By Light Alone by Adam Roberts Page A

of course he did no such thing. Of course he smiled wearily and mumbled his thank yous. ‘No seriously,’ said Peter. ‘I know it’s not easy. But you’re doing the right thing. By staying behind, I mean. Something as important as this, you don’t want to leave it to underlings.’
    The blood would leap out of the wound in a cascade of fire-red droplets.
    ‘Quite,’ agreed Ysabelle. She was acting rather weirdly; spending a period of time in intense scrutiny of George’s face – an unnervingly close attentiveness – and then spending a longer period in embarrassed looking-away and a refusal to meet his eye.
    Pull himself together. He sat up in his seat, or tried to.
    ‘It’s awfully good of you all,’ George said, in a crumpled voice. Away in the corner the card-players began a three-part braying laughter-fugue. What could possibly be so horribly hilarious? No sane human being could be provoked to laughter of such profanity. And George had the sudden comprehension that nobody here was sane, that they were all mad, and the world itself mad to the core. It was one of those crystalline insights that come to us, suddenly, all of a bundle, when we are adolescent; but which, of course, become less and less frequent the older we get. But here’s the thing: an absence is a harder thing to hold in one’s head than a presence. Leah was less to him than this mouthful of gluey red wine, because the latter was inside his mouth right now; the fluid washing between his teeth and staining his striated tongue Persian-carpet-colours. The wine was actually there. Leah was – notionally – somewhere else. And feeling this disparity, on some level – although, to give him credit, without being fully consciously aware of it – George was prompted to stress the magnitude of his loss. Talk it up from its nothingness. Put a figure on it.
    ‘Ten years,’ he said, to the others. ‘Ten years is a long time. Little Leah, my,’ and he had to rummage mentally for an appropriate word, ‘princess, for ten years. It’s an investment of time , ten years.’
    ‘Mmm,’ grunted Ergaste, from his belly. Investment was vocabulary he understood.
    ‘I mean an investment of the heart,’ George clarified, although, of course, he didn’t. ‘Ah! My lovely Leah! She had—’ and, still, moved by impulses of which he was consciously unaware, he proceeded to itemize his daughter as a physical being. ‘The brown eyes. Such lovely dark brown hair – she wanted to grow it long, though Marie wouldn’t let her.’ With an unpleasant jolt in his breast, he realized that he was talking about her in the past tense. There is a horror barely concealed in the past tense. We all feel it. We treat that tense with wary respect, it and its myriad complicated grammatical variants. That tense is where all the misery of the universe is cached.
    George began to weep. The tears surprised him, dribbling from his eyes.
    ‘They’ll find her,’ said Peter, looking away. ‘They’ll find her, for sure.’
    You’re thinking: but when a person cries it is a ticklish calculation as to what proportion of tears are for the putative object of grief, and what is simply drawn from the infinite well of self-pity we all carry within us. Alcohol facilitates the emission of tears. That’s right.
    Ach! Ach! Ach!
    Afterwards Ergaste, with hitherto-unsuspected tenderness, linked arms with George and walked him up and down the balcony outside. As they strolled, the Englishman gave him – for some reason – a detailed account of the rituals of the Catholic Church. George didn’t understand why, but he listened as attentively as his drunkenness permitted, and found a strange comfort in the older man’s chatter. The eating of little coins made of bread, the drinking of wine, which is after all only a sort of investment of grapes over time from which the compound interest of alcohol has been earned. Prayers that are said. The priest in his expensive robes. George breathed