I watched autumn pass. The Penzance winter was surprisingly mild. There were the constant sheets of rain but not the marrow-chilling cold of Chicago. The tide was in nearly all season, sealing off St. Michael’s from the rest of the city and keeping the boats docked. I’d go down to the water to do the books twice, maybe three times a week, and the rest of the days I’d sit in the guest room by the fire looking out to the Channel. Sometimes Anne would sit with me. She was waiting for something from me. She never regarded me with reproach, but the hope was unmistakable.
Sometimes I would nap in the afternoons, up in my room under a quilt Anne’s mother had given me, with a candle burning on my table. More and more I was drifting away from myself; beneath the lids of my eyes I could see out the window the black smoke and blazing green grasses of the moors and the dazed barricades of rain. I barely heard her when she came in one day, standing at the foot of my bed; only at the last moment did I find the presence of mind not to call out Leigh’s name. She was shaken and breathing hard; she thought I was sleeping. She slowly pulled off the sweater she wore, looking at it in her hands for several moments before she laid it down and unfastened the rest of her clothes. As though just thinking of it, she went to the door and locked it, but with no haste; she didn’t actually expect to be interrupted. The whole inn was quiet. There were no sounds from the kitchen below, nothing from outside, just the falling walls of rain. Soon she was naked and standing at the foot of the bed. Her body was fuller and browner than I would have expected of an Englishwoman. It was a long time since I’d seen a woman this way but now it didn’t seem so long, it didn’t seem long enough. A distant part of me wanted her but the heart I lived with these days couldn’t find its own door to beckon her in. I knew that for her to have done this was courage beyond fathom; she was struggling to continue looking at me, to not lower her eyes, though to have lowered her eyes would have been to confront her own nakedness, which was another courage too. I could not find the door for her. I sat up and tried to explain it to her.
“I’m thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” she heard the mathematician say with his usual imprecision concerning personal statistics. He pulled back from the light of the candle on the table as though to hide behind his dark Indianness in the darkness of the room. “I look in the mirror sometimes,” he said, “and I think I’m fifty or fifty-five.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how I got so damned tired. When I was younger I despised anyone who gave up so easily, but that was when the world sang to me, that was when there was a number for everything. I couldn’t imagine I’d ever feel this old and this tired.” Now he leaned into the light of the candle. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t that you’re unbeautiful, it isn’t that you don’t deserve what you want. The humiliation is mine, not yours. In a musicless moor at the end of a numberless world all I can manage now is to grieve for what I once felt and for how much I felt it. How is it I’m so old now and I don’t hear the music anymore, I don’t find the numbers anymore?” He said, “Please.” She watched him pull the quilt from around him and offer it to her; fighting back her tears, she picked up her clothes and put them on. It seemed to take her forever to pick up her clothes and put them on as he sat watching her. Then she went from the room, taking curious care not to slam the door behind her; she was the kind who would never slam even the doors that others were closing to her. She got her daughter from the hearth in the guest room below and the two made their way through the drizzle back to their cottage on the other side of town. Sometimes she would see him in the weeks and months that followed but they didn’t speak anymore and they didn’t walk on the moors. In the spring she sold the cottage and moved to a town in Devon.
After that the long distant part of who he had been drifted so far it was out of sight. He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can’t see it any more, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward. Then he stands watching
