Spring comes, and with it the sly greening of the city. Doing yoga in the living room while Maud is at work, Tim is struck by a beam of sunlight and imagines himself a saint in a painting.
He decides to write a concerto, quite a short one perhaps, which he will call CYP2D6 after the liver enzyme that converts codeine into morphine and which, for the pleasures of her teacherly gaze, her fluency, he has made Maud explain to him at length and in detail. He will, of course, dedicate the concerto to her. For Maud, for M. For M with love. He will give it to her on her birthday or some other auspicious day. The little concerto. It will be proof of many things.
Elated by this—the prospect of the work, the already perfectly imagined moment of the presentation—he cycles to a music store at the bottom of Park Street and buys workbooks bound in blue card. Urtext. Merkheft fur Noren und Notizen. He buys a dozen (they are so beautiful) then cycles to the delicatessen on Christmas Steps and has the plump girl lift ribbons of pasta from the wide floury drawer under the counter. He buys fennel sausages (that he will split from their skins), dried porcini, single cream, imported yellow courgettes. Also a bottle of red wine with a painterly label that seems to show Eve companionable with the serpent, the pair of them under an umbrella pine in some dangerous southern garden.
When she comes home—it’s been a Croydon day, a three-hour meeting about the biosynthesis of alkaloids, then a talk, endless, entitled ‘What can we learn from ABT 894?’—the wine is open, the mushrooms soaking in warm water, a large pan on the gas coming slowly to the boil. She takes a shower. When she comes back to the kitchen towelling her damp hair he says, ‘Today was a true spring day, wasn’t it?’
He watches her sit, watches her set up the little blueberry computer. He pours her a glass of wine. ‘Check out the label,’ he says. ‘It may not be theologically sound.’
The sideboard by the cooker is spread with good things. His technique with garlic—crushing the clove with the flat of his knife, slipping it from its skin, dicing it—has an almost professional flair. He chatters to her over his shoulder. He hears the computer keys, now slow, now as though she is dropping fistfuls of dried peas. He has finished his first glass and pours himself a second. The wine, which had been interesting at first, with notes of rosemary and black tobacco, now seems bizarrely heavy, syrupy and heavy, with notes of tar, dead flowers, bath oil. How stupid it is to buy wine for the label! How stupid to go shopping because you have been touched by a beam of sunlight while practising yoga!
On the wall above her head the plaque of evening light is crisscrossed with the shadows of the plane trees. He takes a plate from the rack beside the sink, holds it at arm’s length over the floor, waits some eight or ten seconds, then drops it. She looks at the shattered plate, glances up at him, turns back to the columns on the screen. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and fetches the dustpan and brush from the narrow cupboard at the far end of the kitchen where all the cleaning things are kept.