‘There must be something solid in all the transience,’ said Burgess, ‘something to hang onto.’

‘How can you drivel on like this?’ Jonathan said. ‘The pieces don’t add up because adding up isn’t part of the plan.’

‘There is something we can get at, something we can tie down—’

‘Why?’

‘Because I can feel it. You can feel it.’

‘I feel nothing.’

Within the past year Senator George Stoke of Kansas, known now to an entire nation as the ‘fighting liberal’, had launched a campaign against what he called ‘America’s lack of community’. Support for him grew every day. He attacked everything from pot-holes in the road and nonexistent street lighting to graft and corruption in the Senate itself, and he used all the graft and corruption available to him (which was considerable) to push through the legislation he wanted pushed through. The reports made Jonathan’s hands shake: he knew that what George stood for was right. These were policies he believed in himself, policies he spoke for in his sermons, policies he would have fought for on a wider stage if he’d had the power to fight for them there – if he’d been in George’s place. How can such a thing be? It caused a rebellion inside him, a state of civil war within his own soul, which in turn caused a serious loss of morale in the already weakened troops massed against George. As everybody knows, civil wars are the bloodiest, the most vicious; victory is never enough: such wars don’t stop until everything lies in ruins.

‘Come on, Johnny, what have you got to lose?’ Burgess was saying. ‘What’s wrong with peeling off a few layers? – looking for something to analyze? Maybe we’ll run across some avenue into the meaning of things. Why not?’

‘The universe affronts me,’ Jonathan said. ‘I do not accept it – or its meanings.’

Sarah’s pains began in the middle of her eighth month. Burgess was no more than two hundred yards away, attending the farrier, whose broken leg refused to mend. Sarah was peeling potatoes. She screamed when the first contraction hit her and dropped the bowl. Jonathan came running to find her crouched among shards and vegetables, eyes white all around the flecked-hazel iris, mouth agape with terror; Eliza was on her knees, stroking Sarah’s back and crooning softly. ‘Get her upstairs,’ she said to him.

He carried Sarah up the first few steps, murmuring reassurances he didn’t feel just as, long ago, he’d murmured assurances he didn’t feel to College when College lay dying. The second contraction caught her as they reached the tiny landing; she screamed again and clutched at him so fiercely that they almost fell down the stairs together. She screamed a third time as he settled her down on the quilt.

‘You’re going to need Cheeba, Johnny,’ Eliza said. ‘I’m telling you true, this ain’t no job for a man.’

But he was already running to fetch Burgess, who tiptoed along the muddy street in patent leather shoes, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and disappeared upstairs.