SIX

Although Henry is always the first person in the country to get a flu jab, he is also always the first person in the country to get flu.

Without the jab, he tells himself, it would have been even worse.

In fact, Henry likes having flu. It reminds him of being jealous. The same aching of the limbs, as though his bones – his clavicles, his femurs, his humeri (words he’s looked up in an atlas of the human skeleton) – have overheated and become new centres of the senses for him; the same lazy throbbing of the temples, like warm jets of water flushing through his brain cells; the same submission to the caprices of the body and its blood. When he is jealous, Henry can barely move his head, so drowsily heavy, like a sunflower at evening, does it become; and so it is when he has flu. For these reasons, Henry has always preferred jealousy and flu to any other sexual activity.

He imagines, Henry, that he looks rather spectacularly hollow on his pillows, the rims around his eyes purple, his lips faintly parted, his cheeks blazing. Not as beautiful as when he was young and the bones showed their burning tracery through his flesh, alarming whoever cared for him at the time, but he has a grander backdrop for his sufferings today, a softer and more billowing bed, an altogether more elegant bedroom with its row of seven little windows – one for each dwarf – looking out, not over the deathly Pennines, but the park, the West End, the City, an extruded horizontal of teeming London, a fluttering letter-box diorama of the metropolis from which, for a cruel day or two, flu has parted him. If you have to be ill, Henry thinks, this is the place to be ill in. He tries to imagine his father unwell here, but he cannot connect him with the pillows, cannot picture his cheek upon them. Which just goes to show that a person is not a person full stop, but changes with his habitat. As Henry’s habitat is changing him, like a hand constantly soothing his brow. So if this had been my place of birth, instead of up there, what would I have been, Henry wonders.

Happy, for one.

Successful, for two.

No one I recognise, for three.

On Sunday morning Moira brings him strudel in a plastic container. She lets herself in now, with her own key, then makes him tea. ‘Fluids are essential when you’ve got a cold,’ she tells him.

‘I haven’t got a cold, I’ve got flu.’

She fluffs his pillows. ‘It’s a little early in the year for flu. People don’t get flu in August. You’ve got a cold.’

‘I’m too weak to argue with you,’ he says. ‘Which proves I’ve got flu.’

‘And I am not prepared to humour you, which proves you’ve only got a cold.’

‘Feel my forehead.’

‘And?’ she asks.

‘What temperature is it?’

‘Hot.’

‘See.’

‘Henry, your forehead is always hot. You’re a hot-headed person.’

‘That’s because I’ve got flu all the time.’

No, she could say, but doesn’t, that’s because you’re jealous all the time. Yes, she has noticed it. They have been going out for three or four weeks, no more, but already he is jealous of his own shadow. When they pass a shop window which offers them their reflection he pauses so that he can admire them together. Henry in his dotage and a woman young enough, almost, to be his daughter. That’s when she observes that he is jealous of himself for being with her.

He has an antique tray which moves up and down his bed on oiled brass tracks. The opulence of this place! On this tray, Moira lays out strudel for him and strong tea. And of course aspirin.

‘You take too many of those,’ she tells him.

‘A man of my age can’t take too many aspirin. It prevents the blood clotting. The only reason I am not having a heart attack now is aspirin.’

‘Fine, Henry, so long as you don’t prick your finger.’

‘Why, what will happen if I prick my finger?’

‘You’ll bleed.’

‘Of course I’ll bleed. If you prick me do I not bleed?’

‘To death, Henry! Think how thin your blood must be by now. It’ll drain out of your finger in seconds.’

‘All of it?’

‘Every last drop.’

He thinks about it. ‘I can’t stop taking aspirin,’ he says at last, cutting into the strudel, ‘I need them for my migraines.’ Then he tells her about the spider, the daddy-long-legs which sat on his brain while his mother laboured to hold him back from a disgusting world.

‘And you’ve had migraines ever since?’

‘On and off.’

She is sitting by his bed in a tasselled chair which must have intrigued and baffled Henry’s father, so dainty is it, so unlike anything that ever came from his workshop. ‘What is this?’ Henry imagines his father saying when he first saw it. ‘A sofa for fairies?’

Moira is no fairy, which might be why she appears uncomfortable in it, on the edge, fiddling with her earrings.

She shakes her head at Henry. ‘I seem to have spent my life,’ she says, ‘undoing what mothers have done to their sons.’

‘Well, one must suppose you wouldn’t accept the job if you didn’t like it.’

‘Who said I’ve accepted it?’

‘You’re turning me down?’

‘Don’t personalise everything. When it comes to remothering I’m turning you all down, I’ve had enough of it.’

‘Who’s “all”?’

Their eyes meet. Hers very Baltic this morning, Henry’s rheumy, the colour of strudel. Then she turns her face from him and gets up, going to the window, where the world of men undone by mothers stretches further than the eye can see.

‘For a start, Aultbach has suddenly developed a limp,’ she says.

‘I thought the strudel wasn’t quite perfect today,’ Henry says. ‘But what’s that got to do with his mother?’

‘It’s got to do with me, it’s got to do with me having to mother him.’

‘I thought he had a girlfriend.’

‘He has, but she doesn’t mother. Then there’s Lachlan, then there’s you . . .’

‘Lachlan? What’s Lachlan been asking you to do?’

‘Same as you. Tuck him up in bed. Spoon him cake and give him aspirin.’

‘Tuck him up in bed? You visit Lachlan’s bed?’

She remains at the window, her head averted. He loves the back of her. The front of her too, but the back of any woman Henry cares about is more poignant and therefore more sensual to him. When you’ve got jealous flu the receding parts of a woman are what you want to look at.

She is wearing a cream suit, well tailored, the waist nipped in, the skirt straight with an insolent slit at the back, not just a parting in the material but a wilful slash, a touch of tartiness which the elegance of the cut otherwise belies. The way Henry likes it. On her feet high-heeled summer shoes, a lattice of fine straps, her painted toenails showing. Her weight is on her left foot, unbalancing her, giving her an impatient look, as though she would rather be somewhere else. But she must also know that when she stands like that her skirt tautens across her buttocks, and therefore she cannot want Henry to want her to go.

‘You’re all ill, you men,’ she says at last. ‘It’s a beautiful summer’s day out there and you’ve all got something wrong with you.’

‘That’s because we’re all old,’ Henry says. ‘But there’s no reason to be irritable with me just because you’ve been visiting Lachlan’s bed.’

‘I haven’t been “visiting his bed”. He isn’t well, you’re all not well, and he asked me to bring him round some patisseries.’

‘The way you used to do with his stepmother? Is he planning to resurrect the tradition? Including cremation?’

‘I don’t know what he’s planning.’

‘But you took him some.’

‘How could I refuse? He’s recently bereaved. He’s a customer. And I was coming to see you anyway.’

‘You mean you delivered him patisseries this morning, on the way to me? You’re telling me you’ve already been there? You’ve done him first?’

‘It’s not a crime, Henry.’

‘That depends on how long you stayed –’

‘I didn’t stay.’

‘– and on whether he got fresher strudel than I did.’

‘Well, you’ve nothing to worry about on that score – he doesn’t like strudel.’

‘So on what score do I have something to worry about? Croissants? Or do millefeuilles run in the family? Let me see if I can guess how he likes them – confectioner’s cream, I’d say, I doubt he’s a custard man . . . yes, confectioner’s cream. Which just leaves the method of delivery to be determined . . . By tongue, I’d say. Am I getting warm?’

She turns to face him, denying him her back. In anger, her face loses its lopsidedness, as though it is contentment which makes her crooked. ‘Grow up, Henry,’ she says.

But how can Henry grow up, given the eye of the storm of her skirt, its still point, where the horizontal tension meets the vertical, that eloquent square of fraught silence which only an engineer or a philosopher of space possesses the science to explain? Let Hell freeze over while Henry’s standing in it, discoursing with the Devil, and let a woman scurry through the icy flames with that square of silence screaming from her skirt – Henry knows which phenomenon will engross him more.

‘Come here,’ he says, reaching out for her, bravely, despite his fevered state.

But before he can touch her she has quit the room – skewering his carpet with her high heels, her hair tossing like a pony’s, the slit of her skirt gaping more lewdly than Henry in his influenza can bear – leaving him trapped under his antique tray, the crumbs and the cold tea. ‘Call me when you’re feeling better,’ she shouts as she opens the door. ‘And you should know that we don’t use confectioner’s cream at Aultbach’s. That would have been your mother.’

Aultbach’s – t,t,t. Her lapping of the t his final torment.

His poor mother.

Not enough she used confectioner’s cream, but now, in death, where she cannot defend herself, she must be derided for it. What’s Henry’s duty here? He has never known. Stand up for your mother every time another woman speaks slightingly of her and the truth of it is you have no women left.

She’d warned him how it would be. ‘They’ll make mincemeat of you,’ she’d prophesied. ‘You won’t know how to resist. They’ll twist you round their little finger. They’ll get you to cut my heart out to prove how much you love them, and you’ll do it.’

And she was right. How could she be otherwise? Who knows women better than a mother? And who better knows her son? First chance he gets, Henry is fist-deep in his mother’s innards, scalpelling out her ventricles and whatever else they fancy while he’s in there. Aorta, anyone? Small intestine? Pancreas? And then he’s off, running, running, dispensing maternal organs like a second Mother Teresa let loose among the bloodsuckers. Whereupon he stumbles, whereupon the heart falls from his slippy grasp, whereupon, of course, of course, the heart cries, ‘Are you hurt, my son?’

Christ! These mothers!

And what does Henry, in the dirt, do then?

Attacks the pulp of pumping muscle, that’s what, throttles it, berates it, cries ‘Will you shut the fuck up, Ma!’, then remembers himself, his task, his sacred duty, and resumes running to the woman, the women, just as his mother said he would.

The women who don’t give a shit how hurt Henry is.

Was that another reason, yet another among hundreds, she held him back from the world, kept him inside her as long as she decently could, and then bound him in ribbons to her side, reading to him of callous men and girls with skin as fine as angels’ wings – because she knew he would have no choice but to knife her once she let him go?

It would help if he knew more men. He could ask them. Is this what you did too, is this what we all do? Is this what we essentially are?

But he’s got rid of all the men he knew. Friends. What do you do with friends? Hang on to your friends, someone should have told him – maybe the wife or girlfriend of one of the friends in question – hang on tight to your friends, Henry, you’ll need them when you’re old. But then he’d have fallen for her, wouldn’t he, loved her for her foresight and intelligence, worshipped her for her wisdom and acuity, and asked her to have dinner with him – and bang would have gone another chum.

His father’s no use. His father was a brute, crashed like a herd of elephants through the fine web of undergrowth which bound Henry to his mother and then, when he was finally called upon to feel his way gently, felt too much – felt too much too suddenly – and let his own heart give out. What sort of example was that?

Henry’s heart could give out, too, remembering the desertion of his mother. It’s cake talk that does it. Confectioner’s cream. He sees it as a measure of her loneliness, the extent to which he and his father had abandoned her, that she should have been reduced to that. She could talk of nothing else the weekend he nipped across from the Pennines to see her and found her in the kitchen – a room in the house she had once upon a time claimed she needed a guide dog to help her to locate – up to her ears in piping nozzles and spatulas. ‘What are you doing?’ he had asked, afraid her sensitivity had finally tipped her over the edge. ‘I’m scrolling, Henry,’ she told him. ‘Look – it’s like decorating a church. It’s like sculpting. I love doing it. You’ve no idea. It’s like a whole new world. I just love it.’ She seemed possessed, inordinate. ‘Did you actually bake that thing?’ Henry asked, seriously frightened for her now. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! When did I ever bake a cake?’ ‘When did you ever scroll, Ma?’ She kissed him, pulled him to her so he could smell the marzipan in her hair. ‘The cakes, I buy,’ she said. ‘Dead plain. Nothing on them. The rest I do. See this? It’s called a crimping knife. Guess what I do with it.’ ‘You crimp?’ ‘Exactly. I crimp, Henry! I flute, I pipe, I letter, I emboss. Aren’t you proud of me?’ What could he say? That he would have been had there been less hysteria in the enthusiasm? That it had always been understood between them that they were too civilised ever to embrace a craze, that they were professional sufferers and bleeders, nothing else, and that they had only to look at her husband, his father, if they needed to be reminded what a hobby did to you?

It was the undividedness of her zealotry that betrayed her. The wild bacchante look in her eyes, the almost proselytising fervour. How long, he wondered, before she’d be buying him a little set of icing scrollers and extruders of his own? This was not his mother. This was not how she operated when she was herself. Yes, her vocabulary had always been extreme, but when she was truly engaged she was vaguer, less upfront, more ambiguous. Henry recalls the time she discovered Nietzsche. He had gone to Paris on a school trip and returned to find her sitting up in bed in a nightgown and wearing reading glasses he had never seen before, with The Genealogy of Morals held out before her as though in some soft-porn parody of a sex-starved teacher enticing her students with German philosophy. He stood at the foot of her bed, waiting for her to ask him about his holiday. She peered at him over her lenses. ‘Have you read this?’ she asked. He shook his head. ‘Probably best you don’t,’ she said. ‘Not yet. But then again, maybe you’re old enough. I don’t know. He’s a profound thinker. Rabid, someone called him, morally contagious, maybe too contagious for someone your age. But no Jew should go through life without reading him sometime. With a pinch of salt, I grant you. But with an open mind as well. Anyway, how was Paris?’

It was the idea of there having been a slave revolt in morals which interested her. According to Nietzsche this was a Jewish revolt, the Jews, a priestly people, having hacked away at the aristocratic edifice of those manly virtues of war and chase and gaiety, and ushered in an era, in which we still live impoverished today, of equality and democracy. Those whom the gods had loved for their daring were henceforth damned; only the unfit were blessed. In the place of power, beauty and nobility, were now enthroned poverty, ugliness, intellection and suffering. A change in our entire system of valuation effected by the terrible potency of envy.

Henry, tired with travel, wondered whether his mother was thinking of what her husband had done to her, the vulgar demos of North Manchester pulling down the aristocratic gaiety of the South. But that interpretation failed when he tried imagining his father as a priest.

Or as potent in his envy.

‘Is that why we all wear glasses?’ he speculated instead.

She looked at him strangely. ‘We don’t all wear glasses,’ she said. ‘You don’t, your father doesn’t, and I have only just started wearing these to read philosophy.’

‘No, but you know . . . I might not wear glasses but I wear a scarf. We all wear glasses or scarves.’

‘Henry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘We put something between ourselves and the world. Is that what Nietzsche means, that we have removed ourselves from nature?’

Ekaterina took off her glasses and called her son to her. ‘We don’t do anything,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘There is no we. And if there were it wouldn’t include us. Now I’d like you to forget everything I’ve told you. I warned you it was contagious. I won’t mention the subject again.’

The trouble was she had mentioned it far and wide already, not least to her mother and her mother’s sisters. Over Friday dinner at their place – tinned chicken soup, tinned chicken, tinned syrup sponge – the Stern Girls, by then depleted by one, and only to that degree less indomitable, quizzed him about it.

‘How long has your mother been reading this person?’ his grandmother wanted to know.

‘Nietzsche,’ Marghanita corrected her, with a quick, precise stare at Henry.

How did she do that, Henry wanted to know, how was she able to make even a dead German philosopher sound like an adventure between them? OK, Nietzsche’s name had a buried z in it, but she could embroil him no less successfully in secrets with Hawthorne or Melville, or Emerson even. Was it her? Or was it him, simply what happened to him when he heard the names of writers?

He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember seeing her with anything but Jane Eyre in her hand,’ he told his grandmother. ‘Always a novel, anyway. This philosophy business seems to have come out of the blue.’

‘It’s not one of your books?’

‘No,’ Henry said.

‘You haven’t been told to read him at school?’

‘No. Look, this hasn’t come from me. But I have to say it sounds interesting enough.’

‘Interesting!’ Effie exploded. ‘Do you know your mother’s reading Hitler’s favourite writer?’

Henry wondered where it would have left them had Hitler’s favourite writer been Charlotte Brontë, as for all he knew it was. ‘She doesn’t believe every word of it, you know,’ he said, as much in his own defence as his mother’s. ‘I think she’s just toying with it.’

‘You don’t toy with fire,’ his grandmother reminded him.

Henry shrugged again. ‘My father does,’ he reminded her.

‘Yes, well, that’s what we are wondering,’ Effie broke in. ‘Could it be that there’s a problem between them?’

‘Do you mean is she reading Nietzsche because Dad’s away a lot? I suppose that’s possible. But then you could argue there are worse things to do when your husband’s out.’

Always supposing you can keep a husband, was the implied slight which Henry intended them to hear in that. He was annoyed with them. On his mother’s behalf largely, but also because he hated the way they would suddenly close ranks and close their minds – even Marghanita – the moment the world beyond threatened to impinge upon their privacy, and thus destabilise, as they saw it, their meticulously contrived anonymity. They read books and played music and looked at paintings, they embraced the arts of civilisation, they loved to talk, they cultivated feeling, yet at the same time they cultivated ignorance. Why does no one ever try to interest me, Henry wondered, in what is happening at this moment? Not to him, not to them, not to the family, and not even to the tribe, but out there, in the world, to the world. He didn’t mean politics, specifically. He didn’t quite know what he meant, since he was describing the absence of a presence for which he had never been given the word. That was his beef. That he hadn’t been kept informed. That he didn’t know what he was missing, only that he was missing something. The way things worked, was that it? The operations of the universe? The physics of being?

But the physics of being as recently understood. Not as decreed on a mountain top on Sinai five thousand years ago.

His father was his father. Uncle Izzi, children’s entertainer. And Henry wasn’t going to look to a children’s entertainer for enlightenment. His father lived out of time, not in the past but on some other plane where there was neither past nor future. His father’s parents had barely learned to speak a word of English though they’d been born in Manchester and lived there all their lives. Yiddish did them. Yiddish sufficed. In Yiddish they thought they were invisible to their enemies. Like the ostrich. Which certainly made them invisible to Henry, at whom they stared in deep anxiety, the few times they saw him, as though he might be about to report them to the authorities, and as though the penny they gave him, pinching his cheek, would buy him off. But his mother and the Stern Girls were different. They weren’t in hiding. They weren’t afraid. So why didn’t the times pulse audibly in their veins? Wherefore, at the last, were they bemused?

Sometimes Henry wondered whether it was all an effect of being in the north. Too cold up there, too dark, too backward, for anything but your own immediate wants to engross you. But always he would come back to believing that the fault – if fault it was – lay more particularly with his own people. They had come north in order not to know or notice; they were up here precisely because it was like being nowhere.

Was this why Marghanita pressed American literature on him? In America the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity, had made the American cause their own, had even shaped it, sometimes dangerously – tempting fate, risking a backlash – in their own image. Not in England, not in Manchester, not on the Pennines. Yes, they were dutiful citizens; they paid their taxes, fought in wars, performed charitable deeds, gave service to the community – but only for the right, at last, to be left alone to notice nothing. And not be noticed noticing it.

The catch for Henry was that he, too, found this half-absence from the world alluring. By Henry’s lights, if anything was civilised, this was – knowing nothing of event, forswearing effect, attending only to the still sad humanity of your own heart. ‘You and your ivory tower version of civilisation,’ his Gentile schoolfriends used to twit him, Geoff the geographer who understood the economic underpinnings of Henry’s street, Ned who could compute the distance of a star from how bright it was, Dick who debated capitalism versus socialism with numbers – how many privileged, how many deprived, how many slaughtered or gone missing, how many enriched – all stuff Henry knew absolutely nothing about. But that’s my point,’ was Henry’s invariable reply, ‘civilisation is an ivory tower.’

Except that it didn’t look so civilised on days like today, with the Stern Girls manning every exit, and his grandmother in the forecourt with her torch, reminding him why it was necessary, on occasions, to round up stragglers and turn the key.

‘Yes, there are worse things to do when your husband’s out, Henry,’ she said, ‘though not very many. You know we don’t go in for old world superstition or fanaticism here. We are free thinkers. But if there’s one freedom of thought we don’t need just at this very moment it’s the freedom to accuse the Jewish people of poisoning civilisation. That we can think about again a hundred years from now.’

Ah well, Henry supposed he agreed with that. Or if he didn’t, couldn’t remember why he didn’t. Jew talk embarrassed him. At school it was frowned on by Jewish and non-Jewish boys alike. It felt old hat. Wej talk was different. Back slang the fact of your being a Jew and you did something witty with it. Joking was fine. Otherwise leave it. As for Nietzsche, he was old hat too. The world he’d set alight was no longer even smouldering. The most interesting part of it all, for Henry, was seeing his mother fired with intellectual passion, reading without migraines, not merely to rub at the itch of her sensitivity – could that have been the reason for the migraines? – but seeking for truth in that penetralium of mystery, philosophy. It made him proud of her. My mother understands philosophy, what does your mother understand? But he also suspected it would pass. He was confident of the soundness of her mind. She was too sensible to be a fanatic.

And at length, of course, it did pass. One day she was talking about ‘slave ethics’, the next she wasn’t. Just like that. Possible that the Stern Girls had put the screws on her, but he doubted it. Much more likely to have been the firmness of her character. The sane are fickle. When it came to cake decorating, though, he could see that something had changed. Her natural soundness had been undermined. She couldn’t stop doing it. Couldn’t stop reading about it, couldn’t stop showing him her sugar pastes and wire flowers, couldn’t stop going on courses, couldn’t stop giving lectures and demonstrations. Once, he walked into Lewis’s in Leeds (never mind why he was in Leeds) and saw her with a semi-circle of women around her, doing something with royal icing. He was relieved he was on his own. Not because he was ashamed of her, no, if anything he was thrilled to see how smart and assured she looked, how well she held her audience, how roundly she rang her voice. Sometimes you need to observe your mother in a public place, at the centre of a world which excludes you, to grasp her separateness. At least Henry did. So that was his mother! So that was what she actually looked like! Amazing. But upsetting too. His mother become a kitchen person. His mother in an apron. She who had sat him on her knee and got him to read to her from The Awkward Age. She who had put her mind to Nietzsche and the idea that there was once, in some city of the mind, a slave revolt, not in marzipan but in morals. Demeaned. Diminished. And all because the men in her house had left her to her own devices, marooned her at home where at last she had grown homey.

Is he to allow Moira, a mere pastry chef who as like as not has never opened Nietzsche in her life, to demean the memory of his mother further? Does being with a woman who fishes for his member on a motorway matter that much to him that he would cut his mother’s heart out on her say-so?

Well, does it?

Well?

What Henry needs is a man to talk to. Is this what you do? Is this what we all do?

Then it occurs to him that Lachlan is only next door.

‘I’ve still not entirely got rid of the witch,’ he tells Henry, pouring port. He is in a pink candlewick dressing gown, presumably hers. Around his throat a Highland scarf, worn like a cravat. His legs, Henry notices, are badly veined. Like many men his age, he will soon be able to pass for an old woman. And in me, too, Henry wonders, is the old woman in me too beginning to show?

As for the persistence of the other old woman, Henry is in no position to have an opinion. ‘I’ve never been in here before so I wouldn’t know,’ he says.

Lachlan wafts the air. ‘Can’t tell if it’s death I can smell or her thirty years of illegal occupation.’

Henry doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s the dressing gown.

He looks around the room. The apartment is the mirror image of his own. If Henry understood more about the architecture of mansion blocks he would realise that the two flats were once one, extending the full depth of the building. But other than in shape and proportion, they do not resemble each other. The old lady’s place is all heirlooms, heavy, dark, patina’d with the mustiness of a long invalidism. Pictures of flowers on the walls, a bad painting of an elderly gentleman looking stern (Lachlan’s father, Henry presumes, before Norma Jean got her playful hands on him), and a small amount of Robert Louis Stevenson memorabilia: ‘Requiem’ in a chipped brown frame –

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

– and a photograph of the grave itself, the famous sepulchre built, as the author had requested, atop Mount Vaea, in a jungle of flame trees and banyans, and snapped so that you can see down to the blue waters of Samoa. On a bronze plate, the poem. Here he lies where he longed to be; / Home is the sailor, home from sea . . .

Sad, bardic Henry sighs. He has a soft spot for the graves of writers. Words and death, there’s no beating the combination.

‘Signed by him,’ Lachlan says, noting Henry’s interest.

‘Signed by whom?’

‘The old boy himself.’

‘Your father?’

‘No, not my father, of course not my father – what would that be worth? – by RLS.’

Henry peers at the signature. Illegible. Then realises it’s nonsense. ‘How could he have signed a photograph of his own tomb?’

Lachlan makes a noise in his stomach. Umbrage. ‘That’s his signature,’ he says. ‘Know it anywhere. We’ve got letters from him. See that S, see that funny L, leaning backwards – his without question.’

‘Spirit writing, you’re saying?’

‘They buried him according to his wishes, who’s to say he didn’t design the tomb before he died. Brain haemorrhage, you know. Terrible thing.’

Very likely, Henry thinks. Designed the tomb, erected it on the top of a mountain, pointed the camera, wrote ‘wish you were here’ across the print, and haemorrhaged in his servant’s arms. Though he has never been to Samoa, Henry can see it all in his mind’s eye. Who needs to travel when you have a lively imagination.

He shifts his attention to the marks on the walls, handprints almost, trails, anyway, leading from one doorway to the next and stopping at light switches, where the old lady must have paused to get her breath and see her way.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Lachlan says. ‘Sad, the poor old girl, living on her own, having to save on heating and lighting. Don’t let that fool you. She slept with the heaters on in summer. See these?’ He shows Henry the blackened linings of the curtains. ‘Scalded from the heat. And she never turned off a light. There are light bulbs here that are welded into the sockets, they’ve been on so long. I’m still waiting for some of them to cool down. She didn’t need to worry, you see. It wasn’t her money she was burning.’

Henry would like to sit down, but he has spotted Angus curled like a cobra in love in his wicker basket. He eyes the dog. The dog eyes him back, lost in the melancholy of sexual desire. Only reduce yourself, the dog says, only meet me halfway, on the couch if not the floor, and I will give myself to you.

‘Maybe she didn’t realise what she was doing,’ Henry says.

‘Didn’t realise! I think you realise when you’re going through someone’s inheritance.’

‘I mean maybe she didn’t realise how you felt about it.’ Henry wants to say maybe she didn’t realise your desperation, but there are some liberties you can’t take in the matter of another person’s fortune, however indiscreet that other person is himself. The other thing Henry wants to say is what the fuck does any of this have to do with me.

‘Oh, she realised how I felt about it,’ Lachlan assures him. ‘She made me check the balance of her account every day and then ring her up and read it out to her, so she could hear how I felt about it. Think of that – every single day of the week. The only time she let me miss was a bank holiday. When I came up to visit she insisted we go to the bank together so she could see how I felt about it. She wanted me to count it dripping away, penny by penny. And she wanted to be there while I counted. There’s a word for that.’

‘Sadism,’ Henry ventures.

‘Sadism. Thank you.’ He secretes bile. Henry can smell it. Hear it. Like the central heating switching on. ‘Sadism. Yes.’

Henry shakes his head. It’s difficult for him, in Lachlan’s presence, remembering how to make his face show sympathy, so he just shakes it to be on the safe side.

‘Have I told you about her suite in the Imperial in Torquay?’ Lachlan asks.

‘Not that I remember,’ Henry says.

‘Ten years she had it. Concurrently with this place. How do you like that? Two homes while I had none. Best view in that building as well. She used to invite me up for tea, to show me the sea and make me eat what was owing to me in scones and cream. “Have more, Lachie,” she’d say. “Don’t deny yourself. Your father wouldn’t have wanted you to go without. I’ll ring up for more cream.” I was so down on my uppers I used to have to work there myself in high season.’

‘Nice place to work though, isn’t it, Torquay?’

‘Might be if you’re collecting deckchairs, but I’m talking about the hotel.’

Henry tries to imagine Lachlan working in a hotel. Guest relations? Baggage? The kitchens? ‘As what?’ As a waiter, Henry decides even as he asks. He must have been a waiter. One of those who never lets you catch his eye, unlike Angus who lives for nothing else.

‘As a gigolo.’

Henry’s mouth falls open. At least he hasn’t forgotten how to do surprise. ‘You were a gigolo?’

‘I was better looking in those days.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I’ve never met a man who has actually slept with women for money.’

‘Slept? Chance would be a fine thing.’

‘So what did you do if you didn’t sleep with them?’

‘Waltzed with them.’

Henry is disappointed. ‘But after the waltz,’ he says. ‘Presumably there were occasions . . .’

Now it’s Lachlan’s turn to shake his head. ‘Never. Too old, most of them. It was hard enough work just getting them back into their chairs.’

‘You’re a good dancer, then?’

‘Was. All the Louis Stevenson men danced. “Can’t call yourself a complete man if you haven’t got twinkle toes,” the old boy used to say.’

‘Robert Louis Stevenson said that?’

‘No, my father did. And look where that motto got him.’

‘But if you didn’t sleep with them,’ Henry goes on, ‘how did you get your money? Did they pay you per dance?’

‘Good God, no. What do you think I was – a prostitute? The hotel paid me. But since the old woman was keeping the hotel afloat anyway, I was just getting my own money back. Makes you bitter, you know, dancing your life away with old bats for nothing.’

Oh, I don’t know, Henry thinks.

Normally, he would like to be off now. By his standards this is a preternaturally lengthy conversation. But he is gripped by the spectacle of a man more disgusted with his life than he is himself. When Lachlan talks he appears to be staring into an abyss. Henry is curious to see whether he intends to fall into it this afternoon.

He notices that Angus has gone to sleep. ‘May I sit down?’ he asks.

‘Of course,’ Lachlan tries to say, making a sign of apology. He is temporarily unable to talk for something lodged in his oesophagus. His life. He is choking on his life, Henry thinks.

‘You never talk about your mother, your real mother,’ Henry says, once Lachlan has cleared his passages.

Lachlan’s eyes water like Angus’s. ‘Too long ago,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry,’ Henry says. He doesn’t want another of them falling in love with him out of loneliness. ‘It’s just that I am thinking a lot about my mother at present.’

‘She alive?’

‘No.’

‘Dreadful business, I know,’ Lachlan says. But what does he know? Nothing. He is not listening, not concentrating, gone somewhere else. London Bridge, circa 1958. The time he threw his bowler hat in the Thames. Kicked the dust of his family off his heels. Watched the hat float away on the tide, then strode off, free, into the future. Except that there was no future. He tries to collect himself. Then tells Henry all about it.

They were in sugar. In molasses, to be exact. In molasses big. Does Henry know anything about molasses? No. Few people do. And those that did would not have known what Lachlan knew. Lachlan was born into molasses. Louis Stevenson – did the name not mean anything to Henry? Treasure Island, obviously. But to some the name was even more synonymous with molasses. Louis Stevenson treacle . . . No? In a sense, the island that provided Lachlan’s branch of the Louis Stevensons was even more of a treasure island than Long John Silver’s. Treasures poured, anyway, however fanciful the comparison, into the pockets of Lachlan’s great-great-grandsires, as it was meant to pour, when his time came, into Lachlan’s. He had been prepared for nothing less since his earliest age. Taught the trade. Taught the history. Taught the geography. Taught the chemistry. Taught the economics. Taught the shipping. High-masted schooners which brought molasses back from the Indies bore the names of Lachlan’s great-aunts, and one day would bear the name of Lachlan’s wife. Except that by Lachlan’s fifteenth birthday his father and his grandfather were employing tankers to transport their molasses, which meant that Lachlan’s wife, whoever she was destined to be, would have to make do with having her name on one of those. Less romantic, Lachlan thought, but as his father told him, progress was progress and no one with a sweet tooth would ever know the difference. Make no mistake, Lachlan was proud to be the heir of Louis Stevenson syrup and treacle and however many dozens of other products besides. He loved enumerating to his friends at public school the sweets and chocolates which would never have been what they were had his family not had an input into them. But for the plummeting of the price of sugar after the First World War, he told them, they wouldn’t have been able to suck on anything that he wasn’t in a manner of speaking responsible for. But for colonial exploitation you wouldn’t be at this school, some of the smartest of them retorted. Which hurt a bit, though he was versed in the arguments to refute that sort of sentimentality. No molasses, no jobs. No jobs, no money. No money, no self-respect – so up yours, Engels Minor. What hurt more were the prosaic tankers, and the storage terminals which had been built to receive them. Lachlan thought he remembered barrels. Maybe he’d only seen photographs of barrels, or heard talk of barrels, nevertheless the idea of barrels was part of the heritage of his imagination. One day he would go over to the islands, share a rum with the natives on his plantation, and sail home, in a boat named after his beloved wife, with the molasses slurping about in barrels. Some who couldn’t wait to have their molasses tinned and bottled and sold to them in the normal way would be standing on the quay expectantly, their jugs in their hands, their lips moist, knowing they could draw from the barrels the moment the ship was still. That was how he had always pictured it. Hand to mouth. Now, there were thousands of feet of pipeline enabling the molasses to be pumped directly from the ship. Suddenly it had become an industry. And just as suddenly, Lachlan had become a City man, no trips to Jamaica or the Antilles yet, but only shipping routes to get to know, warehousing, tank sizes, pumping velocities, mere ledger work no matter how it was bedecked in the language of high finance. ‘Not what I want,’ he told his father. ‘But then what you want might not be what I want,’ his father told him in return. ‘I’m all unexpended energy, Dad,’ he said. ‘Then go on unexpending it,’ his dad told him, ‘you’ll need it one day.’ ‘I’m not a bank, Dad.’ ‘Oh yes you are.’ Hence Lachlan, one bright metropolitan morning, striding along London Bridge in his pinstripe suit – no pirate shirt, no pantaloons – reaching a decision which would affect the whole of his life. Enough. He’d had enough measuring and counting and pen-pushing. He was twenty-three, a young man, not a bank, the white sun-tipped town humming about his ears, the great brown river of promise rolling beneath him. So off with his hat, off with it, a gesture of such liberating boldness that he remembers himself singing as he performed it – ‘Burlington Bertie’ or ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, something like that, though it’s also possible he didn’t sing at all, so contracted was his heart with fear. Away went the hat anyway, in a lovely fearful parabola of freedom, up and away like a black balloon, tumbling and spinning and almost, almost floating, until it landed brim down in the river and sailed away, a little boat with Lachlan’s prospects in it.

In his sleep, Angus cries a lovelorn cry.

‘And?’ Henry wants to know.

‘Oh, there’s no “and”,’ Lachlan says.

‘You didn’t get to the Antilles?’

‘Never tried. Got myself entangled with a woman instead. Took a job as a clerk in an antique auction house for the time being – it’s always for the time being, have you noticed? – fell for the secretary and married her. Dreadful mistake. She thought I was moneyed. I have the look, you see. Or at least I had it then. She thought I was idling until I came into my fortune. After I told her I’d thrown my fortune off London Bridge she didn’t talk to me for three years.’

‘But you married for all that?’

‘We already were married. It was our wedding night when I told her. Damned silly, I suppose.’

‘You still married?’

‘Officially, but we don’t communicate. I hit her with a fish and that was that.’

‘Your life seems to be marked by large gestures,’ Henry notices.

‘I don’t know about large. Futile more like.’

‘So why did you hit her with a fish?’

‘Years of ill treatment. She spoke ill of me and ill to me. Couldn’t forgive the molasses. Couldn’t pass a tin of syrup without abusing me. Sometimes you just snap. It was a kipper actually. I think that made it worse, that it was a breakfast fish.’

‘You like to make your runs for freedom in the morning?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. But yes, you’re right. I believe I can change things in the morning. Or I did. And it was a bit like the bowler, the kipper. I felt the same lightness afterwards, for ten minutes.’

‘And your mother? Had you stayed in touch with her?’

‘We wrote. But she was disappointed in me. I imagined she’d see my point of view, you expect that of mothers – fathers equal business, mothers equal the heart, all that nonsense – but she thought I’d been an ass, walking out and marrying a secretary who wouldn’t talk to me. She had a point, too. In the end it was my father who came round, though by that time my mother had passed on – cursing, I was told, cursing all of us on her death bed – and Louis Stevenson molasses were suffering in the City. Tanker problems – there’s a joke! The old boy was ready to make a gesture of his own, you see, and saw me as an ally. I’d thrown my hat in the Thames, he was about to throw away his life, or what was left of it, on a woman who’d sung in the music halls. Funny the way it turned out – he made a better job of being flamboyant than I did.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you should see it like that,’ Henry says, gesturing to the room, to the idea of St John’s Wood beyond, to the principle of London with all its bleak emancipations and amenities. It was something he’d always imagined for himself, being washed up and cynical at sixty, a free and bitter spirit, proof that nothing pays or matters, that you can persist beyond happiness. In this way they are bedfellows – he born into spiders, wee Lachie born into molasses – the fellow-fallen, but each with a nice apartment.

So Oh, I don’t think you should see it like that is on behalf of both of them.

Lost on Lachie, though. ‘I’ll tell you what sticks in the craw,’ he says, redundantly Henry thinks, since everything sticks in his craw – ‘the fact that I’ve come full circle, still dependent on molasses money, what’s left of it, and still selling the stuff.’

‘I thought you were in pigswill,’ Henry says.

‘Animal feeds. As it happens the pigs don’t care for sweeteners, but sheep and cattle love it. It’s an important source of good-quality carbohydrate. Easily digested, not too high in nitrogen content, and cheap to produce. I should know.’

‘Then that’s all right,’ Henry says, not being a conversationalist in the matter of animal feeds, and not wanting to stir Angus from his sweet sleep with talk of din-dins.

‘Not all right with me. If I’d thought I was going to end up selling molasses, I’d have stayed, wouldn’t I? Kept my hat on. As it effing is, pardon my French, it’s all been for nothing.’

Hmm. Time to go, harumphing Henry thinks, refusing another drink. Time to return to his own disappointments. But not before it has crossed his mind that they have something in common, Lachlan and Moira – she the pastry chef, he caramelised in history and grief. Sweeteners.

Henry has been alive a long time; he knows how much small things count, what tiny fibres of like-mindedness bind the lonely. He himself is merely a failed teacher, arid, an amateur cake decorator’s son, with at best confectioner’s cream in his veins. Between Moira and Lachlan flows, whether or not they yet know it, molasses.

He should let Lachlan have her. Give something back. He’s borrowed from other men all his life, now’s the time to make some recompense. Moira isn’t his to give, he knows that, but if she were he should part with her. Give someone else a chance.

‘Before you go, old man,’ Lachlan says at the door, not quite putting his arm round Henry’s shoulder, but nearly, disconcertingly nearly, ‘do you use whores?’

Henry’s jaw drops. Actually slides out of his possession. He is aware that he has reddened. ‘Not exactly,’ is the best he can think of saying, ‘though I suppose there have been times when they’ve used me.’

They laugh at that, together, if you can call the noise they make a laugh.

Yes, Henry decides, he should definitely let Lachlan have her. Lachlan’s need being by far the greater. And by that token, his capacity to love and cherish being the greater too. It would be a kindness all round. If nothing else, that would at least leave Henry with the eminence he once enjoyed, as the most miserable person in the building.

But he loves her. And you don’t give away what you love. That much he has learned. So there you are.