"But that's the whole point. She hasn't. She hasn't got my anything."

"Is that right?"

A dire but distant possibility floated obliviously from Niall's mouth and as Cathal breathed in, he took it with him, down his own throat and into his stomach where it sloshed and sploshed around with the American beer, making him feel unusually sick. In danger of becoming instantly sober, he called for the familiar velvety comfort of his favorite drink.

"Another two pints of Guinness, please," he said sharply to the barman. "Ordinary, this time." Then he turned to face Niall instead of looking at him in profile. "So are you saying you really aren't Maya's father?"

"Yeah, that's what I really am saying. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," said Cathal, swallowing and sniffing. "Nothing. I've just spent ten years being absolutely sure you were, that's all."

They took the Guinness to their lips and sucked it in, then Cathal raised his eyes to the starry ceiling.

"Here's to life, the universe, Kieran bloody Kennedy and everything," he said, thankful for the mask of drunkenness.

7.

"Look up," Jonathan said to his son in the pitch black as he closed the chapel door. He was wise to the latch now, and he knew to wait for the creak, which came just before you had to lift the whole thing up and yank it. Each time, on opening or closing, it scraped deeper into the light-gray arc on the slate floor. The more scrapes he made, the better he liked the floor.

"Wow!"

A small explosion happened somewhere in Jonathan's heart. Jay, the boy who had stopped using superlatives years ago, had just said, "Wow!"

"I never knew it was this big." Jay's neck was at right angles to his body as he let the night sky fall into his face.

"That's because you've never really seen it before."

"Yes I have, I've seen it loads of times."

"Ah, but in London, you didn't see it properly. There's too much light pollution. All those street lamps and buildings get in the way. You just get a tiny section of it."

Jonathan didn't want to make too much of the chapel's magical properties but there was a lot to be said for the visual impact of a few days' manual labor. In London, he had spent his life dealing with intangible money used to insure against indistinguishable events, and in the end he felt he had become invisible himself.

These days, as he picked out clumsy gray lumps of cement with a pointing trowel or cleaned out the grit with a stiff bristled brush, he felt he was shading himself in again, becoming more noticeable for taking the opportunity to make even the smallest visible contribution. I did that, he could say now. I stopped that bit of wall from falling down. I made Jay say, "Wow!"

His trousers were white with the dusty crystals that had been seeping out of the chapel's granite walls since he had started work on it. The dustier they got, the better he liked them. He also liked imagining the building's relief at being able to let it out, and it reminded him of all those meetings, all those stifled coughs, all those breathing exercises against closed lavatory doors. It was as if something was at last able to seep out of him, too.

When Emmy first showed him the chapel, he'd really believed for a moment that he'd smelled God, or at least a presence bigger than himself. Ever since, he'd half been expecting the wagon roof to open up and a great shaft of light to beam down, and God's voice to say "Yes, you, Jonathan Taylor. It's you I want," but the only disembodied voice he'd heard in there so far belonged to the mid-morning presenter on Radio Two.

Not that God was what he wanted anymore, not now that he had the enticing Tamsin Edwards to look forward to. He thought about the morning's events again, meeting her, the way she spoke, the things she said, the frequency of her laugh. It was a surprise even to him that Historic Buildings Advisers could be so young and so interesting.

Jay put his thumbs together and made a frame with his hands, like a photographer sizing up his shot.

"How many stars can you see now?" Jonathan asked.

"Nowhere near as many." Jay put his hands back in his coat pockets.

"See? They've got nothing to compete with here, have they? You get the whole thing all at once."

Jay suddenly realized he had nothing to compete with anymore, either. The boys at his new school were like him. Their skateboards were just as knackered, their Game Boys just as old, their parents just as cautious.

"I like it in Cornwall, Dad."

"Good. I like it, too."

"Do you think we'll stay?"

"It's not just about us, unfortunately. Everyone has to want it."

"But if you had to put money on it?"

"If I had to put money on it, I'd say ... I don't gamble."

Jay went back to the stars and Jonathan felt that familiar twinge of regret that he was who he was, that he always, for one reason or another, stopped short. One day, he wanted to go the whole distance.

"It's just like that planetarium I had," Jay said. "That was so wicked. I should have brought it with me."

"You don't need it anymore. You've got this."

Jonathan suddenly had an urge to talk to his son about insignificance. If his own father had told him about insignificance at thirteen, too, he might just have seen it coming and been able to jump out of its way. But his own father hadn't spoken to him about much at all. He could barely remember one single interesting thing the man had said. But perhaps insignificance came anyway, whether you resisted it or not.

He was so tired he could have fallen asleep there and then, against the damp granite wall with Jay leaning against him like a human hot-water bottle, but at least it was a different tiredness from the one he had felt in London.

In London, tiredness had come from a permanent proximity to people, a knowledge that you should never take your eye off the ball, a ceaseless traffic noise in your head. In Cornwall, the tiredness came from realizing that, at last, it had all stopped. Well, that and the fact that he was still sleeping on a leather sofa which needed urgent reupholstery.

His back hurt, his neck was stiff and he couldn't remember the last time he had woken up and felt physically refreshed. Sita kept telling him his aches and pains were to do with spending so long on his knees in a damp environment, but then she had a different agenda. She wanted him inside, with the paintbrush and the sander where he could be put to good use.

He knew she looked on the chapel as a selfish frivolity, and to a certain extent she was right, but why shouldn't he be selfish for once? Could she not hear the distant hope flickering or see the little flame that had started to burn again, the tiniest bubble of excitement in his voice?

No, of course she couldn't, no more than he could see her gritted determination to get things done at last, so that she could fan her own flame, too. Which was? He realized he didn't know anymore.

Whatever. Such worries had just for now ceased to matter. Jay-the boy who used to shy from fresh air even at the height of a summer noon-had actually been the one to suggest walking back out to light the candles so they could see the shape of the windows against the night sky. Such times were not to be sniffed at.

He tucked his son's neck into the crook of his right arm, resting his right hand on the boy's slight shoulder and holding Jay's arm with his other hand. A month ago, their physical connection had been the occasional friendly punch.

"Can you see the Milky Way?" he asked, drawing his finger across the cloudy banner that streaked the sky. "It starts there. Keep watching it. The longer you look, the more you see."

They stood, watching without talking, until the galaxy turned itself inside out and became a million holes in a huge black cloth, backlit by the fiery white heart of another universe.

"What's beyond them, do you think?"

"The future, I suppose."

"Not ours, though," Jay said pragmatically. "We'll be dead before anyone gets that far."

Jonathan didn't know how to answer that one. When anyone had died in the leafy suburban street he'd been brought up in, his parents drew the curtains of every front-facing room, out of respect. Death was never mentioned, but you could tell when it had happened because of the hushed tones, his mother furtively sniveling into handkerchiefs in the kitchen, the head-shaking and clicking of tongues. He was going to add silent mealtimes, but it hadn't taken a death to make a silent mealtime with his parents. That was one of the great joys of Bodinnick, the noise level round the table. Noisier, he sometimes wanted to shout, noisier.

"I wonder what it's like being dead," Jay carried on.

"You'll find out one day."

"Yeah, but you'll find out before me."

Hope so, Jonathan thought.

"Dad?"

"Yes?"

"It makes me feel really small."

"We are really small."

In one way, Jonathan wanted to say, that's what this chapel thing is all about. It's about having had enough of feeling small and pointless, and wanting to explore the possibility that it needn't be like that, about giving yourself enough scope and space to see if there is something else out there that you have missed, about seeing what you can achieve without anyone else's help, about not always doing what other people want you to. Do you see, Jay? Do you get it? But he knew how hard it would be to put that across to a thirteen-year-old boy, especially in terms of chiseling out cement, so he stayed silent. It was best not to draw up sides, while Sita was reacting.

When he'd gone to the chapel that morning, he'd been feeling lethargic, aware as he budged the door open that he had given up his early expectation of finding anything redeeming within its walls. And then at that very low moment, Tamsin Edwards had floated into his view.

"Hello," she said, her vague Cornish burr bouncing off the salty walls. "I was just admiring your work."

As he watched her running her bitten pink fingernail along his neatly executed grooves, he'd realized it wasn't just the walls that were being given the opportunity to breathe again. Feck, as Niall would say. He should leave well alone. Young bright women never went down well when Sita was postnatal. Her father had brought her up to believe that if you stand still someone will overtake you, which was one of those truths that were so horribly true, it wasn't even worth thinking about.

"Tamsin's the adviser I've been talking to," he'd said a bit sheepishly when Sita found them talking rapidly over coffee in the chapel, and Sita had looked back at him as if he'd just told the most blatantly transparent lie in the history of their marriage. Maybe he had.

"Hello, Mrs. Taylor," Tamsin replied cheerily. "Fabulous chapel you've got here." Well, how was she to know Sita preferred Ms. or Dr. Dhanda?

Sita's distrust was Jonathan's fault. If he'd been more confident about displaying his interest in the chapel, if he'd been open about his trips to the library and phone calls to the council and subscriptions to specialist magazines, his familiarity with Tamsin wouldn't have seemed so odd. But it was odd, particularly to him. He could remember every single thing she had told him.

"Lime mortar has to breathe," she'd said. "This stuff suffocates it, keeps all the damp in. Can't you smell it?"

Her creamy complexion had flushed with the mildest red again. Pink maybe. The lightest pink flush. "I can't work out why it isn't listed. The house is, but the chapel isn't-though the remains of fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings in Cornwall are so numerous that they sometimes get overlooked on purpose."

"But this isn't a remain, it's a complete structure."

"True, but you sound as if you want it listed."

"Don't you think it should be? Early-sixteenth-century domestic chapels with slate roofs, coped verges and granite ashlars can't be all that common."

"You know your stuff, don't you?" Tamsin had smiled, and Sita had caught him doing that excruciating gesture of false modesty, a quick downward brush of the hand.

He'd taken some of her lines to the supper table with him. "It has to breathe," he told everyone. Every time he said it, he breathed too. "Modern cement is impervious to damp but if there's a tiny crack and moisture gets drawn in it gets trapped, it's got nowhere to go, it can't evaporate. That's what the smell is."

"That's possibly enough about working with traditional building materials, thanks," Sita had said, thinking she could smell something else as well.

"But lime works in harmony with the seasonal changes. It's softer, more flexible."

"Just like Tamsin," Niall had commented, and three of the four of them had laughed like drains.

It was getting cold now and he and Jay would have to go in soon. His hands and knees were aching, and if he wanted a bath before midnight he would have to start running it now. The water pressure needed sorting, which was another job Sita wanted him to do. He was exhausted by the mere thought of it. The muscles in his calves ached from squatting for so long, chipping away at the rock-hard mortar, grueling work for a man who had spent the last twenty years sitting on a padded swivel chair talking into a telephone.

He wondered what, if anything, would happen should he stay out here all night. It was the kind of behavior that people like Niall got away with all the time. People like Niall could sleep in their clothes, go missing for days, drink wine for breakfast, and not a word would be said. So why couldn't he? Stuff went on without him the whole time. Nothing ever stopped because of his absence. And yet at the same time he was required to be ever-present. What impact would his death have on the world? Other than meaning a little extra work for Sita, obviously?

Was it his fault for accepting, even if he didn't entirely understand, the boundaries of his restrained personality? If Niall was a human version of Bodinnick, wild, sprawling, spacious, others saw Jonathan as the equivalent of a modest home in suburbia.

Tamsin would never list him. In architectural terms, he was the kind of man who recognized the social importance of correct cornicing but would never have the guts to rip it out if the mood took him.

But that's where his acceptance of who he was stopped. If he didn't want to be that kind of man, why was he? What had shaped him? What had led him down the path to commonplace? If the answer was himself, why did he sometimes fantasize about being someone else?

What could he pass on to Jay about all that? Don't follow paths just because they're available. Hack through the undergrowth and discover something new. Be brave, take chances. He knew that, to the outside world, it looked as if he himself was doing just that. You don't give up your job, let your house and move your family to the southwest tip of Britain to lead a more simple life if you aren't at least a little adventurous. But of course, you do, because he just had, and he was the most boring man in the universe. Captain Sensible and Mr. Anorak.

The path through the scrub from the chapel was even more defined now, and he realized he'd been making the same journey four times a day for a fortnight. Back and forth he went, once again the commuter-just like the one in the poem who spends his life riding to and from his wife, shaving and taking trains. In fact, just like the one he used to be in London. Was routine his addiction?

Sita's anger over his interest in the chapel managed to swap focus at random. How could he justify spending so much time on it when there was clearly more than enough to do in the house? What did he mean, he was taking Lila there with him? Lime is dangerous: it can blind.

"I've taken advice and I know what I'm doing," he'd said, "but if you really don't like it, why don't you take her to work with you?" Which was when she'd called him a bastard and left the house without saying goodbye. She'd never ever called him a bastard before.

The whole point of uprooting their lives from city to country was to increase their feeling of togetherness, not to wreck what little they had. At this rate, they'd be lucky to see the three months out still married. That would be the ultimate irony. To renovate a house at the expense of their own personal bricks and mortar. To see a house rise out of the ashes and a family sink without trace.

But he didn't say any of those things to Jay. Instead he said, "We should go in. Mum will be wondering where we are."

Sita was wondering about him, actually. She was wondering what on earth had happened to the man she had married, and whether he was wondering the same thing about her. She was also wondering if Emmy had told her the whole truth about her and Niall, why she was feeling such deep-green shades of jealousy, and what the hell they were all doing here. But the worst of her sleepless wonders was why she no longer bothered to share any of them with Jonathan.

They used to be such a team, confronting challenges together, trusting each other's judgment, knowing without being told that each had the other's happiness higher up the list than their own. That was their sex, really. They had never been wildly active, not in the way she knew some of her friends were. They'd never done it in a public place. They'd never used a sex toy or props. She had never even played out a fantasy in her head, let alone admitted one to him. They did it-or rather used to do it-in bed at night, usually with the lights off. It was good when it happened, but they got their kicks in other ways. And there was the "used to" phrase again.

She thought about the holidays they had taken before Jay was born-mountain climbing in the Italian Alps and river canoeing in southwest France. While most other young couples would have gone straight to bed with a bottle of massage oil, they went to a bar with a bottle of beer and spent hours exploring their individual weaknesses, their confidences, what scared them, what excited them. They took it in turns to lead. One minute, he needed her advice, and the next she sought his. Those conversations were their version of foreplay. Very often, after a joint achievement, they would be on a high for weeks. It used to be like taking their marriage vows all over again, remembering that they were a team, that they worked better as a unit than they did as individuals.

She could remember coming home from one such holiday and Emmy asking her why she had ever bothered to leave the Girl Guides. Jonathan had whispered, "She's just jealous," in her ear. It must have been at the peak of her and Emmy's estrangement, a strange few years in which they had focused on their differences. Sita married and pregnant, Emmy single and very much not. But Maya had changed all that.

What goes around comes around, she thought. Maybe Jonathan and I will come around again soon. How though? And when? The children had brought with them a nasty little element of competition. Who was the most tired? Who worked the hardest? Who was the most put-upon? Now, not only did they not have sex, but they didn't have holidays, either.

Her two daughters moved their flawless coffee-colored limbs either side of her, and she tried to condense her maternal bulk into the dip in the middle of the old horsehair mattress. She was facing Lila, her left breast still released from its feeding bra, and she pulled the stretch-marked flesh back to study the baby's dark eyelashes and pursed lips. The horror at finding herself pregnant again had finally disappeared. Lila was surely the perfect gift.

She and Jonathan should be riding the crest of a wave, lying in a bed of smugness congratulating themselves on the products of their union, but instead, they seemed lost in a thickening fog of resentment. Why were they so cross with each other all the time?

She'd naively hoped the Cornish sun might be strong enough to burn through the fog, that the Cornish air might be clean enough to cure Jonathan's obsession with his breathing, that the Cornish wind might blow away their recent selves and bring back their old ones on a summer breeze. But so far, metaphorically anyway, it had mainly rained.

Would it help if she admitted that her main motivation for coming here was him? And that, if she wasn't going to benefit from his new self, they might as well pack up and go back? The difficulty was, she wasn't entirely sure they could go back, despite all the insurance policies they'd taken out.

He had been so much a shadow of his former self in the last year or so that she'd feared for their future. It was as if he'd left himself somewhere, under an office desk or in a computer program, and what she and the children had been getting was his shell.