The Wilderness

3

He knows the route to The Sun Rises like the back of his own hand. He knows without any conscious thought when to change gear, when to slow down or speed up, which potholes are deep enough to avoid and which areas flood, specifically which areas, down to a few metres or so. Sometimes the puddles have frog spawn in. He knows to avoid them at certain times of the year and he knows, by light, colours, and instinct, that it is probably that time of year now.

Eleanor has a newspaper on her lap; when he glances across he sees that the headline is something about a plane disaster, there is a photograph of something mangled. He thinks of Helen. Her love of flight always made her morose over crashed planes, because planes belonged to a perfect world of height and freedom that was not supposed to fail. She would have been upset now by those pictures in Eleanor's paper and he would have tried to cheer her up with some platitude or other. Maybe she would have been upset by Eleanor herself, wondering how x could be put in y's place as if y had never been. He hopes she would have been upset; he is. He glances back at the newspaper.

“What's the story?” he asks.

Eleanor puts down the pocket mirror she has been frowning into, looks at the paper, sighs, and tells him to hang on a minute. “Something about the Rwandan president being killed,” she says. “In a plane explosion.”

“Will there be a war?”

She folds the paper and picks her mirror up again, rubbing her skin with her fingertips. “I don't know. It doesn't say.”

It worries him, war. It seems like one of those things that, now he is unable to follow the news properly, might just creep up on him. He was always so aware; now not so. There was always some control over the workings of the world when he could see what was coming.

Silence settles between them as Eleanor combs her fingers through her hair. Memory, Helen used to say as they drove. He would give her a memory. This was his homeland and she wanted to get to know it through the eyes of his childhood. He drives on and his stomach tightens. It strikes him as strange and sad that whenever he maps out his own history it converges on pain. He has known so much more than pain — and yet recently everything pivots on the tragedies and wrong turnings.

He doesn't know if Eleanor has truly sunk into oblivion over the past or whether she is just pretending. Either way, it obviously isn't important enough to her. But to him it is. While she inspects her hairline he entertains horror. This is the precise route he took that night, from the coach house to The Sun Rises, 1967, the week after the Six-Day War had ended; it was hot. War, you see, and bombed airfields and Egypt's planes blown to nothing by Israel, and Helen angry for an entire week as if they would divorce over this: this war. As if it were his fault.

How full of rage and horror he was when he drove out here and decided to make a play for Eleanor, knowing Eleanor would never refuse. All he could think about was Alice. To salve the blame he had loaded on himself he decided to run to Eleanor's bed, and there she was, of course. Of course she let him in. And then he left.

He cannot decide now how long it was before he and Eleanor spoke again. He was embarrassed. He spent months disgusted with himself, and when he checks now to confirm when that disgust eased he is not sure that it ever did. He is embarrassed, that decades later Eleanor is what remains. Their past seems so dull and grubby, and their present so — inexpli cable. He wonders if he should have brought her along tonight.

They pull up at a junction and wait. In the mirror her eyes become ringed with dark brown and expand in size. She emerges and changes under the nib of the eye pencil as Helen had used to do. In the late sixties Helen had worn her eyes large and black; her once-brown legs had turned ravishing white from the bad northern weather and her knees had seemed to be exposed bone. They are so uncannily different, Helen and Eleanor. Eleanor is plump and her makeup is a mask; he prefers her without it. He wants to tell somebody there has been a mistake. He searches his pockets for a cigarette, finds the accelerator and pulls off.

Eleanor dabs her cheeks in the failing light. “Are you excited?”

Dear Eleanor, to think that somebody could be excited about their own retirement dinner.

“Nervous,” he replies. “It's a bit like going to your own wake.”

She sniffs and puts the mirror on the dashboard. “I don't think I'll ever retire. Don't think I'll ever be able to afford to. I'll be digging my own grave to save money.”

She grins; the smell of her perfume edges into his senses as if through a wall of sponge, just some of the smell permeating and the rest lost. What does she even do for a living?

“Everyone retires. I tried not to — but there comes a point when it's necessary for you to be eased out. It's a system.”

He worries suddenly that he has forgotten the car keys, quizzing himself to think where he might have left them, before realising they are in the ignition. Eleanor clears a blemish from the windscreen with the cuff of her blouse. She turns to him.

“I'll look after you,” she says.

“Sara used to call retirement the Sabbath Days,” he says, ignoring her. He does not want to talk about being looked after or to look across and catch her eye as if they are sealing a joint fate. “The Sabbath Days, the days of rest. No gathering manna, no ploughing or reaping or pressing—” He frowns out of the window at the moors and the cooling towers in the distance, ejecting broad plumes of cloud into an otherwise clear evening. With his thumb and forefinger he makes a small circle. “No pressing those things, not plums. The other things.”

“Grapes?” Eleanor ventures.

“Yes. Grapes.” Embarrassed still, he forges on with his point. “No ploughing or reaping. No cooking. She called them the days of rest.”

“No cooking? Then I'll have to cook for you. Oh Jakey, poor you, it'll be beef sandwiches every day and frozen hotpots.”

She puts her hand on his thigh and squeezes.

“There was something about a man not eating muesli,” he begins, on the periphery of a memory he cannot quite place. “Did you tell me about that, the man who wouldn't eat muesli, or was it meat?”

“I don't think so.”

He pauses, interrogating his brain aggressively for the clarity that sometimes comes out of temporary confusion, but this time it doesn't come. After a lifetime of well-founded reliance on things just fixing themselves, he finds it disturbing to accept that they are more likely, now, to stay broken.

But where was he? What had he been thinking just now, before that other thought?

Eleanor squeezes his leg again and stares lightly at him; he has often asked her not to stare down his foolishness like this as if in great alarm, or, worse still, great sympathy. Her voice, saying something calming he suspects, is somewhere in his head but he is now noticing the plants that push through along the dykes, and tries to conjure their names. Brooklime, he recalls. Labrador tea. Funny that he should remember such trivia.

She scrutinises him as if trying to establish from the way he sits or the expression on his face whether he might let himself down terribly this evening.

“You all right driving?”

He nods.

He must have seen Henry recently because he remembers it, and everything remembered happened either very recently or very distantly; something he must get used to now that there is no middle distance as such.

The moors spin past, the peat dark grey and puddled along the dykes from heavy rainfall. When he saw Henry he showed him the letters. They've been coming ever since Helen died, he explained to his son. They just come and come. All addressed to her: look. Helen Jameson. Look.

There were six or so inmates in the visits room: Are any of these thieves? he had asked. A shrug from Henry. Nobody asks what you're here for, Henry had said. He found this information unbelievable, but let it pass. He could not abide thieves. Murderers, adulterers, heretics, junkies, kidnappers — not ideal, but the world needs its irregularities: it is too perfectly spherical, too perfectly perfect without. God is too easy without the challenge. But thieves disrupted the oiled mechanisms of give and take that he, personally, took as the most human of human traits: the ability to recognise value, fairly trade, to save for what seemed important, to spend on what seemed immediate. To give, also, and to provide.

Each of these six inmates, except Henry, was being visited by a woman. One of the women had a child who played sullenly with his father's fingers, lifting and dropping them. He recalls a black couple whose quiet conversation was casual and sporadic as if they were waiting together for a bus. How loyal women are, he had thought — loyal and patient. His mind was drawn to his daughter, he wanted to talk to Henry about her but had no idea what he would say — could not bear, more likely, Henry's casual regard of her. About Alice, he wanted to say. Let's talk about Alice. Instead he put his hands to his chin and tilted his face upwards.

As he slid the letters across to Henry he looked at the grey walls, the refectory along the wall to his right — no, left, no. Right. He remembers that the woman at the counter looked drowsy as she piled bars of something on a rack. He sipped his tea, usually refusing tea on grounds of its tasting like wet clay, or old wood, but there at the prison it is always strangely delicious — strong, sweet, still hot in the stomach and homely.

Helen was my mother, my mumma, his son had said, cradling his cup in his hands just as Helen used to. Do you remember I used to call her mumma? And she used to call me bubba. And now you sit here and accuse her of having an affair!

He and Henry had disagreed about the letters; he was sure, is still sure, that if they read the letters they would find infidelity in them. Only a secret lover would keep writing to his beloved after her death, not knowing that she was dead. The thought is painful to him, so much so that he sometimes feels pity for this poor man, who must by now be worried, mustn't he? The lack of replies must be eating at him.

Henry was not interested in the theory and put the letters aside, yawned, and rambled about prison life. They saved their fruit rations, he said, and fermented them with marmite and sugar to make wine; he asked if he could be sent some mar-mite, they had stopped selling it at the prison shop.

There was an argument about who knew Helen better. He remembers he had tried to pull the chair towards the table to impose his view, but the chair was rooted to the floor. In the effort he had done something, spilt his tea or knocked the letters to the floor, it is unclear now, but one of the women had looked around at him as if apologetic, and he had felt, again, something like unworthiness or failure in the slow tired blink she gave before she turned back to her husband.

The argument — the argument had been so familiar. He can't with any honesty say they definitely had it this time, more that it is just an argument that is always there for the having, regurgitated so many times it could be scripted. He sometimes wonders if it is the only conversation he and Henry have really had since Helen died. It is an argument over who knows her best, who is more like her, who loved her most. The debate tires and upsets him; how can he even approach these questions? Helen was his wife. Compacted in that word is a whole planet of intimacy, not to mention the fact of choice: that he and Helen chose each other in a way that Helen and Henry never did. Slept together, too. Made Henry. Henry is secondary to Jake-and-Helen, a by-product.

Henry gathered the letters then, from the floor or the table, and patted them tenderly into order. He began to talk about a German poet in his block who had a wife at home with long blond hair and eyes like planets. The poet wrote his wife a hundred poems a day. People write when they're lonely, Henry said, and it would be no good just writing to yourself, what you say has to be said to someone. Days when the poet couldn't get his post sorted in time to go out he went mad. Henry smiled as if at a fond memory. He said that maybe those mysterious letters were just from somebody lonely exploiting Helen's charity.

He must have been looking away from Henry during that speech, because he remembers now seeing him suddenly as a stranger: restless, warring, and vulnerable in his — what is the word — jail costume? It occurred to him that, given a choice of who he should be, his son had been launched into a dilemma he had not yet solved. The baby was in him, and the boy, and the man, the old man, the wise, the embittered, the arrogant. His hair had not grown back from whatever it was that had made it come out, either the drugs or the prison razor. There they both sat, more hairless than ever. He had no idea how to relate to his son. They could not pull their chairs closer, and there was no way of bridging the gap. The table and chairs were all of a piece, arranged so as to never be rearranged.

He put the letters in his pocket before he left. Henry whispered something: There, he said, see that man, he's the one who set his girlfriend on fire.

As he listened to Henry whisper he looked at the clock and saw its fast hand trip forward, and it started near the four and, by the time Henry stopped speaking, it was near the eleven. In that time Henry had told him about how the man would eat nothing that had been in contact with meat; he would eat only muesli which his girlfriend brought in plastic boxes. Yes, that was where he had encountered that man, in prison. He is relieved; he remembers sharp words with Eleanor when he came out into the car park where she was waiting, because she wanted him to tell Henry about his illness and he could not. They quarrelled, but gently. Everything is always gentle now, even violence and quarrelling. He looked at the prison and felt the stab of pride that he had built it and that it was still standing. Eleanor coughed when she started up the engine and punched at buttons to get the radio working. It was raining heavily. The moors were puddling around the dykes.

All of this he remembers and can see as plain as day — he just can't say when it happened. Like a photograph that cannot be placed anywhere specific in the album.

His colleagues are sitting around the long oak table and when he walks in they turn and some of them hold their hands together as if they are going to clap. He eyes the bar, the stone floors, the mirrors behind the glass shelves, the window through which the rope of dusty light always used to sling itself, cutting in angles over Rook's figure on a barstool, and he decides he will not succumb to that last refuge of the old — nostalgia. It sounds like a disease, a weakening of the body. Neuralgia, nostalgia. And besides, he is here to look forward, not back.

Whenever he sees these people together, out of context, he is instantly compelled to think of them as he has always done, as the council corps; they have always thought of themselves as a muted collective, low in flair and kudos, striving onwards in mediocrity. He realises, as he places himself and Eleanor amongst them, that he has come to feel this too. He has become a member of a group that doesn't know whether to stick together for safety or fly apart for escape.

He sits amongst them: all architects except for one, a girl. She waves across the table at him and he waves back, though he is certain they've never met before. There are so few women in architecture that he would remember if they had. He always wondered why more women didn't become architects, and he never came up with an answer, except maybe that women forget to think big, and for this reason they are not engineers or aeroplane builders. An inbuilt humility means they never imagine they can create something bigger than their own bodies, whereas with men — well, all he has ever wanted to do is just that. And despite his own standards, he would still maintain for this very reason that one of his ugly and defunct high-rises is better than no high-rise at all.

“Drink, Jake?” This is Fergus, his peer he supposes. Fergus with his lank and rangy physique and pale Irish complexion. Before he can anticipate it Fergus is leaning across the table and clutching his forearm in a gesture of solidarity. “What can I get you?”

“A bourbon,” he says. “With ice, and a little sugar if they have it.” He offers a twenty-pound note which Fergus declines. He insists, but Fergus is adamant.

It becomes clear that this evening is to be his, and this means that it is all organised for him, and he just has to sit here and behave. In his wallet is a packet of mint which he now lays on the table in a vaguely petulant frame of mind. He considers that he could drink until blind — yes, what an idea! Drink mint juleps until eloquent, like he has so many times at this very table.

Over dinner he is fretful at first, worrying about Eleanor, worrying that she is out of her depth and that these men, who have all known and liked Helen, should be offended by his replacement of her. But this feeling wanes as the bourbon relaxes him and as he learns that if he is indeed being inappropriate there is a perennial pleasure in that. He would like more of it. Prompted by Lewis, one of the younger architects, he indulges in talk of ideals. There is an unspoken creed to being a member of the council corps that says one cannot afford to have architectural ideals. Even theories — even theories without the slightest ambition — are aggravating.

“The modernist project,” he says, “is not just about lack of ornament — it's about the lack of a need for ornament. Think about decoration in general: every time it occurs, it occurs in order to cover up for a crime. The ugly woman. Mankind putting its clothes on after it ate the apple.” He pauses for a moment. This was once his wife's argument also, the one ideal they both believed in. “Think how many criminals have tattoos.”

“Adolf Loos,” Fergus says to his surprise. “You're quoting his theory, Jake, am I right?”

He nods; of course the architect's name had abandoned him but yes, this is his theory.

“But it's just meaningless rebellion,” Fergus continues. “Look where Loos lived — Vienna, which is a beautiful city. He just got sick of beauty, like being full up on a huge chocolate cake. Doesn't make chocolate cake bad. It certainly doesn't mean we should destroy every chocolate cake we find, am I right or am I wrong?”

What Fergus is alluding to, he assumes, is the period of architecture for which they are both part responsible, the decade of obliteration in which wrecking balls defied hundreds of years of history and replaced them with concrete. In which tower blocks were built to be lived in by the most unfortunate until the best inventions in demolition techniques ten or twenty years later allowed them to be brought down in front of applauding crowds. In which bright new towns spliced the landscape with right angles in order that people could move from the expanding twilight of cities. In which the manor house now known as Moorthorpe prison had suffered an extension so ugly that even at the time, and even over something as profane as a prison, people had been outraged and petitioned against the violence done to beauty.

Lined up on the table are three bourbons; he drops mint into them, stirs them with his finger, and knocks one of them back. Fly apart, he thinks. Fly apart.

“You are wrong,” he tells Fergus. “Architecture rests itself too much on the principle of beauty. A building must be beautiful because it is first worthy, and not worthy because it is first beautiful.”

Lewis, sitting opposite, leans forward with his elbows either side of his plate. “So you'd honestly screw someone worthy before you screwed someone beautiful?”

Eleanor laughs. It is the first sound she has made for ten minutes or more, and he supposes that she has laughed out of a need to contribute more than out of appreciation of the joke. He dislikes it when Lewis — not the most masculine of men — assumes the stance of the predator; despite himself, he dislikes the infidel trait that he sees in other men, as if they think they can live by their own rules alone.

“You miss my point,” he says, “if you think it is about screwing people. Architecture is at the heart of life, it's life wrought into something permanent.” He turns his hands as if manoeuvring a great lever. “It's not just how to build but how to be moral and to use your brick, your concrete, your steel honestly, without tricking people, without treating them as if they are children.”

He is not sure how well he even understands what he says, and how much mass has been lost from the argument over the years. Nevertheless it gains stature as he speaks it, warming him to his profession as he has not been for years, unearthing that good faith that drew him to it in the first place. He drinks down another mint julep and considers Joy in her yellow dress gazing out over the ocean from the glass wall of her home, sipping a julep — never gulping, always sipping.

“I was going to build a glass house once.” He cuts steak away from the bone and chews it ponderously, wondering if he has an attentive audience.

He begins telling of the glass house he had always wanted on the moors. A little like that famous one in America, he says, and a flurry of nods and Philip Johnsons echo around the table. But better, he says. Better than that. He tells them how he had intended to dredge the water from the peat; at first the structure would sit out of sorts in its sponge bed. But gradually over decades the peat would begin to dry, it would be smothered and heated by sediment that would crush out its water and slowly, another century later, it would become brittle coal, then the coal would harden until it was a tough, glassy graphite. A polished glass house embedded in polished ground. And at last the land would have adapted itself to the structure. This manmade coercion of the landscape is what is rightly called architecture and the rest is called only art at best — at worst, modelling.

When he has finished speaking he assesses the three or four faces looking at him, sees interest, and so he goes on; he tells them that the building that inspired him the most is the bird place at London Zoo, a great iceberg of glass. While he gestures its size and angles with his arms, some quizzical and troubled stares meet his, the words Cedric Price are muttered; Lewis asks, Is it made of glass? Surely not? Surely the birds would die, isn't it made of some kind of mesh — some kind of—and Fergus interrupts with the assertion that it is a mighty piece of architecture, yes, who could fail to be inspired?

From their enthusiastic nodding he can only assume everything has gone well; he stands. “May I make a parting speech?” he says.

A choral yes passes up and down the table. He meets Eleanor's eye and sees her apprehension. She is sitting up straight, twitchy and almost — very uncharacteristically— birdlike.

“I would like to say only this,” he states. “You do not create a building in keeping with its environment. You create a building that gives the environment something to aspire to. Beauty is not the point. It just happens to slowly become the point. Is this not like life? I am going to spend my retirement seeking beauty. That's all, thank you.”

He does not exactly mean this, or rather, does not know if he means it or not. Seeking beauty? As if it can be found in the cupboard under the sink, or in one's sock drawer. But there is something very marvellous in being blindly profound, and everybody agrees it seems, raising their glasses and toasting him. Now when he looks at Eleanor she is relaxed and heavy once again in that cloak of needy devotion.

He has little idea what he just said; but that, he thinks, is because he is drunk. Nothing more.

Before they leave he decides to go out into the garden, and is confused to find it changed: where once had been a neatly, cleanly filled rectangle of poured concrete, surrounded by a low wall and open view of the moors, there is now a — what is its name? — the glass shed, the glass part, and it is cluttered with tables and large sweating plants. People are eating at the tables and look up at him as he wanders in. Unsure of how to get out again he panics and stares at their hot, flushed faces.

Then he sees on the floor, by his own feet, some footprints embedded in the surface, dried fossils of prints that are making their way out and over the wall that is no longer there. One set is large, the other smaller. He smiles before he has had time to guard himself from the tender swipe of the past, and then Eleanor comes up behind him, not seeming to notice the footprints at all, and guides him back to the others.

In his memories he is often travelling, riding uninhibited down motorways at night, down the brand-new M1 hushing and empty, along an American highway in a brown car with his wife. Flying.

When he is driving in those memories the roads are always like this: black and quiet. The car swishes; everything feels soft, overly soft. His eyes are always closed even when he is at the wheel. There is certainly no danger, only a secured sense of going home, though home is not necessarily the bricks and mortar of the coach house or the fluorescence of a motel or even the flat open landscape of his childhood. It is an eternally imminent concept of home whose proximity brings fantastic comfort until he begins to realise that it will only ever be proximate and will never arrive. Then there comes a longing and nothing to satisfy it, a neural restlessness.

It is the drink perhaps, more than the softness and darkness, that brings the longing now. Here is the urge to touch Eleanor, an urge inflamed by bourbon. An urge to reach across to the driver's seat and find her arm and to feel the movement of her leg pushing down the clutch, just to feel that she is alive. To touch the girl in the pub whose name he has forgotten; to touch Joy. He has not thought of Joy for days, nor her letters about her dear husband. What is the man's name? His brain is too soaked for this. Silas, that's his overblown name. Silas. Now he thinks of Joy, and that picture of her in her yellow dress. Thinks of fucking her, and enjoys the deliberately crude shape of the thought before it passes into reverence — reverence of her distant, almost ghostly being.

It is like a whip slicing through him — the brakes, the bump, the sharp whistling sound from Eleanor's throat, and then they are still, at a forty degree angle to the pavement. Eleanor's hands clutch the steering wheel ineffectually. He assesses himself — he is fine. She is fine too, eyes blank, very still, but fine. He looks back. A shape is lying in the road but he cannot identify it — not human, he thinks with relief, but what?

“Hit a dog,” Eleanor is saying, tearful.

He leaves the car and sees the dog there — it is black, its knees delicately bent and its head tilted up as if trying to escape the body's predicament. It is, he finds himself thinking, just a dog. There is no collar. When he strokes behind its ears his fingers come away with blood. The dog stares without movement but makes a small noise, no more than a song of the breath. It sounds like a tired woman humming a baby to sleep.

Eleanor is kneeling next to him in the road weeping, randomly generating different types of lament. “Oh no, Jake — oh goodness — oh Lord — what have I done? What have I done?”

He can think of nothing else to do; he picks the dog up and it screams. Has he ever heard a dog scream before? Surely dogs do not scream? The sound is similar, he thinks, to the noise his children used to make on their cheap plastic recorder. He lays the creature on his coat in the back of the Land Rover. Eleanor, pulling herself together, asks where they should go, and he suggests the police station, the only place he can think of that will still be open.

At almost one a.m., forms filled, the dog alive but sedated on a vet's table, they pull up outside the dark shape of his house and get out of the car.

In contrast to his own lucidity Eleanor looks exhausted and distressed. She makes her way up to bed. He is as lucid as a bright day, and unaffected by the dried burgundy blood that is still on his fingers or the scream that lingers in his ear. Restless, he stays downstairs and helps himself to Helen's Barley Cup. The jar must have been there for months — years; the best before date is July 1993, but what, he wonders absently, is the date now? It is difficult to believe they are so far down the century already; how time leaves you winded and stupid! He drinks from a dirty mug because the sizable mug collection that the family has acquired over the years has formed a sullied congregation at the kitchen sink, or in the kitchen sink, or on the table.

When he gets into bed he cannot sleep, and instead churns words through his head: Silas, Helen, Eleanor, Alice, Fergus. It dawns on him that these words are all names. What, then, is the difference between a word and a name? How similar they seem: Silas, for example. How similar to silence, and how without physical grounding. He repeats it, not as a name anymore but as a tool with which he sharpens the claws of his memory. He simply must not fly apart, he thinks. It was wrong of him to drink so much, and to indulge his thoughts the way he has.

He turns on the light and begins a letter to Joy in his usual pseudo-aristocratic style. Dear Joy, One thinks one is going mad at last, one lies in bed and repeats the word Silas. One thinks, perhaps, that one takes after one's son after all, though one resists the idea.

Eleanor rolls over and groans. “Turn the light out,” she says.

“I'm writing.”

“What?”

“Epistles.”

“Oh Christ.” She nestles her arms down under the blankets. “What's an epistle?”

“A letter, Ellie. A letter.”

He knows that she likes it when he shortens her name; she gives a contented sigh and slips into an easy childlike sleep.

It is good to write to Joy, he can tell her anything. Letter after letter, year after year, she invents herself as someone perpetually unpredictable. She never thinks, says, or does the obvious. When he told her about his diagnosis — writing the word Alzheimer's carefully, copying the unfamiliar spelling from a book — she wrote back and said only that she has prepared a spare room in her house for when he slips into oblivion, and has told Silas that her formative lover might be coming to stay. She has festooned the room with coloured cushions and may paint the walls orange — her favourite colour — as if expecting the arrival of a new baby. She did not say, how terrible. She did not say, you must tell Henry.

Perhaps he is mistaken, but he has felt Henry coming back to him slowly since Helen died, leaning on him, confiding a little more, looking at him with a depth of empathy he had never shown before. Even Henry's requests for money have been reassuring in his ability to provide it. He has never been richer, never had, he supposes, more to give and so few to give it to. He can now see his son, not as an enemy or a stranger but as an edgy child, his edgy frightened child. Their fractious little chats are the most honest encounters they have ever had. Fatherhood must come in cycles, so that you create something helpless that needs you, and you watch it grow until it is so big it needs you again, like a sunflower that grows to six feet and needs staking. Henry needs him, he decides; depends on him.

When Alice was born one of his first thoughts was that one day perhaps he would be able to give her away in marriage. This was a cause for celebration, because it thereby implied, did it not, that until then she would be his to give away? He was standing at the foot of two or so decades of ownership of this exceptional being. She was his, his! He loved her for that (though not that alone); he loved her exultantly.

Eleanor is the voice of unreason if she thinks a father will allow himself to disintegrate into a dribbling, idiotic babyhood in front of his children. And there comes that feeling again that this will not happen to him, it will not go that far. He will not let it go that far.

Though he is cheered by the thought, the letter to Joy does not proceed terribly well; he feels suddenly exhausted and puts his head heavily on the pillow. He thinks of the dog, the needle entering its vein, thinks of oblivion, and hopes the creature is resting soundly.