At the time it did not occur to me, not for a moment, that this was really written by a man of science. I had no idea how much Cruickshank owed to Humphry Davy's Consolations in Travel. I did not think of the Royal Society but rather C. S. Lewis on an acid trip. And this from Sumper, whose work I trusted and admired all through my working day.

"You have no idea of where you are," Sumper told Brandling. "You have no idea of what will happen here. In this very room," he said, "you have been anointed as a courier, and you will play your role never knowing what you have done, or imagining you have been the brave agent in a history you will never read."

Henry reported the "full furnace heat of madness" and then a fright that "mak'st my blood cold, and my hair to stare."

Catherine reread: " 'Those beings who are before you now, who appear to you almost as imperfect as the lowly zoophytes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellect far superior to the inhabitants of this earth.' "

Catherine wants KayKay. I was spooked.

IT WAS NOT YET nine o'clock but Amanda Snyde was already at her correct work station, cleaning the rings as I had asked her to.

That was our "object"-not a smoking monkey but a gleaming phallus stripped to the bare metal, as if flayed.

To the smooth articulated neck we would soon attach the fusee chains, like nerves rising within the vertebrae. These dry chains ran over a series of rollers effecting the operation of the lower neck, upper neck, nodding of the head, movement of the fish inside the swan's bill.

There were five chains, of varying thicknesses. The finest of these had 170 links which meant, according to Amanda Snyde who had counted them, an estimated seven hundred pieces riveted together. It normally required children and mothers-small hands, young eyes-to perform such delicate work.

We knew that the first of these chains would operate the lower bill, the preening, the eating of the fish. The second chain would operate the fish themselves. The third would make the swan's head nod. The fourth would arch the neck and the fifth was linked to the middle of the neck and would, if we were correct, make the movement very graceful and lifelike.

Today would be the first of two "neck days," but we did not begin a.s.sembly until I had my normal half hour with Matthew's emails, which I referred to simply as "my housekeeping." Amanda kept her distance and asked no questions which made me certain she had figured exactly what I was doing.

Now she was recording the structure and dimension of each fusee link, and I was alone with my beloved. What peculiar people we had been, he and I, rationalists but sensualists, always so proud and careful of our bodies, knowing our lives were finite, acting as if we were eternal. How sweetly he had written to me, and so often. We had not denied time as humans are supposed to. Swimming off Dunwich beach, we had been aware of our skin, our hearts, water, wind, the vast complex machine of earth, the pump of rain and evaporation and tide, timeless wind to twist the heath trees. Afterwards it would make me dizzy to be reminded that the blood from the cavernous s.p.a.ces of the p.e.n.i.s is returned by a series of vessels, some of which emerge in considerable numbers and converge on the dorsum of the organ to form the deep dorsal vein. Dear G.o.d, I thought, we lived for it but now I may never have s.e.x again. I closed down the computer feeling desolate. I began to work again but I saw oil spilled across the lichen and heather, roe deer, rabbits, nightjars dripping, submarine robots crawling through the murk.

Then I thought, thank G.o.d for Amanda. This may not have been consistent of me, but on a good day she could be an extremely comforting a.s.sistant, one of those rare creatures who have the tweezers ready before you have to ask. Threading was slow and fiddly but a good a.s.sistant makes this like a highly disciplined duet, and if one is slow and careful one can expect, every hour or so, to have formed a new connection within the mechanism and experienced the huge pleasure that comes when one human co-operates with another. Yet as the day wore on, various unhappinesses, pale glistening things like liver flukes began to worm their way back into my mind. How I missed Matthew, with what ache.

At lunch I sent a grovelling email to Eric apologizing for last night's outburst. I waited until the end of the day and when there was no reply I telephoned him.

"Croft."

I took fright, and hung up. Then, in my agitation, I broke the finest chain and was the recipient of more sympathy than I desired. Amanda touched my wrist.

She said, "Does it spook you?"

She meant the swan, not Crofty.

"Of course not."

"It is incorrect to think of the devil as ugly," she said.

I thought, why do you need to spin these dreams from darkness? Why can you not appreciate the mechanical marvel before your very eyes?

"Amanda dear, we are fixing a machine."

"Yes but Lucifer is very beautiful."

Her gaze was too direct.

"It's Lucifer," she said, "in Ezekiel. The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes was prepared for you on the day you were created."

"Well," I said, "I think that's it for today."

"You're in a rush."

Yes, yes, I really was.

THE ENTRANCE TO MY flat was a high library, much narrower than the thirty-nine inches legally stipulated for London pa.s.sageways. The shelves were pale soft coachwood which was silky to touch. Every shelf was illuminated by low-temperature lights. On the floor was an old Tabriz rug which looked a lot better than it really was.

It was a jewel box, and I always adjusted the lights so my visitor would get the full effect. By "my visitor," I mean Matthew. I had rarely admitted anybody else. In the case of Eric, it would be necessary, if one was to be polite, to step outside in order to admit him.

When the door bell rang that night, I opened the door to discover, not Eric, but ghosts and mirrors of my lovely man, his two sons, dark-eyed in the rain.

The older boy wore his trousers as Matthew did-pleated, narrow-waisted. St. Vincent de Paul most likely, but super-elegant. This was the mathematician, Angus. He had his father's hair, exactly, the big nose, the full-lipped humorous mouth.

"Come in," I said, and stepped outside. They backed away like frightened horses.

The young one was the taller, Noah. In photographs he had also been the prettier but now he had a fuzzy beard and his hair was raging, tufted, hacked at with nail scissors I would say.

"Please go in." My hands were trembling.

"We're sorry," said Angus. He had hand-painted the b.u.t.tons on his shirt. In this light they looked like Indian miniatures.

"Well, I refuse to have you standing in the rain."

Noah looked accusingly at his brother.

"We're sorry," Angus said, then walked briskly through my library. Noah followed, ducking at the door. He had mud on his boots and I didn't mind. I was looking at his father's long runner's legs.

Noah stroked a coachwood shelf, as if checking on my housekeeping while covertly identifying a rainforest timber. He was the greenie. He was also the cla.s.sics genius. He had, at the age of fourteen, come home drunk and vomited in his bed. Never having met him, I had lived with him for years and years.

I found them shuffling on my durrie, the sort of pale delicate rug only childless people have. They did not know what to do with their bodies. So I chose the Nelson Case Study day bed and sat on one end. Then Noah sat opposite on a Gustav Axel Berg whose eighty-year-old bentwood torqued beneath his weight.

Finally, Angus chose the other end of the day bed. Even from that distance the beautiful creature smelled musty and unwashed.

The stolen blue cube was sitting in the middle of the magazine table. Noah clearly followed my gaze. He was his father's son. He picked up the cube.

"May I smoke?" he asked.

"Of course."

He produced a pouch of tobacco, balanced Carl's toy on one knee.

Poor boys I thought-their dear eyes, great dark pools of hurt, more like each other than like their father-low brows, a terrible silent mental concentration. On what I did not know. But they carried Matthew's beauty, their sinew, bone, the square set of their shoulders, that same lovely nose.

"I'll fetch an ashtray."

I thought, when I give it to him I'll take the cube away, I don't know why, but by the time I returned he'd tucked it deep between his legs.

"We have never really met," I said to his brother.

"No, not really."

"But you are Angus?"

"Yes."

"I'm the troubled child," Noah said, and placed Carl's cube back on the table. "I'm Noah. And you are Catherine Gehrig. I Googled you."

Silence.

"Can I have a drink?" asked Noah.

I knew Matthew did not wish me to give him alcohol.

"Do you have any beer?"

"Just some red wine, and a little whisky."

"Whisky," he said, and held my gaze.

I looked to his older brother. He shook his head. "I'm the designated driver."

When I first met his father, Noah had been in trouble for making a joke about a gay camel. He was just a little boy. He had thought it was funny, that a camel might be gay. The school had different opinions.

"Weird, huh?" I called as I poured the whisky in the kitchen. The "huh" sounding so old, so fake.

"What?"

I fetched a gla.s.s of water and delivered this together with the whisky. Angus was standing in front of the framed photograph of the stables.

"It's strange, us three, here all together," I said as the child drank his whisky straight. "I'm sorry if this is awful for you."

"Did you like it there?" Angus asked, gazing at the photograph. He was being an adult, smelling like a teenage boy.

I stood beside him. "I don't think you did."

He produced his Frankenpod or s.p.a.ce Onion or whatever. "Have you ever Googled it? Would you like to see?"

Of course I did not wish to look. "All right," I said.

Angus sat on the day bed, with me on his left side. We crouched over the gadget, not quite touching, and there it was, the stables seen from s.p.a.ce, the line of cliff, the trees, the grey roof in the shade.

It was nighttime now in Suffolk, but the daylight image was no less disturbing for being captured in the past. The satellite had spied on us during the summer of the drought, the brown gra.s.s, the dying tree. I could make out the Norton Commando so the pair of us were there, alive together, unaware.

"We must have been inside," I said, and then I was embarra.s.sed to imagine what they thought: all that stinky s.e.x. "Did you feel I stole your father from you?"

"Let's face it," Noah said. "You did."

There was some unspoken current of conversation between them.

"No, it wasn't you," Angus said, but I must have existed everywhere around them.

Noah left the room and-don't ask me why-I s.n.a.t.c.hed Carl's cube and sat it on the shelf behind me.

When he returned with the whisky bottle, he spoke directly to his older brother. "We were going to tell the truth. That's what we agreed."

My heart sank.

Noah's mouth, like his father's, was an instrument of infinite nuance. He was staring at the shelf above my head, and although he was almost certainly amused, I had no idea what he was thinking.

Then Angus removed the framed photograph from the wall. I have never liked people fiddling with my things but I forgot that when I saw how sad and grimy my walls had become.

"This is yours now," Angus said.

I was so tense I thought he meant my photograph and I was outraged that he should have a.s.sumed the power to give me what was mine.

"Do you mean this?"

"The stables, yes. It's yours."

My heart did leap at that, but of course they were boys and they knew a great deal less than I did. Matthew and I had talked about his will. He had wished to maintain our secrets after death and if I had been hurt by that, it had not been for long.

"You're very sweet. I wish it was."

Noah picked up the whisky bottle and we all watched while it surrendered the last four drops.

"It is yours." Noah had that slightly off-putting confidence young public schoolboys bring to the workplace. I wanted to say, I saw your father's will, you brat. He signed it in 2006 and I can promise you that Catherine Gehrig does not even have a walk-on part.

"Dad couldn't leave it to you, of course," Angus said.

"No, of course not." He was pushing all my b.u.t.tons all at once. For thirteen years I had been made invisible by this family even while I was subsumed by them, their maths problems and their vomiting. I didn't mind. I really didn't mind.

"He left it to us."

"Quite right," I said, my bitterness a secret, even from myself.

"He could hardly write your name in his will."

Well, he could, I thought, although I would never have asked him to. "It would have looked a little odd to your mother." I smiled as best I could.

"We've talked about it, Noah and I. And as we are the new owners we have decided you shall have it as long as you live."

There were too many emotions in the room, but the two young men were keeping themselves together, both of them with their big hands upon their knees.

"It's called a peppercorn rent. We have brought the lease for you to sign. You pay one peppercorn a year, that's it."

"We brought the Mini here, to give to you."

"Really? Did you do all this on your own?"