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He is not quite sure if it's raining.
The thick old windows take on a certain smudgy quality in the cold, setting the whole garden underwater, or in a deep mist, and now, in evening, he thinks that the effect is of a skilled but slightly dull painting: a weak Turner, a colour-leached Constable. The whole world seems curved, without depth or perspective – a flat, muted backdrop to the diorama of the house. If it were raining, he thinks, the smallest branches of the apple tree would be twitching, bouncing; in summer, the leaves would rustle, small apples dull and dusty underneath - but already it's too dark to tell, and the ground looks as wet as paint, but it might only be the glass. The tree trunks are more ghostly by the second.
If he turns away, lights the lamp that still sits careless in the bookcase, it will all change: the windows will go black and mirrored, the room will warm and tighten around his haloed head. The house will come loose and drift, and he will feel them, both of them, like sea anchors on his instinct: Hannah, above his head, placed as heavy as a grand piano in her white borrowed bed upstairs; Valentine moving barely tethered through room after room, looking for something small and important. The room is not so dark, yet. Blue, maybe, the upholstery gone Ming Chinoiserie, the walls regency royal; he can see, of course, the papers on the table, the unlit lamp, the books which for now are still just books. The furniture seems large and widely spaced in the dusk. He doesn't strike a match.
If it's raining, it's very quiet.
+
Before the first real storms of fall, Chloe had taken to picking apples. Some straw basket, excavated from one of those many household tombs (rakes, seed quarterlies, and almanacs all spilling out onto the polished floor) had held them; she hauled them in alone, two handed, and by the end her hands were fruit-red raw and her lips chapped by the wind. She'd said nothing, then. The others had gone. Valentine, relegated house-keeper, remained, and Bernard and Hannah as guests or ghosts dependent upon their subtle tolerance of one another. She'd left the apples somewhere, Chloe, that was the point – in a pantry, behind a door, in the same forgotten loft which had produced the basket – and now the whole house stank of them, sickly perfumed, as if to cover some other smell, some corpse under a stair. Valentine, perhaps, had looked; Bernard knew he would not find them and had not bothered. Hannah claimed, curtly, not to have noticed.
There was no reason for them to be there, really. He had been permitted to return on the benefit of education, he supposed, and perhaps the vain hope that he might be right about something; Hannah, of course, had work to do. Work had been done – revelations made – and it could be taken elsewhere now, to finish, to polish and to sell; separately, of course, apart, with different things in mind. It's only that the house would be empty, only that there might be something left to learn, that keeps them in.
It is not the pull of each other, certainly, thought he suspects them both of love, being young and enclosed and intent.
It might, he thinks, be the walls themselves, that slowly leak stored whispers out while they sleep; the subcellars that now, in winter, flood with things kept quiet. It might be doors that have always opened where they should but he suspects will not always do so.
He has not stayed for Hannah, who would not stay for him, nor for Valentine, who barely knows his name. He has stayed for some other reason.
+
"It's all quite certain now," she's saying, washing a saucer in the sink. The water is cloudy-hot in the porcelain, and her hands look strong and girlish. He puts down his teacup on the table.
"You could have published months ago," he says, feeling oddly slighted. She doesn't laugh but something in the tipping of her head says she has thought of it.
"Are you going, then," says Valentine from the doorway, and she turns to smile sweetly at him.
"In a while, I suppose." Her voice is pure and inquisitive. Bernard looks out the window, at the frosted rose-leaves over the low stone wall.
"Stay till spring," Valentine is saying, idle or perhaps upset. It's hard to guess from just his voice. Outside, a small bird lands and takes off with the barest of pauses.
"A holiday," says Hannah, and she is amused, though he is not sure in what key.
"Bernard," says Valentine, unexpectedly, and he looks away from the window. "Will you stay?"
"I suppose," says Bernard, and doesn't know why.
+
As a young man, he had taken a certain delight in stealing books. Not for keeping, of course. It was not about having them. But that moment of slipping past the desk towards the door, past silent graying women all reading with still and immaculate intent – and the the open blossom of the sky, and the smooth leather of the Aeneid radiating heat against his side – well. If there was some better feeling of release he had not known it then.
All stolen things get hot, he knows. It is the sort of truth mathematics cannot explain. And it's nothing to do with that weak American slang, though perhaps some car-thief recognized it too; it's the same heat that turns women golden from the inside out when they are married to other men. It lights up dealers on street corners and the best of the papers he's graded, the ones that are clever and yet unsure, the ones handed in late, with dilated pupils and frenetic laughter.
The heat, he supposes, is some expression of the energy put into self-denial: visible, in its potential form, in all forbidden things, but only manifested kinetically. He has not yet decided why some things get hotter and some things cool off. At Cambridge there had been a light in the laboratory at night, where a tall young chemist had explained to Bernard things he has since forgotten, about density and volume. His hands had been quite cold – poor circulation, he'd said – and his cattish smile had been indulgent and clever and Bernard had been angry at his coldness, his power, the calculations of worth played out in his reason. He had waited for heat and it had not come, and he had woken up one night and found the light in the laboratory quite out. Whether he had loved him, now, that was a question. Important. Maybe. But long ago, long ago. There is no longer space for calculation in his mind.
But then: Valentine.
+
Over his favourite desk in the library, there is a portrait. It has some similarity to Valentine in the face, although he couldn't say where; the tip of the nose, maybe, the narrowness of the eye. It could be the hair, even, which looks unbearably soft, like the hair of a child. It's a young man, anyway, with a particularly bitter twist to his lip; he is handsome in a thin, cruel way, dressed in military colours, his hand on the hilt of his sword.
When, at night, he raises the lamp to see it better – some break in his reading, which is not important now, just idle time-filling while Hannah chops firewood into kindling – it seems incredibly real, enough for him to almost pull away. It's realer than the shadow-world outside the window, inhuman in its height and the brightness of its eyes, and he feels some how that inside the circle of light it is alive, hot as any stovetop, powerful and intense.
"I don't know who he is," says Valentine from somewhere between bookshelves. "Don't ask."
Bernard swings the lamp towards his voice, squinting at suggested shapes outside the circle of light. He sees nothing.
"Put it down," says Valentine, and when Bernard does, he emerges, arms full of books bound red and green.
"More pigeons?" Says Bernard, cattily, but Valentine only twitches his lip.
"Grouse. I can read, can't I, in my own library?"
"I suppose it depends on what you're reading," says Bernard, unsure what game they are playing.
"Waugh," says Valentine, with a wry smile, and snatches the top volume away before Bernard can grab it to check. He holds it above his head, and Bernard is suddenly aware of his height. His eyes flicker bright (supernatural, paintflecked, displaced in time, like the eyes now dark above Bernard's head – he shudders, uncontrollably) and light from within. When he reaches out, slowly, to touch Bernard's jaw, his hand is hot enough to cauterize.
Oh, fuck, thinks Bernard, cleverly.
+
One day, in the coldest part of winter, Hannah drops a teacup. Nothing irreplaceable – her own white mug, unmarked – but Valentine looks at it with a horror bordering on insanity, and when she reaches out to touch him (with the same hand that dropped it, Bernard thinks later) he flinches away. They had been talking about – about what? Ergodicity, entropy, the sort of thing he hates to think about – nothing important, surely. But Valentine had left the room as if she'd threatened murder.
They sweep up the pieces together, and he isn't thinking of anything when she says "Accidents," like a revelation from God. He looks her in the eye.
"Accidents," she says, "The unpredictable. You can't figure for –" and then she leaves, abruptly, shards of porcelain still cupped in her hands. He doesn't see either of them that night.
+
"Chaos theory," says Bernard to the portrait in the library, "states that in certain circumstances mathematical projection is impossible, because even the slightest imprecision of input results in such wildly varied output that nothing can be determined." He turns to face the bookshelves. "If the human mind is incapable of even conceiving of the precision necessary to predict events, then the attempt is purposeless."
He knows Valentine would roll his eyes, explain the importance of it, the faults of his assumptions, the failures of his logic. But the library is silent in response.
"Before Aristotle," Bernard says to the empty room, "There was Homer."
And if there is one thing that he and Valentine agree on, it's this: the world on paper is the real one. Everything else is an imperfect approximation. The purity of Mandelbrot or of Marlowe cannot be expressed in the organic, the physical, and if he feels sometimes the possibility that Hannah's lip may be curved perfectly enough for algebraic exactitude, or the lilt of Valentine's quiet voice may realize meter in the finest way – he is wrong. He has learned that, at least.
+
Outside the circle of the light he can hear her moving, unreal, like someone from another time. He wonders what it looks like from outside: if the game of watching them is particularly good. Lit by gas, between the shelves, they might be anyone: Lizst and Chopin, Byron and Shelley, Blunt and Burgess. What they are saying is irrelevant and meaningless; only that they are saying it, here, surrounded by books, ageless, Bernard's hand on Valentine's wrist, or perhaps the other way around. Bernard imagines her moving her hand under her skirt, quiet as a mouse in the dark. The trap lies unsprung. He knows that if they were fucking it would mean nothing, she wouldn't raise her head to see it, but this – this – their heads bent together, their voices kamasutra-twisted, their minds just upon the point of contact – the bonds of Valentine's logic holding him down; the unstoppable ascent of his own mad theories blowing Valentine's poor head open - he imagines she rolls her head against the paneling in silence, and moves her wet fingers again.
One day, he knows, she will end up between them. He is so sure.
+
Valentine could perhaps have plotted their lines of convergence, except for the teacup. Except for the library at night.
And this is where he takes over, wins out: teacups, tempests, affairs and imaginings. He knows ten thousand things to say! He has theories of heat and of light and if they are not his own, well, fine; there is only so much knowledge in the universe. When they are inexorably intertwined, permanently mixed, he will say: "Powers of lightness, darkness, powers that be – come, go in mists of calculus and rumor –" And feel Valentine's understanding like a kiss, like a wash of blood.
And Hannah will say: "The library at night is a function of the library by day."
And Valentine will say: "It is assumed that all straight lines must curve…"
Or maybe not, but he imagines, and the house folding in around them, and always that internal heat, and always the circle of the lamp.
+
It is March 16th and the sun is coming up through the thick glass of the windows. Summer, he supposes, is around the corner. Valentine, who knows the secret properties of things, could tell him when it will come, perhaps, and the likelihood of thunder or of rain. He neither wants to know nor doesn't. Thunder, after all, is just a few lines of a poem.
There is something to be said about human perception, about the struggle to see the world as it is – phenomenology, geography, geometry, the actions of bodies in heat – but it escapes him now. There is weak tea left over from last night, and Valentine asleep below the portrait of his ancestor – which is really nothing like him, in the light – and Hannah, out in the garden, with her hands on her hips.
The fractals of frost are gone from the glass, now, and the windows are perfectly clear. Valentine explained, once, about how they violate some theory, how that schoolboy fact – that glass is a liquid which behaves as a solid – means something grand and important to the universe. He can't remember what.
From the garden, Hannah waves, and Bernard feels Valentine standing behind him, quiet and tired. The room is bright and empty, except for the smell of apples gone waxy with decay.
=
end