Arthur & George

is able to escape evident and apparent death.’
    Arthur smiles politely. That fellow is going to dog him to the gates of St Peter, or whatever the equivalent turns out to be in the new realm that is slowly being made palpable.
    There is little
far niente
in Arthur’s life. He is not a man to spend a summer’s afternoon in a deckchair with a hat pulled down over his face, listening to the bees bothering the lupins. He would make as hopeless an invalid as Touie makes a successful one. His objection to inactivity is not so much moral – in his view, the Devil makes work for hands both idle and occupied – as temperamental. His life contains great bouts of mental activity, followed by great bouts of physical activity; in between he fits his social and family life, both of which he takes at a lick. He even sleeps as if it were part of life’s business, rather than an interlude from it.
    So he has few means of recourse when the machine over-strains itself. He is incapable of recuperating with an idle fortnight on the Italian lakes, or even a few days in the potting shed. He plunges instead into moods of depression and lassitude, which he seeks to hide from Touie and Jean. He shares them only with the Mam.
    She suspects that he is more than usually troubled when he proposes a visit on his own account, rather than as a way of making a rendezvous with Jean. Arthur takes the 10.40 from St Pancras to Leeds. In the luncheon car, he finds himself thinking, as he increasingly does, about his father. He now acknowledges the harshness of his youthful judgement; perhaps age, or fame, has made him more forgiving. Or is it that there are times when Arthur feels on the edge of nervous collapse himself, when it seems that the normal human condition is to be on the edge of nervous collapse, and that it is mere good fortune, or some quirk of breeding, that keeps anyone from falling? Perhaps if he did not have his mother’s blood in him, he might go – might already have gone – the way of Charles Doyle. And now Arthur begins to realize something for the first time: that the Mam has never criticized her husband, before or since his death. She does not need to, some might say. But even so: she, who always speaks her mind, has never been heard to say ill of the man who caused her so much embarrassment and suffering.
    It is still light when he arrives at Ingleton. In the early evening they climb up through Bryan Waller’s woodland and emerge on to the moor, gently scattering a few wild ponies. The large, erect, tweeded son aims words down at the red coat and neat white cap of his sure-footed mother. From time to time she picks up sticks for the fire. He finds this habit of hers vexing – as if he could not afford to buy her a cord of the finest firewood whenever she needs it.
    ‘You see,’ he says, ‘there is a path here, and over there is Ingleborough, and we know that if we climb Ingleborough we can see across to Morecambe. And there are rivers whose course we can follow, which always flow in the same direction.’
    The Mam does not know what to make of these topographical platitudes. They are most unlike Arthur.
    ‘And were we to miss the path and get lost on the Wolds, we could use a compass and a map, which are easily obtainable. And even at night there are stars.’
    ‘That is all true, Arthur.’
    ‘No, it is banal. It is not worth saying.’
    ‘Then tell me what you wish to say.’
    ‘You brought me up,’ he replies. ‘There was never a son more devoted to his mother. I say that not as self-praise, merely as a statement of fact. You formed me, you gave me my sense of myself, you gave me my pride and what moral faculties I have. And there is still no son more devoted to his mother.
    ‘I grew up surrounded by sisters. Annette, poor dear Annette, God rest her soul. Lottie, Connie, Ida, Dodo. I love them all in their different ways. I know them inside out. As a young man, I was not unfamiliar with female company. I did not debase myself as many another fellow did, but I was neither an ignoramus nor a prude.
    ‘And yet … and yet I have come to think that women – other women – are like distant lands. Except that when I have been to distant lands – out on the veldt in Africa – I have always been able to find my bearings. Perhaps I am not making sense.’
    He stops. He needs a reply. ‘We are not so distant, Arthur. We are more like a neighbouring county which you have somehow forgotten to explore. And when