Bayswater Stories

Three Bayswater Stories

John J. Parman

Preface

These three stories move back-and-forth in time, but appear here in the order I wrote them. I started the first instead of editing the Télos Trilogy, novellas that trace a family, the Piranesi, and another into which it married. These stories are also about two families linked by marriage. Perhaps inevitably, a marriage brings them together and provides a coda to Télos.

One feature of the stories is that each two-page section leads off with a digital photo-collage. I chose each one before writing what followed, a visual prompt. I thought of collapsing the text to give the stories a more conventional form, but in the end I carried on as I began.

"Bayswater" figures in the title because a house there seemed significant. The stories move around in space but are centered in London and vicinity, and "the country," an imagined seEing. I had a house in mind in Baywater, visited in the early 1980s.

It felt right to put these three stories together, but I sense there could be a fourth. My imagination runs to families. SeEing one slightly ahead of the time of its writing was an experiment. The circumstances of the story let me dodge the need to speculate about world affairs, of which God knows there are many. If I write another, it will likely be set in the 1990s.

Contents

Time At Last

Set in London circa 1982 and a bit later.

Constance & Tim

Tim didn't intend to fall in love with Jack, yet there he was, a@entive without pressing him in any way. But now here was Constance with her young son August who couldn't bear to be apart from her, so he came along instead of staying with one of her sisters, asked to mind the others. They'd walked over from the room he'd rented so Constance could be with the Russians. She was in her element with them, he saw, speaking in her low voice as they laughed appreciatively. Tim spoke not a word of Russian, not that he could hear or rather that he could only hear their louder interjections, spurring her on while he told August one story after another from memory. And then one of them came over, leaning down and speaking in heavily accented English, "You must marry her! We're all clear about this!" But August spoke up for his father. "Mummy's married!" he protested. "She is," Tim affirmed. "Now don't fret, August. He only means that I should be your mother's friend, one more person to protect her and help her take care of you and the others, as it's too much even with her sisters." August accepted this, as did the Russian, smiling, nodding, grateful that Tim had saved him from a scene with a child he hadn't noticed. He went back to rejoin the others.

"It's all decided then," Constance said when she eventually made her way over, si@ing at Tim's side and le@ing August nestle in her lap.

Tim was reminded of how in weaving one inserts strands of color or lengths of metallic, shining composites in the warp, often left dangling at the edges. He thought of Jack hovering, and then of Constance in her light summer dress with a floral pa@ern, a dress that showed off her figure and went with her lightly tanned face. They were in the countryside and it felt all of a piece. Life is like this too. He sensed it would continue, their affair, but gaps can appear, as they sometimes lose interest. Tim was good at staying hopeful, even if he knew the other might hold out and let it end, suppressing regret thereafter. He didn't think this with Constance, so hope continued. Still, he always feared the worst, wondering why anyone would bother with him. Why would she? He could see why, yet he wondered.

Jack is an object of speculation or vice versa, but Constance is that force of nature women can be. Children have it too, as August does with his mother. Tim liked August and admired the truth he voiced. It gave him a reason for ambivalence, which he felt at times. "I come close to passive, yet I'm alert as a cat with Constance," he thought. He rose invariably to these occasions while Jack would likely only earn the love one lavishes on the help.

Constance, her thoughts

All things considered she preferred a dress. This went back how far? A long way, the frocks said. Quite an array, even now. Men dress uniformly from convenience. Only Tim's friend Jack kept up with fashion; Tim's concessions to it were minor, but he read the women's sections the way other men follow sports. An eye for women, she felt, that began with how they dressed, signaling things of interest to an a@entive person. And Tim was a@entive, but Jack was even more so, Tim said. If he was Jack's object, she was Tim's, and he was also a@entive to August, her youngest, most devoted-to-her child.

She saw that Tim appreciated Jack's a@ention in the same way August appreciated his. In Tim, but not in her, it generated warmth. Tim could bathe in Jack's a@ention without wanting to take it anywhere. Slow to heat up but once in motion, good for any distance she set: she liked that in a man, stretching out afternoons so she came and came, only pausing to cool down and talk. Amusing in the intervals she liked that too. Her husband made love carefully, well enough to father children, and was perfectly solid. She'd never leave him, they both knew.

Of the four seasons, she liked spring best and the times in summer when spring reappeared after rain, for example. She liked terraces in gardens, and Russian poets, but only in outdoor se@ings, waving their cigare@es, laughing at her jokes and parodies of their mother tongue. She detested the heaviness of their novelists, their winters, their afflictions. Of novelists, she liked the Italians, some of them, and

the English. She liked the clothing women wore and the way it found new places to be found, each a discovery, as was the case forever, and shedding them, informally yet choreographed for whoever took it in, knew her down to the bone, every nape and cranny.

She took to Russian but more to speak than read it, hear poets speak it. Italian should be sung, French spoken in the street, English left to do the work, keep up appearances, declaim from Greek from memory. Tim did this admirably. He knew no Russian, his French only passable, but an ear for language, poetic, a kind of natural especially when loosened amorously. Never stupid, but rarely assertive only about things like protecting them.

He meant it, she knew. She told the Russian so when he recounted it. As she said it, she saw why she felt free to give herself to Tim, his complete possession because then they bathed and went their separate ways, yet she only had to ring and there he was, the complementary man, a necessity for a wife like her, married to another, mother of his children. For what, she wondered, these dresses and etc., if not to shed for Tim, if not to wear for him so she could take them off and take him in? Because such a season has its run, like spring dwindling into summer's parch or disappearing altogether. It went without saying she should take her fill. It was only good sense and Tim grasped this, as August did on some level too, this brief and earthly paradise.

Tim's domestic life

Tim lived with his sisters that is, he lived with one sister or another as part of her household or close enough to count as part of it. These arrangements suited him and them, so they continued.

His had always been an improvisational existence, but fueled with sufficient talent to earn a living. He and they didn't see the point of his se@ing up a home when they had several, including a country place they used in season, anchored by a sister whose feelings for the bucolic led her to stay on in the colder months while the rest lived in town.

Tim never brought any outsider to these shared houses unless a sister suggested it, having met this or that friend or acquaintance in the outer world he inhabited when not at home, which was fairly often. His several rooms weren't very large, just big enough to add a small desk and bookshelves, his library spread across these domiciles and moved, if need be, with the flow of life therein. Bookstores figured in his household economy, so his own collection was less extensive than even he'd expected. Like weight and fitness, it came along with habitual modesty except when something more was wanted.

No outsiders except occasionally for dinner or the feast days when he might find a seat for a stray who would amuse his sisters and a@ached others. He played this role himself in his lowkey manner, with their children especially, for whom he made time, addressed as equals, advised if advice was sought.

An unspoken pact among them was never to speculate about another's progress through life, but

only to take pleasure in any expressed satisfaction. This commitment to a buoyant domestic scene was in contrast to their lives as adolescents. It was what led them to set up on their own in ways that suited them, and to make places within an evolving milieu of flats and houses. Several were self-employed or supported by partners who understood their natures. Writing is what we do, they sometimes affirmed; they did it whether or not there was a ready audience, finding one in time owing to their talent for it. A reputation too for living visibly west or south of convention, not vastly so and in fact you had to know them to see it.

Women are be@er at this than men, Tim noted. It was like Constance sidling out of the frame and then sidling in without incident. His sisters were close, chirping like birds in feast day kitchens. He kept his distance but set the tables and cleaned up afterward with a sure hand, a legacy of a season in Bordeaux. It was his preferred kind of schooling, like learning from a woman how to lead her through their afternoon. Memorable, he thought, and memory is themes and embellishments. He set the tables in this spirit, then engaged with one sister or another, or their partners, children, whoever set off his mind's receptivity. Observation was the heart of this, but his mind was fertile: remarks drew laughter or nods of appreciation. He wrote like this, like looking at a field and imagining the harvest.

Jack goes for a walk

Jack could have lounged in the garden his mother's house shared with others, but instead he walked to the park, uncertain of his destination, but it was pleasant and he sat part of the time and took it in. Why, he asked himself, was Tim so much his type and yet clearly Jack wasn't Tim's?

Not that Tim wasn't a good friend. Not that he wasn't appreciative when Jack gave him a book or invited him to lunch. He usually read what he gave and rarely declined an invitation, but he evidently felt no physical a@raction to Jack, so Jack held back.

Tim's entire family were writers. He occasionally dined with them, as one of his sisters had taken a liking to him, and he found them not precisely literary, but more like the characters one meets in literature, with a lot of joking and an awareness of things filtered through their formidable sensibilities, each a variation on the others, so they talked the way children talk if they live in close quarters, which they didn't, in fact, but that sort of shorthand, not a private language but definitely a stamp or mark of the family, completely unlike his own. And this was part of it, his longing. Ironically, the sister might fall for him, but he lacked the switch some men have, a switch he sensed Tim had if he could only find it, but then it was clear he never had. Alone with the sister once, Jack pressed her a bit. "Catnip," she said. "Tim seduces them without meaning to. Self-absorbed the way writers are, but then they come around and he goes off with them for a weekend or sometimes longer, returns, gets back to writing."

Jack was no writer. He read. He thought about things, preferred women to men as companions, as they knew immediately he was harmless, and so were open, intelligent, amusing. They liked fashion and were made for it. Compared to Tim, Jack took some care about his clothes, but nothing outré, as he defined it. Women could wear almost anything if it made sense to them when they put it on, and this was true from childhood. Jack took his fashion cues from peers. Tim threw on whatever was at hand, but the hand that reached for it knew what it was doing, thanks to his unerring eye.

Like my late mother, Jack realized. Some know and the knowledge persists. Tim used cabs in town, but kept an old Lancia in the country, bought while on holiday and maintained like anything else mechanical, like his bicycle or a sister's kitchen appliance. The Lancia was part of Tim's knowing, Jack thought. Constance was also a classic of her type. "I am no classic," Jack admi@ed. A banker, he made decent money, had background, clubbable, but that was it. Tim's sister, a classic herself, didn't hold this against him. Neither really did Tim, who after all was a good friend, yet never a@ended to him as he did with Constance or the Lancia. Writing was one thing he did, and Constance and the car were two others "consuming his time but worth its expenditure," as Tim's sister summed it up.

Tim's modest proposal

Over lunch, as always at Jack's invitation, Tim leaned forward slightly, paused a moment, then launched into it. "I've been thinking," he said. "You have that big house in Bayswater and I have a sister who likes you. What if you took her up? She's undemanding. I think she'd like children, but then you look the part of a father, I would say, a banker, that house with its kids' paradise of a garden. Women know things men don't. I think houses lack spirit if they're not around. And it's not just for her sake that I'm asking. It would bring you into the family, one of their partners, a father. It's certainly a be@er role in life than mine, a writer still living with his sisters, like Wordsworth, although thankfully I don't figure in their diaries nor do they dote on me. No, I was just born to it. You could join us, a good addition."

"Have you lost your mind?," Jack almost said, but caught himself as bankers are trained to do and considered the offer. Not exactly his line: this was the obvious objection, but French kings had stepped up despite the rumors, Cecil Beaton fell for that Swedish actress, Duncan Grant bedded Vanessa. So, clearly, it was possible.

He did like the sister. He saw that she was sweet on him, saw through him to find something more and Tim seemed to see it too, a sort of possibility he flirted with sometimes, feeling at sea in his mother's house, unnaturally empty despite parties, diversions. That there were other ways to fill it he was aware, but too many Tatler profiles signaled "Be wary."

When the trading day was over, Jack made his way home, writing the le@er in his head. Artemis, but known as Tem, was the youngest. "Twinned but displaced," she'd said of her and Tim. "We're both orphans," he thought. They all were, of course, but did she feel it more, raised mostly by her sisters and, like Tim, still sharing their houses? He imagined so.

No writer, but he wrote clearly, and strove in his le@er to be open, not that he valued openness that much, but it seemed called for here. Who am I? in relation to her especially, or perhaps, who are we? As he wrote, he saw that Tim had found and flipped the switch, apparently waiting to be found, labeled "family," like those tiny labels in the fuse box, wri@en by his father before his untimely death.

The arc of his past relationships arose, crushes and his dislike of casual, relying on a destiny which left him with friends but otherwise unrequited. Tim, a@entive to the nuances of others' lives, moved through relationships with a kind of Jane Austen logic. He noted this, "as it may subject me to satire."

Artemis. Tim sometimes said her name in full, a slight awe to it, not unlike Constance when he said it with a nod in her direction, a shifting Mecca. Of his sisters, Tem was his favorite because "most like me, I suppose, well, not really but in ways we recognize, like finding the same things funny despite masses of difference and even incompatibility. We would make an ideal couple, but society frowns on it, so no." His theory that profound difference made for happiness seemed rooted in his memory of his parents.

One kind of love

It was Monday when they'd had lunch and Tuesday when he mailed the le@er. Saturday morning, Tem appeared, wheeling her bicycle into his front hall, then making them breakfast from what she found at hand, a breakfast of the sort a woman makes, Jack thought, as it reminded him of his mother's.

What followed was seduction, he thought later. Jack was struck by how much she resembled Tim had Tim been a woman, a certain boyishness knowingly put to use and insight into the way he worked and how to bring out the parts that worked for her. This was repeated and repeated. In fact, she never really went home except to shift things incrementally to the house, and there wasn't that much of it, as she lived minimally, being essentially a houseguest heretofore.

"We had be@er register ourselves before I whelp your bastard," she said ma@er-of-factly at breakfast. He nodded, as the thought had also occurred to him. It was characteristic, he realized, of the piecemeal way she conducted her life, each day added to the previous one as if a plan guided it, as perhaps it did. They sent out announcements and had a party. At work, the senior men stopped by, a bit surprised but visibly pleased by what they took as a sign of maturity, orthodoxy, the natural evolution of things to their older minds. A few eyebrows were raised, but Tem's sisters took to him like a lost uncle.

Gradually their household reshaped itself. They slept in separate rooms, but used his parents' room to fuck as its bathroom had been done French as Tem

put it once as they bathed together in the big tub. Soon pregnant, but not set back by it, nauseous, as some women are, Tem seemed to be made for it. A boy, she guessed, which was confirmed, and she worked up a scheme for their accommodation, him and his siblings, as she anticipated there would be. It was as Tim foresaw, Jack thought, how family has its own momentum, how one falls into useful roles like supporting it and staying alive so as not to orphan anyone prematurely.

Tem rethought the house for children at different ages. She loved its shared commons, walled off from the adjoining streets by their and others' houses. They split the shopping, as she liked to shop alone. She gave him tips on fruits in season while meat, fish, vegetables she rarely delegated. On weekends, she studied the magazines and queried him on fashion. "I never thought about it," she said, "but I'm your wife and need to look the part." Tim and her sisters felt her instincts about clothes were sound, if warped by parsimony. All that vintage was a clue and now she could afford the new. "Classic," Tim advised, and named some shops whose labels he remembered from the clothing Constance shed when they were together, as his visual memory extended to them. As he reeled them off, their sisters nodded while Jack made a list. The dresses Constance preferred lent themselves to Tem's condition, which made sense as they shared it sometimes. Had Tim thought of that, Jack wondered?

Tim, Tem & Pen

Tim described his dilemma with Constance and her dilemma with him. Using the expression "horns of a dilemma," Tem referred to the Minoan acrobat who leapt over the bull. "But who is the bull and where does she land? What happens next?" Tim asked. Tem replied that a dilemma is always an invitation to transcend, to reach a different ground.

"What do you owe Constance?" she asked. "I vowed to protect her and August," Tim answered. Tem was unsure what this meant, but reluctant to press her brother, who was uncharacteristically ruffled. Yet just her asking seemed to calm him. "August and the Russian heard me make it," Tim said. "The Russian repeated it to Constance, who affirmed it to him and then later recounted this to me in August's hearing. It's our one binding tie."

"You're like a knight," Tem noted, "but the story is inverted. You have to find the sword and place it between you." He looked at her. "But August?" August was older now, just as Tem was a mother of two and pregnant with a third. "Whatever you do," she said, "you must protect him, as well." It was on her mind, as some of Jack’s male friends were deathly ill now or dead.

Walking down from Tem's, Tim heard a familiar young voice, looked left to see August and a woman who resembled Constance but wasn't her. "This is my aunt Pen," August said, unfailingly polite. "This is Tim, my mother's friend." She extended her hand and met his eyes. "Penelope," she said.

"Constance has mentioned you," she continued. "You're a writer?" Tim nodded. "She said you've just published a novel and that it's ge@ing noticed." Tim nodded. All this time, their eyes were locked on each other. Tim let her words fly by, nodding when she ended a sentence. He was struck by the similarities and differences from Constance. "Do you also speak Russian?" he asked. "No, I'm a classicist," she said. "I leave Russian to my sister." Tim nodded. "I don't know a word," he said. "Do you live nearby?" she asked. "No, but my sister Artemis lives in Bayswater and I was visiting her." Pen nodded. "What a lovely name! I'd much rather be a goddess than a muse." Tim looked her up and down. "Penelope suits you. My sister is called Tem. We're quite alike, so Tim and Tem, or vice versa, our whole lives." She nodded, adding "Tim and Pen" as if trying it out.

"I have no particular place to go," Tim said. "Would you like to walk back with me? We could have some lunch and you could meet her." Pen nodded. "We were also just out walking. Constance is very busy with the new baby, so I took August. Did she tell you?" Tim shook his head.

He'd promised to fix Jack's bicycle, so he and August set to work on that while Pen and Tem talked. August asked if Tim could fix his bicycle. He nodded. When she learned this, Tem invited them all back the following afternoon. "Give her your book, Tim" she said, and he fetched a copy. "Could you please inscribe it?" Pen asked. He did. "Walk with them to the park, Tim," Tem told him, and he did.

Penelope, her thoughts

After she brought August back to Constance's house, Pen took Tim's book with her to a nearby café, where she opened it, and found and read his inscription:

They told me, Penelope, they told me you had wed. They brought the bi7er news to hear, but I remained in bed and slept. Eventually I dreamt that you and I, tiring the sun with loving, had set him down the sky.

A muse is a goddess to a writer, is she not? I believe so.

When their eyes locked, Pen imagined, they must have had the same thought. She liked it that he made no reference to her sister, nor asked her to bring her a message. That he and Constance were or had been lovers, she knew, although her sister never said so directly. The telltale glow of satiation gave her away.

"Pen and Tim," she thought again. She liked that he used her full name, that he said it suited her. The irony of her sister's name must be clear to him, but it was clear to her that his sensibility was wistful. Yet here it was, this bold inscription, flipping the dead Heraclitus on his head to make room for something new, even as he doubted it could be possible. Pen wondered suddenly if the babe was Tim's. But in this sense Constance lived up to her name. Honour might be more fi@ing, rendering unto Caesar the occasional offspring, proof that their marriage stayed on its appointed rails, despite layovers in small towns. And it was over, Tim's headshake told her.

"A muse is a goddess to a writer." She liked that best of all, but admired his improvisation, only there

because Artemis demanded it, like his walking them to the edge of the park, listening and nodding as she talked, placing a hand on August's shoulder at their farewell and then their eyes met again. "Tomorrow, then," he said, and she'd nodded.

She turned the book over, looking at his photo, reading the description, the blurbs, and the brief profile. "A minimalist with real feeling," one of the blurbs enthused. That seemed accurate.

"August told me you ran into Tim," Constance said later. Pen kept his book out of sight, not wanting her to read the inscription. "He said Tim offered to fix his bicycle, so you're going back tomorrow." Pen nodded. "It's so like him," Constance said. "Thank you for taking August. The baby fussed all morning." Her telephone rang and, answering it, she launched into Russian. Pen slipped the book into her bag, se@led their visit with August, waved to her sister, who waved back reflexively, and departed.

It's odd, she thought, that Constance was never affected by her lovers. They came and went, and she characterized them afterward in much the same way those writers did on the back of Tim's book. Yet she liked him, Pen surmised, trusted him with August, for example, who also liked and trusted him. Tim is like this, she felt, a friend with layers, as Constance might put it, but there were more, Pen believed. Tim sees this too, she told herself. He'd wri@en as much.

Tem & Tim

"You ought to marry her," Tem said. "I had the same thought," Tim replied. He'd carried it back from the park, how he needed finally to secure what had been elusive, but now made sense in that way that things involving women and desire only could. Constance would be a sister, not a lover, and if Penelope would also be a lover at first, she would be much more, if the gods smiled on them, and August would have cousins to go with his sisters.

This flew by unsaid, but Tem knew his thoughts by the way they played across his face. "She has gorgeous eyes," she said, and Tim nodded. He'd brought them back too. He glanced at the clock and calculated the hours and minutes until they would cross the park again.

"She likes Artemis," Tim said. "She told me." Tem said. "She'll have a goddess as a sister-in-law. You'll marry a muse and have a young emperor as a nephew not a son." But Tim thought of August as August, as his mother was never in the cards. It was license only August's father granted her, much as he tolerated her Russians telephoning at all hours. It stopped short of procreation, and this explained why she'd ceased to call. Otherwise, she'd have been pregnant long before, he guessed. Desire sparked it in women like Constance, but her marriage pulled that urge back into its orbit, her man the sun around whom she revolved, whereas he was just some outer planet, wobbling along without a second thought until she called and he put things aside and met her.

"Goodness, Tim, you never wobble!" Tem said, when he put this to her in summary. "But writers are dicey." Even Pen would be wary if my book wasn't out, but it is, Tim thought. Not yet bankable, but Pen would never marry a banker, at least not one like her brother-in-law, no ma@er how liberal. Still, would she marry a writer? And how was his inscription received? Odd that he just wrote it out, but remembering and improvising were two of his talents. He only ever declaimed if irony was needed or he was asked for it. Like love, he thought, that combo, a li@le magnetism and the force field of another's desire, first felt in his 14th summer, summoned by his lithesome tennis instructor, an acquaintance of Elizabeth, the oldest of his sisters.

"You fuck a good deal be@er than you serve," she told him. The summer had the loping rhythm of one long afternoon after another. She was on the pill. The term began and they parted. His tennis was as bad as ever, but he'd acquired a reputation, Elizabeth said. "Don't let it go to your head," she added. He nodded. He'd liked bedding this woman, but their talk stayed with him. Bits of it found their way into his stories.

He could trace the route from her to Constance. Was it true? That Penelope appeared, that August introduced them, felt entirely new. "Yes," he said aloud, but then his face clouded, "if she'll have me." Watching him all the while, Tem smiled at him. "Of course, she'll have you. I saw this almost at the start."

When she was finally alone, Pen opened his book again and read it, cover to cover. It was, as promised, minimalist but with feeling, a dialogue between a man and a series of women. It began and ended in media res, which made it ambiguous if one sought a denouement of some sort, but she felt this was likely true to life in Tim's case. Also true were the implied inner lives of the conversing pairs, one constant and the others not, understandably, as they came and went while he moved through time in a manner that reminded Pen of the way finches were said to evolve, a li@le different at each season. He was, she reflected, quite young when the book opened, and steadily older as it progressed. That he was the constant and they were the variable was a good way of hiding her sister in plain sight. She did seem captured in the last section, although all was altered except small bits of her that only a sister or a lover would notice, buried in their dialogue with no reference to place, clothes, weather, etc., if one or the other failed to comment on it. No thought except what was said, unlike most novels that bore into heads and surface the meta burbling within.

It was funny, though, their back-and-forth. The man sometimes declaimed while introducing errors and variations, not always understood by the other. Irony, she saw, was how he softened a prodigious memory for texts, and humor if the other could see the joke. If not, other things were remarked on, as he was a@entive to the woman's subjects and objects.

A theory worked its way across the narrative. A working theory, she added, that tried to make sense of the pairings as different species of desire and the means brought to them, the arrangements and their playing out, with talk as accompaniment to fucking, as the women mostly called it, while the man spoke openly of something more, perhaps a craving for it like a postcoital cigare@e only it kept going, she noted, counting the interludes, and not a word about it except a stammering of affection as the woman realized the time and departed, so also a theory of time's elasticity or how desire fits itself interstitially between the usual press of others. His a@entiveness to the other in that space of time was total, and each was well a@ended to, certainly.

Was it autofiction? He didn't deny or agree, but "a novel," the publisher made clear. Nor did it suggest continuation, just the uncertainty of these affairs, conducted under others' noses, likely. The last seemed the most desirous, funny about the men she frequented, their egos and foibles, always trying and failing to bed her, always given the slip. Only one had a hold on her, but he was distracted, only ever pausing to mate.

"Constance," she said aloud, but the dialogue was cagey, the men Italian, complaining they can never tell who's talking, while she laments that pasta is ruining her figure, not that her husband would notice. The man tells her she's beautiful. Coming from him, it doesn't seem banal.

Faced with the interregnum in which he found himself, no longer summoned by Constance and as yet unsummoned or not yet summoning her sister, he cast himself forward to a fictional viewing platform where he briefly glimpsed Constance in one of her characteristic dresses that she filled so perfectly. Perfection, he thought, is a short-order agony for one dismissed from its company. Yet immediately he turned his gaze to Penelope's eyes, surprised by the unexpected ease with which he did so, as if released from a succession of spells a series of desirous but ultimately elusive women had cast. "I am done with spells," he told himself, but silently. His editor had wanted to categorize his book as autofiction, but Tim resisted. Aren't novels memoirs in disguise in any case, even the historic ones? So, a novel it was, a work of fiction by an identified writer who issued the usual disclaimer. And it was true that he'd taken care to shift things around, the events and traits and words. Yet reality has a way of skimming the underside of such accounts, like a shark one imagines is there, absent fin notwithstanding. The world is a la@icework of women, the novel had it, joined by desire's rise and fall. Strange then to think that Penelope was excepted, that they were excepted together from what was in the end a kind of befalling, like the creature in the birdcage in Eliot's Waste Land epigram. Penelope was the opener of that small door or his conjurer.

How far had he cast himself? Far enough that there were children, he sensed, and even children of those children, looking to them as founders of their offshoot dynasty, separated at last from sisterhoods on both sides, although provisionally, such things being indivisible in reality, forces that move through time to a rhythm of their own, hence offshoot, like a tidal current, an estuary of some larger, fertile sea on which they were no longer adrift but looked out at it from the distance of their semi-detached realm.

Finding his way back, Tim telephoned: "I cannot wait." As he walked down to the park, he thought how for once they desired at the same pitch, or was it tempo? Four hands, the senses in tune, a@uned: it was thus when they met and knew that it was time. "Time at last," Penelope said.

In Its Season

Set in the English countryside, summer of 2024.

August is 44

An age of uncertainty, August reflected. Would he face the perils that dog midlife? It's always a question. You're never really sure how it will be posed. He was in the country at his sister Pen's husband Tim's family's house. Tim, originally his mother's friend, he's known since he was three or earlier. Tim's sister Catherine is the doyenne of this outpost. She took it over as the siblings grew up. It had been their parents’ retreat. Later, she married Stephen, local to these parts, and they raised their children here.

Ancient and rambling, it benefited from Tim’s ability to fix almost anything and from August’s attention to it as a specialist in renovating older buildings. Banking, his father’s line of work, struck him as too all-consuming. Architecture shared that quality, but after taking his degree, August apprenticed at a small, bespoke practice. That he spoke Russian fluently, picking it up from expats his mother befriended, turned out to be useful as others showed up in England as clients. His mother helpfully sorted the benign from the malign, a task she was rumored to carry out for M16, but this was never confirmed. So, he gained a clientele, eventually taking over the practice. Entertainers and others for whom the cachet of these old places, in town or country, is appealing also became his clients through that venerable process, word of mouth, helped by mentions in the weekend supplements arranged by his wife and business manager, Prudence.

Tim was a kind of second father as well as an uncle when he married Pen, acquiring August's parents as family. Of all her rumored lovers, never formally acknowledged, Tim alone won Constance's trust and lasting affection. He won August's too and Pen's.

August was at a midpoint at 44, ambling toward that lucky Chinese pairing, 88. He also had Chinese clients, their superstitious natures living side-by-side with their innate materiality, just as their often-exquisite aesthetic sense was mixed with occasional garishness. He sometimes had to arrange for a street number to be altered, not to mention the directives of their flown-in feng shui advisors. He kept his numerically unlucky age to himself.

Catherine and Stephen's house was a literary sort of place, despite Stephen's country roots. Like any married couple of differing temperaments, they divided things up spatially, the outbuildings and grounds his domain and all within but the mudroom hers. A dormitory housed the children; a wing of rooms, sharing a bath, the non-family adults; while the family claimed its traditional places.

August could trace his evolution across the decades, now finally family, like Tim and Pen. He earned his keep by organizing whatever Stephen or Tim couldn't handle on their own, like retiling a roof or shoring up an old foundation. He slowly brought the house into the 21st century, insulating walls and windows, rewiring, replacing, upgrading. But much was left untouched. Along with Stephen's ancient tractor and Tim's beloved Lancia, they liked keeping things in running order. "They will bury him in that car," Pen noted. Likely true.

They had two daughters. Prudence wondered about having a third. She knew so many couples who stopped at two, but she liked them toddling around, despite the disruption they caused to the household. The girls were six and four, so their sister she assumed it would be a girl would go through life seven years behind the oldest.

August left such ma\ers to her. He was a good father by nature, having had to fight for a\ention as a child. His mother tried to compensate for her husband, busy making the fortune that kept them all solvent, but she was equally distracted. August was as close to her sister, Penelope, as he was to Tim. Between them, they filled in as parents. Yet his real parents were benign in their own way.

One aspect of this was Constance's insight that being sent off to boarding school, particularly his father's, would be a disaster for August. She kept him in London as a day student, offering her daughters the same choice. Some went away, some stayed, but leaving it to them avoided the neuroses a family's impositions can stamp on its children.

The end result, thus far, was August at 44. This season brought them to the country, his sentimental journey. She didn't resent it. Tim's sisters thought she was a good match for August, and they loved her daughters. The girls loved them in turn and reveled in the country. August taught them to swim. He pointed out the hazards of country life, but always anecdotally, making himself Exhibit A of what not to do and why. "You'd never be so stupid," he'd add, thanking Providence for sparing him yet again.

He was very good at what he did, but not much good at other things on which his practice depended. It was therefore lucky that Prudence could do them in her sleep.

Like a film company, they pulled people in as a project needed. Bespoke, and large enough to be sequential not overlapping, the work took the time it took. He was clear about this, because the age of these houses ruled exactitude out re: cost and schedule. Yet August knew such houses inside-out and had an encyclopedic mind for artisans and suppliers. They too were handed around, and August was intensely loyal and generous in his referrals provided they held up their end. Friendship was his golden rule, and he also made friends of his clients, armed with advice from his mother and the confidence (and wherewithal) to say no. Pru left all this to him, but made it her business to understand the mechanics of the clients' family offices, whatever it took to stay current and make sure everyone else was paid. She also arranged the photoshoots and coordinated the profiles of these great and good, anxious to show off what they'd wrought, and saw to it that August was mentioned.

Every wife needs a wife. His librarian, as he called her, hired out of Central St. Martin's, combined a thoroughness with anything handed her and a demeanor that would melt a banker's heart, Pru saw. The clients loved her, ringing up just to hear her voice. She was unfazed by their a\entions, having pledged her heart to a schoolmate, a relationship for the record books. Emma and Gemma, Em and Gem to Tim and his sisters, also came down in season, staying in a nearby co\age Prudence rented.

So, in short, a third daughter was possible. In the country, the girls mixing with their cousins, it always seemed like a good idea. "This will repeat," Tim told her, noting that her second and first shared a birth month.

Lev, God help him, is 83

Brunel was his given name, a matrilinear connection to the great engineer resonating with his mother, but in his rugby days he was dubbed "The Leviathan," or Lev for short, and it stuck. Even his mother eventually gave in. As soon as he could, he made his way to The City, where he acquired a reputation for sensing the flow of things. Much later, one financial journalist compared that flow to climate change and credited Lev's ability to spot the broader shifts earlier than his peers. His fortune wasn't in the tycoon league, but substantial. Married to Constance, whose only real luxury was dresses, he avoided the baggage his peers acquired. A house large enough for her and their children, yes, but as the well-educated daughter of moderns, she foreswore live-in help, did her own shopping, gave the household a loose but effective order, bred admirably good-looking offspring. Her passion was contemporary Russian poetry, so a lot of expat Russian poets, but never in their house. She put up with his work habits, relatively all-consuming except on holidays, which he took religiously. He spent lavishly on those occasions, being to his mind far cheaper than owning a house and pool in Italy or France. It provided variety and avoided an encumbrance, both fundamental to his thesis, arrived at early on, to stay open, preserve capital, and be as unsentimental as possible about any investment. A house for the family's all that's needed. Cars are functional. He used public transit whenever possible, or cabs. He joined no clubs, sought no honors, backed no parties. He left philanthropy to Constance, popular with the doyennes. He loved what he did. He had endless patience. He enjoyed the scrum that trading often was, but his rugby days were long over. Years passed. His

coups were noted. Not that he said anything. The ones who noticed were the forensics, journalists who keep score in a longer sense, interested in who's still there when one crisis or another culls the herd. They also noticed that whatever herd was drawing momentary a\ention, he wasn't part of it. And he stood out physically, of course. It wasn't accidental, "The Leviathan." He looked the part, and there were still men in The City who could a\est to their fear of him on the pitch. Like others with that background, he was gentle, hugely tolerant, innately polite and kind in any other se\ing. Despite his absences, his children loved and defended him because of this. Growing up, it was Constance's absences they resented. August, the most devoted to her, sometimes went along, refusing to be left at home. The boy inherited the engineering prowess of Lev’s Brunel ancestor, channeled into the derelict old manors and Georgian terrace houses he restored, a smaller ambit than his great predecessor, but beautifully wrought.

Lev's reputation as a seer led to invitations to speak that he consistently turned down, but he did accept a lunch with the FT, liking the journalist. He ate sparingly, tuning his consumption to his clothing and mental clarity, so he suggested they meet at the V&A café, which he liked. His host marveled at the bill in the published story. Money could be made, Lev said, but it took a lot of concentration to do so, like walking in rainfall. He liked to walk. Seasonally a\uned, aware of the small changes to one neighborhood or another, he made his way.

Jane Birkin's death caught her off-guard. "On a million mood boards," Jo Ellison wrote. Constance never went for the fashions she wore so readily, but Serge Gainsbourg resembled the pirate band she befriended in the lateSamizdat era, when the poets filtered into London, some choosing it over Israel as a place of exile. Birkin was quoted as saying she'd never have left her first husband had he not run off, which she also admired. Loyalty to Lev was absolute with her, yet it was a loyalty on her own terms. Birkin was loyal, but she did ultimately desert Gainsbourg. Constance knew that it would be a grievous error to bed these poets, and Lev was unwavering in his devotion, second only to his work in The City, a nearly allconsuming activity that he would drop altogether when they went on holiday. It was then and only then that they bred, as she thought of it. He was a large man. A friend returning from Tokyo once recounted seeing a Sumo wrestler lunching with his tiny girlfriend and wondering how they did it. "Carefully," she said, and this was true of her and Lev. It was the opposite with a series of lovers, of which Tim, now remarkably her brother-in-law, was the last and most memorable. Just when her desire for him seemed like it might overwhelm her, a holiday with Lev gave her Tatiana, her youngest. A break from Tim turned into an ending of sorts, but then a walk in the park brought him together with Pen, a lucky event for all of them. Tim and Pen were perfectly suited, and Tim slid into the role of brother-in-law without a hitch. Lev admired his wit and his ability to fix almost anything. He and their children loved Tim's family for its beguiling idiosyncrasies.

Constance was Constance in her own mind. She had no specific calling, but her mind was capacious. Tim was a\entive to it, both before and after their liaison. He knew how much she knew, as did those Russian poets. She was someone to reckon with, the man at M16 said to her once. They would call on occasion, "just to talk." Her instinct was the reason, as August saw too. Give her a Russian and she knew immediately if he could be trusted or not. It was unclear to her why this was, but it was unfailing. Only the men, but their women were often a confirming sign.

Lev stayed clear of Russia and China. Revelations of Stalin's and Mao's crimes had an impact, so he was wary. Xi's drift back, which he spo\ed very early, was one of his coups, but his Chinese investments were minimal. He took Constance's word that her Russian poets were good. He liked "Bratsk Station" and Brodsky in translation.

Editors were always after her to do translations, but she was no poet. She did help translators out, and would tell an editor based on a passage or two if a translation was likely sound or dodgy. She spoke it and heard it, but rarely read it and almost never wrote it. It came naturally to her, she discovered, this odd language, so much so that she could play with it, parody it, amuse her poet friends. It was one thing she and Tim had in common, this ability to hold quantities of speech or text in mind, then riff on it. He was wildly funny, if "wildly" could even be applied to Tim, in the interludes of their lovemaking, and she learned from him that humor of this sort is a means of paying a\ention. (Lev could mimic anyone in finance, she reflected.)

Tem

and Jack are 66 and 76

The breeding room, as they called it, was now where Tem wrote her novels and short stories. There was a daybed and it got occasional use, as Tem had Jack's number. Retired from The City, he tended his several gardens. One was the kitchen garden he planted for Tem early on, a joint project. The other was his longstanding involvement with Stephen’s domain at the country house, for which he was a patron and over time as valued a participant as Tim, owing to his facility with plants of all sorts and his instinct for the kitchen and informal gardens, fields, and river banks that fanned out from house and extended its domesticity into nature. Woods and water were part of it, and Jack loved to swim and fish. He was in his element completely, Tem observed, a boy again, unfettered by city life, and those she and the others bred took to him as they looked to Tim to teach them mechanical skills or supply them if they lacked them utterly.

She sometimes contrasted the children's lives with their own, set sidewise by life when their parents expired. Jack loved his father, who died unexpectedly when he was seven. His mother never remarried. She had money, along with what his father left them. Sent away to school, he summered in Bayswater, the only house he knew. When his father was alive, they summered with his family in the country, but that ended. He saw his cousins occasionally, but his mother was as set sidewise by his father's death as he was. Without meaning to, his family triggered her grief, so they curtailed these encounters. Jack took the brunt of the separation. Marriage, children, children's children, a place in the country, throngs of cousins all of this gave him back what he'd lost and sorely missed.

Tem's fiction was like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, one reviewer put it, and she could see that, but then he added that Katherine Mansfield haunted the proceedings. She liked this, but the haunting came from elsewhere. Like Tim, her work was noticed and sold well. Both had followings and were sometimes paired, their fate since childhood, but it seemed unjustified by the work itself, which was entirely different, viewed from within. Tim had what he called an observation engine, absorbing copious swathes of daily life and then working them up as dialogues, mostly, and their incidentals, usually surfaced in the back and forth. Tem too had a holistic memory, but strongly visual. She didn't go as far as Elizabeth Bowen with her scenes, but was less minimalistic than Tim, who would describe a woman as beautiful and get on with it, like a Cavafy poem. She felt the details ma\ered. (They did ma\er to Tim, she saw, but only if they ma\ered to the person speaking, as with Constance in his first book, commenting on a dress's provenance, one of the things that gave her away, Pen told Tem, and yet Constance likely would have been annoyed if Tim had failed to note it. Those dresses really did ma\er to her.)

Tem took to the role of banker's wife. Their Bayswater parties were sought after, not least owing to her cooking, and she was a stunner in her prime. Jack's colleagues wondered how he managed to land her, never suspecting how it actually went. Loathing dating, reticent, wounded by parental deaths, both needed a push. Tem had met Jack and was set on him, so Tim stepped in, as he always did. He knew them be\er than themselves.

Pen is 70 and Tim is 76

"I am emerita," Pen said. "A long time coming," said Tim. She'd been a classics professor forever, and winnowing down and weaning her doctoral students was the primary delay. Despite offers elsewhere, she chose a metropolitan university so they could continue to live in town. Tim was asked often to teach, but invariably declined. He and Lev shared a devotion to their work that made the trappings of their success distractions. It was the same with honors. He only won if his publisher entered. He would appear, speak briefly and gratefully, congratulate the other winners, thank the judges, and leave as soon as possible.

Pen also wrote. A late burst of papyri deciphering almost derailed her retirement, but her university gave her a permanent research position, so she retired and took it up to focus on this trove. Tim contributed his visual memory. "Be\er than AI," a colleague said.

Life was less mechanical than ever, Tim felt. It was digital, the works embalmed and encased, or the materials were composites, arcanely fabricated. He observed a sideswiped Mini, reduced to rubble lying around what remained of it. His old Lancia was a relic, he thought, every time he worked on it. Pru's Emma found someone in Italy to scrounge parts, but it still took half a year to replace the oil pump. He could improvise, and did, but there were limits. Stephen's tractor was similar, an ancient MasseyFerguson. August asked him if the Lancia could be made electric. Yes, in theory, Tim said. He'd considered it, as internal combustion engines were like tobacco now to climate activists. He'd do it if he had to.

Pen's three girls and a boy were fi\ed in around her academic career "in the manner of Elizabeth Anscombe."

Unlike the belle dame of Wi\genstein studies, Pen was funded lavishly by her father, a great lover of children, having missed his own to some extent in his quest to make money. It was his calling, they all realized, and the FT occasionally made it clear he was very often the only one to skirt some debacle, and the earliest to get in on and then get out of whatever drew the herd. Sometimes he sat it out.

Lev more or less took over Tim's extended family as an outsized figure of largesse, so the country house steadily improved, inside and out, and nearby places were acquired that seemed to subvert his dislike of excess property, but it proved he was okay with it if someone else held title and made real use of it, inviting him "anytime" to visit. As he got older, his preference for family outweighed going abroad unless Constance suggested it. He left that to her, but went on his own to the country to be with the children.

Whenever Penelope imagined the ancient Greeks, Lev came to mind, like those farmers who took up arms for Athens, a diversion from plowing, then went back to it. He regarded almost everything as a sport of some kind, but when he fished, for example, he ate what he caught. He thought catch and release was cruel to the fish and stupid.

Pen was close to Tem, August, and Tatiana, August's youngest sister. Her daughter, the lovely Natalia, named for Tat's favorite novelist and her Swiss husband's mother, would soon marry at the nearby parish church, an event promising the kind of festival that made the season.

Reading Michael Frayn's Among Friends, Tim told Pen it was at the border of too late, just shy of it. "Writing is a reflex," he noted, "like playing scales. A book is new every time, unless it isn't. If one of mine isn't, please tell me."

Tatiana is 39

Tatiana was a mystery to her siblings, but not to Lev. He felt she was like Constance had Constance's appetites been directed differently. Tat, as they all called her, wrote on media in the broadest sense. She started with art and film, then followed the trail. Popular culture interested her most of all, and she had a Lev-like knack for absorbing quantities of it and then drawing attention to aspects, typically widely disparate, that related. This is actually from Tim, Lev believed but didn’t say.

She almost never discussed her work, pointing out that "it's all there to read." This was true, she wrote constantly, much of it notes for more substantial things in progress. "I work out loud," she said. Tim in particular followed her assiduously. He wrote screenplays for fun (he said) and worked things in borrowed from her posts, a secondhand relationship to the media itself, viewed only to give his mind a sense of its form or nature. Her own tactic was similar, "snapshots of the flood from my ark," rarely bothering to translate things, being mainly drawn to the action and the soundtrack. "Noise more than signal" was her view of the correct order to get an understanding. Lev totally agreed. "There are no signals, or hardly any," he told her in Tim's hearing. The three of them did discuss her work, as it was talking shop for them, given their minds.

A shorthand went along with it, part of their mutual sympathy. It was, she thought, likely a sign they were on the spectrum, but luckily they were still emotive. Minds like these are a kind of higher species, yet wrapped up in their bodies, hers and Tim's one sort, Lev's another.

Married at 18 to a Swiss architect, they live mainly in Ticino. Lev foresaw Brexit, so Ludo opened an office in Milan. Pru and August's Emma is his back office.

Ludo and August shared the materiality and craft their work involved. Ludo loved Tim's old car, sometimes borrowing it and singing 1950s Italian pop songs as he drove, to his daughters' amusement. He and August were from different planets, aesthetically, but spoke the secret language of their profession.

It seemed odd to her that she wrote, given her subject ma\er, especially when AI threatened to take over, scaring the screenwriters into striking. Tim told her that writing is what humans do and will do. Machines will write like machines, just as some humans do already. If it can be phoned in, then be\er that a machine does so than us.

Tat was all-in for the new, but she felt the past came along with it inevitably, just as Walter Benjamin asserted. Contemporary life may be the source of our creativity, but it's an amalgam of the present's weird flotsam and jetsam. We think often that we're looking at an unchanging scene, but her father, for example, knew be\er, both at the microlevel of things observed on foot and the macro-level that drove finance in its oscillating, sometimes cataclysmic way. She and Lev had an oddly consonant view of many things. They rang each other up sometimes, just to compare notes, and once in a while money would appear in her account with an email to follow: "Your share of our conversation."

Natalia is 20, Ben is 26

Ben, training in the genetic end of medicine, met Natalia at a party near Modena. She'd gone there to see Paola, whose parents owned the farm where the party was held. Paola's mother Genia is a d'Este, the ducal family that ran the region back in the day. She and Paola were friends from a Swiss boarding school they a\ended. Paola introduced Ben as her American cousin. Now that they were engaged, she knew his convoluted backstory: lesbian parents, the father actually one of the women's brother, Paola's father, so Ben's half-sibling. His mother is the wife. Same with his sister Jo, now living in Ferrara, married to another d'Este. Ben's father may be the son of Louis Kahn, the architect, but no one would do a DNA test. His great-grandfather was a Mapuche from Argentina. "Let's do a DNA test," Natalia suggested. Ben resisted, but finally agreed. His showed that yes, Kahn figured, and confirmed that Trent, not some random donor, was his father; hers revealed that her mother's father was her uncle Tim, not Lev.

And now these kind old men, so different yet equal in their affections and surprisingly close given different careers, are here at the country house for their wedding. And Ben's parents are here along with his extended family. So, they put the DNA tests aside and wed across three successive days and nights. Ben made notes in an effort to sort out who was who. Jo and Giulie\a's habies won Natalia's heart, and Jo's Federico made fast friends of Stephen and Jack, walking off to talk agrarian shop. Catherine, ever thoughtful, invited the newlyweds to stay on and use a co\age that appeared purpose-built for procreation. (Her mother vouched for it.)

One by one or two by two, the throng departed. Curious about the sort of medicine Ben intended to practice, Tem invited him for a walk, so Natalia went down to the river to find her grandfather fishing. She'd learned to fish from him, and he had a spare rod with him (always), so they fished together, giving each other luck. When Lev felt they'd caught enough for dinner, they sat back on the bank and caught up on the rest of life.

He was, as usual, open, loving, and innately curious about her. It led her finally to tell him about the DNA test. He said he'd guessed her mother was Tim's, "unsurprising, as Constance was gone on him. I thought she'd drift off, but when she found she was pregnant, she thought it was me. It led her to cool things off, then August introduced Tim to Pen and the rest is history, as they say. Now you've confirmed what Constance herself never imagined. Once I met Tim's sisters, I saw how your mother takes after them, but she favors Constance too, which masks it. Tim never knew, either, but he and Tatiana have an affinity. When he married Pen, he just slid into our family, a happy ending to a story that has your DNA test as a coda. It also solves the mystery of Trent's father. He and his mother have wisely left that ma\er to the gods, and I suggest you leave this one to them, also. Not every revelation should be acted on. It can seem like a signal, but it's likely noise."

Paola, 24, talks shop

Leo made sure Ludo and August knew her granddaughter Paola was an architect. She set the scene by suggesting to the men that they should collaborate, noting how her own work invariably involved a context set by existing buildings or a local tradition. She also noted that the perennial challenge for practices like theirs is to test the limits of bespoke, to see if what they knew could find a larger audience, at least on occasion. They took this in. They'd known each other a long time, of course, being part of Lev's family, and Lev himself took an interest in their work, as he took an interest in everything that interested others who interested him. For her part, Constance, holder of Lev's philanthropic purse, was on the hunt for new causes. The air, she felt, was filled with them.

Paola had finished at Berkeley in May. What she liked best there was the shop she craved tangibility. As she and Tim discussed his Lancia, he picked up on this, mentioning how the family's two architects appeared to have things in common with Paola's grandmother, despite the aesthetic differences of their work. "Apprentice with them," he said, pointing to the season he spent in Bordeaux, years before.

Leo and Paola met with August and Ludo on one of the terraces Jack and Stephen had added to the se\ings one might encounter, walking. A pergola shaded them as Leo made her argument. Then Constance arrived and spirited Leo away. Paola, inheriting her grandmother's directness, made her proposal straightaway. They listened, aware of her provenance. She's very talented, Tim had said, a conclusion he'd arrived at as they bent over the Lancia's motor and he walked her through it. "She could repair it," he told himself, and enjoy the process.

"I tell Lev what to back," Constance told Leo. "Lately, mothers and their babies draw my attention. I spoke with Bren and Lina about Modena. Bren told me you designed a clinic there which needs to be expanded. Lina said that the issues of Bren’s practice have led her to start a seminar in parallel. I gather that you and they are discussing this. My husband and I wondered if we could possibly help."

Leo nodded. "There's one more project to consider. Jo's husband, Federico is a d'Este like Genia, but the branch of the family that tends their farmsteads, all now coops. He's the negociant who keeps it all running. He has an MBA and wants to see if the model can be replicated elsewhere. He and Stephen are talking, but he badly needs a mentor."

"We spent a holiday once in that region," Constance said. "I'd love to go back. Let's talk with Lev. There's so much here to work with, which will please him. We're both so glad that Natalia's marriage has brought our families together. It's odd how that works, isn't it?" Leo nodded. "It's always how it works in my experience," she said.

Leaving the men to work out the details, Paola went back to find Tim at work on his ancient car. "For a family sedan, it's pre\y high strung. It's like the Pavoni we have at home, also venerable. When it works, it makes wonderful coffee, but the gaskets fail every two years, roughly, and I have to take it apart. The Appia is similar." They leaned over it, two lovers of the tangible. "I tune it by ear," he said. Like a woman, he thought, but didn't say aloud, yet Paola was aware that Tim reminded her of Ben. Despite the excursion into genetics, he was as taken with tangibility as her. "Families are somehow like this beautiful car or your Pavoni," she said. "They have to be lovingly tended."

Jo is 24, Nora is one

Lev liked babies, so he gravitated to Jo and Giulietta, and sometimes took their babies so they had a little time to themselves. Jo’s Nora especially was captivated by this mountain of a man, who held her so solidly yet carefully.

Lev had an instinct for adults too. He could ferret out their conflicting thoughts in conversation the way Tem could read Tim from long exposure. Thus, he knew soon that Jo was of two minds about some things and not in others. Not , for example, about Federico, his ambitions, the wisdom of their marriage, the arrival of Nora. But her roles in life, especially those thrusted on her, were an issue. Leo was a Prospero-like figure, he thought, reluctant to break her staff. She meant well and much of her power was used for good, but she had blind spots, as all people do. In Jo's case, what she missed was the nature of Jo's ambitions. Leo was a creator, brilliant at it. Jo was a receptor, helpless without the germ of an idea, but exceptional once planted. And Leo had outrun her ambition, a situation Lev was now familiar with. You see what you always saw, but time is against you, so you look to others, but how do you tell them? What do you tell them? He depended on Constance to help him with this, but Leo had no Constance. Bren came closest to it, because Bren was clear about her roles in life and Leo's clinic suited them. Lina was much less clear.

"Tem is who you should consult," he told Jo. Tem was his favorite of that family's women, and her approach to life resembled Jo's, he thought. "I really mean that she's a model for you. Tem moves through life a day, a week, a month, a year at a time. Her plans are both specific and intuited, but she's moved mountains in her time."

Intrigued, Jo tracked Tem down and told her what Lev had said. "I'm honored," Tem began. "I make no claims at all, but on paper, yes, I've moved some mountains, starting with Jack, not the easiest man to a\ract let alone marry, yet I did, and remade the household, rebuilt the family that life took away from me." Then suddenly she began to cry. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, "I try not think about it, but it's always there and sometimes it surfaces." She paused a moment. "I should explain," she said. "My mother died having me, and then my father drowned himself in the river here when I was four. He never got over her, you see, and I blamed myself forever, but Tim rescued me, God bless him, so I was left only with missing my father, who I loved. It wasn't enough, that love, to save him, that was the quandary, and Tim said to me that really we are bystanders when it comes to the inner lives of others. When they weigh their lives and decide to take them, we can never know the math." She put her hand on Nora's head. "And Jack lost his father early, so we have that bond. I was saved by them both."

She shook her head to clear it. "Ever since, I lived a day at a time, but dared to look out a week, maybe a month or nine months. Life hands you such increments of time and they feel real or legitimate, time you can work with. My desires were quite simple, really: a house with children, a garden, a place in the country, a river where my father always is, mostly for be\er. When I'm here, I pray daily for his soul and he appears in my dreams. He can be calm with me and it gives us both pleasure, I feel. It never happens in London, so he must be tied to this place."

Catherine is 70

"You look like you've seen a ghost!" Catherine said. "By proxy. I've just been with Tem," Jo said, si\ing down at the kitchen table. A cup of tea, warm bread, bu\er, and jam appeared. "She dreams of our father, but I catch glimpses of him," Catherine told her. "It's why I live here, why I married Stephen, my material man, to whom no ghost will ever show its face, yet of course he proved to be a medium and Tom passes messages through him to all of us. We're why he's here, I think, and our presence calms him."

Their mother, Mary, bled to death after Tem was delivered, Catherine explained. Tom raised the alarm, but the doctor had gone out for a smoke and the nurses ran for him instead of helping her. He came at once, but it was too late. Negligence, the court ruled, and they got a se\lement, which was useful as Tom never wrote another book. Mary had grounded him so he could write and not disappear into the world his writing accessed. He never found his footing, and despite his great love for them, his life was untenable. When he felt Elizabeth could keep the family together, he took this dreadful step, but it was an error, he likely realized, and his love for them kept him tethered to this place where they gathered.

In London, he appeared once in her room. It was "the most terrifying thing," but the only way to tell her she should be with him, as his afterlife was hell. It was before she met and married Stephen, who he helped her sort it out. He was receptive to her father, who left messages in his head while he slept to pass along to his children.

"We read an article in the LRB about the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami," Catherine said. It described a Buddhist priest who was visited constantly by

the spirits of the dead, even dogs. He was a doorway or a gateway to the afterlife, and when they found it, they put their traumas down on leaving. 'I'm like him,' Stephen told me. He had chronic nightmares, but he was thrown by their realism. Past lives, he wondered? It seemed unlikely. 'No,' he said, 'it has nothing to do with me. I'm just a portal. And there must be a queue, as Tom hasn't passed through it yet.' It was a relief to realize it was other people's horrors that rushed through him. It made no difference to them if he let them go, so let them go he did."

"Tem is blameless," she added, "but a child's sense of things is close to mythic. Tim saved her by teaching her how to ground herself. Her sense of time is visceral, almost geologic. He also married her off to Jack, the one man on earth besides Tim himself who understands her. Jack is her other ground and their house in Bayswater, that family, grounds them both, but she’s easily untethered, as you saw. She’s Tom’s own daughter in that respect, a day-at-atime girl. Even her name is from him. The rest of us have Bible names, the custom in Mary’s family, but he chose the goddess who took her from him, as propitiation. You’ll meet Demeter, Tem’s daughter, named in that tradition, although their boys’ names revert to form.”

Tim had mentioned that Demeter, delayed by an academic conflict, was on her way. " Her father's late writing, his notebooks, is her subject," Catherine told her. "Elizabeth alludes to them in her biography of him, but she said they were beyond her."

is 80, Lina is 56

Elizabeth

She was unwell when Natalia and Ben wed, but learned that Catherine and Stephen had asked members of Ben's family to stay on. This from Tim, who helpfully wrote out who was who. When she read it, Elizabeth telephoned him to say that she intended to visit if they could find a room.

A room was found, she took the train, fetched by Tim and Paola at the station where they'd all arrived. When they were introduced, Elizabeth surprised Paola by speaking animatedly to her in Italian. As she explained over the Lancia's considerable interior noise, she was the translator of Caterina d'Este, the Ferrarese writer, the great-grandmother of Jo's Federico. She was writing her biography, so she knew a good deal about Paola's family. She also knew from the keeper of Caterina's archive that Lina took an interest too.

Tim had spoken with Catherine to arrange for their oldest sister's visit, but hadn't bothered to tell the others, not realizing the connections Elizabeth described. "We'll have to organize a dinner," he said to Paola. "Oh, Lina will be in heaven," she said. "Her dinners are legendary."

With Paola as emissary, word quickly spread. Tim took it upon himself to ask Lina if she was up to cooking, but first he quizzed Catherine on the makings. "Lev has more than held up his end," she said. "We could feed the county." Lina was willing, as Paola predicted. Unable to resist, she called on Elizabeth, "hoping you're not too tired from the journey." She wasn't. Shaking off her malady energized her and other people always did.

Lina expressed regret, stupidity even, for not asking her about Caterina, but her quest was so specific, trying to work out her parentage. Then she remembered the note

she found. "Oh, yes, I found it too," Elizabeth said, when Lina described it, "but I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. My biography is literary how she relates to Bassani, for example. I made a copy of the note, as it seemed important, but you know so much more about that whole thing. She certainly agonizes about sidestepping the racial law. We should write an article about it together. I'm also interested in the poetry of Luca Piranesi. I think it's wonderful. I want to translate her selection. I gather there are shelves of it, but she seems to have been one of his closest readers."

Lina shuddered with excitement, describing how she sat at Luca's desk in Piranesi's harbor, asking him to give her whatever it is writers require. "Moxie is how I think of it," Elizabeth said. "My father liked that word. I would very much like to see that archive for myself. We all write, as you may have heard, but translating from Italian is my other occupation. Literary biographies pay off the knowledge I acquire about these authors. Caterina is a personal favorite. That your daughter married her greatgrandson is something, isn't it?"

Tipped off by Paola, Leo wandered in, and Elizabeth quizzed them both about Caterina. "Looking at those early photos of her in the archive, I felt she was striking, but as a child, I thought she was kindhearted but not easy to get to know," Lina said. Elizabeth nodded. "One type of writer."

Luca is 90 and then he's 63

At breakfast, Lina told Elizabeth that she’d awakened in the night, remembering walking with Luca and Caterina in the Piranesi harbor. They were discussing the planned reissue of Luca’s poems. “I listened, as I’d told Luca in Modena that I would get them published and make him famous. ‘You have my selection,’ Luca told Caterina. ‘I chose poems that stay clear of matters that might be painful to their readers if they’re still alive. I have no way to know, but here I am, so I can’t be sure.’ He gestured toward the building that houses his writing room. ‘There’s a second manuscript. It’s marked “Number Two.” I had forgotten this completely. There is no such manuscript in Piranesi, only the manuscript that Caterina put together, which is in Ferrara. Judging from the book, she must have ignored him and combined the two manuscripts. The poems she included stay clear of nothing, as far as I can tell. But we should go to Piranesi together, Elizabeth, and have a look. There may be other things worth surfacing."

Leo appeared meanwhile. "I had a dream about Luca, so we must have drawn him here. We were at a different harbor, Buenos Aires, in 1950, so a Luca in late middle age, coming off what I imagine was his last affair. But this being a dream dreamt in 2024, we both were seeped in a foreknowledge of how it all unfolded. We said less than what we thought, as if telepathic, and at different points we noticed a couple in the distance. I was unsure in the dream who they were, but when I awoke, I realized the woman was Mads, who shot herself in that season, whose death left me at loose ends. Luca told me that her doing so led me to meet Gianni and have Lina, so propitious in that sense. 'You know this,' he added, which is true. With her

was an older man I couldn't place, in his early fifties, and wet, as if he'd just been pulled out of the water. Looking at him, Luca said, 'He too figures in others' destinies, which may be a role people play, unknowingly perhaps. It seems tragic, is tragic, to those it directly affects, but it also keeps the game going in which we all figure as players, the great game that your Etruscans take the time to chart. We're like the Mapuche, reading the children on arrival, being more interested in their nature, then conversing, as you and I are doing, checking in to see how it's going. You're an excellent receiver of these small pushes I give you, and as lucky as your father. You have your uncle Paolo's ability to make things happen, or likely you get that from Maria.'"

"Is this what you're writing?" Elizabeth asked Lina, who nodded. "It has many protagonists. Alive or dead, they surface one way or another and tell us their stories. But you need a roadmap or a family tree." Then Catherine spoke up. "That was my father Tom with your Mads, Leo, two suicides who encountered each other thanks to our families gathering here. It may be helpful for both of them to see that it wasn't entirely a mistake on their parts or that life at any rate folds it in, all of it the yeast for the daily bread we continue to bake and put on the table, in remembrance of Him and them." Leo bowed her head. "Amen, as we were taught to say. A good way to look at it."

Dem is 28, Tom was 52

"Only my uncle Tim calls me Demeter," Dem said. "My father calls me Demi and everyone else calls me Dem. Tim is enchanted by Paola, by the way. She's as taken with his old Lancia as he is. We're a family of arrangers, as you'll discover." Jo nodded. "So is ours," she said.

Then Dem described her project. She'd enlisted Pen and Tim for their knowledge of sources for the quotations in her grandfather's notebooks. "He admired Pound's Cantos, and in this last phase, he let his own learning flood his pages. His published novels and poems thro\led it back, the way Tim cushions texts in irony or jokes. Never straight on is one of the two ways our family operates, always straight on being the other. But the notebooks are brilliant, like Wi\genstein if Wi\genstein were a novelist."

Lina listened intently. A small circle had gathered around "the beautiful Demeter," as Tim had characterized her. "Like Homer," Jo realized. "I wonder how he thinks of me?" Tem was calm again in the presence of her daughter. She was another reader of the notebooks, straight up as she lacked the learning Tim and Pen brought to them, and yet, Dem told Jo later, the most devoted, hanging on his words. “She dreams of him so often that I imagine they discuss the texts. Tem is dogged about time and texts both, and so familiar with Tom at this point that his visits lead to conversation rather than trauma, although trauma can surface, as you saw. She and Jack's love for us is so unconditional and absolute, it's quite stunning. We are their lifework, along with the house and Jack's gardens. It's a gift, we decided, not a burden, as we never question why we're here, the reason being very clear."

Dem described the scheduling conflict that kept her from the wedding, "the usual stupidity of academia, but it's the easiest way to do it, the surest route to publication for something so obscure, although my grandfather has a cult following and NYRB in New York is reprinting him." A nod in Pen's direction. "I took her as my model."

Pen and Lina looked across at each other. "You go first," Lina said. "It's definitely an odd career," Pen said. "As you say, it's convenient where obscurity's concerned, one of the few places where excitement is generated by new finds. I read that Tech is giving prizes now to speed things up. I should be grateful, as the old methods would outlive me."

Lina asked Dem to say more about the notebooks. "The main issue is thematic. I theorize that he wrote to make sense of how the fates undid him, and to save himself, if possible. He loved his children as much as he loved Mary, but he was also mad with grief. It's a miracle he lived another four years, but the family would have been dispersed had he not waited until Elizabeth could take it in hand. There was enough money, thanks to the se\lement. His books alone wouldn't have been enough. One was filmed, which was helpful. One book or another has stayed in print, but his work could be be\er known. I think it's ripe for a revival, which spurs me to get my project done."

Elizabeth took the floor. "Dem's interest has prompted my own, and Tim and Pen have helped us both. They're a thicket, those notebooks. He used a shorthand a bit like encryption, which is Tim's forte. And Pen has her father's gift for reading into things. So, it's not as baffling as it was. When Dem's done, I'll give my biography a new chapter."

Bren is 52, Trent is 60, GiulieOa is 27

Giulie\a felt her father belonged to a different world, despite her immense respect for his and Gianni's work. Tatiana's focus was identical with her own. The resistance that had dogged her since Leo recruited her lay here. When she said this to her, Tatiana pushed back a li\le, as she had an affection for their work, yet she saw what Giulie\a meant. "I think we live with media as weather now, remembering our awareness, but also ignoring it, often by necessity."

At the river, Bren found Trent standing alone. "Lina told Jo how she and Ben were sparked," she said. "There's a part of her I will never understand." Trent looked at her. "I will never forget it," he said finally. "She wanted Jo to know she was desired," Bren said. "Usually that's a truism, but desire is a subject in your family. You could start a school." Trent nodded. "We were also desired, Lina and me. Not everyone is, as you must see in your practice. In Ben and Jo's case, desire was purposeful, be\er certainly than using a baster. We all wanted those babies. Fecundity is a marvelous drug. Luckily, our addiction to it was brief, as Genia foresaw. Her thoughts were dynastic, though, breeding for perpetuation. It runs in her family and if you get in its orbit, as Jo did, you'll be pregnant in a fortnight."

Tatiana liked Italians, and Genia came from deep stock, a family of kings, not just dukes. She saw this, even in the more exotic Giulie\a. She was good at reading lineage in women, and ancient noble families were magnets for diversity. Leo too was interesting, an entrepreneur like her own father, able like him to see things others missed and ambitious to do more. No surprise they hit it off. One of her mother's roles in life was to put the next thing in front

of Lev, give him that pat on the head Camille Paglia spoke of. Leo and her family were a stroke of luck, new territory. Tat might follow along to see where it led.

“Film is important the same way books are,” she added. “Books too are ridiculous, and yet I write them and read them. There are many terrible films, but a great film is like a great book. Experiencing it does something to us. Trent and Gianni are masters at documentary. Nothing they ever did is less than wonderful. We have to honor that, even if we admit it’s strange to find it in our demented world, like noticing that a river actually has fish and isn’t just another cesspool.” She looked at Giulietta. “Let’s meet soon in Modena or Milan and continue this."

Bren took Trent's hand and kissed it. "Sometimes I dream about that hut. I read the journal of Lina's ancestor, writing about her lover, and she says it only worked because they didn't marry, they just knew each other."

"Everything in its season," Trent said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

It's What We Do

Set in London in 2000 and a decade later.

In the photo that sat always on Tem's writing desk, framed with a fold-out prop, accompanying her from early adolescence through long marriage, they were in their thirties, already parents. Mary wore her hair cropped short, pragmatically but also stylishly. They touched and Tom looked at her admiringly. "This is the primal scene," Tem told herself again, the world as it was before she entered it. Of her siblings, only Catherine spoke of it as Tem imagined it. Elizabeth took over for her mother and later for both her parents. Catherine shared with Tem their father's restless presence. Tim sometimes dreamt of Mary, he said, but Elizabeth didn't, or, if she did, never mentioned it. Tim briefly experienced his father happy, and so he remembered him more in that form than the later, unhappy one, as he had a buoyant nature that had always carried Tem along.

"Artemis," she said aloud. Tom gave it to her and she named her daughter Demeter to honor it, even if for him it was propitiation rather than allusion. Tim's Penelope fell in the laMer category, a classicist who alone of the extended family said her name in full. It was Tem otherwise, a different sort of propitiation, binding her to the survivors and especially to Tim.

They were both novelists, she and Tim, like Tom before them. It came naturally, the fluidity with which they wrote, although what they wrote differed markedly, Tim aMentive to speech, including those parts of it that are gestures, silence, and everything in between that extends and colors.

Tem felt that their awareness was quite similar, in reality, but Tim wrote mainly from speech in this enlarged sense, his scenery quickly sketched in like the sets of a theater short on props. He was always called a minimalist, but was it true? His imagination was sparked by interaction. "I always liked to have a view," he told her, and indeed was able to recall it in detail, "but it doesn't really figure, just as a bodily detail doesn’t, either, although there it is with great precision if I think about it." Tem found in such details the sources from which her fiction arose.

Once, when Tim looked at the photo, he named a dressmaker their mother shared with Constance, Pen’s sister, then added in his maMer-of-fact way that this might be the key to their relationship, how her dresses reminded him of his mother. "Incestuous?" he wondered. He considered this, then dismissed it, as Tem saw. A great deal passed between them in this manner, a longstanding affinity. Tim was laconic unless prompted, whereas Tem was direct and even declarative in manner. She listened to Tim on women’s clothes, but it was jack who identified her father’s tailor.

"These things maMer," she told herself again. Tim wouldn't wear such a coat. He referred to women's clothes the way gardeners speak bafflingly of plants, naming them as second nature while others look on and try to guess from a handwave which one is meant. Tim felt that the only clothes to buy were those that one keeps because they're classics. Tem had an eye for them even Constance said so.

Jack, his thoughts

The clock Tim gave Jack, a square pendulum one designed in 1910 by Heinrich Tessenow, needed Tim's aMention. It ran slow and on the hour or halfhour, it sounded like whatever it was that was struck was encased with dust. Yet its tick was as reassuring as its provenance. Tim bought it on a trip and then restored it. It ran well for some five years. Whenever it struck, Jack remembered that Tim had noted this.

He liked the clock, positioning it so he could see it from his desk at home when he looked up. The gift coincided with his departure from The City. His friendship with Lev, Tim's wife Penelope's father, had blossomed. Not strictly partners, as Lev famously worked alone, they met weekly as often as not, comparing notes. As Lev saw it, Jack knew about trees and he knew about forests. Conjoined like alders was their shared insight.

The Millennium hovered. Much was aflame now amid the froth, signaling a collapse. Eighteen years since he and Tem had married. Demeter was 14! She sometimes reminded him of his mother.

Time passes. Clocks will do that. In a down market, one can search for bargains, consider alternatives, and find distractions. He'd learned from Lev that up markets should be approached similarly. When he left The City, throngs of traders sat "open plan," an arrangement he disliked. It was contained, this collapse, but something worse could follow. The clock was typical of Tim, bought to give to the one who came to mind when he saw it. Then he would show up, gift in hand, recounting its story, as

if he conveyed what destiny desired. This was Jack's experience of Tim: his unerring intuition, as if he saw the clock exactly as Jack saw it now.

When he considered his life before marriage, it was as if he'd been given the wrong part in a play and had gone along with it. Forced on him by events, he thought, and by his lack of self-awareness; some are truly one thing or another, and not anything else, but Jack had never been sure. Tem and Tim admired his devotion to the trees, but they knew more than him about this forest life situates us in. That he was wandering in it they saw at once; that he had a forest of his own they understood. It made him a mage in their eyes, like Lev too. Tem’s life was precarious, Jack saw, despite her nonchalance. He was needed.

They were raised to find their way regardless, a family prematurely orphaned that ran itself like a cooperative, venerating its houses as anchorages. He brought capital to it, and his talent for gardening.

Orphans take pleasure in their children. Tem knew this, but as Jack was an only child, he didn't realize it until it happened. That he would see it was so clear to Tim that he put it in those terms. Jack acted on it straightaway, so he must have seen it too, this path that had eluded him. It's like this, he thought. Each one knows her own woods."

Tem reflects again

Although always at the edge of grief in some sense, failing again and again to anticipate what might set it off, Tem saw London in general and Bayswater in specific as places of safety, their house most of all. Jack was central to it. She knew this from the start, and Tim saw that she was drawn to him. For him, it solved two problems, Jack and her. It also led him to Penelope by that indirect route which seemed to be how it went for him, another problem solved. It brought Lev into Jack's life, a kind of older brother who drew on Jack's formidable and previously not much tapped intelligence about the financial world. Lev made it possible for Jack to step away from his bank and pursue a different kind of career, more lucrative, far more interesting, and quite singular. No longer a banker's wife in the sense of having to entertain the grandees, Tem made more time for her writing. Their children were older now, less dependent on her. She sometimes missed the days when they were there underfoot, when every day was a juggling act to deal with their young lives and schedules while Jack was off making money. He still made money, but in a less all-consuming way, "longer bets," as he put it, and a stream of rents from his investments in property. She ran an innately modest household "like my wife's," Lev told Jack approvingly. Tem's only extravagance was at the market. She never stinted on ingredients, but her buying was as local and seasonal as possible. After her father died, Tem began to dream of him whenever she stayed at the country house. It began

with dreams of walking together, hand in hand. When she was eight or nine, they began to talk. He apologized to her "for the mess I made of things," and she apologized to him for causing her mother's death. "No need," he said. "It was the doctor's doing." Each dream ended with him fading away like the woman at the end of News from Nowhere. Then he'd return, and they pick up wherever they'd left off. Catherine, who lived year round at the country house with her husband Stephen, was also in contact with Tom through occasional sightings and the messages from him Stephen passed along. Tem never dreamt of her mother, but her father sometimes reminisced about their life together. He was tied to the family as a kind of penance, while she had moved on, so all his thoughts about her were memories. It was helpful to Tem to hear them. Her sisters also spoke of their life with her, but she felt Tom’s accounts were truer. He was absolutely real to her, genuinely a father, and this was a solace for them both. Perhaps it was to her then that he was tied? Catherine was his link to the country house, the family's summer paradise, and he functioned in a way as its patron saint. Lev's family gravitated there after Tim and Penelope wed. Lev in particular loved the place and it benefited from his largesse. Lev and Tim were as close as Lev and Jack, one of those mysteries of life, as if Constance never came between them, which likely she hadn't.

Grief's two forms

In their conversations, Tem and Tom agreed that grief was tangible and terrible, and yet at the same time narcissistic, and that this was true however it arose. Everyone had her version of it, Tem thought.

Tom owned his mistake to this and later in her life, Tem told him it was a common failing, almost a sign of one's humanity, "for we are oddly frail." Like me, she didn't say, but in dreams it doesn't maMer if you say it or not, as all is conveyed in the manner of Swedenborg's afterlife, in which there's no dissembling. Grief came upon her, Tem saw, and she found it difficult to resist. It was always a surprise, despite her knowing in detail what might trigger it.

Her mother's essential unobtainability was one aspect of it. Even now, she longed for her to appear and wondered if, like the Virgin, she might do so. Not really a believer, she nonetheless lit candles in side altars devoted to her or any female saint who might intervene. Her conversations with Tom were set consistently in the everyday of the country house, mainly in the vicinity of the river, and it was clear to her that despite the dreamworld they inhabited, Tom couldn't conjure Mary up. It had a physics of its own that governed them both. Although she studied the photos of her mother, no amalgam emerged to take on renewed life. She simply didn't figure, and yet she figured, looming over Tem from early childhood. It was grief's other form, a regret one can't assuage.

Tim saw it first and named it. He gave her grief two names, the hole and the blame, and told her they were like the ogres in stories who plague us at night.

Tim was maMer of fact when it came to grief. He saw how self-created it is, yet how there really is a hole and the blame. "Ogres aren't quite right," he said, "or if they seem to be ogres, it's because we can't see them accurately, so we misrepresent them. I knew our mother, but you had nothing to miss, just a hole where she was or must have been. I knew that her death was an accident, a doctor's negligence, but you only knew that her death was an exchange, you for her, and how could you ever square that up?”

One of Tim's themes was the sense of gain or loss that people use to assess the world around them. "It can kill you if you take it seriously," he told her, and his fiction went out of its way to satirize the fact, to make it clear how erratic this sense can be if overly determined by immediate circumstances or a fixed, teleological notion, both justifying all sorts of drama.

Maybe he had an ear for it, this self-delusion, but he was tenderhearted as well as pragmatic with Tem, whose situation he saw as being unique, a fate, like being born without a hand. Tem was bodily intact, but these invisible factors made similar demands. It can be second nature, compensating, but one always knows on some level there are missing parts. It was his role in Tem's life to help her out, dispel whatever the nighMime brought, find her an anchor like Jack who also understood, miraculously understood. Bayswater was their project, their zone of safety, a place where grief pressed much less. She'd longed for it, and in some sense Jack had longed for it too.

Demeter takes stock

Fourteen, she thought. "Demeter," she said aloud. Other than a few friends given to irony, only her mother and her aunt used her full name. She liked it, just as her aunt liked Artemis and always said it in full at least once when they spoke, with admiration. Dem liked Pen, married to Tim, also a writer. Pen was a classicist, so their names came naturally to her. She was coming into herself, the mirror told her. Jack said she favored his mother, fuller-figured than Tem, she saw, glancing at the photo that showed her in the kind of dress her aunt Constance wore. Her look was sunny, the photo taken before Jack was born. Perhaps his father took it? Demeter’s mind ran with it, one more vigneMe that signaled a writing gene, Tim told her when he overheard her as a child. It was true, the vigneMes just came to her. She rarely set them down, preferring to insert her unfolding saga into the house and its environs. It also came from her mother, anchored by these seMings, by Jack, by Tim, by them. She saw this early on, her mother's vulnerability despite her natural competence and bravado, so remarkably direct and specific, yet so easily derailed, "like falling on ice," as she put it, referring to bicycles that one could ride as they slid. She was used to it, knew how to slide through it even as she sometimes cried for no apparent reason, or froze, or said things aloud that a child might say, condemning itself and forgiving itself in the same sentence. Demeter saw it, knew it, this aspect of her mother. Jack had a bit of it. "Two orphans," he'd sometimes say, by way of explanation.

"Demeter," she repeated. The goddess goes looking for her child. Her sorrow dries up the earth, then her daughter returns and revives it. Odd to be named for such a one, but then Jack was a gardener, living for the first trace of spring, drawing out the harvest and cursing winter’s onset. She embodied this dilemma, the necessity of sleep and death. It was Pen who spoke of antiquity as if it were out in the back or even in the next room.

Dem wove Pen into the house and gave it door that opened out to the world they lived in in their heads, a quite beautiful door for which they shared the only key. She sometimes fetched things from it, honey, perhaps, for her mother, or a vessel of wine, whereas she wanted sandals and a tunic.

She stretched like a cat, wondering what it meant to become what she was becoming, what to do with fecundity, which Tem explained to her using cats as her illustration, as their lovemaking was in the night air and became a topic of their conversations. And cats’ desires were set out so clearly in their young. Dem wove them in, cats housebound and fat or roaming the garden to be sought by the Toms, those connoisseurs of fecundity.

Men would seek her out, she sensed. Pen was more useful than Tem about that, owing to the differences in their nature. Pen’s formidable sister was also connoisseur, she gathered, "a lover of men."

Tim takes a break

He was working up a sketch. It wasn't exactly clear what for, but the characters, an academic poet and his younger wife, a model, were in trouble. The idea of an academic poet interested him, as it seemed like the true highwire act of the writing life. Tim had an agent and one of her jobs was to press him to write the next book or the next script, whatever it was, but he never saw this as pressure, whereas for an academic poet the pressure was all self-generated and the medium was especially unforgiving. Many of them had partners whose lives were built around their idiosyncrasies, the rituals and proscriptions on which their productivity depended. Living with a headstrong model without much sympathy for the work or sometimes none at all would be hard.

He thought of Monroe and Miller, but Monroe wrote poetry and made an honest effort to fit into Miller's life, however doomed that effort was. The model was a woman a bit like Constance, he saw, in that her desire was an aspect of her nature, a force. It took a man like Lev to contend with her, able despite it to pull her back, assert himself as her husband. An academic poet wracked by the pressures of his work would likely lack the self-confidence to persevere, as Lev did, in the face of barely hidden larks, sprees possibly not hidden at all but flaunted. His theme.

Tim was fortunate, he felt, to have made his way from one end of desire to the other. A sampling, one could argue, but sufficient and with a denouement in the form of Pen and all that followed, seen by both of them as a boon not a distraction or a disaster.

He imagined the landscape of his protagonists, the AP resisting children while fathering them, not seeing the pull of fecundity for what it was. The M offended by this ambivalence, and rightly so, desire being the source of the AP's whole enterprise, any children proof that the balance of productive power lay with her. The AP was a heel, he saw. It would be hard to write him otherwise, yet he would know it and be tortured by it, pulled again in two directions, and the root cause was poetry itself, which is a gift of the muses, not hackwork. "Work as if immortal" was Forster's credo, because you'll likely need the time.

Affairs were inevitable in the city, Mick Jagger had said when his fed-up wife divorced him over yet another model, younger, proof in some way that he had it still. The AP had a bit of that, his pride in M and then his chagrin as she flirted and shagged. Tim disagreed. Affairs were delusive, the way things are that spark desire and, more importantly, let us relive our real or fictive past hubristically, older as we are.

Yet it was genuine. Constance's desire was real when it was there, her love for him palpable. It was wildly impractical to take it further, but he knew she was tempted. He was prepared to refuse, if it came to that, and he guessed that she knew this, although it never came up. It just lay there between them, this unstated possibility, desire's where to go.

Where could it go? That was the pertinent question, which also applied to AP and M, despite a marriage and two children. Not enough, sometimes, especially if writing poems for a living figures.

Pen & Lev at the V&A

Lev waved when he saw her, but Pen had already spotted him in the V&A’s voluminous café, his favorite place for lunches like this, possibly for all lunches, as he was a creature of habit in most respects, his investments being an exception. She had it from Tem that he and Jack had done well in the recent reversal. Lev confirmed this, promising "a hefty dividend," which was always a good thing in a household dependent on her professorial salary and Tim's varying fortunes as a writer. His royalties were up and screenwriting added to it, but the flow was episodic. He never took an advance, not liking the pressure. She admired this.

Lev surveyed the room. He was enough of a regular, and sufficiently singular in appearance, that he was on a first-name basis with many of the staff. They too benefited from his largesse when it came to anyone he knew directly, mostly encountered in this fashion, long acquaintance becoming friendship in a casual, a few words at a time sense. But he saw Pen as a serious person, like Tim's oldest sister Elizabeth.

"I foresee an aMack on the universities," he said. "It's still a decade away, likely, but Mrs. Thatcher set the tone. It's hostile to the liberal arts and to what's seen as a free ride for the students." Pen nodded. "I'm not sure the universities know what they're doing at this point," she said. “They're top heavy and overly swayed by donors and dealmaking. We don't have a name grand enough to warrant brand building, but I'm sure someone is working on it. And every year, I'm asked to justify what I do in ever crasser terms."

They paused to finish their salads. "It's a losing proposition," Lev said. "Money's the wrong measure. That's not unique to the classics, of course. The value we give the past is subject to our present biases in a collective sense. Thatcher had a keen sense of what maMered to her, a bit of window dressing while the rest was sold off to the highest bidder. A university is just a franchise in that view, unless a cluster wants its graduates and likes its ability to aMract talent. It seems right that you stayed in London, as it may be the last bastion of your subject, one metropolis in conversation with a few others that function as the seedbanks of culture, like Kew Gardens."

He went to get coffee to go with their desserts. Pen thought about his analogy. "Seedbank or museum," she said, when he sat down again. "The idea that metropolitan centers are the best places for it seems right, but they're also a much bigger target. Museums can have sordid histories, things pilfered that the victims justifiably want returned."

"We may learn to live without the physical evidence, having found ways to replicate or document it.” Lev said. “Would it maMer, especially to scholars?" Pen took this in. "We need a certain number of examples, but not exclusively. My own work would benefit from a different approach, as we're at the limit now with the current ones, many that can't even be examined. This is where my work touches others. They get just as excited as I do, I notice, once they're on the hunt for new sources."

When Pen recounted her conversation with Lev, he told her that he thought immediately of an episode on Crete that Leigh Fermor recounts, saying the beginning of a classic quote aloud that the German general he'd captured finishes. "It speaks to the complexity of the issue, which is lost on Lev’s 'reformers.' You can't conclude from it that a classical education is a good or a bad thing it's both, apparently, and yet it gives the two men a common ground from which a shared future, likely beMer than the wreckage of the present, is possible. The intention was never to make a career from it, but to provide this space in which it wasn't the point at all, a career or whatever it is you ended up doing that went awry or seems futile at the point you've reached. It reminds you that you're not the first and won't be the last to find yourself there. Like Leigh Fermor's general, I infer, we realize what we knew but had forgoMen until life forces our recollection."

Pen knew that Lev's sympathies were with her. It was something that would likely affect her already affected her, as she told him, but his pointing it out meant to take it seriously, as it could be debilitating.

She and Tim shared an innate belief in the value of what they did, even as they recognized it meant potentially very liMle to others. Tim's books sold, and his screenplays and advice were sought after, but he aMributed this to luck, primarily. Pen's intuitions, her ability to get into the heads of the dead, excited her and animated her teaching and writing. Where had it come from? You remember a text less than the

particular moment when it spoke to you, like love in a physical sense, how it moves you inexplicably. She tried always to tell her students there was no utility to it, only an inner necessity of which she had no concrete examples, although Tim would if they asked him and even Lev would, she imagined. He felt exposure to the classics was always a good thing, whatever the form and even if it was truisms only, because "we are all in the same straits, the swank accoutrements of some and the dismal pickings of others notwithstanding. They prove nothing, in the end, about the real value of a life lived, as writers and artists regularly remind us. BeMer then to have heard something useful from the past, that immense repository from which the classics make a selection. Every effort to stamp it out ends in failure, which also tells us something about its human necessity."

Two visits

Tatiana had made her plan a few days before. Tem was closer, Tim farther, but Tem quite typically laid out the sequence and invited her to dine with them, so she went to Blackheath first to see her brother.

Pen and Tim lived at the top of a four-story building that stood incongruously at what always felt like an edge, but now a violated edge, Tim felt, since Paul Reichman built that stubby tower, visible across the heath and adding nothing to it. Others added to it, giving it more heft but not real quality. Tatiana knew his views on this because he voiced them when he walked her to or from the station when she was younger, but now she was older.

“I’m writing a novella set in a town Walpole made up, Otranto,” Tim said. “Italo Calvino noted it in passing and I liked the idea of a fictional place that I don’t have to visit or read about to imagine.” They were seated in the kitchen of an apartment that he’d expanded, carving space from the aMic for their kids. Their place felt oddly rural, she thought, writerly. Of her mother’s sisters, Pen was the writer, if officially a classics scholar, almost an archaeologist of texts. Tim and Pen were devoted to each other, despite obvious differences. Tim’s family were writers, although one sister was a classicist or something like one. Tatiana wasn’t sure of these distinctions. But her question.

Tim listened as she recounted her conviction that an architect from Ticino she met quite accidentally, in London teaching “to make a liMle money” because the tanking economy had derailed his projects, was the man she loved and intended to marry.

Moreover, she realized that marrying early, with its sense of closure and likelihood of babies, had an unexpected appeal. These thoughts were linked, she saw. “Am I too young to have these convictions?” Her idea was to pose this question to Tim and Tem, originally in reverse order. Tim took it in. “I do think you know,” he told her. “I certainly knew with Pen, but although I'm older than her, she was older than you. There was a basic parity. Also, I was only barely making headway as a writer, so I was doubtful she'd accept me. Luckily, that first book made a splash. If Ludo hasn't had his breakthrough, that's a problem, but your age the main one. You're too young."

Tem’s view was similar. “I knew it was Jack, but landing him was a process. They don’t always see it. If Ludo sees it and you know, then it may be true, but the timing and circumstances aren't right. And if it's true, then it's also possible to wait."

She paused. “The real issue is your education and your work. It’s cart before horse, although that order is just a convention. I have friends whose dissertations were wriMen with babies in their laps. You will be you regardless, and women’s careers are rarely linear anyway. But here's the thing: desire has an enormous pull. Once it's triggered, your mind fills the future in. You see so clearly that house in Ticino, clambering children, Ludo as husband and father. And this vision may in fact be accurate, but it could also be false, even if you and he believe it. So, to me, the real question is how to raise this with Ludo, to keep the possibility alive that you two will marry.

They set their trays down in an almost formal way and took their seats across from each other. They were unsure how to have the conversation, when suddenly Lev appeared, surprised to find them.

Surveying the scene briefly, he said, "Why don't you two join me at my customary table? You're Ludo, is that right? August has mentioned you." Not really having any choice, they did so. Lev took them in. "I'm likely to blunder, saying what I'm about to say, but bear with me. August mentioned that you're mutually smiMen. He also spoke up for you, Ludo, saying that you're genuinely a talent in his field, a wonderful studio leader, and a good match for Tat. And Tatiana is quite wonderful herself, but she's also 17, as you know. August feels you aren't a bounder, but rather a model of sincerity. But your career is still before you and Tat's education has barely begun. There's an imbalance between you raises questions, despite August's imprimatur, which I take seriously. I'm not here to oppose you in the Victorian sense, as here we are in a new millennium and so forth. What concerns me is your happiness, and it feels too soon to conclude that it's assured. The future is always a gamble, but we do what we can to increase the odds. So, my unsolicited advice would be to wait and let life ripen you both a bit. Not anything drastic, but mutually freer to be on your own until you're ready. Marriage and children are harder than you think. It plays havoc with the life you've established, so most of all you need to be sure that the other is with you."

He glanced suddenly at his watch. "I have to go," he said. "Thank you for listening. It's entirely your decision, I want to stress. Tat knows her own mind."

Shaking hands with Ludo, touching Tat's shoulder, he left them together, side by side, at the table.

"I should have known he'd be here," Tatiana said. "Well, at least I won't be disinherited!" Ludo smiled, then turned serious. "Your father has summarized our dilemma very well. Time would erase all doubts, but meanwhile they'll make us wonder if the others are right." Tatiana took this in. "I have no doubts, yet we may be tempting fate to rush. We need not only to get beyond others' doubts, but to get beyond any need for their assurances."

She looked away and then turned back. "We can vow to get from here to there. We can renew it. If it's true, we'll marry soon enough, and happily." He nodded. "A long life together ahead of us, Tatiana, that's what I see. So yes, I agree, vow by vow until all doubts are set aside and we can marry."

Tatiana leaned over and kissed his cheek. "We're all hostages to fortune, yet we act otherwise. My father is rumored to be an exception, but then he's devoted to my mother, not the easiest woman. This is the sort of wager he likes to make, longer term and rooted in intuition. It will begin officially soon, I pray, and end when it ends, as life dictates."

Tatiana and Tem look back

This anyway was how Jack had imagined it, Tem told Tatiana at the café. She was in London with her daughters to see her family. Ludo would join them in a few days, to give a lecture at the BartleM, among other things. Ten years had passed since they first met. She remembered talking with Tim and Tem in succession, their cautioning her even as they threw their advice to the winds, despite themselves, won over unconsciously by her conviction. For his part, Ludo treated her like a car bomb. He saw what she saw, but she was 17, daughter of wealth, sister of the observant and protective August. It was ill-timed, yes and at the same time the truth, as they both knew.

August, perhaps inevitably, became a go-between. He and Jack were circumspect, advised by Tem to let life play out. August was aware of the difficulties involved, but affirmed that Tatiana entire was what struck Ludo. Despite marriage and children, Tat found tutorials and mentors as needed. Ludo was devoted to her, a wonderful father; their village in Ticino was their shared retreat when they weren't in Milan or London. She wrote her books there, then immersed herself again in both metropolises. Their daughters moved easily from one to the other.

Not very long after they met, Ludo’s practice solidified while his teaching at the BartleM drew notice. It reminded Tem of Tim and Pen, she noted. Tatiana was younger than Pen, but they both knew their own minds.

It’s also true that babies win the elders’ hearts, and Tatiana wanted them, specifically with Ludo. “It’s indefensible,” she told Tem. “I may as well wear tshirts that say ‘See: money can buy happiness.’ Pen told me that the classics are aMacked now as a waste of taxpayer money, told off by the former head of BP, amazingly, as if oil wasn’t problematic. Lev has funded social housing Ludo designed. Bespoke work gets tiresome, so he’s also doing schools and clinics. My work has absolutely no utility that I can see, but I know that I see things others miss.” Tem nodded. “I see this in Tim, an eye and an ear, Jack calls it.” “Yes, a nose, the Swiss say. We’re like dogs in that respect, sniffing the air and pausing at every scrap of grass.”

“I wanted a family so badly,” Tem said. “Jack, the house, the children, the gardens and the commons, the bikes in the hallway. When I first saw Jack, it all came along with him. It gives me something to hold onto when my father comes around. Not that he isn’t good company, Tom, but you have to be grounded. Catherine says so too. Only her Stephen can take him straight up.” “It’s odd to be the youngest. That’s one thing we have in common,” Tatiana said. “We don’t seem to aMract the dead, even as mediums, but you feel their presence in the countryside, if there’s an intact community that shares the place with them. Funerals bring them out. Births, too. Our daughters were baptized in the village church and I expect we’ll be buried there eventually. When Ludo gave a talk to his studio about this old house he wanted to restore, I had the same feeling you had about Bayswater.”

Armchair thoughts

After they met, after he spoke with Tem, Tim sat in an armchair near his writing desk and thought about the visiting Tatiana. As was their custom, they talked for several hours. Her work grew more inclusive, he saw, extending out from film to absorb anything that caught her eye or ear. He marveled at her facility for making connections among the most distant things. He thought it came from Lev, but Lev would point back to Constance, and Tim saw the logic of this.

They had always been close, he and Tatiana. He wasn’t sure why this was, some overlap in their natures? His mind was neither as facile or as given to synthesis as hers, but a prodigious memory was one gift they had in common. Perhaps too an instinct for the small beacons, only briefly seen, that stand out in a backdrop of what they saw as repetitive variation. It was a version of Freud’s idea of the slip that gives the game away, but far more subtle. And not always a game but a door or a window into another’s world.

One topic of their conversation was the novels he wrote set in a mythic village in the Apennines. The first worked with stage-set elements, focusing on a family, but Tat and Ludo’s village in Ticino took over and provided physical detail and new characters. His premise from the first was that the village was as rooted in the cosmos as any urban neighborhood. Yet it was also a village in the country, isolated to some extent yet in the orbit, the pull of some metropolis. It struck him, writing it, that the idea of a metropolis is true and false. Its influence and how it’s seen vary, even for him, born and bred but often apart from it.

He was always present in his writing, distributed among the characters, just as Tatiana and Ludo were. His parents haunted his fictional village, much as his father haunted the family’s country house, but in the village, they were far from alone. Its dead were close.

He admired Tatiana for imposing her own order and constantly proving the wisdom of her choices. If she never pointed to these proof statements, it was because no accounting was every required of her. It arose in his own mind because he took an interest in her welfare, a longstanding habit, and also because her life was unusual, worthy of fictionalizing in his indirect, trail-covering way. His methods varied. A favorite method was to divide the character in two, a Jungian divide that saw the real person as a marriage of disparate parts, not altogether complementary. Of course, actual marriage and other pairings stirred it up, giving rise to inner dialogues and outer ones. We are in constant conversation, Tim felt. The armchair creaked as he continued his with Tatiana. She visited the way a child might come around for meals, for the sustenance others and other seMings give her in a life spent largely at play in the fields. No child, clearly, Tatiana roamed freely, taking pleasure in worlds she saw that eluded so many others, and bringing news of them to their aMention in a reportorial voice that, reflecting her fine, discerning mind, had authority despite her lack of every formal trapping. She really was sui generis, he thought.

She would deny it. “Just a writer”: they agreed on that formulation, as did Tem. “It’s what we do.”

Note: In Time At Last, Tim's inscription riffs on William Cory's “Heraclitus,” cited in Penelope Fi5gerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977): “an inaccurate translation from the Greek by an Eton schoolmaster to help his class."

John J. Parman (left, at The Pallas Gallery) is a writer and editor who lives in Berkeley.

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© 2024 by John J. Parman

Three Bayswater Stories begins in London in the early 1980s, moves to the country in the summer of 2024, then shifts back to London circa 2000. The Lancia Appia (above, left), is a leitmotif. There's a ghost.