COPYRIGHT

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

Copyright © Philip Hensher 2014

Philip Hensher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007459575

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007459582

Version: 2016-08-19

PRAISE

From the reviews for The Emperor Waltz:

‘A cause for celebration . . . The five more or less discrete narratives conduct a mutual running commentary, multiplying dynamics, bridging millennia and resulting in a novel that’s almost fizzy to the touch . . . There is a remarkable fullness to the book’s invention. The effect is above all immersive . . . A performance of extraordinary fair and majesty from a writer who seems capable of anything’

Leo Robson, Guardian

‘A glittering performance. Adventurously, it interweaves a series of unrelated stories into a gorgeous amalgam of literary, musical and philosophical ideas . . . Strands converge to form an immensely satisfying whole . . . The author’s exuberant humour and affection for language resonate throughout . . . The Emperor Waltz has the depth and pleasurable density of a 19th-century fiction; I loved it’

Ian Thomson, Evening Standard

‘Complicated and important . . . masterful handling of character and narrative . . . Beautiful because Hensher has an incredible eye for the things that make moments special . . . he might have the iconoclastic temperament of a Kandinsky, but he is an old master when he glimpses the cat asleep under the table or the curve of a woman’s neck . . . Hensher’s multidimensional picture of Europe [is] an insistent reminder of a past that, however picturesque, can only be turned away from’

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

‘As joyful as its musical source . . . The Emperor Waltz is a beautiful book, both profound and funny. It is a powerful invocation to live a life of joy, surrounded by true friends’

Elena Seymenlinska, Daily Telegraph

‘Ambitious and extraordinary . . . A generous, courageous fire-work of a novel – a Roman candle, alive and fizzing in the hand’

Olivia Laing, New Statesman

‘Funny, ingeniously observed and humming with revolutionary ideas . . . [The novel] probe[s] what it means to be committed to a cause that at once binds and isolates, testing love and faith. Along the way there are incidental characters whose vivacity rivals those conjured up by Dickens, and vignettes in which to delight’

Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail

‘The Emperor Waltz is historical fiction stripped of its more blatant identifers, and is the better for it. The Bauhaus sections in particular are astonishing . . . Hensher writes about his characters with real affection . . . His writing is as wonderful as ever’

Jon Day, Financial Times

‘Hensher in full, uninhibited fight . . . managing to emerge with the punter whole-heartedly on his side . . . Every so often there is a descriptive passage to take your breath away . . . sentence by bejewelled sentence’

D. J. Taylor, Literary Review

‘Hensher’s writing reads like a Vermeer painting: his attention to detail is transfxing’

Vogue

‘Splendidly thought out and extraordinarily readable’

A. S. Byatt

‘Hensher’s most ambitious novel to date . . . his sense of fun bounces off the pages of a novel that is always a joy to read . . . As an entertaining and absorbing exploration of what binds us together as human beings, The Emperor Waltz is just that kind of book. Read it and allow yourself to become a better person’

Matt Cain, Independent

‘The Emperor Waltz is rich and captivating, dizzy with memorable characters’

Ben Hamilton, Spectator

‘Hensher is an ambitious novelist who always bravely sets himself new challenges . . . He has a wonderful sense of place and an eye for the memorable and unexpected detail. He handles big scenes very well . . . He is a novelist who makes many demands on the reader, but the chief and most rewarding of these demands is that you should share in his own evident delight in what he has created’

Allan Massie, Scotsman

‘Hensher is particularly well suited to his book’s roving ensemble form – he has the ability to stage-manage dozens of characters across many years, he’s fluent with dialogue, and he can jump into a scene at full stride’

Sam Sacks, Prospect

‘His self-assurance and brio invests The Emperor Waltz with quasi-Victorian breadth and length, and with stylish authority. I was seduced into complete trust and abandoned myself to it completely . . . The Emperor Waltz again displays his sharp and original sensitivity, and, with remarkable boldness and ambition, evokes heroism, joy and martyrdom’

Caroline Jackson, The Tablet

DEDICATION

For Thomas Adès

An E-flat sonata movement

standing at an augmented fourth to the universe.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

BOOK 1

1922

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

BOOK 2

1979

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

BOOK 3

NEXT YEAR

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

BOOK 4

1979

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

BOOK 5

1922 (AND A LITTLE BEFORE)

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

BOOK 6

AD 203

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

BOOK 7

LAST MONTH

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

BOOK 8

1983–1998

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

BOOK 9

1927

CHAPTER 1.1

CHAPTER 1.2

CHAPTER 1.3

CHAPTER 1.4

CHAPTER 1.5

CHAPTER 2.1

CHAPTER 2.2

CHAPTER 2.3

CHAPTER 2.4

CHAPTER 2.5

CHAPTER 3.1

CHAPTER 3.2

CHAPTER 3.3

CHAPTER 3.4

CHAPTER 3.5

CHAPTER 4.1

CHAPTER 5.1

CHAPTER 5.2

CHAPTER 5.3

CHAPTER 5.4

EPILOGUE

2014/1933

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

FINAL NOTE

KEEP READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY PHILIP HENSHER

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

BOOK 1

1.

‘You will have brought your own towels and bedlinen,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, in her lowered, attractive, half-humming voice, ‘as I instructed, as I suggested, Herr Vogt, in my telegram. Other things I can supply, should you not have them for the moment. Soap, should you wish to wash yourself before tea, of which we shall partake in the drawing room in half an hour. Should you wish for hot water, Maria will supply you with some, if you ask her, on this occasion, since you have just arrived and had a tiring journey. I know all about trains, their effects on the traveller.’

She turned, smiling graciously, making a generous but unspecific wave of the hand.

‘Shaving soap,’ she carried on, continuing across the hall, ‘I can stretch to. My husband and boys, my two boys, were killed in the war, and I have their things, their possessions and bathroom necessities, which I have no undue sentimental attachment to, if you do not feel ghoulish at the prospect of shaving with the soap of a dead man, or three dead men, rather. It is better in these days that things should be used, and not preserved. We have all lost too much to retain the conventions of our fathers. Don’t you agree, Herr Vogt?’

‘That is very kind of you,’ the young man said. ‘But I only need soap to wash after my journey, thank you so much.’ He had the appearance of someone who needed to shave once weekly, and perhaps had not started to shave at all. Too young to have known the war at first hand, blond and fresh-faced, his eyes wide open, eager to please, slight and alert. He walked behind Frau Scherbatsky, across the hallway to the heavy wooden stairs of her Weimar villa, dark-panelled and velvet-trimmed, like the interior of a ransacked jewel-box. His stance was lopsided and ungainly; his suitcase, a borrowed old paternal one, leather and scarred with journey-labels torn off, was full and heavy. He was here for three months at least.

‘It was my husband’s house,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, proceeding in her mole-coloured tea-gown with a neat black apron over the top. ‘He thought of it for many years, considering how many coat hooks should be placed in the downstairs cloakroom. “Your house is perfect, Frau Scherbatsky,” Herr Architect Neddermeyer said. Everything so well considered – and reconsidered – you know. Do you know Goethe’s house in the marketplace? No? You must go. Goethe’s study, surrounded by a corridor and an anteroom, so that he could hear the servants coming and not be unduly disturbed. And we have just the same arrangement here. Herr Neddermeyer’s bedroom, now. Necessity called, on both of us, let us say. The house –’ she continued up the stairs, stately, walking, turning at the half-landing, but not looking at Vogt exactly, giving a general smile in the direction of the English stained glass of an angel with a lily, illuminating the stairwell with sanctity ‘– the house was finished and built by my husband to his exact specifications in 1912, and we had three most happy years here. Two years and seven months. This is your room. I hope you like it. It has a view over the park, as you see. You cannot quite see the Gartenhaus of Goethe – that is only from the corner bedroom. In current circumstances, I cannot specify the exact rent from month to month, but I will not take advantage of you, Herr Vogt, I can promise you that. And I think you said you were a student of art?’

‘I am just about to start my studies,’ Christian Vogt said, setting his case down. ‘I begin on Monday, in three days’ time.’

‘And you allowed yourself three days to settle in, most wise,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Those long train journeys are immeasurably exhausting. You would wish to do yourself justice. If I could only ask that, should you decide to paint in your room, you place on the floor, and especially over this rug, some newspaper. You are a painter, I hope – I do hope those are a painter’s sensitive fingers. Just remember, Herr Vogt, the newspaper over floor and rug. That would be so kind. And no models, please, no models, that I must ask you. And …’

Frau Scherbatsky looked at him with one eyebrow cocked. Christian did not at once know what she meant. But then he recalled the agreement that his father and she had reached about the payment for the accommodation, and took the old gold watch of Great-grandfather from his waistcoat pocket. He handed it over. Frau Scherbatsky, almost unnoticeably, ran her thumb and forefinger along the gold chain and bar. She placed it safely, and with due carefulness, in her apron. That would cover the costs for the three months (at least) and then they could enter into more negotiations, his father and Frau Scherbatsky. ‘But does the room suit you?’ she said.

‘It’s charming, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian Vogt said, not wanting to commit himself in speech to being a painter, or anything in particular, just yet. Something of her stately, half-generous manner had got into his way of talking. The room was plain, but well lit, through the diamond-leaded windows the light from the north, illuminated warmly by the last of the summer greenery in garden and park. On the bed was a practical counterpane of woollen stars in primary colours, knitted together; two stained oak wardrobes built into the wall; a dark green English pattern of wallpaper and, over the bed, a small oil copy of The Isle of the Dead, almost expertly done.

‘And here is Maria, with some hot water,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. The maid came in; she poured her pewter pitcher of hot water into the washbowl with minute attention, her hand trembling slightly in the steam with the weight. Her face was freckled; her uncovered hair was gingery, smoothed back in a practical bun. Maria, watched benevolently by Frau Scherbatsky, finished pouring. She transferred the pitcher from one hand to the other and, with a curious gesture, drew the back of her right hand across her smooth hair. The maid caught Christian Vogt’s eye; she gave a cryptic, inward smile with the movement of her hand across the gloss of her ginger hair. ‘We will see you downstairs in half an hour, Herr Vogt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Welcome to Weimar.’ And they withdrew, Maria closing the door behind her, not turning as she went.

As the door shut, Christian Vogt was made aware of the sound of birdsong, close at hand, in either parkland or garden, in Frau Scherbatsky’s bereaved garden or Weimar’s long, quiet landscapes. It was a blackbird, and if he closed his eyes, he could see the bird’s open yellow bill and shining black eye, the angle of its neck as it sat in a tree and sang to the empty air in pleasure.

‘I am an artist,’ Christian said, experimentally, to the empty room.

2.

He had been an artist since the eleventh of May that year. Christian Vogt lived with his father and brother in a second-floor apartment in Charlottenburg, in Berlin. White plaster dragons and Atlases held up the entrance to their block, a polished dark oak door in between, and Frau Miller, the concierge, behind her door with a series of notes explaining her absence or place, to be put up with drawing pins according to need. The apartment was serviced and kept going by their cook, Martha, and Alfred, the manservant. Since their mother had died, the spring before, Herr Vogt had decided that it was not necessary to keep a maid as well, that Alfred was quite capable – Christian could remember Alfred’s departure for the war, years before. He had been a big boy, limber and grinning. When he returned from the army, he still had a sort of smile on his face, but a skinny, bony, pulled-apart one. His father had offered him his old job back. ‘I could do nothing else,’ he said, and let the maid go a few weeks later without complaining. There was no way of doing without the cook, however. When Christian’s mother had still been alive, there had been a succession of varied dishes, and complaints if the food, even in the depths of war, had sunk into monotony and repetition. His mother had made things so much nicer. Now there was more food to be had in the markets, but the cook had settled into a routine, and plain grilled lamb chops alternated with veal – sometimes flounder, and sometimes even horse, done plainly. Nobody seemed to notice.

Egon would drive the motor, if it were needed, but it was rarely needed. There were large changes in the household since his mother’s death in the epidemic, the year before. One of the smaller changes, which had also gone unattended, was that Christian’s future was no longer a matter of concern. Among the large and heavy furniture, Christian and his brother Dolphus went, wearing the clothes they had had for two years, filling the time as best they could between meals. His father went to the office, or he stayed at home, working in his study. Dolphus went to school under his own steam. Christian, who had finished at the Gymnasium in the springtime, spent his days quietly and without much sense that anything was expected of him.

His days were matters of outings and explorations, running outwards from U-Bahn stop or tram-route. It was in the course of one of these explorations that, under a railway arch in Friedrichstrasse, far from home, he saw a poster advertising a new school for the arts in Weimar. It had opened the year before. Students were sought. The look of the poster appealed to him: the letters without eyebrows, shouting in a new sort of way. They might have been speaking to him.

Christian had always liked to paint and to draw. When he was younger, he had been able to lie on his bed and imagine the paintings he would produce: of a girl stretched at full length in a bare tree, a greyhound looking up into the branches, forlorn and spiky with his nude mistress. A sun rising over an alp, but a matter of geometry, not sublimity, the mountains rendered as a series of overlapping triangles. A face in a forest, no more than that, the dim chiaroscuro of the rippling foliage absorbing the cloak of the man, the woman, the ambiguous figure. You could paint a picture that was nothing much but a line and a square and another line and a rainbow – people in Russia had done that: he had seen it in the magazines an art master had shown them. A portrait of his family, the four faces, then the three, floating in the darkness of the apartment. Sometimes he thought them through as far as conceiving of a medium. It could change abruptly: sometimes an oil four-part portrait could suddenly decide to become a polished wooden relief with the word ‘UNTERGANG’ carved in tendril-like letters – no, in modern brash American newspaper-headline letters, much better. He would lie like that, conceiving his works of art. Sometimes he would get up and, with charcoal on the rough paper he had saved up for and kept in a stack under his bed, he would attempt to draw what he had thought of. He had learnt some things in art classes at the Gymnasium, but art there did not matter, was only brought to their attention because gentlemen needed to be acquainted with the collectible, needed to be warned of what artists in Russia were laying waste to. He learnt most at home, on his own. Nobody except Dolphus had ever seen anything he had done, except the drawings he had produced, stiffly and awkwardly and without merit, in the drawing classes at school. Those had been praised by the master and by his classmates. Christian did not know how you would show anyone you knew the drawings of an imagined nude woman in a tree, or explain what you had meant by it. Christian had been intended to be a lawyer. Nothing had been mentioned about any of that since his mother had died. Sometimes Christian wondered whether all arrangements had been made by his father without consulting him.

The poster in Friedrichstrasse, under the dank, sopping railway bridge, struck Christian like a recruiting poster. Around him, the dry-rot smell of Berlin crowds rose, as the short, dark, cross Berliners pushed their way about him, banging him with their bags and possessions. An older woman, like one of his father’s elder sisters, raised a lorgnon and inspected him: a thin, blond boy, his head almost shaven as if after an illness, wearing a soft, loose-fitting suit of an indeterminate brown, like the suits of English cloth the young had worn before the war. The poster said that makers of the new were invited to Weimar, where everything would alter, there, for the better. It was the eleventh of May. In the boulevards, the lime trees that gave them their names were opening, showing their fresh leaves, perfuming the wide way. The weather in Berlin was, at last, beginning to improve, to soften, to give out some warmth to the cold ornament of the city.

3.

That evening, his father’s sister from the town of Brandenburg came to dinner. She was a twice-yearly visitor who turned up in the city to make sure of her affairs, which her brother handled, and in the last year, to ensure that her brother and nephews were continuing to live in a respectable way at home, despite her sister-in-law’s death from influenza. She was a small, beady woman, full of news of Brandenburg life. Her brother had moved away from Brandenburg thirty-five years before, to the opportunities offered by a university education, a long apprenticeship, a marriage in middle age, children and a solid apartment in Charlottenburg.

‘And Herr Dietmahler sold his house in the Kleiststrasse to his cousin Horst Dietmahler, the younger brother of his father the corn-merchant, his son, whose wife had twins last year. His business is suffering and he no longer needed a house on that scale,’ Aunt Luise continued. The ivory-handled spoon, from the set that came out for guests, rose and fell from the grey potato soup. Occasionally her small hand, beaded with black rings and a triple jet bracelet, reached out and tore at the bread rolls. Between mouthfuls, she spoke in a tired, mechanical way of her town. ‘There was a Frenchman who came to visit last week, who stayed with the Enzelmanns in Magdeburgerstrasse, you remember the beautiful house, the big beautiful house that the Enzelmanns always had, the Frenchman came after writing, he wanted to look at some furniture that Grandfather Enzelmann had brought back from Paris in the 1870 war, you remember, Cousin Ludwig, the beautiful chair and the commode and the looking-glass with the stork and the swan in gold in the drawing room, and the Frenchman came to inspect it, and pretended to admire it before he said it had been stolen from his family. And Minna von Tunzel …’

Kind-hearted Dolphus in his sailor suit stared and listened, wide-eyed. He felt sorry for her, he had told Christian on her last visit: two sons killed in the war, both on the same day, or perhaps one day after the other, thousands of miles apart, and the telegrams making their separate way to Brandenburg, and Uncle Joachim dead of an apoplexy six months later. But Christian could remember how Aunt Luise had been before the war, and her two big, cruel sons too, and perspiring fat Uncle Joachim. His father was nodding decorously as Aunt Luise reached Minna von Tunzel’s parlourmaid’s baby, giving a signal to Alfred to bring in the whiting, in a circle with their tails in their mouths in a grey sauce, as they always were when a guest came. Christian was thinking about the decision he had made that morning, in Friedrichstrasse.

‘Father,’ he said, when the fish had been taken away and Aunt Luise was fumbling in her reticule for a handkerchief. ‘We must talk about what I am to do.’

‘What you are to do, dear boy?’ his father said. He had had a long afternoon with Luise, trying to explain what had happened to her investments and her bonds. He never looked forward to her visits, and this had been a very trying one. ‘Is this an important conversation?’

‘Father, I’ve decided what I want to do after school,’ Christian said, summoning his courage.

‘I thought all that was decided,’ Aunt Luise said nastily, placing her knife and fork on the plate, inspecting, pulling the fork back a tenth of a point so that they would be exactly next to each other. ‘I thought the elder was to be a lawyer and the younger an engineer. The elder boy to study in Nuremberg; the younger to take himself off to London, where the best engineering schools are.’

‘I don’t want to be a lawyer, Father,’ Christian said, not addressing Aunt Luise. To his surprise, there was something like a grey smile in his father’s eyes, something between the two of them. His father did not often engage him with a look: he found it easier to look somewhere else, as if not paying attention. He wondered whether his father had been waiting for him to start this conversation for the last year. ‘I want to go to an art school in Weimar. I would be a very good artist, I know it. It’s all I want to do.’

‘Want to do?’ his father said. ‘I never wanted to be a lawyer, either, but I did, and I was very glad of it in the end.’

‘Karin Burgerlicher’s second-youngest boy—’ Aunt Luise began.

‘You can always paint in your spare time, on Sundays and on holidays, in the Alps,’ his father said. ‘Lawyers often do. But I never heard of an artist who drew up wills and contracts on Sundays and holidays. You could never be any sort of lawyer, you know, if you went to an art school. Wittenberg, you said?’

‘Weimar,’ Christian muttered.

‘Ah, Weimar, a beautiful town also,’ his father said, in a full, satisfied tone. The fish had been taken away, and now, the sour beef was brought in. They sat in silence. Aunt Luise was pretending to be occupied with something in her lap, with handkerchief and pill box. Dolphus gazed at his brother in undisguised wonder. It was not clear to Christian whether his father had reached some conclusion, or whether he now thought that everyone agreed that Christian’s future was as it had always been, had never needed discussion, that the discussion was now over.

‘Father,’ Christian said, when the beef was served and Alfred had left the room.

‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ his father said. ‘The world is changing so much. And if it all fails, you can at least become a town clerk or something of that kind. Or start again. Nothing much would be lost, by your year at an art school. I suppose that your brother Dolphus can still go to London, to become an engineer.’

‘Brother,’ Aunt Luise said in wonderment, dropping her fork in the beef. It was the first time Christian had ever heard his father say anything worth wondering at, the first time he had surprised anyone other than by remaining silent when he might speak. His choice of wife had been the daughter of a judge; his choice of dwelling had been between two other lawyers; his choice of children might have remained as it had been – the elder a lawyer, the younger an engineer. Christian was not surprised that his sister, even though she had known him from the nursery, stared and gasped, and in protest dropped her fork in her sour beef.

‘Thank you, Father,’ Christian said. ‘I would be a very bad lawyer, I know it. And I can be a very good artist.’ He wanted to say that he could be a great artist. But at his father’s dinner table, with greyish well-ironed and patched linen, the greying velvet drapes, the Moritz von Schwind Alpine landscape, the encrusted silver candlesticks on the table and the hissing curlicue of the gas jets on the wall, the words did not come out.

‘One thing I must insist on,’ his father said. ‘There are to be no models lounging about the place of any sort. Now, Luise. Let me help you to what passes for spinach these days.’

Aunt Luise began to tell them about what had happened to Karin Burgerlicher’s younger brother in Rome in the 1890s.

4.

In Weimar, Christian came downstairs from his room, not changed from the Norfolk jacket he had travelled in, but washed and refreshed. He stood for a moment in the hallway with the illuminated light falling through the stairway, then entered the room with the door slightly ajar. In there was a man standing at the window, looking out at the parkland. His head was severe in expression, with large, round glasses, and his hair cut in an abrupt round manner that had nothing to do with the shape of his cranium, as if a bowl had been placed on his head before the scissors had been run about. The room was light and comfortable, with a pair of sofas and an upholstered window-seat where the man stood, and some chairs about the table where tea sat. A number of wasps were buzzing about the room.

‘Good afternoon,’ the man said, in a strong Leipzig accent. ‘You must be our new arrival.’

‘How do you do?’ Christian said, and introduced himself.

‘I am Franz Neddermeyer,’ the man said. ‘Also a guest of Frau Scherbatsky. How do you find your room?’

‘Very nice,’ Christian said. ‘I am from Berlin.’

‘I did not ask you that, although I am pleased to know it,’ Herr Neddermeyer said. ‘This is my house, and also Frau Scherbatsky’s house, although we are not connected through marriage or otherwise and only one of us owns it. How do you make that out?’

‘I think Frau Scherbatsky told me that you are the architect of the house,’ Christian said. ‘Although both the owner and the tenant of a house could talk about it being their house, so that is also a possibility.’

‘Ah,’ Neddermeyer said. He seemed disappointed at the failure of his conundrum. He walked away from the window, where he had left a book lying face down on the window-seat, and about the room, running his finger over the piano keyboard, covered with a crocheted shawl, the top of a bookcase, the wooden back of one of the sofas. As he came up to the chairs at the tea table, he minutely but decisively shifted one a couple of degrees; stepped back; inspected the change; shifted it back again. Christian thought of Aunt Luise as he looked at the middle-aged man – no, the old man: his skin was crêpy and drawn in a diagonal underneath his chin.

‘I had always lived in the house my father built,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘He, too, was an architect, here in Weimar. How do you come to know Frau Scherbatsky?’

‘I do not know her,’ Christian said. ‘My father is a lawyer, and he made enquiries about lodgings in Weimar from a professional associate here, and the professional associate came back with Frau Scherbatsky as a suggestion. His name was Anhalt.’

‘Ah, Lawyer Anhalt,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His recommendation – well, he is a friend of old of our “landlady”.’ The word was rendered in a comic tone, as if he was amused by the idea that anyone would offer Frau Scherbatsky money to sleep in a part of her property. ‘Would you care for some tea? I don’t know what has happened to Frau Scherbatsky. Herr Wolff, the other guest here, is on business of some sort in Erfurt today, I know.’

This seemed to put an end to Neddermeyer’s curiosity about Christian’s life, and while he was busying himself with the tea, Christian went about the room. On the bookshelf was a small porcelain or perhaps enamel model of an exotic vegetable, an aubergine. Christian picked it up, and just as he did so, a wasp came buzzing at him. He raised one hand to flap it away, and somehow tipped the aubergine to one side. The stalk and cap of the aubergine actually formed the lid of what it was, a jar, and as Christian tipped it sideways, it fell to the polished wooden flooring and broke. Neddermeyer looked up from the teapot.

‘Oh dear,’ he said.

Christian was crimson – he looked at Neddermeyer with horror. ‘I didn’t realize—’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize it had a lid. I just turned it to one side.’

‘Well, that is unfortunate,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Let me see.’ He put the teapot down and came over. Without its stalk and cap, the aubergine hardly looked like an aubergine any longer, just a bulbous purple vase. It, clearly, would not do. ‘That really is unfortunate.’

Neddermeyer was, in fact, rather enjoying this humiliation. ‘Please help me, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘It can’t be the first thing I do when I arrive in poor Frau Scherbatsky’s house, start smashing her things about.’

‘No,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Although, you must admit, it is the thing which you have started by doing.’ He picked up the lid from the floor. ‘It is really not as bad as all that. A very clean break. And here is our hostess.’

Frau Scherbatsky came in, smiling. ‘I hope you have not been waiting – the tea must be quite cold. I had to finish a letter to my daughter in Dresden. Now—’

‘Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian began.

‘A terrible thing has happened,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I was brushing past the bookcase when my sleeve unfortunately caught your very ugly jar here; it fell; the lid has smashed. But there is good news! It is not so badly broken. It can be mended and riveted very easily.’

‘Oh dear,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Is it so very ugly? I never really thought of it. I don’t suppose it is even any use in the marketplace – no one would barter anything for it, I am certain. By all means, take it and mend it if it salves your conscience, Herr Neddermeyer.’

Christian, full of silent gratitude for the saving of the situation, tried to engage Neddermeyer’s eye, but he quizzically raised an eyebrow without looking in more than Christian’s general direction. ‘Here is some orange cake,’ he said, sitting down. ‘My favourite.’

The orange cake was dry, perhaps a day or two past its best, and flavoured artificially rather than with peel and juice. Christian took a bite just as Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘You are here to study, Herr Vogt, you were saying?’ He could not for the moment speak: his mouth was full of dry cake and his eyes, at once, began to fill with tears of shame at his vandalism. Instead of going on talking – she had asked only for the benefit of Neddermeyer – Frau Scherbatsky waited with a courteous half-smile as Christian took a great gulp of tea to wash it down. He felt like a brutal animal invited to tea with two clever, immaculate dolls, and to finish off the toy-like impression of beauty of Frau Scherbatsky’s house, he now saw, as he prepared to speak, that the teapot from which she had poured was ingeniously shaped in the form of a cauliflower, and the teacup from which he was about to drink was a circle of cauliflower leaves. He swallowed, shook his head.

‘You are a student of what, Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer said.

‘I am about to begin the study of art,’ Christian said.

‘Ah, excellent,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘An art historian. That is excellent. At the university here?’

‘No, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I am studying to become an artist.’

‘At my old school, then,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Is it still in existence? I came here myself to study there, here in Weimar, when I was no more than nineteen, and I have never left. Thirty-eight years ago this autumn. We architecture students had little to do with the fellows on the painting and drawing side. I expect things are just the same now – one half thinks the other flibbertigibbets, and the other thinks them dull, money-grubbing fellows. Artists never change.’

‘You put it so well, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘But is the art school that you are thinking of still in existence, Herr Neddermeyer, even?’

‘I am enrolled at the Bauhaus,’ Christian said. ‘It is only just opening now.’

‘The Bauhaus,’ Neddermeyer said. There was a perceptible chilling; he set down his tea and tipped his head back slightly, inspecting Christian over the top of his glasses. ‘The Bauhaus.’

Christian had the distinct impression that Neddermeyer was now about to change his mind about his previous brotherliness and to tell their landlady that, after all, it had been Christian who had smashed the aubergine pot.

‘I know the Bauhaus,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘There is wild talk in the town, both about them and, I must say, by them. When you are as old as I am, you have seen plenty of young men who hope to change the world by shocking their elders. And as time goes on, the shock fades away – the shock and the desire to shock. You hope only to make things as well as your ancestors made them. That may prove difficult enough. The Bauhaus. Well. They wish to make things new, I believe, and turn our lives upside down; to ask us to sit on tetrahedrons, and to live in houses made of glass, like tomatoes. I have seen plenty of wild young men, wanting to change the world by shocking their elders. I may have been one of them myself, once upon a time.’

Christian inspected the cauliflower teapot; the inglenook fireplace; the padded window-seat. He did not object.

‘Young people will not like the same things as old people,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, smiling. ‘You must admit that if no new opinions ever came along we should be living in the houses of Augustus the Strong.’

‘I don’t think anyone wants to shock,’ Christian said. ‘I think we only want to start by making new things. But I haven’t been there yet. I am sure you know more about it than I do.’

Neddermeyer had got up and, holding his leaf-shaped teacup, had gone over to the window, perhaps to hide his emotions. It seemed as if the mention of the Bauhaus struck some chord with him. ‘They seem very little interested in Weimar, where they are,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe they recruited any teaching staff from the town, though, Heaven knows, there are enough talents and experience to power a—’

‘Herr Neddermeyer feels strongly,’ Frau Scherbatsky said confidentially but audibly, leaning her whole body towards Christian from her chair. ‘He was very unfortunately—’

‘And here they come,’ Neddermeyer said, his voice raising gleefully as he looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know whether you have seen your colleagues and masters yet? They come this way every day, around this time, for their exercise. I promise you, I did not ask them to appear to prove any kind of a point.’

5.

In the park, three hundred metres away, a small group of people was approaching. They had shaven heads that shone in the sun like wet pebbles by the lakeside. There were eight or nine of them; their smiles, too, shone in the light. It was their clothing that seemed most extraordinary. An elderly woman in a fur-collared overcoat was just now pausing, thirty metres from them, and watching them with open fascination. They wore floor-length robes in purple, flapping as they moved; home-made and evidently not well fitting. The robes looked very much like the garb of a wizard Christian had seen in a childhood pantomime. The tallest of the group, a man in his late twenties or early thirties, wore also a metal collar, like a pewter platter with the middle excised. The group surged around him; their combined movement was uniform, rippling, wavelike and unnervingly joyous. Christian felt that if he left the house and went towards this group he would be brought in; he would experience their joy, cut off from the delights and sorrows of the world about him. And yet he did not want to go towards them. The single, jogging, up-and-down rhythm of their heads, like a string ensemble approaching a climax, was unnatural and fruitless. What were they doing? They seemed to be going for a walk, but they were pressed together too tightly for that; they might have been a single body. Their smiles and joyous movements suggested that someone in there was talking, but you could not see that they were anything but silent as they walked. They moved to some music, audible only to themselves. With a shock, Christian saw that they were men and women mixed, brought into a uniformity of appearance by their heads being shaved.

As they passed, their attention seemed forward-facing. But one of them – a woman, it looked like – must have felt the gaze of Frau Scherbatsky, Herr Neddermeyer and Christian upon her from the leaded window of the house. She turned, alone, as if rebelling against the will of the group and, with a habitual but pointless gesture, made a movement over her shaved head. Her wide and empty smile – her mouth was, he could see, too large for her little face – did not alter; he could not see whether she had, in fact, engaged with his look or seen the three of them through the window at all. He felt ashamed. In a moment the girl in her loose Biblical robe of purple turned away again, and the tightly knit procession, like a performance, moved on away from them.

‘They come every day, around this time,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘I couldn’t tell you what it is all about. My neighbours are fascinated by it.’

‘I think it is some kind of newly invented religion,’ Neddermeyer said.

‘Oh, surely not,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘At first we believed that it was some sort of advertisement for a children’s play, something of that sort – the seven noble wizards, you know, Herr Vogt.’

‘Do you know where they come from?’ Christian said. They resumed their seats; Neddermeyer continued to stand at the window, entranced.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘They come from the Bauhaus.’

‘The one at the front,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Did you see? The one at the front, taller and older than the rest, he is actually a member of the teaching staff. I have heard that he has, indeed, invented a new religion, which he requires his students to follow. We were quite safe up here, but if you come close to them, seeing them by chance in the street, they emit an overpowering scent of garlic. I have heard that one of the tenets of the religion is that nothing else may be eaten. A sort of purge.’

‘Very inconsiderate to the rest of us,’ Frau Scherbatsky said.

‘If, when I was a student of architecture all those years ago, I had been told that my professor wished me to wear violet robes in public, to shave my head, to eat nothing but garlic, and to follow a new religion of his devising …’ Neddermeyer started to say.

Frau Scherbatsky nodded, perhaps embarrassed on behalf of Christian. ‘Where is Herr Wolff, Herr Neddermeyer? Did he tell you?’

‘I believe he is in Erfurt this afternoon, on business,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘His usual business. He said he was unsure whether he would return this evening.’

‘Really,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘That, too, is inconsiderate. He might have told me before he went away.’

6.

In a room not so very far away, with a similar view of the park, a man and a twelve-year-old boy sat. The room was hung with paintings; in each of them, an animal, a form, an arrangement of lines, an exclamation mark, the heads of people as drawn by children could be seen. On the easel, a square canvas with blotches and stains in ochre, violet and umber. The boy and the man sat at the tea table, set with a cloth and an old, dented silver tea service. The man fixed the boy with his gaze; the boy’s eyes were huge. The man took a small cardboard box from his pocket, opened it and took out a sugar cube, delicately, with his thin fingers on which paint had dried and dirt been allowed to accumulate beneath his nails. With the tips of his fingers, his eyes never leaving the boy’s face, he lifted the silver lid of the sugar bowl, and dropped the sugar cube among other, nearly indistinguishable sugar cubes. He lowered the lid, and replaced the cardboard box in his pocket. His hands were paint-stained, but his clothes were immaculately clean; Klee liked to take off his painting smock before he had his tea in the afternoon. The boy’s eyes filled with premonitory laughter. Underneath the table on a Turkish leather cushion, a cat slept in its favourite place, curled with its face into its belly, its feet about its face, and paid no attention to anything that was happening.

There seemed nothing more to say. Klee sat back and took out the cigarette he liked to smoke before tea. In one of their shared rituals, Felix got up and went about the studio until he found the place where his father had last left his matches. This time it was by the window-seat, where he often liked to prowl and stand before the view while thinking about his next move on a painting. Not exactly looking at the view, more a matter of letting the world flood in without seeing it, his father had once said. For a second, as he picked up the matches, Felix tried the trick. But it was no good. He could not help actually looking at the world; at the pack of shaved-head wizards moving off into the distance following Johannes Itten, the trees in the park, a blackbird sitting on the branch nearest to the house, and his mother almost at the gate of the house, returning from her walk and already unbuttoning her coat in her eagerness for her tea. He took the matches over to his father and, as he was allowed to, struck one, holding it up to his father’s cigarette.

‘Mother is here,’ Felix said. ‘I saw her just coming up the road.’

His voice trembled with his terrible amusement, thinking of the sugar cube. His father sucked at the end of the cigarette and said nothing. His face was mask-like in its skin; Gropius’s wife had once asked his father whether it didn’t hurt, having a face like that, so tight like a drum, and his father’s face had grown still more mask-like, pulling back into a world of squareness. Felix had twelve tasks in the house, and they were added to every year, at an unspecified date; they included lighting his father’s cigarettes, turning the pages at the piano, announcing dinner when guests came and, most recently, cleaning his own boots. Today his task was to remain normal until the sugar cube turned into what it would turn into.

For weeks now, his father had been constructing a false sugar cube with a shock inside it. First, he had carved a dreadful-looking beetle with goggling eyes and cruel buck teeth out of balsa wood – not even a centimetre long, but you could see its cruelty and ugliness. Then he had stained it black, leaving it to dry under a piece of newspaper, in case Felix’s mother should stumble in. Then he had dipped it in sugar solution, again and again, and finally coated it with table sugar until it closely resembled a sugar cube. Felix had watched all the procedure. His father had not explained what he had been doing. He had merely let Felix watch the preparations and manufacture of the beetle and its encasement in sugar, as if it were a natural part of existence, which Felix would understand if he watched the process. What the purpose of the beetle in the cube was, Klee would not need to explain. It was a practical joke, and therefore not in need of any explanation.

They were sitting side by side, Klee taking occasional puffs and Felix trying not to fix his attention too much on the sugar cube, when Lily wheezed up the stairs. The cat, hearing her, roused itself; stretched and yawned, arched its back, and went to the door of the studio just as Lily opened it. It curled itself about her boots as she walked in; it largely ignored or put up with Klee and Felix’s embraces and gestures of love, but Lily, who only ever gave it a gruff, impatient shake about the head and neck, the cat adored Lily. ‘Am I late?’ she said, dropping her coat on the sofa and coming over to the tea table. ‘It was so lovely a day I felt I had to go a little further than usual. Not cold?’ She felt the tea urn. ‘Good, good. I saw Itten and his children in the park. Gracious heavens, they look so very extraordinary, and their painting, I know, must be simply awful. And I thought I saw Feininger at a distance, queuing with a lot of other Feininger-like beings, but it turned out to be a grove of trees. When is Frau Gropius coming, Paul – do you remember? Ah, tea! “In this world there’s nothing finer/than the tea that comes from China.”’

‘This tea comes from India, however,’ Klee said. As long as Felix could remember, his mother had always poured her cup of tea with the words of what he thought might be an advertising slogan from her childhood; just as long, his father had responded, drily, with the information that this tea, however, came from India. He did not trust himself to speak; he was not looking, with agonizing force of will, at the sugar bowl.

‘Itten saw me, but made no attempt to greet me,’ Lily said. ‘Gracious heavens, he should be ashamed of himself, dressing in such a way, like …’ She paused, contemplating what Itten and his disciples might resemble, and as she thought, she lifted the lid of the sugar bowl and took what must be the false sugar cube, dropping it into her tea from between her fat thumb and forefinger. Felix had thought, with agony, that she might take the wrong one, and delay the catastrophe until tomorrow or even the day after that. But she had taken the sugar cube today. ‘. . . like Mazdaznan, is all you can say,’ she went on. ‘If a child of mine were in Itten’s care, all I can say is—’ And then she shrieked, gratifyingly. The black beetle had floated to the top of her tea and was rotating gently in the English cup. ‘Ah, Paul, you will be the death of me.’

Klee said nothing, but his eyes were full of amusement. Felix was gulping back his laughter. His father was devoted to practical jokes, but exercised them with rigour: he never, as far as Felix knew, played a trick on anyone outside the family, and he only ever played tricks that he could make and invent himself. Only once, in Felix’s memory, had he resorted to a purchased trick; it had been a small rubber bubble that was placed beneath a tablecloth before inflating itself and moving like a mysterious animal about the dinner things. Felix and his mother had adored it, but Klee had shaken his head, half smiling, as if deprecating his own enjoyment in something that anyone could purchase. Since then, there had been carved wooden fruit in the fruit bowl and small amounts of gunpowder buried halfway down one of his mother’s cigarettes, but no more purchased tricks.

‘The beetle!’ Lily said. ‘The beetle!’

Klee slightly smiled. Felix could see his hand under the table had yielded to one of its habits: it was running up and down a musical scale. He knew what this meant: his father wanted to return to work. When music came into appearance – some sound of humming, the gestures of a hand running up and down a piano keyboard or a violin – it did not mean that Klee was about to start practising on the violin, which sat in the corner of the studio on a shelf. It more usually meant that he was thinking of his painting, and wanting to return to it. Presently Klee finished his tea, poured another cup and finished that, quickly, too; Lily finished her story about seeing a woman who looked really very much like Frau Gropius outside the Elephant Hotel, but who had turned out to be someone quite different; Felix slid off the chair, with its uncomfortable oil-slippery seating; and they left Klee to his work.

‘Do you have the black beetle, Mamma?’ Felix said, as they went down the stairs together.

Lily felt in the pocket of her skirt. ‘No – how awful. Now the thing will only turn up somewhere else and make me scream all over again. Do you have mathematics homework? Do you want to work in the kitchen, or in your bedroom?’

But Felix had the black beetle; he had asked knowing where it was; it was for him, now, to decide where it should turn up, and whom it should make scream. Outside, in the quiet street, the lamplighter was beginning to make his patient rounds, still wearing his white summer overall.

7.

The next day, Christian had decided to go out soon after breakfast, and to find the school building at least. He had always had a desire to place himself within cities; not to spend more time than necessary wandering without a notion, and not to put up with living in a city in a state of ignorance about its quarters. He slept well – once, in the night, he woke up and was unsure where he was until he heard an owl calling in the park, and what must be the creak of a roof adjusting as the night cooled. He had never slept anywhere other than with a family above, and a family below; he had never slept in a room with a sloping wall, like this one, underneath a long roof of tiles, and he looked forward to being woken in the night by the rattle of rain or hail. The pillow was warm, and he raised his head and turned it to the cool side. There was a faint smell of fresh laundry about the sheets, the smell that linen had after being dried in the open air. He felt, as he drowsily moved his hands from one side of the tight-wrapped bed to the other, that there was something restless about being in the same house and sharing the same sleep as people he had never met before yesterday, whose Christian names he did not know, who were not related to him or to each other in any way. They were brought together by force and by money, he sleepily said to himself, force and money, Neddermeyer and Scherbatsky, Scherbatsky and Neddermeyer, and the third one, whose name was … whose name was … But Herr Wolff’s name did not come to him in the night; it came to him only with a satisfying abruptness when he was washing his face and torso at the washbasin in the morning. Wolff. He wondered if he had returned from Erfurt last night after they had all gone to bed.

‘I shall not be in for lunch, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said, when he had finished breakfast.

‘If only,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘If only all my guests were so considerate!’

Neddermeyer, reading the Morgenblatt, lowered it and shook his head sympathetically.

‘I’m sure he has important business in Erfurt,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Still, Maria grows very testy at the uncertainty.’

‘Cook a nice rabbit stew,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘And keep everyone happy, however many you find yourself entertaining.’

Frau Scherbatsky clapped her hands. ‘What an excellent idea! My mother – you know, Herr Vogt, I am quite a country lass – my mother always said that she would prefer a well-made rabbit stew to any fricassee or ragout. My father was always very pleased at shooting a brace because rabbits are a dreadful pest in the wrong place, which of course rabbits always are, in the wrong place, I mean. Yes, a rabbit stew it shall be, tonight, with some very nice little turnips from the garden.’

Christian left the house after breakfast, and walked along the road, still a rough lane, that led along the side of the park. He felt, in his loose jacket and short tie, like a man who belonged in this famous town. The houses here, like Frau Scherbatsky’s, were substantial and artistically made. Outside one, with a steep-pitched red roof and a yellow door, a pair of green-painted benches were placed in the lane for the rest of the weary traveller, or so the painted motto from Goethe stated on the wall. Another had a flat roof, of southern inspiration, and others had friezes of angels and devils painted along the walls, under the roofs. There was a pleasant smell of coffee being made from one of the houses, and the sound of eggs being fried; the clatter of knives came out of the open window of one kitchen. ‘“Alfred, Alfred, you’ll be the death of me,”’ the song of last year, burst out; a scullery-maid came out of one kitchen door singing; she threw her bowlful of eggshells, peelings and muddy vegetable water over the compost heap, scattering the half-dozen white chickens who were picking over it with squawks and flappings. Dashingly, Christian reached up and plucked a pear from a tree overhanging the lane; he put it into his pocket for later. At the end of the lane, the main road out of Weimar into the country, he waited as a lumbering famer’s cart went by, as heavy and groaning as if made of lead, and after it, the watering cart of the district, pulled by two huge and shaggy horses. The farmer raised his fat fingertips lightly to the brim of his broad and grubby straw hat; Christian, smiling, nodded.

It was still early when Christian reached the central square of the town, and the Saturday market was still presenting an orderly and fresh appearance. Although he had just finished Frau Scherbatsky’s breakfast, he took the pear from his pocket and ate it as he went round the market. He had thought that the art school was on the other side of the square, but quickly found himself in a quiet residential street. He turned back and tried another side of the square; this time he found himself facing a statue that proved to be of Goethe and Schiller and, behind that, a grand pillared theatre. A gaggle of white geese, intelligent and imperious, was making its way through the square in the direction of the market, driven by a freckled boy of fifteen or so; a man at the wheel of a black car, his vehicle shiny and bright in the sun, waited for them to pass. Christian sat down on the steps of the Goethe statue to feel in his pocket for the small map he had cut out of the guide to the city; it was not there. He remembered now taking it out of his bag, and placing it on the dressing-table ready to take out, but not taking it out.

A shabby figure was in front of him. ‘Do you know what you are sitting upon?’ he said, in a brusque, military manner.

‘I think so,’ Christian said. He observed the man: he was wearing a cheap blue suit made out of some dyed military material. It fitted him so badly that, when the man made a strong chopping gesture with his arm, a lecturer’s decisive gesture, it appeared to move a second or so behind the man, as if it had its own stiff ideas of movement to follow. ‘Goethe and Schiller.’

The man made an impatient movement, flinging his arm to one side and tipping his head back to look down his nose at Christian, sitting on the stone steps of the monument. ‘Great poets and thinkers,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Christian said. ‘Can you help me? Could you tell me where the Bauhaus is?’

‘The –’ the man said ‘– the— What did you call it?’

‘The Bauhaus,’ Christian said. He had an irrational feeling that this stranger was, in fact, Frau Scherbatsky’s other lodger, the unreliable Herr Wolff. The man stood in front of him with his legs apart, building up to some sort of rage. He was wearing what seemed to be military medals, although he did not seem dressed in other ways for a funeral or other ceremony.

‘He means the art school,’ a woman who had been taking an interest now butted in to say.

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘It used to be a respectable art school, but now it calls itself the Bauhaus. So you’re one of those, are you? No wonder you sit on the steps of Germany’s monuments, insulting its greatness. Communists and garlic-eaters and free-love practitioners! Go off to Moscow or Paris, why don’t you?’

Among the small crowd that was now gathering to enjoy the abuse, there was a girl who was grinning broadly. She was at the front of the gathering. Her clothes were simple and rustic, perhaps home-made; they were dark green, straight up and straight down, with a gathering at the neck of blue ribbon, simply tied. Her hat, impatiently shoved on her head, was a coal scuttle made out of brown felt. Her grin was empty and her mouth was too large for her small head. With some shock, Christian saw that her head under the hat must be shaved; he saw the stubble above her ear. The smile and the cock of the head towards him was of indefinable familiarity; it was the smile of a friend not yet recognized. It’s me, the smile said. Come on, it’s only me.

‘Yes, we know what they get up to over there,’ the man went on. ‘Four bare legs in a bed. Klimt. Anarchy. We don’t want that in the city of Goethe and Schiller. “This tree’s leaf, that from the east—”’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ the girl said, calling loudly as soon as the man started to throw his arm out and quote Goethe at them. Her voice was hoarse but educated, with some Bavarian musicality to it.

‘Don’t tell me to shut up,’ the man said. ‘Who told me to shut up?’

‘I did,’ the girl said, still grinning, and raising her hand like a schoolchild. ‘Don’t talk rubbish about what you don’t know. Do you want to know where the Bauhaus is?’

Christian did not realize for a moment that she was speaking to him.

‘Hello! You wanted to know where the Bauhaus was. Come with me.’

‘In this city …’ the man began, unconvincingly, but he had missed his moment, and as the girl took Christian by the wrist and led him roughly off, the little group of onlookers dispersed. On the ground, a drunk man lay on one side, clawing at the air with his left hand and cycling at nothing with his legs, like an upturned cow waiting to be righted.

8.

‘Why are you looking for the Bauhaus?’ the girl said fiercely, as they walked away from the Goethe-statue square.

‘I’m starting there on Monday,’ Christian said. ‘They sent me directions but I left them behind, at my lodgings.’

‘But what I can’t understand, what I can’t understand at all, not one bit,’ the girl said, as if they had been having a conversation for days, for weeks, which had not reached a conclusion, ‘is why someone who doesn’t look like a complete idiot and buffoon and twit, not really, anyway, why someone quite normal should want to go and find the Bauhaus on a Saturday when he doesn’t have to go there until the Monday. That I don’t know if I can understand.’

‘You only have to push me in the right direction,’ Christian said.

‘Because when you get to the Bauhaus for the first time,’ the girl said, ‘oho, oho, that is when it all goes wrong. You hear about lines and essences and energy in a point and the hidden cross-weave and the drain a colour can make in the middle of a form. And how yellow can be yellow or it can be a completely different thing. Look at that yellow.’

The girl grabbed Christian’s arm with both hands, and forcibly made him point at the yellow wall of a palace. He felt they must be conspicuous, but the people of Weimar were apparently used to gestures of this sort. ‘That is what you call yellow,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘It is a yellow,’ Christian said, being specific in the way he had heard an art master once attempt.

‘And there,’ the girl said, pulling him round and making him point again, at a different palace, this time in a deep rustic red, ‘that, too, that is what you would call A YELLOW, is it not.’

‘No, that’s red!’ Christian said, forgetting to be specific.

‘Ah,’ the girl said. ‘You see, that is just a matter of context. That yellow only looks red because it lies between two contrasting greens, and the greens have their counter energy, which they project onto the underlying yellow, and there it is, red but only perceived as red. Not real red. You see?’

The wall was still, undeniably, red. The girl, a head shorter than him, came up close to his face. She smelt, curiously, not unattractively, of fresh sweat and of garlic. He remembered what his landlady had said about the diet of the Bauhaus students.

‘And that is the sort of thing which the Bauhaus will draw you into, and make you believe, and make you accost strangers and explain, and turn you into a raving madman before it turns you into an artist. But let us go on. Look, beauties to the right, beauties to the left. An important library built by a duchess for her thirty-four children straight ahead of us, and directly behind – don’t turn – an elephant house in the Gothic Revival style, 1674, three stars in your guidebook. What is your name?’

‘Christian Vogt. I come from Berlin.’

‘I did not ask all that. I come from Breitenberg. My name is Elsa Winteregger. What sort of maker are you?’

‘What sort of—’

‘What do you make? If you are coming to the Bauhaus, then what is it that you make?’

And now they were standing in a shady square, irregular in shape, with a poster pillar at its centre. The weathervane on top of the poster pillar swung indecisively from left to directly away from them and back again. Christian remembered his decisive belief.

‘I am a painter,’ he said. It was the first time he had said it in front of anyone at all. Elsa Winteregger was the person he had chosen to hear his decision.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. She thought for a moment; looked him up and looked him down; she placed her hands on her hips. ‘And when did you arrive in Weimar?’

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he said.

‘And you come out without your book, your paper, your charcoal and your pencils to draw the beautiful city of Weimar?’

Christian crimsoned. Of course that was the first thing he should have done. It had not occurred to him. Of course a real artist would have loved to take the opportunity to go outside with pencil and paper to sketch a new, a beautiful and interesting city. Christian’s sketchbook was still in his suitcase. He had done nothing, and it had not occurred to him among the most urgent possibilities, last night or this morning. The question of whether he was an artist at all, whether he was deluding himself, presented itself painfully.

‘Or you might be the sort of painter who never goes outside with his easel,’ the word pronounced sarcastically, ‘and his paintbrushes, and his oil paints to paint. You might stay inside the studio painting canvases of something that is almost-but-not-quite a black square superimposed on a red triangle. Don’t you think red is the most important journey you can take as a painter? Who is the greatest painter?’

‘I think the Spaniard Picasso,’ Christian said, priding himself on producing so up-to-date a name.

‘No, it is El Greco,’ Elsa said, ‘or if we are talking about the living, there is no one more wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, than Malevich. Have you discovered what he has to say about black?’

Christian shook his head. He felt defeated before he had even started. Elsa flung her face to the sky, and shouted, in the quiet Weimar square, ‘“As the tortoise draws its limbs into its shell at need, so the artist reserves his scientific principles when working intuitively.”’

A window was flung open, and a voice responded. ‘“But would it be better for the tortoise to have no legs?”’

‘Who is that?’ Elsa shouted angrily. ‘Who is that?’

‘It’s me,’ the voice came. A head poked out of the window; neat-groomed, en brosse, a nice snub nose. His shoulders were bare. ‘I heard someone quoting Itten, I thought I would finish it off.’

‘I wasn’t quoting Itten,’ Elsa said. ‘I was quoting Malevich.’

‘You were quoting Itten, you idiot, you just don’t know it,’ the man at the window said. ‘Who is your friend?’

Christian said, ‘My name is Christian Vogt.’

‘This is not my friend,’ Elsa said again. ‘It is a boy I found in the street. He was being harangued by a local mob. I discovered that he was trying to find the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus …’ Elsa’s voice trailed off into song; she lowered her shoulders and, apelike, swung her arms to and fro in an enchanted manner. Her eyes slid back into her skull.

‘I see,’ the man said. ‘Goodbye, Elsa. Goodbye, whatever your name might be, I didn’t hear.’

‘Christian Vogt,’ Christian said, but the window was already closed. ‘Goodbye, then,’ he said to the girl in the brown cloche hat, her eyes shut as she crooned. He felt quite put out, as if a friend who had been walking with him had turned aside for someone more interesting. But Elsa was only standing, alone in the square, singing ‘The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus,’ to herself in half-tones, with a wide open smile of pure uninterruptible joy. Christian was a hundred paces away before he knew he should have said, ‘Kandinsky,’ to Elsa’s question.

9.

Fritz Lohse withdrew his head from the outside and back into the room. It was a pleasant room, painted pale green, with a dressing-table, an upright old leather armchair, a Turkey rug on the floor and an awkward-shaped, almost square old rustic bed painted yellow. There were twenty sheets of paper, drawn-on, pinned to the walls above the bed and to the ceiling, so that Fritz could see his best ideas immediately on waking. On the dressing-table, by the oil lamp, there sat the remains of last night’s supper: some black bread and two soup pots, alongside the bones of two small game birds. There was an octagonal table, in size between a card table and a dining table; its undecidable size had perhaps led Frau Mauthner, the owner of the building and Fritz’s landlady, to expel it upstairs to her lodger’s room with all the other furniture. On the table there were five objects, just as there had been for the past three weeks.

Fritz observed, with admiration, the ripe curves of his girl Katharina. She was all pink and white above the rumpled bedding; she lay face down. Her back was a deep hollow, rising to her magnificent wide bottom, her thighs slightly marked with the quiver and dimple that fat under skin makes. He imagined striding across the room and taking a deep bite, a spoonful of a bite, out of her thighs. How she would shriek! Katharina was a shrieker, as well as a snorer at night, and, in times of unoccupation, a singer; it was a real trial to her to keep silent during their nights for the sake of Frau Mauthner She was still lying in the bed, hugging a bolster to her as she liked to. She was face down upon it; it ran from her chin between her breasts, under her belly and between her legs; it pushed her rump upwards and emerged between her knees. Fritz often wondered why she did not hug him at nights, but she said she preferred something long, cold, hairless and squashy. She was not asleep; she was just enjoying the bed, and the pleasure of lying there naked in the morning, far too late.

‘What was all that rumpus?’ Katharina said softly, into the mattress. But Fritz was used to the sort of things that Katharina said.

‘It was only Elsa Winteregger,’ Fritz said. ‘She was making a spectacle of herself, as usual. She was giving out Mazdaznan proverbs.’

‘Which one? The one you told me about breathing steadily and praising the Lord?’

Katharina was not an artist. She was a waitress in a restaurant, a good one, in the centre of Weimar. Fritz had met her a year or more ago; his people had taken him there to feed him, to make sure he had at least one hot meal inside him. Katharina had served their table. She had lowered her eyes respectfully, handing about the roast potatoes and pouring the gravy, one hand held in the small of her back. For the next days Fritz had hung about at the back, by the kitchen, waiting for her to emerge, like a stage-door johnny behind a theatre. She did not pretend, she said, to understand the sort of things they got up to at her Fritz’s Bauhaus. But she liked to listen to Mazdaznan proverbs. Sometimes he made one up, too impossible to be true.

‘No,’ Fritz said. ‘It was the one about the tortoise and the artist and his scientific principles.’

‘I wondered why you were mentioning a tortoise. I’ve never heard that one.’

Fritz repeated it, raising his arm solemnly. He finished. He lowered his hand. He scratched his bare chest thoughtfully. ‘That’s only what Itten says of his own initiative.’

‘Is she still there?’

Fritz moved to the window. Elsa Winteregger was in the middle of the square, but alone now; she seemed to be hugging herself and chanting. Fritz reached into his trouser pocket for his cigarettes, but they were in the cigarette case on the table, with the four other objects; he reached into his shirt pocket for his matches, but he had no shirt on, as well as being barefoot. He did not know where the matches could be at all. A small snore escaped Katharina; she loved to sleep, and her question now went unanswered.

At present Frau Mauthner was moving about downstairs. Her normal departure from the house was no later than nine o’clock. It was now nearly ten to ten, and the sound of her movements had a stealthy, suspicious air. It was not at all unlikely that Frau Mauthner knew perfectly well that Katharina was in Fritz’s room, as she had been for four of the last ten nights. She could have found this out in many ways, although the most likely was that her maid Sophie had told her. Fritz had been obliged to take Sophie into his confidence after an encounter on the stairs in the morning. Frau Mauthner was moving about directly below, in the dining room she barely used; she seemed to be changing the position of some furniture, but so slowly. Fritz was sure she was moving about and listening, establishing her evidence for some future confrontation. He shifted his attention from Frau Mauthner’s stealthy tread to the five objects on the table. They had been there for weeks now.

These objects were for Fritz’s non-representative found-object sculpture. It was a task in class. He had found five objects, with the intention of using four, but he could not decide which to leave out. There was the long, thin blade of a saw, slightly rusting along its flat edge, like the hackles of a cornered fox. This was a fierce object. There was a square of steel wool, pocketed from Frau Mauthner’s kitchen when no one was looking. This was a Protestant object. There was a very old piece of black bread, now curling up at the edges slightly. This object, Fritz could not decide what it represented. Some days it was a nursery object, some days it was funereal, like the feast at a crow’s wake. There was a block of cedarwood, the size of two clenched fists together, and that was a virtuous object, but virtuous in an admirable way, not virtuous in a way you felt lectured at by it. And there was a piece of beautiful red glass, lovely vivid red glass, changing the world as you looked through it, making it warm and strange. The piece of red glass was the fall of Austria-Hungary. He had found it on the street. Where it had come from, and what its original purpose was, Fritz did not know and could not guess. Why it was the fall of Austria-Hungary Fritz did not understand. But it had presented itself to him in the way that a woman might introduce herself and say, ‘I am an only child’, and you thought, Yes, you are, indeed you are. The piece of red glass looked like a pane from a piece of church stained glass, but that was impossible. It had once occurred to Fritz that it might be a discarded fragment of another student’s non-representative found-object sculpture. He did not like to think of that.

They would not go together, no matter which of the five he omitted. Now he moved over to the table and picked up the piece of red glass. The other four things – the bread, the cedarwood block, the saw, the steel wool – he moved about in an undecided way. Now the bread sat upon the cedarwood, which was coiled about by the flexible saw – but the bread looked stupid, and what to do with the steel wool? It had an undecided, irrelevant air. He started again, resting the saw on the bread and the steel wool at either end. They could be made to stand upright. But what to do with the cedarwood? The same as the other things, and that was no good. It had been growing in Fritz for some time that he had made a terrible mistake when he first chose the objects of his sculpture. He had concentrated entirely on contrasts in texture – the luminous smoothness of the glass, the rusty saw, the fibrous wood, the knitted piece of steel wool, and the miniature honeycomb of the bread – and forgotten altogether about the shapes. He had thought that some kind of arabesque could be made out of the saw to counteract the prevailing squareness of the other three, or four. But the squareness seemed to dominate and to bring everything down, even the lovely piece of red glass. He could change all his objects and start again. But he had been contemplating these objects for weeks now. As Itten had instructed, he had penetrated the essence of these five objects by long observation. But he had come to understand through observation that they did not like each other and did not live in the same world.

In a dejected way, Fritz raised the piece of square red glass to his eye, closed the other, and prepared to see the world through Austria-Hungary and its fall.

At first it was merely red. There was nothing distinct about the entities in the room. But then the forms began to emerge. There were square forms, and lines, darker and blacker than the air. The air had a flexible form that would take up the space allotted to it by the solid forms. When the world was seen, red, through the eyes of Austria-Hungary, the eye was drawn to the naked body of Katharina, lying face down on the bed.

But the eye was not drawn to a naked body when it looked through a red filter. It did not look at her bottom and rounded shoulders, the tress of hair falling across her face-down head. What it looked at were pleasing curves and lines: a convex and a concave arch, and then another, longer, deeper, arch. There was no lechery, or love, or any sentimentalizing psychological structure.

‘Stop staring at me,’ Katharina said. ‘Stop it. It makes me shiver.’

He took no notice of what It had said. The lines and volumes had weight, and movement, and an innate direction and energy, but they did not have sound or speech. It was a fascinating phenomenon to find in the room he had rented from Frau Mauthner. He looked for a second above the form at the line drawings, if that is what they are when viewed through a red square. They had retreated into the insignificant, along with the smells, the sounds of the room, and the bad metallic taste in his mouth that came from a broken tooth he could not afford to have removed. He lowered the red square from his eye. The hierarchies disappeared. Without the help of Austria-Hungary, Katharina was Katharina again. Her hair was blonde and her body was rumpled and warm and delicious, a bread smell in the morning, and she was sleepy and open and a little disgruntled. He made an effort, without the red filter. The lines started to re-emerge; the arc; the concave form; you did not have to see the animal confusion that filled them.

Fritz stood up. He dropped the square of red glass onto the floor; it fell harmlessly on his white shirt, where he had left it when he had undressed the night before. He went to the oil lamp, and quickly removed the glass form that protected the lit flame from wind and draught. It was straight, circular from above, and towards the bottom bulged out like a brandy glass. It contained air in a form. With steady concentrated fury, he took the glass; inside it he fastened the thin saw, with a dab of glue, which would be good enough for the moment; he made a spiral. Working quickly, he tore apart the square of steel wool until it looked like wild morning hair, and attached it to the end of the saw. The piece of black bread remained where it was, at the end of the piece. The cedarwood would stand behind, supporting it. Anyone could see what a sentry it was. In fifteen minutes the piece was done. Fritz walked back, critically. He picked up the piece of red glass from the shirt where he had dropped it. He raised it to his eye. It was no longer Austria-Hungary. It was just a red filter. On the other side of the filter, the room had changed. It now had two important sets of curves, lines and volumes in it. There was the Form on the bed. There was a new Form. It filled the room.

‘You have been busy,’ Katharina said admiringly. ‘All that grunting and pulling and sticking things together. I don’t know why you can’t do things in a normal way like normal people. Now I want to go and have something to eat.’

‘You’re so …’ Fritz said. He wanted to tell her how she was. But language would not stretch to it.

‘I know,’ Katharina said, putting an immense weight on the word. She was so pleased to be so … ‘I want sausage, burnt, and cold cabbage, and mustard with it, and a whole basin of cold potato salad, a huge whole basin. I am so hungry I could eat what the wolves brought back. Is the old cow gone out yet?’

‘“When China speaks with one voice,”’ Fritz said, in a lust-thickened voice, ‘“then the ear of Europe rings.”’

‘You and your Mazdaznan,’ Katharina said.

10.

That afternoon, Christian took his portfolio out and his charcoals, newly bought with a single gold piece from Grandfather’s hoard. A true student of art would not wait until the first day of instruction before starting.

He had rarely drawn in public before, and even more rarely set out on his own like this, and never in a strange town. Three or four times, the art master at the Gymnasium had announced that they would be going out for this purpose. The eight senior pupils would follow the master onto the overground train, behaving in a subdued way. There was nothing Bohemian about the art class.

Christian thought, too, that their generation was a subdued one. He had been twelve when the war broke out, and at fourteen it sat heavily on their minds. There seemed to be no future, nothing worth studying for, except a short adult life of a few grey days commanding troops on the eastern front, running at the end towards a bank of guns. It was important to put one’s life’s energies into the duties of school and labour, when the eastern front awaited.

During these trips, Christian would place himself before a masterpiece in the art gallery. He liked a landscape; he admired Philips Wouwerman, and he liked the simple arabesque, the invented backgrounds behind the Italian madonnas. How could you tell that those simple valleys with a river curving through them had been invented, whereas Wouwerman had really sat and really observed? From time to time, he raised his pencil and closed one eye; he measured the distance of each part of the landscape, and set it down on his own sheet of paper, making amends as the master made his round, commenting and correcting. Sometimes a lady or a gentleman, visiting the art gallery on a quiet weekday morning, would pause behind him, and observe what he was doing; sometimes they would know what they were looking at, and pass on without comment; sometimes a bundled and smelly individual, dripping from clothes and nose, would express extravagant admiration, call Christian or one of his classmates ‘a little Raphael’. The art gallery was still quiet and warm, in 1916, in January; every class of person came there, sometimes in the love of art and sometimes in refuge from the first Berlin winter of war.

After one of these class outings, it came to Christian that artists did not only proceed by copying famous works of art, warmly in the gallery. He had developed a passion for Menzel, whose painting of clouds of steam in a factory had made him stand and stare. His mother had stood with him in front of a beach scene by the Frenchman Monet, and she had shown him that Monet had painted it on the spot. How can you know that, Mamma? Painters may sketch the composition with charcoal and pencil on the spot, but they have studios to produce the finished work. Look, Mamma had said. Look, you can see if you get close – we are going to be reprimanded, so let us be quick – look, some grains of sand, there, in the paint. And there it is, Mamma said. He did it all there on the beach, because there are lots of things that you can’t set down with charcoal and pencil.

And there it was. They suffered from boredom so terribly then, in the war, in 1916 and 1917; life could not be constructed so entirely of dread and hectoring. Mamma was so thin and pretty, with warm red hair; sometimes, when he was small, and he had been very good, she would let him pull out any white hairs that he could find. He could find only a very few. Perhaps one at a time. He would pull it out, and she would wince, and say thank you, and then she would finish getting dressed.

He was forgetting now what Mamma looked like. The photographs did not get her quite right. The drawing he had made of her did not get her right, either – she had died when he was still not a good artist, did not get things right. He could summon her, just about, by thinking of Dolphus’s nose, and trying to add some thick dark eyebrows, which were like his own in the mirror, and then some dark blue eyes, almost purple. The labour of keeping his mother’s last-days’ face from his memory was hard, too. But then, after some time of holding it in his thoughts, the real face would leap out, effortlessly, in full health, as she had been any morning at the breakfast table, a white silk hat shading her tender and shy expression, and he would wonder that he struggled to think what she had looked like.

There had been outings, after the Monet moment, to draw in the open air. Dolphus had come, to be company. But Christian was shy about his art, and he did not want to be seen drawing in public. There were quiet corners of parks, but they had a tendency to yield large and vulgar families from Pankow on a day’s outing. The country was too far. The street was interesting, but you could not set up in the middle of the pavement in Friedrichstrasse. Dolphus was easy and tractable; he came not just because he enjoyed the outing, but because sometimes the artist needs a figure to add to a scene, and the figure needs to be observed at length. Dolphus rarely minded being told to stand by a tree, or to crouch over a stream. Christian’s drawings were often of an unspecific male figure, leaning against a tree, or crouching as if holding a home-made fishing rod over a tree. They looked like bucolic scenes, but that was only because Christian had grown shy, and the details of the scene had been sketchy, since they could be done later. Mamma had been kind, and had even had one framed for her dressing room, where it still hung, dusted and cared for by Egon, like all her possessions. But anyone could have seen that it was, in reality, a corner of the Zoological Garden, yards from where carriages and motors, unrecorded by Christian, stood in steaming queues.

In Weimar, without Dolphus to wait for him patiently and perform a useful task, there was too much burden of expectation. He had produced only three or four rapid and embarrassed sketches when the time came to return to Frau Scherbatsky’s house. The market was emptying now; the stall-holders were calling to each other, and packing up what remained of their stock in boxes, pallets, packing with straw, berating their boys for getting under the feet. In the window of the coffee house two men sat, one with an amused, superior face, one with a clever, screwed-up expression. Towards Christian, a group came: five soldiers, or former soldiers, in uniform. One was in a bath chair, although it was not possible to see how he was injured. It needed only one comrade to push the bath chair, but all four of the standing soldiers had some kind of hold on it and were walking together. Two held a handle each, one was placing a blanket over the knees of the invalid and fussing, and the last, unable to find a particular task, was demonstratively letting a hand trail at the back of the chair, as if claiming territory. They were all young; perhaps no more than three or four years older than Christian. As they passed, he saw that on their arms was a band, and on the band was some sort of motif. They had the picturesque appearance of veterans, the five of them, crumpled, sincere and careworn.

11.

‘Did you see that?’ Kandinsky said. ‘Klee, did you see that? That group of soldiers, there, with the wheeling chair in the middle?’

They had just sat down in a coffee house. Kandinsky liked to sit in the window where he could see life. Klee did not object. Sometimes he looked inside the coffee house, sometimes he looked outside. In the back of the coffee house, although it was daylight, the yellow lights were on in the card room, in an acknowledgement of the usual evening time for gambling. That did not interest Klee. His gaze disconcerted people. He gave the impression of recognizing strangers, of knowing exactly what a friend had been doing before the meeting, of looking levelly at a waiter and sharing a silent joke with him, without the requirement of comment. Kandinsky was used to it, and used, too, to Klee speaking only when he had something to say.

The group moved away, past a boy with blond, very short hair, holding an artist’s portfolio – probably a student, although neither of them knew him. They dissolved into the late-afternoon sauntering of Weimar.

‘The old brigade,’ Kandinsky said. ‘They are everywhere. The war was never lost, those responsible should be shot, the Kaiser should return.’

‘They had a line,’ Klee said. ‘You could make a picture out of them, a picture of old, old black crows on a bench in a park in Lucerne. Or of five kittens in a basket. Are they young, or are they old? The last one, in the chair, they were saying goodbye to him. Or they were just born and discovering the way that they could live together. The one in the chair, they were welcoming him to life.’

The waitress had been standing there, not ignored by Klee, exactly, but nearly included in his comment. At some point, she lowered her notebook and pencil; at some point, she stopped waiting for him to finish speaking so she could take their order, and began to listen with curiosity and interest. Her apron was clean, but much washed and greying; her white pie-crust collar was torn at the side and had been mended in a hurry; there were things about her that were coming apart, and she looked tired and hungry. When Klee finished, she stood there, her pencil and notebook lowered, in pensive silence. The two gentleman were not different in size, but one seemed to be tall and thin, the other short and square – the talkative one and the one who had spoken. The one who seemed to be short and square stopped talking. He had a measured, tuneful Swiss voice, and his silence, too, was measured, tuneful and Swiss. Then he looked at her, with a sympathetic amusement – the half-smile of someone who knows that you will find the same thing funny, and then you will laugh at it together. She came to. All her aches and concerns returned to her face in a moment.

‘Two coffees, only,’ Kandinsky said.

‘Yes,’ the waitress said. ‘That will be two hundred thousand marks today. Or what else do you have to pay with?’

‘With money. Is that two hundred thousand each?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I see. Thank you. Have they gone, those soldiers?’

He had addressed himself to Klee, but Klee stayed silent, and the waitress had lingered. ‘The colonel?’ she said. ‘You mean the colonel?’

‘The colonel?’ Kandinsky said, puzzled. But the waitress had slipped away and was saying something to an upright man of middle age, an elaborate moustache, the red streaming eyes of the alcoholic and a Bavarian coat. He was sitting with a plump woman in a white fur-trimmed coat; her hair was newly marcelled, with a fringe in the centre over her face like the tassels of a shawl. He stood up after the word from the waitress, leaving the woman and the two glasses of schnapps on the table. His right leg was amputated, and his stump rested on a wooden leg – it was the cheap sort, where the leather was padded with horsehair – and a neatly folded handkerchief.

‘I was not told there would be two of you,’ the colonel, if that was who it was, said. A little gust of sour smells came from him: of old schnapps on the breath, of ancient clothes, not washed, of some kind of brutal disinfectant liquid, not intended in the first instance for personal application. ‘May I sit down?’

‘By all means,’ Kandinsky said. ‘But I think there is some mistake. We were not here to meet anyone.’

‘I was waiting,’ the colonel said. He bared his teeth in an attempt at warmth; his teeth were brown and broken. ‘I was waiting for a business associate.’

‘Who was to ask for the colonel, I quite understand.’

‘It is all the same,’ the colonel said and, without waiting further, pulled out a chair. He nodded, sharply, not quite saluting. He might have brought his heel together with the end of his wooden leg, but the gesture would have lacked assurance. With a swivelling movement, he sat down on the sideways chair. ‘My business associate is late,’ he said. ‘He may not come. Things have been difficult, gentlemen, you understand.’

‘Things are difficult for everyone,’ Kandinsky said, sharply, but with a tinge of resignation. This happened in coffee houses. It was their own fault for being apologetic.

‘Difficult, yes, difficult,’ the colonel said, emphasizing the roll of the word. ‘I lost my leg in battle. Twenty-five years or more I was in the cavalry of His Majesty. And then there was no His Majesty, and no cavalry, as far as I know. And my leg lies in the mud at Verdun. I gave thanks for the escape then, but now I wish they had made an end of me at Verdun, and I would not have seen what I have seen.’

‘Why,’ Klee said. ‘What have you seen.’

He asked it in a plain way, but the colonel turned on him. ‘What have I seen? I have seen the politicians call back the army before they could win. And they dismissed His Majesty. And they declared that we had lost the war, and would not listen to disagreement. We did not lose. We were not defeated by the enemy. We were stabbed in the back. Gentlemen,’ and his harsh voice turned in on itself, remembering that he was there for a purpose, that his voice should be soft and agreeable, ‘gentlemen, I don’t know if you are interested in a very interesting business proposition, but I have property to sell, a very interesting and well-made volume of clothing. I don’t know if you have any means to sell it among your circle, shirts, beautifully made white cotton shirts, and boots, as solid as anyone could desire, truly excellent, and body-linen, stockings, anything you could require, and very reasonable, I know how the cost of things is going, Lord knows how we all know that …’

At the other table, the colonel’s companion raised her glass of schnapps to her lips, shaking slightly. She was tranquil, much powdered, patient and bemused. She had spent so many afternoons at this table, sipping a schnapps while the colonel made his appeal to strangers and contacts. The colonel’s patriotism ran down like a half-wound clockwork engine; the colonel’s offer to sell army property took over. Kandinsky and Klee said nothing. The two cups of coffee arrived. The colonel looked at them. He fell silent. His eyes rested on the table; it might have been shame. Abruptly he pushed the chair backwards, and got to his feet with diagonal thrusts and jabs.

‘Fifty million marks would be a help to me, in the position in which I find myself,’ he said. His red eyes brimmed. He must have seen that Klee and Kandinsky were looking at him intently, in different ways, but both with nothing more than interest, not sympathy or encouragement.

‘Good day to you,’ Kandinsky said.

‘I am sorry,’ the man finished, with a touch of parade-ground sarcasm, ‘to have disturbed you, gentlemen, in your important discussions.’

They watched him go. He sat down heavily in his chair, three tables away. His companion raised her eyes slowly, as if pulling them up with great effort. The movement continued: she raised her eyebrows in question. He gave a brief, decisive shake of the head, only a degree or two, dismissing the possibility. They both took up their glasses, clinked them, and took a sip. And in a moment, as if Klee and Kandinsky had been the bad luck that the colonel needed to expunge, a quite ordinary-looking man, no more than twenty-seven, in an ordinary black overcoat and a bowler hat, slid without invitation into the third chair at the colonel’s table and started to talk.

‘“To one of the nation’s heroes,”’ Klee said, repeating the words neutrally. And the man must have been desperate to accept money, to be unable to barter his possessions for anything else. Klee liked to repeat phrases, trying them out. A week or a month or a year later, Kandinsky knew he would enter Klee’s studio to ask what he had been achieving lately, and he would be handed a drawing, led up to a painting on an easel, of a giant figure, smudged with oil transfer lines, and underneath would be written ‘To one of the nation’s heroes’, and a neat, cryptic entry in Klee’s numbering system, 1922/109.

‘And two more cups of coffee,’ Klee said to the waitress, arriving with a pen.

‘That will be five hundred thousand marks,’ the waitress said.

‘No, four hundred thousand,’ Kandinsky said. ‘You said two hundred thousand each, for the cups of coffee.’

‘It was four hundred thousand when you ordered the first two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. ‘The new price for two cups of coffee is five hundred thousand.’

‘No, no, how can that be,’ Klee said. ‘Two hundred thousand is monstrous already – how can that be the price of a cup of coffee, even here, even in expensive Weimar – but five hundred thousand, half a million for two, how can the price change in an hour, how can that be?’

‘The price now, at seventeen minutes past four o’clock, is five hundred thousand marks for two cups of coffee,’ the waitress said. Her enchantment with Klee had disappeared. ‘If we continue this discussion for long enough, the price of two cups of coffee will be six hundred thousand marks. It is entirely up to you, gentlemen.’

Outside the coffee house, the soldiers were assembling. The group they had seen before had reappeared. There seemed to be a protest or march in the making. They laid their hands protectively on the handles as if the touch would make sense of everything. About their arms, each had a cloth armband, not part of their uniform originally. On it was some kind of device or symbol, a red shape of some kind. By the door of the coffee house, the colonel, leaning on his crutch, shook the hand of the businessman, full of smiles. The colonel’s lady stood five paces off, looking at the soldiers, swaying confusedly to and fro.

12.

Christian had discovered a short-cut through the park to Frau Scherbatsky’s house, after the baroque sandstone bridge across the stream. He was ridiculously pleased with this insight, and came to the door of the house where he lived with a proud feeling of starting to belong in the town. The doorbell was not immediately responded to; he had to ring again before Maria, the red-haired maid, answered. She looked at him as if his face had not registered; she had a confused and perhaps even an embarrassed expression, but she stood back and let him through, with his portfolio of drawings.

There was no one else to be seen, but when he was in his room, and taking the drawings of marketplace, ducal palace, standing figures and park out of the portfolio, Christian was startled by some noise in the quiet house. It was a muffled shriek; then the sound of a woman giggling; then a shriek again, and soon, from only two or three rooms away in the house, transmitted by pipe and panelling, Christian realized that he was listening to the sounds of Frau Scherbatsky in bed with someone, in the afternoon. He did not want to listen, but there seemed no way of not listening. Her shrieks and downward glissandos of joy grew, and then they were joined by a man’s noises: a grunt and a few murmured words of encouragement, though it was not possible to understand what was said. Christian went to the window, and opened it, trying to concentrate on the sounds of the park. But the noises grew and were joined by the sound of wooden furniture banging against the wall. Christian felt himself beginning to blush. He had never heard such a thing in his family circle. He was a virgin himself, if that shameful and dishonourable visit to the brothel with two schoolfriends in the last Easter at the Gymnasium were not counted. Now a phrase was heard more clearly, spoken by a man. The window of the other room must be open, too, and by opening his window, he had allowed himself to hear more clearly. The student lodger had gone out, and Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had taken advantage. The phrase he had heard, whatever it was, had been spoken in a strong Leipzig accent. The maid must have known that he would hear the noises she was used to, and understood that he had breached the unspoken conditions of lodging.

Christian became worldly and calm. ‘I say!’ he remarked, in an undertone to the empty room. ‘What beasts! Good for Neddermeyer – I hope I still have it in me when I am as old as that! And the Scherbatsky! Fine woman – and a woman has needs that an architect-lodger can fulfil. A well-known fact.’ He was practising for an anecdote. But who he would tell the anecdote to, he did not know. With a large sigh and a bestial sound, the encounter seemed to come to an end. Christian realized that they were in what must be Neddermeyer’s room, not Frau Scherbatsky’s, which was on the other side, next door to his room. And in the meantime, an awkwardness was arising: he would need to visit the lavatory quite soon, to cross the landing to the shared bathroom. To leave the room now would risk meeting Frau Scherbatsky in dressing gown, négligé or similar intimate apparel, making her dishevelled way back to her room to prepare her appearance for supper. He looked under the bed, but this was a modern house and there was no pot. He waited.

There was the sound of a door being opened, of footsteps, the unsynchronized clatter of footsole against slipper. The sound went past Christian’s door; the door of Frau Scherbatsky’s door was opened and closed. He breathed out. He must keep quiet in his movements. Frau Scherbatsky and Herr Neddermeyer had only permitted themselves this licence because they believed that Christian – and, presumably, still, the tantalizing Herr Wolff – were not in the house.

He opened the door silently and, shoeless, walked across to the bathroom. The modern flush of the lavatory made a noise, and when Christian stepped out of the bathroom, he saw, to his horror, that Herr Neddermeyer’s door was now standing open – it had been opened in the previous minute. ‘Herr Vogt?’ Neddermeyer’s voice called. ‘Is that you? Do come in.’

Christian stood in the door of Neddermeyer’s room, twisting his hands about, one in the other. The room was attractive and immaculate. The bed was made, under a white counterpane. On the walls were views of Roman and other classical ruins; in the bow window stood a substantial octagonal table in mahogany with a central supporting pillar. The table bore a thick pile of papers, weighed down at four corners by a bronze Japanese fisherman, a millefiori paperweight, a grotesquely shaped stone, mounted in silver, and a bust of Brahms in alabaster. On the table, too, were an architect’s drawing tools of pencil and compasses, squares and protractors, in an open walnut case lined with worn black leather. Neddermeyer gestured towards one of the two armchairs in yellow velvet. Unexpectedly, his appearance gave no indication of the rumpus he had just been through: he was groomed and of normal colour, his clothes not suggesting that they had been flung to the floor and picked up some time afterwards. There was nothing of the debauch about him, or about his room.

‘Welcome to my home – my lair, one could say,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I can offer you some coffee – nothing elaborate, nothing extensive, but I do insist on having coffee-making as a possibility in my room.’

‘That is very kind,’ Christian said.

‘I cannot always be calling on Maria to bring me cups from the kitchen,’ Neddermeyer said, going over and opening a small cupboard and beginning to fiddle with its contents. ‘My one remaining vice. So, Herr Vogt, I saw you venturing out this afternoon with your sketchbook. You found some subjects worthy of your pencil? Good, good. I am sure that the Bauhaus will chase the love of beauty out of you very quickly, and replace it with a love of steel and sharp corners. I saw a soup plate that one of them had made. It was square. The absurdity!’

‘Why so, Herr Neddermeyer?’

‘They had not considered,’ Neddermeyer said, ‘that a square has angles and a circle has none. A maidservant, presenting a soup plate, presents it at the eye level of her master. The master’s attention is drawn to something on his right; he turns sharply. The plate is a square one, however, as designed by the bright fellows at the Bauhaus, and the eye is thrust against a sharp corner of a hard material. The master, who has bought a daring novelty and flatters himself that he has an original eye, has, from now on, exactly that: an original eye. Only one.’ Neddermeyer tittered in a genteel, practised, taut way.

Neddermeyer was talking amiably, swivelling and smiling from his post at the coffee cupboard, and now he turned and brought over the cups of coffee. They were tiny, gold and green, with a small medallion of flowers painted on the side. Despite the smile, Neddermeyer’s voice had been growing tense, and he was not looking, exactly, at Christian as he handed it over. He placed his own on the small table by the other armchair, and removed a spotted red handkerchief from the inside pocket of his Bavarian jacket. He wiped his hands clean.

‘I think Frau Scherbatsky said you are an architect?’ Christian said. The coffee, despite coming from a small cupboard, was delicious, with no taint of chicory or acorn.

‘I was an architect,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I do not think I will ever build again.’

‘Do you have drawings of your work?’ Christian said. ‘I would so like to see them.’

Neddermeyer did not exactly brighten, but he grew businesslike, as if he had been expecting Christian to say exactly that. Perhaps he had called Christian in for this exact purpose, to show his drawings. Christian reflected that after the pleasures which Neddermeyer and Frau Scherbatsky had indulged in, the ego was never satisfied; it was at that point, the day after his schoolfriends had visited a brothel, that they were most apt to show classmates their best marks, the most flattering comments made on their work by masters, or, at the very least, to treat the fellows at a coffee shop, pulling out their marks with a profligate air. Neddermeyer wanted someone to see what a marvellous fellow he was.

‘I do indeed,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Perhaps you noticed my drawings over there, on the table. There are some photographs, too, of some projects that came to life. A very civil young man, before the war, came to see me and spent six months visiting what I had designed and built, and wrote a very flattering article about my work in an architectural review. After that article, I had letters from architects in America, even. Of course, that was in 1905. People are not interested now.’

‘Did you always build in Weimar?’

‘Weimar and surroundings,’ Neddermeyer said carelessly, waving his hand at the window as if to suggest that he might have built all of it. ‘I could have gone to America. Interest in my work was very high there, as I said. But as I told my apprentices, my thinking, such as it is, was formed in an age where people climbed to the top floor if that was where they wanted to go. I was too old to change, to think how a tower of thirty floors could be ornamented. A mistake, no doubt. Now. Where were we.’

Neddermeyer stood, and walked over in a vague, uncommitted way to the table, as if hardly engaged.

‘Well, here they are!’ he said. ‘There is no purpose, really, in continuing to work, but the imagination continues to thrive. Sometimes I am playing at the pianoforte and I will be seized with an idea, quite a new idea, for a suspended balcony at the front of a royal palace, or for some rolling bookshelves to simplify storage and display in a library. Now, this is an idea I had for a triumphal arch …’

Neddermeyer’s fantasy work was neatly drawn, exquisitely finished, ornamented and made human with decorative touches of trees and figures. They were a credit to the tools in the open walnut case. He began to turn over the sheets, lovingly, murmuring words of explanation, like an ambassador introducing great dignitaries. Here was an idea he had for a state library; for a permanent circus on the classical model; for an English cottage; for a nobleman’s country house, refined and yet rustic; an idea for the Emperor’s military barracks; a new cathedral for Berlin (‘I was so disappointed, Herr Vogt, with the one His Majesty built, until I did not see why I should not put my own thoughts on paper’); a monument to the dead of the war; a bridge over a country stream and the same bridge, on a larger scale, bearing the traffic of the town; and a royal palace, eighty windows long on its front façade. Christian turned the sheets one after another. The plans were rich in ornament and fantasy; they specialized in pendentives and arches, in caryatids and classical columns, in portes-cochères heavy with mythological figures, in windows leaning out far over the street like orchards, in stucco ornament in their interiors and stone ornament on their exteriors. They specialized in the heavy imagination of the old Emperor, and Christian turned the pages with fascinated absorption. The moment for gargoyles, he thought, looking at the design for the Berlin cathedral, was gone.

‘You see, Herr Vogt,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘What architecture needs is imagination, and variety. The eye craves richness, and finds ornament restful. Now, for one of your teachers at the Bauhaus, a new cathedral in Weimar would be a simple matter.’ Neddermeyer was pulling a sketchbook towards him, a spiral-bound orange book, and now leant over the table to pluck a pencil from its place. ‘It would look just like –’ he began to draw ‘– you see, just like – ah, yes, that is that problem solved. You see?’

He turned the sketchbook around for Christian to see. On the page, he had drawn nothing more than a rectangle, then filled it in roughly with a grid. He took it back, and drew a line underneath it and, with a couple of scribbles, placed some stick figures on the ground. ‘You see, Herr Vogt, I remember there was a great scandal in Vienna when the leader of the school built something opposite the Emperor’s house. The Emperor had not been consulted, and when he saw the building, he said, “Who has built that house with no eyebrows, just there?” A very ugly building, still, and a gross insult to the Emperor. That is the sort of place you are going to, Herr Vogt. I am sorry for you.’

‘Your buildings are very interesting, Herr Neddermeyer,’ Christian said. ‘I look forward to talking with you a great deal more. But I am hoping to become an artist, not an architect.’

Neddermeyer was now as flushed and excited as Christian had expected to find him. ‘You see, I lost everything,’ he said. ‘It all went – family and business and home and everything.’

‘I am sorry,’ Christian said formally. He wondered whether now was the time to offer to show Neddermeyer the drawings he had done that morning. He decided that now was not the time. ‘Thank you so much for the coffee, Herr Neddermeyer.’

‘I believe that Herr Wolff will be joining us for dinner,’ Neddermeyer said wretchedly. ‘So the topic for tonight will be politics.’

‘I look forward to that, too,’ Christian said, letting himself out with what he felt was an expert smile, like a doctor leaving a patient in pain, a patient midway through a fit of raving.

13.

Before supper, Christian wrote a letter to his brother Dolphus.

It is not very much like being a student of art in the opera, living at Frau Scherbatsky’s house. I do not think I could bring mistresses with tuberculosis to die in the attic – like in La Bohème. (No attic, too.) It is a large, dull, ugly villa, built not ten years ago by a local architect. He also lives here, the architect, so it is important to compliment the beauty of the house, the convenience of the rooms, and so on, very regularly. I thought at first he was living here as a lodger, because he had fallen on hard times after the war. Actually, he has formed a connection with Frau Scherbatsky. They keep up appearances, but their connection is an intimate one. There is another lodger, a man named Wolff, who has been away, but who I have seen since starting this letter, walking in the garden smoking a cigar. I can only describe him from what I have seen – a small, well-built man, with very short grey hair, carrying a cane and wearing plus-fours. He appears alert and fit – he was whacking the side of his legs with his cane as he walked, quite vigorously. He may be younger than my landlady and her architect friend. He was accosted by Neddermeyer, as the architect of the house is called, who came out to exchange some friendly words with him, but he responded briefly and continued walking briskly from one side of the lawn to the other. Neddermeyer tried to keep up with him, but after a while he gave up and sat down on the bench under the oak tree, limiting himself to saying something when Wolff happened to pass him directly. He seemed to be taking exercise, or perhaps pacing because he had something to think through – you know how Papa does. What do they think of me? They deplore all students of the Bauhaus, I believe, but have not come out into the open on the subject. Luckily, because I can hardly defend it as yet. I have met only one student, a woman who introduced herself to me in the street, who I cannot believe is typical, and I have seen another, a man, through an open window. But I have already been shouted at by a stranger, an inhabitant of Weimar, who disapproved of art students indiscriminately, even of a polite fellow like your brother. (That is why I was spoken to by the woman student who introduced herself in the street – she was defending me. I think I may need a good deal of defending.)

Give my love to Papa and my best to the fellows. If there is anything in this letter which you would like to share with them, then you have my permission. I do hope you will come very soon to visit your brother – I have a good-sized room, and you would be very welcome to rough it for three or four days, and I can show you what an art student’s life is like. Do steer clear of wild company – do not drink or play cards or stay out late, now that you have no guide in life. And take care that Papa makes conversation at dinner. He is growing silent as he grows older. That is not good. The weather here is excellent and set to continue fine.

Your loving brother

C. S. T. Vogt.

And then Christian ornamented the remaining blank half-page of his writing paper by drawing a picture with his fountain pen, which he knew Dolphus would enjoy: an Alpine landscape with a path in the foreground, and two gentlemanly snails with Alpine hats on, one smoking a pipe, rising up and greeting each other with a little bow. When he got to the second one, the idea of getting it to remove its hat politely with one of the stalks it had on its head occurred to him. It was hard to draw, but satisfying. He finished it off with a few Alpine bouquets at the foot, put the letter into an envelope, sealed it and addressed it. The gong for supper was sounding softly downstairs.

‘There were Communist protesters, however,’ the man who must be Wolff was saying, as Christian came into the dining room and took his seat with a brief apology. ‘Or Spartacists. I do not know the exact colour of the beast. They were a small but violent group, throwing bottles. We did not respond – a brother in the movement had his head split open, blood running down his face, but still we did not respond, Frau Scherbatsky. We made our point, and we were very much applauded by the ordinary people of Erfurt. Do you know Erfurt, Herr Neddermeyer? A fine town, I believe.’

‘Herr Wolff, I do not think,’ Frau Scherbatsky said, ‘that you have met our new guest, Herr Vogt.’

‘How do you do?’ Wolff said, unsmiling and closing his eyes as he turned to Christian and nodded. ‘You are most welcome.’

‘Herr Vogt is the son of one of my husband’s oldest friends – no, not his son, but the son of a business associate of that most old friend,’ Frau Scherbatsky said.

Wolff nodded in acknowledgement, again turning to Christian but closing his eyes as he did so. He had something shining in his lapel, something attached. It seemed to Christian that all the discussions about his being a student at the Bauhaus had been gone over and expurgated before he had arrived. There had been something wary, alert and savage about Wolff’s demeanour when he had entered the room, like one dog when introduced to another. Christian resolved to be polite and warm.

‘I was passing the time in the train with the fellows,’ Wolff said, ‘counting the number of places we have assembled at this year. Do you know, we have already had twenty meetings and demonstrations, and this only September? Last year, we mounted only twelve, the whole length of the year. We have really already been the length and breadth of the kingdom.’

‘Which town has the best food in Germany, would you say, Herr Wolff, from your exhaustive travels?’ Frau Scherbatsky said.

‘My dear lady,’ Wolff said, beaming, ‘I can hardly say – you know, we are so busy from the moment we arrive to the moment we depart, sometimes running from missiles. We were not always so very popular in the first days. Meeting, arranging, discussing, making speeches. We often have to settle for something simple to eat. Only very occasionally do the local group leaders arrange for the principal speakers to dine. I cannot say that the food was uppermost in my mind.’

‘I always think the best food in Germany is in Bavaria,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘Those knuckles! Those white sausages! The fried veal slices!’

‘And the most beautiful towns,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘And the country, of course. There can be no doubt about that. Surely you found time to raise your head and admire the beauty of a town in the course of your travels, Herr Wolff?’

Maria came in with soup bowls on a small trolley with dragon’s head ornamentation, setting the soup down before the four of them. As she set one down before Frau Scherbatsky, she caught Christian’s eye. He did not lower his: he engaged her gaze as she murmured in her mistress’s ear. She made her way round the table, taking the bowls from the trolley, and he watched her, boldly. She reached him, placed a bowl in front of him, and lowered her face to murmur in his ear as she offered him a basket of bread. There was an attractive smell of sweat and of clean skin under soap, mixing with the soup’s sour odours. He had thought she was going to share a moment’s comment with him, but she said only, ‘Liver dumpling soup’, raised her head, gave the table a single, surveying glance, and removed herself with the empty trolley.

‘You get good numbers in Bavaria,’ Wolff said. ‘When we were just beginning, in the months after the war, we were sometimes only ten or a dozen, and greeted with savage violence. You recall, Frau Scherbatsky – ah, no, it was before I was living here, it was when I was at Fräulein Schlink’s, before she took exception to me—’

‘How could anyone take exception to our dear Herr Wolff!’ Frau Scherbatsky cried.

‘Dear lady,’ Wolff said absently. ‘They broke my finger then – it was in Jena. But in the last year, the numbers have grown so wonderfully! For me, the beauties of Bavaria are tied up with the support and understanding the movement is gaining there.’

‘What is your movement, Herr Wolff?’ Christian asked.

Again, that creaking movement of the head; again, the inspection with quite closed eyes of the art student, the revolutionary, the boy of violence, anarchy and square glass-walled houses. ‘It is a small group of associates who stand for what is right,’ Wolff said, in a voice that seemed to have had its patience tried. ‘That is all.’

‘I see,’ Christian said.

‘There were secret forces that led us defeated out of the war, defeated and shamed, and sold us to people who have long planned for our downfall. Every week, more and more people understand what it is that lies behind. We work hard to help people to understand. In Erfurt, they lined the streets, cheering. The crowd was two deep in places. You can only rely on Germans, now. More and more people understand that, since the war. That was’ – and Wolff did not lower his voice, continued to shout as he moved into compliment and said – ‘a delicious soup, Frau Scherbatsky.’

Maria took away the soup, and brought in a white fricassee of what must be the promised rabbit, with rice alongside.

‘And did you see your wizards today, Frau Scherbatsky?’ Christian said, with an attempt at lightness.

‘My wizards, Herr Vogt?’ She seemed genuinely puzzled.

He immediately wished he had not started it, but persevered. ‘I think you said that the eccentric people we saw yesterday – the people in purple robes – I think you said that they pass every day.’

‘Oh,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘I think I know what you mean. No, I do not think I have seen those people today.’ She made a minute gesture towards Wolff, as if to indicate that such talk was not for his dignity. But it was too late.

‘What eccentric people are these?’ Wolff said, mixing his rabbit fricassee with the rice in an uncommitted manner.

‘Oh, you know, Herr Wolff,’ Neddermeyer said. He was evidently enjoying his food. ‘You must have seen them – an invented religion, I believe, with disciples in purple robes and shaved heads, and a special diet. They seem to be growing in number, too.’

‘I should be most surprised,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Is the stew not to your taste, Herr Wolff?’

‘Oh, perfectly,’ Wolff said. ‘It may be a little dry for me, but I am an old soldier. I ask for nothing in the way of luxuries or especially delicious food, you know. And they come from? It seems a strange conception, to conceive of or invent a religion from the beginning.’

‘Well, it may be an Oriental religion, brought to Weimar, taking root here,’ Neddermeyer said. ‘I believe they are based at the new art school, under the direction of one of the masters – now, his name …’

But then it was clear to Christian that all three had agreed, in the interests of peace and civility, that the Bauhaus and its madness were not to be mentioned before or raised by Wolff, since the conversation was now abruptly turned to a bridge at Erfurt, one filled with shops, one older and longer and more beautiful than the one in Florence that people talked of so. Christian had been trying, without success, to see what the object in Wolff’s lapel was. It was a silver insignia or motif of some sort. He could not quite make it out.

14.

Around Weimar, the Masters of the Bauhaus took their leisure.

Kandinsky sat in a deep armchair, an ashtray precariously balanced on its arm, and sucked on a cigar. His dinner was finished, and a fug of smoke hung heavily over his head. His wife was opposite him, darning a pair of his socks and listening to him talk.

‘I saw Klee this afternoon,’ Kandinsky said. ‘He made such a fuss, oh, such a fuss, about the price of a cup of coffee. You would have thought it was the end of the world.’

‘How much was the sum, Vassily Vassilyevich?’ Nina said.

‘It was two thousand marks. Or three thousand. Yes, first it was two thousand and then it was three thousand. The price of the coffee went up between us ordering the first cup and us ordering the second cup. What would have happened if we had not had the extra thousand marks on us. But we did, so all was well. People fuss so about small things. No – what am I saying. I said two thousand marks, I meant two hundred thousand. You could not buy a cup of anything for a thousand marks.’

‘But a thousand marks is a thousand marks,’ Nina said sensibly. ‘Before the war, you could have bought a sofa, a table, one of my Vassily Vassilyevich’s paintings for a thousand marks. And now it is nothing times a hundredfold, the difference between a cup of coffee one moment and the next.’

‘That is so,’ Kandinsky said, ruminating over a puff of smoke. ‘Klee could not restrain himself. On the subject of money, he becomes a Swiss businessman – not a very good Swiss businessman. His one idea is not to spend any of it. He was telling me that his new idea is to paint his pictures on newspaper – he said the day was approaching when he could not afford to paint on paper or canvas. I told him that there was no need to make such savings – he should simply spend what he had on materials now, and in a year’s time he would be glad of it.’

‘And what did Klee respond?’ Nina asked.

‘Klee?’ Kandinsky said. ‘He cannot bear any outlay. Of course, he paints a painting every day, and none of them can be sold, so the blame lies with him, truly. Nina Nikolayevna, where is the bronze of the horse that used to stand there, on the table?’

‘And there I am – finished,’ Nina said, laying the socks and the needle and thread down with relief. ‘What did you say?’

Kandinsky repeated himself.

‘It must be travelling slowly from Russia with the other things,’ Nina said. ‘If it has not been robbed and destroyed. One day they will all arrive, all your things, and we will be at home here.’

‘The Constructivists have taken it,’ Kandinsky said. ‘And melted it down for one of their towers. We will never see my little horse again.’

‘Soon there will be a revolution in Germany,’ Nina said. ‘And we will all be shot. So nothing will matter very much any more.’

‘Yes, that’s so,’ Kandinsky said. He sucked meditatively on his cigar.

Two streets away, Klee lifted his violin from its case. They had eaten well. On Saturday night, Klee liked to choose the dinner, and to cook it himself. He liked the inner organs of beasts, bitter, rubbery, softly textureless, perfumed with bodily waste in a way only the practised would enjoy, and Felix had grown up finding these things ordinary and even pleasant; Lily had got used to them, and now took the Saturday dinner as part of how Paul was. Klee divided food into blond and brunette; he could cook sweetbreads in either way, dark or light. Tonight the food had been the heart of an ox, a monstrous thing. Klee had cleaned and stuffed it with meat, turnip, carrot and potato, and a herb of his own discovery, which had given the whole thing an odd flavour of liquorice. It had been a little heavy. Lily sat at the piano, ready to play, but evidently slightly uncomfortable: she burped gently from time to time. Felix sat on the sofa, the sole member of the audience. Paul took the violin from its case, unhooked the bow and, without hurry, gave the bow a good coating of rosin.

This evening it was to be the Kreutzer sonata. Klee was feeling ambitious. When he felt bold, incapable of restraint, on the verge of great and exciting things, he cooked the heart of an ox for dinner and he played the Kreutzer sonata afterwards. He often played it as something to live up to, before embarking on great enterprises. Lily often concluded that a great change was in the offing when she heard, from the studio, the sound of the first chords of the Kreutzer sonata being played once, twice, a third time; meditatively, trying it out, softly, then with dramatic force. That first chord, four notes at once on the violin, would be heard again and again, as Klee tried to get the sound exactly right; then a pause on one of the middle notes, a doodle, a trill, a thoughtful and slow attempt at the tune in the slow movement, as if Klee were taking it apart from the inside. This morning, the chord was sounded in some kind of announcement: he took the top note towards quite a different place; a dotted rhythm, a gay and yet monumental tune it took Lily a few moments to place, though she knew it as well as she knew her own face. Klee was enjoying himself by playing the little prelude to the Emperor Waltz. A few notes of it, only. And then silence: he had returned to work. For a week now, the Kreutzer sonata had been sounding from the studio at unexpected times, and Lily had taken the hint, and practised the piano part while her husband had gone out for his daily walks or to meet with Kandinsky. Was the larger endeavour a change in Klee’s art, or was it just to announce the beginning of a new term at the art school? But for days he had been practising in his own systematic way, and tonight they were going to attempt the Kreutzer. The outbreak of gaiety in those few notes of the waltz was a sign of it: he felt liberated today.

Klee raised the violin to his face. He looked, sober, at Lily, who beamed and raised her hands to the keyboard. Klee’s eyes shone intently, like those of the villain in a melodrama. He hung the bow above the strings; with a single gesture, he brought it down. The chord sang out; a cloud of rosin puffed from the bow, its dust glittering in the light from the lamp. Felix sat forward on the sofa, his loose, comfortable brown plus-fours bunching up and his green stockings falling down to his ankles. He clasped his hands in his lap. The beginning of the Kreutzer sonata was the most inexpressibly exciting thing he ever heard. It was like drawing back the curtains at seven thirty in the morning and seeing the lake on the first day of holiday, like the colour of the middle of the yolk of a fried egg in the country, that exact yellow of A major. It was almost better than those other things, because it would soon turn to fury and thunder and blackness, before it went all the way round and found its way back. It was a joy to hear Papa play it and call up a summer morning here, in this dull curtained room filled with things, smelling a little bit of the ox’s heart from dinner.

‘Klee is really too much,’ Kandinsky said in his own room, leaning backwards. ‘I am fond of the dear fellow, but …’

‘He is a Swiss businessman, a quite unsuccessful one,’ Nina said. ‘Too concerned with money, just enough to make him frightened about it, not enough to paint to earn it. The Swiss …’

‘Is he Swiss?’ Kandinsky said. ‘I am fond of him. But I sometimes wonder – can he be a Jew? He has all that race’s enthusiasm for pelf, for lucre, for the pile of gold. How his eyes light up!’

Nina laughed heartily, waving the comment away. ‘Vassily Vassilyevich,’ she said affectionately, as she always did when he said something to her that he would not say to everybody.

In another room, a large, empty one, the disciples of Mazdaznan gathered. The hall was at the back of a church, loaned to political groups, societies, choirs and amateur gatherings of a centrist-to-left disposition. One of the two Weimar Wagner societies, the one with an anti-monarchist bent, met here on Tuesdays, and on Fridays the town’s Communist watercolour society. Itten’s Mazdaznan group met in classrooms at the Bauhaus, but on Saturday nights the building was closed, and it was good to have a weekly meeting to which everyone came.

There were forty people in the room. Most had had their heads shaved, and some were in their formal purple robes, made by themselves, or by adept clothes designers and makers. Elsa Winteregger was talking. ‘And then there’s new people. Oh, there’s always new people. New ideas, new images, new thinking. Do you know? I saw a man, a boy, a new one today, and I took him up, and he was so full of new life, I don’t know where he came from or what he was doing, but he said he wanted to find the Bauhaus, and I helped him, and then I don’t know what happened to him. It was so exciting. And tomorrow there’s going to be so many of them, not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and there’s going to be so many wise new young heads, all of them full of new ideas, and they’ll put us to shame, we’ve been trodden over and made conventional in life, but them, not them, it’s for us to learn from them, us and the Masters, too …’

She went on gabbling. People about her came and went, listening and not interrupting and then going away again. Sometimes they turned to each other and began to talk, and drifted off. Her speech had started somewhere else and it was going to be finished somewhere else. And now she was talking about her sister, who was staying with her.

‘. . . only for a few days, only until Sunday, not tomorrow, a week tomorrow, she came yesterday and was so exhausted, she lay in bed until lunchtime, afterwards, easily, and she said, Elsa, what has happened to your hair, so we laughed about that, and I think she is quite used to it, quite used now, she lives where we grew up, in Breitenberg, so she is used to almost anything now. She is so dear, I could not live without her, I promised her to bring her to the Bauhaus on Monday morning, to see us all, all us oddities, but she says that only I am enough, only I am oddity enough for her …’

The room fell silent, and Elsa too, last of all. Itten had come in, with his head slightly downwards, as if ducking a hit from a low lintel. He was wearing his purple silk robe with a red ruff about his neck. There was a gathering and a shuffling. Itten stood there. His presence commanded attention. He raised his arms to either side and closed his eyes. His chest swelled as he took a great breath in, and held it. The forty people in the room did the same, moving at an angle, not to get in a confusion of arms; they closed their eyes and breathed in, and held it in. For a second there was silence; outside in the street, the shout of two boys, something about the money one owed the other. It was the racket of two voices with no control over their breathing and no sense of the intimate and huge connection between the lungs and the world. Outside, a can of some sort was kicked against a wall, and a shout of complaint; the Mazdaznan breathed out, humming as they did so, expelling the world and its violence; a warm note filled the room, rose, fell, subsided into a satisfied breath in. Itten opened his huge wise eyes; his arms fell limply to his sides. ‘The word is spreading,’ he said. ‘Today we are three dozen. Next week we are fifty. We spread, like breath.’

And in the room of their house, Klee slowed, and his face rose a little, and the sad reflective little tune that came just before the end seemed to fill his features. There was an expression on Papa’s face you never saw at other times. The tune went its way; Mamma and Papa seemed separated by the music, diversely thinking their way through. And then they came together again; there was a little rush and a clatter of fury; and the first movement of the sonata was done. Felix sat on his hands. He knew not to applaud until the whole sonata was finished. Papa would set down his violin and smile in a brief way. But before that there was the slow movement and the joy of the tarantella. Felix could hardly bear the prospect of it.

‘I am so happy to have you here,’ Frau Scherbatsky said to Christian, as he was going upstairs. Her face was warm and beaming; underneath her blonde helmet of hair, she shone. ‘It is so good to have a young person in the house again. I do hope you will be happy here.’

‘I think I shall be, Frau Scherbatsky,’ Christian said. ‘I am very comfortable in my room – I feel very grateful.’

‘Oh, I am so pleased,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. In the drawing room, the men were discussing affairs of state; a conversation that had been an energetic exchange of views was turning into a manly argument. ‘You mustn’t –’ she said, lowering her voice and placing her hand on the forearm of Christian’s Norfolk jacket ‘– you mustn’t mind Herr Wolff too much. I know he seems very serious and angry about things.’

‘He seems …’ Christian thought. He prided himself on finding the right word, when it was required. ‘He seems very – decided.’

‘Very decided,’ Frau Scherbatsky said. ‘Yes, indeed. He is. But, please, I do hope you will find some patience with him. It has been so hard for so many people of our generation. You must have seen it in Berlin, but I know that young people can find it difficult to understand, to be patient. You see, Herr Vogt, it has been so difficult to realize what, all this time, has been working to destroy our lives. We were so naïve, all of us, and we only understood now that it is only other Germans whom we can really trust. You see, Herr Vogt,’ she went on confidingly, ‘we let the Jews go on living among us. We had no idea. They destroyed us, and humiliated us, and are now destroying our money. And Herr Wolff understands this. Does he not have a right to be angry? I would just ask you, please, Herr Vogt, you are an understanding, a kind person, I can see, just to be patient and to listen to Herr Wolff, even when he grows – how can I put it? – loud.’

Christian bowed; he had not expected Frau Scherbatsky to say any of this. The voices in the drawing room were, indeed, growing loud. He flushed, and turned, and with brisk steps went upstairs. There were Jews living underneath his father in Charlottenburg; every day his father greeted Frau Rosenthal with a raise of his hat and a smile; Arnold Rosenthal, the elder of the two boys, had been three years older than Christian, had served bravely in the war, had returned unscathed. He was not working against anyone. He had fought for the Kaiser. Christian bowed at the turn of the stairs again, as Frau Scherbatsky beamed, her eyes following him upstairs sentimentally, as she perhaps thought of one of her dead sons. Tomorrow, Christian thought, he would take steps to find somewhere else to live. The arrangements were that he would live here for three months. However, he would move tomorrow. He said this to himself, but he already knew he would not, not because he disagreed with something his landlady had said. He already despised himself for his own cowardice. He already knew that that was the easiest path for the mind to take.

15.

On Monday Christian went to the Bauhaus for the first time. In the evening he came home. He went upstairs in Frau Scherbatsky’s house, leaving his hat on the pale oak hatstand in the hall, greeting Herr Neddermeyer shortly. In his room, he took out the laid writing paper and his pen, sitting at the desk. He filled the pen with ink. He began to write. ‘Dearest Dolphus,’ he wrote. ‘I must write to you. Today, at 9.15, in the city of Weimar, I saw a girl whose name is Adele Winteregger. My life begins.’

BOOK 2

1.

There was an unusual group of people approaching the lounge from the other side of the glass wall and the door that opened into it. The waiting area by the gate was full, and had been for some time. The largely Sicilian crowd had been fanning themselves – the air-conditioning at the airport in Catania was proving inadequate, even in early June. They had been getting up to remonstrate with the employees of the airline company about the lack of information, the heat, the delay of the aircraft. Voices had been raised; hands had gestured; fury had been apparently entered upon before the Sicilian storm of complaint quickly blew itself out and the complainer went back to his seat with every air of contentment. The men above a certain age were in blue shirts and pale brown trousers; the women, some of whom were even in widows’ black, fanned themselves. The sexes sat apart. Now an unexpected and interesting group of people was approaching from the other side of the glass wall, and the attention of the lounge was drawn to it.

At the centre there was a tall, blond, distinguished-looking man with a large nose and a large-boned face. There was something donkey-like about his features and their big teeth; he looked Scandinavian, perhaps Danish. He wore a neatly pressed white short-sleeved shirt with a dark blue tie and a pair of crisp blue trousers; and his neat turn-out was a surprise, because he was blind. In one hand he held a white cane, folded up and, for the moment, unused. About him were six men. They were Sicilians, perhaps employees of the airport; dark, serious-looking and short. Two held him by either arm, guiding him briskly; another held a piece of cabin baggage, evidently the passenger’s; another, the youngest, walked behind him, giving him an occasional push, perhaps to show what he could do, given the chance. The two remaining walked in front of the blind man; the more distinguished, who seemed to be in charge of the whole operation, was talking to him as they went, the other occupied himself by walking alongside the chief as if ready to take notes. But that was not this last one’s only occupation. He held, it could be seen, the passenger’s passport and his boarding card.

The lounge watched, fascinated. The group came to the other side of the glass wall of the lounge. The blind man was handed his cabin luggage and, by the chief’s right-hand man, the passport and boarding card. His hand was shaken by all six men. They looked for guidance to the chief, who briskly shook down his jacket as if he had passed through detritus, and walked away. The lounge watched the blind man as he waved the folded-up white stick, and it went in a moment into its full length. He had been left by the group on the other side of the glass wall, about four metres from the open glass door. The blind Scandinavian waved in the direction of the wall, but it was solid. He waved to one side, then to the other. Like a blond insect, he went to his left, to his right, not finding the opening, patiently feeling, then less patiently, then tapping with rich fury, his head turning round and calling to people who were no longer there. The lounge watched with sincere interest. They had wanted to know what would happen if a blind man were deposited before a glass wall and told to find his way to the one door through it. Perhaps the guiding party had wondered this too – but, no, they had not waited to watch the consequences.

Duncan watched, too, but with less open amusement. His book, a novel by Andrew Holleran that he had read before, rested in his lap. He thought in a moment he would get up and ask the woman at the desk at the entrance to help the blind passenger through. At the moment she was sitting on her swivel stool, smoking, not paying any attention to that passenger or any other. Duncan was used to Sicilians and their cruelty, the way that dogs would be kicked and chained. In restaurants, he had seen parents pinching the noses of their small children when they refused good food, tipping their heads back forcibly and ladling the milk pudding down their little throats and over their faces. He had watched a carabiniero, a lucky pick-up, sit naked at his kitchen table at the little borrowed flat off the via Merulana, take a breakfast knife to the torso of a wasp that was absorbedly feeding on the edge of a dish of plum jam, and sever the wasp in two. He no longer felt the need to intervene when the savagery or inattention of Sicilians resulted in anyone being hurt. The only time he had intervened, after eight months on the island, was when two Sicilians new to each other started discussing, in his company, the tragedy of Sicily and its national character. That he couldn’t bear: it ruined an evening like a solitary drunkard in company. So he watched the battering of the blind Scandinavian on the other side of the glass wall with mild interest, like everyone else. In time he would discover where the door was.

2.

The man next to Duncan asked him if he had a light, but Duncan did not; he asked if he was French, returning home, but Duncan explained that he was English, going back to London. Why not go back directly? The man was handsome, one of those good-looking Sicilians who peak, to the world’s gratitude, at twenty-two, then lose their hair, grow papery and dry; he was in his middle twenties, and his hair was beautifully thinning. There are flights, directly, now, to London from Catania. Was the gentleman not advised properly?

‘Duncan,’ Duncan introduced himself. ‘Yes, I know about the direct flights, but I had to return at very short notice. This was the only flight today that could take me. I needed to get back as soon as possible.’

‘A holiday?’ the gentleman asked. But Duncan had seen that while he had been speaking the man’s eyes had gone towards the daughter of a large family, a girl in a short skirt and a tight blouse, and had run up and down her appreciatively. He was just passing the time in a neutral way in talking to Duncan – not that Duncan knew what could result from their conversation. Duncan simply said that, no, he had been working here. He had been teaching English as a foreign language to schoolchildren, and had been living in a small flat in the centre of the city. He liked Catania, yes, he did, and the food, and he had seen the fish market and had gone to Taormina to see the beauties of the island, which, yes, was the most beautiful place in the world, and he agreed that Sicilians were really very lucky to have been born in such a place, even given all its terrible troubles, which made you think you would have been better being born in the shit with no arms and no legs, sometimes, but then the sun shone and the sea was beautiful, and the women, the women of Sicily.

Duncan had been in Sicily for eleven months. He could keep this sort of conversation going with only one ear on its content. He had heard its contradictions, its flow and counterflow, many times. The other, more active, ear was busy keeping an interested and acute ear attending to the difficulties of Italian as he went. Was that an idiom the man had used – in the shit with no arms and no legs? Or just his own way of talking? He did not know.

He had come to Sicily for no reason in particular – or no good reason, not one that you could tell anyone of any seriousness. He had been working for the government in London. His job had been in an unemployment office in Kilburn, interviewing the out-of-work and granting them the dole. There were mothers, hard cases, alcoholics, but also students and people who did not really need anything. Duncan did not engage with them, in the shabby office behind the solid stone walls. He knew that, if he thought about it, he would probably take the short step that existed between his state, as a poor employee of the government, and the most desperate of the subjects who came through the door.

One day he could no longer stand it. It was a hot day in early summer and he had, as it were, fooled himself into coming to work. All the way from his second-floor flat in Brondesbury, he had told himself what a beautiful morning it was, how lucky he was to be walking in the sun, what a joy London could be on these days. He admired the boys in their shorts and vests; they might have been on their way to the Heath or to an open-air swimming pool, and Duncan might have been going with them. He had performed this mental trick before, pushing what he did not want to think about to the back of his mind – his father, Christmas, what Mr Mansfield his supervisor had said to him the day before. He had performed the trick with his job as he did now, putting it quite out of his mind and letting his feet trace a route without thinking what was at the end of it. In his bag was a Tupperware box of lunch, in his pocket a Baldwin novel: he might have been saving the two for a read under a tree with a picnic, not an hour in the staff room at lunchtime. It was only when he was in the street of the unemployment office, almost before the staff door, which was to the side of the locked public door, that he remembered he was not going to the Heath, not going to swim, not going to take his clothes off with the boys of London today. He was going to sit in his neat white short-sleeved shirt and tie with his suit trousers on, and listen to the failures of society asking for more money.

‘Did you see that programme on last night?’ Marion was saying, as she puffed up behind him. She was a colleague at the same level as him. She had been there longer – it had been a mysterious amount longer for some time – and had a tendency to explain ordinary things to him, where the coffee money was kept, where the better sandwich shop was at lunchtime, how it was important to stay calm and not raise your voice even when they deserved killing, really. He had in the end discovered that she had started working there three months and two weeks before him. Some still older hands probably regarded the pair of them as having the same sort of newness. He could see it happening when, as time passed, still newer colleagues, processors and analysts and form-fillers, arrived in batches.

‘I don’t think I did,’ Duncan said. ‘I was catching up with some ironing I should have done at the weekend. Terrible, really.’ He held the door open for her.

‘Oh, it was incredible,’ Marion said, coming in and removing her headscarf. Her hair stuck to her scalp. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It was a programme about nudists, all over the world. All of them, all on holiday, like that, like the day they were born. Hello, Frank.’

On the stone steps just inside the unemployment office, Duncan made up his mind without intending to. The steps were just the same as they had been at his grammar school. They spoke institution. He was smiling and trying to show an interest in a forty-year-old woman watching a television documentary about nudists and saying hello politely to a man with a scruffy beard who commuted every day from St Albans. The man looked at him in return with painful disapproval, hardly greeting him. The man’s name he had always believed to be Fred and perhaps he really was called Fred, since Marion never listened to anything she was told. Duncan had been the subject of institutions before, and now, as he easily absorbed himself into the flow of the institution before the locked doors opened, he felt himself to be the easy agent of those institutions. And that would not do. It was as if he had become a schoolteacher, but without the power of doing good in the world. He would spend a glorious sunny day inside, looking at high windows through which the light fell, looking down at men who smelt, at women who had slept in their clothes, at people begging for money just to feed their kiddies because they were desperate and they didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. There would be students coming in soon, pretending to be interested in getting a job between their summer and their autumn terms. There would be people who had been sacked and people who could not work through injury not their fault. He would sit in the sad, echoing hall on the other side of his desk. He thought of all those people and he really did not give a shit about any of them.

Going into his office he realized that there was no reason why he should not resign from his job and go to work in Sicily. Teaching English. It could hardly be any worse than here. And why Sicily? It was cheap, Duncan knew; it spoke Italian, which he had a smattering of. But mostly Duncan thought of Sicily because he had, the week before, picked up an off-duty Sicilian waiter in a gay pub on St Martin’s Lane, and the island, now, for him, was a land full of lemons, oranges and waiters called Salvatore. By half past ten he had told an overweight woman looking for employment in the legal field that she was wasting everyone’s time and should aim much, much lower. By eleven he had gone to see his supervisor, and had told him that he wanted to resign at the end of the month. By six thirty he was in the same gay pub on St Martin’s Lane – he had phoned up everyone he could think of on their office numbers – and he was telling a thrilled group of twenty men with moustaches, almost all with checked shirts on, just what he had done and where he was going to go.

‘You’ve got some nerve,’ Paul said, coming back from the bar with a half of lager and lime and a pint of bitter for Duncan. ‘I wish I had your nerve, even a bit of your nerve.’

‘If you only had a bit of his nerve,’ Simon said, ‘that’d only get you to the Isle of Wight, not much of a life-change, that, I don’t think.’

‘Cheek!’ Paul said.

Even Andrew had come, though it was his night for his men’s group, and he never liked to miss that. Or was it revolutionary politics? ‘I’ll come to that some time,’ Paul said. ‘Sounds like a right laugh.’ Anyway, it was a fantastic turn-out, and they were still there at closing time, most of them. Why Sicily? Why not.

3.

Sicily had spoken to him on the fourth day, exactly as he had known it would. He had gone to see his father in his falling-down old house in Harrow the day before he left, to tell him – after he had left the unemployment job – that he was going to the other side of Europe. He had dreaded it, but it wasn’t, in the end, so bad. His father was not what he had been. His shoulders had narrowed, and surely he had grown shorter. His hair fell in a solid lump away from his forehead, not washed for some days. As always, he had immediately started talking about himself. ‘When I started work in the insurance company,’ he said, ‘there was a man there who was a great friend of mine. He admired me immensely. “I just don’t know how you manage to get through all the work you do,” he used to say. When I managed to get out of going into the army, he was drafted in. And he –’ his father reached for a handkerchief, sitting in a damp crumple on the walnut card table by the side of his habitual mustardy winged armchair ‘– he went into Sicily. The first wave of the liberation. He never spoke about it to me when he came back. By then I had made myself useful in all sorts of ways, and I was his superior by a good distance when he returned to his post, but I always let him call me by my Christian name, if no one was around, and I think he appreciated that a great deal. My father always said to me – your grandfather – he said, “Treat your subordinates with courtesy, and they will treat you with respect.” And I believe I’ve always done precisely that.’

Duncan waited to hear something about Sicily. There in his father’s mind, there was an irritating fly, buzzing about, a tiny fly, not visible, but audible, and introduced into the normal furniture and spaces of the mind without warning. The name of the fly – what was it? It was Sicily. But in time it proved to go quite harmoniously with all the furniture that was already in the room, and could really safely be ignored.

‘Your mother always wanted to go to Italy,’ his father continued. He stroked the arm of the chair; it was bald from this repeated gesture, carried out all the time, all day long, while his father gave the impression of thought. ‘Not Sicily, I don’t think. She wanted to go to Rome, and Florence, and Venice, I believe. But I looked into it, and I found that Rome was a dangerous sort of place. It would not suit us. The food, too, would not suit. The best food in Europe is the food in southern Germany, where the salads are clean and the vegetables are well prepared. I explained all this to your mother. It was only a whim on her part. In the end I decided to surprise her, and we took a holiday on Lake Como, and she enjoyed it a lot. She said, “Samuel, I thought I wanted to go to Rome, but this was a lovely idea of yours, and I don’t think anything in Italy could improve on this.” All the Italians go for their holidays to Lake Como, you know. You don’t catch Italians going to Rome for their summer holidays. That was really a clever wheeze of mine, I always think.’

On the way out of the house, Duncan noticed the long greasy mark, like the drag of a mop, about five feet up along the old floral wallpaper in the hall. He had noticed it before. ‘Let me come with you,’ his father said, walking in a tired old way out of the sitting room at the back of the house. Duncan said there was no need, and with surprise his father agreed there was no need – he wasn’t proposing to walk him to the bus stop. ‘I’ve got to go out to post a letter,’ his father said. ‘To your aunt Rachel. She will keep on writing. “Dear Samuel …”’ Duncan’s father made a derisory imitation of a woman speaking his name, as if it were an obviously stupid thing to write, even at the beginning of a letter. He refused an offer of Duncan’s to post his own letter for him. Then he leant his head against the wall, just above the shoe-rack in the hall, and took his slippers off before putting on his brown shoes, much mended and soft with much polishing. He moved his head along the wall as he did so, just there, where the dark streak of grease had formed.

‘And you’ll be off shortly, I expect,’ his father said. ‘I suppose all the duties of dropping in and seeing how I am are going to fall on your sister now. If you had come yesterday, I could have put all this news in my letter to your aunt Rachel, but I’m not going to waste a good envelope now it’s sealed.’

‘And the stamp,’ Duncan said, opening the door with the stained-glass window. The glass porch at the front was hot and dry; in it, a rubber plant was yellow, dying, withered. That was not the place for it, but his father had given up watering it.

‘Oh, you can detach and reattach stamps to a new envelope,’ his father said, putting his raincoat on and feeling in his pocket for his keys. ‘Sometimes a letter arrives and the lazy so-and-sos at the GPO haven’t franked it. No, I wouldn’t trust you to remember to post my letter, and then I’ve got your aunt Rachel to deal with.’

It was only four days after arriving in Sicily that Duncan woke up not in the cheap hotel in the centre he had settled in but in a bright bedroom at the top of an old palazzo, and just remembering the exchange of glances, the small nod, the turn and the falling into simple conversation on the street the night before. He just remembered the sequence that had followed the delicious greasy almondy dinner, the fish swimming in oil and eaten at dangerous room temperature, and the way the two of them had piled up the four flights of stairs with their hands and mouths all over each other in the hot stairwell; just remembered the man’s face as he turned his head and found the warm tangle of unkempt black hair and the grand Arab nose in the dark sleeping face. His own arm, just flushed with red after wandering around the blazing city for three days, made a sharp contrast against the man’s conker-coloured chest. He had heard that there were blond people in the city, descendants of what, Normans? Englishmen? His father’s colleague and subordinate? But they were not like him, and he saw his desirability as something exotic. That was the day Sicily spoke to him, and it spoke when the man, whose name was Salvatore, as always, left him in bed and returned with what he called breakfast, a brioche each, with chocolate granita in one, lemon granita in the other. There was a shop just underneath. ‘It’s my breakfast every day, beginning May, till September,’ this Salvatore said. The hot brioche and the stab of ice made Duncan’s face ache; the pain of eating iced food too fast spread across his sinuses, and Salvatore rubbed his face with his big hands. Later, when they were done, they were both showered, the dog, a noble Irish setter called Pippo, had been admitted to the bedroom and praised, and it was time for Duncan to go, he commented on Salvatore getting dressed. ‘You don’t wear underwear,’ he said.

‘Again, from May to September, never,’ Salvatore said, spraying his bare chest with cologne. ‘Do you not know? No Sicilian will wear underwear for five months. It is just too hot. Oh, the day in September when you have to put on your underwear!’

‘But the day in May when you are allowed to take it off?’ Duncan said. Salvatore laughed and laughed, warmly, ecstatically, half with Duncan and half in exact memory of that annual private festival. And Sicily had spoken to Duncan. He never saw that particular Salvatore again, not even in passing in the street. He welcomed the introduction of a new rule of Italian life. Most of the rules seemed to be concerned with food, of not having cappuccino after eleven in the morning, of never eating cheese with fish, of not combining a fish course with a meat course – this was theoretical to Duncan, who had to find some means of earning a living within, he calculated, three weeks. Later he discovered rules about behaviour, of what to call people, of who you should stand up in front of. Those were all public rules, which strangers on buses would share with you.

But the rules of clothes, the rule that said you should not wear short socks or a tie with a suit, that you should not wear a pair of shorts in town, and that on the first of May all Sicilian men left their underwear off until autumn, those were rules that were passed on exactly like this one, first thing in the morning in a strange bedroom or, once Duncan had found the loan of a pretty little flat off the via Merulana from another teacher, all wooden furniture and cool dark red tiles underfoot, in his own bedroom. Duncan would walk down the street and see the men passing, and think not only, They’re none of them wearing any underwear, but It’s the rule that they don’t have to wear underwear, and they all – all of them – they all know that none of the rest of them are. Not one of them. Sicily had spoken to him, on the fourth day.

4.

‘Yes,’ he said to the man in the departure lounge at Catania airport. ‘Yes, I like Sicily a lot. I’ve got to go back to England now, though. My father’s dying.’

The man made a formal gesture of regret, and the conversation was over. On the other side of the glass wall, the blind man battered on and on, his face turning from side to side, as he called for help.

5.

The house in Harrow had once looked like its neighbours – a substantial Edwardian house, with gables and a bay window at the front. But it had been added to, and now was pointed out, and people shook their heads over it. A garage had come first, in the 1930s, a square box with a wooden double door, once painted blue; an old red Volvo, seventeen years old, hardly used, wallowed in there. But Duncan’s father had done the rest. A sun terrace at the back, pushing the house further out into the garden; a square block of a kitchen at the side, in a sort of black tarpaulin material covering brickwork, the sort of material that covered flat roofs in this part of the world; a glass porch before the old Edwardian front door, now with a dead houseplant in it and a pile of unopened letters on the windowshelf. There was a square attic conversion at the top, a bald cube in peeling white planks and a square empty window cutting out of the dormer roof; there was another extension, which had been made on the first floor, resting on top of the garage. The original house was in there somewhere, impossible to imagine among all those black geometries, all that contrived asymmetry for the sake of an extra room here and there.

Samuel, Duncan’s father, had kept the builders of Harrow busy, and the property lawyers, too: he meticulously applied for planning permission for every small change and every extension, resubmitting when he was turned down, discussing details every which way with the builder – he would not employ an architect when, as he said, the builder had to build it, and he knew very well what was needed. It was Duncan’s memory of his childhood, to be banished with his sister Domenica to a spare room or other while a part of the house was rendered uninhabitable for months – the dining room with no wall, the kitchen huddled and stripped without cupboards, the builders sitting on the ground smoking where the sun lounge was going to go. There were only the four of them; their parents were in the future going to need less space, not more. In the end, he concluded that it was his father’s hobby, like the law suit his father brought with gusto against a builder when one extension, to the dining room, proved to let in rain in torrents.

In the streets of Harrow, people pointed out the house as a disaster, as something extended and pulled beyond what anything could reasonably take. They pointed it out now. Upstairs, the curtains were drawn in the master bedroom, where Samuel lay dying. He was sleeping at the moment. A nurse had sat with him overnight, now that he was in no position to argue with the expense, or with the fact that she was Trinidadian. She was speaking in low tones to the day nurse, who had just arrived in her little beige Morris Marina and was taking off her thin summer coat in the hall.

In the summer terrace, the glass-covered extension at the back of the house, three women sat. They were Duncan’s aunts, his father’s three sisters. They had been there in pairs, or all three of them, for days. They were Aunt Rachel, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Rebecca. A grandfather had named them after Biblical figures, not foreseeing that, for ever afterwards in north London, people would ask them and their brother Samuel which synagogue they went to, creating a hostility they saw no reason to diminish. Samuel’s children were called Duncan and Domenica; the children of Ruth and Rebecca were called Amanda, Raymond, Richard and Caroline. Normal names, Ruth would say, meaning what she meant by that. Rachel had no children, but if she had, she would have named them away from the scriptures too; she had a black parrot, however, named Ezekiah. Ruth and Rachel were already in black, as if preparing for the day of their brother’s death; Rebecca, a plump woman, was wearing a practical tweed, her hat still on. They were talking about their niece and nephew.

‘She’s no use,’ Rachel said. ‘No use at all. I phoned her and she hardly seemed to understand what I was asking of her. I don’t think we’ll see her until the weekend.’

‘Oh, but surely,’ Rebecca said.

‘She simply doesn’t care,’ Ruth said.

‘Possibly,’ Rachel said. ‘I think she’s a little bit simple, sometimes. I don’t think she understands what’s going on. She said to me that she’d wait until her brother got here.’

‘Her brother!’ Rebecca said.

‘I don’t know what she was thinking of,’ Rachel said. ‘Waiting for her brother.’

‘She loves her brother,’ Ruth said. ‘At least, everyone always said so. Even when she was a little girl, she would follow him round, holding something to give him, a toy or something of that nature. Her little brother …’

‘Oh, what people do, what people justify, in the name of love,’ Rebecca said. ‘“I love him.” Fancy. So she’s waiting until her brother gets here, is she?’

‘She’ll be waiting for a good long time, then,’ Rachel said. ‘Is it me or is it hot in here?’

‘No,’ Ruth said. ‘It is hot, it isn’t you. The brother, too – at least Samuel saw some sense over that one. Giving everything up and going to be a hippie in Italy. There’s no sign of that one, is there?’

‘I am so glad Samuel listened to what we suggested,’ Rebecca said. ‘The estate couldn’t just go to someone like that. He’d just – yes, thank you so much, Nurse Macdowell, thank you.’

‘Are you coming tonight, Nurse Macdowell?’ Rachel asked, but Nurse Macdowell was not. ‘Do have a cup of coffee – you know where the kitchen is. No?’

‘Such a Scottish name, Macdowell,’ Ruth said when the nurse was gone. ‘You wonder where they acquire them from. Coloured people.’

‘The owners of plantations,’ Rebecca said. ‘That would have been the Scottish one, and they pass their name on to the slaves, passed, rather, I should say. They would have thought it quite an honour to be named after the owner of the plantation, all over the Caribbean.’

Rachel and Ruth exchanged a glance: their big sister Rebecca had always been the swot, held up to the twins, three years behind in school, as a scholastic ideal when in reality she had been willing only to put her own ideas of the truth forward in firm ways. And now she was seventy-four, and stout, and wearing a good tweed with a summer umbrella underneath the chair, because you really never knew, and still putting forward her ideas of the truth in a manner that required no contribution or disagreement.

‘It’ll be a shock to the son,’ Ruth said. ‘He’ll be under the impression that it’s going to be him, him and the sister, who are going to get everything.’

‘This beautiful house,’ Rachel said. ‘They would only sell it and pocket the money. And poor Samuel’s savings and shares, too. Neither of them married, or any sign of it.’

There was a shriek from the end of the room. Rachel had brought her black parrot, Ezekiah, promising he would be no trouble but he liked to have some company around him. The room smelt faintly of bird, and he had a look in his eye, a wizened, assessing, timing look; Ruth and Rebecca went nowhere near him, and he sat on the backs of what chairs he chose, his claws like wrinkled grey tools.

‘The son – he was always a nasty little boy,’ Rebecca said. ‘I never thought much of him. Crying into his mother’s skirts, never wanting to come out and say hello. Scared of everything. Just the same now, I imagine.’

‘I found his address in Italy,’ Rachel said. ‘He had written to Samuel to tell him where he lived. I sent the telegram. More than that I cannot do. You know what he is?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ruth said. ‘One of them.’

‘One of them?’ Rebecca said. ‘Oh, not a marrying type. How dreadful for Samuel. I expect he will turn up once poor Samuel has died, wanting to spend Samuel’s money on cushions, lipstick and a sex-change operation.’ Rebecca made a gesture; a feminine gesture but not a feminine gesture a woman would make, rather the extension and admiration of her finger-ends, which were a gardener’s hands, trimmed and painted with red polish. She made a curdling moue, a pout; she meant not to be a woman or to suggest one, but to show what Duncan might be like. ‘Lop it off, Doctor,’ she said.

‘But there isn’t going to be as much money as he thought,’ Rachel said, smiling sadly and shaking her head. ‘Samuel handled that all very well. I am so glad we explained everything to him so well while he was still not in too much pain.’

‘It was such a good idea, getting one of those easy forms from Smith’s,’ Ruth said. ‘It saved all the bother and expense of going to the solicitor. That was a very good idea of yours, Rachel.’

‘But there is a virtue in having a family solicitor for years,’ Rebecca said. ‘I always said so. And Mr Brooke is such a friend.’

‘Samuel saw the point, didn’t he?’ Ruth said. ‘We didn’t talk him into anything, nobody would be able to say that. I am so glad that Rachel got the will, and did everything, and got it witnessed, and took it to Mr Brooke for safekeeping. That was very good of Rachel.’

‘That was very good of Rachel,’ Rebecca said. ‘Of course we didn’t talk Samuel into anything. If the son got hold of the house, he would only sell it immediately and pocket the money. We wouldn’t have any say in the matter at all. He would probably sell it to the Jews. They buy everything for cash. They don’t trust the banks.’

‘They must trust some of the banks,’ Ruth said. She beat the floor with her walking stick emphatically. ‘They run a lot of them – behind the scenes.’

‘That’s true,’ Rebecca said thoughtfully. ‘If it’s not the Jews in Harrow, it’s the Pakistanis. Over the road, the house that used to be lived in by the Harrises, when we were girls, that’s owned by a family called – well, I don’t know, but they’re a Pakistani family and they fill it to the rafters. Soon there won’t be an English family left in the avenue at all.’

Out in the garden, on the low brick wall that surrounded the knee-high flowerbeds on the terrace, a blackbird sat; it cocked its head, and sang, and inspected the three women inside. Or perhaps it was just drawn to the reflection of sun on the large windows. They flashed in the morning light. Rachel was looking out of the window. She was not looking at her sisters at all, even as they praised her sense.

‘Poor Samuel,’ Ruth said. ‘There was really nothing more that any of us could have done in that direction. We wrote to the son, and we wrote to the daughter. Where are they? Thank goodness he doesn’t know what’s going on around him any more.’

6.

Upstairs, in a darkened room, Samuel found himself. He felt odd, and then he remembered that he was ill. The curtains were drawn, but it must be time to get up. Behind the curtains there was a hot day already. He could feel it. The curtains were brown but behind them the sun was bright and making everything red. Yesterday he had been able to jump out of bed and draw the curtains across and the rabbits had been eating in the garden, a dozen of them. He had wanted to go and get his gun and pick them off from the window, but Nanny had not let him. ‘Not on a Sunday,’ Nanny had said. That had been yesterday. But then it seemed to him that that had been a very long time ago, when he was a small boy, and then it seemed to him that it had not happened at all.

The pillow and the sheet were creased and uncomfortable, and he could smell something – a sour smell, physical and not his own smell. But perhaps it was his own smell now. The temperature seemed wrong. His feet and legs were cold, but his head sweltered. No – his feet and legs were not cold, but they were numb. Samuel had always prided himself on getting the exact right word, and the word for his lower body was ‘numb’, not ‘cold’. And yet the sensations in his head and neck were more alert than they should have been, as well as hotter. There was a great heat spreading from the seams and rucks of the cotton sheets into his face, and he turned his head restlessly. There was a woman in his bedroom. There had not been a woman sitting in his bedroom since – he struggled for her name and could not remember the name of the wife he had been married to for decades – since Helen died. For a moment he thought it must be Death. Her face was covered by shade from where he looked. In her lap, a strip of light fell on a book. She read on, and in a moment passed her hand over her hair in an unconscious grooming gesture. Her hair was a vivid ginger, and neatly tied back. It needed no grooming, but the hand passed over it in reassurance. When Samuel saw the hair of the woman, he said to himself immediately ‘At least it’s not the coloured one,’ and then he remembered immediately. She was one of his nurses, the daytime one, who was sitting with him and doing things for him. If she was here, it was not early morning, when the coloured one sat with him. It would be the afternoon. He had slept most of the day, then. He congratulated himself on the continuing liveliness of his own mind, when he concentrated. Her name would come to him, but it was not important.

‘Nurse,’ he tried to say, and then again, ‘Nurse.’ The nurse looked up from her book. ‘The sheets need changing,’ he said.

‘What’s that, Mr Flannery?’ she said, rising and placing her hand, unsmilingly, on his forehead. He tried again.

The nurse smoothed them out underneath him, and promised to change them when her other colleague arrived for the evening. ‘I’m not sure who that’s going to be, to tell you the truth, Mr Flannery, but I know it’s going to be just an hour or two, if you can put up with it a little longer.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Samuel said meekly. ‘They’re really twisted and damp and I feel hot. Can I change my pyjamas?’

‘That I can do,’ the nurse said. ‘I’ll just clean you up and pop you in the chair, Mr Flannery, and then I’ll change your sheets as well, straight away. How do you feel in general?’

‘What was that shriek, that scream? I heard a woman screaming.’

‘It was your sister’s parrot,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s downstairs. He shouldn’t be here at all, in point of fact. It has a strange name, that bird.’

‘I remember,’ Samuel said, and was about to say the bird’s name, but it had gone, and there had been a woman shrieking about it, screaming, really, not ten feet from his ear. He hope that terrible screaming would stop soon. ‘I feel terrible. Terrible,’ Samuel said. ‘I don’t think I can sit in a chair. It all hurts so much and I don’t know where I am sometimes.’ Then a thought came to him. He remembered very well where he was and what was happening. ‘You could ask one of my sisters to help to change. They’re here. They’re the three women sitting in the kitchen. They used to be girls but they’re old women now. You know the ones I mean.’

‘Oh, Samuel,’ the nurse said. ‘Mr Flannery, I mean. You are a card.’

He was puzzling over what she meant, but then he felt quite suddenly very sleepy and he closed his eyes and when he opened them again it was night-time and there was a different nurse.

‘Would you,’ he said, ‘would you …’ but he couldn’t get any further.

‘Hello, Mr Flannery,’ the other nurse said. She stood up in a quiet but decisive way. She was the one called Balls. Nurse Balls. He remembered that one. Not all of the nurses remembered they weren’t to call him Samuel, but she did. She didn’t have ginger hair. It was hard to say what colour her hair was.

‘Would you,’ he said, then stopped again, puzzled. He was not quite sure what he wanted to ask for.

‘Water?’ the nurse said. ‘Is it water that you’re saying, Mr Flannery?’

And then Samuel smiled – did he smile on his face or was he just smiling inside? He was probably smiling inside. His face hurt so much. But he smiled because he had said, ‘Would you,’ and she had thought he said, ‘Water’; perhaps there was something wrong with her ears or perhaps he had spoken indistinctly, having just woken up, and in fact he had forgotten what he was going to ask for but it was right: it had been water he had wanted. That was strange. He tried to say, ‘Would you bring me some water?’ but it grew complicated, his tongue in his mouth. It seemed to have grown and grown. He shut his eyes, and he found himself in the same dream of illness he had always had, since he was a small boy, whenever he had fever. He was floating in a colourless space with no features, just a grid of small dots, when the small dots began to swell and grow inside. One of them had got inside his mouth, and it grew and grew, swelling until it forced his mouth open, and inside his mouth there was nothing but a great hard stone. He opened his eyes. The taste of the stone was still there. He did not know whether he had slept or not. The woman who was standing there, he did not know her. She was wearing a coat, or a white dress, or a uniform of some sort; it rucked up tightly around her thighs and bottom. What was she doing there? It was his room and he was being ill in it. She was not his wife and she was not his sister, any of them. Then he remembered he had a daughter but she was not her either.

‘Would you like some water, Mr Flannery?’ the woman said, and then he remembered what she was. She was a nurse. He nodded and she went over to the dresser where a glass jug stood covered with a plate. She removed it and poured water into one of the large tumblers from downstairs. It was really a whisky tumbler, engraved, but he took it and drank from it. I’ll drink whisky again, he thought, but only when I feel a good deal better.

‘Where is Helen?’ he said, passing the glass back. ‘I want to see Helen.’

‘I think she’s downstairs,’ the nurse said. ‘That’s one of the ladies downstairs, is she not?’

Samuel nodded. ‘And I want to see Duncan,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where Duncan can be. I haven’t seen him since he was – oh, fifteen or sixteen. He ran away to sea, you know. He ended up in Italy. He’s there to this very day. I want to see him now, because I don’t want to die without seeing him. Am I dying? I know I am.’ And his eyes filled with tears. He pitied himself so much for what he was having to go through. Nobody else had ever gone through this. He had asked a question, but the nurse was moving around the room, settling things and returning the water jug to its place. She had not heard any of what he had said. It was typical. But then he thought that perhaps he had not said any of that out loud. ‘I don’t want to have to go to Sicily,’ he said.

But this he had said out loud, because the nurse said, ‘If you don’t want to, you don’t have to, Mr Flannery,’ quite comfortably.

‘Is Duncan coming?’ Samuel tried to ask. His tongue fell back in his mouth. His head turned to one side. It seemed all so normal.

7.

There were pubs in Camden, which would never be touched, and streets, too. The Queen’s Arms in Goldborne Street sat at the corner of two converging Victorian terraces, its corner rounded and sailing out into the junction like an ocean liner. It had recently been painted in dark green and white. The landlord had decided to place only one hanging basket at the front, rather than the usual seven or eight of London landlords – Tarquin thought it was a waste and a demand on labour. He did not discover until too late that it is as much a waste and a demand on anyone’s time to have to water one hanging basket daily during the summer as it is to water a dozen. The Queen’s Arms was one of those pubs that must have been constructed in anticipation of a great crowd of drinkers. Its downstairs rooms, the saloon and the snug, were both gigantic under low ceilings of rosettes and plaster ornamentation. But the crowds that would have filled it never arrived. Perhaps it was in an awkward position, tucked away between residential streets. Perhaps the adventurous young middle-class people who were the only people who bought houses in these two or three streets were not great pub-goers, or not Tarquin’s sort of pub-goers. There were generally a few groups, perhaps only three or four, of slow old drinkers scattered around the place, not making much money for Tarquin. He had refused all the stratagems of other pubs in the neighbourhood; there were no cabaret nights with singers at microphones at the Queen’s Arms, and he would not stoop to strippers at lunchtime like the Dog and Crown – that would scare away his loyal old Regent’s Park ladies, who dropped in twice a week for their Dubonnets.

The pub, inside, had a curious smell, more like a laundry than a public house. No one who entered would be able to tell where it came from. Tarquin sometimes caught his own expression in the mirror, superior and unenthusiastic, when a customer came in, or observed Nora’s way, when a customer was trying to attract attention with a pound note, of lowering her eyes and sorting out the drying cloths rather than attend to him straight away. He tried to remember why it was that he and Nora had thought, ten years before, that running a pub was a good business proposition for them, or why the brewery had gone along with them, either.

The one thing about the pub that was a success and had some kind of use was the upper room. It must have been some kind of club room when the pub was built, and still had a giant dining table there and an assorted mismatch of chairs, dining chairs with yellow velvet seats as well as swivelling captain’s chairs, more recent in manufacture, and odd painted kitchen chairs. There were hunting scenes on the walls, and a tired, torn wallpaper with floral relief, which he must ask Tom to get round to replacing one of these days. (Tom was their son, recently left home; he had gone into the painting and decorating trade, which kept him busy.) Five years ago, a man, a student-type in a neckerchief, with long hair and purple bags, had come into the pub just before the afternoon closing and asked if they had rooms that they hired out for meetings. Tarquin had shown him the upper room, then piled high with lumber and old broken things, and had said it could be cleared out easily if this was going to be a regular thing. It was – Jones and his group of revolutionaries met every Wednesday night, paid five pounds for the privilege and managed to sink a few drinks downstairs once their meeting was over. The revolution didn’t come, during which Tarquin and Nora, Nora observed sardonically, would probably have been strung up as bloodsuckers by Jones’s group. Instead, Jones’s group kept coming, every Wednesday night, the same eight or nine of them, give or take a few.

The word spread. These days, there were four weekly groups and three that met once a fortnight or once a month, all shelling out eight pounds each, now that the costs had gone up so much, as regular and uncomplaining as clockwork. Nora thought they should raise the cost of hire again, but Tarquin thought they’d jib at ten pounds. ‘They’ll pay up,’ Nora said. ‘They always feel more passionately about revolution when there’s a Tory government. They don’t like her, you see. They talk about women’s rights, but they don’t like it when there’s a woman in charge.’

He didn’t really know what they were all up to. They were all lefties, he supposed, but you got that, living in Camden Town, these days. The biggest one was CND – he knew what they were, all right. It was so popular; the group that met here was only the West Camden division, and still forty people came every week. They brought their own film projector, quite often, and liked to sit in darkness, watching old films about nuclear war. It took all sorts to make a world. There was one that might be something to do with vivisection or vegetarians, judging by their strange shoes. But they paid their eight pounds like anyone else. ‘I draw the line only at nudists,’ Tarquin said sagely to his son, Tom, who shook his head. Tom had voted for Mrs Thatcher in May.

Tonight was one of the fortnightly ones. They were all men, coming in ones and the occasional pair, but not talking loudly or, most of them, even greeting Tarquin. They just ducked their heads and moved through the quiet pub as quickly as possible. They wore, most of them, checked lumberjack shirts and denim trousers or, until the weather really hotted up, leather trousers; one or two, now that it had hotted up, some bright-coloured shorts, like the ones the teenagers wore, though these daft Herberts were verging on middle age. ‘I know what they are,’ Nora had said tonight, but Tarquin didn’t respond. He didn’t care, so long as they were just talking upstairs. One of the first to arrive had asked if he could pin up a sign, on the brown-painted doorframe by the side of the bar, directing ‘anyone new,’ he said hopefully. On it, now, pinned neatly with two drawing pins was a piece of paper reading ‘CHE meeting – this way!’ There was another on the door of the pub outside – he hoped that wouldn’t lead to trouble, he said to the main one. But he didn’t think it would. For whatever reason, Tarquin thought that they weren’t a revolutionary group calling for executions in the streets. Whatever CHE meant. It was the exclamation mark, or perhaps the heart underneath, or perhaps just because the notice had been written by the daft Herberts in purple felt-tip pen.

8.

They had hardly started when the door to the upper room was opened abruptly. There was an unfamiliar face, a big bearded fellow and a slim girl with limp blonde hair behind him. ‘Is this the Central and South American group?’ he said. ‘I was told it met on Fridays.’

‘It might well do,’ Christopher said, turning round impatiently. ‘This isn’t it. We’re nothing to do with Central or South America.’

‘I saw your sign,’ the man said. ‘So they meet on Fridays still? We want to come to that.’

‘I’ve no idea when they meet,’ Christopher said. ‘It might well be Friday. But it’s not today. We’re here today and we’ve got nothing to do with Central or South America.’

The man and his girl withdrew; she had been holding a bottle of some kind of clear spirits, only two-thirds full. She waved it in obscure greeting, or farewell, walking backwards down the stairs.

‘Do you think they’d been drinking that in the street, out of the bottle?’ Nat said, when they had gone.

‘Oh, no,’ Alan said. ‘They’re very strait-laced, those revolutionary types. They look scary, but they’re like pussycats, really. They’ll have brought that from home, or from their mum and dad’s, probably. They won’t be drinking out of a bottle in the street. You know, that’s not the first time that’s happened.’

‘What, the confusion with the South American struggle?’ Andrew said. Andrew was the most revolutionary of them or, really, the only one.

‘It’s being called CHE that does it,’ Nat said. ‘They think it’s something to do with that man they all like so much, the one with the beard and the gaze upwards, you know, Che Guevara. That’s the third time we’ve had that. We should really spell out what we are on the poster, write Campaign for Homosexual Equality, then they wouldn’t come upstairs by mistake.’

‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t mind them coming upstairs. One was quite nice. I was sorry to see him go, to be honest. That one I wasn’t so bothered about.’

‘People talk about anal sex as though it’s the be-all and end-all of gay identity,’ Christopher said. He had been trying to revert to what he had been saying before the bearded man came in. ‘And for me it was very important. But I understand if people don’t want to assert it as important. For me—’

‘I don’t think we can really write Campaign for Homosexual Equality on the poster,’ Alan said. ‘The landlord might have views about that.’

‘Well, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Honestly!’ Nat said. ‘I thought the point of all of this was to be proud and public. I don’t see anything proud and public about hiding behind initials, in case the landlord doesn’t like it.’

‘He’ll get his windows smashed,’ Alan said. ‘And we’d be beaten up.’

‘For me, anal sex was always very important,’ Christopher intoned.

There was a noise on the stairs, and the noise of a homosexual talking to himself. ‘The cheek of it,’ he was saying. ‘Now, where did I put my wallet? Not that pocket, not this pocket, not— Oh, here it is. You’d lose,’ he said, as he came into the room, ‘your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders. Hello, hello, hello, hello, Christopher, hello, Nat, hello, all. Am I late? Have you started?’

‘Yes, Paul,’ they said. ‘Yes, you’re late, we’ve started, it doesn’t matter, you’re late.’

‘Well,’ Paul said. He was always late for CHE meetings. He was wearing, like the rest of them, a lumberjack shirt, but it was oddly assorted with a pair of tiny denim shorts, and he had tied the tails of the shirt somewhat above the waist of the shorts to leave his midriff bare. He had blond hair with highlights, and a glossy moustache; just to the left of his mouth was a beauty spot, which some thought was applied with the end of the same mascara brush that gave his eyelashes such length and curl. ‘You’ll never guess why I’m late. I was just on the way out—’

‘Have a seat,’ Andrew said. He was eyeing Paul from head to foot with a faint air of disapproval; his hairy arms were folded across his stomach and his voice was deep and emphatic; he had his revolutionary scowl on.

‘I will,’ Paul said, and sat down. From his bag, he extracted a quarter-bottle of supermarket vodka, a glass filled with ice and a slice of lemon from the bar downstairs, and finally a small open bottle of tonic. ‘I was just on the way out when the phone goes, and I think, Oh, drat, that’s going to make me late, definitely going to make me late for my gay men’s group. So I could have ignored it, but you know me, I can’t ignore a ringing phone. For the rest of the night I’d have been thinking, Who’s that phoning me, who was that. Worst thing that can happen, you say to yourself, I’ll ignore it, then after ten rings you say, I can’t stand it any more and make a dive for it just as it stops ringing. And you’ll never know who it was who was calling you – it might have been the love of your life for all you know. So—’

‘You’re not that late,’ Nat said – Paul’s stories could go on for some time if not curbed.

‘So, anyway, this time I go to myself, I’m not going to be strong and ignore it, I’m going to be pathetic and answer it. And you know what, I’m glad I did. Do you know who it was? Go on, have a guess, you’ll never guess.’ The others showed no sign of making a guess. Christopher shook his head, his lips pursed. ‘Well. It was only Duncan. I thought he must be calling from abroad – you remember my friend Duncan, you know him, don’t you, Nat, but I’m not sure he knows you, Andrew, because I asked him if he knew you and he wasn’t sure. Listen, he says, I’m calling from the airport – I just landed. So I just shrieked. Ethel – you know, the clone who lives in the flat opposite – Ethel he came in and said, What are you shrieking at, you silly mare? Duncan says he’s at the airport, he’s just landed, and he wants to see everyone now, tonight, and so I said I’d tell everyone to go off to the Embassy tonight, and we’ll all be there, and then I said, So have you come back for good, why are you here, and he says he’s only got two two-pence pieces, he’s had them at the bottom of the suitcase since he went to Sicily, so they’ll cut him off in a moment, and then he’s about to tell me why he’s come back and, sure enough, the telephone cuts him off before he can tell me, just as he said it was going to, which I think as I said to Ethel is really a bit ironic if you think about it.’

‘That’s not ironic, my dear,’ Alan said. ‘That’s just Duncan running out of money for the telephone. Don’t sit over there all on your own. Come and sit down by me. I want to hear all about it.’

‘So I wasn’t going to come, but now I have come, though I can’t stay, because I’ve got to go on to tell everyone I can find in Earls Court, but you’ve all got to come to the Embassy later. Duncan’s back!’ Paul said, waving his hands like Al Jolson, taking the vodka and tonic and downing it in one, then getting up and, instead of going over to Alan, trotting off down the stairs. For some reason, Nat and Alan got up and went to the window; they watched him walk down the street in his shorts, with his bag over the crook of the arm. Outside the window hung two small Union Jacks; they had been there since the Silver Jubilee, two years before, and the landlord saw no reason to remove them. The sensibilities of his radical customers, who rented the upstairs room once a week or once a fortnight, did not worry him.

‘I don’t think,’ Christopher said, ‘I ever met Paul’s friend Duncan.’

So then they all told him about Duncan.

9.

‘Who is that coming up the path?’ Aunt Rachel said, peering out of the window.

‘It’s some man,’ Aunt Rebecca said. ‘He is probably selling something from his little bag. Silk stockings and shoe brushes. How dark he is!’

‘I know who it is,’ Aunt Ruth said with a note of triumph. ‘He is that horrid little boy.’

Duncan had been delayed: the plane to Paris had been an hour late, and he had just missed his connection; the next plane from Paris had been four hours later; his luggage had been lost or mislaid in the confusion, and he had had to fill in a lot of forms at Heathrow. All his clothes were somewhere between Catania and London – they could be anywhere in Europe. The only clothes he had were in a suitcase somewhere under his sister’s bed in Clapham, and the ones in his hand luggage, the tiny shorts and T-shirt he had changed out of at the airport. He had meant to get to his father’s house before lunchtime, but it was now nearly night. He was ravenous.

All the way up the hill, he had been thinking of food – he wanted solid, dry English cheese and perhaps, if there was some leftover cold mashed potato in a bowl, that fried with some peas. Sicilian potatoes didn’t go into any kind of mash – too waxy, or something. Even the sight of his father’s ramshackle house hadn’t shifted his thoughts. But when he rang the doorbell, and it had its familiar, inexplicable half-second delay before sounding, its four-note Big Ben call, which had been there for twenty years at least, Duncan remembered where he was and how much of his life had been there. The house bell was so jaunty, and so little of the life within was jaunty. The sound of the doorbell could always bring him and Dommie to their feet, racing downstairs to open it to whoever it was – usually the postman or the meter reader, nothing more exciting than that. It was the things you put out of your mind that could come back into it, with force.

Aunt Rebecca opened the door. She had put on some weight since he had last seen her, seven years ago at Christmas. She was pretending not to know who he was, but overdoing it in an amateurish way. She peered into his face, screwing up her eyebrows and forehead. ‘Yes?’ she said, hooting rather. ‘Can I help you?’

Duncan wished he had insisted when he left home that he had kept a key. But his father had said he couldn’t have sets of keys being mislaid all over London, and he’d always be there to let Duncan in – or if he weren’t, then he didn’t want Duncan going all over the house in his absence. Dommie had done better and insisted; Duncan had been weak and now, with his father dying upstairs, was at the mercy of his aunt.

‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Duncan. How are you, Rebecca?’

‘Aunt Rebecca, you used to call me,’ she said. ‘How extraordinary. I thought you were in Italy.’

‘I was in Italy,’ Duncan said. ‘But I had a telegram saying that my dad wasn’t very well.’

‘Ha!’ Rebecca said. ‘That is an understatement. He’s very ill indeed.’

‘So I came,’ Duncan said. ‘I came as fast as I could. Can I come in?’

Rebecca had been leaning with her arm heavily against the doorjamb, guarding; the word ‘dragon’ came into Duncan’s mind. It was her weight and awkwardness; but she was blocking Duncan’s way all the same. She gave him a thorough look. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether your father can see you. He has been very uncomfortable the last two days.’ Duncan felt accused by her expression, as if he had been the cause of the discomfort, even though he had not even been in the country. ‘He is only sleeping in fits and starts, so I won’t wake him if he’s asleep. You could come back tomorrow.’

‘He might be asleep when I come tomorrow,’ Duncan said, putting his little bag down in the hall by the hatstand. All the doors in the hall were closed, as if in the central lobby of some office. They had never been closed like that before; doors had stood open or closed as they happened to be. In the panelled hallway, closed off, with nothing but the wooden stair rising upwards to the death chamber, Duncan found himself in an unfamiliar and formal house. ‘I’ll wait until he wakes up.’

‘Oh, very well,’ Rebecca said. She retreated into the sitting room; she opened the door and there was the sight of a woman reading in the gloom. The lights had not been switched on; there was only a small table lamp by the side of her, and she peered in a pool of light downwards, not looking up as Rebecca entered. It was either Ruth or Rachel; he could not see. They must have heard him coming in, perhaps even discussed who should answer the door. There was something territorial about her, something relaxed and confident about her ownership. She was saving her own electricity bill, not her brother’s, by reading in the dark; she was not greeting him because he was there to perform a function, like a meter reader or a Gas Board employee. She might as well have been counting the silver spoons. And now, as if from nowhere, a shape leapt onto the back of her chair; not a cat, but an animal of burst and flutter. It took a strut into the small pool of light, and Duncan saw that it was a parrot, quite black. The parrot tipped its head on one side; it looked in Duncan’s direction; it raised a foot and began to groom itself, quite uninterested in the new arrival. Presently the aunt reached up behind her. She had taken something – a nut or a seed – from her lap, and the bird snatched it. All this Duncan watched remotely, as if it were a drama on a television screen. And then an unknown force seemed to push the door behind Rebecca, and it closed, leaving him alone with the staircase.

The stairs creaked. He felt like a burglar. And upstairs the bedroom doors were also closed. For the first time, Duncan saw the box-like construction of the hall downstairs, the landing upstairs; the distinguished shape that the house had once had, and still had at its core. The panelling continued upstairs, and a threadbare green and blue carpet. This was where Samuel had hung his less successful acquisitions in the way of paintings, including the ‘Constable’, signed extravagantly, from which he had hoped to make a fortune until he was laughed out of Sotheby’s – a red-jacketed farm boy on a wagon in the middle of a dark wood. Samuel’s bedroom was in the middle. Duncan gave a very gentle knock, and in a moment there was a small crisp bustle and the door was opened by what must be a nurse. She came out, closing the door softly behind her.

‘Are you Duncan?’ she said. ‘I’m Sister Balls. We’ve been having a slightly restless couple of days, and sometimes he doesn’t make the best sense, but I don’t think he’s in pain any more. He’s falling asleep and waking up and falling asleep again, but he’ll be very happy to see you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s kind of you to say so, though.’

‘Now why would you say that?’ Sister Balls said. ‘He’s asleep, but he’s been asking after you a lot, saying, When is he going to get here? I’ll be all right when Duncan gets here. It’s been very nice to listen to and to be able to say that you were definitely coming today.’

‘Shall I wait downstairs?’ Duncan said.

‘Oh, no,’ the nurse said. ‘No, that’s not necessary. Just come in quietly and hold his hand, and he’ll wake up when he’s ready, and then I’ll go and leave you two in peace for a bit. Don’t tire him out, I’m sure you won’t.’

Duncan felt a kind of gratitude to Aunt Rebecca for being so abrupt, to the other two aunts for being so rude as not to come out to greet him. He felt tenderized. Talking to Sister Balls, he had been admitted to a caring space, concealed and protected. Then the nurse opened the door to the dark room, and he remembered that inside that space, his father lay.

There was the smell of an enclosed hot room, and something alongside, unexpected. Oh, he thought, that’s the smell of a deathbed. But it wasn’t unpleasant, or particularly human, apart from its warmth; it smelt of something unfamiliar, something welcome, and some blocking agents on top, floral and medical and antiseptic. His father’s room had its own smell, too, a masculine one of wood and shoe polish. Duncan went in, closing the door behind him softly. The room was very dim. But he didn’t want to turn the light on and startle his father. He groped around the room, to the side of his father’s head, and in a moment he banged against the winged armchair that had always been on the landing until now, in case anyone tired themselves out climbing the stairs. He felt on the seat to make sure there was no medical equipment – he had a dread of syringes and containers, of cardboard bedpans – and sat down cautiously. He could hear his father’s breathing. Not dead yet. He sat for a few minutes, and shortly his eyes got used to the dim light, as his nose got used to the room’s lingering odours of illness and cure. His father’s profile was sharp and drawn; his hands were under the counterpane, making a pulling gesture. Duncan waited. There might be no need to remain. He had seen his father now. He would wait only fifteen minutes more. But just then, his father gave a deep, rasping breath, as if choking, and woke. His eyes were still closed, but there was a change in his being and his breathing. He gave the impression of being disappointed to wake and find himself still alive.

‘Who’s there,’ his father said. ‘I can’t see.’

‘It’s me,’ Duncan said. Then there was a pause, a lingering silent question, and Duncan had to say, ‘It’s Duncan, Daddy.’

‘Oh, Duncan,’ his father said. ‘I thought you were in Italy. Well, better late than never.’

‘I came as fast as I could,’ Duncan said. ‘I only heard two days ago, and the earliest flight I could get was last night and today. I had to change in Paris – there was no direct flight.’

‘Heard what,’ his father said. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’

‘Just heard,’ Duncan said. ‘I came over as quickly as I could.’

‘Always in a great rush,’ his father said. ‘Always not doing things properly because of something that’s turned up in an emergency. You were the same as a little boy.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Duncan said, finding himself unable to think of what he should have done to preserve his father’s sense of the right thing to do, while simultaneously coming as soon as possible. ‘I do my best.’

‘Have you seen your sister?’ Samuel said. ‘I was expecting to see her, as well.’

‘Are you sure she hasn’t been?’ Duncan said. ‘I’m sure she’s been to see you. Hasn’t she?’

‘What do you think I am?’ his father said. His voice was dry and rasping; the heat in his throat, its pain, tangible. His eyes were still closed; the annoyance of his existence, his ways as if a headmaster, surviving until his last moments. Duncan reflected that anyone else, he would pass him a glass of water without a request. His father would demand one, and then expect the person to put up with being called an idiot for not having one poured out ready. He waited. ‘Do you think I can’t remember if Domenica has been or not? I’m ill, not stupid.’

‘Sometimes you’re not quite sure of things when you’re as ill as this,’ Duncan said.

‘She hasn’t been,’ Samuel said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s important to her.’

And then, to Duncan’s horror, his father raised his hands to his face in a gesture of self-benediction, his palms over his eyes, and began to sob, juddering. ‘My life’s been for nothing,’ his father said. ‘My life, and my children can’t wait for me to die.’

‘You don’t need to think that,’ Duncan said. ‘Don’t say things like that.’

His father’s noise of weeping would soon bring the nurse into the room or, worse, his sisters. But then downstairs a harsh call came; a barbaric yawp and shriek. It seemed to interest or divert his father, and, just as a child’s tantrum can be pushed to one side by an entertainment, so his father paused in his fit, just gave one more shudder, and lowered his hands. ‘I keep hearing that noise,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is. It’s like an animal crying.’

‘It’s a parrot,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s a black parrot that Ruth brought. Or Rachel. I don’t know which one.’

‘It would be Rachel,’ Samuel said. ‘She has a parrot, a black one. Why has she brought it here? I don’t want it here. I don’t want that noise downstairs.’

‘I don’t know,’ Duncan said. ‘I thought she must have asked you. I’ll tell her to take it home again.’

‘Oh, she won’t do that,’ Samuel said. Then all at once he fell asleep; so instantly that Duncan thought it must be a coma or even a final collapse. He went about the room moving things, putting off the moment when he must go outside and say that his father seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. In curiosity rather than anything else, he turned on the bedside lamp. It was the same pink fringed one his mother had always had. The light showed an old, unshaven man, the cheeks sunk in deep under the cheekbones and the eye sockets like a skull’s, falling profoundly into worlds of darkness. The skin was yellow and slack, as if its possessor had slept long under bridges, living on methylated spirits. Only the cleanliness of the dark blue pyjamas with white piping, and the neatness of the sheets, suggested anything but the derelict. It was as if an old tramp had been taken from his streetside cardboard box by a benevolent, given a bath and set down within clean linen to die. Duncan resisted the temptation to run his hand down the side of his father’s face. There was no temptation to kiss it. But the thought came to mind like this: what would it be like to have a father who, on his deathbed, you wanted to kiss? The light had disturbed Samuel in his sudden sleep, and now he woke, raising his fists to his eyes and rubbing them, yawning like a cat, turning about to see what the disturbance was.

‘Oh, it’s you again,’ Samuel said. ‘I didn’t know if it was really you. I keep thinking people are here. You should have stayed in Spain. No, in Italy, that’s where you’ve been.’

‘I’ve come back,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m not going to tire you out. I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘Yes, perhaps that’s best,’ Samuel said.

(And downstairs Rachel was turning to her sisters and saying what she should have said hours, or days ago; saying that she had, in fact, not got round to taking anything to the solicitor’s, that she was rather afraid that the will was upstairs still, in poor Samuel’s keeping. ‘But he won’t know about that, the son, will he?’ she was saying plaintively, and Ruth was shaking her head, and Rebecca was shaking her head, too.)

Samuel looked around conspiratorially. ‘I’ll tell you something important tomorrow, if you come back.’

‘You can tell me now, if you like,’ Duncan said. ‘I don’t mind listening.’

‘It’s not a question of whether you want to listen or not,’ Samuel said. ‘It’s whether I want to tell you. It’s my business.’

‘Well, you can tell me or not tell me,’ Duncan said. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t put anything much off until tomorrow that you want people to know.’

‘You wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?’ Samuel said. But doubt set in, and he started saying ‘You wouldn’t, would you – would, would, wouldn’t, should,’ until he could no longer decide what it was normal to say, and he fell silent.

‘You know,’ Duncan said, quite calmly, ‘it’s very bad luck, getting lung cancer like that. Not smoking, ever, and then you get lung cancer. I don’t know that that’s supposed to happen.’

‘I did smoke,’ Samuel said. ‘But before you were born. Before I met your mother, even. It was when I was at school, and when I had my first job. I was a clerk in the office of – of – of – they were Jews. That’s right, they were Jews, the first people I worked for. I smoked because they didn’t, none of them. But it didn’t do me any good. I gave up just before I met your mother and before I went to another job. That was when I realized that I was never going to be promoted in that place. They only promoted their own type.’

‘That must have been fifty years ago,’ Duncan said. He wondered that he did not know that his father had ever smoked. His mother, he was sure, never had. ‘I don’t think you get lung cancer from that, decades later.’

‘They don’t know,’ Samuel said. ‘Doctors never know. I’m glad I’m not in hospital. I’m glad they’re letting me stay here.’

‘Do you remember,’ Duncan said, and Samuel, for the first time, turned his head towards him, and almost smiled. ‘Do you remember that day when you and Mummy and Dommie and I, we went out for the day? I think it must have been for Dommie’s birthday.’

‘I think so,’ Samuel said. His lips were dry and flaking; he was running his tongue over them.

‘Where did we go? Did we go to Whipsnade, or some other zoo, or Box Hill, or was it to the theatre? It would have been a special treat. I don’t know that Whipsnade was open then, come to think of it, so maybe not there. And did you ask Dommie if she’d like to bring ten friends with her? I wish I could remember what her special treat was.’

Samuel turned his head away. ‘When it gets worse,’ he said, ‘they’ll take me into hospital, but I hope I’m not going to know about any of that.’

‘Oh, you’re not going to get any worse than this,’ Duncan said lightly. ‘This is probably it. I wouldn’t have thought you had long to go. About Dommie’s birthday. What was it that we all did together? I think I remember now. She was going to be nine, and you told her that you thought she was too old to have a party, and she couldn’t ask her friends round because it would cost too much and it would be too much noise and trouble. But since you ask, you’re not going to get any worse. You’re probably going to die quite soon.’

Samuel turned his face to Duncan in disbelief. His hollows and unshaven angles said only this: it’s your obligation to do whatever I say. It was not for Duncan to do anything but to give way.

‘So,’ Duncan said. ‘Are you comfortable? Can I do anything for you, in your last hours? Or do you just want me to go away so that you can sit with Rebecca and Ruth and Rachel? I don’t really care.’

‘Oh, you think you’re so clever,’ Samuel said, breathing deeply, the air juddering within. He raised his thin hand to his hairy, bony chest in the gap in his pyjama jacket. ‘That’s what you were always like, showing off. Let me do my dance – I made it up, Mummy. Look, Aunty Rachel, look, Uncle Harold, look at the dolly I made, isn’t it pretty. Oh, yes. I can see you came back to show off and tell me to bugger off before I die. But I can show you one thing.’

There was a long pause; Samuel’s breath guttered and shuddered; he twisted in pain; he pulled at the bedsheets. Duncan waited. He did not want to help his father. He wanted to see how long it would take him to return to the point where he could speak again, or sleep. He watched with interest. In less than five minutes, his father had calmed. Outside the door, a chair scraped against the parquet. Sister Balls must have returned, and be sitting outside. He did not have a lot of time.

‘It hurts to talk,’ Samuel said. ‘There’s one thing I want you to see. In that box, there, on the dressing-table.’

Duncan went over and drew it out. It was a document; a pre-printed form filled in in Samuel’s wavering looping hand, a will. ‘I don’t want to see this,’ Duncan said.

‘Look at it,’ Samuel said.

Duncan did. There was what looked like a duplicate underneath. In a moment he read that his father was leaving his whole estate in equal parts to his two children, his three sisters, his five nephews and nieces, and seven named charities and educational institutions, including the Harrow rugby club, and Harrow School, which neither Duncan nor his father had attended. ‘I see,’ Duncan said. The will, which was to give him, what, a seventeenth part of this ugly house and the bank balance, was dated from two months ago. It was witnessed by a Corinna Balls, and another woman, whose handwriting made Duncan think she was another nurse.

‘You didn’t ask Aunt Rebecca or Aunt Ruth to witness it,’ he said.

‘No, you stupid boy,’ Samuel said. ‘You can’t get people to witness something they’re going to—’ He broke down in coughing.

‘Going to benefit from,’ Duncan said. ‘They’re not going to benefit very much, though, are they?’

‘I think,’ Samuel said. ‘I think – I’m going to cross Domenica out. She hasn’t been to see me. So you’ll get a little bit more. That’ll be nice, won’t it.’

‘And a lawyer’s drawn this up, has he?’ Duncan said. Samuel looked withdrawn and serene. ‘Oh, I see – it’s just something you’ve bought from the newsagent and filled in. Got Sister Balls to get from the newsagent. Something for everyone to discover after you die? I see. You just want people to know that they don’t deserve anything from you.’

Duncan looked at his father. He knew perfectly well that Duncan would take this document and destroy it. It could have no effect on what happened to Samuel’s estate. But before Samuel died, he wanted to make clear to Duncan what he thought of him.

‘The thing is,’ Duncan said, ‘I don’t think that Domenica would take your money anyway. I think she’d probably take however much it was, and hand it over to the NSPCC. Do you think she wants anything to do with you?’

‘I’m her father,’ Samuel said.

‘There was an afternoon, wasn’t there,’ Duncan said, ‘when you said, Let’s all go out swimming, the children and I. Which was odd, because you never suggested anything like that for the children’s pleasure. You know, don’t you, that because Dommie never had any parties after she was eight years old, no one ever thought to ask her to theirs? I don’t suppose you ever thought of that. You only ever wanted to do your own thing. And Dommie said that she couldn’t swim, she didn’t know how, and you said that didn’t matter. You’d gone to the effort of buying her a swimming costume. She didn’t have one. She was only six. And when we all got to the swimming pool, you said to her, This is the way to swim, you know, and you picked her up by her arms and legs and threw her into the deep end, with no floats or anything, and just stood there. The lifeguard jumped in and rescued her. He gave you what for, you horrible old man, asking you what you thought you were doing. Don’t you remember?’

Samuel shook his head demurely. He looked like such a small person, a small entrapped dwarf in a fairytale with a secret.

‘I remember. Even in the 1950s, you didn’t just throw small children into the deep end of swimming pools and wait to see if they drowned or not.’

‘Oh, once,’ Samuel said, shaking his head.

‘Every week,’ Duncan said. ‘Making her wait at the table to eat mutton fat. Making her walk all the way back to school in the dark in January to make her find a pencil case she had dropped. Do you know, you’ve never once given me any help or advice – you’ve never done anything for me, except once. Mummy made you explain to me how to shave. You couldn’t get out of that. That was it. I’m glad you’re dying. It won’t make the slightest difference to anyone. And what’s this rubbish?’ He held up the will. In the light it was a sad object: the handwritten parts were shaky and full of uneven gaps and holes. ‘No one’s going to pay any attention to that. I’m surprised Balls didn’t tell you not to be so stupid. Shall I burn it or shall I just tear it up?’

‘You do whatever you want to,’ Samuel said, crying. ‘The last wishes of a dying man. The last wishes of your dying father.’

‘The last wishes of my dying father are about as good as the wishes he had during his lifetime,’ Duncan said. ‘I’ll get rid of this, somehow. My conscience is going to deal with it. And it’s all going to come to me and Dommie, your money. You bet. A hundred quid to Balls and another to the other one. They won’t remember they’d ever signed anything. If you’ve told your sisters, do you think anyone’s ever going to believe them? And do you know what I’m going to do with my money? All that lovely money? Because you saved quite a lot from the insurance racket, Daddy. And this horrible house? Not enough to go round seventeen, but plenty for two. Me? I’m going to open a bookshop. I’m going to open the first gay bookshop in London. There are so many good books written by homosexuals. And lesbians. You know what they are. And there’s going to be a bookshop where you’ll be able to buy their books, if they’re dead or foreign or not available, and a place where you can come if you’re a homosexual or a lesbian and spend all day there, buying books and meeting people like you. That’s what your money’s going to do. That’s what you were working towards, all your life, without knowing it, Sam – you were working towards a bookshop celebrating sexual perversion. You know me – you know I’m a sexual pervert, too? My God, the men I’ve had in Sicily. It would make your eyes pop out of their sockets. Oh, I look forward to entertaining your ghost there, in my gay bookshop. We’re going to hang up a picture of you by the front door to say thank you, Sam, for making all of this possible. You thought you were buggering me up, and Dommie, too, and it made you laugh. But you were actually saving up, and giving us the chance to get out from under your stone. So thank you so much. And –’ Duncan took the two wills – ‘I’ll take care of these. Thanks. And ’bye. I won’t be seeing you again, Daddy.’

‘I’ll,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll. Write. It.’ His chest was torn open with coughing. Duncan waited and counted. He would not start caring now. He would not remember his father’s lifelong actions – he could not: most of it was neglect and a sneer. ‘Send. Nurse. Out.’

‘You stupid old man,’ Duncan said. ‘You can’t write it again. Don’t you know? You’re dying. You’re going to die tonight. You might last until tomorrow morning. You can’t write any more. But at least I saw you before you died. Remember that. Oh – I’m sorry. It’s us that will be remembering you, not the other way round. ’Bye then. I’ll send the nurse in.’

Duncan got up, and turned the bedside light off. He folded the two stationers’ wills – they were only a couple of pages each – and put them into his jacket pocket. He stroked his father’s forehead – it was damp and hot, and writhed under the touch. His father cried out, an inarticulate noise, and his arms came up, as if to hit Duncan. The door opened, and the nurse whose name was Balls stood there, her stance inclined and concerned.

‘I’m just leaving,’ Duncan said quietly, going over to her. ‘I think he’s in a little pain, but we’ve managed to talk. I think it meant a lot to him. Thank you for everything, Sister.’

‘It’s my job – you don’t need to thank me. I’ll give him some morphine for the pain,’ Sister Balls said. ‘He does seem bad. It’ll help him to get some rest.’

‘And Daddy,’ Duncan said, raising his voice over the calls of pain, ‘I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.’

But there was no articulate response. Sister Balls switched the light back on, and went to her case on the chest of drawers for the morphine. Duncan left the room and walked downstairs. From the sitting room came a violent shriek, the parrot’s yayayayaya. He ignored the aunts and their clawed familiar, and left the house with the sense of a burden lifting, or about to lift. Somewhere, a knotted little Clapham presence, a girl in a one-bedroom rented flat surrounded by her favourite objects, intensely waited. He could feel Dommie’s northward gaze on him. She knew he was back in her city, and had gone where she would not go. He saw her, in the safety of her room, surrounded by animals in plush on the bed, animals in glass and porcelain on the windowsill. In her frozen menagerie, she was expecting him.

10.

‘Thank God he’s gone,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m going to go upstairs and get the will – the real one, the last one. And then tomorrow I’m going to put it in a very, very safe place.’

But Rebecca and Ruth just shook their heads. Rachel’s parrot raised his head, and looked around from the back of the chair where he prowled and surveyed, and gave one reprimanding, minatory, regretful shriek. He was thirty-four years old, a great age for a parrot. Despite that, his voice was what it had always been, and his plumage as black, and he looked about him with triumph. He enjoyed it when he shrieked, and made the women leap.

11.

It was later than Duncan thought, and the train back into town was almost empty. He stepped into the carriage, its slatted wooden floor and its damp-smelling upholstery familiar but not thought of for months. At the far end of the carriage, a middle-aged black man sat, reading his book. Duncan put his bag on the seat opposite, and opened it. The Embassy would just be opening now. There was no reason not to go. It would be good to spend his first night back in London with a stranger; to get fucked by someone whose name he couldn’t quite remember at the exact moment his father was dying. The suitcases would turn up tomorrow – something else to look forward to. But in the meantime he had the clothes he had been wearing that morning in Sicily, changed out of in the toilets at Charles de Gaulle; a satin pair of shorts and a tight black T-shirt with an American flag on it. He was glad he’d taken the trouble to fold them neatly. He took off his jacket, there in the carriage, and then his white shirt; he pulled his jeans over his trainers, and folded everything. At the end of the carriage, the man had abandoned his book: he was staring, astonished, at the thin man with a shock of blond hair who had got onto the train and quickly stripped to his underpants. Duncan gave a mock curtsy to the man, whose attention quickly focused on the book again. The rackety bopping of the train’s wheels was going all disco in Duncan’s mind; the music on the dance-floor was in his thoughts. He could hardly wait. And then he wriggled into the shorts, glad that he had put on white socks with the trainers; he unfolded the T-shirt, and slipped into it. In his mind was the pump and funk of the two a.m. sweat machine, and the hot grind of jaw and hip after speed; and thirty boys he hadn’t seen for months. To the rhythm of the train’s wheels, he gave an unseen little pirouette, a twist, a shake, a small punch of the fist upwards, just there in the train carriage. And tomorrow he would call Dommie, as soon as he felt up to it.

BOOK 3

1.

‘I don’t know why we’ve got to come here,’ Nick said.

‘Allow it. Always the fucking same,’ Nathan said. ‘We were all right where we were. Then they say to you, you can’t stay here, you’ve got to come with us. So we come with them—’

‘Yeah, we come with them,’ Nick said.

‘And when we get there, it’s long, man. They say us, you can’t stay here,’ Nathan said.

‘Not downstairs, no way, is it,’ Nick said.

‘You’ve got to go upstairs,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s for you, is it?’

‘They don’t say that,’ Nick said. ‘They pretend it’s a treat, like it’s what they’re doing it for, like it’s total nang.’

‘Skeen. And we’re like wagwarn, having to eat all that food and make out you’re liking it, like,’ Nathan said.

‘Leastways,’ Nick said, ‘leastways we don’t have to be eating that food and shit. That looked rank, man.’

‘Don’t laugh at the food, man,’ Nathan said. ‘She said she was bringing us up some food in ten and it ain’t gonna be Claridges.’

‘Oh, man,’ Nick said. ‘I’m glad you bring that bottle of poppers, bro.’

The first speaker was a boy of thirteen, with dark blond hair in curls and thick, adult eyebrows. The second was his identical twin. Both of them had newly deep, grating voices; their faces had grown in large, unexpected directions recently, giving them big noses and angular Adam’s apples. They talked at each other, not looking into each other’s faces, rapidly and with London accents. The room they were in was a large study, with a picnic table set up in the middle with a cloth cast over it. The leather-topped desk had four drawers on either side, and a long drawer under the green leather surface, topped with gold inlay. One drawer to the left was locked, as was the long drawer. The others were all open, but contained nothing interesting: plastic pens, papers of no interest, a ball of string. On the desk sat a small hi-fi system; on it, a man was speaking over the sound of strings playing slowly.

Nick sat in the executive chair at the desk; from time to time he swivelled violently. His twin lay at full length on the green leather sofa to the side of the room, kicking at the underneath of the suspended bookshelves above him, which contained nothing but two dozen boring-sounding books about law.

‘I ain’t eating what they’re eating,’ Nick said.

‘That’s right,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m going to sniff poppers all night, I’m going to get so high, and I ain’t eating that food they’re eating. Did you see that shit?’

‘Who’s coming, apart from us?’ Nick said.

‘There’s that sket whose husband left her,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s got a kid who’s coming.’

‘Who the fuck’s that?’ Nick said.

‘I don’t fucking know,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s that sket with the fat arse down the street.’

‘That why her husband left her?’ Nick said. ‘’Cause her husband’s left her, is it? Was it ’cause she’s so fucking fat, he couldn’t stand it?’

‘Yeah, fat but no tits,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s bad luck in life, man, that’s bad luck. You’re a sket who’s fat, but you’ve got no tits.’

‘Not like Andrew Barley, then,’ Nick said. They convulsed at the thought of Andrew Barley, a boy in their class who was last to be chosen, whom they’d beaten with a torn-off branch from one side of the playground to the other, who’d produced a note from his mum saying that he might be late for chemistry because it was on the other side of school and he couldn’t run because of his weight – it had actually said that, because of his weight. ‘Andrew Barley and his gigantic tits.’

‘Yeah, she’s like that,’ Nick said. ‘She’s coming because they feel sorry for her, is it? And her little boy, we’ve to be looking after him and he’s going to be sent up here.’

‘I look forward to that,’ Nathan said, using a sarcastic phrase they’d heard, with admiration, from Mr Andropoulos next door whenever he’d been told about something really boring or unpleasant about to happen, like the Notting Hill Carnival and Mrs Barley promising to make him her Facebook friend and his garden being bought up to make room for Crossrail and shit.

‘Yeah, I look forward to that too, all right,’ Nick said. ‘And their daughter’s coming in here in a bit, Mrs Khan said. She said she was coming back from something, from orchestra or something, and she’d come and sit with us and have dinner and play cards and that.’

‘Fuck me, Anita Khan,’ Nathan said. ‘I’d forgotten about Anita fucking Khan. She’s fucking mental.’

‘She jezzy,’ Nick said. ‘She’s never gone to orchestra with her flute – she’s out being fucked by the gangsters all the afternoon. She’s just told her dad she’s gone to orchestra.’

‘Poor old Mr Khan,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s piff, but I wouldn’t fuck her. She takes after her mother in that.’

‘Shut your mouth, wallad, she mother coming,’ Nathan said.

There was a noise on the stairs that Nathan had heard, a creak and a clink of glasses. The twins made huge eyes at each other; Nick dug his heels into the carpet to stop his chair and Nathan sat up on the sofa, pulling the bottom of his jeans down. The door to the study opened, and Mrs Khan came in, pushing it backwards and carrying a tray. Behind her came a much smaller woman, carrying another tray. Nick leapt up and held the door open – ‘Oh, thank you so much, you are kind,’ Mrs Khan said. Bina, the housekeeper, set her tray down and left. Mrs Khan set her tray down, also on the desk, but stayed. She was a thin woman with a streak of white in her black hair; her dress was a mauve raw silk with an octagonal neckline showing a slightly wrinkled bosom. She was a sex-bomb, the twins had heard their father say, in a jocular manner, and their mother respond that she was a very good sort all round. Which she was, they hadn’t decided on just yet. She was sket, but the twins described every woman they knew as sket.

‘Hello, boys,’ Mrs Khan said.

‘Hello, Mrs Khan,’ Nathan said, and Nick echoed him.

‘Is Anita not in here yet?’ Mrs Khan said, setting the tray down on the desk. ‘I’m sorry to be leaving you without anything or anyone to entertain you, boys.’

‘That’s all right, Mrs Khan,’ Nick said. ‘You don’t need to make any special effort to entertain us.’

‘We were just chatting,’ Nathan said.

‘It’s so nice to see brothers who get on so well. You could put the television on, you know. I brought it in here because I thought you might like it.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Khan,’ Nick said, ‘but we’re all right, we’re happy just chatting.’

‘How’s Mr Khan?’ Nathan said. ‘Is he well?’

‘Yes, thank you, very well,’ Mrs Khan said, eyeing them strangely. ‘He’ll be up to say hello in a while.’

‘There’s no need for that, Mrs Khan,’ Nathan said. ‘I wouldn’t want to disturb him. We saw him only last week, at the garden centre.’

‘At the garden centre?’ Mrs Khan said. She was fitting a cigarette into a cigarette holder. ‘Are you sure? It might have been someone who just looked like Mr Khan. Don’t worry, I’m not going to light this one in here. I know all about you young people not liking passive smoking.’

‘Last Friday afternoon, it would have been, Mrs Khan,’ Nick said. ‘It was definitely Mr Khan. He was looking at shrubs with … It would have been his secretary, maybe – she was blonde and in a short skirt, a pretty girl it was, Mrs Khan.’

‘Well, then, it certainly wasn’t Mr Khan,’ Mrs Khan said. ‘His secretary is fifty and very fat – I don’t think she would go out in a short skirt. And actually last Friday—’

‘Maybe it wasn’t his secretary, then,’ Nathan said disconsolately.

‘Last Friday I called for Mr Khan at lunchtime and we spent the afternoon together, so it must have been someone else you saw. Now – these are chicken samosas, and this is what we call chaat, and these are pakoras, vegetable pakoras, and these are just little fritters. They are Indian, but there’s nothing to be frightened of. I’m sure you’ll like them. And this is salad, you’d make me so proud if you ate even some of it. Lemon squash, Coke – the television? You’re sure? There’s a pack of cards on Mr Khan’s desk if you want to play whist – Anita will teach you if you don’t know.’

‘Thanks for everything, Mrs Khan,’ Nathan said, as she walked out. There was a click, the noise of a cigarette lighter striking. ‘You’ve been very kind, thank you very much. Man, that sket is bare long.’

‘I thought she’d never shut it and fuck off. I was going to call the feds,’ Nick said.

‘Yeah, and she call the feds on you, wallad,’ Nathan said. ‘Wagwarn with Mr Khan and the jezz at the garden centre? Oh, she blonde, she hot, she short-skirt sket. You know you trouble? You say too much detail when you tell lie, is it. Friday afternoon, blond secretary – she know, Mrs Khan, she know what her man doing Friday afternoon. You leave it vague and imprecise, fool, you plant seed of doubt in Mrs Khan mind.’

‘Yeah, I do better next time,’ Nick said. ‘I buy packet of seeds at garden centre – packet of seeds of doubt and plant them in Mrs Khan mind.’

Nathan and Nick looked at each other, and burst out laughing.

The door opened again. There was Anita Khan. She stood against the jamb, kicking it gently, looking from Nick to Nathan. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it out, letting it drop again. ‘You’re Nick,’ she said, ‘and you’re like Nathan.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Nick said. ‘You’re good. Most people can’t tell the difference.’

‘I can’t tell the difference,’ she said. ‘I was just guessing in like a totally random way, you know, and in my random way I was right? I could have said the other way round, easy. I’m supposed to like entertain you. How old are you anyway?’

‘I’m thirteen,’ Nathan said.

‘Oh, kay,’ she said. ‘And how old are you, little boy?’

‘We’re twins, man,’ Nick said. ‘That means we are like exactly the same age, only by minutes. That’s what twins means.’

‘Wow, is that the case?’ Anita said, coming in and letting the door slam behind her. ‘I never knew that. I was always hearing about twins, you know, but I never believed they like really existed? I was like they’re, like unicorns and shit, mythical beasts, yeah? But here you are. And you’re like the same age, the exact same age, and you have the same birthday, you know what I mean? Wow. Cool. Anyway.’

‘Oh, come on, Anita,’ Nathan said. ‘You know you got to stay in here with us to make sure we don’t trash the place.’

‘Whatever. That’s the best time I ever heard of,’ Anita said. She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Like, spending a whole evening in a room with two thirteen-year-old boys. That sounds like incredible?’

‘There’s an eleven-year-old boy coming as well,’ Nathan said. ‘And they be thirteen-year-olds in the ghetto in Chicago done be killing they third man, so you don’t be treating us like kindergarten, you feel me, Anita. Ain’t they told you that one, about the eleven-year-old? His mum’s coming on her own – she’s that sket where the husband he left her, and she’s wondering why. You get me? She lives down there, ten doors down, is it, and she’s fat but no tits, you know the one.’

The doorbell rang downstairs; a four-toned chime.

‘That’s her,’ Nick said. ‘That’s her with her eleven-year-old we got to entertain.’

‘O-kay,’ Anita said. ‘That sounds fabulous. I’m like running a crèche here, you know what I mean. Are we going to watch CBBC, I hear In the Night Garden’s like on – that’s going to keep them all quiet?’

‘No, it’s X Factor, is it. But that’s dutty. We ain’t seeing that.’

‘That Louis Walsh, he badman, is it.’

The twins laughed. Anita went over to the table where her mother had deposited the tray.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said, running her fingers through her hair. ‘This is like – have you seen this food, it’s like a million calories in like every bite, I’m not touching that. My mother, she’s crazy? She thinks she’s got to feed me up every chance, you know what I mean? You’ve got to eat twice as much or she’ll think I’m anorexic and shit. This food is like so random. This shit, it reminds me, it was like this one time at my friend’s house, like once, it was incredible?’

‘Hey, Anita,’ Nathan said.

‘Yes, Nick,’ Anita said.

‘No, I’m Nathan,’ Nathan said. ‘You got my name right a minute back.’

‘I’ve like forgotten already,’ Anita said. ‘So, Nathan. What were you saying?’

‘Are you going to tell about this one time at your friend’s house, because it was like incredible?’ Nathan said.

‘Oh, fuck you,’ Anita said.

‘I was saying,’ Nick said, ‘that

2.

‘I just couldn’t believe it,’ Mr Carraway was saying, drink in hand. ‘I had a phone call from Simon Wu about the Middlesbrough plant, this is four thirty on a Friday afternoon, an aspect of the sale we hadn’t considered, and could I draw up a memorandum for Helen Barclay’s office, which I did – it was a whole weekend, dawn till dusk – and got it to Simon Wu first thing on Monday morning. It was a piece of work, I can tell you – it was really one of my proudest moments, turning something like that round in, what, forty-eight hours? Next thing I know—’

‘This is amazing, this,’ Mrs Carraway said, confidentially, leaning forward to Mr Khan. ‘Amazing.’

‘The next thing I know, Shabnam, is a furious phone call from Helen Barclay’s office. On my mobile – I was in Birmingham in a meeting on a completely different project that Monday morning, I had to leave to take the call – and it couldn’t wait. What did I think I was doing? I’d sent the report to Simon Wu and cc’d Helen Barclay’s office. They’d have me know that next time I should send it to Helen Barclay’s office and cc Simon Wu. They were in the lead and I should be writing to them.’

‘Doesn’t matter that they would have got the report in the same way, exactly the same way,’ Mrs Carraway said, in the same confidential manner. ‘Can you imagine, Michael?’

Michael Khan shook his head. ‘It’s all about ownership,’ he said. ‘People believe that they own a project and should be addressed first. I’ve met this before. People are so concerned about who comes first in these situations. The main person and the cc is just a part of those questions of hierarchy.’

‘And women,’ Shabnam Khan said. ‘It’s just so typical of a woman in this situation, that a woman like—’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Mr Carraway said.

‘Another drink, Caroline?’ Michael said.

‘Well, I don’t mind if

3.

we can have some fun up here,’ Nathan said. ‘You get me? Anita, you like poppers?’

‘Poppers?’ Anita said. ‘Are you like seriously asking me if I like poppers?’

‘Ah, come on, Anita,’ Nick said. ‘We’re having a bit of banter with you, man. We know you ain’t been to orchestra practice this afternoon like your mum says.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Anita said. ‘So I’ve been like where, then?’

‘You’ve been doing it with some badman all afternoon, ain’t that the truth?’ Nick said. ‘You’ve been lying there, and saying to him, go on, do me, do me.’

‘Whatever. Go away, little boy,’ Anita said. ‘You’re wrong in the head. I went to orchestra practice, you know? I took my violin, and my dad drove me, and I like rehearsed Dvoák’s like Eighth Symphony, and then at seven my dad came to pick me up. So where was I supposed to be doing it you know with some badman, do you think?’

‘Ah, come on, Anita, we know you like it, we know you sket deep down,’ Nathan said.

‘And we brought you some poppers,’ Nick said. ‘You like poppers, Anita?’

Out of his back pocket in his falling-down, underpants-showing jeans, Nick pulled a small brown bottle. Anita leant over and examined it. The label said Jungle Juice.

‘That’s Jungle Juice,’ Anita said. ‘That’s poppers, is it?’

‘I love poppers,’ Nathan said, putting it back in his pocket. ‘Oh, we love poppers. You just take one sniff, Anita, and it’s amazing, you’re falling over. One time, right, we were in IT and we were just passing it around, because our IT teacher, Mr Brandon, he never notices anything, you can just show him your screen and he’s lost in space, and the whole class was just high, and, Anita, listen, Mr Brandon just never noticed.’

‘Yeah, Brandon, he wallad,’ Nick said.

‘He what?’ Anita said.

‘He wallad, I said,’ Nick said, thrusting his chin out and shrugging.

‘I have no idea what that means,’ Anita said. ‘I can’t understand half the things you say. Wallad?’

‘Yeah, man, everyone knows wallad,’ Nathan said.

‘I’m like so –’ she made a face of horror and despair, a mask of tragedy and abandonment ‘– when I even like listen to you, you know what I mean? It was like this one time, at my friend’s house, you know, it was just like …’

‘You don’t have to like listen,’ Nick said.

‘Yeah, but I can’t help it, you know, I’m stuck in here.’

The door opened, and there was the eleven-year-old. He had been dressed by his mummy. He wore an ironed white short-sleeved shirt and blue trousers; his shoes were black lace-ups. He himself wore a cheerful, open expression, his black hair cut short at the back and sides, sticking up somewhat on top. Behind him was Mrs Khan, smoking.

‘Hi, kids,’ she said. ‘Having a good time? This is Basil. That’s Anita, and that’s …’

‘Nick,’ said Nick, and ‘Nathan,’ said Nathan.

‘That’s right. You know Mrs Osborne, don’t you? Have you met Basil before? He’s not in your school yet, are you, Basil?’

‘No, Mrs Khan,’ Basil said. ‘But I’m in the same orchestra as Anita. She plays the violin and I play the cello, though I’m only in the seventh desk back. We’re rehearsing Dvoák’s Eighth Symphony and the Emperor Waltz at the moment. The cello’s not really my main instrument, though. My main instrument’s the organ, but you can’t play that in orchestras apart from a few pieces. For instance, did you know Mahler’s Eighth Symphony has a part for an organ?’

‘I never knew that,’ Mrs Khan said, puffing on her cigarette. ‘That you were in the same orchestra as Anita. We must have a word with your mum, and then we can pick you up together rather than both turning out every week. That would save a lot of effort.’

‘Oh, it’s not an effort for Mummy,’ Basil said. ‘She says she enjoys the drive and I’m happy to be with her as much as possible, since the divorce, you know.’

Nick and Nathan exchanged incredulous glances of joy.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Khan said, with an air of distaste. ‘Of course. Well, I must be getting back downstairs. There’s lots of food there, on the tray, look – my daughter and these two haven’t started it yet. I’m happy to see she has some manners still. If there’s anything else you need, just come downstairs. Bina’s cooking in the kitchen and she’ll help you out, help you to find anything. There’s some dessert, which she’ll bring up when you want it, it’s her special dessert, you’ll love it. You’d make everyone so happy if you ate the salad, too, kids. Well, I live in hope. See you all later.’

She left, closing the door.

‘Is this your father’s study?’ Basil Osborne said. He went round the room, looking in particular at all the books. ‘What do you think of the Emperor Waltz, Anita? It’s hard, isn’t it, harder than you think it’s going to be, but it’s satisfying when you get it right. I didn’t think I knew it, but I’d heard it before, somewhere. I know you, I’ve seen you a lot, but we’ve never said hello or anything like that.’

Anita was looking at him with disbelief.

‘So, Basil,’ Nick said heavily. ‘You play the organ.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Basil said. ‘I don’t have one at home, of course! I have to go and practise it in St Leonard’s Church, you know, the one up by the bus terminus. They let me come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school. Shall I sit here?’

‘Is it a big organ?’ Nathan said. ‘Do you like a big organ, Basil?’

‘Well, I’ve seen bigger organs, perhaps in cathedrals,’ said Basil. ‘But I’ve never played a really big one, I’ve only played on quite medium-sized organs, like the one in St Leonard’s. Is that food for us? Golly. It looks delish. Can we start on it or are we waiting for someone?’

‘Does it give you a lot of pleasure,’ Nick said ‘When you sit on a really big organ.’

‘Well, I don’t know that the size of the organ makes all that much difference,’ Basil said. ‘But I wouldn’t know. It’s true that even a moderate-sized one, when it’s going at full tilt, can be really exciting.’

‘So when you see a big organ,’ Nathan said, ‘I bet you can’t wait to sit on it.’

‘I don’t know that that’s really what organists think,’ Basil said, puzzled.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Anita said. ‘They’re being horrible, don’t pay any attention. Do you want some food? There’s plenty. That’s like lemon squash or you can have some Coke. There’s some like orange juice as well.’

Basil scrambled up from the beanbag and started filling his plate with food. It was as if he were in a race and might end without enough.

‘Take your time, man, take your time. Ain’t no ting,’ Nathan said.

‘You talk like black people do,’ Basil said gleefully, with an air of discovery. ‘There’s a boy in my class called Silas who comes from Jamaica, at least his parents do, he was born here, and sometimes he talks like his grandmother talks and he sounds just like you do. This looks really good, I like everything here. It was nice of your mother to make all this food specially for us.’

‘Yes, she knew how to make food that appeals to people who talk like a boy called Silas’s grandmother,’ Anita said. ‘Ah, Basil, you make me laugh, you really do.’

‘That ain’t true,’ Nick said. ‘Do I look I’m laughing, man?’

‘True that,’ Anita said, in Nick and Nathan’s style. Then she went into hostess mode. ‘Take your plate and sit down, Basil – there’s plenty of food, you can go back for more later. And some squash? Or Coke? There’s more downstairs if we finish this bottle.’

‘Like I say, man, take your time, ain’t no ting,’ Nick said.

‘Skeen, man,’ Nathan said. ‘Is it time to get wavey, man?’

‘Because Anita, that OJ, that Coke, that lemon squash and shit, well, I look forward to that, but there is something that you can put into those things to make them a less long, alie?’ Nick said.

‘I have literally less than no idea what you’re talking about,’ Anita said. ‘Anyway.’

‘Anita,’ Nick said. ‘Have you got any vodka that we can maybe put into the OJ?’

Anita looked from one to the other; she did not look at Basil, who had a samosa in hand and was, frozen, examining them all with interest. ‘Have I got any vodka?’ she said.

‘Vodka, yeah,’ Nathan said. ‘I know you do, girl.’

‘Is there anything else with your banter? Some like rum for the Coke or some gin for the lemon squash and shit or anything else completely random, you know what I mean?’

‘Oh, man, who’s the fool now, bro?’ Nathan said.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Basil said. ‘I don’t think it’s a very good idea if your parents come upstairs at the end of the night and you’re all stinking of booze and can’t get up because you’re so drunk. They’ll smell it on you straight away. I could always tell when my daddy had been drinking because you could smell it on him, even the next morning, and he always said, Never again.’

‘And I suppose he did, though?’ Anita said.

‘Yes, he certainly did, sometimes in the same evening as the morning when he’d said, Never again or sometimes the next day. That was certainly a pie-crust promise.’

‘That was what are you even saying?’ Nick said.

‘That was a pie-crust promise, I said,’ Basil said.

‘What the fuck is a pricrust promise?’ Nathan said.

‘Not pricrust, pie-crust,’ Basil said. ‘It’s like the crust of a pie. Easily made, easily broken. Have you never heard that before?’

‘No, I ain’t never heard nothing like that before, man,’ Nick said. ‘Did you hear it when you were sitting on some massive organ, you might have misheard somewhat, man.’

‘Yeah, you so pricrust,’ Nathan said to Nick. ‘Easy to break, you are.’

‘So, boys,’ Anita said. ‘I’m not going to give you rum, because, you know, he’s right, it smells when the parents like come upstairs at the end of the evening? And gin less so but still it smells in the room and they’re definitely going to come in in some like totally random way and they’re going to like smell it? But vodka, that’s cool, we can put a little Mr V in our Mrs OJ and they won’t smell that. I’ve done that before? Like this one time at like my friend’s house, this is my friend Alice, we got like so wasted, and no one could tell, though her mum, the next day … We can do that, sure.’

‘I’ve never had vodka,’ Basil said, with the air of a reminiscing old colonel. ‘I’ve had a glass of champagne at my uncle’s wedding, when he got married to Carol, that’s his second wife, and once Polly, who’s my daddy’s girlfriend, she let me taste a bit of her margarita –’ and as Anita left the room, he turned to Nathan to go on ‘– because she likes making herself cocktails before dinner and I was there one night on a Saturday and my mummy was supposed to pick me up, only she thought that my daddy was supposed to bring me over, and I was still there when Polly had made her margarita and was putting their dinner in the oven – they get readymeals from Marks & Spencer, my daddy says Polly can’t cook and they like different things. I didn’t know,’ Basil went on confidingly, turning from Nathan to Nick, as Nathan, open-mouthed with disgust, got to his stockinged feet and followed Anita out, ‘I didn’t know about the margarita, whether I liked it or not, it was really strange. I don’t know what was in that, it was more of a mixture. But I’ve never had vodka. Oh, and once this boy in our class brought a can of beer to school and we all had a taste, I really don’t know why people like that, it was horrible.’

‘Yeah, you talking to yourself, man,’ Nick said. ‘I don’t know why you think anyone in this room even listening to what you

4.

‘Well, that is kind of you,’ Vivienne Osborne was saying. ‘Just a very weak one. I’ve been so looking forward to this, I can’t tell you – I’ve had such a week at work.’

‘I do like your blouse,’ Shabnam Khan said.

‘It’s new, actually,’ Vivienne said. ‘I bought it only yesterday in Marks & Spencer – I shouldn’t say, but we all do, don’t we? It’s such good quality, and much better than it used to be, I mean from the point of view of fashion. You really wouldn’t know sometimes that it wasn’t from some Italian designer in Bond Street.’

‘What do you do, Vivienne?’ Charles Carraway said.

‘Me? I teach economics at one of the London colleges – you won’t have heard of it, I won’t even embarrass you by asking you.’

‘Try me,’ Charles Carraway said drily.

‘Oh, I shall, I shall,’ Vivienne said, with a lowering of her head, a glance upwards with her eyes that dated her to the early 1980s. She had seemed, initially, confused and unprepared as she had come in, handing coat and umbrella and glimpsed son over to Shabnam as if she had thought that Shabnam might be the housekeeper named Bina. Now she appeared to have resources of flirtatiousness, directed for the moment at Charles Carraway. ‘It’s called London Cosmopolitan University – people say it sounds like a cocktail. So you haven’t heard of it and now we can move on.’

‘I think I do know the name,’ Charles said. ‘Is it in Bethnal Green?’

‘Close,’ Vivienne said. ‘Oh, thank you so much, a lovely weak gin and tonic. Perfect. No, we’re in Fulham, actually. But I’m thrilled that you’ve heard of it. Thank you so much –’ she gestured with her drink, which spilt a little ‘– for asking me. I’ve just recently been going through the dreaded breakdown-and-separation-and-divorce from my husband,’ she explained, turning to Caroline Carraway and making quotation marks in the air, ‘though, Heaven knows, there wasn’t much to dread about that, it was really quite a relief in the end. We had a long period of not getting on, then of him moving into the spare bedroom, then of spending time avoiding each other in the house, I think he ate at the Chiswick Pizza Express every night for a month, and then his girlfriend, who I wasn’t supposed to know about, moved to a slightly larger place and he decided to move out. It was really not just a relief but a real pleasure for Basil and I when my husband moved out. That would have been two years ago. But nobody asks a divorced woman with a great lump of a son out for dinner. This is so kind of you – I mean to make the most of it. And you must come round to mine for dinner too! Very soon. Single women can entertain and make a success of it, I mean to show you. You have a son, don’t you, Caroline?’

‘They’re upstairs,’ Caroline said. ‘Actually, there are two. They’re twins. Do you like it, there, at the Cosmopolitan University?’

She had tried, apparently, to say the name of the university without altering her tone; she had almost succeeded.

‘It is a silly name, I know,’ Vivienne said. ‘But they decided when they turned into a university to appeal to Asian students, students from Asia I mean, which was very forward-thinking of them, and now we’re all quite used to the name and hardly notice how silly it is any more. Well, it would be nicer if my ex-husband, soon-to-be-ex husband, no, really ex-husband now, of course, didn’t also work there, so I see him all the time and occasionally have to deal with him. He’s the registrar. So I’m looking for another job, somewhere else.’

‘It shouldn’t be hard,’ Michael Khan said. ‘Economists must be so in demand everywhere, these days, with things in the shape they’re in.’

‘Oh, thank you, thank you, but I’m not really that sort of economist,’ Vivienne said. ‘But it’s nice of you to say so. The thing is, after my husband left, it was really an immense relief. For Basil, too – Basil’s my son, Shabnam – Shabnam? It is Shabnam, isn’t it? You get good at names in my trade. Now, you know, this is an awfully unfashionable thing to say, but I really am enjoying being single, for the first time in years, decades, since I was fifteen perhaps, maybe ever! Anyway. Basil, too. Well, that is kind of you – I will have another drink, a very weak one, though, please, Michael.’

‘And an olive?’ Caroline said, passing over a ceramic bowl. She herself would not touch olives, death to the digestion, straight to the hips.

‘Thank you,’ Vivienne said, hovering and then judiciously taking one, as if she were judging produce in the market. ‘The truth of the matter is that

5.

‘Give it me in my Coke,’ Nathan said. ‘I don’t like that OJ, I drink Coke, me.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Anita took her half-full bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and poured an inch into a glass. ‘Vodka and Coke, that’s a terrible drink, that’s a really like thirteen-year-old’s drink when you’ll drink anything? Oh, I forgot, you are thirteen. And you, Nathan, what do you want?’

‘I’m Nick,’ Nick said. ‘That’s Nathan. Can’t you tell us apart?’

‘No, I can’t remember,’ Anita said. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m going to have some vodka with OJ,’ Nick said. ‘That’s how you drink vodka, fool.’

‘I’m drinking vodka how I like it,’ Nathan said. ‘Fool.’

‘And you, Basil?’ Anita said. ‘Do you want to try some?’

‘It’s not horrible, is it?’ Basil said. ‘But just a little bit, so I know what the taste of it is like. I don’t want to become addicted or an alcoholic. But just a little bit and mostly orange juice. It won’t taste horrible, will it, Anita? Promise?’

‘Promise,’ Anita said. She poured an inch or so into Basil’s glass; she dropped ice cubes into his drink; she took a slice of lemon from a plate where it had been sliced into half moons; she filled the glass with orange juice from the cardboard carton. She handed it to him, and Basil drank immediately from it, as if getting the drinking of poison over with.

‘Steady, mate,’ Nick said.

‘Mummy always said that I ought to be given the taste of alcohol when I was younger, like Granny giving me a glass of champagne to make sure what it tasted like, because she said if I did – if I did I would get used to it and never have a problem with it. But Mummy said that Granny had done the same with Daddy. My daddy does drink a bit too much, I think, and when he’s been drinking, he has a tendency to light a cigarette or two, and that I just don’t understand one bit. You know what? I really quite like this. You can’t taste the vodka, though I don’t know what vodka tastes like, it just makes the orange juice taste really orangey. I could drink this all night. Does it do the same for your Coke, Nathan?’

‘I’m Nathan, fool,’ Nathan said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Basil said, puzzled. ‘That’s what I called you.’

Nick brought his knees almost to his chest with laughing. ‘Ah, he got you, man,’ he said, punching himself on the breastbone. ‘He got you. He said does it do the same for your Coke, Nathan, and you said I’m Nathan, fool, though he’d said Nathan, and you weren’t listening, man, you just know everyone’s going to call you Nick when they mean Nathan, you don’t own your name, man, this wallad, he owned you, wallad.’

‘The fuck up,’ Nathan said. ‘Ain’t amusing, wallad.’

‘That was pretty funny,’ Anita said. ‘He was so like cross, too? Do it again, do something funny, Basil.’

‘Well, I can do this,’ Basil said, and he pulled a face, his long lower lip out and his hands to his ears. But they looked at him and did not laugh. ‘Most people think that’s awfully funny, it’s my best face. I can’t be funny to order. I didn’t know I was being funny when I called him Nathan, because that’s his name anyway. Mostly it isn’t funny when you call somebody by their right name, so I don’t know why it was funny then. I like this drink, Anita, can I have another one?’

‘Take it steady, wallad, take it steady,’ Nick said. ‘That stuff is lethal, man. You going end crunk in five minutes you take it like that. Wavey, man, wavey.’

‘This ain’t bad,’ Nathan said. ‘Vodka/Coke, it’s sick, man. But I want something better, me, I want me a safe ting.’

‘Happz, man?’ Nick said, and made that gesture with his hands, a casting down of a viscous liquid, like Spiderman throwing jizz to the floor.

‘Alie,’ Nathan said. ‘I want me a safe ting.’ He wailed upwards as if in song.

‘Oh, my God,’ Anita said. ‘Keep it down or my dad’ll be up and he’ll like know you’ve been drinking, it was like at my friend’s house once, this is my friend Alice, I was just saying, we brought in this bottle of voddie and asked her mum just for a couple of cartons of Tropicana, and we like just, this is like four of us, me and Alice and Katie and Alice, the other Alice who we don’t really like that much, you know what I mean, but we were like getting out of it, and making all this like noise, you know what I mean, and suddenly there’s this amazing noise on the stairs, like a herd of buffalo coming upstairs, and it’s like Alice’s dad telling us to keep it down, but we managed to like shove the bottle under the bed just before he came in so that was just about OK.’

‘I want me a safe ting,’ Nathan said, still crooning what he had said, but more quietly.

‘Here it is,’ Nick said, standing up. His jeans hung down below his buttocks, showing a pair of red 2XL underpants; he reached down and from his back pocket extracted the small bottle labelled Jungle Juice.

‘Well, you’re not going to get at all drunk on a tiny bottle of that,’ Basil said, in a mature, scoffing voice.

‘You don’t be drinking it, man,’ Nathan said. ‘You watch and learn, my friend, watch and learn.’

‘I can’t believe that you’ve brought some poppers out with you. It’s like we’re in a gay disco circa 1996,’ Anita said. ‘Where did you get that, your boyfriend?’

‘Fuck you, man,’ Nick said, giving it to Nathan. ‘Ain’t no gay ting.’

‘That is like so gay,’ Anita said.

‘It’s safe, man,’ Nathan said. He grinned; he unscrewed the lid of the bottle. He placed one forefinger against one nostril, and put the bottle to the other where he sniffed noisily. He put another forefinger to the other nostril, and sniffed in the other nostril. He clamped his thumb to the top of the bottle, and handed it to his twin. Nick did exactly the same, going from right nostril to left.

‘That stuff smells awful,’ Basil said. ‘It smells like disgusting old socks or something. Why would you want to smell that to enjoy yourself?’

‘I’m going to have to open the fucking window now,’ Anita said. ‘My God, I can’t believe it.’

‘But it just smells so awful,’ Basil said.

‘Safe, man,’ Nick said, smiling in a watery, wobbly way to Nathan. They raised their fists and, with some care, managed to bring them together.

‘You’ll like it when you get old enough to try it,’ Nathan said to Basil.

‘I look forward to that,’ Nick said. He was quite serious, but Nathan shook his head and laughed.

‘I look forward to that. Man,’ he said. ‘This stuff is the stuff.’

‘Yeah, the gay stuff,’ Anita said. ‘You have literally no idea how gay you look, passing that stuff between you.’

‘It gets you high, man,’ Nick said. ‘It ain’t no gay ting.’

‘Don’t you know what it does?’ Anita said. ‘It’s a gay sex thing, you sniff it and it makes you want anal sex. That’s why gays always sniff it like the whole time. You get it in gay sex shops.’

‘Yeah, that’s it, my girlfriend, she always wants to sniff it before we have anal sex,’ Nick said. ‘She can’t get enough of that gay anal sex, man.’

‘Yeah, mine too,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s like I wanna sniff that and then I want it up my backdoor pussy, Nathan, yeah, I don’t know if I can take it, it’s too big, man, oh, yeah, I love that gay anal sex, man.’

‘She loves anal sex once she’s had some poppers, you see,’ Nick explained.

‘What in the world is anal sex?’ Basil said. ‘I’ve never heard of anal sex. I know all about sex, we had that in class last year, but we all knew about it anyway – I heard about it from Mummy when I was maybe seven or eight, and then some boys in the playground tried to tell me, but they got some of it wrong. But I’ve never heard of something called anal sex.’

Nathan went through it, his head lolling back and forward. When he had finished Basil said nothing.

‘That was like a horror story,’ Anita said. ‘You’d never guess in like a million years that anyone did that because they thought they would enjoy it.’

‘Yeah, you’ve done it, I know you have,’ Nathan said. ‘Yeah, like Basil here, sitting on a massive organ and loving it.’

‘That is none of your business, little boy,’ Anita said. ‘What Marco and I do in the context of a mature loving relationship is really none of your like business.’

‘Yeah, she’s done it a million times, the sket,’ Nick said. ‘Yeah, ’cause you don’t get babies if he jets his beans up your curry-chute, is it. Hey, Anita, have a sniff on it, it’s good stuff, it goes with your Mr V and Mrs OJ.’ He made an unkind imitation of her voice.

‘Oh, I can tell,’ Anita said, ‘that I’m just not going to have any peace until I have some of your awful drugs. You know what my friend Alice says, the other Alice, the one who lives in Crimond Road? She says that if these drugs are legal, they’re basically random, they’re bound to be rubbish, even if you buy them in like a gay sex shop. The only good drugs are illegal drugs, according to Alice, you know what I mean?’

‘We didn’t buy this in a fucking gay sex shop,’ Nick said. ‘We got it off Chris Garry’s older brother Kevin, he gets it off the internet and sells it to us.’

‘So what do I do?’ Anita said, taking the bottle from Nathan. ‘I have a sniff here –’ she made a ladylike little noise ‘– and a sniff—’ and another one. ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘That stings,’ and holding one hand up to her eyes, she held the bottle out. ‘Put the lid on quickly, it smells awful.’

But Nick held back: he let Basil reach out and take the bottle, and in a quick, puzzled way, he sniffed too, first with one nostril, then the other.

‘Wagwarn!’ said Nathan.

‘Wagwarn!’ said Nick.

‘Wagwarn!’ said Nathan.

‘Wagwarn!’ said Nick.

‘Safe, man,’ Nathan said, taking the bottle from Basil and capping it. ‘Basil, my man, you did it, man. You is the bossman, Basil, respect.’

‘Oh, that is strange,’ Basil said. ‘I feel all wavey now.’

‘Wavey, man, he said wavey,’ Nick said, laughing.

‘No, I really do, I feel wavey,’ Basil said, ‘my hands are almost wobbly, I don’t know why. But I don’t feel that this is like being drunk would be, well, maybe a little, but I feel wobbly, I don’t know why.’

‘I can’t believe you just like gave—’

‘I know why you is feeling a little bit wavey,’ Nathan said, ‘it is because ten seconds ago you had a massive snort off the poppers. Now give me

6.

‘and in the end I suppose I spent about forty-eight hours on it,’ Carraway was saying. ‘It was a whole weekend, dawn till dusk, and in the end,’ he burped sadly, and looked down at his plate, smeared with rice and gravy, looked down at it with the sad realization that he had in fact told this story before, told it earlier in the same evening to the same people, wondered only whether he had told it when the fat divorced woman had been there, drawing some comfort, anyway, from the thought that one person round the table hadn’t heard it before, if he had told it before, which he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of, ‘in the end, I was really proud of it as a piece of work.’

‘He’s an odd boy in some ways,’ Vivienne was saying on the other side of the table, not listening to Carraway at all, ‘I would say rather old-fashioned. I don’t know who he takes after. He has hobbies in the way that children, these days, don’t seem to have hobbies, real, old-fashioned hobbies. Do your boys have hobbies?’

‘Hobbies?’ Caroline Carraway said, with a sharpness in her voice. ‘What do you mean, hobbies?’

‘Oh, things to pass the time, hobbies, you know,’ Vivienne said. ‘My son has half a dozen, and a strange couple of collections, too. It seems so old-fashioned nowadays – he plays the cello and the organ, he keeps a record of the morning temperature, he’s done that for years now, since he was seven. He did all the usual things that children do, like getting obsessed with dinosaurs, only with him it was cactuses, cacti I should say, he always corrects me.’

‘No,’ Charles Carraway said heavily. ‘I don’t think Nick or Nathan do any of that, actually.’

‘Can Bina take your plate away, Vivienne?’ Shabnam Khan said.

‘This was truly delicious, Shabnam, delicious – thank you – thank you! Well, children are all so

7.

‘time we were at my friend’s house, my friend Alice, it was amazing,’ Anita was saying.

‘I don’t know,’ Nathan was saying. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘This is this one time when her boyfriend Jonah wasn’t there, because he’s like always there, he and she, they’re like always all over each other with tongues and shit.’

‘I don’t know what you said,’ Nathan said. He was insistent. ‘What did you say?’

‘What you saying, wallad?’ Nick said.

‘What did you say?’ Nathan said. ‘You said something like, This shit is booky, man.’

‘Yeah, man, I said this shit is booky, man,’ Nick said.

‘Oh, yeah, cool,’ Nathan said.

‘Am I just like talking to myself, or whatever?’ Anita said.

‘You don’t know what booky means!’ Nick said.

‘Yeah, I do, man, I invented it, wallad,’ Nathan said.

‘Yeah, well, what’s it mean then, you feel me,’ Nick said.

‘I ain’t dealing with you and you foolishness,’ Nathan said.

‘What’s it mean?’ Nick said.

‘Fuck you,’ Nathan said.

‘What’s it mean!’ Nick said, and launched himself at Nathan with a chicken samosa in either hand, grinding them into Nathan’s face. They had disintegrated by the time Nick finished.

‘Fuck you,’ Nathan said, brushing the food from his T-shirt and trousers.

‘It means like when you ain’t sure what’s going on,’ said Nick, ‘you think there’s like a conspiracy, you think it’s gonna lead to something bad, then you’re like This shit is booky, man, that’s what it means. I ain’t believe you don’t know what booky means, man.’

‘I know what it means, man,’ Nathan said with disgust.

‘This shit is booky, man,’ Basil said experimentally.

‘Poor little boys,’ Anita said. ‘I know where you can find something better than that poppers, though.’

‘Ah, fuck you, Anita, with your no more vodka and your Indian Cornish pasty or whatever,’ Nick said.

‘No, seriously,’ Anita said. ‘Look at this. My dad would go spare if he knew I knew about this.’

She raised herself from the floor, and went over to the desk. She pulled out the second highest drawer on the left, and awkwardly felt under the bottom of the top drawer. She tugged, and came away holding a small key attached to a strip of Sellotape. She made a mock curtsy.

‘Yeah, what’s that, the key to your mum’s sewing box?’ Nathan said.

‘No, little boy,’ Anita said. ‘It’s the key to the top drawer. My dad thinks I don’t know where he hides it.’

‘So what the fuck’s in the fucking top drawer?’ Nick said.

‘Oh, you wait and see,’ Anita said. ‘You just wait and see.’

‘I don’t think you should be doing that, Anita,’ Basil said. ‘I just don’t think so. If your daddy hid the key like that, he really doesn’t want you to be using it or knowing that it’s there even.’

She took no notice, and put the key in the lock and turned. She gave a little cry of triumph. She pulled something out, pushed the drawer to, and locked it again. She turned round. In her hand there was a small plastic sachet, half filled with some white powder.

‘Oh, my days,’ Nick said. ‘The fuck is that. That is never your dad’s, I don’t fucking believe it.’

‘He thinks my mum doesn’t know about it,’ Anita said. ‘He gets it and then he likes to have a little snort off it sometimes in the evenings when we all think he’s working up here. I saw what he looks at on the computer, and it’s all like lesbian porn – he has a snort of this stuff, and then he switches on his computer and watches these like whores going at it, and my mum’s like going don’t disturb your dad and shit, he’s working so hard at the moment, and I’m like trying not to piss myself like laughing.’

‘Man that shit is nang,’ Nathan said. ‘Yeah, this is like the best evening ever, turning into.’

‘Turning into, man, turning into,’ Nick said, and they bumped their fists together. ‘We is going to watch us some of that lesbian porn and get high. You ever see lesbian porn, Basil, my man?’

‘But what on earth is that stuff?’ Basil said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that. What on earth is Mr Khan doing hiding it in his top drawer?’

‘Ah, well,’ Nathan said. ‘We is going to show you just how excellent a ting can be, and you is going to have yourself a good time.’

8.

‘We’ve just stayed too late for the children,’ Vivienne was saying, helping Basil into his overcoat at the end of the evening. ‘Basil gets so tired, he sort of stops making sense altogether.’

‘Poor little boy,’ Michael Khan said. ‘I hope you all had a good time, children.’

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Khan,’ Nathan – or was it Nick? – said. The three others were in a line on the stairs, Anita’s head in a shadow from the upstairs landing. ‘We had a smashing time.’

‘Come back soon,’ Anita’s disembodied voice said. Michael Khan gave her a glance, a suspicious glance. What had happened? he seemed to be asking himself; but then his head clarified, and he smiled again.

‘Come on, you,’ Vivienne said to Basil. ‘It’s time you were in bed, really.’

‘Time, yeah,’ Basil said, his head lolling from side to side with tiredness. ‘That is just so wrong.’

‘Poor little boy,’ Shabnam Khan said, laughing a little. ‘Your car’s not blocked in, is it, Vivienne? It was lovely to see you, too, Charles – Caroline. I guess the next time we see you, we’ll have been to Washington State, we’ll have lots of lovely boring whale stories to tell you.’

‘We look forward to that,’ Charles Carraway said. ‘Come on, boys. Had a good time, did you?’

‘Peak, man,’ Nathan said.

‘Yeah, peak,’ Basil said.

His mother gave him a startled glance. And then, without any intervening time, Basil was apparently being driven away. He felt drowsy but full of ideas. It had been very nice, he had told his mummy. The others had been fun. It had been a nice evening. And she had had a nice evening too. He wasn’t going to tell her everything! About the vodka, no fear. She didn’t need to know about that. And the other stuff, that came later, the poppers, he wasn’t going to mention that. There would be a fearful row if he mentioned that, or if she found out about it somehow, she or Daddy. It had been strange and he wasn’t sure at first he liked it. But he had liked it, it had been fun to feel all wobbly and wavey for five minutes. The other stuff, the stuff that Anita had given them from her daddy’s secret drawer, the white stuff called cocaine, he didn’t think that was so good. She had said that he might feel frightened and he hadn’t felt frightened exactly, but he’d wanted to talk a lot and he was worried afterwards, and it made his nose hurt, and it felt really strange, the idea of doing that. He wouldn’t be doing that again, no fear. But it was interesting to have tried all those things and to have found out about that thing called anal sex, which Basil had never heard of before and then to have seen it even later on, that had been really quite a coincidence and Basil felt quite grown-up to know about all these things. Basil remembered that those twins had said that they had bought the poppers from a boy called Kevin or a brother called Chris and their name was Garry. He was fairly sure that there was another brother at his school, a boy called Adam Garry, and on Monday he would surprise him by telling him that he would like him to get some of those poppers for Basil, too. There was the Christmas money which he would spend on it. And then there were plenty of people at school who would be interested to try it. You could charge 50p for every time someone sniffed it. He couldn’t wait to tell people how nice and strange it was, and they carried on journeying the short distance into the night.

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