There was a knock at the door, and Thomas put his pen down. It was Hans. "You are late for dinner, Doctor." At the end of June' Thomas received a telegram. "Am back in Vienna. K." He wired a reply at once, inviting her to come to the Schloss. He might even offer her work there, he thought, but wanted to see how Jacques would respond to her presence. He had a delicate course to steer: he did not wish to humiliate or enrage Jacques, but he did want him to understand the gravity of his error. Meanwhile, there was a shadow between them; there was something that needed to be resolved; and when he was certain that Jacques was in a sufficiently robust frame of mind, he told him about the diagnosis of rheumatic fever. Jacques became agitated and pale as Thomas went over the steps by which he and Maierbrugger had arrived at their conclusion. He nodded gravely, and Thomas, like a doubtful assassin, felt pity and embarrassment as he watched. "I see," said Jacques finally. "So when I asked you for an explanation of her joint pains you already had this one." "Yes. I did not say so at the time because ' "I understand why." They were in Jacques's consulting room. He got up from where he had been sitting at the desk and walked to the window. He looked out over the gardens, but he said nothing. Thomas said, "Of course, we shall probably never know the exact diagnosis. Perhaps none of us is right." "Perhaps." "But I knew that you would want to be aware of this severe complication, if only so that you can develop your theory in the light of it." "Yes," said Jacques. "Yes indeed." He seemed far, far away. When Jacques turned at last to face him, Thomas found it hard to meet his eye. He thought of the sands at Deauville and he felt weary, as though he had heard the first call of middle-age, inviting him to subside into comfortable self-mockery, recognise the embrace of defeat and to indulge his own after all, only human failings. But he had seen men like Faverill go that way, and the outlines of their modesty and good humour were in fact a deception because they were etched with the acid of regret. He himself would never give up. "We may have lost a battle," he said. "Perhaps only a skirmish," said Jacques. "But the war, you were doubtless going to say, is not over." "Of course not. I wanted to ask you something, while we are on this subject. Katharina may come back to the schloss to stay for a little while, just a holiday. Or I might ask her to do some of Sonia's work while she is pregnant. She is evidently rather good at that sort of thing." "Evidently' "But would you mind?" "Do you think that every time I saw her in the cloister I would doubt my own abilities?" "I don't know." "Would she be like a raven on the battlement? A bird of ill omen always in the courtyard?" Thomas laughed. "I very much hope not. She is a very... fine woman as you yourself pointed out most eloquently in your case history." "I remember. She made a good impression." "So what do you think?" "I think that you have presented me with a choice. Either I recognise Katharina's qualities and humbly see what I can learn in retrospect from her ailments or I allow myself to withdraw into some kind of unscientific isolation with a closed mind and an embittered heart." "That is putting it a little starkly." "A little. But it is a stark choice. And quite an easy one." "You mean ' "She is undoubtedly a person of superior gifts, Thomas. Ask her to do whatever you like, provided you consult Sonia. Now please leave me for a moment." Sonia was reading on her bed, with the shutters and windows open, giving her a view down towards the lake. She was wearing a white cotton shift and held the book on top of her distended abdomen. Occasionally, she put it down, lifted the shift and ran her fingers over the skin, stretched to near-transparency, beneath which the veins ran like the streams of a blue delta. She seldom felt the baby move, but it seemed to be growing at a vigorous rate and she was anxious about how much bigger she would have to grow before October. Already she had started to shuffle a little when she walked, while her feet turned outwards and her hand reflexively went to the small of her back for extra support when she hauled herself out of a chair. The heat of the summer made her feel that she would like to lie all day in the shallows of the lake, like a basking porpoise. Despite these discomforts, she had seldom felt more purposeful. She ate amply of Frau Egger's cooking, though could not bear the taste of wine and used her condition as an excuse to turn down the bony river fishes that were otherwise destined for the lunchtime tray. In the afternoon, she went down into the office next to the waiting room, where she corrected Lisl's spelling and brought the accounts up to date. In the evenings, she sat with Jacques and Thomas and caught up with news of the Schloss; she sensed the strain between them and was able to lighten it by appealing to shared memories of Torrington or Madame Maurel's boarding house. But in the mornings, she was alone with the unborn child. She lay on the bed and heard the bell-pull being answered by Lisl or Daisy, and the clatter from the nursery, where Hans was putting up new curtains and repainting the room. Josef had found a wooden crib among the furniture stored in the old stables and Sonia had had a new cot with elephants painted on the headboard made by a craftsman in the village. As she lay back, she thought of the millions of women in the world, in Africa and China and England, who were like her at that moment, absorbed by their bodies' invisible toil, which took from her all it needed to sustain the life of something that had started as a mere idea in the nursery at Torrington ("When I grow up I am going to have...") yet now was daily turning into flesh. The size and weight, the specificity, were miraculous to her; he was not just a child, but her child, this very one; and how could you love so much a being you had never met? She smiled briefly because these fancies did not really puzzle her; in fact, she was assailed all the time by a sense of Tightness. What was happening beneath her hands seemed bizarre and in some way unexpected, yet the more she marvelled at it, the more it felt inexorable. She sighed and closed her eyes as a slight breeze came up from the lake and through the open window. This is being alive, she thought; this is what it feels like. When Thomas knocked at the door, she quickly covered herself with a sheet. "Come in." Thomas sat at the end of the bed. "I wanted you to know that I have told Jacques about Katharina's rheumatic fever." "How did he take it?" "Philosophically. He did not like it, but he accepted it. I think there is no need to do any more. He will work out his own response, though I think he will need time." "So you are not going to show him your notes on the case history?" "No. That would be unnecessary now. I want him to come to his own conclusions and they may be quite different from mine. The only important thing is that he understands the dangers to the patient of a theory that is too rigid. We must never forget the simple things fevers, sore throats and so on." Sonia sighed. "I do hope he will find a way forward again. All his hopes rode on this theory." "I think he will need some looking after." "We will manage. The baby will be a distraction. It will occupy his mind." "It will occupy all of us. There is another thing I needed to tell you, Sonia. Or to ask you, I should say. I have invited Katharina back to the schloss to stay for a week or so. I wondered whether it might make sense for her to do something to help us. She could do your morning's work for instance." Sonia squinted down the bed at her brother. "Is that all you wanted to tell me or to ask me? Is there something else?" "I... No. That was it." "Thomas, you are blushing." "Don't be ridiculous." Sonia laughed. "It is all right, you know, Thomas. It is allowed. You are a man of thirty-six years old who ' "Thirty-five, in fact." "Who has never had so much as a dalliance or ' "Not recently, but ' "And Kitty is a considerable prospect." "Prospect! You sound like Father discussing things with Mr. Prendergast!" "I did not mean financial, I just meant that she holds out promise for the future. She is on the threshold of her life. And she seems such a studious girl as well as being ' "Exactly! That's exactly what I love about her. I He stopped short, hearing what he had said. Sonia said nothing, but smiled at him. It was a long time since she had felt older, more advanced in her experience, than her younger brother. "So," he said. "Congratulations. You have found me out. Can you understand why I love her so much?" "Of course, Thomas. Have I not just said?" "Yes, I know, but do you really understand? It means a good deal to me that you should like her." "I do not know her well, but I think that if I were a man, she is the kind of woman I should fall in love with and want to marry' "You are very kind." "No, I am not. I am quite selfish and hard-hearted." Thomas looked at her to see how serious she was. "Of course it is difficult with Jacques. I do not want him to be embarrassed or to see her as some kind of permanent rebuke." "That is what made me suspicious," said Sonia. "I knew you would not have asked her back unless there was some particular reason." Thomas nodded glumly. "It is awkward. If I were to propose marriage and she were to accept, then presumably we should all have to have dinner together every night. And... Did you ever read the case history?" "No." "Good. Do not ever be tempted to read it. But it went into detail that he may find difficult to forget." "But doctors can manage these things," said Sonia. "You are capable of seeing someone in the morning, inspecting their most intimate functions, then seeing them again in the evening as a social being in a white tie. That is what doctors do. That is why we admire you. I think you will find that Jacques will manage. He is a man of great imagination. He has a creative soul." "You mean he will be able to imagine that he has never met her before?" "It would not surprise me. If that is what he has to do. To him she was a patient, Thomas. That is all." Thomas stood up. "I must go and get a room made ready for her." "Yes," said Sonia. "But before you go, I must say that I am not sure about her working here. She may do some office work eventually, if everything goes to plan, but I don't want to give up all I have done. The accounts, for instance." "We will tread gently." When Kitty arrived at the mainline station, Thomas was waiting. He had forgotten, when he held her in his arms, how slight she was: even in her travelling cloak and jacket, he felt he could have crushed her. On the other hand, the set of her blue eyes was precisely as he remembered, and so was the scent of her skin. She had brought only two suitcases and no trunk, as though not wishing to presume anything about the length of her stay, but in the trap on the way back to the Schloss, her eyes were large with questions. "We have put you in a bedroom in the main house," said Thomas, 'on the same side as me. My room is at the front, yours is right at the back, overlooking the cloister and the South Court." "I love that little courtyard." "So your room faces west, and you have a view of the mountains as well." "It sounds perfect." "We can move you if ' "Don't fret, Thomas." Josef whipped the horses on as they began to climb from the valley. Thomas tried to explain what had passed between Jacques, Sonia and himself regarding Kitty's visit; he told her of the delicate negotiation and of how Sonia felt sure that Jacques would be able to forget what had gone before. Kitty looked amused. "My dear Thomas, you are making a fuss about this. For myself, I have already forgotten almost all the details of my previous consultations. I have no more interest in them than in records of my childhood dentistry' Thomas laughed. Mind you, he thought to himself, she has never read the case history; in fact, she does not even know of its existence. "So what are you interested in?" he said. "The future. A healthy future without pains and fevers You forget that for a former invalid it is wonderful just to be cantering up a hill with the summer breeze blowing through the window." "Dear God, Kitty. I love you so much it makes me want to burst out laughing. I feel that if you are here, nothing can go wrong." "Nothing will go wrong, Thomas. Why should it?" "Because..." He was about to say, 'because that is the way life is designed', but did not want to appear gloomy. "Nothing." Kitty dined with the three of them that evening, and Thomas felt surprisingly little awkwardness. Jacques asked Kitty about her mother's family in London and told her about his one visit to England; Kitty asked Sonia about her plans for the baby and what names she had considered for it. The chestnut gateau had already been cleared by the time Thomas managed to make any contribution of his own to their exchange. Afterwards, he took Kitty outside into the gardens, where they walked down over the sloping lawns towards the mountains in the west. Eventually the grass gave way and rolled down into a kind of ditch that formed a natural boundary; beyond it was a paddock, and after that some dark green cow pastures before the land began to rise again up into the foothills of the mountains. Thomas took off his jacket and spread it on the ground for Kitty to sit on; then he placed himself next to her and she leaned her head on his shoulder. "Did you find a job in Vienna?" he said. "No, I... I hardly had time." "And an apartment?" "I did look in the paper. I have brought it with me. But I can stay at my mother's house for the time being." "How long were you in Vienna?" "Three days. Two days." "Not long, then." "No. I was in a hurry to come back here." "Why?" "To see if things were as I remembered them." "And are they?" "Yes. Exactly so." Thomas looked down and pulled a stalk of grass out of the ground. "Do you find my work interesting, Kitty?" "Very much. And your partner's work. I told you that I read his lecture." "Yes." "I may have been lucky. A surgeon's knife removed my minor problem. But I think there is a great deal in his psycho physical resolution." Thomas smiled. Her perversity was liberating. "But," he said, 'do you not think it faintly ridiculous that the two of us should be beating our heads against a rock?" "What do you mean?" "We are trying to answer questions which, at heart, we suspect we cannot answer." Kitty put her hand on his arm. "You might, Thomas, you might. As you explained to me, there are moments when truths are revealed sudden leaps forward. I expect they come when people have for a long time been beating their heads on a rock." "But you would not think me ridiculous?" "I would not think you ridiculous, no. I should probably need to read Mr. Darwin's books, but I would happily do that." "You would do that just for me?" "Of course." Relief made Thomas pause. To think that someone would share his boneheaded convictions and his peculiar, blind ideas... He saw that he had been half in love with Kitty from reading her case history, and that being close to her in person had inflamed the feeling; but the decisive moment came when she showed such interest in his work. She had questioned him and pushed him until that strange release had come, and he had told her of his now-silent voice: only Katharina had been able to connect the different parts of him. "But," said Kitty, standing up, 'you did not say if what." "What do you mean, "if what"?" "You said, "You would not think me ridiculous?" "Would" is a conditional, and I wondered what the other part of the sentence was, the "if" part." "You are quite a grammarian," said Thomas. "So, what was it?" "I feel an idiot. It is too soon, much too soon, and you have been through so much that you need time to recuperate. In fact, as your doctor, I insist that you ' "You are not my doctor. You have kissed me. I am asking to be transferred to Dr. Bernthaler's list. I am perfectly well. I have had several weeks' rest and I am now ready to work." Thomas pushed himself up into a kneeling position and took her hand. "In that case, may I... Would you think me absurd if..." Kitty shook her head, her eyes stinging. "Not at all." "Will you marry me?" "I would be honoured," she said. "So very honoured." Thomas stood up and wrapped his arms round her. As she laid her head on his chest, he lifted up his eyes to the hills, but, despite all he believed, he could see no end to this happiness. They agreed that the wedding should take place in December, when Sonia would be recovered from the birth. The difficulty was in telling the others. It would not seem right for Kitty to remain at the schloss unless she was either engaged to be married or was employed there. However, Thomas did not want to push her into Sonia's place, nor did he yet want to break the news of his coming marriage to Jacques. It seemed precipitate, and he wanted nothing to deflect their energies and attention from the birth. Eventually, he and Kitty agreed, with reluctance, that she should go back to Vienna until after the baby was safely born, returning only for the occasional visit to make Sonia and Jacques aware that she was someone who would be part of their future. Thomas stilled Sonia's questioning by telling her that everything was well between him and Kitty, but that she still had personal matters to attend to; he assured Sonia that she would be the first to know of any development, and she was satisfied with his promise. In the middle of October, Frau Holzer, a midwife from the city hospital, took up residence in one of the ground floor rooms of the lower courtyard; and on a rainy Tuesday evening, two days later than predicted by the obstetrician, Sonia went into labour. Daisy volunteered to help Frau Holzer and was sent running up and down the corridor with towels and pans of water. Mary took up a position at the head of the stairs, her refined hearing giving her a good idea of the progress of the delivery, as she wound the hem of her apron convulsively in her fingers. Jacques stayed in his consulting room and tried to read. He had developed a picture of what the child would be like, based on the idea that it would be a fusion of himself and his wife. The exact process of heredity was a mystery, but anyone could see the work of parentage: the ovum and the seed guaranteed half shares, and while the boy like Sonia, he was certain it would be a boy might have his dark eyes or Sonia's lighter ones, the details hardly mattered because he would be an intermingling of their blood and, it seemed to him, the baby was sure to represent not just a fusion but in some way an improvement. Sonia would die of no childbed fever, and in her continued life his own mother's death would be redeemed. The boy meanwhile would have all of the good and none of the bad: he would be the best of them all. In the bedroom, Sonia braced herself and bore down as Daisy mopped her forehead with a wet cloth. Frau Holzer spoke to her rather as she remembered Jenkins the stableman talking to the horses at Torrington. Having at first told her not to push, she was now urging her onward. "You are not trying, Frau Rebière. Take my hand and squeeze it. I want you to push! Dear God, thought Sonia, I am pleased Jacques is not here to see this mess and strain. She felt the sweat cold on her shoulders and chest as a draught came through the window in the warm night. The pain was greater than she had expected and beyond her control, as though she were caught in a wave that would break only when gravity dictated; yet she did not panic or regret the pass in which she found herself. Though she was surprised at the animal in her, she let it have full rein, she howled, as everything she was the memories, the instincts and desires drove her on to break her body's limitations. Daisy screamed. She was standing by the side of the bed. "Its head! I seen its head!" Frau Holzer stood opposite, the sleeves rolled up on her brawny, bloody arms. "Wait for it," she said. "Wait one more moment." "It's coming," Sonia gasped. "It's coming." "Go on then, my love. Go on. One more time. Go on!" At the st airhead tears came from Mary's blind eyes. Jacques stood still, craning his head towards the ceiling. The shoulders of the baby extruded far enough for Frau Holzer to take them in her hands. She pushed her finger in and round the neck to see if the cord was wrapped there. It was free. As Sonia bore down one final time, Frau Holzer gently pulled the shoulders between her fingers and, with a sound like a huge cork being drawn, the baby, grey-purple, waxed and bloody, slid out into her attentive hands. It was a boy. She blew on him, and the child screwed his features into a scarlet howl; she passed him up to his mother and went to wash her hands before she cut the cord. Sonia lay back on the stacked pillows with the boy at her breast and closed her eyes. Daisy wept noisily by the bed; she had never seen such a thing in all her life. When Frau Holzer had cut the umbilicus, she examined Sonia to make sure that there was no tearing, then set about cleaning up. "Stop snivelling," she said to Daisy,"and get some fresh cloths. Then bring a nice bowl of hot water so we can tidy her up for when Father comes to call." Daisy went out on to the landing, but she did not really know what she was doing. She saw Mary and ran towards her. "It's a boy," she said. "He's such a little treasure. He's so perfect. Oh, Mary, you can't believe it." The two girls clung on to each other, weeping and laughing. When all the sheets had been changed, the towels and cloths cleared and Sonia bathed and put into a fresh nightdress, Frau Holzer went downstairs and knocked on Jacques's door. "Herr Doktor," she said, as the door opened. "You have a son. Congratulations. The mother and the boy are both well." Jacques gazed at her, open-mouthed. It was the news that Sonia was well that struck him to the soul: the mother would live, and the son would know her. He ran up the stairs and down to the bedroom. Sonia looked up at him, pale, but full of shy pride. He kissed her, but could not find the words to speak. She offered the child up to him and he held it in his arms. Then he laid him on the bed and unwound the simple cloth in which he was wrapped so that he could see the whole body. And he saw that it was not a fusion, after all. It was a separate being, like the first man born. You are on your own, thought Jacques: I will do everything I can for you, but in truth, little boy, you are on your own. The child was baptised Daniel Thomas on November 25, 1895 in the local Protestant church of St. Luke, his father yielding to his mother's denomination, and his baptismal certificate showed that his godparents were Dr. Thomas Midwinter, Dr. Franz Bernthaler, Fraulein Daisy Wilkins and Fraulein Mary, who signed her name with a cross. There was a party afterwards at the schloss, where many people from the local villages came to see the baby and to stare at the lunatics in the courtyard. Kitty had come from Vienna to stay the weekend, and the next day, in the afterglow of family pride, they told Jacques and Sonia that they were to be married. The wedding itself took place in Vienna in the week before Christmas; there was snow on the streets and candles inside the church, where the bridesmaids (two young cousins of Kitty's on her father's side) wore green velvet dresses trimmed with white lace and decorated with sprigs of scarlet-berried holly. None of Thomas's family could come from England, but Pierre Valade travelled from Paris, and Dr. Faverill, who had seen an announcement in the London Times, sent a letter of congratulation. Kitty was given away by her stepfather, "Herr P', a grey-haired man with a face like a deep-sea fish, whose name, it transpired, was Julius Bittmann; she wore a dress of ivory satin that had been her mother's. When they left the church to go to the wedding breakfast at her mother's house she put on a long cream coat with a fur-trimmed hood, and in her clear skin and bright eyes there was no sign of the invalid who had arrived at the Schloss Seeblick nine months earlier. Jacques proposed the health of the bridesmaids, having first briefly spoken of his friendship with Thomas. He said how much Kitty had impressed people at the schloss with her quiet stoicism, but did not say how she had been treated, or by whom. Thomas thanked Kitty's mother and regretted her father's absence, though his words were not heard by everyone over the sound of Daniel's fit of crying. A string quartet began to play waltzes and polkas, and Thomas was prompted into asking Kitty to dance. He looked down into her flashing blue eyes as he guided her round the shiny parquet beneath the sceptical gaze of various elderly Prussians. He wanted the day to be over, so that he could be alone with her; but he could see that she was enjoying it and did his best not to tread on her feet as they circled among the trays full of pastries and mulled wine, of champagne and jellies. He was reminded of the asylum ball; and for a moment felt himself back on the scrubbed boards of the dining hall, among the meat pies and glasses of ale, while Brissenden tried to slow down Mary Ann Parker's piano and the old lady danced alone with her arms held out in front of her. When the polka was over, he yielded Kitty to her stepfather's request and went to find Mary. He led her out amid the politely circling couples and felt less stricken by grief and guilt than on the last occasion they had danced together; Mary did not cling to him like a limp doll, but held herself upright, smiled, and, so far as she was able, danced. The movement of her pink pumps made its individual pattern of footprints on the floor. Kitty and Thomas had agreed that there would be no honeymoon until the spring, when the weather would be better and, after the Christmas and New Year celebrations, there would be less to do at the schloss. Kitty was eager to begin decorating the rooms that had been set aside for them on the first floor of the South Court. For the wedding night, however, Thomas had booked a room in a mighty hotel on the Karntnerstrasse with fiery torches burning either side of the front doors, and Josef delivered them there shortly after ten o'clock. When the bellboy who brought up their cases had been tipped and despatched, Thomas built up the fire and drew the heavy velvet curtains, while Kitty turned down the gas in the lamp and lit the candles by the bed. She hung her wedding dress in the wardrobe, but then found herself unsure how to proceed. Her fantasies of making love had generally involved some shameful candour or exposure of herself to rapacious eyes and hands; but now that the moment was there, she found that she was merely worried about doing her duty and not disappointing the man she so loved and admired. When he ran his hands over her shoulders and gently pulled down the straps of her underclothes, she was not able to be the abandoned woman of her imagination. He whispered reassurance, and the sound of his affectionate voice was helpful; there was light enough for her to see his expression and there was an earnestness there that showed he too was anxious. She allowed him to undress her, so that in the end she stood naked in front of the fire, which sent flickering shadows up and down her legs, while he knelt down and kissed her skin, murmuring to himself, as she looked down and stroked his hair. Eventually, he lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, stepping through the tangle of her dropped clothes. The evidence that Kitty had from the words that Thomas whispered, from his sighs and the hunching of his bare shoulders, suggested to her that she did not altogether displease him. By the time spring came, Daniel could often sleep an entire night without waking and Sonia was able to feed him without difficulty. Kitty set about furnishing and decorating the five rooms allotted to her and Thomas in a previously unoccupied part of the South courtyard; once she had had the chimneys swept and had installed one of the large cylinder heaters in the sitting room, it became more homely. Thomas spent many evenings in the cellars with Franz Bernthaler, hunched over their histology slides, searching for the bloom and stain of madness. One night, in idle and tired curiosity after two hours at the microscope, he tried a barred door at the end of the cellar. He found to his surprise that it opened outwards into a dark passage. He took a candle from the shelf and walked about twenty paces on an earth floor between brick walls; at the end were some steps going up to another door. It was unlocked, though stiff, and when Thomas put his shoulder to it he found that he had emerged at the back of a larder in a scullery in the corner of the South Court. He smiled; it was nothing less than a secret passage, installed goodness knows why, by a previous owner, perhaps even the abbot himself. He went up the internal stairs to tell Kitty about it while they had dinner. He had suggested to Sonia that it might be better if they did not all dine together every night, so they took it in turns to be with the patients during the week, all four going to the dining room together only on Friday. Thomas was enchanted by his new life. The private world of his intimacy with Kitty was the most thrilling part of it, yet it did not seem to distract his energy from the communal life of the schloss, where he was the sanatorium's most public face. If at any point during the day his strength or interest flagged, he had only to go down the cloister and double back through the gates into the South Court or, as he now preferred, to take the secret passage under ground, to find himself once more in his private world, where Kitty was always willing to stop whatever task she was engaged on, however much she might at first protest. He liked to whisper in her ear as he stroked her hair, to lift her skirt and run his hands up her leg, to touch her while she still had on her reading glasses. As in time she became more confident, and was reassured that she was pleasing to him, she came closer to enacting the fantasies of her adolescence; and once she was inflamed, she wanted him to go through to the conclusion. Thomas was not sure what he had done to deserve the indulgence of his private desires, but presumed that everything was ratified by the sacrament of marriage. He looked at Kitty at dinner on Friday nights, her head tilted to one side as she listened to Sonia or Jacques, and remembered what she had done to him an hour before; he looked at the fuchsia colouring on her lips and wondered which parts of his skin might bear a trace of it. Marriage, he was inclined to think, was a bountiful and surprising invention. The only person in the schloss not flourishing was Jacques. He went for long walks round the lake and cried into hands clamped across his face. The birth of Daniel had delayed the need for him to face his humiliation and he had thought it better for the practice to behave outwardly in a calm and organised way. Inside, he felt like a child, back in the upstairs room at his father's house, fiddling with a dead frog. He could only dream of greatness because real achievements belonged to other people, to his betters people with a proper education. What pathetic self-delusion had allowed him to believe the words of flattery that had come his way? Intern! Doctor! The applause of the examiners, the patronage of Babinski, the encouragement of Janet... How vainly he had taken them, allowed them to insinuate themselves into his own picture of himself. But he was just a peasant boy, he was a child and always would be; he was good at mending roofs and trapping rabbits, but as far as science was concerned, his level was teaching at the village school. He had given himself airs, strode about the sanatorium with a grave and masterful demeanour, as though he understood the mysteries of the human mind and body. He knew nothing; he had read some books, that was all. Franz Bernthaler knew more than he did. Thomas Midwinter knew more than he did. In a way, it was a relief that the reverie, the trance of self-importance, was at an end. He had climbed one rung at a time, daring himself to fall, not seeing that the fall would be complete; now he wanted only that people should know that he recognised exactly who he was and would never again have thoughts above his natural station. He could not bear to look at Sonia. She had married him on false pretences, taking him at his estimation of himself when he was really her inferior, not worthy of the delicacy of her nature. She had indulged his frenzied working, had not complained when he ignored her in the early years of their marriage, preferring the company of some German book. He had behaved like a boot, and he could never recapture those times or relive them with more grace. As he looked over the still waters of the lake, he seemed to understand for the first time the limits of what he might achieve. He could take some comfort from the fact that all ambition, all desire must have an element of delusion. After all, people talked of the necessity of self-belief, of having faith in one's own abilities, which implied that such capacities were always open to doubt and that it was the act of believing, the leap of faith itself, which somehow made them greater. The degree of comfort that he found was very small, however. Sonia did her best to reassure him, telling him that nothing could change her passion for him and that all pioneers faced setbacks on uncharted roads. She said she was proud of the honesty with which he had admitted his errors, but that he must retain a sense of scale: his life's work was not over, his skill as a doctor was still urgently required. Privately, she welcomed the fact that he seemed so reliant on her and put her feelings first, before his books, but she also felt that this was not the natural order of things for them. She had learned to stand a half pace behind him as he looked forward into the future; she had become content in that role and she did not now want a husband whose imploring gaze was turned sideways on to her, because such a man was not the one she had married or first loved. During the spring of the new year, 1896, Jacques fell into a lethargy, which he ascribed to lack of sleep. He had begun to wake at four every morning and found it impossible to fall asleep again. He prescribed himself strong medicines in various doses, but although he could in this way achieve unconsciousness, he never felt rested. He had to be roused from such drugged slumber by Sonia shaking his shoulder, and he felt stunned or stupefied throughout the day; although the clock told him he had been asleep for eight hours, he did not feel renewed by it: there was no sense of replenishment, no appetite for work, merely a feeling of exhaustion, a dryness exacerbated by the strong coffee he drank and a mind going through superficial exercises without the ability to reach down to any worthwhile depth of wisdom, insight or enthusiasm. In March, Thomas established that the widow in Salzburg who owned the land and decrepit buildings at the top of the Wilhelmskogel would be prepared to sell them; the news from Trieste was that there was still no chance that the lease on the schloss could be extended. One evening, as he was explaining the situation to Kitty over dinner in their upstairs rooms, Thomas suddenly stopped and banged the table with his fist. "Of course," he said. "That's it. Jacques must go to America. Two birds with one stone. Three birds perhaps." "Thomas, what are you talking about?" "Wilhelmskogel, the site of our new sanatorium. A fashionable perch up in the mountains. But we need some sort of funicular or cable-car to get the patients and supplies up there. You can't put a madman on a mule track. There is this place in California which Valade was telling us about. They have built a railway and a cable-car, I think, and people go up from the valley for the day. It all works very well, apparently, with New World engineering and enthusiasm." "And?" "Well, don't you see? We should send Jacques to investigate. It would give him a holiday, it would clear his mind. He has never travelled before, he has just worked and worked and worked. It would be a marvellous adventure for him. An Atlantic steamship. Dinner at the captain's table. Can you imagine? We have been running now for nearly six years and it is time he took sabbatical leave. We can manage without him for a little while and it would show that we have confidence in the future of the enterprise if one of the co-founders goes off across the world to look at new ways of expanding." "He won't want to leave little Daniel. And Sonia." "I think he will. And I think it would be a good thing if he does." Kitty looked unconvinced. "What about the cost and all that time away?" "The railways are not expensive. In that article Valade showed me, there was a story of the different railroads competing for custom. You could get from Chicago to the Pacific for a dollar. The voyage would cost a good deal, I imagine, but we have a surplus at the bank. As for the time, I think if it could be done in three months, we could manage. Also, it is not as if he would not be working. He would have nothing else to do but read though I think we should give him some Walter Scott or Dickens rather than Emil Kraepelin." Thomas mentioned the idea to Sonia, diffidently, in case she might think he was trying to interfere; to his surprise, she did not resist. "I should miss him most dreadfully, but it is not as though I do not have family and friends around me. I am certain that Jacques would benefit from such a venture. It is not just that he needs a rest, it is that he needs to gather himself to go further." "Exactly," said Thomas, looking a little curiously at his sister. Jacques was more difficult to persuade. He argued that he had work which no one else could do and that Sonia needed his presence, particularly now that she had a child. She gently pointed out to him that, fond though he was, he took no care of the infant, seeing him only for a few minutes in the evening, while as for her own needs, she alone was in a position to judge them. Thomas assured him that they could cover his absence, and proposed to offer part-time work to someone he had met in Vienna, Peter Andritsch, a bear-like, bearded man in his thirties who had studied under Janet at the Salpetriere before setting up as a nerve specialist in Vienna, where he had found the competition intense. With all his arguments benevolently forestalled, Jacques had no choice but to acquiesce, though he felt wounded by Sonia's easy compliance and suspicious of Thomas's motives. He felt as though he had been banished, sent into exile for his failures, by the two people he had most loved. The person most sympathetic, oddly enough, was his former patient, Katharina. She occupied herself with planning a route for him and investigating how long it would take. The fastest Atlantic crossing, she established, was by the White Star steamships Teutonic and Majestic, which could make the crossing from Cobh, in Ireland, to New York in five and a half days. She showed him a picture of the Teutonic leaving Liverpool, with her twin yellow funnels and triple mast with the company flag showing its white star on a beautiful scarlet background. "I wish I was coming myself," she said. "I have always wanted to go on a beautiful ship like that. Think of the romance." "Think of the hundreds of Irish emigrants in steerage," said Jacques. "I suppose there is little romance for them." "One of my great-grandfathers was Irish," said Kitty. "Indeed, I meant only that it is a harrowing journey for them to leave their home for a new life." Kitty laughed. "I did not take offence. I have found another possibility. The City of New York, a similar ship, leaves from Southampton for the American Line. I can book you a single ticket from Paris by way of Le Havre and your baggage is transferred. You do not need to go to Liverpool or Ireland. She will take you to New York in six days. She looks even more elegant than the Teutonic, a little longer and with three funnels." "I think the extra funnel must decide it," said Jacques. "I shall go and pack my bags." "She sails on a Saturday' Ten days later, he had said goodbye to Sonia and to Daniel, and found he was halfway to Paris. Le Havre and Southampton passed him by, and he was two days out to sea before he allowed himself to stop and think. While the cabin had its own mahogany wash-stand and mirrored wardrobe, the steel bulkhead above his face when he lay down left him in no doubt that he was at sea, below decks. He took meals in the saloon and walked about the deck when the weather was fine; he said good-morning to his fellow-passengers, but all the time the great steamer lumbered through the grey waves of the Atlantic, he felt that he was being sundered from his past. At night he heard the rumbling of the twin propellers as they screwed the water out beneath the waves; he thought he could hear the steam bubbling up in its gigantic boilers as it drove the cylinders; he pictured the half-naked men hurling wood and coal into the furnaces, and the thought of that slippery-backed toil helped him at last to fall asleep. The past went down beneath the waves, to be forgotten, as the ship pushed forward into the night, thoughtless, blind, like time. It was somewhere beside the Susquehanna River New York a dream and Pittsburgh far behind that Jacques began to feel a change in himself. He had switched to the Fort Wayne and Chicago line and perhaps there was something about the transfer that made him feel he was now embarked beyond a chance of turning back. He thought of Daniel, as though he had never truly thought about him before. The baby was strong enough to support his own weight when he sat, but was still so small that Jacques could balance him on the palm of his right hand with his fingers bracing his back. Sometimes he would lift Daniel up to the light, and turn his wrist so that Sonia could look at her son from all angles, like a jeweller examining a remarkable piece. The boy himself stared back placidly with large eyes given a curious look by the way he sometimes cocked his head to one side, as though he were a bird perching on a branch. My God, thought Jacques, staring at the flashing fields of Indiana, he is my bone and blood, a thought made flesh, and I have barely stopped to ponder it. In truth, he found it difficult to feel deeply for his son. He watched Sonia with him and her attitude seemed sentimental, and at times affected. How could she be experiencing all those emotions for a creature that she barely knew, that no one knew? He supposed his own responses were shaped by his never having known his mother and by a fear that if Olivier s disease was in part hereditary, then he himself, though without symptoms, might be a carrier of it. He did not wish to become too fond. He was told at the Union Pacific Depot in Omaha that for an extra eight dollars he could secure himself a Palace sleeping car all the way to San Francisco, and as the booking clerk pointed out, this was really an economy when you considered that a stopover at even a modest hotel could be four dollars, while the Dellone, where he had stayed the night before, had doubtless cost him... But Jacques had already pushed the extra cash through the window and went off to have his spare bag checked through to the coast.

My Dearest Dearest Wife,

I shall write in English because you have so anglicised me. What happened to the Breton child? He is in a 'sleeping' car in California, travelling alone between the Rocky Mts & the Sierra Nevada, though little sleeping. I hope you are; and that the boy allows you to. Are you both well? You may telegraph to the station in any large town; I shall check in Omaha and New York on my return, though perhaps I shall be home before this letter. The train journey will take in all ten days, so with the sea crossing (six), the various stops and the journey from Carinthia, it will have taken me 21 days from my first pace out of the Schloss into Josef's carriage to my first footstep on Mt. Lowe, God willing. On Wednesday, we made a brief stop at a place called Sherman. This is bad-weather country, as you can tell by the number of 'snow sheds', which are like wooden tunnels to keep the snow off the most exposed parts of the track. We were urged to step down from the train for a little while. It was hard to breathe. This is landscape of enormous grandeur. Surely believers feel the hand of Him who made them among these desolate peaks. Thursday, we were in the mountains all day. I was filled with an odd sense of having lived before. This place seems so wild and terrifying. My heart melts when I think of the men and women and their children who had to cross this terrible landscape. Legends of how some never made it, fell ill or died in the mountain passes, starved, ate one another. Unimaginable yet familiar. And I somehow feel I know what it was to be a rider for the Pony Express, going on and on through all weathers, attacks from Indians, sunburned, snow-drenched, over prairie and mountain, terrible pain and lungs burning, but having to do it no alternative or your wife and child will starve, & at last seeing the light ahead of the station where you hand over the mail and fall exhausted into sleep. Two thousand miles coast to coast in nine days! Would there be food and drink? Would you make love to the stable master daughter, knowing that there are no normal rules in this wilderness? How do I know so much what it felt like? Have I lived it? Am I a reincarnated man? Is there some sort of universal human memory available to all? Or are all our little minds just aspects of one great consciousness? I do not like these thoughts. They make human life seem perpetual, with no escape from self-awareness, even through death... Oh, Sonia, reading this back, I see how little I have conveyed what I have really felt in my travels the utter loneliness, as though I knew not one soul in the whole wide world, had never seen your dear face; I sometimes wonder if you really still exist. The appalling strangeness of being entirely alone in this enormous world, a little collection of cells hurried west in clanking wagons. Above all this pointless sense of being alive, or being a soul a self perhaps for ever. If the soul is not distinct enough to die, then what one wants is utter extinction of all consciousness because there is no rest in individual death. Do you see what I mean? The belief of the Buddhists that one's soul returns again and again on its climb to perfection is surely absurd. But what we can manifestly see is just as terrifying as one is extinguished, another, near-identical, reaches self-awareness, and all the old intractable problems begin again. It is intolerable. The human mind has evolved in a way that makes it unable to deal with the pain and mystery of its own existence. No other creature is like this. Whether this thing I call myself is real or not, whether it is the flickering wave of some electromagnetic field, or exists only as a whirlpool as a dynamic movement made of other particles please, God, let it be real: because a self that does not exist cannot be extinguished. And if my consciousness is not sufficiently differentiated from those of all mankind, then something so close as to be indistinguishable from it is born again each moment in some poor city or village on earth; and I, or a being so like me as to make no difference, is bound to live again, for ever, caught up in some loop of eternal return. Dear God, may my consciousness be real, so that it may die at last... Later: That night we made Promontory, elevation 4,905 feet, so we were into our descent. Ghost town. It was just near here, I was told by the attendant who comes to bring me fresh water, that the East and West of America became one country when the rails of Central Pacific Rail Road were joined to those of the Union Pacific. Men from Maine and Florida shook hands with men from California. Flags, drums and muskets. The final tie in the track was silver-plated. As the last spikes were driven and the telegraph lines were connected 'like chained lightning', he said all work was suspended in San Francisco and New York. Bells rang out. The attendant had tears in his eyes as he recounted this story. Then Friday: the palisades of the Humbolt River. Sheer rock with our 'cowcatcher' nose a chisel through the narrow gap. Finally, the Truckee division We arrived at Reno in the evening, about nine. This was the last stop in Nevada. It was dark and I could not see outside, but there was the sound of a lone banjo and a man with an English voice singing Then I felt the train began a steep descent into the promised land. I awoke in sunshine which penetrated the lowered blind of the compartment, but it was not the usual four a.m." it was 7.15! Heavenly repose, rest. God be praised. I was in the station at Sacramento. I had just time to buy coffee and a bag of oranges on the platform. Oakland Wharf late morning. Across the Bay and disembark at ferry-slip in the city of San Francisco. A morning of transfixing beauty. Explored the city, much of it rebuilt after fires and now home to some 300,000 people, many in the hills, of which some streets served by new cable-cars. Dined at hotel on oysters and American wine! I walked at night into a place frequented only by Chinamen. Was advised to avoid the area known as the "Barbary Coast', haunt of pickpockets and villains. San Francisco is an enchantment, it seems to me, but it is also a port; & like all ports draws drifters, misfits or simply those who have fled the Puritan pioneer towns of Nebraska or Indiana. It is the end of the world. Nothing lies beyond, except what Cortez saw from Mexico and in the eyes of some of the men at night there is a kind of desperation. I spent a day in S-F, then took a train to Los Angeles: a small town, population about 20,000, I would guess, though much older than San F it has been settled for more than a century, a garden city of groves and parks with tropical fruits orange, lemon, lime, banana, eucalyptus. Connected by train to Santa Monica, bathing resort of about a thousand residents, but I had no time for the seaside waters. What if Santa Monica should precipitate a change as great as that wrought in my life by Deauville? No: it is on to Pasadena, the end of my voyage. I am on the new train that since only last year has connected the two towns, and as the warm sun floods the carriage, I have only one thought: It is for you, my dearest Sonia. May God or Providence be thanked that I found you and was not displeasing to you. I love you. I shall always love you, the thought of you, the soul of you, what lived before in your name and whatever shall survive of you. May it prove to be when I return home that you were not the product of my imagination, but exist in reality, my true and breathing wife.

Fifteen

Pasadena was a little town which at first sight looked abandoned in its orange groves at the foot of the mountains, like a piece of sleeping Eden unaccountably spared by the gold rush. Inside, however, there were signs that the settlers had ambitions, and as he stood looking up Fair Oaks Avenue, Jacques could see several stately buildings already in place. Most were formed from cast-iron frames and traditional brickwork, but many also had stone balconies, painted clapboard sides and towers with coloured tiles and flags. The rails of a horsecar line were embedded in the centre of the road, while small carriages waited by the sidewalk as their owners ducked under striped awnings into shops and offices. All around, the workmen drilled and hammered in the even light of sunshine, with palm trees to shade them and hummingbirds darting among the lemons and hibiscus. The Grand Opera House had onion-dome towers, pierced metal decorations and Moorish window arches; on its ground floor, beneath a steep white sun canopy, were the offices of the Mount Lowe Railway. "You need to speak to the Professor," said the clerk, a small man in shirtsleeves and an eye shade, when Jacques went in to ask for help. "Professor Lowe?" "No. Professor James, the director of publicity for the railway' "I only want to ask some questions, I am not offering to "I understand," said the clerk. "The Professor would be mighty pleased to help. He's from England. You from England, sir?" "No, I am from France, but my wife is English." "I thought you spoke funny, if you'll pardon me saying so. Now the Professor, you might find him taking his dinner in the Green or the Raymond. I do believe he's going to show some of his magic lantern slides there this evening. But if you want to be sure to catch him, you just stop by here at nine tomorrow morning. That's when he's always at his desk." "I'll come back," said Jacques. "And if you want somewhere good and homely to eat tonight, can I recommend you try the Acme? It's right next to the Fire Station on the corner of Dayton and Fair Oaks' "Thank you," said Jacques, a little uneasy at what this Americans idea of a good dinner might be. "Until tomorrow." At nine the next day, he found a large man with dense eyebrows and a thick greying beard, sitting at his desk, as advertised, behind a wooden sign that read: Professor George Wharton James, Mount Lowe Railway Co. He stood up and enthusiastically greeted Jacques, pumping his hand as he did so. "We welcome all kinds to Paradise, sir," he said. "But a French nerve specialist... Well, darn me, that really is something. I shall take you up the mountain myself this afternoon. Perhaps you would care to join me for dinner at Echo Mountain House? I guarantee you will have some travellers' tales to pass on to your friends back home. Let us meet here at four, when I shall have done my business at the Raymond. We take the railway to Altadena before we embark on our journey. Does that suit you, my friend?" "Very well," said Jacques. "Bring a stick if you care to do some walking in the mountains, and a coat. It will be cool tonight." "Thank you, Professor." "There is no need to call me Professor. Call me George. I shall call you Jack." In the train on the short trip to Altadena, Professor James told Jacques that Pasadena had been a settlement for little more than 30 years; it was only in the last decade, when the little town had grown to around ten thousand, that the inhabitants had started to lift their eyes up to the mountains and consider what they offered. The more athletic plain dwellers had made a trail to the summit of Mount Wilson, named after an early settler; but the hike was far too arduous for the majority, who contented themselves with a short climb into the foothills, where they walked among the fields of golden poppies. "So this paradise was unexplored. It needed vision. It needed daring. Then," said Professor James, as they stepped down from the train and crossed the platform, 'from New Hampshire by way of Cincinnati, came a genius Thaddeus SC. Lowe. You are now climbing onto one of his railroad cars for the journey of your lifetime. All aboard!" Jacques was struck by the similarity of the terrain to that in Carinthia; although what was proposed at home was more modest, many of the difficulties appeared to be the same. Lowe's engineer had devised a mixed system: an electric trolley for the gentle ascent through the first canyon, which was called Rubio; then, when the gulf ahead had proved impossible to span, the railroad was temporarily abandoned and the passengers were asked to switch to a cable-car, which hauled them to the summit of Echo Mountain, and a sumptuous hotel. Thence the electric railway resumed its more gradual ascent to the peaks of Mount Lowe. There were two other passengers in the carriage with Jacques and the bombastic Professor, as it made its way up into the canyon, grabbing power from the line above; it snaked around the poppy fields and through the hills with their covering of chaparral and cactus. Jacques tried to picture the journey as it might be experienced by some patient in the Alps, and the first thing they would need against the European chill, he thought, was wooden sides and windows rather than roll-down canvas. The ride itself, however, would pose no problem to an invalid; one had only to sit back on the wooden bench and admire the cities of the plain. Jacques glanced across at the flushed face of his companion, which was full of the joys of the ride, and at that moment they rounded a sharp bend, the track straightened and James let out a throaty cry. "There she is! The Rubio Hotel. Isn't she a beauty?" Jacques smiled. To the right of the track was a large building that seemed to be floating in the void above a narrow gorge, in a green mist of sycamore and fern. The pavilion-hotel was made more remarkable by the fact that two further floors were hanging from its underside, one with its own pitched roof beneath the terrace of the upper building. As the trolley car stopped alongside, Jacques saw that this was an illusion and that the lower floors in fact spanned the narrow ravine and took their footing from its sides; but the appearance of a three-storey pleasure palace somehow suspended in the gulf was enough to make anyone smile. "Let's have a look-see, shall we?" said Professor James, pulling his hat down firmly as he stepped onto the platform. They crossed over to the terrace of the hotel, where several brakemen and drivers were taking a rest, and the Professor led the way down wooden steps to the middle floor, from which walkways departed above the ravine. Jacques followed him at a brisk pace until they came to a waterfall, which the Professor invited him to stop and admire. "Did you ever see a prettier cascade? Look at those great boulders. Listen to the crash! We have to give folk something to do once they are up here. Most of our visitors are local people who first came out here from the Middle West. The Indiana Colony they used to call it. But since we had our rail connection to Los Angeles last year, we can expect tourists from all over America. Let's go and take tea at the Rubio, then we can go up the cable car to Echo Mountain itself. You are in for a treat, Jack!" Jacques found himself warming a little to the Professor, and as they drank tea in the dining room of the Rubio Hotel, he politely asked him about his title. "At which seat of learning are you a professor?" "Retired now," said James with a wave of his hand. "It is a courtesy more honoured in the breach than the observance. Have some cake." "And of what subject? Engineering?" "No, we have an engineer, Macpherson, none better. My qualifications are in people. Yes, Jack. People and their minds, that's my special subject." "Like me. Though I am only a doctor, not a professor." "Yes. Just like you. I used to run a correspondence school here in California. It was for memory training. The human mind is a very wonderful organ." "So I believe," said Jacques. "It never forgets. It's all in here, you know. It's just a question of knowing how to find it." Jacques nodded, thinking of Janet's statement that in the human mind 'nothing ever gets lost', which sounded more persuasive, but perhaps was no different in essence from what the old salesman was telling him. "I was born in England," James was saying, 'came out West as a Methodist missionary what they called a "circuit rider". Can you believe that? John Wesley was my hero. I used to love to preach and lead the people in singing. Proper hymns for devout people. Now if you're ready, Jack, we shall go up into the clouds." Jacques followed his guide out onto the wooden platform and over to the foot of the Incline, where an open white cable-car was waiting for them. It had three separate parts, each at an angle to the gradient, so their floors were parallel to the ground far beneath; the lowest section had gilded decorations on the bow, which made the whole contraption look like a three-tiered opera box going up into the unknown. The cable gripped and shuddered, the brakeman whistled and the car began its electrically driven ascent, noiseless but for the drag of wheels on the new rail. In a minute, they were looking down steeply on to the roof of the Rubio Hotel; a few seconds later they were lost in low cloud. Jacques felt a roar of childlike exhilaration building up in him. Halfway up the Incline, they slowed as the downward car approached, then passed, as the track briefly widened for the purpose. Shortly afterwards, the upward car lipped over the top at Echo Mountain and drew silently to a halt. It was cold. "Hop out, Jack, there's plenty to see up here." Echo Mountain House was a three-storeyed building with a dome, much larger than the Rubio Hotel below, and with a smaller companion chalet built off the edge of the hill. Both were painted bright white. In the palatial lobby of the main building, the Professor asked the housekeeper to reserve him a table for dinner "Keep me back some oysters', he called after her then took Jacques outside again. "This is our zoo," he said. "We have to keep them interested while they wait for the car to go down. We got racoons, an eagle. Watch this. Hold my hat." He pulled open a cage door and jumped down into a pit, where, to Jacques's astonishment, he began to wrestle with a black bear. "Don't worry," he called up. "She likes a roughhouse. Ursa Minor, we call her. She's a little character, she is. Here, give me a hand up." When he had dusted himself down and consulted his watch, Professor James said, "We have just about time to go on up to the Alpine Tavern. I guess that might be of interest to you, coming from Europe. We call these here the American Alps. Sure sounds better than the Sierra Madre." "And where is the Alpine Tavern?" "It's on the side of Mount Lowe, which is halfway to our final destination at Mount Wilson. After you now' They were just in time to catch a trolley car, like the first one that had taken them up into Rubio Canyon. The ride was up a r Gradient, slow but not particularly steep, as the carriage snaked round the mountains and the rails rattled on their granite bed. "You could do this back in Europe," the Professor said. "You could surely do it. But you need a first-class engineer and it could be expensive. What costs you is all the clearance. On this section alone we rolled enough rock into the canyons to build a city the size of Pasadena." "But not on the Incline, where the cable-car is?" "Not so much there. It depends on the landscape and what your surveyor says. The engineering is simple enough. It's just a thick wire that goes round a wheel! You might have trouble finding a manufacturer in Europe, but you could buy the wire and the wheel in San Francisco. It's the terrain that holds the key. Just ask the good Lord for a nice even run so you don't have to blow up half the mountain." After they had negotiated two hairpins, the car stopped to allow them to enjoy the view. Jacques looked down through the evening air from which the earlier cloud had lifted. They could see the dome of the Observatory and across to Echo Mountain House, shining white on its green promontory. The streets of Pasadena were so few and so spread, that the Professor was able to point out to him Fair Oaks and Lake Avenue, like straight scratches made with a burned match in the surrounding green scrub. Although it was evening, they could see the ridges of the hills in the plain, and the towns they enclosed: Glendale to the right, Los Angeles in the centre, and beyond it, the undeveloped land that ran down to the little bathing resort of Santa Monica; and still just visible through the thin air, as the sun began to fade, was the island of Catalina, dimly sparkling in the aptly named Pacific. Jacques sighed, loosened his tie and pushed his hat back on his head. What a country, he thought. What a place, where everything was still to do. He decided that in the morning he would make an appointment to see Macpherson, 'the finest mathematician ever to come out of Cornell', according to the Professor, and ask his advice about the feasibility of a cable-car in Europe; then he might take the train up to San Francisco to see the wire rope manufacturers. How expensive could it be, he thought a wheel, a wire and a rail? "This is our terminus," said Professor James. "For the time being at least. We call it Ye Alpine Tavern because it looks so old. In fact it's been open just six months, but it does look European, does it not?" It looked like a version of Europe, Jacques thought: to be precise, it looked like the baroque dream of a homesick European exiled in California. The tavern was in the style of a Swiss chalet, cross-timbered, with a stone foundation that rose to the sills of the ground-floor windows. The tall pines and bare-faced granite outcrop behind gave it a slightly melancholy air, though even in June, Jacques noticed, a mountain spring was running nearby. They went inside to a wooden lobby, where three women were sitting at a round table playing cards. One of them looked familiar to Jacques, though he could not quite place her. Paris... Vienna... Sainte Agnes... Where? It was quite impossible that he would happen on someone he knew at the top of a mountain on the other side of the world, so he thought no more about it as he pulled up a chair near the door. They had been there only a few minutes when one of the three women came over to their table. She was young, plump and confident; she spoke in French. "Please excuse me for interrupting, but I heard you mention your sanatorium in the Alps. I didn't mean to listen, but I couldn't help hearing. It sounded very like a place my father has been to visit. Are you by any chance Dr. Rebière?" "Yes, I am." The young woman let a cry of delight and called out to the two other women at her table. "Royal Mama! I told you so! This is the most extraordinary coincidence, is it not? My father is Pierre Valade. Do you know him?" "Yes, of course. He is a memorable gentleman." Jacques could not help smiling at this exuberant young woman. "I was a patient of your colleague Dr. Midwinter some years ago," she said. "He travelled round Europe with us. That was before you had set up the sanatorium. Now my father says you are both famous." "Hardly. I think ' "Please come and meet my mother." Jacques bowed his head as he was introduced to Madame Valade. "And this is Roya Mikhailova. She is my sister. No, no, not really! But she is like a sister to me." There was a gloved hand offered to Jacques; as he took it, he looked up into violet eyes in a pale skin. It was hard to put an age to this second young woman twenty or nineteen, perhaps but there was something neither American nor French about her, Jacques thought, as the hand was rapidly withdrawn from his; the name Scheherazade came briefly to mind. Nadine was explaining in English to Jacques and to Professor James, who had come across to join them. "Mama and I have rooms in Roya's father's house in St. Petersburg. He is a very wealthy man stop it, please, Mama, I am allowed to say that. Roya has not been well, but now that she is better, her father thought it would be good for her to travel. California was where she had always dreamed of going. Then my father told me about this mountain railway. I think he had seen an article in a magazine." "And does the mountain please you?" said Professor James. "Very much," said Nadine, 'though we have been in the Alpine Tavern for three days and we are starting to be bored. We have done all the walks and we want to go down now." "Tomorrow, dear," said Madame Valade in French. "So," said Nadine, 'you gentlemen must stay and have dinner with us and then at last we can have a fourth at cards." "Alas," said Jacques, "I must decline. We are returning to dine at Echo Mountain House." "My visitor must sample the delights of the dining room at Echo Mountain," said the Professor. "The table here is a little more modest." "If it is good enough for us, surely it is good enough for Dr. Rebière," said Nadine. "As you know," said the Professor, 'in the evening they cook only to order for those staying over, so I doubt whether they have food enough in any event." "Oh, please, please stay' "Really, Nadine," said her mother, 'you should not press the gentleman in that way' Professor James seemed to be weakening, as he considered how all his clients could best be pleased. "If I can get a message down to Echo Mountain, I could ask them to send up some dinner on the next car," he said. "But we would not eat before seven. Would that be too late?" "That would be fine," said Jacques. "We cannot in all conscience refuse the ladies' request. "The higher up the mountain he ascended, the greater his euphoria became. The Professor looked across at Jacques. "All right," he said. "Leave it to me." An hour later they sat down at a long table to begin their dinner with a plate of oysters packed in ice. The staff of Ye Alpine Tavern, excited by the presence of the Professor and his guest, did their best to make an occasion of it, opening bottles of wine that had been ferried up from below to go with the beefsteaks that they grilled in one of the large open fireplaces that dominated the downstairs room. Jacques found himself placed between Madame Valade on one side and Roya Mikhailova on the other. The ladies had been upstairs to change from their walking clothes and Roya now wore a dress of dark purple with a black shawl over the shoulders. The violet of her eyes was echoed in the colour of the dress, but Jacques found it frustrating that so little of her skin was visible in the low light of the tavern. He checked himself in the middle of his speculation and forced himself to listen instead to Madame Valade, who was talking about... What was she talking about? It began as one thing, then, just when he was about to grasp it, transformed itself into another. There were many names of people no one knew and what they had said and how others were right to be outraged, or disappointed, or indifferent because... But they never found out why, because Madame Valade was not side-tracked exactly, because that implied that there was a path from which she had been diverted 'inspired' was perhaps the word, to continue with a new narrative that was contained within the first one, like a kangaroo in the pouch of its mother. Jacques presumed there was one main idea that she was trying to impart and he nodded in sympathy when he thought he saw it, but Madame Valade looked at him in surprise and waited for his brief interruption to finish before she resumed. It occurred to him that although she had been speaking for about fifteen minutes, he now knew less about what she meant than when she had begun. He tried to catch the eye of Nadine, but she was telling Professor James about their time in the mountains; Roya Mikhailova was making contributions to this conversation also, and had turned half away from him, so Jacques was unable to engage her attention. Finally, in desperation, he stood up from the table and asked to be excused. It had grown dark outside, though beneath him he could see white Echo Mountain House and the nearby chalet brightly illuminated by electric lamps. He breathed in the cold, thin air and sighed with the relief of silence. He would take home to the Alps, he thought, some of this exhilaration and, above all, some of the feeling he had here that all things were yet possible. At the schloss, he had undoubtedly become too absorbed by the scientific detail of his theory and by the excitement of the paradoxical connections he had made. He had lost sight of the grand design. He would have to make his peace with Thomas not from a practical point of view, because they had retained their day-to-day civility, but at a deeper level, where they would need to redefine their aims and work more closely together. He had been too much alone, he now saw, while Thomas had been a source of knowledge and invention he had not used; and Thomas himself had not moved onward as he should have done. He was aware of a footfall beside him, and a woman's voice said in French, "Are you all right?" It was Roya. "Yes, thank you," he said. "It was a little hot in there. The fire in midsummer, even at this altitude..." "Were you admiring the view?" "Very much so. One feels... enlivened. It is inspiring." "It reminds me of the Elburz Mountains in Persia, above the Caspian Sea," said Roya. "I have been there only once." Her French was lightly accented, though fluent. "But you live in St. Petersburg, I understand," said Jacques. "That is correct, though my father wishes me to travel. He says the great days of Russia are over and I need to prepare for a new world. Europe is the place, he says." "And Mademoiselle Valade said you had been unwell." "It was nothing. There was a young man in St. Petersburg whom my parents wanted me to marry. I was in love with another. It was painful. I disobeyed them." "And what happened?" "I was diagnosed as suffering some mild exhaustion. It was nothing more than you would expect." "I mean, what happened to the man you were in love with?" "He was sent to a garrison in another town. He was a cavalry officer." "You speak of him in the past tense." "That is where he lives. In the past. And you, Doctor. What is the matter with you?" "The matter?" He was surprised by the assured way this girl spoke. "Yes. You have an attitude of great weariness and frustration. As though you are fighting some long battle." Jacques looked down into the darkness below their feet. In the canyon above Rubio Hotel, hundreds of Japanese lanterns were sparkling, like fireflies. "I am suffering from the limits of my mind," he said. "There is a simple enough problem that I have set out to solve. How our minds work. How sickness enters in. Why the limits of what we can understand seem so narrow. As humans, we have a gift of self-awareness, but it seems to lead us to no explanation. Of what use is consciousness if all that one is conscious of is ignorance?" Roya laughed lightly. "Sometimes one does see through the veil of that unknowing, does one not? At moments of higher awareness?" Jacques looked across at her, but could barely make out her features in the darkness. "In a few days," he said,"I shall take the train back to San Francisco and investigate the purchase of some wire rope and a wheel. That is all I am good for. To be a workman with a pick and shovel on a railway line." "It is a noble ambition, Doctor. At least you will be lifting your endeavours to a higher plane." She laughed, and he felt her hand lightly touch his arm in consolation. Jacques's letter did reach Sonia before he returned, on account of the two weeks he spent in California, a day of which he passed with Macpherson, the engineer, and two more at the California Wire Rope Works in San Francisco. Sonia read it with fascination but a faint unease at the tone of her husband's voice. He sounded overexcited, and although such passion was not uncharacteristic, there was something worrying about the agitation of his tone. She was sitting in the office between the two consulting rooms, deep in her thoughts about Jacques, when there was a knock at the door and Kitty asked if she could come in for a moment. This was unusual, as Kitty was particular about keeping out of Sonia's way and, under instruction from Thomas, made sure never to ask about the accounts or finances of the schloss. "Come and sit down," said Sonia. "What is it, my dear? Are you all right? You look a little flushed." She had grown fond of Kitty, but whatever the evidence to the contrary could not stop thinking of her as an invalid. "I have wonderful news," said Kitty, who, in her excitement, had forgotten to take off her reading glasses, 'and I wanted you to be the first to know. You are going to be an aunt. Thomas is going to be a father." "Oh, my dear girl." Sonia stood up and embraced her. She was winded by the suddenness of the announcement. Thomas a father... There was something comical about it yet apt; she wished their own father had been alive. And how much it would connect Thomas to the world, she thought: it would be the making of him. When they had finished tearfully exclaiming and embracing one another, Sonia said,"I am not sure I like the sound of "Aunt Sonia". She sounds rather strict, doesn't she?" "Dear Sonia. I think you will be the best aunt a child could hope for. If my children grow up half as well as Daniel, I shall be happy' "That is enough, Kitty. You will make me cry again. Am I allowed to tell Jacques?" "Of course. It is due at the end of February. We had better ask Frau Holzer if she is free." "I shall write to her at once." The end of Pier 14 was so crowded that Jacques had to fight his way through the press of people standing, gazing at the City of New York, which rode like a tethered Gulliver, straining at her moorings among the tugs, barges and tenders that huffed in her shadow. On the wharf were lines of passengers waiting to embark, anxiously trying to ensure their baggage was correctly loaded, impeded by the groups of sightseers idling ladies in bonnets with parasols, small boys in flat caps who stared up in awe to the decks above them. Tiny men were in the rigging of the three inclined black funnels with their single white stripes; far below them on the deck were cranes which lowered roped parcels on creaking pallets into the hold, and animals, some butchered, some alive in cages, were winched aboard as though for a carnivorous Ark. In all the tumult, Jacques was sure he glimpsed a familiar female face, but by the time he was on board, greeted by a smiling officer at the head of the gangway and reunited with his bags, it was too late for anything but to push his way once more through the crowd. He found his own cabin, after asking directions from a steward. The stipulations of the line were strict: trunks not to exceed three feet six inches in length or 15 inches in height, and it might further have laid down a limit on the size of passenger, he thought: a man any larger than he was would have found it hard to squeeze into the space between the mattress and the bulkhead; even as it was, he had to post himself in, like a packed envelope in a narrow letterbox. These discomforts he remembered from the outward passage, so spent most of the time in the sumptuous public rooms. On the first night, as the New York pitched bow-first into the Atlantic swell, he fortified himself with brandy before sitting down to dinner at a long table in the saloon, in a chair that was screwed to the floor. The ceiling was a glass dome, like the Crystal Palace in miniature, and somewhere hidden up there an organist, invisible like a phantom of the opera in a short story he had read, was playing melodies to soothe the travellers. The lurching waiters splashed quantities of hot consomme over their wrists as they swayed up and down between the fixed seats; when they brought out the main course, Jacques noticed one of them holding the lamb cutlets in place with a determined thumb; as they set fire to the dessert he had to look away for fear the whole ship would go up in flames. Afterwards, he went to the smoking room, which was panelled in black walnut and furnished with scarlet leather armchairs, but found that the atmosphere of cigar smoke was undoing all the good of the brandy, so took one of the ascending' electric chambers' and went out on deck. It was late July, still light, and he breathed deeply on the sea air as he looked astern towards the receding coastline of America. He wished that he had felt wise or wistful, able to summa rise what he had learned from travelling the width of the country; but he did not: he felt confused and nervous, unenlightened; he felt disorientated and subtly changed. From the short raised deck where he stood, he could see a broad surface on each side of the deck house stretching back to the stern, a distance roughly as far as the length of the main street at Sainte Agnes; it was crossed at intervals by passageways from port to starboard, down one of which he saw the quick movement of that same familiar figure he had glimpsed on the pier in New York. He followed quickly, and found her still wrestling with the key to a first-class suite that opened from the gangway. "Mademoiselle. Good evening. I thought I saw you at the pier. Are you enjoying the voyage?" "Yes, thank you, Monsieur. It is kind of you to ask. Nadine and Madame Valade are both unwell, but I have barely noticed the movement." "Perhaps you would care to walk about the deck a little." "I cannot, alas," said Roya. "I must look after the invalids. Perhaps tomorrow, or when it is calmer." "Of course. Goodnight, Mademoiselle." "Goodnight." She lingered for a moment, he thought, as though on the point of changing her mind; then she was gone and the door to the suite had closed. He went down to the library, where the stained-glass windows, inscribed with quotations from poems about the sea, threw a strange purple light across the dozing readers. He pulled out a volume with its title embossed in gold lettering -Quentin Durward by Walter Scott and sat down to tackle it. For two more days the ocean heaved, and to find himself air, Jacques explored the ship. On the third evening, when the wind had dropped, there was a knock at his door and a steward held out a salver with a folded note on the ship's paper. "We should be delighted if you would take dinner in our apartments. S. Valade.7 p.m. Do not dress." Do not dress, he thought, as he took out a clean shirt from his bag and struggled with the collar; although the wind had dropped, the occasional swell lifted the ship at the moment he was about to secure the stud. Do not dress... As though he had worn a white tie every night on the train in the backwoods of Wyoming. He brushed his hair carefully in the mirror, deciding it would be dishonest to try to conceal where it had receded from the temples: as well cover the grey above the ears with boot polish... His skin was clean and smooth from the razor, and, except for the odd white hair that Sonia assured him added dignity, the moustache at least had remained for the most part bravely black. The steward knocked at the door with brandy and water at six-thirty, and soon afterwards he took the electric chamber up to the main deck. Madame Valade s suite of rooms was like the apartment of a wealthy widow in one of the stuffier blocks near the Place des Vosges. From its cluttered sitting room, full of velvet cushions and fixed occasional tables, a door opened into a separate bedroom where Jacques could see the outline of a large brass bed anchored to the floor. "Awful people in the saloon for dinner," said Madame Valade. "Groups of shrieking young women calling themselves "Kansas Belles" or some such thing. I have seldom seen anything less "belle" in my life. They are serving our dinner up here." "You are absurd, Mama," said Nadine. "It is very lively in there, is it not, Roya?" Roya smiled. "Very lively." "All those handsome young men from Yale going over to some rowing match. What was it called?" "The name was not familiar to me," said Roya. "Henley, I think," said Nadine. "Does that mean anything to you, Doctor?" Jacques shook his head. "The English and their games. It is a mystery to the rest of us. Though I did enjoy playing lawn-tennis once." "What is that?" said Roya. "Not something you will play in the Elburz Mountains, I think." "You do not know what happens in the Elburz Mountains, Doctor." Dinner was brought by a perspiring steward and accompanied, to Jacques's delight, by French wines, which Madame Valade invited him to pour. As her guest, he felt obliged to absorb the greater part of her talk with an appearance of understanding or of interest, but she was low-spirited by comparison with the night in the Alpine Tavern and he was able to talk also to Roya and Nadine. The wine made them all nostalgic for France; they talked of Paris, Burgundy, the Auvergne; Nadine insisted that Jacques ring the bell to order more. Afterwards, they played whist, while Nadine poured brandy and water until her mother told her to stop. Nadine seemed incapable of following suit even at the beginning of a hand and talked loudly throughout the game. Roya looked distracted, Jacques thought, as though her mind was on St. Petersburg or Persia; her movements, normally so swift and contained, had become slow. Her fingertips brushed his hand when she picked up her cards, and beneath the table he could feel the light pressure of her relaxed leg against his own. He presumed that both girls had drunk more wine than they were used to. When Madame Valade began to yawn, he stood up, rocked for a moment in what he took to be the swell of the Atlantic and thanked his hostess for a delightful evening. "I shall come as well," said Roya. "I thought you..." Jacques could not conceal his surprise. "No, it is just Mama and I who share this little apartment," said Nadine. "Good night, Doctor. Thank you for letting me win at cards." "Goodnight, Mademoiselle. Madame." He held the door open for Roya and bowed, partly to avoid hitting his head on the door frame, and stepped out into the gangway. "I am going to walk round the deck once," she said. "It is such a beautiful night." "May I?" "Of course." It was late, and there was no one else on the first-class deck. They leaned over the rail and watched the black sea far below them. It was very strange, thought Jacques. He felt like a child, as though nothing had ever really happened to him before in his life. This, he thought, must mean he was happy. Roya turned round, so that her back was against the rail. Her eyes had narrowed and her lips had taken on a sharper outline, as if slightly stiffened or swollen. Without speaking, she placed her hands on Jacques's shoulders and kissed him on the mouth. He put his hands on her waist and held her, but was too surprised to do more. "That is what you wanted, isn't it?" said Roya. Jacques said nothing for a long time. "I suppose it must have been," he said at last. She smiled. "Good. I am tired. I am going to bed." "I thought you were with... Where are your quarters?" By the time he had framed the question, she had already slipped from view.

Sixteen

In October, Daniel had his first birthday. When the day's work was over, a dozen adults gathered in the waiting room, where the circular table held a cake that Sonia had made for the occasion. She carried Daniel from the nursery in his best short trousers and woollen jacket; he was a compact armful, solid but not heavy, resting comfortably on her braced forearm, while her other hand gripped beneath his armpit to secure him to the front of her dress. When he was being carried by either parent, he had a habit of patting them lightly on the shoulder, as though in consolation. Sonia leant down and inhaled the smell of his washed hair and the aroma of his skin beneath: it was like warm biscuits and honey, and the loose curls brushed her cheek, fleeting, like his life's breath. She set him down on the floor at the entrance to the waiting room, squeezing his ribcage one last time, reluctant to let him go. "Cake," he said, and set off across the room, shuttling from side to side in sudden spurts, then stopping, swaying like a sailor as he searched for balance, then plunging off again diagonally. Eventually, he made it to the table, where Jacques lifted him into his highchair and pushed it up close so that he could admire the cake as they sang to him. He held both small arms straight up above his head in amazement as his father cut the first deep slice, then settled down to eat, with his ankles crossed, as was his habit, on the footrest of the highchair. Sonia looked on from the doorway, happy to be apart and to observe the way in which her child was starting to acquire characteristics of his own: the crossed ankles, the precocious drunken walk, the head held to one side, the eyes wide in wonder as some everyday object was pointed out to him; the voice like a treble bell that sounded out each new word with tentative clarity as though his was the first human mouth in which it had found utterance. Children from the village came to the schloss to play with Daniel, and sometimes Sonia would take him back to their houses. She talked for hours with these young mothers about their children and their husbands and their lives; they were not conversations she felt she could relay to Jacques and they were not women she thought might otherwise have been her friends, but the intensity of what they shared was such that it dwarfed all differences. It was such a common human experience, thought Sonia by definition, perhaps, the commonest of all; yet to each of them, she could see, it was a private rapture so intoxicating that they were forced sometimes to play at being blase, to complain about the work, the sleepless nights, the loss of time alone, when she could see that all they really felt was incredulity that something so mechanically natural was in truth so sublime. They were changed for ever, these women changed by the everyday transcendence they had lived through. She saw them stealing glances at their children on the grass or in the hall, rationing their gaze, hoping not to wear away the miracle by too much looking; but she did not mind that her own exultation was not unique; it reassured her to think that anyone might feel as she did because if the commonplace was miraculous, then it was possible, after all, to take an optimistic view of human life. In return for Jacques's sabbatical leave in California, it had meanwhile been agreed that Thomas should also be permitted to travel or explore outside the schloss. Much though he loved it there the geraniums in the window boxes, the playful water in the fountain, the secret passage that took him back to Kitty he accepted the point that Jacques made on his return, that he needed to develop his own theoretical interests. While Jacques himself was in a position of retrenchment from which to leap forward better, at least he had leapt. Thomas was pushing forward slowly on two fronts, but there was no breakthrough. With Franz Bernthaler's help, he had become a keen-eyed pathologist; he was adept at the post-mortem table and had, with Franz, noted abnormalities in the brains of those who had suffered from general paralysis of the insane and, less marked but still significant, in those who had had dementia praecox, or what they had formerly called Olivier's disease. Even in their most optimistic moments, however, they could not present their findings as anything more than work in progress a promising start on a road that would take many years to travel and one which really needed better instruments. The second advance was on what he called to himself the Rothenburg Front, after the town in whose church he had first been struck by the idea that hearing voices must once have been a common experience. If his work with Franz was stains and slides, biochemistry, notes and observation, the Rothenburg Front was ostensibly the opposite: speculation verging on the metaphysical. He was not alone in sensing that he had come to a temporary halt. Much of what he felt by intuition and he had to confess that it was little more than that depended on the theories of what Mr. Darwin called 'descent with modification' (he did not seem to use the word 'evolution' until The Descent of Man) being more fully explained. Until someone could fill in the details of how heredity worked, then it seemed to him that there was little chance that they could understand, let alone cure, the forms of madness that had an hereditary taint. His own thinking had been influenced by what Faverill called his 'mad-doctor's hunch', something he had mentioned to Sonia: the idea that if humans were the only creatures to be mad, then perhaps it was the very thing that differentiated them from the apes that predisposed them to mental illness. Thomas believed it was possible that the illness had indeed entered into mankind at the moment he evolved into Homo sapiens; it might have been the very price he paid for the acquisition of higher consciousness. But Faverill had never dreamed of trying to prove his theory; it remained for both of them a 'hunch'; and what good were hunches in the world of factual science? He took the train to Vienna one freezing Thursday in December to attend the meeting of a learned society. The gathering was in a lecture hall attached to the university medical school, and because it was open only to members of the society and their guests it was not fully attended. There were few women and no students; it was quite unlike the circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures at the Salpetriere'Thomas thought, but presumably that was the idea. These distinguished medical men did not want members of the public or students reeking of last night's debauch; they wanted like-minded colleagues who would listen in respectful silence. An air of self-congratulation hung over the audience as the speaker, a man of about Thomas's age, with a black curly beard that reached up almost to his eyes, climbed onto the stage. Dr Wilhelm Flless, an ear, nose and throat specialist with psychological ambitions, outlined some theories concerning the relations between the nose and the female sexual organs. He had published a monograph three years earlier on the 'nasal reflex neurosis', in which he cited the case of 130 patients whose various physical pains had been cured by application of cocaine to the inside of the nose. Since the treatment had been especially effective in the treatment of menstrual pains, Flless maintained that there were 'genital spots' inside the nose that were associated with some neuroses and which influenced the menstrual cycle. He was almost ready, he said, to publish a new book: The Relations between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect. The periodicity of the menstrual cycle suggested that two numbers, 23 and 28, might unlock all mysteries of human biology, including unknown dates of birth, onset of illness and death. Furthermore, Flless maintained, his numerical pattern underlay the workings of the entire cosmos: all natural laws were obedient to these two numbers, their sum, their difference and, probably, their square and their cube. Thomas listened in some disbelief, and was surprised that the audience was not hostile. The Viennese world clearly believed itself to be so close to discovering a universal key that it must listen carefully to every offering: no one wished to risk having laughed at the new Galileo. Afterwards, the audience repaired to a sitting room where coffee and wine were served in a dense atmosphere of cigar and pipe smoke. Thomas, who knew none of the others, introduced himself to a friendly-seeming man who stood nearby. "Did you enjoy the talk?" "Not at all. I know nothing of medicine." "Why are you here?" "I am the guest of one of the committee." "And what is your area of interest?" "I am a cartographer. My name is Hannes Regensburger." He held out his hand and Thomas introduced himself. "Where do you make your maps?" "My next venture is to Africa. Although maps are my profession, I am an amateur of palaeontology and in Africa I hope to be able to combine the two interests." They talked for half an hour about the descent of man and the few fossil clues he had left behind; it was a relief to Thomas to speak of things other than the sufferings of contemporary lunatics, and he warmed to Regensburger's dry style of conversation, which did little to conceal his enthusiasm for the subject. He asked if, since it was still early, he would care to join him for dinner afterwards, and Regensburger agreed; they fetched their coats and thanked the secretary of the society. "Did you enjoy the paper?" said the secretary. "Yes," said Thomas. "Though Dr. Flless might benefit from knowing something of the nervous system. The cocaine clearly enters the patients' bloodstream, thence the brain, where it has an anaesthetic effect. It makes no difference where it gets in. If I make a patient calm by giving him morphia by mouth, I do not look for areas of neurosis on his gums." But the secretary had turned to speak to another member, and Thomas was obliged to finish the explanation to Regensburger, who said, "I have no idea about such things, but I do remember elementary mathematics from the gymnasium. If you take two positive integers with no common factors you can combine them to make any other number that you wish. Particularly if you also throw in the difference, the sum and the square!" He laughed as they walked down the frosty street together. In the distance, Thomas could see the two braziers burning outside the front door of the hotel where he had spent his honeymoon night. He shivered in recollection, in cold, in anticipation of fatherhood: he felt irrationally happy as Regensburger pushed open the door of a restaurant and stood aside for him to go in. Regensburger told Thomas of his planned visit to German East Africa. "I expect you have heard of Oscar Baumann," he said. "He has made two expeditions to the area for the German Anti-Slavery Committee, and a map of his journey was published in Berlin three years ago. It is a beautiful piece of work in its way, but it lacks detail. He was unable to survey the land that was not on his route, and in any event cartography was not his principal purpose." The waiter brought their food and drew the cork on a bottle of red wine. "Do you have a particular interest in the area?" said Thomas. "There is commercial interest from numerous European concerns who hope to exploit the natural resources, to build further railways and so on. We shall solicit contributions to the expense of the expedition from such people. For myself, it is a journey I very much hope to make on account of something Baumann himself told me." Regensburger helped himself from the dishes on the table with the heedless appetite of the thin man. He had glasses rimmed in gold and hollow cheeks; the skin was tight over his forehead and scalp, where the hair was sparse. There was a slight swelling in the finger joints that made Thomas suspect arthritis; he wondered whether Regensburger's dry manner had developed partly as a result of dealing with pain. "The area close to the great Ngorongoro Crater," he said, 'is rich in fossil remains animals, plants, all sorts of things. Baumann told me of a particular place known to the Masai, though I believe they have little interest in it themselves. They do not understand the significance of such things." "What is particular about this place?" Regensburger carved himself a slice of calf's brain roulade, a speciality of the restaurant, in which the offal was baked in a Swiss roll of sieved potato and flour. "There are footprints preserved in ash," said Regensburger. "They appear to be human, I am told by Baumann, yet the layer in which they are fossilised seems to belong to a period before any human record we have." Thomas found his interest quickening. "Did he take photographs?" "No," said Regensburger. "Sumptuous roulade, is it not? Such a mild taste, and the parsley adds just a little freshness. Baumann has Christian beliefs of an old-fashioned variety. He is a very good man, but he is not happy with new theories about the descent of mankind." "Why might these prints alarm him?" said Thomas. "Unless someone was proposing that they belonged to Adam and Eve themselves and that the Garden of Eden was in German East Africa." "I am not sure," said Regensburger. "To a believer in the literal truth of the Bible, many natural phenomena pose awkward questions. To live in an age of such scientific progress makes them unhappy. It is not every generation which is alive at a time when we are on the brink of explaining creation. Do you have difficulties, Doctor? Or are you one of us?" Thomas felt as though he was being tested for entrance to a Masonic lodge. "I believe that all species originated in a process of descent with modification, as Mr. Darwin calls it, and that natural selection was the agency of change. I believe that man is no exception." It sounded as though he was reciting a creed. He coughed. "But there is still mystery of course. Maybe Alfred Russell Wallace is right and human evolution needed the presence of God at certain moments. It would be vain, in all senses, to suppose that I know the exact truth of our history." "I see," said Regensburger. "But to suppose that we shared a common ancestor with the apes that does not disturb you." "I accept that it has been scientifically established." "Good." Regensburger seemed satisfied, though Thomas was not sure whether it was the roulade or his own answers that had so pleased him. "We hope to leave in the spring of '99. I shall be gone for two years. I shall see the new century dawn somewhere to the west of Mount Kilimanjaro." He wiped his mouth with his napkin and pushed away his plate. "Perhaps you would care to join me. We shall need a medical officer." Thomas laughed. "It is an intriguing idea, but I could not possibly be away for that length of time. We have discovered that my wife is expecting twins next year and I have a very busy sanatorium to run in Carinthia." "As you wish," said Regensburger. "When we part company, I shall leave you my card. Then you may write to me if you change your mind. I suppose it would be possible for you to come only for a part of the expedition. There is a railway proposed from the interior which could take you back to the coast. Otherwise, with sufficient guides, you could retrace your steps on horseback, the way we came. In a man's life, such opportunities are few." Jacques could not settle to his work when he returned to Carinthia. He felt as though he had joined the roll of ordinary doctors, the pessimists content to manage rather than cure the carpenters and plumbers of the human who did repairs only; he felt he had been forced to sign his name to the doctors' universal declaration of impotence, which said: We Do Not Know. We can cure neither your cancer nor your cold. We do not know what causes dementia praecox or how to alleviate its horror. We wait for better instruments. We hope for a change in the weather. Meanwhile, here is a box of small red pills. He developed a kind of therapy by which he listened intently to the stories of unhappy people and made modest suggestions about how they might improve their outlook. He continued to examine how trauma and high emotion, when denied expression, might subsequently affect the wellbeing of the person, but gave up seeking to apply a universal formula, or trying to derive from it a psychology that might apply to all. In Vienna, a form of therapy that bore a close kinship to his own theory of psycho physical resolution had made an impact in scientific circles. Although many people scoffed at psychoanalysis and called it an expensively protracted cure for Jewish girls nervous about sex, Jacques had no doubt that therapies based on the interpretation of dreams and the function of the unconscious were more than the fashion of the day; they seemed to offer the best hope of therapeutic advance in all manner of conditions, ranging from psychosis to everyday symptoms of a mildly psychosomatic nature. Such treatments, in addition, represented the first real advance in the treatment of the mentally afflicted in his lifetime. Yet Jacques felt what the lawyers would have called 'estopped'; because of a clinical error that in the end had turned out to have no serious ill effects, he was barred from publicly pursuing the line of enquiry that he felt was most congenial to him and most likely to be medically fruitful. He was limited to reading about psychoanalytic activity at a distance, the country cousin in Carinthia to the metropolis of Viennese discovery. The irony of the case of Katharina von A was acute for him. While his own hope of glory had been dashed, the fame of the Schloss Seeblick began to spread, and Katharina was herself a dynamic proselytiser, spreading word of the sanatorium among her old friends in Vienna. To deal with the increase in outpatients and short-term residents they were forced to open rooms in the small Lamp Court and, in the new year, to find a permanent place on the staff for Peter Andritsch, the doctor who had covered Jacques's absence. There was hardly ever a spare room, and in January Sonia was able to present accounts to Herr Leopold at the bank that showed a steady profit. What worried Jacques was that it was earned by conventional means; they were becoming like numerous other well-run hydros and sanatoriums in the Alps. It was true that they still took and cared for public cases from the asylums, but few of these improved or were willing to leave, so the number of new patients from such places was small. The arrival of Peter Andritsch did allow him some freedom, however. Together with Franz Bernthaler, Andritsch could take the majority of the nervous cases, and Jacques was able to spend more time with the psychotics. Here, like Thomas, he found that his work was largely one of observation and note-taking of scrutiny over a long period. There remained the hope, a little forlorn at times, that some insight might be gained by merely looking. To prevent himself from becoming downcast, Jacques also took charge of the question of where the sanatorium should be re-housed when its lease on the schloss expired on the first day of the twentieth century. He had convinced Thomas by his enthusiasm for the Mount Lowe solution and together they set off once more to see Herr Leopold at the bank. "Gentlemen," said Leopold, 'you have reserves and a facility to borrow. You do not need my permission to spend your own money. Clearly the first thing that you need to know is whether the land on top of Wilhelmskogel is for sale and how much rebuilding you would need to do." "We have already established that," said Jacques. "It belongs to a widow in Salzburg. She has no interest in the land, but she is short of funds and is ready to accept a reasonable offer. I have obtained an estimate from a builder in town for the cost of repairing the main house and for building further accommodation for the patients. Although it is considerable, you can see that it is still cheaper than buying an existing sanatorium or hotel of that size." Herr Leopold agreed to look at Jacques's preliminary figures, while Jacques and Thomas examined the possibility of taking a spur from the existing valley branch line into the foothills of the mountains -a ride of a few minutes only before a cable-car would take traffic to the summit. After some enquiries, they were recommended an engineer in Salzburg called Tobias Geissler, who had wide experience of Austrian railways, both passenger lines and narrow gauge in mining, but had long wanted a project of his own. He was currently engaged in advising on the works at the lead mines near Villach, but it was said that his heart was not in it, and the alacrity with which he agreed to meet them was encouraging. Thomas and Jacques went to Villach on the last Sunday in January, with Sonia and Daniel, leaving Franz Bernthaler in charge of the sanatorium for the first time. Kitty had been advised by the obstetrician at the hospital to spend the last month of her pregnancy resting in bed. Twins, he told her, should not be taken lightly, particularly when the mother had not always enjoyed good health. Herr Geissler was waiting for them at the hotel, a newspaper spread across his knees and a clay pipe in his mouth. He sprang up when he saw them. "I am delighted to make your acquaintance." The skin on his bald head was tanned a smooth, woody brown; he reminded Thomas a little of McLeish, though his attitude could hardly have been more different: for every problem they raised, he had a number of urgent solutions. "First of all, we will need an excellent surveyor. I have just the man. We worked together on several projects and he owes me a favour. A completed survey will give us an idea of cost. But I am more or less certain that unless there is much more money in mad-doctoring than I have been led to believe you will need to form a company in which you sell stocks. That is how these projects are normally financed. It is quite straightforward." Jacques told him about the design of the Echo Mountain cable-car. "Excellent," said Geissler. He had a ringing bass voice and thick, powerful hands that continually opened and closed, as though itching for a jack or spanner to hold. "But do not contemplate, even for a moment, importing the wheel or the wire from San Francisco. I know of several railway engineering works where such things can be made to my design for a fraction of the cost. We also need to see how the descent of one car might power the ascent of the other. We could make it almost self-sufficient. On second thoughts, why do we need two cars? The traffic will be much lighter than on your Mount Lowe. We can have one line with just two rails no double track, no run-out. And we can store the energy of the descent in a battery to power the next lift!" As the waiter brought the food, Sonia said, "But will it not all be terribly expensive?" "It should not be beyond the reach of a modestly sized company. The rail itself is not expensive, nor is the timber. As for the labour, I have found the best men are Slovenes, and they, poor fellows, will work all day for a bed and a hot meal at night. Which of you is to be my point of reference?" There was a brief consultation between the three of them. They had not expected Geissler to move so quickly. "We can discuss my fee later," he said, laughing deeply. "In case that is why you are hesitating." It was finally agreed that Jacques would be in charge. Sonia would have control over the finances while Thomas for the time being would continue to devote his energies only to medicine. Kitty might help Jacques with the paperwork at a later stage, if she had time to spare after the birth of the twins, though there would be nothing for anyone to do until a thorough survey was completed, which could take until April. Thomas could see the light coming back into Jacques's eyes as they discussed the schedule; he thought it was a good way for his partner to rekindle his passion. It amused him to think that Jacques might eventually spend time with Kitty once again, and wondered how he would square the real woman he came to know with the Katharina von A of his imagination. He hoped, or so he muttered disloyally to himself, that the clerical work would not make her arms hurt. Kitty was restless, stuck in her bedroom, feeling once more like a neurasthenic patient. Mary came to talk to her and massage her back and legs in the morning, not because Kitty really needed it, but because she enjoyed the company. "Tell me the news from the other girls," said Kitty. "Well," said Mary. "I shouldn't tell you, Miss, but I know as you are very dependable." "You can count on me, Mary," said Kitty, who was leaning over the bed while Mary worked the lower spine with her strong thumbs. "That's lovely." "I think that Hans is a little sweet on Daisy," said Mary. "Hans? Josef's little helper? But isn't he too young?" "A little bit, Miss. But Daisy, she's coming on thirty-seven though she doesn't know exactly, and... You know. If she wants to have children and that." "My goodness. I do see, Mary. And how old are you?" "I'm a year younger than Daisy, Miss. But no one's going to marry me." "But you're a lovely ' "No, Miss. I don't want to get married. Honest. I'm very happy as I am. Just so long as you and Dr. Thomas is happy with me. I'm already happier than I ever thought I might be." "Of course we are happy. You are an important part of the schloss. We need you. I am going to lie on my back so you can do my legs. But tell me, is Hans a good prospect for Daisy?" "I know she's thinking about it. Josef will retire one day, then Hans can be in charge of all the buildings. And he already does a lot of work in the labs, looking after things for Dr. Bernthaler." "He looks like a naughty boy, Mary, that's the thing. He has a face like a little monkey' "Daisy says he's clever, Miss. Maybe he doesn't look it. But he can write and read and he's good with figures." "Perhaps we should give him something to do with the new buildings on the Wilhelmskogel, see what he can manage. I shall speak to my sister-in-law about it." "Thank you, Miss. Shall I stop now?" "Yes, Mary. Thank you. But will you come tomorrow?" Kitty's bedroom looked on to the lawn of the South Court, beneath whose chestnut tree she had often sat to read her book when she was a patient. Her old seat was these days frequently occupied by one of those referred from the asylum, a powerful-looking red-haired man who talked earnestly to himself, or to someone unseen. '"Under the spreading chestnut tree", remarked Thomas one afternoon, standing at the window and looking down, The village madman stands. The voices in his fevered head. Are loud as marching bands. We don't know if he's made that way. Or has infected glands." Longfellow." "Thank you, my darling. That was enlightening." "I have been working on it. Now listen, Kitty. I have a little thought that you might want to turn around in your head as you have your rest this afternoon." "Very well, Thomas." "You have read Mr. Darwin's book, have you not?" "Which one?" ' The Origin of Species! "Yes. I hurried through some of it, but I did finish it." "Good. Well, let us suppose that humans have developed with modification in the same way as other species." "Very well. This is what Mr. Darwin calls "transmutation"." "It is indeed. It was another English writer, called Herbert Spencer, who was I think the first to use the word "evolution" in this context. He also gave us the phrase "survival of the fittest"." "It sounds unpleasant. Do I need to read Mr. Spencer too?" "He is influential, but for the moment you merely need to understand those words." "Not very difficult." "Not at all. But suppose that the gentleman beneath the chestnut tree, who has Olivier's disease, or what we are now obliged to call "dementia praecox" suppose that people like him have been around for millions of years. And suppose that the incidence of this illness was roughly the same in all populations, despite differences in climate, conditions of life, diet and so on." "The very things that influence the outcome of Mr. Darwin's "natural selection"." "Precisely. Suppose this illness had remained at a stable level in all populations, even though it appears to have no natural advantages. Quite the opposite in fact. What does that suggest to you, Kitty?" "How do you know that it has stayed stable?" "We can come back to that. But just suppose we could demonstrate it. What would that suggest to you?" "Well," said Kitty slowly. "It suggests that this characteristic has not been lost, but has somehow been passed on... Despite its disadvantages." "Indeed. Now consider the extent of those disadvantages. People with dementia praecox are irrational. They die young. They frequently kill themselves. Sexual selection works against them because they are an unattractive mating proposition. They have fewer children than ordinary people. Yet, relatively speaking, they have flourished." "But that seems to contradict the theory. I thought only characteristics useful in the battle for life are naturally "selected"." Thomas smiled. "Exactly. So just take the reasoning one step further." "I suppose that, if Mr. Darwin is right, then there must be advantages in this condition. But we cannot see them." "You are a remarkable woman, Katharina. That is exactly what it tells us. But we can go further. We can refine the basic logic a little and still be strictly and simply Darwinian." "Which we want to be?" ' "I think we do. He may be out of fashion, but I feel sure the theory of natural selection is correct in its fundamentals." "So?" "Well, I think we must say that dementia praecox itself confers no advantage, but its survival against all its apparent disadvantages suggests to me that a hereditary predisposition to the disease must be closely allied in whatever microscopic way these things are transmitted from one generation to the next to something that is advantageous, connected in fact to something which by definition must be overwhelmingly advantageous to the development of the human. The more terrible the drawback, the more important must be the related advantage for the disease to have survived at that consistent level." "That is certainly logical." "What I am saying is that it is like a misprint. It is a mistake which serves no purpose. But the capacity to misprint is the minor price you pay for literature." "I don't quite follow' "It doesn't mean that there is something fundamentally wrong with the process of thinking, writing, printing or reading the sequence that comprises literature. It is a sequence so magnificent that misprints have been perpetuated tolerated. Because they are an organic and inseparable part of the greater good. Because you simply cannot have literature without misprints. And it is still a price worth paying. If misprints were somehow taken out of the mixture, you would risk losing literature too. You might throw out the baby, humanity, with the bathwater, dementia." "A very unfortunate choice of words in the circumstances," said Kitty with her hand on her belly. "I am sorry." "So what you are saying is that the capacity to be mad in this way is somehow close to the very thing that made us human in the first place." "Exactly. It is something my old employer Dr. Faverill first mentioned to me. But of course I should have to be able to prove that the incidence of the illness really is stable throughout the world and has survived the selective pressure of all different environments. And that I cannot do though oddly enough it would not present any great scientific difficulty. It is just that the task of organising and collecting the data would take so long. And people would have to agree a precise diagnosis of the illness which, knowing doctors, would be difficult." "But how would that prove that it is as fundamental as you say? If there are as many people with it in Japan as in Brazil?" "Because if it was both universally spread and indifferent to the pressures of natural selection then it must have been endemic in the first humans who came out of Africa. It would suggest that it was related to whatever transmutation took place in Africa that first turned pre-humans into Homo sapiens! "But you cannot prove it, Thomas." Thomas laughed. "No. I cannot. At heart, I am only a scholar of Shakespeare, though I am perfectly sure, as a matter of fact, that Shakespeare recognised and described this illness in several characters. You see it also in the Bible. Think of John the Baptist naked, raving, hearing voices, eating insects. I have treated a hundred such men You could argue that in the times referred to by Homer it was in fact more widespread, because almost everyone seemed to hear voices. But we don't know when that time was, and the voice-hearing could be a literary invention rather than a literal fact." "But what does this mean for your work now?" Thomas sighed. "You are very practical, Kitty. It means that Franz and I will go on looking at pieces of brain tissue beneath our microscope in the hope of finding something. We shall try to find out more about the mechanics of heredity, the nature of which eluded even Mr. Darwin." "I thought we believed in him," said Kitty. "We think he was right about natural selection as the engine of evolution. But he thought that the characteristics of the offspring were transmitted by a "blending" of the characteristics of the parents, and he was wrong about that." "How do we know?" "Because if you fully transfuse the blood of a white rabbit into that of a brown rabbit, it still has brown offspring. A man called Galton did it. So the nature of the brown rabbit's offspring is not altered by anything that happens to it. If you cut off its tail, its offspring will still be born with tails unless it mated with a naturally tailless species, of course. And then you would not get half-tails. You would get either one or the other." "And what then does determine exactly what the offspring inherits?" "Nobody knows. Though gardeners and livestock breeders have always had their theories." "So Mr. Darwin was right about one thing and wrong about another." "Yes. That is the nature of science. Mr. Galton is right about this, but he was wrong in thinking that all murderers have square jaws or that adulterers have high foreheads. Though that theory was quite popular when I worked in the asylum." "And does that apply to you as well, my love? That you will not get everything right?" "Yes. The two-steps-forward-one-step-back law of scientific discovery will take care of that. And the limits of the human mind." "And are you right about your theory of the man beneath the chestnut tree?" "I am probably right about some parts and wrong about others. But I will persist in thinking in this way, because even if Franz and I don't find the lesion or the particle beneath the stain, even if we don't find a medicine that soothes these patients, it may be helpful to think about them in this way, to see their illness in the longest human perspective. It might help us, at the very least, in our efforts to be kind to them." Kitty's twins were born on February 24th. A girl arrived at nine in the morning purple, slight, with dark hair and swollen genitals; then half an hour later, distressed by the umbilicus tight round the neck, quickly freed by Frau Holzer, a second girl. Thomas had given Kitty a powder to dull the pain at the onset, but she waved him away as the labour progressed and he left her with the midwife while he went for a walk by the lake. He knelt down by the small landing stage, concealing himself from any inquisitive eyes that might be turned on him from the schloss, and offered an awkward prayer to whatever deity might be allowed to exist in the interstices of Mr. Darwin's theory, Mr. Wallace's more theistic al variations and in his own child-memory of the Bible and its literary grandeur. He began with many scientific qualifications and apologies to the divinity whose existence he could not logically concede, but ended with a tearful plea to the God of his fathers: please spare my wife and our children and I will always believe in You. He was anxious that, if Kitty's heart had been weakened by rheumatic fever, the birth of twins might strain it, but when he returned in mid-morning, he found her sitting up in bed, washed, tidy and smiling, with a twin at each breast. He sat with her until noon, when Sonia and Daniel came to visit. Thomas felt as though he had been singled out among all men for some enormous, inexplicable and undeserved good fortune; as though after almost forty years of unrequited prayers, each of his desires, including many of which he was unaware, had been granted all at once. Why me? he thought as wandered in a daze through the main hall of the schloss. The fountain sang to him in the courtyard. The snow on the distant peaks flashed messages in the winter sun. The madmen in the gardens muttered and gambolled to a tune whose unheard melody was surely part of a benign universal harmony. Daisy came running up from the North Hall, her wooden shoes sounding on the cobbles, and threw herself onto him. The wind whipped the snowdrops on the bank into a flurry of white felicitation. He heard Mary's stick tap-tapping at an urgent pace over the terra cotta floors of the open section of the first-floor gallery; and in a minute she too was hugging him. He walked on towards the stables, Daisy on one arm and Mary on the other, to tell Josef and Hans of his astonishing fortune, readying his modesty for the onslaught of their congratulations. In the afternoon, Pierre Valade arrived for one of his twice-yearly but still unannounced visits. "It could not be better timing," said Thomas. "I shall put you in the green room." "Tonight," said Valade,"we shall celebrate. I suppose you would have preferred boys, but never mind. Nature cannot be helped. We can still have champagne." "I can," said Thomas. "But you can only have some if you concede that my daughters are not only far better than any boys but also the most beautiful children ever born." "I shall go at once to your wife's room to see for myself Thomas spent the afternoon with Kitty, in the course of which they discussed names. They began with the idea of something Carinthian, and tried out Andrea, Use, Fanny, Ulrike and Claudia, but could not agree on any of them; in the end they settled on Martha, which was almost the local Marta, and since the girls were in any case three quarters English Charlotte. Martha was the first born and Charlotte the younger; they appeared to be identical, but Thomas pointed out that all babies look much the same. Kitty, though tired and with a spot of fever in her cheeks, had suffered no ill effects. That evening, Thomas ate in the main dining room with Sonia, Jacques and Pierre Valade. He distributed champagne to all the patients so they could drink to the health of his daughters, and after dinner Valade insisted on bringing brandy and more champagne to his rooms in the South Court, where they closed all the intervening doors for fear of waking the girls. Thomas went to bed at last in a spare room not far from where Kitty was sleeping with the twins. In the middle of the night he was awoken by a terrible screaming. "Thomas!" It was Kitty's voice. "Thomas! Thomas!" He threw himself out of bed and ran down the corridor. She had rolled over and suffocated one of the twins... He had never heard panic like this before. They had been savaged by a wolf... Both were dead... The bedroom door rebounded against the wall as he burst into her room. "What is it? What is it?" Kitty stirred sleepily in the depths of their large bed. "What?" "What is it? Why were you screaming?" "I didn't scream, I was asleep." "What?" "I was asleep until you came in." "And the girls? Are they all right?" "Look." They were both asleep, wrapped tight and peaceful, lying in wicker baskets by the side of the bed. "But... But you called." "No, I didn't. Everything is fine, my love. Now go back to bed." "All right." He leaned over the bed to kiss her. "But I did hear you." Valade was thrilled by the proposed railway, for which he took the credit, since it was he who had first seen the magazine article about Mount Lowe, and he appointed himself draughts man to the project. He and Thomas went by mule to the summit of the Wilhelmskogel and inspected the widow's buildings. They had clearly once comprised a tiny village, from which a church with double bell tower and onion-dome spire survived. On its west wall were faded outdoor frescoes, punished by the wind and altitude, but still with recognisable Biblical figures in sandy orange and blue. The main house was in the local style, dilapidated despite its extra wooden weatherboarding; there were two farms and a dozen smaller dwellings, some of which had collapsed beyond repair. Valade sat down and took out his sketch pad. Within an hour he had produced an impression of what the new schloss might look like: half a dozen satellite buildings ranged about the main house, which he had extended to include a walled courtyard and a shallow stream. He had notion ally laid down a large area to grass among the existing trees, with walkways, pergolas and secret gardens. "You should have roses here, though of course I don't know what will survive this high up," he said. "And your kitchen gardens will need sun, so they had better be on the south side, down a little and out of the wind. You should keep the structure of the main house if you can. It is rather fine if you like Carinthian vernacular." "A complete world," said Thomas. "And the wonderful thing is that when the cable-car is built and the railway spur is running, you could be in the middle of town in little more than half an hour. So we would be apart and above, but not isolated. I shall show your sketch to the architect." "You have an architect?" "Well... He hasn't done anything yet, but in theory we do." "Could it not be me?" said Valade. "But you are not trained as an architect, are you?" "No, but as far as any calculations of weight or stress are concerned, your little engineer could do them, couldn't he? What was his name?" "Geissler. I suppose he could. What about supervising the builders?" "I don't imagine that with you and your sister and your brother-in-law they will be short of instruction. And your wife told me that the stable boy wants to oversee it as well." "Yes. She mentioned that to me. In fact, it might work quite well. Hans could live up here during the week and make sure they do what they are meant to. He has become quite bossy lately. He is a nuisance at the schloss. I imagine most of the builders will live up here as well rather than go up and down by mule, and he could keep an eye on them." "May I make a suggestion?" "Of course." "The sooner you get the cable-car installed, the easier it will be. Then you can bring the building supplies up on it." During March and April, Jacques and Sonia, with the help of Herr Leopold and a lawyer called Kalman, set about forming a small company to finance the building of the railway and the cable-car. Jacques talked to the mayor and persuaded him that the new schloss would bring renown to the district; he persuaded him to invest some money from the city reserves on financing the rail extension. In return, he conceded that for the first five years passengers would not be charged for this part of the journey, which took them about a third of the way up the mountain, to a place from which there were many walks to be enjoyed. They would build a refuge here, a modest version of the Rubio pavilion in Echo Mountain, with food and drink, lavatories and first aid for blisters, heatstroke and such things. The mayor agreed, knowing that his city's wealth depended on attracting summer visitors. Jacques also went to the physics and astronomy department of the university and explained that the Wilhelmskogel would offer an excellent site for the telescope which he knew they had not been allowed to situate on the nearby Magdalensberg; in return for funds for the building of the cable-car, he proposed that all members of the university department should receive free transport to the telescope at the summit, an arrangement to be reviewed after ten years. It happened that the university's endowment exceeded the requirements of the modest number of students it attracted and its treasurer was eager to invest. Thomas then wrote to their old patron Monsieur Kalaji in Paris; he received a reply from the secretary of his foundation saying that Kalaji was abroad and could not be reached for several months, but in view of the success of his investment in the schloss, the secretary was authorised to make another advance up to a certain figure; further funds would have to await Kalaji's return. The balance of money they needed was raised by a stock issue for the Wilhelmskogel Railway and Cable-Car Company supervised by Herr Leopold's head office in Vienna, and by the time the surveyor's full report arrived in late April they had funds enough to start the work. The existing branch line in the valley was served by small steam engines, but Geissler had determined that the Wilhelmskogel line should run on electric traction, and although it was referred to as a 'spur', the rails did not actually join those of the steam line. Passengers were to dismount and cross a sturdy wooden platform to join the mountain railway; at one end of the platform was an engine shed and at the other the electric power house. The first spike was driven by Daniel Rebière at noon on May 30th, 1897, his mother holding the hammer in his hands, the moment repeated several times for the benefit of his Uncle Thomas's Kodak camera. Sonia was appalled to see how grey her hair was growing when the picture was eventually printed. A photographer from the local newspaper was also present, and his picture appeared on the front page under the headline: "All Aboard for the Madhouse! Doctor's wife inaugurates new railway to proposed mountaintop sanatorium." The article went on: Work has begun on a new private railway line under the direction of Herr Tobias Geissler, the well-known Villach engineer. More than forty labourers, mostly Slovene-speakers from Karfreit in the Julian Alps, are working night and day to lay two kilometres of track up a slope in the foothills of the Wilhelmskogel. At the narrow-gauge railway terminus, passengers may transfer to an electric cable-car that will take them on a gradient of almost one-in-two, up to the top of the mountain. Here, local alienists Dr. Thomas Midwinter, aged 37, from England, and Dr. Jacques Rebière, also 37, from France, are to move their existing Schloss Seeblick sanatorium for nervous disorders. Work is going on simultaneously on 'grading' the slope for the cable-car lift. Herr Geissler assured reporters that there would be no repeat of the loud explosions which alarmed local residents throughout last week. "It was necessary to lay sizeable dynamite charges to clear the rocks at the foot of the cableway," Herr Geissler explained. "Men were lowered on ropes to drill holes in the rock for the placing of the charges. But I believe the rest of it can be cleared by hand. We apologise for any disturbance caused by the explosions." The electric railway will span minor gulfs and ravines in the foothills by means of large wooden trestles which are already under construction. The design of the two electric railway cars is based by Herr Geissler on that of a Viennese tram; it takes power from 600-volt conventional overhead cables, many of which are already in place. The cars are being built by the Neubauer-Hebenstreit iron works in Villach, under Herr Geissler's supervision. The most unusual aspect of the work, however, is the steep cable-car lift to the summit. Dr. Rebière travelled to California in the United States of America to inspect a similar system last year, and is collaborating closely with Herr Geissler on the construction. The main wheels and cables are being made in Bavaria, but the car itself will be manufactured locally by Blatnik and Sons in Graz. Use of the cable-car will at first be restricted to patients and staff of the sanatorium, though it is hoped that it will be opened to the public when the summit has been sufficiently developed to afford privacy to the patients and recreational facilities for the paying public. Viewing platforms, a restaurant and a small zoo are envisaged. "It is important to get the cable-car running as soon as possible," said Dr. Rebière. "Then we can use it to take building materials to the summit." The famous Parisian architect Monsieur Pierre Valade is a consultant to the building work, which is being overseen by Schloss Seeblick employee and local man, Hans Eckert, aged 29. It is expected that the work will take eighteen months to complete." As the labourers cleared and smoothed the cableway, they discovered they could not dispose of the debris without blocking the run below, so had to drag it fifty metres up the hill and tip it down a side canyon, a vertical gash that ran all the way to the top, parallel to the gentler Incline up which the cable-car would run. Progress through the summer was extremely slow. "Do not worry, gentlemen," said Geissler. "It is always this way. Once the electric railway is complete, it will be much faster to take what we need to the foot of the cable-car. Once the cable Incline is graded, the rails are down and we can pull a wagon up, the work at the summit will rush ahead. At the moment, everything waits on everything else. It is just hard labour, hacking rock, night and day. Life is sometimes like that. There is a time to dance and a time to keep hacking rocks, but one must not lose the faith. When it lifts, it will all lift at once." Geissler moved into the schloss and sat up late with Jacques in his consulting room, where the new electric lights illuminated the plans he spread across the desk. He stabbed his forefinger at the paper. "The car will have the capacity to carry twelve people. To reduce the weight, I propose a tin roof, though of course we must have closed wood-and-glass sides in our climate. I calculate it will take ten horsepower to raise an empty car and thirty to raise a full one. Not that we can persuade a mule or horse up a sixty-degree gradient." "A hypothetical horse," said Jacques. "Precisely. I also calculate that perhaps a third of the necessary power can be generated and stored by the descent." Geissler laughed. "Not quite perpetual motion but a damned good effort. The main power source, as you know, is a series of two hundred storage batteries." Jacques had a sudden picture in his mind of old Signor Volta with two hundred batteries beneath his tongue. Suppressing a smile, he said, "How is the water supply?" "Almost ready. The stream from the summit, which will provide your daily needs, has been diverted into a reservoir. A narrow pipe runs down to a 75-horsepower waterwheel at the foot of the Incline. The volume of water is small, but the pressure is intense." The main cable was only four centimetres in diameter. It was spliced round grip wheels at the top and bottom of the Incline; the lower wheel was placed below the platform with access for engineers to go in and adjust the tension. Geissler had it tested to twenty times its maximum load and specified a second, independent safety cable that could stop a full car in less than a metre. The car was to be detached each night and the cable wound on a fixed distance daily to prevent uneven wear. "The main wheel is cast-iron," said Geissler, 'three metres in diameter, attached to an electric motor. If the wheel itself is geared to turn at twelve revolutions per minute, then the Incline should, I calculate, take six minutes to ascend. How's that, Doctor?" "I think anything faster would scare the patients, Tobias." On through the summer, the autumn and deep into the winter, the Karfreit workers toiled. They moved into the buildings on the summit and at night made conflagrations in the huge stone fireplaces from spare railway sleepers. Hans watched over them fiercely, excited by his first position of authority and determined to make sure his employers were not cheated by the workforce. Food still had to be brought up by mule, but they established a cook-tent halfway up the mountain for the midday meal. The Slovenes were dark, lean men who liked eating, particularly when once a week they had breaded veal with cheese sauce; they also liked wine and dancing if they were given a chance but were prepared to work in all weathers and, so far as Hans could see, with minimal rest. Jacques was taken in the coach by Josef to inspect the work once a week, but he seldom went to the top since it took a further hour by mule. He relied on daily despatches from Geissler and a weekly report from Hans when he came back for his day off at the schloss. By the following summer, the railway was almost complete, but a fall of rock on the cableway took six weeks to clear and extra men had to be drafted in to try to complete the work by Christmas 1898. This would still allow a year for the work on the sanatorium itself to be completed in time for a move in the last days of the century. Life in the Schloss Seeblick seemed to slow down, because everything appointments, repairs, planning became provisional. Sonia watched Daniel wander round the garden with the handle of a wicker basket of toy animals digging into the flesh of his right arm. She regretted the imminent move, because, although she saw that it was inevitable, and a measure of their success and optimism, she did not see how they could be more happy than they were. Never mind, she thought; her husband had regained some of that imaginative fire that had first made her love him; she could see that the move would be good for him and so, in a way, it must be good for her and Daniel too. The unexpected bonus in her life was that she had come to love Kitty, who made her laugh immoderately, particularly when confiding in her about Thomas's peculiarities, though Sonia could never quite stop herself thinking of her as an invalid. Jacques counted the days impatiently until he could make a new start and put behind him the irksome memories of his professional failures at the schloss. He liked the buildings well enough, but he had not cured his brother and he had not made his name. Thomas shared his excitement; he felt there was something propitious about their moving at the start of a new century. They had paused; but now they would move on with new heart to fulfil the youthful ambitions they had declared at Deauville. Kitty loved her South Court home, the chestnut tree and the room where the girls had been born. When it was being cleaned for a new arrival, she went to visit Number 18, where she had lived as a patient. She remembered how Thomas had stepped in off the balcony, then seemed to unravel in front of her; how he had seen himself whole for the first time. It was a moment of privilege, and one on which she knew her own life had turned. She remembered, too, how he had gone down on his knee to propose to her, with the mountains behind him; and for these and many other reasons, she was sad to leave. Yet she had been the newcomer; she had tactfully restrained herself, particularly with Sonia who, while she could not imaginably have been more generous, sometimes spoke her mind with a directness that Kitty found unnerving. On the mountaintop they would all begin again as equal partners, and she shared Thomas's delight in the fact that while they would be removed from the world, high above the clamour of the cities of the plain, she could be in the best shopping street in town in half an hour. The work was not finished by Christmas, nor by February when there was further delay while the workers celebrated the Slovene festival of Kurenti. Hans was informed by their foreman that no work would be done for a week because the men needed to drive out the 'evil spirits of winter'. Extra consignments of wine were brought by mule; in the evening the men built a huge fire outside and dressed themselves in animal masks and old furs. They ran through the woods shouting and banging drums; they commanded the evil spirits to be gone, to throw themselves from the summit of the mountain and let the spring begin once more. Hans watched in trepidation, wondering if the exorcism really needed a whole week, and so much wine. The railway was complete, though the car was not yet ready, and in April the cableway, too, was finished. Horses were led up the mule tracks to the top and attached to a wooden windlass, whose rope was in turn attached to the steel cable itself, which, under Herr Geissler's agitated supervision, was hauled up to the summit. It took two days to attach the cable at each end and to tension it to Geissler's satisfaction. The car itself was still being weatherproofed and painted in Graz, but it was possible to attach an open truck to the cable and it was proposed that this first ascent should be marked by a celebration. Although the mayor had agreed to officiate at the formal opening, whenever that should be, Sonia was selected to break a bottle of champagne on the top wheel at four o'clock on April 20, and so inaugurate the run.

Seventeen

"So, you see, we are all of us happy in our different ways," said Thomas. "As happy, at least, as we have any right to expect," said Kitty. "There are philosophers who tell us that happiness is not a proper goal for humans. They say it is infantile to expect to feel happy. It is just an emotion, a transitory feeling, not an adequate purpose for a life. They say you should make your life's work something more enduring." "Yes, I think I have read some of those philosophers. What they say is logical, but it does not seem especially true. It is not how we experience life, is it, Kitten?" "I try to think that way," said Kitty. "But I think being happy is one of the few things I am any good at, so I am reluctant to throw it away. Especially since I have known what it is to be unhappy' "You hold fast to it, my love. We shall need it on the mountain top. "Thomas frowned. "Of course the only person one cannot say is looking forward to the move, or to anything at all so far as we know, is Olivier." "Do you think he is ever happy?" "It is impossible to say. To hear those voices day and night would make you or me most desperately miserable, but with Olivier you cannot always be sure what he feels." "Why won't he get up? Why does he just lie in bed?" "Lazy. Good for nothing." "Today he must do it. He must end it." "He is a sodomite. The world is better without him." "They have made a railway for him." "Look at him." "Why doesn't he do what he is told and just put an end to it?" "They let him have a razor now because they know he is too feeble to do any harm." "Too much of a coward." "He killed his mother. He split her cunt, so she died when the next baby came." "They needed a proper child. The second time they got the one they wanted." "But she couldn't survive. Not after what he had done to her." "What is he doing here?" "Why is he infecting the world? Look at all the people he has made ill with his thoughts." "All he is good for is to lie and play with himself "Cunt-splitter." "Ape." "This railway. It's for him, isn't it?" "They have given up hope that he will do the right thing." "He doesn't even know what the right thing is any more." "Sodomite. He should have died when the cities of the plain were burned." "How did he escape? He who dreams of fucking the young women and the boys? Fucking them in the shithole like an animal." "The Englishwoman. He wants to fuck her, doesn't he? When he rubs himself?" I must move, thought Olivier, I must get dressed. Here is a shirt on the chair. I must move ahead. I must not melt. I must find my edges. I cannot concentrate on what the Seamstress is telling me because of the people I see. All these seen-people with their faint voices, too faint for me to catch. Here is the seen-girl. "Good morning, Olivier. It's just your old Daisy again. Nothing to fret about. It's time for breakfast." "He wants to fuck her too, doesn't he? He's always thinking about it." "He is a disgrace." Follow the seen-girl with the soft voice. Move and keep ahead. "You haven't got your trousers on, love. That's the way. Then we can go and have breakfast. Miss Sonia's made some nice eggs." Legs? Why can't the seen-girl talk louder? The Carver. I can always hear the Carver. Or the Acrobat. Dear God, I can hear the Acrobat. I do not want to eat their food because the Seamstress told me they are still trying to poison me. I will throw this food away from me. "Oh well done! Now he's broken the plate. It's no wonder they won't let him eat with them." "He is a savage." "A dirty savage. He smells like an animal. See how they all back away from him." "He stinks. He never washes." There are too many seen-people in this room, this hall. There is all this noise of wooden spoons on bowls, the clattering, the shouting, hurling, banging, outdoors horses, spades on stone, the people asking me, asking me questions. I want the waterfall that will drown their noise. I want the quiet. "Come on, Olivier. Do as Daisy says. Just eat a little bread and tea. Then it's time for your appointment with Dr. Midwinter. It's Wednesday. You like talking to him, don't you?" They are always asking me these questions. The Sovereign has explained the answers and will not let them take my thoughts now. I am going to be enlisted into the German army. They know that I have the secrets of the King of France. They know I know the day of his return. They want me on their side and have sent me here so I can be watched while my thoughts are taken from me. I do not want this. I am an architect, not a soldier. "Do sit down, Olivier. How are you feeling today?" "He shouldn't answer him. He knows he's a spy for the Germans." "He's not a real doctor." "He knows about Olivier. He knows that he plays with himself when he thinks about the doctor's wife." I must try to hear what the Englishman is asking me. I will read his lips. "Read his lips? He thinks he can hear him above our voices!" "He killed his mother! Mother-killer, mother-killer!" "Why don't you answer me, Olivier? I am trying to help you." "What?" "I am asking you some simple questions. Who is the President of the Republic?" What in public? Something in public? Present? I must say something. Try an answer. "I have no present." "He is useless!" "He doesn't know anything!" I must keep the walls away. If I touch the chair arms, touch my fingers like this I can hold them back. '... and so how old would that make you now, Olivier?" Cold? Me? What I must make sure when I leave is that the man with the hat, the man who has the horse and carriage, does not get me alone because he will take me. He is one of the Germans. And the Englishwoman who has married my brother... But my brother is a boy... He cannot be married. He is... "Olivier? May I ask again?" "His brother! Yes. He was the one they wanted, wasn't he? They always liked him more." "What good was Olivier? Good enough to fuck pigs in the stable yard, that's all." I must find the thread of myself again. I must breathe in and try not to dissolve in the world. I will breathe in. "Olivier?" He does not speak French properly, this seen-man. He is English. I cannot hear him. I must read his lips above the noise of the voices. He is not important. He is not loud enough. I wish he would go away. "Go away!" They are all like this, the seen-people. Not loud enough. They are not like the Acrobat or the Seamstress. I hate them, and the Carver and the others, but they are me. They are part of me. I did not choose them, but I deal with them because that is what I am given and I cannot choose any more than I could pick the colour of my hair. I do not like it, but that is the arrangement. I will go to the place by the lake where the stream runs in and makes a noise. This will drown the voices for a time. I will watch water. "Olivier, you are not speaking to me. I am your doctor. I am your friend Thomas. You remember me. I am Jacques's partner. We used to be such friends, you and I. Do you remember? You were sad when I went away. These days you don't seem to talk to me any more. Do you know how long you have been sitting there now without speaking? Do you know?" Breathe in. Say something. All right. "I will watch water." "I don't understand. Watch water? Why?" "Daughter, no. No." "He is such a clown, isn't he? What daughter does he mean?" I didn't hear him right because you were talking so loud. "Listen, Olivier. You have been sitting here for almost fifteen minutes without speaking. I want to help you, but you must talk to me." I am trying to read his lips but the noise is too loud for me to concentrate. There are too many people here and the man in the garden outside with his rake on the gravel, and the birds in the trees and I hear them saddling up the horses so I cannot pick out my thought. There is a line in me, which is a thought. It runs like a thread from my feet up through my spine into my head. It is a true thought but I cannot grip it for all the distraction. Let me breathe, let me find it. "Well, Olivier?" I have found it. Here it is. "The Germans want me. They want to capture me because I know the movements of the French King. I know when he will return, when he will attack. So the Germans have sent their spies for me." "Are the spies here in the schloss?" "The man with the hat. With the horses." "Josef? He is just the lamp man The groom." What is the point of telling the Englishman? He never understands. He cannot see truth. He always contradicts. "Olivier, do you remember last time, you told me that the Germans know you because your face is coloured black? I took a photograph and sent my camera off for the film to be developed. Here is the photograph of you. And here is one of me and one of Jacques. And do you see how our skin is all the same colour? You are no different from the rest of us. Look!" Touch the chair and hands together fast to stop the walls. Touch, touch, touch. "What do you say, Olivier?" "My skin is black." "Scared now, isn't he? Little coward." "The mother-killer is frightened of the picture!" Picture is a fake. It isn't me. They changed the colour. The Englishman is one of them. Lots of reasons. Take your pick. Which is true? It doesn't matter. Show me a picture of a green sky and I still know the sky is blue! "So, Olivier, tell me what you think." All right. "I think the sky is never green." "Thank you, my dear Olivier. Our time is up. I don't wish to tire you. Perhaps you would like to go out into the grounds. Shall I ask a nurse to go with you? You can do some work in the kitchen garden if you want. Whatever you would like, my old friend. Come along now. Let's find Daisy' "Follow the little bitch out then. Think about how you want to fuck her. In the mouth, is it?" "You made the doctor sad. Don't you see his face?" "He wants to help you. But you're no good." "Why can't you talk sense to him, pig-fucker?" "Shall we go to the lake, dear? Take my arm if you like." "Why do you talk such shit to the doctor?" "He had tears in his eyes." "You are a bad man. You cause such pain in other people." "Don't you see that pain?" "Didn't you see that poor doctor?" I am tired by all this. All this trying to find a thread. I am like some sea creature that can still just live on land. But it is too hard. It is easier to be back under the water, back with the voices, back in the hell-world. "Is this the place you like, dearie? Just here under the tree? I've brought your special book. The one you did the drawings and the colouring in. Here it is. If you need me, just call out my name. Call out "Daisy". I shall be up in the flower gardens with some of the ladies. You can call me if you need. Goodbye for the minute, dear." ' "Some of the ladies." He would like that wouldn't he?" "They know that. That's why they don't let him near them!" Let me see the water now, where it comes down. I want to wash myself in it. I want to take some of my filth away. "He looks at their dresses but he's thinking of their breasts." "They know that. They know he wants to put his fingers in them. His dirty fingers." "They would not allow his dirty fingers near their cunts!" "Don't say those vile words. Don't say that!" "He talks to us, now, does he? Talk to the air, pig-fucker. Talk to the Carver. He always listens." "I do not think that way of the women. Once there was a girl inVannes, that is all." "Of course he doesn't. He prefers boys." "Sodomite. Why don't you end it. You never get it right, do you?" "Kill yourself." "No, no, no! It is a sin." "He is in hell already. He is dead and gone to hell." Watch the water, listen to the streaming, white bubbles, grey bubbles, jets beneath the surface, eddies, surge and currents. See it settle, see the surface of the lake is always flat. Why does it never slope? In lakes there are no valleys. What is a water hill? Where are the landscapes of my lake? By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered thee, O Zion. Even where it runs at steady pace, the shape of the flow is always changing. The trees cover me with their shadow and the willows of the brook compass me about. Behold I drink the river and I haste not. I pour tears into the sea. O hadst thou hearkened to my commandments! Then had my peace been as a river and my righteousness as the waves of the sea... But I did hearken to your commandments, Sovereign. I heard your voice when I was alone. I thought everyone heard your voice. I heard you speak to me loud and clear and I did what you told me. Break his collection of little animals. Smash his room. Break his heart. I did what you told me, but you did not bring me peace. '... and end it now, you coward..." '... and thinking of their bodies underneath..." "Be quiet! I shall lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help." For my help cometh even from the Lord... I see his miracle of water foam and white splitting. Does it never end? Does the rock throw out water from inside the earth and does the earth suck it back from the clouds? Never ending, never end. What lies inside a drop? A million smaller drops. And what lies inside each one of those? There is peace in them because they join. They make softness flow. God speaks his thoughts through me because I am His son. And I once could read His will in the paper of the book, between the printed lines. I can make sense of this world because I use my brain. Why then do others always tell me it is not so? Your hand is not black, they say, but I knew that it was. I could see it! Just as I know the sky is blue. Why pretend? It is so tiring, so wearing, all this nonsense they talk in their soft voices. "A great war is coming to the world." "And it is his fault. It is Olivier's fault." "The mother-killer carries the sins of the world." "In his name ten million will die." I will take the special book and stop the war if I can shade the letters of my name again and again. Take my pen here and shade out the 'o', every time I see it in every line of the book and the top of the 'e', like this, and that will save the world from this catastrophe. But my name has too many straight lines, like the T and the V. I can cover in the valley of the V, but that still leaves the T and the T. My name has too many straight letters, but if I can keep going with all the spaces I may spare the world this tragedy. Once I wrote a book, didn't I? I wrote the Bible. I wrote a book, I drew a book drew a book that showed how people like me might be housed better. I did draw that book. I have good writing. I can draw. I made beautiful pictures in it of many rooms with plumbing and electrical lights and I showed how all the pipes connected to carry out the filth below the buildings. I made that book in another place. In a big house which had nuns in it... Why did I live with nuns? With nuns and madmen in cages... I... I like to write books, so then I wrote the Bible because the Sovereign explained it to me. But I do not like the way he shows my thoughts around. I see them laughing because he had showed them the inside of my head and what I am thinking, and it is true that I am thinking of the women and I know that they can see that I am thinking about fucking her, the one with the little reading glasses and the freckles, I am thinking about her cunt, it is true and I can picture its colour, the soft blonde hairs and the pink-ishness of it all puckered on itself and I wish the Sovereign would not show my thoughts abroad, like the finger writing on the wall for all to see. I must keep moving, try to drag the true thought up through me like the line they drop for building the plumb line for the bricks. It is too hard to think one of those thoughts. I would have to close down everything else to give myself the peace to think it. Like a householder at night, I would go into many rooms and close the shutters, blow out the lamps, lock the doors, close down everything, one by one by one, stop the shouting and the talking in every single room until at last I had the peace to think my one clear thought a thought like those that are thought by the seen-people, like the Englishman or the girl called Daisy. It would be a simple thought, a quiet thought, full of reason, spoken softly, not against the clamour of competing voices, but spoken into silence. But I cannot get into all the rooms at once to close them down. I cannot be upstairs, downstairs, in the cellar, in the courtyard all at once with my keys and breath to blow out lamps and my gags to shut the voices down. How can a man be in fifty places all at once? So it is easier to be in pieces, in the Babel. It is easier to live in fragments. So long as I keep some edges, do not lose the edges of myself. I will lie beneath the tree and listen to the wind in the leaves. What kind of tree is this? Is it a poplar? Or a willow? By the side of the water here. Not an oak or a pine, but a tree with little leaves of grey that rustle in the wind. So let me hear the wind. "It is his fault. Ten million men will die." I will listen to the wind. "Stable boy. Pig-fucker. Why won't he kill himself?" One leaf rustles on another. "He is too much of a coward." It is like the faintness of cymbals. "It all adds up. It all makes sense. His evil has caused it." I will not hear you in the wind. Cannot hear you, I am lost in the leaves, in the hiss, in the sound, in the green and the grey in the big perfection because the wind is perfect, as the water is perfect, you could not make it better, it could not be more beautiful or more watery, not like the things men make, which could always be better, you could not improve the wind, this sound that rings and whistles softly in my head; and all the other voices, all the sounds are mingled in me and I am the centre, chosen, centre of the world through which the harmony is made and in the grey whisper and soft clatter of the leaves I hear the mountains of the east, the sands of Arabia, brown-skinned men playing music, girls dancing with clinking cymbals in their fingers, carrying me and my million thoughts and pictures each one of which carries a million more I do not have the time to catch or see as they ride by in the branches over me, a shadow on a brick wall in a garden, splash of silver fish on the quay in Vannes, wail of women, thrust of green and smell of grass, root and finger, bone and blood, and all in me spinning and whistling, blown and hissing in the wind. "Why is he denying it? It is his fault. A child can see that." Your voices will fade in the rippling leaves. "Kill yourself. Only that can save the world." I can hear the colours of the leaves, the green on grey, the grey on green, the smooth metallic rustle, each sound distinct, each part of a greater whole we cannot see. Cannot see the wind. Cannot see the wind, they say! But I have always seen the wind. When I was a child I saw the wind. I saw it in the apple trees. It was not difficult! Like water made into air, that's all. But lovely in its sound, like Saul and Jonathan, they were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided. "Kill yourself." The leaves weigh on the twigs and the twigs lift the branches and the sounds are all around me as I lie here on the grass beneath the tree... "Kill yourself, coward. That will save the world." I am very sorrowful for the pain I see in the madmen where I live. It tears at my heart. I know it is my fault. as though the leaves are tiny cymbals being kissed by the wind... "Kill yourself. am submerged in this heavenly sound that whistles and rustles and beats like my heart, like butterfly kisses on my face that no one has kissed since... I do not know when someone kissed me last. "Kill yourself, you coward." "Kill yourself." "Olivier? Where are you? It's me, Daisy. Where are you? We are going to see the railway. Olivier! There you are, you funny boy. You've been out here for hours. I thought we'd lost you. You are to put on your coat and come with me and Miss Sonia and Miss Kitty in the trap to Wilhelmskogel. Dr. Rebière and Dr. Midwinter went ahead and they are having a little ceremony at the top to mark the first truck going up, or some such thing. Come along now, Olivier. It's going to be such a lark." I do not want to go with the man in the hat. The horse-man. He is working for the Germans. "Now is the time to do it. To end it." "It is the perfect opportunity." I must find my coat and go. I must pretend to be normal. Pretend I do not know about the horse-man. There he is. He is looking at me. He can see my thoughts. Why does the Sovereign let him see them? "Now then. Kitty, why don't you sit here on this side, and Daisy you sit next to Kitty and I'll sit next to Olivier. There we are. Everybody happy. Off we go, Josef!" "So he's got himself opposite the fair-haired one. She's not wearing her glasses, though, is she?" "He likes her in her glasses. He likes to think of her naked with just the little reading glasses on." "He likes to fuck her from behind, like a dog. In his mind. In his imagination!" "She wouldn't really let him. Only pigs let him." "I brought some cakes, Sonia." "Thank you, Kitty. I think Jacques said it's about an hour. Josef has arranged to change horses at the stables in town." He will take instructions from the ostler. I have seen him before. He is a Bavarian. He wants to kill me before the Monarchy returns. I must keep touching my fingers, keep touching the door of the carriage. "Daisy, would you like some cake, or shall we wait until we stop? We can have a cup of chocolate while Josef changes the horses." An hour. An hour with the horse-man. What is an hour to me? I have no idea of time. Sometimes time laughs at me. I saw a clock laugh at me once. "What exactly is this ceremony, Sonia?" "Well, you know that the track for the cable-car is ready? They are going to try it with an open truck. With just some old railway sleepers on it." "When they first talked about this cable-car I somehow pictured it being up in the air, suspended on the wire." "No, no, you silly girl! It is just pulled up on rails. The cable is attached to the underneath of the car. It is terribly simple. It is like one of Daniel's toys. But don't tell Herr Geissler I said that." "And how do we get up to the top?" "Josef takes us as far as he can up the track, then we change to mules for the steep bit. It takes another hour from there, I think." We are changing horses already. That was not enough time. We are in town, and there are too many people here. "Do you want to get down and stretch your legs, Olivier?" I must stay in the carriage, don't let the Bavarian see me. My thoughts are being shown. Keep inside. Keep my head low. "He is too scared to get down." "Even though the fair girl's got down and he wants to watch her." "Wants to see her hips in the tight skirt and think..." "Too frightened even to want her." "Come on then, Josef. Let's get moving, shall we? I told my husband we would be there by four. Come on, Kitty." I am not managing well. This man Josef. I fear today is the day he has chosen. I saw his face in the horse's face, when it whinnied and stamped its hoof on the cobble. It was his devilish features beneath that mane. It was like the face of the old mare... God, I remember the old mare in the stable where I lived. Why did I live in the stable? In the name of God, why there? Perhaps I do not remember it right. Or the nuns. '... so bossy, Sonia!" "Katharina, I can assure you I am not bossy. I have to organise a household full of... Eccentrics, shall we say. And none more eccentric than your husband, I might add. Someone has to be in charge." "Let us ask Daisy for her impartial judgment. Don't giggle, Daisy. Tell me, do you think Miss Sonia is bossy or not?" "Miss Sonia is... Miss Sonia is ever so well organised." "There you are, Kitty! Look. There is the beginning of our railway line, our own "spur" as the men like to call it leading up into the foothills." "Why don't we take the train, Miss?" "Because there isn't one yet. There is only a line." This journey is over too soon. These seen-women with their silly chatter have made it pass quickly. We are stopping too soon. Josef will hand me over now to the Germans. Touch my fingers, touch the door, touch my fingers, touch the door. "Of course I can ride a mule, Sonia! I am not just a Viennese flibbertigibbet, you know. I was more or less brought up on a farm." "Daisy, you take that one, he looks friendly. Olivier, you get on this one, because I know for sure that you were brought up in the countryside with horses and dogs. Josef will lead the way' We are in beech woods and they are very dense. I like beech trees, but the forests are easy to hide in. Higher up there will be larch and pine. And there will be bears and wolves. These stupid people do not understand how dangerous these mountains are. They eat wild boar but do not ask themselves where it comes from. From the beech woods. I am tired of this riding. This stony track. I am so very very tired. "He is frightened of the lamp man "He knows today is the day. There is no time left." "He is not worth killing. He will have to kill himself." The forest is getting thicker. I want to be above the treeline, where the Germans cannot hide, but maybe this mountain is not high enough. The Sovereign must stop showing my thoughts to the man in the hat. I am worn down by the ceaseless, ceaseless voices. "Getting colder, isn't it, Daisy? Do you feel it?" "Yes, Miss. I can see the buildings at the top. Is that Dr. Rebière waving?" "Yes! Come on. Let's hurry up to the top." "My donkey won't go no faster!" "Kitty, you go first through this little bit, then it's round to the right, past the old chapel. You'll see them waiting." Who is this man talking? He is like my brother, but my brother is... Is a child. I am so tired. "Hello, everyone You made it. Come and see our wonderful cable track. Thomas is waiting with a bottle of champagne. This way, my love. Come, Olivier. Over here. Isn't it a wonderful view? The whole of Carinthia, almost. See those mountains? The SchladmingerTauern. And down in the valley over here is Wolfsberg and right up there are the Fischbacher Alps. Thomas!" "Come and see our wheel. Jacques, bring them over. See this, Queenie? This mighty wheel will pull the car up the sheer side of the mountains. The truck is waiting at the bottom. Look." "No! It makes me feel sick." "Don't be silly! Can't you see how beautifully smooth it is? That's why we chose this incline, because there was so little grading for them to do. I do hope it's going to work. I am feeling a little apprehensive, though not as much as Geissler. Kitty, my love, come and look." "It is magnificent, I must admit. It would be hard to feel melancholy with such a glorious view." "Exactly. And you can see how the builders are progressing with the main house? It should be ready by October. Just in time." "Kill yourself. This is a good place." "He could throw himself off. But he's too scared." "Olivier, hold the champagne a moment. I want to show Sonia something. Here take it. Thank you. Now look, my love, this is where the cable comes up and this is where the safety cable runs and this is where the platform will be where the passengers will step down." "It is wonderful, Jacques." "We will lift the poor creatures up. We will raise them above suffering, will we not, Thomas?" "I do hope so, Jacques. We have worked hard enough to build our promontory it is the height of our ambition." "The peak of enlightenment." "Josef, can you fetch the champagne from Olivier? Then Sonia, would you break it on the wheel." He is coming for me, the hat-man is coming for me... He is coming. "Kill yourself. Kill yourself." "Just run and throw yourself "Too cowardly to do the right thing." He is coming for me, he is coming! "Run and kill yourself. Just run." I will, I will, I will, I am running, I am running, I am running, I am... "Stop him! Thomas! Stop! Stop!" I am running, I am running, I am It took them two days to recover Olivier's body, which lay among the rocks that had been tipped down the sharpest fall, next to the cable-car Incline. Men were lowered on ropes, as they had been when laying the dynamite charges, but Olivier's body was hard to reach and harder still to raise. Eventually, two workmen managed to secure ropes beneath his armpits and tie a sort of noose round his back; three mules at the summit turned the windlass and began to drag him to the top. Olivier arrived at last, over the lip of the mountain, his clothes shredded by the friction, but otherwise oddly unmarked by his fall. It appeared that his neck and left leg had broken; there was some blood that had clotted and stained the white of his beard around the mouth. His eyes were open but their gaze was empty. Under Hans's instructions, the body was then taken down by mule to where Thomas waited with Josef's horse and trap to take it back to the schloss. It was the practice that any psychotic patients who died at the clinic should undergo post-mortem, to see what Thomas and Franz Bernthaler could learn, but Thomas presumed Jacques would rather his brother was not subject to this indignity and had the body despatched to the morgue at the city hospital while they made arrangements for the funeral. Jacques sat quietly in the drawing room of his and Sonia's apartment. The shock of the incident, its brutal surprise, at first made it impossible for him to think deeply about it. When at last he could do so, he found that he felt a most peculiar sensation of solitude. His father was long dead, his mother he had never known; and though he had 'lost' his brother years ago, when he drifted into madness, Olivier had remained his only link to the family of his birth, to that small group of humans that had been his first and irreducible unit of allegiance in the world. Now he was like the last survivor of a platoon. It had a name, a number and a history, but no existence: what had seemed indestructible, his base and point of deepest loyalty, had been dissolved before anyone had made out what it was for; suddenly it was too late, and there was something unsatisfactory about it that left him utterly alone. Sonia comforted him, wept with him and watched carefully over him; but, much though he loved her, she was not of his flesh and blood. In Olivier's skin and veins had been particles of inheritance that they shared with no one else, and that had been the nature of their existence and its challenge: to make of their lives whatever they could, beginning in their narrow Breton world. That challenge now was ended; there was no one left for him to report back to on his progress; and without that narrative, the game, whatever might happen to him in the future, was barely worth the playing, because no one else, however much they loved him, really cared. "We should have a post-mortem," he told Thomas. "I remember asking myself once what Olivier's brain might look like. If he can tell us anything that might help others, then we should certainly look." "Are you sure?" "Yes. I should like to be there. I would like to see this story through to its end." "As you wish. I shall send Josef to the hospital to tell them. I will make arrangements for the funeral the day after." Thomas meanwhile looked back at his record of the last conversation he had had with Olivier to see if they could illuminate his sudden leap to death. Were there signs a better doctor would have seen? What Olivier appeared from his hasty notes to have said was, roughly: I have no present. Go away! I will watch water. Daughter, no daughter. The Germans want me... I know the movements of the French king... They have sent their spies for me. The man with the hat is a spy. My skin is black. I think the sky is never green. And that seemed to be all. There was an emphasis on colour, on spying and... And nothing else at all that Thomas could see. Olivier's mind had long since been unable to make sense, so surely these ramblings were nothing more than the obiter dicta of a broken mind? Yet Thomas could not quite believe it. He felt there was more to his friend than that, and he felt that he should have found it. It was seven in the evening, the appointed time, and the small, bad-tempered servant manhandled the body from its refrigerated bed, banging the head as he did so, labouring beneath the weight before he finally wrestled it into place on the marble slab. Jacques, Thomas and Franz Bernthaler looked on, their faces concealed behind white masks. Around the walls of the dissecting room were specimens in glass jars: livers, aortas, larynxes. At the far end was a wooden board on which were hung saws, chisels, knives and other banausic instruments of the trade. The pro sector was the senior pathologist at the hospital, a man called Holzbauer. He approached the table briskly, rubbing cream he had taken from a tub into his hands. When the corpse had been arranged in the anatomical position and he had checked the identity, he began to examine the surface, dictating notes to his student as he did so. The skin was covered with abrasions from the fall and the ascent. Then it was time for the incision. Although Jacques had seen it countless times before, he found his fingernails deep in his palms as Holzbauer took the large scalpel to each shoulder and cut a "V, meeting at the breastbone; without pausing, he carved straight down to the pubic bone, perhaps three millimetres deep, diverting a fraction as he went past the navel. Working with a smaller scalpel, he began to ease the V-shaped section of skin from the chest wall. He held the first triangular corner of skin taut between forceps, from which it occasionally slipped, and used stroking motions of the knife to separate it from the cutaneous layer. Bits of fat or waste were occasionally deposited with the forceps in a metal mixing bowl near the cadaver's head. As the section of lifted skin grew larger, he was able to grip it in his hand, dispensing with the forceps; and when he had cut both sides clear he folded the flap up over Olivier's face, so the hairs of his chest pressed those of his beard. Jacques was glad not to have to look at his brother's features any more. Poor boy, he thought. He had a desire to embrace him, before he became no more than separate pieces it would be absurd to kiss. He reached out and briefly held the cold thick hand. There was a slight smell, not unlike that inside Meissner and Trattnig, the expensive butcher behind the market square in town. With what looked like a pair of secateurs such as Sonia carried in the garden, the pro sector cut the sternum and front ribs away, revealing Olivier's heart and lungs. With a scalpel, he cut delicately through the sac round the heart, reported no blockage in the pulmonary artery, then went down to the tail of his "Y', slicing back the muscle from the abdomen till it fell away on either side, so that all the inner organs from neck to groin were exposed. Jacques felt that he was looking at what he himself was made of, and noticed that the mixing bowl was gradually filling up with waste, with the detritus of his brother. The next stage was the most difficult, and reminded him of what Olivier himself, at a time when he was first starting to go mad, had shown him when they went hunting with guns and killed a roe deer. After some ritual marking of his virgin younger brother with blood from the testes, Olivier had taken out the guts entire and thrown them to the dogs. Holzbauer glanced towards Jacques as he detached the larynx and oesophagus, then went into the cavity to free the remainder of the chest organs from the spine. He left them in place while he detached the diaphragm and freed the abdominal organs. The contents of the upper body were now held in place only at the pelvis. Holzbauer looked over once more before slicing through this last tie. He stood back for the servant, who mounted a dissecting table over Olivier's legs, then removed the entire bloc of organs en masse and placed them on it. His brother was in pieces and Jacques could see through the empty body cavity to the spine. And this was all, this was all, he thought, as he gazed at the innards on the tray: the great delusion of the human being that he might himself be something more than matter. The pro sector continued with impressive legerdemain to separate the organs. He withdrew from a leather sheath beneath his gown something that looked like a carving knife, which he used in single, deft slices. Only the adrenal glands above the kidneys gave him pause for a moment. Franz Bernthaler went to work on the liver and spleen, while the servant opened the intestines over a stone sink, beneath a running tap. Jacques found himself stifling a protest. Surely this invasion of his brother's privacy was too much. It was a moment before he could name the emotion that gripped him at the sight of the servant rinsing Olivier's intestines: it was, to his great surprise, embarrassment. Since Olivier had eaten nothing on his last day, having hurled his breakfast plate from him, the stench of gastric acid, when Holzbauer opened the stomach, was less than Jacques had known it, though still enough to make his own stomach turn beneath his gown. Franz was busy weighing and slicing the pancreas and the kidneys; he took samples to be examined microscopically and placed them in small glass jars. Thomas whispered in Jacques's ear, "Are you all right? Do you want to stay for the brain? You can always look at it later, back at the schloss." It was such a forlorn sight, thought Jacques. Though Holzbauer had been as neat a performer as he had seen, there was blood on the floor beneath them, blood in the gutters of the slab, and small pieces of flesh stuck on the hooks of the scales. Even the chalk that the student had used to write up the measurements on the blackboard was red-tinged, while some of the statistics themselves were pink and smudged on the black background. There was no escaping the matter of his brother, the red and stinking material of his being. The hulk of his body now was like a half-built fishing vessel in the boatyards at Vannes: though beautiful, it was desolate, and already spoke of shipwreck. The servant poured the organs back into the cavity, where they made undignified slippery noises, as when Herr Trattnig heaved a large order of lights from a tray on to the scale, while the servant packed them irritably with his hands and replaced the chest plate over them. The pro sector nodded to the student, who leant over the body and began to sew up the "Y' with thick stitches, like those on a canvas sail. Holzbauer turned his attention to the head, instructing the servant to take the block out from under the body and place it beneath the neck. For the first time since Olivier had died, Jacques felt the desolation rise up in him. The pro sector took a scalpel to begin the cut behind the left ear, and the annihilation of Olivier was suddenly too much for him to bear. He found himself back in the bedroom of his childhood, back in a broken past, with the mother he did not know, in a dark room with just his childish hope of what life might bring, his boy's bravery and determination, where the only connection to the past he longed for, and to the future to which he would blindly burrow on, lay in the shape of his elder brother: Olivier alone had held the key, and Jacques could feel him now, ten years old, come to his younger brother's bed, healthy and alive, and lying there next to him, shaking with laughter as they listened to the grown-ups downstairs, wrapping his arm round Jacques and holding him against his chest, where Jacques first noticed that special clean, sweet smell of his, so that the recollection of it as they took Olivier to pieces made him suddenly gasp with the appalling grief that came up like a wave in him death, his own death too and the inevitable loss of all the vain hopes of life howling and breaking in the darkness. Thomas helped him from the room and took him upstairs to a bench in a gas-lit corridor, the seat where he himself had briefly sat while waiting for Herr Obmann to operate on Fraulein Katharina. The two men sat side by side in the murky light, as once they had stood gazing from France at the English Channel; now they leaned forward, heads held in their hands in the silent moment of defeat. "Would you like to see your brother's brain?" said Franz Bernthaler three days later. "It has been well fixed in formalin and you might find it instructive." "All right. I always said that I should like to see what it looks like, so I suppose I had better do so." Jacques followed Franz reluctantly to the cellar. Olivier's brain was in a bucket of fluid on the workbench, from which Franz lifted it and held it beneath the electric light. "They are always a little smaller than one expects, are they not?" he said. "So much of the skull area is taken up by the jaw, the eye socket and so on. Then the protection given by the skull restricts the brain space. Anyway, do you want to hold it?" "No." Looking at the organ, Jacques was thinking of Olivier's astral diagrams and of the stable; but he was also thinking of the little boy who had once healthily been governed by this beige and silent piece of matter, from which had sprung inexplicable games and fancies and laughter. "Grossly visible," said Franz, 'is a degree of cortical atrophy in the frontal and temporal lobes, here and here. I see a slight thinning of the surface brain tissue and a generalised shrinkage." "Are these not normal post-mortem changes?" "No. And you see here, the sulci are slightly enlarged. The grey matter seems to ripple slightly more than normal because of the depth of the sulci." "And how do you account for these changes?" "Rather mechanically," said Franz. "I suspect that we shall find that the ventricles are enlarged and that as they have pushed up and outwards, other things have had to make way' It did not seem enough, somehow, thought Jacques, as Franz took a large knife and made a sagittal cut, down through the centre of the two hemispheres. In section, Olivier's brain had the look of a squashed boiled cauliflower, in which the grey matter replicated the shape of the rippled florets, and the white that of the solid inside of the vegetable below. In the heart of the white area was the opening of the ventricle. "I have the brain of a patient without mental illness for comparison," said Franz. "Even in gross appearance you can see the disparity in size in the openings here." Jacques nodded. It was true; though he could not see that an increased capacity for the generation of cerebro-spinal fluid told him much about the metaphysical enigma of his brother's madness. "I shall now take some smaller sections to examine beneath the microscope," said Franz. "Would you like to stay and look?" "No, thank you. Tell me if you find anything unusual." "Of course." "And Franz." "Yes." "Do you normally incinerate the brains when you have finished with them?" "Yes." "Do you think you might arrange with the priest to have it interred with his body in the graveyard?" "I will ask him." "Thank you." Jacques was pleased to be back on the stone flags of the hallway; he felt the absurdity of the countless living functions his own brain performed each second without his even feeling them. You could not properly value such a thing; you could only laugh at it. In the autumn, they began to move to the Wilhelmskogel. None of them gave voice to what they all felt: that Olivier s death had blighted the place; that it had taken the joy from it. At a practical level, it had drawn their attention to how unsafe the situation was for lunatics, and new plans were drawn up to keep those most seriously unstable from having access to the drop. There was no alternative to the move, however; the lease on the Schloss Seeblick could not be extended and the stockholders in the railway company had legally protected expectations of the new venture. Geissler s transport system worked well, and throughout the summer large numbers of visitors were taken up on the railway and transferred into the cable-car for their ride to the top, where they were offered refreshments and directed on various walks. The local newspaper carried letters from one or two people complaining that their fellow-citizens had become lazy and instead of taking this newfangled apparatus should be made to hike to the top of the mountain, but the populace thought otherwise and bought tickets in large numbers. Jacques could not contemplate the move, in fact could concentrate on very little, tormented as he was by insomnia. He dragged himself through the days, dry-mouthed, dry-eyed, though he knew that his inability to sleep was the result of his mind trying to digest his loss, of the grief and the loneliness that he could not face by day. When September came, Sonia organised the carriages to start moving furniture, while Thomas went twice weekly to the top of the mountain to oversee the final stage of the building works. The labourers had been discharged, back to Karfreit, and the plumbing, electrical works and decoration were in the hands of a building company from Villach. Hans had proved himself a worthy foreman, but was anxious to return to the schloss to see Daisy. The only person truly enthusiastic for the relocation was Daniel, who was allowed to celebrate his fifth birthday in October by taking six friends from the village up to the summit to play hide-and-seek in the building site. A place was found for him in the village school near the foot of the mountain, beginning in the New Year, and the thought of travelling to and from school each day in a cable-car filled him with delight. In December, Thomas received a letter from Hannes Regensburger, asking if he could pay a visit. His expedition to Africa had been delayed, he said, but he was more than ever certain that Thomas would benefit from accompanying him; he would not be leaving for another two years, so there would be time to make arrangements at home. Regensburger was the last visitor to the old Schloss Seeblick, arriving a few days before Christmas. He took dinner with Thomas and Kitty in their apartment in the South Court. "I am proposing to steal your husband away, Frau Midwinter," he said. "So I understand. But I shall fight you for his company' "If I promise to bring him back safely, would that make a difference?" "Certainly. I do not want him to be eaten by crocodiles." "I give you my word. We would be travelling a well-beaten path in open country and in cool weather. Some of the German government guest houses have running water and electric light." Kitty handed Regensburger a dish of vegetables. "What concerns me more," she said, 'is what possible use an English mad-doctor could be to a cartographic al expedition. Are you all expecting to go insane?" Regensburger gave a deep laugh. "No though in fact it has been known to happen. No. I was impressed by your husband when we met. It is really as simple as that. Of course, it is a good idea to have a doctor in a large party and I am presuming he has not forgotten the elementary skills cuts and stings and bruises and so forth. I understand that he is also a good photographer, which is not a claim I could make either for myself or for Lukas, my assistant. But we have managed the pictures before and we could do so again." "So, what is it about Thomas?" said Kitty. "It is a question of spirit," said Regensburger after a pause in which he drank from his wineglass. "There are one or two archaeological questions on which I have been doing some preliminary work at the university. These concern the dating of fossil remains. While I shall continue to be responsible for the homework, I know that your husband will share my intellectual interest and that he is a keen amateur of Darwin. But it is more even than that. Africa is a large country and it calls for a large response. When one sits by the camp-fire at night, it is better to be in the company of a man who has risen to the occasion. I feel confident that your husband is such a man." "And your assistant, Lukas?" "He is a very good cartographer." "I see. Well... I think I do." "I have been to see Oscar Baumann twice more and have talked to him about the archaeological sites he found. Although he was not personally interested, he did make maps and keep a good diary so I think that we should be able to locate one or two of them." "And how long would you take my husband for?" "I shall be away for more than a year, but I have worked out a different itinerary for him that would have him safely back to you in three months." "Do you think he is strong enough for such an undertaking?" "I believe he is stronger than I am. Look at him. Hardly a grey hair. No excess weight. You see, my dear Frau Midwinter, there is a fine adventuring tradition among British doctors. They have always been mountaineers and explorers. All I ask of your husband is to sit on a mule, take the occasional photograph and keep me company' "We will think about it," said Thomas. "There is presumably no hurry to decide." "Indeed not," said Regensburger. "You have at least a year to settle into your new home before I start to look elsewhere for my companion." As the builders neared the end of their task, Sonia inspected the main house on the Wilhelmskogel and marked out which rooms might be used for what. Frau Egger had already visited, somewhat apprehensive of the machinery that whisked her up, and given her approval to an enlarged kitchen, while Jacques and Thomas had chosen their consulting rooms. Neither family would live in the main house, it was decided, which was to be given over entirely to the patients and their welfare. The Rebières and the Midwinters had a small house each, a minute s walk apart, both with a fine view of the valley. At the age of forty-two, Sonia felt she had it in her to make only one more family home and hoped that this would be the last. She sighed at the prospect of more builders, leaking roofs, upheaval, unsatisfactory finishes; nevertheless, as she walked through her new house, assigned a room to Daniel, selected in her mind the curtains she had seen for it in the draper behind the church in town, it was hard not to admit a small quickening of pleasure, like an old war horse, she thought ruefully, roused one last time by the sound of the trumpet.

Eighteen

The world looked beautiful to Daniel Rebière. Every morning his mother came to dress him in front of the fire in his room. He could dress himself, but liked the fuss she made of him, stealing kisses when she buttoned up his woollen jacket, calling him odd names and telling him how much she loved him, squeezing his ribs till they hurt. There was no one but them, and although he never thought as much, he had the joy of sensing that she was quietly obsessed by him. After porridge, bacon, white rolls and hot chocolate, he was packed off in the cable-car with either his mother or Daisy or Hans to accompany him to the school in the village where the railway spur ended. His best friend in the class was a boy called Freddy, and when they had not seen each other for a while, they trembled with excitement. Not wanting to embrace, they hammered one another on the shoulders with their fists. Sometimes Freddy was allowed to come home with Daniel and stay the night in the spare bed in his room, where they lay whispering into the small hours. Daniel's father always came upstairs to say goodnight; he read to him and stroked his hair. He taught him French songs and sometimes spoke to him in French, though Daniel resisted it, since speaking German at school and English at home was work enough. His father was always kind to him, never raised his voice, but he was a little frightening. Daisy was ridiculously kind, even more indulgent than his mother, feeding him chocolates and desserts left over from the patients' dinner. Hans called him "Little Soldier', though Daniel did not know why, and gave him rides round the top of the mountain on the pony. Then there were his cousins. He was fascinated that there could be two identical girls. One minute he might be helping Charlotte in her red woollen dress to set out some dolls at the tea table in her nursery not a task he relished, but stuck at for the sake of looking at her. The next minute he would be pulling Martha, in her green woollen dress, on a wooden cart. But she was essentially Charlotte. There was no difference and he should know: he had studied them extensively. He discussed the matter tirelessly with his mother. "I think maybe Charlotte is a bit more boyish, Mummy. "Do you, darling? In what way?" He pondered deeply. "Hmm. I don't know," he said mysteriously. He was one and a half years older than the girls, and understood it was his duty to be kind to them, to encourage them in their childish games. When they reached the age of three in February, they were old enough to play satisfactorily together; so Daniel could sit on the floor, no longer needed, and just indulge himself by watching them, and laugh and laugh inside at this preposterous thing: these pretty girls with blonde hair and brown eyes, so snugly dressed, so individual, so unlike any of the girls at school, yet doubled. He loved them each, but liked them especially for being two. "You are a spoilt little boy, aren't you?" said his mother, when she put him into his pyjamas. "All these people fawning on you." "Who is falling on me?" "Not falling, you silly boy, fawning. Doting." The other person he particularly liked was his aunt Kitty. Unlike the other grown-ups, she talked to him rather seriously, as though he were himself an adult; he felt thrilled by her confidence and tried to be worthy of it. He was invited to have a picnic lunch with her on his own one day, and took a sandwich in a box from his own mother's kitchen. Kitty found him a chair in her main room and prepared a picnic for herself; she poured them both some apple juice, then sat down and asked him for his opinion of their new home, listening to him carefully over the top of her reading glasses. Daniel's brows came close together as he pondered his answer, but he was delayed by his sandwich of butter and cheese, which he was finding irresistible. He didn't really want to talk; he just liked being with Aunt Kitty. He liked looking at her, in the same way that he liked looking at her daughters. He finished too soon, but Kitty pretended she had also finished and went to fetch some fruit tarts from the kitchen. She played songs to him on a gramophone that her mother had sent from Vienna, the needle thumping and hissing through the brilliant black grooves as it conjured pictures of a band, a ballroom, men and women dancing in smart clothes and a world awaiting him. He noticed that she was looking sad. Kitty smiled. "I was just remembering. The songs remind me of when I was sixteen or so. Not an old lady, as I am now." "But you are not old." Daniel was appalled. "No," said Kitty. "You are quite right. I am not that old." "You are pretty." "And you are a flatterer. Have another tart." Daniel's room had a sleigh bed and a long view towards the Karawanken and the Carnian Alps, and the white tops of the distant mountains were the last things he saw at night before his mother pulled the curtains. His toys lived in boxes arranged beneath the big window. He liked soldiers, though there was one that had always repelled him: a clockwork drummer with an alarm bell that went off in its head. He tried to interest Charlotte in swapping it for a knitted monkey he had coveted, but she hysterically refused. Having all his life been surrounded by lunatics, Daniel thought nothing of the oddity of their behaviour. Some of them befriended him, as though they sensed in him a fellow-oddball, this only child wandering over the great mountaintop retreat with his wicker basket of toys digging into his arm, his head for ever cocked to one side in curiosity: wide-eyed, but not to be taken lightly; quietly spoken, but clearly possessed of will and determination, not someone they would trifle with. When he was six, he was taught at school about Saint Valentine and, under the mistress's instruction, made a coloured card for his love. He drew on it a picture of flowers in a bunch, and inside, again with the teacher's help, wrote: "Dear Mummy, Be My Valentine, Love?" He watched intently as Sonia opened it that evening and feigned amazement, delight, then utter bafflement as to the identity of her admirer. "Have you any idea who it might be, Daniel?" He pursed his lips and shrugged with his palms turned outward at the bottom of his skinny arms, trying not to smile. For weeks Sonia kept the card on the mantelpiece in her bedroom; it was the question mark that made her laugh every time she looked at it. When Jacques came back from work, he took to asking her, "How are you, my love? And how is Mr. Question Mark? How is little Herr Fragezeichen?" As for Sonia, what she felt for the child was beyond words and she did not really care to examine it. When he had saved with his own money to buy her a present, a useless embroidered purse, the pleasure of receiving it was so shot through with a sort of anguish at what it told of Daniel and of his view of her that the pleasure lasted only for an instant, and she experienced the charming gesture as a sort of memento mori. Likewise, when she went to kiss him goodnight, the last thing before she herself went to bed, she murmured words of utter devotion as she leaned over; as she kissed him and inhaled the smell of him, she felt her whole being shift in her guts and knew that this vertiginous lurch of feeling came about in her because she was really thinking what a short time he would remain a child the nights could be numbered and what a short life would be his on earth. In truth, it occurred to her, she was not kissing her child a happy goodnight, she was thinking of his death. Seeing this, and feeling shocked by it, Sonia decided she would not be maudlin any more. Just because these thoughts sprang naturally, from an excess of love, did not mean they were healthy. She would banish them, she decided, and look at the world through his eyes only, because his view was assuredly a happy and a healthy one. Daniel saw delight in everything. His day was love and food and cable-cars and Freddy and the bewitchingly comic twins; it was Hans and the pony and Aunt Kitty and the majestic view from his warm bedroom. This was human joy; it was his birthright; and it was Sonia s privilege and duty to share in it, simply, without morbid or excessive under-thoughts. So she looked at the clock to see how soon he would be home from school. Visitors to the Wilhelmskogel were looked after by Hans, who had built and now administered a refuge, to which they were directed from the top of the cable-car. It was some distance from the clinic and offered food, drink and a simple washroom. Hans was also able to give advice on the walks available at the summit, of which the most popular was a two-hour ramble back to the foot of the cable Incline. Neither Jacques nor Thomas cared much for the inflow of visitors, but the provision of some tourist services had been a condition of the public funding, so they had no choice and offered Hans a share in the visitor profits. The clinic itself was full. The publicity that surrounded the building of the transport system had proved an effective advertisement, and in the following summer Pierre Valade, in the course of an extended visit, drew up plans for a further building, safely walled, far from the edge, but with walkways under wrought-iron decorations. When the work had started, Thomas told Jacques that since his American venture had paid off so profitably it was time for him now, after twelve years in partnership and seventeen with his shoulder to the wheel of lunacy, to take sabbatical leave. He wrote to Hannes Regensburger to tell him that his business partner and his wife had consented to a three-month absence; and in the summer of the following year he departed.