a school prize a book on exploring the countryside, which had set out all the different animal footprints diagrammatically, as neatly labelled black ink blots: badger, fox, roe deer, red deer, and so on. He had dedicated himself to learning them, along with the animal droppings, the leaf shapes and the different nuts and berries, as if nature was a kind of code, like learning Latin; if he only worked hard enough at breaking the code, he believed he could break through to the mythic world of beauty he intuited behind it. He borrowed more nature books from the central library in Birmingham, catching the bus into town to change them on Saturday mornings. Afterwards he used to meet his father, who knocked off on Saturdays at midday, outside the corrugated-metal gates of the screw factory where he worked. If Paul got there early, then he started in on the pages of the first book, leaning with his back against the gates in the cobbled street whose walls were the windowless back ends of factories. It hadn’t occurred to him to look for nature anywhere in the world around him. The books were safe in their nylon string bag between his feet. In those days, even at weekends, he would have been wearing ankle socks and his school lace- ups, his skinny knees would have been bare below his shorts.
– Go and make sure he’s all right, Elise said, meaning Gerald.
It was first thing in the morning, she was in the bathroom still in her nightdress, cleaning her teeth, spitting into the sink, watching Paul in the mirror.
– You go.
He had come upstairs from his sofa in the cubbyhole, needing to pee; he wasn’t sure whether, the way things were between them, he should go ahead while she was in the room.
Her eyes fixed him. Wordless, she scrubbed vigorously behind her back molars.
– He’ll be fine. We’d have heard if he wasn’t.
She spat again. – All right then. I’ll go, she said.
– Of course he might not be there. In the summer he spends a lot of time at his parents’.
She ran the tap in a fierce spurt.
Later that morning he heard her drive off in the car. He walked around the place, having it all to himself for the first time since he’d been back. He tried the drawers in the lacquered box Elise was fixing, used the hose to water the trees, and then the vegetables and the borders and tubs, though it was the wrong time of day for this. Inside, invading the suspended stillness of the house, he looked for more to do, but Elise had washed the breakfast dishes, so he tidied up vaguely, straightened the duvets on the girls’ beds. It was already hot in the rooms upstairs, where the sun beat through the roof. His study was cool. He sat reading through a book on ecology and elegy that he’d been sent for reviewing. After a couple of hours he heard the car come back. Elise walked quickly through the house to her workroom, heels scraping on the flagstones in the yard. She must have put on her dressy shoes to go out. He followed her.
– How was Gerald?
She was wearing eye-shadow and lipstick, and a new silky shirt, printed with lilac-coloured flowers, which he hadn’t seen before. It was more or less an hour’s drive into Cardiff: she couldn’t have spent any time with Gerald, even if she saw him.
Squinting at the sewing machine, trying to thread the needle without her glasses, sucking the thread and coaxing it to a point, she claimed she didn’t know what he was talking about, that she’d been out with Ruth to look at a dresser for sale on one of the farms. He didn’t believe her. Perhaps she’d gone looking for Gerald and he’d been out. Or perhaps she’d found him, and he’d closed himself against her.
– OK, I just thought you said you were worried about him.
– He’s your friend, Paul. You’re the one who should be worrying.
They ate leftovers for lunch together, under the umbrella in the yard; Elise said they ought to invite people round for a barbecue the next day, before the weather broke.
– If you like.
He heard her telephoning round.
– I left a message on Gerald’s phone, she said. – But why don’t you try him? Try and persuade him to come. It would be good for him.
Paul tried dutifully. Gerald’s phone was switched off; he left another message.
Elise spent the next day preparing food: marinated chicken and fish and vegetables for the barbecue, little deep-fried Middle Eastern patties, a cheesecake topped with nut brittle, home-made prune ice-cream. Paul thought she was doing too much for an impromptu occasion, but she turned on him angrily when he tried to say so, her face hot from the frying. She sent him to Abergavenny in the morning with a shopping list, mainly for drinks; he drove all the way into Cardiff instead, and called in on Gerald, half-expecting he wouldn’t answer the door because it was still too early. If Gerald was surprised to see him – possibly Paul stood just where his wife had stood the day before and not been invited in – then he only hesitated for one moment, puzzling, swaying slightly on his feet (small, like his ears), before he turned without a word, as was usual, and preceded Paul through the dank old air of the three flights of stairs to his lair under the roof.
Inside the flat, black plastic bags of waste paper and kitchen rubbish lay open on the floor, the hose of a vacuum cleaner plugged in at the wall snaked on the carpet; the windows were thrown up high and the plum-dark leaves of the copper beech outside were bruised and brooding in the wind that was supposed to herald different weather. Neither of them commented on the cleaning in progress; Paul felt uncomfortably as if he’d stumbled into his friend’s privacy. Gerald made tea, meticulous in his measuring and stirring. He said he was trying to give up smoking, and was baking his dope instead into chocolate brownies made from a packet mix; bringing some in a cake tin from the kitchen, he offered them to Paul, who wasn’t tempted. The brownies looked dry. Gerald munched through two with an air of despatching a necessary routine. He asked after the little girls, and then showed Paul a book he was reading, about the variations among different cultures in the language used to categorise emotion.
– The Ilongot in the Philippines have a word to describe a reaction to the violation of a community norm.
– Don’t we have words for that in English?
– Can you think of any?
Paul could only think of words that weren’t emotions, like ‘respectable’ and ‘scapegoat’.
– And
– Very Russian.
– That’s the point.
Paul invited him to the party that evening, suggesting they could drive back together now; Gerald said he was busy in the afternoon. – I’ll let you know. I might come over later.
– Elise worries about you. She thinks you’re in a bad way.
– I was in a bad way. I’m feeling better. Elise persuaded me to wash, which was a place to start, for which I’m grateful. And she drove over here when I was at your place, to get my pills for me.
Paul pretended he hadn’t known this. – She came in here?
– She dropped something actually. Will you take it for her?
Gerald hunted through the heaps on his desk until he found a printed silk scarf Paul recognised. It smelled of Elise.
– Did the pills work?
– They did what they do. Under the nuanced cultural variation, the blunt chemical truncheons. It’s not a fine science.
Elise complained that he’d been gone for hours; Paul didn’t explain where he’d been. It was his job to get the fire going in the big barbecue that Elise had built out of stones from one of the ruined outhouses, the grill made by the local blacksmith. Becky and Joni arrived home with the first contingent of guests, children and parents from the school. The gang of children was soon running wild, looping around the house and garden, a few tiny ones staggering after them, down to the river where Becky womanfully scooped up the babies to safety and Joni swung from the branch of a tree to show it was hers, kicking out her legs over the water. Then they ran back again. Their parents shouted warnings and prohibitions.
Elise had made a summer punch, with mint and borage and strawberries floating in it, served in a glass jug frosted from the freezer. She had showered and washed her hair, and looked composed and demure in the new flowered shirt. He heard her tell the otter story as if it was funny, that he and the girls had wanted to stay on,
