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By Root 645 0

something missing, something he could never capture – they weren't breathing somehow, is what she would say; there was no oxygen, no wind in his landscapes, as if they were under glass. He saw it too but couldn't ever seem to do anything about it. It's the same feeling one has looking at paintings of wild animals – somehow they never seem real, even when every detail is astonishingly precise – and well, that's because one could never be so close to such an animal in its own environment, we could never experience that kind of detail in reality. We feel their aliveness precisely because they are moving too fast or are too far away for us to take in those details. The convention has always irritated me – when I was young I was indignant about it – we could never be so close to a cougar, five paces away, in the wild; we could never paint it on its rocky crag from life. I used to yell on at my mother about it. As a portrait it was impossible because the relationship between the viewer and subject was impossible. A photo is possible, but not a painting. And well, though it seems I've strayed far from the point, somehow my father's painting always felt that way too – as if there was something not quite real about it, whereas my mother's paintings – well, they were too real.

Jean rolled off Avery and they sat together on the edge of the bed. She heard the trucks grinding up the hill.

– I was terrified to be in her studio alone, said Avery, yet I wanted to see. You can look at a few square inches of some of her forests for fifteen minutes and still not see everything that's there. It's hungry paint. A bottomless hunger. It was so distressing when I was small, to know that these images were made by my own mother, who otherwise was pragmatic and straightforward and so much fun – as if just to live – to walk around or do the washing or the cooking was a holiday … I could never put the two parts of her together. Only later when I began to learn the history did I truly understand this was not her nightmare alone, but the world's … and only then began to make sense of some things I'd heard about, and overheard, as a child … The first morning I was alone with my father, after the war, just my father and me, we sat in the hills and he talked for ages about abutments. Abutments! I loved the word, it was a liqueur, his liqueur – he was treating me like an adult, it was like having a first drink together, father and son. We sat in what had always seemed my private place, I had roamed those hills for hours, I had spent many, many afternoons alone watching the light moving across the landscape, the sun setting, in the rain, in the winter, and I knew every animal hollow in the grass. And now I was there with him, in that place, and I could show him everything and he could lie down on the ground and stretch out his legs with a great sigh and talk to his heart's content about abutments and Coade stone and pneumatic railways. It was bliss, that day. I was so excited to be with him, so shy of him, I wanted so badly for him to know me, and he looked so carefully at everything I showed him, took everything so seriously – the field mice, the clouds. It was a perfect afternoon. That was the first time I understood the war was really over. I thought it was going to be the beginning of many afternoons, but there never was another afternoon like that. That was the only one. We were in each other's company so much, and there were snatches of time alone together on his projects – a half-hour here or there, but never again an endless unfolding afternoon when I sensed he didn't want to be anywhere else but with me.

I want to feel what my father felt, Avery repeated, sitting on the edge of their bed on the Nile, what the marmisti know, what the blind man knows when he's on Ramses' knee. What my mother calls ‘flesh-knowledge.’ It's not enough for your mind to believe in something, your body must believe it too. If I hadn't witnessed this particular pleasure in my father when I was a child perhaps I wouldn't feel the lack of it. But I do. I can imagine what