pliant, graceful aspen poplars ran up beside the house from the river to the road at the front, breaking up the glare of the sun – or, more usually, breaking the force of wind and rain against the house. In the barn, planes of yellow sunshine swam with motes of dust from the cloth Elise was using to cover an early Victorian chaise longue, a raspberry velvet with a fine pattern in it, like tiny leaves. Her business partner, Ruth, scoured the sales and auction rooms for unusual pieces, found buyers for their finished products, and delivered them; Elise repaired and upholstered and French-polished as necessary. They had a genius for spotting derelict bits of junk and seeing how they could be made enchanting: the pieces always looked as if they were smuggled out from
Elise paused in her heaving of fabric through her sewing machine, taking off the glasses she was beginning to need for close work, smiling and wiping her face on her sleeve. – Why don’t you make coffee? she suggested consolingly.
He didn’t want to talk to her about how he felt, but heard it spilling out of him nonetheless. – I’m dry. I’ve dried up.
– Why don’t you write about Evelyn? You know, about her life, all the stuff about how she nearly emigrated, and then working in the bakery, and so on. Isn’t that all really interesting?
He hated the idea of turning his mother’s life into material, garnering for himself the glamour of the proletarian hardship in his background, when the truth had been that he had left her determinedly behind, casting off her way of life. He wouldn’t even argue with Elise. It wasn’t the first time she had suggested this. He supposed the social milieu he came out of – the working class of a great manufacturing city – seemed as alien and exotic to his wife as her background did to him: show jumping and boarding school and a house in France. It had excited them, when they were first together, to play out their class roles as though they had been born in another century: he would have been her servant, she would have been his mistress, finding his accent and uncouthness an impassable divide, deeper than all the efforts of sympathy and imagination.
– No, I wouldn’t, Elise had insisted. – I wouldn’t have been like that. Not everyone was like that, there were always feelings that transgressed those boundaries.
The weather was hot and fine. He went out with his friend Gerald, for one of their usual walks in the countryside. They followed the Monnow downstream; it hurried noisily over the lip of boulders and pebbles washed smooth, bulging under the thick lens of water. The path first hugged its bank, then meandered away from it across small fields with hedgerows dense with birdsong, bee-drone; blossom was snowed over the stumpy bitter blackthorns, the beeches’ slim buds were fine tan leather, the still-bare ash dangled its dead keys. One of the great patriarchal beeches had come down across the path in a high wind only a few weeks before, its roots nakedly upreared, the buds at its far extremity still glistening with deluded life, a woodpecker’s neat secret hole exposed at eye level, a raw crack in the wood of the massive trunk where it had hit the earth. They had to climb over it, admiring the thick folds in the beige hide where the limbs pushed their way out.
Paul said he had been thinking about the old model of human time as a succession of declining ages, each approximating less and less to the intensity and quality of the original life-force. Cultures gained through time in technical sophistication, but in adopting increasingly complex forms, the primordial force expended and exhausted itself, lost density and beauty.
– And then what? Gerald said.
– The Stoics thought that, like growth from a seed, at the end of a phase all life dies back inside itself, the form is annihilated, the force remains alone. We’re living at the end of something, using something up.
– It’s more likely that life on earth will just ramble on and on farther ahead than we can see, inventing new kinds of messes, undergoing all sorts of horrors and then patching up again, changing the shape of things out of all recognition. Each generation insisting, this is it, we’ve really done for it, this really is it this time.
Gerald was delicately intelligent, sceptical, huge, with a craggy pockmarked face, massive jaw, long hair tucked behind his ears. He had a fractional post (all he wanted) teaching French literature at the University of Glamorgan, and he lived alone in a disordered flat in Cardiff, his carpet stained brown with tea from the huge pot he was always topping up. The place reeked of marijuana, he lived on hummus and pitta bread and Scotch eggs; utterly undomesticated, he was able to keep his own times and lose himself in whatever labyrinths of reading or thought he strayed into. Paul and he were working together, fitfully, on translations of Guy Goffette, a Belgian poet. Sometimes Paul thought that Gerald’s freedom was what he wanted most and was deprived of, because of the distractions of his family. But he shrank from it too; what bound him to the children seemed to him life-saving. He thought of them as his blessing, counterbalancing the heady instability of a life lived in the mind.
Paul lamented some of the renovations in the valley, ugly barn conversions for holiday lets. Cottages that were once the homes of agricultural labourers fetched stockbrokers’ prices now, as if the countryside was under some sick enchantment, in which the substance of things was invisibly replaced with only a simulacrum of itself. Gerald told him his regret was romantic; he asked Paul if he wanted back the unsanitary homes of the rural poor.
– Did you and Gerald talk? Elise asked later. She was cleansing her face in front of the mirror in the bedroom, sitting in the long T-shirt she wore for bed.
– About what?
– About Evelyn, what you’re feeling. I suppose that’s improbable. You two never talk about real things.
– They are real.
She was pulling the faces she made to stretch the skin while she scoured it with greasy cotton-wool balls; her hair was scraped out of the way behind a band. When she was finished, she stood over him where he sat on the side of the bed, raking his hair with her fingers away from his brow, frowning into his frown, interrogating him.
– Tell me how you’re feeling, she said. – Why don’t you tell me?
– I’m all right.
In the night he woke, sure that his mother was close to him in the bedroom. The pale curtains at the window were inflating and blowing in the night wind; he had a confused idea that he was sick and had been brought in to sleep in her bed, as had happened sometimes when he was a child. Evelyn would wake him, moving around late at night in the room and undressing, quietly in charge. He seemed to smell the old paraffin heater. He struggled to sit up, clammy and guilty, breathless. Elise slept with her back turned, a mound under the duvet, corona of hair on the pillow. Light from the landing slipped through the crack where the catch was broken and the door never quite closed; the dressing-table mirror picked it up and shone like flat water.
When he was a teenager, he had thought his mother an exceptional, unique woman, thwarted only by her limited life and opportunities from becoming something more. She was physically clumsy, good-looking, but inept in her relations with other people, shyly superior. As if it explained something, she had always told the story of how she had been on the point of emigrating to Canada, after her parents died: she had been a dutiful daughter, nursing both of them through long illnesses. She had filled out all the papers, she said. Then instead, at the last minute, in her late thirties, she had married his father and had Paul, long after she had given up hope of having a child of her own. When he was a boy she used to hold his face between her hands, and he had read in her look the promise of himself, surprising and elating her, the giftedness she could not account for.
III
P ia didn’t come home. She was still calling her mother, insisting she was all right, but when Annelies contacted the university, they said she had dropped out of all her classes. Paul went up to London, not knowing what he ought to do to help. Annelies had lived for years in a terraced street off Green Lanes road in Harringay: he could have believed himself in Istanbul or Ankara, the shop signs unintelligible to him, the heaped-up luscious excess of fruit and vegetables lit by electric lamps under green plastic awnings, the cafes with baklava and brass coffee-makers set out in their windows, everything still open for business at seven in the evening, rich with the smells of lamb and garlic from the restaurants. Annelies’s little house was over-stuffed and airless, sweat glistened on the tanned, freckled skin across the top of her breasts. She wore a sleeveless flowered dress; the brassy glints in her curls were beginning to be mixed with grey. They sat in the kitchen and she opened a bottle of Gewurztraminer, which he
