PROLOGUE
Post-Impressionism: Royal Academy of Arts, London 1980
He signed the Friends' Book in his elegant handwriting: Alexander Wedderburn, January 22nd, 1980.
She had said, peremptory as always, that he was to go straight to Room III, where &quot; the miraculous stuff &quot; was to be found.
Early.
So here he was, a distinguished public man, also an artist of a kind, stepping obediently through Room I (French 1880s) and Room II (British 1880s and 1890s), on a lead grey morning, to the pale grey, classical, quiet place where the bright light shone and sang off pigment so that the phrase, miraculous stuff, seemed merely accurate.
On one long wall hung a row of Van Goghs, including an Arles &quot; Poets' Garden &quot; he hadn't seen before, but recognised, from small photographs, from charged descriptions in the painter's letters.
He sat down and saw a bifurcated path, simmering with gold heat round and under the rising, spreading blue-black-green down-pointing vanes of a great pine, still widening where the frame interrupted its soaring.
Two decorous figures advanced, hand-in-hand, under its suspended thickness.
And beyond, green grass and geraniums like splashes of blood.
Alexander was not worried about whether Frederica would turn up.
She was no longer in the habit of being late: her life had schooled her to temporal accuracy, perhaps to being considerate.
He himself, at sixty-two, felt, not quite accurately, that he was now too old, too settled, to be put out, by her or by anyone else.
He thought with warmth of her certain approach.
There had been a pattern, an only too discernible repetition in the events and relationships of his life into which she had ruggedly refused to fit.
She had been a nuisance, a threat, a torment and was now a friend.
She had suggested that they look at Van Gogh together, setting up another form of repetition, deliberate, contrived and aesthetic.
His play, The Yellow Chair, had first been presented in 1957; he did not like to think too closely about it, as he did not like to think too closely about any of his past work.
He stared at the serenely impassioned garden made out of a whirl of yellow brushstrokes, a viridian impasto, a dense mass of furiously feathered lines of blue-green, isolated black pot hooks, the painfully clear orange-red spattering.
He had trouble finding an appropriate language for the painter's obsession with the illuminated material world.
He would have been lying if he had recorded only the more accessible drama of the painter's electric quarrels with Gauguin in the Yellow House in Arles, the distant necessary brother who supplied paint and love, the severed ear delivered to the whore in the brothel, the asylum fears.
At first he had thought that he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was an apple or a sunflower a sunflower.
Sometimes he still saw the brushstrokes, as it were, in this naked way, so that his earlier thoughts of this garden had to be undone, the idea of black wings to be stripped from the painted leafage, the vulgar idea of blood splashes washed off the notation of geraniums.
But it couldn't be done.
Language was against him, for a start.
Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards but resembled the sun, the source of light.
Van Gogh's idea of things had also been against him.
The yellow chair, besides being brushstrokes and pigment, besides being a yellow chair, was one of twelve bought for a company of artists who were to inhabit the Yellow House, the white walls of which should blaze with sunflowers as the windows of Gothic cathedrals blazed with coloured light.
Not only metaphor: cultural motif, immanent religion, a faith and a church.
One thing always linked to another thing.
As the Poets' Garden, a decoration for the bedroom of the &quot; poet Gauguin &quot; was more than it seemed.
Some time ago I read an article on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Botticelli.
Good Lord! it did make an impression on me, reading the letters of those men.
Arles, 1888.
And Petrarch lived quite near here in Avignon, and I am seeing the same cypresses and oleanders...
There is still a great deal of Greece all through the Tartarin and Daumier part of this queer country, where the good folks have the accent you know; there is a Venus of Arles just as there is a Venus of Lesbos and one still feels the youth of it, in spite of all...
But isn't it true, this garden has a fantastic character which makes you quite able to imagine the poets of the Renaissance strolling among these bushes and over the flowery grass?...
The youth of it, Alexander thought.
I thought I was world-weary then.
In July 1890, two years after writing this, Van Gogh had shot himself inefficiently in the groin, and had died slowly.
In 1954 Alexander, a time-obsessed man, had read the centenary edition (1953) of the Letters.
He had himself been rising thirty-seven and when The Yellow Chair was put on had passed that age, was older now than Van Gogh, as he had, in the 1940s, realised that he was older than Keats.
He had felt, perhaps, briefly, the power of the survivor.
What nonsense.
The eternal youth of Provence.
He thought of thick, fat, hot motorways carving up that land.
He turned his attention to the timeless fields of wheat and olives.
She made a kind of progress up the Palladian marble stair.
A painter stopped to kiss her: a journalist waved.
John House, who had organised the exhibition, came almost leaping down the stairs accompanied by a smallish woman in a pine-green tent-like coat.
He also kissed Frederica and introduced the woman, fumbling her name, as &quot; a colleague &quot; and Frederica as &quot; Frederica  you must forgive me, I never know what name you re working under, women these days are so protean. &quot;
Frederica did not attempt to ascertain the fumbled name, having given up interest in stray new people until it was clear that they were of real concern.
She assumed wrongly that John House's colleague was an art historian.
The colleague looked at Frederica with an apparently absent-minded scanning attention.
John House spoke of the history of the gathering of the images, an emptiness here Jacob wrestling the Angel), an unexpected illumination there.
Frederica listened attentively; went on and signed the Visitors' Book.
Frederica Potter, Radio 3 Critics' Forum.
She negotiated a free catalogue.
She made her leisurely way towards where she had told Alexander to be.
An old woman, armed with a Sound Guide, became quite excited and pulled at the arm of another.
&quot; Hey  look at that  Winston Churchill painted that, the... &quot;  carefully  &quot; Cap d'Antibes. &quot;
Frederica dipped round her to stare: Claude Monet: &quot; Au Cap d'Antibes par vent de mistral &quot;.
A whirl of blue and rose, for in less formed plungings of water and wind.
&quot; To paint, &quot; she remembered from Proust's description of fictive Elstir, &quot; that one does not see what one sees. &quot;
To paint light and air between ourselves and objects.
&quot; I said, dear, Winston Churchill  &quot; The second woman tugged free of the clutching fingers.
&quot; Not to be mentioned in the same breath with... &quot; she said, looking nervously from Frederica to painted signature.
The arrested water shone and danced.
In the catalogue John House quoted Monet's description of the painted light around the snowy haystacks as an enveloping veil.
He also quoted Mallarm &quot; I think... that there should be only allusion...
To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is created by the gradual pleasure of apprehending it.
To suggest it, that is the dream. &quot;
It was not a view of things with which Frederica was entirely in sympathy: she liked naming names.
But she looked briefly down, dazzled by the flowing skin of worked and delicate colour; the blue and rose tourbillons of the mistral on the sea, the prismatically sliced frosty nimbus round the mysterious squat stacks.
She scribbled words, notes, in the margin of her catalogue.
Daniel bought a ticket, and paid for the hire of a catalogue, he wasn't sure why.
He had come, he believed, because he needed to discuss certain administrative problems with Frederica.
He was aware that she believed he was in need of art.
Under his arm he carried a folded newspaper with that day's headline: PEACE MOTHER DIES.
He was raw to bad news, more raw as he grew older, which was not perhaps quite what he had expected.
He saw and did not see the paintings.
There was a field of poppies and corn which reminded him only of small and large, faded and ghostly versions of Van Gogh's &quot; Harvest &quot; which he had seen repeated in endless hospital corridors, waiting rooms, school offices.
He had seen these ample fields, as he had seen Cezanne's geometric brown and green undergrowth in more than one mental hospital day room.
Odd, he thought, considering that Van Gogh himself had died mad and despairing in such surroundings.
Not serene, overexcited, these fields.
Daniel's patience with the nervously ill was not what it had been.
Although he was fourteen years younger than Alexander, Daniel too was in the habit of thinking of himself as a survivor, a battered and grizzled survivor.
Alexander saw her coming towards him.
A dozen or so schoolgirls were dutifully filling in xeroxed, hand-written, one-word-answerable questionnaires.
Alexander, always a connoisseur of garments, realised that Frederica had changed her style, that the clothes the young creatures were wearing could be described as a parody of the clothes Frederica had worn at their age, and that Frederica's new style was not unrelated to this shift.
There she was in a conventional two-piece suit, fine dark wool, muted geometrical pattern in greens and unexpected straw browns, caught in at the waist  still very thin  to give the effect of a bustle, the skirt long and straight to the knee.
She had ruffles (not swashbuckling) at the neck and the small velvet hat could, but did not, support a veil.
The pale red hair was in a figure of eight chignon in her neck, reminiscent of one of Toulouse-Lautrec's fine-drawn cafe habitues.
Fifties and post-impressionist, thought Alexander, connecting.
She came up and kissed him.
He remarked on the parody-young.
She took the point eagerly.
&quot; My dear, I know.
Pencil skirts and batwing sweaters and spiky stilettos, tottering with their hard little behinds sticking out, and all that red lipstick.
I remember when I thought lipstick had gone forever, a dream of painted excess, as I thought paper taffeta had gone forever, in Cambridge, when we all took to glazed cotton.
Do you remember? &quot;
&quot; Of course. &quot;
&quot; Do you remember the eclectic Sixties parodies  when we went to the National Portrait Gallery  everything, from swamis to major-generals and major-domos too.
These are such a serious and uniform parody.
More and more of the same.
More of me. &quot;
&quot; Lse-majest.
And you?
You have reverted to type? &quot;
&quot; Oh, I 'm in my element.
I understand the Fifties.
I couldn't do the Forties bit at all, padded shoulders and crpy things, ugh, and pageboys  I think it must have been purely Oedipal, those were my parents' things, dammit, what I was getting away from.
This is my scene. &quot;
&quot; So it is. &quot;
&quot; And now I have money. &quot;
&quot; In our new austerity, you have money. &quot;
&quot; In our new austerity, I am old enough to have money. &quot;
They saw Daniel advancing.
&quot; Daniel doesn't change, &quot; said Alexander.
&quot; Sometimes I wish he did, &quot; said Frederica.
Daniel did not change.
He wore the same black clothes  baggy corduroys, heavy sweater, working-man's jacket  that he had worn through the Sixties and Seventies.
Like many hirsute men he had thinned a little on top where once his black fur had been extravagant, but he had a plentiful and prickling black beard, and his body was still compact and very heavy.
He looked, in this setting, a little like some painter.
He saluted Frederica and Alexander with his rolled newspaper and said that it was cold outside.
Frederica kissed him too, reflecting that he was dressed like a man who smelled dirty, but in fact didn't.
Alexander smelled, still, of Old Spice and a sort of agreeable toastiness.
His smooth brown hair was as thick as ever but shot now with needles of glittering silver.
&quot; We must talk, &quot; said Daniel.
&quot; First you must look at the pictures.
Take time off. &quot;
&quot; I keep trying.
I went to the King's Carol Service. &quot;
&quot; Good for you. &quot;
Frederica glanced shrewdly at him.
&quot; Now, look at the pictures. &quot;
Gauguin's &quot; Man with the Axe &quot;.
&quot; One for you, &quot; said Frederica to Alexander, still skimming the necessary accompanying print.
&quot; Androgynous.
John House says.
No, Gauguin said.
Do you think? &quot;
Alexander considered the decorative gold body, itself a repetition of a body on the Parthenon frieze.
He saw a blue loincloth, flat breasts, purple sea with coral tracings lying flatly on it.
He was unmoved, though the colours were rich and strange.
He told Frederica he preferred his androgynes to be more obscured, more veiled, more suggested, and directed her attention to &quot; Still-Life, Fete Gloanec 1888 &quot; in which various inanimate objects, two ripe pears, a dense bunch of flowers, swam across a bright red table-top rimmed with a black ellipse.
The picture was signed &quot; Madeleine Bernard &quot;, and Alexander told Frederica that Gauguin had flirted seriously with that young woman, had characterised her, as was fashionable at the time, as having the desirable, unattainable androgynous perfection, complete sensuality combined with unattainable self-sufficiency.
Frederica informed him from the catalogue that the vegetation was supposed to be a jocular portrait by Gauguin of Madeleine, the pears her breasts, the dense flowers her hair.
&quot; You could read it another way, &quot; said Alexander, interested now, &quot; you could read the pears as androgynous in themselves, as partly male. &quot;
&quot; And the hair as other hair, &quot; said Frederica loudly, scandalising a few bystanders, amusing a few more.
&quot; You like to cork for your images, don't you, Alexander? &quot;
&quot; It's age, &quot; said Alexander, peaceably, untruthfully.
They were beginning to attract a penumbra of gallery-goers, as though they were offering a guided tour.
They moved on to the &quot; Olive Pickers &quot;.
Daniel's mind was elsewhere.
He remembered a straight mass of red-gold hair, in cold King's Chapel, more golden than foxy Frederica 's, slowly settling onto a collar as the pins released their grip.
He saw a mass of freckles  sometimes melding into sixpenny-sized brown patches of warmth  moving over the hard frame of cheekbones and brow.
The sexless voices rose in the cold.
&quot; Unto us a Boy is born. &quot;
&quot; Herod then with wrath was filled. &quot;
The voices played with the slaughter of the innocents, treble and descant hunting each other, while she bowed her head, unable to sing in tune.
The olives had been painted from the asylum at St Rmy in 1889.
As for me, I tell you as a friend, I feel impotent when confronted with such nature, for my Northern brains were oppressed by a nightmare in those peaceful spots as I felt one ought to do better things with the foliage.
Yet I did not want to leave things alone entirely, without making an effort, but it is restricted to the expression of two things  the cypresses  the olive trees  let others who are better and more powerful than I reveal their symbolic language...
Look here, there is another question that comes to mind.
Who are the human beings that actually live among the olive, the orange, the lemon orchards?
Frederica and Alexander held a discussion of natural supernaturalism.
Daniel looked at the pink sky, the twisted trunks, the silvery leaves, the rhythmic earth streaked with yellow ochre, with pink, with pale blue, with red-brown.
Olives, Frederica agreed with Alexander, could not recall the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, in the day of Van Gogh the pastor's son, the lay preacher.
As the cypresses must always, differently, mean death.
Daniel asked, for politeness really, why Van Gogh had been mad, was it just that he was driven?
Alexander said that it may have been a form of epilepsy, exacerbated by the atmospheric-electric disturbances of the mistral and the heat.
Or you could make a Freudian explanation.
He felt guilty towards the child who had not survived, for whom he had been named.
He had been born on March 30th 1853.
His dead brother, Vincent Van Gogh, had been born on March 30th 1852.
He was in flight from his family, his dead alter ego, his uncertain sense of identity.
He wrote to Theo, &quot; I hope you are not a &quot; Van Gogh &quot;.
Essentially I am not a &quot; Van Gogh &quot;.
I have always looked upon you as Theo Daniel said he could not see the pain Frederica said was in the olives, and Alexander, still lecturing, said that Vincent had objected to paintings of symbolic Christs in Gethsemane by Bernard and his compres, had torn up his own, had made do with the olives themselves.
He told Daniel about the terrible St Rmy painting of the blasted tree, about noir-rouge, and Daniel said that it was odd that these orchards should be all over the walls of other asylums now, to cheer people up.
The trees stood under their haloes of pink and green strokes, small flying things, solidified light movements or saccades of the eye, brushstrokes, pigment.
Here is a description of a canvas which is in front of me at the moment.
A view of the park of the asylum where I am staying; on the right a grey terrace and a side wall of the house.
Some deflowered rose bushes, on the left a stretch of the park  red-ochre  the soil scorched by the sun, covered with fallen pine needles.
This edge of the park is planted with large pine-trees, whose trunks and branches are red-ochre, the foliage green gloomed over by an admixture of black.
These high trees stand out against an evening sky with violet stripes on a yellow ground, which higher up turns into pink, into green.
A wall  also red-ochre  shuts off the view, and is topped only by a violet and yellow-ochre hill.
Now the nearest tree is an enormous trunk, struck by lightning and sawed-off.
But one side branch shoots up very high and lets fall an avalanche of dark green pine needles.
This sombre giant  like a defeated proud man  contrasts, when considered in the nature of a living creature, with the pale smile of a last rose on the fading bush in front of him...
To Emile Barnard, St Rmy, December 1889.
You will realise that this combination of red-ochre, of green gloomed over by grey, the black streaks surrounding the contours, produces something of the sensation of anguish, called &quot; noir-rouge &quot; from which certain of my companions in misfortune frequently suffer
I am telling you about this... to remind you that one can try to give an impression of anguish without aiming straight at the historic Garden of Gethsemane
Daniel thought about dead Ann Maguire who, like Anna Van Gogh, the Dutch pastor's wife, had named a younger, hopeful child for a dead one.
(Though in Van Gogh's case, the names, Theodorus, Vincent, Vincent, Theodorus, appeared and reappeared from generation to generation, the cultural parallels to certain persisting aspects of the family face, a heavy brow, an intense blue eye, a cheek bone, a nostril.)
In the churchyard in his last parish a family in the English 1870s had tried to name a son Walter Cornelius Brittain and had buried three, aged five, aged two, aged one month, interspersed by variegated dead daughters, a Jennet, a Marian, an Eva.
In August 1976 a car, containing an IRA gunman, possibly already dead, ploughed onto a pavement and killed three of Mrs Maguire's children, Joanne, eight, John, two, Andrew, six weeks, leaving one son, Mark, aged seven.
People had been shocked, by numbers as well as by gratuitous death itself, as people will be, and Mrs Maguire's sister and a friend had founded the Peace People, whose brave beginning and sad end will not be chronicled here.
Ann Maguire had borne a second Joanne, in New Zealand, from where she had returned, unable to bear cultural transplantation.
Although the papers referred to her as the Peace Mother she had not been active in the Peace People.
She had brought a case for legal compensation for her dead children's lives and for her own suffering and one of her few recorded public utterances was to call the first offer of compensation &quot; pitiful &quot;.
The day of the hearing of her second case she had been found dead.
Daniel had pieced the story together from the radio: &quot; with throat wounds.
Foul play was not suspected, &quot; and from conflicting newspapers.
&quot; With hedge-cutters &quot;.
&quot; With a carving knife &quot;.
&quot; With an electric carving-knife &quot; &quot; by her side &quot;.
Her motives, the coroner was to say, were &quot; not completely easy to understand &quot;.
Daniel, who had become a specialist in wild blows of chance, thought he understood some of it.
He had not prayed for Ann Maguire.
He was not that kind of priest.
He had metaphorically shaken a large fist, impotently, at some looming energy-field, and got on with his work, his work.
He followed the other two into the dark shadows of the room housing the Low Countries.
Nuns ascended and descended a cool grey stair in winged white caps.
The Lauriergracht in Amsterdam was gloomed and glittering.
Mondriaan's &quot; Evening &quot; was sombre and cloudy.
He liked these.
Like Vincent, although he was unaware that Vincent had remarked on it, he had &quot; Northern brains &quot; and responded biologically and spiritually to tones of black, donkey-brown, varied greys, touches of white in dark.
&quot; One of the most beautiful things done by the painters of this country has been the painting of black which nevertheless has light in it, &quot; Vincent had written from Holland.
Xavier Mellery, the painter of the nuns, was described in the catalogue as &quot; creating a light which is the negation of that which envelops our immediate visual experience of things; it is rather the Interior light of your mind... &quot;
Daniel was used to such language; it was his daily, or anyway weekly, pabulum.
He knew about the light shining in darkness, and had come, for reasons completely different from Alexander's desire for exactness, specificity, to mistrust figurative language.
He never now made a sermon from a metaphor, nor drew analogies: he preached examples, cases, lessons.
But he liked the black Dutch paintings: they were, so to speak, on his wavelength.
He cornered Frederica.
&quot; You said you'd news of Will. &quot;
&quot; A postcard, yes. &quot;
&quot; Where this time? &quot;
&quot; Kenya.
On the way to the Ugandan famine, I think. &quot;
&quot; Hippie, &quot; said Daniel.
&quot; Helping out, &quot; said Frederica.
&quot; What use  comparatively  is a chap like that, wi' no training, no medical... no...?
Another mouth to feed.
It makes me wild. &quot;
&quot; I think he is often useful, in his way.
You judge him so &quot; &quot; He judges me.
Judging runs in the family. &quot;
&quot; It does, &quot; said Frederica.
&quot; Once, &quot; said Daniel, &quot; I was in Charing Cross Hospital, someone's kid had taken an overdose and died, they pump them out there regular as clockwork but this one's liver couldn't take any more.
Anyway, there I was, going up this endless corridor, thinking what to do about the mother, who blamed herself  wi' reason mind you, she was one of those soft suckering witch-women, but that made it worse, not better  and there was th' trolley wi' the dead girl on it, sliding by me  sheet right over, porters in those soft theatre boots and floppy plastic bathcaps  and when they'd got past me and were turning in't door, the first one looked at me from under his plastic frills like, with my own face.
I was shocked for a minute.
Got all his hair tucked up in that thing, you see  otherwise, he's not so like me, not strikingly so.
&quot; Hi, &quot; he said.
&quot; Going about your father's business, are you? &quot;
So I asked him what he was up to and he said he was going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, and then he pushed th &quot; trolley in, and I went in after, and the mother began her howling and shrieking, and Will said, &quot; Well, I 'll walk off and leave you to it. &quot;
And I said, &quot; Where are you going, then? &quot;
And he said, &quot; I told you.
To and fro. &quot;
That was the last I saw of Will. &quot;
The nuns ascended the stairs in a perpetual cool silence.
&quot; Quoting scripture for his own purposes, &quot; said Daniel.
&quot; That was rather funny, I thought, &quot; said Frederica.
&quot; Anything on the postcard about coming back?
Any plans? &quot;
&quot; No. &quot;
Sometimes she wished Will would not write to her at all, if he would send no messages to Daniel.
Sometimes she told herself the postcards, or exercise book scrawls, were messages to Daniel, but one should never, she considered, ignore surface meanings in favour of implications and the damned things were addressed to her, to Frederica.
&quot; Oh hell, &quot; she said.
&quot; Not to worry, &quot; said Daniel.
&quot; I 'll push off.
I 'll see you. &quot;
&quot; You haven't seen the pictures. &quot;
&quot; I 'm not in the mood. &quot;
&quot; We were going to have coffee in Fortnum and Mason 's. &quot;
&quot; No, thank you all the same. &quot;
1.
Ante-Natal: December 1933
It was written over the entrance, gold letters on purple gloss on red brick.
Gynaecology and Obstetrics.
Inside the archway an archetypal hand, the first of a series, pointed on a placard.
Ante-Natal Clinic, First Right.
It was dark in there.
She rode up and chained her bicycle to tall railings.
She was six months pregnant.
The bicycle basket sagged heavily on the front mudguard.
From it she took a string bag, in which was a paper bag, containing knitting, a lemonade bottle wrapped in greaseproof, and two heavy books.
She went in.
The central reception area was red-tiled, walled most of the way up also in dried-blood-red tiles, high windows way above eyes.
At a table sat a royal-blue Sister with a crimped white turret on her head.
In front of her stood twelve women.
Stephanie counted them and joined them.
She looked at her watch.
10.30 exactly.
Twelve was not good.
She wedged the string bag between her feet, took out a book, held the paper up to the dim light.
A fourteenth woman pushed through the swing doors, past the thirteen, addressed the Sister.
&quot; My name is Owen.
Mrs Frances Owen.
I have an appointment. &quot;
&quot; So have all these ladies. &quot;
&quot; At ten thirty, with Mr Cummings. &quot;
&quot; So have all these ladies. &quot;
&quot; Ten fifteen, &quot; murmured one or two.
&quot; But  &quot;
&quot; Now if you just take your place you 'll be seen in your turn. &quot;
&quot; I  &quot;
Mrs Francis Owen stood behind Stephanie.
Stephanie lowered the book and murmured.
&quot; Block bookings.
Some of the sisters are less efficient so they just heap the notes up and the last become first.
It's a nice calculation, whether to arrive early or late.
Best to get the first appointment.
Nine thirty.
Except the doctors are often late. &quot;
&quot; It's my first time. &quot;
&quot; In that case they 'll keep you longer, taking details The queue goes round you. &quot;
&quot; How long? &quot;
&quot; Better not to think. &quot;
&quot; I  &quot;
Stephanie read William Wordsworth.
She had decided to read through his poems, slowly and thoughtfully, in these queues.
There were three problems with this: the weight of the book, increasing nakedness as the examination wound from stage to stage, and failure of concentration, owing to painful legs and a general pregnant incapacity to finish sentences, her own, Wordsworth 's, or Mrs Frances Owen 's.
Who was now quiet.
She read.
&quot; A slumber did my spirit seal. &quot;
The book often opened here.
&quot; I had no human fears. &quot;
Ordinary words, in an extraordinary arrangement.
How did one recognise what was extraordinary?
She shuffled forwards, manipulating the string bag with sensible shoes.
In her turn she came to the Sister, who extracted a folder with Orton, Stephanie Jane, EDD 13. 4.54 on it, from a pile on her left, transferred it to a pile on her right and permitted Stephanie to sit on a brown canvas and metal tube chair for another half hour.
&quot; She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. &quot;
Seemed.
She looked at the women.
Hats, headscarves, bulky coats, varicose veins, bags, baskets, bottles.
&quot; I had no human fears. &quot;
Once her heart would have leapt up, just at the rhythm.
Now its own rhythm was strained and sluggish.
Inside her, unperceived, another quick rhythm fluttered, perhaps synchronised.
She dozed, open-eyed, looking up at slits of light.
I am sunk in biology.
The phrase pleased her.
Sunk in biology.
It was not a complaint.
Biology was very interesting.
She had never imagined it could be so wholly voracious of time and attention.
She read slowly.
&quot; No motion has she now, no force. &quot;
On the contrary, too much and not her own.
They called her name.
She went into the corridor, hurrying as though she did not know very well that she was simply being transferred to another waiting chair, that the urgency of their voices bore no relation to the speed of their, or anyway her, movements.
Mrs Owen spoke behind her.
&quot; I've got terrible pains in the back. &quot;
&quot; It's the standing and these chairs.
They 'll get worse before they get better. &quot;
There was a disagreeable note of clergyman's wife in that.
A jolly sympathetic delimiting of response.
She must not make that particular sound.
The church was beset with choirs of false voices.
She did not want to speak.
The ante-natal queues were, apart from the baby who fluttered and arched, her nearest approach now to privacy.
&quot; Do you want me to get someone? &quot;
&quot; Oh no, &quot; said Mrs Owen, already aware that doctors and nurses were not there to be pestered.
&quot; I 'll manage. &quot;
Stephanie held up the heavy book again.
The ante-natal clinic proper, beyond the red mouth and throat of reception, was, like the whole maternity wing, part of a military hospital added hastily at the beginning of the last war, in anticipation of hosts of wounded soldiers who had never come there.
It was on one floor, temporary-walled, a repeating H-shape of corridors and slopes with dismal bright blue paint.
Stephanie and Mrs Owen, clutching notes, bottles, knitting, Wordsworth, turned left and right and were greeted by a fat nurse who put their bottles on a tray amongst jam-jars with cellophane frills, various medicine bottles, a gin bottle and a large ketchup pot.
They were shown into cubicles with inadequate curtains, where they were told to strip completely and put on the clean towelling gowns in there.
Stephanie's gown had a cheerful beach-look, orange and poster-blue pyjama or deckchair stripes.
It reached her mid-thigh, would in no way meet over her jutting belly and had no belt.
She was used, but not reconciled, to such indignities.
She gathered up Wordsworth and the string bag.
She could hear Mrs Owen being castigated for not having turned right and left, instead of left and right, to Haematology, seeing as it was her first time.
They spoke as one speaks to distracted children or incapable old people, who do not look or listen.
&quot; My back hurts, &quot; said Mrs Owen, &quot; And I  &quot; She was hurried away slowly to Haematology.
At one end of the cubicle room was a set of scales before which another long queue was forming.
There were only two chairs in the whole place for at least a dozen women many now uncomfortably unsupported by girdle or bra.
The scale platform was occupied by a woman so huge, so grossly hung about with mounds and protuberances and pendent ledges of fat that it was impossible to see where there was a baby, or how large, or how high it was.
She laughed, as the fat will, whilst nurses gathered and tutted over the sliding weights.
She was diabetic and a cause for concern.
Nurses liked gallantry and real problems.
Wordsworth read differently amongst so much, so various flesh.
&quot; No motion has she now, no force. &quot;
Wordsworth was a man speaking to men.
He had said so.
One would need to know things  technical things  about speech, about why and how rhythm worked, about selection of nouns and word order to explain how he could state with finality  so that the words for it were his words  simple truths.
Her education had hardly started.
Mrs Owen returned.
Her face was very white above her very brief, neatly closed gown.
There was a moving line of blood along the inside of her leg.
&quot; Mrs Owen! &quot;
Stephanie pointed.
Mrs Owen had an elaborate hairstyle piled incongruously above her thin nakedness.
She bent to peer down.
She stammered.
&quot; Oh, how embarrassing.
Oh dear.
I kept trying to ask them, was a bit of bleeding all right, and the pains, but there wasn't the opportunity, and it really wasn't this much... &quot;
She made a deprecating, apologetic gesture, gave a small cry, and fell over.
A great deal of blood pumped and washed over the clean tiled floor.
Stephanie called &quot; Nurse &quot; and almost immediately there was a lot of efficient rubbersoled running, a trolley, heaps of towels and swabs, subdued chatter among the women.
The doctor emerged from the frosted-glass cubicle beyond the scales.
Mrs Owen, now chalk-white and motionless on her trolley, was wheeled behind curtains.
There was more running.
Stephanie was fetched away, divested of her gown, arranged on a hard high couch under a cellular blanket.
Even here, one could wait a long time.
Stephanie propped Wordsworth against the hard ledge of the bulge.
&quot; She neither hears nor sees Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. &quot;
To name the whole earth with three nouns, that was authority.
Rocks and stones and trees.
The rhythm formed by the reiterated &quot; and &quot;.
Everything, even if named, was part of the same thing.
And the one complex word among simple verbs, diurnal.
A young doctor came.
He probed her hard, tough sides with reasonably kind fingers.
He pushed a stethoscope into her softness and listened.
He did not meet her eye: this was usual.
&quot; Well, Mrs Orton, how are we? &quot;
She could not answer.
Tears were running all over her face.
&quot; There are traces of sugar.
Are you sure the specimen was taken on rising? &quot;
&quot; Mrs Orton, what is the matter? &quot;
&quot; The English.
Are so damned.
Polite.
For hours and hours we stand  with no girdles  in cold draughty places.
That woman.
That.
Mrs Owen.
Lost her baby  I know  because.
Because no one would let her tell them.
Because I wouldn't.
Because nobody here  &quot;
&quot; Don't be hysterical.
It's bad for the child.
Your child. &quot;
She sniffed, wet.
&quot; She would almost certainly have lost it anyway. &quot;
It sounded as though he was conceding a point.
&quot; But not so foolishly. &quot;
This slightly unusual speech pattern seemed to enable him to address her directly.
He came to the head.
He peered at her wet face.
&quot; Why are you so particularly upset? &quot;
&quot; I didn't listen.
Nobody did.
We taught her to stand in line. &quot;
&quot; You would think anyone in that state would have been clever enough, sensible enough, to get out of line. &quot;
&quot; I truly doubt it.
This place puts you in line.
You stay in it.
You stand for hours, without a girdle, because of block bookings and not enough chairs.
Two chairs for all those women.
Standing hurts.
This place changes you.
I told her myself not to think.
Doctors are busy. &quot;
He looked automatically, by association, at his watch.
It was true, he was busy.
He had seen Stephanie before, but perhaps only once: he remembered her vaguely  blond, curved rounds, placid, no trouble, always using &quot; the pregnancy &quot; as a reading-desk.
He didn't think that was quite right, but hadn't formulated why.
&quot; Your baby's fine, &quot; he said.
&quot; Just fine.
Strong heart-beat, a good size, nice position, coming along fine.
Your weight's good, no problems.
Do stop crying.
It does no good.
Pregnancy is an upsetting time for some people.
You must try and keep calm for your child's sake.
Please.
Look  if you're upset  go and have a good talk with our social worker, a good... &quot;
&quot; I don't want a good talk.
And I seem to be a social worker most of the time.
Unpaid.
I was trying to take time off.
I don't...
I thought I could read Wordsworth and forget about the damned queue. &quot;
&quot; Yes.
Now, if you'd just swing your legs down. &quot;
She considered apologising and did not.
She did not feel angry with him: she could imagine how it was for him: woman after woman after woman, all the same, all different, weeping on occasion for fear, boredom, pain, frustration, humiliation.
How could he take on all that, much of it irremediable, at ten-minute intervals?
He was a very young man.
He could peer professionally down his speculum into her vagina, but he blushed when his eyes met hers.
However, she should not apologise for her tears.
He could at least, whatever his personal reticence, have promised to investigate the problem of the insufficient chairs.
Here she did him less than justice.
He recognised the chairs as part of his province.
On her next visit there were another half dozen.
Out in the air identity was partly restored.
Businesslike and not languid, brisk and not tearful, she mounted her bicycle.
She kept her back rigorously straight: the foetus or baby seemed to like the bicycle: its movement usually, and she felt happily, ceased as hers began.
The roads round Blesford were still more or less country lanes, bare blackthorn hedges and deep ditches, with the first few bungalows isolated on their little plots on the edges of little capillary roads.
She remembered the lanes in summer, cow parsley and warm leaves, but not, not bodily, her own light movement.
Eclipsed in maidenly grace, says Dr Spock with a curious inversion.
Well, that was true.
She braked to avoid another cycling figure: her husband, Daniel, heavy and black, clanking a little because of a rubbing chain-guard.
They rode along side by side, amicably, both heavy, legs efficiently working.
&quot; Was it all right? &quot;
&quot; No troubles.
Longer than usual.
How was yours? &quot;
Daniel had been officiating at a funeral.
&quot; Not nice, really.
Old ladies from t'Home.
One daughter wi' three or four kids in tow.
Crematorium.
Usual anti-climax  old birds standing round a bit o' grass at t'back they'd got lease of for a few hours, wi' a garden label saying Mrs Edna Morrison and a few bunches of chrysanths put in rows.
Looked ready to be blown away, the old biddies.
But pleased wi' themselves because they were still on their pins and not slid away into Eternity.
There was no tea, thank God.
T'Home doesn't run to one, and t'daughter only wanted to get all t'kids back to Sunderland. &quot;
&quot; Someone in our queue lost her baby.
Just there.
On the floor.
Fast. &quot;
She hadn't meant to tell him that.
Daniel was much more subject than she was to gynaecological and biological terror about the coming birth.
His bike swerved and straightened.
&quot; Does that happen often, then? &quot;
&quot; No, no.
Only I felt bad, because she tried to tell me she felt rotten, and I was just trying to read. &quot;
He frowned his black frown.
When they got back the little house was empty.
This was unusual.
She put on the kettle and built the fire.
He sliced toast, fetched butter, honey, cups.
He put his large arms round her thick body.
&quot; I love you. &quot;
&quot; I know. &quot;
They sat side by side on the hearthrug: the fire caught: Daniel held the toasting-fork to the grate.
A smell of toast began to infiltrate the paint smell that was a perpetual consequence of their attempts to make the place habitable.
&quot; Where's Marcus, then? &quot;
&quot; Hospital.
In his own queue.
He goes by bus. &quot;
&quot; Psychiatrist once a week for half an hour never did any good to anyone.
In my view.
Though I'd not presume to say what is needed. &quot;
&quot; Don't, &quot; said Stephanie, putting a hand on his knee.
&quot; Daniel, don't.
Let's have tea together. &quot;
&quot; I 'm not complaining. &quot;
&quot; No.
I know. &quot;
Marcus Potter, Stephanie's young brother, was living with them, apparently indefinitely.
In the summer of 1953 he had suffered some sort of breakdown, or nervous crisis, which had been caused (one view) or exacerbated (a more informed view) by his bizarre relations with the ex-biology teacher at Blesford Ride, the public school where his father, and Stephanie's father, taught.
There had been some kind of religious fantasy, and a possibility of homosexual tampering.
Those in authority had decided that Marcus should intermit a year of his education, in order to recuperate, and that he should not live with his father, a man of uncertain temper, of whom he had expressed extreme and unreasoning terror.
Nobody had said what Marcus should do: the result was that he appeared to do little or nothing, spoke minimally and was increasingly reluctant to leave his bedroom or the house.
Nobody had also said how long Marcus should remain in his sister's house.
Daniel, a naturally vigorous seeker of solutions, tried to restrain an instinct to shake or confront Marcus with the unsatisfactory nature of this inertia.
Daniel had occasional violent feelings towards Marcus, which he suppressed.
Bill Potter, the father, was a violent man.
Stephanie saw Marcus, as though they had called him up by naming him, making his way home.
The process seemed to cause unnecessary difficulty.
He stepped forward and retreated at the little garden gate as though rebuffed by some force field or buffeted by some invisible gale which had no effect on the branches of the little trees and evergreens in the front gardens of the cottages.
He carried his long thin arms crossed protectively in front of him.
His head, with its dull-straw hair and moon glasses, was down.
Stephanie watched him dance or shuffle, two steps forward, one back, almost sideways along the paved path.
She felt protective and threatened.
Daniel saw her face set.
The door rattled for some time: Marcus was struggling with his key.
Daniel suppressed fairly easily an impulse to get up and open the door for him.
He turned the toast.
Marcus came round the door feelingly like a blind creature, clinging with fingers to edges and surfaces Although the front door opened into the Sitting-room he was plainly disconcerted to find them there.
&quot; Tea and toast, Marcus, &quot; said Stephanie, in the voice she had heard herself use to Mrs Owen.
She disliked this voice very much but employed it more and more.
Conversation with Marcus had become largely monosyllabic, which did not help.
&quot; No, &quot; said Marcus palely, adding inaudibly, &quot; Thank you. &quot;
He began what Daniel thought of as his &quot; creeping &quot; to the back-stairs.
The room  dark with small windows  was only half-furnished and half-painted Armchairs, little dining-table, Stephanie's old, good mahogany desk stood on uncarpeted boards, splashed with paint.
There was a big rag-pegged rug in front of the fire, and one or two pieces of coconut matting elsewhere.
The walls were papered with very large blue roses, surrounded by dove-grey and silver-tinted leafage.
Half of these were partially obliterated by white undercoat.
Daniel never had time  nor, truly, inclination  to make a good job of the painting.
He was self-trained not to notice his surroundings.
Stephanie had tried herself, but the paint vapour made her vomit, and she had an idea that this might damage the baby.
Daniel, quick to notice essentials, had no idea how much Stephanie disliked living in this unfinished mess.
She would have agreed with him largely as to what were essentials and inessentials, but the mess depressed her.
Marcus reached the staircase, which also descended into the living-room, and looked vaguely back.
He went, less sidling, up, and they heard his bedroom door open and close.
No further sound.
Daniel took the toast off the fork.
The silence upstairs imposed a silence downstairs.
Stephanie watched Daniel, wanting to protect him from Marcus.
&quot; Let's talk to each other.
Tell me about your day. &quot;
A verbal lot, the Potters, even peaceful Stephanie.
Words helped them, apparently.
His &quot; day &quot; was better left without conversion into narrative, amusing, querulous or appealing.
A funeral, already described, two drunk tramps, another lecture from the Vicar on interfering in the domestic wrangles of his parishioners.
He looked at his pale gold wife, her arms folded about her belly.
&quot; Toast, &quot; he said, monosyllabic.
He gave her a perfectly browned, gold-buttered honey-glistening warm-smelling slice.
Sunk in biology, she thought, listening for creaks or moans above the ceiling, listening to the soft stirring in her belly, licking her fingers.
She did not offer Daniel this satisfactory phrase.
Listening for Marcus, she heard Frederica's bicycle grind gravel.
She came in a rush, fell dramatically on her knees before the fire, beside her sister, cried &quot; Look! &quot;
Stephanie saw small buff papers pasted with white strips.
MINOR SCHOLARSHIP OFFERED NEWNHAM + WRITING + PRINCIPAL +.
SCHOLARSHIP OFFERED SOMERVILLE + CONGRATULATIONS + PRINCIPAL+.
&quot; It worked, &quot; said Stephanie.
&quot; You did it. &quot;
In 1948 she had opened almost identical telegrams.
What had she felt?
A great lightening, even if only temporary, of the burden of her father's inexorable expectations.
She had not realised how heavy the &quot; burden had been till it was lifted.
She felt pleasure only very much later, and pride and self-satisfaction later still, on the brink of departure.
She handed the telegrams to Daniel.
&quot; Is that good, then? &quot; he said, not knowing the significance of scholarships.
&quot; A definite offer. &quot;
&quot; I've won, I've won, &quot; Frederica crowed.
&quot; I did a Viva in Oxford, just me and all the dons, all, in robes and furred gowns, and me with a blackboard explaining Milton's English and Latin words.
I've never talked so much in my life and they were interested, they were, I got all sorts of things in, Britannicus and Henry VIII and The Broken Heart and The Winter's Tale and feminine endings and they didn't stop me, they said go on  oh and Satan's speech to Eve in the garden  I was in a place of my own  oh glory. &quot;
Stephanie nodded and Daniel watched Stephanie.
He knew what he did not know about her, but only as a blank.
Once she had all this.
Whether she had unaffectedly cried oh, glory! he did not know, and doubted.
He imagined her wish to go on teaching for they shared, he and she, did they not, a pastoral compulsion.
She filled the cottage with the lost and unhappy.
When they were not put off by Marcus's rigid unfocussed stare.
He waited for a clue, a reminiscence of her own Viva, but she was silent.
Frederica spoke to his thought.
&quot; They all remembered you, Steph.
The Newnham dons asked what you were doing.
The Somerville ones remembered too.
One of the Newnham ones said she'd always hoped you'd come back.
I said of course you were deep in domesticity and waiting for the baby and she said that was what so many good students seemed to be choosing these days... &quot;
&quot; You 'll go to Newnham. &quot;
&quot; Despite the lovely Viva.
Yes.
How do you know? &quot;
&quot; Well.
He wanted us to go to Cambridge. &quot;
&quot; I might have rebelled. &quot;
&quot; You might.
But you've got a Cambridge mind.
Heavy morals.
Grown-in.
For all the Oxford language-talk. &quot;
&quot; They said they'd see me in three years to do my D.Phil. at Oxford.
Imagine.
They asked me what it would be on.
I said John Ford.
It was the worst moment.
They laughed so much, they couldn't go on with the interview.
I don't know why, still.
I don't care.
I did it.
I did it.
I won. &quot;
&quot; We know, &quot; said Daniel.
&quot; I 'll stop boring on.
I 'm sorry, I talk.
I talked too much to the other girls over coffee, I went on and on about Eliot's Chinese jar moving perpetually in its stillness, how ironic, and you could hear them wishing I'd stop and somehow I couldn't.
I 'm sorry Daniel.
I need to let off steam.
It's only just dawning.
I can get out now, can't I?
I can get away from Home  and Them  and the weight of it all.
I 'm free. &quot;
&quot; How are they? &quot; said Stephanie.
&quot; Baddish.
They don't seem able to get over the Marcus thing  it's somehow dismantled their idea of themselves as parents, you know, good parents whatever, and the Home as a home.
Daddy sits a lot, doing nothing and muttering to himself and Mummy's just retreated  she never starts a conversation, or asks a question, or  You'd think they'd be over-anxious about me, their one remaining child and perhaps they are, but they have miserable ways of showing it.
Daddy kept rather obviously bestirring himself to mind about my exams and piling up my desk with secondary stuff I've no time for  I don't want to read literary criticism yet, almost at all, and I 'm damned sure he doesn't smother his clever boys with it.
My work is my cork and my ideas are my ideas and he ought to leave them alone, I say.
&quot; When these telegrams came I ran down and opened the door to the boy and I showed them to Mummy and she began very bravely, how lovely dear, and then began to cry and shut herself in her room.
Not very festive.
So I came here.
But I can get right away, now, I can, can't I? &quot;
There was a silence.
&quot; How is Marcus? &quot; said Frederica.
Daniel and Stephanie gestured mutely at the ceiling.
&quot; He's had heaps of letters.
Well, about three, I think.
From that man.
Daddy shreds them up  I saw him doing it with a razor blade, Steph  and burns them.
He rang the hospital and told them to stop that man sending letters.
You could hear him shouting down the telephone halfway down the road.
Then he didn't go to work for two days.
Probably the invisible psychiatrist should have a go at him. &quot;
&quot; And Mummy? &quot;
&quot; As I said.
She did say to ask you about Christmas. &quot;
Daniel said, &quot; She could come and talk about that. &quot;
Stephanie said, &quot; She seems to have stopped coming. &quot;
In the early days of Marcus's retreat or illness Winifred had come regularly; Bill had not, partly because &quot; they &quot; had said better to leave Marcus alone, partly because he disapproved of Daniel, the Church of England, Christianity and Stephanie's burial of her talent amongst these things.
He disapproved with a liberal atheism that produced emotions more akin to seventeenth-century religious fanaticism than to agnostic tolerance.
So in a sense, Stephanie was lost to him, as Marcus was lost.
Winifred had sat for hours in those early days on the sofa, next to Marcus, who moved away, and like a parody of a mad religious discipline, abbreviated his answers, elongated his silences, until he had imposed on his mother a similar pattern of behaviour.
&quot; I 'm doing no good, &quot; she said to Stephanie.
&quot; How can we tell? &quot;
&quot; I can tell. &quot;
Winifred was not unlike Marcus.
Or Marcus was not unlike Winifred.
Defeat communicates itself, is handed on.
Unlike euphoria, Stephanie thought, considering Frederica.
It was odd how glory could not be shared.
Frederica, now smoothing and folding her telegrams, would perhaps learn this.
&quot; We shall have my Mum, too, by Christmas, &quot; said Daniel, heartily and with edge.
&quot; We shall have a real party. &quot;
At Home
Beginnings, ends, phases, terms.
Stephanie thought of this phase as the deprivation of privacy, not contemplating the possibility that privacy was gone forever.
She was a woman with a young body whose knowledge, biological and intellectual, was defined in clearly marked periods, menstrual, domestic, academic, rounds of flesh, blood, rites, qualifications.
The pregnancy was another such, with its set term.
In December came the end of her teaching at Blesford Girls' Grammar School.
At the last Assembly, where Frederica received, as Stephanie had once received, the School Governors' Prize for Academic Achievement, she was given a leaving present by teachers and girls.
Frederica strode grimly up and carried off the Oxford Companions to English and Classical Literature.
Stephanie's presents were useful and various: an electric teamaker, with alarm, a set of Pyrex dishes with night-light heaters to warm them, and a layette, knitted and stitched by Upper III and Lower IV, little embroidered viyella nighties, crocheted lambswool matinee jackets, knitted bonnets and bootees, pretty fluffy blankets, a woollen lamb with black stitched eyes and a slightly thrawn neck, dangling from a scarlet ribbon.
The headmistress made a long and patently truthful speech about how they would miss Stephanie, and a brief speech about Frederica's outstanding good fortune.
They sang &quot; Lord, dismiss us with thy blessing &quot;.
Stephanie felt tearful, not because she loved the school, but because something was finished.
Wheeling her bicycle out of the school for the (official) last time she saw Frederica striding away in front of her, past the still unlevelled Bomb Crater, bearing a satchel, a large paper parcel, two shoe bags and a paper carrier.
&quot; Do you want to put any of that in my bike basket? &quot;
Frederica jumped.
Her hair flowed lank and forbidden over her shoulders, crimped by the traces of regulation ribbons.
&quot; You shouldn't still be riding that thing.
You 'll do yourself and the progeny an injury. &quot;
&quot; Rubbish.
We are balanced and dignified.
Give me that bag. &quot;
They went on in silence.
&quot; Where are you going, Frederica? &quot;
&quot; Somewhere called N?mes. &quot;
&quot; What? &quot;
&quot; Headmistress found it.
&quot; French family desires respectable English girl to speak English to their daughters. &quot;
I 'm off after Christmas.
Nice to have to speak French.
Nice to get right away from here.
Not sure about the daughters. &quot;
&quot; I actually only meant where are you going now? &quot;
&quot; Oh, to perform a rite.
You might disapprove.
If you don't, you can participate.
If you don't fall off that thing. &quot;
&quot; What sort of rite? &quot;
&quot; A kind of oblation.
Of Blesford Girls' Grammar. &quot;
She flung open her macintosh and Stephanie saw that she was wearing a skin-tight black sweater, wide elastic belt, long grey pencil skirt.
&quot; It's going in the canal.
Do you want to come? &quot;
&quot; What is? &quot;
&quot; Blesford Girls' Grammar.
Shirt, tie, beret, skirt, ankle socks and gym kit.
I can't put the mac in, I haven't got another.
I've weighted this parcel. &quot;
&quot; With what? &quot; asked Stephanie, afraid for the Oxford Companions.
&quot; Stones, idiot.
I don't drown books.
You should have known that. &quot;
&quot; Drowning perfectly good warm clothes is an awful waste.
Some poor girl... &quot;
&quot; I told you didn't have to come.
You shouldn't, if you've already turned into a full-time clergyman's wife.
Which I wish I could understand how you can bear.
Steph, did you want an electric tea-maker?
Do you want to rescue these horrible garments, these symbols of pettiness and niggling, for Daniel to give to some trampess?
Don't answer.
Do come and help.
It's only once. &quot;
There was nothing remarkable about Blesford Canal.
It was decayed and decaying, darkly full of a strange, fine black weed, like tendrils of soot, tipped with faded moss green.
Its banks were slipping into it, over falls of broken, dislodged bricks.
Little boys occasionally drowned there.
The sisters stopped on a narrow bridge over it, near nothing, except a gasholder and a filthy hoarding with a Capstan tobacco advertisement.
Stephanie leaned her bike against the parapet.
Frederica hefted the paper parcel onto the ledge.
&quot; This is a plain rite.
No words, no prancing around.
I 'm a grown woman.
I just want someone to know that this  all this stuff  has been a burden and nothing but a burden from start to finish, and that I feel no twinge of regret at coming out of that place, and that I shall never go back into it, ever, so help me Frederica Potter.
No more group life.
I won't belong to anything, ever again.
I stand for me.
Do you want to help shove? &quot;
Stephanie thought of the sweet, soft, on the whole carefully made layette.
She thought of Felicity Wells, the senior mistress, passionate about George Herbert and Anglo-Catholicism, who had spent a lifetime tempting with these fine things girls from this dirty town.
She thought of John Keats, alive in Hampstead, dead in Rome, read in Cambridge, read here, in class.
She thought of blackened red brick, chalk dust, shoe boxes, muddy hockey boots, the smell of groups of girls in classrooms.
&quot; Yes.
I think so. &quot;
&quot; O.K. One, two, three, ready.
Over she goes. &quot;
The parcel splashed heavily, soughed, and sank in a trail of thick, slow, glutinous bubbles.
&quot; What ceremony else? &quot; said Stephanie, blasphemously.
&quot; None.
I told you.
This is a gesture that simply means itself and no more.
You wouldn't give me some tea, would you, if I come home with you?
Would you?
I don't want to go back to the house yet, a bit, not yet. &quot;
Daniel's Mum came.
She was not unexpected; she had been coming for months.
They had moved from a council flat, Daniel's choice of home, to this partially renovated artisan's cottage to make space for her, when she was sufficiently better from her fall and fractured hip.
They decorated the third little bedroom for her before they finished their own, putting up a sprigged paper, installing a fat armchair, a fringed table lamp, a satiny quilt and a dressing-table with a glass top, all fetched by Daniel from the relinquished Sheffield house.
Visiting his Mum in hospital made Daniel morose and gloomy, which Stephanie noticed, but did not ask about.
He remarked that he had almost certainly brought the wrong objects, except the dressing-table, which was alone of its kind.
And it was fifty-fifty, he said, that that would be said to be too big, which it was of course, in that room, taking up far too much space.
But it had done that before.
The day she came, Stephanie went up and put flowers on the dressing-table, a potted cyclamen, almost maroon in its dark red-purple, a crystal vase, a wedding present, containing asters, violet, cherry-pink, shell-pink.
Brave and graceful flowers.
When Daniel was at the station she remembered that the lamp had flickered alarmingly.
She tried it and it flickered.
She went downstairs, fetched fuse wire and screwdriver, went upstairs, changed the fuse.
She was beginning to tire on the stairs.
As she worked a hand, or a foot, hard, protruding, worked its way up under her skin, outside her rib-cage.
When she heard the front door she was momentarily unable to stand, for inner turbulence.
She had meant to open the door, welcoming.
Daniel's mother's voice came in, small, plaintive, continuous, carrying.
&quot;... last time I ever go anywhere on them British Railways.
Any road, you 'll have to carry me out of here feet first, I reckon. &quot;
Stephanie came down.
Mrs Orton spread like many heaped and plumped cushions in Daniel's armchair.
Her clothes, her face, her hands, her glistening rounded legs were many shades of what Frederica later learned from her to call &quot; mohve &quot;, like, yet unlike, the innocent bright asters and the cyclamen, which now in Stephanie's mind resembled bruised flesh.
She wore a moulded oval felt hat, with a deliberate dent at the high point.
From beneath the hat poked various sheep-like curls of iron-grey soft hair, with a purplish cast, perhaps simply a glow reflected from the shining expanse of floral artificial silk below.
Stephanie, bumping the baby on the chair arm, bent to kiss the isolated, over-defined crimson apple-round of the cheek.
She offered tea.
&quot; No thanks, pet.
I was just telling our Daniel, I was right put off by what passes for tea on t'railways these days: I couldn't stomach no more.
No tea.
And I hope you haven't gone to any trouble cooking for me because I can barely keep owt down these days, not after t'hospital, me appetite quite sickened away on me wi' the things they serve up  greasy bits o' beef skirt and nasty little salads wi' half a two-week old egg and a few outside leaves o' lettuce and a bit o' wet beetroot, no, it was an effort getting it down, let alone keeping it down  I can tell you, there was many as couldn't, eggs from t'infernal regions we got for us breakfast as often as not, right stink bombs, but could you get any o' them nurses to have a sniff or give us another i'stead?
I don't know what I'd ha' done if t'owd dear in't next bed hadn't a had a daughter as worked in't chocolate factory in York, kept her supplied wi' great bags o' rejects she couldn't bring herself to eat on her own  funny that  they get put right off, working wi' chocolate, she had a craving for salty things, them roasted peanuts she was always popping in and Smith's Crisps.
T'owd dear wasn't up to doing much better by the chocolates, having problems wi' sugar in her water, so I did well out o' that.
Until she passed on, which she did two weeks past.
Mind you, when our Daniel come in now and then to visit they thowt I was on me way out too, wi't dog-collar, and that, dog-collars in them places meaning Death...
Half an hour later, eased out of her coat and hat, her belongings piled by Stephanie's bed since they wouldn't fit in her room, she said, &quot; You wouldn't have a nice cup o' tea, would you? &quot;
It took Stephanie some time to realise that she always refused what was offered at the time when it was offered, whether out of a curious notion of good manners or out of cussedness Stephanie was never wholly sure.
When Marcus came in for supper, two hours later, Daniel's Mum was still talking, to Stephanie, who was in and out of the kitchen dishing up vegetables and making gravy, to her son, who moved his weight cautiously from time to time on a dining-room chair and frowned and frowned.
She had, during that time, said nothing about man, wife or child: her conversation was, as it was predominantly to remain, purely descriptive and immediate to herself.
About the railway carriage, the stop at Darlington, the routine on the ward in Sheffield General Hospital, two or three obsessively studied old dears and a batch of more distantly hinted ones, Stephanie knew a great deal.
About Daniel's Mum she knew very little.
She thought she had never been so tired.
Marcus backed away from the door once or twice  it was not a very bad day  and made his usual rush in.
He stopped in the doorway, confronting the large fact of Daniel's Mum.
&quot; Who's this, then? &quot;
&quot; My brother Marcus.
He is staying here. &quot;
Marcus looked, dumb.
&quot; This is Daniel's mother, Marcus.
Who has come to stay.
Neither Marcus nor Daniel's Mum spoke.
It seemed to Daniel that neither of them had bothered to take in, until that moment, the fact, carefully explained to both beforehand, of the other's presence.
Stephanie put food on the table: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding.
roast potatoes, cauliflower.
The meat had been expensive.
She and Daniel were learning about herrings and shin of beef, gnocchi and onion tart.
Daniel's Mum, wedged in Daniel's chair, watched every movement critically.
Marcus wrung his hands.
Mrs Orton addressed him.
&quot; Don't fidget, young man.
He put his hands quickly in his pockets, bowed his head, and made his way sideways to his place at table.
Daniel carved.
He expressed his pleasure, in over-ringing tones, in rare beef.
Mrs Orton said nothing.
She cut all the brown edges of her slices away and ate those, leaving a growing, mangled heap of red beef on one side of her plate.
She chewed steadily and loudly.
Marcus gagged and pushed away an almost untouched plate.
Mrs Orton told Stephanie how in her day they made right big puffed-up brown Yorkshires and served them separate, with the gravy poured in, before the meat, to spin it out, you had to scrape and pinch in them days.
She accepted two more helpings of beef, asking Daniel to cut it from the edges, remarking that bloody meat had always turned her stomach, we all have our different tastes, don't we?
She admonished Marcus.
&quot; You've eaten next to nowt, young fellow-me-lad.
You've got a peaky look, you could do wi' a bit o' substance.
Get it down.
She laughed.
Marcus stared palely at his plate.
&quot; Not much to say for 'imself, 'as he?
We was brought up to eat what was put in front of us.
What do you do wi' yourself all day then? &quot;
Marcus poked silently at the tablecloth with his fork.
Stephanie said that he had been seriously ill and was convalescing.
This had already been explained in Sheffield, by Daniel.
Mrs Orton showed an interest in Marcus that she had failed to show in Daniel and Stephanie.
She asked several sharp questions about what he was ill of and what treatment he was getting.
Marcus did not answer.
Mrs Orton speculated about why this was, speaking increasingly of his illness to Daniel and Stephanie as though he wasn't there.
Daniel thought that in a way this was what Marcus had appeared to want, to be present yet absent and unconsidered.
In the days that followed Daniel's Mum was to elaborate this confidential and blotting-out commentary to an embarrassing extent.
On her way to bed that night Stephanie fell over the cyclamen on the landing floor.
She came down heavily, spattering her nightdress with earth, shards of flowerpot, dark streaks of water from spilled asters.
Daniel found her there on hands and knees, tears running down her face.
There was a listening stillness behind closed doors.
Daniel got down, put an arm round her thick middle, hoisted her silently to her feet and pulled her towards the bedroom.
She resisted, pointing in angry dumb show at earth, water, petals on the linoleum.
She stood and shivered and wept.
&quot; Come on. &quot;
He burrowed in her drawers for a clean nightdress.
&quot; Come on, love. &quot;
&quot; Don't mess my things. &quot;
&quot; Now, now.
When did I ever mess your things? &quot;
He lifted the soiled nightdress up over her unresisting shoulders and head, and for a moment she was naked, bursting breasts, strangely risen navel, arms and legs fragile and ineffectual beside the central weight.
Daniel stroked her and dressed her whilst she wept on.
He whispered hoarsely.
&quot; Go to bed.
My love.
Go on. &quot;
&quot; I've got to clear all that up.
I only meant to make it welcoming and nice.
I even thought I'd got the colours right. &quot;
&quot; Look, &quot; he said.
&quot; Look  it's not that.
She liked them.
She believes flowers breathe out carbon dioxide  well, they do  and they have to be put out at night.
She always has, ever since my Dad was in hospital when he died and the nurses wheeled the flowers out every night.
They do, you know.
She was only doing what they do. &quot;
&quot; She put them jolly far out, &quot; said Stephanie, childishly.
&quot; Aye.
Well, she doesn't bend well.
None of us do, at the moment, for various reasons.
You get into bed and I 'll clear it up. &quot;
She got into bed.
She listened.
Dustpan and brush: taps: back door.
He must be digging earth and replanting the cyclamen corm.
He was the most thorough man she knew.
She heard him come quietly up the stairs; she heard the clink of vase and saucer.
When he came to bed, they clung to each other, cold and clean and silent, feeling that even these small movements were overheard.
As her muscles slowly nevertheless relaxed the child began its dolphin-like arching and wheeling.
In so far as it distinguished between night and day, it was active at night.
Daniel, though his ferocious passion for his wife's body included its swollen state, was not a man who could be brought to a close interest in this unseen life.
The more it churned, the more he moved away.
Even in bed there was no privacy.
As for Wordsworth, she thought as she sank into sleep, as for Wordsworth...
Another unfinished pregnant sentence.
She dreamed, not for the last time, that the baby had prematurely got out, like a kangaroo embryo, and was making its way blind and white and tiny up and up the billowing creases of Mrs Orton's purple front, as that woman talked on and on, shifting so that at every turn the climbing thing was about to be casually suffocated.
Marcus looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at Marcus.
The psychiatrist was called Mr Rose and was, as far as Marcus could remember from time to time, medium in height, medium brown in colouring and with a medium tenor voice when he spoke, which was infrequently.
Sometimes Marcus thought of him as wearing glasses and sometimes he seemed to remember the man's face naked.
His room, too, which was one of a series of repeated offices in Calverley General Hospital, was medium-brown and medium-grey.
It had a brown leathery couch, two metal-and-leathery chairs, an oak desk and pale green walls.
There was a filing cabinet and a metal coat cupboard, both battleship grey.
On the wall over the desk was a print of Munch's &quot; Scream &quot;.
On another wall was a dog-eared calendar with coloured reproductions of Great Paintings.
This month there were some Cezanne apples on a checked tablecloth.
There was a Venetian blind, normally down with its slats open.
The view it obscured was pipes, fire escapes, a sooty-walled well.
Marcus did not lie on the couch.
He sat on a chair facing the desk and did not look at Mr Rose, though he did from time to time tilt his head to measure the angled slices of building and reflected light arranged by the blind.
He had no faith in Mr Rose's capacity to &quot; help &quot; him.
This may have been because he defined &quot; help &quot; to himself as a putting right of something that had gone wrong, a restoration of some earlier, good &quot; normal &quot; state, and he was not sure that such a state had existed or could exist.
Normal was what people said some of their actions and relations were, from time to time, and in Marcus's experience what they said they were bore only a vague relation to their actual forms and configurations.
Bill would say what fathers and sons, sisters and brothers, boys and girls did or were and would scream quite other definitions or labels.
The idea of the Boy at school, of the &quot; friend &quot;, of the &quot; good sport &quot;, of the &quot; bright chap &quot; bore the same kind of bizarrely streamlined relation to real creatures.
Marcus thought of normality as a complex pattern on tracing paper, peaks, rounds, interlocking jigsaw parts, which, when slid over the mess of the actual graph or representation of what was, produced a thickened shifty outline, a jigging blurring worse than the original.
The attraction of Lucas Simmonds had been that he had appeared to be confidently, unusually, happily &quot; normal &quot;, good friend, good sport, reliable leader, bright chap, blazer, flannels and smiling face.
He had been able to appear &quot; normal &quot; because he was abnormal, he was an outsider, he was mad, he saw and desired normality with a piercing vision of what it might ideally be thought to be.
It did not occur to Marcus to say any of this to Mr Rose.
This was partly because he was secretive, partly be cause, with his own version of Potter arrogance, Marcus supposed Mr Rose would probably be unable to follow the significance of his reflections, and partly because he supposed Mr Rose was primarily interested in sex.
He supposed Mr Rose was interested in finding out if he, Marcus, &quot; was &quot; homosexual, and whilst he would have liked to know that himself, and remembered the one explicitly sexual moment of his relations with Lucas with tremors of disgust and anxiety, he had no wish to go into that with Mr Rose.
He had a deep, consciously formulated desire not to be sexual at all, but did not expect to be believed if he said so.
He rebuffed suggestions politely, and allowed long silences to spread in the little room like ripples from some very stony stone descending.
Mr Rose addressed him as if he were younger, simpler and less capable of thought than in fact he was.
This made it easy for him to appear younger, simpler and less thinking than he was.
He thought that he and Mr Rose bored each other.
They connived in a sleepy state of inertia.
This week, prompted in fact by a carefully reasoned properly concerned letter from Bill, Mr Rose was trying to find out whether Marcus thought about going home, and if so, what he thought.
Marcus said he wouldn't like it, and added that he supposed he'd have to go sometime.
Why wouldn't he like it? said Mr Rose, and Marcus said the idea frightened him, he would be trapped, there was a lot of noise, he just wouldn't like it.
What wouldn't he like? asked Mr Rose and Marcus said unhelpfully, everything, everything, the noise especially, but everything.
The word &quot; home &quot; in fact raised in his mind as they spoke their tedious sentences a mental image which it did not even occur to him to describe to Mr Rose.
He saw a house, the house, almost the house a child draws in its infant school, four windows, chimney, door, garden path, lazy-daisy looped flowers in rectangular parterres, only this house was also a crudely three-dimensional flimsy box, barely containing something very large and very much alive, covered with rusty pelt, so that every aperture bulged with glowing fur, was pushed outwards, cracking, and a claw showed here on a sill, and a ripple of muscle there.
And the thing growled and howled to itself in the centre of its blind struggle.
The conversation came to a halt, like an unequally overweighted seesaw, at Bill's anger, Marcus's fear.
He's always angry, said Marcus.
Were you always frightened? said Mr Rose.
Oh yes, said Marcus.
Tell me about being frightened when you were little, said Mr Rose.
&quot; There was the time I saw the bear, &quot; said Marcus unguardedly, remembering the bear.
&quot; Which bear? &quot;
&quot; Not a real bear.
I was sitting behind the sofa playing with a kind of milk lorry I had.
And they called me, and I crawled out, and there was this huge bear between me and my mother, very tall, sitting up the way they do, as tall as... all the way up to the light fitting.
It seemed quite real.
I mean, I didn't know it wasn't.
I couldn't cross the room.
So they came and picked me up, and told me off. &quot;
&quot; What do you associate bears with? &quot;
&quot; Oh, the Three Bears.
I was always getting told the Three Bears. &quot;
Mr Rose sat up a little.
&quot; What did you feel about the Three Bears? &quot;
&quot; Oh well.
I don't really remember. &quot;
&quot; Did it frighten you? &quot;
&quot; You mean the bears bursting out of the house, shouting out of the windows, chasing the little girl away?
I suppose it did. &quot;
It was a difficult tale.
Too much sympathy was required.
There was the lost child, in the forest, peering through windows, knocking at doors, creeping in from outside, trying to find things that fitted, food that was acceptable, chair, porridge, bed.
Then the bears required sympathy, their warm, ordered breakfast disrupted, their chairs and beds appropriated and messed, broken, used by the intruding child.
And then the child, whom he always saw as very peaked and pale, with staring rays of pale gold hair, a spiky, sly little girl, required sympathy in her way, having smashed a chair, dirtied spoons, unmade beds.
And then the outburst of anger, and the quick sliding through the window to the outside again from the furious warm inside.
&quot; And the little bear's chair was smashed all to pieces by the little girl.
I was sorry.
&quot; For the little girl, or the baby bear? &quot;
&quot; I don't know.
For both perhaps.
For the bear because it was his thing, for the little girl because of the shouting  &quot;
His tone conveyed some contempt for this line of questioning.
Mr Rose asked Marcus what he thought of when he thought of home.
Marcus's mental furniture was meagre.
He and Stephanie both always won Kim's game, the objects on a tray, but whereas she remembered them for their quiddity, naming and denoting them in language in her mind, he did it with a geometrical map and total spatial recall.
Home to him was a pattern of relations, lines between chairs, window-oblongs, stair numbers with corner-segments, whereas she could remember every missed stitch on a tablecloth, scratches on enamelled jugs, worn carving knives.
Marcus was unconvinced of the persistence of places or things, perhaps of people.
For instance, the lavatory at Calverley General never struck him as being the same lavatory as he had entered last week, month or year, but always generically as &quot; the &quot; or &quot; a &quot; lavatory.
In the same way he never recognised himself as eating with a familiar spoon from a familiar plate.
He never supposed a bus might recur in his life, to be travelled in a second time, with a recognisable darn in its upholstery.
The bus lines were mappable, new buses succeeded each other infinitely.
Everything was provisional.
So home for Marcus was a few dangerous objects that were extensions of people, Bill's ashtray and pipe, Bill's carving tools, his mother's rubber gloves, his bed and the shelf in his bedroom with his model Spitfire.
He didn't say this either.
He told Mr Rose he supposed he missed his bedroom.
Mr Rose wished to shake him, and knew this would have been unprofessional.
So he yawned, asked if Marcus was using his time in any particular way, looked at his watch.
That night, in Stephanie's house, Marcus dreamed he had gone home and Bill was carving a meal to welcome him.
The meat was cylindrical and bloody, and still had the furry skin on.
Also, he saw at one end, pads and claws.
One of the penalties of talking, or even stubbornly not talking, to Mr Rose was that afterwards he had odd dreams.
There they were at the table, his mother in a hat like a helmet, his father carving the bloody paw which was all the food on offer.
As he carved, it contracted painfully, still alive, apparently.
Mr Rose, had he had access to the whole elaboration of this pleasing metaphor, with its roots in folklore and childhood culture, hallucination and dream, might, or might not, have understood something about Marcus that he did not already understand, and might, or might not, have felt able to offer help or advice as a result of this understanding.
Marcus told himself that he had muddled up some bears, examined his own dream, concluded it told him nothing he didn't know, and decided not to report it to Mr Rose.
Imaginary bears were not the essence of the matter.
3.
Christmas
The nuclear Potter family had practised a muted and aimless version of the British family Christmas rite.
They had inhibitions about concentrating on what might be called the Dickensian essentials; a great deal of specified food and drink, presents wanted and unwanted, the gathering of friends and relations.
They had no available extended family: there were Potters scattered about North Yorkshire who had not been seen since Bill's Congregationalist parents had cast him off for unbelief.
Winifred was the only child of dead parents.
Their household gods were created, not inherited, and were meagre and fleshless.
This was partly  in the Dickensian context  because of uncertainty of manners, owing to upward social mobility.
They had ideas about respectability and propriety which as intellectuals they despised but as Christmas dinner-eaters they endorsed.
Daniel's Dad, the engine-driver, when living, had got drunk in the pub first and at home later: there had been gusto, jollity, somnolence and regret.
Bill Potter took a glass of sherry, and shared out a bottle of sparkling wine.
No neighbours called and they visited no neighbours.
They were blameless of seasonal road accidents: they were closed in with themselves, more than usual, since no shops were open and no employment was possible, except to &quot; enjoy oneself &quot; and wash up more plates than usual, as Frederica frequently pointed out.
They ate frugally: they had learned in the war to make do with the plain, avoid waste, make things go round.
Winifred had aesthetic uncertainties.
As she had little dress sense, only a vague fear that any hat or dress she chose might be vulgar, so she had no sense of a possible style in which to decorate a house, or even a dining table, for Christmas.
She solved the clothes problem with rigorous inconspicuous plainness, and was inclined to solve the Christmas problem, much less successfully, the same way.
When the children were little they made paper chains and strings of painted cardboard milk-bottle tops, and these were draped over mirrors.
(They were never long enough to cross the room.)
When they were little they had a little artificial tree and put out their stockings on Christmas Eve.
Neither Bill nor Winifred could bring themselves to lie about the provenance of the gifts they found in the stockings.
This was not really because of an absolute respect for truth but was something to do with their inhibited negative sense of style.
They could not be seen telling stories: it looked daft.
Frederica, frustrated of magic, took it out on her classmates at a very early age by stripping them ruthlessly of their illusions.
This made her neither popular nor happy.
There was no singing, because they could not sing.
There were no games, partly because they didn't know any, partly because all five were united, in this if in nothing else, in the belief that dice, cards, charades, were a frivolous waste of time.
So, apart from opening presents, they watched each other and waited for Christmas to be over so that they could resume their intense and private working lives.
This year, for Stephanie, had to be different.
There was the church, which she helped to decorate with holly, mistletoe, evergreens.
There were parish parties.
There was the fact of her two families.
After thought, she asked her mother to bring the remaining Potters  Bill and Frederica  to Christmas dinner in the cottage.
This might, she said, provide a sensible bridging occasion when Marcus could establish some new contact with his parents.
Winifred was doubtful.
She seemed to have lost some sense that events could be controlled or hopefully directed.
Stephanie spoke also, for her almost sharply, to Marcus and told him that the visit would happen and that she trusted him to help with it, to behave well.
He seemed to respond and even, to her great surprise and encouragement, took the first active part he had taken in any event for six months, preparing for the feast.
She wanted to make the cottage festive, mostly for Daniel.
She spent money they didn't have on green leafage and bought a large, real tree in Blesford market place.
It was delivered swaddled in raffia, conical and bursting with dark needles.
Stephanie unwound it like a cocoon, stroked and spread its spiky boughs, spent time and effort stabilising it in a bucket of earth with the weight from the kitchen scales.
It stood there with its thick different life, blue-green and sombre, smelling of resin and forests.
Mrs Orton, who spent every day settled in Daniel's chair, stared, said Stephanie would do herself a damage, and offered no assistance.
Marcus, palely flitting past, consented, when asked, to hold the trunk upright with one thin hand whilst she toiled, tamping earth, lashing clothesline round trunk and branches.
Marcus said in a thin voice that the smell of pine needles was nice in the house.
Mrs Orton said they were messy things, got into everything.
Stephanie had a vision of her tree hung with gold and silver fruit and bright with candles.
Because she was a plain Potter she wanted her fruit plain, not frosted with garish patterns or stencilled with poinsettias.
She could find in Blesford only gnomes, dwarfish Father Christmases, hideous waits' lanterns.
She sat down one afternoon with the idea of coiling gold and silver thread into starbursts on milk-bottle tops.
Marcus surprised her considerably by saying why not wire, and surprised her still further by constructing, from fine gold and silver wire, a whole series of stars, hexagons, starry hollow globes and complex polyhedrons, an abstract fruitage which glittered brightly, weaving threads of light among the dark threads of the needles.
She preferred Christmas to other Christian feasts  a magical tale celebrating birth, a common miracle.
Bill had been given to anti-sermons.
His children had been lectured on the folly of the Virgin Birth, the slenderness of evidence for shepherds, star or stable, with the intensity of Strauss or Renan, as though ascertainable historical truth was a freedom he passionately desired for his children.
And it was desirable, or would have been, if his style had been less intimidating, if the proposed freedom had offered a colour, light or warmth to compensate for astral and angelic voices.
Now Daniel was difficult, telling her not to come to the hospital, where he was to be Father Christmas in the children's ward.
&quot; I want to see you. &quot;
&quot; Not there, you don't. &quot;
&quot; Shall I embarrass you? &quot;
&quot; I 'm not in this job to be easily embarrassed.
No.
I just think  I just think. &quot;
He could not say what he just thought, which was that she should be afraid of that place now.
As he was himself.
She came.
The farther in your bed was, the worse you were.
At the end were cubicles, out of sight and sound.
In the outer ward was a silky-white hygienic artificial tree.
Those children who could possibly go home had gone.
The very sick had been wheeled into spaces vacated by simple fracture and tonsillectomies.
Stephanie visited this ward regularly: the perpetual inhabitants she knew.
Two teenage boys, Neil and Simon, with muscular dystrophy, immobilised now forever, propped up side by side with twig-arms disposed lightly on clean sheets and skeletal intelligent faces cocked at unnatural angles, open-mouthed, amongst the pillows.
Anorexic Primrose, thirteen years and five stones, delicate eyes closed against a world she refused to recognise, hands folded white and nun-like, or worse, beneath a sharp chin.
Gary, shaven, swollen-skulled, brutal-looking, heavy-eyed with his death burgeoning and forceful under the bones.
The mobile lower population of younger inhabitants, staggering Dopey-like in dressing-gowns, trotting in party dresses.
Charlie aged eight with a stinking cancerous hip who propelled himself flat on his back on a trolley made from a pram base, flipper-hands paddling, olive, oval face  too big, all their faces were too big  grinning with flickering contempt as he wound skilfully round Stephanie's ankles, his foul air preceding him, and behind him decay and a whiff of disinfectant.
Legless Mike, trundling on tree-stump hip-pads, his one arm a long puckered cone.
Mary in a pretty pink dress out of which stuck yellow claws and a head and face made by plastic surgeons of grafts ranging in colour from vellum to grape-purple.
Mary, lashless, browless, lipless, hairless, except for a freshly washed blond tuft above her left ear.
Mary had fallen or been pushed into an open fire, more than once.
Mary never had visitors.
Sometimes Mary went home, and came back with another scar or suppurating patch.
Stephanie picked Mary up  Mary liked to be picked up  and perched her on one hip as she walked from bed to bed.
Between Mary and the unborn child was a network of expanded muscles and a sealed drum of amniotic fluid, in which it rested, stretched an unfinished limb, rolled and rested.
Beyond swing doors were the babies: mended harelips, and small creatures who had constructed for them by human skill gullet or anal opening or separate fingers with which the working cells and DNA during their gestation had failed to provide them.
In an incubator a brown-gold boy, naked and perfect except that both his legs had been broken during his birth, and were now suspended from a delicately constructed pulley and weight inside his perspex container.
A gramophone began with a bang on &quot; Away in a Manger &quot;.
The nurses and the few mothers who had managed to be available on Christmas Eve sang ragged and loud.
Stephanie sang.
Mary grunted and Charlie whizzed chuntering past on his low wheels.
The gramophone banged a bit more and produced Tchaikovsky.
Little girls from Miss Marilynne's Blesford Ballet School did a snowflake dance, little boys (fewer in number) a snowman tumbling-dance, melting most convincingly.
The gramophone spurted out &quot; Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer &quot;.
Bells jangled.
Who do you think that can be, children, said Sister.
And Daniel came in on a hospital trolley disguised as a sleigh with scarlet blankets and silver-paper runners, drawn by hospital porters dressed as polar bears.
The ballet school children ran up to distribute presents.
They took these from Father Christmas and gave them to the nurses, who gave them to the hospital children.
There was something not right about Daniel, his wife thought.
The Gynae man who usually wore the outfit was thinner than Daniel, so that Daniel's black garments appeared in large and small expanses under and through the red, like coals in a fire.
He had left off his dog collar and was losing strips of his white eyebrows, moustache and beard  the undergrowth, the perpetually springing beard-stubble was subversively blue-black.
He stumped awkwardly about the ward, asking people if they were comfortable, and occasionally getting answers.
He was not really jolly.
One or two of the healthier children cried when he came near them; he moved resignedly away on these occasions, as though this reaction were entirely natural.
He avoided his wife.
Most of the toys distributed by the ballet children were cuddly toys, pink, blue and white, bunnies, ducks, bears.
No child, Stephanie had observed, will love a random cuddly toy, uninvested with history or personality.
What were needed, and were not given, were constructive things, meccano, plasticine, things bad for the sheets and easy to lose.
A puffed-up snowflake, face averted, tried to offer a woolly bear to Stephanie to give to Mary.
Mary buried her face in Stephanie's womb and grunted.
Daniel strode up, booted and cloaked, ludicrous and blackly angry.
&quot; Put that child down.
You 'll hurt yourself. &quot;
&quot; No, I won't.
She likes it. &quot;
&quot; I don't. &quot;
He grinned horribly at Mary across his skewed woolly mouthpiece.
She cringed and began to whimper.
&quot; Quite right, &quot; said Daniel.
&quot; Come on, Steph.
We've done our duty &quot;
&quot; What's wrong with you? &quot;
He could not say, though he knew.
He could have dealt with this decently without Stephanie.
Now, seeing Mary's shapelessness goblin-like straddling her thick hips he wanted her and his child out of there, as though they were vulnerable to these most bizarre manifestations of the random and the destructive.
But Stephanie stood there calm and healthy and said he must speak to Mrs Marriott.
Mrs Marriott was a refinement of alarm.
She sat all day, by the cot of her son in a cubicle.
He was a pale lovely baby with a defective liver and dubious kidneys.
They had tried surgery and were experimenting with dieting.
The child slept, mostly, very deeply.
The woman, not still by nature, moved around the cubicle re-arranging baby powder, water jug, nappies.
She had lost four stones in four weeks.
When she saw Daniel, shedding red and white fuzz, she said palely that she was afraid now she would lose little Stephen, it was hope that killed you, wasn't it, best not to hope, but what else could you do, sitting there?
She felt so useless.
He did not know and could not say: he tore off the silly beard and began a sentence about resignation, which he could not finish.
He knew that what he was communicating was urgency, irritability, frustrated life and fury, wrong things here, and indeed Mrs Marriott began hopelessly, her head in a pile of clean muslin nappies, to cry.
When Daniel saw his wife coming towards the cubicle to offer comfort where he couldn't he flailed his arms and drove her away, leaving Mrs Marriott to cry on, not even telling himself it was good for her to cry, since how could he know, how could he imagine?
The Family Service in St Bartholomew's came later.
It incorporated the Nativity Play, to which Stephanie thought she looked forward.
She had helped enthusiastically with the costumes, making for Mary a trailing blue robe of cornflower taffeta, her own Cambridge May Ball dress sheared apart at the seams, lending or donating bright belts and beads to deck out the three kings, one of whom wore a peacock-feathered turban made of the shot-silk stole she had worn with that dance dress.
The organ sounded.
The children came into the church, half-skipping half-marching, keeping uncertain step.
A big boy and-a big girl, eleven-plus age, she stooping with embarrassment, stood at the lectern and read alternatively the brief, fairy-tale bits of Matthew and Luke.
Matthew's three kings, Matthew's moving star, Luke's stable, ox, ass, shepherds and singing angels.
The children mimed the tale, serious, inhibited.
Blond, Danish-faced Mary sat solemnly on the chancel steps with a Joseph smaller than herself in a striped towelling bathrobe and a towel tied to his head with plaited wool.
He was only too conscious that he had nothing really to do: his hands strayed from time to time above his freckled face to adjust his headgear.
A diminutive innkeeper held the flats of unformed hands up to indicate that there was no room in the Inn.
Smaller children and deaf grannies in the congregation twittered, as each year they twittered, like starlings on telegraph wires, urgent and aimless, look there's our Janet, look at our Ron, there, don't he look funny, lovely, dignified, daft.
&quot; And she brought forth her first-born child, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. &quot;
This central moment was always awkward.
Now, as every year, Mary, back to the pews, bottom upended, fumbled in Mrs Ellenby's old wooden crib and brought out her best and largest doll, smiling, pouting, celluloid, with hard eyes on a metal hinge that clattered open and shut, open and shut as the wavering child righted herself, thrust it up briefly and apologetically before the congregation and pushed it back under the blankets.
Owing to the permanent rigid curvature of the celluloid limbs swaddling was not possible, so the doll was swathed in someone's pretty Christening shawl.
Paper-masked sheep and cows and donkeys huddled in and knelt, adjusting their heads.
Three diminutive Kinglets, carrying a Kelly lamp, a silver sugar castor, Mrs Ellenby's Chinese enamelled cigarette box, bowed, wobbled, kneeled.
A flock of small shepherds collected in the nave.
Down the aisle came a blond choirboy, in sheet and halo, his pure voice just cracking, accompanied by a very limited multitude of the heavenly host.
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men.
The parents were moved in a confused way.
They were moved by their own flesh and blood acting out the motions of birth and parentage with that mixture of awkwardness, ignorance, seriousness and imitation which can be observed in the necessary games of mothers and fathers.
It is the childishness of Mary and Joseph that moves, nothing to do with the celluloid Babe which is always somehow redundant in this set of emotions.
Parents are moved because childhood is so swift and vanishing.
They are perhaps also more darkly moved by some threat in the law of flesh and blood itself.
These small creatures are the future, they are only acting out what they will be.
Not only childhood vanishes: men and women, having handed on their genes, are superfluous.
To watch this acting is to be marginally caught between times, between roles.
Mary looks protectively at the doll: Mary's mother looks, moved and protective, at Mary's childish body and soft face.
And time runs on.
Herod appeared in the pulpit  he was, as always, the best actor  stamped a small foot, tossed an imperious forelock, straightened a paper crown, despatched a token army across the chancel.
The slaughter of the Innocents was offstage.
The large boy at the lectern read about Rachel weeping for her children, because they were not.
Stephanie had in other years enjoyed this believed fairy tale: this year her own heaviness, fear perhaps of real birth, prevented her.
They had a nice tea in the Rectory, with a yule log iced by Mrs Ellenby, and like good children did not receive gifts but brought them, wrapped relinquished Dinky toys and woolly animals to be redistributed to Dr Barnardo 's.
Daniel told them how at this time God had so loved the world that he had sent his only son to give it life, to be made just like them, so that God might live man's life and man might through him come close to God.
God's life and man's life, one life, Daniel said.
She thought she would have made a better job of it, not believing a word, just because she was a good teacher.
What enlivened the world?
Daniel himself, his restlessness, his impatience.
The edge in the blond angel's cracking voice.
Her belly, churning.
Dark trees.
Charlie, Gary, Mary.
Did he who made the lamb make thee, her dark mind said, and for a moment she loved nothing and no one.
She smiled and distributed cups of milk, little packages of brightly coloured Smarties, like magic beans.
Her mood of hostile detachment persisted through Midnight Mass, despite the presence of old friends, Miss Wells, the Thones.
Mrs Thone sang loud and clear those loud, chanting hymns which Yorkshire people enjoy, who sing the Messiah not with the abandoned full rotundity of the Welsh, but sober and strong, heavy and rhythmically marked.
They came partly for the singing, the people.
They sang that gloomy invocation, &quot; O Come, O Come, Emmanuel &quot;.
They sang the Yorkshire &quot; Christians Awake &quot; and &quot; O Come all Ye faithful &quot; with a mixture of respectability, sober energy and abandon which always confused Stephanie who associated the noise both with repressive habits and with unused forces finding an outlet.
They stood there, still and dark and hatted in rows.
The English are ugly, Stephanie thought, not for the first time.
There was a preponderance of middle-aged faces, plum-coloured, ashen, pasty, pursed into a combination of too much patience, caution and suspicion.
They were not outdoor faces, they were not easy faces.
Nor were they suffering faces.
They were the faces of people concerned predominantly either with what people thought about their behaviour, property, social standing, or with their own judgment of other people's behaviour, property, social standing.
They were more uncertain than their parents had been about these things.
It was a generation that had to be brave and now did not know how to be peaceful.
See the hosts of Midian, prowl and prowl around.
Their clothes were ugly carapaces, designed to show the quality of the cloth and be decent: wine reds, bottle greens, odd strident royal blues.
She thought of D. H. Lawrence's requirement of tight white trousers and thought most of these shapeless persons would be worse his way.
No good to sit under beautiful Italian trees amongst beautiful Italian peasants and inveigh petulantly against miners and respectable women.
She thought instead of The Mill on the Floss, that cruel social history of English religion, locating its true centre in the Lares and Penates, a dense structure of things which defined who you were and what your relation to others was, spotted damask, sprigged china, the graduated expense and display of bonnets kept to be worshipped rather than worn.
This had, and George Eliot knew it, little or even nothing to do with Christ's injunctions to his followers, and certainly nothing at all to do with the Incarnation which was now being celebrated as the congregation sang &quot; Unto us a Boy is Born &quot; as Daniel at the white-draped altar, with its lovingly embroidered white cloth, watched with Mr Ellenby over the bread and wine.
George Eliot, Stephanie thought, was a good hater.
She looked long and intelligently at what she hated, with curiosity to see exactly chat it was, and the necessary detachment to imagine it from within and without, these two breeding a kind of knowledge that was love.
George Eliot had loved the bonnets and sprigged china  because she knew them, or because writing them down gave her power over them, made her gentle and generous to their meaning?
She tried to relate this sudden vision of the things of the pieties of the Dodson sisters to Daniel's Mum's instructions about how to cook Christmas pudding, and largely failed.
Stephanie had hopes that the familial Christmas dinner might in some way restore something of the frail threadwork of decency and courteous behaviour broken by the earlier violence of her father and brother.
Mrs Orton, bizarrely enough, represented the necessary public presence of an observer who might inhibit wrath, induce politeness.
She would have had no such hopes in the old days, when Bill took pleasure in flouting normal expectations, seemed driven to flare up, to &quot; create &quot; as Mrs Orton might put it.
He had embarrassed Stephanie forever at her own wedding.
But those who &quot; create &quot; social terror are vulnerable to those who, ruthlessly or desperately, are capable of creating greater terror.
Marcus had embarrassed Bill  as well as hurting him  in a way that outstripped any mischief or shock Bill had ever caused.
From what Stephanie had seen of Bill lately, from what Frederica reported, his spirit was daunted, at least for a time.
She did not consider, though she could and should have done, that Bill's very real affection for herself might temper any onslaught.
He did not like Daniel, or her marriage, and made that clear.
She worked at civility.
She made Cumberland sauce to go with the turkey, translucent and clear wine-red in little pots, with fine gold strips of peel lying in it.
She spent time shelling boiled chestnuts to sit amongst the traditional sprouts.
She rubbed bread and herbs and made stuffing.
She built little mounds of nuts, raisins and mandarins.
She laid out bright scarlet napkins.
She built a good wood fire.
There were cut glass wine glasses on the table.
Stephanie did not like cut glass: she was of the generation that discovered the plain, the functional, the Finnish, Dartington.
But the lines of light glittered on the carved glassy flowers and formed a bright hazy enveloping pattern with the triangles of round mandarins, the crisscross of orange peel, Marcus's fine polyhedrons in the tree, the changing firelight itself.
When they came, she saw Bill would not &quot; create &quot;.
She opened the door to them, crimson-faced and breathless from basting the turkey, a butcher's apron inadequately covering a distended quaker-grey dress.
He stood on the doorstep between Winifred &quot; and Frederica and seemed so very much smaller than either tall woman that he looked to Stephanie horridly shrunk.
He carried several parcels and a box of bottles.
&quot; My contribution, &quot; he said, perhaps anxiously, to his daughter, who found it almost impossible to kiss him across the barrier made by these objects and her own girth.
When she tried to take the boxes he summoned Frederica with a touch of his old asperity, and told her to make herself useful.
The Potters edged their way in, nerved to meet Marcus, and saw Daniel's Mum, lapped deep in flesh and garments in the armchair, flesh overlapping flesh as her chin folded over her folded neck.
Marcus was not there.
They took chairs  a little too close, the circle, for elegance in the small space.
Stephanie offered sherry.
A voice spoke.
&quot; Please excuse me if I don't get up.
Truth is, I can't, wi'out help.
I can just about get down here of a morning and then I 'm stuck until someone gives me a' and up, which they don't want to be doing too often, do they dear? &quot;
&quot; I 'm still strong enough for a tug, &quot; said Stephanie, too brightly.
&quot; And how are you keeping, Mrs Potter?
Bearing up, despite troubles?
As long as you've got your health, I always say... &quot;
Winifred said she was well and looked at Stephanie, sitting near the kitchen.
Stephanie she thought did not look well.
The gloss had gone from the blond hair, the face was sharper, however the cheeks were flushed and the body swollen.
There were lines round the sharpened nose and indigo shadows round the eyes.
And not much colour in the lips.
&quot; How are you? &quot; she asked her daughter cautiously.
&quot; Thriving, &quot; said Mrs Orton.
&quot; The amount the young can do nowadays  now when I was carrying Dan I was not able to get up for days together, me ankles swoll so, and I 'ad dizzy spells, something terrible, but she still gets around on that bike, perky as Punch.
You 'll do yourself an injury, I say, but she knows best no doubt for there isn't a day but she's off for some long trip or other on the thing.
One day last week we 'ad to get us own lunch, me young See-all-hear-all-say-nowt upstairs, and then I had to bellow to get him down t'elp or I'd 'ave been stuck 'ere in this chair wi'out a sup or bite from dawn to dusk and beyond.
But 'e made a bit o' Welsh rarebit after some coaxing. 'E's not as incapable as'e looks, I've come to 't conclusion. &quot;
Briefly, no Potter could speak.
Fortunately at this point Daniel came in, humming, from Morning Prayer, taking up too much space, wishing everyone &quot; Happy Christmas &quot; in a clerical boom.
He took in Marcus's absence, went upstairs and came down with the pale boy behind him.
Marcus stood on the bottom step.
Bill stood up and faced his son.
Daniel's Mum issued a disregarded injunction to sit down, do.
Bill took two steps forwards and very formally held out his hand.
Marcus, limply, but for a perfectly decent period, took it as it was offered, and then moved on to lay a cold cheek against his mother 's.
Through Stephanie's mind ran an image of a huge rent, in sail canvas or something like it, being stitched with large, clumsy, visible stitches, but stitched.
The next thing was the mutual offering of presents, which she proposed.
The presents were curiously uniform.
Marcus received several anonymous shirts and socks.
Daniel too was given garments, some he might wear and some he wouldn't, socks, scarf, tie, all of them not black, as though the company had made a preconcerted attempt to cheer him up.
Stephanie had miscellaneous pieces of kitchen equipment and bedlinen: not a book: although Frederica had all books if you included a book token from Mrs Orton.
Bill had books, and tobacco, and a book token from Marcus with a Brueghel snowscene reproduced on the front, which he turned over several times as though it must contain some message other than &quot; Happy Christmas, love Marcus' written neatly on the dotted line.
Stephanie went back into the kitchen to dish up.
Daniel adeptly and too obviously converted a reminiscence of his Mum's about a joint of pork she had once cooked into a general conversation about Christmases past.
They remembered wartime making-do.
They discussed the new turkey farms.
Bill borrowed a corkscrew and opened some bottles of Beaujolais he had brought.
Sentence by meaningless sentence they held the occasion together.
In the kitchen, Stephanie struggled with the turkey, bloated and slithering in its fatty dish.
Her face glistened with heat and effort.
She suffered from an excess of exact imagination.
They weighed on her.
In all of them some private violence pulled against prescribed behaviour.
Bill most.
If public medical statements have been made about a man's deleterious effect on his son's psyche there is bound to be anxiety and embarrassment attendant on their meeting.
On the other hand, there was the infinite English capacity for underplaying dramas, ignoring situations, pretending things were normal.
Bill had had his own small share of this sometimes useful refusal to recognise awkward truths, particularly where Marcus was concerned.
And there was Winifred, who had tried to teach her son her own form of passive resistance to Bill's rage and had only, perhaps she now thought, exposed him to a homosexual religious maniac.
She had once told Stephanie, whom she trusted, though it did not come easily to her to make confidences to her daughters, that she was possessed by physical loathing of Lucas Simmonds and of what contact  she was not specific  he might have had with her son.
&quot; I wanted to vomit, &quot; she had said sharply to Stephanie.
&quot; Indeed I have vomited. &quot;
Stephanie did not know how far this revulsion might perhaps include Marcus himself.
Marcus found large areas of the world untouchable: Winifred brought herself to make contact with them with difficulty.
Stephanie could feel Frederica's tolerant and arrogant knowledge that she, Frederica, was now tangential to all this.
She could feel Mrs Orton wanting to be noticed, desiring to be liked, preventing these things.
And there was Daniel, who was unhappy or angry, she did not know why.
She could hear him being professionally cheerful, caricaturing himself and the Cloth, as he did, under stress.
She felt every housewife's fury when the guests could not be got to table and the food was ready.
She felt irritable, tearful, contemned.
She carried in sprouts and potatoes and smiled and smiled.
The food was eaten.
Chewing took over from talking.
Daniel sliced the bird's plump breast and pulled tendons out of the lopped legs, fished for stuffing with a long spoon.
Marcus caused the first flurry by refusing meat.
He did not say, but looked, that the sight of it made him feel sick.
Mild Stephanie felt momentary pure rage at his rejection of her good gravy, her dedicated basting, her care.
Mrs Orton took it upon herself, watching him pick at a little heap of sprouts and chestnut, to observe that he had very likely made himself ill with being faddy.
It was Frederica who retorted &quot; Plenty of protein in chestnuts &quot; and took another helping for herself.
They all got hotter and redder and shinier and fatter.
When Mrs Orton proposed that they listen to the Queen's Speech on the radio, Bill's only protest was to produce a bottle of brandy from his case, open one of his gift books, roll himself a cigarette with gift tobacco, lean back and stare covertly at his son.
Who had his eyes closed in an expressionless face but was still present, in his chair.
No, Stephanie thought later, it had been no more and no less than could have been hoped: a reasonable coming together of people close to each other, not by choice, reluctant in many cases.
Nevertheless it had, from the first glass of sherry to the momentary blue veil of flame on the pudding, been what she would have called civilised.
They had behaved well.
Daniel was unhappy.
Stephanie did not understand Daniel's unhappiness because, quick about his attitudes to churchwardens, shirt buttons, Bill's fury, the Ellenbys' lazy matter-of-course snobbery, she was unable to catch the shifts of his feelings about herself, or now, about the two of them.
She had her arrogance: she did not believe he had fully imagined her physical battle with the turkey, her anger, and shame at her anger, over Marcus's vegetarian gesture.
Daniel had in fact imagined all these, and had also adequately encompassed her relief that small talk and eating were proceeding.
He knew a lot about English ways of &quot; not speaking &quot;.
There was more than one couple in his parish who had communicated for years only by note or through neighbours.
And beyond married couples there were siblings, parents, children who froze speech forever, from revenge, terror, hopelessness, small hardened stubbornness.
He knew what it meant that Marcus should stay in the room whilst Bill managed for three consecutive hours to make a series of acceptably banal factual observations.
But he was not happy.
He thought, he had wanted her, Stephanie.
Not a Home.
Just her.
He wished now he had not given her what he believed to be a very beautiful nightdress, creamy and ruffled: he had seen her look at Frederica's books and had understood what he had half-sensed on the occasion of Frederica's telegrams, her sense of loss.
He had his own sense of loss: the grim singleness of himself and his job alone in an anonymous bedsitter.
He looked at them all.
There were three kinds.
The pale Potters, the vanishers: Winifred, Stephanie, Marcus, who effaced themselves too quickly.
The flaming Potters, Bill and Frederica, today out-talked by his mother, but capable of endless egocentric parabolas of speech.
And he and his mother, heavy, flesh and blood.
His Mum was a horrible nuisance, no question.
And ate and ate and ate: everyone had watched her guzzle, blank pale Potters, bird-like, judging, flaming Potters, fastidious Marcus with his bits of greens dissected and rejected.
His child had the weight of all this on it.
If it was not born like hospital Mary, it could be genetically fated to resemble his Mum, or Marcus, or the awful Frederica.
Flesh of these fleshes and blood of these bloods.
He considered the mothers round the table with an almost superstitious wariness.
His own, now saccharine and anecdotal about the good old days of his childhood, when he had in fact eaten pilchards with a fork out of a tin in silence, day after day, whilst she slept.
Winifred, washed-away and thinned-down by a lifetime of self-effacement and subordination to these ferocious, pale or fuming creatures.
Stephanie, double, self-contained, so egg-inviolate that Charlie did not frighten her nor Mary shake her calm assurance.
What would become of her, of him, of his child?
He felt the mothers and the family, as in a different way he felt the hospital children, as a threat.
He told Stephanie to put her feet up and went into the kitchen for solitude, where he began purposefully on the dishes.
He was joined, which annoyed him, by Frederica.
Who had, among other disqualifications, no turn of speed with a tea-towel.
She used it initially to fan her face with.
She said.
&quot; Well, that went off O.K. &quot;
&quot; Yes. &quot;
&quot; Nice to be out in the cool though.
Air.
I can't bear somnolent groups of people. &quot;
Neither could he.
He remarked however that there was little to choose between kitchen and living-room in respect of air, since the oven had been on since dawn.
He handed her a dripping plate.
&quot; Good practice.
I 'm going in a week or two.
To be a Mother's Helper.
Not my forte but a mother's helper in French, at least. &quot;
&quot; Very nice. &quot;
&quot; I have wondered if I ought to leave Mummy.
She's in a grim state.
I don't think she finds me much use.
Tells Steph things, not me.
I 'm unnecessary.
Just as well for me.
I've got to get moving. &quot;
&quot; Yes. &quot;
&quot; You don't like me much.
I've noticed.
I didn't for a long time, I was only interested in whether I liked you.
And when I decided I did, I noticed you didn't like me. &quot;
He handed her another plate.
&quot; I don't spend much time thinking about liking or not liking, &quot; he said.
&quot; No.
But you can do it, without thinking about it.
I hope you get to like me.
I mean, we shall know each other all our lives.
Though I hope we don't go on having family Christmases.
I long to be with people I've chosen.
Are you afraid of defeat? &quot;
&quot; What? &quot;
&quot; Well  you go on  like a bulldozer  like me.
Aren't you afraid of being the other sort  the sort that stops and suffers? &quot;
&quot; Everyone has to be that. &quot;
&quot; No  look  some people aren't defeated.
Some are.
Look at the people in this house.
You aren't defeated. &quot;
&quot; No? &quot; he said, passing another plate, and regretted it.
&quot; Daniel.
You don't feel weighed down  too? &quot;
&quot; No, no.
No more than is inevitable, and manageable.
You're young enough to be dramatic about everything. &quot;
&quot; And how old are you, so wise? &quot;
He was twenty-four.
He laughed.
&quot; You should get Marcus out of your house, &quot; she said, rattling a handful of cutlery
&quot; He's unobtrusive. &quot;
&quot; Is he?
I hadn't noticed.
He's an energy-absorber, like shock-absorbers in cars or astronomical anti-matter.
Since Daniel agreed with this he was reduced to silence.
Frederica studied him as he dealt with the roasting-pans.
His waist was huge over the sink: his arms black and hairy below rolled-up sleeves: the mass of his black hair ruffled by effort.
The back view of a large man in a small space at the wrong height.
She did wish he liked her.
But she did not care greatly.
Her mind was full of the future which presented itself as a bright empty space crossed by tracks of her own shining, clear-cut flights, her passage swift and sunlit.
There was going to be very little room in Frederica Potter's life from now on for this imposed world of people and chairs you had to have because they were there.
It might be all right for Daniel: his purposes possibly included its transfiguration or consecration or whatever words from whatever language he chose to describe it in.
But she rejected.
She dropped, and broke, one of Stephanie's wedding-present wine glasses.
Daniel swept up the fragments.
4.
Midi
When Frederica left for N?mes she had no real idea of the South.
She knew that N?mes was a provincial city and would have preferred it not to be, seeing &quot; provincial &quot; in terms of the English nineteenth century novel, not of the Roman Provincia, Provence.
Drifting citywards in her generation, she had really hoped for Paris and bright lights.
She had booked a sleeper from Paris in terms of time  &quot; I can't sit up all night &quot;  not distance &quot; I am going a long way south. &quot;
When she boarded this train she became involved in an altercation with the sleeping-car attendant, which she enjoyed, because it was in French, and she was able to use her subjunctives and conditionals, and say &quot; si &quot; instead of &quot; oui &quot; at appropriate moments.
She lost the argument, which was about her reservation, which was for berth No. 7 in English which the conductor obstinately read as 1 in French.
Frederica explained that in France the 7 is crossed but that this is not done in Thomas Cook's in Calverley, N. Yorkshire.
The attendant said there was a gentleman already undressing in No. 1 Frederica received no answer to her question about numro sept, but was given permission to stand in the corridor of the train, which was already sliding away from its platform.
She watched Paris rattle past, foreign blocks of lit windows, knots of wire, and she was offered a Gauloise by a compact little man who leaned his elbow companionably against hers on the window-rail.
She accepted the cigarette as she accepted most offerings, and still elated at the sound of her French being understood and responded to by Frenchmen, volunteered the information that she was going to N?mes, to stay with a family.
She would have told him much more, all sorts of improper things, only to hear the old information newly proposed in new words.
She would be lucky, the man told her, to see the South in spring.
The maquis smells wonderful.
For the first time Frederica's imagination touched at the South.
He was going to St Raphael himself, the man said.
He was a traveller.
He sold liqueurs, mostly to the hotel industry.
He could offer mademoiselle a taste of Cointreau, Grand Marnier, Chartreuse, if she really had no berth.
Frederica replied brightly that would be very agreeable.
This was despite a strong sense that the man was unduly anxious about the outcome of his overture: anxiety is a great destroyer of response, and Frederica had no taste for being closed in a sleeping compartment with a worried man.
On the other hand she did not want to stand until dawn, and she did want the French words to go on being threaded together.
The sleeping-car attendant came back and announced that by great good fortune he had an empty berth for which the occupant had unaccountably not appeared.
He ushered Frederica into No. 7, and stood, perhaps awaiting a tip, which she was unable to offer, being provided only with notes of large denominations.
This caused her to close herself abruptly in, without the traveller in liqueurs.
And then she was delighted by the solitude of the sleeping-car, and forgot him.
She undressed partly and padded about the perpetually shifting floor in stocking feet, suspenders, slip and bra.
She investigated ring hooks, water flask, lidded washbasin.
She tried to peer out of the peephole in her blind.
A station clashed by so fast she could neither read its name or discern the pattern of its ironwork.
Black masses of bush, or bull, or thatch elongated themselves howling.
She liked that.
She liked to be alone in a warm, lit box with the world streaming darkly by.
She curled on her bunk, admired her long legs, thought about desire (not for the traveller in liqueurs), read part of Madame Bovary, part of Les Fleurs du Hal and all of a novel by Margery Sharp, bought on impulse at the Gare de Lyon.
She saw the dawn when it came and pulled up the blind.
There in the pale lemon grey were expanses of espaliered rows of strange stumps like truncated Virginia creepers, squat and tough.
These large spaces did not rush past but seemed endless because endlessly repeated.
Understanding took time.
Vines in her mind trailed over trellises, depended from arbours, clung.
Round these orderly gnarled wooden roots the cold soil heated almost visibly as the incredible bright dawn advanced.
She dressed carefully, green herring-bone tweed suit, pinch-waisted, court shoes, very plain, and a complicated face, the tricky little eyeliner triangles at the lid-corners almost smudged by the swaying train.
She had a sort of velvet cap, from which she had snipped a bit of veiling.
She believed cheap clothes could be made elegant by paring them down to essentials.
Sometimes this worked, sometimes she looked tarty, sometimes she looked drab.
On that morning, descending the steel ladder onto the sandy N?mes siding in two-inch heels and an inverted tulip skirt, she looked all these things.
The Grimaud family had written to say that they would meet her with a blue Corvette.
It was only at this late stage that she began to think about them; they had been a means to an end, Frederica Potter's removal from Blesford and Yorkshire.
A large man and a small boy appeared at the other end of the platform: she hobbled on her heels, humping her heavy suitcase, towards them.
They greeted her and introduced themselves  Monsieur Grimaud and Paul-Marie.
Paul-Marie had un-English shorts, long white socks, olive-brown legs.
Frederica ignored him.
M. Grimaud swung up her bag, smiling.
He had a wide waistline, iron-grey hair en brosse, a tanned face with smile-lines set round the mouth, a signet ring, gold serpent coiled round bloodstone.
He was at ease in his skin.
He asked about her journey, and sitting beside him in the car she recounted the mix-up over the sleeper numbers, enjoying, still, hearing herself speak French.
M. Grimaud laughed.
He swung the car out into N?mes and beyond N?mes into the countryside, straight roads with plane trees, cultivated wild land right and left.
M. Grimaud explained everything easily, with a French educational fervour and a local passion which Frederica was too culturally inexperienced  and too confused  to place.
The lovely light, as they travelled, grew and grew.
The fields here, M. Grimaud said, were fields of lavender, a major Provincial industry.
Here she was in the land of the Langue d'Oc which must be distinguished from the Langue d'Oil.
He spoke of troubadours and ancient lords and sang, unembarrassed and unaffected, snatches of song about lavender, about almond trees, about love, in incomprehensible Proven-am.
Frederica saw the long ridges of dusty grey-green lavender leaves and imagined violet spikes.
She saw unshadowed earth in yellow light, more vines, new shoots of what she did not recognise as young maize.
Later, travelling knowledgeably south at thirty, at forty, full of accrued wisdom about good little places, local food and wine, Cafes Routiers and long-vanished sand dunes she tried to remember the surprises, only half-experienced that day, of that land to her unexpecting eyes.
It had seemed, because she was, raw and new, dust and brightness.
And the smells, the beginning of the smells of the south, more immediately apprehensible, more durable in the memory, at least when re-evoked.
Herbs in rough places, juniper, rosemary and thyme, which she would have named but not identified, oregano which she could not even have named.
They approached the proprit along an avenue lined with limes  tilleuls, a word, a name, already in her vocabulary, but now suddenly associated with a solid form and gusts of fragrance.
M. Grimaud discoursed on the making of tisanes, and made obscure references to Marcel Proust.
Tisane, like tilleul, was in Frederica's vocabulary, the word, not the thing, but it was some time yet before she would understand their connection with Proust, who had entered her consciousness largely through a striking nightmare, dreamed the night before her Oxford entrance examination, which she recalled, as M. Grimaud talked and the scented trees brushed past.
In this dream she had been locked into the school library with an exam paper containing one question and one only: Compare and contrast narrative method in Proust and Tom Jones.
She knew nothing about either and in the dream wept bitterly from shame and impotence.
When she woke she was further annoyed at having dreamed a category confusion, a man and a book, not realising that the category error was partly the answer to the uncouth question, since Proust was coterminous with a book as the eponymous Tom Jones was not.
She was never to think of that dream without some of its investing emotions, shame and irritation, even after a man at a party in 1969 had told her such dreams are dreamed typically by those unlikely to fail plausible and real exams.
Then, in 1954, as the car passed under what seemed a mediaeval or Renaissance courtyard gate there was Frederica, brooding grimly about a personal failure in a dreamed, unreal competition.
In later years, say 1964, 1974, 1984, the first vision of Nozires took on its perfection and primacy, as it is only after the mind has cleared itself of the flow of daily preoccupation, planning, expectation, that the moment of a death can be known for what it is, and one's life mapped, prospectively and retrospectively, to that threshold.
The yard was walled in gold stone covered with clean dust and lichen-stains.
Hens ran, calling.
Madame Grimaud, short and trim with a well-managed waist, solid hips and strictly upswept smooth black hair, stood on the doorstep with two cross-looking and awkward teenage daughters, to whom Frederica was to be required to converse.
Mediterranean women in black dresses  Frederica's first sight of these  moved around and behind this group.
There was a lot of formal handshaking and Frederica, directed in part by the nature of the language, spoke several formal French sentences of graceful gratitude.
Inside, at a huge oak table in a stone dining-hall, dark-walled and tiled, she was given a bowl of hot chocolate, a huge piece of French bread, unsalted butter (again the first) and confiture aux cerises.
She was conducted up flights of stone stairs with wrought-iron balustrades to her huge room, whose walls were painted a bright dark blue  a colour which reminded her of a postcard of Van Gogh's &quot; Starry Night &quot;, and even more of the colour behind the fleurs de lys on the banners in Olivier's film of Henry V. Its powdery darkness amazed her: no English room was ever dark blue: maybe this was more like Reckitt's blue?
The floor was faded blue and tawny tiles.
The bed was high, high and curtained, covered with lace and bobbled crocheted cotton.
There was a wash hand-stand with ewer, slop bucket and china washbasin.
The room was twice the size of the sitting-room at home in Masters Row at Blesford.
There was neither writing-table nor desk, though there was a whole set of heavy, yellow-painted bedroom furniture, wardrobe, cupboard, chest.
It was alien.
It was interesting.
She was excited by so many strange things.
She was also exhausted.
And, to her horror, briefly homesick for carpets, bookcases, small casement windows, man-made heating devices, the familiar, the known.
Later, at least for many years, she was not to see this time as part of her life, and perhaps therefore it need not now be told at length.
Frederica's recall of things seen was very much less lucid and automatic than those of Stephanie or even Marcus.
Her mind was self-referring and exclusive as theirs were not  impersonal only in relation to the teasing-out of the intellectually taxing problem.
In the 1970s Ezra Pound's laminated view of vital and moribund cultures, centred partly on Provence, made her see M. Grimaud's easy educating communications about the land, the lore, the language in which she found herself, as a sign of real energy in his community which had been ersatz, or only wished-for, in post-Festival of Britain Yorkshire.
Bill Potter had his local pride: his evening class students collected local words, described patterns of social behaviour and family interrelationship with a kind of Fabian zeal, but without the sun-saturated liveliness of M. Grimaud's sense of what was shared and perpetual in his world.
This family, which was not her own, which threw her own, absent and dispersed, into sharp relief, was certainly kind.
M. Grimaud was captain of a ship that ran between Marseille and Tunis.
He was away for weeks at a time and would return laden with gigots of Algerian lamb, jars of oil, sacks of pulses; Madame ran the proprit, which was large, and not labour-intensive (words that entered Frederica's vocabulary ca. 1960).
There were hectares of vineyards  she never knew how many  and orchards of peaches, cherries, melons.
There was at least a sufficiency of migrant Italian house and garden servants, who rendered any conventional mother's help more than redundant.
Frederica, who did not even make her own bed, acquired one or two odd skills.
She learned to cut asparagus daily, in the wide, ridged, humped beds outside the golden walls, spying out newly poking purple heads, slicing, with a gritty sharp knife, just under the soil.
She also learned to assist in the preparation of foods she believed herself, in 1954, to dislike: a?oli, estouffade de boeuf, kid stewed with wine, tomatoes and garlic, potage de legumes hand-wound through a Mouli, dressed salads made with unknown leaves and fronds, crimson, cream-white, spinach-dark, curly pale green.
She turned the handle of the spit when the Algerian gigots were roasted, larded with garlic and anchovies, in a kind of oval cage of iron slats in front of a hot fire of vine-stumps inside the huge hearth; she sat on a bench inside the chemine, turning the ratchet as it wound down, basting the lamb with oil and its own juices from a diabolical long spoon.
Her one apparent asset, her good French, turned out to be a disadvantage.
Marie-Claire and Monique learned little English because Frederica intimidated them and they intimidated her.
She rewrote their homework in respectable English but appeared, at that time, not to have inherited the family teaching compulsion, and was unable to explain the principle by which she was altering their grammar and syntax.
Thus, although their marks improved, the two girls were not learning.
Only much later did it occur to her that this was her failure: academically self-sufficient and wholly self-centred she saw their sullenness and ignorance as their concern and their fault.
Madame Grimaud treated all this with brisk courtesy, remarking on one occasion that it could at least be said that Frederica was a good moral influence.
Frederica saw this observation at the time as a mark of signal failure of insight.
Later, in England, it occurred to her that it might have been said ironically, but by then she had forgotten the context and intonation of it, could only remember that it was said under hot sun outside the Maison Carre in N?mes, where the air was fluent and the stones shone.
They made courteous and persistent attempts to amuse her.
On the second day they gave her a rubber ball attached on a long elastic thread to a wooden bat.
She stood in the courtyard, solemnly playing, seventeen, sex-starved, muscle-bound, an intellectual shark, at Jokari.
She was no good at this.
The domestiques and Madame Grimaud observed her failure solemnly from doors and windows as they moved about their household works.
Frederica was put in mind, mutatis mutandis, starting with the intention, of Miss Havisham bidding the boy Pip to play, of the brewery yard where he had met Herbert Pocket, which (the yard) irked her, because she could not properly visualise it.
She was taken everywhere.
To the covered fish market at dawn to buy fish for a bouillabaisse, which held no romance for her for she had not then read Ford's description of the great bouillabaisse in the Calanques, nor Elizabeth David's description of the colours and patterns of fish on the stalls.
She went to the dressmaker with Madame Grimaud, where there was a stocky replica, adjustable, of Madame Grimaud's female French form standing headless on a metal leg.
Everyone knew everyone and stopped to speak to everyone.
She thought she remembered lovebirds at the dressmaker, and did remember dark coffee and langues de chat.
The lovebirds in her mind fused into a watching parrot, perhaps made by the metal leg.
She visited neighbouring proprits and sipped aperitifs from unlabelled bottles, white port on terraces, in arbours trailing wisteria, under acacia trees.
In two of these families there were young men, sons and heirs who would inherit the land, unspeaking grave Michel, noisy Dany with one word of English  &quot; bluejeans &quot;  and an explosive Lambretta churning up pale, clean dust.
She had ideas about these two, especially about Michel, but saw that to them she was invisible, not quite real, as au pair girls frequently, perhaps usually, are.
She spoke a lot, and they turned and congratulated each other on her French, as though she was some sort of barrel-organ she thought, being not only sex-starved but starved also of admiration.
When Monsieur was at home, more cultural and purposeful expeditions were undertaken.
They went to a floodlit performance of Mireille in the Roman arena in N?mes.
In the same place, one day, Frederica saw bullfighting.
She had hoped to understand the aesthetic excitement of this pursuit, to see and recognise the &quot; moment of truth &quot; even if she must simultaneously be revolted.
But all she saw was slow, repeated, stumbling, coughing killings at which she retched in a very conventional English animal-loving way, which upset Monsieur Grimaud, who was an aficionado, and had been lecturing Frederica on the provenance and meaning of that word.
The place suddenly had its history of bloodletting to be sniffed, and yet even that was not exciting, maybe because the N?mois did not roar for blood as the Romans had, but sunned themselves and discussed finer points of capework.
They did, it was true, have an agitated fit of booing and hissing, but this was, M. Grimaud explained, an expression of spontaneous disapproval of Picasso who could just be made out, small brown face under black beret at the other side of the arena.
The crowd, M. Grimaud stated, thought his art was fraudulent and Frederica, trying in vain to imagine any English football crowd holding any communal view about any modern artist, suddenly remembered the Picasso prints on the walls of Alexander Wedderburn's study in Blesford Ride School.
She had been in love with Alexander.
Here, distant from home and muddle, she was sure she was still in love with Alexander.
She had made, circumstances had made, rather a mess of this love.
She did not think he would like to hear from her, or possibly even to think about her.
His Picassos had been Blue Period, the Saltimbanques, a strange Boy with a Pipe, crowned with flowers.
It was odd to sit here, so far away, in sun and shouting, and see the small dark and light rounds of the face of the man who had made those images.
His lines are very economical, she said to M. Grimaud, who looked solidly startled at this view and spoke dismissively of women with three breasts, or single eyes, paintings more infantile than those of Cromagnon man.
Moreover, he said, Picasso had discovered and ruined the traditional potteries at Vallauris which now turned out only nasty ash-trays with distorted bulls and gross doves.
He has killed the tradition he loved, M. Grimaud said with contempt.
Frederica thought he was being philistine and was later to learn that he was being simply truthful.
The drawings of bullfights, however, have real merit, M. Grimaud assured her, which silenced her, since she didn't know the drawings and was sick of the bullfight.
Afterwards bleeding bull steaks hung from hooks in butchers' windows, or lay overlapping on white plates.
The Grimaud family purchased and cooked many of these  it was customary, Frederica was told.
Frederica gagged on hers, nauseated by a memory of the foundering black body as the life left the legs, of the crawling sheet of sticky blood over the shoulder under the pics, of trailing hooves and horns dragged over sawdust.
She was later to discover that a certain J. Olivier believed that Vincent Van Gogh's self-mutilation in Arles was an aspect of some bull-ritual.
The victorious matador, he said, was awarded the ear of the bull, which he would offer &quot; to his Lady or to a female spectator who has drawn his attention &quot;.
(No ears were awarded on the day of Frederica's visit to the corrida.)
So, J. Olivier argues, Van Gogh, vanquished and vanquisher both, cut off his own ear after the altercation with Gauguin and presented it, in his own honour, to the lady, the Arles whore.
The vignoble produced a reasonable vin rose which she drank like water every lunchtime.
Unlike Marie-Claire, Monique and Paul-Marie, she did not add water, believing it to be childish or in doubtful taste to dilute good wine.
The result was burning headaches, dizzy spells and prolonged periods of lassitude which the Grimauds, courteous as always, ascribed to the mistral, to heat, to unaccustomed diet.
They may have been glad, since she was turning out to be hard to amuse, that she slept deeply in the early afternoons.
There were no books.
M. Grimaud told her how N?mes had been settled by the veterans of Octavius's victory over Antony and Cleopatra, whose names, Antonin, Numa, Flavien, Adrien, persisted, even today, as did the emblem of the defeat of the serpent of old Nile, the N?mes chained crocodile.
He took her to Uzs where Racine had once come to ruralise, contemplate the priesthood, began to write.
Uzs was and is a town out of another time, a yellow town on a gently conical hill, geometrical roof on roof, a town that must have been as it now is when Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra.
Frederica tried to talk to M. Grimaud about Racine but, although he could quote several speeches, he was more interested in what Racine was and meant than in what he had written.
He had a Racine, a Molire, a Chateaubriand.
Frederica borrowed also Hemingway in translation, and read about bullfights and the earth moving, which caused her to feel worse, sex-starved, desperate for life, and love, and action.
She also developed a need for the English language.
Madame took her to the City Library in N?mes, a gaunt, dark building with high shutters behind grilles and dusty leather books, ceiling high.
There was not much in English: she borrowed the complete works of Tobias Smollett.
These were not what she was hungry for, but they were English, and narrative.
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquillisers.
They were at least long.
Madame then thought of the vlo.
On this Frederica explored the unvarying hot flat country.
She bumped along furrows between vines, spattered cobalt-blue with spraying.
She listened to cicadas and breathed the pervasive liquorice which grew locally and was processed in a factory on the N?mes road.
Whenever she fell off the vlo she sat where she was, nodding, fumed with wine and drowsy with heat, in a classical furrow, under a pale, bright sky.
She decided to become a writer.
It was almost inevitable, given the excessive respect paid in the Potter house to the written word, and given Frederica's own mastery of, and intense pleasure in, the school essay, that she should decide to become a writer.
Foreign places, moreover, bring out the writer in strangers less word obsessed than Frederica Potter.
I do not think the compulsion to write about foreign places can be very closely compared to a painter's sensuous delight in new light, new forms, new colours, Monet seeing the Cap d'Antibes in blue and rose, Turner seeing the bright watery Venetian light in Venice, Gauguin in Tahiti.
Pigment is pigment and light is light in any culture.
But words, acquired slowly over a lifetime, are part of a different set of perceptions of the world, they have grown with us, they restrict what we see and how we see it.
I am trying to account for the paradox of the sameness of so many accounts, in language, of the strange, the exotic, the new.
Frederica will do as an example to illustrate the difficulties of writing about strangeness.
She wanted to set down the southern landscape.
Her tradition of looking at landscape was deeply Wordsworthian, whatever intimations she may have had that Wordsworth's language was for his time and place only.
Frederica could, in the Lake District, have seen a &quot; Wordsworthian &quot; tarn and been able to render it in Wordsworthian words, and, because these words were known, tested, thought about, she could have introduced minute changes, have seen one little thing he hadn't seen, changed the point of view.
There are shepherds in the Andes who have over sixty words for the colour brown in the coats of sheep.
But they are shepherds in the Andes.
Frederica had words for tea party behaviour and shopping discriminations in North Yorkshire matrons.
She had a variety of words, and was adding to them, for the structure of a Shakespearean plot or metaphor.
She saw these new things, paradoxically, in old cliches.
The same Wordsworth, much-mocked, thought himself back to an innocent vision, told us that grass is green and water wet because he had reached beyond familiarity to some primal wonder that these things were so and not otherwise, to some mythic sense that he was giving or finding the words for the things, not merely repeating.
So also Daniel, walking with Stephanie on Filey beach, had suddenly, out of some metaphorical experience as bodily as breathing, known why love was called &quot; sweet &quot; and, as his blood banged, why a beloved was a &quot; sweet heart &quot;.
So now, more mildly, Frederica saw for the first time that the light was gold, that olives were black and warm, the olive trees were powdery-grey, that lavender was a purple haze.
But when she saw these things written they seemed, and were, stale, deja-vu, derivative.
Frederica was also enough a child of her time to suppose that what she should write should be fiction.
&quot; The novel is the one bright book of life, &quot; Lawrence had didactically exclaimed and Bill Potter had didactically reiterated.
&quot; The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained. &quot;
If anyone had challenged Frederica directly as to whether she believed that, she would have argued the toss.
But  however Wordsworthian the roots  in the 1950s the recording compulsion took Lawrentian forms.
And she had no plot.
Or did not recognise those plots she had.
And was not primarily in those days concerned with invention.
She tried to utilise Dany and his Lambretta or a speechless Michel, and disgusted herself.
She was driven back to Alexander, and attempted unsuccessfully to translate that very English poet into a divinity of the olive groves.
All that happened was that her sexual needs became painful instead of grumbling and Alexander became unreal in her mind in a bad way.
She tried a diary, but it reiterated circuitously and boringly that Frederica Potter was bored and also, to her shame, homesick.
She could not see how to see Marie-Claire and Monique, Paul-Marie and Madame, let alone the workings of the wine co-operative, the rglisserie or Protestant N?mes.
She was a good critic, despite her egocentricity, and decided briskly and miserably that writing was not her mtier.
So she gave up, and sat between the vines in the hot sun, alternately sleeping and working her way through the dusty volumes of Peregrine Pickle, bound in crimson and gold leather, with real bookworms making agitated forays from their dark crannies into the heat and light across the extraordinary scenes where Smollett's elderly ladies retained their urine indefinitely to put out putative fires, or sweetened their foul breaths with violet cachous to deceive desired young lovers.
She did not ask herself then under what compulsion he had made his plots or constructed his worlds; she accepted them as one accepts fairy tales in childhood.
And Vincent Van Gogh?
Provence is as he painted it, we use his images as icons by which to recognise certain things, the cypresses above all, the olives, some configurations of rock and vegetation, the line of the Alpilles, the plain of the Crau, the light itself.
He came, as Frederica did not, with precise aesthetic expectations.
He expected to see &quot; Japanese &quot; subjects, the colours of Monticelli, the forms of Cezanne and Renoir, the southern light lauded by Gauguin as a mystic necessity.
He saw all these things, as he expected them.
He saw also Dutch things in the French heat, bridges not formally different from those in Delft and Leyden, colours in the glare that reminded him primarily of the soft blues and yellows of Vermeer.
Also, and simultaneously, he saw what no one had yet seen, what was his to see.
Sunflowers, cypresses, olives.
My dear Theo, I wrote to you already early this morning, then I went away to go on with a picture of a garden in the sunshine.
Then I brought it back and went out again with a blank canvas and that also is finished.
And now I write to you again.
Because I have never had such a chance, nature here being so extraordinarily beautiful.
Everywhere and all over the vault of heaven is a marvellous blue, and the sun sheds a radiance of pale sulphur, and it is soft and lovely as the combination of heavenly blues and yellows in a Van der Meer of Delft [ sic ].
I can not paint it as beautifully as that, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go, never thinking of a single rule...
Here under a stronger sun, I have found what Pissarro said confirmed, and also what Gauguin wrote to me, the simplicity, the fading of the colours, the gravity of great sunlight effects.
You never come near to suspecting it in the North.
5.
Mas Rose.
Mas Cabestainh
Mas Rose
In the early summer the family went to its summer house, a small pink-washed mas on a hillside in the Basses-Alpes, not far from Mont Ventoux.
They took their spiky, useless English girl with them, offering culture, the C?te d'Azur, the Camargue.
They took her to the Palais des Papes in Avignon where, on a warm evening, they saw a floodlit trench production of Macbeth, the Thatre Nationale Populaire, with Jean Vilar, drawn and romantic, more damned troubadour than Scots butcher, and Maria Casares, whitely elegant and frenzied, washing blood from her hands whilst angelic trumpets shrilled from high battlements.
Everything rushed forward in strange, denuded fast prose.
&quot; Demain et demain et demain. &quot;
In the interval Frederica became useful for once, and recited to the bored young Grimauds as much as she could remember  and it was a great deal  of the thick, incomprehensible English verse.
This brought an access of homesickness, not for the Yorkshire moors but for the English language, and also for the long days of last summer's play, for Alexander Wedderburn's blown-rose full-blooded verse on the Elizabethan terrace at Long Royston, English summer evenings.
As she was telling the shuffling Grimauds that light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood, a voice cried above her from the high scaffolding.
&quot; I know that voice.
Young Potter.
I will not act or suffer at the sword's edge  Not that  I will not bleed  my dear, do you remember? &quot;
This sound was both welcome, and a blow beneath, very strictly beneath, the belt.
It was Edmund Wilkie, polymath, to whom in the unlikely Edwardian luxe of the Grand Hotel in Scarborough she had most bloodily surrendered her virginity.
&quot; Wilkie.
I can't see in the dark.
Where are you?
What are you doing here?
Excusez-moi, Madame, c'est un ami, un ami demon pays... &quot;
Wilkie wriggled into the seat beside her.
Here in the Palais des Papes, as at Long Royston, the audience was on tiers of scaffolding.
They had sat together on the other scaffolding and watched the Graces dance.
Wilkie was the same.
Soft, dark, animal plump, exaggerated goggle-glasses, a raffish academic.
&quot; Monsieur Grimaud.
Madame.
Edmund Wilkie.
Un ami, un tudiant de psychologie, un acteur.
Wilkie, what are you doing? &quot;
&quot; What are you, is more to the point.
I 'm staying with Crowe at the Mas Cabestainh.
Crowe's French residence.
Very pretty.
Lots of nice people.
You've gone all brown and peeling in patches, like a plane tree.
Having an exciting time? &quot;
&quot; I 'm an au pair girl.
Everyone is very good to me.
We're staying near Vaison-la-Romaine. &quot;
&quot; Not far.
We could meet.
Lots of old friends at Mas Cabestainh.
The girl, the beauty, Anthea Whatsit. &quot;
&quot; Warburton. &quot;
&quot; Yes, her.
And Wedderburn.
Elevated to producing radio talks.
I expect you knew. &quot;
&quot; I'd heard. &quot;
She was put out.
The row of Grimauds, wanting not this chatter but Shakespeare, value for money at last, was inhibiting.
She managed,
&quot; Is he well? &quot;
&quot; Oh Frederica.
You great fool.
He came to see this play last week.
Told me and Caroline to come.
But dear Caroline's got an almighty hangover, sick as a dog, so I brought him over on the back of the bike to see it again.
He's up there. &quot;
He gestured vaguely at the upper reaches of seats.
The trumpets sounded, thin and clear, for the last act, from the palace's high corners.
&quot; Les anges, &quot; said Wilkie, &quot; rayonnent toujours, bien que le plus radieux soit dchu.
Is that right?
It sounds funny.
Can you see him?
There.
I 'll be seeing you. &quot;
And he scuttled monkey-like up through the rows of seats.
Frederica craned upwards.
A light from a battlement caught, she thought, a white open-necked shirt, a tentative length of lean man, a grave face.
Alexander?
&quot; Guess what I found there? &quot;
No answer.
&quot; Frederica Potter being nanny to a row of French children. &quot;
&quot; Oh Christ! &quot;
&quot; She seemed very keen on seeing you.
Excited you were here. &quot;
&quot; Oh Christ. &quot;
&quot; She loves you, Alexander. &quot;
&quot; Rubbish.
A boa constrictor.
Always was, always will be.
Shut up, and let me watch this play. &quot;
Frederica was agitated.
She remembered her last encounter with Alexander and failed yet again to understand her own behaviour.
She had stalked him with infinite care, she had attacked him frontally, she had thrown herself at him and teased him, and had finally reached the point of consummation where he was coming to dinner, in an empty house, wanting her.
And what she had done was to flee to Scarborough on the back of Wilkie's motorbike.
She loved Alexander.
Wilkie was only a friend to whom she chattered.
She had always loved Alexander.
She had an intimation that it had been important to her to have an impersonal initiation, in her own control, not over-whelming.
But how could she ever explain this to Alexander, who anyway no longer wanted to understand?
&quot; Elle aurait du mourir ci-aprs.
Un temps serait venu pour ce mot. &quot;
Something wrong with that?
There would have been a time for such a word.
Alexander's emotions were simpler.
He could hardly remember why, or how much, he had wanted Frederica.
He referred to it in his mind as a temporary dramaturgical folly.
He remembered very clearly that she had made him look a fool.
He remembered kicking cornflowers and moon daisies all over the little square garden.
He had no wish to repeat any part of the experience.
Tous nos hiers n'ont qu'allums, pour les sots, une voie vers la Mort poussireuse.
Nevertheless the two parties collided in the dark antechambers of the Palace.
Wilkie rushed up to Frederica, his bush-baby eyes bright.
Alexander hung back.
Because the motorbike was tucked cunningly under the very rampart of the fortress, much closer than the blue Corvette, Wilkie was able both to reverse the firm family progress of the Grimauds, and to make it impossible for Alexander not to catch up.
Wilkie enjoyed such moments.
&quot; Hello, Alexander. &quot;
&quot; Hello. &quot;
&quot; Monsieur Grimaud, Madame, Monsieur Alexander Wedderburn... un crivain anglais... qui a crit de belles pices... tres renommes... un ami... de mon pre. &quot;
Everyone bowed.
Alexander, his French less flowing than Frederica 's, asked, inveterately good-mannered, how the Grimauds had liked the play.
They replied.
Frederica interrupted with a comment on the strange effect of the translation on an English ear.
Alexander fell silent.
Wilkie wrote down Frederica's address.
M. Grimaud, interested by these strangers, hoping to amuse their English girl, drew on an envelope a sailor-like map demonstrating the approach to the Mas Rose from Vaison and the Mas Cabestainh.
He supposed it was named for the troubadour, very famous and tragic, very Proven?al.
Courtly love, Jealousy, blood, a terrible story.
The Mas Rose had no gas, no electricity, no running water, but it was on the mountain, it had a spring, the air was pure, one could see the Ventoux, famous of course for the love of Ptrarque for Laure.
He hoped Mr Wilkie would indeed visit it.
Also Mr Wedderburn.
Alexander looked at the stars and shifted from foot to foot.
It was impossible for him to mount the motorbike before Wilkie.
Frederica too looked at the motorbike and remembered her sanguinary defloration.
She plucked Alexander's sleeve.
She tried, not successfully, to recall something of the pupil-teacher aspect of their relations.
&quot; Alexander.
Alexander.
I got into Cambridge. &quot;
&quot; Good. &quot;
&quot; Actually, I got scholarships at both universities. &quot;
&quot; Good.
That should please your father. &quot;
&quot; He's too upset about Marcus. &quot;
&quot; I see. &quot;
Alexander looked at Wilkie who deliberately did not see him.
Wilkie asked Frederica if she had seen the Mediterranean the Camargue  Orange?
She told him nervously, one eye on Alexander, how she had stayed with one of Mme Grimaud's innumerable cousins in Orange, had seen Racine's Britannicus and a Cocteau ballet on the same subject in the Thatre Antique.
Imagine, she told him, Aricie in ice-cream pink tights and Britannicus in a weird gold curly wig and a little clattering metal skirt.
Very Cocteau, said Wilkie, and Alexander buttoned his head very firmly into his Orphic helmet, thus becoming deaf to Frederica's brightness and absurd to look at, globular white anonymity above the beautiful, clean, white-clothed, untouchable long body.
He pulled down his visor and folded his arms.
&quot; Well, &quot; said Wilkie, grinning broadly.
&quot; It was nice, Frederica.
We 'll drop in one of these days, you 'll see.
We 'll all go for a skinny dip one evening.
If you're allowed out.
He pulled out the bike and straddled it, followed by Alexander, who inclined his fat head minimally.
They wove off through the theatre crowd, bending and bowing together.
Frederica wondered if Wilkie had chatted to Alexander about all that blood.
It was about equally likely and unlikely.
She did not really expect to see them again.
At the Mas Rose she hoped every day to see them riding down the white stony hillside track.
Frederica had wanted, but not dared, to ask Alexander how his writing was going.
It was not going well.
Life at the Mas Cabestainh was ostensibly designed for the enjoyment and production of art.
Crowe had bought the house, grey, bullet-pocked, near derelict, for a song immediately after the war and had made it, incorporating its farm buildings, expensively unassuming and very comfortable.
It had a large sitting-room with an open hearth, a refectory dining-room with wooden tables and benches, a small library in which silence was observed.
The barns, stables and servants' quarters had been made into more or less monastic cells in which visiting artists or writers could work or sleep off the night's excesses, alone or together.
Alexander had a stable-room, white-washed, double-doored, with a yellow wooden bed, a green-shuttered window, a woven rug, a writing table, two yellow-stained rush-bottomed upright chairs and a bookcase.
He spent less time there than he meant to: it was a cell, cool and enclosed, whereas from the terrace in front of the sunlit house one could see, sipping wine, the valley of the Rhone away below, lavender fields, olives, vines.
On this terrace there was civilised talk, projects for expeditions, a kind of daily life of the mind for which Alexander, in this not unlike Frederica, had longed in a youth unprovided with games of a serious kind.
One project of Matthew Crowe's was that Alexander should write a play for the house guests to act, a play about the story of Cabestainh for whom the house had, in a felicitous conjunction at Crowe's twin predilections for violence and civility, been named.
Has Cabestainh
Guillem, or Guillaume de Cabestanh, or Cabestaing, or Cabestan, had loved the lady of Roussillon, Soremonde, Sermonde, or Marguerite, wife of the seigneur Raymond of Roussillon, who, in a fit of jealous rage, had the troubadour slaughtered and had served his heart to the lady in a dish.
Whereupon, declaring that no less precious food should thereafter pass her lips, the lady had, variously, starved herself to death or flung herself from the window, in which case her blood had forever coloured the ruddy rocks of Roussillon.
Pound tells and retells this tale, in laminated fragments, in the early Cantos.
&quot; It is Cabestan's heart in the dish. &quot;
&quot; It is Cabestan's heart in the dish?
No other taste shall change this. &quot;
Alexander was excited by Pound's verse, so fluid, so dramatic, so exact.
He was excited by the troubadours, who wrote endlessly varied repetitions of inventive metaphors for love, pain, service.
He thought he could write Crowe a parody at once elegant and shocking.
It turned out to be unexpectedly difficult.
This was partly because he was anxious about his next major work.
He was a writer of the fidgety, costive kind whose works are long in the planning, and meticulous in the execution  only at the very end of a project, when the scaffolding, the foundations, the walls and roof and even the plaster were laid down, did spontaneity and delight take over, in the actual play of, play with, words themselves.
He was not only a perfectionist about the form of his work: he held beliefs, again rigid and inhibiting, about its subject matter.
He believed that the English drama would be improved by the deliberate tackling of large subjects, subjects of political and philosophical weight.
He was in no way a precursor of &quot; committed &quot; drama  it was, in his case, a question of the scope and ambition of understanding.
Too much minor modern art was art about art, inward-looking, narcissistic.
Alexander was rattled, disturbed in his habits, by instant fame, by being treated as a major dramatist.
His correspondents agents, theatres, drama groups, journalists, students, teachers  treated him as a major writer and waited to see what he would do next.
Given the moral seriousness he had already, these expectations intensified his anxiety about his subject.
He toyed with the time of Munich, the decisions and failures to decide that had made the world he lived in.
But he felt, in a way that must seem absurd when the conflict in the Falklands is dramatised repeatedly before it is even over, when the widow of an assassinated president is recreated in large in her lifetime on the epic screen, that these events were too close to be seen clearly, too large and foul and complex to be treated with decorum.
He had now formed a plan to write about the falsely sunny period before the Great War.
He could parody the poetry of grazing cows and vicarage lawns, foxhunting and romantic love.
He could quote trench poetry.
But this project too hung fire, impeded perhaps by the conflicting duty to Cabestainh, perhaps by sun and wine, perhaps by distance  English lawns seemed far &quot; away.
And then he was partly taken over by a piece he neither intended nor wanted to write and which preoccupied him obsessively, the dramatisation of the dispute, in the Yellow House in Arles, between Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh.
This work had begun, like Frederica's limp tales, as a kind of tourism.
He had visited Arles and walked along the Alyscamps.
The Yellow House was gone, swallowed by the railway, but the nondescript indefinite area between nineteenth-century railway and the ancient Roman sarcophagi in their Elysian fields was still there.
Van Gogh had divided his painting of the Yellow House with a soft, muddy-brown line, and there still was the soft muddy raised bank of an irrelevant ditch.
Crowe had the new edition of the Letter 's, and Alexander borrowed them to read in bed.
He also had a copy of Gauguin's Avant et Aprs which recounted the episode in the Yellow House from Gauguin's point of view, patronising, complacent in its nervousness, making sure the world knew who was the great painter, the great influence, the major man.
The impulse to dramatise the events came out of Van Gogh's descriptions of the &quot; electric &quot; arguments of the two.
They quarrelled about art.
They went to Montpellier and quarrelled about Rembrandt.
&quot; Our arguments are terribly electric, we come out of them sometimes with our heads as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down. &quot;
Electricity crackled and flashed in the whole relationship, and in Vincent Van Gogh's body, and brain.
Gauguin painted Van Gogh painting sunflowers.
&quot; Afterwards my face got much brighter, but it [ the portrait ] was really me, very tired and charged with electricity as I was then. &quot;
Gauguin was uneasy.
He woke sometimes and found Vincent standing by his bed.
&quot; Between two beings, he and I, he like a Vulcan and I boiling too, a kind of struggle was preparing itself...
There followed the Christmas episode of the razor-threatening, the severed ear, Gauguin's precipitate departure, the incarceration.
In the asylum a kind of dark Christianity repossessed Vincent Van Gogh.
The surface of the letters to Theo about Gauguin's defection, the disproportionate interest in the whereabouts of Gauguin's fencing gloves, spoke of an anxiety for Gauguin, a Christian concern.
Underneath was rage and humiliation.
Vincent himself was afraid of the way madness brought back a religious intensity he had felt and transmuted:
Well, with this mental disease I have, I think of the many other artists suffering mentally and I tell myself that this does not prevent one from exercising the painter's profession as if nothing was amiss.
When I realise that here the attacks tend to take an absurd religious turn, I should almost venture to think that this even necessitates a return to the North.
He was afraid, particularly at Christmas, of a recurrence of his despair and terrible visions.
There was much that was intrinsically dramatic.
Vincent's position as scapegoat or demon:
A certain number of people here (there were more than So signatures) addressed a petition to the Mayor (I think his name is M.Tardieu) describing me as a man not fit to be at liberty, or something like that.
The commissioner of police or the chief commissioner then gave the order to shut me up again.
I write to you in the full possession of my faculties and not as a madman but as the brother you know.
And the involuntary malice within the desperate attempts to remain on the safe side of the frontier of madness.
If Theo was worried about marriage settlements in the event of death &quot; why do you not just knife your wife and have done with it? &quot;
&quot; Indeed I am so glad that if there are sometimes cockroaches in the food here, you have your wife and child at home. &quot;
So transparent, so furious.
Alexander became obsessed by the yellow chair, of which the yellow chairs in his own cell were close relations, generic descendants, the rush the same, the back the same, the varnish less lemon and ruddier.
He discovered first that it (like the fencing gloves) had been painted in the wake of the Gauguin debacle and as a companion piece to the portrait of Gauguin's empty chair (&quot; Effect of Night &quot;).
Gauguin's chair, an ample, armed chair, was painted in the dark against a lamplit green wall &quot; in dark brown-red wood, the seat of greenish rush, and in the place of the absent a lighted candle and two modern novels &quot;.
The novels, disposed randomly, had, for Van Gogh, as for Henry James, connotations of French naughtiness.
They also, for Van Gogh, represented life.
After his pastor-father's death he painted his heavy Bible, in dark light near two snuffed candles, looming over one small yellow novel, Zola's La Joie de Vivre.
In Paris, learning colour, with Theo, he painted the beautiful &quot; Still Life with Books &quot;, a profusion of yellow novels on a clear, brilliant pink ground.
(And behind these in the imagination the heavy tomes, eaten away and dusty, of the Dutch still-life masters' reminders of the vanity of human wishes, of death.)
Gauguin's chair, &quot; Effet de Nuit &quot;, Alexander came to realise, with its nocturnal colour-scheme of ruddy browns and murky greens resembled the iniquitous &quot; Night Cafe &quot; (and by implication the brothels the two painters had haunted in search of subject-matter and what else?, scene of Gauguin's triumphs and Vincent's humiliations).
&quot; In the Night Cafe I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. &quot;
And the yellow chair?
Blue and yellow, the opposing colours, clean and upright, no erect candle on its seat but a snuffed out, horizontal pipe, light and cleanliness, bare sanity?
The grief-stricken old man in blue of the St Rmy days sits head in hand on just such a shining chair by a fire with fragile flames.
These images had what Alexander desired for his own work and did not have: authority.
The man could both paint and name a chair, and bring into play his own terrors and hopes, and behind it, the culture of Europe, north and south, the Church itself.
The yellow chair was the opposite of the insane messianic visions and voices.
A writer is a man haunted by voices.
Alexander walking to and from the water-tank in Crowe's kitchen-garden, where balloon-like tadpoles, the size of half-crowns, dived and plashed their lips, unable to emerge and metamorphose into frogs, was amused sometimes by the counterpoint that wailed in his mind: Cabestan's heart, Vincent's ear, gassed soldiers' throats, Brooke's poppies, the troubadour's lady like rose and gillyflower, Vincent's irises, jealousy rage and fear, fear jealousy and rage, fear and indignation and pity.
Sometimes, before he drank the fourth or fifth glass of C?tes-du-Rhone that would incapacitate him, he thought with guilt of the Flanders fields, with impotence of the forests where wolves ranged,  with the sense of temptation, secret delight, and energy welling up from unknown sources of Gauguin's cold bluster, of Vincent's two voices.
Mostly he went to sleep, then.
Sometimes he wrote verse about colours.
He did not think of Frederica Potter at all.
He was a man whose personal life, though occasionally exigent, never became a siren song.
The most delightful thing about the Mas Rose was the water-supply.
It came from a source, a spring, further up the hillside.
M. Grimaud showed Frederica how, by building a slate dam here, releasing a little stone floodgate there, he diverted the clear water into its summer channel, a stone-lined gully which ran down beside the house and along its front wall, passing under slabstone doorsteps.
Here they washed Vallauris honey-gold dishes and coffee bowls, here, in running water, they dipped and shook salads and peaches.
The house was rosy and set into the hill.
Frederica slept in a windowless loft that held her suitcase, a camp bed, and no more.
She read at night by torchlight, her own little door open onto the sandy hillside.
There was not much air: the roof heat persisted from the day.
An army of ants marched ceaselessly under the bedhead and sheared away the edges of her dirty underwear with innumerable mandibles.
Owls and cicadas screamed and scraped.
Mosquitoes whined and bit Frederica's face into a plump, knobbed, pink parody of itself, giving her an unfair look of the acne from which her dryness of flesh and perhaps of character had preserved her.
It was unfortunate that she had seen Alexander.
She lacked his detachment and would not even have thought it morally desirable, believing the Byronic tag, &quot; Man's love is of man's life a thing apart: 't is woman's whole existence. &quot;
She retreated into clouded vision, only half-saw the Ventoux, the Vallauris potteries, the evening games of boules under the plane trees in the timeless village square.
She and Marie-Claire and Monique sat, heavy, sulky, self-absorbed, graceless whilst Paul-Marie darted and chattered like a squirrel after the scaly balls and his parents sipped their white port and admired him.
One afternoon, after she had given up hope, stirring a?oli on the doorstep, Frederica heard the crunch of wheels on stones and saw the motorbike winding down the cliff with its two insect-heads swaying in harmony above it.
It disappeared behind olives and reappeared lower down the hill.
Frederica clutched the oily mortar to her breast.
Marie-Claire snickered.
The bike drew up in the yard under the tree.
&quot; Dear girl, what have you done to your face?
I hope we're welcome.
What a divine setting.
For God's sake put down that mortar, you are ruining the front of your dress.
I brought Caroline, now not hungover. &quot;
Not Alexander.
Of course not Alexander.
Wilkie's girl, as Frederica always thought of her  had he not said, in Scarborough, &quot; I've got a girl, you know... &quot;  smoothed blown skirts over thin brown legs and tossed her urchin head free of its case.
M. Grimaud came from his vegetable patch up the hill, where, with further engineering of irrigation, he produced excellent tomatoes, courgettes, peppers, beans and salad.
He extended a huge hand and invited Wilkie to lunch.
Frederica wondered whether Caroline knew the Scarborough story, and, if so, whether it was known as a joke or as something apologised for.
She was, she thought, glad she was no one's &quot; girl &quot; though Caroline, assured in this position and two years into Cambridge, was intimidating.
Frederica felt she looked frightful: the oil was sticky and stiff on her breasts, the sun had frizzed her hair and the mosquitoes deformed her face.
They ate outdoors: sausages, a?oli, vegetables and salad fresh cheeses and new, raw, indigestible Gigondas, inky purple.
Wilkie discussed the Camargue with M. Grimaud, whose cousin had a domaine there, asked Monique and Marie-Claire politely what they were studying and elicited more information in half-an-hour than Frederica had done in several months.
He ate vast quantities of a?oli: his firm, plump chin gleamed with it, like a child 's, approached with a buttercup in search of an affinity for butter.
Frederica talked edgily to Caroline.
Cambridge  eleven men to every woman.
Wilkie  a genius  effortless Firsts  but perhaps still ready to give up and make a career in the theatre.
&quot; He wants to have his cake and eat it, &quot; said Caroline, watching him devour olives and radishes and French bread.
&quot; Most of us do, &quot; said Frederica drily.
&quot; What will you do.
Marry? &quot;
This was, from Frederica, pointedly rude, but Caroline took it complacently, said, &quot; One thing at a time.
First thing, will Wilkie go back to Cambridge? &quot;
&quot; I hope so.
I hope to know someone there. &quot;
&quot; What's this? &quot; said Wilkie.
&quot; Whether you 'll stay at Cambridge, &quot; said Frederica.
&quot; What do you think? &quot;
&quot; I hope so. &quot;
Wilkie grinned.
&quot; I expect I shall. &quot;
Caroline sulked a little.
This did not spoil Wilkie's party.
He sampled brandied cherries and admired the irrigation.
He walked amongst the olives and flirted with Frederica, Caroline, Monique and Marie-Claire whilst talking folklore seriously with Monsieur.
Before he left, he proposed that Frederica join a beach party at Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, next week.
M. Grimaud said that would be very pleasant for her: he would deliver and collect her, and visit his cousin on the domaine.
6.
Seascape
Frederica arrived when the beach party at Les Saintes-Maries was posed.
It was at some distance from other groups, in those days not numerous, on that beach.
It had arranged itself around bright canvas bags and wicker baskets in the part-shade of a fishing-boat.
In those days also the boats were unchanged since Vincent Van Gogh had spent one week there in June 1888 and had painted them, red and blue, green and yellow, with coloured delicate masts erect, and the slanted, tapering yard-arms crossing each other on the pale mackerel sky.
Their lines were curved and beautiful; they were more instantly recognisable than the cypress or even the chair.
They were probably not much changed since long before Vincent Van Gogh: the Phoenician auspicious eyes, white circled dot, were painted on the high prow then as in 1888.
Frederica read the names on these prows: Dsire, Bonheur, Amiti.
By these words she would remember form and colour.
Words were primary.
She stood at the foot of the bare dunes, gripping a string bag of swimming things and a volume of Smollett.
Wilkie came up the sand and arranged her return with M. Grimaud.
Formed groups are alarming mostly: Frederica had not come in the expectation of enjoying herself.
She advanced on them bravely rather than hopefully.
You could see they were English, though how this was, since they were mostly gleaming brown and both elegantly and scantily dressed, it would be hard to say.
A pinker skin-tone under the brown, and then the pristine, non-domestic look this kind of English had  untouched, however untrue that might be.
They rested on elbows, or lay stretched like Stars, stomachs in sand, smooth heads together, a brown hand lifting a white cigarette to a rose-painted mouth, and a line of malachite green smoke going up into the air, which was not here the intense cobalt of the plain of Orange, but pearl-cream-gold, a heavy air, soft and undulating like the pale sand and beyond it the warm, hazed, sand-green sea.
The figures were not hard-edged, like the high boats, but soft patches of bright colour, impinged on by soft sand.
Two unknown men were blue, one with a fawn skin, just deeper in colour than the sand, caerulean trunks and blackbird-blue hair falling smoothly over one brow.
The other, fatter, had stark white skin shadowed, sitting upright against the boat in navy shorts and sky-blue poplin shirt.
Between these, gold-dark, dark-gold and violent pink, lay Lady Rose Martindale, solid but not fat or for in less, indeed very woman-shaped, in pink-and-brown striped silk bathing suit, with gold hair spattered softly over the brown flesh of her shoulders and whitish sand speckled on the gleam of her thighs where she had rolled from side to side.
Crowe and Anthea Warburton lay parallel, Anthea pale only by contrast with Lady Rose's bright darkness, and with the sunburnt red earth colour of Crowe, who had the look of a man bronzed against nature by willpower and decisive planning, a man whose ruddiness was made for peeling crimson but who had constrained his skin to stay on  even the thin shiny tonsure  and go terra-cotta.
His trunks, largely buried between the rolls of his stomach and thighs, were red-purple, a colour neither heavier nor lighter than his achieved flesh colour, which jangled the eye.
Anthea lay as though dancing on the hot folded sand, the pale, lively hair curved as though blown out on the duck egg blue towel on which her lovely profile rested, the skin darker than the tossed gold, the marvellous bones picked out by clear-cut shadows and glitter of sweat.
Her bathing-dress was peacock, rippled green and blue like waves of an illuminated sea.
At the edge of the circle sat Wilkie and his girl, like photographic negatives, Caroline olive-dark in a white bikini, hair and skin black to Frederica's dazzled eyes, and Wilkie, blacker still, soot-black, except for the neat, white, exiguous triangle of his genitals, the smiling teeth, light striking off the bright black hair and off the huge butterfly-blue sunglasses, reflecting in their inscrutable surfaces pearly sky and sand and pearly sea.
The boats stared with their painted eyes and no one else but Wilkie looked up.
Grey ash dripped on cream sand.
She was decided to be agreeable and unobtrusive.
Her highest ambition was to be by the end of the day simply acceptable, to have done no rushing or crashing, committed no vehemence.
Wilkie said to Crowe &quot; Here is Frederica &quot; and the two strange men lifted a limp and a firm hand in silent salutation.
Crowe sat up and stared at Frederica.
Caroline nodded and produced with difficulty a half-sound.
Anthea Warburton pushed back a strand or two of hair from her mouth and said Hi in a failing voice into the thick air.
Frederica's quick mind's eye saw what Crowe saw: a figure broomstick-thin against the dune, splay-footed in sensible sandals, thin-shouldered in the provincial flowered sundress, with its white pique triangles below the straps, butterfly-bowed on the small breasts, plain, yes, but not shockingly or brilliantly plain, smart in Calverley, unexceptionable in N?mes and Bargemon, dowdy in this company.
Her hair and skin were now strangely coloured.
The long red tresses which in Astraea had flowed deranged on her shoulders whilst her paper skirts were slit by Seymour's scissors had in the hot sun of Provence slowly crimped, frizzled, and broken off lustreless.
They stood out now in a fat triangular fan, with a ginger haze of split ends.
Her skin had at one stage, unusual in a redhead, been almost chocolate-brown and silk-smooth, but she was a northern redhead, and had passed beyond the russet and the Negro, back to a strange peeled patchwork, toast-cinder brown, radish-crimson, freckled bone and the translucent grey of flaking skin still shifting.
At the end of the play she had declared to Crowe her ambition to be an actress.
Crowe had told her to get a new face.
This glaring thin skull, striped and quilted with bites, was hardly an improvement.
He smiled benign.
&quot; Well, Frederica, I hear you are employed as a nanny.
It seems most unlikely.
Do sit down. &quot;
Frederica sat down.
They all breathed slowly, some with shut eyes, some with open.
Everything there was slow, slow: a long minute went by, and no one spoke.
&quot; Not exactly a nanny, &quot; said Frederica.
No one displayed any interest in what she really was.
Crowe made known Lady Rose, who had been a friend of the Woolfs in their later years and was writing an elegant book on cats, and the fat and thin men, who were Vincent Hodgkiss, a philosopher, and Jeremy Norton, a poet.
Crowe lit another cigarette for Lady Rose.
Vincent Hodgkiss observed in a tight pleasant voice that it was hard to determine the colours of objects in this light, which seemed opaque, though hot and dry.
Frederica said obviously that the sky and the sea and the boats were uncannily like Van Gogh, and Hodgkiss said that of course they would never have seen them in this way before he saw them.
Wilkie said it was Alexander she ought to talk to about Van Gogh and Hodgkiss said Alexander was an excellent example of what he was talking about, the effect of this light, the difficulty of fixing colours.
What colour would they say Alexander was now, In this light?
Frederica could not see Alexander at all: indeed she had noted he was not there: she stared around and around now at colourless air and sand as though he might rise from them like a mirage.
No, the sea, said Wilkie, and she looked out, at the Stella Maris, anchored off the coast, and there he stood on the curving prow, pale on the pale sky, with a triangular patch of yellow like a painted sun  Van Gogh chrome, not Renaissance gilt  between his thighs and his limbs creamy-brown like the foam on the new cappuccino coffee.
And the long heavy hair was creamy too, in the filtered sun, only just darker than the sky.
He rode a moment, and then dived into the shifting, opaque water, which ran away from him in rays, like jewels flashing, opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis, rubies, sapphires, as Van Gogh had said of the stars reflected in that same sea in June 1888.
Had she got swimming things, Wilkie said?
She shifted her string bag in her rigid lap.
Come on in, said Wilkie.
So she stood up, and pulled down her pants, and rolled on her dark-brown bathing-costume, under her dress, as she had done on seaside holidays, and then pulled that off too.
She was aware that this process exposed first her buttocks and then her breasts, fleetingly, to Crowe, who had seen them and more than seen them, already, but not in circumstances either of them, she took it, cared to remember.
She walked with Wilkie crane-like on burning sand to the water's edge.
Alexander was disporting himself about the boat.
Frederica strode into the water, followed by sauntering Wilkie.
She was a reasonable swimmer.
She struck out forcefully towards Alexander, which seemed natural, since the boat at anchor was the only thing to swim towards or away from or around on the flat Mediterranean.
Alexander now floated near it, on his back, arms outstretched, hair waving under pale green water.
She bobbed down and came up more or less inside his embrace, her crimson, browned and pallid face peering like a floating decapitated head in his direction.
He brought knees to chin, turned gracefully, and looked at her, both their chins on water.
She stared unwavering.
She had a nasty habit of simply appearing and staring at him.
There had been a time when he had been with the then desired Jenny in the back of a car on the moor at Goathland.
There had been a time when she had stared from Crowe's knee, before Crowe's study fire, out at Alexander on the Long Royston terrace.
And now in the sluggish sea of the Camargue and the mouths of the Rhone.
&quot; So you're here, &quot; he stated, with no apparent note of acceptance or annoy.
She stared.
&quot; Are you here long &quot;
&quot; I was asked to a lunch party. &quot;
&quot; I see. &quot;
&quot; Do you wish I'd go away? &quot;
&quot; Not particularly. &quot;
&quot; Good. &quot;
Still staring.
&quot; But I wish you wouldn't stare.
It isn't nice.
I've never liked it. &quot;
&quot; I don't mean to stare. &quot;
She performed a somersault, shook her head, and said towards the Stella Maris, &quot; I just like looking at you, that's what it is.
As you know. &quot;
Alexander's skin crept, possibly with pleasure.
To cover this quickening he pointed out,
&quot; You've got badly burned.
Someone should have warned you.
With your colouring. &quot;
The black and orange skull grinned.
&quot; They did.
This has taken months and months to achieve.
I was a smooth black girl.
Then I peeled.
I thought I was past it but obviously not.
I 'm sorry I look horrid. &quot;
&quot; No skin off my nose, &quot; said Alexander, who veered between the absurdly avuncular, the undignified childish  and something else  whenever he allowed Frederica to trap him into talk.
He crawled away towards the boat and swung himself up.
He thought of diving off again before she, swimming doggedly after, was up.
But he gave her a hand and they sat side by side on the hot wood, pouring sea water, steaming.
&quot; Are you having fun? &quot; said she.
&quot; On the whole.
That is, yes.
Of course. &quot;
&quot; Are you writing? &quot;
&quot; Not as much as...
That is, yes.
But the wrong things.
Or I think, the wrong things. &quot;
&quot; What things? &quot;
&quot; Oh, Frederica. &quot;
He shifted his damp bottom and the planks hissed.
&quot; Come on.
Don't catechise people on a swimming party. &quot;
&quot; I want to know.
I don't see you much.
I really want to know.
Why did they say you would tell me about Van Gogh? &quot;
&quot; Did they?
Well, I could.
Perhaps I will, &quot; he fatally added, standing up.
&quot; But now I 'm swimming. &quot;
&quot; Can I come? &quot;
&quot; I can hardly stop you. &quot;
He dived, and swam, and turned to see her enter the water, neat as a needle, if inelegant.
Her curious visage reminded him of something but he could not think what.
She looked flayed, or striped.
Tiger, tiger.
Not that, despite the staring.
More simian.
There he was, thinking about Frederica Potter, at Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer.
He still believed this was an irritating aberration.
She bobbed up at his side like a terrier, treading water.
&quot; Are you writing about Provence, then? &quot;
&quot; Not exactly.
Not intentionally.
Not about Provence itself exactly.
Oh, come off it, Frederica, try to enjoy yourself. &quot;
&quot; I am. &quot;
She was.
They swam slowly together round the boat.
They did not play water games: he dared not.
But she came close on a corner as he turned and humped his body to avoid a rope, and under the colourless many-coloured water their naked legs brushed weightlessly.
It was still there.
It was still there, they both thought, she with greed and apprehension, he with alarm, a sense of injury, and an animal redirection of intention.
She said something he couldn't catch.
&quot; What? &quot;
&quot; Dolphin-like.
You. &quot;
&quot; I like dolphins. &quot;
&quot; So do I. They sing.
Melodious hootings and echoings.
I heard them on the wireless. &quot;
&quot; Can't you just be in a place, Frederica? &quot;
&quot; No.
I think.
I have to think.
So do you. &quot;
&quot; No I don't.
To my shame, in many ways, I don't. &quot;
But he did.
He was very tempted to tell her about The Yellow Chair.
The whole problem, the way the plays had got wound into each other, would interest her, she would see it was a problem.
He turned on his back and swam away, jerky and splashing.
She swam after, outside the rainbow of his thrashing.
Inshore, Wilkie, lying lazily along the water, propped by flickering hands, watched the to and fro of their dancing and circling and smiled to himself.
At the edge of the water Wilkie's girl cried out that it was lunch, they were going to eat lunch.
Lunch was good: little cold herb omelettes, raw smoked ham, huge pumpkin-indented scarlet tomatoes, black olives with garlic and pepper, glistening, wrinkled and hot.
There was a lot of red wine, C?tes du Ventoux, and a lot of good crusty bread.
There was sharp, fresh goat cheese and rose-orange Cavaillon melons, green-gold like legendary serpents outside, into whose fluted pink hollows Crowe ceremoniously poured pink, sweet Beaumes-de-Venise wine.
Sand got into things, of course, and three or four wasps buzzed, straddled and chewed, could be seen chewing, the meat and the fruit.
Frederica drank a lot of wine and said nothing, but watched everyone in turn, charged with unsatisfied curiosity as they lay and lazily tossed ideas between them.
She did not give their talk her whole attention.
Alexander had much if not most of that.
He lay in the sun, near Lady Rose and Matthew Crowe, not near Frederica, and seemed intent on the talk, which was mostly talk between Hodgkiss, Wilkie and Crowe about the perception and representation of colour, on which Hodgkiss was writing a paper in aesthetics, and on which Wilkie had conducted his experiment with the rainbow sunglasses.
The latter was now staring at the Van Gogh boats and the milky sea and sky through poppy-scarlet lenses, which Frederica thought was perverse, although she wished she had the courage to ask for a moment to put them on, to see all this.
Hodgkiss and Wilkie talked about the nature of colour.
Hodgkiss's manner displeased Frederica; he had a mannered Oxford voice, elided words, and used the pronoun &quot; one &quot; frequently.
He had the voice of a thin languid man and the body of a stocky alert one.
He had been reading the notes of Wittgenstein, he said, who before his death had been working on the relation between the private, sensuous experience of colour and the universal language of colour words with which we appear to be able to communicate it.
He spoke of a mathematics of colour, Wittgenstein, a Farbmathematik: one knew saturated red or yellow, once experienced, as one knew the nature of a circle or the square on the hypotenuse.
Crowe put in that the symbolists of Van Gogh's time had supposed there was a universal language of colour, a primary language, a divine alphabet of colours and forms.
Something like that, said Hodgkiss: Wittgenstein asked if there could be a natural history of colour, like the natural history of plants and answered himself that such a natural history was, unlike that of plants, outside time.
Alexander said that Van Gogh in his letters in French very rarely made his colour adjectives agree with the nouns they qualified.
The result was that they could almost be read as things more real than the things they qualified, a pattern of eternal forms from another world, not part of the solid world of cabbages and pears  yellow and violet, blue and orange, red and green.
Wilkie said it was known to psychologists that certain colours had certain psychological effects: red, and also orange and yellow increase muscular tension and the flow of adrenalin: blue and green slow the heartbeat, lower the temperature.
The conversation moved on to the human habit of colour-mapping.
Crowe said there was an odd passage in Proust where he associated letters of the alphabet with colours.
He claimed that the letter &quot; I &quot; was red  in Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, la Vraie Fille du Feu, for instance.
Lady Rose immediately said no, no, I was ice-blue, and Anthea said no, silvery-green and Crowe said women's interest in colour depended on what colour showed their bodies to best advantage, a woman would always decorate a room in terms of her own skin tone and eyes.
He asked the others about the letter &quot; I &quot;: Hodgkiss said it brought to mind Henry James's simile for the dress of Sarah Pocock, &quot; scarlet like the scream of someone falling through a skylight &quot;.
Jeremy Norton said &quot; silver &quot;, Alexander said &quot; sage &quot;, Wilkie said &quot; inky &quot; and Caroline muttered &quot; green &quot;.
Frederica said she did not make associations between colours and other systems like alphabets or days of the week.
Perhaps, she said to Wilkie, she was colour-insensitive as she was tone-deaf, if he remembered, and he said no, you have little synaesthesia and vestigial sensory responses you don't encourage, that's all.
Jeremy Norton said nothing.
Years later Frederica read a poem by him about that beach, a neat poem, orchestrating colour adjectives, unmodified, against indefinite objects and asking subtly how language fitted the world.
On that day she decided he looked too much like a poet to be a good one, a view at variance with her view of Hodgkiss, who looked too unlike what he was, profound thinker, Oxford don, to be satisfactory either.
Lady Rose went to sleep.
Crowe lovingly arranged the wheel of her straw hat to cover her face.
Anthea kicked the sand with perfect, active little toes and Wilkie's girl lay down in the shadow of the boat, pulling him down after her, putting an arm over his sweaty waist, claiming.
Crowe leaned back and snuffled a snore.
Anthea began to oil her skin.
Alexander, unusually lively after a meal, proposed a walk, and did not know if he was glad or sorry when only Frederica accepted.
&quot; Have you seen the church, Frederica? &quot;
&quot; No.
I don't know who the Saintes-Maries were, or why there are more than one. &quot;
They mounted the white dune and set off towards town square and church, past a few white cottages.
At that time the Camargue had not been invaded by the tourists, who instigated the establishment of mournful-looking groups of tethered, bony horses in American-style corrals, souvenir stalls with gardien hats, and gaucho hats and Texan sombreros, little cotton peaked caps, with Mickey Mouse or pink flamingoes on them.
Nor had the later overlapping visitation of hippies of the Sixties taken place, who had followed the gipsy processions, of which Alexander now told Frederica, and stayed and sung and smoked and loved and sat on the white beaches, so that the pale sand came to resemble road-dirt anywhere.
In the Sixties any vaguely holy and distant place became heaped and congested with the bodies of the seekers of the holy and distant.
Frederica at that time wrote an essay on overpopulation, relics of individualism, the collective soul and Glastonbury.
That was before Stonehenge, in 1980, became enclosed in a concentration camp cage, designed to keep people out, not in, and that fence was built before a Frenchman proposed to preserve the crumbling Sphinx by encasing him/her/it in a transparent plastic skin.
A world was coming in which it would almost certainly never again be possible to walk quietly, as Frederica and Alexander walked, through the village where Van Gogh tramped and set up his easel in the clean dust.
St Mary Jacobus and St Mary Salome, in some versions accompanied by St Mary Magdalene and in all by their black servant, Sarah, had sailed to this coast from Palestine, Alexander told Frederica, after the death of Christ.
They had been miraculously wafted to this place after days without food or water in an open boat.
Sarah had joined them through another miracle, a cloak thrown by Mary Jacobus which upheld her feet on the water.
Every year the saints  all three  were taken down to the sea and ritually dipped into it: every year the gipsies from all over France gathered to celebrate this bathing and rebirth.
The gipsies patron saint was Sarah; it was thought she might bear some relation in their minds to a deity of their own, an oriental deity, Sara le Kali.
&quot; Kali the destroyer, &quot; said Frederica knowledgeably, who in fact knew little more of this terrifying deity than her name and brief tag.
&quot; Goddesses rising from the sea.
Like Venus.
I see what they mean when they say the Mediterranean countries have never missed out on a female god.
It makes a change.
But she was put out  not disappointed but made uneasy  by the images of the Maries in the church.
It is an uncompromising fortress-like church, old, high, square with no elaboration of aisle or transept, bare, which chimed with Frederica's northern sense of fitness, and yet, in its dark, after the bright sun, haunted by things her blood rejected  racks of fragile spiked flames of votive candles, elaborate china and metal plaques and pictures offering thanks for favours obtained, the smell of old wax and lingering incense muffling the smell of stone.
The sacred images of the two Maries leaned out awkwardly from a plinth on a balustrade.
Both had sweet, round, pink-cheeked china-doll faces: both were crowned with wreaths of globular white silk flowers, wound with pearls.
Both were dressed in silk floss, tinsel and gauze, pink and pale blue.
Both smiled thoughtlessly.
Frederica was irresistibly reminded of the two dolls leaning lifelessly on the doll's house dresser, staring, in The Tale of Tao Bad Mice.
They were the first such images she had seen  the Grimauds, like many N?mois, were staunchly Protestant.
She looked at Alexander for guidance: he said that the image of black Sarah was in the crypt They went down.
Sarah was different.
Her carved, dark, fine-nosed wooden face had both austerity and arrogance or contempt, something indeed oriental, though her flounces and veils were the same frothy pastels as those of the upstairs saints.
Round her burned iron-spiked circles of tapering candles, yellow-bright in the dark.
Before her lay heaps of flowers  she was the beloved, the tended saint  dying gladioli, eternal silk blown roses, immortelles.
Behind her on the altar was a reliquary in which Frederica could see through glass a bone or two  a shin, a forearm?
It was like seeing that female body preserved whole in sand in the British Museum, as one feels it should not be, its reddish leathery skin peeling from its temples, crispings of dead gingery hair over its ears.
That woman is many English children's first encounter with death, lying there knees to chin, folded, flaking, tendons taut.
The thing itself.
Image and bones, altar and woman, half-doll, half-idol, iron spikes, flame light on the smoke-stained roof.
Let's get out into the sun, said Frederica, let's go.
After they had left the church they were a little embarrassed.
Alexander, who took refuge from awkwardness in the purveying of information, told Frederica about other Mediterranean goddesses.
He told her Ford Madox Ford's delightful story of the portrait-sculpture of Our Lady of the Castle from St Etienne des Grs.
The Virgin, Ford relates, appeared to a young shepherd in the Alpilles who was chiselling a rock, and remained whilst he carved her portrait.
&quot; When it was done She expressed Her complete satisfaction with the statue both as a portrait and as a work of art,  I particularly asked the Bishop about that last point.
 There at once was presented to the world the final canon of aesthetics. &quot;
Ford set out to see this cynosure and found Her so wrapped and swaddled in lace robes and veiling that he could see no trace of figure or countenance.
And then, one day, he came to her church and saw a great gold crown on one chair, billows of lace on another, &quot; two beetle-like old ladies washing something in a pewter receptacle... &quot;
&quot; And the image, &quot; Alexander quoted, &quot; was a rude, carved piece of reddish rock. &quot;
A primitive, such as Gaudier-Brzeska emulated, such as the peasant-Virgin would have recognised.
Cybele and Venus, Alexander said, were worshipped as conical stones.
How beautiful, how amazing, Frederica exclaimed, associating the red rock of Roussillon with Alexander explaining Rodin's Dana?de to her with his perfect, respectful, abstract sensuality.
Alexander told her about the Venus of Arles, who had been dug up in the Roman circus there, classically graceful with both her arms, holding up the golden or marble apple.
He quoted Van Gogh, &quot; There is a Venus of Arles, just as there is a Venus of Lesbos, and one still feels the youth of it, in spite of all... &quot;
&quot; Ah yes, Van Gogh, &quot; said Frederica. bas he writing about Van Gogh?
They sat in a cafe and ordered citrons presses and Alexander told Frederica about the importunate play, about the evanescent summer of 1914, about Cabestainh.
Frederica said she could not see what he was hesitating about, he must write The yellow Chair, it was alive, wasn't it?
They talked about how to write The Yellow Chair, whether to make it stark and classical by keeping the unities, restricting the action to the terrible days of the battle with Gauguin, or whether to make it episodic and epic, to introduce Theo at least and maybe other figures, even the looming pastor from Nuenen.
Frederica said to Alexander, before he could say it to her, that there was an intrinsic problem in writing about artists, for how could he dramatise the battle with the colours and forms as opposed to the whore and the rival, the father, the brother, the nephew Vincent Van Gogh?
They got excited.
Alexander's mind shifted from conflict over his intentions to certainty that The Yellow Chair was what he was writing.
(Paradoxically the release of tension enabled him in the next week to run up, turn out, patch together, a poetical melodrama about Cabestainh with which the house-guests had some civilised fun.)
Was it at this moment that some reciprocal need established an understanding that they two were friends, would know each other for a long part of a life-time?
Hardly then, though it did cross Frederica's mind that sex inhibited talk and that to be talked to by Alexander was a pleasure not readily to be forgone.
He did not touch her until the end of the day when he stroked the frizzled hair briefly and said &quot; Thank you &quot;, meaning it.
She went home to her windowless attic, sweltered and turned, remembering Ford's red-stone Virgin with intense pleasure, plotting The Yellow Chair, remembering the yellow triangle of Alexander's trunks on the prow of the Stella Maris.
They did not meet again, that summer.
Arles, June 1888.
To Emile Bernard.
I spent a week at Saintes-Maries, and to get there I drove in a diligence across the Camargue with its vineyards, moors, and flat fields like Holland.
There, at Saintes-Maries, were girls who reminded me of Cimabue and Giotto  thin, straight, somewhat sad and mystic.
On the perfectly flat sandy beach little green, red, blue boats, so pretty in shape and colour that they made one think of flowers...
What I should like to find out is the effect of an intenser blue in the sky.
Fromentin and Gerome see the soil of the South as colourless, and a lot of people see it like that.
My God, yes, if you take some sand in your hand, if you look at it closely and also water, and also air, they are all colourless, looked &quot; at in this way.
There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you?
Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities.
