The Infinities

1

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What a silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy. Many of them sleep on, of course, careless of our cousin Aurora’s charming matutinal trick, but there are always the insomniacs, the restless ill, the lovelorn tossing on their solitary beds, or just the early-risers, the busy ones, with their knee-bends and their cold showers and their fussy little cups of black ambrosia. Yes, all who witness it greet the dawn with joy, more or less, except of course the condemned man, for whom first light will be the last, on earth.

Here is one, standing at a window in his father’s house, watching the day’s early glow suffuse the sky above the massed trees beyond the railway line. He is condemned not to death, not yet, but to a life into which he feels he does not properly fit. He is barefoot, and wearing pyjamas that his mother on his arrival last night found for him somewhere in the house, threadbare cotton, pale blue with a bluer stripe — whose are they, whose were they? Could they be his, from long ago? If so, it is from very long ago, for he is big now and they are far too small, and pinch him at the armpits and the fork. But that is the way with everything in this house, everything pinches and chafes and makes him feel as if he were a child again. He is reminded of how when he was a little boy here his grandmother would dress him up for Christmas, or his birthday, or some other festival, tugging him this way and that and spitting on a finger to plaster down a stubborn curl, and how he would feel exposed, worse than naked, in those already outmoded scratchy short-trousered tweed suits the colour of porridge that the old woman made him wear, and the white shirts with starched collars and, worst of all, the tartan dicky bows that it afforded him a wan, vindictive pleasure to pull out to the limit of their elastic and let snap back with a pleasingly loud smack when someone was making a speech or singing a song or the priest was holding up the communion wafer like, he always thought, the nurse on the Hospital Sweepstakes tickets brandishing aloft the winning number. That is how it is: life, tight-buttoned life, fits him ill, making him too much aware of himself and what he glumly takes to be his unalterable littleness of spirit.

He hears from somewhere unseen the faint, muffled clopping of small hoofs; it will be the early postman on his pony, in Thurn und Taxis livery, with his tricorn cap and his post-horn looped on his shoulder.

The man at the window is called Adam. He is not yet thirty, the young son of an elderly father, “product,” as he once overheard that twice-married father say with a sardonic laugh, “of my second coming.” Idly he admires the dense, mud-purple shadows under the trees. A kind of smoke hovers ankle-deep on the grey-seeming grass. Everything is different at this hour. An early blackbird flies across at a slant swiftly from somewhere to somewhere else, its lacquered wing catching an angled glint of sunlight, and he cannot but think with a pang of the early worm. He fancies he can hear faintly the fleet-winged creature’s piping panic note.

Gradually now he is becoming aware of something he cannot identify, a tremor that is all around, as if the air itself were quaking. It grows more intense. Alarmed, he takes a soft step backwards into the protective dimness of the room. Clearly he can hear the sluggish thudding of his heart. A part of his mind knows what is happening but it is not the part that thinks. Everything is atremble now. Some small mechanism behind him in the room — he does not look, but it must be a clock — sets up in its innards an urgent, silvery tinkling. The floorboards creak in trepidation. Then from the left the thing appears, huge, blunt-headed, nudging its way blindly forward, and rolls to a shuddering halt and stands there in front of the trees, gasping clouds of steam. The lights are still on in the carriages; they make the dawn draw back a little. There are bent heads in the long windows, like the heads of seals — are they all asleep? — and the conductor with his ticket thing is going up an aisle, clambering along hand over hand from seat-back to seat-back as if he were scaling a steep incline. The silence round about is large and somehow aggrieved. The engine gives a testy snort, seeming to paw the earth. Why it should stop at this spot every morning no one in the house can say. There is not another dwelling for miles, the line is clear in both directions, yet just here is where it halts. His mother has complained repeatedly to the railway company, and once even was moved to write to someone in the government, but got no reply, for all the renown of her husband’s name. “I would not mind,” she will say in a tone of mild sorrow, “what noise it made going past — after all, your father in his wisdom insisted on us setting up home practically on the railway line — but the stopping is what wakes me.”

A dream that he dreamt in the night returns to him, a fragment of it. He was dashing through the dust of immemorial battle bearing something in his arms, large but not heavy, a precious but burdensome cargo — what was it? — and all about him were the mass of warriors bellowing and the ringing clash of swords and spears, the swish of arrows, the creak and crunch of chariot wheels. A venerable site, an antique war.

Thinking of his mother, he listens for her step above him, for he knows she is awake. Though the house is large and rambling, the floors are mostly of polished bare boards and sounds travel easily and far. He does not want to deal with his mother, just now. Indeed, he finds it always awkward to deal with her. It is not that he hates or even resents her, as so many mortal sons are said to resent and hate their mothers — they should try dealing with our frenzied and vindictive dams, up here on misty Mount Olympus — only he does not think she is like a mother at all. She is absurdly young, hardly twenty years older than he is, and seems all the time to be getting younger, or at least not older, so that he has the worrying sensation of steadily catching up on her. She too appears to be aware of this phenomenon, and to find it not at all strange. In fact, since he was old enough to notice how young she is he has detected now and then, or imagines he has detected, a certain tight-lipped briskness in her manner towards him, as if she were impatient for him to attain some impossible majority so that, coevals at last, they might turn arm in arm and set out together into a future that would be — what? Fatherless, now, for him, and, for her, husbandless. For his father is dying. That is why he is here, foolish in these too-small pyjamas, watching the dawn break on this midsummer day.

Shaken by thoughts of death and dying he forces himself to fix his attention on the train again. One of the seal-heads has turned and he is being regarded across the smoky expanse of lawn by a small boy with a pale, pinched face and enormous eyes. How intensely the child is staring at the house, how hungry his scrutiny — what is it he is seeking, what secret knowledge, what revelation? The young man is convinced the young boy can see him, standing here, yet surely it cannot be — surely the window from outside is a black blank or, the other extreme, blindingly aflame with the white-gold glare of the sun that seemed to take such a long time to rise but now is swarming strongly up the eastern sky. Apart from those avidly questing eyes the boy’s features are unremarkable, or at least are so from what of them can be made out at this distance. But what is it he is looking for, to make him stare so? Now the engine bethinks itself and gives a sort of shake, and a repeated loud metallic clank runs along the carriages from coupling to coupling, and with a groan the brutish thing begins to move off, and as it moves the risen sun strikes through each set of carriage windows in turn, taking its revenge on the still-burning light bulbs, putting them to shame with its irresistible harsh fire. The boy, craning, stares to the last.

Adam is cold, and the soles of his bare feet are sticking unpleasantly to the chill, tacky floorboards. He is not yet fully awake but in a state between sleep and waking in which everything appears unreally real. When he turns from the window he sees the early light falling in unaccustomed corners, at odd angles, and a bookshelf edge is sharp as the blade of a guillotine. From the depths of the room the convex glass cover of the clock on the mantelpiece, reflecting the window’s light, regards him with a monocular, blank glare. He thinks again of the child on the train and is struck as so often by the mystery of otherness. How can he be a self and others others since the others too are selves, to themselves? He knows, of course, that it is no mystery but a matter merely of perspective. The eye, he tells himself, the eye makes the horizon. It is a thing he has often heard his father say, cribbed from someone else, he supposes. The child on the train was a sort of horizon to him and he a sort of horizon to the child only because each considered himself to be at the centre of something — to be, indeed, that centre itself — and that is the simple solution to the so-called mystery. And yet.

He pads across the floor — at his passing that busy clock on the mantel gives a single soft admonitory chime — and opens the door into the hall and stops short with a grunt of fright, his heart setting up again its slurred clamour, like an excited dog pawing to be let out.

He quickly sees that the figure in the hall is only his sister. She is squatting on her haunches at one of the little slanted doors in the white-painted panelling that closes off the space under the stairs. “For God’s sake!” he says. “What are you doing?”

She turns up to him her miniature white face and yet again he sees in his mind the child’s face at the train window. “Mice,” she says.

He sighs. She is in one of her states. “For God’s sake,” he repeats, wearily this time.

She goes back to rummaging in the cupboard and he folds his arms and leans one shoulder against the wall and watches her, shaking his head. She is nineteen and so much younger than her years, and yet possessed too of an awful ancientness—“That one,” Granny Godley used to say of her darkly, “that one has been here before.” He asks how she knows there are mice in the cupboard and she laughs dismissively. “Not the cupboard, you fool,” she says, the sleek dark back of her head — another seal! — aquiver with contempt. “In my room.”

She rises, wiping her hands on her skinny flanks. She does not meet his eye but bites her lip and frowns off to the side; she does not meet anyone’s eye, if she can help it.

“What is that you’re wearing?” he asks.

It is another pair of ill-fitting pyjamas, these in faded blue silk, hanging limp on her meagre frame, the sleeves and legs absurdly too long; hers are too long, his too short, as if to mark something sadly comical about them both. “They’re Pa’s,” she says sulkily.

He sighs again. “Oh, Pete.” Yet who is he to talk? — whose cast-offs is he wearing?

His sister’s name is Petra, he calls her Pete. She is tiny and thin with a heart-shaped face and haunted eyes. For a long time she had her head shaved bare but now the hair is beginning to grow back, a bulrush-brown nap that covers her skull evenly all over. Her hands are the scrabbly pink claws of a rodent. The mice, her brother thinks, must recognise one of their own.

“How do you know?” he asks.

“How do I know what?”—a petulant whine.

“About the mice.”

“I see them. They run around the floor in the dark.”

“In the dark. And you see them.”

She blinks slowly and swallows, as if she might be about to cry, but it is only a tic, one among the many that afflict her. “Leave me alone,” she mutters.

He is so much larger than she is.

As a child she used to sleepwalk, appearing at the top of the stairs with her eyes rolled up into her head and her mouse-claws lifted in front of her chest. At the memory the small hairs stir at the back of Adam’s neck. His loony sister, hearing voices, seeing things.

With a cocked big toe he pushes shut the cupboard door. She makes a gesture towards it, her left arm jerking out stiffly from her side and a finger childishly pointing and then the arm falling weakly back. “I thought there were traps,” she says. “There used to be traps kept in there.”

When she did that with her arm he caught a whiff of her, a musty, greyish smell, like the smell in the bedroom of an invalid. She does not bathe enough. Her mother says she despairs of her. As if they had not all done that, long ago, except for Pa, of course, who claims she is his inspiration, his muse made flesh, the invariable quantity in all his equations. But Pa claims many things. Or claimed: for Pa is in the past tense, now.

The light here in the hall is still dim but the sun is burning gaudily in the front door’s stained-glass panes as if, Adam thinks, he and his sister were confined indoors while outside a gay party is in full swing. In their clownishly ill-fitting pairs of pyjamas they stand before each other in silence, the large young man and the diminutive girl, at a loss, each thinking and yet not thinking of what it is that constrains them so: the fact of their dying father, whose sleeplessly sleeping presence fills the house like a fog. In these latter days no one in the house dares speak above a murmur, though the doctors blandly insist that nothing any longer passes beyond the portals of Pa’s hearing — but how can they be so certain, Adam would like to know, where do they get such assurance? His father is in another kingdom now, far-off to be sure, but may it not be that news from the old realm reaches him still?

“Why are you up so early?” Petra asks accusingly. “You never get up this early.”

“The time of year,” Adam says, “these short nights — I can’t sleep.”

This answer she receives in silence, sullenly. It is she who is supposed to be the sleepless one. Her unsleepingness, like their father’s gradual dying, is a pervasive pressure that makes the atmosphere in the house feel as dense as the air inside a balloon.

“Is the Dead Horse coming down today?” he asks her.

She gives a shrug that is more a twitch. “He said he would. I suppose he will.”

They can get no more from this topic and are silent again. He has that feeling of helpless exasperation his sister so often provokes in him. She stands as she always does, half turned away, at once expectant and cowering, as if longing to be embraced and at the same time in dread of it. When she was little she had no tickles and would squirm away from him with a scowl but then would lean back again, droopingly, unable to help herself, her sharp, narrow shoulders indrawn like folded wings and her head held to one side, seeming miserably to invite him to try again to make her squeal. How thin she had been, how thin and bony, like a sack half filled with sticks, and still is. Now she lifts a hand and scratches her scalp vigorously, making a sandpapery sound.

Adam feels light-headed, weightless, seeming to float an inch above the floor. He supposes it is to do with the supply of oxygen to the brain, or lack of it. His sister is right, he is not used to being up at this hour—everything is different—when the world looks like an imitation of itself, cunningly crafted yet discrepant in small but essential details. He thinks of Helen, his wife, asleep up in the room that used to be his when he was a boy. Stretched beside her rigid and wakeful in the pre-dawn dusk he had wanted to rouse her but had not had the heart, so soundly was she sleeping. He might go up now and lie down again on the too-narrow bed and close her to him, but something that is a sort of shyness, a sort of fear, even, holds him back.

Good thing, by the way, that this young husband does not know what my doughty Dad, the godhead himself, was doing to his darling wife up in that bedroom not an hour since in what she will imagine is a dream.

On the subject of fathers: Adam has not seen his yet. When they arrived last night he pleaded his and Helen’s weariness after the journey and said they would go straight to bed. He thought that to visit the old man then would have been gruesome; he would have felt like a body-snatcher measuring up a fresh specimen, or a vampire-hunter breaking into a crypt. Although he has not told her so he thinks his mother should not have insisted on taking Pa out of the hospital. Bringing him home to die is a throwback, something Granny Godley would have approved. Yet this morning he is sorry that he did not go at once and at least look at him, his fallen father, for with each hour that passes it will be so much the harder to force himself up those stairs and into that sickroom. He does not know how he will behave at the side of what everyone, without saying so, has acknowledged is his father’s deathbed. He has never been at a death before and hopes not to have to be present for this one.

Petra is still scratching, but with decreasing momentum, absently, like a cat slowly losing interest in its itch. He wishes he could help her, could assuage even one of her sore, inflamed spots. Yet he resents her, too, has always resented her, since before she was born, even, his usurper. He has a sudden clear memory of her as a baby in her cot, wrapped tight in a blanket, like a mummified yet all too living infanta. “Oho, my bucko, she’ll make you hop,” Granny Godley would say with a cackle, “—you’ll think your arse is haunted!”

“Come on,” he says now brusquely to the girl, “come on, and we’ll have our breakfast.”

And sister and brother, these waifs, shuffle off into the shadows. It is shadowed too up in the Sky Room where Adam Godley at the centre of a vast stillness is going about his dying. Yes, he too is Adam, like his son. By the way, apropos names and the like, I suppose I should before going further give some small account of myself, this voice speaking out of the void. Men have made me variously keeper of the dawn, of twilight and the wind, have called me Argeiphantes, he who makes clear the sky, and Logios, the sweet-tongued one, have dubbed me trickster, the patron of gamblers and all manner of mountebanks, have appointed me the guardian of crossroads, protector of travellers, have conferred on me the grave title Psychopompos, usher of the freed souls of men to Pluto’s netherworld. For I am Hermes, son of old Zeus and Maia the cavewoman. You don’t say, you say.

I understand your scepticism. Why in such times as these would the gods come back to be among men? But the fact is we never left — you only stopped entertaining us. For how should we leave, we who cannot but be everywhere? We merely made it seem that we had withdrawn, for a decent interval, as if to say we know when we are not wanted. All the same, we cannot resist revealing ourselves to you once in a while, out of our incurable boredom, or love of mischief, or that lingering nostalgia we harbour for this rough world of our making — I mean this particular one, for of course there is an infinity of others just like it that we made and must keep ever vigilantly in our care. When on a summer’s day a sudden gale tears through the treetops, or when out of the blue a soft rain falls like the fall of grace upon a painted saint, there one of us is passing by; when the earth buckles and opens its maw to eat cities whole, when the sea rises up and swallows an entire archipelago with its palms and straw huts and a myriad ululating natives, be assured that one of our number is seriously annoyed.

But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail — planting in the rocks the fossils of outlandish creatures that never existed, distributing fake dark matter throughout the universe, even setting up in the cosmos the faintest of faint hums to mimic the reverberations of the initiating shot that is supposed to have set the whole shooting-match going. And to what end was all this craft, this labour, this scrupulous dissembling — to what end? So that the mud men that Prometheus and Athene between them made might think themselves the lords of creation. We have been good to you, giving you what you thought you wanted — yes, and look what you have done with it.

All this, of course, I cast in the language of humankind, necessarily. Were I to speak in my own voice, that is, the voice of a divinity, you would be baffled at the sound — in fact, you would not be able to hear me at all, so rarefied is our heavenly speech, compared to your barely articulate gruntings. Why, the music of the spheres has nothing on us. And these names — Zeus, Prometheus, grey-eyed Athene, Hermes, even — these are your constructions. We address each other, as it were, only as air, as light, as something like the quality of that deep, transparent blue you see when you peer into the highest vault of the empyrean. And Heaven — what is that? For us, the deathless ones, there is no Heaven, or Hell, either, no up, no down, only the infinite here, which is a kind of not-here. Think of that.

This moment past, in the blinking of your eye, I girdled the earth’s full compass thrice. Why these aerial acrobatics? For diversion, and to cool my heels. And because I could and you cannot. Oh, yes, we too are petty and vindictive, just like you, when we are put to it.

Adam, this Adam, has suffered a stroke. By the way, I pause to remark how oddly innocuous, even pretty, a term this is for something so unpleasant and, in this case, surely final — as if one of us had absent-mindedly laid a too-heavy hand upon his brow. Which is perfectly possible, since we are notorious for not knowing our own strength. Anyway, for some time prior to this stroke that he suffered old Adam had been subject, all unbeknownst, to a steady softening of the brain due to a gradual extravasation of blood in the area of the parietal lobe — yes, yes, I have also some expertise in matters medical, to meliorate the more obstreperous of my attributes — which means in other words he was already a goner before that catastrophic moment when, enthroned at morning within the necessary place — to put it as delicately as I may — he crouched too low and strained too strenuously in the effort of extruding a stool as hard as mahogany, and felt, actually felt, a blood vessel bursting in his brain, and toppled forward on to the floor, his face to the tiles and his scrawny bare bum in the air, and passed at once, with what in happier circumstances would have been a delicious smoothness, into death’s vast and vaulted antechamber, where still he bides, in a state of conscious but incommunicate ataraxia, poised upon the point of oblivion.

He is not alone — as one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed, the living being is only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that. He senses the multitude of his fellows all about, uneasy and murmurous in their state of life-in-death. And I am here as well, of course. When our time comes we shall go together, he and I, into what is next, which I may not speak of.

His wife has entered the room, making hardly a sound, as is increasingly her wont these days. She feels she is becoming more and more a wraith, as if Adam in his last illness were siphoning something vital from her, drop by glistening drop. She closes the bedroom door softly behind her and stands motionless a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. A teeming sword of early sunlight is falling through a parting in the heavy curtains of the middle window, breaking its blade across the foot of the bed. The Sky Room is a most capricious touch added on to the house by the man who built it, the famously eccentric St. John Blount, a timber eyrie set into the north-west — or is it southeast? — corner of the main edifice, glazed on three sides and surmounted by a conical roof with a metal weathervane in the shape of a fleeting, short-cloaked figure, wearing a pudding hat with a circular brim and bearing a staff, who can only be — well, me, I suppose. How disconcerting. I did not expect to encounter myself here, in such surroundings, at this elevation, especially in the form of a two-dimensional tin representation of a godling. My staff must double as a lightning rod — that is something, I suppose, flash and fire and the reek of brimstone; that will liven things up.

Ursula with a qualm acknowledges to herself how restful she finds it being here. There is a dense, intent quality to the silence in the sickroom; it is like the silence that reigns deep down inside her and soothes her heart, even in the midst of so much inward tumult. She can make out his form now, supine in the big bed, but although she listens breathlessly she cannot hear him breathing. Perhaps—? At the unthought thought something stirs in her, a yearning something that she tries to deny but cannot. Yet why should she reprove herself? Everyone says the end will be a blessèd release. Those are the words they use, a blessèd release. Yes, she reflects bitterly, a release — but for whom? All except, perhaps, the one being released. For who can know but that Adam in some part of his mind might not be awake in a way and experiencing wonders? People who are deeply asleep seem unconscious but still may be dreaming the most fantastic things. Anyway, even if she cannot hear him she knows he has not gone. The elastic link between them has not been broken yet: she can feel still the old twanging tug. She is sure he is thinking, thinking away, she is sure of it.

She closes the chink in the curtains and at once the dark seems total, as if the world had been suddenly switched off. Feeling her way through the black and therefore somehow heavier air she advances to the bed soundlessly on slippered feet. In their early days together he used to call her his geisha girl for her pattering, rapidly stepping gait. She recalls the antique kimono he brought back for her from one of his trips—“A kimono from Kyoto for my geisha!”—cut from heavy, jade-green silk, a garment so exquisite she could not bring herself to wear it but folded it away in tissue paper in a drawer, from where subsequently it somehow disappeared. He had threatened to take the thing back — perhaps he did? — and give it to one of his girls, all those girls he said he was well aware she imagined that he had, hidden away. Then he looked at her, with his head back, fiercely smiling and showing his teeth, daring her to call his bluff. For it was a bluff, about the girls, about there not being any, she knew it, and he knew she knew it. That was a way of lying that amused him, saying a version of the truth in tones of high, mocking irony so that to challenge him would be to seem a hapless dolt.

Her eyes are growing used to the blinded dimness. She can see more than she wants to see. Uncanny, to enter this room each morning and find him just as she left him the night before, the blanket moulded smoothly to his form, the sheet uncreased, the cockscomb of silky hair — still black! — rising unruffled above the high, white dome of his forehead. His beard too is dark still, the spade-shaped, pointed beard that gives him the look of a faintly diabolical saint. She has always loved his skin, the moist cool translucent paleness of it that the years have not sullied. She hates, knowing how he would hate them, the plastic tubes that are threaded into his nostrils and held in place with strips of clear sticking-plaster. There are other tubes, farther down, hidden from sight by the bedclothes. What a trouble there was settling him here, Dr. Fortune fidgeting and the nurses cross. But she insisted, and so determinedly it surprised everyone, herself included. “He must be at home,” she kept on saying, ignoring all their objections. “If he is to die, he must die here.” She hated the cottage hospital he had been rushed to, a caricature off the lid of a chocolate box, grotesquely pretty with ivy and rambling roses and a glassed-in porch; imagine if Adam died there and along with her grief she had to put up with all that flummery. Old Fortune, who looks like Albert Schweitzer and has been the family’s physician since Granny Godley’s day, squeezed her hand and mumbled a mollifying word through the yellowed fringes of his moustache, but the two young nurses narrowed their eyes at her and stalked off, their backsides wagging professional disapproval.

By now her ears have become accustomed to the acoustics of the sickroom and she can hear her husband breathing, the faint rustle of air in the passages of his throat and chest. At the end of each indrawn breath comes a tiny flutter, like an impatient twiddling of fingers. She realises what it is that is familiar about this sound. It is just how he used to sigh when she did something that exasperated him, with just that same little fluttering flourish. She misses him, as though he were already gone. She feels a pain such as she thought only those who are still young can feel, new and sharply surprising, enough to take her breath away.

Something brushes past her in the air, less than a draught, more than a thought. She has sensed it before, in recent days. Whatever it is she is convinced it is not benign; she has the impression of haughtiness and a bridling resentment, as if something were bent on jostling her out of position. There are other strange phenomena too, other haunting effects. She has glimpses of figures that cease to be there when she tries to look at them directly, like floaters in the eye. She wakes in the night with a start, her heart pounding, as if there had been a tremendous noise, an explosion or a clap of thunder, which shook her out of sleep but of which there is not even an echo remaining. When she speaks to people on the telephone she is convinced there is a third party on the line, listening intently. She wonders fancifully if perhaps this angry revenant might not be the ghost of Adam’s first wife, or of his long-dead mother, Granny Godley the old hag, come back to claim her son and carry him off with her to the land of the shades. You see? — they think it is the dead that haunt them, while the simple fact is, as her husband could tell her and has often tried to, they live amidst interpenetrant worlds and are themselves the sprites that throng the commingling air. For all she knows it might be one of her countless selves that she is meeting, drifting from another plane into this one all unawares.

Or perhaps it is merely my ever-attentive presence that she senses, the whirring of dainty wings on my hat and at my heels that she almost hears. But I ask — am I haughty? Do I bridle? A little, I suppose. A little.

She dislikes her name. Adam was able to tell her of St. Ursula of Dumnonia, martyred at Cologne along with her eleven thousand virgins—“What a day that must have been, eh,” he said teasingly, lifting an eyebrow, “im alten Köln?”—although this Ursula was recently removed from the calendar of saints, in a fit of anti-German pique, by one of the more reform-minded English pontiffs. When the children were small they called her La, and still do. Adam is Pa and she is La. She wonders if there is ill-intent in their keeping on with these pet-names. She fears she has not been a good mother. She did her best with Adam but poor Petra was too much for her. Having Petra was the start of all her troubles. For nine months she was sick, vomiting all day and not able to keep anything down, until in the end she could not swallow even her own spit; with a shudder she recalls the nurse taking the glinting nickel dish of slime and floating froth out of her trembling hands and emptying it into the washbasin. Then at last the pallid little fish that was her daughter slithered out of her and lay gasping on her breast, so wearied already that no one expected she would live. But live she did, and was called Petra, another stone dropped into Ursula’s already heavy heart.

She touches her husband’s hand where it lies on the blanket. It has an unsettling feel, the skin brittle as greaseproof paper and the flesh pulpy underneath; it is like a package of scrap meat from the butcher’s, chill and sinewy; it is not the hand that she remembers, so delicate and fine. That invisible presence barges past her again, or through her, rather, and she feels it is she that is without substance, as if she and not this other were the ghost. Her husband’s eyelids spring open and his eyes after a moment of agitated searching find her face. She smiles with an effort and speaks his name softly. It is hard to make out his features in the dimness but she is loath to switch on the light. Dr. Fortune assures her that it is her loving care that is keeping her husband alive and nothing else — why then does he look at her now with such seeming fury?

Her head is very bad today, very bad, she must take something soon to soothe it.

In the well of the kitchen the morning light has a sharply metallic sheen and the square of sunlit garden in the window behind the sink is garish and implausible, like a primitive painting of a jungle scene. Adam and his sister are seated at one end of the long deal table, hunched over cereal bowls. When their mother appears at the top of the three wooden steps that lead up to or down from the rest of the house they sense rather than hear her — Rex the elderly labrador, lying on his blanket in the corner, gives a few listless thumps of his tail but makes no effort to get up — and they stop eating and lift their faces and look at her. She sees again with a faint start how alike they are, despite Adam’s great size and Petra’s diminutiveness, each with the same broad brow and little sharp chin and ash-blue eyes so pale they are almost colourless. Perhaps because she had no siblings herself she finds family resemblance always a little eerie, even in her own offspring. Both of them take after her, for it was from her they inherited the wide forehead and sharp chin and azury eyes.

“How is he, today?” her son asks. His skin is mottled from the sun and he has a scorched, raw look. For some reason just now she finds well-nigh intolerable his palely candid gaze. “Much the same,” she says, answering him, and Petra laughs, who knows why, making a nasty sound. Yes, sometimes she thinks her children dislike and resent her, as if she were not their mother at all but a person brought in to be in intimate charge of them, a heartless guardian, say, or a bitterly resented stepmother. But surely she is mistaken. These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like. She recalls Adam just now glaring at her with that vengeful fire in his eyes. “He seems peaceful,” she says.

Her son considers her as she hovers on the stair at the far end of the long, high-ceilinged room. He seems unable to focus on her properly. She has a new quality, of being not entirely present, of seeming to hesitate on an invisible threshold that is there under her feet wherever she steps. She has become blurred, as if under a fine layer of dust. This must be the effect on her of the catastrophe that has befallen old Adam; she has lost the sense of herself. She is wearing a cotton dress like a smock and a baggy grey cardigan the hem of which sags below the level of her hips. Her hair, the colour of a knife-blade, is pulled back in two flattened wings and pinned at the nape of her neck. She descends the steps and comes forward and stands by the table, absently kneading the worn wood with the fingertips of one hand, as if to test its solidity. “You’re up early,” she says to both of them. “Did the train wake you?”

Neither will answer. “Roddy will be here later,” Petra says, looking aside frowningly. Her tone is truculent, as if to forestall disparaging comment. Roddy Wagstaff, dubbed the Dead Horse by her brother, is Petra’s young man, or so convention has it, although everybody knows it is not she but her famous father that Roddy comes to visit.

“Oh,” her mother murmurs, and a pained frown passes over her already frowning face, “then there’ll have to be lunch!” Since Adam fell ill the household has been content to shift for itself, but a visitor must be fed a proper, sit-down meal; Adam would insist on it, for in such small matters he is a strict observer of the conventions.

“We could take him into town,” her son says, without conviction. “Doesn’t that place what’s-it-called serve lunches?”

“Oh, yes,” Petra says archly, with a sneer, “let us all go into town and have a lovely time — we can bring Pa and prop him up at the head of the table and feed him soup through his tubes.”

She glares at her cereal bowl. Under the table her left leg is going like a sewing-machine. Adam and his mother exchange an expressionless look. Her father’s collapse has been for Petra a great excitement, being at last a calamity commensurate with the calamitous state of her mind. The question of lunch is let hang. In the corner Rex the dog gives a contented, shivery sigh. He can see me plainly, lolling at my ease in mid-air, with folded arms, in the midst of these sad souls, but it is nothing to him, whose world is already rife with harmless spectres.

Petra has her subject now and will not let go of it. In a thick, tense voice, goitrous with sarcasm, she embroiders upon the notion of a family lunch in town to which her father would be brought—“in a hammock maybe or a sling slung between us or one of those things with two poles that red indians drag the wounded along behind them in”—and at which they would all celebrate his achievements and make speeches and raise toasts to him as man, as father and as savant. When she gets going like this she has a way of speaking not directly to the others in the room but to the air beside her, as if there were present an invisible twin version of herself off whom she is bouncing her taunts and who will give to them, thus relayed, an added extension of sarcasm. Adam and her mother say nothing, for they know there will be no stopping her until she has exhausted herself. The dog, lying with his muzzle between his paws, eyes her with wary speculation. The table-top vibrates rapidly along with the girl’s bobbing knee. Adam tries to eat his cereal, which has gone gluey; he sees himself yet again as a boy, sitting at this table, listening to his father talking, in that coolly vehement, uninterruptible way that he did, and recalls how he would feel his throat thicken and his eyes scald with inexplicable tears he dare not shed, shaming tears, heavy and unmanageable like big drops of mercury. He glances sidelong at his sister now and sees the dab of sallow light shaking in the spoon-shaped hollow above her clavicle as she tries not to choke on the torrent of words that wells up out of her unstaunchably.

Their mother, standing by the table, regards her son and daughter with a troubled gaze. They seem to her still so young, hardly more than children, really, even Adam — especially Adam — with that babyishly fat overlip that trembles so when he is excited or upset. She notices the bowls the two of them have been eating from. Why does it irritate her that they are unmatched? Latterly so many things irritate her. She tries not to feel resentful of her son for so far not having set foot in the room where his father lies dying. She supposes it is simply the fear of death, its awful presence, that prevents him. But after all he is not a child, however he may seem. She crosses to the sink and looks out through the big, many-paned window above it at the sunlit day, a hand lifted vaguely to her face.

She thinks of Adam growing up in the humid conspiracy that was his Granny Godley. The old woman had seized on him early, a hostage against all the slights she imagined herself the victim of. Then Petra was born and her brother was at once usurped. A blundering, blond fellow he was, with a huge, round head, baffled at being so unceremoniously thrust aside in favour of this tiny, watchful creature clasped jealously in his grandmother’s bony embrace. For the coming of Petra had brought on a grisly transformation in the old woman: she turned tender and clumsily solicitous, reminding Ursula of those shaggy clambering rust-coloured primates in the zoo, all hooped arms and peeled-back lips and baleful starings, that her husband was so fascinated by and would make her come with him to see on Sunday afternoons when Adam was a baby. Granny Godley was dying of a damaged heart and grimly turned over each new day like a playing card from a steadily diminishing deck, anticipating of each one that it would be the ace of spades, while what had come instead was this solemn-eyed coat card, this miniature queen of diamonds, swaddled and uncannily still and always looking at something off to the side that only she it seemed could see, clutching in her white-knuckled fist the wilting flower of the future.

“And and and,” Petra is saying now, her voice ashake on the sliding crest of its arc, “and and and and—”

— And I it is who have contrived these things: this house, the train, the boy at the train window, that slanting blackbird, the dawn itself, and this mother musing on love and her losses, and her troubled daughter at the table gabbling out her woe, and the wife asleep in her husband’s boyhood bed, and her husband, young Adam here, who presently will make up his mind and rise reluctantly from the table and ascend those three short steps and be borne upwards on my invisible wings into the presence of his earthly father.

2

And look, here he is, old Adam, the dying progenitor himself. Dying, yet he cannot conceive of a world from which he will have departed. No, that is not right. He could conceive of it. He can conceive of anything. Conception of impossible things is what he does best. He was ever pregnable by the world. I note the shifting of tenses. What I should have said is that he does not wish to conceive of a world from which, et cetera. Of course, he knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detectable gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

What of his work? What of his work. He cares nothing for their so-called immortality if he is not to be here to savour its vaunted consolations.

Me. Me.

Me.

As to his immediate condition, he has been pronounced vegetate. And so he is, if we take this word in the old, not to say archaic, sense of being endowed with vegetable life. His heart beats, his blood circulates, his lymph courses, even his digestive system goes on mumbling and munching, making the best of the insipid wheys and saps that are fed to him through his tubes day and night without pause. But does a vegetable see, does a vegetable hear, does a vegetable — and this surely is the clincher — does a vegetable cogitate?

The doctors have not witnessed him opening his eyes and do not believe his wife when she says that he does. That he looks at her. That he sees her. They put on a stolidly blank expression and say nothing but she knows that inwardly they scoff, even Dr. Schweitzer I mean Fortune, Dr. Ferdinand Fortune, old Ferdie. Pah, doctors, what do they know?

He fears premature burial.

There is no pain. In the pain department he feels nothing. Or not nothing, exactly. He has an awareness of something, a dinning and hammering deep inside him, the surely agonising effects of which register only as a distant rumour. He is trapped in the celestial dentist’s chair.

Yet why is he not content with this state? Is it not the apotheosis he always hankered after, to be pure mind, mind unalloyed? Whirling and whirling his thoughts go, like the so many grains of grit swept up in a dust-devil. Pure mind, aye, pure thought.

He might have stipulated a little bell to be set on a stick above his plot with a string going down into the hole and tied to one of his fingers. But to what avail? Not even a digit is he capable of stirring. He has thought of a telephone, too, in the coffin, but how would he dial?

An hour ago, when his wife was here — or was it before she came? or after? — he heard the early train grinding past, making the window-panes buzz. When he was a child his mother took him once on that same train to the city for a Christmas treat and bought him a ten-shilling watch, which soon broke. Even in those days the train used to stop here for no reason, in the middle of nowhere, and he would press his face to the window and look longingly at this house standing in a shroud of frost-smoke — this very house, if he is not mistaken and he believes he is not — and dream of living here, of being what his disparaging mother would have called a big fellow, with money and a motor car and a camel-hair overcoat. A big fellow, now felled.

His mind wanders. There are gaps, short and sometimes longer periods of absence, when he is lost to himself, or no, not lost, but as if astray on some far, flat shore, at nightfall, with no moon, and the sea a fringe of soiled white foam off on the horizon, and the sea birds high up, calling and crying in the brumous air.

By the way, tenses: he is stuck in the present, though his preference would be for the preterite. As for the future, he avoids it as the plague. He wishes he had the powers of that emperor of old Cathay who on his deathbed forbade the use of the future tense throughout his vast realm, saying that since he was going to die there would be no future to speak of.

He wonders what time of day it is. If what he heard a while past was indeed the early train it means the sun will be well risen by now. He searches the ceiling for a sign of it but all up there is greyly indistinct, thanks to the curtains his wife insists on keeping pulled day and night. He is reminded of Venice — why? Surely a Venetian ceiling would be awash with lozenges of water-light, a shimmering, amoebic pulsing, and not, as here, soft-grey and crumbly-seeming, like mould. Yet it is definitely the city on the lagoon this memoryless memory is of. Venice! La Serenissima, as they call it, her. Whereas I think of a sea-captain’s frowsty old relict, una vecchia carampana, in tide-stained billows of watered silk, squatting on her piles. To the picturesque I have always had a healthy aversion. I consider it healthy.

But why do I say an hour ago? I have—he has, he, I must stick to the third person — he has lost track of time, he who once was one of time’s masters and a keeper of its keys. Now the things that happen merge and flow through each other unresisted, a hopeless mishmash.

Yet there must have been a ceiling like this somewhere, in a waterside villa or hotel room in some southern sea port, where he lay love-sated and let his gaze bathe in bundles of mould-grey shadow above a bed — where? when? with what woman? So much he has forgotten because it meant nothing at the time or if not nothing then not nearly enough. This it is that torments him now, among his many torments, the thought of all that he had and did not prize as he should have when he had it. A trove of experience spurned as it was happening because it was simply that, something that was happening and not a thing anticipated or recollected. Now: that is a word he never appreciated the meaning of, until now.

Inside his head the numbers swarm in a vast grid, a matrix without limit, flickering, in stellar silence.

For diversion he sets himself to thinking of his daughter-in-law, slumbering somewhere in the house, like Mélisande, if that is who he means. In the night he heard them arriving, she and his son, heard their voices down on the landing, urgent-sounding because hushed, and imagined he was dreaming. But he knows it was no dream, and now at morning Helen is in that room down there, he senses her, yes; his senses extend their feelers and feel her sensate presence. Is she sleeping? He tries to grasp with his mind the reality of her, asleep or waking, being there where he is not. Before the autonomous existence of others he shares his son’s doubt and wonderment — shares? shares? it is his doubt, his wonder, passed on second-hand to the next and lesser generation. He asks, how can people go on being fully real when they are elsewhere, out of his ken? He is not such a solipsist — he is a solipsist but not such a one — that he imagines it is proximity to him that confers their essential realness on people. Of course others exist beyond his presence, billions of others, but they are not part of the mystery proper since he knows nothing of them, cares nothing for them. The truly mysterious ones are the ones who are most familiar to him, his sad wife, his neglected offspring, his desired daughter-in-law. That they should have an existence independent of him, and, indeed, of each other, too, is an affront to the laws of — of what? He speculates sometimes if his early espousal of the theory that posits our existing in the midst of multiple, intertwined worlds was prompted by nothing more than the necessity for somewhere for people to be when they are not with him — I said he was a solipsist — but even there, shoved in sideways with their noses pressed against the glass of those countless crystalline fissures, what would there be to prevent them getting up to things that he cannot imagine or, if he can imagine them, cannot be certain of? Look at him now, unable even to know if his daughter-in-law, like Schrösteinberg’s anxiously anticipant cat, is conscious or not, down there in her sealed chamber. He pictures her naked under a single sheet, the linen, softly aglow in the morning light, moulded to the shape of her lovely limbs. Aah. I wonder if his loins are any longer capable of stirring. Something could have come up down there the size and rigidity of an indian club and he would not know it. In younger days his scrotum was as firm and tightly furred as a tennis ball, but by now the testes have probably shrunk back up into wherever it is they dropped from all those years ago. Maybe there is nothing much there at all any longer, since he seems to have bypassed his second childhood and re-entered the embryonic state. Yes, that is how it seems to him, that he is being born in reverse, so that this garrulous dying he is doing will bring him not to the next world but back to a state of suspended pre-existence, ready to start all over again from before the beginning. It is a nice conceit, is it not? I shall let him entertain it for the nonce.

Down in the kitchen Petra in mid-rant pauses for breath and her mother seizes the moment to say on a falling sigh, “Oh, I have such a headache today.” At this the girl goes furiously silent and shoves her spoon with violent force into a lumpy wodge of stirabout in the baby-bowl before her on the table. The back door opens, making its usual bang and rattle, and Ivy Blount appears, in her old brown mackintosh and her cut-off green wellingtons. She has a basket of eggs on her arm and is bearing by the neck a recently throttled chicken. She pauses on the threshold and looks at the three people in the room with an expression of distracted startlement. The dog thumps his tail in welcome. Miss Blount is unofficial cook, housekeeper and, as Duffy the cowman darkly asserts, taken-for-granted skivvy here at Arden House.

“Good morning, Ivy!” Ursula says, too loudly, for she persists in the mistaken conviction that Miss Blount is hard of hearing. Seeing the ill-plucked chicken she wonders if she might broach the subject of lunch. She really cannot think why she should have to feed that fellow Wagstaff yet knows she must. And how he will sneer, as always. Suddenly and with a shock she recognises the chicken. It is, or used to be, the speckled brown one with the orange feet; she saw it from the window of her room not an hour ago, unsuspectingly scratching for worms between the cobbles down in the yard. She was fond of that one. She used to have names for all the hens, though Adam laughed at her.

Something in her head is pounding; it is like a hammer hitting a block of soft metal, over and over. What if she, too, were to have a stroke? The sudden idea of it almost delights her. She pictures herself lying with Adam up there in the dark, the two of them motionless on their backs and blankly staring, their hands folded identically over their breasts, like a pair of statues laid out side by side on a tomb.

Ivy advances and sets the chicken and the basket of eggs on the table and takes off her mac. She is wearing a heavy tweed skirt and a man’s old-fashioned striped shirt with the sleeves rolled. The wings of her finely aristocratic nose are translucent. She gives off a faint odour of roses and dishwater. The dog gets up with an effort and waddles forward and snuffles at her knees. Adam notes the chicken’s glazing eyeball and tries to think of a word — obsidian? agate? Its head is still attached above a ruff of burnished umber feathers. He can smell the poor dead thing, its blood-warm reek. Petra is peering at the bird in smouldering alarm as if she fears it might suddenly struggle back to life and come flapping and squawking at her across the table.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas. We have stronger stomachs, stouter lungs, we see it all in all its awfulness at every moment and are not daunted; that is the difference; that is what makes us divine.

Young Adam rises from the table and crosses the room and climbs the three steps to the door with the stricken mien of a man mounting the gallows. He pauses and glances back at no one in particular and then goes out, shutting the door behind him so softly it seems a rebuke. His departure leaves an unsettled silence. Ursula has drifted again to her place at the sink with her face lifted to the window. She is glad Petra has shut up and does not care that the child is furious at her for breaking in on her flow of nonsense. Everybody is on edge, everybody’s nerves are stretched to the limit. This waiting is unbearable. It is as if Adam had toppled from an immensely high place and were falling, falling, with dreamlike slowness, and they were all looking up in awe and anguish, at this plummeting speck that presently will lie sprawled at their feet, smashed, bloodied, dead. Dead. The word is another thud of the hammer, achingly soft and dull.

Ivy Blount takes down her stained old apron from its hook on the back of the door. This morning she is even more bemused than usual. She has had a shock, poor soul, though none here knows of it save she and I. It is said she is a direct descendant of Charles Blount, eighth Lord Mountjoy and first Earl of Devonshire, that eccentric soldier whom Mary, Queen of Scots, great Gloriana, on her accession to the English throne after the beheading of her cousin, the upstart and treasonous Elizabeth Tudor, sent over at the dawn of the seventeenth century to pacify this most distressful country. Ivy has the face of a Virgin in an icon, tapering sharply to the chin and touched with indeterminate sorrow. It was from her, last of the Blounts and so sadly come down in the world, that Adam Godley purchased this house, at a knock-down price, twenty years ago. She clings on in a two-storey cottage at the corner of a crooked field where the gates to the property once stood. Duffy, who minds what is left of the farmyard and the few scrawny cattle old Adam insists I mean insisted — tenses, tenses! — on keeping, is known to have a great notion of her.

“Petra’s boyfriend is coming down today,” Ursula says, addressing Ivy without turning from the window. “Perhaps we might have lunch in the conservatory?” She thinks she hears Petra snort but still she will not turn. It is, she supposes, her way of putting things — antiquated, no doubt, arch-sounding — that makes her daughter laugh. She wishes Ivy Blount would say something; Ivy’s accent, her decayed-patrician intonations are far more laughable than hers; at least Ursula believes they are and takes a spiteful comfort from it. But Ivy has transferred the chicken to the draining-board and is doing something to it with a bone-handled knife and will say nothing. The blade of the knife is worn to a gleaming spur. A few feathers drift seesawing to the floor. Petra’s leg is jigging under the table again. What shall I do, Ursula thinks, what shall I do?

Adam on the landing upstairs comes to a narrow door set flush into the wall and taps on it softly three times with a knuckle. He stands intently still, leaning forward a little with his ear cocked, in the attitude of a domestic spy. He feels foolish but the old interdiction is unbreachable — no one would ever dare climb to his father’s room without knocking first. But today, of course, there can be no response, so what is he waiting for? The porcelain doorknob is suavely cold and unwelcoming to his palm. He opens the door. From here a cramped flight of seven steps leads up to the Sky Room. He sets his foot on the first step with a twinge of reluctance. In his earliest memories the Sky Room was the forbidden place where his father worked, impervious it seemed to the discomforts of the place, the winter winds and the summer stiflings. How often when he was little he used to stand like this at doors, listening in vain for the faintest sound of his father at work. That was what fascinated him always, the silence from the study. In fact, it was not silence, not a mere absence of sound, but was a force, a field, like the fields his father once tried to explain to him, abstract spaces humming with the play of fantastically small and forever invisible particles. “Imagine,” his father said, “the little bits of everything in the universe all pulling against each other”—making claws of his long, pale hands and hooking them together at the fingertips to demonstrate—“keeping each other in place.” The boy thought of the safety net in the circus, the way it was stretched there with nobody noticing it until at the end of the trapeze act the last one of the troupe, disdaining the rope the others had already shimmied down, would let himself plummet into its springy mesh and bounce on his back in leisurely fashion, once, twice, three times, like a big baby, before scrambling to his feet and wading off into the powdery darkness on rubber legs, looking smug and brandishing a triumphantly clenched fist. His father sighed—“Yes, yes, something like that”—and turned away. They were living then in the old stone house on Haggard Head and his father worked in the room with the big curved window — Adam had thought it was called a bay window because it overlooked the bay — from where the sea seemed an oval sheet of pockmarked steel and the waves broke in slow motion on the rocks far below. He liked that house, and cried when his father moved them here, to the empty middle of the country.

Still he hesitates, unwilling to climb. It was not just his father’s presence at the top of it that made this unlit narrow stairway so alarming a prospect to him as a child. Something definite seemed to lurk here, where the darkness was darker than anywhere else in the house, something unseen yet clammily palpable, of which even yet, in broadest of broad daylight, he seems to detect a lingering, cobwebby wisp. He recalls his dream again, the cries of battle, the bronze helmets flashing, the bloodied dust. And what was it he was bearing in his arms, what? — a wounded comrade, a corpse, perhaps? He shuts his eyes, opens them again.

He cannot recall his father ever addressing him by his name. He does not resent this or think it a spurning, only he wonders at it. Did his father find it awkward that they were both called Adam? Hardly. Anyway, his father rarely addresses anyone by name; names are something he does not think it necessary to take regard of or remember.

He takes a breath and ascends the stairs as he always does, at a soft run, head down, knees working like elbows. The stairs groan under him as if in outrage.

In the room he wonders why the curtains are shut. At first he can make out nothing but a jumble of standing shapes, vague, dust-coloured, which give the impression of hooded sentinels keeping silent vigil. After a purblind moment he locates the bed. It is the ugly four-poster from his parents’ room that his mother had Duffy take apart and haul up here and reassemble when his father was being brought back from the hospital. No one knows why she moved him out of their bedroom; perhaps she does not know herself. The bed is not exactly too big for the room, but disproportionate, somehow, out of place, with its suggestion of the world of drowsy intimacies, sleep, and dream, that world into which his parents would withdraw to spend together their mysterious married nights. His father would not have a couch, not even an armchair, in the room where he worked. A plain steel desk and a bentwood chair, a block of graph paper in loose sheets, and a plentiful supply of pencils, of course, his famous Ticonderogas No. 4, extra hard, yellow with a green band and pink eraser, specially imported by the boxful; these are, were, the tools of his trade, the implements of the arcanum. When he was famous first, caricaturists pictured him as a monk in a windowless bare cell, wild-eyed and hydrocephalic, hunched with his pencil over a gridded page of parchment; also as a spaceman in a globular helmet popping out of a hole in the sky, as a mad professor with electrified hair meeting and merging with himself in a mirror, as an entire crew of identical sailors marooned each one in solitude on his own earth-shaped island afloat in a sea of inky darkness. Young Adam was proud of his father and secretly clipped these cartoons out of newspapers and magazines and hid them in a cigar box at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe in his room. Perhaps they are still there, mouldering now.

He makes himself draw nearer to the bed, and after some fumbling, finds the lamp switch and turns on the bedside light. At first he cannot bring himself to look directly at his father. The surface of the bed is another field, smooth and grainily grey and uniform except where his father’s form makes a neat, elongated mound down the middle of it. The general arrangement reminds Adam of something though for the moment he cannot think what it is. Standing here like this he feels faintly ridiculous, as he did just now outside the door, and he has the notion that there are people in hiding, behind the curtains and under the bed, with their hands clapped over their mouths, getting ready to spring out at him, whooping and jeering and laughing. He does not know how to behave here. It is strange being in a room with someone who is present and at the same time not. His father’s arms are on top of the sheet, stretched stiff at his sides; it is an oddly hieratic arrangement, as if he had been making a large blessing with arms outstretched over the heads of a kneeling multitude and now had stepped back to conceal himself in the shadows. The hands at the ends of the pyjama sleeves are long and bony and crisscrossed with swollen, greenish-blue veins, the kind of hands pianists are supposed to have, and nothing like young Adam’s, which are short-fingered and blunt.

All at once he remembers what it is that the bed with his father in it reminds him of. One day, at the beach, when they were children, Petra let him bury her in the sand. It was his idea; he was bored, and thought it would pass the time. But no, that was not it, or not all of it. He had seen the look of alarm in his sister’s eyes when he told her what he was going to do and got her to lie down in the sand, and it had excited him. Otherwise he would have tired of the project as soon as he started, for it was not easy: the sand was heavy and sluggish after a morning of rain and the spade that he had to use was Petra’s, a toy plastic thing that was much too small and flimsy for the task. But he kept on until she was covered right up to the neck and all that was left of her was her face, as white as pipeclay, as she lay there in a cocoon of wet sand, with her eyes fixed on him anxiously, trapped and motionless like his father, here, now.

He grins to himself, joylessly, guiltily, leaning in the gloom.

But how shrunken his father seems, so much shorter than in life and pitifully thin — in life, yes, for as he is now he is surely as good as dead; that seems evident. By the time he was twelve young Adam was already impossibly big, with a prizefighter’s rolling shoulders and a weight-lifter’s legs, half a head taller than his tall and sinuously articulated father. The disproportion only made him feel all the more clumsy and slow, and somehow the smaller of the two, a pygmy at the knee of the great, white man. He used to divert himself by fancying that he was not his father’s son at all but the outcome of a desperate adventure entered into by his mother to pay his father back for the many affairs he was said to carry on; it cheered him to think of having been conceived in a flurry of anger and avenging lust. Sometimes he thinks he would like to be like that himself, unforgiving, coldly passionate, a dealer-out of retribution and just deserts. Perhaps, to buck him up, I should plant in his mind the idea that my father Zeus—? But no. Not the most loyal and loving of sons could imagine that Adam’s mother, even in the flower of virginal youth, would have been my heavenly father’s type.

Who else was on the beach that day? Adam tries to recall the wider scene, the tawny dunes behind and the flat slope of sand down to the water’s edge shining like newly poured cement, and people in the water bobbing and squealing, and a sailboat out on the water, and, closer by, someone sitting on a blanket dispensing tea from a Thermos flask and querulously calling his name. The three of them, of course: him, his sister, his mother; always these three, never four, unless Granny Godley came with them, which she seldom did, for she had an aversion to outdoors, and deplored especially the sea and its shore. He thinks of his grandmother with rueful fondness, this fierce old loving woman unable to show her love to anyone.

At last he brings himself to look full at his father’s face, or at his head, rather, that high-domed, ascetic head with its bony brow and axe-head nose and pointed beard and broad-lipped, prehensile mouth. What does he look most like? A high priest at rest after the throes and transports of a religious ritual. A dead pharaoh, mummified and shrunken. Or just Petra, buried to her neck in the sand.

Now he rouses himself from his musings and leans over the bed determined to do he does not know what, and immediately falters. Should he kiss his father? Is that what is expected of him? But if so, does it matter whether he does or not, since there is no one here to see him doing or not doing it, and his father cannot know either way? And when did he kiss his father? When did his father kiss him? If either ever did, it is long beyond remembering. He feels constrained and ill at ease in this crepuscular atmosphere, these dim and somehow churchly surrounds. Does he wish his father gone? The thought comes to him unbidden; he is shocked not to be shocked. He looks at those hands resting motionless on the sheet and all at once, without warning, something gapes open inside him, a vertiginous hollow into which at once he pitches forward helplessly. For a second he cannot make out what is the matter; then he realises that he is weeping. This is more than anything a surprise, for it is a long time since he last wept. He does not know the source of these tears, brimming unstoppably over his scalding lids, so copious and heavy they seem unreal, the fat, hot tears of childhood that in childhood he so furiously forbade himself to shed except when he was alone. But it is simple, surely — he is weeping for his dying father. Why would he not? Yet he is so much taken aback that it seems he might begin to laugh, even as he weeps. The only sound he hears himself produce, however, is a series of little gulps, or gasps, little soft hiccups. Altogether it is a not disagreeable sensation, this sudden extravaganza of grief, if grief is what it is, and he is pleased with himself, proud, almost, as if his tears were a demonstration of something, some task or proof that for long has been required of him without his knowing. And when after a minute or two he regains control of himself he feels almost invigorated, as if he had undergone a religious drenching. Shriven, he thinks — is that the word? Yes, shriven. But also he feels as he felt when he was a child after wetting the bed in his sleep, guilty and gleeful at the same time, and obscurely, shamefully avenged, though on whom, or what, he does not know.

He mashes his wet eyes with the heels of his hands, and having no handkerchief he wipes his nose on his sleeve, and is conscious again of his absurd get-up, the too-small pair of pyjamas he has squeezed himself into, and his big bare feet glimmering down there far below him in the gloom. He lets fall a heavy sigh, which in the shrouded silence sounds exaggerated and almost comical, a stage version of a sigh. He feels sheepish — everything he does is overdone. He tries to touch his father’s stirless form but cannot, and that act too, that non-act, seems histrionic and false. He is not used to feeling like this. He thinks of himself, when he thinks of himself, as a simple being. Helen is the complicated one; he stands before the intricacy of her in awed amazement, like an indian watching from the shore the unheard-of, marvellous ships with shining masts bounding towards him out of dream-blue distances.

He lumbers down the narrow stairs and once outside he shuts the door behind him, easing the doorknob on its spring so as to make no sound. When he turns he is surprised to find how bright the day is already, how rich the morning sunlight streaming down upon the landing. The house is built on four sides around a big, square space two storeys deep, at the bottom of which is the black-and-white tiled floor of the central hallway; the roof is made of rectangular sheets of rippled, greenish glass grimed with moss and bird droppings and plastered with last year’s blown and blackened leaves, and by some trick of light the well below it seems always filled to the brim with impossibly still, impossibly clear water. The walls, clad in slotted wooden laths, were painted immemorially with buff distemper that has turned an unpleasantly sulphurous shade, and with the sun on them, as now, give off a dry, not unpleasant, wood-and-paint smell, the smell of family hotels and rickety seaside chalets, though the sea is a good twenty miles off, and who would think of holidaying here at Arden House, except perhaps Roddy Wagstaff, and he does not count? What caprice led Ivy Blount’s great-grandfather, the whimsical St. John Blount, to have half the house’s wall-space covered with this cheap wood battening? The wonder of it is the place has survived so long and not been set fire to by lightning bolt or rebel torch. “Tinder,” his mother says, “this great gazebo — nothing but tinder.”

Adam walks round two sides of the balconied landing, moving under the leaded glass roof through sharp-edged flickers of light and shadow, hearing his bare feet paddling softly, moistly, on the uncarpeted boards. He comes to another door and again stands listening; he fancies he hears from within his sleeping wife softly breathing, and the faint, diaphanous sound stirs his senses.

“What are you doing?” Helen blurredly demands, sitting up quickly. Something in him always vibrates anew to the sound of her voice, its dark, true note, as on an oboe. She looks at the empty place in the bed beside her, feels the cold pillow with her hand. She frowns. “Where did you go?”

As always his wife’s beauty strikes him as if for the first time — strikes him, yes, for he feels the effect of it like a soft blow to the heart. Why was it he that she chose to marry when so many others had pled with her in vain? The question gnaws at him, he broods on it, but finds no answer. Strangely, though, it warms him, too, affords him a bodeful, warming thrill, which he cannot account for. He toys repeatedly with the possibility of losing her; he is like one afflicted with a fear of falling who drags himself back again and again to the very brink of the precipice. Life without her is unimaginable for him. He wonders if this will change, if one day, old and tired and disenchanted, he will look back and ask himself how he could ever have been held in such helpless thrall by her. She is only human, after all, a human being, like himself. But no, no, she is not like him. The beautiful ones, the rare ones as beautiful as she, are different, he is convinced of it: they carry their beauty like a burden that does not weigh down but magically lightens. Theirs is another way of being human, if they are human at all.

Hear my old Dad licking his chops in the background? — she is no goddess of loveliness, but a human girl, all right. If she were not he would not pine after her as achingly as he does. It is their very humanness he covets, the salacious old rip.

Neither of them brought nightwear, and Helen, excitingly to Adam, has on Adam’s shirt that he wore yesterday, pale blue, like his undersized pyjamas, with a faint white stripe. She is still looking at him strangely, with a strange surmise. The small, square room is shoddily furnished with things that over the years since it ceased to be his have migrated to here from elsewhere in the house. There is the old-fashioned high bed, two bedside lockers painted a sickly shade of chocolate brown, a spindle-legged table, ditto, bearing a china basin with matching jug and a speckled oval shaving mirror on a wooden stand; there is a straw-bottomed chair and, on the floor at the foot of the bed, a brassbound mahogany chest with SS Esmerelda inscribed in neat poker-work on the lid. Some old things of his remain, too, a glue-encrusted model aeroplane on a stand, a faded poster of a football team pinned to the wall, a hurley stick standing in a corner like the long leg-bone of some fleet creature. The floor is of rough-hewn pitchpine beams that have driven a splinter into many an unprotected toe. The window opposite the bed is shaded with a muslin blind, and the room is filled with a powdery white effulgence that seems to slow everything down a beat; there is the musty smell of sleep.

“I was awake,” Adam says. “I went downstairs. Did you hear the train?”

Helen’s frown deepens and she tilts her head to one side and looks at him hard, as if she thinks he is teasing her and is cautioning him to stop. What colour are her eyes? They must be blue, yes, dark blue and deep as the Grecian sea itself. Her head is an exquisite, cream-and-gold inverted egg that sits on its pale length of neck as on a plinth of polished stone. She has cut her hair in a new fashion, close to the skull in countless imbricated layers like flakes of gold leaf; he is not sure he likes it in this style but would not dare to say so. In the matter of his wife and the things she does or does not do he feels he is standing astride the hub of a great steel disc that is spinning at an immense speed and that at the tiniest ill-judged action on his part will begin to wobble wildly and a second later fly off its spindle with terrible shrieks and clangs and send him flailing into darkness and irreparable damage. “You were here, not downstairs,” she says, more in puzzlement than contradiction. “You were here, with me.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She gives an odd, dry laugh. “Is that so?” Her tone too puzzles him; she must still be half in a dream. One naked foot has kicked free the hem of the sheet; he notes the heel’s callused rim and his already smitten chest seems to open and let something fly out, like a bird out of a clock, love’s desperate cuckoo. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. “I’m sopping.”

When she steps from the bed the tails of the blue shirt open briefly in front and he catches a glimpse of her russet fleece. He wants to touch her, to detain and hold her. There is a grain of sleep at the canthus of her left eye, the one that has a slight and captivating droop. She brushes past him and as she goes to the door he is treated to a brief view under the shirt-tails of two pale half-moons of pendent, glimmering flesh. He imagines licking that fleck of hardened gleet from the corner of her eye with just the very tip of his tongue. Sopping?

He kneels on the side of the bed and leans deeply forward on his hands as if prostrating himself in prayer and buries his face in the still-warm nest in the bedclothes where until a moment ago his wife was sitting.

The tiny bathroom is wedge-shaped, narrowing from the door to where the handbasin and the single small window are, which makes the place feel all the more cramped. Half the space is taken up by an enamel bath the size of a sarcophagus with a chipped rim and brown and yellowish-green streaks running down from the taps. Over the bath there is a giant geyser, also enamel-plated, also chipped, which long ago ceased to function but which no one has thought to have removed. The first time Helen came to stay at Arden and was unwise enough to take a bath here she stood up and cut her head on the sharp edge of the brass spigot that sticks out under the hole where the pilot light used to be. That was before she was married to Adam. Married. The word stops her, as it always does. It has to her ears an antiquated and faintly indecent ring, like one of those innocent-sounding words in the old plays, swive, or fig, or mutuality.

The window looks down on a field of thistles and, farther on, a circular dark wood that seems to huddle around itself in fear of something, and over which now the morning sun is pouring in vain its somehow heartless cheer. When she is outside she can never seem to locate that field, or that wood — how is that? — not that she would spend much time searching for them. It is just another of the place’s many small but exasperating mysteries. She is a city girl and finds the countryside either dull or worrying, or both.

She hikes up the shirt she is wearing by grasping a handful of it at the front and lowers herself on to the lavatory like, she thinks, a big white soft hen getting ready to lay an egg. The antique lavatory seat is a mighty frame of varnished, maroon-coloured wood that reminds her of the collar of a work-horse — but where would she ever have seen such a thing? — and feels cold and sticky at first and then warm and stickier still. She listens in mild dismay to the splashings and ploppings going on underneath her. She is sure she can be heard all over the house. She plants her hands on her bare knees and gazes straight ahead of her at nothing. White light glows on the patch of pale-yellow wall in front of her. She hears from below scraps of the life of the house going on, people talking, a door opening and shutting, a dull thud that could be anything; the dog barks, three unemphatic woofs; that door again, banging this time; light steps on the stairs; a brusque, back-and-forth rattling as someone riddles the cinders in a grate. Why is it that people heard from afar like this, in distant rooms on other floors, always sound as if they are doing things — confiding, fighting, striking loud deals — far more interesting than the mundane things that they are really engaged in?

It seems old Adam is going to die, the doctors say so, and everyone except Ursula has given up hope. It is strange to think of him not being here any more, at Arden; strange to think of him not being anywhere. What is it like to die, she wonders, what is it like to be dead? Is it like anything? Like being under an anaesthetic, perhaps, with the forgetful anaesthetist gone home and all the lights in the operating theatre turned off and the doors locked and the last squeaky footsteps fallen silent down all the long corridors. She is not sure what she is meant to feel about this coming death. She knows the old man lusts after her — lusted, now — she has seen him eyeing her when he thought she was not noticing, has seen how he puts his head back, running his nails through the underneath of his beard, and how that white patch of skin between his eyebrows creases as if he were in faint pain. It gives her the shivers to think of it now. Yet he must have been handsome, once, beautiful, even, with that narrow brow and those deeply indented temples, the sharp nose and the large, slightly slanted, glistening black eyes. He is nothing like his son — how can the two of them be so different? But she would not have wanted to be married to old Adam, and not just because he is dying. Why, then? Something uncanny in him; something cold.

She reaches out to the roller and tears off a length of tissue. The parched, leaf-mould smell of the paper reminds her of something from the past — trees, summer, a boy — but it is gone before she can fix it. The flush is operated by a chain with a wooden handle polished and worn thin from use.

— oh, such a dream!

We were upon some golden mountain top,

The two of us, just we, and all around

The air was blue, and endless, and so soft!

She wonders at herself and how she fairly fled just now from the bedroom and her husband in a confusion of unwonted shyness, of shame, almost, that was more pleasurable than not, and now — could it be? — there is already a heat beginning to glow again in her lap. What came over her? And, more amazingly, what came over him? She puts a hand between her thighs and probes inside herself with squeamish fingers. She expects to find all raw and sore there but does not. She lifts her fingertips to her nostrils and sniffs. There are only her own familiar pungencies. Was it a dream? Surely not. Surely something so intensely felt must have been real.

She thinks again of the dying old man.

Loosened, released, she rises from the cascading bowl and walks to the window and peers at what she can see of her face in the cracked looking-glass in its worm-eaten wooden frame. Who if not her husband was that monstrous man who made such love to her in the dimness of the dawning bedroom? And if her husband, how transfigured! Her limbs are shaking still from the awful weight of him. The things he did to her, the things he had her do! Never, never in all her life—! In the glass with its diagonal crack her face is slashed into two ill-fitting halves and a lopsided eye looks back at her quizzically, with a sceptical cast. The morning beats around her like a pulse, the cistern gurgles. The warmish afterglow of her own spicy stink lingers on the air. Through the little window the glare of daylight startles anew, making her squint. The light out here in the country, the hue of headaches, is different than in the city, brighter, more intense, as if there is shining behind it another light, mysterious, unvarying, with an acid cast. The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels. She seems to herself gathered up, somehow, enfolded and gathered up. The burning in her belly is growing more intense, a sullen fire. She lowers her head with eyes shut fast and braces her hands on the sides of the handbasin and leans forward heavily on locked elbows, trembling in remembered pleasure that seems a part of pain. She would swoon if I were not there to hold her up with arms of air. This is how it always is when Dad has done what he does with a girl, the old lecher. I am remembering Tyndareus’s wife, and, later, that trollop her daughter — another Helen! — who caused all the trouble at Troy and brought great Ilium low. Not to mention the nameless ones, countless in number, before and since, betrayed, spurned, forgotten.

Adam is waiting for her in the bedroom. He has dressed. He wears a white shirt and a preposterous pair of rough tweed trousers, of a rusty colour, much too tight for him, that she has never seen before — they cannot be his, he must have found them somewhere in the room. He always does strange things at Arden. Coming here he still speaks of coming home. He is sitting sideways on the bed. This bed — it is wider than a single but far too narrow for the two of them; last night she said she was afraid he would turn in his sleep and squash her against the wall and kill her, as it is said babies are sometimes suffocated when their sleeping mothers roll on top of them. At the mention of babies they both went silent, and he looked away though she made herself stare at him, her eyes narrowed, daring him to say something, but he would not, of course. She looks now at the things of his in the room, that aeroplane, the hurley stick, and in her mind she curls a lip. He is propped on an arm and smiling up at her as if in entreaty. What does he want? She wishes he had gone downstairs. She would like to be alone. She does not want to dress in front of him. She feels still a vestige of excited shame, recalling the dream of their love-making. For she has decided it was a dream, after all. What else could it have been, her seeming to wake and find him looming over her arrayed in light, unspeaking, urgent, his arms outstretched and his hands on her breasts — what else?

When you return, who will you be but you?

What other you is there that I might love?

Again now he moves a hand towards her, the hand he had been leaning on, its fingers scurrying crablike playfully over the sheet. She likes his hands, foursquare and always warm, but now she does not want to be touched and draws back an almost imperceptible inch from the edge of the bed. He makes a smiling frown. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Did Duffy spot you in my shirt?”

She considers this. She has had cause before now to remark the cowman’s seeming freedom of the house, his way of popping up at inappropriate moments in unexpected places, with his beetling brow and his bold, undeflectable stare. What if he did see her, scampering out of the bathroom and up the steps with her backside on show? Well, let him see, she does not care.

“Did you go in yet to see your father?” she asks. Her overnight bag is open on the floor, things spilling out of it as if stalled in a desperate scramble to escape. “How is he?”

He stops smiling but continues to frown, his upper lip protruding over the lower. As always when he dips his head a wing of hair falls forward on his brow and he lifts a hand impatiently to brush it back. His hair is soft and pale. His eyes are pale too, a limpid blue, like her own, but uncanny, somehow, uncanny, that word again. In her dream he was himself and yet not, a figure of cold fire, burning her; his mouth was gold.

“I don’t know how he is,” he says. “He’s just there, not doing anything. I hope he is not suffering but how am I supposed to know?” He pauses, and picks at something on the sheet. “I burst into tears at the bedside.”

“Did you?” is all she says, as if she were thinking of something else. He wonders if she will ask to see him, the dying man.

She walks to the window and pulls up the muslin blind and secures its string by winding it on a hook screwed into the sill and stands looking out. It is supposed to be possible to see the sea from here but she never can. “Poor thing,” she says, and neither of them is sure whom she means, Adam’s father or Adam. Below, there is a different field from the one the bathroom window looks down on, or maybe, she thinks, it is the same one but from another angle. Beyond it there is no wood, though, only a long, lush slope — surely even grass should not be that unreally bright shade of green — behind which rise the roof and single chimney of Ivy Blount’s cottage. Three black-and-white cows are desultorily at graze. A tiny bird flits down from a bough as if not flying but falling, a quick, brown leaf, and then can be seen no more. There is something less than real about the look of this place, especially in summer; it all seems got up, to her. Everything is too flat, somehow, the distances especially but the nearer hills, too, and all laid over with a weak lavender wash, like a badly done backdrop.

She has played Hedda, and Miss Julie. She has swept on in a matt-black gown and seduced and scorned. In the farthest back row they saw the flash of her azure eyes. She had the whip and the whip-hand. Now she will play Alcmene, the soldier’s wife, sweet and baffled and beleaguered. How to pitch it?

“What?” She looks back.

When you return, who will you be but you? —

Tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum. Like Duffy in his big boots.

“I said nothing,” her husband says.

She glances, frowning, about the room. “She even kept your toys,” she says, wonderingly.

“Who?”

“Your mother — who else?”

She recalls again the gold man in her dream, the looming weight of him. She strides quickly to the bed — a maenad! look! — and clambers over the steamer trunk on to the mattress and wades along it on her knees and with an impassioned violence takes her husband’s head between her hands and presses his face to her breast. He wriggles, and says something that is too muffled for her to make out. She feels his breath on her skin and a shirt button that his chin is pressing into her. Although she is slight compared to him she seems to herself a giantess, towering over him, voracious and commanding. He reaches around and lifts the tail of his shirt that she is wearing and puts his hands on her bare behind and they both feel the blood-heat of her flesh. He is trying to speak again but she will not let him, and grinds his face against her, rolling it from side to side. He makes muffled, laughing noises. His nails dig into her behind, stingingly. She throws back her head with a savage sigh.

My father in his lethargy groans, off dreaming in some other place, of some other lass, I hope. But come, Daddums, come put on your horns and take a gander at what these your little ones are up to.

3

Old Adam plunges, a pearl-diver, into the past, going down deeper with each dive. There is a lost world there, he sees the sunken roofs and spires, the streets where currents glide, the people phosphorescent as fish, drifting in and out of houses, through half-familiar rooms, their seahorse eyes wide open. He is frightened; he does not want to drown, as they have drowned; he knows that he soon will. He feels the tide drawing him on, drawing him on. He grasps at tendrils but they slip through his hands, slimy and cold. There is a gleam, a glint, but when he scrabbles in the sand he finds nothing, only shells and jagged coral and bits of bone, and all around him is soon obscured. His breath is running out. He feels his heart beat, hears the blood in his veins, a hollow, rushing roar. He struggles. The water coils around him, heavy as chains and ungraspable. A great bubble bursts from his mouth. Mother! —

He wakes, but what he wakes to is not waking.

He is once again in the humpbacked town above the estuary, with its church, its ruined tower, its steep-roofed, jostling houses. He sees it in raw April weather, a rinsed blue sky with smudges of cloud, ice-white, bruise-grey, fawn. From all the chimneys flaws of smoke fly back, as if a close-packed flotilla were putting out to sea from here. The wind ruffles the widening river, pricking up white-caps. It is all there, compact and tiny, like a toy town in a snow-globe. He is a child, trudging up a hill beside a high, grey-stone wall. He wears a tweed coat with a half-belt at the back, and a peaked cap, and thick woollen stockings the tops of which are turned down to hide homemade, soiled white elastic garters. He has his satchel on his back. It is four o’clock. There are houses on the other side of the sharply tilted street, each one set a step higher up than the other. On the front door of one a black crape bow is tied to the knocker with a pasteboard card attached with a name on it, and dates, written in black ink. The door is ajar. Someone has died and anyone may go in to view the corpse. The town drunks are always there first, for a free drink in which to toast the dead man on his way. He stops and stands for a moment, looking at the house. He could go in. He could just push open the door and walk straight into the parlour. There would be someone there, a woman wearing black, standing with her hands folded in front of her, her eyes pink-rimmed and her nostrils inflamed along the edges. He would shake her thin, chilly hand and murmur something; it need not even be words. He would cross the room, his school shoes squeaking, and gaze down stonily at the dead person laid out in the coffin in his unreal-looking suit, his waxen knuckles wound round with a rosary. There would be that smell, of lilies and ashes, which the recently dead give off, or which at least is always there when someone has died. The woman would offer him cake on a plate and a tumbler of tepid lemonade. There would be others there before him, sitting in the gloom on straight chairs ranged against the walls, gripping whiskey glasses in red fists or balancing cups and saucers on their knees, sighing and shifting, murmuring pious complacencies that set his teeth on edge.

But he does not cross the road. Instead he turns and walks on up the long hill towards home.

Spring winds flow through the streets like weightless water. The blued air of April. The trees tremble, their wet black branches powdered with puffs of green. The tarmac shines. A strong gust pummels the window-panes, making them shiver and throw off lances of light. The priest’s car passes, its tyres fizzing on the wet road. The boy salutes dutifully and in return is gravely blessed, as a reflected cloud slides smoothly, fish-like, over the windscreen.

A fellow in an old black coat and corduroy trousers that are bald on the knees comes out of the church gate with a spade over his shoulder. Without stopping he leans sideways and shuts one nostril with a finger pressed along the side of it and from the other expertly ejects a bolus of snot.

O lost, raw world!

The house stands in a crooked street, wedged narrowly between its taller neighbours as if it had sidled in there one day and stayed put. He slides his hand through the letter box — it gives him a shiver of terror every time — and fishes up the key that hangs inside on a string. In the hall the familiar smells meet him: floor polish, blacklead, soap, gas from the kitchen stove. He hangs his coat and cap on a hook, throws his satchel on the floor. His mother, in her apron, a strand of hair come loose from its bun, wipes the back of a hand across her cheek; she gives him the look that she always does, suspicious, sceptical, faintly desperate. He walks his fingers along the table edge. His father is in the back room, propped against pillows on a makeshift bed made up for him on the brown leather sofa in the corner, his big hands spread out flat in front of him on the blanket. The boy thinks of the crape bow on the door-knocker, and of himself standing in the parlour here, in his Sunday suit, amid the smell of ashes and lilies. His father stirs, sighs, and makes a slithering sound in his throat. The banked fire in the grate has a frightening glare at its heart, and the coke gives off a hot reek of cat. Low in the window there is a patch of late-afternoon sky, milk-blue, and a bit of the mossed wall on top of which his mother’s hens make illicit nests and hide their eggs. Gooseberry bushes out there, potato drills, cabbages gone to seed and grown as tall as paschal candles. Then the fields, and behind them the rocky hills, and then, beyond that again, elsewhere.

The first present that he can remember getting is a clay pipe. It must have been his birthday. His sister took him to the tobacconist’s shop and bought it for him with money their mother had given her. It came with a waxed-cardboard pot of soapy stuff for blowing bubbles. In the garden by the hen-house he tried it out. At first he could not get the hang of it then suddenly did. The bubbles hesitated on the rim of the pipe-bowl, wobbling flabbily, then broke free and floated sedately away. They seemed to be rotating inside themselves, as if the top was always too heavy, and the iridescent surplus kept cascading down the sides. Sometimes two of them stuck together and formed a fat, trembling shape something like an hourglass only squatter. They were made of an unearthly substance, a transparent quicksilver, impossibly fine and volatile, rainbow-hued. They popped against his skin like wet, cold kisses. They were another kind of elsewhere.

His father died at Christmastime. In the back room the bed in the corner was dismantled, leaving the stripped sofa standing in what seemed a gaping hole in the air, and no more fires were lit and as the December days went on the light in the room congealed and grew steadily dimmer. At the end the dying man had suddenly lifted himself up from the pillows with starting eyes and called out something in a voice so strong and deep it shocked everyone. It was not his voice, but as if someone else had spoken through him, and Adam’s sister burst into tears and ran from the room, and his two brothers with their greyish bloated damp-looking faces glanced at each other quickly and their eyes seemed to swell. What their father had shouted had seemed a name but no one had been able to make it out. He had kept on glaring upwards, his head shaking and his lips thrust out like a trumpet player’s, and then he had fallen back and there was a noise as if he were drowning.

His mother said they must have Christmas as usual. She said his father would want it so, that Christmas was his favourite time of all the year.

She baked a cake. Adam helped her, measuring out the ingredients on the black iron weighing-scales with the brass weights that were cool and heavy as he imagined doubloons would be. It was night, all outside a frozen stillness, the leaning roofs purplish-grey with hoarfrost and the jagged stars glittering like splintered ice and the moon high up in the middle of a glistening, blue-black sky and small as if shrunken by the cold. His mother stood at the table with her sleeves rolled, mixing in a brown bowl the dry ingredients he had weighed out for her. Her head was bent and he did not realise she was crying until he saw the tears fall into the bowl, first one and then quickly two more, making three tiny grey craters in the white mixture. Without a word she handed him the wooden spoon and went and sat down by the fireplace with her face turned away from him, making no sound. He held the bowl by the rim, encircling it with his forearm in the way that he had seen her do. When he swirled the spoon in the flour mixture the tears became three grey pellets but they were quickly absorbed. He did not think he had ever seen his mother cry before — even beside his father’s grave she had stood dry-eyed — and now he felt embarrassed and uneasy and wished she would stop. Neither spoke. They were alone in the house. He wondered how long it would take before everything in the bowl was completely mixed. But what did that mean, completely mixed? Every grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly, the particles of salt and baking soda spaced just so throughout the flour, each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it, a solid, three-dimensional white field supporting a dense and uniform lattice of particles of other shades of white. And what about the flour itself, no two grains of which were alike — how could that be completely mixed, even if there were no other ingredients present in it, making their own pattern? And how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved? — how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder? He watched the spoon going round and round, making troughs and peaks and crumbling cliffs in the soft pale powdery mixture. Where were those three tears now? How well into the mixture were they mixed? Was everything in the world so intricately linked and yet resistantly disparate? His mother stood up and blew her nose on her apron and without a word took back the bowl and the wooden spoon and began mixing again.

His aunt came down from the city for the funeral and stayed on for Christmas. She took over the house, directed the putting up of the decorations and the trimming of the tree, ordered in a crate of stout and bottles of port-wine and whiskey, oversaw the distribution of presents, even carved the turkey, while his mother hung back, tight-lipped and watchful, saying nothing. His aunt was not married, and worked in the city for a solicitor. She wore a dove-grey coat with a fox-fur collar and fox-fur trim on the hem, and a black toque with a pearl pin and a piece of stiff black veil at the front, and big shoes with chunky high heels. She had an air about her always of angry sorrow. She was lavishly ugly, with a long horse-face and a mouthful of outsized teeth the front ones of which were always flecked with lipstick. Her Christmas present to him was a box of puzzles made from lengths of shiny steel bent into intricate shapes and linked together seemingly inextricably, though it took him only a moment of motionless concentration to see the trick of each pair and to separate them, which caused his aunt to sniff and frown and make a humming sound. It was voluptuously satisfying the way the two gleaming skeins of metal slid apart so smoothly, with what seemed an oiled ease, and his mind would become for a moment a limitless blue space, calmly radiant, through which transparent forms moved and met and locked and unlocked and passed on through each other in a vast silence, endlessly.

His mother, not to be outdone by his aunt, gave him a little clothbound book of curious and amusing facts about numbers. Here he first encountered the magic square. How strange it was, to add up the numbers in the boxes along each side and down each diagonal and come out every time with the same result, the same and yet, for him, always somehow new. This impression of novelty among identical values he could not account for. How could fifteen be different from fifteen? And yet the difference was there, a sort of aura, unseen but felt, like air, like warmth — yes, yes, we gods were there with him even then — like the breath he breathed, the breath that sometimes caught and swelled suffocatingly in his lungs, so avid was he for more facts, more conundrums, more solutions. He borrowed books from the library, by people with letters after their unpronounceable names. He tried to devise puzzles and problems of his own. The terms eluded him, they squirmed and writhed, slipping through the mesh of his mind. He would close his eyes and seem to be seeing into clear depths, where the figures glinted, but when he reached down he would grasp nothing but shards, shards and surds, and all would become clouded and thick with murk.

He counts. How many steps it takes him to walk to school. How many times in the course of a class the teacher will say a certain word. On the way home he counts how many cracks there are in the pavement, how many men he will meet and how many women, how many counted beats it will take to get from one telegraph pole to the next, how often that bird on that bough will chirp before he has passed underneath the tree. At night in bed he counts his heartbeats. The impossibility of accuracy torments him. So many this, so many that, but what before anything is the unit?

And then there is the question of time. What for instance is an instant? Hours, minutes, seconds, even, these are comprehensible, since they can be measured on a clock, but what is meant when people speak of a moment, a while — a tick — a jiffy? They are only words, of course, yet they hang above soundless depths. Does time flow or is it a succession of stillnesses — instants — moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbreaking wave? Or is there only one great stillness, stretching everywhere, in all directions, through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite, listless sea? And why does it vary? Why is toothache time so different from the time when he is eating a sweet, one of the many sweets that in time will cause another cavity? There are lights now in the sky that set out from their sources a billion years ago. But are there lights? No, only light, flowing endlessly, moving, every instant.

Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate.

Has the early train gone by yet? Has his wife paid her morning visit?

The waters of time muddy, the figures flicker in silence.

4

The father of the gods is in a sulk. It is always thus when one of his girls, all unknowing, goes back to her true, that is, her rightful, mate, as she must. What does he expect? He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him — him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them. Ah, yes, love, what they call love, it drives him to distraction, for it is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death. He is convinced the two are intimately linked, to the point, in his case, at least, that one conduces to the other. In this I grant he may be somewhat in the right. Certainly their love takes it out of him. I do not mean the act itself, which gives no pleasure to us since aeons ago, when the world was young and fecund still and required our constant generative attentions — remember those herds of mares all standing with their hindquarters turned to the north in hope of an inseminating breath from Boreas the amber-winged? Nor is it the effort, the vain effort, of compelling a passionate response from them that drains his strength and leaves him limp and languishing, no, but something in the exchange itself, in the needful shuttling to and fro between her humanness and his divinity, this is what debilitates him so, even as it delights him. Hence he keeps coming back for more. Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known.

This love, this mortal love, is of their own making, the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? We gave them that irresistible compulsion in the loins — Eros and Ananke working hand in hand — only so they might overcome their disgust of each other’s flesh and join willingly, more than willingly, in the act of procreation, for having started them up we were loath to let them die out, they being our handiwork, after all, for better or, as so often, worse. But lo! see what they made of this mess of frottage. It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral, complete with baptistry, steeple, weathercock and all. Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable selfobsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.

And all the time the entire thing is a self-induced fantasy. What my Dad, lusting after their love, does not see and will not hear said is that that which love loves is precisely representation, for representation is all it knows. Or not even that much. Show me a pair of them at it and I will show you two mirrors, rosetinted, flatteringly distorted, locked in an embrace of mutual incomprehension. They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one’s eyes. It is immortality they are after — yes, what we would be shot of they long for, or at least the illusion of it, to seem to live forever in an instant of passion. Hence their ceremonies of surrender and engorgement. Agape? — aye, at that feast they eat each other, gobble each other up. And this, this it is that great Zeus covets, their little manufactured transports from which he is excluded.

Those troubadours and their lays have a lot to answer for.

Maddened by prurience, like an old dog by his fleas, my divine father scratches and scratches, until he has exhausted himself. No bull or bird but a mangy old dog, yes, that is what he is. Or, if you prefer, a hapless boy, a shepherd lad, say, hunched in hiding in some Attic grove, spying on a bevy of nymphs at their bath and frantically rubbing himself and stifling yelps of anguished ecstasy. What else can he do, my poor old man? They will not love him — they do not even know it is he, seeing only whatever outlandish disguise it is he presents himself in and lacking the imagination to conceive of a god. And yet he goes on pressing them for a word, a pledge, a plight. It is pathetic. This morning, with young Adam’s wife, he was more abject in his entreaties than I think I have ever known him. It was shaming, and I would have absented myself from the scene were there not in me, too, sometimes, a panting Daphnis spying on a world of pleasures and passions beyond his savouring.

Besides, I had been working hard and had earned a little diversion. Not only did my Dad set me to monitor the house and ensure he was not disturbed at his illicit amours but I also had to render the lady Helen’s husband sleepless so he would go night-wandering and vacate the bed. Then — and wait till you hear this — then I was commanded to hold back the dawn for fully an hour, to give the old boy extra time in which to work his wiles on the unsuspecting girl. Imagine what effort that little feat of prestidigitation involved: the stars stopped in their courses, the rolling world restrained, all chanticleers choked. And then the readjustments afterwards! You try telling that hotspur Phaeton why he was reined in, or rosy-fingered Aurora why I had to shove her in the face. But an hour of suspended day there must be, and was.

Consider the scene.

Their passion all used up at last, they lie in bed together naked, Dad and his girl, reclining on a strew of pillows in the morning’s plum-blue twilight. Or, rather, Dad reclines, leaning on an elbow and cradling the girl’s gold head and burnished shoulders in his lap. Her left arm is raised behind her and draped with negligent ease about his mighty neck. He gazes before him, seeing nothing. In his ancient eyes there is that look, of weariness, dashed hope, tormented melancholy, which I have seen in them so often — too often — at moments such as this. He is rehearsing in his head the age-old inquisition. When he speaks she hears not his but her husband’s voice, and feels her husband’s familiar breath waft over her breasts, a lapsing zephyr. Familiar but, it must be mundanely said, unfamiliarly sweet, for this early, sleep-encrusted hour. For, oh dear, they do tend to pong in the mornings.

“Can people who are married be in love?” he asks, in young Adam’s very voice. “I mean, can they still care as deeply, as desperately, for each other as they did when they were lovers?”

Always at the start like this his heart races, as he thinks, Perhaps, this time—?

“Mmm,” she says, and squirms, snuggling closer against him, making the tangle of dry old hair at his lap crackle under her like a nest of thorns. “You ask such things, and at such times.”

His arm is across her belly, his great, rough hand caresses her warm thigh. “You know,” he says, “it is not your husband who is here now.”

She smiles. He sees upside down her mouth, with lips pressed shut, flex like a myrmidon’s small-bow being drawn; her eyes are lightly closed under fluttering lids. “Who, then?” she asks.

He waits a weighty moment. “Why, your lover, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, with a contented, feathery sigh, squirming closer still, “him, too.”

Such far silence, not a sound, in this suspended world. She opens her eyes and vainly seeks for focus in the depthless shadows above her. A blissful ease suffuses her veins. She thinks of the baby she lost last year, not with the all too familiar breath-catching stab of woe, but calmly, remotely, even; it is like looking back across a plain and seeing only a smudge of dust where a moment before had been fire and ruin and loud lamentation. The baby died inside her after some weeks of a sort of life. Not a baby at all, then, really. She pictures it as a little soft limpet clinging to the wall of the womb, blind and bewildered, washed at by amniotic tides, assailed by the muffled sounds of her innards at work, a frail failing impossible thing.

“But which would you rather,” he persists, and she feels his fingers tensing on her thigh, “the lover, or the husband?”

She might be exasperated but instead is amused. She is accustomed to her husband’s finicking way, his insistence on tracing all lines of enquiry to their logical end, as if things had an end, as if they were logical. He wants to be his father, reducing life to a set of sums. But Adam is softer than his father, and younger than the old man ever could have been, and love, not logic, is his weakness. What need has she of a baby when she has him? This is one of her secretest thoughts, one of the ones she must never utter.

“Husband or lover,” she says, “what is the difference — a ring?”

“A vow.” She puts back her head quickly to squinny up at him. His voice had sounded so strange, so deep and strange, as if it were he, now, who was making a solemn pledge. “Don’t you see,” he goes on in that same, thickened tone, in earnest haste, “—what I feel for you exceeds infinitely what a mere husband could ever be capable of feeling? Didn’t you sense that, here, with me? Have you ever been loved like this before?”

“Oh,” she says, laughing, “it was divine, surely!” She is looking up lazily again into the somehow luminous dark. She feels him nodding.

“Yes,” he says. “And you won’t forget this night, will you? When the sun rises and your husband returns you’ll remember me — won’t you?”

“But you’ll be him!”

“I shall be in him, yes, but he will not be me.”

“Well, whichever. You’re making my head swim.” With the arm that is about his neck she pulls his head forward and kisses him on the mouth the wrong side up. “Oh,” she says with a little shiver, “you feel like you have a beard.”

“Promise,” he whispers, his face suspended featureless above hers, “promise you’ll remember me.”

She grasps his head by the ears as if it were a jug and tries to waggle it. “How could I forget you, you dope?”

When she releases him he leans back on the pillows and she sees that the window behind its thin curtain is engreyed, and there is a gleam on a curtain rail, and the outline of Adam’s football poster appears on the wall, and when she looks along herself she can see her toes. It is all too quick, too much. Her eyelids droop. “Promise!”—the whisper comes again but as if from far off now. She tries to say yes, tries to give her pledge, though to what, exactly, she does not know, but sighs instead and draws up the sheet to cover herself and turns on her side and sleeps.

He too is sleeping now, my foolish father, having ranted his fill on the fickleness of girls—he, he complains of fickleness! — and their interfering husbands, the poor boobies, who do not even know themselves cuckolded. Young Adam is lucky not to have got a thunderbolt between the shoulder-blades as he blithely ploughed his wife there on that bed my Dad had so lately vacated, in the light of this day I was at last allowed to let break. And now the great god, all ardency spent, is stretched upon a cloud-bank with his thumb in his mouth, dreaming of who knows what. He is heart-sore, or would be if he had a heart. Do not mistake me, I feel a certain compassion for him. I too have found myself in his predicament, or ones very like it. I am thinking of Acacallis, Minos’s daughter, and fair Chione, mother of my boy Autolycus — oh, yes, Dad is not the only one: I have had my dalliances among the mortals, and afterwards, like him, have gnawed my knuckles in rage and pain when I had to give this or that girl back to the bonehead she was shackled to. But I do not think I suffer the same weakening effects, these droops and desponds, as Dad does from his adventures in the flesh. It seems worse for him each time, which is supposed to be impossible since nothing may change in our changeless world, either for good or ill. Perhaps he really is dying, perhaps the pursuit of love is killing him, and this is why he so fiercely persists, because he longs for it to kill him. A dying god! And the god of gods, at that! Ah, mortals, have a care and look to your souls, for if he goes, everything goes with him, bang, crash and done with at last, his Liebestod become a Götterdämmerung.

I have a confession. I indulged in a little adventure of my own this morning, after I tired of spying on my father at his pleasures with the supposedly dreaming Mrs. Adam and had fixed the clocks and set the morn to rights. Hotly restless, I ranged the house in search of diversion, and chancing on nothing to suit me there — the lady Helen was asleep and anyway offlimits, and the poor child Petra would hardly have been a fit candidate for my purposes — I swooped outside and in a twinkling found myself before Ivy Blount’s cottage. It is a grim, two-storeyed edifice with a steep-pitched slate roof and narrow, arched window-frames painted a shiny and peculiarly unpleasant, even sinister, shade of blackish green. Ivy when she saw me gave a little bat-squeak — even Ivy’s frights are tentative — and put a hand to her mouth, as maidens are meant to do, even elderly ones.

“God almighty,” she said, “how did you get in?”

“Down the chimney,” I answered, rather overdoing the gruffness, I suspect — it takes a moment to slip fully into character, even for a god. But Duffy the cowman is a fine big chap and his frame fits me well. He is called Adrian, unlikely as it may seem. I note that Ivy does not address him by this name, or by any other, for that matter, out of a reserve natural to her class and vintage — she is a daughter of the demure fifties — along with an inability to take as genuine the attentions he persists in pressing upon her. Mind, she is not indifferent to his rough charms, not at all, only she cannot make herself believe that such a strapping fellow could possibly be romantically drawn to the dry old maid she has reconciled herself to being — he must be a good ten years younger than she is. She darkly suspects it is the house, her little house, that he is after.

Anyway, there I was, incorrigible prankster that I am, got up as a horny-handed son of the soil, Gabriel Oak to the life, in an old torn tweed jacket and corduroy trews, a calico shirt sans collar and a red kerchief knotted carelessly at my throat. I fancy a pair of leather gaiters would have rounded off the picture nicely, but at that, prudently, I drew the line, though with regret.

Those green window-frames are still troubling me, I wonder why.

Ivy was sitting on a kitchen chair in the sunlight in the open back-doorway. She held a freshly killed chicken in her lap — yes, the speckled brown one, with the orange feet — which she was plucking. When she turned, startled by the sound of my step behind her, the legs of her chair shrieked on the slate doorstep. The early sun was shining full in the doorway and there was a mingled smell of poultry and stewed tea-leaves and damp grass, and that particular sharp, gooseberryish something that the countryside exhales on summer mornings. I had put on the look — earnest, awkward, annoyed — that Duffy seems always to adopt in Miss Blount’s presence. The annoyance springs from that resentment all mortal men feel towards those to whom they are attracted; I imagine even the brow of Peleus’s son Achilles must on occasion have darkened when lover-boy Patroclus came clanking into his tent for the umpteenth time. Ivy’s face is long and sharp and her unruly brown hair resembles a rook’s nest, yet for all this, and the fact that the first blush of youth has long ago faded from her cheeks, she is possessed of a peculiar, subtle beauty. Her smile, rare and radiant, flips open a charming little fan of crow’s-feet at either temple, and when she smiles she dips her head quickly in shyness, and for a second seems a girl again. “I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

She had turned back to her grisly task — is not the skin of a plucked chicken horribly reminiscent of what I imagine is the look and texture of the back parts of an old man? — and gave a laughing sniff. “Oh, do you now? And what about, may I ask?” Ivy has a sweet voice, too, light and mellow; in it, she used to speak three or four languages, thanks to her time at a Swiss finishing school, whence she was bundled without notice in the middle of a spring term when the family’s fortunes went wallop.

“The future,” I said.

“Well, that is a big enough topic.”

I went and stood in the doorway with my hands in the pockets of my trousers, looking down on her. I noticed that her nest of hair, so abundant elsewhere, is thinning at the crown, and the white skin shines through, as if mother rook had laid an egg there.

“Are you not going to offer me a cup of tea?” I said.

She did not look up from her work. “I’m busy, as you see.” How deft she is, the feathers fairly flew. “Anyway, you’re out early.”

“They’re all business up at the house, too,” I said, “just like yourself.”

“You came that way?”

“I did.”

“No news?”

“No news.”

Which is their coded way of conferring together on the question of old Adam’s expected demise.

I went to the dresser that stands against the wall opposite the back door and took a big brown mug down from its hook. There was a pitcher of milk on the table. I filled the mug and drank deep. The milk was barely cool and noticeably soured; one of the incidental interests of taking on temporary mortal form is the opportunity it affords of sampling new sensations. I had never tasted sour milk before; I shall not taste it again. I went back to the doorway. Ivy looked askance at me from under a straggle of that hair. “You have a white moustache,” she said. I flew a finger to my upper lip, fearing I had made a blunder when getting into my disguise, but of course it was only a moustache of milk. I speculated afresh as to the extent of the freedoms Duffy enjoys here. I had helped myself to the milk with an almost proprietorial bravado and had met with not a peep of protest. It was a modest liberty, I admit, but in this area the small things can be the greatest giveaways.

“What I’m saying,” I said, squinting off into the sunlight, “is that the upkeep of a house of your own these days is no joke.” Ivy’s vegetable garden, modest but scrupulously tended, is bordered at its far end by a fuchsia hedge hung with a profusion of intense red blossoms. It made a pretty picture, the scarlet bells and the dark hedge and then the green beyond, of bank and field and tree, in all its shades. Ivy had made no response to my gambit, but was waiting to hear how I would proceed, and waiting with pricked-up interest, as I could sense. Yet I paused. I would have been glad of a helping word from her. You must understand, a god is not a gentleman and likes nothing better than to trifle with a lady’s affections, but there are rules that apply even to a divinity, and it was incumbent on me to proceed with caution and deference, if the niceties of the game were to be preserved. Nevertheless, I did not have all day. “That place of mine,” I said, “is beggaring me.” Duffy too has a cottage, not unlike this one, crooked, stark, stone-faced, on the other side of the hill, in which he has lived all his life, until recently in uneasy cohabitation with his widowed mother, a rough-edged baggage generally considered to have been a witch, who died at a great age only last year.

“Beggaring you!” Ivy said in false wonderment, mildly mocking me. “That’s terrible.”

Ivy’s cat appeared, slinking out of the grass on the far side of the cobbled yard. He is a ragged old tom called Tom, mottled in grey-brown shades that make me think of slugs; he has a great star-burst of spiked fur surrounding his face, like a tilted, horrent ruff, as if at some time in the uncertain past he had been given a great fright and had not yet recovered his composure. Seeing me he stopped and stared, his green eyes narrowed and a paw lifted. Baffling for him, I suppose, a Duffy who seemed Duffy in all particulars and yet was not Duffy.

“The roof on my place is gone,” I said, “or going, anyway.”

I brought out a tin box of tobacco from the partly ripped left pocket of my jacket and a packet of papers from the right and rolled a cigarette, one-handed. Not easy. What skills they acquire, in their little span of life!

“Well, yes, a new roof would be an expense,” Ivy said, in a studiedly neutral tone. She was meant to admire my trick with the fag but refused to be impressed. She knows that Duffy’s mother left a wad of banknotes stuffed in a nylon stocking under the mattress of her bed, but guesses the stash cannot have amounted to much. Oh, yes, she thinks, oh, yes, it is the house he has his eye on.

By the way, I am glad to say this is the last we shall hear of the tedious and hexish Ma Duffy.

“I’d sell up tomorrow,” I said, “if I thought I’d get a decent price.”

The chicken was plucked but still Ivy did not raise her head to look at me. The backs of her hands are liver-spotted and her fingers are like bunches of fine, dry twigs. Across the yard, Tom the cat abruptly lost interest in me and sat down on his hunkers and lifted high a straightened hind leg and began nonchalantly licking the puckered grey eyelet under his tail. I listened to the medleyed buzz that summer makes, and thought how tentative these humans are, how they grope and fumble among their motives, hiding their desires, their hopes and trepidations from each other and themselves, perennial children that they are.

“And what,” Ivy asked in a faraway, muffled voice, still leaning forward and away from me, “what would you do then?”

She lifted her feet out of the wellingtons and set them on the sun-warmed slate. Her arthritic toes are all knobbled and crooked. She waggled them slowly. Feet: how strange they are, tuberous and pulpy, like things growing under water. I looked away, embarrassed; strange that the littlest intimacies, such as a pair of bared feet, can make a mortal flinch, even one as stoutly bucolic as Mr. Duffy. Above the hollow where the house is set the sky was a deep, packed blue, with here and there small clouds stuck to it like dabs of cotton wool — what a make-believe world it seems sometimes, no more than a child’s bright daub. The cat came stalking across the cobbles and, ignoring me — obviously he had decided I must be a phantom — rubbed his flank against Ivy’s bony bare shins that are diamonded all over with the marks of old chilblains.

“You mean,” I said, “where would I live?” I ran a hand through my hair. Duffy is vain of this hair, so black, so glossy, so extravagantly waved. He never washes it, but lets it maintain itself, as an animal its pelt. He does not take care of his teeth, either, it seems, for when I sucked on them just now at the side I got a most unpleasant bitter taste, like wormwood. “That’s the question, though, isn’t it?” I said.

As can be seen, in the matter of wooing I am not my father’s son. What I lack in intensity, however, I make up for in cunning. You shall see.

Suddenly, violently, almost, Ivy rose from the chair and pushed past me into the room carrying the chicken cradled in her arms, where now it suggested not an oldster’s backside but a fat, grey baby. Her damp soles had left wonderfully slim, stylised outlines of themselves on the blue step — odd, that such ugly extremities should make such lovely prints. The cat scampered nimbly after her without a sound. I did not quit the doorway but continued leaning against the jamb and turned my head and followed Ivy with my eye. What have I done with my cigarette? She set the chicken on its back on the table with its neck dangling over the edge and its claws retracting on themselves slowly in a gruesome and unnerving fashion.

“If you have something to say to me,” she said, in a voice that had a noticeable shake to it, “come out and say it, then.”

What a striking tableau we must have made, a genre scene by one of the minor Dutch masters, me in the bright doorway and she in the smouldering dimness of the room and the still-life chicken on the table; look at the cat, the crockery on the dresser, delph, they call it — from Delft! — the red and black floor-tiles, and that glimpse of the sunlit day behind me in the door, mute and calm as money. Poor Ivy braced a hand on the table to support herself and looked at me with a look so needy and defenceless even I experienced a qualm. Something to say? I had nothing to say. I was just amusing myself, toying with one of my creatures, as so often is the way.

Turning to go, I nodded in the direction of the jug. “That milk,” I said, “is gone sour.”

5

Adam feels like Adam on the first day in the Garden. He is bowling along, yes, bowling along a country lane in his father’s ancient station-wagon with his elbow set in the rolled-down window, whistling “Lillibullero,” the only tune he knows. The car is one of the original Salsol models, fitted with a prototype salt-water converter, which makes such a racket, housed in a big black box set lengthways under the front seats. The passenger window also is wide open and in the straight stretches where he puts his foot down there is a wild green rushing and thrashing on either side of him that makes his heart pound with a childish excitement. The mid-morning sun is shining strongly and the air flowing in from outside is redolent of fragrant dust and grass and a myriad growing things too faint and jumbled together to identify or name, even if he knew the names. At one time, when he was young, he had thought of becoming a professional gardener, not that he had a great feeling for husbandry or a great knowledge of what it entails, but he had believed it would be a pleasant and productive way of making a living. His interest had been sparked by the recent overturning of Wallace’s theory of evolution and the resulting to-do in the natural sciences that everyone was talking about; however, nothing came of his plan — another false start. Through gaps in the hedge he catches glimpses of gorse bushes yellowly aflame on the low hillsides, and in the hollows there are lingering blurs of morning mist. He is absurdly happy, perilously so — as is well known, human happiness is a great provocation to us. Under the flaccid worm in his lap he harbours still a warm, sticky smear of juices, his and Helen’s mingled. At the thought of his golden wife he stops whistling and closes his eyes for a moment, remembering her this morning in the bedroom, in his shirt, advancing on him bare-legged along the length of the bed. The wind seizes his hair and shakes it. Yes, we gods do sometimes smile on our creation, but only sometimes, and never for long.

Is it not affecting to see him so pleased with himself, when we think of all that occurred earlier up there in his old room, while he was prowling the house unsuspectingly in that delayed hour before dawn? Mind you, it is a nice question whether he was betrayed by Helen and my Dad, in the technical sense, I mean. After all, Helen did not know the true identity of her divine lover, and thought he was her Adam, as why would she not? Then she decided it was all a dream and proceeded to reenact as best she could what had happened in it, this time with her true, that is, her real, husband. And so passionate was she, fired with the godhead’s inspiration, so wanton, indeed, to her husband’s surprise and somewhat scandalised delight — after all, they were in the very bedroom where his hottest boyhood dreams were dreamt — that it could be said my father did nothing but prepare the way for the young man, this fellow whistling for happiness now as he steers the rattly old Salsol one-handed along these green lanes, bathed in remembering bliss.

He has a secret, one he will tell to no one, not even his wife, for fear of ridicule. He believes unshakeably in the possibility of the good. Not the transcendent piety of the saints, not the abstract entity of the philosophers, but that unemphatic impulse which, he is convinced, is the source of countless humble and largely unregarded decencies, decencies that in turn feed and sustain the source of their inspiration. Now, this would be a harmless fancy, if he did not conceive of the good as a thing in itself, active and forceful, and independent of any agent. For him, good and evil are two species of virus competing against each other for hegemony in the heart of man, with good managing to hold the upper hand, though barely. It is a not uncommon delusion among many millions since the days when the pale Galilean walked amongst you, or from earlier still, from the dawn of that awful day when Moses came marching down the mount with the news inscribed in stone that there is but one God and thou shalt have no other. But thou shouldst have stuck with us. We offer you no salvation of the soul, but no damnation, either; no afterlife in which to be bored for all eternity; no parousia, no day of reckoning and divine retribution, no kingdom of heaven on earth; nothing, in fact, except stories, comforting or at least comfortingly reasonable accounts of how and why things are as they are and by what means they may be maintained or even, on occasion, rare occasion, altered. If the wise man suffers it is due to a hidden flaw in him that we deplore, if the tyrant prospers it is because we admire his overweening and irresistible will. Why plague? — because your king is cursed. How shall your armies be victorious in battle? — place oxen and the odd virgin before our graven images and slit their throats. Sometimes we ask terrible things of you — think of Iphigenia, think of Iphigenia’s father — and often we give you nothing in return. It is our way of demonstrating to you the inscrutable action of Fate. Above all, we would have you acknowledge and accept that the nature of your lives is tragic, not because life is cruel or sad — what are sadness and cruelty to us? — but because it is as it is and Fate is unavoidable, and, above all, because you will die and be as though you had never been. That is the difference between us and your mealy-mouthed Saviour, so-called — we do not pretend to be benign, but are playful only, and endlessly diverted by the spectacle of your heart-searchings and travails of the spirit.

The little station when Adam arrives there is deserted, no station master, no porter, no waiting passengers. He is early, the train is not due for another fifteen minutes, and besides it is sure to be late, as it usually is. The station is by the river, miles from anywhere, not even attached to a village — why was it built here, at the desolate edge of a marsh? It must have been for the convenience of some grand house nearby that is now long gone. Adam thinks of the past piled up behind him, its countless overlapping layers, and of what will have been his own brief moment on this so tender, frail and suffering earth. He parks outside the ticket office and walks through to the platform unchallenged. The pair of tweed trousers he is wearing, which he found in the wardrobe in the Sky Room, have begun to chafe the inner sides of his thighs. What was he thinking, to put them on? It seemed the necessary thing, at the time. This is another mark of his inherent and humble piety, this sense he has of the sacramental in even the smallest, even the most absurd, of actions. Well, holy these trousers may be, but he suspects they are not clean: they have an unpleasant smell, at once stale and sharp. They are the wrong fit, being tight at the waist and short in the leg, like the pyjamas he wore last night. Still, small as they are on him they are too roomy to have been Pa’s, so whose, again, can they have been? He experiences a flash of anger. Is the house itself set on making a fool of him, getting him up in these laughable outfits and sending him stumbling into the world like a village idiot? But he knows it is not the house’s fault that he looks foolish: it is his own.

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat.

Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

He is prey again to the fear that his marriage is failing. There is nothing definite he can point to, as that big red hand points towards the jakes, only over the past year he has been aware of an increasing vagueness, an increasing insubstantiality, in his life with Helen. Something is fading, becoming bleached and dry. Does she blame him for the miscarriage? He does not see how it could have been his fault but maybe in some way it was. He cannot be sure; he cannot be sure of anything. The fact of the lost baby, the non-fact of it, is a tiny, desolate presence always between them, getting in the way. Sometimes when Helen looks at him it is as if she does not know who he is. He feels he is retreating in her sight, like a man standing on a railway platform, being looked back at from a window as the train pulls out, slowly at first, then gradually gaining speed. He imagines her turning from the window and settling herself on the plush seat, smiling at the other passengers in that unfocused way that she does, and taking up a magazine, and him already growing distant in her mind—

Suddenly, as if the thought had conjured the thing, the real train comes shuffling into view down the line, one of the newfangled models that run on steam, the big imperial-blue engine with the black cow-catcher and the carriages after it, scarlet with gold piping around the doors and windows, all shimmering in a silky veil of heat-haze rising from the track. On time, for once!

— And yet, an hour ago, when she came stumping comically on her knees over the bed to him and seized his face and pressed it against her breasts and laughed her tigerish laugh, surely he was wholly there, wholly himself, flesh and blood and solidly present in her arms?

What casuistries they are capable of, even the simplest-minded among them, what fine distinctions and discriminations they devise! This is what we never cease to marvel at, the mountains they make out of the molehills of their passions, while all the time their real, their savage, selves are crouched in hiding behind those outcrops, scanning the surrounds for danger or opportunity, for predators or prey.

When the train draws to a stop Roddy Wagstaff is the only passenger to get down. Tall and slender and slightly stooped, Roddy has the aspect of a film heart-throb of a former time. He wears narrow fawn slacks sharply pressed, and pale-tan, slip-on shoes, and a white shirt that fairly shines in the sunlight, the collar open over a loosely knotted yellow cravat. His caramel-coloured hair is parted at the side and carefully arranged in a casual sweep across his brow. He has green eyes and a phthisic pallor. A white linen jacket is folded over one arm, and he carries a slim pigskin suitcase, old but good, which for some reason adds a touch of the sinister to his appearance. When he sees who is there to meet him a delicate frown concentrates itself between his rather close-set eyes. He casts a dubious glance at Adam’s rust-coloured trousers and the three inches of ankle showing below the turn-ups. “Oh, hello,” he says without warmth. Like Adam’s father, Roddy does not bother with proper names.

The two young men walk side by side along the platform. Adam spots on the wall outside the waiting room a faded tin advertisement for Player’s Navy Cut — lifebuoy with rope, stout Jack Tar, and distantly behind him on the rolling main a pair of three-masters under full sail — that he has never noticed until now although it must have been there since before he was born. Time once again brushes him glancingly with its cold wing. As if prompted by the advertisement Roddy pauses to take out of the pocket of his linen jacket a flat silver cigarette case, flips it open and chooses a cigarette and lights it with a petrol lighter of the same antique vintage as the silver case. A waft of rich, exotic smoke reaches Adam’s nostrils. They walk on.

“Your father,” Roddy says between puffs, “how is he?” He does not look at Adam. Roddy affects always a distracted mien, distracted and faintly gloomy, as if he were in constant anticipation of something that he is certain will displease him. His hands betray a slight tremor.

“Much the same,” Adam says.

“The same as what?” Roddy almost snaps. “You forget, I haven’t seen him since he suffered the stroke.”

They come out on the station steps. Roddy’s sour expression softens when he sees the familiar old Salsol with its lacquered, brown wooden trim waiting for them on the gravel in the sun. Moving forward they pass under a nondescript tree that stands in the heat with its head hanging, and for a second it seems to Adam that Roddy as he enters its shadow fades somehow, becoming a blur, almost transparent, almost vanishing. He blinks, and then Roddy has stepped through into the sunlight again, and is turning back to him, saying something. “Yes,” Adam replies, “yes,” not knowing what he is agreeing to, not listening. He is carrying Roddy’s suitcase, which Roddy set down on the platform when he stopped to light his cigarette and did not bother to pick up again, and now he goes to stow it in the back seat of the station-wagon, and leaning in at the door he pauses and closes his eyes and breathes deep the car’s familiar smells of crusted salt and mildewed leather and human sweat, and at once he catches again faintly a snatch of the melody of that happiness he felt only a little while ago, driving along, and he recalls again too his wife kneeling before him on the bed, her hot hands on his face, her glittering, avid eyes. When he clambers in behind the steering-wheel — even the big station-wagon is too confining for his bulk — he finds Roddy already settled in the passenger seat with his jacket on his lap. He has not finished smoking his cigarette and waves it now airily and says, “You don’t mind, do you?”

The heat of the latening morning has intensified and as they drive back along the narrow roads the scent of dry grass and baking earth is stronger than ever and stings their nostrils. Roddy has shut his window but the shuddering rush of air from Adam’s side scatters burning specks of ash from the tip of his cigarette and forces him to stub out the last quarter of it in the ashtray under the dashboard.

“Pete is looking forward to seeing you,” Adam says. “She has been up since dawn, talking about you.”

“Oh, God,” Roddy murmurs, and looks out at the high hedgerow streaming past. Roddy knows what Petra’s day-long monologues are like. “Is she still collecting diseases?”

“Still at it,” Adam answers with spiteful cheer. Roddy finds Petra’s projects exasperating. Her latest is an almanac of ailments in which she aims to list, complete with clinical definitions, all the illnesses known to afflict mankind. “How far has she got?”

“Astasia-abasia is the most recent one I heard her mention.” Roddy turns to look at him. “Losing the will to stand up and walk. Rare, but recorded, so she claims.”

“God,” Roddy moans again.

I, by the way, in case you have forgotten me, am perched in the middle of the back seat, leaning forward eagerly with my hands pressed between my knees — I have knees, I can perch — taking in everything, words, gestures, looks, noting it all, for this that is happening, or not happening, between these two is what they call life.

“You should take her out somewhere,” Adam says.

Roddy snickers. “A hike, you mean, something like that? A tramp in the hills?”

“Why not? Or take her into town.”

“Into town?”

“Yes, take her out to lunch.”

Roddy is looking at him again. “Take Petra, to town, for lunch?”

“Well, just for a walk, then — anything. She’s lonely, Roddy. She’s too much on her own. It is not good for her.”

To this Roddy makes no reply, only turns to the windscreen again with a deep, irritated sigh. Roddy’s ways are older than his years would warrant. In his middle twenties, he has the manner, by turns prickly and jaded, of a much more elderly man. He leads a mysterious life, being of shadowy provenance and uncertain intent. It is hard to know exactly how he makes his living. Pieces by him appear occasionally in the pages of broadsheet newspapers and in the glossier magazines, on abstruse subjects — Byzantine ceramics, American vernacular furniture of the nineteenth century, contemporary monastic life on Mount Athos — but these can hardly provide an income sufficient to keep him in the Turkish cigarettes and silk foulards to which he is so partial. His people are said to have money, but his relatives, those numerous rich great-aunts and venerable landed cousins whom he makes frequent mention of, all seem to be distressingly long-lived. One night when he was staying for the weekend at Arden he drank a glass of wine too many and confessed to young Adam his plan to persuade young Adam’s father to appoint him his official biographer. Adam laughed at this, to Roddy’s hurt surprise. The following morning, crapulent and shaky, Roddy took Adam off into a corner and swore him to secrecy on the night’s blurted indiscretion, and even yet Adam is aware of a certain restraint towards him, however grudging, on the part of an otherwise sharp-tongued Roddy.

They hurtle down the green lane and then come out on the Hunger Road, a long, straight stretch of smooth tarmac running beside the river. It dates from the famine times, a make-work project for the unemployed poor and starving of the county. Adam feels uneasy on this road. A sense of its desperate purposelessness weighs on him. All this area of marsh and slobland is uncanny. Everything seems to face away, looking stolidly elsewhere, and even when it is sunny the sunshine appears watered and weak. The river drifts into the estuary here, and the widening expanse of water, flatter somehow than even water should be, is featureless and forlorn. There are wide stands of sedge, dry and grey — why is it, Adam wonders, that one never sees green sedge? — and herons and an occasional egret, the latter seeming the smaller, pure-white ghosts of the former, and a black cormorant perched on a log with wings spread wide to dry, as though posing for its portrait as an imperial emblem. Forgotten jetties, their silvered planking smashed or crumbling, extend a yard or two into the water and abruptly halt. There are broad sheets of shiny, indigo-tinted mud arrowed all over with the prints of wading birds, and here and there a rowing boat or a duck-shooter’s white-painted punt is stuck at a drunken angle in the sludge. At a point where the river narrows, a mysterious wooden footbridge with a rusted hand-rail crosses from one sodden bank to the other, going from nowhere to nowhere.

Adam is wondering idly where exactly it is that the river ends and the estuary begins. Beside him Roddy is trying to light another cigarette but the draught keeps snatching the flame of his lighter. Adam pretends not to notice, and will not roll up his window despite the sulphurous reek of mud and rotting seaweed being borne in from outside. “How was the journey down?” he asks. Roddy, annoyedly fitting the unlit cigarette back into its case, looks askance with an exaggerated frown, pretending to find the question too baffling in its simple-mindedness for him to begin to comprehend it. “The train,” Adam says, in a louder voice. “How was it?”

Roddy shrugs. “I don’t know. Same as usual, I suppose — dirty, slow.”

Adam nods absently; he is used to Roddy’s languid rudenesses. Of course, he is thinking, there would be no line or boundary at which the river stops being the river and the estuary starts being the estuary: they would flow into each other, necessarily, back and forth, according to the onward rush of the river and the more or less pressure of the alternating tides. Yet there must be some area of demarcation, surely, however broad or amorphous. He ponders the problem and, having pondered, comes to the conclusion that it is not a matter of the river being one thing and the estuary another; all that separates them, really, and it is not a real separation at all, is his having put the question in the first place. For the question is premised on two, manmade, terms — river, estuary — whereas in fact there is but one body of water, commingling here at the whim of unceasing flow on one side and of changing tides on the other; any separation is a separation made only by the action of his asking. This is strange.

“Does your father speak at all?” Roddy enquires. “I mean, can he?” There is a tinge of umbrage to his tone. The world keeps putting hindrances in his way, of which Adam Godley’s sudden collapse is the most recent and, for the moment, most serious example.

“Oh, no,” Adam says. “He’s in a coma.” Roddy nods. “But of course,” Adam continues, “no one can say how deep the coma is. He may be aware at some level, and able to think, and hear, for all we know. La says she’s convinced he’s conscious but just can’t communicate — she says he opens his eyes, though no one else has seen him do it. You might talk to him. He always did like having a talk with you.”

Roddy glances at him sharply, suspecting irony.

A further thought has struck Adam. Salt — what about salt? The river is fresh water but the sea is saline. That is a definite distinction. He does not know why he did not think of it at once, especially since — thanks to the discovery of cold fusion, the science of it founded, to the surprise of all, on his father’s notorious Brahma equations — the greater part of the world’s energy nowadays is derived from brine. And there is motion, too. All very well to speak of whim, but when the river’s outgoing flow meets the tide’s incoming flood there are two forces in opposition, and two forces mean two separate things doing the forcing. Then after all it is not merely a matter of man — in this case Adam himself — proposing, but of fact disposing. River here, estuary there, not two names only but two discrete entities. Yet where do they merge, exactly? He sighs. He is back to where he started.

Now they turn off the straight road and leave behind the river and its wastes of water and climb into the low hills that were once a part of Arden demesne. As this little elevation is steadily gained Adam’s spirits lift too. The going on this road is bumpy and the station-wagon yaws and rumbles and they hear the salt water sloshing in the tank under their seats. The hill to the left is a hedgeless upward sweep of close-cropped sward capped by a small stand of larches. Sheep are placidly grazing the hillside. A pied horse kicks up its hoofs as they pass by, gallops friskily a little way, stops and turns its head and looks back at them boldly, showing them its behind and flicking its tail from side to side. Rooks wheel in sunlight above the little wood. O Arcady! how I pine for thy brooks and glades.

“I have a great fondness for your father,” Roddy says. Adam has to make an effort not to smile — Roddy has a way of saying things as if they had been written down on prompt-cards and practised many times — but before he can reply Roddy speaks again, quickly, in a muted yet vexedly accusing tone. “I know what you think of me.”

“Do you?” Adam, surprised, says. “I’m not sure I know myself what I think of you, or of anyone else, for that matter.”

Adam waits, but Roddy, it appears, has nothing more to add. He sits with his head thrust forward, looking steadily out through the windscreen with a faint, pursed smile, of satisfaction, even of triumph, it might be, as if there had been a hash in need of settling and he had settled it with gratifying finality and dispatch. Adam has the unsettling sensation of having been engaged in a far more extensive, far more rancorous exchange, involving him but carried on somehow without his full participation.

I am admiring the gorse blossom: it is truly glorious, a froth of buttery gold over the hillsides and along the hedgerows. Aye, this world we gave them appears a pretty place, on occasion.

“Is this all your father’s land?” Roddy asks.

“No, no. There’s only the house and the acre or two it stands on, and the wood behind. The rest was sold off long before our time.” Roddy nods. He peers out at the passing spectacle of green and gold and wrinkles his brow as if faintly deploring all he sees. Adam glances down sideways at Roddy’s tan slip-ons. His white linen jacket is folded on his knees as neatly as a parcel. “Everyone is glad you’ve come, you know.” Roddy does not respond to this, but holds himself aloof, pretending he has not heard or is too preoccupied to pay heed. Adam presses on. “It’s strange, the house, since Pa got sick. We feel we’re all”—he sadly smiles—“mourners-in-waiting.”

Roddy turns his head quickly to look at him. “Is he going to die?” He sounds incredulous.

They round a bend and the house comes into view. Really it is, Adam sees, not for the first time, an impossible sort of folly, square and mad-looking, with its yellow-painted walls and pale-blue shutters and that winged tin figure — ahem! — atop the single turret. Viewed from this perspective the entire structure seems to lean slightly to one side, drunkenly. Two palm trees, dusty and dejected, stand one each before either pillar of the gate — palms, in this climate, and here, in the heart of the country! — brought from afar, perhaps on the SS Esmerelda, by a Blount forebear of missionary or, more likely, buccaneering bent. When he was a boy Adam used to play with their shed fronds, pretending they were scimitars, duelling two-handed with himself. As he turns the car from the road on to the drive the crunching sound the wheels make in the grit-filled ruts brings back for an instant a confusion of lost, sunstruck summers. Rex has heard their approach and in the distance sets up a deep-throated barking, each bark followed by a measured pause, as he waits in vain for echo or response. They wallow on soft tyres to the end of the avenue of limes and make a half turn around the no longer functioning fountain — a blank-eyed boy on a rampant dolphin, last year’s dead leaves choking the dry basin — and pull up short on the gravel outside the front door and sit unmoving for a moment in the sudden, startled silence.

“Look, Roddy,” Adam says, and pauses. Roddy has taken out the flat silver case and is judiciously selecting a cigarette, as if they were not all perfectly alike. “I want to ask something of you. I want to ask you to be nice to my sister.”

Roddy stops with the cigarette half-way to his lips and lifts his eyes and looks straight ahead. The sloping glass of the windscreen with the sun on it is greyly hazed and all beyond is indistinct. “Nice?” he says, seeming to dangle the word aloft by one corner.

Adam’s bare elbow is hot where it rests in the car’s open window. Five ducks in a skein fly over fast, their wings making a whirring sound—hurry-hurry-hurry—and from far off, out on the slobland, there comes, insequentially with the seemingly fleeing ducks, the miniature muffled thud of an out-of-season shotgun-blast. The front door’s blue paint is peeling; gnarled wisteria wreathes the lintel.

“Yes,” Adam says shortly, and puffs out his cheeks and lets them deflate again. “Nice. It’s not so much to ask, is it? Think of it as a gesture to Pa. Because he is dying, you know.”

Roddy, lighting his cigarette, seems about to laugh — at what? — when the front door opens and Rex shoots out, barking again. He dashes menacingly towards the station-wagon with stiff, arthritic gait, not so much running as bounding up and down from back legs to fore like a rocking-horse set jerkily in motion. When he sees Adam his bark breaks and he snaps his jaws shut and looks embarrassed. Adam gets out and Roddy on his side opens his door but holds it close and hangs back behind it until he judges the dog has done capering and the gravel-dust has begun to disperse. The harsh dry salt reek from the car’s exhaust spreads thinly in the dusty air. Petra has appeared in the doorway, in baggy corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved blue shirt buttoned at the wrists, and stands with her left arm pressed stiffly against the peeling frame and frowning hard at a point on the ground half-way between her and the station-wagon, from behind the door of which now Roddy emerges, with his bag held protectively in front of him and his linen jacket folded over his arm, still keeping an eye on the dog, and advances towards her, queasily smiling.

. . .

Ursula in the Sky Room has heard Rex’s barking and the sound of tyres on the gravel but goes on clipping her husband’s fingernails. They do not really need to be clipped but she is doing it anyway, to be doing something. The curtains are still closed and the room is dark and she has switched on the reading lamp on the bedside table and angled it to light her task. She does not know why she keeps the curtains pulled against the summer day, or why, indeed, she set a reading lamp beside the bed. She cannot tell if her husband registers light or lack of it in those rare moments when he opens his eyes; she cannot be sure that he registers anything, but she makes herself believe that he does. His hands are cold as water, soft, and clammy. The nails are flattish and finely striated, and the skin beneath them is milky blue and the half-moons at their bases are a ghostly shade of grey. She started off with scissors but they were too fiddly and made her flesh crawl, and so she is using the clippers, which are easier though still it is a shivery business. She has never cut anyone’s fingernails before, except her own, and she would not cut even those if there were someone who would do it for her. When Adam and Petra were small she was too squeamish to do theirs and left the job to their father or to his mother. She seems to remember that Granny Godley used to trim young Adam’s nails with her teeth when he was a baby. Can that have been? Surely not — surely she is imagining it? Yet in her mind she clearly sees the old woman, lanky and white-skinned like her son, leaning over the cradle and baring her long, yellowish horse-teeth, exactly like the witch in a fairy-tale.

She knows it is not so yet she has the unnerving feeling that her husband, even though his eyes are closed, is watching her from the gloom outside the yellow circle of lamplight in which she leans, watching her along the blanket from under his eyelashes. It is how she often caught him looking at her, askance, smiling to himself, silently amused, especially in their early days together. She might have been his daughter rather than his wife, and even yet there are times when she feels like his child. She is sure this is a terrible notion, and would never confide it to anyone.

Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if the top part of his head had been taken off and carved and trimmed and jammed down into the scooped-out jaws of a stranger. She almost wept, but he went on eating his toast as if nothing had happened. He had bought a cut-throat razor with an ivory handle, an antique thing from the last century; he showed it to her in its black velvet box lined with scarlet satin. She could not look at it without a shiver. He liked to show off his skill with it, and would leave the bathroom door open so she could admire the deft way he wielded the dangerous, gleaming thing, holding it at an elegant angle between fingertips and thumb, his little finger fastidiously crooked, and sweeping the blade raspingly through the snow-like foam. Harsh light above the bath and the steely shine of the mirror and one dark, humorously cocked eye glancing at her sideways from the glass. Where is it now, she wonders, that razor? In a week or two he got tired of using it and let his beard grow back.

Disturbing things, these little horny flanges at the ends of everyone’s fingers and toes that never stop growing, even after death, or so she has heard said. What are they, were they, for? Killing, skinning, rending? Too weak and brittle for that. Perhaps they were stronger, long ago; perhaps they were claws. She thinks she read somewhere that they were originally tufts or pads of hair that became fused and hardened, in the same way that thorns on roses are supposed really to be leaves that over aeons coiled themselves tighter and tighter until they were sharp as needles. Yet it all seems highly improbable. She knows so little, and even the things she does know she doubts. Adam would be able to tell her about fingernails and how they came to be as they are. He would look it up for her. He liked looking things up. He would throw himself back on his chair, frowning deeply, his lips pursed as if to whistle, then sprint off to the bookshelves and return a minute later with a big book open on his hands, hurrying along as if on tiptoe, stooped and swift, reading even as he went.

Her mind has not allowed her yet to grasp the full extent of the calamity that has befallen them, not only Adam and she but the rest of the family, too. There is a saving numbness around her heart, she can almost feel it, like a film of insulating air between the walls of the beating muscle and the soft red pulp inside the rib-cage where it is suspended. For all that the doctors tell her, she will not, she simply will not be persuaded that he is entirely beyond consciousness and not merely asleep in some special, profound sense, and she keeps waiting for him to sit up and clear his throat and start asking for things, his clothes, food, a glass of wine, in that deceptively diffident manner he affects when he is at his most furious, looking aside and frowning, pretending to be thinking of something else. No, he is not unconscious, she is sure of it, only more deeply sunk than ever before in one of his impenetrable reveries. He always had the ability to withdraw from his surroundings, for days on end, wrapping himself up in himself and shutting out everything and everyone. When she sits here alone with him like this, in this peculiar daytime darkness, she seems to hear, or at least to feel, a distant low unwavering hum, which she is convinced is the sound of his mind still at work. When that sound ceases she will accept that he is gone, and not until then.

I approach and lean over her solicitously, folding my invisible wings about her sad, sloped shoulders. You see how, despite our callous ways, we keep you all in our care? She does not feel my presence, only its soothing effect.

She has finished trimming her husband’s nails and holds his right hand now at rest on her left palm. Closer to the lamplight his skin loses its softness and takes on the look of marble, pale and moistly agleam. She hears voices outside on the stairs. Her son is showing Roddy Wagstaff to his room. She supposes Petra will be trailing behind them, going along by the wall, hunched and hangdog, as always.

Before Adam, she had thought herself content. Early on in her life, when she was still quite young, a child still, really, she had decided that the world was not for her. She had even thought of joining an order, entering a convent, but she stayed at home instead. She was the bird who builds its nest behind the waterfall and perches there quite placid, amid the constant crashing, the spume, the flashing iridescence. Adam was the one who drew her, briefly, into the heart of the cataract.

Water: it was always his element, his emblem, for her. The first time she saw him was on a bridge above a torrential river one winter day, under a scudding sky. She had come to witness the famous tidal bore, and someone had brought him to see it, too. She was anxious, for she was afraid of heights. She had a sensation of constantly falling forward, and kept feeling she was about to topple irresistibly over the rail and plummet down into the moiling river far below. He was standing a little way from her. He too was holding on to the rail, as if he too were afraid. The wind was blowing in his hair and his beard and to her he seemed to have a stricken, desperate look. Before they saw it they heard the sound of the bore, a low rumble that seemed to make the grey light around them shake and the metal of the bridge vibrate under their feet. Then it came surging round the river bend, a smooth, high, almost stately wall of water crumbling in slow-motion against the banks on either side. She was thinking how cold she was, despite her heavy coat and woollen hat. When the huge wave was about to pass under the bridge, for some reason she looked upwards instead of down, and the mass of low-slung, lead-coloured clouds sweeping overhead, like a confused reflection of the river raging below, made her feel dizzier still and for a moment it seemed, thrillingly, that she was going to faint. But she did not faint, and when she lowered her head, blinking, she saw that he was looking at her, and did not stop looking when she looked back at him. He smiled, though it seemed as if he were wincing in pain. She was nineteen.

They went to a pub set among trees on a grassy rise at the far end of the bridge. They sat in a tobacco-brown snug where the noise from below of the endless traffic rounding a broad bend in the road seemed an echo of her own blood sizzling in her veins. She could see the bridge through the trees, a pale-blue spectral web. When he asked her what she would like to drink the only thing she could think to say was gin, though she had never drunk gin before. And indeed it was like nothing she had ever tasted, cold and insidious and subtly discomposing. She liked the look of it, too, shinily metallic with the faintest tinct of paraffin-blue in its depths. He did not take off his overcoat but sat with one hand moving about inside the lapel, as if he were feeling for the source of an ache; he was always cold, he told her, could never warm up. With his plume of smooth black hair and great bony gleaming nose he looked like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, distracted, brooding on some other place, some other solitary height. She sat opposite him very straight on the stool and sipped her drink. The mist from the river advanced up the hillside and pressed its flanks shyly against the bottle-glass windows behind them. The gin went straight to her head.

She cannot remember what they talked about. He was very cool and playful, teasing her a little and watching her with his head held to one side, smiling. She was not fooled. Despite the gin she saw through him straight away, saw through the hairline crack running athwart the carefully fashioned mask that he was holding up to her, saw right down to all the things that were coiled and curled inside him like those unimaginably tiny strings he told her people used to think the world was ultimately made of. She asked for another drink but he said he thought that two were enough. Then he started to tell her about his wife, about Dorothy, who had died. He stared before him intently as he spoke, frowning, as if it were all printed on the air and he had only to read it out to her. His tone was one of dull amazement; grief had amazed him.

He was older than her father. She did not care. When he asked her to marry him it seemed to her that she had already said yes, a long time ago.

She places her husband’s hand back at his side on the blanket and watches it intently for the slightest twitch. She believes he would give her a sign if he could. Although she is convinced he is still there in his mind, present and conscious, it occurs to her that maybe it is not she that he is conscious of. Maybe it is not she that he is with, in there, as he was not quite with her that first day, in the pub, for all his teasing smiles and all his talk. Has he ever been a complete presence, for her? She feels a slow heave in the region of her diaphragm, as if some slothful and horribly distressed thing is trying to turn itself over on its back. What if he is with Dorothy? Who is to say he is not nearer to the dead wife than he is to the living one? There is a world of the living and a world of the dead and he is suspended in a place between the two. In that place, is it not likely the dead have more power than the living, are more distinctly present to the one who is already half-way along the way to join them? Maybe even now his lost wife is reaching out a hand to him, over the dark water, and calling to him softly to come to her.

She stands up quickly. When she switches off the reading lamp the darkness spreads itself instantly, and she imagines she can feel it against her face, on the backs of her hands, a softly clinging stuff. She moves away from the bedside, pressing a hand to the base of her spine, and softly groans.

From below she hears faintly the chiming of the clock in the drawing room, calling her back to the world and its wants.

The things that to Petra seem perfectly ordered are for others all jumbled and strewn. It is as if she were written in a primitive script of straight lines and diagonals, a form of Ogham that no scholar has yet learned how to decipher. Not even her father was able to crack that code. The others do not realise that this is what so tires and vexes her, the endless effort of interpreting herself for their benefit. Everything she thinks and intends must be translated into an approximation of their language before they can understand anything of what she is saying. She knows the world is not as she conceives it; she has known this for a long time, for as long as she can remember. Some parts of it are missing and some that are there are there only because she has put them there. This does not mean the parts that are missing are real and the ones that are present are not. It is a matter of fact. It is, in fact, a matter of matter, as her father would tell her. For what is spirit in this world may be flesh in another. In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled; that is one of the things that have been proved by what her father disparagingly calls his sums. Not that he would say it was proved, since all proofs, according to him, are provisional.

Time too is a difficulty. For her it has two modes. Either it drags itself painfully along like something dragging itself in its own slime over bits of twigs and dead leaves on a forest floor, or it speeds past, in jumps and flickers, like the scenes on a spool of film clattering madly through a broken projector. She is always either lagging behind or hopelessly far in front of everyone else, calling plaintively after them through cupped hands or gabbling back at them breathlessly over her shoulder. When she confessed this to her father, confessed how she never seemed to be in step with anyone else, he showed no surprise, and said she was quite right, that time is not uniform and only dull people imagine it is so. It was a summer evening, and they were in the wood behind the house, sitting beside the holy well in the little hollow of brambles and holly that has been here, her father says, since the Druids. She recalls the dampish light, the smells of moss and musty water, the sunlight a spiked glare of white gold and a swarm of tiny, translucent flies busily weaving an invisible design above the water of the well. They were sitting one at either end of the old school bench that someone long ago brought up there so that pilgrims to the place would have a seat to rest on — there is a right of way through the fields to here and anyone is free to enter, and some still do, on holy days especially. She had her feet up on the seat and her arms around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. Time, her father was saying, looking upwards and scratching his chin through his beard, time has tiny flaws in it, tiny slippages, that in the very beginning hindered the flow of formlessness and created form. In the same way, he said, that your nails catch on something made of silk, with little hooks you did not know were there until they snagged. “Do you see?” he asked. Flaws in the matrix, temporal discrepancies. So at the start, when there was still nothing, the world was, you could say, hindered into existence. The whole enormous thing — here he gestured towards all outside the dimness of the grotto where they sat — a vast grid of tiny accidents, infinitely tiny mishaps. He looked at her, smiling helplessly. “Do you see?”

What would Roddy Wagstaff not have given to be there, listening to her father talking about time and its origins. She knows very well that Roddy only pretends to care about her so he can come down to Arden and see her father. Everyone, her brother, for instance, thinks she is hurt by this but it is not so — the contrary, in fact. It was Roddy’s absorbed and single-minded sense of himself that so impressed her the first time he came to stay at the house. She had never known anyone like him before, except for her father, of course. Roddy seemed to her an entirely free spirit, weightless and airy and, unlike her father, unencumbered by labours, achievements, lavish renown. Roddy seemed to spend his life diligently and happily doing nothing. How she wished she could be even a little like that. All her life she had lived under the vast crag of her father’s looming presence. When Roddy scrambled in and sat down beside her in the shadow of that rock, dusting off the knees of his slacks and nonchalantly lighting up a cigarette, he invited her to look, whether he meant to or not, at the grand vista that had been there before her all along, beyond the confines where for so long she had been crouching.

The word she thought of for Roddy, that first weekend when he came down to Arden, was debonair. It was not a word she had ever had occasion to use before, about anyone, even her father. She watched Roddy, in the conservatory after lunch, sitting on a straight chair with one slim ankle crossed on a knee and an elbow resting on the back of his chair and a hand tensely holding aloft his cigarette, vigilant, missing nothing, and all the while smiling tirelessly in her father’s direction. She had never encountered anyone so smooth, so poised and yet so concentrated and determined, too. She even found the tiny rapid tremor in his hand a mark of distinction, the result no doubt of being watchful always of everything, himself in particular. He had fitted himself into the household like a knife into a sheath. It is his very lack of substance that she considers his most becoming quality. He is not earnest and dependable like her brother; he is not good, or nice; he is not anything, much, except ambitious, and acquisitive — he has a magpie’s glittering alertness for small bright advantageous things, the useful trifles that others overlook. He has, besides, a fastidious sheen. She finds most people disconcertingly repellent, men especially. One of them will be standing in front of her, suited and belted, tie neatly knotted and a flower in his buttonhole, talking away and grandly gesturing as they all do, and suddenly she will picture him squatting on the lavatory, with his elbows on his knees and his drawers around his ankles, and underneath him all his awful puddingy things dangling over the steaming bowl. She thinks of puckered anuses, oniony armpits, disgusting tufts of curled-up, glistening hair — she cannot stop herself — of stuff under the flaps of their prepuces, up their nostrils, between their toes. Roddy, however, comes to her as bland and unblemished as a shop-window dummy. His skin has the dulled, waxen gleam of the slightly tarnished plaster of paris that manikins are made out of. She imagines him under his clothes all rounded and seamless save for the intricate joints at elbows, knees and ankles, and nothing between his thighs but a smooth, featureless bump. Unsleeping in her bed in these twilit nights she has fantasies of him being there with her, a beautiful plaster man lying motionless beside her, one knee flexed and one hand extended with an index finger raised as if to signal a waiter or flag a taxi, his perfect rosy lips curved in a pleasingly inane half-smile, his wide-eyed empty stare fixed on nothing, and she with her arms around him, feeling against her the soothing coolness of his shins, his flanks, his navel-less belly.

Duffy the cowman is the opposite of Roddy. Only last night she thought of getting up and slipping out of the house just as she was, in Pa’s oversized pyjamas, and running all the way down to Duffy’s house behind the hill and throwing a handful of gravel at his window as people do in books, so that he would let her in and take her upstairs to his room and — and what? The thought of Duffy’s rancid bachelor bed makes her tremble with revulsion, but with something else, too, something to which she cannot, will not, put a name. There is dirt embedded in the seams of the cowman’s hands; the skin of his palms would be hard and rough and burning hot as all men’s hands are hot, except her father’s. She imagines that skin on her skin, the rasp of it, like a cow’s tongue licking her.

Poor Petra, poor mooncalf, she is the one of all the household who is dearest to us. And because we love her so we shall soon take her to us, but not yet, not yet.

Now she trails along the hall behind Roddy Wagstaff and her brother, the one slim and vaguely beige, the other broad-bummed and big-shouldered. The heels of Roddy’s narrow, neat shoes make a crisp tap-tapping on the black flagstones. In fact, when looked at closely the flags are not black, she has noticed it before, but an unpleasant, shiny deep brown, like the colour of burnt toffee or of the thick pelt of some large extinct animal. This hallway, which leads under a shadowy arch into the big square black-and-white central hall of the house, always stirs in Petra a memory, if memory is what it is, of something she cannot quite grasp, something out of a past too far for her to remember, too long ago indeed for her to have known, in the last century, it must have been, or in the one before or even the one before that again. It is to do with a man, heavy-set, scowling, though she does not see his features at all clearly, in old-fashioned clothes and high boots, standing here and not wanting to do something, to accede to some request or command, but knowing he will have to, will be forced to. That is all there is to this ghostly manifestation, the man looming here, bullishly sullen — does he wear something around his broad neck, a knotted scarf, or a stock? — on a summer day like this one, with the grandfather clock ponderously ticking and a splash of molten daylight from the open front doorway reflected in the mirror of the hall-stand. She is sure the man is one of Ivy Blount’s forebears. She does not doubt that this memory of him, or vision, or whatever it is, though impossible, is real, too, in some way.

When she looks back to see what the phantom man would have seen — the front door open, the mirror shining — she notices Roddy Wagstaff’s case standing on the doorstep, where her brother left it, having decided he had carried it far enough.

They pass under the archway into the chequered hall, the two young men going ahead, Roddy’s heel-taps suddenly making a sharper sound in this taller space, and Petra behind them, she now with Roddy’s pigskin case in her hand. The air in the hall has a faint sweetish fragrance — dry rot, Duffy suggests, with satisfaction — and the light coming down from the tall windows seems somehow bruised. Roddy has not said a word to her yet, not a real word. She will wait for him to look at her, to look at her properly, so that she is sure he is seeing her, and then she will smile, and not turn aside, but hold his gaze for as long as he holds hers. That is what she will do.

6

Meanwhile, on a blast of divine afflatus, I am wafting Adam the elder across the seas to where together we shall invent Venice. Forty years ago, more. It is wintertime, and the city’s vaunted charms are all crazed over by the cold. There are caps of snow on the bronze horses outside St. Mark’s and a freezing mist is suspended along the canals and under the quaint, toy bridges. He is sitting in a restaurant, upstairs, at a corner table, with a view across the canal to where the wedding-cake façade of a white church, which he knows he should know the name of, gleams phantasmally through the midday murk. In some corner of the low-slung sky a weak sun is shining and each wavelet of the leaden canal waters is tipped with a spur of sullen, silver-yellow light. He eats lamb chops and drinks a melony tokai from Friuli — today he can recall that wine as if he were tasting it again, the tawny flash and oily sway of it in the glass, the sour-sweet tang of the fat, late grape. He is grieving for his wife, newly dead. Grief is the shape of an enormous globe that has been thrust unceremoniously into his arms; he totters under the unmanageable, greasy weight of it. Thus burdened he has fled to the sinking city where he knows no one and there is no one who knows him.

And promptly a stranger approaches his table and introduces himself. He is a long-limbed fair smooth-faced person with a narrow head and high cheekbones and a somehow inappropriate ginger moustache which he keeps fingering as if he knows it is not quite the thing. He wears English tweeds, though he is no Englishman, and an unlikely canary-yellow waistcoat and a matching yellow silk handkerchief that droops negligently from the breast pocket of his houndstooth jacket. His name, presumably his surname, outlandishly to Adam’s ears, is Zeno, and he claims to be a count, though from what line or by favour of which monarch he does not say. He makes polite and easy conversation — the weather, the outrageous prices in this restaurant, the slovenly ways of the Venetians — and presently, after three or four thimblefuls of grappa at the bar downstairs, the two of them are crossing the canal in a gondola. The winter afternoon is all salt and smoke and the harsh cries of seagulls. Adam sits in a huddle on the damp wooden seat with his thin raincoat pulled tight around him. He seems to himself a hollowed-out vessel with something rattling around inside it, the dried pea that his formerly solid self has shrunk to. At his back the gondolier, a gnarled old-timer wearing a short pea-coat over his regulation striped jersey, plies a long, amber-coloured oar and croons snatches of a barcarole. The boat wallows in the wash of a passing launch. Vague rain drifts out of the air.

The house, tall and shabby, is in a narrow lane behind the Salute. The ochre stucco of the front is missing in continent-shaped patches, which show the brick and clay-like mortar underneath. It is apparent from the dankness in the rooms and the silence hanging over everything like dust sheets that no one has lived here for a long time. In the windows of the living room there are views of the Giudecca and, beyond that, out over the lagoon to the great hydrogen-powered breakwater, recently erected to save the city from imminent inundation, that appears a low, dull silver beading strung along the curved horizon. On a squat table in the middle of the room there is set an enormous chipped marble head of Zeus — why, hello, Dad! — neckless, with a tight crown of curls and a pubic beard, seeming sunk to its chin in the wood and wearing an expression of puzzlement and slow-gathering indignation. In an armchair facing this irate godhead Adam sits, hapless and distracted, his hands resting limply in his lap with palms upturned, like one of the commedia dell’arte’s mournful clowns. The Count, who has not taken off his overcoat, produces a bottle of red wine and two goblets of purple Murano glass. He has the blandly unimpedable manner of a circus ringmaster. The wine is as cold as stone and so thick it makes Adam’s gorge rise. Outside, the air has turned to the colour of inky water. In a window opposite him the parchment-brown dome of the Salute looms. He feels spongy and raw all over, he has felt like this for a fortnight, sodden with grief, flayed by guilt. He had always thought bereavement would be an inward process only, a malady of the soul, and is dismayed by its brute physical manifestations. His eyes scald, his lips are cracked, even the follicles of his hair seem to simmer and twitch. He is convinced he has developed a smell, too, a rank hot meaty odour, and there is a brackish taste in his mouth that nothing will shift. And yet, too, he is swept at intervals by a gust of what seems to be, of all things, euphoria, a trembling giddiness the like of which he has not known since he was a boy on the last afternoons at school before the summer holidays. How is this? — as if he had wanted his wife to die, as if he had longed all along to be rid of her. This is surely an appalling thought and yet, at the mercy of grief the inquisitor, he is compelled to think it.

The young woman when she arrives is called Alba. Her skin is of an impossibly delicate paleness — Adam thinks of ice, of breathed-on glass, of the cool hard creamy-silver sheen of a pearl. She perches on the arm of his chair. Her gaze moves here and there, settling with mothlike inconsequence on random objects, his wine glass on the table, the frayed edge of a floor rug, the god’s outsized, glaring head. She has a look, at once dreamy and expectant, as if she were awaiting the imminent arrival of some as yet unguessed-at, marvellous thing. When she shifts her position on the chair-arm and puts a hand briefly on Adam’s shoulder to steady herself he twitches as if a ghost had touched him. The Count beams upon them both and seems mentally to rub his hands.

The bedroom is bare of all furniture save a large low square bed with a not entirely clean white cover and no pillows; above it on the whitewashed wall hangs an iron crucifix, which instead of a crucified Christ has four studs of ruby glass set one into each of its extremities. Adam savours the sudden candour of being with a stranger in a strange room, unclothed, in broad or at least broadish daylight; how cool the air feels against his skin, how poised the stillness, poised and somehow archaic. Alba has stepped out of her dress in one flowing, stylised movement, like a torero, the object of all eyes, trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull; underneath, she is naked. She looks to the side, downwards; her eyelids are so shinily pale and fine that Adam can see clearly all the tiny veins in them, blue as lapis. He takes a floating step forward until his chest is barely touching the tips of her nipples, behind which he senses all the gravid tremulousness of her breasts. She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in the simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound. Her hips are goosefleshed and he can feel all the tiny hairs erect on her forearms. When he kisses her hot, soft mouth, which is bruised a little at one corner, he knows at once that she has been with another man, and recently — faint as it is there is no mistaking that tang of fish-slime and sawdust — for he has no doubt that this is the mouth of a busy working girl. He does not mind.

They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense. His heart rattles in its cage, a vein beats at his temple like a slow tom-tom. When they are spent at last, and that beacon in the jungle has been turned low again, they lie together contentedly in a tangle of arms and legs and talk of this and that, in their own languages, each understanding hardly a word of what the other says. Alba, twisting a lock of her hair round and round a finger, pauses now and then to explore with the tip of an agile tongue the mauve bruise at the side of her mouth. She is from somewhere in the north — she waves towards the window behind her, showing him a damp, unkempt armpit — Bergamo, it sounds like, hence perhaps her pale skin and paler hair, for he imagines Bergamasks as blond, laughing types, he does not know why.

He tells her about Dorothy who has died. He marvels at how easy it is, suddenly, telling it all to her, out loud, with not a word of it understood.

In a little while he rises from the white bed and wanders off through the house until he finds himself in what appears to be the kitchen, an odd, elongated room, also white, that makes him think, disconcertedly, of a milking parlour, with a lofty ceiling and a row of frosted-glass windows high up along one wall. Zeno the Count is there, still in his overcoat, seated at a small round table on which stands, aptly enough, a glass of milk, partly drunk. The Count, who is taking his ease and smoking a cigarette, greets him with an open-handed gesture, in the papal manner, smiling. Adam is conscious of being shirtless and barefoot. He sees, in the stark light reflected from the walls, that the Count is older than he had seemed at first. His sideburns are grizzled and there are broken veins in his nose and in the pouches under his eyes. Adam senses a large weariness in him, the weariness of an old actor in the middle of a long run in a poor part. Yet perhaps he really is a count, last of a line as old as the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, reduced to pandering to bereft and needy travellers such as this one that he chanced upon today. He points to the glass of milk and then pats his belly and smiles wincingly and says, “La solita ulcera.” He goes on smiling; his expression is one of calm and not unkindly knowing. Adam sits down opposite him, suddenly exhausted, and folds his arms before him on the table and rests his forehead on them. He is cold. Shivers pass across his back in spasms like gusts of wind on the surface of the sea. Bells are tolling slowly all over Venice. He weeps, making no sound. The Count rises and taking off his overcoat comes and drapes it on his shaking shoulders. “Poverino,” the old man murmurs, “you are cold.” Adam weeps on.

Dorothy, called Dottie, or Dot — even the diminutions of her name reducing her to next to nothing — a mere fortnight dead, is already, shockingly, this day in Venice, fading in his thought. It is as if she had not been sufficiently present, when alive, for her memory to flourish after death. She was a large woman, tall, that is, though not at all heavy. He recalls his surprise, the first time he held her in his arms, at the lightness of her; it was as if all her long bones, of which she seemed to have more than the normal quota, were hollow as reeds. He might have been embracing a tall, fragile bird, at once graceful and ungainly, a crane, perhaps, or an ibis. It strikes him how much in looks she resembled his mother, for they were the same type, pale, lean, angular.

She was secretive, was Dorothy, and led an endearingly furtive existence. The house where they lived for the years of their marriage was not extensive yet she could somehow manage to disappear in it for hours on end. An entire morning would pass without a sound from her, so that he would assume she had gone out — but where would she have gone out to? — then suddenly, padding from his study to the kitchen or the lavatory, he would chance upon her lurking in a passageway, or a doorway, or in the recesses of a room mysteriously made deeper and dimmer by her presence in it. She would start and turn towards him quickly, whipping her hands behind her back and widening her eyes in a panicked show of innocence, like a naughty child caught in the act. When he was with her he had always the impression that she was listening anxiously beyond him for something in the house, some small, telltale sound that would give her away. He wondered what she did all day long. She took up projects — gardening, exotic cooking, carpentry, even — but quickly tired of them. He could tell when a pastime had palled, for she had a particular way of laying a thing down out of her hands, a cookery book, a pair of secateurs, a ball of wool pierced heraldically with two crossed knitting needles, and turning vaguely away, with a vague sigh, trailing her fingers along a chair-back or the edge of a window-sill. The thing would stay there, where she had left it, until by a gradual process of transformation worked by time and neglect, its original identity would blur and it would become a mere object, inert and lifeless, its use almost forgotten, and as often as not he would be the one who in the end would put it away, discreetly, without comment. She had the guardedly distracted air of holding back some large revelation, or terrible confession. In the latter weeks of her life she grew increasingly remote, and he would catch her looking at him with a frowning surmise, as if she knew she knew him but could not for the moment recall just who exactly he was. He would say something then, softly, calmly, and yet would feel that he was calling out to her, more loudly than he had meant to, and she would start, and the light of recognition would dawn in her face and she would smile her radiant, helpless smile that seemed to start from a long way off and make its way to him over immense and difficult distances.

He wonders for how long she had been planning to go. Would she have made a plan, she who seemed to live as if each moment were discontinuous from all others? His mother was furious, at Dorothy and at him, insisting at first it must have been an accident, then accusing him and saying it was his fault, that by his neglect of her he had driven Dottie to her death.

When they took her body from the water there were stones in the pockets of her dress. How could she have thought a few stones would weigh her down and carry her to the bottom? Yet something had.

He accepted all his mother’s charges, and blamed himself — they always do, as if they were the lords of life and death — and blames himself still, when he remembers to. The nights are especially hard. He tosses on his bed, sweating and moaning and muttering imprecations, like a martyr being roasted on a grid. He must not have loved her enough, that must be it. When he was young, the lesson he learned from his mother, as much by cuffs as caresses, was that love is action — what you do, not what you feel — but perhaps, he thinks now, it was a false lesson, and that love is something else altogether, something he knows nothing of. He sees it, this love, hovering like the Paraclete above the heads of a fig-leafed Cranach couple, streaming divine grace down upon them in burning rays. Where was his soul when this pentecostal fire was falling from the sky?

And the girl, now, the girl in Venice, Alba, was she Dottie’s ghost, come back to comfort him? Perhaps she was. Sometimes a soul will be permitted a brief return from Pluto’s domain by that taciturn gate-keeper and his polycephalic hound, but I do not know if she was one of them — I only conduct them thither not thence, for Pluto is a jealous god and fiercely guards his dread domain. Yes, yes, I know, I tried to do Orpheus a favour, he was so heartsore, but look at the consequences. Poor Eurydice, and poorer Orpheus, first losing his wife, then losing her a second time, then losing himself and ending up a severed head bobbing on Hebrus’s little waves, singing still. I often think that for all our powers, or precisely because of them, we should not be allowed to meddle in mortal affairs, considering the catastrophes that our meddlings result in more often than not.

Once, many years later, Adam saw her again — Alba, I mean, not Dorothy, for he sees her every day, in a manner of speaking. This second sighting took place not in Venice but some small landlocked Italian city, he cannot remember which one. He was sure it was she, although it was the merest glimpse he had of her, in the street, in the midst of shuffling crowds. She looked no older than she had that afternoon in the house under the Salute, but she was changed, greatly changed. She was in a wheelchair, being pushed by another young woman, short and round and of a resentful aspect, with a frizz of red hair like so many filaments of copper wire bristling with electricity. This person also Adam was convinced he recognised. Was she not there, in the background, that day in Venice, when he was trying to leave and got into a wrangle over money with the Count? The Count, though firm about his fee, remained amusedly forbearing, showing the faintly rueful, patient smile of an adult being haggled with by a clamorous child over sweets, while, yes, there behind him this red-headed, fat young woman prowled the room in seeming anger, smoking a long cigarette and ejecting smoke in thin quick jets, like squirts of venom. How strange, the way they come and go, memory’s figments. The wheelchair in which Alba sat, or better say was held fast, was of the old-fashioned kind, black, with a wooden hoop, worn smooth by long use, attached to the wheels on either side for the occupant to grasp and propel herself onwards, or backwards, for that matter, and two handles behind should she need to be pushed, which evidently, today, she did. She was clutching the padded arms of the chair and leaning forward urgently, her upper body twisted tensely off to one side, as if her helper had started off pushing her without warning while she was in the act of trying to pull herself up forcibly out of the seat. Her feet, with those slightly splayed, blunt toes that he surprised himself by remembering so clearly, were braced on the foot-rests, as if she might be about to make another desperate and doomed attempt at leaping up and effecting an escape. She wore a childish pair of transparent, cheap pink plastic sandals. The look of thrilled expectancy that he had remarked that afternoon in front of the god had become one of furious distraction; the marvellous thing she had been waiting for would not come, now. She was talking to herself, her lips moving in a slack, rapid mumbling, like a penitent in the confessional gabbling out a litany of sins and urgently demanding forgiveness. He might have hailed her, might have followed after the two of them and accosted them, but what would he have said, what done? Instead, he went on standing there in the lemony sunlight of the Italian noon, and saw again Venice in winter, the grimy air and the wheeling gulls, and gnarled old Charon the boatman crooning for his coin.