For the Sake of Elena

and felt her fingers on his fist and saw the red of her blood when the knife slid across the back of her knuckles to carve a pathway through the canvas again. And then the third cut, but by that time, she had backed away with her bleeding hand held like a child against her, not crying because she wouldn’t do that, not in front of him, not in front of his wife.

That’s enough, Justine said. She turned and left.

He followed her out. He hadn’t said a single word.

She had talked one night in class about the risk and the reward of making art personal, of offering little here- and-there bits of one’s essence to a public who might misunderstand, ridicule, or reject. Although he had listened dutifully to her words, he had not understood the meaning behind them until he had seen her face when he destroyed the painting. It wasn’t a reaction to the weeks and months of effort it had taken her to complete it for him, nor was it a response to his mutilation of a gift. It was simply that three times he had driven the knife through what had represented to Sarah the most singular manner in which she could show him compassion and love.

This was, perhaps, the greatest of his sins. To have prompted the gift. To have ripped it to pieces.

He took his watercolours-those terribly safe apricots and poppies-from the wall above the sofa. They left two darker spots on the wall-paper, but that couldn’t be helped. No doubt Justine would find something suitable to replace them.

She said, “What are you doing? Anthony, answer me.” She sounded frightened.

“Finishing things,” he said.

He carried the paintings out into the hall and balanced one carefully, thoughtfully, on the tips of his fi ngers. You can copy, she said, but can you create?

The last four days had given him the answer that two full years with her had failed to provide. Some people create. Others destroy.

He smashed the painting against the newel post at the foot of the stairway. Glass shattered and fell onto the parquet floor like crystal rain.

“Anthony!” Justine grasped his arm. “Don’t! Those are your paintings. They’re your art. Don’t!”

He smashed the second with even greater force. He felt the pain of connecting with the wooden post shoot like a cannonball through his arm. Glass flew up at his face.

“I have no art,” he said.

Despite the cold, Barbara took her cup of coffee out into the ruined rear garden of her house in Acton and sat down on the cold block of concrete that served as the back step. She pulled her coat more closely round her and balanced the coffee cup on the top of one knee. It was not black dark outside-it never could be when one was surrounded by several million people and a teeming metropolis-but the heavy night shadows still made the garden a less familiar place than was the inside of the house, and thus a place less weighted down by the conflict that sprang from the opposing forces of guilt-ridden memory and simple necessity.

What kind of bond truly exists between a parent and child, she wondered. And at what point does it finally become necessary to break or perhaps redefine that bond? And in either case, is breaking or redefining even possible?

During the last ten years of her life, she had grown to believe that she would never have children. At first, the realisation was a source of pain to her, inextricably connected as it was to the knowledge that she would probably never marry. She knew quite well that marriage was not a prerequisite for parenthood. Single-parent adoptions happened more and more, and with her career finally off the ground, she would be a serious contender in the pool of prospective single parents seeking a child. Should she volunteer for a hard-to-place child, her success would be virtually guaranteed. But, perhaps too conventionally, she had always seen parenthood as a joint venture between two partners. And as the likelihood of a partner in her life grew more remote every year, the distant possibility of becoming a mother grew more hazy-edged, more like a fantasy ungrounded even slightly in the reality of her circumstances.

It wasn’t something she thought of very often. Most of the time she was simply too busy to dwell upon a future that felt like ice. But while most people, getting older, experienced the growth of family and the increase in connection brought about by the ties of marriage and children, her own family was steadily diminishing now, and her own connections were being severed one by one. Her brother, her father, both dead and buried. And now she faced the prospect of cutting the fi nal tie with her mother as well.

In the end, life is all about seeking reassurance, she thought, we’re all engaged in looking for some kind of sign that will tell us we’re not really alone. We want a bond, an anchor that will hold us fast to a landmass of belonging somewhere, of being close to someone, of having something more than the clothes on our backs or the houses we live in or the cars that we drive. And in the end we can only gain that reassurance through people. No matter how we fill our lives with the trappings of a carefree independence, we still want the bond. Because a vital connection with another human being always carries the potential to act as a viable approbation of the self. If I am loved, I am worthy. If I am needed, I am worthy. If I maintain this relationship in the face of all difficulties, I am somehow whole.

What, indeed, was the real difference between Anthony Weaver and herself? Wasn’t her behaviour-like his- governed inherently by an anxiety that the world might withdraw its approval of her? Didn’t her behaviour-like his- mask a desperation which rose from the same insidious source, guilt?

“Mum had a fine day today, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson had said. “She started out a bit rough round the edges, though. At fi rst, she wouldn’t mind me at all and she kept calling me Doris. Then she wouldn’t eat her teacakes. And she wouldn’t have her soup. When the postman came, she thought it was your dad and she wouldn’t let me hear the end of wanting to be off with him. To Majorca, she said. Jimmy promised me Majorca, she said. And when I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t Jimmy, she tried to chuck me out the door. But she fi nally settled down.” Her hand fl uttered nervously upwards towards her wig like an indecisive bird and she touched her fi ngers to the stiff, grey curls. “She hasn’t wanted to go to the loo, though. I can’t think why. But the telly’s on for her. And she’s been as good as gold for the last three hours.”

Barbara found her in the sitting room, in her husband’s tattered easy chair, lolling back into the greasy indentation which his head had made over the years. The television was roaring at a volume that accommodated Mrs. Gustafson’s failing hearing. It was Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The film that had that line about whistling. Barbara had seen it at least a dozen times, and she shut it off just as Bacall made her fi nal shimmy across the room in Bogart’s direction. Barbara had always liked that moment best. She’d always liked its veiled promise of the future.

“Now she’s all right, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson said anxiously from the doorway. “You can see she’s all right.”

Mrs. Havers was slumped to one side in the chair. Her mouth was slack. Her hands played with the hem of her dress which she’d drawn up to the height of her thighs. The air surrounding her was foetid with the odour of excrement and urine.

“Mum?” Barbara said.

She didn’t respond although she hummed four notes as if with the intention of beginning a song.

“See how quiet and nice she can get?” Mrs. Gustafson said. “She can be a real jewel, can your mum, when she wants.”

On the floor just inches from her mother’s feet, the hose of the vacuum cleaner was curled into a coil.

“What’s that doing here?” Barbara asked.

“Now, Barbie, it does help keep her-”

Barbara felt something inside her give way, like a dam that crumbles when it cannot contain the pressure-build of standing water any longer. “Didn’t you even notice that she’d messed herself?” she said to Mrs. Gustafson. She found it a miracle that her voice sounded so calm.

Mrs. Gustafson blanched. “Messed? Why, Barbie, you must be mistaken. I asked her twice. She didn’t want the loo.”

“Can’t you smell her? Haven’t you checked her? Have you left her alone?”

Mrs. Gustafson’s lips quivered with a hesitant smile. “I can see you’re feeling a bit put out, Barbie. But if you’ve spent some time with her-”

“I’ve spent years with her. I’ve spent my whole life with her.”

“I only meant to say-”

“Thank you, Mrs. Gustafson. You won’t be needed again.”