6

‘You understand, this wasn’t magic or anything,’ Atlas said. He poured some of the whiskey he’d bought at the supermarket earlier into the cold dregs of tea that remained in front of us, just as he’d poured gin and brandy into his morning’s coffee. When he breathed in my direction the air was a miasma of sour alcohol, and he forgot from time to time that the small microphone on the table in front of him was, in fact, a microphone; its texture seemed to please him, and he rubbed his fingers along it. I took it away from him once or twice, but after a few minutes he was back fondling it again; when I listened to the tapes later, back in England, much of what he said came through only roughly beyond the static he’d created. ‘When the Indian woman twisted mother’s breast, it was as though she’d injected adrenaline. That’s what pain does: jolt of adrenaline. Very modern practice for people in shock. They didn’t have artificial adrenaline then, and even if they had had it – But how an Indian woman knew about it, I just couldn’t tell you – or how she knew to put salt and sugar in the water. Dad swore it was true.’

‘Do you believe him?’ I asked.

‘Why not? Whatever else he was or wasn’t, he was a painfully honest guy. There aren’t many places I’d doubt him. Can’t see any reason to doubt him in a thing like this.’

Whatever you have threatens you because you can lose it. Sarah was so much younger than Jonathan that he had never considered the possibility of her dying before him – and so it was that she opened up yet another flank in the battered army of his spirit. Defeat was so close he could smell it; the time for serious realignment had come, and he went at the job with a fearsome array of determination. Along with the diaries, I keep on my desk the Bible my grandfather kept on his. Open to Ecclesiastes, and you find he’s underlined the words, ‘And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets.’ This was the moat that was to surround his new battlements. He forced himself to notice that Sarah was a poor cook and that the freckles on her arms were not as charming as the freckles on her nose. He swore celibacy. He’d been celibate once; he could do it again. But he did not find it easy.

From her side, Sarah fretted over his coldness, felt it was punishment for her limitations, some of which he knew, some of which he had yet to learn. Since he was no better at expressing his love for the baby than he was at expressing his love for her, she thought he probably resented the baby, too, and resented her for having borne him. But she had no idea how to mend things, and so began to mark out a few resentments of her own.