remembered her near-religious attitude to literature; he seemed to see her, striding out below him on the path under the trees – tall and serious, handsome, with slanting, doubting brown eyes. But probably she’d sold her house by now, and moved away.
Gerald sat cross-legged to drink his tea and roll up, using for a flat surface a book he was reading, balanced across his knees. It was about the Neoplatonists of the early Christian era, Plotinus and Porphyry. He explained an idea from the book – how, in its work of imagination, inventing forms, the human mind replicates or continues the work of the world soul, inventing forms in nature. Paul didn’t smoke much dope these days – Elise didn’t like him doing it, she said it made him boring and made him snore – but this afternoon he needed it. The sleepy heat and the smoking brought back the years between his first and second marriages, when he was teaching in the language school. When Paul had moved to Paris, Gerald had followed him. The patterns of sleep Paul had developed in those days had been ‘disastrous’, so Elise said; he’d only had part-time hours at the school, often he’d stayed up reading, or talking with the little crowd of his friends, until three or four in the morning.
While Gerald talked, Paul found himself thinking about Pia’s pregnancy, not simply as a difficulty and a disaster. He had a vision of how dumbfounding it was, Pia’s originating as a tiny folded form invisible inside her mother, and now inside her unfolded realised self, starting the same thing over; forms folded within forms. How different it was to be male, to feel the unfolding come to an end in your biological self, which could not be divided. The role of the male in this endless sequence was an act of faith, however definite the science. A Frenchman had said to him once that the man’s role in making a child was about as much as ‘this’ – he’d spat on the pavement.
This train of thought may have all been a consequence of the dope.
– Your eyes are rolled up in your head, Elise told him when he arrived home. – That stuff Gerald smokes now is too strong for you, you’re not used to it.
James Willis came looking for Paul one afternoon when Elise was out at a sale with Ruth, and the girls were at school. Paul had been getting himself lunch in the kitchen – hunting in the fridge for an end of pâté, desultorily reading the Guardian , anything rather than sitting down again at his computer – when the boy was suddenly in the doorway, stooping, worrying about his dirty boots on the mat. In the barn, it had been too dark for Paul to take him in properly, his hunched awkward height, the adolescent hormonal shock still in his face, lips swollen with it, eyes bleary, hands hanging heavy. He was long and pale; when he spoke he addressed his feet. There was a stud in his lip, Paul saw, like the one Pia had taken out.
James said he’d come with a message from his father, who wanted them to cut back the aspen poplars on the border between their places. Willis’s next-door field was planted this year with elephant grass for biofuel. Apparently Willis thought that, because of the trees, the harvester wouldn’t be able to turn closely enough at the end of the field.
– If you don’t have a chainsaw, Dad said, he’ll loan you one.
– You’re joking, Paul said. – Your dad’s crazy, he’s really crazy. Those trees aren’t in the way of anything. Have you even looked at them?
The boy shrugged. – I’m just saying what he said.
– Tell him he’s crazy. And tell him not to dare to touch those fucking trees. They’re on my land.
– He says not.
Willis sending the boy with this message was a cruelty in itself; he must resent his son’s attachment, however tenuous, to an enemy household. Paul invited him in, fetched beers out of the fridge. Warily James stood drinking at the table.
– Your father’s really wrong, you know, about those trees. Whether
Gerald sat cross-legged to drink his tea and roll up, using for a flat surface a book he was reading, balanced across his knees. It was about the Neoplatonists of the early Christian era, Plotinus and Porphyry. He explained an idea from the book – how, in its work of imagination, inventing forms, the human mind replicates or continues the work of the world soul, inventing forms in nature. Paul didn’t smoke much dope these days – Elise didn’t like him doing it, she said it made him boring and made him snore – but this afternoon he needed it. The sleepy heat and the smoking brought back the years between his first and second marriages, when he was teaching in the language school. When Paul had moved to Paris, Gerald had followed him. The patterns of sleep Paul had developed in those days had been ‘disastrous’, so Elise said; he’d only had part-time hours at the school, often he’d stayed up reading, or talking with the little crowd of his friends, until three or four in the morning.
While Gerald talked, Paul found himself thinking about Pia’s pregnancy, not simply as a difficulty and a disaster. He had a vision of how dumbfounding it was, Pia’s originating as a tiny folded form invisible inside her mother, and now inside her unfolded realised self, starting the same thing over; forms folded within forms. How different it was to be male, to feel the unfolding come to an end in your biological self, which could not be divided. The role of the male in this endless sequence was an act of faith, however definite the science. A Frenchman had said to him once that the man’s role in making a child was about as much as ‘this’ – he’d spat on the pavement.
This train of thought may have all been a consequence of the dope.
– Your eyes are rolled up in your head, Elise told him when he arrived home. – That stuff Gerald smokes now is too strong for you, you’re not used to it.
James Willis came looking for Paul one afternoon when Elise was out at a sale with Ruth, and the girls were at school. Paul had been getting himself lunch in the kitchen – hunting in the fridge for an end of pâté, desultorily reading the Guardian , anything rather than sitting down again at his computer – when the boy was suddenly in the doorway, stooping, worrying about his dirty boots on the mat. In the barn, it had been too dark for Paul to take him in properly, his hunched awkward height, the adolescent hormonal shock still in his face, lips swollen with it, eyes bleary, hands hanging heavy. He was long and pale; when he spoke he addressed his feet. There was a stud in his lip, Paul saw, like the one Pia had taken out.
James said he’d come with a message from his father, who wanted them to cut back the aspen poplars on the border between their places. Willis’s next-door field was planted this year with elephant grass for biofuel. Apparently Willis thought that, because of the trees, the harvester wouldn’t be able to turn closely enough at the end of the field.
– If you don’t have a chainsaw, Dad said, he’ll loan you one.
– You’re joking, Paul said. – Your dad’s crazy, he’s really crazy. Those trees aren’t in the way of anything. Have you even looked at them?
The boy shrugged. – I’m just saying what he said.
– Tell him he’s crazy. And tell him not to dare to touch those fucking trees. They’re on my land.
– He says not.
Willis sending the boy with this message was a cruelty in itself; he must resent his son’s attachment, however tenuous, to an enemy household. Paul invited him in, fetched beers out of the fridge. Warily James stood drinking at the table.
– Your father’s really wrong, you know, about those trees. Whether
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