I said in a whisper, ‘A violin. Percy’s violin.’

  His copy of a Vieuxtemps Guarneri. Only Rose could know the meaning and weight of this. Her eyes shone with unspilled tears. I placed the package back within the moulded foam. The other piece was rectangular, and I guessed it held a document in a standard format. It felt comfortable and familiar in my hands. I cut the protective layers away. There were more crystals within each fold, and I let them cascade to the floor. I had been standing a long time and my injured leg was throbbing. I sat down. I felt the heat of Rose’s scrutiny. I had in my hands a heavy folder. Trembling, I opened it out and felt the paper’s unusual thickness, saw the first page and gasped, turned to the middle, then to the last page. I could not bear to read it.

  I looked up and into Rose’s eyes. I too was emotional. I tried to keep my voice steady, and I failed. ‘It’s not … It isn’t poetry. It’s prose.’

  I passed the folder to her and she began to read from the beginning. Then she too turned to the middle and read.

  There was silence, broken by the rustle of a page turn and the faintest creak of the boat’s timbers. From much further away this time, we heard the falling cry of the loon, a melancholy farewell sound but no answering call. A couple of minutes passed before Rose reached across the table and put her hand on my arm and said quietly, ‘It’s going to be all right.’ Then she took my hand and guided it onto her belly, onto a faint swell I had not noticed before, and while our captain looked on, smiling, Rose added, ‘And we are too.’

  Part Two

  I was late for my train. As I stood by my taxi fumbling for the fare – and the rural driver insisted on writing out a receipt – I saw across a picket fence the platform and passengers boarding. I heard the carriage doors slamming. I ran onto the platform of this village Victorian station as my train was pulling out. I stood to catch my breath and watched it go. I had been to visit an old friend, Martha MacLeish, a specialist in modern French literature who had been ill for months with a rare form of blood cancer. The clumsy photograph I took with a disposable camera sits on my desk as I write. She sits up in bed, books and papers scattered about her. Martha’s smile is determined. She had just been told by her doctor that she might live a year, possibly less. We had been holding out hopes for a cure, and sadness for her, for us both, must have made more vivid what I saw next by the summer evening’s orange light. The platform was deserted but for one figure at the far end watching the last carriage recede. Not much in itself, but this was a very small child, a boy of three years, I guessed. He was minute against the scale of the long platform and parallel railway tracks converging on the mouth of a distant tunnel. I looked around. There was no one. I went towards the boy cautiously, not wanting to frighten him. I knew what I was walking towards, the ghost I lived with, and I even wondered if I should turn round and leave. I felt the day’s heat coming off the stone slabs beneath my feet. Stupidly, I felt relief that the child was not a girl. He remained staring in the direction of the departed train.

  I stopped a few yards away and called in a friendly voice, ‘Hello. Are you all right? What are you doing here all alone?’

  He turned. Dangling from one hand was a limp soft toy. He wore T-shirt, jeans and trainers. Even without the immediate circumstances, I would have thought it was a sad and watchful face. Blond hair, pale skin that had not been touched by our recent heatwave. My questions made no sense to him. Or he didn’t know the answers. He was wary as he scanned my face. He may have already received that first knock to innocence and been warned off talking to strangers. My assumption was that a parent, or whoever, had been lifting an awkward pushchair onto the train when it started to move. I assumed a panicked parent would be making calls to the railway company or police and looking to get straight back on the next train.

  At last, the boy lifted his drooping and well-fingered companion closer to his chest. It was a green lizard with red spikes along its spine. ‘I’m waiting for my mummy.’

  In that English way, I automatically registered the fully enunciated ‘t’ and was already placing him in a social order. I disliked myself for it. I went closer. ‘Did she go on that train?’

  Again, to him the question did not make sense. After a few seconds he said, ‘I’m waiting for her.’

  At a sound I turned. At the far end of the platform, a few passengers were gathering for the next train. They were looking in our direction. I said, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Christopher.’

  ‘Shall I wait with you, Christopher?’

  As I spoke, I was taking my phone from my shoulder bag. I flipped it open, pressed triple nine and asked for the police. I thought the word might alarm the boy, so I turned away from him as I said it. A voice came on and I explained the situation and where I was. While I was speaking, I saw a man walking towards me at a confident pace. I broke off and said, ‘Hang on, I think someone’s coming to collect him.’

  What a relief. The little drama was over.

  As the man came up, he said, ‘Ah, so you found him. Thank you.’ He was a chunky-looking fellow with a broad face. Mid-thirties, I thought, quite well dressed, with a fawn linen jacket over a crisp white shirt, well-cut jeans and polished loafers.

  ‘I was just phoning the police.’

  ‘No need.’

  He went close to the boy and crouched down to speak to him. ‘Are you OK? Ready to come home?’

  The child’s expression did not change. He repeated, ‘I’m waiting for my mummy.’

  ‘She says come over and get you.’

  There was something about the way this was said, its speed, its grammar, that caused my relief to give way to the first soft whisper of anxiety.

  ‘She’s waiting. Let’s go.’

  As gently as I could, I said to Christopher, ‘Do you know this man?’ But the boy did not answer. He did not know what he knew.

  I said, ‘Wait a minute. Do you know his name?’

  The man stood between the child and me and came close. His arms were crossed. I thought he was about to be violent, and my legs went weak.

  ‘Course I do.’

  ‘Would you mind saying it, you know, to put my mind at rest?’

  ‘We’re grateful for your help, Miss, but don’t insult me.’

  My voice came out as a croak. ‘If you know him, tell me his name.’

  For an answer, he stepped back and picked up the boy, who stared straight ahead. By keeping us both out of his sightline he banished us and the situation. What was happening to him was so remote from his comprehension that he was beyond fear for now.

  I was nothing but fear.

  ‘Let’s go, laddy.’

  I tried to stand in his path, but the man walked straight at me and brushed me aside. I said loudly, ‘You can’t just take him.’

  ‘Watch me.’

  He walked off at speed. I ran to catch up, overtook him, turned and tried to block his way again.

  ‘You’ve got to stop.’

  I don’t think he even looked my way as he stepped round me. I reached in my bag for my little cardboard camera. It was slippery in my hand. I ran again, passed the man, and now I was skipping backwards in front of him, shouting – I’ve forgotten what I was shouting – and trying to keep his face and the child’s face on the tiny smeared screen. I had used up my last shots on Martha. We were among the passengers, about a dozen watching us. I shouted at them too, something like, ‘He’s taking this child and doesn’t know him. Not even his name. Stop him, help me!’

  But no one stirred. Here was a man and his little boy, pursued by a hysterical woman, perhaps an ex-wife or a discarded lover. A domestic, as the police say. And if it wasn’t that, why get in a fight with a handy-looking fellow when you weren’t sure which side to be on?

  Then we were out of the station, on the edge of the car park. A couple of the passengers followed us out to watch but essentially, there was no one to help. Suddenly, the man came at me and, holding the boy steady on one arm, tried to seize my wrist.

  ‘I’ll have that,’ he said, meaning my camera. ‘Or I’ll break your neck.’

  He almost had my hand – our fingers brushed – but I lurched sideways and ran from him towards the nearest car and flung the camera under it. It was, by luck, a large low saloon. To get under it, he would have needed to set Christopher down and crawl in on his belly. Instead, he came after me. I ran round the car. He reversed direction and I did too. My shoulder bag contained books and Martha’s most recent essay and was heavy, but I was wearing tennis shoes and I was nimbler than he was. As the boy bounced about in the man’s arms, he began to laugh. Here was a game of chase he recognised, the first familiar element in an unintelligible half-hour. Childish laughter seemed to bring my pursuer to his senses. Whether he took the boy or left him, the camera and what he thought was its record were more important than breaking my neck. He put Christopher down, told him not to move, got down on his knees and eased himself under the car until only his backside and legs showed. In theory, while he was so vulnerable, I could have stomped on his legs or kicked between them. But I’ve no gift for violence. The thought of it makes me go weak, and besides, at that moment everything changed.

  As I took Christopher’s hand, intending to hurry back into the station to be among the indifferent crowd, a police car drew up, two constables got out, ignored me, dragged the fellow from under the car by his ankles, prised my camera from his fist and made an arrest. It unfolded as fantasy, as desperate hope dissolving into a vivid dream that turned out to be real. But it was less magical than that. Not long after I had made my emergency call, one of the passengers at the other end of the platform had also called the police. Minutes later, two others had phoned. Those witnesses had not been as indifferent as I had thought.

  A second police car arrived to collect my man. Soon after that, a social worker arrived, a sensible woman who made an instant bond with Christopher and took him away. By that time, I was dictating then signing a statement for the first policeman. When I finished, his colleague came over and said he had just heard that the mother was picked up on Swindon station, fifteen minutes down the line. She had a history of depression and self-harm and had abandoned her child once before. She was in a bad state but able to confirm that she had asked no one to collect him.

  I arrived in Oxford at dusk. It was one of those rare evenings one dreams about in winter, when the air seems viscous with warmth, scents and fading light together melting onto the skin as a balm and soaking into the senses. It was an easy decision to walk home from the station rather than take a bus. Within minutes I was crossing Hythe Bridge. On an impulse I turned down the footpath that led in a few yards to the beginning of the Oxford Canal.

  I rested on the low wall that separates the canal from the Castle Mill Stream. I was watching a lean hippie-ish man of about my age, still with the ponytail of his youth, watering the potted geraniums on his houseboat. He gave me a friendly nod. He didn’t mind being observed. Hanging by the stern was a paraffin lamp. There was a homely gleam from the cabin. Another life. It looked so simple from where I sat. I could ask to join him and from somewhere along our slow journey north, perhaps where this minor canal met the Grand Union, write my letter of resignation to the college and never be seen again. What would I be running from? I did not want to think about it. As I stood, I felt light on my feet, exhilarated at the prospect of flight, as if everything had already been arranged. The air that slipped so easily into my lungs made it possible. I realised that I was in shock and that I was bound to crash. For now, I thought I should abandon myself to the experience. I picked up my bag and walked back onto the bridge, intent on describing myself in a fantastical third person. She was a Victorian waif, as thin as air, floating up Beaumont Street, along St Giles, onwards up the Banbury Road, on her way to a dusty basement office in Park Town, where an ancient lawyer would divulge in grave tones the terms of her vast inherited fortune from an unknown benefactor.

  By the time I arrived at my flat on Linton Road I was coming down. I turned on all the lights and, in the kitchen, as I filled a tall glass with cold water, noticed that my hands were trembling. My mind was trembling too. I opened a window in the sitting room and lay on the sofa. Was I too hot, too cold? Neither. I was alone. No one to talk to. No one cared. Nonsense! My husband was out for the evening at a reunion in an east Oxford pub with fellow musicians. My lover would be back from New York tomorrow in the late afternoon. At the thought of how I was betraying a kindly decent man, my emotions stood ready to be opened easily, like a drawer that slides out at a touch. Here, nestled neatly like soup spoons were familiar items of self-excoriation: I was false, cruel, a deceiving faithless woman whose everyday lies served to keep herself sexually amused. I didn’t think it was like that at all, but I was trying to upset myself. After so much pity, fear, anger and relief compressed into forty minutes, something had to come out and only crying would restore me. I needed tears to help me avoid the nightmare that lay just beyond the periphery of mental vision. Guilt about my affair with Harry was a hard and hot feeling that did not mix with sorrow, and Martha’s situation was too close, too frightening to be exploited as an emotional emetic. Instead, and because he was now safe, I enlisted the abandoned little boy on the platform, helpless and understanding nothing, and that did it. I indulged a fit of weeping, and what release it was. A poor thing without his mother, so determined to wait for her, believing she would come back to him from out of the tunnel, along the same track. And poor me, whose blameless neck could have been snapped in two. Poor world that bore evil in the form of such a man. I wept and minutes later I was done. Feeling better, I sat up. Unbearable to consider what he wanted, what he might have done. The kindest thing one might say was that he was the slave of a compulsion he did not choose. He too wanted to keep himself sexually amused. That rogue thought did it. Horrified at the connection, I stood up and dismissed it. I was cured of emotional blockage. I went back to the kitchen for more water and, leaning on the counter, decided to make a sandwich. While I was cutting the bread, I began to think about the next day’s teaching.

  The principal business would be George Eliot’s Middlemarch, three tutorials and a lecture in the afternoon. I had given the lecture last year and had already rewritten it. I needed to look again at the student essays. But before all that, I took out Martha’s introduction to her scholarly edition of the non-fiction of Albert Camus. She had composed her monograph propped up in bed, a drip hanging from a tripod at her side. She managed a few hundred words a day, without recourse to a library. Respectfully, her Parisian publisher had not hesitated to hold up publication. Martha had written in French of course, so I had to go slowly, though I could just about get by without a dictionary. She concentrated on a lecture Camus gave in 1957 in Uppsala, Sweden, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize – ‘The Artist and his Times’. In it, Camus approved of an observation by Gide. ‘L’art vit de contrainte et meurt de liberté.’ Art lives by constraint and dies from freedom, by which was meant the constraint the artist imposes on himself. For Gide as for Camus, grammatically at least, artists were men. I hesitated. Perhaps Camus was rejecting literary experiment. Further down the page Martha quoted his rejoinder: ‘L’art le plus libre, et le plus révolté, sera ainsi le plus classique.’ The freest art and the most revolutionary will therefore be the most … classical? Meaning, written in a form and a prose long established in the tradition and therefore immediately understood. Or ‘classical’ meaning such writing would endure and would become, over time and through many appreciative readings, a classic. I decided on the former. Camus wrote his lecture when Europe was recovering from a cataclysmic war, when the world was trying to grasp the possibility of nuclear extinction, and when many of his contemporaries kept righteous faith with a dream of utopia in the Soviet Union, which he regarded as morally bankrupt, dangerous and cruel. In troubled times, Camus insisted, the best writing should be the most immediate in its clarity. Surely, Camus’ writing conformed to that ideal. I wrote Martha a long appreciative letter and wished I’d had the skill to have written in French. For her troubled times, in classical French.

  A half-hour later, not long before midnight, I was on George Eliot duties when Percy came in. I could tell that he was just a little drunk, but alcohol only made him kinder and funnier and more cheerful. I shoved the essay aside and listened to the story of his evening. He and his jazz-band mates were soon recognised at their table in the pub. After a din of foot-stamping, they went on stage. They did three numbers on borrowed instruments, with the euphonium player on double bass, and ‘brought the house down’.

  Percy broke off to ask about Martha. I said there was bad news and I would explain later. First, I wanted to tell him the story of Christopher. Usefully drained of feeling, I told it ruthlessly, as if to punish myself with details, though I felt nothing. I wanted to convey to Percy every perception, move, spoken and shouted word, all the moods and their transitions, the blank incomprehension of the child, the man’s ugly ferocity, the dreamlike appearance of the police, their grip on his ankles, on his black socks as they extracted him from under the car ‘like a rotten tooth’, and how his white shirt was besmirched by a puddle of engine oil. Besmirched! I had never uttered the word before in my life. Percy followed closely, cocking his head, as if he’d gone a little deaf, and he grimaced sometimes as if I was punishing him with my details, not myself. But oh, that big black-bearded good-natured face, creased with concern. I was hurting him, if only he knew it.