The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

2011

MAKEUP APPLICATION WAS NOT Tooly’s strength. Summoning her art-class skills, she underscored each eye “gesturally,” as her instructor might have said, then blinked at the blurred image of herself reflected in the rearview mirror, peering through two black smudges. “Oh, this is ridiculous,” she said, and dangled a bead of spittle into a tissue to dab both eyes clean. A certain muss of the hair seemed stylish, while another was vaguely like a teenage boy. Did she look “severe”? Who had said that about her?

She drove from Cork Airport in her rental car, across South Tipperary, east past Clonmel, following signs for Waterford, toward the destination, Beenblossom Lodge, which she’d pinpointed on an online map. In the middle of a two-lane country road, she stopped the Nissan Micra, left clicker blinking. She was jittery to think that “Xavier Karamage” could be minutes away. She’d made this trip to Ireland without invitation or announcement. Would he be there? She turned down a private driveway.

Expecting the house to appear, she drove at walking pace. But the driveway continued for more than half a mile through woodland, offering strobe views between tree trunks of an emerald field containing a pond with a small island. Finally, she arrived at a gravel clearing bordered by rhododendrons. Beenblossom Lodge was a Georgian manor, ivy over the sash windows, pert chimneys at each end of the slate roof, a four-columned portico flanked by Regency urns overflowing with pansies. She pulled in beside a black Range Rover and a pink Mini, and turned off the engine. She sat a moment, looking at the front door.

If she was wrong about what this house contained, her trip would have been a colossal waste, and nothing would be clearer. But if she was right? She remained in place, the back of her bare knees sticky on the vinyl seat.

She knocked at the front door. Waited.

Knocked again.

A flame-haired young woman in jeans and riding boots answered, blue dress shirt undone two buttons too far down her freckled chest, presumably the result of breastfeeding, given the shiny-lipped infant at her hip. “Hullo!” the woman said cheerfully, scratching her red mane with the aerial of a cordless phone.

“Sorry to bother you,” Tooly said. “I was looking for Xavier Karamage. Is this right?”

“Yes, of course,” she said cheerily, in the cut-glass accent of the English upper classes, then told the telephone, “Mummy? Visitor. Yes, yes. Love to all.” She hung up and addressed Tooly—“Please, do come in”—then led the way down a long entrance hall, pine floorboards mottled from dried mud, orphaned shoes among children’s toys, a radiator piled with mail, a pewter vase containing an unhinged shotgun, field-hockey stick, fencing épée, hedge clippers, a deflated football. “My appalling husband is out putting an end to innocent lives,” she said, toe-pecking a baby rattle, which skittered down the hall. She turned through a doorway, jiggling the baby on her hip, voice trailing off: “Can’t even say when the horrible man will be back.”

Tooly followed, passing a door to a somber library, then a burgundy dining room, down five steps into a rustic kitchen with wood-beam ceilings, a vast open hearth, and a cottage window overlooking parkland.

“You know, I don’t even know who you are,” the woman exclaimed, sitting on a long bench in the kitchen, placing the baby on the table before her. Popping a grape into her mouth, she offered the bowl to Tooly. “So busy with the christening, I’m not even thinking straight. Please, take one. Take a bunch. Take them all, if you like.”

They exchanged names, Tooly describing herself as an old friend of Xavier’s, saying she’d been passing through the area.

“Well, I’m relieved we didn’t know you were coming,” Harriet said. “Was going to have to get quite cross with the brute. He has a habit of keeping guests waiting. And so, Tooly, ought I to know who you are? Sorry, that sounded rude. Of course I should.” She scratched her hair, said, “Far too little sleep.”

“You expect him back soon?”

“Yes, yes. As soon as he’s finished his murders.” She gathered that this required explanation. “Ferrets,” she added. “I’m not fussed myself — leave them alone, don’t you think? But my ghastly husband unearthed a nest of them in an abandoned warren and has been on the verge of pumping car exhaust down there for days. Far as I’m concerned, ferrets are sweet. It’s like having foxes dashing about the garden. He’s of another mind. Probably right — they are considered pests. Still.”

The infant gaped at Tooly, who looked back, eyebrows raised. Harriet considered the two considering each other. “Babies stare like that. I am sorry.”

“I don’t mind. Don’t often get the chance to just stare at another person. Long as he doesn’t mind if—”

“She.”

“Long as she doesn’t mind me staring back.”

But the baby lost interest in grown-up noises, and her abrupt inattention stifled them.

Harriet said, “An angel passes.”

“What?”

“It’s that thing French people say when a conversation goes quiet. Speaking of angels, c’est le diable qui s’approche. Hello, darling.” She stood to greet her husband.

His four dogs scampered through the scullery, each different in size and color, from an ankle-nipping Scottie to a hip-high Old English sheepdog, with a Jack Russell and a bull terrier in between, each sniffing, leaping, barking, racing through the house. “Not on the furniture, boys!” she cried. “Nor you,” she told her husband as he kicked off his rubber boots by the washing machine.

He leaned over and kissed his wife. A gentleman farmer, he appeared, in waxed Barbour coat and tweed cap, which he tossed onto the table. Harriet placed the hat on the baby’s head, swallowing the infant up to her wobbly neck, prompting a terrified Waaaaaa! “Oh, you silly!” Harriet responded, removing the cap. Seeing its mother again, the child burbled, and Harriet swooped in to smooch her cheek. “Only one angel here! Isn’t there, darling!” The baby chortled.

Harriet insisted — and her husband seconded it, brushing aside Tooly’s objections — that she stay overnight in the guesthouse, just the other side of the stable yards. He fetched her shoulder bag from the Micra, led her past a dozen stalls, three horses harrumphing in there, toward her lodgings around back.

“I knew,” she said. “I knew this was going to be you.”

They walked for a minute, neither speaking, she closing her eyes for a few seconds, electrified and tranquillized at his proximity. “This place is amazing,” she said. “How much land do you have here?”

“If I told you in acres,” Venn asked, “would that mean something to you?”

“Probably not.”

“In that case, about a hundred and forty acres.”

“Is that half the size of Texas?”

“Not quite. But respectable for South Tipperary.” He opened the door to the guesthouse, slid her bag in.

“You don’t seem surprised that I just turned up.”

“I’m never surprised, duck, never surprised.”

“You don’t mind that I came, do you?”

“Tooly, Tooly, Tooly,” he said, putting his arm around her. “A bit late to ask that.”

They reentered the main house via the scullery and found Harriet tapping at her iPad, the baby mesmerized by the screen.

“I’m going to show our young friend the property,” he informed his wife, not yet having informed Tooly.

“Wonderful,” Harriet said, raising the baby to her husband. “Kiss.”

To Tooly’s surprise, he dutifully did so, stooping to the baby’s pudgy cheek.

Overnight rain had softened the turf beyond the stable yards, and she and Venn squelched toward the trees, the four dogs hurrying along. All this sploshing rendered their outing distinctly ridiculous — she started laughing, looked over, found him grinning back. Onward they went, mud thickening on her shoes. “So,” she observed, “you are the proud owner of a bog. Congratulations. And where the hell are you taking me?”

They reached an open-topped wartime jeep, which he used for zipping around the grounds. To the yapping mutts, he said, “Those of you that are coming, get in now.” All four leaped in, followed by Tooly.

Venn gunned the jeep down the dirt road, kicking up mud, the dogs thrusting their muzzles into the wind. With his elbow, he guided the wheel, noting sights as they went: where Harriet went riding, where they held hunts, the apiary down the hill. He wore no seatbelt, so neither did Tooly, gripping the door handle, wind chapping her face. Venn pulled up at a score of cedar-box hives misted with bee clouds. He cut the engine, its growl replaced by the buzz of the insects. He hopped out and inspected a honeycomb frame swarming with bees.

“Shouldn’t you wear protective garb?” Tooly called over, she and the dogs remaining a safe distance behind. “Don’t they bite?”

He returned, held up his hand, lumpy from stings, and revved the engine.

“You idiot,” she said.

Off they went, the vehicle rattling on rutted cattle guards, his arm shuddering as he made a sweeping motion over the windscreen to indicate the land before them. “It’s all her people’s,” Venn said. “They’re Anglo-Irish. The family goes way back.” During the Irish War of Independence, he explained, her ancestors handed over the manor against their will, when nationalists held a match to the place. Long after, the Beenblossoms had made annual pilgrimages to visit the family graveyard — Harriet used to come with her grandparents. Then, two years ago, Venn earned their undying gratitude when he restored the estate to Beenblossom ownership, persuading the existing owners, who’d been ruined in the property crash, to accept a risibly low bid.

“The recession has been terrible in Ireland, hasn’t it,” Tooly said.

“Only as bad as most places,” he replied. “The same old story: unregulated property market, wild mortgages, the obvious crash.” Conifers brushed past the jeep on either side. “Supposedly, it was the history of poverty in Ireland that made them lose their minds.” He paused, reflecting. “Actually, history was to blame for a lot of this crash. Certainly what’s destroying Europe.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, trying to staple all these different countries together,” he said. “This whole European Union idea, getting sworn enemies invested together so they’d stop slitting each other’s throats — and with the Germans to finance it all out of war guilt. Only now the Germans are asked to pay the debts of Greece, Spain, Italy, and every other country that stuck its hands in the public pocket. What they’re really saying is ‘How historical do you feel?’ They’re asking, ‘Will you still pay for what your grandparents did seventy years ago?’ ” He turned off-road, driving through high grass, and parked before a wired-off pasture occupied by foraging chickens. “History is the issue,” he continued. “People, it turns out, aren’t a product of their own time. They’re a product of the time before theirs.” Keys swinging in the ignition, he hopped from the jeep, splatting into mud. “Need a hand?”

“If Europe is such a mess, why are you in it?” she said, stepping out.

“I came because things were a mess. I used to think you needed to go where places were flourishing. But you have to follow chaos. That’s where the dynamism is. As the poet said, ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!’ ”

“Which poet said that?”

“I’ve done well in Ireland,” he continued. “But I’ll be out of here soon.”

“Where to?”

“Why? Do you want to warn them?” He pinched her arm fondly. “There’s opportunity wherever there’s distress, little duck. Obviously, I’d prefer that no place fell into ruin and no one suffered. But success requires failure, sadly. Success is relative: you make a billion while everyone else makes a billion and one, then you just got poorer. Individuals don’t rise together. That’s a great lie of our time, like this myth of meritocracy: ‘Work hard enough and you will make it! Just want it enough!’ Everyone does want it enough. But only a few can win and nearly all will lose. People can’t accept this, so they convince themselves that, secretly, privately, in their own terms, they’re not failures. But, ah well,” he concluded, smiling, “the individual ego, like the national ego, is wonderfully impervious to fact.”

He led Tooly into an aluminum shed, its corrugated walls lined by nest boxes with hens peeking out, each of which he checked in turn.

“I’m annoyed that you’re not more shocked I found you,” she said. “Aren’t you a little bit impressed?”

“The name gave me away,” he guessed. He had been gathering names, and other information about people, for years. At the Brain Trust, for example, each applicant for membership had filled out detailed forms with personal data that they would never have disclosed in other settings but that they surrendered unthinkingly on an official-looking form. Long after the demise of the Brain Trust, several former applicants had the same strange experience, a growing sense that their lives were haunted: strange charges on their iTunes accounts; a failure to receive mail; businesses calling them about products they’d never bought. It was as if a double operated under their names. Xavi had visited the Brain Trust once on Tooly’s recommendation, had met with Venn, and he’d filled out those forms. When he died, his identity became all the more valuable — no Xavier Karamage to interfere with the actions of “Xavier Karamage.”

“But that photo online, the guy with a red mustache?” Tooly asked.

“Who knows,” Venn answered. “Just a picture sucked from cyberspace by the computer geek who set up that website. My whole company, as I’m sure you realize, is somewhat of a shell operation.”

“Your receptionist hasn’t even met you.”

“She gave out this address? Can’t say I’m too impressed with that.”

“Not her fault. It was my cunning that pried it from her!”

“Of course it was.”

“How long have you been here, Venn?” she asked, with an unexpected surge of emotion. “I’ve been wondering for ages what happened to you. Thought you were going to be in touch. Where were you?”

“Where? There aren’t places anymore, duck,” he responded. “No locations now, just individuals. You didn’t hear? Everyone’s their own nation, with their own blog. Because everybody has something important to say; everybody’s putting out press releases on what they ate for breakfast. It’s the era of self-importance. Everyone’s their own world. Doesn’t matter where people are. Or where I was.”

“Nicely dodged,” she said. “And, for the record, this isn’t supposed to be ‘the age of self-importance.’ Everyone’s busy fighting for causes on social media, aren’t they? The whole Occupy Wall Street movement.”

“Clowns of no consequence,” he retorted, taking a brown egg from a hutch, turning it over appraisingly. “Long after their tents are gone, Wall Street will still occupy. Not the other way around. Was there ever any doubt?”

“The protests in Greece and France and Italy?”

“Those aren’t for a social cause. They’re riots for self-interest. It’s Greek statisticians and Italian taxi drivers and French bureaucrats all saying, ‘How dare anyone threaten our entitlements?’ while their countrymen starve. You have to admire the gumption.”

“The Arab Spring stuff isn’t all self-interest,” she countered. “And they’re doing it through social-media stuff.”

“The Arabs rebelled because of Facebook? They rebelled because they’re not on Facebook. Because they’re not installed in their hardware like the West is. Don’t imagine that digital code topples generals. It’s analog human beings. Not tweets and viral videos. That’s just the sideshow of our times.”

“You’ve become another declinist,” she said. “Everywhere I go! I was with this old friend in Connecticut — you remember that law student, Duncan? All he talks about now is doom and collapse. But there were way worse times than this. People used to suffer famines in Ireland, right? You can’t imagine that today.”

“I agree with you,” Venn said. “The West isn’t collapsing. Empires don’t crumble like they used to. Westerners are just in a bad mood. Suddenly, they don’t have their way, and they won’t stand for it. A bunch of spoilt children. (Then again, the difference between spoilt brats and successful adults is never that large, is it.) But anyone who frets about the fall of empires is missing the point. You have no West or East now. Like the poet said, ‘No such things as societies anymore, just individual people.’ ”

“Who’s this poet you keep quoting?”

“There is no poet,” he confessed. “They’re just lines I pick up. When I go, ‘The poet said,’ people lean in close and listen. Which makes me laugh. Especially since nobody listens to actual poets anymore.”

“But you, at least, are not predicting the end of the world.”

“Definitely not. Things are changing, but I don’t mind that. Look at what everyone’s so upset about: pollution and corporate greed and obesity. It’s all just forms of gluttony. Even this global-warming farce. Horrific. It is. But inevitable, too. Nobody can stop it now. All that happens if you quit consuming is someone else eats your lunch.” He smiled. “Remember all that nonsense about globalization — how the world was a village, how free-market democracy was going to unite the world? There are only individual operators, some pretending to belong to a group, others so naïve that they really believe a group exists.

“And your lawyer friend,” Venn continued, “for all his moaning, is he really acting like life is under threat? Or is he just sitting there, grumbling on his blog? Underneath it all, people trust in progress. Scientists will cure their lifestyle diseases; the Internet will fix their love lives; technology will solve the oil crisis. Because technology is progress, and progress goes on forever. But progress played a trick. It presented the ultimate gluttony of all: those double clicks that turned everyone into rodents pressing buttons for the next sugar pellet. People who used to deride the losers for watching ten hours of TV a day won’t hesitate to click a mouse for longer. ‘Did she answer my email yet?’ That’s the new obesity. And nobody admits it even happened,” he said. “The sci-fi movies got it wrong. No robots marched in to enslave humanity. What happened was far more ingenious: the servants became masters by their perfect affability. No microchip was implanted in any human head. People just handed over their brains. The real clash of civilizations wasn’t between Islam and the West, or China and America. It was between what people had been and what they’ve become.”

“You make it sound nightmarish.”

“Not really.” He tossed the egg, caught it. “Just like it’s always been. A huge majority of fools; a tiny minority that runs the show.”

“If that’s what you think, why aren’t you worried?”

“Because I’m not part of any of this. I just watch.”

“Me, too.”

He shook his head. “You joined in. As you should, duck, as you should. It’s exhausting standing outside forever. I’ve been working at it my whole life. You can’t blame yourself for having been swallowed by your times. They eat nearly everyone.”

“Except you’re not outside society anymore,” she said. “You’ve got a family. The very fact that you married and had a kid is amazing to me, given what you always used to say about cutting ties.”

He sidearmed the egg at her. All she could do was dodge. But instead of exploding on the wall it bounced off intact, rolled along the chicken-wire flooring, stopping at the toe of his rubber boot. Niftily, he kicked it up into the air, caught it, peeled the shell. “I always keep boiled ones in my pocket,” he said, biting down. “Care to try?”

She nodded uncertainly.

He underarmed a second to her, and she snatched it from the air. It burst in her hand, raw egg dripping. He laughed, threw his arm around her, cleaning her off with a linen handkerchief, and continued with their tour of the grounds.

As they drove through the estate, Tooly told him about Humphrey, how they were back in touch and how she’d been caring for him. “It’s bizarre,” she said. “But he doesn’t even sound Russian anymore.”

“Why would he?”

“Well,” she responded, even more confused now. “Because he is one.”

Venn did a three-point turn, heading back toward the house. “That man is as Russian as we are.” Humphrey had indeed been born in one of those places in Central Europe they’d erased, Venn said, but he left as a small boy and was raised in safety in South Africa. He’d trained as a pharmacist there, owned a couple of shops, looked after his father, never married. When his father died, Humphrey went traveling. But the world proved a lonelier destination than predicted: all these people and none approached his café table. Even the waiters found him a bore. So he’d concocted a fresh self, the Russian exile, mimicking how his father spoke. People caught him out early on, so he kept moving cities, refining the act. “He wanted to stop for years, but was petrified you’d be upset with him! He got stuck, the old fool.”

“I guess he gave it up after I left.” She had further questions about the old man’s life, and Venn answered them all, reveling in the comical biography of Humphrey Ostropoler. She smiled at the account — Venn expected that response, and she obliged. But to do so stung; she felt protective of the absent Humphrey, his private life bared despite decades of secrecy.

Abruptly, Venn pulled up at the edge of a field. “This is where you get out.” He sent her squelching back to the house and reversed away to complete his farmerly chores.

When Tooly stepped inside, Harriet was in the kitchen, watching tennis on her iPad. “Can I get you anything? Glass of wine?”

“Please. Thanks.”

Tooly took a large sip, and considered Harriet, who seemed kindly disposed toward her, not because she was Tooly per se but because Harriet was favorable to all human beings (and ferrets), and Tooly fit one of these categories. People had to be demonstrably evil to constitute rotters for Harriet — until then, they were jolly nice. Whenever Tooly encountered that mind-set, she was baffled. Surely experience eroded faith in human beings. Then again, some people trusted and thrived because of it. She watched Harriet with the baby in her arms, a scene of contentment that Tooly couldn’t conceive of inhabiting, and it was hard to insist that she was the wiser.

Venn cooked goose for dinner, a bird taken from their own stock. As they ate, Tooly found her mind drifting. “I keep thinking about what you told me before. That stuff about Humph.”

“Let’s not bore Harriet with talk of old friends,” he interrupted — evidently, she wasn’t supposed to introduce their past into his present.

Chastened, Tooly sipped her wine. “You two have lived here a while?” she asked, since Venn had evaded the question earlier.

“Do we even live here?” Harriet asked Venn. “Technically, I suppose. But we seem always to be elsewhere, don’t we, darling. Disgraceful to say, but we’re here largely because of taxes. The Irish, mysteriously, charge hardly any of them.”

“That’ll change,” he said.

“Yes, with the market things and so on. Turns out it’s frighteningly easy to become an Irish resident, or to claim you’re one. My husband is an absolute master at that sort of wheeze, aren’t you. We still spend a fair bit of time in London. And I love Tokyo. My parents have a place in Scotland, where the whole Beenblossom clan descends like some sort of pestilence this time of year. Which is why we’re hiding out here. All right,” she said, rising and handing the baby to Venn. “You cooked, darling, so I clean up. Those are the rules. Begone, both of you. Reminisce boringly — I insist.”

Venn and Tooly retired to the library. He placed his daughter on the carpet, where the infant practiced crawling, flopping intermittently onto her belly, gaze fixed on her father. The four dogs slept, each in a different corner of the room. From an antique-globe bar, he extracted a Cognac decanter and two snifters. Books lined the walls, each volume identically bound in Bordeaux leather, silver letters imprinted on the spine, gold paint on the page edges. Classics, poetry, essays. They didn’t have the smell of reading books; they were furniture. She knelt beside the baby, who looked glassily around. “I’d like a one-piece outfit like yours. Most convenient,” she told the child, then turned to Venn. “Shouldn’t she be sleeping now?”

“Lots of life left for that. Everything is too interesting to sleep if you’ve not been alive a year.”

The child goggled open-mouthed at her father, oblivious of anything else in the room.

“You’re surprisingly credible as the family man, Venn,” she remarked. “I’d be a disaster as a mother — I couldn’t trust myself to look after a brood. Don’t even know how to hold one of these properly.” She leaned over to try, then thought better of it, took another sip of Cognac, finding herself more uncomfortable with each remark. “Mind if I help myself to another drop?”

“You drink fast these days.”

She poured, but refrained from sipping for a minute. She sat on the oxblood sofa, he on its twin opposite, a glass coffee table between them, stacked with Country Life magazines. “I saw my parents recently,” she said. (How peculiar to use that phrase, “my parents,” in reference to Paul and Sarah.) She recounted what Paul had said about sending money to Sarah for years, and that Humphrey had remembered this, too. But what had Sarah spent it on?

“Well,” he answered. “On me.”

“What?”

“The woman, you may recall, was a bit stuck on me. The only way she figured to keep her hooks in was monthly funding,” he said. “Your father made those payments directly into Sarah’s account, but she refused to just wire it nicely along. Insisted on handing it over in person — her way of clinging on. Meant I had to tell her every place I moved. And when she turned up I put on a good show — just enough rejection to keep her interested.”

Tooly paused, trying to absorb this. But something didn’t fit. “You took me everywhere you went. Why didn’t you guys just plant me somewhere, then? The checks were coming in anyway.”

“Plant you where? If you started sobbing in a corner somewhere, then sooner or later someone telephones Daddy. Better to make you merry and compliant. And there was Humph to keep you busy.”

“Was he earning off me, too?”

“No, no. Humph was an unpaid volunteer. I told you, a sad and lonely man. And everything was fine until you went and turned twenty-one, at which point your father rudely stopped paying. Though the whole thing was a bit tired by then. Humph was terrified,” he recalled, laughing, “that I might take you with me once the money stopped, that I’d do something awful with you. You remember how I tied your shoelaces that day?”

“Of course.”

“Couldn’t have you running after me and making a scene on the Upper West Side, could I.”

“I know you’re trying to get a reaction from me.”

“Well, of course. What else do people talk for?”

“You weren’t just keeping me sweet. I was your friend.”

“You were my salary. And, since you had to be around, I put you to use. Now and then, you came in handy. Though never nearly as handy as you thought.”

“But you weren’t living off me,” she insisted. “You had all that other work.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Like in Barcelona, you were helping that guy with his factory. Those Romanian gangsters were hassling him, and you fixed it. Right?”

“What an imagination!”

“You told me that.”

“Like I said, what an imagination. My Barcelona businessman was just another citizen, a little excitable, a little greedy. If he wanted to believe I was a one-man Mafia, who was I to disappoint him?”

“But I saw you dealing with tons of scary guys.”

“I met a few over the years. That’s not to say I was mixed up with them. Thugs are not famously strong in the forward-planning department — why would I tie my fate to sediment like them? Maybe certain souls have mistaken me for a magician, the man who’ll get around the rules, fix the competition, grant them all the power they never deserved. And maybe some gave me funds in the fantasy. All that ever produced, little duck, was a timely reason for me to find my next town.”

“But I thought … Venn, I waited years to do something with you.”

“What were we going to do together? Your dot-com with those hapless college kids?”

“You’re the one who encouraged me to figure out something with them. Wasn’t that the point, for me to find us opportunities?”

“I sent you into people’s houses, Tooly, like one sends a child to collect pretty shells on the beach: to get the kid out of your hair. You weren’t about to come back with anything useful. Actually, you probably should’ve stuck with the lawyer. You’d be comfortable now.”

“I needed to hook up with someone to get anywhere in life? I’m that useless, you think?”

“Well, how would you say you’re faring now?”

“I know you’re just giving me a hard time, Venn. But I want you to know that I paid attention to what you said. All that stuff. About managing without other people. I’m that way now. We really are similar.”

“Couldn’t be more different. I only said that because it kept you in love with me.”

“Come on — this coldhearted thing isn’t convincing me.”

“Really? What am I doing wrong?” he asked, winking.

“What you’re doing wrong is that I remember. I remember how you spent your own money to fly me and Humph along whenever you moved. How you paid for whatever apartment we were in. You weren’t living off me. You completely took care of me. For years.”

“That was Humph. I never paid for one of your flights, your food, your rent. You only assumed it was me, and I saw no need to say otherwise.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To make himself necessary. Otherwise, babysitting was a job anyone could’ve done.”

“But after New York,” she protested, “you kept supporting me.”

“How? I haven’t seen you in years.”

“My passport,” she answered, meaning the bank card he’d secreted there, and the account that had served as her safety net for years, and with which she’d bought World’s End.

“Never touched your passport — Humph thought I’d spirit you away from him if I had it. Which was crazy. I could’ve sold you, I guess. But how much was I seriously going to get?”

“I know it was you who set up that card, Venn.”

“Just tell me what I did,” he said, “and I’ll be happy to take credit.”

Harriet entered the library. “Oh, darling, you are useless!” she told her husband, picking the infant off the carpet. “You just left her asleep on the floor — I should call social services.”

“She was so adorable. I couldn’t move her.”

“Actually,” Tooly said, standing, “you know what? We were just calculating that I won’t make it back in time if I leave tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Harriet, but I should get going.”

“Sure,” she said indifferently, and carried the baby upstairs.

Tooly collected her shoulder bag from the guesthouse and walked around Beenblossom Lodge. Venn stood in wait, leaned against his black Range Rover.

“You really affected my life,” she said. “Everything I chose to do, how I am now. I think you changed me more than anyone I ever met.”

“Did I?”

“Why do you think I was in love with you?”

“You obviously were.”

“How come you never tried anything?”

“I’m not an animal,” he said. “I’m not someone who just launches himself at any girl on the premises. Anyway, you’re ugly, aren’t you.”

“You’re just being cruel now.”

“If you don’t want to know, don’t ask the question. Think of it this way: if you’d been attractive, I’d have had you and got bored (fast in your case, I’m guessing), and you’d never have lasted.”

“I won’t hassle you again.”

“Thank goodness for that. Wouldn’t want you going the same way as the ferrets.” He embraced her, locking his arms around her lower back, inhaling to expand his chest and compress hers, his knuckles cracking as he squeezed the air out of her. “An absolute pleasure,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Don’t ever fucking do this again.”

Her high beams swept across dark tree trunks, burst out into the roadway. She drove toward Cork, gripping the wheel, then turned into a closed Morris Oil to calm down. But she had to escape this place, so drove onward, tire treads kicking up pebbles.

In a hotel room outside the airport, she sat naked on the bed, running her fingers over her ribs, his grip there, that kiss on her brow. It was as if she had brushed aside a lock of hair and found an eye, a throbbing eye, a hideous growth blinking at her, repulsive yet her own, fed by her own blood. This is how he seemed, incorporated into her yet monstrous. The shower wouldn’t cleanse her. She left her muddy clothing in the hotel bathroom, abandoning her entire outfit there, and arrived for her flight hours early, just to be among strangers at the terminal.

SATELLITE IMAGES SHOWED the swirling eye of Hurricane Irene inching up the Eastern Seaboard. The authorities warned of flooding, a shutdown of mass transit servicing New York City, a state of emergency across the region. “It’s going to be up to individuals to get out of their own areas,” Mayor Bloomberg announced on television, ordering the evacuation of high-risk zones, including where Humphrey lived in Sheepshead Bay.

He was asleep when she opened the door to his room. Someone — Humphrey couldn’t recall who — had run tape in X’s across each windowpane to stop the glass from shattering during the storm. The rest of the room seemed to have been visited by a hurricane already: books everywhere, dirty clothing strewn about, used cups and plates on the floor. Yelena had left town, stuffing Humphrey’s bar fridge with ready-to-eat meals before departing. He had helped himself to a few, but thrown out none of the refuse, nor washed himself or shaved in a few days. Tooly spent two hours restoring order, helped him to the bathroom, cleaned him, returned him to his armchair. Mentioning Venn hardly stirred Humphrey, while references to the coming hurricane puzzled him.

As he slept that afternoon, she went through his documents. She discarded junk mail, then organized his bills by date. It didn’t take long to find the bank statements. As she put them in order, she found payments in each of the cities she had passed through during the preceding decade, including one final transaction from a few years earlier, the transfer of the remaining balance to the Mintons in Caergenog. “You,” she said when he awoke, “were the one helping me. My magic bank account.”

He frowned — waking was always hard for him. Forty minutes later, the statements still lay in his lap.

“Why did you give me all that?” she asked. “It was all you had left, wasn’t it. And I was so stupid with it. As far as I’m concerned, the shop belongs to you. It’s not worth much. But I’ll sell it, or try to. Whatever I get is yours. And we can move you somewhere decent. Okay?”

“You went lots of places,” he said, gazing down at the bank statements.

“Did you read those to know where I was?”

“I thought of you doing things.”

“And I thought of you, Humph. Often, I did.”

“I wasn’t doing anything worth thinking about.”

She took his hand.

“You have a bookshop!” he declared. “You really are my dream girl! I imagine you there, ringing up all the sales.”

“We don’t make many, I’m afraid.”

“You,” he said, “are the favorite thing I did in my life. Even if I didn’t make you.”

“Don’t say things like that.” She blinked. “Look, you have to come see the shop. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let me describe it for you.” She gave her best portrait of the village, the former pub that contained World’s End, the first editions, the snug at the back, and her lone employee. “You’d enjoy Fogg; you two would get on so well. I can imagine you having debates for hours on end.”

Humphrey gave a short nod, by which he communicated that this trip would remain only a fancy. “I’m in the same place as my favorite person I knew. For nearly all of existence, before and after now — nearly all of it — I don’t get to be with you. But now I am. I even helped you a bit in your life.”

“You helped me so much.”

“I don’t remember everything that happened in my life,” he said, frowning. “Parts, I do.”

Ever since her first visit to Sheepshead Bay, he’d been beset by these fragments — his past flickering, repetitive but incomplete. She’d been able to help only by replaying anecdotes he had previously recounted. But now she did know his story. “Venn explained all about your life,” she said. “Shall I tell you?”

“All right,” he said, looking blindly past her. As Humphrey listened, he squinted at the X’s on the window. Tooly had seen him exert himself before — when Mac visited, for example. “Do your best,” she urged him. “Tell me if this sounds right.”

She went on, watching him, his eyes closed tightly with concentration. At times, he specified that he just couldn’t recall this bit, or interrupted with small corrections. At other points, he added details she’d never known. Mostly, he paid attention.

His mother, Tooly began, was born at the turn of the century into a middle-class Jewish family from Pressburg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family spoke many languages, but their first tongue was German. As a young girl, she had aspired to a creative life, to act and paint. And by her late teens she frequented artistic circles, where she fell for an aspiring actor, a Russian Jew who had left Leningrad to make a name for himself in the West. But his career was hampered by stage fright, worsened by his thick accent. He decided to write and direct instead, but the fragile confidence that had undermined his performances foiled his offstage career, too. He was an endearing nebbish, though, so she married him, telling her parents only after the union was legal.

Her husband proved inept at earning and, increasingly dispirited, he drifted into radical leftist politics. To support them, she took work as a seamstress, producing costumes for local productions, while auditioning for parts herself. When she became pregnant with their first child, her father — a doctor — exhorted them to cease these theatrical pursuits; her husband must start contributing. He took work at a jewelry shop, whose customers he privately referred to as “bourgeois stone collectors.” The workers of the world would rise against capitalist modes of production, he informed his wife, since history was inevitable. Exploitation and greed could not be the fate of the species.

Their first child, a daughter, was born with a kidney ailment. Three years later, they bore a boy whom they did not call Humphrey Ostropoler, but who decades later adopted that name. The family, in the grip of revolutionary ardor, became communal farmers. Doing so at the start of the Depression was not an inspired plan. Scenes from those years remained with Humphrey: the milk cow at the bottom of the garden; the orchard where he and his sister had stolen apricots when starving; how he threw a pit that struck her in the eye.

Humphrey grew, but his sister remained stunted. At age five, he was the taller, though she was the elder by three years. Doctors drove syringes into her, dosed her with powders, cut her apart. When she writhed in bed, her mother stood on one side, her father on the other, Humphrey holding her feet. “Help me,” she whispered. “Please, help me.” They placed iced facecloths on her forehead, which at least gave them a sense of doing something.

His sister died at age eleven. She had feared being forgotten, but the opposite proved true. Humphrey gained a doubleness of experience, incapable of fitting through the narrow doors beyond which others lived, being two people now. He still refused to say her name. But, his whole life, he saw his sister in any little girl, and wondered what she’d have become, had she lasted the nearly unimaginable seventy-five years since her disappearance.

Humphrey’s father gave up ideology after his daughter’s death. He resumed work at the jewelry store, no longer moaning about the clients. His wife, by contrast, adopted his former political fervor and intended to act on it. Reports circulated about arable land in the Soviet Union, available to committed foreigners. Her husband had left the USSR as a young man, and resisted returning. She pressed him daily, citing the tumult in Austria, where Dollfuss turned the nation into a Fascist state, and in Germany, where Hitler had taken power. Nazis in both countries agitated for unification, which would put the Reich at their doorstep. It was time to go East.

From impatience, she decided to travel ahead and, if all went well, they would join her. Humphrey’s father read her letters aloud. The boy shared his mother’s enthusiasm for the cause and viewed his father unforgivingly. They should have gone — his father spoke fluent Russian, and could have helped. The Communist bureaucrats disbelieved her story, and held her at the border. Finally, Humphrey’s father packed up their belongings. But the train took them in the wrong direction, north to Rotterdam. He informed Humphrey that his mother had died. They took a ship for South Africa, wearing black armbands on board, their grieving restricted to the time at sea.

His father polished diamonds in Johannesburg, and they lived in an adequate house in Orange Grove. Humphrey attended local schools, and was young enough to learn the language rapidly, his foreign accent gone by adolescence. Soon he and his father spoke only English together. At school, there was a map on which the history teacher stuck thumbtacks to mark the latest battles in the European war. South Africa was almost a straight line south from the fighting. It was up there in Europe that Humphrey ought to have been. He had — and not for the last time — the sense that his life unfolded in the wrong place.

The war ended, and he graduated from secondary school, after which he studied to become a pharmacist, a choice determined by early exposure to medicaments during his sister’s illness. Potions, when rightly dispensed, alleviated suffering. As for doctoring, he never considered that, retaining a distaste for his punitive maternal grandfather, who exercised that profession. Or had done so. Neither he nor any of her family had been in touch since Humphrey and his father arrived in Johannesburg.

Jewish agencies issued lists of those murdered in Europe, and Humphrey glanced down the rolls, looking for someone whose name was the same as his, as if a doppelgänger had conducted his proper life, and death, up there. Lists of survivors arrived, too. One woman shared his sister’s name; another shared his mother’s. He wrote to the authorities overseeing the displaced-persons camp, identifying himself, inquiring into the story of this woman with his mother’s name. Weeks later, he received an answer: she had survived three years in various Nazi camps but weeks after liberation had committed suicide with laudanum.

Humphrey and a fellow student opened a pharmacy. After a few years, they had three stores. Humphrey bought two apartments, both in the same building, one for himself and the other for his father, whom he lodged a floor above, meaning that he could attend to the man by listening to his footsteps. They spent lots of time together, since Humphrey had a limited social life. The rules of romance perplexed him: the more you liked someone, the less they liked you; the less you liked them, they more they liked you. How could it ever work? By his thirties, he pretended to be jaded, kibitzing with the pharmacy assistants and playing the curmudgeon, which endeared him to women in a thoroughly nonsexual way. It was preferable to being shunned.

He considered moving with his father to England, which for him represented the height of civilization. South Africa had never suited them: heat and exploitation and complacency. But his father resisted another move. Finally, the man in the apartment above was too frail, forgot names, locked himself out. Humphrey tended to his father as long as possible, then admitted him to the Jewish care home. To erase the present, Humphrey disappeared into books. He contemplated death, ran through the imagined stages of his own suicide, toying with laudanum in the pharmacy after hours.

When his father died, Humphrey was in his forties. Just as his mother had once done, he yearned for a world of bohemian intellectuals. He lingered at cafés in Hillbrow frequented by the university students. But he was two decades older than those kids. He studied chess as an excuse to interact with them, and treated them to coffee so they’d stay in his company. Embarrassed to be just a pharmacist, he said — and it wasn’t a lie — that he’d come from Europe. To exoticize himself further, he adopted an accent. Rumors circulated that he was from the Soviet Union, because the false accent was, unintentionally, that of his Russian-speaking father, who had never shed his Old World syntax, constantly bungling idioms: “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t hear it with my own eyes!” and “Never count your eggs before they cooked!” However, someone recognized Humphrey from the pharmacy and, to humiliate him, turned up with a modern-languages student who addressed him in Russian. Humphrey sold both apartments, plus his share in the pharmacies, then figured out how to get his savings out of the country, and set out to find the intellectuals.

His first stop was London. He didn’t fit in, lacking the education and social sense. He experimented with playing the Soviet dissident again, but was caught out and moved countries, refining the impersonation over time. He had ample savings, and didn’t spend much anyway. By the 1980s, he was in Asia, passing through Thailand, where he rented a house — he often took overly large lodgings, in hopes of attracting company. He met a young Canadian, a charmer with a thick beard who welcomed a place to stay, then invited others to join him. Soon Venn was using the house as he pleased, while Humphrey was confined behind his chessboard, toilet-paper earplugs to block out the pounding music below.

“Which is when I met you,” she concluded.

Throughout much of this account, Humphrey had listened, his eyelids clenched shut, squeezing from his synapses the weak pulses of recall. But, by the end, he had faded.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “It’s you and me again. But I’m finding a place out here in Sheepshead now. Don’t have tons of money, so I’m hoping there’s something in this building. Wouldn’t it be nice if I was on the same floor? Or maybe I could get a room on the floor below you, so I can hear when you’re walking around!”

He mumbled a few words — the spasms of a spent brain. Without further warning, he was asleep, deeply so, forehead still furrowed from the preceding effort.

By nightfall, she helped him onto his mattress and cleared a patch of space for herself on the floor, lying parallel to his bed. She gazed up, able to make out his shape under the covers, hearing his slow breaths, and she reached her hand over his wrist, which quivered at each heartbeat. When people have children, she thought, they don’t think of them as adults, don’t think of them as old or lonely. They think of having a baby, not having an old man. Tooly was glad that Mac had met Humphrey. Maybe someday the boy would be the last person in the world to remember him.

After sixteen hours of impenetrable sleep, Humphrey was slow to wake the following morning. She smiled, informing him of the remarkable duration of his slumber. Tooly expected to encounter the man who had exerted himself the day before, but such a person had retracted. She sought to summon anew the details of his life, but he betrayed no interest.

Nevertheless, for the first time since her arrival Humphrey was peaceful. He could not see or hear properly, and remained doubtful about the time of day. But he knew who she was, and was uncommonly affectionate, holding her hand as she sat beside him. He kept saying this was the perfect life.

“What do you want to eat this weekend?” she asked. “I want us to have a blowout. Something we can’t afford. The shops will be shut when the storm arrives, so I have to pick up stuff beforehand.” She emptied out her wallet: less than forty dollars. “Champagne? Actually, probably can’t afford that. But a bottle of wine? Or vodka? You used to like vodka tonic. I can make you cocktails, Humph, and we can make toasts about things. What do you think?”

He loved the idea of a celebration, but wanted no alcohol — didn’t want to dull anything now. Tooly abstained in solidarity, stepping into the liquor store, then out again with nothing. She prepared him a smashed-potato sandwich, not because it was the lunch hour but because it gave him pleasure. And who cared about time? That was mere conformism!

“Is it all right?” she asked, watching him take a bite.

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“Oh, my God!”

“Is it terrible?”

“It’s delicious!” he shouted, turning wide-eyed to face her, though unable to orient to her.

“I’m so happy to hear that, Humph.”

“I love smashed-potato sandwiches!” he cried. “How did you know?”

“Because I know you.”

“But how did you know?” He looked blindly beyond her. “How did you know?” Without waiting for an answer, he took another bite. “Delicious!”

After only one further mouthful, he fell asleep again, sandwich still gripped. He grunted when she tried to ease it from him.

Hurricane Irene was supposed to devastate New York City but had diminished into gales and heavy rain by the time it hit that Sunday morning. She went out to witness the wild weather, which always stirred her. Despite the evacuation order, the neighborhood wasn’t empty. There was even a café open. Two young Russian women served, conversing in their language with four male customers, all brazenly nonchalant in their defiance of public-safety warnings.

Tooly asked what damage there had been around here. They spoke of a few fallen trees and toppled power lines, and said the bay had overflowed. But nothing too serious. She bought a black tea and sat at the window, gazing at the empty intersection. A grocery store across the way was boarded up. The barbershop had its shutters down. A traffic light swung in the wind, changing colors without any vehicles to respond. Seemed almost unreal: the pelting rain, the chattering Russians behind her, Humphrey just around the corner, Duncan in Connecticut perhaps peering out the window at the storm, Venn in Ireland with wife and baby. Maybe Fogg was at World’s End, listening to the radio, dusting the stock. All these places at once.

With nearly her last dollar, she bought a croissant for Humphrey. When she returned, saying his name softly in case he slept, he remained still, because his heart had stopped.