“Do what?”

“Tell the time by looking at the-”

“Armstrong, I need to get on, if you’re not helping.”

“Sure. Yes. Sorry.” He handed back the paintbrush. Their hands touched briefly. Israel coughed. George looked away. It was nothing: nothing had passed between them.

“Why are you painting the shed?” asked Israel. “Spring clean?”

“It’s September, Armstrong.”

“Yes. Well. A late spring clean.”

“We’re selling the goats,” said George.

“Oh, really? Why? I quite like the goats.”

“Why do you think we’re selling them?”

“I don’t know.”

Israel’s grasp of real-world economics was not great: sketchy, in fact, might be the word. Or feeble. Or poor. Risible. Rum. Quaint. Or pathetic. He was a salary man, when it came down to it, a public employee, so the gulf between him and someone who had to earn their living by the literal sweat of their literal brow was as big as the gap between, say, primitive tribespeople and the Christian missionary come to save them.

“Goats must be sold,” continued George.

“It does seem a shame, though,” said Israel.

“Shame doesn’t come into it,” said George. “It’s a shame when you can’t eat.”

“True. True. Good point,” said Israel. “So why are you painting the shed, if you’re selling the goats?”

George took a deep breath: it was a family trait. Old Mr. Devine did the same when he was roused: an attention to and awareness of one’s own anger, which Israel always found impressive; he was always utterly shocked and surprised by his own emotions.

“To set them off when people come to see them,” explained George patiently.

“Ah,” said Israel. “Right. Presentation. A sort of framing device for the goats?”

George looked at him, unimpressed.

“Anyway,” continued Israel, sticking his head round the shed door and sniffing. “What’s that smell? Is that the-”

“I’ve bleached the floors,” said George.

“Ergh!”

“And it’ll be the alkalis in the whitewash. You don’t want to breathe too much in.”

“Ugh!”

“And don’t touch the walls!” she said as Israel touched the walls. “It’ll have the hand off ye,” said George. “You have to wear gloves.”

“Ahh,” said Israel, staring at his hands. “I touched it!”

“Well, go and rinse your hands, then,” said George.

Israel jogged quickly across the yard to the outside tap, George laughing.

“Here, do me some more whitewash while ye’re there, would you?” she called over to him.

“What?”

“Hydrated lime. Salt. In the cans in the barrow there. Plus water.”

“All right, all right,” said Israel.

“But watch your hands,” said George.

“OK!” said Israel.

“And don’t rub your eyes,” shouted George.

“Ahh!” said Israel, who’d rubbed his eyes.

Having washed his hands and rinsed his eyes, Israel started adding water and lime and salt into the old cut-down oil drum on the wheelbarrow.

“How much water?” he called across the yard to George.

“About two gallons,” George called back.

Israel didn’t want to ask how much was two gallons, so he hosed what he thought looked like two gallons into the oil drum and wheeled the barrow unsteadily back over, oil drum filled to the brim. He was trying to remember from school how many pints were in a gallon. Was it twelve? Or three? Or thirty-six? Or was that inches in a yard? He’d grown up metric in north London: gallons were as foreign to him as was bitter Sumatran coffee to the coffee crowd in Zelda’s Café.

And as he wobbled back over toward George, for a moment it felt good to both of them to be working together, to have a purpose. It reminded George of her parents: in harmony and in tandem. Each knowing what the other needed and taking care to provide it. Helpmeets. Partners. Farmers. And Israel enjoyed doing something for George, because it felt as though he was not alone, as though his life was in parallel with another’s. For a moment.

George paused from slopping on the whitewash, turned, looked into the oil drum.

“What’s that?” she said.

“It’s the whitewash,” asked Israel.

“That’s not whitewash,” said George. “I said two gallons of water.”

“That’s about…two gallons, isn’t it?”

“How many gallons in an oil drum?” demanded George.

“I don’t know. I’ve never-”

“Fifty-five!” said George. “And this is a half-drum, so-”

“About twenty-seven gallons?” said Israel.

“You’re an idiot, Armstrong,” said George.

“Sorry,” said Israel.

“Don’t say sorry for being an idiot!” said George. “Say sorry for wasting all that lime and-”

“Sorry,” said Israel.

“Stop saying sorry!”

“But you just said-”

“I don’t care what I just said!”

“Well, I-”

“Leave it. I’ll do it myself,” said George, grabbing one of the handles of the wheelbarrow.

“No. No, I’ll do it,” said Israel, grabbing the other. “It’s fine, I just didn’t know how-”

“Leave it!” said George, pulling at the handle. “I’m doing it.”

“Let me help,” said Israel, yanking back. “I want to-”

And it tipped, of course, the oil drum with its gallons of whitewash, tipped slowly and inexorably toward Israel, first splashing and then toppling, the murky white water coming over him like a torrent, and the drum rolling and shrieking across the yard like a wounded animal, the whitewash flooding in its wake. Israel staggered back, soaked, George’s eyes riveted on him.

“Sorry!” he said, not sure how she’d take it.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Yes. Sorry,” said Israel.

“All that waste,” she said, staring as the whitewash soaked into the concrete.

“Sorry,” repeated Israel.

“Just go,” she said quietly.

“I’ll help-”

“Just go away, Armstrong.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Israel. “I’ll-”

“Leave me alone!” screamed George suddenly.

“But-”

“Go!” she yelled. “Go! Away!”

So Israel went. He went back into the chicken coop and shut the door. And George set about putting things right in the yard.

And once again absolutely nothing had passed between them.

9

The lane from the Devines’ to Pearce Pyper’s was one of the most beautiful places Israel knew around Tumdrum, a place so beautiful in fact that it was almost enough to restore his proverbial and habitual and today very particular low Sunday spirits. But not quite. An overgrown, winding, one-way gravel track suitable for single traffic only, and hemmed with high hedges and tall trees, the lane made him think of Gloria and England and of long lacy and weepy Victorian and Edwardian narrative poems. It was a route he walked every Sunday on his way to read with Pearce, and it usually had an effect of uplift. The fields to either side of the lane sprang alive with rabbits and hares and the sound of blackbirds, and then suddenly, with a parting of the trees, there was the arrival at Pearce’s, which was always like stumbling upon a previously undiscovered ancient Aztec ruin, what with Pearce’s eccentric sculptures flanking the driveway and scattered throughout the grounds-the chunky painted concrete, and the driftwood things, and the totem poles made of old railway sleepers-and the avenue of trees extravagantly pleached, espaliered, and cordoned, and then finally the house itself, Pearce’s mad, grand baronial-cum-Corbusier home.

Israel had spent the afternoon tidying his coop, avoiding George, who had also been avoiding him, and he stood now-confused and chastened, but also at least a little cheered and chivvied by nature-and yanked at Pearce’s big chain doorbell, which rang, as big chain doorbells always ring, ominously.

Pearce’s housekeeper, Joan, answered the door. She was not a woman who wasted her words; she was a woman who looked like she permed her own hair. Unwillingly.

“Yes?” she said. Up until recently Israel had come every Sunday to see Pearce, and Joan had always greeted him with the same thin, suspicious “Yes?” as though anything more would be an invitation to unwonted intimacy.