Tentatively he attempts to report his fantasy to Mary. It is night and he is wretched with the cold, with the dirt of the land, with the dull accumulated efforts of his blind-horse days. They are in bed; outside, the land is dark with night, fruitful for the imagining of his house, their house, their future lives free of the doctrinal diligence of Abram Carter. He imagines his wife reading to their children in the parlour, an infinity of playful little Pagan children gathered around her skirts, heeding the soft musical truths of her voice. He imagines the house, its gables, the fires that burn in its grates, the rooms that meet each other across polished wooden corridors; he imagines a love-seat on the porch, a rope-swing suspended from the branches of the sycamore tree. What he fails to imagine, what he is unable to see, is himself in any of these pictures—his family flourishes in the house that he has generously built for them, but he absolutely fails to see himself. Vengefully, he invents a field, a blind, skittish horse, a rusty plough to which he sternly tethers Abram Carter. Returning to the invented house he still fails to find himself inside it.
‘Mary?’ he says. ‘I’ve been imagining a house.’
At first he supposes his wife to be asleep. Her breathing is light and rapid. She lies perfectly still as does he, even though his limbs ache with the discomfort of the posture he has chosen or fallen into for sleep. It costs him more to shift than to stay as he is.
‘Mary?’
He whispers more loudly: something troubles him, her stillness, the quick shallowness of her breathing. She turns away from him. Her voice is muffled by her pillow.
‘Oh, George.’
She is weeping. He would like to comfort her but he has never been skilled at that, and anyway his body, tortured by the day, mortified by the plough, refuses him any movement.
‘Mary?’
‘George,’ she finally manages to say, ‘I am so happy.’
Edgar liked rebel rock ’n’ roll and punk rock and primitive heavy metal, loud noises made before he was born by scowling teenagers in leather jackets with snotty attitudes. Edgar liked songs that rocked and then faded out, as if there was no possible ending to them: shut the door, walk away, and the band still plays on: the drummer keeps clattering, despite the awful weight of his arms; the vocalist sings, his futile eyes examining the sealed room for any possibility of escape; the guitarist picks eternally at his guitar, sitting down now, saving his energy, no more wild darts to the microphone stand; the bass guitarist thuds away, fingers bleeding, and the song goes on for ever. All of Edgar’s favourite songs faded out. He was suspicious of music that knew how to stop.
Seed-spattering Edgar, singing along to his Walkman, wiped down his grandmother’s bathroom surfaces.
Number two. He wondered how old he would be when he could no longer count the number of times he had done this. That would be the end of innocence, he supposed. Edgar worked with flannel and Ajax fluid, cleaning the bathtub with an assiduousness that would have surprised and gratified his mother.
Cheerfully, he gave a second polish to the handrails on the sides of the tub, and enjoyed a pleasant interlude on his hands and knees inspecting the black and white dominoes of the tiled floor, before he banged his head on the brass toilet-roll holder. He returned the flannel to where he had found it, around the stem of the dripping hot tap. He wondered how his stuff might taste. Sickly sweet like breast milk, maybe, which he had sampled at Herman Opoku’s house one afternoon after school before their falling-out. Herman had opened the refrigerator door to show the bottles of milk expressed for his baby sister by his mother, whom Edgar had never met and who worked as a hospital nurse when she wasn’t expressing breast milk. Like connoisseurs, Herman and Edgar had taken small, considering sips from a bottle, which they topped up with water, scrupulously boiled in the Opoku kettle. Herman Opoku told him that semen tasted salty, like caviar, and Edgar had changed the subject. He did not want to find out how or why Herman Opoku had tasted semen and neither did he want to show how impressed he was that Herman Opoku had tasted caviar. Edgar, or The Edster as he’d been then (pre-Edgar, a previous life), wasn’t even supposed to eat the lumpfish that his mother served on blinis with dollops of cream at her vodka parties. ‘It’s a sophisticated taste,’ she said. ‘You won’t like it. Hands off.’
Caviar and stuff were linking now in his mind. He chose to go with it, imagining a crucial part of the caviar-production process as the smearing of fish eggs with male stuff, an intricate, costly procedure, which was the secret reason why the resulting delicacy was so prized. Perhaps there were men, perhaps there were boys, trained, or bred, a family tradition, or kidnapped for that very purpose, condemned to a life of senseless erotic drudgery, milked like cows by Ukrainian women in dairy aprons and hats, or connected, in long, dehumanized rows, to machines by rubber hoses and electricity leads wired into the most sensitive places of penis and brain. Ruuugghghg. He shivered. He had never liked milk trucks and now he knew why.
A final inspection of the room revealed only one dollop that he’d missed, on the mirror over the sink. Urbanely flicking it away, he rinsed it under the tap and watched it swirl down the plughole. He sniffed his finger, which smelled both salty and sickly, a scent that reminded him of autumn. His mother was calling him, loud enough to be heard over the Walkman.
‘Edward!’
‘Coming.’
He was happy here and sorry to leave. The bathroom contained but was not cluttered by old person’s things, and Edgar found the place delightful. The walls were papered in purple and gold. The ceiling was white. Along the ledge by the side of the bath were medicines and dried sponges and bottles of bubble bath. The window between the bathtub and toilet looked over the garden, where roses climbed over the far trellis as if they were trying to get away, a wooden shed, some plant beds of what looked like salad leaves. Threads of a long-ago rope-swing hung from a venerable sort of tree. In the alcove by the toilet there was an anthology of cat cartoons, a history of the Onyataka Association, and a guide to the flora and fauna of Central New York State. Edgar was unimpressed by the cartoon book, uninterested in natural history; he opened the Onyataka Association book at the place that had been marked. The pages had been much underlined, with pencilled comments in the margins, and a small black-and-white photograph on the page of an unsmiling woman wearing a plain dress over trousers, but Edgar was more, if briefly, interested in the photograph that had been used as a bookmark. It was a snapshot of Warren, with close-cropped hair, standing out of focus on a front lawn with his arm around a white-haired lady who wore a red shawl over her shoulders and, unlike Warren, was smiling. She was, Edgar decided, Warren’s widowed grandmother. He saw her as a retired actress, and liked Warren all the better for her.
The sink was deep white. Like the bathtub, it perched on little bronze scaled feet. Edgar switched off his music and looked sternly into the mirror, pressing his chin down against his chest, crinkling his forehead to squash his eyebrows together, and said, most disapprovingly, ‘Edgar. Ed-gah! Ed-GAH! I’m surprised at you.’ Then he rolled his eyes and held his breath until he had to let it go.
‘Edward!’
‘Yes. Yes yes yes.’
Preparing for his return into the social world, the gentleman at his toilet washed his hands, failed to arch a solitary eyebrow, muttered in his fruitiest tone of warm approbation, ‘Ed-gaah’, and vacated the bathroom with his hands demurely in front of his groin, which was when he realized he’d neglected to zip himself back up, and hurriedly did so.
‘Did you get lost in there?’ Mon said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Edgar, with one hand in a trouser pocket discreetly wiping down a damp patch on his thigh.
‘Go to the dining room. The guests will be here soon.’
Waiting for their guests, they sat on high-backed chairs. Mon checked the contents