‘His name,’ Dr Youngblood croaked, ‘he did have a name, didn’t he, this bull?’

‘Yeah,’ Atlas said. ‘That was the joke of it. He was called Sir George.’

The moment seemed to Jonathan, as he wrote about it in his diaries afterwards, to have been the moment in which he first caught sight of the truth stripped bare. But it went by so fast that he was flat on the ground underneath the bull’s horns before he could make sense of what he saw. The bull rolled him along like a log, and the grass whipped at his face just like the Kansas grass of so long ago. He struggled to his knees. The bull knocked him down, leapt over him and rolled him from the other side all the way to the fence some forty feet beyond. Once there the bull began to play, butting Jonathan against the fence, retreating, butting again, blood from the torn nostrils pouring down over grass and man both.

Claire realized she’d forgotten the burgundy only when she was clearing the beef to make way for the salad with walnut oil – too late, way too late: there was no remedy at all.

‘So what happened then?’ Mrs Youngblood asked, elbow on table, eyes glued to Atlas. ‘Did he die? Was he dead?’

‘No. But he was hurt bad – not really conscious. Rayner crept up behind the bull to get the pitchfork, and Jesus if he didn’t pick the damn thing up and stab it into the bull’s neck. The bull woofed and backed away, pitchfork stuck in his neck like a bull at a bullfight – which bought Rayner the time to get hold of dad, get him out. Don’t know how much of this dad understood. Old Mundt couldn’t find an unbroken rib in the poor bastard’s chest. Nothing’s as painful as broken ribs: childbirth, cancer, forget it.’

World War One was a year old. The newspapers carried almost as many stories about opposition to it as about the war itself. George Stoke’s anti-war stand was vocal and, as usual, well publicized. He had no belief whatever, he said, that war, this or any other war, was going to make the world safe for democracy. He and a number of other prominent liberals hoped the war might stimulate agitation for peace; meantime, though, it stagnated in the trenches of Europe. Jonathan, lying on his bed in agony, pushed toward death, pulled away again, pushed, pulled, pushed, pulled, just as the bull had butted him toward the fence and away again. In this state, he thought of George, knew that he agreed with what George had said – that again he agreed, again! – and the agreement pained him so greatly that it seemed to him, so he wrote in his diaries, that the walls screamed all night long, a desperate sobbing scream like a child’s. How was he to know that it was not his own pain he was hearing but his youngest daughter’s? Hope’s pain? Hope, given her name because Sarah had no hope.