It’s What We Do

(Set in London in 2002 and a decade later.)

Tem reflects

In the photo that sat always on Tem’s writing desk, framed with a fold-out prop, her parents were still in their twenties. 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 Elizabeth spoke of it as Tem imagined it. She took over for their mother and later for both their parents. Catherine shared with Tem their father’s restless presence. Tim sometimes dreamt of Mary, he said, but Catherine didn’t, or, if she did, never mentioned it. Tim briefly experienced his father as 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 latter category, a classicist who alone of the extended family said Tem’s name in full. Tem was a different sort of propitiation, binding her to her older siblings 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 attentive to speech, including those parts of it that are gestures, silences, 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, the same way that some 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, then added in his matter-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 matter,” she told herself again. Tim wouldn’t wear such a coat. He referred to women’s clothes the way gardeners speak casually 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 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 attention. It ran slow and on the hour or half-hour, 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.

They were into it now, this new millennium. One meltdown already and then the Twin Towers. Their daughter Demi was already a young woman who reminded him now of his mother. Time passes. 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, Tem felt. 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. It left her grateful and bereft in turns.

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 Mary 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, 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 particularly loved the place and it benefited from his largesse. Lev was as close to Tim as he was to Jack, which was one of those mysteries of life, as if Constance had never come 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 matter if you say it or not, as all is conveyed in the manner of Swedenborg’s afterlife of 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 matter 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 grief when it arose, 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

A woman now, she thought. “Demeter,” she said aloud. Other than a few friends given to irony, only her mother and her aunt Pen call her by her full name. Penelope was a classicist, so her name and her mother’s 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, likely. Perhaps his father took it? Demeter’s mind ran with it, one more vignette that signaled a writing gene, Tim told her when he overheard her as a child. It was true, the vignettes just came to her. She rarely set them down, preferring to insert her unfolding saga in the house and its environs. It also came from her mother, anchored by these settings, 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. She 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 Penelope who spoke of antiquity as if it were out in the back or even in the next room. Dem wove her into her room and gave it a 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 a 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 own 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 a desire to 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 real scholar, like Tim’s oldest sister Elizabeth.

“I foresee an attack on the universities,” he said. “It’s not imminent, but Mrs. Thatcher set the tone: 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 mattered 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 attract 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 them some coffee to go with their desserts. Pen thought about his analogy. “A seedbank or a museum,” she said, when he sat down again. “The idea that a few metropolitan centers are the best places for it seems right. There are risks, though, as they’re vulnerable because a much bigger target, and museums can have sordid histories, things pilfered that the victims justifiably want returned.”

“”We may have to live without the physical evidence, having found ways to replicate or document it.” Lev said. “Would it matter, 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.”

Pen & Tim discuss

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 better 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. 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 forgotten 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 little to others. Tim’s books sold, and his screenplays and advice were sought after, but he attributed 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 don’t remember a teacher or a text much as particular moments when it arose, 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. Better 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 Tem’s brother.

Pen and Tim lived at the top of a four-story building that stood near what has been the edge of the heath, but was now a violated edge, Tim felt, since Paul Reichman built that stubby tower, visible across the heath. Others added to it gave it more heft but no real quality. Tatiana knew his views on this because he voiced them when he walked her to and 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 attic 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 little 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 written 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.

Lunch at the V&A

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 told that you’re mutually smitten. 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 are 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 thinking of this in a 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 Bartlett, among other things. Ten years had passed since they first met. Tat 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 and Jack were circumspect, advised by Tem to let life play out. They soon married. Tat found what she needed to get on with her work. Ludo was devoted to her and a wonderful father. She wrote her books in his village in Ticino, then immersed herself again in London whenever he taught again at the Bartlett, their daughters in tow.

Tat’s account reminded Tem of her and Jack, she noted. Tat was younger, but they both knew their own minds about their men and the children they wanted to have with them. And babies win the elders’ hearts, erasing doubts.

“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 attract 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. Country funerals bring out the entire village. Births, too. Our daughters were baptized in that church and I expect we’ll be buried there eventually. I can’t say that I saw it when I saw Ludo, but then he gave a talk about an ancient house he wanted to restore.”

“Pen tells me that her field is relentlessly attacked as being ‘commercially unviable,’” Tem said. “My whole existence is hard to defend,” Tatiana answered, laughing. “I should wear t-shirts that say ‘It’s true, money can buy happiness.’ My work barely has any utility, either, but, like my father, I see things others miss.” Tem nodded. “I see that in Tim, too.” Tatiana took this in. “We’re like dogs, sniffing the air and pausing at every bush or scrap of grass. Culture has no utility, either, but then billions are made from it. We do it for love, though, which makes us ripe for exploitation.”

Tim’s 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 novellas 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 settings 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 attention 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.”