blowing drifts and across the lake's stunned surface (men in fishing shanties after perch and smelt). How she'd loved it, nature at the cutting edge, alert and pure. I could not have known how pure that winter would one day seem to me, bright with detail, as though set aside for future use. We had our landscape of meditation and rough love, working it out, good days and bad. I could see the place clearly, see them in it, down to the weave of their Shetland sweaters. What I needed was a sense of the present, their living days, the things around them. They'd removed themselves from my experience of real places.Who were they when I wasn't there? What were the secrets they were keeping? I knew them in the simplest way, the accumulation, the natural gathering of hours. Is it a personal limitation or a theory of the universe that makes me want to say this is everything? This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them. Certainly this is what I wanted from Kathryn and Tap, the seeping love of small talk and family chat. I wanted them to tell me how they'd spent their day.Ann, that evening, leaned against the balustrade on her terrace, facing in toward the door, where I stood with a drink. It was still light, too early to go to dinner, and she was telling me that Charles had just become involved in a major project in the Gulf. He would be part of a team responsible for the safety system in a gas liquefaction plant on Das Island, due to be operational by the end of the year. He had recited a stream of data over the phone. Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas per day, yearly tonnage of butane, propane, sulphur. He was excited, the Arabs were excited. The Japanese, who had already contracted for most of the processed gas, were also excited. The safety apparatus was an engineering marvel and Charles could hardly wait to get started.'When does it happen?”'He's back here day after tomorrow. A week later he flies to Abu Dhabi and pitches up on his island.”'Summer in the Gulf.”'It's a wonderful piece of luck. We're both a little stunned by it. He needs to get immersed in something like this, something brand new.”'Complex systems, endless connections.”'These bring him peace, I think. Peace and rest. He wants to talk to you incidentally. Instructed me to make sure James didn't leave town. Bind and gag him if necessary, he said.”'I look forward to seeing the old bastard. It's been a while.”'We're going to Mycenae while he's here. It's that time again. The goat-bells and wild poppies. He loves to sit on top of the palace ruins after everyone has left. The wind makes a ghostly sound, sweeping between those hills. Mycenae is his place, as Delphi is mine. Blood and steel. This is what he says about it. Massive rocks, blood cries, something old that he claims to recognize but can't seem to define for me.”I reread Tap's pages that night. They were full of small incidents, moments of discovery, things the young hero sees and wonders about. But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. I found these mangled words exhilarating. He'd made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable.There's a grizzled old man, a sodbuster he is called in the text, who injures his leg in a drunken fall. The support he uses to get around with is one we've all seen. It includes a crosspiece to fit under the armpit and it is usually made of wood-the wood of a white-barked tree in this case. It is called a burch cruch.This term had a superseding rightness as it appeared on the page. It found the spoken poetry in those words, the rough form lost through usage. His other misrenderings were wilder, freedom-seeking, and seemed to contain curious perceptions about the words themselves, second and deeper meanings, original meanings. It pleased me to believe he was not wholly innocent of these mistakes. I thought he sensed the errors but let them stand, out of exuberance and sly wonder and the inarticulate wish to delight me.
Charles Maitland sat alone in the dark hush of the bar at the Grande Bretagne, a midafternoon lull. He looked up when he saw me enter. A smile broke across his face, some kind of tigerish gleam in his eye.'You wily bastard, James. Sit, sit.”'What are you drinking? I want something long and cool.”'Long and cool, is it? What a crafty piece of work.”'What are you talking about?”The bartender wasn't at the bar. I heard him talking to a waiter in a back room somewhere.'I always thought George Rowser was a fool. I'm the bloody fool, aren't I?”'Why are you a fool, Charlie?”'Come on, come on.”'I don't know what you're getting at.”'You don't know, you don't know. In a pig's eye, Axton. You bastard, I never even suspected. I never imagined. You were damned good. I don't mind telling you I'm impressed, even a bit envious, you know. It's been a year, has it, since we've been making the rounds together? And you never slipped. You never gave me reason to wonder.”The waiter came out. Charles ordered me a drink and then simply looked at me, examining as if in retrospect, wondering what he might have missed that could have given him a clue. A clue to what? I pressed him to explain.'I appreciate your stance,' he said. 'It's the only professional stance. But the channel's no longer current, is it? You're relaxing with a friend.”'What channel?”'Come on, come on.”He was glowing with admiration and delight, pink with it, shaking a match at the end of his cigarette. I decided to wait him out. I talked about his job in the Gulf, congratulated him, asked for details. When I was halfway through my drink, he approached the subject again, fearful of being deprived of it.'Funny how I happened to see the report. I don't keep up the way I used to. I used to read every bloody word in those digests and surveys.”'What did it say exactly?”He smiled. 'Only that the Northeast Group, an American firm selling political risk insurance, has maintained a connection with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since its inception. Diplomatic sources et cetera.”I found it necessary to gaze across the room, to do some retrospective thinking of my own. I was aware that I'd narrowed my eyes, looking into the half light, like an illustration of someone studying an object or development. Two men entered speaking French.'Of course you were aware in advance of this unraveling. You knew it was blown,”'Rowser knew.”'You learned it from him, did you?”'He's very deft for someone who sweats and twitches,' I said. 'Where exactly did you see the report?”Smiling, playing the game. 'Has it appeared in more than one place? I doubt it. Too soon for that.
