"Something standing for something else."

"A stand-in."

"That's movies. Psychology I want. It's a term."

"Metonomy."

"Is that it? It sounds Freudian, but not exactly, I don't know, maybe it's Jungian, is that why? Metamorphosis? Anyhow she was working for me, so it gave him this feeling that if he influenced her, he was getting at me-"

"Ius primae noctis," Enoch said.

"I'm sure that's not it. Look, never mind, will you? It doesn't matter what it's called, it's what happened."

"What happened was you paid him," I said, but she did not hesitate.

"We got rid of him. It was a nice little wish-fulfillment thing he was acting out with that girl, a cheeky type anyhow. I don't know how he worked up an image of me out of her, but that's how they do it. There doesn't have to be any moral resemblance, let alone physical. Fetishism. Her att.i.tude was the world owed her a living. We got rid of them both. The only reason I'm telling you this is to show it wasn't the first time I had to get rid of him. The first time I just came home. Left him. Look, it's what I just said, plain ordinary abandonment. Maybe he would die in the war, maybe he wouldn't. Naturally he survived. That type always does, they're indestructible. In this world the worst always triumph. I could give ninety-three-thousand examples. I don't say I wanted him to die, it was just a bet I had with myself."

"You ought to quit lying," Enoch said.

"I'm not lying. It's a fact, why should I want him to die?"

He ignored this. "After all she's going to him."

"I know that. I know who she's going to."

"Then quit lying to her."

"I'm not lying. You can't contradict one single thing. What happened happened. Now listen. Was it abandonment pure and simple? Was he an out-and-out crook from the first minute?"

"Allegra."

"Allegra Allegra. Did I run from him the way you rim from a plague? Cholera? Malaria?"

"Allegra," he said. The name, or his voice giving it out in succession, sounded like an object: a table, a book. "You don't save anything this way."

"You think I don't realize? I realize that. What's there to save? How do you think I feel, her getting it like that-the G.o.dd.a.m.n b.l.o.o.d.y way he picked to tell her: that word. I didn't think he'd do it that way. I mean not that word. I thought he'd do it with plenty of embroidery, decent words at least. I thought he'd do it like a lawyer, d.a.m.n it."

"Credit him for doing it at all, will you? Don't dream," he said. "If it had been left to Nick-"

"I don't know, how should I know how Nick would do it? Maybe better, maybe worse. How do I know how he's going to act with her? What I'm getting at is William at least was supposed to make something fancy and legal out of it, not plunk plunk h.e.l.lo you're a so-and-so. He could have said it in a, well I don't know, a figure of speech."

"There are no figures," he sighed, "of speech."

"Yes there are. Bar sinister, there's one. Hugh taught me that years ago. It was part of a joke once when William came down. To the camp."

Enoch said, "Don't you see you don't change things by changing them in your imagination-"

"He didn't have to say issue either. Illegitimate is bad enough, he didn't have to say issue. It sounds like out of a nineteenth-century hospital where the doctors don't wash their hands. Leeches and things. Sores gushing. A run of bad blood. He doesn't have any imagination, he could have done a fancy legal job, never mind this hacksawing."

"It's not William's imagination that's at fault," Enoch said.

"Because he doesn't have any, I just told you."

"The most ruthless words are the legal ones," Enoch said, "they have the vice of accuracy."

"Now tell me something new. Tell me about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. You think I don't know that? You think I haven't had any experience with legal words? You take a perfectly beautiful word, you give it to a lawyer and it ends up meaning something just the opposite, ugly as sin, oh but terribly exact, you have to walk right down the middle of the white line the pirates draw on the gangplank for you. I've had plenty of experience! You'd think if somebody gave you a trust it would mean they trusted you, but what it really means is they don't, they think you're deaf and blind and don't know the most obvious things about life."

"Namely," Enoch said barrenly, "that in life nothing is obvious."

"I hate that word."

"Obvious?" he guessed. "Nothing? Life?"

"Oh stop. Imagination. d.a.m.n it, what do you think we're talking about? You don't listen to me. You listen for a minute and then you quip and then you don't listen. I listen at least. You were just telling me you don't change things if you imagine you're changing them, true?-so then please explain how we happened to give her twelve safe years, you said it yourself, you said twelve safe years, and didn't we change things by letting her imagine something that-well, that divorce business, say. It changed things for her, didn't it? It kept her free all that time, right? And the whole thing was imagination, right?"

"Al-leg-ra," he enunciated with drained patient tonelessness.

"You want to make me hate my own name, Enoch? Say leg like that again and I'll kick you with it."

"Don't feed her fairy tales."

"What fairy tales? What fairy tales? He didn't come sucking around that Anneke ten years after? He didn't get stuck for the whole war over there? Look, I don't remember any hordes of lawyers and bankers and ex-Youth Leaders running around in circles trying to find him and get him out, do you?"

"I think," Enoch said, "she should read now."

"Read what? Enoch, you're crazy. What she should do is pack," my mother argued. "I've had Janet standing by for days just for that, every grip in the house wide open, there's not an article of hers that isn't ironed and ready. She doesn't have to do anything but point a fingernail at what she wants to take, and that's too much for her ... as it is she reads more than what any sane person would call normal. Before you got home she was reading newspapers like a fanatic. Mental health columns, everything."

"She should read," he repeated, "history. Here," he told me, "third drawer down, compartment in the back: a little history of Abandonment: cardboard box with foolish stripes all over it, the whole thing holographic and incredibly ancient, you can't miss it," and held up the key to his desk, a short bra.s.s bar crowned at one end, club-footed at the other, and, it turned out, body-warm. He had been fondling it inside his pocket all the while.

"What are you up to?" my mother asked; already it was a plaint of denial. "What are you giving her?"

"h.e.l.l," he answered, a noun, and tossed the key for me to catch; it came winking down near my shoe, attached in flight to its little ring, and displaced in me, even before I bent to take it from the carpet, a ferocious image. "She's ent.i.tled to it same as anyone," Enoch said, while I dived and tapped yellow metal teeth: the touch of points restored me to shock, as though this room were that old other room where my mother had locked me into freedom, naked as birth, and really as though this small sweated key from Enoch's hand, tinkling along its ring, could c.h.i.n.k out reluctant contemplations-a blue bicycle cradled in a hedge shaped like a duck, able to rattle, doomed to clatter and chime, a belfry of mobile violence, each wheel-hoop a spinning coin great as a gong; and the key itself indistinguishable from that old rusted giant which had lain like an icon in my mother's palm, cold as cash.

3.

So I found her letters, and read them through against the scratch of her long argument, and was soon done with them (having skipped the philosophy parts), and knew as little of Brighton as they gave-my mother meanwhile protesting, declaring she had never seen them in her life before, calling them phony contrivances, calling them forgeries, denying her own handwriting, blaming me for looting, for snooping, for attacking her privacy, for crushing the box, for stealing the key, for misunderstanding her feelings, for being unable to conceive of the nature of Brighton, or the nature of those old early days, or the nature of Nick, or the nature of Enoch, whom, she ended, she could easily have had arrested for burglary.

But she was watching me with eager looks: "Now you see how it was! Exactly what I said. He was swallowed up right into the middle of the war. So I left him. The chronology doesn't matter. Who left who doesn't matter. The main thing is I didn't marry him. I couldn't, not with the war. Otherwise I would have. I would have, Enoch knows that. But I had to leave without him, on account of the war."

"Hear it," Enoch said, "how the maze of pride writhes around a new corner. Let it go, Allegra. Drop it. Let it stand. You don't need to try this-"

"Try what? Try what?" she appealed. "I said just exactly what happened. I said abandonment."

"You don't have to justify yourself," he finished hopelessly.

"I'm not justifying myself. You think I'm justifying myself to bourgeois morality, right? That's what you think? Well I'm not. I say the h.e.l.l with bourgeois morality. I've always felt that way. It's been my position from the beginning."

"We're not at the beginning any more."

"Then what are we at? The end? I don't know about you, I'm not at the end of anything. I'm just starting! You think an Emba.s.sy is nothing? Anyhow I'm not justifying myself to bourgeois morality, I'm justifying myself to her."

"It's all the same," he said.

"No it's not," I said.

"There!" said my mother, s.n.a.t.c.hing me for sudden ally. "See? She's not as shallow as you make her out to be, at least she's capable of understanding what an Emba.s.sy means. Only when the time comes," she warned me, "you'd better change your att.i.tude. I'm not a liberal any more, if liberal signifies I have to tolerate gossip. My business is my business, n.o.body else's." She hardened: "Respectable boys don't take, out running sores, they don't marry issues, remember that while you're deciding to be so liberal."

"I'm not respectable enough to decide to be liberal."

"Oh fine, listen to that! Enoch, you heard that. You heard it for yourself. Where's an att.i.tude like that going to lead?"

"You are whatever your mother wants you to be," he told me: "Apparently she wants you to be respectable."

I laid the bundle of letters on the bed and said nothing.

"I don't want her to be anything," my mother remonstrated, "except free. As long as she's free," she said, but this was mechanical: it was not her thought. Her thought was something else. "We're free," she explained. "Free as kings."

"An Amba.s.sador," Enoch observed, "is not exactly an absolute monarch."

"I know that," she said demurely.

"An Amba.s.sador," Enoch observed again, "is not exactly left to do as he pleases. Neither is his wife."

"I know that."

"Then our freedom, you see, is not what you imagine."

"Yes it is," my mother said. "We're free to take the Emba.s.sy."

He said slyly, "You wouldn't trade the Emba.s.sy for Brighton?"

Her gaze floated over me.

"That was fake crying before," she gave out finally.

"I took it," Enoch said hollowly, "for grief."

But she was swift to pin him: "Is that why you called it stupid?"

"Fake is stupid," he blew back at her.

"You didn't know it was fake, it's just that you don't care what I'm feeling," she complained. "You don't take me seriously, you're always clowning."

"I am the grin," Enoch said, "in your chagrin."

"See?"

"I don't like your blasphemy," he said: "It's blasphemous to simulate despair. There's plenty of the original in the world."

"Oh, the world!" she said in the shrill consummation of her disgust.

"You weren't feeling h," he accused.

"No," she admitted.

"You didn't feel a thing."

"It's wrong not to feel a thing, isn't it? I don't feel anything at all about any of that, it's peculiar. It's all gone."

"Brighton?" he asked.

"Nick," she heard herself reply.

"Ah," Enoch said, and sealed in that enclosing syllable their unanimity, self-amazed. It drove a gate against me; wedding-glue had cemented shut the seams at last. I foresaw the Emba.s.sy, a sandstone palace in an alien nation with an iron gate coiling up its scrolled crest through shimmering queer foreign winds, and staves like spears or lances, and myself never in it. I would stay behind, I would never enter. It was Enoch's house, that Emba.s.sy, bought for him by my mother, paid for by my surrender to my father; I would never enter it. I had never entered William's houSe; I foresaw I would never enter Enoch's. Did they pity me, those counterfeit fathers, false Enoch, false William, who gave me for hostage so that my mother in her appet.i.te might take an Emba.s.sy?

I went to pack.

"-Wait a minute, will you?" She stopped me on the way; fatigue narrowed the bone of her nose; her nostrils seemed to waver independent of structure. "Now listen here, I never told you any lies at all, you follow? I mean look-suppose I'd married Nick, you think I could stay married? To a vagrant, a b.u.m? An out-and-out crook? I would've divorced him in the end anyway, you follow? It comes to the same thing, you see my point?"

But there was power in the room: Enoch exultant under its plume, a crease of elation in either cheek, his forehead heavy, white, shining with relief. He had her now. She had sloughed off not Brighton (and what was Brighton after all?), but Nick. He had never feared Brighton, he had never feared me: only Nick. And be had her now, and was, as she said, free as a king. He had her. She reminisced for him; she was telling how, the very day she married him under William's high jealous shadow, in the flesh-gleam of William's wife's scorning glovelessness, all the while she was missing Nick. The fractional cut of diffidence she had earlier opened to me left no st.i.tch or ridge or fissure: she was whole, he had her whole.

She missed no one.

To me she said: "Of course it was a fib-Enoch's saying he didn't have any ambition. He said it the first night we were married, it turned out it was his way of covering up. He always has to cover things up, he's terribly complicated. It's right in his temperament, being negative about things. Negative and proud. The more negative and proud he is the more he's craving something. I ought to know him by now! Take my word for it: he's got a hollow craving in him, more than anyone, more than I have. That's why he's the only person I could have married, logically speaking."

My stepfather responded to this with an uncommon glimmer of smile. "Logically speaking," he began, in a voice so given over to mastery that I was sure he was about to disclose a conspiracy of advice for me to take with me, "there are neither lies nor fibs. Lies and fibs contradict the truth, and contradictions don't exist in logic"-it was only another conundrum, one of his jokes; he had nothing to tell me. "And you," he told my mother, "crave nothing at all," which, while never touching himself, penetrated her exactly. She missed no one, she missed nothing.

4.

In that place there was a short tree crouched over its short trunk, not much higher than a bush, and with a full misty mane like a bush, and all its comb of yellow leaf stained through by sunlight, the wide wash of day narrowed gunlike and spat out in points of magnetic shimmer on each tremulous lamina, the whole blown head of it coruscating like a transparent great net of caught fishes: the little caught tree wriggling, and with every wriggle enmeshing itself still more inescapably in its bag of light; every breath it dared to take sluicing it in a supernal flash-tossing itself there, on the edge of the swamp, back and forth, dazzling, darting.

My mother's chauffeur said, "This looks like it, miss. A bit of dock left here. I was told a bit of old dock," and put my suitcase-I had taken only one-on a nailed-together pattern of soaked colorless faintly noiseful planks. "Must've been deeper here once-deep water-if a ferry ran. They must've cut in deep here, for a ferry."