Invisible
Jonathan Buckley

Dedication

for Susanne Hillen and Bruno

Epigraph

Die Welt die hält dich nicht, du selber bist die Welt,

Die dich in dir mit dir so stark gefangen hält.

Angelus Silesius

Table of Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

About the Author

By the same author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

one

It was an afternoon in late summer, Edward remembers, and they walked through a wood until they came to a circle of sunlit grass in the midst of tall ferns. The picnic was laid out on the scratchy plaid rug, and when their parents had fallen asleep Charlotte took his hand and they wandered off, along a path through the bracken. At the top of a hill they came upon a track of packed earth that had a ridge of matted grass and dandelions running down the middle. One side of the track was bordered by a high wall, which they followed. Walking two or three steps behind his sister, he dragged his fingertips on the blocks of stone. When a motorbike came along she stood beside him as it passed, and put a hand over his face to protect his eyes from the dust. At an angle of the wall there was a wide iron gate, and beyond the gate lay vast beds of scarlet flowers, on both sides of a wide white path that rose towards a pale yellow building. She left him by the gate and walked a short distance up the path, between child-sized shapes that might have been urns or animals. Her footsteps made a loud crunching noise, he remembers, and the building reared up like a castle in fog.

He lets go of the iron gate and begins to walk up the gravel driveway, staying close to its edge. After half a dozen paces he strikes a heavy object. He reaches forward, and touches, at the height of his waist, a curved surface of pitted stone or concrete. His hand reads the grooves of a mane, protruberant eyes, a jaw of granular teeth. He walks on, up the shallow gradient, to a flight of three low steps which conducts him between columns of finely grained stone to a glass door, open. Standing in the doorway, he waits for someone to speak, but his querying cough receives no answer. He advances, treading on polished tiles. The sound of his shoes is absorbed by a space that sounds broad and tall, like the foyer of a town hall or law court. Twenty paces straight ahead, or more, bring him to the foot of a wide carpeted staircase. Plates are being stacked in a distant room, to his left. A sweep of his cane to one side finds empty floor, then an obstruction: a high desk, with a glass-cowled lamp and a bell. He folds his cane, slots it into a jacket pocket, and smacks the bell lightly. As the chime vanishes into the high ceiling he hears a hiss, the hiss of a door’s draught excluder, followed by footsteps, approaching rapidly on a wooden floor. High above him, at his back, a woman’s voice says: ‘Hello? Hello? Wait, please.’ Startled, he turns to face the source of the call, and the footsteps are coming into the hall. A man speaks his name.

‘Mr Morton?’ the man says, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought someone was at the desk.’

‘Not to worry.’

‘I do apologise.’

‘Only this instant arrived.’

‘It’s remiss of us. I didn’t hear the taxi.’

‘He left me at the gate.’

‘Really? That’s –’

‘At my request.’

‘Ah,’ says the man, and from the dragging of the vowel it is clear that he has scrutinised him and understood. A large sheet of paper is turned, and another. ‘Good journey?’

‘Not bad. On time, more or less.’

‘Good, good,’ he says, writing with a harsh nib. ‘And no problem getting a taxi?’

‘None at all.’ High up behind him, near where the woman’s voice came from, an aerosol gushes.

‘Now, we have a single room reserved for you, on the second floor. But if you’d prefer there’s a double on the first floor. A very nice room, large. I can offer it to you at no extra charge.’

‘That’s kind of you, but I don’t need a lot of space. Just a bed and a bath and a table for my laptop,’ he says, hoisting the bag in which he carries it.

‘Well, there’s a small table in the single, a bureau in the double. I would recommend the double, Mr Morton. It’s an extremely comfortable room and very quiet. I’m afraid we don’t have air-conditioning. You knew that? With this weather we could do with it, but we just have the breeze.’

‘I prefer the breeze.’

‘Good, good. So the double it is?’

‘Thank you, Mr –?’

‘Forgive me. Caldecott, Malcolm Caldecott. The manager. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Likewise.’ He holds out his hand and Mr Caldecott takes it, giving a grip that is firm and brisk. Someone wearing steel-tipped shoes approaches and halts at the desk, brushing his sleeves with gloved hands. ‘One other thing, Mr Caldecott. Is it possible to send e-mail from my room?’

‘It is, yes. David here will show you.’ A key clinks, being detached from its hook. ‘David will take your bags up. The lift is very close.’

‘I’d rather take the stairs. You know where you are with a staircase, if you see what I mean.’

Ascending the staircase behind the porter, he slides a palm on the curving handrail, which has the coolness and smoothness of naked metal and is interrupted by a stout column of glossy stone, marble probably, and resumes with a tight angle that steers him round to a landing, where they pass through a fume of furniture polish. ‘This way,’ says David, turning left into a corridor where the air is considerably warmer than in the hall and has a dusty tang. ‘Here we are,’ he announces.

A lock grinds and snaps, and a freshening waft of rose scent arrives. He rests his hand on wallpaper that is embossed with a florid pattern and slightly greasy. A hand gently hooks his other cuff to draw him forward.

‘OK,’ says David, uncertainly. ‘Well, what you have here, sir, basically, is the bed over here, in the middle of the room, against the wall.’ David pats a quilt three times and moves further away. ‘Over here is the bathroom.’ Another door opens, making a soft boom, and now there is cooler air, which has a weak glassy smell in which there is an element of bleach. ‘Right. OK. Well, basically what you’ve got, sir,’ he continues, his voice amplified by the bare room, ‘is the basin on your left. It comes out quite a way, and the bath on your right, yes, a bit more, that’s it. And then there’s quite a gap, a bin there, careful sir, yes, and right down the end here, towel rail there, and down the end here there’s the toilet,’ and as if to prove its existence he flushes it, with a clank like an ancient water pump.

When the presentation of the room has been completed and the computer plugged in, he unpacks his clothes and eats half of one of the sandwiches he made this morning. He switches the laptop on and immediately switches it off again. Still wearing his jacket, he lies on the bed. His outstretched hands do not reach the edge of the mattress, nor do his feet. The smooth fat pillow subsides slowly under his head, exhaling a fragrance of pristine linen. He flips the face of his watch: it is not yet six o’clock. He is unaccountably tired, but he should at least attempt to work. ‘Garzoncello scherzoso’, the phrase that pestered him intermittently all morning, appears in his mind again, pursued by the English words: playful boy; playful lad; larking lad; lively lad. He drowses in the humid air, while the words circle ceaselessly, like flies: lively boy; scamp; lively lad; boy.

Cleaning the mirrors on the balcony, Eloni wonders if the man who has just arrived is somebody important, because there was something important about the way he held his head, in the manner of someone who is used to being treated respectfully. The dark glasses made him look frightening, and it seemed from his expression that he was still annoyed that there was nobody at the desk to greet him, or perhaps David had annoyed him in some way. His slow, stiff-backed walk was like a soldier’s walk, but his hair was longer than a soldier’s would be, and the soft bulge of his belly above his belt wasn’t like a soldier, and his clothes were too messy for a soldier. His shoes were covered in dust, and his denim shirt was black with sweat around the collar. And would a soldier wear a crumpled jacket or have a big brown stain on his sleeve? He is interesting but perhaps not nice, she concludes, whisking the duster once more over the head of Prince Albert, then she hears the double peep of the butcher’s van.

The driver’s surly face, when he sees her hurrying towards him, does not change at all. Reluctantly he climbs down to open the back doors. The hinges crack when he pulls at the handles, making him scowl more sourly. Without a word he hands her the parcels of meat, piling them into her arms without once looking her in the eye. In all the time she has been here, he has spoken not a single complete sentence to her; he has never asked her name, and she does not know his. He pokes a crumpled invoice under the string of the top parcel and turns his back, which has a stripe of sweat right down it.

‘Thank you,’ she says to the stripe.

The driver pushes the doors shut with a slap of both hands. He gives one of them a shove with a shoulder to be sure, and a sound is knocked out of him by the effort: ‘Yup.’

‘Goodbye,’ she says, as the driver gives the door another bang with his shoulder. Clamping her chin on the invoice, she turns round slowly and almost walks into Mr Caldecott, who takes half the packets from her and comes with her to the kitchen.

When she has finished putting the meat into the refrigerator he looks at her directly and tells her again that he is asking about work. ‘But you understand, I can’t promise anything. It’s –’

‘I understand,’ she tells him.

‘I’ll do what I can, Eloni,’ he says. He gives her today’s thin envelope of money.

‘Yes,’ she replies, looking at her watch. She will be late if she doesn’t leave now. Over Mr Caldecott’s shoulder a long string of cobweb hangs from the underside of a rack of pans, with a blue-grey clot of web dangling at its end. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

From a chair by the window Malcolm contemplates the Randall Room, where William Randall was stabbed by his wife one afternoon. And it was in this room that Miss Lavinia Sergeant, the celebrated actress, caused a scandal by attending a song recital without a male escort, a scandal she compounded by smoking a cigarette when the concert was over. He gets up to look at the poppies at the ploughman’s feet and at the shepherdess in the oak grove behind him, whose face is the face of Lily Corbin. She never fails to cheer him up, this girl, with her look of guileless invitation, but will anyone pay any attention to her in years to come, he asks himself, if nobody knows her story?

He wanders back to his office, where the prospectus for the Beltram Highlands Development lies on his desk. An aerial photograph on the cover shows a slender valley strewn with computer-generated bunkers and greens that resemble a string of cartoon amoebas, swimming around the hotel and its lake. Inside, in the computer-generated bar of Scotland’s premier golf resort, a superb selection of single-malt whiskies is provided for the Beltram Highlands’ clientele – the decision makers, the high-flyers, the people who expect the best. Famous international designers have been consulted at every stage in the creation of Beltram Highlands. Only the finest materials and fittings have been used. ‘A perfectionist’s eye for detail characterises every aspect of the Beltram Highlands,’ he reads, and yet the bedrooms could be from any of a hundred business hotels in Frankfurt or Birmingham or Brussels, were it not for the fact that they have no numbers, bearing instead the names of the immortals: Jones, Nicklaus, Hogan, Woods. Throughout the hotel will hang paintings by internationally recognised masters of sporting art, depicting the timeless triumphs of these sporting heroes, whose exploits can be enjoyed once again in the magnificent video library that will be available to guests, either to rent or to purchase from the hotel shop, which will also stock a superb range of top-quality equipment from every leading manufacturer.

‘Give it some thought,’ Giles had urged him, handing him the envelope as if it were a confidential document that could make him millions. ‘Give it some serious thought,’ he said, but it requires no thought at all. ‘Purgatory,’ Malcolm mutters to himself, dropping the prospectus into the bin in his office. He reads – the current economic climate…the ongoing malaise of the domestic tourism sector…a restructuring of the Beltram portfolio – then pushes the letter aside to continue writing to the suppliers who have not yet been notified of the closure. Taking care to phrase each letter differently, in a couple of hours he thanks another twenty people for their services over the years. Intending to write to Mr Ryan of Powerpoint Electrics, he picks up another blank sheet of paper, but as he gazes at the letterhead’s silhouetted oak he begins to think again of his daughter. He tries to envisage her, as she was the last time he saw her. Entering the house where her mother lived, she looked back at him. As the door closed she waved, perhaps because she was told to, and she did not smile. On her purple T-shirt her name was spelled out in silver sequins. That afternoon, he now remembers, she snatched her hand away when he was leading her across Oxford Street.

‘Dear Stephanie,’ he begins, for the sixth or seventh time. ‘Your letter arrived a couple of days ago. I’m sorry I didn’t answer right away, but I had to get my thoughts in order before replying,’ he writes, then crosses the words out. ‘I was saddened to read that you think you can’t talk to your mother. I don’t know what has happened between you, but you have to discuss this with her. Of course I won’t say anything until you tell me to, but she has to know that we’re in contact now,’ he continues, and crosses this out too. Below the cancelled lines he starts another draft. ‘First things first: for years I have hoped to see you again. I do want to see you now – more than you can possibly imagine. You should have seen my face when your letter arrived. I could hardly believe it was from you. If I –’ he writes, but a knock interrupts him and Mr Ainsworth is standing in the doorway.

‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’ Mr Ainsworth observes.

‘Nearly done,’ he smiles.

‘Care to join me? A small postprandial?’

‘My pleasure,’ he says. ‘Five minutes?’

‘Excellent man. Excellent,’ says Mr Ainsworth, winking. ‘I’ll be back,’ he adds, and over his shoulder Malcolm sees Mr Morton striding across the lobby, sweeping his cane forcefully in a wide arc, as though whisking litter from his path.

Sitting at the bureau in room 8, Edward writes:

I am, after all, visiting the family. There was a party at Mike’s place two nights ago. At 2am we had words, and I decided shortly after, while stewing in my bed, that now was as good a time as any to make the trip. Niall Gillespie came round yesterday, to install the new software, and he helped me find a hotel within striking distance of the parents. An Internet search came up with a place called the Oak, around ten miles from the parents. It sounded rather special from its website, with a billiards room and an indoor pool and something called the Randall Room, which has a wall made of glass and murals from floor to ceiling – like a mad millionaire’s conservatory, Niall said. Normally it would be out of my price range, but it has an Amazing Special Offer for August: ‘Experience the style of a bygone time, at the prices of a bygone time.’ And they are not kidding – it’s ridiculously cheap. So Niall booked a room for me, and I thought the least I could do, after all his help, was to buy him a pint or two, which is why I wasn’t at home when you rang.

And now I have arrived at the Oak, which is indeed quite a place, but empty, or almost empty. When I stop typing the only sound I can hear is a rustle of ivy outside the window. And the corridors smell empty – there’s no hint of perfume or cigarette smoke or any other trace of a passing body. I feel as if I’ve turned up at some country mansion on the wrong day, after everyone has fled back to the city. And it really is a mansion, with a vast garden – a hundred metres from the road to the front door, I reckon. Pass through the door and you’re still a long way from the reception desk, which lurks in the corner of an echoing hall that has a double-decker gallery running around it, reached by a huge staircase. The galleries are as wide as a road, with columns at every angle of the gallery – marble, it feels like, or very high-class fakes if not. I’m on the first floor, in a room you could swing a tiger in. Quite sparsely furnished, but with a sumptuous bed in the middle. And as for the bathroom – glazed tiles cover the floor and walls, and the bath is an ancient freestanding tub that would take both of us quite comfortably. It has a wide curvaceous rim, and taps with enormous four-sparred handles, and a shower nozzle that’s as big as a sunflower. The toilet is an antique as well: the chain has a fat sausage of porcelain dangling from it, and the cistern seems to be about ten feet in the air. Judging by the noise, it holds a hundred gallons.

The new software didn’t go quite to plan. Niall promised me a seductively female voice. Like Lauren Bacall, he said. I’d be happy with Ethel Merman, I told him – anything’s better than the drone who’s currently in residence. The name of the new voice was ‘Sandra, high quality’, which suggests a Las Vegas call-girl, don’t you think? (What I had before was ‘Fred’, it turns out.) The sex change was a very swift operation, but the result was not at all Lauren Bacall: more like an over-keen intern on some Midwest radio station. Still, definitely a big improvement: unfailingly clear and her intonation was appreciably more ingratiating than Fred’s. I write ‘was’ because Sandra has left me, after less than a day. When I switched on the computer this morning it was Fred the depressive automaton who spoke to me. I don’t know what has happened, and it’s beyond my capabilities to get Sandra back.

It’s even hotter today than when you left. My scalp feels as though it’s got ants crawling over it and I’m dripping on the keyboard. Thunderstorms are forecast, the manager tells me. His name is Caldecott – an obliging and tactful chap whose timbre suggests someone on the lower slopes of middle age, but with an older man’s undertone of world-weariness. That’s what running a hotel does for you, I suppose.

In the morning Charlotte is whisking me away, so I may not have time to write. Shall we speak the day after? Write me a report from Recanati, if you have the time.

He presses a key, and the computer recites his message to him. Having corrected his mistakes, he sends the e-mail. The air in the garden is absolutely still; upstairs a door closes, then silence returns.

Malcolm locks the door of room 48, reassured that the stain from the water tank has not spread any further across the ceiling. Tucking the key into a pocket of his waistcoat, he covers his mouth to yawn, then walks slowly towards the staircase, past the dormant rooms, none of which has had an occupant since last summer. At the head of the stairs he pauses to press a toe against the uneven seam where a length of new carpet adjoins the old and the field of plain colour behind the loops of vine changes from crimson to maroon. He descends to the landing of the first floor and turns to walk past room 20, which is vacant, as is number 18, and number 16 as well. At the door of room 14, the suite in which the great soprano Adelina Patti once stayed, he hesitates, hearing gunshots and screeching tyres. He listens, and then there’s Simon Laidlaw’s voice, approaching the door, talking on the phone.

He moves away, past Giles Harbison’s room, then the one in which Mr and Mrs Sampson are staying, and room 9, where a Do Not Disturb sign hangs from the handle, above Mr Gillies’s brogues. He goes down the stairs and crosses the hall to turn off the lights in the lounge. On one of the tables, underneath the panel depicting a croquet game, two empty wine bottles stand by an ashtray, in which lies the stub of a cigar, with its scarlet and gold paper band still in place. He turns off the lights, and in the moonlit dusk of the lounge he regards the portrait of Walter Davenport Croombe. Late one night, in the autumn of 1861, Croombe stood on the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, watching the bricklayers and stonemasons at work under arc lamps. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine how it must have been, to see the gangs of labourers, in the small hours of the morning, in a blaze of artificial light, unloading the carts that had hauled the stone from the quarry of St Maximin. He tries to picture the building site, illuminated by banks of gas mantles, and Croombe marvelling at this nocturnal scene, as he would marvel at the completed Grand Hôtel one year later, when he would sit in the Salle des Fêtes, with Sandrine, amid an infinity of reflected gaslights.

Back in the hall, still under the influence of his reverie, he looks up at the galleries that Croombe built around the hall in the year he bought the hotel. Up there, in front of the bust of Prince Albert, Adelina Patti one afternoon sang an aria by Rossini, impromptu, to an Italian family that was gathering downstairs, making ready to depart for the church, for a wedding. He follows the cascade of the staircase from the upper floor to the hall, tracing the spirals of wrought-iron ivy under the sinuous black handrail, admiring the way the spirals unwind into looser strands as they tumble down the stairs. In something like a gesture of consolation, he places a hand on the rail.

Seated at the reception desk, he once again reads the letter he has written to Stephanie:

You ask how I’ve been. I’ve been all right. I have a good job. I like where I work and the people I work with, and that’s more than most people can say, I suspect. But I have to admit it’s been difficult, never seeing you or speaking to you. It’s tempting, very tempting, to pick up the phone right now. To hear your voice – I’ve wanted that so often. How do you sound, I wonder? You were a child last time you spoke to me and now you’re a young woman. It will be wonderful to hear you. A minute from now I could be listening to your voice, but I can’t do this – I mustn’t do it – until you’ve spoken to your mother. Nothing could please me more than to see you straight away, but we must take everyone’s feelings into account. Why don’t you talk to her and then give me a call? The number’s on the top of this letter. I’m here most of the time, Monday to Sunday.

Actually, the Oak will be closing down very soon – less than three weeks from now, in fact. It would be nice if you could come down here for a day or two, to see where I’ve been working all these years, while you’ve been going through school. There’s a pool in the basement, a huge bath of mineral water. You won’t ever have come across anything quite like it. I’ll put a leaflet in with this letter so you can see what I mean.

I would love to see you, Stephanie. Every day I’ve thought about you. I’ll stop now, otherwise I’ll get embarrassing, and you won’t want to come down here after all.

Jack Naylor comes in from the garden, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. ‘Evening, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, swinging the bottle behind his back. ‘Working late?’

‘Odds and ends, Jack,’ he replies. ‘Odds and ends.’

‘Need me for anything?’

‘No, Jack. Thank you. I’ll be off home in a minute.’

‘I’ll say goodnight then, Mr Caldecott.’

‘Yes. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ says Jack, crossing to the room that was once the office of the telegraph clerk.

For the last time he reviews what he has written. It is inadequate, but this is only the beginning, he tells himself, putting it into an envelope with a leaflet for the Oak.

From an inner pocket of his jacket he removes the note he has written for the morning: a copy of the Daily Mail should be put on Mr Gillies’s tray, who would like a breakfast of two fried eggs and thickly sliced ham, with well-toasted bread and strong coffee; a copy of The Times should be left at Mr and Mrs Sampson’s table in the breakfast room – it is their wedding anniversary, so congratulations might be offered; Mrs Ainsworth dislikes cut flowers, so there should be no vase on the Ainsworths’ table. He takes a paper clip from the wooden tub on the desk and attaches the memo to the cover of the register. From the glass door, under the elegant gold lettering, his weary face regards him. He turns off every light in the hall except the lamp above the desk.

Looking at the stairs, he recalls the sight of the workmen as they chipped away the concrete in which the staircase had been encased, exposing inch by inch the wrought-iron ivy. Giles Harbison had come down from London that afternoon. Stooped under scaffolding, they admired the panels that nobody had expected to find: the tennis game, the croquet match, the archery contest. They went to the terrace, where Giles produced a pack of H.Upmann cigars and lobbed one to him. Sitting on a sack of sand, wearing white paper overalls that were too small for them, they smoked their cigars and looked at the rainwater pooling on the tarpaulins that covered the flower beds.

From Jack’s room the sound of snoring emerges, a forthright noise, like the snoring of a bad actor. Looking through the crack between the door and the jamb, he observes Jack asleep on the camp bed. He has wound his jacket tightly and lodged it under his neck as a pillow roll, which has tilted his head back so that his nose and chin and Adam’s apple form three sharp little peaks in a row. His mouth gapes as if an oxygen mask has just been taken off him. Soundlessly he pulls the door shut.

two

On a big white chair, opposite the man and woman who are presenting the show, sits an actress whose face is on the cover of a magazine this week. Behind the man, on a big screen, the actress is dressed in a nurse’s uniform. They all look round at the screen, and the picture begins to move. An old man is lying in a hospital bed, with a white plastic curtain around him. Tightly he grips the nurse’s arm, then lets it go. On the screen the actress is crying; watching her cry, the woman presenter puts down her sheet of paper and looks as if she might start crying too. Facing the screen, the actress touches her hair nervously; she has very long fingers, with nails as pale as cuttlefish bones. Her watch is the size and shape of a lemon half.

Eloni pours the water over the tea bag. ‘Yes, totally, totally,’ the actress answers, making her eyes big, like a young girl’s. She pulls at the hem of her tiny skirt and the man looks at her legs, which are shapely and bare and very smooth. The actress puts her fingertips on her face. ‘I was like, I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ she says, shaking her head in bewilderment, and then she laughs, and the man and the woman both laugh with her.

‘I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ Eloni mimics, buttering her toast. From her window she looks down into the back yard, at the rusting drums of cooking oil and the bin of meat wrappers and the mound of squashed cardboard boxes, on which the pictures of tomatoes have been turned milky by the sunlight. Even with the window shut the room smells bad, because of the blood on the wrappers and the bucket of bones in the corner of the yard, which the cats get into every night, knocking the lid off. And there are big patches of trodden food on the tarmac, a stinking grey mud of vegetable leaves and peel and scraps of rind that never gets scraped away. She would complain, but that might get her into trouble, or she could offer to clean the place, but that might be the same as complaining. She takes the air freshener from under the sink and shoots a cloud of sugary rose scent into all four corners of her room.

Before leaving for work at the Oak she irons her best blouse and the overall she wears at Burgerz. She opens her purse. It contains only coins, so she takes a £10 note from one of the plastic wallets she keeps underneath the mattress at night. She wraps the wallet tightly again, binding it with rubber bands, then extracts the other one and takes them both to the sink, and there she stuffs them into the tin of tea bags, where no thief would think of looking. On the television an expert in something to do with families is frowning deeply as he listens to a phone call from a woman in Liverpool, who has some problem with her husband. The blouse has cooled enough to put it on. She turns back the bed sheets, then switches the television off. At the door she stops to kiss the photograph of her parents, and picks up the sheaf of keys.

This is her favourite time of the day, when the air still has a taste of dew and the whole of the High Street lies in a deep, moist shadow. Up on the highest roofs there are patches of buttery sunlight and the pale blue sky above them is as pure a colour as any precious stone. It is cool in the shadow, but the cloudless sky and the sunlit roofs are promises of the warmth of the approaching day. Singly, at an easy speed, the cars pass by, slipping between the buildings at the end of the street like fish between boulders. She walks up the High Street, looking in the windows, at washing machines and cameras and clothes she cannot afford, but today is one of the days she feels the beginnings of happiness as she looks at these things, because each of them seems to reveal a life that might be hers. Be patient, the shops seem to say to her: be patient, and work hard, and this life will be yours, in time. Resting her forehead on the cold glass, she stares into the delicatessen. On a small white table bulbous jars of fruits preserved in syrup glisten in the light from the street. Shelves recede into darkness, laden with plaques of Swiss chocolate, spices in bottles, dozens of different pots of honey and mustard, deep tins with labels that seem to have been drawn by hand. Stepping back, she looks up and down the street, to make sure that nobody has noticed her. The hands and numerals of the church clock are glowing bronze against the golden stone of the tower. A morning like this is almost enough to make her forget everything, she thinks, staring into the dazzle of the clock, then she sees the time that the hands are showing, and resumes her walk, taking her usual detour to avoid the police station.

She strides up the hill towards the gateway of the Oak, walking in the middle of the empty narrow road, in a tunnel of leaves, on a long avenue of leaf shadows. She passes through the gate, onto the shining white drive, where she stops by the big stone flowerpot in the shape of a lion. The sun is lifting off the horizon and some bits of mist remain in the lower part of the valley, clinging like cotton to the grass where the slopes are in the shade. Above the mist, dozens of cars are on the move, up and down the long line of the road. Nose to tail, two lorries climb the incline, slowly as a caterpillar. She surveys the ranks of roses in the flower beds, these English flower beds that meet the grass at borders as straight as the edges of a carpet. She looks at the hotel, at the place she has worked for so many weeks. The stone of the façade has been turned a sweet hay-like yellow by the early sun and the windows shine like little waterfalls. On the garden side the shaggy coat of ivy that hangs from the gutter to the ground is the black-green of river moss. She looks at the stone and at the ivy, and the beautiful colours seem to soothe the sadness that is falling over her, a sadness that is for herself but also a bit for Mr Caldecott. But she must get to work, she tells herself, counting the windows in which the curtains are closed, each of which is the sign of a job to be done.

Three cars are parked beyond the ivy, deep in the shadow of the building. Close to the wall at the far end is Mr Gillies’s handsome old car, with its thick chrome bumpers and wrinkled leather seats. On the other side of the bay, under the honeysuckle, sits Mr Harbison’s BMW. Beside it is a silver sports car, as slender as a speedboat, with a back window that’s the size of the slit of a letter box. Curious, she walks up to it, treading in the channels that its tyres have ploughed in the gravel. The windscreen is as big as a bath towel and is almost flat. It must cost more than she would earn in two years, or three years, she guesses, then she sees that a man is crouching in the passenger seat, bent double as he reaches for something in the glove compartment, which is nothing but a plain steel shelf. He sits up, holding a map, and notices her. He gets out of the car and leans on the low roof, his hands wide apart and arms locked. ‘Hi. How’s it going?’ he says, ruffling his uncombed hair. His voice is pleasing, like a newsreader’s, and he is handsome in the way that young American lawyers on TV are handsome, with a small straight nose and long jaw, and a brow that’s all straight lines. His white shirt, heavily creased and half tucked into the waistband of his vivid blue trousers, is unbuttoned to the breastbone, showing skin as smooth as a boy’s and the colour of her own skin, a colour that only rich people have in England.

‘Good, yes,’ she replies.

Glints come off the face and bracelet of his watch as he raises a hand to screen the glare of the sun. ‘Beautiful morning,’ he comments, blinking at the sky. ‘Real summer.’

‘It’s nice,’ she agrees.

They regard the unclouded sky for a moment. The man scrubs a hand across his hair again, making it even messier. ‘You work here?’ he casually asks.

‘Yes.’

He rubs his unshaven chin, seeming to consider an idea that has occurred to him. ‘It’s quiet,’ he adds, in a tone that could mean that quietness is good, or could mean that it’s bad.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Very quiet.’

‘Very quiet,’ she replies, and the man looks at her with narrowed eyes, as though she had said something unusual. Beginning to feel embarrassed, she is relieved to hear the clang of the hotel’s glass door. Mr Caldecott appears under the porch but, seeing her talking, at once withdraws with a backwards step. She points towards the building. ‘I have to –’ she apologises to the young man.

He looks at her and smiles again, and opens the door of the car. ‘Sure,’ he says, then lowers himself into the passenger seat and ducks down to attend to something on the floor.

Touching for luck the coin-shaped fossil embedded in the left-hand column of the porch, as she has done every morning, she goes into the hotel. There is no one at the desk, but a note from Mr Caldecott is lying on the register. A printing machine could not make writing as fine as Mr Caldecott’s: you could lay a ruler across the tops of his capital letters, and every loop is identical, like the eyes of large needles laid in a row. She scans Mr Caldecott’s handwriting, then reads what it says and goes to the storeroom for her overall and pinafore. In the kitchen she turns on the lights and the coffee maker. She removes the cutlery that will be needed, giving each piece a shine before setting it down on the large metal tray, which she then takes through.

In a corner of the dining room Mr Caldecott is sitting beside Mr Harbison, studying a sheet of paper that covers most of the table. Mr Harbison is looking out of the window, pursing his lips and grimacing, while with the fingers of his right hand he twists the too-tight ring that he wears on his left little finger. ‘Video games?’ she overhears Mr Caldecott ask sarcastically, at which Mr Harbison stops turning the ring and gives Mr Caldecott a look of glum sympathy, as if they had suffered a setback together. Pinning a finger to the sheet of paper, Mr Caldecott makes a remark she cannot hear. With one hand Mr Harbison makes a gesture of giving something away without a thought, then a frenzy of beeps starts inside his jacket. Rolling his eyes in exasperation, he gets up from the table, plunging his hand into his inner pocket. He turns away, hunching over his phone like a man trying to light a cigarette in a gale. ‘Yes,’ he says, annoyed. ‘Yes. Yes. Good. Goodgood. Yes. Right. Good. Yes.’

Mr Caldecott signals to her, and orders a full English breakfast for both of them. Noticing her glance at the building plan, he raises an eyebrow, smiling resignedly.

‘And a bottle of mineral water,’ Mr Harbison whispers loudly, smothering the phone. ‘Still. Not fizzy. Thanks, Eleanor,’ he says, and then he does a peculiar wave, which she realises a second later is meant for the owner of the silver car, who is coming towards them and looking past her as if she is not there.

Annie has turned up now, and together they prepare the breakfast for Mr Caldecott and Mr Harbison, which Annie serves, leaving Eloni to set the tray for Mr Gillies and carry it upstairs. She returns through the dining room, expecting to see Mr and Mrs Sampson, who usually come downstairs at exactly half past seven, but instead she sees, by an opened window, the man who arrived yesterday – Mr Morton, says Mr Caldecott’s note. Tying the loose belt of her pinafore as she hurries to his table, she apologises for keeping him waiting.

‘Not to worry,’ says the man, directing a smile to the side of her face. He gives his order, blinking slowly at the table, as if he has not woken up properly, while his fingers stroke the folded napkin. Moving around the juice glass, his hand knocks it a tiny distance from its place, and it is then that she knows that he cannot see. ‘Pardon me for asking,’ he says, as she finishes writing, ‘but was it you upstairs when I arrived?’

‘I am sorry?’

His eyes flicker at her. They are very dark and not clouded at all, but the skin around them seems shrunken and lifeless, like a fruit that has begun to dry out. ‘When I was standing at the desk,’ he says, ‘before Mr Caldecott came, there was someone on the gallery, a woman. Up above,’ he gestures, pointing over his shoulder. ‘She spoke to me. “Hello.” I was wondering if it was you.’

‘Yes,’ she replies.

‘I thought I recognised you. My name’s Edward,’ he announces, pushing a hand towards her, for her to take.

‘Mr Morton,’ she says, as if his name were hers. Confused by herself, she backs away.

Through the window in the kitchen door she spies on Mr Morton as he eats his breakfast. His head never stops moving: he turns his face to the garden, to the room, to his food, to the ceiling, as if he did not know what to do with his eyes. Like crabs nibbling at seaweed on a rock, his fingers scurry over the basket of croissants, barely touching it. The sight of him gives her a feeling of unease, not just because of his strangeness, but because he brings to her mind the blind man at Sarandë, and now she can think of nothing except the blind man at his table. All day long he sat there, outside the café, drinking cup after cup of coffee, gulping the soup that the owner’s wife brought him, smoking his American cigarettes without a break. From the start of the day to sunset the blind man sat staring at the sea with his dead white eyes, as if plotting the most complicated plan that anybody had ever thought of. His jaws were moving all the time, clenching with anger, and nobody spoke to him, other than the owner’s wife, and she seemed scared of him too. All day he was there, staring into the sun, with the evil dog at his feet. The animal stooped under the weight of its greasy black fur and a wide scar of bald skin ran across the dog’s shoulder. Its ragged mouth, always grinning, swung back and forth like a scythe when the animal walked. Leaving the blind man at his table, the dog would swagger down to the beach, to root through the rubbish on the sand, and in the middle of the day it took shelter from the sun inside the boat that was stranded on the beach, creeping up the ramp of reddening sand to the breach in the hull. Like a drop of black oil falling into a pool of oil it disappeared into the shadows, and sometimes you would hear it barking at a rat in there, a horrible sound, booming out of the wreck. One day she sat on a chair she had found in the water, a cracked red chair. She was so near the wreck she could hear the scratching of the dog’s claws on the steel as it prowled through the hold. Pushing her feet into the hot sand, she looked out to sea, despairing of her life. She could see a brightly coloured sail against the hills of Corfu. She looked around her, at the tidemark of bottles and rope and seaweed and tins, at the miserable café where the blind man sat. Inside the café, Italian music was playing loudly on the radio. She watched the small waves gnawing at the rusty hull. The blind man’s dog began barking in the hull while she gazed with longing at the coast of the Greek island, thinking of life in Greece, in Italy, in England.

As soon as Mr Morton has gone out of the room she clears his table. He has left everything very tidy: the napkin folded to the side of the plate, no crumbs on the tablecloth, no drips of coffee either. It is odd that Mr Caldecott did not write in his note that Mr Morton is a blind man, she thinks; it is possible he did not realise that he is blind, but it is not very likely. Impossible, of course, because he spoke to him. Noticing that the window has been closed, she unfastens the catch and sees Mr Morton out in the garden, standing halfway down the drive, with his hand on one of the stone dogs.

Edward bends to touch the object that his cane has struck and his hand comes into contact with a steeply curved brow and high ears, above a long pointed muzzle that must be the mouth of a greyhound. Lilies are growing nearby. He walks towards the scent, crossing turf until his shins press against a chain barrier, where the smell of bare soil now mingles with the perfume of the lilies. He turns back to the path and follows it to the iron gate, where he turns right, along the perimeter wall. There is indeed a narrow road here, but a road of tarmac rather than the scrubby track he walked with Charlotte. On the opposite side of the road there is a stand of trees which may be the wood through which they climbed. Standing in their shade, he turns his face into a billow of soft warm air and thinks about where he is. What are the contours, the colours of this terrain? How far is the horizon? He extends a hand to the trunk of a tree. His fingers ruffle a ragged patch of bark, like a piece of frayed satin. It is a silver birch: Betula pendula. He repeats the name, Betula pendula, a name that has given him pleasure since he was a boy, for the melody of it and for its assertiveness and silvery delicacy, a combination perfectly befitting this obdurate wood and its clothing of feathery bark. And there was always pleasure in the sight of the birch, however obscurely he might have seen it. Amid a vagueness of greenery, in the sea-grey twilight that his eyes put over everything, the monochrome birches, the black gashes against the bright white trunks, stood distinct almost to the end. He cannot recall, though, if he saw silver birches on that afternoon with Charlotte.

Excited by the slightest of breezes, the birch leaves sweep themselves. A car horn blares on a road below, the road his taxi must have taken from the station; and farther away there is a continuous low noise of traffic, so low that the leaves erase it with their whispering when the air moves. It is an English sound, this mingling of trees and distant traffic. In England there are cars within hearing wherever you are, and this diffident breeze, carrying a modest scent of grass, is English too. He hears a tractor’s growl, far off; in the trees there is a fluttering of wings – pigeon’s wings, they would be. This is England, he tells himself; this is the voice and the air of England. But then the breeze expires and for an interval the world is emptied of everything except the texture of birch bark and the tenuous roar of traffic far away. Another bird sets off in a shaking of leaves, and now the sound signifies nothing more than a bird taking wing. For all he knows from what his senses tell him, he could be standing on the hill above Gengenbach, the town in which his friends were strolling towards the abbey and taking photos of each other outside the half-timbered buildings. Held by both arms in the centre of the group, like a mascot, for a picture in front of the famous Rathaus, he had abruptly become morose and had removed himself to the wooded hill, where he stood with his hand on the trunk of a birch, in the breeze that flowed over the invisible forests and the rooftops and the vines that grew on the slope of the valley. The valley is called the Kinzigtal, and the cars that he could hear were on the road to a town beginning with Off – Offenburg. Of Gengenbach itself he remembers narrow alleys with plants climbing and hanging on both sides, and small cobbled squares in which fountains dribbled water from high spouts. That was Gengenbach, and this hill he will remember as the hill near the Oak, the hill where he thought of Gengenbach.

Skimming his fingertips on the wall, he retraces his steps to the garden. He strolls off the path, across a lawn that ends at a high hedge. It is hornbeam, he decides, stroking the serrated leaves with a thumb, running a finger across the troughs between the leaves’ prominent veins. And this car will be Charlotte’s, he is almost certain. The last dab of the throttle before turning off the ignition is Charlotte’s trick; the crack of the door sounds like Charlotte’s crumbling Citroën. He brushes the leaves with his hand once more.

‘Edward?’ Charlotte calls, leaving the gravel. ‘Edward? What on earth are you doing?’

‘Talking to the trees, Charlie.’

‘Daft bugger.’ She cradles his face gingerly in both hands. ‘Hello, bro,’ she says.

He receives a kiss of gluey lipstick and inhales a scent which he does not recognise. ‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘The perfume.’

‘Joop.’

‘A whole bottle?’

‘Fuck off, Edward. I like it.’

‘It’s nice,’ he says, putting his hands on her waist.

‘Thank you. Rude pig,’ says Charlotte, brushing something from his shoulder. ‘Dust, not ’druff,’ she explains. ‘Snazzy kit you’re wearing.’

‘Wouldn’t want the folks to think I can’t look after myself.’

‘You’re looking well.’

‘As are you, I’m sure,’ he smiles, squeezing her hips. ‘But a bit too skinny for Mum, I’d say. Bet she’s force-feeding you. How are they?’

‘Bumbling along. They’re well.’

‘And the house?’

‘They like it. It’s the right size for the two of them. But the garden’s too small for a shed, so Dad’s taken over one of the bedrooms.’

‘That’ll be fun for Mum.’

Prompted by a nudge, Charlotte links arms and leads him towards the car. ‘Mum’s hurt that you’re not staying with them. I’m warning you.’

‘And where exactly would I go? Burrow in the sawdust? I mean, you’ve got the sofabed –’

‘They don’t actually have a sofabed. Just a settee and a load of cushions.’

‘Well, there you are then. Ridiculous.’

‘I know. I’m just warning you she’s narked. They were going to borrow a camp bed for you.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Edward, I know.’

‘And I couldn’t get any work done there, could I?’

‘No, Edward. I understand.’

‘And they’d drive me bananas inside a day.’

‘They’re already driving you bananas. Head.’

‘What?’

‘Head,’ she repeats, and her hand falls onto his hair to guide his stoop under the car’s roof.

Charlotte’s car smells of her perfume and warmed plastic and crackers. His hand, sweeping the seat around his thighs, finds some sharp flat crumbs and a cellophane wrapper. ‘This is the same old heap, isn’t it? The Citroën?’ he asks as Charlotte inserts the ignition key.

‘Don’t be rude, Edward. It’s a reliable car, and it’s friendly.’

‘Done sixty in it yet?’

‘Would you like to walk? That can be arranged.’

‘No, but it’s about time this thing was put out of its misery. It must have half a million miles on the clock by now.’

‘Exactly. It’s reliable. And I can’t afford a new one.’

‘But –’

‘Shut up, Edward. Zip it.’ The car begins to turn.

‘Hold it,’ he shouts, putting up a hand. ‘One last thing before we set off.’

‘What?’ she snaps, braking.

‘Does this place seem familiar to you at all?’

‘What? This hotel?’

‘Yes. I thought we might have been here once, when we were kids.’

‘When?’

‘You would have been around seven. I seem to see a picnic and a big building with a garden in front of it. I thought it might be this one.’

‘Afraid not.’

‘You sure? Have a look.’

‘I’ve had a look.’

‘Have another. Just a quick one. A quick little peek.’

The car moves off at walking pace. ‘Nope,’ she states.

‘Not in the slightest bit familiar?’

‘Never seen it before.’

‘Positive?’

‘Bleeding hell, Edward. Positive.’

‘A false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain.’

‘What?’

‘Shakespeare.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s OK. Doesn’t matter.’

‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Edward. Don’t criticise my car and don’t be a smart-arse.’

‘OK. Fair enough. Onward,’ he declares, smacking the dashboard. He opens the window and puts his face into the rushing air.

‘Big kid,’ Charlotte mutters, patting his knee playfully, but she sees nothing playful in the expression that is fixed on her brother’s face: rather, there is anger in the furrows above his eyes, as if she has let him down by not giving him the answer he wanted. She gives him her news about the children, about Lucy’s prize for gymnastics and Sarah’s school trip to Wales. Simon might be in line for promotion, she tells him; her job at head office might be axed, though, and then she’d be back at the Gloucester branch. Edward smiles, nods his head, frowns concernedly, but he is thinking of something else. He seems to have decided that today will not be easy, but she can never tell any more what he’s thinking. It used to be like looking into a darkened cage, looking into his face. In his room, at his desk, he would put down the big lens and wince at her under the glaring light, straining to see. Now he has closed his eyes; he has the appearance of looking inward, making up his mind about something. ‘Try to be patient with Mum,’ she says, and he nods and puts his face back into the rushing air.

In the garden, sitting in the high-backed chair, he is as grim as a judge. Grasping the arms of the chair he tells her: ‘I might go. I might not go. There’s no point getting into a state when she hasn’t even got the job yet.’

‘But I worry, Edward.’

‘As do we all, Ma.’

‘How you’ll cope, I mean.’

‘It’s Italy, not the Siberian tundra. It’s really quite civilised. I’ll cope there the same way I cope here, if I go.’

‘I don’t know, Edward. I saw a story in the paper. Some American boy was kidnapped.’

‘Where, Mum? Where was this?’ Edward demands, almost shouting.

‘In the papers.’

‘Yes, I gathered that. But where in Italy?’

‘Somewhere, Edward. I don’t know. It was awful. Cut off his ear, they did.’

‘Believe me, I am not going to be kidnapped.’

‘Rome, I think it was. Or Naples.’

‘Naples,’ their father confirms.

‘Miles and miles and miles away, Mum. Another country. And I bet your American boy was the heir to a fortune. Not a random impecunious foreigner.’

‘I don’t know, Edward, but it was horrible.’

‘What a catch I’d be. One disabled translator. Any reasonable sum accepted. No cheques. Will consider part exchange. It’s not going to happen, is it? Be sensible, Mum.’

‘He’s right, Mary,’ says their father.

Their mother makes a gesture of woebegone appeal to her husband, miming his name. Looking wearily at Edward, she tallies the beads of her necklace. ‘But it’s a big step,’ she says, passing him another sandwich. ‘You have to think carefully.’

‘Believe it or not, Mum, that’s what I’m doing.’

‘It can so easily go wrong.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Edward moans, putting the sandwich down before he has taken a bite. ‘Here we go. This is the intro to Ethel, isn’t it? Ethel going bonkers in Winnipeg.’

‘You shouldn’t make fun, Edward. She had a shocking time, she did. Thought she’d be all right, but she needed her friends and her family more than she thought.’

‘Enough, please,’ Edward interrupts. ‘So Ethel went to Canada and became an abandoned wife with a brood of uncontrollable brats and a vicious addiction to sleeping tablets. From this you deduce not that an excitable young woman would be ill-advised, on the basis of a two-week romance, to follow a feckless womanising boozer to a godforsaken dump in the middle of a zillion acres of wheat, but that separation from the home soil brings inevitable ruin to any Brit. It doesn’t follow, Mum, so spare me the heart-rending tale of hapless Ethel and her Canadian purgatory. She is not germane to the case,’ he pronounces, using his words to push her away, and so she never says what she means to say, and what Edward knows she means to say, which is simply that she will miss him if he goes away, and is afraid that she might never see him again. ‘So, Mum, what’s been happening, then?’ he asks when he has finished the sandwich, but there isn’t much to say, because of course nothing much has been happening. They are nearing their seventies; they don’t go out very often; their friends have started to die. Edward knows this, but still he asks that stupid question, as if he were talking to a friend down the pub. If he could only see how he looks, she thinks. If he could only see their mother’s helpless face.

‘You all right there?’ his father asks him. Assured that Edward is content to bask in the sun and listen for a while, he excuses himself for a minute or two, to go to the bathroom. Ten minutes later, declining her help, Edward goes to find him.

Following the hum and whine, Edward climbs the stairs. He knocks and opens the door, as a chisel shrieks on spinning wood. ‘Is it safe?’ he shouts. ‘May I come in?’

The lathe winds down with a slumping sound. ‘Hello, son,’ says his father, as though Edward still lived at home and had casually wandered into the room. ‘Careful there,’ he says, as his toe comes into contact with the foot of the bench, but he stays where he is. ‘Clear on your right. Chair just beside you.’

‘So this is the shed?’ he asks, moving crabwise across the hardboard floor until he touches the chair. ‘That’s it.’

‘You’ve got the bench set up, then?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Must be really popular with the neighbours,’ he says, and his father makes a soft snorting sound that may signify a smile. ‘What are you making?’

‘A stool. A footstool. For your mother,’ says his father, putting a piece of wood into his hand. ‘That’s a leg for it.’ The leg has a cube at each end and is ringed with deep grooves which are warm and furred with fine shavings. ‘The ankles need a rest,’ his father explains, taking it back. ‘Not as nimble as she was.’ The lathe restarts; the dab of the cutting tool raises a cry and a whiff of hot wood.

Perceiving a difference between the sound on his left and on his right, he advances a hand across the wall. His hand encounters a low shelf, and another above it, and a third. ‘What’s here?’ he asks.

‘Hm?’ responds his father, though he heard the question.

‘Is this your pots and stuff?’

‘The cars,’ his father tells him.

Walking his fingers along a shelf, he locates one of the model cars. ‘I’ll be careful,’ he says, supporting the car on his flattened hand. He can feel the ridge of the exhaust pipe on his palm. ‘What’s this one?’ he asks.

‘Hm?’

‘What’s this one?’

‘A Bugatti. Show me? T55 Coupé.’

With his index finger he circles the spare wheel on the outside of the boot. He sweeps the wave-like running board, taps the conical headlamps, but he cannot remember anything of the Bugatti T55. His father’s models used to be kept in a mighty cabinet in the dining room, a cabinet of open decks, like a miniature multi-storey car park, painted white. He remembers a section reserved for illustrious older marques: a silver Auto Union car was there, with a scarlet Maserati and a green Vanwall. Concentrating on the name, he recovers the shape of the Vanwall, its thick blade of a body and the cockpit lodged behind the elongated bonnet, and, from this, momentarily, occurs an evanescent bloom of the Vanwall car’s deep green.

‘So, son,’ says his father, fitting another piece of wood to the lathe. ‘They keeping you busy?’ he asks, as if his translations were the benefaction of some charitable committee.

‘I’ve plenty of work, Dad, yes.’

‘Articles and stuff?’

‘That type of thing. Bits and pieces. I’ve a bigger project starting soon,’ he says, meaning the Stadler book, then it occurs to him that he has another book in progress, which it has never seemed appropriate to mention. He waits for another question, but none follows. ‘It should arrive next week.’

‘Good,’ says his father.

‘A book about someone called Jochen Stadler. A German chap. He went to South America as a missionary, then became an anthropologist-ecologist. He lived in the forest for years, in the Amazon, and married a girl who had looked after him when he was ill. When his wife died he came back to Germany, to his home town, and became a professor at the university, and a politician. His father had been a member of Göring’s staff,’ he perseveres. ‘A forester. Looking after bison in a Polish forest, until the partisans shot him.’

‘Had enough of the Nazis by now, I’d have thought.’

‘Not quite yet, Dad. Nazis, cooking and gardening – the three guaranteed sellers. Eva Braun’s Kitchen Garden would be a sure-fire hit,’ he jokes, but neither he nor his father laughs. His father is taking a tool from a rack; he hears the slither of steel on oiled stone.

‘Hotel’s OK?’ his father asks.

‘It’s fine. Very comfortable.’

Rhythmically the steel grinds against the slickened stone. ‘Your mother can’t see why you’re not staying here,’ his father remarks. ‘She’s put out, you know.’

‘But there’s no space, is there, Dad? Unless I’ve missed a room somewhere.’

‘As far as she’s concerned there’s plenty of space.’

‘And where would that be?’

‘I’m not arguing with you. Just telling you what she thinks.’

‘And I’ve work to do. There’s nowhere I could work.’

‘She thinks there is. Charlotte’s room.’

‘Dad, there’s not even a table in Charlotte’s room.’

‘The living room, then.’

‘It has to be quiet for me to work. I’m fussy. I’m easily aggravated by noise. Honestly, it’s better for everyone if I stay where I am.’

‘You know best, son, I’m sure,’ his father concludes, as the lathe begins to spin once more.

Exploring again the curves and details of the model car, he recalls how, late in the evening, before going to bed, he would go down into the cellar of the old house, where his father would be working. He would walk towards the ball of light and his father would take his hand to guide him to the stool. A sheet of wallpaper, reversed, always covered the bench, and on one part of the paper the husk of the car’s body would be laid. The metallic pieces for the chassis and engine were arrayed around it. Some were so small, like rat’s bones, he had to lower his nose to the paper to see them. His father used needle-thin screwdrivers and delicate little knives and drills that he turned between his finger and thumb. Sometimes it made him think of the hospital, and he would secretly become upset. He liked the names: Studebaker, Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Panhard-Levasseur. They connoted ingenuity and high craftsmanship, and he always enjoyed listening to his father as he worked, extolling a beautiful Ferrari engine, or the functional purity of the 2CV, which could seat two farmers with their hats on, and transport them and their pig over a rutted road, and was so simple a machine that the local blacksmith could repair it, should it ever break down, which it hardly ever would. Through his father’s words he came to share something of his admiration for these cars and their creators, but things changed as his eyesight worsened and it gave him pain to use the immense lens that his father used. So in the evenings he would go to Charlotte’s room and she would read the pages he had to study for homework, while his father worked for hours in the cellar, assembling his little cars. They won prizes, his father’s cars, at events they used to attend together, in high-ceilinged buildings with rough wooden floors and toilets outside. Then one year there was an exhibition, in Bristol, to which his father went without him. Sitting in the living room, with the TV on, they all agreed that it was best if he stayed at home. His mother stroked his hair while his father was speaking, but by then he was beginning to find his father’s hobby ridiculous, which perhaps his parents knew. When this was, exactly, he cannot remember. He must have been thirteen or so, around the time that he became ‘son’ rather than ‘Edward’.

His father’s appearance in his mind, the last image of him before he became a ghost with his father’s voice, comes from around this time as well. Concentrating, he can see a white shirt and broad brown tie, and an unfocused face with wide sideburns and a drooping moustache. He remembers him smoking a cigarette at his desk, waving an arm as he talked to his secretary, who brought tea for them all. One wall of the office was glazed, and the cars in the showroom on the other side made a pattern of soft rectangles, like an abstract design in stained glass. And his mother: he sees her wearing a yellow jumper, and he can make out her soft, lineless skin and her eyes, which are surprised-looking and very dark. Her feet now drag when she crosses the room, and her cup chatters against the saucer when she sets it down, but her face when he thinks of her is this one, a face that is dissolving year by year but never ageing, fading on the brink of middle age, where she will stay until she dies.

‘I’ll let you get on,’ he says.

‘OK, son,’ his father replies, stopping the lathe.

After the evening meal they all go into the living room, for a film-length episode of his parents’ favourite programme. He sits beside his mother on the new settee, which is too large for the room, so whenever anyone opens the door it bangs against the thickly padded arm. There is a new television, which would seem to be as wide as an armchair. The room still bears a smell of new carpet and wallpaper paste and emulsion. Nothing has any familiarity, other than the cushions with the brocade borders. For his benefit his mother provides a commentary on the action. ‘Another body,’ she tells him, at a doomy chord. ‘Killed like the first one – bag over her head.’ Feet sprint heavily on waterlogged grit: ‘Someone’s up to something in the alley.’ From time to time she puts a hand on his; he can sense her turning from the screen to his face. He is waiting for the programme to end, for Charlotte to take him back to the hotel, and he feels ashamed at his irritation with the cadence he hears so often in his mother’s voice, his impatience with her pity for him and for herself. Only by talking can he resist the oppression of her pity, but there is little he can talk to her about, other than the possibility of his leaving the country. He is ashamed of betraying what he thought of his father’s childish hobby, if he did betray what he thought of it. And now he finds himself thinking of the day he left home, the day his father took him to the hall of residence. On the steps they embraced. His father clapped him on the shoulders, then drew him close. Now they shake hands, that’s all.

‘Someone’s following the policewoman,’ his mother tells him.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘It’ll be her boyfriend. It’s bound to be. Remember what she said to him, in the pub, when he –’

‘Don’t spoil it,’ she says, taking his hand. The policewoman reaches her car before the stalker can strike; jingly music begins, like synthesised wind-chimes. ‘You’ll visit us again, soon?’ his mother asks.

‘Of course,’ he says, and she squeezes his hand so tightly that the trembling in her fingers stops.

Malcolm looks into the bar, where a young woman in a rhinestone tiara is sitting amidst a dozen friends. On the other side of the room a smartly dressed young man sits in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker, possibly asleep, with a mobile phone on his knee, and two women who may be sisters are tearfully hugging each other. He withdraws to the garden and strolls for a while, before resting on the bench by the night-scented stock. The weather will break tonight: the air is damp and inert, and a greenish tinge is seeping into the sky on the horizon. A canopy of cloud is sliding forward slowly over the hill, occluding the stars. The trees are motionless for now, but soon they will begin to stir, and then the rain will come. Watching the fans of light rising and falling on the bypass, he breathes the perfume of night-scented stock. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, he will speak to Stephanie. He presses a hand against the pocket in which he carries her letter. The leaves are so still it’s as though the garden were encased in glass.

A taxi draws up and he looks back over his shoulder. The young woman with the tiara is standing at the window of the bar, and at the sight of her he experiences a sudden upswelling of happiness, an ambivalent happiness, which vanishes almost at once. He looks at the sky, then again at the hotel, and immediately he understands: what he had seen when he glanced at the windows of the Oak was a vision of the Zetland, at night, when the windows would blaze gold against the sky. Crouching under the sill, he would peer into the smoky room, marvelling at the bottles that were ranged on the glass shelves behind the bar. Indescribable tastes must come out of these bottles, he used to think, because their colours were so extraordinary: a fragile butterfly blue, a radiant amber, a green like new leaves. He would wait, kneeling by the gutter of the terrace, and sometimes his father would appear, setting things right, exchanging a word with a member of his staff. They were like the crew of a ship, each with his role to perform, and the Zetland did resemble a ship, when you looked at it from below the road, especially when it was dark and the mist had risen, and the turret looked like the bridge of a liner, with the slender flagpole on its roof, half hidden in the mist, as though it were emerging from a fog-bank. Sitting on the bench, he gives himself up to his memory of his father’s hotel, to the image of the buildings of Saltburn’s seafront as it appeared from the pier, with the flat spools of foam unwinding on the black water below his feet. The beach was clammy under the light of the moon and the far-off street lamps, and he would stare to find the place where the sand blended into the water, or the seam where the sky became the coal-coloured sea. Some nights, looking out to sea, he could not tell which lights were stars and which were tankers, and the lights of the Zetland were almost extinguished by the mist that flowed around its windows. Before going home to prepare his father’s meal, he might stop at the terrace steps, lured by the burnished interiors of the hotel. Hunched on the terrace, he would gaze at the glossy wooden panels of the walls, at the lift’s dark veneered doors, at the wide stone fireplace of the lounge, at the waitresses who carried tureens and covered dishes as big as rugby balls to a dining room that had a Turkish carpet and a chandelier like a bush of ice hung upside down. Often, when he glimpsed his father moving purposefully across the foyer, alone, like a ship’s captain making sure that all was in order, he would try to imagine how it would be to follow his father around the building, becoming familiar with every room and corridor of it, learning how the Zetland worked. It would be better than any other job he could do, helping to run a building that existed only to give pleasure, a place to which people would return year after year in the certainty of being happy there. Everything seemed well made in the Zetland – there was that as well, and the sense that something of the town’s history was kept alive there, while everything around it changed at a faster speed. But now the Zetland has become apartments and the station is used only by a two-carriage train that shuttles along the coast to Darlington, where Stephenson’s Locomotion stands like a dinosaur in the museum.

The roar of tyres on the gravel eradicates his reminiscence. Headlight beams swing across the grass in front of him and splay against the hotel’s façade. He sees Mr Morton get out of the car, smack the roof, and remain standing where he’s been left.

‘Mr Morton, good evening,’ he calls, crossing the lawn.

‘Mr Caldecott,’ Mr Morton replies pleasantly, raising a hand to give an incomplete wave.

‘Going in?’

‘Presently, yes,’ says Mr Morton, turning away again.

‘I’m sorry. I thought – Shall I leave you be?’

‘No, no. Please don’t. Just taking a last dose of country air,’ Mr Morton explains, with an appreciative sniff.

‘Same here,’ he says. ‘It’s been a fine day, hasn’t it?’

‘It has,’ Mr Morton distractedly agrees.

‘The storm is on its way, I think,’ he remarks. ‘A day behind schedule.’

‘I think so. Yes. The air’s very thick tonight.’

‘It is. Very heavy.’

Mr Morton raises his face, smiling slightly, as if the moonlight felt as good as sunlight on his skin, and then he yawns. ‘I do apologise. It’s been a long day. An early start.’

‘Yes. I’d hoped to catch you after breakfast, but you were leaving as I arrived.’

‘My sister’s clock runs on medieval time. Her day starts at sunrise.’

‘Ah, your sister. I see. I had wondered. Sister or cousin, I thought. There’s a resemblance.’

‘Poor girl.’

‘So your visit to the Oak –?’

‘Filial duty, partly,’ Mr Morton replies, addressing the earth at his feet. ‘A family reunion.’

‘I see, I see.’

Another taxi is coming up the drive; Mr Morton turns to track its progress to the porch. ‘Rarely satisfactory, family gatherings, don’t you find?’

‘I don’t think I’m in a position to comment.’

‘You have no family?’ he asks bluntly.

‘Not much of one. The parents have long gone. An aunt in Rhyl. That’s all for the older generation.’

‘And are you married, Mr Caldecott?’

‘Not any more.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Quite all right. I’m thoroughly divorced. And you?’

‘No wife. Father, mother, sister, a phalanx of aunts and uncles, but no wife.’

‘I see,’ he says. They stand a yard apart, both facing the portentous expanse of slate-green cloud, as though they were awaiting together the appearance of something in the sky. ‘Is the room to your liking?’

‘Very comfortable,’ says Mr Morton.

‘Good.’

‘Positively sumptuous.’

‘Good.’

Mr Morton takes a deep, relishing breath. ‘Very tranquil here,’ he observes.

‘It used to be quieter.’

‘Yes?’

‘Before the bypass was cut. When I first came here you could hear owls across the valley. Not any more.’

‘Believe me, this is tranquil compared with where I live,’ says Mr Morton, and no sooner has he said it than the tiara girl and three of her friends come out of the hotel, laughing raucously. He smiles towards the porch, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Goodnight, Mr Caldecott.’

‘Goodnight. Sleep well,’ he replies, as Mr Morton strides off, plainly not in need of assistance. He waits until Mr Morton is inside, then follows.

A tinny arpeggio announces that a message is waiting. ‘Get next unread message,’ Edward states to the microphone. ‘Speak all,’ he orders, and the machine dictates:

Dear Mister Morton,

Thank you for your message. I tried to phone you last night but you were not home. You must buy a cellphone, or I will buy it for you. You are the only person in the world who will not have one.

I am sorry about the trouble with Mike. I did not like the look of him: he has a silly pattern on his arm, one of those swirly things that is meant to make you look like a Maori or something, and he thinks he’s a man for ladies, it is obvious – he does a Hey baybee thing with his eyes, but his eyes are too small and close together and they are not a nice colour – yellow-brown, like the skin of a potato.

So what is there to tell you? The trouble between my parents is ending. There is still a strange atmosphere between them, but the trouble is ending and now I know the reason for it. It is a good story and I will write it for you, but not now. I am too tired. Tomorrow.

Other news: Pierluigi is not any more with Laura. She is forgotten now. There is a new girlfriend, called Graziana – Graziana Vitelleschi. The same family name as a bishop of Recanati from a long time ago. He was a very famous man. It is not the same family, I am sure. Luigi met her in a shop in Macerata, in a shoe shop. That is funny, yes? You, me and a shoe shop; Pierluigi, Graziana and a shoe shop. She works for a lawyer in Macerata – she is his secretary. He also has a new car – a new old car, because it is older than Pierluigi. A rare Alfa Romeo, he says. It has horrible leather seats, greeny-white, like milk that has been in the sun too long. But he is in love with it, almost as much as he is in love with Graziana.

This morning we have azure over most of the sky and white clouds dotted on the horizon, tiny small clouds, you could not hide a house in any of them. It would be good here, Edward, for both of us. You must come with me. You must. You must.

I keep thinking of things I should have said in my interview. There is a clever way of saying this. A special phrase, in French. What is it? Today we will be at my aunt’s house – she is ill again. But I will find some time to write the story for you. I hope you get some quietness today. I am very sleepy, so this is my ending. Baci, baci, baci. Your Pavolini.

three

A faint vibration, a low quiet thrumming, obtrudes into Edward’s consciousness. He hears it, at first, as water flowing through pipes: it is the sound that one hears when a heating system starts up and hot water begins to fill the radiators. Emerging from sleep, he recalls what time of year it is, and in the same instant he detects a smaller, sharper sound inside the murmur, a ticking inside the vibration. The source of the ticking is to his left, from where a wave of cooler air now passes, followed by a smothered boom of thunder. He goes to the window. Placing a palm on the glass, he feels the pulse of the rain. He pulls the window up and wipes his fingers across the slick wet paint of the frame. Again there is thunder, weaker than before, like a noise from a far-off quarry. He waits, and eventually there is one last boom, an expiring groan, so feeble it barely breaks through the sound of the rain. The horizon shrinks back to the margin defined by the spattering of water on the sill, then a piercing flourish of birdsong makes a point in space come into being, close to the building, within the garden. A pause follows, and a trill of high notes, a whistled baroque embellishment, identical to the first, straight ahead of him, no more than twenty yards away. A third trill receives an answering song: the same notes, in a new sequence. From a deeper recess of the garden comes a different call, a chirrup which rouses three or four kindred voices in a single tree or bush, down to the right, and this small chorus in turn stirs another, of the same species, somewhere behind it, and soon the garden is a fountain of birdsongs.

He puts on yesterday’s clothes and goes out into the corridor, into silence. With creeping steps he walks to the gallery. At the table near the top of the stairs he stops to ascertain what stands on it. His hands bump into a block of stone, on which a stone head is supported, a head with a swarm of minuscule furrows on its cheeks and a narrow nose and high brow crowned with short curls. The eyelids are smooth as cowries and half-lowered, and below the high collar there’s a medal or a badge of some sort. A general or a prince, he surmises, giving the bearded marble face a parting caress. Descending the stairs he becomes aware of rain drumming softly overhead, on a wide svkylight, he assumes. He steps down onto tiles and crosses the enormous hall, passing close to a clock he had not noticed before. Sensing the imprint of something sizeable on the air in front of him, he raises his arms and strikes a pedestal, with a long-leafed plant atop it. He steps aside, and five paces onward he touches the wall, which he follows to find the glass doors. They do not budge when he pushes them, but where they meet the floor he finds a metal plate with a countersunk bolt that slides easily upward, and at the top there is another, and then one door is free.

He stands in the shelter of the porch, his hands braced on a coarse stone column. Though the sun must be up, the coolness of night persists and the air has the cleansing scent of night-time. The conversation of the birds is ending; the rain is louder than it was. Water gargles in a drainpipe near the porch and the gravel driveway hisses, like air leaking from an inner tube that is almost flat. He leaves the porch and walks towards the garden, making a cowl of his jacket. A path of uneven stones departs from the gravel, flanked by leaves that scrape lightly under the impact of the pattering raindrops. Rhododendron, he guesses, and confirms his guess by touch. He reaches a junction of the path, where the rhododendron ceases. Following a track of bricks that veers off to the right, he comes to a spot where the rain is suddenly quieter. He stops and pulls the jacket down to listen. On both sides of the path he discerns a whispering that is the sound of water on a wide area of grass. He continues along the bricks until he comes to a smoothly paved area, encircled by sibilant shrubs. The rain is forming puddles here, but there is also a body of water high up, at the level of his head. His hands, groping, find a broad stone bowl that is fringed with slime. The shower is rapidly becoming heavier: the surface of the water in the bowl is burbling now, and the foliage of a nearby tree, a high tree, has begun to seethe. On the paving stones the rain raises a roar like a ceiling fan revolving at speed. It is a downpour now, but he does not move. Feeling the cold moss on his fingertips, and the cold water dribbling across his scalp, and the cold wet fabric on his chest and thighs, he senses the boundaries of his body, the contours of his invisible body, the dimensions of himself. All around him the garden is defined by tones and textures of sound, a continuum of sounds that give to the place in which he stands a continuous depth, a cohesion that the world presents to him infrequently. Avidly he listens, standing at the water bowl like a pilgrim with his hand on the foot of a miraculous statue.

Eloni looks out of the window of the dining room and sees Mr Morton walking along the path to the rose garden. His hair has been flattened by the rain and his jacket hangs over one shoulder like a used towel. His shirt is so wet that it looks as though his skin has been covered with clear plastic, but he is smiling as he walks along, turning his face this way and that, like somebody who is admiring the flowers. At the wooden arch of the rose garden he seems to change his mind. He lifts his face into the rain and wipes a hand down it, from his hairline to his chin. For a minute or longer he stays there, facing the clouds, then he moves off towards the hotel entrance, and his mouth is moving. He is talking to himself, calmly, continuously, as if having a discussion on his own. ‘Mr Caldecott,’ she calls, not raising her voice. She points at Mr Morton, who has gone up to one of the stone animals and is patting its head, smiling as you would smile at your pet dog. Mr Caldecott puts down the knife he was polishing and moves nearer to the window to watch what is happening, but at that very moment, as though he knew they were spying on him, Mr Morton stops what he was doing and crosses the path to the front door. ‘Do you think he is all right?’ she asks. Hearing the clang of the front door, Mr Caldecott goes out into the hall.

She finishes preparing the tables, recalling the old man who was mad. From morning to dusk some days he would stand by the fountain with his bag of apples and sing the same English song over and over again. His father was a duke, he said, and the pockets of his jacket were crammed with letters he said were from his father, but the letters made no sense at all, she was told. And on Sundays he walked all day, pressing a Bible to his heart, talking to himself as he walked, like Mr Morton was doing, and when he comes into the room for breakfast Mr Morton does look a bit mad, because he is grinning as if he has just met a friend in the hall, and he has rubbed his hair so it looks like straw sticking out of a sack, and his shirt is only half tucked into his waistband and has damp patches all over it.

He crosses the room, towards a chair that has been left out of place. Before she can move it he has knocked against its leg and stumbled. An expression of panic flashes on his face; his hand is on the back of the chair, gripping it as though it were a railing on the edge of a cliff. She runs up to him, and his eyes seem to trace shapes in the air around her head. ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘Let me, please.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, and his hand moves up and closes gently on her shoulder. ‘I’m clumsy this morning,’ he apologises. ‘I think I have water in my ears. I got caught in the rain,’ he explains, with a small laugh.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was bad.’

‘It was quite something,’ he replies. ‘I enjoy a good deluge. Wakes me up,’ he says, making his eyebrows go up and down. ‘And now I’m in the mood for a huge volume of food,’ he smiles, lowering himself into the chair that she has pulled out for him. Speaking clearly and courteously, he tells her what he would like to have for breakfast, and then, toying with a spoon, he remarks: ‘I didn’t catch your name. Yesterday, when I asked you –’

‘Eloni,’ she responds, retreating half a pace, and she adds, in the same breath: ‘I bring your coffee.’

‘And where are you from?’ he asks. Smiling directly at her face, he waits for her to answer. ‘Do you mind my asking?’

‘No. No. I come from Greece.’

‘From where, exactly?’

‘Ioannina.’

‘Ioannina,’ he repeats, pronouncing the name exactly. ‘Ioannina. Forgive me. I don’t recognise it. Where is Ioannina?’

‘The north.’

‘East or west?’

‘West.’

‘Up in the mountains?’

‘By the mountains.’

‘Is it a big town?’

‘A big town, yes.’

‘I see,’ says Mr Morton solemnly. ‘I apologise for my ignorance. I haven’t been to Greece and I haven’t read an atlas for a very long time.’ With the edge of his hand he pushes a shallow wave across the tablecloth. Just as she is turning to go, he asks: ‘And how long have you been here?’

‘In England?’

‘In England. At the hotel. Either.’

‘Some months.’

‘And do you like England?’ he asks with a smile that does not seem to be the smile of someone who is trying to trick her.

‘I like it, yes.’

‘But it rains.’

‘Everywhere it rains. It is not so bad.’

‘True, true. Everywhere it rains,’ he laughs, nodding his head, and then suddenly he says: ‘You have an intriguing voice.’ He says it plainly, as if her voice were something in the room, as if he were making a comment on the colour of the carpet. ‘It’s very nice to hear,’ he continues. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘No,’ she replies.

‘Good,’ says Mr Morton. ‘Sometimes I misjudge.’ He rubs his jaw, and it is obvious that he is thinking about what she has told him. ‘Forgotten to shave,’ he remarks, scowling at his hand. ‘I mustn’t keep you. You have other things to do, I’m sure.’

She turns away from Mr Morton’s smile, believing that he knows she is lying. At the door of the kitchen she looks back, to see him rubbing his chin thoughtfully, like a detective thinking about a clue. He turns his face towards her, and her skin goes hot and then cold. She steps backwards into the kitchen, certain now that he knows she is lying. When she takes his pot of coffee to his table she is afraid to look at him; she pretends to be busy so as to avoid having to talk. Through the window in the door she watches Mr Morton as he eats his breakfast. From time to time he stops, holding his fork upright and lifting his head as though listening to someone speak. Her heart is beating out of rhythm as she watches Mr Morton, and long after he has gone back upstairs it still feels as if something heavy and small, like a little block of lead, is turning inside her chest. Annie is telling her about something she saw on television last night, but she cannot listen properly to what Annie is saying. To control the shaking of her hands she washes some pans that did not need to be washed; she mops an area of unstained floor. At the bang of the kitchen’s inner door an attack of dread turns her muscles to water. She cannot move, but it is only Mr Caldecott, who is calling her into his office.

He closes the door of the office and shows her the chair she should sit on. He does not sit down himself, but leans against his desk, with a serious expression and his arms folded, just as he did on the morning she first saw this room, after she had told him the truth about where she was born.

‘Mr Morton seemed OK to me. Did he seem OK to you?’ he asks her.

‘Yes. He is OK.’

‘He seems a nice man.’

‘Yes,’ she says, but Mr Caldecott is not looking at her now. He is gazing into the garden, as if waiting for somebody to arrive with news that may not be good. With a blink he cuts off the thought that is troubling him and turns back to her. His lips make a shape like a smoker’s, slowly breathing out. ‘I’ve made some more calls, Eloni. It doesn’t look very hopeful, I have to say. There’s a hotel in Bath, the manager’s a friend, but he couldn’t arrange things the way we’ve arranged them here. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘He would have to do things properly. With the paperwork. You see?’ His hands rise and fall in an apologising gesture. ‘In London people wouldn’t be so strict. There would be more opportunities.’

‘I don’t want to go back.’

‘I know you didn’t like it. But it would be better for you, for work.’

‘It is a horrible place. And you need too much money. I cannot go back,’ she insists, and Mr Caldecott acknowledges that she cannot. Worriedly he glances at the garden again. ‘What will happen, Mr Caldecott?’ she asks him. ‘With the hotel?’

‘No, they won’t knock it down. They are selling it to another company, who will change it into something else. A club with bedrooms.’

‘For people to stay?’

‘Yes, for people to stay.’

‘So they will need it to be cleaned. So I could work here?’

‘Well, it will be closed for a long time, while they refit the building. And I think it would be difficult to work here. Difficult for you.’

‘But you will stay here?’

‘No, Eloni. I won’t stay here. They will bring a new manager.’

‘But you will be here? In this place? This –’

‘Area?’

‘This area, yes,’ she says, feeling her heartbeat growing stronger and uneven.

‘No. There’s not much demand for hotel managers in this neighbourhood,’ he says, picking a hair from his cuff. ‘I think it will be London. The bright lights.’

At the thought that she may never be in Mr Caldecott’s office again she looks where he is looking, at the path that leads to the tennis court. Steam is coming off the stones in curling wisps that disappear as they rise. The sunlight on the hanging raindrops looks like thousands of tiny light bulbs in the bushes, like Christmas lights but in summer. When a blackbird bursts out from the branches of the evergreen tree it sends up a shower of droplets that glitter like stars against the dark green leaves. It is so beautiful, the garden of the hotel, and so quiet in this room, that she feels as if she has drunk something that has made her mind stop working, a delicious drink of forgetfulness.

‘Well,’ says Mr Caldecott, touching the knot of his tie as he stands up.

‘Yes,’ she replies, pushing herself out of the chair. ‘I must go to clean the rooms,’ she says, and as she leaves the office she is thinking of the lights of London, the huge billboards of flashing lights above the traffic. She sees the crowds of people pushing each other, in air that tasted of aluminium, and then she sees another scene, a scene she was trying to keep away, and she has to go into an empty bedroom so that nobody will catch her crying, and she sits on the bed, pressing her face into a pillow until she can longer see the tattooed man.

In his room, Edward listens to another e-mail from Claudia:

Here is the story for you. It is a bit silly but also I think a little sad, and beautiful too. A postcard is what it is about. An old postcard and an old love. Not even a love, I think.

Papa called me into his cave of books. He gives me a creased old postcard and tells me what the trouble is about. Last week mother decided to make the living room tidy. The books were spreading all over the apartment – a book-lava, flowing out of the studiolo into every room. She picks them up from under the television, behind the chairs, all over, and carries the pile back to their right home. As she puts the books down, this postcard falls out of one of them. It’s an interesting thing to find – an old-style card, with wavy edges and a picture of Piazza Navona on the front, all in brown. It is addressed to my father at his parents’ house and was sent by someone called Antonietta. She reads the message. The message is not interesting: ‘Rome is exciting…so many things to see…we have visited this and this and tomorrow we will see that and that.’ Boring, the usual thing. But Antonietta had drawn a little red heart in one corner and a little arrow through it. So mother looks at the date: it is from the time when she (mother) was my father’s girlfriend, but before they were going to get married. My mother knows these dates: I know cephalopods, my father knows politics (and a lot more) and my mother knows when my father kissed her, and when he asked her to marry him, and when I walked my first step. She has all these dates wired into her brain. My mother is a calendar.

When my father comes home the postcard is on his desk, in the middle of the desk, so he cannot miss it. The evidence. He picks it up, looks at it, puts it aside. A bit curious, but that is all. He puts it aside. But mother is behind him, watching. She thinks she sees what she was afraid of seeing – and what she wanted to see. Why was the card in the book, she wants to know. It has been in there for years and years, he says. He has not read the book for a long time. He’d forgotten it was there. It’s nothing important. So why had he kept it? He hadn’t kept it, he answers – he just hadn’t thrown it away. That is a different thing. Sometimes my father’s way of reasoning – his way of all the time being reasonable – makes my mother very angry and this is one of those times. She was already angry; now she is furious, because he is being like a Jesuit. Why had he kept the postcard? It is very meaningful for him, that is obvious. Why had he kept it? Was that girl in love with him? Was he in love with her? And my father, instead of telling her ‘No’, he stops to have a think. This was stupid, but what he did next was really stupid. He has his think and he says, ‘Perhaps a bit. Before I met you.’ Why did he say this? Is it because he wants to be an Englishman? Because this is what an Englishman would do? Not do what is best but answer like a child, honestly, saying the truth even if it makes things worse? He says, ‘Perhaps a bit.’ Unbelievable, no? This is the man who knows my mother better than anyone in the world. It is the worst he could do.

It is a very old thing, this card. More than thirty years old. But sometimes the years are like days. Sometimes you were a child yesterday and it is a terrible thing when you count how many years are gone. For my mother this card from Antonietta, this message with the little red heart and the arrow, this betrayal, it happened yesterday. She reads the message to him and it means more than the words are saying. The words are not important – the meaning is underneath them. She is jealous. It is ridiculous, but she is jealous. She accuses my father of deceiving her. She was watching him when he read the card, she tells him. He sighed when he read it, she says. He denies this. She insists that he sighed. I didn’t – you did – I didn’t – you did. So I sighed, he confesses. But not for Antonietta – for the time that has passed since then. Mother of God! What a thing to say! It has been a happy time, he tells her. A very happy time, he says, but now I’m old, he explains. It would be good to be younger, with you, he says. But it’s too late for explaining – she’s gone, out of the room, out of the apartment.

To understand this drama you must have a missing piece of the puzzle. Who is Antonietta? When she wrote the postcard she was Antonietta Venuti, the daughter of a farmer who lived not far from Recanati. A very wild and sexy girl who gave her parents worries because all the boys liked her and she liked all the boys. Antonietta was not liked by all the girls, of course, and was very much not liked by the girl who would become my mother, who was a bit of a goody-goody and never gave her parents any worries. So Antonietta Venuti was a girl who broke many hearts and had very many boyfriends before she married the electrician Roberto Pallucchini, whose son Paolo did not look very much like his father, some people said. There was gossiping about the boy, but Antonietta and Roberto did not give any attention to it. They were happy for some years, the three of them, then Roberto died in an accident when he was not even forty. A mistake by the boy who was working with him, and it killed him in the street, in the middle of the day, so lots of people saw him die. It was terrible. He was putting up lights for a festival, on a stage for dancing and singing that night. Lying on the stage under a string of flags, dead as iron. Paolo took up his father’s business and his mother locked herself in her apartment and never went outside.

For years she stayed in her rooms, seeing nobody except her son. After five or six years she came out again and now she was no longer pretty. She was much more than pretty: she was splendid. When she was younger she was always paler than the other girls, but now her skin was the colour of cream, like those ladies in earlier times who never let the sunlight touch them. And her hair – which was unusual also, because it was red as rust – it seemed even more bright now her skin was so white. It seemed to burn around her head, like a halo. She had become thin in her body and in her face, in a way that made her eyes huge and gave her a nobility she did not have before. In every way she was changed. Before she was mad about new clothes; now she wore plain dark dresses, very simple, very ordinary. Before she was a real talker; now she spoke when she had to speak to somebody, that was all. Now every day she went to mass, and after mass she went to the shops. She never talked about her husband or anything that she had ever done in her life. She is still in Recanati, living alone, in the apartment she shared with her husband and son. You see her every morning, on her way to the church. Sometimes you see her with Paolo or his children, but not often. All the women who hated her when they were young, when she took all the boys they liked, now they look at her with respect or pity, or as if she has something saintly about her. My mother looks at her in this way, but now the sight of the widow Pallucchini is making her jealous too – truly jealous, I think, though it’s about something that is dead and was never very alive, so my father says. And the jealousy is bad because the reason for it is this woman who has suffered and become sort-of-holy. So father will now reason with mother and life will be normal again soon, because really he did not do anything wrong and they have always loved each other, my father and my mother, in their way, which I know is a strange way sometimes. But love is always a strange way, no?

I almost forget: tomorrow night Monica and her husband Bruno are inviting me to their house to eat with them. I will phone if it is possible, but I think it will be a long evening, because we all like to talk and it is a very long time since I have seen Bruno. But the day after, for sure, we will speak, you and I. But you must tell me the number of the hotel – you forgot to do it.

What other things are happening in Recanati? I have met Pierluigi’s girlfriend, the magical Graziana. She is beautiful. But of course she is. Pierluigi cannot see girls who are not beautiful. Ugly girls are invisible for him. Graziana’s mother is from Finland, so she is tall and blonde, with big blue eyes. And big big breasts. They are really amazing – you could hang an umbrella on them. Two umbrellas. I am sure she did not buy them from a doctor, because they do a little wiggle-wiggle swing when she walks. La Stupenda I call her. Pierluigi is very happy. Now he might not come to the villa. He wants to stay here to play with Graziana and her breasts. I am full of envy. My mother has the widow Pallucchini to make her miserable and I have Graziana’s breasts. Ha ha – I wish. Perhaps you wish too? Goodbye. She has good legs too. Bye bye.

Easing back in the chair, he brings to mind the melodiously deep voice of Claudia’s father, and his study full of books, and he remembers the sweet lemon fume that rose from the pot of tea he had set on the desk. The door had been closed, to shut out the sound of Claudia and her mother, who were talking in the kitchen. ‘We leave the women for a while,’ said her father, leaning forward to touch his wrist. ‘I must read you something,’ he said, taking a book from the desk. ‘Some sentences from Mr Burton. There are some words that escape me. I hope you will know them.’ He read a lengthy paragraph, with quirks of pronunciation and stress that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘It is superb, yes? Superb, sublime.’ It was the day after the visit to the Leopardi house and her father wanted to know if Claudia had told him about the coachman’s daughter? Did she tell him about the Contessa’s religious madness? About the way the great library was assembled? ‘Good, good,’ he commented at each reply, until at last he discovered something that Claudia had failed to mention: the public examinations of Giacomo, Carlo and Paolina, who were obliged by their father, Count Monaldo, to answer in Latin the questions relating to history, Christian doctrine, grammar and rhetoric that were put to them by the eminent citizens of Recanati. And later that day, at supper, Claudia joked to her father that he was as bad as Count Monaldo, and complained about the English exercises he used to make them do, every night, making them learn poems they did not understand.

In reply he writes:

I can think of a couple of anatomical corrections that might indeed be of benefit to us, but breasts like La Stupenda’s are not what I have in mind, however remarkable those protrusions may be. Though I wish your brother great joy with the beautiful big chest, I prefer the dimensions of yourself and Marie Antoinette, whose exquisitely modest bosom was said to be the inspiration, as you might know, for the shape of the champagne glass. But did you know that the breasts of Joan of Aragon – Juana la Loca, the mad mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – were reputed to exude a perfume of ripe peaches? I think we need hear no more of Graziana and her wiggle-wiggles.

Thank you for the story of your parents and the widow Pallucchini. I am pleased that harmony is returning to the home. I have to say that I don’t find your mother’s jealousy at all ridiculous. Envy is something I experience every day, but I have not experienced jealousy and I sometimes wish that I could, because evidently I am missing something. If I could see, then I could be very jealous, I am sure. Seeing the handsome Recanati boys you once kissed – that might make me as jealous as your mother. Is Bruno one of them? As it is, they don’t really exist for me, not substantially enough for retrospective jealousy, though I can envy them for having seen you, and seen themselves being seen by you.

As for my parents, the visit was not a success. I did try not to become irritated with my mother, but I made an insufficient effort, I fear. There’s something in her manner that suggests she regards her son’s misfortune as her fault and/or her burden in life, and the way she fusses around me makes me feel like a perpetual convalescent. I shouldn’t complain about her, I know – it was hard for her, bringing me up, and she did everything possible to make my childhood happy. And it was happy, by and large. I am grateful to her, and I do love her, but an hour of her company makes me want to go out and chop down large trees with a very big axe. With my father, on the other hand, there is no friction. What we have is a guilt-sodden truce. He seems to be afraid of me sometimes, and guilty at being afraid. And I think he doesn’t really like me all that much and feels guilty for that as well, while I feel guilty for whatever it is that he doesn’t like. I wonder sometimes how we came to be like this. My impression is that we moved in symmetry, my father withdrawing as I withdrew into blindness. I seem to remember that we understood each other better when I could see something of him, but this may not be true. I don’t know. I’ve started maundering. To conclude: I was a boorish lump and must go back soon, to make amends.

While I’m thinking of it, I think your French phrase is esprit de l’escalier.

And what of life at the Oak? I’m still rattling around in it like one of the last biscuits in the barrel, yet Mr Caldecott, the manager, seems to be permanently on duty: he was at the desk when I first arrived, when I went downstairs to dinner in the evening and when Charlotte picked me up yesterday morning, and he was still around when I came back. I went for a wander in the garden before breakfast this morning and lo! – he’s there again. I can’t imagine what’s keeping him busy. Perhaps an inundation of coach parties is imminent, but I rather doubt it. We had a talk, the manager and I, after Charlotte had deposited me back here. A brief but pleasant chat, out in the garden, from which I learned that Mr Caldecott is a divorced hotelier with a preference for the rural life. I like him. His jib is a pleasing jib, you might say. I have also conversed, in a desultory fashion, with a member of Mr Caldecott’s staff. Her name is Eloni, she’s from northern Greece and that’s about all I know. She’s not the most voluble character, which is a pity because she has a fine voice: low and laryngitic, like a 100-a-day smoker.

No time for Leopardi yesterday, but I feel that work will go well today. Your message has gingered me up for a long stretch at the desk. Speak soon?

He adds the phone number of the Oak, and as soon as his reply has gone he resumes the translation of Leopardi. At four o’clock he rings reception to ask if he might order a plate of sandwiches and a pot of lemon tea. It is the manager himself who takes the call and who ten minutes later brings the tray, and places it on a table to the side of the bureau, and then departs, having made his presence as unobtrusive as possible.

Back in his office, Malcolm continues to leaf through the bills and memoranda and other ephemera from the time of Croombe’s ownership: receipts for quantities of insulating cork, bolts of damask, crates of Bordeaux wine, chairs to be supplied by Maple & Company of Tottenham Court Road. Annotations by Croombe appear in the margins of advertisements and brochures issued by fine hotels in Paris, in German spas, in Swiss resorts, in New York. ‘Flowers in every room, replaced daily,’ he has written beneath a view of the river frontage of the Savoy; ‘140 rooms!’ he exclaims on the back of a print depicting the Baur-en-Ville in Zürich; the single word ‘Cost?’ appears above an engraving of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, connected by a loop of faded ink to a line announcing M. Cadier’s installation of steam-powered lifts. But the most charismatic of these items are the notebooks, small black leather notebooks with marbled endpapers and finely lined pages that have become as fragile as dead leaves, in which Croombe records his impressions of the building site on the Boulevard des Capucines, his introduction to the ‘captivating and capricious’ Sandrine Koechlin and, in 1872, the week that he and Sandrine spent at the Hôtel Splendide. Every meal that he and his wife ate in the hotel is recorded in detail, with observations on the appointments of their suite and the dining room, and then, halfway through the week, there is a conversation with the maître d’hôtel, a young Swiss by the name of César Ritz. ‘In equal proportion he possesses both ambition and discretion, and he displays a purposefulness that is quite remarkable in –’ he is reading when the phone rings and a woman’s voice says, ‘It’s me.’

They have not spoken to each other for months, but she speaks as if continuing an argument that had been interrupted earlier that day. ‘Hello, Kate,’ he replies. ‘How are you?’

‘What’s this all about, Malcolm?’

‘What’s what all about?’

‘You know perfectly well. This letter to Stephanie,’ she says crisply. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? Going behind my back.’

‘I was not going behind your back.’

‘You didn’t tell me. I’d say that’s going behind my back.’

‘Kate, I was not going behind your back.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because she asked me not to.’

‘She asked you.’

‘Yes, she asked me not to tell you yet, so I didn’t.’

‘So why do you think she asked you to do that?’

‘Because she didn’t want you to know yet, clearly.’

‘And you think that’s OK? She says “Let’s not tell Mum, eh?” and you just go along with it.’

‘No, I don’t just go along with it. Why don’t you ask her to read you what I wrote –’

‘I’ve read what you wrote.’

‘I see.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘That I’m surprised you open her mail.’

‘I found it in her room.’

‘Addressed to Stephanie.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is –’

‘The point is that you read it.’

‘Yes, I read it. I’m not going to apologise for finding out what you wrote to our daughter.’

‘And you think that’s permissible? Reading something addressed to her, a private correspondence.’

‘The point is, Malcolm, that I have a right to know about this. I have a right to know what’s going on.’

‘Well, that was my point exactly. As you know, having read my letter.’

Her breathing becomes quieter, as if she is holding the phone away from her mouth, and then she resumes, at the same pitch as her first words, ‘So she wrote to you? Out of the blue, just like that, she wrote to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t start it?’

‘No, Kate, I didn’t start it. I’ve thought about it, I’ve wanted to do it, I don’t think any court would have convicted me if I had done it, but no, I didn’t.’

‘One day, after all these years, she gets it into her head to write to you.’

‘Apparently.’

‘This is a girl who hasn’t mentioned your name since God knows when. So why does she suddenly get this notion to send you a letter?’

‘Ask her, Kate. I don’t know. I was as surprised as you. You’ll have to talk to her.’

‘I will, don’t worry,’ she says.

In the pause he hears a tapping, perhaps of a pen on a table-top. ‘Kate?’ he asks. ‘Why are you so agitated about this?’

‘I’m not agitated,’ she retorts. ‘I’m livid. Absolutely bloody livid.’

‘But why?’

‘That’s a really dim question.’

‘Then tell me. I know this is confusing. It’s confusing for both of us. But why are you so angry that Stephanie wants to see me?’

‘What I’m angry about is you two scheming behind my back.’

‘We’re not scheming. I’ve explained.’

‘Malcolm, even if you’re not scheming, she is.’

‘That’s not how I’d put it.’

‘It’s how I’d put it.’

‘I’m sure she has good reasons for going about it this way.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And what do you imagine these good reasons would be?’

‘I don’t know, Kate, do I? You tell me.’

‘Good reasons,’ she repeats, and he hears her whisper: ‘Jesus Christ.’

This curse, uttered wearily, as though to herself, sets off an echo in his mind, an echo of conversations he does not want to recall. ‘I can’t very easily –’ he begins.

‘I don’t need this, Malcolm,’ she goes on. ‘I really don’t need this.’

‘Don’t need what? Talking to me?’

‘Oh Christ,’ she sighs again. ‘I tell you what: I don’t even think she does want to see you. And that’s the truth. I think she’s doing this to get at me.’

‘But a minute ago you were complaining that she didn’t want you to know.’

‘I’d have known sooner or later.’

‘Kate, what is going on there? I should know. Has something happened?’

‘Nothing’s happened. Life’s lumbering on. She’s a nightmare to live with, and I’m fed up with it.’

‘I think we should discuss this.’

‘No, we don’t need to discuss it. It’s not your problem. It’s mine. Robert’s and mine.’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘Not any more. You don’t know her now.’

‘Well, that’s about to change.’

‘Might be.’

‘No, Kate. Is. Is about to change.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this any more. I have to think. I’ll call you back.’

‘When?’

‘I’ll call you back. Soon.’

‘Call me at the weekend.’

‘Yes.’

‘Before Monday, OK?’

‘Yes. OK,’ she exhales.

‘Talk to her, Kate.’

‘Yes, Malcolm. I don’t need your advice.’

‘Talk to her and let me know what’s happening.’

‘Yes,’ she says, and puts the phone down.

In the beginning perhaps they had been drawn together by her discontent. He can still see her, in the dining room of the Zetland, standing amid a group of aunts and uncles, her eyes desperate and her smile frozen with boredom. A man with a bright red jacket and a paisley tie put his arm round her waist, and her neck stiffened as he kissed her on the cheek. She would have been fourteen then, or fifteen. He had often seen her walking with her friends, a demure little entourage that moved undisturbed through the mêlée of children around the gates, more like a gang of precocious office workers than schoolgirls. Waiting for the bus, she always stood extraordinarily straight, like a dancer, and she was standing that way at the Zetland, blinking at the cigar smoke that was being blown across her face. She turned and tapped his arm to ask if she could get a glass of water, then followed him to the kitchen. When she took the glass from him and sat down in the kitchen, her hair hid her face from him in a way that made her look more sophisticated than any of the adults. Lifting her head, she put a hand flat against her brow and sighed: ‘Jesus Christ, get me out of here.’ She’d drunk a glass of gin. She was three-quarters drunk, and she really didn’t like it, she said, looking at him, with her head resting on her arms. He told her she should eat something, and made an omelette for her, which she ate in about half a minute. His father called him back out to the party, and when he returned to the kitchen she had washed the plate and pan, and made two cups of coffee. And somehow, before the party was over, they came to be climbing up the spiral staircase to the roof of the turret. The weathervane creaked above their heads as they looked out at the sea, standing side by side, so close that her dress kept brushing the back of his legs. Kate surveyed the whole town in one continuous sweep. ‘What a dump,’ she said. ‘Just look at it. Death.’ She removed the pin that held the paper orchid to her dress and flung the flower upward. They watched it fly over the sea-coloured roofs and fall into the street. The skin on her arms had tightened with the cold. He took off his jacket and offered it to her, but she would not take it.

Years later she finally escaped, with him, and they had lived abroad and been happy. For a long time they had been happy, most of the time. He knows this to be true, but at this moment, in the grey wake of their conversation, no instance of their happiness shows itself. What impresses itself upon him is that often, even during their first months in Amsterdam, he would see on Kate’s face a look like the expression he had seen that night in the Zetland, and it seems to him now that their marriage was like a path laid upon a marsh, and that the frigid ooze of boredom would well up through it, more and more frequently as the years passed. And boredom became bitterness, became something like contempt. He remembers one afternoon, on a bridge by a bookshop, when he explained why it would be best to stay a little longer in Amsterdam, as Mr Rijsbergen’s assistant. Just three or four months more, then they could go back to England. She listened, watching a police boat moving slowly down the canal. At last she spoke. ‘Whatever you say,’ she said, nothing more, tightening the straps on Stephanie’s pushchair. She walked off without saying another word, and that night, when he came home, he found in the kitchen bin a sheet of the hotel’s writing paper, on which she had written, in lipstick: ‘bored bored bored bored’. He remembers crushing the piece of paper into an empty tin and sitting in Stephanie’s room to watch his daughter while she slept. He fell asleep on the floor beside the cot. When he woke up he went into their bedroom. Kate lay curled on her side, with one hand under her cheek. He was no longer annoyed by the childish message she had left for him to find. Looking at her as she lay in their bed, turned away from him in sleep, in the shadows that the curtains cast like raindrops across the room, he felt something akin to the misery of bereavement, a misery that now, summoned by Kate’s voice, is returning to him, like an amnesiac’s interlude of clarity.

He rummages through the relics on his desk, with no purpose other than to divert himself from the memory of Amsterdam. Taking up a sheaf of menus, he begins to plan the final night of the Oak. He makes notes on dishes that were prepared in Croombe’s kitchen, and drafts a letter to be sent to his most loyal guests, telling them of the special supper with which the Oak will be ending. He settles some bills, takes a call from Giles Harbison, goes down to the basement to check the gauges in the pump room. He continues down the passageway to the pool, but even the sight of the radiant blue walls, of the burnished pipes and the blooms of electric light within the water cannot bring him wholly into the present. As he stands by the water, breathing the sweetly stagnant air, it is as though he had recently arrived at the Oak, and Kate and Stephanie had departed merely weeks ago.

Going home, he drives down the High Street instead of taking his customary route. It occurs to him, as he waits for the traffic lights to change, that he needs some cash for the morning. He parks outside the bank. Something here is unusual tonight, he is aware, as he jabs at the keyboard of the cash machine, but precisely what is unusual he does not know. The drums and cogs inside the machine start to turn; he puts out his hand to take the notes, glances to right and left, and then notices that several street lights in a row have failed. A pallid light lies over the dark bricks of the bank’s façade. The road has a complexion of indigo and the clouds around the moon are bordered with dark lavender. At a shriek of laughter he looks to his left. Three teenaged girls are sitting on the steps of the library, passing a cigarette around. They sprawl on the steps, one with a foot resting on another’s knee, the third girl sitting apart, higher up the steps, ruffling her tightly curled hair. The two girls sitting together turn to look at their friend. Taking a drag of the cigarette, she makes a remark, a sardonic aside that makes the other two howl and throw their arms round each other. This is what Stephanie will be like, he thinks, and finally, in the delight of the idea of his daughter, the mood of the afternoon is obliterated.

In the alley opposite the library, Eloni drops a bag of stale buns into the bin. The pubs will be emptying soon, and the day’s last customers will arrive, some of them so drunk that they will vomit onto the pavement outside, and it will be her job to clear up the mess they make. She goes to the end of the alley; if nobody is coming she can stay outside for some fresh air. Three shrieking girls are walking down the street, veering across the pavement arm in arm. By the bank a man is getting into his car, and as they pass behind him one of them makes a remark that makes him turn and smile at them. Recognising Mr Caldecott, she steps back to avoid being seen, even though he knows she works here. In the shadows of the alley she watches his car go by, and her heart seems to clench, as though he had gone for ever and suddenly she is friendless and in danger. She returns to the kitchen. From the grills she scrapes the gritty pellets of meat and the slivers of onion that have shrivelled and hardened so they look like clippings from animals’ claws. She drains the dirty oil into a cut-down pop bottle. Out front, Charlie yells an order. She splays the grainy discs of meat onto the grill, and all the time the heavy small thing is tumbling in her chest.

four

At a quarter past one, hearing the front door close, Stephanie gets up from her bed to make sure that her mother is leaving. Pushing a hand into the slats of the blind, she sees her mother reach into her handbag for her sunglasses. It’s the round black-rimmed shades today, the Jackie Onassis pair. Post-workout chic is this afternoon’s look: strappy sandals to make the most of the coral-pink toenails; freshly laundered skinny jeans; and the tight white T-shirt that Robert brought back from New York, which cost a sexily ludicrous amount of money and shows off the high-toned, caramel-coloured arms. It’s the look that suits her best and it’s obvious from her walk that she knows it, just as you can see in the springy movement of her wrist the pleasure she gets when she aims the key fob at the car and all the locks spring up obediently, like tiny servants standing to attention. With poise she steps up into the car, turning at the waist, twisting her hips, dipping her head, reaching for the door in one fluid sequence, like a piece of action that’s been rehearsed and rehearsed until it’s become instinctive. One peep in the mirror and the Jackies are raised upright and jammed into the hairband position. And then we’re off, off to the shops once again, to buy whatever’s needed for this evening’s meal and a bottle or two of whatever wine was the top tip in last Sunday’s supplement. After that, it’ll be a drive halfway across London to see Susie, who will tend her hair for the twentieth time this year. At five o’clock, if the traffic’s not too bad, she will be back, with an immaculate bob from which every strand of grey will have been eliminated by a dye the colour of plastic oak veneer, and an impulse buy on the passenger seat, a scented candle or an exquisite belt, in a tiny carrier bag that’s almost too nice to throw away.

She turns off the radio and wanders across the landing. From the doorway she surveys her parents’ bedroom. The bed has been tightly made and the pillows heaped in two pairs of three, all perfectly aligned and perfectly white. The net curtains hang in waves as regular as corrugated fibreglass. The red digits of the alarm clock blink beside the white plastic lamp and a book from which a green leather bookmark protrudes. And on Robert’s side, underneath the matching white plastic lamp, lies a book with a red leather bookmark. On the dressing table, to the side of the mirror, half a dozen perfume bottles stand on a circle of white lace, none of them touching, all as shiny as new. There’s not a fingermark, not a grain of dust to mar the gleam of the mirror. She looks around, seeking a blemish, an irregularity, but there’s none: not one stray sock, a single dropped coin, a mislaid hair-clip, nothing. She opens her mother’s wardrobe, and it’s like opening the storeroom of a clothes shop. Packed closely on the rail, the dresses and jackets and shirts hang in sheaths of plastic and white paper above a low wall of shoe boxes. In the centre of the rail there’s a small gap between the hangers, where a fat grey satin pouch of pot-pourri dangles on a blue satin ribbon, like the body of a dead bird tangled in a branch. Indifferently, going through the motions of searching the room, she opens the drawers of the pine chest: the deepest is full of jeans, all as clean as the day they were bought, folded in two piles, one for him, one for her; another contains nothing but white shirts and white tops; the top drawer is a fragrant nest of underwear, bras to the left side, knickers to the right, with subtle hues of cream and pink amid the undimmed whiteness. She shoves a hand into a wad of silk, striking the packets of pills that are hidden underneath. If she were to throw the packets away, or just mess things up a bit, it would be no worse than opening the letter, she thinks, and then the notion vanishes, and she feels tired again, that’s all.

Opening the kitchen door, she steps into warmth and brightness. Pouring through the wide glass doors, the sunlight makes the cork flooring look like untrodden sand. A luscious glow comes off a plywood chair, blurring the shape of it, and the empty glass vase by the draining board shines like a crystal block. Soaked in sunlight, the long zinc tabletop has the sheen of a dolphin’s wet flank. Sitting down at the table, she stares at the mottled skin of the metal, at the bright silver nicks and scratches, at the rings of wetness that have become blotches of variegated grey, like rain clouds. She forgets where she is, until the light suddenly goes and again she is in the kitchen of her father’s house. She unlocks the doors and slides them back. Standing on the terrace, she gasps the air in. She watches a plane as it traverses the whole span of the sky. A ring of red string has been strung around the relaid part of the lawn. In a corner of the garden a bank of new plants has appeared, hemmed by a crop of plastic identity tags, all of them perfectly upright.

In the bread bin there are three types of bread. She takes the biggest loaf and saws off two thick wedges. Under a dish in the fridge she finds a drooping Camembert, an overripe Stilton and something the colour of a block of urine. Behind the dish, wrapped in a coat of foil, there’s a roasted chicken, which she might have been told to leave alone, but she’s not sure. It’s the only edible thing she can see, so she tears a few strips off the breast and lays them between the unbuttered slices. On the work surface, between the oven and the rack of spices, a cookery book lies open at a recipe for Fillet of Beef with Red Wine, Anchovies, Garlic & Thyme. Two postcards inserted between other pages seem to mark the other courses on tonight’s menu: Pea, Mint & Avocado Salad, with Strawberries in Dark Syrup to finish. ‘Dear K & R,’ she reads, on the back of a picture of a colossal gold Buddha, ‘This is the life!! Our room is ENORMOUS and the people here are so lovely and friendly they make you feel like you're one of the family. Weather is glorious and the beach is to die for! John went diving this morning and has really caught the bug – says he’s going to do it every day. Too much like hard work if you ask me! London seems a million miles away…’ Mixed in her mouth, the chicken and bread have formed a stringy paste that tastes of nothing but saliva. She lifts the top slice off the sandwich and examines the strips of flesh. They remind her of dead mice in the biology lab.

She grabs the phone but puts it down before keying any numbers, because at the back of her mind there’s an incident involving her father, in a shop. She is walking behind him, carrying a wire basket with handles that are covered in red rubber that has split. He stops by a big freezer and opens the door, but he doesn’t take anything out for a long time, and then finally he holds out a big box of frozen fish fingers, for her to say yes or no. He rubbed her hair every time he put something into the basket. Holding the half-eaten sandwich in one hand, she stares at the floor, trying to remember more, but the sight of her lumpen feet prevents her from thinking. She throws the sandwich into the bin.

On the low oak table in the living room this month’s magazines are stacked in a block, with Vogue at the top. She scans the tapes on the shelves behind the television: the tedious rugby games and tedious Grand Prix races, the Indiana Jones collection, the Humphrey Bogart collection, the Woody Allen collection, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, none of them watched since the day they were bought. Her father’s flat, she recalls, felt more like an office than a place where someone lived. The carpet was too thin for a living room, and he had a desk by the window, with a computer on it, and a pile of letters. He brought her meal out on a tray. She ate it on her knees, watching a cartoon on the television. The radiator in the bathroom was dusty. When she went to the toilet she ran her finger down one of the indentations in the radiator, and her fingertip came away black. The bookshelf at which she is looking is filled with autobiographies: the life stories of film stars, TV personalities, rugby players, mountain climbers, politicians, racing drivers, criminals, soldiers, cricket players, businessmen, nobodies. There is not a smudge of dirt anywhere on the carpet. It is like a pond of cream, and it makes her feel sick to look at it.

In the bathroom mirror she looks at her face, a face in which she sees none of her mother’s features, except for the shape of the eyes, which are deeply set, like her mother’s, and quite wide apart, like hers, but darker. She looks into those eyes and they look without intent into hers. Discarding the shirt, she regards the protruberant collarbone, the scatter of moles below the neck, the heavy breasts, the swell of the belly. It is like looking through a window at somebody else. She turns her hands over, palms up, then back. The fingers do not taper like her mother’s and the knuckles are more bulbous. On her wrist hangs the bracelet that her father sent her. ‘Typical,’ her mother kept saying, appalled that he’d given his daughter something second-hand for Christmas. Cheap and ugly and thoughtless, her mother said it was – worse than the tokens he usually sent. But she knew right away that it wasn’t cheap, even if it was ugly. She kept it in a box under the bed, and at night she would sometimes take it from its case and examine the waves that ran round it, and the things shaped like seeds of corn, and the weird little boggle-eyed man with the boxer’s broken nose, wondering what had made her father buy it for her, where he had bought it, what its story was. One day, at school, she saw a similar thing in a history book. Perhaps it was after seeing the picture that she began to look at the bracelet carefully and see that it wasn’t ugly. And the fact that her mother despised the thing had become part of its attraction. She smiles at the half-naked girl in the mirror, remembering the evening she had worn it, at a dinner for that boozy old bastard Mr Girtin and his pointless wife. She was thinner then, and could jam the bracelet nearly up to her elbow, but when she passed a bowl to Mrs Girtin it slipped out of her sleeve and her mother saw it before she could shove it back. From the look her mother gave her anyone would have thought she’d let rip with a fart. Buttoning the shirt, she goes back into her parents’ bedroom. She sits on the bed, pummels a pillow on her lap, deposits the phone on the pillow, and dials.

Malcolm takes a call from reception, telling him that there’s a Stephanie Tindall for him on line two.

‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Stephanie?’ He hears a clumsiness in the pronunciation of her name, as though his mouth were recovering from an anaesthetic.

‘Hi,’ says his daughter.

‘My God,’ he responds, too theatrically. ‘It’s you.’

‘Yeah,’ she says coolly, and pauses, as if he had been the one who had phoned and she is waiting to hear what he wants.

‘This is – I’m –’

‘Surprised?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Yes. You sound surprised,’ she confirms. There is a shade of an accent in her voice, ‘yis’ rather than ‘yes’.

‘Surprised and very pleased,’ he says. He stretches out a foot to push the door shut. ‘I thought I’d hear from your mother first.’

Stephanie gives a small grunt, perhaps of amusement. ‘Well, it’s me.’

‘After all this time.’

‘All this time,’ she copies.

‘So, how are you?’

‘I’m OK. How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Good.’

Having waited for her to say more, he prompts: ‘You didn’t sound altogether OK in your letter.’

‘I’m OK,’ she repeats expressionlessly, and again does not continue.

He makes a non-committal sound, hoping that she will speak. ‘You’re not, are you? Not really,’ he says at last.

She sighs loudly, then tells him: ‘We don’t get on. You spoke to her. You must have got the picture.’

‘Well, no. I don’t understand the situation. If the problem –’

‘The problem is that she’s who she is and he’s who he is and I’m who I am.’

‘Robert.’

‘The dentist. Yes.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met the man.’

‘What, never?’

‘Not ever.’

‘Count your blessings. I’m telling you. He’s dull. Dull dull dull.’

‘Dull isn’t so bad. One can live with dull. I don’t see why –’ ‘He’s worse than dull.

He’s dullness to the power of ten. Dullness de luxe. And she’s awful. They’re driving me mental.’

‘She’s not awful. Stephanie. She can be difficult. I know she can be difficult. I can be difficult. We all can be. But I don’t think she’s –’

‘But you wouldn’t know, would you?’

‘Well, I think –’

‘No,’ she persists with the aggression of a prosecutor, ‘you wouldn’t know. More than ten years ago you two split up.’

‘Yes.’

‘And a lot can change in that time.’

‘Of course.’

‘You ought to try living here. It’s a police state. A cross between a police state and the Ideal Home Exhibition. That’s exactly what it is. Everything by the book. Everything in its place. All friends to be vetted, all homework to be signed off. Probably got my room bugged.’

‘Stephanie.’

‘Wouldn’t put it past her. She opens my letters –’

‘That wasn’t good. We had words about it.’

‘A fucking outrage is what it was.’

‘Stephanie, please.’

‘Please what?’

‘Don’t use language like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘No, come on. We’re talking about your mother. There’s no need –’

‘We’re talking about my mother and you’re starting to sound like her.’

‘No, just tone it down a little. I want to understand, but abusing her doesn’t help.’

‘It helps me,’ she retorts.

A silence fills the line between them. ‘So did you talk to her?’ he asks. ‘Did you talk to your mother about coming down here?’

‘Oh yeah. We had a talk, as recommended.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What did she say?’

‘It was brilliant. She wanted to know what I was doing writing to you, like I need official permission before putting pen to paper. So I wanted to know what she was doing snooping in my room, and since when has it been a crime to write to your own father? And then she throws a full-on berserk. “Robert is your father. This is your home. Why are you doing this?” Completely bonkers, chewing the carpet.’

‘She’ll calm down.’

‘Yeah. Sure. The day she’s buried.’

‘I think you should let her know that we’ve spoken.’

‘Oh yeah. And have her go ballistic again. Top idea.’

‘It’s best if she knows.’

‘It’s not going to happen. She’ll go totally mental.’

‘Tell a white lie. Say I phoned you.’

‘Won’t work. She’ll find out in the end. She’ll check the phone bill and see your number. She always checks the bill, every time. Like she’s worried I’m going to be spending all night on the blower to Mongolia or something.’

‘But –’

‘Look, I’m not going to say anything to her. There’s no point. I’m not doing it,’ she says, with such finality that their conversation stalls.

‘Perhaps I should ring her tonight?’

‘God, don’t do that. Friday night is social night. She wouldn’t want that ruined. This week’s special guest is Mr Dunne, the gum specialist. A man who’s devoted his life to gums.’

‘A valuable public service.’

‘And his wife’s an airhead. A Nazi airhead.’

‘A bit strong, Stephanie.’

‘No, really, she is. She opens her mouth: a torrent of crap comes out. Lesbians, the Irish, the French, students, anyone to the left of Pinochet – you name them, she hates them.’

‘You’ll be having a fun evening, then.’

‘Too right. I’m out to the movies.’

‘To see what?’

‘Dunno. Whatever’s on. Can’t be worse than Mr and Mrs Gums.’

‘I suppose not,’ he laughs insincerely. ‘Look, if she hasn’t phoned by Sunday evening, I’ll ring her, OK? Let’s not waste any more time. When would you like to come down, ideally?’

‘In about half an hour would suit me fine.’

‘Come on. When would be best?’

‘Whenever.’

‘All right. We’ll say as soon as possible, OK?’

‘Sure. Whatever. OK.’

‘Did you look at the brochure I sent?’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

‘You’ll like the pool. You saw the picture?’

‘Yeah. It looked nice.’

‘And there’s a fantastic garden, with a tennis court. Do you play tennis?’

‘No. Haven’t got the build for swinging a racquet,’ she adds, with a mirthless chuckle.

‘Well, I can’t play tennis either,’ he says, then he notices the light for line one is flashing. ‘Sorry, Stephanie, can you hang on, just for a second? I have to take a call.’

‘No, you go,’ she tells him, perhaps taking offence at the interruption.

‘I’ll be just –’

‘It’s OK,’ she says impatiently. ‘I’ve got to scoot.’

‘One minute. There’s one –’

‘Really. I’ve got to go. See you.’ And then, as an afterthought, snatching the phone back from its cradle, she says airily: ‘Nice to talk.’ The light for line two goes dead, and then the light for line one.

He had imagined that something like joy would be what he would feel when he came to speak to Stephanie again, but instead what he feels is a light-headedness, and a measure of disappointment, not at her attitude towards him, but at her rancour towards her mother, a rancour that was audible in almost every word. He takes her letter from his pocket and reads a sentence or two, but it is irrelevant now, superseded by their conversation, a conversation he almost wishes had not happened, because it has tainted his anticipation of her arrival. Instantly brought closer to his daughter by the sound of her voice, he has been left somewhere that feels no closer at all.

He puts the letter back in his pocket and goes out of the office. About to enter the Randall Room, he sees Mr Morton seated in a wicker chair at the open door, alone, facing the garden, his face raised to receive the mildness of the breeze. He touches the door and Mr Morton turns his head.

The briefest expression of worry passes over the blind man’s brow and then comes a smile of comprehension. ‘Mr Caldecott,’ he says, raising a hand.

Arrested by the certainty with which Mr Morton has spoken his name, he stops at the table in the centre of the room. ‘Mr Morton. Could I bring you something?’ he asks. ‘Tea, perhaps? We have fresh scones and home-made preserves.’

‘Thank you, but no, I don’t think I will,’ says Mr Morton. ‘Later, possibly. For now, this will suffice,’ he says, gesturing towards the garden.

‘Another very pleasant day,’ he comments, preparing to withdraw.

‘Indeed,’ Mr Morton agrees. His fingers play chords on the tape recorder that lies in his lap.

‘We have some tapes you could borrow, if you’d like. Some Mozart symphonies, a bit of Haydn. We use them as background music at receptions. I don’t know if that’s your taste –’

‘Very kind of you,’ says Mr Morton. ‘I may take you up on that offer later. Perhaps this evening.’

He retreats a pace. ‘I’ll let you enjoy the afternoon in peace, then,’ he says, but as he reaches the door he hears the wicker crack. Turning round, he sees that Mr Morton has twisted in the seat to face him, as if suddenly remembering something he had intended to say. ‘If it’s not any trouble, a spot of Mozart would be welcome,’ he says.

When he returns with the tape, Mr Morton’s demeanour has changed. His face, turned down towards the machine in his lap, betrays a darkening mood, a distractedness like that of a reader whose book has led him to a dispiriting thought. ‘Very kind,’ Mr Morton repeats, and there is a sense of absence in the smile with which he takes the cassette.

‘Is there anything else I could get you?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Well, if you think of anything, there’s a bell here,’ he tells him, placing on an adjacent table the small brass bell he has brought from the reception desk. ‘There’ll be somebody right outside all afternoon, in the hall.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll leave you to Mozart and the weather,’ he says, but he remains by Mr Morton’s chair, looking at the cassette, which the blind man is holding as if it were an object of unknown purpose.

Mr Morton adjusts his posture, grasping the arms of the chair to straighten his back, blinking at the garden, like someone mustering his concentration at the recommencement of a concert. ‘Please don’t let me detain you, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, and the request in his voice is unmistakable.

‘I’m not exactly rushed off my feet.’

Mr Morton’s lower lip presses outward and he tilts back his head. ‘To tell you the truth, if you could spare me a couple of minutes, there are a few things I’d like to ask you.’

‘By all means,’ he says, pulling a chair closer.

Mr Morton bends his head right back and turns to left and right, as if taking the measure of the space around him. ‘We’re in the room with the paintings, yes?’

‘We are. The Randall Room.’

‘The Randall Room. The greenhouse,’ Mr Morton remarks, with a nod of amusement. ‘The friend who made the booking for me, he saw a picture of it on a website,’ he explains. ‘He said it made him think of a mad millionaire’s greenhouse.’

‘Yes, yes. I suppose it could be.’

‘The ceiling feels high.’

‘It is. Twenty feet.’

‘And there’s a chandelier? A large chandelier? Behind us?’

‘There is.’

‘OK,’ says Mr Morton, and the skin round his eyes tightens.

‘You knew there was a chandelier?’

‘I had an idea. When you walk underneath it, you can tell there’s something hanging above you. And the breeze is making something scrape up there.’

‘It is?’

‘Yes. Listen,’ says Mr Morton, lifting a forefinger like a conductor preparing to give a musician his cue.’

He listens, and hears nothing but the leaves shuffling in the wind.

‘There, you heard that?’

‘I heard something,’ he equivocates, and Mr Morton lowers his hand, gratified.

‘Now, this room,’ Mr Morton goes on. ‘A ballroom, would that be right?’

‘It was the Assembly Room, when the hotel opened.’

‘Which was?’

‘At the end of the eighteenth century. It was called the Angel, originally. Concerts were held here, and dances. Then, when the Angel became the Oak –’

‘Which was?’

‘1870. Then the new owner, Walter Davenport Croombe, he converted the Assembly Room into a winter garden and commissioned the paintings.’

‘From Randall.’

‘From Randall, precisely. William Joshua Forster Randall of Devizes.’

‘Not a name I know.’

‘I don’t think his fame ever extended much beyond the county.’

‘And what about the paintings? What do they depict?’

‘There’s a wedding in the country on one wall, and workers in the fields on the other side, sowing seed and tending livestock. The third wall is a landscape, with herds of cows and a lake, and distant mountains above the door.’

‘And the style? How do the people look?’

‘Modern folk in medieval costume. Ladies in conical headdresses, men in colourful stockings, with Victorian whiskers. The peasants are all impossibly healthy looking. We had an art teacher staying here, a couple of years ago. She said that Randall’s work was just an anthology of Pre-Raphaelite quotations. A bit of Millais, a bit of Rossetti, a bit of Burne-Jones.’

‘I don’t have a very clear idea of what that might mean, I’m afraid.’

‘No, of course. I’m sorry.’

‘No need. For all you know, I might once have been an aficionado of Burne-Jones. Do you like Mr Randall’s work?’

‘It’s not great art, I know that much, but I like what it does for the room. Gives it a certain gaiety.’

‘OK.’

‘And I like it because it has a story.’

‘Excellent,’ says Mr Morton, laying his hands on the arms of the chair to denote attentiveness.

‘Quite a long story.’

‘All the better,’ Mr Morton laughs, smacking the wicker arms. ‘I have an insatiable appetite for stories. So please, take as long as you like.’

‘OK. Well, our Mr Randall was something of a ladies’ man in his youth, until well into his forties, it appears. Then, finally, he was enticed to the altar by Elizabeth Drummond, the sole offspring of a local magistrate. Croombe commissioned these paintings seven or eight years later. Though then in his fifties, Randall was still a handsome man, slim and with a roguish glint to his eye. His self-portrait is in the wedding procession. He appears as a friar, walking next to a somewhat muscular nun.’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘Precisely. Now, when Randall was here, a rumour began to spread that he had become involved with a local farmer’s daughter, a girl by the name of Lily Corbin, who was around twenty at the time. Tongues started wagging when Randall included a portrait of Lily in his painting: she’s a serving girl at the banquet table. Not only that. The friar – Randall – is holding a book in his left hand, and if you continue a line from the index finger of that hand it leads you straight to Lily. For some people this was a clear sign that something was going on. Elizabeth certainly thought something was going on, because one afternoon she stormed in here, accused her husband of being a heartless adulterer and a corrupter of young women, and proceeded to stab him with a knife she’d taken from the kitchen. It’s said that as Randall staggered back some blood from his hand got onto the wet plaster, and that he later disguised the stains by painting a bank of poppies around them. There was something of a scandal, and Randall’s wife never let him out of her sight after that. Every day she followed him to the winter garden, and sat in the middle of the room all day long. As for Lily, she protested that nothing improper had occurred between herself and Mr Randall. She always insisted on their innocence, but the taint of sin remained with her, and she never married.

‘Now, our night porter, Mr Naylor, his father was a grocer down in the town, and Jack, Mr Naylor, used to go with him when he made deliveries to the outlying villages. This was after the war. One of their customers was an old lady who lived in a cottage on what had once been her parents’ farm. And of course this old lady was Miss Corbin. Some Sundays, Jack and his mother would cycle out to visit her. Jack would play outside while the women chatted in the kitchen. By this time Lily lived almost entirely on the ground floor of her cottage. She had her bed in the parlour, and her bathroom was downstairs. But one day there was a rainstorm and water started dripping through the ceiling of the landing. It was Jack who noticed the water coming through, and he took a bucket from the outhouse and went up the stairs to put it under the leak. Being just eight or nine years old, an inquisitive age, he couldn’t resist having a look around. He pushed at a door, and what he found was a dusty, cobwebbed room that had nothing in it – nothing, that is, except pictures. Dozens and dozens of pictures. Leaning against the wall there were paintings that had gone baggy in their frames. Albums full of drawings were heaped on the floorboards, with loose sheets of paper strewn all over the place.

‘That night Jack told his mother what he’d seen. It was through Jack’s mother that we learned more about Randall’s last years. It was known that Randall had returned to the Oak towards the end of his life, in 1895, after Croombe had installed electric lights in the hotel. The new lighting caused a sensation, but it didn’t flatter the paintings, Croombe thought. On the contrary; the colours looked wan and flat. He made enquiries, and discovered that Randall was still alive, living in Bristol, still painting, but Elizabeth had died a decade before and he was alone now. He was almost penniless, and in poor health, so when Croombe invited him to the Oak to retouch the murals, it was like a gift from heaven. He came back, spent a month as Croombe’s guest, worked on his paintings, and then returned to Bristol.’

Mr Morton has eased himself lower in the chair. His eyes have been closed for some time, but from small movements of his lips it had been clear for a while that he was attending to every phrase. Now, however, there is no sign that he is listening. He may even be asleep.

He leans gradually towards the blind man, who now sits up and faces him, frowning. ‘Is that the end?’ asks Mr Morton.

‘Not quite,’ he replies, backing off, like a shoplifter accosted on the point of pocketing something.

‘I thought not. Go on,’ Mr Morton commands, reclining again.

‘Well, that was the story that everyone knew: that Randall did the job, went home to Bristol and died there,’ he continues. ‘In fact, Randall took a detour on his way home. He went in search of Lily Corbin, and found her living at the farm where she had been living when he first came to the Oak, though now she was in the cottage that used to be occupied by the herdsman. As Lily told it, she answered a knock on her door late one afternoon, and there was her younger brother, Alfred, standing in the drizzle beside a bedraggled old man, whom he shoved towards her as if he were some vagrant he’d found thieving from the henhouse. Alfred said the old man’s name was Mr Barlow, but she’d recognised him straight away. She wasn’t going to say anything, however, not with her brother there, because her family had always blamed her for the affair with the painter. It was because of the affair that nobody had ever wanted to marry her. And when she got him inside, out of the rain, she didn’t have a chance to say anything, because before she could get a word in Randall launched into a great speech about his love for her, how her face and voice had haunted him every morning and every night for these past twenty years and more, how he had reproached himself for his cowardice in not leaving his wife. He was a beggar now, he said, not merely in appearance but in his heart as well. He knelt at her feet on the cold stone floor of her kitchen, pouring out his heart while rainwater dripped from his straggly hair. He looked ridiculous, she thought, and he was talking nonsense. Perhaps he had indeed fallen in love with her in the course of that summer month, when they had walked along the river together. Certainly she had fallen in love with him. It was the one time in her life, that month, that she had been as happy as she had been as a child, but it was too many years ago. Her heart had withered. He told her that he had been back to the room where he had painted her portrait, that he had repainted the face of one of the shepherdesses, to make her the twin of the beautiful serving girl. He had painted a lily by her feet, in honour of her, as a sign of his love. She was no longer the beautiful serving girl, she pointed out, but he told her that she was wrong, and started quoting poetry at her. She looked at William as he knelt in a little puddle on the floor of her freezing kitchen, and what she saw was not the man she had loved when she was twenty, but a man she did not know, a lonely and fearful old man, and she felt pity for him.

‘Randall came to his senses, and learned to content himself with pity. He vacated his home in Bristol and went to live on the upper floor of Lily Corbin’s cottage, while she lived below. When Randall fell ill with pneumonia, nearly two years after he’d moved into the cottage, she nursed him until he died. In his will he left her everything, though there wasn’t much to leave, except the pictures he’d painted in her house. She stored them in the room in which Randall had worked and slept, and rarely looked at them, she said.

‘By the time that Jack and his mother were visiting Lily, the hotel had fallen into disrepair and was boarded up. During the war it was used as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen, having gone out of business in the 1920s. Randall’s paintings were whitewashed over and this room became a ward. In 1945 the Oak was boarded up again, so when Jack came up here, to take a look at the pictures he’d heard Lily talk about, the garden was wild and had started to invade the building. Vines were creeping across the walls and there was grass coming up through the floor. Armed with a torch, Jack would slip in here and try to find the portraits of Lily. Some faces could be seen through the veil of whitewash, but not many, and the whole room had grown a coat of fungus and moss. It was like a magic grotto, with the sun shining through the cracks between the boards, and the painted people lurking underneath the greenery and mould. He’d shine his torch across the walls, trying to find Lily, but he never saw any shepherdess and the only serving girl he could see looked nothing like the old lady at the farm. He described the serving girl to her, but she couldn’t say if he’d found her, because she’d never seen the room herself. All she knew was that the friar’s forefinger was pointing at her, so Jack went looking for the friar, but he couldn’t see him either. It wasn’t until long after Lily had died, when the Oak reopened and this room was restored, that he knew for a fact which of the girls had been Lily. And of course it turned out to be the serving girl he’d picked out with his torch.’

Mr Morton opens his eyes, blinking as if emerging from a daydream. ‘So she must have been in her nineties, when Jack was a boy?’

‘A month short of her hundredth birthday when she died in 1949. The farm was down on the Bath Road, a couple of miles from here. There’s a supermarket on the site now, and a DIY superstore.’

Facing the glass wall, Mr Morton raises his eyebrows as though at a screen on which a film had just been shown. ‘Quite a tale,’ he comments.

‘One I’ve told many times, as you’ll have gathered. But not always at such length. Sorry. I went on a bit.’

‘Not at all. Not at all,’ Mr Morton assures him. A smile begins to form and then melts, and his expression settles into thoughtful composure as he ponders the tale of Randall and Lily Corbin and Jack Naylor.

‘I’ll leave you to your music.’

His lips form an unspoken word, then he says: ‘Not music. Homework.’ Smiling, he places the machine on the arm of the chair. With a finger poised above the Play button, he asks: ‘Would you like to hear?’

‘By all means,’ he replies, and a woman’s voice comes out of the machine, speaking Italian. In a wistful lilt the voice recites four or five lines that sound like poetry, lines in which can be heard words that must mean ‘sun’ and ‘herb’ and ‘rose’.

Mr Morton turns off the tape and smiles in the way one would smile at a souvenir that has awakened ambivalent memories. ‘“La donzelletta vien dalla campagna, | In sul calar del sole,”’ he repeats. ‘“Col suo fascio dell’erba, e reca in mano| Un mazzolin di rose e di viole,| Onde, siccome suole,| Ornare ella si appresta | Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.”’ Solemnly, holding the recorder between his palms, he translates: ‘“The girl strolls homeward from the fields|As the sun is setting, | With a sheaf of grass and, in her hand, | A posy of roses and violets | With which, tomorrow, | As every Sunday, she will adorn | Her bodice and her hair.” A poem,’ he explains, ‘by Giacomo Leopardi,’ and continues, intuiting the response: ‘An Italian poet, a great poet, but in Britain hardly known. Hence my vainglorious mission to translate his poems into English.’

‘You’re a translator?’

‘But not of poetry. More prosaic material, usually: essays, sleeve notes, memoirs, guidebooks, brochures, anything that’ll pay the bills. Leopardi is a private project.’

‘No one’s translated him before?’

‘There’s always room for more. Not that my versions will be better than anyone else’s. They’ll miss the target too, but differently. I miss, we all miss, but every missed shot is useful. Like arrows peppering the bull’s-eye. The poem is the shape in the middle,’ says Mr Morton, his fingers forming a circle of arrow shafts in the air.

‘What were the lines again?’

Evidently expecting the request, Mr Morton repeats promptly, with exactly the same intonation as before, ‘“La donzelletta vien dalla campagna, | In sul calar del sole, | Col suo fascio dell’erba, e reca in mano | Un mazzolin di rose e di viole, | Onde, siccome suole, | Ornare ella si appresta | Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.”’ He rewinds the tape and plays it again, and the female voice recites the words, the same words, but in her voice they are changed, sounding not like a report, as they sounded when Mr Morton spoke them, but rather like a confession whispered in the dark, to herself.

‘Beautiful,’ he responds, and Mr Morton nods, gravely, as if this were not a fatuous thing to have said. ‘When was he born?’

‘Around the same time as your hotel. Born 1798, died 1837.’

‘A short life.’

‘Short and miserable. He was never a happy man, but he had a lot to be unhappy about. With Leopardi you get the full panoply of romantic suffering: poor health, unrequited love – though I have to say that he tended to fall in love after the event, as it were, or with women he knew would not reciprocate. I think his infatuations were essentially literary. There’s something artificial about them, something willed. For his poetry he needed to be unloved. And women weren’t the worst of his troubles.’

‘The worst being –?’

‘His body.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘His appearance was unprepossessing, to say the least. In Naples he was nicknamed “o ranavuottolo”, the little toad. He was very small, with a large head, and his upper body was badly twisted. His digestive system didn’t function properly. He was asthmatic. He had chronic bronchitis. The deformity of his spine and ribcage was so bad that it damaged his lungs and heart. Fatally damaged them. And as if that weren’t enough,’ Mr Morton goes on, ‘he was raised in a moribund little town, in thrall to the pious tyranny of his mother. Imagine this,’ he enjoins. ‘Giacomo is barely four years old. An infant. He enters the great room of the Palazzo Leopardi, the salone. In the centre there is a huge table, decked in red velvet. Giacomo crosses the room. He pulls himself up to peep over the top of the table. And what does he discover? The body of his little brother, laid out on a velvet bed. And how does his mother comfort him? She tells him that she is rejoicing in the boy’s death. She is rejoicing because his death has sent another soul to the ranks of the blessed.’ Incredulous, indignant, Mr Morton cites other instances of the Contessa’s pitiless devotion to God, of her severity towards Giacomo and towards her husband, the proud and ineffectual and kindly Count Monaldo, who once gave his trousers to a beggar and hobbled home wrapped in his cloak, terrified lest his wife discover his act of charity, and towards her daughter, Paolina, who was forbidden to meet her penfriends when they came to Recanati from Bologna, because her mother regarded friendship as a contamination of one’s love of the Almighty. ‘And yet,’ Mr Morton sighs, raising his hands, acceding to the argument of an imaginary opponent, ‘when Giacomo at last escapes from the prison of Recanati he is no happier. For the first time in his life he is free of his family. He is free of the backwater in which it was his misfortune to be born. For six days his carriage rumbles across Italy, and what does he do? He reads his books, barely glancing out of the window.’ He shakes his head with indulgent perplexity, as if he were a travelling companion of Leopardi, observing the eccentric young man seated opposite him. ‘Giacomo goes to Rome,’ he continues, ‘and finds the big city no more to his liking than life in the provinces. Unimpressed by the great monuments, unmoved by its ruins, irked by the people he has to mix with, he claims to find pleasure only in one small corner of the city, one tiny enclave of pleasurable misery: the tomb of Torquato Tasso, in the church of Sant’Onofrio, where he wept for the poor mad poet. In Pisa too he finds a refuge from the vexations of city life, not a chapel or a tomb on this occasion, but a simple lane, a spot that becomes dear to him because – wait for it – it reminds him of Recanati, his birthplace, the town in which he had passed his youth, a period he has now come to regard as his single fleeting episode of true contentment. An impossible person. Precious and self-centred. A dilettante. An inveterate adolescent,’ Mr Morton pronounces, pausing to flop his hands apart in exasperation. ‘And yet, and yet. Adolescents are very often right. And his voice is wonderful. Wonderful,’ he repeats, his eyes following a scribble in the air, as though tracking the flight of a butterfly. ‘So simple, so clear.’

He listens, a little unnerved by Mr Morton’s flittering gaze and by the urgency of his speech. ‘Like a fantastically wealthy man who has taken a vow of poverty,’ says Mr Morton, but the disturbance created by Stephanie, which had abated for as long as the story of Lily and William Randall lasted, has returned now, and become so obtrusive that the voice of his daughter and the voice of Mr Morton are clashing, the one extolling the virtues of an unknown poet, the other berating a woman he no longer knows. Over Mr Morton’s shoulder he looks askance at the garden, weakly ashamed of his inattention, and then, not without a sense of relief, he hears a third voice, calling his name from the doorway, telling him that Mr Grenville is on the phone again. ‘If you’ll excuse me?’ he says, standing up.

Mr Morton too stands up, and shakes his hand firmly. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

Leaving the Randall Room, he looks back and sees Mr Morton on the garden terrace, with his feet widely parted and his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back, like a man on a sea wall, taking the brunt of the wind. And that night, after supper, when he goes out into the garden, he sees Mr Morton standing by the hornbeam hedge, in exactly the same stance.

Becoming aware of his presence, Mr Morton turns and dips his head, once, as if greeting him for the resumption of the afternoon’s conversation. ‘I heard an owl,’ he grins.

‘Really?’ Side by side, arms crossed, they listen together. ‘I hear the road.’

‘Wait.’ Patiently Mr Morton waits, his eyes wide open in the moonlight. ‘There,’ he whispers, remaining perfectly still, as though the bird were so near that any movement might scare it.

‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

‘In that direction,’ Mr Morton tells him, pointing towards the town. ‘There,’ he whispers again.

‘Nothing but lorries, I’m afraid.’

‘Try closing your eyes.’

‘They were closed.’

‘Ah.’

‘I always hear the road. I have a grudge against it. The beginning of the end, the day they finished the bypass. It ruined the view, to say nothing of the din.’

‘The end of what?’

‘Of the Oak. It’s closing.’

‘When?’

‘In three weeks.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘No. The website does rather fudge the issue. Can’t be seen to be advertising failure,’ he says, apologetically, and within a minute he is complaining about the lackadaisical stewardship of the Beltram Group. ‘Things took a turn for the worse in the year the bypass was cut. It costs money, a lot of money, to maintain a hotel of this type, but they just let it drift. The foot and mouth outbreak was the nail in the coffin. Now they’re selling up, to a London property developer, who’s going to turn the Oak into a rural getaway for overstressed high-flyers on a members-only basis. There’ll be a cinema and a gym and a sauna. Aromatherapy, yoga, massage, manicure, pedicure. A room full of video games. And the pool, apparently, is going to be wired up so the burned-out whizz-kids can float to the soothing sounds of tropical surf or a rainforest or the wind in the trees, relayed from microphones in the garden.’

And soon he is leading Mr Morton down the flight of steps below the dining room, along the corridor, past the boiler room and the laundry. Nearing the angle where the corridor turns and slopes downward, he attempts half a dozen steps with his eyes shut, guided by memory and the report of their footsteps on the concrete floor. At the foot of the ramp he unfastens the cabinet and turns the bakelite dials inside, while Mr Morton, raising his face into the dim radiance of the 40-watt bulb, inhales deeply, as if the bulb were an exotic flower from which a bewitching perfume is falling. With a push of his back he opens the door, putting out a hand to help Mr Morton over the raised wooden strip on the threshold.

Some of the lanterns are still quivering into life, sending flashes across the turquoise tiles. In the pool, hemispheres of blue light shine like fantastic sea anemones and at the farther end of the pool there is a vein of turbulence, a colourless plait, where fresh water flows from the pipe, creating an infinitesimal swell that expires before it can reach the mid-point of the pool, where the wall lanterns are reflected as if in a block of quartz. It has always delighted him, this place, especially at night, when it’s absolutely quiet and still, and you emerge from the dingy corridor into this subterranean cave, with its glistening walls and the dark blue ceiling that curves above the water like a night-coloured tent. He imagines bringing Stephanie here at night, then he presents the room to Mr Morton. ‘This is another of Walter Davenport Croombe’s improvements,’ he tells him. ‘When the Oak opened for business there was a little pavilion in the grounds, in which guests and visitors could drink the water that was pumped up from the spring farther down the valley. Croombe, on one of his tours of the Continent, came across Europe’s first indoor thermal swimming pool, at a hotel called the Quellenhof. Five years later the Oak had its pool. A bigger shaft was sunk into the hill and machines were made in Bristol to draw the water and filter it, and to raise the temperature a little. To take the spartan edge off it.’

Crouching by the side of the pool, Mr Morton dabbles a hand in the water. A low wave travels slowly across the pool and on the opposite shore it spills into the gutter, lifting into view a small dark object, a leaf it looks like. ‘Invigorating,’ Mr Morton remarks, stirring his hand.

Jostled by the succession of wavelets, the object in the gutter rises and falls. ‘Will you excuse me for a second?’ he asks. ‘There’s a bench here, behind you, beside the door,’ he says, rapping the wood. He walks round the pool and kneels on the floor above the spot where the piece of debris is caught. Leaning out, he peers along the gutter and sees the corpse of a mouse. ‘I just have to fetch something,’ he calls to Mr Morton. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Mr Caldecott’s voice rebounds from a roof that sounds low. Amplified by the space, the footsteps of Mr Caldecott move to the left, on the opposite side of the pool, and at a distance of fifteen yards or so they stop, whereupon a heavy door closes with a thump like a slack bass drum. Edward shakes the water from his hands. The air smells like an autumn morning. He drags his hand through the water to listen to the lick of the wave he has set in motion. Touching a wet finger to his tongue he tastes limescale faintly, and something else, a subtle and unpleasant ingredient that he cannot identify. He tries to match the taste in his memory, but his search is encumbered by tiredness and by the thoughts that are pressing upon him. While Mr Caldecott talked in the garden he had recalled the sullenness with which he had spoken to his mother. In his fingers he could feel the trembling of his mother’s hand and he can feel it now, as he hears the pitying cadence of her voice, pronouncing his name, and then he hears what Claudia said to him this evening. ‘Your sense isn’t my sense,’ she said, as though acknowledging a difference she had striven to overcome. ‘For me there is one thing more important than all, and I thought for you it was the same. But it is not the same. I misunderstood,’ she admitted, and he was surprised to feel angry with her. ‘You are a German inside an Englishman’s skin,’ she told him. ‘Wearing an Italian suit,’ he joked, but she did not think that was funny. He hears his father saying ‘You know best, son,’ saying it with a sadness that may be misremembered, and he tightens his hand, as though to steady his mother’s. Then the door opens and Mr Caldecott is back. Something light strikes the water, followed by a sprinkling of droplets.

Malcolm teases the dead mouse into the net. Its body, belly to the mesh, bends like a piece of soft mud. He looks across at Mr Morton: he is running his fingers over a section of the wall, with his cheek almost brushing the tiles, as if he were listening for something behind them. It is nearly half past ten. Stephanie will be coming home from the cinema about now.

‘What’s this?’ Mr Morton calls.

‘A medallion of carnations, white and tomato-red, on a turquoise background, with a frame of tulips. A Turkish theme,’ he explains, and he describes for Mr Morton the decoration of the walls and the star-scattered ceiling. ‘Shall we go out this way?’ he suggests, then he puts a hand under Mr Morton’s elbow to lead him back up to the ground floor, past the drinking fountain with the marble lattice, and the side room that houses the copper tubs in which guests could lie for hours in the restorative water.

five

I’m unhappy about last night’s call. My tone upset you, and I apologise. The telephone is not the ideal medium in these circumstances. Disembodied speech is too slippery, too susceptible to imprecision and misunderstanding. I should have waited until your return, but the damage is done now, and I have to repair it. Besides, we’ve skirted around the subject for too long. Neither of us has been inclined to talk openly about the situation until now, with the crisis almost upon us. So let me clarify my thoughts for you, without sound this time. Just words on a screen. My thoughts, with no objectionable tone, I hope.

The first fact, Claudia, is that I love you. You should not question this. It is the truth. I love you, but I do not need you. This also is the truth. I should not have said it, but it is true. I do not need you and I do not want to be in need of you, because that would be a diminution of my love for you. You say that you need me, but is that true? I don’t think that you need me, and I wouldn’t want you to need me. Your self-sufficiency is one of the qualities – one of the many, many qualities – I love in you. And it is important for me to remain as self-sufficient as I can. In London, at home, I can do that. In my rooms I know where everything is, precisely, and when I go outside I know where I am. It’s so many steps to one junction, so many steps to another. I can get to the park without anyone’s help; I know where the gates are, where to find the benches, which way the paths go. When I walk along the streets near my house, I know which voices I can expect to hear and where I can expect to hear them. I know which people are likely to talk to me, and I know something about them. I have friends here as well, of course, and these friends are especially valuable to me, because it’s hard to make new friendships: the blind can never choose whom to meet, only whom to pursue, as I did with you. On unfamiliar terrain, every step requires attention. But I am never entirely lost in England, even in places I have never been before, because I know what the sounds that surround me signify, and the most significant of these is the sound of people talking, of people speaking English. Overhearing the exchanges of strangers, I can generally understand what they are talking about – by which I mean that I understand the references they make, the allusions, the assumptions. I know that so-and-so plays football for Arsenal or that so-and-so is a disgraced MP. Every aspect of their speech makes sense to me. I can tell where they come from, I can infer relationships between the people speaking, can distinguish between the goodbye of close friends and the goodbye of acquaintances or of people who don’t much care for each other. It’s not much information, very little sometimes, but it gives me a degree of engagement with what’s outside me. It gives me material with which to construct a world for myself. In Italy I would be profoundly a stranger, knowing nobody but you, having to learn my environment by heart – an environment in a foreign language. In time I’ll learn it, you may say: we’ll make a home for ourselves, a place with which I’ll be as comfortable as I am in my London flat. I’ll learn the streets, sooner or later. I’ll make friends, I’ll understand what’s happening. Yes, I reply, the anxiety will lessen. But it will take a long time, I fear, and I will always be a far more remote outsider in Italy than I am in England. I comprehend several thousand Italian words, but I will never be Italian. With Leopardi I slog away for days at a single page. It’s a struggle, and I know that I am still missing undertones that would be obvious to any Italian schoolchild. Even if I spend the rest of my life pestering people for explanations, subtexts will always elude me. You have to understand that when I try to envisage this new life what I see is a condition of greater passivity and dependency, and I’m concerned – extremely concerned – that such a condition would not be good for us. You see? It’s not that I have any doubts about us as we are. I have none at all. If I did, the dilemma would not be as acute as it is. I love you. Which is where I started, so I’ll move on.

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