Speaking of divots, I used to have a mission of replacing them. Well, not a mission, though I would get into a great rage at those who left them where they lay, wet and knobbled, like fresh-squeezed turds. This was when I lived on the side of that hill on Haggard Head, above the sea, and my garden, such as it was, abutted the seventh green — or do they say hole, the seventh hole? — of a public golf course, where anyone could hire a set of clubs at so much an hour and there were no green fees. The place was for the most part deserted, apart from the odd, solitary retiree stoically practising his swing in the dewy hour at dawn or eve, but on weekends and bank holidays feral youths would come by train and bus from the city’s slums and hack up and down the course like so many wandering and malfunctioning windmills. I was never a golfer myself, need I say, but I had got into the habit of walking the links — links, that is another nice old specialised word, like divot — especially on those days when my mind seized up and I could not work, and increasingly there were many such. It pained me to see the fairways sliced and gouged. The torn-out sods, retrieved and turned right side up, now looked more like green scalps, or merkins, maybe. They made a satisfying squelch when I trod them back into the ground. What did I think I was doing, patching up this bit of the poor earth’s epidermis? But I cherish the world, it is true, have I not made that clear already? Should have been a poet, perhaps, apostrophising skylarks and doting on daffodils. You will have noticed my way with words, supposedly rare in a man of my calling. Words are so friendly, so accommodating, so loosely adaptable, not like numbers, with their tiresome insistence on meaning only what they mean and nothing more. But what they have that words have not is rigour, and rigour was what seduced me from the start, the promise of one firm thing in an infirm world. It all seemed so simple, early on. I loved the process, the slow accumulating of many tiny parts into a vast and gorgeous gewgaw the joy of which was its utter inutility. What did it matter if some other, a mere technician, should extract from the middle of my mesh a bristling filament that fitted perfectly a slot in one of his infernal machines? Apply, apply away! — that was my cry. And apply they did, adapting my airy fancies to invent all sorts of surprising and useful gimcrackery, from the conversion of salt water into an endless source of energy to rocket ships that will fly the net of time. I was resented, of course; my kind always are. Benny used to warn me, but I never listened. Benny pretends to be a man of the people, though he is just like me, in his deepest heart. We are all alike, all we Olympians. We are supposed to be the celebrants of all that is vital and gay and light, and so we are but, oh, we are cold, cold.
I have left Benny stalled there in the middle of that room, with the evening light eclipsed and rain coming. He is on his way to me, and in no hurry. Let him loiter, there is time enough, I am going nowhere, not yet. I feel suddenly a sad fondness for him, poor unlovely outcast creature, as I felt earlier for my son — I must be softening, here at the end. Benny is a solitary, we have that too in common.
He makes his way into the big central hallway. The aqueous light here is oyster-grey and glimmers on polished tiles and picture-glass. A leaning mirror gapes in mute amazement at all it sees. The rain is a steady, monotonous drumming now, as if the summer day had got a serious, grim new task, and the glass roof high above streams and shimmers, the glass panels darkened to a lambent shade of sea-green, and everything underneath it is adrizzle. He senses another creature nearby, and looks about him alertly. Rex the dog is crouching under an old striped sofa that stands against the wall beside a potted palm. He pants and shivers, big drops splashing off the end of his tongue, for he is terrified of thunder. Benny goes and squats down and talks to him, but the dog only bares his teeth and growls. “All right, then,” Benny says indulgently, rising. “All right.” He goes to the foot of the stairs and listens upwards, straining to hear; is it the sound of the rain or is someone speaking above, a feebly fretful drone that rises and falls? He ascends three steps of the staircase, stops, listens again. It is definitely a voice, murmurmurmur, a sigh, a softly plaining cry, murmur again. This is what Benny loves, what all the gods love, to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others. See him stealthily climbing there, face lifted eagerly and a dab of rain-light gleaming on his stub of nose, his fleshy fist mounting the banister-rail beside him in little hops, like a hunched and pallid toad. I could trip him up, wrap his trousers round his knees and send him tumbling arse over tip to bang his big fat head on those black-and-white tiles. But I will not.
He has to cross three sides of the landing before he finds where the voice is coming from. A door stands conveniently ajar. It is dim inside the room where the curtains are closed. She lies on a couch against the wall with a brown blanket pulled to her throat. Her arms are free of the blanket and she clutches something to her breast, a shapeless something, red and soft. Her son is seated beside her on a little chair and strokes her forehead with one of his huge hands, so gently, strokes and strokes. Ursula’s eyes are closed. She murmurs a gabble of words, with frequent sighs, frequent moans. The rain rattles furiously against the unseen window, booms upon the glazed roof above. Benny presses himself to the wall, all eyes and ears. Is it not a quaint scene? — a moment out of Watteau, it might be, these figures about their ambiguous business, in uncertain light, as the day wanes. Let us leave them there, the three of them, for now, the languishing lady and attendant man, and the listener by the doorway, a meddling jester.
My heavens, what a downpour! Helen is drenched, to the very skin, her dress in big patches darkened to navy-blue and clinging to her knees, her thighs, her breasts. She arrives in a flurry, blinking the rain from her eyelashes and laughing, the kitchen door banging behind her. Even the band of her pants is shiver-makingly wet against her belly. “Look at me!” she cries in happy dismay, and holds up her hands and flutters her fingers, sprinkling the flagstones with drops the size of pennies. Ivy Blount, who has been sitting at the table shelling peas, regards her for a moment without moving, her face reflecting the bedraggled young woman’s undiminished light, for the rain has only made her more radiant, pinking her skin all over and turning her hair to polished wheat. She kicks off her muddied sandals and reaches behind her and with an effort undoes the top three buttons at the back of her dress — goodness, is she going to take it off? My father will faint if she does. But wait, Ivy is not alone. Who is it loitering there by the bog-oak dresser? Duffy, is that you? Aha, my bold spalpeen. He has a sheepish air and seems bemused. He does look like a man who has been accepted in a proposal he cannot remember having made. Ivy too is not herself: there is a hectic flush to her cheeks and her eyes are quick and bright. Have the words been spoken, has the deal been closed? I think so, I think I foresee strewn rose petals and the chanting of epithalamia. What a wily matchmaker I have proved, after all. “I’ll get a towel,” Ivy says.