Well, what can I say? Benign tumors don’t run in the family, but suicide does. If fifty years of whiskey was Atlas’s approach to it, he wasn’t going to win any prizes among us Carricks. There is etiquette (to use Claire’s word) even to suicide: whiskey just isn’t up to snuff. On top of the two attempts Jonathan’s already made, he has one and a half to go, and while the half-attempt is not too impressive, the remaining full attempt is very much so – which is to say that Atlas comes into this legacy legitimately, even if he doesn’t show the family panache. My father Rayner did better. He swallowed 500 nembutals; he did it because my mother found an unfamiliar condom under the bed in his study, one of those raspberry-scented ones, and they had one of their wild fights over it. God help us, what a thing to die for: a raspberry-scented condom. In fact he didn’t die right away, though; the barbiturates destroyed his kidneys and raised his blood pressure: it was a stroke that got him in the end. There is no aim, no meaning, no purpose in life – no pattern, no divine plan. This is truth, but the healthy rarely bother with it. ‘The trouble with depres-sives’, as Atlas says, ‘is that they’re right.’

The stakes are so high, though, that in the afterfog of an unsuccessful attempt, life sometimes reveals a simple-minded, day-to-day charm, a patternless pattern that went unnoticed before. So it was with Jonathan, my grandfather, who thought he could see a way to be happy in just such a simple-minded, day-to-day fashion. He took a train to Billings, Montana, signed on as a brakeman for the Northern Pacific run between Billings and Duluth and when he received his first paycheck, opened a savings account at the First National Bank in Duluth. He grew a mustache, a rich black affair that hung down a little to either side of his mouth and made him look older. The railroad promoted him to baggageman. For another six months, he drank nothing, lived cheaply and worked as many extra hours as he could persuade the railroad to hire him for. What time he had left over he spent as he’d spent left-over time since that day in San Francisco, searching for the father he was never to find. The moment his bank balance stood at $1200 he quit and took a train to the east coast.

He arrived in Ellsworth, Maine, just before dawn on a June morning. It was a smaller town than he’d expected, neater: stores and houses clustered side by side, paved paths to walk on instead of boardwalks, cobbled streets, no smell of pig shit over the horse shit. But the wineglass elms lining the streets were precisely what he’d had in mind and so was the white clapboard church in the town square surrounded by flower beds. He caught up with a lamplighter snuffing out street lights and asked the way; Malloy’s Landing turned out to be fifteen miles to the east. He left his trunk at the station and set out on foot.