18

‘Thomas,’ Austen said, ‘is like the little man you used to see following the horses up and down the streets with a bucket and a shovel.’

John laughed, yet as though in some way the remark had hurt him.

‘Well, almost. Except that he only collects emotional droppings,’ Austen added, seeing his brother’s pained expression with surprise.

John immediately stepped in front of him and opened the double doors of the York Room. A thin cone of yellow light came through a gap in one of the shutters and faintly illuminated the large interior. They waited a moment while Leonard came along the passage, then entered together.

‘Matthew, on the other hand,’ Austen went on, speaking into the darkness, ‘is altogether different. It isn’t so much that you can scarcely distinguish between what part of him is him, and what part is the computer, but that he is quite content that you shouldn’t separate the two.’

The cone of light was broken in two. It stretched across the bare floorboards, then snapped against the wall, rising vertically as a triangle, leaning slightly to one side. Its apex rested just beneath the decorative frieze which, interrupted only by the five tall windows, circled the entire room.

‘And Alex?’ John said.

‘Alex moves through things so rapidly … well, things and people, that if he ever stopped you’d feel that his arms, his legs and finally his head would slowly drop off and roll away. And even then, roll away with a gradually increasing acceleration.’ He paused to look at Leonard. ‘I suppose Alex is the last flame of the Radcliffe fire.’

Leonard had in fact come to stand in the middle of the room and was staring up at the ceiling. Its interlocking figures surged in a formless complexity, colourless and crude; they hung like giants in an obtuse perspective. He gazed up, as though awaiting the climax of a huge event. Then suddenly he stood revealed in a pool of light. The two men were pulling back the shutters.

‘And Leonard?’ Austen said. ‘What about you? I suppose you are the thing that appears after the fire has gone out.’

‘And what’s that?’ John asked.

‘The vision, the blurring, whatever it is that overcomes the senses immediately a light has disappeared.’ Austen crashed back the shutters into their recesses, then coughed and dusted down his suit. He looked up at Leonard. ‘No? You don’t think it’s true?’

Leonard turned to the windows. The estate stretched below in a large and ordered pattern, slow arcs intersecting the receding ground. The houses spiked the smooth contour of the hill. Beyond the final ridge of houses was the undulating level of the valley, its long rows of buildings splayed like ribs across the slopes. And facing them on the opposing ridge was the black crown of the city’s central hill, its old buildings groping up from the hard outline of rock, fingers clutched above the skyline, trailing at their summits a thin and ebbing wreath of mist. Low clouds hung over the land.

‘I think this room will suit us splendidly,’ Austen said.

‘It needs cleaning.’

‘Of course. I don’t mind that. But the whole thing. It’ll be quite impressive.’

Leonard was very pale, the large, matted bruise at the side of his head giving his face the broken appearance of a mask, disused, almost forgotten, only the eyes piercing through. He moved past the windows, the third and the fourth, and paused at the one nearest the fireplace. It was streaked on the outside with dried courses of rain. The hard, red knots of the houses were clenched now like fists beneath the bony shield of the sky. The landscape was heavy, reddened.

‘Don’t let Austen rush you into something you don’t want, father,’ he said quite suddenly.

‘No. Of course not. Why should he?’

‘I don’t know. Except that I feel he’s not the person to plan such a family party without having something in mind.’

‘Something?’

‘Some purpose.’

John glanced at Austen apologetically.

‘And what purpose would that be?’ Austen said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps it’s something I want too,’ John said. ‘An event. To see people in the Place after all these years. If you feel it’s something surreptitiously designed – to what end, I don’t know – then no doubt you’ll find greater satisfaction in staying away.’

John stared at Leonard a moment as though expecting some sort of answer, then went to the door. He paused there, waiting, then hurried out into the passage. They could hear his feet moving down to the stairs.

‘What is it that he wants after all this time?’ Leonard said. ‘A crusade?’

‘Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is,’ Austen answered, smiling at his nephew.

‘And what do you hope to gain by it?’

‘Oh, now, Leonard.’ Austen laughed. He closed the shutters on the second window, looking down from the darkened end of the room to where Leonard was standing beneath the fireplace examining the carving. ‘Do you know what that figure is?’ he asked. It projected heavily into the room, into the oblique angle of the light. ‘The one downstairs, if you remember, is Jehu. This, this one, is supposed to be Samson.’

He slammed the final shutter into place. The room was suddenly in complete darkness. Austen stood still, as though in some way confused by his own action and trying to locate Leonard across the room.

‘Have you noticed,’ he said after a moment, ‘as your eyes grow accustomed to the dark you begin to feel that this is the natural light and that those tiny bright cracks round the shutters are unnatural? You feel this is the natural light, yet it’s almost completely dark in here.’

Leonard was indiscernible against the staggered shadows and crevices of the huge fireplace. Austen waited a moment, then said, ‘You see, Leonard, there are two kinds of puritan temperament. The liberal and the coercive. After spending nearly the whole of his life as the one, your father’s decided that all along he really intended to be the other. The evangelical, I mean.’ Austen paused. ‘Can you see me from where you’re standing?’ he said.

‘No.’

He listened to the tone of Leonard’s voice. ‘But you are looking in my direction?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly Leonard’s voice asked with a kind of ludicrous anxiety, ‘Austen, have you any idea of the time?’

Austen paused again. Then he said, ‘It must be somewhere between two and three.’

They stood in silence for a while. Then Austen went on slowly, ‘Your father’s predicament is not so unusual, you know. He’s got to solve a problem which he knows to be insoluble. Not only won’t the first line of the equation work, but the factors themselves are almost unrecognizable. He begins to doubt, not whether the problem exists – his despair and misery more than confirm that – but whether his will to discover a solution is right. Who willed us? Who instructed us? His intelligence provides him with no escape from this extraordinary predicament. In fact, only one thing ever will. His intuition. And it is specifically this that his puritan temperament denies. This is his real conflict. The thing he’s never realised until now, is that his puritanism is that of a practical ascetic, one whose battles take place in public, not here in this cloister. That’s why he’s throwing open the door. Now he’s waiting, almost insisting even, that something should happen, that something should arrive.’

Austen stood listening for a while. He had thought in fact that he heard Leonard moving, but all was now completely silent and still. He began to move forward, identifying in several places the possible silhouette of his nephew.

‘Do you understand that?’ he said into the silence. ‘It means that you are his image, and he’s searching round now for a suitable setting in which to present it. Otherwise … otherwise he’s reduced to a very simple thing. To seeing his misery and his despair as in some way his only achievement.’

Austen had now almost reached the fireplace. It rose massively before him in the faint light. Then he realised quite suddenly that Leonard was no longer there. That in fact, as his search quickly revealed, he was not even in the room.

As he turned to the door he gave a loud sob, but whether of frustration, or anger, or grief, it was impossible, even for him, to tell.