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sounded like singing. Not a choir, something more random and impatient, a hubbub set to music. He could smell burning but saw no fire, only smoke. Then an enormous rose of flame opened briefly as though, with one supreme effort, it meant to enfold the charred sky in its petals. Against the flame he was able to make out the silhouette of a figure, a slight boy, falling from a high wall. Even before the boy reached the ground the singing grew ecstatic, as though the singers believed their chanting was responsible. ‘Down with the enemies of—!’ they cried. He couldn’t make out the word in the frenzy of its delivery. Life, was it? Down with the enemies of Life ? Or mice? Down with the enemies of Mice ? Down with them, anyway. He thought he recognised the keep from whose tower the boy, like a doll with no weight, continued to float and lightly fall to earth. Yes, he knew it. Inside those walls, inside that fire, he had knelt by the body of a mother – he couldn’t say, after all this time, if she were his. Her eyes were open but unseeing. Her clothes had been torn from her body. Where her throat was cut a scarlet rose flowered, smaller than the one that had briefly illuminated the sky, but no less remarkable. Its loveliness flowed from it in a stream, running down her breast. He dipped his finger in it, as though it were wine, and put it to his lips. Down with me, he thought.

TWO
    Twitternacht
    Friday 27th
    H O, HUM . . .
    For anyone opening my diary for the first time – and it’s for futurity in all its misty uncertainty that I write – ho hum denotes the sound of my mind whirring, not cynicism.
    It would appear that he learnt to take these Byzantine precautions from his parents, as they, perhaps, had learnt to take them from theirs, otherwise they denote nothing other than an uncommonly anxious disposition . . .
    So concluded the first report on Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen I ever wrote. I have a copy in front of me in a black folder. Always wise to keep a copy. I was guessing, I admit that much, but guesswork is an important part of what I have been entrusted to do. Guesswork informed by a knowledge of the ways of men, I mean, a trustworthiness of intuition and a shrewdness of observation, which I flatter myself I possess in as great a measure as any person. Perhaps more. I work – I don’t call my observations of Kevern Cohen ‘work’ – in one of the most trustworthy and ophthalmically demanding professions, as a teacher of the Benign Visual Arts. I am also a painter myself. Landscapes, naturally. Hence their giving me far west Bethesda as my territory. Bethesda with its long history of naive art – spirituality apprehended in the everyday – and of course St Mordechai’s Mount which I can see from my studio window and walk to when the tide is out. Modestyshould forbid me mentioning my Seventeen Sketches of St Mordechai’s Mount In All Seasons which enjoy prominence in the Parochial Beauty Rooms at the New National Gallery, but they are my best work to date and I am proud of them. I would have preferred to stay in the Capital, for all its troubles – if only to enjoy the illusion of being at the centre of things and eating a little better – but the position I occupy in the Bethesda Art Academy has its consolations. Head of painting within a department as dedicated to feeling as any in the country is not a job you sniff at. I’ve heard it argued that Bethesda found it easier than most art colleges to make the journey back from insentience to feeling because for us, feeling never really went away. Conceptualism, or mind-machine art as historians now call it, had always been more of a city than a country fad. It had been practised down here but without any real zest or instinct for it. A few local potters defied the tradition of their craft, forgot or simply refused to remember that a pot’s job was to express, in silence and slow time, a flowery tale with sweetness, and set about throwing misshapen objects