What particularly attracted me to Turner’s watercolor, said Austerlitz, was not merely the similarity of the scene in Lausanne to the funeral at Cutiau, but the memory it prompted in me of my last walk with Gerald in the early summer of 1966, through the vineyards above Morges on the banks of Lake Geneva. During my subsequent studies of Turner’s life and his sketchbooks I discovered the fact, entirely insignificant in itself but nonetheless one I found curiously moving, that in 1798 he, Turner, had himself visited the estuary of the Mawddach on a journey through Wales, and that at the time he was exactly the same age as I was at the funeral in Cutiau. As I speak of it now, said Austerlitz, it is as if I had been sitting in the south-facing drawing room of Andromeda Lodge among the mourners only yesterday, as if I could still hear their quiet murmuring, and Adela saying she didn’t know what she would do with herself now, all alone in that big house. Gerald, who was then in his last year of school and had come over from Oswestry especially for the funeral, told me about the lack of any improvement in conditions at Stower Grange, which he described as a horrible inkblot disfiguring the souls of its pupils for ever. He was kept from going mad, said Gerald, only by the fact that since joining the Air Cadet Corps he had been able to fly over the whole wretched place in a Chipmunk and get right away from it once a week. The further you can rise above the earth the better, he said, and for that same reason he had decided to study astronomy. About four o’clock I went down to Barmouth station with Gerald. When I returned—dusk was already falling, said Austerlitz, and fine rain hung suspended in the air, apparently without sinking to the ground—Adela came to meet me from the misty depths of the garden, muffled up in greenish-brown tweed with millions of tiny drops of water clinging to the fine fuzz of its outline and forming a kind of silvery radiance around her. She was carrying a large bunch of rust-colored chrysanthemums in the crook of her right arm, and when we had walked side by side across the yard without a word and were standing in the doorway, she raised her free hand and put the hair back from my forehead, as if she knew, in this one gesture, that she had the gift of being remembered. Yes, I can still see Adela, said Austerlitz; in my mind she has remained unchanged, as beautiful as she was then. At the end of those long summer days we quite often played badminton together in the ballroom of Andromeda Lodge, which had been empty since the war, while Gerald fed and watered his pigeons before night fell. The feathered shuttlecock flew between us as we struck it back and forth. The trajectory it followed, always turning on its way although you could not have said how, was a streak of white drawn through the evening hour, and I could have sworn that Adela often hovered in the air just above the parquet floor for much longer than the force of gravity allowed. After our game we usually stayed in the ballroom for a little while, looking at the images cast on the wall opposite the tall, arched window by the last rays of the sun shining low through the moving branches of a hawthorn, until at last they were extinguished. There was something fleeting, evanescent about those sparse patterns appearing in constant succession on the pale surface, something which never went beyond the moment of its generation, so to speak, yet here, in this intertwining of sunlight and shadow always forming and re-forming, you could see mountainous landscapes with glaciers and ice fields, high plateaux, steppes, deserts, fields full of flowers, islands in the sea, coral reefs, archipelagoes and atolls, forests bending to the storm, quaking grass and drifting smoke. And once, I remember, said Austerlitz, as we gazed together at this slowly fading world, Adela leaned towards me and asked: Do you see the fronds of the palm trees, do you see the caravan coming through the dunes over there? By the time Austerlitz repeated this question of Adela’s, a question still imprinted on his memory, we were on our way back into the city from Greenwich. Our taxi made slow progress in the dense evening traffic. It had begun to rain; the beams of headlights gleamed on the asphalt, cutting through the windscreen covered with silvery beads. It took us nearly an hour to travel a distance of not much more than three miles to Tower Bridge by way of Greek Street, Evelyn Street, Lower Road, and Jamaica Road. Austerlitz leaned back with his arms round his rucksack, staring ahead in silence. Perhaps he had closed his eyes, I thought, but I did not venture to glance sideways at him. Only at Liverpool Street Station, where he waited with me in McDonald’s until my train left, and after a casual remark about the glaring light which, so he said, allowed not even the hint of a shadow and perpetuated the momentary terror of a lightning flash—only at Liverpool Street did he resume his story. I never saw Adela again after the day of the funeral, he began, which was my own fault, because I did not once return to England all the time I was in Paris. And then, he continued, when I had taken up my appointment in London and went to Cambridge to see Gerald, who had now finished his studies and was beginning his research work, Andromeda Lodge had been sold and Adela had gone to North Carolina with an entomologist called Willoughby. Gerald, who at the time had rented a cottage in the tiny village of Quy not far from Cambridge airfield and had bought a Cessna with his share of the proceeds from the sale of the property, kept coming back to his passion for flying in all our conversations, whatever their ostensible subjects. I remember, for instance, said Austerlitz, that once, when we were discussing our schooldays at Stower Grange, he told me at length how after I had gone up to Oxford he spent many of the endless hours of study at the school working out an ornithological system based, as its principal criterion, on the degree of a bird’s aptitude for flight, and according to Gerald, said Austerlitz, whatever way he modified this system pigeons always led the field, not just for their speed in traveling very long distances but for their navigational abilities, which set them apart from all other living creatures. You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle of a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will infallibly find its way home. To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin. At least, Gerald had said, the scientific explanations known to him claiming that pigeons take their bearings from the constellations, or air currents, or magnetic fields are not much more conclusive than the various theories he worked out himself as a boy of twelve, hoping that once he had solved this problem he would be able to make the pigeons fly the other way, for instance from their home in Barmouth to his place of exile in Oswestry, and he kept imagining them suddenly sailing down to him out of the sky, with sunlight filtered through the feathers of their motionless, outstretched wings, and landing with a faint coo in their throats on the sill of the window where, as he said, he often stood for hours on end. The sense of liberation he had felt when he first became aware of the lifting capacity of the air beneath him in one of the Cadet Corps planes, Gerald said, was indescribable, and he himself still remembered, added Austerlitz, how proud, indeed positively radiant Gerald had been when once, in the late summer of 1962 or 1963, they took off together from the runway of Cambridge airfield for an evening flight. The sun had set not long before we started, but as soon as we gained altitude we were surrounded once again by a glittering brightness which did not fade until we were going south, following the white strip of the Suffolk coast, when shadows emerged from the depths of the sea, gradually rising and inclining towards us, until the last gleam of light was extinguished on the horizons of the western world. Soon the shapes of the landscape below, the woods and the pale stubble fields, could be distinguished only as shadowy outlines, and I shall never forget, said Austerlitz, how the curving estuary of the Thames emerged before us as if out of nothing, a dragon’s tail, black as cart grease, winding its way through the falling night, while the lights of Canvey Island, Sheerness, and Southend-on-Sea came on beside it. Later, as we described a wide arc over Picardy in the darkness and then turned back on course for England, if we raised our eyes from the illuminated board instruments to look through the glazed cockpit we could see the whole vault of heaven as I had never seen it before, apparently at a standstill but in truth turning slowly, with the constellations of the Swan, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, the Charioteer, the Corona Borealis, and all the rest almost lost in the shimmering dust of the myriads of nameless stars sprinkled over the sky. It was in the autumn of 1965, continued Austerlitz, who had drifted for some time in his memories, that Gerald began developing what we now know was his trail-blazing hypothesis on the so-called Eagle Nebula in the constellation of the Serpent. He spoke of huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms projecting several light-years into the void, where new stars were born in a process of condensation steadily intensifying under the influence of gravity. I remember Gerald’s saying that there were positive nurseries of stars out there, a claim which I recently found confirmed in a newspaper report accompanying one of the spectacular photographs sent back to earth from the Hubble telescope on its further journey into space. At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies.