The Wilderness

STORY OF THE CURSE

The table was plainly set. A dinner, an announcement, Sara had said, but when they arrived at her house there was not the mood of announcement. The plates set out between the usual weekday cutlery were patternless and the wine glasses like the ones Eleanor used in the pub, too unimaginative for wine. At least there were wine glasses. He was feeling brimful with some almost belligerent optimism, and in the mood for celebration. Immediately he opened the cabinet and compared the wines — cherry, no, something white and sweet, no. He took an Italian red and put it in the middle of the table.

Helen wore her miniskirt. With elfish steps across the orange carpet she took Henry to the cot upstairs.

Strange creature that she was. The way she had formed this ambivalent bond with the skirt that caused her to wear it often around the house (it's so short, she marvelled, and you can see all my legs!) but disallowed her from wearing it in public (it's so short, she cringed, and you can see all my legs). Dear Helen. He had persuaded her that Sara's house was not public, it was just a slightly more daring version of private, so she had put it on, getting into a thick blue sweater, humming selfconsciously.

Now she reappeared in the living room, blinked, tucked her hair behind her ear, scratched her cheek, as if trying to make herself as one hundred percent pure Helen as possible, sat at the table where Rook was already smoking, passed her hand to his and said, “Hello, forgive my legs.”

“Darling, I love your legs,” Rook insisted.

“They're new.”

“So I see.”

She flowered. They chatted about the passing of summertime and the first falling leaves on the cherry tree, and their second autumn away from London. Rook was a vigilant listener as he turned corners of a napkin into birds which he flew in her direction, and which she gathered into an orderly flock on her side plate.

Dinner was served and they ate in good spirits: lamb shanks, boiled potatoes, vegetables. Plain and righteous food with sprinklings of salt and pepper, a little English mustard. He would not be churlish, he decided; would not comment on the lack of silver and cut glass, or on the unlit menorah, or on Sara's mild, aged presence, as if some substance had slipped from her.

“The announcement,” Sara said, once they were all settled with food and wine, “is that — well, you might as well say it Rook, hmm?”

“The announcement,” Rook took up, “is that I've managed to wrestle that piece of land for you.”

“The Junk? Wrestle from whom?” he asked, setting his knife on the plate.

“Contacts,” Rook winked.

Helen's eyes widened a fraction. “You know Mrs. Crest?”

Rook seemed to think about this far deeper than the question merited. “In a way.”

The table was drenched in yellow from the setting sun, charging up the cutlery, running across their hands. It scattered itself across Sara's dress and cleaned her of any possible sins or secrets; no point turning to her for clarity. Rook winked at him. He stared back and the entirety of his childhood flushed over him in a moment. Its frustrations and unanswered questions, Sara and Rook's collusion, the feeling that he was never getting the truth but should be grateful nevertheless, because the truth is not a right, it is a privilege at best and a burden at worst.

“It's time for our future, then,” he said, and reached for his wife's bare thigh.

“And are you still volunteering at the hospice, dear?” Sara asked Helen.

Dear. He was surprised to hear this sweet tone in his mother's voice.

“Yes, Sara, yes. It's — wonderful, fulfilling. To be with people in their last few days or weeks, it feels like my calling.”

Sara smiled and sank the prongs of her fork so slowly, so delicately into a potato, like a woman too beached in the middle of old age to have the gusto for eating.

“And also,” Helen went on. He saw her cross her legs under the table. “I've become interested in — well, we have a man in the hospice who is … black.” She straightened. “His daughter comes in to visit him and tells me about the terrible things that happen to blacks in this country. Do you all know? Are you aware?”

She lowered and lifted her gaze in one interrogative gesture, spearing a piece of carrot which she left balanced on the plate. “They can't get work, they can't get houses. If you want to rent or buy a house you simply can't.”

A sympathetic murmur went around the table, even Rook had no acerbic quip to add. They ate on in thought for a few moments.

“I mean, these are the 1960s,” Helen added, cutting her food up as if preparing it for Henry. “Have we learnt nothing?”

“Actually I read in the paper,” he said, topping up the empty glasses, “that the blacks in London are being helped by the Jewish communities. Jewish people rent houses out to blacks and then, when the blacks have the money, they buy them.”

He smiled, and met a theatre of blank faces. Helen sat back from her food and put her hands on her belly.

“That's good,” she said. “In fact though, if nobody minds me broaching the subject — I mean, you could argue that the whole problem with racism sprang from Jewish myths. It has been argued. I don't know if I agree, but let's not romanticise.”

He and Rook cocked their heads, Sara went on chewing.

“You know it, Sara, of course. The myth that Ham saw Noah drunk and naked, and in his shame Noah punished Ham by putting a curse on his son, Canaan. And the curse was for him to be smitten in his skin. Burnt, in other words, burnt and blackened — and from that the blacks were cursed.”

Sara raised her head and sighed. “I think there is no agreement, dear, as to what that myth means.”

“All the same. Oh I know what horrors have happened, and I know it's very right, politically, to favour the Jews—”

“But it's never right to be blindly favourable to anything,” Sara added.

“Yes, precisely.”

“I agree, dear. Keep that vigilance in life and you won't come to harm.”

He stood and took his empty plate to the kitchen. His blood boiled. Not against his wife, no, he rather admired her courage, her relentless defence of fair play and good practice, her wish to work out who the unfortunate were and save them. But Rook, Sara? What world of neutrality had they slipped into? He looked to them for some rich-blooded darkness, red wine, human skin, the tiered glint of candles bashing out a statement of defiance, a lily in the hair, a gunshot to sunder the milky carriage of clouds: a dark counterbalance to his wife's whiteness, to bring his life into symmetry — a stone in this pocket, a stone in that. A perfection. A fucking joke! His history was dying.

“Do you remember that myth, Sara,” he said, striding back to the dinner table with a knife in his hand. “What was it? A deer and lion living in a forest. What was the forest?”

“Dvei Ilai,” Sara returned.

He waved the knife in excitement, watching Helen slice a plum and wrangle the halves apart, noticing the juice run down her fingers.

“Dvei Ilai. A giant lion, a massive lion twenty feet wide. And the Roman Caesar wanted to find him and kill him, so he asked the rabbi to call the lion out of the forest. The rabbi said, no, not a good idea. The lion cannot be killed. But the Caesar was adamant so the rabbi did as he was asked. It was the big mistake of the Catholics to ignore the Jews. The lion came, roaring, and his roar crumbled all the walls of Rome.” He took his seat and poured more wine. “Rome was destroyed.”

There had been streams of these stories when he was a child, myth upon myth, myth tangling with myth, myth becoming fact, fact becoming fiction. So many dark close nights of it. Jam, syrup, sugar, baked pastry, an intimate smell of religion come true.

“In a minute I'll go and get the deeds to the Junk, I've got them upstairs.” Rook raised his glass. “Let's have a little toast to Mrs. Crest.”

He ignored the old man and held his own glass firmly to the table. “What's more,” he said, “the lion's roar was so bone-breaking that all the Romans' teeth fell out.”

Sara put her hand to her mouth and pressed at her gums.

“I've made bread pudding,” she said. “Will we all have some?”

“Memory,” Helen's voice fired from the darkness of the driver's seat.

He paused to consider. It was her tactic to make him talk— if she simply asked what he was thinking he would shrug, nothing, and mean it. Nothing. But if she asked him for a memory, in this place reminiscent of his whole life, surely something would come. It was a cheap trick, but it worked.

“House of the exaggerating soldier, just there,” he said.

They passed the dark outline of a derelict brick house.

“The soldier and his wife moved to London, I wonder what happened to them.”

He recalled tables of rich food, the eyes of the soldier and his wife glinting in the poor light, the candles, the wife's blond custardy hair. Actually she had been an attractive woman, at least as he now remembered her; quite the counterpoise to Sara. Fair to Sara's darkness, tall to Sara's smallness. Of comparable beauty though, if it were possible to compare creatures from separate planets.

“Memory,” he fired.

She took in a breath. “I'm in London, I'm about fifteen. I'm walking home and I see a man and woman in the ruins of a building, they are making love. They aren't completely naked, only from the waist down.”

She faced him for a moment, her hands tight on the wheel. She smiled.

“It was quite … comical — but, suddenly, I felt that place was human. That all the world was loving and human and there to belong in.”

He scratched briskly at his chin and smirked.

“So that's the reason.”

“Reason for what?”

“For you being so — forward. When we first met, when we were at the ruins in Stepney. When you dipped your hand down my trousers while I was merrily talking about, I don't know, buildings. When you did all that with the church looking on.”

“Yes,” she replied, “I suppose so.”

He smiled at the thought.

“I decided that I couldn't leave London until I had done what that couple had done,” she continued, “or done something similar. Until I had used part of the city for myself, used it like it was my playground.”

In a way, he understood. He, too, wanted to appropriate a place before leaving, just to affirm that it was indeed him leaving, and not him being expelled.

“I thought it was just your nature, back then, to do those sorts of things. Thought you were a little bit — ah—loose.”

She shrugged. “Jake, I don't have a nature.”

“Of course you do.”

“Then tell me about it. Tell me a few words to describe it.”

He lit a cigarette and handed it to her, lit one for himself. She didn't decline, perhaps because her powers of negotiation were channelled into driving in the cave-like darkness, or because she was too intent on hearing his answer.

“Well, you're kind, generous, funny, compassionate—”

“Ah, see. Now you're describing what a woman is like when she can't think of any other more imaginative way to be. It's not anything as defined as a nature. It's a lack of ideas.”

“Helen—” He reached across and stroked her face. She drew on her cigarette and flicked his hand away.

“Let's go to the Junk,” she said.

“Now?”

“Now. Guide me there. I can't ever get my bearings in the dark.”

It was only two miles or so from where they were; as they went the car filled slowly with smoke. Helen sped up; he arched his neck back and stared at the roof of the car an inch or less from his nose, breathed out smoke and let it wash over his face. Things felt good — Helen smoking, Helen speeding, Helen arguing, Helen driving them off to a black patch of peat. The baby back at Sara's, there to collect tomorrow. A night alone. Land to build on.

They stopped where he indicated. There was the house, slumped, derelict, and behind it the solitary row of wind-bent birch.

Helen knocked the keys back and forth in the ignition with her finger. “Let's go in.”

On the floor in the kitchen they sat cross-legged and took food from the knapsack — some sandwiches, some Battenberg cake, oranges, a flask of tea, mint julep for him at the bottom of a bottle. It was pitch-dark and the damp foxy smell occupied all the senses. When his eyes adjusted he could see his wife's white legs, and he could make out the rest of her because she was blacker than the background. She pulled the edge of the picnic blanket over her knees. It was far too cold for the miniskirt she was wearing but she refused the offer of his coat. He tried to insist, because she wore the skirt for him as she did most things for him; all her suffering came via him. He had, he thought, been corrupting her from the day they met; I do solemnly declare to corrupt you 'til death do us part. But she refused the coat three times, and he swallowed the fourth offer.

She took the cling film from the Battenberg cake and handed him some with a smile. As he dissected it she lit up a match and put it close to his hands.

“You're eating the yellow sections first,” she remarked.

“Yes. I don't like them.”

“So in that case you leave them 'til last.”

“No, you save the best 'til last.”

The match went out and he heard her shuffle and stand.

“It's fishy, all this business about Mrs. Crest,” she said.

He nodded, though she couldn't have seen.

“Perhaps we shouldn't sign the deeds.”

“We will sign the deeds. I don't care where it's from. Once they're signed it's legal. Helen, it's ours.”

There was a pause.

“If we're going to live here, then, right here on this bit of peat, I want to, I don't know, run around all over the moors naked, to stamp my belonging.” She laughed.

“You could,” he suggested.

An intense darkness marked where she stood and he reached forward to where he calculated her ankle would be, stroked the bare skin.

As he touched her he felt an unexpected peace. There was no need to keep searching for something else, no need to live here. He could throw the deeds back in Rook's face and tell him to fuck off. They already had a house. But then Helen crouched and put something in his hand, some clothing. He brought it to his face and smelt it: her top. It had the faint smell of her skin and the pleasant, faintest soap-sweetened sourness from her underarms, and when he looked up he could see her pale torso and the white of her bra.

“Why is it you always get what you want?” she said gently.

He put the rest of the cake on the floor, stubbed his cigarette out, and began removing his shoes. He got out of his trousers, trying to keep his balance in the dark, kicking the trousers off his feet. The lame peace, the inertia of before, had now left him.

“Jake? Where are you?”

“We ought to mark our belonging here, shouldn't we, if there's three of us — if there's going to be four of us. That's an army, that's time to set territories.”

“Are you going outside?”

“Yes.” He lit a match and made his way to the door. “Come with me.”

Out in the drab moonlight Helen removed her shoes. It was easier to see out here. The smells of sugar and steel competed in the air. The white limbs of the birch trees made him think of Joy, he could not help it, he did not want to help it. Long white limbs in the darkness, skeletal and spectral. His memory saw Joy's slender hand cut a square across the black: Here, see it? Framed by the factory. He longed for everything he did not yet have, he longed for himself even, as if he were chasing himself and never quite catching up.

With summer gone the night held little warmth or consolation. He ran. It was a peculiar feeling, to run nowhere for nothing, naked. But he couldn't have done it clothed, it would have felt too absurd, as if he were mad and being chased by phantoms. He ran and shouted nothing for no one. He gestured to Helen to follow him and then flung his arms up and began stamping his feet into the miry soil. In response to his lunacy Helen laughed and scampered in circles. Freezing, she giggled. Bleeding freezing.

“Ours!” he said. “This is ours!”

“Ours!” she repeated.

He ran to the dyke by the road and bent to splash his face with water; the water was freezing and puckered his skin. Helen came up behind him and doubled in breathless laughter.

“You look ridiculous like that,” she said, “with your great long body and your big feet and your testicles hanging down — like a savage!”

He snapped off a few flowers from the bank of the dyke and named them: “Brooklime, Labrador tea — these used to be everywhere.”

Handing them to her he moved on again across the peat making figures of eight and shouting, “This is ours!”

When they were cold to the point that no running could warm them, even though they had years more running in them, they retreated to the car, turned on the engine for heat, and then the radio for celebration: Irving Berlin. Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do, they sang together. They climbed into the backseat. They were three times too big for the space, four times, they crowded themselves.

He held her down and pushed himself inside her, almost savage, as she had said — checking briefly to see that she was with him, that she was receptive, and then closing his eyes to block everything out. His head hit the car window with rousing violence. The birch limbs appeared to his vision in drunken intervals, maybe he had opened his eyes to see them, maybe he had only imagined them along with the flare of yellow, the lilac blink of a child not yet born, a miniskirt draped over the steering wheel, a gunshot, a leaf, a gunshot, some bizarre rememberings of the hammered-silver samovar Sara used to display on the sideboard, appearing to him with erotic clarity as if the memory were extruded through the force of sex itself; a stray thought that he never let in of his grandparents in Dachau. Furious anger cancelled, with shameful ease, by overwhelming pleasure. Helen was shrieking, he clutched her hair and pushed deeper until her shrieks filled the car, filled the moors, made new waves on the sea.

“Memory,” she said.

“I have none.”

She indicated right and they pulled out onto the main road, heading away from the moors.

“Memory?” he asked.

“We're driving along a highway in America. We're listening to Buddy Holly. I'm pregnant — but I haven't told you yet. I will tell you, soon.”

He took a packet of mints from the dashboard and handed her one. The radio played: the Crystals, James Brown, Buddy Holly, and he was grateful for its intrusion into their marriage. He closed his eyes against the memory of his wife's shrieks, and against the slight awkwardness that now tied their tongues as they drove home.

“In fact I do have a memory,” he said at length, turning the mint around in his mouth. “I'm ten, we have to get upstairs by climbing a ladder on the outside wall, it's late. We've had a dinner party with some neighbours and Sara and my father have had an argument, in public, about her being Jewish. She's saying that what she misses, really misses, is olives. You can't get olives in England. Then my father starts: he says she's putting it on—her religion, he meant — he starts mocking her. He hates Jewish food, you see. She's broken some cardinal kosher rules — mixed meat and milk, eating pork, I don't know, my father thinks it's proof that the whole thing is just a show—”

He looked outside the car window and saw nothing but night.

“My father starts mocking her about manna: Are you waiting for manna from heaven, do you think your God's going to save you or do you think, perhaps, that it's me going out to work that will save you? My father takes some money from his pocket and waves it around. This is manna, and it isn't from heaven!

“Then Sara tells him, very coolly, that manner is in fact the way you are, your disposition — she used that word — and manners, with an s, is also the thing you observe when you are in company, and that it is the first thing any self-respecting Englishman should learn. Then she goes upstairs, leaving my father and the neighbours to themselves. I follow her, in case she's upset, but when I find her in the bedroom she is turning slowly in a kind of dance, twisting the praise ring. She looks so happy. I have this vision that my mother is utterly indestructible. And that she will protect me from anything.”

He then turned to Helen with a more resolute expression.

“And then the next day, the Second World War breaks out and after we hear the announcement Sara goes upstairs again. I want to see her do that dance, be that amazing, strong mother. But this time there she is in the bedroom completely nude. Completely. Her body isn't what I expect.”

He examined Helen's face for a reaction but saw only the quick flick of her eyes towards him and back towards the road.

“It's, I don't know, womanly. With clothes on she always seems so narrow and contained. But she isn't. She has a small potbelly, and her hair is loose all over her shoulders. So pretty, that's what I think, and young, and — vulnerable.”

Helen crunched her mint. “Does she see you?”

“Yes. She tells me to go and fill the bath. When the war started there were no more stories about her childhood and Austria and the rest. She just gradually shed her skin and became — English. Her family died, so she thought she should die. And it was as if, Helen, that moment that I saw her naked and vulnerable was the moment where I grew up, and I didn't want to. I wasn't ready to.”

Helen put her hand on his knee.

“I think you were ready to.”

“And because I wasn't ready, I've spent my whole life missing what I left. And I'll spend the rest of my whole life doing the same.”

“No, darling. Don't say that. Everybody has a little something missing inside them, it's prudent, it's like keeping a spare room in the house for guests.” She opened the window for fresh air. “And if there is a big thing missing, find what it is and replace it. We can replace it.”

His wife's words did not comfort him, though; they never did. The memory left him feeling that the urgent growing up of that day had involved transgressing a sacred boundary. The more he tried to rid his mind of the image of his naked mother the more it prevailed and sharpened, so that he could see the birthmark on Sara's hip, her thick pubic hair, that belly, like the most private of all things, laid bare to his scrutiny.

The white front of the coach house flared in the headlights; they pulled up, stopped the car, gathered the items of clothing that had not made their way back on — socks, Helen's bra, Helen's neck scarf, his leather belt. The car engine ticked as it cooled.

For the first time he was struck by the loveliness of their house as if he had been loaned Helen's eyes for long enough to see what she saw: the creamy walls, tall black-framed windows, the modest but clear announcement of its drive, the garden an all-consuming selfish green even in the darkness, the cherry tree burning yellow into another autumn.

“Jake,” Helen said.

He held back a few steps and watched her approach the back door. “Yes?”

“Jake, I believe I'm pregnant.”

He looked at his wife. “Since when?”

She smiled wryly. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

Had it been any other person, he would have ridiculed the premature announcement, but Helen — Helen knew, he could tell.

“That hit the spot?”

She bit her lip. “In more than one way.”

“It's Alice?”

“Yes,” she grinned, “I'm sure of it.”

“Buddy Holly!” he said, his tones muted. He lifted her and spun her around; her feet knocked a milk bottle at the back door and smashed it across the gravel.

His delight was genuine, kissing her, letting her go, hoping against hope that she was right in her inkling, brushing the broken glass aside with his foot. But when they switched on the kitchen light they saw that something was not right. A chair had been knocked over. The French doors were shattered.

“Shit,” he said. He ranged across the kitchen, to the hallway, up the stairs. Ornaments along the way were broken, nothing precious, but why break them? Why not either steal or leave them? He bartered with himself: if the money is still there under the bed it is all right. He paused a moment in Henry's room, seeing that it was apparently untouched. Music came from his and Helen's bedroom, the crackle of a record crawling around the turntable. Love divided in two wont do. If the money is still there, he wagered, all will be well.

He ducked through the secret door, lowered himself to his knees by the unmade double bed, noted the proximity of his knee to a piece of smashed china that had once been a statue of an angel — a rather fanciful thing, a gift from him to Helen that he trusted she would like precisely because he didn't. Fury filled him when he saw her diary torn up and scattered across the pile of laundry by the wardrobe. Confusion, relief, slight offence filled him when he registered also that the human-skin Bible had been pulled from its shoe box in the wardrobe and thrown, intact, to the floor.

He screwed his face towards the darkness under the bed. The money, of course, was gone.

Helen perched on the sofa in her rayon skirt.

“Ginger, dear,” Sara said.

“Actually I don't like ginger.”

“Ah, so.”

Sara dwindled back to the kitchen and he followed her, reasoning lamely.

“They'll find who took it. There were fingerprints everywhere.”

He leaned against the counter and felt pressure on his bladder as the shot of water passed through the coffee. “They'll find who it was.”

Sara prepared the mugs; not the gold-rimmed cups but some two-a-penny blue-and-white striped mugs that were bereft of saucers or the possibility of saucers.

“Jacob, dear, they will never find that money. The sooner you lose hope the better.”

He folded his arms and dug his fingers between his ribs, made a short laugh. It's only money, it's only money. So Helen had taken to assuring him. But, despite their haste to see the police off and get out of the house, get back to their child as if to make up for all they had failed to protect, she had taken the time to rid herself of the miniskirt and leave it in a pile like a curse. On their drive back to Sara's they had lamented at cross-purposes, Helen talking about changing locks and the prospect of rewriting what she had logged in her destroyed diaries, he persisting (so much that he began to irritate even himself) in questioning, why, why did it happen? She interrogating the future, he nursing the past. He suddenly becoming what he did not want to be; a dweller. A dweller on the done and dusted. A dweller in an old honeysuckled house, and condemned to it.

Helen went to bed; it was already two or three in the morning. He stayed up with Sara, who seemed to have no tiredness, either that or no idea of the time. As she switched on her radio and sank back into the bentwood chair he wondered if it were really possible for a person to age in a week, to give up on even the remote idea of youth. She was vacant. The loss of the money had impacted on her enough to cause the faintest of shudders, and then had seemed to absent her mind. He would not be the one to remind her that it was her family, that money. All the blood and bones of it, the sum of the remains.

“Where is Rook?” he asked suddenly. “Did he go home?”

“Yes,” Sara said, and feigned a yawn. “Tomorrow he's going to America.”

He straightened. “Why's that?”

“To see his granddaughter — I hear you've met her.” She smoothed her hands across the cushion on her lap. “The poor girl got herself in trouble a few months ago; Rook wanted to go and help sort it out but she wouldn't let him. She went alone, stubborn girl. I like her. I pity her. It's easier in California — of course she had to go over the border still and keep it all quiet.”

She spoke as if it were all just a matter of course.

“Sara, do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Probably.”

He forced himself not to speak until he had thought precisely what to say. He poured himself a glass of wine, the sweet white stuff, the bottle already half empty.

“Over the border?”

“Mexico.”

He shuddered at the idea of Joy laid out somewhere hot and dark, somewhere with thick spicy air. He turned the vision away.

“Rook didn't say anything at dinner—”

“No, of course. He was quiet with thought. He has been worried, naturally.”

“But it's over? She's all right?”

“Oh, quite all right. But Rook wants to go and treat her and buy her things and make her happy. That girl's happiness is his meaning for life.”

Sara looked a little regretful at this. She tucked her large hands between her thighs.

“How long ago — the pregnancy?”

“Some months.”

He drank, wondering what some months meant.

“But she's getting married — isn't she? Joy? I think Rook mentioned.” He acted out ignorance with a shrug. “So she could have — there was no need for any sorting out.”

“Ah, but she's certain the husband-to-be is not the — what is that word.”

“Father?”

“Culprit.”

He felt rather sick and dark.

“Then who?”

“Apparently she had something with a man here, in England, before she left. That's all she would tell Rook. Or at least,” Sara sighed, “that's all Rook would tell me.”

He felt to be the embodiment of sin, some bedevilled creature polluting all he touched. Or he felt drunk. He thought of Alice gathering cell by cell upstairs; of Sara naked; of Helen's shriek; of Rook's wink; of a gunshot. Of a Bible so bleakly bound that even criminals would not take it. In his mind a door opened, Alice walked through, it closed again, Alice was gone. She was not pleased with what she saw, so she left. Her life was no more than his hush-hush of a door opening and shutting.

“I was going to ask Rook to marry me this evening,” Sara said. “That was to be the real announcement. After the other announcement.”

He tilted his head and watched her.

“But I lost courage. What a foolish idea it was.” She touched her teeth again as she had earlier that evening and lowered her gaze.

“What terrible fates got that girl pregnant and sent him off to America? He's too old for this.” She stood and wandered to the mantelpiece as if it had asked her to come and listen to something it had to say.

“I want to go to the sea with him, this second,” she announced. “Oh, I'm so tired of all this aloneness, every room I go in what do I find? Me. Ich, everywhere, ich ich. I was going to ask him to marry me. Maybe not now. The courage has left me now.”