‘What is truth?’ Jonathan interrupted. ‘I am much interested in truth, George.’

George’s contempt disappeared as suddenly as it had come. ‘How the fuck would I know about something like that?’ he said. ‘I’m a politician. Why don’t you drink some whiskey?’

After my Columbia professor got so angry at me for refusing to accept truth as no more than a function on a computer: after he’d shouted at me, ‘Listen! What I’m telling you is first-year stuff! Elementary!’ After this, he said to me wearily, ‘What do you want, anyway?’ ‘Some explanation of things,’ I said. He sighed in disgust. ‘Then for Christ’s sake, forget truth. Try coinage instead. You can feel it, spend it, and it sure as sweet Jesus tells you who you are.’

‘Why are you asking me questions like this?’ George said to my grandfather.

Jonathan spread his hands.

‘You want a map? Answers?’

‘No. Only a theory.’

‘You don’t work power with theories,’ George said. ‘Nor elections neither.’

‘I most particularly want your opinion – and on one particular theory.’ The heat in the room was so great that the smoke of George’s cigar hung motionless as though encapsulated in steam. ‘According to this theory, truth itself can’t be separated from a person’s search for it. A process of elimination goes on. If you clear away enough of the underbrush, what’s left has got to be truth. The question is, is it possible that you determine this thing not by what it is in itself but by what you discard to get at it?’

‘Don’t know what that means,’ George said. ‘“By what you discard”: that got a meaning?’

Claire took over the driving; it was miles before she could right Atlas’s mistake – miles – and we ended up on a road neither of them knew at all. ‘After mother’s death,’ Atlas said from the back seat, ‘my sister Hope disappeared. Search parties went out to look for her, but it was dad who found her, snuggled away under a bush. When he pulled her out, she snapped at him, teeth bared – like that horse Jenny that had snapped at him when he was at Malloy’s Landing. There was blood caked all around her mouth. She’d bitten the flesh away from the fingers of both her hands – never heard of anything like that before or since: literally bitten it away – right down to the bone. There were ants feeding on the ragged remains of skin.’

In George’s splendid room, Jonathan turned his own hands palm up and then palm down in the gesture he did not understand but had become familiar with in himself; he studied the dry, work-hardened skin. ‘Right from the beginning you discard things,’ he said, ‘extraneous things, things that are too painful, things you haven’t time for, little things, big things: what you end up with is certainly a judgment on you. The question is, is it truth? What do you think?’

‘Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ George said irritably. ‘What I’m left with is you.’