X.

The aspens' absence beside Tre Rhiw, as Paul came up through the garden, disfigured everything. Planes of sky and slanting field were exposed in a new relationship with the house, which was thrust nakedly forward. On the near side of the garden wall was a line of new, very young trees, each with its stake and its beige protective casing this planting undertaken without him was another shock. Around them the earth was still raw, but above the little casings leaves of brilliant yellow-green fluttered out like flags, flaunting their growth. Elise must be watering them every night, in this dry heat. The doors to the workshop were open at both ends and Paul walked through it, half-expecting to find her.

The house door stood open too. He heard the television as he crossed the yard, where the sunlight struck with a new ferocity because it wasn't filtered through the trees; for a moment he was blind, coming into the smothering dimness of the hallway. Peering into the cubbyhole where the television pictures weakly danced, he took in a lungful of its familiar stale morning air: musty cushions, little girls' farting, souring milk spilled from their cereal bowls.

h.e.l.lo! It's Daddy! Becky said in cheerful surprise, making no move.

Where is he?

Joni had to crane to see him around the bulk of Gerald, who was slumped on the sofa between the girls. The girls were snuggled against him, and Gerald had his arms round both of them. Before Paul's eyes learned to adjust, he seemed more like a blockage of the light than a positive presence. Then he made out where the black hair was pushed behind Gerald's ears; the ears stood out as pale, delicate for a man of his build. He was looking up at Paul.

Oh, it's you! said Elise, arriving out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her striped butcher's ap.r.o.n. She was wearing her hair in some new way, pulled loosely into a tail at the nape of her neck; she must have allowed it to grow longer since he left. He hadn't thought he'd been away long enough for anyone's hair to grow.

You could have phoned, she said. To warn us you were coming.

But here I am. Who helped you put in the trees?

Gerald.

Gerald seemed to have gone back to watching the television. The presenters of these children's programmes were manic, they contorted their faces with dismay or were o.r.g.a.s.mic with enthusiasm.

I'll put coffee on, Elise said. Would you both like coffee?

Please, said Gerald, not looking up again.

Paul followed her into the kitchen. In the light he saw that his wife's hair was growing out, an inch from her parting: not grey exactly, but a faded neutral, weaker than the strong honey colour of the rest. He couldn't sit down yet, he was too restless, moving about the room, picking things up and putting them down the pepper grinder, blackboard for shopping lists, plastic bottle of washing-up liquid, vanilla pod in a jar of sugar as if they might have altered while he was away.

For goodness sake, said Elise, lifting the hotplate cover, putting on the kettle to boil. Sit down, Paul.

The kitchen smelled of baking, little cakes were cooling on a wire rack. He tried to catch her around the waist from behind. Something had changed in how she moved and held herself. He thought she was wearing an unfamiliar perfume.

Not yet, she said, pushing him away. Let me make this coffee. Why don't you put up the umbrella, and we'll have it in the yard? The weather's so lovely.

I noticed how, with the trees gone, the yard's in full sun.

We have to not be thinking of those trees all the time. It's pointless getting worked up about them.

Tell me about the day when Willis came back.

Not now.

She explained that she had paid for the new aspens out of Evelyn's money; she had thought it was a good thing to spend it on, something that would endure and would be a reminder to them of Evelyn, for at least as long as they lived at Tre Rhiw. Her tone was as if she was justifying herself, rather belligerently.

So far the new trees were doing fine, they had all survived.

Gerald dug and I gave the orders. We got them all planted in a day.

Good team.

It was good for him. Paul, he was in a bad way.

She dropped her voice, stirring the coffee in the pot, imagining Gerald must still be in the cubbyhole with the children. At that very moment Paul watched through the kitchen window as Gerald stepped out, blinking, into the yard. He stumbled, surprised by the bright light, unearthed from where he had been hibernating. Hands pushed in his pockets, head down, he started with his usual shambling walk down through the garden in the direction of the path along the river to the station. Paul didn't point out his departure to Elise.

When he was first here he couldn't read a book, or even a newspaper. I had to phone his department at the university, to say he was sick. Some days he didn't get up, except to use the lavatory. He lay there with his eyes closed, or watched television. He started to smell, even the girls noticed it. In the end I had to run a bath for him, I made him get in it, then while he was in I put his clothes in the washing machine. I bought him a toothbrush and clean underclothes. Ruth said I ought to get a doctor. I was frightened of him doing some harm to himself.

El, you should have told me how bad it was. I'd have come home.

I did try to tell you, when you phoned from Stella's.

Not the full story, not like this.

I asked him if I should get a doctor, and he said it would help if he had his antidepressants, so I drove into Cardiff to pick them up from his flat. You never told me what that place was like. It's a horror.

At the thought of the flat, the full coffee pot seemed to quake for a moment in her hand.

And did they help?

Did what help?

The antidepressants.

Oh, yes, I think they did. Anyway, he's much better than he was. Tell him the coffee's ready, would you?

He's gone. I watched him leave five minutes ago. I guess he didn't really want coffee.

Who's gone? Gerald? Where?

He walked down the garden, I presume in the direction of the station.

Elise ran out into the yard, then halfway down the garden, and stood shading her eyes with her hand, looking for Gerald; but he was out of sight. She rushed back into the kitchen, pulling off her ap.r.o.n, as if she was going to go after him. My G.o.d, you have no idea! What were you thinking of, to let him go? You have no idea how serious things have been here.

He seemed all right to me. He's a free man: if he wants to catch a train home, that's his business. You said he was better.

But does he have money for the train? Does he have his keys?

If he doesn't, then I suppose he'll have to come back.

Elise came at him with her fists upraised. Everything's been so uncertain. And then you come blundering back into it, with no comprehension.

She hit blows on Paul's shoulders and chest that were only slightly painful, distracting because he had to hold his face away from them while he tried to catch hold of her wrists. Then she smacked him hard across his cheek, which hurt more, so that he pushed her and she fell against the draining board. Crockery smashed into the sink.

Becky and Joni, roused from their television slump, watched from the door.

Where's Gerald? Becky asked, as if appealing for the one sane person in all this mess.

He's gone, Elise said, sounding blank, bereft.

She picked up a tea towel to wipe tears from her face, then reached out for one of the rock cakes cooling on the wire rack. I shouldn't eat these. The calories will only go straight to my thighs.

Paul poured the coffee and made the girls milkshakes. They all four sat subdued around the table, eating cake.

Gerald didn't come back.

In the afternoon Elise played Leonard Cohen in her workroom, while she worked on dismantling and repairing a broken old lacquer box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, that Ruth had bought in a country sale. Paul went through his post, which Elise had piled on the desk in his study, and his emails.

Something had happened between Gerald and Elise while he was away. Elise wouldn't talk about it.

If you mean s.e.x, she said, emphasising the word contemptuously, then you're barking up the wrong tree. I know how your mind works. But he isn't like you.

Paul tried to be reasonable. All right then, it wasn't s.e.x. I'm glad it wasn't.

How dare you? How dare you take yourself off and disappear to London without any warning or explanation, and then come back and think you can call me to account, that you've got any right to know about my private life?

I haven't got any right. I'm not asking you because of right.

When he said he loved her, she only sobbed furiously, carrying the plastic tub into the yard to hang out the washing. Paul guessed she had thrown herself at Gerald, and he had rebuffed her. Or that she had been planning on throwing herself, just about the time when he arrived home, spoiling everything. He found himself imagining in detail her going in to Cardiff to fetch Gerald's antidepressants, parking the car beside the gra.s.sy city recreation ground, looking for the number on the tall gloomy old house, using Gerald's keys to let herself into his flat: a busy competent woman, on a charitable errand. She would have been shocked by the mess; she must have saved up examples to exclaim over to Ruth afterwards: mouldy pitta breads in the fridge, the crack in the wall, the stained toilet. Perhaps she even washed some dishes. In his mind's eye, she wasn't in a hurry. He saw her closing the door behind her when she first arrived, leaning for a long time with her back against it, taking in everything. Before she even started looking for the pills, he imagined she sat down in one of Gerald's broken old armchairs, holding her bag on her lap, closing her eyes, laying her cheek against the greasy ancient chintz, just breathing in the empty s.p.a.ce, the stale hot air. In his pictures she had her hair fastened in the new way.

Gerald's different, Elise said. He lives more truthfully.

Paul was miserably perturbed and jealous, he tried to argue with her that truthful wasn't enough. It was one of the fixtures of their life together, that Elise found Gerald comical, and disapproved of his indifference to material things. But now she was suffering with a breathless excitement, she jumped whenever the phone rang, and sometimes Paul knew she had been crying. Paul slept in the cubbyhole. There was bedding already folded away on the sofa, which must have been Gerald's. In the middle of the night he woke up stifling, and had to go walking around outside in the gra.s.s, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, afraid of ticks on his bare legs. The stars shone brilliantly, the goats detached themselves, pale forms, from the surrounding dark, they came trotting over to the fence, eager with curiosity to watch whatever he was up to. An owl hunted in the fields nearby. He missed London.

Elise asked him about Pia's flat, but as if she couldn't make herself properly interested in his life there.

How's Pia then? What's this boyfriend of hers like?

He described Marek cautiously, making him out to be somewhat more sensible and businesslike than he really was, never mentioning the existence of Anna. He waited for Elise, who managed their bank accounts, to notice the missing money, but she didn't say anything, so either she didn't register it or didn't care. Perhaps she a.s.sumed he'd given it to Pia. When he spoke to Pia on the phone she said everything was fine. The swelling in her ankles had gone down, they were pleased with her at the hospital. She had been to visit Annelies, it hadn't gone too badly.

Paul took over watering the new trees. The drought was supposed to end soon, according to the weather forecast. James Willis delivered the logs cut from the old trees, and Paul paid for them, stacking them in the outhouse, even though when he looked it up he found that poplar wood wasn't supposed to burn well. One evening they all went out with Ruth to watch for otters: apparently there was a family of them living further up the river. Ruth's husband had seen them playing in the moonlight. Elise shivered in her sleeveless dress, because they'd left home in the late sunshine and she'd forgotten to bring a cardigan. Ruth warned the girls that the otters were shy, they probably wouldn't put in an appearance. She showed them a dusty depression on the bank that might be where the otters slept by day, and their spraints nearby, blackish messes of fish scales and fragments of bone, probably eel bones. They watched from behind a screen of hazel stems on the opposite bank; the moon rose out of sight, its glow seeping into the sky from behind the hill, then sailed overhead.

Paul was touched by the girls' obedience and patience; he felt the discipline in their little bodies huddled against him. Elise wrapped one of the blankets she'd brought to sit on around her shoulders they waited for more than an hour, but didn't see anything. Becky pleaded for them to stay longer. She was sure she had spotted something in the water, 'a little ripple, like a nose poking up', but Elise complained she was going numb with cold. She tried to keep her voice perky and joking, but Paul could hear the effort in it. On the way back Becky sulked; Joni whined and was tired, and Paul carried her. It was the first time she'd let him pick her up since he'd been home. She laid her head on his shoulder, her fine baby hair tickled his cheek. That morning at breakfast she hadn't allowed him to cut off the top of her egg; pouting, she had said she wanted Gerald, 'Instead of you.'

Paul began writing something new: not a memoir exactly, but a recollection of his earliest interest in nature. He tried not to think too hard about it, but felt hopeful that it might come to something. At junior school he had won as a school prize a book on exploring the countryside, which had set out all the different animal footprints diagrammatically, as neatly labelled black ink blots: badger, fox, roe deer, red deer, and so on. He had dedicated himself to learning them, along with the animal droppings, the leaf shapes and the different nuts and berries, as if nature was a kind of code, like learning Latin; if he only worked hard enough at breaking the code, he believed he could break through to the mythic world of beauty he intuited behind it. He borrowed more nature books from the central library in Birmingham, catching the bus into town to change them on Sat.u.r.day mornings. Afterwards he used to meet his father, who knocked off on Sat.u.r.days at midday, outside the corrugated-metal gates of the screw factory where he worked. If Paul got there early, then he started in on the pages of the first book, leaning with his back against the gates in the cobbled street whose walls were the windowless back ends of factories. It hadn't occurred to him to look for nature anywhere in the world around him. The books were safe in their nylon string bag between his feet. In those days, even at weekends, he would have been wearing ankle socks and his school lace-ups, his skinny knees would have been bare below his shorts.

Go and make sure he's all right, Elise said, meaning Gerald.

It was first thing in the morning, she was in the bathroom still in her nightdress, cleaning her teeth, spitting into the sink, watching Paul in the mirror.

You go.

He had come upstairs from his sofa in the cubbyhole, needing to pee; he wasn't sure whether, the way things were between them, he should go ahead while she was in the room.

Her eyes fixed him. Wordless, she scrubbed vigorously behind her back molars.

He'll be fine. We'd have heard if he wasn't.

She spat again. All right then. I'll go, she said.

Of course he might not be there. In the summer he spends a lot of time at his parents'.

She ran the tap in a fierce spurt.

Later that morning he heard her drive off in the car. He walked around the place, having it all to himself for the first time since he'd been back. He tried the drawers in the lacquered box Elise was fixing, used the hose to water the trees, and then the vegetables and the borders and tubs, though it was the wrong time of day for this. Inside, invading the suspended stillness of the house, he looked for more to do, but Elise had washed the breakfast dishes, so he tidied up vaguely, straightened the duvets on the girls' beds. It was already hot in the rooms upstairs, where the sun beat through the roof. His study was cool. He sat reading through a book on ecology and elegy that he'd been sent for reviewing. After a couple of hours he heard the car come back. Elise walked quickly through the house to her workroom, heels sc.r.a.ping on the flagstones in the yard. She must have put on her dressy shoes to go out. He followed her.

How was Gerald?

She was wearing eye-shadow and lipstick, and a new silky shirt, printed with lilac-coloured flowers, which he hadn't seen before. It was more or less an hour's drive into Cardiff: she couldn't have spent any time with Gerald, even if she saw him.

Squinting at the sewing machine, trying to thread the needle without her gla.s.ses, sucking the thread and coaxing it to a point, she claimed she didn't know what he was talking about, that she'd been out with Ruth to look at a dresser for sale on one of the farms. He didn't believe her. Perhaps she'd gone looking for Gerald and he'd been out. Or perhaps she'd found him, and he'd closed himself against her.

OK, I just thought you said you were worried about him.

He's your friend, Paul. You're the one who should be worrying.

They ate leftovers for lunch together, under the umbrella in the yard; Elise said they ought to invite people round for a barbecue the next day, before the weather broke.

If you like.

He heard her telephoning round.

I left a message on Gerald's phone, she said. But why don't you try him? Try and persuade him to come. It would be good for him.

Paul tried dutifully. Gerald's phone was switched off; he left another message.

Elise spent the next day preparing food: marinated chicken and fish and vegetables for the barbecue, little deep-fried Middle Eastern patties, a cheesecake topped with nut brittle, home-made prune ice-cream. Paul thought she was doing too much for an impromptu occasion, but she turned on him angrily when he tried to say so, her face hot from the frying. She sent him to Abergavenny in the morning with a shopping list, mainly for drinks; he drove all the way into Cardiff instead, and called in on Gerald, half-expecting he wouldn't answer the door because it was still too early. If Gerald was surprised to see him possibly Paul stood just where his wife had stood the day before and not been invited in then he only hesitated for one moment, puzzling, swaying slightly on his feet (small, like his ears), before he turned without a word, as was usual, and preceded Paul through the dank old air of the three flights of stairs to his lair under the roof.

Inside the flat, black plastic bags of waste paper and kitchen rubbish lay open on the floor, the hose of a vacuum cleaner plugged in at the wall snaked on the carpet; the windows were thrown up high and the plum-dark leaves of the copper beech outside were bruised and brooding in the wind that was supposed to herald different weather. Neither of them commented on the cleaning in progress; Paul felt uncomfortably as if he'd stumbled into his friend's privacy. Gerald made tea, meticulous in his measuring and stirring. He said he was trying to give up smoking, and was baking his dope instead into chocolate brownies made from a packet mix; bringing some in a cake tin from the kitchen, he offered them to Paul, who wasn't tempted. The brownies looked dry. Gerald munched through two with an air of despatching a necessary routine. He asked after the little girls, and then showed Paul a book he was reading, about the variations among different cultures in the language used to categorise emotion.

The Ilongot in the Philippines have a word to describe a reaction to the violation of a community norm.

Don't we have words for that in English?

Can you think of any?

Paul could only think of words that weren't emotions, like 'respectable' and 'scapegoat'.

And toska, in Russian, Gerald said, means 'how one feels when one wants some things to happen and knows they cannot happen'.

Very Russian.

That's the point.