Music, in a Foreign Language E-Book

Andrew Crumey

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Britain with the same post-war history as East Europe battling against a totalitarian regime. "The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality." The Sunday Times Music, in a Foreign Language won The Saltire Best First Book Award and launched the literary career of one of the UK's cleverest and most original post-modern novelists.

Leseprobe

Praise forMusic, in a Foreign Language

Winner of The Saltire Award for Best First Book in 1994, described in The Guardian Fiction Shortlist article as outstanding. One of The Scotsman’s Books of the Year.

“Watch Andrew Crumey, whose very different Music, in a Foreign Language handled real intricacies of time and ideas with astonishing maturity in a haunting, low-key up-date of 1984.”

Douglas Gifford in The Scotsman’s Books of the Year

“an accomplished exercise in European post-modernism.”

Catherine Lockerbie in The Scotsman

“an intriguing and illuminating post-modern meditation on betrayal, death, and paths not taken, both personal and historical. Employing fiction within a fiction, Crumey constructs a philosophical jigsaw puzzle, partly a portrayal of an alternative, Eastern European-style post-war Britain, partly the story of the exiled narrator’s life and of the characters in the novel he’s writing. A promising debut from a talented and unusual writer.”

The Herald

“Music, in a Foreign Language is complex in its change of time and points of view but entertaining, and at the same time very chilling in its convincing impression of life in a police state.”

Paul Scott on Scottish Television at The Saltire Awards

“… thought provoking”

Publishers Weekly

“He brilliantly interpolates passages from imaginary texts reminiscent of Borges and Calvino … Highly recommended for medium to large public and academic libraries, particularly for sophisticated readers.”

Library Journal

“The main theme of this very impressive first novel is that of the falsity of both fiction and reality; and I predict that Andrew Crumey is going to be one of the major novelists.”

Books in Scotland

“… his novel is elegantly mathematical in its ingenious plot and narrative, and highly suggestive about the music of Beethoven and Bach. Highly readable.”

Mario Relich in Chapman’s Magazine

“This intricate, demanding story of political and personal commitment and betrayal introduces a young master of post-modernist irony who will remind many readers of the brainier postwar European novelists. A formidable debut, from a new writer whose possibilities, so to speak, seem virtually unlimited.”

Kirkus Reviews

Contents

Title

Praise for Music, in a Foreign Language

Part One

Chapter 0

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part Two

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Three

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Four

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part Five

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Copyright

PART ONE

0

She was asking me (as was usual at such moments) what I was thinking about. So that I quickly had to make up some suitable reply.

In fact I was thinking of two things. First, of that spectacular diversity which leads every woman to respond to the moment of sexual climax in a unique way. There are those who shout, or gasp, or groan. Those who bay like wolves beneath a silver moon, or sigh with the heartfelt passion of a diva. Some who laugh, as if they had only just got the joke, while others shed a tear of misplaced sorrow. Women who collapse in satisfied exhaustion, and others who get up in a state of restlessness and make a sandwich, switch on the television. Phone their mothers.

But she, throughout all those years we shared, maintained with total consistency that low growling, like a half-sleeping cat disturbed. And afterwards, if she did not fall asleep, she would puncture the silence by asking me that dreaded question: What are you thinking? Which would always send me scurrying in search of an appropriate answer, since I knew from experience that honesty was not what was required of me at such a time.

I told her I was thinking ‘nothing’.

This was not completely untrue; the path of my mental activity at that moment really was of no consequence, and could honestly be summed up in the dismissive manner I chose. But this nothing led – through no will of my own – to something. It had begun with her feline growling – the completion of the act we had just enjoyed. I now wanted only to have peace and quiet and a good night’s rest (I had – if I remember correctly – to catch the train earlier than usual the next day), but instead my thoughts were prodded into action by her refusal to let the business end. I found myself imagining those other women I had slept with, or thought of sleeping with – and all those countless women with whom I would never have the pleasure of broadening my knowledge of life’s rich diversity. I thought of that awesome variety, and I thought how strange it was that events should have brought the two of us together, so that I should listen to her cat-like purr, when I could equally well (had history gone otherwise) have found myself in the arms of a creature as different from my wife as a Chopin waltz is from a Bach fugue.

I mean this as no disrespect to the woman whom I now miss so much. But how could I confess to her then the speculations I was allowing – in a spirit of objective enquiry – into the alternative scenes which I might at that moment have found myself playing, if a thousand coincidences had been replaced by a thousand other equally probable ones?

My second thought was just as impossible to confess at the delicate moment my wife had chosen – for it concerned my need to relieve the bladder upon which she had not long before put much of her weight. I decided to bide my time. I told her I was thinking ‘nothing’.

Of course, one can truly be thinking nothing only if one is dead. Even in my most idle moments, taking the daily train journey to and from work, without a book or sheaf of writing paper to accompany me (until today), still my brain is filled with thoughts which, because they go unregistered, are regarded as having no existence. I gaze out of the window; I see the sunshine on brown earth, and olive trees, and if anyone asked me I would tell them I was thinking ‘nothing’. What a world of thoughts, impressions and sensations is thereby dismissed!

When I was sure she wasn’t going to ask me anything else, I went to the toilet.

All of this seems very clear now in my mind, as I prepare to write the novel which first suggested itself while I stood barefoot on the cold floor of the bathroom ten years ago. Can my memory really be so accurate and vivid? There is of course the possibility that this memory – along with the story I intend to unroll like a carpet before you – is a pure invention, or at least a confabulation; an accretion of successive imperfect rememberings. Can I be sure that the need to go to the toilet coincided with a vision of the orgasm in its infinite variety? Or that this was indeed the night when Duncan and Giovanna first entered my imagination? Perhaps these events actually occurred on separate occasions, after distinct instances of love making. However, since that act, after a very short time during the first year we were together, soon became indistinguishable from one time to the next, it is impossible to conclude the matter with any degree of certainty.

Memory is, after all, far more than the simple replaying of the past. How can one remember, for instance, what it is like to see someone for the first time, when the image of them which you create in your mind is that of a face you have seen on a thousand occasions? Or how to remember a face seen only once? The image constantly amended with each successive act of recollection, until what is left bears little relation to what was originally seen. Whatever it really is (and I have often wondered), memory is not merely some kind of neurological video recorder.

But it was while in the bathroom, I feel sure of it, that the first manifestation took place of the story I hope now to write (if I am not disturbed too much from my work by the usual distractions which this daily journey offers me). Why should the idea have chosen that particular moment? Had it already perhaps been lurking incognito for a much longer time – for at least another ten years previously? I realized immediately that it must surely have been so.

Memories have their own vocabulary of associations and prompts. Often, while urinating, I am reminded of an unfortunate incident which took place when I was very young. In my haste to zip up my trousers after using the toilet, I managed to catch a very sensitive piece of skin between the two rows of teeth. Trying to pull the fastener back down so as to release myself only made the pain worse, and I cried out for help. My father came, and struggled with the zipper – making me yelp like a dog – but still to no avail. With his usual Biblical authority he said that this was the reason why button flies (such as he always wore) were far superior. None of which was of any help to me. Eventually, however, through the judicious use of some margarine, I was saved. Afterwards, my father laughed and said that if the operation had gone wrong I would have come out Jewish. Throughout half a century of living and peeing, the memory of that painful experience has come back to me time and again, whenever I am about to pull up my zip.

Fortunately, no such chain of memories intruded upon me on the night in question – the night which, I believe, was so crucial for everything that is to follow (since it was the night of this novel’s conception) – for the simple reason that I did not put on my trousers when I left my wife to go to the bathroom. Had I done so, then I would no doubt have found myself thinking again about my father, and all the many ways in which I had failed him; and then Duncan and Giovanna, and Charles King and all the other characters who would begin to occupy my thoughts for the following ten years might never have been able to walk, unannounced, into my imagination. But no such urinary madeleine appeared to disrupt the flow of thoughts; instead some other impulse prompted my mind. Some random observation – of the cold bathroom perhaps, or of my own sensations, became combined with another memory – less distant, and together these produced the germ of the story which I have successfully put off writing until today. What prompt or stimulus might have led my mind in the direction which it took? Probably something which would otherwise have been completely insignificant; like when you find yourself humming a melody, and trace back your thoughts until you realize that the casual remark of another person, or a word you read, or some object, has been the origin of a chain of events culminating in a tune which you can’t get out of your head. The novel I intend to write has felt rather like this. I say it all began that night as I stood in the bathroom, but this moment was itself a culmination of some other hidden process. But if I spend any more time thinking about it, then we can be sure it will be at least another ten years before I get anything done at all.

I relieved myself, and I did not suffer any sensations which might have carried me back to childhood memories of my father. But something made me think of a chance encounter long ago, and then I saw them, Duncan and Giovanna, meeting one day on a train. Where had these people come from? Where were they going? (Does anyone ever know where he has come from, or where he is going?)

My mind had now found a new association with which to torture me. Because whenever my wife and I now made love, I found that the act stimulated thoughts of these two mysterious people. They grew within me, resisting every effort I would make to suppress them. What are you thinking? my wife would ask, and I would have to dream up an appropriate lie, since really I was thinking about Giovanna, and whether she might be of the feline type or the lupine.

During the day, when I would get on with my paid work, it would be easy to forget all about those characters (teaching is such a wonderful way of making sustained mental activity quite impossible). It was during the nights that they would creep back – not every night, but frequently nevertheless. And whenever I saw them again, and the story which was beginning to encrust them, it always seemed slightly altered from the time before. Again, this might have been a trick of my imperfect memory. Or else they had begun – as writers always say – to ‘take on a life of their own’.

But I was not happy with the thought of these foreign lives springing up in my head, especially when they caused me such trouble in giving an honest answer to my wife’s customary post-coital interrogations. Because whenever she gave with a sigh that rhetorical question ‘what are you thinking?’, I was in fact thinking about how I might appropriately begin a novel about fate, and the strange contortions of history; and it would be about two people who meet on a train, and the turn of events (wholly arbitrary, like all fiction) which has caused them to come together in this way. Even less chance then, of confessing to my wife the thoughts which were distracting me – she would ask who was this Giovanna, and why did I propose to write about her instead of my own wife, and then I should no doubt have been caught in the trap of discussing in too much detail a past which I had always presented to her in carefully selected highlights.

It was, I am sure, during that moment in the bathroom that the whole story began – or at least its first embryonic version. During the years to follow, it was a story which would be rewritten in my mind countless times. Had I chosen to begin setting it down a year ago, it would all have gone completely differently; Duncan would have discovered the truth he sought concerning that fatal car crash, and Charles King would have been forced to confess everything to the younger man. And if I were to wait another year, no doubt there would be other differences; perhaps Duncan and Giovanna would finally come together in an embrace which I now feel determined to deny them. If I were to record all the stories which those poor people have endured already in my head, I should need a dozen novels, not just one. But the time has come now for me to choose the one which will be committed to paper. How sad it is to have to make that choice, and bid a final farewell to all those alternative scenarios. Rather like the fond adieu you must make to a world full of women, when you at last decide on one with whom to spend the rest of your life. Had your choice been otherwise, who can know whether things would have been better or worse; one can only say that it would all have been different.

But of course, one can extend this reasoning into every aspect of one’s life – by taking any particular course of action, one denies and loses for ever all the other paths along which one could have ventured. Sad, that life should have to be a gradual pruning of that great tree of possibilities, until one is left with a single trunk, leading to a single branch, and a single twig on the end of which one’s life reaches its ultimate conclusion.

And so I continued to dream of that other world in my imagination, and I began to feel like the most abject and faithless husband. When my wife would ask me what I was thinking about, I would long to tell her the truth; that I was thinking about how I ought to begin the novel I would one day write, about a man and a woman who meet on a train. And if I did tell her, then she would smile and ask if she were that woman, and I should have to tell her no, that it was another woman I was imagining, called Giovanna. And then she would pout with dismay, and she would berate me for my cruelty in talking about another woman while I lay with her. She would be jealous and hurt, and our life would be a misery until I promised to cease thinking of the invented woman whose face and voice refused to quit my mind. I knew I could never confess my fantasies, and this only made them all the more stubborn in their relentless growth, and sent their roots further into the depths of my brain. I longed to be able to tell my wife everything; to brave her wrath, or scorn, and perhaps even persuade her to grow as interested as I myself was in the thoughts which were my delight and constant burden. But since I could never bring myself to discuss it with her, I was never able to resolve the question of how to embark on a story which I already saw in my head in a complete yet inexpressible form. If only I could sort out the first chapter, then surely everything else would naturally follow? But in order to make that initial step, I would first have to be able to overcome the sweet sense of guilt which coloured my speculations. I would have to tell my wife everything.

And this in turn became a scene which I saw and rewrote again and again – this confession to her of my thoughts. It was a scene which grew in my mind in just the same way as the story which it concerned. Once I could get things right with her, then I would be able to put aside all furtiveness, and set about fashioning the elusive first chapter. It was a problem which remained unresolved for ten years.

And it is only now – now that I am alone in the world – that I can see with sufficient clarity what the true opening should have been for this novel; an opening which denied itself to me for a decade but now emerges from the shadows of loneliness and sorrow, and presents itself to me like a new-born child.

A man is lying in bed with his wife; they have just made the most joyous act of love, and she asks him what he is thinking about. When he tells her, she does not frown or look annoyed. Nor does she express any displeasure when he says that he is thinking of the beginning of a novel – a novel which one day he will write and they will read together, the two of them, when they are old and past caring about life’s difficulties. A novel about two people who meet on a train. She asks him excitedly to tell her about it, and so he says that it all begins with an image; the image of a motor car crashing through a barrier, and tumbling down a hill. And now she tells him that she would like to hear the rest of it.

1

It sounded no different from pushing an old, empty car down over a hill in order to get rid of it; the speed at which it had approached the bend, and the efforts of the driver to save himself – if he had had time to make any – did nothing to alter the impression that it was only useless junk which was crashing heavily in the darkness through low bushes. And the hillside was being littered with the contents of a suitcase – socks, underwear, trousers – and the contents of a briefcase also, or perhaps a file or folder – papers were being scattered. All of this, they would have to go over carefully afterwards. They would gather every document they could find, for subsequent inspection. Then they would take out the sheaf of typed notes they had been given and throw them, a handful at a time, into the air so that in the darkness the breeze would catch them and they would fall naturally amongst the trail of clothing, metal parts and other rubbish. And then they would have gone back up to the roadside – how many of them were there? Difficult to tell – two or three might be enough. Perhaps one of them would have remembered to check that the driver had not survived, or would not survive. Perhaps they would have done him that final service. Then back to the roadside – all quiet. The road brushed clean of the fine black gravel at the bend; the roadsign corrected – a row of chevrons, white on black, pointing to the left; the metal board inverted and screwed back in place – the chevrons pointing to the right. And on the road itself, a black rubber solution easily removed with industrial solvent – the word SLOW revealed in white paint.

Had you been there to see it, you might have been disappointed by the ordinariness – indeed, the banality of the scene. The white Morris Commonwealth hitting the barrier, the heavy crunching. All quite undramatic – not at all like the films. Not in slow motion, but still ponderous and heavy, and not a good way to die. And all his things coming out of the door when it flew open, when it was pulled back on itself and crumpled under the body of the car then reappeared as the car turned again, the door flapping like an injury and the suitcase opening on impact. The briefcase opening on impact. The things, all those things left behind. The socks, the underwear, those trousers. The typewritten papers. The briefcase opening on impact. Or perhaps a file or a folder.

And when Duncan wasn’t looking out of the window of the train he was reading a story by Alfredo Galli about a young man who sees a girl sitting in a bus and immediately falls in love with her. The bus is just pulling away from the stop as the man walks past. He sees the girl sitting near the back – she looks up and he feels he must speak to her. He tries to get on the bus before it picks up speed but the doors are already closing and the bus goes away with the beautiful girl looking round over her shoulder. So he remembers the number of the bus and every day for a month he rides this route as often as he can – his job as a cafe waiter permitting – but he never sees her. Then one night who should walk into the cafe where he works but the girl – alone – and she goes and sits in a corner and brings out a little book – like a diary – and she starts writing in it. And he is on his way to take her order when another waiter called Luigi – whom he hates – beats him to it and fetches her a vermouth and chats to her a little before he goes to serve another customer. And although he is desperate to catch her eye she only writes in the little notebook or occasionally stares out into space and he thinks she looks somehow sad ‘like a nightingale which has lost its song.’

The train had reached the next station and Duncan became aware of people getting on – his solitude was threatened. Faces drifted past the window, peering inside, looking for spaces, and figures were moving down the aisle. Don’t think now about the crash.

a nightingale which has lost its song. He went through his shift that night like an automaton; aware only of the girl in the corner of the cafe.

Someone had put a bag onto the seat opposite. Duncan glanced up and saw a girl with black hair – foreign looking. Now she was putting things up onto the luggage rack. She looked down at him – asked if the seat was free. Italian accent. He gave a nod, then she sat down and began to arrange some things on the table. A paper bag moist with sandwiches; a book.

The girl wrote with an air of concentrated absence, like a machine at work – though the steady movement of the pen resembled more some blind process of nature, which the young man watching found at once compelling and irritating – for the girl seemed wholly oblivious to everything around her; wholly uninterested.

Duncan heard a voice: ‘I see you are reading Alfredo Galli.’

And across the pages of her book, the pen flicked like a mayfly.

Reading on a train is not like reading in the comfort of your home, where you can relax, stretch your legs, be alone. Be undisturbed, and break off only when you decide you want to. When you read on a train there are always other competing demands for your attention; stations appear and fill for a moment the little world of the window beside you, people come and steal parts of your space. They talk to you. And then other stories intrude on the one you are trying so hard to follow. The story you read on the train is a different one from when you are at home; it is a story full of interruptions, punctuations, digressions.

The Italian girl had been in Britain for a week. And now she was telling him why she didn’t like London.

‘At the Underground station – at King’s Cross – I got robbed. The very first day I arrived here! Can you believe it? I was getting onto the train and there were some people pushing behind me to get on, and other ones were trying to get off, and I was in the middle like a little squashed beetle – I thought oh no, help – and then when I got on and the train started I realized after a while that my purse was gone! Not much in it, thank God – a few pounds only. But now I have learned to be more careful.’

The story you read on a train is a fragile, delicate thing; and though you look after it as best you can, still it can so easily become lost in the forest of other stories which you must journey through. She’s not going to let you read, Duncan. Don’t fight it. Her name is Giovanna.

Giovanna is brought up in Cremona, and spends her childhood longing for escape. She goes to Milan and is a student there, and many young men fall in love with her, and she falls in love with many men, but the ones who want her never coincide with the ones whom she wants, and she sometimes feels destined to grow into a lonely old woman dressed in black who sits at her balcony looking down on a world filled with regrets and unfulfilled longing. Or else she might compromise her high ideals and marry Fabio, who is sweet but tediously unrelenting in his efforts to please her. Fabio moves to Zurich, and every year for the rest of his life sends her a card on her name day.

She soon tires of university and quits her course, then finds work in a picture library, where she is hired because the boss wants to sleep with her, but he never succeeds, and she does her job well, finding appropriate photographic images to satisfy the requirements of the publishers, advertising agencies and other clients. For holiday brochures, there are photographs of Paris, Istanbul, Vienna and all the other great cities of the world. There is the Taj Mahal in full sunlight, or in the cool of the evening, or even a delayed exposure night shot with a full moon superimposed above. Travel pictures are Giovanna’s speciality. But then there are also the portraits of anonymous models, the photographs of every type of car, every type of salad. Photographs of new born babies, of corpses, of machinery. Giovanna grows tired of her job, and not only because of the occasional lecherous remark from her boss. In the room full of travel photographs, filed, labelled and cross-indexed like dead butterflies, she senses a world outside that is revolving without her.

But she told Duncan none of this, and when she got up to go to the toilet he was glad to return to his book.

The girl remained in the cafe for some time. She had another vermouth – which Luigi also brought. The young man watched the strange girl with growing fascination. He tried to compare her with his memory of when he had first seen her, sitting on the bus weeks before. He paid little attention to his own work – customers got the wrong change, or the wrong order. For more than an hour she sat in the corner, making her drink last. When she didn’t write she would stare sadly at a point somewhere in space. Then, while Luigi was busy with a customer, she quickly got up and walked out.

‘Hey!’ The young man ran after her. The fact that she had not paid her bill was more convenient than necessary. She had gone out into the street – he followed. She ran, and he did too. The little book fell from her hand or her purse, and as he picked it up from the gutter and reverently wiped the dirt from the cover, the girl escaped from his sight and was gone.

2

Approaching the bend. Night. If you had been there you might have heard the dull pop of the gun. Not a shot ‘ringing’ out, like it always says in the books, but a sound like a small firework, or even a car tyre bursting; an unexciting sound, and the white car hitting the barrier, rolling and turning. Crashing down the hill-side.

Duncan looked up and saw that Giovanna had come back, and he watched the curve of her hip as she slid behind the table and sat down again opposite him. Her hair seemed fuller now and freshly combed. She saw that he wanted to read, so she picked up her own book and the thick paperback fell open like a sliced fruit at the page she had marked.

At work in Milan, Giovanna makes a date with Franco, who runs errands and is three years younger than she. In her flat, she lies on the couch as Franco’s inexperienced hands work clumsily on the buttons of her blouse, and she watches the silent flickering television screen. Then there is a news flash, tanks are moving in and out of searchlight beams and the red arcs of tracer bullets are finding windows, walls and people. She reaches for the remote control and Franco is annoyed, but too young and shy to complain, and she turns up the volume so as not to hear him. The announcer counts the people he has seen killed before him during the previous twenty minutes, when a peaceful demonstration turned into a riot. She sends Franco home, then cries for the people who have lost their lives, and for the life which she is wasting.

The ticket collector was coming down the carriage.

‘Right. There you are love. Thank you sir.’ The scrutiny of the ticket collector. ‘Ah. You’ve got a blue saver here.’

‘Yes,’ said Duncan, ‘it’s a blue day today, isn’t it?’

‘No, white savers or standard fare today sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to pay the difference.’ The ticket collector consulted the yellowed pages of his fare manual. ‘That’s another two pounds please.’

Duncan looked in his wallet and found a one pound note and another four shillings in change. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got enough on me. I was sure Sunday was a blue day.’

‘Not in Summer, sir.’

‘But it’s only April.’

‘Well, Summer starts early here you know. If you haven’t got it then I can take your details and you can send the money later. If you could just show me your identity card, I’ll take your name and address.’

Giovanna interrupted: ‘Duncan, please, how much do you need?’

‘Oh, no, it’s alright.’

‘Please. What do you need? I have two pounds, look. Take it, please.’

‘Well, how about if you lend me six bob and I can pay you back?’

When Duncan reached London on Friday he was carrying nine pounds and seven shillings. His fares, food and other expenses must have come to three pounds and three shillings. He had given five pounds to tip the man at the Office of Public Records. He would know to take more next time.

‘It’s very kind of you.’ Duncan offered to send her the money, but she only laughed and told him to think nothing of it. And Duncan consoled himself with the thought that since she was a foreigner she could easily afford it.

For six months Giovanna does nothing. She continues to work at the picture library, has a few more dates with Franco, but tires of his company. Every day the television brings news of a world situation changing too rapidly for anyone to comprehend. Old ideologies are replaced by new ones, former enemies become allies. There is the changing of names – names of political parties, of government bodies, of countries. All of this happens on the television, and Giovanna’s life seems trivial and insubstantial by comparison. There are the demonstrations in the streets; the faces of the protestors – students, workers, artists. She is exhilarated by the prospect of revolution. She longs to go and be part of it all. But for more than a year Giovanna still does nothing.

Now they were both reading their books. Duncan eased his stiff legs back out into the space from which they had retreated, until he met the obstacle of her feet.

‘Pardon.’

‘Sorry.’

Reading on the train is not like reading in the park, when it’s sunny and you can sit on a bench and stretch your legs and forget all your worries. Or on the grass; you can lie down and relax (after you checked for dog shit of course). You can lie on your side with the sunshine so bright on the page you have to screw up your eyes (it’s always shiny bleached paper on the imports, not like the cardboard rubbish) – but that’s not so good. It gets uncomfortable. Or on your back, with the book like a sunshade, and this is fine until your arms get stiff. Then you stop for a while and watch the girls go by in those tops they’re all wearing now, and maybe one of them will look at you.

The girl’s diary was dirty from where it had landed in the gutter. He wiped the cover, then waited in the street unsure of what to do. The girl had gone, so he went back to the cafe. Luigi was laughing. ‘When you chase a customer for the price of two vermouths then you are certainly in love! But don’t waste your time. I’ve already made a date with her.’

Better to shut your eyes now Duncan, and pretend to be asleep.

The car approaching the bend. Your father’s white Morris Commonwealth approaching the bend, and then some obstacle, hastily erected – a fallen tree, perhaps, or another car, sitting in the road in the dark, and your father’s inattention; his preoccupation, and the attempt to stop in time – the white Morris Commonwealth hitting the barrier.

Duncan felt the muscles relaxing in his legs; he felt his knees gently falling from the position he had held them in. He saw the flicker of sunlight through his closed eyelids. And he felt the side of his knee reach a part of Giovanna’s leg. Only the vaguest of sensations; probably only her loose jeans that he was touching, so that she hadn’t noticed. But he left his leg there.

(In the park, you see a pretty girl walk by. You call out from where you are lying on the grass and ask her the time, and she calls back and walks on, and you feel rather foolish because your own wristwatch is plainly visible. Though it might have stopped, of course. In any case, what’s the harm in being obvious? Sometimes they like that.)

With the rocking of the train, Duncan’s leg was bumping softly against hers, though she wasn’t moving away.

And if you could have been there, Duncan – if you could have been able to see it. Nearly twenty years ago – you were only a young child. Your father’s white Morris Commonwealth hitting the barrier …

The rocking of his knee against the unmoving obstacle. Duncan could feel the material of his jeans giving with the slight pressure against her leg; a pattern of changing sensations as the material crumpled and moved, from which to infer the nature of her limb – its shape, texture and other qualities. From this point of contact, he could try to reconstruct the rest of her body.