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By Root 359 0

talk, mostly about Cambridge, that lucky, unknown world, while John said nothing. Now the table was silent. George Laidlaw was talking to himself, almost inaudibly, his lips fluttering with his habitual fantastical calculations of the National Debt. Fulton Allen ate with a lad’s appetite, sweeping up juices with a chunk of bread on his fork. Margaret ate morsels silently. Hannah Allen kept glancing at the new man, Septimus Tennyson, whose head trembled and whose gaze seemed too sensitive to look at anything for long, but shrivelled back from what it hit like a snail’s wizening eyes. Tall and faded he looked. Why didn’t Hannah glance instead at John? He licked silky butter from his teeth and would much rather have been eating her, the prettyish, pale thing. He wondered how she tasted in the nest between her legs. He’d have liked to see her cheeks flush and hear her startled breath. The doctor smiled over his chewing at everyone. ‘Do we all have plenty to do today? George, you’ll be working in the vegetable garden, won’t you?’

John lay in the warmth of the bath, nursing the whiteness of his belly. He pressed his fingers into it, forming ridges of soft dough. Beneath, his penis had bobbed up out of the water and was capped with ticklish cold air. He lay back, the water slopping up beside his ears, and let his arms float. He lay so still he could feel his heartbeats shunting a little force around his body.

Knuckles beat against the door. ‘Five minutes, Mr Clare.’

Peter Wilkins was an old attendant. His heavy face was pouched and drooping. The lower lids of his watery eyes hung so low that they showed a quarter of an inch of their red lining like a worn-out coat with failing seams. He had had his fill of restrainings, bathings, arguings, and had now taken upon himself the duty of keeping the gate. He never mentioned that this was now what he understood his job to be in case he was contradicted and had his former duties imposed. Instead, each morning he walked purposefully, but not too quickly or obviously, to the gate under its trees and stood there.

His face was so detailed, so full of character, that John always found encountering him to be a small event, like eating something. John thanked Wilkins with a raised hat as he let him go out towards his work.

He walked with the quick skimming steps of a labourer up the hill to the admiral’s garden, getting a little heat and motion into his flesh. He began whistling a tune, ‘Tie a Yellow Handkercher’, one of those he’d transcribed years ago from gypsies and old boys, for a volume that no one would publish, that died on a desk in a cramped London office. Thus the real life of the people goes insulted and ignored. He sang out loud ‘Flash company been the ruin o’ me and the ruin o’ me quite’, then stopped: he was feeling it too strongly and it was more imprisonment to simplify himself like that in other people’s words, not when he had so many of his own. Also, he’d seen two charcoal burners on the road ahead, round-shouldered and dirty, their faces blackened and featureless. He angled his hat down and skulked under it as they passed, then wondered if that would have made them more or less likely to take him for one of the mad.

When they’d gone, he looked up again into the forest.Wet. Not much stirring. A flicker of wings. Mist between the crooked trees.

As he worked the admiral’s garden a robin joined him. It darted forward to needle the earth he’d turned, watching him, waiting, poised on its little thready legs. John saw the throb of a worm by his spade, plucked it up, and threw it at the bird. The robin flew away, flew back, and jabbed at the meal.

Watching this, being there, given time, the world revealed itself again in silence, coming to him. Gently it breathed around him its atmosphere: vulnerable, benign, full of secrets, his. A lost thing returning. How it waited for him in eternity and almost knew him. He’d known and sung it all his life. Perception of it now, amid all his truancy and suffering, made his eyes thicken with warm tears.

Too easily moved -