’m sure it’s not. Worried that the parasites might return, one day Gloria decided to clip off all the leaves. She went about the task with an uncharacteristic and what seemed to me almost biblical fierceness, showing no mercy, her jaw set, until even the smallest and most tender shoots were gone. When the task was complete she had a sated air, though after-tremors of wrathful righteousness seemed to be throbbing still within her. I could not but sympathise with the poor shrub, which in its shorn state looked starkly self-conscious and sorry for itself. I have a notion that Gloria holds me in some way responsible for the thing’s plight, as if I had brought the parasites into the house, not just as a carrier of them but as their progenitor, a huge pale grub with a swollen sac that one day had burst and sprayed its countless young all over her defenceless, miniature green pet. Throughout the autumn it stood there, leafless, and seemingly lifeless, too, until a week ago, when it woke up and suddenly began putting out buds at a tremendous rate — one could almost see them sprouting. I’m not sure what to make of this unnatural profusion on the brink of winter. Maybe I shouldn’t make anything of it. Gloria hasn’t mentioned the plant’s resurgence, although I seem to detect a triumphant gleam in her eye, as though she feels herself vindicated, or somehow revenged, even, on something, or someone. She is in a very strange, high-strung mood, one that I can’t make out at all. It’s very unsettling. I keep waiting for the air to begin vibrating, for the ground to shift under my feet, although I would have thought there could be no more earthquakes, there having been so many of them already.

I leaned over the table and finished the tepid, soapy dregs of stout and put the glass down and said that I must be off. Dodo still would not look at me, and glared at the stove instead, hunching her shoulders and uttering a furious word or two now and then under her breath. In fact, they were well matched, she and the stove, and even looked dumpily a little alike, the two of them blazing away internally, muttering to themselves and sending out angry shoots of heat and smoke. I am the original anthropomorphist.

Olive came with me to the front door, and we stood a while together in the thick gold light of the latening afternoon. The wind had died down as suddenly as it had sprung up. Big tawny leaves were scratching at the pavement, and an old crow in a tree somewhere was coughing hoarsely and cursing to itself. What a memory I have, to retain so many things and so clearly; I must be imagining them. I stood with my hands plunged in the pockets of my overcoat and squinted about. Bleak thoughts in a dying season. Then, to my considerable surprise, I heard myself asking if I might come round and call here again; I don’t know what had come over me. Instead of answering, my sister smiled and looked away, doing that sideways chewing movement with her lower jaw that she does when she is amused. “You never knew, did you, how you were loved,” she said, “not in all the years, and now look at you.” I made to question this — how loved, by whom? — but she shook her head, still with that knowing, saddened smile. She put a hand to my elbow and gave me a push, not ungently. “Go home, Olly,” she said. “Go home to your wife.” Or was it life she said? — not wife but life? Anyway, I went.

However, I had gone only a little way when I heard a call and turned to see Olive running after me with something in her hand. Churning along that high pavement in her apron and cardigan and her old felt slippers, she bore with her, I saw with a shock, a whole family of resemblances: my parents were there, mother as well as father, and my dead brother, and I, too, I was there, and so was my lost child, my lost little daughter, and a host of others, whom I knew but only half recognised. This is how the dead come back, borne by the living, to throng us round, pale ghosts of themselves and of us.

“Here,” Olive, panting, said, “here’s a present for you.” She thrust a wooden crucifix into my hand. “It might bring you luck, and it’ll save you pinching one.” And she laughed.

—

The notion of an end, I mean the possibility of there being an end, this has always fascinated me. It must be mortality, our own, that gives us the concept. I shall die, and so shall you, and there’s an end, we say. But even that’s not certain. After all, despite what the priests promise us, no man or phantom has yet returned from that infamous bourne to tell us what delights or otherwise await us there, nor is likely to. In the meantime, in our fallen, finite world, anything one sets out to do or make cannot be finished, only broken off, abandoned. For what would constitute completion? There’s always something more, another step to venture, another word to utter, another brushstroke to be added. The set of all sets is itself a set. Ah, but tarry a moment. There is the loop to be considered. Join up the extremities and the thing can go on for ever, round and round. That, surely, is a sort of end. True, there’s no end-point, as such, no buffers for the train to run up against. All the same, outside the loop there is nothing. Well, there is, of course, there’s a great deal, there’s almost everything, but nothing of consequence to the thing that’s going round, since that is completed in itself, in a swirling infinity all of its own.

Wonderful, how an injection of pure speculation — never mind the questionable logic — icy-cold and colourless as a shot of opium, can deaden briefly even the worst of afflictions. Briefly.

Anyway, the prompt for today’s brief interval of mental gymnastics was the thought that at either end, at either extremity, I should say, of the particular loop I’ve been winding round my fingers, and yours — in truth, it’s less a loop than a cat’s cradle — there should happen to occur a picnic. Yes, a picnic, indeed picnics, not one but two. Cast your mind back to my mentioning, oh, ages ago, that the first encounter I could recall between the four of us, that is, Polly, Marcus, Gloria and me, was a little outing to a park somewhere that we went on together one intermittently rainy summer afternoon. I spoke of it then as a version of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, but time, I mean recent time, has mellowed it to something less boldly done. Instead, picture it, say, as a scene by Vaublin, mon semblable, nay, my twin, not in summer now but some other, more sombre, season, the crepuscular park with its auburn masses of trees under big heapings of evening cloud, dark-apricot, gold, gesso-white, and in a clearing, see, the luminous little group arranged upon the grass, one idly strumming a mandolin, another looking wistfully away with a finger pressed to a dimpled cheek — she did have dimples, Polly did, in those days — and in the foreground a chignoned blonde beauty in burnished silk, while nearby someone else, guess who, is angling for a kiss. I have purposely banished the rain, the midges, that wasp I found desperately paddling in my wine glass. They look as decorous as you like, this little band of picnickers gathered there, don’t they? Yet something about them sounds a faintly dissonant note, as if there were a string out of tune on that pot-bellied mandolin.

Your guess about the would-be covert kisser was wrong, by the way. Honestly, pas moi! — to keep on in the French mode we seem to be favouring today, due to Vaublin’s sudden apparition, I suppose.

Jealousy. Now there’s a fit subject for another of those dissertations of mine I’m sure we’re all thoroughly tired of by now. But jealousy is something I’ve only come to in these past weeks and it’s still a novelty, if that’s the way to put it. The heart’s scandal, the blood on fire, a needle in the bone, choose your formulation according to your taste. As for me, I will a round unvarnished tale deliver. Well, there’s bound to be a lick of varnish, though I’ll try to keep it to the thinnest wash. As always with these affairs—le mot juste! — one never gets to the truth entirely. Something is always elided, passed over, suppressed, a date skilfully falsified, a rendezvous presented as something it was not, a phone call almost overheard that is abruptly suspended in mid-sentence. Anyway, if one were to be offered the whole truth, unvarnished, one wouldn’t accept it, since after the first twitch of suspicion everything becomes tainted with uncertainty, bathed in a bile-green glow. I never knew the meaning of the word “obscene,” never felt the overwhelming, robed-and-mitred majesty of it, till I was forced to entertain the thought of my beloved, one of my beloveds — both of my beloveds! — pressed sweatily flesh to flesh with someone who was not me. Yes, once that losel had reared its ugly head, clamped inside its puce and glossy helmet, there was no avoiding its terrible, gloating eye.

It was Dodo, of all people, who had planted the first faint suspicion. Her mention of a picnic, witlessly uttered, so it seemed at the time, nevertheless lodged in my mind like a small hard sharp seed, one that soon put out a snaking tendril, the first shoot of what would become a luxuriant, rank and noxious flowering. I took to the back roads of the town, stumping along in my long coat, hands clamped behind my back — picture Bonaparte, on Elba — brooding, speculating, calculating, above all picking over my memory for clues on which to feed my hardening conviction that things were going on of which hitherto I had known nothing, or to which at any rate I had blinded myself. What had happened, what really had happened, among the four of us, that long-ago day in the park, in the sunlight and the rain? Had I been so busy registering Polly and storing her away for the future, as a spider — my God! — would parcel up a peacock-green and gorgeously glistening fly, that I hadn’t noticed the selfsame thing going on elsewhere? The trouble with thinking back like that, trying to unravel the ravelled past, was that everything became uncoupled — ha! — and half the effort I had to make was merely to fall into step with myself and get straight to where I did not want to arrive at. Even the threads of my syntax are becoming tangled.

“You could say,” Gloria said, picking her words, I saw, with slow deliberation, “that we came to an understanding. Neither of us spoke of it, that day, the day of the picnic, and not for a long time afterwards, not for years, and then only when there was due provocation.”

“Due provocation?” I said, spluttering. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

The things my fancy forces on me! — it’s Bonaparte’s sudden popping up a couple of paragraphs past that leads me now to see myself, in that momentous confrontation, got up in a cutaway coat and tight white breeches and an even tighter, double-breasted sailcloth waistcoat that bulges over my portly little belly and gives to my cheeks an apoplectic shine, as I strut up and down in front of my preternaturally composed wife, a greasy forelock falling over my bulbous brow and the Grande Armée crowding outside the door, shoving and sniggering. In fact, the door was made of glass, and no one was out there. We were in the Winter Garden, that vast, glorified greenhouse erected for the public’s delight by one of Freddie Hyland’s philanthropic forebears, atop another of the town’s low hills — looking eastwards from up here we could see, across a mile of jumbled roofs, the wintry sun, already getting ready to set, tenaciously ashine in the windows of our own house on Fairmount. The Winter Garden afforded us the solitude so necessary for the kind of wrangle we were having, for the place is always deserted: from the first the town considered it a laughable nonsense, and bad for the health, too, in those tubercular days, because of the dampness and the dank air inside. In the time of the Hylands’ hegemony, news of Friday-night lay-offs at one or other of the family’s mills or factories would sweep through the town, like a wind-driven flame, and when darkness fell, gangs of newly unemployed labourers would tramp in a muttering mob up Haddon’s Hill and surround the defenceless folly and smash half of its panes, which on Saturday morning the Hylands, with characteristic, weary fortitude, would cause to be replaced, by paid squads of the very same workers who had broken them the night before.

“You’re completely hopeless,” my wife said. She was looking at me, not unkindly, with the barest shadow of a smile. “You do realise that, don’t you? I mean, you must.”

The day was cold, and here inside, the glass walls were engreyed with mist through which bright rivulets of moisture ran endlessly downwards, so that we seemed to be in a lofty hall hung all round by great swathes of bead curtain, silvery and glistening. There were old gas-jets fixed high up on the struts of the timber frame. Someone long ago had etched the legend Hang the Krauts into one of the panes, with a diamond ring, it must have been, and instantly I pictured Freddie Hyland dangling comically from one of the metal struts above us here, his eyes popping and his blue tongue sticking out.

I said to Gloria that I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that I suspected she didn’t, either. Was she saying, I demanded, that for years, for years and years, since that day of the picnic in the park, she and Marcus had been — what? Secret lovers? “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” she said, throwing up her chin and laughing. Recently I had begun to notice that new laugh of hers: it is a cool, metallic sound, rather like the chiming of a distant bell coming over the fields on a frosty day, and must be, now that I think of it, the counterpart to that cold small smile of Marcus’s that Polly had described to me so memorably. I was sweating now, and not just because of the steamy warmth in here. I imagined the two of them together, my wife and my erstwhile friend, discussing me, he smiling and she with her new, tinkling laugh, and I felt a stab of the clearest, purest anguish, so pure and clear that for a second it took my breath away. Always there awaits a new way of suffering.

“And besides,” Gloria said, “you have a nerve, preaching at me about secret lovers.”

We had progressed into the Palm House, a grand name for what is only one end of the building cordoned off behind glass screens. It is a gloomy, claustral space inhabited by towering growths more like animals than plants, with leathery leaves the size of an elephant’s ears, and wads of thick hairy stuff around their bases that make it seem as if their socks have fallen down. Gloria was seated on a low stone bench, smoking a cigarette, leaning forwards a little with her legs crossed and an elbow propped on one knee. I could not understand how she could be so calm, or seem to be. She was wearing her big white coat, the one that I dislike, with the conical collar. I felt, here in this humid, hot and fetid place, as if I had toppled out of a high window and yet were suspended somehow, on a strong updraught, and would in a moment begin the long plunge earthwards, the air shrieking in my ears and the ground spinning towards me at a dizzying and ever-accelerating rate. Yet I wanted to laugh, too, out of some crazed and suffering urge.

“You should have told me,” I said. I’m sure I was wringing my hands.

“Told you what?”

“About the picnic. About you and’—I thought I would choke on it—“about you and Marcus.”

At this she did again her little laugh. “There was nothing to tell,” she said, “then. Besides, I saw you ogling Polly that day, that day years ago, trying to see up her dress.”

“What are you saying?” I expostulated — yes, I did a lot of expostulating that day. “You’re imagining things!”

I could sense those huge-eared creatures at my back, those elephantine trees; they would forget nothing of what they were hearing, the news of my downfall at last.

“Look, the only thing that happened,” Gloria said patiently, as if setting out yet again to try to explain something complicated to a simpleton, “is that we realised we were soul-mates, Marcus and I.”

I felt as if some heavy, soft thing inside me had flopped over with a squelch. “What,” I cried thickly, “you and that long streak of misery?” Name-calling, as you see, was the level I had come to; it hadn’t taken long. “And soul-mates?” I said, with another tremor of disgust. “Do you know how much I despise that kind of thing?”

“Yes,” she said, giving me a level look, “I do.”

I stepped past her and with the side of my fist made a spy-hole in the fogged glass wall. Out there, a scoured sky, and a lead-pink fringe of clouds along the horizon that looked like the stuffing squeezing out of something. There always seem to be clouds like that, even on the clearest days; always it must be raining somewhere. I turned to speak again to my wife, where she sat with her back towards me, but found I couldn’t, and stood helpless, gaping at the pale glimmer of her bared, leaning neck. She twisted round and looked at me over her shoulder. “How did you find out?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About the picnic, so-called.”

“Which one?”

She tightened her mouth at me. “I’d hardly mean the one all four of us went on, would I?”

I said someone must have seen them together, her and Marcus. “Of course,” she said, amused. “That was inevitable, I suppose, given what this place is like.” Now she looked at me more closely, frowning, seeming suddenly concerned. “Come,” she said, patting the empty place on the bench beside her, “come and sit down, you poor man.”

It’s only in dreams that things are inevitable; in the waking world there is nothing that cannot be avoided, with one celebrated exception. That had always been my experience, up to now. But the way she did that, patting the bench and calling me “poor man,” heralded an inevitability that would not be fudged.

“Tell me the truth,” I said, slumping down beside her.

“I’ve told you all there is to tell.” She dropped the stub of her cigarette at her feet and trod on it deftly with the heel of her shoe. “Whoever the someone was who saw us can’t have seen much. I took along a bottle of your wine, and Marcus had some awful sandwiches he had bought somewhere. We went out to Ferry Point, and I parked on that place above the bridge. We talked for hours. I got terribly cold. You should have seen my knuckles, how red they were.”

I should have seen her knuckles.

“This was when?” I asked, sinking deeper and almost cosily into my newly hatching misery.

“Just after you ran off and Marcus realised what had been going on,” she said, in a hardened voice. “I had known for ages, of course.”

“What do you mean, ages?”

“From the start, I think.”

“And you didn’t mind?”

She thought about this, leaning forwards again and jiggling the toe of one shoe. “Yes, I minded,” she said. “But I shed all the tears I had when the child died, and so there weren’t any left for you. Sorry.”

I nodded, gazing at my hands. They looked like someone else’s: gnarled, rope-veined, discoloured.

“If you knew,” I said, “why didn’t you tell him?”

“Marcus?”

“Yes, Marcus. Seeing you were such soul-mates.”

She made a sort of bridling movement inside her coat. “I thought he knew, too. We never spoke about you, or Polly, not until after you had run away.”

“And then? Did you speak of us then?”

“Not much.”

I was looking at a giant palm that towered over us, like a frozen green water-spout, displaying itself in all its baroque and ponderous grandeur. The infolded fronds, as broad at their broadest as native canoes, were thickly burnished, and scarred, where they leaned low, with the hieroglyphs of ancient graffiti. Such a weighty thing it was, held there at what seemed a suffering stance, and yet weightless, too. The tension of things: that was always the most difficult quality to catch, in whatever medium I employed. Everything is braced against the pull of the world, straining to rise but grounded to the earth. A violin is always lighter than it looks, strung so tensely on its strings, and when you pick it up you feel it wanting to rise out of your hand. Think of an archer’s bow in the instant after the arrow has flown, think of the twang of its cord, the spring of its arc, the shudder and thrum all along its curved and tempered length. Did I ever achieve anything of that litheness, that air-aspiring buoyancy? No, I think. My things were always gravid, weighed down with the too-much that I expected of them.

“Polly doesn’t know, does she?” I asked. I sounded like a bankrupt enquiring mournfully if at least his front door is still on its hinges.

“About what?”

“This supposed second picnic that you and Marcus went on.”

“I don’t know what Polly knows,” she said. She breathed a sort of laugh. “Polly is busy frying other fish.”

Fish, I didn’t ask, what fish? No, I didn’t ask. I would press no further. There was a limit to the number of whacks I could take from this particular cudgel.

I said that all that there had been between Polly and me was ended; it hadn’t been much, anyway, when measured against the general scale of things. “Yes,” Gloria said, nodding. “And between Marcus and me, whatever it was or wasn’t, that’s done, too.”

I got up and went and stood at the glass again, and again looked out over the town. The sun we see setting is not the sun itself but its after-image, refracted by the lens of the earth’s atmosphere. Make some lesson out of that, if you will; I haven’t the heart.

“What shall we do now?” I asked.

“We shall do nothing,” my wife answered, drawing her coat tightly about her, despite the damp heat pressing down all round. “There’s nothing for us to do.”

And she was right. Everything had been done already, though even she didn’t know yet, I think, what all of that everything would entail. Why is it life’s surprises are nearly always nasty, and with a nastily comical edge, just for good measure?

—

I walked out one day recently to Ferry Point and scrambled up the steep slope of the hill there, through thickets of gorse, still in blossom, and bristling stands of dead fern stalks, very sharp and treacherous. I fell down repeatedly, tearing my trousers and grazing my knees and ruining my absurdly unsuitable shoes — whatever became of those boots I borrowed from Janey at Grange Hall? By the time I had scaled the height I felt like Billy Bunter, smarting and bruised after yet another of his hapless scrapes. Poor Billy, everyone laughs at him though I cannot understand why: he seems so sad to me. The hill up there is flat, as if the top of it had been sliced clean off, leaving a wide, circular patch of clayey ground where very little grows, even in summer, except scrub grass and thistles and here and there a solitary poppy, self-conscious and blushing. It’s a spot much frequented by what used to be called courting couples — they drive up at night and park in front of the famous view, though scenery is hardly what is on their mind, and anyway it’s unlikely they can make out much of it in the dark. I’ve seen half a dozen cars at a time up there, ranged side by side, like basking seals, their windows steamed up; no sound comes from them, for the most part, though now and then one or other of them will begin to rock on its springs, gently at first but with increasing urgency. Loners come here too, sometimes. They park well away from the others, their cars seeming bathed in a deeper kind of darkness. Their windscreens stare out blackly into the night, in mute desperation, while in the darkness behind the glossy glass the burning tip of a single cigarette flares and fades, flares and fades.

The view is magnificent, I grant that. The estuary, a broad sheet of stippled silver, stretches off to the horizon, with hazel woods on either side where no one ventures save the odd hunter, and, above, calm hills that fold themselves neatly under the edges of the sky. Over here, on this decapitated height, there is the stump of a ruined tower, like a snapped-off finger pointing in furious recrimination at the sky; in Norman times it must have stood guard over the narrow ford in the river below, spanned now by the old iron bridge that is due to collapse any day, by the rickety look of it. That’s where the farmer in his lorry picked me up that night of storm and flight, how many months ago? Not more than three — I can hardly believe it! Marcus just missed that bridge, on his way down.

Winded still and panting, I sat on a mossy rock under the side wall of the tower. What had brought me up here? It was a place of singular, no, of manifold significance. This was where Marcus and my missus held their first tryst, on that second picnic, drinking my wine and eating Marcus’s awful sandwiches. Was it by day, or at night? By day, surely: even secret lovers wouldn’t go on a picnic after dark, would they? I imagined Gloria’s knuckles, red from the cold. I imagined her lifting up her face, smiling, with her eyes closed. I imagined a wisp of Marcus’s hair falling forwards, stirred by her breath. I imagined the car rocking on its springs.

I closed my own eyes, and felt the faint warmth of November sunlight on the lids.

Things in the great world continue to go awry — talk about the pathetic fallacy! Those solar storms show no signs of abating. Corkscrews of fire and gas shoot out into space from fissures in the star’s flaming crust, a million miles high, some of them, it’s said. The shops are selling a thing through which to view these titanic disturbances, a cardboard mask with some kind of special filter in the slitted eye-holes. One comes upon children, and not just children, standing masked and motionless in the street, staring upwards as if spellbound, which they are, I suppose, the sun being the oldest and most compelling of the gods. There are spectacular showers of meteorites, too, free fireworks displays at nightfall as regular as the universal clockwork used to be. Every other day comes news of a new disaster. Terrible tides race across archipelagos and sweep all before them, drowning small brown folk in their tens of thousands, and chunks of continents break off and topple into the sea, while volcanoes spew out tons of dust that darken skies all round the world. Meanwhile our poor maimed earth lumbers along its eccentric circuit, wobbling like a spinning top at the end of its spin. The old world is coming back, retrograde progression in full swing, in no time all will be as it once was. This is what they say, the scryers and prognosticators. The churches are thronged — one hears the massed voices of the faithful within, lifted in quavering chants, lamenting and beseeching.

I must have dropped off for a minute, sitting there on my stone in the sun under the blunt tower’s wall. It’s a thing I do with increasing frequency, these days; mild narcolepsy, it would seem, is one of the consequences of a beleagured and battered heart. Hearing myself addressed, I started awake. He was an ancient fellow, stooped and skinny, with a stubbled chin and a rheumy eye. For a second I thought it was the old farmer himself, he of the lorry and the hair-raising and — did I but know it — prophetic tale of death by water. Come to think of it, maybe it was him. One old man, at that stage of decrepitude, will look much like another, I should think. His trousers, extraordinarily filthy, would have been big enough to accommodate two of him, and swirled freely about his haunches and his scrawny shanks, held up by a pair of what I know he would call galluses. His shirt was collarless, his buttonless coat was long, his boots were without laces and, like his trousers, many sizes too big for him. “Got a smoke, pal?” he croaked.

I said no, that I had no cigarettes, and at once, I don’t know for what reason — unless it was something in the old boy’s milky eye that jogged my memory — I recalled how I used to come up here, years ago, when I was a boy, with a school friend I was in love with. His name, though you won’t believe it, was Oliver. I say love, but of course I’m using the word in its most innocent sense. It would not have occurred to Oliver or to me to so much as touch each other. For the best part of a year we were inseparable. We were the two Ollys, one short and fat, the other tall and thin. I would never let on, but I was fiercely proud to be seen about with him, as if I were an explorer and he some impressively colourful and noble creature, a Red Indian chief, say, or an Aztec prince, whom I had brought back with me after long years of voyaging. In the end, one sad September, he moved with his family to some other town, far away, leaving me bereft. We vowed to keep in touch, and I think we even exchanged a letter or two, but thereafter the connection lapsed.

Not the least of my chum’s attractions was the fact that he had a glass eye. One doesn’t come across glass eyes very often these days, unless the makers have got extremely adept at fashioning them to look like the real thing. Oliver had lost his eye in an accident — though he darkly insisted it was no accident at all — when his brother shot him with an air-rifle. He was very touchy about his disfigurement, and I think had convinced himself that people didn’t notice unless their attention was drawn to it. He was loath to take the eye out, as I dearly wished him to do — who wouldn’t want to see the gadgetry at the back of the eye, all those squiggly purple veins, those tangles of tubelets, those tiny nozzles with suckers on the ends? When one day he gave in — what things a friend will do for a friend, at that age — I was deeply disappointed. He bent forwards and with the bunched fingers of one hand made a quick, rotating movement, and there it was in his palm, bigger than a big marble, shiny, moist all over, and managing to express, somehow, both indignation and astonishment. It was not the eye that most interested me, as I’ve said, but the socket. However, when he raised his head and faced me, with a curious, maidenly shyness, there was not the gaping cavern I had hoped for, but only a wrinkled, pinkish hollow with a black slit where the eyelids did not quite meet. “It’s the getting it back in that’s the tricky bit,” Oliver said, in a slightly injured, slightly accusing, tone.

The old man had moved away, and was mooching about the hilltop, scratching himself and coughing like a goat. What was he looking for, what did he hope to find? The place is littered with crushed cigarette packets and flattened fag-ends, empty naggin bottles, scraps of paper with uninvestigable stains, french letters smudged into the mud. What did we do up here, the other Olly and I? Sat under the wall of the tower, as I was sitting now, and talked for hours earnestly of life and related matters. Oh, we were a solemn pair. My pal had an uncannily still and, in spite, or because, of his glass eye, particularly penetrating stare. I thought him marvellously sophisticated, and certainly he was cleverer and far more knowledgeable than I ever hoped to be. He knew all about the by now infamous Brahma Postulate, before I had even heard of it, and could expound on the theory of infinities until the cows came home. His father had put his name down, Oliver told me, for a place at the Godley Institute of Technology, that seat of technological wizardry, which Oliver referred to, familiarly and with impressive nonchalance, as the Old GIT. I was much too bashful to tell him about my plans to be a painter. Looking back, I suspect he hadn’t much interest in me, for all that we were supposed to be such friends — even among schoolboys there is always one who is loved, and one who does the loving. I wonder what became of him. Some dull job somewhere, I would guess, an assistant managership, perhaps, in a provincial bank. The really clever types rarely live up to their early promise, while many of the dozy ones eventually shake themselves awake and shine. I did the opposite, shone at first and later on went dull.

Gloria is going to have a child. Not mine, needless to say. She doesn’t know what to make of it, and neither do I. No point in talking about rage, jealousy again, bitter sorrow; all that’s a given. We feel acutely, she and I, the slightly farcical aspect of our predicament. We are embarrassed and don’t know what to do about it. We could pretend I am the father, nothing easier, but we won’t, I think. Gloria might go away, as in former times ladies used to do, discreetly, when they found themselves inconveniently in an interesting condition. There’s the house in Aigues-Mortes that she’s still looking into; she might retire to there until she comes to term — how I love these gracious, antique euphemisms — but what would be the good of that? She would have to return eventually, with her bouncing, unexplained babe in tow. She has no intention now of leaving me. She hasn’t said so in so many words but I know it is the case. She has good reason to go, and I suppose technically I have good reason to ask her to be gone, but since when has good reason seemed a good reason for doing anything? It’s not a matter of protecting our reputation — I believe Gloria doesn’t even care what Polly thinks of her — but of doing the right thing. This will seem strange, I know, and I’m not sure myself what it means, but it means something. I don’t believe in much, in the way of morals and manners, but I am convinced that disorder can be, not ordered, perhaps, but arranged, in certain, not unharmonious, configurations. It’s a question of aesthetics, once again. In this too I feel I have Gloria’s tacit agreement.

It’s all confused, of course, all topsy-turvy. I’m thinking of calling a general meeting of interested parties — not Olive, perhaps, and certainly not Dodo, though I know they would be more than interested — to explain that a mistake has been made, that by rights I should not be the one at the receiving end of all this strife and torment. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t speak of rights. I don’t claim to be the sole injured party; we’re all in injury time, here. But I am the stealer — was the stealer — not the stolen from. Indeed, I want to make clear that the things that have been taken from me were not taken but forfeited. I am master of my own misfortune.

The old fellow came back from his questings, empty-handed, and sat himself down on the rock beside me, arranging the floppy legs of his trousers around his knees, like a woman demurely fixing her skirts. The rock was roomy enough to accommodate the two of us, so that we were both there but not together. I was glad we were outdoors, for he smelt remarkably bad, even for a tramp: rotted animal hide, with an undertone of domestic gas, and ripe cheese notes. “You were a butty of your man’s, were you?” he said. I was watching a small translucent orange cloud making its innocent way along the rim of one of those low hills and setting out across the estuary. I thought of Oliver, I mean Marcus, crouched at his work bench, the jeweller’s glass screwed into his eye socket, tinily tinkering with the innards of my father’s Elgin watch. “I seen him, that day, in that big car, going into the drink. Over there, it was.” He pointed with a filthy fingernail. “The skid marks are still in the grass, if you want to see them.” He gave himself a vigorous scratch, and sighed and shook his head and, for good measure, spat. “You wouldn’t want to be blaming yourself, now, for a thing like that,” he said. Or I think that’s what he said, unless my ears deceived me, which on occasion, on difficult occasion, it pleases them to do. The little cloud was leaving a reflected pinkish smear on the surface of the water far below.

Tick, tock.

Tick.

Tock.

—

Christmas and its bells and baubles done with at last. It was a particularly grisly one, this year; hardly surprising, in the circumstances. Gloria and I passed the day in tranquil solitude, from the world and for the most part from each other. We drank a glass of wine together at noon, then retired to our separate quarters, each with a tray, a bottle and a book. Very civilised. We await the new year with a formless sense of trepidation. What will become of us at all? Fateful events, more than one, are due. Gloria will stay here, that seems definite — there is no more mention of Aigues-Mortes — at least until the child arrives. I’m thinking of suggesting to her that we might try making a go of it, the three of us, Daddy, Mummy and Mummy’s Little Surprise. A bizarre fancy, I agree. The child will not be a girl, I think. I hope not, at any rate: our last one didn’t have much luck. No, I fancy it’s another Marcus the Watchmaker in there, biding his time.

I did a raid on my secret hiding places, here and at the gate-lodge — shivery experience, that visit, I felt like my own ghost — and threw out a goodly number of treasures from the bad old days. Chief among them was Miss Vandeleur’s green-gowned porcelain lady, retrieved from her still-fragrant cigar box and fondly dusted off; also there was a pearl-handled penknife pinched years ago from my beloved friend Oliver, he of the glass eye, and a little crystal dish purloined — sadly, this will be the last appearance of that lovely soft word, which has, for me, so much of Polly in it — from a Venetian palazzo, one day beyond memory, that still seemed to shimmer with reflected water-lights. All gone, in a bag in the bottom of the dustbin. So, you see, I am a reformed character. Hmm, do I hear you say?

How I savour these late days, the last of the year, all dense blue and charcoal and honey hues with long-shadowed backgrounds by de Chirico. The sun is still in turmoil and, thanks to its flares, our sham midwinter summer persists. A great silence reigns, as if the world were crouched in stillness, holding its breath. What is awaited? I feel sequestered, underground, poking out my snout now and then to take a measuring sniff of the air. Yes, see me there, old Brock in his den, waiting too and watching for he knows not what, his pelt prickling, sensing some fearful imminence.

One day recently Polly summoned me to meet her at the studio. And a summons it was: it had an imperious ring to it. Dutifully I climbed the steep and creaking stairway, and there she was, at the top, waiting for me outside the door, as so often, but so differently, now. She wore a long slim coat and high heels — high heels! — and her hair was cut in a new way, short, and with an elegant severity. A shaft of light falling on her from a small window high above the landing gave her a statuesque appearance, so that she seemed to represent some vaguely resolute quality, Womanly Endurance, or the Spirit of Widowhood, something in that line. She greeted me in a business-like fashion; she had a preoccupied air, as though she had stopped by here on the way to an altogether more pressing engagement; shades of Perry Percival. She did not take her hands out of the pockets of her stylish coat, as if she thought I might imagine she intended to embrace me. I reached past her to unlock the door, and on the instant saw myself, as if depicted identically on a set of cards that my memory was thumbing through, doing the same thing, leaning forwards in just the same way, a little awkwardly, a little off-balance, on countless occasions in the past.

Inside, the studio had the familiar-unfamiliar look that schoolrooms used to have on the first day back after the summer holidays. Everything seemed over-lit and much too emphatic. The smell, of course, was a jog to the memory, and to the heart; nothing quite does it like a smell. Polly cast an indifferent glance about her, her eye not even pausing as it glided over the sofa. “How have you been?” she asked. She leaned her head to one side and considered me; she might have been giving not me but my portrait a judicious once-over, and not much caring for what she saw. “You don’t look well.”

I said I was sure she was right, for certainly I didn’t feel well. I said that she, on the other hand, looked, looked — but I couldn’t think of the right word: such a complicated compound doesn’t exist.

She smiled faintly and arched an eyebrow, and for a second bore a shocking resemblance to my wife. In those heels she was half a head taller than I. She was standing under the light again where it fell from the big slanted window under which we had so often lain together, contentedly watching the sky’s slow changes, the stately processions of cloud, the milk-white gulls swooping and swirling. She unbuttoned her coat. Underneath, she wore a skirt and bodice affair that to my eye looked suspiciously like a dirndl, though probably this is the effect of hindsight. The skirt was fullish and reached to mid-calf, and the bodice seemed as forbiddingly impenetrable as a suit of mail, yet I suddenly found myself surging forwards with my arms held out to her, as if she might, as if I actually thought she might, fall into them. She drew herself back about an inch, her eyebrow making a sharper arch, and that was all it took to stop me in my tracks. I let my arms fall to my sides, and the two of us looked away from each other at the same instant. There was a clearing of throats. Polly moved aside, taking deliberate, slow paces, and stopped, inevitably, at the table, and inevitably picked up the little glass mouse with the tip broken off its tail and turned it in her fingers, frowning.

“It was here all the time,” I said.

She went on examining the mouse. “All what time?”

“All the time we were here.”

“And I never noticed.” She nodded, making a grimace expressive of nothing in particular. Her thoughts were far away, from mouse, me, this room, the moment. She was someone else, now. I of course recalled Marcus saying, in the Fisher King that day, that he no longer knew his wife; what negative lessons love teaches us! She moved away from the table, her hands again in the pockets of her coat. “And Gloria,” she asked, in a sharper, brittler, tone, unless I imagined it, “how is she?”

“Oh, coming along,” I said. “You know.”

I was itching to ask her, of course, why she had brought me here, and what it was she had to say to me; simple curiosity is one of the stronger urges, I believe. She stopped pacing, and stood gazing down at the sofa pensively, not seeing it, I could see. Then she glanced at me sidelong, with a narrowed eye. “And will you keep the child?” she asked. “I mean, will you pretend to be the father?” It seemed to me she might laugh. I said nothing, only held out my hands on either side, helplessly; I must have looked a little like one of Olive’s half-crucified Christs.

She set off pacing again, and began to speak of Marcus’s accident — those were the words she used, his accident. She spoke slowly, keeping time with her slow steps. It was as if she were giving dictation, for the setting down of a statement that later she would have to swear to. I tried to summon up, tried to see again, the afternoons we had spent here together, rolling in each other’s arms, but that pair of lovers was another couple, as unrecognisable to me as this new Polly, taller, graver, unreachably remote, who paced before me here. Marcus had always been careless, she said, or maybe it would be better to say carefree, not taking care, anyway, for all that he loved that useless old car. Poor Marcus, she said, shaking her head. Was this, then, I wondered, why we were here, so that she could dictate her deposition to me and I might enter it into the record and close the book of evidence? When people speak, as they will, of Marcus having plunged by accident down the side of that hill at Ferry Point into the calm sea of an autumn afternoon, I become aware of a hum inside my head, a rapid and monotonous vibration that makes my skull ache and causes my eyelids to narrow painfully. A suppressed scream is what it is, I imagine. Yet as I listened to Polly, and watched her pacing in and out of the parallelogram of pallid sunlight spread across the floor under the window, I felt nothing but a tender sadness, a sympathy, almost.

Presently, I began to realise that she had stopped speaking of Marcus — perhaps she hadn’t spoken of him in the first place, perhaps I had misheard her, or imagined it — and was dealing with someone else, someone altogether other than her late husband. In fact, and amazingly, it was her next husband who was now the subject. “Of course, we won’t stay here,” she was saying, “that would be impossible, given all that’s happened.” She paused, and looked at me directly, with a clear, candidly questioning eye, in which, however, I seemed to detect a faint pleading light. “That’s so, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, we couldn’t.” But where, I enquired, playing, confusedly, for time, where was she thinking of going to? “Oh, Regensburg,” she said, not pronouncing it quite correctly, I noticed — she will have to work at mastering the Teutonic r—“where Frederick still has a family home.” She gave a little laugh. “It’s a castle, really, I think.” Then she frowned. “It will be a great change, from here.”

By now, I could see, she was a long way off, from here, and nothing I could say or do would bring her back. I sat down on the sofa, my hands resting limply, palms upwards, on my thighs. No doubt my mouth, too, was limply open, a glistening red blubber lip hanging slack and my breath coming in big, slow heaves. Regensburg! Somehow I knew that place would one day loom large in the puny catastrophe that is my life. I saw the whole thing clearly, as if laid out on a page from a Book of Hours, Prince Frederick the Great, looking stern and stupid in a fur-trimmed coat and pointed hat, being handed a lily symbolical of something or other by his lady wife in her gown of Limbourg-blue, he with his page, old Matty Myler, and she with the Hyland sisters as her maids-in-waiting, all gambolled about by unicorns, and in the distance a miniature model of the city, with its spires and pennants, its towers and nesting cranes, and high, high above the scene, framed in a golden arch, the sun’s great orb streaming out its benison in all directions.

Freddie Hyland. Oh, Freddie, with your cravat and your dandruff and your st-st-stammer. So all along you were the wolf lurking in that limpid landscape. Why didn’t I sense your bated breath? Didn’t have the wit to take you seriously. It was as simple, and simply commonplace, as that. Well, there’s a lesson I’ve learned, among others: never underestimate anyone, even a Freddie Hyland. I could have pressed Polly for details, the dates, times, places, for surely it was my right to hear them, but I didn’t. I suspect she was dying to tell me, though, not out of cruelty or vengefulness — she was never vengeful, never cruel, not even now, at the end — but simply so she could hear it spoken aloud, this extraordinary fairy-tale thing she had fashioned for herself out of what had seemed so much detritus. I could hardly object — didn’t she deserve to be happy? For she meant to be happy: I could see that in every line of her newly assumed demeanour. But Marcus, so lately dead, what of him? His name above all I would not mention, and hoped she wouldn’t speak of him again, either. I feared being presented with a set of justifications, mild, reasoned, numbered off on her fingers, by this new, tall, unnervingly composed version of the Polly I used to lie with so lovingly on this old and now so sad green sofa.

She was getting ready to go. I could see her trying to make herself feel sorry for me, or at any rate to look as if she did. I must have been a hapless spectacle, slumped there with the wind knocked out of me. But I could no longer be fitted into the world she knew: I was the wrong shape, all blunt corners and slippery sides, cumbersome and unmanageable as a piano stuck in a doorway. Besides, why would she want me, fat frog that I was, when she already had her prince?

She had buttoned her coat and was edging towards the door. She said she had stopped off here on the way to visit her parents. Her father was sick — pneumonia was suspected — and her mother was in one of her states. Leaving them behind, she said, would be the hardest thing for her to bear. She would come back often for visits, of course, but that would not be the same as being here to keep a caring eye on them. I was still splayed out before her, looking up at her dully and saying nothing. She had produced a pair of gloves made of fine dark kid, and was pulling them on, briskly wriggling her fingers into them. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring; I guessed she had one, though, a family heirloom, it would be, from the days of Iron Mag, with the Hohengrund arms cut into a diamond, but had slipped it off and hidden it while she was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. I had wanted her to have a ring, in the first flush of our days of love. She had laughed at the idea — how would she explain it to Marcus? I had said there were ways she could wear it without its being seen: she could keep it on a string around her neck, or sewn inside some item of clothing, I said, excited at the thought of the little gold band growing warm in the silvery gloaming between her breasts, or glinting in the shadows beneath her inner thighs. But she would have none of it, and although I didn’t show it I had been greatly disappointed and cast down.

“That reminds me,” Polly said now, though it was plain from her manner — intent yet distracted, wanting to be gone but detained by one last task — that whatever it was she was going to say had been on her mind from the start. “I wonder,” she said, flexing a hand and frowning at the tensed back of her glove, “if you would have the dog. Barney, I mean. They really can’t manage him any more, and I suspect Janey kicks him when no one is looking.” She took a step towards me with a bright little smile of entreaty, a smile such as I would never have thought her capable of. “Oh, don’t say no, Olly,” she said. This, I remember thinking, is the last time I shall ever hear her speak my name. She advanced another step, somehow contriving to soften further the light in her opal-grey eyes and making them glow. “Will you take the poor chap?” she said, putting on a lisping, baby voice. “Please?” I made to rise, flailing about on the sofa’s squashy old springs, and at last got myself up with a great grunt and stood before her slightly asway. I must have nodded, or she must have thought I had, for she clapped her hands happily and thanked me in a breathy rush, and came on yet another pace, fairly beaming now, and even puckering up her lips to give me what no doubt would have been a grateful peck on the cheek. I retreated before her in a panic, until I was stopped by the back of my calves pressing against the edge of the sofa’s cushions. I think if she had so much as touched me, even if only with one of those gloved fingers, I would have broken into a myriad of tiny fragments, like a wine glass shattered by a soprano’s frantic trillings. Then in a second she was gone, and I listened to the flurry of her footsteps descending the stairs, and heard the front door shutting. I imagined her running across the road, in that knock-kneed way that she did, her coat flying. I shuffled forwards, until I was standing in the patch of air where she had stood, and I lifted my head and drew in a slow, deep breath. She could change anything about herself except her smell, that mingled faint fragrance of butter and lilacs. They say an odour can’t be recalled; they are wrong.

I crossed to the table and picked up the little glass mouse and squeezed it so hard in my hand that the broken tail pierced my palm and made it bleed. A stigma! — just the one, but enough to be going on with, for now.

—

So there it is. Gloria will have a child, Polly has her prince, and I get a dying dog. It seems a not inappropriate outcome, you’ll agree. Barney, the poor old fellow, is lying right here at my feet, or on them, as usual. He is heavy, the weight of mortality is upon him. His breathing, rapid and hoarse, is like the sound of a clockwork engine, slightly rusted and with a faulty piston, racing along towards that moment when it will abruptly stop, with a final brief falling sigh. At intervals the engine does pause, but only to facilitate the shedding of one of those deceptively quiet farts the stench of which engreens the air, an awful, stomach-turning and yet endearing memento mori. I’ve trained myself to listen for that ominous caesura, and hurriedly vacate the room before what I know will inevitably follow. As I scramble for the door the dog lifts his big square head and casts after me a glance of weary contempt. Mr. Plomer, Polly’s father, handed him over to me outside the ornate front door of Grange Hall at sunset one January eve, thanking me over and over as he did so, desperately smiling and seeming not to notice the tears that welled up on his eyelids and fell like so many quick drops of mercury through the twilit air, scattering dark stains the size of sixpences on the sleeve of his ancient tweed coat. Of Mrs. P. there was no sign, for which I must say I was thankful.

I had thought Gloria would object to my taking the dog, but on the contrary she finds it richly funny that I should be encumbered with him, and whenever her eye falls on the brute she smiles and bites her lip and shakes her head in wonderment. “Well, at least you can be thankful that she didn’t leave Pip with you,” she said. Her swelling belly is hardly noticeable yet. We still haven’t decided what to do. I suspect we shall do nothing, as we always do, as I suspect everyone does; all decisions are made in retrospect. If Gloria does require me to leave, which she may yet do if I don’t behave myself, I might go and live with Olive and Dodo. I could hew wood, and draw water, and be a perfect Caliban. As for Olive and her friend, I imagine those two would hardly notice me, toiling away there in the garden, or sitting quietly by the stove of an evening, toasting my shins and drinking my stout and pondering the fallen glories of what used to be my life.

I have been doing some calculations. Numbers are always a distraction, even a comfort, in trying times. There was that first picnic, in the park, when without realising it I fixed my spider’s hungry eye on Polly, and Marcus and my wife became, as Gloria would have it, soul-mates, whatever that required and involved. Years passed, four at least, until at the Clockers that glistening December night I tumbled into full-blown love with Polly — let’s call it love, anyway. Then she and I were together for, what, nine months, a little more? Yes, it was the following September when the storm broke, and I fled. It must have been then, just then, that Marcus and Gloria left their souls aside and became mates in the properest, improper, sense of the word, hence my wife’s burgeoning condition. But what I want to know is, when exactly did Freddie Hyland replace me at the centre of the web and get his sticky feelers on my precious Polly? I have no right to ask, I know, and anyway there’s no one who can tell me. I doubt even Olive and Dodo know the answer to that one.

I miss Marcus, a little. It was in the closing days of November that he died, I can’t remember the date, don’t want to remember it. He had lost Polly, he had lost Gloria, he had lost me. I doubt I was a great loss to him, but one never knows. I miss him, so why shouldn’t he have missed me? The day after they hauled the car out of the water, I thought of going out to Ferry Point and throwing my father’s watch in, as a way of marking the sad occasion, but I couldn’t do it.

In my rummagings about the house in preparation for that auto-da-fé of illicitly acquired objects, I chanced upon the burlap folder my father made to contain, like a sacred relic, the portrait I did of my mother when she was dying. The canvas cover was mildewed and the Fabriano paper had gone somewhat sallow and its edges had crinkled, but the drawing itself was, to my eye, as fresh as the day I did it. How lovely she was, even in death, my poor mother. As I squatted there in the attic, musing on her image, with the soft smell of must in my nostrils and thronged around by the wreckage of the past, it occurred to me that perhaps that should be my task now, to burrow back into that past and begin to learn over again all I had thought I knew but didn’t. Yes, I might embark on a great instauration. Hardly an original endeavour, I grant you, but why should I allow that to hinder me? I never aspired to originality, and was always, even in my paltry heyday, content to plough the established and familiar furrows. Who knows, the dogged old painster might even learn to paint again, or just learn, for the first time, and at last. I could sketch out a group portrait of the four of us, linked hand in hand in a round-dance. Or maybe I’ll bow out and let Freddie Hyland complete the quartet, while I stand off to one side, in my Pierrot costume, making melancholy strummings on a blue guitar.

Why did I steal all those things? It seems unreal to me now, what I once was.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that the contemplation of my mother’s image, limned all those years ago by my own young hand, would stir sweet memories exclusively of her, but instead it was my father I found myself thinking of. One winter when I was very young, I can’t have been more than five or six, I contracted one of those mysterious childhood illnesses the effects of which are so vague and general that no one has bothered to give them a name. For days I lay half delirious in a darkened room, tossing and moaning in voluptuous distress. On doctor’s orders my brothers had been banished to sleep somewhere else in the house — I think they may even have been piled in with poor Olive — and I was left in blissful solitude with my fever dreams. The sheets on my bed had to be changed daily, and I remember being fascinated by the smell of my own sweat, a rank, stale, meaty stink, not wholly unpleasant, to my nostrils, at any rate. My mother must have been distraught — polio was rampant at the time — and certainly she was in constant attendance, feeding me on chicken broth and malt extract and mopping my burning brow with a wet face-cloth. It was my father, however, who brought me, each night, a particular and exquisite moment of tender respite when, slipping into my room last thing, he would put his hand under my head and lift it a little way in order to turn up, deftly and with remarkable dispatch, the cool side of my sodden, hot and reeking pillow. I have no doubt he knew I was awake, but it was an unspoken convention between us that I was sound asleep and unaware of the little service he was doing me. I, of course, would not let myself fall asleep until he had been and gone. What a strange thrill, half of happiness and half of happy fright, I would experience when the door opened, spreading a momentary fan of light across the bedroom floor, and the tall, gangling figure crept towards me, like the friendly giant in a fairy tale. How odd his hand felt, too, not like the hand of anyone known to me, not like a hand at all, in fact, but like something reaching through to me from another world, and my head would seem to weigh nothing — all of me, indeed, would seem weightless, and for a moment I would float free, from the bed, from the room, from my self itself, and be as a straw, a leaf, a feather, adrift and at peace on the soft, sustaining darkness.