The Infinities

9

What? Um. Must have dropped off for a minute there. I am getting as dopily drowsy as my old Dad. Let me see, what has been happening in my absence? There is a sense in the house of people poking their heads warily above the parapets after an explosion that did not happen. That is the effect of Benny Grace’s disruptive arrival. Yet why so much unease? See him now, quite content and peaceable, sunning himself in the sunken garden behind the conservatory. He is sitting on a stone step between two ornamental low stone pillars, with his jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled. He has taken off his shoes and socks, too, to give his feet an airing, and at last we get a look at those goatish hoofs of his. In fact, disappointingly, they are more like a pig’s trotters, blunt and pink with the toes all bunched together and the nails thick and tough as horn. His braces are bright blue. He is enjoying the heat of the sun on his bare pate. Through a gap between the straining buttons of his shirt he palps with idle fingers the folds of his belly, eyeing lazily, like the happy faun he is at heart, the sweltering bank of stirless trees that edges the garden. A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that.

Preparations are under way for a late lunch, late because of Benny’s coming, which has upset and delayed everything. Faintly behind him he hears the sound of plates and silverware being laid out, and now and then in the glass of the conservatory Ivy Blount’s stark features materialise from the shadows as she makes another round of the table in there, for each time that she passes she comes forward and bends a hostile eye on Benny’s fat, sloped back. As to this conservatory, it is really just another room of the house, the front wall of which was knocked out at some forgotten time in Arden’s history and replaced by a large ugly extrusion of iron-framed glass. There must be hundreds of small panes in this structure, some of them original and bearing whorls and stipples from the oil on which the sheets of float-glass were poured out — oh, yes, my knowledge is not confined to flora and fauna, for among my many crafty attributes I am a maker and inventor and know the secrets of every trade and skill; I am, you might say, I might say, a Faust and Mephisto rolled into one. The metal frames fit ill and in the windy seasons let in vents of bitter cold, while at the start of summer the room swelters and only begins to be bearable in these last weeks of June when the sun is in the zenith and its rays do not strike directly through the glazing. The chicken is being cooked, and now and then Benny catches the smell of it; the savour of roasting flesh sets his saliva glands spurting. He has travelled far, he is hungry.

In the kitchen Ursula in her shapeless cardigan stands motionless. She has to lean forward and squint at an angle through the window above the sink to see Benny where he is sitting outside on the step. She knows who he must be. She recalls the first time Adam told her about him. Deep winter on Haggard Head and the two of them standing side by side in his study. They were not fighting, exactly. The sea far below the window was a bowl of steel shavings and the sky was steely too and there was no horizon visible. He was holding her wrist in the circle of a finger and thumb and squeezing so hard the small bones creaked and tears came into her eyes — how strong his hands were; they always reminded her of the metal claws in those fairground machines that children pay a penny to scrabble in for plastic toys or balls of bubble gum. It was his way to grab at her, distractedly, at the boy, too, young Adam, and give a pinch, a pull, a shove. She can see herself, a quarter of a century ago, standing there, and him holding on to her, and her biting her lip to keep from crying out. He did not mean to hurt, she did not think he did. Outside, the rain had begun to congeal into flakes of wet haphazard snow that spattered against the window-panes and dribbled down the glass like spit. No, he did not mean to hurt. How long had he known Benny Grace before he told her about him, him, and the woman? Oh, years, he said; years.

A loud and angry sizzle comes from the big black range where the chicken is roasting — the fat must have overflowed on to something. She has often considered becoming a vegetarian. Too late now. Too late for everything, now. She has the impression that her life is coming to an end, she feels it strongly. It is not that she imagines she is about to die, but that when Adam is gone, all that she was when he was alive will go with him, and that what of her will be left will be another person, one that she will not know and will have no interest in, and will not want to be. She has known of cases like this, people living on after the death of someone dear and becoming estranged from themselves. But for her there are the children to consider; she will have to take care of them, Adam no less than Petra. She thinks Adam’s wife will leave him; she has that feeling and cannot rid herself of it. She imagines being here with them, her poor distraught daughter and her son come home to her, lost and helpless. Petra would grow increasingly crazed but perhaps more quietly, more secretively, while Adam would pass his days pottering about the house, mending things that do not need to be mended. And so the years will pass and the three of them will drift slowly into the future, sad survivors on their raft. That is what she sees, coming.

She sighs, still keeping her eye on Benny Grace. She only ever half believed that he was real. Until today she suspected he was Adam’s invention, an alibi for his love affairs. That is why his turning up like this has so upset her. Though surely she should be glad to discover that he does exist and is not another one of Adam’s elaborate inventions. His name, just the kind of absurd name that Adam would make up, always sounded to her like a jeer, a mocking reminder of her husband’s deviousness, his cruel playfulness, his deceits. Was she expected to believe that Adam would consort with a creature such as he described Benny Grace to be, a mischief maker and a rogue? But there was that side to Adam, that compulsion to break things. Benny Grace, he said, was the part of himself he had suppressed in order to become what he became. Who was she to say it was not so?

She is aware of a presence at her back. Is it that ghostly antagonist she sensed in the sickroom, come to crowd and bully her again? No, it is her son, standing on the wooden step below the door into the hall. How does he move so quietly, being so large? It is as if he were made not of flesh and bone but some other stuff, heavy yet soft, too.

“Can you see him, from there?” he asks.

She does not reply, and he descends the last two steps and crosses the room and stands behind her and lays his hands lightly on her shoulders. The sunshine must be stronger now, for Benny Grace has made a sun-hat for himself by tying a knot at each corner of his handkerchief, and is adjusting it to cover his bald patch. “Your father used to do the same,” Ursula says, “make a hat out of a hankie, like that. He was always cold, he said, yet he hated being in the sun.”

They contemplate in silence the fat man in his comical headgear. “He looks like someone in a seaside postcard,” Adam says. If the fat man glanced sideways would he see them? Adam thinks of the child in the train. Benny is scratching exploratively under an armpit now.

“Do you know who he is?” Adam asks. Again she does not answer. “His name is Grace,” he says. “He has come to see Pa. Pete took him up.”

She turns up her face and looks at him blankly. “What?

Where?”

“To see Pa. Upstairs, in the Sky Room.”

“Oh.”

She turns back to the window and the sunlit garden. A part of her is not here. Adam, still with his hands on her shoulders, gives her a grim little shake. Long ago, when he was a boy, one day he saw something glinting in the laurel hedge in front of the disused privy down behind the house, where the rats used to have their underground nests — they fascinated him, those rats, fat and furtive and quick and always somehow with an air of suppressed amusement — and reaching in among the leaves he pulled out an empty whiskey bottle, naggin-sized, and then saw the others, dozens of them, scores, drained to the last drop and pushed in neck-first among the dense, bristling foliage.

“Grace,” his mother says dreamily. “Yes, Benny Grace, he’s called.”

“You know him, then.”

“Oh, I know who he is.”

He supposes that when she is like this there must be a continual buzzing and muttering in her head, the confused noise of herself, that muffles the things that are being said to her. “I think,” he says, loudening his voice, “he’ll be staying for lunch. I told Ivy to set an extra place. And Roddy Wagstaff is here too, you know that — you remember, he came down, earlier?”

She goes on gazing out of the window. “A full house!” she murmurs. There is a wobble in her voice as if she might be about to laugh. “Your father won’t be pleased.”

Speaking of fathers, mine is waking up, at long last.

The two of them turn together as Ivy Blount comes in, carrying something. She enters not by the door at the top of the steps but through a dim and always damp-smelling corridor to the right of the range that leads directly into the conservatory — the house is honeycombed with hidden passages and connecting walkways. Ivy has exchanged her cut-off wellingtons for an old pair of cat-coloured carpet slippers that are absurdly too big for her. Ursula thinks she recognises them as her husband’s. Why, she wonders with a flash of annoyance, has everyone taken to wearing his things, first Petra in his cast-off pyjamas and now Ivy Blount in his slippers? She wishes Ivy would lift her feet when she walks, she is sure she knows how much it grates on her to hear someone shuffling along in that sligging, slovenly way. And to think how well brought-up the woman is, a daughter of the gentry! What she is carrying turns out to be a faded red satin cushion with numerous rips and holes in it through which wads of cotton stuffing protrude. She sees Ursula peering. “Rex was chewing it,” she says. She thinks how like a totem pole they look, standing there, the son close behind the mother and he a head taller than she. “I think it’s had it.”

Ursula clicks her tongue. “Oh, that dog,” she says. “He has been impossible since Adam’s illness.”

Young Adam does not like the look of that cushion: there is something gruesome about it, a suggestion of violence and blood. It reminds him of the chicken that Ivy brought in this morning. He recalls another fragment of last night’s dream. He was high up, on a mountain top, no, in an aeroplane, or on a cloud, yes, a cloud, and flying over a forest, the canopy of trees below packed tight as broccoli and an enormous river meandering through like a dribble of melted tin, a thick-walled fortress on a hill, too, and a tower on fire. He steps from behind his mother and goes and sits down at the table where the wireless is, and takes up the screwdriver and once more unscrews the panel from the back of it.

“I doubt there will be enough stuff for lunch to feed them all,” Ivy says, and looks in vague helplessness at the ruined cushion she is still clutching, as if its destruction will add to the scarcity of the things there are to eat. “Two extra, as well, Mr. Wagstaff and that fellow out there in the garden.”

“Put on more potatoes, then!” Ursula snaps back at her, almost skittishly, and gives a kind of giggle.

Ivy looks at her.

It is not, Adam is thinking, that anyone in the house cares what anyone else does. Not that there is much doing, anyway — nothing gets done. He is sorry he came down, sorry he brought Helen into the midst of all this dithering and disorder. We should have waited, he tells himself savagely, until he was dead! The dusty valves and bundles of cable in the back of the wireless set all swim together in a blur before his eyes. He thought to fix this thing for his father but what good will it be? — his father will not be able to hear it, even if it can be got to work. His father is dying. He will soon be dead. They will never speak again, the two of them, his father will never have another opportunity not to call him by his name. Maybe, he thinks suddenly, he should join the army, become a soldier, go and fight in some foreign war, maybe that is what his dream is telling him. He tries to picture himself, in breastplate and bronze helmet, heaving a huge sword, the sweat in his eyes and a blood mist everywhere, horses screaming and the cries of the dying all around him. He throws down the screwdriver and rises strugglingly, almost stumbling, and the chair rears back, its legs shrieking on the flagged floor, and the two women turn, startled.

“Come on,” he says to his mother, going to her and taking her by the wrist, “come and say something to this fellow.”

He bustles her out through the back door, which catches on the stone threshold and gives a rattling shudder, as it always does; how steadfast in your world are the humblest things, and yet how shamefully little notice you take of them. Ivy stares after the mother and son, pressing the scarlet cushion to her breast like a swollen, tattered heart. O humans!

Outside, Ursula lifts up a hand quickly against the light. “What a glare!” she murmurs feebly. She is trying to free her other wrist from her son’s grasp — his father’s fingers, crushing her bones! — but he holds her all the more tightly and will not let go. He fairly drags her, tottering, across the paved yard to the little wicket gate that lets out into the garden. “Ivy is getting worse, have you noticed?” she says gabblingly, playing for time, trying to hang back without seeming to. “What is the matter with her, do you think? — I’m sure I don’t know.” He does not answer. He feels her trembling, like a horse getting ready to bolt. He wants to shake her again, only harder this time. He wrenches open the wooden gate, and it also shudders on its hinges, as the back door did. They speak, the supposedly inanimate things, they have their voices and they speak, echoing and answering each other.

My father, moving heavily after his long sleep — yes, even the immortals are gross and lumpy at times — has joined me to watch what will come next. He knows Benny Grace for what he is, as do I. We have high hopes of him. We are a jealous and quarrelsome race, the race of gods, but oh my, we do delight in each other’s adventures among men.

Benny has slipped into a doze, his chins sunk on his breast. When he hears the pair approaching behind him he starts awake and looks blearily in the wrong direction, towards the long stand of trees beyond the lawn. Adam lets go of his mother’s wrist and pushes her in front of him. Benny, locating them at last, scrambles up, turning; he is still barefoot. One of his knees has gone stiff and he stoops and clutches at it, wincing and laughing. “Oh! Ow!” he cries softly, ruefully laughing still. He straightens up, as much as he can ever straighten, and hobbles forward with both chubby hands extended. He is still wearing the handkerchief on his head. Ursula says nothing, but allows him to take one of her hands in his; he holds it on his palm and pats it, like a baker patting a loaf. She glances down at his bare feet. He is telling her how eager he has been for them to meet, all these years, and that he cannot understand why they never did. She gazes at him glassily, watching his lips and moving her own in faltering imitation, smiling in a strained way and nodding; it is as if he were speaking in a foreign language of which she has only a smattering and must translate each word laboriously in her head as he utters it. My Dad, already wearying of all this, is muttering plaintively in my ear. He has the itch again and wants to know where his girl has got to. I try to ignore him. How glad I am that only I can see him, in the preposterous get-up he insists on as the father of the gods come to earth, the gold sandals, the ankle-length, cloud-white robe held by a clasp at one shoulder, the brass hair and wavy beard and lips as pink as a nereid’s nipples. Honestly. Benny is lifting Ursula’s hand to his pursed pink lips — oh, the cad! — but she tugs it back in dismay, and he must let go. He steps back, sketching an ironical little bow, and turns and sits down again on the step to put on his socks and his shoes, squatting forward with gasps and grunts. Ursula watches him, slipping her freed hand under its fellow at her waist. How harmless he seems, an obese putto. Adam meanwhile is—

All right all right all right! Keep your curls on, I shall look for her!

Why the old goat cannot go and find the girl himself I do not know. Or I do. It is a show of lordship, merely, he does it without thinking, and does it to all of us, to you as well, though you hardly know it, or have forgotten the effects. How I deplore him. I can almost hear it, my resentment, a mosquito whine, thin and furious. He is the very perfection of egoism — how would he not be, given who he is? — entirely self-absorbed yet wholly unself-conscious. Why do I jump to his whims as I do? Because I must. Because I am afraid of him. Because he would do to me what he did to his father Cronus, fling me headlong from Olympus to the lowest depths of the universe and leave me chained there for all eternity, lost to myself in the darkness under the world. Yes, yes. Zeus is not what you would call a loving father.

I am in the house. I would so much rather have stayed out there with Benny and Ursula and her suddenly wrought son. Now I shall not know what they do and will have to rely on hearsay. Only sometimes am I omniscient.

Here she is, look, the lady Helen, walking swiftly through the house, whistling. She wears a loose silk sleeveless dress, a type of shift, or tunic, girdled at the waist, light blue in colour, very familiar and characteristic, we know the original model well. Look how she moves, a swirl of Attic blue and gold. She has two, quite distinct, walks, one her own and the other that she must have learned when she was training to be an actress. In the learned one she moves with what seems a stately languor, each foot at each step placed carefully heel to toe in front of the other and the hips loosely swaying. A closer look, however, shows that there is nothing loose or languorous here, that on the contrary she is as tense as a tightrope artist aloft in a powdery crisscross of spotlights, inching along with a fixed and lovely smile, not daring to look down. Her other walk, her own, is altogether different, is a kind of effortful yet exultant plunging, her head held forward and her thighs scissoring and her arms bent sharply at the elbows, so that it is not a tightrope she seems to be on now but a pair of skis, or even roller-skates, even the old, cumbersome kind, with thick leather straps and grinding metal wheels — do you remember them? I think it is the roller-skater my father prefers — among Olympus’s lofty ladies there are none but tightrope walkers — since in this mode she appears so impetuous and self-forgetting, qualities he prizes highly, in a mortal girl.

She veers to the left and through a doorway and into a room where she comes upon Roddy Wagstaff, and stops whistling. Roddy is sitting on a straight-backed chair beside a pair of french doors, all alone, one knee crossed on the other, an elbow cupped in a palm and a lighted cigarette cocked at a quizzical angle in his lifted fingers; he looks as if he were sitting for his portrait. “Sorry,” she says, not sounding so, “were you meditating?”

Roddy does not rise, only puts on a chilly smile and inclines his head an inch, to the side first and then down; she almost expects to hear a click. “Not at all,” he says. “I was doing nothing.”

They do not know each other. They met only once before, that weekend a year ago when Roddy was first here at Arden, and then they hardly exchanged more than a neutral word or two. Roddy seems to her a figure from another time, interestingly outmoded. He is handsome, too, in a thinned-out, strained sort of way. He has the appearance of a painting that has been over-cleaned, brilliant and faded at the same time. He cannot really be interested in Petra, surely not.

“Nothing is what people mostly do, down here,” she says. It comes out sounding more sour, more petulant, than she intended. Roddy’s look narrows to a keener interest.

We are in what is known as the music room, although there is no sign of an instrument of any kind, not even a piano, and it is a very long time since anyone has made music here. This is another corner room — for all that it is built in a simple square the house seems to boast more than its share of corners, have you noticed? — this time with two pairs of windows on two adjacent sides. The french doors open on to the lawn, a different stretch of it from where we were a moment ago, with other trees, and no figures to be seen. The walls are painted a pale shade of blue. There is a large and ugly sideboard and, between two of the windows, against the wall, a chaise-longue on which Helen now subsides and drapes herself in an effortless pose, drawing up her legs and setting one hand behind her head and dropping the other into her lap and raising her chin as if for something to be set balancing on it. The colour of her dress is very like the blue of the wall above her. She looks at Roddy along her handsome nose. Have I mentioned Helen’s nose, the way it descends in a vertical line from her forehead, like the noses of so many of my female relatives? And have I said that she is short-sighted and will not wear spectacles because she is an actress and actresses do not wear specs? My besotted father sighs, leaning heavily at my shoulder. He dotes on that slight droop in her right — no, her left, is it? — eye, finding it a sign at once of languor and allure.

She and the young man speak of this and that, desultorily, with intervening silences in which they seem to trail their fingers, as if they were drifting in a skiff on a shining calm grey river. They are conscious of the summer day outside, its soft air and vapoury light. She mentions the play she is to be in, and tells him about her director, who is impossible. He nods; he knows the fellow, he says, and knows him for a fool. She notices his nails, bitten to the quick. The tremor in his hand makes the thin swift vertical trail of smoke from the tip of his cigarette waver as it rises. “Oh, a fool,” he says, “and a fraud along with it, everyone knows that.” To this she says nothing, only lowers her lashes and smiles. A breeze comes in from the garden and the curtain of white gauze before the open half of the french doors bellies into the room like a soundless exclamation and listlessly falls back. The scent of roasting bird penetrates here, too. A hollow rumbling noise comes up out of Roddy’s innards — he too has travelled, he too is hungry — and he clears his throat and shifts quickly his position on the chair and recrosses his legs. “And such a notion of himself,” he adds, widening his eyes.

Helen, I see, is wearing gold sandals, not unlike Dad’s, with gold thongs crossed above the ankles. Her legs are pale, and her knees are bony and splotched a little with red — is this a flaw? My father will have none of it. He knows those knees.

She cannot think, she says, why the play is called after Amphitryon, since Amphitryon’s wife Alceme, her part, is surely the centre of it all. “You could review it, when it opens,” she says. She smiles. “I would expect nothing less than a glowing notice, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” he says, and looks away, somewhat quickly.

He rises and goes to the fireplace and crushes the stub of his cigarette into an ashtray on the mantelpiece. She sees the covert glance he gives to his reflection in the gilt-framed mirror on the wall in front of him.

“It could have been set here,” she says, with a broad and sweeping gesture of her arm, a swan flexing its white wing, “here at this house, when it was first built.”

“Oh? But isn’t it in Greece, in Thebes, or somewhere? I seem to remember—”

“The version we are doing all takes place round Vinegar Hill, at the time of the Rebellion.”

“Ah.” He frowns. He does not approve of the classics being tampered with, he says. “The Greeks knew what they were doing, after all.”

“Oh, but it’s not Greek,” she says before she can stop herself, and then to make it worse continues on. “—It was written only a hundred years ago, I think, or two, in Germany.”

He frowns again, more darkly this time. “Ah, yes,” he says, mumbling, “I forgot.” He walks to the french doors and stands in the open half, holding aside the gauze curtain, and contemplates the garden. She looks at his back, so straight and stiff. “Sorry,” she says in a voice made small, pulling a face that he cannot see. He pretends not to have heard.

She sighs, and puts her feet to the floor — her toenails are painted a shell-pink shade, very fetching — and says that surely lunch must be ready by now.

She walks from the room, feeling the rope sag and sway under her feet, and what she takes to be Roddy’s eyes on her is in fact my Dad shambling eagerly in her warm wake.

10

My father does not like at all the prospect of this late-afternoon lunch, so late indeed it might be better called high tea — time is all out of kilter today, thanks to you know who. He complains that it will keep him from his girl, and it will. I cannot help that. There is a limit to how far I may interfere with the diurnal springs of their world. Holding back the dawn for an hour was child’s play, mortal child’s play, compared with the likely consequences of cancelling an entire lunchtime. How much and how often they eat fascinates and rather appals us, for whom a sip of ambrosia and a prophylactic pinch of moly taken every aeon or so suffice both to quell our peckishness and keep our peckers up. For them, though, everything is turned into an excuse for feeding, be it joy, grief, success, humiliating failure, even the deepest loss. In the weeks after Dorothy died old Adam, who was not old then, seemed to find himself six or seven times a day staring helplessly at a plate newly heaped. No sooner did he stand up and totter from the table than some kindly soul would seize him by the wrist and lead him back again with smiling solicitude to the groaning board and hand him his knife and fork and refasten his bib and fill up his tankard for him to the foaming brim. Come, he was constantly being urged, come, you must eat something, it will comfort you and give you strength! What choice had he but to sob out his thanks and set to work on yet another helping of mutton stew, another homemade apple tart, another round of cadaverous camembert? And how they would beam, then, standing over him with their hands folded, nodding in encouragement and self-satisfaction. Compassion, he discovered, has a limited repertoire. Yet these kindnesses made him cry, as if he had not already sufficient cause for tears.

— But wait, what is this? Something has happened, in the garden, I bet, I knew it would, with me not there to invigilate. As I enter the conservatory hard, or soft, rather, necessarily, on the heels of Helen and my father and Roddy Wagstaff — what a procession we must make! — I detect at once a feverish atmosphere. There is not noise or agitation, on the contrary, all is subdued, yet it is plain we are in the midst of an aftermath. Benny Grace is there, standing beside the table with his fists thrust in the pockets of his jacket, looking over the place settings with a concentrated air, as if he were counting the spoons. Off in a corner of the glass gazebo young Adam is talking quietly to his sister, who gazes up at him intently, nodding the while, both of them glancing now and then in Benny’s direction. What is it he is telling her? His expression is a giveaway, grave and at the same time almost smiling, as if there is behind it a suppressed hilarity that keeps threatening to break out. Where is Ursula? She said something to Benny after I left, I am sure of it, something inappropriate, perhaps outrageous. She has the inveterate drinker’s weakness for blurting out baldly things that are at once consternating and lugubriously comic. Her husband used greatly to enjoy these rushes of inadvertent candour and accidental insult, though they mortify her, when she is able to remember them, that is, and what she said. I would not be surprised if she is even now cowering for shame in the disused washroom behind the scullery, administering to herself a steadying drop from one of her store of naggin bottles, full ones, that she keeps hidden there, my poor sad dithery darling.

Ivy Blount appears out of the dank passageway from the kitchen, bearing the roast chicken on a big tin dish. She has had to hold open the door with an out-turned elbow, and as she comes forward she releases the door and it swings to and snares one of the old grey carpet slippers she is wearing, and she has no choice but to step out of it, which she does, and blunders on, her feet, the bare and the shod, making an alternating slap and slither on the stone-tiled floor. Benny springs to help her but she bypasses him deftly, essaying a sort of caracole — she will not allow herself to look at him — and plonks the heavy dish down in the middle of the table. The others advance and all stand gazing upon the bird with expressions of doubt and misgiving. It is markedly shrivelled and its skin is of a brownish-yellow shade and seems to seethe slowly all over as the glistening coating of fat on it congeals. Rex the dog — where has he come from? — fetches Ivy’s slipper from under the door and brings it to her in his mouth and deposits it softly at her feet and casts up at her a look of mild, sad reproof.

The humans distribute themselves to chairs willy-nilly, and Ivy returns to the kitchen to fetch the vegetables. From this shaded within, all that is without the high awning of glass, the trees, the sunlight, that broad strip of cerulean sky, seems a raucous carnival.

Petra finds herself in a chair beside Helen’s and at once, without a word, she jumps up and crosses to another place, on Benny Grace’s right hand; Benny swivels his head and gives her a conspiratorial smile, arching an eyebrow. Roddy Wagstaff has watched her manoeuvre with grim disdain; he has hardly spoken a word to her since he arrived. Helen reaches for her napkin and her fingertips brush the back of his hand; she does not look at him.

Ivy returns with a great brown wooden tray on which are platters of potatoes, carrots, peas, and a china bowl, unsettlingly suggestive of a chamber pot, with handles on either side, in which is sunk a steaming mess of boiled cabbage. She sets out the dishes and takes her place, to the right of Helen, where Petra was first, and begins to serve. The chair on the other side of her is empty. Meanwhile Adam sharpens the carving knife, wreathing blade and steel about each other at flashing speed, as if he were demonstrating a feat of swordsmanship.

Ursula appears in their midst so quietly, so greyly, that the others have hardly registered her presence before she has seated herself. She smiles about her in vague benevolence, her eyes lowered, looking at no one, and in particular not at Benny Grace, unless I imagine it. Oh, yes, there must have been an altercation on the lawn — I wonder what she said to him?

When Adam cuts into the chicken a sigh of steam escapes from the moist aperture between singed skin and moistly creamy flesh.

“Oh, cabbage, Ivy!” Ursula softly cries, in faintest protest, “—with chicken!”

Ivy ignores her and, still on her feet, brushes a strand of hair from her cheek and fixes her gaze above all their heads.

“I’ve invited Mr. Duffy,” she announces loudly, and has to stop and swallow. “—I’ve invited Mr. Duffy to lunch.”

A hanging silence follows, until Helen suddenly laughs, making a gulping noise, and puts up a hand quickly to cover her mouth.

Rex the dog is a keen observer of the ways of the human beings. He has been attached to this family all his life, or for as long as he has known himself to be alive, the past for him being a doubtful, shapeless place, peopled with shadows and rustling with uncertain intimations, indistinct spectres. These people are in his care. They are not difficult to manage. Obligingly he eats the food it pleases them to put before him, the mush and kibble and the odd ham bone when Ivy Blount remembers to save one for him; he has accustomed himself to this fare, though in his dreams he hunts down quick hot creatures and feasts on their smoking flesh. He has his duties, the guarding of the gate, the routing of itinerants and beggars, the vigilance against foxes, and he attends to them with scruple, despite his increasing years. Before old Adam was carried up to the Sky Room asleep — it was Duffy who did the carrying, by the way — and refused to wake up and come down again, it was Rex’s task to take him for a walk each day, sometimes twice a day, if the weather was particularly fine, and for his sake even pretended to like nothing better than chasing a stick or a tennis ball when it was thrown for him. He is unpredictable, though, old Adam; he shouts, and more than once has aimed a kick. The girl Petra is to be wary of, too; she smells of blood. But they all need careful watching. They are not so much dangerous as limited, which is why, he supposes, they are in such need of his support, affection and praise. It pleases them to see him wag his tail when they come into a room, especially if they are alone — when there are more than one of them together they tend to ignore him. He does not mind. He can always make them take notice, especially the women, by barging his snout into their crotches, as it amuses him to do.

There is a thing the matter with them, though, with all of them. It is a great puzzle to him, this mysterious knowledge, unease, foreboding, whatever it is that afflicts them, and try though he may he has never managed to solve it. They are afraid of something, something that is always there though they pretend it is not. It is the same for all of them, the same huge terrible thing, except for the very young, though even in their eyes, too, he sometimes fancies he detects a momentary widening, a sudden, horrified dawning. He discerns this secret and awful awareness underneath everything they do. Even when they are happy there is a flaw in their happiness. Their laughter has a shrill note, so that they seem to be not only laughing but crying out as well, and when they weep, their sobs and lamentations are disproportionate, as though what is supposed to have upset them is just a pretext and their anguish springs really from this other frightful thing that they know and are trying to ignore. They have an air always of looking behind them — no, of not daring to look, afraid of having to see what is there, the ineluctable presence crowding at their heels. In recent days, since old Adam’s falling asleep, the others seem more sharply conscious of their phantom follower; it seems to have stepped past and whirled about to confront them, almost as this fat stranger has done, just walked in and sat himself down at the table and looked them all in the eye as if he has every right to be here. Yes, the scandalous secret is out — but what can it be?

Does Rex detect the difference between Benny and me? I wonder. Or, rather, I should ask, does he detect the sameness? For in appearance we could hardly be more unalike, I being all spirit and Benny, in his present manifestation, all flesh, deplorably. The significant distinction lies far deeper than in the forms in which we choose to show ourselves. Sprites we both may be, but compared to Benny I am the incarnation of duty, stability and order. He is the boy who dismantles his father’s gold half-hunter to find out how it works. In that arcane science of which old Adam is an adept there are two distinct types of magus. The first sees the world as all a boiling chaos and labours to impose on it a system, of his own devising, which shall marshal the disordered fragments and make of them a whole, while the second finds an ordered world and sets to tinkering in it to discover what principle holds all its rods and cogs in thrumming equilibrium. The latter most often will be plump and satisfied, the former as sleek as the sleekest prelate. There you have Benny, there you have me.

Yet surely Rex should know Benny for what he is. The animals are said always to recognise their panic lord and bow down before him. But what does recognising mean, in Rex’s case, what does it, to coin a phrase, entail? Names and categories are of no more weight in his world than they are in ours — you humans are the relentless taxonomists. He crouches now sphinx-like on the stone flags just inside the door of the conservatory, front paws extended and his big square head lifted, alert and watchful. From here he has the widest possible view of the lunch table, although the light pouring through all those panes of glass is behind the lunchers so that seen from here they are cast somewhat into gloom, some of them faceless while the others, viewed in profile, appear as silhouettes. Being a quadruped, he is most familiar with the lower extremities of the bipeds. Legs are always far busier, down there in the half dark, than their owners realise. Benny, for instance, keeps crossing and uncrossing his, like a baby waggling its fingers. He sits happily asprawl, gripping his knife and fork expectantly in his dimpled fists, his plump thighs overflowing the defenceless chair on which he squats with an already mauled napkin draped over his paunch. He is addressing the table at large, telling over yet again the tale of his great friend and colleague Adam Godley’s triumph on that day, which seems no longer ago than yesterday, when it came to him as a flash of lightning that in those dark infinities which had been disrupting his sums for so long there lay, in fact, his radiant solutions. No one is listening, not even Petra. Rather, all attention is focused breathlessly on the empty place at table which none dares look directly at, awaiting as it is the momentous coming of Duffy the cowman. I confess I am agog myself. What happy consequences have I set in train by my playful subterfuge of the morning? I experience a twinge of misgiving, however, when I suddenly recollect those shiny green shutters on the windows of Ivy’s cottage. Do they presage something, sinister and insistent, like themselves?

“—that it should be possible to write equations across the many worlds, incorporating their infinities, see, and therefore all those other dimensions — What?”

Benny stops as if someone had said something to interrupt him though no one has. Helen turns to gaze at him and takes on the swollen-faced solemnity of one who is trying not to laugh. Ursula, sitting beside young Adam, peers gropingly into the sudden silence, wondering in alarm if she has said something that she should not have. Often nowadays she catches herself murmuring aloud things that she had thought she was only thinking, while sometimes when she does speak, or thinks she does, the person spoken to seems not to have heard. For instance, she is convinced that a moment ago she asked the Wagstaff fellow beside her to open the wine, but if so, he either did not hear or is ignoring her, for he is sitting with his elbows set delicately side by side on the table and his hands joined together under his chin as if he might be about to offer grace, and does not even glance at her. She shifts her attention to her son and watches as he carves the chicken in his irritatingly slow, methodical way, draping the slices of breast meat over the thighs to keep them warm while Duffy is awaited. Duffy, in the house, for lunch! — or did she only imagine Ivy saying she had invited him? No, she did not imagine it, for here he is.

Poor Duffy. He is a great anti-climax after all. He has put on his Sunday best, which is a much washed and faded slate-blue pinstriped suit the like of which I have not seen outside the Cyclades, where it seems every male infant is presented at birth with just such a piece of timeless apparel, to be donned ceremonially on his arriving at his majority and never taken off again before the grave and in many cases not even then. The shirt that Duffy wears is very white and open at the collar, and his boots are brown. He has pomaded his hair, with axle-grease, it would seem, and brushed it back fiercely from his forehead, which gives him a slightly wild and staring aspect. He stops in the doorway and swallows, his Adam’s apple bouncing. No one it seems knows what to say and Ivy cannot bring herself to look at him. Then Petra, of all people, rises from her seat and goes to him swiftly and takes him by the hand, yes, by the hand, which to the others, even to Ivy, and to their surprise, seems the most natural thing in the world, and leads him forward wordlessly to his place at the table. He nods his thanks, arranging the broad planes of his face into an unaccustomed and rudimentary smile. Ivy, still not looking at him, moves his napkin a fraction nearer to his plate, touching the cloth only with the tip of a middle finger, and clears her throat. He has a curious way of seating himself, in stages, as it were, putting his left hand to the table and leaning sideways, pressing the other hand to the front of his right thigh, and lowering himself gingerly on to the chair, which gives a frightened squeak. Perhaps he suffers from rheumatism, what his poor old mother before him used to call the old rheumatizz. Benny Grace is regarding him with frank and beaming interest. Helen picks up the corkscrew and hands it to Roddy Wagstaff. Meanwhile Petra goes back to her own place and sits, with eyes downcast, like a communicant returning from the altar.

“You’re very welcome, Adrian,” Ursula says across the table, somewhat thick-tongued, carefully enunciating the words as if they had been glued together and must be prised apart, one by one. Adam is standing beside her with the carving knife upraised; she touches him lightly on the elbow. “Mr. Duffy,” she says softly, “will take a drumstick, I’m sure.”

There is a general sense of dissipating tension. Duffy’s coming, everyone sees, is not to fulfil the great things that were expected of it. Rex the dog, abruptly losing interest in everything, Duffy included, flops over on his side with a sigh and closes his eyes.

Young Adam is in a state of strange elation. It is as if he were suspended aloft, swaying above the room. He sees his hands as from a long way off, laying slices of meat on each plate as Ivy Blount holds it out to him, and when he speaks, his voice reverberates tinnily inside his head. He does not know what is the matter with him — is this happiness again, the same that he felt when he was driving to the station? Not really, but a sort of giddiness only. Yes, he feels giddy, looking down on the table from this height. His mother, beside him, bows her head over her wine glass and he looks at the pale parting in her greying hair and experiences for an instant a pang of what seems the purest sorrow. What is the matter with him, swinging wildly like this from one emotion to another?

Helen is talking to Roddy and smiling, and Petra is watching her across the table with narrowed eyes.

The carving done, Adam sits down to his plate, yet that teetering sensation persists. His mother on his right is speaking to him, fretting that there will not be enough meat to go round. He tells her to stop worrying, that no one minds. “Duffy has his drumstick, look,” he says quietly, and makes himself smile, but she only gazes at him in that intently vacant way that she does, wide-eyed, with her head down and her chin tucked in. “Don’t worry,” he says again, more irritably now, more gruffly, “everything is all right, I’m telling you.”

Is it? He feels acutely the absence of his dying father from this table where so often he noisily presided. But when was that father ever fully present, at this table or anywhere else in the life of the house? It is I who ask the question not young Adam, who is more forgiving than I am, than I would be, were I him. Ah, fathers and sons, fathers and sons. Not that I know so very much about the subject. I speak of my father as my father and of me as his son, but in truth these terms can be only figurative for us, who are not born and do not die, for birth and death are the sources, it seems, out of which mortal ones derive their sensations of love and loss. The old stories tell of us coupling and begetting, enduring and dying, but they are only stories. Like old Adam in the bosom of his family, we are not here sufficiently to be ever quite gone. Think, if you can, of a sea of eternal potential and of us as the shapes the waters make, surging and swaying; think of the air moulded by weather into transparent forms; think of ice; think of flame — so we are, at once eternal and evanescent.

Where were we? At the lunch table, among these people. All I am doing is passing the time here, flicking these polished playing cards into that upturned silk hat.

Adam looks round the table in a kind of wonderment, seeming now to be sunk in something and looking up, and all sways and shimmers. He feels as if he were being keel-hauled, in the air one minute, gasping for breath, and plunged in a green airlessness the next. How flat and featureless now everything seems up there, seen from down here, even the figures, the figures especially, his mother and his sister, his wife, the preposterous Benny Grace, too. He recalls Roddy Wagstaff passing under the shadow of the tree outside the railway station and seeming to fade for a second into the starkness of that gloom. How to conceive of a reality sufficiently detailed, sufficiently incoherent, to accommodate all the things that are in the world? He lives in that reality yet cannot fully conceive of it. He stands aghast before the abundance of things, all of them separate, all of them unique. A single blade of grass is made of an unimaginable massing of tiny and still tinier particles — and how many blades of grass are there in this impossible world? This is the trick his father managed for himself, the trick he pulled off, making all the bits seem to cohere in a grand amalgam wrought by the mumbo-jumbo of mere numbers. Or so the son thinks.

He surfaces from this reverie with a jolt. The table has become animated, and there is a confusion of talk. Helen is telling Roddy Wagstaff about something — that play she is to be in, he supposes, she speaks of little else these days — her gold head thrust forward on its lovely column of neck. Her throat, Adam notices, is delicately flushed, with a rosy porcelain glow like that on the inner surface of a seashell. Roddy has pushed his chair back the better to face her, and sits sideways to the table with one bony knee crossed on the other and one arm folded and an index finger pressed to his chin at the side. He regards her unblinking and now and then nods, though his look is sceptical, with the shadow of a smirk. Adam feels for his wife the same rush of compassion that a moment ago he felt for his mother; why is Helen giving so much of her attention to this fellow, who surely despises her, as he despises, or so Adam believes, all of them here at the table? Petra too is still watching the pair of them, back and forth, back and forth, like a spectator engrossed in a tennis match; at intervals she darts forward to try to say something but is rebuffed by their refusal to notice her and subsides again, mute and rueful. Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman sit side by side in an atmosphere all of their own, Ivy leaning forward over her plate and plying her knife and fork with concentrated intensity, as if they were a pair of knitting needles, while Duffy, his food ignored, glares unseeing at a salt cellar. They seem to be having an argument, and speak without looking at each other, in an undertone, in rapid bursts between brief intervals of fraught silence. But they are not arguing, not at all. They are, or my name is not Hermes, locked in negotiations towards the plighting of a mutual troth.

Suddenly Benny Grace’s voice is heard above all others. “Oh, no, he won’t die,” he says, loud and emphatic, “no, no,” and Rex the dog, still lying on his side, quickly lifts his large head from the floor and looks at him.

Adam’s mother, on Adam’s right, makes a low, choked sound that might almost be, Adam thinks, laughter. The table has fallen silent — this must be what is called a panic fright. Benny smiles at no one in particular and takes a drink of wine, his little black eyes sparkling merrily over the rim of his glass. His avowal has made all at the table uneasy. Nor is it clear to whom his assurance was addressed. Ivy Blount has lifted her head and is gazing at the little man, her lips parted and the jabbings of her busy knife and fork suspended. Duffy, frowning in the new-made silence, bends his attention to his plate, on which the single slice of chicken, which was all he got besides the scrawny drumstick, has begun to curl along the edges, while the cabbage has gone cold and acquired an unpleasant, whitish sheen. Is this Duffy noticing these niceties of detail, or I? Or is there a difference?

There is no doubt whom it is that Benny Grace was speaking of, whose demise he was denying, or at least the imminence of it. The very certitude of the denial, abrupt and seemingly uncalled for, is what has so unsettled the rest of the table. My kinsman Thanatos, son of Night, in his black robes, with sword unsheathed, has stepped into their midst out of the shadows where he has been biding all along. It is his sudden coming that wakened Rex the dog, who rises cautiously now and stands at point, nosing the tensened air. These are the moments that unsettle him most, when their moods change abruptly and seemingly for no reason. They were all talking, he knew that even in his sleep, and now they are quiet and sit very still, as if something had frightened them anew, that mysterious thing that always frightens them, all except the fat stranger, who seems concerned for nothing. Meanwhile outdoors, beyond the glass wall, the trees on the far side of the sunlit lawn stand like a line of people with their backs turned, gazing off indifferently at something else.

Not die, eh? So that is his little game, that is what he has been brought here to accomplish. Since when has he become the lord of life and death, Mr. Benny so-called Grace?

Yet why am I vexed? What is it to me whether one of them dies or lives? They will all go, in the fullness, in the emptiness, of time. My sole task is to take over from the undertaker and escort them to the next life, whatever it be, different for each of them. Death they consider always caducous; the nonagenarian, bald and toothless as a babe, ignores the silt in his arteries, the amyloids in his brain, and imagines himself in no more than his late prime and good for at least another ninety rollicking years. We should let them have a taste of immortality, see how they like it.

Soon enough they would come to us mewling and puking in their pain, beseeching us to finish them off. My father did once consider giving them the gift — ha ha — of eternal life. This was many years ago, oh, many years, in the time of Electryon king of Mycenae. Here is what happened. The old king’s nephew Amphitryon — yes, the very same — and grandson of my brother Perseus the Gorgon-slayer, became enamoured of his cousin Alcmene, Electryon’s daughter — yes, yes, I know, the bloodlines getting all tangled up, as usual. Amphitryon had fled to Thebes, having managed accidentally to kill his father-in-law in a bit of bungling on the battlefield — at least, he claimed he had not meant to run the old boy through — and Alcmene, a spirited girl, followed him there and married him, after vicissitudes too tedious to waste time picking over here. Alcmene was an exquisite creature, a golden girl, and needless to say my Dad took a shine to her, and employed what we know is one of his favourite wiles to get her into bed, to wit, he came to her at twilight in the very form and aspect of her husband. They passed a divine night together, pseudo-Amphitryon and his darling girl, and with the dawn my Dad withdrew — I shall plod on, steadfastly ignoring the inevitable double entendres — when who should appear but Amphitryon himself, home unexpectedly from the wars. See how I am warming to my tale. The lady Alcmene was baffled, of course, to find her husband apparently popping up again in her chamber a minute after he had left and behaving as if their night of passion had not happened; nevertheless she gamely submitted to a further strenuous session on her already disordered bed — General Amphitryon had been away a frustratingly long time in Thessaly, hacking at his old adversaries there, and was no sooner in the door than he set to asserting his conjugal rights. The result of this double bout of fructifying romps was, in due course, a pair of twins, Iphicles, who was Amphitryon’s son and therefore not much heard of again, and Heracles, whom my Dad was pleased to call his own. A breather.

Heracles, this strapping lad, grew into a mighty man, the greatest of the great heroes of old, blah blah blah. Now, nothing that my father does is ever simple or straightforward, but the machinations by which he arranged for Heracles, who was brave but not the brightest, to carry out the plan to make mortals immortal were devious far above even his usual standards. Having first of all driven the poor fellow temporarily demented he next arranged for him to be instructed by the oracle at Delphi to put himself in fealty to Eurystheus king of Tiryns, who in turn was inspired to impose on the hero, for no apparent reason or discernible purpose, a series of tremendous and well-nigh impossible tasks. You will know of these famous Twelve Labours of Heracles, the killing of the many-headed Hydra, the capture of the Erymanthian Boar, the pinching of the girdle of Hippolyte queen of the Amazons, and all the rest; of the dozen of these tasks, however, eleven were no more than blinds behind which to pass off the twelfth, the supposed abduction of Cerberus, which feat was effected with the help of yours truly and my sister Athene, that headache, and which itself was yet another blind, for the intended elimination of Pluto himself, no less. This was my father’s real intention, the true heart of his scheme, that Sis and I should escort Heracles to the gates of the underworld, where the barking of the guard dog would bring Pluto running to know who was the new arrival, whereon Heracles would bend his bow and loose an arrow into the dark god’s heart and strike him dead. The death of death! — imagine! It was not to be, however. All of Olympus rose up in rebellion, or threatened to. Here was the time for solidarity, we said, the time to show old Zeus the limits of his powers. He had been throwing his weight about for long enough, cuckolding gods and men alike and swallowing his relatives whole. If he were free to destroy death he would be free to destroy us all. We would not stand for it, it was as simple as that. And thereby survived Pluto, the killer of men.

Why did Zeus think to put death to death? I have not enquired of him and never will; there are certain questions one does not pose to the father of the gods. However, this does not mean I may not speculate on the matter. Is it that he could not bear to think of his beloved girls — broidered with bulls and swans, powder’d with golden rain, as the silver poet puts it — writhing in agony on their deathbeds, who had writhed in his arms for joy? If so, why not just kill off all the males and let their better halves live forever? No, it makes him out too kind, too caring. He wished them all, girls and boys alike, adults in their prime, oldsters and crones, all to know what we know, the torment of eternal life. Why must he have a reason? Call it cruelty, call it caprice, call it the revenge of heaven’s lord on the creatures he had made. Or maybe he thought to make a new race of demigods, there is a thing to think of — not only living forever but, my goodness, forever procreating, too, until the world is packed tight with them and they are forced to storm heaven for a new place to populate. Brr.

Anyway, there you have it, his dastardly plan was thwarted and, thanks to us, his extended family, men may go on dying in the good old way.

Rex the dog is growing drowsy again: his heavy head droops. The darkness that Benny Grace’s words brought forth now gradually withdraws, and the others at the table pick up again uncertainly, like gleaners after their midday rest setting off again between the furrows. And I hover in the air above them, my chlamys spread as wide as it will go, in the attitude of Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia, protecting my little band of mortal sinners. I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.

Petra seizes her chance and breaks the silence by asking of the table, in a loud voice, why it is that tumours are always compared to citrus fruits. “As big as a lemon, they say,” she says, “an orange, a grapefruit — why?” She looks about the table, fierce in her demand, but no one has an answer to offer her.

11

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal; there you have the crux of it, the cross to which I was nailed from the start. Difference: the very term is redundant, a nonce-word coined to comfort and deceive. Oh, I told myself, I tell myself, that to say equal to is not to say identical with, but does it signify, does it placate? My equations spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there. Even the self-identity of the object is no more than a matter of insisting it is so. Where then may one set down a foot and say, “Here is solid ground?” As a child I was terrified at seeing the hands of a ticking clock turned back, thinking time itself would be reversed and all collapse into disorder, yet I was the very one who would break time’s arrow and discard the slackened bow. Benny Grace used to mock me for my doubts and ditherings. What business is it of ours, he would scoffingly ask, echoing the schoolmen of old, what business is it of ours to save the phenomena? That was the difference — the difference! — between the two of us. I raged for certitude, he was the element of misrule. When I think of him now I hear again the music of the past, raucous and discordant but sweet, too, the sad sweet music of being young.

Whatever he may say to deny it, we did bring something to a close, we adepts of the temporal. After us, certain large possibilities were no longer possible. In our new beginning was an old end. I recall the atmosphere in the academies in those days, even in those early days of the revolution we had so fearlessly set going. Euphoria first, then the dawn of misgiving, then an increasing lassitude, an increasing jadedness. Arguments would still break out, squabbles rather than arguments, too overheated to be sustained, and ending always in impotence and savage frustration. There was a particular aspect people had when they turned and slunk away from these confrontations, hangdog, muzzled, the mouth drawn sideways in a snarl. A savour had gone out of things, the air was that much duller, the light that much dimmed. We could not comprehend it, at first, this darkening of the world that was our doing — it was, after all, the opposite of what we had intended. Somehow, extension brought not increase but dissipation. My final series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes, was the combination that unlocked the sealed chamber of time. The sigh of dead, dank air that wafted back in our faces from the yawning doorway out of what had been our only world was not the breath of new life, as we expected, but a last gasp. I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail. We hung back from it, exhausted in advance by the mere fact of its suddenly being there. It was, in a word, too much for us. This is what we discovered, to our chagrin and shame: that we had enough, more than enough, already, in the bewildering diversities of our old and overabundant world. Let the gods live at peace in that far, new place.

What a pair we must have made, though, Benny and I, the overman in his overman’s cape and tights flashing through the ether with his fat sidekick clinging on for dear life to his neck. Or was it the other way round, him flying and I clinging on, for dear life? For dear life is what I could never quite get the hang of. Others seem to manage it easily enough: they just do it, or have it done to them — perhaps that is the secret, not so much to live as be lived, let life itself do the work. Certainly that was how Benny seemed to carry it off. Fetching up breathless with emptied pockets and skinned knees after another one of our escapades together, I would look around and find him brushing the dust off his sleeve and humming unconcernedly to himself, as if we had been on nothing more adventurous than a Sunday-afternoon stroll. Did I have a taste for the low life before Benny came along and dragged me gaily into the gutter for a respite? I know I liked it, once I was there, paddling in the piss and spittle. Here, I told myself, is the real thing, the business itself, raw and coarse and vital, this is what it is to be alive. No gentle Inges or Ursulas down there, only drabs and cutpurses and the odd poor Gretchen searching forlornly for her Faust.

I should not exaggerate. I am at heart a timid soul and the scrapes that Benny got me into were no more than that, scrapes and japes and schoolboy pranks. He would turn up at odd times and in unexpected places, but if I was surprised, he never was. That was the uncanny thing, the way he would come bustling yet again into my life, in mid-sentence, as it were, and link his fat arm through mine and steer me aside from whatever I was doing and walk me off into a corner to propose in an earnest undertone some new, preposterous wheeze. He always made it seem that he had been gone no more than a moment or two and now was back, doing up his flies or rolling his shirt sleeves, ready to get the ructions going again. Girls, of course, there were always girls, I marvelled at his way with them. What did they see in him, what was the secret of his roly-poly charm? He would wander off into a crowded bar, a hotel lobby, a conference hall, and come back five minutes later with a likely romp on either arm, the short one for him and the tall one for me. More often than not these encounters fetched up in disaster, or farce, or both — gin-tinted tears, smeared mascara, a definitively hitched-up black silk strap — but Benny was never daunted, would accept no rebuff, admit no failure.

He deplored my taste for Inge and her ilk, the dainty, damaged ones, but I felt no call to defend myself against his gibes once I met Madame Mac. Here I must pause, and confess to a slight constraint, a slight embarrassment. That I took her at first for his mother is one thing, but that I am still uncertain that she was not — his mother, I mean — is surely quite another. He never said who she was, exactly, or specified the nature of their relation, and in the way of these things, after a certain interval it became impossible to ask. He referred to her only as Madame Mac or, sometimes, as “my old lady,” so there was no help there.

Early on there seemed a clear disparity in age between them, and he could well have been her son, but as the years progressed and age coarsened his admittedly never youthful form the gap narrowed and with it my uncertainty widened.

He was not himself, not the self that I was accustomed to, when he was with her. His demeanour veered between a worried lover’s fawning deference and a brusque irritability that to my ear bespoke the filial. I was first introduced to Madame Mac, if introduced is the word, in Rome, I believe it was. I was there to accept the Borgia Prize, founded in memory of gentle Cesare, peacemaker and patron of natural sciences and the arts. I remember well the hotel, one of those gloomy timeless palaces to be found in every capital city, the corridors humming with a vast silence, in all the rooms a worryingly fecal smell, and the unseen below-stairs staff audibly at their larks. In the muffled lounge, where it would always be afternoon, vague bodies were fidgeting over coffee cups and little cakes, and the tall windows were ablaze with an amazement of blue October sky. Had Benny and I arranged to meet or was it another of our chance stumblings across each other? — chance on my part, if not on his. Under one of the windows a woman was seated in an armchair before a low table; with the light behind her I could not make out her features, though I had the feeling that she was regarding me intently. She was leaning forward rather heavily, her skirt stretched tight over splayed knees, while the chair in which she was seated seemed to reach out its stubby wings on either side of her as if striving to draw her back into its brocaded embrace. The dress she wore was made of what seemed swathe upon swathe of multicoloured stuff printed with a large design, roses or peonies or some such, and might have been a continuation of the figured covering of the armchair, so that she was camouflaged and appeared a congeries of disjointed parts, head, arms and hands, thick short legs. All this detail noted in hindsight, of course. At her back, in a corner of the window, an oleander bush tossed and tossed in the hot wind of a Roman autumn.

Benny when he arrived was all bustle and hand-rubbing. He was wearing his inveterate black suit and grubby white shirt. He complained of the chilly air-conditioning — it is never warm enough for Benny, we have that in common — and chafed his hands the harder. He seemed uninclined to sit, and due to the way my chair was facing I had to turn my head awkwardly to the side and upwards in order to meet his eye. Come to think of it, there was always an awkwardness in the stance I felt myself forced to adopt in his presence, I had always a crick in my neck when he is about. I noted a certain shiftiness in his manner on this occasion, a certain breathy excitedness. He said he would take a glass of wine but seemed to be concerned with something else. He was casting about the room as if at random, and now his glance came to rest on the woman by the window. Did they exchange a signal? Benny cleared his throat and mumbled something, then walked to where the woman was sitting and positioned himself beside her chair in the attitude, head back and one shoulder lifted, of a frock-coated gentleman posing for a daguerreotype, and directed back at me a summoning frown. I rose uncertainly and went to him. “This,” he said gruffly, almost dismissively, “is Madame Mac.”

She directed at me from her chair a calmly appraising gaze, and lifted a hand as if for me to kiss it, the back of it graciously arched and fingers limply dangling; I shook it. The thing had the cartilaginous smoothness and faint heat of a bird’s claw. She was wearing something on her head, a close-fitting hat or a scarf tightly bound, which made me think of Lily Brik shouting the good news in that famous poster, or of one of Millet’s cloched peasant women. I had the impression of bright festoons, bits of ribbon, silk streamers that shimmered and fluttered about her. Her face appeared wider than it was long, with a great carven jaw and an almost lipless mouth that seemed to stretch from ear to ear and managed to be at once froggy and almost noble. Her skin was greyish-pale and looked as dry as meal. Within the voluminous dress she wore there was the suggestion of hidden folds of unrestrained flesh. Foul-minded as I am I at once set to picturing Benny and her engaged in congress, like a pair of walruses thrashing and trumpeting in a boiling sea; perhaps that is why, the next moment, my mind introduced to me the possibility of a blood tie between them, so that I should never again be obliged to entertain such an image. Madame Mac’s eyes were the thing that struck me most forcefully. They were glossy, slightly starting, not large but unnervingly piercing, and so intense they made the rest of her features, even that extraordinary mouth, fade behind their light. My memory of that first occasion insists her eyes were black, but later when I took the trouble to notice them they seemed a shade of deep violet — can eyes change colour, according to circumstance, the play of light, the mood of the moment? I must have sat down. I do not know what I said to her, or she to me. Did she have an accent? It did not strike me, if she had. Another mystery. At her shoulder, in the window, the oleander bush with its polished leaves shivered and shook, as if successive douses of water were being poured through it. Perhaps it was the contrast between the stillness of her broad grey flat face and the frantic movements of the bush behind it and the scraps of fluttering silk about her person, but what she reminded me of most strongly was an electric fan, with its warning tassel tied to the mesh, turning its bland, tilted head slowly from side to side, and the blades behind the mesh a motionless blur as they spun and spun and spun.

Benny launched on a rambling account of how he and I had first met, that chilly midsummer in the far north. There was an edge of dismissiveness to his tone, of heavy-breathing impatience, as if he were a pupil compelled to tell over a dull passage not fully memorised. Madame Mac seemed not to be listening, seemed, indeed, oblivious of him. She was studying me still, letting her gaze, at once vague and penetrating, wander all over me with a feline impassiveness while, behind, the blades went on silently spinning. Held there, listening to Benny recite his ill-learned lesson and suffering Madame Mac’s scrutiny, I had the uncomfortable sensation of being somehow lifted up and carried between them, like a satrap borne lullingly down an ever-narrowing defile towards the lair of the assassin. The waiter came with Benny’s wine and Benny took the glass and sucked up a greedy gulp and stared off into space, no longer speaking. He seemed to require something of me, to be silently asking me for something, some understanding or tacit acceptance.

Later that same evening Madame Mac told me the story of her life, or parts of it, parts of the story, parts of her life. We were outside, on the hotel terrace, overlooking an expanse of floodlit historic rubble. Bats flitted here and there in the mauve twilight. I was chilled, and not quite sober, and could not concentrate very well on the knotted fabric of the tale she was elaborately weaving. At some time in the indeterminate past she had entered on a brief and, she emphasised, issueless union with the Honourable Mr. MacSomebody, a wealthy invert with delicate lungs, ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Somewhere to the Holy See, owner of a succession of grand houses, on Capri, in Paris, in Manhattan and Sidi bel Abbès, who before his untimely and, she murmuringly attested, highly picturesque demise had enjoined her to employ the large inheritance she would have from him towards the betterment of mankind in general and in particular the encouragement of the physical sciences, in which the Ambassador had long maintained a keen amateur interest. I listened to this farrago in captivated bemusement, sipping at my sixth or seventh flute of sour prosecco and inhaling the stench of drains that Rome was sending up to us like the fumes from a votive offering. Madame Mac as she spoke bore into me mesmerisingly with those protuberant little shiny eyes of hers, swaying somewhat before me like a cobra poised on its rings. Perhaps it was all true, Mr. Mac and his bad lungs, the minareted mansion in the Maghreb, the deathbed injunction, all of it. The world has many worlds, as who should know better than I, each one stranger, more various and for all I know more farcical than the last. Anything is possible. When she finished we both stood silent for some moments, looking into our glasses, then suddenly, with a sort of wobbling lurch, she leaned her large front against me and fumbled for my hand, which she found, and clutched tightly. The result of all this was that I lost my balance, and would have fallen down, taking her with me, if there had not been the pockmarked limestone parapet to support us. What if we had toppled off the balcony and plunged into the ruins below? What would Benny have thought, when we were found, bloodied and broken, spreadeagled hand in hand on a broken suggestum close by one of Vespasian’s first erections?

It occurred to me that she might have been offering me money. Why else all this talk of the Hon. Mr. Mac’s love of science and his philanthropical bent and of the inheritance she had of him — why else the sudden impassioned intimacy, the desperate seizing upon my hand? Gently I disengaged from her, feeling like a young lady of genteel upbringing who has just been invited by a fat old madam to come for a try-out at the brothel. We turned and went back into the hotel, I embarrassed and she very thoughtful. And the next time I saw her, she was dying.

Was it the next time? Did I only encounter her twice? I do not remember. It was Benny, naturally, who took me to see her in that hospital in the mountains. High summer it was up there, the sound of cowbells impossibly close in the clean, thin air — I thought at first it was a recording that the hospital was piping into the rooms, instead of the usual soothing music. Madame Mac had been wandering back and forth across the continent for months, like a wounded animal searching for a place in which to die. Bald and bloated, she lay uncovered on the narrow white bed like something vegetable that had been thrown there, her eyes swivelling agitatedly and her fingers plucking at the sheet. Despite the circumstances she was tricked out as usual in her varicoloured bobs and bows. I tried not to see her large bare mottled knees. The Alpine sun shone in the window with gay indifference. At first I thought she did not know me but then she clutched my hand hotly in hers — again! — and started to tell me in a gabbled whisper about something that had happened a long time ago, even the drift of which I could not grasp. I pretended to understand, however, and tried to seem interested — oh, that sickly smile that smears itself over one’s face on these occasions! — but Benny tugged at my arm and made a little moue of discouragement, and I stepped back, and Madame Mac let go my hand and of all things gave an exasperated sigh of laughter, as an aunt would sigh ruefully over a doted-upon but unmannerly nephew, and I felt clumsy and churlish, and snatched my arm away from Benny and walked out of the room. Whether or not I met her on more occasions than the ones I remember I do not know, but I do know that was to be the last I would see of her.

A little later on that occasion we found ourselves, Benny and I, standing on a deep, glassed-in balcony where wooden loungers were set out in a row, each with its folded red wool blanket and rubber pillow, while in front of us there sprawled a lavish view of jagged, snow-clad peaks that seemed to jostle each other rowdily in their eagerness to impress and charm. It was midday and staff and patients alike must have been at early lunch for not a soul was there save us two. Benny took the opportunity to smoke a clandestine cigarette, holding it corner-boy fashion in a cupped fist and stowing the ash in a pocket of his jacket. I have always envied smokers the little ritual they are allowed to indulge in twenty or thirty times a day, the lighting up, the long drag, the narrowed eye, the slow exhale. I tried to say something consoling to him but could think of nothing. Nor could I think why I had to be here — what was Madame Mac to me, or I to Madame Mac? Yet I had the impression of having been drawn despite myself into a kind of restive intimacy. Not only Benny had a filial aspect now, we both might have been a pair of grown-up brothers brought uneasily together at the bedside of a dying parent. Benny puffed and sighed, sighed and puffed, scanning the room as if in search of something that should be there but was unaccountably missing. Then he said a very strange thing, the import of which I did not understand, and still do not. “There is no need for you to worry,” he said, frowning in the direction of my knees. “Everything will be all right.” How portentous he made those simple words sound. I nodded, still saying nothing. Why was he reassuring me, when he was the one who would shortly be bereaved? I might have asked, but did not. My unwillingness had something to do with the place, I think, the elevation, and that unnervingly neat row of extended chairs, and the big window tilting over us, and those preposterously picturesque mountains sparkling in the unreal noonday light.

I never allowed Ursula to meet Benny or Madame Mac — I wonder why. She shied from the notion of them, from the very mention of them. I think she suspected something libidinous in my relations with them, as if they had inveigled me into a cabal the rules and rites of which were grounded in the flesh. I do not say she imagined orgies, with me inscribing runes and magic formulae in blood on Madame Mac’s big bare bum while Benny Grace stood by with whip and manacles urging me on, no, nothing so coarse as that. Only she is something of a priestess of the pure, and in those two, or in the idea of them at least, she saw personified, I think, all the temptations of the base world and its steamy pleasures. But, after all, was she entirely wrong? She would save me from myself; that was her mission from the outset. She had the determination for it. Young though she was when we first met there was already something settled about her, something finished, a high fine gloss — finished, settled, polished, and yet wonderfully vulnerable, too. She had a certain dainty unsteadiness in the region of the knees that I found irresistible, a matter of disbalance not due to ungainliness but to the care and vigilance with which she picked her way over the world’s treacherous terrain. That is how I see her in my mind, my dear sweet wife, stepping towards me delicately, frowning in concentration, eyes down and elbows lifted and her hands out flat on either side as if pressing on shelves of air for support, her knees brushing together and her heels a little splayed and her head lowered for me to see the parting in the centre of her hair, a perfect, snow-grey groove. Yet I wonder if I asked too much of her, or, worse, perhaps, too little. There is a primitive tribe that lives deep in the jungles of Borneo, or New Guinea, maybe, it does not matter which, a sturdy little people with potbellies and blackened teeth who eat their ancestors and pickle the heads of their enemies, or the other way round, I forget. The female of the tribe wears a bone through her nose and distends her earlobes enormously by inserting hoops in them, while the male — surely I am making this up? — the male prosthetically extends his virile member by inserting it into a long, narrow shoot of bamboo, held erect before him at a sharp angle by means of a length of plaited cord tied to the tip, the tip of the bamboo, that is, and then looped back and tied in turn around his skull. At puberty these males undergo a ceremonial initiation in which each is presented not only with his bamboo stick and yard of string but also takes possession of a carved wood figurine, semi-abstract though suggestive of a fat little featureless woman, not unlike, I suppose, their little fat mothers. Very impressive, in their vernacular way, these totems, I have seen them in museums. When the boys receive them the dolls are already immensely old, handed down through succeeding generations, smoothed and polished by use and time. Their purpose is to be a lifelong comfort and companion, and also, most importantly, to act as a repository of all doubts, fears, violent urges, vengeful desires — to be an object of comfort and veneration, but also a whipping-boy, or a whipping-girl, as one might say. I wonder if Ursula has been something like this for me. It is a dark thought, and one I do not willingly entertain.

Children were a surprise to me, the second one no less than the first. Absurd to say so, I know, but it is true. Surely on both occasions that unignorably accumulating bulge in my wife’s middle region should have cushioned me from the shock of the inevitable issue. But not a bit of it, the thing sent me stumbling in a daze, not once but twice. The most unnerving thing about these conjured creatures that were suddenly there, by a piece of biological sleight of hand, was their incontrovertible otherness. I know, I know, every other is other, necessarily. However, with Ursula, for instance, and even to an extent with Dorothy, the two human beings I have been closest to in my life, if I exclude my mother, which for the moment I do — in my wives, I am saying, there was a passionate cleaving to me that gave at least the illusion of getting over that gap, the gap of otherness, an illusion that was far harder to effect when the object of one’s baffled regard were these minute brand-new beings that were either uncannily quiet or at the slightest slight turned puce with rage. The boy I found particularly alarming, and not just because he was the first. He was like one of those babies in the cartoon films, chubby face plugged with a soother and bald save for a single question mark of hair, who suddenly reaches a brawny arm out of the cradle and delivers poor Sylvester the cat an uppercut that sets his eyeballs spinning and crowns him with a crooked halo of exploding stars. That was me, the same stunned reeling, the same goggling, cross-eyed stare. The girl was altogether different, lying there still and watchful, as though being born were a trick that had been pulled on her the aftermath of which she was certain would be even more violently mortifying than the event itself.

But she was my favourite. By the time she arrived the boy was a big fellow already, cautious, secretive, solitary. He was frightened of me, just as I was frightened of him. In the girl I could see from the start there was something wrong, something missing, a link to the world where the rest of us carry on with varying degrees of success the pretence of being at home. This, I should be ashamed to say, I found more gratifying than troubling. Here at last was a soul I could share with, one that was damaged, as damaged as I believed my own soul to be.

Did I, do I, love them? It is a simple question but extremely ticklish. I shielded them from what dangers I could, did not stint or spoil, taught them such virtues as I knew and as I judged they would benefit from. I worried they would suffer falls, cut themselves, catch a cold, contract leprosy. I think it safe to say that in certain dire circumstances if called upon I would have given up my life to save theirs. But all that, it seems, was not enough: a further effort was required, no, not an effort but an effect, an affect, whatever to say — a state of being, let us call it, a stance in relation to the world, which is what they mean by love. When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible. For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love — if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods — well. Perhaps that is my trouble, perhaps my standards are too high. Perhaps human love is simple, and therefore beyond me, due to my incurable complicating bent. That might be it, that might be the answer. But I do not think so.

And yet perhaps I do love, without knowing it; could such a thing be possible, an unwilled, and unconscious, loving? On occasion, when I think of this or that person, my wife, say, my son or daughter — let us leave my daughter-in-law out of this — my heart is filled, what we call the heart, with an involuntary surge of something, glutinous and hot, like grief, but a happy grief, and so strong that I stagger inwardly and my throat thickens and tears, yes, real tears, press into my eyes. This is not like me, I am not given to swoons and vapourings in the normal run of things. So maybe there is a vast, hidden reservoir of love within me and these wellings-up are the overflow of it, the splashes over the side of the cistern when something weighty is thrown in.

I always thought dying would be a great and saving confusion, like a drunkard’s dreaming, but look at me, on my last legs or rather on no legs at all, yet in my mind as clear as a bell, though certainly, I grant you, not as sound. I am weakening; I mean my resolve is weakening. If things go on in this vein I shall end up sending for the priest to shrive me.

But Ursula, let us return to the topic of Ursula. I worry about her. I have not been fortunate in my wives — no, what am I saying? I mean my wives have not been fortunate in me. One I drove to drown herself, the other I drove to drink. This is not a good record, for a husband. I have not been fair to Ursula, have not given her the regard and respect that I should have, I know that. I treated my children as adults and my wife as a child. Is it that I was afraid of losing her, as I lost Dottie, and therefore must preserve her in a state of permanent girlhood? As if only grownups die. I do not know when she began to drink in earnest. After Petra was born, I suspect. The giddiness then, the temper fits, the morning lentors and the evening sobbings, which I took for the effects of post-partum trauma, I now think had a simpler cause. She is discreet, none more so; she is an artist of discretion. In this as in so much else she spares me pain, embarrassment, disturbance. And what do I give her in return?

My mind is tired, I cannot think any more, for now. When I got like this in the old days I would leap up and pace the floor, pace and pace, packed tight around myself and my distress like a panther, until equilibrium was re-established. How I loved the ordering of thought, the iron way of computation, the fixing of one term after another in the linked chain of reasoning. No such joy to be had elsewhere, or elsewhen, the quiet joy of a man alone, doing brain-work. Did Ursula envy my solitary calling, did she resent it? Did the children? Petra when she was little would creep into the room where I was working and sit on the floor curled up, hugging her knees, watching me as a cat does, blinking now and then, slowly. It was soothing, her being there, as the boy’s presence would not have been. How unfair I was to him, unfairer than I was to Ursula, even, and now it is too late to make amends. Spilt milk, spilt milk — the dairy floor is awash and the dairyman and his missus are weeping buckets. And would I make amends, anyway, even if I had the time and means?

There was a rhythm, somehow, to the girl, silent as she was, that seemed to beat in unison with something inside me. It was as if she were connected to me, as if I and not her mother had given birth to her and the vestigial umbilical cord was still unbroken. Yet Adam is the one who will care for Ursula when I am gone, I can be confident of that much. He is kind to her and always patient. He does not chide her, or try to persuade her to go the dry; far from it, for he is sweetly forbearing of her sad vice. I forbore, too, but that was not the same: my forbearing, I suspect, was a form of indifference. Yes, he will be good to her, for her. Look at him now, following her into the kitchen with a stack of plates in his hands, being helpful and solicitous. How the sun strikes into this big stone room on days like this, shyly, one might say, at a sharp slant downwards through the big window behind the sink. Faint putrescent smell of gas from the stove as always, and three summer flies cruising lazily in circular formation under the light bulb above the table. She has a delightfully scurrying way, has Ursula, when she is excited, or upset, waddling a little on those knock-knees of hers. She favours shapeless soft wool dresses in shades of grey or lavender or mauve. In our early days together I used to call her my pigeon, and would chase her about the house, my tail-feathers all erect. How she would run from me, cooing frantically and laughing—“No no no no no!”—until I caught up with her and held her under me, my panting bird. Ah, yes. Imagine me, as I imagine myself, striking my brow with clenched fist, again and again, thump, thump, without mercy, bemoaning over the lost years, the lost time. The opportunities not taken.

“—coming here like this,” she is saying, “without a word of warning.” She pokes crossly at something in the sink, narrowing her eyes. She is short-sighted, like her daughter-in-law, and like her will not wear spectacles, out of vanity. “And talking about your father dying.”

My son puts the lunch plates he has been carrying down on the draining-board in the sun. He has scraped all the scraps together on the top one, as his grandmother long ago taught him to do. Like me he wishes for an ordered world. I feel such a rush of tenderness for him suddenly. What is it in particular that has affected me? Something in his setting down of those plates, the disparity between this big, slow-moving man — my son! — and the dainty carrying out of the commonplace chore. When he and the girl were small I used to pray that I would live to see them grown; now I am thankful I shall not see them old.

“What he said is that he would not die,” Adam says, not looking at his mother.

He has a way, I have often noticed it, of going suddenly still, just stopping in whatever attitude he happens to be, as if he were playing that game we used to play as children, Statues, was it called? Ursula does it too; he must have got it from her. All these tics and traits that the genes pass on — why do they bother?

She lifts her head and looks at the sunlit window; I know that groping gaze. “What?” she says.

Adam blinks himself out of his stillness and rolls his shoulders, animate again, giving himself a doggy sort of shake. Before he can speak Ivy Blount comes quickly in from the passageway by the stove, bearing more plates. She has tied up her unruly hair with something at the back, but corkscrew tendrils have come loose and weave about her stark, pale face. The two stare at her, this mild Medusa, as if they do not know her. She halts, the crockery in her hands. Her look has a frantic cast. “I have,” she says urgently to Ursula, or breathes, rather, “—I have to speak to you.”

Adam comes forward and takes the plates she is carrying, firmly freeing them from her grasp as if he were relieving her of a weapon, and sets them on the draining-board beside the stack of their fellows he already placed there. Dishes, sink, the sunlight in the window — how precious suddenly they seem, these perfectly commonplace things.

I used to yearn so for Ursula that even when she was in my arms it was not enough, and I would clasp her to me more and more fiercely, octopus-armed, in an ecstasy of need, as if it might be possible to engorge her wholly, to press her in through my very pores. I would have made her be a part of me. If I could I would have had a notch cut in my already ageing side and a slip of her, my young rose, inserted there and lashed to me with twine. Tell me, tell me, was that not enough of love?

I wonder if my son is as abject in his desire of that lovely wife of his. Who could blame him, if he is?

When he leaves the kitchen now, padding soundlessly on those big feet of his, Ursula wishes she could go with him. She does not want to be left alone to deal with Ivy, for Ivy is clearly in a state. She seems to be quivering all over, like a struck tuning fork. What can be the matter? The awful notion occurs that Ivy, impossible woman, is going to quit her place in the house. This is the catastrophe that Ursula has been dreading since she first came to Arden and took on Ivy to help her with the children and be a foil against Adam’s fearsome mother. Her heart or some such organ has swollen up suddenly, suffocatingly, inside her breast, and her mouth has gone dry. How will she manage without Ivy? To be left here alone with a dying husband, a demented daughter — ah! She turns aside and walks quickly to the big bog-oak dresser — hideous thing that Granny Godley brought when she moved in with them, Adam and her, here at Arden, she has always hated it — and takes a white cup down from its hook. Ivy watches her, still with that shivering look of a retriever, moving only her eyes. Ursula comes back to the sink and fills the cup from the tap and drinks, opening her throat and pouring the water straight in, almost without swallowing; it tastes of tin. Through the window she sees the sunlight, the garden, the un-resting mass of trees beyond the lawn; everything is so calm, so careless, and seems to mock her. She fills another cupful of water and drinks it off, the cold sharpness of the stuff hurting her throat and spilling into her stomach as heavy as lead. She feels a remote sort of pity for her body, as if it were something separate from her, some poor suffering thing clenched around its pain and dread. Is it whales that suck in tons of sea-water through their teeth to trap the plankton that they live on? I am like a whale, then, she thinks, with a sad, inward smile, only there is no sustenance, for me, to be sieved out of any of this.

“Mr. Duffy,” Ivy says behind her, “has spoken to me.” The words come up out of her like bubbles, trembling and plosive. “Adrian, that is.”

Ursula frowns, but goes on looking out at the garden, giving herself time to think. So that is it, Ivy and the dreadful Duffy have been fighting. She feels a panicky urge to laugh. It is like something out of one of those old melodramas, the paterfamilias on his deathbed, the family gathered, and below stairs the servants squabbling. She thinks of that big blackened picture in the hall of the booted man in the black coat and high collar, reputed to be one of Ivy’s ancestors. What was the story Ivy told her about him, something to do with the Ribbon Boys, a threatened lynching? She cannot remember; she cannot remember anything, these days.

“Spoken to you?” she says faintly, turning at last. “About what?”

Ivy has done something to herself, has drawn herself up, or has been drawn up, somehow, like a doll on a string, with neck extended and eyes popping and arms dangling stiffly at her sides. Also her face is tinged with palest pink, like milk with a drop of wine in it; it might be from anger, or she might be blushing, it is hard to tell which. “Well,” she says, and swallows, “not spoken, exactly. That’s to say—” She stops, helpless, and her face crumples, seems to crease down its middle, like the spine of a book that has been opened back too far — and are those tears that have sprung into her eyes, and has she clenched her fists, and does her lip tremble? Such distress! O Hecate of the triple way, is it all my fault, for taking on Duffy’s form and giving poor Ivy the notion that she was being significantly spoken to in that moment over the milk jug? If so, I shall have to speak to him, too, and put some mettle into him. I thought it was all fixed — what were they doing at the lunch table, if not fixing it? My name must not be Hermes after all. Oh dear, oh dear, how difficult are these matters of the heart, their hearts, I mean, I am an amateur in this arena. For now, I must manoeuvre Ivy out of here before there is more mischief done. She makes a sound, part a groan and part a grunt, and screwing the heel of a hand first into one moistened eye and then the other she turns away abruptly and hurries from the room.

Ursula blankly stands. She is not certain that what happened really happened, and that she did not imagine it. Latterly she has been having what seem to be hallucinations — she prefers to think of them as waking dreams — brief episodes of intensified reality, as if the flow of ordinary events had been compressed at a certain point and made to speed up and overheat. That is where the phantoms come from, those insubstantial revenants pushing past her, hindering her, haunting her days. She wonders, with a strange detachment, if she has damaged her mind, and if these lurid jumps and hurryings are among the first signs of its decay. Perhaps Ivy Blount was not here at all; perhaps for the past five minutes there has been no one here but herself, standing in this crooked box of sunlight imagining people talking to her, first her son, then Ivy. She stirs herself, and goes to the passage that leads out by the stove and walks through — dark-brown dimness, a dank smell, the lino slightly bubbled underfoot — and comes into the conservatory, where the light is so large and glaring that she falters. This, she thinks, this is what her life is now, a listless, shadowed passing from one hardly bearable patch of brightness to another. She considers the big square table from which the last of the lunch things have not yet been removed — where has Ivy rushed off to? — crumpled napkins, smeared dessert bowls, four empty wine bottles, three green and one clear, the clear one looking self-conscious and a little shamefaced in its nudity. At first she thinks there is no one here but then she makes out the form of her daughter-in-law, sitting, lying, almost, in a cane armchair in front of the glass wall, smoking a cigarette and looking out into the garden frowningly. The blue silk of her summer frock reflects the light sharply in angled shapes; her legs are crossed and one gold sandal dangles. She has not yet noticed Ursula, and her face, unobserved, as she thinks, appears almost featureless. Ursula leans forward to see what is outside that the young woman is looking at so intently. Benny Grace is out there, sitting as before on the step above the sunken garden with his back to the house. Roddy Wagstaff stands beside him, leaning negligently on one of the stone pillars and gazing off into the trees across the lawn. Whether they are together or have merely drifted by chance into the same vicinity it is impossible to tell. There is a blackbird on the grass, hurrying as if by clockwork first this way and then that, the very one, as I can attest, that young Adam at the window this morning spotted flashing across in the dawn light. How all things hang together, when one has the perspective from which to view them.

“I wish you would not smoke cigarettes in the house,” Ursula says mildly, and is gratified to see the start that Helen gives, the cane seat of the chair under her crackling in protest. “It leaves the air so stuffy.”

Helen makes a series of small adjustments to her pose, leaning her head back and extending her legs in a show of languidness. She does not care to be chanced on unawares, especially by her mother-in-law. The slipper dangling from her toe falls off and makes an unexpectedly loud clatter on the flagged floor. “You don’t protest when he does it,” she says, gesturing with her cigarette towards the pair outside in the garden, “Roddy what’s-his-name.”

“Well,” Ursula answers, looking at her hands folded in front of her and measuring her words, “he is a guest.”

Helen chuckles. “How delicate you are. It’s a wonder you can bear us at all.” As if he had heard his name spoken Roddy Wagstaff turns and peers vaguely over his shoulder, trying to see into the room through the opaque reflections on the glass panes. Helen shifts her weight again, and again the chair crackles, a milder outcry this time. “Who is he,” she says, “that other fellow?”

“Who?”

“Grace — isn’t that what he’s called?” She squints down the length of herself at the toes of her unsandalled foot and wriggles them; the polish on one of the nails is chipped, though she only put it on this morning. “What does he want?”

“He wants Adam,” Ursula says sharply, and frowns. Helen has turned her face and is gazing at her with interest sidewise from her chair. Ursula gives a small laugh, flustered. “I mean my Adam — Adam’s father, that is.”

“Wants him?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I mean. He’s just someone Adam knew.”

Helen finishes her cigarette and leans down to crush the stub of it in the big glass ashtray she has set on the floor beside her chair. The commotion in the cane-work every time she moves, like the sound of a flame sweeping up through a thorn bush, is setting Ursula’s nerves on edge. She comes forward and bends to pick up the ashtray — three crushed butts, two of them lip-sticked, standing at drunken angles in a parched puddle of ash — but Helen snatches it aside and glares at her. Such venom! She is wearing a large, ugly ring on the middle finger of her right hand: some kind of whitish metal set with a flat lozenge of polished black stone in which a curlicued initial A is carved. Ursula, still awkwardly at a tilt and seeking to save face, peers at it with exaggerated interest; the raised bezel brings to her mind an obscure and unpleasant suggestion of ulcers. “That’s new,” she says, straightening. “How nice.”

Helen, sitting up and swinging her legs to the floor — one foot groping for its elusive sandal — glances disparagingly at the ring. “Adam gave it to me.”

Ursula ventures a smile. “So I see.”

“What?” Glaring again.

“A for Adam.”

“No,” with a shake of the head, quick, dismissive. “Amphitryon. The title of the play I’m in. Or it could be A for Alcmene, my part. He said it was for luck but in the theatre you’re never supposed to wish anyone luck.” Sitting on the edge of the chair she stretches herself, lifting her arms in an arch and leaning her lovely gold articulated head to one side and pressing her cheek, cat-like, into the hollow of her shoulder. Ursula catches a whiff of her sweat, sharp and hot; I can almost catch it myself, smell of civet and summer nights. Helen sighs. “He’s such a sap,” she says complacently, suppressing a yawn, “your son.”

She rises and walks to the table and begins to gather the dessert bowls, stacking them with negligent haste and making them rattle. “God,” she says and sighs again, more heavily, “is there anything duller than a summer afternoon?”

“You mean, down here?” Ursula enquires gently.

“Anywhere.”

Ursula now comes forward to the table and begins to collect the napkins, thinking of snow. She glances out at Benny Grace where he sits on the step in a cobbler’s slump and at the sight of him a shadow crosses her mind. “They used to know each other very well,” she says, “Adam’s father and — Mr. Grace.” Benny’s name she pronounces with a sort of grimace in her voice.

Helen has picked up all the bowls and now is gathering the spoons. Her eyes are hooded, she seems far away. She takes the napkins that Ursula has heaped and puts them on top of the stacked plates. In single file, with Ursula leading, they carry the things out to the kitchen and I glide invisibly behind them along the passageway, still sniffing after Helen’s feline scent. Who am I now? Where is my Dad? Enough, enough, I am one, and all — Proteus is not the only protean one amongst us. “They were colleagues, in some way,” Ursula is saying over her shoulder. “Only I think your father thought he was a fraud — I mean Adam’s father — Adam. But then”—a shrug—“I suspect Adam thought — thinks — everyone a fraud, more or less. Even himself.” Helen puts the bowls into the sink and Ursula stands looking down at them, a jumble of shallow, grey-white discs against the greyer white of the porcelain. There is something faintly, comically, endearing about them. They remind her of — what? — circuses. A clown somewhere, a long time ago, spinning half a dozen plates on the tips of a dozen sticks, everything wobbling, the plates, the long slender sticks, the clown’s extended arms. The recollection flickers, fades. Helen takes off the ugly ring and puts it on the window-sill and rinses her hands under the tap. Ursula watches her sidelong. Helen’s hands are the least lovely part of her, boneless-seeming and slightly mottled, the fingers plump above the knuckles and tapered sharply at the tips as if each one were bound there tight with invisible thread. The sun has hardly moved in the window. Is there music playing somewhere? Once, when she was a girl, in some place, she cannot remember where exactly, a splendid park or the grounds of some grand house, Ursula reached up on tiptoe at a little moss-covered wall and saw into an enclosed garden, with masses of flowers and flowering fruit trees, exotic shrubs, climbing vines, all crowding there together in the sun, profligate and gay. Now in rosy retrospect this seems one of the sweetest moments of her life, replete with all the promise of the future, and she keeps it stowed jealously at the back of her memory, like a jewel box in a secret drawer. If she were to return there today she is sure she would not be able to see over the wall, it would have grown higher, somehow, or she would have become smaller, although she would know the garden was there, abundant and glorious as ever, waiting for others to come and glimpse it, and be happy.

“I hope,” she says in a rush, with a terrible feeling of falling over herself, “I hope your play is a success — I hope — I hope you will have a great success in it.”

Helen is drying her hands on a tea-towel. Ursula regards her anxiously, pained and waiting — why, she asks herself, why must I blurt out things like this, like a fool?

“Do you?” Helen says tonelessly, and drops the towel on the draining-board; she is thinking of something else altogether.

Ursula sees anew how radiant she is, in that sky-blue dress and those gold sandals, with that tight-fitting gleaming helmet of hair.

My Dad is plucking at my sleeve.

“Yes, yes, I do,” Ursula says, feeling herself falling still, as in a dream. “I wish you — I wish you everything.”

Helen turns abstractedly and walks from the room.

I can feel my father’s burgeoning itch as together we rush after her from the kitchen into the music room and out by the french doors where she almost collides with her husband coming in from the lawn. She has never managed to accustom herself to these sudden loomings that he does. He is like, she thinks vexedly, a great large soft eager dog.

“Here you are!” he says breathlessly, grasping her by the upper arms and smiling into her face. “I wanted to say — I wanted to tell you—”

“What—?”

She twists free of his hands and falls back a step.

“Well, just that I’ve decided—”

— to leave you, she finishes for him in her mind.

He does not know what he wants to tell her, what he wants to say. He is still all at sea, under that keel, sat at the end of that thrumming plank. He has a brimming sensation, as if he were himself a vessel that he has been given to carry, filled with some marvellous fluid not a drop of which must be allowed to spill.

“What?” she asks again, more brusquely. “What have you decided?”

He frowns. How strange her look when she stepped away from him like that, drawing in her chin and glaring up at him, with stony unsurprise, like a child about to hear an announcement from the big world that the adults think momentous but in fact is only dull.

“I was going to say,” he says, treading over the flaw of doubt and rushing on, “I thought we might — I don’t know — I thought we might move down here, after — afterwards.” His forehead flushes. “What do you think?”

“What do I think? Of moving, down here, to Arden?” She gives a sour laugh, a sort of snort, and looks past him quickly. It strikes her how like a lighted stage the sunlit garden seems, garish, innocent and faintly mad. “I’m going for a walk,” she says.

Adam blinks. “A walk?” This little scene between the two of them is already rankling in his mind, as if it were past already and he is recalling it.

“Yes, a walk — is that all right?”

“Of course, of course.” He laughs, his brow fairly on fire by now. “Can I come with you?”

Although he does not move she has the impression of him dodging from side to side in the doorway so as not to let her pass.

“Your mother is drunk again,” she says. “I think you had better look after her.”

For a second it seems he will put his hands on her arms again, more roughly this time. Despite his flustered smile and doggy eagerness she is a little frightened of him, so large and unnervingly blond, so sharp-eyed sometimes, as now. Points of stubble glitter on his cheeks and chin as if a pinch of reddish sand had been thrown in his face and stuck there. She imagines him hitting her, the jarring of fist on bone.

— 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—

You see how my Dad does it, putting all sorts of fancies in their heads to distract and confuse them? She begins to recall something from her dawn dream of love and then does not. But she will always remember this day, for as long, that is, as a mortal may remember anything.

Frowning now and suddenly helpless, her husband steps out of the way to let her pass. As she does, he tries eagerly to take her hand but she brushes him aside and is gone.

To make her way to the garden from the music room she must cross an enclosed, cobbled yard and go out by an iron gate.

There is another yard beyond, where the chicken-runs are, and often the chickens escape and get in here through the gate because they like to peck among the cobbles, where there must be worms, or grubs, or something. Helen is nervous of these high-strung, baroque birds with their trembling wattles, the way they look at her with malevolent surmise and make that slow thoughtful gargling sound in their gullets. Their droppings are multicoloured, chalk-white and black — what do they eat? — olive-green and a shiny silk-green and a horrible glistening dark brown. She goes gingerly, careful of her sandals. The gate when she opens it resists her, dragging and shrieking on its rusty hinges.

The two she had observed from the conservatory are still where they had been, on the step above the sunken lawn, oddly consorting there, the one tall and sleek and the other fat and humped and bald. Benny Grace is eyeing her at an angle, and she sees that he is smiling to himself. He has taken off his shoes and socks again — is there something the matter with his feet? Roddy Wagstaff pointedly pretends not to notice her as she approaches. In her sandals she can feel the grass, it is moist and cool and tickles her toes deliciously. Because of the low level of this part of the lawn the sunlight shining down over the trees seems sharply bent, as if it were water and not air it is striking through. A stray wind, soft and lapsing, rustles through the trees and makes their leaves tinkle; the leaves are darkly polished on top and greeny-grey underneath. Summer seems an immense height, an eminence towering bluely over the day. See how all stops for a moment, here in this dappled grove, where now even the breeze is stilled. This respite is a gift of the god, your less than humble servant.

Helen is asking Roddy Wagstaff for a cigarette. He bends on her his finical smile and clicks open the slim, silver cigarette case with his thumb and offers it open flat on his palm. The still, bright air pales the flame of his lighter. They both ignore Benny Grace, squatting on the step at the level of their knees, squinting up at them, genial and quizzical. They smoke in silence for a little while, ignoring him — he might be a garden ornament, for all the notice they take of him — and then, together, without a word, they descend the steps and walk away along the lawn.

“That fellow,” Helen murmurs, “—who is he, do you know?”

Roddy shrugs. “Mm. When you came along he was in the middle of telling me some rigmarole, about Greece, I think it was, about being up in the mountains there, doing something or other. I could make no sense of it. And that greasy little smile that he has!” He stops and lifts one foot and examines his shoe and frowns. “How can the grass be damp? It hasn’t rained for weeks.”

“No one seems to know who he is,” Helen is saying. They come to a vertical grassy bank — it must have been a ha-ha once — and pause to finish their cigarettes. When she looks back down the length of the lawn Benny Grace is still sitting where they left him, between the two stone pillars, a blurred homunculus, his bare feet glimmering whitely at the ends of his black trouser-legs, and she thinks of rats and drainpipes. “He gives me the creeps,” she says softly, and makes herself shiver.

They turn and walk to the corner of the lawn where the bank becomes a ramp that they have to scramble up ungracefully — she thinks Roddy might offer her his hand but he does not — and find themselves on a weedy gravel path that meanders off beside another trail of trees. They are beech trees, someone told her; she likes to know the names of things, even things she does not care about. They have what seems to her a resentful aspect, brooding above her in the sunlight and slowly and haughtily moving their high heads from side to side in what little wind there is. It is pleasantly cool in their shade, though, and suddenly quiet, too, the air muffled by the great dark bundles of foliage. The white jet-stream of an aeroplane high up is unzipping the sky down its middle, swiftly, without a sound. She had not intended to go for a walk, that was only something she had said to get away from her husband, yet here she is, strolling along this path under trees in the middle of a summer afternoon, like one of those women in Chekhov, and with Roddy Wagstaff, too, who seems to her more like a character in a play than a real, living person.

What did he mean, Adam, about moving here — surely he is not serious? The things he thinks of, the notions he dreams up!

She always wanted to be an actress, from when she was a little girl and dressed up in her mother’s clothes and mimed in front of the wardrobe mirror, preening and striking attitudes and stamping her foot. Later on she conceived of the stage as a place of self-improvement, of self-fulfilment, and still sees it as such. She is convinced that by an accumulation of influence the parts that she plays, even when the characters are petty or wicked, will gradually mould and transform her into someone else, someone grand and deep and serious. It is like putting on makeup, but makeup of a magically permanent kind, that she will not take off, only continue adding to, layer upon careful layer, until she has achieved her true look, her real face. She knows what people say of her, that she is hard-hearted, relentless, driven by ambition, and they are not wrong, she has to admit it, but what they do not know about — for of course she will tell no one, not even Adam, especially not Adam — is this notion she has cherished since she began, the notion of being destined to become something more than she is. This we must assume is the source of her interest in Roddy Wagstaff. He is like her, not quite achieved yet, not quite the full person that he will be, some day. He has no smell, that is a thing she has noticed. There are smells about him, yes, a smell of cigarette smoke, for instance, and of soap or cologne or something, of other things as well, but of Roddy himself, the flesh-and-blood man, she can detect not a trace, and this adds to her sense of him as hollow, a thing of potential more than actual presence. So there is a sort of affinity, after all, since this is what she is, too — pure potential, in a state of perpetual transformation, on the way steadily to becoming herself, her authentic self.

The tree-lined path without her noticing has taken them in a broad curve, and the garden is no longer in view, though she has a prickly sensation between her shoulder-blades, as if Benny Grace’s eye is still on her, somehow. From here there is a view of the house she has not had before. At this angle the place looks crazier than ever, all slopes and recesses and peculiarly shaped windows; it is, she sees, more like a church than a house, but a church in some backward, primitive place where religion has decayed into a cult and the priests have had to allow the churchgoers to worship the old gods alongside the new one.

Roddy is worrying about his shoes again, and keeps stopping to peer at them, clicking his tongue in annoyance. They are narrow and sharp-toed, and a sickly shade of pale tan, like sucked toffee. He complains that the leather is bound to bubble up where the lawn has dampened it above the seams. “They haven’t seen grass since they were still part of a cow,” he says with a scowl. Helen laughs shortly and puts a hand quickly over her mouth — she is conscious of her raucous laugh: it always comes out before she can stop it and gives her an embarrassing shock. Roddy turns his head and stares at her, uncertain, faintly alarmed. He had not intended to be humorous. He does not care for jokes, does not understand them or what they are for.

The path ahead veers abruptly and leads into a dark little wood. This must be, Helen thinks, the wood she saw this morning from the bathroom window, the one she has never been able to find before, not that she has ever made such effort to find it. She does not hesitate but goes on without comment, and although Roddy falls back a step or two he soon strides forward again and catches her up, and they pass side by side under a sort of arch woven of brambles and ivy that is like a doorway into a church. Within the wood the day is suddenly different: it is dimmer, naturally, because of the shade, but it feels different, too, feels attentive, almost, watchful. There is a mushroomy smell, and the air that surely should be green, given all this greenery, instead has a bluish tinge, as if there had been a bonfire that had gone out and left its smoke thinly dispersed all around. When she makes a closer inspection, however, she sees there is not so much green, except high up where the leaves are, for down here it is mostly brown: wood-brown, thorn-brown, clay-brown. A bird breaks out of a bush and flies off rapidly, whistling shrilly. The path peters out and the ground becomes spongy underfoot, like a trampoline that has gone slack. She thinks of Hansel and Gretel — were they the babes in the wood or is that another story? They left a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back through the forest but the birds ate them and they got lost. And then what happened? She tries to remember but cannot. There was a witch, probably, there is always a witch, waiting in the wood.

Nature, though, how impassive it is, how indifferent. The trees, this lilac air, the leaning briars and the clinging vines, none of these register her and Roddy moving in their midst; even the moss on which she treads does not care that her foot crushes it. The cries of lost children would be lost on this place; even their blood would not stain the ground, or not for long, but would be absorbed like anything else, like dew, like rain. Yes, she marvels at how it all just goes on, not needing to notice anything or respond to anything. But then it comes to her that there is nothing going on, really, and that what these things are is not indifferent because that would mean they could be otherwise, that the trees could turn and look at them, that the creepers could reach out like hands and clutch at their ankles, that the briars could sweep down and lash them across their backs like scourges, and nothing like that ever happens. For nature, my dear, has no purpose, except perhaps that of not being us, I mean you.

Now they have reached the heart of the wood and here is a little — what should she call it? — a little bower, under a low, vaulted roof of ivy and brambles and sweet woodbine and other things all tangled together. “Oh,” Roddy Wagstaff says, “it must be the famous holy well,” and for some reason gives what seems an embarrassed laugh. A well? At first she sees no well but then she does. There is nothing built, no bricks or stones piled up, just the pool of water, brimming and still, like a polished dark metal disc set on the ground, with vivid wet green moss all around it. Now too she sees the rosaries, dozens of them, hanging among the ivy and the woodbine blossoms, and there are scraps of holy pictures propped between twigs or hanging from thorns, of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart, and photographs of people as well, smudged and creased: a little girl in her First Communion dress with plaits, a toothless old woman squinting in sunlight, a cocky young fellow in an army uniform, holding his cap in his hand. Such a hush reigns here, at once tense and dreamy, as if some sound that had been expected long ago, some call or cry, had not come, and would not, now. All feels liquid under this densely matted canopy. The air is damply cool, and among the moss there are black rocks flecked with mica that gleam wetly, and something somewhere is making a steady, reverberant drip. In front of the well a place to sit has been provided, a narrow little bench with metal legs set crookedly in cement. It takes her a moment to recognise it as the seat from an old-fashioned school desk. Roddy is telling her how people from the farms and villages round about still come here to the well to pray—“There’s even a May procession, I believe,” he says archly, with a smirk — and how her father-in-law had tried and failed to close off the right of way through the wood. She is hardly listening, watching the dust tumbling lazily in a narrow shaft of sunlight through the leaves.

They sit down on the narrow bench. She sees that despite the seeming stillness of its surface a little of the water is constantly spilling over from the well; it moves through the moss at her feet, a stealthy, swarming flow. Where does it go to? The beam of sunlight is fading, like a sword blade being stealthily withdrawn, and yet somehow leaves the air faintly glowing in its wake. Roddy is offering her the flame of his lighter. She does not remember accepting a cigarette from him but there it is in her fingers, a slim white thing, untipped, the tobacco smelling of somewhere foreign. She pictures a crag, a crooked tree and golden, dusty distances, faint voices singing, hands linked in a ring, a round-dance on a summer day in a green glade. The heavy flab of smoke when she draws it in scratches the back of her throat. The feeling of being watched is so much stronger now.

“Your husband does not like me,” Roddy says, in a strange voice, not his own, and as if from a long way off. She watches the water brimming in the well.

“Why do you think that?” she asks.

“Because he is jealous.”

“Adam?” She laughs, then falters, shivers, and her voice falls to a whisper. “Who is he jealous of?”

She does not look at him. Although he does not move he seems to draw himself closer to her, tensed and somehow as if suffering.

“How still the air is in this place,” he says. “Do you not feel the presence of the god?”

“What god? What do you mean?”

She peers, squinting, into the foliage behind the well, fancying she sees a face there, then it is gone. She has finished her cigarette, though its perfumed, acrid aftertaste persists. Roddy’s voice when he speaks is large yet makes a soft, a tremulous sound.

“You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.”

She stirs, a start — was she asleep? She feels she might swoon and puts a hand on Roddy’s arm, laughing a little in confusion and blurred dismay. “Sorry,” she says, “I thought — I was thinking — something from the — lines from the—”

He says her name, his mouth is by her cheek; she turns to speak again but he kisses full her open lips, his tongue burning on hers. Surprise floods through her, a sort of whoop, like laughter. Her eyes are open and so are his. Such a stare he has, as if straight into her soul! And his arms, two airy hoops that hold her fast. She tries to draw back, saying something into his mouth, his golden mouth. Something deep inside her stirs, a bud of something, stirring. At last he releases her and she gives a great gasp—“Oh!”—as one who has been drowning but is suddenly saved.

what other you is—

She leans back, at a loss, panting, her arms open, her lips still saying a silent Oh! He seems as surprised as she is, and blinks, and frowns, and touches his fingers to his lips as if to find a trace of her. She puts a hand to her hair, her cheek, her mouth. “What do you think you’re — what?”

“I don’t know—” He shudders and takes out a handkerchief and wipes his lips. What is that medleyed music in the air, of pipe and tabor, bugle and flute, what voices chanting as the radiant cavalcade departs? “I’m sorry.”

She rises from the seat and with a flowing movement, a dancer’s sweep, leans down and slaps him smartly across the cheek. He draws back, stares, and his eyes narrow. He is only himself now, the god having abandoned him. The air is darkening. He makes to speak. A whiplash crack of thunder sounds directly overhead and seemingly at the level of the treetops. Thunder? Yes!

Oh, Dad.

12

Benny Grace hears that thunderclap and smiles. It catches him stealing across the music room from outer door to inner. For such an ill-made thing he moves daintily when he must. Now he pauses, hearkening. All outside has gone breathlessly silent, from the shock of the god’s great shout of anger. Presently our faithful blackbird will try out a splash of liquid notes in the dimmened and newly oppressive air, and then will come the first and faintest susurrus of rain, like the sound of a blind man’s fingers reading braille. Where did the clouds appear from, how did they creep up all unnoticed? Benny knows a jealous deity ordained. He moves on, still smiling to himself. He is barefoot yet and carries his cracked shoes in his hands, each with a sweat-limp sock stuffed inside it under the tongue. One flap of his shirt has come out of the waistband of his trousers and not all his fly buttons are done up. Where is he going? Whithersoever his fancy takes him, so long as it is in the direction of me. The hushed air is his element.

Strange, how tentative we are when we come into their world, shy amongst the creatures we have made. Is it that we are worrying we might leave the order of things calamitously disturbed? Everything is to be put back exactly as it was before us, no stone left turned, no angle unaligned, all divots replaced. This is the rule the gods must obey. Did I say gods, did I say obey? Fine gods we are, that we must muster to a mortal must. But even our avatar, the triune lord of a later epiphany, forfeits the omnipotence you ascribe to him in the simple fact that the thing he cannot do is will himself out of existence, as one of the desert fathers, for the moment I do not recall which one, inconveniently pointed out and was promptly stoned to death — or crucified, was it? — for his impudence. It is all a matter of demarcation, the division of labour, one job one god. We too have our hierarchies, our choirs, thrones, all that. Seraphim. Cherubim.

What am I saying? I am mixing up the heavenly hosts.

My mind is going, going.

Benny Grace tiptoeing across the music room, his damp soles making unpleasant small smacking sounds on the parquet. His element, yes, this hush after thunder and before rain and the bird’s sudden drench of song. It is so for all of us; this is where we seem to ourselves most really real, in these little lapses, these little creases in the fabric of our creation. For we do not come amongst you, not in the actual fact of being here, whatever I may claim to the contrary. To us your world is what the world in mirrors is to you. A burnished, crystalline place, sparkling and clear, with everything just as it is on this side, only reversed, and infinitely unreachable. A looking-glass world, indeed, and only that. Hence our melancholy, our mischievousness, too — oh, to put a fist to that blank pane and burst through to the other side! But all we would meet is mercury. Mercury! My other name, one of my other names.

Speaking of divots, I used to have a mission of replacing them. Well, not a mission, though I would get into a great rage at those who left them where they lay, wet and knobbled, like fresh-squeezed turds. This was when I lived on the side of that hill on Haggard Head, above the sea, and my garden, such as it was, abutted the seventh green — or do they say hole, the seventh hole? — of a public golf course, where anyone could hire a set of clubs at so much an hour and there were no green fees. The place was for the most part deserted, apart from the odd, solitary retiree stoically practising his swing in the dewy hour at dawn or eve, but on weekends and bank holidays feral youths would come by train and bus from the city’s slums and hack up and down the course like so many wandering and malfunctioning windmills. I was never a golfer myself, need I say, but I had got into the habit of walking the links — links, that is another nice old specialised word, like divot — especially on those days when my mind seized up and I could not work, and increasingly there were many such. It pained me to see the fairways sliced and gouged. The torn-out sods, retrieved and turned right side up, now looked more like green scalps, or merkins, maybe. They made a satisfying squelch when I trod them back into the ground. What did I think I was doing, patching up this bit of the poor earth’s epidermis? But I cherish the world, it is true, have I not made that clear already? Should have been a poet, perhaps, apostrophising skylarks and doting on daffodils. You will have noticed my way with words, supposedly rare in a man of my calling. Words are so friendly, so accommodating, so loosely adaptable, not like numbers, with their tiresome insistence on meaning only what they mean and nothing more. But what they have that words have not is rigour, and rigour was what seduced me from the start, the promise of one firm thing in an infirm world. It all seemed so simple, early on. I loved the process, the slow accumulating of many tiny parts into a vast and gorgeous gewgaw the joy of which was its utter inutility. What did it matter if some other, a mere technician, should extract from the middle of my mesh a bristling filament that fitted perfectly a slot in one of his infernal machines? Apply, apply away! — that was my cry. And apply they did, adapting my airy fancies to invent all sorts of surprising and useful gimcrackery, from the conversion of salt water into an endless source of energy to rocket ships that will fly the net of time. I was resented, of course; my kind always are. Benny used to warn me, but I never listened. Benny pretends to be a man of the people, though he is just like me, in his deepest heart. We are all alike, all we Olympians. We are supposed to be the celebrants of all that is vital and gay and light, and so we are but, oh, we are cold, cold.

I have left Benny stalled there in the middle of that room, with the evening light eclipsed and rain coming. He is on his way to me, and in no hurry. Let him loiter, there is time enough, I am going nowhere, not yet. I feel suddenly a sad fondness for him, poor unlovely outcast creature, as I felt earlier for my son — I must be softening, here at the end. Benny is a solitary, we have that too in common.

He makes his way into the big central hallway. The aqueous light here is oyster-grey and glimmers on polished tiles and picture-glass. A leaning mirror gapes in mute amazement at all it sees. The rain is a steady, monotonous drumming now, as if the summer day had got a serious, grim new task, and the glass roof high above streams and shimmers, the glass panels darkened to a lambent shade of sea-green, and everything underneath it is adrizzle. He senses another creature nearby, and looks about him alertly. Rex the dog is crouching under an old striped sofa that stands against the wall beside a potted palm. He pants and shivers, big drops splashing off the end of his tongue, for he is terrified of thunder. Benny goes and squats down and talks to him, but the dog only bares his teeth and growls. “All right, then,” Benny says indulgently, rising. “All right.” He goes to the foot of the stairs and listens upwards, straining to hear; is it the sound of the rain or is someone speaking above, a feebly fretful drone that rises and falls? He ascends three steps of the staircase, stops, listens again. It is definitely a voice, murmurmurmur, a sigh, a softly plaining cry, murmur again. This is what Benny loves, what all the gods love, to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others. See him stealthily climbing there, face lifted eagerly and a dab of rain-light gleaming on his stub of nose, his fleshy fist mounting the banister-rail beside him in little hops, like a hunched and pallid toad. I could trip him up, wrap his trousers round his knees and send him tumbling arse over tip to bang his big fat head on those black-and-white tiles. But I will not.

He has to cross three sides of the landing before he finds where the voice is coming from. A door stands conveniently ajar. It is dim inside the room where the curtains are closed. She lies on a couch against the wall with a brown blanket pulled to her throat. Her arms are free of the blanket and she clutches something to her breast, a shapeless something, red and soft. Her son is seated beside her on a little chair and strokes her forehead with one of his huge hands, so gently, strokes and strokes. Ursula’s eyes are closed. She murmurs a gabble of words, with frequent sighs, frequent moans. The rain rattles furiously against the unseen window, booms upon the glazed roof above. Benny presses himself to the wall, all eyes and ears. Is it not a quaint scene? — a moment out of Watteau, it might be, these figures about their ambiguous business, in uncertain light, as the day wanes. Let us leave them there, the three of them, for now, the languishing lady and attendant man, and the listener by the doorway, a meddling jester.

My heavens, what a downpour! Helen is drenched, to the very skin, her dress in big patches darkened to navy-blue and clinging to her knees, her thighs, her breasts. She arrives in a flurry, blinking the rain from her eyelashes and laughing, the kitchen door banging behind her. Even the band of her pants is shiver-makingly wet against her belly. “Look at me!” she cries in happy dismay, and holds up her hands and flutters her fingers, sprinkling the flagstones with drops the size of pennies. Ivy Blount, who has been sitting at the table shelling peas, regards her for a moment without moving, her face reflecting the bedraggled young woman’s undiminished light, for the rain has only made her more radiant, pinking her skin all over and turning her hair to polished wheat. She kicks off her muddied sandals and reaches behind her and with an effort undoes the top three buttons at the back of her dress — goodness, is she going to take it off? My father will faint if she does. But wait, Ivy is not alone. Who is it loitering there by the bog-oak dresser? Duffy, is that you? Aha, my bold spalpeen. He has a sheepish air and seems bemused. He does look like a man who has been accepted in a proposal he cannot remember having made. Ivy too is not herself: there is a hectic flush to her cheeks and her eyes are quick and bright. Have the words been spoken, has the deal been closed? I think so, I think I foresee strewn rose petals and the chanting of epithalamia. What a wily matchmaker I have proved, after all. “I’ll get a towel,” Ivy says.

She rises from the lyre-backed kitchen chair but hesitates a moment, looking hard into the bowl half full of sinisterly glistening peas, which is a way of not looking at Duffy, then turns and goes quickly from the room. Duffy too does not know where to look — I think he thought Helen might indeed be about to unsheathe herself from her wet dress, which I am sure would have called for another application of the smelling-salts. She crosses to the sink and leans forward and with her palms presses her hair hard against her skull, and a few squeezed drops spatter on the porcelain. The rain-light sinuates in the window, brightening, phosphorescent. Duffy averts his gaze from her invitingly elevated rump; he is something of a gentleman, after all, in his rough way. I have mocked him, usurped him, spuriously enthused him, yet I do not wish him ill. I hope that he will marry Ivy. I hope they will have a happy time of it, in the time that is left to them — though he is younger than his putative bride he is no spring chicken either, as his Ma would sourly say. Yes, I wish them happiness, in so far as mortals are capable of being happy. Duffy’s life, like Ivy’s, has not been easy, a long and joyless bachelorhood in that ugly house behind the hill, wriggling in restive impotence under the thumb of his jealous mother, who in her turn was beaten by her mother and abused by her father, who in their turn were similarly used by their respective sires and dams, and so on all the way back to Adam and Eve who no doubt mistreated their misbegotten brood, compelling them into an orgy of incest so that the race of men might flourish and fill all the earth. But Duffy’s expectations are modest and so are Ivy’s; they have that advantage as they set out on their adventure together, for the inevitable disappointments of married life will not hit them so hard as they would if they were young and starry-eyed. Have I mentioned that Duffy is illiterate? His mother — by the way, I thought we were to hear no more of that harridan? — did not hold with schooling, being little schooled herself. He hides his lack of letters by means of various stratagems, the devising of which took more effort than he would have expended in learning to read, but which are so subtle and convincing that even Ivy does not know his shaming secret. He is worrying already as to how he will manage to sign the marriage register. But it will be all right. I shall intercede with my stepmother Hera, whose bailiwick encompasses all matters conjugal, and have her arrange for Duffy to confide his secret to Ivy on the night before the wedding, and together they will spend a happy hour seated side by side at the oilcloth-covered table in Ivy’s kitchen, their heads inclined and foreheads almost touching in the lamplight, while Ivy’s tender hand guides Duffy’s as he traces out laboriously, in pencil, over and over until he has them off pat, the magic letters of his name. More than the wedding itself, that little ceremony there under the lamp, all silent save for the soft scratching of graphite on paper, will mark the true beginning of their life together. Yes, yes, I have it all planned.

Helen turns from the sink and asks Duffy for a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she says, “which is why I never buy them.”

Duffy’s look turns leporine and he moves the tip of his tongue along his lower lip — is she making a joke?

“I only have roll-ups,” he says, showing her the tobacco tin from his pocket and quickly palming it again.

She shrugs. “Roll me one, then.”

All the more alarmed by this he turns a quarter way away from her and remains motionless, staring at nothing. “Oh, it’s all right,” she says. “Someone will give me a real one.”

He nods, relieved. She comes forward and stands by the table, leaning her hip against it and running the fingers of one hand back and forth on the wood as if the raised seams in its worn surface were the strings of a harp. “What’s keeping Ivy?” she murmurs. “I really am soaked.” She seems unaware that the buttons of her dress at the back are still undone, affording Duffy a glimpse of a taut white elastic strap. The rain is ceasing and out in the garden the blackbird is piping again its heedless, piercing song. “Damn,” she says without emphasis, and glances absently about the room. She has never slapped a man’s face before and her insides are jangling still from the thrill of it. She feels as if it were she who had been delivered a tingling smack. Poor Roddy! She is amused, remembering how he reared back on the bench with almost a maidenly quiver, staring wide-eyed at her, a palm pressed to his cheek. She surprised herself by noticing his hands, pale and long and tapered, like her father-in-law’s, their beauty marred only by those bitten nails. She was surprised too at how livid the mark was that she left on his cheek, how quickly it was spreading. She had not meant to hit him quite so hard — in fact, she had not meant to hit him at all, it had just happened, before she knew it. But what had he been thinking of, kissing her like that? She wonders if she should tell Adam. What would he do? Threaten to horsewhip Roddy, challenge him to a duel? She is sorry now she spoke of the play to Roddy, and regrets especially saying that he might review it. Not that it was entirely a joke, for the production would need all the notices it could get. Now, of course, if he does write something he will be certain to take his revenge on her; she is sure he is that sort, small-minded and vindictive. But then, she reminds herself, I did hit him, after all, and is all the more amused.

From the corner of her eye she can see Duffy begin to edge his way cautiously along the dresser in the direction of the back door. She wonders where Roddy is now. He fled the wood ahead of her, striding off furiously and still wiping at his mouth with his handkerchief, as if there was a foul taste that he could not get rid of. She hopes he is as wet as she is; not much hope for his slip-ons if he is.

Ivy comes back at last, bearing a huge white towel folded in her arms. She pauses for a beat, catching something in the atmosphere, and looks from Helen to Duffy and back again and narrows her eyes.

“Oh, you’re an angel,” Helen says. She takes the towel and begins vigorously rubbing at her hair.

“Here, give me that,” Ivy says, not untenderly, and takes the towel back from her and makes her sit by the table.

Duffy, sidling, has almost reached the door, but pauses now to watch the two women, Helen voluptuously slumped with her hands limp in her lap and the back of her dress folded out at the top like a pair of small blue wings, and Ivy leaning over her, all bones and bird’s-nest hair, with the white towel draped over her hands like the priest’s communion stole at Mass, stroking slowly that helmet of damp, dark-gold hair. She says that when they are done she will prepare for Helen a nice hot cup of tea, but Helen, her voice muffled, says she would prefer a nice cold drink of something with gin in it. Ivy does not reply but only wields the towel more vigorously. Helen chuckles to herself in the warm tumult where she leans.

The rain has stopped and a weak sun is shining wetly in the window. Duffy moves to the door. Even when he lifts the latch Ivy does not turn her head to look at him. He steps out, and the door grates on the slate threshold. The scent of drenched grass assails him. Which would fetch the better price at auction, he is wondering, Ivy’s house or his own?

Petra too got wet in the rain but was not drenched as Helen and Roddy Wagstaff were. She is afraid of thunder and ran back from the wood, her heart pounding, and did not stop until she reached the house, and she was crossing the lawn before the rain started up in earnest. How silent the house is, holding its breath, as if it too had got a fright. She stands in the hall to listen and hears beyond the noise of the rain the faint maunderings of her mother up in her room; it is a sound she is used to. Then from far off she hears the yard gate creak, and a moment later the back door rattles, and she knows that Helen or Roddy or both together have returned. She hopes they have suffered a good soaking, and that Helen will catch a cold followed rapidly by pneumonia, primary or atypical, pneumo-coccal, interstitial or lobular, she does not mind which variety it is, just so long as the attack is severe and accompanied by numerous and distressing and, if at all possible, fatal complications. Not to stray beyond the Ps, even pleurisy would do, the effusive form—pain in the breast is common, of a cutting or stabbing nature, usually in the neighbourhood of the nipple—and, for Roddy, at least a chronic pleurodynia of the intercostal nerves. That would teach the two of them.

On the landing she sees Benny Grace crouched and listening outside her mother’s bedroom doorway, and through the partway open door sees her mother inside, lying down, and Adam sitting by her. None of them notices her.

In her room she locks the door and kicks off her wet shoes and sits on the bed, hugging her knees, listening to the sound of the rain on the roof. The light is silver-grey and sad, and she would like to cry but cannot; she was never any good at crying. The rain on the window makes everything beyond the glass shimmer and swim, as if she were indeed seeing it all through tears, all those greys and watery greens and undulant browns. She wonders that she can be so calm. Everything is changed, her life is changed. Or, no, it cannot be changed, since what she thinks should be her life has not properly started yet. Roddy was to do that for her; Roddy was the one who was supposed to take her hand and lead her into the sunlit uplands of the future. It surprises her to realise, to admit at last, how high a hope she had of him. Everyone tried to warn her but she would not listen. Now she feels — she feels — She does not know what she feels.

She leaves the bed and goes to the door and opens it cautiously and peers out. Benny Grace is gone, and the door of her mother’s room is shut and her mother has stopped moaning. She flits across the landing on tiptoe — who does she think will see her, of whom is she afraid? — and opens the door and climbs the seven steps to the Sky Room. Someone has drawn the curtains again and she can hardly see. She gropes her way through the shadows until she finds the bed. She has to listen closely to hear her father breathing. She is getting used to the gloom and can see him now, or his outline, at least. How like a wax figure he seems, a life-sized waxen model of himself. Taking care not to displace any of the tubes or the feeding bottles dangling on their metal stand she crawls on to the bed and lies down by him on her side with her face up close to his. His profile is like a line of mountains, seen from afar, at nightfall. There is an unpleasantly sharp, ammoniac smell; she supposes it is from the jars that she knows are under the bed and that the other, unseen tubes lead down to, but behind that there is his own familiar smell, darkish, warm, a little musty. She puts her arm across his chest. He is so thin, hardly there at all, just a scant arrangement of bones under the blanket.

She is wondering how long Roddy and Helen have been lovers.

How strange the way the shadows all around her when she peers into them seem to move, billowing slowly, like smoke, like distant storm clouds. There is a thing dripping in her head, dripping, or ticking; it is often there, or maybe always there and she only notices it sometimes. She hears the cries of gulls, far off, then suddenly near, then far again.

Kiss me. Kiss me.

Oh. A sudden start. She opens her eyes — have they been closed? Did she fall asleep for a moment? She must have, for she has that feeling that she always has when she wakes up of stealthy things having been happening that she is not to know of. Not that anything has happened: she is still lying beside her silent father as before, here in the gloom of the sickroom. But something has changed — the rain has stopped, that is it. Such enormous silence, as if the two of them were lying deep at the bottom of a huge empty stone vault, stone, or metal, maybe, a huge rusty iron tank emptied of everything, even air. She lifts her arm from her father’s chest and turns on to her back and gazes upwards at the uncertain ceiling. She thinks of her father facing blindly into another world, breathing other, even darker air. Why are the gulls no longer crying? Where have they gone to? Kiss me.

In a little while she goes back to her room. Yes, the rain is over and the sky is clearing to a delicate, breakable blue. She stands by the window looking out on a rinsed and sparkling world. She can see rather than feel the chill that the rain has brought, for the air outside seems polished and shines thinly, and there is a new edge to everything, sharp as glass. Rex the dog is crossing the lawn; he stops, sniffs, lifts a leg, then after a moment of motionless gazing ambles on. The Salsol is parked on the gravel in front of the house, slewed at an angle. Duffy is walking along slowly by the box hedge, examining the hedge as if for damage; he has a furtive and a watchful mien. The limes along the drive are darker than everything else, as if night is gathered already among their foliage, waiting to be released into the air. These things seem to her set out just so, the countless pieces of a vast and mysteriously significant design. She looks downwards, inwards; how the light of evening pales her hands. Across the back of one of them there is a stippled scratch, like a chain of tiny rubies, where she caught herself on a briar. She did not really mean to spy on Helen and Roddy Wagstaff — how was she to know they would come to the wood? She had gone there, as she often does, to be alone and sit by the holy well and let her mind slow down and soothe itself. When she heard them approaching she hid among the woodbine and the ivy — why, since she did not even know who they would be? — like a child, she thinks, caught at something naughty. And indeed, like a child, she felt a secret, gloating thrill, crouched in her damp and odorous lair, crawled over by invisible mites, her nails digging into her palms and her face on fire. When the pair sat down on the bench before the well she was directly opposite Helen, who she thought would surely see her. As soon as they began to kiss she wriggled backwards through the undergrowth, not caring now if they heard her, but of course they did not: they were so busy, lost in each other. When the thunder crashed directly above her it almost sent her sprawling on her face, so loud it was, so near. And then she ran, stumbling.

She turns from the window. A sense of urgent anticipation is starting up inside her, familiar, guilty, hot. Has she locked the door? She makes sure that she has. From the door she goes to the wardrobe, opens it, kneels. There is a drawer, low down, at the back, hard to notice, an ideal hiding place, almost ideal. She draws it open cautiously, making not a sound, and slips her palms under what is inside and lifts it out and bears it to the bed and sets it down. Within its wrapping of thin tissue paper the green silk shines dimly, like a slab of jade half hidden under a dusting of snow. When she opens the paper she shivers as always at the terrible crackling noise it makes, like the noise of some precious, fragile thing being broken into pieces. She unfolds the kimono and lifts it by its wide, square sleeves. The seams release the faint perfume that she loves, soft and dry, like the scent of orange blossom or dried rose petals; she likes to think it is a lingering trace of the great lady for whom it was made, for it is an ancient piece, brought back from Japan by her father long ago. She undresses, and puts on the heavy garment over her nakedness; the silk lining is cold against her skin; it is always cold. She ties the broad belt of matt black silk and pauses a moment and bows her head, her eyes closed. The ritual has begun. With tiny, hampered steps she hurries to the door and makes sure yet again that it is locked. On her way back to the bed she touches in strict order with her fingertips these three things: the first stripe in the wallpaper to the right of the light switch, a framed photograph of her father on the mantelpiece above the closed-off fireplace, the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush on the dressing-table.

From her pocket she brings out a ring made of heavy white metal — platinum, is it? — and set with a flat black stone in which an initial letter is carved. She slips it on to her wedding finger and admires it at arm’s length.

Where do they see each other, where do they meet? Have they a room somewhere, a love nest? She pictures it, off a mean, cobbled street, up a dirty stairway at the end of a corridor smelling of cats. Lino on the floor, and the sagging bed shoved into a corner, two straight chairs and a stained table with an empty wine bottle and two glasses in the bottoms of which the purple lees of last week’s wine have gone dry and turned to crystal. A meagre window with a yellow net curtain and a view of back yards and crooked dustbins. Two cigarettes smouldering in a tin ashtray, one smeared with lipstick. A cistern drips, a voice in the street calls out something. In the corner, in the shadows, his pale flanks moving, her stifled cries.

There is the sound of footsteps below the window, harshing on the gravel. She hides behind the curtain, then risks a quick glance down. Her brother and Roddy Wagstaff are walking towards the station-wagon. Roddy has his linen jacket draped over his shoulders. His hair, still damp, is combed flat across his high, narrow skull, and from this angle she can see that it is thinning on the crown — he will be bald before he is forty. He is carrying his suitcase. So he is not going to stay, after all. Why has he changed his mind — has something happened? Perhaps they saw her, he and Helen, when she was wriggling backwards through the brambles, and they are afraid she will tell what she saw. She supposes he hates her now, for Roddy would hate anyone he has reason to fear. Does he at least feel ashamed, embarrassed? It is true, he never promised her anything. Does he talk about her when he is with Helen — do they lie in bed smoking and laugh at her for being childish, stupid? Adam takes Roddy’s suitcase and puts it on the back seat of the Salsol, they get in, they drive away. Behind the passenger window Roddy is bending to light a cigarette; he does not look back at the house.

She could betray his secret, his and Helen’s. She could tell her brother what she saw at the holy well, before the thunder came. What would he do? Would he break Roddy’s neck, would he strangle Helen? No. He would be decent and stoical as always; he would bear his pain and forgive his wife, probably he would even forgive Roddy, too. She thinks of him as she saw him a moment ago, stumping over the gravel like a bow-legged sailor in those too-tight, ridiculous trousers he has been wearing all day, as if they were a penance, her big awkward blundering brother, and she knows that she will say nothing, will never let him know how he has been cheated.

She goes and takes the razor in its velvet case from behind the chest of drawers, where she keeps it hidden in the shallow gap there above the wainscot, and carries it to the window and sets it on the sill. The brushed black velvet seems to bend the light to itself from all directions and drink it in. She lifts the little brass catch. It pleases her how snugly the razor fits into its bed of scarlet satin. The ivory handle is cool and smooth, like cold cream made solid, and the round-headed blade is the colour of water. She takes the lovely thing and balances it lightly on her palm. There are raked shadows on the lawn, and birds, restless at the day’s lapsing, whistle plaintively in the trees. She shrugs back the kimono’s great loose sleeve. The underside of her arm is cica-triced all along its length, the crescents of healed skin brittle and shiny, like candle wax. She leans against the window-sill in a sort of anxious trance, all her flesh yearning for the kiss of the chill, steel blade. She draws in a breath, hissingly. When she cuts, the world suddenly has a centre, everything on the instant realigns itself and points to this edge, where the skin draws back its thin white lips and the first beads of blood make their shy début. She unties the belt and lets the kimono fall open and clasps her arm to her breast, and feels the ooze of blood against her skin; it is warm, and her own, and it comforts her. She waits a moment, then bares her other arm.

13

Ursula slowly wakes, rising from level to level, from dark to lesser dark, as if through successive shallowings of the sea. She feels herself heavy yet buoyant, a corpse somehow coming back to life. It always does her so much good, a little sleep at evening, disperses so many fogs and fumes in her head. For a minute or two she does not open her eyes, basking in the blanket’s warmth, the pillow’s softness. As soon as she does open them, she knows, the usual headache will start beating its unbearable drum at the back of her skull, but for now her mind drifts contentedly, weightless as a bubble, touching on random things and caroming off them lightly. She has so many matters to worry about but lately, she has noticed, her consciousness on first waking affords her a blank interval of grace before getting down to the grim business at hand.

Someone was here with her — her son — is he still—? Yes, she can sense him there, beside her.

She is fond of this room, where she and Adam shared so much of their lives together. He was always at his most manageable here, his most playful and forgiving, of himself as well as of her. She feels his absence, of course, feels it painfully, yet she has to confess to herself that this new solitude of the bedroom to which his illness has abandoned her is a surprising and a welcome luxury. Not that the room is in any way remarkable or particularly well appointed. It is large, indeed much too large, impossible to heat in winter and in summer forbiddingly stark, but all the same it has by day a reassuringly stolid aspect; it is like a room remembered from long ago, from the fixed antiquity of childhood, while at night, or in daytime with the curtains drawn, as now, it might be a great brown tent set down on the steppes of Muscovy or on the Arabian sands, ringed on all sides by a protecting vastness. She mocks herself for this fancy yet she clings to it, like a child clinging to a favourite toy. She does not regret moving the big double bed up to the Sky Room for Adam to lie in — to lie in in state, she almost thought — though its absence adds to the gauntness of the room. She felt he would want to be alone, as he always did when he was ill, hating to be fussed over. Even if the bed were still here she would not sleep in it, where she is sure the absence of her husband from it would pierce her all the more sharply. This old couch, or chaise-longue, really, is good enough for her, though it is hard and lumpy and when she lies down on it exudes a mildewy odour that she suspects is a vestige of all the bottoms that have sat on it over the many years since it was first carried in and set down here, at the behest of who knows what Blount ancestor.

She hears the late train going past on the up line.

Her moments of drowsy calm are coming to an end, and the needle of dread and doubt prepares to insert itself again. She remembers talking to young Adam before she fell asleep, remembers saying things, but not what things they were. She should not talk at all when she is in that state, though being in that state is what frees her tongue and lets her speak of all the things that concern and frighten and infuriate her. She must stop drinking, she must give it up altogether, for everyone’s sake including her own. She thinks of the spectacle she might make of herself at the funeral, for instance, the drunken widow keening and caterwauling and trying to fling herself into the grave — She catches herself up. The funeral. The grave. The widow. How seamlessly she has accepted it all, the imminence of it, the inevitability. She opens her eyes at last and turns her head on the pillow to look at her son, to plead with him for something, some large gesture of exoneration, absolution, or perhaps only a word of solace. But with a jolt she sees that it is not her son who is there. It is Benny Grace. He has carried the chintz-covered stool from in front of her dressing-table and set it down beside the couch, and sits on it facing her in the pose of a Chinese sage, with his belly hanging over his belt and his fingers laced together in his lap. His shoes are by the stool, and his bare feet loll on their sides, turned inwards with the ankles almost flat against the floor, and she can see the calluses on his soles. He smiles at her in friendly fashion, and twiddles his toes. How long has he been here? “I didn’t want to wake you,” he says, as if she had asked the question aloud. “You were having such a sleep.”

She struggles to sit up, the blanket getting into a tangle and sullenly resisting her. She is holding something — what is it? — a cushion? Yes, it is the old red satin cushion that Rex chewed up and Ivy rescued. How did it come to be here, and why is she clutching it to her so fiercely, as if it were a shield to protect her? “My son,” she says, “where did he—?”

“He had to go. His pal needed a lift to the station.”

“His pal?”

“The tall thin one. Wagstaff?”

“Has he gone? Oh dear. He was meant to stay.” What has happened now, what offence has been given, what umbrage taken? Yet she is glad that Roddy has gone. He did not even ask to visit Adam. She supposes it is the last that they will hear of him. “He’ll think me rude, not to see him off. He wants to write Adam’s biography”—she laughs softly—“imagine!” He does not respond. She sighs, casting about her, fretful suddenly. Lying here like this, with this man watching every move she makes, is like being in one of those shameful social compromises that happen in dreams. She is wearing her dressing-gown, she notices; she does not remember putting it on. So many things these days get lost in the increasing confusion of her mind. She looks at Benny Grace again, his fatness, squatting there. What is she to do with him, what say to him? He has an unavoidable solidity, yet at the same time there is something fantastic about him. Yes, it is like being in a dream, so real it seems not a dream at all, and he is one of the figures looming in it. He gives no account of himself, that is what it is. He simply appeared amongst them, as if he knew them all and they must all know him. But no one knows him, except she, and what she knows of him is next to nothing, really. She throws the satin cushion on the floor and struggles again to sit up straight. She sets one hand on her thigh and folds the other over it, as her mother used to do when she was preparing to deal with something difficult.

“I’m sorry I spoke to you like that, in the garden, earlier,” she says. “I was — harsh.”

He shrugs. “Harsh is nothing. Harsh I’m used to.”

“Especially when”—she takes a deep breath—“especially when there is so much that I — that we — so much we must be grateful to you for.”

“Not me, Ursula,” he says softly, with a shake of the head, modest and smiling, “you know that.”

“Well, you, and her.” Ursula, he called her — how dare he? “Where is she, by the way?” He says nothing, only goes on smiling. “Adam said she died but I did not know whether to believe him.” Still he will not answer. She intended to be direct, so as to shock him, but of course he is unshockable. She sighs again, irritably this time. He is just like Adam in that way he has of keeping silent and causing the other person to babble on and on, blurting out all sorts of fatuous and self-incriminating things. “You mustn’t think we weren’t grateful for your — your kindness. And hers, I mean. Both of you.” All that awful money, years and years of it, just appearing in the bank every quarter without explanation, and Adam not saying a word so that she had to be silent too, no mention permitted, no acknowledgement, even though it was what they were living on, since Adam despite all his fame and his great reputation no longer earned anything, since he no longer worked. What did he think she would think? It had to be a woman, naturally.

The room seems to be swelling around her, as if it were indeed a tent, billowing and burgeoning as it fills up with more and more thickening, unbreathable air. The shadows seem deeper, too, a denser greyish-brown.

“He used to insist there are no great men,” she says, in a rapid murmur, “only men who occasionally do a great thing.” She is not sure why she said it. Was she replying to something, a question, a contention? She cannot remember what he said last. She feels all the more irritated. What she wanted to do was ask him about the woman: is she, was she, beautiful, clever, worldly, all those things that she herself is not? “I don’t know why we’re sitting in the gloom,” she says, with an unsteady, small laugh. “Would you mind opening the curtains, Mr. Grace?”

She looks after him as he pads across the room, his fat arms hooped and his big head bobbing. When he draws the curtains back she is surprised at how light the evening is. It will hardly get dark at all this night, for a few hours only. The thought for some reason makes her feel tired again.

He comes back and sits down on the stool. The light from the window makes a shining aureole all about him and sets a gleam on his bald pate. She draws the dressing-gown close about her. “I don’t know exactly why you’ve come,” she says tentatively, shrinking into herself. “Is there something you want from us?” She feels small suddenly, small and crouched and wizened, as she knows she will be when she is old. Did they do something to Adam, this fellow and the woman between them, did they damage him, as she always suspected they did? But no, she thinks — whatever damage there was to do he would have done himself. Only the young can work, he always said, only they have the ruthlessness for it, the savagery. “He always said,” she says, fingering the blanket, “that by the age of thirty he had finished all he had to do, that he had given everything.” She looks at him pleadingly. “Is it true?”

He shakes his head, impatiently, it seems, not answering her question but dismissing it. He has matters far more momentous to address. He leans forward, all confidential, and lays a hand on both of hers. She sees the scene as from above, the couch just so, the blanket covering her, the discarded cushion on the floor, red and swollen like a broken heart, and the fat man’s head inclined, its monkish tonsure gleaming. From far off in the fields she hears the lowing of Duffy’s cows; it must be the milking hour. The oval mirror in the wardrobe door seems a mouth wide open, getting ready to cry out. Something brushes against her, not a ghost but, as it were, the world itself, giving her a nudge.

“I spoke to him,” Benny Grace says. “—He spoke to me!”

Great consternation and commotion now, of course, voices calling from room to room, running footsteps in the hall, the telephone fairly dancing on its doilied table beside the potted palm, and Ursula’s dressing-gown ballooning about her as she comes flying down the stairs like Hera herself alighting out of air intent on burning the daidala and claiming back her aberrant spouse. What shall I say? Yes, it is true, I felt something. First there was Petra, then the dog. The girl was upset, certainly I could feel that — no mistaking my daughter in her darker modes. How I wished I were able to reach out a hand to touch her, to offer her reassurance, as she cowered there on the bed beside me, trembling as she does. That young scoundrel Wagstaff must have said something hurtful to her, or else said nothing at all, which I imagine would have been more hurtful still. For this we shall give him cramps, side stitches, pinch him thick as honeycomb. Or will we? Perhaps not. We have not been kind to him, we have not been fair. He is not such a terrible fellow, after all, only disappointed, unsure, untried. Perhaps Ursula will let him write his book about me; that would be recompense. As well him as some other scribbler. Yes, he shall limn my life, in delicatest washes of blue and gold, and make a great success of it — this is my wish.

When Petra was gone the dog pawed open the door and came nosing through the shadows in search of me. What a racket his claws make on the floorboards when he is preparing his leap. As often as not he fails in the first and even second attempt, and slithers backwards off the bed, scrabbling and groaning, and collapses on the floor in a heap of fur and bones. Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense — have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes? Yet when he succeeded in getting aloft at last and flopped down beside me with a grunt and a sigh, I did feel his brute warmth. At first I did not recognise the feeling, I mean the feeling of feeling, and thought I was only imagining with an intenser acuity than heretofore. It would not have been the first such misapprehension I have suffered these past days. In my form of paresis, if I am using the term correctly — Petra would know — it is distressingly easy to mistake an imagined sensation for an actual one. This raises a number of interesting questions in the sphere of idealism, I mean philosophical idealism, and I would address them had I the time and wherewithal.

What was I saying? The general panic in the house, yes, and my experiences leading to it, and whether they were indeed experiences in the full and accepted sense.

So. The dog on the bed, his haunch against mine, its spreading warmth. This was more than my having felt Petra’s trembling; this was a sensation in my very flesh, the suffusion in me of another creature’s blood heat. Nothing had touched me like this in all the time I had lain here apparently dead to the world after being so curtly knocked off my pedestal. Yet my first impulse was panic, a sort of panic, or fluster, at least. How can I explain this curious and, as it surely seems, ungrateful, not to say churlish, response to the resurgence of feeling, faint as it was? When one is at death’s door and waiting for it to be summarily opened, one does not care to be distracted by a tap on the shoulder from someone coming up casually at one’s back in the street. It is no small thing to have got oneself properly aligned there, facing in the right direction, with one’s exit or I should say entrance visa clutched in an already rigoring fist. I am not saying I was not glad at seeming to be recalled — being prepared to go is not the same as being eager to go — however faint the summons and however humble the summoner. It was just that everything had seemed prepared and ready, and now I would have to turn back, fizzing still with travel fever, and trudgingly retrace my steps at least some way along that weary road already travelled.

Did I speak to Benny, as he says I did? He came into the room, alone this time, and drew open the curtains again — I had been attending enraptured to the rain as it stopped, it is a sound I have always loved, the whispered ceasing of summer rain — and again leaned over me, surrounding us both in a breathy bubble of intimacy, and spoke my name. But did I really respond? I did want to say something, not to him in particular, but to someone, anyone, who would listen. I was upset, I was more than upset. It must have been the sound of the rain that had set me brooding bitterly on all that I will shortly lose, all that I shall be parted from, this frightful and exquisite world and everything in it, light, days, certain faces, the limpid air of summer, and rain itself, a thing I have never become accustomed to, this miracle of water falling out of the sky, a free and absurdly lavish, indiscriminate benison. One last time among the living: those were the words that formed themselves in my mind, and so perhaps in my mouth, also. One last sweet time among the living. I did not think it so much to ask, or would not have thought it so, if I did ask it — but did I?

I heard the sound of tyres on the gravel. It was Adam, returning from the station. How smoky the evenings become, even in midsummer; it is like the smoke of memory, drifting from afar. He passed under the wisteria, into the hall, stopped, stood to listen. No sound of anyone. He was still puzzling over Roddy’s hasty departure, for which no explanation had been offered. The atmosphere in the car had been tense, and Roddy had smoked all the way, using the last of each cigarette to light the next one. He got on to the train with only seconds to spare, which was a relief for both of them. Climbing into the carriage he did not look back, but thrust his suitcase in ahead of him and sprang up on the step with one arm lifted behind him in a curiously abrupt gesture, whether of farewell or angry dismissal Adam could not tell. Nor when the train started and was going past did he even glance through the window from the seat where he had settled himself, but went on folding his jacket with a cross look, pouting his lower lip and frowning. Well, now he is gone, and there is an end of it. My biographer. He should change his name to Shakespeare.

In the kitchen Adam comes upon his wife on her hands and knees half-way under the sink. His step startles her and she rises up quickly and strikes the back of her head on the waste pipe, and swears. “My ring is gone,” she says, sitting back on her heels and setting her hands on the tops of her thighs. “I left it here, on the window-sill.” She turns up her glance to him. She has changed into a blouse and a blue skirt, and is barefoot. “The one you gave me,” she says. She makes a feline smile. “Will you hit me, if it’s gone?”

He prepares a drink for them both, gin in a jug with lime juice and a big douse of soda water. It is what they call their gimlet. She is still on the floor, rubbing the back of her head pensively where she banged it on the pipe. He brings the tray of ice cubes to the sink and stands beside her and hacks at the ice with the point of a kitchen knife, his fingers sticking to the metal of the tray. “It makes me shiver, the way it groans,” he says.

“What?”

“The ice — damn!”

She puts her hands to the edge of the sink and hauls herself to her feet. He shows her a bleeding thumb. “Serves you right,” she says, and takes his hand and squints at the cut.

“Can’t feel anything,” he says. “It’s numb, the ice numbed it.”

“Typical,” she murmurs, though neither of them quite knows what she means. He holds his wounded hand over the sink to let the blood drip there and puts his other arm around her waist and holds her close against him and kisses her. “Mmm,” she says, drawing back her face, “you smell of cigarettes.”

“It was Roddy, he smoked all the way to the station.”

She fingers a button on his shirt. “He has no smell at all — have you noticed that?”

“Roddy? He smells like a priest.”

“What do priests smell of?”

“Ashes. Wax and ashes.”

Out in the hall the big clock there makes a laboured whirring and after a weighty pause lets fall a single, ponderous chime.

“Why did he run off like that?” Helen asks.

Adam shrugs. He is still holding her with an arm around her waist, like a waltzer waiting for the music to begin. “He wasn’t well, he said,” he says. “Something about a stitch in his side. I didn’t believe him.”

She leans back on his arm, arching her spine and rolling the font of her hips against his. “He tried to kiss me,” she says, smiling. “In fact, he did.”

“Where?” He is smiling too.

“You mean, where did he kiss me, or where were we when he did?” He does not answer. “In that wood”—gesturing towards the door, the window—“by the well.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He made a sort of speech. Pure ham. It was very peculiar. I thought he—”

“What?”

Smilingly she shakes her head. “Nothing.”

“So that’s why he hurried off,” her husband says. “Did you slap his face?”

“Yes,” she says, and softly laughs, “as a matter of fact, I did. And then the rain started. He was very concerned for his shoes.”

“Poor Roddy.”

Now they both laugh, not quite cruelly, and he releases her and turns to the sink and scoops into the jug what ice cubes he managed to free before cutting himself — they are flecked with his blood — and she goes to the dresser and comes back with two tumblers, and he pours out their drinks, and they drink.

So you see, old Dad, she will not love you. We are too much for them; they prefer to settle for their own kind.

Petra sits by the window binding up her wounds. Although they sting and make her bite her lip she does not think of them as wounds but as the marks of passion, love scars, kisses. She is calm; a beautiful peace reigns in her heart. In the garden the blackbird hops on to a bough and pours out its song, and all the evening seems to stand back and listen dreamily. How pale the sky is at its edges, a barely blue, and higher up a swan-shaped cloud of purest white with a soiled edge sails sedately westwards. She has a sense of the air up there, the weightless enormity of it, thin and clear, arched over the world. She is proud of the skill with which she has learned to bandage herself. First she smears the cut with antiseptic cream to stem the blood, then puts on a patch of gauze and winds the linen bandage round and round. She makes a knot one-handed and pulls it tight with her teeth. Presently the first shy spot of crimson will appear as the blood seeps through the cloth, but soon it will stop spreading and as it dries will turn to a rich red-umber, like the paint in an old picture. She sees herself in a picture, she is its centre, its focus, a girl leaning at a window with everything attending her, the bird, the cloud, the hushed, still trees. The sting has turned to a steady throbbing now. She extends one arm along the window-sill and cradles the other in her lap. She has never got even a speck of blood on the kimono, in all the years; that is another thing to be proud of.

She hears her mother on the stairs, calling for her son, for Ivy Blount. She shuts her eyes and lays her forehead on her arm. Something is the matter, something has happened in the house. The heavy silk of the sleeve is cool and slightly rough, almost metallic, against her brow. Downstairs, Rex the dog begins to bark, loud, peremptory, with measured pauses. The telephone rings, and stops after two peals as someone snatches up the receiver. Two doors open, one is slammed shut again. More footfalls on the stairs, heavy this time. Her thoughts drift, calm as clouds.

My father is chafing to be gone. All is done with here, he says, but I think not, not quite, though it is true that to make a happy ending one must stop short of the end.

Petra lifts her heavy head; her eyelids too are heavy; she could sleep, now, but we shall not let her sleep. She rises, takes off the kimono, dresses, then folds the kimono and wraps it in its tissue paper and returns it to the drawer in the wardrobe. The razor is already in its place behind the chest of drawers. She stands a moment, looking carefully about the room. Everything has been put away, everything is in order. She loves herself, a little.

From the landing she looks down into the well of the hall. There are voices, but the speakers are not to be seen. She feels faint for a moment and seems to sway. What a weight her scarred arms are, and as if they were not hers, as if they were not arms at all but something else, thick lengths of liana, or the limbs of a tree. The throbbing of the razor cuts has abated but in the night it will return and keep her awake, and she will feel there is someone in bed with her, this throbbing other.

She sets off down the stairs. Before she reaches the bottom Helen appears. They stop, the girl on the stairs, the woman in the hall. It is not fair, Petra thinks, it is not fair.

“What’s going on?” Helen asks. “What has happened?” Petra descends the last few steps and holds out her hand. Helen stares, frowning. “Ah — where did you find it?”

“In the kitchen. Here, have it.”

Helen takes the ring and turns it in her fingers, gazing at her sister-in-law, half smiling, with a quizzical light. “Who is Z?” Petra asks.

“What?”

“Z — the initial carved on it.”

“No, no,” Helen says, “it’s an A, A for — for Adam.”

“It’s not, it’s Z. Hold it like that, look.”

They bend their heads together over the ring and Helen turns it first this way, then that. “It seems an A to me,” she says doubtfully, “but I suppose—”

Ah, crafty old Dad!

Now a little posse of people comes in from the direction of the front hall, talking. Adam and his mother lead, with Benny Grace and Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman crowding at their heels. They have the excited air about them of a band of disciples hurrying towards Emmaus. Adam’s colour in particular is high — he is tipsy on love and half a jug of gin gimlet — and he seems both eager and apprehensive. Helen makes to speak to him but it is to Petra that he turns. “Come with me,” he says to her, sternly unsmiling, “the rest of you stay here.” Petra asks no question, but follows meekly after him up the stairs.

“Where are they going?” Helen asks, petulantly; why will no one tell her what is happening? There is a tickle in her nostrils.

“It’s your father,” Ursula says distractedly, not looking at her but gazing after her son and daughter as if they were being taken up in a cloud. “I mean Adam — Adam’s father. Adam.”

“What? Is he—?”

“Ssh.” This is Benny Grace. She turns and stares at him, but he only smiles, pressing a finger as if playfully to his plump and ruby lips. Ivy Blount too is gazing after the disappearing pair — they are shoulders and heads up there, then heads only, then gone — and clasps her hands before her breast. Duffy shuffles awkwardly.

“I wish someone would—” Helen begins, but has to stop, and remains a moment motionless, her mouth slackly open and her eyelids fluttering. “Ah,” she says, “ahh,” then sneezes, a snapping bark, and blinks in the surprise of it.

But look! What beast of burden, burdened beast, is this? Adam and his sister have reappeared at the top of the stairs — they suggest an elephant and its mahout — Petra leading him by what seems a set of reins and he bearing his father in his arms. Old Adam is wrapped in a blanket from his toes to his beard; his eyes are closed; he is not dead. The two embark on a careful descent, as if from somewhere immensely high — the packed trees, the shining river, the dust and blood of ancient battle — Petra still in the lead but turned watchfully sideways and Adam following with stiff and stately, pachydermous tread. Petra is carrying her father’s feeding bottle and his waste jar, attached to him still by their rubber tubes. Rex the dog follows, waddling down the steps with his tongue out and his tail going from side to side like an untended rudder. Duffy advances a pace but stops irresolute, and Benny Grace with unsuspected agility darts past him and swarms up the steps to meet the descending pair.

“Careful!” Ursula calls, addressing at once her son, her daughter and Benny’s back. She puts a hand to her mouth. “Oh, please be careful.”

And Helen sneezes again.

When Dr. Fortune arrives he finds the front door standing open wide and fears the worst. He is tired and out of sorts after a long day in the surgery — a couple of his elderly patients have been particularly trying of late — and he does not relish the prospect now of dealing with the Godleys. It was impossible to make out what Ursula was saying on the telephone, babbling something about grace — surely she has not taken to religion? She seemed to be insisting that her husband had come round, which he considers extremely unlikely, although of course one never knows with such cases, all of them tricky and each one tricky in its own way. But what if Godley has returned to consciousness? By all the indications he should have been dead days ago — indeed, he should not have survived the stroke at all, so severe it was. Could it be that a brain of Godley’s type, exercised constantly throughout a lifetime, is tougher and more durable than the ordinary kind? That would be an interesting line of inquiry, and in his young days he might have taken it up, for he is not just a country quack and used to have a notion of himself as quite the man of science. How did it happen that he got so bogged down, and here, in the middle of nowhere? Sighing, he steps into the hall. His old black bag never feels so heavy as it does on occasions such as this.

If anyone ventures a word of criticism he will remind them all how strongly he advised against their taking the old man out of the hospital and returning him here.

He is well familiar with the house and advances through it confidently, though still with a somewhat quailing heart. Families are impossible when an illness strikes. As if they imagined Grandpa Gaffer and Granny Groat should live forever. There is the faint sound of music coming from somewhere. He crosses the central hall, where for some reason the chequerboard floor tiles always give him the jitters, stops to tap the face of the big, oak-framed barometer there — the thing has not worked in years — then raps a knuckle on the door of the music room, where the voices are coming from, and, getting no response, pushes open the door and steps inside.

So strange and strangely quaint is the scene that greets him that in the first moment he thinks he is the dupe of an elaborately staged prank. Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman stand each in one of the two tall windows, facing into the room, like figures in a pantomime, a faded Columbine and her rustic Harlequin, gilded both of them down their backs by the evening’s tawny sunlight slanting through the glass. The dog is there, playing the sphinx again; when he sees the doctor he hardly stirs, except for his tail, which gives a languishing thump or two. The french doors are opened, the gauze curtains drawn aside, and a sofa has been brought right up to the doorway, and on it Adam Godley reclines full length, wrapped in a red blanket to his chin, though his pyjamaed arms are free and draped along his chest. His drip stand is by him and the tubes are still in his nose, his waste jar is pushed under the sofa, where it gleams. His eyes are open, and he gazes into the garden, yearningly. His wife is perched awkwardly by his side, and is holding one of his hands and stroking it. One of his feet is visible too, long and slender and pale, like a prehistoric artefact, and this in turn is being stroked by his son, who kneels cumbersomely by the end of the sofa, in a pose that seems designed to illustrate filial subjection, filial love. Hand and foot, hand and foot, as ever. Petra is the most striking figure of this tableau, standing off to the side with her arms folded around herself, each of her hands clutching an opposite flank, and gazing at her father with a look of — of what? Sorrow, anger, pain, all of these, and more? Although her sleeves are buttoned at the wrists the doctor sees at once by her pallor and the leaden shadows under her eyes that she has been cutting herself again. Poor child, poor child. He notices the bandage on young Adam’s thumb; surely he too has not, surely—?

“Oh, Ferdy,” Ursula says, seeing him. She smiles, and blushes. “I — we—”

The doctor says nothing; what is there for him to say? He makes a gesture, helpless and accepting. He looks at the figure on the sofa, waited on hand and foot, as he would wish. As well end here, he thinks, as anywhere.

On the mantelpiece there stands an old-fashioned wireless set, its green eye pulsing. From there it issues ancient music of pipes and plucked strings, tiny and far, as from another world.

Those shiny green shutters, I see them again.

And where is Benny Grace? The last anyone saw of him he had a finger to his lips, saying Ssh. Benny has gone, has stepped back into that old rackety machine to be winched up into the flies. Shortly the contraption will return for my father, who would be gone, now that he has given up his girl. See how he strides, as strong as ever was? It is always this way, when he lets them go. Debilitating business, being in love; it puts a hundred thousand years on him, the fond old fool. Well, Father, and what now?

They shall be happy, all of them. Ursula will drink no more, she and her son will go down and ceremonially empty the laurel hedge of its burden of bottles and the rats will come out and frolic like lambs. Adam and Helen will move here to Arden to live, Adam will delve and till as his originary namesake did, while Helen will wear a bonnet and carry a pail, like Marie Antoinette at the Petit Hameau. Petra will put away the razor and wound herself no more. Will Roddy come back and make amends to her? Perhaps that is a little too much to decree — we shall find someone else for her to love and be loved by in the short time left to her. Ivy Blount and Duffy we have already accounted for. What else? Adam, of course. What gift shall we give him? A hitherto unsuspected letter will turn up, a final note written by Dorothy, his dead wife, exonerating him of any blame for her sad end. Will that do?

He gazes into the twilit garden. Thick, tawny sunlight creeps along the grass, drawing spiked shadows in its wake. The trees tremble, talking of night. The birds, the clouds, the far, pale sky. This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.

Wait, who is this? Helen, of course. She rises from the armchair by the fireplace where she was sitting all unnoticed and comes forward now, smiling. Light swells in the windows, the evening’s last effulgence. The doctor expects to be spoken to but Helen seems to pass through him, somehow, a golden breath. Beyond him she stops, starts, as at a touch — it is my father, bidding her farewell, his hand on her cheek. He nods to me. I fly to Helen’s husband, where he kneels, and breathe a word into his ear. What have I to tell him? Why, that his wife is, as in our antique way we quaintly put it, with child. He hastens to his feet and turns. Helen looks back, and sees his look. She presses a hand to her womb.

“Oh!”