What We Can Know - 18

I left South Downs Harbour at eight in the morning. The ferry made it across to Ball Hill Quay in a heavy early-autumn mist. I took an electric bike across and was in Port Marlborough by midday. The mist had only partially lifted and seemed to soothe the usual quayside frenzy. Boats were waiting for the incoming tide. Parts of the straits had silted up and dredgers, like other heavy industrial equipment, were difficult to procure. High tide was the only way out for the bigger vessels. I waited in a pub making notes and nursing a herbal tea laced with a local rum made of beet sugar. After ninety minutes I went to find the Snowdonia ferry. It took me a while. I discovered it moored on the far side of a giant twin-masted barge. My boat was driven by four small electric motors and once I was on board, I learned that we would need to wait two hours after high tide for the batteries to be charged. The current overnight had been weak. I paid extra for a cramped bunkroom and slept.

I’ve had the same dream in various forms over the years, unsurprising, given my preoccupations. When I woke, it often raised my spirits. The common element was the poem. I have dreamed it on parchment and heard it recited, but this time it was on the printed page, in a book that someone passed to me. By the usual dream logic, I took it for granted to have it in my hands. I read the first two lines – clear, intense, rich in imagery and layered meanings. It seemed simple to commit them to memory. Of course, when I woke, they faded, but an impression of their beauty lingered throughout the day.

I was cheerful as I put on my shoes and went up onto the ferry’s passenger deck. The afternoon was still. The mist had been replaced by low cloud and everything – the sky, the smooth channel, the last of Marlborough Island’s coast – was in the same shade of grey. It was too cold to stay out long. I went back in to find a place on the cramped wooden benches and abandoned myself to the liquid sound of half a dozen murmured conversations.

Next to me was a man of about my age, and from the look of the scratched leather satchel on the floor by his feet, I guessed he was also heading to the Bodleian. We added our own quiet exchange to the mix. Lars Corbel was a professor of history at UC, the University of the Chilterns, and his special subject was North America. I said I had heard that fewer big boats were making the crossing to Rockwell now. He nodded and told me that things were worse than people imagined. The Nigerian empire had its own reasons to keep on cutting the Atlantic seabed cables. They alone had the submarines to do it. Very little news was getting out of North America. Corbel had friends who spent time there and were lucky to have made it back safely a year ago. They told him that the old warlordism continued but it was no longer correct to speak of ‘armed groups’. Many had merged. Now large armies were fighting each other. Peace was fragmentary – a ceasefire might be negotiated in the north-west, while fighting flared in the Midwest. During periods of peace, the armies either taxed or plundered the civilian population. Each faction claimed to be the legitimate inheritor of the spirit of the once great nation, the greatest in the world. All fighters claimed to be true patriots. Every warrior loved his country with a passion and was prepared to die for it. Empires, Corbel said sadly, declined in pain. Take China. A thirty-year-old experiment in democracy was falling apart under pressure from a violent populist revolution wanting war with Nigeria.

He had written a paper comparing the situation in America to that of Europe from the time of Charlemagne in AD 800 to the early nineteenth century, when the highest prestige and divine right were associated with the precious mantle of the Holy Roman Empire. The professor’s conclusion was presented as an optimistic one, though the time frame seemed damning to me. In the end, after a thousand years, the lure of the ancient past, the weight of a dead hand, became irrelevant. After Napoleon imposed his will following his victory at Austerlitz in 1805, no one cared much for the Holy Roman Empire. The wars in America would exhaust themselves one day, new ideas would replace the American worship of the old dispensation. It might take centuries, but it would happen.

I suggested that unlike the American case, the Holy Roman Empire had conferred a degree of stability on Europe.

Corbel nodded impatiently. ‘Yes, yes. That could happen one day in North America too. But what interests me is the persistence then collapse of an idea.’

He politely asked about my own work, and I told him. He said he had sometimes wondered if the Corona had ever existed. I assured him that it once had and that I was determined to find it. Corbel said that long ago he’d had a passion for Blundy’s poetry, but it had been many years since he had read him. He quoted the opening lines from ‘In the Saddle’. We were getting on well.

The conversation moved on to a subject that had always interested me – the strange stability of the English language. We considered the orthodox notion that the internet, having survived so long, had imposed a lasting homogeneity.

Corbel said, ‘There’s an old saying that I like to repeat to my students. In human psychology, anything worth studying has multiple causes. So, if the English language happened now to be dynamic, we could just as plausibly claim that the internet was the cause. I’m not saying it had nothing to do with this stability, but we could add in the nostalgia for the old times that still infects the educated classes. Then include the Inundation, when the way we spoke and wrote froze. Now, cultural timidity stifles innovation in all kinds of areas.’

‘I’m with you on those,’ I said. I was thinking of Kevin Howard at Corbel’s mention of nostalgia. ‘And I like your multiple causes. So here’s another, one that you should appreciate. Over a hundred years ago it was the United States that had the cultural energy to drive change in English usage. In my research I’ve come across many historical anglophone writers who complained about the Americanisation of the language. That can no longer happen.’

‘Back then,’ Lars said, ‘there were all kinds of English on every continent driving change. Now people don’t move around much. Too dangerous. We don’t have intimate contact.’

I said, ‘America tears itself apart, and on our archipelago we’re as peaceful and dull as a Hampshire parsonage in a Jane Austen novel. Perhaps we’re a bit like the England of 1370, reeling from the Black Death but just beginning to recover.’

‘Here’s one more cause for the list,’ Lars said. ‘Since our dark ages ended, our populations have grown older. It was always the young who experimented with language.’

We talked of history and literature into the evening and the hours passed quickly. I liked Corbel. His mind was quick and open. He was generous in conversation, he listened as easily as he talked and he had a sense of humour, of fun. Later, we dozed uncomfortably through the night in the sitting position along with three dozen other passengers. The bunk I had paid for was now occupied by one of the crew. I did not feel brave enough to wake the man and tell him to go elsewhere.

It was not only conversation that shortened the journey. At dawn the captain came by to tell us that a following wind and a useful swell had powered us along and we would arrive at the quay beyond Maentwrog-under-Sea an hour early. Corbel and I cycled to the Bodleian funicular station. This was my fourth trip and I had not yet lost my fascination with the mechanism that would raise us to the library. At the top station, a large tank fixed under a carriage was filled with water from a stream. As tank and carriage descended on a looped chain down a railway track, their combined weight pulled our carriage and its empty tank up along a parallel track. When the journey was complete, the tank at the bottom was emptied, the tank at the top filled, and the process was repeated.

We had the handsome oak cabin to ourselves. As we rose to our destination a thousand feet above the sea, I challenged Lars to derive a lesson for humanity from the funicular’s ingenious machinery. He pointed through the window at the track up ahead. We were about to pass the descending carriage.

‘An optimist’s charter: we see our same old mistakes coming at us again, but their weight will see us to the top.’

We parted at the library reception and went to our rooms to catch up on sleep. At four o’clock I ate a lunch of bread, protein cake and mint tea, all that the library canteen could provide at that inconvenient time. I learned that the archivist Donald Drummond was unwell. It was a relief not to have another conversation about the phone numbers in Vivien’s journal.

A scholarly project extending over years involves much drudgery and boredom, easily forgotten when the entire undertaking is over. Only amnesia permits the folly of a fresh undertaking. I suffered as I stood in the doorway of the room I had booked. I needed it for its long boardroom table where I could set out the Blundy archive. Stacked on the floor were 135 identical sealed boxes, each one numbered and coded. So familiar. Twelve were Vivien’s, a misleading figure, for her life was at least as interesting as his. Seven of her boxes were dedicated to her Blundy years. Her academic work, drafts of papers and books, and research notes for her doctorate on John Clare were missing. She may have destroyed them in an act of self-obliteration when she gave up teaching to become her husband’s secretary. Or she never thought of herself as someone whose life and papers would be archived.

I surveyed the room from the doorway, reluctant to step back into the tangled lines of other people’s lives that I had foolishly made my own. I had been doing this too long. The Corona, even its long-dead author, even his entire era had no business squatting across so many of my best years. I was almost forty-five, a time when maturity and accumulated knowledge intersect with the last of youth’s lingering strength and quickness of mind. I should be doing something of my own. Something useful, for others. The loudmouths over in the Science and Technology building may have been right, the humanities were a waste of mental breath, of paper and ink, of entire lives. I sometimes compared myself and my colleagues along our corridor to medieval monks. But they at least were preserving a body of precious ancient knowledge that would one day stand against the violent tyranny of Christian thought. Whereas we were a diminishing band whose field, from Chaucer to Fisk, no one read but us. A thousand-year enterprise was turning to dust. It was history. History was history. Our students were right, the past was what they had to leave behind.

A fit of pointlessness gripped me and I could not move. I was a parasite, an intruder on the intentions and achievements of people who lived in another world more than a hundred years ago. They would not care for or about me if I’d lived then or if they had lived now. If I met them, I probably wouldn’t like them. I wouldn’t like the way they thought they lived on a historical summit with a privileged all-round view, when in fact they were ‘crouching’, as Blundy’s beloved Larkin had it, ‘below extinction’s alp’. I pretended otherwise, but I would never grasp how different they were from me. They were as shaped and trapped by their times, their material circumstances, their expectations as I was by mine. We were flies confined in separate bottles. When Francis Blundy was fifteen, in 1965, it would have been possible for him to have a conversation with someone born in 1885. Blundy’s contemporaries often declared that they could not comprehend the Victorians. If so, I had no chance of understanding Francis or Vivien. I could not describe them. Or judge them. Or believe they had relevance.

I forced myself into the room and sat down heavily on the nearest chair. The boxes were stacked three high around three walls. No point sifting through one when I would never find time to sift through them all. My notes already filled boxes of my own, piled up in a cupboard in our apartment. Our? I didn’t want to think about it, or of Rose. Not now. It was not going well between us. I had to do something, so I turned to the screen in front of me and tapped out on the loose, worn and yellowing keys the password that would take me into the Blundy files. The machine mirrored my paralysis. It was no more powerful and probably not much different in design from the late-twentieth-century computer Vivien used to type the email that now appeared on my screen. I must have pressed a box reference number without looking.

3 May 2003, 15:09

My darling,

It’s been eighteen days. I’m miserable. I’m going mad. I’ve just spent one of the worst nights of my life. At 3 a.m., Percy was shouting or screaming in his bedroom. I came out of deep sleep into a panic and rushed into his room. He had crapped in his bed. It was getting light when I finished cleaning everything up. How I loathed the human body, his, mine, everyone’s. We’re foul. All the time, he was trying to help and making it worse, spreading shit everywhere. When I’d got him showered and his bed ready, he said he wanted to get up, it was daytime and he had ‘things to do’. I lost my temper. I screamed at him to get into bed but he wouldn’t. I was desperate to sleep after being awake with him the night before, and the night before that. But I don’t dare leave him to go downstairs by himself.

So we got up. He wanted fish fingers. I said we didn’t have that kind of food and it wasn’t right for breakfast anyway. But he kept on. I shouted at him again and he started crying and wailing. A police car stopped outside. Two officers were at the door, a woman and a man. A neighbour had phoned. The police were OK. When they left, I wished they’d taken Percy with them. That thought stirred up my guilt and we went out for fish fingers. Once they were cooked, he wouldn’t eat them and had forgotten that he’d ever wanted them.

He begs me every day not to put him in a home, or in a hotel, as he calls it. He must have overheard something. He cries. I can’t possibly send him away but I can’t go on either. That home, the one that was almost bearable, gave the place away to someone else and I was relieved – it settled the matter. All the other council places are too grim and are also full. I couldn’t do it to him anyway. I couldn’t live with the knowledge of him a few streets away pining for me. I need to see you. Rachel is ill again so there’s no chance of my getting away. Write today, phone, whatever. But don’t come, not today.

I love you,

Vivien

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28 May 2003, 15:31

My darling,

What I realise is this: he’s already dead. His body keeps going, sort of, but the man I married has left. When he’s up and about, dressed in the clothes he always wore, and he looks sort of thoughtful, I think this is one of those weird remissions, a ‘retrieval of lucidity’ we once talked about. But as soon as he says something, the dream collapses. I know that if he had one of these retrieval moments it would frighten me.

So look, I don’t like to repeat myself, but I worry about how this is for you. You’ve got yourself involved with a woman in a nightmare that you’re having to share, when you could be as free as you like. Our times together amaze me. A late afternoon, an evening and part of a morning are like a whole existence on some gorgeous faraway planet. But our last meeting was eleven days ago, twenty minutes in the lane, and we don’t know about the next. It would nearly kill me I suppose, but if you have to go, this is the time, now, before we go even deeper – after which it would kill me if you decided on the rational thing.

I love you,

Vivien

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28 May 2003, 19:34

Dearest,

In haste from a shabby little dressing room, about to go on stage with Craig Raine.

The most erotic two words I’ve ever read are your ‘even deeper’.

Must get them out of mind. I have to give a talk.

Upwards to the deeper! We can do it.

My love,

Francis

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7 July 2003, 03:17

My darling,

I hate him. No, I hate what he’s been forced to become. I can’t handle his awful bulk, his dependence, and I hate the way his disease is sucking the life out of me. He barely knows who I am, but he wants things from me all day and never leaves me alone. I hate the pathetic anger fits and the stupid questions he keeps repeating. I can’t remember what it was like to love him and I hate Alzheimer’s for wrecking our memories of love. I hate my life. You’re better off without me. Just go.

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7 July 2003, 09:53

Dearest,

I’ll be there tomorrow, 2 p.m. Come out the back, into the lane. He’ll be OK for ten minutes.

Keep the faith,

Francis

I had read these exchanges and taken notes two years before and remembered them. There was no hint of what was discussed in the lane the next day, but soon after, Francis sent the name of a private care home ten miles from Oxford and Vivien made an appointment. He was playing a constructive role, though it was clearly in his interests to have Percy out the way and Vivien freed from twenty-four-hour care. On the day, Percy refused to go and Vivien cancelled. Francis must have offered to help financially. But he had written earlier to say he was broke because of the Barn conversion.

‘He was a wonderful man once,’ she wrote to Francis, possibly atoning for her ‘I hate him’ outburst.

Last night, when he was asleep, I went into the garden for some fresh air. There was the darkened locked-up shed, the workshop where he’ll never work again. I remembered the time I went in there to clean it up. Not long before our four nights together. I unwrapped the Vieuxtemps Guarneri violin he was working on. It looked finished to me, ancient and worn round those lovely dark raised edges as if generations had played on it. It felt so light in my hands. It was beautiful. To hold it was to remember what a brilliant craftsman he was (don’t be jealous again), how capable and kind and loving a man, and what a tragedy this is – for him, not me.

It was useful to be reminded of the burden on Vivien of the sorrow of Percy’s illness in the time before his death. I read all their emails of that time. Neither Francis nor Vivien could afford a private care home set in parkland with fountains etc., and yet he was telling her to make an appointment.

After Percy died, Vivien sank in grief and the affair seemed to be over. Francis went to the United States to teach and their parting must have been bitter, for the emails cease for many months.

But my purpose in being here again was to look at post-Dinner exchanges between Vivien and Harry Kitchener. I had to know if she or Francis let him see the Corona or make a copy. Old questions, but it was easy to miss a clue buried among so much material. October 2014 onwards was catalogued from box 110 in the Blundy archive, and from box 8 in Vivien’s. I lifted the two boxes onto the table and removed their tight-fitting lids and the perforated container of preserving chemicals.

It was as though I had stepped into a crowded room, or was watching a play for the hundredth time. Here were all the characters, the Blundy friends – John Bale, the vet, the botanist Tony Spufford, Graham Sheldrake, referred to by Francis as ‘the fainéant’, the do-nothing, and his wife Mary Sheldrake, the lauded novelist that time forgot, and Harriet and Chris Gage worrying about their baby, Jane Kitchener the potter and Harry Kitchener. Once they were people whose lives, friendships, loves and possessions were self-evidently real, while behind them and ahead, the past and future were populated by shades. Now they were the shades, ghostly traces, their lives reduced to words, confined for decades in the dark, buried under packs of absorbent crystals, inside boxes stacked on the bolted basement shelving of a mountaintop library. Back among them again, my mood improved. But I wondered sometimes if writing about them would be an act of betrayal. They needed me, and in return for my care, I needed them to whisper their secrets. Their journal entries and emails were not enough. Sifting through the remains of Francis and Vivien’s last years, together then apart, would at best give me only a small fraction of the truth. I needed them to tell me what was really happening between them.

Over the next two days I read through everything between October 2014 and October 2016 and found nothing, or nothing new. I read all the messages from Vivien and Francis to Harry and he to them. I searched for Harry’s name in everything that passed between Francis and Vivien. I did not neglect any of the social media available to them. If Harry arranged with Vivien or Francis to read or possess a copy of the poem, it must have been by telephone or in a meeting. Between Vivien and Harry, the messages, never that frequent, cease for a while after the Dinner. That was not surprising. Her irritation with Francis may have spilled over – the last thing she would have wanted was to have anything to do with her husband’s editor. In that time, she travelled frequently to London, but it was Peter she saw rather than Harry and Jane.

In the afternoon dusk of approaching winter, I walked along the cliffs beyond the funicular station. It was not only Corona business that had brought me here. I wanted to be alone. The unusual student walkout, the collapse of our course and the embarrassment it caused us in our dealings with the administration, which regarded us now as fools and failures – all of it had brought on a coolness between Rose and me. It was not mutual blame so much as shame and wariness. We had failed at this, and we might disappoint each other again. We would not have brought down such ignominy on ourselves had we not been so close, had we been living apart and more objective with each other. Disruption of any kind by students was an astonishing event and everyone was talking about it. The clamour amazed us. Hilarity, ridicule, contempt. That Rose and I were left staring at empty chairs was entertaining. The spokesman, Kevin Howard, became a local hero. His little speech, described as an ‘evisceration’, had been recorded somehow and a transcript circulated. The entrenched enemies of the humanities joined in. Our ‘History of AI’ course was yet one more example of a pointless project. The students were being failed by an outdated and exhausted mode of thought that was typical of the humanities in general. The various subjects had no proper theoretical underpinning. Their confident assertions were not subjected to conventional methods of proof. Published essays were not peer-reviewed. The best portion of the Humanities funding would be better spent in the Science departments.

Rose and I could no longer discuss the mess we had made and the damage we had caused. We could barely look at each other. When I told her that I was leaving for the Bodleian, she did not conceal her relief. So I took my walks after work along the clifftop path and wondered about our future. I made no progress. Surely, we could not end our marriage because of a failed course. That we were thinking of it suggested our bond was frail. That we blamed each other suggested the same. But I was in the right – this course was her idea, not mine. When I asked myself if I loved her, I felt nothing at all, neither for nor against her. That was an answer in itself. Then I should fight for our marriage and go on living with her. I mentally shrugged. If I moved out, I would be offered a ‘studio’ apartment, one small room and a shared bathroom along a corridor. Fine by me. Stay or leave, I didn’t care.

One evening, after dinner in the Bodleian canteen, I spent time with Lars Corbel. He was more engaged politically than I was. He was exercised by the state of the various Citizens Committees that ran the country at local and national levels. According to him, there was corruption and malign influence in the selection process for the committees. He was astonished by my political innocence. For all the calamities and change, Corbel said, our system was unchanged in 130 years. The same top two per cent, highly educated, highly trained, hard-working, met their spouses at elite institutions, ensured the best schooling and health care for their progeny to whom they passed on their capital and ensured their group’s continuation. They were cut off from the rest of us and were large and varied enough as a faction that they didn’t even think of themselves in those terms. They had taken over the high ground of the Pennine Chain, transforming it into a massive and wealthy suburb. They were barely aware of how they controlled almost everything. In the name of ‘fairness’ they had selected a preponderance of early school-leavers to serve on the Citizens Committees. Those with minimal education were more easily influenced by subtle input. ‘Ordinary’ people were predisposed towards hearsay, prejudice, ill-placed anger and an absence of objectivity. They were easily steered. Lars said that if there had to be a selection process, he would want it to go the other way. Education to a high level should be a minimum requirement to sit on a Citizens Committee. There were still enough freethinkers around to ask the awkward questions. The elite promoted and hid behind the wisdom of the common people. But early school-leavers made disastrous decisions.

‘Like what?’

‘Legalising cigarettes.’

‘Nicotine? Really?’

‘It’ll be law next year. Where have you been, Thomas! It’s grown under glass in the lawless south-west. The bureaucracy hasn’t the resources to fight smugglers and dealers, and the Treasury needs the tax revenue. The committee was a pushover.’

‘How do you know about this influence?’

‘It’s common knowledge!’

A conspiracy. Lars had a cranky side.

I said, ‘Have you tried it?’

‘Tobacco? You inhale it once and you’re addicted. Then you die of cancer.’

‘Why would an early school-leaver vote for it?’

Lars glared at me. ‘The administration gets the results it wants.’

I didn’t ask him how he knew this because I guessed the answer would be some variant of ‘common knowledge’. I would have liked to challenge him on the Citizens Committees, but I didn’t have the background and I hadn’t been following events. I never do. It was my old problem. I preferred the past. I moved Lars onto safer ground. We talked happily about Milton’s Comus .

Next morning Lars was due to leave. I waited for him in the reception hall. A librarian I did not recognise approached me with an envelope in her hand. She told me it was a note from her colleague Donald Drummond and apologised for not passing it on sooner. I stuffed it in a pocket of my coat. It would be an apology for his absence. I wished illness on no one, but I had been happier without him. At that moment, Lars appeared and I walked with him to the funicular. We stood to one side to watch the carriage water tank being filled from a pond fed by a small waterfall. I didn’t refer to our conversation of the night before. I’d had enough of being told I was politically naïve. I preferred a brief and pleasant farewell. Before he boarded, we swapped contacts and shook hands. I waited to wave as he receded down the mountainside, then I went back to work.

I suspected that I would be going through the motions. I had no hopes for fresh discoveries, but after an hour I opened box 98 of the Blundy archive and found a passage in a notebook from 2001, probably jottings of his towards a poem, though not one I recognised. Nothing relevant to my immediate research but it spoke to me and I took a picture.

Loss in general. Something pure. If you find that thing at last (which you probably won’t) it will not live up to your hopes. Always beyond reach, is the principle. This is how religions begin, with pursuit of the ineffable, and continue, as their gods become lost gods. Where is Thor? Where is Jupiter? Or God? (See Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium . The prediction and the longing are for God’s return.) If you love the natural world, you will think of loss. Paradise Lost. Expulsion inevitable. Childhood is the lost estate. Children at their happiest enact for adult onlookers a tragic foretelling – the estate will not last. Loss is the fabric of existence. All bad things are lost too. All torturers, all diseases. Lost civilisations, lost causes, lost symphonies, computer files, Edens, umbrellas, loves, landscapes, keys, wallets, pens, cats, innocence, sorrows, talent, parents, wits, reading glasses – a ceaseless parade of receding carnival floats.

Half an hour before lunch, I decided I could do no more. I’d had enough. There was nothing between Vivien and Harry beyond sparse and uninteresting emails. NAI’s proposal was a dud. I decided to leave a day early. I would have tried to phone Rose to let her know, but I knew that any conversation between us would be awkward. I packed at speed, made my closing arrangements with the librarian in my section and by two o’clock was making my own descent to the afternoon ferry.

We had a lucky escape as we made our way southwards along the Welsh coast. After five hours and only slow progress against a headwind, the skipper came to tell the passengers that there was a storm on its way and we might have to put in somewhere for safety. The sea was choppy rather than rough and no one was seasick as we dozed through the night on the hard benches. By the time the storm broke the next morning, we were already a few miles into the relative safety of the old Severn Estuary and soon we were passing between the piers and eerie ruined towers of an old suspension bridge. Then we turned east and later passed the Cotswold Hills to our left. We were not in the moorings at Port Marlborough until six that evening. All the bikes were out on hire. I had to choose between walking the twenty miles across Marlborough Island to Ball Hill Quay or waiting for a bike to be returned. I was tired from the journey and decided to wait. It was a lucky call, for I was on a bike by seven thirty and was on the last ferry to South Downs Harbour at ten.

It was one in the morning as I walked the last couple of miles to the campus into a strong wind. I was cold and exhausted. Rose was likely to be in bed. My plan was to sleep on the sofa in the living room rather than wake her. When I was at last outside our apartment door and reaching into my backpack for my key, I had an intimation that something was not right. Nothing extraordinary in that. I was coming into a tense situation. I indulged a wild fantasy that she might have killed herself and her body had been lying on the floor undiscovered for days. All my fault. I turned the key softly. There was a single lamp on by a low table close to the sofa. On that table was an empty bottle and two glasses with the dregs of red wine. The sofa resembled an unmade bed. Two cushions that belonged with it were on the floor. The bedroom door was closed. As I advanced into the room and the apartment door clicked shut behind me, I heard Rose’s muffled voice. ‘Shit.’ The sibilant sounded loud in the night. Then, the creak of the bed. Seconds later the door opened, and she was before me in her dressing gown, my wife, unkempt and beautiful, tenderly closing the bedroom door on her lover.

In the circumstances, any opening remark was going to sound stupid. She said in a flat tone, ‘You’re back early.’

It was spoken like an accusation. After a silence I said, ‘You have a visitor.’

She went forward to pick up the cushions and take the wine glasses and bottle to the kitchen sink, removing evidence, making everything OK. Or a step in that direction. She came towards me and stopped and used both hands to settle her hair, ruffled by the rut I had interrupted.

‘Tom, I’m sorry.’

I waited.

‘We can talk in the morning. You could sleep over at—’

‘Get him out.’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll do it.’

As I went towards the door, she stepped in front of me. ‘All right. All right. I don’t want violence.’

‘There won’t be if he leaves now.’

She went in, closing the door noisily behind her. I tossed my backpack onto the floor and sat. I heard voices, mostly hers interspersed with a monosyllabic male’s. Even in my worked-up state, I could not suppress my curiosity. There was a Jane Austen specialist on our corridor said to be active among faculty women in the residence blocks. Another possibility: when Rose and I had gone to one of the Science buildings for our course research, there was a big blond fellow, an AI coder. Rose had spent a long time with him. He would tear me to pieces in seconds.

The door opened and my wife came out first.

‘He’s going, OK?’ She made a downward pushing gesture with her hands to mime or promote a lowering of tension. Some hope. Her lover followed her out. I knew him instantly and was amazed. Kevin Howard of the kissable mouth and spotless complexion. I stood. It could have been taken for a mark of respect. Perhaps it was. What an achievement! His best friend, even his mother, would have thought that a woman like Rose was beyond his grade. There was a time when Rose would have thought so too. He would not meet my eye as he hurried towards the door. Rose took care to keep herself between us. As soon as he was gone, she went past me, also careful not to look in my direction, and locked herself in the bedroom. Silence settled over the apartment. I took off my coat and shoes, found a blanket in a cupboard and lay supine on the sofa, waiting for my heart to calm and sleep to come.