‘Couldest thou not watch one hour?’ he whispered to Burgess Mundt some ten days later.

Burgess frowned. ‘Just try to get some rest.’

‘Send me the boy.’

Rayner stared down at him, his face expressionless except for a slight movement of one eyebrow that he seemed to be struggling to control.

‘The bull?’ Jonathan said, watching that eyebrow. He’d meant to thank him – wanted to thank him – but the words wouldn’t come. If he could have used his hands, perhaps he could have gestured but – Why did the damn boy always have that look of contempt on his face?

‘I called Mister Wade. Like you said.’

‘Do you want him?’ Rayner had said to the itinerant butcher who peddled meat to houses and farms around Hannaville. ‘Will you pay me for him?’

‘Depends. We’ll see.’

The bull had wandered around in the field all afternoon with the pitchfork sticking out of his back. ‘Toward evening Rayner went to the barn and got a pretty young heifer,’ Atlas said (the French dinner party, to the great relief of all its partakers, had reached the firmer ground of Roquefort and sourdough bread from San Francisco), ‘he put her on a leash, took her out into the field to tempt the bull. There’s an irony for poor old dad, huh? Jesus, the number of times he quoted to us: “And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is traps and snares.” Anyhow, Rayner slammed the door behind them. By the time Mr Wade arrived next morning, all was calm. Mr Wade shot the bull, paid twenty-five dollars for him, ground him up and sold him to neighborhood housewives as hamburger.’

Atlas toyed idly with a crumb of Roquefort. ‘They found buckshot in the rump,’ he said, as though puzzled by the blue veins in the cheese. ‘Somebody’d mistreated that animal once.’

Jonathan didn’t notice when Rayner left him. He just knew that the boy was gone and that he had not managed to thank him.

12

All we guests at Claire’s dinner table put on a brave face for the pièce de résistance, the magnificent gâteau au noix de coco, which turned out to be chocolate as well as coconut. Claire poured out a lovely chilled Château Yquem to go with it. The glasses were a wedding present from her mother – her first marriage, not her marriage to Atlas; they had gold-leaf rims on them. Atlas fell silent and picked idly at his cake, just as he’d picked at his cheese, lifting and dropping forkfuls without putting them near his mouth. The conversation was desultory when I noticed that Dr Youngblood, on Atlas’s left, had sidled so far down in his chair that only shoulders showed above his plate; he had one leg stretched out, probing under the plate glass table. (I am helpless, an innocent bystander: I can’t move my legs at all.) The dining-room carpet was white. Next to Atlas’s foot lay a dark glob of gâteau au noix de coco. If Dr Youngblood could get to it before Atlas lifted his foot and ground it into the rug, perhaps all wouldn’t be lost. Success at hand (or rather at foot), and suddenly Atlas stands up. ‘Got to take a piss,’ he says, lurching away from the table: behind him on the carpet, a squash of gâteau au noix de coco.