He’d put the pea coat on before opening the door, but he waited until he was a bit farther away, in the dark, alone. Then he started to move his shoulders and arms around, and at last he savored the warm dependability of the woolen cloth. The heavy jacket faithfully held its former owner’s form and gestures. Now Herman gradually filled it with his own. He knew, when he bought the old sea coat, he was buying a whole person. That’s why he didn’t bargain over it. You don’t bargain over the ghost of a mate: a fellow who sometimes favored his left hand, seeing as he’d worn the armholes evenly on both sides of the jacket; someone who wasn’t afraid of catching a sore throat, or else he’d also worn a beard, because the large collar wasn’t used to being fastened; something of a fighter, because the right-hand pocket had often been weighed down by the barrel of a pistol; and not very mindful—or, at the very least, more concerned about the figure he cut in the world than about his garments—because he was in the habit of hoisting up his coattails and stuffing his hands into his pants pockets. Which is the right way to present oneself in nautical settings the world over, but it stretches pea coats horribly out of shape. In brief, at the very least it lends them a somewhat peculiar air.

Yes, he must have been one of those finicky rascals. The old sea dog had stuffed camphor into all his gear. Even so, there’s a memory of wind in this woolen cloth. In spite of the camphor, the wind is in there. This brings salt water to Herman’s eyes. In his mind, he hears rumblings over unbounded reaches. But he’s more in tune with the mysteries of the world than with Palmerston’s mundane politics. All of a sudden, he sees that the zinc shop signs aren’t swaying, that the bits of straw on the pavement aren’t flying about, that the laneway is quiet, that the fog isn’t moving. It’s his own, personal wind. “So here you are, back again!” he says. The battle with the angel has resumed. He’d always suspected it was only a truce.

He’s never breathed a word of it to anyone. But plenty of times, since he came back from the sea, he’s been locked again in secret tussles with the wing-bearer. While he’s been hunched over his manuscript, alone in his writing room, the angel has often leapt onto his shoulders from behind and grabbed hold of him. Grabbed hold of him with the terrible kind of grip that suddenly twists your neck with a merciless sort of cruelty. Merciless: oh yes, no question about it! The cruelty that takes no account of weariness, of wants, of the right you have to live in peace. A right, after all, that you possess like everybody else: the right to live peacefully, while lying a little, ever so innocently, from time to time. Simply to live, to give up on big ideas and grand resolutions, on yearnings for sacrifice, for self-denial, for things that are tough, things that are difficult to accomplish, things to which you have to drag yourself by the scruff of your own neck, things that wake you up in the night; to live like everybody else, with that great, complacent selfishness taught to us by all the churches and by all the powers that be; to travel the well-trodden roads, to hold the key to all the unbarred doors in everybody else’s stairwells and corridors, to everybody else’s bedrooms (short of venturing into the bedroom of Henry VIII . . .). To live, with one’s wife, one’s house, one’s garden, one’s modest job.