‘I didn’t do him a mischief upstairs. You could have gone up and changed him. I’ve seen you go up and down when you think no one’s here. You can.’

  ‘So we’re answering back, are we? I see I s’ll have to come and tek him.’

  To Marcus’s horror she did in fact raise her bulk from the chair and waddle slowly in his direction. He stood uselessly against the newel post: it was not in his nature to clutch William tighter: Mrs Orton rolled up at his side and the little bulging hands pulled at William’s shoulders. Marcus more or less hung on. Mrs Orton, still clutching at William, skidded on a rug and went down on the stone floor. So, between the two, did William. Marcus sat down on the stair. The baby lay still at his feet. Mrs Orton began to scream abuse, wallowing like a beached whale.

  Stephanie, her mind on the platonic aspects of the ‘Immortality Ode’, her body extremely anxious about William, came through the front door.

  There was a terrible silence and then Stephanie, books flung down, had scooped up her still son, who, simply winded, began to scream. Mrs Orton cried that she was sure she’d broke a bone again, it hurt something terrible, they must get the doctor, it was all the fault of that daft boy who wasn’t fit to be let loose, who expected to be waited on hand and foot, hand and foot, the pain was something terrible, get a doctor.

  ‘Marcus, please help her up.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Hold William, then.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust ’im wi’t babby, not after what’s just happened …’

  Stephanie gritted her teeth and said, ‘Can you get up if I pull?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘I’ll get a cushion. And the doctor.’

  After she had done these things, she took William from Marcus. She sat down, holding him close, shivering with fear and shock and guilt. Her hands were soaking.

  ‘He’s got no nappy on, either. Well, not to speak of. Where are his rubber pants? Who changed him?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Oh Marcus. Really. Oh Marcus.’

  She began to cry.

  Marcus went upstairs and shut himself in his room.

  Mrs Orton lay, moaning and muttering vituperation until the doctor came and pronounced her bruised but not broken. He and Stephanie assisted her up the stairs, where she took to her bed. He checked the baby, who had a grazed temple but seemed otherwise fit and cheerful. Stephanie kissed the graze and wept. There is something, peculiarly distressing about the first wound on new skin.

  13.

  THE MUMMIES

  ‘Do you dream?’ the psychiatrist asked Marcus, routinely.

  ‘I had a bad dream after I dropped the baby.’

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  They had been sitting in a circle, on upholstered chairs, their knees touching. It was a party game, his labelling mind more or less captioned it ‘party game’, though it was not clear whether it was ‘pass the parcel’ or ‘musical chairs’, or one of those obscene ones where you pass something with knees, or noses, or tennis ball between ear and chin, without dropping it. All the people in the dream had been stiff, upholstered, with clumsy skirted knees and thick aprons. Their knees had been touching. He had been one of them. He had lost what they had been passing.

  And then he was what was lost, crouched in the midst, and they were closing in on him, aged female players of The Farmer’s In His Den who had reached the point of ‘We all beat the Dog’ only they were kneeling heavily on him on the floor, shuffling together. They had faceless heads wound wholly in white cotton wool hair like those cactuses woven in soft grey filaments.

  They were spinning and unwinding themselves into strip after strip of bandage and noisome cloth, and with the cloth came their flesh, deliquescent. And he labelled them, the Mummies. They were covering him in what they wound off the squat bobbins of themselves. They were busy, busy.

  ‘I was in a circle of people. Well, women. They were squashing me. Their clothes came off. I called them Mummies.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t like the idea of mothers?’

  ‘Perhaps I don’t.’

  ‘Can you say why?’

  The next week, Marcus went home. He appeared one day in his mother’s kitchen, and said simply, as he could always have done, ‘I’ve come back.’ She cooked a chicken in his honour, and Bill shook his hand for a long time on coming in from school, but no more was said, except ‘I like the white paint, it’s nice to come home to white paint.’ Stephanie reflected distractedly on the fact that her gentleness, Daniel’s patience, Mr Rose’s expertise, Winifred’s love seemed inconsiderable moving forces compared to Mrs Orton’s bloody-mindedness and a dirty nappy. She felt that Marcus was in the world again, as much as he ever had been. Meanwhile, who would hold William if she were ever to try to finish the thought about the ‘Immortality Ode’?

  14.

  FIGURES OF SPEECH

  These were Alexander’s Bloomsbury days. He worked in Broadcasting House where, for the first time in his thirty-seven years, he was part of a non-educational organisation, with an office, a secretary, a salary, a hierarchy, a gentlemanly code of conduct. He was called an advisory producer, but did not exactly produce talks or drama. He was expected to have ‘ideas’. He drank with poets, gentlemen and peripatetic dons in The George.

  He was living as a temporary paying guest in a mansion flat rented by his friend Thomas Poole, who had moved from a Yorkshire training college to the Crabb Robinson Institute. His parents had kept, still kept, an hotel in Weymouth. He had gone from prep school to public school to Oxford to school-mastering, returning temporarily to the hotel and whatever room was vacant and convenient. He was used to being limited to one room in an institution administered by someone else. Life with the Pooles, even in the early days of tea-chests and too-brief curtains, was the nearest he had come to ordinary domestic life.

  The block of flats was between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street, made of red brick, with stone-framed sash windows and mahogany doors with polished brass. It was Edwardian and solid, designed as city homes for families with perhaps one or two servants. When the Pooles came the kitchen was still equipped with a system of electric bells and lights for summoning these people: little discs oscillated in a glass box above the legends: drawing room, master bedroom, nursery. It was not clear which rooms were which and the bells no longer worked. There were four large rooms and four small ones, opening off a long dark corridor. The servants’ quarters – kitchen, pantry, small box-bedroom – looked out onto a white-tiled well, spot-streaked, punctuated by window boxes, in which, on hot days, music and voices echoed. The Pooles were at the top of the building, on the sixth floor. The bigger rooms fronted the street, and through their glass bays could be seen the tops of London plane trees, flocks of pigeons and, in later years, the mystifying discs and cylinders of the Post Office tower as it rose over opposite roofs, stage by geometric stage. Alexander had a room at the end furthest from the kitchen. It was airy and bare and quiet. He had few things in it because he was only temporarily there. On his white walls he had his old posters, now under glass, the Picasso ‘Boy with a Pipe’, the Saltimbanques, the advertisement for his own Buskers, the Rodin Danaïde. To these he had added a poster from the London production of Astraea, the Darnley portrait in a border of Tudor roses. He also had smaller prints of the Van Gogh sunflowers and the Van Gogh yellow chair. In Cambridge Frederica was reading in Brideshead Revisited how Charles Ryder shamefacedly took down his sunflowers and turned them to the wall. Alexander was daily more puzzled and delighted by the sunflowers which he had seen without seeing for years. The print was a greenish yellow, unlike the paint it reproduced. Alexander had brought back a Provençal bedspread, a geometric floral print on a dark yolk-yellow ground, and he and the Pooles had chosen plain yellow curtains, a near-enough match. So the room was yellow and white, with a grey cord carpet.

  He had come to London as successful writers did, or successful characters, at the end of those exploratory novels which analysed and celebrated working-class values and virtues in the North, whose authors and heroes hurried down as fast as they could to the busy capital. The Pooles, too, were very deliberately leaving the provinces, making themselves metropolitan. They had left almost everything behind – the three-piece suite, the Wilton carpets, the glass-fronted bookcases, the family silver. Elinor Poole said to Alexander that the exciting thing was that the flat was flat, the rooms, all in a row, just rooms. You could sleep or eat or work in any or all of them. They furnished it with fitted cord carpets in silver and greys, with white paint, geometrically patterned curtains. Carpenters fitted streamlined shelves and cupboards. The children had bright Finnish blankets, scarlet, blue, yellow. They put up a Ben Nicholson print, a Matisse poster. Alexander liked it.

  He also liked the new richness and ceremony of their cooking. His first vision of Gower Street had been Henry James’s Glower Street, an unbroken dark grey line of Georgian terrace bordering wailing cars. On his daily walks to the BBC he discovered the glories of Goodge Street and Charlotte Street, Italian grocers smelling of cheese, winecasks, salami, Jewish bakers smelling of cinnamon, and poppyseed, Cypriot greengrocers overflowing with vegetables unobtainable in the North, aubergines, fennel, globe artichokes, courgettes, glistening, brilliant, green, purple, sunshine-glossed. In Schmidt’s amazing delikatessen you could buy sauerkraut from wooden barrels, black pumpernickel, wursts cooked and uncooked, huge choux pastries and little cups of black coffee. In Schmidt’s you paid for everything with little receipts at a central caisse presided over by an erect, moustached lady in black dress and lace. In Belloni’s tall Luigi spoke rapid Italian and rapid Cockney, and weighed paper cones of black and green olives, a tiny bag of sharp-scented twisted scraps of mace, a mozzarella in cool, wet, strawtied paper. It was urban, it was international, it was, or seemed, timeless. It was also a village, his village.

  These were the early days of Elizabeth David who taught a whole generation, dentally healthy, sensuously deprived, to see and smell and taste and make food.

  A civility of Alexander’s life at this time was the discussion, the repetition, of the detail of these cookery books with Elinor Poole. He shopped for her, emptying from his briefcase in the kitchen a packet of fresh ravioli, a bag of soft parmesan, a vanilla pod. Every day there was something new: mackerel with fennel, a stew of small squids, fresh-risen pizza. There was something splendid about this earthy life in the middle of a city. T. S. Eliot had observed austerely, in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, that a people needs not only enough to eat but a proper and particular cuisine.

  He gave up his early tactful attempt not to eat with the family. He observed that the Pooles were conducting their daily lives carefully and ceremoniously because they were afraid.

  Thomas, like Alexander, had been clawed by love, or sex, during the Long Royston Astraea. Anthea Warburton had been quickly and quietly relieved of Thomas Poole’s child in the summer of 1953. During the time Alexander had spent with her at the Mas Cabestainh he had never heard her express pain or regret. He had never heard her refer, explicitly, or implicitly, to Poole. By the time Thomas and Alexander came to discuss the lodging plan, Poole’s own period of articulate misery was over. He and Alexander drank a couple of pints in The Little John in Lower Royston where Poole remarked that if Alexander could see his way to lodging with them a bit he’d actually be doing them a favour, an outsider would help things along, things were a little sticky with the best will in the world. Elinor hadn’t really got over that business last summer. Alexander felt unable to ask what Poole himself now felt. An English tacit decorum prevailed. They spoke to each other of Dr Leavis and the common pursuit of true judgment, of how they would miss the Yorkshire moors, of the possible future use of television in education. Poole was nevertheless the nearest thing to a close friend Alexander had.

  At first he thought that the ceremoniousness was initiated and largely conducted by Elinor. There was a way in which it could be seen as a placating of her husband, a daily, consciously renewed offering of herself as wife and housewife. If it was to Alexander that she talked about new discoveries – a mandoline in Madame Cadec’s Greek Street cookery shop, an Italian pudding made of cream cheese, rum, and fine, fine ground coffee – it was always for Thomas that things were said to be made, acquired or done. She would show Alexander Dolcelatte, creamy but not ammoniac, exactly as Thomas liked it. Or anchovies from a dark wet cask in a Greek shop. ‘I don’t like anchovies myself, but Thomas has a taste for them.’

  Alexander saw that this solicitude could be read as aggression or reproach. This showed in the way in which the children were removed, gently and firmly, from areas of the flat where Daddy was said to be, or to be about to be, working. There were three children, Chris, Jonathan and Lizzie, eight, six and three, the boys with Thomas’s square brow, blond hair, straight mouth, the girl with fine colourless curls so that Alexander thought of mouse fur and its shadowy paleness and only then remembered that that word, for hair, was rubbed clean of any lively associations. The children, having no street to run in, also lived ceremoniously. They were accompanied to school and nursery school across Russell Square. They were accompanied to Bloomsbury Square Gardens, where they rode tricycles purposefully and collected fallen leaves. Alexander knew too little about children to realise how little these quarrelled. He remembered, seeing their art work, that Elinor had been an art teacher. A collage they had made – a glittering dragon, with fleshy elastoplast nostrils and a brilliantly sequinned, beaded, sinuous body – ran the length of the kitchen wall, woollen smoke twined above him. Things they had made – a cake, a papier-mâché dolphin – were ceremoniously shown to Thomas for his approval. ‘Look what we have done,’ she would say, setting him apart with the pronoun. And to Alexander, differently, constituting her audience and witness, ‘Look what we have done.’

  Thomas’s responses were also ceremonious. He thanked Elinor for the good meals, thanked with care and specificity, making it clear that he knew what work had gone into sieving the soup, timing the sauce, arranging the salad. He discussed the children’s works of art with them, and proposed expeditions to London things, the zoo, the clocks in the British Museum, the crystals in the Science Museum. The children’s lives were full of startling and interesting things.

  One morning over breakfast Alexander put it to himself clearly that communication in that flat was centred in, conducted through, things. He had no real idea what Elinor thought about Thomas, or Anthea, or indeed himself but he knew exactly what she thought about potatoes, coffee, wine. He himself was so much in the habit of rendering things into language that he found them hard to see or touch without some kind of mental naming and comparing, in words.

  He had a dim sense that it was possible to conceive of a state of affairs where this busy naming and comparing might not seem as much of a biological imperative as an unreflecting man might suppose. Working with words on a painter who was also an articulate writer had taught him that: you could see things before saying them, indeed without saying them.

  Breakfast was muesli with fresh fruit, fresh coffee in a dark green French filter pot, gold-rimmed, croissants, unsalted butter, home-made jam. The fruit changed with the seasons: dark burgundy cherries, gold-green greengages, wax-gold spotted pears, plums misted on purple-black. He watched Elinor arrange the fruits and then watched the fruits. Elinor grew her yogurt in a white bowl with a beaded muslin cover: these were days when the English had not in general seen any yogurt, let alone taken to having it delivered in sterile painted plastic pots. Alexander thought about its being a culture. It grew in the white bowl, differently white, a curded, sharp-tasting, glistening mass. It was alive – more than the not yet dead plums, with their breathing skins, were alive, though there was the germ waiting inside the stone. The breakfast table was a still life, with the easy life of vegetables and culture. ‘Thomas offered Elinor pale yellow butter: Elinor lifted the coffee pot: Alexander slid yogurt into the dusty seeds and flakes of his muesli. There were two lemons amongst the plums, to intensify the colour.

  How would one find the exact word for the colour of the plumskins? (There was a further question of why one might want to do so, why it was not enough to look at, or to eat and savour the plum, but Alexander did not wish to address himself to that, not just now. It was a fact that the lemons and the plums, together, made a pattern that he recognised with pleasure, and the pleasure was so fundamentally human it asked to be noted and understood.) There was a problem of accurate notation, which was partly a problem of sufficiency of adjectives. Do we have enough words, synonyms, near synonyms for purple? What is the greyish, or maybe white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine? How do you describe the dark cleft from stalk-pit to oval end, its inky shadow? Partly with adjectives: it is interesting that adjectives in a prose or verse style are felt to be signs of looseness and vagueness when in fact they are the opposite, at their best, an instrument for precision.

  A writer aiming for unadorned immediacy might say: a plum, a pear, an apple, and by naming these things evoke in every reader’s mind a different plum, a dull tomato-and-green specked Victoria, a yellow-buff globular plum, a tight, black-purple damson. If he wishes to share a vision of a specific plum he must exclude and evoke: a matt, oval, purple-black plum, with a pronounced cleft.